Earworm Jam by ursagames

A game about trying to escape an ear worm.
Not quite an endless runner. Something related to a rhythm game.
What is your high score?
| Link | https://ursagames.itch.io/ldjam50 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/earworm-jam |
Ratings
| Given | 40🗳️ | 80🗨️ |
Very nice game overall, congrats!
we are gonna die
like everyone else
An ear as character! Why not :smile:
Once I understood the mechanic was more than *just* getting perfect beats, I got much further. Got around 1600 on my best run, then the jump was too slow to avoid obstacles in a row haha. Really good submission, super impressed!
I want Google to replace the "no internet" dinosaur running game with this! Really weird and well done!
When is this track dropping on spotify, i need it in my life
Gameplay idea is great, but little confusing. But overhaul - amazing experience, thank you!
P.S. often freezes for a while
That being said, you may have lost cause that song is going to be stuck in your head for awhile if you're at all like the rest of us mortals!
Music is gorgeous
Lyrics - thematical
"Like an everyone eeeeelse
You gonna diiiiiiie!"
I know what I will sing tomorrow:D
Ear worms, they're the worst without actually being *that* bad.
The rest was the genius of the others and I did not follow their majestic leaps to this piece of art so I cannot speak for them.
Thank you though! :D

Found the juice slider! Love this- but I can't beat 41, even with the juice turned up. I'll try ooooone more time. Fabulous song. Thanks for the game!
Great entry overall, adding the annoying voices to throw off your rhythm was truly genius.
Second guessing my choice to not be more explicit on telling people one of the core game mechanics or being a lot more obvious with it. There's hints from the combo text as you get more combos, but it takes time to unlock and most people in jams aren't going to run into it.
@bhughes We thought about that at first, but the issue is that we want to encourage people to spam the left/right quickly as well and there's no way to get that to look good animation wise without spending the whole jam on animation tech, so we settled on making the left/right increase/decrease your overall run speed.
@anoma1y Sorry about the random freezes, that's an issue with loading in audio for the first time in HTML5 that I couldn't find any solutions for. It should be smooth after things have played though, although mileage will vary based on your PC of course.
@nardandas You do indeed win as far as I've seen! My personal record is 2500 and you blew right past that, well done!
But, I do want people to have a chance of figuring it out on there own so do give it a try :)
The graphics and audio are well-produced, and both fit together well in how absurd they are. The gameplay is fun in terms of seeing just how far I could get (the answer is not very-about 600 points was my highest). I did notice what you spoke about in your 'making mechanics obvious' with perfects causing more harm than good (so much so that the previously mentioned high score came from purposefully button-mashing and getting a ton of offbeats). Other than that quirk in the game design, I had a lot of fun being confused at the absurdity of this one. Good entry!
Constructive feedback: adding gameplay depth via a hidden mechanic when gamejam play sessions are so short is a pretty big risk.
Hard to play but a very nice entry.

The jumping felt a little bit janky, but the rhythm bits worked very well!
Also if it's any consolation, I hate the jump too.
FYI:
Playing on Windows 7, Chrome browser and it took 5 reloads to get the game to start. It freezes from time to time as you hit the rhythm causing you to lose the rhythm but I will keep trying it to see if it is because I haven't loaded the sound effect before.
In other words, fantastic job making this earworm that will stay with me for days. I mist share this with my team lol It's inevitable~~~
@asukanami Not sure why that would show up, but the game does require WebGL and will run awfully without hardware acceleration on. I only have tested it on chrome personally, but I had reports of it working fine on edge and firefox as well.
@vixenmink Game does require hardware acceleration to run decently with webGL, also it should run better if you don't reload the browser but just play another round it should be more consistent. There's an issue with audio loading in Godot with multiple scenes on HTML5 export and having hiccups when loading the audio for the first time.
@shadow64 That's really odd! From what I've found there's some issues with audio loading in on HTML5 export in godot with multiple scenes, but once it's been loaded once it's in memory and should be smooth after that.
@gamesplusjames Glad you enjoyed it! I had a blast making it :)
I'll try and get a windows version exported for people to play as well, the current issue is there's some bug in export that changed the lighting so we tweaked the game to look decent on web sacrificing how it looks on a standalone build.
Love the song, and how happy the worm is when they catch you.
🎵You're goooonnaaa diiiiieeee🎵

i don't know what i just played
Great game tho

Btw, that song is brilliant.
@morricore Yeah, we definitely didn't make that aspect of the game obvious enough that this is actually an anti-rhythm game. Another huge joke as a Dune reference that's in there by just by hidden mechanics... well and one of the worms does reference Fatboy slim - Weapon of Choice when you walk by. The hint that the pink text combo messages are the big worm isn't very obvious especially since people tend to not pay much attention them.
@shrillwhip It's possible the delay is different based on your audio / video devices could make it desynced, but the window is actually probably more generous than it should be for the fact that it's an anti-rhythm game.
I liked the art, the sound, the overall mood here. The concept was a bit too cryptic for me and that was a bit unpleasant at first, even if losing was still fun because of those awesome animations and great music!
Great job on this it's quite something 🪱
I'm really not sure about deliberately misleading the player on how to play the game, it didn't lead me to an AHA moment as you mentioned in your blog post, it just annoyed me.
From a technical standpoint, it was a well put together entry. It's nice to see options and a tutorial in a game jam game.