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triplefox

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TimestampSince previousGametriplefox's comment
Dec 3 08:36:07 Ludum Dare: The Game ♥ 3 This game feels like the nightmare version of game jamming. I'm not sure if it's actually meant to be strategic because there is no feedback on why work didn't progress or how helpful it was to take breaks. It could easily be something very calculated that you have to puzzle out with a combination of delay timers(e.g. you can look at your calendar to see when the special events happen, and taking them will give you a stat boost that you can plan around; sleeping at night is more effective than sleeping during the day, and so on) and bonuses for following a certain priority (e.g. the code->debug->polish cycle is faster than others). Also, it should model the part where you choose between advertising your game with blogspam and rating and commenting on other people's games.
Dec 3 08:56:09 20m 02s Life in the Trenches ♥ 2 The repetition and simple "choose A vs B" structure like "Reigns" makes this game effective at giving the mood of trench warfare. I enjoyed the variety of events, although I was frustrated by their randomness. (Randomness tends to act as a design placeholder, because it cuts off the player's ability to calculate further ahead) I would be happy to see more of this game.
Dec 3 10:05:09 1h 09m Maze of Death ♥ 1 This game takes a lot of patience! I almost made it to the halfway mark with plans to finish, but got up and yanked my headphones out which crashed the emulator. Oops. One thing I think might improve the game is to make it a little more Minesweeper-like by letting you mark possible walls. Whenever you hit a corner, there's a chance of taking the right direction, which is actually bad for mapping purposes, so I was sacrificing lives just to indicate both edges of corners.
Dec 4 05:02:59 18h 57m Chiiip ♥ 4 "Wait, I have to learn a new language to play this game?" "Oh, it's a setting." Kudos on making something very polished looking. The concept feels a bit limiting, though. Maybe something could be done with items, powerups, terrain etc.
Dec 4 06:57:27 1h 54m Just delete them ♥ 0 I really like the concept, but I discovered something that ended my playthrough very quickly: the released build doesn't store the assets in the same way as the source, so I can't do as suggested and "delete folders". I can only delete entire levels.
Dec 4 07:32:07 34m 40s NOT SO ARIGATO MR. ROBOTO ♥ 3 This had some very stylish presentation and once I had repeated the intro a few times I finally realized that Teedus was not a completely random character. I enjoy room escape games although I don't actually understand how I solved the puzzle in the end. On a second playthrough the state of the lights doesn't get reset which produced some bugs, and I think(?) there were more issues related to the state of modules - not every scene presented itself the same way with the same settings. As you can imagine I was just clicking around a lot and hotspot hunting to get through it.
Dec 4 07:53:23 21m 16s Bloodcaster ♥ 1 1. I have to tell Windows to force off DPI scaling, or it overflows and I can't see the HUD anymore. There may be an option in Godot to tell it to force DPI. 2. The enemies appear to move and shoot randomly, which is a missed opportunity to program interesting behavior. Good enemies don't need complex AI, they just need a pattern I can plan around. I like the Downwell aesthetic so it's nice to see it again.
Dec 4 08:28:53 35m 30s Space Captain Leslie in ... Disasteroids!! ♥ 1 Although I've played many shmup games with rotation, I've never played one that felt quite like this one and let you slide along the screen borders, which is really cool! That said I have a lot of remarks about the difficulty. * The asteroids have a very large collision boundary and touching them means I take repeated hits with no invulnerability timer. When I die the enemies fly past me off-screen... * If I let the enemies get off-screen then they can shoot me without me seeing where they are. * Once I die more enemies will still spawn, making the game snowball away from me as I lose multiple ships in a row. * It's lengthy for a game jam game and all these little issues add up to frustration. * There is no visible score counter so I don't really know how far I'm getting apart from the dialogue. Edit: I first tried the game on keyboard only(cause, laptop). I was able to get to around 70% of the way through the game doing that. With keyboard + mouse, combat becomes so much easier that these difficulty issues, while still present, aren't as obvious.
Dec 4 12:19:47 3h 50m Hail To The King ♥ 0 I made it to level 7 and had a good shot at finishing only to have the game crash suddenly. Not sure what caused it...it's a really fun design though, a good take on the "sacrifice to reveal the board" that I've seen a few games do this LD.
Dec 5 09:14:06 20h 54m Santa on Skis ♥ 1 I liked the look of this game the moment I saw the screenshot. The "Procedural Delivering Christmas Presents" genre is quite under-served, with the last entry I really liked being all the way back in 1984 with "Special Delivery" on the Atari 800. That one had a whole stealth minigame section where you go inside the houses and avoid the residents.
Dec 5 10:23:45 1h 09m Morbid adventurer ♥ 2 As a latecomer player I feel like I am not seeing the best the game has to offer. The map doesn't really tell me enough about the state of doors or where enemies might still be, and while I did win a few battles and encountered doors that might be openable, it wasn't giving me an option to sacrifice myself on the one I wanted to open, so I ended up just quitting altogether instead. But I did like going around and reading the notes. I like the idea of something Souls-like/Zelda-like that engages with the succession gameplay more directly. Succession roguelikes are a thing and I recently sunk a lot of time into one of them, *Dungeonmans*. And games like *Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?* demonstrate that you don't need to have very much going on in the game's scenario to make people experience "collaboration" on a thing.
Dec 6 01:39:59 15h 16m Learn to be a self stopper! ♥ 1 I love this take on the trolley problem, if it were expanded upon I would suggest making the scenarios progressively more absurd with choices between cats and dogs, ninjas and samurai, and Batman vs Superman.
Dec 6 02:19:28 39m 29s Ursa ♥ 5 This is a pretty game with pretty music and it made me sit on the title screen for a while to listen. The platforming part of it was the weak part, and the game would probably work better if it had mechanics that felt more like "bear power meets star power".
Dec 6 08:29:00 6h 09m RAT LABS ♥ 2 First impressions: uh oh, it's a mouse game and I just got cozied up with my laptop. Basically no game jam game ever works well on trackpad so it's my usual expectation that I have to get up and sit in a chair to use the mouse. Regardless I managed to build some conveyors and accept the first assignment but got stuck on selecting the research center because no amount of mashing keys or clicking on the text seemed to help me. After trying the mouse: Yeah, okay, the mouse wheel is the one and only way to select different structures to build. And now that I built it, completing the assignment was cumbersome since it involves multiple presses of Enter. It's clear that there was a lot of effort put into the graphics design of the UI but that's a pretty big investment for any game jam. I would have been happy with a scrolling text log and some hotkeys. A little while later and I have gotten stuck on the task "Visual Research into 'Photograph'". Finally I figure out from the descriptions that I need to send the photos back through the photo booth. It's nice to set up conveyors and reminds me of setting up train lines in OpenTTD. But my enthusiasm for solving traffic jams is limited. Finally after rebuilding parts of the line I have completed the carbon pressurization puzzle but I'm getting bored, the end. It's a fine example of this type of automation game, I think I'm just not the target audience since they've never really gotten me excited in the past.
Dec 7 03:10:55 18h 41m STAR JUNK ♥ 0 I like this kind of arcade gameplay, although I'm not sure I was really sacrificing anything but the space rocks and enemies that were in my way. The game is polished and fun but lacks for coherency in matching the scenario to the mechanics: too much of it is built on self-evident game tropes like "of course you shoot the enemies to take their loot", "of course you trade things at the shop to power up", so no particular meanings are conveyed.
Dec 7 03:41:12 30m 17s Muscles and the Gun ♥ 1 I really like this kind of Glorious Trainwrecks-style "game looks broken, is actually thoughtfully designed". It's easily the most creative thing I've seen in this LD. But the control, physics, and AI all conspire to make it really difficult. I had to restart when I trapped myself in level 2, and I stopped after reaching the final part of level 3 only to die to that blasted cowboy's perfect aim. The enemies, as-is, aren't a good fit for the powers of my main characters, so it was a real struggle even to get that far in the level. I would be happy to see more like this, with just a little bit easier gameplay.
Dec 7 04:42:10 1h 00m Timestep ♥ 1 Good small game with some neat features - I won on my second try. I really like that map zoom although the game is so small that it probably doesn't need such an elaborate implementation. Here's a UX gripe: Why does the game use the mouse to chop things, and the E key to use objects? It doesn't even use the mouse for pointing at objects. I was so close to being able to play the game without fighting my laptop's trackpad, but for that darn mouse button thing.
Dec 7 05:29:01 46m 51s Goblin Quest ♥ 0 This kept me playing for quite a long time(I've seen a few different succession games this LD and this is one of the best examples of them), but eventually I realized that I had accumulated so many corpses that the game was actually soft-blocking me from proceeding with events in the mountains, because it would either kill the character or give them an amulet they didn't need. So I started a new run of the game only to find that the mountain death rate was still extremely high. If the point is to allow me to deliberately kill them, I should have an option with a 100% failure rate, instead of an option I actually want to pick that frequently kills them. It's really hard to see the possibility space of the game because many of the elements are random(unable to plan ahead, pure trial and error) versus chaotic(hard to predict but always consistent). For example, if it were only safe to hunt goblins or explore the mountains at certain times of day or days of the week - this is how VN and raising games will typically create "miraculous" events.
Dec 7 06:26:45 57m 44s Christmas Game ♥ 0 This game is easily compared to [Special Delivery](https://youtu.be/oOJMnuKJZVs?t=8) since it has the fly-by delivering presents stuff. I like that opening part where you have to decide who is naughty, that's something I haven't seen done before.
Dec 7 07:03:30 36m 45s Save da people! ♥ 0 I enjoyed this game, but I think it focused too much on the element of scoring at the expense of the experience during play. My thought process once I had played a few sessions was: Sort the people by the ones that can be transported the fastest. If I have fewer total people then my chances are better. I had one with 8 people and saved all of them, while the 27 person one was impossible. I "solved" the game, so my score was just a matter of good RNG. In contrast this game could easily use the action presentation to support interesting trade-offs that work with the scenario: using limited resources like a fire ax or extinguisher to open paths, turning on the sprinkler system to buy time, losing paths and people as time goes on and the fire spreads. These are all things that could result in sacrifices, and they're more hands-on and make me think strategically while I'm playing, so they engage me with the theme better than trying to balance the score at the end. Scores are a relatively slow feedback mechanism, and they don't always guide players to want to do better.
Dec 7 07:34:16 30m 46s The things we carry ♥ 1 Flappy Bird (sad version) I enjoyed the aesthetics. The gameplay left me feeling a little bit numb when it resorted to abstracting away life's slings and arrows as literal sawblades and axes, because with such general imagery, it cuts off the possibility of further exploring the themes. An infant figures out pretty quickly that sharp objects are dangerous, and learns to avoid them. But in later life, some of the most distressing acts look very ordinary and only later, when reviewed, can be seen for what they are. People get traumatized, and they push it away in their mind, only for it to intrude on them over and over like an angry scar. Even real violence, when filmed, tends to look banal and less impactful than what is portrayed in media. I think the game is close to being really good, it just needs to resolve this metaphorical issue of how to "unknowingly sacrifice" things, and to turn that into a burden on one's conscience. As it is, when I reached the end, I felt like I had played any other game about resource management, and it was doing some tell-not-show to declare that it was about sacrifice.
Dec 10 03:21:35 67h 47m Eldritchual ♥ 1 I enjoyed this game for one playthrough, but I have two thoughts: 1. The strategy ends up being too linear in nature. The timers and increments are extremely regular and don't cascade into each other, so it was straightforward to find a pattern that kept all the numbers under control indefinitely. 2. The game has to do some tell-not-show to get where it's going(lengthy manual), because it's focused on mechanics that manipulate abstract numbers, which creates a need to learn the abstraction at play. It doesn't matter if the abstraction is actually very simple or well-explained: each one you add increases the likelihood of "it is so complex" "my head hurts" types of feedback. There are many examples of computerized strategy games that are successful with an abstract approach, but they still have to invest a ton of effort on UX to make it parse well...and a major allure of video gaming is in being able to minimize the need for the player to do any parsing of rules in their head, instead communicating the bulk of feedback through a visceral, direct interaction and its result. When the rules, interactions, and scenario synthesize well, the game nearly explains itself, and all you need to know are the basic controls. In most of AAA, this means the cross-genre combat template of equipment, formally named skills, cooldown timers and status effects. For strategy games, it tends to mean moving away from aggregate values and towards fungible items and agents. There is probably a way to revise this game to depict more things visually, although it admittedly would also probably go out of scope for a jam project.