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mcc

Feedback comments for LD21

Timestamp	Since previous	Game	mcc's comment
Aug 23 05:35:00		Number 23 Escapes!	So first off, in terms of graphics, sound, style and scope this is an amazing achievement… definitely an EXCELLENT advertisement for Polycode. Not joking-- while playing I kept thinking "Wow, Unity sure does let you do a lot in a brief time" before remembering this wasn't a Unity game! <br/> <br/>The problems I did have: The gameplay seemed very slow (the guy didn't seem to move very quick) and the AI's behavior seemed nearly random. Sometimes the enemies couldn't seem to hit anything, sometimes they would zap me on the first try (four or five times I got sniped as I was entering through a door). Sometimes they would decide to run in circles forever instead of shooting (a couple times I had an enemy run into me and just keep running instead of try to shoot) and sometimes they'd run out of the room and not come back. Because I never figured out things like what would make enemies likely to start shooting at me or not, what would make them more or less likely to be able to hit me, even where they were aiming or their bullets were landing most of the time, or what the rules were for when the "Alarm" would restart after 30 seconds vs stopping... because of all this whether I got through any one situation felt like mostly a matter of luck. Meanwhile, since in a lot of the rooms I could get through just by charging through and hoping I didn't get shot, I felt like I didn't have a lot of incentive to play "correctly" vs barreling through. Some of the rooms looked like they had interesting level geometry to them that could be used to get through by stealth, but it seemed like if I tried to play that way I'd be increasing the chances a random AI behavior would kill me whereas if I just ran for the exits eventually I'd get a run where the enemy would either miss me or voluntarily run out of the room or something. Because rooms were small and saves were frequent this all wasn't really a problem for most of the game, but then I got to the last four rooms, died I lost count how many times in a row trying every variation of strategy I could think of, couldn't get through and gave up :( <br/> <br/>I feel like, if you were willing to keep working on this a few small changes could have a really dramatic impact. I like the way you implemented a stealth game that feels like an arcade game, that seems unique (basically, I'd really like to play a version of this that had predictable enough AI to support playing it like a stealth game). One obvious thing that would help a lot is a save function. Another thing that stood out to me, the fact that sometimes enemies did run off the edge of a screen seemed to suggest the idea that it would change the game a lot if enemies could chase you in to other rooms. There was this <a href="http://i.imgur.com/uQxU1.png">one room</a> that didn't seem to serve a gameplay function, but looking at it it was easy to imagine a version of the game where if you're in "alarm" mode the enemies can chase you into the next room, and then you'd need rooms like this one (full of nice big hiding places) in order to lose them. <br/> <br/>I ran into a handful of bugs, but only one big one. Every time I saved, there was a phantom "save tile" shimmer at a seemingly random point in the room… in <a href="http://i.imgur.com/8EK8O.png">this room</a>, the switches fire continuously, not just when you step on them… and there seemed to be a lot of slowdown which at first happened only when there was a lot of stuff in the room but toward the end seemed to sometimes occur even in empty rooms. The one big bug: If you hit "M" while running, the dude will keep running as long as the map is showing… and… if the dude goes through a door in this state… he will fall OUT OF THE LEVEL and the game will effectively be frozen. I got halfway through the game my first time and then ran into this and had to start over.. <br/> <br/>I guess I'm posting a lot of criticism here, I do want to stress that the only reason I'm able to find so many areas for potential improvement is that the game had so much ambition! This is really incredible for an LD48 game. <br/> <br/>Two more tiny thoughts: Sometimes I'd be running between two enemies and they'd both shoot sort of "at each other" as I was just between them, it would be funny if the guards could shoot each other. Also, the isometry means there's a lot of hard edges to the lines in this game, I would be VERY curious what this looked like with something like 2x FSAA.
Aug 23 05:44:00	9m 00s	BATHOS	Oh god I can't stop laughing
Aug 23 06:01:00	17m 00s	Damn My Stubby Little Legs	Oh, this is very cool. I like how the gameplay concept is much deeper than it looks at first. Music is very good. <br/> <br/>You might want to upload somewhere a version without the exit bug, I hit it on my first serious playthrough and it lead me to suspect the game was just unwinnable (hey, Ludum Dare, you never know). <br/> <br/>You actually seriously might want to consider this an iOS/Android port, it seems amenable to touch/tilt controls and this is the kind of game (randomly generated arcade game with simple controls) that gets rewarded there. I feel like in that case it would help if some kind of metagame to encourage you to keep playing multiple times-- like, maybe you have a global score on total distance traveled, or % of games which you won, or maybe each time you got to the exit it would send you to a new "tower" and your "score" was how many towers you made it through before you lost. An approach like that might that might turn what seems like the one downside of the game currently (ie that the distance before you hit the exit is random) into something like a bonus.
Aug 23 06:11:00	10m 00s	When I Was Human	Interesting, seems to demonstrate there's a lot you can do with the canabalt concept that hasn't been explored that I've seen. I liked how there seemed to be explicit "puzzles" here and that some of the power ups (like cheetah mode) hurt more than helped you. <br/> <br/>Small things: The fact distance could kill you was not well telegraphed, the checkpoints remembering that you've lost health seems a little mean, it seems odd the game seems to go out of its way to give you "easy" stretches to build up distance but then as soon as you die you seem to lose all your distance?
Aug 23 07:04:00	53m 00s	We'd like it if you Stay	Mac version works. I got totally stuck on level 3 however and could only get by with the = trick... <br/> <br/>Overall it was very neat, actually the concept you came up with turns out to be very similar to the one from my entry. It was interesting to see how the different choices you made from that similar starting point lead to a different game... I liked that you were able to get a story and some "events" in, the moments with the "four blocks" were surprisingly tense given how simple the presentation was and my heart was actually pounding after the game end. <br/> <br/>The main issue I had was that the block dragging felt... maybe not clumsy, but my actions didn't feel very natural or immediate. Given that the graphics mostly "looked like" things, it felt like there should have been a sense of physicality to the things I was dragging, the buttons, etc that wasn't present. I didn't feel like I knew what the blocks I was dragging "were" or what the method of my manipulation was (chunks of wall, what?). It seems like even some simple changes, like a little sparkle at the point on the block you were dragging "from" (the blocks track the mouse slowly, so maybe the mouse is doing something like pulling with a magnetic field?), could do a lot to make it seem to the player like they knew what was going on there or like what they are doing feels "real".
Aug 23 07:36:00	32m 00s	Prelude of the Chambered	Hm... I really want to play this but... I am running this on OS X [snow leopard] in Chrome and I am having a lot of trouble getting it to run.. the screen flickers black every 3-4 seconds, and a few seconds into the game the character abruptly started running backward and would not stop. Has anyone successfully run this on mac?
Aug 24 07:31:00	23h 55m	Escape from Castle Puzzlestein	So… played with this a little. Very interesting concept, and I'm really intrigued this is pure html5. I found it a little hard to play. Some thoughts: <br/> <br/>- It seems like your character could move quicker. <br/> <br/>- If the wall pattern were different, it might be easier to estimate at any one time how many steps "forward" were needed to get to a particular place. <br/> <br/>- The game (seeming to) start out with that long straight section like that doesn't appear to be the best introduction to the engine. I want to try out various things, turn left and right and see what the buttons do, but if I do that I'm kind of thrashing back and forth in this thin corridor. (It took me a surprisingly long time to realize I could turn right from the start.) Then I run into: <br/> <br/>- Is it correct that you can't remove items from the queue once you've placed them? I couldn't figure out how. This means that if you make a wrong" turn and have to correct yourself you've got tons of clutter in your deck of "moves". <br/> <br/>- The interface in general seemed a bit odd. The use of the slider (or even if the slider has a use) is not obvious. The pause button is hard to use effectively since you don't know straight off what item in the move queue that, say, "3/10" corresponds to. Dragging things into the move queue would often cause scrolling (actually sometimes horizontal scrolling, which was weird) and cause me to lose my place in the move queue. If there were enough items in the queue new tiles would often not drop where I expected… I'm on Chrome on a Mac btw. <br/> <br/>These maybe aren't fair sorts of criticisms for an LD entry, I don't know. This is still quite impressive both as a 48hr game and as an html5 game, and I did keep playing a good bit longer than I expected. It mostly feels though like a prototype for some other game that you might make later and I eventually gave up because I couldn't get the interface to do what I wanted. I'd actually be sort of curious to try a version of this with some cleaned-up UI. <br/> <br/>I like how the nazi killed me with his crotch.
Aug 24 07:48:00	17m 00s	Land of Colors	The screenshot looks really intruiging, I am having a lot of trouble getting it to run in the browser though (Chrome on mac). I will try to run it later on the command line...
Aug 28 19:17:00	107h 29m	Heartbreaker!	OK wow just posted this on a forum and got 8 or so people to play with me and this is FANTASTIC! It's fun to play, and I love the way it's "casually" / party line internet multiplayer. <br/> <br/>The one problem I have with this is that while it seems like this would have been great with a couple fewer players, with 8 or so it's just unworkable-- the Ice Queen cannot protect herself, she can knock out 1 or 2 players but then the rest just barrel in past. But the game doesn't give a way to manage the # of players downward. <br/> <br/>I would love to see a version of this with maybe some changes to address this, like: <br/> <br/>- Limit on the number of mages on screen at once, other mages are in a "penalty box" and wait for another mage to die so they can jump in <br/>- The ability to create a "room" with a unique URL (if you want to invite a few people to play but there are already people playing-- part of the problem when we jumped in was there were already 3 people online), or maybe the game automatically sorting players into "rooms" of 4 or 5 or so if a bunch of people come in at once on the main URL <br/>- More stages with different maps, so even if the Ice Queen keeps losing this doesn't make it feel repetitive <br/>- (This would be my preference, but sounds hard to balance) the Ice Queen gets stronger or weaker depending on the number of wizards (for example, given more stuff to place). <br/> <br/>It also might help add some strategy in lots-of-players situations if the ice queen or other wizards could see how close the wizards are to being able to fireball again. <br/> <br/>Other random thoughts: I absolutely love the music. The character movement is a little odd but I'm imagining that has something to do with netcode.
Aug 29 04:29:00	9h 12m	Dungeon Exit	THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANT OUT OF A VIDEO GAME
Aug 29 05:06:00	37m 00s	Crime Zone	This was great, I started giggling within a few seconds of starting and continued nonstop basically until I finished. Afterward I tried it another couple times to check for branches I missed, it took me until my third try to realize there doesn't seem to be a way to quit except by winning :O <br/> <br/>I thought at very first this was just going to be an endless chain, Officer A looks in the puddle, Officer B attempts to arrest Officer A for public urination, Officer C attempts to arrest officer B for assaulting Officer A, and so on... what is actually happening though is much more clever. IT ALL FITS TOGETHER.
Sep 12 06:26:00	337h 20m	Flee Buster	I just got to 129!! (And was informed on Twitter that apparently due to a game bug there 129/130 == 100%?!) This game consumed a surprising amount of my last few weeks, I have to admit that once I found this game I stopped playing many other LD21 entries because I was playing this too much. My new copy of "Catherine" is gathering dust because I was playing this instead. There are a lot of things in here that are crack for addictive personalities ^_^
Sep 15 06:29:00	72h 03m	epacse	Looked this up, went "wow, this looked cool, I should port it to mac so I can play it!". Ported it to mac. By the time I was done kosinus had already ported it to mac ^_^; oh well. <br/> <br/>However it looks like Kosinus's mac port currently only works on Lion, whereas this version should (?) work as far back as 10.4 (Intel only), so I'm posting it anyway: <br/>Game: http://vote.grumpybumpers.com/j/ld/etc/epacse-mac.zip <br/>Source: https://bitbucket.org/runhello/epacse_temp <br/> <br/>It also has an icon :D <br/> <br/>Now I'm going to go play this.