Breathing Room by Barondev
You landed on an unknown planet after your spaceship suffered some major damage. The planet is inhabited by ferocious beasts! And to make things worse, there's no oxygen in the air! All hope is not lost, however. The cargo you were carrying contained spare parts for your spaceship, so if you can find them you can repair your ship and get back home! The lack of oxygen won't be a problem either! Well, kind of. The round plants you can see scattered around can produce oxygen.
But don't let your guard down, as the 'safe space' that they create when you activate will shrink before disappearing completely, and you'll be left gasping for air again! And that's not all: the beasts that populate the planet hate the smell of oxygen and will attack the plants, accelerating their decay. With your trusty handgun and the oxygen-powered jetpack on your back, fend off the monsters and defend the plants as you fight for your survival. Will you be able to go back home?
Controls - Movement: WASD - Interact: F - Shoot: Mouse 1 - Dodge: Mouse 2 - Aim: Mouse
Team
- @barondev - Programming Extraordinaire
- @squaredev - Master of the Visual Arts
- @mobiusdisco - Music and SFX
| Windows | https://squaredev.itch.io/breathing-room |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/breathing-room |
Ratings
| Overall | 70th | 4.019⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 258th | 3.594⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 638th | 3.125⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 851th | 3.179⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 59th | 4.415⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 36th | 4.108⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 97th | 3.858⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 58🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
Really wanted to escape! Good job on the balancing!
-> your turret logic for firing at where the mouse redical is not accurate. I suggest removing that aim end and instead having a modeled or effect "laser beam" to show where the muzzle is facing in real world. Otherwise VERY frusterating to miss
-> enemies, especially early on, need to be easier to kill
-> Force the player to interact with the oxygen plant right out the gate. ( also anything that you can interact with F, you should have it appear over it when the player is even somewhat close to it just to reinforce it)
-> My first goal was to try to open chests using F but then realized shooting is what opened. This is a classic example of expectation vs what I interacted with. I am not primed or shown how I should interact with it, and the only other selection or interact from the menu is F. So I was slamming. I would suggest changing them from chest to maybe an enemy with it on their back, or maybe have an enemy next to it and it can drop once you kill that enemy. So really being clear on translating hwo you interact in your world.
-> Movement, when moveing around, in my experience as a game designer, in top down, to give the feeling of momentum or speed, I suggest genetly pushing the camera foward in the direction you are moving. And the faster you go the more you lean it. This is subtle but gives a much more... speed feeling to movement. PLus the most important direction of movement is in the direction i am going.
-> Shooting, I could go on for HOURS and HOURS about how to make a gun feel good. So instead I will be quick and say, one the sound effect cut off is weird. It is a bit disorrenting. You need an impact effect, sound, just something to reinforce I hit. If you are going to making CLICKING and shooting be required and controled you should let the user shoot as fast as they can click. If you want to limit this, do it through clip reloading. Otherwise you can do a firing rate, but then allow me to hold the button down and shoot. Make the bullets smaller from a model wise, but you can keep there hit rate bigger and make them brite and stand out in comparison to the world.
-> Finally, give me some ability to sprint that burns more oxygen kind of trade off. Also MOve the top left corner oxygen. You don't have a lot of interface so you don't need to fight with a lot of it, but you need to choose top or bottom and then group it. In this case, I recommend having health be lower middle. And put maybe information below the players feet for oxygen. Maybe even just move the top left meter down to the bottom center as it's far away from where my attention is and takes a lot for me to check. And then also have a value of oxygen pass over my head at like lower than 50% maybe to reinforce checking it.
@cranestyle
no worries on the grammar, thanks for caring enough to share!
@datyak
yeah, we didn't want combat to be a focus and I think its almost discouraged with how many and how much health(partly on purpose) thanks for playing!
@c0nst4ntin yeah, mouse on menu would have been nice. if we release a post-LD version we'll try and get that in! I'm glad you enjoyed the game, tell your friends!
@ckyre Thank you, I was very happy to do the music for this! I'm glad you enjoyed.
@yamiog Luckily unity will open on anything, were you able to finish?
@x-pilot I'm glad you had fun, and even happier that you enjoyed the music!
@nam-nguyen We're glad you were pleased with the game and polish! We will seriously consider some difficulty options and rewording tutorial wording if future released come in.
@foxserranu Its great to hear you liked it, the "running out of space" was tied in with the safe air spaces shrinking. it was a little more dramatic in the initial idea but as we started making it things changed shape.
Thanks for playing, tell your friends!
@simogecko Many thanks from the team! the enemies can get out of hand in some areas(levels are procgen), the best bet is to only focus on the enemies when regaining health in the oxygen bubbles. Did you make it to the end?
The graphics are nice and the gameplay is really crisp and intuitive.
Thanks for your awesome submission!
I feel like the design is where it fell down a bit, I was too worried about the oxygen meter, enemies were too tough (especially for how many there were) and why make me press f to pickup the parts, just let me run over and collect it! For a game where you aim with the mouse it would have been nice to be able to use the mouse with the menu buttons.
Okay really big gripe here, if you're going to disable the Display Resolution Dialog in Unity please please offer a alternative, I know it's ugly but it's functional, I have a 1440p monitor and the game launched in the wrong resolution for me and was letterboxed. You could have at least made it 'Hidden by Default' so holding alt while launching will still open it.
All in all, Good work guys :thumbsup:
If anything, it's a little bit weird that oxygen zone disappear before reaching a 0 scale.
We're planning a post-LD version, so we're going to keep track of all the feedback we can get.
Thanks @m0ngoose , If you've not beaten it the best advice I have is ignore the enemies unless you're in the oxygen bubble. We didn't have too much time for a balance pass.
@plukers We hope you had fun, its incredible what you can get done once you realize you don't need to sleep!
@yllia Thank you, we hope you had fun playing!
@stjester We appreciate the kind words, I hope you were able to finish!
@halfwater Have you made it through more than once? the levels are procgen for replayability!
@zykroma As the music man I am especially appreciative! just to be clear on the 0 scale, you mean the zone not actually shrinking all the way before disappearing? - I played your game and had fun, I see the similarity.
I loved the fact that you even created everything randomly, it gives us a little more challenge each time we play, tho sometimes I wasn't able to find anything for miles !
GG WP !
Great job !
In terms of gameplay I have one main problem with it - your bullets do so little damage that you may as well not have a gun at all. So you feel really disempowered (and maybe that was a goal) and annoyed that it's basically pointles to use a gun for any other purpose than destroying crates.
Other than that I would significantly lower the enemy projectile speed. Right now it's simply impossible to dodge more than two of those shooters at the same time. Sure, you could use your dash ability, but it uses up all of your air and most of the time I would rather take a little hit than lose a significant amount of air that would result in me spending more health while searching for a recovery flower.
And one more minor thing is that your character's dialogue is really hard to pay attention to. You start and right away you are faced with enemies and you also surrounded by enemies most of the time after that, so you simply can't stop and read what he is saying.
Overall this game is very well done in terms of graphics and music, it is well built and has an enjoyable gameplay despite all the mentioned flaws. This game also really reminded me of my own old game. Don't want to post a link because people would think that it's some weird attempt of self-promotion, but if you are interested in seeing just how much they have in common it's called TopDownSpaceGame and it is on my itch.io page.
Your feedback has been noted for consideration in the potential post-LD update. Thank you.
But in general the game have fun and interest. And very nice menu (separate thanks for the switch without the mouse) =)
Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)
K I N O
As for improvements: I'd say the fire rate could be increased, at least I feel that could make it feel better than just making the enemies faster to kill. Additionally, moving down is kind of problematic in the game, since you can't see far ahead and have a habit of running into enemies and/or having enemies shoot at you in unavoidable and frustrating ways. I'd also have liked more feedback when getting hit by enemies. Finally, there's a typo in the first textbox, "Surrounded my monsters", or maybe the protagonist is hiding something and had a freudian slip. Anyway, that's as far as my wishlist goes.
The art style is great, I took another look at Scrap Hunt to compare and you can really see the difference. Big level-up there.
I'm not a music buff, so take what I say with not only a grain, but rather a shovel of salt, but I felt at times the gameplay music was too calm for the chaotic action taking place. On the other hand, it really nailed the spacey-ness and mood of being stuck on a strange planet. Additionally the music is high-quality, no doubt about that.
Really well-done game, everyone above already said it, but it felt very polished and something with potential to turn into a bigger game. So yeah, good job and good luck with the post-LD version.
Game looks and sounds great even though the chill exploratory feel doesn't match the breakneck rhythm of the combat and oxygen mechanic. Wish that instead of having exactly 6 crates in the world, there would've been lots more, but have the non-essential ones being random lore tidbits or little jokes, or temporary powerups for the player.
Anyway, great job, hope to see more!
@wetbox I think some of those ideas are floating around in-house as well. very glad to have the feedback!
@captaindreamcast Thanks Captain! Among the other feedback someone suggested the camera could move a little bit more depending on which direction you're headed. we're taking a look at that. I did the music and agree with you, the game turned out more active than I had originally planned(for the better). You're the first person to say what I had thought Very glad you had fun and played!
@homeworld unfortunately we didn't get much time for a balancing pass on the combat but I like the cavestory idea! If we had more time to work on a full game I agree that some lore and a bosts and such would help fill it out.
@fullmontis If we do a post-LD version I will make sure we take a look at a linux version. Thanks for trying it on wine, thats useful info.
@awix I always appreciate critique and feedback, what of the music should be improved?
@virtual-window Thank you for playing, If we developed this into a full title there would certainly be more stages.
@dutssz the procgen we have in place creates mostly good levels, but of course occasionally makes things a little more difficult. thanks for giving it a try!
Really nice graphics and music too, amazing !
Liked the camera effect when you are out of oxygen but i didn't realized i had a oxygen bar before i interacted with the plant.
I don't have much more to say than @cranestyle that made you a super nice constructive comment.
I totally agree with him on the plant and bow thing, ennemies have too much life and maybe shoot a bit too much.
Tahnk you for this nice moment !
There really are a lot of great games this jam to play!