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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Antti Haavikko's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 9 13:15:22 | Carrots | ♥ 1 | Pretty little stuff to do here. Sadly the carrots seem to cap at 100 no matter what so you can't even go for a bigger score. Took me quite a while to understand why it stopped gathering carrots at some point but after reaching the max few times I finally understood why that was. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 14.54.38.png Now after writing this whole thing I went for few more rounds and it seems that the field even has more than 100. And if I just gather everything from there, the counter loops around back to 4. Doesn't really give much motivation to go for the treasure now does it? Even less so when the treasure is worth way less than what you'd be able to gather in carrots using the same time. It sounded and looked pretty nice, though I guess everything was pre-made. The only thing that kinda stood out from the rest mega low poly style was the rabbit itself. And I think the shadows were a bit too dark which made it unnecessarily hard to sometimes figure out what was an object and what was just the shadow. The carrot picking sound was a bit tough on the ears. The controls were a bit weird. The turning seemed kinda slow. Probably is nicer on a gamepad though. And only supporting WASD when the other hand isn't doing anything (except maybe space for jump) isn't a great choice. You should pretty much always add both WASD and arrows. And btw, jumping wasn't even explained at all anywhere. In here either. And it was absolutely broken too 😉 And sadly the jump seems to get stuck where it really matters the most, near the treasure chest. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 14.48.55.png The farmer AI, if you could call it that, was absolutely busted. His activation seems very arbitrary, sometimes aggroing you even if you have not stepped to the yard at all. And when he does aggro, it's crazy, shooting through walls and everything. Feels cheap. Anyways, good job! 👍 | |
| Jan 9 14:38:17 | 1h 22m | Harv&West | ♥ 0 | So it's not a "web" build but just a Windows one. |
| Jan 9 15:54:48 | 1h 16m | Crops Survivor | ♥ 1 | Pretty cool! I've never actually played Vampire Survivors but even still it's not hard to figure out what game you're most inspired by here. 😅 Grabbed the first spot for now... Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 17.09.30.png Actually went for another run and managed to improve it by a bit. Now I'm not even getting any powerups at all on level ups, even the crappy movement speed one is gone. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 17.57.11.png And yes, I am saying that movement speed is an absolute waste of a skill here. The increase is minimal and you're already moving way faster than is needed. I think bumping it much would even hinder as it'll make gathering orbs harder. Would have wanted to see a bit broader variety of powerups overall. Constantly getting served the same three with magnet capping out fast and speed being quite useless left me feeling like there wasn't much of a choice at all. Splitting the scythe one to be maybe separate damage/area would have been nice and pretty easy to come up with more different ones too. Like attack speed and healing would have fit in absolutely fine here. So all in all, after the first few damage upgrades, more damage is pointless (just for the area). Movement speed caps at what, four stacks? Meaning 20% increase which wasn't even noticeable. And finally yeah the magnet did kinda work but I don't think it really was that much worth it to go for instead of damage and hit area. So bigger pool of upgrades and serving three of them randomly might have been fun and obviously way more replayable. Allowing player to stack up the skills more would have been cool too. Of course it becomes harder to balance, especially for online leaderboards, but letting the player feel like they're getting (too) powerful is always a good idea. And all you need to really do to balance that is to ramp up the difficulty even harder at some point. The early game of the (repeated) runs was often very boring. It picks up pace rather slow and feels grindy to get going. And as there is no healing, even small mistakes stack up. The enemy attack was hard to figure out. Was that on timer like the player one? Player character attack being timed felt weird at first too but I got used to it. It kinda served as a neat rhythm to the game. Looks like we make quite a few same design decisions as game devs. The bouncy/scaling UI buttons, wobbling texts, the sliding panels on scene changes and even how your leaderboards/name input is setup are all very very similar on how I like to do things. Few things I'd focus more if I were you are color choices, fonts and overall player feedback. You know, like particles, flashing effects and screen shake on hits on so on. The player character health bar was weirdly in front of the upgrade choice buttons... Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 17.15.13.png Your audio work could have used some more love too. The music was kinda quiet and the sound effects were few and monotonous. Some variety to em would have been nice. And the swing sound started clipping like mad on the "end game" where you were killing dozens of enemies with a single swing. Not a huge fan of the voxel art style either but that's just me and my taste. A better color palette would have helped here too. Now it looked too muddy and dark to me. Oh yeah, almost forgot! You should usually add arrow keys too as alternative controls for WASD. And just requiring to use mouse for the upgrade picks while the whole game otherwise was just keys wasn't great either. But yeah, good job! Fun game. 👍 |
| Jan 9 17:47:16 | 1h 52m | Hearty Harvest Tycoon | ♥ 1 | Well, that's a Windows only build. Even if Unity says it's "Windows, Mac, Linux", you still need to pick (and separately build each) platform. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 19.45.29.png |
| Jan 9 18:40:42 | 53m 26s | Nimkip! | ♥ 5 | Neat idea but too bad the execution breaks in almost every way possible. I did manage to beat it though after soft locking myself few times first. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.20.31.png The biggest issue really is that the nimkips don't really do what they're told. They have like 20% chance to actually do it and otherwise they just go there and do sweet FA. nimkips.gif Can't recall the non-workers either really as that will also recall the ones who are actually contributing too. Makes the whole gameplay loop absolutely tedious. And it's especially bad on combat cause no matter how many nimkips of what color ever you throw at an enemy, they might just glitch out and get killed and completely lock you from progressing. Finally I tried avoiding combat altogether and that seemed like the best strategy. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.18.29.png Another pretty big issue was nimkips clipping outside the map and getting stuck in the void. And unless you figured out the completely unmentioned secret unit selection functionality, you couldn't even command your nimkips because the if the first acting one was stuck there. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.13.41.png And that selection mechanic was also confusing when I first found it by accident. Obviously I tried to build one but hit the portrait instead and took me quite some time to find out why only reds were doing anything. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.11.11.png The pixel art seemed pretty nice but it was mega blurry. And that green outline just looked weird. I think you did not set the sprite scaling mode to point. Doing that keeps the pixels from blurring out when upscaled. The animations also might have looked good from what I could see but everything kept blinking and flashing which kinda ruined it. And that grass texture was almost seizure inducing on non-fullscreen and moving. This UI color choice was absolutely horrible too, completely unreadable. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.00.57.png The textbox text appearing animation looked weird as the words suddenly wrapped from line to line. I usually tackle this issue by making the full text actually always be there but the not appeared bit just being rendered transparent. There were also some z-ordering issues. Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.07.06.png And finally the controls. Well they did work but they didn't really feel great. The movement had this weird laggy inertia. Didn't really bother the gameplay that much though as no precision was really needed. The command and recall both did work but the recall size changing made it a bit inaccurate and prone to accidental recalls. So yeah... as I told, the idea was pretty sweet but had some major issues in playability. Good job on finishing it though. 👍 |
| Jan 10 14:35:04 | 19h 54m | Harvest Heist | ♥ 2 | Almost made it to a minute... Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 16.16.43.png So it's very frustrating really. Dodging the shots is basically just up to luck and sometimes the watermelons just can't be found in time. Died several times without finding a single melon. Kicking the scarecrows felt weirdly random too. Sometimes they just got their shot off without any warning so I guess the tactic is to only go for them right after they've shot. And you weirdly get stuck there for a while too which makes you vulnerable another scarecrow attacking you while doing so. But you lose too much time doing so as you pretty much constantly need to be on the prowl for the watermelons. Seeing the shots is pretty difficult and I'm not even red/green colorblind. And the shots move so fast that it's really difficult to dodge them on reaction. Their hitboxes seem too big too and it makes very difficult to estimate how much you'll need to dodge. And the fact that they shoot even from off screen and sometimes in random directions doesn't really make it any fairer. Also a quite weird design choice to have the player position etc not reset on retries. Sometimes you can just already have an arrow coming right at you when you start. Anyways, good job! 👍 Some more tries later, needed to beat that minute marker at least... Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 16.34.37.png |
| Jan 10 15:25:22 | 50m 18s | Hex-Yield | ♥ 3 | Kinda fun to experiment around in. Of course I would have really liked there to be some actual goal and so on but guess this'll do too. I guess just discovering out new tiles could be a goal enough. At least I "achieved" in unlocking the full progression... Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 17.08.14.png Couldn't find all the different tiles though. But did find quite a lot. I'm missing 22, 24 and 26 only. Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 17.15.24.png Can't really say that all those combinations really made that much sense. And it was so difficult to try to plan forward enough to make room for some specific combinations you wanted to try out. And the initial "watering phase" became such a bore after doing it over and over again. It controlled quite smoothly and they were kinda intuitive. Hated the automatic camera movement when clicking on tiles though. And getting locked to some tile and needing to right click or hit the X to cancel felt pointless as just selecting some other tile could have done the same thing. Visually it looked amazing. Loved the hand drawn art style and especially the bouncy animations. The sound scape was pretty perfect too and the music fit the mood and feel of the game great. Oh yeah and the mac version needed this classic thing to actually run... Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 17.24.03.png Anyways, good job! Clearly one can see that you have a team where everyone knows their area well. 👍 |
| Jan 10 17:58:03 | 2h 32m | Rough Harvest | ♥ 2 | Pretty good. Very easy though. Played it through twice, the second time even without using any foods at all. Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 19.37.54.png It get kinda out of had quick. I think the weed timers could have been a bit longer and have a more visible cues for when they became plantable and were about to grow weed. As the action was so constant that it really gave no room to familiarise oneself with the recipes and ingredients and so on. The combat worked pretty well but felt too slow and not dangerous at all. Only the corn enemy seemed like it could actually pose even a minor threat. But as you were always in control of what was spawning, it wasn't a real issue either. There was no downside at all to just constantly keeping both mouse buttons down and literally mashing space to move constantly as the normal walking speed was so horribly slow. You should pretty much always evaluate your player "actions" whether they could just be used all the time. That is why shooting usually has recoil, slower movement, reloads etc. Or even making them fully automatic could be another way to go. Now you only really had to stop for planting and cooking. The visuals worked pretty well. Nice animations too. Would have wanted to see a bit more feedback on actions like hitting enemies and getting hit yourself. It just didn't feel like anything had much impact. And the screen shake was off by default for some reason, only noticed the existence of it on my second run. But it looked pretty weird. Not sure why but it felt sluggish somehow. Was it only camera rotation? I think it should be snappier and ideally accompanied with a gut punching sound effect to really drive the impact home. But yeah, it was good. Of course it could have been better with a smoother progression and maybe having the foods permanently build up your stats instead of just being timed buffs. Good job though! 👍 **edit:** Oh and only now read the description. I played the web version and it worked just fine. |
| Jan 10 18:22:22 | 24m 19s | eHarr West err... | ♥ 3 | Umm, okay... Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.06.08.png Had to play the post-jam version as that was the only mac version provided. Guess it doesn't really matter that much though. The game started with a completely black screen. I guess it's not supposed to do that? Then after clicking randomly I was greeted with this. Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.02.17.png And after clicking some more, some UI elements appeared too. Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.02.21.png But yeah, it was still very cryptic. I guess you could do some major low rez pixel art here. Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.02.47.png So managed to actually start the game after all this major league artistry. The pixel art looked pretty nice. But I did not like the color choices on mainly the player character. I guess everything else looked just fine. The info texts were weirdly offset from the center too. Oh yeah now that I think about it the "inventory" was on the other side. 🤔 The character controls could have been snappier. I felt like the acceleration and slowing down was unnecessary. And probably should setup the colliders kinda like this so you could walk behind the objects and it would make more sense. Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.12.34.png The main "point and click game loop" here was pretty simple. It felt unnecessary to be that tight in the order of things like having to do the watering can thing before you could even interact with the bucket. And none of the things really made any sense either. I guess the machines could have hinted a bit more on what they needed if interacting with them without the required thing. And of course getting rid of that rigid order and adding in more stuff to interact with (as maybe like red herrings) would have made it more interesting. The ticking sound for the footsteps got irritating quite quick. Didn't really help that it along with the interaction beep were the only sounds in the game. Music definitely would have helped drown em out and some variety (and more sounds overall) would have really been the correct thing to do in my opinion. Anyways, good job! 👍 |
| Jan 11 15:33:32 | 21h 11m | abundance | ♥ 2 | Cool! Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.02.02.png But since obviously missing a log is a deal breaker so again we go... Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.08.50.png Very solid work. Super stylized look and it works well. The swaying plants and lighting really brought the world alive. Some minor dithering issues here and there and some transparency glitches like this plant but nothing major and didn't really spoil the feel at all. Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.15.32.png The controls were on point! Mega generous coyote air you got there, it never blocks you from jumping when just falling off. No wonder I didn't really mess up any jumps for that reason. Oh but overall I did mess quite a few jump. Can't blame the controls really, they were tight enough. But those death beams were brutal! I often took several hits when just getting hit once because of the knocks and then there were some instant death traps where you couldn't even get out anymore like this one where you just kept bouncing between the beams. Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.20.07.png Well dying wasn't really a punishment but losing the logs and needing to backtrack again for those wasn't that much fun. And in my opinion the logs should disappear from the world just like the items do, as you can always just get back to them on your PDA. Do the kids nowadays even know what PDA is? On repeated runs closing it with P felt awkward. Could have been just like the final door at least that you could just git Z again to continue playing. The 2.5D aspect really made my misjudge my jumps in places like these at first and I kept hitting my head. But then I got used to just staring at the "front bits" and judging my position from there. Which didn't really like to fit to my head as usually you'd think the character is in the middle of the z-axis. Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 16.53.32.png Really would have needed some music or some ambience at least. That could have fit the mood too I guess. The sound effects already had some variation it them it seems, nice touch, often overlooked. And finally a comic relief... https://youtu.be/5KL7M6p41wA Good job! 👍 |
| Jan 11 17:15:20 | 1h 41m | Zarguuf's Big Berry Heist | ♥ 4 | Dang, so short. I was just getting used to the control and it was already over. So time to bump up the difficulty and go for the SPEEEEEED... Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 19.03.26.png I did a scouting mission too, guess I'm not supposed to be here? Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 18.48.54.png And after going around the whole base, I found myself stuck on the other side. Walking the whole trip back didn't seem like a good idea. Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 18.50.28.png After few glitchy teleports, I got myself out from there. Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 18.50.49.png I think it was basically throwing too much stuff at you too fast. Didn't really get to properly use all the spells. I pretty much completely neglected the shield after the tutorial level since just dodging was more reliable to me. And the spells going off cooldown didn't have enough of an indication. Especially happened when I was pulling berries and the biggie on a crowded space. I so many times kept missing my pulls and also messing up whether I had the spell prepared or not. I think it could use leave the last used spell to be ready without the need to arm it again. Should make it smoother. It looked and sounded good. The only thing that mainly irritated me was how the "cursor" kept jittering while moving. Also this teleport (at least) "bouncing off" looked a bit weird at times. And it hitting the walls was somewhat annoying when trying to quickly move and right before teleport something appeared slightly in the way. So it could be a bit more forgiving when going near corners. Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 19.05.59.png Oh cool, found another shortcut to shave off few seconds... Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 19.14.59.png Good job! 👍 |
| Jan 12 15:57:56 | 22h 42m | Rot Waits for No One | ♥ 2 | Cool! Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 17.40.23.png It's quite discouraging on like season 8+ cause there is no way to serve even a majority of your clients. I'm pretty sure some of them even had so huge orders and little patience that they could barely even grown in that time. Let alone having to manage all the packing and few orders at the same time. Basically you could just serve one or maybe two of the clients and the rest will storm out. Didn't feel great. I was doing quite good before the timers just became nigh impossible, the bar was even almost out of the frame already. Not a great use of space on this screen by the way. Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 17.32.05.png It gets very repetitive after few seasons in because there is nothing new really. Just bigger orders and more ingredients which doesn't really make it any harder, just more annoying and time consuming. Sure it also got easier to do the orders wrong but having the box in correct spot helped and you only managed to serve two customers at a time anyway. Pretty much only sometimes forgot some slow growing ingredient from an order because I thought it was going to the later one. Strong and cohesive visual art style, looked nice and the sound effects did their job well. Music got repetitive quick too being that short of a loop but not to the point of annoyance really. The orange sprite kinda popped out from the rest by being less detailed and sloppy looking. The customer patience meter was kinda confusing. Would have made a lot more sense (to me at least) to get rid of that arrow and just have the red fill up. At first I didn't quite understand that the boxes needed to be closed. After messing about trying desperately to drag them, I found the button and clicked it on all of the boxes not really noting what was inside of em. Run ruined, it was time for a reset. The close button was also annoyingly small compared to everything else that had a a quite generous hitboxes and effect areas. Other thing that felt tedious was watering the plants. The can being positioned so far and needing to drag for each plant separately was a bore. So much going back and forth there for no good reason. Didn't require any skill or precision, just a waste of time. And these aren't seeds really. 😅 But of course it would maybe be confusing to have some other sprites for them (and more work to the artist on your team too). Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 17.16.56.png But yeah, that's it. Good job, very strong entry! 👍 |
| Jan 12 17:05:59 | 1h 08m | Energy Harvest | ♥ 1 | Neat idea. My first though was "cool, Marble Madness with two balls at the same time". Didn't do too hot on my first run... Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 18.45.41.png The second one was better but need to do some math to get the time for it as your total time calculation doesn't reset on "play again" it seems. And not that I count it, I guess knowing the levels and how to reserve the energy didn't help at all. Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 18.49.21.png The charging mechanic was quite un-fun. Forcing player to wait is never a good idea. Just doing a time penalty would have done the exact same thing without being annoying. And by using momentum and tapping you lose time that way too so I'm not sure if that's a really good idea either. Felt like there wasn't enough force in the movement. Moving felt sluggish. Having more control over the movement would have definitely made it more fun. And the sluggishness and huge mass made the tactic of using one ball to bump the other pointless too. Just couldn't really do it. Pretty sad since it would have most likely introduced some interesting strategies. Obviously needing the mouse to proceed between levels wasn't the best choice. Could have just made and keypress do the same thing and that way the player wouldn't need to move their hand to the mouse. A minor details but would have made playing (especially replaying) feel so much smoother. The camera work wasn't great either. You basically had to know the levels already to actually be able to play well. The flat shading on the ground made it near impossible to see the height differences. The wobbling effect after charging was done was cool but looked awkward when moving. Went for another run, at least this time I improved a bit. Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 18.57.24.png Anyways, good job! 👍 |
| Jan 12 17:50:39 | 44m 40s | The Gold'n Apples | ♥ 2 | Pretty relaxing indeed. Barely made it after fumbling around at start and very very bad RNG. Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 19.34.27.png And my final "great" build... Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 19.34.41.png So the random deals were pretty brutal in the early game. You could even get so bad a luck that there is no way to pass the first island. And starting the whole thing again after a fail like that wasn't fun at all. Getting served a handful of only marketplaces at the start of an island was soul crushing. The game should probably explain too that the apples and coin carry over so you shouldn't rush to the next island as soon as you can. The visuals were pretty good. The white spot for the "picked up" building was a bit off putting and it was quite hard to remember where it was picked from when trying to return it. Could of really helped to have some sort of in place popup text/icon showing when you harvested apples or sold em for coin. Would have really made easing into the mechanic so much nicer. Sometimes (or I think maybe even always) the hover effect didn't appear. Happened quite a few times at least on the one square off from left bottom corner on different islands too. And would have been cool to have the picked up building on the hover as kinda like a reminder preview of what you took. Messed up quite a few times because spent some time thinking and forgot what I had picked. And of course having undo functionality in a game like this would be a godsent. The music was chill and fit the vibe of the game. Some sound effects would have been nice. They also would have helped giving feedback of gained apples or coin just like the visual effect I already mentioned. Anyways, good job! 👍 |
| Jan 19 13:32:00 | 163h 41m | Adelie - Water Under the Bridge | ♥ 1 | Super fun idea and very well executed. Of course it would have benefited from some sweet tunes too but even without one, the sound effects remained pretty much non-irritating. Screenshot 2023-01-19 at 15.11.46.png Difficulty seems to stop ramping up around level 12 where the piranhas start to spawn. So after that it's all about luck just waiting until you run in to an un-winnable situation. It was really clear what enemy was what and how they behaved after seeing them just once. Really good design on that department. Well maybe the tentacle thing was a bit confusing for the first few encounters as it seemed much scarier than it really was. The early days started to feel like a slog after some repeated runs. There wasn't anything interesting happening and nothing you could do to improve your score as that was predetermined. But trying to breeze through that made me sloppy and prone to mistakes. A similar thing that happens often in roguelikes that you start trying to be fast to get to the interesting and new bits and start making stupid mistakes. But even in roguelikes (which are considered like the hardest genre ever) you aren't punished as hard as here. They always have some leeway for recovering but not here, just one stupid miss-step and you're done. Like 75% of my runs ended before that day six marker where it actually starts to get interesting due to my dumb mistakes or enemy patterns that just can't be beaten. Usually that being two betas so near to each other in a "wrong" shape and you having no blocks to fall to. Well at least their AI wasn't perfect and you could sometimes juke them out even if they had you cornered. The cutscenes get annoying. Even skipping them took forever. Any delays between tries (and levels) in a score chasing game like this start to really irritate fast. And since you pretty much only die on your own stupidity or RNG being cheap, the end of the run never really feels good. At least it does have that "1 more" aspect but it would be boosted quite a lot if restarting and level transitions were quick and if there was something interesting in the early game too. At least like having the scoring be more skill based and not just "you get 80-120+ points randomly by level 10". Good job! 👍 What is it that PICO-8 games pretty much always are far above other games in overall quality? 🤔 |
