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benk

Feedback comments for LD52

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		benk's comment
Jan 12 23:02:42		Harvest Ur‌anus 🪐	♥ 1	I liked the world building / setting a lot - the flavour text, graphics in the base, the way the harvesters come and grab the crop when you cut it down, the beasties, and the way the game mechanism(s) worked alongside that. I also liked the variety of gameplay - having to water plants and balance that with actually planting, and defending the base (while not killing the plants), chopping them down, all with different items. One big thing for me though was all the insult text. Not my sense of humour, but also gameplay wise it hid the status text of the plants and it was really hard to figure out what was going on (especially with the beasiest running at you). It was almost a fluke that I managed to harvest a plant. IMO it would have been better with everything being graphical... like a progress bar at the bottom, and only having 1 status not 5.
Jan 12 23:38:49	36m 07s	FarmUp!	♥ 2	Fun game and super polished. It all felt very tactile with the graphical flourishes and the SFX. I'm envious of your screenshots, because I never came close to doing that well. Managed to harvest some corn but that's as far as I got, and I did try for a while. Some things which IMO would have helped: - Have mouse controls as well. Sometimes I'd fail (or just get confused) pressing the wrong j/k key, or not really sure which direction I needed to face. - Have the tool colliders be larger so that they can't overlap with each other. It would help with the problem where they'd overlap for me and it'd be hard to pick up the right one. - Be less difficult especially at the start?
Jan 13 00:04:42	25m 53s	Nocturnal Enrichment	♥ 1	Really original, good sense of humour, and a bunch of really nice touches especially with the audio (e.g. being close to the band). I enjoyed this game - the dialog was fun, the room had a lot of atmosphere, everything worked well together. I wasn't really sure what the hide mechanic did. I seemed to survive even though I didn't hide, or maybe I did? I got into a state where grabbing the gem would instantly fail. The whole steal mechanic was definitely necessary but seemed a bit too tedious. The dialog portion was more fun to me. I especially liked that the guy down the bottom had completely different dialogue. I wish that the different fancy people had different sets of correct answers to the same questions, it seemed to be a bit like that with the Marxist guy? but it would have been better with even more of that sort of thing.
Jan 13 00:24:13	19m 31s	Poo Farmer	♥ 3	I had fun running around (very quickly) gathering poo (looking for the unicorn) and seeing what the different weapons did. A couple of balance issues was that the unicorn was pretty OP since if it sits next to the silo you can farm a lot of poo, and that the weapons were pretty expensive so I got a bit tired of it. I know I was supposed to be killing goblins (right?) but they were hard to find and pretty hard to hit too. Having the velocity of the player affect the velocity of the bullets would have helped. The audio was fun. An area for improvement would be to have multiple sounds then cycle through them randomly to give some variety, it got tiring after a while hearing the exact same farty effect.
Jan 14 05:07:15	28h 43m	Market Restaurant	♥ 2	I like your game. The mechanic of putting together combinations of things that change each turn, with that limited resource, and making a number go up is classic in a good way. The setting of that being in a market with those icons and little 3d sandbox worked well, it has a lot of character. It felt like it belonged in a Fire Emblem game or something. I would for sure play it every day. There is definitely a lot more that you could have done here, but it's compo so I'm not sure if that's a useful thing to say. For me... if the score system were more "achievement / objective" based than "high score" based it would have scratched a bigger itch. It's also a natural tutorial sort of thing. I was a bit lost at the start feeling out what I was supposed to do and having like "cook a meal with potatoes" or whatever would be satisfying. It's nice having some chill music to go with the whole thing. Works well for how short the loop is, though IMO something more lively would have suited it better. A much smaller change would be to make the ground green, brown is a bit depressing.
Jan 14 05:41:12	33m 57s	Flee the Farmland	♥ 3	Fun game! I liked the first level a lot and I played it a few times to see how long I could get the mouse. It's a nice riff on Snake to avoid the tractor. That with the sound design and the music[1] was a really nice package. Having the different animals with different control schemes and obstacles keeps things interesting... like warioware for animals. Like other people have said though, I found the gecko super difficult, the bird unsatisfying to control, and the frog a bit too slow (and the obstacles not super meaningful). If it was a matter of time, dropping the gecko and tuning the others might have been better. [1] The music was super cool except I found the loud-trombone section maaaybe out of place with its intensity. Felt like a chase scene from a Pixar movie. Either way, it was very effective, and the sound design was great.
Jan 14 07:14:32	1h 33m	Robert the Druid has Made a Terrible Mistake	♥ 1	Daaaamn loved this game. Graphics and colour palette were great. Wonderful animations (especially at the end). Music was amazing... great tunes, really made the mood, and changed with the game perfectly. Did you write it for this jam? SFX were good and well done though competed with the music sometimes. Maybe EQ them differently? I dunno. Gameplay wise it was really fun at the start when it was more challenging, but as other people have said, after a few rounds when you've established a bunch of trees (especially the powerful ones) it's impossible to lose, and nothing to do other than sit there and watch. Which really, at the end, was still fun. But before then, there wasn't much variety. Maybe there could be? Like have another couple of enemy types that get introduced gradually. Gameplay wise... maybe make the better trees more expensive (like way more, 4 or 5). Have some way that trees die or something. Basically just some reason to stay interactive over the whole time. Ending was hilarious, kudos.
Jan 15 00:10:03	16h 55m	Crop Creep	♥ 2	Really original game! Good balance of cutting down the correct crops and trying to get the farmers out of the way. Graphics were cute and the grass especially was really well done. The sound design was excellent (and funny). Music set the mood well. I did finish the game, but found it pretty time consuming and challenging at times. Some things which could have helped: - Make the hitbox of cutting down good crops a bit larger than the hitbox of the bad crops. - Have a magnet sort of effect on the corners of the crops, they were pretty difficult. - Have some indication that there is a farmer messing up your stuff (like a subtle arrow, or spatial audio). - Something felt off about the position of the ant thingy and what crops it was actually affecting. And a nice satisfying addition would be to fade in the completed crop circle at the end of each level rather than just transitioning into the new one. But overall, it was super polished and I enjoyed it a lot. Did you disable ratings on it or something? I don't see a way to.
Jan 15 10:40:53	10h 30m	Happy Tree Harvest	♥ 1	Hah, fun game. The music was a highlight for me, especially on the first minigame, but the contrast to the 2nd minigame was very well done too. The minigames themselves were cute and well done. The axe one at the end was pretty distressing. My 1st time around was a funny commentary on doing what you're told in games, and the message at the end made me laugh. My 2nd time around I just let the humans die to see what would happen. My 3rd time around I was trying to keep things stable and get something other than those 2 endings... the promised "the credits is not the end"... but after 9 years I ran out of time (for the evening) and honestly patience :-( I'm not sure what I was supposed to see? But something does need tweaking.
Jan 15 11:25:31	44m 38s	Galactic Garden	♥ 3	Wow, the most complete game I've played so far at this LD. A lot to do and the loop of plant -> fly around -> harvest -> kill crows -> upgrade -> etc was pretty deep. I enjoyed it a lot. I thought that the crop planting and harvesting mechanic was the most solid, the way that there were only a few slots per asteriods, and that the asteriods flew around so you couldn't find them. A good way to solve the problem that other LD games seem to have with similar mechanics. It also just felt really good, maybe it was the sounds and animations. The shotgun was my favourite weapon for sure, nuke was also fun at the end to spam. The combat wasn't as strong as the harvesting IMO. Fun because of the upgrades, but it felt a little off somehow. The lasers and crows were hard to avoid, they tracked you really close. But there also wasn't much of a downside to getting hit by lasers anyway (once you had enough energy). Also I thought the timing could have been shorter between waves... maybe more smaller waves or something. But the variety of the weapons and enemies well made up for it.