Roustabout by bitdecay

[raw]
made by bitdecay for LD 43 (JAM)

A hard working roustabout finds himself the lowly deckhand on duty. Now, with sole discretion on the manifest, you have to decide: what it going to ship?

Controls: WASD/arrow keys - Directions Space - Grab/Release Q & E - Rotate a piece if still attached to the crane F - Fast Forward!

The dock crane will lower cargo onto the deck. lower-crane.gif

It is your job to organize the deck for the shipment. organize.gif

Rats live on the ship and will occasionally infest some of the cargo. They cannot be stopped. You must dispose of the infested cargo or face hefty fines. rat.gif

Tools used: Unity Tiled SuperTiled2Unity FLStudio FMOD Pyxel Edit Sound effects were either created during the jam or built up from base sounds found on zapsplat.com. Go check them out! Donate to keep that site going. It deserves the love.

teaser.gif

Ratings

Overall 196th 3.811⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Fun 148th 3.764⭐ 38🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 103th 3.797⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Theme 725th 3.149⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 319th 3.905⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Audio 59th 4⭐ 39🧑‍⚖️
Humor 385th 3.103⭐ 36🧑‍⚖️
Mood 367th 3.514⭐ 38🧑‍⚖️
Given 38🗳️ 36🗨️

Feedback

AidanMarkham
06. Dec 2018 · 04:03 UTC
I really liked this entry! It was a fun take on a tetris type game. My only wish is that I was able to get into the resolution settings to fullscreen the game, I want to see the pixels! It being locked this at that resolution makes it really small if you have a 2k computer monitor.
DJH
06. Dec 2018 · 04:30 UTC
Liked Mechanics! If you made game with Unity, consider porting this to WebGL! I'm sure you'll get more ratings and feedbacks
Lexyvil
06. Dec 2018 · 05:18 UTC
I got the end~ I had fun.
It felt like I was playing Tetris, and there were times I felt I wasn't going to be able to move all those pianos on time on the second level, so that much added to the challenge. It makes me wonder if the rats infest at random or always the same item in the level. I didn't have to skip/sacrifice any object at least, otherwise I'd rate it higher on the theme. But good game!
wolar
09. Dec 2018 · 22:15 UTC
Very good idea, nice audio and graphics. I had fun playing your game. One problem I had was fixed resultion as on my macbook the screen with the game is like 5x5cm maybe not even that. Second thing I want to mention is LD theme. The game would be great without those sacrifices of cargo and to me it feels like the theme is kinda forced into the game. Overall very nice game.
Drekler
09. Dec 2018 · 23:23 UTC
This was a blast! It felt like Tetris with a twist. I loved the visual design and animation. The sound effects and music were a nice touch and helped to set the mood. The music did get a little repetitive, but only toward end. Overall, I think you did a great job of executing your idea and polishing it on time. I also enjoyed that it had an actual tutorial and a sequence of levels, rather than just one.

One thing that I would have liked is to make grabbing and letting go of objects a little more fluid. Perhaps if you are grabbing from the bottom and want to move left or right, take a moment for the character to move around to that edge and then continue pushing. I never really felt the need to sacrifice anything unless the mice got into it. The last level was a challenge with how many objects were given, but I broke the crane before I had to start chucking things overboard!
EdwinGameDev
10. Dec 2018 · 00:29 UTC
Nice entry, i enjoyed it a lot! The puzzle of the items of a lot of fun. Good job! :heart:
patvanmackelberg
10. Dec 2018 · 00:41 UTC
This game was really well put together. I'm not usually a big tetris fan but this was a really great take on it. Awesome submission!
cdunham
10. Dec 2018 · 01:26 UTC
Really nice art and music! The game mechanics fit in so well together in this, making you worry about how to rotate the next item being dropped while making you rush to push stuff out of the way to make room for it. My only gripes were when I had to move things that were big and hard to fit in just right into where I wanted them to go, but that's probably me just being bad and not precise enough at pushing and pulling other objects.
v1ru6
10. Dec 2018 · 09:19 UTC
Nicely put together. I liked the tetris inspired mechanics.
kaeveris
10. Dec 2018 · 20:13 UTC
Very cool mechanism! I love the art and music! Great use of the theme! Really nice and polished game.
Mordokay
10. Dec 2018 · 20:38 UTC
I love games where you have to manage space ... this game is awesome! Sound was simple enough not to be distracting and graphics were very well made. The controls were very intuitive and the fact this game has many different levels makes it a lot more fun and replayable!

Great Job!
samh
10. Dec 2018 · 22:42 UTC
One can really see that a lot of effort was put in this entry. The artwork is nice, there is a map, little background animations… even a credit screen (which I have been unable to leave… no clicks or buttons seemed to work).
The mechanics are really interesting, I think they’re the basis for some really nice arcade/puzzle game, but may need some polishing: everything feels a bit slow, and I was often stuck because of what seemed to be tiny offsets smaller than a pixel, so it was hard to see what object was in the way. Maybe snapping objects to nearest pixel (or grid) position after moving them could help with that. Also having the space key toggle drag on/off was confusing at times; have you maybe tried the variant where holding space drags objects, and releasing it goes back to free movement?
As for the music and SFX, I thought they were quite pretty and fit well with the game. Congrats!
Aim
12. Dec 2018 · 10:48 UTC
This is really clever and well done. I really enjoyed the unique combo mechanics between tetris and NES zelda. The seafaring theme is so charming. Good job!
peterfonts
12. Dec 2018 · 11:07 UTC
Awesome game! Mixing tetris mechanics with push and move objects... great! The mood is amazing and all the game has coherence! Also, you all add subobjectives! \o/
Maybe you all can improve somethings:
- Is difficult to see when an object collapse with other object... maybe mark these objects with a different shader or color (example red) is better to identify this situation.
- Maybe you can add inside the gameplay an interface identify the scores and the stars at the same time, something like this:
![UIExample.jpg](///raw/036/e1/z/1f9bf.jpg)
- When the players complete the game, they are at the credits scene... but is impossible exit in this section! xD

Overall, Congrats people! Amazing job!
JUSTCAMH
13. Dec 2018 · 12:52 UTC
I've seen this mechanic executed multiple times in past LDs, but it is still a fun idea. Some things felt a bit off though. There is very little linking the game to sacrifice. You'd pobably say the whole rat thing, but that is less of a 'sacrifice' and more forced. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything when throwing one of the items overboard.

Some of the collisions felt a bit too sensitive, and the game often seemed to stray from grid patterns. I had a nice grid going, with a one sized hole that I slipped an item into. But the item was slightly sticking out, despite being pushed in as far as possible, and this lost me the game. The shadow of the dropped item didn't even look like it was overlapping the item. I think that the game could have benefited from a forced grid, wherein socoban style, boxes can only be moved whole grid spaces. This would have made the placements a bit more intuitive.

I liked the details in the game world; the person on the wharf, the buoy, seagulls and mast as an obstacle. This felt rather polished, so well done! Could have maybe had a lineup of items along the dock, to both act as an opportunity to plan and polish off the fact that items currently appear at the end of the crane. Otherwise, the animations are very smooth, and it is nice that you can speed up the crane movements. Very well made game, I hope this feedback helps. :thumbsup:
🎤 bitdecay
13. Dec 2018 · 14:45 UTC
@justcamh Thanks for the honest feedback! Our plans for the theme tie-in started a little more ambitious, but as the gameplay developed, we had to simplify it and it became what you experienced. The pacing of the game changed up a few aspects of how we got to the final product due to time constraints, but that's the game jam experience in a nutshell :)
digitaldude555
14. Dec 2018 · 11:11 UTC
Very good game and fun to play, I like the design of all the items, they are all very unique. If this game was for ludum dare 42 I would give 5/5 for theme but since its 43 I dont feel like this game fits the theme. Anyway good job.
badpaul34
14. Dec 2018 · 11:11 UTC
I agree that the sacrifice mechanic is not very obvious. Maybe only a matter of size. If the boat would have been smaller, you would have needed to take choices and sacrifice some objets. Size vs price?

What stopped me from playing was that I don't understand why I can't move the object only forward or backward. That's really a pain in the a** to be forced to turn around the object all the time. Too bad because the overall realisation is good.
Pompi Pompi
15. Dec 2018 · 14:48 UTC
Excellent game!