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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Evan Minto's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 1 06:25:13 | Is it a drag? | ♥ 1 | Took me two or three tries to figure out how to actually do anything, but once I did I ended up getting pretty into this. The big issue is that there aren't clear perceived affordances on anything. I had no way of knowing that I could pick up the cards, and even when I did there was no indication of where I was supposed to drop them. Something as simple as circling the drop area or graying everything else out would have been enough to indicate what I was supposed to do. I like the two-step choices you have to make: first to unlock the cards, then to change the probabilities. I found myself stopping to strategize about the optimal cards to use at each step. That said, once I figured out the patterns it became a bit too easy to play the game on autopilot. And I appreciate the philosophical bent to this. Using time and support to unlock trauma is a nice touch, and it was interesting to try the game starting with a lot of cards vs. a little to see the difference in difficulty. Walking a mile in another person's shoes, you know? | |
| May 1 06:35:24 | 10m 11s | Welcome | ♥ 2 | This is a fun premise but I've gotta be honest, the platforming needs a lot of fine-tuning. The jump is the most important part and it's way too floaty in this game. It feels like you're accelerating into the jump when it should be basically instantaneous or close to it. I constantly died because the character wouldn't start jumping fast enough or would float down to the ground while I was trying to start up another jump. Still, the risk/reward dynamic of deciding whether to go back for coins when they're about to be swallowed by the spikes is great and I'd be interested in a more ambitious and polished version of this premise. |
| May 3 05:36:48 | 47h 01m | HWEY Heist | ♥ 2 | The platformer level design is pretty fun — I liked getting a powered up jump and backtracking to find new areas I could navigate to. But the jumping and shooting mechanics could use a lot of polish. As someone already mentioned, the jump needs some acceleration. Right now it appears to move at a constant speed without any gravity which feels unnatural and hard to control. The shooting also feels a bit clunky, partially because it seems to interfere with the jumping sometimes (I can't figure out exactly what's wrong, but jumping up and down and shooting the whole time seemed more difficult than it should have been). Also, I imagine the walking through the walls bit was intentional, but it feels a little like a bug. If there are going to be extensive "secret tunnel" sections like that, I think there should be some kind of indicator for when you can actually walk through a wall/floor. |
| May 3 06:24:09 | 47m 21s | PigsyBanksy | ♥ 0 | Really really like the way different aspects of the game all pull from the same mechanics: more coins means more weight but shooting more reduces your number of coins. The pig is really cute too, and I like the animations when it moves forward and back. Great job! If I have any criticism it's that the floatiness is a little too hard to control for me to play this for long periods. It feels like even if I got pretty good at it I'd still be ramming into things by accident all the time. |
| May 6 07:16:17 | 72h 52m | Mint Sprint | ♥ 0 | Great puzzle design, definitely had me scratching my head for a lot of them but I eventually got to the end. I agree with others who said that level 3 has a big difficulty spike. It feels like it belongs closer to the end. The reset and undo functionality was super useful, but I did box conveyor belts into corners way too often which made me feel like maybe there should be a a more graceful way to fix that (pulling rather than pushing would break the puzzle design I imagine but still...). Sometimes I did push things I didn't mean to push, partially because the blocks are locked to the grid but the character isn't, so sometimes I thought I was going to push one thing when I ended up pushing something else. Anyway, the character design is really cute and nicely drawn and honestly that's what sold me on it initially! |
| May 6 07:28:16 | 11m 59s | cut'n'align | ♥ 1 | Well done, I had a lot of fun with this. You obviously take a lot of inspiration from existing falling block games, but the twist is just unique enough to feel fresh. I found myself cutting the first block from the bottom most of the time, but I definitely figured out some cool strategies that only worked if I cut larger chunks to set up combos. The music really helps make the experience too, as does the nice shake effect when the level gets really full. |
| May 9 05:26:35 | 69h 58m | Ripple | ♥ 0 | Love the concept, art, and music. The puzzles where you have to switch back and forth to toggle things were great and I wish the game were more centered around that. The ability to sacrifice myself for a powerup was interesting but since you said the levels are solvable without it I didn't really find that to be an interesting strategy (levels were either too hard without the powerup or way too easy with it). I also originally assumed that to beat a level I needed to get both characters to their respective doors, but apparently not. I'd encourage you to try a version with that as the constraint, I could see it making for some neat puzzles. Basic platformer mechanics-wise, the jump feels a bit too quick and hard to control at times, and I would love some slightly more forgiving collision detection and maybe a late-jumping frame or two. A lot of times it felt like I needed to do a running jump and take off in the one frame where the player is on the edge of the platform. Finally, there is a segment where you drop down a pit but some pits kill you and others have floors. This was pretty confusing since I had no way of telling the two apart. |
| May 9 05:33:23 | 6m 48s | Mr. Bees Wild Adventure: Buzz Off | ♥ 1 | Whoa man the wasps are a little too fast, I felt like I couldn't catch them and shoot them fast enough! Also would be great to have some indications of how many bees I have left and how much longer left until the finish line. It's also relatively samey all the way through, so different kinds of platforms or enemies would help add some strategy and more interesting choices for the player to make. I love the idea of spending your own life to shoot bullets (we considered doing that for our own game at one point as a matter of fact)! |
| May 9 05:49:38 | 16m 15s | For A Bike | ♥ 1 | Neat idea but it definitely feels pretty one-note right now. I really wish I could stack the upgrades and that I knew how many more souls I needed, as others mentioned. And yeah, the spawn rate is too low, I found myself milling around a lot. |
| May 9 06:24:05 | 34m 27s | One shot | ♥ 0 | I don't see enough narrative games in LD, good job! I like the idea of having a bomb you can detonate at any time and calculating whether you want to do it now or wait it out. It has a nice tension to it. I like the writing but parts feel a little rushed (there are typos and some sentences are awkwardly phrased, etc.). That makes sense in a jam game, I imagine you would do another pass on it for a post-jam version. I was having a little bit of trouble understanding the bomber's political philosophy. The intro kind of paints them as an anti-capitalist, but then it seems like maybe it's just nihilism, since they seem to be angry at "the man" in general and don't have any idea of what society looks like after the bombs go off. I wanted to learn more about that but maybe the lack of coherent ideology was the point. |
| May 10 04:54:08 | 22h 30m | Spirit Seekers | ♥ 0 | I really wanted to like this since the visual style is awesome (especially the light effect that only lets you see things near you) and the concept seems really fun, but like others have said the platforming mechanics feel kind of broken. I kept getting stuck to walls or finding myself unable to jump when I expected to be able to. |
| May 10 05:23:27 | 29m 19s | MassTransfer | ♥ 1 | Cool idea that I’d be interested in seeing fleshed out with more art and music and such. Took me a little while to figure out how it all worked, largely because the controls and camera are really finicky. Because I have to command the units in real time, the camera caused quite an issue as I'd always end up scrolled away from my units. |
| May 10 05:31:35 | 8m 08s | The Demons Deal | ♥ 1 | As others have said, this is really solid for just two weeks of Unity practice! You probably figured this already, but there's not much challenge in the game right now — the creatures don't do damage or try to run away for example. It would also be nice to have the hitbox for the vacuum be clearer since I couldn't always figure out if it was working. |
| May 10 06:06:39 | 35m 04s | Soul Tycoon | ♥ 0 | I finished at Day 26 with 16,744,831 extra souls after maxing out all the properties. Phew, that was addictive! You definitely nailed that feeling of accumulation you get from clicker and tycoon games. I had hoped there would be more strategy to it, but it seemed like the building types all just got me more souls rather than having any special effects. Also props on the art. The game has got a fair amount of personality and mood to it. Music would have really helped in that regard. |
| May 10 06:13:46 | 7m 07s | Blood Bot | ♥ 1 | This is pretty fun! I like the balance between the two types of enemies, ranged and melee. And the trade-off between bullets, health, and the fact that enemies drop more blood makes for some good split-second strategizing. Something I want to call out is that despite the art style and color scheme in general being kind of rudimentary, there are some very cool little animations on the enemy attacks. Nice work. As an animator myself I always appreciate that kind of polish. |
| May 10 06:28:44 | 14m 58s | Fehu | ♥ 0 | Excellent work! Beautiful visual style (the smoke/particle effects and fisheye effect really helped sell it!) and great music and audio cues. The puzzles were relatively easy but still kind of clever and fun to work through, especially in the later sections when I had to combine the "overworld" navigation and the puzzle navigation. I had a lot of fun with this. Great job! |
| May 10 06:36:27 | 7m 43s | Shoot And Kill | ♥ 2 | The core shooting mechanics are fast and fun but the trading health for upgrades thing didn't work for me — the guns appear to all be identical. It also would have been nice to have a more steady increase in the number of enemies rather than them all swarming at once, and some way of bounding the player so they don't run off-screen. |
| May 10 06:44:33 | 8m 06s | MONEYMONEYMONEY | ♥ 0 | Oh no I didn't come here to do math! This is super simple but it's pretty solid. Feels like it would work well as an educational game for kids. However, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of a cultural disconnect here for anyone not used to Euros. I'm from the US and had to look up the denominations on Wikipedia to figure out whether the red or the blue circles were for cents. Some clearer labeling could have fixed that. |
| May 10 07:34:17 | 49m 44s | Signal | ♥ 2 | I'm very impressed by the amount of content in this and the level of audiovisual polish (great music!) I got pretty far before I had to put it down. Loved the Metroidvania backtracking to discover new areas, but sometimes it was hard to tell different areas apart since a lot of rooms look almost exactly the same. And I agree with the comment about taking damage from off-screen enemies. The same goes for walking into a room and face-first into an enemy whose walk cycle has them right up against the entrance at the moment I walk in. That was definitely a bit frustrating. |
| May 10 23:12:31 | 15h 38m | 15 Minutes to Live | ♥ 0 | The trading quest-style mechanic was a fun way of touring the game world and I really appreciate that you managed to include a bunch of little side characters and stories alongside the main one. It gives the game a surprising amount of life (har) for how simple it is otherwise. This was a really solid, entertaining little game, great job! I agree with others who say the music is a bit repetitive. Different music for different locations would have mixed things up nicely. |
| May 10 23:41:23 | 28m 52s | Life Stock Exchange | ♥ 0 | Oh god this is so stressful, no wonder I don't work on Wall Street. Great job. The intro/outro bits are pretty funny and the actual stock trading mechanic is nicely polished (lots of great little details line the lines showing min/max values and the horizontal line across the graph). I also appreciate the (intentional? unintentional?) critique of both finance and for-profit medicine in here. Literally trading your life on the stock market is not all that different from how this stuff works in real life 😬 I second the point about the percentages not affecting buy. That made it impossible for me to accumulate money entirely through small sales, which I was originally planning on doing. |
| May 11 22:08:31 | 22h 27m | Choose your life | ♥ 1 | I like the concept and the interface a lot (the arrow keys and the roving grid make things super easy to navigate). Unfortunately I couldn't really figure out how to get a good ending, partially because it was difficult to figure out what each choice actually does. |
| May 11 22:28:14 | 19m 43s | Daybreak Inn | ♥ 1 | I really like this! I haven't played a game where you give quests to RPG adventurers from the safety of your tavern before. There's a nice mix of competing tasks throughout: placing adventurers in seats, picking out quests for them, making sure they're healed up and leveling up enough. I was very impressed with the art style and music, but also the level of detail that went into the characters and quests. The world feels surprisingly alive for a jam game. Great job. |