Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD30 → Feedback comment stats → Wertle
Feedback comments for LD30
Wertle's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Wertle's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 05:02:00 | Star Garden | Nice work on a networked game in such a short time, I can appreciate how insanely difficult that is! I like how the framework of the planets and needing to physically move around and explore adds a nice layer to a shared art gallery type thing. Nice work! | |
| Aug 25 05:16:00 | 14m 00s | A Light In The Darkness | Well done on creating a networked multiplayer game in 48 hours! I thought this was really a clever way to force people to co-operate and it was intuitive to figure out what the limits were pretty quickly. It gave me fond memories of crystal chronicles :) |
| Aug 25 05:32:00 | 16m 00s | 99 LuftWaffels | This is a pretty fun interpretation of a routing sort of game. It kind of made me think of Spacechem only with zeppelins and waffles :P It was super hard, though! I had trouble keeping track of what I had already routed (like if I already had something going from one place to the cities or not). My solution to all problems was just build more zeppelins, but apparently that's not so great seeing as my population declined x_x Nice work! |
| Aug 25 05:37:00 | 5m 00s | Bumper Planets | I think this game could polish up really nicely and you should totally keep working on it. The mechanic is simple but got me thinking in a way that I was not used to with interpreting the arcs and paying attention to the overall rotation. Some sound and feedback could make this really great, and I think it would be well suited to different platforms (touch, etc). Nice job! |
| Aug 25 19:28:00 | 13h 51m | Intergalactic Delivery Services Corporation | I think you have a really clever core mechanic going on here. A big challenge you have is in UI and how to convey all the information going on, I was confused at first that the colors of the planets were telling me what was needed/obtainable, etc. Also, more feedback for how much fuel you have would be helpful since it's really important. I'd say if you plan on continuing working on this, that pacing out all these different mechanics will be really important (for example, having fuel not be an issue on the first level and just teaching out to escape planet gravitational pull, then introduce resources, then introduce different color planets with different gravity, etc). If you spread all that stuff out a little at a time, it'll make learning all this extra information easier without putting a huge burden on UI. |
| Aug 25 19:38:00 | 10m 00s | Circular Logic | Super mind bendy! I thought the whole circular platforming vibe was really successful. I'd say the biggest thing you could do to make this better is figure out how to give appropriate feedback for when the gravity is going to switch up since it's hard to figure out without experimenting and it's not really sticky information (since experimenting often leads to death). Nice work! |
| Aug 25 19:52:00 | 14m 00s | FACED | This is a wonderful approach to a slider puzzle, I love how it remains simple but incorporates a lot of complex things to consider for the player spacially (both in where the character can move and where the blocks need to move). My one suggestion would be an additional visual distinction between happy and sad positioned blocks, the face by itself makes it hard to read at-a-glance the entire board. Perhaps a saturation shift or something? Also the music stressed me out so i had to turn it off :O Great work! |
| Aug 25 20:02:00 | 10m 00s | RED Thread | I love the concept and wish I'd gotten to do more levels with the string lengthing/shortening. I got stuck on the level with the lava balls because the tuning on the jump and movement is such that it's very easy to overcorrect on the ground but undercorrect when in air, so those precision jumps are killer. Definitely something that can be tuned, though. I also had a little simulation sickness with the rotating of the camera, even though it was a neat visual effect. Nice work. |
| Aug 25 20:13:00 | 11m 00s | HopSlide | I love this concept! It made me think a bit of Continuity with the slider puzzle/platformer combo, but having them go in in two different games was quite nice. I love how there was also an element of making things happen in the world based on position of the sliders other than just the exits. I didn't get as much time with this as I'd have liked as I feel like there's a lot of things to discover that I didn't have time to delve into, so I'm planning on coming back to this and poking around with it more. Very nice work! |
| Aug 27 03:58:00 | 31h 45m | Rails | I read about your adventures making this on twitter, so I can empathize with your struggle! You did have a complete thing though and the ambient audio and lighting did create a mood :) Way to push through! |
| Aug 27 04:09:00 | 11m 00s | OmniCorp | Congrats on your first LD! I think there are a lot of little polishy things you could do to clean up this game but one thing I struggled with was knowing overall if I was doing well or doing poorly. Once I got a lot of speech balloons demanding stuff I couldn't figure out if it was because I was doing something wrong or if that's just the expected game state. Having the planets orbit might be a fun way of messing with people trying to keep track of which planets needed what. Nice job! |
| Aug 27 04:18:00 | 9m 00s | This Little Piggy... | I love the twist, it was hilarious! I like how the round planet made the world seem bigger than it was since you can't see over the horizon. The shooting mechanics could use some work, a reticle or something because I had no idea if I was hitting anything or not. Also a touch of feedback from getting shot. The animations were great, nice work! |
| Aug 27 04:30:00 | 12m 00s | Portal DAGger | I would say that if you're going to have a solution that requires you to move diagonally, you should make sure to teach it explicitly and then use it lots more after that (otherwise people will be looking for places to use the thing they just learned, like how we figured out how to get through walls :) ). I wasn't really sure what the red thingies (not the blocky red thingies but the portally red thingies) were and how they were different from the green thingies. I felt like the straightforward puzzles were good for teaching how the mechanics worked with the swapping, but after that there wasn't too much puzzliness since you mostly just walked forward and triggered things in order. |
| Aug 27 04:41:00 | 11m 00s | Get Set | Great work on creating a moody atmosphere with the art and the little polishy effects went a long way. I liked how this was sort of a an ambient exploratory game but still had moments that involved dexterity like evading the stabby things with a quick turn or dive. I don't know if it was a bug but the camera got really crazy in one of the later levels. Some nice ambient moody music and sound effects would take this a really long way if you intend to keep working on it. Good job! |
| Aug 27 04:49:00 | 8m 00s | SHIT RUNNER | I liked the drastic shifts in world and the supporting VO was pretty funny. When you make a first person game you have to be careful about making your collsion pill too big. What would make sense in third person instead in first person means you collide a lot when you feel like you shouldn't have touched anything, especially when you have stuff coming from behind or outside the periphery. Health models in games like this can help the player learn the bounds of their own collision versus one hit kill games in which it's much trickery. I thought the visuals were great at conveying the mode shift. Not personally a fan of poop jokes but that's just personal preference :) |
| Aug 27 04:59:00 | 10m 00s | Stanley Squeaks and the Emerald Burrito | I love the mechanic of needing to mind where you step in order to set yourself up for the escape. I think the level with symmetry on both sides is actually the best level to teach this, though I wish there was feedback on the thingies I landed on so I could remember which ones I had touched. Nice work on those animations! Note about jumping, it can be handy to allow a jump the first few frames into a an in-air state, to help situations where you're right on the edge of a platform and need to move-jump and fall off the edge when you intend to jump. Nice work! YAAAY! |
| Aug 27 05:14:00 | 15m 00s | Battle Of Solis | I really liked how only being able to move with gravity shook things up. I played with only one ship per squad but I can imagine how chaotic it would get otherwise. I kind of wish this game wrapped around pacman style, but that's just sort of an intuition. One thing I think you could do to really help is give some manner of feedback about the range of the gravitational pull on the various space objects, as I often overshot because I thought I was gonna get sucked in when I actually didn't. Perhaps some manner of trajectory arrow? |
| Aug 27 05:42:00 | 28m 00s | Blue Screen | Nice job, we gave lots of feedback in the stream which I will not repeat here because it's long but hopefully it was helpful :D |
| Aug 27 06:01:00 | 19m 00s | Oathkeeper | Nice work! I think the biggest problem to overcome here is that the world shifting being on the same button as the shooting leads to lots of accidental world resetting when trying to switch buttons. There is a saying in UI: "don't put the ejector seat button next to the on switch." Since it is such a different mechanical function perhaps it could be mapped to its own different button? Also I wasn't sure if I could kill enemies even though they had hit feedback because they had such high health. Some indicator that I was making progress would help. I liked the overall way you married progression with needing to collect the hearts with eventually having enough health to fight the boss, and I loved how you got to fight the boss in the whole first world, although it was a little tedious because I could only take one shot at a time before having to turn around again. Overall really nice work! |
| Aug 28 19:28:00 | 37h 27m | Relative to Scale | I think my favorite part was when I got to be the dino pack and attack with everyone at once. It felt good to do. You have a couple of inconsistencies which were a little bit confusing, like how in evolution 2 I only had to touch the bits to get them, whereas other times I had to actively eat them. I got stuck on the pack phase because I eventually was unable to find another pack to fight. I might come back to this and try pressing forward as I believe there are many more phases. Good work! |
| Aug 28 19:36:00 | 8m 00s | Sneaky Nessie | Super cute! I immediately experimented to see what the disguise did and lost it, which was kinda sucky since it's a long time before you get a second one. I wish the humans had some kind of tell for when they are about to turn, like maybe a pause or an animation, or a sound, or whatever, since the punishment for getting caught is so severe it might help encourage people to get at it if they feel more in control and more like getting caught was their own fault instead of just getting unlucky. Overall very cute, well done! |
| Aug 28 20:04:00 | 28m 00s | Icarus Crisis | I think my two biggest pieces of feedback that would help make this better would be 1) don't let me go to a mission where I don't have enough dice to win. I kept doing that on accident because I wasn't clear on the UI for needed dice or whatever, and it's really frustrating. 2) In a lot of dice combat games like this (like Eldritch Horror, for example) you often get things that let you make meaningful trade-offs when you are in a situation where your roll is destined to fail, like rerolls or +1s or whatever. Something like that would really help alleviate the frustration when you lose on your second roll and still have to keep rolling. I didn't understand the value of ambushes, I was just frustrated that I lost an opportunity to find more dice. Similarly I valued finding dice over medkits, so a medkit ended up being disappointing as well. Overall I like the mechanic of rolling and choosing which dice of which pools to keep based on the probabilities, i thought that was a fun choice. I also thought that if I fought a dude it would make my counter go down, but apparently not! Nice work overall! |
| Aug 28 20:12:00 | 8m 00s | The Maze Of Worlds | Congrats on your first LD! A couple of small things that could help polish this up: I'd recommend really pushing the color of the spikes to be completely different than the walls, I see you had them all share a thematic color, but it made the spikes difficult to parse and you really want those sticking out like a sore thumb so I understand they are hazards. The other thing you might want to play around with is the camera. I'd recommend trying a lead-cam instead of a follow-cam since you are often jumping into situations of danger so it's more helpful to see more of the screen in the direction you are traveling than the one you came from. Good job! |
| Sep 2 02:35:00 | 102h 23m | Meowrror | Be mindful of the colorblind, you already have patterns on the blocks so you could use that as an extra distinguishing factor. I think you could have done a better job of explaining the "weirdest thing" in your world. The thing with why the cat was dying was baffling and didn't really seem to fit the gameplay, so I think you could have spent more time on that. The art was lovely but the sound needed variety. I thought the base puzzle was interesting but the slowness of moving the blocks didn't really add to the experience, and often grew tedious. It just seemed like a bit of a mismatch in intent as to WHY the interaction was super slow. Nice work for the compo, though! |
| Sep 2 02:49:00 | 14m 00s | Schizophrenia | I'd recommend making the default binding for mode switching on a key that doesn't force you to lift your hand away from the arrows or space. Since this game is about speed and precision, I'd recommend ghosting the platforms for the other phase (similar to things like Guacamelee, Fly'n, Outland, etc). Without a ghost of the platforms the switching is more exploratory, which suits itself to a slower pace. |
| Sep 2 03:06:00 | 17m 00s | Bipolar World | Super cute! The momentum of shifting between worlds reminded me a lot of Ibb and Obb. The way the music shifted between worlds reinforced your theme in a nice way. One minor thing: if you make the way you start your game the same as your in-games control, it can be a nice way to ease someone in (so like you had click to start but the controls are keyboard based. Maybe try space to start. The little animations on your character's jump and land and mid-air transitions gave him a lot of character - nice use of your polish time :) The spikes in happy world are a liiitle subtle and can be tricky to see sometimes. |
| Sep 2 03:17:00 | 11m 00s | Onomo | Great cohesive aesthetic, but alas, the perils of focusing on aesthetic first :( It has potential, though. Next LD rock out those mechanics first, even if they are super simple. |
| Sep 2 03:26:00 | 9m 00s | These Cosmic Chains | We played this two-player with one person controlling each world and it worked out really well! I wish the starscape was more noticeable to help me feel like I was moving when I got away from the sun. The chain physics looked great, though the collision was a little hard to predict at the ends near the planet. Nice job! |
| Sep 2 03:45:00 | 19m 00s | Chalinkamachoo | The sound effects in this game are hilarious! I had trouble telling how the weapon switching was working, but overall it was just a fun romp with good feedback. |
| Sep 2 04:26:00 | 41m 00s | The Beginning | Fantastic twist at the end to bring all things into context! The drift in the mechanics added just enough subtle complexity to really set this apart as a puzzle game. Definitely difficult but you clearly have addressed this already. Really wonderful job! |
| Sep 2 19:18:00 | 14h 52m | Arrow Rain | Nice work. I thought the camera felt a little low to the ground which made it tricky to navigate portions or the world with any sort of rise to them (like the spiral tree). It's interesting that you put the golem second when its combat mechanic seemed a bit more complex than the minotaur, but I liked the minotaur's attack. Something that could help would be some audio or visual feedback for getting hit, as it took me a long time to notice the hearts. My favorite thing was the bubble effect, it was stylized and felt kind of great. |
| Sep 2 19:39:00 | 21m 00s | Driver's License | I loved this game! I'm normally not one to experiment with crafting to try and figure out combinations, but because it was so cute and fun to throw things into each other, I was much more willing to play around. I had trouble mapping which mouse button was which free hand, but I'm not sure a good solution to helping to convey that. I was a bit sad that after I made the final thing, I didn't get to throw my excess helpful things into the ocean. If i had more time, I'd go back and make a bunch of the helpful things and throw them in for other players. Well done! |
| Sep 2 19:49:00 | 10m 00s | Bald-Faced SPACE TRUCKERS | Really solid compo entry! I think you did a great job with the parallaxing of different game elements to create a sense of depth in the space. Most of my feedback would be about polishy things or extra feedback (like sound or different color flames on speed boost, ramp up in pacing, etc). Nice work! |
| Sep 2 20:04:00 | 15m 00s | Matters of Perspective | Really nice work with the shifting mechanic! I think you had some pretty difficult spatial puzzles that might need a lot of extra feedback to convey the current game state. But I think there's a lot of fun puzzley stuff you can do with this. I loved the drawn style of the UI. Some audio work will really polish this right up! Nice job! |
| Sep 6 05:57:00 | 81h 53m | Warp Paint | I loved this game! The mechanic of carrying the portals around really added a fun, innovative twist to the puzzles that I hadn't really felt before. Even though there were a lot of mechanics going on, I felt like you ramped up the introduction of them well. My critiques are minor: Things happened SUPER FAST on my machine (is your game framerate independent?), it would be nice to have some beats or breathers at the transitions, like when you go through the portals, because I felt like I didn't have enough time to celebrate my brilliance at a successfully executed puzzle because it moved so fast that it was basically instantaneous. Another piece of feedback: while the art was well constructed and the music pleasant, if you continue to develop this I would encourage you to explore a more cohesive aesthetic that fits well with the gameplay. And I do hope you continue it because this game is awesome! SUPER NICE WORK!!!!!!!!!! |
| Sep 6 06:14:00 | 17m 00s | BOND | Sorry to hear that you weren't able to finish in time for the jam. Dem life emergencies! I could sort of see where you guys were going with it, though, and I think the idea has potential. The part with being able to disconnect each side seems like you could do some fun puzzles there that you don't see in other games where you have two connected characters like this. One minor note, consider adding a grace period to your jump by enabling jumping a few frames into the fall state so it makes it nicer to jump off a ledge and not just fall. I will try and check out the post jam version if I have time. Nice job! |
| Sep 6 06:29:00 | 15m 00s | Inverted | Endless Runner | Nice work on this, I liked seeing the Ikaruga-style mechanics in a runner, which I don't believe I've seen before. If you continue this I would recommend a method of ensuring you don't get "impossible" spawns or long stretches of spawns where you don't have to interact (you can do this a couple ways, one way is pre-designing segments that work really well and just procedurally generating the segments, or you can figure out the minimum distance needed to swap and make sure things don't spawn under that distance). Since swapping is the only mechanic you could really play up the polish on those characters and have them animating super cute! Playtest with the colorblind :) Overall really nice work! |
| Sep 7 05:59:00 | 23h 30m | Faction Wars | Those ships are so teeny tiny! I think one sort of polishy thing that would really help the pacing would be popup contextual menus instead of having to go back and forth to the side and the planets (the hotkeys helped a lot with this, though). Nice work! |
| Sep 7 07:00:00 | 1h 01m | Through the Mirror | The audio was very slow and pensive and relaxing, but it didn't really fit well with the more intense, hectic platforming segment. I like how you did patterns on the different sides instead of just colors, that was a nice touch. It was a little on the painfully hard side, though. Nice work for the compo! |
| Sep 9 04:50:00 | 45h 50m | Fear - Friendly Extraterrestrial Assembly Robot | Nice work! I liked how weighty this felt with just physically pushing things around and trying to overcome the angular momentum and such. I had one moment where a piece was spinning across the space and it looked like it was going to spin right into the last slot, but it just barely didn't make it. If you can detect cases like that, I'd cheat them in because it would have made me feel like a badass :D Nice polishy touches like the shooting stars in the starscape, etc. |
| Sep 9 05:08:00 | 18m 00s | A Sneeze A Day Keeps The Crates Away | I had a really great time with this puzzle game! Though it took me a bit to figure out what was going on, in spite of the title, but once I did I thought it was hilarious. The pushing mechanics made me think a tiny bit of Road Not Taken, which is a good thing :) More knowledge of what is happening early on would help a lot, like maybe an actual sneeze sound effect, or brushing sound effect when you have the brush out, etc. Super great job! |
| Sep 9 05:22:00 | 14m 00s | Star Fuel | There was some great feedback here on the ship and the boost and such. I felt like I was in freakin Top Gun. However, I was never able to destroy a chain, there's a lack of feedback on hits so I never knew if I was actually damaging anything or not. Screenshake might be a fine method of hit feedback, but audio or vfx or any sort of cue would have helped. Good job! |
| Sep 9 05:31:00 | 9m 00s | To The Stars | I love how you learn more about the character through the dialog choices, I just wish I could keep learning more. Some of the little sets of messages left me wanting more. It felt very sad and lonesome :( Good job! |
| Sep 9 05:52:00 | 21m 00s | Melody's Long Ladder Home | Interesting idea for a resource-based platformer (sort of). I got frustrated by a couple of things: accidentally clipping a ladder and having it consume one of mine was frustrating, although if you had an action to use a ladder it might get tedious to climb so I'm not sure if that's the best solution? Also the parts where you had to climb a ladder on the very edge got real tricky with the wrap-around, it seems like that happened mostly in the beginning. I loved the voice overs, well done! |
| Sep 9 06:09:00 | 17m 00s | wrldDIVISION | This is like some weird cross between Bounden and Antichamber and I love how weird it feels. The minimilist level was a bit much. Great simple aesthetic and fun exploratory puzzle. Well done! |
| Sep 15 19:14:00 | 157h 05m | Starlight | So I didn't get to explore this as in depth as probably was intended. I struggled with the movement being incredibly slow. Since this seems to be an exploration game, and the biggest obstacle between me and exploring is slow movement, it can feel pretty frustrating. Sometimes this can be addressed by making the act of moving feel really pleasant so I enjoy just floating around the universe. One suggestion would be to make the starscape move in parallax with me so that I can tell if I'm moving at all/making headway towards something. I tried to skip the dialog by hitting enter, but it seems to have broken something, and repeated dialog, so I just avoided attempting to skip in the future :) The music sets a distinct mood. |
| Sep 15 19:23:00 | 9m 00s | Pulley Planet | Great work! This had some fantastic polish to it that really made it fun to play. The animations, effects, and sounds all worked really well together to convey all the important information. I would suggest that for the little wheel by the pulley, making it stand out as more of a UI piece than a background element would help, because I didn't notice it until you said something in the chat and it was really useful. Well done! |
| Sep 15 19:32:00 | 9m 00s | Blobs RPG | Nice job on your first ever Ludum Dare! A few things that might help for future games - when you make anything with a top-down movement that has shooting, i'd recommend making the player shape something where it's easy to see what your facing is at a glance. It was a little tricky with the round blobby. I liked how giving that guy the sword came back around in a way I was not expecting later on. Hopefully this gives you a good basis for figuring out scope in future jams. Good job! |
| Sep 15 19:51:00 | 19m 00s | Warlord of Connected Space | I think the concept behind this sort of strategy game has a lot of potential to explore lots of fun interesting interactions. Your biggest challenge seems like it will be UI presentation and how you dish out information since there is a LOT going on at once. If you continue to work on this, I'd recommend teaching things in isolation step by step so that by the time they reach a point where the game is now, the players have internalized all the cues for all the information and how it is meaningful. A lot of the UI issues came from not showing relationships between things in an easy way, like if I couldn't sell I didn't understand why, the jump to figure out it was because I didn't have any ships out was not clear. Also, I'm not sure the station justified having its own "mode," just because the information there was minimal and there was a lot of unused space. Just be careful that time spent at the station doesn't result in the player forgetting the overall course of the game that's going on back in the universe. Well done, I hope you continue to explore this idea! |