Seicho Boru by Robert
A Katamari Damacy inspired game made for the Jam.
| Itch.io | http://robert.itch.io/seicho-boru |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=33146 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.53 | 315 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.31 | 356 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.50 | 251 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.34 | 572 |
| Humor(Jam) | 3.83 | 69 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 2.60 | 853 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.40 | 362 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.80 | 389 |
I like the 3D play and exit buttons as part of the game.
Maybe having an explosion with all that items would be awesome.
Good job!
Cheers,
Morco (tyrants.not.found team)
This game is fun.
But the satisfaction of gathering things is limited, for two reasons:
-first: in Katamari Damacy, when you ran over an object, it'd stick in place on your katamari. This would make for weird irregular shapes that became harder to control, and would ensure that whatever was last put on the ball would be visible. In Seicho Boru, you threw all the objects the player gathered into the center of the ball at random rotations, which just made a lot of clipping issues and a bit of a mess. On top of that, late-game it didn't feel like a "add things to the pile" game so much as a "collect things to grow your size arbitrarily" game, since things would vanish before I reached them and get attached somewhre I didn't see them.
The solution to this would be, when you pick up an object, to SetParent to the ball, but not to touch the localPosition of it.
-second; katamari's difficulty and appeal came from the constant increase in the size of things you could pick up. In Seicho Boru, pretty much everything is the same size (within a small margin of error that you overcome in the first minute of playing), so there doesn't seem to be any point in growing, other than to reach the end of the game. I think it would be a much better game if you varied up your model sizes a fair bit more; any given area should contain a mixture of things you're able to gather at that level, and bigger things for context and challenge.
Smaller issues include the intro taking way too long. The character's nice and the writing is funny enough, but it just drags on way beyond its welcome. In writing cutscenes, less is more. Also, the ball gets weird behavior when hitting some walls (most notably the south of the menu select), where it floats up toward the camera.
Overall, the writing's cute and you've nailed the aesthetic, but some of the balancing needs work.
Also, please re-compress your OS X build with a program other than RAR, as rar screws up unix permissions and makes the game unrunnable until you make the binary executable again.
And, of course, I would be remiss to mention my own entry which uses a similar mechanic, but in quite a different context.