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Recher

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Recher's comment
Apr 5 20:58:37		Degrowth	♥ 1	There are explanations when you put the cursor on an icon or a value, but even with that, I cannot understand the global game mechanics and I ended not being able to remove any building. Also, I cannot determine if the game is real-time or turn-based. Does the game situation changes when you wait a little time ? (citizens going away, power supply reorganizing, ...) It's a nice idea, but the game is unclear for me.
Apr 5 22:24:22	1h 25m	Fire Hazard	♥ 1	456.16 seconds and one carpal tunnel ! I took a little time to realize there was 3 plugs and not just the one in the middle. I also took a little time to realize the fire meter decreases quite fast when nothing is plugged. So it's really useful to sometimes remove all the plugs, wait some seconds, then plug all you can do. For the sake of my carpal tunnel, I would have loved that the game could be played with 4 keys (one for each gun type), and not just the mouse. Having only 3 plugs and 4 type of monsters is a good idea, which keeps you on a constant stress. You are always wondering if your current plug config is the most optimized one. The monster characteristics (speed, frequency of apparition) are well-balanced and really different for each type, so that you know how to deal with them. The tutorial is quite confusing, because you "inevitably" lost it, and it does not learn you so much. I would say it's better to remove it. The "lore" is totally WTF (why are you in a company, why do monsters look like this, ...) so it's great. Funny little game overall.
Apr 6 11:39:08	13h 14m	Meteor Power	♥ 1	I agree with @lako , the interface suggests you that a level could be "finished" or "won", but it seems there is no such thing. We have to try to get the highest score, and that's enough. I did not believe the robots could make giant jumps until I clicked on a top platform. I like how they manage to path-find, wherever you click. It makes them more alive and more "independant". Like many other people said, controls could have been simpler. Click on a robot to select it, then click on a destination, or click on two stations to connect them. Click on another robot to change selection. That's all. The stations seems to be powered off or powered on, but I couldn't determine when. It does not seem to depend on wether it's connected or not. Nice music and graphics. The background deserved more variations. These two moons infinitely copy-pasted looks quite weird. Thank you for this cute game.
Apr 8 12:20:03	48h 40m	CABBAGE DEFENSE	♥ 2	Nice and beautiful game. Graphics and sounds are well-polished. I agree with all the points said by @vitor-milioni : more crop spaces (we could have to buy them in the game), repairable and upgradable turrets, more crop types. I did not understand the heal calculation. It occurs at each new day, but the quantity of HP healed is never the same. Is it just random ? It seems I heal more if I do not move during the night, but I am totally not sure of it. Some explanation on healing would have been appreciated. Growing a special crop that would heal you when you use it would be really cool. So that you would have to do a choice between money and HP. Complete randomness on the seeds you get when a crop has grown is not a good idea. I was frustrated not to be able to plant cabbage after my first harvest. Maybe a seed market, where you would exchange two wheat seed for one cabbage seed ? I never saw the knights stealing my plants, I just read it in the comments. I suppose it could be a strategy to not harvest one plant and let a knight go away with it, in order to save some hero HP and turret HP. I did not took time to test it. Thank you for this nice game !
Apr 8 21:42:18	9h 22m	Hyper Kremlin Bros. II Tournament Edition	♥ 1	A game with an "engaged" plot, which is a good choice. I agree with @skleembof : it's hard to evaluate how the game configuration will be after one move, and nearly impossible to anticipate two moves. I ended up pushing blocks mainly at random. Tile graphics are not very clear and do not help. It's like in the board game "Labyrinth". You can more or less anticipate the next game configuration, but not the next two ones. The intro screen reminds me of Tetris. So I was expecting more references to this game. The psychedelic and shakey visual effects are well done, but not really adapted to the game and the theme. I often misclicked the arrows because of the rotating effect, it was quite annoying. Maybe some Putin-related effects would have been better : dolphins, rifles, shirtless... (these are memes related to him). I was wondering if the game wouldn't be better with simpler tiles. Instead of big tiles with/without walls in the 4 directions, you could use little tiles which would be either a full block or an empty square. Then you multiply the board by 3 in width and height. Block pushes would be more predictable. Maybe Putin could move two tiles at each turn, to balance the fact that the board would be bigger. I think it's worth a try. Anyway, I liked that little moment of fun.
Apr 8 23:01:20	1h 19m	Deity of Jigsaw Puzzle	♥ 0	It reminds me of those games where you assemble spaceship parts and go fight or harvest meteorites. Here is an exemple of one : http://www.polygonpi.com/?p=1298 The concept is great, but would really need some balancing/buffing/nerfing. When I feel a game is to hard, I start to wonder if the problem comes from me and my lack of skills. But this time, I would say the problem comes from the game equilibration. - too much variety in the joint pieces. - durations too slow. - not enough chests on the map. All these problems have the consequence that there are very few possibility of puzzle piece assembling. My high score is 22 days, and that's really poor. It's terrible and frustrating to see all the pieces I have in my inventory, and to konow I can't use them because they do not fit. It's also frustrating to see all the pieces I managed to put on my core piece, then to realize they are all disabled because the only piece that connects them to the core just disappeared. You have the beginning of a great idea. Find more tricks and more mechanics to exploit it at its best, and you would have a complete great idea. You still deserve a high note in Innovation, because having a new idea that failed is better than having no new idea at all.
Apr 9 14:29:52	15h 28m	Brickroll	♥ 0	Aaaand that's one more carpal tunnel to replace ! Anyway, the idea is great, the ball powerups are great too. I just wished there was other mechanics or strategy than frenetically clicking where the ball will land. Maybe some power-ups for yourself and not for the "enemy" : auto-build, stronger bricks, larger pad, ball power-ups dispelling, ... Nice start, but too short. More please ! Achievements, quests, story, bonus, things to buy !
Apr 9 16:32:47	2h 02m	Keep It Warm	♥ 1	Inevitably dark and frightening. I liked it. It's the kind of minimalistic and emotional games that Anna Anthropy would like. (Not sure if it interests you, but I'm a fan of her). The particle effects of the fire and the chimney are nice, and suits the global graphic style of the game. Is there a way to go on the second floor and get the books and table that are in it ? I did not find any stairs nor ladders. Also, thank you for having compiled the game on many platforms, especially the web. I try to avoid downloading and executing random stuff from internet, even if they are games.
Apr 10 22:05:32	29h 32m	Sir Blocksalot	♥ 1	Beautiful pixel art. This is what pushed me to test your game. The retro sound is nice too. I can confirm there is a visual bug. hammer_visual_bug.png. When you die as you are holding a tetris piece, it is still displayed on the screen, but do not count as real blocks. We really need an explicit feedback at the end of a game : - show some score (how long have we played). - fix the bug and remove held blocks. - completely clear the boards. It's really weird that we keep rocks and bushes of our previous game. It would mean our high score of the current game depends on the previous ones. Currently, we sometimes don't event realize we started a new game. The knight is put back in the middle of the board and the castle is healed, that's all. It's really too bad because it removes the incentive to play "just one more time to see if I will do better". I'm sure I would have naturally played about ten more games if there was a clear separation between each game. It's hard to guess if the tetris piece we are holding can be put on the ground or not. And when not, it's hard to guess which part is blocking. Very often, I was clicking at random until I found a place to put my piece. Maybe the red squares that shows where your piece will be could change color to indicate if there is free room or not. Anyway, nice game. Thank you !
Apr 11 10:18:51	12h 13m	Super Crusher Fighters	♥ 1	Like many other people said, the UI to place crates is a mess. I guess it can be understood when you have time to, but not when a crusher approaches you. I got used to the UI by learning key combinations by heart. - To put/remove a crate : the key combination is X-Z-X. - To change crate type : the combination is X-up-wait-what-which-button-is-it-no-not-that-one-oh-sh*t-I-died. Then, the selected crate type is kept between two games, so you can now place the wanted crate by a classical X-Z-X. I would have chosen this key mapping : - up : jump. (isn't that natural for a lot of games ?) - X : put/remove normal crate - Z : put/remove super crate I didn't finished the game. It was too hard and too frustrating for me, because of all the problems previously told : messy controls, buggy teleporters, no possibility to immediatly restart a game. I didn't manage to figure out the cat movements. It does not seem to always follow the same wall. I would have loved to take time to understand it, but the crusher and the lack of pause urges you to try random things fast, instead of recover your calm and think about the behavior of the game elements. In this game, we have to be fast and have good skills in agility, and at the same time we have to be intelligent and find tricks to solve the puzzling levels. This is a horrible cocktail that rarely works in games. Your level design looks really good, and I'm sure some levels are really smart and well-polished. But all your efforts are spoiled by the frustration of having to be agile and intelligent at the same time. Maybe you could fix that by clearly choosing the type of each level : some are fast and skillfull, others are calm and need reflexion. The calm levels should have a very slow crusher (or even no crusher at all). To sum up : I did not really enjoyed this game. But I remember having played Antenna Antics at the previous Ludum Dare. You seem to regularly create NES games, and you begin to have a graphic and gameplay style of your own, which is interesting. I will definitely play your entries of the next Ludums, and I will try to find the time to test your previous entries. See ya !
Apr 11 17:09:05	6h 50m	Loading...	♥ 2	Nice frenetic shooter with a weird and uncommon scenario. The little gnomes inevitably remind me of the South Park gnomes who steal underpants. While I'm at it : what are gnomes doing in a computer ? The starting interface is great. You're not the first one to have this idea, but that's still a nice idea. I agree with @antti-haavikko about the bullet limit. It's a stupid concept that had the right to exist only with old systems which had memory limitations. If you want to limit the fire rate, add a cooldown (more or less long, as you wish), but no crappy bullet limit. This bullet limit thing just resurrected traumatistic memories I had when I was trying to beat the jelly-eyes boss in Super NES Demon's Crest... Sorry, that was unrelated. I did not realize killing gnomes lowers your score. I learned it when reading other comments. I thought the only disadvantage of gnomes was that they block your shots while dying, so I payed attention to kill them with only one bullet, but that was stupid. Maybe you should explain the gnome mechanics in the game description. There is too few features in the game to give me the incentive to play longer and beat a high score, but these 5 minutes of crazy data-shooting were pleasant.
Apr 12 16:21:34	23h 12m	Descending	♥ 1	It reminded me of the first Populous games. I loved removing the earth below the enemy people and watch them drown stupidly. I'm not sure to understand why, but if you put soil on the borders of the game area, people will automatically walk too far and fall in the water. If there is no soil on the borders, people kindly turn back when they reach the borders. So, we just have to be careful enough to put lands everywhere, except on the two border columns. As others said, we need a score. I would say that just telling how many times we managed to survive won't be a precise calculation. If you can last for one minute with only one people, you should score less than if you last one minute with two people. Maybe granting one point per second and per people alive would do a fair score calculation. Just to be fun and cruel, I would have loved to see the drowned people floating on the water surface like dead fish, then slowly going to the depths of the water. Nice game. Needs more mechanics to have the incentive to play and discover it for more than 10 minutes, but nice game anyway. I love the sprites from Pixel Frog, thank you for having made me discover this artist.
Apr 12 16:24:12	2m 38s	Alchemy	♥ 1	This game is a tribute to the "RTFM" acronym, which is amazing. I like the fact that you have to read the recipe and remember it by yourself. In every actual games (and also in many apps and many aspects of our lives), everything is guided, tutorialized, repeated, hinted to the max. In this game we have to learn instructions by heart, and it is frighteningly original. This obligation to learn by heart perfectly fits with the alchemy theme, where everything is mystical, magic formulas must be pronounced exactly as they are, and knowledge is transmitted by ancient means, without hard-disks or internet or whatever. About the UI, it could be a good idea to highlight the interactive object that the mouse cursor hovers on, and the interactive zones could be a little bigger than the object itself. It would remove any doubt about the fact that some objects are either not working or we are not selecting them properly. The demon manifestations are mysterious, the recipes are cryptic, the atmosphere is dark, all this deserves a 5/5 on mood. I totally imagine an ancient guild of alchemists relaying themselves in this laboratory, containing this demon for millenaries. They may have forgot the demon origin and how he could have been sealed in this place, but they still perform their duty and transmit their knowledge from generations to generations. I made it to the level 3, but the recipes needed too much speed execution for me. Anyway, I loved this game. Thank you !
Apr 12 21:35:57	5h 11m	Card O''Clock	♥ 2	The simplicity and depths of the mechanics reminded me of Arcomage. Your game is a sort of "one-player Arcomage against the time". Like many other people, it gave me this feeling of "just one more game". It's simple and efficient. I like the fact that at some moments, we have to think rapidly, and at other moments, there is nothing to do except waiting for a slot to become free. It provokes continuous switches between stress and idle, which are emotionnaly fun. I may be wrong, but I had the impression the cards "bank -> timer" and "timer -> bank" do not work, except during tutorial. When I put one of these cards, I expected the bank value to change (increase or decrease), but it does not happen. Don't know if you remember me, but I raided you on twitch while you were creating this game. :-) . Well, let's go, "just one more game".
Apr 14 16:58:58	43h 23m	CinderWoods	♥ 1	The idea of this game is simple and great. I somewhat had this feeling of "just one more game". But I could have it even more with some UI improvements. As @Yellowscope said, the game is tile-based, so the movements should also be tile-based. The hero should occupy only one tile. When I press a key, the hero should move exactly one tile in the specified direction. For the difficulty balancing, you could add a little movement cooldown between each moves, if needed. Sometimes, my position is exactly between two tiles. When I hit the space bar, the resource is not taken, and I stay blocked. cinderforest_fail_resource.png The problem is solved by just going a little up or down. But in the urge of building barriers and evading fire, I have no time to handle these movement glitches. These glitches would solve themselves if the game was entirely tile-based. It's hard to lay barriers where I want to. The barrier is put in the direction I'm facing. Usually, I place barrier between me and the fire. So I have to move slightly toward the fire. Sometimes, this little move makes me step on the next tile, and exactly at the same time, a fire is generated on that tile and I die. Laying barriers should be done by pressing the "B" key + the direction key where I want to lay it. So that i don't need to make a slight move. This problem is more or less related to the not-entirely-tile-based thing. The fire spreads quite rapidly, which is a choice of difficulty that I have to deal with. But the fire spreads without any warning. Very often I was at a distance of one or two tiles of the fire, and it immediatly spread to the tiles where I am. It's rather frustrating, it gaves me the feeling I died because of unluck and randomness, not because of lack of attention. Maybe, some seconds before the fire propagates to a new tile, you should show little harmless flames on the tile. So that I know I have to quickly go away of it. Speaking of fire, does it spread diagonally ? It seems so, but I'm not sure, as it's really fast for me. The sound is great, and we all love Whilhelm sound. But the sound played when a barrier is laid is too long. Hammering noises that lasts about 2/3 seconds, whereas we sometimes lay more than one barrier in one second. It sounds weird and it can break the concentration. The score calculation is well-thought. It is quite simple to understand, but it can provoke an "emerging behavior", where we are driven to contain fire as much as we can, to have more clean tiles that generate points, instead of just running away to survive as long as we can. All right... Just one more game, even if the movements are unpractical... See you next time !
Apr 15 13:14:35	20h 15m	The Gardener	♥ 1	Nice game in the genre "resource gathering and tower defense". Shooting debt collector with vegetables because of mortgage, why nobody thought about that plot before ? It's fun and serious at the same time. There are many types of terrain, enemies, resources and turrets. That's a fair quantity of game contents, which deserves more polished graphics. I guess you had no time to do more, but the plain squares representing grass, sand, water and rocks are really too bad. There is a little annoying glitch : the tile just below a resource is empty, but is not passable. Sometimes I thought I could go between those two rocks, and not. I had to harvest them to pass through. There is another glitch around the house. Some tiles looks empty, however we can't build or plant on it. Unpassable zones are a good idea. You should add in the map some dense resource patches, to force the player to harvest them to pass throug. Also, you could circle an onion zone with dense resources. So that we would have more a feeling of accomplishment when we manage to reach these precious onions. UI could be improved in some ways : I was expecting a selected tile to be deselected when I reclick on it, but it does not work. The only way I found to have no tile selected is to click on a resource tile, then harvest. When I'm exploring or thinking about turret placement strategy, I feel better when no tile is selected (call me weird if you want). As @Itskdog said : only one click on a resource should be required to harvest it. Executing a new harvest should be blocked while a harvesting is currently being done. When I'm harvesting my dozen potato tiles, I often miss some of them, because I execute my harvests too rapidly. Overall, a really nice and complete game, which gave me a great moment of fun. Maybe you should continue working on it !
Apr 15 21:47:19	8h 32m	Get Out Me Dungeon!	♥ 3	Nice catch on the "Dungeon Keeper" theme. Graphics are really cute. When I want to move a room, the drag-drop does not immediatly work. I have to click a first time, then re-click to do the drag-drop. I don't know if it is made on purpose. I would have loved to level up my creatures and my traps to a level higher than 3. That would give more choices : do I buy another room and another creature, or do I level up an existing one ? The user interface is not always clear. The logo on top of the screen, showing the degrees of mastery of the heroes, are not very clear. We guess there is one logo per trap type, and that they are in the same order than the buy buttons, but they are really too small to be distinguishid. I was always looking at the order in the bottom to have the correspondance. I'm still not sure of how to interpret the trap modifiers +2 / -2. Does "+2" means an advantage for the hero or for the dungeon master ? In short : should I put at the beginning the traps modified by a +2, or the traps modified by a -2 ? I would love a second episode, with a 2D game mechanic. Dungeon would be a grid, with many treasures on a border. One or more hero would spawn from the other border, and they would each have a different behavior (a trap type they love/hate, a preferred direction, ...) Thank you !
Apr 18 10:38:05	60h 50m	The Great Filter	♥ 3	Nice game and beautiful graphics. The intro image is a really good idea. It's a perfect compromise between a real intro in-game that would have taken too much time to do, and simple text dialogues in the game description that would have not pushed us in the story. All the elements in this image contributes to build the "game lore". As many other people said, the UI has some glitches. Here are some improvement propositions : - Selecting a first ship, then a second one does not refresh the ship info on the left. This is the main UI glitch thas confused us all. We have to deselect the first ship, then reselect the second one to have a complete updated UI. - We can deduct which ship is currently selected by the green-lighted hexagons around it, but it is not clear enough. Especially when ships are packed. The selected ship should be explicitly shown on the map, for example by coloring its hexagon borders with a light green color. - You don't need to describe empty space. We know what an empty space is ! It adds some useless UI showing/hiding when we move our mouse cursor near a ship. - The ability descriptions tells : "targets enemy ships". You should add : "targets adjacent enemy ships". One little word that would greatly help the new players who discover the game. - Ranged weapon seems to be blocked by game elements, but not the movements. (Or maybe only the movements of one or two ships among the three, I'm not sure). It has to be made clear, or at least explicitly told somewhere. But these glitches are not so important, compared to all the cool things in the game. The character design and their abilities/weapon immediatly makes us understand the behavior type of each ship : a short-ranged tank, a middle-ranged fighter, and a multi-purpose wizard. The difficulty and game speed is progressive and let us discover the game aspects one by one. It was really fun to hat-twirl these nasty enemies in the void ! Having the ships starting with no full health is a really good idea. It forces us to use even the first planets, and we imagine the ships had to suffer previous battles (one more little dose of game lore). I love the character animations in-game. Wraith is moving his/her strange eyes, that's cool. It's too bad that there is only one ship animation for every of their actions. Are they supposed to act the same when they attack someone and when they harvest a planet ? That's strange. The Gunship animation is particularly confusing, because it fires everywhere. At first, I thought the "Blaster" attack would touch all the adjacent enemy ships, but that's not the case. Please, show our score at the end-game screen ! I was quite proud of my game and all my heroic actions, but I can not tell you how heroic they was, because I do not know my final score. One last thing : Why is it called "The great filter" ?
Apr 18 18:00:42	7h 22m	Colony Defender	♥ 1	At my first try, the game ended abruptly while there was still escape pods going to the exit, and there was still humans in the main base. Did it end because of a limited time ? Because the main base was destroyed ? I don't know. At my second try, all the escape pods I sent went through the exit, there was no human in the main base. Only turrets were left. Once again, the game ended abruptly without any reason. I was imagining these last humans, inevitably lost inside their turrets. I wanted to see them fight to the last of them. Not for surviving, but to make sure the escape pods would leave in safety, and for revenge, and for honor. I wanted to see the main base finally destroyed by all these evil enemy ships. But I had nothing of that. The game just ended and I was disappointed. You could have displayed some story texts each time an escape pod goes to the exit. For example when you save 60 humans, the text tells : "all the families who have children have been saved". Then, after 200 humans : "all the civilians of the base have been saved". You could also add some ironical text. After the first pod escaped, you could display : "All the richest people of the base are safe, they are happy and they thank you !". I thought escape pods could be attacked, so I built turrets all along the path to the exit, but it was unnecessary. Escape pods can only be momentarily blocked by enemy ships. That would have added more depths to the game if escape pods were vulnerable. Then I would have to make more difficult choices : "Do I launch a pod now, as I'm not sure they will survive ? Maybe I should launch it later, but the situation may be worse, or the base may be destroyed." The attention I had to give to escape pods was quite limited : when the button "escape pod ready" is available, I click on it. I read the previous comments. People who spammed lots of turrets because they have lots of coins missed the purpose of the game. We have to put as fewer turrets as possible, in order to save as many humans as possible. However, even with this game mechanic, the coins are still earned too fast. Very early in the game, we have so much of them that we don't have to make the choice between turret types. We always choose beefy and expensive tier-2 missiles. The 3D is beautiful and well done, but is totally not used. The game mechanics just use a 2D board represented in 3D. I put turrets inside rocks, and also turrets colliding other turrets. Maybe these bugs would not have happened in a real 2D board. Your game is built on an original and frightening idea : the choice of sacrificing humans in turrets, to save other humans. It's really interesting. But I'm sorry to tell you that your game misses lots of opportunity to force us to make difficult choices, and to have emotions and empathy toward those humans to save.