News @ Doorstep by Petronus

[raw]
made by Petronus for Ludum Dare 53 (JAM)

Welcome to "News @ Doorstep"

News @ Doorstep is an endlessrunner game. You have to throw the mail to the doorsteps of the houses. Gain points by delivering correctly, lose points when missed and do not let 5 houses pass by without the morning news!

About the development: I am interested in game development for quite some time, but never created one on my own. During the last three days I had much fun and I hope you also have some fun minutes with my game :slight_smile: .

Tools I used: - SFML library for C++ - VSCode - LMMS for the music - Audacity for sounds - Asesprite for some graphics - PowerPoint for the house graphics - lots of mineral water

Ratings

Overall 1057th 3.045⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Fun 880th 3.091⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1148th 2.523⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Theme 801th 3.682⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1047th 2.542⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Audio 718th 2.619⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Humor 843th 2.675⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1040th 2.881⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Given 25🗳️ 29🗨️

Feedback

JosephlDooley
06. May 2023 · 02:57 UTC
Nice game, got 285! its nice once I get in the rhythm I'm sniping houses just entering the scene. I loved the old man "hey" when missing a house lul.
AfroAnt
07. May 2023 · 18:55 UTC
I think I got 900! Felt good to throw once I got a system going. The gameplay music got repetitive fast, but I liked then results screen music. Glad to see you had fun gamedeving, and thanks for sharing!
Le Don
07. May 2023 · 19:12 UTC
This has some charme! I liked it, but it was a bit hard to figure out the throwing mechanics - maybe something like a preview curve or something might be helpful.
joao-marcello
07. May 2023 · 20:37 UTC
Unfortunately, the game does not support 1366x768 resolution and I cannot play it 😥

![game-tt.png](///raw/be6/25/z/5b915.png)
🎤 Petronus
08. May 2023 · 16:45 UTC
@joao-marcello Oh no, sorry for this. I will definitely add some feature in the next one for scaling.

@le-don , @afroant Thank you for the feedback, also something that will come on my list. For the music I had on day 3 very much fun with it, but got a bit lost in time and then decided to make it very easy. Next time I want to spend a bit more (but then also the tool is known, so lets see)

@josephldooley I always laugh when this happens, too! But it was my actual voice :sweat_smile:

Thank you all for your feedback, really appreciate it.
Anton Semenov
08. May 2023 · 18:14 UTC
Yay, catchy! =)

Got 1170 from the second try (and something around 500 on first). During the game I had a little difficulty predicting the end point of the newspaper's flight, it's absolutely ok, but unfortunately by some reasons (isn't `std::this_thread::sleep_for` :) ?) the game becomes less and less responsive in the later stages, despite on low CPU load :'(

Thank you so much for fun gameplay and my favourite style a "good old game from scratch" and even on C++ *(on one of the previous LDs we also participated in the SFML game, but this time we decided to shake up UE, I envy you a little )*
LDJam user 276593
08. May 2023 · 18:33 UTC
Like the central mechanic, once you get into a rhythm with it and you learn how to predict the speed and trajectory you can get quite good at it. It is very, very hard though! Took me a good 10 minutes to even get past 100 points, and then another 10 to get past 200 🤣

I think that might just be a me problem though!
LDJam user 166918
08. May 2023 · 19:06 UTC
Nothing outstanding but quite good and fun. Nice work.
cureja
08. May 2023 · 23:51 UTC
Got to 720, before the pace became very very fast. Fun little arcade game~
3ggplant
09. May 2023 · 09:54 UTC
Takes a while to get used to the throwing mechanics, but it's pretty fun once you do. Good job.
Johnny Turbo
10. May 2023 · 05:37 UTC
Fun little game! Though it was a bit challenging as the main character was at the bottom of the screen making it difficult to aim forward as I'd need to pull the mouse below the screen. So it meant that I really only had one shot at throwing a paper to a doorstep, but I guess that adds to the challenge of the game 😊. Nicely done and congrats on finishing and submitting your game!
jk5000
10. May 2023 · 14:09 UTC
A fun and pretty well made little game. The controls takes a bit time to learn, but when you first got it, it's pretty fun. There could perhaps been a bit more gameplay, but it's okay for a jam game. I like the games simple visuals and music. Overall a fun little jam game. Well done.
epb9000
15. May 2023 · 05:17 UTC
Took me a moment to figure out the controls. Well made, and laughed pretty hard at the old man "Hey!" when I missed a house. Seconding that scaling would be nice, my window decorations cut off the bottom edge on Linux, but not so much that I couldn't play.
Trevor Lentz
15. May 2023 · 14:59 UTC
Takes a bit to get used to the controls, but it was fun. Well done. :)
Honey Pony
18. May 2023 · 19:56 UTC
It took some reconfiguring of my monitor resolution to make this game playable. But, once that was fixed, it was a fun little game.

As I started playing the game, I thought I would probably prefer the player character to be centered on the screen, or at least somewhat farther up. It's surprisingly awkward to perform the throwing mechanics with the player right on the bottom.

One reason for this is that I don't feel comfortable using my mouse at the bottom of the screen. This is because I am liable to accidentally click outside the window, which is never fun. I think a fullscreen mode could be worth considering, so that the player doesn't have to worry about clicking outside the window.

Instead I opted to generally click in the middle of the screen. Now this is actually kind of an interesting twist on usual throwing games. Usually you would see your aiming indicator anchored from where you are actually going to throw... but in this case, the anchor can be wherever I want. And it is actually kind of fun to try to figure out how to throw even with the player character disconnected from the throwing.

I think it does work, and it is kind of novel. So I am somewhat conflicted on what the best choice would be here -- as I said, my immediate preference is that the player is centered, but there is some interesting challenge created by the current player placement.

Besides that, I think this game is at its best when the houses start to move by faster. At the beginning of the game, I sit there aiming at each individual house for seconds, which feels slow. But later, when the houses are moving by quickly, I end up moving my mouse much more fluidly, flinging papers at each house as quickly as I can, and it's a lot of fun.

One interesting thing I realized is that spamming the throw command is much better for getting a high score -- because apparently you get points for every newspaper that lands on a door, not just the first one.

I find the sound in this game is quite fun. The music has that upbeat fun quality to it, while the character sound effects are fun as well.

It is always cool to see an SFML game. I think that games built from the ground up always have this certain charm to them, and this one is no exception.

Good job!