PhotoSquatch by digitaldude555
Click and drag to jump, right click place up to two pegs you can latch onto, spacebar to kick birds. Left click while in air and in view of the camera viewfinder to take a photo. Get the highest score you can in two minutes.
Made in 12 hours cause ldjam started on my birthday.
| Link | https://digitaldude555.itch.io/photosquatch |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/photosquatch |
Ratings
| Overall | 836th | 3.258⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 830th | 3.106⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 626th | 3.288⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 909th | 3.097⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 762th | 3.273⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 270th | 3.516⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 865th | 3.121⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 42🗨️ |
For 12 hours this is a really solid game, well done! (And late happy birthday :D )
I declare myself the world's most bird-kickin'-est, pic-takin'-est guy. Took me a long time to figure out that the big points are to be gotten from the camera and the bird kicking is kinda incidental. That's a weird sentence. Some kind of combo system would be cool: kick a bunch of birds and get them all in the frame with you for a big multiplier. Very nice for 12 hours!
It's nice to play something different! Looks good and is fun to play. Also happy birthday!
I really like the concept of a “photo bomb”, the idea is very funny ! Well done
it's too difficult but normal with time to jam :)
Especially with time running out, and happy birthday ! :)
I don't know what big-foot's beef with the birds was either :smile:
- I didn't like the controls. One thing I would've preferred is if the kick would be assigned to 'left click' because when you're airborne you can't aim anyway...
- IMO you should get rid of the spacebar kick mechanic and just make it so that you always kick birds. It seems redundant. Or maybe the kick animation should end so you have to time it...
- I didn't really see the point in moving the ledges as the birds are all over the place anyway. Just placed two and left them there for the entire play session! Maybe they could "dissolve" after a while, or get kicked by a different kind of bird, or just be limited to one use, etc. Or maybe the ledges should've appeared on their own.
- I didn't get the picture taking thing. I get that it's sasquatch so you'd obviously want proof it exists, but the system felt unrelated and chore-y. I get that it makes the game more challenging and rewarding, but I just didn't really like it. Maybe instead of left clicking to take pictures, the pictures should be taken automatically, this will make it less chorey and more scorey :)
Still, it's nice that you managed to make this within 12 hours! Happy Birthday!
Jumping with left mouse+drag and then taking photos with left mouse was difficult to get right. Space for the photo instead would've helped me a lot. I took a lot of photos when I didn't even intend to take a photo because of it. I ended up scoring 3394 points.
I understand having just 12 hours removes a lot of the time you'd need for polish though, it's hard to speedrun developing a game in *that* limited a time window.
The art is cute, though I would've preferred a less muted palette. The sound effects are solid.
A cool concept, and it just needs a *little* polish to feel a lot more refined. If only there was time! :laughing:
As controls go I think overloading the left click with jump and taking the photo is a bit confusing. I found myself often taking photos when trying to jump before reaching the ground wasting away my score as a result.
While I like hanging on the pegs I didn't like having to deal with spawning and despawning them and they looked out of place from the rest. I think it would be nice for gameplay and fitting to the sasquatch theme to be able to hang on any of the trees in the background. Alternatively let the oldest peg auto despawn when clicking on a new location.
For later improvements I think some combo system would be beneficial that would make the viewfinder follow you for a bit if you keep providing interesting moves. For example kicking a bird in the view would momentarily align the view's velocity with yours. Something like this would make the game more satisfying. Even just not repositioning the view on capture would be nice to be able to burst shoot a lot of images, think this would give the game more momentum.
As a stronger feedback you could add camera flashes to capturing photos. Then maybe balance out the former suggestion of being able to take multiple shots in succession with some blinding effect where the sasquatch gets dizzy from too much flashing xD.
Anyways, nice entry, I enjoyed jumping around kicking birds haha!