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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | PeachTreeOath's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 5 09:00:01 | Go Go Car Boom | ♥ 2 | This idea is too funny, all odds are against you! Even the opponents don't have bombs that's how you know this race is rigged. Speaking of the AI though, it's pretty great to watch them fly out the gates. There were a few runs I had where I managed to get all the bombs off me in one go. Couldn't figure out how to do it though. Sometimes I could even do just running very slowly into the barricade. One thing I really liked was how you just had diegetic tutorial panels built right into the stage. Can't say I've ever seen that in a racing game before. It fits well because the speed isn't too intense so you have time to read it anyways. The game is flexible and I had fun doing stunts or trying silly things like racing across the mountains as a shortcut. I'm looking forward to seeing your magnum opus where you combine all the mechanics from your previous car games. | |
| Apr 5 19:29:53 | 10h 29m | Delay No More! | ♥ 2 | I never realized the pun in the title despite knowing Cantonese, that's a clever one :) The effort you put into the running around and attacking animations went a long way. Since there isn't a terrible amount of content, having those things be in the core more than made up for it. Like others said, it was fun to just run around and smack things around. The penguin eyes turning into X's in particular made that action 3x more entertaining. On my 1st winning playthrough, I ended up smacking my boss which was a mistake. When trying to get back to where I was, I kept running into cars and dying haha. Eventually I played it patiently and correctly and got the win. Neat game! FYI the game doesn't play well on ultrawide monitors. It was still playable though even if I couldn't see my items. |
| Apr 5 19:41:38 | 11m 45s | Highrail to hell | ♥ 1 | 50 ratings in half a day? You're like an LD celebrity now lol That was a really neat twist of a game. I initially forgot I could dodge so I was Dark Soulsing the first enemy trying to figure out how to hit and back off optimally. Eventually I realized that was not how I was supposed to play the game and found the dodge. The puzzle aspect is very WarioWare-y and it was fun to recontextualize everything accordingly. Simple scene and simple controls, and you figured out how to wring possibilities out of it. Very cool. I was mostly impressed with the innovation here. I can't say I've ever seen a beat em up puzzle concept so this definitely surprised me. I feel like the genre could use a lot more of these ideas. |
| Apr 5 20:30:16 | 48m 38s | Chess at the End of Time | ♥ 1 | Brilliant game, you've done it again! There is a fantastic interaction of resources here, mostly derived from the idea of breaking tiles and that stepping on tiles prevents further breakage. This means that you must consider: - How to protect your king in normal chess fashion - How to place units at the boundaries to make sure your playspace remains alive This meant that there were some incredibly tense fights, especially with a low amount of units, where you needed to do some costly duels, all the while the stage is breaking and you eventually lose. Although this means the game is easier with many units, you are still susceptible to getting hit from multiple angles, which is a natural way to prevent the player from having infinite units. Something like this isn't sustainable: chess.png Other random, interesting points of strategy I saw: - If you have a pawn you really need to keep a path open for it early. This is very hard in later stages. - Typically in order to get a kill with the king (due to their slowness), you need to quickly spread out your units to hold the territory. This kinda reminds me of SRPGs where you purposely try to give your weak units last hits to catch them up in exp. With the addition of the breaking tiles this makes it a much more interesting tactic to pull off. - The 6th or 7th stage where the rook is castled by trees is really clever. Some chess intuition kicks into play here and it summons up old thoughts on the game. The rotating camera is lovely. I really sunk my teeth into this game for a while. I didn't even talk about the story and presentation, the gameplay itself has enough cool things to talk about. You added some relatively simple rules to Chess and explored it super well. Excellent game. |
| Apr 5 21:10:26 | 40m 10s | Hold Time | ♥ 2 | This is actually a pretty innovative game! I've seen quite a bit of Getting Over It style games but this is one of the more unique concepts. The clock hand in particular I haven't seen before. At first I thought it was a light gimmick, but once you started speeding things up, it really became quite the minigame. I know that if you put in UI indicators of your controller angle that would be way too easy, so no complaints from me. But for the first stage, I did get stuck on the 2nd to last one for FORTY years! It was very tough and I had to skip it. Oddly enough, in the 2nd stage I was able to complete ones with similar speeds and directions. Now that I think of it, perhaps you simply narrowed the timing window on that one. The arm angle for jumps is clever and diegetic, rather than having some UI pop out of nowhere to show your aiming direction like Angry Birds. I unfortunately got stuck in stage 2 though I tried my darndest. In some ways the bricks reminded me of the gears in Double Dragon 2. Those were a nightmare for me as a kid, and having to go back a while because you missed a jump from a brick to a grass platform was just as painful :) I normally don't/can't stick with these games long but this one was enjoyable. |
| Apr 6 03:57:00 | 6h 46m | Kiwis Can't Fly | ♥ 4 | Some straight up Orisinal vibes here, I loved it and it's been a while since I've played that sort of game. The gameplay, while simple, still had enough of a mastery curve to keep it interesting. Making it have an angled bounce like Breakout let you do some neat stuff like set up all your objects ahead of time since you had an idea of which way the kiwi would bounce. It feels great to perfectly set up 3 objects in time without having to touch them again. It goes without saying that the art and sound design are top notch as usual. Though iirc, this is the first full-sentimental game you've done in a while. Great message and way to subvert the theme. Doesn't overstay its welcome because you keep introducing new instruments to play with over time. Really impressive stuff :) |
| Apr 6 04:18:58 | 21m 58s | Tatertot Towers | ♥ 0 | I can't believe people were getting to wave 20+, my fingers were already dying by the end of story mode! This game had an excellent presentation and it made it a joy to play. Just a really fresh take/angle on the defense genre that kept it really interesting. What were the differences between the towers though? I don't know if there was any text I missed on what they actually did. Even if there were, I was usually frantically farming resources so I may not have seen it anyways. |
| Apr 6 05:37:43 | 1h 18m | Xermatt Redux | ♥ 2 | What I liked most about this game was its balance of being lighthearted while still keeping ominous tension in the background. The dialogue is funny with a lot of personality, and you don't really find any threats for most of floor 1. Of course, after a couple run-ins with the alien on floor 2 you start to realize just how bad things can get. So the end result is you still feel like you're in a lighthearted romp of sorts, but the threat of the alien forces you to at least try to play optimally and to get the hell outta there. It's certainly a great incentive. I couldn't actually complete the game though :( I got to the part with grabbing the Gundoom model but I may have missed a key piece of dialogue because I wasn't too sure where to go next. I went to every room, searched whenever I could search, and tossed a good amount of flashbangs. Regardless, I enjoyed my time with it and I'm still curious what the 3rd woman will be like given how different the first two are. Might give it another go before the review period ends! |
| Apr 6 06:17:48 | 40m 05s | Nuclear Arms 8.5er: Skeleton Survivor | ♥ 4 | 8.5er Skeleton Survivor is such a great title :D I was hoping to see some VS games this jam given the theme. You actually improved on several things and weren't just derivative (I have not played the latest VS version so these comments could be outdated): - The shotgun having some wind up before firing is great because it allows me to position my attack without jeopardizing my position as much. I can just aim and then go back to my original route rather than constantly thinking about my facing. On paper this SHOULD be the same thing, but for some reason I felt like I was strategizing more with this shotty. - The zamboni machines being immune to knockback, thereby making my aura tactic useless was a good idea. No afking here! - Being able to upgrade the size of the barrels, not just the quantity was super satisfying. It certainly create a lot of visual chaos, but it's almost like a risk/reward thing - use these super barrels at your own risk. Loved how crazy it got near the end. This gameplay style of being over the top definitely fits the franchise. Great choice! asdf1.png |
| Apr 6 06:30:20 | 12m 32s | One Fuse | ♥ 1 | Agreed, this is probably the most unique take on the theme yet. Instead of delaying the inevitable-game-mechanic, you're delaying the inevitable human desire. TECHNICALLY.........we could go through this entire jam proving you wrong, but that would've been utterly impossible to achieve. ..I suppose someone out there could run a clickerbot that constantly extinguishes. I'm not sure what will happen in that case with your code. Maybe if enough saboteurs banned together they could overrun said bot. |
| Apr 6 07:27:43 | 57m 23s | A Drag on Chaos | ♥ 4 | My typical reaction to your other physics game are a lot of tension and breath-holding. But this is your first game I've played that didn't have a loss condition. It was more an implicit failure from loss of momentum rather than something the game dictated to you. I thought this has some really interesting consequences. My reaction to this game was more of my eyes just drying out from intense focus lol. There is effectively no downtime because you are constantly attacking the pendulum whether you hit or miss trying to conserve the momentum. So even though I didn't feel *tension* itself, I was still fully engaged, if not MORE engaged due to having a pretty singular goal of gaining speed. I actually never did get all 3 secrets, just the center one and big air. The secret goals were a really nice touch and inspires me to try something like this where I create an interesting toy first and foremost, and then give some hidden goals for people to find, rather than explicit ones. I feel like that leans into the exploration feeling you want to give to people along with a toy so that they are encouraged to creatively probe the game. The fact that this is a physics game helps a lot with this approach. There are other hidden objective games like Achievement Unlocked. But in these sorts of games you're kinda just playing against the designer. Trying to get in their head and guessing at their secrets. For Drag on Chaos, you know that all the secrets lie behind mastering the physics, both in the pendulum and the lazy cursor. So ultimately I think that's what I really like about this game. There are a lot of implicit rules that are built right into the core of the game and you stick to it. All those rules cascade into a system that really keeps the player engaged and wanting to master this simple looking toy. The extra feedback of the trails + increasing music definitely adds to this feeling. Lemme grab some eyedrops.. |
| Apr 6 07:43:40 | 15m 57s | Ejected! | ♥ 3 | This is a really funny and unique concept! I think the best part about the premise is that you have no real idea why you're motivated to keep moving forward and faster, you just are. I had a fairly similar experience to @carlos-murillo in terms of stocking various items vs using them. I also thought the speed aspect of the game was a very interesting risk/reward mechanic to slow you down, other than the obvious ones like the cop car or the space dust. IMO there are very few games that let you play with speed in this sort of way so it was nice to see you explore it in a very organic way that was totally in line with the theme of the game. All the perma-upgrade items felt AWESOME to get, but it was quite hard to know which ones were which on the first few playthroughs. Overall I'm a big fan of the speed looting concept here and you explored it in a VERY novel setting and game theme. |
| Apr 6 17:50:43 | 10h 07m | Descending | ♥ 1 | Really unique presentation of erosion, seeing the air bubbles go up while your own blocks was pretty hectic. I actually couldn't really tell what the logic was behind all the clicking (due to having to keep everyone alive quickly), but I ended up going with a strat where you box in the sides, and then try to encase those suckers in :P |
| Apr 6 21:09:45 | 3h 19m | The Beast Within | ♥ 1 | SUPER clever theming. I doubt I'll come across another game with this concept this LD! I didn't terribly mind the fact that you couldn't see your timer. I thought it added an element of threat to the game, which works extremely well with the concept. You SHOULD be afraid of turning into a werewolf so this helps sell that feeling. The legos were a hilarious touch seeing this big bad monster have to carefully step around them. It gets to even the best of us! This was a very fun and unique jam game, really entertaining and a lot of polish. |
| Apr 6 21:23:56 | 14m 11s | Procrabstination | ♥ 4 | I think this was unintentional, but the fact that all the games were pretty easy to accidentally click and start the game over is actually pretty clever. Without it, the player is likely to exit at will and finish up the game, but with this one you're more playing as the avatar who won't stop playing. It's a great use of mechanics to sell the theme :) |
| Apr 6 21:36:15 | 12m 19s | Pixel-Panic | ♥ 1 | 44.7 best here. The extra effort put into the tutorial really shows. It was done very cleanly and you delayed the Next button such that the player had to practice at least a little bit. That gave me a lot of time to fully understand how the AI of each square worked. Conserving momentum through your dashes is something I haven't seen in these types of controls and I think it was a fantastic choice. You wind up with less control and now had to factor in 3 things before letting go: what your current velocity is, where you're aiming, what obstacles are around you. That extra 3rd variable creates a lot of depth for a small mechanic! The game speed was an interesting mix. On one hand, it plays so fast that it would be suicidal to stay on normal speed. On the other hand the slowdown mode makes it very easy to analyze what's going on. I think for gameplay reasons this is a good mix, but there were times where I wanted to sit back and revel in the chaos but couldn't as a result. The ideas all work very well and the execution is very high. There's just a lot of nice touches to everything. From the font choice to the power gauge. Well done :) |
| Apr 6 22:32:38 | 56m 23s | Ydunian Prune | ♥ 2 | Very engaging incremental! It took me 4 attempts before I figured out what the strategy should be and was able to clear it and get the true ending. This game really parallels how RTS' feel to me, whether its AOE or SC. You start off just harvesting and having a great time watching your city grow. But eventually armies come in and ruin your day and you realize you need to spend time and resources building an army - something you don't really care to do but you have to do for the sake of your economy. So I think you actually modeled an RTS experience down to a raw, incremental format which is very cool and not something I've seen often. The shading of the fruit on the underside of the tree is such a nice touch that I don't think a lot of people would have considered. I really like that even after you got the castle, there is still room to grow the tree, and exponentially slower at that. It's nice to feel safe and grow the tree in peace rather than ending the game as soon as you got the castle. Having to deal with an actual threat put a lot of pressure on me to optimize which is something you normally don't have to deal with in an idle game. I thought this was one of the best incrementals I've played in recent times and very much enjoyed it, well done! You should check out my game too, it's also a visual incremental and a similar style of ending :) |
| Apr 6 22:45:59 | 13m 21s | The Itsy Bitsy Jumper | ♥ 1 | LOL this is the first game that genuinely made me laugh out loud. Other games have humor and I might smile or acknowledge it, but the crazy speed at the end totally caught me off guard! 17 was my best: end.png I liked the controls a lot more than I thought I would. You roll your fingers like right->up, creating a galloping effect and sound which is very pleasing. So maybe that might run counter to what you're thinking about regarding QOL. I think being able to blindly mashing would be a mistake in a game that's already fairly simple. I didn't realize I was going to be timed so I didn't try SUPER hard. But even with that in mind, I thought the raindrops were implemented well and kept the player motivated. They sucked when you got hit with them and I would decide to try a little harder each time. I really enjoyed the game. It has a lot of character and bold execution. Awesome job! |
| Apr 7 05:45:07 | 6h 59m | Jupiter Station - v0.5 | ♥ 2 | 4205 high score here. I probably could've done a lot better but I started to play a lot more loose later on and also experimenting with the wilder sounding cards. Since you're eyeing a full version, I speak more about that angle. I think you have *very* good potential in this game. One of the problems with Slay the Spire-likes is that they're mostly all the same. You change up the conditions of the game here with the inclusion of a 3rd party, the refugees. So now instead of figuring out how to simply dump damage on the enemies while keeping your HP from attritioning too much, you have to figure out how to efficiently corral those people to safety alongside that. This creates a risk reward mechanism where you try to save as much refugees as possible, even risking some extra damage in doing so (in the theoretical full version that is. In this version you prioritize your hull). I think this creates an effect that other deckbuilders lack since they have the singular goal of taking as little damage as possible - and thus always having a best answer in every round of play. I think this will be a key point for your team to hammer on. Now you can allow for more styles of play (among other benefits). I for one, usually like to take extreme risks. If I could be rewarded for saving a ton of refugees that grants me some awesome upgrade, I'll gladly take critical hull damage :) Overall this was a very clever twist on a tired genre. You did well for this complex of a genre in such a short time, and you also seem to have a good plan forward for a future version. Great work and keep it up! |
| Apr 7 06:38:22 | 53m 15s | Mr. Final Boss | ♥ 5 | Man this game is unbelievably polished with great timing on the theme. I'd be surprised if this didn't get top 10 in a few categories. I'll touch only on the gameplay since the art quality speaks for itself. The game has a nice effect on the player because you immediately think about FromSoft games and what it'd be like to play as one of those bosses. So you pretty quickly buy into the fantasy of being a boss - more so than other boss games because of this tie. I think the part where you really differentiate yourself from similar games is when a 2nd hero steps up to the plate and you have to fight multiple at a time. That's something I don't see too often and it immediately kicks you out of whatever rote pattern you've already been using. I think leaning into this aspect even further will get some great gameplay out of it. The spells were varied enough and I really liked that you only had 2 to choose from. That made the choices fairly critical and also made the playthroughs feel very different. The game theme and fantasy promise really sucks you in. And with the long learning curve, it kept me playing for a while. I'll definitely be keeping track of future games :) |
| Apr 7 07:35:18 | 56m 56s | Somnokid | ♥ 3 | Wow that's a lot of playtime for a jam game. I was surprised it kept going (in a good way). Really interesting strategy to try to pick apart. I am assuming the safest way to play the game is to clear all the blocks before going into platforming mode. Since it's LD though, I tried to be as quick and efficient as I could be, foregoing a lot of the combat blocks. I thought this was a fun tradeoff to try to juggle. You get less real estate to play with, but a lot of time gained from not having to fight as many things in shmup-mode. I could see this leading to a lot of replayability as the player experimented more what what types of platformers they liked to use on various stages. Of course, once things got hard things changed where it was more a puzzle and you were trying to find a good setup for you to complete it. The forced mode switching is a neat mechanic in general that I don't see very often. It makes you think about the stage in 2-dimensions. That is, as you are filling the blocks you are consciously thinking about how the platforming section is gonna go once it's complete. This adds to some mental depth to the game. This was a hectic game that was worth the play, great job on the execution! Also, gratz on sustaining such a large dev team. Must've taken a good amount of practice to get there :) |
| Apr 7 08:00:17 | 24m 59s | The Last Savior | ♥ 2 | I *really* liked the core combat. At first I played it straight up by trying to match the colors of attacks to enemies. But at some point I realized the active frames start so fast I might as well time J K L to be an absolute machine that just grinds through whatever's in front of me. Throughout the play, I also saw you could direction-cancel to hit 2 angles at once. So I'd start my attack facing left, and then quickly hit down to hit another angle. This was of little use given that the first phase is pretty easy. .......but little did I know I had the opportunity to test these skills! The sorceress fell down and now I had to take on the huge wave. I was excited to try out both the above skills are were confident in them so I actually parked myself in a corner and let myself get surrounded. That ended up being a mistake as I didn't have enough close quarters practice and just got swallowed up. Gave it one more try but 578 is the highest I can manage. What can you get @justuspan ? Once the bosses come in it was way too hard for me to keep things under control. The game is excellent and I loved how it pushed my execution abilities. I personally want to be able to skip the 1st phase and get right to the survival portion, but what can you do :) |
| Apr 7 08:18:45 | 18m 28s | 1 Man 6 Bullets | ♥ 5 | Won't lie, you got me to come into the game cuz I thought it was a quick 6 bullet challenge, but you got me to stay through the gameplay even though it was more than 6 bullets :D 2 things I didn't expect: - Superhot slowdown - Bullet speed such that I had to factor in bullet travel into my initial shot The 2nd aspect led me to taking only straight on shots or very short ones. I'm not sure the absolute best way to play but it does seem like some high scorers here are finding a nice room to park themselves in and just take simple shots. I think that aspect could use some improvement, but don't get me wrong, I played this game for a long time and enjoyed it. The polish and juice is through the roof and I'm happy you made the multiplier meter so gigantic, practically Guitar Hero levels of size. All the color changes and effects all add to the fun when you end up clearing the entire stage. The concept is solid and if you do a full version it'll mostly come down to your level design. I think the larger rooms will add more strategy and opportunities to do things like purposeful bullet catches. Bullet catches do absolutely feel awesome when intentional, but I mostly just got them accidentally in small rooms. However, the small rooms are incredibly satisfying and doesn't really get old. Much like nailing some perfect AOE in a game. Would love to see what you come up with in the future, this game was awesome! |
| Apr 7 23:11:42 | 14h 52m | Shotgun King: the Final Checkmate | ♥ 1 | Floor 11 here. Mostly died cuz I was playing too fast and didn't notice I opened up a pathway for the queen to kill me >_< The game has amazing replay value. I didn't expect that much variety in cards to change up gameplay. Even the simple addition of hit points to the game wound up added plenty of depth to the rest of the mechanics, allowing for spread shots and distance to be very meaningful. The slot cards are especially strategically interesting, especially if you have the card that allows you to fire after using a card. Now you're really breaking the rules and doing some nutty combos and repositioning tactics. |
| Apr 8 02:09:27 | 2h 57m | We Need To Talk | ♥ 2 | Suuuper unique game idea, and a relatable one! Even outside the theme, I haven't really seen a game like this where your decisions get placed into execution commands. It makes me think of Sabin's special moves, except here your choices actually matter. I must admit, I didn't pick up on the strategy and elemental effectiveness until I read it in a comment. Personally, I didn't really have any trouble just punching in the moves super quickly. Because of that I didn't look for opportunities to optimize. But now that I'm aware of the underlying strategy it does make me appreciate it more. I wouldn't mind a hard-mode with some finger twisting action :) |
| Apr 8 03:42:52 | 1h 33m | WHEN NANA SAYS IT'S TIME FOR SCHOOL | ♥ 3 | I agree with a lot of the sentiment here. Usually the folder-based games follow a certain format so that's what I expected. You broke all those rules though and created something I haven't seen before. It's not JUST that you're navigating files and reading things. It's that you are actually upgrading your inventory and even ability to delay time ever more. By far the coolest thing I saw was when you copy paste a new rule into your rule sheet. Not only was it brilliant but it gave me a sense of progression I wouldn't have felt from a videogame. This gives me confidence in your team that even if you DID have a coder on hand, you would've blown us away with something just as well. Awesome job and thanks for trying something so new :) |
| Apr 8 03:49:15 | 6m 23s | Grandma's kiss | ♥ 3 | Best I could do, it got pretty rough best.PNG The multiple weapons and limited ammo worked very well. It actually makes you think pretty hard on what you should be firing. *Especially* because the difficulty ramps up pretty fast halfway though. I liked the extra effort you put into selling the setting. The characters having different outfits, the ominous cat portraits in the BG, and of course, the wild kissing animation lol |
| Apr 8 04:14:22 | 25m 07s | Mech & Aliens | ♥ 1 | Haha I didn't expect this evolution of VS-like games to arrive so fast. And it actually works really well? The decision points come down to figuring out what's effective, and then creating an army that can break through the defenses. It's more like a game where you sorta just run different experiments over and over and observe the results. The fact that the mech upgrades as well is a GREAT twist to the idea. It puts a lot of pressure on you to time your upgrades well, otherwise it just keeps gaining speed and firepower and makes mincemeat out of you. It definitely feels bad to be on the receiving end of this deal for once. The game has enough build flexibility that I was willing to try several attempts and combos. After the first run, I had a sneaky suspicion that the best build would be to power up just 2 species and then try to spawn big wave of them. That way you would be efficient. As fun as it is to upgrade the entire army, surely it's just free food for the mech. That ended up being the right call, mostly because speed is such a huge factor so you really need to specialize. I was able to win at 3:03. This game really does have good future potential. Having different mechs, maybe even mech parties, and having different monsters to choose from sounds like a very fun formula. Even better if you throw in branching upgrades like how other roguelites do it. You already proved it out halfway, hope you keep going with it! |
| Apr 8 04:26:03 | 11m 41s | Starline Rescue Squad | ♥ 0 | I think the looser controls are totally fine. Since there aren't any threats, it's ok to push the players a bit on their execution. I really struggled at first, but I eventually got the hang of it and had a massive surplus of days, maybe 2000? Sat at 133,000 population too before I think I saw most of the content. It was kinda neat to see the doodads and buildings in the galaxy, though it can feel sparse after a few minutes of play. Was it just me or were there no fries around except for in the beginning? They were the most satisfying to collect so I was bummed! Were items supposed to fly off the ship when you moved to fast? That seems to be the case with visuals, but when I dropped them off I still seemed to get full value so I didn't really mind. All in all, it's a fun core concept. I lost some intensity in play due to having so many excess days, but I can totally see why you would balance it that way. In my first playthrough I struggled to even get back to the station haha. |
| Apr 8 04:41:31 | 15m 28s | Aloft | ♥ 5 | Wooooooo that last level is a tense one! I think the last 2 levels in particular show off a really unique consequence of the mechanics. There's actually an unusual push/pull effect created from the shrinking balloon. On one hand you are becoming a smaller target, allowing you to navigate harrowing areas a lot easier. On the other hand, you're running out of time so you need to mosey on. It's funny and interesting to be trading one source of tension for another. I did like your final stage design because it was so different from the others and you were using a slightly different skillset. The control scheme wasn't just unique (including when your balloon spins out of control), but the idea of air getting sapped from the holes is *definitely* something I hadn't seen before. I imagine there could be some crazy player who is super air efficient and knows how to maneuver the balloon 1 airstream at a time. Lastly, great job on always pushing your LD projects in different directions. I'm curious how much of a priority it is for you guys to do different things. For a while I thought your team had the humor category on lock and might stick to that. |
| Apr 8 08:07:14 | 3h 25m | Orbles | ♥ 3 | I failed this game at least a dozen times, but I'm really glad I stuck with it. I actually scanned the comments here and on Itch but none of it was particularly useful. You sorta need to just tinker around with the economy until you figure it out, unless you need an exact walkthrough. My advice for anyone struggling: pay attention to your resources and how they pile up. From there try to figure out what would be an efficient way to move all your resources along and keep things occupied. The mistake I made was treating this not like a supply chain game. I was taken in by the theming and spectacle, but ultimately your strategy fundamentals will save you here. Since I played 40m+, needless to say I thought this game was amazing. The turnbased movement of the titans works extremely well here. They are able to move in more predictable ways which keeps you calm while at the same time imposing huge threat onto the player. This concept was done in They Are Billions, but I think this style works much better because you aren't taking constant light damage all the time on your walls and can focus on the grand scheme of things. Finally, I loved that final stretch of the road when you go for the orbs. Sure by then you probably have an efficient economy going on, but just seeing the flashing titans + your slow, big headed carrier run around gave me a sense of dread that it might fall apart still. This was a brilliant idea and probably a top 3 entry for me this jam! |
| Apr 8 21:57:26 | 13h 50m | Return to the Glade in the Sky | ♥ 0 | Bit of an interesting setting. Almost looked like a golf course in space which isn't something I see every day. TBH I actually liked the moving boxes mostly because it shook up the puzzle design and gave it more of a puzzle flair. Doing a remake is a pretty neat idea. That's a bit tempting for myself since my early projects were.....not so polished :) |
| Apr 8 22:08:05 | 10m 39s | Shoal | ♥ 3 | That's a neat concept, though with a pretty grim take that all fish will die eventually lol. The presentation is great, with lots of graphical touches and the harrowing waterfall rocks that slowed you down. Touching a pack of fish felt *fantastic*. Personally it was hard for me to get more than say, 15 fish, but over time I just expected that to be the case. I was pretty incentivized to get my little swarm growing and getting far. Only got 25 fish though unlike some pros here. A failed split attempt cost me dearly! Great animated title logo btw :) |
| Apr 8 22:25:35 | 17m 30s | OVERCOME | ♥ 2 | The song you used for the empty houses totally reminded me of some existing game I played as a kid. There's no way I can remember which game at this point, but it was really surprising. When I started the game, I actually mistook that tutorial arrow as a guiding arrow telling me where I needed to go, so I started to make my loop around that whole area. I guess it ended up doing the same thing it was meant to do regardless because I managed to go through the game anyways. As you already know, the boss HP is a bit much. Even 250 might be too much unless it's given more phases or firing patterns. I was actually happy I didn't take damage so I could park myself and slowly whittle it down over time. Otherwise, the overall design was fine because you could place yourself in between the 2 lines of fire to practice some shmup skills. I thought the section in the lower right where you claw through the darkness was pretty good. I'm curious what you would do in the full version. You may be able to play with that as a full mechanic because it was pretty satisfying. Great job on continuing to experiment with a variety of game styles! |
| Apr 8 22:43:48 | 18m 13s | Crisis Bot | ♥ 2 | Though the game concept is simple, it still plays with the important concept of logistics so decisions remained pretty interested as you tried to figure out the most efficient thing to do as damage appeared. The playspace does narrow down over time which makes this a bit easier, so when you're down to a handful of rooms it's much more simple. The energy boost was a really good idea. I was initially dashing around constantly and didn't realize I couldn't repair without it. Once I realized that, I *only* used the dash to run to rooms that were already in danger of dying. Though they rarely appeared, the energy instant refill powerups were extremely interesting because that would immediately change your routing and running behavior to maximize the use of it. Those were very fun moments in the game. I was glad I read about the bomb points ahead of time. I would prioritize that over everything because the points were worth so very much. I thought this was a pretty neat game, and that the energy concept was enough to give this enough depth for strategic play. I think if there were more immediately consequences to your actions, it could find a broader audience (rather than people who are mostly into optimization tests) as well as fill in the "void" some people are mentioning. Great first LD entry! |
| Apr 8 22:57:27 | 13m 39s | Heat | ♥ 2 | I never though I'd see an aim trainer themed this way, that's actually extremely unique :) My first run I prioritized taking fires out asap. But after reading themes comments and seeing that my score was WAY behind at 34, I figured I should try to do people first. That didn't work either! Turns out I was just bad. Trying harder I finally am happy with 75. You getting 100 is insane though... The decision-making was light but effective since this game is all about hecticness. So you had to make quick decisions on the fire vs person choice, identify which person might be nearly dead, but also the chance to click something correctly. I would favor packs of people because if I misclicked, I might pick up some random guy while I'm at it. I really enjoyed this game. It also highlighted to me how few games there are that sorta play with this concept. Usually they are time management games like Diner Dash, but Heat is all controlled by your mouse so it more directly tests the player's clicking abilities. Great stuff and I wouldn't mind seeing future versions! |
| Apr 8 23:10:05 | 12m 38s | The Floor Is Lava | ♥ 1 | Just when I thought I've seen every possible iteration of the stacker concept, I came across this game. I haven't seen one with an organic time limit like this where you had to start making risk reward decisions dynamically. Basically, if the last piece I dropped was a big square, I would try to drop another piece asap. But when it was small, I would wait until my piece came around before placing it, giving me some time to get the timing down better. This is all made possible by the lava timer because otherwise there's no need to optimize! My highest score was 34, getting onto the leaderboard is good enough for me. I feel like it's a bit RNG dependent though, because on some runs I would get like 5 holes right off the bat, but in other games I wouldn't see one at all. They make a huge difference and I'd be curious what the spawn rate on those suckers are. The physics implementation of it all worked very well and it made each drop feel intense honestly. I forgot to doublecheck but are the leaderboard stacks ACTUALLY the same stack as what the player got in terms of positioning? If so that's very cool. There were some runs I had where I was practically building a bridge horizontally which would look funny on the leaderboard. |
| Apr 8 23:33:53 | 23m 48s | Pizza Gal | ♥ 2 | LOL the lethargic Speed Racer pose. Absolutely brilliant. This is easily my favorite concept I've seen this jam. There is an unbelievable amount of innovation here: - An "unoptimal" routing game where you maximize roads and time rather than taking the shortest path to victory - Randomized cities(!) I can't believe you had the time to implement one that created such clean looking cities. Any insight on the algorithms you used? I'd love to try something like this for city generation some day. - A great story and character personality that ties into the gameplay perfectly Back in the day I would just work in fast food kitchens rather than the cashier so I wouldn't have to deal with anyone. The character was too easy to relate to... I maxed out my score on the first 3 stages but then got lazy later on. I'm glad you put a cap on it at 200 so that players didn't *have* to completely paint the town red. But at the same time, this core gameplay of quickly analyzing the longest distance route was so unusual and engaging. Never had to flex those brain cells before. All the little touches on the MC driving and looking around sold the setting of her driving in total boredom. This game is a gem. |
| Apr 8 23:49:55 | 16m 02s | Merge Getaway | ♥ 1 | 44 high score here. I love how the concept makes absolutely no sense lol. I liked that you had autocorrection on the car itself. I think the game would've been a bit too easy to fly off the road otherwise. It took some getting used to, but eventually you learn to use it to your advantage. Another thing I did was try to only merge with cars when I hit them head on. It was pretty risky to merge with them at an angle at high speeds. I thought this was an interesting risk reward mechanic. |
| Apr 9 00:01:58 | 12m 03s | Nyan Tower | ♥ 5 | Very interesting, this is the first 1h typing game I've seen as well. Here's the evolution of my play which may be useful for you: 1. Started off typing with 2 hands, expecting a normal typing game 2. While clicking and dragging items around, I realized everything was on the left side of the keyboard so I switched to KB+M 3. At some point I hit the wrong key and I see that you can type things out of order. I've also never seen this in a typing game and it set the stage for the next realization which was... 4. I started mashing more and more. Sometimes I would do some smart mashing with just 1h so that I could drag stuff around. Sometimes I did 2h. Sometimes I would take 4 fingers and just roll them down my keyboard. I did end up quitting around 5k stage because I figured there was really no end to this strategy (though I didn't see @dining-philosopher 's score before I quit. Definitely a very unique typing game variant with a lot of potential. Nice work! |
| Apr 9 03:36:02 | 3h 34m | QUADRATORUM | ♥ 2 | Nice! We had similar concepts in having gameplay that sync'd to the beat. This isn't something I've seen before in a topdown shooter. The art/music/gameplay really lined up quite well. I couldn't help but be inspired by the gameplay especially once I saw the upgrades. Since you're lucky to have a music artist on the team, it would be really neat if a full version tied different weapons to different music instruments/tracks. So if you pick up missiles, now missiles are firing to the bass or something. But I digress. For the gameplay I mostly did a gigantic circle strafe. I'm sorta glad the HP bar was forgiving, I definitely ran into a lot of enemies when they spawned right next to me lol. I thought it was really neat that the arena size shrunk and it became VERY apparently once you were near the end of the game. The ending was a very nice touch honestly. It plays right into the shrinking arena by making you feel like you're screwed but having someone drop down to save you. It worked better emotionally than I expected. A very cool concept that shows what a beat sync'd game can do. I could see this going further with more work, great job! |
| Apr 9 07:30:02 | 3h 54m | Wizardfall | ♥ 2 | The graphics, perspective, and animations all reminded me of old 16 bit games that were forced to master all these tricks to give the illusion of 3d. I'd say you got that depth down pretty well! After getting the first ending through nonstop spirit bombing, I was wondering how they heck you squeeze 5 endings out of this. But upon diving into the speech options I could see where you opened up those options. I thought that was all very clever because typical this sort of stuff simply offers you 2 options, which is the violent path of the peaceful path. It's also cool that each path had their own mood to it. I'm a little curious what ends up causing the keys to not register as well. I got a little superstitious and would start clicking everywhere before the round started, hoping I would activate something with the focus. Pretty sure that didn't do anything. Overall a pretty neat interpretation of the theme. You must've put a decent amount of work into the BG too which was very cool to see changing and giving the sense of falling all the way from the sky. |
| Apr 10 21:33:24 | 38h 03m | Space Ninja | ♥ 2 | The thing that easily stands out the most is the readily apparent leaderboard at the bottom. It's a fantastic idea and I think a lot more games should to play around with that concept. That was sorta something I wanted to do with my last game but didn't have the experience to whip it up quickly. Out of curiosity what tech did you use to make that? Even regardless of the retention benefits of wanting to climb the leaderboards, its mere existence made me pay more attention to the game *immediately*. I knew my score would "matter" now, and I knew that even the easy, early stages would be likely contribute to my final score importantly so I would try to focus and get optimal combos early. Each time I hit one of those gold meteors and shot past 8 people, it felt super satisfying. I tried the post-jam version and I think the limited meter was a great solution. I haven't played Fruit Ninja in a very long time but I assume that mechanic doesn't exist in that game. I underestimated this game at first! I thought it would be a pretty looking Fruit Ninja with a different theme, but you quickly showed new features that ended up being a much more engaging version. Awesome work! |
| Apr 11 02:53:07 | 5h 19m | Reversary | ♥ 0 | The progression of dialogue and relationship between the boss and hero were definitely the highlight of the game. It's certainly not something you see terribly often, and even more so from the boss' perspective. That meant there was good opportunity to throw in some novel dialogue and you delivered there. There was good combat depth for the amount of controls you gave the player. I hadn't expected jump and magic to be wielded in several ways but the game system ended up allowing for that. |
| Apr 11 19:34:10 | 16h 41m | DashFight | ♥ 1 | The rage mechanic is very clever and unique! I haven't seen this sort of push/pull on deciding when to attack vs stand there except in Fantasy Strike's throw break system. It's a really nice way to practice patience in a genre where buttons are everything. The enemy rage mechanic technically serves as a way to discourage beating up 1 guy, and to encourage juggling multiple enemies. Which is a very cool concept and not a common one, but in practice, you'll probably get hit in the back trying that so it's quite scary to do so. Looks like you addressed a lot of those issues in 1.1, but I do want to say that the core idea is quite good even without those changes and it has good potential. |
| Apr 11 19:49:13 | 15m 03s | Concave Knave | ♥ 0 | Crisp, clean combat :) When I play these games, usually the first thing I try to do is see what kinds of cancels I can do. I couldn't find anything useful other than attack -> backdash, and dashing into the boss' head which does a tiny hop over it (this one was not useful at all but occasionally looks cool. You put in a lot more variety in the boss attacks than I expected. Especially when the fire pillars appeared I was like "oh okay, we're doing THAT now". So excellent work overall on making an interesting game! |
| Apr 11 21:54:14 | 2h 05m | Eschaton, Dark Forest of the | ♥ 2 | Very interesting, you caught me off guard with the design. After the first battle I thought it would be rote and repetitive, but in the following battles you quickly showed that there was in fact, going to be a lot of intention in the stage/battle design. Some of the patterns I saw in the game were quite clever and fun to navigate through. The bullet hell dodging wasn't the only cool thing. You clearly put a lot of effort into the worldbuilding and it shows. There's a pretty clear line between the peaceful running around and the intense battles so it's interesting to jump between that a lot. Like others said, some of the extra running around hurt, though it turns out I ran around way more than I should've only because it took me a little bit to figure out how the echolocation worked. Probably wouldn't have been as bad if I picked up on that earlier. Definitely a very impressive effort for a compo game, I doubt I could pull something like that off that fast. Great job :) |
| Apr 11 22:20:06 | 25m 52s | Hold The Line | ♥ 3 | Excellently balanced gameplay! The RPS aspect is pretty obvious as to what you should be doing. That gets you over the initial hump of getting into the game. But the REAL juice is figuring out *exactly* how many units you should be placing to conserve your resources. That, in addition to fact that you can run into army sections that field multiple units, results in a surprisingly high skill ceiling for such a simple mechanic. I honestly think you can take this concept a lot further. This is a good game to reference for campaign ideas if you decide to do a full version: https://armorgames.com/winter-falling-price-of-life-game/18961 |
| Apr 12 20:58:43 | 22h 38m | Stone Sabbath | ♥ 1 | One of my my first impressions was "whoa, there's a lot of content in this game", especially by the time I ran over to the tent/marketplace area. Indeed like others, I noticed that kiting was an option, and in a sense that was the real Delay the Inevitable for me. I have to say, I am terrible at Dark Souls games, so when I was able to down the big guy in the beginning I felt ecstatic. So thanks for the confidence boost :) Another thing I really liked was the oddly creepy atmosphere. It actually starts with the dancing circle setting up the stage, and then you start seeing the other villagers aggro you later on. I was surprised at that feeling and I think it was a combination of level design, art, and music. Great job on being able to run such a massive team for LD! I used to do this myself so I understand how much of a nightmare it can be too coordinate all the moving pieces. The gameplay is solid and I didn't notice anything that stuck out sorely. |
| Apr 12 21:12:46 | 14m 03s | Hydroponica | ♥ 1 | You know, it's funny you brought up idle games on my page, cuz I was viewing your game as an idle game too! I know it's more of a simulation, but I felt like the clicking to remove metal + buying machine generators was actually the same sort of economy you might see in one of those games. There were some runs where I just sat back and stared at the plants taking over. It's actually a little unfortunate the primary, initial strategy is to build machines away from the plants because you don't get to watch the plants grow. Though now that I come back to the comments section, some people were actually using them to block the plant grow which was something I definitely hadn't considered. The system itself is pretty clever, with different interactions between the plants and machines on multiple levels. This allows for depth and flexibility of how you want to play. Ultimately I think this game's strength is in its incremental visuals. It's a joy to see the system grow and be self-sustaining........until it's not lol. I certainly couldn't keep it going for a terribly long amount of time, but I could still see where the design shined. Great job and clever idea! |
| Apr 14 21:23:14 | 48h 10m | Somnipathy | ♥ 4 | A game about revenge bedtime procrastination, definitely a really unique concept I haven't seen this jam even though it's probably something we've all done a bit in our lives! I think the threat of the monster was a necessary ingredient to making the whole game work. It needed to be visually scary, and it needed to do a fair amount of damage once it hit you. This added to the perceived difficulty of the game and immediately makes you stop playing lazily. I thought the gameplay worked very well as a result. It's sorta a logistics game where you have to quickly figure out how many phones you can grab, if you should pick up any energy boosters through your route, and most importantly, can you do it without getting tagged by the monster. Since you have lots of rooms, each serving as its own puzzle, the game kept me really interested from the variety of layouts to consider. Some of them were especially interesting like one that was shaped like a 3-pronged fork, with phones in each prong. I'm a little glad you were generous with the energy boosters as it let you take your time more if you want. I personally just blitzed through the stages if I could, resulting in leaderboard 40 which probably isn't great lol. Anyways, I think the concept works pretty well and the monster chasing you is the highlight and is implemented well. Gratz for fielding a big, solid team and managing to rate so many games with meaningful feedback and not just spam! |
| Apr 14 21:57:42 | 34m 28s | Carrot Grove | ♥ 3 | Doh! I didn't see the best ending tips until I came back here. I had the book of notes filled and thought I had every item so I just went for it (turns out I was missing the key piece of mead anyways which I don't think I would've ever naturally stumbled upon without a hint). I'm not a VN savvy person and now I know I really should've saved before starting the ritual... I did play it a few times trying to to solve the mystery though. I didn't know what to expect coming into the game, but when I saw the map and especially once I got quizzed and understood the game structure I started to pay extra attention. I thought the game was quite interesting in how you could get conflicting pieces of evidence in your notes, so you had to pay special attention to the dialogue to figure out who was lying or not confident in their answers. So my takeaway from this game was its concept of being one of those logic-lying-puzzles mixed with a VN and the result was a lot more entertaining than I expected. Coupled with an unfolding world it was need to explore and learn not just about the new characters, but ultimately the clues they had for the ritual, forming a longterm goal to think about the whole time. Awesome concept and pretty innovative! |
| Apr 15 21:24:54 | 23h 27m | Super Mowser Bros | ♥ 3 | A very fun presentation that practically demands a click. The concept is immediately engaging and a fresh take on a formula we all know. The concept was very unique and I struggled to understand what to do on first playthrough. Honestly that's not bad though, as the 2nd playthrough went very easily and I was outpacing Bario by 2 or 3 screens without a sweat. Honestly for a jam, even though you got a lot of comments about how easy it is, it's probably better to have that than the other way around so that people can experience all your content, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. It felt really good to upgrade buildings, especially castles to gain slots. I skimmed the comments but I don't see anything talking about the enemy types - I couldn't tell the difference between the different workers/tokens at all. I ASSUME the evolved ones were better than the mushrooms, but when I stared at them in action, I couldn't actually figure out any differences. Can you explain what the differences were here? Overall the game was very interesting and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the feeling of building out the world map, which is something we've traversed through many times from the opposite angle. I like how much potential this game has as a post-jam thing as well. Great job! |
| Apr 21 00:33:08 | 123h 08m | The Inevitable Relay | ♥ 1 | Wow! This relatively simple mechanic actually has a lot of interesting consequences to it which were super fun. My first run was a somewhat disaster, but at that point I realized how precious every decision was. 1. Jumps needed to optimized. Afaict, jumps do take extra energy? So anywhere I could get away with a single jump vs a double jump, I went for that. 2. Never leave a person topped off. That's just wasting energy that could be regenned, so you had to juggle people around. 3. Frankly, you just couldn't miss any jump. There's this really harrowing jump at the bottom left of the map that I probably missed 6 times and I was just sweating the whole time watching my bars drop to nothing. Fortunately, those misses weren't toooooo terrible and I still managed a decent score: asdf.PNG It was a relief to see the map loop. The reason is because I was thirsting for HP, and once I saw all the familiar gem locations, I could play fairly optimal because I already had practiced those jumps. In general though, this concept is hilarious with the 2 segways which drew me in, but I stayed for the gameplay which imo, has some serious legs to it. Awesome job :) |
| Apr 21 17:10:10 | 16h 37m | Board to DEATH | ♥ 1 | Just when you think every chess variant has been done, you see something like this. I really enjoyed this game, AND it winds up being a great teaching tool for teaching coverage and territory control in the actual game. Around stage 9 when you introduce the baiting is when the formula changes up quite a lot. It certainly made it a lot more difficult to play, but I think it was quite needed since otherwise you'd mostly have to rely on adding more enemies or something. A nice ending to the game since the skeleton has been staring at you the whole time and you sort of forget it being in the background, and a perfect way to tie it back to the theme. Very cool game. |
| Apr 21 17:27:19 | 17m 09s | Eleventh Hour | ♥ 2 | IMO, the sun-as-the-timer alone warrants noting. It was such a nice way to tell when you would need to time travel, although since it's not totally precise, I would often just time travel probably unoptimally just to be safe. But it sorta had the dual purpose of visually brightening up the scene, but also giving you a visual sense of relief as the timer now retreats back into safe territory. The game was pleasantly challenging. I will say that on a wide monitor, I found myself turning my head quite often, but that should be a rare case for most players. |
| Apr 21 17:38:19 | 11m 00s | Healer's Handbook | ♥ 3 | Felt like I was playing The Witness on steroids lol. A seriously excellent game with a unique presentation. Basically every aspect of this game oozed originality and intentional design. I liked how progression was fast and apparent. That is, the player itself gains skill very quickly because the symbols are fairly easy to memorize over time, and your mouse speed starts increasing as well as you get used to the movement patterns more and more. I like how there was some mild decisionmaking to be had, usually juggling between choosing your most dire squadmate vs choosing someone with multiple of a debuff, thus making them an optimal choose. It does get easy once you figure out all of the above, but I have no issue with that since that's the reward for mastery of the game's skillsets. Music and gfx all solid. The UI, although VERY daunting in screenshot form, ended up being a breeze to learn. This is one of the coolest games this jam for sure. |
