Sunburn by LDJam user 301358
A game where the sun burns you to death every 10 seconds... unless you stay under the cover. In the meantime, enormous bugs try to attack your unarmed character, who has to lead them into traps.
Press 'F' to go fullscreen.
Unfortunately, the web build seems to not work on every device. I provided simple ZIP files that you just extract and run. Sorry for the inconvenience!

| Link | https://git.sr.ht/~cstefan/ldjam-51 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/sunburn |
Ratings
| Given | 6🗳️ | 17🗨️ |

I like that this game tries new things, but I'm not sure they all work. Having to guide enemies into traps rather then killing them directly is difficult, especially since they don't follow the player in a straightforward fashion. I really like the notebook art style, though.
The pathfinding can be annoying too. It originally followed you perfectly on a straight line every frame, but they would gather in a ball and follow you, and it became boring. The status quo is definitely better, but it doesn't work very well as you noticed. Another thing would've been to take a curved path and kind of surround you, but I don't know the math for that and it would've taken way too long to figure it out.
Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback. I'm glad you liked the art!
Having to lead the enemies into traps is a good mechanic. They don't always follow the player directly, which gives the player an extra challenge but also kinda hurts the core loop of the game as sometimes you are just waiting around for an enemy to start chasing you again.
Having to rush to a heart while dodging enemies, then running back to the shade before the sun shines was quite fun. Enemies being able to steal your health pickup is also a cool mechanic, tho often times they will get there first before you can.
Map being randomized each time is cool and could be expanded further, perhaps have the trap locations randomize every time the sun shines?
My main gripes:
- The bad worldgen that was already mentioned. In my opinion, if you can't find the time to implement a good procedural worldgen (which indeed is a lot of work, and probably out of scope for most LD projects!), just accept that you'll have to manually create like five levels that are fun, and then just randomly pick one of those on startup. Player frustration will be much lower.
- The graphics are endearing, but there are no animations at all. A very-low-frame-count "flipbook" animation would have been a cool effect, and probably not too much work to implement; for example, for the insects, you could have gotten away with just two frames, probably (left legs in front, right legs in front).
- The enemies like to spawn nearly on top of the player, giving the player no time at all to react when they immediately charge them. This one is such an easy fix coding-wise that it makes me think it may have been intentional, in which case: please don't do that, it's just frustrating and not fun. A good gameplay improvement (in addition to giving the player a little bit of distance) would be to have the enemies be "frozen" for a second or so after spawning, such that the player can plan their moves.
All in all, it's a nice entry though! I'm just trying to give constructive advice. :smile:
I agree with all of that. It does feel like not a lot of work to implement it, but then again, I did finish with 1 minute to spare. And I think most of this is just because of my lack of experience (it’s my first actual game).
About the enemies spawning on top: I would’ve fixed it if it occurred in testing, but it never did, so I never even thought about that. It definitely is an issue that I knew existed in the world gen, and I just realized that it would’ve been an easy fix there, so I have no excuse for that.
Thanks again, I appreciate the detail.
I probably should’ve found some more straightforward rules. Thanks for the feedback!