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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		almost's comment
Oct 5 23:57:28		Crazy Ball	♥ 3	Score of 99. I died because a block fell in the middle and I became stuck on the left side. I guess I was probably supposed to destroy that block before it fell? It definitely was unexpected. Multiple balls is a nice powerup though sometimes I am greedy and miss them all instead of just catching one ball.
Oct 6 00:25:33	28m 05s	Timeslime	♥ 1	Very unique, and hard to wrap my head around. Negative points for misses feel pretty punishing, especially when enemies kill each other such that your old shot is now a miss. I got a score of 66 after I realized that I want to provide as few inputs as possible and just be sure to always end up where I started. Remembering which moves I made previously to know if I need to change anything is tough!
Oct 7 00:14:22	23h 48m	Lucky Lefty Lost In A Labyrinth	♥ 1	It's a neat puzzle game, but sadly I think it is better without the 10 second timer so that you can take time to think and take notes instead of being rushed to make a move and just remember which moves killed you on the previous attempt. It would also be nice if the snail was a bit more speedy.
Oct 7 00:34:13	19m 51s	Terminal Velocity	♥ 2	It's cool and I like the visual style of the lights in the winding tunnel and the floating lights in the menus. I noticed that there were a few cases on the leaderboard where someone with less distance or time had a higher score, so I was unsure of how score was calculated. I also noticed that score only went up when I touched a checkpoint. After playing I see the info in your game description here but it might have been nice to know in-game. It felt good to get into a rhythm and stay at full speed for a long time. Some of the spinning obstacles later are pretty tough to time, which is fine I suppose since difficulty is supposed to ramp up. I found the dodge a bit disorienting so I didn't use it too much. I think it would have been neat if it caused you to drive on the ceiling instead of spinning your camera so that you are on the bottom of the track, but that might have been disorienting as well for different reasons. I made it to the top 10! For now, anyways.
Oct 7 02:50:15	2h 16m	Auto Parker	♥ 3	A simple but unique concept well executed! I found the numbers on the ground very helpful, though I was a bit unsure initially if this indicated my position at the start, middle, or end of the second. It took me a little bit to realize for the last level that there were speed bumps messing with the timing, and that super-sharp turn in the previous level was a challenge as well.
Oct 8 01:17:33	22h 27m	10-Second Magic Artist	♥ 1	A really neat use of the technology! I felt a bit rushed by the client but I think that is part of the fun. There were a couple of times where it seemed like the text prompt was too specific and so several elements of the drawing were lost. For example for "The Kraken Arrives" I drew a lot of boats and docks but the prompt didn't mention them so the AI turned them into tentacles lol. I think it might have been nice if the text prompt to the AI was more specific like "Kraken attacking boats in a shipyard".
Oct 8 15:45:08	14h 27m	Cubical Mayhem	♥ 2	Pretty chaotic initially with the pressure of the rows changing while I am just trying to figure out what the buildings do and trying to read all of the different parts of the UI. But I eventually realized the board is a cube and so it is ok to have building be rotated away and I just focused on producing lots of resources and made it to space. UI at the top indicating the production rates for each resource was helpful to determine bottlenecks.
Oct 8 19:32:58	3h 47m	HURTEC	♥ 4	I accidentally clicked past the instructions for the binary sequence and was confused why I could no longer shoot but I eventually figure it out. Satisfying when you get a big shot, but I was confused about why some were super homing and others didnt home at all, though in hindsight maybe it needs a full 10 of some stat in order to home and I was afraid of dying so often fired at 7 or 8 of each stat. For the later 10 second cycles, I often could not tell whether I died from damage or the time ran out or what as it just starts another 10 second battle.
Oct 8 20:02:57	29m 59s	Relay PeaJay	♥ 2	My best score was 95.8 seconds and 11/13 checkpoints. I got 10.2 on the track right after the "unlimited dashes" and something like 15 on the final section. It's pretty fun when you go fast, though I did a decent amount of crashing with the dash. I like the audio and visual feedback for jumping and dashing. I think it might have been nice if some of the walls were slopes instead of square tiles so that there are fewer corners to bump into as you are dashing diagonally. That one bird who is stuck is pretty troll lol, just there to bait me into an awkward spot.
Oct 8 22:04:03	2h 01m	Holospecter	♥ 3	At the point where the game says "Special" I had to mash the keyboard to figure out what key it is, and the same with the dash. WASD shift spacebar and F is really crowded on a keyboard. Ideally all of the non-movement keys are far enough away that I can play with two hands spread out. And then with two hands on the keyboard, needing a mouse to retry after dying is awkward. I also would have liked if the stealth power recharged faster while not in use (so 10s to run out, and 2s to refill). There is one level part where you need to fall through a small gap and then dash before landing, and I failed a couple time before I realized that the dash button only works if I provide a horizontal input. Anyways, those complaints aside, I quite liked the game. I think the art style is great, and I like that you have a bunch of background art decoration while still having very high contrast and clarity for interactive elements. The invisible visual effect is pretty cool. I enjoyed the platforming and did manage to beat the game in the end.
Oct 8 22:21:48	17m 45s	The Goose Bureau	♥ 3	There was some weird vsync issue where if I move my camera I can see that the top half of my screen refreshes before the bottom half. Also the text on postits at the start was really hard to read from a distance. I liked the music and the visual effect when dashing, it made me feel fast and cool. Bouncing off of the spring platforms was also quite satisfying. Restarting the entire level instead of having checkpoints after each challenge was annoying. I solved most of the puzzles in the "big" level (abut 80% through the game based on icxon's video), but then I got kind of stunlocked on some cones after failing a dash and bounced from cone to cone and died, and I dont want to do have to do it all gain from the start.
Oct 8 23:12:46	50m 58s	Game Name	♥ 3	This was really cool, and some nice polish for a bunch of the minigames. Some minigame specific feedback: The sleep minigame was confusing the first time that I encountered it, and pretty difficult in general. I was able to get great or perfect on most things, but I really struggled with the later design levels, as there is just so much stuff to place and I sometimes pick up a different item than I thought because they overlap. My favorite minigame was bugfixing where I got to go nuts with the hammer lol. It would have been really sweet if the image that I drew for the art challenge was used in the level-design and playtest challenges. Here is my final score, which I assume is based on how well I did in the minigames: game dev game score.png Though other than art and audio, which minigame contributes to which score? And is overall rank #6 based on an actual leaderboard? Either way, I'm pretty happy with the score :)
Oct 8 23:44:11	31m 25s	CRAVE	♥ 2	Kind of cool, but it suffers from the fact that my objective is to survive and chicken's egg ability is an easily obtained renewable source of food. I went exploring to discover creatures and try out their abilities, but it was way easier to survive as a chicken than as any fancy enemy. I didn't make it to the volcanic or void biomes from your screenshots, but I think I saw the others. The on-screen text and UI was pretty small, and I think "eating" has a range that is not visually indicated, but aside from that the mechanics were fairly intuitive.
Oct 9 01:00:31	1h 16m	BeaT-Rex	♥ 2	The game is really cool. I wish I knew what more of the powerups did, or had more time to think about the powerups. A couple of times I was choosing between icons that meant nothing to me and ended up not getting anything at all because the chest despawned just before I could click. On my first run I missed a few powerups and was pretty weak. In my second run I got a fireball, but blue and yellow were never offered. In my third run I got lighting and a lightning cooldown upgrade early, and with that I was able to live for a long time and get lots of powers and upgrades. There were a lot of icon combinations that were unclear to me: sword + rotate, sword + arrows, sword + sword, fireball + sword, blue + sword, blue + arrows, 3 fireballs, lightning bolt with diagonals, and so on. I'm guessing that some were damage upgrades and some were size upgrades, but each one was confusing the first time that I saw it. I thought that fireball + sword would make every sword attack shoot a fireball. I thought sword + sword would be a bigger sword but now I think it must have been damage instead. The visual style is great, and I liked that audio changed with each zone while still having a core beat that helped with timing my own attacks and enemy attacks.
Oct 9 01:53:59	53m 28s	Poda Wants a Statue	♥ 2	180 years on my first try and 132 on the second. It's a cute game, and I like that I can get a bunch of upgrades to make things go faster. Poda causing bunnies to drop resources was annoying later on, as there were so many bunnies and resources that my mouse couldn't keep up. Though I did realize a little bit of optimization is possible where I can force bunnies to drop resources and carry them myself (but too much work to do that after the early-game)
Oct 9 04:06:02	2h 12m	Empire Under the Clock	♥ 2	@juxipolo I encountered a lot of the same confusion as pkenney. I was especially stumped by not knowing how to settle a city. It showed me all of these places that look settlable but the city was not settled, and the tutorial didn't seem to be giving me any new instructions on how to do it. After reading your comments I realize that I needed to recruit some soldiers and move them into empty territory in order for it to become settlable. You might want to copy paste all of the info from your reply to pkenney into the game description in order to help other new players. Another huge point of confusion for me is what to do with my resources. Is food consumed over time? Are smiley faces population or happiness? I don't see any cost indicators for recruiting troops or settling cities, or any of the other buildings. Probably a good way for the game to communicate some of this info would be that if the player tries to perform an illegal action like settling outside of your territory, the game could say why it is not possible "You can't settle outside your borders" or "You need more food to do that" or "You are already at the population limit"
Oct 9 04:38:58	32m 56s	Police Mayhem	♥ 0	Going flying off of small ramps is pretty funny. I think it would be cool if you make it so you can spin or flip in midair to do tricks. Maybe maybe it a rocket-powered car so you can steer even while in the air.
Oct 9 17:03:09	12h 24m	The Many Short-Lived Adventures of a Box	♥ 2	There were a few relatively small things that I think could be improved Several of the powerups were not very clear about what I just obtained. It might have been nice to have a text popup say "Opened a door" or "Gained double jump". It would be nice if the 10 second timer didn't start until the user enters an input. As is I often lose a half second while I am trying to figure out which way to go. Additionally, if I was holding right as time reset, it starts me out stationary and I have to let go of the right arrow before I can press it again. Sometimes I mess up the first second of a run and have to wait for a reset before I can try again. It would be nice to have a button like R to immediately trigger a reset. I managed to complete it, and I think there's some nice potential in figuring out where to go and in getting good enough to platform quickly to each of the objectives.
Oct 9 17:17:04	13m 55s	DEEP DIVE	♥ 1	Pretty cool! One minor annoyance is that there are several things to pay attention to at once when each round starts. Sometimes when I was reading the story text the numbers would disappear before I memorized them, or enemies would kill me. I liked the dodging and shooting, and I liked that if I run out of time I just have to wait a bit for it to become my turn again.
Oct 9 17:30:15	13m 11s	Pet the Damn Cat!	♥ 1	My first two tries I failed very quickly while just trying to figure out the controls for each minigame. On my third try I managed to finish the day. I never figured out how to tell which part of the cat it wanted me to pet, but in my successful run I always pet the head and I did so with a large mouse motion so maybe it just counted as petting the whole cat. It's pretty stressful trying to satisfy this employer and cat!
Oct 9 17:42:59	12m 44s	Tower of Kraduul	♥ 2	Pretty unique mix of card game + autobattler. I really wish I could see health bars and damage numbers, especially for the enemies. For example, I want to know if the 25 damage laser will kill my own units, or if it will kill the enemies. And I want to know how much attack each of the enemies has. Little floating numbers whenever damage is dealt and health bars with little ticks for every multiple of 5 would probably be sufficient.
Oct 9 17:58:08	15m 09s	Moirah's Manor	♥ 3	The audio and visual mood at the start is great. A couple of times you see a 2D image from the side which is really jarring. It happened to me when interacting with the first door and when I saw the ring spinning. If using 2D art like this, I think keep it facing the camera. I had a really hard time navigating the building. Doors on side walls are hard to see, and in the dark even the walls are hard to see. Is the idea of the theme that I can only use the light-ring after a 10 second cooldown? If so, this was kind of annoying, because it meant I either keep bumping into spiderwebs and rats in the dark, or I keep going afk for 10 seconds while I wait for the cooldown. I opened the first door which has three buttons via trial and error. I wandered in the dark for a while and found another door with 5 colored buttons but couldn't figure it out and didn't see any clues nearby, and I eventually died from bumping into rats too many times. I tried again and found some paths to the right that I had totally missed including the numbers for the first door, some math equations with no context of where to use them, and the second item whose purpose I have yet to discover. There are probably some other paths available to me but I got lost in the dark. Given how large the building is, a map of where you have been might be helpful, or even just try having fewer paths and smaller rooms. You could also try to change the layout so that doors always go up and down, instead of left and right.
Oct 9 18:44:38	46m 30s	Tecton Inc.	♥ 0	A simple concept, but a very slick presentation, I appreciate all of the little audio and visual polish. I liked that you could see little shadows in the lava when the cats hide there, and I appreciated that I get a bit of warning when my feet are on fire before I die. On my first attempt I died almost immediately but then I saw that the text mentioned a jetpack so I tried some buttons and found that I did indeed have a jetpack, which helps a lot. After I also realized that I can scare the cats with small jetpack hops, I was able to survive relatively easily. I got to 1000 points and think I could go on forever if needed. Carrying a stack of 20 diamonds looked kind of funny but it was very satisfying when an opportunity presents itself to cache them all in.
Oct 9 20:56:50	2h 12m	Room Again	♥ 2	Pretty cool game. I was confused a couple times about what I was supposed to do with some of the later items, but I managed to work through the possibilities and escape eventually. One little thing that annoyed me was that using the glass shard on the windows seems to cause it to cease to exist, and I did this on accident a couple of times since I wanted to "pick up a glass shard" and didn't realize that it had automatically picked one up already. I thought the stool code was a hint for some puzzle but it seemed to be unrelated. The art style is quite good, and it reminds me a lot of Don't Starve. 10 seconds worked out to be a pretty good amount of time for your level design, where as long as I planned out my actions I was able to do everything with a second or two to spare.
Oct 9 23:48:40	2h 51m	Sweet Seconds	♥ 1	Nicely done! It started out simple enough but got pretty hectic with multiple orders and cooking techniques. Mouse-only and the gentle music made it fairly relaxing. I was confused each time a new type of food appeared and I had to click around until I figured out how to make it, but it wasn't too bad. Failing to unlock an upgrade feels pretty bad, as you know that later levels will be harder without the kitchen upgrade, so you are pretty much forced to repeat the same level. I downloaded and played the original version, and I got upgrades for the first 7 stages, but failed the 8th stage, and I figured at that point I had seen most of the game, so I didn't bother to retry stage 8. So many customers want hotdogs :O
Oct 12 02:33:20	50h 44m	Lavalette	♥ 2	The tutorial seems to be bugged sometimes. It rejected a bunch of valid matchings (like grass to grass) and so I started brute forcing positions and rotations and it accepted this: mismatched tiles.png Anyways, I've played Carcassonne, so the idea is intuitive enough to me. I found that by making skinny paths I had plenty of tile edges available and could go on indefinitely (though the small tiles became harder to see). I wonder if a finite board might be better, as it would force me to think a bit more about how to use my tiles more efficiently. Here's what my board looked like when I chose to stop: lavalette.png Edit: Oh, after I read your description again I realize that there is a score incentive to complete cities, and the table is finite, which is good. But the table is still kind of huge, I was able to place a ton of tiles without even realizing that the edge of the table was a game mechanic.
Oct 13 02:12:41	23h 39m	Out Of Memory	♥ 2	The idea of the game and puzzle setup is pretty good. I like that you have multiple robots so you can choose which robot performs a given action and you can coordinate their timing. You did a pretty good job of having levels that make use of this. Most of my feedback is about the UI: - The visual selection for selecting units and controls is pretty subtle. I would prefer something like a huge green circle or glow. - I think drag and drop of commands into slots would be more intuitive than click to select and click to place. - It would be nice if the buttons for available actions was physically closer to the timeline of robot actions so that my mouse doesn't have to move as far. - Gray buttons looks like they are disabled. It might be good for 'Go' and other buttons to be green. - 'Keep Going' sounded like either "go to the next level" or "try this level again". It really surprised me when it continued the current level without resetting anything. I would recommend not even asking whether the player wants to keep going but instead have it happen automatically. - Cables and squares don't seem to do anything. I think it would be simpler to just have circles on the tiles that you need to press. As is it looks kind of like you are supposed to place square boxes on square tiles. - Since robots pick up and drop box in front of them, I thought the robot would hold the box in front of them while carrying it. So for level 6 I was worried about the lasers shooting my box if I stopped in front of a laser.
Oct 13 02:31:10	18m 29s	Smack Demon	♥ 2	Nice visual polish, I like that player, enemy, and fire all move a lot in order to feel alive. The difficulty is decent in that I have to put a bit of thought into my actions, but it's also pretty easy to take 0 damage if you are patient. At first I underestimate the shield since I thought even if I block the damage of an approaching fire wave I thought the ground would be on fire and I would take damage the turn after. But it destroys the fireball completely and it is pretty effective. I like the idea of alternating between offense and defense. I think it would be even cooler if the enemies chased you or unleashed stronger attacks during the seconds that they are invulnerable, so that you actually have to run away instead of just standing a few tiles away and hitting skip or shield until they are vulnerable again.
Oct 19 23:47:08	165h 15m	Big Block Mode	♥ 1	Could you rename the link to the itch page to clarify that it is the 1.1 version? The downloads are nicely labeled but I wasn't sure whether or not the itch link was to the original version. The idea of building a chunk and then adding the chunk as a single block to a persistent "main" scene is kind of neat. The fact that you create multiple chunks before placing them confused me as it seemed like it made things more complicated without really changing how I play. I never wanted to reorder them, and I always wished I could just place my big chunk right away. I had a hard time counting to compare distances between the current board and The Big Block board. The grid that you added in the postjam version probably helps a lot on that front. In addition to the 1x1 grid, it might be nice if the middle vertical gridline was marked in bold, or that I could measure distances like "1 to the right of the center" instead of "4 from the right edge". I often ran out of time without realizing how low the timer was. It might have been nice to have an audio clip play as the clock gets low, or maybe to put the timer at the bottom of the screen so that it is closer to where I am looking. I also think that I often ran out when trying to use S to move my block downwards faster, as it takes 2+ seconds even when holding S down. Given the 10 second time limit, I would like to be able to drop to the bottom with S in around half a second. One relatively minor thing is that sometimes when a block or chunk was near the edge of the board it wouldn't let me rotate it. Other than miscounting distances, I had fun and think it is a neat twist that changes how you think about the game. I really like that you can rotate your chunks as you are adding them, so you can assemble a big chunk with a specific shape on top and then rotate it 180 before placing it in the main scene so that it fits perfectly.
Oct 20 00:36:53	49m 45s	10-sec pause mania	♥ 1	I was very confused initially so I am just going to write down my thoughts as I play. I read the following: Every 10 seconds the crystals start their own actions They will keep doing their actions until nothing can move Push the crystal to the plus shaped target And then I see a yellow diamond and a white diamond. I thought a crystal would be white but when I pressed an arrow key it was the white diamond that moved, so maybe yellow is the crystal. I accidentally pushed the yellow diamond into the edge of the level and can't push it away from the wall so I guess I messed up, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. I reloaded the page but I see now from the description that R resets a level. It might be good to put the "R to restart" on screen when the player is in a stuck state. On my second try of the level I walked around the crystal and started to push it to the right, but at the 10 second mark it moved up, and as far as I can tell the level is now impossible. I don't know why it moved up. I tried restarting the level and pressing nothing but "wait" to see if it was imitating me but it still moved up. I noticed that the top pixel of the yellow diamond is brighter so maybe it just always tries to move up, so I pushed it down and figured it would just move up a single time, but it moved all the way up to the top of the screen. So I tried standing above it and then waiting and this worked, and I finally completed the first level on my sixth try or so. I think it would be nice if the first level was designed such that even if the crystal move is not expected, it won't cause me to be completely stuck. For example, if the crystal moved up and the goal was at the top of the screen, that would be ok. After this I was mainly able to figure things out for all of the later levels. Though I think it is odd that when two crystals see each other they stop while there is still a 1-tile gap between them. Even weirder to me is that a T shape of birds resulted in none of them moving into the tile that is in between them all. Air block is a very difficult level. The level after it that introduced spikes was a nice difficulty, and then the one after that was very difficult, but I eventually got it. For the next level after the two spike levels, I had an almost-solution that was 1 move too slow, and I chose to stop there. I think your game idea and puzzle design are pretty good. I would say just try to find a way to more clearly communicate the game mechanics at the start, or add a couple more introductory levels.