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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Honey Pony's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 14 03:05:52 | Claw Express DS | ♥ 1 | Cool little game. One thing I personally appreciate is just how finicky it is to grab things with the claw -- it's just like using a real claw machine, where it really seems like it should be possible to grab something and then it just doesn't work. Although, I do think it's probably a good thing that it is still much easier to grab things in this game than in a real claw machine... I think it strikes a nice balance between being finicky just like a real claw machine, while being easy enough to use to keep the game moving. There are two mechanics I do find unclear in the game. One is, I can't tell whether anything I does influences the score, or if it's all based on what items happen to generate. The other is, I can't tell if there's much reason to use the claw lower/raise buttons. With the claw fully lowered, it seems as though it can reach every item available. I think it could be fun to play with the third dimension in this game. Maybe force the player to lower the claw for every item and then raise it up? I personally sometimes enjoy executing sequences of inputs like that. But, it's possible it wouldn't be very fun. Just an idea. 😄 Overall though, it's always cool to see a DS game, and I enjoy the claw-machine vibes. | |
| May 14 03:22:37 | 16m 45s | Please Mr. Postman | ♥ 1 | I thought this was a fun exercise in spatial reasoning. Once I figured out what angle counted as 0 degrees, it was nice to see if I could throw things in generally the correct direction. I personally would not add any kind of indicator for what your current direction is, I think that judging the angle mentally is a lot of fun. I think it is much harder to judge the power correctly than the angle. I was usually off by quite a large factor. This is perhaps partially because I was playing with a touchscreen most of the time (I also tried using the mouse). Nonetheless, I eventually managed to deliver a package 482 distance units away, which was satisfying to do. I think that learning the power/distance relationship is really the core gameplay loop here, which is interesting. I personally am a big fan of games that use controls in a tactile way, and I think this game accomplishes that. It feels like moving the mouse, or moving my finger on the touchscreen, is a very direct interaction with this game. So, overall, I think this game does a great job of taking a solid control scheme and turning it into an interesting challenge. It's fun to play through and strive towards delivering at least one 400-500 distance package. |
| May 14 06:02:16 | 2h 39m | Honey BZZZness | ♥ 6 | I played this game for quite a while, both on my phone and later on my computer. I have some thoughts about the game progression. So I was very excited to see that this is primarily a phone game. I don't often play phone games due to the number of games with ads, etc, so whenever somebody makes a phone game for Ludum Dare it seems like a great opportunity to try a phone game. So the first time I played this game was on my phone. However, I feel like progress in this game just plateaus pretty quickly once all the upgrades are unlocked. In particular, it seems like I can just barely earn enough honey to fend off all the enemies and maybe buy some bees. But it is very very difficult to actually grow the hive any bigger, because by the time I've earned any amount of honey and built some new bees, a new threat shows up and I have to spend forever dealing with that. I think this is partially because I misunderstood the mechanics. I thought that the "threat" was responsible for basically killing all my bees, but now I am under the impression that the bees just naturally leave at some point. Either way, the mechanic I wish to complain about is the bees leaving at a regular interval. This is because, at least on mobile, it is actually extremely physically strenuous to earn enough honey to spawn a meaningful population of bees in the hive. The fact that all the bees have to be bought over and over just to have a hive at all makes this game really really hard to play on phone, as you just have to keep tapping over and over, and this becomes physically very difficult. I think a traditional clicker game would have some way to earn resources over time, namely, honey. But I couldn't figure out any strategy that earns significant amounts of honey over time. It seems like there are strategies that will earn honey somewhat slowly, but I can't imagine that the total honey earned over the lifetime of the bees will be enough to re-spawn all of them once they all leave. So, I think my suggestion would be to make some permanent upgrades that help you earn honey/sec or similar. Because although it is physically strenuous to tap the screen so much, I actually had a lot of fun tapping the screen right at the beginning of the game, when it helped me build up some initial skills in the skill tree. I think that having a clicker component to the game is perfectly fine, because it is fun to do clicking, as long as you can take breaks -- there just needs to be a way to make progress in the game without that mandated constant clicking. One point of confusion for me is I can't tell if there is a way to actually win. After deciding that the game was simply too hard on my fingers, I decided to try the Windows version with an autoclicker. This went much better, overall, as I didn't have to strain my fingers tapping. But, I still was not able to win, even with some bee setups that produced some honey over time. As a final resort, I tried hacking the honey value in my save file to 100,000, as well as searching through the source code for instances of "jelly" and "royal" and "win." I can't figure out if there is an actual win condition. I think it might be good to clarify this just on the Ludum Dare page, as it definitely sounds like it's possible to win based on the current description. (As a side note, the fact that you have save files here is really cool! That's one of those features that's difficult to implement but can make a huge quality-of-life difference sometimes, especially in the Ludum Dare setting). So, now that I've talked about the gameplay, some other notes: I think the graphics in this game are great, everything worked well on mobile and computer (although some things are a little tiny on my phone). The music is great, Flight of the Bumblebee is a fun choice for the threat music. And of course bee puns are always greatly appreciated. Overall, lots of great polish here in terms of sounds, graphics, save files, and e.g. the skill system. It's just difficult to play this game for a long run, due to the amount of tapping required. |
| May 14 06:29:16 | 27m 00s | Delivery: New Hope | ♥ 2 | Really cool game. I played through a couple times... the first time, I failed, but then the second time I was able to win (and then I was able to win with the teddy bear after that). I think the way that choices affect the story was pretty cool here. My first game I lost because I took the ride with my friend, which resulted in the police hunting me down. And then in the second game, I saw that some choices were grayed out because this time I rode the bus. I personally like the graying out effect here; it makes the weight of my choices feel more real, I would say. That is -- as a player, I am aware that the game is not really open-ended, that the choices I have will always be finite. So the only way to communicate that something I did earlier is affecting me in some way is by literally showing it -- and I think it adds to the game. One extremely minor nitpick: I think it would be worth considering having a reset button in the game, rather than having to refresh the page. I mean, on the one hand, forcing the player to literally re-open the book so to speak is kind of appropriate, as when you get to the end of the story that is literally the end. It's over. If the player wants to start over they'll have to manually retcon it. But, on the other hand, I feel like this game encourages exploring the branches to at least some degree, and having a reset button in the game could be an opportunity to have some custom animations or music or something that maybe made the reset feel right. I don't know. Something to consider. It's difficult for me to write much about such a branching story, but there is one moment that I really want to write about. The very first choice, with the four items, and which one to leave behind -- it hits hard. The 'obvious' choice, and I would argue perhaps the canonical choice, is to leave behind the stuffed bear. There's just no way to know what resources you might need in the future, and when escaping a situation like this it feels deeply like you have to give yourself the best chance you can, even at the cost of everything else. At that sucks! And it feels bad in the game too. And overall it's a really impactful moment. Overall, great game. Just that one moment I talked about sold it for me, and the rest was good too. |
| May 14 06:45:01 | 15m 45s | Space Soba Delivery | ♥ 2 | Short game, but fantastic. Navigating around the obstacles with little taps of the various keys is super satisfying. I think it is great that moving around with the arrow keys impacts the rotation of the soba boxes, it means that you can't just set your rotation independently of your movement, but rather you have to continuously course-correct with taps of the A and D keys. This is just really fun to me, and navigating the soba boxes around a tight turn is even more satisfying. (I won with 12 soba). One other thing is the sounds here are fantastic in a way that I don't even know how to describe. The music itself has this wonderful space vibe, and the onion-collect sound is just really really good. It fits with the music perfectly but it's also just such a great sound on its own. Like, I feel incentivized to collect the onions just so that I can hear that sound. Overall, just a great short game. |
| May 14 07:08:31 | 23m 30s | Swallow Express | ♥ 2 | I think that this game is a really good use of Flappy Bird-style mechanics. In particular, I really like that the primary punishment for failure is loss of time rather than, e.g., dying. This makes the game much less frustrating than Flappy Bird as a whole, while it still feels better to do better at playing. More specifically, I love the feeling of speed in this game, when I really get a good flight going. It just feels good to do well at flying, and so there really doesn't need to be any sort of death mechanic. It is fun to fly fast, I want to fly fast, and I do like to try to score reasonably high on the leaderboards that you all always have in your games, although I'm not sure I did too well this time. 😄 And, the glide mechanic is a great addition to the traditional Flappy Bird mechanics. It's actually a little difficult to pull off, because whenever I want to glide I usually have already released space, so hitting space again sends me too high. Learning to use the glide effectively therefore actually takes some practice. I did find the eagle chase a bit frustrating but ultimately it was not too bad. I think it took me around 3-4 tries. If I had lost really late in the chase sequence I might have disliked it more, however. One thing I did find somewhat frustrating is it is actually kind of tricky to visually distinguish the obstacles from the background, especially the hanging vines. I think this isn't too bad during the normal gameplay, because again, there's no real penalty -- and so it's kind of fun that there's an intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing the obstacles from the background. Like, I actually have to learn to really watch carefully -- and I did get better at this! I think that's kind of cool and kind of fun. But, it is definitely more frustrating during the eagle chase, where you can't make very many mistakes, you have to keep going as fast as possible, and the map is completely distinct from the rest of the game, from what I can tell. It did seem like there was relatively low obstacle density in later parts of the chase map, which I think was a good decision for this reason of visibility. Going into this game I was thinking there might be some darker or macabre elements, given the twist in your last game. And I was absolutely right. It started with the grilled chicken and just got worse with the bear. It definitely takes this fun flying game and makes it quite a bit more sinister. I think this is interesting, as it really defines the game's tone / emotional state. That is, had there not been these darker elements, I think I would describe this game as lighthearted, cute, maybe sweet, due to the ending with the pigeon. But... instead I think I would describe the tone as maybe ungrounded or dreamlike (or maybe even nightmarish). These darker elements just create this clash with the other elements where everything begins to feel irreconcilable (so, dreamlike). And to be clear--this is meant to be a description, not a criticism--I just want to describe the feeling I get from the game, as I think it's a good thing to describe (and it is a very unique atmosphere! I haven't played a lot of games like this). Whatever the general atmosphere of the game is, I do appreciate a lot of the art in the game. A lot of the animal portraits are pretty nice, and the ending scene looks great and is, as I said, sweet. Overall -- this was a really fun game in terms of raw gameplay, and there's definitely a solid narrative backing as well. Great job! |
| May 15 05:31:33 | 22h 23m | Courier Crusaders | ♥ 3 | Really nice graphics and overall layout here. In particular, I love the randomly generated character names, as well as simply the variety of character portraits available, and same for the equippable items--they just have a fun variety of item graphics. The delivery descriptions are fun as well. I found that the debt was very quickly outpacing the amount of money I could possibly earn, once I got around day 20-30. In particular, the debt is -71 right now on day 34, and it seems like it just linearly increases by 2 every day? This does seem to be fixed in the post jam version, from what I can tell in the above screenshots, but in the jam version it definitely seems like the debt outgrows the amount of money you can possibly earn per day (which is something like 50-60 at best). But if it is fixed already, well, then I guess you already knew that was a problem. 😄 Having to map out where deliveries go is a fun mechanic. I did find that the character stats themselves were not super meaningful to me, especially with so many. I think it might be worth cutting down the stats to a small number, and then making them have super-clear gameplay implications, and then at that point maybe reintroducing more stats. That way, the stats can mean more than just "I think the bigger number is *probably* better," which is all I can intuit about them in the current game. One way to do that would be to just have, say, some obstacles on the map that can only be cleared with X stat or higher (or you can take a chance and try to clear it with a lower stat). That would create some obvious risk/reward situations for the player, where they have a couple couriers available but have to plan carefully for which one to send in case they need a different one for tomorrow's delivery. Either way, I think the overall DND sort of vibes in this game are great, with the map and all the portraits and text descriptions. Good job! |
| May 15 05:42:17 | 10m 44s | Bad News Inc. | ♥ 1 | Always fun to see a game with voice acting. Lots of interesting variety in the characters as well. 😄 One thing I really appreciate here is that each character gets to be the solution for one of the puzzles. This means that we at least get to see a pretty reasonable range of gameplay, despite the limited scope of the game. Another thing I liked is that, I'm pretty sure I was able to solve all of the puzzles in no more than two guesses. So I think they are well designed in terms of giving enough information for the player to logically figure out the solution rather than just trying all the combinations. I think the worst puzzle in terms of raw guessability is, however, puzzle 3. I did actually get it on the first try, mainly because I figured that the solution was going to be distinct from the last two. In terms of the actual descriptions given, however, I find that it is a little unintuitive that Finn, who's description says "do NOT mock him," has a correct solution of Flake, who "has zero tact." Moreover, before sending the letter, there's no real way to guess that his voice will be similar to Luke, and that Luke will therefore be perceived as mocking. Of course, this is a bit of a silly complaint. For one, puzzle 3 is still the easiest simply due to the obvious idea of trying the character who hasn't been the correct answer yet. And for two... the game is not really meant to be purely about logical deduction. The whole idea is that it's actually pretty hard to guess which messenger won't be shot, and so it's actually pretty appropriate that puzzle 3, which is difficult to guess from pure logical deduction, comes right before your ultimate resignation. So overall, I would say everything works pretty well. The puzzles work as logical puzzles, but they also work as illogical traps that are the worst job in the world. This is a nice combination of contradictory things. And, I would say that the music and graphics work pretty well to tie everything together. Also, the characters are pretty great. I would say my favorite character is Palla. The voice acting really sells her well, in my opinion. 😄 |
| May 15 06:10:03 | 27m 46s | Fetch Quest. A small text adventure | ♥ 2 | This was a fun game to play through but I have to say I was stuck for an extremely long time on the beginning section. This is probably because I do not really know anything about text based games, but, here is a short list of things I was frustrated did not work: - examine locked door - examine door - examine bread - eat bread - examine waterfall - examine window In particular, the fact that so many things were impossible to examine made me think that I probably couldn't interact with them at all. I don't think I ever would have thought to simply try writing "north" had I not seen a comment suggesting it on this page. Once I finally got over that hurdle I had fun completing the fetch quest. There was enough variety in the remaining story to keep me engaged, and I have finished three endings so far. The fourth ending seems trickier to get, however, I haven't managed to find it yet. That's a cool thing to have, I think... a variety of endings, with varying difficulties. Good job! |
| May 15 06:24:40 | 14m 37s | Crop Delivery | ♥ 0 | It took me reading some of the other comments to figure out how to properly harvest crops, but with that sorted out, this is a fun little gameplay loop. I think that fast-paced farming is kind of cool--this game feels kind of like a cross between a cooking game, where you take in orders and have to fulfill them, and a traditional farming game, where there's questions of where to plant plants, etc. I think that adding more farming features could be an interesting direction to push this in, for example, requiring water to grow plants--and of course it could also be interesting to make some customer demands more complicated, such as requiring three seeds. One small detail--I'm a bit confused why clicking on a square sometimes opens the inventory menu. I find this kind of distracting, I think I would rather the inventory only opened when I explicitly asked it to. Overall though, it was fun to sort of figure out the gameplay loop and start pumping out deliveries with some efficiency. |
| May 15 06:32:04 | 7m 24s | Hade's Delivery | ♥ 1 | Wow this was short but fun! The health system is cool, I very often lost all my health to the spike traps but was able to carefully recoup some and keep moving. One thing I particularly like is the way the shotgun works. It is a little tricky to use at first, as it has very short range, but the way that the damage stacks up when you get really really close to enemies has this great risk/reward tradeoff. In particular, it took me a while to kill the first rat nest I saw, but the later ones I tried to move in closer and I was able to kill them much faster. This gives the game a surprising amount of depth, it really requires careful movement and timing to perform combat effectively. Good job! |
| May 15 06:43:44 | 11m 40s | Deerlivery | ♥ 1 | Nice game! The graphics are pretty fantastic as others have said, especially the environmental graphics. It took me a while to figure out what exactly I needed to do to win. At first it seemed like the main goal was to simply avoid the ninjas as much as possible, which seemed difficult to do and made the attack and dash feel pointless. In particular, at one point I lost because I had left the dumplings on the ground to try to fight the ninjas, and so I thought that leaving them on the ground was just generally a bad strategy. Later I managed to figure out that the ninjas were actually stealing the dumplings directly from the package, whether it was on the ground or I was carrying it. This made the game make a lot more sense, as now I knew I had to either avoid the ninjas entirely or fight them off before they got to me or shortly after they stole a dumpling. This made the game a lot more fun, as now I actually understood what was going on, and it meant I could actually productively use the dash mechanic, which is a fun mechanic to use. Overall, fun game! |
| May 15 06:59:14 | 15m 30s | Pinball Delivery | ♥ 2 | Wow, I love this. The overall graphical style combined with this music is fantastic. The music is in fact probably some of my favorite music I've ever heard in a Ludum Dare game, it is just such a jam and the rest of the game has perfect aesthetics to fit it. The combination of action puzzle gameplay with, say, non-action puzzle gameplay here is a fun combination as well. For example, level 3 I am able to mostly just decide when I want the different balls to roll, but then level 4 ups the ante by forcing me to deal with the situation more actively. And a lot of the levels have active components that have to be dealt with even if it's not for the whole level. I think level 4 was my favorite, in any case, as it was just fun to have the difficult directly ramp up from the previous level like that and come up with a strategy to win. The variety of gameplay in the first 5 levels is great, and the bonus levels are all super fun too, although I admit I find them pretty difficult to actually win. But it is just cool to see these level concepts, like breakout, built all from the same stuff as the first 5 levels. Overall, this is one of the best games I've seen this jam, I think. Neat gameplay concepts, and the music just sells the game so hard. Great job! |
| May 15 07:42:37 | 43m 23s | Deliver letters... IN SPACE | ♥ 1 | Cool game! Pretty difficult in my opinion, although I apparently did make it onto the scoreboard. 😄 One thing I found difficult is it seems like there are some words I would expect to be in the dictionary that just aren't there. Two examples I can recall: 'lop' and 'cay.' Also I feel like 'ax' seems like a real word, but maybe I'm wrong there. (Is it written somewhere that two letter words are excluded? I feel like that would be a reasonable rule, but as far as I can tell it isn't mentioned anywhere). I think that my "high score" run was largely luck. Sometimes I had no idea of any words that could possibly work, and I was just spamming the shoot button, and happened to get a word that worked. Once I completely by accident formed a 5 letter word right on the brink of death. This is interesting, because I'm not actually sure what kind of strategy will beat random spam. Sure, I do think that some well-chosen right clicks did bring my score higher, but at the end of the day I would not have nearly as high a score had I actually tried to rationally build every single word. I think this is to some degree a good thing. It's interesting that the game has more strategic depth than just being really good at coming up with words quickly. Moreover, random spam is sometimes a strategy that requires some thinking -- in particular, I would often have a specific word in mind, like "cup" or "pat" or whatever, and just be shooting between those two consonants as fast as possible because I know it will eventually work. Interestingly, I think the missing dictionary words were much more punishing when I actually had a specific letter and came up with a rational placement for it by looking for one in the words. That is, both the examples I gave, "lop" and "cay," have similar words with a different vowel in the middle, so the random letter spam strategy will work for them even though it won't work due to that particular word. But when I just have the single letter "o" or "a" and I am trying to come up with a quick way to form a 3 letter word, and forming "lop" simply doesn't work, unexpectedly, it's actually pretty punishing for that strategy. So I think that expanding the dictionary a bit could be a good idea. It is definitely hard to find a good balance between including the words that people will happen to expect to be in there, and including words that are so rarely used that they don't really seem like fair words to include. The problem is the dividing line is different for everyone. In particular, I personally am extremely surprised that "lop" is not in the dictionary. It seems like a pretty normal word in my mind. Anyways, I did have a good time with the game. The game design is pretty good, I think, very engaging, and there are a few different strategies that work at least reasonably well. I also found the difficulty to be a nice change of pace. It was difficult but it wasn't annoying or really very frustrating. I think the graphic design is pretty clean, and the music is great as well. Great job! |
| May 17 20:53:21 | 61h 10m | Generated Adventure | ♥ 2 | AI generated media is interesting to me. I think you succeeded in building what is, by and large, an AI generated game--it maintains a lot of the qualities I've come to expect of AI output, but in the form of a game. In particular, although the AI is able to make surprisingly consistent choices in a lot of places (such as the stylistic consistency in the art), there are also extremely glaring inconsistencies that a human would never make. In particular, the layout of the different locations is completely inconsistent, with entrances and exits essentially never matching up, and with some locations like the "cave" having an entrance that looks nothing like a cave at all. Another major inconsistency is in the writing. For example, the beginning, the player is told that each person will tell them the location of the next person. I don't believe this ever actually happened in the game, however. Or, the situation with the librarian that pkenney pointed out. This is extremely interesting, especially when I try to think of what you would need to communicate to the AI for it to make better choices. For example, you could tell it to "write <this>, not that" -- but at that point it's probably faster to just rewrite the dialog yourself. I think it was definitely a more interesting choice to try to hand the AI the reins and just see what it makes. I did end up softlocked in the castle, like some other commenters. Overall, I would call this a fascinating experiment in trying to get AIs to generate a game largely by themselves (at least, that's my impression of the goal of this project). I am glad to see the bizarre novelty that AIs provide in other fields (art, writing) also exists in this project, as I think that novelty is one of the most valuable aspects of AI as it stands today. |
| May 17 21:14:19 | 20m 58s | Not Fit For Human Consumption | ♥ 0 | One boring but important point: the items in the first level take way too long to start appearing, in my opinion. It takes ~33 seconds for the first item to show up, at which point the music sounds as though it's built up quite a bit and the game feels as though it must just be broken. Now, this is an interesting mechanic insofar as it really makes the game drag on. If it's supposed to feel like waiting around for half an hour before your job starts, with nothing to do--it captures that feeling quite well, I think. The only flaw it it's liable to make people think your game doesn't work and click away 20 seconds in. 😄 (If you wanted to keep the waiting, because you like that feeling, I think it would help to have more animations or even a timer counting down for when the shift starts... just to make sure that everyone knows the game is still functioning correctly). I found the click-and-drag controls gave a nice sense of slipperiness to packing the boxes. Like, it feels like you can easily mess up and have to try again; you have to be precise with your movements. This seems like a reasonable feeling for a packing game. I also liked the strategy possible in packing the boxes into the delivery bin: in particular, if you just drag and let go, it's possible that you miss and have to try again. But if you drag right until you see the number change in the upper left hand corner, then you're guaranteed that you got it in. So with the right strategy--not letting go until you see the number change--you can avoid messing up, but it does take some practice. One thing I like a lot is the music. I did find that, when it got to the end and didn't repeat, I was sort of feeling like it didn't build up as much as I was hoping. But, besides that, the music was really my kind of music--it just goes hard, as they say. |
| May 18 15:59:29 | 18h 45m | Stork Run | ♥ 1 | Having to aim to drop something very far below is a fun mechanic that I don't think I've seen very much before. It is surprisingly difficult to aim well, which is I think because of the intrinsic fact that the targets are very far away -- so there's only a small range of locations that result in a correct hit. Interestingly, one mechanic making aiming more difficult was the spawn location of the package. I kept expecting it to spawn in the player center, and I had a hard time really learning how to position correctly. I think this is interesting, because it seems like the kind of thing that would be straightforward to adapt to as a player. I do think that the game probably should not have restarted all the way when you lose. This is for the following two reasons: 1, it takes a long time to play through all the levels, and 2, there are some mechanics that are difficult to learn about quickly. In particular, the anti-air system does not have a clear functionality when it first appears. In fact, I still don't understand it entirely... one of my runs, the red targeting dots appeared, and I figured I had a few seconds before I had to evade... but then I died almost instantly, which was very confusing. So, because there's these mechanics that take a couple attempts to learn about, and because it takes a long grind to get back to where they show up, I think it would be best to restart at the level you died at (or maybe have a lives system that resets your progress entirely after losing a couple lives, for a compromise). After losing too many times, I ended up simply cheating by deleting the checkPlayerHealth() function. 😅 I actually love it when Ludum Dare games are written in plain JavaScript -- it can be a lot of fun to mess around with a game's internals like that. I do think that the combat mechanics were otherwise quite fun. I think that there's a nice mix of things... avoiding the guys on the ground, as well as being able to fight back directly against the helicopters if necessary. Then, the anti-air systems are actually kind of scary with how fast they can kill you, adding another layer. Overall -- a fun concept in terms of story and I liked the gameplay, both the package delivery and the general combat. Just a little too hard for me to beat legit. 😄 |
| May 18 16:09:31 | 10m 02s | West Delivery | ♥ 0 | This was fun! It is short, sure, and seemingly unfinished, but I like a lot of the playfulness of this game. It's pretty funny, and I especially like how the player character turns from a relatively normal platformer character into a gigantic horse drawn carriage. This is a sort of subversion of normal platformer gameplay, and it's fun. I did find that sometimes my jump inputs seemed to get eaten. But I do think I eventually managed to get to the end. The dialog was fun as well. Good job! |
| May 18 16:29:30 | 19m 59s | Unwanted Delivery | ♥ 1 | This was cool! I liked the idea of a scroll that was dangerous to read, even if it ended up not being real. 😄 I actually think that idea could potentially be used in some fun ways as some sort of combat mechanic, as well. Still, I liked what was there. I think this game actually felt a lot deeper to me than it ended up being -- the existence of the inventory system, plus the combat mechanics, plus everything else -- it gives the feeling of a complete game, where the reason I don't end up with stuff in my inventory is not because it wasn't implemented, but rather because I ended up winning so fast. Moving around the map with the text-based descriptions was pretty fun, I think. The map gives a feeling of playing a board game, or something, while the text of course feels like a traditional text based game. The combat is not too deep but it has some interesting strategy. In my first playthrough I had no need for the cheat button -- it seems like with careful rerolling it's not too hard to escape unscathed (my strategy was generally that I would immediately accept any green number, even if it is 0, because there's no penalty to taking a 0 -- e.g. it doesn't grant the enemy an extra turn or anything). I did play through a second time to look in the rooms I had skipped by accident in my first playthrough (the treasury, plus the combat room next to the king). In this playthrough I did end up needing the cheat button, although I can't recall if this was due to bad strategy on my part. For 15 hours work I think this is pretty incredible, honestly. It gives the feeling of a reasonably complete game just by having various menus that work, and there's quite a few different mechanics and systems to play with. Good job! |
| May 18 16:47:31 | 18m 01s | You Got Served | ♥ 1 | Fun game! I really felt the time pressure here, although I didn't end up losing. As such, I guess the difficulty level was tuned pretty well. I thought the audio cues were a great addition, even if the game can't be played completely on audio clues. As a nitpick, it seemed like the dark blue shirts looked slightly different on the actual characters as compared to the clue of who to look for... in particular, on the actual characters I think the shirts almost looked black? This was a little confusing in the city level, where it seemed like there could well be too people with subtly different shirts. Overall, though, this was funny, very well-polished, and with extremely solid gameplay. Great job! |
| May 18 17:19:47 | 32m 16s | Deliver Us From Evil | ♥ 1 | Extremely spooky and tense. I got to 92% in my first run, then failed spectacularly in my next two. After starting to write this, I went back and managed to win. I think that there is a nice balance in the kinds of tradeoffs the player has to make... do I reload now, or wait in case a zombie shows up very soon; do I try to pick off some of the far away zombies; where should I shoot the flares. This creates that feeling of tension... this game really has me on the edge of my seat. It does feel like there is an element of luck to the game. My last run, it seemed like I wasn't getting crowded nearly as much as my two spectacularly losing runs. Also, the placement of the holy sites seems to be randomized? Which I think will also contribute significantly to the winnability of the game. Still, there is nothing wrong with the game being partially about luck... after all, we are literally surrounded by evil here. Overall, very atmospheric game, lots of interesting gameplay choices. Good job! |
| May 18 19:56:34 | 2h 36m | News @ Doorstep | ♥ 1 | It took some reconfiguring of my monitor resolution to make this game playable. But, once that was fixed, it was a fun little game. As I started playing the game, I thought I would probably prefer the player character to be centered on the screen, or at least somewhat farther up. It's surprisingly awkward to perform the throwing mechanics with the player right on the bottom. One reason for this is that I don't feel comfortable using my mouse at the bottom of the screen. This is because I am liable to accidentally click outside the window, which is never fun. I think a fullscreen mode could be worth considering, so that the player doesn't have to worry about clicking outside the window. Instead I opted to generally click in the middle of the screen. Now this is actually kind of an interesting twist on usual throwing games. Usually you would see your aiming indicator anchored from where you are actually going to throw... but in this case, the anchor can be wherever I want. And it is actually kind of fun to try to figure out how to throw even with the player character disconnected from the throwing. I think it does work, and it is kind of novel. So I am somewhat conflicted on what the best choice would be here -- as I said, my immediate preference is that the player is centered, but there is some interesting challenge created by the current player placement. Besides that, I think this game is at its best when the houses start to move by faster. At the beginning of the game, I sit there aiming at each individual house for seconds, which feels slow. But later, when the houses are moving by quickly, I end up moving my mouse much more fluidly, flinging papers at each house as quickly as I can, and it's a lot of fun. One interesting thing I realized is that spamming the throw command is much better for getting a high score -- because apparently you get points for every newspaper that lands on a door, not just the first one. I find the sound in this game is quite fun. The music has that upbeat fun quality to it, while the character sound effects are fun as well. It is always cool to see an SFML game. I think that games built from the ground up always have this certain charm to them, and this one is no exception. Good job! |
| May 18 20:39:49 | 43m 15s | SNE | ♥ 1 | I personally found the graphics here quite nice. The player character does not look out of place to me; the crosshatching effect is visually interesting and it just generally works. The wolf, when encountered, also looks fantastic, in my opinion. I am not entirely sure what, if anything, the player is able to do after encountering the wolf. Most of the time I just lost -- it seems to drain the bar faster once the wolf is encountered..? But one time I did win even after encountering the wolf, just by following the compass instructions. The very first time I played this, and actually a few times after that, I did not encounter the wolf at all -- I mean, I saw some of them on screen, but never touched them, and I actually won quite easily. One thing I really like is the compass directions are given entirely through text. This had me getting out good old Never Eat Soggy Waffles (as I am generally not good with directions without such a mnemonic)... this was quite fun. I like the ways your games often require novel modes of interaction, and I think this method of directional communication accomplishes that here. It really does just require the player to know their directions and translate them directly. And, I mean, I kind of like the way the compass insists on always providing two directions. Going back and forth and back and forth and realizing I'm really just heading in a straight line... it's a fun little limitation for the compass to have. The snow effects and vignette and the music all work together to build a strong atmosphere, as others have said. Unfortunately there does seem to be some sort of strange behavior happening around the dialog boxes -- especially when winning, it *seems* like there is some interactable object there, that is opening a dialog box and then the YOU WIN screen, but I can't tell what the object is or what the dialog is. I tried to look in the source code but I can't seem to get the game to run in my Godot. I did find some text strings in the file player_state.gdc that might include the ending dialog, so I suppose I can consider that the true ending. 😄 |
| May 18 22:22:12 | 1h 42m | Otherworldly Delivery | ♥ 1 | I've tried playing something like 5 times now, and even with the info that rage management is very important I'm having a really hard time winning. The main difficulty is that, it seems like I often do not get any attack cards after playing the cards that combo well with them (e.g. reduce negative damage), and I also will have periods of time where I simply do not get enough of a certain kind of card (e.g. sometimes I simply see no attack cards whatsoever, or no apology cards, etc). I think this is because the cards are simply being chosen randomly every time from an overall pool, rather than chosen one by one from a deck, like a traditional card game. That is: there is no logic in the source code, from what I can tell, that ensures the player gets a balanced set of cards -- so it's all left to getting a lucky hand. My suspicion is that this game would feel more balanced with just a traditional deck-of-cards system, where the player draws cards from their deck, and once the deck is empty, all the previously played cards are shuffled together into a new deck. Of course, there are other approaches that could be tried as well, such as enforcing some minimum rate at which players receive cards that can reduce rage. I am curious how consistent you are at winning. That is -- if you play this game, can you win every time? I find it difficult to believe such a feat is possible, based on my experience playing it so far, but it's possible I am just bad at choosing the right cards. Anyways... there is a lot of good stuff here. I like the double-sided healthbar, it flattens the distinction between attacking and defending in a very natural way. The rage system makes sense as a second variable that the player needs to manage, and I did find that I lasted longer when taking it account, although I still have not won. I also liked a lot of the card effects. The way that the reduce negative damage card paired with different attack cards was cool, similarly the 1.5 damage card had some cool pairings. The compromise card in particular I think is very interesting. One thing I especially love is the way that each card is tied to some action within a debate. This is one of the elements of the compromise card I like so much -- it makes sense that it affects both parties equally, and then that leads to interesting gameplay when combined with the other cards. Overall, lots of fun card mechanics here, even if the game ends up being quite difficult. 😄 And I did find the secret game (I scored 33). Also, I got the QR code to work. I think that QR codes in a game, containing nothing but text, are a very interesting feature... kind of reminds me of the manual from Shenzhen IO that is downloaded as a separate PDF. |
| May 18 23:55:28 | 1h 33m | Love at First Slice | ♥ 0 | This game is super, super sweet -- and I love it for that. The dialogs between the characters just had me smiling wider and wider, until of course the last one I just had the biggest smile on my face. It was just an absolutely joyous thing to play through. The dialog is of course the main driving force of the game in that sense but I enjoyed the pizza delivery gameplay as well. I did not get bored of it at all -- I can see why it could be considered repetitive, but this was not a problem for me. After all, it is made extremely clear that we only have to do exactly 5 days of pizza delivery, and this just isn't enough for me to get bored. There is of course also parallels to other repetitive, working-a-job games like farming games, and I think the art style in particular is reminiscent of Stardew Valley. The art (plus the music) is actually one of the reasons I find the delivery gameplay quite relaxing -- it's kind of like walking through town in Stardew Valley, it's just a nice space to move through. One thing I do think would be cool: having to physically go to the blacksmith shop yourself to get the gift. I was glad that there was a separate dialog for that, but I think it would be even better if the player had to actually go there manually; I think it would make the story more immersive. That's a bit of a nitpick, of course. Overall, this was great. I had a fantastic time playing through this. Great job! |
| May 19 20:57:51 | 21h 02m | Mortality | ♥ 1 | I didn't have any trouble with the puzzles in this game--I thought everything was pretty reasonable. It took me a while to find the star, but this is just because there's a lot of sky to search. I quite like the interaction with Ivanova. When on the ground, the primary concern of the player character seems to be that we can't reach her teeth which is a great reaction to seeing a giant person trapped in a cage. Then, of course, there are the additional interactions once we get the flying powerup, which helps round out the story. I think the flying powerup is a nice twist. First, the way it affects the player character is vaguely dark--like, her normal body is gone, and without much say in that process (as far as I know). But flying is a nice ability to get in return. The flying mechanic itself is a nice extension of the general left/right movement, and as I mentioned it means that the star requires much more exploring (as now we're exploring a 2D space rather than 1D). Overall I think the puzzles were nicely balanced, the key seemed pretty obvious to me and was easy to find but then finding the star took longer and let me interact with caged Ivanova to advance the story and see if I could learn anything, etc. I'm glad to see the music worked this time. 😄 |