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Feedback comments for LD39
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | JoshDBB's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 31 12:23:36 | Powersnek | ♥ 1 | I think there could have been a little more content. I would have foregone the hexagonal movement and stuck with an easy-to-use square grid in favor of polishing and expanding the rest of the game because it doesn't largely support the main mechanic. That being said, it was an enjoyable puzzle to play in its own right. | |
| Aug 1 07:25:27 | 19h 01m | Jumpy Robot | ♥ 0 | I was unable to pick up the batteries so I couldn't interact with generators either. Your double jump mechanic is a little unconventional in that double tapping it quickly gives a much higher jump than if you were to execute the second jump at the peak of the first jump. With that mechanic there are a few platforming sections you can skip by jumping right over. Being able to coordinate your landing on platforms is a little difficult given how close the camera is to your character. I would recommend zooming out a little and having what's called a "drop shadow" if you decide to improve this or work on anything similar. |
| Aug 1 07:53:02 | 27m 35s | Wind-Up Knight | ♥ 1 | Absolutely love those sound effects! It took me a while before I realised I could click on the wind ups multiple times rather than just once and wait til it runs out and up until that point it felt very limiting but then the experience felt a lot more fluid and enjoyable, making that more obvious could go a long way in making the beginning of the game feel more attractive to start with. My suggestions - if you choose to develop this idea - would be to have visual indicators for when a wind-up is 'almost' out of power, in its current state it is hard to keep track of all of them at once while also trying to platform and defeat enemies. Another suggestion is to have alternate controls for winding up like (1, 2, 3) for example which would make the game more accessible to laptop users if all they have is a trackpad. Overall though it was a lot of fun and it's a very inventive concept. |
| Aug 1 08:19:10 | 26m 08s | Socketbound | ♥ 1 | The graphic theme is very nice and everything acted exactly as one would expect when you see what they look like which is the big plus here considering the small range of colour. Sound-wise it feels empty without even a simple backtrack and the little 8-bit sound effects don't serve much to create a mood. The way your character moves might make sense for the theme of the character but it hurts the flow of the game and the environments are designed in a way that almost expects you to have more fluid movement. I think with the way movement works it could have been nicer to go in a puzzle direction rather than a combat/survival direction. |
| Aug 1 08:52:52 | 33m 42s | Pylon Defense | ♥ 1 | I can definitely appreciate the humour in those Starcraft references. Everything here is very functional and supports the main mechanic of clicking to restore power so I would have to disagree with the criticism from others that generators shouldn't need to be clicked on, it would turn the game into a typical incremental game and you would lose what makes your game unique. However, I agree that as you get further in, it feels less and less rewarding to be recharging individual towers. Given the limited space to place towers and the limitations of the towers themselves it's impossible to go any further than a certain point. As the difficulty of the waves gradually increase it gets to a point where even if you play perfectly you will still lose so I think being able to upgrade towers' damage/range/chargeAmount could extend that playtime for quite a bit longer. There is also a small gripe with the AI, I could be wrong but when 2 towers attack the same object it appears to do 1 damage in total so either adjust the AI to only have 1 attack an object at a time or make sure the damage stacks up properly. Finally, something that's letting this down is the lack audio which can make the game feel a lot more satisfying and responsive to the player's actions. The Audio category has been left available to judge so for future reference keep in mind what categories you want to be judged on and opt out of categories that aren't present in your game. |
| Aug 1 09:33:43 | 40m 51s | Lonely Robot | ♥ 1 | This is not bad in concept but there are quite a number of details that are holding this game back. It suffers a a lot from its UI design and how turns are made. A lot of your instructions tutorial can be summarised into something shorter. I think you could have foregone requiring the player to press a button to end their turn, clicking on a tile to move could have already counted as your turn. The lighting bar shows you how much energy you will use but not how much light it will give you which is probably more important. Giving the player a reminder to submit data when they're filling up could reduce that amount of information the player needs to keep track of. Having the data bar and the submit data box in two very different places on the screen is not very intuitive. Right-click/hold to move the camera around could be twice as fast, though that is a small nitpick. Hovering the mouse over different tiles while telling the player how much energy it will take to move to that tile will reduce the time it takes to make a turn because the player won't have to look at various parts of the screen for common information. |
| Aug 1 10:26:00 | 52m 17s | They come at night | ♥ 1 | Despite constantly running out of power I still found it quite easy considering all the mistakes it looks like I was making. It seemed like building a whole bunch of power sources was the best strategy because I was only being limited by how much power I could generate. It could do with some balancing but the concept is solid and I would like to see a cleaned-up version of this game. I think it's a great that you have the box on the bottom for tool tips to help people understand your game a little better because one thing the game lacks is an explanation of how to play. However, that tool tip box only covers so much and some elements are not explained at all. For example, I had no idea what the "people" icon meant or what it was used for until enemies started getting through. Maybe exploring the idea of defending people and bringing that to light can be used to create a more emotional mood for the player. I think you could have a tool tip box appear near you cursor when you mouse over something instead of a fixed box, that way you keep relevant pieces of information close to each other on the UI. On the game board itself, everything looks visually clean and clear. The sound effects are funny and I would definitely prefer to have them than without but at the rate and frequency they're playing I can see it getting quite annoying. |
| Aug 1 11:22:09 | 56m 09s | Cute Chute | ♥ 1 | I was part of a team that made a game earlier this year and honestly I thought THAT was morbid because if you failed then dogs would drown. But then I find THIS and you are actively throwing cute things down a hole as the objective. Now I don't feel bad about making that game I made. The humour here is top notch, the graphics are great, the gameplay is smooth and the sound effects are also nice and cute. Can't quite say the music fits the theme but other than that this has been a very unique and inspiring experience. |
| Aug 1 12:43:49 | 1h 21m | TrappedWithAI9000 | ♥ 0 | A fairly stock-standard 2D platforming shooter. The graphics are crude but at least they're clear and easy to understand for the most part. There isn't any music to generate or support a mood, the sound effects are so piercing and frequent that I could not keep listening to it. There is no humour in sight. For future reference, if you didn't focus or build in a category like humour and you don't want to be judged on it then you should opt out of those categories when submitting here. The energy bar really just ends up being a timer renamed as energy which sort of governs all of your actions since it is actually a multitude of different concepts like health, ammo and the timer I've already mentioned. I would have kept these stats separate to make the game more about balancing various linked resources that compliment the genre. For example, weapons can expend energy and go on cooldown temporarily to replenish that energy, your movement can include a dash or a double jump which expends its own source of energy and standing still replenishes that. In short, lumping all of those things into one energy bar has really narrowed and limited the choices of the player. |
| Aug 3 03:39:13 | 38h 55m | Battery Pack | ♥ 1 | I was only able to get up to level 7 so ignore some of these suggestions if they already exist beyond this point: - Having to start right back from level 1 after dying is not so fun because you then have to spend too much time doing something you've already done. Randomly fired bullets mitigate this a little bit because the challenge is slightly different but randomness itself tends to lessen the puzzle effect of a game because it makes it less solvable. I'm not saying that the player shouldn't lose any progress at all for failure, but reducing those consequences a little bit makes a game much more enjoyable for most. - Consumable charging stations didn't mean much when there isn't a need to back track. Maybe if you required the player to pick up a key before going to a portal you can have the player explore more of your puzzle and give consumable stations more meaning. - Blue bullets that freeze you have very little effect on how you solve each puzzle. Getting hit by one rarely requires you to change your course of action because it has no effect on your battery power. One suggestion might be to have bullets that push you back a little bit when hit. It's already been said but the bullets should be more noticeable and a little slower so the player has time to make decisions. - Alternate means of movement (doesn't necessarily have to be originating from the player's abilities, it could be environmental or enemy-driven effects like suggested earlier) can spice up your puzzles quite a bit. |
| Aug 3 04:01:03 | 21m 50s | No Sorcerer's Sky | ♥ 1 | This LOOKS really nice, but the extremely poor UI design is just too hard to ignore and kills what could have been one of the better game I'd seen so far. All those menus don't need to cover the whole screen, you lose a lot of information just by trying to play the game. Some HUD around the sides would have been nice, maybe clicking on a place should show its HUD elements on the screen and then be hidden when you click on a different building. One thing to note is that even though those menus cover the whole screen you can still click on the other places despite not seeing them. At the start, if there is going to be only one obtainable place (or only one that is viable to obtain), you might as well have it on by default so the player has some direction as to what to do first, especially when nothing is explained in the game. |
| Aug 3 05:02:30 | 1h 01m | Fluffy Racer | ♥ 1 | I have to echo the other comments, I had to have a try or two before I fully understood what I was doing but once I did I really enjoyed it overall. I had a strange bug where I was on 0 hp but then picked up some repair items and I was good, it might have had something to do with a shield item or maybe it was supposed to happen, who knows but I couldn't recreate it. This would make a nice tabletop game that's easy to make and build upon. |
| Aug 3 06:57:52 | 1h 55m | Hungry Sky | ♥ 1 | I think the core gameplay has been really fleshed out which is great. I think the indicator for where the lightning strike should be much clearer but other than that, the only thing left to do is to incorporate this core gameplay into a larger scheme to keep players going for longer periods of time. |