Gameplay

Сool game

Thanks for playing my game, I like what you were going for here. It took me a couple tries to get the mechanic down but it worked pretty good. Nicely done.

Super cool, love the mechanics!

I like the game, it feels a little strange that you can throw an axe, but you have to recover it manually, but still: nice art, nice music and nice game overall :v:

Game fits the theme very well and was genuinely fun.


The best village name I've ever seen!

Super creative, and original, I loved the mechanics of throwing myself in front of the train to detelo.

I really think the ax should go back to the character's hand, instead of going for it, something a bit thor. (Even if it was a temporary power up)

Congratulations!

The concepts perfect for the theme and it comes across in the gameplay really well! I like the concept of tying the axe's power to your momentum - did you try letting the player call the axe back to them after throwing it? I found that if I missed a fast throw on one of the big trees the train would leave me behind as I chased after the axe and I was immediately done for (though this may have been a design choice and I'm just bad).

Really neat game and a unique take on the theme, my best was 40. I liked the momentum mechanic especially. Sometimes it was a bit frustrating when the axe got stuck behind the train, but other than that it was super fun!

I jumped out my skin when the train hit the village lol, very nice art, and that background beat is rocking! Also liked the change of music when the train sped up, gave a sense of urgency. Great entry, fits the theme well.

@pashaloban Thanks!

@simplepotential Thank you! I’m glad you got the hang of it!

@orcifried Thank you! I’m glad you liked the mechanics!

@davide-rossetto Thank you for the feedback, yeah a retrieval button might have improved the experience! Thanks for playing!

@pinballjunior Im glad you found it fun thanks for playing!

@very-bad-bunny-studio Thank you for playing! I was trying to do an accurate village name haha. Thank you for the feedback too, and yeah a retrieval system would have worked well!

@benskca Thank you for playing, some retrieval system would have worked well, I added in some red berries you can eat that spawn behind the train to speed you up to try and catch the train again, but yeah a retrieval would have helped! Thanks again for the feedback!

@waffleworksgames Thank you for playing! Thanks for the feedback, there’s some red berries that spawn behind the train to increase your speed, but some better way of getting your axe back would have helped a lot! Thanks a lot for the feedback!

@squaxcom I’m really glad you liked the art! Hahaha it might be a bit sudden! Thank you very much for the feedback!

Nice idea! It's cool to use the train momentum to boost your axe velocity. I feel like it's pretty much game over if you lose your axe when the train is moving fast though, would be cool to have some sort of mjölnir-axe that returns to you!

@roblaro I’m glad you like the boasting feature! Thank you for the feedback! There’s some red berries you can collect to increase your speed, but I think a returning feature would have worked well! Thanks again for the feedback, it’s very much appreciated, I hope you had fun playing!

Love the game! The idea was really good and there was a lot of mechanics to learn to actually be good at the game. The graphics were on point and I love the fact that everytime you cut a tree, you need to take back your axe. I would of probably change the sound when he hits the village but overall, other sound effects and the music were great. I really enjoyed the game.
Great entry!

Hey! The idea of the game is cool but the sound is not balanced.

@mathglo I'm really glad you liked it! Yeah, I think that noise definitely should have had some adjustments its quite jarring, thank you very much for the feedback and thank you for playing!

@sagiii I'm glad you like the idea! Yeah, it could have done with a few adjustments, especially with the last sound effect as it hits hits the village. Thank you for the feedback and for playing! And thanks for submitting your game too, it was so polished and the whole game-feel was amazing!

It's a funny game. However the sound of the train throw the village scare me :cold_sweat: I don't want to know what's append at that time.

Original concept! Good job!

I like this idea and the graphics looked very nice.

@fifut Thank you for playing! The sound at the end is a bit loud haha

@yetanother Thank you! And thanks for playing!

@sawyer I’m really glad you liked the graphics and idea! Thank you for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Really nice pixel art and cool music! Quite unique idea for a game, I like it. My only complaint would be hitboxes of trees sometimes feels off. Besides that, great job!

@zimny11 Thank you for playing and leaving feedback! I'm really glad you liked the pixel art and music! Yeah, I think they could have probably fit the shape of the trees better in some places! Thank you for that feedback its very much appreciated and thank you very much for playing!

I liked this entry! The graphics and sound added to the game. The idea is fun. I tried multiple times to save the village so I got invested in the story/mood.

I think a retrieval button (that other mentioned) would totally change the game balance but might be fun to try to see how it feels. The strawberries were a good add but I rarely found them to be sufficient to get me back into the action once it was lost. All around it is a good game.

Great job making a fun game in 48 hours!

That was fun =). I had a lot of trouble aiming the axe, sometimes I'd be aiming, I thought to the lower right side of the screen, I'd click after getting bumped, and the ax flies up to a little tree up and behind the train to the left, and then at that point I just can't get back over to get my axe back in time ^_^.

It was fun bouncing off the train to get momentum, that's not a mechanic I recall playing with before =). Nice graphics and sound.

Hi @black-flag, thanks for inviting feedback on your game!

This is a solid compo game! Nice music and sound, excellent execution of the theme, the graphics are nice and evocative. I also haven't played a game with this set of mechanics before, but it totally makes sense! I really like the polish of the motion blur effect when you're moving very quickly. By the way is the axe throwing sound you just blowing into the microphone? lol it works though!

I have some thoughts on what might your game even better. Take them all with a grain of salt though, I know all too well how much scope and ambition we have to cut at that 48 hour mark!

- To help the player get started, I'd integrate the tutorial into the game. I appreciate that you put it in as an option, but tutorials are almost always boring, so I skip them when I can, and I bet a majority of players do. So I jumped right in and was extremely confused about the controls, objective, and even what I was seeing on the screen. After dying I went back and looked at the tutorial and now I see it was just a single screen of explanation. So, to avoid dummies like me bouncing right off your game, switching the main menu to be just a "Play" button that shows a tutorial, and when you click starts the game, gives players a better chance of success :) To go even farther, you can introduce the game mechanics gradually and use in-world explanation (like that sign of "innocent villagers"... but the arrow on it is pointing the wrong way :sweat_smile:). That way it doesn't even feel like a tutorial, and players don't feel like they want to skip it.
- The tutorial talks about things you can do, but it's not immediately obvious why you want to do them. Probably best to clearly state the objective - stop the runaway train *to give the village time to evacuate*. Then it makes sense why you want to chop down trees or push boxes onto the tracks. (I see now you did that on the Ludum Dare page for your game, but I didn't see that until I came back after playing)
- It's easy to permanently(?) lose the axe which kind of ruins that playthrough, so I wonder if using a trick (I'm thinking like Thor and Mjollnir) where it automatically comes back to you after a few seconds. That would help keep the player in the game rather than punishing them for a mistake. Another way this failure mode _could've_ happened is falling too far behind the train, but you thought of that and added the strawberries to catch back up! Nice. :)
- The boxes didn't move quite the way I'd expect... might be simpler to make it so they move in the direction, especially since you put in the trouble to make trees take into account the player's momentum.

Anyway, I gave you some suggestions for improvement only because I promised you I would :) Most of all, you should feel proud that you finished a complete game - programming, art, sound, polish, etc - in one extremely short weekend! Looking forward to checking out your future games!!

@blockerz I'm really glad you liked the sound and graphics! I agree completely, I think they either need to be more reliable by having a higher spawn rate or maybe they allow you to run through trees so it's easier to catch back up without getting stuck on them. Thank you for the feedback and thank you very much for playing!

@jimbly Thank you for the feedback! I'm sorry to hear the aim was off for you, and yes some better way of getting the axe back would have been better! I'm glad to hear you had fun and thank you again for the feedback and thanks for playing!

@shawn-moore Thank you so much for all of that feedback, that is greatly appreciated! I'm really pleased you liked the sound and graphics!

I really like your idea of having the tutorial screen appear when you click play, because reading a tutorial by choice does feel like a chore in a game jam lol. Using those signs would have helped as well, maybe for the first playthrough if you touched them or something the gameplay would freeze too to give the player time to understand each feature as it shows up? I also agree with stating the intentions more clearly too, like maybe at the start where that exclamation appears above the lumberjack it could just be a little speech bubble that says, "I need to delay the train so more villagers can escape"!

With the axe, I like the idea of it taking a few seconds, I'd thought that maybe it could come back to you if it goes off screen so that way there's still a bit of a consequence but not as drastic as it is now? For coherence a similar system for the trees with boxes would have worked well!

Thank you for all your feedback, its very kind of you to take the time to write such valuable feedback! Genuinely thank you!

PS: You're right about that sound effect 😂

a bit brutal :) fun game though.. took me some time to figure out why I'm loosing my axe after I chop the tree :)
great game

@dusho I’m glad you had fun! Thank you for the feedback too and thank you for playing!

Wow this was really fun to play! I appreciate all the subtly in the game design like adding the red berries only when you fall behind the train, the fact the course starts out full of small easy tress, but ramps up to bigger ones, etc. Nice job!

Unusual gameplay, but an amazing aesthetic for a solid entry. At first I did not understand what I was supposed to do, but after a while I understood the main mechanics - especially with the axe. My only complaint would be hitboxes of trees. Well done. Thank you. I wish you the best ++

@nick-rafalski Thank you! I’m really glad you had fun playing p!

@geckoo1337 Thank you for the feedback! Yeah, I should have made them more representative looking back. Thank you for playing!

The game is pretty good, overall. The graphics and audio fit the entry well considering the goofy concept for purposefully knocking trees in front of a moving tree. The gameplay loop is mostly satisfying, as it was fun getting up momentum for powerful axe throws. I think the main issue right now, though, is that once the train gets up to speed and passes the player (by, for example, the player throwing their axe at a tree too late so the train goes by before the tree falls), the game is essentially over as the train gets up to speeds faster than the player can move. The experience would be improved if there was a way to catch up with the train beyond hoping it hits a box and you catch it up with it then. Overall, solid entry. Nice work.

@proxy-games Thank you so much for that feedback, it’s very much appreciated! The catching back up state could definitely do with some improvements, I’m not sure if you saw but theres some red berries that spawn behind the train as it moves that if you touch will give you a speed boost to give you a chance to catch back up. I recognise there could still be a lot of work to be done on the system as you’ve rightly pointed out it can feel unfair when that happens. But thank you very much for the feedback, it’s extremely appreciated! Thank you for playing and I’ll check your game out later!

Nice take on the theme, I like the sense of urgency and how I had to make quick decisions on the type of tree I wanted to take down. The art goes very well with the game and HUD is not invasive, so I can see what I'm doing. Here is my feedback: make the axe return too you like in God of War. Although part of the challenge is recovering your axe, I think it adds frustration to a game that demands speed.
Still, I enjoyed it a lot.

@binaryprinciple Thank you so much for playing and for writing feedback! I’m really glad you liked the style of gameplay too! Yes, I think some way of removing that frustration of losing your axe would have been a good addition. Thank you again for the feedback! I’ll make sure to okay your game later!

I lost the axe a couple of times, which made the game fairly difficult to play, but I loved the execution otherwise. The game's art and audio were also fantastic!

@xedur I'm really glad you liked the art and audio! Thank you for the feedback about the difficulty too! Thanks for playing!

The concept is cool and the game is fun! Recovering the axe is somewhat finicky and the berries that make you go faster were not enough to catch up the train for me. With some more balancing and mechanics this could be great, nice job!

@jackaljk Thank you so much for the feedback! I agree the berries should have been more helpful than they ended up being. Thank you for playing!

This is a really clever idea for an entry! The train is unstoppable, but you can make good of the situation while you still can!

The graphics and music aren't bad, but nothing remarkable.

The gameplay loop is pretty good as well: knocking trees and crates in the way of the train. Though I *REALLY* wish there was a restart button, because it doesn't take long to fail. And when you do, you have to wait until the game ends, maybe "gameplay LOOP" wasn't the best way of describing it. It's a single experience, with an inherit time limit.

It's a bit strange at first, throwing the axe and then having to retrieve it, but there's something actually kinda satisfying about it. It being momentum based only served to bog down this mechanic. If I threw the axe at a standstill, it travels nowhere, and IF it hits a tree, it won't budge. If there HAD to be momentum-based throwing, at least give the player a good-enough throwing velocity by default.

What if I could chop down a tree at standstill? So that I'm not constantly going back and forth, throwing the axe, then retrieving it, rinse and repeat. Why even is it that bigger trees tip over, but they don't fall? Eh, that's more of a nitpick, how about the *real* problems I encountered?

This game has a *lot* of bugs, here's a list of how the one's I've found

#1 - Sometimes I try to hit one tree, but I end up hitting a DIFFERENT tree because that so happened to me in the axe's path. And usually it's a small tree that rotates so fast I cannot get my axe until it's stopped completely!

#2 - If #1 didn't happen, sometimes the axe *just goes RIGHT THROUGH the tree,* for whatever reason.

#3 - If neither of the above happened, the axe is so damn finicky about being picked up! I can hit a tree from one end, and end up having to go *all the way around the tree* to get the axe again, wasting time.

#4 - When hitting a box, the axe, around 50% of the time, will just get a mind of it's own and start flying off, and it usually goes just as fast as me. So I basically go right off the track, giving the train and it's psycho conductor plenty of time to go right on by!

#5 - For some reason, there's times when the axe refuses to be picked up until the tree's fully rotated and stopped. I've had this happen when the tree BARELY MOVED as well!

#6 - **I SOMEHOW MANAGED TO KNOCK A TREE _RIGHT BACK UP!_ AS IN, I HIT A TREE THAT WAS ALREADY KNOCKED DOWN, AND I _STOOD THE DAMN TREE RIGHT BACK UP!!!_** Good god, either that's a bug, or I'm so unlucky I defied the programming!

Those are all the bugs I've found, but this game also has some really annoying things as well. As... mentioned above.. tree's that are knocked down can still be struck, still have collision on them, meaning I still have to completely go around the tree to retrieve my axe. Though I just now thought, the train has to collide with the tree; I'm not too familiar with Unity, but could you perhaps use tags to make the tree collidable with the train, but NOT the player?

If you miss a tree, the axe travels FAR! Yet ANOTHER opportunity for the train to get ahead! Eh, what instantly came to mind as a 'solution' would be to use a raycast axe's direction to see if there's any trees. If there aren't, then the axe stops not far from the player.

Like what's mentioned in Bug #1, if you hit the top of a small tree, it'll rotate fast enough that you can't get the axe for basically *forever!* I'd like to say "make the axe bounce off a tree if it rotates fast enough", but that does NOT sound like an easy thing to do. Maybe you could find a means for that solution, but essentially, don't make the player wait so they can pick up the axe.

I'm starting to run the 4096 character limit, so I will wrap this up. This game has such a good idea, yet is held back by these bugs! It's still great that you made such a clever idea within 48 hours, though! But I'm wondering, CAN you save everybody? The most I can save is 70. I'd really hate it if you can't actually save everyone.

Sorry for such a long comment, and being so harsh. I do hope you've had a great Easter!

I like having to recover the axe, but I did have one or two instances where the axe got stuck deeply enough in a tree that I couldn't actually reach it to recover it no matter which angle I came in from. Otherwise this was fun.

Perhaps rather than adding a magic axe recovery system, there could just be spare axes scattered around the map that you could pick up if you lose the first one. Maybe you could even have an inventory allowing you to collect and store multiple axes.

Fun game, I enjoyed the mechanics and it was pretty fun. The only thing I would suggest is having the axe slowly come back to you when you throw it because sometimes its very difficult to get back the axe when you throw it. Other than that, great game!

Really cool idea and use of the theme! When I got into the groove of knocking things down, it felt great. I would suggest giving the character a sprint and/or giving the player the ability to recall the axe. Since momentum makes your throws stronger, and you need to run up to the tree to grab your axe, knocking down big trees felt like a waste of time as I would have to go through that long process multiple times for a single tree. Otherwise I liked it a lot. Good submission!

Unfortunately too laggy for me to play online.

@ronanrory Hi! Thank you so much for the feedback! I really do appreciate this really detailed feedback! For the second bug, I’ve not encountered that or the tree standing back up, so I’m really sorry you were the one to find this! That sounds like it would be very annoying!

The big trees are meant to be cut down after bouncing off the front of the train and then throwing your axe, this would answer your points about big trees just tipping over and why it would seem annoying standing next to a tree to chop it down over time. There actually is a collision matrix where the axe can interact with the top parts of the tree and the player can only hit the log part, but you’re right, after the trees hit it shouldn’t be collideable by the player.

I’m sorry to hear you didn’t have the best experience with the game, I hope you have had a great Easter too!
I’ll play your game when I’m at my computer next!

Thanks again for taking the time to write detailed feedback, it’s very valuable feedback so thank you again!

@pizzasgood Thank you for those suggestions! I’ve encountered that before, I think I should have increased the axes hit box when it collided with a tree so it can be picked up more easily. I especially like the idea of having spare axes scattered around! Thank you for the feedback and thank you for playing!

@moooks I’m really glad you had fun! I agree a better way to get the axe back would be good! Thank you for playing!

@jzucc12 Thank you for playing! The momentum part comes from bouncing off the train to get momentum to knock down bigger tree, so if you can time your throw right you won’t have to do that process! Thank you so much for playing and leaving feedback!

@ronanrory @pizzasgood @moooks @jzucc12 I’ll play your games when I’m next at my computer!

The axe got stuck on the train and couldn't get it. Still, the game is fun and has unique gameplay.

@john-llyod-apolo Thank you so much for playing and thank you for the feedback! Thank you for bringing that bug to my attention too. Thanks again!

The idea is good, but there's space to improve it a lot. The gameplay can be frustrating, as the need of collecting back the axe it's hard to balance it could works better have it come back to the player by itself.

I like the art style, well done for the compo.

Interesting concept. I like the use-the-train-to-gain-momentum feature. I found the hitboxes on the trees frustratingly large, though. It was pretty easy to get the axe stuck somewhere semi-inaccessible and fall behind quickly, and catching up can be tricky even with the berries, since it's so easy to collide with the trees. But with a little bit of improved balance/polish the gameplay could be pretty fun, I think.

Incidentally, we also made a game about delaying a train!

Love the idea behind this one xD

I left feedback and stuff on stream, vod here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1458309860?t=2h4m56s

@homineludens Thank you for the feedback! I agree there should have been an easier way to collect back the axe! Thank you for playing!

@3lstmsinatrenchcoat Thank you so much for the feedback! The berries could have probably done a lot more, maybe they could have knocked down trees while you are running that fast so you don’t get stuck on them as easily. Thank you for playing!

@itsboats Thank you so much for playing this on stream, just watched the VOD back now and it was great being able to watch you play and give live feedback, you gave me a lot of valuable feedback, thank you! I’m really glad you like the idea! Thanks for playing!