Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD32 → Feedback comment stats → Andy Gainey
Feedback comments for LD32
Andy Gainey's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Andy Gainey's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 21 04:40:00 | Speed Smash - Jam Edition | Controls were hard to figure out; I kind of managed to make a few things I could walk on, but was too frustrated by the limited ammo, really bad lag, crazy colors, and my tendency to fall off into the infinite abyss. I might have stuck with it a bit longer, but I didn't even know where I was suppose to try to get to by building stuff; nothing that I saw drew my curiosity. | |
| Apr 21 04:55:00 | 15m 00s | Bloomp Purple | Very good job! I got a little frustrated on at a few moments, and almost quit, but the game kept me playing long enough to make it through all the levels. <br/> <br/>I never ended up needing the wooden statue; I used the car as a weight before I discovered the statue existed. Tried to use the statue at the very end when the spikes descended into the water, but was disappointed to find out that it didn't float, so I simply had to restart the level. <br/> <br/>Controls felt a little stiff, but not so bad that I couldn't do what I need to do. <br/> <br/>The variety of "weapons" was fun. Though the fun was lessened when I had to micromanage three different weapons in a short period of time to get through a spot. But that's just because that's not my preferred style of play. |
| Apr 21 05:06:00 | 11m 00s | Towel Boy | Couldn't tell if I was accomplishing anything when I was just making people jump rather than sail off smoking, and had a hard time figuring out if there was any particular timing that would give me a good success rate at the latter. <br/> <br/>I also lost on some levels without any clue as to why. Especially on levels where the screen was fixed (no where to go left or right) and I filled the green bar all the way well before time was up. <br/> <br/>Level selection was cool, once I figured out what it was. :-) |
| Apr 21 05:23:00 | 17m 00s | Daunting Disorientation | Well, I'm lost alright! No matter which direction I wandered (diagonal was faster, by the way, due to not dividing by square root of 2), I never found anything. The friendly animals gave me something blue when my dog attacked them, but I don't know what that was for. (<continues playing> Ah, experience, I see.) My lantern always ran out of oil well before I found anything interesting. When it restarts me, it seems to be already pitch black much of the time, and my lantern doesn't even last a single night. <br/> <br/><continues playing> Well, I finally found the cabin. But got frustrated by how easily this dude keeps getting lost every single day. :-) Being lost without any clear idea of a strategy I could employ to resolve my problem was not particularly fun, unfortunately. |
| Apr 21 05:31:00 | 8m 00s | Hula Fighter | Heh, pretty goofy. Not much to do in terms of gameplay, though. It appears that the direction of the hula toss is dependent upon the direction you use to start dancing, so you have to make your decision of direction before you have the relevant information. And once the decision has been made, you're locked in. But the opponents also seem to always alternate between left and right, so it becomes a trivial decision in the end. Or I suppose you could just spam left/right as quickly as possible. My fingers didn't feel like doing that tonight, so I didn't find out how effective that strategy would be. |
| Apr 21 15:19:00 | 9h 48m | Color Blind | Not too bad for such a short period of time. Kudos for trying a second time after the first idea fell through; I know that can be discouraging. <br/> <br/>I did have a hard time telling if the color matching was actually doing anything. I seemed to have plenty of success just staying one color (black in this case) and firing at the big blob of enemies. They'd slowly die regardless of their color, and trying to match their color didn't seem to increase that rate any. <br/> <br/>The fact that all enemies move at the same speed and with the same basic AI while the player character moves faster meant that all the enemies turned into a mostly harmless blob that was easily avoidable. <br/> <br/>Eventually my down key got stuck, and I couldn't move off of the lower boundary, so I died. |
| Apr 21 15:29:00 | 10m 00s | Brute Force Commander | Creative interface style, though it quickly became so irritating in practice that I gave up. :-( Typing the enemy's 3-character code wasn't the worst. Having to hit three separate keys to simply move a bit was too much though. Maybe a compromise where movement is achieved just by pressing WASD once, but it only applys on the frame when the key is pressed. So if you want to move up a bunch, you still have to hit W multiple times, once for each bit of thrust. The force multiplier could slowly ramp up if the player is repeatedly hitting the same direction quickly. |
| Apr 21 15:45:00 | 16m 00s | Behind the Fence | I gave it a shot, made it through to the end, but the commas and phrasing produced a rhythm that I found to be rather laborious, filled with too many pauses. But maybe my mind simply isn't in a poetic mood at the moment; it is a rather subjective affair. <br/> <br/>The ambient sounds upon beginning particular scenes was a nice touch, though. |
| Apr 21 15:54:00 | 9m 00s | ldds | Tilling I could do. I tried planting, but I couldn't tell what I was holding, or if anything got planted. Usually I'd just see either nothing, or an apple drop on the ground. Once I saw a tree grow after a few seconds, but that was a surprise since I hadn't seen anything happen when I tried to interact with the tilled ground. <br/> <br/>None of my attacks seemed to have any effect. Not sure if I wasn't close enough, or just needed to attack more. <br/> <br/>And the controls had some glitches. For example, if I was holding both W and D and therefore moving up and to the right, and then I released W, I would continue moving diagonally, instead of heading directly to the right. This made it hard for me to feel like I was confidently in control of the avatar. |
| Apr 21 16:31:00 | 37m 00s | Game Project Warrior | I wish I could make $50,000 in a month pumping out tiny adventures. :-) <br/> <br/>There was certainly a mood of urgency and profit over quality. Deadlines often seemed to be unreachable. But the lack of a pause except when selecting the next project was the biggest cause of that mood. Interesting effect, but not fun. As a management sim, I wanted to spend time looking over project and worker stats so that I could match things up the best, but I barely had the time to do so. It turned into more of a memory and reflexes game than a management sim. Not sure if that was the intended effect. <br/> <br/>I also noticed that quality quit going up once the task was complete. Would be a nice effect if a worker who had nothing else to do could continue to improve quality (still limited by skill, of course) even after finishing the task overall. <br/> <br/>It also felt like project complexity was influenced most strongly by number of employees. I think it might be better to base it on some other stat (or combination of stats), such as money in the bank, or total revenue earned thus far before expenses. That way, hiring more people will be the natural gameplay choice of being presented with bigger projects, rather than the other way around. That way, the game will lead the player to a degree, rather than the player having to completely lead the game toward greater complexity. |
| Apr 21 20:12:00 | 3h 41m | SuperSwapGun | Pretty cool. Has a lot of potential for interesting puzzles if you were to add larger levels and vertical movement. Especially if you need to swap one object with another a long ways away, but navigating between the two seems to also require swapping objects, thus resetting your shot on the original object. <br/> <br/>Roaming enemies could add a further twist, making you decide whether you can avoid them without swapping, or question what more complicated effect swapping them to a particular location would have, given that they move. Physics could also make a lot of the swapping puzzles rather intricate. |
| Apr 21 20:34:00 | 22m 00s | ELITminate | I felt constrained by the constant-speed running and the inability to shine the light in any direction other than the direction I was also running. Although constraints are a natural part of games, I was wishing I had at least some additional control to compensate for the above two constraints. Because as it was, facing the ghouls out in the open was suicide, as was trying to run past them. The only strategy that seemed to work was to hide behind each cluster of boxes, destroying any ghouls visible ahead before venturing out past the boxes again. <br/> <br/>Visuall, the lighting didn't seem very clear. A sharper light cone would have been useful. And the light cone doing more damage as a ghoul got closer due to more intensely concentrated light could have been an interesting mechanic that could have allowed head-on attack of a ghoul and viable option. <br/> <br/>One last thought is that you might add a timer and a distance measurement, and save high scores. Maybe have a milestone every 100 meters, and each milestone records the fastest time you ever made it that distance. Also record the farthest distance regardless of time. These metrics would give the player something to compete against, even if otherwise the game were exactly the same. |
| Apr 21 20:52:00 | 18m 00s | Quantum Fields | Not too bad once I figure out effective timings, distance, and positions for clicking. But could have used some visual indications of the gravitational effect. The widescreen aspect ratio was a bit of a problem too, making asteroids from above or below extra obnoxious to deal with. <br/> <br/>And I feel like the force of gravity and it's drain on energy could have been substantially tweaked. Its effect is very strong when really close to asteroids, but it drains energy really quickly too. Since most of the asteroids seemed to be heading directly for Earth, what I generally did was give each asteroid a very brief click really close. It didn't deviate the asteroid's direction in any predictable manner, but just about any deviation was sufficient. But regardless of the super brief clicks, I was still almost always out of energy. Even if some alterations would make the gravity equations less realistic, such as reducing the significance of the inverse square law, it might nonetheless improve the feel of gameplay. <br/> <br/>I did live long enough use the actual unconventional weapon, but not long enough to ever discover what the consequence would be if I hadn't. Regardless, you get theme-squared for having a second-order thematic mechanic. |
| Apr 21 20:58:00 | 6m 00s | DJ ALIEN Mission:Save The World | It's definitely got a goofy mood and some humor, but the mechanics were just too disappointingly thin. And I kept watching the instructions and thus didn't get a good chance to watch any silly alien animations. I was worried I'd miss their heads exploding too, not knowing exactly when that would be or what it would entail. |
| Apr 22 19:54:00 | 22h 56m | Bloody | Looks pretty. But the spacebar key (and the R key when restarting) barely work on my machine. Most of the time the presses are just ignored. I tried super short presses, long presses, medium presses; regardless of the timing, seemed to be about the same. <br/> <br/>Got to the second level, where it appears that the blood supply is limited and you take damage. Is there anyway to determine what your current blood quantity is? I noticed that the avatar graphics are different, and at first I thought its body was actually getting thinner as I spewed blood. That would be a cool effect, if you're healthy and full of blood, the body looks healthy. As you become weaker and have less blood to spew, you become thinner, bonier. |
| Apr 22 20:07:00 | 13m 00s | Warp Wizard | Couldn't make it past the wide spikes on the second level. I have a suspicion that I'm suppose to warp once, then swap places with the enemy on the platform, but I don't have the agility to pull that off. <br/> <br/>I can understand the feature of getting stuck inside objects when warping, but one thing you might experiment is having a bit of a forgiving margin of error: When a player warps into a solid object, if there is open space within a certain distance above the warp location, then set the resulting warp location to that open space instead of within the solid object. <br/> <br/>Alternatively, or in addition to that change, try making the click location correspond to the player sprite's *feet* rather than the sprite's center. That would make it easier to accurately determine where to click in order to teleport just above the ground without getting stuck in it. |
| Apr 22 20:18:00 | 11m 00s | Harry and his Herring | I like the concept, and the levels visibly generating as you go, but the control scheme felt off. If I had to speculate, I think it is because rapid motions with the mouse work better horizontally than vertically or circularly, due to pivoting about the wrist. Maybe you could ignore the mouse's vertical position entirely, and determine the fishes location purely by translating the mouse's horizontal position into an angle value, describing the angle around the player that the fish is pointing. <br/> <br/>Alternatively, you could do some fancier math over multiple frames to determine the mouse's average location and point the fish in that direction, and then calculate the amount of overall rapid mouse movement to determine how wildly the fish is swinging back and forth around that direction. Rapid mouse movement (regardless of specific direction) results in rapid fish swinging. Rapid movement within a very tiny range results in the fish also swinging back and forth rapidly, but in a narrow range of angles, while broader mouse movements makes the fish swing back and forth across larger arcs. <br/> <br/>I feel like you might have something fun here, but experimentation with the controls is needed. |
| Apr 22 20:29:00 | 11m 00s | Weapossession | That was an interesting exercise for my brain. I'm so used to tracking a single player character that I'm controlling that my mind didn't want to temporarily jump over to the possessed enemy. I kept getting confused at first, but gradually got better. <br/> <br/>I was also learning to not possess an enemy until after the bigger dude fired its occasional shot, but then an enemy spawned right on top of me and killed me, which was disappointingly out of my control. <br/> <br/>It's a minor point, but the second spawn noise (when the enemy actually appears and starts moving) felt a little strong to me. The first sound was less abrasive, and the second event didn't seem significant enough to warrant being communicated to the player with such a bold sound. The first sound presents new information, and so the second sound should just be enough to confirm/finalize what the player is already expecting, that the enemy has finished spawning. Though I will say that talking through this does make me appreciate that there *was* a pre-spawn event followed by the actual spawn. |
| Apr 22 20:48:00 | 19m 00s | Pizza Panic | Not too bad, though at first I couldn't tell why I wasn't blocking pizzas, until I realized I had to wait until the pizza was over the marker before pressing the key to block it. I know it would take additional time, but certain kinds of animations could go a long way toward explaining why that is. For example, using a skillet to swat the pizza, but if you swat too early, the skillet has swung all the way forward and the pizza simply flies over it. <br/> <br/>I also had to rotate my keyboard in order to use the QAZ keys semi-comfortably. And I ended up just rapidly pressing the key corresponding to the row of the next pizza that was incoming. That worked up until level three, so maybe I should have learned more careful timing. I noticed that you could block two rows simultaneously, which made controls a little more awkward. I think I would have preferred if there was a short cooldown (quarter second?) per blocker, but each blocker could be activated independently of the others. That would also allow you to make the advanced levels more complicated, with pizzas in more than one row simultaneously. Though you might need something like an energy bar to prevent players from just pressing all three blockers over and over simultaneously. It replenishes only fast enough to support activation of 3 blockers per second, for example, but is large enough to active 6 blockers in a second before running out of energy and having to wait for it to recharge. Just some speculative ideas to consider. |
| Apr 22 20:59:00 | 11m 00s | RandomSpell | I was so confused by this game. For one, the menu was hardly navigable because I couldn't tell which item I had selected. I eventually discovered what the letter 'a' looked like when selected versus not, and managed to get the 3x zoom and start the game, finally. I don't know if that was by design or just a graphical glitch on my machine. <br/> <br/>Then I kept getting hit by the falling weight, wondering where it was coming from until I saw in comment that it was actually my own magic. I don't know if sound effects would have helped clue me in to the fact that it spawns at the exact moment that I press the key. Or perhaps if it spawned more on screen, with a little animation; I just thought it had always been there and was falling from above. |
| Apr 22 21:08:00 | 9m 00s | The Cheeseburgermogrifier | Rather humorous. And it may have been unintentional or a hasty hack, but I liked how after winning, new but invisible and harmless enemies were still spawning, and I could still shoot them and get more burgers. |
| Apr 22 21:18:00 | 10m 00s | SquadaBOOM | Boy, I suck at that. The randomness of the first two forms of AI make it really hard to know when to use your weapon. And since there's no way to recover health, it's preferable to not hold too long and cross the threshold at which your weapon causes you damage. But a small radius weapon makes it that much harder. <br/> <br/>I suppose the overall concept of tradeoffs is sound, but I feel like there are a lot of things that could be balanced to make the core concept work well. <br/> <br/>The implementation was solid, though. |
| Apr 22 21:22:00 | 4m 00s | You Are The Sun | Having a visual indication of the satellite's communication range would have been useful, and would have made the game mechanic make more intuitive sense. <br/> <br/>Also, having music but no sound effects feels a little backwards in terms of priority. Being able to both see and hear the disruption of communication (as well as unwanted damage to the satellite) would help a lot in terms of letting the player know how well or poorly they are doing. |
| Apr 22 21:31:00 | 9m 00s | Dim Sum Fusion Assassin | Not very forgiving. I can understand the instant game-over for poisoning the wrong customer. But for having a customer leave, or failing to poison the target, game-over felt harsh. I would have preferred to see a point system, or some other means of penalizing the player or making the game harder due to those mistakes, without instantly slamming them with the worst possible penalty. <br/> <br/>I liked the art style, though the target icon at the bottom was a little hard to see and match up to the larger icons of actual customers. <br/> <br/>And naturally, sound effects could have gone a long way to enhancing the experience and mood. |
| Apr 24 13:52:00 | 40h 21m | The incubator | I had a hard time navigating the far side of the sphere, mostly because the camera angle made it hard to see over there. Maybe tie camera rotation around the center vertical axis to the horizontal mouse movement? <br/> <br/>The first time around I also got stuck on the side/bottom, and simply couldn't roll my ball back up the sphere. Intended? |
| Apr 24 14:07:00 | 15m 00s | Robot Restores Nature | Nice effects with the growth! Too bad you didn't have time to work in an objective. Perhaps things that soak up water and dry the plants up, and plants that help propagate water automatically, with the objective being to create a self-maintaining ecosystem. <br/> <br/>Aiming was difficult, since it was strictly tied to movement direction, which was awkwardly modified by object collision. Since I was using the mouse button to spray water, I kept expecting I could use the mouse to aim. My brain refused to learn otherwise. |
| Apr 24 14:20:00 | 13m 00s | Wooly Defender | The game didn't fully capture the mouse, whenever I rotated too far and then clicked to fire, I'd end up switching to another window, because the cursor was outside of the game screen and active. Alternatively, in fullscreen mode with the game on my left monitor, I decided to only rotate one direction, so my cursor was always on the left edge of the left monitor. But then I kept muting/unmuting the sound every time I launched a sheep. :-/ <br/> <br/>Part of me wished that the sheepapult direction was tied to the camera direction. To prevent that from being overpowered, you could still cap the max rotation speed of the catapult, but still have the catapult rotate in order to realign with the camera. Might at least be something to experiment with. If you tried that, you could even have the vertical camera angle tied to the catapult "charge", with a visual indicator on the ground for how far the sheep will go. Then again, maybe I'm just wanting to make the game trivially easy. :-) <br/> <br/>A minimap would be a nice added touch to know when knights are popping up behind the player. |
| Apr 24 14:29:00 | 9m 00s | Flatulent Bovine | With only one pair of farters up top, in only one configuration, and with a predictable stream of zombie cows differing only in speed, it became a little monotonous after not very long. It was definitely functional, but the decisions I was making while playing the game just felt rather flat. <br/> <br/>Nonetheless, it was complete and didn't cause me any troubles or confusion, so kudos on successfully navigating your first Ludum Dare! |
| Apr 24 14:43:00 | 14m 00s | RCCAT - Radio Controlled Cat | It was tricky to learn to control by the dude and the RCCAT simultaneously, without stomping over the dude with the cat. I think the lethality of the cat to the player was a valuable gameplay element addition to the core concept of controlling two characters at once. <br/> <br/>It was tough navigating, though, because the viewport was centered on the player, not the cat, even though the cat was the one at the front of the action. I would have preferred if the viewport had either been centered on the cat, or at least centered on the average point between the cat and the dude. <br/> <br/>Once I got the hang of it, I destroyed all the enemies I could find, but the game claimed that I still had 10 enemies remaining. Since I couldn't find them, I decided to just stomp all the remaining houses myself, because what else is a person to do with a gigantic RCCAT and no objective? :-) |
| Apr 24 14:55:00 | 12m 00s | Vinnie Cancer | Controls felt a little floaty, especially while falling, and the hit-boxes on the floors were particularly odd to navigate. <br/> <br/>On the second level I wasn't sure where to go, and ended up jumping off into nothingness. <br/> <br/>Seemed odd that the enemy bullets would hit each other. Not necessarily bad design, especially since defeated enemies could still act as shields for the player, but having level design such that tanks were initialized in positions where one would shoot another in the back seemed unusual. |
| Apr 25 14:14:00 | 23h 19m | Double Invasion | Painfully slow; as Kushulain said, seems to be tied to the number of dynamic objects being drawn. <br/> <br/>Even if it were running at a much faster speed, though, it felt impossible to be able to reach and shoot down all enemies, given the speed of the player unit relative to the speed of the enemies. I spent my first $80 on a movement upgrade, hoping that it would carry over from one game to the next, but it doesn't appear to do so. That would be one way give the player a chance, though they would have to suffer through a lot of losses without giving up for that to work. |
| Apr 25 14:41:00 | 27m 00s | Cornflake Ninja | The core physics felt pretty good, but given the player's jump height, the level felt cramped vertically. And he was unable to jump upward through the higher of two blocks stacked on over the other; may have been intentional, but caught me by surprise. <br/> <br/>I presume there was no actual objective for making progress, beyond collecting cereal. If there was, I missed it. |
| Apr 25 14:49:00 | 8m 00s | Russian Thug | My ice pick attack felt very finicky. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, and I couldn't tell why. I got the impression that attacking a soldier from the front was more reliable than from the side, but that might have just been my brain inventing a bogus strategy. <br/> <br/>Movement was also awkward. It was less of a critical issue, but colliding with a soldier apparently caused the game to forget that I was still holding down a movement key, because if I killed the soldier, or he moved, or I moved to the side (while still holding down the original key also), I had to repress the movement key to get moving again. <br/> <br/>Between those issues and semi-unskippable cutscenes, I made it to the second level twice before I just gave up. |
| Apr 25 15:04:00 | 15m 00s | BDOLD | Good job on supplying a tutorial. I actually managed to die on the last tutorial rocket, but it credited me with surviving the tutorial anyway; it was very forgiving. :-) <br/> <br/>I couldn't tell the difference between blue and green items, though. I thought the tutorial said something about using blue items three times, but I aimed it, let it loose, and it was destroyed, and I couldn't figure out any way to reuse it. <br/> <br/>I was also unpleasantly surprised by the fact that if I took too long to aim an object, it would simply vanish. Indicating this countdown through some audio/visual method would have helped. <br/> <br/>In the end, and because of these lost projectiles, the spawn rate of new projectiles was too low to adequantely keep up with the rockets, and there wasn't anything I could do to remedy this. Maybe if there were ways to play more efficiently, such as by taking out multiple rockets with a single projectile, I could build my way back up to having a few spare projectiles laying about. As it was, I had an empty play field, saw a rocket spawn, waited for a projectile to spawn, and then tried to click and aim it quickly, hoping that I still had enough time before the rocket hit the house. Usually I didn't. |
| Apr 26 15:26:00 | 24h 22m | Pie Day Revenge | Hehe, pretty good. In particular, the various options of pie throwing based on duration held. Though I was kind of hoping that the final variant would hit multiple clustered people in one shot. Herd them into a corner and then get them all at once. <br/> <br/>The flee AI felt nicely done. They flee early enough to be irritating to catch, but not so early that they're easy to herd. That they even flee from long range pies themselves was a nice touch. <br/> <br/>Scattering powerups around the level could add more interest. Temporarily get a different type of pie. Or charge up pies more quickly. Or have a longer scare radius to make herding easier, or a shorter scare radius to sneak up close to people. Or move more quickly, or other people move more slowly. Et cetera. |
| Apr 26 16:11:00 | 45m 00s | Tinka The Turtle | My curiosity about the 20K item managed to keep me playing a while, but it got kind of tedious. Here are some thoughts I had along the way: <br/> <br/>Even though superficial, it would have felt more rewarding if the sound effect for collecting more valuable items was different. Maybe even just raising the pitch up by a half step for each tier. <br/> <br/>Given the window's short vertical distance, only one forward stroke strength, and slow turn rate, it was obnoxiously difficult to aim for and collect gold. Once I got a radar, all I did was swim straight for the radar object, ignoring everything else along the way. Trying to pick up all the stuff passing me by would have slowed me down too much, especially since I couldn't see objects early enough to efficiently aim for them. If: the turtle was placed at the bottom of the screen (upgrades arranged vertically on left?), or the screen zoomed out the faster the turtle was moving, or multiple radars could be active at once, or some more controlled form of side swimming were available, I might have bothered with the side stuff. Instead, it was just aim for a radar object and go to auto-pilot. <br/> <br/>Some control schemes you could play with would include: Long press on forward key does a strong stroke, while shorter taps would do weaker strokes for better control. Turn keys could apply one or the other flipper, inducing both rotation and a little bit of forward movement. Quick tap on left/right key could shift turtle to the side without rotation. <br/> <br/>Some indication of distance with the radar; I found myself aiming just to the side of the target object, so that I could tell when I was getting close (because the dot started veering off to the side more quickly). It didn't make me any more efficient, but it was valuable psychologically to see that I was making progress toward the object. <br/> <br/>The lateral movement of the waves messed with my eyes and made me always unsure I was heading directly for the dot. I felt like I was always going slightly sideways, even if I wasn't. It was a nice effect in isolation, but once the game became mostly about swimming towards a radar dot, it became mildly unwelcome. |
| Apr 26 16:18:00 | 7m 00s | Dunk the Ostrich | Camera and movement were both very unnatural; too much inertia. Starting location of the player was unhelpful. No targeting reticle. It was weird that the completion screen came up before the physics system or score had settled. |
| Apr 28 21:50:00 | 53h 32m | Yum Kaax Relic | The mouse look being entirely independent of WASD movement direction felt unconventional, but I was able to mostly get used to it. The lack of wall slide, especially against foliage, was less easy to adapt to. (It might have just been a high degree of wall friction, but the result was the same.) <br/> <br/>Made it past one bear with the bananas, though I wasn't sure how non-thrown bananas caused damage. Nor did I have any clue at first if I was actually making progress against the bear, or if I was simply stunning him, and he'd always wake back up and attack. A health meter, or maybe at least some audibly changing indicator might have helped with that. But I stuck with the banana approach and then saw that he poofed out of existence. <br/> <br/>Also damaged a second bear using an angry radish. It was convenient to have had a room where I could grow the radishes with water, so I at least knew that mechanic, but it took getting to the next room with the bear to have any clue what the point of watering radishes was. I was hoping they'd give me health, because I lost a lot experimenting with that first bear. Ultimately, I failed to defeat the bear with the radish because the only source of water was very inconveniently located in a dead-end. If it had been in a loop, I would have had a better opportunity to experiment. |
| Apr 28 22:03:00 | 13m 00s | What do you mean "brought it bowling"? | I thought at first that I could only use balls as ammo from near the lane that I was firing at, so I was more cautious about spamming three or four balls down a single lane. Then I discovered that I could instantly use any ball available, so I started launching more. Given that they keep going after eliminating a Pomeranian, it seemed like a good strategy to just fire off a bunch of bowling balls and let them do their work. Not much thinking required. But eventually the speed and frequency of Pomeranians overwhelmed me, naturally. One way to encourage not spamming balls might be to give out bonus points for having more balls in the queue, ready to go. <br/> <br/>I had to get used to the fact that the ball launched from the right side of the character. Obvious, given the nature of bowling, but my gamer brain kept expect the ball to emanate from the center of the character. Maybe if the character was actually visibly holding a ball on the right side my brain wouldn't have been so stubborn. |
| Apr 28 22:20:00 | 17m 00s | Anima's Keeper | Invisible walls seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes it seemed to just be glitchy collision detection that would go away if I moved around enough, but other times it seemed permanent. In particular, I couldn't get anywhere inside the castle thing because there was an invisible wall just beyond the black button-controlled wall. <br/> <br/>Not that I knew what was happening in the first room inside the castle anyway. Not sure what the create was, why I couldn't shoot it, when or why it decided to occasionally move forward, or why it walked through the entrance in the middle. Nor could I determine why the entrance was no longer usable and would disappear if I shot either of the orbs next to it. <br/> <br/>The camera was really obnoxious in the desert, the way it lagged behind the character. If anything, I want a camera to move out ahead of the character, so I can see where I'm going and what enemies or other relevant objects are areas I might run into. |
| Apr 28 22:32:00 | 12m 00s | Chlorine Dawn | Moving around is really tedious; the controls are not friendly, don't feel right. <br/> <br/>On the second room where I had time to rearrange things, I took a bunch of time to lay out a long strip of boards so I could sprint to the door after pulling the lever. But I got tripped up with the controls when trying to quickly do the 90 degree turn onto the lane of boards, ended up dying, and then was disappointed to see everything reset back to it's original location. If it were so tedious to rearrange anything, or if I felt like it was just my own clumsiness which made me lose time getting to the board lane, I wouldn't have minded as much. But as it was, that's when I got frustrated and gave up. <br/> <br/>Also, a minor bug, but when hitting space in the middle of moving (even if the character is 95% of the way to the next tile), the character picks up whatever is in the *previous* tile, not the tile he's moving towards. That got me confused a few times, as I was wondering what had happened to the thing I had previously dropped. |
| Apr 30 21:42:00 | 47h 10m | Dog Bulldozer | Definitely had a lot of good stuff going for it. Good clear graphics, loading/tutorial screens, effective sound effects and music. <br/> <br/>The control was unpleasantly constraining though. Especially since there was a little bit of inertia tied to rotation, but you can only rotate while moving forward, I had a really hard time actually running in the direction I wanted. It made the game more difficult, but not in a fun way. <br/> <br/>The smoke cloud on the zombies could maybe benefit from being less opaque, too. There were times that I couldn't tell if the zombie underneath was done for, or still moving, and if so, moving in which direction. So I didn't have the information necessary to decide where to run, or where to send my dog. <br/> <br/>Being able to toss zombies (or oneself) in the air with the dog was a cool effect, but I couldn't tell how to trigger it intentionally, and it still seemed to cause the dog to come to a standstill momentarily. It would be interesting if there were ways to utilize the dog that required more skill, but enabled stronger attacks, or more efficient attacks that didn't suffer from the momentary stun. |
| Apr 30 21:54:00 | 12m 00s | Give me that! | Controls were a little too laggy to be comfortable, especially the attack control, but the jump to some extent. <br/> <br/>I wasn't able at first to recognize the friendly zombots from the enemies, but eventually got over my button-mashing phase. The vulnerable enemies with the red glow was even harder to recognize, even when I knew to look for it, because it was very similar to the purple, and was often gone due to my button-mashing before I noticed it. Maybe that's just due to my poor gameplay style, but a subtle sound effect might have helped to indicate that something had changed with an enemy's state. <br/> <br/>I was definitely happy to get health from the rescued friendlies, though I wish the health would just come straight to me from the left side of the screen. Having to turn back and pick up the health felt like an unnecessary nuisance. And the fact that my health bar was more of a damage bar, filling up as I got closer to infection, was briefly confusing. I suppose it wasn't bad per se, but I'm cautious about going against UI conventions without a very compelling reason. |
| Apr 30 22:05:00 | 11m 00s | Killer Joke | It moved so fast, I never had a chance to comfortably look at the city networks, or figure out a strategy. And the interface made it difficult to act quickly. The AI seemed capable of placing a unit instantly upon getting enough points, while I had to wait until I had enough money to click the unit type I wanted, and then click the city I wanted. That small difference in time seemed to cause me to always be behind. <br/> <br/>If there were any nuances of behavior with the networks and such, I wasn't able to recognize them. This seems like it might be the kind of gameplay that would work better as a turn-based style rather than real-time. Give me time to consider my move; give me tooltips and info panels describing the immediate effects of any particular choice. I wouldn't be surprised if this would bring out or enable some really deep interesting mechanics, but I just couldn't find any depth the way it was setup. |
| Apr 30 22:22:00 | 17m 00s | BeatFace In Space | Couldn't figure out how to actually *do* anything intentional. Clicking on the beat seems aggressively strict, and sometimes I was apparently out of sync with the beat without feeling like I was. Though I'm far from an awesome drummer, I do practice a ton, and so I've developed an ear for hearing when my rhythm is off, but in this case, I felt like I was on even when the game didn't think so. I dunno. <br/> <br/>But it appears that the game doesn't penalize off-clicks, so I just started spamming the mouse button repeatedly, and that seemed to effectively keep my power bar near max. And then I tried moving around and doing things, but I had no sense of control, could barely aim for the enemies. The sudden shifts in camera position didn't help. I eventually discovered the tire-looking thing, but didn't know how to trigger it; only seemed to occur when I was in the air. Couldn't tell if orbiting served any purpose. Seemed to just keep me away from the enemies that I had to do ?something? to. I eventually eliminated one enemy, though I don't know how. Gave up on the other two because I didn't feel like I was learning anything more about how to play. |
| May 8 04:14:00 | 173h 52m | A.R.B.F. | Pretty solid. The physics felt good, including the double jump and wall slide/jump. Although the single-height jump reduced the amount of control that I could exercise. <br/> <br/>The diagonal wall reflection was pretty intriguing, but since the boss was almost always out of frame, I mostly just spammed the attack everywhere I went. If I was patient enough, I think I could have defeated the enemy without ever really engaging him directly. But that might just be a limit of the AI, which I'm sure would be difficult to actually make highly intelligent in only two days! <br/> <br/>I was hoping that I could hold down two arrow keys and fire diagonally (thus allowing for vertical/horizontal walls to also participate in reflections, and diagonal walls to consume weapon fire), but I suppose that would require introducing a small amount of latency for keyboard tappers, because the game would have to wait for a few milliseconds after one arrow key was pressed to find out if another arrow key would be pressed soon enough afterward to justify a diagonal bullet. Though a cheap way out of that would be to spend those few frames starting the fire sound and drawing an omnidirectional muzzle flash that doesn't care which direction the bullet will eventually go. <br/> <br/>Okay, I'm rambling now. Excellent competition entry! |
| May 8 04:21:00 | 7m 00s | Cupid's arrows | Very clever. Add a few supplements to this core mechanic, and I bet you could come up with an endless collection of interesting puzzles. <br/> <br/>The loss condition felt like it happened rather abruptly, but upon reflection, I think it was just the fact that the game play screen was replaced by the "They caught you" screen. I think somewhere in my brain, I wanted to continue to observe the map and where I and the guards were when I got caught, and I was mildly surprised and frustrated when I couldn't. But that's just a minor UI polish sort of thing. |
| May 8 04:39:00 | 18m 00s | Makeshift Defense | Pretty cool. The possibilities of using different types of weapons in combination with each other for effects not achievable by a single weapon type on its own is promising. The windmill + 10 ton weight was the best example of sort of effect that I saw in the levels I played. <br/> <br/>Gravitation felt a little weak, but maybe I just wanted objects to fall more quickly thereby making the game easier. :-) Sometimes clicks didn't seem to register, though, which was slightly frustrating. Might have been only when I was trying to use multiple weapons one after the other quickly; is there a cooldown? <br/> <br/>The level with the zombie potions defeated me. I found myself wishing the zombies would last longer before they faded. There was very little chance of getting a significant chain of zombie infections. Maybe with windmills I could have gotten more. Crowd control is what it's all about. <br/> <br/>Finally, sometimes the weapons would get placed in completely useless positions, such as bows pointing in directions where an enemy will never travel. Minor, but made me sad when things came down to the wire and I only had a few weapons left, and most of them were incapable of achieving anything. |
| May 8 05:13:00 | 34m 00s | Weapon Shortage | Humorous as heck, and unlocking new silly items is always fun, but ultimately the fun ran out, both because the combat mechanics were hard to decipher, and the behavior of the various weapons generally *felt* about the same, even if *technically* they were different. <br/> <br/>Also, the rotation/testing screen was awkward, especially if I accidentally approached the table from a non-standard angle. The weapon would show up in a fixed world position, but my camera would be in some inconvenient orientation, and I couldn't reorient the camera, or cancel out of the dialog without committing my settings. If I got the settings wrong, I had to trash the weapon and rebuild it, just to fiddle with the awkward XYZ rotation angles again. <br/> <br/>I did manage to get up to unlocking bread and a boot and such. But I gave up when I hammered a fried egg to a head, and the physics engine decided to freak out and bounce the head off screen somewhere. But given that this game gave me an opportunity to describe a bug that involves nailing a hard fried egg to a forehead, I'm not really complaining. :-) |
| May 8 05:27:00 | 14m 00s | Adaptation | I liked the guns. On my second try, I went for swords, but didn't like them as much. They're simply too dangerous when approaching gun ships that could fire at any moment. Given the massive amount of control granted by hooking ship position directly to mouse position, the optimal strategy seems to be to focus primarily on dodging everything, and using guns to slowly take everyone out. I ended up just spinning in a circle with four guns for a while before I eventually just got sloppy and died. <br/> <br/>It's a compelling concept, but I feel it needs some more nuance to drive interesting decisions. Maybe also a way to slowly grow in power while *reversing* some of the damage, so that there's a stronger sense of progression. |
| May 8 05:36:00 | 9m 00s | Baguette Jousting | I apparently suck at riding a bike; I drove off the edge quite a bit. It was hard to judge where the edge really ended, given that the collision body and the graphics didn't match very well. |