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pkenney

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Dec 3 04:07:55 Manik Hungers ♥ 0 Very interesting entry. I liked the music and sound effects, and the retro look was well-done here. Some basic story, and then on to some nice challenges. I was immediately curious about the camera, because it's very distinctive. It feels almost like a side-scroller at times. At first I assumed I wouldn't have to ever change camera views, and interesting notion in the 3D world, so I was wondering where you'd take that. But then I saw - middle mouse changes it! I had to exit the game to read that, but no big deal. (Same for ctrl and shift). The jumping challenges to get the sword seemed designed to challenge my ability to manipulate the camera. I didn't even notice the platforms, looking from certain angles! There were a few times where the camera was off by a little angle (because I'd set it to be off, my error) and then I'd be going along and WHOOPS I fell right off because there was a diagonal aspect to my motion I didn't notice. It was disorienting, but also a unique element of the game, and I kind of got used to it after flubbing the execution of what I thought should be basic stuff a few times. Once I saw that I had to leap down from the high area to grab the sword, I knew I had figured it out. If I could tweak one thing, it would be the way that holding down jump re-jumps when I hit the ground a second time. I found I was holding down the jump key to try to get more air time, Mario-style, but if I held it a little too long I'd immediately jump again on touching down, sometimes right off the side. A minor thing to adjust to, but typically games don't check the button BEING down, they check is TRANSITIONING to down, for the initiation of a jump. Cool little game with nice flair and style, good job!
Dec 3 04:27:54 19m 59s Cowboy Hell ♥ 2 Haha wow nice! This one is definitely unique, you have a style of your own. The first game I felt like I missed a lot, and list to the viper-frog demon. So the second and third runs through, I figured, well 5 points is 5% of my health, but it's like 50% of my damage! So I went all-in on damage and attack. My third run through I had 40 hp to start, but 40 attack and 40 damage. I one-shotted all three of the first demons, but I know the devil is not kidding when he says he's the big leagues. I liked the song, but it's a bit long to hear over and over without skipping, so I didn't try all that many times. I wanted to sell my soul the last time just to try it, but for some reason on that run the buttons for my choices just never appeared? Or maybe they did, but I was looking at another tab waiting for the song, and when I returned they were gone? Either way I could not proceed. IF I could change one thing, I would have a little line of text saying what the damage (or a miss) of each attack was. Very unique game, nice work!
Dec 3 05:02:38 34m 44s Casualty ♥ 1 Really well done. It feels like a complete and coherent package. The music fits the sarcastic cynicism just as well as the mechanics! I enjoyed the lack of tutorial, letting me test by experimentation. Small tight scope like this benefits from that joy of discovery. I liked the simple effective graphics, and they fit well with the crunch static-filled sound effects. There were times when the spectacle of chain reaction and escalation of screenshake would burst through what was reasonable and run away over the hill, but I kind of didn't mind. Except a few times when I did, but those were times when I had to repeat the same puzzle a few times. I made it to the puzzle with two arrows near the center, and a lot of bombs creating a wavefront of flame coming at you, and you have to predict the future. The game got me there, I had learned the rules. Or so I thought... I tried this puzzle a half dozen times at least. Then I quit, not ragequit, but just finished my time with it, when I thought "Finally, I figured it out" and I took my final turn assuming I would win, but something I didn't understand happened and I died in the same turn, rather than one turn later, than my enemy. Not sure what it was. Speaking of not sure what it was, I was a bit unclear on the art of the... turkey leg? Country of Italy? Tornado? Swinging swoosh sword? No worries. Usually I suggest a small tweak. Here I'm not sure what that would be, it's pretty fully realized. I think my favorite thing you DID include was a solid variety of you-lose messages. I guess maybe after I lost the flame level five times I was wishing for a "hurry up and restart" button? But not hard enough to be mashing my kb. Very nice entry covering all the bases and creating an experience, well done.
Dec 4 00:44:50 19h 42m Tiny square - Ludum dare 43 ♥ 1 I won! I liked the graphics, they have nice character to them. The sound effects are also nice and solid. A lot of games go too slow, but not this one! You really zoom around, and there were some fun moments there. But it fouled me up a bunch of times the way I would go off the screen. Walking from one screen to the next, there was a dead zone I had to move through, where I could not see myself. Some of these dead zones seemed to have obstacles in them, and several times I got stuck. I could also jump something like 1.3 screens high when I had the item for hi jump, and lost sight of myself a few times that way. This was just a bit awkward, and not usually a gamekiller, but I did end up having to restart the game 3-4 times because I got stuck. The main place I got stuck was going down one screen and then left. I don't know what's on the edge of that screen, I may have popped up to the screen above and got stuck somewhere... the camera didn't follow me, so I was offscren and unable to get back. The hi-speed movement and insta-death spiked with total restart was a tough combo, but I kind of liked it in a way. With the game being so short, it was sort of okay to send me all the way back! If the game were longer, I would advise keeping the item you died with, because I had to go to get hijump maybe ten times. I hope the offscreen stuff wasn't just a matter of my computer being a weird setup. I do have an odd resolution, but I also tried playing in windowed mode, and that was not any different. So snappy fun movement and nice look and sound, that's a solid entry!
Dec 4 02:15:05 1h 30m Whatever It Takes ♥ 1 Great moody art of the grim cultist village fit the thematic idea well! Bit text heavy on the tutorial, and quite slow to play. I wanted to experiment a lot with your interesting system, but I could only try things at a snail's pace so I didn't really dig into the systems. In fact, I never sated my god. When he got mad I sacrificed people, but his anger level never went down. I sacrificed my entire population but two to him.. and he didn't seem to like it. Another element that made it confusing a little was the way that the resources appear suddenly and all at once at the end of the day, instead of trickling in over the course of the day. It left me confused about what would (or did!) happen when I moved a character from one building to another mid-day. In general when you have a complex system like that in LD, you want to go overboard communicating the secret state changes to the player. So like a little animation saying "this farm is working!" Even if it's a totally simple 2-frame cycle of the farm bobbing up and down or something, and its speed goes up or down based on productivity, that is enough. Then you have a little "Food "icon pop out each time it kicks out food. Then I can get a feel for your system. The way it is now, you have this cool system but only you the developer REALLY know what's going on! It's vital in these LD games where ppl only play a short time to make that stuff shine through... even at the expense of other features. That's my opinion, anyway! Nice mood and some interesting complex systems here! Very solid first entry, and it even had music.
Dec 4 04:17:09 2h 02m Hide and Seek ♥ 0 Great illustrations to set the mood of the dark cave. I was curious how the story ended, but I gathered a LOT of kids I felt, but still not enough. After I lost, it was too daunting to start all over. As I got late into the game, wandering was quite tough. I wondered how it ended, by my hand was starting to hurt from pressing the button harder to walk faster! Nice evil touch that the kids ran away sometimes, it's like NOOO don't you know I have a timer?? Nice entry.
Dec 4 04:48:07 30m 58s Night of the BloodMoon ♥ 1 The graphics and sound effects really came together here in a wonderful way. I had an odd experience with the difficulty -- I played probably a half-dozen times getting WRECKED. I think the problem was a combination of having four buttons, not knowing what was effective, and the fights being really short. My fights went like OK here is a fight maybe I'll try WHOOPS, ok that didn't WHOOPS. Game over. Despite my poor initial performance, I have to say that the controls are tight and super-clear, so it was all my fault. The enemies telegraph and everything, which is huge. I noticed there is no buffering of a jump command, so I drop the input if I press it a moment before touching down, but it's not a big deal since jumping is not a huge element. During this struggling phase, I got frustrated by the combination of back-to-the-start, and the quite long retry delay. I was grinding my teeth and hammering the keys. Then I hit some kind of pivot point and started wrecking the cultists pretty good. I guess I just stopped trying to blink-knife them (tho maybe that's also viable) and just got the timing of the blood magic down. I had a stellar run and managed to double-kill twice. But then the boss kicked my ass. I came back again, but with a new leet strat: fight nothing and just dash past the entire game. That got me to the boss no problem, with respectable blood levels. I got to the part where he summons the super-cultist wave and that did me in. I feel like I was pretty close! The game is short enough that I can see why you back-to-the-start me. The long retry loop indicates you underestimate how bad I was when I first picked up the game, though. I was BAAAD. Throwing both knife, blood magic, and blink at me all at once just kind of overwhelmed me initially, I guess. I maybe would have preferred Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, adding abilities along the way, and with checkpoints. But maybe that's too much scope! I offered some critique here, but certainly not because it's bad, this is a solid and charming game. Solid tight combat controls, great art and sound, and a unique flair, complete with interesting boss fight, all in a small scope. Well done!
Dec 4 05:36:49 48m 42s Jesus Take the Wheel ♥ 4 Oh sure, you come into this world with a cheerful "beep beep!" But we all know that soon enough you'll be playing your part in the the death revue. If you make it a scant 38 miles, be grateful and consider yourself lucky! Just try to stay on that straight and narrow. Sometimes you'll have someone watching out for you, but the road through the valley is long and difficult, and you don't want to be asleep at the wheel. What's that you say? Incoming death wall alarm? No problem! Hang on, I'll just adjust that a liBOOMsplat. Oops. And like that it's over. For you at least, and your motorcycle pals. But this semi isn't going anywhere! Who all these fools are that decided to stroll the superslab in their sneakers, I cannot say, but this semis tires barely flinch. Oh boy, a reward? Outstanding, I'll take this one here. How nice! And now it's just OH MY GOD WHAKABLAMMOCRUNCH. AND NOW YOU'RE TEXTING??? ... I definitely had to make some sacrifices in this one! I managed to jam the prtscr button at what was my peak chaos moment and captured it here: https://imgur.com/V3aZbzb I had a lot of fun with this one. Never felt solidly in control. Or at least when I did, it was a quickly-shattered illusion. I played the first few times exclusively with the mouse, and had a hard time getting about 2-3 cars for any long stretch. I switched later to a combo kb-mouse game, and by being able to make tappa-tap adjustments on the keys I could better control things. If I could change one thing I would make WASD work, since mouse is right hand, and arrow keys are also right hand, but I have one left and one right. I'm also not sure the "runs out of prayers" mechanic is necessary, as it wasn't that much fun to be locked out, and the game was crazy enough without it. I may be wrong about that, and it's required to drive the game to conclusion, in which case nevermind! I very much enjoyed the zany out-of-control chaos, with the theme, music, art, controls, everything, all working to a coherent vision. I don't know exactly where the right level of control is, and I feel like when you chose which side to err on, you erred on the side of chaos. Likely the right call, but there were times where I was like "REALLY?" All in good fun though. So very well done, this is a nice, fun, funny, coherent package.
Dec 4 05:42:21 5m 32s Plane accordingly ♥ 0 Fell for the title and wanted to play, but when I clicked the link I got an error: "Refused to Connect" Sorry! I'll try to come back another time to check again. Didn't rate since I didn't play.
Dec 4 06:33:34 51m 13s Last Platoon ♥ 1 OK I played this for a while. It's great that you were able to make an interesting 3D game for your first LD entry! Well done! It was kind of interesting to explore the space. My favorite feature by a mile was the leftover bodies from my previous lives. This helped give me a sense of history in the space. Because the space had the same wall, floor, and ceiling tiles used throughout, it was super-easy to get lost, but this bodies feature really helped with that. The best moment for this feature was when I blew open a door and thought I was entering a new area, but waiting for me on the other side of the new door was my dead self. Boom. Turrets were annoying at first. It seemed like they were either in range and then were way too strong, or were out of range and were way too easy, and took so, so, so, so, so, so many hits that it was just totally impossible to strafe-dodge kill them and totally tedious to safe-distance kill them. So there's a design flaw with turrets, something is off. But as I played, I realized the turrets also had an important purpose, which was to highlight new areas. If there were turrets, I hadn't cleared it! And believe me I know, because I definitely tried just dashing past turrets, but it didn't really work. The feature I just downright hated was the random invisible fireball traps. The first seven or eight times they killed me I had no idea what had even happened. I was just walking along, and then I was respawning at the beginning. It was only after I got some of the health pickups and actually survived a blast that I even saw the fireball. I thought maybe it was a bug, or a monster behind me, or something. I really think if you're going to kill me I should get to know something about what happened. And just having random squares that if I step on them, BOOM. If I missed something, like a mine item on the ground or something, that helps me deal with those, sorry, I didn't notice it. Another negative was the infinitely-looping sounds. Was this a glitch, or intended? A voice said "Zoom Zoom" on a neverending loop. Another voice had a long fancy line, like "Not only am I the final boss, I'm also a nuclear bomb" and he said it over and over and over FOREVER without stopping, the whole time I played. That was not cool. :( I got into exploring, and I blew up four reactors. That felt like a lot. After that, I died a few times. Second to last time I died it was to a random explosion trap. The next and final life I found a new area but I had little health and it had like 10 turrets, and I was like screw that, because I couldn't take the voice repeating the nuclear bomb line anymore. I tried to dash-run through rather than grind the turrets down, but I got killed and that was that. Looking at this review it sounds maybe too negative. But please don't take it that way -- for bad games I don't even bother pointing out the tough stuff. But this game was pretty impressive for your first LD entry and I felt like it was interesting enough with the exploration and the body-leave-behind mechanic that I should go ahead and dump out all the little things that got in the way of me digging in even further. The idea is honest takes on the negative side can help you bring even stronger games next LD. Nice job, especially for a first outing, and welcome to the game.
Dec 6 01:36:43 43h 03m Octli 2 Step ♥ 1 Wow, this game has so many features! TNT, a wide variety of enemies, and lots of weapons! Barbed wire, powerups, treasure chests. And randomly generated battles and rooms, too! Nice. I liked the art, with the simple but effective drawings that had animations and communicated important state information like the enemy's invincible/stun frames after you hit him. Controls were snappy. And I really liked the background music and sound effects. Oh yeah and the blood! Great job. I had a few issues with learning, for example I didn't even realize to use the mouse and just thought it was a dodging game at first, but I figured it out pretty quick. It's pretty hard, so I didn't get to the crash. Sometimes you spawn into a room and they are all over you right away. But it was okay because this game keeps me on my toes the whole time. The restart was nice and quick, to keep me right in the action after a death, but I also really appreciated that the first room was empty, so the enemy wasn't attacking me the second I restart. Nice job, this was fun.
Dec 6 02:46:44 1h 10m Silent Whisper ♥ 1 Wow, this is really something. The music and sound effects create a moody atmospheric background so that the art and prose can pull me into the game's world that much more. I puzzled and debated over choices, fretted over low supplies, and declined to take a few risks that might distract from my important but grim mission. My only critique was that maybe it was a little long. I felt like I was repeating a lot of content and the game was asking a lot of time for an LD entry, but then as I neared the end I started seeing the arc of change in the towns. So the longer length was utilized for good purpose, but I still wondered if it could be 30% shorter, just personal taste. I felt like a key design decision that really worked well for you was making me wait. Normally I find that terrible in games, but here it was a strong positive. Watching the tank's travel animation (which was excellent) with the parade of progress-meter dots and the mileage going up while the supplies went down, it was a strong moment. Especially because I was never sure when it would stop and I would face some choice. Overall I feel like this game had a strong vision of the experience it wanted to create, and all of the aspects were highly focused to that goal. It really works. Great job!
Dec 6 02:59:18 12m 34s Faces ♥ 1 Oh man, you totally got me with this. I probably went through exactly the phases of thinking that you expected me to. And then I was like "ohhhhhhh". And then I thought about the theme, and was like "OHHHHHHH". So you really created quite an experience with a minimal feature set, and I loved it. If I could change one thing, it would be to leave the last command active on the button so I could spam more. Or at least that's what I thought while I was playing and didn't yet get it, so maybe it's actually important to have that slight inconvenience of having to go face-button-face instead of being able to rapidly hammer out the same command repeatedly? Anyway, very nice work here. Face graphics and the sound effects were simple but quite effective, but the real star here was your interesting concept and your successful execution in leading me through that.
Dec 7 03:16:51 24h 17m Sacrifice Island ♥ 0 Love the charming art, and there's lots of it! The simple animations work well, too, I especially liked the parrot. Also enjoyed all the little quips -- Panther's like, "make my day". No thanks! But I guess sacrifices must be made... I played through twice, and I found a nice strategy for getting a bigger posse, can anyone beat 9 going into the final boss? https://imgur.com/6qCThcx The ominous music was another nice touch. The game was a nice contradiction: light-hearted art, ominous sound. Cheerful banter, terrible fates. Nice entry!
Dec 7 03:32:35 15m 44s Death Metal Crowd Pusher ♥ 4 Man... I think I've been to this club. Except there was more drinking, the way I recall it. I don't read the instructions to my heavy metal, so I jumped right into this one. It took me just a couple of seconds to find out what button to press, and only maybe a minute to recognize that the type of crowd member telegraphs what pattern of attack I get. That was pretty cool! The art is really strong here, as is the music. I found the combination of the two was more than the sum of the parts because they fit really well together. I played through a number of times, trying to improve my score. It was interesting to try to control the chaos using the varied attacks. Unfortunately my highest score by far was the time I just hammered the spacebar thoughtlessly. I ended up with 170 sacrifices that time. If I could add one feature to this game, it would be that during the solo the crowd would change behavior and start doing a circular mosh pit, to capture that aspect of a metal show. But maybe that's just a different game altogether! I'd play that game, too. Anyway, nice job here, you hit the theme, the art, the sound, and the feel nicely. Well done.
Dec 7 03:57:08 24m 33s PeonCraft - Sacrificed ♥ 2 The visuals are really compelling here, with the nice poly models and these two huuuuuge player giants dominating the visual space, standing over and gesturing. That was VERY cool. The voice commands, existence of "complain" button, and the music were also very nicely put together. I appreciate that you felt free to use asset packs but then opted out of the related categories. That said, your "direction" or whatever you want to call the skill of putting elements together, was on point here. I found the gameplay fell a little bit short of what I'd imagined when I saw the awesome visuals. I let my imagination run a bit, and imagined I would be helpless but running around in a battle and able to kind of use stealth. So OK, it wasn't that, which would have been extra-cool. But what you did have was still enough to get me running around in this cool space and getting that feeling of being a peon, which is what you were after. Nicely done - cool entry here.
Dec 7 04:16:53 19m 45s BlobSacrificator ♥ 0 Nice job hitting all the bases on your first LD entry! You had some art with a style, nice crunchy sound effects, an original song, multiple weapons with weapon-switching, the title screen, score screen, UI timer, it's really a lot of stuff that covers all the aspects of the game. No small feat for a first LD entry!! I think you've had some good advice above, so I won't go too much into repeating. I was okay with the music, personally. But I will repeat the camera thing, just cuz that's like a huge deal. You went for a more advanced "offset" camera that isn't exactly centered on the character, and that's great, but if you can't do it smoothly you shouldn't do it at all, because a centered camera is much easier and allllmost as good. You can just child the camera to the player and set the transform position to 0,0,0 and boom. Then you only come back and try the fancier camera if you have time to get it done smooth. So like the first thirty seconds I was brainscrambled by the camera, but after that I got used to it (it probably feels completely fine to you since you experienced it so much). And then it didn't matter anymore. The triple-jump was an odd choice but I kind of liked it. I certainly USED it a lot, to get up to higher platforms. I think if you have a cool feature like that, you can lean into it and make it a bigger part. Maybe flying slimes? I don't mean to suggest more scope - you have a LOT of scope and it's impressive. Well done. I'll look forward to seeing what you come up with in future LDs.
Dec 7 05:05:10 48m 17s Goo Glow ♥ 0 Excellent compo entry. Charming character, nice touch with the face slowly sliding from one side to the other, rather than flipping the sprite. This made the slime feel rounded in the third dimension as well. The novel mechanic was really compelling, and the way that dying accidentally did NOT yield a splatter was an important strong design choice imo. It created a wonderful risk/reward tradeoff. So I was on board right away. But my regard for the game went up again once I got to a couple of the later levels where you subverted my expectations by having... well, I don't want to give spoilers but let me just say the non-static elements involved. I didn't anticipate that was coming, but once I saw it I felt like it was an essential evolution of the core. There was only one thing I really struggled with, and that was the controls for the wall jump. The way I have I to hold rightthenimmediatelysiwithfsioto shit I fucked up and I'm dead again. And again. And again. I immediately noticed I was struggling with walljump-then-away, but I figured it wasn't important. Then I came to that climb up the shaft in the center of the level in the middle of the game, and I just kept falling and falling and then overcompensating and dying, and back all over again. I'm not quite sure what the fix is, as walljumps always seem a bit awkward to me. Must I hold the direction into the wall? That was my one and only stumbling block in this game. The only other tiny thing I could even suggest was the the sound effect for me exploding was like a failure sound. Couple of times my brain said "dammit we made a mistake" and then a moment later "oh wait I meant to do that." Anyway, this was a really strong entry, I liked it a lot. Bane to all slimekind, indeed.
Dec 7 05:27:02 21m 52s Baby Grenade ♥ 0 You knew what you wanted and you fuckin went after it. Nutjob story, superslick music, nice graphics, disturbing voice acting, and a message that nobody can take home to their mother. I played a handful of times, and my best time was 32 seconds. I like brutal short runs on a beat-your-time game like this, cuz I'm not about to restart when my best time is 6 minutes, as that means about 5:30 of boredom guaranteed. Not so in Baby Grenade! It gets right the fuck down to business. I appreciated the tight tight controls. I wished for a jump feature, or at least that what I conclude from the way my thumb kept hitting the space bar. What I think I really wanted was for this game to be in third-person view instead of first. First is great for aimin' and shootin' but third is superior for that immediate-proximity situational awareness, which would be key in surviving longer in this game. I mean I lasted just fine when I could distract the horde with babies, but after that? I was doomed quickly. But I'm not sure effective dodging of these ladies was what you had in mind... Nice work.
Dec 7 06:47:04 1h 20m Cultist Clicker ♥ 0 Oh man, I did a loooot of clicking, and then I left it running while I tried another game, and came back to play with some of the higher-level stuff. I got up to Blood Wizard, but the fact that the only thing it did was more +sac/sec made me less curious to continue to see the rest of them. I was hoping for some sort of alternate kind of upgrades that would add a little more complexity. But even though it wasn't full of wild innovation or complex mechanics, you had some nice graphics, and strong theme usage. The meat cleaver was a nice touch, too! Solid first entry, welcome to the compo!
Dec 8 18:56:34 36h 09m Orion Force ♥ 1 Very well done! This has a great look and feel, with very nice sounds and little polish details like the surviving ships tallying up at the end. It feels like a nice complete package. The core design idea is showcased well. You can play but you get wrecked if you don't use the main idea. I did sac my last ship by accident straight into gameover once, but hey that was dumb! I didn't do it again. I never got past wave 7. I especially liked the small fighters. They could really score a powerful blow against the enemy in the ideal case, but it was quite tough to capitalize on them. A lot of them went screaming VALHALLA into the void and didn't bring down even one enemy. Others would absolutely wreck way about their own value alive. This was a nice mix. I found it pretty tricky to set up these moments, due to the somewhat unpredictable turning of the ships. I had to more seize opportunities as they presented themselves, as opposed to manufacturing them, or so it felt at my skill level anyway. It was a bit beyond me to monitor the whole fight and instantly react to these windows of opportunity, so I never managed to get past fight 7, I think. Overall a very nice entry, well done!
Dec 8 19:18:51 22m 17s The Cold Equations ♥ 1 Very nicely done. The story, though drawn from an inspiration, is a great setting to choose for the theme. The game itself captured me and pulled me into the story quite well, and the way that I had to click through things like turning the chair around, and fiddling around with information panels that really weren't able to save me from the terrible choice, and then making me take the actions I took, well, it really worked very well. The moody ambient sounds was also very well done. Nice job all around!
Dec 8 20:00:10 41m 19s ANKH ♥ 1 Very strong for a first compo entry! You have a nice graphical style that looks good and has a nice retro vibe. The classic-style sound effects also worked well. The core idea is good, I enjoyed the mix of puzzle and platforming with this unique mechanic, and it fits the theme really well. I have a few small suggestions for improvement: - The "Level Complete" sound is a lot louder than the rest of the sounds, and blasted my ears. - This is a game played with two hands on the keyboard. It was annoying that I had to switch to use the mouse for advancing to the next level, or restarting. This was only a minor annoyance, until I got to the level where I have to throw a block and then jump on it to get over a large area of spikes. The game has never asked me to to do a precision throw OR a precision max-jump before, so I am going to fail several times. Instead of hitting 'R' to immediately restart, each time I fail I have an annoying task to take my hand off the controls, reach over there to get my mouse, bring it onto the screen, click the button, bring the pointer back off the screen so it doesn't annoy me visually, and then take my hand back onto the keyboard. All for something like 5 seconds of game, then I do it again? This is bad and no reason for it. I think in future games, think about the hand position: it's either left hand KB, right hand mouse (WASD + Mouse) or it's all-mouse, or it's all-keyboard. Select one style and never ask for controls outside that style, in my opinion. That means even your main level select screen shouldn't use the mouse, and should have keypress 1-9 or something, I think. - A few times the spike colliders seemed a little bit too large, just a tiny bit. It's okay to "forgive" the player a little, and lie to them about whether they actually struck a negative object. In general, death/damage colliders should be a little bit smaller than their graphics, and positive/pickup colliders should be a little bit bigger. This seems crazy at first but it just feels better in the action that way. Specifically, I was noticing this on that same long precision-jump over the spikes I mentioned in the previous point. I was trying to jump as late as possible and collided the spikes a few times that I felt I did not. (Usually player is wrong about "not hitting spikes" they really did, but offer a margin of error so they don't have this feeling). I also want to say you did very nice with the tutorial blocks that show text, and having the fun final level. Those were nice touches. So a very strong first entry, well done. You can be proud of this one. Welcome to LD, I look forward to seeing what you come up with next time.
Dec 8 20:26:52 26m 42s Lucky Number 13 ♥ 5 Wow, this is so totally complete! It has multiple mechanics, multiple enemies, a story, and a bunch of nice extra features like the notes and terminals! Really well done. I enjoyed all of it, the story, the gameplay, and I felt like the length of it was just about right. Art and music were in sync the rest of the vision of the game and it all came together really well. Normally I'd offer a couple of critiques but really nothing got in my way... no splinters. Great entry. Release the frogs!
Dec 8 21:37:08 1h 10m Apatanat: the benefit of all. ♥ 1 The art style is unique and very nice. I liked the story, and I enjoyed seeing the little comic-book style stories about how my attempts to sacrifice myself failed in some funny ways. I also liked the humorous text in the hint screen, which made me want to proceed without looking every time. I know that "fetch quest" is a big part of RPG gameplay. It's not personally my favorite, so I am not exactly the perfect audience for that sort of game. But even with that disadvantage, it was good enough that I played it through all the way to the end! Nice job creating a unique entry.
Dec 8 22:01:39 24m 31s Alien Sacrificial Predicament ♥ 1 This game is crazy!@ It's sooooo hard. I am surrounded on all sides in the first four seconds, and must learn to run or die. I memorized the pattern: turn left and sprint. Try to juke-dodge the two guys in the way and hopefully only take one hit. Kill the next two melee guys + gun guy in the hall and then jump down the pit before the conga line of ten dudes RIGHT ON MY TAIL kills me. No use fighting them. Down the pit the battle is instant, so I hope you reloaded while falling, that was the most peaceful zero point seven seconds this game has! I hope you enjoyed. Now you have to tight-quarters pulse-strafe these two shooters right on your face while shooting them. Phew, okay. Now you can breathe for a second. Or so I thought, the first time. How foolish! Actually you better get your ass in gear because all of those guys are about to respawn! I thought I would use the cover to "clear the area before moving in" but that is not in the spirit of this game. No careful pop-n-shoot then stroll through the park type situation here, just fucking pedal to the metal, full speed or die. So now I sprint out and it's just not worth shooting any guys cuz they'll surround and respawn forever. Better just concentrate on shooting the generator while dodging everything, and look out for the deathpit. It took me about twenty runs to get to that stage where I had it all memorized and was able to frantically clear the generator just barely. Ohmygod. OK. Phew. I did it! FINALLY a new area. Something different that I haven't played twenty times now. And then I died, and it send me ALL THE WAY BACK>???!! I can't imagine doing four of these straight without dying, and so that's where I stopped. Super-intense entry. I loved the crazy sci-fi weirdo alien textures and shapes on everything. I sort-of loved the high-octane deathmetal pacing, although it was borderline too much for me. I would have played more if it didn't ship me back to the very start. Really intense and unique entry. Looks like your first LD entry, and that's impressive to have something this potent. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next time. Nice work.
Dec 9 02:07:11 4h 05m Volcano Island ♥ 1 Top score 9100: 3 blonde, 2 brown, 2 red -- 3 blonde, 1brown 1blonde, 2 red, 2 blonde I had it framed as a 3-2-2 and then repeating, with one swap. At that point it was taking so long, that the hard part was not so much remembering the sequence as waiting for the dudes to come and remember where I WAS in the sequence at that moment. A few times I really had to wait a long time! Then the volcano would repeat. At this point I was up to a chan of 9, then 10, then 11, and I started to feel like the chain was too long and just deliberately picked the wrong guy to see what would happen. I think I got a little luck in having such an easy pattern to recall, though. (Unless that's not random?) Anyway, that was my run. I found the game really charming with great art that works super-well. Everything was really clear, and looked polished and with charm. Especially the volcano. I enjoyed the smoke coming from it in the title screen and I honestly just watched it so long I heard the song loop! If I could add one thing, it would be a "correct" sound when I complete the full chain. Also, I wondered what it would be like with a faster pace: The volcano only says ONE guy, and it's the new one at the end of the chain, instead of repeating the whole chain. That, plus code to ensure that if any type of guy is not available he is swiftly spawned. It was really the pace bogging down as the chain got real long that eventually made me tap out, up til then it was fun/interesting. Game itself was a little bit simple, but that's okay too. I know the music and sounds weren't yours, but they were well-selected, and worked with the game seamlessly. Nice job!
Dec 9 02:51:46 44m 35s Room44 ♥ 2 Really nicely put together. The art is amazing, and fits well with the chosen music (I assume not original music since you opted out of audio category). The writing was nice - the dialog and information to work from was hazy and ambiguous, but I was forced to make a decisive choice, so I felt that overall the whole project worked well in service of the theme. I felt unclear, but hey, I had to make some choice! A couple of things that hit me in-game as tough: I couldn't read the file to see the content and influence my judgment. I wasn't sure how much to read into the wrench being put in my locker, for example does that reduce the guilt of Kate because she would have had to kill, then sneak into my room to plant the wrench, then go BACK to the murder? Or else sneak the wrench out right in front of me? I wasn't sure how much weight to put on "clues" since it seemed clear I would not have enough info, given the theme. Lastly, I regretted that I couldn't confront people about facts I had learned, for example Fiona about the file, the scientist about the DNA link, the mechanic about the milk and wrench, etc. I won't say who I chose in the end, but I did think it was nice that you shared the results, and that the results were pretty even! I was impressed by how well put-together this whole experience was. The claustrophobia of the ship reflected the uncomfortably small amount of information available, and it felt right. Nice work!
Dec 9 03:43:57 52m 11s The Omicron Fleet ♥ 2 Very nice compo entry here! You are hitting all of the elements: theme-derived gameplay that is well-realized, nice graphics that communicate somewhat complex state to make it easy to understand, solid controls, good sound effects, and fitting music. Impressive -- I enjoyed your past game as well, but you've upped your level here, in my opinion! I enjoyed this one a lot, and it made me feel powerful and clever to create these complex dodges. You avoided blunders and did not send me back to the start, instead respecting my time by immediately restarting me at the beginning of the current fight so that I was right back in the meat of the interesting gameplay with no reason to quit. So of course I played to the end. The escalation going into the conclusion was very well-done, and the overall game length was just right for the amount of interesting content you had. Any longer and it would have overstayed the welcome a bit, and you were smart to telegraph "this is the end" in the voice lines. I always have a bit of a mixed feeling with developer voiceovers, but yours are pretty decent. Sometimes games are SO weird and crazy that devlines work, but a lot of games it's kind of trying to be polished but the lines aren't working. You did a solid job though, and the voice lines did not pull me out of the experience. I'd usually like to offer a critique to the feedback. There were no real splinters here to speak of, though, and no serious gaps. The only items I can think of are these: First, I would have preferred the smaller ships to be a sprite layer above the main ship, as a lot of times I lost sight of them, yet had to click on them. I'm also not sure it was necessary to make me click on the little ship, instead of anywhere on the cluster, but then I'm not certain how you'd deal with ambiguous clicks on overlapped clusters. Controls were generally very strong, but they were a little bit fiddly due to the tiny and sometimes-hidden click targets. It also took me a little while to realize how to use the mousewheel feature, just input-wise. I spun the wheel and was like "what should this do, it does nothing?" in the first few moments. Pretty soon I realized. My last point of critique would be that the game is a tad bit easy. I don't WANT to lose a lot in this game, though. Perhaps some kind of second-level difficulty of optional goals that are a bit tougher, maybe? Perhaps some of the littlest ships are a different color and I want to preserve them because the pilots are important officers or something? Then I can ignore and play, but if I want to opt into some extra-fancy dodging, I can? I don't know, but by the end I had found my strategy and just went with it over and over. That said, the core was compelling enough that I still had fun even if it wasn't super-tough. I very much appreciated the escalation of complexity at the end. The stand-out feature here, though, was the absolutely excellent predictive transparency, with the lines and circles projecting accurately what the consequences would be. Very well done here. The two mobility circles per ship were also smartly done, and I appreciated that you didn't tutorialize me to death with all this stuff, but just presented clean, clear information and respected my intelligence to figure it out. Very nice entry, well done!
Dec 9 04:22:22 38m 25s SpaceCrafter ♥ 1 Highlight here is the wildly open-ended customization system. Wow, you can really do a lot there! I had fun tinkering around with my ship, trying to have some armor but also leave clear shots for the guns. The battle mode wasn't like super-exciting and obviously the controls there were limited, but it did serve its purpose as a testing ground for the ideas explored in the build phase. I had the mouse selection issue, but it was weird. Sometimes it was fine. Sometimes it needed a couple of clicks, and sometimes it was nearly impossible to select a piece unless I rotated the camera five different ways. One wing-shaped piece was REAL nasty to try to select. I also struggled to select just the armor to unsnap off a chasis, instead of the chasis itself. So if you were selling this as a $300 modeling program, I would have some issues. But for a jam entry customization system, actually it is very impressive. I have a couple of ideas, if a raycast is not working for you, but I don't know for sure: 1. Spherecast instead of raycast, to hit with more margin for error. 2. Cast every frame when there is no selected object, and highlight with a glow the object i WOULD select if I clicked. Then I can learn the quirks of the system more easily. 3. Use some fancy math to select the object whos bounding box comes closest to the line. That is: I can never miss when I click, because I ALWAYS get the nearest object to the ray of my click. Just a few ideas, but I do think if you're having a lot of complaints, this might be something worth experimenting around with to find a better answer. Really well done with this editor, very cool tech. I had fun tinkering, thanks!
Dec 9 04:37:42 15m 20s Battlecraft : Orcs and Famine ♥ 1 So many games focus on the battle elements of Orcs, as opposed to the procedural administration concerns. But there are so many things to worry about as an Orc leader! I never realized it before. I think it was 52 days that I did on my best run, but it felt like I had a run of good luck, with several BABIES and bards, then even a village. If I could add one thing it would be for the change in the numbers from a choice to somehow pop out or linger on the screen for a second. I couldn't always remember what my old numbers were, and thus what the effect of the new choice was. Even an up/down green/red under the impacted numbers might be cool. I enjoyed experimenting around with the systems, and hearing the funny sound effects. Nice work!
Dec 9 05:39:27 1h 01m Benefice ♥ 1 I love how you just throw me in to figure this out. First moment was like "umm okay I have an island and some icons? I move the mouse into the screen, and already the mouseover tip is indicating I can build stone. From there, the system is very self-discoverable, given how complex it is. There were a couple of things that I struggled with early, but then they smoothed out after I lost a few times. One was that I got into a wood trap: this was likely a false trap, but I had spent enough wood that I had only 3, and the wood-creating building takes 4. So I also hadn't discovered what the "Sell" does. Part of my confusion around "Sell" was that I thought the money icon was wheat, in an unprocessed form. It took a game where I was stuck on needing "wheat" to plant more fields, and none was forthcoming. I had fields, and even a field that was not next to a farm that would harvest it. I waited, but eventually I started experimenting, and then at some point it all clicked. After that I was rolling. I didn't do super-duper well. I imagine an island of pretty epic proportions is possible, with proper advance planning and many layers. It's really cool how the highest possible island is conceivably doable, but the timing and the monkey-wrench of the pirates (whether you pay or not!) that would distort your perfect plan, all come together to force you to improvise. All that, plus the way that stuff falling down wrecks you because your mines have to be on the ground layer. It's really cool how all of these elements come together, and how these problems are rooted firmly in the theme. The time pressure of the pirates coming is also a key aspect creating some tension while I play. Beyond the design, I found the aesthetics very nice. The music is soothing and just the right amount of peppy to set the building mood, and the graphics are very nice as well. Overall, a really nice entry. Even as I'm typing I'm kind of picturing that idealized island and wondering if I could build it with just one more go... hrmmm....... (Three more games later) Oh, weird, I built to the top of the screen and the game simply shut down. I can rep that from the start by just building straight up -- actually it doesn't happen if I build to the side of the menu, but if I build such that a block ends up behind a button, I run into trouble quickly, but I'm not certain if it's on build, mouseover, or button interaction. But I did get one doozy of an island going. Right out of the gate with with a 5-slot area dedicated to wood with one layer of food, and then the right-hand side of the island was all mines with a handful of stone markets for money production. I was able to pay off all the pirates until I ran out of room. Really a fun entry, well done.
Dec 10 00:21:44 18h 42m Hell Well ♥ 1 Your crew always makes some high-ocatane challenging action games, and this is no exception! I always miss it when your sound gets cut because your games are so visceral. I played a while before understanding the controls fully. That is, I understood how to jump, but not the meaning of the color change. I think part of it is the way the lava comes IMMEDIATELY and I'm on instant freakout. That's great on the restart, and I'd hate to see you add a slow ramp-up phase. But maybe a dotted line that is a bit above the start, and the lava doesn't kick off until I pass it or something? I could have used a sandbox just to learn the nuances of the button presses, before being thrown to the wolves. After I got the hang of it, I started doing better. But it was definitely tricky as heck. I think something about the space bar is tough for me, in precision jumping games. I may have done better if I could have used W to jump or something. The spacebar is a large clunky button to accurately double-tap, at least on my crappy wireless kb. Tight brutal action with rapidly switching realities based on a cool core concept, nice art, all around this was very well done. It was just a bit more than I was able to hack, difficulty-wise.
Dec 10 00:35:01 13m 17s PowerGateLD ♥ 1 Interesting and difficult core control scheme, where I have to fly toward something to shoot it. The enemies are quite tricky, and their pattern vs the movement of my ship created some really interesting dogfights. A few times I could not believe I had snuck through a set of shots without getting hit! WOW. So it's cool the way those systems interacted to create these tricky moments. The difficulty was a bit tough for me, and then it was quite disheartening to go backward one level and have to repeat each time I died. It took some care and time to destroy the enemies, so I really wanted to restart the same level from scratch. Perhaps that makes the game too short? I'm not sure. So I had some real highs and lows on this one: at times I felt like an ace dogfighter, and at other times I felt hopeless. An interesting mix! Interaction of the ship with the walls (Sticky instead of Bouncey or Slidey) was a bit jarring at first, but sort of intriguing too, like maybe there were some tactics there? Since flying at the enemy can be tough maybe there is a tactic of "landing" on the wall to shoot safely, and then flying off when they shoot back? Graphics were nice and it was clear when I got hit, though I did miss having some basic sound effects to make the game feel more real. Overall a nice job!
Dec 13 02:29:29 73h 54m Welcome to the North Pole! ♥ 1 Outstanding entry, weighing in strong on a bunch of categories! The core control mechanic was very creative, and very well done. That's not easy! The graphics were great, and the way snow accumulated made it feel very organic. Whatever discrete chunks there were underlying things in the logic, the fluffy snow felt real. The excellent chuff-chuff sound effects of moving around really sold the snow feel, and the vocal music was sweet and charming. I did run into one problem: when the game told me to go my own way, instead of just building a snowman I somehow settled on the idea of jumping up then splitting midair to stick the landing just between the overhead spike and the ground. I managed to do it. But trying to do this precision maneuver really tested my control limits and I got a bit frustrated rolling off the edge. This was me being dumb, and generally I felt like the momentum controls were strong, and I enjoyed rolling and jumping over a bunch of pits, and later saved myself with a few nice midair splits anyway. But maybe at very low speeds the character could halt more quickly, at least near edges? The second minor splinter was that I didn't understand the unlocking of gates. Sometimes I built myself up to climb over the top, while other times I unlocked it. I never quite got the rules - I'd be doing stuff, and then click it would unlock. But overall this was amazing and blew me away. My wife also enjoyed it and was singing the tune after we stopped playing (finish time 14:59). Excellent entry you can really be proud of, nice work.
Dec 15 17:27:04 62h 57m As Of Yet Unnamed ♥ 1 This is pretty great but I also had a really rough initial experience with it. I was playing in Chrome, and I guess there's a technical issue with the controls in Chrome. I played maybe 15 times without being able to control anything reliably, and stopping maybe three rockets in total. This really put me through the ringer on the retry loop... it's quite a long time between the failed jump that lets a rocket hit the president, and the next rocket appearing on screen. It goes Pres-hit animations, score screen, flag-wipe transition, text tutorial, initial marching, laser sight, and only seconds later does a rocket appear and I have one jump of gameplay experience before looping this again. Eventually I concluded it had to be that I was missing something - and I saw the comment saying to play it in another browser. So I played in firefox and I had a far, FAR more reasonable experience. Actually a pretty good one! The pixel art is just totally great - really charming and communicative. Only critique I can offer is that I did find it a bit hard to pick out the rockets against the busy and just-as-saturated background, but maybe this was intentional as it definitely kept me really tense. The sound effects and music are great, too, and I loved how it escalated in difficulty, with the helicopter appearing. The time-slow is a really nice touch, as well -- added a lot to that mixed feeling of realtime/sort-turn-ish, and made it feel nice to line up shots. Super-slick! (No points off for the Chrome part of the experience, just mentioning it since it happened.)
Dec 16 03:45:02 10h 17m Upsystem ♥ 2 Very nicely done! The mood is really great, with the sounds and background music/ambiance. But that just did well setting the stage for the real star: the strategy. I was definitely thinking a bunch, and making some tough choices. It was a nice mix of both "puzzling" out the order of operations that would be effective, and also on making uncertain risk/reward tradeoff decisions, too. The outcomes were a nice mix of things often going my way, but then going wrong just enough that I was always worried. I did make it to the end (normal difficulty) but with only three ships of one ... crew ... each. I think I lost one ship to total starvation, one ship sacrificed to delay the bearlons, and another ship abandoned while scouting. The food needs are pretty extreme, and I ended up deliberately starving most of my crew so that I'd only need one food per ship per jump. But hey, you know... sacrifices must be made, right? If I had to critique, I would say that the controls are a bit fiddly, and it took me a little while to adjust to them. But honestly, it's a complex enough strategy game that it's pretty normal and I would say these controls are actually pretty darn solid for a jam, where you haven't had ten iterations with playtesters to refine. The roughest part of it was actually the tutorial piece... I got pretty confused about why I was trying to activate certain ships but could not, and the tutorial "taught" me that there's an order to my ships, which is a lie. I pretty quickly figured out the truth, but that misled me a bit. It's good that you left a tip about how to do transfers, as this was not super-smooth either. But since I did read the tip (there was only ONE after all) I was pretty good to go quickly. Anyway, a very nice all-around package here. I enjoyed it - nice work!
Dec 16 23:57:03 20h 12m Let Me Eat You! ♥ 1 Nice sound effects! Also a funny humorous vibe to it all. I played to the humorous conclusion, but there were many censorings along the way. Actually I felt like I was going to get over the line with a big herd, but then here came a predator. I decided to get clever, and to select a guy to send off alone as bait, drawing the predator away from the pack.... sacrifices must be made, after all! However this was a terrible strategy idea! I forgot my whole pack would follow this guy, so what happened was they all took a detour, which had two terrible outcomes: firstly they went to the predator together like one big lunch, and second the delay in moving straight toward the green zone meant they clumped up and stalled, which meant more cannibalism. I stuck around for the final grim humor at the end, and was rewarded. On the critique side, I felt a bit confused initially. I had to manually reoirent the camera and guess that the green line was probably the goal. Once I figured that, I was off to the races. Perhaps it was possible to set the camera up initially to more clearly communicate the objective? I don't know. Nice job!