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piscythe

Feedback comments for LD38

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		piscythe's comment
May 2 05:08:36		A Small Hell	♥ 1	I'll give you serious style points for the creepy words and I loved how the eyes on the eye tree followed me. However, I couldn't get mouse interaction on the Linux build to work with any consistency and couldn't open the journal at all. (I played on Linux Mint 18.1.) Mouse interaction worked properly on WINE, but I had even stranger issues there. Edit: WebGL version works fine for me.
May 2 05:21:01	12m 25s	Super Small-io World!	♥ 2	I managed to reach the win state after a bit of practice. The enemies are certainly tricky, but they're manageable once you figure out how to deal with them. I was worried about the respawning coins, but they weren't really an issue for me. My gameplay issue was getting smashed between the rotating clouds on the big planet, often because my character didn't jump when I felt like it should have been able to. Props for the engine and the gravity mechanics. The music did its job well. EDIT: Yeah, I kinda figured that it had something to do with the bouncing. Not that big of a deal once I got used to it.
May 2 05:34:15	13m 14s	DUCKTRON	♥ 3	This game is almost too tactically demanding. The player's slow turn radius and limited attack range make properly ambushing the score-critical flashing ducks an art. This is complicated by the huge herd of regular ducks, and it is very easy to get blindsided by a normal duck while approaching your target. I do worry that scores are influenced by the RNG component of where the flashing duck spawns. Music loop worked well and the graphics got the job done. I also had fine performance on the web build. HS:1130.
May 2 06:01:42	27m 27s	Mind's Eye	♥ 1	I really like the design of the combat system. Most of it was intuitive, and I quickly learned what the heavy/light attack dynamics were. I really like the enemy design with the "no light attack" symbol on the shirt. However, after playing for a while I felt that things got a bit monotonous. Eventually I just ended up sitting on one side of the arena, hitting whatever popped up on the one side of me, then unloading everything I had in the other direction. My interest was regained once I understood the damage mechanic - those blurred-out consoles are an excellent way of showing damage. I reached level 10 on my run.
May 2 06:20:14	18m 32s	Space Cowboy's Last Stand	♥ 1	I really think the aliens are putting too much effort into this one. All they really needed to do was land some targets on the asteroid and watch Steve shoot himself trying to do target practice. That said, I like how misfires can also work to the player's benefit, as stray bullets and come circling around and nail enemies. This is a very tight and challenging game. Whether I was trying not to kill myself, trying to chase down an alien before it blew the ground out from under my feet, or watching my ammo counter tick down I felt like I was fighting a desperate battle. High Score: 20
May 2 16:36:21	10h 16m	Antnator	♥ 3	Nice work! I like the weapon and power up selection. I felt like I should have been able to jump up through the moving platforms, but nope. Supply management was tricky because I didn't see a way to switch guns, each gun starts with a different amount of ammo, and ammo power ups give the same amount for every weapon. Also, I would have appreciated a couple seconds of warning before God Mode wore off. The difficulty seemed pretty manageable to me, but then the last two levels were cakewalks. I love the character designs, but now I kinda want to watch an action flick. (Cleared in one attempt, 1 life remaining.)
May 2 19:14:21	2h 38m	Barely There	♥ 1	I put so much effort into not missing the flowers and then [spoilers] happened. It was so tragic. This has to be an allegory for something.
May 2 20:04:52	50m 31s	Little Asteroid	♥ 1	I like the minimalistic style, even more so since it reflects the game's philosophy. The mechanics seem simple at first, but engineering an ideal factory quickly becomes a puzzle. I do wish that the spaceport could sell more than one item type, though - it's a pain to toggle it back and forth when I'm making money from more than one thing. I'd suggest adding a recipe list to the description so players don't need to build one of everything to understand the economy. I ran the web build on Linux Mint/Firefox and had no performance issues, but I couldn't get the crafter to make satellites even though I was feeding it all the requisite parts.
May 2 23:08:38	3h 03m	Beware The Idiots	♥ 1	I somehow made it through my entire first run having entirely missed the fact that clicking was what killed the sperm. The irony here is not lost on me. This is a fun, innovative, and satisfying game.
May 2 23:25:52	17m 14s	Food Fight	♥ 1	The art style looks good, but I can't actually try the game because mouse input doesn't work on my Linux Mint. This is a known Unity bug. ~~If you make a web build I'd be happy to test that out.~~ Update: I tried the web build. Arena was empty when I showed up so I can't comment on that. During the platformer, I fell onto some spikes and didn't seem to take damage. Having an attack mapped to middle mouse was awkward. The attacks seemed to lack a feeling of weight and motion. I'd suggest having the player move forward as they attack instead of kinda floating back to their original position. It seemed odd to me that holding the jump button made you ignore the springs. Still, a multiplayer game is pretty ambitious for LD. I'd love to see a post-compo edition of this.
May 2 23:33:20	7m 28s	Death's Knocking	♥ 1	You absolutely nailed the mood with this one. The mood in question being panic. The music, mechanics, and not having any idea where Death is mean that running around blindly suddenly starts looking like a workable strategy. My record: 1 minute 47 seconds.
May 2 23:42:26	9m 06s	Snail Fighter	♥ 1	I am a dude with a mustache and I approve of this game. Simple, intuitive, deep, and stylish.
May 3 00:19:31	37m 05s	Little Fortune Planet	♥ 4	First run: apparently I turned the Earth into a hollowed-out sphere of boiling water full of exploding nukes, dolphins, and zombies. The three card hand seems a bit small for directing the world though - I tried for the volcano achievement but got locked into choosing between Biblical Flood and Hollow Earth, at which point I mispicked Biblical Flood because I thought Hollow Earth would also clear the lava core. Then I tried again and got stuck with two Biblical Floods. Fourth attempt I chained ballistic missiles and volcanoes together and turned half of the planet into lava craters. This still was not enough, so I just blew the whole thing up. That volcano achievement requires a lot of lava.
May 3 00:33:04	13m 33s	A Brief Retreat	♥ 1	I didn't find my tropical island vacation very relaxing. Something about the being so tight on time and resources. I did enjoy working out the correct course of action, and managed to escape on day 6 of my first attempt.
May 3 01:44:04	1h 11m	Tiny Asteroid War	♥ 1	Marvelous work here. I love how the environment turns what would otherwise have been a very simple game into a deep tactical and spatial challenge. The soundscape was well done and the visual environment did exactly what it needed to. The health pickups might have looked better if they stayed solid longer and then faded more quickly. Perhaps surprisingly, driving backwards led to a dramatic improvement in my scores. I found that being able to watch my enemies and return fire was more important than watching in front of me. Trying to navigate to the next health pickup without getting caught in a crossfire is a challenge. Highscore: 22.
May 3 04:05:25	2h 21m	Too Many Weird Aliens	♥ 3	I like seeing a depiction of space combat where navigation is tricky and velocity management is crucial. The "defend Earth" objective limits the player's ability to explore, but the combat mechanics and variety of enemies give the game a lot of depth. The graphics are effective, and the soundscape fits well. The physics take some getting used to, but combat is very satisfying once you get a handle on what's going on. Ramming into my own missile, not so much. Good work!
May 3 05:16:12	1h 10m	LOST PLANET(oid)	♥ 1	I like the open world exploration style and the assets were nice. On the downside, the controls on the whole felt sluggish. I had no problems with the strafing mechanic, it was the low speed of pretty much everything the character did that got to me. The "dead end" and graveyard were nice touches. I especially liked how you left a gravestone next to the graveyard key to hint to the player that the key went to the graveyard door.
May 3 05:39:44	23m 32s	To Valhalla	♥ 1	Interesting. I liked the depth and detail of the environment, and the monsters felt like a very legitimate threat. The controls seemed odd, and I think that having keys for rotation and acceleration rather than directions might have been a better fit. It took me a while to find Mjölnir and after that the voiceovers for "found Mjölnir" and "the gate is open" overlapped. That said, the voiceovers really helped set the stage. Just earlier today I was lamenting my lack of a smooth yet rugged narrating voice and here I find a prime example of what I was talking about.
May 3 18:33:49	12h 54m	What Remains.	♥ 1	It's very cool that you were able to build a strategy game like this. It's complex enough that it took me a moment to get a handle on things, and the early game was really fun as I scrambled to get production for each resource online before it ran out. However, after a while I started to feel like everything was stabilized and I wasn't really in much danger. The crises I was getting were like "people start going hungry because one food-maker apparently needs to be told to fix his own broken oven and the other one is asleep". Good work!
May 3 19:47:15	1h 13m	Escape to the Stars	♥ 0	Nice work! The pixel art style is very cohesive and I like how all items are usable as powerups. Combat feels a little slow with the long weapon recharge time. The robots in particular take an annoyingly long time to kill. Also, I found myself wishing that I had some warning for when the mushrooms were going to unburrow. There is a lot of strategy to dealing with the overlap of the different monster mechanics. Doing the quests was fun, but it was hard to click the quest and inventory buttons while I was constantly under attack by the monsters. All that said, this felt like complete experience and that itself is a good sign. I completed the game in 837 seconds.
May 5 20:41:22	48h 54m	Factions	♥ 2	The spherical map adds a lot to what otherwise would be a pretty basic design. The levels I saw did a good job of emphasizing that. Having left-mouse only controls on an RTS felt awkward to me, but the voice-acted unit responses really made the control scheme more satisfying. However, it appears that the bug with units dying for no apparent reason is still active in the web build (I used LinuxMint/Firefox). This came to a head in Level 6, where I got stuck because all the units died before they could do anything. The day/night cycle was neat, but I had a hard time seeing what I was doing at night. The AI is well done considering the circumstances. Good work!
May 6 20:57:13	24h 15m	Slimes in Panic	♥ 1	It looks like you're onto something cool here. It was kinda fun building a bunch of houses are watching the slimes hop around, but after a couple minutes of house-building the game froze. The tooltips prevented me from feeling completely lost, but I still felt kinda lost. I'd suggest doing a post-compo version of this so we can see what it looks like with the intended features.
May 6 21:08:54	11m 41s	Potions recipes	♥ 2	That was interesting. The music is good and the graphics are clear. I don't understand why you made the horizontal dimension of the game so small. The only way I could figure out to get the item collected notification to go away was to go back to the main menu and then re-enter the game.
May 18 06:11:51	273h 02m	Spabullare	♥ 1	That was certainly interesting. The controls felt fine to me, but the player's starting bullet speed is way too low. I might have been better off making a "good side," but some part of me wanted to obsessively make sure my upgrades were symmetrical. The enemy behavior is just complex enough to make them interesting opponents, but it's super easy to get blindsided by one of the asteroids while trying to focus on the actual enemy. The upgrade system is well done. I like the way the wave/checkpoint system works, but I'm not sure how much I like having both checkpoint heals and regenerating health. It sounds redundant on paper, but in actual gameplay it seems to work fine. Good work!
May 18 06:33:23	21m 32s	Yet Another Zombie Wave Shooter	♥ 1	I also ran into the WebGL framerate bug. Something must have thrown off my aim, too, because where I should have been landing precision blow after precision blow with my mouse-aiming skills, I was getting only marginally better accuracy than if I were using a real gun. For clarity's sake, I am a horrible shot with pretty much any ranged weapon imaginable. When you said "suspiciously oversized objective," I was not expecting a monolithic pillar of doom sticking up from the sand like the last vestige of some forgotten kingdom, but there it was. Makes me wonder why the zombies were going for that instead of me. I will give you credit for implementing the most realistic gun sounds I have ever heard in any video game.
May 18 19:10:30	12h 37m	1964 World's Fair Engineer	♥ 1	Great work! The mechanics are very innovative, presenting a challenge that isn't quite like anything I've seen before. The art style is cohesive and fitting, and the amount of content is impressive. That said, the way scoring is currently rigged makes adds an order of operations element that results in some strange situations. For example, at one point I had a mountain and a light bank next to eachother in darkness. If I approved the mountain first, I'd lose the delight from it because it was in darkness. If I approved the light bank first, I would take the -3 eyesore penalty. What I think should have happened is that when I combined the mountain and light bank, it would recalculate so that I got both the concealment effect and the delight from the mountain. I agree with @nilead that something like this could work really well on mobile.
May 18 19:39:14	28m 44s	BAD RNG	♥ 1	I think the voxel art worked really well since this is a variant of a classic title. The bomb and spider mechanics were inventive, but they were also confusing for someone who didn't realize what was going on. The sounds were more or less exactly what they needed to be. I'm not sure what any of it had to do with a bad random number generator though. It's been a long time since I played the original, but the core mechanics from that are still solid. The difficulty curve seems well calibrated as well. My score 28000/2nd attempt
May 18 20:04:59	25m 45s	Draw a Small World	♥ 0	Screenshot from 2017-05-18 13-01-48.png Interesting. I liked how everything came together, but it seems way too easy to draw an animal that gets its head obscured by a cloud. It's times like this that make me wish I owned a drawing tablet.
May 18 20:29:57	24m 58s	Graphite	♥ 1	The artwork here is excellently done, giving the game a very nice mood straight off the bat. I love the design work on the enemies, and the aiming and shooting mechanics feel excellent. Melee, however, is punishingly difficult, thanks to the long windup and the unclear hitbox on the player's attacks. The level-up system doesn't feel like a progression so much as a way of delaying the inevitable. Fortunately, reading @stevenjmiller's comment alerted me to the fact that the game also included a full boss fight. The boss was dynamic and challenging, and I felt accomplished having reached the win state.
May 18 20:45:49	15m 52s	Going No Air	♥ 1	It is very lucky that Jones keeps an infinite supply of corks on his person, and equally unfortunate that he loses motor control at low depths. I died at 1:32 because I couldn't figure out how to QWOP a particular hole shut. I mostly like the graphical style, but the rotating fish bit seemed a little off to me. The menu is well done, and the atmosphere as the world begins to fill with water is excellent. The final moments of the game are beautifully panic-inducing.
May 18 20:57:43	11m 54s	Welcome to the Show	♥ 0	This is pretty nice. It feels unfinished alright, but you were certainly on to something here. The character design is cool and I love how the projectile jitters up and down. It effectively conveys that I'm shooting some kind of chaotic sonic blast rather than a bullet. The enemies are hazardously fast - the boss pretty much comes out of nowhere and the bats can easily swoop in before you react. It took me two tries to beat the game thanks to such shenanigans. I like the soundtrack, simple as it is. I really found myself wishing for a health tracker. I ran the .swf provided using my Linux flash projector and everything seemed to work fine. Nice work!
May 18 22:27:02	1h 29m	What Do You Mean The Planet Is In Danger And All I Have Is This Deck Of Cards?	♥ 1	I played one game with each of the three decks, and won all of them. The mechanics are pretty basic, but they worked well enough. I never actually used the defend button. The keyboard controls took some getting used to - I think this would have worked better with mouse controls. I liked the discard and draw a hand mechanic. Most of my strategy was about trying to draw the 6-attack/defense cards and keeping my defense above the enemy's attack. The AI seems pretty weak, as it often does useless things like attacking when it can't do any damage or defending with 0 defense. I like the aesthetics of the game, too. Nice work!
May 18 22:39:05	12m 03s	Tiniest Assassin 2	♥ 0	That was certainly interesting. The flying controls really caught me off guard, but they were fun once I got used to them. The physics still felt pretty strange though. Despite the dialogue and well-defined quests, I didn't really feel like I was getting solid feedback for my actions. Still, you certainly did a good job of showing the player character's abilities and perspective. Nice work!
May 18 22:54:35	15m 30s	Dreamers World	♥ 1	The game starts off on the right foot with an impressively-done intro cinematic. This is backed up by a solid soundscape and excellent animation work. The combat mechanics are simple, but there's an art to taking engagements correctly. That said, the player's attack animation is rigged so that when she finishes her combo, she instantly resets to her starting position a few steps backwards. I think it would be better to make it so that when she finishes her combo, she ends up standing at the point she stepped forward to - a few steps forward from her original position. Still, this is very well done.
May 18 23:18:42	24m 07s	Hops and Fever Dreams	♥ 2	Huh. I liked the level design, but ultimately I'm in the "couldn't understand the jump physics" camp. The art style is very nice. It's cohesive, distinctive, and cute. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the soundscape, which was cute for about five seconds and then became obnoxious. Also, the player's horizontal movement felt too slow, especially when a level asked me to walk all the way around one of the blocks. I like the environment variety and the carrot-eating animations. Nice work!
May 19 04:03:38	4h 44m	Cell Out!	♥ 0	Excellent work! I love how the natural state cell ripples and deforms. This especially helps the visual contrast with the rigid cell. I was not expecting the nucleoli to switch states when I grabbed one, but it made sense once I saw it happen. I also liked seeing the text appear to warn me when I tried to do something in the wrong form. I didn't need them, but it means that I probably could have figured this one out even without the help screen. Unfortunately, it was over in only a few levels. This seems like something that's worth developing further.
May 19 04:26:29	22m 51s	Eldritch	♥ 1	Very interesting! I certainly needed to read the blog post to appreciate how detailed the mechanics are here. There's a lot to keep track of in this game, and the player is expected to have a long-term plan even as they frantically tap things. As I learned, knowing when to drop the big cooldown abilities can make the difference between victory and defeat. Nearly learned, that is. I got the boss to negative HP, but apparently my party getting wiped out registered first. Seems I broke my arm punching out the Eldritch Horror. Incidentally, I love the voiceovers - they really add a lot of flavor to the game. Overall, it was a memorably hectic experience.