Inconvenient Drone Convention by PeculiarCarrot
Inconvenient Drone Convention is a game where you are an alien tourist who has come to check out all the cool stuff on Earth, like the Seven Wonders of the World, Niagara Falls, and fidget spinners. Unfortunately, you didn't fuel up enough before you left your home planet, so now you're falling toward the surface of Earth at an alarming speed. And there just happens to be a massive drone convention happening right where you are falling. How inconvenient.
Controls
Use the mouse to steer and click for a big ol' speed boost to get out of tricky situations.
| Windows | https://peculiarcarrot.itch.io/inconvenient-drone-convention/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/inconvenient-drone-convention |
Ratings
| Overall | 36th | 4⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 11th | 4.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 208th | 3.368⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 525th | 3.053⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 146th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 39th | 3.842⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 40th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 113th | 3.5⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
Fun concept. It could be quite frustrating when bad luck killed me less than 500 meters from the ground, but that's par for the course with this kind of thing. Once I figured out effective use of the speed boost (for hardcore 90 degree turns and such) it could be very satisfying.
Over time I found myself turning down the music. It's frantic and effective, but it did get annoying after a few minutes.
One thing I noticed is that drones are easy to see on a cloud, and easy to see outside of the cloud, but can be tough to see when they sit on the edge of a cloud. That said, you did a good job of making them quickly visible. That can be tough in a game that moves this fast and I have seen many games in which objects simply couldn't be registered quickly enough for a player to react, so well done.
The movement felt like a fantastic balance of nimble and dangerous, right on point. The boosting and crashes felt nice as well.
The art and sound were also good, and supported the game well. I enjoyed the small touch of the whoosh sound when I changed direction for example.
I came quite close to the bottom a bunch of times, but WOW when I got past like 90% of the way the horde of drones overwhelmed me, and then it was quite long to get there again. But I did retry a lot of times, and got into a zen with it.
Everything comes so fast it's juuuust on the limit, so nicely done. My strategy became to keep the mouse cursor near the ship for fast turning, but my eyes at the bottom of the screen, and just go screaming straight down in flames the whole time.
If I had to suggest changes, I think the drone art is a little hard to scan out at the frantic pace of the game. Maybe the high saturation of the blue background sky made it tougher for me. Red is a good contrast color, but something about it made the drones not exactly LEAP into my awareness like I wanted them to. The art didn't really indicate their direction very strongly either, so it was like I had to watch them for a few milliseconds to track their trajectory - an eternity in this fine game.
Great work.
PS damn that drone that was hiding in the cloud!