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Papabirb

Feedback comments for LD49

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Papabirb's comment
Oct 5 02:14:06		Don't Kick The Oxygen (more of a physics sandbox really)	♥ 2	I love the animation on the little shrimpy dudes, it's almost perfectly in sync with the beats of the background music, some of them spawn off-beat though. Overall, it's more of a physics sandbox than anything, but here is a breakdown of my ratings on it: Fun: 1.5 - Overall, it's more of a physics sandbox than anything else. I accidentally lost my Oxygen Machine in the void, but I wanted to experience the end state, so I entertained myself by sweeping up the long line of shrimpy dudes and head-bouncing the lil star guys. I think that it takes way too long for the oxygen meter to go down when outside of the radius of the Oxygen Machine, as I got pretty bored, which is how I ended up just enjoying the physics sandbox until the timer ran down. Innovation: 1.5 - Gameplay wise, not very innovative; just a physics sandbox with WASD controls. But it's a solid concept, having a kick-the-can game where you need to keep the can from being kicked or else you die. Theme: 3.5 - Needing to stay next to an Oxygen Machine that just won't stay put and is so turbulent and bouncy seems pretty unstable to me! Graphics: 5.0 - I love the minimalism and as I said, the animation on the shrimpy dudes. I feel like the simple bright sprites on the black background does so well for broadcasting that it's the bottom of the ocean, all that's missing is maybe some seaweed or bubbles floating up to emphasize ocean rather than outer space or the void. All the colors you chose for the sprites are very pretty! Audio: 5.0 - I LOVE LOVE LOVE THE MUSIC!!! I know it's not really a song so much as atmosphere, but it's atmosphere with a BOP!!!!! I love when the shrimpy dudes spawn in a way where they bounce to the beat, it's so cute! Humor: 5.0 - The concept of an Uber "diver" just dropping you off in the middle of the ocean with a flimsy rubber Oxygen Machine is really funny! Mood: 5.0 - You also managed to home run with the mood, as the minimalist void aesthetics with that amazing soundscape bop does create a very scary, bottom-of-the-ocean vibe. Overall: 3.0 - Not really a game since you didn't have time to finish it, but the components to turn it into a game are all there, and I enjoyed just vibing to the soundscape and playing with the physics while waiting to die. I feel like it's pretty hard to make something that is both atmospherically moody and also a funny setup. Good work overall! I hope you have more time to finish next time you do a jam!
Oct 5 15:34:35	13h 20m	Farmers' Market	♥ 1	Played it on mobile; device: Pixel XL. It's very visually interesting, but kind of boring. I can't see the graphs very well in the distance, and it's not clear that those are buttons you can click. There is no win state or lose state. I purposefully let my crops all die so I only had $5 dollars left. I never saw anything go down to $5 in price, lowest I saw was 45. I don't know how you're doing the graphs, but I would recommend some kind of minimum = 1$ type situation, so that there's always a chance, unless the player has 0$, which should be a lose state. Between that and the lack of win state, there is no reason to play. I like the sound effects, but I wish there was music. I also wish the money display was anchored to the bottom of the screen rather than top left, as on smaller devices like phones and some laptops, it's hard to see the graphs on the left: Screenshot_20211005-112539.png Overall, pretty okay. Stock markets are unstable, so pretty on-theme. I was impressed by the use of 2D assets in 3D; I've yet to try out Godot 3D properly myself.
Oct 5 16:15:55	41m 20s	can't let go	♥ 1	Played on mobile; device: Pixel XL. I liked it! Really good simulator of interpersonal relationship anxiety. The music was disorienting; it sounded like an audio glitch more than music until I got used to it. Unclear if there was music on the last level or if that one actually was a glitch I caused by turning my phone off briefly. Overly, it felt like playing Cats Are Liquid, with less mechanics and a little easier. I think some of the platforming was too precision-based for clickable buttons at least on mobile, not sure if you intended mobile friendliness or not but I did beat it. Definitely shares the experience of "platformers on mobile aren't a good idea", not sure how it plays on PC. Some of the text colors aren't readable on the white background, so you either needed a different bg color, different text colors, or a simple border on the font to provide readability.
Oct 5 17:59:31	1h 43m	Quantum Splitter	♥ 1	Played on mobile; device: Pixel XL This was really fun, but it felt like there was a difficulty spike around level 9, at which point every other level was a little too hard, that might just be me though, I gave up on level 20 since that's close enough to beating the game lol. Regarding the specific feedback you requested on the itch.io page: 1. No tutorial required for native or high?mid?-level English speakers, as the titles of the early levels served as tutorial enough. A more visual tutorial might be better for increasing the range of people who can play it. 2. As I said, I think it spiked in difficulty around 9, but that might just be my inability to solve the puzzles. Overall difficulty felt fine though, and solving the hard ones felt really rewarding. 3. I liked both the easy and hard levels, as the easy ones helped me learn the mechanics and provide breaks between the harder ones, and the harder ones were more satisfying to solve. 4. I wish there was a hint system I could use for the harder ones. I don't think they're too hard to solve, but they're confusing to me. Some of the level titles helped like "round trip" but others only? described the start position like "h bomb".
Oct 7 03:15:50	33h 16m	Unstable Tricky Table	♥ 1	Pretty nice! I love me a tetris-type game, though not being able to slow drop & place the b locks like I would in tetris was confusing, as well as having infinite time to decide how to place my blocks, and for whatever reason my mind felt like the yellow square blocks should have been 4b4 cubes instead of half of that lol, nothing else felt off, my brain just can't handle 3D Tetris I guess. I had to restart the game in the beginning as the controls are only on the menu and I couldn't figure out how to exit the gameplay to go re-read them when I had forgotten everything but WASD after testing out left ctrl+R in the main menu. I really liked the music, might have been nice to have some sound effects for the collisions between blocks so as to have that sort of clunky stacking-things-up vibe, and I enjoyed the memey choice of game over screen. The online leaderboard was a fun touch. I find not being able to slot my pieces together the way I would in tetris to be a general discourager, as it makes it feel like it's more up to luck whether I get good blocks or bad blocks to do anything with. I mostly just piled up the bad blocks on the side of the table, and I lost after accidentally hitting spacebar twice when dropping on of my pieces. I think this game would benefit from either looking less like Tetris, or controlling more similarly to Tetris in terms of the ability to soft drop a piece to position it more accurately. Overall, pretty cool game!
Oct 7 10:18:19	7h 02m	Instability Verse	♥ 1	Lol, it took me until I only had like 3 platforms left and stuff stopped happening before I figured out I could do stuff on the other platforms. No idea what "purify" does on the home base, I just spammed 'X' and built stuff on every platform I could and then they all started crumbling away until the last 3 platforms, which stopped crumbling away I guess? I got bored and didn't really feel like restarting. I love the aesthetics visually and the audio, it feels really epic and looks really watercolory to me, something I love! The sound effects are a little crunchy and distorted though, and either the song doesn't loop or that was an indicator that I lost or something because they stopped chanting at me after I had 3 platforms remaining. One thing I'll note is it threw up a weird error the first time I clicked on it on Itch.io on Chrome, repeatable on refresh. Something about full screen error, even though I was not clicking the full screen button. error on dudes game.jpg With a proper tutorial, I think this has a lot of strategy potential! I liked it!
Oct 9 02:52:58	40h 34m	Rocky Rhodes and the Cracked Case	♥ 4	Alcohol status: 23 minutes in, haven't drank a lot due to being confused as hell by this game, but what I have drank is starting to set in for this reviewing part, lol. Played the jam version. Thought I was gonna have to quit, the corner piece shapes for the "bread puzzle" were really unclear. Didn't think you could make me go "What??" at every genre change, but every single one was surprising and unsuspected. Ending was definitely odd, and the auto-closing gave one more final "what??" sensation of a sudden change. Really good work. Wish there was a way to skip through the opening noir text like there is in the visual novel aspect. I appreciate the dedication to Rocky alone maintaining the noir style throughout, except at the end - really makes that last bit seem so heavy, along with the creepy voice and ambience. Hardest part (besides the corner pieces of the bread puzzle (the other shapes were very clear! and very impressive since they're photos! also I liked the hand photo it was cool and creepy!)) was definitely the car level. Voice acting was fantastic, although I'd say Barbara did better at the visual novel kawaii voice than the hardboiled femme fatale detective voice. This game was perfect, and the perfect game to start my series of drunk ratings on lol. Gonna follow to see what over weird stuff you guys make in the future, good work!!
Oct 9 03:07:40	14m 42s	Celestial Heights	♥ 1	Alcohol status: 38 minutes in. Feelin' a lil somethin' somethin', but games aren't challenging yet (reviewing might be a different story, we'll see). Now, this is a game I was excited to play on PC. I first played it on mobile(Pixel XL) (despite unity and itch.io warning me not to), and it was really fun and challenging. The menu buttons were hard to click as it was clearly meant for computer resolution and was thus, very very tiny. But I could click them, and I could tap on the screen in the direction I wanted to shoot my grappling hook. So it was still really fun, if challenging, on easy mode. But I wanted to give a proper review, so I waited to play it on PC. On PC, it's actually less fun for me. I can navigate the menus better and it's easier to play, but it doesn't feel as good as it did as a pseudo-mobile game. The length of how far I can shoot is unclear, and it feels really bad to click to release before I can shoot again: either I only click once and I am always constantly falling, or I am always double clicking, which is a problem at the beginning of the game. I would rather have one click, one shoot mechanics. Overall, I really had a good time, especially on mobile. I couldn't stop "one more trying!" right up until I had class time / low battery. I did not have this same "just one more try!" feeling on PC, even though I made significantly more progress by about a hundred meters or so (the background color started changing, which I never reached on mobile). Really fun game, if you play your cards right.
Oct 9 03:24:20	16m 40s	U.N.S.T.A.B.L.E.	♥ 1	Alcohol status: 52 minutes in, feelin a lil woozy in my face brain face. Game was still playable during onset of alcohol vibing. Reviewing is getting harder. Played the initial bugfix version since bug fixes are allowed and I've done a few myself. Wish there were sound effects. Sausage dog game was way more unforgiving than smash egg game. I disagree that it's unclear what players need to do, but there's no time to read the sentence that tells you what to do in some of them like sausage dog. Did not experience the random game over bug in smash egg. Wish I had more time to read the sentences, realized they're ALL acronyms of unstable, thought it was one like sentence starts with U, sentence starts with N.... etc. would be cool to appreciate the acronyms better. Really love the aesthetic, music was a little too repetitive without sound effects. Liked that the games seemed to be getting harder each time it went through? alien and boy shot faster. Ufo is ingrate, I fixed it and then it shoots me? Seems different alien though, different color. Maybe it's just the ufo that's angry, alien seems confused and looks around, very cute animation.
Oct 9 03:41:07	16m 47s	Rage Against the Alien Chicken	♥ 1	Alcohol status: 1 hr 12 minutes in, low sense of balance, reviews harder than games though because play game easy but type thoughts hard??? seems like unknown timer on when i can move right from the guy talking, makes game feel like it is stuck or not registering inputs since i can click during that time. Gave up 372 meters, the enemy types are very hard to dodge (but i am drunk right now so grain of salt to that part of review). found a speed strat of jumping to climb the platforms while they are falling. I think later i will play this sober and see if I can find the space chicken, I want to see the space chicken a lot. seems to be a glitch on this entry page, you have a screenshot of the game that is showing in its markup form, (//raw/blahblahblah). I think this game will be more fun when i have coordination again. Very good graphics and movement feel, except I keep instinctively trying to use spacebar to jump over things, as "w" just feels like Climb to me instead of jump. I will leave this page open and play again later. edit: forgot to say, game is very loud. had to turn down computer because there are no audio settings in game. i think audio settings would be good.
Oct 9 03:58:59	17m 52s	UNSTABLE - The UNstable cattle STABLE	♥ 2	alcohol status: 1hr28m in. typing is weird but games are fine. thinking this beer will not get to point games are hard maybe, only thinking? originally tried to play this game days ago at school, on my phone. struggled with it and though PC would be easier as the intended platform. was slightly easier, got to level three but failed there, assuming from game description that 3 is final level. main problem: very difficult to get adapters onto cows, wish they would snap on without letting go. also wish washer would pop them out when done the way the cows do when they go off screen, it is very difficult to get them out of the washer. popping them out on click would be fine too, washer is basically just invisible adapter to drag out, difficult to do. exploding cows is very wild! definitely unstable. like the polka music, feel perfect fit for the game. sound effects and graphics good.
Oct 10 18:18:43	38h 19m	Political misdirection	♥ 1	For a game you made in less than a day, this entry is really good. The art is nice and the gameplay is fun once you understand the concept (which I was only able to understand by completely ignoring the representations of the population and only focusing on the graph + the options that pointed in the directions I wanted the graph to get bigger). I made it to turn 121 before I got bored and quit, though, as the lack of any time of ambience or sound effects detracts from the simple gameplay; it's too simple of a puzzle game to hold up under its own weight, so it's more of silent anxiety simulator, trying to figure out what option to pick. I did have fun though! I hope your familial matter went over okay & that you have more time to work on your entry next jam!
Oct 10 19:22:31	1h 03m	Project Stallion / Zherebets Proyekta	♥ 1	Lol, level 7 is so infuriating, just turn around little dude the barn's right behind you... chrome_MSw8viAcs1.png Interesting little game, I liked the little news report clips, although I died enough that they started looping. Mutant horse noise became very grating during level 7's restart hell. Thought it was interesting that you could go to next level without beating the previous level, which came in handy when I accidentally level skipped by clicking next level instead of restart and had to refresh the page to get back to that level. Level 7 feels way too random compared to the other slightly random levels. Boss level was way too easy in comparison. I wish there were some kind of tense actiony music or tense spy music; I'm glad for the sound effects, but the overall game could really use a good ambience. Good work overall though, a lot of takes on being unstable!
Oct 10 19:44:12	21m 41s	....To the Ends of the World and Back	♥ 1	I wish that while holding spacebar I had the ability to scroll up to see messages I missed; I missed the first few at the beginning of the game (since I was trying to figure out how far I needed to move my mouse to fix the steering) so I had to restart. The mood of the conversation is a little off; Grace comes across as though her GF is dead or something, though the other party simply thinks it's cute that she's out here for her gf. It is additionally hard to tell who is speaking at the good end of the game since it's all one font color with no indication of who's who. I enjoyed the low-quality fan ambience you went to a lot of effort for; it felt natural and I didn't even think about it until just now. The warnings were a little annoying yet also cute sirens in a way? I also really liked that the stars we were hyperdriving past seemed to have real dimensions, as I could move the camera back and forth to see them from the other side. It was a really cool touch, like getting to live inside an old screensaver or something. Gameplay wise it was kind of boring having only two things to do that only happened sometimes, but I understand that the point is to make the visual novel part easier to enjoy (plus ludum dare compo scoping!), and I feel it; without the visual novel portion I don't think I would have the patience to reach the end of the world. Overall I liked it! Good little story, good little game. 💙
Oct 10 20:19:57	35m 45s	Wiggle Bird	♥ 0	I gave up on level 4. Every single level felt like a random chance of whether I would beat it or not; in fact, in level 4 you can press the button that rotates the bird upwards, and it's random whether you can make a full circle to crash into yourself or whether you'll crash into the floor first. As such, I'd say the hitboxes are unforgiving. I also found the controls themselves to be very unintuitive; so much so that after the first level I had to turn my keyboard around backwards to even have a chance at beating levels 2 and 3, which I barely managed. Also, you can input things before the level has finished transitioning when it restarts / possibly when going to a new level? Didn't try that one. But I would keep dying before I had finished dying as the circle of black filled up the screen but the bird was still accepting inputs. I'd recommend: - Reversing the input or allowing the player the option to do so (it is more intuitive for me to press right to go DOWN rather than UP, and vice versa) - Slower bird: he frequently collides with himself just as I'm pressing the button to turn the other way. - More forgiving hitboxes; maybe allow bird to overlap himself so that only the actual obstacles are obstacles? - Maybe smaller arcs or a wider area per level. - Prevent player input when restarting level/loading a new one. - Pause/quit menu; I had to alt-tab when I gave up as nothing happens on hitting ESC. The graphics, mechanic idea, and audio are all perfect; this would be an amazing mobile game I think, but it's also pretty good on PC. It's just too hard for an average joe like me, which sucks because it looks so fun but my ability to play it is so bad. :( I want to say I had fun, because everything about this screams fun to me, but constantly dying before I can even move past the starting point, for every single level, with no improvement on my ability to control the bird as each win is basically luck + strategy, was more of a disheartening experience than anything. Still, it's really cool and I can't stop wondering how you made it!
Oct 10 20:47:18	27m 21s	Cloudfall	♥ 1	This is really good! I wasn't good enough (mostly mentally) to be Top Crow, but I loved the soundtrack changing over time. Enjoyed the dev time-lapse & gameplay video to see what I was missing; I'd genuinely pay money for this progressive soundtrack haha, the second stage of it is a little murky compared to the cool beginning bit of the song but when the rest of the song starts coming in??? Hoo baby!!! That's what I call a bop! A jam! *A real slapper!!* And the bird was so cute, I loved the art a lot! I appreciate seeing the white squares as indicators of where on the cloud is landable, though it also slightly detracts from the cloud being a cloud, but I think it's perfect regardless. Amazing entry, wish I was more coordinated!
Oct 11 01:18:40	4h 31m	Commucity	♥ 3	Shame more people weren't playing when I found this. I completed an entire neighborhood alone (+ one building placed by streamer), and I have to say it was satisfying watching it grow from a blank slate to a full city; the progression of the busy city background noise was nice, and as others say it felt really responsive (though I'm sure that's ping-dependent). It would be nice to have a bot or something that points out errors like "there's already a tile there!" or "invalid argument!", as I kept getting confused as to which tile I was actually targeting (as well as doing silly things like confusing the number 7 for the letter j, then trying to place houses like "78" or some such); the more buildings and roads were on the board, the harder I found it to figure out what letter/number combo I needed because the grid was obscured. Not sure that can be helped. I also love, in the busy city life bumbling, it's mostly generic People Noise but you occasionally get the snippet of conversation you can make out ("What an original comment!") - much like actually being in a busy place! It was very pleasant. I think the helpful plane banners would be more helpful either higher or lower on the screen, as I find they also contributed to my not knowing what grid tile I was trying to get to when they blocked my view in the middle. It was lonely and slow playing alone, but I found the music satisfying, like a really tedious game of SimCity or something? I think it would be extremely fun in a mid-size viewer stream; not hundreds, perhaps, but at least maybe 50 viewers. There's a fine balance between having fun building a city as a community versus your tiles never getting built in a high-paced chat, hypothetically speaking. I think other features might be fun in that situation; maybe the ability to cause earthquakes or something? Though !Burn covers a lot of that. Aesthetically, the one thing I don't really like on the stream is the !command panel. Specifically, what's up with the gap on the bottom grid, bro? chrome_H58LfeLGYa.png I also have no idea what the blue meter is; it's either "tourists" or "dance party at the casino tonight!" but I had no trouble deducing what buildings did to the different meters. Fun game overall, wish it had more visibility so I could play it in a group as intended! Maybe a couple bots that input random commands every time a player types one could solve that problem, lol.
Oct 11 08:27:15	7h 08m	Duck Optimizer Pro 2021	♥ 2	This was... interesting. Needs more cues. For, like, everything. First resistor puzzle I was confused by, both resistors were identical and I solved it by accident. Music puzzle was really hard; I memorized the first few so that I could get away with failing the last few. Don't understand the spelling puzzle, just seems like "find the arbitrary invisible path" more than a puzzle. First puzzle was funny and cute introduction. LOVE the aesthetics and visuals. Really wish the quack text stayed on screen much longer, so I could actually ready your funny texts :( Music fantastic, including the naughty difficult music puzzle that needs to go sit in a time-out corner. My super smart musical bf says W/E were only half steps away. I would recommend each note being full steps away. It's really tricky to tell the difference between W&E, even if the musical puzzle is a bop. Pretty neat game! :)
Oct 11 08:58:19	31m 04s	Unstable Tables : Tales Of A Super Hero Waiter	♥ 2	Well, it crashed after a long while of playing, maybe it couldn't handle having ~17 minutes on the c lock? Perhaps I should have tried beating levels slower or something =P I could tell this was a Godot game while I was playing because it has the same occasional audio glitches my games suffer from, so glad I'm not alone in that. Perhaps one day we'll find a cure... I love Match3 games, though, and if it hadn't crashed I would have beat this game. Unfortunately, the music is nice but a bit repetitive and the controls feel just a bit, have-to-wait-for-the-animations-to-finish-but-there's-no-animations in the match 3 segments. The chili peppers weren't all that threatening except in chain reactions from the newly-spawned pieces at the top. Whether or not pieces had gravity felt a little inconsistent at times. Still, good work!
Oct 11 10:01:15	1h 02m	Eroding Chickens	♥ 0	I didn't experience the arrow keys moving the page problem; might be because I clicked on the game before I read the controls. I can't say this game was very interesting for me to play. You dig up the green bits, fence in the sand with at least one chicken, plant alfalfa and then maintain your island till you run out of dirt. No way to herd the chickens into the fenced area. No sound effects other than the sound of your own keyboard, planting railings/walls, and the ominous drone of the ambience. Theme wise, felt more like it was made for 'decay' than for unstable. Not sure why you opted out of being rated on mood but left humor up for grabs; I felt like it was a much moodier than funny game. The title and premise is a little funny, a chicken farmer on a constantly eroding island who has to grow alfalfa and keep the chickens from dying in the ocean. But the actual game, with the creepy ominous vibes and no chicken sounds, felt very isolated and moody, not very funny.
Oct 11 10:09:20	8m 05s	Timofei Cauldron	♥ 1	This looked like it was gonna be a really fun game! Won't lie that I'm kind of disappointed that it's unfinished, but it's still fantastic to just duck and jump around with my square little buddy and his lightning pizza boxes that he has to get to the cauldron for some reason. Would be better with sounds or music of some kind, but still enjoyable as is for a short demo of an idea.
Oct 11 21:02:37	10h 53m	Monster Shopper	♥ 0	Ragequit the bonus level... controls just feel too janky to be able to spam spacebar efficiently while ALSO holding down K to shop (maybe if I'd remembered the other control was E, I would have done better, but instead I kept either pressing L or transforming unwantedly with J). Control layout + the people being "sticky" if you accidentally bump into them during their patrols is my main complain about this game. Not sure how other beat it without spamming spacebar; it was a necessity for me. Didn't feel great on my hands, spamming space while trying to use WASD, so again the physical layout of the controls leaves a lot to be desired; maybe arrow keys for movement with space to spam and I don't know, right CTRL or right shift for picking up groceries? Or just a way for the player to change key bindings. Also wish the retry button had a keyboard shortcut; very annoying to take my hands off of the werewolf positionings to click "retry" every 5 seconds. Otherwise, a good little stealth game!
Oct 11 21:14:42	12m 05s	Instability	♥ 2	chrome_SymP0jQaqO.png Ropes felt frustrating to interact with... so I tried the tutorial, since I'd just jumped straight in. Ropes then made a little more sense, went back in the main game, still struggled. Even if you can swing them, it doesn't really help if you're stuck on one side of it because you landed too high... maybe make the player slide to the bottom of the rope to avoid getting tangled in it? Other than that, seems like a fun high score platformer. I'd have kept playing if the ropes didn't feel so sticky. Almost every run I had was ended by a rope...
Oct 12 07:51:09	10h 36m	Enter the Ungeon	♥ 1	The resolution leaves quite a bit to be desired; my two options were either play it in a tiny view where everything looks correctly but the font is hard to read and the details or so tiny, OR full screen it to my monitor and see all the nice pixels get stretched by width... Weird bug after I hit 'R' to get back up: lost all my health but instead of dying again, the next hit gave me half a heart? in the middle heart? uZoQYDVVC1.png Could use some music and/or SFX. Maybe more rooms? Seems like after the tutorial it's just a single arena? Or I just never got to see more since I died and couldn't get the golem to die. Also not sure I get the name; I get it's a play on Enter the Gungeon, but don't really get what an Ungeon would be by comparison. Good work on the theme otherwise! I hope you had a good jam too 😄 Although, @domantas is correct: your player and enemy sprites come from [this person's free asset packs.](https://www.gamedevmarket.net/member/elthens-pixel-art-shop/) I don't mind it too much, but since you are not supposed to use pre-existing assets without heavily editing them (per compo rules), I won't be rating the graphics. They're 5-star quality, but you didn't make them, nor does it seem you changed them in any way to make them a "derivative work".
Oct 12 08:09:12	18m 03s	The Land Of The Hungry God	♥ 1	The lack of feedback on how far out I was allowed to build was very confusing, as well as figuring out which tile I needed to click on to select/deselect things, also figure out that the weird grid line icon was roads (not sure what that does, I assume extends buildable areas). The lack of visual/audio feedback discouraged me pretty quick, so I didn't get very far, but it seems really fun in concept - sort of a tower-defense city builder of sorts, which sounds like it would be great with enough time for polish and tutorials. I read the entire description, but just didn't understand what I was doing enough to get as far as the monster attacks. That's probably on me though, I'm just a little bit of an idiot sometimes, and it seems other people managed to get that far. I think this is a complicated game to make and good work on your first jam / sharing online project! I'm gonna drop you a follow on here and itchio so that if you ever polish this up, I can give it another shot! :)
Oct 13 02:24:59	18h 15m	doctor concoctor	♥ 1	This is a really damn good game. I especially love the attention to detail on having a separate sprite for each rotation of the gun; because to me, that says you're actually doing the aiming calculations under the hood! Aiming calculations always mess me up, so I was glad to find out my engine of choice had a "look at feature" and pretty decent pixel rotations. Doesn't beat the vibe of manual sprites though, very authentic and in-world. My main problems are that I have no idea what any of the items I picked up did, it was sometimes a little hard to see the platypus influence in the beautiful platypus bots, and it doesn't really seem like unstability made much of a difference? Like, every room had a new effect anyway, so I just kept picking up the items. Still, it was a fun little bullet hell! I only made it to level three (four? it's all a blur but I think the floor was purple) before I finally got out-bulleted. Don't really think I'm the right type of skillsetted player to try again since I don't really feel like any of my choices are informed decision. Like, I picked up Scrap Metal and bullets started coming out of my ass, which was great when "aim backwards" showed up, but WHY did Scrap Metal do that? The item descriptions are all so cute and quirky and I love them, but absolutely do nothing to communicate to me what they might possibly do. Music and audio is fantastic - I love that it just sounds like I'm shooting a Nerf gun of some kind. Level purple's soundtrack is a little obvious when it restarts calm version versus battle version - felt a little stilted every time I entered a new room then defeated the enemies. I also love the contrast of the enemy bullets versus the player bullets, as bullet hell games often confuse me in that I can't tell my own bullets apart from my enemies; but I also worry the pattern of the bullet animation may not be accessible to people sensitive to flashing lights, especially in rooms where "Darkness" is taking place. (Speaking of which, I love that darkness occasionally faded in the layout so you could tell where you were going but still had to put up with everything in mostly the dark, rather than just blind tripping and fumbling. Fantastic QOL design there!) Overall, absolutely amazing work. Really good job on the whole thing! Just absolutely stellar 😄
Oct 14 01:39:12	23h 14m	Nukaloid	♥ 2	Absolutely superb. I think the player needs to be a little more differentiated than the environment - I was initially unable to tell what was happening when I started the game, there was a lot of text on screen and it was quite disorienting. The camera angles made it difficult to tell the robot you're playing as had a face; so at the beginning I just thought it was a pillar until I noticed the idle animation. Other than that, this is absolutely fantastic in every way.
Oct 16 20:19:25	66h 40m	Pepper Dealer	♥ 1	I kinda wish there were sounds, some kinda spicy Tetris bop... but my main problem with the game is lack of lose states; such as having 0 money to buy 0 new peppers with, so I had to restart. I also wish there was some kind of set orders per day so that my peppers would carry over; it's difficult to save up for upgrades when I have to keep buying peppers. Progression isn't fast enough (because of the money draining) for me to get past the first scale upgrade, assuming there's more. Having more stable platforms but less space really drains the amount I can successfully do per order, and at the end I wasted 2kg of peppers because they all piled up at the top which spawned the rest of them rapidly. However, I do love that the first scale upgrade traded platform stability for pepper stability; suddenly, the fact they were tetrominos actually made a difference. Which is part of why the profit slowed down since I couldn't just pile them all up on one side real fast... I love the concept, though. Overall, good work!
Oct 17 05:15:20	8h 55m	Flat Earth (Not Another Rude Bear Game)	♥ 4	I admit, I spoiled myself on the aliens part of the song because the link was very tempting (in that I somehow thought "unnecessary guitar playthrough" meant a playthrough using a guitar to control the game, because I like weird videos like that so that's where my mind went). What I wasn't expecting was the soft and gentle crooning for the first song. Not enough video game soundtracks utilize lyrics in a looping song, I feel like; I think I've experienced it maybe one other time, and enjoyed the- OH YES I was going to say I forgot what game it was but I remember now! I was absolute FLOORED by the first boss of Scooby-Doo: 100 Nights of Frights; the music was chill and then the lyrics came in and I was like ???? in the best possible way and THAT is exactly how Edge of Space and Edge of Town made me feel: ???? in the best possible way. Specifically, it reminds me of the aforementioned Scooby-Doo video game music, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IZUe-0-b0A in that both have an amazing vibe and then lyrics show up around 20 seconds in, and manage to make looping lyrics still feel amazing; but in terms of tone, it also reminds me of the singer/songwriter they put into Dreamfall Chapters, with specifically this song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CW1EM0jQTo Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I had no idea what I was doing while I played (I understood the mechanics, but I was absolutely terrible at playing; something something controlling everyone was difficult? like I just selected everyone at once and sent them in the same direction and hoped they'd collide with whatever their job was, which only really worked for woodcutters) and there's no end state when everybody falls off the world so you can't balance it or build anything anymore and yet I spent about 5 minutes watching aliens shrink each other and the dinosaurs because I couldn't stop listening to the soundtrack of this game. Also, your tutorial text always stays slightly visible on screen. That, or I need to check my monitor... But yeah this was super super rad. More games should really use these soft and gentle lyrical soundtracks. You might have converted me from trying to learn how to make good chiptune music for my games to trying to learn how to write lyrics..... like, between this, the Scooby game, and the Dreamfall song, there's clearly a very specific musical aesthetic here that I am LIVING FOR. Also, I had to google Rude Bear to understand the title/description of this game, so now I know about EGX Rezzed's game jam thing that will hopefully resume when the pandemic's over, so now I have a new life goal to go participate in that & see some youtubers I like who often do live DND at EGX. So, double thanks for this amazing soundtrack & the new life goal! Anyway, I'll just be sitting here listening to the bandcamp page for a while..... Side note, I thought videos weren't supposed to embed if they're in another paragraph, especially wrapped in the git markup code for linking stuff, but unless the preview is lying to me, then enjoy not having to go to another tab I guess, lol.
Oct 17 10:35:38	5h 20m	Wobbly Penguins	♥ 7	🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶 Good work!
Oct 17 10:41:50	6m 12s	Status (LD 49)	♥ 2	Man there's not even enough time to read the instructions of "do the thing" before it explodes, haha. Very confusing, good pick on audio (but probably should have opted out of audio voting maybe?). Pretty okay!
Oct 18 04:39:24	17h 57m	Pop Shove-It	♥ 3	After experiencing your stream and looking at your old entries thumbnails, this is exactly the energy I expect you guys to bring. Unfortunately I'm terrible at it - controls wise, I would love to tilt and pull the screen down at the same time, something I would do on an actual console. With just a mouse? I spent 4 minutes trying to get "T" and then wasn't skilled enough to finish(?) the game later on when I got trapped with the "L" and a matchbook. So, hope there's no surprise genre changes or anything, because I'm as bad at this game as I am at the Rocket Power video game! But I also recognize that perhaps that difficulty of not being able to do both actions is intended. Just not something I can enjoy the fun tricks of because I am the world's most uncoordinated. That or my large monitor is making it harder to move the mouse between places fast enough, but it seemed like a pretty fixed size on itchio (ignoring the full-screen button which I did not click), so it's probably just that I'm bad. Still though, the audio and that intro, all the aesthetics, all the personalized little "KBCB" graffiti in multiple styles? Absolutely fantastic. "NICE LEGS" table store? Incredible! I love this, I wish I was better at it.
Oct 18 07:14:51	2h 35m	Lovecrafting	♥ 3	I originally tried to play this on my phone about 12 days ago after one of you commented on my game, and I gotta say that despite itch.io and Unity WebGL's complaints, it is technically playable on phone! But the resolution is very tiny and hard to read and click on, so I wasn't able to tell what I was doing. Waited to have time to play it on my PC properly, and well, university + other life things happened... But now here I am, and it's a good game! I made a few abominations but couldn't figure out the recipes for any of the actual gods. It would be nice if there were clues about what combinations might make gods (as I assume it's based on the things like humanoid/dreamcatcher/feral, etc). Visually, "immunity" is a little too large - the "y" is behind the meter. It is also a generally small resolution UI - I played in browser and had to full screen it to see hte buttons, which is at least a step up from not being able to read anything on my phone's screen. The cards are nice as they are very large and easy to click on even on small devices, but the fonts and buttons could use some legibility work. (This is counter to my advice regarding "immunity" being too big - which is to say, perhaps it's more that the fonts need to be larger, but have more breathing room away from the meters). I enjoyed this a lot, even though I gave up on making any gods - but that's partially due to outside forces demotivating me from playing longer (read: I've got some kind of back sprain or other injury going on so this game is very intellectually stimulating in a very fun slay the spire type way but not in the right way to distract me from my pain). ### TL;DR: Fantastic game; UI resolution isn't quite accessible & hints on god recipes would be lovely.
Oct 20 01:45:19	42h 30m	Alchemeow	♥ 0	Fascinating little game. Kind of reminds me of an old game on the Looney-Tunes website, where you had to figure out the correct potion ingredients for your customers' demands. I wonder if anyone put that game into the megacollection of Flash games before Flash died... For me, the passport pictures were oddly tiny on full screen, but guessing from others' screenshots it wasn't supposed to be. Other than that, the only real quality of life I can suggest is making it a bit clearer why certain ingredients cause the results they do - unless you can try them one at a time? I've been assuming I have to fill the pot every day. But as to why a lightsaber, fossil & some batteries made a fedora with a feather in it and a weird Pikachu tail? No clue. Also, would be nice to have a sort of, skip to end button - sometimes you can figure out the correct potion on day 2 and then you have to force your way through the next couple days before the pawsport cat checks your passport. Great work!
Oct 21 06:56:31	29h 11m	Rumble	♥ 0	Stellar work, I rage quit on round 6. I like the tutorial, although I was worried the game wouldn't have music - a tutorial tune might be nice, just so we don't go in thinking it's an SFX only game. The actual music is pretty nice. I love the art style - but I think the difficulty curve per levels after 4 is a bit too high. Round 5 was essentially a combination of RNG + skill, while round 6 just had too many floors to deal with even if you only prioritize some of them - the earthquakes just come too fast and the people move too slow. It might be nice to have powerups in a game like this - something to delay quakes, or fix all the columns, or make the people speed up temporarily. As is, I'm just not skilled enough to finish level 6, I tried for a while; the building is just too tall with only the same management techniques and time between quakes and movement speed for these people who clearly want to die. Also, a bit disappointed the adorable birds are only on the menu screen. Birds flying away from collapsing buildings would have been really cute (and I kind of played for the bird graphics anyway).
Oct 21 07:13:39	17m 08s	little rats' big top	♥ 1	This was way too damn hard to beat... stupid little tightrope mouse kept falling off when he was ALREADY ON THE SAFETY BEAM... I don't get the point of the arrow pointing to the ruler in the middle either, because it's not hard to collect that much cheese and doesn't seem to help give me a win condition... is it a lose condition maybe? I wouldn't know, because the tightrope guy can't keep his balance at the end of the rope! Where I can't reach the other side of the Qtip to help him!!! so after a few runs I rage quit and just watched the video the one guy posted in the itch.io comments so I could see the ending, lol. I've got a bit too much of a short temper this week to be playing games this difficult. I love the art and music and the secret on the pause menu, but I hate how long it takes to get back to replaying since your "play again" button is just an arbitrary screen you click on... to go to the credits, which you click on... to go back to the main menu, which you click on... to go to the instructions, which you click on... to get back to playing the game, after what appeared to be a 10 second countdown? In other words: it takes way too many clicks and waiting to get back to the actual gameplay, which adds to the frustration levels. Good work, but man is it a rage game for me! I really love the bizarre music to emphasize this weird mouse circus scenario.
Oct 21 19:56:56	12h 43m	noCharge	♥ 0	I wish this was longer. I had a lot of fun! The settings button journey was fun and so was the game itself. I almost gave it a 4.5 in fun for being too short, then realized that didn't make any sense. As far as the single settings option the button shared - muting the music altogether - I would have preferred a simple slider on the main menu for the sounds in game, no fancy menu needed :)