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FireSlash

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		FireSlash's comment
Dec 4 07:42:53		The Feast	♥ 2	Oh man, I love the art for this. The audio also is a wonderful compliment to the style, and the atmosphere in general is on point as heck. Gameplay wise, the piercing mechanic took a few shots to figure out, but it ended up being self-explanatory enough that I figured it out on my own. However, it seems enemies can just spawn anywhere, and multiple times I had one spawn right in front of me, before I could even react to it. Random spawns aren't entirely evil, but giving the player a "safe zone" goes a long way in reducing frustration. If you find that too easy, add a telegraph to where the enemies will spawn, giving players more time to react before the enemy appears and becomes dangerous. I'd also consider adding a slow health regen, and simply preventing the player from attacking when it would be fatal. This gives players an "out" to having health lower than the sacrifice level, without just being doomed. Overall great entry! I'd love to see a post-compo version!
Dec 4 07:53:13	10m 20s	Dragon God Trail: The Card Game	♥ 0	This very much has an old school adventure game vibe to it, as rpgfaker mentioned. Balance may need a bit of tweaking; but honestly getting it right in this kind of time frame would be more luck than anything. Bit of a shame there's no audio, but overall I found it quite enjoyable. Good work!
Dec 4 08:00:29	7m 16s	Sacrifices Must Be Made	♥ 1	The forced time limit felt really bad, as it simply added pressure while I was trying to figure out the game. I also found the system for assigning workers to be fairly counter-intuitive at first. This lead to a bit of a flummoxed first night. Even after I figured it out, the system felt fairly rough to use. I suspect streamlining this process would improve the game feel quite a bit. That aside, the idea's quite nice! Once I got the hang of things I found it to be a fairly enjoyable experience.
Dec 4 08:50:52	50m 23s	Back at Valborgne Manor	♥ 2	Neat little game. The enemies seemed mostly harmless though. They Even touching the edges of their cones mostly showed no reaction, and should they react, you can just walk away from them. The layout itself ended up being more confusing than anything. It felt like work to traverse the area, where in stealth games you usually want it to be more tense and puzzle like. That said, the atmosphere is good, and there's certainly plenty of map to traverse. The abilities make it much more enjoyable to zip through the map. Overall quite good. Nice work!
Dec 4 08:56:54	6m 02s	Pigheaded Pirate	♥ 1	Mechanically, I found more often than not enemies get stuck together, or the pig head gets stuck on enemies, or some combination of these. The pig head dying also seems to complicate things. In general, I suspect you're fighting the physics engine more than it's helping you. For future games, you might look into using just a gravity constant with more traditional collision detection. I suspect it'll solve a lot of your problems here. As for the gameplay, it's weirdly enjoyable to shoot pig heads at things.
Dec 4 09:01:19	4m 25s	Bottomless God	♥ 2	Graphics have a nice consistency and mood. The movement feels pretty wonky though. You can get "stuck" on walls, and it's sometimes hard to jump while heading up the side of the altar. I'm also really good at catching fireballs with my face...
Dec 4 09:07:18	5m 59s	Reactor Overdrive	♥ 1	Nice and juicy interface! I see you speak tween. Enjoyable little defense game with surprising depth. if I had to complain (I do), your pixel sizes aren't consistent. That's a paddlin'.
Dec 5 06:12:58	21h 05m	Cross the Hell	♥ 1	This is a really neat idea! Some minor nitpicks: - Levels don't seem to be timed for "zero cycle". (For example, the third level has the first platform too far away to make a jump even if you move at maximum speed) - The right click power tends to fade a bit slowly, which leads to some frustrating moments - The power circle obscures the other world, meaning moving platforms are extra evil. - It's important to remember platformers like this thrive on being tough but responsive and fair; such that the player always feels like it's their fault when they die. Right now I'm blaming the game a lot, which is not ideal. That said, these are pretty minor annoyances, and easy to tweak. Overall I really love what you've done here!
Dec 5 06:38:41	25m 43s	Zoe and the Polypantheon	♥ 1	The inventory combination system really threw me for a loop a few times. But wow, everything else here is solid. Good writing, standard point and click implementation, multiple endings. The works. If I had to complain, the lack of a save feature makes some of the joke endings a bit rough. We all knew I was going to end the world with delicious candy... Really though, amazing work!
Dec 5 06:52:34	13m 53s	Ulti-MEME Sacrifice	♥ 2	I'm not a fan of the controls here. First, because they feel a bit floaty. Second, because after sacrificing a drone, your ship tends to fly off after the mouse cursor, leading to a quick demise. Other than that though... a very competent shmup! You might try playing around with bullet engines like bulletml; they'll allow you to produce more interesting patterns without much work. Also consider difficulty options for shmups in the future; balancing these things for LD is near impossible. Really though, the pacing was on point for LD, and it was fun enough to keep me engaged to the end. Nice work!
Dec 5 07:16:22	23m 48s	CUTE ROBOTS	♥ 1	More PICO-8 love! Really neat take on the genre. I do find that needing to manually kill robots is rather tedious. I suspect this is a theme consideration, but it feels like itjust makes the game less fun. It took me a while to fully understand how you gained the second resource. I guess that'll teach me for skipping the instructions. Lovely mood in this, it's very retro in a good way. I would have liked some music, but that's about the extent of my complaints in the atmosphere department. Nice work!
Dec 5 07:23:04	6m 42s	Hemorrhage	♥ 1	I'm not super happy with how the player moves, though I'm having trouble articulating how. I would have loved to see this applied as more a puzzle platformer, but as it is there doesn't seem to be any real punishment for doing several overly excessive jumps. Also, A lot of places force you into extra jumps if you slightly miss, which doesn't feel good design-wise. Also I'd suggest making the restart as fast as possible in platformers, else it can be frustrating as the player waits for the death and wipe animations to play. Overall the mechanic is good, but I think it might be more interesting to apply it slightly differently. What I played was solid though. Good work!
Dec 5 07:32:10	9m 06s	The Pursuit of Profit	♥ 1	A+ in the mood department. I'm loving what you've done here! That said, the actual game part felt a bit unsatisfying. Throwing babies into the thing's mouth is tricky as there aren't any real aiming controls that I could see. They also tend to just sit in front of his jaws instead of going in, and when they pile up, the physics engine has a Physics Moment and just shoots babies off at a zillion miles an hour. The ending also left me wanting. This is one I'd love to see developed more post-compo. You've got a lot of really promising looking set pieces, but I think the idea needs to bake a bit longer.
Dec 5 07:45:16	13m 06s	Santaur's Elf Cola	♥ 3	I agree with kambing on the traps being more frustrating than enjoyable. I think it might be more interesting to have a trap budget, set them once, and let things roll (ie more of a setup puzzle than an active game). If you want to improve the current design, consider some kind of indicator on how long before the traps disappear, so the player knows when to replace them. The saw traps seem overly powerful compared to others. There might have been a tradeoff, but it wasn't really clear. The art is all wonderful, and the intro comic was a nice touch (even if the controls to advance through it were a bit weird) In general I like what you've done here, and would love to see more work on this in a post-compo release!
Dec 5 08:00:58	15m 42s	Sacrifices must be made - Ludum Dare 43	♥ 0	I had the same issue as great-bobleny, the mechanic around population seems really weird. If population started at 3 (one per resource farm) I probably wouldn't have had the issue, but I kept making corn and wood while waiting for a new person to pop up.
Dec 5 08:13:13	12m 15s	The gift for us	♥ 0	I like the premise, but the time constraints don't feel very engaging. I'm not sure how I'd design this game honestly. Perhaps a limited number of actions that can be performed over a set period, vs making the user wait to unlock content? The UI could use some polish, but the goblin in the background is a nice touch. Might be worth playing with the design a bit post-compo. There's a lot of good content here, it just needs to be presented in a different way.
Dec 5 08:22:29	9m 16s	Martyr	♥ 0	I love how you've implemented the theme here. On the surface it looks like the standard implementation, but you've done it in a way that forces the player to make meaningful decisions. Minor annoyance: I tabbed out for a second and a bat flew under the hero. When I tabbed back (having heard the damage sound) I saw nothing! ... the bat was rendering completely under my party, rendering him effectively invisible. That was a silly way to die :D
Dec 5 08:36:00	13m 31s	Space Battle Zero	♥ 1	Holy heck, this is great! You pushed basically all of my buttons here. low poly scifi 3d graphics, space battles, power management, orbital combat AAAAAAAAA I love this. Please keep working on it. I wish I could give you constructive feedback but nope. Just keep doing what you doing. But more.
Dec 6 07:35:22	22h 59m	Oregon Tail	♥ 1	I would have liked some follow up text to go with the net change. It's not always clear why I'm gaining/losing something, and that bit of flavor text is important to providing context to the world I believe. The gaining/losing hunger is a bit weird; it's not immediately clear if I want to gain hunger or lose it. It also might be nice to get high level probabilities for some riskier outcomes. This does tip your hand a bit, but it lets players make smarter choices coming in blind, and allows you to tweak the odds without it seeming completely random to the player. Those minor nitpicks aside, it's a solid implementation! I had fun playing and would love to see this expanded in a post-compo version.
Dec 6 07:59:54	24m 32s	Hazardous Cleanup	♥ 1	Neat take on the puzzle platformer! Controls were a bit floaty for my taste, but very servicable. It took some work to get the muscle memory down, but I'm honestly now sure how I'd do it any differently. It wasn't immediately clear to me I didn't always need to kill all of the peasants. The graphics were lovely! Felt like a more whimsical version of Binding of Isaac. It fit the theme quite well. Overall nice entry. I look forward to seeing if you do anything with it post jam.
Dec 6 08:04:50	4m 56s	Goblin Quest	♥ 0	Y'all got any more of them goblins to slay? Only real complaint I have is that I died a lot for reasons that aren't really obvious to me. Maybe that's just the intent, but it felt bad when i just died without warning. Then again, more dead goblins, so still a win?
Dec 6 08:09:17	4m 27s	The Tearable Three	♥ 1	Echoing other comments here: I love the visual style, the theme, and the choices. But the hitboxes and other bugs (I fell out of the world twice) make this game a bit hard to really enjoy. Please do make a post-compo version of this!
Dec 8 08:02:41	47h 53m	Lastcrifices	♥ 0	The pacing was a bit off I think. Text boxes opened/closed way too slowly, and in general everything moved a lot slower than I'd expect for a shmup. Interesting to remove the shooting half of the equation, but there weren't enough bullets/things to dodge to really offer up much of a threat, so it wasn't super engaging to me. That said, balancing shmups in LD is dang near impossible. Overall interesting idea with solid execution, but could likely benefit from some minor tweaks to really make it shine.
Dec 8 08:08:53	6m 12s	Penance	♥ 1	The attack animation feels really awkward. A faster, single directional "slash" would probably provide more compelling feedback, as well as adding some kind of hit effect when you strike something. It wasn't super clear at first that blood -> money. One I figured that out, I wasn't sure if monsters were respawning or I was just finding new ones. A lot of this could have been explained in the game (or at least the LD page) but it's pretty spartan right now unfortunately. That all said, you've got a decent amount of content here for a 3 day siesta, I don't think it would take much tweaking to nudge this one over the line into something that's pretty fun to play. Consider noodling on a post-compo version when you get some time!
Dec 8 08:13:01	4m 08s	Sacrifices must be made	♥ 1	Neat idea on using rescues as health! I found the shooting felt a bit unresponsive at times. More pressing, if you're up against a building (ie one is directly above you), bullets don't fire at all. (They're likely colliding with the building itself and vanishing before even rendering). Minor issue aside, the graphics are wonderful and the idea has solid execution. Well done!
Dec 8 08:25:13	12m 12s	Slime Arena	♥ 1	Holy heck this game is hard! I would have liked to see a bit more variety in the gameplay. Ultimately it seems every encounter boils down to kiting the slimes, which isn't super engaging. Implementation seems solid; everything worked as expected. The powerups were a nice touch, but it felt like optimizing for speed/damage was the only right choice.
Dec 11 20:36:05	84h 10m	Watching	♥ 1	A surprisingly fun implementation of a text-only adventure. Two bugs: 1) Sometimes the scroll behavior feels a bit weird. This is further complicated by choices occasionally being below the "fold". it might be nice to have a big angry flashy arrow of some kind to remind us that there's more to see. I find myself getting into a "groove" clicking options and not really paying a ton of attention to the scroll bar. 2) The game seems to have ended (or bugged out) at "You turn on the TV. It's showing some sort of Japanese cartoon." followed by the narrator quipping "Is now really the time?". I can't seem to progress from here, but it's not obviously a failure/game over state. After reading some other comments, I realized I had to scroll up and click a different option, which was not obvious. Quite a bit of writing here for a Jam game, and I love seeing narrative works in LD. Great job!
Dec 11 20:48:00	11m 55s	Hire Power	♥ 1	Interesting design for a puzzle platformer! Jumping and movement felt weird at times, especially around ledges. I suspect this is something weird in your collusion resolution, but it's not super critical since the game largely doesn't require precise movement. Intro was a nice touch, but a "skip" might have been nice to have. It feels a bit weird to fail by having too many followers (but not sacrificing them. I think I see why you did this, but maybe an alternative solution would be to have a "finish" or "exit" spot, and if you can make it there without accidentally sacrificing more than the required number, you can still progress. Level design could prevent this from ever occuring, but at least then it feels "fair", which I feel is an important aspect in a puzzle game.
Dec 12 02:37:12	5h 49m	Of Gods And Rain	♥ 3	Great job end to end on this! The art, music, and gameplay all work very well together, and produce a rather fun little stealth game. If I had to nitpick, the intro/text sections are a bit slow; I'd like to see more text on the screen at once and a slightly more interesting text interaction, but what you have is a good compromise given your time budget. Something to look into for post compo I suppose! The skip button was welcome. I don't have much else to add, but keep up the good work and strongly consider fleshing this into a larger experience.