Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Feedback comment stats → pkenney

pkenney

Feedback comments for LD52

pkenney's games and stats for all events →

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		pkenney's comment
Jan 15 18:12:59		Harvest Tataki - Whac-a-carrot	♥ 1	Nice! The music, sound, and juicy graphics were all pulling together to create a fun, engaging vibe. I also appreciated the lack of overbearing tutorial - the graphic effects and screen layout made it super-easy for me to just intuit how to play. The carrot's success-hit FX was especially nice, and reinforced the key moment really well. Also liked the sun disco-ball rays that made it feel a little more like a party. Well done a super-polished entry!
Jan 15 19:35:08	1h 22m	Guardian of Corn	♥ 1	Nice work, you got a complete game loop here. Graphics were solid and it has some nice touches in place, for example the bobble of the character as he walks, and the little aim arrow and the sword slash. Contextual text pop-ups were also really nice for learning the game and verifying my situation. Hard to build more than this in a short time! If you did expand, it would probably benefit from a few more upgrades to make me want to play deeper into the game, and some more (or just bigger) feedback on combat like knockback, an on-hit FX for both farm and critter, and stuff like that. I see that the game has no opted out of audio, but I did not hear any sounds or music. Was that a problem on my machine? I tried it in chrome and then in edge, in case it was a browser issue, but no sound. If you had cool SFX, sorry that I didn't experience them! I did feel like the pacing at the start is nice and tight - I have to be careful, because I want to blow all of my money on upgrades, but I need to plan so that I have money for my next seed. That's cool. My first game I locked myself out by harvesting my last crop and spending the money on an upgrade, leaving my with zero dollars and no seed -- basically a soft gameover state! Next game I was more thoughtful and planned my economy better. I also felt that sweet, sweet multitasking a few times. I would be fighting some critters and make a harvest, hit a guy, plant a seed, finish the guy off, then buy an upgrade, and fight the rest. That sort of juggling was sweet stuff, and while I think the game could have created even more of it with the right pacing and more juice, I did get some nice doses sometimes and it was a very nice feeling of juggling priorities in a cool way.
Jan 15 22:04:16	2h 29m	The Crystallographer	♥ 1	Such great polish around a cool core loop. I loved the non-tutorial and it was a breeze to just jump in. I think my favorite moment was when I did a break then a harvest, and realized "oops I should have harvested that first to create the empty adjacent space!" That showed me some of the tactics in the layout and I had fun fooling around with that. Polish was a real high point though, with the nice art and sound, and tight controls. I also appreciated the really attention to detail on having a clear gamestate, like the squares painting which gridcell I'm really standing on. Not easy to make a game with absolutely no splinters getting in the way of the play experience. Nice entry!
Jan 16 15:09:45	17h 05m	Musical Mining : The Harmony of Greed	♥ 2	Very nice-looking, and the circular track twisted my brain in an interesting way as compared to the usual linear timeline in rhythm games. So this game was really cool, but there was one problem that prevented me from spending more time with it than I did. I don't mean for this to sound too negative, so I hope this is constructive feedback: I stalled out in level three because the retry is so slow and the failure is so fast. I counted, and when I fail it's gameover in 2.5 beats. Then I have to wait 16 beats after pressing retry before I am actually playing again. That is 86% of the time sitting and waiting vs 14% of the time playing the game. Makes it hard to get that "one more try" feeling... I would have spent a lot more time with the game if the retry delay was nearly instant instead of so so incredibly long. Sorry if that was too negative. There is a lot of really good stuff going on here. The background music is sweet, the art and presentation are very cool, and the "OHNO" was humorous and made it ULTRA-clear where I was succeeding and failing. So definitely a cool entry all around.
Jan 16 15:20:17	10m 32s	Late Harvest	♥ 1	Wow nice work with a super-short time! You did well to pick such a compact scope and then make it interesting through several different nice design choices: obviously the eye-catching unusual art style helps, but the less-common click-move controls also make it feel more novel than it would with WASD, and even though it's a small play arena I think your choice of a VERY limited visual range gave it a feeling of danger, suspense, and exploration that would have been completely missing if you had the whole arena on the screen at once. Smart stuff, maximizing the experience of the small scope, well done! And the audio vibe really did well too.
Jan 16 15:51:30	31m 13s	LD52 - Space Cargo Harvest	♥ 1	Cool system and I appreciated the detailed status readout in the top left. Dust sound was pretty cool, too. The ship's thrust was pretty strong after a few upgrades, and I appreciated having the friction that slowed me down so that I didn't get lost in space. I see that this is your first Ludum Dare entry... CONGRATS!! That's awesome. And you made it for the compo, too! I want to give some feedback on one pain point I had. I don't want to sound overly negative, since this is a small thing. But I think it's important so I'll go deep on why... but I hope this is helpful constructive feedback! I struggled with what I physically had to do with my hands in this game. I have to use the arrow keys to drive my ship. So I line up my ship. Then I push uparrow for 2-3 seconds to harvest dust and fly to the exit. Then a window pops up but I cannot close it unless I take my hand off the keyboard, and go find my mouse, and then aim the mouse to the button to close the window, and then aim it again to a different place to close the other window. And then I have to take my hand off the mouse and find the arrow keys again. Then I press the downarrow button for 2-3 seconds to fly backwards into the cloud again. Then I repeat. I do this on an infinite loop and then unfortunately the main work of the game becomes switching my hand back and forth between arrow keys and mouse. Probably this sounds like a really dumb complaint to have, but honestly I would have paid 25,000 for an upgrade that let me press space bar to close the dialog box, or use WASD to fly my ship. The game would have felt so much smoother and I would have run my loop so much faster, if I could just put my hands on the controls and leave them there. I remember my first few Ludum Dares, I had to learn all these little annoyances and gradually built up a list of "oh I shouldn't do that" stuff, but only if people pointed them out. So I hope this was helpful. I don't mean it to be some big negative. In generaly, I think a keyboard game like this should have keyboard UI elements and not need the mouse. But if you must use the mouse, then I think you want your FPS setup with WASD+mouse, and then also allow arrowkeys for the lefties who left-handed mouse. But arrows+mouse is a nono in my opinion for this reason. ANYWAY sorry to dwell on that minor point. I thought this game had nice art and good flight controls, and a cool core gameloop that would have built up into a sweet progression if you'd had enough time to add 3, 4, 5 kinds of upgrades. Nice work and congrats on a successful LD compo entry! EDIT: I cannot rate your game. Maybe you have opted out of all the categories? If so, here is how you fix that: Go to your game page. Click the pencil in the lower-right of your game page. Scroll down past the decryption, cover image, and links. Find the "Rating Category Opt-outs" and make sure they are NOT CHECKED.
Jan 16 17:30:15	1h 38m	The Dealer	♥ 2	Wow! Such a complete system with all of the UI, different organs, different customers, different resources, upgrades, timers, etc etc. It's an impressively well-rounded bunch of scope for a compo entry, and supported with nice graphics (esp the portraits) and sound effects, too. And most importantly it was fun to explore the consequences of the system. My first run I was dragging it out being careful, but I kept getting jammed into a corner because most of my deals were done at a cash loss. Needed more murder! But then I pushed it a little too far too fast. If I could tweak one thing it would be the way the menu system works. If I clicked on a tube I sometimes didn't want to do anything, and I had to click "exit menu" but that wasn't intuitive or convenient. Sometimes I wanted to just click into another tube, or even into the same tube to toggle out and back into my inventory. I was often struggling with "what is my current inventory" so I'd do things like try to sell limbs that were at 100% in the tube but not yet harvested into my inventory, and I'd be clicking "sell" and nothing happening, and by the time I realized what I was doing wrong the timer ran out and OOPS. Or I'd click an empty tube and then "buy" and then I'd be picking but not recall what I already had in inventory. Must be so hard to get the multi-modal sub-menus into a streamlined play experience in a compo, and I think you did a really good job with it, but it's SO hard that I still felt a few minor splinters along the way on that aspect. But I enjoyed the dark mood of it all, and really fun to experiment around and see what's what. Really imaginative and complete well-rounded entry here, nice job!
Jan 16 17:51:35	21m 20s	It was all for the Tuna	♥ 2	Almost! I had the goldfin tuna boxed into the corner of the map and thought I would be able to reel it in, but even with some extra chances b/c it couldn't flee, I didn't quite get there. Super-charming game with a great vibe, and the core fishing mechanic was well-done, adding a touch of mechanical difficulty and execution without overwhelming the chill vibe. Water was really nicely done and sold me on being in a boat, maybe a small touch of drift when the boat came to a halt would have sold it even harder. Nice entry.
Jan 16 18:18:51	27m 16s	A Day in the Life of Death	♥ 1	Good grief this was so much more than I expected it to be at first contact. During the first culling I interrupted my wife's reading to hand her my headphones and say, "check this out - this crew is SO good at the music and the art and how it comes together." She was appropriately impressed and I thought wow charming little one-screen game here. Then it was cutscene. Then it was game within game as I entered the phone, and it continued to unfurl from there. The parents and the pushing from a place of well-meaning that still bristles and the rebellion and the transformation. It all felt like Truth in Art despite manifesting in such a surreal setting. Really great job. And did I mention the art and music are amazing?
Jan 16 18:45:08	26m 17s	Harvester Horizons	♥ 1	NAILED IT with the engine sound. And at first I didn't like the way the steering doesn't snap quickly back to center when I release a turn direction key. But after playing a bit, I feel like this was actually a really good choice after all. It made it really feel like I was operating a piece of heavy equipment. I found myself planning my turns more and really working with AND against the machine itself. I got a really cool feel of operating this huge heavy lumbering piece of equipment, and that was really what this game was all about. Small touches like the smoke and the beeping reverse also helped to sell it. As did the 3D model with the turning treads. And of course that SOUND. Great job. Probably could have capitalized a bit more on the core by having jobs that acknowledged success and auto-advanced, as opposed to the more DIY menu-driven system, but that just gave it more of the simulator feel. Really nice work on crafting that big-machine experience.
Jan 17 02:49:27	8h 04m	Growin' Ballistic	♥ 1	Made it to wave 15. Wow, something kicked into gear on the enemy side -- or else I set myself up with a strategic weakness -- because I was running so hot that instead of enemies coming to attack it was just raining grain-money from the sky. And then I glanced at something offscreen for a moment, came back, and there was one pulsing enemy in the middle and ALL OF MY PLANTS were dead!! Wowzers, I can't imagine wave 21! Nice vibe here with several upgrades to follow, and a feel that mashed up bits I've seen in different genres, like a little tower defense, a little clicker upgrade, a little missile command... it was nice!
Jan 17 03:56:01	1h 06m	Cardwork Cycle	♥ 1	Wow, really complete system with a slick implementation! Very nice job! I spent a bunch of time with this entry, and became the first farmer ever to grow the mystical plant. Must be so hard in a jam setting to get so many UI elements working right, but I really had very little friction! Ditto for the balance of the deckbuilding cards. If I had one critique of that, it was that I didn't see the biggest difference between basic/middling/quality seeds all that much, and that once my deck felt relatively complete I didn't really want to add to it and to avoid dilution I cashed out cards beyond the shop's ability to sell me stuff. But the choices felt impactful, especially in the early and mid game... should I improve my suite of watering cards, or should I save up some gold? The bugs could be tough sometimes, but always felt fair. I re-opened my mind to buying new cards to shift my lategame deck a bit toward combat, which was a nice late wrinkle. The art and sound also carried the game really well. The music created a nice chill atmosphere and the way the plants grew with each watering was a great guide for what I needed to protect and push over the finish line. Overall a very impressive entry, great work!
Jan 17 04:21:36	25m 35s	The Orchid's Edge	♥ 2	Amazing job on graphics and polish! Very well-rounded entry. I felt like the collection objective was a little bland compared to all the other cool stuff going on, but it did make me see lots of stuff and explore, so I still definitely enjoyed my time with the game.
Jan 21 16:54:32	108h 32m	Verdant	♥ 1	What a game! I spent a lot of time with this. It's wonderfully complicated and complete-feeling. The music set a great atmosphere, the graphics were solid and clear, and the little sfx and flashes were at first confusing but eventually became very good indicators of what was going on. My first game went well but was a back and forth. I had fun exploring the combo-spells and figuring out what was effective, and the humans were successfully attacking me on multiple fronts, but in the end I prevailed. Things felt wonderfully tight - should I develop my mana production, or bolster this defense over here? Then I started to see that expansion of territory and offense were also important factors to consider. The tipping point was when I started leveraging the multiplier, and combining it with location-independent spells, especially creeping death and the double-energy one. After I won I was curious how I would do in a second round, leveraging what I'd learned. I absolutely STOMPED the pesky humans: Mullin-StompedHumans.png I spent my first turn creating a doubler and got a combination of creeping death and energy production connected to it. With aggressive use of forest-expansion and double-eyes I got map control quickly and used a core with a ton of doublers. My turns, I couldn't even spend my mana and as soon as I got humans in sight they were ripped to shreds. They did manage to destroy one forest tile and knock out a couple of spells, though. I wonder if a flawless victory is possible... It's really cool how the order you put spells down ends up dictating what you get, so you need to expand your mind out a bit to think about the final state you want, and then back into it step by step. Really compelling across the board. I'm amazed you built such a deep system in such a short time, well done!
Jan 21 18:22:05	1h 27m	Monkey Oolong Harvest Bop	♥ 2	This is awesome! It's got great style really well-grounded in the mechanics and the music is so on point for pulling it all together and drawing me in. The elements shuffle up well so that each situation requires some careful thought, which I really appreciated. I felt myself getting better as I played. One thing I really like is the wide, wide range of the effectiveness of a turn. The floor of a turn is utter failure, and it's common enough. But there are soaring highs on turns that I saw, and I can IMAGINE even much more. Nailing a buddy-toss into multiple pickups and then catching another monkey to spin back around and make ANOTHER pass, it's gold. My first few attempts I was awful and lost a bunch of energy at the start, but then I learned "Don't be dumb, throw your first monkey halfway to their range so that it's easy to chain the next one!" And gradually I started getting better. I really don't know how that other commenter got fifty-three leaves?!?? I can't even get to twenty! Since this game was so good, I want to point out a couple of ways that I felt like the game left a little something on the table: - The ultimate high is chaining monkeys into many pickups and getting a LOT done with one turn (especially powerful after a few failed turns). But the wave-based spawning of leaves worked against this high, and sometimes left my rare great turn spinning with no next leaf to get, which was a downer. - The z-zoom was of course valuable and necessary, but it was a splinter that I had to use it so much. I kept wishing for an arrow pointing toward offscreen leaves that somehow also indicated the distance, for example by scaling. I feel like if it exactly indicated both distance and direction, I could learn to play with much less of the inconvenient zooming. I also would have preferred the active-monkey be somehow indicated when I'm in Z mode. And I wouldn't call it a problem, but I could probably have been more powerful if there was some minor graphical indication of what WOULD happen if I pressed space, for example the buddy monkey reaching out or seeing a little trail pointing the vector that I will launch at while spinning. Those things I learned by rote eventually, but there was an adjustment period where I kept being surprised to have grabbed the tree instead of my buddy. Anyway, I really enjoyed this! The art is also great, and had so many nice touches that made this feel really alive. The rolling fog, the subtle animation on the birds. Especially well-done was the tree: The leaves, which are decorative, blow in the window, but the branches, which are critical gameplay elements, are snapped stock-still. So smart. The monkeys and tea leaves also stood out really well against the background elements, with their relatively high saturation. And those face/tail animations! Monkeys had such great personality. Really well done entry, hitting every element. Great job!
Jan 21 18:42:54	20m 49s	Space Harvest	♥ 1	Congrats on making a complete compo entry with graphics sound and music, all in a new engine! The high inertia on the player control was pretty cool - it's unusual and it forced me to plan a head for the slipperiness a little bit! Unreal Engine meant a kind of annoying experience as a player: I had to install pre-requisites, agree to terms and conditions, and then when the game ran my firewall popped up a warning that the game was trying to export data over the network. That's a lot of overhead for an LD jam, and it's okay if ONE game makes me go uninstall software after, but if everybody did that it would be a very bad experience. Not your fault, but just be aware that this is the consequence with that engine. Anyway, nice job with a complete entry, it was fun little game to mess around with and I enjoyed the music, the slippy controls, and the hand-drawn art style. I won, and then I played a few more times until I won without taking a single hit!
Jan 21 19:10:41	27m 47s	Salvage City	♥ 1	Visual style and use of the colors was very nicely done. I also liked the sandworm feel, especially the way you had control under ground but were committed in the air, where bombs might be falling. It was an interesting and novel movement scheme. I felt like some nice sound effects during the salvage part would have made it much more visceral and really amplified the parts that are already good about it. The building placement part was a nice break and gave a narrative purpose. Nice job!
Jan 21 19:24:34	13m 53s	Cream of the Crop	♥ 1	Cool vibe with the silly story and unusual controls of the plane and being so low to the ground! I did mostly just cruise on the ground so I think I lost a bit of the flying feel but it was still a fun vehicle to control. And the "destructible terrain" style of wheat was a nice touch that worked well. Nice job!
Jan 21 19:43:35	19m 01s	The PIT	♥ 1	Wow! This game has a lot of innovative stuff I haven't seen. The inventory-grid/tetris puzzle mashup paired with the varied growth patterns of the different types of plants.. the tradeoff between growing plants vs not making them too difficult to use, and then managing to keep the lifecycle of seeds vs pots vs plants all in line. So many unusual interlocking elements. Love seeing a game breaking new ground and mashing together a bunch of interesting ideas. Very cool, nicely done!
Jan 21 19:49:05	5m 30s	Backyard Fruitball	♥ 1	Cool core concept, and then a great clear presentation with simple effective graphics. I think there is some dynamism missing -- my double-controlling is more like setting up and then acting, and not quite so dynamic. But maybe it would completely overwhelm to present more fluid situations, in a bad way, I'm not sure. The batter's lack of air control did feel a bit stiff, however I would say well done on making the angle he hits the fruit at really matter, this gives a lot of feeling of control that is necessary. Interesting entry, well done!
Jan 22 03:08:50	7h 19m	Kilzpacho	♥ 1	Wow, really loved the real-instrument music, so well done and had nice rising and falling sections that had a good balance between active sections that rose to the front of my consciousness and quieter sections that receded into the background... just like a good videogame soundtrack should! Art was nice, and the shadowy edges of the arena meshed well with the spooky vibe of the mutant cropses, and the sprites were all well done. I enjoyed the action. It could use a little more "juice" in terms of emphasizing when I take a hit or successfully hit an enemy. But the biggest problem I had was the rolling guy who leaves a cloud behind. Fine, except that I HAVE to kill him. So a lot of my time with the game was waiting and waiting and saying "THERE HE IS" but he would already be gone by the time I could get over there. I struggled badly to find a way to force an encounter, and the end of each wave was quite a long time of me just hoping and waiting and guessing, which really broke the otherwise nice pacing. But other than that, I thought the action was well done. The theme came through nicely with the tough choice between harvesting my cropses to save them for a big upgrade later, versus spending them incrementally on improvements that I REALLLLLY wanted like faster attack speed etc. So I feel like you nailed the tough-choices thing. Nice entry with a lot of different cool elements!
Jan 22 03:29:02	20m 12s	Techno Plants	♥ 4	Jammin! Was disappointed to see myself back at Level 1 and would have been happy to experiment a bit more if there were some more tracks, but it was still good enough that I ripped through the whole game a few more times trying to get a better feel for the timing. I started off making tons of mistakes but then I settled into the groove and was jamming along. And then I turned off my brain a little TOO hard and ended up here: TechnoPlants-Oops.png WOOOOPS! Nice art, thumpin music, appropriate difficulty, and a headbanging sunflower all came together really nicely in this entry. Well done!
Jan 22 04:16:41	47m 39s	Paper Druids	♥ 1	Wow so good! Turn based games are tough, and they risk having this plodding slow feel. But this game moves along nice and quick if I want to input quickly, but also gives me as much time as I want. The polish of the graphics and the interaction is great, and the predictive indicators and attack-range mouseover previews are absolutely top-notch and help me learn. The game itself is really tense and well-done. The tension between planting, harvesting, and double-damage to clear enemies is super interesting. And the music was also very nice and well-matched to the mood and pace of the game. Very well done all around!
Jan 22 18:32:27	14h 15m	Terrible Brakes Practice	♥ 0	Thought my experience with the previous iteration a few LDs ago might set me up for success, but this was tough stuff! My runs were a megafailfest but I had fun along the way.
Jan 22 19:00:18	27m 51s	Definitely Not A Pyramid Scheme	♥ 0	I was very excited to play this because it looks very cool and unique. But I wasn't able to play so I have not rated. I downloaded and ran the game. It started and I saw the playfield and heard the music, but it did not respond to any inputs. I couldn't even alt-tab out of it when I eventually gave up and tried that instead. Then after like a minute my guy zoomed off the field, it said game over, and some debug info appeared on the left side. I was able to alt-tab out then so I killed it, checked the instructions, and tried again. Similar result except I had to ctrl-alt-del to exit the game even after gameover. Sorry! Maybe my Radeon 590 was not up to the task. Again, I didn't rate b/c I couldn't play correctly, but I thought I'd drop a note here with the experience in case it's helpful in any way. Very cool-looking game, was sorry I couldn't give it a proper shot.
Jan 22 19:27:54	27m 36s	Farmula Grain Prix	♥ 1	RC Pro-Am is such a great formula, and this is a wonderful riff on it. And what a nice job nailing so much and so well done for a solo entry! The game felt really alive and complete, with a great core of driving that felt good, and this tower the crop loop over and, then this tower of upgrades and features standing on top of it all. Plus jammin tunes and nice graphics. I really enjoyed my time playing. If I could have one boon, it would be to be able to navigate the Pit screen with the keyboard, at least enough to switch vehicles, maybe with 1-4 number keys. Very impressive entry, great job!
Jan 26 01:00:15	77h 32m	Lil Death	♥ 1	So cool! My first experience was constantly always dying very quickly and being super-awkward. You were very right to so strongly recommend the gamepad... I could feel that the game had a lot to offer that I was not getting, so I went into a box in the other room and unfurled my gamepad, and the whole experience changed. Then it changed again when I realized that the direction I push while I press attack actually changes the direction of the attack! So I went from the earthbound fragile fretter to a soaring demonslayer that never touched the ground. A wild ride, very well done! Art is effective - both clear about gameplay and also striking a nice mood. Music is jammin and the escalation track kicked the game up a gear nicely. But the real heart of this game is the feel of the complex movement that both opens and closes options and always leaves you a way out, and challenges you to attempt mastery.
Jan 26 01:12:46	12m 31s	(Test)	♥ 1	I liked the implied (but clear) story that didn't have to get in the way and left a bit of room for imagination, but was compelling. Same feeling about the art style, actually - clear but left room for imagination while still being interesting. I appreciated that I could explore the system without being tutorialized. Always smart when there an entry is light on content to get that extra bit out of the mystery of figuring it out! Tending the garden and growing it was fun for a bit, too. I tried jamming seeds into the hose (smoke?) coming out of the back of my ship to refuel it, searching for an end goal, but I think it's just not there, right? Cool prototype!
Jan 26 01:23:48	11m 02s	Bee Happy Harvest	♥ 0	The way the music stops dead the instant you die, but leaves the rumbling sound of the tractors... very effective. Felt very cool. This was a happy fun game, but I felt like there was a tension: the slowness made the game-feel less fun so I don't really want to pick up more flowers. Sure, the game tries to encourage me to risk it because I score more, but there's not a time limit or anything to force me, so I can always just go one flower at a time. So this is a cool core, but I wonder if there's a knot in the middle of the idea, and what you could experiment to untie it and incentivize the player to take more risks. Cool entry that made me think and feel! Nice job.