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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Honey Pony's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 15 21:31:21 | The Cursed Vest of Soul Harvesting | ♥ 3 | Fun game! I managed to beat all the levels and the boss. Speaking of the boss, I am sometimes not the biggest fan of boss fights, but I think this one worked pretty well. It felt like a puzzle, as it was straightforward enough to get some deterministic results out of the boss. And then it was interesting to try to solve that puzzle--for example, I had to learn that I had to kill some of the skeletons that were spawned in, or they would kill my skeleton. (And, the boss wasn't very hard... due to the way the cycles work out, you basically get a free attack on him at the end, so you just have to get him stunned twice. I personally appreciated a boss on the easier side, as I feel that past that point it would basically just be repeating the same strategy with some slight variations, and it would get more frustrating to restart each time.) In general I think the puzzles here were very well designed. I often tried different things that ended up failing spectacularly, in ways that seemed very intentional--as in each case, I learned a little more about the mechanics. For example: the imp puzzle took me the longest. Once I tried using the rightmost skeleton, and saw how deadly the imp was to those characters, it became clear to me that, within this puzzle, there was absolutely no way I was going to possess the imp, and then it became clear I should attack it with that middle skeleton, etc. And that rightmost skeleton seems to me to be entirely placed there to provide the player an opportunity to see how deadly the imp is. I think this design was very effective, as in every case where I tried one of those failing paths, I really did learn more and get better at the puzzles. Another example: in the second level, the bottom path really taught me to think about the soul counter. In terms of the counters / monster statistics -- at the beginning of the game it did seem somewhat daunting how many there were. But I think they ultimately were not that hard to work with. I do wonder if the defense statistic could be hidden from all the characters that don't have it, and then simply introduced along with the Golem? I have no idea if that would improve or worsen the learnability of the game. One thing I really liked was the animation on the characters. The amount of personality in the movement animations, despite them being very simple, is just a super nice touch. But yeah, overall, great puzzle game! Very well designed levels and overall fun to play. | |
| Jan 16 03:18:51 | 5h 47m | Encryption Harvester | ♥ 1 | I love the terminal interface for this game, it's a lot of fun; in my opinion, the terminal sounds also worked quite nicely. The only complaint I have about the sounds is I think the music is too quiet. On a technical note, the web version just does not work for me at all. At first I thought it was just a Firefox thing -- in Firefox, the intro won't even display -- but in both Firefox and Chrome, the terminal seems to freeze up when I try to type in it. The downloaded version worked fine though! As others, the main strategy I used was to type a lot of the same character in a row to try to just grind out some information. This is surprisingly fun, although my fingers started to hurt from typing "guess" over and over; eventually I stopped typing the "guess" part because it still worked (a helpful feature, to be honest!) and later I switched to the jam version, which was even more helpful with the indicator of when the right number of characters was entered. In terms of what made this grinding strategy fun, I think it was mainly when it got to the last few letters, where I could sometimes guess the word directly. Whenever I managed to do that, especially with a long word, it was very satisfying--and a surprisingly similar feeling to guessing a wordle, despite the very different overall strategy! One interesting property in the game is the rhythm of word-solving. To explain what I mean: so, at the very end of the game, there were a couple two-letter words, which could be solved extremely quickly. As I was just rushing through these, it felt like a climax, like when the hacker in a movie is just about to break into the vault, or whatever. And I think that you could play with this feeling more, mainly by not having a 9-letter word after those short words. In particular, there is a very nice contrast between grinding out the long words in the middle of the game, and between quickly cracking the short words at the end--and I think you could turn this into a very satisfying story beat, where the player accomplishes something through a series of decreasing length words, so there's this feeling of "gaining on it." Hopefully that made sense. It was a feeling I got there, and I wanted to make sure to describe it. 😄 One other note: at one point I did one of the optional guessing sections, and in that section guessed the word "candy"... this was a fun moment for me at least, as I am "in the know" as to the rest of the series, perhaps? I don't know, it was cool. Overall, I think the way this game used the wordle mechanics was interesting and rather fun, despite the grinding, and it had some nice moments throughout. |
| Jan 16 19:23:37 | 16h 04m | Escape From The Ostrobothnia | ♥ 2 | So far I've played this game for about 45 minutes or maybe an hour. With my current farm setup, in 15 minutes I managed to earn ~$500, which I estimate means it will take me another 45 minutes to get to the end of the game. So, I think I can say for sure that this game is a bit of a grind, taking at least 90 minutes to win and perhaps even longer than that. Now, I don't necessarily have anything against this. For a while last night I was just playing the game for a bit, as the core gameplay loop ends up being somewhat nice to just chill out and do for a while. That said, I feel like there isn't enough feeling of progression to really hook me in for a long grind. The only upgrades I bought were the faster harvester, as well as a couple fertilizer so that I could make some plots closer to the shed... these upgrades do seem to be perhaps worthwhile, but the rest of the upgrades seem so expensive that I have to imagine that buying them will actually just make the game take longer. In particular, I think it is rather frustrating that the only real way to advance in terms of money is to kill the pests, and they seem to spawn somewhat inconsistently... there will be stretches of time where the only pests that show up are on the edges of the map, and run away as soon as they touch a building. OK, so I've talked about how the game is a grind. So what did I like? Well, I think the core mechanic of the harvester is really great. I haven't played a ton of farming games with vehicles, so this was a bit new to me just in that sense. But the game mechanic itself is also really neat. In particular, relying on the harvester to travel quickly is really cool. Like, there's a lot of gameplay revolving around getting in the harvester to go somewhere, getting out to shoot something, getting back in to go somewhere else or to harvest something... overall I think it's a really good part of the game. The repairs also contribute to this--it was interesting whenever the harvester got completely destroyed, and I had to walk back to the shed to get the wrench. This was a cool mechanic as well, in my opinion. One other thing about the harvester that I liked is that there was actually quite a bit of technique involved in driving it efficiently. In particular, exiting the harvester causes it to immediately stop, which means that quickly turning around, for example, can be done by hitting E twice and then accelerating. Similarly, whenever loading resources into the silo, I would basically hit E twice. This braking technique made the harvester surprisingly fun to drive, as it felt like it actually took some skill, and it was fun to successfully execute the technique and drive the harvester more efficiently. I think the other farming game mechanics were also nicely implemented. I especially thought the distinction between the planted-plants and the harvested-plants (and harvested meat) lead to some interesting interactions. In particular, whenever I killed an animal, I would try to harvest it even if I couldn't actually store it in the harvester, simply because that would prevent it from fading away. The variety of interactions was also fun, and I think would be more than enough to keep me hooked for a shorter grind. Although, I do think you should mention somewhere that selling meat is actually very important, because otherwise I probably would not have kept playing nearly as long... the other things are just so much worse in terms of money. I think the easiest way to fix this would be to just show all the recipes that are possible to unlock in the store, so that the player knows they should be trying to obtain a resource called "meat." So, overall, a game with some very well-thought out and fun mechanics, just too much of a grind to play in one sitting. (Although I am keeping the game running on my computer... so perhaps I will finish it one day. 😄 ) |
| Jan 16 19:52:02 | 28m 25s | Growin' Ballistic | ♥ 1 | OK, so to talk about this game I first must describe the journey I took to play it. So, the first time I played I did ... ok. I didn't really pay attention to any of the plant statistics until the very end, when I lost on round 19. So, I was basically just using the meteor parsley for everything, but I realized right at the end that it had pretty low DPS overall. Then, for my next few runs, I started playing in fullscreen, and with the wheat turned off. I was under the impression that the wheat was just a particle effect, and I had felt it was somewhat distracting and made it harder to see my plants. I started using a strategy based basically entirely on cucumbers, but then the game crashed on round 15, and then when I tried again, it crashed on round 19. At this point I figured that perhaps my changes to the settings were causing it to crash, so I decided to just play in non-fullscreen and with the wheat turned back on. But then I started running into a very strange problem. For some reason I wasn't getting any money! This was super confusing to me. I restarted the game over and over, and I just couldn't seem to earn any money. Occasionally the money seemed to randomly increase by some amount. (I thought maybe my hand was just brushing the C key...?) I tried re-downloading the game. I tried playing the web version. In all cases, I couldn't seem to earn any money! This didn't seem like it could possibly be a bug, as it was happening across different versions of the game and it hadn't happened the first time. But I couldn't find any information in the game description or anywhere else I looked about how I was supposed to earn money. However, I saw that the source code was available. Aha! I would be able to just see what was going on! And then, after looking through the source code, I finally realized... oh. The wheat gives you money when you pick it up. It isn't just a particle effect. So, suffice to say, I think there should be a note somewhere explaining where you earn money from in the game. 😅 Okay, so, that was my story. But there was more to the game then that! So, first of all, I really love the graphics here. Super clean and crisp. Second, the core tower defense concept is absolutely fantastic. Having the enemy ships literally pulling your towers out of the ground is such a cool concept. I have previously played tower defense games where the enemies attacked my towers, but never in a way nearly this creative or fun. It was also fun trying to come up with a good strategy, although my first real idea, after reading all the tower info, was to basically just use cucumbers and occasionally a couple other towers (e.g. I had a dragonfruit, as well as some meteor parsleys, with each group of cucumbers). And this strategy seemed to work pretty well. The cucumber DPS was just so high, especially given its super long range. The only towers with more DPS had much shorter range, or simply attacked very occasionally. In particular, I'm not sure whether it's worth using the shallots. It seems like they could be pretty powerful, but I never really got a good sense on exactly how much damage they were doing. However, I did decide to plant a missdemandrake, as it seemed nice to be able to zap enemies anywhere on screen occasionally, and I also wondered if there would ever be any enemies with super high health. Well, it definitely paid off in round 20! My singular missdemandrake basically handled the UWO by herself. At that point, only a handful of towers had died, so I had like $2000 or so. So, in round 21, when a bunch of towers did get killed, I basically just started planting more missdemandrakes... and I won! Hooray. (continued...) |
| Jan 17 04:44:40 | 8h 52m | Plantus Infestantibus | ♥ 1 | So I played this game for maybe 20 minutes, and gave it around 8 attempts. The highest round I managed to get to was round 11. I think my main thought is that the game is way too hard. And I think there are a lot of factors into why it is hard, and I want to talk about some of them. First and foremost is that there simply is no real way to know when a plant will shoot. The only way to tell is based on kind of gauging how long it's been since it last shot, but this is imprecise. More importantly, however, when staying a safe distance from the plants, there is actually very little time to close in on them for the kill between attacks. This is especially bad with the initial green plants, which in my opinion might be the most dangerous enemy in the game. In particular, if there is a large group of plants, and their timers are not all in phase, there is essentially no actual period of time where it is safe to approach. The only strategy is to walk over and pray that any plant that does shoot will happen to shoot away from you. For this reason, I actually think one huge improvement would be to simply make plants always shoot in a fixed direction. That way, when approaching a group of plants, you could simply pay attention to which areas were going to be dangerous, and route your way around them. And, just to emphasize this point a little more: 2 of my reasonably good runs were ended by a green plant that shot me in the face. My best run was ended by a yellow plant that did the same thing. It's just so easy to misjudge when their next shot is, and if they happen to shoot in the wrong direction, it's game over. One other important mechanic that I think contributes to the difficulty is the camera. In particular, it is actually not possible to see very much in the direction that you're moving... which makes it very difficult to know what plants are up ahead and when they are shooting. This is mitigated to some degree in the later game, because the direction of bullets flying past you indicates where the plant came from (especially with the blue plants, where the bullets triangulate it, maybe..?), but it is still somewhat frustrating. I find myself sort of walking in steps to let the camera catch up. Now, despite all this difficulty, I did end up having a bit of fun in my best run. It is actually a really satisfying gameplay loop to try to kill enemies who can shoot at you just by touching them. It has those nice dodging moments from bullet hells, and I think it is more interesting to have to literally go up to the enemy than it is to just shoot at them back. I think that this core gameplay can be quite addicting, especially, perhaps, with fairer enemies. Of course, the difficulty can be fun in this as well... I think part of the joy of reaching round 11 and doing relatively well throughout that run was that my previous best run was round 8. It is fun to excel at the game. Another fun component is the random layout of enemies. Although this can result in unfair patterns, there is one additional fun component--trying to notice where enemies are spawning in, and then killing them right at the beginning of the round before they have a chance to attack, is satisfying, and provides a nice contrast to the more cautious approach that the rest of the game requires. So, overall, I think you have a fun idea here -- a good twist on the bullet hell genre. It's just so difficult--and difficult in an RNG-way, rather than a skill-way, that it is hard (for me at least) to commit to the 20-round grind, especially starting from the beginning each time. |
| Jan 17 05:41:14 | 56m 34s | Chop Crop & Drop | ♥ 4 | To me, this seems like a straightforwardly good game to just play through and enjoy. That is to say: because the player has complete control over how many enemies to fight at a time, there is really no required difficulty to the game--but it is nonetheless so well put together that just playing through it, even on really-easy-mode, is just a nice thing to do for a little bit. More specifically, the graphics and design of the game are just fun to play around with intrinsically. Particularly, the board game components are great--it is just more fun to upgrade your player statistics by adding a dice to your dice rack than it is to push a +1 button. And of course, it's a lot of fun to have the 5 dice roll whenever doing a maxed-out attack, and it's great how that feels different and more exciting than a level 4 attack, just like physically rolling more dice. Another detail along the same lines is the card storage. There's just something so fun about having a drawer that you can slide out and put cards into, complete with some very nice shadows and the ability to flip them over (which, as far as I know, does not affect the rest of the game at all? It's card flipping for its own sake!) And of course, the card upgrade slots are good for the same reason... it's just intrinsically fun to slot something into a slot that it fits into. On top of all that, I do think the gameplay itself has some fun components, in particular in terms of strategies. I did two playthroughs. The first one I just spawned one enemy at a time, as I was playing cautiously, and I maxed out my main attack, piercing, defense, and armor break (giving me a score of 13 days). For my second playthrough, I was trying to do a "minimum nights" run, which I won with 7 nights (probably far from the true minimum, of course). It was fun to play through that minimum nights run, though, as my strategy completely changed from spawning one monster per night to spawning as many as possible (so that I could get ~12 dice, and max out attack, defense, and armor break). When doing that, I even learned of a new mechanic, which is the way that the enemies will push chests out of the way. There are two little nitpicks I have: - It was a little annoying to set up my screen for 1920x1080. I do wonder if the app could do it automatically somehow...? - In my second playthrough, sometimes it was not clear when it was my turn and when it was the enemies' turn, seemingly due to the number of enemies on screen. It seems like it might take them a while to think, or something..? Maybe just having, like, an "ENEMY TURN" indicator somewhere, or something, would help make the UI a bit smoother when doing big fights. But overall I think this is just a rock-solid entry. Great polish, art, sound, and so much fun packed in as well. Great job! |
| Jan 17 21:46:29 | 16h 05m | Pomodoro Panic | ♥ 1 | This game does a lot with a very small set of mechanics. It's definitely nice to have a game where the only control is moving around... this makes it very easy to jump into as a player. But, because everything is interacting, there is a lot of strategy involved, despite the relatively small number of mechanics. It's quite effective game design. It is a rather tricky game. Level 5 took me a few tries; I lost with 20 tomatoes three separate times. But, it does seem possible to get better at it, which is interesting, because I don't feel like I internalized a lot of conscious choices about the strategy. If I analyze it a bit, I think the only real strategy I could put into words is minimizing down time. That is, as I got better at level 5, it seemed to me that I was more efficiently switching to watering plants when there weren't any tomatoes to collect, and that maybe I also made better decisions about when to abandon far away tomatoes because they would take too much time to collect. It does seem like time is the main currency here... tomatoes in the middle of the screen, for example, are especially expensive if you're already at the edge, as it takes time both to move to the middle and then to move back to the edge. I did find it somewhat frustrating how little control I had over the two tools. One especially frustrating mechanic here is that there seems to be very little control over where the tool you're not using is located. The only way to move the tool you're not using is to hope that it flies off in a useful direction when you swap tools. This mostly affected me on, I believe, the second level, where for some reason most of the time when I swapped tools the other tool just stayed put, and it was far away from everything else. I do think it worked out better when the tools just flew off in a random direction, as this made it more into just another random item you had to dynamically incorporate into your route, rather than a static point to keep returning to. But, I do still wonder how the gameplay would change if the player had control over whether to pickup tools. It would certainly make it easier, as then, for example, you wouldn't have to worry about picking up the watering can when trying to deliver tomatoes, and vice versa. But that particular obstacle does seem to be rather important to the gameplay. It wouldn't be quite as frantic and tricky of a game without some degree of obstructive controls. In any case, I had fun. It is a tricky game, but it seems to be tricky in an engaging way. As others have mentioned, there is a lot of nice polish or juice... the sound effects for collecting tomatoes, and the way that the canned tomato flies up in the air, are great effects that make it satisfying to collect tomatoes. And, as I sort of described earlier, the way that everything is interacted with through movement results in a lot of interesting interactions. Perhaps the most important is just how collecting multiple tomatoes in quick succession works... you kind of have to push them over near the canning machine, and then sort of get on top of them. This is cool, because it's a bunch of pretty simple mechanics combining together in a natural way. Another fun strategy is trying to decide which way to push tomatoes, in particular if the watering can is in the way. Is it better to go the opposite way, even though it's longer? Or is it better to try to jump over the watering can? So overall, I would say this is a nicely polished game that has very well designed mechanics. |
| Jan 17 22:57:04 | 1h 10m | Deck of plants | ♥ 1 | Absolutely fantastic game! So, I initially played this because I also made a deck-builder for this jam, and I saw yours on itch.io or something like that, and just had to see how other people built deck-builders for the same theme. I have to say, I think you did a much better job than me. 😄 But, our games both had a similar "water" mechanic, which is an interesting similarity! The run I did, I used mostly tomalones + the orange plant (the one that does +2 coins for each copy of itself), can't remember its name. Near the end I switched to just that orange plant, as the ability of it to stack more money with more plants on the screen was very helpful. More specifically, I think that an important property of cards in this game is how much money the card can earn divided by how many turns it takes to grow... basically its money/turns. And for that orange one, I was easily getting a ratio of 2 or more near the end, as it only took 5 turns to grow. Compared to the tomalone, which has a ratio of 1, I think this orange plant could be very powerful, and I might do another playthrough later to explore the strategy more. But that's something... this game is really fun! I literally want to go back and try to explore my strategy more! I haven't played a Ludum Dare 52 game with that property yet. So, I think the way you balanced the card deck is pretty good. There are some cards that seem perhaps overpowered, such as rain, but overall it seems reasonably balanced and I think there is probably more than one good strategy (and for cards like rain that are really powerful, it seems like they are powerful in every strategy, so it's pretty fair overall). In particular, I definitely saw other people using tomalones... and I'm guessing it's possible to get pretty far with those. But I think that orange plant can probably do just as well if not better. So, seems like there is some nice balance there. One thing that I think bit me is I completely misread the "+1 max energy" card. I kept reading it as "+1 energy," and so I never picked it up, as it seemed ridiculously difficult to grow for just 1 energy. But with 1 MAX energy... now that's a different situation! That seems to be an occasional problem with deck building games -- I think I've had similar reading issues with Slay the Spire, for example. I think this was the only misread I had in this game, though. Maybe just underlining "max" would be a minor but helpful change. I feel like the mechanics for gaining and getting rid of cards felt nice. Getting rid of cards is always powerful, for sure, but I feel like its gradual enough in this game that it doesn't feel too easy to just build a super powerful deck immediately. But it is kind of a nice feeling to be able to slowly build a better deck by repeatedly discarding cards. By the way, my score was 169 days. Definitely not as good as some of the scores I saw on the itch page. 😄 |
| Jan 18 01:29:53 | 2h 32m | Honeybee Harvest | ♥ 1 | Nice little game. I think the coolest mechanic here is the flowers. It's interesting to have an item that we are trying to protect, that at the same time can be damaged by us. I found that the controls seemed somewhat sluggish. In particular, I would often end up facing the wrong direction when trying to shoot. What would happen is: there would be a bat that I needed to shoot, but I was offset from it perpendicularly by a couple pixels. So I would turn to move those few pixels, and then turn back towards it and start shooting... but my "turn back towards it" input would get eaten, and so I would fire the wrong direction. Nonetheless, it was very satisfying to successfully take out enemies. I think I got pretty adept at the game by the time I stopped playing, as the waves didn't seem to be getting much harder and I would easily be able to survive large groups of enemies. Flying around to corral the enemies and then leading them in the correct direction to be able to shoot them felt good, even with my inputs sometimes being eaten. I was using Lebi rather than Gawon. I actually had no idea that they had different properties, but I went back and checked before writing this comment, and I think I am glad I used Lebi. The slower shooting speed of Gawon would just make those later waves so much harder. I do think that the scoring system does not make too much sense in the current game. Scoring is basically inversely proportional to how many enemies you fight. In particular, if you kill all the enemies but a single spider, you are able to score as many points as you could possibly want. On the other hand, in the later waves, it is basically impossible to earn any points while the enemies are alive, because the enemies will just destroy all the plants so quickly. So, spawning new waves is basically the last thing you want to do if going for score. I think that making enemies count for points could be a good change. Similarly, in the later waves, the plant mechanics end up a bit less meaningful, as the plants are practically always dead whether you shoot them or not. One way to change that could just be to make the enemies unable to harm the plants--I did find it difficult to shoot those last spiders while I was racking up points, because they would weave between all the flowers. This was kind of a fun challenge. One direction to explore could be making the plants invulnerable to the enemies, and making them even more important, such as by making shooting them all dead result in a loss. (I have no idea if that would be fun, but it could make the plant mechanics more important). I played this game for quite a while; I kept trying to see if the later waves would kill me, but they haven't had much luck yet. I've racked up 1601 points, mostly in between waves. I have found it fun to challenge myself with these later waves, as it is more interesting to try to dodge the big groups of enemies while still firing into them. There's been some close calls and other fun moments. So overall, I think you have some satisfying shooting gameplay with some fun and creative plant mechanics, even if the scoring is a bit odd. 😄 |
| Jan 19 20:39:04 | 43h 09m | The Night Harvest | ♥ 1 | [Spoilers for anyone who hasn't beat this yet] Getting through this game took a bit of effort. Especially night three--it took me a couple tries to get through it. The strategy I eventually used to win was to have a plant from night one still there by night three, and then hoping I would have enough energy after eating that to get through the rest of the night. I wasn't expecting night three to be so long, though. However, it all paid off in night four. At first I thought it was going to be completely impossible -- I was getting absolutely destroyed by the balloon pair and had barely any energy left. Then, of course, the light turned on, and I had to hide in the bushes, and I thought I would run out of energy for sure. But then it seemed like the lady was not going to go back in the house, so I guessed that perhaps I was simply meant to run out of energy here / let her find me. And sure enough, I believe I ran out of energy and then won! This was a super cool payoff for all the hiding mechanics and frustrations trying to get food in night three. Thinking for sure that night four will just be a huge grind, and then having it be super easy instead... it's a very fun twist. The winning cutscene itself is sweet and a great end to the game. One small detail that I love is that the humans speak gibberish. This makes a lot of sense for the player playing as a dog character. I think the game mechanics here are well thought out as well. The fact that crops grow did indicate to me that they would probably be worth more energy, and then I was able to start engineering strategies about leaving certain crops in place and, e.g. in my final strategy, only harvesting a single crop on night one. The combination of the slow animations plus the rapid frequency of the balloon popping does make night three kind of frustrating to get through, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem. In particular, because night four really pays off that frustration in an incredible way, it seems to me like a good use of frustration. So overall, this game was a great experience, definitely not what I would have expected going into it. Very cool. |
| Jan 19 22:03:44 | 1h 24m | FleshShot Plus | ♥ 0 | Like others, I had a lot of difficulty trying to survive the later rounds. I got to round 6 a couple times but I cannot seem to survive it. One strategy I tried using to perhaps buy some time was to just put as many upgrade towers as possible in the way of the central tower. This seems like it might help, as it should distract the enemies, but it ultimately wasn't enough for me to be able to get past round 6. I am curious how far is known to be possible -- e.g. how many rounds did you get through while playtesting? It seems possible that I am missing something about possible strategies. But as it stands, I don't see any real way to win against these larger groups of guys. The specific problem seems to be that it takes a long time to move between the different towers, and so inevitably there will be enemies that reach one of the towers and damage it. In particular, my thinking is that if I leave tower A to go to tower B, even if I have killed all the enemies that are current at tower A, the round-trip time to get to tower B and back will be long enough for some enemies to show up and start doing damage -- but if I don't even try to go to tower B, then the enemies will do damage to tower B, of course. I do like the novel tower defense mechanics, though. Having towers just be upgrades is an interesting twist, and I think it adds depth for them to also act as enemy distractions, even if I couldn't use that mechanic super effectively. The upgrades themselves are fun, and it was nice trying several of them out over the course of my different runs. And, the overall combination of the player being able to shoot while moving around, and being able to shoot in the towers -- while those towers are at the same time the object to defend -- it's an intuitive set of mechanics to learn, and they all reinforce each other nicely. It also seemed like perhaps the tower upgrades were affecting the player's own shooting while in range, which is cool. I quite enjoyed the music, especially the music that plays during the enemy wave. |
| Jan 19 22:56:05 | 52m 21s | Charles, the Bee | ♥ 4 | Very cute game! I thought that splitting the game into the two separate phases was a great choice. It really does have the feeling that I am just a regular bee, working towards a dream of mine. So, I think this game very effectively tells its story through its mechanics. The later pollen values do get a little large, but I never felt like the phase really dragged on too long. And I completely forgot about the boost during my playthrough -- so it seems to be fine even without the boost! I also enjoyed the transitional phase between the two gameplay phases... where you are moving up to the flower within the beehive. The atmosphere is so different and also kind of calming. The only thing that I think can drag on a little long there is depositing the pollen into the flower right before the rhythm section, as there you're kind of just moving in circles and waiting, but the part where you're following the arrows was very nice in my opinion. And of course, the music that increases in loudness as you approach is a nice touch too. I have a couple specific thoughts on the rhythm section: - It was hard for me to tell what exactly I was doing wrong when I missed a note, especially in the first song. Later I went back and did the first song while pressing zero keys, and if I'm not mistaken the only way to mess up is to press the key too late...? Either way, some feedback about whether you missed because you were too early, or too late, or wrong key, would be helpful, I think. - If I'm not mistaken, there is no way to lose the rhythm section. I think this makes a lot of sense, because the game is just a sort of relaxing game to play through, not an intense rhythm game. In particular, I was definitely giving the game my best effort, even though I suspected that I would win either way, simply because it is fun to try. And, it was kind of nice to not have to stress out about being perfect. So I think that was a good feature. - As others have said, even more player feedback would be nice, including not only for missing a note but also for getting it right. Some sorts of highlights and animations would make it more exciting, I think. - In the third song, there were some combinations of notes where there was one at the very top and then one at the very bottom, slightly offset in time. It was very hard for me to tell whether these were meant to be played at the exact same time or not, as it's difficult to tell between horizontally aligned and slightly offset when they're moving so fast and have such a big vertical distance between them. I think maybe adding some vertical lines could help make the notes more readable in this case...? Or perhaps just avoiding that particular pattern. Overall though, the rhythm section was fun to play through, and there were a lot of nice touches. The different poses for the main character were fun, as well as the audience cheering you on. In general the graphic design for this game is pretty great. And, of course, the cards introducing each opponent bee, and for each victory, were very nice as well. I also appreciated all the bee puns. 😄 |
| Jan 19 23:08:15 | 12m 10s | Harvest Roar | ♥ 0 | It was an absolute blast to try shouting to control the game. I think microphone control is a great choice for this, because it is both somewhat readily available for a lot of people (unlike, say, VR support), but also pretty novel and a lot of fun to try out. I did experience some strange latency issues and distortion with the audio--e.g. my voice would cut out pretty often, and it seemed like the audio would be delayed for a couple seconds before playing back...? I was using the downloaded version if it helps, although the web version seemed to have similar issues. This did make it somewhat hard to intentionally control much, as the amount of time between when I would say something and when it would actually affect the game was longer than the period of time that it took apples to fall from the tree... so my best bet seemed to be to just continuously shout so that the apples would keep bouncing. But it was still fun to play around with, and the graphics are gorgeous. The design of the monster is great -- it's just such a fun concept to have a shouting, apple harvesting monster. |
| Jan 20 03:11:11 | 4h 02m | BLUOT | ♥ 2 | This game was a bit of a journey for me. First, I was very excited to see cards in the description, as I also made a card game for this Ludum Dare and it's been fun seeing how others made card games with the same theme. So, I started by just playing the online version for a bit. There were quite a few mechanics to play with, such as the movement, which has some fun characteristics, and building the map... but I couldn't figure out how to attack the enemy. Looking back at the description, apparently red cards were used for attacking -- but I hadn't seen a single red card. I tried refreshing to start again, thinking maybe there was a glitch happening or something. I believe this time I got a single red card near the beginning, but it only had a range of one and I wasn't able to kill the enemy. So I played some more, but more red cards just were not showing up, yet again. I tried refreshing a couple more times, and I just couldn't seem to get red cards to show up, ever. I thought at this point it would be worth downloading the source code and seeing if I could figure out why. Much to my surprise, red cards were seemingly a simple 1/10 chance to be generated, same as e.g. the healing cards, which I had seen many of. I decided to print out the value of `x_roll` just to be sure, and yup, it seemed to not really be rolling in the 0.9-1.0 range. Strange... Then I turned my attention to the `randomize()` call at the top of the function. According to the documentation, this function seeds the random number generator based on the system time. Aha! This must be what's causing the random number generator to not be uniform! So I simply removed the calls to `randomize()`, both in front of `x_roll` and `y_roll`, and played again, and sure enough -- this time around I was getting red cards. It still actually took a while for me to get one, but eventually they did start showing up. And then I was finally able to win. So, to summarize... in this game, at least in the officially available version, your luck is based very much on the time that you decide to play the game. Depending on when you decide to play it, red cards might show up practically never, simply because the time values being used to roll the random numbers are much less likely to generate certain values than others. And this is, admittedly, quite an innovative feature... a game that simply gives you terrible luck if you play it at the wrong time. But I imagine that's not what you were going for! 😄 Nonetheless, it was a good time figuring that out. And the experience of reverse engineering that was itself not unlike playing some of your other games, namely Contact Nesigur, which had some intended shenanigans along similar lines. That said, there were still some things I liked about the game as designed. In particular, I thought that the movement mechanics were very interesting. At first I thought that, say, the "walk" card would only let you move 1 space, i.e. move to a space connected directly to the one you're currently on. But this isn't really the case... it seems to be based on distance, meaning you can move two spaces, or cross gaps in between spaces, if the edge of that space happens to be close enough. This is super fun, as it means that the strategy for moving around often means closely inspecting the board to see what spaces might be possible to sneakily move over to. I also really liked the way that the create-a-new-space cards worked. It seemed like they sort of generated one shape to follow your cursor, and then generated a different shape when you actually clicked... but this feels like a nice little animation, when the shape instantaneously turns into a different one. It's just a nice effect. (continued...) |
| Jan 20 03:36:15 | 25m 04s | Skooma Simulator | ♥ 0 | Pretty cool game! It was a lot of fun messing with the different cooking mechanics, and I liked how some of them required simply waiting while others required mashing space. This actually made the game more immersive, I guess, as things that require waiting, such as boiling water, also required waiting in the game... while things that require physical effort, such as mashing things in a mortar and pestle, require me to physically mash space! Just some fun design. The first time I played I thought the "secret room" was just automatically secret and so I didn't understand how the guards saw inside it. Later I figured out about the bookshelf, however, which is another fun mechanic. I don't entirely understand the purpose of the skooma dealer, as it doesn't seem like there is much difference between selling skooma out the door or waiting for the dealer... in particular it doesn't seem like there's much penalty either way. But perhaps that's just due to lack of time. I think the graphics are pretty nice and they are quite readable as well. It's fun that the pots can be turned sideways. Overall, quite a fun game to play through, even if the selling mechanics aren't too fleshed out. |
| Jan 20 20:52:37 | 17h 16m | Square Factory | ♥ 2 | Nice little idle game. I definitely did not use a very clever strategy to beat this. Basically, my problem was that I did not have 100 pluses when I bought the square factory, and then my hex factory started eating all my pluses so I could never build them up. After reading the other comments, I realize that one strategy that would have saved me a lot of time would have been to just buy a bunch more hexagon factories so that the square would have priority. Instead I ended up with 73,605 circle factories and 21500 triangle factories. These took forever to buy; I just used a macro that held my mouse down for me. I'm not sure if there would be a good way to get the player to think about more strategies. I did sort of try to reason about how I could maybe get pluses to build up in other ways, but I never had the epiphany that I could instead buy more hexagon factories. I think part of the problem is that it's not overwhelmingly clear exactly how the factories decide who gets to eat the resources. In particular, late in the game I had ~20000 blue circles, and my triangles cost ~40000 while my diamonds cost ~20000. However, the diamonds and triangles seemed to be taking turns in eating up all the blue circles. To me this seems like an antisoftlock mechanic...? But it does mean I don't have a super intuitive grasp on what exactly is going on, and so maybe that makes it harder to reason about strategies. One solution to this would be to just make it possible to buy buildings really fast. I think this would basically be fine, as it is still fun to build up all the factories over time and get a really big circle production compared to the beginning. I do think that the way the different shape resources interact is pretty interesting. It does enable good strategies in the game, even if I never found them. But, there were fun parts of the interactions nonetheless... in particular, the way that the circle and triangle factories build off each other is quite fun. The graphic design and audio is also very nice. I think that using arbitrary shapes as the resource is a good idea, it makes it pretty easy to reason about the different buildings and how they're interlinked. |
| Jan 20 21:09:57 | 17m 20s | Public service announcement | ♥ 1 | Pretty polished experience all things told! Great to have a little introductory game before everything falls apart. Then, the news cutscene itself looks pretty good. An interesting thing: it is actually surprisingly straining on my eyes to try to read the text while holding the spacebar. But, I also wasn't going to resort to just letting it scroll past on the slow speed. Near the end of the game ( 😉 ) I developed a strategy where I would quickly scroll some text on to the screen, and then release spacebar so I could read it with less eye strain. So, there you have it... your game even has some strategy involved! 😄 |
| Jan 20 21:39:18 | 29m 21s | Afterlife Assistance Agency | ♥ 2 | Very solid entry! Everything is nicely polished, the graphics look great, and the music feels very appropriate. The game does seem rather dependent on luck. In particular, my best run, with 12 souls harvested, had a bunch of characters show up right next to the coffin, making it very easy to score them quickly. On the other hand, sometimes a person will wander under the character info card, or off screen, and then you just kind of have to wait. This is somewhat fair, as if you're seeing them walk off screen, technically it is your own failure if you don't manage to grab them before they walk all the way off. But it is rather difficult to grab somebody right on the edge of the screen, particularly because it is somewhat awkward to click near the border of a game running in the browser. Adding some extra padding around that could be helpful. I did have to test the unfortunate mishap mechanic separately, as I didn't have any in any of my other runs; perhaps my strategy is just rather cautious. But anyways, this was kind of funny, because the first two times I tried to just grab a random person and throw them in a coffin, I actually had gotten the right person by accident. So I had, by luck, just started a run with 2 free souls, that had taken like less than a second each. Anyways, I do think that a sound effect for unfortunate mishaps would be a good addition, and I almost didn't notice that the timer had gone down, so maybe a little visual effect there could help...? The one other mechanic that seems a little difficult to appreciate is the info card for each human. That is, there's really not time to read it while you're scanning for them on screen. Maybe you could read each card after the game is over...? (Although, that might have a rather sinister feeling to it... 😅 ) The variety in the human characters is super fun, and provides for some nice gameplay. In particular, sometimes in the early game you can very quickly identify somebody by just one feature, which is cool. And, it makes the later game interesting as you have to kind of scan for features that you think you can recognize at a glance, and then filter down the people with those obvious features to see if they are an exact match. So, the difficulty curve is also a great feature. It definitely feels fair and fun, the way that the number of people on screen increases over time. Overall, great job! |
| Jan 20 22:18:54 | 39m 36s | Body Harvesters | ♥ 1 | Very cool tower defense game. So, the first thing I noticed when I started playing is that the mouse moved the camera, and it moved it really, really fast. This kind of made me motion sick, and I thought I was absolutely going to hate the camera for this game, but that is not what happened. Instead, I ended up thinking the camera controls were pretty dang good. I mean, I guess they are to some degree standard shooter controls (maybe?) but I thought they worked great here, especially in the early game. In particular, although it is true that the camera moves kind of fast, it's also true that the player controls it, and can lock it in place just by avoiding moving the mouse. This ended up meaning that I was actually having a ton of fun pointing the camera exactly where I needed it in the early game -- I would scan left and right to see if I could see any alien ships, and what's even better, is that I could shoot at them from almost anywhere on the map with quite a bit of precision! Of course, hitting the ships from so far away was not always easy -- it's difficult to predict how much they will move in the time it takes a bullet to get there -- but it was fun to try. The other tower defense mechanics were fun as well. I ended up building two anti-airs before I built any missiles for some reason, but then when I finally did build a missile, it was super fun to see how powerful it was. I guess I'm not actually sure what the utility of the anti-airs is, given that the missiles do seem very powerful in comparison, but perhaps the fact that they're cheaper makes them effective for their price...? But, trying to build up some defenses was pretty fun, and I think the arc of the game ended up working out pretty well too. More specifically: at the beginning, you're kind of on your own, and you can't really stop the UFOs very fast. In the middle of the game, the UFOs come somewhat often, and there are the UFOs that will shoot at you, but your defenses are strong enough that you almost don't have to do anything. Then, in the end game, everything becomes total chaos, and your defenses are woefully inadequate. No matter how invincible you feel in the mid game -- there's just nothing you can do here. As my final strategy I did try to just spam the city upgrades to buy myself a couple more humans. I think that perhaps I should have tried to buy them earlier. I do think that there is possibly some real strategic depth there. In particular, it seems like the only two factors you can really affect in the very end game is how many humans you have currently stockpiled in your cities, and how much you can reduce the rate at which the UFOs are grabbing them. I think there's quite a few strategies to explore in terms of building up big cities and keeping them safe in the mid game, especially if you could also get shields to last right up until the end, they could provide some extra seconds as well. Although, I am not really sure what the score means...? My score was 6993 with 885 humans harvested; I lasted a bit more than 1000 seconds. Overall, this was a fun game to play through, with a lot of fun variety (e.g. shooting by yourself vs. building towers), and what seems like some real strategic depth. Good job! Edit: Also, while giving a star rating, I noticed that I think this is the most creative use of the theme I've seen so far. So that's a nice bonus as well. 😄 |
| Jan 21 21:52:37 | 23h 33m | Hex-Yield | ♥ 2 | Well, it took maybe half an hour or so, but I managed to unlock all 31 tiles! I did reach the full progress bar earlier than that, I was actually kind of surprised when it stopped filling up. 😄 Everything here is very polished. All the graphics look great, the music and sounds are great -- I love especially the cascading notes when tiles start to combine, especially when I had a really big village that generated lots of wheat, and there was like an entire ascending and descending scale. That was very satisfying and made me want to make more big cities. As a small note, I saw some complaints about tile deselection... I personally did not have this problem, although the deselections did feel a little slow to do when trying to check all the tiles on the map to see if they had a built-in upgrade. (Perhaps somehow marking tiles that can be upgraded could be a good thing...?) For a while I was stuck on 28/31 tiles. Then I found the castle and fortress, and was stuck on 30/31 tiles. The fortress was also basically dumb luck, as I was kind of surprised that there was a recipe so similar to the castle recipe... wasn't really the kind of thing I was trying out intentionally. The very last thing I found was the observatory. What was interesting is that I had thought I had tried the combination for observatory before... but of course, I hadn't. I think that the fact that the order that the combination is done in changes it makes it pretty difficult to mentally track all the combinations that you have tested. Now, this does add some interesting puzzle elements to the game... I remember in the late game, I did have some fun trying to test a specific combination, and building all the elements in order to make it happen. Still, I think that some sort of tracking system or hint system would be worth considering. There are lots of possible directions for this, depending on how easy you would want to make it... for example, I think perhaps the most helpful thing would be a note on the compendium when a player has found everything that can be made from a given tile, so that you don't have to waste time trying a bunch of combinations that don't work. In particular, if my calculations are correct, there are 31 * 30 = 930 ways to choose two tiles, where the order matters, where the tiles aren't the same. This is a lot of combinations to work your way through with brute force, and it seems like it's possible to just get lost in the weeds doing something with combinations that are completely unrelated. Now, one thing that does help here is the order of the tiles in the compendium. I wasn't trying very hard with combinations with the enchanted forest or desert when looking for those last tiles, as it seemed like they would be near the end of the compendium if I had needed to. Anyways, I don't think there would be too much harm in just making the game easier in this way. It could even be a difficulty setting if need be. Still, there is a lot to love here. I thought that the variety of combinations was pretty creative, and I liked all the little details, such as the differently colored tiles for different "themes" of tiles. The "potential" system worked well too, in my opinion--it was fun to get a bigger map over time, and it also meant there was some strategy in spending the potential effectively--for example, I was happy with the discovery that forests could take over fields to make more forests, and earn a little bit more potential. One thing I thought was really cool was the way that the game world ended up looking kind of beautiful each time that I built it. It's very fun to just have these little worlds pop up as a side effect of bumbling through various attempts to craft stuff. The contrast between the feeling of, well, let's put this over here to see if we can try X combination, and the feeling of looking at the complete world at the end, is just a really good contrast. So, overall, this game was a very creative take on the sort of genre that its in, and it was very nice to play through. Good job! |
| Jan 23 20:15:43 | 46h 23m | Drake's Fortune | ♥ 2 | Lots of really good stuff here! Combining a physics destruction game with an upgrade system works really well, I think. Like, the combat with the upgrade system is already pretty good, and adding all the physics elements to it is just a nice way to build on top of that. I think that framing a physics based game like this as a dragon going around destroying things is also a great idea. I have no idea if that's a new idea or not -- I can't remember all the physics games I've played -- but playing as a, basically, evil character is a great take on the genre. The gold mechanics are also really cleverly designed, I think. In particular, it's really cool that the castles get upgraded as they collect more gold. This leads to the natural progression in difficulty, but it also ropes the player in to the story there... the player is able to intervene in the castles being upgraded, although it is of course still hopeless to prevent the upgrades due to the sheer number of castles and the fact that the dragon has a minimum amount of gold to look for. With the main fire ball attack, I had a lot of fun getting better at aiming it, as well as sometimes lobbing fireballs over walls to attack safely. I did think the aiming felt a little weird, but I more or less got used to it as the game went on. I found the fire breath occasionally useful, but it seemed like I was more forcing myself to use it than anything else. One thing that would happen is I would use it, but because the enemies wouldn't die immediately, merely catch on fire, I would then shoot them with the fire ball... making the fire breath attack I had done somewhat pointless. There are a handful of glitches. First, the health bar seems a little weird. If I'm not mistaken, I observed at least two glitches: - When starting a round with fully upgraded health, and full health, the health would extend out of the health bar -- but once I took damage, it would go back into the health bar - Sometimes the health bar in the dragon den didn't seem to match the health bar I had at the end of the round...? I could be mistaken on this one. There are also a couple problems that occur once you go too far in the game. So, once I had unlocked all the upgrades, I figured I should see what would happen once the castles reached the 99999 upgrade. So I decided to skip a bunch of days by resting. Then, just to see what would happen, I raided a castle when it had like 80,000 gold. Well, what happened is that I harvested all the gold, and now I am at 1320/16060 gold... and I seem to be softlocked, with no way to return to the map. 😅 Then, the other glitch is that once you do reach 99,999 gold (I tested this on another copy of the game), everything just falls apart... the castles rank up every day, and when you try to raid them, they don't have any gold or archers, or buildings. Of course, all these glitches do not really impact the gameplay... I just thought I should mention them, because I did experience them. Overall, this game combines a lot of cool mechanics -- upgrade systems, physics, and gold -- in a very effective way. Good job! |
| Jan 23 21:16:53 | 1h 01m | Farmula Grain Prix | ♥ 1 | Wow, this was really good. Almost everything was very polished, it looks and sounds great. Combining farming and racing is such a great concept, and its executed very well. Having the different farming actions represented by different vehicles is intuitive and fun. The other mechanics are also easy to pick up; building different buildings for upgrades makes sense, and the various obstacles and bonuses that show up on the track also are pretty easy to understand. I do think it's somewhat difficult to understand how time is gained. It seems like the crowd will give you time upgrades, occasionally, but I'm not sure how effective crowd upgrades are in giving me more time. The other problem is it's not exactly clear when or why "bonus time" is granted, or why the bonus time value is a particular value. I do think that a longer tutorial section could be useful. It took me a few times stopping at the pit stop and reading the game description before I figured out exactly what to do, which seems like means I might have wasted more of my precious time that maybe I should have. Of course, the first run a player does will always have more time loss than their second run, so I guess it's not actually a huge problem. (And, once I did figure out what to do, it was such a fun concept that I just wanted to jump in and start playing!) Unfortunately the game ultimately crashed before I lost. What happened is, I was trying to build the thing that reduces nitro cost, but I wanted to cancel out so I could read what the bonus building was. I hit "Escape" to try to cancel the building command, and then the game crashed. :( I think that canceling a building is my single biggest gripe with the UI -- over my playthrough, I had misclicked on building purchases multiple times and had to cancel out, but it felt a little sluggish somehow...? Not sure what's going on there. Maybe it's not officially supported to hit Escape to cancel? Perhaps I'll have to try playing again now that I have more knowledge about the game. Overall, though, this was a really good entry. It honestly looks and sounds incredible, it's just a great execution of a very fun genre combination. Great job! |
| Jan 24 20:22:29 | 23h 05m | Money grows on trees | ♥ 1 | I played this first a few days ago, and got a score of ~131,000 (I thought I had taken a screenshot of it, but I can't seem to find it). Today I decided to play again and go all in on bananas, and because I didn't really want to spam the mouse button for 3 minutes straight, I just used an AutoHotKey script that lets me click automatically. I ended up with a score of 333,000, and I had several thousand bananas that I forgot to sell near the end, so I imagine my true score was quite a bit higher. 😅 I think that making an incremental game centered on a high score system rather than on anything else is a very fun twist. It means that strategy actually really matters, unlike in most incremental games, where bad strategy just means that it will take you longer to get through the game. And, when playing through the second time, it was fun to be able to efficiently work my way through a small apple tree to quickly unlock the bananas. It is satisfying to execute well and waste little time. The progression is kind of fast, however. Even on my first playthrough, I unlocked most of the upgrades pretty quickly -- and in that playthrough, I unlocked all the upgrades for every plant type. On the one hand, this is fun, because it is possible to just blast through a lot of the early stages. On the other hand, it could be interesting to have some harder-to-reach progression stages, especially in terms of making strategizing (for those highscores!) more complex and, hopefully, therefore more fun. I liked the hand-drawn art and the sound effects. The way that the plants sort of grew over time before you could actually harvest them was interesting, espe cially in terms of, again, maximizing score... it takes some real learning (or just spamming the mouse) to efficiently harvest the plants. And, in terms of playing with an autoclicker... the sound effects are actually even more satisfying than they are in the game, somehow the way that the clicking lines up just makes it sound great. (My autoclicker clicks every 16ms if that's relevant). I think that implementing an autoclicker as just another upgrade that you could buy could be an interesting way to implement it directly into the game, because I think it is actually pretty fun to use, and the game could have it upgrade in multiple stages, perhaps.' And, it is actually pretty tiring to spam the mouse for so long, so having an autoclicker built in is almost just a matter of preserving the player's physical health, maybe..? Especially for doing multiple runs in a row. Overall, though, this was a fun twist on the incremental game genre, and it was fun trying to play through it to get a high score. |
| Jan 25 00:30:18 | 4h 07m | Alice Redux | ♥ 1 | What a great use of image scaling in a game! Having both Alice and the trees simply be scaling images with not much other animation is a very effective aesthetic in my opinion, and what's more, the game mechanics are tied in to this scaling extremely well. "Plant trees before you get too small" is so direct and to the point, and made perfect sense as soon as I started, watching Alice shrink. And, the fact that you can't harvest trees when they're bigger than you makes intuitive sense -- although I did not actually learn of this mechanic until I was doing some investigation into whether the game will tell you whether you have lost. (It does not seem to -- it seems you simply get softlocked if you plant all your seeds and get too small. Which, seems to fit the in-game instructions perfectly!) I also love the amount of strategic depth that you managed to put into this. Like, at first I thought I would just be running around harvesting every tree, but eventually I realized that only a specific kind of tree was dropping seeds. Then, as my forest got larger, I realized that I would want to try to get those trees located away from the others, so that I could harvest them without accidentally harvesting a different tree. (I was not super successful at this, but I managed to win anyways). I did guess that I might be able to just plant a tree and immediately harvest it, as the first one seemed to be the one that would drop seeds (a nice way to prevent softlocks..?) but it seemed like once you reached a large number of seeds this was no longer the case. Maybe it's seed 5 that is always that tree...? That would make sense to me. (I had skimmed the source code to look for losing mechanics at one point, but I did not look into the tree generation at all. 😄 ) Honestly this might be one of the best entries I've played. It is a short game that manages to be extremely effective; I felt like I experienced more strategic depth and discovery in this game in just a few minutes than I have in some games that took me much longer. And I really do like the use of the image scaling. It was especially great to see Alice get gigantic at some points, and I love the way that the image feels vertically stretched... it just feels playful, in a sense, and I think it works really well. So, great job! And super cool that it's a 25-hour game. EDIT: On a technical note, during my playthrough, the main music did not play for me either, I'm on Firefox. It is only now that I read the comments that I have learned there was main music. Note that I can play it manually through the JavaScript console--specifically, if I click on the page and then use the JS console to play music, it works (if I don't click on the page, it throws an exception, even if I am using the JS console). This reminds me of some similar annoyances I was having with Emscripten 😅 . Perhaps you need to wait for user input somehow before playing the music...? |
| Jan 27 02:43:49 | 50h 13m | Harvest City | ♥ 1 | I don't have anything too insightful to say here, but I can talk about one feature I enjoyed that I'm not sure I saw in any other games I played this Ludum Dare. The driving in this game! It's slow and takes a while, and feels exactly like driving through town to get somewhere. This is a great mechanic to have in a farming game, I think. It creates incentives for the player to avoid going to town too often, because it is slow. So if there was more progression in this game, for example, a larger car inventory -- I probably would have gone for it! It would help me save time going back and forth, and so I would be directly incentivized to participate in other game systems, by a mechanic that makes narrative sense. I mean, this is kind of seen in, say, Stardew Valley, where getting anywhere from the farm takes a lot of walking, and there is explicit game progression that helps you get around faster. But I haven't seen it done with a car before, and it's a surprisingly effective combination. I think this is because, at least for me, I have personally experienced having to drive somewhat far away on a regular basis for work, while I have not yet experienced having to walk through the countryside on a regular basis (like in Stardew Valley). So it really is a more personal, and therefore more immersive, framing. |
| Jan 27 03:56:16 | 1h 12m | Farming For FUn | ♥ 1 | For some reason, this game was lagging a lot on my computer, especially when I went in full screen. Perhaps a 4K resolution does it in...? 😅 I eventually got it to run OK somehow. I quite liked the little achievement that popped up when I died. It was super unexpected, particularly for a four hour game. Made it feel like a much more detailed game than one would expect for four hours. Then, I managed to get all the corn and win. So, there really is a nice variety of mechanics for a four hour game. I think labeling it as "this game was made in 4 hours" really sells the experience, makes me not sure what to expect, and then I can sort of appreciate everything that is there. Very nice! |