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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | mildmojo's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 21 05:43:00 | Lawyer Golf | This is so cool. Two problems up front: in Firefox, it only rendered a strip at the top of the page, maybe 15% of the height. Switched to Chrome and it rendered full-page. But turning seemed to be using keypresses instead of keydown, so you could only really turn your character by holding still and keeping the key pressed, waiting for key repeat to kick in. <br/> <br/>Otherwise, this is great. I only got to hole 3 before the darkness came over me, but man... The humor's fantastic, from the parking job to the conversation. The putting is pretty solid once you figure out that you can give it a pretty good whack. Love the art style, too. | |
| Apr 21 05:48:00 | 5m 00s | Concrete Escape | I got run off the road by an indestructible cop car on its roof. Ha! <br/> <br/>Could use a little improvement on the driving physics and the control layout; I'm guessing arrows + space + mouse might work better for southpaws? |
| Apr 21 05:58:00 | 10m 00s | So long, Space Hero. | This is pretty cool. I like the way you get in between the spaceman's "cells" on your way to the heart. I didn't know what the goal was when I started, not knowing what the heart looked like. But I totally found it and eliminated that dude. <br/> <br/>It's pretty hard to move inside the body at first since everything's so tightly packed. Maybe that's a tactics issue for the player to solve. Once you're playing, there isn't really any way to get your bearings to the heart. A minimap, even if it didn't actually show the heart's location, would really help when you're zoomed in that far. |
| Apr 21 06:05:00 | 7m 00s | SHiFT | Reminds me a lot of VVVVVV, with the gravity flipping and flip-flying. Not bad. Using the webplayer on this page, the game popped out of fullscreen mode every time I clicked it (Firefox). It looks like you left a development console turned on, too, which was always open with a note about a NullReferenceException. And the game froze on me in level... 3, I think? When I died at the first exploding dude. <br/> <br/>It's got potential. The mechanic feels good, so it comes down to making interesting puzzles out of it. |
| Apr 21 09:25:00 | 3h 20m | Symmetric Torpedo | This is lovely. The UI is beautiful (I'm a sucker for control panels). It took me a few games to get the hang of the symmetry and to learn to look at the damage and accuracy meters and launch when they were "good enough" rather than trying to squeeze every last bit of perfection out of the tube. <br/> <br/>The sound did a nice job of keeping the pressure on, and I like how the auto-replenishing "reserves" limit you from just firing off endless mediocre torpedoes. I haven't been able to get through the second wave, but I'll come back to this one. =) Congrats. |
| Apr 21 16:48:00 | 7h 23m | fateOS | Mood 5/5. <br/> <br/>Really nice kinetic fiction. The best examples make it feel less like you're exploring content and more like you're a part of the progression, which this does. It looks so good, too. I sort of wish the other desktop icons did something, even if it was just displaying a window sprite that you could dismiss. <br/> <br/>The music sounds great. It has a nice somber tone and rhythm to it. It's not "we're winning" or "we're losing", more like "this is happening, deal with it." <br/> <br/>Only two small criticisms: the email body font was a little hard to read, and the delay after clicking a response should've been much shorter. But those are tiny things here. <br/> <br/>Excellent mature story that we don't often get from game jam entries. Did not expect the ending. |
| Apr 21 17:24:00 | 36m 00s | Soundkraft | Music as a weapon reminds me a little of Harmonix's unreleased FPS, Chroma. <br/> <br/>The sound is good. The gun's dubstep is appropriately wub-wubby and sounds powerful. <br/> <br/>Really nice pixel art and effects. The glows and particles work really well and the color palette is cohesive. The game looks great. <br/> <br/>The controls are a little strange. On a mac, the browser went weird when I tried using modifier keys to shoot, so I used the trackpad (not ideal). I could tell there was a double-jump, but couldn't make it work reliably. <br/> <br/>It doesn't look like you can dodge enemy bullets because their firing rate is so high, so it's more about wading into the fray and then retreating to find health packs. It'd be nice if the successive waves upgrade your weapon's firing pattern so you could hit them from above (sound grenades? bass drop?). And are the black blocks left behind when enemies die supposed to keep firing at you? That was odd. <br/> <br/>Nice work! |
| Apr 21 21:21:00 | 3h 57m | GAMUBòRU GUMBALL!! | Man, you nailed the physics on that truck. Got any resources for making good vehicle physics in Unity? The truck is really satisfying to drive. I love how the driver sways back and forth when you corner, too. <br/> <br/>The details like the loader/shovel on the front flipping gumballs in the air and the signs and traffic cones are great. It'd be cool to see where you could go with this. Maybe a wacky take on firefighting? Give it the Bossa Studios treatment? <br/> <br/>Delightful music, too. I need a little more of an objective to keep playing, though, even if it's just exploration/discovery. |
| Apr 22 17:26:00 | 20h 05m | Badass Inc | This is so complete it hurts. Love the attention to detail, all the bits of description for environmental stuff that isn't core to the solution path. Art, effects, UI are all perfect. The setting and environmental art in particular is top-notch. So much mood. Mixing in a little gunfighting was above and beyond. <br/> <br/>I don't even know what to criticize. Yeah, it's short, but so's the compo. Great vertical slice. This could turn into a series of vignettes where the assassin has to complete more and more unreasonable assassination puzzles which all end with a gunshot anyway. <br/> <br/>Only a couple of typos I could see (since you asked): <br/> <br/>"You notice a woman perfume" <-- "woman's perfume" <br/>"washbassin" => "washbasin" <br/>"cigaret" => "cigarette" <br/>"what its name again" => "what is its name again" <br/>"shitiest" => "shittiest" |
| Apr 22 18:26:00 | 1h 00m | Deadly rain | Okay, I give up, I get it: there's no safe place in war. =P I assumed there wasn't an end, though comments seem to say otherwise. <br/> <br/>Random number generator from hell. There were a bunch of times when a missile would explode and leave you with no place to stand. Or you'd have to wait forever in one spot because you were in a Tetris pit you couldn't jump out of or there was a gap too wide. <br/> <br/>The visuals were excellent, sound was great, mood was good. I'm not sure where I stand on holding the jump button to bounce; it led to a lot of unintentional deaths as I finished a jump and bounced right into gunfire. Nice work overall, but more frustrating than I like. |
| Apr 23 03:29:00 | 9h 03m | ScarKrow | First, a couple problems: keyboard input didn't work at all in Firefox 37 for Windows. I haven't had that problem with a flash game before. Chrome worked. Unfortunately, keyboard + mouse control schemes work pretty terribly with a trackpad. I got through the game with a touchscreen, but it was pretty tough and I was fighting just to stay airborne. <br/> <br/>Besides the controls, it's really nice. Great visual style, very interesting enemy art and behaviors, nice weapon arc animations. The sound effects and music fit perfectly. It felt like there were several ways of getting through each level, and the tutorial levels did a good job of teaching the player how to move. |
| Apr 23 04:08:00 | 39m 00s | Time Bomb | A pacifist shooter; I like it. The time bubbles worked really well and those one-touch-kill robots were super creepy. I'm glad they stopped following you when you were out of sight. It took me a few tries to get through and I had to dig out a gamepad, but I made it. I really appreciate the control rebinding and inverted Y option; the stock settings didn't work well with a PS4 controller. <br/> <br/>It would've been helpful if the robots made some noise to let you know when they were closing in behind you. Even just some soft whirring or something would've helped. It felt like the projectiles didn't collide with the enemies, either, just the floors (yay Quake rocket splashes). It'd be a little more satisfying if you could peg them in the chest to slow them down. <br/> <br/>I wanted a little more environmental art for the teleporter. Maybe just a few shafts of light to show teleporter pads. <br/> <br/>Cool idea, though, and you totally pulled it off. |
| Apr 23 04:21:00 | 13m 00s | Hitchhiker's Tales | Hey, this plays really well. It strongly reminds me of old arcade games the way you have everything contained on a single screen: instructions, HUD, and marquee graphic. The art style inside the play area is really cohesive. I like all the SMB2-style picking up and throwing of things. <br/> <br/>It took me a few plays to figure out that staying in the air as much as possible was key. Pick an alien up, double jump, throw to kill. Try to take out another alien if you can. This is a game that knows what it is and does it well. Good job! |
| Apr 23 04:26:00 | 5m 00s | Dreamfisher | It's a small thing, but I'd recommend against RAR files for distribution, especially for a jam game. Every major OS has a native ZIP extractor, but not a one of them comes with a RAR tool. I'm on a borrowed machine with neither a working java nor a RAR tool, so I'm afraid I'm hosed on this one. =( |
| Apr 23 04:35:00 | 9m 00s | The Calcannon | The difficulty ramps up really quickly on this one. Entering a number and then right-clicking and left-clicking (on a trackpad!!) was kind of awkward. Plus the game didn't capture the minus key so it popped open my browser's search box and took focus away (I use typeahead find). <br/> <br/>Sometimes two expressions would end up on top of each other, which made them really hard to read. Using non-integer fractions (even though you use an integer answer) was a mindbender. <br/> <br/>The idea is pretty good and kudos for working on something that could be good for reinforcing arithmetic skills. It just needs a little better pacing, streamlined control, and a little polish. |
| Apr 23 04:59:00 | 24m 00s | Mein Sheep | This looks really nice. The little sheep are cute and original, and I really like how they're branded with the credits on the main menu. The DOF effect is really nice. The font was pretty hard to read at small sizes, especially in the webplayer version. <br/> <br/>I'm not sure I quite figured out how to play. The different darts will cancel each other out, the blue darts just slow sheep down (?) and the red darts make them eat whoever's nearby? I only made it past the first level; it's pretty hard to right-click on a touchpad. =P <br/> <br/>Cool idea. The gold sheep level might've been better with fewer black sheep so you had less chance of them going all cannibal on you. =) |
| Apr 23 05:18:00 | 19m 00s | Genemon | The version on the submission page rendered the playing field as mostly black with a few bright pixels for the creature spawns (FF 37), so I used the "doesn't work" web link which seemed to work perfectly. =D <br/> <br/>Great concept. Combining units to progress through the tech tree was really cool, and the larger sprites and mutation animations were very pretty. The sounds were a good mix of combat and semi-creepy scifi. <br/> <br/>I played on a touchscreen since it was easier than trying to use a trackpad, but dragging moved the page instead of the cursor in game. Not sure if that's even a problem you could solve in the browser. <br/> <br/>If I played more, I probably could've figured out which units were most effective against an incoming attack. My noob attempts were mostly frantic clicking and whizzing around picking up DNA seahorses every time I ran out. The pacing was quite frenetic. I would've liked a little bit slower gameplay with a little more emphasis on strategy. <br/> <br/>It feels very complete, though. Nice job. |
| Apr 23 05:47:00 | 29m 00s | Uprooted - a carrot simulator | The art is standout here. So is the idea of a carrot burrowing into the dirt and springing back out again. Sound and music were good and fit the presentation. <br/> <br/>When I pressed the arrow key to land, I usually held it down long enough that it counted as the start of another jump, which always got me in trouble. If you hold the arrow down to fully charge right next to a rabbit, you're just screwed. It would be really helpful to have a way to cancel a charge. <br/> <br/>The random number generator could be harsh, leaving you leaping into an area with 70% gaps that you couldn't see until you were falling through them. A little bit of air control might've helped, though it would complicate the controls. <br/> <br/>The game was unplayable in Firefox. As soon as the carrot came onscreen, the browser basically locked up. =P Chrome was better, but still dropped some frames here and there. On the initial how-to screen where the carrot leaps out of the block, the block sort of flickered black after the leap. I didn't see any tile flickering in-game, though. <br/> <br/>A distance counter! My kingdom for a distance counter! =P Nice work, guys. |
| Apr 23 06:14:00 | 27m 00s | TUNDRA | This has mood in spades. The backing audio of howling wind really puts you into the world. The soft static of the radio is perfectly understated. Great air of mystery to the whole thing. I really enjoyed the bunker, but I got stuck. I think I clicked on everything twice and explored the whole facility and all the floors (1 & 2 were all but closed off?), but I didn't find a way to progress or a place to use the key or get a fingerprint for the safe. I would've liked to find out more about why the installation exists (though I have suspicions). <br/> <br/>Some of the Twine tricks like climbing the ladder or the opening text sequence were a really nice use of the framework. I feel like I'm missing something by not completing it, whatever that means. |
| Apr 23 07:12:00 | 58m 00s | Ice Story ( koori monogatari 氷物語 ) | So this is gorgeous. I'm a long-time Bubble Bobble fan and this hit the spot. =) The music was cute and the sound effects were great. The little floating "HURRY UP" animation was lovely. And a million points for having a tutorial intro. You packed a lot into 72 hours. <br/> <br/>I think the stunned dinos recovered a little too quickly and their collision boxes were a little too small. I died a lot trying to get to them before they recovered, and it felt like Nya's sprite was on top of them when they flipped back to life and killed her. <br/> <br/>I don't know why, but my brain *really* wanted Z to be jump and X to be fire. Like others, I found that holding Z and pressing X worked way better than trying to hit them together. Something to note in the future: on AZERTY keyboard layouts (Europe?), the Z and W keys are swapped which makes Z/X tough to use. It's worth also binding W or using X/C. <br/> <br/>I'm not sure if it's a configuration option with Construct 2, but the game didn't properly capture the Z key, so it kept popping open my typeahead find box and taking focus away. The X key was captured fine. Maybe there's someplace you have to tell it which keys the game uses? <br/> <br/>Anyway, nice work! Really polished! |
| Apr 23 07:22:00 | 10m 00s | THUMP | This is nifty. It sort of like extracting table nudges from pinball and making it into its own game. The thumping felt great (though it took me a bit to realize I wanted to shove fro the opposite side from my target) and your font selection was time well-spent. =) <br/> <br/>I think I let everyone escape from that bottom left corner. Never figured out how to angle them into those tiny diagonal death boxes. <br/> <br/>Clean design, good feel. Nice work. |
| Apr 24 05:53:00 | 22h 31m | Search & Destroy | Really clever ammo system using search terms. Not allowing reuse was a good decision but makes it that much harder. Thankfully most strings of characters produce search results. <br/> <br/>I thought at first the ammo count was dependent on the number of search results or popularity, later realizing it's based on health. Given how your mobility's restricted when you're carrying ammo, I think the capacity/health penalty is a little stiff. <br/> <br/>That anthem music comes on really strong. It fits the theme, but might be better used sparingly. <br/> <br/>The level layout seemed good and the game over screen was funny. There could be a little more visual feedback when you take a hit so you know when the game over's coming. <br/> <br/>Keep it up! |
| Apr 24 23:27:00 | 17h 34m | I am Gonna Smack You With My Words! | Cool typing game! I always struggle with these games that make me think up words on the fly. =) <br/> <br/>The sound got the job done. The impact sounds were good, but the music was pretty repetitive. <br/> <br/>I liked how the word display highlighted correct vs. incorrect words (though I found a few it doesn't know). Letting players skip a hard letter was nice, too. And the character art was nice. I liked the way the protagonist flapped his jaw when he was speaking the attacks. |
| Apr 24 23:46:00 | 19m 00s | Space Boy | Wow, nice work! Very challenging. It took me a few tries to get to the UFO boss, but I didn't make it through. Good world design, enemy and player models, sound effects, and particles. The music was a touch loud compared to the sound effects and got a little repetitive, but the tone was right. Reminded me a little of Starfox music. <br/> <br/>I played with a keyboard and felt like the WASD and arrows should be the other way around since arrows are more common for movement in PC games, but it worked fine as is. I didn't use dash much because it seemed more dangerous than helpful. A little like warping in Asteroids games. <br/> <br/>I felt like the shield powerup should have a different color than the weapon upgrades, but that's a small thing. The weapon tiers were good upgrades in effectiveness. <br/> <br/>It's awesome that you made this alone! Congrats! |
| Apr 25 01:32:00 | 1h 46m | BodySlam!: Oil Wrestling Simulator | Cute game! <br/> <br/>Can you actually win or lose? The first time I played, I got so big I covered the whole ring and the CPU got stuck in the air near one of the corners where I couldn't slam it. The second game, I intentionally let the CPU player slam me into oblivion, but the game never kicked me out. After a while I felt a little undirected. <br/> <br/>I thought the slamming felt a little slow. It seemed like the titular action should be a big, decisive, splashy affair, but it was a little floaty. If it was a matter of giving the other player a chance to dodge, maybe the block could fly off screen but leave its shadow as an indicator before slamming down at high speed. <br/> <br/>The movement felt pretty good. I liked the powerups for size and speed. The bouncing crowd sprites were a nice touch. The sound effects were cool. All that slamming could use a little screen shake. =D |
| Apr 25 05:26:00 | 3h 54m | Don't Choke! | It was a bit of a panic to find the cursor and get it to the right word on time each round. <br/> <br/>Cool idea to use timed dialogue trees as the core gameplay. Simple, but effective. The rap sound effects were amusing and the character graphics looked good. Congrats on your first game! |
| Apr 25 06:33:00 | 1h 07m | Ex-Sword-Stential Crisis | Rolling a sword around has got to be the least efficient way of cutting your lawn. =) <br/> <br/>The actual physics of the sword made the controls really unresponsive. Even with all the speed upgrades, I really wanted the sword to change directions faster. <br/> <br/>The sound effects and the visuals were great. The world looked cohesive and the visual effects were nice. The world looks great, with its large area and varied terrain. <br/> <br/>Killing animals has a nice effect, but it took me a long time to realize it also cost you cash every time you collide with an animal. <br/> <br/>Overall, cool idea and pretty polished execution. Just need to tighten those controls up a little. |
| Apr 25 06:38:00 | 5m 00s | Turbo Moon Hero | Makes sense. Looks nice. Hard. I want that planet to move just a little faster. <br/> <br/>The smash sound is nice, but it could use a little company. Maybe a little music or a few variations on the collision sound. <br/> <br/>Your game's goal is the opposite of mine. =) You want to keep the asteroids away, I want to bring the asteroids home for mining. |
| Apr 25 06:53:00 | 15m 00s | TUGBOAT | Well, the game looks nice, but I couldn't figure out how to engage the tractor beam with a PS4 controller. So all my scores were zeroes. =) A little bit of instruction or demonstration in the game would help. <br/> <br/>The art is nice and colorful. The music gets repetitive, so I turned it off. Good variety of sprites for enemies. |
| Apr 25 23:17:00 | 16h 24m | keyTD | I think I just took 50% off the life of my keys. =P Wishing I had a keyboard with n-key rollover about now. <br/> <br/>I quit after wave 35 because of time constraints. And my wrists were hurting. =P That's intense! Cycling through the waves of abstract enemy types was great. It was cool that you had support for a bunch of different key layouts, too. <br/> <br/>I love the minimal presentation. Everything's clean and nicely tweened, upgrades are shown with simple color. The layout's attractive, there's great feedback when you hit keys. It seems like you probably spent a lot of time polishing. <br/> <br/>The sound is entertaining, with the key clicks and little laser sounds. <br/> <br/>I never really used the area-of-effect upgrades. They weren't powerful enough for the cost of occupying a finger and locking out a bunch of other random keys on the keyboard (the '90s shareware local multiplayer problem). <br/> <br/>The disabled keys could've used a more obvious indicator that they'd been destroyed. In the heat of battle I usually couldn't spot them, only at the end of a round. <br/> <br/>The round should probably end after the last enemy dies, too; killing a boss early meant you just had to wait out the 10-15 seconds left on the clock. <br/> <br/>But I really, really like this entry. Excellent work. |
| Apr 25 23:52:00 | 35m 00s | Flail Rider | Cool game. The flail reminds me of Velociraptor Safari, but that's probably going to be true about any game with a vehicle towing a large mass behind it. =) <br/> <br/>The graphics look great and the flail feels good. I think the crashing was a little unforgiving, though. Giant indestructible flail, itty-bitty tissue paper car. <br/> <br/>You mention powerups in the description, but I don't think I saw any in the game. <br/> <br/>Anyway, nice complete and polished game. Great entry. |
| Apr 26 00:28:00 | 36m 00s | APT: Advanced Persistent Threat | I think I got the hang of what was going on, but it was hard to see what effect your actions had on your performance. I can see that going into a hack you have odds for or against you and you can get boosts with exploits, but it was unclear how adding team members helped. ZeroDays never worked for me. I pressed Enter on them during a hack and nothing happened. <br/> <br/>The mood is lovely. The execution of the terminal UI is very good, with a draw rate that makes it feel like it's coming over a modem and some screen color flicker and garbled characters when things get tense. The text and terms were pretty legitimate, too. Maybe not important to the game, but more than placeholder sci-fi jargon. <br/> <br/>It took me a bit to realize I had to move the cursor down to the bottom area to inspect the sitrep and hosts. <br/> <br/>Sometimes the same job would show up twice in a day, and it would add the same host to my hosts list twice. I only had to take down one of them, so I guess that's a bug. <br/> <br/>I refused the opening offer the first time I played just to see what happened, and I'm glad you made that an option. <br/> <br/>I lost after 40 days. |
| Apr 26 00:33:00 | 5m 00s | Ally VS Wild ! | This was alright. I can see you were strapped for time. The bug art is cool and the character looks good, though the animation could be a little smoother. <br/> <br/>Ally has a pretty wide spread with that gun, huh? I guess that helps since there isn't any targeting indicator. Her hitbox seemed larger than it should be. She'd sometimes strike a sullen pose when there was still a decent buffer between her and a bug. |
| Apr 26 01:01:00 | 28m 00s | OPERATOR 42 | This game has everything. Perfect art, great animation, great voice work, automated voice response satire, fire suppression systems, dials, levers, buttons, wires, gauges, fake corporations, Parisian destruction... Premise and execution are top notch. The voice script was detailed and felt expansive. <br/> <br/>I really liked the option to extinguish myself but leave the console afire. That was a highlight. <br/> <br/>A couple of the voice segments didn't sound like they had the same band pass filter applied as the others. You probably processed the audio files outside the game? Do try Unity 5's new audio mixing stuff if you haven't already. It lets you do things like high-/low-pass filters this in-engine in real time. I'm using it for a game about managing radio station audio streams and it's great. <br/> <br/>A few of the clicking bits had fiddly targets. The grid of 9 buttons liked to double-read single clicks, and the bank of levers often moved the wrong lever when I clicked. <br/> <br/>Those are pretty minor complaints, though. This is probably my favorite jam game so far. |
| Apr 26 01:13:00 | 12m 00s | New Grafflebog Colony | This is a cool idea. I think it was too far gone by the time I tried it, though. The text on the Town Hall page said there were instructions to the right and menus above, but there was nothing to the right of that column and there were no menus above. I checked out the newsletters (#1 requires a google sign-in?) and the other location tabs and it seemed like stuff was coming from somewhere, but I didn't see a way to breed plants. The description mentions a library card and the game referenced forged library cards, but I didn't see any way to get or make use of those things. <br/> <br/>Great idea, great flavor, but it didn't seem to work? |
| Apr 26 01:30:00 | 17m 00s | Giant Spiky Ball of Death | Did you see Flail Rider (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=40591)? It's a little like a 3D isometric version of this with a car. <br/> <br/>It was pretty weird using my left hand for controls. Arrow keys are pretty standard, no? Three key layouts and no arrows. =P <br/> <br/>Hard game. I kept running into everything. At least the AI isn't smart enough to avoid the ball on its way to get me, so I could sometimes let them come to me. I like how the ball reflected laser shots from the pink boxes. Adding the big dumb box that takes a couple of hits to kill was nice, too. <br/> <br/>The instructions written on the center of the arena were a nice touch. |
| Apr 26 01:35:00 | 5m 00s | Space Deuce | I tried the WebGL build. I saw the monster on the horizon at the start, smacked a few tennis balls into him, and he blew up. Then it was just a steady stream of tennis balls from nowhere. I didn't see a way to move the player side to side like the screenshot. I smacked a few more balls into space before quitting. <br/> <br/>The art is quite nice. I'm not sure if the game had a bug or was just incomplete. |
| Apr 26 01:52:00 | 17m 00s | Tourist Trap | Cool idea. It took me a second to realize that I needed to hit the keys when the circle closed around the buttons. And I'm glad you had the buttons positioned accordingly around the band, too, since they didn't match the keys I was using. <br/> <br/>The hand-drawn art is really pretty, and there's a lot of it. I like the style a lot. <br/> <br/>I made $300! |
| Apr 26 18:26:00 | 16h 34m | Audio Assault | This is really cool, so I'm going to start with some criticism. =P <br/> <br/>When starting a song, it wouldn't recognize my keystrokes until I clicked the applet with the mouse. This was after clicking through the menus, so it wasn't a focus issue in the browser. It meant I always missed the first few notes. <br/> <br/>The notes approaching each turret should really look different from each other. You might be able to reuse colors/shapes between the left and right halves, but one side should have different sprites for each location. The two green bars (S/F and J/L) really confused me. <br/> <br/>It looks like the game doesn't penalize you for false presses and doesn't pay attention to timing. I played hard mode on the first song and mashed all the buttons the whole way through and got 324/408. It would help to reward the player with feedback about how well they hit a note (like the DDR perfect/great/good messages) and then use that data to make a comment about the player's performance at the end. It would at least be good to show more feedback when a note is hit or missed. <br/> <br/>It looks like you're from the FTL School of Difficulty Ratings, where Easy is Normal and Hard is Impossible. =P Easy could use another 10% nerfing for new players. Impossible seems to throw you into the deep end with chording, which is pretty advanced. Some keyboards may not be able to hold down more than a couple keys at a time, too, which might get in your way when using a lot of chords. <br/> <br/>On to the good stuff. Cool rhythm game! Hard to believe you had time to compose 3 songs during the compo, let alone create the note timings. According to your source code it looks like you made it easier on yourself by picking a straightforward BPM and time signature. The tunes are great. I'm still listening to the music while I write this. =) <br/> <br/>The game is very complete. Menus with on-hover effects, full loop from menus to gameplay and back. Interesting choice to hide the score until the end. I think it makes me really want to finish a track to see how I did. I couldn't detect any de-syncs in the music, either. All the notes seemed spot-on. <br/> <br/>I like the concept of a rhythm version of Missile Command. Defending your city with rhythm. The menu and game art looks good. You could go further with the city and the theme of neon EDM-driven nightlife. <br/> <br/>Top notch entry! Nice job! |
| Apr 26 18:39:00 | 13m 00s | Mass-X | Whoa. Nice puzzle platformer. So much action. Beautiful art, great sound, great sampler of the level design elements. The falling+teleporting bits are a little frustrating, but that seems intentional. This could totally be expanded to a much larger game with just the elements you've got on show here. <br/> <br/>And it's a compo entry! Well done! |
| Apr 26 18:55:00 | 16m 00s | DAGDROM | Too beautiful. The sound design works so fluidly (ha!) with the gameplay. Sounds like it's mostly mouth sounds, including the music, but the organicness fits with the paint dripping everywhere and the squishiness of the wall jumping. The twinkles where the paint can stick are a top-notch touch. <br/> <br/>It took a while to discover the paint-as-thrust. Maybe that could be introduced in a spot where the paint pushes you off a tiny platform into the void, communicating that there's force coming from the expulsion of paint? |
| Apr 26 19:16:00 | 21m 00s | Bubbles | Great non-lethal puzzle platformer. It's a little light on the puzzle part, though. =) <br/> <br/>Good variety of platforming elements. The charm with floating hearts is nice; reminds me of stunning Vorticons in Commander Keen. Bubble blowing is cute. <br/> <br/>I would've liked to see the bubble floating used as a puzzle element, like needing to float bubbles to locations you can't access or having bubbles directed by wind flow. Still, the game's very complete as-is. Good work! |
| Apr 26 19:34:00 | 18m 00s | Ice Princess | Cool idea and aesthetic, but the controls really get in the way. =( Trying to walk in reverse just makes the camera flip out. Turning feels too fast; this might be less of an issue if the camera position was elastic with respect to the character (lerp to position/rotation) and if the character's rotation speed was absolute, no acceleration. I frequently detonated my children prematurely because it's difficult to execute a right click on a buttonless touchpad without it getting interpreted as a left click occasionally. <br/> <br/>I'm not sure what you were supposed to do with the enemy. After half a dozen deaths I gave up because the dialogue was unskippable and there was a significant trudge back to the fight. Improving the character controls and drastically shortening the delay before child detonation would probably help there. <br/> <br/>The tilt/shift effect was nice, but a little too extreme. The candy characters were cute, but it was also tough to tell which way a round character was facing. The candy box art was fantastic, and the ground surface was nicely textured. The exercise-induced growth and reproduction was a great idea. <br/> <br/>With better controls, this could be really nice. |
| Apr 26 19:57:00 | 23m 00s | What Have We Created?! | Cool idea. <br/> <br/>The monster building part was nice, though it was difficult to tell by looking at a piece which way it would attack. I understand the green border system, but it didn't quite communicate enough to me. Pushing the armor art more toward the edge of the tile might help. <br/> <br/>I had a really hard time using the parts I rolled to make a monster with more than one leg. The minimum height of a leg plus the armor block joining it to the body means you can't effectively attack short buildings. When I finally built a monster that had enough pincers to do some damage, I spawned in a city that was mostly short houses that I couldn't reach. It might help to have the city be all tall buildings, like Rampage. <br/> <br/>The art and animation was good. The lab screen served its purpose, though it could use a little more polish and maybe some animation. I'm glad I was able to re-roll the available monster parts, but it often took too long to find what I needed. <br/> <br/>I think a better strategy for the grid would be to allow you to place monster parts anywhere and remove them on the fly. When you hit "launch", any disconnected parts could just fall off. There were a bunch of times when I knew where I wanted to use a part, but I didn't have the intervening parts to get there yet. I wanted to place the part in the monster grid and use later parts to build the connections. <br/> <br/>The text and the UI could be dressed up a bit. Using a non-system font would go a long way, and Unity's new UI system is really nice for creating good-looking HUDs. <br/> <br/>Once you get a monster built, it's satisfying to see them tear through the city (at least when they have enough teeth). The "build it and watch it go" element is fun to play with, and you could spend a lot of time designing monsters if you didn't have the supply limit in place. <br/> <br/>Nice work on the art and the monster building in general, though. That's a lot to get done in a short period. |
| Apr 26 20:06:00 | 9m 00s | Coder VS Bugs | This is like an arcade version of keyTD (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=36186). <br/> <br/>Quick experience. Very frantic. Debug mode is a cool addition. It would be helpful to have some sort of health indicator on the incoming bugs so you can tell how tough they are. The first time you notice a bug not dying in one hit, you start to worry. <br/> <br/>I didn't last long. =) |
| Apr 26 20:29:00 | 23m 00s | Crump Rush | I played the web version hosted at itch.io, which doesn't seem to record your high scores to display on the level select screen. I'll have to secretly know that I beat one of the developer times. =) <br/> <br/>I had a problem where the HTML5 build didn't seem to consume key repeats properly, so they'd fall through to the browser and trip my typeahead find box, taking focus away from the game. It only happened when keys were held down, not if they were repeatedly tapped. Maybe there's some setting in Game Maker where you have to define what keys it should eat? In Javascript you solve it by calling .stopPropagation() and .preventDefault() on the key event objects. <br/> <br/>The attraction beam to the circles looks great, and the physics feel good. The character feels like it has weight, which is nice. The environment tiles and the character sprite look very good, too. I like how you can destroy the anchor circles with your gun. <br/> <br/>Playing on a webpage, it was pretty easy to overshoot the edge of the screen and wind up clicking or right-clicking on the surrounding page. The camera could be zoomed out just a little more for that environment to make the buffer wider. <br/> <br/>Like most of your games, it feels good to play. I can see where you could get really good flow through some of those levels. I had a few satisfying moments where the attraction gun applied just enough force to arc over a spinning sawblade toward the goal. |
| Apr 26 20:57:00 | 28m 00s | Billy McMath Solves Problems | There's a lot more to this one than I expected based on the screenshots. Great job with the whole script and voice acting, even for the failures. I played it a few times to hear everything you had. That football scene kept kicking my ass, even on easy. =) <br/> <br/>My favorite art part was the pirouetting football players. There were lots of clever background gags, though. <br/> <br/>It's a pretty straightforward series of linear scenes with math problems in place of quick-time events, but in that respect they were tied into the theme of the game pretty well. Cute adventure. |
| Apr 27 01:48:00 | 4h 51m | Hugline Miami | Hot stuff! Great aesthetic, fantastic look with the scanline shader and the deformation around the edges and the CGA-like palette. I love all the characters with slightly different abilities, though my favorite is "hugs are more effective". Hug grenades! And this is a compo entry? Wow. <br/> <br/>I might've had the "issue with player movement" you describe. After a while the character felt pretty sluggish, though the NPCs still moved freely. <br/> <br/>The theme's kind of a wink and a nudge, right? You're still firing projectiles at nameless enemies, they're just called hugs. Remote hug projection technology. |
| Apr 27 03:59:00 | 2h 11m | Umbrellespionage | This is really nice. I don't usually enjoy these kinds of stealth games, but this one had a nice style to it. Movement felt pretty fluid, the environment looked good, the sparse guitar spy music was a pretty short loop but it sounded great and fit the atmosphere. <br/> <br/>It would be cool to have more levels, but that one looked pretty big. And based on your timelapse, it's actually built in the scene, not data-driven, right? Using a level definition file might increase your level design throughput. <br/> <br/>The umbrella animation was a little bit slow. I read some advice recently that said to make weapon attacks happen in one (maybe two?) frames and add some sort of trail or blur to the weapon to indicate that it moved. It sounded good to me. <br/> <br/>I wasted my darts really early because I was just trying them out. There aren't very many; maybe there were parts of the level I didn't see where they were important? <br/> <br/>Really cool, solid entry here. Nice work. |
| Apr 27 04:17:00 | 18m 00s | When Planets Collide | The controls weren't listed here or in the game, so I just jumped in. It didn't feel like I could make the planet move with the mouse or keyboard. So I read the comments here, which mentioned radar and very high mass. So I gave it another shot and still didn't feel like I was controlling it. <br/> <br/>Then I figured out that the red/green dots weren't moving like the starfield, and figured out it was a radar overlay. That really wasn't clear. Then I spotted the blue dot which was definitely moving in the universe, even if it didn't feel like it on screen. So there was control, just very slow. <br/> <br/>I never managed to make my planet intentionally collide with a smaller body. I think the force applied by the controls needs to be higher. <br/> <br/>The idea is sound; this is basically what Solar 2 does, but they make the galaxy density a little higher and the gravity lower so the matter doesn't all end up consolidating into larger bodies in short order. <br/> <br/>Higher force, lower gravities, and maybe some more material in the universe would get you on track, I think. |
| Apr 27 04:25:00 | 8m 00s | Bottle Toss | Congrats on your first submission! <br/> <br/>This is a pretty solid level. The bottle ammo reuse is a nice feature. Given that everything in the game is pretty slow moving, it could be difficult to aim well. <br/> <br/>This is a pretty solid first level that introduces a few creature types. There's plenty of vertical real estate if you wanted to add reefs to climb or something. <br/> <br/>The audio did the job. The music loop was pretty short and a little obtrusive. <br/> <br/>Hope you had fun. Keep it up! |
| Apr 27 19:42:00 | 15h 17m | ＢＥＤ✰ＨＯＧＧ | Lovely brawler. This handles really well. I like the way you need a pillow to fight and the pillows are consumables. Everything looks great, especially the feathers floating around. I like how you have to "get your points and get out", too. I guess that's the *hogg part. <br/> <br/>Excellent work. |
| Apr 28 04:12:00 | 8h 30m | I CRUSH YOU | I know the skit but I've never actually seen it. This was a cute implementation. The hand looks really nice! I think I crushed three heads and then the people stopped showing up and I just had an empty landscape with a floating hand. Not sure if that's what was supposed to happen. Cool entry. |
| May 5 20:20:00 | 184h 08m | Crossy Hell | Nice work! The little piano hits on dropped packages were a good choice. I like the way the packages detonate and blow away the oncoming zombies/ghosts. <br/> <br/>I wanted a more concrete indicator of my health than the smoke. I played until it told me I couldn't play anymore (86 dispatched entities). It was a little tough to match the in-game package icons to the oncoming enemy models, too, though you eventually just learn which is which. |
| May 6 16:57:00 | 20h 37m | Udom Nebdon | This is fantastic. The fixed camera perspectives were gorgeous, really dressed up an otherwise boring corridor with an interesting camera angle. The whole visual style was beautiful and consistent. So, so nice. <br/> <br/>After the first enemy near the first pool of light I was exploring and thinking to myself, "oh, you could totally throw a monster in one of these corridors and make the player lead it back for a kill," and then that totally happened. =D I never played "Alone in the Dark", but that moment felt a lot like the early pursuit in "Out of This World" (aka "Another World"). <br/> <br/>I picked tank controls because I'm not sure how direct controls would let you move backward. I tried replaying with direct controls, but the game didn't recognize any inputs (HTML5 build embedded in the submission page). Might have to reload it. <br/> <br/>It really feels like this would lend itself to a larger game, if you were so inclined. |