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Feedback comments for LD43
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Linear's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 6 16:59:39 | Fight For Your Light | ♥ 1 | Game is very nice looking and the music is good, but the mouse sensitivity, combined with the really, really slow fire rate, made it very frustrating to play-through. There's no affordable upgrades before the first wave, and by the end of the first wave, I only had enough light to spend repairing the generator that went down because I couldn't shoot the enemies fast enough. So yeah it definitely needs so balance, but there's potential there. It looks like with a bit of tweaking it could be something great. | |
| Dec 6 17:11:08 | 11m 29s | Abbey Massacre | ♥ 1 | Great game, but a bit hard, since someone who is off-screen can see you being up to no good. I think it would make more sense if being spotted wasn't an instant game-over. Instead, you could enter another phase of the game where police enter the building and start looking for you. That would give you more opportunity to continue sneaking around (albeit with more enemies to dodge). |
| Dec 6 17:30:12 | 19m 04s | Lonely Wanderer | ♥ 1 | Honestly, it's a great concept, but the implementation was a bit of a miss for me. The skull drops the second that it touches anything, and if it starts rolling, it's impossible to pick up until the rolling stops. Would have been better if you just parented the skull to the Main Camera while it was held (sure it could protrude through walls that way, but honestly, that would have been less frustrating gameplay-wise). The double-jump didn't always go off, so sometimes I fell short of where I wanted to jump. There was almost no air-control, so once you jumped, you couldn't change direction in the air (which would be fine in any other game except one with jumping puzzles). I also didn't realize that the lava that you drop the skulls in mattered on my first run, and got myself stuck when I sacrificed the first two skulls in the same lava pit, although that's just me being dumb so it's not a huge issue. The graphics and mood were spot on though, and the text really helped to sell the atmosphere. One stylistic suggestion I had: if you're going to use shadow mapping in a game like this, you should consider making your point lights move around a little bit (might as well make your shadows dynamic if you're using real-time shadows). Having all the torches flicker and sway would have made things real eerie. |
| Dec 6 18:16:00 | 45m 48s | Baby Grenade | ♥ 1 | This is the worst game that I have ever enjoyed so much. I don't even know how to rate this... Also, it's damn hard to survive past 30 seconds. Great job guys! |
| Dec 6 18:26:30 | 10m 30s | Skeleton Key | ♥ 4 | The graphics were pretty good, but the character controls could use some work. Whenever I would pick locks or operate levers, my character would slide away from the object as if on ice. I like the puzzle gameplay, but it was a bit on the easy side. |
| Dec 10 21:54:01 | 99h 27m | Maze | ♥ 1 | So, since this your first LD, thought I'd offer some suggestions. This may be a lot of criticism, but don't let it scare you away from doing another LD, I just mean to help so your next game will be even better. If there was any one thing I'd do differently, it's that I would use a different, less obscure game engine next time. Engines such as Game Maker, RPG Maker, Unity, and Unreal are a bit trickier to learn, but they also have a much larger online community of people willing to answer questions and help out. The [r/unity3d](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/) subreddit is a huge community, so despite larger engines like Unity being trickier to learn, it's also easier to find answers to things when you get stuck. Additionally, you'll want to make sure you leave extra time for testing and packaging your game. Firefox does not appear to run Maze at all (you just get a white screen), and Internet Explorer runs it, but without music. A few test builds while you're making your game go a long way to making sure your game is playable once it's time to release. When you're finished with the game, you're only 75% of the way done. The other 25% is testing, getting your friends to test it, fixing bugs, etc. Many of the games people do during LD are similar enough to other games, or have similar game mechanics with some creative deviations. Your game is no exception, and that's not a bad thing. However, for each game mechanic that you borrow from another game, you'll want to find your favorite implementation of that mechanic in an existing game, and try to recreate it. Take, for instance, your character's movement. He seems to have an acceleration and deceleration when you move him. That causes him to slide all over the place and makes it difficult to avoid the lava. There are plenty of GameBoy games where you navigate pits and lava with an overhead 2D character (the 2D Zelda games come to mind). I would have mimicked their controls, which are a lot tighter and leave no room for sliding. In turn, that would have allowed you to make more complex challenges with the lava, since you're no longer forced to place lava so sparsely to account for the character sliding. Also, pay special attention to your UI. Starting with level 2, the "Level 2" text at the top stays at the top and scrolls off-screen when you move. Additionally, the black text is very tiny and difficult to read with such a busy background. Surrounding the text with a white bubble would have gone a long way towards improving the quality of the UI. As for the stuff like level design, graphics, and animation, it would be unfair to critique as this is your first game, but again I highly recommend picking an existing game's art style and doing your best to mimic that. Usually before a Ludum Dare me and my team sit down and make a design document detailing the style we're going for and the art assets that are going to be needed to get the bare minimum of level functionality working. The theme doesn't get announced until Ludum Dare starts, but you can still pick a style and general concept of a game ahead of time. Hope this helps man and welcome to Ludum Dare. Congrats on your first entry! |
| Dec 10 22:11:21 | 17m 20s | The Village Sacrifice | ♥ 2 | Pretty decent game but it's rough around the edges. The UI is a bit simple, there's no menu, and I would have really loved more than 3 levels. Most of all though, for those of us who want to play it sneaky-beaky, there's no audio besides music. There should be grunts or footsteps the golem makes, or the camera should shake more and more as he approaches. |
| Dec 10 23:19:30 | 1h 08m | Wizard Malikens spell failed | ♥ 1 | So I sat down and played this for 30 minutes and couldn't figure out any of the puzzles. I found the panties and gave them to the fox. I dropped them in front of the fox, I talked to the fox while wearing them, but nothing came of it. The rabbit was hopping between the house and the garden, so I searched the entire garden for a key, but found nothing. I climbed on roofs to look for chimney entrances. I tried every door and every animal, but just couldn't find a way to progress forward. For future, I would advise against using hiding as a game mechanic. It's very tricky to balance scavenger hunt games, because as the maker, you know where everything is, but as a player who has never seen the game, it may be infinitely more difficult to find the item. We ran into this problem during another LD entry ourselves, where we had keys and locked doors. Lots of strange things came out in play-testing. For instance, if you have a level with two locked doors and two hidden keys, a player may find one key, and instead of assuming the existence of a second hidden key in the same area for the other door, the think that they have to make a choice between one of the two doors. Then they get to the end of that area, and they're totally confused where to go, so they restart, find the key again, and choose the other door. It takes a long time for them to realize that both doors need to be opened and that they just haven't found the second key. A better approach is to place 'hidden' items in easy-to-find places that are out of reach, like a key that's hanging from a chain on a ledge somewhere high up. That allows the player to realize that the key exists and that it's an important item. In your game I'm still not sure if I was supposed to be looking for keys, or if I needed to turn the animals back into humans and then they'd open the doors to their houses themselves, or if I was supposed to find a clever way to break in through the roof, etc., because I never saw so much as a single key or witnessed an animal transforming back into a human. So I didn't know which approach I was even supposed to be taking to get into one of the houses. |
| Dec 10 23:39:48 | 20m 18s | Wastage | ♥ 1 | I got stuck towards the end. I was out of ingredients and nobody needed anything (there were no orders), and the game wouldn't end. But it was an interesting experience! |
| Dec 11 00:09:47 | 29m 59s | Be Near My Little Ones | ♥ 0 | Your graphics are top-notch and there's a very good atmosphere. Unfortunately I had a lot of gameplay issues. The biggest issue I feel is that it's very difficult to employ stealth. The camera locks you into a nearly top-down view where you can't see very far, and to add to that, it's dark. The enemies are completely silent, so you really can't see or hear them until it's practically too late. I died twice because an enemy that somehow saw me from off-screen ran at me at ten meters per second. There was no warning despite me panning the camera constantly looking for enemies. The levels are so sparse that you have to sprint anywhere, which affords you little use of the sneak button. Basically, I found sneak to be the button you used only if you happened to run into an enemy that somehow didn't see you first. If you sneak around everywhere all the time, you end up wasting a lot of time as the level is very vast, and you give the patrolling enemies even more time to catch you out in the open. I couldn't find a use for the rocks. I threw them near enemies and at enemies. Perhaps I should have thrown them at bushes to make distant noises? A tutorial level or screen would have helped explain their rightful use. I really liked the different girls at the campfire being different lives (I think that's what was happening?). There was another game that did that on Steam called "The Path" based on Little Red Riding Hood, and your game reminded me heavily of that. In all though, besides the gameplay issues, I found the graphics and animations very well-made and with a few control/gameplay tweaks it's a solid game. Great job man! |
| Dec 15 18:19:58 | 114h 10m | Point & Sin - Ludum Dare 43 edition | ♥ 1 | I think the art was excellent, but the level design and gameplay needed a bit of work. I think allowing arrow keys or WASD for movement would have gone a long way towards making the combat more manageable. Your fireballs didn't travel very far, so you had to get up close, but when you're fighting up close, moving with the mouse is very tricky. Additionally, the level design suffers from an issue where you can't really see a clear delineation between walls and floors. You could in some spots, like on the ladder over lava or while on a bridge, but there were a few times where I got stuck because it *looked* like there was rubble in my way, but I could in fact walk over it. In all though, I definitely got the Diablo 1 feel from it. I think that with a bit more work you could make an awesome post-LD version that would be a lot of fun. |
| Dec 15 21:27:00 | 3h 07m | Drained | ♥ 2 | I think this is an overall excellent entry, and it is because it's better than most that I wanted to critique some finer game design points: I think that the idea of spending blood to open doors works on paper, but in practice, when presented with two or more opaque doors, there's no real choice to be made, because there's no information to make an informed decision with. You either choose one or another. So if your choice actually matters (i.e., it's important to open one and not the other), it becomes frustrating because the player is punished with a removal of blood over a choice that can only be made via trial and error. To compensate for this, you guys added lots of blood packs so that you could never really run out of blood. However, that also invalidates the game mechanic itself, since at that point, you're not really sacrificing anything of value if you can just refill blood from a million different places, so blood just becomes a resource you have to tediously manage, much like stamina. If you use too much (and you have to), you are obliged to sit around refilling it from a blood pack for a while. So you've designed yourself into a hole with the blood mechanic because if you place too little, it's frustrating and you get stuck, and if you place too much, it's too easy, with virtually no middle ground. I would recommend solving this by making bloodpacks scarce while also making sure that there's intelligent ways to manage blood. That can be as simple as making the doors have grates that you can peek through. That way, you can make an informed decision as to whether or not you want to open that door at all. For instance, maybe the door leads to a hallway full of other doors, but you see a bloodpack on the wall, so it's a low-risk door. Or maybe you see no bloodpack, but there's a pentagram shrine, so you'll come back to that once you're sure you have enough blood to spare. Maybe blood could even come back / regenerate, but it happens slowly. So if you ever really mess up and run completely out of blood packs, you can sit around and wait for it to come back--except you can't sit in one spot because the patrolling enemies will eventually get you. In that way, blood could be like fuel. With it, you can move quickly, open any door you please, and feel rewarded for your wits and budgeting. Without it, you're a coward, hiding in closets and hoping the enemies don't clobber you while you're trying to regain enough blood to open that door that you should have opened earlier. An additional way to make blood scarce without making it completely frustrating is to put some bloodpacks in easy-to-reach places, while placing others in rooms full of enemies or other difficult challenges. That way, it's not just "oops, that was the last bloodpack", but rather "okay, this is the last bloodpack, except for that stash in the basement I read about.... I don't want to go down there, but I don't have any other choice." This way, you can punish the player gradually for mis-managing blood, with each punishment becoming more severe than the last, by sending him into riskier and riskier areas to get the remaining blood. Lastly, I wanted to comment on the big dudes. They seem unkillable, which is fine, but there appears to be no way to break the chase and hide from them, and stunning them with blood doesn't last very long. I think if the blood stunned them for longer, like 1-2 seconds, and they stopped chasing and started searching for the player once line of sight has been broken, it would be much better. As it was, I was killed because I couldn't loop the evil dude around the hallways long enough to crank the portcullis open, and quickly gave up on trying to stun him with blood since throwing blood at him slowed both of us down, not allowing me to gain any real distance over him. Anyway all that aside, this is a great entry! I think overall it's got some promise if you wanted to do a post-LD version. |
| Dec 23 02:52:37 | 173h 25m | Cult Under Construction | ♥ 2 | You know, it's incomplete, but it definitely has promise. Like, if you continued on and make a Post-LD version, I wouldn't mind playing it! |
| Dec 23 03:05:24 | 12m 47s | Goat Life | ♥ 1 | Catacombs were pretty cool, but I ran out of things to do pretty fast, and Q didn't seem to work for sacrificing additional goats once I resurfaced. |
| Dec 28 00:26:44 | 117h 21m | Altar Dodge (best experienced in VR) | ♥ 0 | In your download link, you've posted the 633 KB executable file... but not the much larger data folder that actually contains all of the game data like the models, textures, scripts, etc. Your entry is actually unplayable. It's a shame because I wanted to try it, and now it seems you won't be able to get the required number of ratings to proceed to scoring =/ |
| Dec 31 17:45:50 | 89h 19m | Ritual of the Seeds | ♥ 0 | I actually could not figure out how to play. Neither the arrow keys nor WASD appeared to move my character. I didn't know what on the screen was *my* character and what was the horde. I only ever saw two characters on screen and could move neither. They both seemed to move on their own until eventually a pop-up came on-screen saying I survived 0 waves. Then it takes me to the title screen where I can restart, and upon restarting, it immediately says I survived 0 waves and restarts again. There are no written instructions or an intro of any sort either in-game or on this entry's post. Without that, I'm afraid I have no idea how to rate this entry. |
| Dec 31 17:54:13 | 8m 23s | Catapoultry | ♥ 1 | Always a pleasure to see what the chicken-leaning teams come up with. The game is a bit on the safe side in terms of a jam entry, but that works in its favor in terms of polish. I managed to get 12 chickens in before the game restarted. |
| Dec 31 18:28:03 | 33m 50s | Tribu 43 | ♥ 2 | Excellent entry. Petman. Petman has seen some shit. As a level 17 ranged soldier, he has seen virtually all of his friends die in battle in front of him. But, with 1% of his health left and a badly bruised tank whose name he does not recall (best not to get attached), he limped out of the swamp, victorious. |
| Dec 31 19:02:03 | 34m 00s | Spirit Dungeon | ♥ 0 | There have been several games based around this concept, but what I like about yours is that you executed it a bit better. Most entries based around taking away player abilities make the mistake of never teaching the player about their abilities, so when you get to the checkpoint and the person says "I will now remove your ability to doublejump", you go "wait, I could doublejump!?" But here, you're removing things like vision and light, so it's immediately obvious what has changed. That being said, I loathed the spikes with a passion. The trouble with the spike puzzles is that they got very repetitive and later on you had to stop in exactly the right spot in between two spike tiles in the dark. It was a challenge based on your ability to adapt to the player character's movement speed and acceleration, not one in which prior skill or problem-solving capabilities gave the player any advantage. |