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Feedback comments for LD33
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Wertle's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 6 16:14:00 | ...But which one? | I love the experimental approach to the concept. At first I was like "why are you all wiggly and unresponsive this feels not great" but then it immediately became clear once other ghosts showed up. It was a good way of disguising your player. I'm wondering if there is a way to get that feature while still making the controls feel responsive once you notice who you are playing, but it would probably be pretty challenging since they are conflicting goals. I think even a tiny bit of sound really would have kicked this up to the next level (possibly opening up some other opportunities to identify your player, identifying footsteps among lots of footsteps?). There were times when I got the candy and wasn't sure if I had correctly identified which ghost I was, but it may just be that the collision on the candy is kind of awkward when approached from the bottom, so it triggers sooner than I expect. Overall nice work trying something different! | |
| Sep 6 16:25:00 | 11m 00s | Employee of the Month: A Binary Story | You folks did a really great job of implying a lot about the world with little "hint" details so I was constantly curious about what was going on. I like everything appears to be a normal world due to how you reference things casually (like "cleansing") that end up being rabbitholes to more complicated threads. The squiggly animations were great and added just enough extra visual interest to make this feel different than just a text adventure with images. I'm not normally one to try text adventures more than once to explore different options, but I did so with this game because I was very curious about the world and you didn't reveal it all at once so I had a reason to go searching. Good job! |
| Sep 6 16:34:00 | 9m 00s | It's Sunday | This was really funny, I loved the animations and the reaction of the alarm clock when the alarm goes off. The intro text faded too quickly for me to read, though! I like how you have a buffer of time before the skull starts moving to let people get their bearings, that feels pretty great. I mentioned this in the stream, but I think there are a couple of things you can do with the spacebar to make it feel more responsive - extra feedback on when you're supposed to press, but also maybe experiment with some grace period after the bar hits the target for registering a successful press. Right now it can feel like I should have gotten the target but I didn't because it was just on the edge of collision. Otherwise super cute and simple, great interpretation of the theme! |
| Sep 6 16:45:00 | 11m 00s | Candy Creeper | Super cute concept, I think there is a seed here to try a lot of really interesting things. I love the flat-but-with-shadows art style. I'd be curious to see where you take the mechanic, seems like a lot you could do mainly with the question "why should I bother returning to the cave frequently?" If you continue work on this, I feel like that would be the best thing to start experimenting with next. The acceleration on the movement seemed to feel out of control pretty quickly, there's not really a consequence for this at the moment but could be another thing to play with (maybe if you bumped into a parent, game over, or something) basically a reason to want to walk instead of just run everywhere. Overall, fun concept, good job! |
| Sep 6 16:55:00 | 10m 00s | Power Went Out At The Dinner Party | This was a wonderful little experience, i loooove the audio and I thought you did a great job of characterizing everyone through the dialog. I didn't want to eat the doctor, I liked him :( Perfectly consumable experience for the jam. The talking "sound" effect was hilarious, I wish there were more variation in them just because I liked hearing the sound and I wanted to hear more of it. The flailing animations were fantastic. |
| Sep 6 17:06:00 | 11m 00s | Monster Truck Rampage | Congrats on your first Ludum Dare game! This was a great entry and very silly. I loved the juxtaposition of the super metal music and the fact that I appeared very small on the screen, it felt super silly. There's a lot of little feedback things you can do to crank things up that I think wouldn't be too involved - since the game is all about crushing cars, that's a place where you could really push the feedback and make it feel REALLy satisfying to smoosh a car (mix up the sound really loud, do things like a fullscreen flash or a bit of screenshake, effects, go all out because this is what the game is about!). You may also want to look at some extra feedback when I am in the correct place for gas and repair, sound or state change when I am fueling up in addition to the meters themselves would help. I would even suggest experimenting with different zoom levels, i'd be curious to see how differently this places with a closer camera. Just something to think about. Overall, nice work! |
| Sep 9 02:48:00 | 57h 42m | Lady Bug | Excellent job on the little details in the animation. I love the wing flutter when you jump, and the feedback for chomping dudes. I had some trouble understanding how the bullets tracked me, sometimes I would charge ahead in a setup and not get hit, but if I tried the same strategy a second time I would get hit. Since this is a pretty hard game where you're solving room-by-room, I'd recommend making the restart time sliiiiiiiightly faster (the splatter feedback when you die is great, just a hair long. I want to get back in the action quickly when I die to try and learn how to overcome what killed me). I couldn't play as much as I wanted for the difficulty, but I think it's a solid entry. At some points I wish certain challenges were isolated (like the crouch jump part, I kept dying in the subsequent parts and felt like I had no way to practice or prepare and so kept having to do the crouch jump challenge over and over). Camera panning could be smoothed out, but that's polishy stuff. Well done! |
| Sep 9 02:50:00 | 2m 00s | PixelMonster | Alas, wouldn't run on Windows 8 (the executable ran and a command window opened but the program itself never ran) |
| Sep 9 03:03:00 | 13m 00s | Humon | Pretty fun and accurate pokemon parody. I like how the humans just straight up die, no candy-coating the hard facts here :) I thought you did a good job with the framing around alien abduction that was definitely making a comment and not a joke, which is what makes the best satire. There were a few little things that I think could clean up the experience, notably when you enter the cave you very easily walk back out because you're already pressing up. If you aren't going to have the exit mirror the entrance, it can address this problem if you have a no-input state when going into/coming out of doors, to give the player a beat to reorient and realize they're going to need to switch directions. That's a minor thing but stuff like that can help a lot! Nice work. |
| Sep 9 03:27:00 | 24m 00s | Cruelty Free | A lot of great stuff going on here! The animations on both the rat and the scientists were really well done to the point that I had an easy time buying in to the fantasy (I felt inclined to hide in nooks like a rat even though I wasn't actually sure if I could get caught). I loved how you made the most of very little, like how the scientists idle while at a counter made them look like they were working, but the same animation out in the open made it look like they were searching for me). I see that you couldn't get the sound implemented in time, but I love that the music changed with the different states, another great example of a small thing that had a large impact. In my stream chat, our resident edge detection expert (William Chyr) mentioned that it would be cool to explore varying the line thickness with depth (like if ratty's butt had thicker lines because it was closer to the camera, etc) could be something fun to play with. A few minor notes, you may want to look into some kind of grace period jumping when running and jumping off of ledges, I often tried to do running jumps but fell when I expected to jump. Just a few frames after falling off a ledge where jump can still be performed would work wonders (since this is a 3D game and you are often jumping forward, you can be a little more generous with this sort of grace period than a sidescroller because I often can't even tell when I'm exactly off the edge anyway). Great work on having a satisfying payoff with simple implementation. Excellent work! |
| Sep 9 03:48:00 | 21m 00s | Primer | Nice proof of concept for a potentially interesting mechanic. You did great work giving character to the cubes with your animation feedback, tilting, and particle streams. I immediately understood that the badguy was bad and that I wanted to avoid his flashlight. There are a few things I think you can start to play with if you want to push this further. One, consider trying out a lead camera instead of centering it directly on the player - sometimes I felt a little cramped in the direction I was moving. There's a lot you can do with camera so I think it's worth experimenting. The teleport mechanic has potential but is really sensitive and a little unruly. If you haven't, I'd love to see how that works using a controller and analog stick, and if that precision makes moving around the teleport circle easier, that way you could really push things like needing to move your teleporter around corners and such. I hope you keep it up, nice work! |
| Sep 9 04:07:00 | 19m 00s | Monster Production | I think there's a super interesting premise here and there's a lot you can do to push the promise of the setup (scaring people being a blue-collar working job for a monster) in the actual game itself. For example, I got confused about the coffee breaks and didn't understand why I was getting reset. If you made it super clear that that's what was happening, it could be pretty funny because union-mandated coffee break is actually disrupting your progress. I had a hard time telling if I actually scared someone. Sometimes they would scream, sometimes they wouldn't, I think if your game is all about scaring people awake then that's an area where you could afford to spend lots of feedback and polish - basically prioritize the core interactions of your game to make them feel really good. Even though there were objects in all the rooms, it felt kind of abstract and maze-like. Since part of the charm of the premise is the monster being in a real human world, it would be worth it to try and find a way to make the level feel like a real space. Is it a hotel? Is it a boarding house? What are the functions of the rooms? It doesn't have to be hyper realistic, but just a little bit of logic can help you dress them appropriately and make it feel like a more coherent space (would help with navigation too, because I could be like "I've been in the kitchen already" and so on). The game was quite long and I didn't get much further into Day 2 so I don't know if anything different happens in later days. The base idea has promise to be really charming, just find ways to push it in the rest of the game. Nice work! |
| Sep 12 21:51:00 | 89h 44m | Scream Hunter | I really liked the visuals with the 2D lighting (is that a godot engine thing?) and the effect for hiding behind things read really well. There was some confusion over when I had actually succeeded, because the counter didn't go up and nothing happened visually other than you walking out the door, so I wasn't sure if I actually did what I was supposed to do or not. It wasn't entirely clear when I would get caught by the resident, like if I just had to be in the same room as him or if it was the boundaries of the light, etc. At first I was flustered that I couldn't tell if a bed was occupied, but then when I figured out that a big part of the game is luring people out of bed to even tell where they are, I thought it made a lot more sense. It was a little confusing that you were trying to wake them up to scare them, but waking them up in another way put you in danger, just kind of fuzzy narrative logic that took a bit for me to understand. Nice work! |
| Sep 12 22:12:00 | 21m 00s | Tenebrous Expanse | Resident UI expert in my group when we streamed this really liked the spiral level select menu :) (Extra points for instant retry option). I really liked how you gave this game a lot of character and mood with the visuals, the little touches like the idle sucking in of particles and how the darkness expanded made it feel ominous. It made it feel like it had some story to it and not just a minigolf game. I wish there was feedback to tell me that I couldn't grab the character while it was still moving, some visual change on it or whatevs. I think the mood could have been pushed even further with some sound effects, especially in the spreading of the darkness. There was a lot of content for a jam game, so I appreciated you calling out which levels introduced new mechanics, it ramped up fairly nicely to the point where you started to have to make perfect shots. Nice work! |
| Sep 12 22:27:00 | 15m 00s | FTLOL | I really enjoyed this because I'm terrible at management games so only having to make one decision at a time with no time pressure was great for me ;) I enjoyed the potential for silly options (like stuffing towels in a hull breach). The fun in this game came from seeing the results of attempting silly things, however i never shot people at the aliens or anything like that because I'm too much of a goody two shoes. I guess if you want using people up to be inevitable, you could extend it to use all resources but that might get too long so the joke doesn't hit. I still liked that you had lots of options, though, because it made me feel like I had the ability to experiment with stuff. Nice work! |
| Sep 12 22:38:00 | 11m 00s | Beast Of The Woods | This was an amazing job for the scope that you did it in, you put a lot of effort into all the places that mattered most. I loooooved the little monster hands creeping onto screen to indicate range, and what you did with the music for the same. It was an elegant way of both creating mood but also giving the player important gameplay information at the same time. My only note would be that the effect when you successfully kill someone is a little unclear, and when it happened the first time I thought I had been killed. I think the fullscreen red flash makes me think "I have been injured" because it's as though something has happened to my own vision. The fact that the human whips around to see you at the last minute is really cool but also adds to this confusion (did they shoot me?). Perhaps a scream or finding another bit of feedback and saving the fullscreen red when YOU are shot. Not sure what that could be. That was really the only confusing point. Wonderful job with the mood and all the foley! |
| Sep 12 22:52:00 | 14m 00s | Curse Of The Poncho | I though there was a lot of cute wrapper to this game and I liked the cactus form, but it's difficult when you want someone to do something (i.e. eventually turn into cactus form) but you tell them in the game NOT to do that (don't kill innocents). Some people love to just thwart that for fun, but I'm the sort of person who would have really tried not to kill innocents, and only started shooting them because you told me "that's what the fun part is." If that's the fun part, maybe just make that the whole game or find a way to get there more quickly? I had some difficulty with the collision on the bullets which I mentioned in the chat. I think with game jams it's better to err on the side of generosity. I liked the art a lot, and the ambient Western-ness. In the shooty-shoot parts, I wish I had a way to back up while also facing forward (i believe you mentioned wanting to play with mouse targeting, that would have solved this, or perhaps some manner of strafe button). Nice work! |
| Sep 12 23:04:00 | 12m 00s | Crypt of the Minotaur | I loved the sound effects on this, they were super juicy! I think there were a lot of little issues with feedback that could really push this game forward. It was unclear to me when I was taking damage, because I assumed the knights were just going for the treasure, i didn't register them as "attacking" me and only noticed I was low on health when the screen edge effects kicked in. A sound effect would have sufficed since figuring out a fancy animation on the knight would have been a lot of work. Though if you went the animation route, I'd recommend something really simple and obvious. I big ole sword swoop sprite perhaps, just something that makes the silhouette on the knight REALLY different so I catch it right away. I also wasn't clear exactly when I took damage, and wasn't sure how to attack them such that I wouldn't take any damage, since our ranges overlapped. I think you could have given a beat on the minotaur's death before going straight to the score screen to give me a chance to register what had just happened. Even if there was no animation, if everything on the screen just froze in place for a beat and maybe a sad sound effect, it would have given the same effect more or less. I felt sorry for this minotaur, his plight seemed hopeless. Nice job! |
| Sep 12 23:17:00 | 13m 00s | Museum City Boat | Any game that has an achievement to destroy abstract art is the game for me! <br/> <br/>The shuffle animation was so adorable that I couldn't stand it, and the main character looks like a delicious chicken mcnugget. <br/> <br/>I think being more explicit about the controls would have been a good idea since it took us a while to figure out the ducking mechanic. Overall really short, but really fun to play. Great game! |
| Sep 12 23:30:00 | 13m 00s | You, little Monster! | I was frustrated that the actions I took were handled so well by the parents. I wanted them to be upset, but I got away scott free. I liked the fact that the choices were limited by your previous actions, so there was decision making to figure out how to get the most evil options to open up. Nice work! |