LD43 Journey by WegPast
Here is our first game for our first Ludum Dare :)
LD-43 Journey
After an emergency landing on an asteroid in the heart of a radioactive space storm, you have repair your ship (the LD-43, colonial transport), and run away from this disaster to complete your mission : deliver colons in cryostasis.
But beware ! You don't have much oxygen and the asteroid integrity is week. You need crystals, that could be find inside of this big rock, to repair your ship. But digging into may speed-up the asteroid degradation.
You can sacrifice members of your crew to keep more oxygen. Upgrade your, only, space suite and try to repair your ship to take your chance on running away through the storm.
The more your ship is repaired, the more chances you have to get away from the storm !
*Controls : *
- "Space" to use your rocket to move.
- "E" to enter the ship when close to the top door
- "Escape" to bring the pause menu and get back to main menu if you're lost in space :p
A sacrifice must be made :
The game is build on 3 axes :
- You will need better tools, but for that you'll have to sacrifice your sight (big equippement hiding part of your eyesight)
- You need crystals that are part of the asteroid integrity and the asteroid is protecting you from the storm. So you sacrifice your shelter to get mor crystals
- You have few oxygen, you may have to sacrifice one of your team member to breath longer
*Other secondary axes : * Crew members have two habilities; one outside of the ship, one when they're left in the ship, but not both. So you'll have to sacrifice habilities dépending on the situation, as each member is usefull in special cases.
Will you survive ?
Update 05/12/2018 : - Few minor fixes - Few balancing
Good luck !
Team : @wegpast, @arktas, @lut1n
Music : https://soundcloud.com/eric-skiff
| Windows | https://gamejolt.com/games/ld43-journey/383045 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://gamejolt.com/games/ld43-journey/383045 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ld43-journey |
Ratings
| Overall | 321th | 3.645⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 399th | 3.402⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 313th | 3.421⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 521th | 3.464⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 438th | 3.64⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 394th | 3.268⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 191th | 3.735⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 60🗳️ | 66🗨️ |
We used some tool to create the concept (like "brainwriting") and split tasks like ticket a bit like with the Agile method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development).
I did it! I won! So cool, all galaxy is mine now! :) I love your graphics and music! Good job! :D
A shame that there no way to split "Audio" rating in music and sound effects...
The music artist's website is in the credit page of the game.
Pixelart are by me, particle effects, sound effects, and background image by @lut1n
Simple controls, yet effective.
Too much text at the beginning; didn't read it.
Maybe the crew stats could have been displayed when selecting them in the ship.
Anyway, great job; enjoyed playing it !
I didn't realize that the suit energy ran the gun and boost and got stuck outside the ship so it might have been nice to get a way to just reset the game.
Overall pretty decent job though :)
Nice work!
On thing that I noted is that it didn't use a sacrifice mechanic on one aspects, but on several, as opposed as most of the others games here.
The audio was very good, as well as the graphism. One thing that slightly bothered me, is that the blocs outside the ship were a bit "big".
The controls were pretty simple and easy to understand.
Well, a very good game !
Merci en tout cas du feedback, nous testerons ton jeu dès que possible ;)
Also proof-read your texts, guys, why the hell were we transporting freezed anuses in the first place? (I'm not native english speaker, may be wrong on this, sorry if so)
The music was very nice, I left it on as I was writing this review.
I don't see what we are to do when we run out of energy, just wait? Restart? Something should happen. I guess you didn't have time to finish that part.
Unlocking 'asteroid integrity' was a poor choice on my part, because it blocked the screen and offered no useful info. I wish one of cheap unlocks offered something interesting, to encourage players to unlock more. It got worse once I unlocked the other skills.
There were also some balance issues, most upgrades besides crystal and energy boost are unimportant, and Miner is just amazing (gaining 5x more crystal outside than the others, I just used him). I do understand what your intention with the theme was, but balance makes most choices trivial.
Now after all this nitpicking, I have to say, the game is very good! I had so much fun in playing it, and I think I spent many hours in it - most of any game so far. Good job!
PS : musics are not ours, only sounds was made during the jam, take time to check credits if you want to know more about the artist.
LudumDare rules : "Audio – How good the game sounds, or how effective the sound design is. A catchy soundtrack, suitable sound effects given the look, voice overs, etc."
And sounds effects can add a lot to a game's atmosphere and game mechanics. We work on what sound effects should we make and when to use it. It would be a shame not to have a feedback on those :)
But aside of this, thanks for your analysis :) It's as you said, we didn't have enough time to polish the game balance, there is nearly no tutorial as it's lacking of simple and effective explanation and most of players end floating forever in space without understanding what happened because of that x)
We will surely patch those things later, but I don't think we will add those in this current release, as balance and tutorial are, in my opinion, part of a game conception and not just fixes (we might add some fixes for UI reading ans spelling for example but no more balancing.)
We'll post the Post LD version soon on this page though :)
As it's written:
- "You’re free to use 3rd party Artwork/Music/Audio assets, or assets you previously created, but we ask that you OPT-OUT of the respected voting categories (Graphics, Audio). You can opt-out of a voting category when you submit your game." https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules
- "Opt-out of categories here if you and your team didn't make all your graphics, audio, or music during the event." (edit page of your game, was also shown when you submitted it)
I can understand how hard it is to balance the game right. Especially since many players here come and play for a few minutes, that's hardly enough to give a proper review. And players who play a lot will find many imbalances.
If we go in your way (with exaggeration) : in our graphics we used a font for our text, and it's not made by us, so we need to opt-out graphics too ? It look a bit unfair to me...
But in some way you're right, those musics are awesome and they're not made by us. As a reminder we used [Erik Skiff](https://soundcloud.com/eric-skiff)'s awesome work.
But we chose them accordingly to the atmosphere we wanted to create for our game, and we made sounds effects depending on our need, so we work on audio too...
This is an interesting subject to debate on. Maybe it deserve a post on the main page. I'm really curious about what @pov, or others think about it. Don't you ?
PS: I'm honestly not sure if this site is a good place to do any long-term discussion with the rest of the community. I think any post would just get buried in the midst of people advertising their game. But if you do want to start it, send me a link, it's an issue that's been nagging me for a while :)
*ps: played your game, cool one !*
I think the setup is pretty good, maybe you can expand a bit on the gameplay, make it a tough choice and have a feeling about needing to sacrifice. Overall, good entry :)