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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | hoqjed's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 04:39:00 | EVILATOR | The music is so devilish! Fantastic presentation and a unique idea. I'm taking the stairs from now on... | |
| Aug 25 04:50:00 | 11m 00s | Beast Mode | My fingers gained muscle from spamming up and down. AWESOME! |
| Aug 25 05:05:00 | 15m 00s | Village | Despite it being short and unfinished, it was really entertaining. Ragdolls YES! Nicely done. |
| Aug 25 05:09:00 | 4m 00s | Minko | Nicely done! |
| Aug 25 08:51:00 | 3h 42m | Brood | Really nice job overall. The game seems well rounded in all departments, gameplay, art, and sound. I glazed over the instructions enough to understand the basics, though it's fairly verbose (which is both good and bad) some people might like the extra hints, but others will skip it because they just want to start playing. Introducing the gameplay in a more natural manner would have been preferable (slower start and ramp up pace over time, hands on learning). On the other hand, the tutorials do look quite nice so that's a plus ;) <br/> <br/>At the end your monster stops spawning eggs and so I essentially waited for the nuke to go off while I tossed humans around. From the end game message I assume I played the game correctly and "won". I just found that bit slightly confusing while playing because of the wait duration for the end to arrive. <br/> <br/>Aside from those criticisms the game just works well. It feels challenging and once you understand it the game is paced fairly well in terms of the monster grow/feed/throw loop. Really nice job to everyone on the team, you guys should be proud! <br/> <br/>Here were my end game stats <br/>--------------------------- <br/>Overall score: 10158 <br/>Parenting Efficiency: 100 <br/>Monsters Saved: 31 <br/>Monsters Lost: 49 <br/>Eggs Lost/Eaten: 88 <br/>Humans Devoured: 34 <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 10:00:00 | 1h 09m | Whimsical Monster Mind Melting Fun-Time | Played it on the web through gamejolt and the controls text was very difficult to read. Luckily it's not hard to pick up and figure out though! I also played the windows version and it worked as expected and of course looked better full screened. <br/> <br/>The concept is solid and I like the idea of having a sort of body-snatching stealth mechanic. The execution of the idea felt somewhat rough though. Not bad by any means, I'd say it's definitely a good base to expand on, but it feels like it still needs more work and polish. <br/> <br/>The guard patterns and level design were pretty straightforward. It kind of seemed like there was some struggle to try and keep the design interesting and there's some very noticeable repetition in some areas. On the plus side the possession mechanic redeems these flaws somewhat and I enjoyed navigating through areas just killing all the guards along the way. In these kind of stealth based games I tend to not take my chances leaving someone around to catch me ;) <br/> <br/>The art wasn't very attractive to me in general. Lots of very small repeating textures and parts that don't necessarily look like they fit visually together. For instance, the floor texture and lighting underneath the player have a smooth look, but the walls look very flat and harsh in comparison. It reminds me of an early pc game look and retro in a "hasn't aged well" way. <br/> <br/>The sound is also pretty basic. Again, like the art the sounds have a very old feel. There aren't many of them either so they can get somewhat repetitive (especially the possess/unpossess sounds). A looping ambient 8-bit track might have helped make the game feel a little less empty audio-wise. <br/> <br/>I did a random search for ambient moody 8-bit stuff and found this as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T2oBTbilyM <br/> <br/>Also, there seemed to be a bug where if you pressed x to leave a body prematurely the transition from body to player would play again when the timer WOULD have run out. It's not game breaking, but it was fairly noticeable since I pressed x pretty often to leave guards early. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 10:27:00 | 27m 00s | Takodemon | How the heck was something so polished done in just 7 hours? Even for the full 48 hours this would have been extremely impressive. That baffles me, honestly. <br/> <br/>The mechanics work fairly well, and once I got the ball rolling (ha) with the controls it wasn't actually too hard to navigate. I found that if you enlarged the upper corner of the direction you wanted to go you could actually gain some pretty decent speed. <br/> <br/>The "monster" key controls is an interesting move to try and match the theme, but sadly it just felt really unintuitive to me. In some ways that difficulty of mapping strange keys to movement directions is interesting, but it's also fairly frustrating knowing that if they were mapped differently it would have made for potentially more enjoyable gameplay. <br/> <br/>That said, the organic nature of the monster creature was stellar to play around with. I loved everything about the movement. My favorite part is the level 5 area where you slide down between the cramped walls. <br/> <br/>The art, audio, and general ambiance is spot on. I mean just really, really good, even without considering the time constraints. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 11:17:00 | 50m 00s | Sucker Punch | I sure made a mess of all those boats haha. This was a really entertaining little entry. It's just packed full of sail smashin' wilhelm screamin' octopus flailin' goodness. It fulfills all my primal "I just want to smash everything" needs. <br/> <br/>I did find the health damage aspect somewhat confusing. Since there's so much debris on-screen it can be pretty difficult to tell what's doing what to you at times. Sometimes I would stop and try to figure it out, until I remembered I was an octopus and all I wanted to do was smash more stuff. I suppose there are an awful lot of splinters floating around. <br/> <br/>My final score was 86598 <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 12:48:00 | 1h 31m | The Howl | Ah, I remember seeing this one on Twitter mid-development. <br/> <br/>It has a really nice atmosphere and I enjoyed wandering around, even though it felt a bit directionless (both in terms of movement orientation and the hunting motivation). <br/> <br/>Over the course of playing I found and killed two rabbits. They yielded nothing but bloodstains... and so I decided I wouldn't kill any more rabbits. After walking around a little more and noticing the repetition in scenery I decided to quit because I felt like I had mostly seen what the game had to offer. (I noticed someone else mentioned some sort of monster so I re-visited the game and did see, shoot, and apparently kill that). <br/> <br/>I found the mouse movement to be overly sensitive, toning that down and smoothing it would have helped the experience a lot for me. The hunting itself was also a tad bland as an activity. It boiled down to me running (or walking) around like a madman until I saw something run away from me... then it's just a matter of following it until I figured out how close you can get to it's detection radius before it runs. Then shoot to kill. <br/> <br/>Not that it needs to be "gamified" more or anything. It's just that the AI reactions and the skill required to use the bow was fairly straightforward and lacked depth. <br/> <br/>I did like the weather effect transitions though. Especially when the wind goes calm after an intense session of rabbit murder. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 16:18:00 | 3h 30m | Three Bags Full | Wow, for such a short time period you guys did a STELLAR job. Some nitpicks though. The kids are really passive, so it was a bit alarming to find i could feed them to the monster since the motivation to do so isn't really there, despite being poor (that's a pretty drastic action for some money). There's also a bug where I click on two sheep to sheer them, but the mother stops mid-action for both of them and I get no wool, and the sheep shear animation continues to play. <br/> <br/>Despite this I gave you five stars. I love coming across games that push the medium and this definitely does that. And made in 72 hours, holy crap!! |
| Aug 25 16:27:00 | 9m 00s | Some Knights Left | Great gameplay, well paced, and fantastic presentation. I felt the monster was a bit slow which made chasing archers annoying. Stellar job! |
| Aug 25 16:38:00 | 11m 00s | Mighty Golem | The art is great, but I felt the knights run at you way too fast. |
| Aug 25 20:39:00 | 4h 01m | Labyrinth of the Minotaur | Had a bug early on where Theseus spawned out of the map and apparently got stuck somehow (he would rotate but wouldn't teleport anymore), which I'm not sure how that happens since his main method of travel would seem to solve that. <br/> <br/>I might be somewhat biased with this aspect, but the minimap bugs me soooo much haha. I generally don't care for games where my focus is drawn to only ever look at the minimap, making the main scene take a backseat. The map is essentially a "better" view of the game, so in this case I was almost solely looking at that. Seems like the map bit came from some crossover with the "a map will be useful" theme. <br/> <br/>I didn't personally find the game to be terribly challenging, but I could see some places where you could easily get cornered by Theseus. Sometimes his teleportation works against him though ironically, and he'll be in a position near me but will poof away haha. Seems like his movement could have been rounded out a bit more. Though it is an interesting solution for not having to deal with wall collision and pathfinding stuff haha. <br/> <br/>As others stated, the mythology aspect is an appealing setting though and the movement and whatnot works fairly well. The mouse rotation aspect seems like you had an idea there that wasn't implemented, since it doesn't seem to be used for anything. I almost think it would have been more satisfying to have a set amount of people in the labyrinth rather than being endless. This is because the difficulty doesn't really change throughout the experience, so it's fairly easy to lose interest when the player realizes that they'll just keep doing the same thing in a loop. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 23:15:00 | 2h 36m | Karnage in Poupouland | You nailed the graphics and audio design down. It's simple but it all meshes really nicely together and I didn't find any of the sounds annoying or overly tedious. That can be hard to pull off. <br/> <br/>The game itself is also enjoyable. Again, very much like the art and audio it's simple but just executed very nicely. A previous comment by ChosenCharacter made a very good point that the further in the game you got the less intense it felt and more tedious it felt. I probably got the crowd down to about 50 or so before I felt like I had seen enough. I'm not sure if there's some sort of end game thing, I may return to it at some point to see. <br/> <br/>Oh, also I just started the game and tried to figure out the controls myself. I got the movement down easily but it took me a while to figure out that left click was how you pushed. I didn't realize you could carry them until I read the description. I'd encourage having some sort of little controls graphic or text in-game (on the main menu perhaps) just in case someone dives in before reading the game description. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 23:40:00 | 25m 00s | A Meal For The Gods | I really like the overall design of the game. The visuals, the audio and of course the physics oriented gameplay feel really nice together. <br/> <br/>I did find it quite difficult to actually get the people to properly fling into the mouth. I found out later that it was much easier for me if I grabbed them by their body rather than their heads. The heads are the obvious thing to grab though because of the proportions. <br/> <br/>The people felt really "heavy" to drag and it was quite easy for them to kind of slip out of your control because of that weight. I had to kind of drag them back a bit before I flinged forward otherwise they wouldn't have enough momentum to get even remotely close. I also found the perspective to be somewhat confusing at first, since you're dragging left and right but there's some depth there that's hard to gauge. You do get somewhat accustomed to it over time though. <br/> <br/>I wasn't sure if it ended at some point or not. I played it over a couple of times and enjoyed myself. It's fairly difficult but also ends up being pretty rewarding when you do start getting the hang of it. I found the satisfaction bar perhaps drains too quickly though for most people to be able to manage it without spending a fair amount of time failing (which might be frustrating to some). <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 25 23:52:00 | 12m 00s | Mr. Legs | Nice, I've been seeing a lot of these physics-based awkward to control sort of things and I tend to enjoy them. This one has a method for me that tended to just work in most cases. That was holding the 'O' key to keep one set of legs up and moving the other set of legs in large swooping patterns to sort of "fly" and push off the ground. It's very elegant looking once you get it down haha. <br/> <br/>Knocking over the buildings tended to be mostly "rubbing against it until something happens" at first, but once I got my octo-swooping method down I was flinging my arms into buildings like a champ. <br/> <br/>The game description says you knock stuff over until you fall over, but from what I could tell there wasn't really a fail state in terms of falling over. Being on the ground is just kind of the natural octopus state, so as far as I could tell you couldn't really mess up. Which is fine by me actually. <br/> <br/>Oh also, really nice art and colors used. It's simple but does a good job. I really wish there were some audio in here somewhere. The silent flopping around just felt like it needed something. |
| Aug 26 00:03:00 | 11m 00s | BreakoutBeast | Kind of surprised there isn't a web version since it's in Unity. I've noticed a lot of other people are still using the unity webplayer and it's been working fine for me (of course it's not going to be supported on chrome much longer though). <br/> <br/>The game itself was nice. It was sort of basic but it's a solid game for a solo shot. The sounds helped quite a bit to me, that splat sound that people make is really satisfying haha. Also figuring out the javelin throwing patterns was interesting. It kind of contradicts your typical expectations which would be to jump onto enemies. But here it generally seemed better to try and avoid jumping since you'd typically end up in more danger. Though falling with style was definitely a thing. <br/> <br/>It's not mind blowing but it's not bad either. Overall, it's a nice solid game you should be proud of. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 26 00:22:00 | 19m 00s | Meepocalypse | This game should REALLY be getting more attention. I understand it's not finished and most of the game wasn't implemented but what IS here is really nice. Remember to play and rate other games, I know it can be discouraging when a project doesn't pan out as expected but to me this is still a really solid entry. <br/> <br/>I absolutely love the art haha. It's freaking adorable, and it's incredibly consistent. EVERYTHING is drawn in that style, even the health bar. Wow. I even like the roughness where you can see some of the parts that were erased haha, it's just brilliant. <br/> <br/>It seems like the programmer had their hands full but what's in here is still very good. The movement is nice and has some subtleties to it. The platforming is decent and at the very least handled collisions and whatnot well. The jumping felt perhaps a bit over exaggerated but works nicely with the block sizes. <br/> <br/>Last but not least the audio work was also on par with everything else. Nice little jumping and "hurt" sounds give extra impact to actions and the background track is cheery and matches with the tone of the art. <br/> <br/>I dunno, maybe the animations and stuff just really make this thing for me but everything has a nice feel to it and makes me smile. I would gladly return back and play and give additional feedback on a post-jam version if that became a thing. <br/> <br/>Also consider creating a Unity webplayer version, I've noticed other people are also still uploading webplayer versions even though it won't be compatible with chrome soon and they're working fine on my end. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 26 16:10:00 | 15h 48m | Pit of Despair | People will do anything to get back their cats...even stepping on pits of despair! |
| Aug 26 21:32:00 | 5h 22m | Out West | This one really sucked me in. I kind of started it and glazed over the text at first, thinking "ah it's a text adventure, probably will just be okay". But as it progressed I grew more an more immersed in the experience. <br/> <br/>***I'll try to be somewhat spoil-free out of respect to the game, but I also want to hint to the dev as to the path I took. Just go play the game*** <br/> <br/>As I continued to play the mystery built up because of the pacing with the narrative. Decisions play out elegantly, making it feel like you don't get those cheesy "oh you picked that option, you died, oh well" paths. <br/> <br/>My first playthrough really just worked its way up to the climax well. The way the game kind of psyched you out was interesting: "is going to the town a good decision?" "what happens when you get there???", "who am I? Who's that? Why why why". The ending was extremely satisfying and was very much not in line with my expectations. <br/> <br/>I especially liked the bits where you were given information, and clicking on the links cycled through similar content. That was a great way to use the text to convey confusion and doubt. <br/> <br/>Nice job overall, it's kind of hard to rate this game in certain aspects ("fun" I'm looking at you). But you nailed the mood, especially considering it's all delivered with just the vague images and text. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 26 21:57:00 | 25m 00s | Even In Your Ludum Dare | I agree with others in that when you start getting much larger it actually becomes much more difficult to consume things. It's partially because of the hitbox changing and partially because the npc jumping patterns are out of your control and sometimes you needed to just wait for them to "sync" up correctly with you... or desync, whatever. <br/> <br/>I think actually just spawning in much more over time and altering the hitbox as you grow would be probably the simplest solutions. I would have liked to see more of the npc's getting larger too, since I found that aspect interesting... coming across a bigger npc and knowing it's like that for a reason. Not just because you spawned it in randomly larger. <br/> <br/>I actually didn't mind the one button aspect for the controls though. At the very least it makes the game simple to pick up. <br/> <br/>After a certain point it does seem like the kind of game where you just want to leave it idling because you kind of want to see what happens but you don't necessarily want to actively play anymore. <br/> <br/>I have to say though, this is probably one of the better "I didn't like the theme so I made something silly" games I've seen for LD in general. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 26 22:39:00 | 42m 00s | Unwelcome Presence | Dark Souls! I'm sorry, I'm going to make a lot of souls comparisons. It reminds me of why I like the souls series. It's not necessarily because it's hard, that's a part of it, but they're really atmospheric... and encounters can be tense. This definitely has that, though it's fairly rough in some aspects. <br/> <br/>The visuals were definitely interesting, and I'm sure the grayscale aspect helped to keep the artist(s) sane. I do think it could be tweaked a bit so that certain areas are less muddled and give the feeling that you can't quite see what you're doing. It's not terribly common, and through most of the game it works well, but visual confusion can happen especially in tight spaces. Animations were also very nicely done for the most part. <br/> <br/>One aspect of the controls that I didn't like was the sprinting. If you started sprinting and tried to go at an angle you start sidestepping and it's very clunky feeling. It works better if you run and use the camera to point your character in the direction you want to go, but it's awkward since sprinting is the 'a' button with a pad. Aside from that the controls work fairly well. <br/> <br/>Combat is nice, it's not perfect and has rough edges for sure, but it does also capture the souls feel, at least in the strategy and mental aspect. Study enemy patterns, figure out holes in their defenses, and exploit them. I like that process and you've got it. I loved it when you introduced the first two-on one fight, and I was inclined to slowly back up down the hallway and lead them into the open area. Then I proceeded to divide and conquer. Some interesting level design and enemy placement there. <br/> <br/>The combat did kind of feel... disconnected though. It was sometimes difficult to judge the attack range and actually hitting the enemies felt a bit hollow. There's very little feedback there aside from the audio cues you get. <br/> <br/>I tried a bit of everything, I actually ended up using the crossbow a lot even though it was a tad awkward. I found out it was three shots to kill so that kind of ended up being my go to method for dispatching enemies since I could get a better idea of the health they had left. <br/> <br/>Oh, the audio work was nice too. Specifically the rattling sounds the monsters make... gah, reminded me so much of a souls game. <br/> <br/>Umm... the only other thing that comes to mind for me was that it took me a while to figure out that I could consume enemies in order to gain health. I think maybe that could have been hinted at better. Perhaps some sort of glowing "loot drop" effect to indicate there's something to collect. <br/> <br/>Overall, fantastic job. It's not perfect and there are a lot of aspects that could be improved but for the scope and the timeline it's seriously ambitious and impressive. |
| Aug 26 23:04:00 | 25m 00s | Good Luck Gardener | Do those people seriously just eat literally anything they find on their doorstep? Gosh. <br/> <br/>The tutorial image does help quite a bit, though I wish some of it was a little more intuitive through the gameplay itself. <br/> <br/>The graphics are the definite strong point here. It's kind of what kept me around playing it, because it looked like a nice game. <br/> <br/>I'm afraid I didn't actually enjoy the game part of it very much though. It felt very tedious after I learned the main pattern you had to follow. Pick up object, throw in ground, water, water again, pick, leave it for the people. It just didn't hold my interest, and I ended up quitting before I drained the people bar fully since I thought I kind of saw where it was all going. Though I did manage to get one of em killed... maybe that'll teach the rest of them a lesson about eating doorstep food. <br/> <br/>I did like the cute oblivious monster approach though. Kind of a "I want to help people!" attitude, but proceeds to seriously screw stuff up haha. <br/> <br/>Some audio in here would have been a great addition also. Atmospheric woods-y sounds and stuff for the main interactions. Maybe even some kind of background music. <br/> <br/>It was adorable and I really wanted to like it based off of the visuals and humorous screenshots posted for it... but it just didn't do much for me in the end. At least it seems like you had fun creating it though! I do admire games that give off the feeling that the dev just enjoyed their time with it. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 27 00:55:00 | 1h 51m | BIG BAD WOLF | Really nice graphics, though I realize they weren't made during the jam. <br/> <br/>The gameplay itself was enjoyable though for some reason it didn't leave a huge impact on me. Something felt missing to me, or maybe my expectations were just off from what it actually was. The levels were structured in a way where most of the time I felt solutions were very easy to come up with. That feeling might also come from how little reinforcement there is on the rating system. It sits very quietly down at the bottom and I actually hadn't noticed it for a bit. In my head that sounds great, I generally dislike blatant "bing! bing! bing! you're a winner!" star systems in games. But I felt like something needed to be there to either encourage or enforce less sloppy methods to progressing through the game. <br/> <br/>Certain levels I didn't care for, like the domino one and there's another called pitchfork that's similar in approach. They don't really allow for much creativity on the player's part because they very heavily imply the obvious solution. <br/> <br/>The ones I enjoyed most balanced the "you can do this" hints with the structure and consequences for blowing up something that might have been vital for structural stability. The building in the screenshots with the very long beam is I think a good example. It has this obvious points that you're tempted to blow away, but doing so might cause you to fail later after you take out other chunks. There are many times (even in that example) where certain treasure can be collected by blowing away a wall that won't cause any overall structural consequences later. <br/> <br/>It's kind of a strange thing because I know how much work this kind of thing takes, and that it's impressive how it was actually pulled off. Something about it just felt somewhat lackluster though. But maybe you're just unlucky and I played it while in the wrong mood ;) I do feel awfully nitpicky about it. <br/> <br/>Anyway, fantastic job on the entry. It's very polished and you've done an excellent job putting it all together in such a short amount of time. <br/> <br/>- Dylan |
| Aug 27 16:23:00 | 15h 28m | Dragon Defense | You have a nice concept and great graphics, but the knight's movement random movement coupled with not being able to control the height of my arms AND only swinging one arm at a time makes randomness too prevalent, and turns it from a potential skill-based game into a frustrating luck-based one. If I had more control over what I'm doing I feel I'd enjoy it more. |
| Aug 27 16:33:00 | 10m 00s | Grave | Wow. Like others have said, very addictive game. The theme is there but it's kind of just a sprite swap between the enemies and the player. But quibble aside, great presentation, gameplay was challenging yet fair, very dark souls-esque. Fantastic entry, wonderful job!! |