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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | HuvaaKoodia's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 1 08:47:01 | Neopolitan Panic! | ♥ 3 | Great audio-visuals, they both fit the style perfectly. I mean, gangsta ๐ง how did you come up with that? The visual gag with the ice-cream loving penguin chicks is also brilliant! The car handling could have been more loose for my liking. It is nearly impossible to drift or even drive fast without spinning. Maybe that is by design taken how rickety ice-cream vans are, but it doesn't quite feel good to me. Braking and reversing are also under powered. It is annoying more than anything to brake, hit a box and get stuck for dozens of seconds trying to reverse out of the situation. Another issue, which is worth looking into now that the jam is over, is performance. Granted my computer is old, but it can only manage 25-30 frames full HD at lowest quality setting. There are also odd hitches regardless of settings, when traveling from one area to another. Quality work overall, good job! | |
| Aug 1 09:27:12 | 40m 11s | Dash Guy | ♥ 2 | It is enjoyable once you get the hang of the dash timing. I have to repeat some of the criticism already given. The first level should be randomized too, it becomes boring after a while. I only ran out of power once and then it felt like the input had bugged out, that is how rarely I had to look at the power bar. With a bit more polish, tweaking and design this could be super frantic fun all around all the time. |
| Aug 1 10:05:41 | 38m 29s | Extend that cord! | ♥ 1 | Brilliant graphics, very stylish indeed. Looking at the screenshots I thought it would be a puzzle about connecting plugs into their respective sockets, but no. It turns out to be a game about shortest path navigation, which is where it kind of lost me. Maybe with more mechanics (the oil is a good start) this could become interesting. You came to the same conclusion too so... Do continue working on it, if you have the time. The basis for something enjoyable is there, no doubt. |
| Aug 1 10:59:08 | 53m 27s | BATTER-E | ♥ 2 | The inspiration is clear, the graphics and audio are fine, but unfortunately you miss the mark in a few areas. There's no challenge, ever. The level 3 spread shot you start with is more than enough to dispatch all and any enemies. There are batteries everywhere so I never had to use the level 1 blaster after trying it out. The lack of challenge only intensifies with every battery upgrade you find. The purple death lasers are so over powered that I genuinely zoned out of boredom and nearly died as a result. That should not happen! On top of this the screenshake gives me a headache, seems I'm not the only one either. Without challenge there is no fun, simply grind. Here are a few suggestions. Power should be rare to come by. This creates a sense of urgency: find the next battery at any cost. To mitigate the frustration of not finding a battery the player could have refillable (costs money!) reserve tank which is automatically used should they run out of energy. The super weapons should drain a lot of power, choosing to switch to a lower powered weapon conserves energy. Fighting enemies is a choice, avoiding them might save energy after all. One excellent example of urgency and challenge from LD 38 is [Quantum Catburetor](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-catburetor). It has a shrinking level mechanic, which is fitting to the theme and more importantly works like a charm. Do give it a spin if you missed it last time. In conclusion: Quality workmanship, yet the design is a bit lacking. Good work for 48 hours, don't get me wrong. |
| Aug 1 11:59:17 | 1h 00m | MarsX | ♥ 5 | Countless UFOs were not on my mind when I signed up for a trip to Mars. Well, maybe that is the reason they call it a one-way journey. The audio-visuals are fine and the controls solid, except for the shield which is implemented in a rather curious way. If you repeatedly tap space nothing happens, but you end up losing shield energy anyways. The theme doesn't really show up. Sure, you have energy to use, but it does not run out on its own. If you are really good at dodging, there's no power running out at all. Just a little observation. An ok, dodge'em up in all. You could have done a bit more I reckon, taken the size of your team. |
| Aug 1 13:37:19 | 1h 38m | Terminal Attraction | ♥ 0 | Well that was an entertaining story. Sure it's about dating as usual, but the battery theme was a very funny take on it. Now then, to complaining. Whenever I play interactive media, regardless of the medium, I have to bring up choice and consequence. If none of the choices change anything, then what is the point of interactivity in the first place. The story here is interactive, but it never changes based on what you do. There are no consequences to any choice and as such it would work in video or short story form just a well. The thing is, there are a few obvious and easy ways you could add consequences to this very same story: * Blowing a date, no not that way, as in making a very bad impression (those pick-up lines already exist) and causing the date to go bust. Someone hates you now, good job! * The bad guy should be a stalker who follows "promising" batteries who use the app. So after 2-3 dates the bad guy strikes and takes the player (I called him Mr Creepy and no-one cared!) to their lair. * Then when you have to message someone it suddenly matters how well your dates went. If you try to contact someone who doesn't like you, then they will dismiss the message (you could have a funny reaction scene here too). * With no help you are fresh out of luck. Try again with different dates this time maybe? Replayability! That's what I would change at least. Eh, I was entertained anyways. Fine job on the story itself. Do think about interactivity and consequences next time some more. |
| Aug 1 14:25:39 | 48m 20s | Coffee Hero: Powered by Coffee | ♥ 5 | Pleasant to look at, yet the music is grating. That averages out nicely, doesn't it? The task of brewing coffee for a bunch of devs doesn't seem like a nice job, to be honest. Especially if the equipment they got, four machines specifically designed to make โ๏ธ and nothing else, are slow, hard to use and loud. Having to use each machine multiple times per cup really kills it for me. Why don't the sugar and milk machines simply add 2 slots per use and the coffee machine just fill up the rest of the cup. This way each different drink would only take a maximum of 4 machine uses. Of course a super fancy 4 machine combo coffee should boost the devs more than a plain brew to compensate for this system. Another little annoyance is the info button. It should toggle the info on and off, rather than having to press it down. Unnecessary input should not be required to acquire or assess vital information; that's some UI design 101 for you. Otherwise this works fine. There's even a rather tough 3 star goal for those who can live with the annoying machines, but I cannot. Sorry. |
| Aug 1 18:08:36 | 3h 42m | KOCMOHaBT Spaceman | ♥ 1 | An enjoyable exploration experience this. Usually these types of "wander around and listen to audio logs" experiences are quite boring, but here having to conserve fuel and use a bit of reasoning to find the next satellite made it much more pleasant. The visuals are really neat, I especially like the collage technique used on the planets. The procedural music is somewhat odd to say the least, which does help set an alien mood. The voice over is maybe a bit too muddled in places, but it's not bad by any means. Yeah, certainly worth playing. Can't really tell that it was made in mere 48 hours. Good work! |
| Aug 1 18:38:35 | 29m 59s | From the Shadows | ♥ 2 | Asymmetrical turn-based strategy game! Now this is right up my alley and after playing it I can say the design is indeed nice, but the execution does leave a few things in the dark. The main problem in solo mode is not seeing the shadow turn. My people just die seemingly at random even when I *clearly* had them far enough from any lvl. 1 shadows. My only option is to blame the program as it doesn't show me what happened. The other problem is related to the first one. Your instructions say lvl. 1 shadows can attack one space away, yet in reality their range orthogonally is two. That threw me off initially before I checked the multiplayer mode. Of course if the shadow turn was shown I would have gotten it immediately. The graphics are neat and the audio serviceable. I really like the simple, yet effective animation of the characters. With visible shadow turns and a solo shadow mode this would be just great. Now it's merely ok, so not a bad effort. |
| Aug 1 19:15:11 | 36m 36s | Sunseeker | ♥ 5 | The concept is interesting. Rather than having the player alone fight hordes of enemies, there are AI buddies and even a bit of resource management with the energy crystals. In practice things quickly go south. Choose one you can't have both: distant overview camera or click to attack. Currently clicking on enemies in the heat of the battle is really tough, annoyingly so. I would outright use auto attack on the hero as it is positioning that matters here, not pinpoint accuracy or actions per minute. Another problem is the AI allies. With AI you need to make sure it acts reasonably in the every possible situation it can be in. Here the allies protecting the king just stand there doing nothing until an enemy gets close at which point one or, at most, two of them go fight while the other two continue doing nothing at all. In the end they die one by one rather than fighting as a coherent unit. The king could also position himself away from the openings, trying to stay behind his protectors. He is also alarmingly keen on simply doing nothing productive. The magician at least has an excuse for standing still. So ah, it needs quite a bit of work this one. The graphics and audio are fine though. |
| Aug 1 21:15:04 | 1h 59m | Starship Alpha | ♥ 2 | The idea is solid and there seems to be quite a few events in there, based on looking at the code, but this is just not very enjoyable to play. I'm going to be blunt from here on out. There are *many* of issues with your entry. Due to the nature of the design these are mostly *user interface* issues, so I'll just give you a quick run down. Here we go: * Stats update every 15 seconds. This should be every second or even multiple times a second. If the numbers aren't constantly changing, then the user doesn't know if anything is happening at all. **Immediate feedback** is *super* important in UI design. * Teaching unimportant information. The user doesn't need to know how often events happen. Tell them they happen occasionally, that's enough. **The less you need to teach to the user the better**. Only give them the bare essentials as all they want to do is to start playing now! * Vague information. The production bars give me a relative representation of production as in there is more food production than fuel production, but the stats on the right are absolute values. So how much fuel do I get every minute if my production is 5 bars? **Accurate information is required for decision making** so the GUI should relay this information. * Loads of buttons, nobs and doohickeys. General rules: **less is more**, **concise is better**. All the 8 production widgets could have been represented as sliders, with the production name and amount on top of the slider. Unity has great built-in GUI sliders for this purpose. * GUI scaling. The GUI does not scale with the resolution of the window. Unity has great built-in tools (RectTransform anchors) for this too. * Noisy background image. It is supposed to look like a hyper drive effect, yes? Well, all it does here is make everything harder to read. Keep playing different kinds of things for inspiration and reference. Keep developing different kinds of things for practice and fun! Eventually you'll get great at making things. |
| Aug 2 07:50:30 | 10h 35m | Mech Core | ♥ 1 | Easy mode is easy indeed. Got to the boss a second time (and it managed to get stuck on the energy generator in its melee phase) and then the bots just stopped attacking. No congratulations screen, no nothing. Bots Demolished: 371. Hard mode is also easy. What?! Once again beat the boss two times. Bots Demolished: 368, I must have missed some of the energy stealing bots this time. The only difference, I'm guessing here, is how much energy I lose when hit, but dodging bullets is just as easy as before. I expected more bots, more bullets, more everything! Hard mode should be *really hard*! Other that the lack of challenge everything is just fine. A competent Smash TV ๐ค reskin on a shoestring budget. Good work! |
| Aug 2 08:26:44 | 36m 14s | Unleaded: The Story of a Van | ♥ 1 | Why not call it Desert Van and start a fundraiser? Joking aside, driving forever is surprisingly fun when you are going as fast as you can dodging invincible twigs. Playing it safe is less challenging and as such less fun unfortunately. I got to 11km before giving up. I had a near full tank of gas as there were loads of pickups just next to the road. Driving on the road is the best strategy anyways as you can get stuck on ramps if unlucky enough (like me!). The twigs and the cardboard boxes are made of strong stuff indeed. You should have put physics on the boxes at least. Engine sounds, particle effects (smoke and dust) and some kind of a damage model (running headlong into a fence should affect the van a bit yeah?) would have been great additions in my book. Currently this is ok for what it is. |
| Aug 2 10:33:52 | 2h 07m | Power Struggle | ♥ 1 | Nice take on the Hidden in plain sight formula. Both sides have their weaknesses, but I would say playing as the resistance is easier in the end once you master the skill of blending into the crowd. A few small issues: * It is rather easy to keep tabs on the spawn-points as the state and kill the operative right when they emerge. This could be alleviated by having civilians constantly spawn from and end their journeys to the same points too. The resistance player can always figure out which dot their agent is by timing their spawn correctly. * The different colored doors are quite tough for colorblind people. Each door could be associated with a shape too, for instance: red square, green triangle, yellow circle, etc, to remove the problem. Had a lot of fun with this. Great work! |
| Aug 2 11:01:50 | 27m 58s | Yet Another Exhausted Day | ♥ 0 | A bit disappointed by the ending really. It should have been something trivial or useless to make it all *worth while*! I love bizarre ideas so great job! |
| Aug 2 11:14:30 | 12m 40s | Ultimate | ♥ 1 | The design is very standard, but it could work if everything else was spot on. Unfortunately the controls leave a lot to be desired. Usually in top-down shooters you can shoot independent of your movement. This can be achieved by using the mouse for completely free aiming direction, or by using the WASD keys for movement and the arrow keys for shooting in 4 (or 8) directions. I'm so used to such input schemes that going back to Atari-aged "run towards enemy and hope for the best" controls is simply not acceptable. Neat graphics effects though. Solid effort. |
| Aug 2 11:39:31 | 25m 01s | The Wrath of Dracula | ♥ 0 | You managed to squeeze competent graphics out of Unity's standard assets, that's quiet a feat. The bat is suspect though. I like turn-based tactics and in the end it even got a bit challenging, but I had nearly given up due to boredom already. The user interface makes playing very slow. You should have used the mouse for everything right from the beginning. There is also a noticeable pause after every move, when the AI is is taking their turn. Their movement speed could be sped up a bit and the pause should be removed completely when there are no visible AI characters on screen. Biting the priest froze the program. That wasn't a very nice end to my rampage. |
| Aug 2 12:32:13 | 52m 42s | Alien Swarm | ♥ 1 | Turrets! Who doens't like them. The difficulty should ramp up faster. It got a bit stale already at around 3 minutes. Then at 5 minutes things started happening so at least it didn't take longer than that. Safe and simple entry. |
| Aug 2 12:49:52 | 17m 39s | Discharged Automaton | ♥ 1 | Some neat ideas there with portals, clones and the devil. Surprising amount of content with a neat conclusion to boot. The controls are the weakest link here, which is very usual. The collisions are sticky and the animations bug out whenever changing directions or jumping, which is to say when doing anything at all! In general platformers now-a-days need polished and interesting movement mechanics. It is hard to get excited about the same old "move right and jump" spiel. Good effort, great mood too. |
| Aug 2 13:54:23 | 1h 04m | Leonardo Montes' DUNKIRK | ♥ 1 | Having seen the film in cinema, but not the real battle, and knowing a thing or two about aerial combat I have to, regrettably, inform you that your simulation doesn't quite hit the mark, old boy. The controls are impossible on PC and tough even with a pad as there doesn't seem to be any way to invert the vertical movement axis, which my brain seems to require. The AI planes exhibit erratic movement patterns, much unlike the smooth playable plane and such make for needlessly hard targets. The axis/ally indicator seems to be broken too. It showed 0 allies, but there were a bunch of them around. Lastly I wasn't even close to running out of fuel when exiting the battle. That too was missing from the authentic **DUNKIRK**โข๏ธ experience. Valiant effort nonetheless. Top marks on visuals and atmosphere. |
| Aug 2 14:12:47 | 18m 24s | BOOMRANGED | ♥ 1 | Looks and sounds nice, controls well, the camera seems a bit too close for comfort and then there are no monsters at all. All I can do is collect things and eventually run out of energy... Why is this? @Narudgi Let this be a lesson for you. Always test your project before uploading! Trying again then. Got to level 3; nothing much has changed. The colors sure and the layout a bit, but the challenge is still on the same low level as the previous two levels. Every enemy dies in one hit and taking a hit yourself is not a big deal as every enemy drops more health. The only marginally difficult task was finding the ship sometimes when I had wandered off course for too long. Pleasant, but too easy to hold my interest for long. Solid effort technically. I especially like the spaceship expressions. |
| Aug 2 14:55:19 | 42m 32s | Battery-Powered Business | ♥ 3 | The graphics are neat and they sure did a great job at luring me in promising city building, strategical thinking or at least some solid resource management fun. What I got is none of those things. I'm gravely disappointed and here is why: I get the idea, there's no way to get more power because of the theme, but it makes absolutely no sense that a nuclear reactor, ** *a nuclear reactor* **, would only reduce the amount of power other buildings use. That's not how a reactor works, it could power the *whole bloody city*! The power generators could instead be high tech labs researching power efficiency solutions or employee training centers, something like that. Sure this is just a visual thing, but don't underestimate believability. It is a very important aspect of immersion. I have a bigger issue with the pipe fixing puzzle. It happens constantly and it is not interesting, thus it gets annoying quick. On top of this it too makes no sense. It's not my job to fix the power lines. I'm the company CEO, I can pay some mechanics to do it for me. You already have these random events popping up all the time, the electrical fault should be just one of them. Talking about the events. They are random and there is no way to deal with them. No choices to take, no decision to make. Why are they there at all? You could have made them interactive, e.g. There are riots here. Do you yield, bribe them, scatter the rioters with force? Now that would be something. That's about it. Nothing personal, I just had to get this off my mind. *Cheers!* |
| Aug 2 17:49:21 | 2h 54m | Spaced out | ♥ 1 | Brilliant audio-visuals, excellent in fact. The controls are fine, yet driving is quite tricky as the levels are very narrow. Slowly floating back to the track is quite annoying. I'm not an expert driver so that might have something to do with it too. The design is very basic, it's *carting in space*, but at least the "last one gets no fuel" mechanic is somewhat novel (I haven't seen it before that is). Good work! |
| Aug 2 18:34:16 | 44m 55s | ULTIMATE PROSELYTISM & MIRACLES SIMULATOR 2017: THE MOVIE THE GAME | ♥ 0 | I expected schlock based on the title and you delivered! The fact that the schlockiness extends to the interactions as well is where you start to lose me. There's basic platforming, needless icon clicking and even a QTE piss-take. It is all pointless, boring time wasting. Basically this is not good-bad, this is bad-bad. At least some of the jokes were chuckle worthy. |
| Aug 2 18:45:34 | 11m 18s | Power Defense | ♥ 1 | It's a start alright. The flashing lights are a neat too. Eh... I ran out of things to say. This doesn't happen often. |
| Aug 2 19:23:29 | 37m 55s | PowerBot | ♥ 3 | Retro to the max! Graphically reminds me of [MegaBot](http://www.acid-play.com/download/megabot), while interaction-wise [Janitor Dan the Spaceman](http://www.groovylime.com/janitordan.htm) is closer. Them's some genuine retro freeware titles for you (so retro that you need a virtual Win XP run Janitor Dan, unfortunately). Quite liked it, even if ultimately it is very simple. Some more power based mechanics and this would be quite something. |
| Aug 3 06:35:50 | 11h 12m | LD-39 - Cyborg Mattness | ♥ 0 | A standard shooter defense mission with a *twist*! The twist being super fast bug enemies and a generator which keeps popping up after been destroyed countless times. Oh and an energy mechanic too, but that is par for the course in this jam. The generator respawning is the most curious idea here. Usually in these sort of titles the generator has a lot of health and if you fail to defend it then it is the end, try again. I think that would have worked here too. The fast enemies I can deal with, but maybe they should spawn from the edges of the screen not from a random position. Sometimes there is barely any time to react. Having to spam the F button is another small issue. Holding it down would be much less annoying. Ok effort this. More polish and playtesting would have gone a long way. |
| Aug 3 07:00:47 | 24m 57s | Energy Scraps | ♥ 1 | I quite enjoyed this. For some developers exploration equates to simply walking around, but here you managed to create a hostile environment surprisingly effectively with some basic turrets and patrol robots. I would have liked to play more, but once I died (tried only to upgrade my speed and energy harvesting rate, didn't work that!) having to start from the very beginning just didn't feel worth it. A simple solution would be to save the current progress every time the player visits the upgrade machine. That would have kept me going. Good work! |
| Aug 3 07:11:37 | 10m 50s | Low Power Spacecraft | ♥ 1 | What a blast! Beautiful Voxely art-style, tight controls, challenging enemies (and loads of them!). There's nothing much more to say really. I'll go play a few more rounds. |
| Aug 3 07:30:40 | 19m 03s | Mega Awesome Super Cool Battery Game | ♥ 1 | Sure, it's not a masterpiece or anything, but you are beating yourself too hard over this. I can see past the crude outer shell and admire the beauty inside. You see this, most importantly, is fun! Gravity flipping infused with infinite ~~running~~ flying is a novel enough concept (although I'm sure I've seen it before somewhere). Three flips seemed about right to me. You can pass most obstacles with two, but having one extra just in case ain't a bad thing. The running out of power bit works great when you speed up, but less great once you start slowing down. It is an agonizing death, trying to reach the next battery and getting so close, *so close!* Fine work all things considered, really. |
| Aug 3 07:41:17 | 10m 37s | Remote | ♥ 1 | I killed the internet *and it felt good!* Splendid animations (why no graphics rating?), pleasant enough dexterity challenge and ah... ??? There's not much more here, but sometimes little is enough. |
| Aug 3 08:05:06 | 23m 49s | Socket Punch! | ♥ 2 | Spectacular brawling this! Neat graphics, solid tutorial, fun for quite a while. Unfortunately spamming the shoot button didn't jell with me at all. A rapid fire (maybe even spread shot) weapon which drains more energy would have been ace against the flying enemies. Playing also gave me some motion sickness after a while, not much but enough to put me off in the end. Another small issue is sometimes not noticing when the pylon I'm connected to retracts again. You could have a plugged-in icon next to the power bar when charging. Great work overall! I always find things to nitpick about. |
| Aug 3 09:08:46 | 1h 03m | Wrong Slumber | ♥ 0 | An interesting and weird setting, that's always nice to see. Fun too, but I do have one major input issue with it. You see I'm not a fan on clicking. Holding down the mouse button to ~~shoot~~ flick, even if slowly, would have suited me a lot better. The rapid fire mode runs out *so quickly!* Well made nonetheless. Quite enjoyed the strangeness. |
| Aug 3 09:50:22 | 41m 36s | Dynasty Through The Decades | ♥ 0 | **Space Tsunami!** This never ends does it? Like @matita I also ran it for 4000+ years doing nothing and there we are, still trucking to the far reaches of space with 0 power. That is not very thematic, my dynasty died thousands of years ago. Tried again this time trying some of the actions proper and it hardly makes a difference. A whole lot of clicking with only guesswork to guide my choices. Then a few random events take it all down anyways. In the end the things you choose are all for naught. What's the point if there's no way for my dynasty to crumble to the sands of time, as the voice over so eloquently puts it. The idea and scope are ambitious, but the execution does not live up to them at all. |
| Aug 3 10:17:57 | 27m 35s | The Visible City | ♥ 3 | I love the idea and the aesthetic. The police squadron doesn't seem to affect the rapscallions at all. That surely is a bug? The maintenance team does work, and boy do they have to work overtime to patch up for the ineffective police force. More (functional) police squads and technical staff would have been ace. Something along the lines of [Atom Zombie Smasher](http://blendogames.com/atomzombiesmasher/). Worth playing that, if you haven't already. Good work. |
| Aug 3 12:17:53 | 1h 59m | The Quest for the Mighty Battery Charger | ♥ 4 | Short and simple, it just works. The boss design clearly takes cues from the book of boss battle tropes. It could have been something more interesting is all I'm saying. Pretty ok job all in all. |
| Aug 3 18:57:53 | 6h 40m | !SMARTBOTS | ♥ 3 | I generally aren't a fan of programming for entertainment as I already do it for a living and your take on the idea didn't change my mind. There's a reason why the most popular production line management simulations have neat mouse driven interfaces and no cold hard programming. Figuring out the logic is the interesting bit, not messing with the interface. Well I gave it a go and noticed that commanding the bots is very finicky, for a multitude of reasons: * They push the ore around (through walls at times) rather than picking it up. * The bots collide with each other so trying to get them to work together is a hassle. * The robots always reset back to their original position when compiling. * Destroy() doesn't work on pressure plates. * The elevator bot falls like a brick when moving down. * Movement is in seconds, out of all things. Lets roll with this. How to make it work? * Robots pass though each other. * Robots pass through ore too. * Elevator are flat so that they can move other robots as well as ore * A Drop() command * Movement based on targets rather than seconds or tiles. Targets are set in the world by clicking. Each target has a name, so the movement command becomes MOVETO(TARGET1). This way each target can be used by multiple robots. The node system you got already works well, good job on that. Right, the effort is there, the ambition is there. Now make it work, yeah? |
| Aug 3 20:20:44 | 1h 22m | Away Team | ♥ 1 | A functional management simulation which leans heavily on random chance. Now I can live with RNG, calculating chances is a big part of management. What I cannot live with is only having net loss actions, another big part of management is avoiding those. In the second set of locations I ended up in a situation where each location took 4+ turns to explore, but the reward for each was on average less than 200 supplies. 4 turns costs 40 energy, 40 energy costs 200 supplies. Notice the problem? You only had 48 hours to make this of course, so it would be unfair to expect loads of content, but the missions would be much more interesting were the any choices to make based on the team composition and the location type. For example: a rogue droid blocks the path? Fight it with small arms, blow it up (costs an explosive), sneak past, reprogram it, talk to it. Stuff like that. Solid work overall. I simply have high hopes that's all. |
| Aug 4 07:03:48 | 10h 43m | FIZZLE | ♥ 3 | A well made entry, no doubt. Moody too. I've seen these types before, but usually they lack any sort of urgency. The power constantly running out really did help in that regard. I didn't have any close calls, but in the end I though I had lost one of the power cores. Luckily I found it in a close by room. Phew! There are a few technical issues, such as the gravity beam area being very big making it hard to pick up single objects. The AI is also very dumb, which isn't all that bad as you can easily trap monsters in rooms you've already been to. Some graphical glitches here and there too, like the gravity beam not shutting down when activating the last power core and things prodding through the side of the door sprite. Little things. Enjoyed it more than I though I would. Good job! |
| Aug 4 07:07:57 | 4m 09s | ABANDON SHIP | ♥ 1 | Solid entry. I would have preferred dropping people too, simply because it makes more sense and allows for more choices to be made on the fly. Some additional mechanics for controlling the fire might work too, such as fire extinguishers or cutting the air to different sections of the ship. Now that I think about it a different take on the same idea might work. A top-down view where you control the doors and multiple squads of emergency personel. You can vent the rooms to fight fires, but the air recyclers don't work no more so it is a risky move. The electric systems controlling the doors and other systems of the ship can break down at which point you can command some of your personel to hack fix the borked parts, but that means that they aren't taking part in resquing people. Good work, dismiss my ramblings. |
| Aug 4 07:16:51 | 8m 54s | Blackout Z | ♥ 1 | Simple, intense, fun! Those spinning blades are a rad innovation, better get more batteries often! Neat *Mission Impossible* inspired graphics. Wait, that's *Hotline Miami* now-a-days. Thanks for making me feel old! Fine work! |
| Aug 4 07:57:37 | 40m 46s | Wizard Out of Power | ♥ 2 | I agree with @linky439 on pretty much everything. More polish is gravely needed and the controls could use more depth (jumping, sliding, teleporting, anything really) and tightening up. Thematically it would be more interesting to be running out of power yourself. Why aren't we playing as the red wizard again? |
| Aug 4 08:57:13 | 59m 36s | BATTERY BLASTER | ♥ 3 | **Metal!** I managed to destroy two of the generators no problem. Finding the last one turned out to be a bit more difficult and that annoying ๐ followed me dealing chip damage. Destroyed the last generator and the cowardly ๐ buggered off right away! *The nerve!* At this point the enemies in the room also stopped moving and simply shot me from a distance. That didn't happen before and they managed to get me down to 10% health or so. I'm quite sad to say that this is as far as I got. The grand finale was foiled by the doors to the boss room (the forth pathway from the start). You see, while looking for the 3rd generator I accidentally *nearly* walked into the boss room and the doors slammed shut right in front of my eyes. The ๐ forgot to open them up again when fleeing back to his lair. An impressive entry in all. Could use more polish of course as does pretty much every other entry. Good work! |
| Aug 4 09:51:04 | 53m 51s | Car jump | ♥ 1 | The physics are indeed wonky. Driving down a ramp should be the easiest task, not the hardest! I would have liked to see some targets up in the air, like rings or stars, to go for. Crashing into boxes is a bit too trivial, once you do manage to clear the ramp that is. Not a bad idea and only partially dreadful excecution. I'd call that a pretty good first jam. |
| Aug 4 10:11:58 | 20m 54s | Only on Batteries | ♥ 1 | A test of patience. *I failed*. Is there anything out there in the great unknown? I will never know. I would more often than not forget to look at the battery and shoot myself to death! Finding energy on the field or even more batteries would have increased the tension. Cor, energy pickup! Do I dare to venture further right away? Taking risks is interesting, you see. The effects are very nice. Controlling a battery powered cake was also quite amusing. Well made entry in all. |
| Aug 4 11:00:39 | 48m 41s | Power Earth Saver | ♥ 1 | Simple and effective. Dodging hundreds of bullets is always fun. My controls went weird once I lost my shield, but I played again and it did not occur a second time. Probably my keyboard or something. Good job! |
| Aug 4 12:40:30 | 1h 39m | XenoSiphon | ♥ 1 | Opening a door to a xenosiphon nest was genuinely unnerving the first time around. Less so later of course. I could not find the escape pod, even when playing again. The closest I got was a window to outer space. *Freedom so close!* The audio fits like a facehugger and the graphics, while low tech, do convey the scifi horror aesthetic. That Nostromo spacesuit is marvelously blocky! The only issue I have, apart from there being no clues as to where the escape pod is located, is the controls. Cane (surely that is a suitably off brand name for him) moves like a tank and the combat controls have no weight or desperation to them. More shakycam and xeno guts please! Good entry in the Xeno series (this is just the first of many, yes?) |
| Aug 4 13:23:37 | 43m 07s | AI Overlord Runaway | ♥ 3 | Funny thing, I though about making a time bending dodge 'em up (using Unity's new Timeline feature) before the jam, but ended up scrapping it as the theme didn't seem to fit. Well, you found a way to make it fit! While initially confusing, once I got the hang of it switching powers became a breeze. Conserve energy, switch to slowmo, back to eco, then a few seconds of time stop, now leave a ghost... Brilliant stuff! I'm not a fan of the "super powers", but hey you can sacrifice them later. If only there was a hotkey for sacrificing too. Here's an idea for that. You can set a priority number for each power. When you press H it will sacrifice the lowest priority power. Maybe even do it automatically if you run out of energy? Challenging (and as such fun!). I didn't quite manage the normal boss yet, but I will keep trying. And you keep working on this; it is an interesting project. |
| Aug 4 13:50:03 | 26m 26s | Ted Crashed! | ♥ 1 | A pleasant (partly due to the lovely music) experience. Exploring the land, connecting energy crystals, it's all well and good. Some hostile forces, like animal life or toxic areas, on the planet would have improved the discovery portion for me. Currently no carefulness is needed when moving around. The theme doesn't quite fit here either, you are running out of time and gathering power, not losing it. That's a minor thing though. The theme is there to get people started on a project, not to *ruin it!* It is very good for a first timer. The *Thanks to* section is very sweet indeed. |
| Aug 4 14:11:45 | 21m 42s | Phil | ♥ 1 | An ok puzzle this. You got a lot of mileage out of a the crystals, which is a sign of good puzzle design. The last problem had me stumped for a bit, I tried a much more convoluted solution and couldn't quite get past the door in time. Then I noticed the tunnel next to the door.... Yeah, silly me for not using my eyes! Would have liked some more levels of course, but such is the curse of the jam (most entries are content light). Fine job in all. Puzzle design is something I tend not to even try so I gotta give you props for that too. |
| Aug 4 16:02:03 | 1h 50m | Captain Quark and the Search For More Power | ♥ 0 | Asteroids, eh? Bog-standard Asteroids, eh? Where's the gimmick?! (fuel running out doesn't count, everyone has that now!). It is hard to get excited about Asteroids in the year 2017, it really is. Do think about additional mechanics. Here are a few for free: Force push asteroids into each other, a slow-mo field, a grappling hook to use an asteroid as a wrecking ball, teleportation ability, homing missiles, stuff like that. Solid work otherwise. |
| Aug 4 18:24:29 | 2h 22m | Exponential Maintenance Engineer | ♥ 1 | First use of mathematical powers I've seen so far. *Numbers?* Rad! Quite a bit of fun, trying to fit in as many blocks as possible, aiming to blow up the TNT and not to blow up the plutonium. Good stuff! Using escape to start is pushing things too far though... |
| Aug 4 19:01:59 | 37m 30s | Universal Powers | ♥ 1 | It sure is funny, but not any fun. How could it be? It is completely arbitrary! Played three times, got to situation 15 three times. Only saw one repeated question. That is quite a few events there; a solid amount of content. Like said the irrationality of the questions is both the blessing and the curse of this project. Absurdity is funny, but it completely undermines the interactive side. Might as well flip a coin to choose left or right. Destroying asteroids is very relaxing though. |
| Aug 4 19:54:14 | 52m 15s | Rats will kiss the gunner's daughter | ♥ 4 | Didn't get the mutineer the first time as I tried to figure it out the hard way, evaluation all the answers. Then I hatched a theory: how 'bout simply trusting their answers to the direct question on day 1? So I played three more times, each time bribing the bribable looking person and manhandling the snitch looking fellow on day 1. Then I skipped the rest of the days by spamming the neutral question button, not reading any of the answers. Every single time the person who got the most votes on the first day turned out to be the mutineer... You might just have a bit of an issue here. I second @amras0000's suggestion of asking the direct question last. Why wouldn't you do that as the captain? That is when you've figured out who is the stern sailor type, who is the snitch and who likes money. Apparently you don't even need to know any of that, but you get the point. The graphics, audio and mood are great, *so it is not all bad!* In fact it is mostly not bad; I'm being facetious. |
| Aug 4 20:19:38 | 25m 24s | Sky Sea | ♥ 1 | A nice tranquil experience this. The graphics are neat and the ambient music sets up the mood well. Currently none of the choices matter much due to the early ending; a bit of a let down that. I was getting invested in my choices though, so there certainly is potential here for a solid interactive and, most importantly, non-linear story. Just a guess, is that mech based on the Page Delta-2 Peacebringer (I just looked that up) from the original Deus Ex? |
| Aug 5 07:37:32 | 11h 17m | Power Planet | ♥ 1 | Splendid cel shaded graphics, on the flipside the music is annoying (thanks for the options menu!) The level is very impressive. I love verticality and massive structures and you have both! The first jump after the generator should be telegraphed better as @kornel remarked earlier. I tried it once and failed, then after a while came back here to find out that you can run and even then it is a very close jump indeed. There are a few more like that later too. The secret is pretty funny ๐. I would have liked to see more such hidden gems around the level. I managed to sequence break the bit after the Proto Gel bridge. You can walk around the pilar to the right and drop down to the purple door. I though it was a secret and got a bit disappointed when the lift went up to the intended path instead. Fine job in all. Thematically it is not a good fit, but I certainly don't care. |
| Aug 5 09:18:04 | 1h 40m | Power Planner | ♥ 0 | Simple resource management fun. The graphics are nice; music is sorely lacking unfortunately. The difficulty ramp up, especially in the metropolis map is very sudden. For 3 minutes it gives me single tasks and then all of a sudden ๐ฅ 5 concurrent tasks! Some tweaking there would be pertinent. Great work for 48 hours! |
| Aug 5 09:37:27 | 19m 23s | Ads will tell our Story for us | ♥ 1 | Sweet audio-visuals! The main melody stuck with me for quite a while. The ending is clever a way to get a bit more mileage out of the level assets โ๏ธ I'm certainly going to use something like that in a future project. On the interactivity side there's nothing special to note. Basic platforming with a fuel system, because everyone is doing that now. I would have liked to see something special here too. Great job! |
| Aug 5 12:00:54 | 2h 23m | Windup | ♥ 1 | Brilliant audio-visuals. Winding down; the lights dimming, movement slowing and the sound effects changing; is done really well. The controls (โจ๏ธ and ๐ญ) aren't terrible, but the camera certainly could use a few tweaks. Mainly, not going inside walls blocking the view. The big issue for me is that I simply have no time or interest in these *collectathon* type experiences any more (too old!). It is all about 3D platforming (not a fan) with very little reasoning or decision making involved. The biggest sin, for a gotta-catch-them-all-fest, is resetting the items if you manage to die, which happens constantly in the second level. Collecting everything again all over again, again and again is simply not interesting or fun. Solid workmanship, the design is not my cup of tea. |
| Aug 5 13:56:07 | 1h 55m | BAT-BATTERY | ♥ 1 | I love it how everything goes ๐ฅ. ๐ goes ๐ฅ, ๐จ goes ๐ฅ, even ๐ goes ๐ฅ I got to a pilar of ๐ฎ๐ฎ๐ฎ flinging ๐ฉ at me when the program (HTML5) froze. Too bad, had fun until that point. Why does a ๐ฆ need a ๐? Why so much ๐ฉ? These questions and many more will haunt anyone playing this for the rest of their lives. Well done, you! |
| Aug 5 17:13:32 | 3h 17m | They Attack At Night | ♥ 1 | Very nice thematic mechanics you've got here to back up the basic shooting and tower defense. Not to say the execution is brilliant all around. Absorbing the power of the city, it shutting down and the vision range dropping is marvelous. The enemy graphics are less great, but serviceable at least. The turrets should be more powerful, their damage and range are very low. Constructing them is quite slow too. Maybe they could build up on their own after right clicking, draining energy from the main core directly. Them trenches. I get the idea of lighting your path with "light spears", but that doesn't make it any less annoying. An old-school flashlight would do better in this regard. Last little niggle: Runs pretty badly on my computer. The options you put in allowed me to get it up to 40 fps, looking very pixely though. More of a UE4 problem this. Inventive stuff really. Good job. |
| Aug 5 20:12:27 | 2h 58m | Mars Mystery | ♥ 1 | I love manually toggling systems and subsystems, be it in a sub, a mech or a mars rover. Having total control over a machine and knowing how to use it is a very nice thematic idea. I didn't even think of that in the jam, *the possibilities!* Sure, it is just a maze under the hood, but the atmosphere and the controls really make it work. Good job! ๐ฝ |
| Aug 6 08:19:30 | 12h 07m | ErixStein 3D | ♥ 1 | Using Qix (I like to go to the source) to generate fps levels. Quite an interesting idea this and it even works. The shotgun is very inconsistent for some reason though. At times the images take a single shot to shatter. Other times good 5+ hits. Seems to have something to do with distance and whether the image has been activated yet or not. Good work. |
| Aug 6 09:17:31 | 58m 01s | Manual Mech | ♥ 4 | The controls are difficult for a reason and I quite like that. Jumping especially takes a lot of time to get used to which makes it challenging. The graphics and audio are good too. Now, I could not finished the second level mostly due to unfair level design. Dying to a turret or running out of power never felt like I had made a mistake. Turrets quite often cannot be seen before it is too late, so you have to memorize their positions which is lame. Running out of power is also more of a memorization problem. Play the level multiple times and eventually you know which is the most optimal path to the exit. I'm not a big fan of this type of *trial and error* design. I want to be able to make good enough decisions the first time playing, not the tenth time. Being able to see further would alleviate some of this memorization. Checkpoints with an energy charging station would work too. Another possibility is to simplify the controls, but then you would start losing the mech angle which would be a shame. Good work overall. |
| Aug 6 09:50:24 | 32m 53s | Power Rush | ♥ 0 | The idea is solid. There's a nice timed resource management aspect to it, having to choose which machine to power with each crystal. Unfortunately it is very finicky to play. Crystal deposit look like rocks and they are also very small. When I tried mining one in the very beginning it didn't seem to do anything, so I tried the big rocks next and was stumped until I came back here to read the comments. The problem with the drill is that it does not mine at what the cursor points at. It mines what the drill model points at. Either the drill needs to point directly where you look or the crystal ore should be much bigger making it impossible to miss accidentally. The deposits should also look like big lumps of crystal to make the difference explicit graphically. Throwing crystals into the pipes is a funny idea, but then one of the crystals got stuck in the side of the blue pipe. That was the last straw for me. Polish, polish, polish. That's what you need. |
| Aug 6 10:08:54 | 18m 30s | Turn Out | ♥ 1 | A pleasant puzzle this. Nice progression of mechanics and I didn't get stuck on any level for too long. I don't like the camera snapping back after rotating it, but I guess it was the easiest way to make the controls consistent. The controls were surprisingly intuitive too, taken the 3D nature of the levels. Fine job. |
| Aug 6 10:49:25 | 40m 31s | Bolt World | ♥ 4 | This becomes trivial when using the attack roll. Agar.io has very subtle mechanics, splitting up and spitting mass, which you need to master to do well. Here you just need to roll in the direction of the green arrow. On my third go I lost due to hitting a smaller ball and within the blink of an eye: expanding, eating another ball, expanding again, eating another ball, expanding again and touching a massive ball outside of the screen... That was a bit of an anticlimax. The ball should expand slowly, not instantly, is what I'm saying. The AI opponents don't seem to care much for their survival. They don't flee or use the OP attack roll either. It is functional, but the design requires some tweaking. |
| Aug 6 20:14:51 | 9h 25m | Jetpack June and the Tower of Power | ♥ 1 | Whoosh! |
| Aug 7 07:03:15 | 10h 48m | Neuropower | ♥ 1 | A slick physics based exploration/survival simulation. I would have liked the world to go on forever. Survival has never been this *relaxing*. Good work! |
| Aug 7 10:37:03 | 3h 33m | Power! | ♥ 0 | Seizure inducing flashes ๐ต?! Might want to add a warning for that. It is a reaction test at best. Games required decision making, which there is none here. You could add different colored (and shaped, think of color blind players!) tiles with a multitude of effects, some positive some negative. This way you'd introduce a layer of decision making into the mix: which tile to click next? Eh, what can I say. It is very simple, probably works better on a tablet. Not very innovative or interesting though. Ok job for a first jam. You should rate more entries to receive more ratings, btw. |
| Aug 7 11:37:09 | 1h 00m | Unit S-2 | ♥ 0 | Nice set of abilities. Shock is mostly useful once caught, which doesn't happen very often due to the ease of avoiding contact with running and cloak. Drain was an interesting addition, but it made each encounter even more trivial. The enemies also lose your sight extreme quickly and don't seem to be able to search around very effectively. The โ๏ธ icons work well though. Solid entry; lacking challenge. I'll checkout the post-jam version, no doubt. |
| Aug 7 12:40:25 | 1h 03m | Runnerbot LD39Entry | ♥ 2 | Well made with some *proper* retro graphics to boot (reminded me of Supaplex for some reason). It's been said before and I'll say it again, there's a criminal lack of challenge. I suggest getting rid of extra lives for a start, never needed them. Then reducing the amount of energy power ups. Good job for a first timer. **Edit** Just tried the Post-Jam version. It is much better. I was invested this time and even managed to die naturally (well, being mauled by a zombie ๐ค). I did manage to find one bug through (HTML5). I restarted the run and the abilities didn't work anymore. It simply spawned the "Shield" and "Pulse" popups without the effect... Strange. |
| Aug 7 13:26:50 | 46m 25s | Energy Raid | ♥ 1 | Invokes some early 90's design ideas this one: cheesy intro with lousy English, prerendered looking flat 3D graphics, loose controls, underpowered weapons, crazy fast unfair boss. It's all here! Usually movement controls in shmups are super precise for a reason. You need to be able to dodge bullets, any kind of sliding or acceleration only mess up even attempting that. The enemy weapons are much more interesting than yours: Bouncing bullets, energy snakes/lightcycles, super lazorbeams; good job on those. Why the player's weapons are such simple *pew pew* lasers made me scratch my head. The energy mechanic I'm not so keen on either. All your powerful (yet rather anemic) weapons require energy, but when you run out you also die for good. You don't lose a single life, you lose them all?! Having both a life system and an energy system is weird. Maybe the energy system should only be used for weapons and not for the ship. After all there is little incentive to use the super weapons, as then it is unsure if you can make it to the end of the level at all. The recharge stations, which area easy to miss, don't recharge that much either. Strange 90's design. Did elicit some nostalgia for me though. |
| Aug 7 14:09:55 | 43m 05s | Danger Forever | ♥ 1 | Simple and challenging. Colliding with obstacles isn't very impactful; bouncing backwards with an anemic sound effect doesn't quite do it for me. Just plow on through with sparks and sounds of *trashing metal!* The environment graphics are very dull and gray indeed. The ground texture especially repeats a lot. Not a graphics person me, so can't give you any advice there unfortunately. Found a ๐ I hit one of the breakable walls and instead of it breaking the ship moved upwards and stayed above the action for the rest of the run. Could not pick up any energy there so it is not a very effective cheat, too bad! Ok entry this. Could use some polish, graphical mostly. @blk-dragon Meant to say dull and brown; the old brain is jamming again. Apart from the environment there sure is color. I also forgot to say that the enemy robot model is quite a looker. No worries! |
| Aug 7 14:25:50 | 15m 55s | The Last Stand | ♥ 1 | Simple and effective wave defense shooter. The graphics are nice, audio passable. About the only issue I have with the interactivity is having to spam the mouse button to shoot. I'm allergic to clicking so that elicited a reaction. Bugs: * You can shoot while reloading, meaning you never run out of ammo * If you die after winning you get both messages on top of each other * Back to menu button doesn't quite work * I was promised supply drops. *There were none!* Ok job in all. |
| Aug 7 14:44:57 | 19m 07s | Engines & Earl Grey | ♥ 1 | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, what kind of a name is that? (Holy Mr Moly, it's real!) RNG gods were not on his side that evening thus Isambard spend most of it catching crystals. That rocket has massive idle power draw, not the greatest engineering there Isambard! Simple, fun, charming. The music could have been a bit less low-fi for my taste. Fine job! |
| Aug 7 15:09:00 | 24m 03s | Robogod | ♥ 0 | The graphics are nice. I quite like the divine look of Robogod. I echo @steve-johnson's critique. This is just busy work with a seemingly random outcome (*they all die!*). You could double down on the fiction and world building: giving the player information on what the citizens ended up doing with the energy they received and showing that there are consequences to your choices. Alternatively you could add in game mechanics or puzzle mechanics to test the logical side of your player's noggin. Robobro, you shall be missed. |
| Aug 7 15:28:23 | 19m 23s | Lightbulb | ♥ 0 | For me the words *idle* and *game* don't go well together. Games are about choosing actions to win and not to lose. Sometimes taking no action is the right call, but to do that all the time? It all becomes trivial to say the least. I like to call clickers and other idle software *time wasters*, but one of my more diplomatic friends suggested *passive experiences*. I'm fine with that. Watching paint dry sure is an experience, if you can stomach it. I like the physics though. |
| Aug 7 16:03:07 | 34m 44s | ZETPACK-99 | ♥ 1 | Try the Zetpack? Ha, I'll rather jump off the cliff! Uh oh.... *It doesn't restart!* Amazing visuals. The music fits too, but it gets annoying after a while. It seems I have no ear for low-fi chiptunes any more. (I didn't rate it down, don't you worry). Clever level design, brilliant mechanics. I'm running out of superlatives here. About the only issue I have, is with the controls. Clearing up ๐ธ๐ธ๐ธ after yourself is at times finicky when the auto targeting chooses the ๐ธ in front of you, not the one behind or under you. (It seems @felixmcfelix beat me to the punch) Best of all? It is a puzzle, but it doesn't *feel* like one. Spectacular job in all! |
| Aug 7 19:57:46 | 3h 54m | The Zorvma Invasion | ♥ 0 | It is a strange idea, I have to say. Kind of works too, but it becomes trivial once you get the hang of it. Shoot the walls a few steps ahead of you to keep the line of sight open and, TADA!, infinite energy. I got to 100000 and could have continued indefinitely had I the patience, which I sure don't. How to make it more challenging? Maybe you could fluctuate the speed of earth or the spawning rate of the walls. Another thing you could easily test is varying the size of the walls and the amount hits they take. Not sure if any of that would work, but it's worth a go eh? Ok job. *I guess....* |
| Aug 7 20:24:55 | 27m 09s | Nanni | ♥ 1 | Seen something like this before, you trying to play your gameboy in class dodging the gaze of the teacher. Can't remember the name of it though. I could pretty much just stand next to a power outlet and play the cheap Asteroids clone for a long time. RoboNanny didn't seem to get up to the second floor at all so I went downstairs instead. Then **it** *assaulted* me from around the corner! *Yikes!* Let's not go downstairs no more. Eh, the idea is interesting enough with switching between modes both running in real-time. Nanni simply isn't good enough at patrolling to make it tense or interesting. |
| Aug 8 06:54:05 | 10h 29m | Crankship Courier | ♥ 1 | *"rapidly clicking"* oh dear... There isn't that much clicking thankfully, but, ah, not the most pleasant design that rapid clicking. Neat and funny idea. Is it fun though? I'm not so sure. There seems to be a solid yet boring strategy which works well. Stay above the birds, crank up the engine, crank up the cannon, swoop down a bit, repeat. I guess you'd eventually get too close to the sun for real, but I didn't get to test that. Instead I tried the courageous route. *Have at them, full speed ahead, man the cannons, en garde!* My ship went down pretty much immediately, there are that many birds. The tutorial should be skipped when restarting. It is a good tutorial, but I don't need it a second time. The text sometimes skips forward before I could read it too, unfortunate. Ok job this. Funny to say the least. The graphics aren't bad either. |
| Aug 8 07:23:08 | 29m 03s | Cryozia | ♥ 2 | Wow, this very challenging thus a lot of fun! At first I didn't think there was any progression, but all of a sudden there were red crystals and walls. Then the edges were blocked too! *Those treacherous masters of the Ludum-verse!* Mastering the movement controls was a blast. Trying my hardest to not use both thrusters at the same time, weaving around conserving energy. The random level generation works pretty well. Sometimes the level was real tough, other times a cake walk. Not a big issue and there isn't much you can do about that anyways. RNG is RNG. Excellent work! RIP Jasper ๐ถ |
| Aug 8 08:15:41 | 52m 33s | LAMBDA-DASH | ♥ 3 | I love the amount of control you have over the ship. Having to manually repair everything using the repair interface is less stellar. I'd rather press the button of the system in question to repair it. For instance pressing shift should repair shields, if shields are down. This way the repair interface is only for checking the current condition of the ship, not required for repairs themselves. There are so many enemies after a while that even a single hit taking out shields or one of the thrusters can seal your doom. I got through three big groups of enemies, but the forth group (dozens of fighters again) got me. I think a hit from a lazor or asteroid should not wreck a module completely, 40-60% damage per hit would be more tolerable. Some checkpoint at the energy beacons would be ace too. Small itty bitty graphical glitch: I ran out of energy in the very beginning, but luckily collected the energy beacon after that. Everything worked fine, but the lights of the cockpit didn't turn on again. Great work! |
| Aug 8 09:46:58 | 1h 31m | Robot Kernel PaniK | ♥ 4 | **Micro-management hell!** I finally managed to bring in some crops and clean the air, but nothing happened? I guess I should have opened the vault door too; but I simply cannot get the door, leading to the vault door, opened no matter which terminals I try. Do you need to use multiple terminals for that or what?! The user interface is obtuse and hard to use. It is by design, by the looks of it, but that makes it no less annoying. The energy and life meter should be visible at all times, not behind a menu. *So much unnecessary clicking!* Make it clearer which terminal opens which door (the power lines overlap a lot currently) and reduce the mount of clicking in the UI. Ok job otherwise. |
| Aug 8 10:36:08 | 49m 10s | Spincharge | ♥ 1 | Simple idea, but the physics don't quite work. The spinning looks weird for a start, as if the tops stopped spinning altogether at times. Secondly the spinning doesn't affect the movement in any way. I managed to get my top wobbling and even jumping at one point, but it didn't get out of control movement-wise. The big issue comes from both combatants having the very same amount of spin and the same movement control. All you need to do is to park yourself at an energy charger and wear the opponent out. Another possibility is the edge trick as discovered by @will-walters. There's potential here. With more players, trickier (slightly unpredictable even) movement controls, environmental hazards and maybe even powerups this could be quite something. Currently it is functional, but ain't very enjoyable. |
| Aug 8 10:56:52 | 20m 44s | Times New Robots | ♥ 0 | The trusty old Tommy gun does nothing! I am disappoint. The turrets are much more effective, yet fetching batteries for them does become boring rather quick. More management aspects might save this: repairing turrets, collecting scrap from destroyed robots, upgrading turrets, stuff like that. The graphics are ok. Playing is just tedious; that's the problem. |
| Aug 8 11:55:56 | 59m 04s | Sunpoint Salvage | ♥ 1 | Pretty good puzzle this. Funky physics too! Even more post-jam levels would be nice indeed. Good job. |
| Aug 8 12:22:45 | 26m 49s | Magic Chase | ♥ 0 | I like the idea and the world building you got going on in there, even if it is rather generic fantasy cruft (I have a soft spot for that kind of stuff!) Could not defeat a single Will-o-Wisp and they spawn in huge hordes. Crystals are also found in big groups. I got more than 25 one time and then started searching for the portal. It was surrounded by Will-o-Wisps... This could be a solid *turn-based-light-roleplaying-experience* with some more mechanics (magic man should be able to wield magic, man!) and a more fair battle system. |
| Aug 8 12:47:08 | 24m 23s | Trough The Desert | ♥ 3 | The editor works, launching works and even flying works, but flight is most certainly the weakest link here. I expected the plane to control as a glider. A glider gradually loses altitude. To gain altitude you need to pitch up, which drains speed due to air drag. That's when you'd use the thruster to gain more speed. Here it seems that speed never goes down, so there's little need to use the thruster. Pitching also feels very unnatural, as if gravity didn't exist. Unity Standard Assets has decent physics based airplane controllers, you should take a look at those. Solid concept, doesn't follow the laws of physics. Ok job with the rest. |
| Aug 8 13:02:52 | 15m 44s | Mobile Charger | ♥ 1 | Physics based fun times, until the battery runs out. Managed to break the physics completely once. All the limbs just shot off, with the torso hanging in mid-air wiggling away. Weird! I would have liked to see the police come after you. You are stealing phones after all. I wonder how well this would go down in court? "I only stole those 15 devices cause my own was running out of power and my BFF told me so." Yeah... Good job! |
| Aug 8 16:59:37 | 3h 56m | Final Factory Flux | ♥ 0 | Graphics are fine and the lights shutting down one by one is a neat thematic idea. Too bad the interface and interactions are not very intuitive. To make a hypothetical single material product you need to: * Take (Press 'E') base material from right side to middle * Take base material form middle to the refiner * Refine material (Press 'F'). You cannot leave the refiner! * Take refined material back to middle * Tale refined material from middle to the builder * Start build process (Press 'E') * Wait until the build process has completed. You can leave the builder, but if you wait too little or too long the build fails. * Lastly take product through middle to the release basket (Press 'E') There are two inconsistencies in the process which could be easily removed: * Pressing 'F' for refining is unnecessary. 'E' would work just fine, reducing your button count to one (sans movement input obviously) * Not being able to leave the refiner. Why not? You can leave the builder to do something else so that would make sense here too. A little ๐ You can accidentally drop items (batteries and screws) over the counter if you drop one on top of the builder. Ok co-op concept, ok execution, some design issues and lack of polish. Put a bit more time into this and it'll be fine I reckon. |
| Aug 8 17:06:05 | 6m 28s | Running Out Of Power - A Ludum Dare Film | ♥ 0 | First video entry I've ever seen. Quite funny too. That ๐ฑ looks like it didn't care for your shenanigans one bit. |
| Aug 8 17:34:22 | 28m 17s | Get Off My Lawnpocolypse | ♥ 0 | The graphical style and audio are nice. The intro is well made, but you cannot skip it when restarting. Mixing genres can work and I guess it works here too. If only the genres were not match-3 and tower defense...*I don't especially like either!* Having to keep tabs on both the enemy advance and the resource icons is challenging to say the least. The power tends to run out pretty fast though so there is not a lot of time to concentrate on the tower defense side of things. The match-3 part would be easier interface-wise if the different icons also had different colors. Currently trying to quickly match the icons I need is rather grating due to their similar look. Of course this wouldn't fit the style, but playability should trump style any day of the week. Ok job in all. You should give out more ratings so that people can find your entry. |
| Aug 8 18:32:42 | 58m 20s | Candy Wars | ♥ 1 | **CHOCOLATE!** I'm glad to see some more interactive fiction in this LD. Your entry is structurally a classic non-linear story tree with one minor branch and one major branch. Not a bad amount of content for such a short time, really. The 3 main branches aren't wildly different in their events, but that ties to the limited jam resources too (and you've already talked about that). Played through all of them and got the 16 "Achievements". *Worth it!* The story is absurd enough to be funny. The graphics are what they are, crude yet kind of charming. Skipping dialog could be even faster. Jumping into a specific chapter of the story is worth considering too, for future projects. Good job. ๐ฌ |
| Aug 9 09:03:07 | 14h 30m | Messy Getaway | ♥ 1 | Forget electric cars, this is the future of personal transportation! *A stealoconomy!* Imagine everyone stealing gas from everyone else. No-one would be going nowhere no way fast; oh no, not on time, no sir. Right. The car controls well, winning and losing both work (some entries didn't even get that right!) and the graphics are ok (the less I say about the *music* the better). A bit too easy to my liking, I could have gone on forever and ever, except I got bored of course. Here are a few ideas: * Manual acceleration and deceleration to support higher, more exciting, speeds. * A zoomed out camera to help with said speeds. * Any police car witnessing your gas siphon in action should give chase and try to ram your car, until you manage to loose them (drive really fast and/or they collide with something) Ok job. Just a bit tedious after a while. |
| Aug 9 09:37:06 | 33m 59s | Lost in the Dark | ♥ 3 | 354.42 The problem with timing a maze is that mazes are a subset of puzzles and puzzles are deductive logic challenges thus once you know the solution, in this case the layout of the maze, you can simply speedrun it. I didn't bother going that far though. Solving (there must be a more apt word) a maze is also rather trivial. It takes patience, trial, error and memorization. The visibility mechanic and the lasers did spice things up a bit, but not enough for me. There are at least two ways to make mazes more interesting: * Procedural mazes. If the layout changes after each playthrough, memorization goes out the window. Now we are dealing with an inductive logic challenge. You have to sometimes guess which path to take, based on the little information you gathered before. * Hostile entities. The stakes would go through the roof, if the maze was inhabited by enemies which chased you down upon visual inspection. The monsters (of course there are monsters in a maze) could make disturbing sounds, both helping you pinpoint their location through walls and attributing to the atmosphere. Yeah, I'm not too much into puzzles, especially mazes. Inductive logic challenges, i.e games, are more interesting to me. |
| Aug 9 11:32:35 | 1h 55m | Cubed | ♥ 1 | The graphics are functional, simple shapes. The music ain't great. Slipping around, as if on ice, made the whole show slightly challenging. The yellow cubes didn't seem to respond at all. Adding more environmental objects/hazards would be a quick way to top up the challenge: Moving walls, teleporters, boosters, slowdown fields, jump pads, gravity reversal fields, lazors... The possibilities are endless. *Endless!* It works, that's good. Unfortunately it is not exciting or interesting at the moment. |
| Aug 9 11:59:02 | 26m 27s | Tellus 13 | ♥ 0 | The text is hard to read and the graphics aren't very pleasant to look at. The movement speed is agonizingly slow. Realistic maybe, boring also. Didn't get far as the energy ran out already on the second rock. That was that. The concept of controlling a rover in a hostile environment is solid. Your take on it is less than solid. Sorry to say. |
| Aug 9 13:06:37 | 1h 07m | Hyper Battery Girl | ♥ 3 | Fine job with the audio-visuals. Also fun playing, very tricky platforming indeed. I got stuck in the level which starts with a super jump leading into a wall jumping section. On the top there are energy draining platforms and right in the end a chasm, seemingly requiring a super jump to pass. Trouble is the small charger in the end of the platform does not charge at all. I have no idea how to make that jump, is it a bug? (this was in the BugFix version btw.) Good work apart from the aforementioned. |
| Aug 9 13:23:10 | 16m 33s | RavageR - The Lone Swordsman | ♥ 0 | /- - - ** *RavageR* ** - - - / I do like the name, if you can't tell! I was expecting more gore though. It's tough attacking and not getting hit at the same time as the weapon swing hitbox is tiny. The character doesn't turn either, which make attacking hostiles to your right a swing and a miss. The presentation didn't jell with me too well. Tiny pixel people rendered in three colors (+ alpha, you cheat!) and the audio similarly sparse. It is a stylistic choice of course and you pulled it off nicely. Ok entry. A bit basic in places. |
| Aug 9 14:10:17 | 47m 07s | Modular Destruction Labs | ♥ 3 | I'm not so sure about energy efficiency, but it sure can wreck things. *The military will take it!* Solid production values, funny physics based shenanigans and a good amount of content. There wasn't enough challenge for me in the long run. I could finish most of the levels with the very same design and having to rebuild it every time certainly didn't make the later levels more enjoyable. I never ran out of energy either. Right click should remove robot parts in the editor too. Well made, just a tad samey after a while. |
| Aug 9 14:19:12 | 8m 55s | Vivid Sustain | ♥ 0 | A top down shooter at its most base form. Ok, there's the obligatory energy mechanic due to the theme. Hard to get excited about basic shooting no-more. You should have added in a gimmick of some kind, be it teleportation, enemy mind control, energy harvesting/absorbing, expanded movement mechanics (energy based of course)... Anything really! The graphics are adequate, no bugs either! An ok job for what it is. |
| Aug 9 14:36:17 | 17m 05s | Planet Nanadoo: Quest for the Powered Fruit | ♥ 4 | Time to repeat what everyone else has already said before, positives first: * Neat, cutesy, voxely graphics * The audio fits, while not being very complicated * Clear concept and goal Then the bad: * Aiming is a pain * Enemy and bullet hitboxes are too small * Movement speed is just a little bit too fast, could have a movement ability instead * Health can go above 100 (not all bad this) * Calling for help with the SOS beacon isn't explained anywhere That's about it. Not bad, but the negatives do annoy me immensely. |
| Aug 9 14:49:55 | 13m 38s | Depths of Oceania | ♥ 1 | Neat graphics, the audio less so; it is all over the place. The ship controls well enough, but the cursor should most certainly be locked and hidden to make the cannon controls clearer as mentioned by others. It seems everything is scripted to the bone. I got the the shark bit, dodged right under the rockface, picked up some energy orbs, could no go any further down and then the eels came back for some revenge. Tried multiple times to get past that situation, but could not. The idea is interesting, the execution not quite there. |
| Aug 9 15:02:29 | 12m 34s | Rise Shine Fall | ♥ 0 | It is pretty 3D diorama with a few buttons to press, just in case you want to stay there for a bit longer. I play interactive media for the interactivity. Seeing the actions I take change the world in interesting ways. Here there is nothing of interest to see beyond the trees and the inevitable night. How about some insects living in the trees. If you help the green tree then the green insect population grows and starts fighting with the other insect species. Now that would have been interesting to watch, playing lord of the flies for a bit. Then the night comes and they all die anyways. Even a metaphor for life that, albeit simple. Eh, too little to get me interested is all I'm saying. |
| Aug 9 18:36:53 | 3h 34m | Greenville Deliveries | ♥ 1 | Dodging buildings is surprisingly fun. Technical issue mire the fun slightly though. First, there's the level generation. Why doesn't it happen instantly? I can stomach a few second loading screen. Now I have to wait 5 seconds for the city to slowly materialize out of nothing. It looks silly too. Second, there's the performance. The WebGL build does not run well (on my computer at least). Could it be that the MagicaVoxel models are not quite as optimal as handcrafted models? Or something else, who knows? A desktop build would probably fix these issues. Ok entry. |
| Aug 9 18:53:30 | 16m 37s | Borks Electro-Dungeon | ♥ 0 | Yeah, it's the numbers that are all *borked* here: * Energy runs out so fast that enemies don't even have time to close in, if you stand still * Enemies spawn in huge hordes. Trying to collect a battery is super risky due to this * Enemies take loads of hits, meaning the little energy you have left might not even last against a single enemy If the numbers were ok, this would be a very basic shooter. At that point you could start adding in new enemy types, weapons, powerups, the usual stuff. The HUD issue is probably related to UI anchors. They are critical for having a scalable GUI. |
| Aug 10 08:06:00 | 13h 12m | 0|0|0|0 | ♥ 1 | The graphics are very nice. The main character looks as if 3D, but it is all fake of course. 2 EZ as someone might say... There is very little challenge as you have ample HP and you respawn after death anyways. I would have gone with a single hit out system myself. Not bad really, Ok entry. |
| Aug 10 09:10:37 | 1h 04m | Sabotage | ♥ 0 | Executing your plan is tricky due to the random guard patrol routes, but once everything falls into place it feels excellent! The guards are very effective killing machines, but the ladder became their undoing. I picked them off one at a time when they were trying to reach the top floor. Extra observation 1: You can jump with J! (not mentioned in the description) Extra observation 2: You can fall off into *space* by jumping over (and through) the engine outside the ship! Solid work! |
| Aug 10 17:32:30 | 8h 21m | Power lines down! | ♥ 0 | An addictive (in a good way) timed puzzle. I lamented in a prior entry that speedrunning a timed puzzle becomes trivial once you know the solution inside out. Roll in procedural level generation and ๐ฅ problem solved! The generator is rock solid too, which is nice to see. Got to level 10 and could have gone on for a long time. The challenge doesn't seem to ramp up at all, or at least not by a lot. I would have liked to see the level generator add in some unnecessary powerlines to make it less clear which lines you need to rotate and use. Also, how does a hacker scramble the physical powerlines themselves? Eh, I'm thinking too much into this. Good job! |
| Aug 10 18:44:09 | 1h 11m | Power City | ♥ 0 | Here's my city. Perfect design for making everybody happy. LD39_PowerCity.PNG Could squeeze out more population with hotels, factories and less happy people, but I like my utopia the way it is. The simulation is too simple to be interesting really. There should be some forces working against you to make building the city less cookie cutter. Some ideas: * Global events (climate, recession, war, new technologies, etc.) affecting population and happiness * Local effects (weather, powerty, riots, new building designs, etc.) affecting infrastructure condition and happiness Thematically these seem like big complicated things, but they can be simulated in very simple ways (weighted die rolls with a bit of data tracking to make sure that successive events make some sense at least). It's a fine start for a city builder simulation. Not complicated enough yet. |
| Aug 11 07:27:14 | 12h 43m | Superstuff | ♥ 0 | A very nice concept this. Even I, runners aren't my thing, found this fun to play. Power management adds a lot to the otherwise simple running and jumping. The graphics and audio are the weakest link here. Neither is very pleasant so that's something to improve for the future version. The superhero theme gives you a lot of material to work with. Eye-lazors and air-jumping are just the tip of the iceberg: teleportation, shape shifting, invisibility (to avoid enemy attacks for instance), shields; the possibilities for different mechanics and levels are huge. Good job so far. Hopefully you take this far too. |
| Aug 11 07:53:55 | 26m 41s | mind battery, mind debts | ♥ 2 | The treasure hunting is simple, but works. Having an increasing amount of enemies spawn in the more you dig does heighten the tension as does running out of batteries. Although constantly draining one of the batteries for your light would make this even more tense as would a proper lighting system, with a limited flashlight view cone and monsters lurking in the shadows! The dept mechanic does incentivize replaying, but I do find it weird that you cannot simply repay the debt when having enough money already. The mystery box was a royal waste of money that. Is there anything useful in there? If so why not just have a shop where I could buy equipment? There is a lack of visual feedback. Finding treasure should show up in the GUI as an icon or as a particle effect. Digging should leave a pile of rubble on the ground too. As an additional challenge digging could stop your character for a bit and leave them exposed for enemy attacks. Having to fight off or shine your torch at the nasties to keep them away while you dig could be quite intense. Solid concept, ok entry as it is. There's quite a bit of potential here for a fun light treasure hunt / dungeon crawl type of deal. Do keep working on it. |
| Aug 11 08:21:21 | 27m 26s | Electro Evac | ♥ 1 | ### First impressions Your help page is very hard to parse. The red text alone is unpleasant to read, but the real issue is having too much information on a single page. Splitting the different concepts onto separate pages would solve the issue. An interactive tutorial would be even better of course. Starting with a smaller level first would be a smart move too. There's a lot going on in the current level and it is difficult to get a grasp on the mechanics as everything is running out of power all the time. Hurry! Do something, but what right now? Loads of choices, which is good in the long run, but you shouldn't start with that. ### The good stuff There is a lot of cool tech here. Power propagating through items, the way conveyor belts function, the lighting system, very cool tech indeed. Managed to save 15 light bulbs on the second try. There's a lot to keep tabs on at the same time, which, like said, adds a lot of depth and choice once you get used to it. It is challenging thus *fun*. ### Suggestions There could be some more active elements in the factory floor messing up your flow, like cranes moving around or other robots doing their thing. Yes, I know. More features, but now you have ample time, right? About the only bug I have is not being able to drop batteries or light bulbs on the conveyor belts. That would have been useful in hauling multiple light bulbs from one end of the factory floor to the next. ### Conclusion Good work in the design and simulation departments. The first impressions weren't very impressive, that's worth fixing so that people won't bounce off immediately. |
| Aug 11 11:49:57 | 3h 28m | Clone Colony | ♥ 3 | I'm a **Strategy Master**?! *Nice to know.* Played the 1.06 version and it is solid. The simulation is well though out. There are loads of actions, but all have a purpose. The same goes for stats, no fluff there. Each action has a direct effect in the world making it clear what they do and how. The only actions lacking feedback at the moment are those building something over multiple turns. The current project and its progress aren't indicated anywhere by the looks of it. Now there is a big'ish problem though. It UI is slow to use. It took me 66 days, nearly 2 hours in realtime, to finish the 6 enemy bases. The slowness can be attributed to a few aspects of the UI: * There is no way to quickly see which clones have AP left. You need to go through them all one at a time, if you forget who has already finished working this turn. * Clones often times end up with 1 or 2 AP which they simply cannot use. It would be nice if actions like mining and searching could be used with less AP for worse results. This would speed up resource gathering and as such speed up the whole experience. * No toggle actions. If I want one of my clones to simply stay put farming food, I still have to go click their farm action button each and every turn. Having certain actions, like farming, being a toggle switch instead would be much more pleasant. If I want the farmer to stop farming, that is when I have to click again. Otherwise they automatically farm when the turn is ended. It is worth pointing out that, despite the slowness, playing is exciting. I only lost two clones, one to hunger early own and the other a civilian casualty in battle, yet there was always a sense of dread in the air when more and bigger enemies started spawning in. Great work! There is even room for expansion here, so hopefully you keep working on this (or similar projects in the future). |
| Aug 11 13:05:11 | 1h 15m | Lights Escape | ♥ 1 | It all starts so simply. A bit of running and jumping, some spikes, wait a minute? What's up with the *lights*? I get some N vibes from the enemy design, if only the movement physics were as funky too. Level 5 is already pretty tough, having to blindly jump over the spikes in front of the exit, but level 7 has you running completely blind down two dangerous corridors without even knowing which one if either has the exit. Needless to say I skipped that level (good call having all the levels unlocked right from the start). The rest of the levels are doable at least and the ending is pretty great. I'm pretty sure I've heard that music somewhere else too. Good work. |
| Aug 11 15:14:52 | 2h 09m | The adventure of Dotty | ♥ 1 | The absurd, tongue-in-cheek plot and presentation are marvelous. The dialog and voices are very funny too. The typing meditation mechanic is less to my liking. Having to take my eyes off the screen and look at the keyboard (as my hands were not in their proper typing positions due to having to use the arrow keys for moving) makes dodging bullets nigh on impossible. Not that you need to dodge them all, but that is what I always strive for in any *bullet hell'ish* type of deal. I would have enjoyed the controls more if it was all typing (quick time events basically) or if it was all bulled dodging. Now that I think about it maybe if the key prompts were only WASD and QEZXC then it would be possible to press them without having to take a peek. You should test that at least. Good job otherwise. |
| Aug 11 16:03:41 | 48m 49s | Heat Death | ♥ 1 | Brilliant concept. Well realized setting and atmosphere too. Very tough and random tough. I saw a power core once and then got shot to pieces again. I'd like to be in control just a bit more, starting with a few more power bars might do it too. The hostile robots are nearly impossible to beat, while the humans are weak, but even two of them coming from different angles can lock you in place as they have longer range than you. A bit torn on this one, but I do think the positives outweigh the negatives. Do work on it, if you have the time. |
| Aug 11 20:47:56 | 4h 44m | Slowbot | ♥ 0 | For being called a *Slowbot*, the Slowbot sure is quite zippy at full power. **A few mines will change that!** Dodging mines is fun for a short while. Played 10 odd levels, but it was already stale at number 5. You see it is a maze, which you run though in the dark, with a 1 meter view range, over and over again. Yeah... Not sure how to make it more exciting without changing the concept altogether. There was another similar entry where you had to conserve energy by turning off your radar and lights whenever possible, that could work. Another idea is environmental hazards, but taken how dark it is those might just turn out to be very annoying indeed. Eh, I tried. Ok job. The intro is neat-o, nearly forgot to say that. |
| Aug 12 08:58:23 | 12h 10m | Electro-Brains | ♥ 1 | Managed to electrocute 77 zombies before been bitten one too many times. The electric effect sure is neat-o. It goes crazy if quickly swinging the mouse around, but it looks the part even then. Sure, more time would have resulted in more features and you already have a list of those so I won't reiterate. One graphical feature which I would like to see is a running animation for the main character fitting the cheery tune, a gallop of sorts. You know what I mean (hopefully) Good work all things considered. |
| Aug 12 09:43:29 | 45m 06s | Climate Clicker | ♥ 3 | I would call this an interactive simulation. There is no way to win and seemingly no way to lose either so it ain't a game for sure. Instead you play to achieve your own goals, for instance: keep people alive for 500 years, reach 100 population or get everybody killed! This is most certainly not a clicker either. In clickers (or idle "games" or time wasters or passive experiences, whatever you wish to call them) things (numbers) never to down. You wait and click to reveal more content. Calling your entry a clicker nearly made me skip it all together. *I'm glad I didn't!* The simulation is robust. Little people live their little lives on a little plot of land. Weather, bears and age their only causes of grief. They even get married and have children, that is just *perfect*. The player then acts as a god of sorts. Not omnipotent, but clearly in control and responsible for this land. Running out of power creates all sorts of nasty weather effects so this god is keeping the harm at bay. The simulation update speed is quite fast. A bit too fast in fact. There's no way to pause either (escape hides the view for some reason) to take in the information and read the log. *That log!* It ain't very good at relaying information. There are only 3 rows of text and due to the high speed of the simulation it fills up way too fast. Scrolling with the mouse wheel only helps slightly as text just *keeps coming in*. I tried to keep a single person (called Jared) alive as long as possible, but after three rebirths I had to choose between reviving him and smiting a rampaging polar bear... Sorry Jared, see you in the afterlife after party. If you had ample power to save everyone this would become very boring very fast. Adherence to the theme really makes this *click*. That doesn't usually happen. Great work! |
| Aug 12 10:30:51 | 47m 22s | Corrupted | ♥ 1 | Very interesting battle system you got here. Node based abilities, position matters (most of the time), power management. It all clicks together nicely. Reminded me of one of my old ideas and now I want to get back to working on that. I love it when that happens, thanks! The writing is good too. Didn't get to read the ending though, as the RNG barrier grew too high. Tried dozens of times and just cannot beat some of the crazier combos. Will keep trying though. Great work! |
| Aug 12 18:08:00 | 7h 37m | Shut Everything Down | ♥ 3 | More of a stealth puzzle than a stealth game this, as there really is only one way to *solve* each level. Due to this it is annoying having to replay the beginning of a level when failing right at the end, but it ain't that bad. The graphics and audio are ok. The ending is predictable, yet somewhat inconsistent. Why shutdown a coal powered robot after switching back to coal power? Eh, coal powered robots are a bit of a stretch to begin with. The main menu image also looks as if Coalie is giving the evil rampant robot a back rub or doing *something else* altogether. Ok job. |
| Aug 12 18:43:28 | 35m 28s | Cyborg Apocalipse | ♥ 1 | It is funny to imagine a badass cyborg robot hunter fighting killer droids by laying down rocks in front of them so that they lose more energy having to travel on rough terrain. Even describing that takes much more time than the simpler alternative: Pick up rock, throw it at robot, robot breaks down. The combat is not very interesting, is what I'm saying. The graphics are derivatives (not sure about the robot, care to elaborate?) of Unity tutorial graphics, which is technically fine in the jam. The problem is they are not very good derivatives. The environment tiles are straight up ripoffs, while the main character simply has an added robotic eye patch. You did disable the ratings for graphics though, so ah, why am I complaining about it again? It works, just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You should have gone with something even simpler. The tried and true formula: Man has gun, man shoots robots, robot uprising foiled; is yet to fail any dev, honest guv. |
| Aug 13 09:33:53 | 14h 50m | DefXagon | ♥ 1 | 977 points. Even managed to fight off some of the bigger hordes due to the increased amount of energy you get from dispatching more enemies. Having to spam the shield recharge button is annoying. There is also a lack of content to keep me playing for longer, but you already have many things planned so I need not repeat them. I didn't hear any audio even though the credits do have a listing for music. Is that a bug or simply a jam omission? The graphics and lighting are quite nice. Ok work this. |
| Aug 13 10:37:17 | 1h 03m | The Liberation of Liberatia | ♥ 1 | A functional passive (die roll based) interactive simulation this. The problem is that due to the clear cut random nature of the exercise it is not very interesting to play. Choosing an actions is always based on three points of information: the amount of enemy agents, the action with a bonus this turn and whether the overlord operations are disturbed or not. More on this later, now to the UI. I like it! There color coding of the two sides in the buttons and icons works well. The audio cues for successful missions are a very nice idea indeed. In fact after a while I stopped reading the wall of text altogether and just listened to the mission sound effects. This might not be what you intended of course. If you want people to read all of your writing then each event needs to have more gravitas. Currently you need to find multiple weaknesses per overlord in order to assassinate them so reading the success texts, even when different, becomes a bore. If a few weaknesses were enough and the text contained some important information too, not just flavor, it would be much more interesting to read through. You already got some good pointers on the GUI concerning the wall of text so I won't reiterate. Back to the simulation. To make it less passive you could add in a map. All operations would be taken in a specific area on the map. The population of that area would affect the success chance of the operation the most, the areas next to it a bit and the rest not at all. You could do a lot more with separate areas too. For instance, overlord information could tell you that one of them has a summer cottage in a specific area. If you manage to build an underground rebel group there, suddenly you chance of assassinating the overload in summertime rises up a lot. More information to base your choices on is my main point here. Trying to figure out which action fits the current situation the best and which actions you would like to do in the future is what strategy is all about. The resistance fights more with information than weapons. Surgical operations go terribly wrong if taken in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accurate, up to date information is key! Basing some more actions on information gathering would be pertinent. Good work nonetheless. There are a lot of places you could take this. |
| Aug 13 10:51:59 | 14m 42s | Charge | ♥ 0 | 133.21 seconds two handed. Good multitasking training this. Fun, but having to spam the shoot button did become tiring by the end (very thematic!) I think I ran of of batteries to shoot at one point, but it is hard to say as you end up constantly collecting new ones. I'm not even sure if there is such a mechanic in there due to lacking GUI elements. I would test it if it wasn't for the excessive amount of input spamming. Good work! |
| Aug 13 11:03:49 | 11m 50s | Hope Glider | ♥ 1 | Neat concept, great graphics and challenging controls. Managed to save humanity in 33 seconds, multiple times! I am quite interested in the fluid (air) simulation you got going on in here. Is it based on a third party tool or is it all custom made? It is super funky. Great work! |
| Aug 13 13:21:07 | 2h 17m | BugsTD | ♥ 1 | This is about as basic a TD can get. Sure 12 hours is not a lot of time, but you don't even have any kind of a thematic gimmick? There really should be one as Tower Defense is one of those seen-it-done-that genres. What could that gimmick be though? A few ideas: * Constantly running out of power, having to generate more power with power cores which the enemies tries to steal or destroy. * Draining energy from the enemies with special turrets which do no damage. Having to balance the amount of weapons and energy drainers in the level. * Building your own robots to steal energy from an AI opponent trying to do the same thing. Closing on RTS this. * The enemy corrupting your turrets disabling (or turning them against you), having to send in repair troops to get them back online (or just paying for it directly). Something like that. Ok job with the time you had. |
| Aug 13 19:56:24 | 6h 35m | The Unseen | ♥ 3 | Brilliant graphic, audio and mood. I especially like the lighting system and the ๐ sounds (how do they even make sounds???). Very smooth controls too. The major issue: where's the theme? The light never runs out, I was expecting to happen any moment. You never lose control of the character or become hindered in any other way either, in fact by the end I was an expert in dodging eyesight. The theme just isn't here as far as I'm concerned. Good entry apart from the previous gripe. Fine work. (You gotta give more ratings to get more eyeballs, just fyi.) |
| Aug 14 11:39:43 | 15h 43m | ROOP (Running Out Of Power) | ♥ 1 | The controls are fine! Newtonian physics must have gone over their heads ๐ The fuel runs out pretty fast, but that is thematic enough and keeps the playthroughs short which is fine and dandy. Good work! |
| Aug 14 12:03:18 | 23m 35s | RagooP! | ♥ 1 | Very tricky indeed. The controls are suitable for basic platforming, but the character does start sliding around once jacked up on power making some of the jumps harder than they should. There is a very small window for survival once you charge up on energy. Take just a bit too little and you cannot make the jump, a bit too much and you are dead. I think that window should be slightly wider so that the levels weren't as punishing as now. Ok work otherwise. |
| Aug 14 12:08:38 | 5m 20s | Running Out Of Power Plant | ♥ 0 | Funny physics based old man simulation. Basically happy wheels without the blood, yet more radiation. The graphics are good and the sounds fit well. I heard a rumor that you might have added a few features after the jam. Generally speaking you are only allowed to fix bugs, not to add anything new. If you do work on a post-jam version it should be a new build specifically marked as such. People need to be able to play the original jam version for rating purposes. |
| Aug 14 17:24:07 | 5h 15m | Glitch | ♥ 0 | The audio-visuals are great! The interactivity less so. It's basic platforming, dodging bullets here and there. I can't get excited about these types no more. Some sort of gimmick is gravely needed. The theme is only apparent in the setting and plot, not in the interactions. The glitches don't really make the platforming any harder, for me at least. Ok entry, it works. |
| Aug 14 18:09:10 | 45m 03s | Encounters | ♥ 3 | That magical moment resulted in *years of agony!* I'd call this something along the lines of virtual story or interactive story space, both clunky terms but apt. There's a story in a (small) virtual world and you cannot change the story in anyway (only one ending, each interaction plays out the same way every time). The only thing you can do is choose the order in which the events happen. There isn't even any optional content hidden around the world (which is fine, there's only time for so much in a jam). Because of the prior I have to say I'm personally not a big fan of your entry. I like interactive mediums where interactivity is the main deal (like interactive simulations and games), titles where choices have to be made and consequences of your actions change the world. That is interesting to me. Linear stories work just fine in non-interactive media, so why make an interactive one? Here are a few ideas to make your actions matter here: * Time it. If you take more than 5-10 minutes, the date is off. * Change how people talk to you based on what you've already done. If you start with the fireworks then one of the other character doesn't like you as they hate noise, for instance. * More actions, some with clearly dreadful outcomes. If you rob the store to fuel the hobo's alcohol addiction, then the police arrives and takes you away. These sort of things are still scripted, but at least your story would be partly non-linear now, with multiple (if sudden) endings. This way playing through your story becomes an exercise of exploring the possibilities of the world, probing for a sequence of events which you like. Just a little rant this. You did well for what it is, I don't rate entries for what could have been. |
| Aug 14 19:50:21 | 1h 41m | Car race without gas | ♥ 2 | That was an experience alright. For something so cerebral I do find it a large issue that you cannot hold the horn down. It is the key feature here, the hero of the show! Give it some love, eh? ๐ - โฝ๏ธ = ๐ฒ ๐ถ ๐ฆ ๐ฒ โฐ๏ธ โ๏ธ Sweet. |
| Aug 14 20:03:59 | 13m 38s | HOME IS DEAD | ♥ 0 | Cor, this is great! Until the main fleet arrived and sapped my home to a withered husk. Fun for a short while. The graphics are neat. The music could ramp up with the action, it is somewhat low key at the moment. The idea of choosing between high power shooting and more efficient melee is a good idea. It breaks down once the level is completely full of enemies of course. Nice entry in all. Keep it up! (Don't forget to rate more entries, you deserve to get to 20 yourself!) |
| Aug 15 06:58:34 | 10h 54m | Lichometer | ♥ 1 | +1 to tricky controls. Fine design and graphics. Not a lot more to say really. Ok job. |
| Aug 15 08:32:02 | 1h 33m | Probe Abuse | ♥ 3 | *Flash!* Here's hoping they get the HTML5 version running soonish. Neat mechanics. Collecting upgrades and shutting down to help your future selves, well designed progression through the levels too. There's not a lot to complaint about really. Some ambient sounds and background art would have improved the presentation. It is curious how you went from Mistreated Probes to Probe Abuse! Good work! |
| Aug 15 16:59:02 | 8h 27m | Cosmic Influx | ♥ 0 | It's a functional package all right. The audio-visuals work, while not being very pretty. The controls are super simple and work too. Lastly we have the interactivity, which is where I think the simplicity is a bit too much. You see I half expected there to be a some sort of a landing mode where you have to move around the planet surface collecting fuel and dodging enemies, as in Star Control, but it was all just a die roll. As such the initial adventure feel wore off real fast. The adventure is also very short and with a a few safe probability calculations very easy too. More difficult choices are needed, especially if there is no landing mode. Some sort of events where you can lose fuel, crew and other resources too, maybe? Ok work, a bit too simple for my taste. |
| Aug 15 18:21:33 | 1h 22m | Abstract Demon | ♥ 0 | ๐ต That *"congratulations"* screen! Solid puzzle. Neat graphics. The user interface is hampered by the simple presentation. There should be names over the characters (spazzing cubes). Another GUI nicety would be different looking arrows pointing from character to character denoting from who you can haunt/possess whom. Possession is OP, but then again it is only required once. Audio is severely lacking. Some sufficiently unnerving ambient noises would have been ace. Good job on the design, but there are many ways to improve the end product. |
| Aug 15 18:57:27 | 35m 54s | Nyctophobia | ♥ 1 | An atmospheric maze (i.e. a puzzle). The graphics are simple, but fine. The audio is very fitting, except for the light sound effect maybe? The darkness is a formidable foe, slightly unnerving and even scary once you are low on light. The lighting system also works well, especially the one frame flash when turning on a torch. I've been ranting against mazes a few times already and here is the short if it: memorization isn't interesting; having to restart the maze from the very beginning and executing the same moves over and over again isn't interesting either, it is annoying in fact. So how to get around memorization and endless retreading? More hand crafted levels or (at least partially) procedurally generated levels. This would also switch the project from deductive logic problem solving (puzzles) to inductive problem solving (games), which I'd prefer for one. A little technical niggle: full screen does not work properly for me at least. The HUD does not scale, you see. Good work. With some more polish and tweaking this would be a very moody experience indeed. |
| Aug 16 06:58:38 | 12h 01m | Inverteb | ♥ 1 | *Radical* graphics and nice music. The pixelating effect for running out of power is *sweet!* The controls are a tad sluggish. Jumping didn't quite feel right and I ended up taking a dive a few too many times. Switching dimensions also has some lag/delay to it at times. The overall speed of the character and the rising blood could be higher. There should be a restart button (*R*) for quick retries. Good work. |
| Aug 16 09:52:16 | 2h 53m | Powering Down | ♥ 1 | Excellent work! The graphics are amazing, the controls just right and the power toggling system very thematic. I always turn off HUD elements whenever possible and here I even get a reward for it. Great! Reminds me of Solar Jetman, a classic Rare oldie from back in the days. The only thing missing here, in comparison, is a grappling hook to haul massive ๐s around and fiendish difficulty (hitting a wall should take away energy. *Ramp up the stakes!*) Excellent work! (๐ป ๐ป ๐ป...) |
| Aug 16 10:53:10 | 1h 00m | Despotism 3k | ♥ 3 | 16:15 (just sacrifice 50+ people and lvl 10 is a cinch) Creepy oppressive atmosphere. Apart from the *turning people into power and soylent green* part this is nothing but modern society in disguise. Alternatively it is a future society in plain view, us run by our robotic overlords. The graphics are great, the GUI works and the resource management is solid if a little simple. This is all about keeping an eye on the stats and quick reactions. There are no decisions to be made, really. The main issue I have is with the clicking. There is an excessive amount of it in the few later levels once your population reaches 40+ or so poor sods. The music is great. Where is it from? (link plz) Stellar work! |
| Aug 16 16:29:44 | 5h 36m | A SWELL BULLET-HELL | ♥ 0 | Nice graphics, the particle effects on enemy death are really inventive in places. Needs audio badly, of course. The controls are very tanky. There is no way to dodge anything so it all simply boils down to shooting both barrels at anything around. I got to level 12 and there wasn't a single point where I had less than 90% power. Way too easy. The lack of challenge is the bigger problem out of the two. Running around as the dog didn't seem to serve any purpose either, maybe having to fetch some items to recharge the mech would have worked. Good work for a first timer. |
| Aug 16 18:05:15 | 1h 35m | Leaf Runner | ♥ 1 | Nice concept and a rather ambitious design too. You managed to create a whole city, implement car physics and add in a basic trading system. That is a commendable amount of content. Some issues and suggestions: The reverse gear doesn't work as it should. In RL a reversing car will turn left when you turn the steering wheel left, not the other way around. This made it really tricky for me to drive on the thin streets. The trading system is very basic and it is based on time rather than location. In RL rare things are more valuable than common things. So a drug only sold on the west side of the city should be more valuable on the east side. To make it easier for the player to understand such a positional pricing system, buying (and maybe even selling) should only happen in specific places on the map. These places would be marked on the main map and the minimap (which is pretty neat-o) to make planning easier. It is a shame you didn't get a proper police car in. Occasional car chases would really spice up the experience. Good work; but, as you know, there are many possibilities and improvements to be made. |
| Aug 17 10:04:29 | 15h 59m | The Color of Days To Come. | ♥ 0 | *This is not a traditional game* I agree. In fact I'd go one step further and say that is not a game at all. You said it well yourself, it is a *Narrative experience*. That's all you need! *Narrative experience game* has a redundant word in it. Basically this is a video where you click to move the video forward, so ah, a mix between video and novel. You got to keep turning the page. Turning a page is interactive sure, but the content (story) is not. It is linear, always the same, with a whole bunch of clicking between the pages for good (bad) measure. You might as well remove all clicking and make it into a video, would something of value be lost? Just some thoughts on specific use of words. The word *game* has already lost all meaning apart from *anything interactive*, but there is no need to actively drive it to the ground when a more specific alternative exists. Cheers! |
| Aug 17 14:21:52 | 4h 17m | SPU-1 | ♥ 0 | Simple and fun. Not very innovative, except for the well fleshed out energy/time mechanics. I really like the different abilities and how they use and refill the power bar. The bosses could have sped up as they lost health as it becomes trivial dodging their predictable attack patterns after a few goes. More (random) variation in their shooting and movement arcs would have amped up the difficulty too. There are a few issues with the energy recharge stations/checkpoints. At times walking back to a previous checkpoint resets the current progress, for instance respawning a boss or blocking a path. Not a big deal, just odd. Good work! |
| Aug 17 14:54:16 | 32m 24s | The power of blood | ♥ 1 | Challenging (i.e fun!). Got 95 after a few practice runs. It becomes increasingly difficult to stay alive once more and more aggressive villagers start showing up and that keeps the play time nice and short. The abilities really are the star of the show here, they are all great. I would like the cooldowns to be just slightly faster, especially for the dash. The gore and ability effect particles are on solid second place for me. The achievements and titles are a nice addition, but they could be less generic. *Kill X amount of Y* could be *Fry 3 fatties with dark magic*, or something like that. Good work! |
| Aug 17 19:20:48 | 4h 26m | PowerPath | ♥ 1 | A simple memorization and dexterity challenge. Found if enjoyable enough. The movement controls are ok as they are shown on the map. The transition from the shown path to the movement mode could be done on input from the player. Currently it starts the movement mode automatically after a delay, which means I have to spam the first direction key to not lose any energy which is slightly annoying. Some groovy soothing music would really fit here. Good work! |
| Aug 17 19:29:41 | 8m 53s | Dream Disc | ♥ 1 | Relaxing and a bit of fun also, even if the challenge is optional. The graphics area nice, audio fits too. Good work! |
| Aug 17 19:42:11 | 12m 30s | LittleBots | ♥ 0 | Bizarre and innovative, I like that. Aiming is tough due to the loose physics and the fact that it is constantly raining little bots usually blocking your shots. That is a nice challenge, but I never quite got the hang of it to really feel good about the exercise. The sudden ending is a bit aggravating. There should be some sort of an effect to show you that you are low on power and a small window of last moment opportunity before the power completely runs out (i.e. it should drain slightly slower when near 0). Good work. |
| Aug 18 06:45:01 | 11h 02m | Robit Needs Love | ♥ 3 | Solid concept and production. The graphics are good and there are no bugs that I can find. The problem is the lack of challenge. There is no reason to reach very high. The enemies close to ground give out just as many batteries as the ones on the top so risking it makes no sense. This leads to a very dull experience indeed. Here's a suggestion for wrangle the difficulty curve. The power drain of the computer should raise overtime in increments with some sort of a gauge showing the current drain. The enemies on the top should give out bigger batteries or more batteries more often. This way the player is forced to reach higher and higher, taking risks. Ok entry, needs some tweaking in the challenge department. |
| Aug 18 07:13:09 | 28m 08s | Shadow Lurkers | ♥ 1 | Brilliant idea! With audio there could be some very tense horror moments indeed. The graphics are clean, but they do look like default shapes in places. Some simple texturing and coloring would help there. @nyri0 and @shinmera already came up with great ideas. What I'd like to see specifically is bigger, more complex, even maze-like levels. Exploring a space and managing limited light resources with nasties hiding in every shadow would be a dread filled experience. Good work! |
| Aug 18 07:47:05 | 33m 56s | 3% | Power Saver | ♥ 0 | When I had a *myPhone* they had a *DroneCall*, when I had a *DroneCall* they had a *myPhone* and when I had a *BlamazoonFlame* they had a *BrickPhone* out of all things! I spent the rest of the time insulting people and bathing in the fountain, half expecting security to pop up at any moment. You managed to recreate the authentic *Mall Experience*โข๏ธ to the bone, only the vendors themselves are missing. There must be a recession going on. I would have also liked to see some secrets hidden around the place, just for fun. Apart from the inherent randomness of finding a compatible charger from a set of random people there aren't a lot of issues. A small visual feature that I would have liked to see is the expressions being part of the character, not the GUI. Happy people should have a happy face and so on (the emoticons would suffice). This way the interaction GUI could pop up only when getting the character's attention. Another little feature, which would have added a lot, is cracking jokes. If small talk won't cut it, try a joke and hope for the best. Some people will take it the wrong way no doubt, but at least you tried. That would also be a nice avenue for some absurd/bizarre dialog. The tutorial works, even if it is somewhat text heavy. The miniature model of the mall is a nice touch there. Great work in the presentation department, a few tweaks here and there would have improved immersion for me at least. |
| Aug 18 08:11:32 | 24m 27s | -simov | ♥ 0 | Bizarre to the max! If only the interactions were more bizarre too, basic platforming is basic. The graphics are the main deal here. Very innovative designs. The running animation takes the cake for me and the weapon particles are a close second. The music does become annoying in about 10 seconds though so that should have been worked on some more. Good work! |
| Aug 18 08:27:40 | 16m 08s | Power Rod | ♥ 1 | Looking at the screenshots I expected more involved fishing physics where you move the rod rather than the hook. Having to swing the rod and pay attention to underwater currents to guide the hook would have been more enjoyable than slowly moving the *remote controlled* hook around. It works of course. Juggling between fish and batteries is fine. Sometimes the physics go a bit wrong and a battery falls over such that you cannot catch it any more, but that doesn't happen too often. Ok work, could be more exciting. |
| Aug 18 13:19:18 | 4h 51m | Carbรณn | ♥ 1 | 527.6 seconds. I could have gone on forever basically. It didn't seem to get any harder over time. The audio-visuals are nice and the controls, while slippy, are fine. Hurling coal into the pyre is strangely relaxing. Now there is one issue with the controls due to the fact that attacking and throwing are done with the same key. If you spam attack a group of coalies next to wall and one of the dies and turns into coal, you end up constantly throwing coal to the wall instead of attacking. Another bug relates to the bigger coalies. A few times I ended up smashing one of them indefinitely. They'd somehow become invulnerable! Having something else to do alongside keeping the bonfire burning would make the overall experience more varied. Ok work this. |
| Aug 18 13:35:57 | 16m 39s | Asteroid Scavenger | ♥ 1 | Using an impulse engine instead of a basic thruster is an interesting twist. Didn't see too may reasons to upgrade the impulse force too much though as that makes it way too easy to collide into asteroids in close quarters. I did not realize there was a timer at all. It just slammed a *Game Over* screen on my face. I accidentally dismissed it immediately with 'J' so I didn't even get to read it... Oh well, I hope I did well. There should have been some sort of an alert there, similar to the power warning text for instance. The graphics are fine, audio a bit basic to be honest. Solid work, not a lot to complain. |
| Aug 18 13:57:55 | 21m 58s | SOMETHING IS WRONG. SOMETHING IS WRONG. SOMETHING IS WRONG. | ♥ 1 | A digital experience for the ages. Future historians will study this piece to ascertain how the post-modern ~~man~~ person of the 21 century intefaced with constantly crashing, buggy, spyware they used to call computers. Thematically brilliant stuff! Sure there isn't a lot to do, but that's fine with experiences. Locating the camouflaged teleporter could be the basis for some more involved interactions too, potentially. GOOD WNULL NULLOD WORKNULLOOD WORETHING IS WRONG! |
| Aug 18 16:18:11 | 2h 20m | Super Charged | ♥ 0 | The graphics are ok and the music good, but taken that you didn't make it you should have disabled ratings for it. The idea itself is not half bad. I've seen these *upgrade-centric* types before (back in the days on the internet, mostly on mobile now-a-days) and as long as the core interactivity is enjoyable enough and the upgrades are frequent and poignant it can work. That's not quite the case here. There are few choices to be made because it is all about timing and as pointed out by pretty much everyone and their dog, spamming works! Lastly the progress you've made isn't saved if the program is closed... Good effort, unfortunately the end result doesn't live up to the potential of the genre. |
| Aug 18 16:35:29 | 17m 18s | Captain Pixel Vs The Round Invaders | ♥ 1 | I don't have much to say in addition to what has already been said. The third level should have been completable with the shotgun and pistol combo. Currently neither weapon has enough ammo or damage output to take out the high HP mongrels. It is kind of lame to succumb to old age right in the beginning of the 4th level. I like the civies running around. Gives you a nice *alien invasion in progress* feel to it all. Good work. With tweaking and polish this would be great work. |
| Aug 18 17:11:04 | 35m 35s | CHAINED | ♥ 1 | Broke all the chains, died a free soul at 4.44. Has a nice mythological feel to the audio-visuals, although *edgier*. The controls are fine and the challenge up there. Going on an *AFFECT* rampage is always very cathartic. A little bug. When restarting after death the HUD disappears. Great work! |
| Aug 18 19:58:09 | 2h 47m | Light out | ♥ 1 | Pretty cool for a first timer! The flashlight works well and the zombie noises are very unnerving indeed. Had a little scare with the first zombie jumping out from the dark behind a crate. The other attacks were less scary taken that they all spawned in from the same position (and eventually killed me!) Next I tried the obvious tactic for a cowardly chap as myself: sitting in a corner knive out. The Zombies clearly found my superior stance disturbing as they started moving back and forth wildly barely attacking at all. Their path finding skills must have rotted away. Some objectives to complete before the time runs out would force the player to make a move. Not a big problem really. Good work! |
| Aug 19 07:50:52 | 11h 52m | The Last Miner | ♥ 0 | Managed to get to 16 points/power (one to one ratio, I suppose?). Using the thruster for everything is a nice piece of minimal design, but it does make mining somewhat arduous having to constantly spin the ship around. I would try adding another functionally identical thruster to the front of the ship controlled with RMB. That might allow for some quicker/fancier moves around the asteroid as if dodging hazards and enemies *hint*, *hint*, *nudge*, *nudge*. Quality work! |
| Aug 19 08:35:05 | 44m 13s | Mr E McPower | ♥ 1 | Man, I would have loved to moan about the GUI design but @amras0000 got there first. Oh well! I'll complain about something else, which is the instructions here on the page and in the program. They both say *You'll receive a bonus for keeping the regulators in check* and sure you do receive a bonus, but in actuality spinning the wheels is super critical for keeping the danger level low! This should be the first thing you tell me, not the last! I figured it out after three quick disasters. Then I got to work proper and that is what it feels like. There are no interesting decision to be made, just spinning wheels and buying better equipment once you have enough money. The progression might have bugged out too as there were only a few houses and 35 demand on Tuesday? The progression is very slow, if that is not a bug. In the end I had enough money for a hamster generator already on Wednesday morning, but soon afterwards I accidentally right clicked it and lost due to the danger level getting out of hand. What a nice ending to the 20 minute slog. You already have a list of potential additions so I need not bother coming up with any more. Just make sure you add in meaningful choices (decisions) for the player to make. Simply managing power levels is a job, not challenging and by extension not fun. |
| Aug 19 09:18:40 | 43m 35s | Despot 3900 | ♥ 1 | Great presentation. The interactivity suffers from the loop you can get into with one of the groups at 0% approval and the other over 50%. Maybe taxation of a group shouldn't work that well once popularity/loyalty drops below 20% or so with a random chance of terrible things happening right away. More groups (zealots, merchants, immigrants, etc) might work at making the balancing act more difficult. Good work nonetheless. |
| Aug 19 10:37:18 | 1h 18m | LEADER | ♥ 1 | I got the pope on the phone pretty fast. Enjoyable for a while, but having to choose from three random cards every day does seem a bit off. Sometimes the best choice completely reverses a decision from just a few days prior. I'm pretty sure they could not have even put the previous law into practice that fast. Played a few of these types before already and this is certainly up there. Good work! |
| Aug 19 15:52:15 | 5h 14m | Island of Revolution | ♥ 1 | Great concept, solid production. The graphics are fine, too bad about the audio. There are a few bugs and issues, though: * A police force assigned to seizing assets should have a different icon to show that the order was received. * There is no way to see the hours left on a bank without going there. * After a while all the police forces set to seize assets started swimming in the ocean. Maybe they wanted to leave the island the cheap way. * Bought the mid sized plane. They didn't charge me any money and 12/12 family members escaped? Little things really. Good work! |
| Aug 19 16:26:28 | 34m 13s | Quad and Cycl | ♥ 1 | Ok puzzle prototype with solid mechanics. I can imagine a *power running out* mechanic adding a lot. The graphic's are messy and unpolished, but not eye-searing. It is a bit weird that the characters are colorless shapes, while the rechargers are colored yet nearly identical. This is probably an even bigger problem for colorblind people. Keep at it, by all means. |
| Aug 19 17:51:33 | 1h 25m | Output | ♥ 0 | Starts of very promising and I even managed to lose once due to not building enough power plants. The second time I build so many power plants that I easily got to 200 days. The problem: simply building more and more is not interesting! I had dozens of plants active in the end. Loads of clicking to get there, but after that each plant requires no actions. It would be more pleasant (mentally and physically, my poor index finger likes to point out) to concentrate on a handful of plants instead. Managing repairs, adjusting salaries, bribing inspectors, making press releases, quelling riots, etc. The heatmap overlays are a nice bit of UI design. Ok entry. Too simple for my tastes. |
| Aug 19 18:21:42 | 30m 09s | Once Upon a Spaceship | ♥ 1 | Simple, too much so. Dodging asteroids is enjoyable for only so long. The lack of energy power-ups doesn't help. The graphics are neat, audio rudimentary. Ok job, could be more exciting with more mechanics. |
| Aug 19 18:38:34 | 16m 52s | iPowerless | ♥ 1 | Short and simple. The graphics work well. The music volume should be higher in relation to the sound effects. The lazor sound drowns it out at the moment. Would have liked to play through a few more levels. Now we will never find out what the rest of the abilities were going to be about. Ok entry in all. Good for a first go even. |
| Aug 20 06:06:36 | 11h 28m | Ardis Mobile Mission | ♥ 1 | Played the Post-Jam version. Brilliant graphics, audio serviceable. The concept is great too, if only the design didn't have a fatal flaw. Recharging... Why is recharging a possibility? While the phone is recharging there is nothing to do. The battery runs out in mere 35 seconds while it takes a full minute to recharge. This means that on my first playthrough I spent more time looking at the recharging phone doing nothing, than actually hunting for information. That is boring, lame and dreadful design. Here's what I would have done, just for perspective. There is no charger, the battery has about 4 minutes of juice left after which the character has to leave (for some reason). Find the answers quick! Once the time is up there is an epilogue. Here the information found affects the rest of the character's life in all sorts of ways. For instance: if you found 0 pieces of information the character misses the party, becomes a social outcast and ends up in a crappy job; if you only found out about the party, then the character makes a fool of himself loosing his confidence causing some terrible things to happen in the future; if you do manage to find all the data then everything is all sunshine and happiness. You'd get to do a bit of writing is what I'm going at. Maybe that is not your thing, it's fine. Currently what you have is *puzzle* / *dexterity challenge*, the world is full of these. Shifting the focus to finding information to cause different outcomes would make this into more of a *digital experience* / *interactive short story*. I'd prefer that at least. Ok work. I have high hopes, is all. |
| Aug 20 06:26:58 | 20m 22s | Power Plant Manager | ♥ 1 | It works, more of and idle experience than a game at the moment, but more development time would have helped there. The wire frame graphics are ok. Kind of like looking through an old power plant control terminal. Not that I have any knowledge of what those really looked like. It is the illusion that counts. The program update certainly should not be affected by the computer processing power. I think that is the reason why I needed 6 Cooling tower 3.0s around a single nuclear power plant. Delta time is your friend there. Solid start for something more fleshed out. |
| Aug 20 06:40:28 | 13m 30s | Save The Day ! | ♥ 1 | Cool graphics, simple and effective interactions. *Seen-it-done-that* sure, but the acceleration mechanic was somewhat novel. I'm addicted to speed so I spammed it way too much to my own detriment. You could add some more abilities for the ship, like slow-down, slow-mo, shield, weapons, etc. Everything uses energy of course. Ok work, what can I say. |
| Aug 20 07:51:53 | 1h 11m | Power Ownage | ♥ 1 | *NICE* Reminds me of [Take No Prisoners](http://www.mobygames.com/game/take-no-prisoners), except actually enjoyable (tried replaying that and it does not live up to modern standards). The dodging and fighting work fine. I too would have liked an incentive for targeting multiple enemies as it is a cool idea. Regenerating health based on the energy you have is neat too. At first I though it was plain old magic regen, but luckily that was not the case! The energy beam broke near the end of the first level and it didn't show up until getting to the boss fight. It still worked, the graphics simply disappeared. Good work! |
| Aug 20 08:15:48 | 23m 55s | May the power be with you | ♥ 0 | There's nothing but walking around and reading some text, but the ending makes it worth while. Any longer and the experience would have started to drag on. I usually don't divulge ratings, but what the heck! Big points for theme and humor. |
| Aug 20 08:34:43 | 18m 55s | Mining Brothers: An Energetic Tale | ♥ 2 | "When the bar is completely full you'll can concerning just with jump things with the D key." *The best tutorial tip ever!* Quality audio visuals, the rest is lacking in places. I managed to break the jumping once, it just changed the direction of the cart. A restart fixed it. Talking about restarting. There should be a quick restart button (R!) for quick restarts. Yes, it is important as death is everywhere and everytime all at once. Seriously, it is so easy to die. Falling into a bottomless pit and hitting an electric fence are the worst. They both take away all your lives too! What is the point of lives again? Ok work. More polish and bug fixing on the programing side would be great though. |
| Aug 20 09:18:24 | 43m 41s | Falling Down | ♥ 1 | 271 days as a ruler! I managed to keep my approval rates high in 4 stats, while two were complete lost causes. In the end the middle of the road states all flipped to oppose me. It seems very random which side wins a state when both me and my opposition have around 45-49% approval in a state. I would also like to know how the election debate tactics work. Knowing more about each state and the people living there might help. Info like average education, wealth, health, etc to base my demeanor on. Good work. Some fitting audio would add to the mood. |
| Aug 20 09:39:16 | 20m 52s | Power Ring Facility | ♥ 1 | Simple, clean platforming dexterity challenge. Nothing I haven't seen before, but testing reaction times every once in a while is a worthwhile pursuit. The last bit (before the outro text corridor) of the levitation chamber got me quite a few times as the horizontal movement of the ball has a slight slide to it. Not bad, but noticeable after sliding into the same spikes for the fifth time. Good work! |
| Aug 20 10:16:04 | 36m 48s | Railroad Trucker | ♥ 1 | Very high quality workmanship on the presentation and code (there are no bugs that is) departments. Feels like a proper finished product. The cheery music got on my nerves after a while, but that's just me! A timed puzzle is what I'd call it. Although if you don't let the timer restrict you then it becomes trivial to beat each and every level one train at a time. I would have liked a more robust scoring system based on, for instance, amount of tiles or energy used. The energy mechanic also goes out the window in levels where you can place down your own energy stations. Nice work overall. |
| Aug 20 11:11:54 | 55m 50s | OnFuelDrain() | ♥ 2 | I like the *damage into fuel* gimmick on paper, but in reality it turns out to work too effectively! There are so many enemies after a while that the only thing I needed to care about was health. Fuel was topped off constantly. I think the problem with the ship thrusters is that there is no effect for them. Spawning some particles would help to see that the thrusters are actually doing something. They could also be more powerful in order to feel less sluggish. There is some strange camera jitter when being hit. Is it supposed to be camera shake? On my computer at least it doesn't look very good. Play testing and polish is what you need. |
| Aug 20 13:26:32 | 2h 14m | Rocket Rescue | ♥ 0 | Yeah, the lives need to go. The 4th level is tricky enough on its own. Other than that this is pretty ok. Certainly evokes some retro feels and controlling a *fat jetpack man* is certainly a first for me. |
| Aug 20 13:40:27 | 13m 55s | Goo-Boy and the Maw of Darkness | ♥ 1 | *That ending!* Impressive visuals and blob physics. Jumping is just a bit stiff at times, but it kind of makes sense taken that you are a drop of slime (or something similar). Good work! |
| Aug 20 14:26:39 | 46m 12s | I'm an (nuclear) engineer! | ♥ 2 | An interesting interactive simulation. At first I thought this would be way too passive an experience to be enjoyable, but the one slider controls really work. Trying to maximize output by keeping the core temperature at optimal 280-290 degrees. *I sure hope real life nuclear engineers don't optimize core temperatures manually!* About the only issue I have is the lack of optimization. Runs pretty bad on my (granted, old) computer. The WebGL version especially suffers from bad performance. It doesn't quite look the part so you probably just have needlessly high poly counts in the 3D models or the terrain. Good work! |
| Aug 20 15:26:13 | 59m 34s | Almost Home | ♥ 0 | A serene experience with beautiful graphics and tranquil music. The presentation and mood are magnificent. The interactivity is not bad either. I do like flying in space among asteroids. There is a big problem though, for someone like me who highly values consistency and believability. There is no air resistance in space! The inertia of the spaceship should keep it moving forever and ever (until colliding with something that is). I totally get why you did it as otherwise people would just fly directly for the planet (which is what I tried the first chance I had), but I don't agree with drag being the best choice to force players to go through the asteroid belt. One modification is all that it takes. Exchange fuel for oxygen. Now we have a resource which ticks down on its own and works as a handy limitation to the planet problem. Try accelerating for the planet and you'll simply run out of air before getting there. Another possibility, which is what I'd go for, is to have both fuel and oxygen. The clever bit here is having separate canisters for both. This way you need to make a real choice every time when targeting a nearby canister: do I need O2 or fuel more? There are other believability issues too, mostly concerning the scale of the world, but those are technical issues more than design issues so they don't bother me that much. It wouldn't make much sense to have players fly around for hours. Right. I like it as it is, but I would love it were it bundled with the tension stemming from oxygen management. Sure that would kind of change the mood of the piece, but with leniency on the resource management side it wouldn't be too challenging. ๐โก๏ธ |
| Aug 21 06:05:16 | 14h 39m | Running From Power | ♥ 1 | The presentation is pretty good and pretty too. Unlike @piotrek I didn't mind the mixed style that much. The camera being blocked I did mind though. The super punch (or whatever it is) is kind of interesting, but you sure are not running out of power by any means. What if you started out with a set of energy. Every punch would deplete the energy a random amount and cause a random sized explosion. That way you'd be running out of power and not being in total control of your power. Some consequences for accidentally attacking civies would have been nice too, for instance a short epilogue after the pirates have been dealt with. Something along the lines of "These peaceful citizens of Peaceville were mauled in the pirate attack: ...(list of names based on casualties)... Mick Fist (the hero) is being prosecuted for destroying property, causing third degree burns and indecent exposure. (list of crimes based on what you did)" Ok work. |
| Aug 21 06:59:57 | 54m 41s | Super Starcade PANIC | ♥ 1 | Absolutely spectacular presentation! The concept of managing an arcade is solid too, but interactivity is sorely lacking. Here's what you do everyday: * Pay the bills * Buy more max power (if you have money), * Buy more cartridges (if you have money and power) * Turn on the power * Plug in all the machines again, one at a time. * Wait... That is all, for 5 days. It is the plugging in and waiting bits that make no sense to me. The machines that I've already plugged in (or activated as is the case with the other entertainments) should stay plugged in. Why would the arcade owner unplug all the machines everyday when they have a master power switch? They would not. The waiting. 3 minutes everyday with nothing to do (plugging in everything again doesn't count as you shouldn't need to do it). Here are a few ideas for a Post-Jam version, if you're going for that: * Litter. Kids litter. You need to keep cleaning it up or the mood goes down. * Puke. Kids puke (give them candies and flashing lights aplenty, you'll see). Once again you need to clean it up or suffer a massive mood penalty. * Machine malfunction. Takes time to sort it out. Maybe even needs professional help, which costs money. Basically, some things you need to take care of while the day ticks on. Importantly these tasks need to happen often enough that you are forced to make choices. Do I need that machine back up today or should I clean the floors? Good work. Great if there was more to do and decisions to make. |
| Aug 21 07:31:06 | 31m 09s | I Need A Charger! | ♥ 1 | The audio-visuals are nice. The design also works. Sure it is a bit silly that only one store in the whole city block allows you to use their power outlet. The major problem is the movement speed. The music becomes borderline epic by the end, but you are still ambling about like there was no rush at all. The ability to run, which uses stamina that you can only recharge by buying trash food at trash stores, would have helped. Maybe even buying a skateboard from one of the stores to slide around with. At that point it would be pretty great to have cars in the city too. Dodging them, until you are distracted by the map and ๐ฅ to the ๐ฅ you go! Feature creeping. A slightly faster movement speed might just do it, easy and effective. Good work! |
| Aug 21 07:56:26 | 25m 20s | Static Shoes | ♥ 1 | Yeah, the idea is cool and the levels work, but wiggling around in place to gather static electricity is annoying. It is too easy to accidentally fall or hit a spike while doing it. You can hug a wall and charge that way which makes it tolerable. As such pressing down could change too. Having to move to charge simply does not add anything to the mix. The graphics are what they are. You had little time, so it is fine. |
| Aug 21 08:11:57 | 15m 31s | Robo Drainer | ♥ 3 | Solid design. Platforming works, but it is very basic. Some special abilities would have improved the draining robots part, like distracting or reprogramming them in order to be able to siphon their power. It is all too easy at the moment. All of a sudden a "She is fine" message just pops up. What a surprise! I agree with @prodigalson on requiring energy for the main character too. At the moment its fine to run out of energy. It should turn off your oxygen flow too! (or something similarly grim). In the end I tried to end it all by jumping off the left side of the ship. That didn't quite work. Ok entry. (Needs audio!) |
| Aug 21 09:28:13 | 1h 16m | Cyberg | ♥ 0 | You should use Dropbox or Drive to host the download links. Giving out an email address to download an LD entry is taking it a bit too far, for me at least. |
| Aug 21 10:04:04 | 35m 51s | Last Hope | ♥ 0 | Exploring the virtual spaceship is interesting for a while. Fixed the aux generator, but the main generator doesn't say which parts it needs. Even after fixing all the leaks and the *source of the problem*, no hints are offered. The random part I gave it did nothing. Good work on the spaceship. Some more instructions are needed. |
| Aug 21 12:54:57 | 2h 50m | Exodus: Fleet Commander | ♥ 0 | Searched every single area, no fuel. Jumped, 95% dead. Gee! Rudimentary. Do work on it if you have the time. Could be interesting with the features you've lined up. |
| Aug 21 13:05:57 | 11m 00s | Batterime | ♥ 1 | Simple idea, quality production. The music is great and the graphics good too. About the only nag I have is the player death particles. They look somewhat out of place. Platforming with a thematic gimmick. That is a Jam classic, but as said works well here. I would have loved to play through some more levels. (Any chance for a post-jam level pack?). Good work! |
| Aug 21 13:21:25 | 15m 28s | Pokkie | ♥ 0 | A rather faithful interactive simulation emulating a simplified mobile phone. Nice work there. I don't see the satire though. Sure the OS update doesn't want to leave me alone, but other than that there isn't anything satirical here. Pointing out that being bored and wasting time on a phone is not the best way to spend your time is just common sense (to me at least). Also Flappy bird isn't/wasn't that easy in RL. Good work nonetheless. A digital experience for future historians. |
| Aug 21 13:44:43 | 23m 18s | PARODIANUS II : ่ดๅฝ็ใชๅคๅฝไบบใญใใฎใชใฟใผใณ | ♥ 1 | Solid shmup. The glitches really add to the home brew NES feel of it. I'm not sure the first boss needed to look like that. *Messy!* The first three levels were very easy and then the Nuclear Plant boss just wiped the floor with my ship. I managed to destroy it on the third try, not taking a single hit as power had run out, in spite of the annoying warning sound. Then after 10 odd seconds the ship blew up anyways? Oh well. Good work! I have a feeling you don't need me to tell you to keep at it. |
