Journey to the Center of the Mind by JavierDega
Hello! We're a team of 3 and this is our first go at Ludum Dare:
Our game is a surreal 'Endless Faller' were your character goes through a sort of fever dream (We've not been very specific with what the story/theme is about :P), trying to fall as fast as he can without approaching terminal velocity and splatting into coming platforms!
Controls: Gamepad (Recommended). Left Stick - Move. Right Stick - Camera pan.
Keyboard. WASD and Arrows.
The strategy of the game is about managing freefalling with resting on the faster platforms (Tip: The smaller ones fall faster!), to obtain their speed just before jumping off again :cloud: The gameplay switches as the game speeds up and platform spawn decreases, to a point where you will reach terminal velocity and should try to finish the rest of the run by avoiding platforms, as opposing to the start where you will switch between platforms to progress.
We hope you had fun and like the surreal look as much as we do. We took a risk mixing 2d and 3d art but in the end were quite happy with the whole look!
Info about 3rd party assets:
Font: Years supply of fairy cakes https://www.dafont.com/es/year-supply-of-fair.font
Participants:
Javier Dieguez
Ollie Plaatsman
Victor Prudhomme
| Link | https://javierdega.itch.io/ld48-journey-to-the-center-of-the-mind |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/journey-to-the-center-of-the-mind |
Ratings
| Given | 10🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
The game mechanic was pretty original, but it needs a bit more polish... I don't know if it's the screen size or what, but it had a weird kinesthetic and point of view.
Want to say it again: the setting is unreal. We had thought about similar ideas, but I'm sure we wouldn't have reached this level. Great work.
Its quite hard, sometimes I lose track of my character when it goes off screen.
I liked the idea of an 'endless faller' that wants you to land on or hit things. Usually it's all about dodging. That was a nice change.
Not a fan of the player model... I don't know what you were going for (alien? tail? 3rd leg?) but it definitely looked like a penis. That's uh, not great. You might want to throw an adult content note at the top of your page. And if that IS what it's supposed to be.... why? As far as I can tell, it serves no purpose in gameplay or story which makes it appear as if someone thought it was 'funny' and reason enough to add it.
I mostly agree with everything. The controls and the gameplay tweaks to make the gameloop work as intended are not there and completely polished, however the jam was about proving a concept and we have found points were the balance was indeed fun!
That said the speed might be a bit off, as well as the scale of the platforms and just how quickly one can reach the 'lethal fall' threshold. The story is quite improvised, refering to some sort of 'Dream sequence'. We just tried to give the game a fun little presentation.
Were super glad you loved the visuals! Im loving the PSX references, we were thinking of something akin, with early 3Dish grafx and the narrow colour palette.
The tube is done with two semi transparent meshes (One wider and one narrower cube) which have two textures that have their UVs offset increasing and looping at a speed multiplied by the character's falling speed. (The letters are like some extract from Alan Watts book, lol!)
Thanks an hope you guys had fun with the jam!
Im not sure, I used my keyboard, but controlling the player accurately was almost impossible.
If you improve on the controls it would be an really big improvement!