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Feedback comments for LD39
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | gelisam's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 4 22:58:01 | Evelyn | ♥ 1 | The macOS link is a 404 :( edit: fixed now, thanks! | |
| Aug 4 23:42:02 | 44m 01s | Shut Everything Down | ♥ 2 | For me it's the opposite, I like the sound effects but not the music! I guess you can't please everyone :) I gave you a good score for Innovation; the gameplay isn't super innovative for the stealth genre, but using robots as enemies is a great way to justify those existing mechanics: the enemies keep walking back and forth in a fixed pattern because the robots are simply executing a for loop, and we can see their vision cones because they're using lasers or something in order to see things! I'd recommend some kind of transition when you display the text messages, it's really jarring. I liked the difficulty later in the game, but not so much the tutorial bit. Maybe give more room for experimentation instead of a text-based tutorial? I'm not a fan of the mouse-based movement, how about WASD to move the robot and arrows to move the camera, or vice versa? Or just center the camera around a point a few cells ahead of the robot. |
| Aug 5 00:07:36 | 25m 34s | Torch Boy | ♥ 1 | That was... short. I thought this was only the first level of something bigger! But maybe I'm not playing it right. I rushed to the top while there weren't too many enemies yet, that's the only way I managed to stay alive more than 5 seconds. |
| Aug 5 00:24:25 | 16m 49s | Lantern | ♥ 3 | Too easy! ...at first. Maybe ramp up the difficulty a bit faster? |
| Aug 5 13:27:32 | 13h 03m | Scale of Life | ♥ 2 | There's way too much stuff going on on the screen, it's not at all clear when we're supposed to press space. The "Ok" and "Great" feedback helped, but it took me a while before I figured out that "Great" did not in fact indicate that I had figured out which circles were not supposed to intersect, and that I should aim for "Perfect" instead. Regarding the theme: you chose a planet becoming a star, but wouldn't it make more sense to start as a star? If I remember correctly, as the fuel inside a star gets used up, that is, as the star runs out of power, its internal nuclear explosions can't push back against its own gravity anymore, so the star collapses, which can somehow causes it to go nova. Going nova would provide a better justification for pushing away the asteroids than just "deciding to stop growing"! |
| Aug 5 14:22:54 | 55m 22s | Pipe Trek | ♥ 0 | Nice twist on the pipedream formula! Getting power to the engine quickly before the enemies fire at us is a much better motivation than having liquid mysteriously start to pour in before the pipe installation is complete. Mechanically, being able to swap pieces around instead of having to place a predefined sequence of pieces in order is also a big improvement, I feel much more in control of my toolbox, and yet the time pressure means I'm likely to pick a piece from the random ones surrounding my destination, so I'm not over-powered either. I wish the effects of "shield strength" and "engine trust" was as clear as that of "life support", "hull integrity" and "phaser charge". Putting the shields up didn't seem to protect me against torpedoes, and activating the engines didn't seem to allow me to dodge them. A suggestion: maybe shooting the enemies should cause them to back off for a bit? This way there would be a risk/reward tradeoff in trying to complete the phasers before the rest, because it would give us more time to fix the rest. As is, the incentive is to always complete phasers last. My only complaint is that the music was quite repetitive. |
| Aug 5 14:31:34 | 8m 40s | 15 Minutes | ♥ 0 | Didn't work for me on macOS 10.10.5, I see a black screen with red circles around it and a 15:00 countdown, but I don't see any questions? |
| Aug 5 14:52:39 | 21m 05s | Kings | ♥ 3 | Dragging the "increase population" card to a city's action slot didn't work for some reason, and when I pressed "next turn" I saw that unused cards are kept forever so I'd be forever stuck with that broken card, and I gave up. Looks way too complicated anyway. Maybe introduce the different parts of the game one at a time instead of all at once? |
| Aug 5 16:15:24 | 1h 22m | Running Out Of Tiles | ♥ 1 | The first 6 notes of music were super promising, but then it stopped and the game remained silent for the rest of the game? Weird. I was carefully saving my cubes in anticipation of running out, but it turns out we have plenty! Having a secret ending makes the game feel much bigger than if it had a few extra rooms, good call! |
| Aug 5 16:35:51 | 20m 27s | Shekateka | ♥ 1 | Wow, I have a hard time believing this was done in 48h! Great production values, varied enemies, and most importantly, fun to play! |
| Aug 5 17:36:48 | 1h 00m | No Sorcerer's Sky | ♥ 1 | Nice! It took me many attempts to figure out to make progress, but that's fine since that was the fun part. If I already knew from the get go how to play the game, I don't think I would have liked it since clicking scraps isn't super engaging and I didn't feel like my spending decisions mattered that much. One design decision I really don't understand though is why do we have to go to the main module in order to see how much of each resource we have?? This makes the rest of the game more opaque for no good reason. Like I for a while I couldn't figure out why spending apples on the greenhouse didn't do anything, and it turns out we're harvesting them not spending them! I also had to write down the prices of all the buildings and upgrades because after switching from the page which shows the price to the main module to the alchemy table I had already forgotten which materials I now had to craft in order to buy the thing. A few bugs I've noticed: the X button isn't visible unless you play full screen, that X doesn't work while the cube is at the top-left of the screen because it brings you right back inside one of its buildings, and upgrading the solar panel didn't work even though I had the necessary resources. Finally, a suggestion: since it's the scraps which we can click on, not the shooting stars, perhaps it is the former which should announce their presence with a sound, not the latter? |
| Aug 9 03:51:20 | 82h 14m | Drone Supervisor | ♥ 2 | Amazing game, it has kept me entertained for hours! I didn't realize that the recipe list was in the game, so I spent a ton of time trying different combinations and writing down the results. Eventually I saw, or rather I thought, that there was a logic to the recipes, that it wasn't simply a secret list of recipes which work while the rest gives junk, like in some other crafting games. There is certainly a logic to which combination produces pure materials, bracelets and necklaces, and so I was convinced that this was some sort of puzzle, that by experimenting I would learn more about the logic of the recipes and I could deduce how to make the masterpiece. Unfortunately, I was wrong, there was some logic to some of the recipes, but in addition to those logical recipes there was also a secret list of special recipes which couldn't possibly be deduced. Oh well! I got a good laugh the first time I got "large junk" instead of "junk"; I had made a complicated contraption for electrum + electrum + electrum, and I thought the supersized junk was a way for the game to tell me that I was trying too hard... Oh, that might have been a good recipe logic! The recipes which combine too expensive stuff would give a large junk, those which combine too cheap stuff would give small junk, and those which are incomparable (some items are cheaper than the target, some are more expensive than the target) would just be "junk" :) I think that having to build an assembly line in order to try a combination is a great way to solve a typical balancing issue which crafting has. In some games, we have access to an infinite supply of (a subset of the) materials, and we can combine them freely. For example, the adventure games which allow you to attempt to combine any two objects in your inventory. Since this is low effort, this leads to a thoughtless style of crafting in which the player simply tries every single combination without thinking about which ones might work. In other games, attempting to combine two items consumes those items, even if the combination fails, and so when we get a rare item we are unlikely to experiment with it for fear of losing it. By having the player build an assembly line, we can encourage experimentation by having an infinite supply of materials, yet combining them requires some effort, so the player is less likely to brute force and more likely to think about which combinations are likely to work. Hence my attempt to figure out the combination by experimenting. It's also really nice that the positions of the resources means that each combination requires a slightly different assembly line, so this experimentation doesn't get boring. Especially since there are several obstacles which naturally emerge out the interaction between nearby assembly parts, so some assembly lines are surprisingly more complex to complete than others! |
| Aug 13 02:43:38 | 94h 52m | Powerless Miner | ♥ 1 | Please use another key than ESC to bring up the menu: in the HTML version, ESC leaves full screen mode, so in order to play in full screen mode you have to press ESC twice to bring up the menu, and then go back to full screen, which is needlessly annoying. |