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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | hoqjed's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 9 04:01:00 | Tiny Square, Big Tower | NOOOOOOOOO!, I KILLED THE PINEAPPLE!!! as always, stellar humor and level design. i loved the hard way. <br/> <br/>ps. i died again in dark souls 2...like 4 times. one day... | |
| Dec 9 04:07:00 | 6m 00s | Lord Of the Dungeon | it's a gorgeous looking game. i had difficulty with the controls. when i'm moving to the sides, sometimes jumping would work and other times it wouldn't. in the second room, it's hard to notice some of the structures because they're so dark. <br/> <br/>i'm glad you're taking this beyond ludum dare, it definitely has potential. |
| Dec 9 04:15:00 | 8m 00s | Hex Defender | the visuals are nice and clean. i was confused what the defeat status was. a couple times i got defeat very quickly with the red hex still up and almost all white hexes still up. introducing new missiles at a slower pace would have helped me learn better, as right now it's very fast and confusing. |
| Dec 9 04:25:00 | 10m 00s | Cryo Storm | the graphics are great, especially the explosion effects. <br/> <br/>the game bugged out for me. a couple enemies spawned in wave one, then they disappeared. waves 2, 3, 4...up until 8 happened, but no enemies spawned during the waves. |
| Dec 9 04:28:00 | 3m 00s | Helga Kills Everything | i tried playing the web entry on kongregate, but all i get is a red screen. i didn't put any ratings, so i might check back later to see if it's working. |
| Dec 9 04:40:00 | 12m 00s | Attack of the cybernetic aliens | it's hard to see the bullets, and the controls were awkward (i agree with WASD to move), otherwise great job on finishing. |
| Dec 9 04:51:00 | 11m 00s | Fight, Because. | HOLY...CRAP!!! you guys did this in 72 hours?!?! alright alright, must compose myself. <br/> <br/>it's polished UP THE WAHZOO. the graphics are superb, and the AUDIO!! wow! i could listen to that music outside of the game too. the sound effects are fantastic. <br/> <br/>the controls are absolutely perfect, reminiscent of a link to the past. it has a great feel to it. dashing feels amazing, and thanks to limited health it doesn't feel overpowered either. <br/> <br/>the pacing is FANTASTIC. starts off slow, introducing new enemies and such, and gets harder over a good period of time. <br/> <br/>my one nitpick is that the player doesn't have enough invincibility frames after getting hit. i got hit by 3 tornadoes around the same time and lost a chunk of health. some more knockback on the player when they're hit would be nice too. <br/> <br/>this game, jesus...this is like 2-inches from being ready to sell. actually no, just sell this is as, it's DAMN GOOD. |
| Dec 9 20:19:00 | 15h 28m | Zombie City | This is surprisingly ambitious for a first time jam, great job guys! I liked the board game style approach, since it has a strategic feel because of the turn based nature. Of course, with the limited time it is apparent that not enough time was left at the end to balance the game properly. <br/> <br/>I found that most of my characters would completely destroy most zombies without a scratch. Though I did end up with one character who was knocked down to 5 or so might which grew tense near the end trying to "protect" him by navigating away from zombies to the helipad. <br/> <br/>I think aside from the balance issues though, I had an issue with how information was displayed after you end a turn. I enjoyed the card drawing aspect, but if you split up characters and sent each of them into a building... it wasn't very clear which cards were being drawn for which buildings. So that left me with quite a lot of detachment towards the 4 characters, as it hindered my ability to recognize when their stats were being changed. Since a lot can happen in between turns, figuring out the best ways to display information to users is really important. (but I definitely understand that the time limit cut into a lot of the time you guys could have used to polish that). <br/> <br/>This other thing goes back to what I just mentioned, but I apparently picked up all the vaccines without realizing it in the game. Having a vaccine count or something would have been nice in case someone misses information somehow. So yeah, I ended up exploring every single building/park/graveyard on the map haha. Then returning everyone to the helipad to be surprised that I must have not noticed picking up 3 of the 4 vaccines. <br/> <br/>Finally, I noticed a bug near the end where if you selected one character, and then selected a different one... you could move your currently selected character to the other character's potential movement squares. Which means you could essentially move a character with 1 speed to tiles they shouldn't have been able to reach. <br/> <br/>I'm sorry if all my criticisms give the impression I didn't enjoy the game, I did like it quite a bit! I think you guys did a really fantastic job considering how much you managed to pack into the game in such a limited time frame. The fact I could write up so much about the game (and still not even mention certain mechanics) goes to show that it has a lot of potential depth. <br/> <br/>- Dylan Gallardo |
| Dec 9 21:39:00 | 1h 20m | Try Saving Animals | I liked this concept, and the simplicity of it. Also creative use of the theme for sure, 5 stars in that department. The visuals were also very nice, clean, and felt appropriate for how the game felt. I thought the audio could have been a bit less "active", but in retrospect it also fit the game. <br/> <br/>There were a couple of issues however. I found trying to click on specific objects a bit difficult, as the surrounding objects and ones layered underneath tend to also be selected and tossed out. This can also work as an advantage, sometimes just clicking once and saving 4 animals in one swoop. But it all felt a bit too easy, and by the end it felt pointless to try to only click on the animals. <br/> <br/>That was mostly because the points rewarded for clicking an animal vastly outweighed any points that would be taken away by clicking anything else. After a while I found I could just click constantly in one spot an toss out nearly everything but still rack up tons of points. So the other objects probably needed to have higher penalties. <br/> <br/>Although I liked using spacebar to slow down the conveyor and the sounds associated with it, this mechanic also felt somewhat pointless by the end since holding down spacebar permanently wasn't penalized. Also after finding out what I mentioned previously about the point values I had no need to slow down the conveyor since I was tossing objects out of peoples luggage with little care (which was humorous, so extra stars in that department). <br/> <br/>Overall, this was a very clean and appealing game in terms of how it looked and felt. But it sort of dropped the ball in terms of providing interesting gameplay because the mechanics were easy to exploit and resulted in a lack of challenge. In order to remedy this, improve the precision of clicking certain objects, increase the point penalty for clicking "wrong" objects... and perhaps figure out a motivation for the player to not want to constantly keep the conveyor slowed down. <br/> <br/>I enjoyed your game and it has some very good things going for it, specifically in style and all the little things you did to polish the visuals, movement, and sounds associated with the conveyor. Great job on those. <br/> <br/>- Dylan Gallardo |
| Dec 10 03:13:00 | 5h 34m | Force Feedback | yes! great humor with this one. |
| Dec 10 03:16:00 | 3m 00s | Horde Mode(s) | nice music, and the graphics do what they're supposed to. killing enemies was tedious rather than engaging for me. there's so many, you shoot pretty slow, and they take multiple hits to die. |
| Dec 10 03:21:00 | 5m 00s | Elf Fight | That was a lot of snowballs. |
| Dec 10 03:28:00 | 7m 00s | Poltergeist | Very cool concept. To make it more interesting, it would be nice if there were also multiple items that she would go to that would comfort her when you scared her, but you could keep her away from them if you're quick enough to activate scary objects close to them. <br/> <br/>Nicely done. |
| Dec 10 22:48:00 | 19h 20m | Goblin Crown Fever | Graphics are pretty nice and the game is fairly engaging. Having only one life helps with this. Great job! |
| Dec 10 22:56:00 | 8m 00s | Vanishing Point | It took me about 5 tries to get used to the controls, then i managed to make it to 1.56x speed. <br/> <br/>The blue square that shows different slots to move to is unessessary, as all it did was confuse me in the beginning. I thought the blue squares was my character, and it confused me why it moved in the opposite direction i wanted it to. <br/> <br/>This is a cool game concept. I feel with some polish and testing it could absolutely be a fully fledged game. |
| Dec 10 23:08:00 | 12m 00s | An Icy Night In Snowman's Land | Simple, intuitive, just great. And very nice background music too. Great job. |
| Dec 10 23:16:00 | 8m 00s | THE MAZE | Wow. EXTREMELY polished. Great graphics and background theme. 2 sides to the maze adds nice variety. WASD controls don't seem to work but the arrows keys work fine. Fantastic job. |
| Dec 10 23:21:00 | 5m 00s | Mind Words | Nice concept. There seems to be a couple bugs. For words "screen -> is" I collected 0 where I should have collected 1, "a -> canvas" collected 1 where i should have gotten 2, "a -> game" collected 2 where i should have colllected 1. I think those are the only ones. |
| Dec 10 23:29:00 | 8m 00s | Press Enter | Damn good, simple, and original game. Fantastic polish and just a great concept. Great job. |
| Dec 10 23:34:00 | 5m 00s | ATTACK ON RADMARS | AWESOME. Gameplay, graphics, and audio are also superbly polished. Great concept and humor. |
| Dec 14 22:25:00 | 94h 51m | Filthy And Guilty | As some others have said already, it's a bit confusing why exactly certain actions work and lead to winning the game. I played and won twice, but I'm not entirely certain why I won on each occasion. <br/> <br/>I knew it had something to do with using specific characters (perhaps in a sequence) to soften up specific people so that you could get the middle guy to give in. It just seemed really vulnerable to guesswork, and players can do things by brute forcing their way through the game rather than thinking about why certain things work/don't work. <br/> <br/>It's a nice concept, very nice graphical style, intense mood... but the gameplay itself isn't terribly intuitive to figure out. I think that if there were a focus on less player controlled characters then some of the mechanics may have been more obvious for this size of game. 4 characters all at once is a bit... much to throw at someone at once while figuring everything else out. The same could actually go for how many people to interrogate... since having three people but only seemingly needing to interrogate two to win... seems like there's definitely some stuff that could have been cut to make things clearer. <br/> <br/>Try to focus on introducing mechanics to the player in a way that builds up rather than tries to do it all at once. But overall, good job! <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Dec 14 22:41:00 | 16m 00s | Paws of Fury | Hmm... not a fan of the click-fest angle, since it gets repetitive quickly. Aside from that though, there were a couple of things that could have used some polishing. <br/> <br/>Being able to right-click to push more seemed.... questionable, since it brings up the right-click window also... which is odd and probably should have been avoided since it can cause issues. (someone right-clicking, then accidentally hitting "save image as"), which brings up the save dialogue box and ahhhhh, it's just a messy implementation for such a simple game. <br/> <br/>The only other thing that may have been nice is to have some sort of splash when you push the cat to the other side, maybe animations for a cat walking/pushing. Just some additional visual indicators. <br/> <br/>Maybe also cut out some of the cats, since the game is already fairly repetitive, I'd say having half the amount of opponents would be more suitable to the pacing of the game. |
| Dec 14 23:00:00 | 19m 00s | O-Inari Origami | Wonderful visuals and very innovative mechanics. I loved the take on the theme, even though I suppose "entire game" counts as each individual level in this case. <br/> <br/>As much as I loved the mechanics conceptually, it grew a bit tiresome after a while pulling at each corner to figure out which ones would lead me to building pathways to the goal. But it's really clever, and I think this idea of having a platformer tied into the paper-folding mechanic could be explored much further. <br/> <br/>Really, really great job coming up with such an interesting concept in such a limited amount of time. |
| Dec 14 23:15:00 | 15m 00s | INtire | Wow, this game sounds quite a lot different than I imagined from the images. Visually it's got this really clean aesthetic, and then the 8-bit chiptune and goat sounds start playing haha. <br/> <br/>I ended up liking the game, though the character's jump and goat throwing seemed a bit too floaty to me. The spider's hitboxes were also a bit unclear, since their legs reach out really far... it makes them seem much larger than they really are. <br/> <br/>Overall nice job, it's lighthearted and pretty to look at. Good use of the theme also. |
| Dec 14 23:42:00 | 27m 00s | Watch your head! | I liked the visuals of the game, the isometric clean style is very appealing. But I think the game has some definite kinks that hold it back from being straightforward to play. <br/> <br/>First is the character positioning and the shadow. Shadows, normally when used in this manner, help the player understand their location in the world space. But here they end up making it more complicated to figure out as the shadow tends to show even if another platform should be covering it. It also may be somewhat off-centered, and the player seems to get off-centered also... which doesn't help. Those problems make it really difficult to figure out what tile you're on... which is something that is really vital to this kind of game. <br/> <br/>Aside from that, I think the world's transition animation wasn't playing correctly for me... as the transition wasn't like it is in the gif in the game's images. It sort of pops in, like the game skipped some frames in the transition or something. <br/> <br/>I liked the approach to the visuals and what this could have been. It seems like this game just needs a couple of bugs fixed so that those graphical problems don't happen with the player's shadow and and whatnot. |
| Dec 15 00:39:00 | 57m 00s | The Second Thought or Please, Don't Touch Anything | Really fantastic job on this. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but the way things are put together it creates a really wonderful atmosphere. I played the postjam update btw. <br/> <br/>First off, I like how things are just difficult enough to figure out so that you're about to give up... but then you do a sequence right and something new to play with pops up. It's a really wonderfully rewarding experience fiddling around with things and being rewarded with new ways to interact with the game because of it. <br/> <br/>The music and sounds create a really nice layer of immersion, though I did find the red button sound to be somewhat annoying after a while. But it's forgivable. The music especially is actually really nice to just listen to... I've got the game running in the background and it's lovely. <br/> <br/>The visuals were also really nicely handled, and adding a little image for every type of ending was a nice touch. Everything just really meshes well with itself. <br/> <br/>I ended up finding 6 of the endings myself before giving it a break. But I'm leaving the game very satisfied, rather than frustrated or bored. Also, nice use of the theme. Great job guys, it's a really nice little compact experience. |
| Dec 15 01:19:00 | 40m 00s | Leaving | This was fairly nice overall, though breaking the rocks and doing things in general gets tedious after a while. I ended up beating the game, though about 3/4 way through I was feeling discouraged and just powered through it to the end. So while I did finish, I think it overstayed its welcome and went on a bit too long. <br/> <br/>I liked how the game expected you to learn everything by experimenting and talking to the characters. It was nice that there weren't any "wrong" ways to go about it, and even though the rock spawning made me think something was time sensitive at first, I learned I could take my time and chat with the locals. <br/> <br/>The visuals were really well done, very polished, clean animations. The audio was also pretty nice, and the moment the music kicked in was really refreshing and encouraged me to keep playing... it was interesting it had a delayed entrance. <br/> <br/>Some small bugs, there was one rock I couldn't smash for some reason (you could walk through it though so no harm done). Also there was one point in dialogue where I had the pink blob propaganda talk to the blue blob (I think his name was lucien). And he said "lucien told me... blah blah", when his own name was lucien. <br/> <br/>Pretty nice game overall, it just dragged on a bit long. |
| Dec 15 02:17:00 | 58m 00s | The Aardvark and the Manatee | A pleasant experience overall. Sort of funny how the aardvark just takes advantage of the manatee's hard work. <br/> <br/>It's simple, easy enough to pick up and understand (though it took me a minute to learn the manatee was defending the food). It's also very beautiful in regards to the artwork and visuals. It works well overall, but I feel like there's something lacking and I grew discouraged after a while when I realized it was a seemingly endless cycle. So my manatee lost its will to continue defending the fruit and the aardvark ran out of food :( |
| Dec 19 08:57:00 | 102h 40m | Terra | Awesome usage of the rock paper scissors concept, it's nice planning what you'll do according to the ai's last move... so it feels somewhat more strategic than dumb luck. |
| Dec 19 09:11:00 | 14m 00s | Snow Wars | Some hints towards the controls and instructions would have been nice to have in there. It was somewhat difficult to figure out exactly what needed to be done without even knowing if this was a mouse based game, if it used the keyboard at all, what you need to click on etc. <br/> <br/>Since all the images and icons are static (even when you hover over them) it's difficult to tell what exactly you're able to click on or what is expected to be used. I eventually figured most things out, but it took a lot of trial and error, clicking, and clicking again. <br/> <br/>After figuring the game out a bit one thing that bugged me was that when you selected a unit to attack something (to just see if it possibly could attack), and nothing was in range, that unit couldn't be used anymore. This isn't really ideal since early players won't know what their move radius or attack area is at all, so it's punishing to lose a turn like that... especially when each unit's moves are pretty significant. <br/> <br/>Mostly you guys just need to work on communicating to the player how to interact with the game (and it doesn't need to be heavy handed with tons of text). Simple things like, when the mouse is hovering over the button, make it seem highlighted... same thing goes for selecting units and many other areas. Find ways to teach the player what to do, and if something is just really complicated then fall back on text explanations to give the player an idea of how to play. |
| Dec 19 09:13:00 | 2m 00s | Testsubmission | Eh... please don't submit stuff like this. If too many people do this just to vote on games it'll clutter the Ludum Dare page with tons of these. |
| Dec 19 09:30:00 | 17m 00s | Survive the Attack | Kind of surprised to see you didn't opt to be rated on the audio, the music was fitting, even if it doesn't have accompanying sounds of gunfire and whatnot. <br/> <br/>I enjoyed this, it was simple, but a pretty interesting take on the tower defense-ish vibe. Nice to have the variation of the 4 different troops, though I didn't feel the need to move them around toooo terribly often. They all seemed to handle the varieties of ants pretty well, the main differences being their range and shot speed. <br/> <br/>The clean aesthetic made it pretty simple to look around and figure out what all the important stuff was. Though the one thing that was interesting was the choice to have a tile they have to go to stock back up on ammo. I like having it as a separate tile since you take notice when they need to move to it, though it does prove to be a very slight annoyance when you want to move someone and they're somewhere in the motion of resupplying. (since you tend to want to click on their actual position in space rather than the tile they're supposed to be at). <br/> <br/>I liked everything though, good job on this. |
| Dec 19 09:43:00 | 13m 00s | Kiwi | Interesting concept, but it has a huge flaw in that when you want to move to another side... you normally have to get around the corner cannons. Since there's no real warning with when they're going to fire, it's very easy to get hit just by a corner cannon, much less all the other ones firing at the same time. <br/> <br/>The implementation just seems a bit... sloppy I suppose. All of the cannons seem sort of haphazardly thrown in to make the game more difficult... but it comes at the price of making that difficulty feel really cheap. <br/> <br/>Some nice things may have been giving the cannons a "warming up" animation, so you can identify when they are about to fire. Cutting down on the number of static cannons in the game and adding the possibility for them to move, so that they still can potentially shoot anywhere... it's just less all at once. This could be introduced slowly so that they don't move much at first and get more intense at time progresses. |
| Dec 19 10:04:00 | 21m 00s | Trivial Travails | Awesome I won hehe. The trivia questions tend to repeat quite often (though I know it's because of the random nature). Excluding cards as they are picked up from the random question list would have been a good move so you don't get the same questions unless you go through all of them first. <br/> <br/>I found the gate unlocking to be confusing... as I'm still not entirely sure why they all seemed to unlock in one turn... and I wasn't quite sure how many of each color was needed for each gate. <br/> <br/>I escaped the yeti just in time, he would have eaten me if I had taken one more turn. I thought it was odd he had such a crazy amount of moves each turn. Maybe he was "rolling dice" too, but he was totally cheating, home field advantage for him. <br/> <br/>I found the music was a bit intrusive, especially for a thinking question game. The frequent high chimes in the tune are just bound to eventually wear down on players over time. Good call on the sound button, though I tend to like having audio personally, even if it's distracting me hehe. <br/> <br/>I did like the idea of rolling dice and treating it like a board game though. It felt a little more "classic" than some of the other entries I've seen doing similar stuff, in a way that invokes some nostalgia for me. It feels like one of the games that would have been on my family's computer from the early 90's. Like SkiFree, maybe it's the music or the board game aspect... or the snowman theme that creates that nostalgia. |
| Dec 19 20:13:00 | 10h 09m | birdsong | Stellar presentation, and the fish-eye effect is a really nice twist to see on the theme. It's interesting being able to see the whole map but only really being able to comprehend it if you stay still and look closely at the surrounding area. It creates this really nice focus on the immediate area while keeping the player aware of their greater surroundings. <br/> <br/>The game itself is well crafted, sort of standard, but everything is solid and helps to reinforce the main fish-eye attraction. One thing though, I was under the impression for a while that after building a nest you had to press the "s" key to activate it as a spawn point due to the s below each save point. I think a non-letter symbol would be a nice substitute so that it isn't confused as a key that requires to be pressed. Aside from that I found everything intuitive and straightforward to pick up and understand. |
| Dec 19 20:33:00 | 20m 00s | JumpBall | Played it solo with a controller. I thought the idea was interesting, and it's definitely something that could be expanded on more. <br/> <br/>It was somewhat difficult to intentionally hit the ball correctly, having that auto-target in there was a nice touch and probably helped a great deal though. Perhaps the ball was a bit too sensitive, since touching it sends it flying all over the place... creating a nice bit of chaos... but at the same time making things a bit haphazard. <br/> <br/>The idea of limiting the player to jumps was a cool avenue to explore, though that in addition to the overly sensitive ball creates a loss of control which I found to be somewhat discouraging. <br/> <br/>I didn't mind the lack of direction, I ended up trying to only score in the right goal since it made a more positive sound. |
| Dec 21 20:51:00 | 48h 18m | Nauty Sub | The main thing that threw me off at first (only on the first run) was the lack of indication of the player shots "hitting" things. I didn't know at first that the rocks were able to be destroyed, mostly just because they didn't react to the first couple shots. <br/> <br/>The atmosphere and general visuals for the game were really well done however, and the impression of the submarine having light was nice. |
| Dec 21 21:05:00 | 14m 00s | Alfred Bonzo | I really enjoyed the music playing in the background, though the actual game sounds were a bit too loud in contrast. <br/> <br/>It took me a little bit to figure out that I was defending the box/area rather than trying to move it around. There was also a glitch after you lose where the game seems to get stuck somewhere between the game over screen transition. It happened twice out of like 6 replays... so it wasn't just a minor inconvenience since it happened fairly often. <br/> <br/>The movement was clean and I liked how things reacted to the ground pound move. Though I felt very limited very quickly with that attack since the enemies pour in really fast. <br/> <br/>The art was also nice and simple, easy to distinguish things from each other. Though the giant grid bars surrounding the main tile confuse me, and seem somewhat unnecessary since you never travel out of your main area. |
| Dec 21 21:28:00 | 23m 00s | Get Out | Even though there isn't a ton of content, you've got an eye for putting together visuals and creating an atmosphere in a short amount of time. <br/> <br/>Just keep working at it and you'll keep building off of your previous knowledge. This is very much reminiscent of "Lone Survivor" and a couple of other games that have come out recently with the horror-esq sidescroller approach. Basically, even though this wasn't "finished", I think you showed you'll be able to handle yourself whenever you get more experience. <br/> <br/>Also, good job with the dialogue at the end to signify the game wasn't complete. I really liked how that was incorporated in the game itself. It would have been nice to be able to move afterwards though, since I still sort of wanted to look around at what you did. (ended up restarting). <br/> <br/>Oh also, the music was fitting for the game up until it brings in the more aggressive guitar parts. It's still very fitting during the early portions though, even though it's an older piece of yours. <br/> <br/>See you next Ludum Dare! And keep up the good work! I'd be interested to see what you can do when you balance the amount of visual effort with the game design portion. |
| Dec 21 21:49:00 | 21m 00s | Alex Takes a Test | Wow, this was surprisingly engaging. The audio and visuals while simple, had a very polished look. But it wasn't even just the visuals or audio that made this excellent, it was how it was all wrapped in the mysterious mechanics also. The gameplay was similar to the rest of the game... simple, but mysterious. <br/> <br/>I did get to the end, but the only real negative about that was I wasn't entirely sure why I successfully completed the tv puzzle. I think I got all the faces to be content... not happy or sad, but somewhere in the middle... but the game jumped along too quickly to the end for me to observe my own successful action. <br/> <br/>I really enjoyed the free-fall punishment for failing the tv puzzle. It was a very fine balance between being a fair punishment (in that it took you away from the main puzzle) while also being intense and polished in its own right. <br/> <br/>Overall, very, very nice job on this all around. I'm not entirely sure the significance or meaning behind this, but the game carries its weight elsewhere so that the obscurity of it is acceptable and adds intrigue rather than frustration or pretension. |
| Dec 21 22:10:00 | 21m 00s | Centipede | Technically speaking, there is an objective, which is to not be hit by one of the centipede squares... since it kicks you back to start. I did enjoy the lack of score, since it allows the player to see the game mechanics as they really are. <br/> <br/>This was very clean, and while it isn't very innovative, it does show promise since you stripped away things and revealed the game for what it truly is. I appreciate that "honesty" in the design, and it helps me sympathize with the lack of interesting interaction. <br/> <br/>Since it does actually have an objective (don't get hit), and a way to avoid that (shoot blocks), there are ways to exploit the game fairly easily due to a design choice. Since the "bullet" isn't consumed or destroyed on impact, you can clear out entire rows of blocks by sitting in one spot (ideally one of the spawning sides) and shooting repeatedly. Also since you can shoot as fast as you tap space, there are very little limitations to encourage players from exploiting the obvious. <br/> <br/>Of course, this leads to an underwhelming experience because the mechanics don't end up being that interesting to interact with. The endless nature of the game compacts this and makes any action the player decides to take feel irrelevant... whether they destroy blocks or infinitely restart the same sequence over and over due to their pacifism. <br/> <br/>Oddly enough, I still felt compelled to write up all these criticisms even though it's fairly obvious where the game is lacking. I think it goes back to that honesty in the design... and how you didn't make any attempts to increase the longevity of the game with pointless score-keeping. In the future it could be good to keep this in mind, and to explore game mechanics with as little additional clutter as possible. Keep up the honest work. |
| Dec 21 22:25:00 | 15m 00s | a TV Show or a One Screen Game | Excellent job on this, and a very creative approach to the theme. I really liked the overall concept of needing to balance out the channels with family interests so that you can bring them together. It's pretty well executed for the time limit also. <br/> <br/>The transitions that characters showed went a long way to help determine what programs would work for the different members. I also liked the turn-based aspect, and how it became more of a puzzle than a real-time juggling act. <br/> <br/>Great job on the visuals also. Though I tend to dislike extra screen clutter that isn't completely relevant to the game's mechanics, I appreciate how much work went into this visually in such little time. The sound was also handled very well, coming up with audio for each channel I can imagine was... difficult. <br/> <br/>This whole project just has a really nice charm to it. Excellent job on nearly all aspects of this entry. |
| Dec 21 22:56:00 | 31m 00s | Shots In The Dark | You really shouldn't be so hard on yourself about the graphics, Unity's lighting engine carries most of the weight here anyway and does a good job of making it look polished. <br/> <br/>The idea itself is creative, and I think it was implemented somewhat well-ish but obviously could be taken much further. <br/> <br/>The area that really needed the most work was the audio. Really, don't underestimate how powerful and important audio can be to really create an experience. The music in my perspective wasn't a great choice and seems like an afterthought. It doesn't match the dark atmosphere of the game and picking something that was more somber could have helped a great deal. I think this game's world would actually feel very good without music and relying more on atmospheric sounds. Having footsteps, a gunshot sound, ricochet sounds, etc and having a great deal of reverb (echo) applied to each one would have really created a nice claustrophobic atmosphere for this. <br/> <br/>You had a really nice direction and concept here, so don't knock yourself down too much about this entry. I think you should spend a little more time adding in some quality sound and making small changes to gameplay to really do your idea justice. If you revise it some, feel free to send me a link to check it out again and I'll give you my thoughts on it. You can find me on twitter as @CriticalMammal. |
| Dec 21 23:27:00 | 31m 00s | Pushy Blockbuster | It's definitely interesting mostly due to the idea of rotating things to get them to fall the direction you want. Very cool and novel concept, though the blocks falling upwards was a bit of an odd choice to me. I think that may have thrown me off a bit in the beginning. <br/> <br/>I found it somewhat hard to intentionally match up 4 squares. Sometimes I would do it intentionally, but most of the time it was blind luck. This may have mostly been due to the game's pace starting out fairly intense from the get-go, which means I never had a point early on where I only had to focus on a couple of blocks. The block spawning can sometimes screw you over also, reinforcing the blind luck since they seem to be able to pop up anywhere on screen as long as it isn't currently filled. I think I only really noticed this one main time, where I had a couple of blocks falling where I wanted and some random yellow block spawned between a potential match I had lined up. <br/> <br/>The graphics were fine, though having that side panel slide out could have been nice to give more screen-space and be less of a distraction. The audio was somewhat similar, where the bg music was fine but could be distracting to some. <br/> <br/>Clever idea, I think the main improvement would be to have some more balanced pacing (specifically in the intro), so the player can adjust to how the game works. Also working on spawning blocks in a non-obtrusive manner. Aside from those things it's a very solid concept and implementation. Great job for a compo entry! |
| Dec 21 23:35:00 | 8m 00s | Sea King Hunter | Nice job on this! The graphics were surprisingly well polished. The movement was also intuitive and simple to pick up and understand. I've seen a couple of other entries that share a similar approach to being able to walk around the borders and some of them become difficult to control when inverted. <br/> <br/>I also liked that you could change your direction mid-air. That wasn't something I expected and felt like a very valuable addition to the game. <br/> <br/>After a couple of tries I got past the first phase of the sea king, but didn't survive much longer past that. <br/> <br/>It seems simple, but you guys did a good job creating a nice polished experience that is more difficult than it seems to be at first. |
| Dec 23 00:36:00 | 25h 01m | HOB | It did get quite repetitive after a while, but the concept kept me around playing longer than I expected. I liked that I actually was somewhat fearful of the creature after it transformed for the first time. It made me wonder what would happen if I didn't love it... would it eat us? Not knowing encouraged me to keep it very satisfied haha. <br/> <br/>I also noticed how as it kept transforming the food and water drained pretty quick, nice touch to allow the gameplay difficulty to increase over time. <br/> <br/>I ended up quitting after two or three transformations? Things started to look bad after the supplies were running low and I was getting a bit drained from the repetition. |
| Dec 24 01:27:00 | 24h 51m | Follow the screen | It's an interesting concept, though I'm not a fan of unlocking things by waiting on points to accumulate. Though figuring out words and typing them makes it less of a waiting game, it still uses a lot of intentional obfuscation to hinder the player's ability to figure things out in sort of cheap ways. <br/> <br/>I guess what I mean is, turning the display on and off and blurring the text seems like a really cheap way to add difficulty to a game. It's also not as rewarding to figure things out because typing the words themselves isn't engaging as they seem to be randomly selected. Meaning they aren't tied to each other in any way, and lose their intrigue because the users realize that it's all a bit... meaningless. <br/> <br/>It mostly just falls a bit flat in terms of interesting interaction. I never felt like I really figured anything out for myself, I was rewarded and given a pat on the back for... not really doing much... waiting... reading text and typing it. It all felt like a hollow victory. <br/> <br/>I think in order to improve that, abandoning the pay-gates and constantly increasing point rewards would be good so you reward players for what they do (rather than what they don't do). Interaction with the tv could be a bit more dynamic... perhaps move antenna to clear static?, change channels, things that require the player to be more involved with figuring out what the tv is displaying. Then finally, figuring out what to do to make typing the words themselves more interesting. Perhaps rather than a single word, they are constructing an entire sentence... and each word they find on the tv gets them closer to being able to guess what the whole sentence is? There are a number of ways to tackle each of these mechanics and the only way to find out if they're interesting or not is to test them. |
| Dec 25 04:12:00 | 26h 45m | Labyrinth | Really superb job on this, there are a number of things that really stood out to me while playing. <br/> <br/>I don't normally mind 8-bit/9-bit music but it does wear on me after a while depending on how it's arranged. While the first track was running I was thinking to myself, gee, this music is starting to get a bit abrasive on my ears. Just a few moments later I completed a level and the second track kicked in. I started to smile because it felt like you perfectly anticipated when it'd be appropriate to change the audio. <br/> <br/>The level transitions are pretty stellar also, and just really helped make everything chug along at a smooth pace. I get what you were going for with them, and it would have been an incredible match for the theme if the level pieces were being rearranged without needing to pull in/push out extra parts. But yeah, that would have made the level design a pretty ridiculous task for the timeline. Good job nonetheless on coming up with that interpretation of the theme and implementing it visually. <br/> <br/>The level design itself was pretty solid. Even though there were a couple of different mechanics being introduced all along you did a good job introducing each one so that there wasn't any confusion about how things worked. I'd imagine there are a lot of potential ways to arrange all those mechanics together to create some devilish puzzles. I liked the interaction between a couple of them specifically. There was stuff I didn't expect like seeing a spinning blade trigger a switch, or having platforms block the wind fans from pushing you upwards. Some good interplay between the mechanics there. <br/> <br/>In the beginning I did die in a spike pit and it spawned me a couple of times back in the pit... which creates this pretty overwhelming audio/visual strobe feeling from the repetition. But it's more than forgivable, and as I played I generally found the spawn decisions to be fair. If there were limited lives or something it would have been a bigger issue but luckily that's not the case. <br/> <br/>Also, nice touch at the end displaying everything in-game. Another one of those things that made me smile to myself because it was just a nice sort of way to end it. It provides a small amount of really loose and carefree interaction at the end, and tapers things off nicely rather than an abrupt cut to black credits approach. |
| Dec 25 18:26:00 | 14h 14m | Orion | Really nicely built atmosphere and I like the brief feeling of confidence it gave me when you're tasked to turn a couple of switches on in a row. <br/> <br/>Sort of makes you feel like you have all of this vast experience because you're THAT pilot you see in movies that flips a couple of switches effortlessly to get a ship going. And then the countdown sequence started, and all sorts of doubt went through my mind. "I'm definitely not qualified for this, I was just following on screen instructions... I'VE ONLY DONE THIS IN VR TRAINING LET ME OUT". Then everything is okay because the launch ended up going alright, confidence restored. <br/> <br/>I think the main thing that did end up taking away from my enjoyment was how direct and controlled the whole experience was. The only part that I truly felt like I had direct control over was the pitch, everything else I turned on or off because of the plainly obvious instructions. There wasn't any experimentation, I never really felt like I learned how to do anything or that I had to learn in the first place. The game led me with a carrot at the end of a stick the whole time, and even if I wanted to try to flip some other buttons on/off I couldn't. I can't, say, turn the engine off mid-flight like an idiot, or turn the radio off and pretend I'm going AWOL. It's just not allowed and that really breaks me from the experience. <br/> <br/>Another bit of criticism was how the game ends (both when you succeed or fail). If you try to crash, you get this really sudden and static "game over" screen. It was just way too sudden, and a quick fade to black/white with a crash sound would have probably gone a long way to help with the consistency of the rest of the game. Actually even just a slow fade to black as you enter the fail state would have been a pretty effective transition by itself (then fade the game over screen in). <br/>The "win" screen was pretty much the same, a smoother transition would have gone a long way to help reinforce the mood of the rest of the game. Of course, I understand that stuff didn't make it because of time constraints. It was just sort of disappointing to leave such an atmospheric experience on a flat note. <br/> <br/>Overall, it's a really nice atmospheric experience which is excellent for Ludum Dare. 5 stars in graphics, audio and mood. But it sort of drops the ball a bit as an engaging interactive experience, so that aspect would need to be addressed more if you continue work on this. |
| Dec 27 05:28:00 | 35h 02m | Cultural Influences | Well, I have to say this didn't do a whole lot for me. It's sort of interesting to make something that's almost entirely composed of pop culture references, but there didn't seem to be an effort to connect them in any way. This makes the whole thing really disjointed, and makes it feel pretty hollow since it doesn't seem to really have an interest in creating a dialogue about anything in particular. <br/> <br/>The lack of interaction really cripples this quite a bit. It's not so much the idea that in order for it to be a "game" you need "game stuff" like enemies, platforms, princesses, whatever. It's the feeling I get that you wanted to represent all the references with audio and images FIRST, and then figure out how the player was going to see all of those things. Since the gameplay's purpose is only to get the character from scene A to B, it's essentially about as interactive as a slideshow presentation. <br/> <br/>Since the interaction is a really important aspect to an interactive experience, I wanted to elaborate on it a bit more with an example. In the Matrix reference (red plant or blue plant), you are forced to take BOTH plants to continue. You're (possibly unintentionally) conveying with the game mechanics a paradox, and it contradicts the film reference completely. Now, that's actually kind of interesting, but the whole game plays out that way (enter scene, collect/move to X thing, next scene). Not having commentary on it also invalidates the notion that the lack of choice meant anything. You can sort of see where I'm coming from when I say how important the interaction portion is in games. Just like any other medium, you can communicate ideas with a game; except unlike other mediums you can do it with interaction. <br/> <br/>The audio itself here isn't bad. The narration itself was good, but the content was lacking somewhat. Each scene and it's commentary was completely separate to each other, so it didn't flow well from one to the next. In addition, there are many occasions where the narration plays over itself if you trigger certain things too early. A couple ways to handle that would have been to wait to play the next audio when the others have finished, cutting off the previous narration and playing the next, or spacing things in the game so that the player is less likely to hit multiple triggers simultaneously. <br/> <br/>The art seemed to be intentionally embrace it's weakness, so I won't go into that too much. I suppose it matches the mood of the game, since it's sort of lighthearted. <br/> <br/>Overall, the game has a hard time meshing with itself. It often seems to randomly pull references out of nowhere for no real reason aside from the fact that they're references to things. It's lighthearted and quirky sure, but it never really finds its own voice because it's too preoccupied reminding you of other things. |
| Dec 27 05:46:00 | 18m 00s | Laundry Day | I found it interesting how sometimes a compelling narrative would be revealed through the phone/items every once in a while. I liked that approach and even though the game can be random it felt personal at times. <br/> <br/>I was wondering where exactly those clothes were coming from however. I could swear I was just washing the same ones over and over haha. <br/> <br/>Nice job on the audio too, everything was perfectly mundane. Matched the setting pretty well. |
| Dec 29 22:21:00 | 64h 35m | Game of the Probability Goose | Huh actually a pretty interesting concept considering quite a bit relies on luck... but it still feels very strategic. So great job on balancing those aspects so it doesn't feel like you've been cheated by the game's random properties. <br/> <br/>I played it solo against a single bot and it beat me haha. I was sort of disappointed halfway through because the bot was a solid 15 or so spaces ahead of me, but I was really surprised to see how the end of the board worked (and it was a fantastic design choice to prevent someone from wanting to quit because someone is ahead). This was pretty polished overall, the game and its graphics were both solid and clean. It seemed pretty well thought out for a compo entry. |