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DrPetter

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game	DrPetter's comment
		‘0xF0’	Ok, since nobody else will, I'll whip out as much negative critique as I can come up with. Bear in mind that I voted 5 on fun and tech, so I do like it. This nitpicking will just drop polish to 4. Also I think I still hold the 1-1 track record after some 70+ attempts - record in both perseverance and time perhaps. <br/> <br/>Minor annoyance: Sound effects. The countdown is ok, but the fall sound (whistle) is excessive and pretty random as you basically hear it all the time. Menu sounds could be lighter with less bass (this is almost always true). <br/>Thrust sound is weird since it seems to be a longish one-shot sample rather than a continuous noise, which makes you think that the thrust is also one-shot (so you could repeatedly tap it to go faster for instance). Sound should mirror functionality to aid the player rather than confuse them. <br/>Fall sound is my personal nemesis. I hate it. I always try to hit space as soon as I sense the race is lost, but if I'm a split second too late it'll trigger the sample and it'll go on and on for an hour before it finally shuts up some time in the next run. "Hour" is subjective here. It gets on my nerves though, should be muted when you restart the race. <br/> <br/>Onwards to the actual simulation. A cosmetic issue is that, at least on my system, the frame-to-frame jitter is pretty bad. The ship is shaking back and forth along the movement vector, as if the timing is messed up and some variable time delta suffers as a result. It's often better (sometimes worse!) when I disable the glow and framerate goes up to 60 fps, but there's always occasional hickups which are sort of jarring. Maybe you could have capped the delta measurement or smoothed it over time, to prevent a temporary timer hickup from noticably affecting the animation. <br/>As for the actual gameplay, I don't quite like how the ship turns like an asteroids vessel, with almost on/off angular delta. I suppose it's mainly due to the camera being fixed in the same direction as the ship though, making it feel rigid. If the camera had lagged behind a bit you'd get a better sense of what it's doing in terms of movement and direction (like a typical 3rd person racing view). <br/>Speaking of camera lag, the vertical lag is pretty extreme in some cases, leaving you temporarily above the ship looking straight down, having no view of the track ahead. <br/> <br/>Stability-wise, it's been mostly good to me except one time when it crashed out with an unhandled exception as I was sitting on the starting line. It triggered the fall sound right before crashing (even though I was sitting still on the track). <br/> <br/>The level system is a little bit harsh in that you can't skip a single track if you want to see the next batch. It isn't terrible, just not optimal for lazy players :P <br/>I've completed the first 11 tracks, but I probably won't play further anytime soon. If I had a warp option I'd try a few of the really late levels, just for kicks. <br/> <br/>Anything not mentioned (bitched about) here is probably great, like the graphics and ghost replay.
		all roads lead from home	Lovely coherent NES-ish look and feel. The elaborate intro sequence (well, story text anyway) makes it feel a lot more polished than if you'd been thrust into gameplay straight off, and the environments help keep things interesting as well. <br/>Gameplay does manage to get a little bit repetitive even through this short span though, and it could have used one or two special features on some screens, like traps or collectibles or something. I kept expecting traps in the caves, but they were all barren. <br/>Having different music in the caves is great for building atmosphere, but it could have been even more separated from the main tune (maybe just an eerie ambient track, wind noise or foot steps). <br/>The game managed to scare me into failure at least once, when I unexpectedly strayed off course by a pixel or so and then over-reacted to the monster sound, throwing my mouse pointer way off to the side and consequently within reach of the hands. <br/>Luckily I didn't have to start over, and eventually the game was beat. I even managed to cheat on one screen!
		Two Roads	Seems most compos get a clickventure. Good thing too, they are often refreshingly simple to play. Took me four attempts to beat this one, which I guess is a pretty good balance between being easy and frustrating. Extremely important that the monologue is skippable when you already know what to do.
		Frog Rescue	I got my best score of 77 while writing this comment, not touching the game window at all. <br/> <br/>Consequently, I would say the gameplay design is somewhat flawed. But I still really like the game though. The sounds and graphics give major flashbacks to cheap crazy NES games from the mid-80's. <br/> <br/>Not quite sure what you could do to make the game more challenging/rewarding... a smaller playing field would be a good start, since it's impossible to manage this large area given the strict time limitations. The frogs are so many and so randomly distributed that it's unclear which parts of the level you should block off to get the best result - often it's not even beneficial to block a car into one place since it will still smash a few frogs. <br/>The main problem is that all the frogs are concentrated to the center region when you start, and the roads + cars are initiated randomly, so chance will decide if you get a hostile or friendly situation during these critical first few seconds, while there's nothing you can really do to affect it. Blocking a car in this area is obviously not a good idea since the frogs will pass through in large numbers. <br/> <br/>I love the frog graphics and animation, and I really want the game to be fun, but it would need heavily revised gameplay. Perhaps it's enough to slow everything (particularly cars) down and reduce the size of the playing field, so you have time to assess the situation and make choices. The number of road blocks could be limited so that you have to focus on one or two areas at a time. Like maybe having 5-6 blocks and reusing the oldest one when you've placed them all. <br/>Definitely prohibit roads in a region around the center of the map as well, so you get an initial breather and a chance for the frogs to spread a bit. <br/> <br/>I like Hamumu's idea regarding bait. Frogs could be attracted to it and maybe stop to eat for a few seconds, so you can delay them while preparing the road ahead.
		Roads of Dare 1.0	Nicely polished, this one. Upon starting it I dreaded what could be a long dull while trying to figure out the card-based gameplay, but it was really more of a dice affair and thankfully very simple. <br/>I forgot about refueling on my first lap and managed to get snugly into the pits on my last card after the second lap - phew. After that I apparently won the race, although it kept going until I ran out of cards before announcing me as the winner. <br/>The neat swooshy card/move transitions along with the puffy smoke particles really do a huge amount to make the game enjoyable and stylish. Without them it'd be rather clunky. <br/>You get a 4 in food for the caserole, I bet it looked great.
		GBGames – Road LOCKDOWN!	I'm annoyed by the controls, and the menus being timed and uncontrollable. I had to restart the game three times to read the entire instructions screen. <br/>The car didn't really seem to obey my input all the time. In my first run, it wasn't even obvious to me which car I was supposed to be controlling - they both seemed pretty autonomous. <br/>I managed to catch the crooks once. Not sure what determines the lifespan of roadblocks... they seem to be timed. <br/> <br/>Hamumu's right - is it a crime to be driving a red car? ;) <br/>I suppose you could argue that they are notorious bank robbers known to be in town for a heist.
		Exproad, Improad, Reroad!	Great one. I doubt anyone hit the theme in as many ways as you did ;) <br/>The particle effects are indeed effective, and the monsters sound very zomboid. The graphics come across more cartoony than poor, which is nice. Reminds me of the Bart games on NES. <br/>My main complaints are with the interface - I initially launched the game with my keyboard out of reach, so had to get up and fetch it to select a difficulty level only to realize that the game is actually played exclusively with the mouse after all... Also, more importantly perhaps, the default cursor is really lost in the mayhem of gameplay, so you should have put in a huge flashing reticle or something to show where you're aiming. Oh, and there were some interesting timing hickups - the game would sometimes freeze for a second or two, and other times it'd race ahead at breakneck speed for an instant. It didn't seem to disrupt gameplay all that much though (but I guess I could have lost a few boxes of rice without noticing). <br/>Overall it's fun and frantic. I scored 180-something after maybe a 5-minute run on normal difficulty.
		Voyage, a puzzle game	More fun than I expected. First impression was "shit, a sliding puzzle... ok, I'll poke around for a few seconds then quit" - but it actually managed to balance the difficulty rather well, and I kept going with the "just one more screen" thing until I had beaten it. <br/>I suppose there may be more endings though, but I got the pink and tasty one (went through the forest). In 2057 moves. <br/>I also managed to slot in the gas canisters for levels which had them, but there was no indication of whether or not that made any difference. I assumed that you needed it to proceed. Would have been nice with a "pickup", making the can disappear as you went by and maybe an animation filling the gas meter up.
		The game	I was going to bitch about how the road was a really random element in this game, but eventually I got past the first gravity inversion level and onto the escort one. At that point it got a bit more "sensible". It also got harder, in a different way. I gave up. Would have been nice to get some higher framerate (I saw maybe 15 fps), as it would have made it more comfortable to play. Turrets were a bit overly aggressive and numerous early on. Player offensive capabilities were odd and limited. Anyway, I sort of like it. Mostly because hamumu dislikes it.
		PizzaBitch	Rather ambitious packaging and presentation, but the gameplay is so-and-so. Main problem initially is the limited viewing distance, meaning you have to inch along while staring at the map to have any idea where you're going. After a while you sort of learn the streets though. <br/>If polycount is an issue you could maybe collapse neighboring tiles/squares to make larger (potentially rectangular) quads. I don't think fillrate would be a problem since you can draw tons of transparent smoke particles like nothing at all. <br/>Might have been nice to make the out-of-bounds area high-friction instead of bouncy. Things get a bit cramped as they are now, with zero tolerance for swerving a bit. <br/>I delivered some 3-4 pizzas for a score of 80, then I crashed on purpose since the car was already pretty smashed up.
		I has FAIL!	I love how your funds can go negative. I finished all roads by May 1900, ending at a respectable debt of $22M. <br/> <br/>The cost of individual contructions were a bit crazy though. They seemed to be represented by numbers only ranging between -18[something] to +18[something], leading to periodic wrap-around while building from Pittsburgh to Miami. <br/> <br/>I'm assuming you intended to add some means of gaining funds as well, through trade or something. Obviously different cities would have different potential for revenue, and combinations of cities would have various effects (with one city consuming the produce of another). Could be lots of fun. I guess the state wouldn't directly benefit from trade transactions, but you could have variable tax rates! :) <br/> <br/>Would have been cool if the rails were visually built on the map, Indiana Jones-style. Like maybe putting down a dotted line and then gradually filling it in with a wider solid one. <br/> <br/>Also I would have liked to start several builds at once, but I guess the work force was limited to one team. For fun, you could have had a few separate teams with geographical positions, and they had to use rails for moving between different spots. So you'd start off with maybe one team in every city (or in just some of them) and then build rails to other nearby cities, then have to move the team along tracks to either expand in other directions or maybe pitch in and help each other on the same patch of track to speed up construction. <br/> <br/>Also, you'd definitely need some bandits roaming the plains and intercepting shipments, North & South-style! :) <br/> <br/>You'll get a high mark in fun just because it made me go off on such a tangent regarding what the game could have been like :P
		Final road : Bad Ass Frog Escapes from LA	Yipe. It's nasty how cars keep crunching your corpse over after you're dead. <br/> <br/>Frogger sure is a neat ol' design. I had fun with it, getting some thrilling close call moments. Obviously not original though :) <br/> <br/>Humosour (wow, fancy sp) story attempt worked in the sense that I went into the game with a smirk rather than a mood of neutral criticism.
		LD Road Racer	Crashes with this: <br/> <br/>File "psnake\LD13\car.py", line 20, in collide <br/> pxls = sdl.PixelArray( <br/>collision_map.subsurface(self.rect) ) <br/>AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'PixelArray' <br/> <br/>I'm assuming it needs a different pygame version. The game seems like it could be fun, so I might update pygame and give it a try later. Will edit this comment if I do. Consider releasing a post-compo windows executable next time.
		Hexxxy	Innovative but flawed gameplay design. As I pointed out earlier, the "most difficult" level is impossible to beat, and the others are fairly easy. Could have used a more interesting playfield, with static obstacles/holes and maybe tiles that you could rotate but not move or vice versa. <br/> <br/>Another evil twist would be to have two or more "cars" moving at once, perhaps starting from different corners of the map, and/or more than one goal (or pickups/keypoints that you need to collect/visit before finishing). <br/> <br/>I'm assuming you're talking about your basecode when you say "cheating", which isn't really very relevant in this case since you're just using graphics primitives and basic input in addition to the core gameplay logic.
		Title	Broken. Would have been nice with a readme file explaining things.
		Done! With Zombies!!!	The rotated controls are a bit odd. With this scheme, you'd typically expect forward to be upwards or "into" the screen (for 3D), alternatively having a rotating car so that the controls map to the local car direction. The obvious choice for a fixed side view like this is to have the arrows map directly to the screen direction you'll move in. <br/> <br/>The gun reload time seems to be one frame long, which means you can't really conserve bullets the way you'd want to given the low (and not refillable?) ammo supply. Hitting fire will spew at least a handful of bullets every time. <br/> <br/>For it to be fun, I'd say make it fire only one bullet per keypress, or maybe autofire with something like 5-10 bullets a second. You'd also need some kind of ammo reload, or make it an explicit survival game where your score is based on how far you made it along the road (so you can make a mad dash at the end when your ammo runs out). <br/> <br/>The zombies also should stop and properly die when they're hit. It's not at all rewarding to just paint them with some red splatter and have them move on as if nothing happened. Bullets should stop when they hit a target. <br/>Shoot+hit sound effects would have been nice. <br/> <br/>Kudos for haing menus and music.
		DEAD END Will be at	I would actually like to see the source code for this, or I won't be able to give a technical rating. I have no idea what you had to do in terms of coding to make the game work, since it's using a pre-baked engine (Unity). For all I know, you could just have pasted in a few given constructs (fps players, projectiles, mesh level), substituted your own models/textures and called it a day. <br/>It would have been a pretty respectable feat to build the whole rendering and collision system during the compo, but yeah... I don't know what you did. <br/> <br/>The models and music are very impressive, but they contrast so heavily with the rather crappy gameplay that it makes the whole thing more of a screenshot photoshoot than a game. <br/>You should probably have made the view fully 3rd person to show off the mech models a bit more clearly, as it is now you have a pretty hard time seeing what's going on at all. The most annoying aspect for me (besides sluggish movement and weird sticky rotation buttons) is that you don't seem to be moving straight towards the middle of view, but rather sliding somewhat off to the side.