Bond by Cheshyr
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***!!! WebGL takes a LONG TIME to load. Seriously. I was surprised too. It'll load. !!!***
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Your weapon of choice is... a Rubber Band. Navigate the tower, try not to fall off.
It's not so much a puzzle game, so much as a sandbox for screwing around. Most of my LDJAM entries tend to lack the 'fun' factor, so I focused on a simple mechanic that allowed for player shenanigans.
It's been a while since I've actually attempted to play the piano, so the background music was recorded hastily in the last 30 minutes while trying to recall something I wrote as a teenager.
I've found a bug or two that I'll try to patch, but they're mostly related to excess velocity, or creative players. I'm pretty ok with that. (see comment about shenanigans)
edit: Added support for lefties, using Arrow Keys and Enter.
***!!! WebGL takes a LONG TIME to load. Seriously. I was surprised too. It'll load. !!!***
******
Your weapon of choice is... a Rubber Band. Navigate the tower, try not to fall off.
It's not so much a puzzle game, so much as a sandbox for screwing around. Most of my LDJAM entries tend to lack the 'fun' factor, so I focused on a simple mechanic that allowed for player shenanigans.
It's been a while since I've actually attempted to play the piano, so the background music was recorded hastily in the last 30 minutes while trying to recall something I wrote as a teenager.
I've found a bug or two that I'll try to patch, but they're mostly related to excess velocity, or creative players. I'm pretty ok with that. (see comment about shenanigans)
edit: Added support for lefties, using Arrow Keys and Enter.
| WebGL | http://games.metacrow.com/LD32/index.html |
| Source | http://games.metacrow.com/LD32/LD32%20-%20Bond.zip |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=20497 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall | 3.32 | 411 |
| Audio | 2.96 | 412 |
| Fun | 3.23 | 402 |
| Graphics | 2.42 | 913 |
| Humor | 2.08 | 857 |
| Innovation | 3.72 | 165 |
| Mood | 2.83 | 641 |
| Theme | 2.79 | 914 |
Neat idea, looks like with more time, you could have had a really cool puzzle game.
Really solid foundation to what could make a great game with some more polish.
Maybe I didn’t get enough through the game but I would love to see this mechanic used to kill enemies.
The one thing I would change is I think the ball doesn’t have enough friction on the ground and maintains its momentum too long, sometimes I did a puzzle successfully but failed because I slipped off the other side. Just a thought and it’s a minor gripe on what is otherwise a very nice system.
I'm liking entries where the "weapon" can be something that is used to solve puzzles or kill enemies in creative ways, not just "weird" LOOKING bullets without special behavior... So this has that covered.
Cool entry, good luck!
It's a bit of a challenge to actually click the blocks you want to attach to, so maybe selecting the nearest thing when you accidentally click on air would be a good change.
The actually movement physics are pretty weird. Did you implement left-right movement by spinning the ball?
I'd also like tell you that using ASDW when you could have used the arrow keys is a pet peeve of mine, because my ASDW keys aren't in the same place as yours and I have to go in my settings to switch them over for every game that does this unnecessarily.
Anyway, good job!
@cgmorton: glad you had fun. Honestly, the first 3 levels were effectively tutorials, so I'm not surprised they weren't as fun. I need to find better things to do with moveable blocks. Maybe near-misses could attach close. Yes, I used mostly torque for motion, with just a little force so you could move in the air to get on top of blocks. Arrow keys actually work too, but when embedding the game on certain websites, arrow keys scroll the entire page, even when the game frame is active. Thanks for the feedback.
A couple of small suggestions. A couple of times I left my rubber band behind and forgot to hit spacebar to remove it. So it was off the screen but keeping me from forming a new one. Maybe when it reaches the edge of the screen you could have it dissolve, possibly with a sound effect, to indicate to the player that they're free to make a new one. Or if you're going to keep the ability to have a band off screen, then there should be some kind of level design that requires you to do this for a specific reason.
Also the audio sounded kind of cool, but the level was really low. I had it cranked and couldn't hear it very well.
Nice game though. I would definitely pay money for a fully developed version of this.
very fun.
good pzl game!!!
This could definitely do well to be extended with more / more polished puzzles - it's a really solid idea for a game!
Rating this one really high. Well done!
I'll start from the top...
Puzzles and physics definitely need a little refinement. I took them to a point that felt reasonable for a 48-hour game jam. Likewise, I probably needed to provide a little more guidance on objectives, and perhaps a couple more incremental trainig puzzles early on.
I did notice that the physics reacted differently in different browsers, and on different PCs. I probably need to tune the graphical quality a touch, and constrain things just a little bit.
For lefties: If you use arrow keys for movement, what keystroke is prefered for releasing the bond? It feels like Right-Ctrl or Right-Alt are the best placed, but I thought I'd ask. I assume Colemak and Dvorak users have no problems with similar mappings?
Click accuracy was mentioned more than once... adding 'close enough' zones to both the mouse and the objects is one approach, although a player-bond shortcut or ability is a great idea as well. Thank you for those suggestions.
Regarding movement; I used torque instead of force, since I wanted the spinning ball feeling. I know it made control feel looser, but that was supposed to encourage foresight, and reliance on the bond-mechanic for precision. Did it work? Did I make it a little too loose?
I may tweak the discovered self-propulsion into an actual mechanic witha dedicated block, since it was so popular and novel. Props to those that found that; I missed it entirely.
I'm torn on adding an actual combat mechanic to this. I had considered throwing stuff at enemies, or throwing enemies at enemies, or throwing yourself at enemies... In the end, I had no time to add it, so it's not present in the compo submission, but maybe in future versions.
I'll work on making the tutorial levels more focused, and making puzzles more puzzle-like. I want to keep some of the sandbox feel of the game, so that'll be fun to figure out.
Amusingly enough, I have a persistent audio effect when both ends of the band are attached, but not when only one end is attached. Thanks for the heads up; I'll fix that.
In retrospect, the Crystal Blocks shouls have had collision with the plyer disabled entirely. More intuitive, and easier to implement too.
Getting WebGL to work was the hardest part of this, frankly. I only spent about 16 hours on actual game development, the other 20 hours were spent trying to make the toolchain work as expected, and working around some new and/or resurrected limitations of Unity in v5.0. The loss of Native(RAW) Audio Import comes to mind.
Glad the music wasn't too obnoxious. Not sure what to say about audio levels, other than they needed a volume control in game, but I didn't find the time.
I'm glad everyone enjoyed it. It's rather motivating to finally create something fun after such a long drought.