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Feedback comments for LD43
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | BoltKey's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 3 01:05:10 | 43 and Me | ♥ 1 | I enjoyed it. Nice and simple. Conventionally, I would expect + to be at the top and - at the bottom. The theme is not there at all for me - probably a bit too abstract 😄. I just don't see the connection between sacrifice and subtraction. When the game is controlled with keyboard, it is awkward to have clickable buttons. "Press space to restart" is much better. Also, 0! = 1, instructions unclear 😃. | |
| Dec 3 02:25:57 | 1h 20m | Free-Bug | ♥ 2 | First of all, it obviously seriously lacks polish, like proper tutorial, restart and others. The game itself is actually interesting strategy-wise. First, I though that the optimal strategy is to just kill all but one bug in the start. Then, I had one bug which just didn't grow fast enough. Because by killing, you don't just preserve more food for other bugs, but also lower the amount of potential bugs that get lucky and eat a lot of food at once. Another aspect is that if you have more bugs, theoretically the average time to get food is lower, since if a bug goes to a food far away, it is likely to get eaten by a different bug and the first bug perhaps finds food which is closer. Also, you can keep the bugs you know will not win just to strategically clear some areas of the board. I got score of 36 and think I found a strategy that could be good. In theory. All the strategic decisions sadly get vastly overpowered by the random factor, but here it is. At the start of the game, select one of 4 quarters of the board, the one with most food and least ants in it ideally. Kill all the ants that are not potential winnters going into the segment. Once there are 2 or 3 ants left, hope for the best. They are more likely to select food from the area you protected, saving them distance they need to cover. It would make the game more strategic and less random if you highlighted the foods that some bug is going to. |
| Dec 3 02:46:02 | 20m 05s | The Cure | ♥ 0 | That was lovely. I really like the idea and level design. Basic set operations with a little coat. What a shame there's no random level generator! It was a bit unclear how the multiple traits worked on one disease. I thought there needed to be both traits present to kill the desease, but eventually got it. The theme is very nicely interpreted. The music was bad, I muted it after a while. The font didn't load for me and I was stuck with Times, which looked bad and messed up the layout... |
| Dec 3 02:56:33 | 10m 31s | Sacrificial Showdown | ♥ 0 | Cute interpretation of the theme and great job on music! The game however was not quite there for me. It was not really challenging or interesting and got extremely repetetive after a while. |
| Dec 3 03:15:45 | 19m 12s | Hardcore Cave Painting | ♥ 1 | Application folder: F:/Users/BoltKey/Downloads/CavePaintings-1.0 There should be 'HardcoreCavePainting_Data' folder next to the executable (yes, I have extracted the archive) Solved: renaming ld43_data to HardcoreCavePainting_Data worked. |
| Dec 3 04:33:03 | 1h 17m | Dungeon of Lost Items | ♥ 1 | I like it! I see inspiration by Mamono Sweeper, is that right? The playing board holds far too much information, much more than what is needed. And it is very crowded and confusing. It took me a while to realize how the game works, particularly what the items do and that I lose them on each monster. Eventually I got it and reached the stairs. I like the system and I think that with a bit of further work, an interesting puzzly dungeon game could run on it. |
| Dec 3 04:51:14 | 18m 11s | Coloremix | ♥ 1 | I like the core concept. I always like games based around color, there are not many of them. I like the visual and sound effects. They really add to the experience. It would be nice if you had some mixing cheatsheet somewhere on the screen. Like you said, it is easy to cheese the later levels, which I did... |
| Dec 3 05:06:10 | 14m 56s | Clucked Up! | ♥ 2 | Fun game. I always love voice acting in games and yours works very nicely! Clever concept. I think the scoring would made much more sense if you got score for each individual bird based on how much time was left when he got home. |
| Dec 3 05:49:37 | 43m 27s | Faces | ♥ 1 | It took me a while to solve it, but eventually I got it. Interesting message. |
| Dec 3 20:13:54 | 14h 24m | Tezcacoatl's Dance Dance Paradise | ♥ 1 | I loved so many things about this. The graphics are cute, the sound effects are on point, the game gets challenging at good pace. And the little things such as screen shakes and many more work perfectly. Sometimes, it was a bit too unforgiving in my opinion. But that is probably because I suck at rhythm games 😄 . Got about 32 on second try. Did you record/create all the audio yourself? Like the birds, volcano explosion and all that? |
| Dec 3 20:21:01 | 7m 07s | All Alone, On This Plateau. | ♥ 1 | This is not a game, goal of Ludum Dare is to make a game. That aside, I liked it. The sound effects and atmosphere were nice. And the message too. |
| Dec 3 20:51:31 | 30m 30s | Island | ♥ 0 | The UI makes it so annoying to play. I really want to like this game, I like the graphics and the overall feel. But there are too many fundamental UI errors that I just can't. First and foremost, scrap the "confirm" button. There is literally no reason to need to confirm the actions when you can easily take them back. And the options that cannot be taken back, eg. eating food, doesn't have confirm button? Doesn't make sense. And it is placed so far away from the actions you mostly pick. When you need to click 3 times to make once action, and all the places to click are so small and awkwardly far away from each otehr, it is just annoying. The actions have too much text. You should replace them with pictures. Compare "Collect bananas (+1)" and "+🍌". This way, you can have all the actions be about 4 characters wide. Then, you could have all the options for all the characters on the screen at once. Also, it will be much more readable. The option box blocks available resources. The dudes should have HP and satiety visible even when not selected. Even better, have them show which action they are going to perform, even when not selected. I think everyone should have a default action selected, eg. collect branches. Next, the options that you cannot choose should be unavailable. It is frustrating having your dudes do nothing for the day. |
| Dec 3 23:02:29 | 2h 10m | Flyswatter | ♥ 0 | I kinda like it. Simple, straight to the point, but quite fun. Got 252 on my second try. I am not a huge fan of the background, it doesn't fit the rest of the visuals. |
| Dec 6 04:46:28 | 53h 43m | Jesus Take the Wheel | ♥ 2 | Whoa, now that's a big team. Were you all together? I think we all would love to see some photos! --- I was about to write that the mouse controls fest wonky and awkward, only to find out there are keyboard controls too! I was about to write that sometimes my vehicles spawned right into a wall, just to find out I could click them when they were still ghosts. The gameplay is challenging and not furstrating. It was very atmospheric, and I was loudly calling my drivers names for not driving properly and looking at their phones. What could be better? I didn't like clicking to select next driver. Maybe using some keys to cycle through the vehicles? Or make each vehicle have a number and you can select them with your numpad. It was frustrating when I clicked a vehicle and tried to start maneuvering it, while in fact I just sent another vehicle into oblivion. I think it should get hard sooner. Or maybe have several difficulty levels? I always felt like I lost to some random bullshit. 4 drivers falling asleep at once, 3 walls spawning right next to each other, vehicle refusing to turn the way I tell it to (yes, I had prayers left) etc. I never felt like I lost and it was actually my fault. Jesus sometimes blocked my road even when there was vehicle I was just controlling below him. Stories of the victims in game end screen are a lovely touch. |
| Dec 6 22:47:23 | 18h 00m | Volgar | ♥ 1 | I like it conceptually, but there are many UI and other issues. Resources should be pictures (you can just use Unicode symbols, aka emojis. It is equally as complicated as displaying just text plus finding the correct symbol.). You should use different font, Arial is generally a good choice. Building options should display right next to the building, not on the other side of the screen, since there is so little information. Also, there are several general RTS conventions every RTS game should follow unless it has a really good reason not to. If you are building a structure, you should build only one and then get back to default mouse mode, unless you are holding shift (in which case it is as it is now). Right click should cancel selected building. Buildings should definitely have people working in them displayed at all times, not only when you hover over them. Especially since your dudes die over time, and you don't know which buildings they died in, and where they need replacements. Default HTML buttons look ugly, and it is really simple to have nice looking buttons. Good start is a [button css generator](https://www.bestcssbuttongenerator.com/). Also, the whole layout is very wide. imho a web game should fit into width of max 1000px. 1600px is just way over the top. You should just scrap the brown panels. Have info from panel on the left on top of the screen, with just resources and worker status (as is conventional). The panel on the right should be below the play area (again, as is conventional). Then, you comfortably fit into 800x600 without any major changes to the play area Now for the actual game. As it is, it is very easy and there is not much pressure to evolve. You can win just fine (and perhaps it is the optimal way) if you build just the basic buildings without upgrades, get 185 dudes and use them to evolve 3 times. Evolving doesn't feel like "whoa, finally, I cannot wait to see what I just unlocked". As it is now, having much more restricted space could help, as you would have to be much more efficient with it, and evolving certainly helps with that. Or just have evolves unlock something essential for further development. Maybe, if fields unlocked after the first evolve, so at start you would have to live on hunters, and after evolving transfer into more efficient fields. Also, you can get to infinite state where you just keep sacrificing workers and get potentially infinite score. Whew, that was a lot to cover. Hope I didn't discourage you and you will work some of my suggestions into post-compo! (I don't see any difference between compo and post-compo?) |