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Feedback comments for LD49
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | squimmy's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 4 06:59:45 | Tama Town | ♥ 2 | The idea is neat and the execution is quite good. Unfortunately, after the first few levels, I found the game-play more frustrating than fun. I'm not certain why I found it frustrating but I suspect the rotating field of view makes it makes it feel like the ball moves in unpredictable ways because relative gravity is always shifting... I don't get motion sickness from playing games, but after this I have started to empathize with people who do! The issues with the spinning camera aside, the music fits the feel of the game very well, the sound effects work well without being distracting, and the visuals are simple and easy to understand. Good job! | |
| Oct 4 07:20:50 | 21m 05s | Unstababel | ♥ 2 | I like the sound effects. They really suit the simple, playful style of the game. I don't know if my screen just isn't wide enough, but when I had bought all of the blocks, the building area became so crowded that I'd sometimes lose pieces off the side of the screen! Whatever the case, I quite liked this game! |
| Oct 4 07:30:15 | 9m 25s | StarBase Balance | ♥ 0 | This is a fun idea. I agree with zwodahs and cogcomp that some sort of explanation of how to control the rockets would have helped. Most people will work it out after a couple of failed attempts, but it's not a good first impression. Related to what zwodahs said about leaving a single rocket alive, I'm not sure if it's a bug or just an oversight but it seems like a single rocket can maintain its altitude indefinitely, so the score becomes simply a matter of how long I leave the game running! I also think it might have been a good idea to disable the scrolling the view when the cursor is over the control panel. It's a little bit distracting when everything moves around as you change the rocket power. The music and art are nice, by the way. Simple and easy to understand. π |
| Oct 4 07:47:36 | 17m 21s | Unstable Economy | ♥ 1 | This is an interesting simulation, but there's so much going on behind the scenes that it's a little bit intimidating. I think this would be a lot more approachable if you had been able to add more UI conveniences. Trying to keep track of everyone's names and homes and where they work is a little bit overwhelming, especially when they also have so many gauges and statistics. For example, a warning when a gauge is getting too low would make it a lot easier to know when you're about to lose, or at least _why_ you lost. Reducing the complexity, or at least adding more information about how all the different values influence the economy, could also help, too, I think. I do like the visuals of the game. The simple shapes and colors work well for this kind of simulation-based game. |
| Oct 4 09:01:53 | 1h 14m | Harry | ♥ 0 | Beautiful game. I like the writing and the presentation is fantastic. The visuals and music tie together really well to support the story. I agree with retrisma and rjhelms, though, that the text displays a bit too slowly. It also would have been nice to have seen more interactivity somehow... but I imagine that would be a lot of work to implement for a story like this. I wanted to take a look at the source code, but the linked github repository is empty! π§ |
| Oct 4 09:34:59 | 33m 06s | exclamation_mark | ♥ 0 | I love this kind of elegant simplicity! There are little things that could be done to improve it (for instance, it would be nice to control with the arrow keys rather than A and D), but if you start adding too many things, you quickly lose the simplicity that makes this interesting. |
| Oct 4 13:01:24 | 3h 26m | A puzzle with a cube and lazers | ♥ 0 | Nice clean graphics (for me, at least) and simple, easy-to-understand animations (though I don't quite understand what's going on with the end-of-level animation) The idea of the lights going out when you turn off the lasers is interesting, but in the levels I played, it ultimately turned out to be inconsequential. That being said, I didn't finish all the levels due to, as barrier said, the controls feeling unresponsive. I think some sort of input buffer would go a long way to help in this regard. |
| Oct 4 13:15:19 | 13m 55s | 5 Minutes | ♥ 2 | I like these kind of "control panel" games! Unfortunately, I couldn't work out how to survive for five minutes :( One suggestion I have, if you revisit this game after the compo, or make a similar game in future, would be to add plenty of feedback when activating buttons and flipping switches. A satisfying "click" sound, a light turning on, a fan humming to life, these kind of things make even the process of interacting with the controls fun, and also make the game easier to understand. For instance, part-way through my first play-through of this game, I because confused as to which toggle switches were set to "on" and which were "off", since the two modes look so similar. |
| Oct 4 13:40:34 | 25m 15s | Insecurobot | ♥ 1 | This is a neat idea and there's plenty of polish (lighting effects, screen-shake, etc.) too. I like the way you have to balance the benefits of keeping the temperature high against the risks of overheating. A lot of these types of top-down arena shooters devolve into just running in circles around the enemies chasing you, but the falling obstacles and the risk/reward element of the temperature mechanic help keep it interesting. It seems that if you keep moving, you can generally avoid taking damage, so once I'd gotten the hang of that, the game started to feel a bit too easy. |
| Oct 4 13:46:29 | 5m 55s | Experiment #56 | ♥ 2 | Funny, cute and interesting. It took me a little while to get my head around how the controls work, but once I did, they felt intuitive and responsive. |
| Oct 5 02:47:43 | 13h 01m | Helico Pter | ♥ 1 | I love this! Very unforgiving but compelling enough that I played it all the way through. I suppose "Lunar Lander, but with more level design" is accurate, but it sells the game short, I think. The level design is fantastic and adds so much to the game. The controls are responsive, the art work is lovely, and the sound works well. I'm not sure if it would work better with music, or if the silence helps keep the sense of tension you get when attempting a dangerous turn or a tricky landing. The speed-tun timer is also a clever addition. I wasn't trying to speed-run the game, but I feel like it was still subtly goading me onward nonetheless. Even the source code is very concise and easy to understand for something made under these time constraints. But do I feel compelled to point out that most nodes in Godot (everything under `Node2D`, at least) [already have a `show` method](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_canvasitem.html?highlight=show#class-canvasitem-method-show). |
| Oct 5 03:37:44 | 50m 01s | Gunstable Tanks | ♥ 1 | Good game! The graphics are clear and easy to understand and the controls are simple and responsive. The dash mechanic is a neat way to make it possible to dodge enemy attacks without making the game feel too fast-paced, but when playing the game I mostly used it to dash towards the goal line as quickly as possible. I did have trouble activating the dash sometimes, but I suspect I just wasn't performing the input correctly. The idea of the breaking gun is neat, but in practice it feels no different to an ammunition gauge with a special animation and model when you run out of ammo. I realize that being hit by enemies will also damage the gun, but since the player is generally trying to avoid being hit anyway, it ultimately felt like it didn't have much impact on how I played the game. Applying the system to enemies as well as the player did sometimes encourage me to target enemies quickly before they use up their guns, but just as often it led to me ignoring an enemy, knowing that he would soon run out of ammo and become harmless. One place the system did come into play nicely was with the boss, and how it followed the classic shmup boss trope of how you destroy all of its weapons. It was immediately clear how to approach the boss, even without prior knowledge of this kind of boss design. |
| Oct 5 04:11:01 | 33m 17s | UnicycleBot | ♥ 1 | I like the idea and the little cycling animation is pretty cool. The parallax background also helps emphasize the sense of motion, too. I think basing the score on distance traveled (with a bonus for coins collected) would have made the game a lot more fun. The level layout seems to be extremely random and, combined with the difficulty in controlling the character, it makes the scoring feel unfair and based more on what level gets generated than on how well you play. (for example, on time I was presented with a row of coins to collect, but on another attempt I there was nothing but ramps and spikes without a single coin in sight.) |
| Oct 5 10:15:47 | 6h 04m | Unstable Genius | ♥ 1 | One of the best things about ludum dare is when you see games that are a little bit experimental or try something new and different. This isn't the first game to have live-action cut-scenes, or to be set within a fictional O.S., but together with the off-kilter sense of humor, it's enough to make it feel quirky and interesting. The game is just the right size, too. it's large enough to be satisfying, but small enough that it never gets boring or has parts that were obviously unfinished. I say this mostly because I always find managing the scope to be difficult in the short time-frame of the compo. If I had to find one thing to complain about, it would be that the music doesn't quite loop properly (at least on my computer), which I found surprisingly distracting. |
| Oct 5 12:45:07 | 2h 29m | Unshippable | ♥ 1 | I like the idea and the clean, simple graphics. The game-play itself didn't quite "click" for me, and I think the main reason was that it felt more about trying to guess what the crane is over, rather than actually positioning the containers and balancing them on the boat. Your idea of a "highlight" option is a good one, but even just tweaking the lighting to be from directly above would let you use the crane's shadow to line things up. I also had some trouble remembering how much the various containers weighed, which is a problem when the heaviest ones are ten times the weight of the lightest. Writing the weights on the containers themselves probably wouldn't suit the clean aesthetic of the game, but a hint or reminder somewhere in the UI would have helped. There were also handful of bugs and stuff, but I'm guessing you're already aware of most of them and they're a result of the unforgiving time-frame for the compo. |
| Oct 6 11:59:02 | 23h 13m | Stable Inc. | ♥ 1 | This was very engaging for a game about reading instructions and pressing buttons. The interactivity of the controls and the sounds and animations when using them was fun all on its own. I'm not sure if the music added to the experience. I think just having silence, punctuated by the blare of the alarm and the click of the switches would have helped keep the sense of tension in the game. Luckily there was a volume control option, and not only that, the settings menu used the same fun-to-use controls as the rest of the game. I quite liked that little detail. |
| Oct 6 12:16:22 | 17m 20s | Hexworld | ♥ 2 | The presentation was great. The music and art worked together to make for an amazing game-world. Unfortunately, I didn't find the game-play itself very engaging. Perhaps there was depth to the combat that went completely over my head; if so, a little bit more in-game help might have made it easier to engage with. |
| Oct 6 12:22:24 | 6m 02s | Tables & Tremors | ♥ 1 | Very fun! The speed-running-style "best time" marker was enough to make me start a second play-through, but my second attempt stopped half-way through. The game was definitely fun enough to make me power through those last few tricky levels once, but they were hard enough to not make me want to bother beating them a second time. |
| Oct 6 12:28:06 | 5m 42s | Among Monolyths | ♥ 1 | I very much enjoyed this game. I can absolutely see how this game was inspired by The Witness, and in a good way: particularly how puzzles are presented to the player before they have information necessary to solve them, forcing them to go exploring to find easier puzzles to act as hints. That sort of game design is definitely easier said than done, but you did it well. |
| Oct 6 12:35:33 | 7m 27s | Unstable Piles | ♥ 1 | This is a fun idea and the art and music are both very cute. Unfortunately some of the game-play was a bit frustrating. The risk of bombs messing everything up made me just drop blocks away from my tower whenever there was a chance of a bomb, so they ended up being an annoyance rather than adding much to the depth of the game-play. Also, it felt like the logic for calculating tower heights was a bit buggy. Nonetheless, this is a very solid game for your first ever ludum dare entry. Good work. |
| Oct 7 03:03:00 | 14h 27m | A Hard Pill to Swallow | ♥ 1 | Great work on your first ludum dare entry! This was good, simple fun, but I do have a couple of small criticisms: - The enemies near the end (antibodies?) seemed to move very suddenly. When there was only one, I could follow their movement, but when there was more, their movement felt very abrupt and hard to predict. A simple wind-up animation just before they started moving might have helped. - The pill turning to a "dead" sprite as soon as I fired made me think I only got one shot per level! The was just me misunderstanding things, but a different sprite might have helped me avoid that misunderstanding. Really, though, these are minor complaints. This was a fun game with just enough content to be engaging but not so long that it ever really got boring. Good job. |
| Oct 7 03:46:37 | 43m 37s | Fragile Payload | ♥ 1 | Congratulations on your first ever entry! The art was neat. I liked the dithering in the background, and the subtle particle effects worked quite well. Sadly, I didn't find the game itself fun. Maybe I just don't have the necessary patience, but I also feel like the game didn't give me the information I needed. The changing color of the orb helped a little bit, but I didn't have enough control over my speed, especially when on ramps, to make use of this information, especially when it's possible to go from fine to dead very quickly. It was also very counter-intuitive that the solution to the large ramp with alternating hot/cold zones was to move _slowly_ through the fire. This would have also been easier to work out if the game gave more information about the relative temperatures of various things. Nevertheless, I still think the idea has promise, and just adding something simple like a UI overlay showing a heat gauge (or better yet, something more subtle that tied into the game world... maybe a gauge around the orb that filled up?) might have been enough for me to really enjoy it. I also feel like I should point out that the game is likely unplayable for people with certain kinds of color-blindness. Still, this is a great effort considering the harsh time constraints of the compo. |
| Oct 7 07:06:11 | 3h 19m | Unstable Pinball | ♥ 3 | This is a very cool idea, and it's well-realized for something made on such a tight schedule. But unfortunately, I has quite a few problems playing the game π I personally found the visuals to be a bit hard to read. Points of interest didn't really stand out, so it was hard to distinguish walls, ramps, and bumpers from the background art of the playfield. It also felt a bit flat. A bit of gloss on the ball, or some glow around the lights and targets would have helped in that regard, I think. Also, This is probably the fault of the low-end laptop I played it on, but the ball fell through the flippers several times. I managed to make it to one of the later areas but got stuck when the ball ended up outside the play area: γΉγ―γͺγΌγ³γ·γ§γγ 2021-10-07 16.02.50.png But there's still clearly potential here and I particularly like how you managed to tie a pinball game in to the theme of the jam. Well done. |
| Oct 9 08:25:30 | 49h 19m | Save the Reactor | ♥ 2 | I really like the art style. it suits the feel and mood of the game. The music was also quite good, but I feel like it drowned-out the sound effects a bit. |
| Oct 9 09:26:18 | 1h 00m | The Salatroitsk Incident | ♥ 0 | I enjoyed this! The atmosphere was great and I loved both the sounds and visuals a lot. I think the lack of music really helped the maintain the feeling of tension in the game. My main criticism is that a lot of the sound effects were a little bit too video-gamey for my taste. They broke my immersion somewhat and made the game not quite as spooky as it could have been. Instead of bleeps and jingles, I think the sound of clicking switches or rustling equipment would have worked better. I didn't get lost while playing, but I can understand why some people complain that they did. The buildings and landmarks in the background were really good, so perhaps positioning something distinctive behind the car (like the Ferris-wheel) would make it easier to find the way back there? Anyway, these are minor complaints. I think you did a really good job. |
| Oct 9 09:47:12 | 20m 54s | A Long Way Home | ♥ 1 | At first I found the game a little bit frustrating, but once I started to understand how the mechanics of the game worked, it only took me a couple more tries to beat the game. I'm not really a fan of long tutorials that spell everything out, but I suspect perhaps if the game was just a little more clear about how things worked, it might have saved me that initial frustration. Aside from that, the game was lovely. The music was nice, the art was pretty, and everything came together in support of the style and mood of the game. |
| Oct 10 05:35:39 | 19h 48m | Time Rift | ♥ 3 | This game was really visually striking! The lighting, geometry and effects all looked really interesting! The design of the game was also interesting, but unfortunately I felt like each individual element of the game was working against all the other elements and it made a lot of things frustrating or counter-intuitive. For example, the game starts off with a timer counting down and tells you you can sprint and vault, so everything lead me to expect a fast-paced _Mirror's Edge_-style experience! But the level design was cramped and enclosed and full of instant-kill traps that made it suicidal to charge ahead at full speed. And instead of respawning me close to where I died, ready to get back into the action, dying sent me back to the start of the game! The time-traveling ability was very interesting, but felt a bit like an afterthought. There's no explanation for why you can control it (or, earlier, why you _can't_ control it) and there are only a couple of puzzles to be solved with it. I also think the time-travel system needed a bit more testing and debugging. Given the time constraints of the jam, something else would have had to have been sacrificed, but I found it buggy enough to detract from the experience. All-in-all, there were some neat ideas presented with a lot of visual polish, but there wasn't much sense of cohesion to the game, as if it wasn't really sure about what it wanted to be. A couple of examples of level-design that made me feel the game encouraged a cautious approach: - the spikes in the first spike-pit aren't visible until you're already in the pit, and even then only if you look down - although you can see the lasers before they kill you, there's no indication that they're an instant game over. (maybe they just activate something mechanism when they hit you!) In fact, since you don't have the time-jump ability yet, the time-jump-recharge bar looks just like an HP bar, so it seems reasonable to expect the lasers just knock off some HP. Some bugs I encountered using the time-travel ability: - one time, the chromatic aberration and double-vision effect became more severe each time I used it, until it was almost impossible to see anything at all. - a couple of times, I ended up outside the level geometry with no way back in, and had to restart the game - If just go back out of the entrance to the spike room with the closing-in walls, you can still use the time-travel ability but the rooms are all blank and untextured |
