Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Feedback comment stats → scsc

scsc

Feedback comments for LD46

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		scsc's comment
May 10 22:53:36		Negative Zone	♥ 1	Great job with the aesthetics, your non-intrusive pleasantly paced tutorial messages together with self-evident goals should be definitely a part of most new games. Hopefully you're still improving the movement logic, because I was able to get stuck, having to jump to unstuck the character several times. I'd also suggest that when the user holds a jump key while falling down (as long as it's pressed the second time), the character should jump again as soon as it touches the ground. I also subjectively feel like the movement is a just too slow, so the game hasn't fulfilled its potential of being too comfortable, which is most visible when you accidentally make a mistake and have to re-do all of your actions, which isn't really satisfying, so you could try to lessen the impact of this if you plan to continue working on this game ;)
May 11 13:51:38	14h 58m	Surge	♥ 1	Nice visually good looking game, but your multiplayer instructions are very lacking, as you are letting users figure everything out by themselves. I'll assume that you intend this to be purely P2P without any server of your own, so users unable to forward port 7777 and share their IP with someone they already know have no way of experiencing the multiplayer. I didn't understand why the game starts after first pressing Play, yet when the match ends and I click Play again from the menu, suddenly I'm waiting. Running a second game instance didn't let me connect from the first one either no matter what I did, it only says "waiting to begin...", so the instructions could be more explicit even about how to join a local server. You have chosen a very unusual aiming system, as most people are used to having crosshair stay at the middle of the camera :) When spectating after dying (at least it seems that's what happened, even though it doesn't say "life terminated" immediately), controllers seem to be stuck based on previous rotation, e.g. left/right is swapped, and it doesn't say when (if) will I re-spawn. One other issue is that the mouse gets stuck inside the window even in menu after the game ends. Mouse scroll is also too slow in-game. If you plan to continue developing this game post-jam, fixing these small issues will have a huge impact :) One small tip for your Git repository, try not to add the files listed inside before creating the .gitignore file, as you have plenty of temporary files inside /Library that can cause you conflicts on top of wasting space (Mirror even has one useless 30MB benchmark scene inside its Examples directory). We've also begun to learn Mirror as a part of our LD Jam 46 game, so feel free to check out our server-sided approach that doesn't rely on P2P if you're interested in some specifics :) There are currently plenty of non-intuitive issues regarding Mirror documentation, while some of them could could be addressed very easily if any experienced users contributed to improve it.
May 11 14:40:43	49m 05s	Grandma's Boi	♥ 2	Nice low-poly graphics and music, along with the realistic idea of carrying a grandma. The interactive tutorial idea would be great, but the delay between switching text in the left-bottom corner seems too arbitrary, as one may not even notice that he missed a message. Also, during the tutorial my game turned into extremely low FPS, and it felt like I've just become slow due to exhaustion, but I couldn't fix it. Also, the way you have to attack by spamming mouse button wasn't too intuitive from the attack animation, is there even a reason why one can't simply hold the key considering the large attack cooldown? Other than that, if you work on the game post-jam, your main priorities should be the leg movement animation depending on a direction, better visual interaction between kids and the grandma once they all start stacking together, and the player clipping behind stairs, along with camera jumping when running towards the home, or when at max/min zoom level, plus considering that it's possible to zoom the camera in, you could use raycast to zoom in the camera temporarily once the player is behind a tree :) (Plus try to press Esc when on the Lose screen.) Also, I must say that the Normal mode pretty much feels like an infinite mode, so you could at least add a few additional short-term goals for the player to always strive towards :)
May 11 15:02:59	22m 16s	Pas	♥ 0	As a first impression I must say this effect is really cool, and it'd be definitely worth occasionally using even in other games. I also had a huge issue with <1 FPS, as I currently have monitor attached to iGPU instead of AMD, and the game refuses to utilize the external GPU this way; if you could optimize the performance to be at least 3 times faster, e.g. by reducing the number of dots for users that have low FPS, it'd at least become relatively playable. If you can parametrize it, the game could track FPS to update this dynamically as required. The motion blur also extremely hurts this, and I'd prefer the option to completely disable it in these low FPS scenarios, so the movement takes only 1 frame instead of several of them (and I think it hurts most games generally anyway). As a further feedback, there's a strange cursor when loading the game, and the music doesn't seem to be seamlessly looping. By the way, if you're using URP in Unity, try to disable post-processing in the camera object to make sure this wouldn't double the FPS, as URP has some very strange issues :)
May 11 15:17:43	14m 44s	"IT" dies	♥ 3	Nice straight-forward mechanics once I got used to the meaning of those icons (take from a shelf, put into a cauldron) in spite of a very brief tutorial. I liked how detailed was the graphical design of all characters. The name uses capital "IT", which feels as if it meant I.T., so I'd probably name the game with "it" instead :) Also the game gets quite repetitive with the "tower defense" without any time counter, or any event to look forward to, so I'd advise you to improve this you continue the development post-jam, so that you won't lose players mid-game, thinking there's not much more to it :)
May 11 15:32:31	14m 48s	Sim Cell	♥ 1	Just as others have mentioned, I also wasn't capable of understanding the mechanics to be able to provide any relevant feedback, but considering how detailed it is, this has a huge potential of becoming an educational tool for people interested in biology if you focus your post-jam efforts this way. If you integrate the knowledge describing various other specific cells like bacteria, maybe it could help people visualize the consequences of some of their structural details, e.g. if the cells could also interact with specific environment. But ignoring the WebGL iframe issue, directing casual players to "Wikipedia: Actin-binding protein" seems like an overkill... :D Anyway, there was recently a huge project at legendsoflearning.com which financed various small Unity games by thousands € each, having them cover simple educational curricula, and this game seems to resemble some of their better quality stuff, all that's missing is a tutorial along with some quiz :)
May 11 16:45:52	1h 13m	Keep it up, Aline.	♥ 1	Nice story and game mechanics, and even though the process of loading doesn't seem to seamless, that's probably just a blender limitation. The goal of the game seems too vague though, as there are too many paths to take and not enough positive feedback for the player, so casual games probably wouldn't rate it high before some you make some post-jam improvements. The choice of having to hold an E key together with W and D wasn't too clever, as most cheap keyboards have a technical limitation that don't let you hold these keys together (rollover) - maybe you could make the E key a toggle :) And considering that nothing interesting seems to be happening most of the time, maybe you could at least add some funny dialogue between the characters while they're walking together. After all, even though it kind of makes sense to occasionally suddenly bite someone's neck and drink some blood, usually one would at least warn, or otherwise mentally prepare the other side every single time they should expect to feel the pain, even more so if they are carefully walking around traps, holding a heavy baggage on their shoulders ;)
May 12 10:47:01	18h 01m	Lively	♥ 1	Too bad you didn't continue on this post-jam, or at least mention the individual features you've worked on, along with those that you originally intended to implement, but didn't have time to do so, as the description doesn't really make it clear to us :)
May 12 10:47:10	9s	Friday at Barney's	♥ 1	Nice non-traditional graphical style. Personally I dislike the inability to return and read old messages in games like this, along with the need to click at least twice for every message, though that's a standard nowadays. I'll point out one little bug: when you click on Phone in your inventory, the object behind it (door) also gets activated.
May 12 10:50:40	3m 30s	Don't Let It Die	♥ 1	Funny concept along with the voice-over, though the mechanics is sadly just as repetitive as the voice lines. If you plan to work on this post-jam, it'd be definitely worth it if you could add some variance to it using some state machine, so that "it" seems a bit more lively and moody based on some game events :) And yeah, I really dislike the forced motion blur without an option to disable it, which also makes it unplayable on low FPS.
May 12 11:13:53	23m 13s	The Angel Recording the Truth	♥ 1	On a negative note to give you some feedback, the UI is quite cumbersome to use, for example the OK button is too small and always moves its location, and even though I appreciate the Enter key being supported, having to click between predicates and to press a confirm button manually doesn't make for a good user experience. On top of that, the lack of looping of the background music is a bit annoying though, and it feels just a little bit too repetitive. But on a positive note, this is a great educational tool, which reminds me of a recent project legendsoflearning.com which funded similar games that follow certain educational curricula by paying few thousand dollars for each game, and this game would definitely meet their quality standard from what I've seen, so maybe you could find a way to make a post-jam effort in a similar way to improve our education :)
May 12 11:40:48	26m 55s	The Business	♥ 0	Well, as a suggestion you should really fix that severe text contrast issue on the first screen asap, as we can barely read the instructions, this would be definitely within the acceptable limits of a fix made few hours or days after the jam; also it doesn't really explain that we should leave the first computer, and go buy a new one in the other room instead, plus the instructions of using "space key" should be really introduced on the second screen, so we don't forget it :) Also, it's not nice to force players to use ALT+F4, as we can't get back to the menu :P Otherwise it's a nice first attempt overall at a semi-idle game casual game, so if you add some interesting storyline (and work on the graphics), it could be easily turned into a nice mobile game :)
May 12 12:13:34	32m 46s	Tomb Flamer	♥ 0	Nice dungeon style game, though I felt like the map is larger than it had to be, luckily I soon found that the correct path towards the boss is just "straight up", but of course, I haven't figured out the mechanics to beat the boss myself, as it kept resetting back to the spawn whenever I went too far (even if that meant going to the tunnel behind him). I think it would be more satisfying if there were ways to re-fill the health other than going far away in the map to find new one-time consumables, which also prevents the user from using right-click to jump freely, as the comfort costs him life. Also, I found that some barrels could be opened by jumping over them, while others had to be jumped from the correct distance to land just over them. Good job nevertheless.
May 12 13:08:34	55m 00s	Keep Hope Alive	♥ 0	I'm not trying to take the issues like depression and anxiety lightly in any way, and I know it depends on many subjective factors, but still, I feel like you aren't giving them a representation they deserve, as this game makes the issue very binary, as if taking for a fact that people are victims of all of their circumstances, an that striving for a "success" and "opportunity" in life (whatever it may be) is the only feasible mindset there is. That's why I'd much rather see the game present, or at least hint upon some alternatives, so as to at least address the most stereotypical issues and self-destructive patterns that people repeat without a second thought, over and over, just because they've been programmed to do them by our society. Of course, anyone can get unlucky and fall to a rock bottom without having the energy to get up, but that doesn't automatically mean that most people aren't responsible for this happening to them. For example, the difference between a wasted life and a successful life may disappear the second one changes their semantics within their own belief system. However, there isn't any general solution that applies for everyone, so all we can do is to analyze the most obvious patterns, and to at least try to prevent those :) It's honestly scary how easily people can get stuck in a pattern just like this game visualizes, falling prey to entropy by chasing impossible expectations, deprecating their self-worth along the way :) Nevertheless, there are also actual physical issues of depression and anxiety, which aren't as simple as "being down" from having "wasted your life" (and if you apply a bit of critical thinking, you'll find out that the current medical system is flawed and broken, as they only research pills that cover the symptoms instead of healing a root of the issue, which can be even as simple as nutrition, including a belief that we need carbs to survive, which is further propagated by illogical expectations that people are capable of objectively researching conflicting nutritional studies). There are even some "substances" one can use to explore these unconscious states of mind, though they carry a risk of opening a mental wound you didn't know you had, and can also very well destroy your life if you underestimate them and then give up. I think this game is doing a disservice to such people by using these two conditions of depression and anxiety interchangeably, as if this was their real meaning, because there's a really huge lack of awareness in this regard within our society. On the other hand, the analogy of good times providing better opportunity of further good times, and vice versa, can often definitely feel just like you described it (and I believe our society should strive to explicitly address this, as it's insane how little can sometimes be enough to save a person's life, yet such people completely disappear from the frequency of successful people due to a default human nature) :) Either way, good job making a nice representation of how many people feel during their lives, I'm just suggesting for next time to also add a little bit of advice along the lines of "it's not that simple" ;)
May 12 13:14:27	5m 53s	Walter and Water	♥ 0	Well, at least I had fun falling down off the platform several times; also, once the enemies stacked on top of my player and each other, they managed to shoot me towards the sky :D
May 12 13:21:33	7m 06s	Keep your heart alive	♥ 0	A nice simple memorization game, I'd advise you to at least add a way to skip the memorization phase, and speed-up the random reordering once the player decides they are ready. You could also tidy up the text a little bit :)
May 12 14:26:17	1h 04m	Kill the Dead	♥ 1	Nice and stable top-down shooter, too bad there wasn't enough time to add more goals to make it feel less generic. I'd point out though that the health bar colors don't make too much sense (gaining green means losing health), and I'd also prefer to see some visual or sound feedback to warn me about the impending death from infection, because it's easy to forget about it due to the game's slow paced nature. Out of curiosity, considering that you seem to prefer Godot over Unity, which surely currently likes to keep many new features under development without stable alternatives, yet they also keep rapidly improving and are far from being an inferior choice for larger games; could you gives us some specifics of what you personally find more convincing about Godot in the long-term (except that they are completely free and maybe arguably simpler to use for some)?
May 12 18:51:13	4h 24m	Aviarium	♥ 1	Excellent graphics with pretty good flying mechanics, though the ground rotation speed could be a bit faster, and considering there are so many trees, you could have made searching for the 7th stick a bit easier ;) Also the requirement of 5 crabs makes it feel too repetitive, 3 would seem like a better choice (as the comment above me mentioned, it would also make more sense :P)
May 12 19:19:44	28m 31s	Carpe Diem	♥ 0	Well, the music is... interesting :P When it comes to plants seizing the day, I would most likely expect them to chase (or slide) towards the sun, but I wouldn't have thought of a decision to collect stopwatches to help me travel through time, I guess I still got plenty to learn from a Time Lord. You really should have added the basic game loop along with fixing the text font quality though, even if it were post-jam.