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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Antti Haavikko's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 1 09:16:29 | Elite Delivery. Pizza Dangerous | ♥ 5 | I think this is enough. Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 12.03.51.png Nice dual purpose design having to use your potential score to kill enemies. Too bad it doesn't really work that well as killing enemies is not a good strategy at all. Killing them gives no points or anything really and just deducts from your points. Much better to just keep them facing away from you and snipe deliver full pizzas. pizzas2.gif Skipping planets has no penalty at all either so you could pretty much go infinite if playing patiently and carefully. Skips should really penalize score/health somehow and having enemies spawn even if you didn't kill the previous one would deter away from the cheese pacifist strategy. Dunno if such would be feasible to implement with pico and such visuals. Speaking of visuals, looked cool! Nice pseudo-3d on pico, I like it. Sounds left something to be desired though. I was just that same "pew pew pew" on repeat and pretty much nothing else. Got kinda irritating. Was this end text dupe thing intended? pizzas-end.gif Anyways, good job! For some reason pico games more often than not deliver (pun intended). Just would need some balancing and slight gameplay loop fine tunes. 👍 | |
| May 1 09:49:22 | 32m 53s | Contraband Crackdown | ♥ 3 | Nice idea but it's so buggy that it's near unplayable. Did make it through it though... Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 12.30.36.png First of all, the web version at least has some major scaling issues. It doesn't really like to respond well to screen size and (maybe because of it) you get hard locked in the how to play or game over screen and have to do a full page refresh to continue. Not too fun. And zooming the page so that it the "supported" play size fits affects the positions somehow so that for example mouse clicks are misaligned a bit left and up. Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 12.21.06.png Really hard to stay informed on what is fully going on. The convicts sometimes teleported around and moved even while being knocked out. Didn't really figure out how the whole losing thing happened because sometimes they got away with contraband and nothing really seemed to happen. Played again and looked at the scoring thing more closely and I guess you just lost "points" when they escape. It is only detrimental in the beginning though and later on you really can't lose anymore as you get points so much faster than they possibly can take them away from you. Best strategy (if you could even call it that) just seemed to be to just knock everyone out periodically and try to grab the loot. And knocking them out was a bit though to "aim" and the visual seemed a bit misleading. Same as aiming your punches, grabbing stuff was weirdly intricate as well. Sometimes I could run circles on top of item and it just refused to get picked up. And items fading out by themselves didn't really help either. The pickup sound was quite often also missing which made it harder to understand whether you picked up an item or it disappeared or what happened. Were the drones supposed to drop the items? It looked like that most of the time but sometimes they just appeared out of nowhere. Oh and completely missed that there was supposedly a sprint on my first play. Even though, it didn't seem to work. Oh never mind, looks like there is an invisible cooldown on it. And having the music be muted by default was a weird choice. But even having it on didn't really help much with the irritatingly monotonous and repetitive sound effects. Some more variety would have been nice. Anyways, good job! 👍 |
| May 1 10:13:29 | 24m 07s | Contraband | ♥ 1 | Success! Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 13.03.58.png Was very confused on the final level and had to restart completely to read the oh so slow messages (stopped reading them after to second one) thinking I missed some crucial information on maybe how to shoot or something. The story messages could really be a bit speedier and could offer a scroll skip too (instead of completely skipping it) so you could read it on your own pace. Guess I didn't miss anything and it was camera being absolutely dumb and not following me up before being way higher. And it also had some issues with following me back down in the end. And it was though to even figure out you could go up as previously your height was capped and this spot didn't appear any different. Just stumbled into it as there was no other ways around really. The guardian hit box was very weird. Didn't seem to matter where the package was and all in all seemed quite arbitrary. Moving every direction besides up was annoyingly slow. I don't think allowing a bit more control would really hurt. The sound scape was actually pretty nice. The ambience painted a nice mood without any need for special bells and whistles. The pixel art wasn't bad either was it looked a bit messy as the pixel size varied all over the place and not in a logical manner even (like the biggest pixels were in the background). Nice parallax though. That's about it. Just would need some minor adjustments and obviously more content. Good job! 👍 |
| May 1 12:52:59 | 2h 39m | Waggle Danger | ♥ 0 | Very fun idea but it's mega annoying to play as the music just doesn't keep in sync at all. So basically missing the most important aspect of a rhythm game. Really can't do any better as I keep dropping the combos left and right... Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 15.36.17.png I tried everything. Pausing to resync and full refresh starts too but to no avail, can't do more than a single full trip without it getting way off sync. It looks nice. Very pleasing color palette and nice pixel art. Music and sounds work too but a more beat emphasising music could work better. The scoring could be more interesting too. If it was in sync, it wouldn't be too hard to get the perfect 64*24 (at least that's how I figured it works). Nothing much else to say here. I like the idea and the look/sound but the off syncing is really pissing in my cereal. But good job! 👍 |
| May 1 13:36:39 | 43m 40s | Bloodrush -DELUXE- | ♥ 1 | Pretty fun! Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 16.27.15.png Looks and sounds great, nicely polished! Even though the visuals themselves were rather simple, the effects and everything make it really pop. Some adrenaline pumping music would have been a nice addition too. And it would have helped with selling the slow-mo too. Now it was sometimes quite easy to get confused between the modes. Also would be an amazing feature to see your run in real time afterwards... 🤔 The driving physics seemed a bit off. Or maybe not the actual driving but the collisions. They are just out of control. Looks like the car just randomizes it's rotation on collision. Really brings in these uncontrollable chain reactions where you just mash against walls and mail boxes. I think it leans too much on the package/letter delivering and not that much on the actual fun part which is the driving. Especially not fun on those huge clusters of mailboxes like that one spot where it goes around the same are at least three times. 😤 The control scheme for throwing seems overly complicated and causes confusion on whether I'm normal or slow-mo and whether I'm charging a throw or not. That extra click to trigger the mode seems unnecessary. Throwing also has this weird inaccuracy that I think is caused by car spinning around. It's mega annoying as it just hinders your play without much you can do about it. The levels feels kinda long and as I mentioned already, has too many delivery points. I think the game would have really benefited from having some shorter circuits even on that same city map. The current one is just too long and repetitive to really warrant trying to improve your time much. Anyways, good job! Very outstanding quality for a compo game... 👍 |
| May 3 15:21:48 | 49h 45m | Perceptive Perilous Package Piloting | ♥ 1 | The difficulty spikes from nothing to sky high in a split second. Screenshot 2023-05-03 at 17.59.27.png It kinda suffers from being too same each try to really warrant going for a better score. But on the other hand shuffles the words just enough that you can't really learn them and improve like that either. I think it would have been better to choose either or. Go with a full on random route or have everything be planned. Could have even done some thematical storytelling or at least have the other words besides "takeoff" fit in better if choosing the hand picked route. Having to repeat the tutorial every try too isn't fun as it's just brain dead easy and always the exact same. Having the game be split to levels doesn't really make sense here to me. It just adds unnecessary waiting time in the form of transitions, showing the score and even ramping up the difficulty back. Especially so when it's so insanely balanced that probably vast majority of players can't beat level three. This slight size issue was very annoying to me. I'm blaming that missing 10 pixels for my poor performance! 😅 Screenshot 2023-05-03 at 17.48.09.png There were some depth issues especially in the tutorial like this health bar and "dimmer bar" too covering the help texts. Also having transparent white on transparent so it multiplies for the arrow doesn't look good. Going full opaque would have been better here. And sometimes reading the red letters from purple background was tricky. Or just do the same as for the previous bubble and not have the arrow be angled. By the way, I made something conceptually very similar on last Ludum Dare. 😜 typefarmer-cover.gif But yeah, good job! 👍 Obviously would need some balancing and tweaks to help with replayability like a bigger dictionary. |
| May 4 14:48:34 | 23h 26m | Why Deliver Y ? | ♥ 5 | Very cool! Got the "secret" ending on my first try. Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.11.22.png You get hard locked on that ending by the way. Had to refresh and try the normal one. Glad you had enough of a foresight to have a cheat for that (too). Awesome way of telling a story really. Supported the gameplay very well so that even a slide puzzle hater such as I managed to breeze through it without any loathing. Also very glad that you didn't include any time/move limit so you can puzzle out those solutions in peace. The lock picking mini game was my favourite part of the game really. Too bad it was very underused and that having no time pressure or anything really made it less of a hurdle. And now that I think about it, even the "enemy" detecting and moving mechanic was pretty much just scraping the surface. But obviously it was already pretty large scope for a jam and of course it's better the keep it tight feeling and have players wanting more than get repetitive. And the story could have easily handled few more levels of suspense to make the pacing better, now the end came kinda fast in my opinion. The arrow keys didn't work on the level cleared menu. Of course not a major issue as I switched to WASD and mouse anyway after figuring out that the lock picking needs mouse anyway. I think this might have been the only part where it happens but it wasn't great that you get ambushed from a blind angle because you had to flashlight on and have to replay the level to learn about it and keep your light off. Guess it hits two birds with one stone by teaching you about the restart too. 🤷♀️ Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 16.53.52.png Then of course you go and punish that blind faith in turning off your flashlight at the start of each level like this... 😶 Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.39.08.png Was it actually intentional that you could use the flashlight as a glorifier "skip turn" button? I felt like I cheesed at least one level with it. It looked and sounded awesome! Nice pixel art and animation with just a few frames. Kudos. Perfect color choices too. 👍 Music fit the mood very well but having some jazzy drums (with brushes obviously) would have been sweet addition as a classic noir style detective trope. Did you do it yourself by the way? Didn't see any mention about it and I recall you having someone else usually tackle that part. Didn't like the i in the font though. Of course it's just an opinion. Interesting choice though but it does make the text harder to read. There were some overlap too like this. Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.44.33.png What's with the rank? It doesn't seem like rating on how well you did on the level and I at least couldn't find any difficulty selection or such. Good job! 👍 Very full experience with practically no issues. Left me wanting more. Wanting more slide puzzles, guess I'm going crazy... |
| May 4 15:27:42 | 39m 08s | The War is Over | ♥ 2 | As opposed to previous commenter, I didn't feel like the shooting sound packed enough of a punch really. It sounded lacklustre and felt like it too as your shots were just tickling those pesky bullet sponge robots to their deaths. Didn't help it either that you could always completely outrange them and make them absolutely trivial. The mines did get me though so here is a post mortem moonwalk... warmoonwalk.gif At first I thought that they were too invisible but hey, that's exactly what they're supposed to be. The game was just so short that you didn't have enough time to start seeing them properly. Spelunky does this perfectly too. You start off triggering them all the time but learn to see them so clearly after enough runs. Of course I made it to the end too. Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.58.15.png This bit was a bit tricky. As you need to notice that one dim square to get up there. The difference between those foreground and background elements could have been a bit more in my opinion. And now that I look at that picture I'm wondering how I managed to get up there without getting hurt as I didn't shoot the first mine before trying to hop up there... 🤔 Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.56.30.png Of course the sprite tearing and cursor etc flickering wasn't great but wasn't that bad either really. The pixel art looked good and even though the pixel ratio kinda unnaturally grew bigger when going to the background layer, it was still consistent and worked. Could have used with some more feedback. Like flashing and sound effects of enemies when getting hit and so on. Especially as they (well, the floating one really) were so tanky that you didn't even know if you were hurting them or not. Or even hitting them at all. And the "inaccuracy" or the shots wasn't often the player's fault either. war-accuracy.gif Shooting could have used like a bullet trace line. Other than just looking good, it also serves a purpose in helping you see if you hit the enemy or if the shot gets clipped by some corner. And it might look better to attach the muzzle flash to the gun so it moves with it. The smoke (if it's separate particles) would make more sense to still emit in world space though. warmuzzle.gif What a programmer way to call it "mouse button 0". 👌😂 Always a good idea to add a separate jump button (space) as an alternative to jumping with up. Also, of course double jump was necessary level layout wise but didn't really fit in thematically. Good job! 👍 |
| May 6 06:45:09 | 39h 17m | Duke Burger | ♥ 2 | Nice DOS days vibes! 👍 Started off very easy but the last level did give me some challenge. But not a good type of difficulty though. Blind jumps and trappy places where you throw your burger to the void etc. At least there was an endless supply of 2-ups. Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 9.04.38.png Another big issue was the huge enemy hit boxes. They just weren't fair and impossible to estimate. And the getting hit feedback was so slight that quite often didn't even notice until later that you had taken damage. And on the other hand, the coin hit boxes were too small so especially on stairs you had to even go mega slow or do this awkward back and forth moving. duke-coins.gif The intro was weirdly paced. Some pointless scenes lingered on for way too long (like phone ringing or the "YES") but then the actual information slides whizz past so fast that I could barely decipher the part of the controls and guessed the rest. The tunes were great! They had some awkward gaps while looping but that wasn't a big issue. That one piece was just straight up Prodigy right? All the musics and art too fit the "source material" perfectly. It was quite cruel to have this tough jump and as a reward for getting up there just an endless pit of death. Having a piece of chicken there with an invisible wall would even have felt better. Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 8.57.54.png The throwing arc felt weird. It was really tough to estimate it so that you'd actually hit enemies. And same for landing your burger safely. And it seems like sometimes the burger hurt the enemies but usually not. Maybe I was just doing something else like stomp them at the same time. Feature by the way that I didn't discover you could do until the very last level. Other than the very abrupt flash on getting hit, it also could have used a bunch more feedback and sound effects on different things. I think sound effects were right now very much under utilised. Stuff like jumping and landing were all silent. Weirdly enough, throwing the burger and having that land did have a sound though. Even the player character walking could have some subtle sound. Just falling of an edge didn't trigger the jumping state correctly so the wrong walk animation was playing instead of jumping/falling one. duke-air-walk.gif "Come get some..." Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 9.29.40.png Good job! 👍 **edit:** Oh and one more thing. Not a big fan of whole rejump at landing if you are holding down the button. Especially awkward when high/long jumping up to another platform and hold it down to get the maximum height and distance. And then you're just immediately jumping again from the landing platform corner. Feels weird. |
| May 6 08:43:22 | 1h 58m | Holy Ghost Kitchen! | ♥ 1 | Pretty cool warioware'esque mini game madness! Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 10.58.22.png The visuals are pretty rough. They serve their purpose but it's quite difficult to figure out what is what when seeing them for the first time. That hand maybe being the weirdest and most abstract thing of em all. Mini games aren't really balanced. The chopping game is very difficult and with the fine chop it takes ages to complete compared to everything else. It is also annoyingly accurate. It can somehow get stuck so that you can't pick any games anymore. The numbers do nothing and hitting space just nudges the background around. Don't quite understand how the scoring and game over happens. Is this bar trying to indicate something? Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 11.01.47.png Oh never mind. Now actually went for some more runs (full screen) and realized that your UI doesn't scale properly. Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 11.06.05.png Managed to tie that 40 again and now I understand the scoring even less. I seem to get arbitrary number of points every mini game completed. Quite often even nothing at all for "perfect". Does it actually need to be perfectly completed to get any point. Now that I'm trying to pay attention, the chopping game never gives my points. It's pretty much impossible to get it perfect. Makes that game even less worth your time. The fine chop is easiest to time down but obviously it has the most chances of getting even single non perfect and wasting your time. The big chop is completely impossible to judge. And I still don't quite understand the stir game circles either. Not quite sure if I need to do a rotation some specific way and end on the given direction or what. I do get perfects no matter what I do but rarely hear the ding for a score. So basically the only good scoring mini games are the time based pot one and the nacho one. Both quick and easy points. But yeah, good job! 👍 Would be really fun to score chase if it was more balanced (with more interesting scoring) and had a bit more variety. |
| May 6 12:55:20 | 4h 11m | Postal Jump | ♥ 1 | Not fun getting stuck on walls all the time and having to fully restart the game to try again. Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.18.04.png You had a R to restart but it only works when you've died. Pointless really. You should allow restarting at any time really and in the death case, any key really should do it or it could be completely automatic too. Having to keep a hand on keyboard just for retries (especially in a rapid fail game like this) on otherwise mouse based game just isn't great user experience. Of course it's an issue in the other direction too which is maybe even more common in jam games where the game itself is played with keyboard but the menus are mouse based. The controls feel awkward. The double jump feels weird as the controls are different than the normal jump. The jumping angle doesn't look to be absolutely correct. The angle doesn't just seem quite right. And the spot where it starts drawing the launch line keeps starting at arbitrary positions too. Here are just a few *fun* scenarios of being stuck in a wall... Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.20.05.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.18.04.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.33.44.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.24.42.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.30.09.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.41.45.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.53.02.png And this is a first, you can even get stuck on the ground too... postaljumpground.gif The throw feel very limp. Of course it needs to be kinda nerfed to keep the main point on jumping. Just makes the whole throwing part almost unnecessary as you need to be almost touching the mailbox to deliver anyway. I think the route to true fun and distinguishing itself from Jump King would be to hone in more on the double jump and the throw as a pseudo third jump. Of course the level design would need to compensate for proper throw not being too good. I also would make the normal jump and double one be more consistent in controls. Double jump one could be the same sling shot manoeuvre and it could maybe slow down time while charging. And same for the throw too. Now it's awkward that the initial jump is a sling shot nudge (from behind the character), second jump is also from behind but a nudge and then the (limpy almost useless) throw itself is inverse so that you need to move the mouse to the other side of the character. These really should be unified. Really irrirated to have to give up but really can't be bothered to keep replaying these same levels again and again only to be constantly getting stuck in random spots and having to do a hard reset. Good job though. 👍 |
| May 6 13:32:34 | 37m 14s | Here's ur Package | ♥ 2 | Could be fun with some more polish. Mainly in the controls/playability department. Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 16.13.21.png I feel like I cheesed like pretty much the whole game though. Mainly with this awkward wall cling which allowed you to climb pretty much anywhere and pretty much ignore all the need for different packages. wall-hug.gif Guess it was intentional but it felt weird. And the physics overall felt kinda glitchy all over the place. And placing the packages down seemed very accurate about the placement. I usually had to wiggle the mouse around the spot mashing the button to finally find a spot for em. Otherwise they just barely blinked green and then went back to red. A bit too late to explain that you need to place a package by the house when the player has already just done it. Was really pondering before figuring out that why enter/return does nothing. Went back to see if I was supposed to bring a package there and then kinda accidentally placed one right by it and found out that's what is supposed to happen. The pixel art looked good and actually pretty consistent considering that I guess you used some ready made assets and some were made by yourselves? The house looked weirdly blurry though and made it stand out from the rest. Almost took your "deliver all" challenge but it got too tedious on the third level with the back and forth running. Also found out that it doesn't even accept the slime block. Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 16.22.22.png Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 16.24.05.png Anyways, good job! 👍 |
| May 7 07:31:48 | 17h 59m | Void Scion | ♥ 1 | Wow, big team. The game seems kinda incomplete. The world is very empty. I kept wandering around for ages and only managed to find I think three enemies and the boss. Which weirdly enough was the easiest of them all to defeat. 🤷♀️ Went for another run and found the start knight enemy, two shield ones, bow man and the cavalry. Then it seems to just be a whole lot of empty space to wander around in. That isn't even enough enemies to warrant an upgrade system. The enemies were also a complete joke difficulty wise. Your on attacks did more damage to your health than they did. Few of them also had completely unavoidable attacks so not a great design in that manner also. The three different attacks weren't distinguished enough to have them all. Should have focused more on making one of them at least feel good and then maybe have other upgrades be for movement speed and health and so on. And of course would need a whole lot more enemies to make those upgrades matter too. My favourite from the attacks was the spear as it was the most polished one and had some interesting potential mechanic on the snake-like cursor following. The character sprites looked pretty good. And the health bar especially was top notch. The tile set itself could have used some more love. They didn't really fit together and even in the only part that was tried to smooth out the "tiledness" on the road corners, it then was bleeding to the grass and looked even more awkward. Having just few minor variations for each tile would go a long way to break up the repetitiveness and make it look more natural. And then of course have a more nice blends for going from tile to another which those road corners started to resemble already. And then of course just adding some decorative sprites of stones, tree stumps, flowers and so on every here and there would help tons to make it feel more alive. It was also sometimes hard to distinguish mountains and the cobble road from each other when coming from a grass or dirt patch and only seeing one of them. Screenshot 2023-05-07 at 9.53.41.png Music was nice and chill, fit the vibe of just wandering around aimlessly perfectly. Even though it was a rather short and repetitive loop, it didn't get boring. It's still playing on the background for me while I'm writing this. The sound effects were good also. Having a small bit of variety in repeated ones like the walking one is so important (and often over looked). Kudos on that. 👌 Would have been nice to have some restart or any option really to get unstuck from the game over screen. Went for another stroll through the game. Managed to kill the final boss with a single spear swipe by wiggling the mouse over him. And then the whole game crashed. 🤷♀️ And I also had some very weird frame rate stutters at random spots where nothing was even happening. Anyways, good job! 👍 |
| May 7 08:13:32 | 41m 44s | Storks Delivery Service | ♥ 1 | Like your logging 😅 ``` we are ready to go to the title screen!! trying to create all the things! doing the level doing the Player x: 800y: 450 doing the Kittens Kittens added (at least one!) doing the evilDogs evilDogs added (at least one!) now everything is done ``` Always nice to see this mspaint aesthetic and and with a bunch of cooky animations and effects like here it really delivers. Some colors were quite rough to look at. Like the dirty puke green background on one of the level transitions. Sadly it was very incomplete. I guess you had planned for more with all those actions that had no use at all in the game. Nothing besides move really did. Well the block did something at least and sprint also had it's use but neither was really needed. And having a sprint with no downside whatsoever isn't great. It needs maybe stamina system (which maybe you were planning too based on the bars above the character) or some downside to warrant a key press and not just be always on. I'm pretty sure the kick also was absolutely pointless. And it was actually left click, not right. Was it supposed to be an attack against the dogs or to kick the kittens around to keep them safe? Anyways, good job! 👍 Too bad this wasn't fleshed out more. With all the crazy stuff going on, it could have been amazing experience. **edit:** Went for few more runs and I guess it was an attack after all. The hit box is just very strict and you risk more trying to do it than it's worth if you succeed. Once a dog spawned on me right at the start of a level making me fail instantly without any chance to do anything. And alternating between needing to press space and enter was annoying. |
