Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Feedback comment stats → chaotikza
Feedback comments for LD39
chaotikza's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | chaotikza's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2 19:08:38 | The Last Wisp | ♥ 2 | Wow - really nice entry!! Reminded me an awful lot of http://store.steampowered.com/app/349100/Notrium/... I was very flustered the first time it started to turn dark and then about the 2nd try started realising that the light level is tied to my health / power - having just the one resource was quite an interesting choice. I found it quite easy to survive for 3 minutes or more - mostly by running away - didn't use the items much, they were a bit too clunky to activate while running away and the short durations made them not feel worth the effort... Likewise with the light particles from killed enemies - it wasn't worth running into the mobs of ranged enemies to fetch the particles, nor was it clear if killing and harvesting was a net gain of energy. The biggest issue I have is that the game is all tension all the time... some form of pacing would've been nice, like escalating waves with breaks in between or perhaps some higher level objectives like kill all the monsters; kill all the monster generators; or have a certain amount of rocks turn glowy. Really promising entry though - lots more you could do with this one... | |
| Aug 2 19:32:39 | 24m 01s | Project Sunspot | ♥ 2 | Graphics and audio were both great, setting the mood very well! Respect for trying to do an adventure game on a jam timescale - it's very hard to get the difficulty right for those... Your game has nailed that 90s adventure game feel, but it's just way too hard without a mechanic to let the player resume after dying... In those 90s puzzle games I could at least save at the hard parts and try again without having to replay the game from the start. Saving or a restore point mechanic would've helped a lot. I found the 2nd jump extremely difficult - there was no hint whatsoever that holding space longer would make me jump further - it just escalated straight from an easy jump to a hard jump that requires maximum distance and timing an obstacle! A gentler escalation of the difficulty with a bit more hand-holding to teach mechanics would've made the game much more playable. Thanks for the walk-through - I can see there's much more that I didn't get to before getting frustrated, which is a pity... |
| Aug 2 19:47:44 | 15m 05s | Delivery.boy | ♥ 1 | Good effort! Just a bit too hard - I couldn't finish it... I got stuck on that jump for the very tall wall just before the 3rd tesla coil. Liked the art. Didn't like the jump mechanic... something felt off... I got stuck on corners a lot and jump height did not seem consistent, so I sometimes failed what looked like easy jumps and got tesla-coiled. I also often got extra jumps when it seemed I was still in the air, which I'm guessing is a mismatch between your player model and the bounding box - I'm guessing the bottom of box is actually below where the character ends visually? Got around some of that by using a capsule bounding box and having it's bottom slightly inside the character sprite last time we tried to make a platformer (by capsule I mean box with half-circles on the top & bottom end). Battery was a bit of a brutal timer - might've been nice to have lower or no power consumption while idle and then increased drain when jumping or running. |
| Aug 3 20:38:45 | 24h 51m | ULTIMATE PROSELYTISM & MIRACLES SIMULATOR 2017: THE MOVIE THE GAME | ♥ 2 | Very nice! I was having quite a lot of fun spamming random miracles - even though I was uncertain whether I'm gaining more followers than I'm killing! Nice juice! Crashed out in the 2nd desert level when using a miracle to get to the next one... specific error message was: source/lib/sti/plugins/bump.lua: 149: Layer not found: power2_way |
| Aug 6 17:56:00 | 69h 17m | Sparkman Adventures | ♥ 1 | Great job for your first jam entry! This is miles better than my first entry... The music and art worked quite well together even if the art was a bit inconsistent. I assume from the fact that you're not asking to be rated in __Graphics__ and __Audio__ that you were using assets off the internet, in which case the inconsistency is understandable - I only really started creating my own assets since LD37 so I know finding consistent assets online can be very difficult. Only issue I had with the running out of power theme is that I was never in any danger of running out of power... most enemies could be avoided instead of fighting them. |
| Aug 6 18:21:34 | 25m 34s | A Night at Grandpa's | ♥ 0 | This is an amazing little horror game - very well done! Art and sound combined to set the mood perfectly and the controls were great! I just lost the last half-hour of my life trying over and over to get a better ending to no avail... is there one or am I mistaken that the key room is the key? If it is, maybe that room is a little too hard - feels like a need another second of battery power to make it possible... |
| Aug 6 19:22:53 | 1h 01m | Orcs in Space | ♥ 2 | Great job! The micro-management was a bit rough, but you did capture that old-style RTS feel perfectly! As others said the big wave attacks were perhaps a bit heavy - I couldn't summon the patience to finish it after dying at 10 minutes for the 3rd time... Gave you 1 / 5 for humour - just for having a game called __Orcs In Space__ that doesn't seem to contain any orcs... |
| Aug 7 20:49:47 | 25h 26m | Night Light | ♥ 3 | The two of you take the award for the toughest review I've had to write yet this jam! 😅 My cousin @Cyberwiz told me to play this as one of the best entries he's played so far, so I went in with my expectations pretty high... I only have about 1 hour a night to review games at the moment, so I went straight to the _"Normal"_ difficulty setting... Let's start with the __good__: - The art is great! Emma is super cute; the dungeon, darkness and monsters are all nice and scary. - The music is a good fit and the effect of fading it in as the light runs out was brilliant at setting the mood and creating tension. - I liked the story, it kinda reminds me of a Hayao Miyazaki movie, in the sense that it takes you back to the dimly remembered bits of your childhood when monsters and magic were still real. - The platforming controls were quite tight. I didn't like them at first, but the speed with which I got through the 1st level on _Hard_ on a second play confirmed that they allow for quite skillful control of the character and that I had in fact improved at the game in the hour I was playing. - This is your first / second / 1.5th game jam?! Well done - great job! I've participated in many more jams and my games are still probably quite terrible in comparison... - The pacing and introduction of new mechanics was quite good. Sounds great so far right? So why the Good, The Bad & The Ugly format? Well I thought there were a few things that were __bad__ from a gameplay perspective: - Those one block platforms! Sometimes under time pressure and in nearly complete darkness... Tight as your controls were, if I have to do 6 tricky jumps in a row I'm bound to screw one up sooner or later. - Failure to let me fail fast... By which I mean that when I do screw up in the above scenario I now have less time and less light making me much less likely to succeed on a 2nd attempt... so now I have to waste my time on a doomed 2nd attempt?! Better to kill me immediately on failure so I can try again with the same chance of success (better chance if I learned anything from the last attempt). - A difficult sequence of darkness clouds to dodge followed by 5 moving one block platforms that each catapult me so high into the air that I can't see the next platform that I need to land on?! 😠Which brings me to the __ugly__: - There's a save point just after the the moving one block platforms of doom, but I somehow missed it on my first 2 successful attempts at crossing the moving catapult platforms of doom area... So I probably spent about 20 minutes trying to get through a 3rd time, because I had started on what looked like an interesting end-game puzzle, but failed to finish it the first 2 times. Sorry if this review is a bit negative, but I feel like your game had all the ingredients of greatness, but then difficulty for difficulty's sake dragged it down into mediocrity... your ending was heart warming, but by the time I reached it I was raging too hard to appreciate it. You clearly did a lot right to hook me into playing for more than an hour, but what was intended as difficulty often seemed more like punishment and I think that undermined the story you were trying to tell. I'm about 2.5 hours into the 1 hour I had to review games tonight and I'm not sure if I've done a good job of articulating the feelings your game awoke in me, so I'm calling it quits now to go sleep - I hope there is at least some constructive criticism that you can take from this review... if not I leave you with a few videos I ran across while trying to understand what I wanted to say (as well as a link to another entry that was thematically similar, but a bit which I found less punishing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Y6y1MOoEo https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/a-night-at-grandpas |