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Feedback comments for LD34
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | HuvaaKoodia's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 14 12:57:00 | Ecosystem | A neat cellular automata simulation. I especially like how seeds travel on water. <br/> <br/>A few issues: <br/> <br/>Water should even out horizontally a lot faster. <br/>Right now it's possible to create a mountain of water, which looks a bit silly. <br/> <br/>Turning a fully soaked ground tile into stone keeps the moisture level intact. <br/>This means that the stone tile is blue, which is not normally possible, and a plant can grow on it as well. <br/> <br/>Plants can grow through tiles above them. <br/> <br/>Cacti can grow underwater as long as it resides on a stone. | |
| Dec 14 13:25:00 | 28m 00s | Xonatiuh | The presentation is great, but unfortunately in this case adherence to the theme is a hindrance rather than a strength. <br/> <br/>Having only two buttons makes the gameplay very limited. <br/>Staying alive on the harder difficulty is as easy as spamming the dash move. <br/>The ability to jump and dash in mid air would have allowed for more variety in enemy attack patterns and made the gameplay more interesting. <br/> <br/>Another victim for the button constraint is the gameover menu. The moment it pops up it closes down again because it uses the same keys as the game. <br/>To be honest this could be fixed with a delay of some sort like a death animation, but with more buttons there would be no problem to begin with. <br/> <br/>On other news, while there most certainly is a way to lose there's no way to win. <br/>You could implement a highscore system based on the time survived to give the player a reason to keep playing. |
| Dec 14 14:59:00 | 1h 34m | Growing Gordon | You managed to use both themes which is laudable, even if the growing mechanic only serves as a time limit. <br/>As such it's a shame that imprecise controls and faulty hit boxes kill any enjoyment to be had here. <br/>Platformers, particularly endless runners, live and die on those faculties. <br/> <br/>Most of my deaths were due to the aforementioned issues which makes starting all over again, every time, even more aggravating. <br/>Checkpoints at the start of each level would at least allow people to get though all the levels. <br/>Perma-death is not a useful feature without randomization, challenging mechanics or both. <br/> <br/>A restart from checkpoint button would be a nice user interface improvement as well. |
| Dec 14 23:29:00 | 8h 30m | Realm | The presentation is great, the idea of an empire management puzzle game hybrid is also great, the randomization is not. <br/> <br/>The main gameplay problem is not getting the right buildings when needed due to RNG. There are multiple ways to tweak this: <br/> <br/>- Refresh all buildings rather then just those used. <br/>- Refresh all buildings but one (the oldest one). <br/>- Refresh all buildings except those that the player wants to keep. <br/>- Allow discarding one building every turn. <br/> <br/>There's also a bug concerning the building costs. The farm, for one, don't cost anything to build even though the card begs to differ. <br/> <br/>Also, building a mine should not cost any iron. |
| Dec 15 20:50:00 | 21h 21m | ZORC | The audio is soothing, I give you that. <br/>Everything else.... Oh boy. <br/> <br/>This doesn't work as a game because there's no way to lose. <br/>This doesn't work as a puzzle because there's always only one thing to do at any given time and the two actions required to do that are obvious. <br/> <br/>Here's a short example: <br/>There's a locked blue door to the right and a blue lever to the left. <br/>What to do? <br/>There's only one thing to do -> hit the lever. <br/>Which two actions to choose to do just that? <br/>It's obvious -> Go right action & Activate lever action. <br/> <br/>Every level is like that, apart from the "guess the two actions required to activate the exit" level, which is not obvious, yes, but rather arbitrary. <br/>When it comes to puzzles arbitrary is even worse than obvious. <br/> <br/>To make functional and interesting puzzles you need to: <br/>- Have more than one possible action to do at any given time. <br/>- Have a system that encourages thinking about which actions to do to solve the puzzle, rather than spamming every possible action. <br/> <br/>Keeping those things in mind, here are a few things you could try out: <br/>- A variety of interactable objects in the levels. Every area should have multiple levers, keys, hazards, doors, etc. <br/>- The objects could have interconnected effects e.g. opening a door creates a hazard somewhere else. <br/>- Limit the amount of times the player can change the two button actions, this forces them to think carefully about their choices before acting. <br/>- More actions e.g fly, shield, dash, teleport, shape-shift, travel back in time, etc. Go crazy with these. |
| Dec 15 23:34:00 | 2h 44m | Deflext | The game design is perfect. <br/>The music is perfect. <br/>The difficulty is nearly perfect... <br/> <br/>Completing a level makes me feel like a master and the next level makes me feel like an apprentice again. That's how it should be. <br/> <br/>Some of the fireballs are BS though. <br/> <br/>I got to level eight and that white wizard on the left side sure loves to aim right next to the hilt. Deflexting a shot like that is a crap shoot. Is it going to land on the left side or the right side of the hilt? Who knows! The angle of the projectile is too steep to parse in the heat of the moment. <br/> <br/>Another needlessly unfair shot is one targeting the very tip of the sword arc. It even seems that those shots don't hit the sword at all, but that could just be a sore loser talking. <br/> <br/>I'd suggest you designate the area around the hilt and the area at the very end of the sword arc as a no target zone. <br/> <br/>Those are some mean wizards, but even evil has its limits! <br/> <br/>Still, loved it and I will keep trying to crack that black wizard a new one. |
| Dec 16 13:00:00 | 13h 26m | earth defense | The basics for a wave defence game are there, but the execution is far from inspiring. <br/> <br/>Here are a few suggestions: <br/> <br/>- Emphasize precision aiming over spamming. It would be quite nice if the amount of enemies was smaller and the bullets were slower meaning the player would need to lead the target a bit. This would play well with the movement of the moon, requiring small aiming adjustments based on the current position. <br/> <br/>- Attack waves. The harder difficulty is, quite frankly, impossible because the assault never ceases. If only one group of enemies appeared at a time, even four attack directions would be manageable. <br/> <br/>- More enemy types. Faster enemies, armored enemies, evasive enemies, partly invisible enemies, etc. Combining enemy types with different wave compositions would give you a lot of options to add variety and difficulty to the gameplay over time. |
| Dec 16 13:29:00 | 29m 00s | The Lost Wanderer | Disclaimer, I've never been a fan of mazes. <br/> <br/>To pass a maze all you need to do is to visit every area once and eventually you stumble upon the exit. The challenge thus is that of memorization. <br/> <br/>The problem is that the maze looks the same all across the level. This makes remembering which part of the maze you've already visited a pain. This frustration is multiplied by the ever rotating camera angle, which makes it even harder to remember which way is which. <br/> <br/>Having some landmarks and tileset variation would help quite a bit. <br/> <br/>The breadcrumb idea proposed by jackrugile is also fitting, we are talking about mazes after all. <br/>This would require an additional button however, which is forbidden, so here's a similar proposal. <br/> <br/>Have the player character unspool an infinite ball of yarn, leaving a trace where ever he goes. That would indicate which areas are all ready explored and also create a new aspect to manage. Walking around all willy-nilly would leave a tangled heap of yarn which is hard to parse. |
| Dec 17 13:13:00 | 23h 44m | Eda | For a relaxing procedural bonsai tree generator this is quite good. <br/> <br/>However, right now there's nothing interesting to do after creating a pretty enough tree. Here are a few ways to make it more engaging, if you are up for that: <br/> <br/>You could make it into a simulation by adding in elements like water and nutrient requirements; insects, both useful and harmful; and environmental changes such as humidity and temperature. This, in itself, would be compelling to watch for a while (similar to what Mountain did, sort of). <br/> <br/>You could then make it into a game by giving the player tools to maintain and shape the tree while it grows. Using the right tool at the right time would differentiate between winning (having a resilient, beautiful tree) and losing (having a dying, pest ridden nightmare). <br/> <br/>Technical issues: <br/> <br/>- The hit boxes on the branches seem to be a bit off. It's quite hard to make specific smaller branches grow due to this. <br/> <br/>- The web player still has console errors, as pointed out by others. <br/> <br/>- The Data folder in the windows version has to be renamed in order to work, which is kind of a hassle. Even then it only works with the x86 exe, not the x64 exe. |
| Dec 17 16:57:00 | 3h 44m | Phantom Cell | The gameplay is good fast paced fun. <br/>The music is also great. I'd like to know the artist and the song. <br/> <br/>In other games I've seen with a similar radar mechanic the camera and the radar follow the player character. This combined with a level that wraps around the edges gets rid of the corner problem. |
| Dec 18 12:19:00 | 19h 22m | yaschiki | This is quite brilliant; the tone is off in just the right way. Unlike some, I do like the tank controls, reminds me of Fatal Frame. The reloading mechanic is interesting as well. <br/> <br/>What I don't like is restarting from the very beginning, having to replay all the basic fights, just to give the boss another go. I nearly got it on the second run, but couldn't stomach going for a third. <br/> <br/>Here are a few suggestions: <br/>- Checkpoints, notably just before the boss. <br/>Or <br/>- Multiple pathways to the boss. Make the level into a bit of a maze where, if you know where to go, you can avert most fights. <br/>And <br/>- Less HP on the rotating four eyed beast. If every eye only took two shots, a skillful player could take that thing down with just one clip. That would be cool. |
| Dec 18 13:47:00 | 1h 28m | Hyperdemocracy | It's an interesting dystopian setting for interactive fiction, but at the moment it's not very interactive. <br/> <br/>The only interaction, the voting, has no effect. This is to drive in the point that a single vote alone has no power, I presume, but I inferred that from the chat messages alone so what's the point? <br/> <br/>The one motion where a single vote does get a reaction from the chat is also scripted to always have that one vote no matter what I choose, why take a way the only vestige of agency? <br/> <br/>That's one thing I really dislike about this kind of interactive fiction writing. It's all a smoke-screen easily revealed by replaying with opposite choices. Reading this as a novel or a visual novel would have given me the same content in a more compelling form, i.e. not as a slow chat drip feed. <br/> <br/>Some suggestions: <br/> <br/>- Make those few close-call motions matter. Don't force the outcome. <br/> <br/>- The moving around bit is completely unnecessary and could be replaced by an image of a room where clicking the computer would start voting, clicking the window would look outside, etc. <br/> <br/>- Come up with more ways to interact with the chat and people outside the chat, after all that would totally happen in this kind of world. Branching dialogue trees, hazy pattern matching, relationship simulations... There are a lot of tools to include meaningful interactivity. |
| Dec 18 14:43:00 | 56m 00s | Arkanika | Surprisingly fresh despite the age-old inspirations (Arkanoid and Strika. Come on people, it's right in the name!) <br/> <br/>Good job. |
| Dec 18 15:03:00 | 20m 00s | RITUAL | As Bumblepie pointed out earlier, nothing happens if the player breaks the rules. The story is always the same no matter what the player does. What's the point of interactivity if every action yields the same result? <br/> <br/>Some suggestions: <br/> <br/>- If the player breaks the rules on the first day, the parents should scold and warn the kid of the dire consequences of misbehavior. <br/> <br/>- If the player breaks the rules on the second and third day as well, the forest should not protect the kid from the bandits. <br/> <br/>- Also there really is no need show the three rules on the screen at all. It's not difficult to remember them. In fact it would be more interesting if the rules were complicated and harder to remember causing reckless players to err accidentally. |
| Dec 18 15:16:00 | 13m 00s | Homeworld | I concur with many of the prior comments, having only one button for movement makes is needlessly hard to aim. <br/> <br/>Shooting could be automatic leaving both buttons for movement. In this case the weapon power-ups should function based on a timer rather than ammo. <br/> <br/>One of the weapon power-ups does nothing. The laser and three-way shot work, must be the last one then. |
| Dec 18 16:19:00 | 1h 03m | CyberMayan | That's some pretty programmer art you got going there. <br/> <br/>The game mechanics are solid, like Pac-Man with puzzles. The two button controls are well implemented to top it off. <br/> <br/>Too bad there are only a few levels; I would have loved to play more. |
| Dec 18 21:12:00 | 4h 53m | The Crunch | 246! My old skills at the Super Sheep training level in Worms Armageddon finally pay off. <br/> <br/>Super simple, lot's of fun. Good job! |
| Dec 19 12:22:00 | 15h 10m | Legendary Legionnaire Massacre 2 | I really like the real-time swarm strategy genre and this one is a good addition. <br/> <br/>The (alien) graphics reminded me of Infested Planet (a great real-time tactics game) while the gameplay is closer to Eufloria (the quintessential swarm strategy game, for me at least.) <br/> <br/>Some suggestions: <br/> <br/>- Restart button and/or a back to main menu button. <br/> <br/>- Optimization. Spawning hundreds of unit at once when moving them causes lag even when using the standalone player. There are multiple ways to fix this: <br/> <br/>* Having one unit represent more than one soldier (the super-unit idea you mentioned.) <br/> <br/>* Object pooling i.e. reusing the soldier objects so that they don't need to be instantiated again all the time. <br/> <br/>* Spawning units one (or a few) at a time until all of them have moved. This requires some logic changes so that you cannot send the same trooper twice, but it's doable. <br/> <br/>I would love to see an optimized post-jam version. <br/>No pressure! |
| Dec 20 16:14:00 | 27h 52m | Skill Clicker | Usually I just break out the old automatic mouse clicker when dealing with clickers (or time wasters as I like to call them), but here even that is unnecessary. <br/> <br/>The save file is a plaintext document. It really highlights the uselessness of the endeavor to jump right into level 100 on everything and notice that you missed absolutely nothing. <br/> <br/>The one redeeming feature of clickers is uncovering new features (some of which require clicking, some of which don't) and hidden content (usually funny in some way). This one has neither. <br/> <br/>You should invest in the payout for clicking. If a player is willing to mindlessly click away for minutes, give them something in return. <br/> <br/>Another possibility is to take it into a direction where time (or amount of actions) is limited and the player needs to invest & manage their clicks (currency) carefully. |
| Dec 20 16:52:00 | 38m 00s | Soup | I've always liked cell-agent simulations and the idea of indirect control. The main challenge when developing games based on these attributes is creating interesting and compelling gameplay. <br/> <br/>The main problem here is the "neutral" purple cells. No matter how actively I keeps spawning fighter cells, sooner or later, one of the big ones is going to appear off screen and hit my base or the enemy base. <br/> <br/>Losing like that is infuriatingly random and winning like that isn't an achievement in the slightest. <br/> <br/>I feel relaxing the two button limitation and allowing the player to choose the cell spawning direction would go a long way in alleviating this issue. <br/> <br/>You could also try to redesign the purple cell to act in a different role, for instance not as a menace but rather a small hindrance in the beginning or as a tactical obstacle between your base and enemy cells. |
| Dec 20 17:10:00 | 18m 00s | Zolander Bebop | The camera angles are cool, the graphics are pleasant as is the music. That's the good stuff. <br/> <br/>The gameplay is silly in a bad way. I'm not sure if you have any "lore" justification for the space adventurer to only turn clockwise, but it shouldn't be down to the controls. <br/> <br/>Many other entries have figured out novel ways to make two buttons count. Here's an example: <br/>Button 1 - turn right <br/>Button 2 - turn left <br/>Hold down both buttons - move forward <br/>Double tap button 1 - Dash right <br/>Double tap button 2 - Dash left |
| Dec 21 14:22:00 | 21h 12m | Astel's Journey | The constant stuttering killed it for me. It even crashed once. Get these technical problems sorted out and you have a foundation for a solid space game. |
| Dec 22 12:45:00 | 22h 23m | Winter Wilds | Overall a good entry with some technical hiccups and loose design. <br/> <br/>Issues: <br/> <br/>- The level has some invisible walls which glitch the movement of the entities. This is most prevalent near the edges of the map. <br/> <br/>- Animations sometimes don't blend properly causing entities to slide around and such. This could be due to the "Has Exit time" variable in the Animator. <br/> <br/>- The hunter is a bit lame. It too easy to run him over and then notice that you cannot kill him. I'd change him to always spot the wolves way in advance (he could have a dog that starts barking or just keen eyesight) and then start shooting with his weapon. This way you could kill the hunter with a big enough pack, but you'd end up losing a few wolves. <br/> <br/>- The pack mechanic is a little arbitrary at the moment. Why do you get a new wolf when catching a deer? I would start the player off with a big pack and have a few stray wolves patrolling the level who join you if you find them. Losing wolves will have a bigger impact if it is harder to raise and maintain a big pack (more wolves require more food). <br/> <br/>- More survival mechanic would be nice, for instance finding shelter when a blizzard comes around. There are a few winter survival simulators out there from which to get inspiration. |
| Dec 22 12:55:00 | 10m 00s | Lightreach | A good puzzle mechanic with solid tutorial progression. All it needs is more levels and some indication on what those switches do. Trial and error quickly becomes a bore. |
| Dec 24 00:27:00 | 35h 32m | Plantagone | Checkpoints would be a good addition with such slow movement speed and uncontrollable swinging. I got to the level with spike balls and elevators and didn't feel like replaying after dying right before the end. <br/> <br/>Graphically well polished, the physics are also sleek. Overall a good job. |
| Dec 24 11:02:00 | 10h 35m | Sushi Roll | A well executed and polished entry. There are a few issues however: <br/> <br/>- Sometimes there's a cat right after a tree or right in front of a tree. In these situations there's nothing you can do to avoid dying or slowing down so much that you're caught. You should make sure that cats are not spawned in such places. <br/> <br/>- The chef should slow down when traversing steep hills. Right now if he's close by when going down such a hill, he'll run down faster than the fish can fall and waits there to catch the fish. <br/> <br/>- A restart hotkey would be ace. |