Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Feedback comment stats → Yaen

Yaen

Feedback comments for LD43

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Yaen's comment
Dec 4 23:32:39		Save the Town!	♥ 1	I love your sound design, especially Ding, ding. We need more Ding Ding in games and in this world in general. Was pretty cute. The framerate dies when you shoot too much or when a wave spawns. It was still fun though. My favourite part: Selecting units. You know why ;)
Dec 5 00:06:32	33m 53s	Fight For Your Light	♥ 1	Hey, cool game! Looks really pretty and well polished. Getting to this level of graphical quality in a game jam is quite an achievement. I especially liked all the VFX. I felt pretty weak though which is why I stopped playing. My damage felt too low, my character too slow and the enemies too hard to hit and too strong, especially for the beginning. I like the concept of the rune rotation combat mechanic. Lots of potential there. I wish I could have unlocked the spells more quickly so I could experience what you did with this mechanic. I feel like there's no reason for a smart camera here. Simple, direct 3rd-person camera control without any blending or automatic adjustments would have done the trick just fine. Right now it was really difficult to aim which reduced my enjoyment of the gameplay. Overall good job, especially on the audiovisual side. The rotating combat mechanic should be explored more.
Dec 5 00:16:46	10m 14s	Golem	♥ 1	Was pretty fun, playing with Jonas today and comparing our solutions to the puzzles. I agree on the rotation blocks. The arrows should not rotate with the block orientation. There should be a delete all blocks button. I played before you added objectives and with the objectives the game is like 100x as fun! :D I quite like the visual style. Pretty charming to look at. The wall sensor is a bit annoying since you can not change the relative direction of the green and red outputs. Looking forward to what else you'll do with this concept!
Dec 5 02:21:49	2h 05m	A Dark Forest	♥ 0	I don't think I really understood this game. All I did (after two failed attempts of running to the side and into everlasting darkness) was holding W, which worked fine enough until a text informed me that I sacrificed my fuel. I kept holding w until it told me that I had nothing to sacrifice... Not really sure how the game is supposed to be played. The atmosphere with the torch light against the purple VFX of the entity was quite nice though.
Dec 5 02:52:34	30m 45s	Agent of Sacrifice	♥ 0	Hey, that was pretty cool! I found one (pretty straightforward and stabby) way to do the deed. I wish the game involved a little less waiting and an option to walk more quickly or run because of the setback right to the beginning once you get spotted. I also ran into an issue the first time when I didn't go to the elevator and I had no way to turn off the power again. The thing is that the first time I thought I must not get into the light cone because that's usually bad for you in stealth games. That's why I stayed in the back and basically softlocked myself, having to reload the page. I wish I was given a reason for killing her. Some backstory about why I'm doing the things I'm doing, you know? Other than that it was a pretty exciting time, trying to figure out how to use the environment to my advantage to get people to move to certain places and so on. I also liked the unnerving soundtrack and creepy art style of the characters. The animations looked pretty good, especially the walking cycles. Good job, overall!
Dec 7 02:42:58	47h 50m	Meta Magic	♥ 1	The low res effect was a pretty interesting form of punishment. When I first played the game (hadn't read the description) I was confused by it and thought something had broken though haha. I feel like the controls could be a bit more intuitive - or maybe I was just overwhelmed by the large amount of spells, all with their own buttons. Something like that can work but only if you learn it over the course of a longer game, piece by piece. I can also confirm that the screenshot @spacemonkey posted is 100% legitimate and definitely not edited. Impressive score, I must say!
Dec 13 23:53:45	165h 10m	Total Party Kill	♥ 0	Man that was great fun! My favourite entry so far, I think. Feels pretty complete and has lots of levels. Had a good length for the content it gave me. Most levels felt pretty distinct even though there weren't so many new mechanics. Sometimes I found the timing to be a bit tricky for a puzzle game, but maybe that was just me not finding the intended solution and cheesing it in an overly complicated way, I'm not sure haha.
Dec 14 00:10:50	17m 05s	A Man and a Dog	♥ 1	Very pretty game. I had lots of fun exploring. Nice environment design, too. The mood was spot on! Audio was great (don't know why I can't rate audio for this submission but I would've given it a good rating here). Trying to forcibly escape the bear trap resulted in an ending that didn't fit the game's style. Felt kind of slapstick but in an unfitting way. I'm a bit unsure how to feel about the third ending. It's a bit strange that for the best outcome there are no additional sacrifices to be made. In the end it just depends on picking up a weapon, so it feels like it clashes with the narrative theme a bit.
Dec 14 00:26:53	16m 03s	CROM	♥ 2	I like the way this game looks for sure! The 3D models blend in perfectly with the 2d art which makes everything look really nice and still gives you all the 3D advantages. Love it! I'm not sure how I feel about having fewer mechanics the further the game progresses. Combat basically gets less interesting over time. I liked the idea of the boss being the dog at the end. I'm not sure about this but does the dog get more difficult, the more you hurt it before? At first I tried to do a no dog-hurting run, but I found it too hard. Then, with some dog hurting, I found the dog too hard. Wish the dog had a health bar in the end. I'm really impressed by how far you got with this game in such a limited time!
Dec 14 00:45:10	18m 17s	Sense Shift	♥ 2	Very solid entry! The idea of having to rely on spatial audio and switching back and forth was really nice. For a while I didn't understand the blue platforms and I figured out the order by trial and error at first. I finally understood it at the very end though. I liked the music :) I think that if this works with controller input, you could even add haptic feedback to the mix which could be very interesting in my opinion.
Dec 14 00:57:06	11m 56s	Hell Well	♥ 0	This game looks pretty good! I liked the effect animation when you land on something. Gives it a lot of impact! Sometimes you can get stuck. I wish I could jump with the up-arrow (controlling with one hand is way easier to coordinate than having to use the other hand to jump. I liked how the colours changed each time I collected a gem. Did the colours signify the ability I currently have? If so, I didn't notice while playing. I just remember that I kept thinking "I wish I had a visual way of telling which ability I currently have. Theme felt a bit weak as it didn't feel like sacrifices and more like exchanges. That's ok though, it's an interesting mechanic! Look and feel remind me a lot of downwell. If that's what you were going for that's a job well done!
Dec 14 01:21:26	24m 20s	Sacritech	♥ 1	You've got some great aesthetics in this game. The colours and shapes go well together and it feels like a well designed art style. Sounds were satisfying too and I especially liked the laser sound. I actually liked the music, too! It had many levels, maybe even too many for its own good. Some of them felt a bit pointless, introducing no new mechanics and not really having anything particularily challenging or unique about them. I too think that movement direction should not be based on mouse position. The amount of mental gymnastics I have to do just to know what button to press in order to move in the right direction was so much that I ended up only using the up arrow. This could be way more pleasant if the up arrow alway just pushed me up, down always pushed me down and so on... I ultimately gave up on the solar system level because it was so big and empty with very few goals and no clear sense of direction. I felt lost and eventually drifted off into endless empty space without a way back home until I lost my last remaining energy... That sounded kind of sad :(
Dec 14 01:42:31	21m 05s	The Cave God	♥ 1	That was quite fun even though the gameplay wasn't all that engaging. The funny writing and the cute and polished sprite art made up for that! I had fun trying out the various objects and reading the god's reaction to them. I was quite surprised that he didn't appreciate the goat, though it kind of makes sense if you think about it haha. Some nice sound design would sure improve the game a lot.
Dec 14 02:07:19	24m 48s	Watching	♥ 1	I don't usually like to play text adventures, but this was quite fun - especially due to the visual effects, font changes, audio (I think there could have been some more audio but what was there was good) and small text bites. It was quite fun to read the game commenting on my choices (though my choices obviously didn't matter much) The scene in Jakes house was delightfully uncomfortable. I find it interesting how I got fewer and fewer choices towards the end. Almost like I was remote controlled. That went along with the narrative quite well!
Dec 14 02:37:34	30m 15s	YOU ARE FIRED!	♥ 3	Haha that was hilarious! The weird dialogue and the funny sounds when firing someone really elevated the game feel of this one! I also accidentally fired the wrong person a lot. I think that if you simply highlighted the person I'm about to fire, that issue would not be so big. I sometimes also hit space reflexively right after placing someone at a desk, firing them immediately as a result. I'm not quite sure why I had this reflex but it may be better if there was a dedicated place-at-desk-button so I don't accidentally fire people. Oh and I absolutely loved the music!
Dec 14 02:55:56	18m 22s	Welcome to the North Pole!	♥ 1	Aww that was so cute! I loved the faces on the snowballs and snowmen. The music was adorable too. Really nice mood on this one. It was very fun to play around with the snow, growing and splitting both felt satisfying, building specific snowmen was an interesting challenge. All in all, great submission! The gameplay reminded me of loco roco by the way. One way to give it even more character would be to give the snowballs some cute voices :D
Dec 14 03:17:47	21m 51s	Ropasquib	♥ 0	Wonderful visual design! The game does benefit from the sacrificial aspect a lot. It actually made it pretty hard. I couldn't beat the AI consistently, to be honest haha. Sounds were also very well made. Good job!
Dec 14 03:27:14	9m 27s	False God	♥ 1	I quite liked the harsh, relentless audiovisual style you have going here. Controls were a bit weird, like juggling all these slow bodyparts individually was kind of hard to pull off. I didn't really know how well I was doing at any time. the green bar filled up a bit at some point but I didn't get why. The yellow bar never filled up and I didn't understand that either haha. Oh and the hands with blood at the bottome... Well I don't know what they're for either :D The mood was pretty cool nontheless, even though it was hard to understand.
Dec 14 11:48:47	8h 21m	Reactor Overdrive	♥ 1	It's impressive that you managed to pull this off alone! There's an upgrade system, different enemy types, various strategies, visual effects... Cool stuff! I'm not sure I quite understood all the mechanics. I also felt a bit uneasy when going into the menu since the game was still going on and I couldn't see most of it. This may be better if the menu was slightly transparent...? The guns felt a bit frustrating to me since they always seemed to shoot everywhere except where my cursor was or where I wanted them to shoot :D Maybe I'm missing some crucial aspect of the combat mechanics to fully understand how they work. The music was pretty strange. Sounded a bit like music generated by a computer.
Dec 14 14:45:25	2h 56m	Jamming Dilemma	♥ 0	Haha, the whole game is a meta-game, love it! Lots of cool ideas that you have to throw away here but as they say, you have to kill your darlings. Good job!
Dec 14 18:40:53	3h 55m	upgrades at a price	♥ 1	Nice pixel art and visual effects! It's impressive how you made a game with character progression all alone in such a short amount of time. Checkpoint placement is pretty good, thank you for that! At the same time, I must say that this didn't really feel all that much like a metroidvania since I only ever got one fairly standard new ability: the double jump. And when I got the double jump, there wasn't even a notable trade-off so it felt kind of off with the theme. Generally the sacrifices felt more like trade-offs than like sacrifices. You could say, you sacrifice easier combat for an additional heart but that seems like a stretch, haha. It was still very enjoyable to play and I had fun exploring. I liked how the level changed when the traps were added. Made backtracking way more fun due to the added challenge. Good work!
Dec 14 22:46:30	4h 05m	Kill chickens for better art!	♥ 1	Wow that was surprisingly fun! Most levels didn't really pose a challenge, yet I still enjoyed just making patterns and seeing everything come together. I had trouble getting back to the menu at first too (when you're done it doesn't show the hotkey anymore so you don't know what it is and M is not really a typical menu-key). The music gave it an interesting mood. Felt pretty cool to me. I feel like the submission is just losely connected to the theme and the chicken-thing felt kind of tacked-on but that's fine, building patterns was still super fun and relaxing!
Dec 20 23:12:05	144h 25m	Colors of Your World	♥ 0	This is a beautiful game and I had a lot of fun playing it! The music was really good too. I felt that the theme wasn't all that strong mechanically since only a visual change occurs with each sacrifice. Gameplay felt top notch though and the graphics are really nicely drawn and animated. It got surprisingly hard but it felt like a good challenge all the way through. I appreciate that you allow space for jumping (In my country, y and z are swapped on the keyboard so it's frustrating when you can only jump with z.) but I think that it would be even better if you allowed jumping with the up arrow (especially since the up arrow is currently not in use) It was a pretty cool moment when I turned into a bird in the end :)
Dec 21 02:49:31	3h 37m	Sacrificio Inc.	♥ 1	Great presentation, animations, sprites, colour scheme, audio were all really nicely polished. Controls felt unresponsive due to the lack of real time feedback and because I had to click multiple times to move something further than one block. Levels got a bit repetitive quickly and I didn't really feel challenged most of the time. I think that I "got it" pretty early on and then the game didn't add anything new. There were some strange flickering issues on texts. I'm not sure why. I played it on a windows 10 PC. Your idea to change the timer to a move counter sounds like a good plan! The timer did nothing for me, personally ^^ Optimizing move count would be an interesting challenge though. Good luck with further development!
Dec 21 03:08:25	18m 54s	Path of (dis)abilities	♥ 0	The idea seemed pretty interesting to me and your thumbnail looked promising. However, I had some issues with how this game was balanced. Overall it felt like there wasn't a lot of strategy involved. I basically only ever did the thing that was obviously the best to do in each situation. The timer wasn't an issue either because it was super lenient. Because you could always just buy back abilities at the next store (and there was never a shortage of currency) the sacrifices didn't really feel like they mattered all that much. The abilities didn't feel distinct from each other. Mechanically they were all the same which made it less strategic as well. Since I had no way of knowing which abilities were required (as secondary abilities) in each level, I also felt like I couldn't really plan ahead and relied on random luck to get through to the next resting place. When slotting an ability, all the other abilities changed their position. That felt irritating and I wish that they all just had their fixed slots which are emptied once the ability is slotted or sacrificed. I actually liked your music. Sounds quite pleasant to me :) I hope my feedback makes sense to you and doesn't sound too harsh. Good luck!