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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | DrPetter's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strong AI | Haha. Excellent! <br/>The ever-present and developing AI narrative made it very much like a dramatic adventure rather than a random shooter. Some cheap bonus points in the end there for compo reference, but it's all good :P <br/>Great timelapse too, music and dual monitors did a nice job of keeping it from becoming dull :) | ||
| Mondrian | Ah. Great idea and excellent for the theme. Makes for some very tricky puzzles. I am stuck on level something-or-other, with 4 vertical and 3 horizontal bars... colors are scattered all over so it's hard to find any path that will avoid clashes. Maybe the difficulty ramped up a bit too suddenly there, as the previous 5-6 levels were all pretty easy in comparison. | ||
| Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | Yay, graphical adventure! Doing it all in black and white does reduce the graphics burden I guess, otherwise that's the main killer with these games. So intensely time-consuming to draw tons of environments that will only be glanced in a jiffy while clicking away at some keypoints. <br/>Reminded me more than a little of Lost... Trapped on an island, locked up control room, password codes, mysterious button, hatch. Intentional references or coincidence? | ||
| Things on Top of Other Things | Played through a WIP version and don't have time or energy to go through all of it again, so most of my voting will be based on that one. <br/>The general idea and presentation is great. I also liked most of the levels which were pretty well balanced and fun. <br/> <br/>However, I prefered the old input style where he'd only move once each time you pressed a key (well, actually it was once each time you released, but if that had been changed to once per press it would have been perfect). The current style of repeating motion while a key is being held doesn't quite work for this kind of tile-aligned game. You have to be very careful not to move one step too far, and it tends to feel unresponsive and floaty when he sometimes keeps going if you keep the key down for too long (also he doesn't seem to react instantly to a keypress but rather waits for one "repeat delay" before moving). | ||
| Of Robots & Groglots | So. Difficult. <br/>It gets madly hard to control once you come closer to the level hub. Maybe with analog joystick input it would have been more manageable (so you could find a nice balance between gravity and thrust). Most of the time I found myself crashing into enemies since the aiming was pretty wild and hard to influence. Hitting enemies wasn't very rewarding either, you don't get any feedback that they were in fact hit (until they die). <br/>I didn't complete the game, though I did finish three levels and tried another two before giving up. Hunting for the green circuit thing buried deep within the spiral maze was the most memorable moment (mostly because it was damn hard but also because I did beat it at last ;)) | ||
| Still Pond | Argh. It's amazing! <br/>Short but very sweet, and just the right amount of challenge. I finished it on my 5th attempt or something. First one I just sat there and didn't get it. Then came a crapload of tries stumped by the deck of cards. Once I got past that I was home free. <br/>Great humor and style, plus the actual gameplay works very well (yeah, I'm not bothered by how simple it is - presentation saves the day). Fullscreen caused no problems for me. Another killer from the ham. | ||
| Pixelman 3 | Finished it on my second attempt. First time through I got stuck on level 3 or 4 I think, the one where you have to go right-left-right. Bottom part had a few tricky jumps, and it was hard to get used to the controls. In general I think he moves a bit too fast and slows down too quickly. It's as if the game is running too fast (I get 60 fps btw). <br/>In Mario and other established platformers, you generally have a lot of intertia so that the character keeps going left or right for a bit even when you let go of the keys - especially while jumping. In pixelman you slow down to a stop within just half a tile or so, which makes it very hard to land on small platforms. <br/>So a few tweaks on the controls and some more varied enemies & environments/graphics would have improved this a lot. Maybe for PM4? | ||
| Block Picker 1.0 – final, timelapse | I think I mentioned this earlier, but I have a problem with the hitbox... since it's so small, why not just make the visible box equally small? Having them disagree makes it feel fluffy and annoying, as you must deduce the actual active size and play by that while trying to ignore the visuals to some extent. <br/>And... uh, that pretty much covers the entire game, so I have nothing else to say ;) <br/>(guess I'll bump polish up by one point due to actually having a menu) | ||
| warrior | Ooh, really posh. Rolling squiggly ball thing is cool. Pretty much everything about the presentation is excellent. <br/>Aiming is a bit weird though, I can't quite get my head around it. I mean, it's easy enough to deduce how mouse motion maps to aiming direction, but it doesn't correspond to anything obvious. I guess it might be some kind of "aim at point on ground plane where mouse is", but it didn't seem to really work that way in all cases. I ended up ignoring the mouse pointer and just holding it some distance up the screen and moving right/left to rotate, looking at the arrow and path of my shots. <br/>Finished the level without too much trouble. Not sure how many hits I could have survived since I never touched any enemies. I had some close calls though, so let's say it was one-hit-kills to make it exciting :) | ||
| Sailor | Hah! Cool water. Works really well as long as it doesn't get too cramped up in small spaces (tends to shoot "drops" away rapidly when it does). <br/>Not much of a game though, of course. Took me a few attempts to get a good floating boat, but when I did I managed to hold off until the cannon balls really started raining down after a while. | ||
| redgate | Hah. Great minimalism in not including instructions and forcing the player to figure stuff out by trial-and-error (at least those who didn't bother reading the final submission post ;)) <br/>What's with everyone getting 16? Me too... I need to try again. Can't be that hard to top. <br/>I actually like the extreme simplicity in this, and the fact that it's not a rehash of some worn-out idea. Great Warioware factor! | ||
| Tiny Hawk final release | Game/presentation in itself isn't extremely minimal, but theme score is safe anyway because it's valid as a minimalistic interpretation of the Tony games, which are relatively complex in comparison. I doubt it'd be possible to distill it further without losing all meaning. <br/>I would have liked some feedback on the kickflip move. It's nice to try and hammer a few of those in between rails just to rack up the multiplier, but it's also pretty dull since you're just incrementing a number without any animation or sound to go with it. A short back-and-forth animation with the board or even just a "blurp" sound would have made it more rewarding. <br/>Was close to giving up on the last level due to missing various jumps/rails and having to go through the same section at the bottom over and over, but I toughened up and made it through eventually. <br/>Thumbs up overall. <br/> <br/>(I still can't get over how cool a name that is... I can only imagine the look on your face when you went "tiny skater... tiny skater... there has to be something better here, tiny - waiddaminute!") <br/> <br/>[EDIT: "someone" pointed out to me that the kickflip is indeed animated, though I had to look real hard to see it... oh well, even more minimalism!] | ||
| minimalist entry | Very nice and sparkly for a text adventure. Not as minimal as it first appeared, though I was eventually killed while exploring all the dialog permutations (wretched A!). <br/>This also made me rethink the purpose of a "red herring" present in one old Amiga game which I played to damnation way back... Can't remember what it was called, but it was all 3D and polygonal. Made in Amos3D I think. At one point there was a red fish in a fishtank and it did come up as "red herring" when you examined it. Since it was placed around an area with lots of really weird stuff which I couldn't figure out, I naturally spent quite a while manipulating it in vain. That game was horrible. | ||
| Typoworm | 1368. Pretty damn hard. It's so tempting to just type away freely when you start a word. Also surprisingly quick to start dropping too fast if you miss a letter or have to look down at your fingers. Very unexpected twist on the one-button concept for sure :) | ||
| Exxon – The decontaminator | Impressive polish and smoothness. I'm curious as to how you did the whole loop-fill thing when wrapping up oil blobs. Can't see an obvious way of solving that, unless maybe the playing field is divided into a rectangular grid and you sort of floodfill the outline made by the divider... but then you still have to find out which side to fill. I did some stuff with concave polygon triangulation a while ago and it was pretty nasty stuff, but I guess that could also be a way to do it. Suppose the answer is in your code, might look some day. <br/>The controls and everything else turned out real nice in the final version, but it's still pretty lacking in gameplay and challenge. Might have to throw in some "enemies" or other obstacles to create challenge. | ||
| GBGames presents Minimalist – the | Level 140. Did I play for too long? At some point my eyes started to blead, but then I recovered. It was interesting to try and blink in sync with the flashing, you can make the squares appear the same constant color if you time it right. Nice pling sound. I wish the buzzabuzza would keep speeding up even after a handful of levels. | ||
| dots | 126876! <br/>Masterfully done on this one, really. Snug glove fit on the theme, and very fascinating to play. At first I thought it was a really cheap stoneage game and expected the balls to be one-hit-kill. But then I noticed the physics and was increasingly fascinated by what a huge difference it makes to the gameplay. Since the balls sometimes collide with each other and introduce chaos to the whole scene, you can never relax. And obviously, if you hit one it goes off at a weird angle and speeds up, so you've just put yourself at even more of a hairy spot. <br/>Although I still have a few games left to try, I dare say that this is one of the better games (probably the best) with regard to theme. It's truly minimalistic (basically single-state; moving player vs increasing number of bouncing balls) yet still very interesting due to emergent complexity. | ||
| entry – Minim Madness | What the hell? Why don't you just call them "balls"? <br/> <br/>I actually love the idea of shape recognition and drawing games (I played using my tablet), but this is pissing me off a bit :) <br/>So very hard, and the sounds are really eating away at my nerves. Why does the clock panic sound go off like one second before time's up? It's just penalizing. <br/> <br/>Instruction sequence was very elaborate, bordering on long-winded. General presentation is pretty good (disregarding sounds). <br/>Mainly though, I spent the majority of my playing time redrawing the same shape 50 times without even knowing if it would be at the right angle to bounce my "balls" into the exit. Not fun, sorry. <br/> <br/>(the last drop was when I finally did get the right angle down on the second level and the damn balls wouldn't register a hit on the exit even though they clearly overlapped by several pixels when going through, grr) | ||
| The Butler Did It | The cook did mine! And he admitted it too... <br/>Very cool concept and most of the execution is great as well. The gameplay is a bit slow-paced, maybe having a draggable timeline for each story would have helped (so you can go back and forth quickly without having to start all over again with the sequence of events). I guess that would remove some of the cozy traditional pondering and book-keeping that you get/need with "realtime" execution though. <br/>Oh, and the text rendered crappily for me. I ran the Windows build. Think I got the same issue with some other game as well - the text is sort of stretched down with nearest point sampling so you lose some pixel lines and it gets generally hard to read. It's probably due to whatever you used for building that executable I guess. <br/>Poker! | ||
| Too minimal for a name… | Lots of fun, and kind of tricky in places. I did beat it though. It's nice when you can complete a level in several ways, physics-based games often do that. <br/>Everything is very smooth, only thing missing is some nice sound I suppose. | ||
| Mininode | Ok. Level 3 was basically the entire game I guess. 1 was a little puzzly I guess, but mostly trial-and-error without penalty for error. 3 had some potential in that you kind of got an advantage for having nodes in tactical positions, surrounded by enemy nodes (so you could pump juice into them faster). It was too short and frantic to explore that properly though. <br/>Next time you'll have to be less helpful with random irc inquiries ;) | ||
| Title Unknown | Music sync is effective (though minimal). Makes the game feel much more thought-out and tactfully put together than if music and action had been completely disjoint. Indeed I was just waiting for those "burst" moments where everything stepped up a few notches. Game was rather bland between them though, partly due to little action on screen and partly due to technical reasons, namely: Relatively poor framerate on my machine (15-20 fps?) and not very responsive controls (lots of weird acceleration/inertia that I had to anticipate and compensate for all the time). | ||
| The white gazelle laughs maniacally | Yargh. Invasion is evil. Tried that one with the cylinder but got run over constantly. <br/>Oh well... sort of interesting concept, a bit Wario Ware or DS-ishly. Shaking isn't as rewarding as it could have been though. Maybe the object should have followed the mouse around more strictly, and it would have been great if the little specks sort of waved around as if they did their best to hold on, and eventually they would lose their grip if you yanked too hard. <br/>Object rotation was really weird and I couldn't really make friends with it. <br/>I like the odd gouraud shading on the meshes for some reason. Makes them look soft and warm. | ||
| WORLDMAKER | "...all you have are scraps." <br/>"What do you add? >scraps" <br/>"scraps is not something you have." <br/> <br/>Thank you for setting me straight on that one... Ahem. <br/>Text-based grow. Kinda nice. Nice and weird, and less rewarding than a graphical grow. I'm too tired right now to be playing it properly, and I doubt I'll have time tomorrow. Voting deadline is screaming closer! <br/>You will have to make do with this comment and a handful of N/A. <br/> <br/>(woah, I just glanced "ninja pellies" in the random tag box to the right, and it came across as decidedly raunchy... I should definitely get some sleep) | ||
| The Pushers | Damn. I think 5 is impossible. Managed 6 several times though. Seemed a bit random as to how well it would handle a corner. Sometimes it would crash out with almost any speed and sometimes it would slip through the most crazy bends at high speed. <br/>It's really rewarding when you get a sweet drift going, but again pretty random and sort of rare. <br/>I like the hood :) | ||
| win32.dll The Game | My first and only score: 210290 <br/>Nicely executed, for what it is. I'm so glad to have popup killers nowadays so I won't have to go through this kind of stuff anymore. Once is twice too many. <br/>The ambient music does a good job of building an uneasy and slightly alarming mood. | ||
| Final Submission | Whee, always nice to get some epic space battle action down in these compos. At first I had a hard time playing it properly as I'd just sort of swerve around in a bunch of enemies and die rather quickly. After a few attempts though, I got the hang of it and ran a 7-minute game with lots of level-upping and nice bullet dodging. I love the slingshot effect you can get with the powerups, particularly when you accidentally sling them away into outer space :) <br/>Minimalism might be the name of the game this time around, but it would sure have been nice with some auditorial feedback for destroying enemies, or at least an explosion-like flash or something. Anything. Disappearing enemies aren't very satisfying. <br/>Overall great fun though, the whole control scheme is very nice and fluid. Most raw gameplay fun I've had so far in this compo. | ||
| Brainwave | Argh. This is lacking a win condition! I actually played until I managed to leave the right-hand side of the screen, but I kept getting bumped back in. If you meant it to be more of a classic "neverending" game then you should have made it incrementally harder to the point where it'd be impossible. <br/>I like the general (weird) concept, and at first it was kind of fun to fly around generating these bleepy moves, but it got repetitive and dull pretty quick, plus the music was totally killing me after a few minutes ;) <br/>Maybe it would be possible to put the same control scheme into a slightly more complex/eventful game? | ||
| miniPals | Ah, gots me some Lost Vikings action in lieu of the fabled inquisition game from times past... <br/>It's cute and has very nice & cozy sound in it. There's no real challenge, though I did only play it in 1P mode. Most of the levels seemed pretty similar, could have put more thought into those maybe? Controls/physics weren't spot-on, but servicable. <br/>Overall, some more interesting/challenging levels would have boosted this one a whole lot, since the rest of it is of pretty good standard. | ||
| Simple Dungeon | Kind of exciting, and surprisingly immersive. There was a clear sense of accomplishment and development as you went from being all "what the hell are those characters" to becoming relatively familiar with the initial surroundings. I eventually managed to get "inside" and fight some goblins, but once I attempted a sneaky move to get past one and grab a potion, two flanked me and held me up against a wall while beating down on me. For some reason the game crashed just as I was about to be completely drained, so I'll just take that as divine intervention and get on with the other games :) | ||
| (T+48:48) Final Entry: BlockOut v0.LD48_11 | I think I won. The ball ended up in an infinite bouncing pattern, so it couldn't possibly hit my goal unless I placed a brick in its way. <br/>The idea is really nice, and it makes for an interesting twist on the whole thing. Collisions in this implementation are a bit shaky though, and that results in some unfair situations where the ball gets tangled up and takes down a large number of bricks at once. <br/>It's also a bit annoying that the only way to gain more cash is to wait... a long time. Might have been better to include some more alternative sources of income, like selling old bricks or building certain structures that aren't really helping to protect the goal but rather help you to raise money instead, or something like that. Maybe you had some of that stuff planned already. | ||
| Spacbattle is done-ish | Getting similar errors to what others are reporting. Looks kind of interesting on the screenshots though. | ||
| CGA Quest | I win! Damn, that next-to-last level was tricky. Great job on the retroishness, but what the hell is the deal with the smooth rotating transition when you restart a level? Not very CGA I say :) <br/>Sound was mostly very good, but the volume was a bit unbalanced at times - do you play one instance of the "bump" sound for each tile that disappears around the exit? They seem to add up and play really loud on some levels. <br/>Laser system makes for some really nice puzzles, requiring both thought and reflexes/timing. Great job overall. | ||
| Battle Magic Done! | I did a few runs to try out different tactics, but I think the enemy was random enough that it wasn't particularly hard to win if you played carefully. Gameplay mechanics were a bit opaque and gamble-like, but I guess that's common with this kind of game. | ||
| Kill ALL Life!!! | Heh, it actually looks pretty neat. And it's fascinating to watch it move so fast, looks really flowing with the colorfade effects. <br/>The killing part of it isn't particularly satisfying, but at least you get to kickstart some more chain reactions (hey, maybe this should have gone into the previous LD? :)) | ||
| Cowbell Hero | It's completely random, isn't it? Had nothing to do with the song being played, just sort of trying to sync up with the shift-tapping (time between last two taps maybe)? <br/>Anyway, it makes for a rather surprising amount of fun actually. I loaded up a few tunes and "rocked out", imagining that the triggers were actually related to the song in some complex way ;) <br/>I guess the main issue with these games is that you have to spend a lot of effort to input good patterns for all songs. Even if there's great beat detection going on it would still be hard to automatically generate an interesting and relevant string of triggers... although it's kind of an intriguing problem, might have to play with it some day :) | ||
| “Desktop Rox” | Neat trick. Boring game. Awesome timelapse. All in all, a decent effort :) <br/>The actual asteroids part is in fact easier than it tends to be normally, as the rocks just slide off screen and disappear instead of bouncing back or wrapping around. That, coupled with the predictable fragmentation, usually means that you can fire two shots for each big rock and then wait for three smaller ones to glide off screen. | ||
| The Minimizing knight | Doesn't run from the .py and I have no desire to go mucking around in the sources to fix it. I might check back later to see if you get a fixed version up (or a binary). | ||
| Leap , at least it’s something… | I love the graphics, obviously. Jump sound is very soft and sweet on the ears, as opposed to the death sound. Collisions are unforgiving and rather nasty at times. The idea is interesting and could be a lot of fun if the player was faster and more responsive. The current long delay between hitting space and actually jumping away leads to some delicacies with timing and prediction, but it also means that it's often pretty much impossible to get out of a situation. If the jumping had been a lot more zippy, then maybe you could have frantically jumped around back and forth to sneak out of an impending tight spot. I dunno, it might be worth exploring. | ||
| Space Stuff Trader | Starfields! And blinky ones too! <br/>First up, I've disliked space trading ever since I first touched Elite... This one is a bit better in the sense that I can actually manage to do anything but die (only just, though). My main concern is with the ship controls; rotation is much too floaty, which (coupled with the insanely small ship graphic) makes it really hard to navigate effectively. <br/>The enemies are also crazy, why do they fire at 5000x the rate you're capable of producing or enduring? I guess you can upgrade your ship, but not until you've traded for a good while. If you happen to run into an enemy early on you're pretty much toast. <br/>It's all very ambitious and stylish though, while being minimal in some way. | ||
| Circle conquest | Interface was a bit awkward, the whole click-deploy thing (which is all you do) didn't work as smooth as I would have liked. Sometimes clicks weren't caught properly. I kept trying the charge with king button, but nothing happened. I'm now thinking that maybe I should have dispatched him to some location after pressing the button... or something. Oh well. <br/>I'm not much for these slow and deliberate games anyway, and this couldn't hold my attention for more than a few minutes. It did remind me a bit of a cool board game I played with my dad way back though, it was LEGO-themed and you sort of pranced around a gridded landscape building castles and waging knighted war. Good times. | ||
| Dot2doT | It's kind of interesting how you only see a small part of the "world" and you sort of explore while munching away. But that also makes it pretty random as you'll have to guess most of the time and just hope there will be a string of same-colored in the direction you're going. The time limit doesn't help, as it encourages fast play and you get punished for thinking/planning too much. | ||
| As good as it is going to get | Harr. I'm not on facebook. Actually rather surprised by the comments here that so many others aren't, either. | ||
| Title Unknown | I think everything has been said already. You move much too slow, gets tiresome very quickly. I used to play a clone of this on my Amiga 10-or-so years ago called Bally (3?). That one had adjustable game speed, and if it was cranked up somewhat it would be pretty frantic. I tried making one of my own at some point but failed with the fill algorithm since I couldn't figure out how to decide which side of the line to fill. I should try again. <br/>Presentation in this one is pretty nice, but with the same speed problems as the gameplay - you get rather sedated by the drowsy music and slow transitions at restart. | ||
| Micro Macro | Whaat? How does this work? The levels seem to tick by automatically, regardless of what I do. Should I just be firing at the nearest circle? They grow, then sort of stop growing... Not sure why. <br/>The particle spraying is sort of fun though. But of course I can't make sense of the bullet attraction. It just seems random and pointless, besides creating pretty colors and more particle chaos. <br/>You've successfully confused me! | ||
| Col-4 | Yay, I remember making one of these games a long time ago on the Amiga (without the rotation of course). <br/>General gameplay works ok-ish, though you could have thrown in some delay between combo lines. It's kind of unsatisfying to just have a huge section disappear instantly without explanation. <br/>The playfield rotation doesn't really add much, imho. I think it's too complex to provide anything but a random-ish panic thing for when you're running out of space. I mean, the feature isn't complex in itself, but it's probably hard to keep several playing fields in mind and plan/match patterns (I didn't even try). <br/>Most casual games resemble gambling in the first place though, so maybe it's appropriate. | ||
| Title Unknown | Bugged out on me after I reached a score of 418. The buttons wouldn't work properly after that, and it didn't seem to roll any games. It just sat there with the same numbers and same computer symbol. <br/>I was performing a statistical analysis of the game made possible by holding down return on one button and observing the score numbers. For some reason, scissors created a roughly even score while paper made me gain a slight upper hand of +20% or so compared to the opponent. <br/>It would have been less interesting without the bugs and anomalies :) | ||
| The Hunt for Pepsi Blue | A bit frantic. The tank was too fast for comfort, made it hard to aim properly. It was also pretty unclear as to what I was going for on each level in terms of win conditions. Maybe the people counter mattered there, but I couldn't see the numbers properly (was just a few squashed pixels). | ||
| There Is No Screwdriver | Ok. I suck. Couldn't make anything happen, despite capitalization. N/A for sake of fairness. | ||
| Title Unknown | Argh. It's broken! So broken... Would probably have been quite fun if the physics were solid. It's just unfair when you're trying to time a jump and your ball suddenly drops through the floor or simply doesn't react to your button press. I had a nice first impression for a few seconds at the start, before I got acquainted with the collisions ;) | ||
| Title Unknown | "You need to collect bookcases, walls and random items hidden inside an aeroplane." - wtf is up with that? Renders you a high score in humor at any rate, from sheer weirdness :P <br/> <br/>Gameplay is extremely simple, and it's annoying that you keep sliding left and right unless you press a key to stop. Would have been nice to catch key-up events for that. <br/>Graphics are... gradienty. At least the protagonist has trendy pants. <br/>I'm ashamed to say that I didn't finish building my house, quit somewhere around a score of 2000 I think. Didn't see much more than a brown triangle which I presume is the roof. I guess some more feedback on your progress early on would have helped there. Gaining a very predictable brown row of pixels for each cow-patterned square you catch isn't going to keep people's attention for very long. <br/>More action, challenge and reward would have improved this one. Like maybe falling things to avoid from time to time, and bonus items that are particularly good to catch. | ||
| minimalist rts | Ok, not much to do here? I built my apartment and spawned four guys. The rest seemed to be pretty much placeholder. <br/>Forgetting about the "game" part is all too familiar to me... maybe you've learned something about priorities for next time? :) | ||
| Origami Wars | -1 point in polish for having an installer. It's annoying when going through hordes of compo entries. <br/>Apart from that, presentation is overall good. Music is nice, sounds are okay. Background graphic looks pretty but doesn't tile well. Framerate was pretty bad on my computer, which seems a bit strange as there wasn't really much going on. Whenever I killed an enemy things would lag down to a handful of fps, making it hard to control and aim properly. <br/>The game appears to be quite repetitive, with the same enemy pattern appearing over and over. I didn't play for too long though (due to that very reason) |