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ZungryWare

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		ZungryWare's comment
Jan 10 07:41:16		Charles, the Bee	♥ 3	Very cute artstyle! Nice job syncing up the audio with the gameplay. I was able to feel the rhythm instead of waiting for the notes to touch the line. The custom music also worked well. I liked all the little eighth-note (I think) bits that matched up with the rhythm pattern. The honey-harvesting bit was definitely too easy, but it made for a good pace-breaker for between the dancing sections. There were a couple things that made me think there was meant to be more to that part, but time constraints got in the way. Here were my nitpicks: - I wish the rhythm game bit had some more player feedback. There are no sound or visual effects for making or whiffing a note. - I didn't know how good of a score you needed to win. I figured I probably lost the third level since I whiffed like a third of the notes. but I won anyway. - I think the third song should have been paced a bit better. It comes right out the gate with insane combinations. I think it should have started with simpler note combinations, then worked up. Overall, I enjoyed. Nice work!
Jan 10 09:02:45	1h 21m	Dear Ivan	♥ 1	Man, I really tried to figure this out, but I just couldn't. I got stuck right at the start because I didn't know what I was doing. The E key didn't seem to be working, and I didn't know about the R button. "Harvest a crop of memory" was strange wording. I think simply "Harvest a memory" would have been better wording. But even after I figured that out and watch the tutorial on this page, I still couldn't seem to figure it out. I think you throw too much at the player at once. All in the first level, you have to figure out: - The controls - What your goal is - What all the cryptic names are referring to. - How to get the roof to fall. (I still don't know what caused that. It just happened after a while.) - Timing (since you have a moving object in the level.) - Switches that activate when you place stuff on them. - Whatever else, because I still couldn't continue even after enclosing all three things in the shape. I wish I could have figured it out, because it looks really nice, graphically and had a great mood.
Jan 10 09:49:32	46m 47s	Definitely Not A Pyramid Scheme	♥ 1	This game is a trip for sure. The ridiculous music and sound effects, weird graphics with hard-to-read text, and Sesame-street characters for some reason? It took me a few tries to figure out exactly what was going on or why I couldn't move some times. (And it printed "move failed" on left side of the screen under some lighting errors.) But still I haven't been able to answer some questions. How close together do the triangles need to be before you fall through them? What causes me and the people following me to get bigger and smaller? What determines the triangles I get after each round? Does the big pile of numbers at the top of the screen mean anything important to gameplay? Why does the ground model sometimes stick through the placeable triangles? Also, I was never able to figure out the connection between the pyramid scheme theming and the actual gameplay. I assume the people following you are supposed to be your downline? But what's the connection between that and the fact that they block your movement? Despite my confusions, the game was pretty fun (as far into it as I could get), the sound effects were weird but satisfying, and it had some unique ideas. I just wish things were explained better.
Jan 10 10:44:22	54m 50s	Fall's Tome	♥ 3	Cute graphics with a fun premise. I liked the relaxing atmosphere of the cell-shaded art-style. Though I'm not sure if the corn was supposed to be translucent, or if the renderer just wasn't sorting the outlines properly. I was trying to figure out what I need to do to get three stars on a photo. I centered the shot. I obeyed the rule of thirds. (As much as I could when the camera frame doesn't completely match the photo.) Turns out it's just how close you are. And with that in mind, I couldn't help but do stuff like this: pitchfork.png Really brings back memories from Bioshock. Action Shot!.png I wasn't sure how to find the "Inhabited Pumpkin", so I just kept taking smaller and smaller photos of the pumpkin patch, seeing which ones showed one-star vs zero-stars (essentially binary-searching) until I narrowed it down to the correct one. A couple nitpicks: Holding left click and scrolling at the same time is awkward because I (and probably most people) use the same finger for both of those actions. The pages scroll really slowly, so it can be annoying to find the thing you want to take a photo of. When I was tabbing out to notepad to take notes, I accidentally hit Esc, which takes you back to the menu and deletes all your progress. It should at least ask for confirmation first. But overall, I enjoyed. Nice work!
Jan 10 11:46:30	1h 02m	Straight Line Farming	♥ 6	Neat concept! It was fun planning out the next few turns in order to fill a tricky order. I just think there were some issues with the execution that limited it. Personally, I think it might have made more sense as a level-by-level structure where you have to figure out how to fill four specific orders within X amount of time and money. The main problem I found was that most of the interesting puzzles came from having two clients at once. The problem is, why would I ever buy it? I'm making the same amount of money per person, but with half the amount time to fill each order. In fact, the farm size-increase also seemed like a downgrade. The larger my farm, the more I'm required to spend planting lines. I only used it once in the attempt that I won, because converting a four-line to a five-line was the only way I would have been able to fill a particular order in time. So if I only ever have one client at a time, the game becomes really easy. It just takes a while. So it ends up feel like ten minutes of platespinning rather than an actual puzzle. The game seems to have a lot of polish from a visual perspective. (Sound design notwithstanding lol) The graphics and animations made it pretty clear what was going to happen when I did various actions. The recycling animation was an example of a feature that isn't strictly necessary, but really nice to have since it acts as a warning when you missed something on your order. Overall, I think there's a lot of potential here. I just think the puzzle design needs work.
Jan 10 13:51:38	2h 05m	ORGAN GRINDER	♥ 6	I think part of the reason first-person action games are so hard to make in a weekend is because there's so much polish that's expected to be there that has to be added on top of the extra difficulties created by 3D game development. Here is a list of things I think made this game feel rather awkward to play: - No crosshair. (Maybe an intentional design choice, but I'm not a fan.) - No Audio/Visual feedback for taking damage. - Really high mouse sensitivity with no way to change it. - No movement acceleration. - No enemy pain or death sounds. - No enemy attack sounds. - Unsynced attack animations. (Damage is dealt at the beginning of the animation rather than when the punch actually happens.) - Melee attacks that are way longer-ranged than they feel like they should be. (I thought they were shooting me, at first.) I wasn't able to get very far in the game because I kept getting ambushed by skeletons from every angle and not noticing I had lost half my health until five seconds later. The very open-ended map design doesn't help things here. That said, what you did manage to accomplish is impressive. There are a lot of custom assets with animations, and they're quite well made for the time constraint. The title screenshot is particularly eye-catching. And I'm glad to see someone else who thought of organ harvesting as a take on the theme. :)
Jan 10 21:09:41	7h 18m	Body Harvesters	♥ 1	As others mentioned, it definitely needed a balance pass. I didn't even get to the part that others said was impossible. I just assumed the game never ramped up the flying saucer spawn rate, so I didn't see a reason to keep playing. The money build rate didn't feel like it ramped up fast enough for the amount I spent on upgrading the cities. Still, a fun little game!
Jan 10 21:40:21	30m 40s	Hare Runner	♥ 6	I made about eight attempts, but I was never able to get past wave 9. I think a way to restore health would have made the game a bit more enjoyable, since it feels really bad to lose health knowing you can never get it back. Doesn't necessarily needed to be handed out like candy, just some way to restore health that appears every so often. I found that the crouch ability was incredibly strong despite the speed reduction. I ended up holding down Shift most of the time and treating release-Shift as a run button. It helped avoid the issue of the somewhat ambiguous hitbox of the player sprite. That ground texture is really visually noisy for being a background image. It's not as bad in the game when it's scrolling past, but those still screenshots make my head hurt. I like how the music got more intense as the game went on. And how the plants' attacks would sync up with it to create a backing beat. Nice touch! The voice acting was pretty good. It managed to avoid the "I recorded this in my bedroom using a cheap headset mic"-syndrome with some good audio editing. Pretty unique to have the main player attack be a melee attack. It made landing killing blows really satisfying with the swing animation. I do wish the indicator for when you have i-frames was more distinct. Between the noisy background, bright projectiles, and everything moving really fast, I found it hard to pick that out. Overall, I enjoyed. There's a lot of little touches that make the game shine.
Jan 10 22:59:21	1h 19m	Junkship	♥ 1	Nice work! I enjoyed the physics gameplay and trying to wrangle seven or eight physics objects through a tight space. I was able to beat the game before I unlocked the last ship, and I didn't want to scrounge together enough debris for 10K credits. But what I did play was enjoyable. I would have appreciated more progression elements. The small ship being required to navigate tight spaces made me think we were going into Metroidvania territory.
Jan 10 23:49:55	50m 34s	Tiny FarmLand	♥ 2	Very simple, but very polished game! All the graphics, animations, and sounds worked together to create a charming game that was satisfying to play and move around in. My main complaint is that it doesn't get more difficult the further you get. I got into a pattern where I just kept doing the same thing over and over with no sign of anything changing or challenging me.
Jan 11 00:34:30	44m 35s	Astral Aberration	♥ 1	The raids are a nice change of pace, but they feel really clunky. It's mainly the controls. If you stop pressing any keys, your character stops moving instantly, but if you switch from moving left to moving right, your character very slowly accelerates in the other direction. The low air acceleration means I try to avoid jumping. You can't see your health, so I don't know how many hits I can afford to take. There are tons of blind jumps into enemies that shoot and hit you before you even touch the ground. I mostly took to shooting forward while walking and backing up if I heard a hit sound. The procedural (I assume) levels are very repetitive. They just seem to keep going until my character careens into a spike that I tried to avoid or I randomly stumble in the glowing orb. At a certain point in the game, I lost the ability to destroy security cameras and I'm not sure why. I never got to the point where I got to really interact with the ship upgrades. I unlocked one new room after my first raid, but the additional cores from the other three raids didn't seem to unlock anything except resources I didn't know how to use. After four identical-feeling levels, I didn't really want to play anymore. Good attempt, but I think you bit off more than you could chew with three distinct games in a weekend. It means none of the three feel particularly polished. I'm impressed you got as much as you did, but I think it would have turned out better if you had focused on just one of them.
Jan 11 01:38:31	1h 04m	Feeding Time at the Church of the Cosmic Void	♥ 1	I was able to beat the game, but it was tough! You have to be on the ball with movement and rune placement. The penultimate level in particular took me several dozen tries. It was a good mix of puzzle and platformer. Often times I knew what I had to do, but had to practice getting the moves down to do it all in one go. Or I might think I knew what I was doing, but forgot the pig can only be commanded if he's looking straight at you and had to figure out how to adjust. It was very engaging! One gripe I have is that knowing which runes to use where demands knowledge of what obstacles are coming up later in the level. (Because you might use a jump rune where you should have used a shoot rune, and then you find out later that you needed that specific rune for another part of the level.) And there's no way to know what's coming up since the level restarts quickly after you die. The controls also threw me a lot. The attacks halt your movement and the jump wasn't as tight as I would have liked. I kept failing the jump over the fire in the second-to-last level since I had to walk up to the fire, place the dash rune, walk back to give me space to build speed, run forward again, time the jump right, then place the jump rune on the other side, all before the pig beats me there. It was a bit frustrating having to play the rest of the level and do the awkward crouch under the purple skull thing before I could make another attempt. I also think you introduce mechanics a bit too quickly. A few more levels in between that ease you into the different runes could have helped the learning curve. But I know, it's a jam game and all that. Overall though, I had a lot of fun! A very cohesive, fun, and unique game all the way through!
Jan 11 16:14:30	14h 35m	Grave Harvest	♥ 8	High score: 163 Fun little game! I didn't realize on the first run that you had to drop off your fertilizer at the pumpkin. I probably lost all the ferilizer I was carrying and then tried to interact with the pumpkin to no avail, so I ignored it for the rest of the run. I figured it out in the second go though. I'm still not sure why lighting lamps creates fertilizer though. Combat can be a bit unfair when you fight two or more ghosts at once. If the two ghosts are positioned in a particular way, it becomes possible for a hit on one of the ghosts to not knock it backwards. I think what happens is that it gets hit back, bounces off the other ghost, and then comes right back for you again before your attack recharges. Fighting three or more ghosts from different directions is very difficult, but usually avoidable. It's simple, but the core game loop works well. Nice work!
Jan 11 17:32:15	1h 17m	MONDO LABS	♥ 1	Fantastic! I was hoping we would get some systems-building games with this theme. This game had me hooked all the way through trying to get my machine up and running before the cancer overtook me. The theming was beautifully grotesque. The fleshy sounds and structures with the dark-ambient backing track did a very good job of conveying a dystopian Cronenberg theme. I think the fact that the premise is around turning cancer cells into meat did a lot to convey the theme. I really loved it! meatt.png meat2.png No notes, save for a couple bugs. - A lot of times, when I tried to select a new building to build, it would place a building instead. - In the screenshot below, I would expect to be able to transfer energy like so: nomove.png
Jan 11 18:26:41	54m 26s	Plot Luck	♥ 1	Cute little game. Could make for a good minigame as part of a larger game. I managed to get over $100, which seemed like a good stopping point.
Jan 11 19:10:10	43m 29s	Barvest: The Iconic Bug Harvest of 2005	♥ 2	Has the Nintendo DS nostalgia wave officially begun? I ask because this game really reminds me of the look of Mario 64 DS. Well I couldn't be happier. This game has a lot of charm! That spider looks so graceful with his scuttle and procedural limb movement. Controls felt very responsive! The swinging mechanics felt pretty good as well. I had a bit of trouble near the end when I had to chain multiple swings together with double jumps while avoiding floating spike walls. But it was fun getting better at the mechanics. And while I was not up to the challenge, I like how you intentionally left in the ridiculous traversal mechanics that I saw in other people's comments. That sort of stuff is always cool if you're the kind of person that can pull it off. One thing I would suggest is putting a shadow directly beneath the player, so you can tell when he's over a platform. Fantastic game! I will always remember the grace of that spider as he floats through the air while calm classical guitar music plays in the background.
Jan 11 20:52:29	1h 42m	Crisis in Banana Republic	♥ 2	Cute little puzzle game. I do think it gets a bit samey after a while. After level 5 or so, it starts to feel like the same puzzle but bigger and in a different configuration. (I got to level 10.) But the earlier puzzles are well designed. In level 2, you figure out pretty quickly that you have to start by grabbing the tree on the right, which signals you to the later realization that you have to do something similar for the one in the top right. Nice work!
Jan 11 23:02:21	2h 09m	Macrogreens	♥ 1	Holy hell, this was an incredible submission! No notes, I'm just gonna rattle off things I liked about it: - The voice acting was top-notch. You must know a lot of really good voice actors because they played their parts perfectly! Maybe a couple of them were a tad over-the-top, but all together, they were such fun characters. I particularly liked the worrywart girl, the critic, and the bro. - Hammering all the ingredients was very satisfying. The animation, sound design, and physics all made it feel like I was actually hammering a cube of melon, shaking the brains out of a miniaturized man, or blowtorching a chili pepper. (Tell a lie, I do have one note. At one point I got stuck, unable to load the corn pillar into the shaker. Turns out I had accidentally dropped something else into the shaker without realizing. So I would have made the filled shaker look more distinct from the unfilled shaker.) - The balancing of the levels was perfect. Every time, I got down to the wire. I had to retry the last level, but that was because I didn't notice that the overburnt ingredient the red lunatic guy wanted me to make was the same thing I had sitting literally right next to his plate when the order came in. - Very funky music that conveyed the spacey setting at the same time. Great job! This is extremely impressive having made all this in just three days.
Jan 12 01:35:44	2h 33m	Feast of Gévaudan	♥ 2	This was an interesting marriage between action and stealth. It was all about picking your fights to determine whether you could win them or if you should come back later after picking off some stragglers. There were a few things that caused some frustration though. The clerics don't look visually distinct enough from the townsfolk. with how fast everything moves, you really only have about a quarter-second to make the call on whether they're a cleric you need to avoid or a townsfolk you need to kill before they ring the bell. The best score I was able to get was seven-left. I died when I charged at a civilan who was inches from the bell. But my hitbox got caught on a corner of geometry during the charge and my movement was locked out until she rang the bell. werewolfcorner.png The game crashed a couple of times. The music kept going, but the screen was completely frozen. Here is a screenshot of the console: werewolfcrash2.png But overall, it was fun, but frustrating since those three issues killed my three best attempts.
Jan 12 05:35:34	3h 59m	Menagerie Street	♥ 2	Cute little game with great writing! The characters really felt alive. I loved all the dilogue, like how the queen of busybodies thought it necessary to require people to RSVP to a fucking harvest festival, or the beaver girl trying desperately to rationalize her faithlessness. But at a certain point I got to thinking, what exactly does all this petty small-town gossip bullshit and intrigue on an extramarital relationship have to do with MY ludumberries! I just want them back, dammit! Then I realized that all of the shoddy excuses for how they're not all cheating with each other actually made for good alibis, so I tried to make a list of who was where. No dice. Only two of them had real alibis. I thought, hey maybe it's the turtle woman. Maybe she wanted to use them to distill exotic liquors. I should talk to her one last time to check if she had an alibi. Then a new dialogue option appeared that revealed the solution and the end of the game. It kinda came out of nowhere. I didn't come out of it feeling clever, just like I learned a life lesson. Lame. In all seriousness though, great writing. I was really sucked into the story here and trying to learn more about these people!
Jan 12 06:25:22	49m 48s	The Wheat is Yellower	♥ 1	I don't think I can really play this game until I know why I'm taking damage. It's not the dude with the shotgun, it just seems to be happening at random. I checked the itch page and saw that it mentioned booby traps, which makes sense. Except, even after knowing there were traps, I still couldn't see them! I leaned into my screen to try and spot them and still couldn't. I don't know if it's a bug, or if they actually are meant to be invisible. The tag-team collaboration thing is pretty neat. We did it in the Quake mapmaking community and it was a lot of fun. Maybe I'll try it in a future game jam.
Jan 12 08:11:36	1h 46m	Art of Occult Harvest	♥ 1	@picross I piped it into a music recognizer. Looks like it's from the Full Metal Alchemist soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1khzQ_x-q4 @jajakeim You should close your audio category. Having it open implies you created all the audio for the game yourself.
Jan 12 09:50:31	1h 38m	Pseudo-Harvest	♥ 1	I think this is the most creative take on the theme I've seen yet! I was just reading about how many communist countries forged their statistics, not (just) out of malice, but because of stuff like this. The last level took me many attempts. I knew what I had to do, but physics objects kept jostling against eachother causing the structure to fall apart before the inspector climbed to the top of the ladder. But the actual selection of the objects to put them in place felt very natural. My other main gripe is that restarting the level is very cumbersome. You have to go through a transition animation and wait for the dialogue-skip button to work. Very clunky. And if time runs out, you have no way at all of skipping the inspection. Really neat concept for a game that ties unique gameplay and unique setting together perfectly. Great work!
Jan 12 22:36:55	12h 46m	I Require Human Parts	♥ 2	@flaterectomy Small world, huh? Your game was really good at creating tension for a text adventure game. The ambient music and time limit created a sense of panic. The kind that would normally be reserved for the humans in such a scenario. The one downside to that is that I had to stop reading the dialogue when I got to really low health, lest I waste precious time. I thought maybe the message telling you to limit your queries on the medical system was a hint to keep querying so you could waste the ship's power and turn out the lights. Maybe that was the solution to keep people from slipping away from me. Well that wasn't the case. Then I read the comments and found that people slipping away is just a random chance to happen. I must be very unlucky then! I also thought maybe the comms panel was going to be used to trick a human into coming out. Like, you would send a message to one of the humans making it look like one of the humans you just killed saying, "Hey, I have it trapped in the Medical Bay! I need your help killing it though!" I had a lot of fun and the mood you created was excellent. Great work!
Jan 13 00:17:55	1h 41m	Wheater of the Colossus	♥ 1	I was wondering what the game meant by "use wheat to defeat the giant". Does the giant have Celiac disease? It wasn't until I noticed the wheat stalks on the side of one of the boxes I had climbed up that I figured it out. Very unique idea. Only then was it time to climb to the top! There were definitely a lot of things that should have been polished. The camera should not be able to clip through the ground. (I'm sure you can find a tutorial for making the camera collide with the world.) The default sensitivity is crazy high. (To get it to a tolerable value, I had to be extremely precise with my mouse movements. You should have put in a sensitivity setting for the sensitivity menu :P. I also don't think it's necessary to have separate sensitivity for X and Y.) Movement acceleration always makes movement feel better. Sounds (even simple ones) give more weight to your actions in-game. Sucks that it took so long to get that one feature working. I'm sure many of the things I listed would have been there if you had time. Either way, nice little prototype!
Jan 13 01:27:13	1h 09m	FarmUp!	♥ 2	Stress is right. So many times did I pick up the wrong tool, or forget that I had three seeds piled up, or panic completely and forget which key to press, throwing my watering can across the screen. My highest score was 895. It got really intense when I had two trees up blocking my farming spaces and hiding tools behind it. But I liked the different plants having slightly different (but still intuitive) farming processes. A couple minor nitpicks: There were a few times when I watered a crop just in time...for the sound effect to play, and then I lost a life anyway. Also, standing directly on top of a tool sometimes doesn't let you pick it up, resulting in me panicking and trying to quickly change directions to pick it up and then I just spasm back and forth never being quite far enough to the side to grab it. I also had a lot of situations where I tried to pick up one tool but picked up a different one instead. I determined that could be solved (in theory) by better organizing my tools. Though in practice, I sometimes just had to chuck a tool into the pile to grab another tool in time. I really had fun with this one! It's balanced well so that it doesn't build difficulty too quickly or too slowly, and really challenges you near the end!
Jan 13 05:02:33	3h 35m	Initial Harvester	♥ 1	Fun little game. Controls were tight and there were a lot of nice visual touches. 572 was the highest I could get.
Jan 14 05:33:44	24h 31m	Robert the Druid has Made a Terrible Mistake	♥ 1	Fun little tower defense game with a unique mechanic! I really like the risk/reward associated with having to destroy your defenses to create better ones. The graphics and music were simple, but they did the job well. A few gripes: - When I first started, I didn't realize that the tree-planting took time, so I thought that the controls were just really unresponsive. Maybe add more distinct sound effects and animations to indicate that the player character is currently performing a task. - I never figured out the difference between the two tree types. I figured the pine trees were stronger since they cost more, so I built more of those. - For the final boss, you don't do much except sit there crossing your fingers that the damage is pouring into him fast enough. You can't build new towers, because that would require demolishing an existing tower just to create a weaker one. Other than that, I enjoyed. Nice work!
Jan 14 10:46:04	5h 12m	Chop Crop & Drop	♥ 3	Let my playthrough of this game be a cautionary tale: Do not frontload your game's tutorial with six paragraphs of information! I'm not the type of player who just skips anything with more than three words of text, but even I couldn't retain all of the information that was dumped on me at the start. I was able to figure out most of it on my own, but some things slipped past me. In fact, I had written up a bunch of notes about how the game was overly simple in its combat, too rng-dependent, and worst of all grindy. Then I figured out what that floating question mark square near the top of the screen was for. Yeah... With all two-dozen or so dice loaded into their slots, I suddenly I went from dealing 1 damage per turn if I got a lucky roll to wiping everything off the map (including the final boss) with ease. Only took me 28 nights. (I did a second run after in 15 nights.) But even once I had figured everything out, I still wasn't sure what the strategy was supposed to be. Maybe this is just my complete inexperience with the "turn-based combat strategy" genre speaking, but it didn't feel like I was getting the most out of the mechanics. I was pretty much just thwacking the same dude over and over again and hoping the numbers coming out of him were bigger than those coming out of me. I figured that there was no reason to ever fight more than one enemy at a time unless going for a minimum-number-of-nights run. And if you're fighting only one enemy at a time, there's no reason to ever move, so the grid board doesn't have any purpose nor do any of the slashing or piercing attacks. Again, me reviewing a turn-based strategy game with D&D-esque combat is a bit like a vegetarian reviewing a steakhouse, but here's what I can review with confidence: 1) The visual style is awesome! Lots of little polish with the animations and textures. 2) The music reminds me of the Terraria soundtrack. It fits really well in this game and sets the mood perfectly! 3) I would have preferred the movement between spaces to be a bit snappier and quicker. When I did fight multiple enemies in one round, I did so by spreading them across map so I would only fight one at a time. And moving across the board to do this felt rather sluggish. Tutorial notwithstanding, this is clearly a very well-crafted game. And I did still have fun even if the genre isn't my cup of tea. Nice work!
Jan 17 21:02:42	82h 16m	Carrot	♥ 1	Once I learned the mantra of A.B.C. (Always Be Carrot-planting), I got a lot farther. Having essentially infinite ammo at my disposal made things a lot easier, but still didn't save me when bats were spawning faster than I could send carrots into them. My high score was 114. It's a really cute concept, and surprisingly deep for an action game with only one action outside of basic movement. Your carrot-gun is your weapon, ammo-farmer, and rocket-jumper all at once. I loved pulling off slick movement like taking advantage in a gap in the bats, jumping off their head, then carrot-jumping to freedom! This seems like it would make a fantastic mobile game. Super addictive! Great work!
Jan 22 08:23:19	107h 20m	Drillydown	♥ 1	Interesting little puzzle game. The movement reminds me a bit of Snakebird. The graphics were simple, but they did the job well. I liked the little raytrace lighting effect. The sound effects, however, were really grating. The first time I died, I instantly shut off the volume for the rest of the game. The game felt pretty easy, though that might have been because I did not bother to limit my number of steps. I think I would have preferred it if you had instead given each level a maximum step count instead of making it a high-score system. That would have made the game harder and would have provided much more opportunity for particularly challenging levels. (For my personal tastes, I don't like high scores in puzzle games. I would rather it be a defined pass-or-fail goal as the main objective.) Also, if you want the high score to be an important part of the game, you should give the player to restart the level once they beat it, so they can try to improve their score. The trap-grates seemed like they would have made the game harder, but it wasn't too hard to just try every possible way to move through the level until I got the right solution. I never felt stumped since none of the levels took me longer than 30 seconds. I think the hardest time I ever had was figuring out exactly how the game determines whether the dynamite will kill you. Maybe having quick levels was a good thing; that's a lot of levels for a jam game! Nice game, though I think the difficulty balancing could have used more work.
Jan 22 08:54:41	31m 22s	Fruit Pick Tricks	♥ 1	I really enjoyed this one! The visuals were very abstract, with the empty nothingness outside the playable space and the dev-textured fruit. But I liked that; it kept the focus on the game objects. The background track set a nice mood as well. I'm surprised you managed to make so many unique puzzles out of such basic (and strange) mechanics. The level where you use the purple fruit to jump from tree to tree really stumped me. So it was very satisfying when I finally figured it out! :) Thank you for the snappy restarts. None of the levels felt frustrating to have to replay earlier areas over again, so I think you hit the right balance in checkpoint placement. Unfortunately, the game crashed on me right before I reached (what I assume was) the end. I had just figured out how to get up to the top and was about to execute it when I got hit with an error message and had all my movement disabled. I forgot to screenshot it though, sorry. I assume I would have beaten the game right there anyway, so I didn't bother playing it all over again. That aside, this game was a lot of fun. Great work!
Jan 22 09:25:54	31m 13s	Techno Plants	♥ 5	Huh, I've never played one of these Crypt of the Necrodancer style rhythm games before, but I did enjoy this one! The gameplay is very satisfying at a basic level. The rhythm timing felt very natural. I didn't have too much difficulty staying on beat, which means the game clock and the music track were well synced with each other. I only occasionally would get a note too late or too early, but I assume those were my fault. I had trouble at first, figuring out how to keep track of when the roots would deploy to suck up the nutrients. But it became a piece of cake when I noticed that was also queued by a crescendo in the music! The visuals were very nice, with how everything would pulse on the beat. I take it this is a requirement for the genre :P I did have a few problems: First, I don't feel like I ever really understood all the enemy movement patterns. The ladybug was simple, but I never figured out the rolly polly. I just felt like it was a roll of the dice whether they would be in my way by the time I got to them. During the last level, my strategy evolved into just picking up as many nutrients as possible then tanking the damage I took from any enemies that block me. Second, you really need to let the player restart the level manually by pressing R. I had many situations where I got myself into a corner with >300 nutrients, and I just had to wait until my inevitable death. waiting.png Those problems aside, I had fun! Great work!
Jan 25 04:56:42	67h 30m	Final Harvest	♥ 1	Man, I don't even know how to judge this game. Because it's an obligate multiplayer game that apparently takes place over several weeks, I don't feel I got the full experience. In fact, I still don't understand all of the game's mechanics. I'll start by describing what happened in my time playing. I first tried out the game on the web client. It took a very long time to load in. In fact, I got up to grab a snack while it was loading and came back to see I had been killed. After a few more minutes of playing, I switched to the desktop client since the web client felt sluggish and unresponsive. I didn't see any other players around, so I just played the game as I would Minecraft. I crafted my stone tools, found a cave, and explored it, finding some iron to craft some tools and armor. I was basically just playing off-brand Minecraft. I was still unsure of what exactly my goal was. I was told by the game page that I was supposed to be fighting aliens, but nobody else seemed to be on the server. I really didn't know what the spreading corruption was for either. Then you and a couple other people joined the server. It was only then that I found out I was an alien, since you told me to press C to examine my player model. (It was like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie; I was the alien the whole time!) I wandered around corrupting forest land. Then I stumbled upon a human player, killed him pretty easily, and then...well I didn't know what to do after that. All the humans were alien-ified so there was nothing left to do. This game is a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat. It's built into an existing game, it's multiplayer, it takes more than a single sitting to fully experience, and it has very confusing and ill-explained mechanics. And if one hasn't played Minecraft before (I have, but not everyone has), then it becomes even more confusing! Here is what advice I can give (keeping in mind that I don't know what is possible with Minetest): - Remove anything that isn't absolutely critical to your game. For example, one of the crafting recipes was for a screwdriver for rotating decorative blocks. This is not necessary to have in your game about fighting aliens. - Make it very clear whether or not you are an alien. It should be obvious just from looking at your first-person view which side you're on. - Create some sort of singleplayer mode that lets the player get to grips with the mechanics. Multiplayer pvp can be a stressful environment, especially when you have no room for failure if you want to remain a human. - Create some sort of tutorial or quest system so the player can understand how to play. At one point, the game told me through console that I was full and I should build a new heart to spend my biomass. But I could never figure out how to actually do that. (And a side note, the heart's menu text was cut off. All of the options said "00 biomass", so I couldn't see what anything cost.) - Create an ultimate goal for the players on each team to work toward. When we harvested all the humans, I would expect there to be a celebratory "Aliens win!" followed by a map reset for the next match. But nothing happened. I just ran around exploring the terrain until I got bored and logged off. - Don't make a multiplayer game that relies on there being multiple people on the server at a time. It makes it very hard to judge your game. I didn't find out about this game until after your gameday had passed. I know, it's a three-day game jam so adding the stuff I mentioned would be a lot of work, but that's why you need to scope well. It's an admirable effort, but I think what you tried to make was just too ambitous and ill-fitting of a game jam like Ludum Dare.
Jan 25 07:19:35	2h 22m	Stealth Organ Harvest	♥ 1	Fun little puzzle game. Reminds me of a few flash games I've played. I like how you implemented the sight mechanic, with the raytraced lines to represent their field of view. I liked how their visions radiates outward. It does a good job representing the fact that you'll be spotted faster if you're right in front of the enemy. I understand that the picking up mechanic was for the upgrade system you had planned, but since it has no purpose in the current version, I think you should have removed it. I like how getting spotted can sometimes be a useful tool to draw an enemy away, as used in the last level. I think there is a lot more design space here than was used in these five levels. Nice work!
Jan 25 08:30:02	1h 10m	Strange Garden	♥ 0	Interesting puzzle game. It was fun finding different patterns and structures that would allow me to most efficiently farm the various fruits. Graphics and sound design were both great! Everything was easy to classify and the game was pleasant to look at. There is a lot of little visual flair and polish that ties everything together. Great work there! My high score was 201. I would have gone for more, but I was pretty fatigued after my last run. Restarting a run is very arduous since you have to start all the way at the beginning again. And the further I got, the less I wanted to go for another try. Part of the problem is that this game is very vague with how it decribes the fruits' mechanics. Ordinarily that would be fine, but I think this game disincentivizes experimentation. Whenever I considered spending a few turns to figure out how a fruit works, I decided against it since I didn't want to risk running out of turns. Here are the questions I had during play: - Does the pink fruit count diagonals? - Does the pink fruit count a fruit if I just planted it this turn? What about if I just harvested it? - Does the rock count as a plant for the purposes of the pink fruit? (It comes in the same seed pouch the other plants come in, after all.) - What does it mean when the white fruit "wanders around"? - Can the white fruit walk off the stage? And if so, does it count toward my goal? - If the white fruit walks over an unripe apple, what happens? - If the white fruit walks over a fruit other than an apple, what happens? - If the white fruit walks into an immovable object, what happens? - If the white fruit pushes a ripe apple into an immovable object, what happens? Some of these questions I never found out the answer to. Others, I was very surprised when I found out the answer. On my last run, I figured that if the white fruit walked onto an orange fruit, it would stop moving, unable to push it. (It does say immovable after all.) But what actually happens is that it destroys it. What?! I didn't notice that I wasn't getting any points from those orange fruit until I was too low on remaining turns to be able to grow any more. This is the third puzzle game that I've said this on, but I think a level-by-level structure might have been better. Or at the very least had some sort of checkpoint system that let you skip the early parts. I believe players need room to experiment in puzzle games, and this game does not provide that room. Despite those gripes, I did still have a lot of fun. There was a lot of interesting strategy to get out of just five placeable objects. Great work!
Jan 25 23:31:03	15h 01m	Hivesters	♥ 2	Nice little RTS game! Great 3D models and texture work. Everything was easy to classify and munching up fields of wheat was satisfying. The controls felt nice for the most part; I liked using the line-drawing to lead the insects. I did find it to be a bit trying sometimes though, since I would often draw a line only for a small section of the hive to not follow in with the rest, or for a clump of bugs to stop part way through following the path. And because the camera is so zoomed in with no way (that I could find) to zoom it out more, I had to draw many lines which meant I was losing bugs left and right. I could herd them back in, but that would often mean letting my main group be a sitting duck for a few seconds. I enjoyed the strategy. Scoping out the map and deciding which way to take my hive first to clear out various towers. Or judging which towers even need to be destroyed. Sometimes I just sent a small squad of bugs to nab a field of wheat and run. I wish you had made more "if A then B" type sections. There was one bit where I decided to go up a hill to take out a tower so it wouldn't be bombing me in a later section. I wish there had been a bit more of that sort of thing to make routing more interesting. Just when I got comfortable with the idea of splitting the swarm into two sub-swarms to do two separate tasks, I got to the last level which put a stop to all of that. Because there's no way to zoom out, I can't really control two swarms at once. If I ever leave a swarm alone while I control a different one, it will be dead when I get back because of the long-range cannons that can fire from across the map. There's no safe place I can leave a swarm, so the best strategy seems to be to go forward, eat a bunch of crops, walk all the way back to collect the new guys I just hatched, then walk all the way back again to destroy the next line of towers. So that level was a bit arduous. But those nitpicks aside, I had a lot of fun! Great work!
Jan 26 06:00:12	6h 29m	Puzzling Harvest	♥ 1	Now this is how I like my puzzle games! Short levels where you're not out much time for making a wrong move. And each level builds on the previous one in order to teach the player bit-by-bit how to maneuver the harvester. Level five made me feel particularly large-brained for beating it. There are a few clever revelations about the game's mechanics you have to arrive at in order to beat it. And it does it all with so few moving parts. Level six was really good too. The fueling system was a bit awkward to figure out. First off, the big glowing red cube doesn't really look much like a fueling station. (I assume this was a time constraint thing.) Second, I had to go back to the menu to determine which side I had to fuel it from. I figured out the grain deposit from the model, but there doesn't seem to be anything indicating fuel side. An undo button would have been nice as well. I had to restart the level many times due to misclicks. But overall, this is a nice snacky little puzzle game. Great work!
Jan 27 19:00:03	36h 59m	Seed Rampage	♥ 0	The game keeps freezing for me within a minute of starting. I used Firefox. farmerror.png
Jan 27 20:07:58	1h 07m	Gene Graph Garden	♥ 1	Wow! This is exactly the type of game I could sink my teeth into! I loved coming to new understandings about the game's mechanics. I have beaten up to level five right now, but I plan to come back later and finish the rest. I liked how you even included a little debugger system where you can see which node a section of plant is currently on while stepping through the frames one by one. Great touch! Here are my (minor) nitpicks: - The growing fruit mechanic just seemed like platespinning. I would figure out the solution to the puzzle, remember "oh yeah, I have to stick a 'grow fruit' node before each 'grow forward' node", do that, and then I would win the level. It's an extra step that doesn't make the game any more difficult, but delays the level win. - The "Grow Forward" node mentions a green arrow in its explanation text. I know now that this refers to the connection arrow. But at first, I thoight it referred to the green arrow on the node's icon, so I was kinda confused to what it meant. - I think a separate "Start" node would have been a better choice instead of a Start label next to one of the nodes. It's more elegant, I think. - A few more levels in between to get the user used to the mechanics wouldn't be a bad idea. I have some previous experience with state machines, so this was a lot easier for me. - I wish you could set a numerical value for the "wait" node. My solution for level five involved a chain of 20 or so wait nodes and hooking those together was a bit tedious. But those didn't do too much to damper my experience. Fantastic work!