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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | pkenney's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 4 04:24:37 | Ninjitsu Conservation | ♥ 1 | Beat it! It took me a bunch of tries, and a lot of being EXTREMELY careful. At fist I thought it was a little unfair how they can fire so many stars at me from out of sight. Especially bt the last few guys when they get [SPOILER REDACTED] I was hiding like a sissy behind a wall and feeling that there was nothing I could do. But after some experimentation I realized that while the ninjas have these strengths, they also have weaknesses which a wily player can exploit. It was a little awkward, trying to shoot 45-degree diagonal shots on the run at an off-screen target. But I feel like instead of this just being a bad part about the game, instead you made it into a puzzle. I am not a huge fan of the controls/display being the challenge, I prefer to make the player strong and smooth to control and them set the challenge around that... but in this case I actually didn't mind it. It was a cool trick of design how you capitalized on the implementation's shortcomings, if that makes sense. Also, I noticed a nice small touch which I liked, with how if my star would spawn into a wall you defer, and don't even just cancel it, you let me fling it later with a direction change input. Other nice aspects were the clarity of information, and the fact that you let me use spacebar as well as enter, which I preferred. The title screen and associated transitions were also nicely done, and I appreciated the very short retry loop on failure (which I had a number of!). I think this is a great first LD entry. You threw some implemtnation out there, and then you found what was interesting about it... just what a jam is all about! Well done, and congrats on finishing. | |
| Dec 4 04:41:38 | 17m 01s | LD40 - SirPumpy | ♥ 2 | My top score was 1050. Wow this was beautiful, it's really a great combination of shader programming and artistic taste, and the music fits great with it! It's oozing with style. Gameplay-wise I like the rush of the sharp turning and boosting, and there was some great aerial acrobatics possible. My high score though was when I did something boring: just pointed my ship up and pulsed the jets now and then while holding down shoot... this sort of let me go infinite. No big deal though! That just let me take a closer look at the art. Only thing I'd change would be the effect of hitting an enemy ship. Took me a little while to realize they were getting down down and flying into the water. Oh, and I liked the way my health was indicated by the shader effect of encroaching darkness rather than a meter or number! Well done, you've got a serious eye-catcher here. |
| Dec 4 05:38:56 | 57m 18s | Magus O-Minus | ♥ 1 | I came to check this out because I liked the animations I saw in some posts during the compo. And I dig the animations a lot. But wow, it's so much more than that. This entry has a strong vision and all of the details are in place reinforcing it. I care about my hp much more than in a normal game, so there's a sense of tension. And combat is fast and sometimes brutal. I'm on edge. But the camera has some nuances that raise the tension. I can't run too far ahead without losing visibility, so I have to move in short careful chunks. The aspect ratio and close camera makes it frightening to move vertically. I can't run and gun - attacking prevents movement, so I have to stick and move, stick and move. Use the cover. The art, music, and sound are all very focused on this mood. I made a mistake, and now there is a corpse to remind me, every rest. It's haunting and tense. I think I'm doing well. WHAM, three hits from a spider just off the screen reminds me of how quickly that can change. Will another villager die because of that? Be more careful. The first moment when the slavering enemy rushes me: wild panic. I thought I had the luxury of range. No wonder blood drips from his misshapen chin. This entry transported me fully into its stark vision. Outstanding job. Few minor nits that intruded: I spawned and backed off from a sudden attack, but happened to spawn right next to the stairs. Entire level gone. That's how I got my first villager corpse. Was trying to get to the end with five villagers, but I couldn't get down these stairs. Level cleared. Did I miss something? A bug? Or just a grim finale as intended? https://imgur.com/5q4obwE Last minor thing is there was a bit of chore to that double-check search I did every time, just to make sure I'd cleared a level. This is strong vision well-supported by every aspect of the implementation. Great work. |
| Dec 4 06:15:12 | 36m 16s | Lights, Camera, Action! | ♥ 1 | Just short of five million bucks - I guess I lost a few of the kids when I carved the guy at the end up with a knife! This came together nicely - the story, the voice work, and the fun art all come together well! I dug the skeletal animations that helped me show off my oversized fists. If I could add one thing it would be a little more impact when I punch the guys. (Oh also, random, but heads up, I noticed your youtube link in your profile has a typo.) |
| Dec 4 16:36:39 | 10h 21m | Clumsy Paws | ♥ 3 | Oh no, not the belt!! I tried a few times but I just could not stay ahead of those cats. Things got especially hard with the cat by the low table, which gives a very short time to catch the falling object. I think I could have improved my performance a bit if the hitbox detection on the falling object was a little bit more generous. It seemed to be quite exact, and if I was zooming the mouse around the screen to catch several objects but I missed one by [what FELT like] a few pixels, then I'd have to reverse motion and try clicking again but by then I'd miss the rest of the falling stuff. Of course if I miss then I deserve to lose, but I maybe could have gotten into the ZONE better if the hit detection was like "you got pretty close, I'll give it to you". Also, omg that red sausage with its narrow vertical space! I also felt like a "doomed but not dead" state when I had missed two objects early. I wasn't exactly certain I understood how the broom goes, but I think I get one broom per mom-check, yes? It might be better if the broom is ALWAYS there but to use it is a distraction... that way I can always recover but things spiral out of control if I fall behind? Not sure. Anyway, those are some minor thoughts about what could be changed, but I really liked this. It's a simple system but the art is great and nicely animated, I like the hints of a dark tone w/ mom and dad especially. The music and sound are nicely done. Oh, and it was a very nice design idea to have the laptop, a large visible object with insta-lose... this created a special area for my attention and prevented it from all being the same. The low table was also that way - really had to keep me eye on those two spots! Very nice work. |
| Dec 4 17:12:04 | 35m 25s | Robox! | ♥ 3 | There's a lot to like here. Off the charts in terms of looks: it looks great, is really well animated via algorithm in a way the gives a great robotic life to the character, and there are loving little details in the fire, trap doors, machines, and the "grand dump" of everything at the end. I'm blown away. I would respectfully disagree with the other commenter asking for instructions. It's mere personal preference, but for me and my taste, I appreciated very much that you did NOT provide instructions. In a game where there are just two buttons and a few simple rules, you can seize the opportunity to give the player that extra pleasure of experimenting and exploring the unknown system. I think this is especially true in a physics-based game with a limited set of discrete possible outcomes. The downside risk is confusing the player beyond a reasonable/pleasurable amount and losing them, but I didn't experience that here. It's a risk, but I'm glad you took the chance, I enjoyed the rule-learning period. My first run score was a bit more in the fire than not. I tried to do better, and I managed to lower that to 37 into the pit. I think there may be a small bug where after restarting the boxes which you succeed with do not become hearts and are not counted. For example: https://imgur.com/a/qoWx5 It's a shame there is no audio. With such an awesome presence in the visuals, it would be a bigger shame to detract with poor audio. But still... it all feels distinctly less real with a total lack of sound. But that's a jam for you - something comes up, and you cut scope, so nice work delivering anyway! Great job. (One last thought looking back at the screenshots: this is a 2D game, but it felt more realistic than that, and in retrospect I think it was a big deal that you drew the cubes in various states of angled perspective rather than as rot-locked squares. I played again looking just at this, and also noticed that slight camera rumble which plays nicely with the flicker overlay to give an old-timey feel that fits.) |
| Dec 4 17:35:06 | 23m 02s | The Harsh Life of Terry the Homeless Dude | ♥ 1 | High score 13,738. Nice job soldiering through on your first LD and getting a playable submission in! It sounds like it wasn't easy, but you made it and got something I can play. There's some cool stuff here, nice pixel art, music, voice work, various screen transitions including a story and credits, a high score, several kinds of enemies and powerups, etc etc! It's kind of a wild ride the way it all comes together, probably meaning a smaller tighter game was the right target, but you definitely should feel good about hitting a lot of content. I ran into two small problems: first it took me a while to figure out that Z was jump (I think the instructions said it was A?) and I kept getting stuck on rain gutters. I'm talking about the thing that looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/Ix6GN I would get stuck on those and be unable to pass, and my life would keep ticking down.. eventually I'd either die or randomly become unstuck. Other than that I was able to zoom around the city high on drugs and eating garbage, crash some rooftop parties with my sick jumping skills, and try not to embarrass myself by puking. You can be proud of finishing your first LD! |
| Dec 4 18:30:31 | 55m 25s | Temples of Purgatory | ♥ 2 | Nice work! This game created a very tense atmosphere. The controls made it feel old-school, which was a nice mix with the graphics. The inability to circle-strafe and look around freely made it a tradeoff between movement and examination. In idle moments this didn't matter, but when enemies were around it was a big deal! The way that enemies were slower but infinitely respawned was a cool design decision. I had to dash through packs of enemies without being totally aware of my surroundings, and it was nice and scary. When I explored the wrong place and had to backtrack, I would come back upon huge roaming packs I had left behind me, creating moments like this: https://imgur.com/Lma2uta or this https://imgur.com/T0F9flw There was another moment when I thought I was alone and took damage, I whirled around and there were two evil snowmen. Had they just spawned, or were they following me in my blind spot?? There was a cool creepy atmosphere to it all, reinforced by nice work on the audio and a great variety of places and enemies (even if I did deal with the different enemy types all in the same way: knockback attack and sprint past). I liked the way that stepping on a box created a glimpse of the thing it unlocked. I know I had to remember the distinct graphics of the areas so I'd know where to go next from the glimpse... and for the first few I could. But eventually I reached a state where there were huge roaming packs everywhere so I had to sprint through areas without looking around. And I lost my way and couldn't figure out where to go next. After circling the same three or four areas looking for that side door I must have missed, I eventually got totally surrounded and died. Very nice entry - a compelling experience that I enjoyed! |
| Dec 4 18:57:20 | 26m 49s | Uncivilized | ♥ 0 | Nice art and audio! I played around a while, of course it's easy to get overpopulation by just always waiting, but I could never quite totally exterminate life. I noticed for example that when a new city is first set up and my bomb is at 0/0 I can kill it in 3 hits. The first hit military goes from 1 to 0. But then the second hit I can't observe any specific state change. I watched the art and numbers, but couldn't see what was quite going on. Then the third hit blows up the city. Although I never totally understood the rules, I liked the vibe and tinkered around a while with this. |
| Dec 4 19:12:58 | 15m 38s | Kalyuka | ♥ 1 | (Quick note - I notice in the credits you said that someone else made the music. That means this should be entered into the jam, not the compo as that is against compo rules.) Nice entry - especially for a first LD! There was a fun variety of graphics to the enemies, and they were nicely alien/creepy/monstrous. Definitely played to your strength by having a lot of different ones. Also cool that you had four totally different boss fights! If I could change one thing, it would be to have more feedback when the player is hit, like a little flash appear on the screen. The sound effect of the axe hitting the black blinking slime monster was great, more of that kind of feedback when the player gets hit would have helped ground me in the world of the game. For example I wasn't even sure at first if the tentacles were hurting me in the first boss fight. Nice job! I definitely held space the whole time, but that wasn't a problem imo. |
| Dec 4 19:25:48 | 12m 50s | Greedy Balloon | ♥ 2 | Nice job, loved the painting-style art! I liked experimenting with the controls, and I liked the theme usage... the balloon really did become very heavy and sluggish when loaded up with gold! If I could add one thing I think it would have been a little animation to the birds to see the art come more alive. Nice entry that hits all the bases here! Good job. |
| Dec 4 19:58:25 | 32m 37s | Golden Cave | ♥ 1 | This game looks really fantastic. The way the rich yellow light soaks the room is so well done. Also loved all the angry snake/worm statues glaring at me while I stole their legacy! I had some issues with the jumping - there seems to be a very short but noticeable lag on jumping, plus a re-jump limitation. I think it's reasonable to prevent me from just consta-jumping the entire puzzle away, but it felt a bit raw when I hit the button and nothing happened, and I died. Nailed it on the atmosphere though - and I shouldn't forget to mention the nice work on the audio which did a nice job of gently reinforcing the overall feeling of the cave. Nice job! |
| Dec 4 20:22:57 | 24m 32s | The 1D107 Exterminator | ♥ 1 | Nice work! The lighting and perspective were nice, and the audio did a job of rounding out the atmosphere. Most calming slaughter ever, thanks to the music? Mechanic was straightforward but I liked the twists you threw in, with the energy management, and then the light source competing with shooting for energy. It was also a nice decision to not force me to hunt stragglers down, but only achieve a certain threshold of death - I feel like that was a bad trap that you could have fallen into but sidestepped. I experienced the wall-passthrough bug, here after this moment: https://imgur.com/iGaGk8M There were enough guys that it was getting real choppy, and then I lurched through the wall into them middle of that crowd of idiots. Let's just say the battle did not go my way after that! Good difficulty balance, I had to retry a few times but not dishearteningly often. Nice entry! |
| Dec 4 20:52:45 | 29m 48s | Shape Invasion | ♥ 2 | Sorry LD was stressful - congratulations on powering through and submitting something! Honestly I thought it was going to be real rough to play, given your description of the event. So I was pleasantly surprised. There is some good stuff here! My favorite part was the projectiles, and how they have an arc and bounce around a bit. This was WAY more fun than simply having a normal straight-shot gun. I enjoyed bouncing a bunch of projectiles into an area by banking them off walls, to clear out a bunch of shapes. The over-the-top particle systems were fun, too. You hit all the checkboxes: music, art, sound FX, some menu transitions and a story. There's even all this attention to detail. Like the way the menu items pop larger on mouseover. And the way the gun starts on the ground and I pick it up, instead of me just starting with it. A surprising amount of nice little touches for a first LD! My score was 2001 and here is a screen shot right before I died: https://imgur.com/6B1NidI Shoulda used more bombs! Anyway, nice work. Sorry LD was a hassle. |
| Dec 4 21:26:36 | 33m 51s | (MAAB) Mistakes Are Actually Bad | ♥ 2 | Wow, this is a very cool idea! I'll have to see if I can return to it with a second person, for now I only played it alone two-handed. It looks super-slick, very impressive. The mechanic is a new idea I enjoyed exploring. It looked really nice when I sliced something off. In the part I saw, it seemed like if I could move past something to get on both sides to slice it, then I didn't need to slice it because I could just move past it the same way with both guys... but then I didn't get super-far. My furthest run I got to the point where the bottom floor takes a plunge downward and didn't last much past that. If I could change one thing I would make the restart happen faster and via keyboard command. With two hands on the keyboard, it was a friction to have to reach over for the mouse every time I made a mistake, and o/c that friction hits me at the downbeat of having just died. This was an awesome little core: a novel idea with a slick look and tight controls. Well done! |
| Dec 4 22:21:49 | 55m 13s | TECHNOCIDE | ♥ 2 | Wow! Wasn't expecting turn-based from the screen shot, but I approve! This was excellent and I played it all the way to the end. Difficulty was just about right - let me learn in the beginning, and then tested me with the final boss. I used lightning around corners a lot, took all the cores I could, and used a lot of double-shot early, then quad vs the boss. I really didn't experience any problems. Everything looked great and played smoothly. The graphics as well as audio were on point - really made a nice space and mood. Then menus/UI are tight as well. I'm glad it wasn't longer, the last level was about the right place to end it. I would say maybe there was a little bit of excess wandering, I got a little lost on maybe level 2 trying to find the exit. It was interesting the way the AI hung back around corners. They wanted to blast me when I stepped through to initiate battle, and that made sense. But there were times where they could have pressed an advantage, but I was able to fall back past one corner and they'd sit patiently and let me recharge, heal, recharge again, and then blast them around the corner with lightning. It was definitely cool that they had this aspect, and sometimes the one that looked a bit like the alien face-hugger (2nd enemy you see) seemed to break the rule and charge me, which was awesome. This is really well done - great entry. |
| Dec 4 22:30:40 | 8m 51s | Bubble Sort | ♥ 2 | Do you think you could offer a download on a site other than mediafire? Itch or dropbox maybe. Mediafire is such a bad experience - I went to download your game but five browsers popped open with sketchy junk, including one of those fake warnings trying to scam me into calling so they can rip me off: https://imgur.com/a/p7ZMT (Do not call that number, anyone!) That window refused to close and I had to task kill my browser. Want to try your game, but now I'm worried what that site has tried to install on my computer. Sorry. :( |
| Dec 4 22:52:15 | 21m 35s | Fish Catchers | ♥ 1 | I think we have a shark problem! https://imgur.com/3lW1wYL This was a fun game, liked the art style. If I could have changed one thing I would have made it so I could retrieve the fishing line with another click (or right click) instead of waiting for it to go all the way out and then come back, then I could have felt like a fishing ninja with either a mulit-hit or quick jabs depending on my choice. FORTUNATELY this was not an issue with the sharks, smart call making the line auto-retrieve as soon as it hits a shark. Nice entry! |
| Dec 4 23:45:42 | 53m 27s | Catch the bomb | ♥ 1 | Once a happy way to pass carefree time, now a grim reality. My friend the solider is dead. What good is a gun against such a hidden menace? I set my mind to work and ran around putting up flags, thinking I could solve this with reason. Those were the days before I made a mistake and blew my right leg off. Now I hobble around slowly, trying to convince my wary colleague the medic to take calculated risks. He stares at me blankly over the crackle of the fire. Only my dog seems unaffected by the grim realization of a casual game. He runs about, and as if to taunt leaps onto a square I agonized over revealing. All this would be a challenge, but one I could muster my will and human intuition against to overcome. But what truly saps me is the insanity of it. I carefully construct towers of logic based on the numbers I find on the ground, but then I see this: https://imgur.com/G027JNb Using a precious disarming unit, I clear a mine I was sure was there. I recall the progress meter vividly. Then I remove the flag. Hopefully this will unblock some progress. I step into the newly cleared space - an explosion erupts against my weak flesh, in total disregard of my efforts. Have I lost my mind from the horrors? I must escape this madness. ... Great entry! Really transported me. |
| Dec 5 00:29:43 | 44m 01s | Rocket Jump | ♥ 1 | This was really cool. I'm an old Tribes player so I totally love rocket jumping. I needed the mouse sens way higher, so it was great that you had the option in game. I hit it like 10x and it was what I wanted. However, every time the level restarts or a new one is loaded, that is reset to default which hurt badly since you need to restart so often (or at least I did). Otherwise, I enjoyed the rocket jump puzzles! Nice work. |
| Dec 5 02:00:29 | 1h 30m | AntiBucket | ♥ 1 | Thanks for adding the non-installer version! This was a nice little game - not a to of complexity, but cute art, effective sound effects, and some music. Plus nice camera rumble for impacts! Everything moved really fast - especially the bricks! My best time was 33 seconds, but I think I was kind of lucky not to get bricked. Nice job. |
| Dec 5 02:38:02 | 37m 33s | Nuclear Arms 5: Orphan Overdrive | ♥ 7 | ADOPTED! There I was about to give up on video games when my AI alerted me that a new Nuclear Arms game had been released. I proceeded immediately to the download link provided. Cannot be scanned for viruses and may be unsafe? Obviously! This time there was no destructible terrain, but instead I was able to cause THE most majorly ridiculous traffic cluterfuck ever seen, I mean I was jumping over piles of buses to deliver kids to their loving if somewhat standoffish families. At one point Shadow G tried to trick me by crashing the game and popping up a dialog to fool me into sending information about Craig Killbane to what was obviously a front of theirs, a false company called "DefaultCompany" here is the evidence: https://imgur.com/a/NJVhY Obviously I didn't fall for it, but maybe this is how they got [STORY SPOILER REDACTED]? This didn't dissuade me from victory though, and while I will admit I surfed the silver a few times in this game, I kept at it until victory was mine. Just like in Fallout (obv I mean "of the Mountain King" not that other game) I love the crazy over-the-top story, combined with action elements. It felt good to dash around, I loved the preview of the baby toss which let me feel like a baller by hurling kids all across town square into the doors, and dash-smashing huge busses out of the way like COME ON I GOTTA DO IT BEFORE THE MONSTER FINISHES!! By the end I was feeling like a champ by running past a set of doors and making throws on the move - so satisfying. You guys always get some difficulty that's on point for the fun action, and wrap it in a great story package. Well done yet again. (ps I don't wanna spoil the story but can you imagine when that generation grows up?) |
| Dec 5 03:08:25 | 30m 23s | Speed Demon | ♥ 2 | Top score 9108 distance. You probably blew that away, but I was feeling pretty good about it... the 4-button controls thing was warping my brain HARD. In the end my strategy was to play with two hands, and only think about three lanes. I would stay in lane 2 in good times, and know what fingers moved to lanes 1 or 3 as my outs. Wowzers. I mean, the first few times I played I got wrecked real hard, real fast! The blobs being unable to get hit by the beam was critical to the balance, so great call there. This looks really nice, and has a tight feel and compelling difficulty -- nice work! I remember your old LD game IceMan, which was also super-slick, tight, and tough. One thing though, does this game have audio? I tried the HTML5 build in both chrome and firefox, but I didn't hear any sound. A shame because if it does have sound like IceMan did, then I missed out big time. Great job! You're a master of the slick tough action-reflex game. |
| Dec 5 03:22:06 | 13m 41s | Gas or Pass | ♥ 0 | I think I reached wave 21? Nice parts are a cool open almost tron-like environment and some nice SPEED! That horizontal shifting, wow, it's potent. Heads up, I got confused the first couple of times I played and thought maybe the game froze. Try opening the game and doing nothing (pretend you're reading the UI For the first time). The enemy will catch you and the game will "freeze" because you lost. Really if you hit escape the game explains this to you, but I didn't know to do that! I had to come back here and read up a bit more, then try again. But, that splinter aside, once I Got rolling I had some fun swerving around and grabbin' gas! Nice work. |
| Dec 5 03:38:48 | 16m 42s | Desert Express | ♥ 2 | Simple core mechanic, but well done with nice art and sound, a good difficulty curve, and a short play loop. I played through a couple of times and managed to deliver a 15-crate train without losing any. I definitely had some moments of panic, and I thought it was kind of funny how the calm friendly music juxtaposed with the violent slaughter. Those bandits must be desperate!! Nice entry. |
| Dec 5 04:50:23 | 1h 11m | Critters Inc. | ♥ 3 | WOW! Loved this entry. The concept and mechanics are especially strong. I played a bunch, shipped 18 critters (3 full freights) and burned 81 on my last run. Initially I thought a whole slew of clones of myself was going to be great, but it was too much chaos, and they kept eating my sandwiches. So in later runs I worked closely with a single clone, and tried to stay on top of the incineration of bad units while being opportunistic about shipping good ones. This was a really strong entry, with nice graphics and a strong idea. Actually several strong ideas: the shipping, the super duper, the blower/sucker, it all came together really nicely into a cohesive interrelated game. I do want to say I had some frustration with the blower. It seemed kind of random. Sometimes a creature would go flying across the room, other times they would not move at all. I tried to get a screenshot of a really clear case of where I expected a critter to move but it didn't, and I only got this mediocre one: https://imgur.com/7CwdByR The other issue was that I kept getting guys stuck on the edge of going in. Instead of feeling like a smooth operator, I was usually stymied by a corner blocking the shot. Then I'd come around the side and blow, but he'd blow past the opening entirely. I guess I wished the openings were a bit more forgiving - that would have made the game easier of course, but I wanted the challenge to be about the higher-level positioning and not the jank of the edge case of getting the dude in the door. I'm drilling into the nuance of the feel only because this is a great game that I enjoyed a lot, and I think it could be ridiculous-level fun if I felt smoother at the controls. Really nice job here! Edit: went back to test a little more about the feel nuances I mentioned. Here's a better screenshot of the corner thing - this critter doesn't go in from here: https://imgur.com/a/PziH1 Then the time I'm using the blower and not sure why the monster isn't being moved is here: https://imgur.com/a/JtX3t |
| Dec 5 05:14:21 | 23m 58s | Duck Guardian | ♥ 1 | Looks and sounds fantastic! I also enjoyed the controls, and the way I could zoom around and then stop to apply a gentle nudge. The cool part about that was how I often created worse problems than I solved and things would get out of control! Then I started abusing the heck out of the quack feature and basically playing it Katamari style, traveling around the edges as a huge blob of ducks! Nice entry with style and some interesting gameplay. |
| Dec 5 06:17:31 | 1h 03m | Feature Creep Inc | ♥ 2 | I made a 7-feature game but I ended up more than thirteen thousand dollars in debt! Good thing that doesn't happen in real LDs. ;) Took me a minute to realize what was going on, with the connection between the real world and the game world. Like, I'm inside the game that I'm creating. Or the game I'm creating is changing the real world. It's a cool idea! I think you just scratched the surface. I managed to open the chest across the river, but not on my first play through. I spent a lot of time coding up shooting but then it didn't seem to happen in the real world. Why was violence my instinct? I could have coded talking instead... It's brave that you exploring creating some of these other types of games you're less comfortable making, instead of sticking to your action formula. |
| Dec 5 06:49:27 | 31m 56s | Cats are assholes | ♥ 1 | This was fun! The graphics are really well done, with nice little animations and supporting audio that made everything feel grounded and alive. Loved tinkering with the systems. I never got super far, my best run I probably got through four shipments of food before I lost it. I wasn't very good at the multitasking I guess! My grandson has zero initiative, but at least he's obedient. Something was sapping my money... I'd collect a bit for food, then get to the telephone, but then realize I had zero! Was I paying my grandson or something? Whatever that one piece was I missed it. Really nice total package here - sick idea, strong implementation, fun time. Oh a small technical note: I played the flash version in firefox because I ran into the following problem trying to launch the PC version on Windows 7: https://imgur.com/a/RNxtJ |
| Dec 6 04:54:03 | 22h 04m | Home Decoration. | ♥ 1 | A nice simple game that was pleasant and short - I liked it. Tried to see if there was a secret ending if I took none of the items, but I couldn't avoid taking two clocks in the second to last screen. I thought the waves on the beach were a nice touch. Great job finishing a complete submission in five hours! No matter how small, that's an achievement. |
| Dec 6 05:11:29 | 17m 26s | Knockback | ♥ 1 | Suuuper satisfying to fire the gun. I wish it was as satisfying when it hit someone! Nice work given the time problems, I would have loved to see where this went, it seems like a cool direction. Sorry to hear about the problems during the jam, and congrats on shipping anyway. |
| Dec 6 05:36:56 | 25m 27s | Mini Mystery | ♥ 1 | This is a really cool idea and executed with a lot of charm. I was also really bad at it! I want to dig into why I was so bad a little, but please don't take this as criticizing the game. Really it's a sign that it's a GOOD game that I got invested in thinking about it. Here goes: I was trying to build chains of logic, but they would lead me astray. I may not have understood the rules. For example in this scenario right here the game made the death-peep: https://imgur.com/a/2g1DZ Does that indicate the person just died? Or did the red-shirt man just discover a corpse that might have been killed several turns before? If it's the first thing I can eliminate the people in the room with me, but not if it's the second. A second aspect that I was unclear on was the "if two are alone and one is the killer, the killer will strike" rule. Take this example position: https://imgur.com/a/Z4N4w If I move out of that room and nobody dies, can I cross those two in the room with me off the list? Or do they move simultaneously with me, and won't be considered "in the room together alone" once we all move? That is, I can't tell WHEN that rule is checked in the turn cycle, if that makes sense. I know the display of the move is simultaneous, but that doesn't really indicate whether the logic has an internal sequence and when the check occurs. If they do move simultaneous with me, I guess what I need to keep my eye out for is this: https://imgur.com/6UCW8RQ In that shot I'm moving right and as I enter it appears that there were previously two folks alone in a room. I guess I can cross them off? This moment is harder to see. Knowing I don't know these things, normally I would just test. But it's quite tough to set up a deterministic test here as the player. ... Anyway, that's just a sample of some of my specific confusions, but again this is a really cool idea and a nice polished implementation. I'm just a bad detective! |
| Dec 6 06:05:16 | 28m 20s | Boiler Room Defense | ♥ 1 | Wow, this one drew me in and I kept trying until I got on the scoreboard. I definitely was a little unclear on a few things early - like I thought the green buzzy things were points I was supposed to get, when they were enemies out to get me, and it took me a little bit to understand the relationship between missing shots, ice, and getting hit. But wow, once I got it I had a lot of fun. It's tough! You have to move around a lot, but not too much, and you have to shoot the enemies, but don't miss! I decided to cheat the system by sitting there without ever shooting once and letting the swarm build up. In my mind there would be fifty enemies filling the screen and only THEN would I shoot. But the game was resilient to this attack: it only spawned a reasonable number, and then when I did fire my first shot I missed and the ice that was created was ENORMOUS because I'd been hit fifty times by then. Awesome! My strategy going in later was to AVOID PICKUPS. Those things are like death, because they make you fill the screen with ice. You have to be surgical. I stayed near the center, tried to stick and move. Often I would just take the damage from the last few green buzzy flies instead of attacking them. As my doom approached on this final good run, it got really tense. I was operating in TINY spaces, and starting to rely on a new layer of rules I didn't fully grasp yet, which is when ice gets deleted to turn into powerups or flies. Never totally grasped that, but I was certainly glad for the space opening up! So more ice, worse, more enemies, worse, and most surprisingly, more of my own bullets, worse. I also appreciated the nice animations, art, and sound, plus the responsive control scheme (altho maybe just a tiny bit TOO responsive, when I was first learning I crashed right into ice before I learned to stay in the center). Great realization of the theme in a well-done action game here. Strong entry. |
| Dec 6 06:57:28 | 52m 12s | Radioactive Rumble | ♥ 1 | Oh man, I ALMOST HAD HIM on hard! Lot of fun, after I figured out the basics (like aiming with mouse fer instance). Maybe three fights, then I was able to take him on easy, tried stepping it up to hard but just kept losing. I was so bad at dodging... and then it felt really disheartening when I was hammering space to get back up and he was standing over me rapid-punching the empty air my head was about to move into, like YO REF THAT'S CHEATING! Then I looked around and realized... shit, there is no ref in this fight. Also wasn't that good at punching. (Who talked me into this fight anyway?!) The mouse aiming is a cool twist on the original, but I never felt locked in. I think that's somewhat as designed: clearly the arms are intended to make the controls feel awkward.... a fine line to walk design-wise but I think you pulled it off here by having the right humor about it. Doc told me to use shift to activate star power but I never got it working. Sure would have loved to whirlwind all those arms at his ugly face after all those beatings. https://imgur.com/a/qAxSX Great entry, lots of personality! Really enjoyed it. |
| Dec 7 01:33:48 | 18h 36m | America 2018 | ♥ 1 | What if Minecraft's world fell victim to the Upside Down?? Hiscore of 1998. Love the juice in this, the music was entrancing and the art was squishy and evil and consistent. I really felt like you made a cohesive world here way above the range a typical compo game can approach. Outstanding! Of course the concept of the gameplay was not fresh, but that's not what you were after here. Regarding the nuances of the game feel, most importantly the act of shooting felt satisfying. The randomization of the spray was a really nice touch that gave your excellent visuals some room to breathe. Moving was good when it was nonstop, but there was a bit of weirdness in the deceleration. At first I thought it was simply a matter of decelerating too slowly... but what happens is stranger than that. It seems that the motion glides a bit more past where you let go, then instantly stops. But only once you've already moved for a certain amount of time. I couldn't quite feel out the math. Also I wished the death of the enemies was a bit different, they seemed to turn away and linger a moment before dying, but it was not instant satisfying feedback when the fatal shot hit them. I was overshooting them a while not realizing quite yet that they had already died. Lastly on the nitpick list, I fell off the map and had no way to restart better than refreshing the browser. Coming back to the best part, the art and sound! I can't say how much I like the music, and I especially like that it feels comfortable coming down to nothing, like it wants to be music in a video game, instead of trying to be so "interesting" to take my full attention like album music might. Loved that the blocks were empty inside, spotted, and rotting/cracked. Later when I pushed the limits of the gameplay, I came to REALLY appreciate the sky-bound sparkles over the stars, and I frantically wove between hordes of enemies. I really enjoyed this one, and I'm impressed by the look you achieved. |
| Dec 7 01:57:02 | 23m 14s | Retro Rocket Run! | ♥ 1 | 22,570: https://imgur.com/a/y5wf2 This was fun! Nice job adding a variety of power-down effects to make it risky to take the coins! Invisible + inverted was nuts!! The damage one made it tough for me to know.. should I collect coins at all or not? If I could make one tweak, I would make the restart command usable from the keyboard instead of having to take my hand off to grab the mouse. Don't want to add friction to that moment where I'm deciding whether to play "one more game!" Also I liked the coin art and the way the lighting and slight perspective made it feel much more like a real space than pure flat top-down would have. It DID have a flying-into-a-field-of-coins feeling! Nice work. |
| Dec 7 02:16:27 | 19m 25s | Endgame | ♥ 0 | Meta-ness points achieved! Initially I assumed the Swfl. Pot. from the game description was going to be a potion. A swiffling potion I guess? But after seeing it in context in the game I now think it's potential. Um... Sword-flinging potential? I think I explored all the nooks in the menu system, and I wasn't sure it was even going to have combat but oh boy did it ever! I even got to kill Supersatan (or *a* supersatan, anyway). Fun little romp through a parody of childhood, thanks. Nice work with the art and charm, oh and the music too. Really liked global monkey, and all the other tiny random nonsense. |
| Dec 7 03:02:40 | 46m 13s | The Luckiest Businessman | ♥ 1 | Wow this was interesting. Nice graphics and presentation/UI. The story was pretty dark: I don't enjoy my work, and my only outlets for happiness are gambling, drinking, and the vacant consumerism of purchasing items I don't need or even use. Then when I try to just live a balance of work and light drinking with the occasional visit to the casino (like a normal person, obv) the police and mob are both out to get me! Backed into a corner I started drinking more heavily, doing shady work, let me sleep schedule go to hell. Eventually I descended into massive gambling just to feel something. It's no wonder I ended up in prison. Nice and compelling entry here, you drew me into the world of the game and created a story! |
| Dec 7 03:32:27 | 29m 47s | You can't handle my final form | ♥ 1 | Wowooww this was a brainbender! I loved the look and the different ideas combining like that, great job. I only got 92 because I'm awful at this kind of thing, but I bet some people that get really good could go on quite a while longer. Nice entry - art, sound, idea, and execution were all on point! |
| Dec 7 03:56:37 | 24m 10s | Love Potion #7.2 | ♥ 1 | Nice work! The art, animation, and music are very nice, and the sound effect for the "sudden interest" was cracking me up. Of course the fart was a pleasure to behold. Controls felt smooth, and game was mostly clear except I did play one game assuming left click was fart and I had to fill the meter before using it, dunno why. Nice short play length was right on point to showcase without overstaying the welcome. Impressive amount and quality of 3d assets for a solo-compo, too. Good job! |
| Dec 7 04:16:37 | 20m 00s | Tosser | ♥ 2 | This was a cool idea, and you did the most important thing right -- it was really good about picking up the object I wanted to pick up. Oh god it would have been frustrating if you hadn't nailed that part!! If I could tweak one thing I would remove the metallic surface, as I strugged to differentiate three of the colors, and two pretty badly. Def got some of the "wrong hole" sound. Overall I enjoyed this one. Simple but effective. Nice work! |
| Dec 7 04:36:32 | 19m 55s | Space War Never Ends | ♥ 1 | You nailed a couple of really important pieces here. Firstly, the actual reflection of the projectile feels really good. It's just super satisfying with that metallic clank sound, the change in color, and so on. Second, there's totally a "one more time" hook with this game. I'm not really a big player of grindy progression games, so eventually the pacing lost me. But I played it a bunch because I kept wanting to upgrade my speed and start dashing all around! I feel like the really fun game that *I* wanted to play was in there, but I had to upgrade 20 levels to get at it. But I totally understand that this is a design tradeoff, and what you get with the upgrade based game is a hook that can really pull the player deep into the game in a way that a "here's everything at once" game can't do. So nice work, the reflection of projectiles, destruction of ships, the puffs of smoke when projectiles bounce off the top/bottom of the screen, the smokey slow-fall trail from the protagonist, the way the background music rotated songs between plays.... you have done a great job of putting so many small touches into it. And that's on TOP of the whole upgrade system! Great job. |
| Dec 7 04:59:11 | 22m 39s | .SWARM | ♥ 1 | Really enjoyed this - made me think. Due to a technical problem on my end I played it without sound, so when I saw that it was my mistake I went back and replayed the first two levels with the sound and was markedly improved from my first tries. I kept kind of feeling like wait wait no don't start yet, but it's probably better that the game is the way it is there! I wouldn't have minded seeing a % of probes that died, as it was hard to gauge the success level from the time. I was basically listening for fried probe sounds the second play through, which really helped this aspect. I liked the core mechanic here, and I also liked the presentation and graphics style. Nice work! Diagonal switchback paths were my main strategy after a while. |
| Dec 7 05:16:45 | 17m 34s | 10 inches or less | ♥ 2 | Wow!! This is super-cute, a great puzzle concept, and has great audio. It feels so complete and polished! I loved the main character, especially when he would get so full of water he'd pop (yes I tested it, sorry little fellow!). Otherwise he bobbed around so happily to the happy tune. Then his sound going through the tubes was so satisfying. Really great job on this, I played 16 levels and enjoyed it. |
| Dec 7 05:37:32 | 20m 47s | Click | ♥ 1 | Felt on beat to me, but then I'm no drummer. I got wrecked by this game, mostly. My top score was 2800 after a handful of tries on song #1. I was getting the third track going for a while and the game offered me the fourth, and my brain was like sure I guess, and it all went horribly wrong from there. Thank goodness this game backs off when I start screwing up badly! That was so important to not being totally brainfrozen by it. I maybe would have slightly decreased the break after I dropped back down to two. Like once I had started working on the third, and then lost it, I did want it to back off and let me reset, but not to hang out there for quite so long. This was really nicely put together. It didn't spellbind me in the amazing way that Hopper did before, but that's too much to ask, and Click's songs were fun, the dynamic challenge was cleverly designed, and the graphics were clear, effective, and nice looking. Great job! |
| Dec 7 06:06:24 | 28m 52s | Komainu | ♥ 2 | I also experienced some technical issues around input playing the WebGL game in Chrome on Windows 7. I'll provide a bit more detail in case you want to troubleshoot, and then do the rest of the feedback after. There was a graphics issue with two small black lines that would sort of randomly appear, as seen here: https://imgur.com/a/0iNoM They were just a minor visual glitch and didn't impact gameplay at all. What was a problem was the way the input would lock me out. I would stop being able to throw shurikens and then the character would stay move-locked in a certain direction, say, moving left and can be stopped by holding right, but you cannot move right (it just cancels the locked left) and if you release it you walk left. I tested it a bunch, and following the comment by @dragoon I agree with him that both the inability to fire shurikens and the move-lock I experienced were both caused by clicking and dragging the mouse while the click is still down. I could see that sometimes the system would become confused and the mouse cursor would toggle modes from the red shuriken (the game's cursor), the circle with a slash "no" icon (the icon I would expect if I was trying to "drag and drop" an image from the browser but was not hovering over a valid drop target), and the normal operating system default cursor. I am not sure what the exact issue is, but it was a killer for sure! I lost my first handful of games by being move-locked and unable to shoot in the middle of a fight. My *guess* is that the system was recording the keydown, and then I would drag and release while in the confused-dragging mode, but in that mode the game would fail to register the keyup, and so it would continue to think it was down for maybe 2-15 seconds at random. OK so I wanted to provide some detail there, but let's move past that aspect. Once I was aware of this issue I was able to just be much more careful with the shuriken, and then I could play the game to the end. I loved the opening screen, and the art overall is very nice. Although the way the rock and very nice cherry blossom tree have a higher resolution than the characters threw my eye a bit. I didn't find a lot of use for the sword in combat, but the shuriken was sure nice! I enjoyed the ranged battles against the blue shooting enemies the best. Dodging between their shots while I whittled down the hordes was the peak fun of the experience for me. I thought the music was nice and the sound effects did their job of grounding me in the game's reality. I liked the animations, particularly the death throes of the aliens. Nice job, I think you have a nice style on this and a good combat core that could be explored more. |
| Dec 7 13:38:43 | 7h 32m | Bum Bag Bangin' | ♥ 2 | Oh man, thanks to that bit of work at the open, immediately after I was done playing this I had to go throw on a taste of "A Grand Don't Come for Free." I haven't heard that stuff in years and years, but it came right to mind. This was a lot of fun. The mechanics were really basic, so it wasn't like omg what gameplay, but the art was excellent and even more importantly it was brought alive with nice animations and effects and of course that great voice work. It was awesome that you had a nice variety of lines and that it backed actions of both the enemies and the player. Music did a sweet job of keeping the audio on grounded footing without getting in the way. If I could add one thing it would be a score/distance shown to me on death. Also, good grief that is a horrifying painting; I hate looking at his face but find it hard to look away. Nice entry! |
| Dec 7 14:12:52 | 34m 09s | Bearhalla | ♥ 1 | Sorry, I ran into some technical issues with this and couldn't really dig in so I haven't rated. As I moved away from the center, map tiles popped in and out of existence visually, and the graphics didn't seem to line up with the colliders so I was unable to tell where I could move. In case it's helpful, I used FRAPS to record a quick demonstration of what occurred, and I've uploaded it to youtube as an unlisted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM8OPcHTDIc My system is Windows 7 and I played the rc1 build trying both fullscreen and windowed. That video is from the fullscreen play. Looked like an interesting combat multi-tasker with nice art/sound and a few systems to explore! |
| Dec 7 14:24:05 | 11m 13s | Chezz! | ♥ 0 | Cool thought experiment, but WOW it made me realize that chess is really about trades and threats, and if you are the human you cannot allow a trade so you have to back down from everything. At least that was my little solo exploration. I didn't get a chance to play with another person. In the end the poor humans were feeling so glum that I let them just use the first move to leap the knight all the way onto the zombie king on the first move! In this world where even the rules are not enforced, the human's first move advantage does outweigh even the mighty zombie power! Nice art, good basic sound, getting the job done. Probably this idea is too unbalanced to be worth a larger game, so a good idea to explore it in a jam with a small game. Nice entry! |
| Dec 7 14:40:49 | 16m 44s | Reyerta | ♥ 1 | This is a nice little game. The strategy is not very complex, but the character I play against makes the experience a lot more fun than it would be without him. His fingers tapping, and the comments he makes, along with the subtle music, it all creates a nice atmosphere. I played until I won, and learned I am a filthy being. Good job! |
| Dec 8 03:27:00 | 12h 46m | The Incredible Car Salesman | ♥ 1 | I sold the allotted amount in 22:23 (altho you can never win). This game was a real contender for "Best Traffic Jam" https://imgur.com/6MADI44 But I'm afraid that the top traffic-jam honor still remains with another LD40 game called Nuclear Arms 5. Anyway, I enjoyed this one! I wasn't going to click on my store twenty-six thousand times, or even one thousand, but I enjoyed tinkering with my signs and my sales price and dreaming of opening a second location. The cars and coins look nice, the emergent traffic patterns were kind of hypnotic to watch while I waited for my monies to accumulate, and everything was clearly understood from the first moments. I would have loved some audio to make the world I was looking down on feel more alive. I played the jam version but I see in comments you are adding some traffic interaction post-jam - interesting idea! Nice entry. |
| Dec 8 03:45:49 | 18m 49s | Bee Rush | ♥ 1 | Nice work exploring a new idea. I played a bunch of runs, my best score was 40. I started to notice, wow, I haven't got any friend bees in a while. I think the game doesn't respawn all the stuff when I hit space to retry or G. I had to quit and restart the game after I had sucked the map dry of all flowers. I couldn't quite get the multi-bee thing to its full potential. I experimented a little with toggling on and off the bees but it was tough with everything happening so fast and me getting confused. I wasn't successful. So I resorted to a simpler strategy of just controlling the whole swarm and giving up on some bees but trying to snap up more pickups this way. That was pretty fun. I would have definitely gotten into the zone with it more if the horizontal controls of the bees felt more snappy. It was kind of a huge effort to cross the map. I wonder if you can experiment with a different control scheme to capture the flavor of your multi-bee idea. I feel the toggle is simply a bit too slow and clunky for the speed of the game. Experiment! It's an idea worth looking at from a few angles to see if you hit on something really fun. If it was me, my first experiment would be to 10x the horizontal speed and make it so WASD controls the Queen and the arrow keys affect all other swarm members. And then I'd make the queen more visually distinctive so it's ULTRAclear. Then you could be juggling multi controls without toggle, and still have swarm? I dunno, just riffing on it because I feel like you had a cool idea but I didn't get to really experience it at full potential. Nice entry. |
| Dec 8 05:14:30 | 1h 28m | Poser | ♥ 4 | I played to the end. It exceeded my expectations that I had from reading the description. There are a lot of careful details, which are really nice. Firstly the mechanics could easily have been as confusing as heck, but they were minimally explained and then tutorialized just the right amount. This was well designed! Next, I had transparency into the underlying system. When making friends, not only did the bar go up, but the green circle visibly expanded as well. This later had gameplay implications when I was being a poser, but it also reinforced the learning phase and kept things totally clear throughout. The bar alone might have been trickier to see, for example when learning to be the skater, I wasn't sure if just being near was enough, or if there was some spacebar mechanic I had to use - but nope, I passed by another skater and saw the circle expand and knew what to do. The separate mechanics for each clique are of course the showcase feature. And they are key to it all working. I enjoyed the skater the most, because I'm a fan of unusual movement systems. But the difference in move speed between the furry and the jock was also quite significant, and the ability to hold hands and take a furry with you away from trouble, or to flee danger but use the ball toss to beckon a jock with you, this all mattered in the later stages. The strategy I settled on was to do the furriest first while there was nothing to lose, and then convert to skater because while they are fast they are a little awkward and need room to maneuver. I finished with the jock, who has the fast but simple movement, and the ability to beckon another jock away from trouble, so they were good at cleaning up last. I don't know what it is, but maybe there is some insight that can make me change up my approach. Once I got decent, I would always switch, do that entire set, and then move on to the next and never come back. It may have been fun to be force to switch more, and hammered the thematic message of being a poser home even harder. Given that my approach was the same once I'd learned the rules, I was glad the game wasn't any longer. But my favorite detail of all was one I didn't even notice at first. And that is the ghostly normal student which you can only half see. These sub-humans are not in the social cliques I am interested in, and so they hardly even exist! That was a really great small supporting detail to include. And of course I shouldn't neglect to mention the fun music and how it switched between cliques to reinforce the identity shifting. It's amazing to me that your crew can make games in such a large group! I still remember enjoying Meteor Jam, and looking back at it I notice there is much but not full overlap on the team members. Makes me curious about your backstory. Anyway, congrats on an intriguing entry that clearly had a lot of thought and care put in! |
| Dec 8 14:17:38 | 9h 03m | escapeš„hatch | ♥ 1 | This was a fun game with a basic but engaging premise and a lot of focus on a clear vision. Graphics and audio were both really strong, and the tiny chick had character. His opening line of dialog established character surprisingly well for so few words and in my head I gave him a bit of an attitude, which I enjoyed. The feel was pretty tight but since this is a game about short intense bursts of high-stakes movement, I did have one microscopic things that I noticed after a while. I felt like a rect collider in a rect world. Here in this screenshot: EscapeHatchExample.png I am holding down the up key but not moving up. I have like a 1px overlap in colliders. I would prefer in this case to "slide" around the corner. I don't know about Haxe but in Unity this can be done by having the character be a circle collider and making sure the physics material has some slipperiness to it. This arose in gameplay a few times when I was trying to dart into a corridor while being chased. An argument can be made that I shouldn't be off by a pixel in my control inputs, but personally I prefer to grant the comfortable affordance and then have the challenge be balanced accordingly. That was just a tiny detail and didn't downgrade my experience, but the game is otherwise so tight and focused I figured I would mention it. I loved a few of the details, especially the animation of the main chick while moving or laying an egg, and the gameplay-critical tiny detail of that little handful of white pixels when the knife-weilder notices you. I enjoyed playing as a stealth game, but after a few failure loops on a level I found myself probing the tactical limits of high-speed chickening. This was also fun, so not a problem for me; just not sure if it's your intended experience. I found that a critical aspect to exploit is the momentary non-movement of the knife-pig when they first notice you. By sprinting (a key I held most of the time) and making liberal use of diagonal movement to break line of sight, I was often able to rush past. This is just a consequence of the broader restart-then-wait problem inherent to the stealth-with-insta-death game genre, and not specific to this game. I'm GLAD the rush option was viable. Thinking back on it, I only noticed the collider feel issue I mentioned once I switched gears to this more precision-intensive rushdown play style. Music was really nice, and other nice touches were the "show me you know the buttons" start screen, the pacing of tutorialization, overall game length, and death scene / restart pace. Many subtle things well done here. Very nice entry, well done! |
| Dec 9 16:40:26 | 26h 22m | Do you have the colour? | ♥ 2 | My high score was 40: HaveColor.png Definitely exceeded my expectations from the screen shot. There is a nice difficulty curve. It start so easy it's basically a tutorial, then comes into careful color differentiation. By the end it becomes about time and the scan sometimes gets a bit frantic. In the 40pt run I was still nailing a few tricky color differentiations but maybe 1 in 5 times toward the end I would brain-blank during the scan and just not see what I was looking for. Couple of times I was even like "yea THAT color, I remember him" but then it would be a memory game of "but where in the grid does he live?" I lost game one when I was getting into the zone and tried to play quickly. The way the "earned new color" step displays the new color in the "guess this" box, but I lose if I guess it, tripped me up. This meant I always had to be really careful to know which state the game was in, something I wasn't nut about. I hesitate to say you shouldn't show it though, because the colors up top are lined by white and the colors below are lined by black, which can slightly confuse the eye, so I did appreciate the momentary showing of "this is what the color looks like against a white background." I'm not sure how to have the best of both ideas there. Anyway, I enjoyed my time with this, the design was tight, and it had some nice small touches such as the tweens. I most especially appreciated the "you lost" screen where you get to see what the right answer was and stare as long as you'd like. In fact I really liked the overall graphical layout of the compo version, not so sure I like the post-compo as much, judging only from the screen shot, it feels a lot more severe and less inviting to my eye. I was surprised by how engaging this mechanic was. Great job! |
| Dec 14 04:53:50 | 108h 13m | Rokku Bando | ♥ 1 | Nice tight game with cool art/style and music. First few games I was pressing the QWERT buttons but nothing happened... realized I had to hit space for that red line, and also that I had to click the QWERT input option. I got 5275 on the easy mode. I was on top of things thanks to the steady pairing of QE, and I could handlle three things... space, R, and some QE. Once W was added to the mix I started falling apart. Nice progression of difficulty for one long play-through altho it was maybe a bit slow for repeated plays. Tough to make it work well on my first play and my third or fourth. I tried hardmode but got pretty wrecked by it after the longish intro phase of bass and drum. I appreciated that I could see near-hits vs hits, that was a nice touch. The art of the band itself was cool but I could only steal the occasional glance, unfortunately. Nice entry! |
| Dec 14 05:14:41 | 20m 51s | Hats On! | ♥ 1 | Way more fun than I assumed when I saw a screenshot! Great job balancing the, well, balance. I upped my fun level when I found the control scheme for me: that was holding down left click at all times and just moving the mouse left/right to move the guy. I felt this game me a lot more finesse than playing with the keyboard, and wow can the wrong lurch hurt you in this game! After ball caps I thought, well dang there's nothing gonna be crazier than this! But the pilgrim hats were a bit more than I could manage, though wow I came so close. Really nice entry here taking a simple system and getting the feel and balance spot on. The hat balance, the facial expressions, the loony tilting of the hat stack as it got taller, the interactions with the wall, the way hats could form odd stacks in a desperate bid to reach the sky... it was very nice. One thing that hurt was the lame-duck situation where I've failed but I have to wait out a bunch of hats that I know won't be enough. I hit R hoping for an instant reload but no go. Not a huge deal but I figured I'd mention it as one small splinter I felt. Very nice entry! |
| Dec 14 05:23:30 | 8m 49s | Ice cream stacker | ♥ 1 | Nice job! It looks and sounds nice, and balancing with like 20 ice creams on top was a pretty wild feeling. Good feel for a nice simple premise, well done. |
| Dec 14 05:45:15 | 21m 45s | Pixel Cartel | ♥ 1 | Well done! This felt really complete with nice art, gameplay, sounds/music, and a story with missions! It was about the right length too. I got sucked in and and enjoyed it. I did encounter one issue. I got stuck in this corner here and had to reload the game: https://imgur.com/a/0cF8B It was worth reloading and starting over though! Difficulty was on point, except maybe the final boss who wasn't shooting back at me. And I appreciated the "I got hit" sound effect which wasn't annoying at all, but was totally distinct from the others and really let me know. I was worried enough about the enemies to be careful, and the money-safe mechanic was nice because it put some consequences to dying. I completed the game with $274 in savings for my retirement. Nice entry. |
| Dec 14 06:03:32 | 18m 17s | Quest for Harmony (Audio is required) | ♥ 0 | This was nice, and something different, even if a little unfinished. I enjoyed the voice work and traveling from one culture into another. A few things seemed to not work, for example it didn't seem to matter what notes I answered the melody with, and when the guy asked me if it was okay to leave and I said yes, he said okay bye but was still present in the following scene. Actually I was glad he was there though, and the incompleteness did not get in the way of this being something unique. Nice work, especially for a first Ludum Dare! |
| Dec 14 06:25:14 | 21m 42s | The Darkest Light | ♥ 1 | Really nice job with the art and sound, which really coordinate well with the main mechanic and horror theme. Even the choice to go with tank controls is interesting. They certainly have a big impact on the game, making it harder to change direction to flee from the ghosts, and thus making it more of a commitment to move. Many times I died because the ghost appeared two feet from me and I pressed a side direction, to merely turn in place and die. This added to the tension and horror since I knew it would never be trivial to flee. What hurt my experience the most was the full restart. If each portcullis was a checkpoint, I certainly would have played to the end. Eventually though, it wore me down having to repeat the same sections. But the main thing was that you nailed that spooky high tension - and maybe checkpoints would have ruined that. Lot of really nice elements here, well done! |
| Dec 15 14:29:57 | 32h 04m | Get all the Wood | ♥ 0 | I had to check out your game after I saw you leave a comment on another game where you'd had a problem running their entry so you downloaded their code, fixed a bug, and rebuilt. Your entry was a cool little experience. Sure, there would need to be more to do to make it a real contender but I enjoyed it. The highlight moment for me was definitely the reveal of the twist. So much of the same thing had happened that the change made me jump a little. Other nice moments were staring at the deer a while, and crossing the rickety wooden bridge and taking in the view. The art was very nice and this homey little valley worked well. It supported the games message really well that my first feeling was enjoying the nice nature! I also appreciated being dropped straight into the game with no explanation whatsoever. I of course tried WASD + mouse and had zero problem playing. I feel like the "no comment" from the developer regarding what to do and how enhances the message a little bit, because I have nobody to blame but myself. Nice job! It seems like you had a different initial vision but then when mid-jam you did a good job rethinking it to get to a tight little experience rather than something feeling half-finished. |
| Dec 16 04:27:41 | 13h 57m | Sheep without Shepherd | ♥ 3 | 277! Phew. I guess I feel pretty good about that, although there were definitely some casualties along the way! I remember your crazy asteroid game from a previous LD, and this is another one with an interesting movement/interaction mechanic. At first I got right up next to the sheep but then I realized this disperses them too much. I started to keep a further distance and I found I could corral the sheep better this way. But wowzers that level with 200 of them! It was cool to see the rippling wave of my influence fighting against their natural tendency to have elbow room. A surprisingly compelling system emerged from very simple rules here, which is a credit to your design. The controls were snappy, the feel fluid, and the art was very nicely done and felt cohesive. It's a shame that there is total silence, as not having any sound makes the game feel less real and further away, whereas all the other elements were strong enough to make a game that could draw me in. Very well done! |
| Dec 16 05:07:55 | 40m 14s | One Final Task | ♥ 2 | Very nice entry! Nice meaty sense of personality to the game with the AI, his flickering moods, and his (its?) glitchy faces. In the end, my services were no longer required. I thought the end puzzle was perfect difficulty. That is, hard but doable after a serious number of retries. I thought, when the early version of the AI blew a capacitor trying to keep up, that there might be some future for humanity. But the machine was relentless, and my biological future bleak. Speaking of bleak, I must convey one significant splinter in the experience. I was playing, and I made a mistake. Or perhaps it would be fair to say I discovered the way something wasn't going to work. And, having previously flung my packages off the side to fail and invite reprimand and restart, I decided to improve upon this by pressing R to see if it might instantly restart. Well, yes. It did instantly restart. THE ENTIRE GAME FROM THE BEGINNING! However, your game was good enough that I played the whole thing again to get back to where I was, and then pressed on to finish. In addition to strong puzzling and personality, there were many nice touches. The shader (?) on the faces. The babbling sound as text was displayed. The way I could (upon second play through) cancel past text-babbling instantly with a click. That the heavy box had a different sound effect when moving. That I could shovel multiple boxes quickly into motion at the end of a puzzle without waiting for each to complete its move, yet I could not set multiple boxes in motion mid-puzzle which would have created invalid results. These and others were small details of craft, which I noticed and appreciated. Very well done! |
| Dec 16 06:58:09 | 1h 50m | Sugar Crash | ♥ 1 | @Conrad123 asked for more critical feedback focused on areas for improvement, so I'm going to try to make that my focus. Don't take that focus to overstate negatives though, please. Because there are positives! The game is an interesting idea, has tight responsive controls, decent art sound and music, and most of all it achieves that sense of wild panic I think it sets out for. OK here's the critical stuff. I played the windows download version. ## Retry Loop You have a hard game with quick deaths, so you must take great care with your retry loop. That is ULTRA-important. You make two mistakes in your retry loop. Mistake 1 is sending me back two whole screens. It should be zero. Mistake two is that the gameplay input is on the keyboard but the retry loop input is on the mouse. I want to press a single key from the hiscore display to instantly be playing again in this game, ideally a key that is not used during play so I don't hit it as a "spillover" input and cancel through my score review by accident. ## Controls It's such an all-in decision to have deliberately frustrating inputs. Most games bend over backwards to smoothly translate the player's intention into in-game action. Examples include the "ghost jump" where platformers will still accept your jump input even 50ms after you walked off the edge of the platform, or how colliders will often be rounded so you don't get corners stuck. A game is just automatically more fun by having fluid inputs that translate thought into action easily. You have gone the total opposite way and deliberately made it hard to make my thoughts into action. It's a design decision you successfully executed on, and your vision for the game. I don't want to suggest you shouldn't experiment. But that's like advanced game design where you're poking me in the eye and saying "isn't that fun?" Be aware that this design decision creates an initial barrier between the player and your fun. ## Input Mapping Display Given that you set out to make it frustrating, I would have appreciated some other affordances. For example you could have laid out the up/left/down/right controls with UI elements that were actually up, left, down, and right in their display. Instead they are just a line of text which I have to read. Here's how it felt: The only strategy that I found that could work was to read just ONE input, down, so that I could stop the car by pulsing this input while I looked at the others. I would be pulsing backward, let's say S. Then I would back up into a bottle. The inputs would change. I would look at the new inputs and read the down input. It says W. Which one is W again? In my brain it that key is "UP" not "W". I am dead now. A) read the text labels to find "down", B) read the character "W" and C) translate that character to the actual key to press. Maybe it would have been easier for me to play with the arrow keys? Here is a mockup of what the lower-left boxes indicator might look like if it used no text and the game were using arrow keys: https://imgur.com/tbpD4Z9 Imagine how much faster I could absorb the "what key is down" information, since this cuts out two of the three steps from the current thought process. ## Summary OK back to the fair and balanced review. My top score was 100. This was an interesting experience, something different. The art, sound, and music were all nice. I appreciated the snappy response on the car when I did know the keys, and the decals of the breaking car were nice. I clearly knew when I had hit the house and taken damage. I think you achieved your goal of creating a feeling of panic in me, and that's definitely something! I critiqued how maybe that feeling wasn't the right one to go for, but I give you props for achieving it because it's not necessarily easy. You also had me with a one-more-try feeling because I thought "shit it's just a simple translation of keys, I'll nail it next time." So a nice entry, but since you asked for the tough love I tried to dig in more to the splinters. |
| Dec 20 03:19:24 | 92h 21m | The Beforlorne Wander | ♥ 2 | Wow, an impressive amount done here, especially for a compo!! I was like wait a minute this is a boss fight with special unique theme music!? Awesome. The controls were demanding but tight. There was only one scenario where I felt the controls failed me, and that was jumping up into a 1-unit-wide shaft from below. I would move left and right but it was hard to position myself exactly so I would overshoot. Then when jumping I'd catch the corner of my collider on the edge of the wall. No big deal, but I did have to shuffle around and re-attempt the jump a handful of times when I encountered this setup. Otherwise the controls were solid. This game required a lot of planning because a mistake could easily lead to taking several quick hits in a row. So it was good that the controls were predictably reliable. I liked the variety of enemies and areas -- again, impressive amount of content! If I could have tweaked one thing I would have moved the checkpoints a bit closer, I feel like a game jam is not the place to ask players to repeat the same content to earn more. |
| Dec 28 02:37:31 | 191h 18m | Widget Satchel | ♥ 1 | Super-slick music, great sound effects, and very nice art. This has a lot of character. Unfortunately my impression was that the controls really worked against me. Since this game has such a high polish in all the other areas, and I think a few tweaks could change the feel a lot, I'll go into some detail here. But don't take the fact that I'm going into detail on the critique side means I think this is a bad entry. On the contrary, it's because it's good that I dive into the area for improvement. Here is a short unlisted youtube video of me demonstrating my difficulties with the camera and movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80uplWd4wJg I'll highlight a few of the issues that I have: 1) CAMERA: The camera is pretty wild in how fast/far it whips ahead of my motion. The most obvious problem is demonstrated at the start of the video, where the main character is totally off the screen. But more generally, the camera was so eager to change positions that I felt it to be very disorienting. 2) INERTIA: It's okay to give a bit of inertia to a character, but I feel it takes too long for your character to get up to speed, and then to get back down to a stop. I had serious control issues. In the video you can see I struggle badly with a basic jump. At the 17 second mark you see an example of where the air control inertia is too high: I have positioned myself near the base of the platform and I jump and then hit right, but the character does not start meaningfully moving right until later than I expect. I fail to make the leap I wanted. The next try, at the 21 second mark, I start pressing right immediately and I do manage to ramp up the air control to get on the platform, but then upon letting go of the controls I slide right off because the high inertia causes a slipperiness. I think I would feel more in control of the character if the time between direction-press and full-speed (or full-stop) were significantly shorter. 3) JUMP INPUTS: At 54 seconds you can see a clear instance of where I press the jump key but don't get a jump. I even get the jumping sound effect! You could consider adding the "ghost jump" idea where if I was on a platform in the last ~100ms or so, you let me jump even if I'm currently not. That way, input lag won't rob me of jumps. At 13 seconds you can see another instance of where I get the sound effect without a jump, this time on the ground. A window of time where you'll buffer a jump to see if I land in an instant is nice to add, so that I don't lose a jump if I press the input a frame before landing. A jam is time-constrained, but my advice is to spend a LOT of your time just moving around with your character, especially for an action game. Try spending 15 straight minutes right now with your game, just in that zone from my movie, leaping up onto the various blocks. Do it over and over and over for that 15 straight minutes. See if you can stick all your jumps, and if you feel like a total boss. If you don't feel like you're smooth and in charge, you have to start grinding out all that little stuff that really matters in the feel. 15 minutes is *nothing* either, I do this for hours and hours over the course of an LD! OK I'll stop being hard on you about feel, which again I only do because you have such an awesome game in the other aspects! I liked your character, your environment, the whole thing felt tightly cohesive in its presentation. There were lots of awesome little touches to the animation, such as the way the character rolls when landing from a jump over a certain height. You could really do something awesome with a handful of feel tweaks to bring me into the game's world. Hope that's a helpful write-up and not going too far! Also, thanks for doing your 1-minute rip through a whole slew of these on youtube, that was great to watch. :) |
| Dec 28 03:57:19 | 1h 19m | Adventure of temple | ♥ 1 | Thanks to @philippe for leaving the comment about how to get started with the windows build. I was stuck before I saw that, because it said width,height so I was entering two numbers with a comma, like the prompt. My favorite part to this was the nice hand-drawn art, which was charming and had some nice animations. The monsters looks cool, and I thought it was a nice design touch how they will sometimes back off and come back at you. My first few play-throughs I got killed by just using attack all the time. But as I learned the rules with dodge and stun, I was able to do much better. Unfortunately, the game froze and crashed on my farthest run. What a shame, because I was getting into it and would have gone further with the experience. Nice short levels, and another good design decision to have me fully heal with each new level. That let you make the enemies tough, but even if I make a few mistakes I can always get back on track as long as I survive the immediate situation. Smart to avoid the "I'm definitely dead next round" feeling that would come from bringing a sliver of health into a new level. If I could add one thing, it would be more feedback when I got hit. |
| Dec 28 04:22:45 | 25m 26s | Shiny Dream | ♥ 1 | OK So first thing I did in this game was notice that the left/right move controls were satisfyingly tight. Hrm, okay, I said. Let me test this developer: I jumped, and then just a bit before landing, I hit the jump button again to see if you would correctly buffer the input and make me jump again upon landing. And you did! Altogether I have to give high marks here for the nice tight controls with attention to detail. I probably could have done without the edge-grabbing, which sometimes screwed up my flow and was nearly never what I really intended, but it was a cool feature to show off your character-controller chops anyway. I had fun with this, and there were a couple of times where I was alllllmost ready to call it quits but came back for "just one more" or to see that next upgrade. Ended up playing the whole thing and getting to the throne, although my score was only 75 when I got there, so nothing amazing. Very nice touch to have the post-win runthrough bring a new challenge! The only critique I can offer is that when playing, I mostly just held down "right" the whole time, and "shoot" the whole time. This wasn't really that much of a problem, but I wonder if there was some twist. Whenever I find myself holding a button always, I try to change the game, either making a more balanced reason not to hold it, or else removing the button and making the game auto-go. This was a very minor flaw only, though. Another aspect of the design that I liked was that high ground had value because your shots could not go through the terrain but your enemies could. So if you got stuck under and overhang that was your worst moment -- here comes a guy but you can't shoot him until he's right in your face! Overall I enjoyed the feel and design of this, and the art and sounds were pretty solid. Nice entry! |
| Dec 28 05:06:01 | 43m 16s | Mineral Hunt | ♥ 1 | Nice solid FPS for a compo! You created a good original atmosphere here. Smooth controls and a brutality that matched the spare environment. I tried a mix of sniping and run-n-gun, although in the end those buzzing flying guys with the guns got me. Dang they were hard to shoot down in the heat of the moment! I was definitely worried if I got a few on my tail. The creepy light background soundscape was nice, and the buzz of the fliers blended well to announce their arrival and help me orient. If I could add one thing it would be to have a little more feedback about when I was hit and when I scored hits on enemies. Beam was a good navigation tool, critical in such an open space. Nice entry! I didn't really feel rock-n-roll powerful, almost more a feeling from a horror game where I'm on the run rather than a rocket-fest. |
| Dec 28 16:21:07 | 11h 15m | Rude Bear Rabble | ♥ 2 | Always tough for the multiplayer games! You deserve more after doing so many ratings yourself, plus the keynote. I had a mix of fun and frustration playing this one. I could sense the potential of what it would be like to have a funny mangle of strangers in there undermining and helping each other out. The timed waits were not so much fun with just two players, as the suspense wasn't present. I largely had to imagine "what-if" to see your vision, which is a shame because I bet it would be fun. The actual play experience with 2 ended up being a lot of waiting. Waiting for players to join, waiting for timers to count down, waiting for the platform to regenerate, waiting for the ghost to move away. I think this was intentional, to give time for sabotage; would have liked to experience that aspect. The punishment for death was severe: the other bear had to notice I'd died, and jump into a pit or something. Sometimes I'd use platforms and then be unsure if he'd died or was waiting for them to respawn. Poor guy. Think it was you actually so you know what I mean! There was a small feeling of laggy choppiness, which left me feeling a little awkward and resulted in a few extra deaths. So a cool idea but I guess problematically ambitious. I suppose that's a GOOD thing to try in an LD! If I could add one thing it would be an indicator of the position/status of the other bear(s), and if I could add a second thing it would be some basic means of communication, for example an "over here" button and a "hang my head in shame" button. I thought the art was really nice, especially the enviornmental backgrounds. The checkpoint things were a good mix of clear-but-mysterious. The music was also nice. Nice job taking an ambitious vision and running with it, sorry you didn't get a lot of plays! |
| Dec 28 17:43:07 | 1h 22m | CARnage | ♥ 2 | This LOOKED so metal that I got my expectations way up for FUCKIN' CRAZY to come raining down on me. I strapped in and prepared for the extreme. In fact, I worked myself up into such a frenzy that I was like "WAIT A MINUTE this engine sounds like a vacuum cleaner instead of a severed leg going into a wood chipper downed an octave!" I drifted, but where was the skidding howl making me feel like I was at the edge of losing all control? I body-checked the enemy car - you know, the one with the awesome funeral art, slamming into them with my skull-adorned armor-plated wasteland-warrior monster machine, but nothing happened. No ca-runch sound, no jutter-slam rumble of power hitting power. I was tuned to a different channel than the other drivers. I was screaming that kind of cheesy metal the metalheads won't even listen to because it's too far into the whole Dungeons and Dragons warrior hymn viking thing, but they were like rolling down the window to ask if I had any Grey Poupon. Then I drove in the dirt like a peasant and they ostracized me from their society, and I never saw them again. I want my car sprite to vibrate a tiny hum that increases as I speed up; I want screeches and crunches and clanks; I want shoving and reactions to my actions. I want to feel out of control, edge of my seat, slammed in the face. And I want a couple of the drivers to suck, so when I drive in the dirt I still have someone to tangle with when I get back on the road. In all seriousness, you have kind of an awesome core here. A killer art scheme, a straightforward but compelling premise of RC Pro-Am + Mad Max, and tight easy-to-pick-up controls. I was having a little fun with the review, but hope I didn't sound too negative. I think what's here is really nice, but it's got this potential to be taken up to eleven that I would have just loved to see. It takes twenty tiny touches and you'll get it there. You should totally grind them out just for kicks before calling it quits on this one. Nice entry! |
