Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Feedback comment stats → lisyarus
Feedback comments for LD52
lisyarus's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | lisyarus's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 9 16:21:53 | MegaBurgers | ♥ 1 | Interesting take on the theme! Pleased to see something that isn't a farming game :) I loved the balance of the game, it felt like I was consistently making progress yet I almost never had a lot of money, having to convert it to cows/meat/bread/etc as soon as possible. So, my wealth was usually not in the money but in the intermediate goods, like in real economy :) The bread & meat flying around and the UFOs gave me giggles, though the cow-to-meat process looks just a bit gruesome. A few bugs/suggestions: * After playing for a while (maybe ~20-30 minutes) my bread started disappearing. I though it's rotting away, but then I noticed fresh bread disappearing as well, even before it hits the ground. Looks like some bug! * Of course, the UI could be a bit nicer, with clickable buttons instead of key presses. * It would be nice if the money for the UFO would be taken as soon as you've pressed the button - otherwise, it is easy to miss that and go bankrupt. It might be left as it is as a design choice, of course :) * The graphics looks a bit too primitive, maybe just adding some background and throwing a few trees (a brown cylinder + a green sphere would do) here and there, a few stones, some bushes, etc would make it feel much more believable! * I might be the only one who'll notice that, but the transition between shadow cascades is noticeable - when the shadow suddenly changes based on distance to the camera. I'm guessing you'll need to tweak with Unity shadow settings. Anyways, enjoyed the game, good job! | |
| Jan 9 17:03:33 | 41m 40s | reOrganiser | ♥ 4 | Nice game, a bit gruesome but excellent take on the theme! Great atmosphere and audio. Made my 50000 in the middle of the fourth day :) A few bugs/suggestions: - The text floating in the air is hard to read with pixelization unless you come really close, but at this point it stops filling the entire screen so you have to move left-right to read the text, which is a but frustrating - A few times in between the tutorial & the settings (or somewhere in there) the mouse pointer was hidden and I couldn't click anything. This seemed to restore itself in a few seconds though so not a huge problem, but might be worth looking into. - After you've figured out that you just need to harvest everything good and better, the gameplay becomes very repetitive and non-challenging, with the only real choice being which customer to select, and this is still pretty trivial (take the legendary, if there isn't one take the exceptional, otherwise take the one with the most good stuff), and you simply keep pressing buttons and clicking a lot without much interest. So, I'd say this needs some tweaking, e.g. maybe add some random events. |
| Jan 9 19:09:01 | 2h 05m | Iris's Scrappy Rumble | ♥ 1 | A very cool game! Pretty intuitive controls, nice first "tutorial" enemy. Great music and feel! A few suggestions: - The game is obviously very fast-paced and it is hard to be strategic about what types of weapons you're going to use, you spend most if the time just dodging the bullets. Maybe the bullets should be slower, or maybe there needs to be a way to heal? - Sometimes the enemies spawn right next to you and hit you immediately, which is a bit sad :) - Speaking of dodging the bullets again, the room felt a bit too small and the enemies a bit too fast. At some points is seemed like I've no option other than just making circles dodging the bullets and not letting the enemies to get close, and I'd occasionally shoot if I happened to step on enough weapons. So, maybe increasing the room size would make it better? Or maybe even add obstacles and stuff. |
| Jan 9 19:45:11 | 36m 10s | Rogue Farmer | ♥ 4 | Interesting take on the theme! Love the roguelike+farming mixed genre. Found that placing about 8 plants in a 2x4 rectangle makes me able to start harvesting the first one as soon as I've planted the last one. Didn't realize how to fight at first, thought I need some new tool as a weapon or I need to run from the enemies until dawn. Moving "into" the enemy with my bare hands just didn't sound like a reasonable thing to do until I did it accidentally :) A few suggestions: - It would be nice to see what tool you have equipped right now, and having the same button do both dropping and picking up a tool would make it much easier to play. - You can accidentally use a tool on a tile where this tool does nothing and the player gets stuck on this tile until he ends using the tool, which still does nothing. Would be nice if the game ignored attempts to use a tool on an inappropriate tile. - Again, when using a tool you can't attack or even heal. This is exactly how I died in my last playthrough - started sowing the seeds and got suddenly surrounded by a dozen monsters and died suddenly, with nothing I could. Would be nice if there was a way to prevent that, e.g. maybe cancelling the tool if you think you need to run :) - It felt like removing trees and rocks is pretty much useless: takes a lot of time and doesn't give you anything at all - you still have plenty of free dirt everywhere, and due to ripe plants turning into bushes you can't really sow a large enough field anyway. - Finally, it would be cool to have more options to fight with the monsters, or at least build some defenses/wall against them. The game felt a bit unfair when I finally got to a good amount of crops but they didn't help me to defeat an overwhelming army of monsters. |
| Jan 9 20:08:56 | 23m 45s | Crop Quota | ♥ 1 | Interesting idea! Cool take on the theme. Lovely art style and music. Would love to try to finish the game, but I got really tired of clicking to sell my crops. Is there any way of selling them faster then one by one? I tried clicking and holding the sell button, clicking it with shift/alt/ctrl, right-clicking it, and nothing worked. Seriously, when I got to ~35 people and about 15 planting pots my biggest time consumer was just clicking to sell! Anyways, a few more suggestions: - It would be nice if the cursor showed what type of plant you've chosen to plant right now, or maybe the plant button itself would change background color during planting, something like that. - Planting itself felt a bit off because the planting pots don't react in any way to you moving the mouse over them; the UI would feel a lot better if the pots were highlighted or something like that. - It's a bit weird that planting is done with the left mouse button, and harvesting with the right button. These actions can't possibly conflict (a pot is never both empty and contains a ripe plant!), so both could be done with the same button to simplify the interface. |
| Jan 9 20:18:32 | 9m 36s | Harvy Tile | ♥ 1 | Ha, a hex game, just as mine :) unfortunately I can't understand what I'm supposed to do in the first level. I've moved the cows together and that's it, no other tile can be moved anywhere, although the green & yellow tiles can be selected to be moved (but not moved). Is the game expecting me to do something else? 2023-01-09-231406_288x189_scrot.png |
| Jan 9 20:50:58 | 32m 26s | Goba Day | ♥ 1 | An interesting take on the theme! A bit sad and frightening, though, but it sets quite the mood so it's a plus :) Nice visuals and sounds! The tips appearing one by one are a nice alternative to a dull tutorial. One suggestion I have is to make the goba spawning more intuitive. In my playthroughs, the always ended up stuck on the field's edge (where they don't grow well, as per the tips) and there seems to be no way to fix that. Maybe the player should be able to replant the fruits or select where newly planted fruits should go? The tips also say that they need some space to grow, but it's hard to see how much space exactly. Maybe there should be a square/hex grid of planting places, which would allow for strict planting rules and add a new interesting mechanic to the game. Anyways, fun & well-executed idea, great job! 2023-01-09-234519_1214x585_scrot.png |
| Jan 9 22:02:54 | 1h 11m | Market Restaurant | ♥ 2 | Nice take on the theme! Interesting gameplay as well. The art style looks a bit primitive, but that's understandable for a game jam, of course :) A few suggestions: - It didn't really feel like I was gaining money. Not sure if that's by design or maybe I'm plain wrong, but such was the feeling of it. If it's not by design, probably the game needs some balancing? - It would be nice to have a faster UI (without animated transitions between scenes), ideally with everything always on one screen, so that one can be really efficient about buying ingredients, keeping track of combos, cooking, etc. I ended up e.g. impatiently clicking on a product I want to buy long before the animation of zooming in to the specific market stall ended :) |
| Jan 9 22:22:55 | 20m 01s | Vegan Robot Takeaway | ♥ 1 | Nice take on the theme! Love that it's not just a farming sim but also has cooking and droids :) nice simple art style, although it would benefit from some decorations around. A few bugs and suggestions: - In my first playthrough, after preparing the first meal the robot couldn't serve the dish. I clicked the serving area many times in many places: the robot got to the serving window, but didn't actually serve the meal. So, I guess there's a bug :) - In my second playthrough the previous but seemed to have disappeared, but after serving a ton of meals the robot got stuck in the serving area and didn't respond to my commands. Another bug, I guess :) - It seems really unnecessary to select the robot all the time (at the game start & after buying new seeds). Pretty much the only thing you do in the game is manipulate the robot, so you can just always keep him selected. Unless you add the option to buy new robots, but that's a whole new story :) - Sometimes the robot responds poorly to the player's commands. E.g. when trying to grad the hoe, the robot sometimes moves towards it and stays really close but doesn't grab it, then you try to plow the land but it doesn't since it doesn't have the hoe! Then you realize he doesn't have the hoe, click on it again so he actually grabs it, then you click the land to be plowed and he still doesn't because the robot itself received the click (and did nothing with it) and not the land. All this gets really frustrating because the game itself is so fast-paced and everything is on a time. So, I'd say this "selecting/issuing orders" part of the UI needs some more work. Maybe e.g. the selected objects should be highlighted, that would make a huge difference already. |
| Jan 9 22:42:08 | 19m 13s | Beware The Wheatshifter | ♥ 1 | Very interesting idea! Lovely art style. I tried to figure out the exact logic of the wheatshifters' movement but failed, and couldn't proceed past the third level! |
| Jan 9 22:54:08 | 12m 00s | Life is Fleeting: New Harvest | ♥ 0 | Sorry, maybe I'm missing something: how does one play it? I only see source code linked... |
| Jan 10 21:43:03 | 22h 48m | Settlement | ♥ 1 | A very interesting game! Loved the pretty unique core mechanic, although it more or less boils down to knowing the probabilities of various dice outcomes (assuming the dice are fair, of course). Didn't understand what to do in the beginning, but figured it all after several turns thanks to the helpful tips. The font in the tips could be slightly larger, though, - it is a bit hard to read right now. Speaking of probabilities, since the game is all about them, having just 70 turns seems a bit unfair: the random dice outcomes mean more than your own strategy. Maybe if the game lasted way longer the probabilities would average out enough not to feel unfair? The game is pretty fast-paced so I think 300 or even 500 turns would be fine, and would allow for a more developed colony. Maybe it could be a game mode selection thing, e.g. select 100 turns, or 300 turns, or 500 turns if you feel like playing that long (I definitely would, ha-ha). Extra points for a hex grid and a dual grid used for the settlements. I'm a simple man, I love a good grid :) 2023-01-11-002846_1920x1080_scrot.png |
| Jan 10 23:01:37 | 1h 18m | Gempire | ♥ 1 | Interesting core idea, nice submission! A few suggestions on how I'd improve the game: - Selection through keys isn't the most convenient way, maybe just buttons with all possible seed & building types would be simpler to use? - Sometimes the game has black text on dark background which is a bit hard to read. - Scrolling the map is a bit painful: the scrolling itself is too slow yet has large inertia, meaning it always takes the player too long to scroll and then one has to stop the movement manually due to inertia. Would be nice to have faster camera movement, which can be achieved with a mouse or maybe with arrows or WASD keys. - Speaking of scrolling the map again, there isn't much point in that other than to make the player angry :) There isn't anything on the map except a few soil spots & building spots, and they could all be in one place to prevent the player from needing to painfully drag the camera here and there all the time. - The game doesn't seem to have any specific objective, and after you've figured the mechanics the gameplay pretty much boils down to a whole lot of clicking, so I'd say this needs some work, too. |
| Jan 11 16:42:53 | 17h 41m | God Control | ♥ 1 | The concept sounds pretty interesting, but it's really hard to play since there's almost no feedback given to the player. I didn't even realize at start that the "temperature" etc. things are sliders and not just indicators and that you're supposed to actually use them. The buttons on the top we're clickable for me at start, but then they suddenly became clickable. The turns advance with different speeds which I couldn't relate to anything happening in the game. And, finally, I had absolutely zero idea about how exactly my actions affect the game! So, I'd say this is a very promising concept, but it really needs a better communication with the player: make it blindly obvious which parts of the screen the player can interact with, explain what various parameters & actions do, how they affect the state of the game and how do they interact with each other. |
| Jan 11 17:08:37 | 25m 44s | Catchy | ♥ 1 | Ooooh, I almost envy you making this game, I've wanted to try making realistic sailing mechanic for a very long time :) And fish catching fits the theme nicely. The art style is very cool, although the sea looks a bit empty, maybe it could use some more decoration. I've only found three fish types, guess I should've sailed a bit longer! It's nice that the hook can grab several fishes at a time, but it's a bit tiring to keep the mouse button pressed to retrieve it back. Maybe it could be just another mouse click? I.e. first click releases the hook, another click gets it back without the player having to keep track of the hook and the sails simultaneously. 2023-01-11-200135_931x511_scrot.png |
| Jan 11 18:01:56 | 53m 19s | Unfortunate Harvest | ♥ 2 | A very cool game! Fun & unusual interpretation of the theme. The level design is great: hard at the beginning, but not stressful, and you keep getting better with each try. Managed to finish it with full health after about a dozen attempts :) One bug I've noticed is sometimes you can fall into water and then move to the end as if being under the map. Also you can fire the shovels while still in the game menu without starting the game :) (they don't start flying until you actually start the game, though). Of course I'd love to see more levels, more enemies, etc. 2023-01-11-205836_634x352_scrot.png |
| Jan 11 18:26:11 | 24m 15s | Not a simple harvest | ♥ 0 | A very nice game! The enemy designs definitely gave me giggles. The tutorial text disappears a bit too fast - I never learnt what you can actually do with that white bar in the top-left because of that :D The levels seemed a bit too easy - I managed to pass them all on first try. You have plenty of room to hide from the carrots, the onions can be easily dealt with from a distance. The potatoes are a bit hard but they still can't reach you if you jump around like crazy, as if playing Quake III :) The last level with a ton of carrots can be basically brute-forced: you shoot and immediately hide behind the walls of the previous level. So, yeah, the enemies and the levels could be a bit more tough, but maybe it's just me. One more thing: the trident moves to the player a bit too slowly, maybe if it moved faster it would feel way more satisfying. However, this would make the game easier as well :) 2023-01-11-211729_1920x1080_scrot.png |
| Jan 11 18:39:57 | 13m 46s | Expand | ♥ 1 | Oh, fractals everywhere! Nice :) Loved that part of the game, having more planting fields was something I definitely didn't expect. The game gets pretty repetitive soon, unfortunately. I figured that planting 9 plants in a 3x3 pattern, each separated by 2 squares, is a bit suboptimal but easy to use and provides steady income, so I just did that for all the soil types. After that it was just a ton of clicking: select farm, harvest, plant, zoom out, select farm, and so on. Definitely agree with others that some automation would be cool, or alternatively a more deep UI that allows you to do repetitive things easier. 2023-01-11-213436_1145x197_scrot.png |
| Jan 11 18:54:39 | 14m 42s | Jumping Bean Harvester | ♥ 1 | Oh, someone using a custom engine as well, with less than 2Mb download size, love that :) Also haven't seen anyone use imgui as a game GUI, that's an interesting decision. I've noticed you have a whole lot of DLL's in the package, mostly for the physics, I guess? It feels strange because what you'd typically do is just make a `libphysics.dll` with all that stuff inside. A lot of DLL's means a lot of files to read & load at startup, which increases the time for the game to start. It also means a lot of functions can't be inlined or called directly by a relative address, since they reside in a different DLL and the address isn't known before actually loading them, so they have to be called through an address lookup table, which is slower. It's usually not that big of a deal, but if this happens for a lot of functions in a hot loop (like the physics engine update), this might be a problem. So, speaking of the game itself, I love the concept but I'd say the implementation needs some polishing. My camera was routinely stuck inside walls, and since they're all of the same yellow color it's really hard to navigate and understand where you are. The car movement looks a bit jittery, - I guess because the wheels are actually polyhedral and have rigid contact with the ground? Since you're making you own physics engine, it shouldn't be that hard to support proper round cylinders, I think: you mostly only need collision detection, and most algorithms for polyhedrons (like SAT or GJK) can be adapted for spheres and cylinders as well. After playing for a while I managed to turn the car upside down and got stuck - guess this should be detected by the game somehow and considered a lost life or something like that :) 2023-01-11-214351_1920x1080_scrot.png |
| Jan 11 20:57:08 | 2h 02m | Pachinko Farm | ♥ 1 | Cudos for your own engine with C++ and SDL! Mine is the same :) I tried the game on Linux under Wine and unfortunately it lags a lot (runs at about 2-3 FPS), then it crashes, Wine debugger wanted to attach and then my desktop manager froze :D Haven't seen anything like that before :) |
| Jan 12 15:58:49 | 19h 01m | Ol' Booty | ♥ 2 | An interesting title! Liked the art and the atmosphere. Here are a few suggestions: - The main game loop is kind or repetitive and, more importantly, feels a bit pointless: you can only gain money to improve your ability to gain money. I mean, yeah, all economic strategy games are like that, but they are about optimizing the process, while in this game there's really nothing to optimize: you can't fail at all! So, maybe there should be some threat to the player, some real obstacle for them to overcome using the earned money. - The ship speed upgrades felt a bit unfair: an increase from 6 to 6.06 knots doesn't feel satisfying at all. Also the upgrade shop said "0.6" speed while the actual increase was "0.06", not sure if that's a bug or something. - Speaking of the speed, it generally felt a bit too slow: most of the in-game time you just press the W button to move to the next ship. - It would be nice if you'd be able to see the amount of space you've left on your ship: otherwise it's hard to make an informed decision about what to take from each harvested ship, you have to sort of guess how much space you have. - At first I thought that "End voyage" is kind of "Exit the game" thing - you'll be shown some stats and then it's game over. Turned out it's more like "End turn" or "End day". Maybe renaming this menu option or adding a hint that it's a natural part of game progression would be cool. - The animation after you end your voyage, which synchronizes in rhythm with the music, is really cool, but only for the first, maybe second time. When you're deep into the game, you really want to move quickly, so I'd suggest adding a way to skip that animation, have a quick look on your stats, and move on. |
| Jan 13 13:16:42 | 21h 17m | Space Garden | ♥ 1 | A very interesting entry! Loved the mix of card-based games with a farming sim, it's a really nice mix of genres. Nice art & music. A few suggestions on the game: - I couldn't figure what watering does: it didn't seem to affect growth at all. I noticed that you can only grow meteorites on non-watered tiles, but then it seems that the right strategy is not to use watering at all :) Guess it's either a bug/unfinished feature, or the watering mechanics needs some better explanation maybe. - The "grow a plant to neighbouring 3x3 tiles" card seems to only work with meteorites: I've tried applying it to all other plant types, to all tile types (non-digged, digged, watered), it didn't seem to ever do anything. However, the text on the card suggests that it should work! - When you don't have enough energy to play a card, the game still allows you to pick it up, but then when you click it again it just doesn't do anything, which is quite confusing. Maybe you shouldn't be able to pick such a card? In any case some indication that you don't have enough energy would be cool: maybe highlight the energy points, maybe play an "error" sound, something like that. - The general balance of the game felt a bit off: I had too many "plant something" cards and too little "harvest" cards. In fact, I ended the game with a whole lot of things to harvest, which I couldn't do thanks to the cards :) 2023-01-12-191021_1273x709_scrot.png |
| Jan 13 13:36:51 | 20m 09s | A Walk in Nature | ♥ 1 | An unusual entry! The graphics has the vibes of PS1 but also the grass moves with wind which looks fun :) Beautiful music. Of course there's pretty much no gameplay so I can't comment on that. A few bugs and suggestions: - When harvesting those 4 spherical plants, selecting them with a mouse works a bit weird - it doesn't always detect looking at the plant, sometimes shows a strange mouse pointer and I've no idea what it means, etc. - In a few places around the map, the grass grows right in the air, as if it uses a different heightmap compared to the player & the terrain. - The billboard trees are not centered on where their trunks are, which lead to the following effect: when you go around such a tree, it rotates to face the camera, and only its center stays at the same spot, while the trunk rotates as well and has a visible movement, as it you are "dancing" with it :) |
