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Defrag

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TimestampSince previousGameDefrag's comment
Oct 3 02:55:50 ROOMGUN ♥ 2 Fun blend between FPS and puzzler, in a way. Each enemy felt like it a secret that made the level feel rewarding. The white beasties were the hardest initially, but I managed to eventually beat them with some elaborate jumping. Unfortunately, I couldn't get back the unhinged cats in level 22. This was a fun game to stick around in for 5+ minutes, which is really great for a game made in a weekend. Novel concept, and clever use of the them. Play_0.gif
Oct 3 03:16:24 20m 34s Apocalypse Mall ♥ 1 Fun game about a group of friends just trying to make it through the zombie apocalypse at the local mall. I liked the way that you control a group of survivors instead of just a single hero. It also made it not too painful when a person succumbed to the horde. I tried walling myself in, only to realize that you could easily starve to death if the zombies didn't break down the walls in time to let me out. Nice pixel work, great soundtrack. Don and Tony - great work rolling this out in 72 hours in a new engine. Lightyears beyond where I would be in Godot. Play_1.gif
Oct 3 03:26:29 10m 05s Flappy Bat ♥ 0 I appreciated the tried-and-true gameplay - no tutorial needed. Excellent graphics, especially in just 48 hours. I would have like to have seen something original to keep me going beyond a few iterations, but this has everything a game needs to be a game. Nice work! Play_2.gif
Oct 3 03:38:32 12m 03s If I Fits, I Sits! ♥ 3 This was 5* for theme and innovation for me. I love a game that nails the theme with simple, original gameplay. I don't have a cat, but I've seen enough cat videos to appreciate the weird accuracy of this. The game felt very polished and well-designed. I don't really have any critical feedback, and my guess is that you probably hit the game experience you were aiming for, right? Ok, maybe my only feedback would be that the tiny boxes are really tough! I consistently can't get the cat's bottom in if I stop the head even a few pixels too soon. Play_3.gif
Oct 3 03:48:23 9m 51s PELLET BOI ♥ 1 The graphics threw me off for a bit initially, but I'm glad that I stuck around for two full playthroughs. My high score was 4750 on my second run. This was a surprisingly tough little puzzle game. I like that the core loop was easily grasped and required very little onboard. The controls and visuals felt very tight and snappy - I think you nailed the speed of the square's movement on the board. What was your high score as the developer? I'm interested if there is some kind of strategy in this beyond just filling in the outer square layers first. Play_4.gif
Oct 5 03:03:17 47h 14m The Bellhop ♥ 1 I'll second the comment that this felt like Mini Metro's spiritual predecessor. I like the gameplay. However, I didn't understand what caused me to fail. Is it too many people waiting on a floor, or too many people in the elevator, or too many people getting into the elevator at once? If there was some kind of hinting at which it was, I missed it. However, the audio was nicely rhythmic.
Oct 5 03:16:31 13m 14s Defrag ♥ 1 Nice connection to the theme, and unique gameplay. However, it seems like the benefit of making colors contiguous is merely that you get to save a single space by not needing to have a buffer. My initial expectation was that some kind of Tetris/match-3 style block removal would take place. I didn't grasp the core game loop for a while. Because the gameplay is novel, you probably would have to spend a little more time walking the player through intended gameplay.
Oct 5 03:29:52 13m 21s Escape the Closet ♥ 1 I felt very smart working through this. It took me a while longer than I normally would spend onboarding with a jam game, but I stuck around long enough to solve a couple of the problems. I liked that the problems aren't immediately obvious, and that I had to deduce the solution from the tools presented to me. This type of game probably isn't exactly my cup of tea, but I am really impressed by what you pulled together in just a weekend. To code a game about coding also seems a little mind-blowing to me.
Oct 5 03:35:06 5m 14s Voynich Lecture ♥ 2 This gave me some unpleasantly accurate flashbacks to college. This was a really unique take on the theme. I managed to get 4/6, but I don't know that my scrawled notes were all that helpful. It still felt like I was kind of guessing. I suppose I still don't understand the Voynich language. Thanks for making me feel like an unprepared student again!
Oct 5 03:42:56 7m 50s Let Me Breathe! ♥ 1 I kept dying, but I don't know exactly what was killing me. Do I lose a heart for entering a death zone, or just staying in it too long? I felt like I had to sometime quickly run through the deathzones, and that I wouldn't lose a heart sometimes. I think some additional hinting would go a long way - maybe screen shake upon imminent damage, or some edge vignetting. Good job getting the upgrade system in there - many entries seem to scope for that but never get around to implementing them well (or at all).
Oct 5 03:47:38 4m 42s Bee Catcher ♥ 1 I maxed out at 30-something bees. I thought the movement was strictly determined by my tongue strikes, only to read in another comment that I could have moved around via keyboard! Honestly, I think the mechanic of 'attacking determines movement' is really intriguing, and could make for a more interesting game in the long run. I would have liked to have seen an end-game panel that I can't just click through. I kept missing my final score because I was clicking too fast when I died.
Oct 5 03:52:41 5m 03s The_Box ♥ 1 I managed to win (at 0:22) after my third attempt. I encountered the same issue that others had where the cylinder stopped listening to me. The game itself had really simple gameplay. In fact, it was so simple, that I wasn't sure if I wasn't missing something. However, after a few seconds, I figured that the game really was just put the cylinder into the hole!
Oct 6 02:33:46 22h 41m Gold ♥ 0 Good work on implementing the fog-of-war mechanic. I liked the mood created by the tile-by-tile, limited knowledge (and memory) exploration. However, I didn't understand the differences between the enemies, other than the visuals being different. Oh, I liked the subtle animation of the black shadow guys. Nice work!
Oct 6 02:39:44 5m 58s Elevators Go Boink ♥ 1 I guess I missed something, or maybe the game is more of a narrative thing than a mechanic-based game? I suspect that I am supposed to wedge my way through the bedlam in the room, but I have utterly no idea of who I am. I did chuckle reading some of the quips of the super-violent fellow passengers.
Oct 8 03:31:25 48h 51m Mousetropolis ♥ 1 I enjoyed watching the timelapse of this game coming together. It's pretty neat seeing it get built in just 6 minutes. For the game itself, I had the same question as the reviewer above me - does placement matter? I feel like I should put the police station near the housing, but my guess is that location has no bearing. I also wondered what I could do to increase my cash inflow. I was perpetually out of cash. Finally, I also could not manage crime. Both times I played, I lost due to crime. Great audio, BTW.
Oct 8 03:50:06 18m 41s Just why? ♥ 1 This was quite possibly a perfect Compo entry for me. I didn't quite catch the save-point mechanism at first, but once I did, giving two save points was great. I really like the subtle push-your-luck mechanic that really creeps in there - "Can I make it through just one more challenge before I burn a save point"? Excellent work.
Oct 8 03:58:15 8m 09s Super Cube ♥ 2 5-star audio and innovation for me. This was incredible for a Compo. This feels finished. I don't know what else you could do to improve, except maybe get this in a cabinet and put it in an arcade somewhere. Very, very nice entry.
Oct 8 04:10:51 12m 36s Claustroshooter ♥ 1 Nice entry. I jumped right in and picked it up quickly. It wasn't until I had quadrupled my weapon shots that I realized the danger in doing so. Spraying bullets meant that I had to spend a lot more time reopening the arena. That adds a really nice, intuitive tension to gameplay. One quibble - I think that using audio that you didn't create/creatively derive (ie, used from Freesounds) means that you shouldn't be rated in Audio.
Oct 8 04:17:18 6m 27s The Lost Probe ♥ 1 Play_0.PNG I think I had a similar struggle with the controls. Above is a snip of my 2 cents. I like the simple gameplay of this - no complexity to overcome. That didn't make it any easier though!
Oct 8 04:31:11 13m 53s Awesome Spaceship Dude! ♥ 2 I liked the mechanic of actually building your ship. I think a few more modules may have helped with the depth a bit without adding too much complexity. Maybe a radar, or seeking missile launcher? Or a recharging shield? Only so much time in a jam game. I hadn't seen anything like this before, and the hand-drawn bits were a unique art-style as well. I enjoyed rolling over some aliens for a bit in my take on the X-wing: Play_0.PNG
Oct 14 02:57:28 142h 26m O-Line ♥ 1 Nice work! I appreciated that the enemy team seemed like giants compared to my dudes. Music, SFX, graphics were spot on. Dash and space were used heavily, and I made it to 17 yards. My two suggestions would be to tone back the screen shake a bit, and to reduce the padding on the camera. I found myself at the far edge of the screen a couple times and soon learned that I had to hang back for the camera to catch back up before moving on. Great submission!
Oct 14 03:05:28 8m 00s RIDE OF THE LIVING DEAD! ♥ 2 I picked up on the Oregon Trail mechanisms pretty quick, but I appreciated the point-and-click aspect of each encounter as well. I ended up dying pretty quickly, presumably due to poor luck on getting antidotes after being infected. I thought the polish and audio was great, especially in the Mood category. This was a great Jam submission!
Oct 14 03:16:00 10m 32s Super Drillboy ♥ 1 Really simple mechanics is the way to go for a Compo, and I think you nailed the easy-to-learn, hard-to-master with this. I wish you had had more time to the the post-Compo graphics in the original submission, but I think you prioritized things correctly. Were there any blocks that you planned for but didn't have time to include? I thought that some kind of reward block with extra gems in it might be nice. Also, did you hand-make all the levels, or is there some kind of procgen running to create the world as you fall?
Oct 14 03:25:49 9m 49s Towersprawl ♥ 1 This felt a little line Tetris mixed with Dwarf Fortress. I appreciated the non-competitive sandbox element to the gameplay, but I didn't feel much eustress ("good stress") from anything. Without a currency limiting me other than the space (which felt plentiful, once I actually realized I had to build the block-building machine), it was hard to keep motivated to keep expanding. This could be the start to a really thoughtful and fun game. That said, the systems you had seemed solid. Nice work!
Oct 14 03:35:17 9m 28s Soffie's Tiny Garden ♥ 1 Really nice Compo entry! Puzzle games in LD make me always cringe a bit because balancing/testing always skews towards way too difficult or trivially easy (due to time constraints). However, I felt like you had a great escalation of difficulty over time. I thought each level built on the previous one. I don't quite understand the in-game lore of why the plant vines/roots block me and water seedlings, but I don't supposed that matters a whole lot. There is a lot in this 48-hour entry, and you should be really proud of this!
Oct 14 03:43:02 7m 45s Seat Fighter ♥ 1 This was a clever take on the theme - nice! As far as mechanics go, I couldn't really tell what a good strategy should have been. I just sort of pressed buttons until I beat the CPU. Turns out that is my strategy in every fighting game! I appreciated the features you included in this, but perhaps a little more onboarding would have helped me make sense of what was going on.
Oct 14 04:02:17 19m 15s The Spellswapper of the Dark Forest ♥ 1 This was one of the few LD entries that I desired to fully explore. I was intrigued by the prospect of different synergies. I elected to go with a Gold build, which carried me through wave 17. I occasionally had what seemed to be a bonus cast - ie, an extra salvo of three gold tornadoes would be fired when I expected the next spell to trigger. Maybe that was a part of the synergy? As it was, I only saw the synergy kick-in as an extra bullet/tornado/whatever being fired in a salvo. I also don't think I understood what the 'ultra' or 'quick' was trying to tell me. The systems were interesting, graphics and audio helped sell the story, and the CGL was fun. Did you have a favorite build to go use when testing this?
Oct 19 00:48:53 116h 46m CASHBLAZER ♥ 1 Nice work finding your core game loop. The graphics weren't immediately readable, especially for the enemies. I had a hard time with the really fast moving dudes, which I initially thought were the projectiles of the enemy and therefore unshootable. I think others already mentioned it, but the UI popping up over the player when hitting the invisible paywall (and stopping the ship completely) felt punishing, in a not-so-fun way. Unless getting the player to memorize the invisible paywalls is critical to your planned experience, I would include visual hint when the player is approaching a border, at least after the first contact with it. To continually hit the invisible walls just kind of sucked the fun out of it for me. That said, I felt the ship movement was pretty tight. You did a good job coming up with a few unique enemies as well. Nice work fitting all that in on a 48-hour timeline.
Oct 19 01:07:28 18m 35s Tetradom ♥ 1 Very nice Compo entry. Well polished, and remarkably well-balanced for a 48-hour game. Graphics were lo-fi readable and the whole UI/UX felt tightly integrated. Concept was clever, and very quickly understood. I enjoyed the rogue-like elements of choosing different upgrades, although I felt like I was dealt a rather weak economic hand initially. I also didn't understand that my buildings regenerated after each run until I eventually lost one and then saw it come back after surviving the night. Once I saw that, my strategy changed slightly. Did you consider or test a version of the game where you couldn't move any buildings once they were placed? Perhaps that would be saved for a hard mode.
Oct 19 01:13:42 6m 14s Penguin Waddle ♥ 1 Cute, complete game. I was surprised by the blood-splosion when my first baby penguin was gulped. Later, I lost about a dozen to an ill-time orca arrival. The fun-meter dropped for me a little bit after I felt like I understood the whole extent of the game. I like the push-your-luck aspect of the escape whale, but I would have liked to see a new challenge arrive once I'd gone through a bit of gameplay. Maybe some polar bears arrive? Do polar bears eat penguins?
Oct 19 01:21:09 7m 27s Cybermaze ♥ 1 Novel approach to the theme - good job finding something different and nailing the execution. I got to the "You Win", and probably had about 60 seconds of gameplay to do so. I was expecting some pickups to increase my available memory, and perhaps some stronger enemies - I understand the time constraints you were operating under though. I thought your polish and game systems that did make it in were excellently done. I'd be interested in seeing what this might have looked like if you had another 48 hours to expand it. Capture.PNG