Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Feedback comment stats → Solrun
Feedback comments for LD41
Solrun's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Solrun's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 25 04:55:44 | Tactical Hydra | ♥ 1 | This game is very complex. As such, it would be super handy to have all of the controls stay on the screen the entire time. It takes a few tries to get the controls down and figure out what all the buttons do. You have quite a few options at your disposal every turn. I really like your art style. The lines around and behind your ship as you zoom across give the movement a great feel. The music and sound effects are also quite good and fit the game nicely. | |
| Apr 25 05:11:05 | 15m 21s | Devil's Playground | ♥ 1 | Wow, I somehow managed to guess all 3 tricks on my first try. What are the odds? I was worried it was just going to last forever, but then it started getting faster. After a point, I wasn't even sure what trick I was supposed to be doing. Like I didn't know if what he was saying was the current trick or the next trick and my brain couldn't keep up so I ended up with 109 tricks. The second try is quite tricky when you change around the symbol. The symbol that used to be jump is now sing. I think that's more tricky than the first time around. I like the style of the horns in the title page and how the menu fades in so you have a chance to look at the art. It seems like the menu and end game screens are a little bit higher quality art than the main game which seems backwards. Although, your eyes are locked to the top 10% of the screen on the commands so you don't see much of the rest of the game screen. Having the commands closer to the middle might let your eyes take in some of the rest of the scene easier. The music was cool, but it didn't really keep up with the mounting speed. An easy trick you could try is increasing the pitch a little bit over time to get the music to sound like it's going faster (maybe you do something already, but it was too subtle for me to notice). |
| Apr 25 05:27:42 | 16m 37s | FetchQuest | ♥ 1 | That's some cute art of the main character. He's got a nice run and a cool hat. The grass looks kinda off because of the dots of a different shade of green. Maybe it could have kept the same one colour style of everything else by having two greens make a checkerboard pattern? (like how they cut the grass on a baseball diamond or most other sports fields). I think if you're going to have the player run back and forth to fetch a bunch of items, it would've been nice if there was some variety like the different objects were in slightly different spots and if it was a bit shorter. Of course, the shorter the walk, the less likely you are to forget what you came out to grab so maybe that takes away from the memory aspect. |
| Apr 25 05:47:06 | 19m 24s | Pseudonarrative Dissonance | ♥ 0 | How you did the setting was very nice. The dark alleyway setting with the fog, the streetlights and the moon giving off the monocolour light all sold me on the noir theme. I can't say I really understood what he was talking about most of the time, but the words I did understand and the structure of the narrative immersed me in the world. |
| Apr 25 06:03:05 | 15m 59s | Farmer's Delight: A Twin-Stalk Shooter | ♥ 2 | I wasn't sure that the crops were ready the first time around. They were all glowing so I thought maybe they needed water, but then they got up and attacked me. It's very handy that they drop a few seeds when you kill them so you don't just end up with nothing if you mess up the harvesting the first time so good job having that safety feature in. The enemy animations were actually pretty cute. They kinda dance around in a silly way. |
| Apr 25 06:18:19 | 15m 14s | Shoot bullets in my head while I play golf | ♥ 0 | This game is really fun considering I can only play the first 30 seconds of it. The bullet hell elements are really great. The plane and the windmill have very unique firing patterns, but they are very predictable so they still feel fair to the player, but they are 10 steps past the basic "this guy shoots one shot", "this guy shoots 3 in a cone". I mean, it is borderline impossible for someone who isn't the dev to be able to dodge anything with the amount of bullets on screen and the move speed of the player. I'm not a huge fan of the pacing of the game. The movement speed is too slow (compounded by the terrain that slows you down more), the scrolling is too slow, and the difficulty ramps up too quickly. It would be nice if scrolling was more dynamic so if you manage to kill the first windmill quickly, you could putt up and gain some good distance without being hindered by the scroll speed of the game. The art is fantastic. The bullets background texture looks great and it tiles well. All of the art matches. The ball rolling animation is cute, but subtle, your gold swing is very smooth and has some nice heft behind it. The music is pretty catchy actually. It got me pumped up so that I kept retrying the game even though I knew it was impossible. All in all, I would've really like to have seen more of this game, but I'm garbage so I can't make it very far. |
| Apr 25 07:10:25 | 52m 06s | Aggroculture | ♥ 1 | The idea that you replay the same level over and over, but it changes based on your previous runs is a cool idea. It was nice to fly by and see the plants that I had planted on the previous run. The main mechanics of the game take some getting used to. I didn't really realize the controls until a few days in when I remembered there were other buttons and started pressing stuff. The upgrades for the weapon feel a little bit off. The weapon you start with feels a little too slow. A lot of times I would miss an enemy by a hair and then not be able to maneuver into position and fire again before he killed me. The first upgrade fire rate felt better. The fire behind you felt pretty useless and then the triple fire felt way too powerful. I found a good strategy was to just get to the triple shot as soon as possible, then you could just sit in the middle of the screen and mash fire and kill everything. I would have like slightly faster attack speed for the base gun and just more enemies to kill. Maybe less spread on the triple fire so it doesn't cover the whole screen. I think throwing down seeds and growing them with the blood of your enemies was a great idea. The only problem I had with that was how hard it was to water them. I found it rather difficult to kill the enemies over top of a specific plant (It also seemed like blood from enemies in the top half of the screen wouldn't drop to the seeds). Mostly I would just try to cover the entire floor in plants to have a higher chance to get one of them to grow. I think having like double the amount of enemy spawns might help that problem a bit. I didn't find the speed upgrade or using my own blood to be very helpful. The speed upgrade just made me run into the floor and ceiling more, thereby killing myself. And the blood sacrifice was too great of a risk of accidentally killing yourself. Both of which lead you to go back to using the basic gun again. I think blood sacrifice may have been a bit better if you lost blood when hit, but didn't immediately die. Then you would have more of your blood being spilt and a little bit less punishment (losing your upgrades). The pixel art is pretty nice. The blood splatter animation is pretty satisfying and the parallax effect on the background adds some depth to the background. All in all, I think it's a cool idea and it was fun to play. |
| May 1 17:58:34 | 154h 48m | Zumaster | ♥ 1 | The physics of everything was great; hitting an asteroid with another ball and having it get pushed around by the force was very satisfying so kudos for that. The spaceship movement was stellar as well. I felt like I had exactly the right amount of control when I needed it, but could also drift around in a way that felt great. I think it could have been really cool if the when the asteroids collided with one another, they could get matches and clear for you (that might be really hard to do and then maybe the game would play for you, but it would still be cool). Playing again, it actually seems like this might already be the case, maybe it's just very rare. Good job on the visuals. The spaceship showing the next ball to be fired looked great and was intuitive. It's a great way to give you all the information you need in a minimalist way. The balls too were great. Each of the icons looks like they belong (it's not like square, triangle, cat for example). Having the colour coding and the icons was handy because I would get a little confused by the yellow diamonds and orange moons at a glance. I'm not a huge fan of the different texts. The score text is different from the main menu text and the cursive is a little harder to read. The pop animation of the balls was quite cute. A small score popup when you cleared balls would have been nice. I never actually noticed the score tracker in the top left until I saw it in the screenshot here. Sound effects were good. Nice pop sound, shoot sound, and spaceship thrust sound. The music was a little bit exciting which sort of captured that epic feeling of flying through space and dodging asteroids, but chill enough to not make you anxious the whole time. Except right when you load the game; you get an annoying pop sound if you're wearing headphones. @GenTel That isn't the only way to clear the board. Getting down to, say, 3 green and 3 purple, you would just need to get one colour, then the next in order. Which is only (2/6)*(1/6) I believe. A possible way around the nearly impossible clear chance would be to eliminate a colour from coming up in your spaceship once all of that colour is gone from the asteroids. |
| May 1 18:45:28 | 46m 54s | Crane Command | ♥ 1 | The art really sells the scale of your units. They feel like toys because they are so small in relation to the large glass bin they are in. The pattern on the floor is a bit much. I found the units get a little bit lost in it; there isn't enough contrast. The inside of the claw machine is a nice setting for this and I like your artistic choice to make everything feel so small. The arrow and square cursor above the active unit are nice to identify which unit is moving. The grid lines are also handy so I don't have to guess if a gap is 2 or 3 moves away. The controls are a bit weird, but you get used to them. Thanks for putting up the alternate controls build because I don't have a numpad. I think having little arrows telling the player where they could go would help with people understanding that you can move diagonally. When it's a toy's turn, there would be 3 little arrows (like the arrow that tells you which toy's turn it is, but half the size) in front of them pointing upRight, right, and downRight. And then once you've moved, these arrows would get an attack icon (like some swords or something) so the player knows the movement phase is over and now when they press a button, they will attack. I also never noticed that I could use the mouse to see the stats of units. It might have been more likely for players to stumble upon this if the info was displayed right at the mouse (or on that specific unit's head) instead of in the top left corner. Then as you move your mouse across the screen, you would notice the popups. Individual health bars might get lost on top of one another. I found that I wasn't always quite sure if the unit I was moving was the one I was thinking or the one in the next row because the perspective kind of breaks down in the center. Other than the center, the one point perspective is very nice for spacing out the units to be able to see them without being all on top of one another and losing the little guys behind the robots. |
| May 11 21:01:18 | 242h 15m | Jeff From Accounting | ♥ 1 | Cool game. The art is incredible. I like the style of having larger than life office furniture. Gave it a cool absurdist vibe. Having glowing red eyes on enemies made it super obvious which things are bad. The text above their heads was very clear. The impact red splashes was nice. The enemy health bar/name with the delayed red text was really cool. It helped to show you when you missed a letter. You would feel like you're pumping out letters, but if their name didn't keep turning red, you knew you had missed a letter. The sound effects were great. The typewriter had awesome typing sounds, a satisfying lock and load and firing sounds. I would have liked the enemies to have some sort of sound. It was super creepy advancing into an area, not knowing if you were going to get flanked by a killer desk fan. The main loop of pressing r, typing, then hitting enter and unloading on the enemies was very satisfying and fluid. I was only getting like 5 fps for some reason and it was still playable. After restarting my computer and trying again, everything worked fine. It would have been handy to be able to heal somehow. I tried typing out health, and it would have been cool if that worked. I failed one time on the very last enemy because I had gotten down to 1 H left. The hitboxes for the enemies hitting you was a little bit large so it was kind of frustrating when you were trying to take a corner to skirt by them and they still got you. All in all, cool game. I found myself actually wanting to look around a bit (once I checked my surroundings as to not get flanked) which is more than I can say about most jam games. I even restarted my computer to try to get more than 5 fps because it was a game I wanted to try out. That may sound minor, but I mean it as a compliment. |
| May 11 21:39:20 | 38m 02s | Skaart And The Cursed Woods | ♥ 1 | It's neat idea for a game. Your art is quite great all around. I love the colours of everything. The way the slots spin is quite satisfying how the things seem to drop faster once they're past the center. The animations are all good and quite subtle so they are easy to miss. The forest sprite guys have a nice flowy animation, the muzzle flash and gun smoke are nice for the gun. Very cool attention to detail there. The sound effects really fit for everything. The bullets and bomb sounds had a lot of weight to really sell their impact which is great. I think a potential easy fix for the slot being 2/3 bad would just be a add a smaller bullet. It would be functionally the same as the bullet, but just do less damage. That way, if you pulled the small bullet, it would still suck because it wouldn't do much, but it wouldn't suck as bad as the bomb killing you or the coin doing nothing. The amount of downtime in the game made it very slow. You have ~5 seconds in between every shot and even when you start up the slot machine, it seems to be impossible to select the first 2 items in the list. You said this is a bug so I guess that's that. Seems like most of the bad parts of this just came down to time constraints so that's too bad. I know I've totally missed stuff that becomes painfully obvious once I release it and people comment on it. The gun gave me the feel of the sniper in Risk of Rain if you've ever played that game. It's a little bit of a different mechanic, but it does feel quite similar. |
| May 11 23:03:43 | 1h 24m | Ｘｘ_ｓｋａｔｅｂｏａｒｄｉｎｇ_ｘＸ | ♥ 2 | How is this the best game in the whole jam? It isn't fair. The music is perfect. The sound effects are perfect. The art is also perfect. I would have liked the ground texture in the second and third stages to tile a little bit better. The first level ground texture and all the backgrounds tile fine. The Arizona Iced Tea is pure art. Each level is unique. Each level is fun. Each level is exactly the right length so when you fail, you don't go back too far, but it not so short that it still requires some skill so you can't just beat it by dumb luck (usually). The design of the different challenges is great. Everything is extremely clear so you just know what you have to do intuitively. There are a number of times where the targets line up perfectly so you can get snipe two at once and it is very satisfying. There's never a boring part of the level. Each level you get to do at whatever speed you choose to do it at (except for some spots where you need to exercise some control). This isn't your mom's platformer. This is exactly outside the tape-your-right-arrow-key-down-while-you-go-grab-a-drink genre of other platformers. There should be an alternate mode where you can only shoot after you do a 360 in the air. It is just plain fun to mash left click to get moving and to do a 360 every time you get bounced into the air. The humour in this game kinda reminds me of these videos:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOvWhQwC3oY and:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnNemokPEIQ Having each level be skippable is such a nice thing to do in a game jam. I didn't use it because that would have robbed me of the experience of one of the levels. But it's nice to have nonetheless. |
| May 13 03:28:44 | 28h 25m | Harvest Royale | ♥ 1 | That's a pretty chill game. Nice to play when you're kinda tired and just wanna relax and just farm. You've got a nice little run animation and the sprites for the plant growth are very clear. No ambiguity about what stage of growth a plant is at. Which is nice so you don't have to wonder if the plant is ready to be harvested or not. The little particles when you hoe earth or sprinkle some water or when the plants grow are a nice addition. There's very little downtime in this game which is cool. While I'm waiting for my plants to grow, I can go hoe some more plots and water them to get them ready. Near the end, I was trying to get my farm large enough that I could just continuously run around in a circle, watering the plants that had just grown, but I beat the game before that happened. |
| May 13 03:47:26 | 18m 42s | Minigulf Gods | ♥ 2 | I got a hole in one on the first hole so I'm basically the best. I like the art of this game. I really love how you did your water. The texture looks great and the slow movement of it is nice. The water currents are very clear and intuitive, but still in a fairly subtle way. They still look like they belong like they're just markings on a map. The music and sound effects really fit with the tribal island theme. I've played the last mission a couple times and finally beat it without getting -7000 points. I feel like I'm still a little confused on what I'm supposed to do. I feel like if I send my archer islands in to attack the volcano, they just die and I lose. It seems like it's just easier to attack the small islands, put 1 villager on them so I can control them and then try to fire them at the volcano for damage. I suppose what I'm most confused about is how the villagers swap islands. It seems to be a max of 1 villager on the small islands and when the 2 archer islands are nearby, they share villagers. When the archer island goes near the non archer island, they steal all the people. So the time I got a good score, I just went and stole the one island, packed it onto my archer island, then flung my 2 archer islands at the volcano. |