Donut Park Here! by Rongo Matane

--- Game Description: ---
The next semester of Wizard School is approaching, and funds are low... What's a young apprentice to do? Time to hustle!!
Donut Park is the newest bougie foodie hotspot. Orcs, fairies, and elves from all over the realm are lining up to indulge in sugary delights.
But... the parking lot will only fit so many cars! As valet, it's up to you to park patrons' cars and return them in pristine condition. Your tips (and your tuition) depend on it.
Good luck!
--- Controls ---
Control Character/Car: WASD / Arrow keys
Drift (In Car): Space
Enter/Exit Car: E / Enter
Use Horn: Control



Team: - René Habermann - Direction, game design, production - Anne Hecker - Character design - Raffaele Picca - Game design, coding, 3D modeling - Emilia Baron - 3D modeling, level design - Martin Kvale - Sound design - Cameron Paxton - Composing & music production
| Link | https://bippinbits.itch.io/donut |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/donut-park-here |
Ratings
| Overall | 12th | 4.429⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 16th | 4.331⭐ | 73🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 135th | 3.986⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 34th | 4.536⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 27th | 4.62⭐ | 73🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 17th | 4.333⭐ | 71🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 71th | 4.087⭐ | 71🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 60th | 4.236⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
I experienced a bug where I couldn't enter vehicles anymore and after restarting the level, no cars spawned at all. But after a restart everything worked fine again!
Rage quit after getting 400$, guess Wizard school has to wait until I find a different job...
Awesome work, the graphics are fantastic.
Tricky controls, but I guess that is intentional, definitively can feel getting better at it.
I was laughing my ass off at this one. :laughing:
There is also a nice ramp in difficulty/skill required. Like once I figured how to drift etc, it was very rewarding. But I still had a hard time getting cars out without a scratch, which made it aggravating and hilarious. (Because it feels achievable).
I am blown away by what you were able to achieve in this time. :open_mouth: It's insane... and so so good.
I did have a little trouble running it on my laptop at first, it ran such low fps, I could barely control it (especially in full screen)... so I wanted to give it a fair shot and run it on my PC before rating.... and WOW, it is a blast to play, and just looks absolutely beautiful. Nice work. :heart_eyes: :heart:
I'm going to have a hard time getting through the other games, as I can feel myself pulled back to this one to keep getting further. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: It's got a great hook.
There was a moment, when I pressed E to enter the car, but it was too late is the car driver decided to drive away, but I was already in the car, so I draw away as well and could not return.
My feature suggestion is to be able to GTA style intersect car when it leaves)

I just stole one car to pay for my tuition in the first day lol
Really an amazing game! Congratulations team!
I made it all through the 12 days and can get back to Wizard School :grin:
The game feels complete, good work!
I was stuck at day 6 with the first puzzle game, I couldn't figure out how to park 3 cars in such a small space
('-_-
I love the low poly art style and the fact that you have to switch between the character and car controls. I feel adding time pressure if it's well balanced would make it even more fun because you would have to choose between a risky drive or loosing some time.
I agree on the pickup/dropoff being tricky as it's not separated. It's a side effect of the action mode just coming in a few hours before submission - until then it was the puzzles only. But we figured the action mode might be more simple fun. As it is now, to succeed you have to drop off the cars in the right orientation already.
I recorded a playthrough, check it out if you want to see my mad drifing skills :D
(or want to see some solutions to puzzles)
https://youtu.be/hclNIy9nVq8
@dsfan @dekajoo it's solved like this. One of our team members calls this "italian parking" :D

it's quite stressful, especially when you need to get accustomed to the controls being relative to the car and not the world (which is just personal preference ofc), the pacing really is intense!
I spend almost an hour trying to cram those cars of a 5$ tip :D somehow it felt more fun to just go crazy rather than be thoughtful about it.
Didn't manage to attend school in this capitalistic nightmare of a fantasy world, but I had lots of fun !
GG
Keep the great work
*Edit*: whoops, ignore me, have sound issues on my PC -- sound is great, and rating has been amended accordingly :grinning:
You all did so many things well. The whole art style was very charming and peaceful, the music was a perfect complement, and I liked the whole fantasy aspect. The car controls felt very smooth too. I really appreciated the auto-pathing system for the computer drivers, too. That was really interesting to see them find their way out of a tight spot!
It wasn't immediately clear where I should deliver cars, but it seemed like the most reliable activation point was up on the sidewalk. And if I put the car in front of the line, then the customer was able to get out easily. I had my best day after really getting that system down!

We embraced a lot more of the chaos in our version, because we just had too much fun crashing cars. The result was much more frenetic gameplay, versus the calming and methodical game you've gifted us :D

One major improvement would be a clear drop off zone, I didn't like having to drop off the car into oncoming traffic, this caused a slowdown waiting for the AI drivers to figure out a path.
Puzzle mode is really tough :D
However, I did notice some bugs and issues. The first one is that when customers received and got into their cars, sometimes they were just frozen in place and not driving anywhere, which blocked the incoming traffic and made the level unable to complete. Second one is there was no boundary in the map, I tried walking off-screen and then came back, but then noticed I could not controlled my character anymore and he's just wandering around aimlessly. Or if I were in a car and drove off the map, then I pressed E to exit the car and my character got brought back to the starting point but the car wasn't, which resulted in missing that said car and hence the level was stuck. Although restart the level did fix those issues, but I didn't know if they might happen again on other levels.
But other than that, I really had an awesome experience playing this game! And you guys did manage to be able to complete and submit such a big entry on time is mind-blowing for me. Very impressive and astonishing job!
how did y'all make this in 72h? what's your secret !?
it's very impressive and fun,
it's great you went into puzzles with the existing level design elements you had,
there's a good variation in-between each level
nice storytelling and humour, good variety in the vehicles too
I'm having a hard time being objective, I played this for way longer than I should
really well-done and keep it going :grinning: :sparkles:
Great game! The atmosphere is awesome! Props for music and sound design. Same goes for 3D models. They look really nice :D The whole game is really fun to play. The only part that gets a bit too messy is when I start to give cars back, maybe if they arrived from one side of the building and left from the other? But maybe that is part of strategy and fun. Anyway. Amazing job with the game!
Also, I do not understand about what those people are complaining. They are getting their cars back... well whatever is left of them at least...