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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | VDOgamez's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 29 03:31:00 | Red Swarm | The biggest problem I can see in this game is that there's a single dominating strategy that pretty much guarantees you to win. By spamming workers in the little safe area you start off in, you can just sit there while they get thousands of units of nectar. Then you can just ignore workers for the rest of the game and just run into the middle of enemy territory dropping soldier eggs. The units don't seem to play nice with corners, and the workers kind of frustratingly run into swarms of snake things when they smell nectar. And then your queen can just hide around corners and never get hit and keep spawning things. Overall the gameplay kind of suffers from the lack of polish due to the time constraints. More time for playtesting and fixing gameplay flaws, along with perhaps a bit more depth and reason to control territory and not just hide your workers in one spot would greatly improve this. <br/> <br/>Still, it's nice to see that you pulled through and finished your game. | |
| Apr 29 03:45:00 | 14m 00s | OCDC | The controls are a little hard to manage, especially the way that you fall faster than the blocks, but in general this is a pretty good implementation of a simple concept. It felt like it needed more levels, but I don't know how much further you could take the mechanics. The blocks shifting into the holes when they were close was a welcome feature. |
| Apr 29 03:56:00 | 11m 00s | Pixel Pusher | I don't really see the appeal of this. You push blocks of different colors into each other, but you keep having to change your color to avoid taking damage. The color changing doesn't seem to do anything for the game except acting as busywork. Additionally, the blocks can all just be stacked into a single square without paying attention to the colors, so that doesn't really seem to come into effect either. There are some cool things you could do with pushing different colored blocks around on a grid, but making them all overlap isn't one of them so much. |
| Apr 29 04:09:00 | 13m 00s | Join | This is a very original idea, and I really like it. It fits in well with the theme, too. The puzzles are interesting to solve and difficult to play out, although my one major complaint is that they're often made far more difficult than they should be by the game's reliance on being able to act quickly after looping to the other side of the screen. I may just be bad at it, but it took me forever to get past a level that required making a quick u-turn on the first square after looping across the screen, and then doing that repeatedly. Aside from that one source of possibly unnecessary difficulty, this was a very enjoyable game. The noises it makes when clearing the level out were pretty great, too. |
| Apr 29 04:25:00 | 16m 00s | Anti-Tac-Tic | This is a pretty interesting variation of tic-tac-toe. It has the same kind of simplicity as the normal game, so it was neat figuring out the winning strategy all over again. The AI doesn't quite seem to have it down, which makes it harder to analyze but is probably a good thing, because it looks pretty easy to force a win. |
| Apr 29 05:08:00 | 43m 00s | Tendril | This was a very enjoyable game once I learned how to play it. It does a great job with the theme as an extremely minimalist game, but takes those mechanics and does a lot with it. I think one of the things that really made this game stick out was all of the levels you were able to make, which gave it a lot of gameplay time. The graphics and sound were very simple, but fitting for the style (though the wall color was a bit grating). Ending the level was rewarding too, to get to see the tendril you made break up into sounds. The only real criticism I have is that the difficulty is a bit haphazard. There was one level near the middle shaped like a sideways S with boxy rooms and narrow corridors, which was easily the hardest level. Then right after that there were a bunch of levels with straight passages to the end. So far, this is the best game I've played in the competition, despite its deceivingly simple look and premise. There's enough skill and finesse involved in playing for it to feel like a challenge, but it's generally not so hard as to be frustrating, and ends up with a pretty good balance. |
| Apr 29 05:29:00 | 21m 00s | You Must Escape | This is a good implementation of a really neat premise. It reminds me of a documentary I saw on how some blind people use sound. I was already sold at the beginning, especially with the really cool visual effects to represent the sound, but then you had to go and add monsters. It's a really wonderful mechanic to have your only way of seeing the maze also attract monsters, and make the way to avoid them be blinding yourself and withholding the mechanic you just got attached to using. |
| Apr 29 05:39:00 | 10m 00s | OnlyOne | While the graphics are a little silly, looking, this is a pretty neat maze idea. The fact that your ability to move a direction can get taken away again adds to the depth. It's kind of unpolished, and short, but it's definitely creative. |
| Apr 29 05:49:00 | 10m 00s | Folding | I never quite feel like I know what's going on in these kinds of games, but this is a rather unique puzzle and was fun to solve. It could definitely do with some more levels to further explore the kind of stuff you can do with the mechanics. |
| Apr 29 05:58:00 | 9m 00s | Messimalism | It took me a while to even figure out how it was interactive because there were so many balls on the screen that seemed to be content going up themselves. The green platforms turn out to be the worst ones to hit, because you lose the big group of balls you've collected. |
| Apr 29 06:05:00 | 7m 00s | mesh | The file doesn't seem to be loading for me in any of my browsers. I just get a white page that says "movie not loaded" if I right click. |
| Apr 29 06:43:00 | 38m 00s | Fallen Outside | This is very reminiscent of meat boy, although a lot floatier than I'd like in the controls. Especially when you're touching a wall and you don't want to be hugging it. I also felt like the walls that shoot blobs at you were a bit too unpredictable to avoid well. The mini games in between levels were a nice touch to break up the game, although the tron one seems to be bugged a bit in its AI. You've really made a lot of game in this short a time, I'm impressed. One thing of note is that when you beat level 16 the game gives you a button to go to level 17. I pressed it, hoping for secrets, but it just crashes the game. Also, when you've beaten all the levels and collected all the potatoes, it doesn't seem to say that you have 100% completion. It just says something like 91%. Nice job. |
| Apr 29 07:12:00 | 29m 00s | mz | I tried this from the executable jar file and then downloaded it onto my phone and I have to say, somehow tilting the phone around makes this a whole lot more fun. To anyone rating this, I would recommend trying it on an android device if they can, it's pretty neat. I've always liked maze generators like this, and this is pretty polished for being so, well, minimalist. |
| Apr 29 07:46:00 | 34m 00s | Minimalist Dungeon | That was pretty amazing. I really liked the interesting graphical style, and the puzzles were fun to solve. I ended up going back a second time to get all the potatoes. Great job for such a short period of development time. |
| Apr 29 14:44:00 | 6h 58m | The Boy Who Leapt Through Planets | I was amused by how quickly the jump height escalates into rocketing straight up unto the sky. My main complaint is that some sections are really unforgiving compared to the rest of the game. Once you have enough jump height it is extremely difficult to navigate the pit of spikes at the beginning, for example. Still, pretty good game. |
| Apr 29 16:48:00 | 2h 04m | Life of Colonies | It was neat to have a competitive game of life thing, although I felt like I knew too much about how it worked for it to be much of a challenge. You can just stick one of the stable configurations in the corner and let the other ones die off |
| Apr 29 16:59:00 | 11m 00s | Sanity | I really enjoyed the musical effects in this game, and the particle effects were well-done too. That said, it got frustrating trying to find the single point that was a win condition, and this was compounded on by the fact that you go back a level when you lose. The obstacles that affect your ability to scope out the exit were a neat twist. |
| Apr 29 17:17:00 | 18m 00s | Werewolf in Space | This was a very silly concept, executed pretty well and minimalistically. The achievements were really what made the game, getting the player to try all sorts of different ways to play. Without that, it isn't much of a game and more of a tying people up and killing them simulator, but the achievement hints give it a bit of a puzzle element. |
| Apr 29 17:34:00 | 17m 00s | JuggleSim | This is extremely well-polished and meets the theme very well. The single player mode was fun and a bit frantic to control two separate players at once. I'm sure it would be fun to do with a friend, too. What it really needs is an AI to play against. |
| Apr 29 20:14:00 | 2h 40m | F*** This Job | This was great. You have a solid one-button platformer here with simple but sufficient graphics and a whole lot of well-made levels. My favorite part is the discreteness of the different jump heights. It means that I can really get the timing on the jumps down a lot more effectively, and better replicate my previous attempt. This almost makes the game act like more of a puzzle than an action platformer, deciding when and how long to jump. And at the end, when you see all the previous attempts, you feel very rewarded. There was obviously a whole lot of work put into making good levels that are organized in a way that flows well for the player. This is one of my favorite games in the competition so far. |
| Apr 29 20:18:00 | 4m 00s | Red | The core idea of this was pretty neat, but it ends up both being too hard to tell where the ball is going, and too easy to accidentally fall off and land on the massive goal. There weren't enough levels afterwards to give a lot of material to explore the mechanics, and it all came down to dumping the ball off the level so it misses the platforms and hits the goal. |
| Apr 29 20:39:00 | 21m 00s | Ninja Cube | I didn't really understand how the game was working, but by pressing the arrow keys you just keep going up indefinitely. I don't really think there's a way to lose unless you just let go of the keys. However, I think if I was playing it right (and if you had enforced that so I knew the right way to play) then I would have had a lot more fun, because you say it's apparently challenging when played correctly. Nice job for a first time participating, though. |
| Apr 29 21:11:00 | 32m 00s | MiniSim | I don't know how gamey this is but I had a lot of fun playing with this. This was a really impressive thing to make in this amount of time. I'm having fun seeing what develops in the silly designs I'm making. It would be neat to see more with this kind of thing. |
| Apr 29 21:17:00 | 6m 00s | Left vs. Right | That's a pretty neat game idea. The biggest problem I have is that it seems to be a bit too simple and predictable, such that it is easy to make a strategy that wins every time. Like tic-tac-toe. |
| Apr 29 21:28:00 | 11m 00s | Euler, Inc. | I liked the idea of this game, but either the controls are too finicky to construct your amalgamation perfectly, or the goal is too strict to handle the controls. Most of a level is spend slightly trying to adjust things by a few pixels, which then gets thrown off because the rotator isn't entirely conservative. |
| Apr 29 21:36:00 | 8m 00s | XYZ | I enjoyed that a lot. The way the shapes were rendered really works well for this, because they kind of look like 2D shapes transitioning into each other. I've played games like this before, but this one is especially nice because of the way it's streamlined so that you're not trying to find the perfect angle, but just rotate it to one of a few, so you can complete the many levels in quick succession. It has a good flow to it. I liked the ambient music, too. |
| Apr 29 21:56:00 | 20m 00s | Short Fall | This game had a very nice feel to it. I liked the exploring dark weightless corridors looking for enemies, and the lighting was a really great touch, as were the bullet effects and enemy death animations. My main criticism for the game is that it's occasionally difficult to search the whole level for the last five enemies, although the lights really help that by letting you see which rooms you've been in. It would be nice if the lights didn't alternate states with every bullet, however. Also, the player looks kind of off. It is just a triangle always facing the camera in the 3D world. |
| Apr 29 22:09:00 | 13m 00s | Antarctic Skirmish | The AI's a bit too fast for me in this, I can't seem to win. What the game really needs I think is a better ability to automatically target nearby enemies. I've noticed that my penguins will just keep fishing while the ones next to them get killed off. It's at least somewhat effective to stay on the edge of a big squad and pick them off without triggering aggression from the whole group. I really liked the art in this, and I thought the limitation of penguins on the ice holes were a good choice to influence expansion of territory. Overall a pretty good implementation of minimal RTS mechanics, and I think despite my frustration at the difficulty it's better to have the AI be too hard than too easy. |
| Apr 29 23:17:00 | 1h 08m | Atom That Matters | I really liked the idea of an anti-katamari game. Triggering things breaking off was a bit iffy, sometimes a collision would do nothing. Aside from that the game was pretty good. It looked quite nice, especially with all of the debris floating around. |
| Apr 30 02:57:00 | 3h 40m | Ming Imah Lism the Wizard ! | This is mostly nice, though I eventually came to a part that killed me because the fireballs fired from further up than the enemies were. It's very pretty and has lots of decent sound effects, and I like the mechanic of charging mana. |
| Apr 30 03:14:00 | 17m 00s | Tower | This plays very smoothly and looks nice, though I agree with it feeling a need for sound. I'm impressed by the inclusion of a pretty functional level editor in this, that isn't something I expected. It does seem to suffer from being kind of short on levels, which are something that a game like this needs a lot of. |
| Apr 30 03:31:00 | 17m 00s | TOO MANY DISTRACTIONS | This was a pretty amusing entry. It looks amazing, and plays well for the rather simplistic concept it has. Looking at some of the distractions the player has to deal with, what the heck kind of work are they doing? Really, the game- <br/> <br/>Ok uh I should get back to work and stop playing all these games. |
| Apr 30 03:45:00 | 14m 00s | MiniQix | This is similar to the classic game of dividing off space from bouncing balls, here generating a pretty image and an amusing take on the theme. Being able to control the slower movement instead of just quickly cutting off a straight wall makes the game more, but this mechanic can easily be abused by making tiny segments repeatedly across the screen, which are too small to be usually hit by the ball. There's nothing really enforcing not doing that, so the player kind of has to decide not to do it for themselves. |
| Apr 30 03:56:00 | 11m 00s | One Bullet | The core mechanic of this was very unique and fits well with the theme. The graphics and sound were also extremely good. The game was fun to play, but it starts to become somewhat repetitive. The game is also somewhat hard, especially when your towers disappear and disrupt the pattern you were planning on the shot following. It's a shame you didn't get all the features you wanted in, I'm sure more levels would have added some variety to the gameplay. |
| Apr 30 04:08:00 | 12m 00s | TOOM | The art for this game is the best I've seen so far, and it's well animated too. I can see why you were so insistent on using the audio, too. The series of events you're supposed to do to progress is a bit nonsensical at times, so you kind of just need to use everything with everything then. There's a lot more stuff in the room than what was used, so I'm looking forward to the post-competition release. The interactions with stuff that there were were very nice details, so it would be nice to see that kind of stuff with more of the objects. The ending was rather silly and certainly not what I was expecting. |
| Apr 30 04:11:00 | 3m 00s | Factorism | The website you're hosting on keeps giving me errors all over the place and won't let me download the file. Try hosting it somewhere else, because from the screenshots the game looks great and I want to play it. |
| Apr 30 04:32:00 | 21m 00s | Soldier Chess: The Game | While ranged chess is a neat idea, I don't think this is the way to go about it. The pieces all just go forward and don't really affect anything not in their column. They also all have health, but don't have any indication of how much they have. The game doesn't really have a lot of strategy, either, you just march your pieces up the board and keep them possibly doing more damage than the two guys in front of them. The core concept is neat, and it would be interesting to see more done with it, but a more chesslike implementation might be more effective. |
| Apr 30 04:42:00 | 10m 00s | Last Shot | This is a neat idea, but it's extremely difficult and unforgiving. I don't really like holding down the spacebar to charge the shot, either. The graphics are very nice looking, though. I feel like the timing on the boss or the speed of the ship or the one hit or something just doesn't fit well enough to make it a fun fly-around-and-dodge-the-attacks fight. |
| Apr 30 04:51:00 | 9m 00s | Double Hydra | From a very simple core idea you've managed to make a rather frantic and fun game. I really like the art style, and the music is nice too. After a bit of a slow start the difficulty began to ramp up quickly and I was soon overwhelmed by enemies too great in number to hit accurately. The flipping mechanic really adds to the game and makes it require a lot more skill. The only complaint I have is that the hydra takes two rows worth of space but is only vulnerable on the top one. While this makes sense mechanically, it caused me a bit of confusion in trying to dodge and aim. |
| Apr 30 17:18:00 | 12h 27m | Factory Consultant | I love games like this, and you've certainly done well on it. The puzzle difficulty curve was well-done, which is an important factor in this kind of game. I ended up having a good challenge on the last puzzle and I'm not entirely sure I completed it the correct way (are you supposed to be able to put sprayers in the exit?). The graphics look nice and do a good job to facilitate tile placement, and the little bit of audio you have is effective. You've made a surprisingly good puzzle game for the amount of time given, and it's one of the best games I've played this competition. Good luck on your post-compo version, I look forward to seeing more levels in this. |
| May 1 22:59:00 | 29h 41m | This is not a minimalist game | This was a very nice take on the theme, and the story had a very Flatland feel to it. The graphics were really well done, even the simple ones, and the game generally played nicely. I didn't really like the whole concept of going back and forth between places that much, and there were some rough spots with the item system, although some of the puzzles were neat. The ending was a neat idea, but it seemed a little rushed graphically. |