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Feedback comments for LD45
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | squimmy's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 6 23:16:35 | It may be your story | ♥ 1 | Nice job telling a story with minimal art assets. The difficulty curve was great at the start, but it got slightly tedious later on — partly because you have to switch from the keyboard to the mouse to restart. Letting the player press a key to start again would have helped. It also seems that some of the words stop moving (or don't start falling) if you're in the air. I assumed this was a bug, since at one point it seemed to make it impossible to progress, but it also added a little bit of extra strategy to some sections. Great work on your first entry! | |
| Oct 6 23:25:52 | 9m 17s | Mr.Grind | ♥ 1 | A neat take on the clicker genre. The truck was an interesting way to add some breaks from the clicking and stop things from becoming flat and repetitive. It would have been nice if you could have done more with that idea. It would have been cool if there were more different types of upgrades, or ones that start off locked and have to be unlocked somehow. As it stands, there's a nice progression but it feels a bit linear. The music really helped build the kind of frantic mood that's perfect for an endless clicker game. Great job. |
| Oct 7 12:41:28 | 13h 15m | Semantics | ♥ 0 | I love it! The sound and music work is fantastic and suits the surreal feeling of the experience perfectly. |
| Oct 7 12:48:24 | 6m 56s | Shape Void | ♥ 1 | I like the visuals. The glowing effect highlights the emptiness of the playing field. It isn't clear how to play at first. There's not much to tell you what you'll be controlling or what you're aiming for, but the trial and error is part of the fun. |
| Oct 7 13:07:31 | 19m 07s | LEGION | ♥ 1 | Wow! This is really good. The music, the graphics, and the gameplay are all fantastic and come together to make a great creepy atmosphere. If I had to nitpick, an explanation of the score multiplier might have been nice, and the ending was a little anti-climactic. Anything other than an empty room would have been great, even just getting out of the facility to the outside world... But these are both minor complaints. This game is really impressive. My high score is 7400 points :) |
| Oct 7 13:58:40 | 51m 09s | Dispel The Nyxion | ♥ 1 | Playing as a mysterious void of nothingness is a pretty cool idea for a game. The system with the men building houses and everything is really neat, but your ability to interact with it is kind of limited. It feels like there's a lot of untapped untapped potential. It's a little annoying that you can end up in a losing position long before you actually lose the game, and on your first playthrough it won't be obvious that you've basically already lost... Perhaps an alternate lose-condition (e.g. once they build 15 castles) would help with this? Either way, the visuals are lovely. The camera shake when you destroy things is a nice touch, too :) |
| Oct 7 14:24:52 | 26m 12s | DAY/ONE | ♥ 0 | The low-poly assets and clean, high-contrast UI look great. There's some strong [Overland](https://overland-game.com/) vibes. The interface is a bit lacking. It's not easy to tell what you can interact with or which character you have selected. Some simple highlighting of the active character, or more pronounced mouse-over effects for items/monsters would help a lot. The more interactive, the better! Animations—even some very simple ones—would also help. It's not always clear what's happening when nothing is moving. The music, however, is pretty good. It suits the atmosphere of the game really well, and the ambient background effects are a nice extra touch. |
| Oct 7 15:02:33 | 37m 41s | Hadron | ♥ 1 | Maybe I'm missing something (or maybe I'm just bad at video games!) but I found it brutally difficult to mine anything, and even harder to fight the enemies... The sound effects are very plain and simple, but they suit the feel of the game perfectly. The UI's not particularly beautiful and the combat isn't much to speak of, but the game has an absolutely wondrous sense of scale. The plain black background really feels like the vast, empty expanse of space. There's a sort of beautiful loneliness to it. |
| Oct 7 15:06:14 | 3m 41s | Bearly Alive | ♥ 1 | I like the effect of the changing seasons. It's such an efficient way of showing the passage of time. Some parts were a little confusing, like the way you have to pick up dead animals before you can eat them, or that you have to stop moving to restore energy, but these issues only detracted from the game in the most trivial way. This is such a sweet little story. For such a simple game, you really empathize with the little bear by the end of it. |
| Oct 8 00:18:30 | 9h 12m | Knight of Redemption | ♥ 1 | I like how you start off defenseless and having to avoid the monsters, but once you find the sword you get to go back and show them who's boss. In that way, it reminds me of the first Prince of Persia game. There's clearly a lot of space for polish and improvements, but the core of this game is good. The controls are responsive, and the combat is simple but intuitive. Even the music gives a solid sense of urgency to the game and makes it feel fast-paced. The real star is the level design. Exploring the dungeon is fun, and exiting from the cramped, twisting tunnels onto a wide green field gives a great sense of accomplishment, even if there's no flashing "YOU WIN!" text. |
| Oct 8 13:10:57 | 12h 52m | Abstractio | ♥ 1 | The visuals are clean and efficient. The gameplay is interesting and strangely satisfying at first, but after a certain point, you eventually have to resort to trying every combination. This quickly becomes tedious and only grows worse as the number of possibilities expands. I like the UI. It strikes a good balance between being intuitive while still forcing the player to experiment and work things out for themselves. The audio is simple and utilitarian and suits the mood of the game well. Ultimately, the game is well executed but the core idea behind it has inherent limitations. |
| Oct 8 13:27:41 | 16m 44s | Mission Start With Nothing | ♥ 1 | Inverted controls (with no way to change them!) is a bold choice. Unfortunately, it this case, I don't think it pays off. Sound is such an integral element of so many stealth games that the total lack of audio in this one is a pity. The general visual appearance of the game is good. The foggy environment lends credibility to the idea of such short-sighted guards ;) The quality of models, lighting, and animation is in general rather high, given the time constraints you were under. The objective wasn't clear to me so I was unable to finish the game. |
| Oct 8 14:15:41 | 48m 00s | Click-N-Move | ♥ 1 | This is a nice idea for a game! Unfortunately, it was a bit slow-paced to start with, so by the time I got my second weapon, it hadn't done a lot to capture my interest. Obviously it's important to save the most powerful and exciting weapons for last (to give the player a sense of progression), but first impressions count. The crossbow is by far the least exciting and *least interactive* weapon. Having to use it for too long is going to put people off before they can see the rest of the game. Having a weapons that are useful in different situations (rather than simply getting more powerful) would give more opportunity to think about what to use, instead of making old weapons obsolete as soon as new ones are unlocked. Of the monsters I saw, all of them just moved directly at the me, so it wasn't difficult to hit them. It was simply a question of whether I could move faster than them or kill them before they reached me. It would have been great to see monsters that tried to dodge, or that hung back to build up numbers and attack en masse. As for the visuals, you're certainly no Rembrandt, but the art's really not that bad. It definitely does its job. The iconography is simple but it's immediately clear what everything is. There's a clear visual progression to the weapons and the monsters look like monsters. It might seem like I have a lot of complaints, but it's clear that the problems with the game are simply a result of the time constraints. The design and the core idea of the game is solid. |
| Oct 8 14:42:39 | 26m 58s | There was something here | ♥ 1 | This is really cool. I particularly like the way the scale, complexity and depth advances as the game progresses, not just in terms of gameplay, but the visuals and music, too. It's impressive how almost every facet of the game works in harmony to support the story the game is trying to tell. There's not much to criticize here. If I were to make one complaint, it's that it wasn't clear how anti-things and anti-converters worked. But this minor issue didn't really impact my ability to enjoy the game. Great job. |
| Oct 8 14:53:01 | 10m 22s | The Thing | ♥ 1 | This game made me chuckle several times. It's a very clever take on the theme with a good amount of polish to top it off. |
| Oct 8 15:26:27 | 33m 26s | Emergency Procedures | ♥ 1 | This is a good effort for your first time, and you've got some interesting ideas at work, too. I really like the way you've captured the physics of moving in zero-gravity. You're completely at the mercy of momentum until you reach a wall, so you have to plan your route carefully. It seems like you already know this, but it's pretty clear there were some time-management problems. You probably could have gotten away with putting much less effort into the art. There's a lot of fine detail in the visuals but I imagine most players will be focused on trying to win rather than appreciating the art. Spending less time on the art doesn't just give you more time to spend on other things: it also forces you to be judicious about what elements need the most artistic detail. Making the most important parts of the level the most detailed helps draw the players attention to them, too. The tension between trying to charge the battery and maintain shield and life-support power is an neat idea. With a little more polish and some sound to add to the atmosphere, you could have a pretty fun game on your hands. But most of all, you made it, you finished it, and you put it out there for people to play, and that's what counts. |
| Oct 10 13:03:46 | 45h 37m | JO-KEN-DO! | ♥ 1 | This game has the most content of the compo submissions I've played. The number of characters and amount of dialog is impressive given the time constraints. This is an interesting game. I like the multiple overlapping rock-paper-scissors mechanics, but the current implementation of it is a combination of random guessing, trial-and-error, and rote memorization... Other people have mentioned this, but the lack of sound effects or other UI feedback harms the gameplay experience. Combined with the time-limit, this makes the game rather confusing at first. But the music is pretty good! It suits the pacing of the game particularly well. More than anything, the size and scope of this game is really quite impressive. |
| Oct 10 13:28:10 | 24m 24s | Flourish | ♥ 1 | The artwork is beautiful and the aesthetic cohesion of the game is top-notch. The audio, visuals, and gameplay all work together very well. I'm usually of the opinion that music plays a big role in building the mood and feeling of a game, but the ambient background noise you've added seems to do that job just fine. It's particularly refreshing to see a nice, slow-paced game about creating life, and not another frantic action game based around destroying things. |
| Oct 10 15:23:30 | 1h 55m | Terra Nil - Reclaim the Wasteland | ♥ 1 | Truly fantastic game. The basic gameplay mechanic is clever without being confusing. The way each structure interacts with the others is well explained and intuitive, and the tension created by conflicting requirements means you have to give proper thought to each placement. The art is great. The use of strong key colors (brown, green and red) makes all the key gameplay elements stand out clearly (but you may want to seek feedback from red/green color-blind players on this). If I was going to be nit-picky, the water pump and calcinator could stand to be a little more distinct. The audio work is very good too. The music suits the mood of the game perfectly, and the sound effects give strong feedback for all the actions you can take. The construction sounds have just the right level of punch and the little blips when collecting resources are subtle but satisfying. The UI is very good too. The tooltips are a great way of conveying a lot of information without getting in the way. Even the font is a great fit. (Incidentally, is it a unity built-in font or your own work? I don't mean this in an accusatory way. I'm genuinely curious.) The only suggestion I can offer would be to make it slightly more obvious which structures do or do not require power — perhaps a lightning-bolt mark lightbulb or somesuch? The level of polish is outstanding given the timeframe. If you're planning on continuing to work on this, there are a couple of tweaks I'd love to see, namely: More options for scrolling around the map, such as click-and-drag (presumably with the right mouse button) or using the WASD keys; and remembering difficulty and map size selections, rather than them resetting each time you choose "Play again". I really only have one true criticism of this game and, to be fair, it's largely a matter of taste: The combination of "pixel" and hi-res art is rather jarring. Someone else mentioned the leaf icon, but the same applies to the little green orbs you collect, the power cables, and the UI overlay in general. Even the font, though really quite lovely, is particularly incongruous as the only obviously antialized element in the entire game. The little weeds and other decorations are also not aligned to the same pixels as the main game art. Most people probably won't consciously notice this, but it still subtly undermines the otherwise phenomenal artwork you've got. That being said, this is a remarkably good game. I hope you continue working on it in future. I'll be keeping an eye on your itch.io page in the hopes of further updates after ludum dare 45 concludes. |
| Oct 11 12:32:39 | 21h 09m | NoGo45 | ♥ 1 | Nice work. I like the sense of progression. The bug where you shoot yourself killed me a couple of times and it was frustrating to start over from the beginning, but aside from that, it was fun! It's not really a bug, but it seems like you can bypass a lot of the challenge by collecting as many coins as you can before enabling enemies... The only criticism I could offer would be that the monsters didn't stand out very much. It's not that they were hard to see, but they'd didn't draw your eye. Perhaps using lower-saturation colors for the terrain might have helped with this. The music a nice, up-beat pace, the sound effects all made sense, and the combat was largely without fault and developed as the player makes progress. A good game. |