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Feedback comments for LD39
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | MufinMcFlufin's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 1 05:00:04 | Lost in the Dark | ♥ 2 | Great use of the theme, but only really got interesting once the lasers were introduced. Very trial-and-error heavy, though. Not very fun retracing your steps to find one new path that doesn't get you closer to the exit. | |
| Aug 1 05:15:43 | 15m 39s | Recharge | ♥ 5 | Looks nice, good music and sound effects, and sticks to its own aesthetic well, but there doesn't appear to be anything gameplay-wise. The hitboxes don't appear to either function correctly or are fully implemented, running out of power doesn't seem to do anything, and there doesn't appear to be any objective (yet) in the game, so you can only really platform through walls, recharge, or fall into the endless void. |
| Aug 1 05:29:59 | 14m 16s | PowerBalanceTD | ♥ 0 | Neat twist on the typical tower defense game, power generation is not something you often seen in them. Would have been nice if I could pay even $5 to destroy a placement (as just a nice little QOL thing) after realizing it wasn't a great placement, but I suppose I could just start over and try again. Started getting really loud when all towers were constantly firing simultaneously, though. |
| Aug 1 05:44:04 | 14m 05s | Dark Risk | ♥ 0 | Nice interesting game here, the lone piano playing Silent Night gave a creepy vibe always keeping me on edge, especially with the very dynamic camera. The zoom/reach of the flashlight always had me darting around looking for more mineral deposits before I even realized why I had to be more careful in the dark. Not very much to the game as a whole, but a great short experience for that creepy atmosphere. |
| Aug 1 06:14:19 | 30m 15s | PowrConnectr | ♥ 1 | Good puzzle game, a bit of a different take on the usual pipe puzzle game by draining power through the pipes to unlock different sections of the puzzle. Graphics made for a great aesthetic which paired with the music and simple gameplay made for a nice overall experience. Definitely a great entry. My only gripes with the game was that the mechanic for connecting power to a red node caused an instant failure of the puzzle and the colored tiles all moving simultaneously weren't well conveyed (to me at least) and it took a few more puzzles than I believe was intended before I really grasped those concepts. The instant failure probably could have been handled better by making it more obvious to the player (at least near the beginning of the game) that the level has reset back to its original state (perhaps having each tile rotate itself back to their default states). The colored tiles all moving simultaneously issue I ran into was because of misreading the puzzle fail text (because it was showing up behind the puzzle for some reason) and thinking that the red power drain nodes also had the same logic applied to them for the red colored tiles. Perhaps this could have been better conveyed by avoiding the use of red for pipes. Either way, small misunderstandings about the game's mechanics that were eventually properly understood to eventually complete this overall very nice game. |
| Aug 2 20:37:29 | 38h 23m | Powering Down | ♥ 1 | Overall, this was a game that had a solid concept (well suited for the jam) and stuck to it well. The mechanics all lead to interesting decisions for the player to make to better dodge shots, tank hits, or do whatever to their power consumption to make sure they have enough power to get to the next recharge station. I agree with Pedro, the controls felt a bit clunky because of having to pause to change systems around, but this was otherwise a great game, and I'd love to see more to this than could be made during the jam. |
| Aug 2 21:46:09 | 1h 08m | Unlit | ♥ 3 | Given these comments, I feel like the only one who didn't really care for this entry. Being a platformer, there was a lot of jumping around, timing movement and jumping with obstacles (spikes), and finding checkpoints, but that seems to have been all of the gameplay there was to this game. There aren't any decisions to make, no creativity on behalf of the player (other than perhaps finding new routes, but there aren't many opportunities for that), few mechanics to work with, only timing your movement to run from safe-spot to safe-spot before spikes kill you in-between. I ran into several glitches while playing the game that definitely hampered the experience with unnecessary deaths: the spikes that come from floating ceiling pieces can still kill the player if they walk against the side of a wall that contains the spikes (example after checkpoint 5) (check player hitbox and make sure it's not overlapping into the wall when moving against the wall), the player can clip through some wall corners while falling (example after checkpoint 7, when falling down to the first challenge area after checkpoint 5) (not sure what to recommend to do to remedy this one), and lastly the checkpoints themselves can be very glitchy at times, sometimes spawning you about 5 blocks or so above their location, and they apparently have a hitbox you can jump through and stand on top of (make sure they only act as a collider, unless this is intended). The checkpoints that are in areas that will kill you are just plain frustrating because you cannot control when you respawn, so you may sit there and wait until you die 2 extra times before you have a chance to move. This would be much less of an issue if the game waited until spikes/blocks were not literally directly in your hitbox when you spawn, and would still retain the challenge of some of the checkpoints will kill you if you wait there too long. The camera can take a long time to pan back to the player if the player dies a far way away from their last checkpoint, which is frustrating when you know your next checkpoint is a ways away and you need all the time you can get to make it to the next checkpoint. It'd be nice if the camera would either snap back to the player, or move faster back to the player if it knows it has to move further. I can't tell if you already have a system like this in place, but if so, then reducing the time it takes for this snap-back to complete would be helpful. Movement felt clunky to me, like the players movement was inconsistent and was jittering a lot, but after checking the game again, it seems that this is an issue with the camera snapping to the player at about 10-20Hz. It appears this camera snapping is handled via FixedUpdate, and would look a lot more smooth if it were instead on Update. Lastly, I just didn't feel that the light/power/time between checkpoints ever gave the impression of being power, and this never gave me the feeling that I was Running Out Of Power. Besides death and slightly dimming the screen, power didn't appear to do much anything, so rather than feeling I was running out of power, it felt more like I had an obscured timer ticking down that displayed a (presumably empty) battery upon death. Perhaps if the light from the player was a bit more noticeable (it appears to be much more significant in your screenshots than in the actual game) and having that be reduced closer to death, or perhaps making the screen dim much more significant would better convey to players like myself who never got that intended feeling. I'm glad you do still have people who enjoyed it, but I really didn't care for it in many ways. tl;dr: Didn't enjoy the core gameplay and felt it didn't well fit the LD39 theme, but explained my several other gripes with the game and possible fixes for many issues and some bugs. |
| Aug 3 02:20:30 | 4h 34m | Cave torch and black screen for ludum dare 39 | ♥ 0 | Interesting premise. Could definitely use some quality of life changes, such as being able to move your flashlight down to see your immediate area or being able to change batteries while moving and/or in the air, and making it so the "ghosts" won't spawn immediately next to you before you have a chance to move. I died at least twice going into a new zone and having a ghost spawn directly next to me before I could move or react. While I can understand and respect sticking to your guns about not moving while in the air, it'd be nice if there was one or two extra frames after the jump before cutting off movement. I often would be stuck between 2 objects and unable to get out because any time I'd move then jump I'd either not get the movement before the jump or move too far into an object before the jump. There's a distinct difference between designing your controls to make the player uncomfortable and frustrating the player with bad controls. Besides that, definitely a more challenging platformer that did a good job of conveying the intended mood. The eyes coming at you, finding ghosts nearby you when you leave your light off, and many other obstacles made me always want to keep a very healthy supply of batteries while trying to move through the level as quick as possible. The art was all consistent with itself, the music was well timed with the remaining charge of your flashlight, and the enemies showed up just frequently enough to make the player always try to get further into the levels quicker. Overall pretty good, 3-4 stars for most every category. |
| Aug 9 19:16:36 | 160h 56m | HackOS | ♥ 1 | A notably different puzzle game that understands and works with and around its own mechanics in an interesting manner. Clear difficulty progression that leads to good flow. Teaches the player everything they need to know about the game without being obtuse about it. Graphics maintain a well-defined style, although some of the sprites don't overlap very well together; it was difficult at times to see which tiles were what when overlapped by locked tiles. Personally, I feel the theme wasn't very well incorporated, as it didn't very much convey "Power". This same game could have easily been changed to call the power, "Life", "Distance", "Seconds to death", or a plethora of other names while still working in the same manner. Name aside, this mechanic felt like it only really half contributed to the puzzles. Running out of power did mean that whatever path you were trying to get to a new node was the wrong one, but that's all it ever felt like. "This is the wrong, find a more optimal path." This made it feel more like an inconvenience to run out of power. Theme aside (as that's only a minor part of the ratings) the rest of the game was very well executed. Overall 5/5 from me. |
| Aug 9 20:02:50 | 46m 14s | A Forlorn Wizard | ♥ 1 | Good graphics and overall aesthetic that works well with the audio work. Gameplay is interesting, your mobility is your offense and your defense made for some unique decisions for the player to make on the fly. That said, I personally don't care for exposition dumps for teaching the player. I tend to find that it leads to a "reading a manual" type situation with games, where either you read and understand everything the first time (sometimes works depending on the length of the dump) or you have to keep referring back to it as you understand the different mechanics and how they relate to each other. In my opinion, a much better tutorial would be one that instructs the player while allowing them to experiment to get a better understanding of what they're being told while applying it. The controls would feel a lot better if it were to lock the cursor to the window for the game. Perhaps it does this in one of the downloaded versions, and I'm missing out because I played on the web version (which has its own minor problems), but I'm assuming this is not the case. This is a problem I find with mouse-based games that are faster-paced. The nature of the game may often have the player quickly moving the mouse all over the game's window, and if the player accidentally overshoots, they could easily miss a necessary jump or movement by clicking outside the game's window. If the game were to pause while not focused (another thing a downloaded version may fix, but I also assume not) then this wouldn't be as big an issue, aside from the interrupt in gameplay the player has. Most of the non-gameplay screens are wonky at best. The Restart/Gameover screen requires you to not click the screen in order to actually restart (despite being the opposite of what the game tells you to do), the exposition dump takes significant time to skip once you've read and fully understand it (rather than allowing the player to just spam left click through it), and the web version's exposition dump actually goes off-screen. It only cuts off one letter on the left and right sides, but it's still an issue that should be addressed. Lastly, the power is just life/health/hp. There's not really any two-ways about it, this is almost nothing but a life-bar that slowly goes down. The only strategizing involving it is making sure it's somewhere above 0. It doesn't change your offensive power, shorten/length your blink distance, or affect any other gameplay in any way other than giving you a gameover once it runs out. The mechanics fit the theme in name only. Theme 1/5 from me. Overall this was a game I did legitimately find fun, and would like to see after given more polish to the overall experience, but was barred down by several issues some worsening the first experience of the game, others the entire experience of the game. EDIT: I did actually go back and try this game's downloadable version, and found it did actually pause when not holding focus. This does help the player get back into the game rather than punishing the player for missing the screen with every click, but still inhibits the flow of the gameplay, and literally pauses the pacing of the game. |
| Aug 15 01:30:13 | 125h 27m | Fading Points | ♥ 2 | Interesting and unique puzzle game that sticks to its aesthetic well. Graphics are nice and simple. They convey most everything the player needs to know well, although I would have liked something to tell me how many right clicks I had remaining. The game was fun as a puzzle game, but I could tell it would get dull relatively quickly. Personally, I stopped playing it before I really ran into that, so it wasn't too big a deal for me. I didn't find the game very well fit the theme, unless that's supposed to be how/why the grey walls keep disappearing. I ran into a bug that broke one specific level, but could easily break any level: Small red dots appear to not realize that the large red dot is not navigable. I had the situation pictured below where one red dot was stuck behind the large red dot and would never move itself from behind it, so I could never destroy it. Not a very big issue, unlikely, and definitely not game-breaking, but it is level-breaking, and it shouldn't be too hard to fix. ss (2017-08-14 at 01.49.24).png The puzzles appear to be randomly generated, which lead to some interesting (nearly impossible) first puzzles after learning the mechanics. The game feels almost too easy on almost all the larger puzzles (it's easy to split up enemies and set up walls to destroy each one at a time) and extremely difficult on smaller ones. I never found myself actually using the second of blue dots, as the usual strategy tends to be bottleneck on one route and destroy anything that comes through while hoping your grey walls hold up. As a side note, it would be interesting to change up the pathfinding algorithms from time to time to keep the enemy dots from being totally predictable when there are multiple optimal routes, and the game could definitely be improved with some better random level generation (look into some maze generation or terrain generation methods, some may suite this game well) Overall a very interesting game that just needs some more polish and TLC to really shine. |
