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James Laird

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TimestampSince previousGameJames Laird's comment
May 4 00:33:37 DroidDash ♥ 1 What a great game! Solid small-scale point-and-click. Fully voiced, lots of art.
May 4 00:44:36 10m 59s Adam Offline ♥ 2 Solid, slightly bare-bones trader sim. I think there are some interesting market dynamics under the hood (you can glut a market and drive the price up/down).
May 4 01:59:53 1h 15m Isekai Delivery ♥ 3 Delightful concept, great art! Ending screen for the first character made me lol. Not deeply interactive, as others have said. Skip option is my #1 ask. I can imagine a version of this where the player has more possible interventions.
May 4 02:07:50 7m 57s Void Scion ♥ 1 Worked on Windows for me (May 3rd). A complete game with combat, an upgrade system, multiple attacks, multiple enemy types, and an ending, props to the team for shipping. The guide-able spear attack in particular was interesting to play with. I wanted to see more development on this theme! I beat every enemy by simply spearing them to death and ignoring their attacks; didn't seem like I had a way to block or dodge the archer's arrows, for instance. Attacks costing health was an interesting mechanic, but the answer was still just to kill enemies as quickly as possible (so they couldn't deal more damage). Always only one enemy on-screen.
May 4 02:15:56 8m 06s Pushing The Envelope ♥ 1 Upgrade loop is compelling--"just one more flight" syndrome.
May 4 02:20:58 5m 02s Missive Defense ♥ 1 There's a compelling simple game in here; drag-and-flick envelopes to get rid of smiley faces. Clear as many as possible. Use missiles to clear clumps. Don't let the envelopes you need get buried when you need them! I found drag-and-flick to be very finicky with my mouse; maybe this would work better if I were playing it on a mobile touchscreen, and if the envelopes were a little bigger.
May 4 02:31:01 10m 03s Ancient Order of Michaels ♥ 1 Reminds me of other swarm control games, like Pikmin and Overlord. Good mechanics to force me to avoid enemy AoE attacks with my Michael horde.
May 5 00:47:39 22h 16m DO NOT OPEN THE LETTER ♥ 2 Not a ton of gameplay, but a solid small-scale experiment where interactions all branch based on whether you've opened the letter. Delivering letters between players is a nice take on the theme.
May 5 01:38:03 50m 24s Divine Messenger ♥ 1 Controls are deeply frustrating; jump starts only when I release the button, which is not what I expect after years of playing Mario games. Getting over that, this is an interesting game: what if a platformer had a new, difficult control scheme?
May 5 01:44:04 6m 01s Perfect Pizza Pinball L(a)unch ♥ 2 Reminded me of Sonic Spinball and other games where you adjust the course of a bouncing ball. Camera shifts made me feel like I wasn't always in control.
May 5 01:54:29 10m 25s Blind Delivery ♥ 2 Clever! Really innovative design. There's room for a little confusion about how the controls work; do left/right rotate the player? Game breaks if I don't completely understand what the basic rules are. For a game with no graphics, audio needs to be great and it is.
May 5 02:13:55 19m 26s Elite Tactical Postman Simulator ♥ 1 Solid game. Only complaint is that it's too simple; game becomes a race to earn food faster than delivering uses it up.
May 5 15:06:13 12h 52m Waiting for delivery ♥ 1 Guitar music is a big plus! I found the minigames a little frustrating; the card game sometimes doesn't register when the card is in the right position. I still don't know how I got past the delivery location. Truck-driving was fun until I lost and had to restart from the beginning. Thematically, I was a little confused by the minigames. Why do leaves rotate my credit card? Why are there bubbles in the way of my delivery truck? Don't mean to be too negative; props for building and shipping a game, and the "series of minigames" structure is working in a good way.
May 7 00:26:37 33h 20m Parcel Control ♥ 0 Very solid, well-executed spot-the-difference. Hard to criticize, except to ask for more! If I *were* asking for more, I'd ask for more story or mood. Why are there so many dangerous objects in the mail? Hard not to compare to Papers, Please, since PP does story and mood so well. Thanks for sharing!
May 7 00:30:17 3m 40s Dimensional Delivery ♥ 1 Bite-sized but really nice for what it is. Thanks for sharing!
May 7 01:07:39 37m 22s R&D (Research & Delivery) ♥ 2 Graphics are really great pixel art. Gameplay is compelling; reminds me over Overcooked and Among Us. Agree with some other commenters that the tuning seems pretty stiff; it's easy to run out of parts very early on, and hard to get much value out of coffee or other scientists.
May 7 01:11:12 3m 33s West Delivery ♥ 1 Great first entry! Very smart to focus on the animations and humor; gameplay didn't need to be groundbreaking for this to be a fun play.
May 7 01:18:08 6m 56s Night Rider ♥ 1 Soundtrack, and graphics, and gameplay make for a great retro-arcade feel! I'm pretty sure some deliveries take more time to make than you gain seconds for making them, which is not a great feeling as a player. I'd enjoy seeing this game developed more!
May 7 01:28:23 10m 15s Couriers' Route ♥ 1 Agree that the learning curve is pretty rough; my first two games I died pretty badly. I can imagine players bouncing off of this, which is a shame, because I really got into the game. I really like the mechanic of describing a quest but leaving it to the player to remember; I can figure out which town is Twin Pines Town and which is Lake Town or Mining Town just by looking at the map. In its current state, it seems like the best strategy is to replay it a lot, and probably the story suffers when I know what all of the outcomes are. But the mood is great, the pixel graphics do a lot without needing to be high-fidelity.
May 7 01:52:40 24m 17s Daring Delivery ♥ 1 Turning is really loose; I don't know whether that's by design or not. It's certainly easier to crash than playing GTA 2! I wish I got multiple offers at once; it seems like it's usually correct to accept an offer because otherwise I'm burning time. I really liked how the bushes slowed but didn't stop the car. Also liked the arrow that changes color based on how far the target it.
May 7 01:57:37 4m 57s Drive-By Delivery ♥ 1 I was able to start a game and drive a truck; I saw that one of the people on the map was marked but couldn't figure out how to "deliver" to them (shooting them, interacting, ramming with the truck didn't seem to help). I found the truck controls to feel very strange, maybe broken; the brakes were either very weak or didn't always register my inputs. Hard to test multiplayer games, unfortunately. :( Building a working mutiplayer game in a jam is a big deal!
May 7 03:45:18 1h 47m Dragon Express ♥ 1 I got a crash when leaving the all-forest town, which was shame because I was having a good time! Definitely achieved the feel of DQ-style exploration (exploring in progressively more-difficult biomes). I was surprised that the items weren't consumed when used; once I had the right item to defeat a particular enemy, that enemy becomes trivial to defeat. Definitely liked the feel of needing to find the right items to traverse each terrain type, and feeling the map unlock for me. Likewise, the encounter rate felt pretty high; I ended up doing a lot of "grinding" just as I traveled (which feels worse than in DQ because I'm not gaining XP from the fights, so they feel like a waste of time). Would happily play more games like this!
May 8 01:45:08 21h 59m Caravan Express ♥ 1 Was able to play and understand what was going on without trouble. Simple trader game; if you fail an obstacle, you lose some or all of your reward. Short and fun; extending the game would have meant having some kind of permanent upgrades, or some routes that were much more dangerous but more lucrative. I was a little disappointed that there was always exactly one obstacle during each trip; it would have been a good way to differentiate the routes (safe but low-profit routes). Still, a fun, functional, shipped game. Good work!
May 8 01:49:02 3m 54s Astro-Web Deliveries ♥ 1 This is incredibly compelling! Arcade-style game with multiple packages and delivery points. Should I detour to pick up another package? Drop off one of the ones I'm carrying now while I'm in the neighborhood? I wished for a minimap or stronger distance-tracking for the offscreen indicators, so I could plan my routes a little better. I've played a number of similar "pick up a package and drop it off" games on LD; this game convinces me that all of those other games would have been more fun with multiple simultaneous packages and destinations.
May 10 00:35:37 46h 46m Babylon Prime Delivery ♥ 0 Really fantastic mechanic of trying to avoid spending durability on your cards!