Fire Frog by Jungorend

made by Jungorend for LD24 (JAM)

This was a great competition! While Internet was lost due to a storm on the latter half of the competition, (and as such the levels are poorly made), this is much more of a game than my last entry. We're very proud of it.

The concept is simple, you need to open all the gates to get to the next level. You can only open a gate by firing bullets of the same element as that of the gate. You change elements by getting hit by enemies.

X-> Fire
Space-> Next Level

Squirrel->Earth
Bird->Water (Yeah, I don't know either)
Fire->Fire

The purple things are health, everything else are enemies of different elements.

The programming was done in Java with LWJGL and slick-util, and the art in Photoshop. The music was done in Finale Notepad. It was a two person team.

Hope you enjoy!

EDIT:
Removed the Linux/Mac versions, as I have no way to actually test it for the errors people have been having. Apologies to those who wasted their time.

Windows	http://www.mediafire.com/?htms08k2h2cep5c
Source	http://www.mediafire.com/?fnmyx4mzj9wstc9
Original URL	https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4392

Ratings

Coolness	39%	742
Overall(Jam)	2.75	183

Audio(Jam)	2.86	120
Fun(Jam)	2.31	212
Graphics(Jam)	3.00	157
Innovation(Jam)	2.63	166
Mood(Jam)	2.54	159
Theme(Jam)	2.27	197

Feedback

chumez

28. Aug 2012 · 18:14 UTC

The graphics are good, and the concept sure has potential, but, movement and camera are a bit dodgy, and sometimes it's hard to see where the gates are.

bvanschooten

29. Aug 2012 · 20:46 UTC

Like the graphics and sound, but the controls are fiddly, the camera follow is sadistic, and somehow the character doesn't always shoot when I press X.

🎤 Jungorend

30. Aug 2012 · 02:19 UTC

Sorry, I forgot to mention, you're supposed to just hold X to fire. Thanks for the critiques!

thewiseguy99

02. Sep 2012 · 02:33 UTC

I enjoyed the game play. The music and art were good, the concept unique. The only issue is the screen at time was a bit trippy but not to the extent that it was a big problem. Overall worth the play...thanks guys!

TastyOrange

02. Sep 2012 · 02:35 UTC

Not much to say that has already been said: good graphics, nice background music, nifty concept, but not the best movement and view. I do love the first four bars of the "earth theme", but I don't really care for the rest of the piece. I would have preferred some sort of theme and variation involving just the first four bars. It would be great to see what this could become though!

ubear

02. Sep 2012 · 05:58 UTC

Couldn't run the game on Ubuntu 12.04. Executed java -jar Fire\ Frog.jar, got java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/lwjgl/LWJGLException

evilseanbot

03. Sep 2012 · 06:41 UTC

Game opens for a sec, then closes.

mohammad

03. Sep 2012 · 21:23 UTC

fatal exception occurred. program will now exit.
:(
can you fix this?

Cake&Code

03. Sep 2012 · 23:15 UTC

Hmm, opened to a black screen, no errors, and pressing esc closes the window. I can't seem to do anything else.

Oh, it does change the title of the window to "Level: 1: Are you ready?" before not doing anything anymore.

Cake&Code

03. Sep 2012 · 23:16 UTC

Forgot to mention, on Window 7 Home Premium x64

🎤 Jungorend

04. Sep 2012 · 01:50 UTC

For Cake&Code: That's not an error, that's just me burnt out and not designing a level screen. Just press space to go to the next level. I am sorry it is so confusing.

Cake&Code

04. Sep 2012 · 03:12 UTC

Ahhhhhh! I see, you might want to put that in the description. After hitting space on the black screen I did get to play the level.

That's a very interesting concept! It was fun trying to dodge the different projectiles so that the character wouldn't swap elemental powers before shooting the right gate. I did notice that it was much easier to shoot by holding down the x key than by tapping it (I think you've got a cooldown for it that only counts down when it is pressed? If so, you should probably change it to always cooldown until ready even if the key isn't pressed)

A fun concept and it was well executed! With some more polish this could be an exceptional game, keep going with it! Post-jam updates please! :)

Benjamin

04. Sep 2012 · 03:22 UTC

scrolling should keep the player on the center so he can see where he's going. Anyway in the first levels most of the gameplay is on one screen only so why not make the level a bit smaller, so the player is not going to loose his way trying to explore the whole level.
The black screen without notice about pressing the space key is a very bad point, most of the people coming here won't test your game further.
To change element sometime hiting bullets was not enough, I had to hit enemies themself which make them dissapearing. I eventually finished with a lock situation : no more birds and a closed blue game. In this case you should trigger some gameover sequence or spawn new bird so the player can finish the level.
Nice music(s) ( Dont know why but it switches music every game and not every level ) and nice graphics too.

Kmad

04. Sep 2012 · 12:20 UTC

Couldn't run this on Windows 7 64-bit, it loaded a black window titled "Level: 1: Are you ready?" and nothing happened after that - tried a couple of times.

Wan

04. Sep 2012 · 12:25 UTC

Good idea, the gameplay is simple yet interesting. I too have been left with a mixed impression because of the camera movement, some hard times finding the gates, and the shoot key not being very reactive (I guess you implemented it by making shooting work only one tick out of X, but it's not very comfortable for playing. Instead when you shoot, you could set a timer to X, decreased with each tick, for which you'd have to wait until it's back to 0 until you can shoot again).

With these issues fixed this would certainly be a very entertaining game, so good job!