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the neon shark

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		the neon shark's comment
Apr 3 17:53:24		Delay Ludum Dare (Browser Extension)	♥ 0	Very meta! I love it.
Apr 4 04:29:31	10h 36m	a	♥ 1	I really enjoy this! I had to play about 10 times to get past the early game difficulty spike in to a stable loop. Once I got there, the game because too easy and the felt more like a traditional cookie clicker where I couldn't quite lose. The good: Clever idea and well executed overall. Had me hooked trying to make it a bit further in the game's progression. The music was also a big win here :) The bad: The game's balance felt off. This is the nature of game jams I suppose, but it hurt my enjoyment of the early game. Also, the default x1 speed was wayyyy too slow. I had to play at x5 to tolerate. The graphics also could've use some love, but I suppose they provide a sort of charm as-is haha. Great work!
Apr 4 14:26:07	9h 56m	Anonymous VS Death	♥ 1	I had to click around a bit to get the game running, but once it did boot up it ran fine. I like the simplicity of the game loop and mechanics, but I had a hard time connecting with the physics/controls and the UI was rough. For physics / controls, I found that everything felt too floaty, especially my player character. Walking and jumping around felt difficult to get good player placement. In a game that is heavily position-specific, the feeling of running and jumping around is the most important thing to make feel great. The other issue I had was "knowing the health of things". I had died several times after blowing up the special boxes, but I wasn't sure why? It simply says "You died :(". This would be fine if I had a health bar that was ticking down or something, but I couldn't find such a thing ⭕️ Ironing out these two things would make a big difference. Nice work on this project!
Apr 4 14:40:14	14m 07s	John The Icecube	♥ 1	Excellent work! Melting is right on theme. The recipe for this game feels pretty traditional with the twist of it being timed. The humor is AMAZING. I love the little phrases from the Ice Cube character between checkpoints. Some constructive points here would be: 1. The jumping power meter doesn't give me a great sense of power. Consider having the animation get longer instead of wider as you're charging up the jump. 2. Clipping an edge with your square face was very awkward since it killed all momentum instead of bouncing you backward. Without some more ricochet physics, you're forcing players to hop away from the wall instead of introducing a fun mechanic where you can bounce against them. 3. The first room was WAY TOO HARD. After I made it out of the first area, the rest seemed much easier haha. Don't scare new players away with an difficult first room (unless that's the game's style). Putting a couple more snow flakes in that first room would solve your problem without requiring a level redesign.
Apr 4 15:01:57	21m 43s	Delay the inevitable deforestation	♥ 1	Nice idea for a game here. I have some suggestions and some questions :) 1. The bucket's state should be 10x more obvious. It was hard to know if I had water or not or if I had splashed it on something successfully. The splash/usage of water has to have a juicy animation to convey that it has been spent (and where it was used). 2. Why do I need to pick up the bucket? Can't I just start by holding it? 3. Are the upper platforms relevant? I found myself running around only on the ground. Great foundations here! Just needs a bit more polish to really hook me.
Apr 4 15:10:07	8m 10s	Pain survival	♥ 1	A classic style of top down shooter to fight for your survival. The controls feel good and the game runs smoothly. The audio for taking damage I found funny -- couldn't tell if the player was saying "oof" or "boom", but it was funny either way. What can be done better though? 1. There are way too many medicine collectibles. I had to actively try to avoid the medicine collectibles to lose. By making them more scarce, you make the game more interesting by forcing the player to go get one. The medkits were abundant too, but at least they only healed a small amount. 2. Enemy deaths should have a fun animation, even if it's just particles. 3. More weapons PLEASE. This sort of game really thrives on having many gun types. I only saw two and I think that's a missed opportunity. Nice work on this project.
Apr 4 15:24:01	13m 54s	Starline Rescue Squad	♥ 1	There is one obvious win in this game: It's funny. The instructions very casually explaining that the only thing to do is party while trying to survive jives well with the absurd visuals. While the graphics themselves are not amazing, the simple addition of everything pulsing to the beat brought this game up a couple of notches. It's definitely a bit irritating to look at on the player character, but the collectibles pulsing to the beat was definitely win. My biggest criticism is that the physics for flying around feel reeeeeaaally rough. I felt it was too hard to make interesting maneuvers reliably. Another thing is that the instructions should mention that you need to return to home base to get additional time (obvious in retrospect, but not obvious first time I played). Thanks for making this interesting piece.
Apr 4 16:47:34	1h 23m	Hack OR Die	♥ 1	Great idea, but I want MORE! The appeal of this game loop is excellent. The mechanics generally play nicely together, but the experience doesn't scale well past the first minute. 1. Once you have a steady income stream, then money doesn't matter. I became cash immortal within 40 seconds of playing. To fix this, the cost of items should go up over time. 2. When a node is depleted of cash or firewall, something should happen. A red node made it to $0 then just starting counting in the negatives... This was unexpected and sort of demoralizing since it felt like the game was broken. 3. The text didn't render very well on my screen so it was hard to read. Not a dealbreaker though. Thanks for sharing this.
Apr 4 22:12:01	5h 24m	RESET	♥ 2	This is an excellent short piece. The audio and narrative were perfect. The graphics worked in their own way and mechanics were tight enough to not be disruptive. The biggest suggestion I have for improvement is to make the intro dialogue way way way shorter. Just have Dr. Carl give me a 2 second rundown that we're going to reset the day and let me experience the rest. I only got addicted to the game once I made it through my first loop, but I almost gave up going through my first loop since there was too much reading to get the experience started! Overall GREAT stuff. Very eerie and well done :)
Apr 4 22:27:52	15m 51s	Birdless In The Zombie Apocalypse	♥ 1	Straightforward gameplay. Overall the controls and feel of the game were good. What I was craving the most in this experience was: - More weapons - Limitations on those weapons (ammo for guns or integrity for other weapons like bats/knives) - Something to do with the collectible coins... At least a counter (unless I missed it) - Different enemy behaviors. They would always follow you, so staying stationary and spamming attack would be sufficient to killing hordes of enemies. Their dead bodies would drop health on top of you. So ultimately I could play the game and survive while standing still! Nice work!
Apr 4 22:36:07	8m 15s	Inevitable Defense	♥ 1	The comms audio was great haha :) The game vision here is great, but I want MORE. It's easy to get worn out of this gameloop within just a couple tries. Some suggestions: 1. Turning around should be faster. Searching for enemies requires searching the map a bit, but then when you inevitably swoosh past them, it can take a few seconds to turn around. While I understand this may have been the intentional design of the game, it felt more frustrating than fun. 2. The alien's projectiles need more contrast against the sky, they were very hard to see. Again this could be considered part of the game's intention, but it felt more accidental. Make them a sharp red color instead of a transparent green would help a lot. 3. Give the player something to work towards. I felt weak and lame. Killing the enemies didn't seem to give me any new abilities or points in any way. A basic weapon upgrade system (even if it was just default weapon + homing missiles as specials) would go a long way at adding strategy and replay value. Thanks for sharing this project, it was fun!
Apr 4 22:44:21	8m 14s	The Greedy Pirates	♥ 2	Phenomenal idea and execution! Great way to take a typing game and give it some strategy and a fun story. I think my only criticism is making the problems that need addressing more "obvious". When water was filling up in my ship, I was like "oh no duh, gotta clear that out". But when I had some holes in my ship that were rather small, I just assumed I'd be fine? I wasn't fine haha. Essentially the only way to know that an order needed to be shouted was to start calling out someone's name and see if there were new options. Overall though, this is an excellent project.
Apr 4 22:56:00	11m 39s	The Death of Time	♥ 1	This game was challenging to play by nature of how fast everything was moving and because the graphics were sort of harmful to the experience. One thing I really liked is that the player's shooting mechanic didn't originate from the player, but rather from a floating drone nearby -- cool! Here's some suggestions on how to improve this game: 1. Remove all of the details from your graphics and make everything simple and solid colors. Make it easy to understand what the game elements are. The ground should be a simple single color. The background should be very muted colors (easy fix is to make it 30% opacity to get started). The regions where a player can fall to their death should be clearly visually marked. 2. The game should be a bit slower. It felt rapid and sporadic and hard to understand in its current form. Having everything be a bit small on the screen and slower would give some time and space for our human brains to understand what's going on (and then react and play the game in a controlled fashion). 3. Once those two playability improvements are addressed, the final step is to improve the user interface. The game seems to be designed for a 640x480 screen exclusively, so many of the UI elements on larger screens were visible "off screen". The game over menu was a dark red which made it hard to read, just make the text white instead. Thanks for sharing your work with us all!
Apr 4 23:02:14	6m 14s	PLOUF!	♥ 1	Game art style here is amazing! The use of profanity in the short narrative felt out of place and ultimately took away from the purity of this experience. Not a big deal of course and definitely it's the artist's choice to share the story that way :)
Apr 4 23:14:07	11m 53s	Don't Grow Up!	♥ 2	Concept here is great! But gameplay user interaction felt a bit bumpy. The game loop and abilities were funny, I think you're on track to build something very cool here if you take the game further :) My biggest calms with this are that using the abilities didn't feel good or tangible. Reading about them was fun, but I found running toward the stars with almost no combat seemed to get the job done usually (at least early on). An example of the awkward UX would be when I tried using the slip-n-slide ability. I pressed it and saw my selection area change, but then clicking in the new selection area didn't seem to do anything. I had a similar experience with a couple other abilities. Aside the UX hiccups, I really like what you've made here. Thanks for sharing this.
Apr 4 23:28:18	14m 11s	SHAMAN, DO SOMETHING!	♥ 4	This game has great potential, you should pursue a full game for this. What did I love? - This makes me think of the old classic game: Populous. Casting spells in a radius around your native tribe members is a great mechanic. - The spell casting mixing bowl was a nice touch to impact multiple tribesman at once. - The games theme and overall design were well made. What would I like to see done differently? - I spent the first half of the game not casting any spells because there was no instructions on how to do it. I pressed all buttons until eventually SPACE BAR made the difference. You must tell players to press space bar either in the instruction or in the game itself in the center-bottom of the screen: "Your spell is ready to cast. Press [SPACE BAR] to use!" - When the spells are cast, the tribesman should do something visually interesting. Right now, it's hard to tell if I've made any difference after the spell has been cast. The player needs visual JUICE to keep them going. - Finally, I had some tribesman just popping in and out of existence and I found that confusing. I wasn't sure if they were dying or just glitching. Overall, this is a really great game concept and I'd love to see it fleshed out to completion!
Apr 4 23:33:11	4m 53s	Stir Cry	♥ 2	All around great game! Many characters and weapons to choose from. Simple game loop with a fun twist on the theme. My only criticism is that my browser was struggling to play this for some reason, but that' probably a me problem :p
Apr 4 23:48:10	14m 59s	Colony Defender	♥ 6	Game idea is awesome, but as mentioned above, the balance was off. Some ideas for improvement: - When all my ships have escaped, take me to the Game Over screen with a report card. Currently, the game just keeps going and that's lame. - The different turrets should look different. I know this is a game jam and all, but at least make them different sizes and colors so I know what I've placed! Also, I had a hard time telling if they were doing more damage or not :/ - Building escape pods manually feels pointless right now, it should just be automated unless something changes in the game's design. Maybe they did cost something to build, but the currency system was so out-of-whack that I never felt poor. - Having an auxiliary competing objective would make this game much richer. Right now it's just "defend defend defend and crank out escape pods." But for the game experience to feel more rich, I need decision to make. The decision could be (e.g.) trying to move the main ship to mine new resources. This would force the player to think about their global turret layout and not just encircle one home base. It may also solve your infinite currency problem :) Thanks for sharing this, it was quite fun!
Apr 5 05:42:10	5h 54m	Detection Day	♥ 1	Interesting and creative! The concept here is quite fun and captures the theme's essence too. Your spectrum of upgrade/ability cards were super fun. Here's some constructive feedback from my playthrough: 1. The game is very lonely with no audio. A simple addition of music and some sounds on purchasing would help build the mood significantly. 2. The number of meteors became overwhelming too quickly. I felt that by the time I had one meteor arriving, there were already 20 more on the way. Maybe this is survivable, but it looked absolutely daunting and made me feel like I wasn't even close to surviving. This steered me away from wanting to play again. 3. The card upgrade system is a really neat mechanic, but I always felt poor. Maybe I was just mismanaging my money, but I found myself often with only ONE choice which makes this less of a game. Having two free fallback options could help here. Imagine "Run a campaign" and "Taxes" were two cards that were always available. This could let the player choose between a fallback option to gain currency vs. purchasing one of the more engaging cards (like buying a missile defense tower). Player agency is critical in a game like this! So just make sure the player gets to make some decisions even if they're broke :)
Apr 5 05:46:39	4m 29s	I Refuse to Hibernate!	♥ 2	Simple, cute, and fun! Great work on this. Losing is definitely inevitable in this game, so the theme is right on haha :)
Apr 5 05:53:40	7m 01s	Riftrunner	♥ 2	I like the core mechanics here, but I had a hard time controlling the character in a fluid way. - The jump mechanic felt inconsistent or sometimes unresponsive. - The teleport mechanic was awesome and responsive, but I'd lose so much speed that it wasn't really worth it. - I'd sometimes experience my character slowing down to a halt and seemingly having no way to recover from that. - I wasn't sure what to do with bullet time :/ Overall, I like the foundations you have here, but there's some more tuning necessary to make this really shine.
Apr 6 19:25:16	37h 31m	Entropy Rally	♥ 0	I wasn't able to successfully join a lobby and play the game! I like the idea of this online multiplayer experience, but it wasn't working for me :/
Apr 6 19:41:27	16m 11s	Blorbsitter	♥ 1	Fun and simple entry! I enjoy the fundamentals of the game loop here, but my blorb never got sick so I didn't get to experience it all. Although it stayed true to the Tamagotchi play style, I found it quite boring after a couple minutes. I suppose it's a rather "meta" experience though, since I inevitably left the game and my poor blorb will starve.
Apr 6 22:21:04	2h 39m	M.A.D - Maintain A Dictatorship	♥ 3	Well made game! I like the concept and execution overall. My biggest criticism is around knowing which police force is currently selected. Once I had multiple police, I was getting hung up on how to quickly select and move them -- I had the idea, but not the right support from the UI to execute. Some potential additions that would've improved my experience: 1. Make the currently-selected police unit highlighted. 2. Make selection hotkeys (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) for selecting the police troop instead of only click or drag. 3. Give some animations to juice things up. The "combat" of simply standing on top of each other was lackluster. Overall, great work on this, I enjoyed it :)
Apr 9 17:37:31	67h 16m	Definitely not Titanic	♥ 3	Easy to understand and easy to play. Fun little game that is definitely on-point with the theme. The music selections and cut scenes were excellent -- A great addition to the experience! Some potential adjustments: 1. Make it easier to understand where the staircases are. I found the transitions between the regions jarring / somewhat surprising even when I knew they were coming. 2. The hammer is a nice addition to the game, but I never encountered it :/ Would be nice to have that sort of upgrade be guaranteed at least once to expose the mechanic to players. Great work!
Apr 11 19:29:01	49h 51m	Fuse Lit!	♥ 1	Great vibe and visual style. Novel game mechanic and solid teaching moments. The main thing I didn't like was being unclear on how the fuse pushing works. Sometimes it worked as expected, but other times it wouldn't behave consistently (seemingly). This ultimately took away from me feeling like I was expressing my creativity while trying to solve the puzzle.
Apr 12 19:01:38	23h 32m	Foundations	♥ 1	Nice project! Great card game implemented digitally. The game's concept is quite fun, but I'm held back by the nuances of the User Experience. 1. Sometimes clicking on cards would select then rapidly deselect. This made basic interactions annoying. 2. Having to click to view next card on the deck was agitating. It added no value to the gameplay and could be short-circuited digitally by showing the next card automatically, then clicking the stack you want to place it on. This takes 3 mouse clicks down to just one for the build phase. 3. The gameplay itself was fun, though some visual hints of what valid options remain may have been nice (nitpick). 4. Finally, the game over screen felt like it was trying to force the theme on me by saying "THAT WAS INEVITABLE." I had that feeling all on my own without needing the game to bash me over the head haha :) Overall, nice work but please consider the user experience for games like this since they can make or break its addictive nature.
Apr 19 01:33:13	150h 31m	Embers	♥ 1	The style is great, but I sure would love to see a more rich interplay of mechanics. 1. It'd be nice to see the number of rounds remaining without visiting the fire. 2. Narratively, if I can walk away from the fire for a long time, why do I need this fire at all? 3. The controls felt a bit tricky on a hex grid. I wouldn't mind this if the game mechanics benefited from the hex grid though. 4. The game needs to force me to make a decision. Exploring randomly isn't a decision, it's busy work and will always lose its spark after a short run. A mechanic that balances the number of items collected vs the player's move speed could solve this. 5. Upgrades never hurt :)