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Dan C

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game	Dan C's comment
May 2 14:24:00		Spud	One screen wants me to press enter to continue, then the next wants me to press space. What were you thinking? That is really irritating. <br/> <br/>I kind of like the fact that you get a different weapon each time. Some weapons make the game far too easy though. My level of success was generally determined by what weapon I started with. <br/> <br/>The manual reload is not obvious at all. It took me a couple of tries to figure out that I didn't just have ridiculously small amounts of ammo. It'd be better if it displayed a message, or reloaded automatically, but I realise it's difficult to fit everything in. <br/> <br/>It's hard to see what's going on most of the time. The graphics could do with more contrast.
May 2 14:31:00	7m 00s	Breathing Room	Interesting idea and well presented. Great work. I too was disappointed by the short length, though.
May 2 15:10:00	39m 00s	Trollbridge Armours	I like this use of the theme, but the basic idea seems to be the same as BigBoyBlue's (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/04/29/a-possible-idea-target-market/). Is that a coincidence? <br/> <br/>I couldn't find a way to craft anything other than planks and wooden swords. I purchased some iron but there don't seem to be any recipes that use it. Am I missing something or is that part unfinished? <br/> <br/>The character encoding errors are extremely distracting. If you are going to use characters outside the ASCII range you need to configure your web server to specify the character set you are using in the HTTP response headers (UTF-8, in your case).
May 2 15:31:00	21m 00s	Take This	I absolutely love this. Great idea, well presented. The audio is simple but effective. <br/> <br/>I wasn’t very good at figuring out which items worked well against which foes, but I’ll have another go later on with a notebook to hand :).
May 2 15:45:00	14m 00s	Many Small Hands	Really nice creative interpretation of the theme. <br/> <br/>The presentation of the first screen is beautiful, but a bit too ambitious. It would have been better to spend that time on the actual game. <br/> <br/>It did take me a while to figure out how to get into the game from the first screen. <br/> <br/>At one point some of my orphans ignored the path I set up for them and ran straight towards the policeman, which was a bit annoying. <br/> <br/>It was also kind of annoying that the game leaves the district you're playing as soon as an orphan brings back enough money. Each time that happened, some of my orphans still had money in their pockets which was lost.
May 2 16:11:00	26m 00s	Egglins Attack	I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but the music is truly awful. My ears were in searing pain within about three seconds. Silence would have been far preferable. <br/> <br/>The minimap always crashes for me in the first level, regardless of whether I've used it in the tutorial. For that reason I didn't get past the first level. <br/> <br/>The concept is OK although you seem to have shoe-horned it into the theme. There's some potential for interesting puzzles, although that potential didn't seem to be met (but perhaps I didn't get far enough through the game). <br/> <br/>It's annoying that the teleporters move so slowly. It is rather boring to have to wait for them to gradually crawl towards their destination.
May 2 16:16:00	5m 00s	City Collision III	A curious idea, and it's kind-of interesting to watch the collisions, but the 'control' part seems to be missing. I jabbed at various keys and sometimes something seemed to happen at the beginning of a simulation, but I couldn't tell you what or why. <br/> <br/>I don't understand how it fits in with the theme at all.
May 2 23:05:00	6h 49m	Asteroid Explorer	For me it gets stuck at the beginning of what I presume is a countdown (while displaying "3"), but it looks really cool. <br/> <br/>Do scientists always pose sexily and wear burlesque gear while they brief you for dangerous space missions?
May 5 19:47:00	68h 42m	Dangerous Dan	I'm all for silly dialogue (I even included some randomly-generated silly dialogue in my own entry), but if I'm honest I didn't find the dialogue in this game sufficiently amusing to carry the entry, and there isn't much else to it. <br/> <br/>However everyone else seems to like it so I guess I'm just humour-impaired. <br/> <br/>I did like the interpretation of the theme, with the items provided being more of a hindrance than a help, and the protagonist never actually getting to go on his adventure. But then, I'm a bit biased because I had fundamentally the same idea, although I made a completely different game out of it.
May 5 20:01:00	14m 00s	Speculum	Lovely graphics, and some clever gameplay mechanics. <br/> <br/>I really like the design and rolling animation of the main character and friendly NPCs :). <br/> <br/>I'm also very impressed with how much you managed to get done in such a short time. <br/> <br/>I found it too slow-paced to be fun, though, and the music is a little atonal for my taste. Also, the interpretation of the theme is too literal to be interesting, but at least you didn't make a Zelda clone. <br/> <br/>The choice of name is... odd.
May 5 21:08:00	1h 07m	Robots nicked my stuff!	This is a pretty cool game but the way the pick-ups are implemented spoils the fun a great deal for me. <br/> <br/>Some of the pick-ups are worse than useless, but you're forced to pick them up because the game won't give you any more ammo if you don't. It's particularly irritating the way that new weapons replace the previous weapon and sometimes leave you with hardly any ammo. <br/> <br/>The black hole is especially annoying in this regard, because if you don't notice you've picked it up you're likely to drop it on top of the portal, which causes all the enemies to zoom towards it and cause more damage. If you do manage to use it right, then it's a highly destructive weapon, but then you're left with no ammo and nothing to do until the portal deigns to give you another weapon. Also, because the portal is dead centre, the black hole is bound to draw some enemies towards the portal no matter where you place it, and with no ammo you're left with no way to defend the portal. <br/> <br/>The background graphics are simple but effective, and I really like them. The foreground graphics aren't as good but they're perfectly serviceable, but it is a shame that you used the same rather ugly sprite for all the weapons except the flamethrower. <br/> <br/>I noticed that the flamethrower doesn't seem to work properly: the flames just stay still in one place wherever you fired them (or is that intentional?). <br/> <br/>The music is very nice and fits the game really well, but you didn't create it yourself during the competition, which is against the rules. The music does add to the game, and it would be a shame to lose it, but at minimum you should have added a note asking judges to disregard the music when scoring (I see that you did credit the artist on your blog post accompanying the entry, but it's not really obvious). <br/> <br/>I'd really like to see an updated version of this game with a few tweaks - it's a good start but the handful of little problems make me not want to play it very much :(. To me, the most obvious improvement would be to make the black hole a 'helper' instead of a 'weapon'.
May 5 21:32:00	24m 00s	Cheese Hunter	I got the cheese! <br/> <br/>I didn't immediately understand that I had to go inside the hut before embarking on my quest, so my first attempt was a disaster. Just showing an open door on the hut instead of a closed one would have been a useful cue, since closed doors are often not passable in this kind of game. <br/> <br/>I agree that the lack of explanation is a weakness but I did enjoy the fact that none of it makes any sense. A quest into a dangerous dungeon to retrieve cheese? A paperclip that shoots fireballs? Oh my eyes like stars and my soul again in Eden! <br/> <br/>The graphics are simple but attractive and very effective. The animation on the boss is cute :). <br/> <br/>The game itself is a bit dull though. I never really did see the value in games that force you to wander around looking for switches to open doors. That mechanic works better as an irritant in an otherwise good game than as an engine of fun in itself. Also, it's a shame that all the rooms inside the cave look nearly exactly alike. <br/> <br/>I did try to catch you out by walking all the way back to the house instead of going through the final door, but you thought of that ahead of me so well done for that :).
May 5 21:59:00	27m 00s	Legend of Parasite	That's odd. I page-searched for your entry a couple of times but it didn't show, so I assumed you never entered it. Then you mentioned it on Twitter so I looked again, and it's staring me in the face. <br/> <br/>The graphics are really lovely and seem to be quite different in style to your other games, which I like. <br/> <br/>The idea is, as I'm sure you're aware, very similar to Soul Brother, but it's still quite clever, and interesting to see the idea in the context of a Zelda-esque game. <br/> <br/>I like the dual interpretation of the theme. On the one hand there's "It's dangerous to go alone" -> multiple playable characters and "take this" -> take control of other characters, but at the same time you've managed to merge that with the otherwise very boring and obvious "Zelda" interpretation. Or am I reading too much into it? I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt with my rating anyway :). <br/> <br/>I'm not sure if it's fun though. Once you get the basic idea of what to do, it's fairly obvious how to proceed, but it can get a bit dull waiting around for the right enemy to shoot at you. The enemies have an annoying habit of killing each other instead of you, which serves to extend the wait. <br/> <br/>Does the initial character deliberately look like No-Face from Spirited Away? Because if so that's kind-of clever :). <br/> <br/>I think I noticed a bug, which can be reproduced roughly as follows: <br/> <br/>1. Wait for one of the shooty enemies to shoot two shots in your direction. <br/>2. Get hit by the first shot. <br/>3. You die and take control of the shooty enemy that killed you. <br/>4. The second shot hits the spot where you died. <br/>5. The shooty enemy dies and the game is no longer playable.
May 5 22:32:00	33m 00s	Let Me Save You! Your Faithful Companion	Wow. <br/> <br/>I am dazzled, astonished, and entirely in awe. <br/> <br/>The graphics are beautiful, and I don't just mean the boobies. The music is nicely put together and it fits. The dialogue is well written and funny. There is a surprising abundance of all three of these things. I am completely amazed that you managed to put all this together in 48 hours. <br/> <br/>The use of the theme isn't exactly startlingly original, the story is entirely predictable, and it's full of cliches, but in light of all the rest I really don't care. <br/> <br/>The pony is pretty. This game is highly impressive.
May 22 16:57:00	402h 25m	Laser cats VS Zombie rats	Cute idea. <br/> <br/>At first I thought I had to get the rats to walk in between the cats, which makes the game pretty much impossible. It took me a few attempts to figure out that the cats fire their lasers immediately when there's a rat between them, even if you're halfway through a turn. <br/> <br/>It's quite fun but it could definitely do with a bit more graphical pizazz. As it is it feels very static. <br/> <br/>I also found it a bit clunky that I had to keep clicking 'next turn' even after moving all my cats. <br/> <br/>One major problem in my view is that as the game progresses, more cats seem to make the game easier, not harder. <br/> <br/>Also, it didn't seem to fit the theme in any particularly interesting way.
May 22 17:10:00	13m 00s	Hammerspace	I like the way that the powerups encourage the player to move round the screen, instead of standing in the middle and shooting diagonally. The graphics are quite pretty. The gameplay could do with a little more variation, though.
May 22 17:22:00	12m 00s	Wild Forest	The graphics are very beautiful, but it's a shame there isn't just a little more to do. <br/> <br/>It was really interesting to see how the graphics progressed during the competition.
May 22 17:42:00	20m 00s	The World Above	Everything about this game is lovely: graphics, music, gameplay. <br/> <br/>I felt that the difficulty curve was too steep. The game is quite long so I felt you could afford to be more gentle at the beginning. I found it very difficult to avoid running out of fuel, even once I knew what I was doing. <br/> <br/>Like some other commenters, I really didn't like the enforced wait time after a crash. Also, when you run out of fuel, the game gives you so little fuel back that it tends to run out again before you even get a chance to collect more. That gets old really fast. <br/> <br/>The ending made me laugh, and a nice use of the theme. The game is very long for a Dare, though, and I suspect that a lot of players won't have been willing to keep waiting through all those pauses to see it, which is a shame.
May 22 17:54:00	12m 00s	N3: Name Not Needed	I liked the idea of adding weapons to your ship and then losing them when they run out of ammo. <br/> <br/>The game seemed to get easier as it progressed, which made it a bit boring. I stopped playing after a couple of minutes but felt like I could have kept going forever.
May 22 18:34:00	40m 00s	Fish With Weapon	Lovely music - very fitting. <br/> <br/>The graphics are also very nice, although they could do with a bit more texture. <br/> <br/>I'm not really a fan of these sort of exploration games, but I'm sure it's a fine example of the genre.
May 22 18:45:00	11m 00s	Fiat Lux	Very stylish, but the collision detection seems to be buggy. I love the idea. With a bit more polish this could be fantastic. <br/> <br/>Great interpretation of the theme!
May 22 19:00:00	15m 00s	You Cannot Beat This Game	Interesting and original idea but unfortunately boring to play since gameplay consists of nothing more than pressing space at defined intervals. <br/> <br/>It would have been helpful if you'd mentioned that the key to transmit power is space. <br/> <br/>Clicking the ships doesn't seem to do anything, despite the instructions. <br/> <br/>I tried it in Chrome and Firefox, and it seems to be really buggy and jerky in both. Maybe that's just on Windows, or due to dodgy ATI OpenGL drivers, but other WebGL stuff works fine for me.
May 22 19:12:00	12m 00s	Loonadrift	Great style, good use of humour. Love the random messages and the way the whole game pulses in time to the music. Great stuff!
May 22 19:28:00	16m 00s	Change of Heart	Lovely use of audio, but it's no fun having to listen to the same long sections of narrative repeatedly. It reminds me of Dragon's Lair in that there's scarcely any game at all. The audio just makes it worth playing.