A flight to the gallows by thomas-olsson
Summary
When a dangerous criminal leader must be escorted to his sentence in a high citadel, Captain Wade volunteers to take him aboard his Hot air Balloon, the Hippocampus. The way is long and dangerous, but the criminal must be taken there alive. What Cargo will you take or lose ? Can you fight your way through ? Will everybody survive ? Everything is a dead weight in an Aircraft...
Gameplay
The player controls the captain of a Hot Air Balloon and has to guide it until the final level.
General info : Put the mouse on objects to have descriptions. Mouse wheel controls zoom! Moving : W fires the burner, A and D use the lateral rotors. Combat : Use Right click + Left click to fire the Gatling gun. Cargo : Whatever you pick or is linked to you has a weight. Click on a cargo to cut it lose. The cargo is also your inventory. Healing : Click on a part of your Balloon to heal it. Requires a repair kit. Bombs : Cut lose a bomb with the mouse or by pressing B to drop it.
Development
"A flight to the gallows" was made in 48h using Construct 2, FL Studio, and Audacity. It has been a while since I've been so excited with a theme, and I was able to put all kind of things in the game. I can see that his has a lot of gameplay issues, but it was personally challenging as this kind of design was unknown territory to me.
This story is freely inspired by the 3.10 to Yuma films. Special thanks to my lovely Akane who took care of me like always. Now, I need some sleep.
Ratings
| Overall | 3th | 4.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 20th | 4.087⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 30th | 3.957⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 125th | 3.848⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 9th | 4.5⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 11th | 4.087⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 205th | 2.9⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1th | 4.717⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 28🗳️ | 11🗨️ |
Even tho i want to go to bed so badly i still finished the whole game, the ending was interesting.. :open_mouth: Not sure if its possible to have different ending states, but it still was a nice story.
Gameplay was interesting, and every level had different chalanges. I'm suprised that you managed to make so much content :open_mouth:
Some of the dialogue was a bit speedy but that didn't really subtract from the game. Also i barely got to use the bombs.
Not only the game is top-tier but you are also clearly very talented. :thumbsup:
I have only two complaints with this game:
Sometimes when I'm flying up, I can't see what the prisoner is saying
The last level was too hard for me, I couldn't beat it >.< so now I don't get to see what happens.
Apart from that, very well done, congrats on a great game :D
That's being said, there is two things i would like to see changed in a full game:
– Physics. I had a-lot of damage done to the ship not because of enemies, but because i got inside of the wall and was getting damage until i flew out of it. I think there should be some sort of collision system, preventing you from getting inside the walls (Balloon seems to have it). Ship movement feels a little clunky, but this is a good thing, i felt like i was operating a real balloon.
– Overall speed of the game. Prologue and first 3 chapters felt very slow, and whole tutorial could have been packed in one level. But when bullets start flying, game became much more interesting, so i propose a shorter prologue.
This interpretation of the theme was fantastic.
I would only complain about the lack of menu : I had to alt+F4 from the game :yum:
I don't know if I had any other choice, but I felt so bad for cutting the doc away (and dropping the coffin by accident at the same time...).
-Incredibly innovative mechanics. I've never seen a game like this before, and that's something to be very proud of nowadays.
-Very interesting world and characters. The solemn cliffs and caves really set the mood for this game.
-Combat is a real challenge, but shooting your own balloon is more annoying than interesting.
-Beautiful graphics with great sound design. The fact that the art alone didn't take up the entire time allotted is crazy.
Overall a fantastic concept, this could totally be turned into a full game. However, there are a couple of problems with the game that I thought I'd mention.
For one, during some sections the game expects you to have ammo (sometimes during non-combat areas), when I didn't have any. I had to tank a lot of damage from wood planks and such during a few levels because I just plain didn't have any left over from the previous level.
Also, collision is very wonky. I actually couldn't finish the game because after I made it past the final area I couldn't land where the arrows pointed, resulting me crashing through the floor and bursting my balloon. Like heck I'm doing that final challenge again.
But it was amazing to play. remindet me a little bit of sunless sea but just because of the mood
Why you gotta go do that.
You feed me this fantastic story, and then at the very last second, the ending was bugged.
Why man.
Other than that though, the game was super awesome. The mechanics fit really well with the theme, and there were lots of tiny details that really pulled the game together, like the little distortion shader that results from using the burner, and the fact that your balloon gets slightly bigger when you're moving fast.
Very nicely done.