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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | amras0000's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 14 00:41:00 | CHILL PILL | score of 71. The increase in size as you make mistakes was a nice touch, though the final zoom level was larger than my monitor (any way you could grab screensize data in html5?). <br/> <br/>Main complaint is the travel time of the grandma. I think the game would benefit if: <br/>-the color switched the frame I hit the appropriate button <br/>-I could only hit a pill when part of it was over the dashed-white-line <br/> <br/>Solid game otherwise. | |
| Dec 14 00:51:00 | 10m 00s | Unexpected Growth | Here's a log of an issue that showed up: <br/> <br/>You startled her.(if:)'s 1st value is the number 0, but should be a boolean.► She jumps, turns, and asks how she can help you.There's nothing before this to do (else:) with.►.. TWICE. She jumps, turns, and her eyes grow wide as her gaze falls to your now porn-legend-sized penis. <br/> <br/>---- <br/>otherwise, there's a much larger array of options than I'd expect to see, but you sort of paid for that with the choices not really being consequential (I'm not wearing underpants > I'm not wearing Pants > game says "and yet you wear underpants?") |
| Dec 14 01:07:00 | 16m 00s | S.E.N.T.I.N.E.L. | First off, the graphics are impressive as all hell. Great job on those. <br/>The terminal on the side is a very nice touch as well. <br/> <br/>The combat itself is nice and tense, since you're always able to outrun/outmaneuver the enemy, but have to get in vulnerable positions to fire. <br/> <br/>Or rather, the combat would be nice, if the cannon shots registered consistently. There's a deadzone directly around the SENTINEL in which you can't hit the enemies, and that deadzone is exactly where the spawners aim for. I could see that being by design, but half the time even when I move away I can't hit the bastards. <br/>Most of my damage was due to shots that visually appear to hit not registering. <br/> <br/>Get that fixed and this would be a great game. |
| Dec 14 02:04:00 | 57m 00s | Sentient Sewage | In the higher difficulties, it's a bit hard to tell whats watery pseudopod and what's vulnerable water surface. Since you don't want to hit the chlorine with the central panel, this makes aiming a bit difficult. Having a stronger indication of safe zones would have been useful. |
| Dec 14 03:12:00 | 1h 08m | Harvest | Fast-paced, manic, and tense are not adjectives I thought I'd ever apply to a harvest moon lookalike. The combat/survival is excellently balanced such that I'm constantly trying to click somewhere and do something. Music's solid as well. Great work. <br/> <br/>Nitpicks: <br/>-it's not immediately obvious how to gather wheat/drink water. <br/>-The screen size/resolution is hard to see on larger monitors <br/>-if you don't plant something immediately, you're liable to start starving before any wheat reaches maturity. A day's leeway would have been nice (some food in crates/hunger is slowed for a day) <br/>-After a couple of days, food stops being an issue and you're free to focus on combat, only occasionally dealing with farming or drinking. Since you're not constantly discarding your weapon, the combat becomes a whole lot easier and the enemy waves don't increase in strength at a proportional rate. |
| Dec 14 03:22:00 | 10m 00s | Crystonal | When you're packaging the game for download, make sure you include all the directories that the build comes with (in Windows' case, crystonal_data, for example). The executable itself isn't enough to run the game. |
| Dec 14 03:40:00 | 18m 00s | Laser Dodge | First issue that came up: the top-fight and bottom-left ability descriptions are partially obscured by the edge of the screen or the color picker respectively. You might want to fix that. <br/> <br/>As far as the game itself goes... it's a relatively average jumpy dodgy sort of thing, with the gameplay mostly boiling down to sitting in one spot and moving back and forth or jumping occasionally. Not the most exciting thing, but it does the job. <br/> <br/>More importantly, though, I've got to ask how this ties in to either of the themes. I didn't see anything growing other than the wave number, and there's at least 3 buttons used for controlling the game. I'm honestly confused there. |
| Dec 14 03:47:00 | 7m 00s | Disphere | Overall, a fun little game; difficult but very nice-looking and easy to grasp, fits with the theme. <br/> <br/>There were a handful of times I really don't feel like I should have survived when I did. The spikes sometimes line up perfectly and the only way to avoid them is to use the invulnerability of the movement animation, which doesn't feel terribly fair or intended. I feel like the game would've worked much better with clearer deliniations of where the player should be at a given point. I'm mostly nitpicking here, though. The system works and isn't hard to learn. <br/> <br/>Only other complaint is that the sound effects are a bit grating. |
| Dec 14 04:10:00 | 23m 00s | Libellule Paradise | First off, brilliant interpretation of the theme. The flight model allows for smooth turning and moving forward. <br/>Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to gain altitude, and any attempt I made at flying eventually ended in a crash. <br/> <br/>The model's a tad unintuitive; a tutorial, or at least a learning environment would've been appreciated. <br/> <br/>Finally, after a crash there's really no way to recover. mashing both buttons only pushes you further into the ground if you're flipped over. |
| Dec 14 04:24:00 | 14m 00s | Higher, Higher, AAAAHHHHH I'M ON FIRE!!! | Title's brilliant, levels are well-designed, humor is spot on, and the lore matches perfectly with the mechanics. Main issue is with the controls. <br/>Mashing W doesn't instantly increase my size, there's an inconsistent delay between zooms. And the size increases are never big enough for one increase to cover my needs, so I've ended up mashing W a lot just waiting for the delay to pass so I can get to the size I need to be. <br/> <br/>To solve that, either try making bigger jumps in size (plan it out so I can hit 'W' once and be at the next size most puzzles want me to be) or let me mash W to grow quicker. <br/> <br/>Enjoyed my time overall. |
| Dec 14 04:47:00 | 23m 00s | Celebration Of Jand | For games where you're getting resources for the sake of resources, it's important to have a cutoff point. Something simple like "get 10,000 resources and the game will display a bad drawing of a bonfire" provides a goal to work towards and makes the tasks along the way seem at least somewhat meaningful. <br/> <br/>As it stands, though, I had an embarrasing amount of fun throwing peons to their doom and watching an endless centipede of workers carrying stone to and fro. <br/> <br/>One minor issue is that I had a tree spawn below the resource counter so I couldn't read the second digit at all. Maybe put a bit of a margin on the left for the resource spawner? |
| Dec 14 05:54:00 | 1h 07m | BINDAFFIX | I couldn't stop laughing at the bouncing animation. The general mood and graphics work really well, and the world is very pleasant to explore. <br/> <br/>Possible improvements: <br/>-I'd kill for sfx of wind and waves crashing into the island, even with no other audio <br/>-the navigation was very confusing and I pretty much always ended up trying each combination of direction+holding/not holding the button. A cleaner system might have been somethign along the lines of: <br/>---if moving right, hold right to turn right, don't hold right to turn left/go straight <br/>---if moving left, hold left to turn left, don't hold left to turn right/go straight <br/>-when you can't turn down a certain path, the character glitches out a bit but there's no further indication. Ideally I'd like a message to popup saying I can't go that direction, with a hint as to what abilities I need. Alternatively, at least mark restricted areas with a red direction arrow or whatnot? <br/> <br/>Thoroughly enjoyed the game, though. |
| Dec 14 06:13:00 | 19m 00s | World Grower - Growth of the civilization | Even without an objective, I see the appeal of a perpetually growing city like this. The mechanics you have for clumping buildings together are really solid. The game falls apart for me on one issue, though. <br/> <br/>In my eyes, a world builder like this should be about exponential expansion, where the city starts out with 10 residents and a little cornerstore and by the end of the game you're plopping down giant skyscrapers with spare change. You, on the other hand, went down the cookie clicker approach, where you match growing income with growing prices, making any gains on the player's part a completely meaningless skinnerbox. <br/> <br/>Instead of increasing the price of each building with each one placed, I think you should've just made the upgrades more potent and exponentially more expensive (though still at a static cost). At that point, the player still has to increase income to afford the upgrades (which are neccessary because of limited worldspace), but the city actually shows the progress the player's made. <br/> <br/>(P.S. - in your dropbox links, if you replace 'dropbox.com' with 'dl.dropbox.com' you'll get a direct download instead of going through dropbox's page) |
| Dec 14 15:28:00 | 9h 15m | Kill 'Mall | I think the game would benefit greatly from either a time restriction or stronger AI in the shoppers, so they run away from you. As it stands, a perfectly viable strategy seems to be just aligning yourself horizontally and waiting for the shoppers to walk into you randomly. <br/>The sound effects are a bit grating. and the background texture could use some work, but I've seen worse on both accounts. <br/> <br/>The segmented snake looks rather nice, and the game's pretty fun, so not bad overall. |
| Dec 14 15:45:00 | 17m 00s | The King is Dead | There's a lot of elements at play here, and a lot of them seem superfluous. Ultimately I was able to mash one of the keys and just push forward when given the option, and that won me a couple games. I still have no idea what the buildings accomplished, or what combat actually affected. If the end goal is to push forward, try and make the abilities around that, rather than around combat, maybe? <br/>I did like the idea of being able to control the enemy's actions. <br/> <br/>Also, a couple bugs I came across: the game freezes/locks up if S < 0. And at one point I had both options (A and D, both buff and debuff) be identical. |
| Dec 14 17:03:00 | 1h 18m | Combat Hell | The music was a fair bit grating. Tocatta and Fugue in D is much quicker, so hearing the slowed down and un-quantized version on primitive synths was...unpleasant. The graphics are nice, with the scanlines and all that. I feel like the cash you get per plane shot down is a bit small, takes a long time to get to the $1000 you need, and the game doesn't have enough content to make it enjoyable. <br/> <br/>Ramming other planes seemed like an effective strategy. Not sure if that was intended, but it was rather fun to do. <br/>Also, seems like the bullets despawn when they go off screen, even though there might be enemies there? <br/> <br/>As an improvement, I'd recommend that powerups spawn a lot more often (think several weapon changes per minute) your plane get much faster movement, and have the whole game zoomed out a lot more (larger playing space, smaller planes). There wasn't really enough room to dodge properly and the whole thing felt sluggish and heavy. |
| Dec 14 17:10:00 | 7m 00s | Snake | It's snake, there's not much else to say on that front. |
| Dec 14 17:26:00 | 16m 00s | Temple of Gh'Ro | I can get to the first two grails just fine, then there's a vertical shaft I fall down, and a checkpoint at the bottom. I can't reach the grail to my left there, and the jump to the right is unrachable as well, at any size. <br/> <br/>The jumping itself is very clunky. It seems like you move upwards at a set speed, then fall back down at the same speed. A more natural jumping animation should start at a certain positive vertical speed, then decrease that speed every frame. <br/> <br/>If you change the download link from www.dropbox.* to dl.dropbox.*, you can skip the dropbox UI. <br/> <br/>The title is cute. |
| Dec 14 17:41:00 | 15m 00s | Rise | The concept and mechanics are solid, but the game feels very unstable and rough around the edges. <br/>You can hover in the air slightly if you hold the jump button down, and rubbing against walls while jumping boosts your jump as well. <br/>The hitboxes on the obstacles are a bit unforgiving as well. <br/> <br/>Good concept, though. |
| Dec 14 17:59:00 | 18m 00s | Giant tree battle | The core principle of the game is very clever and enjoyable. If it wasn't a unity build and with some UI improvements (and some changes to the theme, I could see something like this being a minor internet sensation for a couple days on a subreddit somewhere :P <br/> <br/>Most of my issues are with the UI, though. It straddles the line between ornamental and minimalist, and doesn't really commit to either. I think a cleaner design would do away with the buttons: Have two trees, one on either end (one good, one evil). Clicking on the tree or its corresponding bar would help that side. The level could be displayed somewhere on the corresponding tree's image. <br/> <br/>Alternatively, you could keep the bottom bar as it is, and make the main play area a bit more interesting. Instead of the blue line, have a mess of green and red branches or leaves. Maybe play with negative space a bit. <br/> <br/>Still a nice concept, though, and the execution's not bad. |
| Dec 14 18:54:00 | 55m 00s | Grow Up! | Game's very nice-looking, but the obstacles often can't be avoided, the suns and purple balls fall far too quickly giving no reaction time. And the obstacles sometimes hide behind others, again giving no reaction time. <br/>Core gameplay is solid, though (if frame-droppy at times), I just can't get past a few tens of points and level 1. |
| Dec 14 19:11:00 | 17m 00s | Chaotic Potato | The humor's good. My main issue with the game has to be the sound, though. Each one jump emits several identical sound effects, which drive me up the wall, and they don't stop if you hold down the jump key. |
| Dec 14 21:25:00 | 2h 14m | Light Speed Snake | I've got to ditto OfficialProjectFantasy there. The food was incredibly tiny, to the point of it making more sense to just change directions randomly and hope for the best at the higher levels. Larger food pellets, or just a more zoomed-in grid would have helped. I loved the control scheme, though. Wreaks your brain a bit. <br/> <br/>having the music open in my browser meant that it wasn't on loop, and I couldn't be bothered to restart it. <br/> <br/>Significant bug: Difficulty doesn't reset on restart; the speed you had continues on into the next game. |
| Dec 14 22:00:00 | 35m 00s | Droplet | As much as I realize you were sticking to a theme here, I think this game would work much better without the control restriction. Most notably, I'd like to be able to look around to find the blue blobs. <br/> <br/>While building your own shaders is nice and all, you could accomplish something indistinguishable visually with a semi-transparent solid-color material in unity, a rotational animation on the droplet, and a normal map on the ground. <br/> <br/>I think you tried too hard to reinvent the wheel and ended up running out of time before you built the cart. The game doesn't have enough to do and the controls feel like a hindrance more than a design feature. |
| Dec 15 14:22:00 | 16h 22m | Puff Enuff? | The controls were smooth and worked well with the level design. A bit awkward to get used to, especially when trying to jump onto a 1-block platform (instinct told me to adjust for straying too far right by pressing left, then when that catapulted me to the left to press right, etc) <br/> <br/>Biggest frustration early game was that the autoaim didn't differentiate between enemies and chests. It would have felt better to aim for any enemies within range (and not behind a wall) before any chests were chosen as targets. <br/> <br/>I liked the intro level which let the player figure out the mechanics without the threat of death. And the the slot machines as a method of upgrades worked really well in the game's setting/theme, while also being balanced rather well. <br/> <br/>Because of the knockback of the weapon, I found it impossible to stay on 1-block platforms after hitting the chest there, and the gold always vanished before I got back on/caught any. <br/> <br/>Also, mashing right quickly enough on the slot machine seemed to always give me a reward. Not sure if that's intentional. Waiting between button presses worked like you'd expect a slot machine to. |
| Dec 15 18:27:00 | 4h 05m | In this game, you can not jump | The game's a tad glitchy for what it is. if you walk off the left side of the screen, sometimes the level restarts and sometimes it doesn't. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if not for the fact the game tries to pull pranks on you several times. I'm basically left questioning whether something was intentional or a glitch every time something breaks. The drop before the box wasn't so much of an issue in this case as the last ending flag. With the box, at lesat you had the narrator to justify it. With the last flag, I was convinced the game'd broken again and only went off the left side of the platform because I wanted to restart the level. <br/> <br/>As a rule of thumb, I personally consider it bad design to mismatch your level geometry hitboxes and your level appearance. If there's a hole in the floor I'd like to fall through it and if there's not a hole I'd like to move over it. (same principle goes for invisible walls mid-level). Holding information back from your players is a cheap way of adding difficulty or puzzle elements. <br/> <br/>All that aside, the core mechanics are reasonable and the level design does some cool things with them. <br/>I'm really not sure why the protagonist had that light-grey growth on the front end of their sprite, it didn't seem to serve a purpose and looked a bit naff. <br/>And it seemed like when I hit the enemies from the side I'd still bounce off them somehow. |
| Dec 15 22:24:00 | 3h 57m | Economical Growth | biggest issues in the game right now: <br/>-the maps are too big, takes forever to get to the other player's play area, and with the max zoom as it is it takes a while to even find them. <br/>-it takes far too long to create units, at least initially. A 4x game like this should never start with 100 turns of both players waiting for a settler, especially in a hotseat. Maybe allow the players to choose starting locations so they're both in forest? <br/>-To get my warrior across the map, I had to: rightclickdrag to get my carea to him, click on the warrior, click on the 'Move' button, click on the space I wanted him to move, click end turn, rinse and repeat. My mouse hand is cramped up now. This would be easily fixed with a hotkey for "next warrior" (tab?) and a hotkey for movement (M?). I couldn't be bothered to get more than one warrior to enemy territory because scaling such a huge territory was painful with even the one. <br/>-There's no end-of-game. When all a player's cities are sacked, nothing happens. I'm guessing this is to allow a player with a warrior to retake a city, but there didn't seem to be a way to destroy warriors from what I could tell? I know one of mine did get despawned, but I don't know how. <br/> <br/>Otherwise, the mechanics are actually really solid, and the production chain makes for that great dynamic of building up an economic base, and timing the start of the war machine just right. |
| Dec 15 22:26:00 | 2m 00s | keep it growing | The screenshots and description look really cool, but there's no game. |
| Dec 15 22:34:00 | 8m 00s | DeepHunt:Procedural gen. survival | The game does feature growing as a measure of health, but I don't see how the growing actually affects the gameplay. It would've been nice to have, say, movement use up mass, or to be able to destroy antibodies smaller than you. Maybe even tie it in to the passages you were coming through, where you have to let an antibody damage you to get through? |
| Dec 15 23:16:00 | 42m 00s | Tale Of Two Buttons | Music's great, visuals are solid, and the design seems good, but the game's just a bit too glitchy to be playable. <br/> <br/>Dashing seems to involve random jittering which sometimes tries to clip through the central platform. And jumping with Y sometimes makes X jump as well, at random points. I've found the most effective strategy to be mashing both Y and X quickly, which causes both buttons to leap away from the central platform and avoid all the obstacles. <br/> <br/>Also, X and Y on a QWERTY keyboard are incredly far apart (I'm guessing you were developing for a QWERTZ). A and D might have been a cleaner option. |
| Dec 15 23:45:00 | 29m 00s | Relay | Great idea, great execution, great atmosphere. The last day put a smile on my face. <br/> <br/>Main issue I had was that no matter how well I performed there never seemed to be enough troops and supplies coming in to cover the losses. It was really hard to tell how much my abilities actually influenced the course of battle. It makes sense that the available troops have to be redistributed by HQ and not a technician, but my actions felt a bit meaningless. <br/>I wasn't able to see any punishment for failing letters, either. <br/> <br/>As a complete nitpick, I started out waiting for the sfx of the dashes and dots to finish playing before sending the next symbol, but the ended up with me failing the letter. I had to mash the combination, which ended up with some of the dashes merging together in audio? It worked fine, though, no big issue there. <br/> <br/>Great audio design, too. I realize the music's not yours, but the contrast between that and the military noises really lent a unique mood to the game. |
| Dec 16 00:41:00 | 56m 00s | Repulsor | This was a mess to get working. First mega.nz tried to download its own downloader for me, then once I managed to circumvent that, the bat crashed because I had whitespace in my pathname (put quotes around pathnames in the future). Once I fixed that, the bat only opened up cmd and cd'd to the appropriate directory. I was able to start up the file by just navigating to the appropriate spot and opening it, though. <br/> <br/>Regarding the game itself: <br/>The pod racer itself looks great. It's far beyond what I'd expect from an LD entry, and shows a lot of fine detailing and crafting. <br/>Everything else suffered for it, though. The level geometry is messy and hard to follow. The sound effect for hitting things is far too long and plays too often. Half the assets placed in the level don't have their hitboxes set. I couldn't figure out a way to move the second pod, and the game didn't register when I finished a lap. <br/>The movement was actually rather smooth, except for the constant crashing into slightly glitchy obstacles. <br/> <br/>I think the game would have benefited from a larger open play area with some sand dunes to leap over. Scrap the track design and just give me a desert to play in. No second player, no racing, just a sandbox. The driving mechanics would've really worked well for just jumping off hills at high speed. <br/> <br/>The game really doesn't fit into the theme, either. It's just a generic racing game. <br/>Sorry :T |
| Dec 16 00:55:00 | 14m 00s | Archangel | I'll admit, based on the art style and the genre I was expecting to dislike this game, but you've done solid work here. <br/> <br/>The stamina on the shots is a really cool feature that really makes this a relatively unique shmup, and the enemy variety forces you to use both attacks consistently. The timing on new enemy types is pretty great, too. <br/> <br/>The only nitpick I can think of is that it's a bit difficult to dodge some of the projectile attacks, since they fly at you faster than you can fall/fly out of the way. But you can see them coming so it's still dodgable. Just difficult. <br/> <br/>It's a solid game, great work. |
| Dec 16 01:05:00 | 10m 00s | Nia in Mushroom World | Minor nitpick here, but a lot of people don't read several lines into a description, so try and provide the controls for your game in the game itself. <br/> <br/>More generally speaking, the game's rather pretty but the mushrooms seem to fall on their side whenever I throw them. I'm not sure if that's intentional, but it looks a bit glitchy. Since you're working in unity, I think a better approach would be to disable the physics on the mushroom once it's planted (mushroomObject.GetComponent<Rigidbody>().SetActive(false);), and just keep the collider as a trigger so any baddies that walk into it get killed. (make sure it's only a trigger so Nia can walk past it and it doesn't get knocked over - trigger colliders don't have physics) |
| Dec 16 01:14:00 | 9m 00s | Drone, the Package Collector | I have to second Andrew there, holding the space bar would be a much smoother control scheme. Also, some visual indication of when I can turn would be great. something as simple as the drong turning red while unable to turn. <br/> <br/>I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the presents grab onto the drone at random points and don't shift to the center. (I'm assuming you're setting the drone as a parent to the presents' transform, in which case you want to also set present.transform.LocalPosition = Vector3.zero;) <br/> <br/>Finally, the present dropzone is far too small. I feel like a circle about 3 times wider than that square would have worked much better. |
| Dec 16 02:36:00 | 1h 22m | PlantGrow | The growing mechanics look really nice and smooth. The main issues I had with the game design were that I had to stop every couple moves to restock on water, and more importantly, that my plant got despawned as I went along. <br/> <br/>I'd have loved to zoom out by the end of the game and see a giant branching behemoth that I've built. <br/> <br/>Maybe in place of the red circles which force you back, you could have markers where you end that particular branch, leaving the flower there? Then you could assign a random position somewhere along the existing branch structure that the player could continue playing from. Aside from the resulting aesthetic, it'd mean mean the player could gather the water droplets more quickly as time went on. While they're a nice balancing mechanic early on, they quickly get tedious with having to constantly stop and wait. If you could grow out your water gathering operation, they'd remain a limiting factor early on but would become less of a bother late game. <br/> <br/>Bugs: <br/>-I ended up having two parallel stocks turning simultaneously, about 200px apart horizontally. The flower would jump between them if I mashed right or left enough. <br/>-The A/D keys would become unresponsive if I turned too far in a given direction. Not sure if that's intentional or not, but I'd like to be able to make fuller spirals. |
| Dec 16 03:14:00 | 38m 00s | Vine | If you could make a sandbox mode (as a seperate download) with the obstacles removed and the rotation sensitivty turned down a couple notches, I could play this for hours. I'm serious, btw. If you could add an alternate sandbox download that would make my day. <br/> <br/>A lot of games this LD have done the vine/snake thing, but I don't think I've seen one done this smoothly or beautifully. |
| Dec 16 03:48:00 | 34m 00s | Wargraph | Great work. The turn speed and controls are just right for a smooth dogfighting experience. I had some issues with the boss seemingly not taking damage once I got him to a small ball. It could've just been my bullets not hitting him, though. <br/> <br/>Biggest issue I had was that there didn't seem to be a way to tell how much more damage I could eat up. A red flash when my health is low, or a healthbar somewhere on the screen would've been really helpful. |
| Dec 16 13:04:00 | 9h 16m | Seicho Boru | It's katamari damacy, more or less, and you've definitely managed to copy over a lot of the charm from it, between the music, the fabulous king of the universe, and the kitchy artstyle. <br/> <br/>But the satisfaction of gathering things is limited, for two reasons: <br/>-first: in Katamari Damacy, when you ran over an object, it'd stick in place on your katamari. This would make for weird irregular shapes that became harder to control, and would ensure that whatever was last put on the ball would be visible. In Seicho Boru, you threw all the objects the player gathered into the center of the ball at random rotations, which just made a lot of clipping issues and a bit of a mess. On top of that, late-game it didn't feel like a "add things to the pile" game so much as a "collect things to grow your size arbitrarily" game, since things would vanish before I reached them and get attached somewhre I didn't see them. <br/>The solution to this would be, when you pick up an object, to SetParent to the ball, but not to touch the localPosition of it. <br/> <br/>-second; katamari's difficulty and appeal came from the constant increase in the size of things you could pick up. In Seicho Boru, pretty much everything is the same size (within a small margin of error that you overcome in the first minute of playing), so there doesn't seem to be any point in growing, other than to reach the end of the game. I think it would be a much better game if you varied up your model sizes a fair bit more; any given area should contain a mixture of things you're able to gather at that level, and bigger things for context and challenge. <br/> <br/>Smaller issues include the intro taking way too long. The character's nice and the writing is funny enough, but it just drags on way beyond its welcome. In writing cutscenes, less is more. Also, the ball gets weird behavior when hitting some walls (most notably the south of the menu select), where it floats up toward the camera. <br/> <br/>Overall, the writing's cute and you've nailed the aesthetic, but some of the balancing needs work. |
| Dec 16 13:31:00 | 27m 00s | Mystic Mushroom Massacre | The game's missing a lot, but the mushroom growing mechanics are rather nice. I think you could've done a lot more even with limited time if you ignored the enemies, the walls, the plots, and the character, and just had a small environment for throwing spores and growing mushrooms (check out Viridi for an example of what I mean). If you're limited on time, try and adust your design to account for that, focus on fewer mechanics, don't spread yourself thin. <br/> <br/>I'd have really liked to see a small first-person spore-firing, watch-giant-mushrooms-grow-from-tiny-spores-over-several-minutes thing. |
| Dec 16 14:40:00 | 1h 09m | Ascending Roots | Great work. Puzzles were brilliantly designed, and paced just right. Music and audio design perfectly suited the graphics ands setting. Beautiful game all around. <br/> <br/>Minor complaints: <br/>It was difficult to tell how many units of water I'd need to grow most vines; I usually had to work through trial and error to figure out which platforms were reachable with 1 water, and which I needed 2 or 3 for. <br/> <br/>The platforming on the vines felt very stiff, and getting down 1-block-wide holes was very messy. I had to hit 'up' to actually mount the vine in a way that allowed me to climb down. <br/> <br/>Very minor complaints: <br/>Some of the graphics had outlines and other graphics didn't, which seemed a bit jarring at first though the style grew on me throughout the game. Very nice looking otherwise. <br/> <br/>The final level (summit) seemed a bit too easy... just grab the water on the right, move back down the ramp before the fire starts, grab the water on the left, do the same thing, climb up the plant in the middle, step to the left, grow the nearest plant there, climb it, put out the fire, take the water, water the plant to the left of center, leave. There was a whole lot of level outside that central area that seemed like you intended the player not to run back after grabbing the first two bits of water? <br/> <br/>In summit, on the top level, there's a plant that grows out from the level below, between the two sprouts. If you grow it all the way up, it clips through the platform, and if you then try to climb it, the protagonist gets launched into space and dies off-screen. |
| Dec 19 19:20:00 | 76h 40m | SAUROPOD vs THEROPOD | The audio is spot-on, the voices are very amusing and the music fits the theme perfectly and is really nice to listen to. I spent the first chunk of the game walking in rhythm to the music and very much enjoying the feeling of that. <br/> <br/>It's definitely interesting to have a tile-based game in which the player occupies multiple tiles. It wasn't the most intuitive, but once I figured out I eat with my head it made sense. <br/> <br/>The combat is painfully repetitive, though. The amount of dodges and light scratches just makes the event drag on, and since there's no way to skip cutscenes or auto-attack, I'm just stuck mashing X until my hand hurts. Since you're aping pokemon, one of the things that makes the grind more bearable in pokemon is that you can take out much weaker enemies with one, two hits max. That balance would have improved this game greatly. <br/> <br/>Also, running should really despawn the enemy you're running from, since I ended up immediately getting into combat after running. <br/> <br/>After a couple evolutions, I got stuck with no food anywhere in range. I tried exploring but I couldn't outrun the enemies and after not finding any food for about half a dozen battles I just gave up. <br/> <br/>Sound and visual design is great, but the core gameplay needs serious balancing. |
| Dec 19 19:55:00 | 35m 00s | Growing Sakura | Very well done. The game's difficult from the start, and, unlike what I'd expect from abstracted mechanics, actually feels a bit like I'm growing a plant. <br/> <br/>The game's definitely difficult from the start, and might benefit from a slightly gentler curve up front (first 4-6 levels) - something simple to introduce the mechanics and mode of thinking you'd need for the rest of the game. The first level is good for this, but it might've been good to keep a tutorialish feel going until level 4. <br/> <br/>That said, the save feature does allow the player to put the game down for a while and pick it back up with a fresh mind, which is excellent for this genre. <br/> <br/>As far as I've played it, the game seems well designed and certainly feels very smooth to play. |
| Dec 22 00:37:00 | 52h 42m | Pigeon | The core concept of the game is interesting, with a tool to destroy obstacles that requires you to get into danger to use it. Unfortunately, the controls really break this entry. They feel very twitchy, stiff, and generally hard to use. I never once felt that a death was my fault, and the one time I got to the moon I felt pretty much no satisfaction from it because I was mildly steaming from having to restart so many times. <br/> <br/>It seems like the audio clip of the road traffic doesn't loop properly, and there's a pop on the seam because of mismatched waves. The way you'd normally fix this is either fade in at the start/fade out at the end, or: cut and paste the first half after the second, and crossfade at the seam (give a bit of overlap between the two clips, fade out one clip at the same time as you fade in the other). <br/> <br/>Still, good use of the theme and great idea. Just a bit lacking in execution, unfortunately. |
| Dec 23 22:06:00 | 45h 29m | Panball | First off, regarding jam rules: if you used pre-made music, it's asked that you opt out of the audio category. The same applies for graphics if you used any pre-made assets. <br/> <br/>I only saw the first two levels (because the second one was too difficult, as explained below), and while the graphical aesthetic is rather cute, I really didn't enjoy this as a pinball game: <br/>-probably the biggest issue is in the boss level. Any direct path to the boss is blocked by bouncers. So There's no real way to use skill to defeat the boss. The only thing you can do is flail randomly and hope that the ball bounces off randombly to hit it. Having a tunnel you need to hit or a smaller hitbox on the boss would have provided similar difficulty without relying on luck. <br/>-the flippers take far too long to reset. In a pinball game, you want the flippers to be either up or down at all times, with as little downtime in between as possible (1 or 2 frames of transition max). <br/>-the controls for the flipper are both bound to the mouse. This means that I can't realistically put one hand on either flipper control without some scripting locally. Try Z and / or the two shift keys for a more fluid arcadey experience. <br/>-and as a minor nitpick, since the menus are navigated with the flipper controls, I ended up choosing an option because I was in the middle of controlling the flippers, before the menu actually loaded up. A much cleaner solution would be to have the player move the mouse over the option they want to select (this wouldn't sacrifice the theme, either). <br/> <br/>Overall, it's a LD game so I'm not expecting the best pinball game I've ever played, but for future projects, those are the conventions pinball games tend to follow. Good luck :) |
| Dec 30 17:09:00 | 163h 03m | fungus fungus fungus | It's definitely an interesting submission. It was definitely a bit tricky to figure out what was going on exactly, since it seemed random whether pushing in a certain direction would expand my fungal empire or just waste the lives of by back row soldiers to no real effect. I'm not sure if the AI was just really good at countering or if the overall size of the population changes the calculations there. <br/>The game's very difficult, at least against the AI. Seems like the best strategy is to do a landgrab and avoid fighting for as long as possible. Not sure if that's the intention. <br/>Overall, this is definitely a very cool area control games, but I'd like to have a bit more feedback on what I'm doing or how the game's resolving the border conflicts. |
| Jan 3 16:16:00 | 95h 07m | Jack and DeVine | I can tell you spent a lot of effort on the vine growing, and it does look really nice, but I feel like your effort may have been a bit misplaced. The game overall just felt a bit tedious: jump, water, jump, water, jump water. <br/> <br/>I think the game would have beneffited immensely if, instead of jumping up to water the stalk, you cut out the watering altogether and had the stalk grow when you reached the top, or collected some item or other. Then you could have some terror coming up from the bottom of the screen and force the player to climb ever faster on the stalk. <br/> <br/>The sound effects are really quiet and the controls could do with an in-game explanation (especially "hit enter to continue conversation" - I'm not used to using enter on a game that uses z, x, and arrows so it wasn't obvious at all and I thought the game was broken) |
| Jan 3 16:25:00 | 9m 00s | Murphy's chaos garden | First off, I really don't think the game benefitted from the two button controls. The text was small and hard to read, and the limitation of only being able to change some things at a time really didn't add much to the gameplay. I'd have much preferred a set of sliders to control everything, and you'd still be sticking to the growing theme. <br/> <br/>If I pushed the game too far in either direction on temperature, I ended up getting a few rows of brown dots and black rows above and below them, and every other tile was spazzing out. I have no idea what that's supposed to signify. <br/> <br/>Overall, I think the game turns take too long. It would've been nice to have smoother animations on a much slower clock just to know what's actually going on. <br/> <br/>The game idea looks really interesting but I think the player just needs more feedback on what's happening in the garden. |
| Jan 4 01:26:00 | 9h 01m | Sickle & Sword | Very well done, this is the best approach to the two-options-at-a-time mechanic I've seen so far (most other games just restrict your options at random, you've ensured that any one choice only has two options). The writing's really nice and atmospheric. <br/> <br/>Main complaint I'd have is that it seemed like foraging the trees gave me enough food to cover all my needs until the end of the game. I did build farms and farmers, but having 10 food at regular intervals from the 2 trees in my village would've covered what was consumed by far. <br/> <br/>The game could use a fair bit of balancing in general. I pretty much never saw a use for my [non-food] resources except for rock carving, and neither the statue nor the tower seemed to do anything. <br/>You did make up a lot of the balancing issue with the rust and the fact the game ends after the dragon's killed, though. Good job on those. <br/> <br/>Very nice game. |
| Jan 4 01:38:00 | 12m 00s | Super Lefty Garden Fighty | First off, graphics are great. I really enjoyed the fact the monsters walk away after you die. The audio needs work, the music especially didn't seem to fit well. <br/> <br/>The gameplay itself obviously isn't anything new, though it definitely felt just a bit sluggish and heavy, hard to pin down what was the exact cause. Something between the blurred visuals and not a whole lot of feedback to crashing into an enemy. It might have helped if the enemies were easier to make out against the background, and exploded or got knocked back as they died. Something to make me realize the momentum at play. |
| Jan 4 02:15:00 | 37m 00s | CafeGarden | The core idea of the game is really nice and exciting, but there are just so many minor annoyances that I was unable to enjoy this game at any point. <br/> <br/>To start off, the game's far, far too slow. At the start it took far too long to get the 25 coins of regular income I needed to start blueberry farming. Then, with every plant taking more time to grow, the game just dragged on far beyond its welcome. <br/>Second issue, and this is a huge one. To control the mouse, you need to click and drag. But the mouse isn't locked to the window. So I was left having to click, drag to turn a little bit, move my mouse back over to the other side of the screen, drag again, to do any sort of turning and my wrist is absolutely killing me right now. <br/>You made a really nice asset for the chef and gardener (though why they're wearing winter clothes while it's "sunny" I'm not clear on >_> , and the plants look fairly nice as well, but with the complete lack of texturework on the walls and building it loses a lot of the overall effect. <br/>Finally, don't make the user hit 'f' on every single plant. Let them gather in a radius, or have the plants gather themselves, or let them hold down f to gather everything they walk past. My hands are in pain from playing this game :T <br/> <br/>In short: lock the mouse to the window, speed up the growth time of the later plants, increase the selling price of strawberries, let the user hold f instead of pressing it, add some texturework to the walls/building and you've got a pretty fun game. <br/> <br/>I'm sorry that I'm so harsh, but I think you should've simplified the character assets and put some effort into balancing and designing the gameplay. <br/> <br/>outstanding bug: not sure if it's intentional, but you can easily place overlapping plants; you prevent the player from placing plants while standing inside another plant's area, but if I stand outside of the area facing in I can easily make the plants overlap, though that does make gathering them difficult. |
| Jan 4 10:00:00 | 7h 45m | O3000 | It seems like you're taking a lot of cues from Osmos here, and there's just a few annoyances based on the elements of that game you didn't port over: <br/>-Most significantly, there's no way to tell which things will kill you and which won't. Their borders are just vague enough that on multiple occasions I got destroyed by things that definitely looked smaller. The ideal solution here is to color them, say, green when they're smaller than you, and blue/red when they're bigger. <br/>-As another minor annoyance, though this is much more excusable in a LD entry, there's no real feedback as to how much mass things take. In Osmos specifically movement would result in a little blob of mass being spewn out in the direction opposite of movement, though I'd imagine there's other solutions to better signify how much mass I lose per click/second/boost at a given size. <br/>-the hitboxes are also very unclear and don't match the graphics <br/>-Finally, it seems to me like you applied the same force/cost the same mass regardless of the player's size. Or at least the increase didn't scale properly with the mass of the player. By the end of the last levels the game was a bit hard to control. Would've been nice to just spew out more mass per second in exchange for the same speed I had at the start. <br/> <br/>Definitely enjoyed the game, save for the annoyances. Nice work. |
| Jan 4 21:05:00 | 11h 05m | Eldritch Trance | Nice work, great atmosphere. Main issue is just the lack of difficulty. If you'd matched the changes of symbols to the audio pulses you could force the player to have much tighter timing on their changes. Maybe start with two training rounds of each pattern without losing health, then force the player to match the timing tightly not to lose health. <br/>It feels really odd for a summoning ritual of ancient gods to be this trivial is all >_> |
| Jan 4 21:43:00 | 38m 00s | BOOM BOAT | It took me a few tries before I realized that when I pressed both arrow keys, exploded, and had the entire screen explode with me, I wasn't actually winning anything. Got really confused as to why I didn't get hearts. Once I figure out that I had to charge up an explosion the game went more smoothly. <br/> <br/>The control scheme primarily was a substantial bugbear. After I finished turning, there'd be about a second during which I couldn't turn again, which made the controls feel really stiff and unpleasant. <br/>Also, it would've been nice to have a bit more visual feedback on the explosion radius of various ships. Add a shockwave graphic to show how far they reach, maybe. |
| Jan 4 21:58:00 | 15m 00s | Morse GRO | The concept is really good and the detection of lines vs dots could be worse, but the game kept resetting my letter. The timing even on the post-compo version is incredibly precise, not just in terms of how long to hold a dash for, but just in getting all the symbols in before the game arbitrarily decided that my ..-. is actually a ..- and an E. I couldn't finish the game before I got too frustrated to keep going. <br/>Given the low-bandwidth premise and the space aesthetic, I think sending 0's and 1's using the two buttons would've worked much better than trying to work with the morse timing. |