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Feedback comments for LD46
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Talops's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 24 00:52:15 | Raising the bar | ♥ 3 | Very well done on this one guys, the sprites set the mood so well along with the music, an easy 5* for me in the mood category, hands down! As for gameplay, you know me @spacemonkey, clicker & strategy games aren't my forte 😉 So I focused much more on time min-maxing and upgrade path optimization rather than playing recipes & market, and I felt your game design's real strength resided there, ending up in a much more fun and frantic result than I expected from that initial pitch! On the flipside, it overshadows the whole cocktail-mixing barman aspect a bit, but I believe the leaderboards will make it much more worthwhile for the stubborn strategizers. It took me a lot of time to find out that there were mouseover tooltips (as they displayed too slowly), the critical information that is upgrading cost would have been better placed directly near the upgradeable part, so the player loses less time to access it and it makes the upgrades more obvious to the eye (I initially thought the mixing slot upgrades were locked out of buying for some reason, because they were too discrete). Also a minor UX problem prevented me from seeing the end result pop-up by mistakenly clicking on the Main Menu button right as it appeared, since I was mash-clicking the blender below it at the time. Making the menu items uninteractable for 2 seconds after it appears would solve that issue. By the way, I fell into a state of deep abysmal despair when I tried to play around with the jukebox and nothing happened, dem fake buttons! 😆 Congrats! | |
| Apr 24 02:01:53 | 1h 09m | Soda Pop Vampire | ♥ 3 | A nice game that knows what it's doing and does it well with a simple and well scoped gameplay loop which allowed you to make it look good and have a good amount of content for a solo project! Definitely one of my higher ratings! The only criticisms I have are very minor so I really have to push it 😆 : - On windows, camera movement is inverted. - The humans' view angle and range sometimes don't fit the cone gizmo precisely which leads to some deceptive detections and the inverse as well. - Level 6's challenge is great! So great in fact that I was let down when the following level was a complete cakewalk. - Maybe it's me being a speedy gonzales but I really didn't feel the health bar depletion mechanic too much, the level design didn't make a lot of use of it while it had a lot of potential. One of the earlier level goes through the effort of teaching it through a well placed dispenser, too bad the later ones weren't more... thirsty! Congrats @neontropics ! |
| Apr 24 02:48:41 | 46m 48s | Cadavour | ♥ 2 | Neat concept! The only two criticisms I have are that the body part health isn't visible enough (the desaturation being too discrete) and the non-body-part-related gameplay is too basic, making the game not very challenging once you've figured out the main mechanic. If you are planning to continue it, giving enemies more complex and interesting behaviour would be a must 👍 ! And while you guys had to use a bunch of external assets, the choice is well done and everything blends in well together! Congrats, I hope you will keep polishing it because the idea deserves to be dug! |
| Apr 24 03:48:37 | 59m 56s | The Heart Of The Keep | ♥ 1 | Amazing for a compo game! It really reminds me of rpgmaker xp horror games like Ib, the Witch's house, mad father, but less on the gory and more on the moody side, and with a really nice setting. Really elegant in its minimalism, having just the good stuff where it is needed, optimizing the workload like crazy (2f animations to give life almost everywhere, choosing a genre where you don't need music but good ambients, less mechanics and more level design, really cool!). I've got all 4 endings (nothing, dagger, elixir and dagger + elixir) and had a blast even though low-gameplay high-narrative games are not my cup of tea at all. Here's some points that could've been improved/fixed: - The terrace NPC, when giving advice, says North-East instead of North-West, so I looked around and didn't find anything (which wasn't helped by the vague room name), so I took the assumption that maybe the dev mistakenly inverted it and found the pass-through tile. - Due to the high visual granularity and lack of points of attention (palette/patterns) in the teleporter room, I at first didn't notice the north and southwest exits and was very confused (the eastern one was very readable however). Was that deliberate? Using it to make teleporters blend in with the rest was a smart decision though. - The one main gripe I have, is that as the game goes, movement really wears down on your fingers due to them working in a similar way as text input (single presses, or long delay after holding resulting in very fast strokes), this makes movement feel more clunky and tedious over time. - It could have used one or two more good ideas in its mechanical level design, the gameplay in itself felt a tad bit lackluster, even for a game in this genre. Congrats and good luck on the rankings, it has potential to easily reach top50 imo! |
| Apr 24 20:16:42 | 16h 28m | The Last Tree | ♥ 1 | Gameplay loop works really well and the environment looks nice! The UI could have been rescaled to prevent blurry fonts (There are ways to do that, unity's 3d UI doesn't work too great out of the box 🙁 ), the camera movement was a bit on the slow side, and the one main criticism I have is on the very unreliable player movement, being force-based instead of linear velocity which makes reaching resource nodes frustrating. I managed to make the plant survive. It becomes quite easy once you've grabbed the bot upgrades (which should cost more than one seed, too strong!), but all in all I had a lot of fun playing this! Well done! |
| Apr 26 14:00:07 | 41h 43m | Kardiossomatic | ♥ 1 | A total killer in the mood category, and a nice take on the theme! I was sad there was nothing past the gramophone in the jam version, and also had to change my keyboard layout to properly play it (The french AZERTY keyboard version of WASD is ZQSD. A good practice is to bind up/forward to Z and left to Q, making your game compatible with both keyboard layouts!), but I really loved the texture/sprite work especially on the player viewmodel animation feeling gross and uncanny! Congrats! |
| Apr 26 14:28:21 | 28m 14s | Birb Island | ♥ 2 | You can pet the bird, so this became an instant favorite of mine! Also the first thing I tried to do was to eat my cellphone 😆 Two things weren't clear in the gameplay, however: The relationship between the mama bird attack and the player's failure to care for the chick properly (as the text isn't telling enough, and there isn't enough information about the chick's hunger state), and what does the campfire, leaves and burns do? While your game suffered from overscoping, it stays very impressive for a compo submission! A lot of things to do, a ton of assets, and even a procedurally generated map! A game like this is definitely worth continuing, I am curious as to how you would make it evolve! Well done! |
| Apr 30 16:24:23 | 97h 56m | Rememberance | ♥ 1 | I really liked how the game displayed a more and more sinister side of John as evidence got more complicated to reach. A nice and well scoped submission. While poor in pure mechanical fun, it completely makes up for it with a very neat concept and good use of the theme! The visuals were pretty nice and rich although their dithering really suffered from the camera not being pixel perfect (see below). I really loved the character portraits! Really well done, congrats! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU4YjSZNTnY |
| Apr 30 16:42:54 | 18m 31s | Soulectron | ♥ 1 | Simple but efficient gameplay and really polished visuals with a silly story that sets the mood just right! The only criticisms I have would be the music being too simple and short, quickly becoming repetitive and annoying, the colliders being too big (it's better to have punishing colliders be smaller than the visuals and goal/reward-purposed colliders be bigger), and the invulnerability period's ending point not being telegraphed/clear enough. Other than that I found a bug where I was invulnerable for a whole level 😆 Don't know how I triggered it though... A really cool submission, well done! |