Asterisk by Crychair
Web_GL is not the most optimized, Download instead if you can!
Welcome to our Ludum Dare project: Asterisk!
A small group of 6 North Americans and a European working together for 72 hours to create something fun and enjoyable for the LudumDare48 game jam.
Game Summary:
Asterisk is a short re-playable platform adventure filled with space exploration and explosions. Jump into the boots of a expendable employee as you are tasked with harvesting ancient alien relics for the mega corporation Dig Deep inc.
"Everything is valuable, except for you."
All assets within Asterisk was created for this project from scratch and should not be taken or used without permission as Dig Deep inc does not hire workers who steal.
Thank you for playing, reading and even possibly sharing this project! We put our heart and souls into Asterisk and hope you enjoy.!
Be sure to follow us!
Programmer
- https://twitter.com/EvanMalmud
Artist
- https://twitter.com/Woodspixl_ / https://woodspixlportfolio.carrd.co/
Sound Designers
http://twitter.com/jjbullfrog
https://twitter.com/zavidatsound
https://twitter.com/Dagostino_Audio
Music Composers
https://soundcloud.com/alexakimikothanos
https://soundcloud.com/sean-ettlin
Web_GL is not the most optimized, Download instead if you can!
Ratings
| Overall | 238th | 3.956⭐ | 309🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 437th | 3.677⭐ | 310🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 938th | 3.187⭐ | 310🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 270th | 4.104⭐ | 309🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 271th | 4.257⭐ | 311🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 56th | 4.298⭐ | 312🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 141th | 3.904⭐ | 303🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 447th | 3.859⭐ | 304🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 152🗳️ | 169🗨️ |
Couldn't find how to jump, is that on purpose ? also, keyboard controls were not pratical with a QWERTY keyboard.
- Rad blackhole image.
- Nice play on words in the game title!
- Voice acting was great! Funny!
- The art style was great and the character movement felt good.
- The filtering / volume change in the music track at the start was a nice touch. It felt great as it became more present when actually starting the game following the intro.
Suggestions:
- What is the point of the sonar mechanic? I understand that you need it to find objects, but why hide a sense (vision) behind a key press? The ability to use sonar is infinitely available anyway, so I wondered why I needed to keep pressing a button to see my environment.
- I found the bomb behavior hard to predict. Some bombs seemed to go off randomly for no reason and others did not detonate. This apparent randomness had the effect of me feeling not in control of what was happening.
All up - a great effort! Well done! :)
The mine collision seemed a bit inconsistent at times, but maybe that was just me not fully understanding something.
I am the solo pixel artist who worked on all the graphics, animations and overall direction of the game. :blush: it was honestly so much fun being able to lead a team to the finish line-
I also included the teams social links on the itch page but if you want to check out my work, please take a peak at my twitter https://twitter.com/Woodspixl_ and even watch me live on my twitch https://www.twitch.tv/woodspixl
As for now I hope you guys keep digging- I mean playing!
The visuals look so adorable and the controls menu and interface is so finished its almost like this isnt a jam game.
Fantastic! Thank you for the experiance!
Overall, it's rare to see such a professional quality on a jam game ! Special mention to the intro that really is a hook.
I did find it a little too difficult at first. I died twice right off the bat before I understood what I was doing which made it a little frustration since I couldn't get back to playing immediately from all the transitions and button clicks.
Also, the sonar mechanic I could use constantly. It would have been more interesting if there was a way I could gain charges or if there was a cooldown to it.
Overall great work!
Great job
teenythanos (@teenythanos) , zlan100 (@zlan100) , Dagostino Audio (@dagostino-audio) , Woodspixl (@woodspixl) , Jeremy Scott Olsen (@jeremy-scott-olsen) , ohsnapitzsean (@ohsnapitzsean) , and Crychair (@crychair)
The polish is realy good
Great work
Audio was a bit glitchy, made it a bit hard to play :)
Спасибо за игру, было интересно ^_^
Спасибо, что играете в нашу игру! Так рада, что тебе понравилось. Хорошая идея с эхолотом! Я не знаю русского, поэтому использую гугл-переводчик, извините, если это плохой перевод.
Pixel art is nice and crisp and readable. I think a full fledged game could see being a rogue like perhaps or maybe a mission based thing of making enough money/collecting a certain amount of things in the time. Either way great stuff, your team of 6 North Americans and 1 European did swell!
From the "don't give up" flavor text I was hoping for some kind of easter egg if I dug down far enough, but all I did was make profit for the corporation! It was actually very easy to dig straight down and just move left/right a little when I hit a landmine or wall, and I ended up getting a super high score. I would hazard a guess that your goodies might be uniformly distributed, and so digging the optimal strategy is to just blindly harvest as many blocks as possible. Since down is the fastest way to travel, it would yield the highest expected score. You might be able to work around this by having them spawn in clumps/veins instead that need to be explored with the sonar.
Great work! :smile:
Also great job at coordinating such a large team. We did that a while back for LD 38 and I know it's not easy.
Fells like a finished game, amazing work!
My favorite game so far
I got 33000 Space Dollars on my best try, I dont know if that is good just wanted to say that😂
But of course this being a game jam I know time is the biggest enemy :P Great job!
Music: SLAPS! The slight details of having it be light during the menu then really kicks in as you play the game is awesome. Great detail! Plus the variations to it with the piano trills and it muting a part of the tune when a bomb goes off makes it super enjoyable without being repetitive.
Art: Cohesive and clean. Great UI design.
Gameplay: Simple but fun gameplay. It seems like there was a promotion system possibly caked in there but cut out due to time. That would've solidified the runs. Only thing I can think of maybe adding is some sort of particle effect upon dying. Though obviously you're limited in what you can do with the time allotted.
I highly recommend playing the downloaded version instead of WebGL. Explosions don't work correctly on the WebGL version and a few other bugs.
I had some issue with sound effects popping with the downloaded version though.
Game has a great atmosphere, has a lot of potential.
PS. I had some sound issues, the music was stuttering.
Great job.
(Give our game a try, it looks a lot similar to yours on some points)
wish there were some feedback loop though, to collecting materials. also, the death felt a little unfair. sometimes bombs went off right next to me, and i lived, and sometimes bombs would go off a little far from me and i'd die? it'd be nice to have some indication of how close i'm allowed to be. wasn't sure if i had health either, or if it was a 1 hit kill kinda deal?
either way, loved how rushed you felt to dig deeper, and how frantic it'd be to avoid bombs as you tried to dig deep. great game!
The gameplay is fun and the game has potential.
I think a shop with maybe different lasers and upgrades would be cool, so you can spend your hard mined money :smile:
Overall a great game, good job.
If you'd like to watch my play and revisit the commentary you can find the highlight at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1006135462
A game delight. Beautiful art and very immersive music. Could you put the link to this song here, please?
Congratulations to all involved!
The art is beautiful, everything is very well polished, full of particles and animations.
The gameplay loop is cool: use sonar, escape the mines, get the treasures. But I felt that there was a lack of purpose for all of this. If it had a ranking or a store where you could buy upgrades and the challenge would increase, maybe the game would be more interesting.
But overall, it was an amazing entry!!
Adored the corporate propaganda voice overs, they were a really nice touch and made it feel like there was more behind the basic gameplay (which I always enjoy). As others have said before me, it feels very polished for a Jam game, and your team did a great job on every front. Bravo!
Interesting to see so many sound designers on a single game jam game! I wonder how the workload was shared there. It does have some of the typical fmod problems with loops just suddenly cutting off and glitching out but it's a minor thing here.
The art was pretty all around but I wish the mines had a bit more visual feedback like a warning range and some nicer explosion effects.
Also, did I get it right and you can actually charge the mines actively and destroy them with the laser to prevent explosions? If that's intended, it only worked sometimes for me and I'm not sure why.
I dig the music, well done to the composers!
Wish there was some sort of meta-game loop like doing something with the money whenever you survive and get teleported. Without any run-to-run progression it feels like it's lacking some depth (hehe)
But it's fine though, I get it was made for a game jam so obviously resources to pull off stuff like that are quite limited.
All in all, good job, fun game!
i did like the art, it was very well done.
overall, good work!!
I appreciate how quickly you can get back into playing a level (That said, I could not bring myself to skip the voice lines!)
I'm trying to figure out the mines exactly... sometimes I have enough time to try and run away, others not so much.
Tiny bug, I once 'died on my feet'. Mine went off and I could still look around, but not move.
The digging could use a little more weight or oomph, but other than that it's a really solid game, well done!
Game looks and feels good on all accords! Wish there was some continuity between succssesful runs
When I first started the game, I promptly blew myself up! I did better later (was hard to do worse :wink:). The game plays well, although I will admit that I kept pressing Space to try to jump and reach those artifacts that ended up above me just out of reach.
It felt a bit sad to me when those bombs were blowing up all the nice artifacts. So at some point I just stopped using the scanner. Just dug down deep and went in lines blindly. That yielded surprisingly great results that I was in no way able to achieve with scanning (too many bombs destroying too many yummy artifacts ;)).
I did run into some small bugs where the mines would disappear and not seem to affect me? (I was playing in browser if that helps).
10/10 from me, congrats!
The gameplay was fun, but I usually ended up being a little too risky and exploding in the end. I enjoyed working myself to death for this space corporation and would do so again.
I especially like how the rocks crumble :slight_smile: The sprite jolt/jank when deploying the laser is a little jarring, could have been smoother. The arm itself is also a little weird looking for an otherwise great looking game.
The voice acting is great, and the tone and dialog remind me of the quippy Borderlands respawns.
I like the ideas of using the scanner to find loot, but it does set off the mines, but there's a weird trade that ends up making the scanner less use-able.
Overall a very good game! Good job everyone!
The game itself have a potential. It is sad that you didn't have time to implement promotion. Meta-game is strongly recommended for this.
THANK YOU, everyone! Thank you for all the love, playthroughs, ratings, reviews, and helpful feedback! If you really enjoyed Asterisk and want to play more once we've developed it further, keep in touch:
• We are https://twitter.com/PlayAsterisk on Twitter.
• Follow our programmer Crychair on itch.io, and add us to a collection there.
We've already been busy debugging and working on some of your most-requested features. Can't wait to share more Asterisk with you. Cheers!
As a member of this audio team... THANK YOU! We're so, so glad you liked Asterisk, and proud that audio was any part of that! =)
We're continuing to develop it. If you want to follow along, and play a more polished version with more features, follow https://twitter.com/PlayAsterisk on Twitter, and on itch.io you can follow our programmer Crychair and add Asterisk to a collection so you get updates. Happy gaming!