Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Feedback comment stats → TheMonsterFromTheDeep
Feedback comments for LD41
TheMonsterFromTheDeep's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | TheMonsterFromTheDeep's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 24 16:10:50 | Flappy Typing | ♥ 0 | It's pretty cool to see a game written for a retro computer. The game itself was challenging, as others have said, but I believe that the challenge is mostly deserved, given that it's a Flappy Bird game. The one gripe I have is with the spaces--I got tripped up quite a few times by needing to type spaces, which I think is partially because they aren't indicated very well. However, I imagine that it might just be hard, psychologically, to switch from typing letters to typing spaces and back. | |
| Apr 24 16:22:33 | 11m 43s | Bullet Heck | ♥ 3 | I think this game is a pretty neat idea. Turn-based bullet hell is a very interesting mechanic. However, I do think that the game suffers from two problems: - It is possible to be completely trapped at the start of a floor, if you check the wrong side of the room first and bullets show up that you can't get around. I think the main fix to this would be to show the walls, as previously mentioned. - There doesn't seem to be a way to get away from the goblins, which to me seems to mean that goblins could easily trap you similarly to the wall problem. Maybe it should be possible to see where goblins are at all times? Or maybe they should be killed by bullets--I managed to get one in the same square as a bullet, but nothing happened. It could be an interesting strategy though. In any case, even in its current state, it's actually pretty fun--I played through quite a number of rounds, but eventually started running into a lot more goblins (I don't know if this is a bug, but the first ~10 times I played I didn't run into any goblins on level one, while eventually I saw one almost every time). |
| Apr 24 16:37:40 | 15m 07s | Oceanscapes | ♥ 1 | I think I understand the game pretty well. However, I couldn't manage to get anything to happen on the second level, even after mapping out the whole thing in Notepad. I must have mis-mapped it. I think that's the problem--there's really no way to get anything done without mapping out the whole level, which takes 16 moves, and is really tedious, and it's pretty easy to not even map it correctly, which just means that it's kind of a chore to get anything done. I think the concept is good, but I don't know how the actual gameplay could be done in a way that would be fun. |
| Apr 24 17:22:37 | 44m 57s | Extreme Tower Fishing 2018 | ♥ 3 | This seems more like a tower defense game with a fishing minigame than necessarily a fusion of genres, but it does work well. However, on my second playthrough, only about seven fish spawned in and then no more showed up. The only criticism I really have is with respect to graphics: it isn't too noticeable in this game, but it suffers from a stylistic choice that I personally feel is undesirable: multiple resolutions of pixel art, which often doesn't look too good. |
| Apr 24 17:39:14 | 16m 37s | Keep Blobby Alive | ♥ 2 | Sadly I haven't played any tamagotchis, so I can't really judge the Theme too accurately. I do have to say that the health and food indicators are not very clear--it seems like when they're empty, you don't immediately lose--you lose after some amount of time. This means that once the bar is empty, it isn't really clear when the game will end, and you kind of have to just hope that you'll make it in time. |
| Apr 24 18:11:33 | 32m 19s | Platform Assembly | ♥ 3 | That was pretty good! I nonetheless have two complaints: - The price increase is so steep that you're basically forced to just do dry runs until you get enough money for more stuff. I don't know that that's really necessary. - There is no way to destroy things you have already placed, which means that sometimes you might not be able to put jumps where they need to be. (Luckily, all of my jumps sort of just magically worked out). The only other thing I'd like to mention is that for some reason, the level isn't always repeatable--my character would sometimes get killed on certain places, and sometimes not. Overall, I really enjoyed this game. The gameplay works, even with the problems mentioned, and the graphics and music are good. |
| Apr 25 22:13:21 | 28h 01m | ClickerDefense | ♥ 1 | I think this could be a pretty cool game. It's main issue is, as previously mentioned, balance. In the first few rounds of the game, I couldn't afford enough money to not lose a few lives -- although perhaps that's because I didn't skip enough rounds. But now it's run through about 20 rounds or so without me buying any new towers, simply because the bomb towers are really powerful. The other problem is that the clicker part suffers seriously from diminishing returns -- every single building just does +1, but usually in a clicker game you can buy better buildings that do more so that it is feasible to get a reasonable rate of resource generation. I also spent a lot of time getting a mill and apparently it doesn't do anything? The other criticism I would have would be with respect to graphics -- it's not a big thing, mostly a personal opinion, but I don't think that it looks very good to have multiple resolutions of pixel art in a single game. This doesn't really affect this game too bad -- just the buttons at the bottom and the toolbar at the top -- but it is something to keep in mind. Also -- just out of curiosity -- is there a last round? |
| Apr 25 22:30:39 | 17m 18s | Feed Me | ♥ 2 | First, when I started the game, the window was glued to one half of the screen and so I missed all the buttons on the left, and I had to put my computer in Tablet Mode to force the game into fullscreen. (I'm on Windows 10). And then I think I must have encountered a bug, because Tim came over and then the screen went dark and credits played, and then I switched windows but I heard music so I switched back and the game was still going and I had gained $50. --- In any case, from what I can tell of the gameplay, I think this is kinda neat. There certainly seems to be something of a story. I'm not entirely sure what, exactly, the player can do to influence the story -- I imagine that the primary strategy is to buy a tiny bit of food every day (but, I couldn't, because I spent all my money right at the beginning). I think the hand-drawn graphics are interesting, especially because you don't seem them much in games or in Ludum Dare. I should say I was properly apprehensive of the creature -- I really didn't know what was going to happen, so I think this game really sold the creepy well. |
| Apr 25 22:48:56 | 18m 17s | Bullets of Insight | ♥ 0 | Neat game. I think my primary concern is that it seems really difficult to really get a handle on how to play well vs. not well. My main strategy was to just point the thing somewhere until it turned green. This happened to work on both stages 0 and 2, although I can't seem to beat stage 1. The replay feature is really neat. |
| Apr 25 22:59:29 | 10m 33s | Pivit | ♥ 1 | I think the main thing that this game is missing is instructions. I have no idea what any of the numbers in the bottom mean, or what any of the bumpers do, exactly. At first I thought I was supposed to try to destroy the bumpers with hearts. I'm still not sure what the bumpers with skulls do, as I didn't manage to destroy both of them without dying. |
| Apr 25 23:26:31 | 27m 02s | threeSpace | ♥ 1 | @HS_Dave : I ran into the same tile-respawning bug three separate times, twice with fuel and shield tiles and once with capacitor and shield tiles. I like the space graphics, as well as the background sound -- very neat. I encountered an issue with the capacitor: I couldn't seem to match tiles fast enough to charge it up, even when not flying. I also don't know if this is intentional or a bug -- but usually tile matching games don't let you keep switched tiles if no matches were formed. |
| Apr 25 23:43:43 | 17m 12s | Eat Your Ammo! | ♥ 1 | That was pretty funny. It's a little difficult to tell exactly what causes corn to grow, but it's easy enough to get it growing so it doesn't really matter. Probably the best improvement would simply be audio. |
| Apr 25 23:56:19 | 12m 36s | Survival Racing - LD41 | ♥ 0 | I like the concept, but I'm afraid I can't seem to get anything to work right. I've tried cutting down trees and mining rocks, but it seems like neither works: the character starts the attack animation, and then won't stop and won't eat. If these are simply bugs, and you have time to fix them, I would be happy to try playing again. I can give one other piece of feedback: it's really hard to do anything when you have to memorize six keyboard controls. At the very least for the crafting part, a graphical interface would be much nicer. |
| Apr 26 01:01:54 | 1h 05m | SURVABY | ♥ 1 | I think two added options for the player would be really helpful: the ability to leave the room before the zombies broke the door, and the ability to reload the gun. |
| Apr 26 01:46:39 | 44m 45s | Crops in Space | ♥ 2 | I liked this a lot! It really has the space atmosphere down pretty well, and I think with a little more content it would really have the "alone in space" atmosphere down pretty well. As such, the only thing it really needs is fleshing out. In fact, as it currently stands, the game was pretty easy once I figured out that you could convert food to all other kinds of resources: it means that landing on planets is not really necessary, and because you can use 18 fuel to escape any enemy, it becomes pretty straightforward to just click the "wait 10 hours" button and the "plant seeds" and "convert" buttons and win. |
| Apr 26 01:55:44 | 9m 05s | Chord Run | ♥ 1 | I liked this, although I'm a sucker for any game that lets you play music. 🙂 It feels a little slow in the beginning, but is certainly fast enough by the end. The only complaint I have is that, especially in the beginning, it's really hard to jump over the platforms -- it's really easy to land on them. I think this game would be especially neat with background music that complemented the player -- although I suppose that might be difficult, as the player's timing is not as exact as in pure music-playing games. |
| Apr 26 02:10:45 | 15m 01s | Transmute | ♥ 1 | After reading other people's comments, I realized I was supposed to play with a controller, which explains why I had some difficulty with the controls. But in case you want feedback on the keyboard-and-mouse controls: The camera is kind of unintuitive, given that it kind of swings in a circle around your character in accordance with your cursor, but I did get more used to it as I played further. The primary problem with the keyboard controls is that, for some reason, W doesn't work on the player character to jump, which means that you have to switch between using WASD and ASD + Space or between WASD and arrow keys. However, ASD + Space is really the only option, because Q is so far from the arrow keys. Finally, the controls felt kind of slippery -- but again, I got more used to them. --- Aside from the problems with the controls, I liked the game. It looked pretty good, and I did manage to beat it even with the problems I experienced, so I imagine it's very playable. My only question is how exactly the green things work, because it seems like on the first level I would shoot them and they would become "invisible" for a fraction of a second and then come back and start moving again. |
| Apr 26 16:00:07 | 13h 49m | World Bender | ♥ 0 | A nice little puzzle game. I agree with respect to the controls -- they simply aren't as precise as one would expect from a platformer. But the foundation is solid, and could easily be turned into a full-fledged puzzle game. |
| Apr 26 16:17:11 | 17m 04s | 12Slash | ♥ 1 | This game is fun! I think it might benefit from some way to protect yourself or heal -- I'm relatively certain that the best you can do to avoid getting killed is stay on the opposite side of the screen during enemy turns. |
| Apr 26 16:29:51 | 12m 40s | Gem Labyrinth | ♥ 1 | I think that the main thing this game suffers from is a lack of clear instructions -- I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do, and reading through the description didn't help. After I figured it out, I still didn't entirely understand the combat mechanics, especially with respect to the ranged enemies. The graphics are nice and consistent and the music works well. |
| Apr 26 16:45:01 | 15m 10s | Fishy | ♥ 1 | This game starts out nicely, but quickly becomes tedious and boring. I think it's really just a matter of not having enough content yet to really have a whole, fun game -- there needs to be more progression than "buy bait and spam the cast button." I did find one bug -- somehow the first time I went fishing I ended up with -1 bait. |
| Apr 26 17:11:03 | 26m 02s | Magic Rocks | ♥ 2 | This is pretty good! Although the graphics could use a little detail (and maybe material tweaks?), they are there and look good, and the music, although not made for this game, was chosen well. One possible improvement: it would be nice to be able to cancel invisibility, given that is prevents you from attacking. |
| Apr 26 17:21:30 | 10m 27s | Ascii paouf II | ♥ 0 | I'm not sure what the note about QWERTY keyboards is about -- my QWERTY keyboard worked perfectly fine. I think it's neat that the ball slows down whenever a word shows up to give you time, which especially works well with mouse controls, because you have to take your hand off the mouse to type. I think either a highscore or a win condition would be a nice addition. I also think difficulty levels would be interesting, as I found it a little easy. |
| Apr 26 17:29:08 | 7m 38s | TOBR - Tower Offense: Battle Royale | ♥ 0 | I tried pushing the "Join Match" button and it disappeared, but nothing else happened -- sadly I don't know if this is because there were no servers, or if the game is just behaving weirdly. Is there any kind of an indicator whether the game is looking for matches? In any case, I might try again later. |
| Apr 26 17:41:43 | 12m 35s | Blue Marble Sniper: Bullet Hell Stealth | ♥ 1 | A very strange game with a lot of different mechanics. Nonetheless, I thought it was pretty fun. However, I don't really understand what most of the sniper upgrades do -- especially things like weapon level and bullet size, given that it seems like the only thing you're doing is clicking on enemies who are insta-killed. I also didn't manage to get really any of the blue ball upgrades -- it was really easy to click on it my accident, although I suppose that's just part of the gameplay. In any case, I like the sheer strangeness of the game, and it does actually work pretty well. |
| Apr 26 17:54:12 | 12m 29s | Build'em All ! | ♥ 1 | Not bad. Right now, there's not a whole lot to do, and there doesn't seem to be a win condition, but there's certainly a solid foundation here. The main criticism I have: - It's really annoying to use the keyboard to build things. It's not so bad here, because the icons at the bottom remind you which buttons to push, but I think it's just something to avoid. Or, at the very least, I think an option to change the keys would be good. - I think the graphics could be improved, but, of course, this is just a Jam game. I do think that the whole planet mechanic is really cool, and I especially like the minimap in the bottom corner. Wrapping physics like that is difficult. |
| Apr 26 18:07:33 | 13m 21s | Flat Survival | ♥ 1 | The sounds don't work for me. I played a couple of levels -- not bad. I also suffered the end condition problem. The primary feedback I have is that maybe the fires move too fast -- they move the same speed as the player, which makes it actually kind of difficult to jump over them. Maybe they should move slower in the earlier levels? Also, I'm not entirely sure what the "survival" aspect is. I think expanding on that mechanic could be interesting, and could influence interesting level design (if you had to go back and forth to different areas in order to survive). |
| Apr 28 05:15:00 | 35h 07m | Python Barrage | ♥ 1 | A very cool concept. Very well executed, as well. I don't in particular have any criticism, although I have to wonder if it's possible to get so long that you can just form a continuous wall, blocking all enemies. (I didn't manage to do so). I really like the music -- although I can't tell, given that you've disabled the audio category -- whether it was made as part of the jam or not. |
| Apr 28 05:27:08 | 12m 08s | Puzzle Jumper | ♥ 0 | I'm not sure I like the mechanic of requiring the player to stand on the blocks to move them -- it really makes it difficult to have any control over the blocks at all, especially when trying to e.g. rotate them. Perhaps it simply needs some tweaking -- currently, the main issue with the mechanic is that it's simply really difficult, as a player, to pull off. Additionally, I encountered problems with the controls: - W should be supported for jumping, so I'm not switching between arrows and (Space)ASD. - There's no way to control the character jump height, which makes landing on a piece in time to be able to control it pretty difficult. |
| Apr 28 05:41:47 | 14m 39s | Gradioid | ♥ 1 | I got through the first level three times and then got killed almost immediately. Some way to tune the difficulty, or at least not have to re-do the whole game on every death, would be nice. (I tried pushing 'X' on the menu screen and it doesn't seem to do anything). Perhaps that's just part of the genre, but it certainly makes it more difficult to rate the game. This game is really polished, and, I imagine, pretty interesting. Sadly I can't seem to get farther than slightly through the second 'level'. |
| Apr 28 05:46:51 | 5m 04s | Medieval Melody Mayhem | ♥ 1 | I think the option for larger bars would be nice. The problem, especially, is that it's easy to start typing for a wizard slightly before they get in the box, and once you realize that your first letter went through, you've typed the second letter and then there's not enough time left to retype both letters. |
| Apr 28 06:05:49 | 18m 58s | Dungeon Kart | ♥ 1 | I'm not entirely sure how to play this game -- e.g. what exactly the red cubes do -- but I suppose it's a workable concept. In it's current state, the main problem it has, I think, is the controls -- the cart has a lot of momentum and doesn't turn very fast, and it's pretty easy to just fly straight into enemies. |
| Apr 28 16:44:38 | 10h 38m | Thrust Vector | ♥ 2 | I don't really understand the gameplay. The only way I managed to get killed was by driving into the red zone at the edge of the map -- the enemies didn't seem to do anything at all. I like the graphics, especially the warp effect. I think the camera controls could be improved -- primarily, it's really annoying to have the camera move when your mouse is in the corner, when you're trying to click on one of the thrusters. |
| Apr 28 16:53:46 | 9m 08s | CMD TUTOR | ♥ 1 | Cute little game. Apparently "cd .." is invalid, which I would say is a little strange, given that the actual command required by the game, "cd..", is usually not interpreted by non-Windows command-lines. |
| Apr 28 17:04:00 | 10m 14s | TwoForOne | ♥ 0 | This is neat! And for a game made in five hours, this is pretty cool! The shooter-puzzle really works well with this kind of two characters puzzle. I do have one complaint: On my keyboard, the delete key is really far from both other sets of controls, meaning that I basically have to run with the blue square before focusing both by hands on the shooter so that I don't die. Of course, it's something of a pain to have customisable key controls in a Jam (I certainly don't!) so that's mostly a nitpick. |
| Apr 28 17:12:59 | 8m 59s | FLAPPYKARUGA | ♥ 1 | I really like this. The combination of specifically the Ikaruga genre is actually really clever -- if it were a combination with a normal shooter genre, this game would be an absolute nightmare, because one would have to fly out of their way to shoot the enemy ships, which would inevitably lead to crashing into a wall. However, in this case, you can simply dodge the ships by switching color and shooting at them when convenient, and it all works out very nicely. I suppose that does lead to this being more of a flappy bird game than anything else, but I think it's more fun than the original flappy bird. 🙂 |
| Apr 28 17:17:37 | 4m 38s | Slapshotter! | ♥ 0 | I'm not entirely sure what the losing condition is? Also, it seems like the collision detection is somewhat broken -- lots of blocks didn't break when the puck (?) bounced off of them. Also, the puck really liked to get stuck with low vertical velocity, which was kind of frustrating. I think breakout + sports could be interesting, but it would need more work. |
| Apr 28 17:33:44 | 16m 07s | Line'em up | ♥ 2 | This is awesome! It has probably the best use of the theme I've seen. It's also horribly difficult, but I did eventually manage to beat it after much cursing. Easier difficulty options could include more life or a longer shooting range. This game is really polished and really fun. |
| Apr 28 19:24:17 | 1h 50m | Infinitris | ♥ 1 | It's horribly annoying that the blocks will stop allowing you to move them once they go inside the ground. This single problem is probably what prevented me from being able to get past the fourth puzzle, and to usually fail at the third puzzle -- simply because I have to be very careful to not accidentally clip the ground and immediately nuke my chance. I think they should either not be allowed to clip the ground at all, or allow movement at all times. It's especially annoying, because it takes about thirty seconds to get all the way back to the third puzzle, which is essentially time spent waiting. I do think the concept is solid. Some of the other puzzle-platformers I have played require a lot of attention to both the platforming part and the puzzle part, which can be really difficult, but here it's just focusing on the puzzle part which I think might actually be the better way to go. |
| Apr 28 19:40:02 | 15m 45s | CARED | ♥ 3 | I'm afraid I can't really tell what to do to win? I think I activated all four nodes, and then the resources in the top-right corner ran out so I died. But this game is really polished -- good graphics and gameplay. The title music offends my ears slightly with the way it goes almost completely silent at places. |
| Apr 28 19:52:21 | 12m 19s | A Tavern Life | ♥ 3 | I would have to agree with @Avon. Each day, after taking off 150 gold for the wastes and an employee, there doesn't seem to be enough money to pay for enough beer to earn back the same amount of money the next day. It's also not clear why sometimes you seem to lose money? |
| Apr 28 20:13:49 | 21m 28s | Survival Cannon | ♥ 0 | This is a surprisingly workable concept, and I kept playing for a couple of minutes even after seemingly unlocking everything. The main things I didn't understand where under which conditions multiple blocks would break, and what exactly the different kinds of cannon balls did. Aside from that, I had some fun with this game. The cannon balls you shoot when you have none left kind of creeped me out. 😉 |
| Apr 28 20:24:42 | 10m 53s | Carnage | ♥ 1 | Simple and fun. It can be seriously hard to dodge enemy bullets -- maybe it should be possible to shoot rockets out of the sky? Or perhaps the player should simply move slightly faster? |
| Apr 28 21:04:38 | 39m 56s | Rose-Coloured Dungeon Life | ♥ 4 | Well, I think I got through the whole game, after accidentally killing the fish person. The game seems pretty polished, but I feel like the combat system is seriously lacking. It's pretty difficult to hit the enemies, and it's practically impossible to avoid being hit, especially in close combat, which means I was only able to kill a couple of enemies without enabling Waifu Mode. |
| Apr 29 18:22:08 | 21h 17m | Just Bill | ♥ 1 | One of the better puzzle games I've played this compo. A lot of the puzzles were really neat, although I simply built a ladder on the very last one. I like the music, although the jump sound effect is a little out of place. On the title screen, the character is scaled bilinearly (or something), which looks a little strange. Sometimes the game would lag spike for a second, which was a little strange, but didn't affect the overall gameplay. |
| Apr 29 19:01:51 | 39m 43s | TD Racing | ♥ 1 | Good concept, but man, the controls are impossible. Every time I tried to take the first left turn, I would end up with so much rotational momentum that I would end up backwards. Then, every time I tried to turn right, I couldn't turn nearly fast enough. As such, I didn't manage to make it past the finish line ever, or unlock any of the other cars. |
| Apr 29 19:12:31 | 10m 40s | KalashKnight | ♥ 3 | I feel like the main problem with this game is that it's super unclear what causes the different blocks to move. Sometimes I would shoot them and they wouldn't move at all, and sometimes they would move perpendicular to the direction of the bullet, etc... I feel like there should be some way to deal with the dark gray boxes aside from running from them. Once, during a box shower, they covered all but one spot in the screen, and there were too many blocks in the way for me to move there. I often wasn't aware when I got the laser gun and wasted it. I don't know if that's just my fault, or if there would be some better way to indicate the start of a turn. I appreciated the DHMIS reference. |
| Apr 29 19:27:58 | 15m 27s | Spellbowl | ♥ 0 | This is one of my favorite concepts this Ludum Dare -- super awesome use of the Theme. However, the controls have some serious problems. It's so incredibly easy to try using a spell, and fail because the action wasn't performed quite correctly, that I have to actively focus and put time into making sure I'm making the correct mouse gesture. This adds serious frustration to the gameplay, and is also why I can't get past wave four without losing a significant amount of health. Simply allowing the player the whole screen to aim would be seriously helpful, and I don't see how it would be unfair in any capacity. |
| Apr 29 20:06:30 | 38m 32s | Slime Garden | ♥ 0 | It takes wayyyyy too much grinding to get anything done in this game. I got all the way up to level 60, and still got killed very quickly when entering the area leading up to the boss. Perhaps this is simply because of the sheer quantity of enemies that spawns in. Aside from that, I enjoyed this game. It has a surprisingly large world with quite a bit to do. |
| Apr 29 20:22:46 | 16m 16s | Super Soccer | ♥ 1 | Fun game. I like the variation in levels and I appreciate that there's different music for each one. |
| Apr 30 23:16:25 | 26h 53m | The Mad King's Tournament | ♥ 1 | It took quite a bit of kludging to get this game to fit on my screen, as Godot apparently tells Windows that it is DPI-aware... In any case, I had fun. Multiple times I failed to pick up something because the "You found a [blank]!" text tricked me into thinking I had picked up something. It seems like there wasn't really enough food -- I only found one in both my playthroughs -- I died of hunger the first time and won the second time. Something that would be really neat is autocomplete for the command window, especially because typing out things like "Male Orc" is kind of painful. |
| May 1 00:23:03 | 1h 06m | Draw Me Something | ♥ 1 | Nice! Drawn To Life plus a twin-stick shooter. I had quite a bit of fun. The one useful thing I can say is that I'm not sure what, exactly, the purpose of the color-changing is. The extra cognitive load (or whatever) of keeping track of colors is actually more effort than simply spamming the shoot button. |
| May 1 00:53:57 | 30m 54s | Trishoot | ♥ 2 | Super fun game -- really addicting. I ran into the same bullets-on-ground bug, but I also once saw bullets moving with an enemy that were not attached to that enemy by any path of bullets (there was blank space between the enemy and those bullets). Seems like the best strategy is to isolate an enemy and then pump them full of bullets to get all the combo points. This, sadly, is how I eventually was killed. :P |
| May 1 01:03:00 | 9m 03s | pressspace | ♥ 1 | This is pretty neat. I think my main criticism is that every time you miss a word, you inevitably miss another one, which is kind of annoying -- I think I would prefer if the game just judged you on whether you put the spaces where it was expecting. After all, the game doesn't actually judge you on what words you create -- even if you create a word that is technically correct, the game will still mark you off if you didn't put the spaces in the right spot. I enjoyed the graphical objects that would appear after typing nouns, especially the "big monster." Also, the beat does not exactly align with when you want to press space, which is kind of irritating given that it's a pretty prominent beat. |
| May 1 02:32:35 | 1h 29m | Piloteer | ♥ 1 | Very cool combination of genres -- I have to say it definitely fits the theme. 🙂 Seems very difficult, mostly because there doesn't seem to be much enabling you to predict enemy movements and attacks, but maybe I'm just not paying close enough attention to their movement. |
| May 1 16:33:22 | 14h 00m | Dream World | ♥ 1 | Neat game. Very difficult, but seems to work okay. I think my main complaint is that it takes way too long to fall around the world again. I would fall off the edge a lot, and have to wait a couple of seconds before I could try again, which was really frustrating. The hitbox on the enemy projectiles is also somewhat difficult to get a feel for. Sometimes I could dodge a bullet very closely, but other times I would be killed when just in the general vicinity. |
| May 2 18:43:50 | 26h 10m | A Tale of Two Towers | ♥ 1 | I played both (?) versions -- the one with recruiting and the one without recruiting -- and I think they both suffer from opposite problems: without recruiting, it takes a really long time to build up any sort of substantial force. With recruiting, it is almost trivial to build up forces in the hundreds of thousands. However, it is a solid basis for a game, and the imbalance is not actually my primary complaint. By far, the thing I found most annoying was several deficiencies in the command line interface. First, sometimes I would enter commands when the game was expecting me to press enter to advance a line of text, and then I would have to re-type those commands. Second, the game would say things like "you don't have enough men" or "you don't have enough gold," but wouldn't tell me how many men or gold I did have or, at the very least, needed. Finally, when upgrading, the game will not tell you that you don't have enough gold until you've already chosen the number of workers, which is really annoying. But I did play for something like 40 minutes, so I did have fun. |
| May 3 01:52:02 | 7h 08m | Age of Pacman | ♥ 1 | Arcade + RTS is a very interesting combination, and not one I've seen thus far. I found it somewhat difficult -- I tried to split my guys into groups, but didn't do so very well, and the towers often spawned on the opposite side of the map from where my groups were, which is probably due to me not making enough of them... An "easy mode" could just be making the time you get for each tower be a bit higher. 🙂 |
| May 3 21:03:08 | 19h 11m | The King of The Hill | ♥ 1 | Just so you know, your Google Drive link for the Windows version doesn't work -- when trying to download the file, Google Drive blocks it and says "you can't download this because a virus was detected." I played the web version, and I must say, it's quite strange. I never really got the hang of the controls, even after trying quite a bit. It seems like they are almost random in whether they will work the way I expect. Seems relatively fun, aside from that -- a mad scramble to get to the top of the hill. However, given that it's just "survive as long as possible," it gets somewhat boring. |
| May 3 21:17:04 | 13m 56s | Tower Defense Paradise! | ♥ 1 | A good start to a game. I'm very intrigued as to where the tower-defense + dating-sim might go -- it could be, for example, the way to level-up towers, or maybe if a tower feels neglected it could choose to stop working. I think that would be pretty funny and certainly very unique. I did only play the 1.01 version, so maybe I missed a couple of things. But it was fun nonetheless, and with future work could be pretty neat. |
| May 3 21:35:17 | 18m 13s | Modern Fairway 4: Spec-Ops in the Rough | ♥ 1 | This was really fun. Simple, absurd concept; great execution. I think the only improvement, gameplay-wise, I can think of is adding some sort of indicator of your goal, because I'm not entirely sure where it is in the desert map. Also, a bug: On my first play-through, the gun that said "press 2" and the gun that said "press 3" were switched -- pressing 3 switched to the "press 2" one and vice-versa. I don't know if this just has to do with the order they are picked up -- my second play-through (of the same map) had them in the right spots. |
| May 3 21:59:28 | 24m 11s | Ready, Deck, Go! | ♥ 1 | Neat game. I had quite a bit of fun. It's a little irritating to have the time increase by five every single win -- it makes the game take a lot longer. I'm also not entirely sure that visibility is working correctly -- my first game did not have too many asteroids, but by the fifth game there were a lot -- and about the same amount between the 1 visibility ship and the 3 visibility ship. I think it would be neat if the cards you played actually increased your stats by that amount, or something to that effect -- sometimes I would not have any need to play a card, because I already had enough stats, which felt like a waste. (Although incrementing your stats could make the game a little too easy...) The main thing I feel is missing is some kind of progression. You basically get all the best cards as soon as you want them, because there is no apparent limit on money, and neither is there any kind of limit on how good of stats you can get on the beginning. Some sort of ultimate goal would, I think, add a lot to the game. I really enjoyed the sound effects, especially the card ones. They were really neat. However, I might just have strange taste. 🙂 |
| May 3 22:21:18 | 21m 50s | Cornivore | ♥ 0 | A good start to a game. I think the main thing, as has been said, is more player feedback. I couldn't exactly tell how to harvest crops or even plant them, largely because of a lack of feedback, and because the fruit-falling-through-ground bug made it hard to know if I was really harvesting things correctly. I believe your character, and perhaps the hoed ground model, would look better with smooth shading enabled. Better camera controls could also be a plus. With a third-person view, it's kind of expected that you can see what is behind you, but it doesn't really work out that way in this case. A first person view might actually be better for this specific game, but I couldn't say for sure. |
| May 3 22:40:40 | 19m 22s | CITY^3 | ♥ 0 | Neat game. I managed to find both secret combinations, although I'm not quite sure what the one for D is (I just got it accidentally at the end). I think an improvement would be to make it clear what your score is based on, so the player can put more strategy into getting a higher score. |
| May 3 23:00:10 | 19m 30s | Super Billiard Chalk | ♥ 2 | Very nice game. I faced some frustration when I couldn't quite figure out what to do on a level, but I eventually got through the whole game. It's not entirely clear what opens up the pockets to shoot the enemies in, which would be nice to know. I'm not entirely sure that the flying enemies that require three (?) rebounds to kill are exactly fair -- if their AI worked and they didn't get trapped in the middle pocket, they would be very difficult to kill. |
| May 4 01:39:49 | 2h 39m | Text Based Adventure | ♥ 1 | This is a pretty great game! I managed to die a lot on level 2, but none of the other levels, and I was rather surprised when it seemed to change layout. The use of "text-based game" is really clever, and I really like all the "U [did such and such]" puns. I have to say that the exploding weapon seems a bit overpowered -- killed Z in about 3 hits, but also insta-killed me twice on level 2 when enemies used it at super close range, because I was hit by something like 10 bullets at once. I think a cooldown on damage would mitigate that, or you could just leave it in as something to watch out for. |
| May 4 03:51:05 | 2h 11m | Brute Force Art Defence | ♥ 1 | This is really neat. A tower defense game where you have generic upgrades that can be applied to any towers is interesting and unique. Strangely, after my first playthrough, I have to imagine that the best strategy is to lose lives in a controlled fashion in order to get the extra cards. I might try playing this again sometime, as it is very interesting. I did find it to be somewhat difficult. Almost whenever I upgraded a tower, I would immediately be fighting the enemies that match that tower, which was bad luck on my part. However, it might have something to do with the progression of the game nonetheless. I do have one complaint, which is that after an enemy was shot a bunch I couldn't tell what towers would be able to shoot it. Perhaps enemies could become targeted by all towers once painted? Something to think about, in any case. Also, it might be nice to know the number of enemies for the next round before starting it. Before the final round, I created a new tower with a backwards shot upgrade, which turned out to be absolutely worthless for fighting a single enemy. But that's just one nitpick. Overall I really liked this game. The graphics, although not fancy, are more than good enough, especially when considering the paint splatter effect, which works very well for this game. The card mechanic is innovative and interesting. The audio works well enough in my opinion. |
| May 6 22:00:29 | 66h 09m | Mud and Pixels | ♥ 1 | Very interesting choice of genres to combine. I played around three rounds of this game, and I think my main complaint is that there are certain balance issues. My first playthrough I got through 16 rounds, my second I got through about 4, and on my final playthrough I lost at round 96. It seems like the strategy of "spam troops" works pretty well, but aside from that it's rather difficult to come up with a strategy -- thus my compliant about "balance". |
| May 6 22:32:15 | 31m 46s | Piece of Paradise | ♥ 1 | A good start to a game. A solid basis for gameplay, although I ran into a couple of problems.... I think the main problem is the hitboxes -- they really mess with trying to get any kind of resource. I think I might have ran into a bug -- one of my farms would give me a couple hundred food every time I harvested it, while the other ones would only give about twenty or so. Once a zombie showed up, the game simply froze, although it was still consuming about 15% CPU. I didn't see many of the other characters -- several of them, including several zombies, were trapped in the ocean, which was a little strange. Also, it somehow managed to use 1.8 gigabytes (!) of RAM, which is kind of a lot for a simple game like this. I tried looking at the source code to see if there were any obvious problems. The only thing that looks a little suspicious is retrieving an audio file (and creating a thread) every time a sound plays, and also requesting a subimage every time a sprite is drawn (which would probably involve a lot of allocation and copying). It's especially strange to me because I've *written* really inefficient Java games before -- namely, my second Ludum Dare game, which loaded a copy of a sprite's appearance every time it created a new instance of that sprite -- and that game only takes up about a tenth of the RAM this game does. As it were, the audio didn't seem to work on my computer. Overall, I did *like* the game. But it has a lot of bugs, which seriously detriment from the experience. |
| May 6 23:17:05 | 44m 50s | Retroviral | ♥ 3 | I like this game. However, I think it might be just a little too difficult. It took me almost no effort to finish the first three levels, but the fourth level is incredibly difficult. The main problem is that the enemies respawn so quickly that you don't really have time to shoot the ball, and when you do, you almost certainly miss. The fifth level has a similar problem, but I managed to beat it on the second try. |
| May 6 23:34:21 | 17m 16s | Type Hero Adventures | ♥ 2 | Nice game. Gets pretty challenging in the later levels, as typing "jump" repeatedly is kind of difficult. I think one thing that makes it harder is that, at least for QWERTY users, "jump" is typed entirely by the right hand, which makes it slower to type repeatedly. A checkpoint system might be kind of nice, as right now the basic spiel is "repeat the level until you memorize it," which would become worse if you also had to memorize when to crouch or not (as right now you can basically just crouch the whole time). If the command were "checkpoint," it would actually take a while to type out and be something of a tradeoff. 😉 Anyways, neat combination of genres. Real-time platforming and text-based controls are definitely not the most compatible. |
| May 6 23:49:28 | 15m 07s | War General Simulator | ♥ 1 | I'm not entirely sure what's happening. The DESTROY command appears to work, but MOVE does not (i.e. `MOVE c0 BY 1 0` does not work, nor does `MOVE c0 TO 27 75`). `SURVEILLANCE MOVE` does work, however. I'm afraid I can't really rate this game, simply because I can't really play it. If you want me to leave a rating anyways, say so, but I can't really give much useful information. I do think it might be kind of fun if it worked -- but I'm afraid I simply don't know. |