Beetle Thomas by NuggetTeam
You're Thomas the Beetle!
Roll down your ball of dung in order to feed your family!
But it'll not be that easy! Your way down is infested with enemies and traps, to avoid them, you just have to resize your ball of dung.
Controls:
X to make the ball larger.
Z to make it smaller
This game was made in less than 72h to participate in the #Ludumdare #LDJAM jam. Be sure to vote us! #LDJAM
Here's the team:
Imjeax -> Music http://gamejolt.com/profile/imjeax/1057268
Joanrelos -> Programming http://gamejolt.com/profile/joanrelos/47900
Matla -> Art http://gamejolt.com/profile/matlahvi/1083672
Ana -> Art http://gamejolt.com/profile/anagf/123159
Xuso -> Art http://gamejolt.com/profile/xuso74/1083731
Iris -> Art
Fernando -> Art
Jorge "RGC"-> Art, Character
Roll down your ball of dung in order to feed your family!
But it'll not be that easy! Your way down is infested with enemies and traps, to avoid them, you just have to resize your ball of dung.
Controls:
X to make the ball larger.
Z to make it smaller
This game was made in less than 72h to participate in the #Ludumdare #LDJAM jam. Be sure to vote us! #LDJAM
Here's the team:
Imjeax -> Music http://gamejolt.com/profile/imjeax/1057268
Joanrelos -> Programming http://gamejolt.com/profile/joanrelos/47900
Matla -> Art http://gamejolt.com/profile/matlahvi/1083672
Ana -> Art http://gamejolt.com/profile/anagf/123159
Xuso -> Art http://gamejolt.com/profile/xuso74/1083731
Iris -> Art
Fernando -> Art
Jorge "RGC"-> Art, Character
Ratings
| Coolness | 51% | 3 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.42 | 414 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.38 | 313 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.35 | 357 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.58 | 450 |
| Humor(Jam) | 3.57 | 132 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.44 | 290 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.33 | 411 |
| Theme(Jam) | 4.07 | 177 |
I've always to know what it was like to live the life of a dung beetle, and now I know! well done!
This entry does much better on meeting the theme than my beetle! :D
Here is what I liked:
The parallax background, it's beautiful. The foreground terrain could really do with a similarly calm style to make the other objects pop out even more.
The kawaii beetle sprites, a nice over the top combination.
The puddle warning sign, really useful.
I've had a lot of trouble gauging how large the ball needs to be for the ground obstacles. Just fitting below stuff overhead was easy enough, but how large exactly do I need to be to get over a stump? A fix would be making the exact height of all ground obstacles really obvious and requiring the ball to be at least twice as high (rotational axis being above the height it has to get over). Because the height of overhead obstacles *is* really obvious, which makes them easy to get past. This would mean you'd have to drop the puddles/holes or make their interactions a little more dynamic (perfectly getting stuck in the hole or simply losing size while moving over a puddle instead of breaking for example).
Some simple visual true/false indicator of whether you will get past the next obstacle at your current size would do as well (you can be subtle about that by for example making the beetles expression look worried if you won't make it and normal/calm if you will).
I also wish there was either some way to manually speed up, so you can get past the early section you already know quickly (hold both buttons perhaps), or instead making the obstacles random/different every time. I stopped going for a higher score because replaying the beginning got boring.
And it would've helped if the story/description was in game additionally to some sort of progress indicator. Had I known how close I got to feeding the family I might not have given up.
Last thing: qwertz keyboards. They exist and I'd like you to never again use the all too common XZ button combination without thinking about those.