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pkenney

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Oct 4 23:06:58 Oroboro ♥ 1 Really interesting concept that forced me to (try to) think long-term and in layers. I enjoyed the fact that it doesn't give a ton of instructions, which gave it a nice air of mystery. It was a little too tricky/long/difficult for me to complete, but definitely something memorable! The repetition of action (with accumulated knowledge) captured the theme really well, but eventually became a little repetitive after a bunch of tries. The art and music also worked well with the vision to give a coherent vibe to the whole thing, too. The darkness and vision-cone did a great job of highlighting the past-selves and their dangerous vision. Nice work.
Oct 5 01:18:12 2h 11m [WebGL/HTML5] Murder Loop ♥ 2 I did it! I made the whole loop!! I spent quite a while with this, because it has a cool air of mystery about it, and a mix of combat, exploration, and cube-soccer. The animations and models are wild, too, love the mohawk and the unusual walking. Part of the issues, but in a strange way also part of the appeal, was that the procedural animation seemed to get corrupted over time. After I had been playing a while, my guy would stagger around, sometimes spike way up into the air, shatter into pieces and then reform with twisted limbs. This corruption was another form of challenge, and you did a great job of giving me tools to deal with it, including some really smart choices like: the frequent checkpoints, the killplane beneath the level for when I clipped down into space, and the K key for when I clipped into other invalid areas. In fact, the whole options menu was vital, as it let me set my mouse sensitivity. I appreciated the short bursts of combat, but I was glad it wasn't the main focus of the experience. I got to a part where I went up an elevator and got a 7-gate, but my corruption was so extreme by then that I couldn't move forward.. at first. I would get 3-4 pieces together and then clip away, respawning, and my work would be undone. I actually started writing this review having quit there, but I went back and gave it another shot, and I made it through that darn 7. After that it was a breeze to complete the loop. If I could tweak one thing about the game it would be the make the cube-kicking a little more generous... maybe have a special "cube kick" layer, and put like an invisible "plow" collider in front of the player so they can herd the cubes slightly easier? A very interesting and memorable experience, nice!
Oct 5 01:49:47 31m 35s Hall Of Mirrors ♥ 1 Really imaginative puzzle game. It has a nice presentation that goes beyond just showing the basic game state, to really reflect the idea of the game and emphasize how it ties to the theme. The first few puzzles were a journey of discovering the rules, which I always enjoy. Then I started being able to reason them through and execute on a plan. I hit one with three red bricks and a not-quite-brick-sized hole in the floor, and I got stuck here. Maybe I got stuck because I had the wrong solution in mind -- my solution involved carefully balancing the square brick on my round player in mid-air, which was quite difficult. I tried a lot but eventually gave up there. I think partly it was because of playing in the browser, as my frame rate and input responsiveness seemed to bog down a little. For that plus the sound, I tried downloading the PC version but I got this error from itch when I tried: https://imgur.com/XE1VIUc Overall excellent, was sorry I got stuck without going further. Very nice entry!
Oct 5 02:19:02 29m 15s Fort Loop ♥ 4 Very cool entry, with a strong idea and great graphics/sound/polish to match! I played the whole thing through, and the challenge and length were just right for my taste. It was fun to experiment and explore the rules, and the last few levels were clever tests of what I'd learned. A nice touch was the enemy guards, and they way they didn't require me to input an attack command or threaten me, except to delay me a bit. Heads up, I did have to go dig up a gamepad because with the keyboard control I could not use ladders, leaving me unable to proceed through the tutorial. This was in the browser version. I went to download the windows version but I didn't see a link on the itch page. Once I got a USB gamepad everything worked fine. Very strong compo entry, nice work!
Oct 5 14:31:09 12h 12m We need to talk ♥ 1 Played a few times and managed a positive ending. I was pulled into the atmosphere of the game by the ambient sound of the Ferris wheel, the way the lighting made the shadows move as the wheel rotates, and the idle animations. These details were all in the nearby things, focusing me on the conversation, while the far-off things were highly abstracted. I felt like it was really well put together. My hand of cards seemed like it always wanted me to be snide and evasive, but I guess that was a commentary on the difficulty of dealing directly with your fears! Nice work all around, and very well polished for a compo entry.
Oct 6 00:27:09 9h 56m Loop Drifter ♥ 1 Drifting feels great! Started off totally sucking at it, but once I got decent it was just great to drift around curves. But there is one thing that hurt while I was trying to learn the groove: the ultra-high friction between the wall and the car is SOOOOO punishing. If I brush the wall with a front corner of my car, instead of a little bounce-off jolt, instead that point sticks hard to the wall and jerks my car around 90 degrees so I'm facing directly into the wall. Bumping walls should cost me time, but I was feeling like I could have had a lot more fun if they were a bit more forgiving by having less friction and more bounce. That one complaint aside, it's a very nice game: great drift controls, tight gameplay-focused structure, a very clean nice-looking presentation, and strong audio. Nice work!
Oct 6 02:03:45 1h 36m Rad Boar Rewind ♥ 1 Verrry slick, from the intro to the art to the music, and all that on top of a great concept and tight controls. I've seen several other "collaborate with past selves in a time loop" games but this one was definitely my favorite so far. I especially appreciated that the loops were tight, and that I could hard reset. Game did a great job of not wasting my time, which is a big risk with something that by definition forces me to repeat quite often. I thought I would definitely complete the game, but I did ragequit at the two-elevators-7-seconds puzzle. My frustration on that one came when I had run something like 30 supporting lives to get the weights right, which was fine. (In calmer retrospect, maybe it can be done with only 1 or 2 and doesn't need a crowd?) I had it all set up but then one guy got his head stuck where the elevator enters the shaft, jamming it. BOOM once I havd mispositioned that guy by a few pixels it was game over... A soft reset didn't work because it was already too late, and a hard reset sent me back like 30 precision-button lives into the past. I did the hard reset once but after it happened AGAIN I'll confess I ragequit. Kind of hope that was the final puzzle because I wanted to see all the game had to offer, it was really excellent! Just an awesome entry, very well done. Man.. I bet I didn't need so many lives on that one puzzle, maybe I'll go back and try it again... (EDIT: The guy at 9:15 in your walk-thru was the one that jammed the up-elevator when I gave up)
Oct 6 03:14:11 1h 10m SpaceRace ♥ 1 OK I made it to 60 seconds -- I feel like that has to be pretty good because I was doing some really nimble dodging to get there! Took a little to get used to the mouse controls, but after I got the hang of it I was positioning myself with good confidence in split seconds. Endless runner may have been done many times before, but the controls, 3D dodging, and look made this one feel unique. Nice work!
Oct 6 03:39:56 25m 45s Crypt of Capitalism ♥ 2 Music upgrade was clearly OP, loved it! Humor and sprites were on point, and the platforming was solid enough to be a good foundation for the concept. Loved that I not only had to upgrade, but also downgrade my jump back and forth. Tried to cheat that system a few times but I definitely lost more than I gained. A highlight moment was the first time I ran out of currency and couldn't buy the jump I needed, and wasn't sure where it would go from there... Short, but the right length to not overstay its welcome. All around nice entry!
Oct 6 04:20:38 40m 42s Klone Karts ♥ 3 The second I saw the art I rushed to play the game. I love driving/combat mashups and I love drifting in the mud, and from the screenshot/gif it looked like this game was going to be ***** METAL!! And it was fun -- but I didn't feel the METAL. I felt like it needed a few tweaks. I'll go a little deeper on what I was hoping for and some issues I ran into, not because it's a bad game but because it's good and could be great.. I hope this is constructive: First problem is the main design challenge of any driving game: you have a discrete input (keyboard) controlling a vehicle usually controlled by a continuous input (steering wheel). With a steering wheel I can turn a little bit left, or a lot, and express any precise angle I intend. But with a keyboard, I can only press or not-press "D". How does a driving game create the ability for a player to express their intent for turning angle? This game doesn't have an answer, and so what happens is the classic problem: every single turn is at exactly the same radius. Extra-unfortunately in this game, that radius is not well-matched to the radius of the track's curve, and every turn goes the same way: gradually out toward the wall. You can see this problem happening in your gif. There is no perfect answer to this design problem, but here are three ideas you could try that might improve the feel of this game: Letting go of "W" while holding "D" could sharpen the turn. Or I could have a brake/drift on space that I can tap (and weapon goes to another key). Or at least the car's turning should be TIGHTER than the track and not looser, because then I could use quick bursts of releasing "D" to realign with the track. In this game, I can't press "D" enough, so I always go into the wall which isn't very METAL. Second problem is the killing. I was pretty excited for it, but I struggled to get satisfying kills. The best ones were purple-box items rocket and land mine, which were both satisfying. I could have used a 10 or 20x increase in how often I can use those features. The smoke screen was always a disappointing pickup because it meant "no fun kills this lap." I didn't find the green boxes worth it, they just slow down the driving for me as well as the Klones, so I rarely got them... perhaps I just misunderstood their use? Since the weapons of war were so rare, and I wanted to get my METAL combat on, I tried ramming people into wrecks or into the wall. But it was hard to line up rams, and when I did get into position for a ram what often happened is that I hit the wall and died. So I felt a little discouraged to experiment with rams. Anyway, if I could steer better, drift a little, ram people, and get 10x as many weapons, I think would really get into this. The basic idea is great, and there's something really special about the badass way it looks and *almost* feels. Hope that wasn't too much critique! I definitely had some spikes of intense fun with it.
Oct 6 04:36:17 15m 39s Strange Planet ♥ 1 A simple concept but the charming artwork and nice sound effects make it work. The few bits of dialog establishing a character also helped to get me a little more invested before the slaughter began. Lot of ideas for little things that could be added, but it stood on it's own well enough. Eventually my finger got tired and I fell soon after that. Nice basic but well-polished and charming entry.
Oct 8 15:21:58 58h 45m Mudcar Sprint ♥ 0 Oh, wow... metal + driving in the mud is definitely the way to my heart! Great job on the music, especially the evolution of the drums through the sections and the various turnarounds, really kept my head banging without making me bored. Overall look was very nice too, with some solid models, nice crisp clear track lanes, and an overall nice palette of colors. Title screen with that text bouncing to the music got me all ready to go! The gameplay itself was solid, but it wasn't exactly the METAL I was hoping for... it was kind of a pacifist mosh pit, with everyone politely staying in their lanes, and the no-touching rules very strictly enforced. When I'm driving in the mud to metal, what I really want is to slip and slide just over the edge on the wrong side of control, roughing up the walls, the other drivers, and myself. This game was not that game, and that's completely fine of course! I did still enjoy some of the really narrow calls in the lane-switching -- I appreciated the tension of how tight some of gaps were. I eventually needed some more variety to the gameplay, but for a compo this was still nice scope. And I'm still listening to the music in the background as I write this review and STILL haven't gotten bored of it! Edit: still letting this song run... if you dig this sort of music, I can recommend checking out the game Jupiter Hell, I'm getting vibes of that soundtrack from your tune.
Oct 9 01:28:23 10h 06m The Ring Of Happiness ♥ 1 The music was just great - small concise pieces that very well captured the mood of each scene. These paired so well with the animated pictures floating in darkness, which felt like pages from a storybook. The music and the pages really worked together. The first time I encountered the scene on the rock in the river, I sat and just enjoyed it for a while. I also liked the writing, with a little mix of poetic phrases and humor. I think my favorite was "Happiness by intermittence." The opening also told me to "have little empathy" and I enjoyed being left to wonder whether this was an intentional subversion of my expectations or a small oversight. I also liked that you left a little mystery. I have a guess at what the ring of happiness is, but I appreciate that it's up to me to decide. From a tactile perspective, I liked how easy it was to rocket through the choices. In ordinary life we can only take one path and not explore the others, so I appreciated that it was easy to do so in a game such as this. I went to the book shelf to find the appropriate quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I think it's up in the attic in a box, 90% read. Overall delivers so well as a total package. I don't know how to feel about the fact that the music was added after and thus the audio cannot be rated. I guess I wish you gave yourself that extra day and submitted to the jam instead, so that I could give you those stars.
Oct 9 15:30:54 14h 02m Soundcloud The Concert: The Game ♥ 1 Really cool crazy backstory, and I liked the feeling of jumping around frantically and trying to get the beat going. I think this game is harder than it means to be. I suspect it "means" to be about the correct level of difficulty, but then ends up too hard because of some really low-level stuff that creates splinters in the experience. Let me go into detail on a few of the splinters I felt while playing, but first let me say I don't mean to dwell on the negative or say it's a bad game. I don't go into detail on splinters for bad games, I do it when I think a game is cool and has potential to be great, but let some tiny things get in the way. So I hope this is constructive, that is how I mean it to be!! First, everything feels a little too abrupt. It probably doesn't feel that way to you as the creator because you know all the systems, but as the player it's tough. The green spark is there, but by the time I change direction to get it, it's already too late. Or I'm watching for the spark and checking my wrench health, and avoiding a soundwave, and GAME OVER - what?? With multiple things to track, all happening very quickly, and on top of a core of difficulty, I need more information flow than this game gives me. I need it to telegraph in advance, with a pre-sparkle coming before the spark so that I can change my path and still make it, rather than memorizing the exact timing in advance over two dozen deaths. I need a cue that the audience is about to reach its limit so I know to go all-out, rather than just playing and getting surprise insta-death. Ideally these cues would be both audio and visual so that I can perceive them through the clutter of my attention jumping around. You as the designer understand how all of the pieces fit together, and how often/quick each piece goes, but as the player I am totally bamboozled at first, and the game underestimates how confused I am. Try to put more attention into details of communicating and telegraphing important state changes. Second, the game is a bit too stingy and brutal with the microscopic stuff like colliders and jumping. For example, I was running right along with the rapper, wrench ready, just as he sparked... and I DIDN'T GET IT?? Apparently I have to jump, because the collider is so tight that it doesn't overlap with me standing. Another example is the top platform, and the way I have to go jump up to get a fresh wrench. The character controller doesn't offer me the usual "ghost jump" leeway that I expect from modern games, and so many times I felt like I did push the jump button but didn't get the jump out. I think in general you want to be more generous to the player about microscopic things like this so that the controls feel "great", and THEN tune the difficulty on top of great controls. The way the game is, the controls feel a little bit stingy, and difficulty does not feel as fun when stingy controls are the source of challenge. But splinters aside, I had fun with this game, and I found it super creative. You seem to have some very cool ideas, and I think you as a developer can upgrade your skills to be more aware of these details that can subtly enhance an experience, and you'll really start making some top-notch stuff. Look forward to seeing what you do next!
Oct 11 16:32:53 49h 01m Another ♥ 1 Very interesting game. I generally don't appreciate when the difficulty arises from the controls, but when a game leans into it the way this one does, it can work and create a unique experience. To succeed I had to be careful where I put my eyes when, and the way the the movement keys would switch function when the time came to attack.. it was difficult but it felt like it should be doable. So I kept retrying over and over. Eventually I gave up at the 3-handed other. If I could wish for one player boon (and I played the compo version only so maybe you did this) it would be a tiny audio cue indicating the state change between when the game is in movement mode vs attack mode. I need a small cue on both seams. Most of my runs were lost like this: OK dodge 1, return to center, dodge 2 return to center, dodge 3, return, 4, now a conflict between the key to return me to center and the attack arises in my brain, and whoops I didn't get my return movement, now let me press the attack, woops too late I got a movement instead, but because my eyes were over on the attack area I didn't even clearly see it. Now when I do focus back the game state that "should" exist in my mind is different than the game state I see on the screen, and I move to correct that but it's already too late and I start getting hit. Nothing in the world wrong with that, it's clear that the game wants to overwhelm me with what the right inputs are. But audio cues on that ultra-important state change would power me up. I could also use a "player moved" footstep sound. (EDIT: now seeing that other commenters didn't take a single hit, ha. Each has their own experience I guess!) The other way I took hits was trying to simplify by not returning to center, but this left me too many 3-moves plus made the muscle memory harder to build up. I enjoyed that the game had this tension about the best way to approach it. Clearly the game had me thinking through the details of the interactions, which I think is a sign it was pretty successful at engaging me in the gameplay! Beyond gameplay the art was really nice, the ambient audio was a good baseline for the solid sound effects to sit atop without feeling empty, and I enjoyed the mysterious intro that gave a background context to the fight but left room for imagination. That air of mystery carried over well into the fact that I had to explore a little to learn the game rules at first. I personally enjoy that in small games where that figure-it-out phase adds a bit more to the experience. Overall a really solid compo entry, nice work.
Oct 11 17:02:14 29m 21s Of Kats and Carens ♥ 2 This game was a pleasure to interact with all around. The music was fantastic and had me bouncing, and if I'm picking up what you're laying down, the supermarket level had a version of the song that sounded like it was coming from the far-away store speakers. Nice touch! The art looked great and was nicely animated. I also liked how the ... targets "popped" their size a bit when I snapped them in a circle. The sound effects of the angry growls and huffs were great, and the buzzing of drawing a circle was also nice. I think a buzzing sound effect like that is risky because it can become grating, but this one avoided that problem and felt electric without becoming unpleasant. Gameplay was simple fun that I think captured the spirit of the game. If you were hosting a high-stakes KnC tournament or something I guess you could tighten up a few details.. it seems you can kind of cheese things a bit by drawing huge fast circles. I am also still a little unclear on when/why the circle-draw action gets cancelled. It is when a Caren complains? Or when someone crosses a line? Or maybe they have an interrupting collider on their head? I went back and tested specifically this but was still a bit unclear, and on my initial playthrough I had a general feeling of "wait what just happened?" No big deal, it was still fun, but if I was supposed to understand a specific aspect there I missed it. It also felt like sometimes Carens didn't "pop" and I wasn't always 100% sure which were quarantined. At first I assumed you had to circle each person alone, and was wondering why I had to wait for "game over" when I had 5 Carens, and wasted one of my 5 circles. But I figured out that I had to quarantine "Carnens vs the world". Makes sense! Very nice entry with a ton of personality.
Oct 11 18:36:55 1h 34m Bust-a-Loop ♥ 1 I always had this gap with fighting games: I'd read about how deeply strategic they were, for example from Sirlin, and that would get me excited to play one. But there's this HUGE wall. It's a struggle to even know what my character is going to do next when I press a button, never mind watching my opponent to look for openings. So you install, let's say... Street Fighter 4 on your windows machine. And you go into practice mode and choose one fat guy and learn a bunch of his moves. Repeating over and over vs the AI. Then you go find a match... And it takes 10 minutes to pair you with someone, and you finally get paired, only to have the game cancel and send you back. So you wait another 5 minutes, and finally a match, and you get wrecked in 1 minute. Oh did I mention you had to install some whole slew of "platform" software just to run this game on windows? And so you bounce off, every time you try fighting games. They are clearly not intended to be played by people who don't already play them. So I love that you took an essential fragment of this genre and manifested it in this simpler form for me to experience. I had a lot of fun with this, and I played until my fingers got tired. I am pretty terrible at it, but after some practice I started getting good enough to really enjoy the 3-move difficulty level. I definitely achieved a bunch of that HELL YEAH feeling when nailing a combo, and it was super-satisfying to get there. It also felt really cool to build up to that moment through trial and error, better learning the interaction of the timing and knockback of the specific moves in a specific order. And then there was the strategic layer of what order to use. This puzzle build-up to HELLYEAH pay-off loop was really awesome. Well done! Because I suck at fighting games there were a lot of small boons I wished for in this game, let me just fire off a few things that I think would have helped me perform better without eroding the essence of the game. Probably just pointing out the obvious with some of these, and you didn't have time: - I want to understand the hitboxes better. I kept wiffing with cloud kick. The boon I want is a small impact graphic at the exact point of first intersection so that I can better internalize the boundary. In a perfect world, if I wiff and it's close enough, I'd even like to see a "wiff" graphic describing the delta at the min-dist point of the boxes. - I could use a bit more transparency for the knockback effect of a move, and so perhaps the impact graphic could include a vector component pointing out the size/direction of the momentum it will impart. - I wished for clearer transparency into the recovery time of a move. The cards themselves did show this, but I often couldn't spare a glance there. I think maybe if my actual character did something like have hand/feet or hat turn to a different shade during recovery it would have helped me with some of the tighter timings. A specific example where I struggled was dragon punch into arcane fist from standstill. - 1 3 2, 1 3 2, 1 3 2. This was the source of my main feelbad, and part of the reason I struggled when going to 4 attacks. The game needs me to memorize a pattern of button presses but they don't reflect a decision. The main thread in my brain is having fun processing my positioning and timing, but I also have to keep chanting the button numbers to myself. I lost a lot of combos to pressing the wrong number just when things got tight, and that felt bad. Part of the issue is that a move can be on a diff button in a diff round, so my own subconscious would betray me. I found myself wishing that I had a single attack button, and could re-sort the attack cards into the order they would be fired by that one button. Anyway, I don't mean to emphasize any negatives, because I really enjoyed this game. The peak HELLYEAH moments were really enjoyable. My favorite thing to do was Valiant Foot into Blade Drop. Great entry - a very clever use of the theme, and overall an awesome package.
Oct 11 20:08:31 1h 31m Caught in the music loop ♥ 1 Pretty cool! I got to level 9 before I couldn't hack it any more. My main struggle was synchronizing the start. Maybe if you gave the first beat for "Free" to the player, it would let them know where the rhythm begins. I had a couple of times where I thought I had it, only to realize the real one started on 2 and not on 1, for example. I am glad to see in your screenshot that you added a "clear" button, because that was something I also wished sorely for a few times. Nice work for only 10 hours!! And a good level of challenge.
Oct 11 21:00:05 51m 34s Orbit ♥ 1 You really accomplished your goal of creating the moody atmosphere of chill where I could contemplate the puzzles with calm. If I imagine the same mechanics but with an countdown timer of maybe a bomb defusal theme, I am feeling very tense and not appreciating it as much. I really liked the decision to go with the chill contemplative abstract vibe. The monochrome palette was a good way to emphasize that. And the sound was *almost* just right. I think the concept was right on point, but maybe the actual sound was slightly wrong. It was maybe a little too peppy to my ear. So still good, but maybe a sleepier more synthetic sound with a little slower attack would have had even more harmony with the rest of the experience. The tactile interaction was nice. I liked the slow sliding movement of the puzzle when it wasn't being interacted with, though I was glad it was very slow because faster rotation would have been too distracting and caused me to lose the geography of the puzzle. I never once made an error in input, and when I was testing to see if I could swap non-adjacent pieces the result was clear ("you cannot"). Gameplay-wise the puzzles were nice. The length was appropriate for the depth, and I felt like you explored most avenues. Because there are only two types, and because the selection must be continuous, it felt like the possible ideas for you to explore were a bit limited. Totally appropriate for the game length and stayed engaging throughout, but I suspect you'd need some extra element to unlock further puzzle-space to explore. My general strategy was "find the largest existing contiguous already-correct section, almost certainly the best move is to flip at its borders" and I feel like generally this held true. In the 3-move puzzles I generally made move 1 on blind faith on that basis and I never once had to restart. So a new element for an expansion would probably have to invalidate that shortcut. Really a very nice all around entry, especially when I consider the limited time you had available! Great job on both puzzle mechanics and feel.
Oct 12 03:41:53 6h 41m Leten Paradox ♥ 1 2416 was my top score. Not sure if that's good, but it was definitely a lot better than my first few attempts! First couple of games I was totally bamboozled about why the game was ending, if it was not because I directly took a hit. Came back to read the instructions and realized I was probably killing my past self. After that I had a strategy: Take over the left side of the screen, and for the first life just bulletspam to the right while walking up and down. Second life doesn't shoot. I sort of looped back and forth between spammy and mostly-passive lives. But even then I was a little confused because I wasn't sure about the rules of the enemy playback ghosts. Or were those greyish guys something else? There was a lot going on and it was all happening fast and when I did something wrong the screen instantly disappeared, so it was not easy to learn in this game through experience. But the action was fast-paced so I didn't mind restarting, and the concept was interesting enough that I wanted to explore it, and the controls were tight enough that I felt like it was my own mistake when I did die. So I found myself getting sucked into "one more try" mode, over and over, which is a great sign! Nice music, effective graphics, tight controls, and a unique concept -- all around a nice package!
Oct 25 15:30:42 323h 48m Infinitely Worse - A Necromantic Adventure ♥ 0 Looks nice, plays smoothly, pace feels like a pretty good balance of waiting vs getting new stuff. It felt a little linear to me since everything was the same: pay outflow, get +inflow/sec. I found myself wishing for a few other mechanics that could interact and create that feeling like I'm building up a machine or combo. The writing was imaginative and helped sell the necro thing in the absence of art or sound. And the "delete all for x2" is a very nice savage twist the captures the LD theme.
Oct 25 15:53:35 22m 53s Among The Stars ♥ 1 Music is jammin! Leaving it running while I write here. Had a little friction at first trying to figure the game out, but then I got into it and played until I got a respectable spot on the leaderboard (nice touch). Friction points on first contact: controls felt backwards and I struggled to activate the option as it did not seem to kick in when I activated it. I still don't know what happened, it just suddenly seemed to kick in one time. Then in game trying to play, it took me a while to figure out at what scale the objects were passing my collision plane, especially the rings. I kept leaping for them too late. But after a while I got better at judging the distance. None of those issues stuck around after I got up to speed though. And then I found myself getting into the zone. I appreciated the very quick restart, and REALLY appreciated the way the game is not exactly repeating itself every time I play, so it was fresh enough that retry meant "play more" and not "do the exact same thing over again." Controls were solid, and I enjoyed the feeling of flowing through the different geometric patterns the obstacles came in. If I could tweak one thing about the game, I think there is room for improvement on the VERY small adjustments. The controls may be slightly too responsive to tiny taps, given that it asks to you to sometimes make tiny movements. I found myself overshooting tiny moves, and the feel might be improved by having a few frames of ramp-up on the responsiveness. Overall a nice entry that sucked me into playing "one more game" a few times more than I thought I would. Nice job!
Oct 25 16:05:29 11m 54s Race Condition ♥ 1 43 flags was my best. I loved how hectic some of the intersections got, like this: https://imgur.com/hkXfTyG It was a very cool idea that played out well. I also liked the controls on the car.. It's always tricky to get a WASD car feeling good because I want to steer at different angles at different times, and while I also felt that stiffness in this game, you had a good match between the turns the track asked of me and the turns the controls gave me. Nice tuning. The car-on-car collisions were also tuned well. When I hit ... myself ... it was bad but not instantly game-ending. It was in a nice sweet spot of setback. The edge of the track was a little more brutal, and I lost all of my games the same way: clipped the edge of the track with the front of my car and got spun around backwards, then couldn't get righted in time. But I'm split on it -- on the one hand, if the game was a little more generous with edge-collisions and had some way to build back up lost time, I could get further into the game and have some REALLY crazy car-filled tracks. But on the other hand, the difficulty felt good and forced me to concentrate on driving well, with a good level of punishment when I didn't. Overall really enjoyed it, nice work! EDIT: check it out, while I was tying, left the game running and then this happened: https://imgur.com/MYCyKtw
Oct 25 17:06:50 1h 01m Jack's Inferno ♥ 3 Wow this one is firing on all cylinders, very nice entry. I played the web-compo version, and I got the black-screen bug after circle 2, so I restarted. Then I got the bug again, and nearly gave up. But I tried a third time, and this time I got to continue past it, so I ended up beating the game. Obviously the art and sound are really strong here, so great job with that. But what I liked most was some of the really nice design work. Here are a few points I enjoyed about the design: - Enemies are very straightforward to deal with in isolation, but difficulty arises from the combination: melee enemies make me want to approach cautiously and in a straight line, while fireball guy makes me want to circlestrafe and rush in. This tension was excellent. - Melee guys had some other nice touches: their hiding was effective about the right amount, saw them if I was cautious but also got surprised sometimes. They break off the chase and retreat after a certain distance, so you don't get a huge megaclump you see with a more basic AI. This helped them cooperate even better with fireball guy. - Fireball guy made terrain feel more important in a nice way. - Crows respawning made it so that health was always just a matter of surviving this fight, and prevent the game from becoming a battle of attrition. Attrition games (where you never want to take any hit) can be great too, but I feel like you made the right call for this game and wisely avoided it. So overall I felt like a lot of very small decisions worked well together to maximize the experience and make for an enjoyable game. The only thing that didn't really work together with other elements to create interest was the sheep. I also just held down the pitchfork button during fights, and even a lot of the walking around (in case I got jumped). I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Not much to critique here, this was an excellent entry. Great music, great art, great gameplay, nice boss fights. Well done!
Oct 25 17:45:31 38m 41s Frozen Potency ♥ 0 Super moody with the color scheme and audio layers working really well together. I was very confused at first, and getting shot before the I'd even parsed all the instructional text. So I hit the move key to dodge while I read, but this made it all disappear. I quit and restarted to read, so not really a big deal. I'm not quite sure if I ever played how I was meant to. I just held down walk+sprint forever, and then left-clicked a box, charged up a powerthrow w/ right click, and then threw it at the guys. I wasn't really sure if I was supposed to also be deflecting their shots or moving in a more complex way, but that strat seemed to work. It was a little repetitive after a while like that, but it definitely had a very cool mood/vibe and a really unique gameplay.
Oct 25 18:10:38 25m 07s Danger Beat ♥ 1 Very cool concept, and nice presentation. Good use of light and dark to indicate status, and also to call attention to the record even when the screen gets busy. Especially kind was the turbo-slide from last position to new one for the record, which helped me track it in a busy field of bullets. I stink at bullet-hell games, but I was especially bad at this one. The farthest I got was to briefly hear the "HEY" sound. The controls are full-tilt - they seem to go from zero to full speed instantly, which makes it quite hard for me to micro-dodge. So I have to take my moves in huge lurches, meaning I have to read more of the field. That may be the style you were shooting for, I just wasn't able to keep up! It was very nice that the game counter-balanced this high difficulty with a mostly-low punishment for failure, since getting hit just put you -1 record instead of gameover or some other brutal thing. I still found myself getting streaks of hits sending me WAY back, because once you get far into the game there are tons of bullets all over the place, and even if you get set back a few steps and some of the guns relax, those bullets they've already shot still exist for a while and so there's a "buffer" to how quickly the game will de-escalate the challenge. I enjoyed playing around with it and giving it a bunch of tries, though. Cool twist mashing up a few different genres here to create a unique entry here, good job.
Oct 25 18:56:55 46m 17s Ouroboros ♥ 2 Wow this was really good! The usage of the loop theme was nice, I was unclear what it meant to choose one of the three pillars at first, but it was nice the way the mystery revealed itself later. The shopkeep was also a nice touch. I did have a few small issues: There seemed to be a problem with parts of the game being offscreen, so I couldn't see the shopkeeps head, and I asumme there was also a UI showing my health and arrow count but I could not see it. Perhaps because of that, in the first room I was trying to learn the controls and shot off all my explosive arrows before beginning the game. Last, I ruined the final boss by pressing E after a bunch of fighting, and got teleported away to an empty room and could not finish the game. But those few tiny things aside, this was a great experience. The art was really great (nice shadows too!), and the audio was strong across the board. Controls were nice, with the hitch in my step when I shot creating more interesting situations than "spam fire all day and backpedal." It also forced me to choose what targets to go after first and who to spend my explosive arrows on. Very nice jam entry, well done.
Oct 25 19:07:24 10m 29s Perseverance ♥ 1 Graphics, music, and gameplay worked well together here and created a very nice mood. It was tough to eke out a living and survive, I really did feel trapped in the loop! Nice work. The feeling of being close to death all the time prevented me from relaxing and exploring the system, but it did achieve the brutal feeling of barely scraping by that I think you were aiming for. Each fruit was hard-won and yet sustained me for such a short time that I never felt satiated. I did get really confused trying to play at first, but once I came back to read your complete instructions it was much clearer.
Oct 25 19:34:05 26m 41s Hyperloop hell ♥ 1 Nice art and story! I like how you captured the theme a little differently than many other games, and created a pretty full experience here for a jam. The parallax background captured the movement of the train well, and the music was a great touch that worked with the mood. Nice work.
Oct 25 19:52:00 17m 55s Bloop ♥ 0 Nice job with taking a clean idea and communicating the rules through a nice progression of puzzles instead of text! I especially enjoyed figuring out what the blue square does the first time, and also the puzzle where I thought it would be easy because I had a bishop, but then realized the only path through was on the wrong color square. Overall a nice puzzle entry, well done.
Oct 25 20:01:51 9m 51s Planet Hopper ♥ 1 I played and lost like 5 times before realizing I was a tiny ship and not the planet with the arrows! WOOPS! That little ship is sometimes hard to see. After I realized who I was, I started doing a lot better. I liked the physics feel, and the way that your best shot is really that first hop, and if you miss and have to try for the next orbit, the danger level really spikes! It was fun trying to set up those quick safe one-shot hops. Nice job with a cool physics-based control scheme. I think my top score was a 7, but I bet if you were patient and careful you could get a really high score.
Oct 25 20:44:47 42m 56s Loopin' Dungeon ♥ 1 I got this far: https://imgur.com/ou490xI It looks very nice, and the sounds are solid, too. The concept is nice, and fits the theme, and there is a huge variety of enemies and obstacles for a compo game. Really nice work, in a lot of ways. The controls are a huge drawback, unfortunately. It's not a problem that I cannot go diagonal. The problem is that I cannot switch direction until after the deceleration of my previous direction finishes stopping me, which feels like there's just a huge lag in turning. To experience this in a straightforward way, hold D to move right. While holding D, press S. You keep moving right, all that is fine. Then release D. You think the character would immediately switch to down movement, but there is a huge delay. Most of combat was dominated by this delay. Original-Zelda-style combat is about quickly reacting to the changes in direction of the semi-predictable AI, and spiking your sword shot onto them without getting so close you get hit. That very often requires an instant switch of direction immediately before the swing, and I just can't do that in this game. I know others mentioned the controls so maybe I'm repeating, but I'm a big believer that control feel is the #1 thing in these jams, so I hope the extra detail is constructive. Glancing at your code, I think the problem might be an unintended interaction between PlayerController.ProcessInputs() and CharacterMove.GroundMovement() In ProcessInputs you do: horizontal += Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"); And then in CharacterMove.GroundMovement() you have: xVelocity = speed * input.horizontal; //... if (xVelocity == 0) { yVelocity = speed * input.vertical; //Set up and down movement } If you read the documentation for that "GetAxis" function you're using, here: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Input.GetAxis.html You will see a tiny note at the bottom: > Note: The Horizontal and Vertical ranges change from 0 to +1 or -1 with increase/decrease in 0.05f steps. GetAxisRaw has changes from 0 to 1 or -1 immediately, so with no steps. So my best guess is that the GetAxis step feature creates a "cooldown" when the horizontal walk is released by your player. That cooldown takes several moments to get all the way to zero. While it is still not zero, your "if (xVelocity == 0)" check returns FALSE even though the user is not pressing any x-direction movement button. And this is why the player cannot instantly turn down. My experience is that I hate this smoothing that GetAxis does, and I usually just read raw Input.GetKeyDown. You can use GetAxisRaw instead. By accessing the raw input, you can take more direct control of the game feel and get it just right. Hope that helps! Anyway, this one unfortunate thing in the controls aside, the rest of your entry is really strong and well-done for a compo. There's an ambitious amount of scope here, with nice art and sound and design. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next! (EDIT: I tried the fixed-controls version and it's a lot better. I still think it's a tiny bit mushy and if you are still using the smoothed GetAxis I suggest trying GetAxisRaw, but it's a big improvement already.)
Oct 25 21:07:55 23m 08s A Night Around the Fire ♥ 1 Wow, SO moody! The natural parallax from the distant tree/pillars, the volumetric fog, and the way the pink light contrasted eerily with the grey, I really loved the vision and execution of the art here. It nails a mood of creeping from the alien danger. The music and sound was also contributing really strong to this. I got 259m. Nice entry!
Oct 25 21:24:46 16m 51s Loop Lab ♥ 2 Nice idea for the theme, creating a new experience and then letting my play with it in a variety of different ways to explore it, all tied up in a nice package with strong graphics. Great work! Achievement names were a small touch but I enjoyed them, hat tip to Sweet Tooth, and I liked the little remark after the slow-moving pirate about "I am NOT doing that again."
Oct 25 22:01:10 36m 24s Regguman ♥ 2 Very cool, I really liked the music, art, and sound. The confusing doors was a nice touch, the absurdity of the head-switching was charming, and the puzzles were over my head. I got to the use of seeds on my own, but not the secondary function of that interaction, so I resorted to the walkthrough for most of the game. That said, I enjoyed interacting with everything and had fun just wandering around trying everything out. Nice work!
Oct 25 23:09:10 1h 08m Looper Cooper ♥ 0 Looks beautiful, plays hilariously. I had some really harrowing flights, as I never quite got the hang of the controls. You can pull into VERY tight loops, but then pulling out of them takes a little while so it felt a bit difficult to predict exactly where/when my loop would broaden, and since I was looping quite close to things, I'd generally crash. My attempts to actually go around the circle were hilariously terrible. But it didn't matter that I stunk because it was still fun to fail!
Oct 25 23:34:38 25m 28s One Frog's No Good Very Bad Automobile Malfunction ♥ 1 NICE. I did everything including the bonus level. This game was awesome. Cool mechanics with a great mix of planning the solution out in my mind and trying to execute the timing. Art was fantastic, the layered backgrounds made it feel very rich, and not like a jam game. The main character was popping with wide-eyed life, and the tweening used on him took it to another level. The music was enjoyable and fit well, and even better were the sound effects that made the interacts feel strong. I think you hit everything across the board here, extremely well done. Congrats!
Oct 25 23:53:23 18m 45s Rail Gun ♥ 0 9:27 to complete. Nice game! At first I felt like it was chaotic and random, sometimes even the barriers would just push a ball or two in. But as I got better, I was able to make plans and then execute on them better, and I started feeling the groove more. I had fun! Looked nice, and felt good to play! Music was a nice touch if perhaps slightly repetitive after a while... but a good fit with the graphical look. Nice entry - contrats.
Oct 27 03:04:27 27h 11m Repeater ♥ 2 Very nice entry! A cool idea, great setting, nice music to enhance the mood of the art, which captured classic metroid vibes that meshed so well with the theme of being lost and looping. The gun feels great, fires away with old school turbospam required in some panicked bursts, but then there is also downtime in between fights if you want it. Lots of the art is strong, but the particles of the bullets hitting the wall was a highlight. So overall the game was really good! Because it was really good, let me dig into two things that caused me a little pain in the experience... but seriously, I'm just going into this because the game is so strong, so I hope this is helpful and constructive: First the controls: I started with WASD but couldn't find a shoot button friendly with that, so I did invert and play lefty. Been a while. I was rusty with arrows/x/z. Second, I feel there's maybe some room for improvement in the way combat plays out. These enemies are brutal in the way they come at me fast and with acceleration, do not get knocked back, and take a few hits to kill, and do a lot of damage. It's fine if they approach at the height of my standing gunfire, but I got hit a lot when they came at just-above-normal and I had to multi-shot them on the rise during a jump. I failed so often that I gave up and my approach to the game became: spam jump and shoot off the screen for a while before entering any dangerous area. If I do aggro an enemy that's not at shot-level, flee wildly and try to gain space or wait for them to come down to shot-height. When I encountered the vertical climb, I extracted each enemy one by one down into the corridoor rather than mix it up with them. The exploration was great, but ended up a bit at odds with the combat, where I wanted to explore but I did not want to take the risk of new areas lightly, so my exploring became extremely meticulous. It did pay off in the end though: https://imgur.com/3jTg29Z On the other hand, maybe I just needed to git gud, and I will say the enemies did their job of slowing me down and preventing me from turboing through the whole maze to figure it out. So a really solid game that I enjoyed jumping into and playing to the end. Hope I didn't over-focus on critique, because I do like this game. Nice entry!
Oct 27 03:31:01 26m 34s Eloi's Adventure ♥ 2 I enjoyed this!! It's different and charming. It has a few raw bits like superjump against certain platforms, some wallclimbing, and sticking to edges a little. But I don't mind, those things make it feel charming. I also don't mind the controls here, with the air-control style of "instantly when you let go you will lose all horizontal velocity". I know some people don't enjoy that style, but for me once I realize that is what a game is doing (zero momentum in midair) I just switch into that mode of thinking, and I can use it very effectively. So I found the controls and physics interactions enjoyable. The mechanics were also cool, and you had some very nice progression of introducing the ideas. One especially nice touch was to have the new enemy type safely encased in tiles where I could observe it the first time I saw it. Great idea! If I could tweak one thing it would probably be the side-friction onto the walls. I think the character mostly felt fine, but the bad-feel moments I did have were around getting stuck on the sides of walls why trying to slip through a space. I think just setting friction to zero is probably fine, since this is a zero-momentum game anyway! Nice entry overall, I played through to the end and enjoyed it.