Mate Escape (LD) by alexandervrs

[raw]
made by alexandervrs for LD21 (-)
I finally made it! My 1st Ludum Dare!
Mate Escape! Help our desperate groom escape his wedding and meetup with his secret spouse! Is he fast enough to catch up with her car?

Controls:

Left/Right Arrow keys - Move
Space Key - Jump
Down Arrow Key - Duck
Ctrl Key [Hold] - Focus (Slow Motion)
Esc - Quit Game
F Key - Switch Screen to Fullscreen
W Key - Switch Screen to Window

The game feels it needs a lot stuff, the art took me a lot of time to make. The music is reaaaally simple as it isn't my forte + I was running out of time. I was planning to add more levels, story, enemies, powerups, achievements. But 48 hours is never enough, no? ;)

I liked the weird concept I came up with though. I might expand this into a proper game later if people like it. :)

The motivation and ideas I got out of this Ludum Dare is my personal contest "prize".

Enjoy! Don't get pecked too much!

*Windows build works on XP/Vista/7 (Extract all the files/folders from the zip first)

**Source requires Game Maker 8.1 + the extensions installed from the zip

Ratings

Coolness 0% 418
Overall 3.54 60
Audio 4.00 12
Community 2.17 314
Fun 3.15 110
Graphics 4.38 8
Humor 3.09 50
Innovation 2.62 286
Theme 3.38 124

Feedback

recursor
22. Aug 2011 · 15:28 UTC
I like the artwork, and the sound/music was good too. I agree with your assessment that it needs more "stuff", but that is normally what you can say about every 48 hour game. Nicely done!
ChevyRay
22. Aug 2011 · 18:10 UTC
Cute graphics, I have no idea what the story is in this but my imagination fills in the blanks for me!

The gameplay could use some tweaking here and there, particularly for enemy/collectible spawning (make it so food never appears right next to enemies or below ones low to the ground, otherwise it is impossible to get). Then again, perhaps those serve as temptation.

Great work, nice high-res 2D graphics.
AndyBrown
23. Aug 2011 · 02:18 UTC
That was fun, although after dying once.. it ended up being easier to just duck the entire time until I won. At extreme speeds it seemed impossible to dodge any of the low birds, so I just plowed through them. Great artwork and sound though!
James Paige
25. Aug 2011 · 02:58 UTC
For a game that was all about running very fast, it was rather slow-paced. Gameplay mainly boiled down to pressing down or space at the right time and patiently waiting for the next rollerskates.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the artwork, and the style. The tie flapping in the air cracks me up.
offwhitefox
27. Aug 2011 · 02:40 UTC
Not bad, though toward the end it was too fast to react to birds coming, or to get fruits and whatnot, so the balance was really off.
summaky
27. Aug 2011 · 16:18 UTC
Very "clean" graphics and the music fits very well.
Jacic
30. Aug 2011 · 23:02 UTC
The graphics were quite nice, and I liked the music too. It could use a couple more power ups/something, but overall its a very good game. Congrats on your first-time entry!
Chaoslab
08. Sep 2011 · 12:00 UTC
Well rounded and fun! :-)
marudziik
08. Sep 2011 · 19:51 UTC
My end score was 52/1/1920 so it's definitely winnable, but I feel it's quite random when having high speed (from about 130-150km/h). I liked the graphics, music, and warning works quite well. Definitely one of the better games in the genre.
Jedi
12. Sep 2011 · 22:49 UTC
It's really well-polished and fairly fun. I really like the rotationy-animation :).
My biggest gripe is that the game is a little hard to control. It takes a little too long to jump and you stay in the air a little too long, IMHO. It was still fun to beat. 4* overall.
pekuja
12. Sep 2011 · 23:40 UTC
So... what am I escaping from? A couple of comments about the gameplay itself: The warning signs appear below where the birds actually appear. That made me jump into a bunch of the birds that came down the middle of the screen because I thought they were going to fly lower. Also, I felt like the slowdown was something that you would probably want to use all the time. I felt like all you could really do is to save it until you couldn't keep up and then use it. Weakens the mechanic, I think. I felt like moving left and right didn't really seem to have any use at all.

I just played the game a second time after writing that. I thought the game was one that you're supposed to just play forever and get as far as you can, but apparently there was an ending. It was really pretty easy to get there though. It seems like you just duck down most of the time and maybe jump over a low bird every now and then. Even if you hit most of the low birds, it seems to me like you'll end up grabbing enough health powerups that they won't matter. Of course if you wanted to really optimize your score, you'd want to be jumping for high fruit and stuff, but it seems like at high speeds there's not much of a chance of being able to catch them.

The graphics and music are pretty nice. I'm sorry if I came across as too negative here. I'm trying to be constructive.
🎤 alexandervrs
16. Sep 2011 · 16:51 UTC
@ChevyRay & @pekuja
Supposedly, there would also be a bride chasing you, each hit from enemies would make you lose speed and eventually getting caught in the raging bride's hug xD. Due to time though I could not add this nor an intro to properly introduce the characters and the plot.

@ChevyRay
Yeah the food ovelapping bug happened to me as well and could be easily fixed. I left it in due to lack of time.

@AndyBrown, @offwhitefox & @marudziik
Sadly as well I didn't have enough time to playtest the game properly. After playing around enough times and having friends to play it I had complaints about the ridiculous speed, which I agree, speed should increase but not too much that is impossible to dodge enemies and give the player proper time to react.

@pekuja
No worries, that's why comments are for and I agree with everything you've said.

Thanks for the comments guys. All are much appreciated. :D