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FireSlash

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		FireSlash's comment
Oct 4 02:07:43		Tiledom	♥ 1	Agree that more instructions would be useful. I was able to stumble my way through, but I don't quite understand how to optimize my strategy.
Oct 4 02:19:02	11m 19s	Groceries, Please!	♥ 3	Ah, not-so-pleasant memories... Neat little game! I found it quite difficult at first, but I realize much of it involved memorizing where the barcodes are and building that muscle memory. A softer ramp for newbies would perhaps be nice though. Not sure if I'm supposed to need to zoom in to see the numbers of not; but they were quite legible in 4k without any additional work.
Oct 4 04:00:29	1h 41m	Starshock!	♥ 1	A simple concept with very solid execution. Sometimes I found the asteroids would fall into the corners and not provide any cover, forcing a death. They probably need to be constrained more. Had a lot of fun playing this! The mechanics are simple but come together in a very enjoyable way. Nice work!
Oct 4 04:48:48	48m 19s	Proxima	♥ 2	Love me some narrative games. Same with the above, I'm not super sure if there are actually any bad choices? I just picked what felt right and never really got into any trouble. It would have been nice to see more consequences or have a better understanding of the impact of my choices. The 10s pacing is very on-theme but feels like it just slows the game down; making me hesitant to play again to experiment more. If there was more data to consider or more choices to pick from, I might feel more time pressure. Nice work!
Oct 4 05:23:16	34m 28s	Bearly Fishing	♥ 2	I didn't know I wanted to play as a bear riding a fish with a grappling hook. But I'm glad I've now been enlightened to this extremely important thing I was missing in my life. Frankly I had way too much fun with this. Some of the later sections are a bit tricky, but the cost to retry is fairly low so I kept coming back. I wish the initial setup was a bit more reliable (the move speed in water could be faster to make the initial launch easier?) but these are minor grievances to just smooth out my extremely bad gameplay skills. I did wish the hook was a bit more forgiving; felt like if I didn't click close enough to a ledge it wouldn't fire? Not entirely sure, might just be a skill issue. Graphics are lovely, audio was fun, and the mechanics are a bit tricky but addictive. I could bearly stop myself from playing it a second time after the first run. Fantastic work!
Oct 4 23:00:44	17h 37m	Space Chase	♥ 1	Simple gameplay loop with a pretty nice difficulty curve. My only major complaint is that the collision boxes seem a bit oversized; I occasionally take a hit I thought I dodged.
Oct 4 23:05:28	4m 44s	10s Bar Brawl	♥ 4	Anything with billboard sprites gets instant love from me. As others have stated, the combat felt a bit iffy in spots. The main thing is I can't quite tell when the enemies actually attack me; so melee weapons are particularly challenging. A bit more communication here would go a long way towards improving combat feel I think. Overall fun little entry, nice work!
Oct 5 02:44:55	3h 39m	Brightsight	♥ 3	Neat little design. Maybe it's been done before, but I've never seen a game remove targeting like this and let you optimize risky placements as damage opportunities like this before. It works really well! The intro is polished to the point this could be in a retail game. Even the voice acting is good, with a nice post process. Well done. No obvious bugs or missing features, and it's quite fun to play. Well done!
Oct 5 02:51:50	6m 55s	Out To Pasture!	♥ 1	Cute and comfy little sheep game; love the art style! You had me at sheep girl. Also got the black rectangle at the end. The world is just big enough that it's easy to get disoriented. I wish it had a few more land markers or perhaps a minimap as a brute force solution. Something to help me know where I am in relation to the pen. Nice work!
Oct 5 03:11:16	19m 26s	> deploy helper bot	♥ 5	When I hit the checkpoint I got excited for more but that's basically the end. I had a ton of fun! There were really only a few minor issues I had - Arrow key movement is off axis with the map, so it's tricky to stay on the speed pads. - Sometimes, pressing a switch makes something happen off screen so you have to spend a few turns hunting for the right place to go - I wish there was an instant reset button for when you know you've already messed up (the tighter timed sections) The graphics are all super nice and coherent, the style is simple but works really well and feels good. Mechanically the game has a nice bit of progression; the speed upgrade in the end is tons of fun! I'd love to see more if this if you ever make a longer version. Nice work!
Oct 5 03:24:07	12m 51s	The Turgenev Study	♥ 0	The effects on this game are frankly nuts. I don't know where you find the time. I agree with the earlier comments around visibility and noise; at a certain point I simply don't have the mental capacity to be aware of everything on the screen, and certain cell types can snipe you from afar with their charges. A stronger tell might be useful here; I know you're limiting your palette but some kind of pink flash could do a lot to help direct the player's attention to oncoming threats; audio cues could help too. Even then it might be worth reducing the number of enemies and focusing on giving them interesting behaviors vs going for quantity. At least early on anyway. perhaps the issue is more just about pacing. Overall I really love this entry. It looks fantastic, has solid mechanics, and is weird in all the best ways. Fantastic work!
Oct 5 04:41:42	1h 17m	Die Dong LD51	♥ 1	Looks like the embed is broken, and the itch link also appears to be largely unplayable (seems to only show a small part of the screen?)
Oct 5 05:17:03	35m 21s	Not Late, Or Early	♥ 1	I never felt like I was getting good feedback to understand the rules. Using more explicit failure states would help direct the player towards their goal. The art is really nice and cohesive. Started to make sense after I read the rules and experimented a bit. Nice work!
Oct 5 05:38:04	21m 01s	Ghost Room	♥ 1	Mechanically simple but solid. I found it a bit easy, but shmups are one of those things that you basically can never balance for everyone because touhou exists as a benchmark many gamers aspire to reach. I agree with comments about the audio being a bit repetitive. Using softer sounds here might have helped. Nice work!
Oct 5 05:53:52	15m 48s	Sasha Jump	♥ 2	Lovely graphics! Got stuck sometimes if I teleported back on top of a sprite in that time period. I wish I could choose when to switch between times; if I miss a beat I'm stuck for 20s waiting for it to shift. Very cohesive design, and good use of palette shifting to indicate time period. Nice work!
Oct 5 06:01:39	7m 47s	J-Menuing	♥ 1	Love the progression and rampup. The only part that threw me for a loop was when the command menu order changed. Graphics are simple but effective. Music is good. Everything felt cohesive and bug free. Nice work!
Oct 6 06:30:01	24h 28m	Exorcist Patrol	♥ 2	This is a super neat idea. Some of the effects were a bit tricky to use in a good way; needing to think about cast order and location made selection a lot more interesting. I missed a way to preview or understand cards before selecting them, but managed to make it work anyway. Boulder was a bit tricky though since I tried to use it after squirrel and it wouldn't hit; but I like that I had to reshuffle my combo to fit it in instead of just constantly adding stuff to the end. Realizing this would be a nightmare to implement inside LD: it would have been nice to have a timeline I could scrub through to better understand where I need to tweak my setup; sometimes it wasn't clear if something hit or not in the chaos. The art was comfy and the music was a bop. Everything worked as expected and cleared my house of ghosts. Nice work!
Oct 6 06:42:36	12m 35s	Flameout	♥ 1	I wish enemies were more of a threat beyond just existing; perhaps they could be the thing that lights the furnaces, instead of it happening randomly? Might give me a reason to prioritize them. Once I hit level 2, I found enemies would spawn on top of me sometimes, which caused me to take an unavoidable hit. Certain angles don't seem to line up with the mouse. I noticed the most when shooting the lower right end of the screen. Combined with the slow projectile speed, I'd often spend multiple seconds shooting the wrong spot before I got the feedback needed to correct. Movement feels a bit floaty. Reducing the deceleration time would probably make the movement feel more responsive and snappier. As others have mentioned, the gameplay in general feels a bit on the slower side. I think it'd be worth experimenting with faster kill times and more enemies. That all said, I didn't hit any showstoppers and the game was easy to understand and fun. Nice work!
Oct 6 07:05:48	23m 12s	Stellar Sauce	♥ 1	Movement jank aside, the beam mechanic was quite fun. You also did a nice job with the level design in communicating what areas were safe or not. The ending puzzle felt a bit obtuse and took a while to figure out; I think a bit of additional communication here would have helped a lot; perhaps a special hit sound for the bulb that tells the player "bullets don't hurt this thing" while giving it a distinct behavior over walls and other unimportant objects. Similarly, I'd like to have seen a targeting laser for the ketchup gun since it's hard to know what's going on when it's off screen (and the position it landed after the second shot required me to do some tricky alignment). Overall a solid attempt for your first platformer! You probably already learned this lesson; but physics engines shouldn't be used for player movement (Write a static or kinematic character controller and use the physics engine just for collision). It's a very common thing to get wrong especially in LD, so don't sweat it too much. Nice work!
Oct 6 07:14:55	9m 07s	Perihelion	♥ 3	The graphics and mood on this are off the charts. I love what you've done here; a simple style that just bleeds aesthetic. Movement wise, I found the character to be a bit fast and floaty; not entirely sure how to describe it but I often found myself wishing I had better control; especially in the end section. This could just be a skill issue, but it felt like the character had a bit too much momentum perhaps? I did feel like the fast movement helped with the urgency, which was good. On Level design, I saw a lot of sections where I just BAAARELY couldn't make a jump unless I hopped up one tile higher before jumping. This was a bit annoying, but often forced me to move into the light; if that's the intention with these jumps then my annoyance is probably more on the movement not letting me execute the precise jumps I wanted to do there. Ultimately this game is just lovely. The art, the music, and the feel are just spot on. It didn't have any of the common platformer jank like sticking to walls, and the controls felt like some care was spent trying to tune them even if they weren't my taste. Nice work!
Oct 6 08:15:14	1h 00m	Solustella	♥ 1	The polish is strong with this one. This game is dark. Trying to build population felt fairly painful; part of me wishes the upgrade system helped more than it did but I ended up building tons of clone vats and consuming lots of biomass. Lots of stuff going on mechanically and it all seems to work as expected. I appreciated the manual control sliders; they saved my run several times when I got overambitious with my buildout. Didn't quite make it out on my run but the lure of a clearly defined endgame will likely draw me back for more. Graphics are great and have a nice consistency. The audio loop was comfy and didn't feel too repetitive. Nice work!
Oct 9 06:16:20	70h 01m	Teen Detective Allegra Gumshoe in Temporal Troubles!!!	♥ 1	I have to agree with Shrill here. There's a lot of charm and interesting dialogue, but the only seeming way to play is to just furiously click through it all, which further buries the lede since I can't figure out what I'm actually supposed to do. Even with the 1=10 debug setting, I can't sit back and enjoy the dialogue like I'd like unfortunately. I also noticed some dialogues don't lead anywhere, like the "Pretend you have honey" option. The art is charming and the music fits, the dialogue is fun too. This would be a prime candidate for a post LD version.
Oct 11 06:13:15	47h 56m	Heartbeat	♥ 1	Finally managed to clear it! I'm bad at these kinds of games. There's a lot to do here; I appreciate the use of keyboard shortcuts for most of the actions. I was a bit confused at first on what was killing me; I wish the death screen pointed out your mistake. I lost several lives to not knowing how the o2 pump worked (and a few more after when I was only reading the LED instead of looking at the gauge). A lot of this probably just comes to being introduced to mechanics in a high stress environment. A few more audio cues could be useful. The red screen flash on the space bar one was super helpful, but many others lacked any real big "Pay attention to me" states beyond just being red; the switch board got me a lot since I tended to not focus on it. Perhaps a pulsing or flashing state would help? there's already a lot of red on the screen so a LED turning red doesn't stand out much when you're in a panic. Honestly though these are all minor annoyances mostly coming back to my lack of skill in this class of game. Other than the O2 pump, everything else was easy to understand in the heat of things and worked as expected. The theme is well represented as well. Music is comfy. Nice work!