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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Finn Truman's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 22 18:54:36 | Come Meet My Friend Who Lives in the Attic | ♥ 1 | I see you had the idea to something that was almost like a stealth game: avoid contact with enemies and make it through a house. You had a good idea to make it unique - with the fact that the player cannot see in the dark with a side on view, and the ability to see anywhere in the house with a click - but it'd not fully realised. First of all, there's no incentive to click anywhere that isn't near the player, because it's not beneficial to see anywhere in the house other than right next to you. Moving up a floor isn't dangerous because you can see silhouettes in the window, so you just need to keep spamming click around you to make sure you aren't being jumped, and watch the window for a silhouette to know when its safe. I woud've given the player a permanent - but short - light source that is always on top of them so you're never sure what you're walking into. And without a "mana" bar or equivalent, there's no reason the psychic button couldn't have been held rather than clicked, because you can spam with no consequence. The width of the house is also either irrelevant, or unfair. if the key is on the left half of the house, you can grab it without ever needing to walk past a zombie, because stairs are everywhere, If the key is on the right side of the house, its unfair because you *have* to walk through a zombie to get to that half; they don't stagger their patrols enough for there to be a gap. I also found a bug where you can repeatedly press Space to spawn the key in a new location. It resets your score, yes, but on the first run this isn't a concern because you don't teleport back to the beginning. Interesting concept, but unfortunately not realised because of the design. | |
| Apr 22 19:10:48 | 16m 12s | Protect the little one | ♥ 1 | It looks nice (although the attack animation is lacking), and the audio is serviceable because its cute. The gameplay isn't completely thought out, though. The block not being a held button action is very frustrating, because it's a block, not a parry: I should be able to hold the button to block an attack. It's frustrating to get caught out by the attack I knew was coming because the character decided to put the shield down. There's a strategy that makes the gameplay trivial, and therefore boring: a) Run as far as you can b) When in a combat wave, comfort your friend to reduce his stress income as much as possible c) When an enemy approaches, block the first attack, then attack. Repeat block->attack until dead d) If friend's stress is 30-40%, comfort for as long as possible until combat wave e) Repeat It's all rather one note. There's nothing that makes combat dynamic or organic, it's two people standing opposite each other taking it in turns to do an animation of set length like an MMORPG. Knockback, short attack animations, and attacks that do less damage but hit more targets - like a ground pound (which would in turn give a reason to jump), or a long-range thrust attack - would give the player more options. But when its this rigid, you encounter easy to abuse patterns like I found. |
| Apr 22 19:21:30 | 10m 42s | cheяnoбуl simulator (chernobyl simulator) | ♥ 1 | The idea of juggling tasks in the buildings a good one for the theme, but a severe lack of player feedback and clearance of objective made it pretty much unplayable for me. I don't know what the 20 seconds is trying to tell me. 20 seconds to do what? I walk up to the phone to "save 120 seconds" and nothing happens. About the only thing I figured out to do was walk into the wash room to reduce my radiation. Also, you're not Yahtzee Croshaw. The How To Play screen really needs some punctuation. Also, is my build broken? Because I can't hear any audio, but you submitted it as a category. |
| Apr 22 19:36:45 | 15m 15s | Can you look after my plants? | ♥ 2 | It's not going to set the world on fire, but it was nicely put together and did what it wanted. Although figuring out how long a plant can go without water was a little obtuse, which isn't good when you need to rely on keeping them alive until the end to be able to earn the information you need to keep them alive, which seems a bit backwards. And it's a bit too unforgiving. I can water a plant as soon as I see its dehydrated, and its dead the next day. Not good when you're trying to figure out the timings. Nice introductory cutscene though. It was fun to watch. |
| Apr 22 19:53:25 | 16m 40s | Feed The Flame(s) | ♥ 0 | There's no motivation to do anything, and causing 400 instances of fire to appear in the world lags the game. But the fire chaining between flammable objects is cathartic, and it made me chuckle at first, but there's nothing to it after that. |
| Apr 22 20:11:54 | 18m 29s | The Lamp Man | ♥ 1 | The main focus of the game was the pipes, as opposed to the thing you're supposed to keep alive. The puzzles were certainly an innovative idea, but trying to maintain a map in your head and juggle the light level is not fun. The light does not pose a threat when you can walk back to the lamp for no cost, so it just becomes busy work and something that repeatedly interrupts you when you're trying to do the puzzle. And I do not like that the diagrams can straight up be wrong. You had a puzzle idea, and it's good on its own. Making a puzzle that deliberately gives me incorrect information, especially when I have only so much time to be near the puzzle, is not good design. But the mood was nice, and the tutorial was welcome (though needs spellchecking). |
| Apr 22 20:27:53 | 15m 59s | Party Animal | ♥ 1 | It looks nice but it seems like a lot of the assets weren't even yours (like the background, the main thing you look at). The main issue is that the game does not give your room to breathe. The next incident happens mere seconds after the previous, sometimes the same incident at the same place. It's impossible to look at the bars to judge your resources when you've got one fight after another screaming at you, and two people throwing up on the floor. Because those have sounds, they become the immediate concern in your mind, and the other resources get forgotten about. If you can even do them in time, whilst you're trying to break up the next fight. |
| Apr 22 20:51:59 | 24m 06s | RoboRepair! | ♥ 1 | I liked the look and idea of this, but there are two things that hold it back: very slow movement, which makes getting anywhere a chore; and world aligned movement controls that mean when the camera is at an angle, it's difficult to guess where you're going to walk. But its looks wonderful, and the toon shader is really nice! Did you really make the shsader yourself? |
| Apr 22 21:03:41 | 11m 42s | Keep it Fire | ♥ 1 | I liked the game. It works, it's got a good idea that you managed to realise, and it looks nice. I have two major concerns: 1) It's too easy. There's no incentive to venture far from the bonfire and risk danger, because you can wait near the bonfire for logs to respawn. And there's no reason to take fire from the bonfire when you can just wait for those two logs a mere jump away to respawn. 2) This is more an opinion about the whole idea: I think you did yourself a disservice making it a platformer. The ability to take and give fire makes it more innovative, but when I saw the title screen, I was expecting a Gods Will Be Watching sort of game. If you're inexperienced in making games, then that's okay, you've got to learn by making the easy genres. But in the future, don't be afraid to try making something out of your comfort zone. If this had been a cozy, warming, atmospheric experience, I would've given it 5 stars on Mood. |
| Apr 22 21:18:13 | 14m 32s | Pig For Slaughter | ♥ 1 | There is no challenge, there is nothing trying to stop me from achieving my goal. What even is my goal? |
| Apr 22 21:35:11 | 16m 58s | Flight of the Cepheus | ♥ 1 | The game dumps a lot of information on you, some of which I think could've been removed from the game without sacrificing anything (like Hull and Armour being two different stats). I think the console should colour code certain keywords so it's easier to pick out what happened. Like, ammunition is orange, food is green, morale is purple, etc. So when you glance at the console you can tell what happened without shifting through the dump of information. I also couldn't figure out how to fix Hull, so I only travelled 100 distance. Some more information on what the actions are supposed to do would be nice. But I did like it overall, it just tried to do too much without polishing what it had. Sometimes, less is more. |
| Apr 22 21:51:22 | 16m 11s | No Fish To Die | ♥ 2 | I got to the second level after the tutorial stage and stopped. It's not the difficulty I have a problem with, it's the lack of room for error. The lasers flash way too quickly, so you have time it perfectly. The fish has only 2 seconds to love, so you have to act quickly without any pause for thinking. I wasn't finding it fun, I was finding it frustrating. But the respawn time is really good. There's no faffing about. Death leads straight into another attempt. |
| Apr 22 22:07:51 | 16m 29s | Lamps | ♥ 4 | It certainly looks nice and manages to establish a tone and mood without words, which is impressive. But there isn't much substance to the actual "game". It's unfortunately nothing beyond a maze, and there isn't a mystery to discover. And the lamp needs some more feedback on what purpose it serves. I got it in my head that it loses power when you bark. "The amount of time the light stays on" as an indicator for the correct path doesn't work too well because we have no comparison for a normal rate of dimming, so you wouldn't notice if it was getting darker faster. |
| Apr 26 17:44:59 | 91h 37m | Deliverey (VR Only) | ♥ 0 | I have to admire the large brass balls it takes to decide to make a VR game for a game jam alone, props to you. Unfortunatrly, I couldn't complete one delivery without getting frustrated because of the jankiness of everything. I don't think the truck needed to be on spring joints to its wheels, or at least, the springiness needs to be turned *way* down. The way the truck rocks from side to side is really weird. The long range grab mechanic also interfered with trying to pick up the thing you pulled towards you. You can't catch things mid air because it causes them to hop into the air. On the vive wands, grip is not a good button to map to gripping things (ironically), because its not comfortable to hold. Trigger is much better, or it should be toggle, not held. The hand also freaks out when you try to interact with physics objects, like the van door. It seems like its trying to figure out its position every frame, but once you've grabbed something like that, you should hard set its position. Ie.: when you've grabbed the handle, the hand should not try to figure out whats its position and orientation should be each tick. Instead, it should recognise it is gripping and set its value to the handle's position, but allow the handle to be pushed/pulled by the controller inputs. |
| Apr 26 21:37:06 | 3h 52m | Until We Freeze | ♥ 1 | I would liek to play the game but the browser version is too laggy for me and I can't find a download link on the itch page. Am I missing it? |
| Apr 26 21:54:14 | 17m 08s | Goat Rider | ♥ 1 | This was a pretty cheery and enjoyable game! My biggest concerns are: * It's sometimes a little tricky to tell which tile you're on * It'd be nice if you could turn on the spot (considering how important direction is and how it has to be timed) * There needs to be some instructions for the core mechanics (I got stuck on the first few levels because I didn't know what sitting was) * The colour of the ropes clashes with the colour of the ground, and sometimes lines up with the edges of tiles, so it's difficult to make rope out against the graphics But I did enjoy this, and I've giving it a good upvote! |
| May 9 22:30:38 | 312h 36m | FurBall | ♥ 0 | I adore the visuals, it looks like something out of a Nick Jr. cartoon. It's unfortunately let down by a lack of polish. The animations are a little broken, how high the cat goes when you hit it feels inconsistent (I'm sure there is a system behind the scenes, but it *feels* inconsistent where one swing might make it hop, and another swing will send it soaring for miles), and I never saw a reason to use the underhand swing (S is also an awkward button to put the underhand swing when I need my finger free to press W to jump at a moment's notice). |