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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | JustinMullin's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 5 15:50:17 | People/Power | ♥ 3 | This is awesome. I love this genre, and this was a really fun take on it. Between the restrictive placement of the pieces and the non-deterministic physics making it difficult to know if a piece is working properly, I had a hard time getting into the swing of things, but it was still fun experimenting and playing around. I particularly appreciated that you can hover with a block to see how it functions a bit before committing. The graphics are great, just right for what you're doing here, and the music fit well. I really like the packaging - with a bit of tweaking to the physics and maybe a bit more balance on the blocks, this could be something really great! Definitely one worth some iteration after the jam if you're into that. =) | |
| Dec 5 17:14:43 | 1h 24m | Pyew | ♥ 2 | Hey, this is pretty cool! Looks really nice, I like the voxel ship and the heavy use of bloom. For me having the roll/pitch based flight controls was refreshing, but I can see how others would be frustrated. Controlling felt very smooth, definitely a bit challenging to navigate in close quarters sometimes, but once I figured out I could use shift and space to adjust my throttle it got a lot easier. It seemed like the initial primary weapon (the yellow lasers) weren't always targeting correctly, but once I got the upgrades, particularly the big green constant laser, I was able to clean things up pretty quickly. Cool entry! |
| Dec 6 02:34:47 | 9h 20m | Robot Altar | ♥ 2 | This is so incredibly cool. I underestimated this severely when I first popped it open due to the appearance, but this is such neat puzzle design, interesting mechanics, and surprisingly deep interactions. I just about lost it when I noticed you could stack up minions carrying each other! I hope I get some time to come back to this because I know there's more content I haven't gotten to. The main thing I found myself wanting was some solid keyboard controls - the mouse controls were really fiddly, and I'd be much more comfortable with the keyboard. Seriously though, this is something special! Nicely done! |
| Dec 6 02:41:40 | 6m 53s | For Brain ! | ♥ 1 | Cool stuff! Nice smooth platforming, clever mechanic, and good execution. Short but sweet. The only thing that bugged me was I thought the count was "extra lives" but in fact it was "number of zombies" so I kept thinking I had one more than I did. Anyway that's an extremely minor gripe - nicely done! |
| Dec 6 02:55:33 | 13m 53s | Food Chain | ♥ 2 | Hah, the animations and everything are so great! Dragging the candies around feels great, though it was a little strange to me that I couldn't get the chain of candies into the goal all together, and had to drag each in separately. That's a minor thing though. Apart from the fact that I'm now guilt-ridden about candy murder, I'm quite pleased with this little game. Bite-sized puzzling, not too long, and well polished. Nicely done! |
| Dec 6 03:03:28 | 7m 55s | Throwing Shade | ♥ 1 | Love the graphics! The buggy platforming was tolerable; actually the jumping and movement felt pretty good if the collision was just buttoned up a bit. Once I realized I could walk past the enemies, it was just the sheep who couldn't, it became way easier. Previously I thought it was waaay to hard for me, but I completed it pretty quickly after that. Anyway nice feel to the game, and lots of good building blocks for next time, this was a great first entry! |
| Dec 6 03:11:55 | 8m 27s | Snackrificial Chamber | ♥ 1 | Cool game! Lots of polish for what's here, real clear explanations and good ramp into the mechanics. I was hoping to get to a puzzle that was a bit more challenging, but that just means I was enjoying myself. =) Love the graphics, and the splitters were a neat design. Well done! |
| Dec 6 13:37:22 | 10h 25m | For the Princess | ♥ 2 | Oh boy I was not expecting those suicide animations, heh. Cool use of the mechanic, and the physics were really solid. I particularly appreciated that holding jump would bounce pretty much the same way for each grape, so I could span gaps consistently between lives. The only strange thing to me was later levels seemed to require less sacrifice and more platforming, though I can't really complain as the size of the later levels would have been very punishing if you had to get many grapes through to the later bits. The cutscenes were awesome, fun graphics and very polished. Nicely done! |
| Dec 7 02:50:56 | 13h 13m | AkimBear | ♥ 4 | Games like this make the LD rating experience so much sweeter. I enjoy the loop of playing lots of games of various qualities, leaving constructive feedback, participating in the community, and all of that, but most games just..._are_. They're neat, they're creative, they're an awesome endeavor for 48 or 72 hours, but okay cool now I'm onto the next one. Every once in a while a game makes me sit up straight and smile, and sticks with me for a little while. Usually I don't even know what _exactly_ it is, there's just something different. It's just that this game is different. This game is _special_. Akimbear is one of those games, and I wanted to let you folks know. Every little bit is so finely put together - I love all the visual touches, especially the reflections and the RGB-distortion damage effect, that wonderful Vlambeer screen shake and time stretching fanciness, the awesome animations, the character and style oozing from everything, and the super tight gameplay. There's not much here in terms of novelty that sets things apart (though honestly now that I say that I can't immediately think of an on-rails side-scrolling twin-stick shooter off the top of my head...), but it just doesn't matter. It's fantastic entirely on its own merit, and it's just plain fun to boot. One of the intangibles that shines here is the way a particularly well aimed shot, or perhaps a big desperate barrage fired to fend off a large group of enemies, feels like a personal accomplishment. The mechanics are simple, but the execution and responsiveness is so spot on that I feel I can take pride in the waves where I do well, and I know what I should have done differently when I fail. For me that sets hooks in deep, and is super compelling. Thanks for this game, and I'm looking forward to seeing more in the future! P.S. I didn't initially notice controller support and yeah, wow it's _so_ much easier with thumbsticks. The keyboard controls did feel pretty great for what they could provide, though, so kudos for polishing that up as well! |
| Dec 7 02:59:18 | 8m 22s | Follow Me | ♥ 1 | Very cool! This is my favorite take on the "sacrifice lives to make platforms" thing so far. Using the path taken through an area as the pathing for the followers was a really neat effect. Nice simple visuals with matching sound effects and a catchy little tune wrapped the whole thing up nicely. Great entry! |
| Dec 7 15:56:00 | 12h 56m | Quest for the West | ♥ 1 | Very cool! I love that there's so much content here - not really sure what's the fixation on frogs, but hey, it was fun! I'm not entirely sure it's possible to lose, just seeing how many resources I had at the end of the game, but maybe you weren't going for the Oregon Trail "everyone died of dysentery on the third day" feel. ;) There were a few flubs; in one instance the result of an event told me I'd lost many members of my party, but I actually gained that many. Minor things, nothing that compromised the experience. I love the overworld map, and the animations on the oxen/wagons! The music was nice too. Great entry! |
| Dec 8 19:55:13 | 27h 59m | Slithering Dark | ♥ 2 | Very cool! I played about halfway through before remembering there was a "c'mere!" button, which really made things a lot less tedious. I did find the difficulty fairly low (it's relatively easy to lose the monsters around a corner) but it didn't detract from the tension of stumbling on a monster around a corner, nor the thrill of the flight when you're trying to lose it. I like the layer of needing to lead the monster on a chase that avoids your other people as well, especially in cases where that means stumbling through the dark elsewhere. Because of the lower difficulty I didn't find myself very motivated to explore and find extra people after stacking up a couple early on, but knowing now that there's a score to play with does provide some motivation to go back and try to maximize the number of people I saved. Forcing the monsters to sit and digest their meal after a kill definitely ticks the "strategic sacrifice" bit, and I'd be interested to see how the game plays if it kept ramping to more numerous and/or more dangerous monsters to force those sorts of sacrifices a bit more. As it was it saved my life at least once, but I didn't have an opportunity to use the mechanic profitably, it was more of a grace period on the game's part than something I was able to capitalize on. I found the strategic nature of the darkness really interesting as I got a better feel for the game; I learned to intentionally leave areas of the map unexplored in order to maximize my cover - maybe I was drawing the wrong conclusions, but it seemed like line of sight for the monsters could be abused that way since monsters can't see out of the dark either. Lots of interesting tactical stuff if that's true, which I like. The procedural levels were cool, and felt high quality. I also really like the effect of the darkness and the little animations, and I chuckled at the ending too with the bucket of free clothes. Neat stuff! |
| Dec 8 20:26:27 | 31m 14s | The Temple of Cipactli | ♥ 0 | Cool game! The strategy in choosing what color weapon to sacrifice was interesting - definitely feels neat to sacrifice a weapon knowing you'll be strong against the enemies next time. I found it a little strange though that some weapons (the really slow double-ended spear thing in particular) just do a ton more damage, as that kinda downplayed the rock-paper-scissors effect. Sadly after a few attempts I never managed to get a weapon different from the starter (aside from various colors) before I died. I do think a mini-map or dedicated pop-over map would have been very useful, as I found myself getting lost and doing a lot of backtracking. Anyway, I liked the notion here and had fun even with the limited amount of content that's here. Love the music! |
| Dec 11 02:38:28 | 54h 12m | Out of Frequency | ♥ 2 | Really cool concept - I played for a long while and didn't seem to be making much progress though. It was a bit strange to me that there was so much friction stopping me from coasting to the outer limits of the system, and that there was no gravity from the planets, but it worked out okay. The sound and music are just perfect, and I really love the look of this game. The sounds when getting close to a satellite were super atmospheric. Even though I never found what I was looking for I really enjoyed exploring. =) |
| Dec 13 03:16:10 | 48h 37m | Welcome to the North Pole! | ♥ 1 | Ahhh, this is so cool! I love the concept and I'm impressed how much you managed to get out of it in the scope of the jam. Everything worked perfectly, the sounds and music were just spectacular, and there's tons and tons of polish. I particularly love the way the buttons pop in on the body. =) I don't usually see tight level design in LD, but this really flowed well. I'm curious how much the skill of making a snowman would get locked in over just a little bit more time - I felt like I was advancing at just the right pace to match the content, but it was definitely a bit of a struggle on the last puzzle. I might succumb to temptation to come back to this one later and see how quickly I can zip through. Always a sign that an entry worked! I think my only complaint is that I frequently wanted a way to switch which snowball was focused. It's part of the charm in some areas to have it set organically, I think, but especially in the later puzzles it just bugged me a bit. A minor thing - so many things to love here! Wonderful entry! |
| Dec 13 13:31:07 | 10h 14m | RAT LABS | ♥ 2 | This is SO cool. I am super into these Zach-like automation games, and the execution and presentation on this is just marvelous. I love the visuals and the feel and the writing on the research projects. It felt really great to progress, and I was _so_ excited to get into complex builds and the later stages of the game. There's a lot of really interesting content even just early on, combined with the promise of a lot past where I was able to get, and I feel like I missed so much of it - unfortunately after about an hour or more of repeated restarts, I need to call it a day on this one. There were a couple of big issues I ran into that prevented me from finishing: First, I got the fatal error listed above a few times, though I believe I figured out that it's triggered if you jump straight into the first ash-related project instead of starting on the meta-photography line. Definitely took me a few attempts to figure that out, but as stated above this game is really exciting to me, and I was motivated to force through it!experimenting Secondly, after experimenting for a while on the first pressure mixer project, it seemed the pressure mixer just stopped working entirely. It would accept input but nothing ever came out. I removed the machine and it seems I managed to dump a slide of ash onto the floor of the lab, but couldn't remove it successfully no matter how hard I tried. Re-building the pressure mixer didn't help; the next mixer also failed to work properly. I have some other quibbles with the execution here which helped me to bounce off: the small, fixed resolution made it very difficult for me to read the text on my screen. Nothing preventing me from continuing here, but it was definitely something that took a bit of focus to get through. The controls also are very awkward; it took a few minutes at the beginning just to figure out how to use them properly, and even after an hour of play it still feels very difficult to work with what's there. I think a few small changes would help a lot: the biggest one for me was being able to remove buildings with the "remove conveyor" tool. I didn't understand why I would need to drop out of that tool, select a building, and then press X to do that. In general there were a lot of places like that, where it was required to back out of a screen before continuing onto something else - just contributed to lots of (non-intuitive) button presses to do most things. I also would have really liked to have numeric hotkeys or something similar for the buildings, as the arrows and scroll wheel were tedious to use. I agree with justcamh as well that it was really hard to know why things weren't working sometimes - while I do think there's some charm in discovering everything for myself, when things behaved seemingly inconsistently it was hard to know what was a bug and what was design. Okay. That's a lot of words. Let me pause on that and come back to my first and most important thing: this is SO cool. Honestly as I type this I'm sorely tempted to go back in for another hour to try to power through the bugs. Instead of doing that, though, let me just say this: you've made something really unique here, and I so hope that you continue with it. Please mention me in the comments here or catch me on itch.io (JustinMullin) when you have the post-compo release out. I want to play this again, I want to finish the content you made for the jam, and I want to buy the finished and polished product if you go for that. |