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acro

Feedback comments for LD31

Timestamp	Since previous	Game	acro's comment
Dec 9 15:36:00		Blockade Runner	Hi guys, thanks for commenting on our entry; would've loved to know how far you got into it :) <br/> <br/>Um, so, "Blockade Runner"... this will be blunt, harsh and to the point. Sorry, but it's meant constructively and I won't mince words. <br/> <br/>Players don't care what makes a thing work, only about the experience presented. And this is just about the worst possible way to strain someone's eyes: looking for a tiny spot in a wide field of highly saturated colours, all of which are mixing together and moving. <br/> <br/>The 'graphics', image/asset wise, could be made in under an hour. <br/> <br/>Three of the six times I ran it (including the first time), it randomised into an unconnected rectangle. I tried something like that in LD30 ('Connected Worlds') and had to spend a long while ensuring connectedness - in the end didn't have time to finish the entry, so I totally understand you just leaving this with the occasional break. It always seems like it shouldn't take that much time, but it does. <br/> <br/>Also (still playing devil's advocate, here), I didn't read the wall of text concept/description until after playing the game. <br/>I was, however, quite intrigued by the screenshot, as I couldn't work out what it would be. <br/> <br/>All that stuff about '20 themes' and 'being a robot'... what? No, you're a painfully slow-moving white dot! <br/> <br/>The graphics are genuinely, impressively horrible. The use of saturation inflicts pain (although I've been staring at a monitor for 3 days already), while hue and saturation aren't used at all! If the aim was to strain the player's eyes to the maximum possible extent, you couldn't have done much better. <br/>The only way it could look worse would be to make the victory/death screens raw Cyan, Magenta, or shocking pink, instead of red/green, or perhaps flickering rapidly between red and blue to trigger epileptic seizures (please don't do that). <br/> <br/>One of the screenshots shows circles. A circle would be really useful when you spawn. <br/> <br/>So, as a game, it's outstandingly bad. <br/> <br/>I found the most interesting aspect here to be Alex's timelapse video - I also use Eclipse Luna and didn't know it's possible to block-edit vertically, so thank you for that, I learned something :)
Dec 9 17:06:00	1h 30m	Pocket Contra Force	Totally brilliant. Initially thought it was too easy, then got to the octo level. It ramps up nicely, very smooth (left/right motion was a little too fast for my liking). Presentation / graphics are really nice. <br/>Only two things I'd criticise are the player blends in a little too much sometimes, and, after you kill the big things like the thing at the far right side of the first level, they continue making the red damage burst effect when shot, so it was hard to tell if I'd killed it yet or if more shooting was still required. I stood shooting that thing for a good long time before deciding 'it's probably safe to go nearer now'!
Dec 13 15:07:00	94h 01m	Spacebank Heist	Seriously good game! So many well-made mechanics going on, the gameplay is really solid and fun. <br/>I love the high-tension music change-up and the huge scope of possible stuff to do. I haven't even made it anywhere near a vault yet! The escape-to-double-your-score mechanic is very well considered, too. <br/> <br/>This is very complete for a jam entry - how many people contributed to this on your team?! <br/> <br/>I disagree with the comment asking for a crosshair, I think the aiming mechanic works well as-is, making it down to the player's own accuracy. <br/> <br/>Some very minor nitpicking: <br/>1. Is there supposed to be no way to see/know your health? Kinda irksome. <br/>2. It's very more-ish and quick to retry, but prompting for high-score name every time is really annoying there. <br/>3. I'm a bit concerned as to why it tries to change a bootup registry entry when it runs. I'm not terribly happy about that, and glad I have spybot system shield on. That is nothing to do with your game though, i'm just very paranoid - it's probably just because my own installed version of Gamemaker Studio needs updated.
Dec 13 15:26:00	19m 00s	Do you want to kill a showman?	Very eye-catching game title, although there's something wrong with you! (In a good way). I found this too frustrating to be enjoyable, probably down to the relentless unstoppable feeling coupled with the clunky reloading. Got on much better second time after figuring out when to shotgun, but still have no idea what the bow does. <br/>I'm willing to accept that it may have appeared to me to get harder too fast purely because I couldn't figure out when to use the shotgun properly. But whatever it was, <br/>the pacing/appearance of big snowmen seemed to unfairly block too many smaller ones from damage. As others have commented, some kind of more pronounced reaction to shots would help a lot. The shotgun seems to spray particles rather than having an abrupt burst to it, so it was hard to tell when it had worked and when not. Most of the time it aggravatingly didn't seem to do anything, but once I cleared over half the screen in one shot. No idea what was going on there. <br/>The model and animation are surprisingly high quality, it's just a shame there's not a bit more variation.
Dec 13 15:54:00	28m 00s	Project Candyfloss	I played this because it reminds me of the look of a game map I drew in mspaint decades ago, but I didn't learn to code until university, so kudos to you for making a working game. Definitely keep making them. <br/>There seems to be a completion bug: I foolishly let one vehicle escape on Wave 5 (it indeed takes ages to reach the end - would be nice if you could do something about that, perhaps detect if a baddie is beyond all the towers, and the player has no more money to place more, and in that case accelerate that vehicle.) Anyway, when it reached the castle, and I presumably should have taken damage, I 'won'.
Dec 13 17:00:00	1h 06m	TapRPG	Impressive progression, variation, depth, and amount of playtime. And a nice UI. I think the character art has a lot of charm, too, and there's a lot of it for the time. <br/> <br/>The only parts I didn't like were on #12 (and #15), the 1000 ton hammer: there's no way to anticipate the first one, you just get game over immediately. It's an interesting addition with the block mechanic, but it's not fun because there's no way to tell to keep it in reserve and no way to know to use it immediately. I failed that same monster a second time by using a block on a punch, not realising 1000 ton hammer could happen again, and didn't realise there was another way out of it (ie arrow interrupt). <br/> <br/>Similarly on #15, there's no way to anticipate 2 wipeout attacks in succession - and there's only 1 way to survive; it's never possible to heal through the damage, you have to interrupt and block. I used my block up experimentally, so I wiped. <br/> <br/>The music is too quiet by default, would like to be able to hear it. <br/> <br/>But I should point out I've now played this for longer than any other LD31 entry, including my own. I really, really like it overall! Used 9 continues finishing and ... ohgod I don't even want to know what hard mode is. Well, maybe later. <br/> <br/>Did you really make all this art and so many encounters in 3 days? very good stuff!
Dec 14 18:47:00	25h 47m	To Bee Or Not To Bee	Nice presentation and audio. Would be nice to see the difficulty ramp up more quickly and have some more variety in enemies / powerups. Well done.
Dec 14 19:10:00	23m 00s	Goblin Crown Fever	Fun game once I figured out what to do : ) For some reason the sides of the screen are cut off even on full screen mode. Would be nice to some pickups / items. Multiplayer would be quite fun and frantic. Good job.
Dec 14 19:26:00	16m 00s	War On Cutetopia	Very nice graphics, probabaly the craziest entry I've played so far : ) Would be nice to have a bit more variety in terms of enemies and weapons. Also the difficulty curve is a bit low. Well done though!
Dec 14 19:28:00	2m 00s	Dragon Wars	Unfortunately can't rate : (
Dec 14 19:35:00	7m 00s	Windows Cleaner Simulator	Leo, nice job on the graphics! I downloaded the .blend and would like to know how you got the aliased, sharp pixels appearance as shown in the animated gifs on the blog post. Just rendering after opening has pixel blending/anti-aliasing happening. I've tried making pixel art with Blender in the past and always had problems with that. <br/> <br/>As for gameplay - it's a bit strange! Also, the sound was too quite (and I had skype on in the background) so I couldn't hear it at all and thought it had no sound. <br/> <br/>The option choices would be much better if you could just click next to them instead of the bottom of the window where it shows '1' and '2'. <br/>There's animation of a woman falling out of a window, but that didn't happen in the game? Was this finished? <br/>Overall, nice idea and cool design, but there's not much gameplay which is a shame.
Dec 14 19:38:00	3m 00s	For the Homeland!	Very nice art style and animations, seriously impressive for such a short amount of time. The economics were not really clear but after reading some of these comments above it made more sense. Also as some others have mentioned the barrier to entry is a bit high with the long explanation. Overall enjoyed this one, well done.
Dec 14 19:53:00	15m 00s	AZOR	Good atmosphere and sense of tension. The overall presentation is really well polished. The into screens are perhaps a little too fast. <br/> <br/>Not sure it fits the theme but nevertheless I enjoyed playing this one. Good job!
Dec 14 22:21:00	2h 28m	Make War, Not Science!	Wow, I've thought about making a card game for Ludum Dare before but always thought it'd be infeasible - I'm really impressed you managed it! I like the flow of play, it seems quite well balanced and came down pretty close (although I still won on my first attempt). <br/> <br/>I like the resource types but found it a little hard to intuit what needed to be spent on what -- it would be easier if you had perhaps colour-coded the numbers, eg green for science and blue for energy, matching the icons. <br/>Also, when I and the CPU were both at about HP 9, I first noticed it seemed to stay there, even though I played gunshot cards. <br/>I guessed that generators or scientists gave some kind of shielding effect, but didn't know what was going on. <br/> <br/>You can guess, then, I didn't read the whole instructions page. It's a high-contrast barrage of text in a bold, headline sans-serif font -- it hurts to look at, and would be easily fixed just with a less heavy font, and some less contrasty colours. <br/> <br/>Overall the game is OK to play, but I felt would be nicer if it had some more visual cues showing what is happening, for example when it locks out for some time period, you can't click to continue; you have to wait. You can't see your own cards when the opponent plays one, and the card effects aren't 'obvious' if you're not closely remembering what all the numbers were. <br/> <br/>Still, even saying these things, I'm really pleased to see a card game on here, and I've enjoyed playing it through several times now.