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Feedback comments for LD49
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | PolymathLD's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 4 22:01:20 | The Show Must Go Down | ♥ 1 | Really funny, creative premise, and I liked the art and the general idea behind the game. It was a little unintuitive figuring out how to disrupt the play--I wasn't sure what to do with the objects on the table, although punching the curtain and dropping the piano were pretty obvious. I also feel like I would've picked up on things quicker if it didn't take me awhile to figure out that the narrative stability bar was going from bottom to top instead of vice versa. I'm probably just tired and braindead at this point, but I do feel like it might be more intuitive if you reversed the direction of the progress bar. In any case, wonderful work! Love the humor, the cool splitscreen layout, and the art is fun and appropriate to the concept. Also think you nailed the theme in a way I never would've considered. | |
| Oct 4 22:09:59 | 8m 39s | Unstable Piles | ♥ 1 | I liked it a lot! Simple, fun, and intuitive idea for a physics puzzler that slots neatly in with the theme, and the pixel art is cute. |
| Oct 4 22:50:09 | 40m 10s | DRILL | ♥ 2 | Holy crap this is ambitious. A basebuilding/tower defense/twin stick shooter/survival and resource gathering game with character animations and pathfinding in a gamejam? I'm gobsmacked that it works at all, let alone that I was able to play it for half an hour and had fun. In terms of the core gameplay loop the only significant critique I would give is that I always felt severely short on the fire resource. Maybe there's something I didn't understand or notice, but it feels like you can only get it automatically when the drill activates? It would be nice if there was some way to convert wood to fire and/or you could collect it from the aliens or something. In any case, nice work! Would love to see where this idea could go with more polish. |
| Oct 4 23:07:01 | 16m 52s | O'Ryan | ♥ 4 | There's an impressive amount of game here already in terms of level design and content. I love the art, sound, and the overall mood of the game, and the platforming felt pretty good (especially the basic jumping and running). The shooting felt underbaked to me--I really found myself wishing that I could shoot while jumping or falling, and that the attack direction would default to go forward instead of up. I think this is a great starting point for a fun Metroidvania and it's really cool how much you guys already have in place. Good stuff! |
| Oct 4 23:38:14 | 31m 13s | Trauma | ♥ 0 | Fantastic premise. Love the art, sound, story, gameplay concept, all of it. I was half-watching your stream while working on my own game so I have to admit I was so distracted I didn't fully understand what you were going for until I finally played the game. But that just made it better when I got to be surprised by the gameplay. Super interesting to combine a movement command game like the board game Mechs Vs Minions with a story-driven puzzler/Metroidvania--I never would have thought of that. I have to dig really deep to find any criticisms at all, but I did have one game-breaking bug that forced me to start over near the beginning of Session 2. The only other thing I would say for a full/final version, if you do one, is I would consider putting some thought into making the card-switching a little less cumbersome. It was fine with only a few near the beginning of the game, but when you started to get a big stack of cards, I was wishing I could use the mouse or that there was some faster way to re-arrange them. (I suppose it will work much better on touchscreen devices if you can drag them around, though.) In any case, amazing work and thanks for slamming yourself with so little sleep to give us all this awesome experience! |
| Oct 5 00:34:04 | 55m 50s | Buggy the Bunny | ♥ 2 | This is incredibly unsettling and I love it. The way it uses disconcerting imagery and sounds to punish the player for "cheating" is brilliant. It's also really clever in that the platforming mechanics not being all together *there* just enhances the theme and overall experience. Great work. |
| Oct 5 00:41:47 | 7m 43s | Space Crazy | ♥ 1 | I think the problem with the sensitivity is partly that the window is not always capturing the mouse. It took a minute for it to kick in for me but once the mouse stayed in the game window it worked fine (though higher sensitivity from the settings menu was welcome). Anyway...! Love the concept here, simple and well-executed and the AI dialogue was hilarious. It was very short and light on challenge, but good idea, I had fun with it, and laughed out loud, so high marks. |
| Oct 5 02:17:13 | 1h 35m | Temple Sprint | ♥ 3 | Fun to combine Indiana Jones with something like Mirror's Edge. The grapple mechanic has potential but I could never get it to work consistently as expected. Love the Hollywood set pieces--floor crumbling, not one giant ball but a *bunch* of them, the platform dominoes ala Moria. Cool stuff, lots of potential here. |
| Oct 5 02:24:46 | 7m 33s | Ethereal Runner | ♥ 3 | Agree about the Lovecraftian vibe! Nice horror themes for the Halloween season. I like the thought put into the magic mechanics with the tradeoffs and risk vs reward. And it's pretty satisfying blowing stuff up. Cool submission! |
| Oct 5 02:30:10 | 5m 24s | Landslide | ♥ 1 | Nice spin on the platformer/endless runner genre! Haven't seen anything exactly like this before. Everything works well, the pixel art is cute, it feels good to play, and it sounds good. Only real feedback I can give is that the falling rocks move pretty fast so it's hard to react in time to do anything about them, which makes it feel pretty luck-based when you die to one; but maybe I'm just getting old and my reaction time sucks now. Anyway, fantastic job! |
| Oct 5 03:24:51 | 54m 41s | Outer Space Transport Service | ♥ 1 | Beat it in 7:59. Was really fun hunting down all the salvage and dropping off the yellow boxes. Everything worked perfectly and I enjoyed the physics. Love that CRT screen effect you put in there and the cool little 80s-tech hums in the soundtrack. Perfect chill little game. From someone who also just made a top-down game about a salvage pilot in space, it's really cool how two concepts that sound similar on the surface (even with a fairly similar movement scheme) can have two such wildly different outcomes in both aesthetics and gameplay. Nice work on your game! |
| Oct 5 03:42:26 | 17m 35s | Dank Brew of the High Mage | ♥ 3 | This is one of my favorites yet. So damn funny--laughed my butt off--simple yet challenging, and fantastic art (especially the death animations). Kudos. |
| Oct 5 07:07:36 | 3h 25m | Cairn | ♥ 3 | Absolutely gorgeous, relaxing game. I half-expected going into it that the physics wouldn't work or that it would be too hard to control, but those weren't nearly as big of issues I expected, and I was able to make some nice cairns within just a minute or two of playing around. The music and visuals are just wonderful. I will note that the scoring seems finicky and a lot of times I struggled to get it to give me a score at all (maybe I was doing something wrong regarding the center stone, I don't know). In terms of features I'd love to see added in an expanded version, I would like to be able to control the camera more and gain a higher viewpoint. Although I understand that with the way the controls work this could break the game so I can see why you went the way you did. Anyway, really cool stuff! Nicely done. |
| Oct 5 07:32:42 | 25m 06s | Lovecrafting | ♥ 4 | As everyone else said, the art is fantastic. When trying to start over I did encounter some crashes, but easily resolved by refreshing the page. No crashes or game-killing bugs in actual gameplay. I feel like this is the sort of game that could be played with a deck of cards on the tabletop, but the addition of the increasingly-problematic timers really adds a lot of (good) stress to the challenge. |
| Oct 5 07:44:56 | 12m 14s | Frosty Wobble | ♥ 2 | Unbearably cute! I have a six year old daughter and she'd love this. Might show it to her tomorrow (it's the middle of the night here). The art is absolutely fantastic, especially given the time constraints, and it's pretty neat how you managed to work in all the staple platformer abilities in usable form, plus wobbly platforms, in such a short time. I do feel like the camera could use some work if you continue to polish the game, it was a bit jerky and sometimes got frustrating in the sense of not being able to see where I wanted to go. I also couldn't seem to find a quit button and had to CTRL+ALT+DEL out which is a bit of no-no from a usability perspective. But clearly since I found all the collectables none of that was game-breaking. Fun little kid-friendly game that I could easily see getting polished up and sold over the upcoming Christmas season. |
| Oct 5 08:02:55 | 17m 59s | Orthoptera | ♥ 1 | I love this. With the unique movement style, I think you really managed to capture the feeling of grasshopper-ness if you know what I mean. The audio was really great too--loved the piano tracks and the rolling thunder and the different notes that play as you hop. The art was charming too--there's similar geology around where I live and that orange-and-blue palette from the red canyons is striking. Liked the little character portraits as well. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to glide (that's what I get for not reading the instructions properly, I guess) but once I did it was a lot of fun hopping and flying around the canyon. Also enjoyed the little snippets of dialogue and story. Just a nice feel from the whole game. Good work! |
| Oct 5 09:22:53 | 1h 19m | HONK III | ♥ 1 | Kept saying out loud "how did they do this?" while I was playing. A whole damn FPS with multiple enemy types, multiple large levels, a bunch of weapons, and a dedicated honk button over a weekend? As others have mentioned, I don't really see the theme, and obviously the gameplay relies on tried-and-true old school FPS design tropes, but I still had a lot of fun and I'm still incredibly impressed. Honk. |
| Oct 5 09:53:56 | 31m 03s | Insomnia | ♥ 1 | This is incredibly artistic and easy to relate to. I love it. The tying of figurative gameplay elements in with conceptual, emotional concepts is a really powerful thing you rarely see outside of indie developers and you did it really well here. The soundscape in particular is incredible, but the imagery is great too. Thanks for the poignant experience! |
| Oct 5 10:07:07 | 13m 11s | Disruption | ♥ 1 | So atmospheric. The music is great, and I love how it switches when you get close to the monster. The pixel art is perfect; the player character's walk animation is the essence of depression and it totally got me. Excellent job. |
| Oct 5 10:19:19 | 12m 12s | Riot Village | ♥ 2 | Nice little core gameplay loop you've got there. It's fun to see how many villagers you can get to pop out before everything falls apart, and it definitely has a thematic feel to it with things getting more and more hectic and unstable as the game goes on. Would love to see this expanded with additional mechanics in the future! |
| Oct 5 10:51:40 | 32m 21s | GUNSTABLE MAYHEM | ♥ 2 | Can't believe you don't have more ratings/feedback yet. Interesting core ejections mechanic, and so many other mechanics as well. Awesome gamefeel. Solid art/visual effects. Excellent work! The only real issue I had was I had a difficult time reading the text in the top left, so it was hard for me to know when to eject the core sometimes. Not sure if this had something to do with the scaling or the shaders you used or some interaction or if it's just intended behavior. Anyway, other than that, I had a blast. |
| Oct 5 16:00:24 | 5h 08m | Twin Tails Jetpack | ♥ 1 | Okay, this is actually hilarious. The visual idea for the character goes a long way here. Gameplay-wise, this is a genre I've seen done before, but the execution is good here and the levels are fun, with some creative camera movements to spice things up. Well done! |
| Oct 6 00:47:00 | 8h 46m | Volatile Defender | ♥ 2 | Really fun! This would make a great mobile game. |
| Oct 6 00:53:33 | 6m 33s | Capt'n Slippy | ♥ 3 | Awesome take on the theme, love the art and premise. I think it would feel a little more clear if the player could always see what they need to put in the cannon somewhere on the screen. It was still pretty intuitive though and I picked it up quickly! Love the aim and fire screen. |
| Oct 6 01:11:55 | 18m 22s | Reef Gobbler | ♥ 2 | This is so fun and chill. The art is great and the sounds are so relaxing. I especially liked the feeling of growing the plants with the flashlight. In a future version it might be nice to have a little more positive feedback for the player, like growing sounds while the plants sprout, having the creatures react when they get fed, or pause for a second then visibly scuttle over and start an eating animation, something like that. For LD though this is perfect! Nice work. |
| Oct 6 01:27:43 | 15m 48s | Danger Flask | ♥ 1 | The overall presentation here is spot-on. Great animations, art, music, sound. It felt great to run and jump around. Gameplay-wise I think this is really thematic. It did get a little frustrating how randomly the flask would pop out, like sometimes I would grab it and drop it the same instant. A nice addition if you keep going might be some kind of "drop risk" meter that increases as you run/jump/etc--just a thought. It took me awhile to find the third flask on the second level, a little strange having to jump over the level exit door to get to it. I'm sure that was intentional on your part but a lot of players might not make that intuitive leap, haha. Anyway, this is a really cool and thematic game and it's very polished and well-done. Kudos! |
| Oct 6 01:38:46 | 11m 03s | The Escape | ♥ 1 | Nice visuals, really creative approach to the graphics. Feels good to steer the car and it's a lot of fun trying to avoid all the holes opening up. I do wish I had a little more time to react to some of the holes but that's a minor complaint. Good work. |
| Oct 6 01:44:43 | 5m 57s | Dreampoint Collapse | ♥ 1 | Difficult and fun! Really coherent visual style and simple, fun concept to basically edit the levels as you play. One minor thing I wished for while playing was for spacebar to also activate jump, since I have a lot of muscle memory for that from other games it feels more intuitive. Anyway, cool game! |
| Oct 6 01:53:03 | 8m 20s | WONKERZ | ♥ 2 | Ha, this is awesome. So much inherent humor in things toppling over, I love it. The visuals are cool and psychedelic and it's fun to control the car. The camera did get a little frustrating, especially in the pillars of eternity section when it became hard to see the vehicle, but I'll admit that just added to the "unstable" feeling. Which is the other good thing, this is obviously really thematic. Anyway, love physics games like this! Cool stuff. |
| Oct 6 04:52:06 | 2h 59m | Mountaineer | ♥ 1 | I found it quite difficult and frustrating but also really addictive! The random hazards made me mad, but in a way that made me want to keep playing. Probably tried it a few dozen times before I had to give up. I think the controls are a bit difficult to pick up as others have said. I think they would work better on mobile than on a computer--having to quickly mouse over to the buttons then mouse back to the playing field was really tricky. Perhaps assigning them to keyboard buttons as well (like 1,2,3 for example) would help. Anyway, I thought the game was really thematic and creative and I had fun trying (and failing!) to beat it. Nice work! |
| Oct 6 05:35:43 | 43m 37s | Hammer Keep | ♥ 1 | Really creative combat system and it works extremely well. Visual style is coherent and appealing. Sound effects and music sound good and appropriate. I'd love to see this expanded on more but as a core gameplay loop it's pretty cool! |
| Oct 6 06:44:04 | 1h 08m | loop | ♥ 1 | This is such a simple and fun concept. It's so obvious and great that I feel like I should have seen it before somewhere, but I don't think I actually have. The one thing that I really wanted was more of a sense of challenge and urgency. I assumed the lava would be rising beneath me as I built and climbed upward, so I was racing to get as high as I could as fast as I could, but then I fell down and realized I was in no danger the whole time. But this way is more of a chill experience and maybe that's what you were going for. I personally would like to have more of a risk of death and more of a drive to climb quickly, though! In any case, this is such a neat idea and the actual mechanics and aesthetics are really well-done. Cool stuff!! |
| Oct 6 06:53:28 | 9m 24s | Escape from planet Shaduk | ♥ 2 | The game looks so cool. Love the squash and stretch in the animations. The puzzle was really mindbending, I might have liked to see the game begin with some very easy puzzles and ease you into the concept better. Really neat ideas and execution though! |
| Oct 6 06:57:33 | 4m 05s | Go Hard! | ♥ 1 | This feels so great to play. Love all the positive feedback, particles, the light show. The insane cackling in the background and the insanity meter. Just awesome. |
| Oct 6 08:22:23 | 1h 24m | Karawan | ♥ 2 | Absolutely gorgeous game. Gives me a ton of nostalgia for Oregon Trail. The premise is interesting and thematic. Gameplay-wise, I agree with other feedback that it was a little frustrating that it felt like you had to take fairly specific actions without a lot of guidance on what they should be, like it wasn't sure if it wanted to be more of a puzzler or more of a strategy game. I still had fun with it though and I think there's a ton of potential here. |
| Oct 8 11:50:23 | 51h 28m | Unstable Isotopes | ♥ 1 | Despite "think-ahead puzzler" not being my favorite genre, this is a really cool direction to take the category. Love the idea of basing a puzzle game on chain reactions and energy. I like that there's not just one solution and that you can really think about optimizing your score. It looks like a really elegant piece of code, too, which is worth serious bonus points in my book. Given the unique platform and the barebones nature of the game, I don't have any major criticisms that feel like you don't already know about them. The only one that feels relevant to address from the design perspective is that I did have some trouble intuiting the rules at first. It took me awhile of playing around with the game to feel like I was beginning to grasp what would happen when I made my move. In terms of post-LD, if you were to continue developing this concept into a full game, I'd love to see level design get brought into play. Such as some smaller tutorial levels to start out with and explain each rule and some later levels that are much bigger and offer unique challenges to even complete them at all. Feels like you could pretty easily crank out a ton of levels for this and very gradually ramp up the challenge. I'm also kinda dying to hear what it would sound like with some awesome sound effects (preferably sounds that harmonizes together and come together like a cascade of beautiful notes, because that would be so cool). And of course more visual polish would be welcome. But I'm sure you already know all that! Nice work! |
| Oct 9 06:40:10 | 18h 49m | Rock On | ♥ 1 | Things I liked: The minimialism of the gameplay and visuals, very clean and easy-to-grasp game. Blowing enemies off the edge was cool. The sound effects and music you chose worked well. The game was very thematic. Upgrades are always great, and the opportunity to play better and optimize your power curve. Things that could be improved on: The difficulty curve feels a little off, goes from zero challenge to almost no challenge to extreme challenge very fast. Probably just some more intervening levels that gradually ramp up would be welcome. I would like to see more visual polish--textures, particle effects, animations, etc. Overall great work on fulfilling the theme with such a simple, creative, focused game! |