Fathom by Joe Williamson
Originally intended for the 48 hour compo. Sadly, it wasn't quite ready, so I decided to take an extra day and submit to the jam instead, but it's still solo/from scratch.
Control bullets with your mind. Click and hold to slow time, then drag across bullets and release to redirect them.
The unconventional weapon is your telekinetic time-slowing robot-mind.
NOTE: Apparently it tends to play best in Firefox, and terribly in Chrome.
ALSO NOTE: If you find yourself having to "brute force" your way through sections, chances are there's an upgrade via a different route on the map that you should find first.
Control bullets with your mind. Click and hold to slow time, then drag across bullets and release to redirect them.
The unconventional weapon is your telekinetic time-slowing robot-mind.
NOTE: Apparently it tends to play best in Firefox, and terribly in Chrome.
ALSO NOTE: If you find yourself having to "brute force" your way through sections, chances are there's an upgrade via a different route on the map that you should find first.
| Web | http://joecreates.itch.io/fathom |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=28182 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 61% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 4.37 | 5 |
| Audio(Jam) | 4.23 | 19 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.94 | 40 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 4.80 | 5 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.62 | 629 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 4.13 | 27 |
| Mood(Jam) | 4.00 | 52 |
| Theme(Jam) | 4.12 | 52 |
Looking forward to see if this game keeps going after this.
The game felt extremely polished, well done! ^^
(My only complaint is that there aren't more levels :P)
Congratulations! Keep up the awesome work!
My only real feedback is that the power feels too over powered... If there were a limit, for example, it wouldn't be possible to brute force some parts, like the first shielded turret (unless that was intended).
If this were a full game, I'd buy it!
I finished the game, but was disappointed that the mechanic has no surprising applications... It is a bit repetitive...
The controls were the main point of contention in this. They were great most of the time, but can be a bit unwieldy. The way the time controls versus the bullet speed works means I'm often pre-emptively slowing time to wait for a shot to come, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Maybe an indication of some sort on the gun itself to say whether it's going to fire or not is useful, often I'm just staring at it in slow mo while I think I'm just out of its raycast or something.
Could maybe do with a camera that looked ahead to where your mouse is closer to, maybe. Maybe just subtly. I think I overdid that in my game XD
Superb polish. Seriously good! Absolutely should continue with this!
Unbelievably cool on its own and especially for a 72 hours Jam entry!
The slowdown effect ground chrome's flash plugin to a halt but still playable. Music & Art were amazing and gameplay pretty decent too with some nice light puzzling. Excellent job!
The audio is a nice little loop and suits the game. The pixel art is by far the best thing about the game, highly polished look to it!
At first I thought the game was broke as I could not jump with spacebar, would really add this in. The movement of the character is really smooth and the turrets too.
The mechanic is a neat idea, had fun throwing bullets all about the place. It would be great it the turrets exploded, that would be more satisfying.
I feel you should have limited the slow-mo time, being able to use it constantly made it a little easy.
Overall a great idea well executed, would make a nice game but never been a fan of too much slow-mo in a game.
The controls are difficult to use, specially because it zooms when slow motion, making it hard to aim
A great entry, worth multiple plays.
I died a lot. Probably because and I felt that the slow motions was too strong. I kept holding and releasing mouse button quickly just to make turrets shoot bullets faster but I often didn't caught them in time.
P.S- HaxeFlixel rocks!
Really enjoyed your twist on the theme too. Thanks for making it :)
Amazing game! (as usual) ;)
-CH
I have a couple criticisms, but they're very small and the work here far outweighs them. I don't know if you ran out of time or if it was an oversight, but some sort of life indicator would've been nice. The other criticism is that it is a bit hard to time out when to slow things down for specific puzzles (like when you have to move the bullet up and to the right, out of the tunnel, to the destroy the generator).
Overall, very fantastic work!
It was a bit hard to get into the right rhythm to use the bullet time bullet control, but's probably intended.
Fantastic game!
That's my only gripe, however; the game looks absolutely fantastic, as always, and i really wish there was a full version of it. Using the slow-time for environmental puzzles was particularly clever. Brilliant work!
More levels please!
Graphically, it was amazing, as always, and I really enjoyed the music as well. The mechanic was interesting, and very well implemented. I especially loved arcing a bullet around corners to hit other guns :) The mood was really good as well. I really can't find anything to criticize this on. Solid game, solid graphics, solid everything. 5 stars.
(I was confined to using a laptop, and so my fingers are cramping after playing this XD)
Would definitely like to see this mechanic expanded.
The bullets are a tad too fast in normal mode. It's nigh impossible to catch them if you're not already in slow mode before they're fired.
Great execution! Only thing I wished for was a camera feature that would focus the camera a bit closer to the cursor, if the cursor was far away from the character.
Well done!
I would love to see a post mortem describing where things where 40 hours into the event, where each component/feature stood in terms of development, integration, and polish, and how you made the decision to switch to the jam.
Either way great entry!
I see some influences of Ori and the Blind Forest, but that's a cool thing.
So shut up and take the 5 stars. :D
just kidding.
It's a very, very fun game. Well done!
Some graphical indication of when a gun is about to fire would have been helpful,
Great job!
Amazing pixel art, fantastic music and I love the bullet time mechanic. Full marks on everything!
Your music was excellent, too!
Great job! Thanks for sharing and congrats on finishing!
Oh, I noticed when I "restored a backup" that turrets stayed dead.
Thanks for the rating and comment. I thought, that the only joke there was in the text and that some people might not get it or it's not that good of a joke. plus, I didn't intend the game to be humorous. it should just be entertaining. so, I removed the humour category. Judging by videos that people made, they didn't find it humorous, so I am happy with my decision.
To your game. I had a second more thorough playtrough and i realised, that you can destroy the turrets, which made it easier. But, when i got to the machine gun with the shield, i just could not get past him. I tried like 20 times. I did realize all of the things, you told me in the first playtrough i just have very bad reflexes and hand-eye coordination. So, even in constant slo-mo, i could not grab the bullets and change their direction fast enough. Maybe, you can add a option for retards like me that you could change the bullets direction immediately after you've grabbed it and maybe give a cooldown to the slo-mo time.
But otherwise, excellent job. I wish i could be as quick as you and do this kind of detail within 72 hours.
Not my 1-minute gameplay game :D
Thanks for the tip but i could not even get this right https://youtu.be/O_A0X3DitJk?t=34 I worked that out but i was just too slow to do it like this. i tried to find different routes but i couln't find any.
Checked your previous entries, I remember your LD30 game! :D Great stuff as usual mate
The game was unexpectedly short. Also, I'm pretty sure the speed upgrade doesn't do anything. There a some more bugs, like some collidable air in the top-left corner of the starting room. And once I collected two crates in a short period of time, and that messed up sizes of letters of "Research acquired".
Overall, a very-very great game, though it seems like an experiment.
The gameplay is interesting and seems promising: you could create very good puzzles from it.
The art is great, as usual! The music too is really good: how did you create it?