Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD31 → Feedback comment stats → NickMakesGames
Feedback comments for LD31
NickMakesGames's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | NickMakesGames's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 8 03:35:00 | Words War | the movement system reminds me a bit of how Ghost Trick worked. Kind of cool to see that applied to a more action-heavy game. It works very well. | |
| Dec 8 03:36:00 | 1m 00s | Mobile Life | A brilliant interpretation of the theme. A step far beyond the typical entries this season. |
| Dec 8 03:42:00 | 6m 00s | CRUSH | clever. I love the idea of hats being your most useful tool. Very true to the source material. |
| Dec 8 03:45:00 | 3m 00s | Doktornix And The Fetch Quest | the magnifying glass over a zoomed out overworld is actually a really creative way to make the most of one screen, and it actually feels semi-functional, giving the player a strong sens of where they are in the grand scheme of things while simultaneously having a close-up view of themselves. Almost like a reverse minimap. |
| Dec 8 21:43:00 | 17h 58m | Ant Farm | reminds me a bit of Rymdkapsel, but it has a very interesting twist on the formula. Very neat. |
| Dec 8 21:48:00 | 5m 00s | Gay Love Cop | with a name like Gay Love Cop, you know that it'll certainly be interesting. I'll admit that I found the game a little bit awkward, but it was ultimately very silly and entertaining, in a very offbeat way. |
| Dec 8 21:52:00 | 4m 00s | Monsters | making an old-school LED style game was a great take on the theme, plus the game is actually a lot of fun to play! Well done. |
| Dec 8 21:58:00 | 6m 00s | Bubblemellow | a pretty standard platformer, but still very well made. Nothing wildly unique or innovative, but nothing out of place, either. Nicely done. |
| Dec 9 02:00:00 | 4h 02m | The Screening | ah, seems like we had similar thought patterns as far as "screening" goes. Great minds think alike, eh? <br/>An excellent game, by the way, also. Lots of interesting choices to be made. It might have been nice to have the ability to improve subject mood slightly by skipping training, but I imagine that might create an imbalance that I haven't thought of. |
| Dec 9 02:05:00 | 5m 00s | Guambo | very fun! I'm always a big fan of games that require multitasking like this. Well done. <br/>I should also note that the game doesn't seem to load on Firefox. Got it working fine on Chrome, though. |
| Dec 9 02:13:00 | 8m 00s | Carillon | not terribly complicated, but nicely polished. The metronome is very nice, and I love that you have the option to play without it if you feel confident. |
| Dec 9 02:15:00 | 2m 00s | El Dictador | very good for a first effort. The core gameplay is solid, although the UI and the visuals are a little bit offputting. Keep working at it, and you'll pick up on the tricks of the trade in no time. |
| Dec 9 02:18:00 | 3m 00s | 7 Days of War | simple, but focused. I like it. Took me a minute to figure out what I was doing, but I had a good time once I did. |
| Dec 9 02:23:00 | 5m 00s | Untraveled | very clever. Took me a moment to realize the relation to the theme, but once I realized that I was just wrapping around a single-screen sized world, I was actually very impressed. Especially once the more creative targets were introduced, like the grouping of blocks that got pushed around by the edge of the screen. Very creative and very enjoyable. |
| Dec 9 02:26:00 | 3m 00s | Subpixel | man, you really went all out with the theme, huh? You made an entire game out of just a few **pixels** of the screen. That's really cool, and extremely creative. |
| Dec 9 02:40:00 | 14m 00s | pOp | Simple, hectic, fast paced, and playbale on just one keyboard. A winning combo for any local multiplayer game. Had a great time with this one. |
| Dec 9 02:47:00 | 7m 00s | SplitScreen | very clever. I like the idea of having to navigate an environment that shifts based on judge interest, but it can be very tricky to know where a judges screen portion will land until it actually shows up, which leads to some frustration. Perhaps having everything be at the same perspective would be easier for the player, and layers that are no longer solid could become semi-transparent. |
| Dec 9 02:54:00 | 7m 00s | Orlyrinthum | I'll admit that I didn't find the gameplay to be extremely interesting, but I was blown away by the quality of the pixel art. You've got real talent there, friend. |
| Dec 9 02:56:00 | 2m 00s | Drunk Home | doesn't feel like much more than a QWOP-clone, but it's still fairly impressive given the time frame. |
| Dec 9 03:00:00 | 4m 00s | Chromyrinth | I couldn't actually find my character onscreen. It might be nice if there was a button you could press to briefly put a crosshair over the player so that they can locate themselves quickly. |
| Dec 9 03:04:00 | 4m 00s | Mechanism | I had a good time with this. The difficulty curve feels very nice, and the challenge ramps up to a very satisfying level. |
| Dec 9 03:09:00 | 5m 00s | Voxey Adventure | shame that there was so little content. The core mechanics seem solid, and there's a lot of room to expand upon what you have with some more complex puzzles. I really hope you continue this after LD! |
| Dec 9 03:12:00 | 3m 00s | Neighboring | I like the idea of trying to have to balance everything. Very satisfying and tense to keep everybody happy for long periods of time |
| Dec 9 03:16:00 | 4m 00s | Cave In | a little bit discouraging at first, but very satisfying once you get the hang of it. |
| Dec 9 03:28:00 | 12m 00s | Kerfuffle | just played this with my cousin and had a great time. Doesn't seem to be a ton of mechanical depth, but the reflex element adds a strong layer of skill, so the gameplay is still exciting and fun. <br/>The feeling of movement and swordplay is also fantastic. <br/>I also think it was a great idea to not show score until the very end of the match, so that the game feels suspenseful the whole way through. |
| Dec 9 22:39:00 | 19h 11m | Visibility Zero | very impressive from a technical standpoint, although a little low for my taste. Feels like a cool environment to traverse, and probably a great game for fans of the first-person exploration genre. |
| Dec 9 22:43:00 | 4m 00s | Quirky Roadblock | pretty neat! I don't think I've seen anything quite like this concept executed before. I had a good time with this one. |
| Dec 11 15:09:00 | 40h 26m | Faryad | the overall game felt a bit generic, but the option for co-op was well appreciated, and the particle effects/screen shake went a long way towards making the whole experience feel more enjoyable. Keep up the good work! |
| Dec 11 15:16:00 | 7m 00s | FIWPFT (F&*K I Wasn't Prepared For This) | This was a pleasant surprise! Stumbled onto this through the Rating Rescue Ranger program, and it turned out to be a much more fun game than I was expecting! I didn't really appreciate the use of memes too much, but the core gameplay wasn't focused on them, so I can't complain too much. <br/>I like how aggressive the enemies can get - you really have to keep your distance, or you're going to die real quick |
| Dec 11 15:20:00 | 4m 00s | Hexawing | sadly, button mashing *is* the best way to play this game, especially when only one ship remains and there's no pressure from having to multitask three lanes at once. <br/>That aside, I'm shocked by how polished this is! The game is very pretty and has an incredibly professional look and feel to it, especially for a 48 hour entry! <br/>(And as a word of advice, you should probably save your .exe in a .zip file and upload that, instead. Many folks are hesitant to just download a .exe on it's own, so you're probably missing out on a lot of well-deserved votes.) |
| Dec 11 15:27:00 | 7m 00s | Orange Juice | it's a cool idea, but I feel like it moves a bit too slowly. I think this would be a lot more enjoyable if there were more chunks produced by each killed orange(?) so that progress feels a bit faster and each kill feels more significant. |
| Dec 11 15:29:00 | 2m 00s | TUBE | a cool game with a spectacular aesthetic. I love the look and feel of this game. Well done! |
| Dec 13 23:56:00 | 56h 27m | Tightrope Theatre | extremely polished, although not terribly unique or interesting. Everything felt very tight and responsive, though, and I'm hard pressed to find any serious flaws in this game. <br/>One minor gripe I had, however, was that restarting a level felt like it took too long. A slight increase in the speed of the little curtain animation would certainly be a large improvement. |
| Dec 14 00:42:00 | 46m 00s | LiliLight | brilliant idea! Played in the proper setting, this could actually be a pretty serious survival horror game. There's a great use of the classic "fight or flight" decision in both the player's actions and the AI of the enemies, who seem to rush at you desperately just as frequently as they run away from the light in fear. A truly original and interesting game, and one of the more pleasant experiences I've found over the course of the jam. |
| Dec 14 00:46:00 | 4m 00s | The Cubenator | very creative! The block placing mechanic actually introduced quite a bit more tactical depth than I would have initially thought. Not all of the blocks made a ton of sense, though, in terms of their effects in battle. |
| Dec 14 00:56:00 | 10m 00s | Eschaton | I can't say that I fully understand the story, so I don't want to praise/critique it. That said, I was very impressed with how well it was told given the time restrictions and the very minimalistic presentation. A lot of the text reminded me of the sort of writing you would hear in an old radio drama, alluding to things that just aren't visible but the audience accepts as being there anyways. It's a very neat trick and it works stupendously well for game jams like this. |
| Dec 14 01:04:00 | 8m 00s | Swotch | great work! Very reminiscent of Super Gravitron, but with a slightly trippier vibe. <br/>I also like the inclusion of power-ups, although I felt it was a bit un-intuitive to represent them as just a larger version of your primary obstacle. |
| Dec 14 01:10:00 | 6m 00s | A Grimm Journey | it's a brilliant idea with an absolutely stunning visual aesthetic, but I feel like the actual mechanics fall a bit flat. Combat doesn't feel responsive, platforming feels floaty, and the mechanics are extremely vague and unclear. <br/>A good start, though, and I'd love to see this built into a more polished product with stronger gameplay. |
| Dec 14 04:05:00 | 2h 55m | For the exit | the gameplay feels a bit too easy, in my opinion. With slow move available at no penalty, the game is very little more than a simple maze navigator, with very little challenge at all. <br/>That said, the visuals and sound design were very nice, and the glow effect on all the controllable blocks was fairly impressive. |
| Dec 14 04:14:00 | 9m 00s | Space Debris | very cool! Reminds me a lot of Captain Forever, but condensed into a slightly more competitive environment. My only two major complaints are that <br/>a) the player controlled ship is tough to find when you start, since it's basically the same size and shape as everything else. <br/>b) grabbing parts to put onto the ship can be a pain sometimes, because your move speed is the same as the speed that loose parts float around at. This means you can chase after a piece going in the same direction as you and simply not close any distance. |
| Dec 14 04:27:00 | 13m 00s | Screen King | the good: <br/>creative take on the theme. <br/>quick and simple to get into. <br/>genuinely exciting and thrilling to evade the dreaded flyswatter. I wasn't expecting to feel so exhilarated the first time I got out of the way of that thing. <br/>the bad: <br/>the UI is a bit unusual. Having the player's fly-points hidden off in the bottom left is un-intuitive, as it's not a very common place to look. Also, the opening text and the text that display when you die kind of linger in the top left corner (it might just be my 1600x900 monitor having a wider range of view than it should, though.) <br/>The buzzing sound after every jump gets a bit irritating. Recording a few different sound effects and playing one randomly would have been a big help., |
| Dec 14 04:30:00 | 3m 00s | Expression Quest | pretty cute! A bit bare-bones, but very interesting all the same. I like the rainbow rings shooting out of all the audio sources. They add a nice sense of joy and happiness to the environment. |
| Dec 14 04:36:00 | 6m 00s | Don't Fall | I'm genuinely shocked that more entries don't have a button the player can press to locate their character like they can in this game. So many games this jam take place in a zoomed out perspective where it can be easy to loose track of where you are (this game being no exception), but this is the first I've seen somebody actually bothering to implement an easy locator function. Good work, team. |
| Dec 14 17:25:00 | 12h 49m | Jump to Boom x 2 | very reminiscent of Plinko, but I appreciate having more control over the characters as opposed to just letting them drop and do their own thing. |
| Dec 14 19:44:00 | 2h 19m | Like a Fairytale | the ending was fairly predictable, but the overall story was fairly strong all the same. I love the opening line "You said I looked great in green," and I thought it was cool that the amount of butterflies onscreen was kind of proportional to the emotional excitement of the memory. |
| Dec 14 20:22:00 | 38m 00s | Inventory | ouch. A brilliant ending to a game rife with dark humor. The twisted story combines with some surprisingly deep puzzle mechanics, making Inventory a winning package. <br/>Well done, friend. Well done. |
| Dec 14 20:28:00 | 6m 00s | Shellac's dream on an entire screen | Unless I missed something, there doesn't seem to be too much here in the way of gameplay. <br/>That said, you've made a shockingly vibrant and exciting world in such a short period of time, and I had a neat experience with this all the same. |
| Dec 14 20:35:00 | 7m 00s | Channel Surfing | pretty cool. I like that the continuity of the screens breaks up after the first level, so there's a bit more thought required to progress. However, I did *not* care for the static that eventually blocked out screens after awhile. If it was manually scripted in such a way that it imposed a consistent time limit, it would have been fine. Unfortunately, since it seems to affect screens randomly, you can find yourself failing a level in virtually no time at all, even though you haven't done anything really wrong yet. |
| Dec 14 21:04:00 | 29m 00s | Atticus VII | very polished and well presented, but also extremely unclear. I couldn't figure out what the little mail icon next to any of the character's portraits meant, the requirements for any given action on the ship are never defined, and I have no idea what benefit comes from fixing a module, nor do I know what causes a module to break. <br/>I'm afraid that this game was just a bit too confusing to really be engaging, but I do believe that there's something pretty nifty down there if you take the time to explain it a bit more carefully. |
| Dec 15 20:47:00 | 23h 43m | Life Goes On | I feel like the choices of path were really meaningless. There was no way of knowing (or even making an educated guess about) if anything different or unique would happen depending on the route you followed. |
| Dec 15 21:43:00 | 56m 00s | SIRTET | as a recovering Tetris addict, I was happy to find this game, although I did come across a few minor flaws. <br/>1) The "current" block should probably be above the "next" block, because that's how the majority of tetris games represent their incoming block lists and it's fairly unintuitive to have them flipped. <br/>2) The difficulty curve is, as far as I can tell, nonexistent. Even something as simple as introducing a basic time limit that grows more demanding as the player progresses would make this game a lot better. At the moment, though, placing your first block really feels no different from placing your hundredth block, because the challenge never grows. |
| Dec 16 01:25:00 | 3h 42m | Man on the Field | I really don't feel like pressing random buttons while hovering over a moving wound is a really great mechanical interpretation of a field surgeon's job. That said, it is pretty tough to invent brand new mechanics over such a brief development cycle, so I'll give you a pass on this one. <br/>The presentation was super polished, with wonderful pixel art, superb music, and a bit of dark humor that I really appreciated. |
| Dec 16 01:29:00 | 4m 00s | Tight Fight | really impressive! I love that the arena doesn't reset when you start over. Makes each new try feel just a little bit different, and it's cool to feel like you had an influence over the arena you fight on, as opposed to just letting a random number generator do all the work. <br/>I have to note, though, that my goal wasn't immediately obvious until I read the submission page. Maybe adding a couple of blinking arrows pointing at the hatches would help to make them a more obvious target? |
| Dec 16 01:39:00 | 10m 00s | Pit Lords | feels a bit dull to just pick some stats and let the computer dictate the entire battle for you. I also found there to be some bugginess to the character's animation when trying to select spear in the left hand and something else in the right. |
| Dec 16 01:47:00 | 8m 00s | Spacebank Heist | wow! I actually had a great time with this! I feel like there's a lot here that could be expanded upon if you intend to make a post-jam release of this game. There's already quite a bit of content in terms of enemies, and the bank is set up cleverly to allow for quite a few plans of attack/escape. <br/>My only complaint was that enemies seemed to know where you were at all times. Being able to sneak around and outflank enemies would be great fun, especially with the bomb to open up new routes that would get you behind your targets. |
| Dec 16 01:49:00 | 2m 00s | ROCKROCKET | the inputs didn't seem to work for me, so I can't speak to the gameplay. That said, the visuals and ambient sound was very impressive! |
| Dec 16 01:55:00 | 6m 00s | Avoid the Pushers | I found that in many of the worlds that were generated, pushers spawned in walls, and there were a number of cases where my destination appeared on the other side of a wall that I simply could not cross past. Additionally, not being able to move on diagonals felt weird. <br/>I don't want to leave you with only negative feedback, so I'll note that you did a good job introducing the game. A lot of LD games either fall back on the giant wall of text to explain their game, but breaking it up into sentences that are displayed one at a time makes the intro feel a little less daunting and easier to get into. |
| Dec 16 02:01:00 | 6m 00s | Concealed | I feel like this relies too heavily on luck. Even in the "easy" mode which gives the player a couple of revealed pegs to work with, there are usually far more possibilities to guess on than there are chances to succeed, meaning that the victory of the player comes down to just being lucky with what they chose. |
| Dec 16 02:56:00 | 55m 00s | Ball Room | this was surprisingly compelling. I saw it all the way through to all ten stars and had a great time doing so. The tiny map meant that screwing up never meant losing a ton of progress, and all the puzzles were just easy enough to piece together that they never felt frustrating, but just tough enough to actually be satisfying. An excellent entry, friend. Well done. |
| Dec 16 15:54:00 | 12h 58m | Escape or whatever | after grabbing the hand item, I couldn't quite figure out what to do next. Perhaps a little popup text explaining what the powerup does would have been useful. |
| Dec 16 16:01:00 | 7m 00s | Artful Dodger | excellent work! I love that you can lure the incoming enemies into asteroids to clear up the field of play a little bit. I don't think I've seen anything quite like that before, and it's a nice added layer of depth ontop of what would have otherwise been a fairly generic avoidance game. |
| Dec 16 16:04:00 | 3m 00s | Order Up! | for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to progress. My goals were very unclear, nothing I clicked on seemed to do anything, and I was hemorrhaging money from the start of the game. <br/>A bit of tutorial text at the beginning of the game would have really gone a long way, I feel. |
| Dec 16 16:05:00 | 1m 00s | Fadin | the Windows Link currently seems to be broken... |
| Dec 16 16:15:00 | 10m 00s | Angelfall | I've experienced the same problem as everyone else, but ran the source code in Game Maker and had a pretty good time. <br/>The particle effects and lasting bloodstains on the walls all work very nicely, and the game is pretty fun for the first minute or so. After that, though, I felt it to be a little repetitive, since no new enemy types show up and you never have to do anything besides move turn left/right and hammer away at the left mouse button. <br/>The idea of stances was really cool, but I feel like it fell flat in execution. I didn't really feel like any stance aside from the default one was really practical in any way, so I really left that feature alone. I also thought it was something of a missed opportunity not to have the character actually change their sprite slightly to reflect their battlestance. <br/>Finally, I really have to encourage you not to use comic sans if you can avoid it. It's considered by many to be one of the least professional fonts available, and very few people will take your work seriously if you use comic sans. |
| Dec 16 16:18:00 | 3m 00s | Two Man, One Screen | the four-directional shooting was pretty cool. That's usually kind of a rare thing for many platform shooters like these, I feel. The gameplay was overall fairly solid, but I feel like it would benefit from an increased spawn rate on weapon crates. I encountered a lot of scenarios where both my opponent and I were out of ammo and couldn't interact with each other, so we just had to wait patiently for the next weapon drop. |
| Dec 16 16:25:00 | 7m 00s | Arkan'em Up | I don't really think this changes up the gameplay of either pong or arkanoid as much as you were hoping it would. <br/>As a breakout game, this struggles with a very familiar problem - waiting. You spend more time hoping that your ball will land in an advantageous spot than you do actually getting it there. What's worse, if your ball gets onto the enemy side without your opponent getting their ball over to you, the game becomes even *more* boring, as you don't even have to worry about managing a ball on your side. It's just stuck over on the far end for the opponent to worry about. <br/>As a game of pong, I feel like this lacks a really critical feature - the ability to affect the trajectory of the ball based on where it hits your paddle. I was able to identify a very little bit of this in Arkan'em up, but not enough to be significant. Much of the strategy in pong comes from fooling your opponent into thinking you'll lead the ball one way, and then quickly shifting your paddle at the last second to send the ball flying in the opposite direction. That strategy isn't viable here, because the amount of variation that you can put on ball angle by using careful positioning is extremely limited, which cuts out a lot of the tactics and head-games from the pong element of the game. |
| Dec 16 16:31:00 | 6m 00s | Collided Worlds | I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. My goal is to just have the two worlds collide with each other? Is there any obstacle to that goal? <br/>This seems to be a two-player game, is there supposed to be some kind of role-playing happening outside of the game? If so, what have you done to encourage that role-playing? <br/>I really feel like this is far too simple, or at least far too poorly explained, to really be enjoyable. |
| Dec 16 16:46:00 | 15m 00s | Maze Race | okay, let me get the first criticism out of the way - this maze is WAAAY too big for a number of reasons. <br/>First of all, it's a significant eyestrain to have to find your tiny character on such an enormous landscape built out of sharply contrasting colors which are really harsh to look at. <br/>Second, there is just far too much content to expect a player to complete, especially in the brief five to ten minutes that many people try to burn through jam entries in. <br/>This problem of difficulty is made even harsher by the multiplayer component. I played this on my own (and had a rough time doing so) but made sure to test out how two characters could interact with each other. The element of bouncing wildly off of your opponents is an added layer of difficulty that I don't even want to think about having to deal with. <br/>Okay, criticisms out of the way, let me hit on the good stuff. <br/>Firstly, I liked the BGM. I think it would get repetitive after the thirty to forty minutes it might take to complete this game, but it's still a fun song. <br/>Second, the player bouncing is actually a good idea, just not in this particular setting. Many multiplayer games fail to let players directly interact with one another and feel the impact of each other's actions, and the bouncing is a simple and elegant solution to that shockingly common problem. <br/>Leaving character deaths persistent on screen is pretty cool. It lets you easily visualize choke points and feel real satisfaction when you clear them. <br/>Finally, the controls were smartly done for a multiplayer game. Many keyboards have a limit to how many inputs they will process at once, which can be a problem with local multiplayer games where upwards of four keys are being pressed at any given time. By setting a character in motion permanently after just one button press, the issue of overloading the keyboard and creating unresponsive controls is largely reduced. |
| Dec 29 16:00:00 | 311h 14m | A Game with Life and Death (Theatre Simulator) | visual novels aren't really my cup of tea, so I can't really give any strong praise or criticism to this game without being misinformed. That said, I can point out that it was a bit irritating that the arrow to advance to the next text box shifted location with every line of dialogue, which made it a little frustrating to advance the narrative. |