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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | DaleP's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 7 05:34:15 | Komainu | ♥ 1 | The art and music were well done and worked well for the style of the game, but I thought the gameplay was a little simplistic (good start though!) The enemies stopped coming when I got to 355 XP, not sure if I missed something I was supposed to do in order to progress or if that was the end. With the two enemy types, it's too easy to just kite around and throw shuriken at them while they get into a big cluster trying to follow. I didn't even realize I had a melee attack until after I had killed them all, so showing the controls somewhere would be helpful, along with more enemies/attacks that would require different strategies. One other note is that the player can move faster diagonally than straight up/down/left/right, so that might be something to address if you continue working on the game. | |
| Dec 7 05:50:54 | 16m 39s | Space Freight | ♥ 3 | Sorry to be that guy who complains about weird distro-specific Linux issues, but the .rar file can't be extracted on ElementaryOS because "parsing filters is unsupported". I'll definitely come back and play this if you can upload it in a more compatible/standard archive format like zip or tar.gz. |
| Dec 7 06:43:14 | 52m 20s | Furtive Fortune | ♥ 0 | Good challenge. The decision of whether or not to open each safe was quite impactful to the difficulty later on. This is a concept I could easily see being expanded upon with new mechanics like the ability to drop coins and maybe pick them up again later (something I kept wishing I could so so I could scout the area a little more safely), rooms with echos, a chance of evading guards if you run fast enough, etc and eventually becoming a full, complex game. Even though it's sort of a sound-based game, I thought the actual sound was its weakest area. The jingling sounds didn't seem to quite match what the circle was doing and like another commenter said, they got repetitive fast. A few times, I found myself getting caught because I was focusing on the jingling sound (thinking I was safe because of the delay between occurrences of the sound) instead of noticing the motions of my circle. |
| Dec 7 07:13:44 | 30m 30s | Santaur's Special Delivery | ♥ 1 | Great graphics, music, and general atmosphere. A couple issues with the gameplay made it less fun than it could have been for me: 1. Spamming the spacebar got annoying quick. Even after I figured out you could avoid the elves, it didn't seem like there was ever any reason to *not* be pressing spacebar except for brief moments when dodging elves, so why make the player do it manually in the first place instead of just constantly dropping presents at a set interval? 2. The physics seemed odd. When you're not pressing left or right the presents dropped straight down relative to the sleigh, retaining the same momentum as the sleigh flying through the sky, but when moving left or right, they didn't inherit momentum from the sleigh's movement. This made aiming at the houses counterintuitive. Also, sometimes presents would just unpredictably shoot out in some random direction. |
| Dec 7 07:36:56 | 23m 12s | Litter Burg | ♥ 3 | This is really polished. I do think you could have simplified the interface to just "click a tile to build" and "click a truck to set a route" without having separate modes for each, and made it easier to see what would happen on the next turn without having to mouse over each building to see production. Was there any point in choosing where to build stuff? Might be interesting to add effects where people e.g. don't want to live next to industrial plants or dumps to add another layer of complexity to planning. About two thirds of the way through I think I clicked on something during the turn animation and it froze with the error "GwtApplication: exception: Cannot deposit trash af" |
| Dec 7 08:43:24 | 1h 06m | Carnage [ Board Game ] | ♥ 1 | Any chance you could make a light version of the game board? Printer ink is more expensive than blood. (if not it's fine, I'll just draw it out) |
| Dec 8 22:15:16 | 37h 31m | Plague Venue | ♥ 1 | The music, art, animations, and actions you take in the game all work together to make this really creepy. In some places, it just becomes easier to wipe out everyone in a room indiscriminately, which adds a lot to the dark and disturbing mood but I'm not sure if that was your intent or not (if it was, bravo, you've done far better than most games that advertise "moral choices" because it was so easy yet made me feel like a complete monster for doing it). The lack of animations for climbing stairs made it impossible to keep track of people when there was more than one repeatedly going up and down the same set of stairs. |
| Dec 8 23:07:37 | 52m 21s | Flips! | ♥ 0 | This definitely needs to ramp up in difficulty more slowly so you can make sure the player understands each mechanic before moving on to puzzles that depend on understanding the basics. You might want to look at other puzzle games to see how they introduced similar rules and mechanics to players. The Witness has similar abstract puzzles but devoted a lot more time to introducing mechanics to the player. Basically, each individual mechanic had a whole series of levels devoted to teaching it. Flips tried to introduce multiple mechanics/rules per level, so chances were high that a player could choose correctly and progress without understanding why that choice was correct (this is what happened to me when I played it). I think there are also some issues regarding the terminology and graphics you used. For instance, the term "level boundary" is kind of confusing (does it mean that two stacked tiles of the same color will match each other, or that tiles of the same color will match if they are in the same row/column but different vertical levels?). The first level told me to "flip a tile" but clicking a tile doesn't actually show an animation of it flipping, leaving me wondering if I did the wrong thing by clicking on it (the "x" might also throw people off because an "x" in a square usually indicates a clickable delete or close button). It also wasn't intuitive that "flipping" a tile would mean disabling its color, since the tiles are depicted as being the same color all the way through (I wonder if cards might be a better physical analogue than tiles, since people already know cards have two different sides). |
| Dec 9 09:21:30 | 10h 13m | LootOnline | ♥ 1 | Watching the stuff just pile on the ground and sometimes get thrown in the air when I bought another loot box was all the reward I needed for clicking a button 300 times. 👍 |
| Dec 9 09:50:53 | 29m 23s | The Ol' Flower Shop | ♥ 1 | Simple but well done. The character starting to wobble was a nice touch and the controls getting slower to respond was a good twist on the classic game mechanic. |
| Dec 9 10:18:24 | 27m 31s | WAVEFORM | ♥ 1 | You might want to list the Linux build on this page even though it's the same link as the Windows one. The graphics are stunning and the music and sounds create a really nice atmosphere. The enemies were a little easy to kite around once I got used to them (seeing the giant one on wave 4 was a nice surprise though). After playing for a little while I stopped taking any damage even if I just sat still and let them attack me. |
| Dec 12 10:48:22 | 72h 29m | Home Raider | ♥ 1 | > did the levels work for you? Level 1 was a good introduction to the mechanic that let me get a feel for how everything worked. 2 was fun to plan out how to get in and out and what to grab, but there was so much stuff in that one room (with the safe, pokeball, etc) that it didn't really make sense to go through the rest of the house other than just grabbing what I could on the way out. 3 was a nice way to get me to be meticulous with my item use and a good final challenge to end the game on. I didn't really like the fact that if I wasted some items and then got caught, I had to farm previous levels with no variation to afford the items again. > was the sound mechanic clear and balanced? Yes, the way sound carried between rooms made sense and the graphics represented it well. > how did you approach level 3 (if you did)? it is super basic, being created 60 minutes before the finish line First I tried luring them to the other side of the map and stunning them. This didn't work well because only one wanted to chase me and he was faster than me. What worked for me in the end was: run in, flash bang, grab oscar, hide in box while the guards recovered and went back to their normal spots, flash bang, run out. > which items did you use, and which not, and why? :) - Smoke - didn't really use. I tried it in house 2 and didn't think it slowed them down enough to be very useful. - Moss - I tried it once in house 2 to sneak out of the treasure room without the TV watching guy hearing, and it appeared to only cover a few tiles which wasn't what I needed to get out of that room. - Flash bang - Yes. As currently implemented, they just seem like a better version of smoke with no downside. - Box - Yes. Good for stopping and getting your bearings or planning the next move. Also good for getting everything in the treasure room in house 2 since TV guy doesn't give you enough time to grab & go before he walks in. |