Ev'ry's 10 Second Adventure! by José Bonilla
UPDATE: A small post-compo bug fix (1.0.2) version has also been uploaded. See the version control at the end of the page and download that version if you want.
Instruct commands at specific times to your pal Ev'ry, so it can collect gems and get to its goal in 10 seconds or less.
Made by manta ray (a.k.a. José Bonilla, i.e. me) in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 51 Compo.
- Version: 1.0.0 (compo)
- Genre: Puzzle platformer
- Builds: Windows x64 - Download below and unzip to play
- Total playtime: 15-20 minutes
This game is a puzzle platformer in which you do not control the character directly, but rather instruct it actions to perform at specific time slots of a 10-second period. You do so by placing different action tiles in the timeline:
After placing tiles there, you can start the commands by pressing the green Play button and stop the current run by pressing the Stop button. You can also press the Restart button to restart the level with a clean slate.
NOTE: * There are *7 tutorial levels and 6 regular levels in the Compo build. Try to get all three stars in all levels! The game will save your progress.
Finally there's an Options button to take you to level select and/or mange options (Sound/Music).
Controls
- Mouse Left click - place tiles in the timeline, and generally interact with the game UI
- Mouse Wheel Up/Down - scroll and toggle between available action commands for Ev'ry (see below). Also used in the Main Menu for scrolling up/down for the level selection!
- Mouse Right click - use while over an already placed action in the timeline to remove it.
The actions you can specify are the following:
No action or empty (doh!). By default all the timeline is empty.
Walk right. Ev'ry will keep moving right unless told to stop explicitly.
Walk left. Ev'ry will keep moving right unless told to stop explicitly.
Stop. Ev'ry will halt all horizontal movement, even while airborne.
Jump. Ev'ry will jump, keeping its horizontal momentum. If specified while airborne, Ev'ry can also double jump.
Duck. Ev'ry will duck to avoid hazards and remain ducked until further instructed to do otherwise.
- Game Design by me, relatively inspired by King of Thieves
- Coding by me - GameMaker 2022.8
- Art by me - Aseprite
- Music and sounds composed and performed by me (Roland GP 609 + Audacity)
- Font is Milky Coffee by Syafrizal from dafont.com (https://www.dafont.com/milky-coffee.font)
Note that you cannot drag and drop tiles in the timeline.
UPDATE: A post-compo bug fix version has been released. See below
There a a couple of bugs (now fixed in the post-compo bug fix release):
- The cannons currently have a small bug that does not initialize their timings exactly the same every level restart. This can prove difficult to overcome the levels that contain cannons. If faced with this issue, try your same timeline configuration again several times.
- Even though there is a volume slider in the options menu, it actually does nothing. This is a bug.
- Tutorial level 5 has a bug in which certain ceiling tiles are not solid and they should be.
I opted out of the Humor category.
Source code is included (see LD51.zip).
- A Post-Compo 1.0.2 version has been released, fixing the above bugs and adding very small UI/UX enhancements. If you want to try it out, please go ahead. The bugs are not game-breaking but it's always nicer to play the clean version :)
The version control can be checked directly on the Bitbucket repo:
1.0.2
- Fixed a bug found by players on the GUI animations, where clicking restart twice would animate the GUI twice and would position it incorrectly
- Fixed a bug on Level 5 that was introduced in 1.0.1 in which the timings of the barriers changed making the level impossible to finish.
1.0.1
- Cannon and barriers now reset their state every time, so they are predictable now on every run.
- Fixed Tutorial Level 5 bug where certain ceiling tiles were not solid.
- You can now press SPACEBAR to start/stop the timeline.
- Improved timeline UI so initial selected tile is non-blank to avoid confusion and selected tiles are displayed with transparency to indicate they are not set
- When levels are finished, current action sequence persists and is no longer wiped out, to allow for easier iteration over the same level. Note that the action sequence does not get permanently stored in the progress data, so quitting the game and restarting it will reset the sequences to blank.
- Fixed Tutorial Level 5 bug where certain ceiling tiles were not solid.
- Added Quit button in the title screen
- Garbage-collected surfaces
| Link | https://bitbucket.org/biyectivo/ld51/src/main/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/evrys-10-second-adventure |
Ratings
| Overall | 30th | 4.048⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 78th | 3.79⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 53th | 3.919⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 155th | 3.79⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 216th | 3.532⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 137th | 3.5⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 155th | 3.484⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 38🗨️ |
Thanks!
Love to this in the app store some day :)
Post compo when my kids played it and did not get 3 stars the were also frustrated by the game clearing the commands.
For the post compo I'll fix those two. Thanks again!
It would really mean a lot to me if you can give it another shot, knowing the above, if you can!
Thanks
- I think you could improve that a bit by drawing the picture with some transparency (or greyscale) when it's not validated, then with no transparency once you've added it (mouse click).
- It could be also nice to trigger the commands by pressing "spacebar" (play/pause behavior).
- When you "stop", you could draw on the piano the last avatar's position reached to help the player building the sequence.
- You could maybe redesign the level a bit so it's mandatory to get all the gems to have the end flag ("goal"). Like in a golf game. I'm thinking of that old super nintendo amazing game : "Kirby's Dream Course" :-)
- I think the first level is a bit too hard (the last jump it's too high). You could let the player some space for finding its own way to the goal.
- Also the same concept could be more "puzzly" with a top down camera and no gravity
Anyway you've a done a great job with that game. There's a lot of potential in level and game design! Keep up and Congrats.
I agree with your UX comments, I'm including some of them in the 1.0.1 bug fix. I also think obviously there's some further level balancing that needs to happen in a post-LD release (if that ever happens!). Cheers!
Note that, on the time being, I published a 1.0.1 post-compo build which at least allows you to use spacebar to start/stop the timeline, shows currently selected (non-placed) action with transparency and allows to keep the last configuration - all ideas by @chaseplays and @chevre :)
Thanks again!
One suggestion I have would be how the commands themselves are input. Using the scroll wheel works well, but having a command picker would be a nice touch. Maybe something like clicking on the timeline cell opens a palette to click the command you want to input.
Overall, great work.
Congratulations for the game.
I have a problem with the mouse wheel, but that's not your fault. :smile:
I love the music, I played the game for quite some time (mainly because of level 5) and it was still a joy to listen to.
I really appreciate the tutorial, it would need far more games in this jam.
Just by the way, I have no idea how to beat level 5 in 10 seconds. I managed to get the character under the barrier, I don't know if this is the right way or just a bug.
Thanks!
The bug you show might have to do is surely related to the easing of the UI elements (note that the buttons, options and level name UI is also lower than it should), I'm at work right now and can't access the GameMaker project but I'm probably just not resetting the initial position of the UI elements on the start of the level, and my easing script works on a delta (not on a target value / I knew this was a bad idea but didn't have time to change it) so if you click "restart" twice too quickly, then the easing starts from an already higher (or lower) position and ends up farther from where it should. Thanks for pointing that out, I will release version 1.0.2 and upload it as soon as possible.
Thanks again!
Level 5 is beatable depending on the version: if you played the original compo version it's just a matter of starting the timeline at the right time, since barriers are not synced exactly the same every time (this was a bug with barriers and cannons, as described on the page). If you played the post-compo fix, you should be able to double jump to the middle platform, wait there for a bit and then go forward, you should reach the goal at nearly 10 seconds. Probably too hard though for level 5 :)
Thanks!
There's so much to like here. The tutorials are helpful and fun. The level select and overview of the gems acquired is nice if I want to complete the basics then go back for the gems. The programming mechanic is so pleasant to use (mouse wheel was a good choice). Watching Ev'ry go (and hopefully make it to the finish) is entertaining. Nice animations. The music's great too. It's super calming.
Sometimes I make it to the finish when I'm trying things out, but I want to get all of the gems. Since I finished, the instructions get wiped out and I need to reprogram Ev'ry. It'd be nice to have a "continue" option, rather than a clean restart.
Now that you've rated, you can play version 1.0.2 where I have already included what you suggest (others had suggested it before). In post-compo versions, previous instructions persist until you quit the game, so it's easy to try for the three stars. Thanks again!
I would have liked a different input method with hotkeys for the main directions, like using WASD or Keyboard, but it's a minor thing!
Our game also explored the concept of programmable actions, but you took it in a very different direction from us, so that was fun to see!
Input method/UI in general is definitely tricky here and can go many places depending on input type (keyboard vs mouse vs touch...) etc. I did check out your bot.copy() game as well and I see what you mean about the inputs, that would be a little different approach.
Thanks a lot and glad you liked it!
https://youtu.be/x8_8yrtjEcU
Also a very clever take on the theme, I really liked how well the game eased me into the mechanics and then let me play with them. The only thing I missed was the ability to move entire sections on the timeline but i really had to look with a microscope to find something negative ;) Even the music is nice!
So much better than my game! 🥲