Short Fuse by Orionhart
We recommend the downloadable version for the best experience, and controller support.
About
Take control of Fuse, who's been magically cursed to blow up every 10 seconds! The witch who cursed them told them they could find what they're most in need of down in the dungeon... it might be painful, but dive deep by finding the exit on each floor marked with torches!
Please Note: Wick is not available in the jam version.
Important!: The particles on the map are actual collidables!
Little orange blobs are lava which will damage you- so wait out their timer or go around them.
Watch for where the blue drips fall- that's water! You can also expose water spawners by exploding water blocks. Useful for if a slime gets on your head.
Little grey particles appear as little red cubes on WebGL (an issue with shaders): That's gunpowder, which will heal you if you get 25, and allow you to resurrect teammates if you click the explode button near them.
Controls are remappable, but the base controls for Keyboard are WASD and Spacebar to explode early. Use stick with joysticks, and either A or right trigger by default. ESC or Start will open your menu. To join on controller, it's usually Start, though some controllers have different maps.
*If you are playing in WebGL, you may experience issues with the controller or FPS. The game is primarily designed for downloading. Also, use the scrolls on the edge to navigate to the fullscreen button, as the UI does not scale correctly. Also important to note is that WebGL does not release memory correctly, so the Restart button and falling through the map will not always work. Reload your browser tab if you wish to restart the run. My apologies.
The Mac OS build requires you to run a permissions command formatted like this: chmod -R +x .app/Contents/MacOS
*With regards to the rules, a bugfix patch has been made making no changes to the game besides fixing core underlying bugs that impacted gameplay, including issues with controllers, UI, exploding, and more. No additional patches will be made until post-jam.
Additional Art and Information
[Click Here for the Concept Art Album!]
You can blow up your head early with spacebar or the mapped joystick keys, but you'll get far less damage and range, making it much more difficult to traverse. Some rocks take more damage to explode, and some can't be exploded at all!
Look for the exit on every floor, and go down the stairs to progress! Avoid getting caught by slimes, lava, and the like... but fear not, for slimes don't like water much. If you get them a bit soaked they'll hop right off.
The game ships with full local co-op features, include a join and drop system. As usual with a jam, there are some unfinished features and bugs, but the core game loop can be a blast! (see what I did there?)
Take too much damage, and you'll have to start over...
Collect gold, go through floors, and have a good time. I can confirm split screen multiplayer is fun! (and I can confirm as well!)
Credits
Core
Samuel "Orionhart Reinhart - Lead Designer and Programmer
Luke "PuppyBoy" - Systems Programmer & More
Jacob "JW" Schick - 3D Models, Rigging, Animation and Texturing
Badger the Kit - Concept Art, 2D Art, Addtl. 3D Modeling
Chris Lucca - Music Composition and Mastering
Logan - Sound and Sound Mastering
BeanSnail - Block Texturing
Additional Support
Ethan Hoepner - Additional Set-pieces (Unused)
Tyler Fitzpatrick - UX Design Support and Programming
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/short-fuse |
Ratings
| Overall | 887th | 3.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1083th | 2.74⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 929th | 2.9⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 945th | 3.24⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 401th | 3.88⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 459th | 3.36⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 573th | 2.854⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 975th | 2.96⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 27🗨️ |
1: There is no clear indicator of how to progress or even a simple tutorial. While discover-able game-play is always great, with ProcGen, it's just not realistic to expect players to understand.
2: The major mechanic, exploding every 10 seconds, is poorly represented, with no visual element to tell you how long it is until your next explosion.
3: Death happens at random for poorly explained reasons. Could be fixed with better explanation.
4: Explosions could be way more impactful; blowing up many blocks in one strike would provide urgency and also make the explosions far more impressive.
Still, it was fun running around on the first level for a bit, seeing the cute main character and hearing his lil explosion noises! Good work.
Some how it reminds me of Cuphead. would def love to see Fuse again in the future.
I couldn't help myself when he starts to scream XDDD.
Please also check out our entry! We took inspiration from Bomberman as well!
@locemo for sure. there were some hiccoughs in the development process that lead to us not leaving enough time for playtesting or exports, and one of the things I've historically been poor at is building in a tutorial in time. definitely a good note. in addition to making the explosions stronger, we could have increased the radius to make it even more fast paced for the jam. the challenge was balancing it around the 10 second timer, and the fact that we had originally planned to make proc gen more robust (I have a page of notes in front of me on what we were planning on doing) but had some issues before even getting to that which prevented us from making more cohesive, navigable levels. for now, they're mostly just pretty labyrinths to showcase the mechanics!
@gangrue thank you! I didn't have time to offset the individual sound levels (left that to the sound designer) so I added a sound a music mixer in the settings menu. are you meaning the sound effects overall are too high volume, imbalanced between effects, or that the sounds themselves should be replaced?
@shiro-white for sure! we'll take a look at the project. thanks for checking out ours! Fuse hopes to see you in the future again as well (maybe with a full roguelike game design shell!)
Thanks all four of your for your feedback. We'll take it down and use it!
@thorpalsson thank you, and I agree. one of the downsides of the theme was that we realized 10 seconds feels a bit long.
The graphics were nice and the music was good too, but i started to feel annoyed by the character screaming every time he exploded. Very cool to actually see the concepts of the character and art.
I felt very lost and didn't know exactly where to go, i also had some random fps drop but nothing and for some reason i just randomly died and didn't understand why.
Thought it would be nice to have a main menu.
@wilko there was a bug preventing the menu from working properly. I've pushed a fix to the webgl and download.
@lenan sorry about that. we wanted to get sounds in, but we didn't iterate on them very much! very valid criticism, and we'll change the sounds in the future. there are fps drops on webgl. we do intend to make a main menu post-jam, but for the jam submission it was unfortunately not implemented, and your criticism is 100% valid.
Where to begin? I really admired the vision you had for this and the execution that you followed up with. It was a really ambitious jam game and you delivered on almost all of that ambition. The world and characters felt alive, the music was BUMPIN, and I was having a great time even when I was blowing myself up in slime-headedness. Your team should feel proud of the work you accomplished this weekend. It also tells me something that you're tirelessly working on infographics for the game AND busy with your job AND submitting the game to be played on streams. You're putting in real work and it shows!
If I had to get critical for a second, I'd say the movement was a bit slippery and certain consequences were a bit too punishing (holes & slimes). But for a jam game, some difficulty spikes are to be expected. What matters more is that I was compelled to continue through the challenge. The visuals, music, character, and mystery of what lies another floor down kept me playing.
Great job and thank you for sharing the game!