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mhorth

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		mhorth's comment
Oct 4 20:55:29		The Curse of the Four Towers	♥ 2	Nice one! Big improvement from your previous game regarding keeping a consistent visual style throughout. Everything felt like it belonged, and was very clearly depicted. Your enemy design conveyed itself very well too, when the bad guys turned into the bigger version, they slowed down which clues me in to how they might behave. Same for the faster swarming birds. Audio was excellent. It almost went right over my head that the music was changing with the environment. I could tell something was happening, but I had to actually stop shooting for a second and focus on it before I noticed that the music was different each time. That's not a criticism, it's almost like it blended too well, perfectly seamless transitions right on the beat. Once I noticed it though, it was a great vibe. I also really liked the crunchy sound when pieces of the tower were destroyed. Only critique I have for you is to try to add controller support, especially for a top down shooter style game like this. I got excited when my controller could move the character, but then wasn't able to aim.
Oct 4 21:04:06	8m 37s	10 Second Testing	♥ 1	I got stuck on the test where it asks me for a verb. Not sure if that's the intended ending? Other than that I'm impressed you got a smooth first person shooter up and running in just a weekend, not to mention a little bit of storytelling around it! Nice job on that and congrats on your first Ludum Dare!
Oct 4 21:20:10	16m 04s	DecaDare	♥ 4	This was great! I played the normal mode a few times to make sure I'd gotten to see all the various minigames. My best run was 8. The amount of content your team made it astonishing, but I gotta say my favorite bit was how the main menu just moved the camera around to various parts of the room, really slick. Only critique I have is that audio was a bit harsh at times. I think all the sounds were good, just different mixing levels might have helped. Mostly the TV static noise was quite loud. Nice job all around!
Oct 4 21:47:11	27m 01s	Clock Caper	♥ 4	Call off the rest of the rating period, we've found the winner... Seriously this was soooo good! Like I'm honestly skeptical that this is the team behind Cuphead just smurfing in a jam for the weekend. Art was super impressive, sound design was excellent, gameplay/difficulty was perfect. Well done by the whole team. I usually try to think of at least something to suggest as improvement, and I'm coming up blank here.
Oct 4 22:01:09	13m 58s	CONJR Rapid Text-to-Image	♥ 2	This is such a cool idea! Top marks for innovation. I think the lack of a scoring or checking for accuracy system dropped a little bit of the fun for me, but at the same time I imagine it could be very frustrating if there was a correct answer that didn't match what we (I mean the AI!) decided to make. So probably the right choice. In fact, definitely the right choice because sometimes I found that I didn't actually want to add anything on the 3rd round. I think I had a prompt that a guy with wild eyes stares at his past or something, and I just didn't put any 3rd objects in there so he was staring at nothing.
Oct 4 23:00:35	59m 26s	The pond & the stars	♥ 1	You guys absolutely nailed the mood here. Such a calming vibe you made with this!
Oct 4 23:13:58	13m 23s	Survives on time island	♥ 1	@fabula-rasa I started with that too, but I eventually alt-tabbed to the blue screen and moved the mouse around. It was our player starting by looking straight up at the sky 😆. Once I realize that, I got to play. I don't think I got too far, never got into combat, but was able to pick up food and be less hungry for a little while. I would recommend trying to get sound effects into your next jam entry, it can make a huge difference! Still a great job getting the game done in just a weekend!
Oct 4 23:20:44	6m 46s	Speed Barber	♥ 3	Very cool! How did you detect how close we matched the goal? I'm very curious to know your tech! I also really liked the touch on shaking the background when the buzzer is on, nice job!
Oct 4 23:33:32	12m 48s	Maze Runner	♥ 3	Loved the idea that the main menu to start was on the player's arm and part of the world, very cool! This has really impressive 3D graphics, is it an endlessly generated maze? If you're looking for suggestions to take the game further, a sensitivity slider for the mouse would be really great. Nice job!
Oct 5 01:01:53	1h 28m	Under Pressure	♥ 5	Wow wow wow your team members in charge of graphics absolutely crushed it! From the images at the start that told a great story, to the loading animation of the sneaking fox, and then the overall 3D assets and "behind a wall" and "field of detection" shaders. Everything else was good too, the graphics were just next level. You already know about the collision issue that makes us move backwards sometimes, other than that I really don't have any critiques. Maybe a little bit too hard? The 2nd level already had tons of coverage where I couldn't walk, it made it a bit overwhelming. Still a fun challenge though.
Oct 5 21:13:37	20h 11m	Flip and Swap	♥ 3	You've already heard plenty of feedback about the character speed, which is the only critique I would have said. Otherwise, the idea is really cool. I love the thought of a platformer/puzzle game where you switch between two worlds, nice one! The transition effect was also really good in my opinion.
Oct 5 21:30:02	16m 25s	Sasha Jump	♥ 1	Huuuuge congrats on your first Ludum Dare. Making this solo for your first entry is amazing, way better than I did my first time. I really liked the teleport animation. It was too fast for me to tell exactly what was happening, but I think that made the effect really work. Were you just stretching the sprite or was there more animation to it?
Oct 5 21:35:59	5m 57s	Sub-scured	♥ 2	Maaaan I'd really like to know the tech you used to make the green terrain change like that. Is that shader magic or are you animating that some way? Looks really cool whatever you did, your graphics impressed me a lot.
Oct 5 21:48:29	12m 30s	ULTRA INSTINCT NINJA MASTER of the Dark Forest	♥ 1	This was great fun! There were so many nice little touches to animations: the camera shake, the springiness of the player's dot moving around. Just when I was thinking "it would be nice if the green things were hidden behind red things to force specific routes", you did it! There was so much content that I was trying to figure out if it was procedurally generated, but it had such a good hand-crafted feel to it that the puzzle difficulty increased perfectly over time. Really really nice job. My only critique is that it was hard to see the monsters in the background behind the foreground gameplay. That kept the game very clear and easy to see, but I feel like I missed out on the art skills.
Oct 5 22:29:16	40m 47s	Shutter Chaos	♥ 4	I don't know why, but reading "and his name is JOHN CENA!" as one of the yearbook quotes made me lose it 😆 Exactly the right kind of goofy fun that I love about your team's games. One thing I'd suggest whenever picking things randomly is to implement some rules such as "each choice has to be picked once before anything can repeat". I think I got 5 or 6 dab poses in a row before anything else. Still had fun, just a small thing to keep in mind for certain types of games.
Oct 5 23:20:35	51m 19s	Near Death Sentence	♥ 1	This one somehow gave me a tougher time than horse on a tightrope! I think it was deceptive that it looked simple and I always thought I could get another punch in before I needed to get back to a square, then didn't make it. Or the assholes who would come into my square with the perfect timing and bonk me outside of it. Had a blast the entire time though, always love to see what you come up with. I don't think I can truly blame any deaths on this, but I do with the character's decel was quicker. It felt a little out of control that I could let go of movement and I'd still slide a bit further.
Oct 6 01:12:11	1h 51m	Torquemada, Heretic Slayer	♥ 1	This has some juicy combat, very well done! The sound effects and the screen shake really sell the impacts and felt great. As per usual in jam games, difficulty curves are one of the hardest things to get right. I felt like I got to lulls in the game where there just weren't enough enemies to fill the meter and had to wait for a few respawns. I'm not sure what the best way would be to fix that.
Oct 6 01:25:00	12m 49s	It's Snake, But Every 10 Seconds The Food Turns Into Walls	♥ 2	I was not expecting that level of graphics from a snake game. You had a lot of animations like the spinning squares that really added a nice touch. Music also was a great vibe. I did struggle with the movement a bit, I was constantly late by one square of where I wanted to turn. I agree with your previous comment that smooth movement looks nice, but I wonder if the chunky step by step movement was necessary for snake to have precision control over what lane of the grid you would turn on. I also got frustrated the first time I was about to eat food and it turned into a wall, but I realized that's the whole point of the theme and I just needed to pay more attention to the timer. After that it added a lot of depth because I had to think about whether I could make it to that food in time or if I'm setting up for a crash. Really really impressed by your reimagining of an old game, nice job!
Oct 6 22:20:11	20h 55m	Junkyard Space Race	♥ 1	I went through a mental roller coaster on this one: - These controls don't work very well, I can barely steer. - Oh I don't steer! - These upgrades are too cheap, I can keep just buying them all. - Oh I'm replacing parts, not upgrading them! In the end I really liked it and am very curious how you pulled of the AI. Sometimes it made silly decisions, but for the most part it was pretty smart. Once I stopped being dumb and realized how the game actually worked, I got really into it, nice job!
Oct 6 22:35:04	14m 53s	CyberBeat	♥ 1	pleeeeeeease continue working on this. I'm a fan of rhythm games and this one has seriously good potential. It felt so good to do gameplay action in sync with the beat. I know you were short on time and might already know most of these, but some things I would suggest focusing on if you do decide to take the game further: - Input feedback. When I just barely missed the beat, nothing happened. It would be nice if there was some indication that my input was recognized and that it was my fault for missing the timing, or maybe even my move/attack is less effective. - The attacks had almost no warning, they would just appear and if I was standing in the wrong spot, I was going to get hit with no chance to avoid them. - The attacks to the side seemed useless since I couldn't kill the red blocks? I guess you were planning to have small enemies in the play area where this would come in handy. Even in this raw state I had a lot of fun playing and it just felt good. If you polish it up, this could be amazing.
Oct 6 23:07:44	32m 40s	PULSAR	♥ 6	So let's pretend my difficulty in understanding the game was totally not my own fault 😆 I restarted 7 times before I finally started to understand how things work and what I was supposed to do. The gameplay and amount of content you were able to build over the weekend is astounding, I just feel like the barrier to entry was too high. I read the tutorial (twice), read the infographic here on your ldjam page, and still had no idea why things weren't working. The biggest thing I stumbled on was that I was looking at the small yellow arrows on the ground of the transmitters, and it wasn't until attempt #8 that I finally got that they only send power in the direction of the BIG arrows. The rotators took a small amount of time to figure out after that, and then I was finally off to the races and had a good time with it. That could be completely my own fault and lack of knowledge since I don't play many games of this type.
Oct 7 00:00:01	52m 17s	Exorcist Patrol	♥ 2	I know I can always count on you to bring some innovation to the table! This is probably my favorite one of yours yet. While this one still has some periods of waiting, they were filled with action to watch and strategic thinking to do compared to Study Lady's "just wait for this screen to come back around". And the 10 second loop was so short anyway so it was never boring. It took me a short amount of time to fully understand what my goal was, that the spells were going to move the ghosts in a specific pattern and the spells would always cast in the same location and my timing adjustments were to control the space. Did you have any trouble making the bouncing deterministic so that it always took the same path with the same inputs? It seems like the idea would have failed if you didn't make that happen, so nice job there. Once the mechanics clicked in my head though, there was an audible "oohhhh okaaayyy!" It became so much fun that after beating it, I went back through another time to try to make even better combos. I started playing my own meta game to see how I could arrange the spells to maximize all of their hits and it just got so satisfying. How many games do we play where you beat a level, get offered to continue onto the next level, and instead say "nah I wanna stay here and keep watching that replay." Controls were super smooth too, it was a joy to place spells on the timeline and then be able to slide them by fractions of a second. exorcist patrol.gif
Oct 7 20:44:50	20h 44m	Sweet Nightmare	♥ 1	So ambitious to not only make one character controller for a jam, but 5+?! Nice job. I do feel like that caused some of them to work better than others. There were times in golf mode that I couldn't play the game because enemies were on me, so I was moving a little bit, so the golf club was disabled. But the flappy bird, popcorn thruster, and standard shooter all felt nice. It's a really really cool concept and I bet if you had another day to work on polish, this would have been a contender for winning the jam. As is though, it does feel a bit unfinished, mostly in the "game feel" department.
Oct 7 21:01:53	17m 03s	Bullet Hellth	♥ 1	Agreed with squimmy, the idea is neat but maybe needs a little adjusting to balance out the risk/reward. Sound effects would certainly be a step to work towards, but we all know in a jam we don't have time to get to everything we would have wanted. Art is looking good though, I especially like the health bar being a customized gun sprite rather than the typical rectangle, keep it up!
Oct 7 21:23:19	21m 26s	Delta Shift	♥ 3	As others have said, this is a really neat idea and the gravity shifting works great. Your team has a real talent for level design, because you had to make levels that are playable in all orientations. You did such a good job with that, that every side felt like it was the correct floor with good ramps and ledges and openings to jump through. I would agree with the controls feeling a little floaty. If that got tightened up to be more responsive and you added some sound effects, this could become a really great game for speedrunning! Congrats on the entry!
Oct 7 21:28:29	5m 10s	GRABOUL	♥ 2	The thing that stood out most to me was the characters animations were excellent! Great job there. I thought the movement control felt fine, the slower movement made it easier to make sure we landed exactly where we wanted to. I think you've got a good start here and would be excited to see what this would have turned into if your team had more time.
Oct 8 21:04:12	23h 35m	Speed Dating for Misfits	♥ 1	"I'll be your ghost today. I mean your host!" was already enough to make me smile and get you top marks in humor. This is not the type of game I'd normally enjoy and somehow you kept me interested in it the whole time. It's really well put together, no bugs, plenty of immediate feedback to know if my choices were good or bad, and the 10 second pacing added a good urgency and encouraged me not to take it too seriously. Nice job!
Oct 8 21:29:53	25m 41s	Sweet Seconds	♥ 1	This game has no business being this fun! Such frantic gameplay in the upper levels, it kept me really engaged and I wasn't expecting to get so much entertainment out of clicking to prepare food. The strategizing on what food I could prepare early really hooked me in, so I'd have to say major props on your game design and how you left some rules open to the player. Nice job!
Oct 8 21:47:16	17m 23s	Gigabite	♥ 2	The art and sound is great throughout, everything is very clear and never had any questions about what I'm supposed to do or how the game works. Obviously it makes sense that the difficulty has to increase as the rounds go on further, but I do wish the difficulty came from something other than precision mouse movement over small objects at high speed. That's just me personally, I'm sure others loved it. Regardless, I think your difficulty curve is good because anyone can enjoy the game and pass the early levels, and then they'll start losing when the game passes their skill level. Can't be mad about that, great design!