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hgcummings

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		hgcummings's comment
Apr 21 19:08:41		Ice Light	♥ 3	Really great core concept and wonderful mood. Quite nice puzzles too. Would definitely be interested to play an expanded version of this.
Apr 21 19:15:39	6m 58s	PRECURSOR	♥ 1	Nice core mechanic, the dexterity/control challenge was quite fun. I quite like the aesthetic too (reminded me slightly of Superhot). I seem to keep getting thrown back to the start after completing the third stage, but the other comments seem to suggest there are more levels than that (maybe the game got confused by multiple monitors or something?)
Apr 21 19:24:16	8m 37s	Hextayin' Alive	♥ 2	I really liked this. It's a nice twist on game of life and definitely turns it into something that feels like a game. Step-wise real-time strategy is a concept I haven't seen before, and took a little getting used to. This feels like a game that could have quite a lot of depth to it, even with simple rules, which is a really hard thing to achieve. Nice work! Would be interested to see something with different goals to aim for (rather than just maintaining balance) and perhaps different scenarios, which could allow players to get a lot of mileage out of the same simple set of core rules.
Apr 21 19:37:33	13m 17s	How to Air	♥ 1	Really cute game, lovely art style. I got a bit stuck due to not being able to pick up the medkit, so couldn't complete the last square of the air generator. A bit more puzzle depth would make it more engaging too (most of the elements were just "pick up a thing and take it to the gas extractor" or "pick up a thing, use it on something else to produce another thing, and take that to the gas extractor") but these very constrained puzzle games can work really well, and it's a great start for a jam game.
May 2 08:35:10	252h 57m	This is Fine	♥ 1	Great game! Really well-executed with a consistent graphical style and music. Lots of interesting and innovative puzzle mechanics. The puzzles themselves were good although some of them could have been more satisfying: some were over-constrained making it a bit too quick to find the only possible solution, and others felt a bit inelegant (high number of turns required), but a several of the later ones were very neat.
May 2 08:41:57	6m 47s	Mr. Cheesy	♥ 1	Very fun simple game, with a great feel and amusing graphics. Could see this being really addictive. It could do with a tiny bit more variation or difficulty ramp-up. Once I got going I found I was able to avoid damage for a really long time, until it sped up quite a lot. Perhaps the speed could ramp up a bit earlier or there could be one more kind of challenge/obstacle to deal with? I liked that the hitbox was pretty brutal (most of my damage came from switching lanes too early rather than too late, and catching on a grater just behind me).
May 2 09:04:47	22m 50s	Lamps	♥ 1	Absolutely brilliant mood and graphics. Wonderfully atmospheric game. I have to admit I needed the hints in the comments to make much progress. I'd guessed that visiting the ghost friend recharged the lamp/bark, but hadn't clocked the significance of how long the lamps lit up for. I did get a "I don't want to be here" vibe from the rooms that only lit up very briefly though, so I agree with the designer's preference for communicating this through feeling rather than words (which fits really nicely with the player avatar being a dog). Maybe just need to find a way to provide players slightly more of a hint without spelling it out. I think the main reason I gave up on my first playthrough was actually that some of the rooms were a bit similar and I thought I was going in circles. Obviously the graphics and models are amazing for a single weekend build, but if doing more work on it, a bit more variety in the look and feel of the rooms would really help (and perhaps make it easier to figure out the lamp mechanic). Would love to see this as a full length game with a fleshed-out story being slowly revealed throughout. I can imagine all sorts of powerful endings, and different ideas for the significance of the ghostly human. I could see this being a really beautiful piece of storytelling without using any speaking/writing.
May 2 09:10:12	5m 25s	Stay Alive	♥ 1	I really liked the CRT aesthetic and simple graphics. The gameplay was intense. I felt like I didn't have all that much control over how well I did. It was mostly just moving as fast as possible rather than puzzling out the timing and firing angles of the turrets, or routes to avoid them (most levels didn't offer much choice about which route to take). Also some of the later levels seemed a bit repetitive. The fundamental gameplay is really strong though; could be a great game with a bit more time to spend on level design.
May 2 09:26:19	16m 07s	Until it blooms	♥ 1	A beautiful little game. Honestly not sure how you'd expand on it because I think it was perfectly formed. Wonderful graphics and music, and a very effective story (really impressive how it was so minimal but so effective). I thought the three elements were well balanced against each other and mechanically varied enough to keep it interesting for the duration of the story mode. I didn't play the endless mode for long because I thought the gameplay did start to become a bit repetitive there. The story mode was just brilliant though.
May 2 09:37:49	11m 30s	To The Bunker!	♥ 1	Fun game. I completed the normal mode quite easily, but the hard mode took me several tries. I never seemed to run out of time, and couldn't see a timer, so not sure if there was much of a trade off between taking side streets. I actually found it easier to just stay on the main street though because it was wider. The fact that each assassin throws just one mine means you can just wait for them to throw it and then navigate around. The main challenge seemed to come from the controls being a bit twitchy. Would be interesting to see it with some of these aspects tweaked a bit, perhaps making it more about maintaining speed and reacting to the assassins' mines.
May 2 09:47:00	9m 11s	Ruins of Waste	♥ 1	Nice game! The pixelart graphics were great: the rock people were really emotive and I liked the growing grass and vines. The sounds of the cans and bottles landing were really good too. I'm on a 4:3 screen and the bin was outside my viewport when I first played it, so I didn't really get what to do (was just throwing the trash out of the bounds of the screen). When I played again I resized the window and was able to play properly.
May 2 10:07:36	20m 36s	Don't taste the lava	♥ 1	Excellent puzzle game! Simple mechanics with lots of interesting emergent complexity. Really great mix of puzzling and speed/dexterity, and the levels were very well-designed. Introduced new ideas at a good pace and the puzzles were really satisfying to solve. With more levels and a bit more graphical polish this would make an awesome mobile game. I managed to complete the final level without needing the last three blocks. Was that intentional? One minor note: playing the web version fullscreen didn't work well for me (in 4:3) but playing without fullscreen worked fine.
May 2 10:18:05	10m 29s	Rhythm Castle - Platformer/Rhythm Game	♥ 1	This looks awesome, like a cross between Celeste and Cult of the Necrodancer. However, it didn't seem to quite work for me in a few ways: - The fixed window size meant it didn't fit on one screen for me, so was split across two monitors - None of the double-tap controls, or the double jump or glide seemed to work (I tried numerous variations of quick double taps, in time with the beat, etc., and never saw anything work) - Nothing happened when I found other sleeping moles (were they supposed to be revived or something?) - For the rhythm bit on the very first screen seemed not quite in time, the music graphics and control input all seemed not quite in time with each other. I got through it with some trial-and-error but it didn't "feel" right I'd love to play this and see more of it. The concept is brilliant and I really like the graphics and sound.
May 2 10:32:26	14m 21s	Mission Impoppable	♥ 1	5/5 for humour. Brilliant mechanics but unbelievably frustrating (in a good way)! I was unable to get past the lasers lever after numerous attempts (I can see that it's possible, but it's just SO DIFFICULT). Great mood, audio, graphics and humour. Really well-realised idea. The balloon physics were great and made the game frustrating and fun at the same time. Also, I love that in the character designer, "face" is apparently a boolean.
May 2 10:47:18	14m 52s	current	♥ 1	Great game. Really nice graphics and sound, strong mechanics, and well-designed puzzles. The final level took me a long time to get, but it was a great puzzle. A really satisfying game to play throughout. Nice work!
May 2 15:20:06	4h 32m	Cydonia	♥ 1	Absolutely brilliant graphics and mood. I loved the co-op and light-based mechanics too, and thought you created some really interesting puzzles with them. I could also see how the story might tie in with the theme later on.
May 2 15:26:03	5m 57s	Gaia - Keep It Alive	♥ 1	This was very satisfying and absorbing to play: spawning volcanoes/meteors and watching the fledgling population slowly spread out across the globe. I really like how you managed to make the topology important and a key part of the gameplay: volcanos providing more land, and population being slow to grow past mountain ranges, etc.. The graphics are really impressive and the music is very well-chosen. It feels like not quite a whole _game_ yet, more of an enjoyable interactive simulation. But all the gameplay components that are present work really well, and it wouldn't need much more (maybe a couple of extra tools and some kind of objectives or challenge/conflict) to make it into a really compelling game.
May 2 15:28:48	2m 45s	SPIRE	♥ 0	Sorry you didn't get to finish this. Small-scale tactics games (which this appears to be?) are one of my favourite genres, and I really like the aesthetic implied by the game UI. Would be interested to see a more completed version of this if you get the chance to work on it again.
May 2 17:03:00	1h 34m	Overjammed	♥ 1	Fun game. Nice pixel art, and the meta-story was a nice touch :) I liked the animations on the devs, especially every time the guy lost his blue thing and had a little meltdown, or when the router died and everyone panicked. It was also good how sometimes people just got sad and you had to talk to them to cheer them up. The variation in the mechanic here was good too. A few more varied mechanics (other than just "press space on a thing" or "pick up a thing and take it to someone") would be a great way to extend the game post-jam.
May 2 21:13:19	4h 10m	Quiet Steady Dragonfly	♥ 1	Ah, it's a tamagotchi! I don't know if that's what you were inspired by, but it's a great idea for a game jam to work with a very minimalist concept like that. Also, they sold tens of millions of those things back in the 90s, so if you can find a way to capture some of that nostalgia you might be onto something. Doesn't seem to be all that much to the game yet, but it could be interesting to extend and polish it while keeping with that very minimal retro style.
May 2 21:22:35	9m 16s	LYMPHOSITE	♥ 2	Great game! It's very polished and feels more like a complete game than something from a game jam. I love the graphical style, and it really reminds me of a lot of late 80s / early 90s shooters like Xenon 2. Also, I am bad at this game... I found the relatively short range of the player's weapon made it quite challenging, especially when moving around. I really like the variety of enemies with different styles of attack and movement.
May 2 21:42:37	20m 02s	Slime Mama	♥ 2	Great game! Fantastic graphics and sound, and some nicely implemented mechanics (the wall jumping controls felt really good). I particularly like the visuals for respawning: very clever way to make respawing make sense in the context of the game. I also like how respawning becomes a mechanic, since you can travel far away, throw a load of food back towards the start, then respawn to collect it. I was unable to defeat it despite several tries. I suspect I was missing something tactically... Took me a little while to realise just how far you could throw things, so I was being a bit inefficient initially. But even when I resolve that I still struggled to get past about half strength.
May 2 22:01:58	19m 21s	Dorfromantik	♥ 2	Absolutely love the art style of this. The graphics are really polished and wouldn't look out of place in a commercial game. I like the core mechanic. I find that part of the joy of these kinds of tile-laying games is building neat little layouts while also meeting the goals of the game. I couldn't see a way to rotate tiles before placing them, which would have helped with this. Also, the rewards for building disconnected groups of trees/houses/fields encouraged spreading out the tiles a lot more, which made things look less neat. It would be nice to have a way to split up groups without having to do this. Perhaps the railway lines could count as dividers, like roads in Carcassonne divide fields? (In fact, I couldn't work out whether the railway lines had any functional significance at all; they didn't seem to, although I like the way they looked in the game). Overall I really enjoyed it though. Just a few mechanical tweaks and a nice soundtrack would make this into an excellent game.
May 7 08:32:58	106h 31m	Cheat Or Die	♥ 2	Innovative mechanic, and I really liked the graphics and sound. The humour was really dark! I found it slightly frustrating to play because it was a little bit unintuitive to tell what would be seen by the supervisor. It was mechanically consistent, but the graphics didn't exactly represent when they would catch you (sometimes they could be looking right at you, but you were out of range, sometimes they seemed to be looking away but were close enough to detect you). Telegraphing when the supervisor noticed someone looking around was really good. Making the rest of the graphics really closely match the mechanics would make this a lot more satisfying to play; you could really feel you were getting away with passing notes, rather than second-guessing the game mechanic.
May 7 08:43:57	10m 59s	Clumsy Looter	♥ 1	Great concept; it fits the theme really well and I love the idea of running around after a bumbling idiot trying to keep them alive. The graphics fit the humour and mood really well. The fights were a little simplistic, but looked great, and I can see them being expanded to something with a bit more depth. I found that the (randomly-generated?) room layouts meant it was pretty rare for Chris to actually collide with a monster. I played through a few times and barely saw him get hurt, let alone killed. Some small tweaks here could make Chris a lot more disaster-prone, really keep the player on their toes and make it a lot more fun to play.
May 7 08:55:18	11m 21s	Wanted: Alive!	♥ 2	Really nice twist on the idea. Great graphics and overall aesthetic, and it was fun to play! I found it pretty easy to get through, so would be interested to see how you'd expand it with further levels and keep it challenging without it becoming repetitive. Perhaps introducing other obstacles/peril (like the holes) or different player mechanics (e.g. moveable objects)?
May 7 09:02:11	6m 53s	Keep Me Breathing	♥ 2	Really nice art style and music. I love how calm and relaxing it is when everything's good and how jarring the alarm sound is when things aren't (it might be even more effective to have the music fade out when the alarm starts and fade back in afterwards). Having to react quickly to all the different changes was really fun. I liked the colour theory mechanic too.
May 7 12:13:31	3h 11m	Gino the Neutrino	♥ 3	Really nice idea, well executed and fun to play. The graphics and music are great. I love the art style, the space cats and the duck.
May 7 12:24:40	11m 09s	Kingdom Trainee	♥ 1	I liked the art style a lot, and the game mechanic is a really good idea. I liked having to make the best of my limited hand while people came to me with their problems. I found a bit of dissonance between the wording of the cards and the outcomes: e.g. the 2 money card sounded quite dismissive even though it was pretty good, most of the church cards sounded quite weak although they were sometimes the right solution. I was surprised how often I got away with what seemed like a weak card leading to a good outcome, and the bad outcomes didn't always seem "fair". I think some randomness (or at least hidden information) is good, but a few tweaks to the text might make it seem fairer.
May 7 14:35:08	2h 10m	Party Animal	♥ 1	Oh my goodness that was stressful. The number of different things to keep track of seemed well-balanced. It felt hard but achievable. The slight variation of the mop mechanic was good. Would be nice to have a bit more variation with the other mechanics. It feels like there would be lots of scope to do so (the breaking up fights one in particular could be a minigame in itself).
May 7 14:43:06	7m 58s	The Call of the Unicore	♥ 1	Great graphics and mood! Fun gameplay too; and a nice level of challenge. Not sure whether the item spawns were entirely random or not, but food seemed a bit low on all of my playthroughs... my Unicore eventually died of low health each time, but if I'd been a bit more competent at fighting off enemies I think it might have died of low food, despite me picking up every single piece of food that spawned, which would have been a bit frustrating.
May 7 14:59:34	16m 28s	HARD IMPACT	♥ 1	Love the synthwave aesthetic, and this was fun to play. Although short, the level design was really good: the first mini-level introduced the mechanics really well with no text, and the second level was challenging enough to take a few tries (and demand some degree of learning how to use speed/jumping) while always seeming achievable enough to make me want to keep trying.
May 7 15:06:09	6m 35s	hype dream	♥ 2	Really charming art style, and entertaining to play. I liked the range of different mechanics (squashing bugs, peeping at the right time, etc.) and keep on top of them all at the same time while also dealing with popups was fun.
May 7 15:17:26	11m 17s	Keep It Alive	♥ 1	Oh wow, this was great. Not the kind of game I normally play but this was really compelling and kept me hooked until the end. The writing is very good. Excellent mood too, and the minimal graphics were really well done. It did seem a bit light on interactivity for interactive fiction. When it offered choices they didn't seem to impact the story much (I replayed it to confirm this, but even on first playthrough it felt like the story was quite on-rails). Obviously that's quite understandable for a jam game, but if you're planning to expand on this it would be great if the story could branch a bit more.
May 7 15:48:16	30m 50s	Keep Bloo Alive	♥ 1	I really like the art style. It was fun to play as well. One very minor annoyance was that the main menu captured the mouse but the main game didn't (I kept accidentally clicking other windows), which was probably the opposite of what I'd want.