Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Feedback comment stats → EvanGreenwood
Feedback comments for LD42
EvanGreenwood's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | EvanGreenwood's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 29 16:48:53 | Gut Reaction | ♥ 1 | I really love the title screen art actually. The pixel art is good, but the title screen is wonderfully derpy! I also missed the "E" to pick up at first. It controls well though, the shooting is satisfying and pushing enemies back feels good (before knowing about "E" I was shooting enemies towards the hole). Though the player damaging bounding boxes are a bit unclear (particularly for the acid). Given the camera angle I feel like they should damage you when your feet are near them (rather than damaging your head when it overlaps the acid). I would have liked a way to deal with the loss of health, or a way to improve my ability to receive ammo. I felt I was a little bit at the whim of the world, with my only ability to avoid getting hit while having to pick up every single ammo drop before it disappeared and no way to solve some of the problems I was facing (like low health or low ammo or the clogging up of acid piles). I'd like to see you take this further and play with that possibility space. When I did get a bit further in the game (I got to Day 3) I had a nice moment where I was being ganged up on by a horde of sickly food. Have you seen that Adventure Time episode with the zombie candy? That's what it reminded me of, with that wonderful tension of food trying to eat YOU. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9OOLl2rdCY I'm not a fan of enemies that hurt you just by overlapping you (unless they're covered in spines or something). But for the purposes of a jam I think it's fine. If you do take it further I'd suggest trying to add in enemy attacks (like maybe just for the sickly food, who can then vomit just in front of them, making temporary vomit piles that damage you, while the other enemies just slow you). | |
| Sep 1 18:18:19 | 73h 29m | Get Off My Boat, You! | ♥ 0 | Fun game! I enjoyed the way you incorporated the theme and the disregard for swimmers' safety. I also found this a little sea-sickening, particularly when I tried playing it fullscreen. I wonder if inducing sea-sickness was a goal? I enjoyed turning round in circles and herding the swimmers until driving right over them, there was a bit of strategy to getting a higher score. And the art style is good. It looks particularly charming at fullscreen. Given it's Unity, it might have been cool to pitchshift the boat sound based on whether the boat is turning or not. In the HTML5 version I played the boat sound was pretty constant and some variation might have been rad. Like others said, steering with the boat wheel felt great! I like games where the controls are more 1-to-1 rather than being abstracted to right-left-up-down. |
| Sep 1 18:32:58 | 14m 39s | Deep Down | ♥ 0 | I really enjoyed that you worked the theme into the level design. Really tight levels as well! (it took me many deaths before beating the game, but the check points and the quick respawns stop it from ever getting frustrating). Hope this game does really well! |
| Sep 1 19:50:08 | 1h 17m | Acreage | ♥ 1 | I can only get 119 on 5X5 (After about 6 tries). I tried a mass boot and flower run, but it seems not as effective on the 5X5 as building houses and chopping trees. Maybe flower runs are effective on the larger levels? But the fact that I could see multiple strategies towards scoring makes me think this game design has great potential. The reason I gravitated towards boots and flowers is that I really like strategies that involve feedback loops, like building machines that generate more resources over time. When I saw that the flowers returned each turn I wanted to try exploit that. I wonder whether it'd be possible to do make more of the tiles exhibit this behaviour (so as the level gets filled, a sort of machine emerges, with, for instance, ways to make the trees renewable and renewable ways to spend that wood etc). Something like a really stripped down version of Stardew Valley. I've played a bit more now... I've tried the 15 X 7 map placing a lot of boots and flowers, I got 804 points, but played far from perfectly. I think houses still are the best earners, certainly after 18 turns from the end, but flowers and boots are very useful in other ways (and some of the flowers placed near the beginning do earn better than houses). Like others have said, it feels like the player is a bit at the whim of the random tiles provided. I think providing some way to overcome that might be a good addition. Some way to be able to affect your deck would help. I don't think this needs to go as far as a deck builder, but perhaps some elements of that? Like if there was a building that could be built that allows for a hand to be discarded in favour of another one. And if that sort of thing is possible, maybe some buildings add future tiles to your deck. Like building a house adds the possibility of a marketplace tile (for instance). i.e. as you play you trigger certain conditions for more complicated cards to be available.... I guess I am suggesting a kind of deck builder :) In any case, I think this is a strong design! Love to see this taken further. |
| Sep 2 16:47:58 | 20h 57m | Knight's Crush | ♥ 0 | Nice job! The game felt a bit like those coordination excersizes, where you pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. Trying to remember the order while judging the jumps while trying to get to the end as fast as possible. I don't know if it was the intention, but it feels like a ridiculous challenge that an evil twisted wizard might send a knight on, like one of those fantasy movies where the hero has a series of unfortunate trials to beat (like a twelve tasks of Hercules), but where the taskmaster is more sadistic. I guess I'm saying, I think there's some room for humour in the theming if you were to take it further. Those later levels were very difficult (thanks for the warning in advance). Is that the standard Unity character controller? It feels like the character has a capsule collider on it and so it slips off the edge when it is just off the edge. I actually got quite good at the jumping by the end :) The knight character and animation looks really good of course! |
| Sep 2 17:07:45 | 19m 47s | Here | ♥ 1 | Love the setting and the story! The change of character to the enforcer was really interesting. I'd love to know where this story leads, in general I really like the idea of starting a story long after something horrific has occurred from the perspective of a detached/confused observer. The text at the beginning lead me to thinking that we are observing a universe from another universe, and as such being decoupled from time and causality. I wish there was more of this. It left me intrigued. I played through twice to see what other dialogue options there were (I assume it ends always with the station exploding?) I don't know if this was the intention, but this captures something of the feeling I had when reading Slaughterhouse 5, or watching Twelve Monkeys, that a everything has occurred and ended already and as much as we want to affect events the best we can do is witness them. |
| Sep 3 21:47:27 | 28h 39m | This Way Up | ♥ 0 | Really impressive visuals. The game looks gorgeous! The opening screen is really great as well. The atmosphere for a Overcooked game is spot on. Like others have said, filling the boxes isn't very motivating yet. It takes a long while and doesn't really reward you. It's a nice start to a box packing game though, and I expect you had a ton more planned that didn't get in. Congratulations on making a game with such a large team with so many different levels of expertise! (I know it can be tough keeping everyone pulling in the same direction on a project like this). |
| Sep 4 09:55:32 | 12h 08m | The Swarm | ♥ 1 | Really nice entry! The increasing acid pools fit the theme well, and I appreciate that there is a way to fight them with the blue barrels. The guns felt meaty (especially the turrets and the shotgun). I didn't realize at first that I could switch weapons (I tried using the mouse wheel, as I noticed picking up different boxes). Maybe some HUD display of the different ammo counts to make clear there are definitely different weapons. The aliens are kind of cute and kind of terrifying. And their swarming behaviour works well with the confined space and the acid pools. I was a little disappointed that acid pools kept eating my ammo. I think that's a nice mechanic, but I think it could happen a bit slower and with a little feedback (like they fizz for a while). The blue canisters also get eaten by the acid and don't spawn a white foam explosion when they die from acid, which I felt was a rule tweaked a little too harshly against the player. There's a lot of really nice touches, like the aliens creating some acid particles as they travel over acid, and the white foam looks beautiful. The kick attack seemed a bit unreliable. I imagine there's a long cooldown or something? But I didn't notice any feedback as to why it's sometimes possible to kick and othertimes not. The rendering is really great, with the depth of field and the slight darkening as you lose health. I felt like the alien and box health was a bit high. Personally I'd have preferred more aliens with less health, or if the aliens reacted more to being hit (shooting them a few times before getting any reaction isn't ideal in terms of satisfaction). Smashing the boxes got a lot more satisfying after I discovered a turret in one of them :) Sorry if this post seems a bit nitpicky. I'm only pointing out these little tweaks because the fundamentals in this game are really strong. |
| Sep 4 10:07:43 | 12m 11s | Move_LD42 | ♥ 1 | Nice jiggly loading screen and a clever incorporation of the theme. It's quite tricky moving left and right and horizontally over a grid that is diagonally arranged (though a different diagonal orientation to pressing up and right). I got caught moving over a corner of a hole a couple times. Is there any warning/logic about which tiles are going to disappear? If you take this further, I'd like to get something for eating the coin. Like growing longer (and so perhaps having more segments to sacrifice). Or getting more jumps. Or some gameplay reward for collecting the coin. Well done on making this in such a short time. Really well scoped for your constraints! |
| Sep 4 10:49:12 | 41m 29s | LEO | ♥ 0 | The musical tones as the satellites pass over their origin is a really nice touch! I think the exact sound effect they use is a bit piercing, but with a little tweaking it could be a really cool generative soundtrack. There's also a nice feeling of progress here, getting more money faster as you produce more satellites. I think the shadows are a little dark, given how peaceful the feeling of the gameplay is it might be ideal to match that in the visuals. Also it brilliantly incorporates the theme (along with having a real world concerns present within the game). I think it's a very strong entry! |
| Sep 4 14:13:14 | 3h 24m | BLOCKADE | ♥ 1 | A really cool variant on Tetris/Match3. Like others have said, those row wiping blocks are really fun. At the same time they might make the game a little easy. I do enjoy making combos in this kind of game, so I'm definitely not suggesting taking the special row-buster blocks out, though I think ideally you could find another way to introduce more difficulty. Even as it is you have a very short amount of time to make a decision about where to lay the next block, so I don't think the speed can be increased. I wonder whether the jump could be reduced. I had a moment where I had made a cliff that I couldn't get over, and that affected my strategy, but placing a block with my jump was always a bigger concern than getting to where I needed to be, and there was never much time to make a decision in any case. I don't know if it would work, but it might be interesting to have zero time pressure and more types of blocks, meaning that it would play out as a kind of puzzle where making matches is actually difficult and requires planning (because navigation and block placement would be completely tied). I don't know if you tried this already? Otherwise maybe introducing grey blocks (that don't combo but row busters can destroy), or blocks that require special conditions (like two matches). Also extra points for connecting more than 3 blocks would be rad. As well as combo points for creating a combo when falling blocks connect. I played twice and had a good time. A really nice entry. |