Tables & Tremors by SlimmerBurger
Hi everyone, thank you for playing my game.

Here are my times if anyone would like to try and beat them:

When the theme got announced, I immediately thought about two things - earthquakes & tables. Or Tables & Tremors.
So I decided that I'd make a first-person platformer where you ground-pound tables and then dash into them and bounce off of them for extra height. I usually only really make arcade style games for game jams, so I wanted to challenge myself to make a level based game for once. I only managed to make 14 incredibly short levels, but I think that they turned out pretty good considering how much I suck at level design. I also added times to every level, so you can try and speedrun them if you'd like.
Anyway, I worked really hard on this game. Especially considering this is my first time doing the compo instead of the jam, so I felt quite pressured for time. But, I hope you like it, let me know what you think in the comments :)
Tools Used:
-Audacity and my mouth for the sounds
-Bosca Ceoil for the music
-Blender and Aseprite for the art
-Unity as the engine
Updates & Bug-Fixes:
-Fixed UI scaling on Web GL
-Adjusted mouse sensitivity on Web GL
| Link | https://anogrm.itch.io/tables-tremors |
| Link | https://anogrm.itch.io/tables-tremors |
| Link | https://anogrm.itch.io/tables-tremors |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/tables-tremors |
Ratings
| Given | 128🗳️ | 178🗨️ |
The game is fun and challenging. What can I say... I just love smashing things.
If I had to give feedback on something it would be the death screen. The sudden flash to bright red is quite heavy on the eyes, but that could also be because of me staring at my screen for so long :D

@swen I thought the same, but honestly I had the same thought that it was just me staring at the screen for to long XD
and nice graphics too
edit: I think the music could be a bit louder? I like it but tbh I didn't even notice there was music until I was in the middle of writing this review lol
Graphics are pretty polished and unique. Sounds are just comfortable.

I tried my best, and stopped here temporarily. I'm not good at FPS.

@corbeng Yeah I'm sorry about the sensitivity, I'd set it up so I could implement a slider, but I just didn't have the time to make a menu for it
@nethead Yeah I thought about putting a cooldown timer on the space bar, but I figured it doesn't really break the game or anything, it was just a bit strange so it was a low priority. Also, the musics really quiet because it got really annoying when I was testing, so I just kept lowering the volume :sweat_smile:
@recessive Damn! Those times are so good, you managed to finish the tutorial in under a second?!
@sawdust I haven't been having this problem, so I don't really know what I can do about it, I'm sorry you weren't able to properly play it. I can have a look into it though, thanks for letting me know
Really proud that you managed to finish <3
I loved the creativity of this! Amazing job! :D
Nice animation (these hands look so good) and concept. If feels very polished.
It was just sometimes very hard to aim at the tables mid air and the camera moves too quickly for my liking, but still amazing entry ^^
But never saw anything like this before. Nice job
Amazing how many levels you managed to include! Also liked the difficulty being in the sweetspot! Thank you for your fantastic entry!
@wuppos Yeah I adjusted the mouse sensitivity a little bit during the submission hour but I don't think I lowered it enough, sorry if it's annoying
@zomk I had the same thing where it's hard to hit them, especially if they're coming from the cannons, maybe I should've made them a little bigger or something
@parttimeindie You can dash into the tables and break them and it'll bounce you up and reset your dash :D
The sounds and graphics are pretty minimalist but manage exactly what they need to here.
This gave me some serious flashbacks to running Rocketjumping/surfing/demojumping maps in TF2, was there some inspiration from there?
I felt a bit like the high pace limited the potential (slightly) to have more creative / complex challenges as with the current settings, doing things like pivoting 180 and punching towards the stage is really hard in such a sparse environment, if only for the fact that you have to do it so quickly that there's not enough time / visual feedback to regain your bearings in time. I wonder if bringing the speed and distance of the punching and launching down a notch, with smaller levels, could have opened things up a bit.
This aside, I think the entry is really solid, and I love that you save the times to the level select screen. I immediately sent a screenshot of mine to my brother, as others have done here. It's a great addition to a great entry.
the game works really well as a game and not just a gimmicky jam game.
Can be a bit frustrating at first when not utilizing the slam efficiently but then it gets quickly addicting.
I hope you give thoughts to continue working on it after!
**Hats off to you.**
@teenythanos I'm a huge dark souls fan, so I guess that's moulded my git gud mentality
@aderpychickenstudios @giraffalope Yeah, I put that level in as kind of a road block so you'd have to learn the mechanic of bouncing off of tables mid-air to get through, because all the levels after that use that mechanic
@khaoz-fang Yeah the last level is pretty tough, I threw it in to try and test your skills with every mechanic in the game at once
@adamcyounis Thanks a lot for playing my game, I'm a big fan of your youtube videos. All of the pixel art was done in aseprite, which I learnt using your tutorials :D Also thank you for the feedback, I originally had it that you'd jump and dash even further but I toned it down a bit, maybe not enough
@mathemagician I've never actually played TF2 which I know may be a sin, but I've played a lot of games with similar mechanics like overwatch and paladins and stuff
[Untitled.png](///raw/d39/22/z/46d6e.png)
Nice work.
Other than that, really fun, and WOW there's a lot of levels...
Playing the web version was really not an ideal experience (trying to flick around with low unstable framerate and that super high sensitivity...)
Still, this is among my favorites!
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
The FPS punching concept is always fun to see
It took me a while to understand how to play it though. I think it's kind of misleading that you can complete first few levels without actually punching tables mid-air which is the point of the game. Maybe I missed something.
Anyways later I really enjoyed it: it looks good, has some nice sound effects and good difficulty progression. Nicely done!
Спасибо за игру!
It sure is a unique game! Congratulations.
Really cool entry and amazingly put together in 48hours!
Art was good, sound was good, menus were good. Good all round!
well done 👏👏
Also the game is really impressive for 48 hours, amazing work!
I think the game should be a bit slower though, maybe a bit of a time delation in the air could help, especially where you have to aim at flying tables shot by the cannons.
I tried hundres of times but I failed at the level where you have to climb multiple platforms and reach that portal at the very top, it would have helped if those tables would respawn, because I need kill myself and start over the whole level, which is a bit frustrating.
But overall, amazing job!
It's amazing
Also the mouse sensitivity was super high for me which made it hard to play, so if you plan on making a full release I suggest adding a settings menu for those things
I'm honestly so sorry to lump you all together like but I just wanted to thank you for your kind words, I worked really hard on this game and it was really nice to come back from work to these.
I found that air strafing was the way to go for me. I realized that you can move with WASD only on the 3rd level or so (I suck at reading tutorial text, sorry :sweat_smile:), but still managed to get these scores:

The mechanics are tight! As mouse sensitivity was mentioned already multiple times, I've nothing to add.
The tables flying into the air were really fun to interact with, I would add many more tables, it was great fun to destroy them. This is a safe space to break desks. :slight_smile:
Kudos! I'd love to see your stuff in the next jams!
Also, I beat every map in under 4 seconds :v: speedrun strats are strong :sunglasses:

*edit with improved times (addicting game lol)
@sprotex I think it might be that I'm bad at writing tutorial text ngl :laughing:
@itsmebutsolo I think that's a great idea, but I have no clue how to visualize it
@shaggy Yeah I noticed that, I thought I was just being bad, I think I need to make the players collision capsule a little thicker
@tastiham Honestly, I'm absolutely shocked!!! How did you manage to get such good times, specifically how did you manage to finish the last level so quickly?!

Not sure if it was just the web version but aiming felt a bit choppy sometimes, the mouse sensitivity is also quite high so I would have appreciated a sensitivity slider.
Overall a really nice, well polished game with a breakneck pace and entertaining premise.
The speed-running-style "best time" marker was enough to make me start a second play-through, but my second attempt stopped half-way through. The game was definitely fun enough to make me power through those last few tricky levels once, but they were hard enough to not make me want to bother beating them a second time.
I love the design and it fits really well with the theme!! Took me a while to get a hang of it but once I did, I had tons of fun!! Overall a really great game :D
@jharler on the one where the platform is too far away you have to bounce off of the table to get over, dashing into a table resets your dash.
@iradchenua I've been trying to think up some plot since the jam, best I can think of is dude gets lost in Ikea, falls into table purgatory lol
@sawdust Ah I see, thank you for coming back and telling me, hope you sort out your hardware issue
@thegreenworm Yeah I thought the tables might not stand out from the background enough, I think I'll make the ones in the background a darker shade and the ones in the foreground lighter.
@dsoberdan Thanks a lot, glad you like my level design and animation, I agree the death sound might get a bit annoying, I could try randomizing the pitch and volume a bit to add some variety
What a fresh and fun game, I really enjoyed the challenge! The art was minimalistic, but very clear, and the UI and audio helped make the rules understandable. At times, I felt the accuracy with which you have to click on the flying tables was a little unforgiving (I might have preferred a couple degrees of leeway), but it definitely feels good when you hit! Having floating tables all around the arena was a good decision to give visual reference as the player moves through space, though there was less visual reference higher up in the levels and while looking up/down. The persistent timer data is a great touch, and lends a lot of replayability to the levels. I found myself wanting to come back to ones I knew I could do better on.
This game is very well-made, and I really liked playing it!

Strengths :
- Very refined gameplay and level design
- Cool graphics
- You uncover so much depth and inventivity as you go through through the levels
Possible improvements :
- Highly subjective, but having Space mapped to the punch caused by death more than once.
Excellent game !
Sometimes it wasn't clear that I had hit a table so fell too far before realize the punch had been reset.

Simple mechanics, but good enough. Funny sfx.
@osh-studio Thank you so much, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. The hands are kinda rotoscoped, I made fist models in blender and then rendered them as pixel art and went over them in aseprite and added outlines and stuffs
@6smith I can add a FOV slider post-jam if you want that, shouldn't be too hard
@jackiex9527 I thought about doing something for that like how your hands turn white when you can't dash, but I didn't have time to implement it
@mitjmcc Thank you for the feedback, I think I've already got a solution for this in my head, so I should fix it in post-jam
@jlv Having space mapped to ground pound seemed like a good idea at the time, since it bounces you up when your on land, but I get thank it shoots you straight down when your not above land, so I'll probably change it.
@omarmobadr I think it might already work for controllers? I can't test it, my controllers broken at the moment
@zachsbutt @lucas-viana @subcreation Thank you for all the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed it, I'm definitely planning on increasing the size of the tables' hitboxes
@dj-depressive Yeah from all of the comments, I agree the mechanics aren't explained clearly enough, when making it I just assumed everyone would understand from the change in reticle and the one level where you can't make the jump without dashing into the table, but thank you for the feedback
@pixelydian Thank you for your kind words, I'll definitely make sure to change the death screen a bit in a post-jam version

Couldn't get past the second level, though. I'm not much of an FPS player so maybe it was just me having trouble comprehending my surroundings, but I kept ground pounding straight into the void when trying to jump and running all the way out of platforms when landing. I think adding some coyote time would've definitely helped me, as I was just pressing jump way too late when trying to jump from a platform while running.
Liked the mechanics and vibes of the game though, so definitely wished I was able to play it further :slight_smile:
As for the presentation: Art was good (especially the hands, really clean animation), but the music was a bit dull (a nice boppin' track would have elevated the experience even further).
Edit: By the way, you seem to really undervalue your level design. I think they are really creative and fun!
For some reason, level 10 tables just dont work and wont let me jump off of them, not even the crosshair highlights that the table is targetable. The other levels all worked fine.
this sparked a local competition on our discord, love it!

There may be a bug with the high scores: When playing level 4 it updated the score for level 5.
The ground pound enables you to dash mid air (when spammed really fast). You can get veeery fast times with that...

Overall, though, this is a fantastic entry! I'd love to see where you could take this in the future.
really awesome job :)
This is so fun, and creative. The sound, the game play, the puzzles - all of it is so top notch. I really enjoyed this.
One minor note - the death screen definitely sells it but man, the red hurts the eyes after a bit. Maybe finding a way to desaturate the color, or, instead of solid red put it transparent over the background and blurr it out so that the player still gets the good transition but isn't without retinas.
Additionally, the dash is a bit hard to get used to at first - maybe a zoom out effect to really sell the player that they are going fast but still lets them get relative frame of where they are in the world?
Otherwise, this is a well done game. Really really fun. nice job :)
I've made a plan for updating the game, although I'm going to wait until the rating period is over, because it'll defeat the point of the compo if a big portion of my game was made outside of the 48 hour period. I've gone through all of the comments and picked out stuff that I agree should be fixed about the game and I'm currently implementing them all as well as more levels and mechanics.
@hoeleboele Thank you, I plan on slowing it down a little when I next update it, although not too much since I like how fast it is.
@stefanie-leitch You can also use shift to dash and space to ground pound if you want. What control scheme would you recommend?
@shrillwhip @proxy-games I'm considering making a full game, although there are some parts of game-making that I'm pretty bad at like music, texturing and story, which I feel will hold me back a bit. This is the main reason there isn't any story and the musics not great in this game :sweat_smile:
@python-b5 @mig-moog I'm planning on fixing this by increasing the hit-stun when you hit a dash to give you more time to orient yourself, and then lowering the gravity a bit
@gurbx @jusw85 @sagan-rayner @raindrinker I've already added the sensitivity slider and increased the size of the hitboxes in my Unity project, as I said before at the top of this comment, I'll release the update with all this after the rating period is over
@lazzor Thank you so much for your kind words, I find level design really daunting so I only really make arcade games. For this game I pretty much thought of anything I thought could be fun then just ordered them by difficulty :sweat_smile:
@mascoll The ground pound already stops all of your horizontal movement and bounces you up off the ground a bit, so I thought it'd be more streamlined for that to work double-duty as a jump and ground pound
@nobleboy My god, that's impressive, I've tried playing it with a trackpad and I can't even get through it!
@zacharypinkham That's a good idea with the sound effects, in some of my other games I've randomized the pitch of the sounds a bit, so I'll probably do that with this game too
@pbg I appreciate the idea for adding a lock-on. Although I think part of the challenge is needing to aim properly on the tables, although I've increased the hitboxes so they're less fiddly to hit.
@chartle You need to dash into the tables when they fly far away, I would've added a tutorial explaining that a bit better if I had the time in the compo, although I've got a level design idea to make it more intuitive.
@liviuslycurgus @leon75 The level 10 tables are too far away to hit when they're at the peak of their trajectory, and you can't hit them from the platform, so you have to jump off the platform at the right time and hit them in midair. I'm definitely going to change this level a bit post-jam though.
@ryjcio There really isn't much world design :laughing: I pretty much just made a void full of tables and let you punch them, but thank you XD
@anton-florey That's so awesome that you've made it into a competition, that's exactly what I want from this game!! Also, thank you so much for mentioning this bug, seems I mixed up the time text for levels 4 & 5, I'll fix it when I update the game.
Also I was hoping you could elaborate on the ground pound midair dash bug, you're supposed to be able to dash midair once after you've bounced up from a ground pound, but only once. I'm not sure if I've misunderstood the bug though. But I mean if it makes the speedruns faster I might just leave it in, I love it when speedruns include fun bugs.
@britt-henderson A lot of people have mentioned their eyes being burnt by the death screen :sweat_smile: I'll lower the saturation and value of it a bit I think
regarding the dash bug: When using the ground pound move without any ground below, you would normally die. But when you dash right after using the pound, it cancells the pound and sends you flying forwards. One can repeat this to basically fly through the air. It is quite hard to excecute and control, so I would leave it in tbh :)
Very satysfying to play, sometimes a bit hard and requires super good tracking of the moving tables, I would love to have an option to have the aim a little bit more forgiving, so I could focus more on "how to do this" instead of trying to be an aimbot and failing to execute.
Very nice entry, impressive! I liked the difficulty progression a lot. The level with the arrow up and 4 cannons firing down was the hardest for me
Obligatory end screen screenshot:

That was super cool. I just wish it was easier to home onto tables and maybe a table indicator (much like a hit indicator) after a groundslam so that it would be easier to find and chain dash -> groundslam combos.
I feel like it would be cool to have a small drop shadow
It also felt odd to play a platformer without the ability to do a jump, many times i pressed the spacebar expecting to have even a small jump, but it's alright !
Well played !