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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | tuism's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 31 08:38:22 | < Mr. Plug > | ♥ 2 | Not sure what the problem is, the controls keep becoming completely disabled for me. Keys stop working. I restarted the game several times. Sometimes it happens early, sometimes late (late as in after I picked up the first fragment). Besides that: The plug head dude is cute, but... the main character is a female plug (as in, holes, not prongs), and is drawing power from... Other holes? Would have liked it to make sense, to play a plug that draws power from outlets :) Controls were fine, camera was fine. Would have liked to see more "liveliness" in the character, I feel that's central to a platformer's feel. There is one problem I find with the design, when you're running low on power there's literally nothing you can do about it, leading to what's known as "deadman's walk" problem, where the player must continue while knowing what they're doing is pretty much pointless. The R to restart helps, but doesn't solve the fundamental design issue. Cool! Hope the feedback's been helpful :) | |
| Jul 31 10:31:34 | 1h 53m | Erebot | ♥ 1 | No OSX :( sadness, looks really cool and an achievement for 48 hours! |
| Jul 31 10:49:24 | 17m 50s | AI Overlord Runaway | ♥ 2 | Half of what you wrote went completely over my head, and I think 80% of people won't read 50% of it. That's not to say don't write stuff that's interesting about your project, but try not to bury the TL:DR so that people who don't want to have a choice of skimming/skipping and not be completely confused. For example, first you have to read 3 paragraphs before finding out about the pause menu at the last sentence of its paragraph, when it's your most important piece of info for people to start playing your game. Then in the pause menu there's a whole whack of text before getting to the basic controls. All those things should come first. From what I understand, you're trying to make an engine for bullet hell games? Sounds rad, hope you get to something easy to use for the average joe :) The game itself: There's almost no feedback on gameplay - It's hard to tell when the ship's been hit, and that's really important to know. The three hearts in the corner of the screen isn't enough. The whole interface to the right doesn't make sense, there's a list of names, you can click them to... turn them off? Then they have batterie things next to them, you click them to... use it? But then you have to still press keys? Not sure how it all works. It needs to be much, much clearer, and probably simpler, like click to deploy power. I'm not a fan of mixing control schemas (obviously the common FPS is the exception), but it seems like it might work here. |
| Jul 31 10:57:10 | 7m 46s | Battery Pack | ♥ 1 | That was surprisingly cool :) The idea behind it is sound, there's just some executional issues. Predictability is a big thing - as it goes on it becomes less predictable, and that just becomes less interesting. Randomly getting struck by a randomly directed shot is no fun when the whole game seems to be about working out patterns. Also feel like the current control scheme isn't a good fit for the gameplay - what if you controlled the player by clicking somewhere and he'll walk towards it? That makes the movement more predictable and more complex dodging can happen. The current movement can work but it just is too fast to control with much finesse. The narration is a cute touch :) |
| Jul 31 11:13:54 | 16m 44s | Running out of Coffee | ♥ 4 | The idea is cute, could make a meta clicker game out of this, I guess. On presentation: The simple instructions you have really should be *in* the game. Right there on the screen. Just put letters next to items and people could work it out easily. There's very little visual feedback of what's happening too. The bars are there but the correlation to action, for example the W to work - I thought you kept pressing it, eventually realised you just press it once. The biggest problem here is that it's hard for anyone but yourself to play the game. The game could be great. Hope this helped! |
| Jul 31 11:24:23 | 10m 29s | Jerry The Donut Eating Engine Driver | ♥ 1 | For some reason there was maaaaassive lag at the beginning and I thought the whole thing had crashed. The game is pretty confusing - it's not clear what the goal is (not sure if there are, if you could win or not). It's not clear in the game. Yes you've written some stuff here but that's still not clear. There are instructions in the game but sometimes instructions are contextual and only comes up in the right moment, sometimes they just are there and do nothing when you follow the instructions. Some consistency would help. I'm guessing there's some kind of health system that the donut is tied to, I noticed that he became slow, but by the time I noticed that it was way too late and I couldn't get out of the situation. I do like the visual styling, background, etc. Could be improved but fun. |
| Jul 31 11:33:29 | 9m 06s | And Here Again | ♥ 2 | If this is a commentary on the subject matter, and that it's a drag, then I guess it fits? But as a game, piece of entertainment: - It's confusing as heck, I have no idea what to do, where to go. Apparently I picked up a cigarette, it's now in my hand, and I expect that it's a weapon, but have no idea what to do with it. I have a yellow blob, and people on the street are yellow blobs. I thought it was a jelly zombie apocalypse. - If this was "going to the shops", wouldn't you know where the shops were? I have no clue, there are no directions. That, coupled with the super slow speed (yes you can shift to run but that basically is pointless because I don't know where I'm going and therefore will run out of energy before I get there and be forced to start over again. - The "yellow people" have completely unpredictable movement or non-movement, and move faster than you, and that's not fun. |
| Jul 31 11:36:40 | 3m 11s | Electric lovers | ♥ 2 | 130MB later the osx file simply tells me that it cannot be opened. Tried it several times. You wanna separate the two downloads please. No point for anyone to download both. |
| Jul 31 11:43:41 | 7m 01s | Running Power | ♥ 0 | Went to the folder called "PC_MAC_LINUX" and I only saw the exe version? No Mac? |
| Jul 31 11:48:07 | 4m 26s | Battery boy is running out of juice ! | ♥ 0 | Great art style, it's a shame it didn't permeate through more of the game, like the environment and such. The game itself is a pretty good implementation of the idea I've seen in several other entries. Brief but well thought out. The character movement could have been more interesting and juicy given the simple nature of the game. But cool work nonetheless :) |
| Jul 31 11:54:00 | 5m 53s | No Power-Got Juice? | ♥ 0 | A very basic implementation of a dodge runner, I think it had potential to be much more, but the problems are quite irritating, which become quite glaringly obvious when the core loop is literally a couple seconds: - The need to use the mouse to start and space to jump is weird. Why even use the mouse at all? - The super precise jump that is needed to completely clear the obstacle is not fun. Way too unforgiving. - It's weird that both landing on red bit and running into the red bit both result in the same "running into a wall" outcome. |
| Jul 31 12:56:07 | 1h 02m | Zombie Rush | ♥ 2 | "ZOMBIE RUSH MAC CAN'T BE OPENED" <-- Can't play, sorry. |
| Jul 31 13:02:54 | 6m 47s | Amber-graph | ♥ 1 | Interesting concept, I usually don't like this kind of puzzle where you basically want to brute-force all possible options to get to the "most efficient". The inclusion of a time limit kind of alleviates that, but it doesn't *really* reward you for going faster. So on the design of the game - Are there any actual logic to the placement of the numbers, or is it completely random? Is there an "expected cost" that one could work to go under per level? I ask because if it's completely random, then players' scores aren't comparable - someone could get really lucky and just get low-cost, direct paths all the time. Or vice versa. If there were some sort of "standard" per level, either a highscore per setup for all the players who played (around the world or whatever), or some kind of worked-out "par" for the course, then there would be a goal to work towards. Right now, it's just... Random, right? |
| Jul 31 13:06:10 | 3m 16s | Icarus Launch | ♥ 1 | A well rounded little game overall! The loop is challenging with a handful of elements. Most things work as expected. Nice. I feel like I want more points of references that are closer to the ship so you can deduce your current momentum and speed, you can very easily feel like you're not moving. So like particles or stars around the ship would really help. Cool :) |
| Jul 31 13:58:29 | 52m 19s | Tesla Defence | ♥ 1 | Your self-awareness is refreshing :) Yes it's unfortunately not fun to play, the "best strategy" involves jogging up and down between the machine and the middle turret... That's about it. But really well polished, great graphics, wished there were more variety in movement and feel. You're definitely right about the need to scope down! I've had the same problems too, and now I build a toy until the last 6 hours and I turn that into... Something. With scores :) |
| Jul 31 14:38:59 | 40m 30s | Take Me Home | ♥ 1 | That was interesting, I was going to immediately launch into how the lack of instructions or labeling was bad, but then I quickly got to playing with the relevant bits, i'm not going to spoil it here :) I kinda wished there was more to it, though that's pretty much what everyone is beholden to at jams :) The big question is - could you fail? Don't tell me here, don't spoil it for other people :) |
| Jul 31 14:50:56 | 11m 57s | Powerless Miner | ♥ 4 | Oh man, I'm in two minds about this one. What makes so different is also what makes it so terrible. At its basis, it's a sokoban-style puzzle game. All good there. Count the steps, achieve some goals. Except that the resource of time is now also an incentive to use memory. I think all games that *require* memory is bad - trying to remembering things is not a fun challenge, nor an exciting skill, or choice. But! I really like the way this was put together, the darkness mechanic has some charm to it. You could actually do the entire thing without picking up batteries if you just remember it all. Is that good? Logically, I don't think so, but it's intriguing. Also the control scheme, why do you require a mouse click on a thing when you're REQUIRED to stand next to it? Moving into it should be just as much a valid action. Just like in roguelike games, moving into enemies = attacking. Makes perfect sense. But the clicking also feels like it mimics digging in the dark. So the thematic link is interestingly novel, if hugely frustrating. Allowing clicks to do nothing is also really frustrating. Man, overall, I don't know. It's as "badly designed" as it is interesting because of those designs. |
| Jul 31 15:07:11 | 16m 15s | Down in the Light Mine | ♥ 1 | The visual style is quite cool, I liked the bold textures and glows. But the game itself is lacking from several angles: The bugs have been mentioned already - they're all pretty obvious and glaring, so I won't go over them again. The core mechanic is interesting but as soon as you know that you can just walk around with the lights off and you know where the trap is, that's it. There needs to be a counterbalance to that so that the dark is actually frightening and you want to keep your lights on. As with many of these games, I feel like the *feeling* of the character movement can really be improved, and that would add a lot to it. A linear straight-line movement is very... unappealing. A little animation, bobbing up and down, would have made a huge difference, for example. Yes g-o made a great point - this looks like iti was overscoped for the time and skill level. it's great to challenge oneself, but finishing is also a worthy challenge to tackle :) Good luck :) |
| Jul 31 15:31:32 | 24m 21s | Let's go to the mall | ♥ 2 | Hahahahahaha! I love it! Genuinely made me chuckle :) though of course we should not buy so much into sexist stereotypes :) There are some control choices that I think could be improved, for example the running forward - should I even need to press a key for that? I feel like automatically running would be a good thing. Then the getting up from the chair requiring W is not awesome. Pressing S again should work, and much better than right now. Wasn't sure how to "get bags". And also feel like it should have something to do with reaching your partner :) |
| Jul 31 15:39:49 | 8m 17s | The P.U.R.G.E. Protocol | ♥ 1 | I had... Other things in mind when I saw the production value on this baby, but I certainly wasn't expecting a linear quiz that I couldn't be arsed to work out all the answers for :) It's like a twist that was less fun than what it was gonna be :P |
| Jul 31 15:53:22 | 13m 33s | Generator #4875 | ♥ 1 | This game is incredibly well produced. Everything is well polished......... Except the gameplay? I get the "metaness" of it as a commentary on society and blah, but seriously it's not a fun game. Like, I did it twice to see if there's anything else to it, but it seems like a no and well, it's not fun... Sorry, everything else is great. I guess it's "ART". |
| Jul 31 15:57:06 | 3m 44s | Powerless: Trump Teaches Typing | ♥ 3 | Frantic fun game :) The music was pretty spot on too :) I didn't like the fact that you had to type THAT HIGHLIGHTED WORD and you didn't have any other choice. So when you know you can't make THAT word in time, and can't start on another, well, that's super annoying. Have you played the Typing of the Dead? That was great :) The Trumping of the Dead will make a good sequel :) |
| Jul 31 16:20:15 | 23m 09s | LOTS - Legend of the Teleportation Stone | ♥ 0 | It's really interesting, but the lack of player feedback means taking blind shots aiming at nothing hoping to hit the target, and then dying, then trying to remember how far you tilted up and repeating that again and again. For example, if there were a distinct skybox, you could use landmarks in that texture to facilitate with aiming, perhaps. Right now it's just repeating and repeating, and the repeating takes forever too because of the falling effect. I see the potential for a "sporty" game where one builds up skill of it, like golf, but what's there now doesn't feel like it gives you enough to do that with. |
| Jul 31 16:48:31 | 28m 16s | Manual Overload | ♥ 0 | Beautifully presented, but not that much substance to it. It's basically solo Spaceteam :) The UI could be done better I think, having to rely on an exploit to beat the game makes it less fun. And the reaching wasn't really explained, for a piece of critical info. Really really pretty though :) |
| Jul 31 18:49:32 | 2h 01m | Rocket Rescue | ♥ 2 | What really caught my eye are the animations, the good ones are really great. The game mechanics are okay, I thought the attacks would drain energy or something, but it looks like the only thing that drains is basically a timer? The bombs were weird, perhaps they linger too long. After the explosion I walked towards it and died. The jetpack hella unresponsive. It feels like it's on some kind of delay, and that makes controlling it really difficult, I think a more responsive jetpack could make it challenging still while not feeling like it's intentionally broken. |
| Aug 1 06:42:02 | 11h 52m | Robot Guy | ♥ 2 | The concept is there, but the elements of the gameplay don't quite balance out to form a cohesive experience. Things happen seemingly too fast, robots are dead before you have a chance to get to them, which is compounded by the initial confusion of being completely uncertain of what to do, which is compounded by the control scheme - I think you didn't need a Q for drawing power, why not use the same action key? I don't see there being ever a case where both actions are possible and you have to be clear about which one you want to do? And holding the key down seems less interesting, doing them in increments might be good, like pressing the key twice instead of holding it down and you're not quite sure if you've overdone it or not enough or whatever. The floaty movement is fine I guess for a system like this but yes a better movement would feel like a real character. With minor acceleration and deceleration, some animation (even if just bobbing up and down) to make it feel like it's moving while it is... well, moving. Not sure what 1 2 and 3 did, I made things but not sure how they compare to each other or what they were meant to do, that might have been better implemented as part of some on-screen GUI. Very ambitious :) Art is great :) |
| Aug 1 09:24:11 | 2h 42m | Recoil - Mike Said No Short Titles | ♥ 1 | The mechanic on this is fantastic fun :) The only gripe I have is with the left and right click being difficult to work out in my head intuitively, and because each move costs charge, I inevitably end up wasting a lot of power when I really shouldn't if the controls were more intuitive. I think maybe a click and drag to go to the orientation you want (still costing same power) would be better. So you click, drag to show the orientation you want, and let go to apply and deduct cost. And the lose level menu is broken :) the "next level" button does nothing so it should be removed. Good stuff! |
| Aug 1 17:54:26 | 8h 30m | The Light City of Karola | ♥ 3 | Ah, ye olde LDJAM pixel platformer :P An olde staple :P Very well presented, great polish, really pretty with great sounds, good stuff. The wall jump is great and the general versatility of the character was good. though: - Why even use enter to start? Why not use a key already being used? Moving my hand away from controls to restart and coming back was annoying. - The last level was confusing (SPOILER AHEAD), some walls could be crossed, some couldn't. It was unclear by just looking. Also there was a bit where you could run and run... into nothing. Why even have a path there if it only led to nothing? (Top right). In fact the entire level was completely unnecessary once I just kinda ran towards the exit out of sheer frustration. - The controls were generally very tight and very good, but at the last level the super tight spacing of the enemies there shows that there is a weakness to the controls at tight quarters, either tighten the controls to allow finer degrees of control more easily or don't have such tight situations. - The overall mechanics weren't really all that interesting to support the great feel of the game. Running out of energy over and over didn't create interesting decisions. It was purely a timer that ran out. The coins may have added a cool challenge to hit precision platforming acrobatics but that wasn't really implemented as such. - That bit of floating city in the last level LOOKED LIKE a thing to interact with. But it didn't do anything and felt like it was broken. Overall, great job :) PS I just realised that I completely missed the presence of this "turbo" thing. In-game teaching is always better than expecting people to read ahead of time :P PPS Lol then I realised that your screenshot above is old as there's no turbo in-game, you might wanna fix that :) |
| Aug 2 07:02:23 | 13h 07m | Power or die | ♥ 1 | Without reading the textual instructions at the top here, there's really no indication that you're not supposed to build things until the first colonist arrives, which is weird since the game starts with A LOT OF TEXT, which most will skip. I read it all and still didn't get that. The concept of the game is cool, a numbers balancing game. I feel like the entire map thing doesn't add to the game itself - the important things are how the numbers change when you build this thing and that, and those consequences are completely left out of the UI, leaving the player to guess at the outcomes, which doesn't work well. I think if the whole game worked without the map like one of those clicker incremental games, it would communicate and work much more easily to a player. The concept of "stable power" also was very vague and needed to be clearer from the beginning. Has potential but lacking in the ability for the player to understand what's going on. |
| Aug 2 07:12:23 | 10m 00s | Defend Home: Mars | ♥ 3 | The intro was cool :) The game itself... it's a fairly standard feeling FPS, which really wasn't fun to play because of various reasons: - The walking speed is just too slow, or things were spread out too far. You're chasing from one end to the next constantly and not much actually happens while you're peddling slowly. Trying to shoot tiny targets with your gun is not fun. - The lack of indication of whether you hit the enemy or not is an issue, especially since half the time you're far far away from them. - Chasing down far, far away ammo is not fun. - Needs more feedback when you lose health too. The art and style was pretty great, I appreciate the work in presentation. But the gameplay itself I think was a miss for me. |
| Aug 2 07:31:02 | 18m 39s | Delivery Drain | ♥ 1 | Man, I really want to like this, I love the concept, I love all the little touches - the indicator for a turn, the little map that only works when you're stopped, driving on the correct side of the road, all really cool little attention to detail bits that I enjoyed. BUT The game doesn't give you much context when you start out, and the interface, while neat, is confusing. I had no idea what W stands for (still don't), I just assumed that it's wood. Which is a fair assumption because, well, it's telling me about wood deliveries. There are also other coloured blocks. Also have no idea what they are. Needing to press the map button to bring it up is annoying. Either bind it to a key or have it automatically come up, and disappear immediately if you drive off by pressing direction buttons - there's no need to close it with another mouse press. All these add up to a clunky interface for something that shouldn't require so much action from the player. Punishing a "wrong delivery" by completely ending the game seems unnecessary and confusing too. The player has already been punished for spending all that time and energy for nothing. Then, the problem with trying to tie the game in thematically in is that you have some theme in there that completely doesn't make any sense either: Why can you only stop at a stop street to look at your phone but you can't pull over whenever? Why don't you have a car charger? :) Then the more I play it the more I feel like, am I supposed to beat this with rote memory? Never open the map up and just do it all once? In which case why wouldn't I take a screenshot? There have been several games that I've seen in this jam that has a similar thing - use power to see stuff, or use your memory. I think memory is one of the worst mechanics in games, it's just not fun. If you could recharge your battery power by achieving things, so that the "best play" isn't to take a screenshot, then that would make the map thing more interesting. It might sound all these criticism means I dislike the game - I really don't, I liked it, but I hope these issues can get addressed and it becomes even better :) Good luck! |
| Aug 2 08:38:39 | 1h 07m | Artifact Dive | ♥ 1 | The procedural generation is a nice touch, it can't have been easy to implement. I would have liked to see more elements of the levels to make better use of the procedural generation but I understand time is always the constraint. I liked that you didn't go overboard with the power mechanic - so many games just made the power aspect basically a timer and then it just became a mad thoughtless dash to do the next thing, which genuinely felt worse for their games than better. I found that you could edge away from a lot of enemies without being hurt, but there were still times where you *would* get hurt. That was a nice balance. Though overall it was probably too easy. Would have wanted a bit more than absolutely random wandering around to find the goal, some kind of clue or pointer but not dead obvious would have been great. Or perhaps just pick one default ending point but leading to that point would be procedural - like how Spelunky does it - you always go down, but how you get down would be varied. Good, considered, if not really all that mind-blowing :) Good back-to-the-basics. |
| Aug 2 10:12:07 | 1h 33m | Scale of Life | ♥ 4 | It's really pretty and has great style and music and everything is ace on presentation - but: * I can't tell where the "too late" point is. That means it's essentially a blind game of chicken. * I don't know if you actually built this to the theme. There's not even a vague connection. But hot dang it's pretty. So very juicy. |
| Aug 2 21:13:51 | 11h 01m | Disaster On Nebula One | ♥ 6 | Looks cool, but... Windows only :( I run a mac :( |
| Aug 3 10:39:18 | 13h 25m | Zombies and RVs | ♥ 1 | Well produced, great graphics and the music is great (though sound effects a bit lacking in contrast). But: * The platforming controls are really unresponsive, the best thing to do in the game seemed to be to just stand and not move. If you fall off, there's very little chance of getting back onto an RV. In fact I'd rather you instantly died if you fall off, as trying to get back on and the struggle is just terribly not fun. * Don't think you did anything with the theme at all? * Character upgrade? Died like 3 times and didn't see anything to that effect? |
| Aug 6 19:45:08 | 81h 05m | X-Moon 2: Dark Moon | ♥ 1 | This is such a polarising entry!!!! I really want to like it but I really can't say that I do - the design choices really conspire to make the really cool mechanics sort of just flop around. - The game is SUPER JUICY. The shots and effects and the glowy lights stuff are really really fun, looks great. - Movement is great. Responsive, great speed. BUT: - Finding the "black holes" and completing the level felt like a matter of rote memory, die, and come back and remember where you died. In the dark. Repeat three times. The whole "light dims when you get closer" thing was not obvious to me, if I didn't read that comment I wouldn't have known. And at no point in the game did I feel like I was armed with the knowledge that the thing I was going after was what was killing me over and over. It FEELS like I just got shot out of nowhere and died without knowing why. It didn't feel like I was running into a static thing that killed me because it was the same colour as everything else. L feel like the goals should be a different colour. I know you've made it like this intentionally, but it just simply wasn't fun. - Getting a good angle to get a shot at the squids also felt really painful to do, it wasn't "challenging" because of a skill, it felt challenging because of controls that felt wrong. The game felt like a twinstick shooter, so I felt I should have been able to strafe and shoot (walk up and shoot right, for example), but the lack of that degree of control freedom made me feel crippled, even though I understand that this is not a twinstick shooter. I really really wanted to like this! |
| Aug 10 16:55:43 | 93h 10m | Extraction | ♥ 3 | Dude! Superb game! The mechanics are deceptively simple but incredibly difficult to master, it looks really simple from video playthroughs, but when you're in the thick of it it's very hard to actually track everything. But the actions are so simple that the challenge is never from confusion. Only bits of improvement I can think of: * The on/off states are less obvious than I'd prefer them, yes the wires are there but I guess you've intentionally made them less than perfectly clear. * I'd love some kind of mapping to keyboard to move the little guy to turrets, clicking is less speedy than I'd like it to be. It fits touch perfectly, I guess! * There wasn't really indication of those pickups being pickups - that would have been nice to know off the bat. That's it really. GREAT JOB :D |