Crazy Critters by freso
Who put this junk in my garden? Oooh, those shiny things are pretty.
There's too many slimes in the garden!
- Move with WASD.
- Avoid getting slimed!
- Collect coins to hire slime-eating critters
- Left mouse button: order critters to move or attack
- Right mouse button: recall all critters
| Link | https://umesweden.itch.io/ludum-dare-56 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/crazy-critters |
Ratings
| Overall | 294th | 3.8⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 449th | 3.52⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 651th | 3.16⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 227th | 4.04⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 259th | 4.12⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 137th | 3.88⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 236th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 253th | 3.88⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
The pixel art and animations are very good - The slime explosion and all of the charm of the chickens are top-notch. On the down side, I did not understand why my chikens disapeared after defiting a slime. I hoped that I woud have a big flock at the end.
When I first started to play and a little critter spawned very near me, I tried to flee and it was really hard staying away from it. I guess this is a very stressful game, I thought. Then I noticed they didn't close the final gap, and I realized they were my friends. I don't think there was anything in the instructions or lore that said anything about having friends, it might be good to add that.
And speaking of adding. After having played a while I noticed a very small text in the upper corner that I could order and recall my friends. That should probably be mentioned in the controls too. Especially because of the cute sound bites that played when performing these actions.
Over all, I think I liked the sound of the game the most! Really good work on all the effects and the background music.
The graphics were very nice too. There were some cases of erroneous tiling when the grass borders weren't correctly placed and I think it would have been nice if the world edges had been uniformly and nicer handled. This is of course details... so I'm not really complaining at all.
I didn't fully know what the end goal of the game was. First I figured it was collecting coins, but after a while I guessed it was getting rid of the slime. The instructions say to avoid getting slimed. It might be good to also mention that the goal is to clear all slime.
In the end I had missed two slimes and it took a little bit of hunting to find them. It wasn't too bad, which I guess was a result of the world size. It could have been nice with some visual or auditory queue about the direction of the closest slime to avoid the final slower pacing of the game.
I also didn't fully understand the coins, in particular the coin UI meter that for a long while said 2 for me and I guess this is what I bought friends with, but I think I had more at some point than the 2-3 I had when the UI said I had two coins.
All in all though, a very good entry! Good work!
I wasn't totally sure how much strategy there was to fighting the slimes. At some point I had like 4 or 5 critters and they more or less all died to one slime, but then for the rest of the game I just had one or two critters at a time and still managed to kill the remaining 6 slimes.
The various objects sticking out of the ground were fun to see. In general I think the graphics were pretty good!
It would be even more fun to have a more complicated game-loop - since you just try to find the enemies and let them get devoured!
But for a three-day Gamejam its super nice!
Everything just seems to be done really well!
I also did enjoy running around with them, although I did feel like it wasn't very clear whether they were responding to what I told them to do with the mouse. I think they were, it just felt a little wishy-washy, if that makes any sense.
The basic gameplay was fun, and I would have liked a little more of it, maybe some additional maps/levels or some different enemies, even if it was just another background piece to really make it more obvious that we're small, or a red slime that moves slightly faster, or something.