Friendly Baubles by micahcowan
(NOTE: Tested on FIREFOX, CHROME, and SAFARI. All other browsers, use at your own risk. Firefox is most heavily tested.)
You live within so many worlds. But your friends don't know each other. There are connections between your worlds. You're beginning to lose your identity!
Talk to your friends, grab them and toss them into your other friends, unlocking other worlds. Try and get all your worlds connected! (For starters, try connecting the two people who like to call you "n00b")
WARNING! PARENTAL GUIDANCE SUGGESTED. This game includes some (rather juvenile) humor and phrases that parents may find objectionable for young readers. Play through the game yourself first (it's not hard to figure out most of the connections to make) and decide whether it's appropriate for your children before allowing them to play.
"Improvements" version fixes some movement glitches, adds more path-taking variety to the worlds, and has significantly improved graphics for the "friends".
Written by hand in HTML5/Canvas + JavaScript, using the CreateJS library.
Music played on my Yamaha NU-1 upright-action digital hybrid piano. Sound effect generated using Audacity.
GPL, GPLv3, CC BY
You live within so many worlds. But your friends don't know each other. There are connections between your worlds. You're beginning to lose your identity!
Talk to your friends, grab them and toss them into your other friends, unlocking other worlds. Try and get all your worlds connected! (For starters, try connecting the two people who like to call you "n00b")
WARNING! PARENTAL GUIDANCE SUGGESTED. This game includes some (rather juvenile) humor and phrases that parents may find objectionable for young readers. Play through the game yourself first (it's not hard to figure out most of the connections to make) and decide whether it's appropriate for your children before allowing them to play.
"Improvements" version fixes some movement glitches, adds more path-taking variety to the worlds, and has significantly improved graphics for the "friends".
Written by hand in HTML5/Canvas + JavaScript, using the CreateJS library.
Music played on my Yamaha NU-1 upright-action digital hybrid piano. Sound effect generated using Audacity.
GPL, GPLv3, CC BY
| Web (Submission) | http://micah.cowan.name/friendly-baubles-submit/ |
| Web (Improvements) | http://micah.cowan.name/friendly-baubles/ |
| Source | https://github.com/micahcowan/ld30 |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=38013 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 88% | 2 |
| Overall | 3.17 | 596 |
| Audio | 3.61 | 102 |
| Fun | 2.65 | 892 |
| Graphics | 2.53 | 902 |
| Humor | 2.83 | 273 |
| Innovation | 3.58 | 236 |
| Mood | 3.07 | 486 |
| Theme | 3.72 | 215 |
Also, I completely fell in love with your light simple music ~ it gave the game a very relaxing and inviting atmosphere. ^_^
Not that that stopped me from letting my 7-year-old play...
Well done, pretty cool game.
Not a game for kids though. I'm relieved that my daughter couldn't figure it out when she played it as I really don't want to explain certain things to her.
If I get around to fixing the game's glitches, I'll probably add a "clean" mode that completely replaces world 4. I was shooting for a higher "humor" rating, though, and naughtiness can be funny. :)
Maybe you could have tuned the game a bit more to the music: what does this beautiful piano piece have to do with a church, a gaming, etc? Instead maybe watching the stars or a fireplace in a living room, a walk in the park, camping at night...?
As to video feedback for hitting something, didn't I provide that? If you hit someone with the talk balloon, they... talk. If you hit 'em with the grabber, they disappear. If you hit 'em with another friend, they talk, and potentially swap and open a new world. There could always be more feedback, and certainly finding time for another sound to put there (especially, one distinguishing connection success from failure), but clearly something happens in every case that you hit something.
A bigger problem, to me, is that when you hit something, they don't always look close enough to be touching. There may be a glitch in EaselJS there, or else in my use of it...
It doesn't lag on any devices I had handy (except for my Kindle Fire HD, but that doesn't do Canvas stuff very efficiently at all), but if I had to hazard a guess, it might be because I'm using SVG for the spritesheet, and if EaselJS isn't careful in its implementation, they might be getting redrawn inefficiently. There's probably some ways I could try to work around that.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback!
Thanks for playing/commenting!
Used IE11, shows "Not enough stack space" on the console.
Also the lack of an indication of which tool you were using until you fired it was confusing at first cause i didn't see any feedback when i pressed the tool keys.
But in any case, it's a great original concept, and I stuck around long enough to finish it which says something. 5 stars for innovation and audio here!
I _just_ fixed all the graphics in the "Improved" version if you want to try it (also worth trying if you hadn't yet, because the friend movements are more challenging).
The lack of tool indication is definitely a big problem. Thinking I'll fix that tonight, and then call the game done (with the possible exception of a "clean" version). I enjoyed making the game, especially the path mechanics (though the code for that is atrocious), and I'm very happy with my novel interpretation of the theme. But it's not actually that inspiring, and I'm not very motivated to make more of it than I have already (in the "Improved" version, that is).