Moon Picnic by Fractal
Your picnic on the moon did not go as planned, you dropped a bunch of food on the ground and some moon ants seem very interested by it. Will you manage to rescue it all?
Controls
You need to get rid of all of the ants before they steal your food.
Tap/click anywhere to create a shock wave that will crush/repel nearby ants and ant sources. Make sure to wait a bit afterwards for it to recharge, to use it to its full potential!
After a couple of levels you will get additional ways to deal with the ants. Activate them by pressing one of the additional buttons on the bottom and then tapping/clicking anywhere on the screen. The push creates a shock wave that pushes the food item away, the bomb creates a much more powerful shock wave, the hologram diverts away the attention of some of the ants, and the freeze creates an area where the ants move much slower.
Credits - Art and animations by Filip Grudziel - Programming by Guillaume Brunerie - Music and sounds from a Humble Bundle of music and sound effects
Changes post-jam - Fixed crash on older Safari versions - Fixed level unlocking not working as intended
| Link | https://latcarf.itch.io/moon-picnic |
| Link | https://github.com/guillaumebrunerie/LD56 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/moon-picnic |
Ratings
| Overall | 58th | 4.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 36th | 4.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 83th | 3.978⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 56th | 4.348⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 337th | 3.978⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 176th | 3.717⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 168th | 4⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
I loved frantically clicking away at the ants. And beyond the clicking it had enough depth let me take decisions such as fighting off the ants vs destroying their spawner. It felt really well balanced.
And the introduction of the powers really kept it fresh at every level.
The music and sounds were just so whimsical, I loved it!
And on top of all of that you have a brilliant level selector.
Well done! :smile:
The difficulty curve felt little weird to me since the levels actually got easier the more power ups and i would liked to have stronger enemies or something. The 2nd ability was useless to me and i mainly used the basic click and bomb. Freeze is way to long for the cd it has.
To me it felt little like a rythm game since getting to groove of tapping the basic attack to the music was really satisfying and efficient strategy. I would have liked to have keybidings for abilities since clicking the ability always ruined my tempo and flow.
I thought at the start that the critters ate the food and and the health bar was how long i had to defend. I realized my mistake of sometime wondering why nothing is happening even though i keep smashing these bugs and realized i had to destroy the nest.
The repairing of nests is really good mechanic to the game.
easily 4+
The abilities were all pretty neat and added additional depth and strategy, but I mostly found myself using the bomb and the normal shockwave.
At first I thought the anthill's healthbar a timer counting down how long a level so I was just spamming shockwave next to the pizza until I realised I had to destroy the anthill, I feel like there should be some signal to the player that destroying their anthill was the main objective.
The fact that you have to destroy the den and then kill all the ants actually makes this more interesting than most defense games, and the music was fun. I like it.
I do think that if y'all were to map the abilities to some keyboard keys (like QWERT or 12345) it would make the experience feel a lot better and enhance the chaos and frenetic gameplay, but that's a minor complaint for an otherwise fantastic game!