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justalocalhero

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		justalocalhero's comment
Apr 20 08:39:48		Bullet Blocker	♥ 2	Using the same projectiles to heal and hurt you is a cool strategic element. Could have been improved a lot by checking each input button and then calculating which direction to move so that some directions don't overwrite others. The endless level takes quite some time to ramp up and it seems like most of the projectiles don't have a chance to hit the target. Maybe all or most could have been launched with a trajectory that is at or near the target? You were suggesting that sometimes you'll have to decide whether to block a bullet or not, but there isn't much of a sense of danger. If there's no audio you should opt out of being judged in that category to save everyone some time. Big congratulations on your first submission, hope you're back for more!
Apr 20 08:59:51	20m 03s	Outpowered	♥ 2	Needing to return to base for power is a cool way to add a little tension, especially in spots where you don't know whether the path you are on will loop back around or dead end. The minimap tracking your progress is a really nice touch. I liked the music. Was there a second theme for when enemies were inbound or did it just seem to line up that way?
Apr 20 09:17:18	17m 27s	Harvest Season	♥ 3	Such a fun game. A ton of potential to be expanded: adjacency bonuses, different shape and size crops, maybe deckbuilding elements. Took some time to nail down the mechanics, but it was fun figuring it out. Wish I could have seen the max size of the crops after they were planted. Some crops didn't seem to work in some tiles and I wasn't able to figure out why. The art style is charming. Really impressed.
Apr 20 09:45:13	27m 55s	Late Medieval Network Engineer	♥ 2	So much to love about this one. The theme is clever and funny. There's a ton of strategic depth from such simple mechanics. Should you go to a weak network and repair it or a strong network and heal yourself. Should you take damage now to move to the center and open up more options. There's a nice balance of information. You know which cards are bad and which networks are failing based on the art, but you have to internalize exactly how bad. Really great job.
Apr 20 09:59:53	14m 40s	Crop Time	♥ 2	Cute little game. Like the music, simple as it is. Could have used a way to tell when the plants were in danger of withering. Mostly I want to figure out the mystery of the tree. It haunts my dreams.
Apr 20 10:19:45	19m 52s	Rise of the Purple Slime	♥ 2	So cool. So ambitious. Love just flying around the planet. My major complaint is the delay between figuring out a winning strategy and actually winning.
Apr 20 10:30:44	10m 59s	RestoPlane	♥ 1	The art style is gorgeous. The best iteration of the lunar lander control scheme that I've encountered.
Apr 20 10:37:19	6m 35s	Save the station	♥ 2	Looks beautiful. A small set of core mechanics that work perfectly. Could use a way to build multiple buildings faster. I'd love a version designed around building bigger or with more interaction between different building types.
Apr 20 10:46:03	8m 44s	Space Station Alpha	♥ 1	Just oozing with flavor, even the instructions. It takes some work to decipher but somehow that adds to the horror/survival feel. Really great work;
Apr 20 11:33:21	47m 18s	The Last Ship	♥ 2	The theme is a lot of fun. I like the idea of scrambling to patch up a your ship, having pressure from multiple angles, having to decide whether to let your machines take a little damage while you repair, or let the oxygen vent while you fight. You could improve the immersion quite a lot by fitting the collider bounds to the sprites so that you don't get stuck on invisible corners. Switching from wrench to weapon feels a little odd since they're on different inputs already. Either click to use selected tool or click to shoot, r to repair would make more sense to me. If you really want switching tools to be part of the challenge, you could have players pick them up the way you do with the metals.
Apr 20 11:59:32	26m 11s	Mom, I Started a Cult!	♥ 2	The core idle gameplay works, but I would have liked at least one novel feature to grab some attention. Maybe your cult members convince others to join, or attract law enforcement attention if they get too big, forcing you to expand somewhere else. Some benefit from having more members other than just direct contributions every day. Not sure that it fits the theme since your cult seems guaranteed to grow. The currency could be formatted so that the box doesn't flicker every time the number changes. If the UI for a town opens when you scroll over it, it should probably close when you scroll out of the box. I do like the idea of spreading out over a map, especially if it were fleshed out to allow strategic decision making and benefits for being embedded in different areas(transport hubs, factories, radio towers, etc).
Apr 20 12:14:23	14m 51s	Star Buffs	♥ 1	Looks really good. Feels smooth. Pretty fun after the initial learning curve. It felt like almost all of the danger was in the first moments after an enemy came on screen. Maybe a farther camera angle would help. I guess I could have stopped to check the map constantly to dodge things off screen but that feels against the spirit of the game. Maybe the heal should be disabled while you're at full health. I used it up quite a few times at first because I wasn't sure what it was for. Spamming click to shoot isn't the most fun mechanic. It'd be nice to know a summary of your buffs. Mostly the ships I took over felt similar to the one I started with, but maybe I never got far enough to notice.
Apr 20 12:25:22	10m 59s	Cell Defence	♥ 1	Fun idea. I like the mix of action and base building. Controls felt really nice. You could move fast without losing control. I'd love to see an expanded version, securing more territory, building up a strong outpost, moving your attention somewhere else, different cells/cell parts to generate resources, defense, and upgrades.
Apr 20 12:38:00	12m 38s	KingdomKeeper	♥ 1	One of the better implementations of the swap/match mechanic that I've seen lately. There's some good strategic depth with managing the quests, even just having two options for how to pay adds a lot. It would have been nice if there was something to do with the different resource types. Maybe there should be a reward for finishing quests early, otherwise it seems optimal to just let them stack up and pay in the last week to make a more informed decision.
Apr 20 12:51:36	13m 36s	Forests of Xahil	♥ 0	Love a good roguelike. Seems like there is a ton of depth with different behaviors as parts get damaged. I like needing to decide what to prioritize in repairs. Really polished overall.
Apr 20 13:06:58	15m 22s	Last Fortress Left	♥ 1	Fun concept. Looks clean and sharp. Could have used more challenging puzzles. I kept waiting for the different colored tiles to come into play somehow. Maybe something as simple as having enemies that hop two tiles at once or do two hearts of damage would have been a starting place. You need some kind of interaction besides tracing the lines and counting to two. I'm struggling to think of any new challenges with only the towers and enemies as they are.
Apr 20 13:13:30	6m 32s	Virtual Fish Tank	♥ 2	"Total poop" is a tracker I wasn't expecting to see today. It's a neat little simulator. I love games where there are a lot of little visual interactions happening in the background. Is there a way to recoup resources, or is it just trying to optimize how long you can survive with the resources? Could be neat as a tycoon type game, keep fish alive long enough till you can sell them and use the resources to buy more food and fish. There isn't a ton of decision making or strategy as is. Still neat to watch the fish swim around and interact with the environment.
Apr 20 14:27:10	1h 13m	ECHO	♥ 2	Beautiful. Immersive. Sounds great. Parallaxing stars are gorgeous. It took me so long to figure out how to accomplish anything. Holding up makes you stop and making noise prevents your sound eating friend from finding you. Controlling your speed in general is tough to get used to. I still don't really know how to advance. I assume collecting some set number of shapes does it? It's like everything I'm trying to do is wrong but the atmosphere of being adrift and out of control is so enjoyable somehow.
Apr 20 14:36:36	9m 26s	NWO Simulator - World peace is an inside job	♥ 0	Fun mechanic. Whenever a dialog window pops up it shifts the screen (I assume because of using space and arrow keys as controls?) It could be a bit smoother if the focus radius on the cities was a little larger and if you didn't need to hit space in the same city twice in a row: to end a dispute there and then again to focus on it.
Apr 20 15:26:02	49m 26s	To the Moon and Back...	♥ 1	Cool interactive story. You bit off quite a lot, with the sheer number of scenes, trying to tell a story. It'd be interesting if each scene had some little challenge that you had to fulfill in order to make it to the end safely. Making all the characters interactive doesn't do too much if it's all just filler dialogue. I got a kick out of the fact that you could slide the rolling chairs in the control room. I think there's a hidden game there: the player stepping into all these momentous times and just trivially messing with things in the background.
Apr 20 15:37:10	11m 08s	Adventures in the taiga	♥ 0	Everything works great. I like that your options pop up as they become available, it promotes discovery and avoids ui clutter. There isn't enough in the way of goals to be a really complete game yet, but it's a nice launching point. Although I did walk off the map and get lost, so that qualifies as danger I suppose ^_^
Apr 20 15:46:37	9m 27s	Wandering Star	♥ 1	Really cool use of this mechanic. Unique art style. The controls and the gravity feel great. Swallowing another star has some nice chunk to it. Do the different em field lines have different effects? I wasn't able to tell. Cool atmospheric effect regardless. The spawning seems to go haywire occasionally and just fill the screen with massive stars. I played five or six times and it happened in three of them.
Apr 20 16:45:10	58m 33s	floweressence	♥ 1	Really fun twist on tower defense. There's good depth, deciding when to speed up and slow down your targets and how to balance colors. The fact that you're keeping your targets alive really turns the whole genre on its head. Love the art style as well. I was having some issues with the audio spiking and getting quiet, although I did enjoy the music when it was working.
Apr 20 17:09:58	24m 48s	Spiders and Sports and Plane Crashes	♥ 2	Hilarious. Love the mechanic of retrieving your soccer ball. Wish the hitboxes were a bit more accurate, weaving in and out of oncoming spiders would have been fun. The sound effects made me laugh every time.
Apr 20 17:13:30	3m 32s	Snake 99	♥ 0	Doesn't seem to be working for me. All I see is a button that says to view instructions but doesn't do anything on click. I'll hold off on rating.
Apr 23 17:05:12	71h 51m	Space Ship E.V.E	♥ 2	What an awesome immersive experience. The narrative and the music established the tone well. The art style is really creative. Lots of little pieces of polish like the asteroid tracking lines. My only complaint is that edge pan for camera control doesn't work great in browser, it's too easy to go out of the canvas. You could lock the mouse or choose a different camera control scheme. edit: on second look, I have one more small complaint. The stars in the background don't quite reach all of the visible space, and the base image is a little small so you can see the tiling at a glance. Picking nits. Something that could be improved without too much pain. Really enjoyed the game. Bravo.
Apr 23 18:01:13	56m 01s	Conservation Inc.	♥ 1	The idea of combining a macroscopic strategy game with minigames to provide action is a lot of fun. I think the gradient shading in the dinosaurs and the ms paint spray can(?) of the ground don't look as good as just the solid colors like the clouds. It could be an interesting art style if it were a little more consistent. The dodging section is quite long and doesn't pause your income. Dodging for a long time gives you a ton of money and trivializes a lot of the strategy about what to buy. Given the size of the hitbox and the keyboard controls, it seems easy to have an unwinnable spawn, with no way to buy a second attempt. Losing without having any say feels bad. A little odd that the popup for surviving a hazard has two different close buttons. I'm pretty sure I got softlocked while trying the tutorial when I clicked the button to start the hazard while a message box was up. With snappier minigames that matched the hazards and some more strategic depth, this could be a lot of fun. Very ambitious for a jam game, cool theme, fun idea. I enjoyed it, despite all my complaining.
Apr 23 18:10:42	9m 29s	Soul Cube	♥ 1	What a cool concept. Multiplayer in a jam is so ambitious. The core mechanic creates a lot of strategic trade-offs. I wish there was some incentive tied to surviving or killing.
Apr 23 19:00:43	50m 01s	Ultimate Planet Habitat Support Tester 2020!!	♥ 1	Love the idea and the simulation aspects, but it could really use some ways to make incremental progress. Most game states seem doomed from the start (maybe not the case on a larger planet size with enough knowledge, I couldn't say). I tried dozens of restarts without any configurations that seemed close to stable. If I did find a winning state, it would just feel like luck more than anything I did. A good first step might be to invalidate spawns that are impossible, like a planet with only plants or only carnivores. Maybe if there was an option to tweak stats for an energy cost instead of only randomly re-rolling and hoping things work, or to add species in addition to replacing the ones you have. It could be a lot of fun to work your way up from plant life to herbivores to carnivores if there was a little more player input in the process. I love that you went for a whole ecosystem simulator for a jam.
May 11 06:59:49	419h 59m	Life of the Party	♥ 0	What a realistic simulation of a party. I pissed everyone off, ran out of things to talk about, and they all left unhappy. Really interesting use of the core mechanic. I love that the music changed with the game state, great piece of feedback. The disorienting perspective and the tone of the chatter added a lot to the sense of tension when things weren't going well.
May 11 07:08:24	8m 35s	Vegetablist	♥ 1	Fun little juggling act. Took me a minute to realize what the fertilizer and its icon were. I really liked the combination of placing the plants on the correct tiles as well as bringing fertilizer to the plants. It felt a little clunky at times to grab and place things in the slots that I wanted, particularly under time pressure when I was trying to cut corners. With a little more variety of challenge and some more long term goals, this could make a nice mobile puzzle game. I played the web version but I imagine it controls great by swipe.