Magic Rush by Verga
Magic Rush
A game by Lorenzo Vergani and Alberto Fogliata @foglia
This is our submission for ludum dare 47! Hope you like it! Game downloadable from itch.io
Theme: stuck in a loop Category: Jam
The old wizard found the book of all the evil in the world, he was not able to handle all that power, so the book made him obsessed and paranoic. One day, trying to protect it, he did a special and antique magic from the book. He was not powerful enough, so he created a Space-Time loop. Only the knowledge contained in the good books can save him. Can you collect them all?
Move with A and D and jump with SPACE.
Note: The game is written exclusevly in Python and if you download the source, then it needs an interpreter to work on every device. Make sure you downloaded the pygame library too!! (python3.* and pygame 1.9)
| Youtube | https://verga.itch.io/magic-rush |
| Youtube | https://verga.itch.io/magic-rush |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/magic-rush |
Ratings
| Overall | 1027th | 3.35⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 850th | 3.3⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1117th | 3.026⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1364th | 2.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1145th | 3.175⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 742th | 2.781⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 794th | 3.4⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 66🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
That'll make a it a lot easier for people to play, as even if someone has python installed, it might be the wrong version or they might not have all your dependencies installed.
First, a little parenthesis on the .zip you distributed.
- As the other commenters mentioned, launching the game should have been more user friendly. If you are not able to bundle it into an executable, I would recommend adding simple instructions instead.
For example, on linux, (I have `virtualenv`) I called:
```
virtualenv -ppython3.7 .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install pygame
python game.py
```
You also didn't mention which python versions can be used. (I used `python3.7` as I saw it was the one in your venv)
- You should have removed the files you used for version control (e.g. `.git`, `.gitignore`), linked to your max (`__MACOSX`), and your virtualenv (`venv`) as it can't be reused.
Now for the actually game, it is a nice platformer. The control where okay, could have been improve a little to improve the game feel (e.g. jump height depending on the time space was pressed), but remained very responsive. The physics and "pixel perfect" didn't feel sloppy (a common issue with platformers). Some death still felt a little unfair (e.g. grazing spikes kill you).
Simple consistent graphics (and good the lighting effect in the title screen ;)). Very good music (although is seems it wasn't made during the jam).
Main details that could be improved:
- The difficulty curve is weird. The 4th level was a lot harder than the next ones for example. The limited number of life was not necessary, because it is annoying to start again when you just want to finish it.
- The 10th level is not finishable (already mentioned), but if you add a book, the end screen appears correctly (with a "TODO"). Not enough time to finish it I guess? ^^'
- The window is small! Could it be possible to double the zoom, i.e. turn 1x1 pixels in 2x2?
Well done to you two! :)
Edit: I see your a DaFluffyPotato fan after looking at your code
The most room ofr improvement is in the handling/feeling of the player character's jump.
The connection to the theme is barely there, but I trust you didn't start this before the compo started.
(the game didn't have a clock and the lightning ran super fast in the main menue.)
I converted your game to a Windows exe using pyInstaller (apparently py2exe is deprecated). This worked without issue on my desktop. I tried it on my laptop which is running Windows 10 and Windows is SUPER suspicious of the exe that was generated because I guess it's never seen anything like what pyInstaller generates, but of course it should be safe to run if you allow it. Once I did tell Windows to run it it loaded very slowly, but seemed to work fine once it was running. Maybe this will allow more people to play and rate your game. [Here's the Windows version pyInstaller generated](https://myldgames.s3.amazonaws.com/ld47/Magic_Rush.zip).