Let Me Breathe! by 247gamestudio

Controls: - W/A/S/D: Move - Left Click: Shoot - Space: Dodge-Roll - My first Ludum Dare attempt! I hope you all enjoy this game!
It's a survival shooter, where you need to stay in the Air/Oxygen zone to stay alive. - Destroy balloons to create Air zones - Staying out of the Air zones for too much time will get you killed. - Enemies create danger zones when killed. - Every 30 seconds the wave changes, and you are able to buy upgrades and weapons. - Survive for 5 minutes to win!
Changelog: 19:56 (GMT -03:00) - Fixed a bug where blood spills particles were not emitting. - Fixed upgrade descriptions tooltips not appearing.
| Itch.io | https://cezarcoelho.itch.io/let-me-breathe |
| Github | https://github.com/247GameStudio/LudumDare54 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/let-me-breathe |
Ratings
| Overall | 148th | 3.646⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 91th | 3.813⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 224th | 3.271⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 64th | 4.146⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 147th | 3.646⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 245th | 2.864⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 197th | 2.525⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 202th | 3.239⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
Had a lot of fun with this one. The idea of having to enable your oxygen bubble made me keep constantly rolling in and out to try to spot a bubble. The death fireballs were a problem though, they last too long and I think they hide the little bubbles under them.
Also it is unclear to me how long I have before dying without oxygen.
Nevertheless, still very fun and a cool idea!
Very solid first entry! :slight_smile:
The game is very satisfying, and I like the feeling of released tension at the end. I agree that an O2 meter would be helpful since it's hard to know how much time you have between O2 zones. I think with upgrades carrying over between rounds, you can kind of get away with not building up a whole lot of skill and just waiting for the upgrades to start overpowering the enemies.
This game has a lot of potential, but has a lot holding it back. When the upgrades come up, other than the extra heart, none of the icons convey what it is that you're upgrading.
Do I get the upgrade that does something with the projectile? Or do I hold on to my money until next round so I can get the other upgrade that does something with the projectile? Is it worth it to get the face upgrade? Is my face really that bad? *(reads a few comments)* There's tooltips?
The enemy speed is too close to the player speed, I have to spend almost all of my time dying from being in the dark too long, at least when I'm not busy getting hit by the enemies or their fiery corpse area. Projectile speed being the same as the character speed makes it hard to create a safe area for the character to go.
If you make the upgrades more obvious and change the balance a little (possibly just adjust the speeds), this would be something solid.
Sidenote: either sound wasn't working, or you should have opted out of Audio. I'm assuming it was broken, so I'm giving a 1 in Audio.
About the Upgrade Tooltips: There are tooltips. If you hover the mouse over the upgrade icon, you can see a short description.

@wheelsx About the sound, that's confusing, it should be working correctly. Weren't you able to hear any sound at all? There is currently a simple music loop I created for the game, and also effects for some feedbacks like hitting, shooting and rolling.
This tri-shot weapon is my favorite one when you have enough damage to one-shot anything. :)
The game started to drop FPS close to the end due to the number of particles on the screen. I played it in the browser, Firefox to be more specific.
Regarding the tooltips: I couldn't see them during my gameplay. I read some other players had this issue too and I found out what was the culprit. I was hovering over the "buy" (price) button, not the actual icons. The icons don't look interactable, therefore my attention shifter towards the shiny button. Maybe it would be safer to copy the tooltip to the button as well.
I tried to press both of these buttons, but nothing happens. I guess I can't have some more. :'(
This game is quite enjoyable.

It could have something to do with the asset loading issue every Godot game here seems to have, the first time I do a thing, the engine has a stroke while it loads a texture or sound asset. Maybe it didn't load the sounds the first time because it just couldn't recover from said stroke? I usually don't like to discuss engine choice, everyone should use what they think is the best fit for them and their project. But the multi second stutter while loading a single asset the first time the game needs it thing is why I will not consider trying Godot. I mean, I have a Ryzen 5 2600x, 32 GB ram, RTX 3080, SSD, and that's not enough to give Godot a smooth experience on these little game jam games? Of all the games I've played this jam, with all the different engines they used, only the Godot ones seem to have this issue.
With the tooltips, what @quasilyte describes what I did, I was hovering the buy button. It wasn't immediately obvious what I was supposed to interact with, so when the upgrade window popped up, I tried clicking the icons and nothing happened. So I swept my mouse across different elements of the upgrade window, looking for something to change, and noticed the buttons with the price were what I was supposed to interact with. If there was no tooltip delay, I would have found them immediately, I didn't realize you had to hover on them for so long for anything to happen.
I liked the upgrades, they felt good!
Didn't really understand the air mechanic all that well. Maybe a meter next to the character or some other indicator that things are bad would have been great? Either way, just moving and shooting was fun, and I like getting to an end :-)
As others said some indication of your oxygen when outside of a bubble would be helpful.
I'd appreciate a built-in cursor as my system one can get very lost in front of the busy background of the game, something like a larger crosshair (or even a dashed line between it and the player) would be great to help aiming feel better imo.
Being able to dash with right click would be nice.
In the upgrade menu it would be more intuitive to be able to buy stuff by clicking on the icon rather than the prices. Effect tooltips seem out of place from the rest of the graphics with the resolution and antialiasing going on.
Being able to burst the bubbles by just running or dashing into them could be nice.
The game over screen should also contain some stats about the failed run. At least say how much time was left to win or something similar.
Nevertheless this is a nice game with lots of polish and good design, thank you and congrats on making it!