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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | pkenney's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 3 00:31:12 | Rockatoo | ♥ 3 | Nailing it with the AC/DC tribute! This was fun and a really good length. Obviously the music is a high point here, but the art is great, too. Heads up that there may be a bug: both times I played, after completing the game and circling back to the main title screen and re-entering the first song, it freezes with the bird head-banging but no song, no crowd movement, and the notes never come. If I could tweak one thing it would be to not have to move my hand to the mouse to click continue in this otherwise keyboard-controlled game. And that ain't much! It must be really, really hard to convey any information in a game like this where the player's eyes are so hard-locked on the incoming notes. The bird did a good job of emoting, and the transparent scoring data was nice -- both gave me the hints that something was happening I didn't understand. My first run I thought I should do nothing on the _ beats. My second I thought it didn't matter what I did as long as I did anything. It wasn't until late in run three that I realized what the stuff at the top was up to. But even when I was a bit clueless about the scoring rules I was having fun. And the game did not punish me for my misunderstandings in any way that interfered with enjoying it. Nice work on a strong well-rounded compo entry! | |
| Oct 7 02:08:04 | 97h 36m | Sushi Panic | ♥ 1 | I got 17! And oh man, was panic the right title! That moment when you slightly stumble on the recipe and it restarts, and then just as you almost get it the second time it cancels because something broke, it's CRUSHING. But in a really fun way. This was super well-done. It had a cool core game loop, a lot of tightly-paced challenge, and it made me want to try "just one more time." Nice art, decent sounds, and a nice little bumping song in the background were nice. The multi-repair was also interesting... kind of a risk/reward thing, in a few cases I felt like a genius but then other times I would accidentally restart a really slow one like the freezer and be kicking myself. Really appreciated that arrow keys worked for movement, as well as WASD. Nailed the panic. Nice entry! |
| Oct 7 02:37:12 | 29m 08s | Lighthouse | ♥ 1 | The mood is so good here! How did you do the sound effects? The wind, the rain, the oars in the water, the lighting, each one was really good. The lighting worked really well across all the sources, the lighthouse, the lightning, and the boat's lamp. The controls felt a bit chunky almost like a turn-based grid-based game, but I think that was probably smart given the challenge of staying oriented in the dark. All in you really sold the experience of being in the boat in the dark, well done. I did wonder if you could sell the storm itself even better with a little more vertical wave motion... the sea felt maybe too calm. But again you're probably making tradeoffs against the player feeling oriented. I managed to get home without hitting anything, and the great atmosphere got me into a slow and steady, cautious head space. I restarted just to test what would happen if I crashed, and I like the way you handled that, too. Really nice compo entry! |
| Oct 8 18:49:58 | 40h 12m | Empire Under the Clock | ♥ 4 | I love how ambitious in scope this is for a solo entry! There are a bunch of cool systems going on here, and the art is very nice. I did experience a lot of confusion interacting with the UI. I know this kind of stuff can be hard to detect for yourself as the developer, so I tried to screencap specific examples of me being confused. I hope this is helpful! I wouldn't go into detail like this if it wasn't a very cool entry, so plz don't take this as negative feedback! In this example I am trying to place my first fort. I am confused because I keep clicking but nothing happens! The message that I need to select a city doesn't go away. As I keep clicking the countdown timer turns angry-red and I am harried. What am I doing wrong? Empre-Build.png Answer: I did successfully build the fort, and the message that telling me I need to select is misleading, because it doesn't disappear once I do select. The game has changed state but I have not noticed. My failure was that I did not see the few pixels hidden behind the LVL UI that indicated I was already successful. (I don't figure out that it worked until I restart the game and play again 3-4 times) In the next example it's turn 2 and the tutorial has told me to select what I should research. Empre-Research.png I click Granary. It highlights granary but nothing else happens. It still says I need to select research. Have I selected it? Do I need to hit an OK button? There isn't one, but there is a button called "Dismiss". That sounds more like a cancel than an ok. I spam click granary while the countdown gets angry. My turn ends and I see no change. I guess I didn't research it right. I quit and restart the game 2 more times and experiment with whether clicking "dismiss" does something different. No. I try hitting enter. Oh woops that's the key for End Turn. I never figure it out... until I give up and play on and then a bunch of turns later it says "You researched Granary!" I can't remember if that was a run I hit Dismiss or not, so I still don't know what is right. In this next example I am trying to expand to a new city: Empre-Expand.png It says to click a city (left) and then I do, and it slightly highlights the region. So I feel like I did make a choice. But nothing ever happens. Is it that I couldn't pay the cost? I think the popups in the "select a region" are telling me a cost. I check that I have the right resources. This is difficult in realtime because the resource cost display lists the resources in a slightly different order than the resource inventory display at the top of the screen. I actually never figured this one out. But I did play on a bit more and after figuring out that I did indeed build a fort, I was able to raise an army, and while I could not expand myself I did defeat some intruders and expand that way. I guess I misunderstood something really fundamental. I bet there are things that signal the state changes I'm not following (such as the fort pixels, and now looking at the screenshot, do I see Granary pixels too?), so sorry for not having a sharper eye! So I feel like I didn't connect with your intended player experience, but I did spend some time with the game restarting and playing around a bunch. I think this is a cool entry even though I struggled, and I see you have a bunch of other interesting-looking games in your history. I'll add you to my follow list and keep an eye out for what you do next time! |
| Oct 8 20:05:04 | 1h 15m | Yo, Listen! | ♥ 0 | This was really good! The humor was a stand-out, but the graphics and sound were also strong, and it had nice tight fast controls which were VITAL for such a repetitive game. I didn't mind going around the loop over and over, and was having fun exploring the mystery. Until it got to be a while and I started dragging. I got the sword and broke the window. But I didn't get past that. I was committed to figuring it out, but two things caused me enough friction that eventually I lost heart and gave up: - The guy sets me ALL THE WAY back and I have to restart from "get cheese and draw mouse out" and do it all over again. And again. And again. Sometimes it was fine, but other times I would feel like I was just about to test a theory with my next life, but NOPE back to the start. Eventually this wore me down. - The controls are fast and tight. Except for one aspect: They are really stingy about whether I did or did not pick an item up and don't have any instant indication of whether I did or did not. I don't think it's important to the gameplay that I have to be pixel-perfect with my mouse aim when picking up the sword. I would prefer if you granted me leeway, and when I click the button, see what the closest object is within some distance and grant me some slop to my input by understanding my intention rather than requiring precision. This was NOT a problem at first, but given the repetitive loop + the tight time limit, I needed to be able to move as fast as possible and wanted to feel smooth, and "nah actually you didn't grab that item" kept kicking me in the teeth exactly when I was already feeling low. Hrm I worded those strongly but actually they were really minor and I only point them out because this was such an overall excellent game! I sunk a lot of time in and had a bunch of fun. Really nice job with a super-well-rounded comp entry here, very impressive! |
| Oct 9 01:50:31 | 5h 45m | Ten Seconds Again | ♥ 1 | Wow very cool action game! Started off chill enough that I could get my bearings and then ramped up into crazy frantic clicking. Some real nice feel-good moments like multi-killing or using the special and then reclaiming a bunch of coins (the coins/special was a great design). The graphics were solid and did a good job of conveying the action, the sound effects were satisfyingly crunchy, and the bumping soundtrack added a ton to the experience. Love your more experimental entries but I also enjoy when you come around to making the occasional action game too. Oh - and I was glad the autofire wasn't strictly better than spam-clicking. Although I did sort of wear out my clicking muscle, it felt a lot more satisfying to noscope some fool than to just wave my hands around. Very nice all-arounder compo entry! |
| Oct 9 02:05:32 | 15m 01s | 10 Seconds To Avoid Death | ♥ 2 | Nice! The voice acting is really strong! Man, UE is a heavy beast though. 180MB download. Then I have to install DirectX UE pre-reqs. Then it warns me it doesn't like the specific version of my graphics driver. Then it pops up my firewall warning because it is trying to access the network (no idea why). Definitely nothing to do with your game, but interesting to be on the player side of that experience. I've used Unity but sometimes wondered about UE. Anyway, nice entry - right on theme, really strong voice acting that hits the absurdity with the right sarcasm but also has that voice quality an announcer would really have, and the other visuals/sfx are nice, too. Good job! |
| Oct 9 02:12:07 | 6m 35s | Baseball of Max Stress | ♥ 1 | This was great, especially in terms of fun-per-scope. Really charming, the art style was nice and the hilarious voice intro had my chuckling. I had to play it a few times over and was decently happy with my 90. Great job! EDIT omg 215?? |
| Oct 9 02:28:14 | 16m 07s | It's all in a day | ♥ 2 | I.... Succeeded? Nice entry! Charming art, cheerfully presented sinister theme, and the mid-tempo music did a good job of setting the mood without overstaying its welcome. I never did find my bootstraps though. |
| Oct 12 01:40:18 | 71h 12m | Exorcist Patrol | ♥ 2 | This is great! Tightly focused design and some great art. I found it really easy and fun to learn what the game even was. (I skipped reading the page until after playing, which I generally like to do). The game is pretty intuitive, but more importantly it's REALLY easy to discover through experimentation. The tweakable-loop core model was very effective at letting me learn the UI, mechanics, timing, etc. Great job of uncovering that and NOT getting in the way of the goodness. Even having a "restart" button press in between iterations would have gotten in the way big time, I think. The UI letting me pull items out of the timeline and into a card was also nice. Especially with vortex, I sometimes needed to experiment with an effect alone to test its behavior. The boss also did a good job of forcing me to engage with the game at a deeper level. I had mostly gotten through the earlier enemies by leaving my existing loop in place and just slightly tweaking it. But he forced me to clear decks, set up some early hits, carefully note his position at certain moments on the timeline (thank you, sweep-line UI) to line up the subsequent chain of hits. I had to go back and play again and try out a different set of cards, and I was a lot more able to maximize my attacks the second time around, from what I had learned in that boss battle. In fact, I had set things up so well on my second run that the boss insta-died on the first loop! Here is my final setup: ex-patrol-win.png Really nice entry, well done! |
| Oct 12 02:36:34 | 56m 16s | Just Roll With It! | ♥ 2 | Wowww what a jam game! IT's SO complete and polished, on top of an exciting core character control. Even the UI menus have great details and vibe. This is amazing, really well done! I went back to look at your history of games and just from the screen shots and descriptions I can see that you are making strong steady progress in your skills, it's impressive. I enjoyed zooming around a lot, but wowzers the difficulty was a bit over my ability. I worked a lot just to solve the tutorial! So I really appreciated that I could jump around an experience each of the levels without having to beat any. Great choice for a jam experience. I could also feel myself getting better over time. I was initial super-disoriented at times, but as I built some experience it got better and my deaths were more due to execution failures. |
| Oct 13 01:36:27 | 22h 59m | Sun's out Buns out | ♥ 2 | Cool game! It has some small scope but it does a lot with that scope. I felt the difficulty balance was nicely designed. I had to take some risks and make some tough choices, and even then I didn't QUITE get the plant all the way to the top. The art looked nice, and it also communicated effectively what was going on. For example, it was really clear when the plant was hit by a rabbit, which was really important to understand as a player learning the game. The choice to show the rabbits go into little holes, and to have the previous-round rabbits come back, those were both good design choices too. So a lot of smart ideas in this small entry! I do thin it would be a lot more exciting to play with a few sound effects and some other "juice". I see this is your first LD, so it's a great start and maybe you can work on some of those bonus-type skills in the future! If you haven't seen them, there are two talks on youtube that everybody likes, called "juice it or lose it" and "the art of screenshake." Check em out if you haven't, and you're curious about nice small touches to add. Nice entry! |
| Oct 13 02:00:40 | 24m 13s | Encoded War | ♥ 2 | This was cool! It had a nice moody vibe with the background music, great art, and the ticking of the machine. It felt really smooth to be moving the papers around and flipping back and forth in the code book. The 10-second pace was really interesting. It seemed to have pros and cons. It created spikes of urgency and spikes of idle waiting. I think the expression from this time period was "Hurry up and Wait"? If you had not used a 10-second timer, and this game was about cranking out code translations as fast as you could, it would be a really different vibe! If I could change one thing, it would be to add a satisfying sound effect indicating SUCCESS. I don't read instructions so I just jumped in to play, and for a while I didn't know what I was supposed to do, and the lack of "good/bad" feedback left me stranded a bit. And then once I got the hang of it and started shipping correctly-coded messages, I guess I just wanted the pat on the back of a satisfying "ca-chunk" sound or something. MAybe I just missed it... I noticed there is that UI on the top left, but I never understood what it's trying to communicate. The ASDF page turning was great for easy controlling, and the option to either click or use space-bar to signal was also nice. Enjoyable, unique entry, well done! |
| Oct 20 01:35:06 | 167h 34m | Every ten seconds, the game skips... | ♥ 1 | This was a cool mind-bender. I enjoyed that it took me a little while to figure out what was going on, and the way that each screen was a unit. Once there was just one screen that didn't repeat I started to realize how things would unfold, and I had some nice little rush moments after that. Nice touch that it included combat, getting to the exit, and speed-reading! Good variety that hit on the genre tropes of the larger game it hinted at skipping through. I think I might have mutually-killed the fire-spitting dragon though, because I did die but he didn't repeat... or maybe I missed something in the speed-reading afteward! Fun unique entry with something I hadn't quite seen before. |
| Oct 20 02:30:45 | 55m 39s | Teleporter Malfunc-ten | ♥ 1 | Really cool! There's a great addiction loop going on here. The three phases of the game really flow into each other well, and the sense of progression is strong. Art and sounds are pretty basic but do the job well enough. I did feel like there were a few small quality-of-life issues that got in the way of me wanting to play "just one more time" more than I did. I'll mention some but I don't mean this as a bad review, I just think this is a great idea and a few tweaks could have really pushed it into becoming seriously addictive... that said, here is my wish list: - Score summary at the end saying something about how I did and what upgrades I got, so I could relax and bask in my achievements for a moment - Font needed to be bigger. I could not read the upgrades easily. This was a very very very serious problem because of the time-tension between healing and reading. A lot of the nuance of the upgrades, the core motivation of the game, I could not engage with. - Needs fullscreen mode - While I felt the time-tension between healing and buying upgrades was a powerful thing and I wouldn't want to lose it, it also created a problem that I could not salivate over the upgrades. I wonder if you could let me READ the upgrades while I'm on the healing pad by just always showing their text and cost. Late in the game it was pretty feelbad to just go CHECK THE PRICE of something or read a new upgrade only to learn I could not afford it, and later lose the game because of the health gains lost while I read. - The mining gets pretty boring and while I appreciate the downtime from the other two tense phases, I found myself wishing it had some kind of unexpected occasional boon that would pop out from the stones, or something else to spice it up from time to time. - The first few rounds of the game are a bit slow, so after a restart it's a bit dull until it picks back up, and this makes it less desirable to click "one more game". I think if you let me pick 1 of 3 free upgrades as a starter on retry that would have kept me more hooked.. or something else to jump-start re-runs. I hope that's constructive feedback, as I really did think this was a great entry! Overall this was a surprisingly engaging game for a jam entry, and I fell right into the loop. Very nice work. |
| Oct 20 03:08:13 | 37m 28s | Village Defender | ♥ 1 | So ambitious! Complex system of AI with platformer-pathfinding, fancy UI, a variety of unit types, an economy, nice music, solid art and holy smokes look at that options menu areyoukiddingme. Really impressive amount of stuff going on in this entry. It did seem like you needed some more polish passes to really achieve your vision though.. the game got quite choppy on me, performance-wise (tried web and download), and strategically I couldn't really find a better strategy than rallying my first 4-5 guys to high ground on the left, and then never issuing another command, which got my village to live forever. It seemed like a trap: if I ever used rally again I would pull all my fighters to one side when attacks are coming from two. But I still enjoyed playing around with it a few times to explore a bit. Nice touch that falling off the bottom wasn't game over, btw. Nice entry with many impressive elements, even if the core gameplay was a little rough around the edges. |
