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Local Minimum

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Local Minimum's comment
Oct 9 17:34:49		Survivor Slots	♥ 2	I got off on day 14! Really good game with the balance of randomness and strategy. Also liked the detail that you needed those mice to get rid of the tigers (which I noticed after eliminating them and having 4 tigers all the sudden taking up space). I like that trade-off strategizing though! I had a bit of an issue that the arrows having the opposite meaning to what I expected, so I wasted a few critical actions here and there because I see them as the direction you want to spin the wheel. I also built a rap trap before day 3 because I could before I realized they had no use until after you get rats. So perhaps not allowing the player to waste actions they have no use for would be a good idea. For the meaning of the arrows, I'm not sure short of allowing an undo of one step. The graphics was nice and it was really easy to get into the game. The interactive tutorial was a really nice touch too, but I happened to start the game on step 2 before reading step three... oops! By I guess my 🎰 skills were all right. The (in order) bit on the last got me a bit scared because I got worried the icons had to be placed left to right in that sequence just as I had gotten the light bulb in place. I was happy to note there was no particular requirement on it.
Oct 9 17:51:23	16m 34s	The Many Curses of Kepi	♥ 2	I really loved the cat animation and the clean color scheme! The wall jumping felt really cat-like too. The main issue seems to be the initial sluggishness of movement and limiting the maximum speeds, because boy-howdy did that cat go fast sometimes. Cats are lazy beasts and they can be very purposefully slow , but if they decide they need to jump they don't need no time getting started, they pretty much are at max speed at once. At least that's what my cat currently sleeping in my lap would say. So a few tweaks to the speed curves and maybe making the cat moody so that it just sits down and cleans itself after having sprinted a while. That would be awesome. Congratulations on getting to a playable state for the first time! 🐈
Oct 9 18:02:36	11m 13s	gaarden	♥ 1	🥚 ⛰️ 🏠 🌲 !! I wanted this to just keep growing, expanding and becoming more finding more and larger things! A really great feeling in this game. I liked making mountains most, because the sound there was very nice. The egg was also really nice sound but it didn't feel like I could do much to it. So besides perhaps hiding the smaller things and focusing on a larger scale once the world had grown a bit, the most important improvement to me would have been if the game also felt like it was building up more and more sounds, becoming a bit of a musical instrument. But then the sounds would have needed to be longer or been repeating or echoing a while.
Oct 9 18:04:13	1m 37s	The Trader	♥ 0	No link 😢 ?
Oct 9 18:35:51	31m 38s	Hide It / Break It / Pay It	♥ 2	Very fancy entry! Both in the setting, but also in the detail to menus, text and UI and world objects. I spent the majority of the time myself hiding in the pool before I found a way out. Though the premise was simple it wasn't that clear what was valuable. Were the chairs around the dining table valuable? They kind of looked expensive. Or maybe they were just meant to be used to break things. If breaking was your strategy. The game said I trashed a whole lot of things but I blame it on the garden hose, because as soon as I picked it up it went bananas glitching out with insane speeds clipping through walls and such. So that could probably be a strategy for getting a good score. I also think the game could have had more than two minutes to it as it takes some time just getting used to the movement. And maybe simplify the controls to always be running, since that makes more sense in the context of the game.
Oct 9 18:50:08	14m 17s	Moonlight Kingdom	♥ 4	I liked the art, the music and the voice acting was a rare touch very seldom seen in LD games!
Oct 9 18:54:05	3m 57s	flue	♥ 1	I almost missed the pdf for the pain text because the plain text ended up as first option on itch! And while it contained the same humor, I think the more personal touch of the illustrated version elevated it several notches. It would also have been fun if it was made in style of a card-game and card-game instructions you might find in a store. I'm a bit at a loss as to how to properly rate this, but I do enjoy the absurdity of it.
Oct 9 19:01:37	7m 32s	Rubber Duck Genesis	♥ 1	I demand you make more! I want to see where you take this. The sound and dramatic design was really great in each of the little episodes, but it needed more to build a general story arch (where I mean story very loosely). It felt like there was a lot of power in the pieces you put forward together, but as a total experience it didn't fully get there. I really enjoyed it though!
Oct 9 19:12:58	11m 21s	While you're here	♥ 3	I enjoyed walking around and discovering the story of the main character. The house felt very real, as it might have been someone's and that is quite a feat for the time that LD affords. I almost gave up on the game on the first inspection because using right mouse button as only way to get out of the inspection seems very unusual. I would suggest a hint in game on that or allowing revisiting inspections and having any button exit inspection. Well made game!
Oct 10 18:31:28	23h 18m	Draw Your Own Adventure!	♥ 2	kiss.png Very interesting entry. I really liked how the color flowed out when drawing. It had a very nice feel. Also got very happy with the twist for the rogue as I happened to make it the correct character. As someone before pointed out, I would have wished for a less gendered story to make it perfect. There was also some cases where it felt like the z-order of the drawn sprites and the sticks weren't matching when many were in the same spot. Another graphical detail was that they perhaps were too much in the same place sometimes and that the most important character in the group didn't get put on top. But those are just minor tweaks. Overall a very very well made game!
Oct 10 18:53:11	21m 43s	When Nothing Came	♥ 2	A lovely feeling, wonderful art, nice music to go with it. I never really understood if I was solving some puzzles or if it was just enough clicking and poking around that got me further. I don't mind that too much though as it was a very interesting beautiful experience.
Oct 10 19:13:12	20m 01s	Enlightened	♥ 1	I enjoyed playing this entry. For a while at the start I was confused because I hadn't read any instructions and I would have guessed at least arrow keys would have worked too, not only WASD. A neat little experience as a whole.
Oct 10 19:39:58	26m 46s	A Merchant's Adventure	♥ 1	I was confused for a while, I thought the first option at start was the easiest and I just kept getting nowhere. When I figured that out and got to play some more of the game it was quite nice. I felt a bit at the mercy of whatever the cards were going to give me, but maybe I just didn't get some of the strategy. It also felt a bit unfair that the game ended when I got to 0 even if I by getting to zero got enough resources (that according to the game wouldn't cost me any more) that would have allowed me to sell and gain back some coins.
Oct 11 22:05:07	26h 25m	Genesis 1 (God Simulator Procedually Generated)	♥ 1	genesis.png A very nice genesis! Lovely experimental game. The dropdowns were a bit glitchy but nothing really that bugged me greatly. Good work. I couldn't figure out where the screenshot ended up so I took my own.
Oct 12 07:50:39	9h 45m	Memoirs Found in a	♥ 1	Great style and mood. I feel I got stuck in the church, but had a fun time walking around it. Very atmospheric. One thing that for me made the navigation harder than it needed to be was that I couldn't use A/D to move laterally.
Oct 12 08:35:03	44m 24s	Pandorama	♥ 1	Really well made game. Interesting to both use your thin dimension as a defense but also the wide dimension of the enemies to have an easier time hitting them. Also a fun challenge that the projectiles moved so slowly that you had to lead the aim quite a lot to hit them. Very well made and stylish. First time I played I survived for quite a while and that was because even if I moved around quite a lot I never found the add UI box. So the game got a little boring after a while. Next time I did find it and then a bunch of other boxes after that which made it quite hard instead. It's a bit hard to figure a way to help the player without also breaking the premise of starting with nothing. But perhaps the game world could have been a little smaller in the beginning and grown to become larger the more populated it became and the more tools the user has at their disposal to navigate the world.
Oct 12 08:43:03	8m 00s	MLHA	♥ 1	Fantastic visual style, and audio to make a great mood. Interesting interaction to use scroll as move, it had a very tactile feeling but I do think that, at least with my scroll settings that the animations/transitions were a little too short and the fading in of things too abrupt for the general feeling of the game. I had to carefully scroll myself forward and I still felt that many things happened too suddenly compared to what I think they wanted to happen.
Oct 12 08:49:20	6m 17s	ghosts with guns	♥ 0	I'm sorry, I tried to start a two player game and I think I did because there were two players there but it seemed like non of my keys I had bound did anything?
Oct 12 08:56:52	7m 32s	Naked Guy	♥ 1	I got a couple of levels in, but it was quite hard with the wonky physics (friction on lateral sides making you stick to platforms, though that also helped sometimes because you could wall jump that way). I also think you should consider increasing the gravity to make it behave more like most platformers. I enjoyed it though, and the corporate slogans felt very authentic!
Oct 12 09:41:01	44m 09s	Ball of Duty: Special Drops	♥ 2	I really liked running it on 10x speed when all upgrades were in place. What a mayhem! I was intuitive and easy to get started. It took me a little while to figure out the speed multiplier and in the beginning when not much was happening it would have been nice to speed things up. I thought it was just an indicator for the score multiplication first and only clicked it when I got upset that it didn't change as I upgraded the multiplier. My computer wasn't struggling with the web version, but I can imagine it could become an issue. Well done.
Oct 12 09:50:50	9m 49s	SNEN - Start with Nothing, End with Nothing	♥ 1	Cute game. I much liked how the character got happy as it filled itself up. My main issue was that half of the time when I pressed a direction I moved two tiles rather than one. I think this might be because you track if the button is down, not if the button was pressed. The former is OK and can be nice if there's a limit on the speed that it registers to about a half second or so, but now I almost destroyed my chances to solve the puzzles several times because of this.
Oct 12 10:02:28	11m 38s	Prison Escape	♥ 1	This game was hard! I think part of it was that the collision boxes for the dangers were all too large. Even if they were the exact outline of, say the fire, the expectation from this type of game is that it should be a little more forgiving than that. It also felt a bit unfair because the game reset me right away to the starting position and that way I didn't see or feel that I had actually hit anything. I was about to even give up on the first fire, because there was no way to jump over it, until I finally after 10 or more attempts discovered that there was a double jump. So that could have been more clear and it should probably not have been needed to double jump to get past the first obstacle, and if you didn't want to put more text in the game the obstacle should make it clear that there was no way to jump over it without a double jump. Now the jump length was such that it seemed almost possible to make it both to the platform and directly over the fire. So both those things kind of said that there's no double jump, you should be able to do this in a single extremely well timed jump. But don't take this long paragraph as me being overly negative, just some tips. An important thing though, you submitted this as a Compo game, and the rules state that you must supply the source code, so you should probably upload that. Congratulations on your first LD game!
Oct 19 12:10:03	170h 07m	Nocero	♥ 0	Very well made little game. It took me a little while to get used to it and the +40% IP bit kind of confused me because I though that it was some passive generation of IP. I didn't quite get to an end, I got a few fights in and had learnt three or four attacks but then I ran out of stats. Because as far as I understood the game you get IP from defeating enemies and the other two stats from sucking statues? First time I played I tried to be sneaky and avoid all fights and got pretty far, was just about to reach the third statue but then a fight triggered and I had no attack that could hurt the enemy so I had to let it play out before the game restarted. So perhaps there should be some sort of restart/surrender option too.
Oct 19 12:26:17	16m 14s	Lucifer's Rise	♥ 0	I played the v1.0 version as the others seemed to have too much fixes beyond what the rules allows and most of my concerns seems to have been addressed. I did however only discover two levels, so if there were more, it might need to be made clearer in the game how to find them. As the character was quite hard to control in the first version and the collision with enemy a bit too strict and sudden, I almost ran out of coins completely and also on my second attempt I felt like not re-spawning the coins made it feel like a chore to run back and forth between the shops, so I would suggest having coins come back at some rate so there's still some fun and reward in traveling the distance between the shops. It was a cute game though!
Oct 19 12:41:32	15m 15s	Super Goat Life	♥ 3	I really enjoyed how well the music fit the game. And it was quite fun running around. I never found the helmet though, and that made me a bit sad, otherwise I had the running boots and the cape so I think I got most of it. Perhaps, since the power ups were a bit discrete it would have been nice with a 6th goat sense that would help the player navigate to them should the player, like me, be a bit lost. It was a ton of graphics you managed to get done in a very short time! Very well made.
Oct 19 12:50:36	9m 04s	We Are The N-O-T-H-I-N-G	♥ 0	I like the idea with the nothing bubbles as weapons and it would really have been interesting to see how you were planning to have that work.
Oct 19 13:05:32	14m 56s	A Ghost's Tale	♥ 0	Well made graphics and audio indeed. I walked around the first area shining lights and got some extra text to trigger once, but I honestly wasn't sure of what I was supposed to do or how to progress into the veiled areas around me that obviously had things in them. So perhaps scaling down the complexity of what the player encounters at start and making it initially more obvious what is the path forward and when the player has learned how to play the game, you can make it more vague and challenging.
Oct 20 09:43:48	20h 38m	Travel With Spaghetti	♥ 0	I had a bit of an issue with the time it took for the spaghetti throw to execute, I think it could have been made a bit easier by having it happen faster and also indicating clearly when you had a new spaghetti ready to throw. The music was fun and it was kind of interesting jumping around, but I really didn't understand if I was progressing or even walking in the correct direction, so reducing the complexity, perhaps making smaller level with less things to learn at once would have made it easier to get a hang of. Interesting game though.
Oct 20 09:53:40	9m 52s	The Library	♥ 0	I don't quite think I understood the puzzles, but maybe I wasn't patient enough. I liked the environment though and the interactions were clear. I would suggest making it much much easier for the player in the beginning, showing them how to solve a puzzle by having a trivial code, before giving them real challenges.
Oct 23 16:06:38	78h 12m	Kobold Simulator	♥ 0	Using own 3D engine is really extreme version of LD! I liked the game premise and the tone of the minimal dialogue. I would have liked the music and perhaps effects to more strongly feed the same mode. The main character animation was also really fun. There are some obvious areas of the game that would have been nice to have gotten more focus, but using your own engine, that's very understandable. Good job!
Oct 23 16:17:32	10m 54s	Leaf blower	♥ 1	Very cool game! I got as far as @ongomato's image above before I gave up. Very simple mechanics and simple objective. And very well defined controls. It took me a while to figure out I was actually supposed to get the ball upwards in the beginning, but it wasn't as I was about to give up before I figured it out either. So I don't think that is a real issue. If anything it could perhaps have been nice to see the ball a second before it drops, but on the other hand the game restarts so quickly, I don't know if that is needed. It also feels like something that could become a quite addictive mobile game.
Oct 23 16:25:51	8m 19s	Tower of Minos	♥ 1	Interesting concept. I liked the idea but for some reason I felt like I had to spam space and most of the time the character refused to jump, so it was really really hard to play for me. Left and right keys worked fine. I ran it on Firefox v69 / Windows 10, if that helps.
Oct 23 16:49:14	23m 23s	Inky	♥ 1	Great graphics and well made game! It was very well made. There was some quirks with the shooting and movement that could have felt a bit more spot on to be perfect, and the key-bindings weren't great for people who want to have the mouse in the left hand. So I ended up on the most precision levels to use left and for A/D and Space on right hand. Then taking pauses to shoot when needed. And that kind of disrupted the play feeling a bit since it felt like the game in general wanted you do just jump around fast and fun. One way could have been to shoot the ink base on the motion vector of the character with some key. I'm not sure, though, how that would feel.
Oct 23 17:12:33	23m 19s	Flow	♥ 1	Cool, though I got stuck with the slush planet, I tried a whole lot of things, but now I realize I forgot to try and drink it 🍹. Maybe that was the solution... I get the insane amount of work it would be to get to the flexibility that the player doesn't feel like it's the game that doesn't understand the player and still keep it a challenge... but at the same time, I think, I kind of need that amount of understanding from the game for me to not get frustrated with the format.