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Feedback comments for LD44
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Finn Truman's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 30 18:25:21 | The Reapers Delight | ♥ 1 | I think you spent way too much time on art considering you only had 48 hours to make it. There's no incentive to leave the front of the door so a lot of the off-screen stuff is wasted. Some of that time could have gone to polishing the mechanics (I sometimes get stuck on nothing from left-to-right and vice versa). It was certainly a humorous setup, but there's not much else to it. | |
| Apr 30 18:36:26 | 11m 05s | Adepts of Virgil | ♥ 1 | It looks alright, but it's a bit flawed in design. It's literally impossible to get all the heretics to the altar because they operate on flock logic, and the paths are narrower than the group, so of course heretics are going to fall in. And there's no point to branching paths to try and lead me on a goose chase when I can move the camera independantly to the flock to find the altar. I also got stuck on a level because my last two heretics disappeared, but didn't count as dying so I still had some left being counted, but there weren't any. But, like I said, it looks nice! It's quite colourful considering it's in Hell! |
| Apr 30 18:46:27 | 10m 01s | Love, Death&Swords | ♥ 2 | It looks gorgeous! Ultimately though, I stopped playing out of frustration. Movement feels slidey, awkward and unresponsive and I had an enemy who didn't die even though he was on no health. It seems a bit easy since you can get back more health than you're paying between sacrifice stations, and once you've got the ranged abilities, what's to stop you from carpet bombing the enemies from afar? I may not have finished it, but I did like it because of the technical marvel of it. It looks impressive considering the time frame, it just ultimately falls flat from lack of polish. |
| Apr 30 19:03:03 | 16m 36s | Force of Nature | ♥ 3 | It's got some of the best presentation I've seen from LD, but balance wise, it is completely broken. Since upgrading a building to max will probably net you a health max increase, there's no reason not to do it since the upgrade will probably give you back the health you spent on it! You recover HP faster than enemies can take it away unless there's lots of them, I found myself never using the tree ability and mostly the sweep, rare the stomp. And there's a bug where if you die, go to the menu and start again, it keeps your progress. But I absolutely love the art! It's sooooooo colourful and the sound is also nice! |
| Apr 30 19:14:52 | 11m 49s | Choice of Life | ♥ 1 | The idea is a really good one. Sacrificing specific organs, and a different effect happens depending on which organ you sacrificed, is a really cool idea. But it's executed poorly. Sacrificing nerves makes you invisible? Unplayable. The sound design is also very annoying. |
| Apr 30 20:00:47 | 45m 55s | Money Is Life | ♥ 1 | It's a little boring since you're stuck in a loop of doing the same thing. Get up, water plants, plant some more if you have time, sleep, repeat. The plants grow slowly, which makes sense if the game was released comercially, but this is a game jam: I have the attention span of a gnat. I just don't think a farming game is a good choice for an LD. It needs extra things around the core mechanic so it's not the only thing you're doing. Stardew Valley lets you visit the town, talk to people, find goodies elsewhere, all so you have something to do while you wait for plants to grow. |
| Apr 30 20:19:16 | 18m 29s | RogueLife | ♥ 1 | This is certainly one of the best games I've played this LD. You had a style and stuck with it, and little things like the fish eye effect really bring that out. It's cathartic to see things explode, and I'm filled with little schoolgirl-like titters of glee when I see a golden barrel of health or a room with upgrades in it. I was very close to turning it off straight away however, because I got to the next level without upgrades because I didn't know there were any or what the teleporter was before I touched it. Once you've got the skills down and got plenty of upgrades, about all the game has up its sleeve is "open door, enemy straight away in your face, free hit". it needs something like a boss battle to really top it all off. Despite all that, I was playing for ages, so I must've really liked it! I gave you 4.5 Overall stars 😄 |
| Apr 30 20:51:24 | 32m 08s | Blood Money | ♥ 2 | I completed the second level and stopped playing because nothing was changing. Nor was it challenging. The flamethrower rofl stomps the enemies. There's no reason to buy upgrades. And with no sense of direction you're just walking around to find an enemy you haven't killed yet. |
| Apr 30 21:08:48 | 17m 24s | Dr. Ectomy | ♥ 1 | It's a little unintuitive that the organs drop to the bottom layer if there is nothing beneath them, or that you can't pick up bottom layer organs (I thought that was a bug at first), but the art style is beautiful! Very old timey! |
| May 1 09:58:02 | 12h 49m | Heart of the Grove | ♥ 0 | It's certainly well put together and looks very nice, but the grid is a bit of a mess. Tbh I don't think it even needs a grid at all. It's also pretty annoying not being able to tell the ents where to go. You can have some free ents on the other side of the island not reacting to enemies on the other, so you have to waste a few trees to build new ents. But I kept playing until the end because I liked it enough! I lasted 13 winters. |
| May 1 10:05:23 | 7m 21s | Bribery | ♥ 1 | The game severely suffers from lack of intuitiveness, and more than once I said "what just happened?". It's unclear what the shapes are meant to be, it's unclear that the shop takes away health maximum (at least, i think that's what it does), it's unclear when an enemy is near you (particularly the brown ones, because they blend in with the background and you can't see them in the dark), and even when I got to the room that said "Complete!" I wandered further into the room and was then hit by an enemy and killed. Why? I thought the game was complete? Some more play testing was necesarry too. The first few doors to the next room don't take health away, even though they say they do, and I had a white enemy hit me through a wall. |
| May 1 10:30:43 | 25m 20s | The Cult of the Morning Star | ♥ 2 | I certainly enjoyed this! Card games are hard to make, so you've pulled this off quite well! The choice of font is a bit questionable, there are some spelling mistakes, and it's not very clear what suspicion does, but I liked it enough to complete it and I had fun! |
| May 1 15:10:00 | 4h 39m | Danko | ♥ 0 | Will it certainly looks pretty, gameplay wise it controls a bit clunky. Your melee range is far too short, while it seems like you take contact damage from enemies when they are nowehere near you. |
| May 1 15:34:39 | 24m 39s | Your Pain is my Gain! | ♥ 0 | The use of the theme is very uninspired. Instead of losing HP, you lose money, but it functions exactly the same way. It's just a health display with a dollar sign on the end. Enemies spawn on top of you with no warning, there's no incentive to keep as much money as possible, and I beat level 1-2 and no other levels became available in the next room. The character looks nice, I like how his blinking is independant from his movements. I also like how colourful it is and how it's got a sort of Prison Architect style going on, but there just isn't anything to the gameplay. |
| May 1 16:34:59 | 1h 00m | Coinus Accumulus | ♥ 1 | This is quite impressive, tech wise. I liked the opening cutscene, and I like premise, the gameplay is just a bit frustrating. Your hitbox is way too narrow, and wrestling with the movement physics makes the game feel more like a loosing battle. The game was hard enough with all that, so throwing in enemies on top of that makes it a bit too frustrating to be very fun. I turned the game off because I was fed up wrestling with the controls, and because I was annoyed with the short, repeating music, but I'm going to rate you favourably! |
| May 4 09:24:57 | 64h 49m | Space Farmer | ♥ 0 | The game is enticing, but very very poorly balanced. Extra saplings barely ever drop from trees, random lightning strikes happen way too frequently and are just an arbitrary "you lose that tree because RNG", and considering how slowly wood is being produced, rent is way too high, and to top it off you have the mafia sucking away more pennies. I also had issues with the clicking, as it targetted a tree I blatantly wasn't cliking on, destroying that tree's progress. While unoriginal, it's a nice idea for a farming game. I like how fast paced it is, which it should be for a jam, but the balancing is not good. |
| May 4 09:33:17 | 8m 20s | Paycheck to Paycheck | ♥ 2 | As cool as an idea as this is, it suffers from lack of intuitiveness. What's the point in job proximity if lack of transportation makes you late anyway? When does payment come in? How much does overtime affect your health? How much does overtime increase income? Wtf just killed me, I was healthy! |
| May 4 09:38:06 | 4m 49s | Selloutpunk | ♥ 0 | Unplayable. Controlling hands independantly with keys is a terrible idea. Can't even pick things up. |
| May 4 09:51:55 | 13m 49s | Blood and goods | ♥ 2 | It's truly gorgeous and well put together, but I ultimately got fed up because the random enemy generation is very unfair. It's not uncommon for the first enemy to be a dinky rat that for some reason deals six damage, and you can find enemies with 20-something stupid health before you've seen your first shop. It's almost as if the enemies use the same RNG stat rules throughout the whole game with no scaling. I also don't like how if you miss a key, you take damage. The very nature of this mechanic encourages fast key pressing and key misses are bound to happen. And missing a key already carries the punishment of not dealing damage (since every damage point is essential), and letting the enemy get that little bit closer to dealing damage to you anyway. Despite that, I played it through a few times because I enjoyed it, but ultimately turned if off because of these issues. |
| May 4 10:11:28 | 19m 33s | Dear Substance of Kin | ♥ 1 | It's biggest strength is its own weakness. It is a wonderful case of showing without telling, but because of that, there is a sense of "wait, what am I supposed to do now?". |
| May 12 14:35:19 | 196h 23m | Populistic Optimization by Genetic Selection | ♥ 1 | This is a very good idea. A very good idea that relies on communication of information. And that's where it falters. The sliders mean diddly squat, for two reasons: is higher better or worse (Which direction even is higher?)? The sliders tell you that citizen's value for that stat relative to the other citizens, but it doesn't tell you what their true value is. I had a lot of citizens that seemed to be murdering other citizens even though their law-abidding stat was all the way to the right; I suspect this is because even though they were the most law-abidding, their true value was still very low. What does the productivity stat even do? How does fertility work? It makes citizens produce offspring more often, but what does that actually mean? 10% more often? 100% more often? Law-abidding is just annoying. A random chance for a citizen to murder another. Randomness is good for the stat generation, but not good if you need to actually rely on it. I need to rely on my best citizens not getting killed just because I rolled a 1 on a dice. It's difficult to tell how close a citizen is to death. I know they fade out to black, but if you're min-maxing, it would be nice to see exactly how close they are. |