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amras0000

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		amras0000's comment
Apr 24 03:58:47		Finding your loved one	♥ 6	The graphics are gorgeous, if a little inconsistent at times, and I do love the design of growing and shrinking and the various ideas you've associated with it. My complaints are purely mechanical; either easy mistakes to make or bugs you might not have noticed. I do love the theming. Two childhood mascots tied together into an artstyle and mechanics set fitting for them both. The sound didn't play for me so I can't comment on how that tied in. Unfortunately, the most noticable aspect of the game is the controls. As a rule, you should never control a platformer's character with physics. I know it makes intuitive sense to try that, but there are many issues in practice. Just check the "make kinematic" checkbox if you're working in unity, or disable physics interactions on the character in whatever engine you're using, and use custom code for the movement. In the last level, you have a leap of faith. It's good that you postmarked it, but at the size I attempted to jump (pretty large) I wasn't able to make it. It's not a minor oversight, but it meant I had to guess at what size the invisible ceiling would allow me to pass. It seemed like I could only jump on the yellow enemies but couldn't damage the blue ones. At first it wasn't too clear if that was a bug or intentional, and it took me a couple levels to work it out. The wording of the tutorial made it seem like I should be able to jump on all the enemies, though I may have missed some text because of the control scheme. I realize that larger Alice could jump higher and that makes sense to me, but it seemed like the increase in jump height was much larger than the increase in Alice height. Nothing wrong with this mechanically, but it felt a bit off. I did enjoy the game overall, despite the wonky control scheme. The levels are well designed and short enough not to be irritating if I failed. I may have liked the hitboxes to be more obvious. Some of the platforms that weren't rectangular could have done with a flatter top. Nice work.
Apr 24 04:10:26	11m 39s	Dot	♥ 2	The core mechanics are pretty fun. The speed of the car and the spacing of the parking spots/competitors makes for some fun and frantic dodging around the streets. I tend not to be a huge fan of retro-styled music and sfx, but I could get into these. I would have liked to see income play a bigger role, mechanically. Maybe every day I have to repay a loan, or make more cash than a competitor (the second option would make for some interesting dynamics of crashing a competitor's vehicle, paying the fine, but also cutting their profits). I recognize that level of balancing and worldbuilding might be outside the scope of the Compo, though. I don't have much else to say, really. The game's fun, arcadey, polished, and has an aesthetic that it holds to well. Good work.
Apr 24 12:07:26	7h 57m	Krilgor	♥ 1	Very nicely done. the writing had me chuckling throughout, the gameplay was engaging and explored the mechanics thoroughly without being repetitive. I love how large of a level you were able to fit into a relatively small screen. I'm slightly curious about the aspect ratio of the game window. The height actually didn't fit on my smaller monitor, and I feel like with a very slight redesign of the world you could make something more friendly to horizontal monitors. The writing's superb, this level of camp humor and constant predictable pranks somehow feel perfectly cockroachy in itself. Only thing I felt was missing is some conditional dialogue for, say, trying to squish krilgor or the questgivers. When I first saw the tweezers, I was expecting them to be much more difficult to use. They're large, the hitboxes they're trying to hit are tiny (especially the worms at the start), and the perspective doesn't lend itself to careful aiming. But I was immediately pleasantly surprised at how little effort it was to squish things. It could be that I'm a messed up human being, but for the ending I was ready to squish krilgor. Maybe have a dialogue along the lines of "oh god what are you doing get those away from me" where the only way to proceed is to squish him. That may have been a lot harder to design properly though, and the current ending's pretty good too. I really enjoyed this title. Keep up the good work, sheep.
Apr 24 13:12:08	1h 04m	Smalltrek	♥ 2	Very well done. The writing is very atmospheric, the visual style cohesive. The music fits into the theme well. The puzzles feel quite a lot like block sliders, only with a lot more freedom to move. I know I've seen this mechanics set in previous LDs and I've really enjoyed it every time I've seen it. One quick complaints: in the level select, X both closes the dialogue and lands on the planet. This means that to get between levels I have to hit X twice, and this has thrown me off almost every time: I'd reach the planet, hit X, not land, overshoot, grumble, move back, hit X. The game has a lot of levels for a compo, and I do applaud that each has its own dialogue and varied mechanics. But the impression I got after some 14 levels is that the mechanics aren't varied enough to warrant this many levels. Certainly, each new race adds something new to the puzzle, but because the levels up until where I played are all just 4x4 you're limited in the patterns you can use, and a lot of the puzzles (to where I've played) just come down to blocking off tribbles then sliding everyone into the largely obvious right position. I don't feel particularly challenged playing through the levels, and the game's aesthetic doesn't quite lend itself to a zen state of mindless clicking like you'd get in, say, hexcells. The above is obviously a highly subjective criticism, but I would have loved to be able to skip ahead in levels. With the warp drive system, you had a perfect opportunity for that. You'd just need to unlock the first stage in each quadrant and a player who's not feeling engaged with the current set of levels could jump ahead in difficulty to where they're more comfortable. I can't fault the game on any objective measures. The design is solid all around, and the execution is spotless. It just feels a bit too long. Keep up the good work.
Apr 24 15:09:31	1h 57m	Tiny Pollen	♥ 1	As a quick note, on the WebGL version, the objective bar gets cut off. This is an interesting title largely for the controls. You're using zero-gravity spaceship physics to control pollen. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but it works well enough. One tweak you could do to really improve these kinds of controls is to control with the mouse rather than the keyboard. Left click to move the pollen's velocity towards the cursor, right click to move it away. In Unity I think you'd want to use Vector3.MoveTowards. In terms of graphics, my main complaint has to be the fonts. pure red doesn't look very good in most contexts and this is no exception. I would have liked to see the font you used on the title be used throughout the game, maybe in a dark green with a light-green outline. Other than the font, the game looks quite nice. I love the blur on the backgrounds and the wind effects. I got through the first 4 levels without too much problem. The first three were a bit samey, but also pretty quick. On the fifth level though, it seemed like the objective increased dramatically, and I couldn't find enough pollen to complete even half of it. I tried waiting around for the respawn, but at some point the game just decided to kill the stage and make me restart it. I don't know what happened. Maybe I ran out of some hidden or off-screen timer? Since I couldn't return to the main menu I had to stop playing there.
Apr 25 16:25:15	25h 15m	...claustroful...	♥ 1	The core concept is great, the controls are well designedx and feel very smooth, and the graphics are pleasantly thematic and fit together with the music and the mechanics. I can't fault the game on its gameplay. Good wrok. I did have some concerns with the level design, though, or at least with the first few seconds I was able to get through. During the first vertical line area, the best strategy I've found is to just stay blue and hide under all the walls. The section would've been much better if you'd introduced a fourth color that nothing can pass through, and forced the player to shift color to fit the walls. Or if you'd forced the player to jump through the vertical areas by leaving a gap in the floor. Right after that area is the obstacle I couldn't get through. I can't jump through it no matter the color, I can't roll through it because the floor isn't safe, and I can't see to land under it without smashing myself when I try to get back up. It's a pity I couldn't get any further though, the game looks like it'd be really fun for quite a while with some better levels.
Apr 26 19:23:56	26h 58m	Strangeness	♥ 3	The sound effects are much louder than the music. I learned this the hard way, after adjusting the volume to suit the music. On entering the first level, it was very unclear what terrain was passable and what wasn't. It was quick enough to work out but the bushes you can pass through really have no right to be there. On the whole, I very much enjoyed the design of the puzzles. They're devilishly difficult, and have a slight air of "gotcha" to them, but they're small enough in scope that they're not frustrating to solve. Unfortunately, their presentation leaves a bit to be desired. The mechanics you have to work with are a bit unintuitive though. enemies can pass through boulders if the boulders are moving, boulders can pass through walls but not through keys. I feel like with some stronger visual indicators you could remove a whole chunk of the annoyance that comes from figuring out the solution to a puzzle, and then realizing that the world doesn't work the way you expected, and having to repeat it again while cursing the developers. On each turn, each enemy takes its turn in order. This means that when a lot of enemies are in a level, I have to wait between each move. With a game where I have to repeat each puzzle a dozen times to work out the solution, this did get on my nerves. The better option, I think, would have been for each enemy to move simultaneously to the player. Despite those flaws though, I really enjoyed this game. It made me feel a bit stupid for trying to grab keys I didn't need and generally poked fun at the fact I never looked far enough into the level. I don't know that this design style would have worked in a much larger scope, but for this title it's perfect. Thanks for the game.
Apr 26 20:06:19	42m 23s	Starstruck Ducky	♥ 4	I can't tell if a more fitting saying for this game would be "if at first you don't succeed, try again" or "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results." Both seem oddly apt. The sound effects are fun to listen to, though it's a bit of a shame there wasn't some lighthearted music to go along with the game. The writing's good, though the main impression I got out of it was that ducks have an unhealthy obsession with toasters. My main mechanical complaint is that there's no way to skip turns. If no one higher up is answering my calls, I'm forced to chit chat with one of the nobodies in my inner circle. While this does mean I get to see more of the writing, the relationship I gain makes no difference to my stardom. (as an aside; I hate to mention my own title in someone else's comment feed, but I tried to give you some closure on your concerns with the turtle dying, in a reply, and I don't know that ldjam notifies you of those)
Apr 26 21:19:05	1h 12m	KeyPuppers	♥ 2	As has been mentioned, holding down the shift key doesn't add much to the game, and in my case it made the experience just that bit more frustrating, since hitting the right side of my keyboard was made more difficult. The main thing I'd have liked is to be able to repair 2 or more keys at once. I do like the time management aspect of not being able to fully repair a key instantaneously (though I've seen effective uses of that mechanic, too, in other games). But because of the health bars being very obvious, and the repairs taking as long as they did, I felt like a lot of my time was spent watching progress bars fill up, which is never a fun experience. Granted, this is highly subjective and a massive nitpick, but it's a gripe that stood out in my playthrough. In the spirit of constructive criticism, here's an alternative I might consider to avoid that problem: press the key once to start repairing, a second time to stop. make fewer keys be damaged at any one point, but make repairs take longer. allow 2 or 3 keys to be repaired at once, so the player's always hunting for new targets even while keys are repairing. Still, besides the nitpick I can't fault the game on any front. The sound effects are fine, the graphics are nice and polished, the design's very nice for a LD game. Very nice work.
Apr 30 14:19:27	89h 00m	Signal?	♥ 3	First off, great concept and I love the shaders. I only played through the glitchy artsy version but it was playable enough. The death white noise went through the doors, which felt like a bit of an unfair death since I had no way of seeing it coming. It may have been nice to have a more obvious (no pun intended) signal for when a wall was about to appear in front of me, but I can't fault the approach you took with the monitors changing color. I got the gun, went down the elevator, and found a code for "A". Then I hunted around but couldn't find anywhere to input the code, so I went back up the elevator and shot a bit at the hearts in the white noise spawner above me. Eventually it stopped spawning white noise, and after exploring for a second I fell off the world. So, might have been nice to (pun intended this time) signal where the player should go a bit more clearly. Maybe you could have added some big fuck-off arrows which would be visible through the colorful fuzziness. Regardless, I really enjoyed the game. The rewind mechanic worked well both with the obstacles and the theme, and the artstyle was cohesive and compelling. Nice work.
May 1 13:42:31	23h 23m	Ship in a Bottle	♥ 1	The graphics are interesting enough. I managed to get a fish specifically by hitting an area of the sea with no fish in it. I kept getting reset towards the center of the screen. And while I'm enjoying the piano track and there's a lot of it, the minor stumbles are very audible and irritating. I suppose they add to the feel of the game in some sense of the word. I can't honestly say this is a bad game, it feels deliberate but I don't understand to what end. I can't honestly say I didn't enjoy this, though by all rights there are not enough mechanics for that to be justified. This distinctly feels like the ending to a Blendo game, and I'm happy that this came to be during a ludum dare. But commenting on this game at all is difficult.
May 1 15:47:59	2h 05m	The Little World	♥ 2	The game's definitely interesting, if a fair bit repetitive. I love this interpretation of the theme (second time I've seen the little prince used this LD), and you've definitely managed to capture some of the charm of taking care of the prince's planet. I would have loved to have some gentle music to accompany the gardening, the lack of sound definitely hurt the mood of the game. But it's Ludum Dare so can't be too harsh on that. The baobabs always spawned on the start of a day. It may have felt a bit more natural to have them sprout at random times, maybe with a subtle scale increase (spawn at scale=0.1, lerp to scale=1 over a second or so). The volcanoes had a warning system if they were about to blow, but I would have liked some better visual indicators of the 5 stages of dirtiness. Maybe something like changing up the height of their spout. I hate to encourage people to conform to the norm, but it felt like you were aiming for a specific gaming experience so I might as well bring a couple design practices to your attention that I've seen accomplish something similar. You seemed to want each day to be a little more frantic, and force the player to switch between a couple different tools to solve problems ever more quickly and with ever higher quantities. But, despite the switching of tools, at the end of the day the game only actually involved clicking on each thing a couple times. It would have been nice to have a more involved procedure for cleaning out volcanoes and rooting out baobabs. Something to the style of typing various quotes from the book to clear out baobabs, or having to hold the mouse close to the rose while watering it. Still, it's a sweet little game, and with just a bit more variety in its mechanics it shows a lot of promise. Thanks for your work.
May 1 16:11:05	23m 06s	Tiny Planet Corp	♥ 0	The main element lacking from the gameplay was some form of obstacle to the initial drilling portion. There's a trivial solution to make the claw game easier by just not turning during drilling. That aside: The graphics are pretty compelling, and I like what you're going for both in terms of theme and mechanics. The claw game is a bit too difficult to control, but with a bit more polish on the controls this could be a great little game. I'm always a fan of any title that makes me hate my past self's decisions and have to work around obstacles I made myself. The music's fun to listen to, but short enough that it gets grating after a while. Both with the music and the graphics/animations you've managed to nail a very cohesive mood, one of hostile, impersonal industry and mining for greed's sake. Nice work.
May 3 12:09:51	43h 58m	Batter Bros.	♥ 3	The first strategy I tried out with this game was the obvious one - mash J repeatedly without moving. And to my great dismay, it worked. The game ended up feeling really shallow and repetitive because the optimal strategy is to ignore most of the game's mechanic and just get a good rhythm going with the bat. And this is really dissapointing because the graphics, sfx, music are outstanding and the core design idea is solid (if not terribly innovative) and promises a lot of fun dodging and timing challenges. There's a number of fairly simple ways to resolve this issue. Most trivially, you could force the player to face in the direction of the ball, or add a cooldown to the bats, maybe a .1-.2 second animation of the bat going back into position for the next swing. If you were to go a bit more extravagant, a charge-up mechanic would be nice, where I have to hold down the j key to pull the bat back, and release to swing it, with force proportional to how long I've been holding it. Great work on this title. I would love to play it with friends as a simpler alternative to Lethal League but the optimal strategy weighs it down too much.
May 3 12:35:54	26m 03s	The Lonely Captain	♥ 1	There's a part of me that would have really liked this to be written in curses, not love, and played from a terminal. The graphical inteface felt just a tiny bit more than neccesssary for the game. That thought aside, I loved this experience. A minimal control scheme which distracts you from a text adventure is not something I've seen before, and I do adore it. Every other instance I've seen of a game merging long text narratives and action gameplay, the two have had a solid dividing line. One has always been paused while the other was going. But this merges the two in a really satisfying manner. Great work on that. One concern about the story: after all the dialogue is finished and I'm on the ending screen, I get to keep playing. Based on how the story ends, my course of action is obviously to aim for something to crash into. And what I'm expecting is a final piece of dialogue that accepts death as the final solution to the predicament. While the story's still unresolved, I'd be ok with the death scene being "I didn't want to die. Press space to try again", but once the story implies I should kill myself, I want a longer paragraph accepting it. Some more nitpicks about the mechanics: I wasn't too clear on what the 3 red numbers meant. I didn't know if their order mattered, if the objects were some distance to my left/right, or directly in front of me presented in random order. Also, it seemed like sometimes I'd be getting really low numbers (~300), then turn a couple degrees and suddenly get really large ones. I just wasn't sure how to map the numbers to the actual map I was navigating, which meant avoiding obstacles mainly came down to clicking around the compass until the numbers got big again. Maybe that was in line with your narrative though. Still, I really enjoyed this game, and would love to see more like it, with the act of reading and absorbing information itself a realtime gameplay mechanic. I'm looking forward to seeing more games you end up making.