LudumData

Rescue Hamsters! by ryjcio

[raw]
made by ryjcio for Ludum Dare 45 (JAM)

Wooohooo!

rescue_hamsters.png

How to play?

You need to help those little animals to go through levels. They are silly and lazy so they won't make this task easy!

On each level you need to rescue defined number of hamsters.

  • Mouse click - Placing tiles
  • Mouse click + SHIFT - Removing tiles
  • Z - Choose ground tile - You can do it also from menu on right side
  • X - Choose spring tile - You can do it also from menu on right side
  • C - Choose hammster killing hammer - You can do it also from menu on right side

Theme explanation

I didn't want to focus on quantity, so I focused on level constructions. You need to build a level for your silly hamster from nothing to something that its silly mind can handle. In fact, you are starting with nothing and building towards something!

Source code

The game is written in PhaserJS 2 with TypeScript. Whole code base of this game is available on GitHub. Whole game was written by me.

Graphics

All graphics are created by Alicja Gołębiewska.

Audio

Unfortunately, I had no time to work on all sounds, so I decided not to be reated in this category. Some audio and music are made by me, but most of sound are downloaded from freesound.

Credits for sounds

https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/402581/ https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/402581/ https://freesound.org/people/fellur/sounds/429721/ https://freesound.org/people/JoelAudio/sounds/135465/ https://freesound.org/people/jimhancock/sounds/376318/ https://freesound.org/people/Isaac200000/sounds/188013/ https://freesound.org/people/Juaner_/sounds/468332/ https://freesound.org/people/satanicupsman/sounds/144015/ https://freesound.org/people/Breviceps/sounds/445958/ https://freesound.org/people/Soulox/sounds/460094/

Links to play below

Youtube https://rescue-hamsters.herokuapp.com/
Youtube https://github.com/bkostrowiecki/rescue-hamsters
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/rescue-hamsters

Ratings

Overall 658th 3.362⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Fun 560th 3.268⭐ 30🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 504th 3.241⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Theme 830th 2.931⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 383th 3.793⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Humor 181th 3.556⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Mood 526th 3.379⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Given 30🗳️ 24🗨️

Feedback

ShellDragon
09. Oct 2019 · 23:14 UTC
those little squeaks just broke my heart lol.
yyam
13. Oct 2019 · 21:51 UTC
Really nice art and cool game! The ability to quickly restart would have been nice, but it was very fun to build a working solution and see the hamsters all get to the end :)
johnryanaudio
13. Oct 2019 · 21:58 UTC
I really like where this was heading. It was a little bit too hard with how fast paced it was, but I think it could actually be a really fun game.
Cole and Jordan Studios
23. Oct 2019 · 23:31 UTC
Pretty good little game! I think it may have made more sense to only do one hamster per level, since you effectively end up doing the same thing over and over. I don't have a lot of negative to say about this game. Nicely done!
Unlockingcube
24. Oct 2019 · 01:41 UTC
The sound effects were really funny. I think my main complaint is the time to think / do what you want before the game starts. Other then that great job on the theme!
coachsisyphus
24. Oct 2019 · 11:37 UTC
My ovaries exploded; excellent work!
adhesion
25. Oct 2019 · 02:33 UTC
Nice! The overall concept is great and the atmosphere made by the graphics & sound works really well. Gameplay was pretty fun although I'm not sure if there's any point to having a limited number of hamsters per attempt - mostly that just meant I did some trial and error to figure out the solution, then if I ran out of hamsters & failed, I just had to remember my work & tweak it a tiny bit to win. Wonder if it might be more effective to just move on to the next level when you get one hamster in, and use total hamster deaths as a sort of score. Also had a weird issue where occasionally the hamsters would come out of the entrance going left, which resulted in some unexpected deaths. In the level with the X, it seemed like I could get hamsters to died & get rescued simultaneously, but it counted towards rescue so yay! :D Ended up giving up on the level with the spiral since each attempt was pretty slow. Still a pretty fun experience, nice work!
benk
25. Oct 2019 · 06:21 UTC
Nice one, had legit fun playing this. It reached a point where I felt I'd figured out the game, but then micromanaging tiles to get hamsters to the end was a little tedious, but a lot of things were satisfying. Smaller levels might have helped, or just something to make it feel like less effort to play.
MaxKlimenok
25. Oct 2019 · 11:11 UTC
Not bad - but it takes time to get used to Shift+LMB -> Right click should be much more convinient!
Also I'd like to have enough time to prebuilt (think about) the level and then hit "play" to see hamsters go through. Here I have to do everything in real time and I'm not that fast for it.

And thanks for "online" html/js build!
pkenney
26. Oct 2019 · 19:43 UTC
Very cool idea here, and a nice art style and cool sound/music. But it was a little too hard for me, with the combination of how fast the hamster comes out at the start, the very few bricks/etc I have, but most of all how the whole thing resets after I lose a few too many. The best fun of this game is the crazy experiments I can do, but I felt like it was too focused on making me find a proper solution and not about letting me enjoy the experience by doing crazy stuff. If it was a little less punishing (maybe infinite hamster deaths allowed?) I feel like I could have started out by having silly fun and worked my way toward a solution.

But a very cool core idea here, with a nice presentation.
CGIXE
26. Oct 2019 · 19:49 UTC
Great idea! Especially loved having to move around tiles which brought a new element to this type of game. Although would have preferred right click over shift click for removing tiles. Great game!
philomory
26. Oct 2019 · 21:39 UTC
This was a neat concept, although I'm too bad and could only beat the first level before my patience ran out. It felt a bit like Lemmings, only sort of backwards, which was neat.
FireSlash
27. Oct 2019 · 00:42 UTC
The lack of setup time and the large building grid made this more frustrating than anything for me. A better start/stop mechanic to give you setup time would be ideal (See: The Incredible Machine); or starting from a position where the hamsters don't instantly die (See: Lemmings).

The fisrt level was also brutally difficult. Typically you want to ease players in with a simple mechanics demo that's hard to mess up, so they can quickly learn the mechanics.

That said, the art is cute and the core mechanics all seem sound. These are minor gripes that can be easily sorted out in a post-jam version.
scsc
27. Oct 2019 · 10:05 UTC
I like the mechanics and this game definitely has a potential, but there are some UX issues, which I believe you should be able to fix post-Jam :) First, the ground selection in the top-right corner has mostly the same color as the background, so it's almost invisible on a first glance - I kept clicking on the screen and trying to use the hammer to build something. When it comes to the dynamics of the first levels, I have to assume that it's an intentional part of the difficulty that we have to immediately start to build unless we want the first hamster to die, then we have to quickly delete and re-spawn the ground around him (as there isn't enough resource to build the entire level) - and if the hamster dies, we have to quickly improvise and delete a part of our construction, so that we quickly build it around the spawn once again. Also the difficulty is implicitly increased by the need to be able to easily draw a straight line with mouse (which I'm not really complaining about, but it feels like some players may not enjoy). Also when the player moves the mouse too fast, sometimes an unexpected gap appears (but interestingly enough, sometimes the hamster walks over the gap). On top of that, when I was playing the second level, after I switched the Firefox tab for a moment and then went back, the respawn got stuck and the game did not restart even though all my hamsters died :)

Nevertheless, these issues are completely acceptable after 3 days of development, it's just something to think about in your future endeavors :)
Roka Josh
27. Oct 2019 · 11:49 UTC
Fun puzzle game, it would potenetially be better to plan a build and then send the hamsters rather than just send them straight away, however it may just be because they get sent very quickly and are fast. Overall though great job!
MrsTari
27. Oct 2019 · 12:11 UTC
wow nice job ! :D really funny
mosaic
27. Oct 2019 · 13:03 UTC
Many hamsters died... We could only save a few and those who were saved were as stupid as normal.
![Screen2.PNG](///raw/ce8/81/z/29deb.png)

Really funny and fun to play. One objection though: I think you have to wait too long for the hamsers to all walk to the end of the path. Maybe add some time-warp or something similar. It would maybe be enough to rescue 3 or 2 hamsters. The music felt a little bit repetitive. All in all, I think this could be made a good commercial game.


P.S.: I discovered these two fun bugs:
![Screen1.PNG](///raw/ce8/81/z/29dea.png)

Anyway, great game!
Cedric Matheus
27. Oct 2019 · 13:42 UTC
Great game!
Artyom Volkov
27. Oct 2019 · 22:27 UTC
A nice small game, but I miss pause and restart button.