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Feedback comments for LD38
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | cerno-b's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 24 09:53:22 | Mr-Vpn | ♥ 1 | Looks really cool! I bookmarked it and will give it a spin when the voting starts | |
| May 1 07:11:33 | 165h 18m | W.R.L.D. (World Reconnaissance eLite Defense) | ♥ 1 | 2300 points and certainly coming back for more. It's immediately recognizable how much thought went into this game. From draining health to introduce a natural timing factor to the continue functionality that allows locking the difficulty. It has everything it needs, be it screenshake effects or even a highscore table to keep up the motivation. There are a lot of little touches, like the soft outer boundary and menu transitions. It's a very polished entry and I love it! On the downside, I found the music to be kind of monotonous. I assume you wanted to go for a chilly atmospheric vibe, but it seems a bit repetitive. Maybe the base line is a bit too prominent. Also I thought the controls were not quite tight enough, but that could be an "easy to learn, difficult to master" thing. Specifically since you can only thrust forwards, and the orbital cannons always fire at you head on, it's quite tricky to avoid them. Even if that is by choice, I think the momentum mechanics could use a little tweaking. I found myself struggling with picking up the extras because I had some sideways momentum left. My biggest complaint however would be the lack of fullscreen, which to my mind, would not only have a positive visual effect, but might also help with the controls since a bigger screen allows for finer interaction. Despite the complaints, I think it's a very fun game, and I'll keep it in my itch library for replay. |
| May 1 07:29:18 | 17m 45s | Krilgor | ♥ 2 | This is awesome! I didn't expect much and came for the Game Boy graphics but the game is actually really great. It's rare to find an actually funny entry on LD. What I especially liked was how you kick off the game by having the player find the main character. That part gets you right into the game's world. The graphics work pretty well, especially that nasty tweezers animation when you squash something. Character design is fitting, especially the boss. The weak point here is the car that looks kind of generic. Sound effects are really nice, but the game definitely lacks some music. Gameplay-wise I have three things I would like to address: First I was able to kill the guards before getting the task to do so which lead to a hiccup when I actually got there. An easy way to solve this would be to hide parts of the game that are not accessible yet by a blank screen. Second, I think the game crashed when I defeated the boss. I couldn't move my character and he wasn't saying anything. I was able to use the tweezers but couldn't figure out what to do with them. I'll probably replay the game with my daughter, so we can check whether it works a second time. Third, the boss fight itself. It would have been so much cooler if you could have put the car down away from the boss and see it run him over. I had to try a few times to actually get the crash right, so I was confused for a bit. But it was still clear what to do, so it's not a big deal. Overall I enjoyed the game very much. |
| May 1 07:50:10 | 20m 52s | Gaia | ♥ 3 | I absolutely love the atmosphere you create, especially taking it slowly in the beginning when you only show the planet and then introduce the title screen. The music is really good at contributing to the mood and presentation-wise there is not much to criticize, great job! The ending was pretty good. I suppose you were aiming at a creation myth background and I think you pulled it off quite nicely, although it took me a while to realize there is actually something happening here. Gameplay wise, I liked the mechanics, and you spend some effort in introducing them in an organic way, but it took me a while to figure out you were supposed to call back the clouds and use them as spring boards. The puzzles were well-conceived, but for the difficulty you chose, I think the controls should have been tighter. This is actually my only real complaint. Sometimes was dragged up through platforms, and that little jump at the end of landing was a bit annoying. So it became a bit frustrating towards the end. Overall a very solid entry. I had fun. |
| May 1 08:08:32 | 18m 22s | _Save_ | ♥ 4 | Very fun little game. The screenshake is very important and works in favor of the game. It would really come to life more if it had some music. I really like the idea of not protecting your ship but a small world. I will go into a bit more detail about this mechanic because I think there is room for improvement. First of all, your ship is basically invincible, which was a bit confusing at first. I think it is a good idea to not have two things that could die, but I think it might have worked better if there was some way of being punished for getting hit, like being propelled across the screen or not being able to fire for a few seconds. Next you chose to counterweight the power of the special weapons by allowing them to harm the planet. While I appreciate the thought, I think the weapons are not useful enough for such a big disadvantage, especially the laser which can decrease the planet's life quickly. The weapons feel great and it's fun to use them but they feel impractical after a while. Finally, have you thought about getting rid of the energy bar and instead show the planet's life implicitly, e.g. by reducing its size or having chunks blasted off it when it's hit? I think it would avoid the initial confusion that it's not your life bar but the planet's. From a replayability perspective, I think the game's difficulty should ramp up a bit faster to get that "one more round!" feeling. Maybe introduce the weapons bit by bit instead of all at the same time. Maybe play around with the idea of having rounds instead of a single continuous level. Overall I think it's a very solid game with a few flaws. I really like minimalistic games like this and the feel of the game is spot-on. My suggestions for improvement would be to tweak the mechanics a bit more. |
| May 1 08:24:25 | 15m 53s | Frag Saga | ♥ 0 | I love the idea of building your own level and using stepping stones to get to the goal. I like how your little character looks like he's going for some 2D-Counterstrike and then the game turns out to be more cerebral in nature. The game itself could definitely benefit from some more polish, for instance, I got stuck in a block when I placed a room to save myself from falling. Also I would question whether you actually need mouse controls (maybe with the exception of placing rooms). The game's controls might feel tighter from keyboard-only controls when you steer the guy around the room. I appreciate that you added music to the game, but I think it was a bit too playful for the general feeling of the game. Overall a solid entry with a very unique idea that I could see outside of Ludum Dare if you gave it a few extra rounds of polish. |
| May 1 08:36:22 | 11m 57s | SmlWhrld - A Puzzle | ♥ 0 | I'll give the game a try later, just letting you know that you (probably by accident) put it in the Compo, but play by the Jam rules (multiple participants). Not sure whether you can switch at this point in time though. |
| May 1 09:15:14 | 38m 52s | Small Kingdoms | ♥ 0 | I love the basic premise of having a very small-scale strategy game. Then taking that idea and turning it into a working game in two days is an intimidating task. So first of all, I think you did a very good job pulling it off. From the start, it feels inviting to play and has a lot of charm. Unfortunately the AI is really weak (as you mentioned yourself), I wasn't even able to lose on purpose. I think writing a good AI is not easy, especially on such a limited time budget, but if I had any major complaint, it would be this. Some more specific things I noticed: - I played the game twice to the end and afterwards it gets stuck in a weird bug that allows you to use the level up button on the menu screen but not start the game again. - When the Orc has his turn, you see its level up button, which I found a bit confusing as I thought it was my own. I think it would be better to hide that button on the opponent's turn Overall I think it's a solid game that could have been really special with some little additional polish, especially the AI. |
| May 1 09:43:39 | 28m 25s | Space Hummus | ♥ 1 | I have to say, you are really talented when it comes to setting up a game and telling a story. The little comic in the beginning sets up the game tremendously well and the one at the end gives it proper closure. It was a very fun read. The game's graphics are pretty good and fitting the comic vibe you set up in the beginning. The music is atmospheric and sets the mood well without becoming too repetitive. The sound effects are really cute. Did you record them yourself? The game itself is a lot of fun and you managed to bring together a lot of different planet mechanics that keep the player entertained. Although there were frustrating bits, I never had the feeling that I wanted to quit the game before finishing it. I very much appreciate that you can press Enter at any time to reset the level. It alleviates the frustration of failure by setting the player back into the game quickly (Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy do this very well) My biggest (and to be fair only) complaint would be the gravity mechanics. It took a while to figure out how the game works and it is playable, but it is not very intuitive. The gravity changes opposite to the direction you jump off to, which makes gravity relative to your position which feels very unnatural. Also there is absolutely no gravitational pull of the other planets, so you can almost touch the next planet, but are still dragged down to where you come from. It may be a matter of choice here, but it may have been worth exploring real gravitational mechanics. It might competely turn over your design, but it would have been more accessible. That complaint aside, I had a great time playing Space Hummus. |
| May 1 10:38:55 | 55m 16s | Cellular Defense | ♥ 3 | Solid tower defense game. Took me a bit to figure out a good strategy but then I made it to wave 26 with just Splashers and Fasts at 100 health and 32.000 leukocytes left. Unfortunately from that point on the game waits 60 seconds between stages so I decided to leave it at that. Not sure if that is a bug though, maybe because I use fast forward a lot and the timer is not affected by that. I found a bug when you use 2x and 3x speed up, in that case the towers hit the opponents much less frequently. I assume this is because when you speed up the positions of the shots change by a greater step size, so they skip the opponents' position more frequently. So whenever I am in danger of being overrun, I turn down the speed to 1x and immediately back up to 3x, but yeah, you may want to fix that. I don't know whether there is an end to the levels as I quit at 26, but I feel the game could be improved by having shorter rounds, maybe by increasing the difficulty ramp up, but you said you ran out of time towards the end, so this kind of balancing probably fell victim to that. Control-wise I would have preferred the tower placement to be inverted, i.e. select the tower type and then select the position, because that would have allowed the player to place multiple towers of the same type more quickly. All in all I enjoy tower defense, and yours is a decent example of the genre. With a bit of polishing and improved graphics it could become really great. |
| May 1 10:55:35 | 16m 40s | Near kingdoms | ♥ 3 | Nice game, I managed to finish in on Normal difficulty after I found out that just spamming woodchucks and horses while not worrying too much about my own castle works fairly well. There is a minor bug where the "insufficient money" message pops up after you buy something that reduces to your funds to a very low amount, I would guess the "money available" check might be below the spending code at the moment. |
| May 1 11:00:48 | 5m 13s | I Want To Explore | ♥ 2 | Your game looks nice, I will play and rate it later. Just a comment: Please mark the game as Windows-compatible on itch.io, otherwise it won't be playable from the itch client. |
| May 1 20:32:04 | 9h 31m | Space Honey: The adventure of Little-Bee 🐝 | ♥ 1 | Man, I wish you'd had more time for polish. I followed your game from your initial sketches and thought it was a very neat concept. Ultimately, I think the game would have benefited a lot from some way to zoom out to see the different planets, like in your sketches. The hive was a bit hard to find and the by minimizing the travel time between planets and hive, I think the game could be much more enjoyable. I was very impressed by the pixel art. Seeing the hive for the first time was a really nice experience, which would have been perfect if you added some epic music on approach. Finally, I wouldn't personally worry about changing the keys at this point. There is a certain leeway given about what constitutes a bug and what is the unallowed addition of features. Since the choice of keys significantly impacts the gameplay and it's really just a very minor change, I would assume that changing the keys should be no problem at this point. Maybe you can just add the W and S keys to the existing keys so it would be even less of a change. All in all I think the game has a lot of potential. I would be interested in what you can do post-jam. |
| May 1 20:47:49 | 15m 45s | Worlds Project | ♥ 1 | Very nice idea of a sandbox game. I followed your updates a bit so I had some insight in your frustration of building a sandbox that was not much of a game initially. You got the core mechanics down and everything works nicely and is inviting to play around with in order to see what happens. Since sandbox games are not really my best genre, I may not be the best person to say this, but personally I would have liked some sort of goal, even if it was just a simple one. Maybe some sort of resource you need in order to change things. Starting from that, you could set up different worlds with different goals, like terraforming a volcanic hellscape or colonizing a micro-island nation. You have all the pieces in place to make this a fun "classic" game beyond what is currently possible in the sandbox. Overall it's a very unique game that dares to try something new. I would love to see where you can take this concept. |
| May 1 20:57:55 | 10m 06s | Inner World | ♥ 4 | Overall the idea of the inverted world is awesome and would be a good starting point for a fantasy story. I really love how you actually recorded narration for your game. That's something I always wanted to do in my projects but never got around to. I also appreciate how the camera has some inertia. This makes the game feel very smooth. Now on the downside, I think you know this, but the game is really short and you cannot die. Also the jumping mechanics don't seem to have a real purpose. It seems like you ran out of time, which is unfortunate because I can totally see how this game could have become a neat little experience with a bit more fleshed out story and actual things to accomplish. Maybe you can spend some more time on a post-compo version with more narration and adventures. I would revisit it. Tag me if you do. |
| May 1 21:11:59 | 14m 04s | Crumpets and Cannons | ♥ 3 | Awesome graphics and atmosphere. You pulled off the English Aristocracy theme so well and it's really fun to read (I tried a similar theme in my game but it doesn't show too much). The graphics are amazing (although I'm not a big fan of stretching pixel art), I just wish there was some music and sound effects. In my opinion it would help the game a lot if you just skipped the intro (and especially the pre-game explanations) after death, it sort of takes away the motivation to try again. Gameplay wise, I found the action to be a little too short and at the same time not quite tight enough. Since you apparently can't shoot down the enemy shots, your success depends largely on how well you hit the aliens and I found that to be a bit twiddly. Still managed to barely finish the game on the second try. One minor bug: If you rotate the cannon to the far left, it will shoot to the right (while still pointing left). |
| May 1 21:24:56 | 12m 57s | The World At Your Feet | ♥ 1 | Pretty cool and fresh concept. I made it to 7,58m. Keeps you coming back for more and try out different strategies in order to get higher. Graphics and music are adequate (nice Mega Man paintover) ;) I would have preferred some more control though, maybe the option to slow down or speed up the rotation by pressing left and right might have helped a lot in making the game a bit tighter. Also I think it may have been nice to use two different keys for jumping and dropping items, as often when I wanted to jump from a building to reach a higher place, the guy dropped another house. I wonder why the game is 30 MB though. Did you pack some debug stuff into the exe? Pretty neat that you made a post-jam Android version. |
| May 2 18:40:24 | 21h 15m | Dwelling | ♥ 2 | The atmosphere you create is really special. It's a melancholy game about life and death portrayed through the eyes of a dog and its ability to be reborn to reach the heavens. Really good stuff. Graphics and music tie it all together really well. The short texts of the other dogs give the game even more character. Unfortunately I didn't manage to finish the game. I reached the top after sacrificing two lives to get the maximum jump height, but then it told me I was too heavy to stay in heaven. Not sure what to do. I tried shedding more tears in order to maybe get lighter, but since I also lose jump height that way, I don't seem to be able to reach the sky like that. Also the plants on top die off faster than I can regrow them, which made me give up feeling frustrated a bit. When it comes to room for improvement, I would say the watering, eating and withering mechanics could use some tweaking. Maybe I was just not good enough, but I felt that part was a bit unbalanced. Giving better visual indicators that help guide the player while at the same time integrating well with the aesthetics as not to break them is probably a tough nut to crack but I feel the game would benefit from a little more work in that direction. All in all a very charming entry with some unique mechanics. Great job! |
| May 2 18:52:40 | 12m 16s | Orbitunes | ♥ 0 | Sorry, I messed up. I put the review to a different game here. I'll play yours in a minute. |
| May 2 19:00:49 | 8m 09s | Carefulzilla | ♥ 0 | Am I doing it right? carefulzilla.png No, but really, instant favorite, my first 5-star rating of LD38. Tremendous job making a game that is both fun to play, funny, challenging and addictive. There are some graphics glitches if you move carelessly, especially if you try to kick the indestructible buildings (looks like I broke its toes). On the upside, kudos for getting the toe animation just right. The way Carefulzilla is tiptoing around obstacles and very carefully placing his foot is hilarious. |
| May 2 19:45:39 | 44m 50s | Doodles | ♥ 2 | I absolutely love the notebook aesthetics complete with scribbles on the paper. The transition animation was really great as well. My version didn't have any audio, I would have loved to hear some rustling paper or scratching of a pen for sound effects, and also music as well. My biggest complaint would have to be the controls themselves. First of all I think it's consensus that the up-key is never a good idea for jumping. Instead using one hand for motion and one for action is generally preferred. Controlling the character feels a bit twiddly, for instance since you have to wait for a second after landing to jump again which often caused me to run into spikes or miss jumps. The physics need a little tweaking as well, especially on the last level where the boulders drop down but hiccup on the diagonal and just stay there. The level design was well thought out, but I fell there could have been a little more as the more interesting levels that require actual through only come up towards the end. All in all I had fun and the graphics reminded me of drawing trap-filled dungeons on squared paper in my childhood days. |
| May 2 19:58:36 | 12m 57s | Agaric Abyss | ♥ 1 | I love what you attempted to do and it looks really promising, but for me, the controls were not very approachable. Even after reading up on the different things you could do, it was tricky to get it right. Having to 'hold' the left mouse button to transport water was not mentioned anywhere and even after I figured it out, I had trouble getting the water infused. I managed to grow one mushroom but then gave up. I think with complex controls like these, it is important to have an organic level design that introduces mechanics bit by bit. It's probably a lot to ask for in a game made in 48 hours, especially after you put a lot of effort into the mood. The game looks and sounds fantastic and creates this very dense atmosphere. I have to ask: How did you produce the wind sound? Did you tune a synth until you got it right? It can't be a real recording. Very well done. I also loved the water effects. I think if you polish the controls and level design, a post-jam version of the game could become really great. |
| May 2 20:51:11 | 52m 35s | My world | ♥ 4 | At first I considered giving up because the controls were really tough. The dash almost always slung me into the water. Then I realized there was some story to the game and I stuck with it. Good decision, because I found the game to be very likeable. The graphics and music create a really nice atmosphere that works well with the story you are telling. Let me go into a bit more detail about the mechanics. Purely gameplay-wise I think the game could use a bit more tweaking. The dash's acceleration was really strong which resulted in immediate death if you don't hit the opponent. Maybe reducing it a bit may work better. About the water threshold, I think I would have preferred if you don't die right away once you touch the water. Allowing the player to enter shallow water and struggle their way back to land would probably alleviate a bit of the frustration caused by dashing just a little too far. Conceptually, I found it a bit ironic that the best course of action was actually avoiding the enemies until they run into the water instead of attacking them, which sort of breaks the moral of the game. Also since they are quite aggressive from the get-go, the final message falls flat a bit. I think the game would have benefited greatly from a bit more consistence with the theme here, e.g. by making the enemies passive at first and appeal to the players gaming reflexes to attack, then moving on to a more aggressive stance. All in all it was a game with more depth than anticipated. I really appreciate that you took the effort to tell a little story here. Great job! |
| May 3 19:01:44 | 22h 10m | Rock my Ship | ♥ 3 | That was a really weird experience for me. On the one hand the game feels very raw, with no audio whatsoever and a few game-breaking bugs. On the other hand I couldn't put it down although I failed to build the ship to completion for over half an hour (I got to twelve metal parts, how many do you need?). I think your game is a diamond in the rough. I love what you did with the deformable terrain. It was a very clever trick building the planet from circles and removing each one on impact. The graphics were low-res, but very fitting in a retro way. The missing music is regrettable but missing sound effects is a crime for this genre. I liked the planet changing color each round. I also liked the core mechanics, balancing the need for stones against the planet's health. I feel that one could have been explored a bit more. About the bugs: I was able to shoot my ship into space with a rock. Not only was that frustrating, but it also broke the game, because the guy didn't want to build a new one after that. The other bug occurs when the ship is hit by an asteroid while the guy is building it. If that happens, the poor guy never finishes his building animation and gets stuck. A minor issue was that I had to get really close to the ship in order to upgrade it. Also the clickable area for the menu items was shifted a bit, so it took me a bit to figure out where to press the buttons. Now, I hope you don't mind if I shoot some possible improvements your way \*cracks knuckles\*. First, I would suggest you head over to bfxr and create some cheap explosions for the asteroid impact, that should take about 30 seconds. Next, add some screenshake, and while at it take some more advice from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U. With these two changes you will already notice a world of difference. Now, personally I would tweak the mechanics a bit. Having the throwing stones interact with the ship doesn't add anything to the game so I'd get rid of it. I would increase gravity a little for the guy, the metal parts and the ship, so everything responds a bit faster when upset. I feel a round of the game is too long for dying in one hit, so maybe add some lives. Maybe make the guy a bit faster. While at it, why not make everything a bit faster, have more asteroids appear at the same time, while making the planet a bit more sturdy. Don't destroy the ship immediately but have the asteroids take away the last upgrade. I know that the changes in the last paragraph will totally change the feel of the game, so please only understand it as a place to start exploring different mechanics and see what works and what doesn't. I would really be interested in replaying the game should you decide to keep working on it. So drop me a line in case you're doing a post-Compo version. |
| May 3 20:01:44 | 1h 00m | The Adventure of Malvin | ♥ 3 | Lovely little game! I adore the graphics, and you pulled off a whole bunch of game mechanics very nicely. Great job on the level progression! The way the player learns that slide can knock out enemies or that you need to run in order to jump far are very well thought out. I also enjoyed how you built tension by first traveling to the anthill and then enter it for a change of atmosphere. Nice nod to Mario Bros on the boss, I also liked the way you introduced it with some heavy screenshake when the game was very toned down on the special effects before that. Gives the sudden shake all the more impact. The music is good, albeit a bit repetitive, and for my taste you should really consider creating a closed loop. This very nice talk gives some insight on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WoepccKGSI The section about loops is at the 19:00 mark. With respect to the controls, I think the wall-jump could have been a bit tighter, I kept sliding off a lot. As for gameplay in general, not much to criticize, as I said above, but one thing put me off a bit, and that is your design choice of lives and checkpoints. So hitting an enemy reduces a life, but falling down a hole doesn't, that's a bit inconsistent but nothing I haven't seen before. Now falling into a hole resets you to the last checkpoint with the current amount of lives left, but losing the lives resets you to the start of the game? That was a bit confusing. The classic approach would have worked better I think: Fall in a hole and be reset in front of the hole with one life lost, hit by an enemy loses one life. All lives lost resets you to the last checkpoint. All in all it was a very atmospheric little game that I enjoyed to play despite minor nitpicks. |
| May 4 18:41:29 | 22h 39m | House Escape | ♥ 1 | I really like minimalist graphics and I think you pulled off the visuals very well. I just wish the game was longer, with different environments. Music would have been nice to enhance the atmosphere. I reall liked the idea with the scaling text. Matching the theme was a bit of a stretch, though. I think it would have worked better last LD. Unfortunately I found the game to be a bit buggy, as I was able to pick up everything more than once even if the item wasn't on screen anymore. When I used the coin or ball with the washing machine it flew across the room and rolled on the floor, which was very confusing. But since I was able to pick up all the items again, I was able to solve on the second attempt. Overall I think it's a solid idea with a somewhat shaky execution. At its core, I think you're on to something, so with some additional polish, some music and a more fleshed out story it could become quite great. Edit: Despite what I wrote above, I would agree with @blacksheepza that the execution of the scaling text was indeed a bit jarring, but to me that was because of two things: First, the scaling was too strong, so the text changed from very large to very small quickly, which is straining on the eyes. Second, I think the scaling was not smooth enough. I assume you scaled based on length, with length being the number of letters. Since there are wider and narrower letters you get a jaggy transition. Adding some lerping might help. The effect itself was fine I think, but since text holds a lot of information, you have to make sure it's pleasant for the eyes to follow. |
| May 4 19:18:38 | 37m 09s | Blackhole Escape INC | ♥ 1 | The game looks really nice, props to you for going through all the pain of making a custom engine. It took me a while to figure out how to play it though. Unfortunately I ran into some trouble. For instance, the turrets wouldn't attack the monsters (I figured they were supposed to). I had no sound whatsoever, but I read in the comments that there was supposed to be sound, so there was something off. It's a pity really that I wasn't able to defend myself properly, as I had the feeling that from the moment I grasped the concept of the game I would have loved to finish it, as I think the general idea of starting with only a little and building/expanding from there was very well executed which motivated me to stick with it. The inventory shows what you need in order to beat the game and it created some anticipation of reaching that goal. The eerie atmosphere contributed to that, pity that I didn't have sound. The crafting system was well-conceived and geared towards base building and exploration. Now that being said, I see some areas for improvement that I would like to expand on. First, the game starts with an info dump, which is quite off-putting, especially in a game jam where people are playing a lot of games in a short amount of time. It would probably have been better to chop up the info into smaller bites and present them to the player piece by piece. There, I would suggest handing out the backstory first, to create interest, then explain the controls. Even better for explaining how the game works would be to create an overlay to show what to do inside the game world with arrows indicating points of interest, something like "place mine here". You can also explain things implicitly using the game mechanics, for instance, by allowing to place a building that needs energy only when there's a generator nearby and giving some information what is missing. The inventory as major part of the game mechanics should have been explained more clearly, which also goes for how the mines just dump their produce into the inventory. Here I would have preferred to pick up the stuff, as it gives the player an additional activity to keep the game interesting. I wasn't a big fan of the controls, I think WASD and mouse would have worked better and offered tighter control over the action. Also I think you need some indicator when something was hit, and probably knockback and invincibility frames for the player. Finally, I found a bug where you could place a building on the player's position which made him get stuck. Overall a very promising game that I could see myself replaying should you decide to keep working at it. |
| May 4 19:49:39 | 31m 01s | Destroy The Dome | ♥ 4 | I quite enjoyed your entry. The graphics are definitely your strong suit. The nuke animation was really great! I also liked the monster design, although I don't quite grasp why you chose snails and then made them the fastest monster of the game. Must the radiation I guess. On the flipside, I think the game could do with quite a bit of balancing. I found that all weapons except the rocks (1) and the grenades (2) were basically useless since switching between the two worked so well and their reload times were really low. Speaking of which, I think the game would have benefited tremendously from having individual reload times for each weapon. The game would become a lot more fun instantly. As it is, the awesome nuke is not really usable because you are pretty much stuck for a few seconds after using it, which deadly towards the end when the nuke would have been its most effective. I think fullscreen would have been important as it would have prevented the game from losing focus all the time when clicking outside the boundary of the window. That happened a lot, especially since I had to drop the grenades from the top of the screen and often found myself frantically dropping some rocks on approaching monsters at the very edges of the screen. The difficulty ramp up worked quite nicely for me until the very end when it was a matter of luck to find the sweet spot of not fighting the monsters anymore but spamming grenades at the dome on a race to see who loses first. That part could have been improved. Overall a very nice entry that could greatly benefit from a little polish. Great job! |
| May 4 20:28:22 | 38m 43s | Calor | ♥ 2 | I truly marveled at the scope of your game. A neat intro sequence, then a fairly complex simulation and I thought man, that's quite a lot of content! And then you go and slap combat on it for good measure. The mechanics of the sim and the combat felt really fresh and interesting. The graphics are pleasant and convey well what's going on. The intro sequence was cute and added a lot of character to your game. That being said, I wasn't really able to figure out how to actually achieve something, so I went and built some stuff in different sectors and tried to keep them in the sunlight, but I didn't really feel I was working towards something, or trying to evade some pending doom. Then came a fight and I had totally forgotten details of the combat mechanics. I had to connect to a red node for attack and to a blue one for defense, and I could optionally pick up these other nodes on the way but didn't remember what they were good for. I should note that I'm not really a simulation buff, so from my naive perspective it was all a bit tough to optimize both the sim and the combat. Against the consensus here I actually enjoyed the tutorial, although I agree that it was a bit too long to keep all the aspects in my head. It may not be perfect, but you actually went through the trouble of making a tutorial, instead of slapping on a wall of text explaining what to do as many other games around here do. I have to say that the music is a weak point for me. I don't know whether you composed it or used a tool like Wolfram, but it sounds like random notes without much of a musical structure. It kinda worked for [Carefulzilla](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/carefulzilla/) because it's a wacky game, but if time as an issue, I think I may have preferred some spherical, drawn out notes using a pad instrument to create auditory atmosphere. So although it's not my cup of tea genre-wise, I still appreciate all the effort that went into the game. Definitely an innovative concept that very well deserves to be expanded on. Impressive game! |
| May 5 19:13:17 | 22h 44m | The Czar, the Demons and the delicious Midnight Snack | ♥ 1 | I like the concept of tying rockets to a planet in order to escape annihilation. I think you are on the right path with your game mechanics, especially the way you force the player to keep moving because they can't see the pentagram showing up if they stand still. The graphics were nice, I especially liked the clouds on the planet, and the tentacle animation. Presentation-wise I think the game could be easily improved by adding some visual effects, most notably screenshake. I always hand out this video at times like this because it's great place to start learning to give your game a more visceral feeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U I think your game could use some tweaking of the difficulty ramp up. I played for about two minutes and did feel that the game became harder over time, and it has rudiments of the "just one more round" feeling that's important for your genre, but I think you need to make the experience a bit tighter. Visual effects can help with that, good crunchy sound effects are another way of achieving that goal. But the most important piece I think is to make each death feel self-inflicted instead of random. I really appreciate you took the effort of making an intro. That's a nice way of easing the player into the game. A Trump joke is always good for a chuckle, but personally I prefer a bit more depth when it comes to humour. Unfortunately the music did nothing for me. It just seemed like random notes. Overall I think the game, while simple, was quite nice to play and could become really addictive if you keep polishing some more. |
| May 5 20:22:28 | 1h 09m | Leafcutters | ♥ 4 | Man, a simple game like yours should have no right to keep me at it for an hour: ants.png And no, I wasn't running it on auto-pilot. Even if it weren't for my strange affection towards watching numbers go up, I commend you for creating a unique little game that stands out from the rest. It's a real shame that you ran out of time for giving it a real objective, more things to do and most of all, a challenge. Although the ants looked a bit scribbled, I overall really liked the aesthetic of the game. It's what drew me in initially. I also very much enjoyed your core mechanics that contained some biology research instead of "red ant", "blue ant". Unfortunately there was no sound at all, which would have contributed nicely to the game. I would love to see you continue from where you are now. You probably know that ants build intricate hives with special sections that are much more complicated than the little buggers let on, with a micro climate for optimal fungus growth and ventilation shafts. If you managed to pour this complicated dance into an algorithm that creates a realistic anthill from scratch, that would be a sight to see. A scrollable screen to see what you gatherers are up to, with the occasional trapped bug or discovered rodent cadaver to pick apart could keep things interesting. And of course fending off attackers, either as a minigame or just in simulation mode. So much to do, so little time. Anyway great job on your first Ludum Dare, keep it up and see you next time! PS: While I wrote these lines, the anthill grew to 233 cm and has now over 10.000 inhabitants. I guess I'll just keep it running for a little longer. |
| May 5 21:19:32 | 57m 04s | World en abyme | ♥ 1 | I love the level in the ball idea, very cool! The graphics were very nice. If I had to change one thing in that department, that would be getting rid of the overzoom and instead zoom directly to the target size of the level. In general the level design was very good with a nice difficulty ramp-up to keep things interesting. Unfortunately I lost patience in the first dark level because I found the collision detection to be a bit imprecise. Either that or I sucked too much. I think the game would have benefited from tighter definition of when the ball touched a forbidden surface or not. If it rolled slowly, I had the feeling that it counted as a hit before the ball made contact, but if it moved quickly it would pass halfway through the lava before registering as a hit. The physics were a bit frustrating at times as the ball would sometimes bounce back directly into an obstacle much more than I expected, but that could also be explained by me being bad at the game. Overall a very likeable entry that would have been even better with some atmospheric music. |
| May 5 21:57:10 | 37m 38s | Mouse and Blade | ♥ 2 | Wow that game is much harder than it looks. The graphics are absolutely adorable. I also liked the level design, sometimes dangling a checkpoint in front of the player's nose just out of reach. The music was very good, but unfortunately it was so short that it outstayed its welcome a bit. On the technical side, I think the hit animation should have been a bit faster and interruptible. I made the same mistake with my LD37 entry. I think for this sort of attack mechanic it is important that the player can push the buttons at a steady, fast beat and the game does not miss a single one. Otherwise the attack doesn't feel responsive enough. I made it all the way through, but it was a challenge. Great job overall! Edit: One more comment: I'm playing on a German keyboard, which has Z and Y exchanged. Maybe S and D for attack and jump would work better internationally. Edit2: After reading @pkenney's comment, I may have been mistaken and the controls were done that way on purpose and I just wasn't getting into the spirit of the game. So if you were deliberate in your choice of controls, ignore what I wrote :) |
| May 6 13:16:25 | 15h 19m | Ghostscaling | ♥ 5 | I read your post on the front page where you asked for input. I'm going to give you some feedback on the post-compo version. I'm not going to rate that version obviously. This is only to give you some ideas on where to improve First of all, I think you had a very solid idea with your game, using the two modes as ghost and rock works fairly well as a puzzle mechanic and zooming the environment was a really neat idea. The graphics are nice, however personally I prefer true pixel sizes over mixed-pixel sizes. What I mean by that is that you should choose a game resolution (e.g.640x480) and everything on screen must fit into that resolution. You can still scale up objects by integer factors (2x, 3x), but they cannot be smaller than your game resolution allows. As an example, look at the visual effects when the stone blows out air. The pixel size of that effect is really low, and much lower than your character's pixel size, which gives it an inconsistent design. I really liked the ghost animation. You can give it some more personality by creating a 3-frame idle animation that keeps playing whenever the ghost doesn't move. Your camera motion is quite nice. I noticed that you precede the motions of the ghost, which is cool. However you should fix the camera wiggle you get when hitting a wall and when you change direction. Try a more inert camera that can only move a maximum distance each frame. Also when you scale, the step size is too steep. Lerp the scaling between your current and the new size, that way it will feel much smoother. The sound you play while scaling was too long, it can't be longer than the scaling actually takes and should probably be much shorter than that. Definitely so short that it doesn't sound choppy when you scale multiple times quickly. Your terrain collision detection needs some work. When in stone form, I was able to move through certain blocks and got stuck in others. Background music is missing, so maybe play around with some spherical music, or maybe go with some ambient sounds. [Agaric Abyss](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/agaric-abyss) created some nice wind sounds in bfxr for example. That could be an alternative if you don't feel confident composing. The music you do have isn't too bad but a bit too loud which can seem jarring. When introducing your game mechanics, never ever confront the player with a wall of text. You could have achieved the same thing with under 30 words if you just clicked together an image containing your assets, some arrows and a few pieces of text. Players are not stupid and have likely played games before. The brain can pick up these image overviews very quickly, but reading a long instruction manual is really boring. I only skimmed the text and totally missed that the mouse wheel plays an important part in the game. The thought bubbles were for the most part superfluous. Again, people are not stupid. When they see a red wall with something interesting behind it, they assume they have to get past the wall. When there's a red switch later on, they'll figure out how it works. Some of the fire monster had a thought bubble which appeared to indicate that you have to kill them and not the others. This is totally confusing. Get rid of the thought bubble and give the invincible monsters different graphics, best design a completely different monster/turret for that so the player can distinguish them from the soul-giving foes. Personally I would have preferred to have lives in the game. That way you can make the experience more challenging without being too frustrating by getting insta-killed. Finally I had trouble finishing the first level. I didn't figure out how to turn back into a ghost. I assume the stone form locks the scaling, so I didn't fit into narrow spaces afterwards and since I couldn't turn back into a ghost, I was stuck. The first level requires 3 souls, but I was only able to find 2 of them. Maybe this was due to the scaling, maybe they could have been more visible, maybe I was just frustrated. |
| May 7 18:46:57 | 29h 30m | World on the Tip of a Ballpoint Pen | ♥ 2 | I'm very impressed, your design is really special. I came across your game during the Compo when you posted a picture of the map and since then I wanted to play the game, because I found the world really appealing just from the title and that single picture. When the game was finished I looked at a screenshot and was taken aback, because everything looked like a pixelated mess. Only when I actually played the game, was the initial interest renewed, as the world oozes charm and atmosphere, especially for such a low-res title. The mystery in not knowing what the game and world is all about, the choice of undecipherable gibberish added to that effect. My only real complaint would be that it's so short, which is a damn shame because the map foreshadows more to see and to reveal. That and maybe some more music would have been nice. The ending fits a game with this unusual presentation very well. I can only assume that the length of the game was due to a lack of time, since I didn't see too much of the ballpoint pen concept realized in the game itself, or maybe I'm just too dense to see the metaphore here. Is the black cloud following us the ink? Do we have to resucitate a failing pen? Is the character's death somewhat symbolic for the short-livedness of utensils like that? I don't know, but I would have loved to see this expanded. All in all I think the idea and the art design would make it a perfect fit for a game offered on itch.io, possibly even a paid title. Just expand on the concept (if you do, drop me a line, I would play it). A problem with this concrete example of a game is that it's hard to present in a still image, since as I said, it looks like a mess unless you actually dive into the world. So if you should decide to expand and publish, it might be a good idea to present it in animated form. Great job overall! |
| May 7 18:57:39 | 10m 42s | Rocket Roller Space Polo | ♥ 1 | Definitely one of the coolest Compo entries I have played (of over 40 titles so far). Everything just works. The levels of challenge, the design of the terrain, the balancing of skill vs. luck, the way you have to make gravity work in your favor. It even has a sort of implicit home run-like special move where you can make the ball orbit the planet and score 2-3 points without the robots having any chance to counter. The terrain, despite seeming arbitrary at first, plays a big role in the awesomeness of the game, having long shallow streaks as well as ridges that stop a freewheeling ball. I managed to finish with two robots but got my butt handed to me with 4. The game kept me motivated throughout and I had a strong feeling of "just one more round" going when I lost against the 4 robots. On the downside, there is no music (the only reason I'm not giving 5 stars) and I found the jetpack somewhat superfluous (or I didn't manage to use it well), probably because I didn't realize that it exists before I had a replay just now. A minor nitpick that is easy to figure out but could be explained a bit better is that when you start the game for the first time you don't clearly see from which direction you need to pass the line. So I gave away the first point to the robots. So all in all there is really not much to not like, I'll definitely keep this one. |
| May 7 19:18:11 | 20m 32s | One Push Man | ♥ 1 | Pretty good, beautiful game. 42 was my max score, could probably be better. Graphics and basic idea are the game's strong suit. Looking at a picture or video of the game wants me to try it out right away. Some points for improvement: I felt the collision with the edge was a tiny bit too early, I often had the feeling that the drop was unfair measured at where I was on screen. I also found my ability to push a blob to a bit inconsistent. Sometimes I was able to shovel them across the room like a champ, other times they offered more resistance. But it wasn't clear to me why that was. It may be linked to different colors but I didn't get the difference. Maybe a clearer cue, like size or different sounds would help understand better what effects the player's actions have. About the items: I didn't really feel the difference between the hammer and the shovel. I felt like the hammer should be more powerful, but it didn't feel that way in the game. Some risk/reward balancing might do wonders in that respect, like using a powerful weapon really slows you down or increases your inertia, thus increasing the danger of uncontrollably falling off a cliff. The potion and the feather didn't feel like valuable additions to the game. I didn't have the feeling the potion made me much harder to push, and the increased speed of the feather didn't help pushing enemies at all. All in all I think you made a pretty good game that could be super fun and addictive with a few tweaks. |
| May 7 19:51:34 | 33m 23s | D4RK and the Small Worlds | ♥ 1 | Wow, awesome game! I love chiptune music and yours is perfect, especially that boss theme. Did you use Fasttracker or something similar? I found the graphics a bit inconsistent between awesome pixel art on the one hand and sketchy mixed resolutions on the other hand. The fact that the terrain sometimes was a single pixel off (not game resolution but screen resolution), is a huge no-go for me. That being said, I found the animations to be outstanding! The attack and dash animations were awesome, especially for a low-res two color game like yours. The earth trailing you, rotating beautifully was another cool idea, although I wish there would have been more of a chemistry between the two characters with some snide remarks and quibbling. While I really enjoyed the unique and fresh backstory with its plot twist at the end, I didn't much care for the humor, which was a bit repetitive, except the very cool joke in the end which actually made me laugh out loud. Control-wise my experience is that an arcady game like yours should never assign up to jump. If you didn't want attack, jump and dash tied to the left hand, I think down for dash would have been more acceptable than up for jump. Also down for continuing the text didn't work for me. Attack would have felt much more natural for that. The difficulty ramp-up was very good, with some more challenges towards the end, like the elevator and the really tough and rewarding boss fight. I think the game could have done without perma-death enemies on continue, which took the challenge out too much. For the boss, I think it would have been a bit fairer if the bombs didn't sometimes appear behind it (black on black), which sometimes caused you to jump right into them when you attacked the boss. After learning the patterns it was a manageable fight that rewarded observation and perseverance. Did I say I loved the boss's soundtrack? So all in all I found it to be an awesome experience with some minor flaws and overall one of the best games of all 45 games I have rated so far. |
| May 8 18:48:07 | 22h 56m | 6 degrees of separation | ♥ 0 | Hey, would you mind marking your game as a Windows download on itch.io? That way, people with the itch.io client can download it (it will be blocked otherwise). |
| May 8 19:11:08 | 23m 01s | The Spoiled Prince | ♥ 1 | Your game looks and sounds fantastic. The music is really good, and presentation wise the game is top notch. There were some minor problems though. Controller support did not work at all, and unfortunately the keyboard mappings were not really intuitive for me. A reaction based game should not use the space bar because it's harder to push. Also using J and space was only comfortable to reach if I used the thumb for pressing space which was a bit awkward. The other issue may be due to my 16:10 screen, and caused the help text to be cut off halfway so I had to guess what the buttons were. I enjoyed the game mechanics in general but the execution was a bit lacking in some respects. The maggot prince often didn't go where he was supposed to and those damn chickens made the whole ordeal a bit frustrating. I gave up at the stage with two platforms on top of each other with a chicken right next to them. I generally like difficult games, and yours certainly is, but a tough game need to get its controls perfect. In summary, the game is really pretty and the soundtrack among the strongest I have seen so far, unfortunately the mechanics could use a little polishing. All in all you did a great job! |
| May 8 19:37:44 | 26m 36s | Bug Attack! | ♥ 1 | Cool stationary defense game. I liked what you did with the setting. Made it to wave 15. I think your game could have benefited a lot from a more visceral feel. Everything was so tiny that it was hard to get the impression of a real battle, which is difficult to pull off I think. What could have helped may have been some additional balancing. Maybe make all your attackers stronger and spawn more weaker enemies from the beginning. Give the player the feeling they are creating a powerful army right from the start. Taking a cue from Tower Defense games, maybe allow the troops to get upgrades, possibly one upgrade that affects every single unit, e.g. by building a special building that can also be destroyed and thus needs to be protected at all costs, which would require repairable buildings and so on. I love this video on game feel, I post it everywhere, and your game is a good candidate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U Technically, one thing I found a bit strange was that there was no minimum distance between buildings so I put them all down at the same place until I wasn't able to find my barracks anymore :( All in all a solid entry that deserves to be expanded upon. |
| May 8 20:07:48 | 30m 04s | World Destroyer | ♥ 0 | I very much liked the concept of having to be careful with your bullets because every shot could come back to haunt you. That instantly clicked with me. Unfortunately you didn't expand on this idea and went in a different direction, keeping the revolving bullets as an afterthought instead of the central design idea. What you created was fun to play anyway. I got to level 13 and appreciated that you added trophies. That hive on the pedestal really tested my patience until I had to give up. It felt unfair, because there was no indication about when there would be an enemy coming out of the hive, so it was more a matter of luck. What didn't help was that the keyboard layout wasn't at all pleasant to use. I prefer my keys next to each other, not all over the place. You could have gotten rid of the beam-me-up key, as that didn't add much to the game, but required the player to keep track of another key. What I really liked was that the game reset you instantly (like Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami do). For games where it's all about quick reflexes, that's great way of keeping the player motivated. Another are special effects like screenshake, which would have worked great with your entry. All in all it's a solid entry with a very good premise, which I think deserves a second approach *revolving* (hurr hurr) around the theme of "don't shoot yourself in the foot". |
| May 8 20:20:01 | 12m 13s | CHEM TRIALS | ♥ 1 | A very good looking low-poly game. Unfortunately there was no music but the sound effects were pretty nice. I played it to the end. Are those levels randomly generated? Because I felt sometimes the boxes were a bit too close to the mountains to pick them up. All in all very solid entry. |
| May 8 20:29:21 | 9m 20s | Incidental Dimension | ♥ 0 | That was delightfully weird. I don't know whether the boxes moved at a different speed to the terrain on purpose but it made for a pretty trippy effect. I loved how you made a world that is actually smaller than its contents. Unfortunately the controls were a bit fiddly and sometimes it wasn't entirely clear what I was supposed to do. At one point I found a glitch that allowed me to push a box right through the outside wall, so I was able to skip all remaining puzzles and go straight to the end. I chuckled at the flavor text in the beginning. Well done! |
| May 8 20:47:46 | 18m 25s | Troll Castle | ♥ 1 | Despite the game feeling pretty raw, it was a fun little experience. I think the music and dialog was quite nice and I love the sound effects the trolls make. For the introduction, a wall of text is a sure-fire way to scare away players, I think it would better to introduce the mechanics bit by bit. You could have shown the key for mining or growing mushrooms whenever the player was on top of a square that allowed action. You had a dialog system already, which could have aided you in showing what the game was about bit by bit. Although the game could use some more work I think you did very well in the audio and humor department, especially since many games rely on bfxr sounds, so yours stands out in that respect. |
| May 11 17:04:46 | 68h 17m | Our little island | ♥ 1 | Adorable game with an awesome backdrop and fitting atmospheric music. The character moves a bit slowly but it's still fitting to the relaxed atmosphere. Game direction was pretty clear from the beginning so I knew what to do. I wasn't sure whether feeding your mate made any difference though, I assumed without food s/he stops fishing. My only complaint would be that the game is pretty short. I would have loved to see more of that scenery. One note: I was able to download the game via the itch.io app, so I assume you marked it as Windows-compatible. However it doesn't play from the app. It plays fine from the website, but I thought you might want to know. Edit: I recalled one thing, though: Having different keys for pick up and drop didn't really serve a purpose as you can't drop when you don't have anything and can't pick up stuff if you have something, so I think one key would have been more practical. Also having WASD for movement and then having the action keys on the left side of the keyboard as well (for US keyboards) is a bit unwieldy. |
| May 11 18:28:37 | 1h 23m | Saucy McMassive vs The Universe | ♥ 0 | I came here because of the art, which is outstanding. A shame really that you didn't manage to put all assets in the game but at least you added them as a gallery. I love the idea of the cool ice planet. Music is simple and effective, but the sound effects could use a little more oomph. Also you could add a lot to your game by adding some simple effects like screenshake, especially when you slam into the planet. Overall, I found the game a bit on the easy side and what difficulty there was, was mainly due to some control flaws, which I would identify as the area that needs more work. First of all, I think the control scheme should be simplified. I didn't use the slow down function and I didn't miss it at all, since you can achieve the same effect by just pushing in the opposite direction you're moving in. Using mouse and keyboard in tandem can work in general, but I felt your keyboard responsiveness a bit lacking (I think you identified that as a bug already). After slamming into the planet, my asteroid is uncontrollable for a moment, which really takes away from the otherwise quite arcadey feel of your game. I think what might have worked better here would have been to invert the acceleration direction at the moment of impact, catapulting the players away from the planet. Definitely give them control over the character at all times. In order to make the slam attack less cheap, you could have required a minimum speed for making damage and maybe deal damage to your asteroid if you are below that speed. What it boils down to game design wise is that there is little risk-reward balancing, so I can just carelessly throw myself at the planet without a second thought. I know these things are tough to tune, but I think your game will benefit a lot from some more work in that area. Overall I think you are on the right path. I honestly wonder why you only have so few comments with graphics like those. |
| May 11 19:08:59 | 40m 22s | The Fleas In My Head | ♥ 5 | The Game Boy graphics drew me towards your game and I have to say, I really enjoyed playing despite some flaws. The difficulty was pretty brutal but still motivating. I think this is because you pulled off the pacing really well, resetting the player into the game immediately after death and not taking too long to increase the difficulty which would otherwise have created some problematic tedium towards the beginning. My first thought was that the game was unfair because the hands were always destroying the houses faster than I could rebuild, so I thought I could cheat the game by collecting 30 blood and quickly building all the houses. This didn't work (good design), so I played around a bit more and noticed that the 2-story buildings actually served a purpose and I couldn't get around using them (again good design). Then I realized that the fleas were only killed when they were without shelter and a destroyed house didn't decrease your score if you rebuilt before the hands came again. At this point, the game came to life for me and I managed to finish it after a few more tries. My biggest complaint would have to be the music which was quite jarring from the beginning, and didn't get any friendlier. I understand you may have wanted to go for a strange, insecty vibe and it might have worked better if the music wasn't so repetitive. Definitely could use some more polishing. A minor issue was with the placement of the hands. I found no sense in going up and down since the hand would hit me whenever I was in the same x-coordinate. Going up and down didn't add any value in the building of houses, so I would have preferred if the hands came down at different y-coordinates, indicated by a shadow and then could only hit you when you were in the same position as the shadow. Also they shouldn't kill you when you run into them from the side, especially while they are going up again. A tiny thing about the animation, which was pretty good, but I think it would have worked better if the hands didn't animate while reaching (or maybe just change one frame about halfway), but then they would scratch exactly once when they reached their destination. It seemed pretty random the way you did it and the other way may give it a more visceral, threatening feel instead of a comic one. I think this would give the game a lot more character without having to draw any additional frames. When it comes to controls, I would strongly advise against using the Z-key for an international game because some folks have different key positions (Germany for instance). You can circumvent this by choosing keys that are the same for most players or set actions to more than one key (Z and Y for instance). Personally, I found the hiding mechanic a bit superfluous, as for me, the game didn't gain anything and I had to keep track of yet another key that I didn't end up using. Overall I enjoyed playing the game, despite some flaws and I think its main strength is the fact that it made me come back for round after round long after a less well paced game would have had me quit. Great job! |
| May 13 10:11:08 | 39h 02m | Too Big For This WorLD38 | ♥ 2 | Sorry to be that guy, but I don't think you're doing it right. Ludum Dare is supposed to be a game jam where people make a game in 48/72 hours. It seems your project has been going on for months now: - http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=92338 - http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=92338 While it's okay to use pre-existing assets I don't think it's in the spirit of the Jam to keep developing the same game spanning multiple Jams. It's definitely a commendable effort for a single person but I think it would be better suited for Steam Early Access than Ludum Dare. But on topic: The graphics are outstanding and the intro is quite effective. Other than that the game feels very raw in terms of control and objective. I like the story setup and atmosphere but without a handle on the action there is not much to actually do in the game. |
| May 13 10:36:59 | 25m 51s | Noizy | ♥ 1 | The visuals of your game are awesome! There are some minor graphics glitches that may come with the 3D world you designed. Sometimes I was stuck in a block, but it was easy to get out of, so nothing game breaking. Sound effects are simple but appropriate for the visual style. They have a heft to them, which is good for arcady games. The music was very nice and also fit the atmosphere well. Level progression is good, with a nice difficulty curve leading up to a boss, which felt nice and gave the game proper closure. I would say it's a bit on the easy side, as I may have preferred a tougher experience where each level is a challenge and the game would reset you to the beginning of that level, but the version you made was very enjoyable too. My main complaint would be the controls. I think a game like yours should split up movement and action between both hands (as with a controller), therefore Space/Enter for jump/shoot is not ideal in my opinion. A/D/Enter/Shift or Left/Right/A/D might have worked better. Overall a very enjoyable, complete and beautiful game. **Edit:** One comment: If you don't mark your game as Windows-compatible on itch.io, it's not possible to download it with the itch.io client. |
| May 13 11:24:41 | 47m 42s | "It's a small world!" | ♥ 0 | Cool idea and nice design. I especially liked all the different character ideas, so visually there is not much to criticize. Gameplay-wise I think I would have preferred a sidewalk that doesn't end by repeating the scenery. Hitting an invisible wall took a lot of momentum out of the game. |
| May 13 11:35:54 | 11m 13s | Bumble Jumble | ♥ 0 | Wow great job on the presentation! The graphics are stunning, and the ambient music contributes greatly to the atmosphere. You actually managed to create a believable world. Unfortunately gameplay-wise there is not much meat. I couldn't figure out what the shooting was for and collecting the honeycombs was a bit frustrating as it was fairly easy to lose them by flying into something. You clearly geared the game towards controller input, and the keyboard controls are really a bit frustrating. I think it may have worked better with controls where you fly in the direction you look (mouse), rather than having motion and camera independent. Overall a very relaxing experience, great job! |
| May 13 11:49:41 | 13m 47s | Stardust - A space adventure | ♥ 0 | Awesome hand-drawn art and very fitting background music. It's a pity the game is so short, but with that amount of craft, that's understandable. I think the overall concept is great to expand upon, as your ideas for this game are very interesting and I would like to see what else you could come up with. When it comes to Graphics Adventures, your design certainly stands apart from the masses with its huge sprites, but that's what makes the game interesting. The puzzles were a bit too easy and straightforward for me, which was in part due to the fact that there were actually only two rooms. However, you placed all the necessary items in one room and then you only had to combine everything in the second room to finish the game. So I would love to see what you can do in terms of puzzle design when you can afford to put more time in it. From a story perspective, the characters immediately pull you into their world, but I think they could use a little more depth. Fixing the hatch made me chuckle, but the fourth wall-breaking joke was a bit tired. Humor is really tough to pull off well and while I think you are on a very good track, you may use some additional polish in that respect. Overall it was a short but very cool experience, great job! |
| May 13 12:38:32 | 48m 51s | SittingDucks | ♥ 1 | I enjoyed your take on the world defender theme. It took me a while to figure out that I could lay eggs. the graphics were pretty cool, especially the bigger asteroids and the world eater. I couldn't find out how to defeat it but it certainly looked mysterious, the way it blended into the void of space. There are a few areas that I would say could use a little work though. The music was fitting, but it's important to create a closed loop without breaks so that the player doesn't notice the repetition. Gameplay-wise I think the difficulty ramp-up is too slow which decreases replay value. In the beginning there is just so much time where nothing happens. The pacing for laying eggs is also a bit off: In the beginning you can lay a lot of eggs because there is still time, but as the game progresses you barely have time to lay new ones. That is really a shame because I found the idea of laying eggs and using the chicks as ammunition really fresh and one of the strong points of your game. Also there is no clear indication of when an egg is actually laid. As it is, laying an egg is a huge investment because it takes so long. If you let go a little too early that investment does not pay off, which is frustrating. I think, about half a second might be a good value here, as that would give you enough time to lay eggs later in the game. I think defining a separate key for picking up chicks is important, as it gives the player more control over resources. This is again about investment: If the eggs are precious because they take so long to lay, the player should not be forced to pick them up, as this sort of destroys the game's economy. But even with faster egg-laying, having more control is probably a good idea. While I liked hitting the rocks with your head until they explode, I think the game may be more fun if you could destroy the smaller ones with a single hit. While at it, maybe increase the rotation speed of the planet a little for faster controls, and allow moving sideways while in the air. Finally, I couldn't figure out why I would win or lose a round. My first play was a loss, because my planet's energy reached zero. My second play didn't throw me back to the start screen, so I assume I survived a round, but since the round ended with my planet being destroyed I didn't know whether I won or lost. Maybe this could have been communicated more clearly. These points may sound like a lot, but most of them boil down to tweaking some game constants. That will likely change the character of your game, so please consider them only as ideas for trying alternatives. Overall I liked your ideas despite some flaws and I think with a little more polish the game improve considerably. |
| May 13 12:57:39 | 19m 07s | Routine | ♥ 1 | Great world-building skills! The intro and the music created a dense oppressive atmosphere. The graphics were simplistic but beautiful and very fitting considering you are a planner that is supposed to control peoples lives from in front of a screen. It took me a while to figure out what the game wanted from me though. I thought I had to make the people meet at work or during off-times, but later realized that this was hard-locked in the game, so I figured out I had to make them meet by chance on the street. I found that challenge a bit tough for my tastes, as the controls were a bit unwieldy. Since I could only change work during off-times and vice versa, the game felt like it was holding me back whenever I wanted to try something out, because it wasn't the right time. I managed to finish tasks 1-3 but gave up when all three rebels almost passed on the the street, but missed each other by a fraction of a second. Overall it's an awesome set-up that could benefit from a little more refinement to give the player more control. That and maybe a few more mechanics, but of course time is always an issue. Great job overall! |
| May 13 13:09:46 | 12m 07s | Colonial Kart World | ♥ 1 | One of the few games that actually might work better without music because the ambient sounds worked so well. Graphics are outstanding, but since you opted out of that category I would assume that you used a fixed asset pack? Generally there is a lot in this game: The graphics, wave physics, AI. It's quite impressive. One minor issue would be that it took a little too long to get back into the action after dying which takes the wind out of the game's sails (hur hur) a bit. Another thing was that if felt the waves caught my shots too often, but maybe I just suck at this kind of game. All in all a pretty impressive display of skill from a single person. Great job! |
| May 13 13:44:02 | 34m 16s | Glass Houses | ♥ 1 | A masterful semi-interactive story you created. The expressiveness of the characters despite the simple graphics is awesome. I love how you told the story of impending doom and human fallacy in attributing guilt. I played it twice to get both endings. I don't have anything bad to say really. It is short, but encapsulates everything it's trying to say so well that it wouldn't gain anything by being longer. Full marks. |
| May 13 13:53:58 | 9m 56s | Hexoworld 9999 | ♥ 0 | Awesome presentation. The graphics and music are really pulling this one together. The sound and visual effects pack a punch which makes the game fun to play. Unfortunately I feel that by choosing a hexa-layout for the game it becomes quite tough to control, since the direction of the shots changes dramatically whenever the player turns a corner, which creates a lot of blind spots where you can't hit the incoming tiles. It may be tricky to pull off, but I think hexes with rounded corners might boost the fun significantly as that would close the blind spots and would have added some measure of strategy (will I stay near the spots that give me more control or keep moving along the edge to hit more asteroids) and skill (fine-tuning the sweet spot on the rounded corner that will hit the asteroid). Overall you made a beautiful game (sight and sound) that could have benefited from some more tuning of its gameplay mechanics. **Edit:** After reading some of the comments, I decided to give the game another try and I have to say that after collecting a few powerups, it gets really easy. I got to 280200 points just by holding Left down until some random asteroids managed to get past me. |
| May 13 14:28:08 | 34m 10s | Intergalactic Gold Rush | ♥ 1 | Awesome visuals! I love the way the hexagons shake and drop. The choice of music really makes the game come to life. It was challenging and fun to play. Some things could have been communicated better. I didn't get why you had two types of magic that did the same thing, but no life bar, until I found out the squares were supposed to be hearts. It didn't help that clicking the squares also activated your magic. Speaking about communication: I would assume that many players will find it a bit tedious to read a wall of text to understand the game, especially when a bullet list would have transported the same information. There are so many games to take in every LD that this carries an additional weight. As for pacing, I really like how you will die within seconds if you don't react, so the game starts immediately as you hit Start. On the other end of the spectrum, I didn't really feel that the game became harder over time, although it probably does. Maybe a steeper difficulty curve may keep the skilled players interested for longer. All in all it's a very polished, beautifully looking and sounding game, great job! |
| May 13 14:51:34 | 23m 26s | Pixel Town | ♥ 1 | You made a cute simulation game that was fun to play. It reminded me a bit of Actraiser. Graphics and music came together as a coherent whole. After a few attempts in which I built myself in, I somewhat got the hang of it and finished level 1. After a few more tries on level 2 I managed to hold back the monsters from the west, but the ones from the east snuck up on me and destroyed my main building. There are a few minor issues that I came across. First, I didn't see you display the price of the buildings, e.g. in the form of a tool tip you already have in your game. That would help a lot with planning. Second, I didn't find the placement of buildings very intuitive. Once you try and put something down, you get a message telling you why it didn't work. I think it may have been better to indicate this by using a red overlay over the building as that would allow for quick checking about where a building could be placed. The reason why it couldn't be placed in a certain spot would then be displayed next to the overlay. Even so, I noticed that the position the building finally ends up being placed is a little different from the indicated position before placing it. Another improvement in my mind would be to allow setting down buildings without being connected to roads. That would make organizing the city easier. If a building wasn't connected with a road, an icon would appear, marking it as inactive. That way you would retain the functionality you already have in place but the controls may be a bit more agreeable. Overall you made a very charming simulation game that worked pretty well in my eyes and could be improved with a little tweaking. |
| May 13 17:31:04 | 2h 39m | Penguin Deliveries | ♥ 1 | Nice Lunar Lander clone. I especially liked the amiable graphics and your choice of music. What stood out was your solid handling of the gravity between the different planets. It may have been on purpose to make the game more relaxing, but since you cannot crash, the game was lacking a bit of a challenge for me. I noticed that you don't need to land upright but can just set down your rocket any way you like. It was a fun experience. |
| May 13 17:53:59 | 22m 55s | Membrum | ♥ 1 | What a nasty but cool game you made. I enjoyed it a lot! The graphics are very unique and unsettling, and the idea is brilliant and fresh. There are some issues that could have improved the flow of the game. I would probably still be playing if it weren't for these constant pop-up messages that I had to click away, thus losing focus of what I was just looking at. The other thing (which may have been deliberate) was that I would have preferred to see the life bar of all my organs all the time. The color coding wasn't very clear, as in some cases black meant near death, while for others brown was already close to organ failure. I think I would have been motivated to stick to it til the end if it weren't for these flaws, as I liked the idea a lot and it spoke to my inner optimizer to find a stable solution to my character's ailments. Overall a great game that I would probably pick up again if you made a post-LD version. |
| May 13 18:06:30 | 12m 31s | rovR | ♥ 2 | That was certainly interesting. I found the concept of setting up the planets in a way that lets you solve the puzzle without their heads getting in the way quite unique. The graphics and music choice was very amiable, overall a relaxing experience. I found it a bit difficult to estimate how I had to setup the planets and at what angle I could blast off safely. Not sure whether this was deliberate but I once managed to use the gravitational pull of the planet to slingshot myself around it. If it was deliberate I would have liked to see this feature more pronounced as such a move as pretty hard to pull off. Overall a solid entry. |
| May 13 18:17:05 | 10m 35s | Superbugs | ♥ 1 | Wow, a rock solid puzzle game, great job! It's not really my favorite genre but even so I quite enjoyed it. Since it wasn't really much of a challenge for me, it may be a bit too easy for puzzle aficionados, though. I don't really have any serious complaints. The music choice was nice, the graphics clean and self-explanatory, and as a big plus, you managed to explain the game mechanics with a few words and images instead of a wall of text. The only improvement I could imagine would be to add an upper limit of pills that determines whether you get a bronze, silver or gold rating, as is quite common in this genre. This would increase replayability. Other than that, great, polished game! |
| May 13 18:31:08 | 14m 03s | Entropy | ♥ 1 | I liked the setup and once I realized what roles the different characters play, I had some fun. Playing blue, I thought it would have been unfair because as I understand they team up with green against red, but I didn't stand a chance. Every time the plants took over 90% of the land, the fire people would attack and the fire spread so fast that the balance tilted in no time. I have to ask, has anyone ever won this game? Also what happens if nobody's joining? How are chances that I played against an AI? Anyway, it was a fun experience, great job! |
| May 13 18:37:15 | 6m 07s | (Un)Happy | ♥ 0 | That's a cute little game, I think it may be perfect for kids, as the difficulty is not too high, the concept is easy to grasp and the characters are amiable. Great job. Minor nitpick: The side thrusters are switched they should activate on the opposite side to where the ship is turning. |
| May 13 18:47:47 | 10m 32s | Qwer CiTy | ♥ 3 | That's an innovative idea! I struggled with the controls though, as I am so used to having special keys for moving that it takes a lot of re-learning to understand which key belongs to what house. Maybe I sucked too bad, but maybe the game needs a little more polish especially when it comes to communicating to the player that they pushed an invalid key, maybe by quickly showing an overlay that indicates what key the current house belongs to. A comment on deploying: You shouldn't export games to Installers in Game Maker, since most people on LD don't want to be bothered installing your game which could potentially leave some unwanted files behind after uninstalling it. In order to export the game properly, you have to pick File -> Create Application and then in the file dialog choose file type "single runtime executable" or "compressed application". The exe will be the least hassle for players but may cause problems with some virus scanners, so I would suggest picking the compressed application. |
| May 15 18:37:08 | 47h 49m | Abaddon | ♥ 0 | Devil Daggers! I suck at this type of game, although I love a good challenge. I got to 2700 points (probably not that good). Overall I am awed by the level of polish you offer. The graphics are outstanding and the shader you use make the game visually unique. The details on the models are awesome! The music is pumping and giving the game the urgency this genre is begging for. Gameplay wise there is not much to criticize, I like the general mechanics, especially the healing clouds as they create a point of attraction that is usually surrounded by danger, which creates a very good risk/reward balance. The only minor nitpick would be that the game could have a slightly tighter difficulty curve. I feel that until right before the first spiders appear, the game could pick up its pace a tiny bit faster, which I think would improve the replay value and increase the already good "just one more round"-feeling. All in all certainly one of the big greats of this LD! I wouldn't worry too much about the similarity to DD though. There are so many clones of popular games at LD. Sure, it would have been nice if you had added some new twist to the game, maybe something more closely tied to the theme "A Small World", but for me, it's not a big problem. Your game is fun in its own right, and I'm pretty sure, Devil Daggers has not been made in three days. |
| May 15 19:01:57 | 24m 49s | Galactic Girl and the Puzzle Planets | ♥ 2 | I love the idea of jumping among planets to play the different levels. There is a lot to like in your game, from the fitting pixel art to the outstanding soundtrack and the really cool game mechanics. I especially like the idea of double jumping out of your suit which takes away your ability to double jump until you get back into the suit. Unfortunately there are a few flaws as well which make the game less fun that it could be. First, I found the sound effects to be a bit grating, which is extremely weird, since you have such a talented audio guy. I can only assume that you ran out of time in the end. While the graphics are really cool, I think that sometimes the mixed resolution drags down your visual style a bit, especially when jumping out of the suit. If you stand in front of the suit, there appear to be some pixel artifacts. It's pretty hard to pull off a mixed-resolution game and not alienate pixel-art lovers and Unity may be susceptible to that, although I remember I've seen a pixel tutorial around somewhere. When it comes to gameplay, I think the gravity mechanics could use a little more work, as I think it's a bit too hard to actually aim at planets and hit them through skill and not luck. The platforming was a but frustrating for me, especially since the heroine does not seem to move with the platforms. A part of that frustration may be due to the keyboard layout, which I think uses too many different keys. I wonder why you chose to use Space to jump outside of the planets and W in the levels. Why not use one key for both? The same goes for O/P, since I didn't find you could remove your suit in space, why not use the same key for entering planets and entering your suit? Also I think for jump 'n' run kind of games it has been an established standard not to use Up for jumping (W in your case), which should be assigned to the other hand, like on a controller. So if you would have used A/D for motion and O/P for jumping/action, I think the controls would have become much clearer. About the game logic, I found the fact that exiting a planet without the suit sent your character back to the surface with the suit, reduced the otherwise awesome atmosphere you created. Here an additional sprite of a rack of suits next to the teleporter may have kept the game logic intact. Something else I found a bit irritating was that you were able to just skip worlds if you wanted. Not sure whether you had to finish all levels to complete the game (I only managed to get to level 3), but maybe some token that has to be collected to piece together some sort of McGuffin would have helped tie things together. Overall I think you managed to create a neat game with a lot of cool ideas, and a number of minor flaws. Great job! |
| May 15 19:25:04 | 23m 07s | Memory:Leak | ♥ 3 | I was immediately drawn to your game due to its outstanding graphics and cool idea. When I started it up, I was pleasantly surprised that the music is well up to par with the visuals. After some initial confusion as to what the goal was, I quickly got the hang of it. Unfortunately there a single thing that really takes the wind out of the game's sails and that is the necessity to click each building type again after building. Adding to that, sometimes clicking on an empty tile did not register so I constantly had to click buildings on the menu which was really frustrating. It's such a shame because I can imagine the game being super-awesome, but this was really breaking it for me. Some notes: I think you could have done without the icon to increase population, by simply adding population through clicking on a tile. It would be much faster to control, which is important for a game that can become quite hectic. I enjoyed the fact that you made a tutorial, although I felt it could have been a bit more challenging, by only allowing the player to solve the tutorial level by showing that they mastered the skill you wanted to explain. That way you would have a more challenging early game which currently is a breeze to finish without actually learning anything. Don't get me wrong: I really love every single thing about your game: The premise, presentation, music, mechanics, everything. But I feel that the few shortcomings it has have a severe impact on making it as much fun to play as it should be. Please consider making a post-LD version, I would definitely want to revisit it after you gave it a little more polish. |
| May 15 19:46:23 | 21m 19s | Tumblin' down | ♥ 1 | Oh man, this really pains me. I came to your game after seeing your cool trailer video and I have to say the idea of the shrinking world is executed so beautifully. It's technically very impressive. I absolutely love the way you pulled off the tumbling mountains, bridges and trees. You also managed to pull off very cool sound effects that underline what's happening to the world. The music is really relaxing and fits very well into the atmosphere you create. After enjoying all this, I was really curious what the gameplay mechanics would be like. Unfortunately there is not much here. My units are totally overpowered and even a small handful are enough to defeat a large group of enemies. The pacing is really slow, so it takes ages for the world to shrink and consequently it doesn't really feel threatening. There is just not much *game* to your game. After reading the summary I somewhat figured out what the game mechanics are supposed to be but I didn't find them very interesting. This is such a shame, because technically you created something really special. It's just that the game experience itself simply feels slapped on. I gave the game high marks in all the places that I enjoyed and consider it a very successful and well-executed tech demo. In case you revisit the basic game idea and try to go in a different direction, I would be interested in giving it another shot. |
| May 15 20:03:31 | 17m 08s | Until Tomorrow | ♥ 1 | Wow, that was cool! You really have a knack for storytelling. My favorite part was where the old man deliberated pushing you off the cliff. You set this up masterfully by having him startle you seconds before in the room and then repeating the same motion later outside. You know exactly what he is thinking before he even mentions it. If the story was longer and I was more invested in the character, that scene might have given me goosebumps. The missing music and sound effects are a shame though. The ambient sounds you added towards the end were quite effective due to the long silence that preceded them but I still think some music throughout the game would have been worked better. Even if not, the missing sound effects hurt your game the most. Other than that, there were no bugs or unclear parts, you told the story very well, which I think was your main concern, so overall it was a very nice experience, thank you! |
| May 15 20:26:30 | 22m 59s | Small World | ♥ 1 | You created a pleasant and relaxing game with well-designed graphics a moody soundtrack and some cool game mechanics. I got the feeling that you optimized the game for controllers, as I found the keyboard layout to be a bit fiddly. This could be due to the fact that German keyboards Z and Y are switched, so I had to hold my hand in an awkward position and often fell to my death because I hit the wrong key. Control-wise I would say the jumping mechanics are the weakest part, as I found the jump arc to be too steep and the jumps a bit too short to feel comfortable. On the other hand, I loved the way you visualized the shovel action. The way that you move the platforms by wedging the shovel in the crack and leveraging the landmass to the next location worked really well vusally. I think the game may have worked better with discrete movement patterns where you have to decide to which side you want to jump and you jump exactly one square without having to time the jumps. That would change the character of the game from a more skill-based to a more puzzle based game, but I think it may have worked better. I stopped playing the game in the randomized level, as I found it hard to re-focus on the new configuration all the time instead of repeatedly trying to figure out the solution to a constant level. On the other hand, I generally enjoyed bits of randomness, like the placement of the crystals and the trees. Overall I think you made a very atmospheric experience that for me was marred a bit by fiddly controls. Nevertheless a very good, graphically impressive game. |
| May 18 18:47:39 | 70h 21m | Hives (Gameboy ROM) | ♥ 0 | Wow, a real Game Boy game, I'm impressed! It failed to load on Firefox, but I got it running in an emulator (would have tried that anyway to see if it would work - it did!). I thought your game was a pretty cool idea that could use some polish. I am not sure if the fact that the game is a bit raw was deliberate because you wanted to keep a more realistic Game Boy feeling, but I'm going write this comment according to modern design standards, of course taking into account the platform's restrictions. The graphics were really neat and the difficulty ramped up well, introducing new enemies piece by piece. The audio was good but the game was really missing music. The Game Boy had a such iconic sound that some cool chiptunes would have improved the game's mood immensely. The controls were appropriate but could use a little more fine-tuning to make them a bit smoother. I love that you added a menu and the transitions were also pretty cool. The game design idea was solid, I liked your decision to make the main character invulnerable but let each death increase the number of enemies implicitly because the player couldn't fight them off during the cooldown period. I think however, that this mechanic could use a bit more work in order to make the game flow better. One option would be to reset the bee immediately but make it unable to shoot for a few seconds, which would give the player something to do while dead. The healing mechanic seemed pretty unbalanced to me. If I got this right, you can heal all the hives by hovering over any single one which reduces your shield that cannot be regenerated. So the player doesn't have to take into account which hive was damaged at all. Also I assume that if your shield is empty, you cannot repair the hives at all anymore. I assume this was to give the game a limit on playtime, but you already have one in place by making the enemies come faster and faster, so I thought you could get rid of that without taking away from the game. What I think would have been more fun would be to give each hive a separate health bar (even better an implicit damage indicator like changing the hive's sprite). Now the player would have to repair each hive which would force the player to keep in motion. Then I would consider getting rid of the shield and having the repair function assigned to the second button, which also would give the player more to actually do. With that setup you could play around with different ways to balance the game to make it most fun and get a "just one more round" feeling going. Some temporary weapon upgrade collectibles might introduce a risk-and-reward mechanic. So overall I believe you are on the right track and I am thorougly impressed you pulled off the game in C as an actual Game Boy game, and I think with a few tweaks it could be a lot more fun. |
| May 18 19:07:16 | 19m 37s | The Shifting Catacombs of Mu'ralagh | ♥ 2 | Fantastic game! Full marks on mood. Even though you used a music generator, the audio fit really well to the game. You really have a knack for level design, taking a few simple game mechanics and combining them in interesting ways. The setup is perfect and the game is really engaging throughout. There is one bug that soured the whole experience for me and that is apparently you cannot move up-left and jump at the same time which made some of the jumping puzzles really frustrating especially if you don't figure out why your guy is dropping into the water. I would have loved to have a little outro similar to the intro, maybe with the whole catacombs collapsing and your guy escaping at the last moment, but there is only so much you can do in 48 hours. A really lovely entry. One remark though in case you didn't know: You can and should increase visibility of your game by rating other people. You receive a coolness score based on your ratings and comments, so if you receive lots of votes but don't vote/comment yourself, you will drop down in the game list which is a shame because I would consider your game a hidden gem in LD and I wish you all the best for getting the 20 votes necessary to end up in the ranking. |
| May 18 19:45:13 | 37m 57s | Tiny Planet Defense | ♥ 1 | I think this was the first ego-tower defense game I have ever played and overall it was pretty neat. Despite some flaws, it had some really beautiful moments. So first of all, the graphics are a mixed bag in by book. On the one hand you have the beautiful backdrops, earth texture and lensflare effects, on the other hand you have very simplistic character and enemy models, especially the rockets, which are just elongated spheres. The sound effects were okay, but obviously some spherical music would have made the game's mood much better. Gameplay-wise there are a few snags. I don't think being blocked by your towers adds anything to your game and could be removed. The intro was unskippable and takes away from replay value that way. You should definitely add a way to skip the countdown: Especially in the beginning the wait times take the wind out of the game's sails. I think you could have communicated better where the next waves would come from. I realized after a few tries that they came from the direction of the signs, but an arrow or a shiny line pointing away from the planet towards the impending attack would have avoided some confusion here. I managed to finish Tiny Planet Defense with just Multi-shooters and rockets and couldn't really figure out how to set up the lasers properly. It was a bit tight defeating the normals with the multi-shot, which cost me a few lives on wave 2. The rest was a breeze though, so I think the game might benefit from some more work on pacing. The game really started to shine as soon as I had some more towers. Seeing three rockets majestically amble towards a boss and detonating it into bits with a single strike felt very good. Also the amount of debris flying around from defeating enemies gave the game some sparkle and charm in the later game. Despite a slow start I would have loved to continue playing to see a bit more of a challenge, as the game became very easy very fast. Overall quite a solid entry that could greatly benefit from some polishing and gameplay tweaking. Great job! |
| May 18 20:29:36 | 44m 23s | Miskro | ♥ 0 | Awesome entry! Everything looks very polished, and I love the pastel color palette. I only found three coins, but felt motivated by the exploration setting to try and find the last one, but had to give up in the end because I couldn't find it. When it comes to atmosphere, your game is spot on, with the exception of the "buddy"-tone of the statue's text which I found was clashing with the general soothing atmosphere of the game a bit. Gameplay wise, I liked how you changed the speed of the player depending on its size, but I would have preferred to have the larger modes make bigger steps so they would get faster from A to B. Maybe a more pronounced ambling animation in the camera with a slight pause between two steps would have worked well here. Overall a very impressive entry for 48 hours. Technically I'll have to mention that you are not allowed to add anything to the game outside of the allotted time, even if you opt out of that category. If you want make changes afterwards, please create a separate post-compo version of the game in addition to the original version and mark both accordingly. If you haven't recorded the ambient music yourself, that is also not allowed for the Compo. However, in the Jam you are free to use any external assets and you also have an extra day for adding them. You can even switch from Compo to Jam in the middle of LD if you feel time is running out for you. Just in case you wondered why you received only a few votes: You need to rate and comment more on other games to appear higher on the games list, which in turn will increase your chances of getting exposure and thus more votes for yourself. |
| May 20 03:52:00 | 31h 22m | Retro Rabbit | ♥ 0 | I just watched the game on the TechValleyGameSpace stream and had to play it. I don't really have to say much: It's nearly perfect! The music and animation are especially lovely. The way you integrate the guitar riffs into the munch mode was perfect. Maybe the transitions could have been a tiny bit smoother, but that's not a real concern. For my personal tastes, I think the difficulty ramp up could be a smidge steeper to increase the "just one more round" feeling, but that may just be my preference. Played to 127.309 points. Will likely return. Great job! |
| May 20 04:05:13 | 13m 13s | Spider Collider | ♥ 0 | I just watched the game on the TechValleyGameSpace stream and wanted to give it a spin myself. The general idea is awesome and both music and graphics make the game really enjoyable. The sudden use of red together with the pixel burst when you are smashed are super effective. If I was to suggest some tweaks it would be to the gameplay: I found myself just mashing space which worked out fairly well for most levels. The fact that the player has to wait half a second after landing before controls register again hinders the game flow a bit. I think I would have preferred instant reaction after landing together with the possibility to move mid-air a little. With tighter controls could have come more challenging levels, as currently the increasing difficulty mostly asks for luck instead of skill. I could have done without the grappling hook, as I didn't use it at all. I think the reason for that was that it was controlled via mouse. Maybe you could try controlling it with the keyboard (A/D for targeting with an indicator that rotates around the spider when airborne). I think this would offer more consistent controls and might be more fun. In case you build a post-compo version that has this mechanic, drop me a line, I'd love to give it another spin. Overall I enjoyed the game a lot, despite some minor issues with game flow. The idea was quite unique and well executed, good job! |
| May 20 16:54:24 | 12h 49m | Escape to the Stars | ♥ 0 | Beautiful, both in sight and sound. I can't praise the graphics and the music enough. From a gameplay perspective, I would have preferred to trade permanent skills, as the items felt pretty useless after I figured out that the raw materials do their job well enough, especially heal. I think having the traders upgrade speed, vitality and max shot count would have worked much in your favor. Grinding the traded items felt a bit like a grind in the end. I didn't like the mixed mouse/keyboard controls. I guess this is primarily a mobile game, but still, keyboard only would probably have worked better, especially for a retro game. Navigating the menu would have been more relaxed if you paused the game. Overall a beautiful game with a few gameplay flaws. **Edit:** I'm sorry, but I have to take back my votes. You are not allowed to make significant changes to your game after the deadline and it looks like you changed quite a lot. Since you didn't mark your game as post-compo, I cannot tell which state the game was in when the Compo ended, so I cannot properly vote for you. Next time you want to make changes, please upload two versions of the game and mark them accordingly. |
| May 20 17:14:39 | 20m 15s | BUTERATOS | ♥ 0 | I'm with @mmason. I played Buteratos back in LD37. This looks too similar to the LD37 game to be in the spirit of Ludum Dare, unless you opt out of the categories in which you used existing assets. If you really drew all the art (background and characters), made the animation, the intro, and everything else in 3 days, hats off to your team! |
| May 23 05:15:40 | 60h 01m | It's A Small World | ♥ 1 | Post LD comment here because the ending was just so awesome. I played the game with my daughter last night and neither of us understood what was going on, especially in the part towards the end. When I was in bed later I was mulling it over, half asleep when it hit me. Mind Blown! I actually woke up my wife to tell her and she hasn't even seen the game. Great job! This remain with me as a personal favorite. Well deserved place, congratulations! |
| May 26 16:50:59 | 83h 35m | Bamboo Life | ♥ 1 | Post-LD comment: Congratulations to a Top 20 spot! This is what my daughter and I made: bamboo.PNG |
