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Feedback comments for LD48
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Koolruz's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 27 03:03:04 | What Lies Below | ♥ 0 | Great job with the art direction on this game! It looks and feels very slick! | |
| Apr 27 18:24:08 | 15h 21m | Pâquerette Down the Bunburrow | ♥ 2 | This was really cute and fun! Great job! I felt like I had a really good intuition of how the bunnies would move pretty quickly - It was impressive how effectively the first few puzzles teach the player! My only (minor) complaint was that movement would sometimes feel a little bit laggy when the bunny moved multiple spaces at once. Once I realized that I was just waiting for the bunny to stop moving before I could move again, it made sense, but it still broke up my flow just a bit. I managed to get ten bunnies deep before getting stumped by this puzzle, but I had a lot of fun catching bunnies! I also loved the art style you have going on - Everything felt very polished and intentional! Capture.PNG |
| Apr 27 19:08:33 | 44m 25s | Just A Shot | ♥ 0 | Looking at your gifs, I feel like I was missing something when trying to wallkick/wall jump - I always ended up losing my momentum when I hit the wall - It made it really difficult to complete a lot of the platforming. During the fight with the two cultists where you had to drop down through two doors, I obtained a single key and dropped down the first door, and ended up stuck and unable to climb back up to kill the second cultist. :( I went back and recorded a gif of my attempts at wallkicking during the tutorial area, in case it helps you to see what I was doing wrong! wall-kick.gif |
| Apr 28 16:48:15 | 21h 39m | Deep Fall | ♥ 1 | This was fun! :) Just like Peace of Cake above, I also ended up replaying it for a perfect run after beating it the first time, just because it was a fun little bite of a game. The controls felt responsive, and I really appreciated the fact that the game had an end state - It might have gotten repetitive as an endless runner, but it was very enjoyable at its current length. Great job! |
| Apr 28 19:09:52 | 2h 21m | Deep Dive | ♥ 2 | I really liked how cohesive everything looked and felt, stylistically. Solid art direction, and a neat idea for a puzzle mechanic! Having the player dive deeper and deeper underwater was a great use of the theme to provide a straightforward and easy-to-grasp reason for gravity to be inverted until you pick up the treasure! |
| Apr 28 23:13:10 | 4h 03m | DeepO | ♥ 4 | Great job on the level of polish here! Everything feels very well made - The sound effects and visuals are both great! I was playing on a keyboard, and I had a little bit of trouble getting used to jump and dash being mapped to the same button - I kept instinctively trying to hit X to dash rather than Z, but I have no idea why that was. I think I was having difficulty releasing then immediately re-pressing the jump button, without losing too much height. Unfortunately (possibly because of my trouble with the controls), I ended up getting stuck here - No matter what I did, I couldn't get enough jump height to get through this hole. That said, this may entirely be my own lack of skill :) stuck.gif Overall though, great job on the game! I had fun with what I was able to beat, and I really loved the atmosphere you created! |
| Apr 30 04:00:46 | 28h 47m | GRAPPLE the Abyss! | ♥ 1 | I had a lot of fun playing this! The pixel art looked great, and the final boss fight at the end was tough enough that it took me a few tries to beat, but not so tough that I ever felt hopeless. Checkpoints were generously placed, so I constantly got to experience new content as I went through the game, and the music accompanying the boss fight was a jam! In terms of constructive criticism, I really only have a few minor nitpicks. I had a hard time at the beginning of the boss fight figuring out that I could only hit them while they were grappeling, especially because of the free hit you're given to start the fight - For my first couple of attempts, I felt like my attacks were randomly phasing through the boss, but I pretty quickly realized that they could only be hit mid-grapple. The risk/reward of sending yourself diving at the boss if you missed an attack was a lot of fun though, and really heightened the tension of the fight. I also had a strangely hard time getting through this underwater section, which was the only time the game bordered on being frustrating - Between the very tight gaps between the moving blocks, the delay between launching your grapple and getting pulled forward, and the inability to precisely reset yourself to a fixed distance away from the blocks, it felt awkwardly fiddly to pass. Even when I got the timing down on the first block, it took me several attempts to be consistent enough to do it twice in a row. tricky-section.PNG That said, the rest of the game more than made up for that minor hiccup. All in all, I had a lot of fun. When even just moving around in the controls screen felt great, I had a good feeling that the rest of the game would be a good time and I was not let down. |
| May 1 16:30:35 | 36h 29m | Monkey Quest | ♥ 0 | This game felt really polished and juicy! I loved the art, and I also loved the sound design - The cadence of the "clink, clink, smash!" as you broke through a block was extremely satisfying, especially when followed up by the gem-collection sound. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to fight back against the enemies as I unearthed them - It seemed like my pickaxe didn't do anything to them, so I ended up just trying to lure them into different parts of the map than I wanted to explore, which was a little bit tedious. It felt like there was something that I was missing. I agree with other commenters that starting from scratch on death felt like a really harsh penalty - I wanted to keep playing and exploring new content, but restarting every time I died meant that I only ended up playing the first two areas again and again, instead of experiencing the rest of the game in full :( That said, the moment-to-moment gameplay still felt really satisfying because of all the polish put into the game - Great job! :) |
| May 1 16:50:08 | 19m 33s | Conduit | ♥ 2 | Really great looking game, and all of the puzzles were a ton of fun! They all had a really satisfying "eureka" moment as you figured out the solution, and the level design telegraphed what you had to do really well - I never felt like I didn't have any idea what to try next. Unfortunately, I had to quit playing before I got to the end because of this section - I'm not sure if the game was designed for a higher resolution monitor than my 1080p laptop screen, but I couldn't see anything while I was trying to solve this puzzle. It was entirely offscreen, and I didn't want to try to memorize the exact inputs that I'd need to do in order to solve this puzzle without seeing it. :( off-screen-puzzle.PNG Aside from that, I had a lot of fun playing this game, and really wanted to finish it! It was really well polished, looked great, and the puzzles were very clever. Great job! :) |
| May 1 21:46:42 | 4h 56m | Chess Hellevator | ♥ 1 | This was a really fun puzzle game! The slightly melancholy soundtrack worked strangely well with the elevator operator's monologues, and really did set an interesting mood behind the entire piece! I also loved the very click-y sound effects you had when moving pieces around - It was really satisfying, as was the announcer's delivery of "Bonus Move!" and "Combo!". I also really liked how you subtly explained how pawns move via the elevator operator, so that even players who aren't knowledgeable about chess could quickly grasp how their enemies would be moving. The one place I felt a little bit let down was at the ending - With the melancholy mood, I was expecting things to tie up in a less slapstick fashion once I met the queen, but it's a game jam - Getting any ending in at all is a race against time! :) Overall, great game! I really enjoyed this one, and had a lot of fun playing it. |
| May 3 16:41:34 | 42h 54m | Dig Straight Down! | ♥ 1 | I really liked the music - It felt like it was part of a soundtrack to some lost Nintendo game. :) It took me awhile to figure out how I was supposed to play - After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get a drill pulling blocks up onto a conveyor belt to sell them, but eventually I stopped being able to drill any further (It seemed like I hit an impassable block), and I couldn't figure out what to do next. That said, I might also just not be the target audience for this game, because I'm not very into sandbox-style games where you as the player decide what to build/what your goals are. This seems like a cool start for a Factorio-style game though, for players who enjoy that type of game! :) |
| May 3 17:11:01 | 29m 27s | Air-O-Space | ♥ 2 | The graphics were cute, and the number of different items to juggle made for a frantic (in a good way) experience! I liked the ramp up over time - At first just breathing and sorting the aliens was pretty straightforward, but you quickly felt overwhelmed by how many different tasks you had to juggle. :) Unfortunately, I couldn't play very long at all :( Hitting Q and P alternately was extremely uncomfortable for me (I had to hold my wrist at a very awkward angle to reach both keys), and I had to stop before injuring myself, as it was getting very painful. While I understand the intent behind spreading the keys apart was probably to add to the pile of things that the player was juggling, I think that making the player physically uncomfortable as part of the gameplay experience is a risky idea, because everyone has different physical tolerances, and you are limiting your potential audience. |
| May 4 16:43:59 | 23h 32m | Fathomless | ♥ 1 | This game concept is *really* cool - I immediately understood what was going on as soon as I entered the first sub-level, and I loved how kept recursing through stage after stage trying to get to the other side of the first screen. One thing that felt a little bit unfair/awkward was how you had absolutely no friction with the moving platforms. When I was on this screen, it seemed like it might have actually been impossible to get across the two fast-moving small platforms - I'm sure that it was possible with pixel-perfect precision, but the player's lack of interaction with moving platforms felt really unintuitive. level.PNG I'd also echo other commenters' concerns about collision feeling just a bit off - Hazards would often kill me before I had even visually touched them, as seen in this gif. In general, you want the hitbox of your hazards to be smaller than their visual size, just as a matter of pragmatism. When a player dies by just barely brushing up against a spike it can feel very unfair, but if a player just barely squeezes by a hazard that they thought would be lethal, they feel great about it. That small visual change can make a world of difference in how much fun players have with your game, even if nothing changes about how tight a jump is. ldjam.gif I also found myself wishing that I didn't have a fixed jump height - The fact that I couldn't do a short hop was unexpected for a tight platformer like this, and led to several deaths against ceiling-spikes. Given how tight the platforming sections were, as a player I really wanted to have equally tight control over my character. Overall though, really cool and solid entry! Great job! :) |
| May 5 16:32:21 | 23h 48m | Augmented | ♥ 2 | I got pulled in by the writing and genuinely wanted to see how things ended, so good job! :) I finished the story, and while I did see the twist coming, it was still an enjoyable read and kept me engaged to the end - It was long enough to be satisfying, but not too long that it felt like it was being dragged out. |
| May 5 21:45:26 | 5h 13m | RogueRally | ♥ 2 | Pre-programming your characters moves is a really neat idea for a roguelike! It reminds me a lot of robo rally, which I'm assuming was intentional, based on the name! :) One thing I didn't quite understand was why I would want to pre-program several moves at once, as there seemed to be no penalty for taking several smaller turns. Especially once the available moves became randomized, if you had a bad "hand", it felt like it was better to make one small move and hope for better options next turn, rather than work within the limits of your current moveset. It would have been nice if there was some sort of reward for programming longer sequences into your drill, so that players were incentivized to do so and have fun figuring out satisfying sequences. :) Overall though, cool game! |
| May 13 03:22:02 | 173h 36m | Recursio | ♥ 1 | This is a really neat idea for a puzzle concept! I had a lot of fun figuring out how I had to rearrange the walls of the maze to get each of my blobs safely to the goal, but I found myself quickly overwhelmed with too many blobs as the levels became composed of more and more pieces. Because the level layouts generally kept my blobs safe, I would frequently find myself not paying attention and losing track of one of them, then dying seemingly out of nowhere. It wasn't difficult to ensure that a blob stayed on screen if I knew about it, so this mechanic didn't add to the challenge of each screen, it just felt frustrating. Visually, I really like the style that you were going for here! Everything feels very cohesive and polished, and the subtle shifting of the maze lines really help tie everything together. I also really liked the subtle details - The fact that your blobs and the maze tiles all swayed slightly out of sync with each other added some nice visual interest, and helped very subtly distinguish the various elements making up each level. My only real feedback here is that the goal looks very similar to your controllable blobs, and it can be difficult to locate at a glance. I did run into one strange mechanic that felt odd to me, and might have been a bug - When I had multiple blobs lined up next to one another, they did not all move as a cohesive group. You can see in the attached gif that when I step left, only one of the two adjacent blobs moves left, and the other was still stuck until its neighbor was two spaces away. ldjam.gif Overall though, this is a really well polished game - Great job! |
