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Evan Minto

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Evan Minto's comment
May 5 00:20:10		Keep Hope Alive	♥ 1	I can't say this was very fun to play, but I’m not sure how much of that was on purpose. The strong gravity, quick exhaustion rate, and slow acceleration on the player makes it seemingly impossible to stay airborne for more than about five seconds at a time, so every time I tried I basically spent the entire game at Rock Bottom. I was able to jump up a level every now and then, but couldn't figure out how to stay there. Even when I tried with the easiest settings on (that's what I assumed the start screen was controlling), a single wrong move would shoot me all the way to the bottom and then I could never get enough energy to escape. I appreciate what that communicates about the spiral of depression, but I'm not sure if you were specifically going for that.
May 5 00:32:08	11m 58s	Destructive Flyer	♥ 1	Neat concept. I liked trying to figure out where to put the towers to best hit the enemies, which is pretty standard for tower defense. I wasn't super into the pushing enemies mechanic, mainly because it felt like I had to do too much precision maneuvering with what felt like a fairly imprecise input. It was easy to hit enemies, but very difficult to swing around them and hit them in the right direction. More often than not I just pushed them into the slime. I wonder if the mechanic would work better with directional inputs rather than the mouse. I couldn't really tell where the bullets were and ended up just ignoring the patterns rather than learning the different tower patterns. I really liked the music and the way the sound effects worked alongside it!
May 5 00:42:38	10m 30s	Saving Zenith	♥ 0	I went to an asteroid but I couldn't move around well enough to actually do anything. The character seems to move without any friction or something, so if I go forward I just slide forever. And I can’t reach the top of hills because I keep sliding back down before I get to the top. Am I missing something or is this a bug?
May 5 01:01:40	19m 02s	Error code: 107222	♥ 2	Great work! It’s got personality and a nice little story about consciousness and humanity delivered in a short package. Loved the ending too! Definitely impressed with the anime-style artwork. The translation could use some work as you said, but the story came through just fine. Worth mentioning that I also got confused when entering my name and couldn't figure out how to delete letters. I just named myself "player" and moved on.
May 5 01:19:48	18m 08s	Shiver	♥ 1	Great music and I like the visual style (the prisoners are super abstracted but still animated, which is cool). Like other folks, I couldn't keep the prisoners alive for more than a few seconds in the first mode and was able to easily stay alive the whole time in the second one. Because of the lack of clarifying animations and the fact that the game instantly resets when you get a game over, I couldn't figure out WHY I kept losing. It seemed like there were still prisoners left alive each time. That said, this is a cool concept and I think with some tweaks it could work. I'd love to have more ways of influencing prisoner behavior rather that just the whistle.
May 5 02:05:10	45m 22s	Virtual Meeting Simulator	♥ 1	Pretty fun! I wasn’t expecting a typing game in there, but it works well as a way of breaking up the fast pace of running around. I had to really control myself so I didn’t get hyped up and mistype. It did take me a little while to figure out how to activate each station and how the typing mini-game worked, however.
May 5 02:25:18	20m 08s	Gizmick!	♥ 2	Fantastic music and visual style! You did a lot with just grayscale. I love the Moon-in-Majora’s-Mask-esque boss designs. I agree with a lot of commenters here that the difficulty is out of whack. The first boss seemed pretty unbeatable to me until I realized I could just stand in one place and spam the sword. The second one felt the most like a real puzzle I had to solve, though it didn't take very long to figure it out. The third one died almost instantly when I ran up to it and spammed my sword (didn't even need to dash). Also, dash seemed pretty much useless to me because the creature follows after you and doesn't get any invulnerability, but I assume I was just using it wrong.
May 6 03:51:42	25h 26m	Keep it Lit!	♥ 1	I had a similar idea during my early brainstorming! This is very well executed and fun. I enjoyed experimenting with each item and venturing out to explore the nearby area, with the risk of getting too cold pulling me back. I did immediately wish I could light a branch on fire and use it as a torch, like a smaller, shorter-lived version of the fire. That might make for even more interesting strategy. The rate at which it got colder at the end felt a bit unfair, but if the rate was progressively speeding up over time I would have been more able to prepare for it.
May 6 04:19:23	27m 41s	Outbreak Control	♥ 1	Super addictive and yes, topical. I got into a great rhythm of outbreaks and then moments of calm, and had fun experimenting with different strategies (vaccining the entrances, etc.). One thing I’d note: the color contrast could use some work, as I had trouble distinguishing the yellow, green, and white dots.
May 6 04:38:28	19m 05s	Affordable Pet Care	♥ 1	This kind of reminds me of the old arcade game Tapper! The memory aspect is kind of difficult since so many pets have the exact same sprite and sometimes two pets have the exact same name, but the concept and art is solid.
May 6 04:49:31	11m 03s	Oh, the Connection!	♥ 1	Pretty hard to think through movement on the hexagonal grid, but the concept is pretty clever. It felt good whenever I figured a puzzle out. I agree with others that the controls aren't intuitive. Also, a rewind feature would be a lifesaver, especially when you lose the connection. Something like what Baba Is You has, where any action that causes you to lose control of the character means you "die" and need to either restart or rewind to the last move you made.
May 6 04:57:05	7m 34s	Work from home - rat battle!	♥ 1	Simple whack-a-mole concept, but fun for a round or two. The simple visuals work pretty well and I figured everything out almost immediately.
May 6 05:07:28	10m 23s	Shadows of Drakthur	♥ 1	Had a good time with this one. It was fun watching my firepower increase as I gained more credits. It could definitely benefit from more variety in enemy and upgrade types. I did have an issue where the UI in the bottom right obscured part of the play area, so I couldn't always see what side enemies were coming from.
May 6 05:20:16	12m 48s	CAT 5	♥ 0	To be entirely honest, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. Looked everywhere for a CAT.COM file, tried deleting as many of the cat pictures as I could (but they just kept reappearing). Love the visual style and general vibe, just can’t figure it out.
May 6 05:29:05	8m 49s	Blinded by the Dawn	♥ 1	I couldn't really figure out how to use the spawned mosslings, since they didn't work very well as shields against those homing-missle beetles. It seemed like the only strategy worth doing was to run straight ahead as a group as much as possible. I agree that a selected indicator on the current moss would be very helpful; I struggled with that. I like the music a lot!
May 7 05:50:56	24h 21m	Turkey's Plant Emporium	♥ 1	The How to Play screen is very intimidating with the walls of text. Likewise, the game took me a while to figure out, but once I did it was relatively fun. As with any resource management game it's got an interesting balance of when to sell resources vs. when to reinvest them. I'd love to see more conflict to overcome, since right now it seems like I'm just making a nice garden without anything to really strategize around.
May 7 06:21:23	30m 27s	ALYVE	♥ 1	I also had trouble understanding the controls at first (I know the Pico-8 X/C thing, just couldn't figure out which button was the one for placing a turret vs. canceling, etc). Once I figured them out this was pretty great. Love the simple but really vibrant pixel art. Great world-building in such a small project too! And a fantastic twist. I'll also note what someone mentioned: when I died I kept my turrets from the last run, which made subsequent runs much easier. Seems like a bug but I’m not sure.
May 7 06:31:30	10m 07s	MMO Healer Simulator 2020	♥ 1	Very clever. Visual effects for damage taken and healing/damage inflicted on other characters would make it a lot clearer. Would also be great if the other party members had different effects on the outcome, so that you would have a good reason to prioritize healing one over the other in the moment.
May 7 06:47:43	16m 13s	Flame Guardian	♥ 2	Some nice visual touches in here (cool particle effect when you light a brazier) and the music is really good. I do like the concept behind the gameplay here: maneuvering your character and the torch around obstacles while avoiding water and completing tasks before the fire goes out. Unfortunately the controls are pretty frustrating right now. The character slips around on the platforms too much, making it hard to land precisely. He also seems to frequently drop the torch when I don't expect him to, and throwing it usually ends up just dropping it instead.
May 7 07:06:51	19m 08s	Adrift	♥ 1	Great concept, though games like this one that are based on controlling inertia with limited friction can be really finicky. I definitely enjoyed solving the little puzzles for each level. By the end, however, it started to feel a bit too hard. The fuel disappears almost immediately, and because you're working against your own momentum a lot of the traps you set up in the level (boost gates that shoot you straight into a mine, for example) are extremely difficult to avoid. Despite some frustration later on, I had a lot of fun with this. Good job!
May 7 23:55:40	16h 48m	It Hungers	♥ 0	I like the concept and the controls are smooth enough. Definitely too many enemies though, and I never really figured out how to effectively use my shield. With a few tweaks to enemy spawn rates and something to make the shield more tactically useful (possibly making enemy bullets slower and making the shield stop enemies from moving past it), this would be pretty great!
May 8 00:35:43	40m 03s	Keep IT Alive!	♥ 2	Holy cow, that art and music is wonderful. Super cute, lots of unique personality, great colors. The way that the game breaks down as the characters die is incredibly clever. I was marveling at each successive failure as they died. Unfortunately the shooting was hard to control. It felt like sometimes I'd be up against the wall and the bullets would collide with the wall because I was facing the wrong direction. Seems like my character should always be facing in the direction that I’m shooting!
May 8 02:07:49	1h 32m	Keep IT Alive	♥ 1	Great concept! Kind of like a mundane IT version of Papers Please. The emails were fun to read, especially the scams. I’d love to see this expanded into something with more ongoing storylines and consequences.
May 8 02:17:51	10m 02s	Proto	♥ 1	Great work for a first Ludum Dare! Unfortunately the platforming is too floaty in the air and slippery on the ground, and the platforms and characters are too big. I kept bumping into the wrong platform and falling all the way back down. The conservation of inertia doesn't help matters; when I got hit by an asteroid I would maintain my inertia and be unable to correct in time to land on one of the platforms below, which felt frustrating.