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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Devenger's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 20 03:31:00 | Scanno Domini | Good fun. Played up until the difficulty spike, then got royally trounced. Certainly there's a technique to fighting them once they're onto you, it just eludes me this late at night. Liked the spambot/web-ad styled tutorial text - 'scan secretly now forever my lord'... disliked how your blog flagged my comment as spam. ;) | |
| Dec 20 03:43:00 | 12m 00s | Quest for the Four Altars! | Game works nicely - a pleasant way to spend 5 minutes. Only major quibble is that if you go to the rightmost altar before you go to all the others, you have to restart because you can't escape from that rightmost area (or at least I found no way to). I found a couple of logos around the place, one of them for doing some slightly tricky jumping, which is a nice touch. As you are clearly aware, it would benefit from being a bit more complex, but it's nonetheless a nice low-stress few minutes of game. I hope you have time to expand on it for the Jam, or just beyond LD. :) |
| Dec 20 15:56:00 | 12h 13m | Alphabet Trader | Likewise, I couldn't figure out how to buy letters. I'm testing on Vista, I'll give it a go on my Win7 netbook later. |
| Dec 20 16:11:00 | 15m 00s | Nameless Island | The game crashed when I finished the bug splatting minigame. (This was a shame, because I genuinely want to find out how this game ends.) Is the bug-splatting minigame required to complete the game? |
| Dec 20 16:36:00 | 25m 00s | Furbinator | A good little concept, with the short-range scan preventing you getting complacent. A bit too unfinished - many of the enemies stayed black even when scanned (though apparently could be treated as male in that they weren't rage-inducing when killed). A score counter would have been nice, or some way of winning the game (I didn't find a way, at least; they seem to just keep appearing). A bit more works on fixes and features and this will be great - I hope you continue to work on it. |
| Dec 20 16:45:00 | 9m 00s | Discover The Name | Well presented and a fairly interesting mechanic. As others have said, the breaking blocks don't present enough of an obstacle - however, perhaps they would if there were more levels that required you to reach multiple different end points, that had a lot of breaking blocks (so you could leave yourself stranded.) Despite the low difficulty, still a nice few minutes of game, and certainly something you can expand on now beyond LD - well done. :) |
| Dec 20 16:55:00 | 10m 00s | Juxtapose | Very cool. Some things perhaps should be clearer (I presume Power Up! increases the points you get for each ball you remove/change?) but generally it was a pleasure just to try things, see the results, and try and build a strategy from it. The different sound effects for the different results you could get were a nice touch. Well done :) |
| Dec 20 17:05:00 | 10m 00s | Mr Head and the Journey of Discoveries | 117 seconds on my second try. Dialogue was concise and helpful. Good use of implicit game mechanics (especially the 'out one side of the screen, in the other' thing). A good job for only 8 hours - well done. |
| Dec 20 17:11:00 | 6m 00s | Wysp | Legacy: from the leftmost platform in the black phase (change phase with P), hold right and hold jump (you jump higher if you hold it), and it shouldn't be too hard. |
| Dec 20 18:03:00 | 52m 00s | Mystery of Yrevoc Sid | Graphically impressive, and some real potential in the established elements (inventory and item pickups are very slick), but perhaps too ambitious for an LD game? Certainly worth finishing; I'd love to see this game with a variety of weapons, enemies and objectives. |
| Dec 20 18:18:00 | 15m 00s | Anacalypse | Alas, I did not discover anything edible. ;) Nice graphics and use of lighting, decent sound, quite fun. Could have done with something to add challenge/risk methinks. |
| Dec 20 18:59:00 | 41m 00s | Get Out | I got to a screen with a blue wall and a light blue sky; I assume that's the end of the game. I find precision jumping on ice quite compelling actually, but I did keep getting stuck in walls (had to use R liberally) and the game isn't really anything to do with the theme. The level design was actually quite good, given the very limited range of hazards you used (just a LOT of spikes). Congrats on finishing your first LD game. |
| Dec 20 20:14:00 | 1h 15m | Ghosts and Gemstones | Excellent! The digging was satisfying, the enemies were interesting (their inertia, and that some of them destroyed terrain, allowed for some fun tactics), the difficulty was spot on and the end boss was a tough but thrilling challenge (only beat him on my 4th try). Movement was slightly strange but this wasn't a huge issue. Randomised shop could sometimes be a bit harsh (often not selling healing when you really need it), but along with the randomised levels it kept each attempt at the game fresh. Graphics and audio were purely functional but that's not to the game's detriment. Overall: fantastic. First LD game I've got quite addicted to. Well done :D |
| Dec 21 01:47:00 | 5h 33m | Q-Bers | A very nifty idea, well executed. Difficulty curve needs work - I always had at least 20 seconds to spare until up/down rotation was added, at which point I lost by a large margin (it was made particularly difficult by being required to correctly rotate the background of the nutcracker image, which being an almost consistent colour was practically impossible). Game over voice made me chuckle. Thanks for an enjoyable 10 minutes. |
| Dec 21 03:45:00 | 1h 58m | Pickup | Game worked fine for me. Not sure it fits the theme, since there was no discovery for me - I already knew I don't know how to chat up girls [/jokeattempt]. On a serious note, I couldn't really discern the required sequences, except that doing the same thing twice in a row never worked. There really isn't much actual 'game', it's just clicking buttons and listening to strangely creepy voice recordings. The volume on the sound clips was very low and a bit inconsistent. <br/> <br/>I did really badly, then I ended up with some handsome looking fella called Emilio. I'm treating this as a win, even though I have a feeling it isn't meant to be. :D |
| Dec 21 12:42:00 | 8h 57m | The Complex | Game works for me (though when I played it all the tiles had red outlines; they don't in your screenshot, so I presume this is a bug?). The dialogue and description in the game is suitably enticing, making it somewhat disappointing that the Complex is completely empty. It would be a shame if you never end up finishing this game. |
| Dec 21 13:00:00 | 18m 00s | Sprawl | Always nice to see a bit of random level generation, but the world wasn't really populated with anything interesting (though the recurring features like the walled gold caches were good in that it gave a little more of a sense of place). The movement was a bit tiring on the fingers (even if movement is to be locked to grid squares, it would be nice if holding down a direction moved you that way at a steady pace), and the penalty for being killed was trivial (making death result in game over and having therefore the concept of a high score would help give the game challenge). Still, well done for getting a working game out. |
| Dec 21 13:30:00 | 30m 00s | Arise | Excellent graphics - I really liked the slow revealing of the world out of the darkness as you explored - but the gameplay was really nothing special, the heavy checkpointing removing any difficulty and the somewhat slow floaty jumping preventing the movement from being satisfying. It would have been very cool if the pervading dark areas were somehow dangerous, and you actually required light sources to stave away the unknown - it feels a bit like that already, in some ways. The difficulty level affecting the range of your revealing ability is good. I think the game just needs something extra to make it excellent. |
| Dec 21 13:39:00 | 9m 00s | Land of the Fishies | Brilliant music, a colourful and easily readable art style, and pleasant surreality. Looking forward to seeing more of this game in the future. But don't force players back more than a couple of screens for not correctly deducing how cute a bunny rabbit is. :P |
| Dec 21 13:59:00 | 20m 00s | ancient codes | Well presented and with a good core mechanic (I assume that horizontal and vertical colour or shape matching were the only ways to trigger destroying the shapes?) that forces you to think tactically - very nice. But yeah, not that related to the theme. |
| Dec 21 14:20:00 | 21m 00s | Code Monkey Trials | Not a bad bit of puzzling. The whole lighting thing never really became important, since you needed to light everything every level, and you always had enough lights to place one every two spaces/whenever you would otherwise need to move into darkness (I think). Still, well done. |
| Dec 21 14:35:00 | 15m 00s | SPACEMEAT DISCOVERY | Awesome! Everything from the music to the planet names is brilliant, and there's even a modicum of strategy too (estimating size based on weight, etc.) - only thing that's maybe slightly disturbing is the implication that you're killing all these astronauts, or at least wasting vast amounts of taxpayers' money on firing ships randomly into asteroids (if you're me) :D |
| Dec 21 14:50:00 | 15m 00s | Purgatory Area | Quite fun, though maybe I just enjoy awkward control schemes. Use of sound was very good - very nice audio touch at the end. |
| Dec 21 14:59:00 | 9m 00s | Untitled Discovery | There's certainly discovery, but I'm not sure it's a game. Game implies more interactivity than one or two things you can click, and the ability to move left and right. Many of the screens did make me chuckle though (like the pictured 'game design department', with the idea dispenser). |
| Dec 21 15:48:00 | 49m 00s | Mothership | Probably a bit too ambitious for 48 hours, but I'd be interested to see what this becomes given a bit more development time. |
| Dec 21 16:01:00 | 13m 00s | Planet 53 | A nice art style hinted at, but innovative or thematic this is not. Though there's certainly some value in the 'carry item back through level unable to fire' mechanic - it made me look at the enemies differently once I couldn't just gun them down. Would be great if you took the time to add more levels and enemies, and improved some of the alien art a little. Take this beyond LD! :) |
| Dec 21 16:07:00 | 6m 00s | LD19 Planets | Impressive on a graphical-technical level. Some of the lower quality planets could be great as a backdrop to a 3D spacecraft game, and I'm sure you could build a game around the higher quality ones. |
| Dec 21 16:53:00 | 46m 00s | Discoverer | This would have been perfect for last theme, but it just about fits in this one as well. I was surprised at how long the game was, though disappointed that a lot of that length was solely from the vast number of compulsory randomly generated levels that were best solved by running around, never stopping, picking up keys as you go then dashing back out. The challenge rooms to get the portal keys were a lot better. The turrets were fairly interesting, though perhaps less of them should have been perfectly avoidable just by moving across their line of fire. Overall, a very full and finished game, well done. |
| Dec 21 16:56:00 | 3m 00s | Discover - Collect - Profit | Yep, I think you forgot to include that .dll, I get the same problem as ranklar. |
| Dec 21 17:37:00 | 41m 00s | Epic Treasure Hunter | Nothing new, but fun enough nonetheless. And I love the player character art. |
| Dec 21 17:55:00 | 18m 00s | Robots Among Us | Clever risk management element to this. Nicely done. |
| Dec 21 18:37:00 | 42m 00s | ...You Are A Duck! | Brilliant concept, but only fun because of how broken it is :D Definitely the collisions and movement are what needs sharpening the most. |
| Dec 21 19:33:00 | 56m 00s | Penguin! | Wonderful. I was optimistic for the penguin when he thought he could fly a bit. Alas. |
| Dec 21 20:00:00 | 27m 00s | Crystals Hunter | Seemed fun enough up until in the 3rd level where you must move two crates into two holes next to each other to get to one button... when I tried to push the second crate there, the first hole made it disappear, making the level impossible. This problem aside, the game seems to work quite well (though you can get stuck with no way to reset if you push a crate into a place where you can no longer move it in the right direction, up against a wall). |
| Dec 21 20:36:00 | 36m 00s | Run | Hitboxes are a little too unforgiving, and game is quite slow in between the duck walls (which are the only serious challenge, at least as far as I got). Nice bit of setting building with the intro, though it's still only tenuously linked to the theme. And yes, it has good music. <br/> <br/>For a bit of study on how technically incorrect hitboxes can be a good choice, check out http://blog.semisecretsoftware.com/tuning-canabalt - a pleasant read for anyone making games about platforming precision, actually. |
| Dec 22 00:05:00 | 3h 29m | Voyage of Discovery | Had really good fun with this. What really impressed me was how I didn't find one dominant approach to upgrading - all the upgrade choices had merits (even Hull upgrades, in a dangerous situation). Like any good roguelike, you can approach problems in a variety of ways - I had just as much fun using lots of supplies and field-of-view upgrades to mass-colonise the world whilst avoiding pirates from afar, as I did pumping all my upgrades into attack and barely surviving off of the drops from my wrecked enemies and the occasional colony I'd blindly bump into. For 48 hours, making a game this balanced and compelling is stunning - well done! |
| Dec 22 00:27:00 | 22m 00s | Retirement of the Space Shuttle Discovery | 400000km up, and I'm still getting 'Satellite Destroyed!' messages. Truly, my launch was a triumph. |
| Dec 22 02:20:00 | 1h 53m | Scarab Amazing | Quite a few graphical glitches for me (things being walls when they aren't, or whole pieces of the maze being visually missing), but still good fun. |
| Dec 29 23:49:00 | 189h 29m | Epic Spice Quest | Would have been worth adding some sort of hazard to the adventure, but it was pleasant nonetheless. What Zemmi says is true, however picking up the map repeatedly doesn't increase your discoveries, so it's not at risk of breaking the scoring or anything. |
| Dec 30 00:06:00 | 17m 00s | Discoveries | I found this enthralling. Perhaps I had better luck than others, though. Sometimes, I didn't even know if my choices mattered, or my clicking was having any effect. Nonetheless, an interesting exploration of viewing a stream of consciousness - well done. |
| Dec 30 01:22:00 | 1h 16m | Good Ship Exploration | All the aliens with hats made me giggle. The secret was well-hidden, but pleasantly obvious once revealed (as all good secrets of this nature should be). Game somewhat overstayed its welcome, though - for such a basic premise (and such limited controls) it probably shouldn't take well over an hour to complete. There's certainly something interesting about trying to spread the most different explor-o-things around the universe with the least flight distance, but having to wait to get places so often (even with 3 or 4 thrust upgrades, and even to an extent with the portals) was pretty boring. Still, fully functional game, well done. |
| Dec 30 01:39:00 | 17m 00s | Attack of the time travelling pygmy from outer paleolithic (aka Time Pygmy) | Excellent, nice art style, amusing gameplay. Didn't get most of the discoveries though - I just don't think in the right way, methinks. |
| Dec 30 01:55:00 | 16m 00s | Terra Nova | Didn't realise the importance of markers the first time. Didn't survive the first time. Used markers liberally the second time. Got three men back the second time. Take that, history! (Bet they wished they'd had multiple tries at staying alive, poor real-life team.) <br/> <br/>Cool idea, reasonably well executed. A shame about the controls (I got to grips with them okay eventually, but it was confusing for a good while). Wonder if you'd been better off making the controls mouse-based, rather than the up-is-right strangeness and the numerous letters to remember. Regardless, good fun, thanks for this. Well done. |
| Dec 30 02:14:00 | 19m 00s | DiSub | Functional, but not quite fun yet. As the dominant strategy is to just move and hold space, there's very little game (except to find some efficient scanning pattern perhaps). Still, seems close to something interesting - I look forward to updates. And well done for getting a 3D game out in 48 hours; my basic understanding of mathematics suggests this is about 50% harder than a 2D game. ;) |
| Dec 30 02:22:00 | 8m 00s | Pass it! v1.1.5 | Fun enough, but just a platformer with a twist, and a slightly annoying one at that (the discovery was entirely in peering at my screen checking for marginally differently edged tiles). I completed one level without even realising how - hiding portals and exit flags may not be the best plan for making level completion satisfying. Still, game works and was fun enough to play to completion; well done. |
| Dec 30 02:52:00 | 30m 00s | Let's Science | First game I'm giving a 5 for humour. The idea of some grey-haired scientists, including Prof. Layton, House M.D. and Simon Tam, in a big room with a few desks and chemistry sets working their way to eternal youth and the meaning of life by 2011/2012 seems very, VERY funny to me. The game itself was merely average - there was no actual challenge, the scientists generally took good enough care of themselves, random events saved me from ever glimpsing cashflow problems, and a lack of ending makes the whole experience feel like a loose end untied - but it's still the game that's made me chuckle the most of all those I've played so far. Well done. |
| Dec 30 02:58:00 | 6m 00s | Discovery - Researching Space | Very playable, but nothing notable except the randomised enemy graphics and a few different projectile patterns. Needs a little more innovation before 50 points is 'awesome', methinks. Regardless, well done for getting a working game out. |
| Dec 30 18:14:00 | 15h 16m | Coffee Forever | Pretty fun, fairly funny. Difficulty ramped up at a good pace (I got to level 11). Well done for managing such a decent game in 7 hours. |
| Dec 30 18:54:00 | 40m 00s | PRIOR | Excellent; played it three times to get all the endings (though I'm not sure I found all of the notes). The anti-gravity was slightly strange (unreliable whether it allowed you a second jump after you activated it), but only using it after a double jump was sufficient to get to everywhere in the game as far as I can tell. The music and graphics gave it a powerful atmosphere of despondency, ruin and abandonment. And the events (both explicit and implied) were impressively intriguing for a 48h game. Also, the controls were well explained without removing from the mystery of the whole scenario. Well done! |
| Dec 30 19:20:00 | 26m 00s | Links | Please stop trying to explain your game is better than it is. If the being able to screw up your pattern by touching the same node twice in a row within a split second (because you don't have absurd precision with your chosen pointing device) is meant to be a feature, it's a rubbish feature, a result of poor design. (I can see that being able to hit the same note twice is handy for composition, but there's little sense ruining the game's actual playability for that.) On a less egregious note, with the third level, I kept forgetting the target pattern - a key to show the target pattern again would be nice. <br/> <br/>Issues aside, it's an interesting premise - not particularly on theme though, since the way you are advised to play the game, and the way of scoring points, is nothing to do with discovering things. The music generation element is actually good fun; watching the 'beat' reverberate around the node graph you create is interesting. I think you may have been better off removing the scoring and predetermined orders entirely, and making it a more open game about composition instead, though that's just my opinion of course. <br/> <br/>Note: I don't comment to gather critique on my commenting ability. Please do not attack my opinions, or I'll adjust my rating of your game accordingly. Sorry I'm having to be so blunt. |
| Dec 30 21:30:00 | 2h 10m | Caves of Darkness | Jumping was a bit strange (very fast falling compared to walking). Completing the game mostly came down to trial and error, and two of the levels could be completed without throwing flares at all - just jumping over holes and spikes when you see them. You probably ought to include in the instructions that you only have 3 flares. Not particularly thematic (maybe I'm just tiring of all the games that are just platformers in dark places, though). Still, a solid game, quite fun for its brief duration. Well done. |
| Dec 30 21:34:00 | 4m 00s | Cardboard adventure | That bunny got *puts on sunglasses* plunged into the depths of hell... no wait, it went up to the clouds. Oh well. <br/> <br/>Funny, but only a game by the loosest sense of the term. |
| Dec 30 22:02:00 | 28m 00s | Teleport Discover | Works, but nothing too engaging. Tried it many times, and all I did was wander through very similar looking levels (never found any of the structured ones like in the screenshots) picking up mysteriously one-use axes, hacking through trees, stumbling into sources of pure energy then dying because I hadn't stumbled accurately enough. I didn't find the altar; if it's truly more interesting than the rest of the game, well, it's dangerous to expect players to play through a lot of less interesting stuff to get to an interesting bit. <br/> <br/>On a technical level, it works pretty well, though. So well done for getting a working game out in 48h. |
| Dec 31 08:24:00 | 10h 22m | Evening | I like the animation, though such extreme changes in the character's height and width through the animations does mean that they visually clip into the terrain quite often - then again, I suppose it would be a pain to keep adjusting the character's collisions, and compensate when these changes would suddenly put the character partially inside obstacles. The movement feels a bit strange, to accommodate the animations I suppose, but is sufficiently precise. <br/> <br/>I reached a wall that I couldn't surpass. If this is intentional (or even if it isn't), it suggests a strange narrative indeed. I might have just missed something, though. |
| Jan 1 21:47:00 | 37h 23m | Deep sea discovey | Fun enough, but not particularly challenging, beyond the issues of getting lost and of avoiding the incorrectly sized hitboxes of the enemies. Even if the hitbox was correct, the enemies should probably only drain oxygen rather than kill you instantly - each level, particularly the large one, takes enough time without having to restart because of instant death. And the threat of running out of oxygen was a bit too minor, because it was plentiful compared to how much was required to break down obstacles (as others have said, having it slowly tick down would have been a possible solution). Finally, it was only really as theme-related as any game about being somewhere and collecting things is. <br/> <br/>Still, quite fun, and the .png based level loader is pretty nifty. Well done. |
| Jan 1 22:17:00 | 30m 00s | Case Closed | Clever and horrifying. The idea of being in a cell having been framed, endlessly replaying past events in your mind to no avail, terrifies me. That everything in the world could be looked at, however inconsequential, was excellent at giving the locations identity, and made it feel like a real investigation. That some of the apparently inconsequential things gained meaning when I looked closer at descriptions on my second playthrough made things even more wonderful. Good work. |