Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Feedback comment stats → bmacintosh

bmacintosh

Feedback comments for LD48

← LD46   LD53 →

bmacintosh's games and stats for all events →

TimestampSince previousGamebmacintosh's comment
Apr 27 07:03:10 Deep Way To Basement ♥ 4 The pitch for this game is awesome, as is that GIF. Pretty funny game. It took me a couple of rounds to notice that leveling up was an option. I would have liked to know what that actually did, but it did seem to make me go farther by some means, so that was good. It wasn't too clear to me what I had to do to go far, speed loss seemed more tied to randomly landing in certain ways rather than steering.
Apr 27 07:14:35 11m 25s Substrate Mining Co. ♥ 0 Nice little story, the way it is paced out and delivered is very good. Was curious about the mining machine, but I couldn't find anything to do with it. RIP Simon indeed.
Apr 27 07:38:34 23m 59s Drill City ♥ 2 The voice lines were obviously great and the variety was amazing. Totally worth the time investment! "No whoosh for you", lol. Some of my mines and farms stopped producing resources after a while and I had to demolish and rebuild them; unclear if that was intended.
Apr 27 17:59:28 10h 20m Drillromantik ♥ 4 Nice little clicker game. I particularly enjoyed the voxel art. It took me an embarrassingly long to figure out that I needed to click on the building icons to mine and do actions. I also hit the bug where the charcoal burner was consuming wood but not producing charcoal, which seriously impinged on the playability of the game because I had to manually click all charcoal. I think you would be allowed to fix this bug under the rules since it renders the late game nearly unplayable by normal means.
Apr 27 18:46:15 46m 47s Highly Successful Research Submarine ♥ 2 I want to play this but I was unable to figure out what button to press to use tools on broken stations.
Apr 27 18:54:49 8m 34s Treasure Hunter ♥ 1 Nice job! I got 857. I noticed that the camera tended to be centered behind the player's direction of motion, which made it harder to see threats ahead - it would make more sense to have it centered in front of the player.
Apr 27 19:06:01 11m 12s Subterrene ♥ 0 I liked how the bombs and diamonds had lights around them so you could spot them even when they were a little offscreen. The visuals are nice, particularly how you did the tunnel behind the drill. I seemed to run into an invisible wall about -263, so I was unable to continue following the blue arrow, wherever that was going. It could be interesting to have the difficulty increase with depth by making the bombs more dense.
Apr 27 19:21:53 15m 52s RRRR U Scared ? ♥ 4 This is a very impressive game for the time limit! All the art looked great (especially the kraken, obviously), and I liked the interstitial cards that reminded me I was working toward something (the kraken). I didn't immediately notice I could charge shots, which was very important, but I eventually figured it out. I wasn't able to hit the lower part of the kraken near the waterline, which I hit a lot and it felt like it should have worked.
Apr 27 19:33:20 11m 27s Protocol B.E.P ♥ 5 Wow, this art is excellent! That must have been a lot of work, and I think it paid off. I thought the controls were cumbersome at first but I quickly got used to them and found they game me a surprising amount of control. I really enjoyed the boss's animations and also found that they telegraphed the attacks very well - I was able to avoid being hit by the attacks just by moving away from where it looked like he might be attacking. Sound and visual effects when the player hits something would add a lot. My only gripe was the damaging stalactites/mites in some levels - they didn't look like a hazard initially, and the hitboxes on some of them were much larger than they felt they should have been.
Apr 27 19:53:38 20m 18s Sticky Diagnosis ♥ 3 This game is really excellent. The art and audio were great, the upgrade paths made sense and gave a good sense of progression, though I didn't initially understand that the game had permanent progression, which made it feel quite hard. I really liked the way "going deeper" was presented visually. I didn't quite understand how the Stackbuddy fire rate worked - some kind of indicator of when they were going to fire would have been helpful. EDIT: the game did freeze and eventually run out of memory once during the game over screen, at about 700 cm
Apr 27 20:43:54 50m 16s Deeper in space ♥ 0 Congratulations on finishing the game! It works well. It would be great to have more variety in the rooms - even though the enemies are different, my approach to every room was the same - kill the bees, then jump over the ground creatures until they are dead. Perhaps spawning the player at a different location, or adding some more blocks to stand on would mix it up. As a side note, I believe you are intended to opt out of the Graphics category if you and your team did not create the graphics during the jam.
Apr 27 21:20:33 36m 39s Khazads ♥ 2 Nice job, this game has a surprising amount of variety in it. I enjoyed the intro and the dwarf portrait. I found it to be difficult to tell where my melee attacks were hitting - even when I was right in front of something I had to mash and wiggle around to kill it. A more representative animation or hit particle effects could help with that. I was completely unable to hit the boss with the pick even when inside of him, but fortunately I eventually remembered how to switch to the crossbow. I had no idea what the slider in the settings menu was for, so I just set it to the max because that's how I was feeling.
Apr 27 22:14:15 53m 42s Teh Man and the Sea ♥ 1 Well done, I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. The art in particular was quite good, and the game ended at a good time and didn't try to stretch things too far. I like that you made the player move faster when going up in order to make it easier for them to escape trouble, though it did throw off my attempts to calculate when I needed to turn around. Starfish are jerks!
Apr 27 22:51:36 37m 21s Healer Simulator ♥ 2 Innovative idea, delightful graphics. Definitely a lot of great polish, and I also loved the text chat, it really made the tone of the game. I would say my eyes were glued to health bars 85% of the time and the chat 15% of the time, which unfortunately didn't leave me much time to check out the enemies, which look great in the screenshots, haha.
Apr 27 23:06:25 14m 49s Condemned ♥ 1 Interesting low-res art style; I dig it. The combat felt pretty good, though I think it would be improved by having the enemies only damage you using their attack animations rather than when you touch them. Damage on touch feels weird in a game like this, and it made it so that I would often take damage due to my character lunging into the enemy during his attack animation. I was unclear if there was a reason to choose fists over the sword and just went with the sword because it made it slightly less likely I would take damage during my attack.
Apr 27 23:31:34 25m 09s KATABASIS ♥ 2 Pretty solid game; I liked the status screen between missions and the opportunity to take a break and read the lore. I was a bit confused by the lore, though; I couldn't remember which companies were the good and bad guys, and the lore kept referring to Icaria in the third person, which made me confused because I though I was Icaria. I wasn't sure who the numbered android referred to at the end was. The backgrounds were also nice and low-contrast, and the character collision was good. The boss spawned a static dot apparently full of projectiles after death, which my character proceeded to fly through during the transition-out "cutscene" and died.
Apr 28 00:53:32 1h 21m Penguin Paradise ♥ 3 I did play this game for quite a long time, which is a good sign. I enjoyed balancing the rates of various things, and I liked the theme of penguins digging a giant hole in the ground. Some more quality-of-life UI would be a great improvement, such as readouts for your current and maximum count of each type of penguin, and a faster way to reassign gathering hub specializations en masse (like a window to manage how many hubs are on each type of resource). I wasn't a fan of waiting random amounts of time for penguins to actually show up before I could assign them, but that could be subjective. And I quit when I started building the monument. I had only a few robot penguins assigned to it and didn't even see the percentage creeping up up at all, and I felt like I was just going to have build about a hundred more of everything and I didn't really feel up to that - so the game may have overstayed its welcome a bit there. 2021-04-27 17_52_39-.png
Apr 28 02:05:21 1h 11m Line ♥ 1 Very unique and clever idea to make the player protect something other than just their character. The controls worked great. I liked the swordfish audio a lot. I did find that the game didn't really give me a reason to use all the tools it had, like wall-sliding to slow down. The best way to avoid the fish was just to dive as fast as possible because they'd always hit the armored part of the hose that way. Perhaps a different kind of fish that charges when it's below the player would fill that gap?
Apr 28 02:19:30 14m 09s Trash Squid ♥ 2 This is a surprisingly fun game for how simple it is. I was initially just depositing the trash by sticking the tentacles up through the boat, but then I discovered you could air-drop it and that was great. Very inconsiderate of those boat people to keep throwing the trash back in again. I tried taking it to space instead but I think I jumped over the collision on the side of the level.
Apr 28 05:42:42 3h 23m DRYVER ♥ 2 I enjoyed this a lot. The feeling of driving from the audio, music, FOV, and particles was very fun (fun enough to keep doing it over empty sand for long enough to finish the game). Atmosphere looked great. I didn't feel like I was going deeper since the parts were largely in a circle around me - could have been an opportunity there to make the player navigate between multiple known charging points to reach a further point, but I know the parts already take a while to track down. I also would have liked to coast to a stop instead of immediately respawning when running out of charge - I was within reach of a charger a few times. The FOV does make it harder to read the charge bar when actually driving, too. That sounds like a lot of negatives but honestly they're mostly polish; really great game.
Apr 28 06:40:22 57m 40s Peak Oil ♥ 1 Pretty intense little simulation game, there's an impressive amount here for a jam. I didn't have the time to go for any really deep wells, but I did several shallow ones and some radar scanning and enjoyed it. It would have been handy to have a little more information available in the game, like specifically how deep each radar scan reaches and each rig (before placing it). It would also be amazing to have a record of all the scans and info you've discovered instead of trying to remember if I scanned between these two trees before, but of course you can only do so much. I was also reminded of the saying that players will optimize the fun out of a game if you let them. This came up after I saw the price go above $4 early on and then refused to sell until it went there again, even when I was sitting there with $0 in the bank doing nothing. Not too sure what the fix would be for that particular case but overall I did enjoy watching the market and deciding when to sell. Overall I would probably play the heck out of this as a fully-fledged game.
Apr 29 03:41:06 21h 00m Nuclear Chaos ♥ 1 Pretty fun for how simple the idea is. Tried for a bit and then spent a while just spamming balls trying to see if I could get a good run of one color (got 10 blue 0 red).
Apr 29 03:49:44 8m 38s 2 Leagues At Dawn ♥ 1 Fun and innovative control scheme. And no need to couch the graphics, I legitimately enjoyed them - looks like a great PS2 game. I found that the best approach was just to set one of the levers to half power and then simply manipulate the other one. I beat the game just doing that; would be interesting to try to come up with a way to make me mix it up, like a pattern that requires full horizontal speed to traverse.
Apr 29 04:26:06 36m 22s Under The End ♥ 1 The terrain deformation is very clean and impressive. Overall it's a unique idea that works pretty well, though it does get a little samey after a while. I thought it was weird that I had to drop down useless buildings when I had too many of the wrong resource in my inventory, I would have liked the ability to drop items and to pick them up manually rather than automatically, given the very limited inventory space. I did not initially understand that the battery was health, I think because it was flickering around I thought it might be a rate of radiation gain for a while.
Apr 29 05:27:10 1h 01m 27500m drop ♥ 1 Nice job, the game is intuitive and plays well. The art was quite good as well, and I was surprised that there were three completely different biomes. I made it in one with liberal use of the slow key, but it felt challenging and took concentration.
Apr 29 05:38:44 11m 34s Bunker Björn ♥ 2 Looks and feels great, a lot of good polish on the shooting, which was great since that's the primary activity in the game. The camera perspective made it much more difficult to see south than north, and the very strong depth of field also didn't help, making it possible to almost run face-first into enemies without seeing them. Perhaps centering the camera more south of the player would help. I got stuck in a wall around level 5 maybe. 2021-04-28 22_35_01-Bunker Björn.png
Apr 29 15:18:19 9h 39m Search for the Quacken ♥ 0 Great HUD, it was nice and readable (with the exception of the torpedo count). Quite a bit of art and level design, too, which is impressive. I found the "quacken" but I didn't have enough money to afford torpedos. I went up and down a few times unloading my 3 harpoons on him but couldn't tell if I was making any progress there.
Apr 29 15:49:47 31m 28s you are chained to an egg and are falling down a pit ♥ 2 At first the gameplay seemed kind of random, with little time to react to threats when they appeared, but eventually I felt like I had control and was able to progress by trying instead of just luck, so that was great. The aesthetic and mood were excellent, as was the humor. I, too, got stuck in a wall after being frustrated on the third big egg level for a while.
Apr 29 16:12:11 22m 24s Bomb Miner! ♥ 1 Cool idea to take a classic game and try to change up the rules. It's well-implemented and easy to understand. I did find that not including the diagonals in the count led to much more frequent situations where I just had to guess than in normal minesweeper. And the inability to dig outside the revealed area led to situations where I was almost entirely contained by a wall of bombs I couldn't get past.
Apr 29 16:24:52 12m 41s The Tourist ♥ 2 I love the mood and pacing of the reveal. Solid experience, can't say much more than that! The first time I read the final sign the <spoiler> didn't appear, so I walked all the way back to the start like the sign said, but didn't get anything for that. I had to walk back to the end and put my face in the sign to trigger it.
Apr 29 19:40:51 3h 15m Dome Romantik ♥ 1 Amazing visual style and great game loop. I liked the simplicity and intuitiveness of the control scheme, using the same keys across the several different modes the player could be in. I think the difficulty could ramp up more as the game progresses - I never felt really threatened after I unlocked the fast laser.
Apr 29 19:54:00 13m 09s Deeper-Geddon ♥ 2 Perfect scope and length for a Ludum Dare factory-builder game. Beat it with 3 minutes to spare, but I felt like I had to work fast. I liked the extra touch of the earth getting bigger behind the map. I expected to be able to merge conveyors a few times, but I can appreciate that it might be this way intentionally. A click/drag function to place conveyors would also be a welcome improvement.
Apr 30 01:44:10 5h 50m Surface ♥ 0 Adorable seed kid! I really enjoyed how you unlocked new mechanics that made different ways to traverse the same play space. I didn't always feel like I knew where I was going, but I got there, so I guess that worked out. Really great first jam game. It was possible to die to sphere while close to them but not quite visually touching - slightly more generous collision could give the player more fun close calls and less times feeling like the game cheated them a bit.
Apr 30 01:56:39 12m 29s Glamour ♥ 4 Excellent animation, a great balance between scope and polish. This was definitely a neat experience. The puzzles were fresh and pretty intuitive. Of course the visuals could always be polished more, but you do what you can with the limited time.
May 1 04:03:58 26h 07m dig deeper ♥ 1 CONTAINS SPOILERS. This is great, seems like a compelling and relatively well-balanced mystery. I really liked the pressure of the timed days and the personal investment the game gives the player. I felt like I was very close after a couple of plays, but I didn't have any more leads to run down other than maybe 'inspect'ing every mundane item I hadn't already. I did the woodchuck and nomad "quests" and spoke to the spirit and dug up the grave. This all seemed to suggest quite strongly that Chloe (wife) is the murderer and is using hypnosis for some purpose. The talk of words in the master bedroom led me to believe that I was perhaps being hypnotized into doing the murder (also, the murder weapons are still 'used' even if they're in my inventory, which I think you would have thought of based on the attention to detail). However, neither "chloe / pocketwatch" nor "chloe me / pocketwatch" seemed to be a solution, and nothing seemed to implicate any other character to me.
May 1 04:17:45 13m 47s Deep molatoes ♥ 1 Very good even for a full 48 hours. It's a unique idea that's challenging and interesting. I didn't find much use for the signs, except I used one right at the very end when I had one potato left and he was missing the diamond by a few tiles. Way too hectic to do more than just keep them alive. Using the number keys as hotkeys for the items would be a great quality-of-life improvement so I don't have to move my mouse up and down and up and down the whole screen all the time.
May 1 04:52:09 34m 24s Diggy hole ♥ 2 I like this execution of the Dwarf Fortress/ONI concept a lot. The character AI was sensible and easy to understand, which is quite important for these types of game. I ended up just keeping the shop window open the whole time, as it was relatively compact and I didn't want to scroll all the way back to the chest to open it. As soon as I'd mined the starting gold, I just started digging a weird ladder straight down. The next deposit was large and was quite some distance away. Even with bags, I had to sit around for quite a long time while my characters hauled it up.
May 1 05:35:14 43m 05s Falling Bot ♥ 3 Nice job, this was a creative twist on the "falling down dodging things genre". Amazing amount of custom art, also. I found it difficult at times (especially my first few tries) to tell which objects were background objects and which were collidable - I thought it might be the red glowy ones for a bit, but that wasn't it. A consistent visual language for those, such as making them brighter or more saturated or colored a certain way, would be great. I did not initially realize that there was a laser at all until I had crashed into the first impassable obstacle a few times, and that did help with this a bit.
May 1 20:09:38 14h 34m Dangerous Depths ♥ 1 This is a great first game. The controls were responsive and the reaction time from the submarine to the bottom of the screen was pretty well-balanced. It did seem to me that the power-up blocks were actually something to be avoided, as they have a 66% chance of speeding you up which is nearly always suicidal (the rocket one does grant invulnerability but it can still drop you off right in front of a mine and leave you with no time to get out of the way).
May 1 20:33:14 23m 36s Hook, Mines & Sinker! ♥ 0 This is actually very similar to my LD29 game, so I like it, haha. The fish sprites are is adorable and very good, and the UI is useful and has everything you need. I did find the movement to be twitchy and accidentally shot myself into sharks several times. The robot arm also felt a bit noodly rather than robot-arm-y and didn't always want to go where I was pointing.
May 1 20:59:26 26m 12s Divine Comedy ♥ 3 What, no humor rating even though it's a comedy? jk. Very ambitious game, especially in level design, and it works decently enough. Combat is pretty hard, I think only succeeded by abusing some AI quirks - best tactic seemed to be to run circles around the enemies while swinging, and sometimes they would get stuck and I could stand behind and hit them. Perhaps a block or parry could provide a cleaner experience there. I don't think anybody rates games if they can't play them, I know I don't, I just skip them.
May 2 05:28:03 8h 28m Deep Diver ♥ 2 Excellent art, it is refined and consistent and it looks great. The game was pretty easy; I mostly just from coin to coin and only had to actually take any kind of evasive action once or twice. That said, I did notice that once I did touch an enemy it zapped all my health away almost immediately - a brief period of invulnerability after getting hit would help that feel better. Great candidate for a mobile game, which I see you might have already thought of based on the aspect ratio.
May 2 16:35:06 11h 07m Asteroid Mining Operations ♥ 1 This is a good concept and it functions well. Like others said, I think it mainly needs some mechanic to help the player find ore, perhaps in a puzzle-solving way, so it isn't just "drill at random". A goal would also be great! I noticed that the ore is visible through partially drilled tiles, so I found sliding up the edge of the main hole touching each time on the edge of it to be a very efficient way to look at a lot of tiles at once.
May 2 16:56:17 21m 11s Submarine Frenzy ♥ 0 Nice art, it's simple but consistent and looks nice. The UI was also simple and effective. The primary issue for me was that the collision shapes were slightly larger than the art, which made it feel like I was being cheated a bit sometimes when I hit a mine, particularly on the first level that required me to go between two lined up horizontally.
May 2 17:11:19 15m 02s Cthulhu's Deep Dream ♥ 1 Innovative and funny use of the theme - Cthulu just wants to sleep, so he has to go deeper to get away from all the cultists? The sprite art was also amazing, especially the jump frame, though I wasn't quite sure why sleepy baby Cthulu was raising a toast with his mug all the time. As a side note, if you didn't create any or most of the audio, you should opt out of that category.
May 2 17:22:32 11m 13s Submarine Salvage ♥ 1 Like previous commenters said, excellent polish and visuals, particularly on the particles. The controls also felt smooth and comfortable. It did get samey after a while, and I eventually stopped after I started seeing the same levels again. It might have helped to hold back one of the enemy types for a bit and introduce it later, or to include a hard ending or goal. I also noticed there was an overheat mechanic for the gun, but I never came anywhere close to filling the bar, so its capacity probably could have been reduced.
May 2 17:36:08 13m 36s Deep Space Escape ♥ 1 This is a unique and innovative idea - give the player a limited amount of time to collect resources while their ship jumps inexorably forward. Implementing the other two resources would add a bit more decision-making - right now you really just need to click on every planet as quickly as possible. Perhaps some higher risk higher reward planets that take longer to harvest and are clearly identified would also be interesting. Don't forget that if you want a score, you need to rate games so other people will see and rate yours!
May 2 18:42:36 1h 06m Dungeons and Caves ♥ 0 This is pretty great. I like the music a lot, and the amount of content is truly impressive for 72 hours. I found the slow fire rate (compared to Nuclear Throne) to encourage hiding behind walls and popping out for shots rather than madly charging around firing, and I didn't think it was quite as fun. If you wanted to encourage a more deliberate play style, some other mechanics might be needed to compliment it, like enemy AI that's better against this strategy, or even a cover mechanic. Don't forget that if you want a score at the end, the best way to get ratings is to play and rate other people's games.
May 2 18:51:21 8m 45s Deeper ♥ 0 This is honestly pretty great even for a longer development time - I wouldn't give up on it! I didn't know what it meant, but I felt it, haha - the mood was great. The swinging mechanic was smooth and intuitive and a lot of fun. It was a bit hard to keep track of where I still needed to look. I also found it unexpectedly tricky to hit the tiny blocks - some kind of feedback about where my aim is hitting could be handy.
May 3 16:29:09 21h 37m Goldsweeper ♥ 1 Cool variation on the classic game, it successfully retained a lot of the fun of the original while adding something new. I felt strangely confused about how to think about the numbers for reasons I didn't initially understand, so I looked at Minesweeper and noticed it's because Minesweeper puts the numbers only in excavated tiles and not in unexcavated tiles. There might have been some reason you did it this way, but keeping it consistent with Minesweeper would make it easier to pick up for Minesweeper fans. I was also confused about whether blank spaces meant '0', as in Minesweeper, or whether they were just a missing rating. I was successful for a while with the 0 assumption but eventually hit a mine here, so I'm not sure. If leaving the numbers as is, it might be good to distinguish tiles that have a rating from those that do not to reduce ambiguity. Capture.PNG
May 4 16:34:23 24h 05m Turn of the Tide ♥ 1 This is a solid game - nice art (I liked the shadows), nice audio, works well. I would definitely play a more fleshed-out version of this. Unfortunately I wasn't able to figure out how to detonate explosives I had placed, so I feel like I missed out on being able to influence the game a bit more there. Nonetheless I enjoyed driving around blowing up the antennae.
May 5 02:24:49 9h 50m Minerun ♥ 1 I like how the game explains itself so well. You're a dwarf, here's some rocks, you have one minute. You know what to do. I enjoyed it for one play at least. The isometric graphics look nice, but I didn't like how the controls (WASD/arrows) were rotated 45 degrees from the board. I had to tilt my head to the right to make it work a little better mentally.
May 5 02:35:09 10m 20s FallEndless ♥ 1 I'm really impressed by the amount of story content there seems to be here. I played once and had several items that I didn't find out what to do with, I'll have to play it again when I have more time. I enjoyed the risk-reward balancing and guessing what each option would do to my stats. The English font was rather difficult to read for such a text-heavy game. Don't forget that you need ratings to receive a score. The best way to get ratings is to rate other people's games.
May 6 03:52:40 25h 17m Krepkiy Oreshek ♥ 1 Really digging the animation of the sphere when strafing, and the bullet effects. Overall it was fun: a good length and pacing and good controls. I quickly realized that there was no reason to not hold the fire button down the entire time - there could be some design space there to add a mechanic to make the gameplay a bit more unique. There's a philosophy that says "if there is a button for the player to press, you should also give them a reason not to press it".
May 6 04:08:04 15m 24s MachDrop ♥ 1 I liked the unique perspective of looking out at a character moving in a ring. The gameplay was very simple - I just had to choose whether I wanted to try right or left, usually with no basis for choosing one over the other. It would be good to ask a little more of the player. Still it has a beginning, a middle and an end, so great job finishing!
May 6 04:19:06 11m 02s Echoes of The Underworld ♥ 0 This is a great-looking game with a cool idea. And the audio is excellent; I especially liked the directional audio leading to the exit. Some of the mechanics I felt didn't actually work out all that well. Because the sound waves propagate at about the same speed as the player moves, you can't learn much of use from them while moving, but there's not much reason to stop because there aren't really any hazards to run into except the one bad guy. Perhaps faster waves with a cooldown would be interesting. I also didn't initially pick up that the torch was the exit on the last level, since it's not consistent with the other levels and doesn't even have the directional audio. I died once circling around it and would have again, except I managed to not pick up aggro at the start on that run.
May 6 04:33:11 14m 05s River, Carry Me Away ♥ 3 Very nice experience - a great example of "show, don't tell". Wonderful how the music followed the tone of what was going on in the 'story'. The start was a bit slow as the game made me wait for quite some time without anything to click on and also without anything to think about, but later was better as I had the storytelling to consider while waiting for the next item.
May 6 04:51:01 17m 50s Sea of Lies ♥ 1 Really enjoyable simple experience. I liked the practical message the game had, and unrelatedly also the squash/stretch animations for the creatures. As I eventually fell into dashing quickly down, I noticed that the speech bubbles became hard to read. Perhaps that could be considered part of the point, but I wonder if you could do something where the bubbles are biased toward the center of the screen at higher speeds, to make them hold a little stiller in the center for a moment to be read before they zip off.
May 6 05:08:53 17m 52s Deep Dig Pizza ♥ 2 This is a great and innovative mashup of mechanics. Drilling into a planet of pizza to make pizzas for guests? Awesome. "Dig In"? Awesome, haha. I liked how the later levels started to introduce some puzzle-like navigation, requiring the player to think about how to get where they wanted to go. I think the UI in pizza-building mode could have been streamlined a bit. I appreciated how you used the existing UI elements for the player's resources and the active orders, but it required a lot of mouse movement and dragging all across the screen that didn't feel all that great. Perhaps auto-completing orders when the pizza matches or a submit button near the pie (or an action like flinging the pie out) could have helped.
May 6 05:25:38 16m 45s Corpse Clue ♥ 1 Impressively polished visuals! I was able to solve it in good time - the addition of the arrows for the torch part was helpful. Great horror game moment with the "go see what's happening" line. But what if I don't want to? Haha. I found the controls a tad clunky. I think the addition of right-click drag to rotate would have been good, making the game fully playable with the mouse
May 6 05:46:36 20m 58s Dipper And Dipper ♥ 1 Good take on the two characters/one input idea. The puzzles are solid and build on each other well, and the boss fights are a good twist on the puzzle mechanics. Some of the boss attack patterns were not very first-timeable, such as the one that requires you to squish the characters close together, since you have to push one against one wall and then send them all the way back across the screen and there's hardly time for that. They are manageable once you know what to expect, though. I also did try standing on the attack tiles the first time since they match the level exit tiles, I thought they might be the good ones. Overall, fun to play!
May 6 16:27:51 10h 41m This Goes Deeper... ♥ 2 Cool and ambitious concept. The volume of information available is great, and I liked the quantum physics "theme". It might be good to bring the player more information and features over time as it can be a bit overwhelming at the start. The in-game notebook was a great idea. I got the "winner" dialogue from dialing Klaus Fuchs, but I was just dialing everyone to see what they had to say, I didn't really feel like I had figured anything out.
May 6 16:37:06 9m 15s Run, Glim, Run! ♥ 2 Great music, impressive to have three tracks for the different parts of the game. They set the mood well. The character art was also fun. The stalagmites didn't "feel" like obstacles because they were just grey rock, the same as the platforms. Perhaps sticking with the "water bad" theme and making them geysers would be more consistent. The collision on them also wasn't reliable and appeared to get even less reliable at higher speeds, making it difficult to lose.
May 7 02:36:09 9h 59m Town of Monsters ♥ 1 This was cool to play. Really liked the music and how the attacks added to it with guitar riffs. The voice acting was also great - so much variety for, presumably, just you doing all the voices! I didn't really get how the game worked the first time though (how you pick one enemy from each grouping of map locations to kill), but I figured it out for the second time. I also didn't understand what most of the combat buttons meant even in general terms, except the gun - they could have used icons that were easier to interpret at that small size, or tooltips.
May 7 05:37:15 3h 01m Mycelisation ♥ 2 This is an amazingly polished game, graphically and aurally. It plays very smoothly. The UI was intuitive and easy to use, though a few things took me some time to figure out: that water income is based on the size of the root network, and water left in the pool is drained every turn. I did find the game quite easy; because you have passive water income from the root network, it seems like you can't really fail unless you do something immensely self-destructive early on. That's a valid design but this felt like it wanted to be something more thoughtful.
May 7 05:49:10 11m 55s A Quest for Cheese ♥ 2 This game looks and sounds amazing. I don't know what more to say about that - it's really just about as polished as it needs to be. I enjoyed it a lot - once I figured out what to do. Because the camera seemed to really fight the UFO going up or down, and the obstacles were moving sideways, I assumed the game was a sidescroller. I played it like that for a good couple of minutes before I figured something should be happening and tried pushing on the bottom, but I might not have tried it even then if not for the theme.
May 8 05:30:57 23h 41m Yermak ♥ 1 I really like the feeling of playing this game. Considering where to camp was fun and interesting and the rules supported spots that felt like they should be good spots quite well. I also really enjoyed the art. I did head east but eventually just hit a lot of mountains; tried going around them but died before finding a way.
May 16 00:44:59 187h 14m Downfall ♥ 0 Nice game! It was fun for what it is. Everything was smooth and intuitive and worked well. It did get a bit boring after a while, as the difficulty seemed to spike up quickly but then flattened out and didn't change much. It could be beneficial to give the player some reason to not be constantly shooting all the time to make the game a little more engaging. Typically that would take the form of something like a target you need to not shoot, or perhaps a reload after a certain number of shots, but there's a lot of space there for something more creative, too.
May 16 05:40:20 4h 55m Space Train ♥ 0 Really unique idea. Great polish, too. It took me several tries to figure out exactly how to operate the jumping on and off the track, but once I did I had a good time. Transitioning from the track to flying was a bit tough, I think because the train comes off the track in the direction of the mouse and then additionally picks up a bunch of rotation in that direction - I think it would feel smoother to have the train be going straight ahead at that point and require additional mouse movement to rotate it.
May 16 15:31:47 9h 51m Last Star Legionnaire ♥ 1 Amazing artwork and a pretty fun concept. I think a key would have been better as the fire button; because it was the mouse I initially assumed I would be able to aim guns to some degree independently of the ship's heading. The chaotic feeling of the game disappeared when entering walkabout mode since the exterior game seemed to be paused - could be interesting to have it continue on at a somewhat slower rate.
May 16 15:45:04 13m 17s Dead End ♥ 1 Really great mood, look, and feel. The placement UI was helpful and worked great. I appreciate that you added a hard respawn when the player is in the darkness to prevent them from bumbling around, but it felt a little aggressive, especially as it didn't respect pre-placed light sources. Having to optimize the light chain lost me - I was a ways down the tunnel with the water puddles in it and I just didn't feel like ripping up all of those lights all the way back up and re-placing them. Possibly allowing placed lights to connect to any number of in-range lights (instead of only the last light) would have helped with this so I could shift them one at a time from the top, and also explore possible side passages without destroying all of my work.
May 16 16:03:50 18m 46s In the Hole ♥ 1 This is a solid game. It took a moment to figure out what things I needed to click on to play the game, but once I got that the interface was easy to use. A few changes could dramatically reduce the numbers of clicks needed to play, such as automatically expanding the Build interface for new rooms when placed, since you're nearly always going to use it immediately, and leaving the buy/sell interface open permanently, since it's used very frequently. I liked how the surface outpost "followed" you down so you could still use it, would have liked to see it do so horizontally as well. I played for maybe 10 minutes and didn't see any sign of increased resource density, so I assumed the game was unwinnable, especially given the "soulless corporation sucking you dry" skin.
May 16 18:05:42 2h 01m Come back ♥ 1 Really dig the simple zero-buttons control scheme. Movement felt smooth and the collision was good, too, which is often an issue in games like this. I would have liked a little more feedback about the effect the bubbles were having - I didn't know if they stacked up or timed out.
May 16 19:25:45 1h 20m Ludophile ♥ 0 This is so good. I almost quit a bunch of times but I eventually ended up solving it, which I guess means the difficulty is good. I did have problems with some of the library shortcuts even after moving the game to the folder it wanted to be in, which was a little annoying. They were using "Go/Dir" instead of "Go to stacks/Directory", I think.
May 16 20:18:44 52m 59s Spooky Ocean Game ♥ 1 Great music! The surface water effect was also neat, though it initially gave me the impression that something was chasing me that I needed to escape from. I found a number of mushrooms but never did find any plates. The handling of the sub was a bit bizarre; it seemed like if it had, for example, a lot of upward momentum then pressing down+left was significantly less effective at slowing it than it should have been compared to simply pressing down.
May 16 20:45:33 26m 49s Deepest Darkest Double Bogey ♥ 1 Nice game. The music and the graphical style go together well to make a sort of weird fantasy sci-fi feel. I had to turn all my shots a bit to the side to actually see where they were going, it might have been better to have the camera offset in an over-the-shoulder way. I wonder if the dummies shouldn't actually block the ball. Because they're largely rectangular you are very limited in the ways you can bank off of them, so you generally just waste a shot to pick up +2. Would be cool if there were more possibilities to pick up the dummies while also going where you want to.
May 16 20:51:28 5m 55s Block Attack ♥ 1 Solid arcade game; I got 353 on my first go. Not much to criticize, except maybe that the blue walls feel solid based on how they look - some kind of more teleport-y look could help remind the player they can cross them. Good choice of music.
May 16 21:00:46 9m 18s Space Trench Miner ♥ 1 Really cool visuals and art, particularly for the menu/overworld. It didn't have much to keep me playing as the only apparent goal was to unlock upgrades, and the upgrades weren't particularly interesting. I also found it a bit confusing that you had to hold the direction you wanted to dig - perhaps a drill graphic that points where you're moving would clear that up, or using the mouse to aim instead of the character's motion.
May 16 21:21:02 20m 16s Deep Root ♥ 0 Really cool and creative game, I enjoyed playing it. It took me a bit to figure out what to do but then I was able to go to town. Would probably be good to have a game-over condition for when you have no loose ends left to grow from.
May 16 23:27:09 2h 06m Deep Focus ♥ 1 I thought this game was kind of silly when I started it but I ended up rating it 4.5 just about across the board, so I guess it was actually amazing, haha. It was fun figuring out strategy over multiple plays. I, too, decided that the optimal strategy was to never stop working and rely solely on upgrades for defense (given that money has no other purpose), which seems a little odd but I guess it's realistic. The focus effect was immersive but I was a little disappointed that it meant I couldn't appreciate the art or the music while I was doing well. I'm totally downloading this music for later.
May 16 23:52:59 25m 50s Mars Cave Explorer ♥ 1 This is a slick game. Very challenging controls, but fun to master. I would love to play something like this with a bit more progress mechanics. I found the collision damage unintuitive as it seemed to be based entirely on how long you were in contact with a surface and not at all on your impact velocity, so I wasn't able to land gently on surfaces but I could go careening off of them all day. The health and battery bars also got me at least once as they both reach actual zero long before you expect (half of the health icon is green at 0 health and same for the copper cap on the battery).
May 17 05:08:48 5h 15m Adventure to the Deep ♥ 0 Good job finishing your first jam game. I liked the concept of having a sequence of unique door lock puzzles for the player to solve. The key dropped in the grate was a fun one, though it took me a bit to figure out what the screwdriver was supposed to be while looking at it, and I still don't know what the loopy thing was. The collision for the platforming part of the game was very janky and I think it detracted from the experience - perhaps you would have been better off discarding that part entirely and focusing more on your core mechanic, the door puzzles.
May 17 15:56:46 10h 47m How Low Can You Go? ♥ 0 Nice visual style. The art was pretty good, and I really liked the flashlight effect. Also a fun idea to have previous players appear in-game and not only on the leaderboard! For some reason I can't fully explain, it felt somewhat more difficult than it should have to harpoon big groups of fish. They tended to get bunched up easily but I could never get more than a few at once; I don't know if there was a limit?
May 17 16:20:44 23m 58s Knee deep in jelly ♥ 0 Adorable art! I felt like I could have used at least one more tool for avoiding the jellyfish. There were some situations where sitting and waiting a while for them to bounce into better positions was the best thing to do, which was a bit boring.
May 17 16:30:58 10m 14s Deep Cleanse ♥ 1 Great job making a complete game with an ending. The art is quite good, and there's nothing really to complain about. One minor note is that I found it difficult to get a good sense of distance to the blood cells when I was close to them, and sometimes missed. It's possible that moving the camera up relative to the submarine would help with that, or even adding a subtle distance number to them when nearby.
May 17 16:38:22 7m 24s Outbreaks ♥ 0 It's a cool idea that has some potential. I found myself over time only really using the machine gun/grenade launcher because they were effective and felt the most natural. That grip also allowed me access to the shield if I needed it, but I didn't because there was no player health. It would be a good idea to have different situations or enemy types that strongly encourage the player to use different weapons against them. I had to use the area spear once or twice when surrounded by small enemies but this was pretty rare.
May 17 16:46:22 8m 00s DICE - Demolition Into the Core of the Earth ♥ 1 Even though the music was like a 15-second loop I kind of dig it. It was decently fun to play for a bit and smash up some rocks. My biggest complaint would be that I spent a lot of time strongly fighting where the craft wanted to go. It seemed to really want to be level for some reason and I kept having to force it to point down because that's where I wanted to go. It also felt a bit larger than I expected and would get stuck on the edges of a one-dynamic tunnel. Perhaps some external pieces that stick into the player's view would help gauge the size, or just make the dynamite blasts big enough that the player can properly fit through them.
May 17 20:51:28 4h 05m Deeper in color ♥ 0 I really like the visual style of this game. The particles and screenshake felt great on top of the decent graphics. I did find that I actually didn't need to move around the map at all - I just stood at the left edge and alternated which hand I was using to spam left click at the enemies. This was totally effective against the normal enemies and also the boss, because they only ever move and shoot directly at the player, but not very fun.
May 17 21:07:11 15m 43s Terrace Territory ♥ 2 This is a cool idea and I enjoyed it once I figured it out. It could be a fun educational math game. That said it did take me a long time to even figure out that I needed to point pots at each other to get them to connect. I think it would have helped immensely to just have a horizontal laser always coming from each pot, perhaps in a different color/style if it isn't connected to anything. There is the yellow one during placement but as it's in line with the camera I just interpreted it as an upwards laser, also. I also interpreted the blue flower as simply 'x' and didn't understand why I needed to connect one to every constant (and I initially interpreted your hint about this backwards). Finally, I found the labels on the plants to be quite difficult to spot and, on level 4, to even read. On the whole I do like this idea a lot and I think it has a lot of promise.
May 17 21:15:35 8m 24s Deep Space Surfing ♥ 1 I like the gameplay system here where you can come back from getting hit by playing well, but it gets harder and harder to do so. The reaction timing was well-balanced - it really pushed me at the beginning but I got used to it. The art was also nice. As others said, some music seems really critical for the feel of this one. I also didn't feel like the intensity was really ramping up that much - the pace of objects felt much the same at all intensities. I think more could be added at the high end, and other effects such as crazier starfield lines could be keyed off of it, too.
May 18 06:53:18 9h 37m Infratoad ♥ 1 What outstanding art. I especially enjoyed the player character animations, and the reflections in the pond really added a lot to it. The music really added to the feel as well; it reminded me of Ibb & Obb. Only gripe would be that it got a bit samey after a while, I finished it mostly because I saw that the frog was changing shapes so I figured there must be some kind of end.
May 18 19:53:31 13h 00m Mind Pit ♥ 0 Great audio that really sets the mood. Gameplay-wise I was not sure if there was anything to it other than random guessing. Rolling my fingers quickly and repeatedly over all three keys got me to Master Mindsleuth, though :D