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Feedback comments for LD53
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | ZungryWare's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 1 15:48:53 | demaker.s game | ♥ 1 | I like the unique progression system! Though I do wish we eventually got to upgrade to a DS, (Since that was the first handheld I owned), it was time constraints I guess :P. I think it would be fine if you went a bit longer before giving the player the Paladin. I thought we were gearing up for a system where you switch back and forth between the faster-firing system or the vertical aiming system. Like choosing between classic 90's shooters or modern console shooters. Funny, because the Gameboy systems weren't really known for their FPS games. My main problems were: - I didn't really understand the death mechanic. I figured out how you lose certain console features on it and might have to downgrade to a lesser console, but when I died completely, the monsters didn't reset. So I just died to the same spawncamping enemy repeatedly until I was able to escape. - Losing turning and strafing at the same time can get you stuck. Having pgdn is a workable solution, but not a great one. - The bullet collision detection/aiming system was messed up. My shots would only hit like 1 in 3 times. Those issues aside, I had a lot of fun! That final fight was intense! | |
| May 1 18:19:12 | 2h 30m | Fulfillment | ♥ 2 | Fun little game. I liked using the physics sim to wrangle boxes backwards on the conveyor belt. High score was 22. And considering I am playing the hard mode for colorblind people, I think that's pretty darn good. Actually, I think my main problem is that the mode can change with no warning. A couple times, the mode changed milliseconds before I dropped off the box and caused me to lose a point. Also, a sound effect for each mode it switches to would be helpful. |
| May 1 18:53:26 | 34m 14s | Multiverse Delivery Inc. | ♥ 2 | I enjoyed the humor and world map screen, but the gameplay seemed too easy. Even on hard difficulty, I was finishing fights in seconds because the airstrike attack(s) do so much damage that your units just have to clean up the rest. Unit placement didn't matter much since all of the units are melee. By the end, I didn't bother anymore since placing the units took longer than the fight itself. |
| May 1 20:09:06 | 1h 15m | 04 Mail Service | ♥ 1 | It's funny how awkward these controls are, given that they're just a slight variation on the ubiquitous WASD setup. I think it's the sort of thing that sounds good in your head but by the time you find out first-hand how awkward it is, it's too late to change it. So it's an extra step to figure out which button to press. But even if I press the right button, sometimes the game double-inputs. And since there's no undo button, if you make a mistake, you have to start all over. Oftentimes, I knew how to solve a puzzle, but actually executing it was a tedious process. I think the way I would have done it would be to make movement super quick (like 1/10th of a second), but require a distinct button press for each move. There were a few good revelations about the game's mechanics, such as the way you can move the parcel to a lower height without getting it stuck. The jump mechanic was neat. I love how there's a wall hang mechanic that never gets used by any of the puzzles :P The visuals are cute. The game has a soft palette that fits well. Nice work! |
| May 1 21:02:19 | 53m 13s | Drone Diner Dash | ♥ 1 | Oh man, that was a lot of fun! The controls were tough to get used to, but that's the entire point! I just wish there was more to do than deliver plates. Delivering six plates isn't much different than delivering a cup. Once I got the hang of the controls and did a few more orders without much trouble, I called it quits. Maybe in a future version, you could add more restaurant-related tasks like uncorking bottles or refilling drinks from a pitcher. drone distaster.png Yup, that's me. And you might be wondering how I got out of this situation. |
| May 1 23:15:27 | 2h 13m | Sender Not Found | ♥ 1 | I can never tell with these Papers Please-esque games whether an unintuitive or frustrating design element is an oversight or intentional. Typing those long strings gets annoying, especially with how similar 1's and lower-case l's look. (Damn you, penny-pinching typewriter manufacturers!) The twist at the end was clever! It was surreal thinking back on the previous emails and thinking how they fit together. But I did not confess because I can tell you they got the wrong guy. I happen to know with some certainty that I did not commit a hit and run. Although if I were really in such a situation, I would plead the fifth on advice of my lawyer. Not sure how you would fill in those blanks in that case, though. Overall, I enjoyed! The gameplay is repetitive, but it doesn't outstay its welcome. And the revelation at the end makes it all worth it! |
| May 2 05:14:52 | 5h 59m | The Doldrums of Delivery | ♥ 2 | Funny that you used ChatGPT to make a game about robots. Maybe that's what inspired it? :) I get the idea was to force the player to learn the layout themselves, but there is no way that's happening with the number of different rooms this game has. I even started writing them down on graph paper, but there were just too many. It's a big investment to memorize this many rooms all at once. I think I would have started the player off making deliveries only to level 4, then expanded outwards. That way, you're constantly learning a bit at a time instead of being expected to either memorize (or write down) every room right at the start, or just give up and wander around until you stumble into the correct room. And then once you have everything memorized, the rest of the game is just rotely executing a series of movements. Rolling the two gameplay processes together would have made for a better experience. The movements could be more intuitive by arranging the buttons on the screen in a diamond pattern. Then I can just click the button that corresponds to the direction I want to go instead of translating from map direction to cardinal direction to dialogue option. The menu-based system adds to the busy-work feeling of navigating the tower. If that was intentional, that's fine. But I'm not a fan. I think what I mainly I didn't like is that the writing (which I think is the entire point of making a text adventure, so you can spend more time writing and less time programming) doesn't really matter for any game events. In I Require Human Parts, all of the text described game events and rooms with real in-game functionality. It matters that this person has a cyborg heart and not a real one. Here, only a small percentage of the text you're presented actually affects the game. It's not so much a text-based game as a game with text on the side. Sorry this feedback is all negative, but I hope it was constructive. |
| May 2 05:35:08 | 20m 16s | Package Man | ♥ 3 | High score: 12 Fun little arcadey game. It was hard to tell at first what was a game object and what was just set dressing. I'm not sure why you made so many unique sprites just to use them clutter up the game area. Were they for planned mechanics that got cut? The background is pretty noisy as well. Try putting a semi-transparent solid color layer over it to reduce the contrast. That way, the eyes naturally glaze over it and know it's not part of the playable space. The jump felt a tad sluggish and floaty. I noticed that it's responsive to how long you hold the jump button, but it doesn't affect it by very much. You can't really short-hop with it. I think the parameters just needed more adjustment. It was fun getting the hang of the throwing mechanics. I like how the box would carry your existing momentum, allowing you to choose precisely how far it goes if you can control your speed well enough. My one nitpick would be to let the player pick up the box if they're already holding the grab button when they come into contact with the box. Not a big deal though. |
| May 2 05:55:54 | 20m 46s | Slip & Slice | ♥ 3 | It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out how to get past the first menu screen. Having the pizza represent a forward arrow is clever and thematic, but not immediately obvious to me that that's what it was. I figured it was just set dressing. I'm not sure if there is an ultimate goal to work towards. I thought maybe it was to get the houses counter to 0/44, but that seems like a fools errand since six new orders come in in the time it takes me to back myself out of a corner, let alone deliver an entire order. Or maybe I'm just bitter that my gameplay didn't look remotely as impressive as yours did in that promo gif you posted. There were a lot of nice touches in the audio/visual department. The skid marks are of course non-negotiable in any game where drifting is a mechanic. And I liked the descending-tone sound effects for indicating how many pizzas you have left. Good visual and sound design all around. Nice work! |
| May 2 12:13:08 | 6h 17m | earthmover | ♥ 1 | Wow! What a pretty-looking game! The color palette and shaders did an incredible job creating atmosphere! So many little touches, like the level start animation and the "inside view" on the top left, to the weather-effect shaders and vertex animations. 5/5 on graphics for sure. And the puzzle design is great as well. Very cute, having the player move around to "find the PDA", but it's really to train them on the controls. My favorite level was the one with all the ramps. It had several great catches to figure out how to set up movement for future sections of the level. I think the pushable blocks and ice blocks had the most interesting designs. They force you to think ahead and how moves now will affect the future. But then you committed game design cardinal sin #1: Making you sit through unskippable dialogue whenever you want to retry. But the real pain was the lack of an undo button. I was really wishing I had that once I got to the falling blocks. It sucks to have to restart the level from the beginning every time I want to try a new way of moving through the ice. It just goes to show that no matter how much work you put into fancy shaders, weather palette shift effects, custom assets, and ambience, it never matters more than the gameplay. I didn't finish the game. I played for over an hour and got to this point: iceberg.png I got the crate into the chute, but then the exit was revealed and I did not have the proper ice blocks left to angle myself at the exit. That's pretty messed up, considering I had no way of knowing where the exit would appear beforehand. It was a pretty fun level too and I felt clever for beating it. So the realization that I would have to restart felt like a cruel joke at my expense. But despite those issues, it is a super fun and engaging puzzle game. I am so impressed on how much you created here as a solo project in two days. Fantastic job, seriously! |
| May 2 21:50:21 | 9h 37m | Super Special Delivery | ♥ 1 | This is why task prioritization is so important in game jams. Even when making the game, you should add features in order of how much ability you have to cut them if you start to run out of time. Making the menu before the game is like putting the cart before the horse. It's an easy mistake to make though. In my first Ludum Dare I had the benefit of working with a friend who had done several of them before. And he was constantly talking me down from the overscoped ideas I was pitching. :P Here is a flowchart of the order in which I do things if I'm unsure of whether I'll finish in time: Base game with minimum mechanics -> content -> polish -> menus, sound effects, music, etc. It is legitimately a really nice title menu though! Slick animations and funky music! Great job on that. |
| May 2 23:36:13 | 1h 45m | Ultimate Postal Service | ♥ 5 | Fun arena shooter reminiscent of Quake III. I really liked the back-and-forth between the platforming sections and the arena sections. And also the unlocking of new sections and the introduction of flying enemies to the platformer sections kept things interesting. The graphical shaders were awesome. They added a lot of flair to the solid-color levels. Everything felt impactful and polished in the graphics and audio! Here are my notes: - Make the difficulty ramp up faster. I feel that attempts last too long in their current state. - Change the layout of the central arena to encourage the player to move around more. With the way the arena is set up, I felt the best option was to stand in the middle and turn to shoot oncoming enemies. And that's pretty disappointing in a game with so many movement mechanics. - Use raw mouse input for aiming. Many people have mouse acceleration (known on Windows as "Enhance pointer precision") turned on, which is bad for FPS games. But other than that, I had a lot of fun! High score: 205775 - Wave 13. |
| May 3 00:26:23 | 50m 10s | Zip Drone Dash | ♥ 1 | I wasn't very good at this. The best score I got was 505 because I got lucky and was able to deliver two packages. (The second one half a second before I ran out of fuel and crashed!) The problem was that staying level at the ground for long enough to find a drop-off point cost so much fuel that I couldn't get back up again. Maybe if drop-off points were more common or there was an indicator that one is coming up, it would help. Or maybe I'm just bad at the game. To clarify, I enjoyed using the flight controls, I just was never able to use them to get very far in the game. The systems interact in fun ways so you have to keep track of your height, speed, and energy level lest you crash and burn. |
| May 3 00:46:30 | 20m 07s | Deliver Us From Evil | ♥ 1 | Fun little game with high-tension moments! Long reloads are great for creating tough moment-to-moment decisions on resource management. And the flares were a cool way to let the player "buy" information that helps them decide when to reload and when to stay ready to shoot. So the two mechanics work quite well with each other. The mood is great too. The pitch-black lighting, harsh shadows, and sound design create a very unique atmosphere. I just wish there were more voice lines, since the prayers got a bit repetitive. But that's my only complaint. Great work! |
| May 3 01:44:33 | 58m 03s | Mail Day Mayday! | ♥ 1 | I see you watched the same episode of The Simpsons I did. This was really fun! I came in expecting a puzzle game, but instead got a micromanagement game about monitoring moving boxes. It was fun figuring out my workflow for the level and then executing it. "Okay, I need to watch for incoming boxes when the first hazard checker is in use to improve efficiency, watch for non-hazard boxes coming out so they don't go to the hazard tube by mistake, and move boxes that come out of the color checker into the respective tube. Now let's do this!" I think you could have turned up the difficulty more at the end because I three-starred every level on my first try. Maybe just make everything faster. Pickup and place controls were pretty wonky. I'm not sure what it was, but the boxes often wouldn't go where I thought they would go, and sometimes the input wouldn't work at all unless I moved around a little. In fact, the only time I placed a box into the wrong pipe, it was because the game placed the box in a space I wasn't expecting it to. Just make the box always land on the space you're standing on and make the whole space glow brightly when carrying something. But that issue aside, it was a fun and frantic game that had me hooked the whole way through. Great job! |
| May 3 04:43:46 | 2h 59m | Buccaneer Mail co. | ♥ 4 | Very nice looking game with a refined-looking pixel-art style. I liked the starting area sky city. I was a bit confused on the gameplay though. I noticed that the bombs from the crows never damaged anything, so I just stayed in the lower deck and repaired holes. Then no more bombs got through. After a few minutes of doing that, the screen got dark and it started over. I had to go to the comments to figure out that I had apparently won, but that there's no ending screen. The core gameplay loops seems cool, but doesn't seem to have much actual challenge behind it. If the bombs on the top deck could blow holes in floor, that would have been really fun. Cool game and great-looking, but I wish there was a bit more to the gameplay. |
| May 3 07:31:50 | 2h 48m | Deliver to Whence you Came | ♥ 1 | How does one come up with these sorts of ridiculous game mechanics? It's so weird but it works. Very engaging all the way through! |
| May 3 23:32:05 | 16h 00m | Package Quest: AI Adventure | ♥ 1 | I experimented a bit with using ChatGPT for NPC dialogue before the Jam started in case I wanted to make a game that used it. But the NPC's never talked the way I wanted them to. Even if I specified things like "Only provide your own dialogue, never anyone else's", it would write a full conversation between two NPC's instead of just the one response I wanted. And your game not only does all of its conversations correctly, but wards against prompt-hacking pretty well! It wasn't perfect though. Here few funny examples. In the second one, the guy later said he was still at the bank, so I tried delivering the package to the two people there and they were both wrong. But it's to be expected with how ChatGPT works currently. hackingcombined.png Since I'm really curious: - How did you get it to give information, but only after some pressing and not right away? - How did you ward against prompt-hacking? - How did you prevent bad responses from NPC's or prevent them from going off topic? |
| May 4 00:48:18 | 1h 16m | Deliver Them From Sin | ♥ 1 | Fun runner-type game! I got to 4 souls and 22/26 city blocks. The kick and punch were both satisfying to pull off and combo off of each other. The jumping mechanics felt pretty smooth as well. I would have appreciated adjustable-height jumping, but that could trivialize the movement a bit. It was satisfying to get just a little bit farther each time. My notes: - Bind a gamepad button to restart so I don't have to lean back forward and click it with the mouse. - Please support movement with the D-Pad. I much prefer that for sidescrolling platformers. - Since you can't control your jump height, there are a lot of blind jumps that arise from jumping too high to see the ground below you. It's not so bad since I realized later than you can use the punch to stop your downward movement, but it's still good to avoid blind jumps. - I hate having to restart all the way back at the tutorial for the 16th time just to retry a section way ahead. I definitely would have been more willing to try beat the game if there were checkpoints. Not even that many. Just two or three. |
| May 4 01:19:14 | 30m 56s | With the Grain | ♥ 1 | This is pretty easy as a puzzle game. Aside from a one town (the one where you loop the path back around it) the paths were pretty obvious. It seems like a good concept for a tough level-based puzzle game, too! I am impressed with the non-uniform tile-based map. The rails all connect up properly and figure out which directions are legal. I'll have to checkout out that Sylves library if I ever do anything with Unity. Nice atmosphere and cool mechanics, I just wished those mechanics had been used to their fullest! |
| May 5 00:32:02 | 23h 12m | 🗣️ MR SPEECH: The Purr-fect Pitch | ♥ 1 | I've been going through creators whose games I liked in previous jams and I have to say I'm not disappointed. This game is just as crazy as the last one I played. I was thinking about using the theme to "deliver" a speech, but I couldn't think of a way to do that in gameplay. This implementation is really cool, having two audio tracks in parallel that you switch between and pick which one best supports your case. And it's very expandable to more writing/songs. My only note is that I wish there was more visual feedback for when you should switch between tracks if you have to go up and down really fast. I tried to do it on-beat, but would get tripped up by words with multiple syllables. And it could use some audio and visual feedback for when your score goes up or down, like you get in most rhythm games. |
| May 5 02:11:56 | 1h 39m | Culling Cards | ♥ 3 | Fun little card game! I liked the dithered-palettized 3D look and the monster sprites. Having the color of light creep under the doorway was a great touch that added some sense of agency to moving through the dungeon. The gameplay got a tad repetitive near the end. Though it was saved by the new green and blue cards that could combo with the other cards. I also wish the final boss was tougher. By the time I was ready to use my damage-doubler card on the 50-damage card, the boss had so little health left that it hardly mattered. But I enjoyed overall. Nice work! |
| May 5 03:40:47 | 1h 28m | Western Fury | ♥ 1 | Those were some pretty cool mechanics that worked together well! Everything is a throwable physics object, including the bullets! The final boss was definitely the highlight of the game. I think it was a perfect difficulty for everything else up to that point. I love how even the gun at the end had the wierdo physics everything else had! :D physics.png Here are my notes: - I wish I could turn around while holding an object. Maybe this was an intentional limitation, but it made the game feel a bit clunky. - Throwing a physics object at an enemy sometimes wouldn't do damage if they were to my left. - I wish enemies would signal their attacks before firing to make it easier to dodge bullets. - I know the gun isn't really part of the game. But if it were, I would like to be able to hit enemies that are a bit farther down. The bullet usually hits the top of the crate when doing that cover-fire. If you fix those issues and add more content, I could see this being a good post-LD game! |
| May 5 04:08:40 | 27m 53s | De-Liver-y | ♥ 0 | Interesting concept for an action-puzzle game, but definitely could have used more polish. My main problem is how easy it is to screw yourself by placing the wrong pheromone. One pheromone placed in a way that the ants can't (or won't) follow means the run is over if you can't get back up to place another pheromone. It doesn't help that the controls are really strange. I normally associate Space with jump. And this is likely a problem unique to me, but I made the mistake at least six times of pressing R for 'red pheromone'. The controls are pretty wonky as well. There's a wall jump that I can't get to work consistently. I fell through the floor several times. Having to vault over a thin wall made it very difficulty to get the queen over. You have to use the buggy wall jump and when you succeed, you have one chance to place the pheromone correctly or the queen will be stuck facing a wall for the rest of the run. The farthest I got the queen was 75%. Also, your play link says, "Source Code", which will make some people think the only way to play the game is to build it from source. |
| May 5 22:36:38 | 18h 27m | Santa's Workshop | ♥ 2 | I'm impressed you got so many mechanics working in three days! The crossover conveyor belts and gate conveyor belts seem like they would cause a lot of edge cases. I enjoyed having the ability to both automate the tasks and manually move stuff around myself if the splitters didn't quite do what I wanted them to. Though I think the time limits were too forgiving. I reckon I could have skipped the automation entirely and just done everything myself and still beaten the levels well under the time limits. Tougher time limits and less money to spend would mean having to choose carefully how to set up your factory so that your manual labor can be as efficient as possible. My playthrough ended in South America when I ran into gamebreaking bug. Every time I took a step I would rise upwards, causing me to shoot up into the sky any time I tried to move. When I restarted the level, I was wobbling back and forth and unable to move. It happened when I was carrying a package through a gate conveyor belt. nullreference.png nullreference2.png |
| May 6 01:46:44 | 3h 10m | Egg Panic | ♥ 2 | Very well-polished minigame. Animations are simple but they do enough to convey the actions. Great sound effects and snappy controls. Nice work! |
| May 6 23:03:11 | 21h 16m | African Bicycle Dealer | ♥ 0 | Interesting idle game. It was fun trying to figure out how to optimize my route, but I don't feel as though I ever got the efficiency I was hoping for. If you assume each biker spends the same amount of time at each city, you should hit max near max efficiency with five bikers. The problem is that with limited city capacity (each city buys goods only if it has half or less and sells only if it has half or more), it can cause bikers to skip past a city and get blocked by the biker in front of it. So the capacity upgrades didn't so much feel like they were giving me some huge bang for my buck like I would expect by their price. It just felt like I was finally getting a the efficiency from the bikers I had already paid for. And since the city upgrades increase in price way faster than their benefits would suggest, the game gets really sluggish at the end. I think it's a bad idea to upgrade bike capacity too much because then it runs out a village's stock faster and causes a bike to take longer at each villlage. Which therefore causes bigger jams instead of spreading the bikes out across the villages. The "sells-everything" village in the bottom left felt kinda pointless because my bikers would always buy low-margin goods first instead of the high-margin bananas. And there was usually plenty to buy from at least one of the other three towns and I would rather they buy from the right and top villages. |
| May 8 22:06:13 | 47h 03m | Deliverance | ♥ 2 | I spent over 20 minutes of trying to clear the room above the one full of spikes. I was trying to wall jump off the right wall and dash over the the platform. I was using the keyboard at first because I prefer that over using an analog stick for a 2D platformer. I decided to switch to the analog stick to see if it was easier and discovered that wall-jumps with the analog stick are more forceful for whatever reason. I determined that was the issue and I spent even more time attempting over and over. It was only after I misinputted and accidentally held up while dashing that I found out you can do a vertical dash. I never thought to try that. I think the problem is that there is no part of the game up to that point where the vertical dash is obviously required, so I assumed I already knew all of the game's mechanics that I needed when I got to that room. My method looked possible so I kept trying. Here are my other notes about the game: - After beating the game with the gamepad, I went back to beat it a second time with the keyboard and found the controls to feel better. The arrow keys have movement acceleration (presumably to make up for lack of analog input), and that actually improved the feel. - It's usually a good idea to implement coyote frames in platformers. The jump mechanics felt a bit unresponsive on small platforms. - There are several rooms where you have 1/20th of a second after entering a room before you fall into spikes. The penalty for failure is low, but it's not a good idea to put hazards immediately after blind room transitions. - The spike hitbox is too big. Hazards should usually have as small of a hitbox as you can reasonably give them to match their sprite. Standing on the floor *next* to a spike definitely shouldn't kill you. - The wall jump felt a bit clunky. Since you have to hold *away* from the direction you want to go in order to cling to the wall, it's a timing challenge to change directions right after hitting the jump key. The trick I've seen used is to lock the player's movement controls for a few frames after performing a wall jump so they have more time to switch movement directions. - Other than those issues, the controls are very responsive for a Jam platformer game. - The auto-camera felt really good in the last room. It always showed what I needed to see. - Great retro NES soundtrack. It's an impressive OST for 3 days! - Well-designed levels that each test the player's moveset in unique ways! |
| May 10 21:22:38 | 47h 16m | Deliver-E | ♥ 1 | Reminds me of [Gene Graph Garden](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/gene-graph-garden) from last LD. I love these sorts of programming-based puzzle games and this one had me scratching my head on that last level. Great work! |
| May 15 18:27:44 | 117h 05m | Parcel Dunk | ♥ 1 | Really fun and satisfying speed platformer! I loved the time-slowing when jumping and aiming at the same time. The slopes and dogs added a lot to the game as it progressed. Great job! Here are my notes: - There should be a sound effect for when a dog steals your package. I kept not noticing that my package was stolen until I tried to throw it. - I always avoided bouncing the package off walls. The package is simulated as a rectangle, so it's very unpredictable how it will actually bounce when thrown. - The movement controls could be streamlined a bit to make the player feel better to control. - The package would often get blocked by level geometry even though the dashed line showed a clear path. three_dog_night.png |
| May 15 19:50:39 | 1h 22m | Rock Paper Scissors Inc. | ♥ 1 | Fun and engaging puzzle game. The mechanics all felt sensible and well-tutorialized. There were some great aha moments, with the last two levels being particularly clever. Great job! My only complaint is that the controls are a bit sticky. If you're holding any of the WASD keys when pressing a different one, it won't register. sokoban.png |
| May 15 23:54:24 | 4h 03m | The Deliverer | ♥ 1 | Fun little twin-stick shooter. I enjoyed the difficulty of destroying the spawners. It was hard to tell where I was aiming since there is no reticle for exactly what direction the bullets will come out. I ended up playing really slowly because I couldn't reliably hit enemies when I needed to. (I used gamepad controls.) I also didn't use the dash at all. I only found out I had it in level 3 and still didn't find a use for it afterwards. |
| May 16 17:00:50 | 17h 06m | Postal puzzle | ♥ 1 | Like others have said, the sluggish controls make it tedious to execute attempts, especially if you make a mistake and have to restart. It's probably a good thing that this game is easy because otherwise it would just be too frustrating. That level with the four switches gave me a lot of pause because I thought I had to mail all three letters. I figured it was solvable if I only mailed one, but I was afraid to try it in case I was wrong and would have to restart. Congrats on building the game with no engine. That sounds very time-consuming! The game has some fun mechanics that can create interesting puzzles. Nice work! |
| May 16 17:41:08 | 40m 18s | (H)armless Delivery | ♥ 0 | Interesting idea to combine golf with puzzle game elements. The switches felt a little awkward to hit though since it's unclear how much force is required to hit it and how close you need to be. Maybe it would feel better if it was a toggleable pressure plate instead. It's really easy to softlock yourself in level 3 by knocking yourself out of the level. And if you go back to the level select, you can't select level 3 so I had to replay level 2 three times to beat level 3. softlock.png |
| May 16 22:39:45 | 4h 58m | Cube Delivery | ♥ 1 | The lighting effects are pretty overbearing. The animations were too sluggish and make it slow to complete a solution. On level 3, the colors were hard to tell apart, especially since I'm colorblind. I didn't realize the purple box was next to the blue switch until I took a screenshot and used the color picker in MS Paint. In level 5, the toggle switch controls many different blocks. If you misremember which blocks it controls, you can accidentally destroy the box. This is a general problem throughout the game, where you don't know what each control or switch does before you press it. Figuring out how the puzzle works shouldn't be part of the puzzle. And once the mechanics are figured out, none of the puzzles are particularly challenging to solve. This game has interesting mechanics, I just don't think they're used to make very challenging puzzles. The idea of making controllable elements range-based is neat, but none of the levels use that mechanic to its fullest. There should also be some visual effect to tell you which elements can and can't be controlled. |
| May 17 00:27:12 | 1h 47m | Sermon Delivery Simulator | ♥ 1 | I decided to play twice. The first playthrough, I was completely pragmatic, just telling people what they wanted to hear. I praised gay people; I slandered gay people. I spoke positively about both globalism and nationalism, and somehow that caused people to trust me even more. On the second playthrough, I gave sermons with priority and opinion based on my own beliefs. Apparently I wouldn't make for a very good priest since I was down to three people by sermon #4. My favorite was when I was given the choice between talking about white people, black people, or mixed race people. Really putting me in a box here. This is a really neat concept, but it has a lot of mechanics I didn't feel like dealing with. When I have 30 parishioners, I don't want to be clicking on every single person about their beliefs. In a full version, I think seeing the parishioners' faces would go a long way to feeling like you're building relationships with these people. Maybe hearing gossip or things people did as a result of your sermon. (Little Timmy started a lemonade stand because of your positive sermon on small businesses.) |
| May 17 01:58:51 | 1h 31m | POST TRUCK | ♥ 0 | I wasn't sure at first if this game's mechanics would be enough to create interesting puzzles, but the last few were pretty good! It wasn't super challenging, but it defied my expectations at certain points when I had to combine multiple numbered cards to create the required move distance. Nice work! |
| May 17 03:10:35 | 1h 11m | Delivery Shift | ♥ 0 | I hate to claim that a puzzle is impossible since people have probably said that many times about puzzles that are definitely possible. In fact, that's what makes a great puzzle: Making it seem impossible but then it's obvious once you figure it out. But considering I'm the third person to comment about the "getting tricky" puzzle, I think you should confirm that it actually is possible. As for the game itself, it's a pretty neat concept. The blocks add a lot to the thought process of positioning tiles. The isometric view is a bit awkward though since the arrow keys are mapped at a 45-degree angle. You could map the arrows 90-degrees counter-clockwise and it would make just as much sense. Nice work overall, but there are few worse sins than making a puzzle game with an unsolvable puzzle. So I would appreciate confirmation that that level has a solution. |
| May 17 05:06:06 | 1h 55m | Parcel Purgatory | ♥ 1 | Neat little Bloxorz type game with some new mechanics. The enemies, size-changers, and ability to roll halfway off the ledge kept things different enough. Though for the security cameras, it's hard to tell what their pattern is. I just had to bum rush it and hope the pattern moved slow enough. I liked the transitions and mood as well. Nice work! |
| May 17 05:20:44 | 14m 38s | Quantum Post | ♥ 0 | I got softlocked part way through. Time wouldn't get rewound far enough and I would still be dead. timerewind.png |
| May 19 08:41:15 | 51h 20m | Volcaninja | ♥ 1 | I love me some tough-as-nails games with short iteration times and low penalty for failure. Well, I did notice you put a death counter in the corner of the screen, but the day I start caring about my death count in Super Meatboy-esque platformer games is the day I stop playing them. You really got your dime's worth out of the game elements. It never felt like you were remixing the same ideas to pad out the levels. Little stuff like, "explosive crates, but this time you have to stay in the air while you wait for them to explode" is an excellent new way to use that element. I like how you always put in an easy level after each tough level as a bit of a pacing break from beating the previous one. The graphics are decent, but the music is fantastic! What a catchy soundtrack! Top marks there. The high air friction got me a bit. Given how wall-jumps always seem to work a bit differently in different platformer games, my usual strategy is to stop holding forward a little bit before I hit the wall and let moment up carry me to the wall, then start holding the opposite direction after I jump. That way I won't cancel my momentum by moving against my desired direction after jumping. But with the high air friction, I stop moving before I hit the wall and fall to my death. Maybe it's just muscle memory built by playing too many Ludum Dare platformers with poorly implemented wall-jump mechanics, but I think less air friction would make the wall jump feel a bit better. An issue often complained about in platformer games is the "blind jump", where the platform you have to land on is off screen, making it impossible to know ahead of time where you will need to land. This game has a lot of "blind grapples", where you are encouraged to grapple onto an off-screen object and may accidentally grapple into some spikes or into an enemy without knowing it was there. I think you should have made the grappling hook limited to only going as far as you can see and adjusted the level design accordingly. But overall, fantastic game that had me hooked all the way through. Great work! |
