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mcc

Feedback comments for LD22

Timestamp	Since previous	Game	mcc's comment
Dec 19 06:08:00		.Journey to Polygonia	This was a really neat, relaxing play. Very Zen as an experience. I liked the music a lot. <br/> <br/>I felt like I had the most fun when I just barreled through levels without stopping or looking when I was going. <br/> <br/>Sometimes the collision detection near the edges of floors seemed a little glitchy. Like if I stomped down on one of the "falling" floors I'd sometimes drop through it briefly, and more than once the "exiting level" animation had me sliding through a floor or through a wall. Also when I reached what I think was the end of the game, the entire game area just disappeared and all I could see was the page background as if the game weren't being displayed at all. The audio continued. Is this correct or a bug? <br/> <br/>This is a really great use of HTML5. I love the "maps" in the source code.
Dec 19 07:00:00	52m 00s	Survive The Desert	Okay I laughed pretty hard at this! The music and graphics do an amazing job of conveying a mood and when you get into the later humorous screens they work better because the initial serious mood is undercut so heavily. I like how the graphics feel like they work whether you choose to interpret them as examples of that particular kind of lo-fi adventure game art or a send-up of that same art style. <br/> <br/>I got a bit frustrated on my first playthrough or so because I could not tell if the things I was clicking on were making any difference. The interface was erratic enough that I thought for a moment the progression from screen to screen was random and/or the NESW clicks were being disregarded.
Dec 19 07:50:00	50m 00s	Puppy Shelter	Aww mean :( <br/> <br/>The puzzle concept here is very clever, simple but original and sets up a lot of interesting situations. I guess one could say that about basically all of Stephen's games. I liked the smiling/frowning puppies as a way of providing feedback on puzzle progress a lot. <br/> <br/>I did have some confusion figuring out how to interact with this one exactly. Part of the problem is on my first playthrough I accidentally triggered the level editor, as a result failed to notice click&drag worked because I was focusing on the editor features, and also having activated the level editor was unable to complete any of the levels. Even once I figured out dragging worked, I didn't realize you could "swap" puppies until near the end. <br/> <br/>What's the deal with the #3/swirly block?
Dec 19 08:17:00	27m 00s	By Your Side	I feel like I've played some puzzle games similar to this one before, but I liked the wrinkles this one added (reusing a single map many times to present different puzzles, I really liked the concept with the music). Hurt my fingers pretty bad by the end because I kept wanting to punch the arrow keys one at a time to create interesting rhythms instead of holding down the arrows as would be easier (it is to be interpreted as a good thing that the game left me wanting to play this way). I had a little bit of trouble understanding the movement rules at very first because it was not immediately obvious the game DENIES FEMALE AGENCY. <br/> <br/>I'm not sure if I should have laughed at the "twist" midway through, but I totally did.
Dec 19 09:04:00	47m 00s	She Loves You	This seems very polished for a compo game. The style/atmosphere was neat and I feel like the basic concept could support some interesting depth of strategy. I really like your three-scripts method of doing crossplatform distribution (most java games only ever seem to wind up getting packaged in a double-clickable way for Windows…) <br/> <br/>I did find it a bit hard to play. The instructions were cute but didn't communicate the really important thing (you need to fill up the left bar before the right bar depletes). A number of things felt sort of nonobvious while playing, like whether I was supposed to interpret the girl as running away from me or not or whether there's a way to get the right bar to ever replenish (or even just deplete slower). It took me awhile to figure out the thing where you can't pick up hearts while holding a "present". I could not tell if there was meant to be sound or not (I heard a low pitched noise periodically, possibly at random). Also the whole thing felt unnecessarily difficult-- right click to jump seems like an odd choice and makes it hard to jump with mac trackpads, also having to go all the way back to the beginning after losing on level 2 is very harsh :O
Dec 20 03:13:00	18h 09m	Find your stuff	This was funny, impressive how much of a Metroidvania you implemented in an LD timeframe. For some reason I liked that getting shorts meant you could do walljumps, there was a sort of weird logic to that. I liked how there seemed to be variety and character to the areas despite the minimal graphics (the "basement" felt very different from the "upstairs"). I also liked how the game subtly walks you past a series of areas you can't get to yet at first-- on my first trip through the level I thought I was just picking arbitrary paths, and didn't realize I was being guided in a way that was also showing me where my goals were. Well structured. <br/> <br/>I found the game very hard to control and this made it hard to enjoy. The triangle jump was a bit odd but was manageable, what I had more of a problem with was that there didn't seem to be a way to fall "down", you could fall left and at an angle or down and at an angle but not straight down and this made it very hard to position oneself onto small platforms. Also maybe it is just my machine (Flash often runs slow for me) but I often had jerky frameskips/responsiveness issues when there was vertical scrolling going on. And the camera didn't help things, it often would point fairly high up vertically and I wouldn't be able to see what was in a sometimes very short pit except by jumping into it. Having to go ALL the way back to the beginning on death is very harsh for a game with simultaneously so much precision jumping and also a jump that impedes precision jumping and also a beginning which is a long featureless hallway. I got a ways in, then lost all three lives on a section (near the headband) over a pit that the camera wouldn't let me see which sections down were safe or not, and where there was a lot of frameskip-inducing vertical scrolling. Mleh. I may go back and try to finish later. <br/> <br/>I really, really liked the game over screen.
Dec 20 05:09:00	1h 56m	Alone Game	I also get that error, when I double click the jar on mac Snow Leopard. <br/>12/19/11 9:07:23 PM [0x0-0x5a05a0].com.apple.JarLauncher[21188] java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: alonegame/AloneGame : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 <br/> <br/>My java -version says: <br/> <br/>java version "1.6.0_26" <br/>Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03-384-10M3425) <br/>Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02-384, mixed mode)
Dec 20 05:25:00	16m 00s	HUG MONSTER	This is THE TRUE SPIRIT OF LUDUM DARE. <br/> <br/>I liked that in some levels I was able to "defeat" Hug Monster by tricking him into running off the level. <br/> <br/>The ending was awesome.
Dec 20 06:00:00	35m 00s	Courage Quest	This was great! It felt like a full length game rather than a LD game. I think I've played commercial NES games less intricate than this. I really liked the concept (it reminded me of Pikmin), the execution was great at all levels, and I loved all the little details like the day/night cycle. I liked the (theme-appropriate!) idea of a time management obsessed caveman. <br/> <br/>I like speedrun games so I had a lot of fun with this. After several games I managed to win for the first time at 11:05 AM. I think I might be able to get it before 11 AM if I try… <br/> <br/>There were only a couple bugs I noticed. You could get the tasklist up at odd times (in particular you can get it up during the credits, in which case the word "Tasks." just floats on the screen, which is funny). It seemed odd (though necessary) that you could bring the torch underwater. Mostly there seemed to be some bugs around the dragon. I kept crashing the dragon, in which case you don't get credit for the riding "task". On one screen, once (I got a screenshot) I crashed the dragon and the game froze up-- the little star flew away, the caveman did not respond, the timer froze and the "r" key was unresponsive.
Dec 20 06:58:00	58m 00s	3 Missing, 4am	Spoilers below <br/> <br/>Wow, this was fantastic. It felt original and was fun to play. This did a great job of creating legitimately spooky moments, like the first time I saw a blinking red light in the distance. I don't usually find "scares" in games, even when the game is designed for that, but I found myself actually afraid of things like straying off the path or the way that my shadow looked like something huge and looming following me. <br/> <br/>A lot of moments in this looked really picturesque, I kept taking screenshots while I played. A lot of Unity 3D games look kind of same-y to me but this game avoided that. The electric noises as ambient "music" were great. <br/> <br/>There were only a couple of problems I had. The camera did odd things when I tried to climb the "towers", like going behind/through walls and forcing me to readjust, which was distracting. (On the way back down the camera worked great oddly.) The only real problem I had was it felt unnecessary to do the battery thing three times. The first battery I found, on top of a tower, actually felt like a discovery and something I'd thought about and worked for. The second two, I basically had to comb the space to find it, which both wasn't fun and also made me feel like I was "playing a game". (I actually found the second two batteries by left-hand-rule-ing the wall, which I think if a game ever leads me to do that something went wrong.) By the time I found the other two batteries the sense of tension and threat in the environment the game had carefully built up was gone and I was fearlessly doing things like walking off cliffs (in the process finding the engine lets you do lots of odd things when you try to do that, like walk on stone walls). I think maybe the game would actually be better if the only battery were on top of the tower. (I also wondered why I couldn't try to scavenge a battery from my original, wrecked car.) <br/> <br/>Poo :P
Dec 21 08:15:00	25h 17m	Nobody Wants Kitty	This was a fun little play. I think I probably would have had more fun if I'd just played the game and not tried to collect all the ($)s but THERE WERE COLLECTABLES IN THIS GAME AND I HAD TO COLLECT THEM DAMMIT <br/> <br/>I really really liked the sound effects.
Dec 21 08:24:00	9m 00s	Craequ	This was a great play and very meaty for an LD48 game, it oozed atmosphere and the puzzle setups were original and the exact kind of creative, deconstructive mechanics I love to see games explore. Just… everything was neat! <br/> <br/>The puzzles did seem just a little easy/straightforward. I wonder if you could make a more challenging version of this with more time to design puzzles...
Dec 21 08:50:00	26m 00s	Holdout	Hm. I had a lot of trouble with this. The art was amazing and I did really like the story/premise, but I couldn't really get the game itself to work. The performance went to unplayable nothing when the camera moved (i.e. when you aim or shoot, i.e. all the time) and the strange jerking when you fire made it hard to do anything. There didn't seem to be any strategy beyond "click repeatedly until overwhelmed", since there didn't seem to be a good way either for you to dodge pitchforks or for invaders to avoid being shot by you-- but it's hard to tell since I couldn't get the game to work well enough to experiment (I never figured out what the third item does). Other odd bugs: You can't move until you shoot; if you are standing with your back to a wall and an invader walks into you, you get pushed inside the wall; the mousewheel to item select interacts very badly with Macbook trackpads. <br/> <br/>This game made me feel like whatever it was you were <i>aiming</i> for would have been really cool, I found myself wanting to play what it was you intended this game to be. Have you considered making a "completed" post-LD version? <br/> <br/>Is it possible to interact with the purple octopus thing?
Dec 21 09:35:00	45m 00s	But You Wake Alone	This was interesting and ambitious, I'll say that. The visual style was super cool. <br/> <br/>The problems I had with this mostly seemed like byproducts of the 48 hour deadline. A lot of stuff seemed haphazard-- I felt like there was a lot of text and I didn't really get to read any of it, I had to keep my eye on the character at all times so I couldn't look at the bottom of the screen. Except for a couple levels where I got swarmed right at the beginning and there was a bit of strategy in quickly locating an "empty" area, there didn't seem to be much happening, it was basically run dodging yellow things until you get the sound effect saying you can go on. (Since the crowds couldn't hurt you the "now go for the exit" bit, though it looked cool, seemed unnecessary). It was frustrating to not be sure either how close you had to get to a yellow dot to start losing memory, or what it is you even do that causes you to hit the "no need to remember" lose condition. The actual moment-to-moment process of dodging yellow dots was quite fun but since it was the only mechanic it got repetitive kinda quick. It was fun while it lasted tho
Jan 8 22:48:00	445h 13m	/follow	I loved the sense of style in this. And the little in-jokes in the background. <br/> <br/>The gameplay was a little shallow but I did like the "small single screens, 1 challenge each" concept a lot.
Jan 8 23:31:00	43m 00s	Slot Machine	I liked this a lot, one of the better "Unity Myst" games I've played. I feel like a lot of other "surreal" first person Unity games could learn from this one (environment seemed to be trying to say something, environmental chunks actually "did stuff", cinematic sense to the animations etc). The cat sign did amuse me. I liked the implication the protagonist was doing all this in hopes of getting a kitten. <br/> <br/>The "block road" bit did feel frustrating to me and it felt frustrating in an "unfair" way, i.e., it didn't feel like I was screwing up, it felt like the game was screwed up. Since I couldn't see where my feet were, I didn't feel like I had a fair chance to figure out where on the tinier platforms were safe to land.
Jan 9 00:17:00	46m 00s	Shrimp	I had a lot of trouble understanding this one at first-- I didn't read the explanation, so I didn't know about the z/x keys and was frustrated because it didn't seem to be possible to win a level. I played a LOT of times trying to figure out what I was missing before I figured out how to use a match. <br/> <br/>Once I figured out the matches, I felt like I liked the basic idea and what you were going for (the "shutter" effect looked cool, the environment looked good, the idea of trying to navigate a maze in encroaching darkness where your ability to extend light is also your health is great) but it just didn't feel like it worked. One problem was that every part of the maze was like every other and every level was like every other, so it didn't feel like there was a lot of reason to keep playing-- it was just repetitive. The fact every part of the maze looked the same interacted badly with the closing-diamond trick, I didn't have much chance of exploring the maze in a systematic way because I couldn't tell if I'd visited a particular section of the map already or not. (I felt like one thing that would have helped would have been if my character left footsteps, so I could tell where I'd been before.) So I was just performing a random walk, grabbing matches if they appeared, until the level ended... The "oh quick, a match, get it" moments just as the darkness is closing in felt like they could have been exciting and fun, but there wasn't much of a sense of either reward in getting the match or risk in failing to get the match because the effects of winning a level and dying were the same (begin in a random corner of a random map). The match-counting x-key thing didn't really work in practice because (1) there was some kind of html5 sound glitch on my machine where the sounds were broken up, so it was hard to tell the difference between one tone and three and (2) it didn't really matter how many matches I had, all that mattered was "are there more matches or not" and if the answer was "no" it wasn't useful information anyway because my only option in that case was to die. <br/> <br/>The act of moving the "boy" around didn't really feel very fun (movement was sluggish, it was unforgiving about turning covers) and this made me feel less willing to forgive other issues. <br/> <br/>Technically speaking though this is a really good effort so I bet you could make something more "playable" from this basis later.
Jan 9 01:07:00	50m 00s	Snow	This was neat, I really liked the visuals. I liked the dreamlike quality where the narrator didn't seem to be questioning their surroundings (you go "outside" but it isn't snowing...). <br/> <br/>I got four separate endings before I got to the "good" one. One thing that tripped me up is it didn't seem very obvious the connection between the final ending and what had gone before. It took me a few playthroughs to realize how the game actually worked. The ending was very sweet. <br/> <br/>I wished that when you clicked "move" there was an option to stay put, sometimes I clicked it by accident or to check options and then was forced to go somewhere I didn't want to. It also would have been nice if I could have selected things with space bar (playing this with the mouse made my hand tired!)
Jan 9 04:17:00	3h 10m	For the Love of Life	This has absolutely fantastic style and I like that it tries to have a story. It was really cool to turn this down to the "fastest" quality setting and see how everything looked kinda flat-shaded. <br/> <br/>There didn't however really seem to be much in the way of "game" here. It was basically a walk to the end of a large, meticulously crafted 3D model and back. The only challenge seemed to come from me misunderstanding the controls. I spent a long time in the first room because I couldn't figure out the walljump, and an even longer time replaying the end because I skimmed the description and didn't realize you had to press E to pick up / drop. The game prints out the "activator acquired" and "landscape change detected" messages if you simply walk to the activator and then the altar, so I was fooled into thinking I'd done what I was supposed to do. Some things that occurred to me is that the walljump would have been easier to work out if there were jump and walljump sounds, so that I could while experimenting have realized I had performed a jump when against a wall; and the pick up / put down button really may have been a bit unnecessary, since you could have just had the item get automatically picked up when you touch it. <br/> <br/>I found some weird issues. If I moved too quickly through the level, the game would print multiple messages on top of each other simultaneously, making all of them unreadable. When I got over the wall the final time at the end, I think I only did it by glitching the physics. <br/> <br/>I did find the kittens! I wonder what happens if you go there with the "resource" instead of back to the ship at the end...
Jan 9 04:44:00	27m 00s	An Empty Room	Although I'm generally philosophically opposed to games using the microphone, this one did it really well. I wished for a moment there was a way to "win" but actually it's kind of neat like this, it's really just an endurance test on how long you can put up with the game's impossible demands. Full marks on graphics and audio, too. If "anti-games" are a genre then this is an excellent one.