Core Drop
Steer ball of lava deep into the Earth's mantle using nothing but a fiery rope
You are a ball of lava that is trying to be reunited with the magma in the depths of the Earth. Along the way, you obviously want to avoid anything that looks like water. You also want to collect as many diamonds as possible, because diamonds are forever, even if they fall into magma¹.
What do you mean, that story doesn't make any sense?!
All you have at your disposal is a ninja rope made of fire. Press and hold the left mouse button to use it. (If it doesn't find a target immediately, you can hold the button until it does.) You win when you reach a depth of 100%, but "%" is displayed as "km" because the font is a bit lacking.
For extra depth there's a parallax effect.
Oh, and there's waltz music. It seemed fitting somehow.
¹ This is actually true, I looked it up on the internet.
Comments (12)
Cool Physics. I Imagine implementing rope physics isn't trivial at all. I wish attaching the rope came with a bit more pull, so you could control your own velocity a bit better. All in all, a bit more gravity and velocity would've been cool to make the game less floaty.
However it's a cool gameplay mechanic. I like ropes. I like swinging.
This is definitely strong in its idea and execution, well done. A good basis for a fun casual game, given more polish especially in controls (as elZach described, finetuning physics and velocities) and graphics, as it currently looks a bit draft-y and might need a concise style to create initial appeal.
Getting a full row of gems with one swing - golden. Good basis to create one of these highly satisfying addictive mini-games.
@Dolores123 Well, I find it satisfying to just watch the ball drop down too. I've once seen it get to 93 km, so it may even be possible to "win" this way :) -- Edit: I just did, with 13 diamonds!
@elZach I made the rope as a chain of pill shapes joined together with pin joints. Godot makes this fairly easy. The difficult bit is that its physics implementation is not nearly as robust as, say, Box2D, so there's more stretchiness than I would have liked. And I had to make the rope relatively heavy to make it not go haywire. More gravity and velocity ditto: the rope would stretch and break and launch you in crazy directions.
@Odrez At first I thought it would make a nice mobile game, but the screen is too small to work well. Maybe on a tablet. To make the game better, I think hand-designing levels would be a big improvement over my lame spawner, so you could tune them to make those satisfying full swings always feasible. But there was no time to do that during this jam.
Thanks all for the feedback!
Really lovely and original mechanic. Lots of beautiful particles and a scoring system that had you wanting to keep chasing those high scores.
Sound design was very nice - I loved that the pitch of the pickup sound got higher as you hit each successive diamond in a swing. Would be nice to have some kind of bonus if you got all of the diamonds to encourage getting full swings more.
Very satisfying falling & swinging.
Having the end goal of 100km was nice as you have to balance between getting as many diamonds as possible while keeping enough lives to reach the 100km mark. It's a good risk/reward system and it plays off well.
Sometimes at high speeds it's difficult to latch onto the thing you want, and you end up hitting the wrong thing and spiralling into water. Water also sometimes enters the screen quite quickly, not giving much time to respond.
For a game which has a main draw of high scores, having so much of your score depend on randomness can feel a little off - having a possibility to share a seed would have been nice, as then it's much more comparable and you could learn the course.
Having some sort of marker before attaching to things would also be nice, as then you could see what you're going to swing from when you release your rope. Perhaps having the LMB be a hold action which releases the rope when you let go, and slowing down the game so you get a little while to set where to swing from. This would also give lots more of the satisfying swings.
I really liked:
- The sound design & music. Music was very silly but in a good way, I felt like I was on an adventure. The sounds felt appropriate, I especially liked the rising burning sound when the fireball was free falling.
- The graphics.
The not so good:
- Gameplay. While I managed to get good enough at the game to avoid the bubbles, controlling the fireball never felt very satisfying.
- Lack of UI. It was quite hard to know ehere I could attach the rope to since there is no cursor interaction in the game. Some kind of distance indicator or cursor change when hovering over grabbable stuff would do wonders!
Finally, all the hours spent ninja roping around in Worms Armageddon are paying off!
That was fun! A good challenge is always welcome. Sure the roping around itself is no biggie for a career veteran, but plotting a route around the randomly generated level is at times rather tricky. Just out of curiosity, is the amount of diamonds same in each level or is that random too?!
The interaction design itself is not too original, there are many other titles with rope/grappling hook swinging. The strange mixture of audio-visuals does fit the mark though, to a slight fault. The blue walls look like a background sky to me with the cave texture kind of like the bark of a massive tree. I cannot not see it and, while it is a zany idea and would actually increase the difficulty around edges, this is not actually the case, so a slight deduction there on clarity.
What else, what else? I didn't mind the rope physics, but sure they could be tightened up. Collecting diamonds, while sounding nice, could also be embellished with extra effects and maybe spiced up with combo meter action?
Fits the theme alright. Technically the stakes get higher the further down the line, if you lose health in the beginning, but I often didn't so the ending came more as a disappointment than anything. There is no reason to save lives really, better to blow them on collecting a few more diamonds if the opportunity arises. As such an infinite cave could actually work better. In that case each life is always used up, either on purpose or accidentally.
Pretty good job in all!
Overall: Good (7.0)
Graphics: Above Average (6.0)
Audio: Good (7.0)
Gameplay: Good (7.0)
Originality: Good (7.0)
Theme: Above Average (6.0)
Wait? Did the project name actually change, or am I imagining things?
Very addictive! I just had to claim a spot on the leaderboard.
My best strategy seemed to be to go slow though, which is a bit sad, since you'd really want the feeling of those swings. Perhaps a bonus for the speed you're currently going at could be implemented? (Or just a score multiplier for picking up diamond bunched in quick succession.)
The music that's provided is also very nice. However, I found that it also paired very well with @maartene 's music for 'Enjoy Diving' somehow, since I had the tabs open at the same time (and that music is a lot louder than yours')
Graphics are very good, but suffer a bit from being too 'zoomed in', in my opinion.
Finally, although I think getting stuck is avoided most of the time (which must've been a bit of work balancing the physics), there was a run where I was stuck between a wall and a target.
@alyphen Great feedback, thank you!
Having some sort of marker before attaching to things would also be nice, as then you could see what you're going to swing from when you release your rope. Perhaps having the LMB be a hold action which releases the rope when you let go, and slowing down the game so you get a little while to set where to swing from.
That's a great idea, though I'm not sure about the slowing down; it might break the flow a bit. Maybe it would be enough if the rope just attached to whatever is closest to your mouse at that moment, no matter how imprecise your click?
@bradur Thanks for the feedback!
The sound design & music. Music was very silly but in a good way, I felt like I was on an adventure.
Well, it's the third or fourth track I ever made in my life, so that's quite a compliment :D
The sounds felt appropriate, I especially liked the rising burning sound when the fireball was free falling.
It's the sound of me blowing into the flame of a gas stove.
@HuvaaKoodia Thanks, very useful feedback!
Just out of curiosity, is the amount of diamonds same in each level or is that random too?!
Partly yes. The number of obstacles is fixed at 124 for the entire level, which is the size of the level times the density of obstacles, which is more intuitive for me to tweak than the total count. Each obstacle has a 1/3rd probability of spawning 3-12 diamonds around it.
Incidentally, the obstacles are assigned to grid cells and if a grid cell is already occupied, the spawner tries another one, in an attempt to keep them somewhat evenly spaced. Same for the water bubbles.
The blue walls look like a background sky to me with the cave texture kind of like the bark of a massive tree.
Heh, I never considered that. Just picked a colour combination that looked alright.
As such an infinite cave could actually work better. In that case each life is always used up, either on purpose or accidentally.
It would break the gripping, amazing, totally relatable story though ;)
Wait? Did the project name actually change, or am I imagining things?
It's been the same ever since I originally prototyped this idea, which was about 8 years ago :) (It never got this far, and no code or assets were reused from that project of course.)
@remco Thanks, and congrats on your leaderboard position!
(Or just a score multiplier for picking up diamond bunched in quick succession.)
That would be the best, I think. I was almost there with the rising sound effect, but even that was 11th-hour code.
Graphics are very good, but suffer a bit from being too 'zoomed in', in my opinion.
It zooms out when you go faster (and also tries to move ahead of your direction of motion), but it could definitely be tweaked better.
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| # | User | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @HuvaaKoodia | 141 | |
| 2 | @DiningPhilosopher | 71 | |
| 3 | @alyphen | 66 | |
| 4 | @remco | 62 | |
| 5 | @Aurel300 | 34 | |
| 6 | @elZach | 29 | View all 6 scores |
Wonderful idea! I like the artstyle and all the little gimmicks. (y)
Unfortunately I only looked at the flame while it felt down. I couldn't interact with it because I didn't understood the movements. Maybe I'm a bit too slow for it. :=)