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Feedback comments for LD44
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Random-storykeeper's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 30 03:36:51 | Sofa Kingdom: Change of Thrones | ♥ 3 | The faces are terrifying as they are hilarious. I like the idea of the player being a wallet and coins that make for your weapon and life force. I'm a huge fan of puns, and these ones hit the spot. 😂 I played through all the levels except I got stuck on the boss, which I think might be the last one? The biggest issue I was having was understanding how the combat system worked. Sure you can't really take damage or die, but that became a detriment when I was at the boss, where I take it the only way to win is to kill it, and I just wasn't able to do anything. I would shoot coins, but I wasn't able to collect any of them, and the ground pound only seemed to work inconsistently and was overall very frustrating. The art is very humourous, although I think the sprites kind of look way more detailed than the backgrounds? My favourite sprites are the evil dust bunnies. The music also followed a goofy tone; I liked the little vinyl pops in the title screen theme. Improvisational jazz was not quite what I was expecting with this sort of weird and wacky idea, but it was very welcome in my ears. Overall, it was quite fun to just navigate around the area. Despite the levels being maze-like, I was never really lost, which is good. I just wish the game's main mechanics were more consistent. | |
| Apr 30 05:34:43 | 1h 57m | Change Lives | ♥ 0 | lmao well you all definitely thought out your title very thoroughly, so props for that 👏 I beat the entire game and I have to say, I really enjoyed playing it. It took a bit to understand the idea, but once I did, it was neat seeing all the different ways you could beat a level. Having to lose lives as part of the puzzle felt well integrated into the game and it was very satisfying to beat. I also really liked the use of the bars as a platform and, in later levels, a movable object. In level 6, I was able to move off screen to the left, and I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, since you basically just get stuck once you go off screen. It's not a huge deal since I can restart, but given that the other levels had walls within the boundaries of the game window, it felt weird that that one level was open ended. I have to say, I really liked the solution to this level. It was really creative. The graphics are adorable, and the palette is pleasant to look at. While it's cool that you see the tail of the coin as it moves left or right, I have to say, it didn't make a whole lot of sense why the coin would suddenly turn its back to you as you move? It's a small nitpick; I just found it quirky is all. 😛 Overall, I finished the game feeling satisfied that I played it. Nice job. 😁 |
| Apr 30 17:37:50 | 12h 03m | Catch all the coins | ♥ 1 | AH NO I got a score of 22 😩 This was fun! It took a while for me to understand the difficulty behind it, but once I noticed the timer getting shorter and shorter, I realized that a simple concept was getting quite hard to keep up with. The controls felt responsive and fluid, though I had a lot of trouble getting coins that were a diagonal from my current position. It often felt like I couldn't make very short movements and kept circling around a single coin trying to get it. Other than that, I liked zipping around the small area, trying to collect all the coins back and forth. You picked some good sounds that work with the game. Perhaps adding a couple more different coin sounds of varying tones and randomizing those sound effects would add some extra flair in the audio department. It was a quick and easy to learn experience overall, though. |
| Apr 30 18:04:44 | 26m 54s | World War III: Ghost War | ♥ 1 | I found this game incredibly frustrating until I re-read the instructions and realized you can recharge your health. 😂 (At first, I thought you had to conserve your health and you had to strategize which enemies you had to shoot and which ones you'd skip.) Knowing the special ability compensated for some of the more frustrating behaviours in this game, particularly regarding the enemy collision. It seems like I only sometimes lose a sliver of health when I run into a green ghost face-to-face, while other times, I almost drain what seems like half of my health. Just being near an enemy often inhibits my ability to jump, and my collision with an enemy on a ledge would cause it to walk off said ledge in a straight horizontal line and sometimes twitch a bunch of times before walking back and resuming its normal pattern. It was quite funny to watch. 😂 Another issue I had with the game is that the controls are kind of unintuitive. I found myself messing up a lot when I first played because I kept positioning my finger over the W key to jump when you really had to use the space bar, which I believe works better for games with mouse controls. That being said, I think it also would have been ideal for the shoot key to be mapped to a keyboard key rather than using the mouse, since the game doesn't have positional shooting. All keyboard controls would work better for this sort of game and feel more comfortable all around. But despite my quips, I think holding out to the end of this game was worth it. That final boss was terrifying! 🤣 |
| May 2 00:27:17 | 30h 22m | Dryad's Forest | ♥ 0 | Oh gosh, that game over image is freaky. I walked out with a score of 41298. This was overall a pretty solid entry, pretty easy to pick up and understand. The pixel art looked a little strange with the attackers, but overall, the gameplay was fun. I like how the music changes once you start getting down to a low number of trees; the ominous tune was quite nice. The mechanic was very well tied to the theme; I like how you regain life by attacking, your life transfers to the trees and you spent portions of your life to get familiars that help you protect the trees. Having less trees makes it easier to protect the few, but is more prone to attacks. Overall, the gameplay and use of the theme stood out to me the most about this game. There were times when I got stuck in the trees, but nothing I couldn't wiggle my way out of. |
| May 7 03:52:13 | 123h 24m | Bet on it | ♥ 0 | I played until I got this message: Bet on it - Fatal crash error.png I'm not really sure what state the game was when I got it. To be honest, I didn't really understand a whole lot of what I was doing. 😅 Maybe it's because I wasn't familiar with how to play Poker at all, and the game was more designed in mind for people who do know Poker? I believe I got to almost 200 years in a bet before the game crashed on me. As for the game itself, I do like how I get *An Untitled Story* vibes. Everything from the art to the music, even just the gambling concept itself made me think of AUS' Blackjack mini game. I like the idea of having your opponents converse with each other in between turns while you remain the silent protagonist. The dialogue did start to get a bit repetitive as the game went on, and it was hard to tell when it was time to take my turn again. The music worked for the kind of game that this is, given its art and presentation. It set just the right tone, too. I think, overall, I was just confused on how to enjoy this game to its full potential. It was an interesting atmosphere in general, though. |
| May 20 23:32:33 | 331h 40m | Sacrifice | ♥ 1 | Hearing the monsters still attacking you after you die is pretty terrifying. 😰 I love it. This was a very simple but well executed take on the theme. I always like the approach where being more powerful also makes you more vulnerable to dying easily. The enemies looked pretty terrifying, and their sound effects were creepy. They were definitely my favourite part about the game. I quite enjoyed the combat; using the mouse made it easy to precisely deliver blows, which made it all the more fun to get behind an enemy and completely destroy it. The music was also really cool; I like the level of intensity and the balance between the percussive and more quiet moments. Overall, it was quite easy to pick up and understand how the play this game, and I had a good time. |
| May 20 23:55:29 | 22m 56s | Ephemera | ♥ 1 | Got the download, enjoyed staring at a black void of nothingness while listening to some good music 10/10 Seriously, that happened with the last entry of yours I tried to launch. I guess my computer can't handle your amazing visuals or something. So I watched the YouTube video to see what I missed. I guess the reason why that one isn't preferred is because some of the lyrics don't quite sync up with when they actually appear in the song? Regardless, everything was very...particle-y. I liked the fuzziness towards the end; it did match up with the way the song built up to the end. It was cool. |
| May 21 00:47:59 | 52m 30s | Inflate Me to the Moon | ♥ 0 | I'm really curious how well this will play on mobile, so I might download the iOS version at some point. I did play the original Jam version, and it was giving a real workout on my wrists. Nothing too demanding, though. The biggest issue for me was that the graphics didn't quite match up with what the rest of the game was going for. The gameplay, the silly references in the music, the narrator...these elements seem to match up with an over-the-top cartoon style rather than the pastel colours and cutesy art. I like the graphics and the visual references, but I don't think they were an appropriate style for this sort of game, especially going all out with the arcade sounds and the narrator. As a comparison, this game uses a similar art style to another of your titles, "Bath Time", and to me, that works because the rest of the game's elements and the humour are kept "cute". So all these elements work together and create a cohesive product. I didn't feel that way about Inflate Me to the Moon. There's too many over-the-top elements that make it feel very cartoonish and not cute. To see that similar art style being inserted into a game like this felt really off. Actually, looking at the soundtrack, it seems like the game was going for 16-bit references in its audio; I'm wondering if referencing 16-bit graphics would have made it mesh a little better? If they were already referencing 16-bit graphics, I wish I could have seen a more clear connection. The concept was interesting; I do like the play on the word "inflation" here. I thought the scene with the bird being launched into the sky was nice, and the progression of hearing more of the audio as the rounds progress leaves more sense of anticipation as I reach the final round. It was cool hearing references in that particular cutscene to "moon" related tracks. The combination between the Duck Tales moon theme and that motif from To the Moon was particularly satisfying. I couldn't quite catch all the references, but looking at them on the Bandcamp page confirmed some of the references I had suspicions of. I wasn't super hot on this game, but I'm glad it appeals to other people. It just wasn't working for me in terms of cohesiveness, if I have to be honest. |
