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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Dylan Fries's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 22 16:27:38 | King's Table | ♥ 3 | Great concept and execution. I was totally drawn into this and found it hard to put down. A few minor things you might want to look at: - The SFX get repetitive and a little harsh after a while. Perhaps a less sharp sound or reducing the volume could help. Some SFX on hit not only death might also help (although it could be hard to not overwhelm with them). Perhaps putting the sfx on the towers instead of the enemies would help. - Some ambient background music would also be nice. - Maybe a tutorial page or something. I didn't know what the towers did until I placed them so perhaps something that gives you a heads up. - I couldn't figure out if there were differences between the different gems so maybe some differences (eg different speed, health, etc) - I didn't understand the level selection at first and perhaps putting the levels in terms of difficulty would be helpful (eg 1 = easy, 2 = harder etc) These are all things that are low priority in a jam game so totally understandable. Really great job though. I loved the graphics. Great gameplay, really fun and additive. Would love to see where it goes! Hit me up on itch when you get an update I'd be happy to playtest it. | |
| Apr 22 16:58:49 | 31m 11s | Sachka, Heal-sitter | ♥ 10 | Really interesting take on MMO mechanics and dealing with toxic gamer culture. Very cool idea and a great start. I loved the boss art and the general idea of dealing with your teammates while boss fighting. Some suggestions: -several of the narrative buttons didn't really accurately reflect the narrative option text when selected - I liked balancing between healing and the chat. Rather then switching between the boss doing nothing and then dishing out tons of damage, perhaps you could make the boss damage slower but do both narrative and healing at the same time. - having to follow the text added a lot of pressure and made it really interesting - I liked having to play the healer, it felt like a good fit for the narrative role. - the middle section of fighting the boss with no narrative felt really long. A really interesting look at gamer culture and toxicity. Great start! I hope you keep working on this. |
| Apr 22 17:07:51 | 9m 02s | Bubble Story | ♥ 1 | Very fun little game. Great concept but took me a few minutes to figure out the RMB mechanic. I found it quite hard at times, especially the first funnel since the walls were so bouncy. It might be interesting to vary the "weight" or drag of the bubble in its two forms. You could slow the "bubble" down a bit when it is in its floating form but have it drag less when it was in its "marble" form. Cool puzzles and enjoyable music. I also found the walls being very bouncy made it hard to get the "marble" into its slots. I'm sure you could come up with a ton of puzzles with this mechanic tho. Great start! |
| Apr 22 17:49:19 | 41m 28s | Wayward | ♥ 1 | Very fun little game. Art was great, Scythe throw was really awesome. Jumping was a little inconsistent ( I guess reading other comments there was a wall jump I didn't notice) and sometimes seemed to do nothing and other times launched me to the moon. Left handed control setup felt a little funny, maybe include arrow keys to move as well. Needs a bit of polish on the controls but an excellent start. Maybe include the input buttons within the game as well (L isn't exactly a standard key to use). I agree with some of the other comments that it was hard to tell what to do with the portal as it doesn't seems like you are damaging them. Perhaps a flash to red for one frame old school style would be a simple fix. A tiny detail but it still said "take soul" when I had already taken it right at the beginning. Also I didn't notice that the doors in the buildings had opened at first, maybe just a short SFX would help draw attention to the change (or an animation). Great job, I hope you keep at it. |
| Apr 22 18:11:35 | 22m 16s | Blazerunner | ♥ 4 | Really nicely done. Great UI and graphics work. Fun, puzzle, speedrunning gameplay. Smooth operation overall. The UI menu ordering is a little strange as you sign in for leader boards then select play. Also you could probably easily cache the leaderboard name. I loved the fire effects. Was that a custom shader? Burning things was really fun. I liked the ambient atmosphere as well and I thought the piles of garbage everywhere were really funny. Skill sometimes jumped around a little bit. Mostly it was really slick, really well done and fun to play. ***Spoilers*** I found the introduction of the torch holder mechanic in LVL 2 to be a a little misleading as I didn't need it to solve the immediate problem. When I reached the second torch holder in lvl 2 I threw it and thought I was done. Lol oops. I found the second half of L2 a little confusing and kept looping back to the beginning as well. |
| Apr 23 15:39:51 | 21h 28m | trader, raider and space | ♥ 1 | Try using a bit of momentum when flying for smoother controls. The spelling and grammatical mistakes put me off but perhaps you were going for ironic. I thought the concept was funny enough and liked the awesome grandpa and ship art. I thought the mechanic was really cool once I figured it out. A good effort with a lot of potential. I hope you keep working on it. |
| Apr 23 15:46:52 | 7m 01s | Keep The Spirit Stone Allive | ♥ 0 | Looks cool. I found my browser locked up. You may want to try reducing the build size or turning down the lighting quality (more based on other peoples comments). You could also try putting out a desktop build and see if that helps. I froze up after showing unity loading and then about 10 seconds later received this: (attached image). Could be you have a bug or are using too much ram for chrome. Let me know if you fix it and I will have another look. Looks fun! CrashBug_SpiritStone.PNG |
| Apr 23 16:17:17 | 30m 25s | don't dead it | ♥ 1 | I opened this up and heard "I hear cute noises" from my girlfriend in the other room. 20 minutes later she had 200 cookies. Very cool ambient game idea. Very great start to a game. Art was very cute and impressive you did it without a tablet. You should definitely try to expand on this. I really didn't like the camera motion and perhaps an option to pan with arrow keys or otherwise smooth out the motion would help. It also seemed to be a little sluggish on the browser so you may want to look into some optimization. Extra lighting, too many textures etc. Make sure you are using prefabs and batching assets. Another minor detail is the blueberry bushes don't have berries on them to start. Some rocks or something in the prairies might help as well. We assumed it was the edge of the map the first time and stopped. The next time we traveled for a long time into the void at the edge of the map just in case. Obviously all not problems to work on for LD but maybe a good place to start. Also, I'm not sure what monitor resolution you are working on but I found the font extremely small and hard to read on both the browser and in game. I hope you keep on it, it is a great start. |
| Apr 23 16:49:03 | 31m 46s | Space Scavenger | ♥ 1 | Cool start! I really liked how tough your ship was and the emphasis on long term strategy. Repairing your shields was insanely expensive and might be something you want to lower the cost on as it will help newbies survive much longer. I really liked how everything got damaged over time and you really had to allocate funds to repair it. Reminds me of the old classic arcade game Raptor: Call of the Shadows, which if you have never played you should go play right now for an hour or two. I dug the floaty physics movement and thought you could play that up even more. I also liked the slow speed of the rail gun (more like a torpedo really, rail guns are usually insanely fast, maybe a new feature?) however the length of the cool down really reduced its usefulness. One suggestion around the pausing feature is rather then actually pausing the game, just give people a break (10 seconds, 20 seconds) between waves to build the ship or vary the intensity. This way you are still putting passive time pressure on them but are able to remove both a full button and an UI from the interface. I also found after 5 minutes it was getting exhausting and could use a break. Just a thought. Also, you could consider asteroids coming in from different angles as well. This would let you greatly reduce the speed required (for the asteroids) and the total number as they could come in from different angles and that would be much harder to avoid. Be careful with this though, it could easily become over difficult. That would reinforce the strategic elements you already have in place. I also agree with some of the others that it was hard to tell scrap from the asteroids, although that could be a feature in some ways. You might want to have some more obvious scrap and then some which looks like asteroids but is higher value. You might also want to consider high risk, high reward trade-offs such as an asteroid that you could destroy with a rail gun to gain a big boost of metal . This would give players as skill shot to work on and would greatly increase the depth. It sounds like you are already working on variable difficulty too. Other people have mentioned sfx, vfx etc and I think those would also really help. I can see you are managing many uploads. You may want to consider Itch.io for hosting (also allows for long term updates) and especially Butler, which is a command line uploader for Itch that is very cool. Google it and you will find the docs. That is all you need. Good job! Keep at it! |
| Apr 23 17:05:09 | 16m 06s | Critical Landscape-Scale Force of Nature | ♥ 0 | Beaver art is hilarious. Tree falling is chaotic to control. I am torn because I liked having to reverse constantly and look behind me to see where the tree was falling but I also found the controls a little clunky and trying to hit a moving target (even with the stun) was quite hard. Very fun and funny though, just needs some polish. I was trying to think of alternate strategies such as blocking the road with a tree, blocking walking paths with a tree to funnel movement etc. Also strafe keys would have helped perhaps let you get into position and E + RMB was sort of an odd input choice. I think if you can make it mechanically more easy to hit the dudes with the trees you will be able to make it more strategic in the long run. Very funny and fun though, we had a good laugh at the cute beaver! Good job! It did crash once upon loading, maybe I was trying to click too fast? Reloading fixed it though. Also, you are hosting with random web host and might want to look into Itch.io and Butler to help manage builds if you intend to continue with it. |
| Apr 23 17:10:53 | 5m 44s | A'Light | ♥ 2 | An image would help. Someone reminded me so I am playing it forward. You also might want to rename your downloadable from LudumDareGame to your own name since once I download it, it becomes one of many LD games and will be hard to find later. Cool start. I think possibly my favorite feature in any jam game so far that I have seen was how your eyes followed the mouse. Great effect that adds a lot of feedback and characterization. Art was nice. I found the fire burned out really quick especially with only 3 wood slots. I'm sure you have lots of ideas for things you can do next. Good start! |
| Apr 23 19:37:37 | 2h 26m | BEARable apples | ♥ 2 | Fun little game with a nice environmental angle. Very cute and accessible gameplay. I thought the powerups were not that helpful, high jumps were hard to judge a landing. Nice art and great music. Would be interesting to see where you took it from here! |
| Apr 23 19:50:27 | 12m 50s | Cardboard Frank | ♥ 1 | Graphics and music were great 5/5. I found the input really confusing however some feedback on what direction you are floating would help (like a world space particle trail). Another trick is to make a particle field that is very sparse and covers the whole flight area (like just tiny particles that hang in the air) as it helps give the motion a reference point. Really fun but hard to fly. I did the best when I ignored all the input keys except w and just aimed with the mouse only so perhaps you could simplify your input. I kept dying every time I tried to get ammo bc I couldn't slow down or turn fast enough and crashed into buildings. I suck tho so don't take it as gospel. Another suggestion for the flight model would be increasing both the drag and force slightly, as the extra drag would make it slow down a little faster when you reduce new forces coming in while the increased force would balance out the drag. It should give you a bit more of a burst feel and also come to a stop faster, which makes it easier to control. I liked the floatiness but found the keyboard layout hard to get my head around. An alternative might be asdw - strafe qe vertical but obviously that is up to you. I usually just aimed with my mouse so you really just need a 6 dimensional strafe. Also I noticed you have multiple builds and might find it useful to look into using Butler on Itch.io as it will patch your versions for you. It looks complex but is simple once you read the manual page. The browser version didn't load but desktop ran ok. Might want to look at reducing realtime lighting or the number of textures in the build, I suspect the browser is running out of ram. Super fun procedural exploding goodness. Fireball shader effects and explosions were also super tasty. Could use some additional SFX to round things out. What tools did you use to generate the world? It looks like Houdini maybe? Did you use Unreal or Unity? Great job, I hope you continue working on this. |
| Apr 23 20:12:57 | 22m 30s | Lamps | ♥ 2 | Very beautiful graphics! Nice and atmospheric! |
| Apr 23 20:35:20 | 22m 23s | Antarctica Story | ♥ 1 | Very nice graphics. I agree with some of the advice above about introducing too many mechanics at once. Also you might want to start without spikes initially just so people could get used to it. I got stuck on the second screen. Couldn't go right, couldn't go up so jumped down and died. Not really sure how to get past that. I also agree it is a slow turnaround time (the intro, the fade to black and the end credits) and especially for a hard game where you die instantly you might want to allow people to speed that loop up. Good effort tho! |
