A Following Wind by LDJam user 387002
This is my first game jam, and my first compo to boot! But please don't go easy, honest evaluations are appreciated!
DESCRIPTION:
In this game, you play Zephyros, god of the wind. You must guide pilgrims (ships with white sails) to your temple unharmed, lest they be dashed upon the rocks or taken by pirates (ships with black sails). These same pirates wish to sack your temple! You must turn them away.
You gain score by successfully guiding ships to your temple in the center of the screen. Anytime your temple is raided, or a pilgrim crashes, this will reduce your worshippers' faith in you. If your faith drops to zero, you lose! Increasing your score also increases your faith.
INSTRUCTIONS:
You alter the course of ships by summoning gusts of wind. To summon a gust of wind, CLICK your left mouse button down. Then, DRAG your mouse (while still holding the mouse button down) to set the direction of the wind. Then RELEASE the mouse button to unleash the wind!
PRO TIPS:
You can CLICK + DRAG on TOP of a ship & RELEASE. The ship will then average its current direction with the wind!
The wind currently only changes the DIRECTION of the ships it hits, NOT their SPEED. You don't need to spam!
THERE IS AUDIO! There seems to be an issue with the audio being very quiet for some but not others...
PLATFORMS:
We've got a WEB BUILD through itch below, and a downloadable WINDOWS standalone. NO MAC support atm, so sorry!
CHANGELOG:
4/15 - 6am PDT: minor bug fix to resolve unintended wind behavior in an edge case that was adding to confusion.
4/15 - 7am PDT: fixed an audio issue that was causing all of the game sound to be much quieter than intended.
4/15 - 9am PDT: fixed an issue with the spawn timer that was preventing the difficulty from ramping up over time.
4/15 - 12pm PDT: squashed one last bug that was causing ships to crash outside the screen area when spawned.
4/15 - 2pm PDT: removed unintended crash effect from playing when player scored, and tried to fix volume issue.
| Git Repo: | https://github.com/digitaliliad/afollowingwind |
| Embedded: | https://digitaliliad.itch.io/a-following-wind |
| Standalone: | https://digitaliliad.itch.io/a-following-wind |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/a-following-wind |
Ratings
| Given | 24🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
It's a bit hard to tell how much of an effect each gust is giving though. There were some times when I thought the wind touched the ship but they didn't change direction as much as I expected.
I don't know if this is just Linux via Wine, but the window is too small in my opinion. But overall, this is a very nice game!
Audio seemed a bit low for me so I really had to crank it up. But love those foley sounds, and the chill background lute.
Gameplay was fun and satisfying as well, but occasionally the ships would stop responding to the wind and get stuck in crash-courses that I couldn't seem to affect. Not sure if it was user error or a bug.
Although I loved the wind visuals, it was a little confusing to know exactly where the "game interaction" was taking place, since they were kind of appearing and disappearing all the time and I would lose track of the vectors I had drawn. Sometimes a ship would rush past before the gust of wind intersected with its path since it would kind of slowly crawl along the click-and-dragged vector path. I think my instinct was to want the wind to be a bit more immediate and semi-permanent so I was more aware of what vectors active on the screen.
Overall, really fun concept and excellent work!! I had a great time playing. :)
Engagement starts to drop after the first few ships because the difficulty never really increases, so once you figure it out, it's a tough sell to keep playing. It would be neat if the amount of ships started increasing, or there were moving obstacles to avoid. Or even pirate ships that are in pursuit, which would make you have to change the course of one of them without affecting the other.
The visuals from the screenshot drew me in, and I was not disappointed! The wind effect specifically was just really cool looking. The audio was simple, and effective.
* The game would be better with more clear visual feedbacks when we drag mouse to create the winds. Even a simple line could work.
* The background (sea) looks bland and dark compared to the sprites, I assume you hadn't time for background.
* I thought the white ships crashed when they reached the temple and played that particle, in a sense that the Faith score decreases.
* Hard to read the title screen.
Your idea has a nice potential, good job!
Did you use a line renderer for the wind? I really like the way the trails move.
One way I would improve this would be to make the wind feel more responsive and maybe a bit faster, but then again the current speed could be the whole point of the game.
In any case this a great entry for a first game jam, kudos to you for doing the compo. Good job!
- Very nice entry, pretty, plays well and feels good. I appreciate the emergent challenge too :p
At first I imagined it would be easier but the winds carrying out through the world after you'd summoned them made it more challenging, in a good way. And I think the number of ships increased in just the right pace, making it difficult after a while to steer the pilgrims away from the rocks and each other.
A solid entry!
My only complaint is that it feels a little slow, I would've enjoyed some gradual speed-up or perhaps currents / storms that make ships go faster momentarily.
Great job all around :)
I think the cognitive load of having to keep track of all these ships at once is enough without the wind making it harder with its infinite range and less-than-responsive way of averaging the direction of the ships. I think better, more obvious/immediate visual feedback to tell me when a ship has been influenced by the wind would go a long way as well. The graphics and sound are great, just needs a little more fine-tuning with the mechanics.
The ocean texture could be more than just a color
I don't really like how the boats are unresponsive, but hey it's boats after all !
The concept is fun and chill.
I would have appreciated more types of invocations to mess with them, like big waves, storms, sharks, kraken...
Maybe randomized rocks and islands too
@amberfall92 thank you so much for playing, and for the kind words and encouragement. Appreciate you!
Right now the game controls feel a bit unresponsive/difficult (tho difficulty isn't necessarily a bad thing). I think a visual indicator would really help with the feedback, like a white line or arrow indicating your cursor start and wind direction (see picture below).
One thing I noticed while playing was that it's very difficult to successfully steer all the pilgrim ships when there's multiple ships near the temple, as the wind will push the ships on the opposite side of the temple off course. Maybe this is intentionally difficult, but I think an interesting mechanic would be the ability to control the strength/length of the wind bursts, i.e. holding/dragging a short distance for a short burst of wind, and dragging for a longer distance for a longer burst of wind. This allows the player much more control over the ships and might help it feel a bit more responsive instead of fighting with the controls.
This is a minor suggestion but it would be nice if the black ships also had a skull icon on the flag, to communicate more clearly that they are evil/pirate ships. I understand that you didn't have time with the compo tho.
Those are just my suggestions! Feel free to take or leave as you see fit. Congratulations on your first compo, and hope to see you around future game jams :) You've got really interesting ideas and I would love to see you continue.
wish we got better visual seedback when "selecting" the ship
good job
Very cool puzzle game lol. Great presentation overall. Love the art and the music was pretty catchy.
I like the overall concept and how you pulled it off. It really did make me feel like a god
Like others have said, I think some more visual indicators were needed, if only to know for sure that a ship was turning. I know you mentioned on the game's page that I didn't need to spam the wind, but it felt like I had to sometimes since the ships weren't really turning sometimes. This system also kinda makes it hard to turn ships in tight corners, but if anything it's realistic at the very least lol
I also like how I had to make sure that when I sent a gust of wind, it didn't re-direct some other ship. It was a cool layer of strategy to consider.
However, I think the game needed more audio feedback in general. My biggest issue with this game was that the sounds for ships getting destroyed all sounded the same ( i.e a pirate ship getting destroyed sounds the same as one of your ships getting detroyed ) so I constantly had to keep checking the faith and score counts and take my eyes off the game, which would cause me to lose more ships as well.
Another issue that resulted from this was that I wouldn't know where exactly a ship crashed, so I constantly had to look all over the screen for that dust cloud that would be left over, which isn't exactly helpful in a game where you need to keep track of 100 things at once.
All things considered, for something made in under 2 days for the compo, this is damn good. Awesome job
I love the fact that wind continues all across the map, it can mess up everything (especially when you summon loads and loads of wind x) )
I saw the other comments and the idea you mentioned of having different directions for the ship and its sail seems very promising.
I found it interesting that we have an experience that is both chill (slow ships, calm music, summoning some winds here and there) and hectic (too many ships to take care of, ships crashing here and there, colliding with each other...) at the same time :)
I ended up playing this way longer than I normally play score chase games because the vibe was just really enjoyable! I did eventually stop before I died, because it felt like I got into a sustainable rhythm and was gaining more faith than I was losing on average, but it's a game jam and figuring out the exact balance for endless games is really hard to do in 48 hours :) Overall, it was very enjoyable, and an awesome first time entry!
@timo654 the lack of tutorialization is my biggest regret. I'll def try to make more time for in-game tutorialization during the next LD - I'm hooked on LD, btw.
@mortith that is the highest score I've heard of so far, congrats! I did realize that the difficulty curves out and you can just kind of get in an endless grove, but most don't get there, so I'm impressed you did!
@wendel-scardua I appreciate the touchpad feedback, and I'm heartened by your appreciation of the balance between chill-game and challenging one. I def have more work to do to refine it though.
@koolruz thank you! Yeah, locking the ship directions to whole-integer vectors had a lot of unintended side-effects in terms of usability, but we can fix that. I think that I may move away from endless score-chaser (and scrap score altogether) and instead have multiple levels with different faith thresholds required to advance...
@sozey @oblivioncreator and @funnypumpkin thank you for the kind words! I'm very encouraged to continue with it.
Thank you all for playing, and thanks again for those of you who shared your games with me onstream this morning! I might keep doing this until rating ends if the demand for it doesn't fall off too fast!
https://youtu.be/Foe4js2jhJ0
And I'm the host for the ludum dare score chasers tournament this Ludum Dare. Wanted to ask if youre fine if I put some gameplay of the game in an intermission video. Last year for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_eIvjBmIQ
I came back to see if I can beat my score and... Well, I did better. Did you change the game? It is much different, ships are faster, it also felt easier etc. If you did change it, I suggest you to keep the original one for the jam and a seperated post-jam version. So jammers can check both and see the differences and can vote on the original state (we can check it out again and speak about it during the next streams if you wish)
I went back to your VOD to check what day you played it, and it was two days ago (4/16 PDT). I made some bug fixes the previous day (4/15 PDT), but that's it, and it was certainly well before you played.
I want to reassure you that I haven't changed it other than the posted bugfixes. Perhaps it felt different to you considering the sleep deprivation, and possibly gaining a better understanding of the mechanics?
However, there are so few ships on your game over screen, I am a little concerned about that... was that indicative of your experience the whole playthrough, or just a lucky screenshot timing?
Anyway, I'm definitely impressed by your score, but I'm even more encouraged that you felt like playing it for so long! I'm torn between leaning further into chill game or challenging...
I really like everything in the game. The most amazing things is your idea of implicit control. And you know what, a meachanics that spread a wind much futher than you do is a very good idea that makes gameplay much deeper. I mean, you want to change a direction of one ship, but the wind spreads futher and effect anothers. That's really good idea.
The arts and music are very suitable for the mood of the game!
Also, I have a few ideas what I would add to make it a bit more fun:
- I'd change the balance, because it's easy to win. For example, to make punishment for pirate ships much bigger and punishment for destroyed allience ship also bigger. After some score the game becomes harder, because an amount of ships rised. It would make a nice challenge together.
- I got 125 score and I think this game is infinite. I'd just add the win condition, like 50 score.
So, I think it is the best innovation I've seen on these jam. You inspired me for some new game ideas as well. So thank you a lot for your game! It makes really nice and peaceful mood!
Lovely entry great stuff!
The gameplay itself is unique, and it's fun for a while. It lacks some difficulty progression or an overarching goal. As it stands now, it's very easy to just go infinitely. The difficulty doesn't really grow with time, there is no overarching goal to strive for. So, it just gets old after a while, and you don't really want to continue.
Still, I had fun playing while I did :grin: It's a really good piece of a compo game, and you should be proud.
I stopped here:
- the game felt a bit too easy and a bit too slow, I would suggest to make fish move a bit faster
- pirate ships were not as big obstacle as I wish they would be, I suggest they should avoid rocks and islands, correct they course after a while and maybe if they are close to normal ship to start to go towards them,
- the wind indication could be a bit better, as someone show on the screenshot in posts above,
- I think it would be more interesting if the faith would not go up, so loosing it had more consequences, or if it is too much, then maybe a gold-sails ship that moves way faster than others and guiding it to the temple would restore the faith?
Besides that, well done! It is a solid game :)
As others already pointed out, the main weakness of the game is the legibility of interactions : you don't really know the exact size of the zone your wind acts on, and the direction of ships is not always clear as they are so tiny on the screen. My main strategy to avoid that kind of problem is to think about things in terms of interactions : list all the things that interact together gameplay-wise, and make sure there is a visible feedback that show that the interaction is there. If you have gusts of wind, island and ships, you need something for every couple of those elements.
Feedback can be anything : change of sprite, particle effect, tint effect, small scale animation, etc. It does not even need to be beautiful, but it needs to be there. For the wind/boat interaction, you could make the boats have a sprite with sails on that appears only when they are in the wind, or they could change color if you don't have time to make a different sprite.
The zones for gusts of wind also need to be clearer. Maybe just a transparent sprite that displays the exact zone would make it way more clear.
I hope that will help, great job and see you next LD ! ;)
I actually 'killed' myself by letting the game run itself at 306 score. It was super easy, very different from the game we played on stream. I was around 100 score and I still had 60 something faith. It became very repetitive and I could go forever with thousands of score easily. But that is not fun. It just needs a whole lot of balance.
I love the idea of the game, once again, great job on first Godot game and it was amazing to meet you on this LD :D As for the feedback, the ones we gave during the stream still applies.
Some challenges to make it more engaging; krakens, sirens, whirlpools.. Strong chimes sfx, some particles effects when you reach the temple, killing pirates can give some points as good karma, different difficulty ships perhaps...
Keep on working on this, if you are passionate about it. It will be an amazing game that I would be absolutely addicted :D
- Trying to correct boats while close to the temple.
- It makes the side-effects of old wind is more obvious.
- As-is, it seems to message to the player that they should have taken care of direction issues earlier.
- Player feedback when starting a wind.
- Having a starting whoosh sound effect that is different for a failed click versus a successful swipe could help confirm the player executed an action.
- Adding a visual, slightly-opaque arc to the front edge of the wind gust could make it more obvious, and the current wind could be a trailing effect for flavor.
If you work on the game longer post-jam, I think you could randomize the island and rock positions some as long as they don't overlap with the same type.
The pixel art and realistic music compliment each other well, I'm not used to that mixture but you did well with jaunty strings and satisfying crunches when a ship wrecks. Great job with the color contrast too, I can still identify everything uniquely through a black-and-white filter.
While I enjoyed the graphics, I felt like the 8 directions assets of the boats (you can hardly do better in pixel art I suppose made the exact direction that they were going in a bit difficult to track (I think they move in more than 8 directions?), I would add some kind of visual reminder for that
Great entry for a first submission to LD!
<3
I dig the art style and the music too.
I particularly like the wind visual!
I have so much respect for this as a First Jam, First Compo.
I also think it's a pretty good working prototype for a really great
little game, should you choose to develop it. There are some great
suggestions above in the comments, and I won't add to those as I'm
sure you have plenty of ideas on where to take this.
Overall, really impressive, lovely work!
Cool concept, and well executed, my only feedback would be that it sometimes felt like the wind affected ships different amounts so I wasn't reliably able to predict what the ship would do, but that's probably a skill issue on my part.
It's really cool that the boat can hit another boat as well. Great job!!