Downfall by bnmkt
Good night, everybody!
I made this little game in a little dozen hours, I and you know that it is not finished but I would all like to have some comments in order to improve myself.
I will present you the game, it is a simple game of collapse, the goal is simple: blocks fall, you can position them but beware, the game will not let you do! Every 20 seconds you will suffer his wrath and his curse, a speed-up, a big slow, chains that will prevent your combo from coming true as well as some others!
The source code is available, you are free to tell me anything ! even a little "your game stinks", provided you tell me what makes you say that :)
Come on, good gamejam to all and a huge thank you for playing my game
| HTML5 (web) | http://bnmkt.net/ld42/ |
| Source code | https://github.com/Bnmkt/ld42 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/downfall |
Ratings
| Given | 4🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
The game is playable in principle, and has a solid foundation, but it's plagued with weird design decisions and bugs (and I honestly don't know which is which). I will do my best to critique the game in light of its being a 12 hour title, but a lot of this could have been avoided if you didn't try to do so much.
So the first issue came up immediately when I started playing: the A key doesn't work. I can steer with the arrow keys or with Q/D, but even then half the time my input doesn't register. After a while the 'powerups' started kicking in, which either made the game unplayably fast, tediously slow, or randomly changed the game state in ways I could not begin to understand for how frequent the changes were. I felt like my input didn't have much impact on the state of the game, compared to the random stuff that was happening without my control.
I was not able to work out what caused blocks to disappear. At one point I made a 2x2 square and that vanished. At another I made an L shape (4 blocks high, 2 blocks wide) and that disappeared. At another point a random event happened and half my blocks vanished on their own. So I don't really know what I was aiming towards.
There seem to be 2 blue colors and they're virtually impossible to tell apart.
The controllable area "shrunk" every so often but the blocks still fall outside it. So by the endgame, where I only have 3 columns in the middle, the vast majority of blocks I have no control over, and can't speed up. So it's just a waiting game until I get a block I can actually use.
Here's what I'd like from a 12 hour game: Blocks of solid colors (red, green, blue, yellow, orange, pink) fall from the top of the screen. I can move the blocks left and right. I can speed up the blocks by pressing 'down' or 'S'. When I make any set of 4 connected blocks of the same color they disappear and I get 1 point. If any column reaches the top of the screen I lose. Done. Make that, add some sfx and music and polish up the graphics/tutorial/difficulty if you have time left over.
You asked for honest feedback, I hope this fits the bill. You tried to do too much. Keep your scope smaller next time.
Noticed your meme game is on point, though. :turkey:
My game is clearly not perfect, far from it and it is full of bugs like the fact that blocks appear in dark areas and even sometimes outside the area of appearance, this is due to the fact that I have a table that decides where they can not appear and not the other way around... A huge mistake, especially since the way I did it would have saved me a lot of trouble.
Regarding the "A" key, actually my code uses javascript keyCode, code 37 corresponds to Q on an AZERTY keyboard and A on a QWERTY keyboard, having tested it by changing my keyboard configuration this should never have happened, anyway as it happened I will think of another solution (like a choice of keys by the user)
For the fact that the key has not been taken into account is also a big mistake, I will correct it as soon as possible.
One of the events of the game is "Lucky", which is not really the case... which makes that 10% of the blocks disappear, these events appear every 19seconds.
And finally I will increase the number of remaining columns at the end of the game (or change the number of columns removed to 1 every 30 seconds instead of 2)
Thanks for this long comment, I will take into account all remarks, fix bugs and take time for graphics to make this game playable.
( @psychead i don't forget you, thank to you too !)