Always impressive to see networked multiplayer games in LD. This has a great classic arcade vibe to it, good fun. Sadly, I was only able to find one game when I went in to rate it so I didn't get a chance to really master the game. I'll definitely come back to this one in the near future to see if I can find some more people online.

Thanks! We are currently working on an offline version for the next update that will be posted to itch.io to combat this issue.
Updates will be on https://craigaubrey.itch.io/ball-dash-arcade

This game has potential. I had issues with my generic XBox 360 controller during my game-play but was Steams' Big Picture fault. I would like to note that some of your player may have a disadvantage trying to identify the "target to be capture"; sort of speak. This issue may happens also when getting the ball in your slimey hand, the place to go with the ball is implicitly given as "down", as the player went up the stage to pick it –and no "you win" billboards appeared– but then you are at the bottom of the level and nothing seems to happen until you move towards the thing that have fire in it (which will turn your character in the color of your opponent, a nice joke).

So, my advice is "be clear with the player", if both players stay on the bottom level of the stage for too long you should make appear some visual aid about where they should go (up, for the ball in this case (I ended smashing buttons at the bottom of the level thinking the slime will throw the ball and score a touchdown or something)) and once they got the ball it seems like a good idea to tell them where they should go with it (near the torch thing?), but avoid babysitting the player, once the core mechanics of your game are explained those visual aids can go away.

One could say "Well, I had this YouTube video where it shows the core mechanics so the players could grasp what it was about and how it had to be play" and I would say "fair enough", but we should avoid this line of thinking because one ends assuming all people will follow certain steps to gain the knowledge about how the game works, such assumption will backfire most of the time and is a risk not worth taking, thus, some explanation about the core mechanics of the game should exists somewhere and should be shared with the player in such a way he cannot omit by accident seeing them, for your particular case, this could go right when the game is matching the player with another player.

And also, please be sure to check out my game Dance Dance Road Rage Revolutions https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dance-dance-road-rage-revolutions

thanks for the clear feedback. This will be taken into consideration for our further development of the project!

I couldn't get it to work with my steam controller so I didn't play or rate.

@craig-a np :) be sure to check my game Dance Dance Road Rage Revolutions https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dance-dance-road-rage-revolutions

Good work on getting through!

so some feedback, the player movement feels very sterile to me. adding some bouncy jump animation to the player might help a lot but maybe have the player accellerate up to max speed over a few frames as opposed to snapping to it instant.

visually if everything was a bit more unified that would be cool, ike having the particle effect vbe more pixellated perhaps?

has a lot of potential as a couch co-op game keep it up!

Hi, fun game, but I have a suggestion and a question/critic, first I think that(and this is more of a personal opinion) you could add keyboard controls, given that the controls aren't that complex and doesn't require analog presition, wasd or arrow keys I think could work fine, and I just download the game and it looks really different from the images and video here, and the file says post update, so I assume is a version 2.0, with some upgrades, which is great, we did that with our entry, but you should put two different download links, one with the LD version and one with the updated version.

Hi guys! I'm not able to play/rate your game cause I do not have a console controller.
Any workarounds except going to the next store?

This is a competent little puzzle platformer that works really well in multiplayer. A little more time on the graphics would help sell the experience better, I suppose. You can keep that cool retro vibe, while updating to some modern techniques, such as sprite normals, etc. Controls felt a little clunky at times, but that's nothing that can't be addressed with a little more time and polish. You should definitely develop this further, as it shows a lot of promise. Good stuff!

@Axe Thanks for the feedback, more animations are being added currently to improve this aspect.

@Adtberp This is something we're looking into for future implementation. We're now aware that demanding gamepads is a little restricting.

@MaxKlimenok Hi Max, unfortuately the game requires a gamepad at this point, but we'll be adding keyboard controls in an update soon.

@Darby Costello Neither of us come from art backgrounds, so this is definitely an area we will look at. Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!

Nice game. A little boring alone and would benefit from some better graphics and the jumping feels a bit off. might be too slow compared to lateral movement speed.

@ThatSommeS Thanks for playing. We've had a lot of feedback with regards to controls, so we'll be examining that area in the future

Nice entry. FYI You can opt out of some categories if they don't make sense like I was not able to hear any audio, or maybe I just didn't get far enough.

not bad thing) but i think it need some little more abilities, skills or buffs for make game more fun)