Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD34 → Feedback comment stats → Jwatt
Feedback comments for LD34
Jwatt's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Jwatt's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 12 03:04:00 | You only get one vote. | You think you're an OG gangsta but you ain't seen Jazzy Jeff | |
| Dec 14 13:42:00 | 58h 38m | Express Bonsai Cultivator | Let me just fetch my good old Playstation Move controller, which I totally have. It's like a mountain of Playstation Moves just piling up in my closet. |
| Dec 15 02:49:00 | 13h 07m | PISTIL PISTOL: BOTANY BLAST II | A clever and cute little package. The way the next level portal scales with your progress is pretty next level in itself. Also good thinking for including dampeners for the effects, they get pretty hard on the eyes after a while. <br/> <br/>...But really, space bar and right arrow? |
| Dec 15 03:47:00 | 58m 00s | Longbeard | Audiovisually a pretty damn impressive entry. <br/> <br/>But you could've afforded to sacrifice some of that detail in favor of more content. LD is always a learning experience in time allocation. |
| Dec 15 03:55:00 | 8m 00s | Tile Breaker Revolution | ZAT IS NOT HOW MOMENTUM VÖRKS. ZAT IS NOT HOW ANY OF DIS VÖRKS. <br/> <br/>More seriously, having the camera follow the ball all the time makes the screen a bit too active. Unfortunately, my run ended by getting stuck inside a wall. <br/> <br/>Now it's just me and this music... forever. |
| Dec 15 04:06:00 | 11m 00s | Hero Feed Co. | Tricky, partly due to the challenge of the controls, and partly due to the cramped level design. Since the knight orbits the cursor so far away, he's got kind of an "icy floor" vibe to his movements. I ended up trying to lunge whenever I could, but I still didn't get very far. |
| Dec 15 17:33:00 | 13h 27m | Need For Seed: Undergrowth | A thousand points for the name alone. Bookmarked so I can try this after finals week. |
| Dec 15 22:17:00 | 4h 44m | Panball | The physics feel as you'd expect from a pinball game, no complaints there. The presentation is fairly charming too. <br/> <br/>But the character growing seems kinda like a gimmick, it doesn't have a real effect on gameplay. If you want to take that aspect further, consider blocks that are only breakable when you're big, or something. |
| Dec 15 23:02:00 | 45m 00s | In this game, you can not jump | This reminds me of the very first (unreleased) game I worked on, which had a similar concept. Except you'd also place down springs where you wanted to jump. <br/> <br/>Okay, this is buggy and short, but you still get an award: http://i.imgur.com/j75vIc8.png |
| Dec 15 23:36:00 | 34m 00s | Snowball University | It was charming alright. About the difficulty curve, the first lesson felt like the most tricky to time right, but after that it was smooth sailing. |
| Dec 16 00:12:00 | 36m 00s | SpaceHex | These sort of coffee break strategy games are my jam. The difficulty's pretty well optimized to not be too easy and to make use of every structure type. Looks very much like a DOS game with the details of aliens doing their thing inside the hexagons. <br/> <br/>If there's something explicitly negative to be said, having the camera just snap around the place is kinda disorienting. And there's the bfxr effects once again, taking the focus from the otherwise spacey ambience. <br/> <br/>4 stars gj brah |
| Dec 16 01:12:00 | 1h 00m | bat story | A pretty versatile use of the theme. With just two buttons, you can either lure enemies around, try to dodge them as a bat, or straight up punch them. Gotta say the presentation is a step up from some of your earlier jam entries I've seen. |
| Dec 16 01:21:00 | 9m 00s | Upright | I like the concept of only having half of your movement directions, but the execution suffers from some false difficulty at its core. The sluggish movement makes it tricky to estimate where you'll slide and bounce. While it was fun for a while, ultimately my patience wasn't enough to reach level 15. <br/> <br/>You could try ramping up the speed or having some visualization of your expected trajectory. <br/> <br/>The commentary from the player adds an extra bit of charm. The audio is listenable I guess, but those graphics kinda hurt to watch. |
| Dec 17 01:27:00 | 24h 06m | Lands of TSR Lore | Nevermind, I hurried to play this now after all. <br/> <br/>I see this primarily as a tech demo to build on. Even without the features you were aiming for, some feedback from the enemies could make this an interesting little experience. The presentation is of course on point, but what's being presented is very barebones. <br/> <br/>Keep us posted on future updates! |
| Dec 17 01:42:00 | 15m 00s | Frog Well | This control scheme combined with a noisy level type is quite a frustrating experience, really. It seems like an obvious case of a design issue when the player spends nearly half of the game time in an input-blocking state. <br/> <br/>Some fixes would include the frog grabbing onto ledges when hitting blocks from the side, or a slower movement in general for more precise left-right mid-air twiddling. <br/> <br/>As it is, this felt more like fighting against a software's quirks than playing something, unfortunately. |
| Dec 17 01:54:00 | 12m 00s | 2Door | This has quite many layers of misdirection to hide what's "only" a memory game at its core. It's moody as heck though, I'll give you that... couldn't have expected an entry like this from a two-button restriction. |
| Dec 17 02:56:00 | 1h 02m | Arc | A no-bullshit arcade game/reflex test. <br/> <br/>The fundamentals check out, it kept me trying for a while. The visual style has a distinct personality to it, and the palette is fairly tasteful. Music's alright, gives this a fittingly tense touch. <br/> <br/>So yeah, this is a solid entry. It's just that I can't really see a connection to the theme(s). |
| Dec 19 07:46:00 | 52h 50m | Parse The Sky | It's moody and stuff, but man is the control scheme off the wall. It's fun to look at but not really rewarding or enjoyable as a game, and it's utilization of the theme seems like an afterthought. <br/> <br/>The best way to describe this is that it feels like the result of an animation studio hired to make a game, when they don't really even play video games. I'll be a bit bummed out if the presentation fools people into rating this high in the jam. |
| Dec 19 08:10:00 | 24m 00s | 2 button metroidvania | Now this is quite an interesting experience, and a creative take on the theme(s). Goes to show there's a lot to do with two buttons. I mostly enjoyed playing to the end, and this is one of the more memorable entries altogether. <br/> <br/>To help you work on this more, maybe, here's my two main gripes regarding the gameplay: <br/> <br/>1) The reaction times required are occasionally a bit overwhelming. It sorta feels like playing a debug fast-forward mode that you got used to during development, and which you never slowed back down for the poor players who are just taking their first look. <br/> <br/>2) The skills aren't really explored to their fullest extent. I guess this is one of those things that feel "off" to me about many modern Metroidvanias. You only get skills to reach the next area - as a new key to a lock - not as a new degree of freedom that allows your character to explore more. This can sort of be excused considering it's made in a weekend, but I'd like to see you play around with non-linearity more after the compo. <br/> <br/>Also, the audio does get on your nerves after a bit. Actually it seems out-of-place right from the start, mood-wise. It's just there doing its thing but not really complementing the gameplay. |
| Dec 19 10:54:00 | 2h 44m | RhythmRider | This is fundamentally a very fun game. Hard to give it anything other than 5 stars for Audio, as it's very listenable but also used effectively for gameplay (I mean, duh). <br/> <br/>No major gripes about this, it's a game that knows what it wants to be and delivers just that. |
| Dec 19 12:51:00 | 1h 57m | Radical Revolver Recoil Rampage | I actually kinda like this a lot. There's a lot of different elements that go together in fairly interesting ways. Well-executed in the gameplay department, and I can say I'm still having fun after quite a few retries. <br/> <br/>But let's have a word about visual presentation. <br/> <br/>There's something about this style that seems very MS Paint-y as far as pixel art goes. Muddy colors, palette all over the place, shading not having much contrast with the environment. Also moving things kinda-but-not-really snapping to the grid - which I guess can be excused as a stylistic gimmick in games not actually based on old hardware - but in combination with everything else, it just comes across as carelessness. <br/> <br/>It's not just about looking pretty, you gotta consider functionality too. Composition-wise, most of the screen is just empty space. And there isn't really any gameplay consequence for everything to be moving like you're on a treadmill, so it's an unnecessary (even misleading) visual cue. Not to talk about how the more urgent threats don't always stand out more. <br/> <br/>...Yeah, it's a lot to digest. But I'm not pointing it out to be mean. In fact, I'm hoping you'll find advice like this useful in your future games, so you can give them that extra polish to really complement your already solid design thoughts. <br/> <br/>On the plus side, the audio's OK, seems like you have a good sense of what kind of tune fits the mood. |
| Dec 19 15:43:00 | 2h 52m | ZORC | Captivating audio, and I guess including bits of narrative adds some level of charm. <br/> <br/>But ultimately I'm with HuvaaKoodia on this one, the levels themselves are more of a chore than anything. Everything's already been conveniently settled for you, every step of the solution is in the right order. Despite all the stuff you've gone out of your way to introduce, there's no assembly required. <br/> <br/>Just by seeing a level, it's like you immediately know what you gotta do, and then you just have to do it with no surprises or depth ahead. It's endless exposition with no resolution, and once I realized this is how it's gonna be, I didn't bother playing till the end. <br/> <br/>Besides that, there's something very repetitive about the basic interaction that peeves me. For a bit of automation, you should be able to drag a new mechanic over an old one. I mean, instead of dragging the old one out of the way first. That alone would go a long way. |
| Dec 19 15:50:00 | 7m 00s | DESEEDER | It's a solid if plain infinite runner. <br/> <br/>I can see a lot of work has gone into the music, good job with that. Plenty of polish all around. |
| Dec 19 16:12:00 | 22m 00s | Enliven | I wonder what kind of unrealistic expectations you had if you call this "unfinished", it's an order of magnitude more finished than most entries. This actually utilizes the mechanics pretty thoroughly, and as a package stands out from the average game. Real good job all around. |
| Dec 19 16:23:00 | 11m 00s | Reap | MANAGORE DROPPING THE PROCEDURAL BEAT BOOM CHI KAH CHI CHI CHI KAH BOOM BOOM CHI BOOM KAH CHI KAH KAH |
| Dec 19 17:09:00 | 46m 00s | Ludum Vitae | No se oli sitten vissiin vaan semmonen. Ilmeisesti aika helkutin tärkeitä puhekuplia kun pitää aina tulla hiiren tielle. Eipä mulla muuta. |
| Dec 19 17:14:00 | 5m 00s | Concrete Jungle | This is a clever little game/toy. Big up for the timelapse aesthetic. Also that music is hilarious to me for some reason. |
| Dec 19 17:20:00 | 6m 00s | Simultaneism | Hah, I appreciate the surprise factor. I'm not sure if stuff was syncing with the music or not, would've made the multitasking easier. |
| Dec 19 17:59:00 | 39m 00s | Milgram | Well, this was a pretty memorable entry. I guess this sort of stuff can come from the two-button theme too. <br/> <br/>I found the third ending too. List of things I didn't expect: that fucking thing. |
| Dec 19 20:23:00 | 2h 24m | White Rose | Your choice of song affected... nothing, which is strange especially in a game like this. The entire gameplay seems like an afterthought, and nothing in the visuals really wants to complement it. Even the "enemies left" text is ashamed to be there and would rather sit this one out in the corner. <br/> <br/>But hey, I guess it's at least neat to look at. |
| Dec 19 20:32:00 | 9m 00s | Agent Hooker | Quite a lot of uses for a fundamentally simple mechanic. I could confuse this for a Nitrome game in spirit, but also in terms of production values. |
| Dec 19 20:40:00 | 8m 00s | Pigeon | Very strange to have two mechanics where the other lets you to go up endlessly, and the other... lets you to go up just a bit. <br/> <br/>Needless to say, I didn't need much help from the tree, it just slowed me down. |
| Dec 19 20:49:00 | 9m 00s | Valk Unit Lawyer | Ohgod this game. I kept playing because I wanted to see all the dialogue. Also all these faces are killing me. <br/> <br/>Is anime real?? |
| Dec 20 14:05:00 | 17h 16m | Flowershop Tale | Can't get this to run. "Game.exe has stopped working" straight off the bat, using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I did unzip the game first. <br/> <br/>Looking at the other comments, this is probably a problem on my end. The game seems to be based on SDL, so I wonder if it's somehow trying to use some of the SDL 1.6 DLLs I have on my system instead. (SDL has been problematic to setup before...) |
| Dec 20 15:11:00 | 1h 06m | Long Long: A snake lies in the Past | I'll give you credit for being ambitious, with special props for the audio work. The concept came across as somewhat unique, even if the constant underlined catering to 90s' kids was close to cringey levels. <br/> <br/>And to reiterate the same complaint once again, this really ought to have a checkpoint in every room, considering the timing isn't very precise and leads to tons of fake difficulty. Having to replay 3+ rooms in a row all the time is nearly a game-breaking flaw here. |
| Dec 20 16:05:00 | 54m 00s | this is the game | This had tons of style. A puzzle game that's actually a puzzle, not just an exercise in repeating a bunch of rules. <br/> <br/>4 stars gj (5 for everyone's favorite category, Mood) |
| Dec 20 16:46:00 | 41m 00s | Sphere Co.™ | This is such a Java game. There's something about the controls that gives them that shared feeling of unresponsiveness. Similarly to how Unity games are bound together by floaty physics and the mouse swooshing all over the place. <br/> <br/>Combat is pretty tedious due to enemies being so static. I'd say you should rethink this with more of a Binding of Isaac control scheme in mind, which would let you could go wild with enemy logic. The lack of autoshoot and the slightly too slow movement are more annoyances that could be easily fixed. Unless they're a requirement in Java(TM)(R)(C). <br/> <br/>All my cheekiness aside, it's moody for sure. I wouldn't call this a 1-star entry at all, the story and ambience are the meat that kept me playing. Maybe speed up the dialogue boxes a bit and lose the "use your gun to shoot" type lines. |
| Dec 20 17:20:00 | 34m 00s | SportsRaces | Huh, rare to see GUIs in LD with this amount of effort gone into them. On the other hand, the crude sprites aren't exactly a treat for the eyes. <br/> <br/>This sort of interpretation of the theme could easily be an excuse, but it's actually been worked into the game well enough. The whole ranking thing is a solid framework for keeping an otherwise simplistic game interesting. <br/> <br/>Now, the actual gameplay has Unity Physics(TM) written all over it. Too much focus on acceleration and not enough on dampening. The result is a velocity curve that swooshes all over the place, making basic control an unnecessary hassle. (And no, the possible comedy aspect isn't enough of a defense.) <br/> <br/>I'm intrigued, but get your differential equations together. |
| Dec 20 18:29:00 | 1h 09m | Fluffy Horde | Uh, okay, apparently the mouse controls are the opposite of what the instructions say. That took me a while. <br/> <br/>It's presented like a strategy/resource management game, but it's more like a micromanagement smash and bash. On a larger scale you just buy all the farmers ASAP and grind some soldiers. Then you just move the guys around and sorta hope something sticks. Seems like wasted potential on the whole setup's part. <br/> <br/>The fail condition of 250 bunnies comes across as an obvious quick solution by the programmer, especially when there isn't a counter in-game to support it. Strange because there is a visual cue of bunnies stacking, and I thought that'd be an indication of how deep in danger you are. <br/> <br/>Would also be convenient to be able to click on the mini-map and hop around like that. And maybe to not have the instructions just float around awkwardly. <br/> <br/>All in all, it's pretty solid, but there are also signs of lackluster time management. It's gonna take a few more bandages to keep this package together, and apparently you've already been working on post-jam fixes, so let's hope something comes out of it. |
| Dec 20 18:44:00 | 15m 00s | Ourobos | Looks like most everything has been said. This makes you forget you're playing a jam game. |
| Dec 20 18:58:00 | 14m 00s | Grow and Regrow | Starts getting pretty tricky later on. Zero production values, but it's got heart. |
| Dec 21 05:29:00 | 10h 31m | Attack In The Mushroom Kingdom | This was kind of a surreal experience to play first thing in the morning. <br/> <br/>The game seemed to play itself for the most part. Gotta have more feedback for the player about what their actions are doing. If watering the mushroom is the important bit, it'd help to have some visual cue of water falling when you press left Alt or something. Just in general visualizations of the information that would affect your watering, like a timer for when elves spawn. |
| Dec 21 05:49:00 | 20m 00s | Star Warrior | There's plenty of things that have got to be just right to even land one shot in a terrain like this. This premise could be interesting if dealt right, but the biggest frustration comes from the game not doing a very good job communicating where the worm is. <br/> <br/>It's not easy to put my finger on what exactly it is that bugs me about that, but I think it's a mixture of <br/>1) the camera angle, <br/>2) the reticle pointing at an inexact direction, <br/>3) misleading depth perception due to lack of luminosity differences with the distances you're dealing with, and <br/>4) the worm's aggro respawning almost instantly after it's gone underground. |
| Dec 21 06:47:00 | 58m 00s | All Ways Down | Solid entry. This gave me an inspiration of a game with a similar control scheme where you need the ball to grow larger to break thicker and thicker walls. <br/> <br/>But there is one big problem here. One that I'm surprised not to see in the comments already. <br/> <br/>You are simply transforming the local coordinates of the *room*. It does not change the relative movement vectors for the *ball* in its local coordinates. There's no need to have this smoothed out trajectory business when turning. <br/> <br/>Consider a short scenario without collisions. If a ball goes up at t=0, and there's a rotation at t=t_r, then it'd damn well keep going up (from the camera's perspective) at t>t_r. The direction of the gravity in the ball's coordinates doesn't change either! Which means the ball doesn't start swerving right/left or doing those bonkers loop-de-loops visually, even if one did keep spinning the room around. The way you're doing it now is as if the ball is collecting extra momentum from the rotation itself, but there's no interaction to cause that, which fucks with the player's brain. <br/> <br/>This is a big deal because it causes the result of your input to be less intuitive and harder to predict than it needs to be. Also there are some additional concerns with the floatiness (common to Unity games because of default physics I guess?) and the lack of elasticity of the ball. |
| Dec 21 07:29:00 | 42m 00s | Auxochrome | Had to play this in fullscreen to make anything out of the text or sprites. You've got liberal screen space - use it! <br/> <br/>Okay, those little creeps take like a cosmological amount of time to kill. It comes across as an artifical way to stretch out the game, as fighting them isn't very dynamic. Would've hoped for some variety here, as it's kind of the only thing you do in this game. <br/> <br/>I feel like the audio was a nuisance more than something that complements the gameplay. So honestly I can't give that aspect more than 2 stars at best. |
| Dec 21 08:30:00 | 1h 01m | Space Pilot | You can tell this was made by someone who thinks of themselves primarily as a "programmer". There's no transitions, no interpolation, no rounded edges. Everything either just happens discretely or doesn't happen at all. Zeroes and ones brah. <br/> <br/>Conceptually very basic, no mentionable twists to break the monotony, or to change the player's relation to the environment. You've pretty much seen every mechanic there is in the first few moments. And it's very short to boot, almost ashamed to exist on your screen for the briefest moment. |
| Dec 21 11:38:00 | 3h 08m | Litterlings | This is a clever and polished little toy, unique as far as the entries I've played go. Tamagotchi vibes. The zoom-out is cool. |
| Dec 21 17:42:00 | 6h 04m | Hope | Woah, the mouse pull is crazy. Makes this pretty intense, like you actually gotta put your body into survival. Especially when the bottom part is pretty much instadeath. I kept thinking this could be nudged slightly towards a more ambient, artsy kind of game. <br/> <br/>Perhaps surprisingly, I haven't seen other games interpret the two-button theme as a "light vs. dark" motif. So it's got that personality going for it. |
| Dec 21 18:15:00 | 33m 00s | Parascythe X | Holy crap, this looks and sounds exactly like a C64 game. Not just vaguely retro, this is faithful stuff down to the title screen. <br/> <br/>5 stages is a lot of content, with fairly interesting enemy patterns, an upgrade system and the whole kitchen sink. It's very much a complete shoot-em-up. Pretty impressive all around. |
| Dec 21 18:43:00 | 28m 00s | Riding on Cars! | RIDING ON CARS <br/> <br/>JUMP AND SHOOT <br/> <br/>MEGAMAN MEGAMAN |
| Dec 22 05:21:00 | 10h 38m | blackfisk | You should have the controls in the description rather than hidden in some menu. People just don't read menus. It seemed intuitive that it would've been just the mouse, but the mouse buttons did nothing. (In fact, why don't they?) <br/> <br/>Your take on the growth theme seems like a good idea, but it has a very one-dimensional effect, and I feel you could've done more with it to add some variety. Like shooting different kinds of enemies would cause you to grow in different ways, with your shots becoming different and all. <br/> <br/>The bumping gets pretty crazy sometimes, but it seems well playtested enough. |
| Dec 22 05:30:00 | 9m 00s | Combat Hell | This could scale quite a bit faster, so that one could see the different types of enemies and test out the shot types with less tedium. The cash system is a decent start. <br/> <br/>Reeaally not a fan of the audio. Brings back PC Speaker flashbacks in a bad way. |
| Dec 22 06:01:00 | 31m 00s | Disassemble | One of my favorite concepts so far. And you've done a lot with it. <br/> <br/>Objects with varying uses increasing your hitbox, making it a risk/reward thing to capture new weapons. Then you think that's subverted with dummy objects, except dissassembly is basically a bomb attack no matter what you had attached. And there's a bunch of enemy patterns relating to your configurations, testing your understanding of the possibilities in various ways. <br/> <br/>The one gameplay quirk in the current execution is that the player's movement isn't symmetric - going up is way faster than coming down. <br/> <br/>Madly wanting to see this become a more polished little experimental game. This leaves you hungry to see the full potential, like a bunch of new enemies/blocks for all sorts of combinatorial effects. And of course you could slap some fancy graphics/audio on top while you're at it. Stay in touch with the community about this. |
| Dec 22 06:17:00 | 16m 00s | ORB LORDS | Pretty clever, and you've taken the concept places. Since people are already raving about this, lemme work some quirks out for your further development. <br/> <br/>The ball getting stuck fairly often is a bummer. Tilting is a cheap way to fix this, when you could just avoid flat tops in the level design or have some boosters going on. <br/> <br/>Flipper physics need some more work, feels like there's not enough punch and the ball's position doesn't affect the shooting angle as much as would be intuitive. And when the ball does manage to gain some speed, the camera lags badly, which is problematic in a table this large. <br/> <br/>Also, I'd like to have a special mention for the music. This is my jam, successfully captures the visual aesthetic in audio form. |
| Dec 22 10:35:00 | 4h 18m | Slate | The updated version makes a better use of screen space regarding the arrows, for sure. <br/> <br/>It's an alright take on a fighting game, even if there didn't seem to be any time pressure or rewards for being quick at tapping. The environment changes gave a distinguishing character to each level, and made it look more like a journey to tie it into the (J)RPG aesthetic. Mood-wise, this comes across as more than the sum of its parts, which is really needed for an idea this simple and straightforward. <br/> <br/>But with two graphics artists, you really should've worked more on your palettes. Also, those glow effects mainly only serve to blur any important information. No complaints for the audio, though. |
| Dec 22 18:36:00 | 8h 01m | The War of Japants | You asked for feedback, and this is a great chance to give some, since I immediately saw some issues that were fundamentally hindering the simple gameplay. So while I am focusing on the negatives because they're easier to write about (and maybe because that's the kind of guy I am), I don't mean to discourage you in any way. I can see the effort is still there, and I appreciate you taking risks to liven up the game, like those 90 degree turns upwards. The neat Japanese aesthetic to tie it all together thematically is worth mentioning as well. <br/> <br/>... <br/> <br/>Okay, so the biggest nuisance is easy to condense into one example: those small platform jumps. <br/> <br/>They demonstrate a lot of what needs fixing in this whole experience. I've seen straight up bugs like the player flying inside a wall. There's the classic missing the jump because I wasn't able to predict what was coming. Sometimes I manage to do it and feel like I didn't earn it. <br/> <br/>The point about not being able to see it coming implies that the running speed in this game isn't proper for doing these kinds of precise jumps. There's no variation with how heavily you've pressed the jump button either, which is a detail I really feel you should've focused on, since - well - it's only one of two buttons, after all. Plenty of those "little things" that pile up to make me feel like it wasn't my fault I died. And they come back to haunt you on a lesser scale when fighting enemies, for example. <br/> <br/>I think the common factor is that the game feels like it's going in fast-forward. This is something that happens with a lot of entries - during testing, the authors get bored of the slowness and ramp up some variables. After a weekend of having gotten used to the speed or difficulty or whatever other adjustable setting, they release the game, and the poor players who are just seeing it for the first time will feel left out of the ride. Having a third party playtester somewhere along the development is the best kind of reality check about what aspects of the design to focus on. <br/> <br/>So because of the above points, you'll be resetting a lot. Regardless of how often you die, I'd say there's never a reason for a jam game to return to the title screen. The music restarting with resets is an additional small thing that becomes a big deal over time. <br/> <br/>(In fact, I think title screens in LD games are unnecessary altogether. They don't offer any kind of meaningful representation, because a screenshot is more informative in a huge list of games anyway, and the lack of an options menu is simply an exercise in having reasonable default configurations to begin with.) <br/> <br/>The graphics are tasteful for the most part. You've got some shader and particle type things going on that aren't overused or distracting. Be careful of pixel-perfect sprites stretching out, though. The only place where I felt like you were being lazy with the sprites was the sudden screenful of monotonous brick tiles in the tunnels. <br/> <br/>One trick people easily overlook is fonts. Picking something beyond system fonts is an implementation-wise quick way to bring the visual style to the next level - for a game like this, many of the more readable bitmap fonts on Dafont would be appropriate. Consider the layout as well; place the relevant text to where the player can see it, and try to keep the possible text spawns to a minimum. (Text popping up in the middle of the screen is a bit of a dirty solution, and in this case makes some of it blend with the backgrounds. Better to dedicate some spot on the screen for announcements only.) <br/> <br/>... <br/> <br/>Hopefully you'll find at least some of my ramblings helpful. Grats for finishing and good luck on future LDs. |
| Dec 23 18:51:00 | 24h 15m | Ascending Roots | Okay, let's get this out of the way first: 5 stars for Audio, easily. I could see this claiming a top 3 spot in the Audio category overall, comparing this to the Jam entries I've played. A case in point of how it really does improve the whole experience when people have a dedicated sound designer in their team. <br/> <br/>The puzzles were just the right easy/medium difficulty. Nothing too challenging. Some fairly clever uses of the simple mechanics that I was anticipating to see, like your limit of 6 drops coming into play, and things like fires spreading to other blocks. I don't primarily think of this as a puzzle game after all, but more like a Knytt-style exploration game which happens to have environmental puzzles in the mix. <br/> <br/>Speaking of that, I did note how the levels have all sorts of neat nooks and crannies. Sometimes there's a longer walk to get somewhere, sometimes there's purely decorative fires out of your reach here and there. All this gives you the impression that levels don't exist only for the puzzles' sake, which is important for the sort of immersion you were surely going for. This game really has a sense of cohesion about what it want to be and convey. <br/> <br/>Graphically it's a bit hit-and-miss. Many of the sprites look like a "first attempt", but then again, there's a lot of content visually and none of it is ugly per se. I'm not sure if I should count the lack of contrast between foreground and background as a criticism, as the game's pace is slow enough for you to stop and parse the landscape for a while. But I'm sure all of what I'm saying has to do with acknowledged time constraints, and post-jam development would be a good time to round off some of the sharp corners in the visual look. <br/> <br/>Overall, this really managed to engage me for a while. I think you did a great job making an experience that seems complete as it is. It left me with a positive impression, with just slight quirks that I see have been mentioned and taken into account. |
| Dec 26 09:30:00 | 62h 39m | Breathe | Looks like we have some lore going on here. Very simplistic when it comes to design, but the gameplay isn't as zen as this would warrant. (Lore-wise, a nearly enlightened monk certainly wouldn't fight off enemies! They'd just accept them and spread kindness to them or something like that.) <br/> <br/>While I would argue that space+mouse stretches the definition of "two buttons", making breathing the focus of the Growth theme is pretty clever. |
| Dec 26 17:20:00 | 7h 50m | Infinite Tower | It's a fun, mindless sort of reaction game. Good for rapid replaying. Was having difficulties determining what my orientation is for shooting, though. |
| Dec 27 10:14:00 | 16h 54m | Homeworld | It would add an extra layer if tapping Z didn't reverse your direction and you'd have to go around the planet when you miss something. That would've been a more natural way to utilize the whole two-button theme and complemented the gameplay as well. I mean being able to tap-dance around the same spot suggests fast maneuvers, but this game is actually quite slow-paced, and the difficulty curve doesn't seem to ramp up anytime soon. <br/> <br/>Speaking about slowness, and on a larger scale easiness, that's my main gripe. I managed to get the impression there was no way to lose - even if enemies do crash on the planet, it doesn't seem to get smaller or anything, and you just get more points. Weird. |
| Dec 27 10:40:00 | 26m 00s | Memory Jump | Oh god, it's Invisible tiles: The Game. And when I thought we had, as a society, moved on. <br/> <br/>The cube aesthetic is neat and all, but... no. Not my type of concept, no matter how cool the execution might seem. |
| Dec 27 23:41:00 | 13h 01m | Growing Ties | This is actually quite well done and solid. Now that this exists, I finally have a game for which to give 5 stars in Theme. <br/> <br/>The performance chart at the end is much appreciated, would hope more of these kinds of high scoring games displayed some stats. |
| Dec 31 19:51:00 | 92h 10m | The Uncertainty Principle | That was one wild ride. I don't go "woah" about LD entries often. Concept aside, it has solid audio design and a visual style that stands out. <br/> <br/>Take this to the next level in post-jam development and have the timelines influence each other somehow, that would make for some great puzzles. |
| Jan 1 19:34:00 | 23h 43m | Klangwelt | I know it's hard to make anything that revolves around music and still feels like a game (without it being a rhythm game). It's equally hard to rate, cause I was pretty impressed, but it's hard to defend quantifiably as a game. <br/> <br/>This is an interesting experiment in its own right, and the interface has lots of neat tweens going on. Of course having any sort of online play is a technical achievement. The way it's one object per player makes this a social experiment kinda thing. |
| Jan 3 17:46:00 | 46h 12m | Puff Enuff? | Unmistakably a bitslap game, in both good and bad. The music was like avant-garde free jazz. |
| Jan 4 01:24:00 | 7h 38m | Thing I did in 10 minutes | A modern classic. This will go underappreciated in its time, but I predict an academic interest booming decades after. |
| Jan 4 23:02:00 | 21h 38m | CHILL PILL | Not particularly interesting apart from the screen growth. It does have a bit of an aesthetic sense going on, so I'll translate that to the Mood score we all love. |