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Aurel300

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Aurel300's comment
Oct 5 21:09:53		Lucky Lefty Lost In A Labyrinth	♥ 1	Interesting twist on a classic pen and paper puzzle ([train tracks](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/tracks.html))? The challenge is a bit unevenly distributed: the first ten seconds matter the most, to try to figure out the solutions, the rest of it didn't really matter. For that matter the snail/UI also felt a little bit slow once actually playing.
Oct 5 21:13:31	3m 38s	The Goose Bureau	♥ 2	Tenuous connection to the theme! The second level felt a bit Portal-y (as did the overall vibe and the sticky notes), the third one felt a bit too chaotic. Great music, nice puzzles.
Oct 5 21:18:14	4m 43s	UMBRELLA REVENGE	♥ 3	This looked and sounded really good! Reminded me a bit of The End is Nigh. The platforming has a bit less air control than I would have liked, especially given the types of levels you created. I was hoping for more of a plot resolution than "a nuke goes off", but why not :)
Oct 6 15:17:24	17h 59m	Swapwood Quest R	♥ 0	Nice, a very cleanly executed, polished game. Pretty pixel art (with unique enemies), nice music. Worlds 1 and 2 felt quite easy: I didn't feel there was much strategy involved other than match as many blocks as possible. Stage 3-2 felt like a very sudden jump in difficulty. Another thing to improve would maybe be the tutorial: it might have been nicer to force the player to acknowledge what is going on rather than just go with the timer as usual.
Oct 6 15:30:17	12m 53s	Thwack	♥ 0	It's a cute game, although I wish there was a bit more to it. The graphics, the legs, the overall design is nice and silly. The gameplay is quite intuitive but I don't know if it is particularly skill-based. With more ways to actually influence the way to ball goes etc this would make for a really fun 1v1 (local) multiplayer game.
Oct 6 15:40:26	10m 09s	Clockmachine Chaos	♥ 0	Very cute, I liked the minimalist vibe. The "conditions" on the platforms were clever. The platforming was nice (although there were some tight jumps in there), maybe the worst thing was to get stuck inside a platform even though it was just the legs that were stuck: unsatisfying!
Oct 6 15:58:58	18m 32s	Tecton Inc.	♥ 4	Screen Shot 2022-10-06 at 17.57.59.png Nice and simple, balanced well enough that it's probably possible to play forever :) I guess it would be interesting if there were further additions to the gameplay after a point.
Oct 6 18:01:04	2h 02m	autoball	♥ 1	Neat, feels like a twist to a clicker game. I like how the costs etc keep things in balance, although one thing that felt a bit frustrating is the longer the ball was bouncing, the less time there was to make changes.
Oct 6 18:22:17	21m 13s	Yes, Comrade.	♥ 1	Nice! If I have one gripe with this game it is that it is too slow. There doesn't seem to be much pressure to do anything once the order is given. On the other hand, misremembering anything from the call is very punishing.
Oct 6 18:31:53	9m 36s	Decrypt	♥ 2	Neat game. Tthe controls are not very enjoyable. I would have much preferred to write the letter on my keyboard, or to click the letters in order. Trying to drag them around, with no visual feedback as to where they will end up, did not work.
Oct 6 18:41:38	9m 45s	Hourglass Outlaw	♥ 1	Fun game! I found myself holding down the mouse button for most of the game, which was not very pleasant: maybe following the mouse pointer could be the default behaviour? I don't think I made use of the split fire very much anyway. Having a bit of warning for when enemies will arrive onto the screen would be nice. I figured out the mechanics as I was playing but the "tutorial"/intro text didn't explain things very clearly: for example, that the hourglass must be touched every ten seconds (at first I thought this was the "charge"), or that the hourglass can also be used to kill off large numbers of enemies.
Oct 6 18:53:26	11m 48s	DEEP DIVE	♥ 1	Nice game. The art is sparse but consistent, sort of minimalist. Music was also nicely moody. Gameplay-wise what I was missing the most is more/better control. I would rather shoot the bullets on click when I need to, not on an auto cooldown, and the bounces didn't seem to be useful. I also wanted to hear when the dash is ready (maybe to even see a timer for it), I didn't really feel like using it unless absolutely necessary.
Oct 7 10:12:17	15h 18m	Dr. Word's Machine	♥ 2	When I saw this on a stream, I instantly knew it was a game with Euler in the team :) Something about the very simple B/W graphics and heavy use of foley. It was a cute twist on a point 'n' click adventure: no pixel hunting, no attempt to explain something about an object, just the name of the object on screen. (Even so, words like "carpet" played with the format a bit.) For the most part, the puzzles were fairly understandable. Some were perhaps a bit surprising, e.g. that you need a hook for a hole, when that hole could have been any size really (why not climb into it? etc). I'm not sure how I feel about the 10 seconds to teleport. It puts some pressure on the player to remember what is on each screen, to try to quickly figure out what to do, which is fine. But once I knew what I was trying to accomplish, I found myself just waiting for the teleport to the room that I needed. A "skip to next room" would alleviate this, but I guess that could also easily be abused to basically stay on one room for a long time. 🤷 Anyway, nice game!
Oct 7 10:24:35	12m 18s	The Many Short-Lived Adventures of a Box	♥ 2	Nice little metroidvania. Could be more polished with sounds and more than the bare minimum (albeit clean) graphics, of course, but the concept works. Given that the instructions say "dash (when available)", I think there is a bug (maybe leftover from testing?): the dash is available from the beginning of the game. It also explains why it is possible to get to the goal without picking up the red key or the "D" powerup. And it's also why I had to play for a second time, to get to the secret screen ^^ As with many games this LD, having an early restart button might be convenient. When I missed a jump, I knew that I wasn't going to make it to wherever I was going, I just had to wait for the respawn. The music was cool, reminded me of Environmental Station Alpha somehow. (By the way, I see you have very few ratings: you should rate other people's games and/or submit your games to streams to get ratings for your game...)
Oct 7 19:50:18	9h 25m	The Sandwicher	♥ 1	Oh no the pun... That was fun, easy to lose a lot of time trying to reach a high score :) I did manage to show up on the front page at least. With very large amounts of bread the game got a bit laggy (but the hardware is a bit old now). I have no idea how your score is attainable. It took me a second to understand just when the potions are actually used (I need to wait just a bit). I am also still not totally sure why Breadalt is following weird trajectories: is it that each sandwich has its own "gravity" to it? I guess without something like this the game could be too easy, but sometimes it felt too arbitrary. Graphics, music, overall juice: all well polished of course. Great game! Also the timelapse was nice to watch, thanks for posting it!
Oct 7 20:58:08	1h 07m	Space Kitten	♥ 1	Nice game! Felt polished and mostly complete. What I missed the most was some difficulty. There was nothing puzzling about the levels and the difficulty was pretty much only in some tight jumps. The 10 second timer was a good motivator but it was a lot less interesting once I saw that there is still a long grace period before the crusher actaully reaches the player on most levels. Two small bugs I noticed: one, the player can be "beaten" just as the crusher gets to the cat, in which case the "Level clear" window shows, but the level is still restarted. Two, if you clear a level, but then click to go back to the level selection screen, the next level is not unlocked, you need to replay the level you just beat (only noticed this because the Z key drops you back to the level select). The graphics were clean. Audio-wise stuff sounded alright (meow meow meow), maybe the SFX could have been a bit quieter compared to the music.
Oct 7 21:25:22	27m 14s	Downpour	♥ 4	Cute game! The visuals were clean and consistent (nit-pick: I enabled pixel-perfect mode but the "squashed" character looked a bit off, not scaled with nearest-neighbour scaling?), it was always clear what was going on and how to continue. The two different weather events were neat, although maybe some more variation could be added. I was happy to see that the wind was eventually used as a positive/necessary event, not always as something to be avoided. The red clouds for speeding up the next event were a nice way to avoid having to wait the full 10 seconds. On the other hand, I think the game was almost too "perfectly" balanced: there was always plenty of time to get to the next checkpoint or safe area, but trying to be fast or trying to get through two checkpoints in one cycle was almost never possible. Towards the end I wished the game would have been just a tiny bit faster overall :) The audio was sparse but added to the atmosphere. Playing notes whenever the weather event happened was a nice touch.
Oct 7 21:49:30	24m 08s	TENET SECONDS	♥ 1	This was a clever idea but I feel it was almost ... too clever? I think it would have been good to introduce the player to the various mechanics one at a time. Why can you switch time direction in the first level? How do you know that you can collect the orbs with any blue or orange object? What do blue objects even do? And so on. I see now that these things are explained in text in the description, but it is so much better to let the player experience them first-hand. (For that matter I felt the blue objects were somewhat inconsistent with the game's own rules: at the start of the level they are static for 10 seconds, but for every other cycle from then on, they will spend those 10 seconds reversing through their motions.) It's nice that you note in the description that there are unintended solutions, but I think I solved more levels unintentionally than intentionally :D That also makes me wonder if there isn't too much freedom in the system vs constraints in the level design. I think I would have spent more time trying to solve the remaining levels had it not been for the platforming: it was way too floaty and jumping from the diagonal platforms was a very bad experience. The visuals and audio were quite polished. Playing music like this in reverse is always an interesting sound, and it didn't get old too quickly.
Oct 7 22:02:18	12m 48s	Two More Minutes	♥ 0	Neat game, but I feel its beautiful art and nice music is a bit lost in the not-so-fun gameplay. Moving and jumping feels alright, but it seems really arbitrary as to whether an enemy will hurt me or vice versa. Are the bells which shoot projectiles to the sides even possible to beat? I've tried that level a dozen or more times but I always get killed by the bell (which somehow takes 2 lives at once). I think just once did I damage it, but then was killed immediately after. Sometimes enemies just ... disappeared? And as noted in the comments already, the camera should let the player see to the left too.
Oct 8 19:07:33	21h 05m	Drum Dance Showdown	♥ 1	Cute game! The graphics are simple but clean, the palette is nice. For the initial couple of loops the music felt great and I was looking forward to the variations of both the music loop and the drumkit (+ the movements of the little dude). The gameplay itself could have been improved. The reference and the user input are far away so it's a lot of semi-tedious back and forth without much real challenge to it. The timeline bar is also far away: maybe you could add an indicator of time on the right-hand side?
Oct 9 19:46:43	24h 39m	AllegroRPG	♥ 1	Great game! It took me a second to understand what to do, and for example that I should be attacking the place where the enemy will be, not where they are. Once I got it it was pretty fun, a little bit frantic when there were many enemies on screen. Although the visuals were mostly clean and not trying to cram too much information on screen at the same time, I would have appreciated a little bit more guidance when starting. Also were there meant to be items in the game? I can't figure out what the three tiles just below the game area represent. When I lost one of my units (the soldier), I felt the game actually became easier: the overhead of managing one more unit was not worth its abilities, it seemed :)
Oct 10 08:29:41	12h 42m	360° MICROSCOPE	♥ 3	Nice game! I liked that the movement of the gun around the area very literally represented the 10 second timer. The little monsters were cute, and it was cool that each type had its own kind of movement. The music was great, I wish it didn't restart when I died :) The gameplay was ok, but some things could have been improved. The beginning of the stage was extremely important, perhaps too much so: you could miss an enemy that is already in the path of your gun, or you could do badly with your shots overall, getting flooded with too many monsters as they eventually multiply. On the other hand, once the arena was down to 4 enemies or so, it was a mostly tedious process of making sure all the enemies are frozen all the time, then lining up shots to remove them. I also found the loss condition of a monster running into the gun a bit random.
Oct 10 08:41:59	12m 18s	SPACEMAN	♥ 1	The idea is nice but the gameplay felt too punishing. The collision boxes on the ship felt a bit arbitrary (sometimes I was "standing" on the ship but actually far away) and very slippery. I'm thankful for the soothing music!
Oct 10 17:08:47	8h 26m	Gamma Protocol	♥ 1	Nice game! I got to round 26. It was good to see the variety in the guns, and that the chests still had some value once all the guns were collected. In my first game I got the Zeus 9000 and a Marine rifle in the first chest: it felt a bit OP because I could mash Z (weapon swap) to get the big Zeus bullets all the time. Maybe the cooldown should be maintained for each gun instead of resetting on weapon swap :) The auto-lock was appreciated towards the end. But the gameplay also got a bit less interesting: hold down X with whichever gun selected, run away. I guess this wouldn't work indefinitely because the player is bound to make a mistake and I'm guessing the monsters do eventually overwhelm the player, but still, the beginning of the game was more interesting. Maybe more variations should be introduced later on. I wasn't sure about the camera system. I guess not scrolling the camera unless the player is near the edge of the screen is good to reduce motion sickness? Still, at first I didn't realise just how much I could explore, later on I didn't like the system because moving towards the edges was dangerous: I couldn't see what I was walking towards. Maybe it would be enough to make the zone where the camera does not move smaller?
Oct 11 21:52:50	28h 44m	The Stack Machine	♥ 1	A Zachtronics game in a gamejam is not easy to manage. There are many things that should be added: some way to debug, a better indication of what is currently executing, fast forwarding, much clearer tutorial, and so on. Jumps, of course :) The fact that the "input" was hardcoded into the description without any randomisation makes this feels more like a toy/sandbox than a game, because it's only up to me to decide whether I really fulfilled the goal or not. That's fine for some of the programs but for the "digging" for example, it can be interpreted in different ways: do I just drop all the values? Do I need to keep them on the stack, in the same order? Moving the manual into its own PDF is a lot of effort and might seem a bit esoteric but for these kinds of games it really does make sense: have an actual "document" to consult while playing the game in another window/screen. On that topic the text needs to be more clearly structured and proofread otherwise it can only lead to more confusion. The card stack system takes a lot of space but I didn't find that much use for it, why not just make the cards longer? Thematically (as in, every 10 seconds), it fits I suppose? Also it makes more sense as a stack of punching cards, but it is also just a bit inconvenient for the player.
Oct 15 13:36:41	87h 43m	HeartBeat	♥ 1	The graphics, audio (+ voiceovers) were good. The idea of a person saving themselves in the limbo world (or whatever you want to call it) is interesting. The theme was indeed there, but I am not sure if it supported the game or just introduced an inconvenience. Switching back and forth between worlds is cool, but more often than not I knew what I had to do and so the seconds spent in the normal world were just wasted. I guess it was time I could spend talking to people but that was mostly about getting some hints. (Nit: the indicator that you can interact with something/someone could be a bit more visible.) I wish the overall game were longer. There were just two "puzzles", one of which was to open a window, the other to place the tray. The latter was stretched out to feel "longer" by having to fetch the tray from the other side of the screen... I guess making the gameplay more substantial and longer would go against the story you were going for, but I'm sure there are lots of cool puzzles you could go for with "one world influencing the other".
Oct 15 14:50:25	1h 13m	bäbäböx X	♥ 2	Managed 2876 so far. Fun game! Definitely kept me interested in trying to get higher and higher scores. The gameplay is interesting, the overall idea feels rather unique. I felt there are some things that could be improved. Most importantly: the visuals are very busy! Don't get me wrong, they look good, the animations are fluid, etc etc. Still, I think the blocks-to-be-removed could be indicated without adding one "clock" for each tile + one "scared face". In the late game it gets really tricky to find spots which will not be removed (if any), so adding more elements over top of the enemies + powerups + blocks is not great. Speaking of which, when there is a block to be picked up on top of a tile that will be removed, it is hard to tell: the block covers the visuals! And: it's nice that there are variations of the tiles (plain vs checkered vs battered), but this is even more visual noise. What about indicating the tiles which will be removed with a colour tint? Simple, easy to spot, hard to cover up. Overall I got a bit of an Earthworm Jim feeling from the graphics: they look great, but they sometimes make the gameplay worse. As for the gameplay itself, it took a while to get used to all the mechanics and what I could and couldn't do. Eventually I figured it out enough to reach a (I hope :D) good score, but: - What if the player landed when a block was placed? Every now and then I got caught off-guard thinking I had placed a block (but actually hit an enemy) and so I was safe to keep moving in the direction I was going. It's safe when I'm on the ground, but not when I'm in the air... - I am still undecided about the jump button = block place button. On the one hand it makes the controls feel fluid and intuitive, on the other hand I sometimes wished I could just place a block without having to jump. It's related to the previous point, I simply felt safer when I was on the ground. - The delay between the skull and an enemy actually spawning was long enough that it took me a game or two to actually spot that the skull means "an enemy will spawn here". Maybe a more obvious indication and a clear point of time when the enemy is there? - Maybe I missed this because of the busy visuals, but: does the game really eventually get to the point where all blocks get destroyed? I guess there is a way to survive this still (by keeping a block equipped, jumping just before the timer runs out, and placing the block afterwards to land on it), but if this works, it is very finnicky. It's easy to hit an enemy and simply lose at that point. Maybe increase the difficulty a bit slower, and always keep some tiles safe? Anyway, even with all that said, it was very fun. Oh, and I'm also glad there were multiple music tracks, it kept the game sounding fresh.