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Feedback comments for LD36
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | hitchh1k3r's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31 20:28:00 | Desert Strife | Pretty neat concept! I've got a soft spot for barren post-apocalypse worlds and forgotten technology. <br/> <br/>The whistling wind sets the mood well, and the audio design is pretty nice. The interface explained itself pretty well, but the tutorial was nice. The combat pause was a little tedious sometimes, but not too bad. <br/> <br/>Wish there had been a few levels in succession, playing with the existing mechanics. Maybe a level where you have to attack an opponent who was pillaging a rich region of ruins before they got too strong. Maybe even a level with a far-away opposing team with a tank, and you with many ruins to sift through hoping to defend yourselves. <br/> <br/>Thanks for putting this together! | |
| Aug 31 20:29:00 | 1m 00s | Cavemind | What a neat concept for a puzzle game! I liked this quite a bit. Took me a few tries to get a village, but once I knew the mechanics I could figure out a path to victory. <br/> <br/>There were a few interactions that didn't happen as I expected them to. I expected fire to burn trees and logs (that might have made things too easy though!) I thought a hammer would have more uses, I expected multiple houses to make a village, and I expected a fire would be needed to make them complete. <br/> <br/>Thanks for putting this together. I had a fun time playing! |
| Sep 3 18:45:00 | 70h 16m | cognizance | We come to expect good level design, and unique ideas from you, and you did not let us down. The level design is both extensive and well polished. The core idea is unique, and explored really well. The amount of work you put into this in only two days is astounding. <br/> <br/>I was playing on a new computer, so this could easily be my problem, but it's the first time I've noticed screen tearing and sub-pixel blurring in one of your games. It could be a feature of the library or engine you are using, but the 1-bit graphical style would look a lot better with some pixel snapping, and the fast moving and jumping sections would benefit from some vsynch. <br/> <br/>This is a great entry, and I really liked how the wall jumping was sticky enough to be accessible to players that aren't the best at twitch platformer games. Thanks for giving us another world to explore, and really nice job on this one. |
| Sep 3 18:57:00 | 12m 00s | No Mario's Sky | Congratulations on having your game get such a big response! <br/> <br/>You guys really went for something technically challenging, and clearly put a lot of work into it. <br/> <br/>If you had more time the controls could use another pass, probably polishing up each aspect one at a time. The air control was very slippery (I believe real Mario has that problem as well), but with the modern platformers we've been playing and nostalgia goggles on, I think the air movement needs a bit more control. Also the space ship jerks a lot as it goes slower and faster, some acceleration would really make the movement seem more dramatic. <br/> <br/>The art, sound, and ambition of this was really excellent. Thank's for putting it together! <br/> <br/>PS. I'm looking forward to Moonman! |
| Sep 3 19:04:00 | 7m 00s | Cavey | What a fun idea. I enjoyed playing around with the different objects, trying to see what I could put together. It did take me a few restarts to not destroy the starting stick before making an axe though. <br/>It would have been nice to have some coherent goal other than exploring the world and combining things, but with a project this ambitious I'm guessing that would be beyond your scope. <br/>Good work on this, I really enjoyed the experience. <br/> <br/>PS. I don't know if it was intentional or not (but it was fun to do), I found that you could grab a tree to climb up it, and once up in the air throw the tree backwards to fling yourself though the air. |
| Sep 16 17:13:00 | 310h 09m | Too Late | Interesting experience. Getting out of the starting pen felt a bit like breaking the game, but I think that is a good thing. It would have been nice to see the graphics developed a bit more, but I know that's difficult on a solo weekend project. ^_^ <br/> <br/>I found the slow walking speed frustrating, but at least I could guess where I had to get to right away, and reached the end before too long. I think a faster walking speed might have ruined the effect you were going for. Good work finishing this! |
| Sep 16 17:18:00 | 5m 00s | Stones versus Blasters | I generally liked the graphics. The outlines made a lot of the details pop, but it would have been nice to see a bit more texture consistency. (The grass is very bland, but the rocks and ships are very detailed). I'm not sure if this was a bug or not, but I found that once I placed the first tower I could no longer move the camera. <br/> <br/>The usage of the theme was apparent, but in my opinion could have felt a bit more "Ancient" and a little less "Technology" ^_^ Good work one this! |
| Sep 16 17:23:00 | 5m 00s | Siege of Scarborough Castle | I do enjoy Rail Shooters, I think the fact that the game can better predict my experience (by controlling the pacing) is one of their greatest strengths. Turning seemed a bit slow (especially on turns where the cart was spinning my away from where I wanted to aim). As others have mentioned the aim felt a bit off. <br/> <br/>I really enjoyed watching the towers crumble, it was made extra satisfying from the aim making it so much harder. Good work on this one! (It makes me think of rail shooter+tower defense, which could actually be a really neat mashup). |
| Sep 16 17:28:00 | 5m 00s | poramid | This was a lot of fun, good job. I think I liked everything about it! I especially liked the different audio vignettes that played on each of the "job" screens, so much that it would have been nice to have them somewhere else in the game, just so I could have listened to them more. <br/> <br/>It would have been nice if some of the jobs would require (or gently encourage) the use of the other building tools. I tried them all but found them less comfortable then the basic one, so I just ended up going back to it. The spaceship was perfect though. Good work, I look forward to seeing more from you! |
| Sep 16 17:34:00 | 6m 00s | MistIslands | The graphics were very charming. The water texture and movement reminded me of The Wind Waker, which I think has an excellent graphical style. <br/> <br/>I found the amount of information the game was asking me to process at the very beginning a bit daunting (though a lot of people seem to like that in games). It would have been nice if you could have boiled the choices down to something simpler, and then built them up over time. <br/> <br/>There were a lot of features in this game (card choices, movement, battling), personally I think it might have been too much, but it must have been hard to get it all done, so good work! |
| Sep 16 17:41:00 | 7m 00s | Merlins Dungeon | I really like the stone brick texture, I'm not sure exactly why, but I find it very pleasing. The gameplay could use some more polish, but the idea was straight forward enough to be played by anyone. I would first focus on the collision detection. It's a bit frustrating to be killed by a wall or the dragon, when I can see a large space between us. Then if you still had time next you could add more mechanics (ex. buttons and button controlled walls). But for the time you had it was a good work! <br/> <br/>PS. I get that a "mechanically enhanced dragon" fits the theme, but the game doesn't really feel (to me) like "Ancient Technology." |
| Sep 16 17:54:00 | 13m 00s | Echo Through the Aztec | I can tell you put a lot of effort went into this, it seemed to have a lot of content for a Ludum Dare game. Good work! <br/>The artwork looked very nice, but as said before the text was hard to read on a light background. I thought the teleport mechanic was a unique idea, and wasn't sure how it could be used meaningfully, but it seems you found a way. I found that the game's difficulty spiked a lot once I was expected to do precise teleporting. Good work on this! |
| Sep 16 19:07:00 | 1h 13m | Dont Get Eaten by Dinosaurs | This game was super charming, I liked the graphics style, and the general notion reminded me of Joe & Mac. <br/> <br/>As popular as it is in media to put dinosaurs and people together in the same place/time, it's always bothered me (what with ~60 million years between them). That being said you total prepared for that (maybe intentionally?) by having chickens in you game. If I were to say, "Why are there dinosaurs and people in the game?" You could just reply, "Because people love chickens." ^_^ <br/> <br/>The recharge time made dinosaurs difficult to attack, and since they could kill you so fast it often felt pretty unfair. It would have been nice to have increasing challenges before the dinosaurs, and maybe some checkpoint to give the player a sense of progress. Attacking trees and chickens was a lot of fun. You did good work on this! |
| Sep 16 19:25:00 | 18m 00s | ArsonVille | Burning down a village is surprisingly fun! The graphics look nice, and the fast forward feature is great. <br/>My critique is that after placing all the "fire proliferating goodies" you have to wait for the timer before starting the fire. The timer is encouraging you to go fast, but then essentially punishing you if you go too fast. I wonder if the timer is even necessary. If there was no timer you could just place things and then start the fire right after. There would be less pressure to act, but I think the bulk of the game was in watching the village burn. <br/>Certainly fire is an ancient technology, but I don't really feel this relates to closely with the theme. All is all, you did pretty well, and good work! |
| Sep 16 19:37:00 | 12m 00s | Ancient Heritage | I liked the simple graphics style, and figuring out what to do was fun. I liked that after connecting a few pillars your temple can take a few hits before the game ends. This gives the player some time to fail (maybe dying the first play through), before starting to pick up pace and move towards the ending. <br/> <br/>I didn't like that the player moved so slow, and at an off axis (up moved up and to the right). I didn't enjoy finding the last few temples (maybe each time you connect one the camera could zoom out a bit making finding the last few more easier). And I really didn't enjoy instantly dying when you pickup too much energy. I understand that is keeps the player from gathering all the pillars and hooking them all up at once, and means you have to make tactical decisions when you pick up energy, but it punishes the player very bad when they are wondering through the forest and can't even see the node they pass over. <br/> <br/>In all I think you did very well, I like that the game let me discover how to play it, and did some unique things. Good work! |
| Sep 16 20:32:00 | 55m 00s | 54 Years of Hatchets | I found it frustrating and gave up early, but after reading the above comments I decided I'd give it another go, and try to give you some constructive feedback. <br/> <br/>First off, you should know I am not in your target demographic (I don't really like micromanagement or even RTS games much). ^_^ <br/> <br/>Some good things: <br/>- It works with the theme really well. <br/>- A more modern crafting system was unique to an RTS (I'm not sure how well it played -- it's hard to tell with so few things to craft, but nice innovation). <br/>- The fast-forward feature was smart. <br/> <br/>Some things that could use more work: <br/>- The graphics style was inconsistent... I'm not one to conflate graphic fidelity with quality, minimalist "grey-box" assets can be used to a good effect, but when you mix resolutions, styles, and polycount as wildly as you did it has a negative impact on the games aesthetic (unless you want some sort of surrealistic or dadaist style, but I don't think you did). <br/>- The input. This is very hard to do well in an RTS, some features that I really wanted were easy deselecting (deselect when starting a new selection, shift select to add -- this uses the affordances of modern operating systems and RTS games -- Shift + E was a bit cumbersome), relevant selections (if you box select resources and people, only select the people), <br/>- The wall of text! A lot of reading scares away some players (myself included). Because the gameplay was complex there was a lot of help text, ideally (if time permits) a tutorial (of some sort) is a better way to teach the player about the game. <br/> <br/>Some bugs? <br/>- There is a lag spike when selecting a large box (I think it's selecting resources far away, but I'm not really sure how you did selection code). <br/>- The selection box doesn't select correctly towards the end of the camera. (I ran into a lot of problems with calculating what was in a sub region of a perspective projected camera in a previous Ludum Dare game, so I know how hard it can be. An easy fix would be to raycast to the ground plane and then have a selection box that moves only in the X-Z plane, and hovers a fixed Y off the ground, then just check the entities X and Z verses the bounding box). <br/>- The objects have "(clone)" at the end of their names in the menus. (You could fix that by setting the name in the instantiated prefabs to the name of the original object something like `Instantiate(prefab).name = prefab.name;`) <br/>- When fast forwarding there are errors or something. If I get arm my people and then fast-forward when they are attacked they don't seem to do anything. If I slow down time, they take a while before they start to respond again. I tried to right click the enemy tribe, and a lot of the time they would just stand there being attacked. <br/> <br/>Sorry for the "Wall of Text" ^_^ But I hope some of it is helpful to you, and good work! |
| Sep 17 18:46:00 | 22h 14m | 105.2fm | Good job creating a sense of monotony, to the point that the gun starts to seem like the "best" way for you and your character to get their jollies. <br/> <br/>I refrained for a long time. Just threw the yo-yo, and learned to improvise some tunes with the Ukulele and the few good chords that came through on the radio. I like how they were tuned to the same key! <br/> <br/>The denouement at the end was interesting in how it got every bit as monotonous as the gas-pumping. I stopped paying attention to their stories and carefully picking "deserving" targets, and just shot anyone. The faces blurred together. And then the actual ending just accentuated that. <br/> <br/>Just for personal preferences in games (not really relevant to this as an art piece), I'd like to see more feedback for making the Ethical choice, beyond getting egged on by the Temptation Vulture. Something like how Papers Please handles moral choices within a monotonous-seeming game structure. Without an option to make a lasting "good" choice, the decision to start going on a killing spree feels forced or artificial. It's the only meaningful way the game leaves us to interact with it, you know? <br/> <br/>Anyway, this was a solid, evocative piece. Thanks for putting it together. |