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F.U. From Uranus 2's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community Choice | #22 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
Jumping into this game with the clever parody of the game E.T was really charming and enjoyable. The art was amazing for this type of game and what it was going for. The music felt very well composed and really gave me that E.T feeling.
Liked:
- Clever parody of E.T
- Great artstyle
- Great character movement animations
Needs Work:
- Game could use a little more difference in screens to help differentiate where you are and where you’ve already been
- Game feels a little too repetitive, maybe having a boss fight here and there could really help mix things up. Maybe different enemies that do different things. (Use of guns, fists, etc)
- Less candy spawns, there’s no fear in dying or attacking since candies keep respawning infinitely. Changing max amount of candies the player could hold could fix this.
My major issue with this game was the repetitiveness of the game and how it felt like I wasn’t making any progress. A player could easily get lost with the lack of difference in areas, only using trees and rocks wasn’t really enough to help figure out where and where a player has not gone. There was one specific crater that was hiding behind a tree that a player could easily miss because of how hidden it was isn’t very practical either. Making them a little harder to see is fine, but that was almost unnoticeable with all the background, foreground, etc.
While playing the game, there was no fear or worry of getting a game over because of the infinite spawning candies. There was no incentive to being careful with the baddies, you could just run right through them, eat a candy and keep running. Having the craters spawn candy after picking up the cartridges was also a little difficult in terms of, have I been in here yet? Was this where a cartridge was? Sort of feel. Maybe having a flag or some other kind of indication that a cartridge was picked up could go a long way in terms of helping the player understand where something is.
Elevator pitch
An alien travels to Earth to collect and destroy old Blatari game cartridges.
Describe how your game adheres to the theme
It's an unnecessary sequel of E.T. for the Atari 2600.
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Comments
Pros:
Cons:
Here & There:
There's a lot of nice components to this game, and I need to doubly express my joy at the name being such a perfect fit while simply shifting the letters over by one… it's just serendipitous. The art is fantastic and though the music is curated it fits quite nicely, though I've definitely heard that Kevin Macleod song before. The movement of FU is a little momentum-heavy and so it slides a bit more than I'd like, and the neck extension works but not in the intuitive way it would seem to. I tried keeping track of each area to know where to get the last cartridges but they're just big enough and separated by walls enough that it gets a little too difficult to keep it all in my head while going through. I managed to find the last cartridge after only a couple minutes of wandering and also made my way back to the start without much trouble but some sort of aid in that regard could be hugely impactful. The shooting feels nice and has a nice punchy impact. The enemies could stand to telegraph their attacks and damage taking though, as it feels like you're encouraged to spam shots that while fun is a little more mindless than it has to be. Some variety in that respect would have been cool too, if even a sprite swap to something other than the standard enemy. For some reason I expected the outro to be that FU gathers the carts only to then burn the planet entirely but I guess I'm just a maniac that thinks those kinds of thoughts. A fun if slightly confusing romp through the park. Nicely done!
Really nice graphics and feel. And a faithful follow-up to one of the most notorious video game flops of all time.
I went into the game with knowledge of the cube-shaped world, so I was able to keep track of things just by heading into each screen, finding the cartridge, then backtracking to the start.
I also found out about the the infinite-spawning candy feature, but noticed that the candy will stick around even if you don't collect it. So you can hop in and out of a hole until 10 candies have piled up, then grab 'em all at once.
I also made use of the head extension on the back face of the cube, where you could put your head over the bottom walls of the rock maze. Otherwise, it would have been nice for the head-extending to actual mean something.
Anyway, the game is pretty good for where it's at.
It's improved a bit from when I playtested it! Seems like there's more sounds and hit feedback is a lot nicer than it was.
I have to echo my earlier issue with not really knowing where to go, however. I felt like I was just wandering around aimlessly during my run of the game. Some kind of signposting or indicator to the next nearest cartridge might help!
The map layout is kind of confusing. There are warps that you take out of the top of a map that spit you out from the top of another map. That is _really_ disorienting.
Aside that, game played fine.
Shooting felt good, but it needs some kind of auto-fire feature.
The sound and art were great.
Thanks for helping to playtest it!
One feature we're hoping to get in post-launch is the ability to eat candy to locate cartridges. This was a feature in the original E.T. and was something I couldn't adapt in time. That and an indicator for whether or not a cartridle is available on the screen should help immensely.
I'm also weirdly happy that the warps between areas are disorienting. The cube world of the Atari E.T. was adapted into the world design for F.U., and can be seen on the top/bottom areas (where all exits lead to a top or bottom entrance) and the side areas that link together in a loop when walking sideways.
I will also look into auto-fire post-launch. Thanks again for playing!
Nice art and sound. Movement felt a little floaty. I felt myself just moving around and clicking as fast as I could without thinking too much. Stopped playing when my hand got sore.
The movement felt fine to me during development, but I specifically say that because after launch I'm now seeing that it is indeed floaty thanks to feedback! When you're neck-deep in the development you get used to weird mechanics and don't notice flaws as much. Post-launch I'll be spending time tweaking F.U.'s movement to be much tighter.
Thanks for playing and helping to playtest!
I like the explosions that the bullets make. Neat animation. It's funny the way you can extend your neck, and I really enjoyed wobbling it back and forth as I ran around. (Does it do anything, gameplay-wise, though?)
I didn't realize you could enter holes until I had beaten like four screens, ha.. I thought they were just stage obstacles since my bullets seemed to hit them also. So I had to double back around to the holes I had passed. Problem is... I got really lost playing this game! Every screen looked pretty similar, and I also wasn't really a fan of the way you could go to the top exit of a screen and then suddenly be at the side of another screen. I would prefer it to be 1:1. So, like, top to bottom, left to right, etc. I think that would help my sense of direction.
But my journey ultimately came to an end when I went to go take notes about the game and pressed escape on my keyboard, resetting the game. Oof. Maybe a warning would be good "Are you sure you want to reset?"
The neck extension was going to be used for some sections we didn't have time to complete so as it is it only helps to shoot from different directions and to avoid bullets.
As for the other comments we will keep them in mind if we go back to work on this. Thanks.
Simple but effective. Some collision issues, like not being able to shoot over the pits. Also I found what feels like an exploit, I was able to continually re-enter the pits and collect infinite candy (maybe note infinite, but after 15, it got a bit silly).
It felt an appropriate length for the content, and that wobbly neck is just great.
We know about the respawning candy but decided to leave it like that for now since the game felt a bit too hard otherwise. Thanks for the comments,
A neat game with a cool art style. The combat starts feeling a bit samey pretty quickly, it could probably use a bit more complexity. Also fits the theme well. The only issue I noticed was bullets still doing damage during level transitions.
We were going to add platforming puzzles to the pits but we ran out of time. Maybe if we keep working on this.