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Feedback comments for LD29
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | pkenney's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 30 03:03:00 | Beneath Europa | Wow, flying in the dark is nuts, cool touch! Had me on the edge in a good way. Love the style, too, you nailed the look. <br/> <br/>Seeing this game is very interesting, because I started from the same core idea! In some ways we made the same game: a side-scrolling space ship flying under the ice on Europa. But in other ways we made the exact opposite game: yours is about moving a straight line to avoid waves, while mine is moving a wave to avoid along a straight line. Give it a try and see what you think of the inversion. <br/> <br/>Quick point of feedback - it took me a second to realize I had to hit right to start moving my ship in your game, you could add that to your text instructions in the note here. | |
| Apr 30 03:10:00 | 7m 00s | broken | Cool little entry, a nice sense of style. Had to think about a few things just long enough! Not much scope, but I liked the idea for the theme anyway. |
| Apr 30 03:39:00 | 29m 00s | Shanghai | Yeah, shoot, I had the city-not-loading, too. I tried both chrome and firefox, but no dice, sorry. <br/> <br/>There's a very cool feel to this game, the sound is great and the look is nice too. It really feels well-polished. <br/> <br/>I had a number of misunderstandings about how to play... I didn't realize the colors had to match, even though that's dumb of me! <br/> <br/>I finally got the basics, but without the city it was hard to gauge what was working. <br/> <br/>What I liked about the game rules was when I made a match, I would lay down a track that would later get in the way for a future match, so the track was both good and bad. Causing my own mess is a cool type of strategy game, so nice work on that. Once things got ugly they could spiral out of control. |
| Apr 30 04:58:00 | 1h 19m | Feelin N Dealin | This was a really cool idea for the theme, and along with the music and art made the mood come together. <br/> <br/>I did get tired of walking places, though, which extra-hurt when I died. Maybe if the guy were increased in speed something like 60% faster? |
| Apr 30 05:04:00 | 6m 00s | Splashy Bird | Yeah man, where's the game? I want to try it and see how our mechanics compare! Not gonna build from source though, sorry. |
| Apr 30 05:13:00 | 9m 00s | Surf Ace Splashdown | Cool concept! Liked the sense of humor, enjoyed that was both dodging and hitting things in the unusual contest. <br/> <br/>Wished there a wave to ride though, I didn't really feel like I was surfing. I liked the little graphics touches you had, like the animated wave thing on the water's surface, and the chunks taken out of the surf board. |
| May 3 14:22:00 | 81h 09m | Mr. Fisk | I finished the whole game. Nice work, especially for what looks like your first Ludum Dare game. <br/> <br/>What I liked: My favorite thing was that you made the surface of the sea active, that you made it get rougher through the game, and that you made it impact my movement. I also liked that you had a complete package that had progressive missions that ran to completion, I stuck around and finished the whole game because you told me there were six challenges and I knew I could complete them. The "big thing" at the end was a nice humorous mystery. <br/> <br/>What I personally would have changed: The pace - I would have made everything a bit faster, including the boat, the rope, and the impact of waves on the boat. BUT that is personal preference! I like more arcade-type games, but it's totally fine if the slower pace was a deliberate taste, after all it's a fishing game. <br/> <br/>I struggled badly to move on the final mission. There was a flying fish just left of me when I started, but I could not get there. I held down the left button but the ship was stuck in the waves. I'm afraid I never QUITE understood how the waves affected my ship. The final mission for me, I had to find a flying fish to finish, and I spent like 7-10 minutes just holding down the right button, inching along extreeeeeemely slowly. <br/> <br/>Still, it was worth it to have the sea get rough, cuz that was my favorite part! <br/> <br/>Lastly, a technical note. I ran it in firefox and it kinda worked, but the surface of the sea was not rendered. I wouldn't have known this if I didn't see your screenshot, but I did so I switched over to chrome and it worked fine. <br/> <br/>Anyway, a lot of rambling there, but good job making a complete game with some nice touches! |
| May 3 14:58:00 | 36m 00s | Jimmy the explorer | All right!! Cool game with a lot of interesting ideas. I liked it so much I decided right off the bat that I would finish it and take notes so I could give you better feedback. <br/> <br/>I completed the game, and I had 269 gold at the end I think. <br/> <br/>I died just about the right amount, and the puzzle aspects were also spot on in terms of how long I had to think about them. I liked that the "rules" of the gameworld were a bit different than I'd dealt with before, and I had to use a number of tools. I enjoyed the mix of thinking and execution puzzles. <br/> <br/>Also I am totally going to google soundhelix because that generated music was quite a nice touch. The sounds were all appropriate as well. <br/> <br/>Now, since the game is good, I feel okay giving a bit of negative feedback as well, here are a few points that hurt my experience: <br/> <br/>- The spacebar jumped in the game, but it also scrolled down in my browser, taking about 1/3rd of the game off the screen. Thank goodness W also jumped, or I couldn't have played. I hit Space reflexively a number of times, including in the final boss fight when I didn't have time to stop playing and scroll back up. <br/> <br/>- Some of your levels had more entities on the screen than your game engine could handle, at least on my machine, which isn't cutting edge but is no slouch. Levels with to many slimes or too many blocks slowed down to a lurching jerky experience, though it didn't prevent me from proceeding. The reward at the end of the game had so many itmes that it totally became impossible and even "not responding"ed by browser, but obviously that was not the end of the world. I am happy to say that the many arrows and handful of enemies during the boss fight did not slow down enough to hurt the experience, so that was fine. <br/> <br/>- I felt uncomfortable in the handful of instances where you required me to jump off the top of the screen and not be visible. It was never a real problem. <br/> <br/>- I had an unexpected death when I used E to sail on a blockset over some lava, and when I un-E'ed and went to step off, a piece of gold in the lava pushed the block back away from the shore exactly as I went to step off, and I fell in. I experimented with this one more time, and it felt a bit weird the way the parts interact in that setup. <br/> <br/>- Lastly, there was one spot in the game where I died maybe four or five times and was frustrated. It was where you are climbing up and you smash some bricks, and there are slimes above you. The third slime up, he falls down on you. I had a plan, but the way he moved while falling, I dunno, it didn't work out how I planned the first three times, and then I did what I thought was the same thing again but that time it did work. My fault, I'm sure, but that was the one and only death that I repeated. <br/> <br/>Overall, excellent work! |
| May 3 15:50:00 | 52m 00s | DeepGlow | Had a tough time figuring out how to collect the yellow beings, a sound on successful collection would have been nice. |
| May 3 16:05:00 | 15m 00s | Drill Fish | I liked this game! Fun and different. The only issue was that the controls were a bit wonky, which made it hard to take risks out of water for fear of getting stuck. |
| May 3 16:12:00 | 7m 00s | Beneath The Surface | Good execution, you had a little of everything with graphics, sound, music, a HUD, etc. But I thought the sharks were a little too similar and non-sharkey to keep me replaying. <br/> <br/>There was a bug on level 2 where I went off the top of the screen and got stuck outside the game world. |
| May 3 16:31:00 | 19m 00s | async | What a great idea for a game. Really grabbed my attention, and the graphical style totally worked. <br/> <br/>I found it to be too hard, though. I feel weird saying that, as my own game is very hard and I like hard games, but I suppose what got me here was that the difficulty came from the momentum of the character. Instead of using a tightly-controller character to solve a difficult challenge, I was fighting against the looseness of the control. Maybe I'm just being a wimp, though. <br/> <br/>Still a strong game, but I didn't get past the third level where you have to jump on the individual pixels. Got to the first checkpoint but many dozens of retries I finally gave up as frustration overwhelmed me. <br/> <br/>Yeah... What a wimp. Nice work, but I didn't extract the full measure of fun. |
| May 3 20:19:00 | 3h 48m | Kill or Kill | Great job! Loved the music and the theme. The only thing that kept me from finishing it was having to start all over from the beginning when I got shot, but I did retry a bunch so it wasn't bad. <br/> <br/>Sorry you had a tech issue trying to play my game, I dunno why Unity player would refuse your input but I did see that happen to one guy who tested, he played in Chrome, no dice it ignored all inputs, then he played in FF, was fine, then Chrome again and was fine. Never managed to explain it! |
| May 3 20:32:00 | 13m 00s | The Deep | Very cool how it got darker the deeper you went, so it was up to you how difficult you dared to make it! And better not forget about that return trip. <br/> <br/>I also thought it was an interesting choice to make the enemy hits continue throughout contact. That way instead of saying "oops I got hit" like you do in a lot of games, you say "oh no I *AM* getting hit I better run for it!" <br/> <br/>Nice work. |
| May 3 21:07:00 | 35m 00s | Rocket Mole | I beat it! It took me maybe like 15 minutes or a bit more. <br/> <br/>The key realization was the little green "forward" vector indicator, and realizing the way that my control came completely from that thing, and that I would reset that thing every time I impacted. I didn't pick up on this at ALL for the first three or four times. <br/> <br/>You have a very interesting mechanic here, but even better you made it so it was very easy for me to retry when I died, and to experiment. Also it seemed randomly generated every time so it was always a bit of a different puzzle each run. <br/> <br/>The best moment for me was when I didn't die, but I did get stuck in an annoying cluster of "friendly" polygons that was more like a prison. Well, I decided to hit "R" the button I can hit to respawn after I die... and sure enough, it restarted me! <br/> <br/>So I have to say good job respecting the player's time and having that tight retry loop that allowed me to enjoy experimenting and failing just as much as success. <br/> <br/>In fact, I was almost sorry to see the bottom at 256. <br/> <br/>Great job. <br/> <br/>If I try to think of something constructive but critical to say, I am hard-pressed, but I guess I would say this: I didn't do as much forward planning as I think your game system would allow. I am far from certain if it's a good idea, but if it were my game I would experiment with zooming the camera out a tiny bit to allow for more thinking ahead. If that worked, my next experiment would be to juice up the speed slightly, or at least to add a speed increase choice to the options. <br/> <br/>Solid compact little entry, nice work. |
| May 3 21:18:00 | 11m 00s | Icesome! | Hahaha, nice - after spending 48 hours making my game about AVOIDING icebergs, it's nice to play your game where the shoe is on the other foot. <br/> <br/>Also, very cool graphical stylings and water sounds. |
| May 3 21:37:00 | 19m 00s | Dig Dig My Friend | Yeah, addictive. I don't even play these kinds of click-n-watch games at ALL, but this one sucked me in anyway! I think it might have been the sounds. If there was anything I'd change, it would be the move the menu over to the side instead of having it be an overlay. I left it open all the time and it felt a little bit odd being over the game area. Totally not a big deal at all, just a tiny thing. |
| May 3 23:59:00 | 2h 22m | SURF ACE | Whao, I expected something crazy from the screen shots, but this was even more nuts than I thought it could be!! A slick, wild ride... well done! <br/> <br/>I wish it showed me the number of fish I speared at the end of the level, so I could feel like I needed to ride the wave better just one more time. |
| May 4 00:43:00 | 44m 00s | Mars Under The Surface | Great backing music track that got me in the mood to blast stuff, and you have the graphics and programming here for a nice solid fight into the dark depths. <br/> <br/>But I felt that three design decisions held you back, and obviously you might disagree, just my opinion. I hope it's okay if I provide a bit of negative feedback because you *almost* had it: <br/> <br/>1. Pace is too slow. Everything should be sped up 4x imo. Player, bullet, enemy. <br/> <br/>2. Blind jumps aren't fair. The first thing you taught me player was that it's safe and necessary to do blind jumps. Then you punish harshly for blind jumps, then you make it necessary again. The final moment of playing the game, I had to guess if the correct blind jump was down, or to the right. I guessed wrong and was sent back to the start of the game. <br/> <br/>3. No checkpoints is a mistake here, I think. Given the slow pace, and the errors by jumping as players explore, and the way everything is in the same place each time, the from-the-top restart meant most of my experience was repeating already-seen content instead of experiencing new content. <br/> <br/>Anyway I don't mean to be harsh, you did a good job putting together a package here. I left critical feedback because you accomplished the hard part of implementing, but the experience fell short because of a few tweaks. Sorry!! |
| May 4 01:01:00 | 18m 00s | Cthulus are Beneath the Surface | Nice work getting mutliplayer w high scores, though I didn't happen to see someone else playing. <br/> <br/>Solid implementation that ran well and had a little of everything, but I felt it was too easy, or maybe too slow. The enemies eventually won by having huge numbers of them but I felt like I had nearly maxed out the killing I could do. |
| May 4 01:13:00 | 12m 00s | Ant Slaves | Neat, but not enough danger/reward to keep me going for very long... I did have some interesting puzzle moments trying to get a few leaves down. What I liked was trying to get the leaf, you would create a mess in your wake (or with the other ants) and then you'd have to try to get the other ants to dig out the leaf-carrier and make a path for him. |
| May 4 01:19:00 | 6m 00s | Project Brain Damage | Can I leave the first room? Wasn't sure if I was just bad, or if that's the whole thing. <br/> <br/>Solid SmashTV-type shooter implemented here. Would have loved to see a bit more content, like sound and additional enemy types. |
| May 4 01:23:00 | 4m 00s | Deep Dark Dank Dusty Musty Dirty Decrepit Massive Moist Manholes | A real brain-bender! Keeping track of everything was really tricky, I got to fingerspaz mode pretty quick. |
| May 4 01:29:00 | 6m 00s | Spunk Spelunk | Cool mechanic and a nice implementation! I think a few touches of polish would have gone a long way, mostly around shooting the gun and having bullets hit the bats, and also when the player takes damage. |
| May 4 06:38:00 | 5h 09m | CRUDE | Fun little sim, I built the whole thing up twice and wished I could chop down forests to build some more. The feel was really there, with the art and the gurgling sound. <br/> <br/>It would be interesting to see where it could go if you kept working on it. The way it was, life was a little too easy for the oil tycoon, but I could see the parts were there to make it tougher! |
| May 9 06:02:00 | 119h 24m | Sub Bomber | Cool game for such a short time! Controls were something new and difficult to explore. I learned to be very careful, and I tried many times but I never did better than four. Well done! <br/> <br/>I tried it because I saw your blog post with the animated gif, and I also made a game about a ship that moves in curves under water, but it turns out they are very different. |
| May 9 06:16:00 | 14m 00s | The world beneath | Fantastic sound design - wandered around for a while exploring and throwing torches, you really set a mood. |