Wiggle Bird by SamDemaine

--- About The Game ---
Wiggle Bird is an arcade style game with cute graphics about directing your snake-bird through multiple levels.
--- About Me ---
My names Sam and i'm 14 from the UK, I have been making games for around a year or two in game maker and had an interest in game development since I was around 10 years old. I hope you enjoy my games, you can play my other games at my itch:
https://samuel-demaine.itch.io/
| Windows Download | https://samuel-demaine.itch.io/wiggle-bird |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/wiggle-bird |
Ratings
| Overall | 41th | 4.032⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 46th | 4.008⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 94th | 3.865⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 156th | 3.905⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 44th | 4.185⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 137th | 3.537⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 116th | 3.318⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 118th | 3.629⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
Your game also has really nice looking graphics, but it's missing sound sadly, I think it could have greatly benefitted from it.
Good job, and good luck on ratings!
Sometimes I found the level reset time a bit high. - I wanted to immediately retry :D
I quit at level 6. Really cute game, it amaze me how you made in only 6 hours
VOD Link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1167820246
My strategy was to only use one direction and tap very rapidly.
Since it turns out I'm terrible at games like this, I was unable to make it through level 4 :( I hope I didn't miss too much.
Great job !
I spent, idk, 20~50% of my total time in this game just waiting for the restart animation to finish, and often I would accidentally press a button (while sitting around waiting) which would start the bird before I could see, causing it to hit a wall and sending me back to watch the restart animation again.
I'm not sure if I got the controls; I don't understand why I would ever want to use both buttons in a level (I only used one button)
the levels were a really nice length -- long enough to be challenging, but not long enough that I quit in frustration. thanks for the game!
As such, I'd say the hitboxes are unforgiving. I also found the controls themselves to be very unintuitive; so much so that after the first level I had to turn my keyboard around backwards to even have a chance at beating levels 2 and 3, which I barely managed.
Also, you can input things before the level has finished transitioning when it restarts / possibly when going to a new level? Didn't try that one. But I would keep dying before I had finished dying as the circle of black filled up the screen but the bird was still accepting inputs.
I'd recommend:
- Reversing the input or allowing the player the option to do so (it is more intuitive for me to press right to go DOWN rather than UP, and vice versa)
- Slower bird: he frequently collides with himself just as I'm pressing the button to turn the other way.
- More forgiving hitboxes; maybe allow bird to overlap himself so that only the actual obstacles are obstacles?
- Maybe smaller arcs or a wider area per level.
- Prevent player input when restarting level/loading a new one.
- Pause/quit menu; I had to alt-tab when I gave up as nothing happens on hitting ESC.
The graphics, mechanic idea, and audio are all perfect; this would be an amazing mobile game I think, but it's also pretty good on PC. It's just too hard for an average joe like me, which sucks because it looks so fun but my ability to play it is so bad. :( I want to say I had fun, because everything about this screams fun to me, but constantly dying before I can even move past the starting point, for every single level, with no improvement on my ability to control the bird as each win is basically luck + strategy, was more of a disheartening experience than anything. Still, it's really cool and I can't stop wondering how you made it!
I would recommend making it clearer that you're supposed to HOLD the keys, rather than JUST the picture of the left/right arrows.
Amazing game!! Glad I got to enjoy it this time!!! :0 :blue_heart:
All in all, a fun and challenging game with wiggly but tight controls.
It's a solid solid entry for the theme. It uses a familiar mechanic, but not something that I've seen used exactly like this before.
The only criticism I'd have is to slow down the game a little, at least in the beginning, and just to add more stuff :) I understand that this is a jam game, but I liked the speed-up area. I think more hazard areas that define some sort of mechanics changes. But overall a very cute little proof of concept, and something I'd totally play on my phone (as far as I can tell, you can limit the controls to just 1 button [tap] if you'd like, which would work super well on mobile)
It's a great game but I just couldn't take it anymore, it reminds me of playing flappy bird or something like that.