This is my entry for Ludum Dare #19, “Discovery”. There’s a lot I didn’t get to (like more than 3 kinds of enemies, geography besides bushes, and stuff in chests besides peanuts). Even so, there’s still plenty to discover (check out the megadungeon at (-20, -142, 0) if you have some time on your hands). Go explore.
This game’s title was provided by Jonathan McCoy.
Game 41: Circus Peanuts,
1587, but I got bored and kinda let myself die. Kinda cool, but could probably do with some of that variation you missed out on adding.
Went for that mega-dungeon (which took a long time) and got 3988 within.
I’m not sure what this “Arrows” bit in the instructions is about. I’ve only got a slashy thing.
In addition, I think you might have inverted the y-axis for the location indicator.
It looks like the start of a promising game, I hope it’s expanded upon at some point.
The rudimentary combat system is oddly satisfying.
I’ve gone to -20, 142, 0 AND -20, -142, 0, and I didn’t find any ultra-dungeons.
Peanuts: 219
I found one of the dungeons, but not the mega one. It took me a bit to figure out the green square on the map gird was me, but that was probably just me being a ditz.
I think it’s good that only enemies drop life. It was fun with the red enemies to lead them around until they all clustered together and take them out in one blow, and fun in general to see how many I could take out at the same time. Is there a higher chance of peanut dropping for taking out multiple opponents? If not, that might be a good incentive for the player to not just tediously tap out one enemy block at a time.
Echoing above, I think some terrain would help spice things up a bit and give the player a better sense of motion.
Neat game, Nathan. The world looks pretty vast and explorable. I didn’t have a lot of time to go in depth into this game, so I’ll reserve my comments for when I discover more.
Peace, Nathan,
-John
Great update! Did you add a second theme to the overworld music? I couldn’t pinpoint the difference but it sounded better =)
This was the first time I got to use bombs, very fun.
Nice variety with the enemies now like those ones who can shoot rocks at you. What are the yellow things that flap around? Butterflies? Difficult to kill.
Great work!
-John
It was neat for a few minutes, but I just didn’t really feel like exploring after a while, all I was getting was peanuts, and there was no incentive to get more. I couldn’t spend them on anything. There was nothing telling me where a good idea to go was. It was mostly aimless wandering.
The dungeon right next to where you spawn gets you the +1 to life, but trying to find the level 2 sword in such a huge map was too daunting for me to go after. This game was also way too similar to Zelda, and that also kept me from wanting to explore more, because of the similarities, this started feeling like a poorly copied clone.
I figured out that the small box in dungeons means a treasure chest, and sometimes you need to kill all the monsters on the screen to make it appear, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the treasure chests in the regular wilderness. I’d just come to a screen empty of monsters, and nothing I did seemed to make it appear, so that was a little frustrating as well.
Stuff that would make me want to keep playing:
* Buy things with peanuts, like more bombs, arrows, or upgrades.
* More interesting monsters that get harder the farther you go.
* More direction, like putting notes in chests that give coordinates to the next huge boss.
I think the most fun I’ve had with an exploration game was Alphaman:
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/alphaman.htm
I beat it a couple times, but played lots of times where I just died alot, and still had much fun.
I’m sure there’s alot of great stuff to find in Circus Peanuts that I missed, I just lost the patience to look after about 30 minutes. If the original Dragondot had a second world after you killed the 4 corner bosses, that would’ve been the perfect exploration game.