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Feedback comments for LD54
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | henk's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2 20:38:48 | Doubling ground crew | ♥ 1 | Very fun, played to the end. I like how there's time pressure without an explicit timer because of the spontaneous multiplication. Platforming felt mostly solid. I like how it can get out of control if you're not careful, but I wish you could get to way more dudes on screen before that happened, since I think it'd be satisfying to clear them all out. | |
| Oct 2 20:49:58 | 11m 10s | The_Box | ♥ 1 | Neat idea. I had to restart a couple times because the little cylinder would sometimes get stuck. The shape of the level gave an interesting challenge, and it would have been neat to have a few more levels with other ideas as well. |
| Oct 2 21:17:54 | 27m 56s | Ishmael | ♥ 1 | I liked it a lot! The sounds were especially entertaining. I ran into some performance problems in firefox starting from the level that introduces Moby, although playing in "slow motion" gave me somewhat of an advantage for later levels :P. The "island growth" mechanics did sort of feel optional to me. Maybe some more levels would help give room to flesh that out. |
| Oct 2 21:43:39 | 25m 45s | Tiny Rocket | ♥ 1 | Fun and educational! I think the level of difficulty was perfect and ended up playing through the whole thing (tbf I do already know a wee bit about orbits). I also laughed at several of the little "taunts" for when you crash. It's a bit hard to know when the intro blurbs are complete so I'd often launch prematurely; it'd be nice to have a more explicit "go" button or something so the player is better prepared. |
| Oct 2 22:31:13 | 47m 34s | Hunt for Emperor Littlefin | ♥ 1 | I couldn't find items 1 and 4, so I killed emperor littlefin with the star shield :P. The damage from hitting the walls felt pretty unforgiving, but once I got the heal item I could just power through everything by spamming "3". Perhaps it should have had a cool-down like some of the other items? Sound and music would have really helped, I think, in addition to some more visual variation in the cave terrain. I like the 2.5D style, and the movement felt pretty solid, although it seemed more difficult to navigate diagonal passages than vertical/horizontal ones. |
| Oct 2 23:12:16 | 41m 03s | DeskStop-30 | ♥ 1 | The game felt very complete, and I liked all of the creative little details. When I change the mouse speed to "insane" the cursor jumps off-screen to the bottom right, so it took me a while to "find" it afterwards. I'm not sure if this is just a limitation of the tool, though. |
| Oct 3 20:24:00 | 21h 11m | Let Me Breathe! | ♥ 1 | I've been trying to complete a pacifist run of this game. I think it's possible, but the more dudes you have on screen, the more likely a balloon shows up in the middle of a group of them, so it may take a bit of luck to do. The game is very satisfying, and I like the feeling of released tension at the end. I agree that an O2 meter would be helpful since it's hard to know how much time you have between O2 zones. I think with upgrades carrying over between rounds, you can kind of get away with not building up a whole lot of skill and just waiting for the upgrades to start overpowering the enemies. |
| Oct 3 21:05:16 | 41m 16s | Ability Management | ♥ 3 | Nice idea. The platforming felt solid, and the last level managed to stump me for a little while. When resetting, it might be nice to initialize the checkboxes to whatever the player last set them to, so you can get right back into the level with one click. The level with the moving spike boxes took me several tries, and it was a little frustrating to have to re-click the same ability choices before every attempt. |
| Oct 3 21:37:43 | 32m 27s | Force Field Sokoban | ♥ 1 | I like the sound design, and the idea itself is very neat. The graphics were good, but It would have been nice to have some animation as well, even just a simple sliding movement when going around the board or when the force fields close in. |
| Oct 3 23:56:28 | 2h 18m | Space Phantasy XIV - Disc 5 | ♥ 1 | Happy to report no technical issues over here on Ubuntu 20.04. Good job with the game, it feels very complete in all dimensions, which is rare, I think. |
| Oct 4 22:20:30 | 22h 24m | Whack-a-Soul | ♥ 1 | The sound, graphics, and animation gave the whole thing a "gameboy color" vibe to me, very neat! I seem to be able to cheese it by hammering in a little three-tile circle, but I'm not sure how you'd fix that. Maybe you could have the chests spawn randomly in the whole space rather than only within tiled portions (so a larger island gets you more chests), or maybe the tiles could have an "angle of repose" where a stack that's too tall automatically spreads into a wider area (sort of like the sand or liquid physics in those 2-d pixel sandbox games). |
| Oct 5 11:03:45 | 12h 43m | Burst Lifter | ♥ 1 | Oh boy was this frustrating to play! It's hard to pin down exactly what makes the last level feel so impossible, but two things I noticed: - The rotation force is absolutely tiny. For me this meant I was barely able to control the ships orientation, especially after accidentally bumping a wall. Since orientation is tied to horizontal movement, that becomes difficult to control as well. - The ship can lift the magnet, and the magnet can lift the containers, but the ship paradoxically can't lift the containers. This makes it really easy to accidentally get "pinned" under a container and need to restart. It also results in instabilities: - Landing on a container with the magnet draping over the side can cause the entire container to flip over due to the slight upward force on the magnet by the ship. - On the last level, trying to drag the container over the middle part risks it smacking the ship from behind, which causes the ship to fly forward and yank the container even harder. A good entry nonetheless! |
| Oct 5 20:42:59 | 9h 39m | Limited Heart | ♥ 1 | Hilarious and unexpected! I was also surprised at how easily the puzzles stymied me with only a handful of pieces and the same target shape each time. Unfortunately the "press space" video didn't play for me for some reason in firefox on linux, although the network pane showed the video file downloaded successfully (and I could still press space to skip it). I'd assume autoplay was the culprit but I'd allowed autoplay in the site settings and none of the other videos had any issues, so I don't know. |
| Oct 5 22:08:05 | 1h 25m | Malthus and The Rocks | ♥ 1 | Neat idea. I like the back and forth rhythm of the meteor showers and the resource management. Some of the mechanics confuse me a bit, though, like I don't quite see what the incentive is to create more houses, for example. I also ran into two issues: - After losing and restarting, some of the planet's state was carried over into the next round, like crater and building positions. - After playing for a little while, the game will sometimes get stuck in the "asteroid defense" mode with no asteroids on screen. I think it's maybe triggered by getting hit by too many asteroids? I had a strategy for a little bit where I would invest no resources into turrets and just rotate the planet so asteroid impacts always landed on an existing crater. |
| Oct 5 23:45:40 | 1h 37m | Light snakes | ♥ 1 | I had some difficulty trying to run this game. Here's the list of things I tried: 1. I tried to launch the linux build, but it depends on libglew 2.2 and I only have 2.1 (Ubuntu 20.04) 2. Not discouraged, I downloaded the windows build and tried it under wine, but I was missing the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Redistributable. I installed it in wine, but it looks like my version of wine is missing some APIs the game uses, so it crashes on launch. 3. I then tried building from source. This gave compilation errors on my machine because `Lazynput/PrivateTypes.hpp` contains a declaration of `StrHashmap<ConfigTagPresent>` but `ConfigTagPresent` is an incomplete type at that point, which is something that apparently compiles fine with some STLs but not others. Swapping the definitions of `ConfigTagBindings` and `ConfigTagPresent` fixed the error for me, and I was able to build the game. 4. I then tried to run the game, at which point it segfaulted immediately. I can't seem to get a debug build working due to linker errors with my system's libinotify, which I assume is a dependency versioning problem. 5. Finally, I tried to see if I could run the windows build under Proton, where it worked just fine. Kudos to Valve. The game is super neat! The movement feels super smooth and the whole thing has a nice feel. I wish there were a "person-v-computer" mode, though, so I could get a better feel for the mechanics. The turning radius is a bit wide, but I think that adds nicely to the challenge and could imagine getting more skilled at controlling the snake. I think it might be better if it weren't possible to accidentally clip yourself, though, since that seems to happen fairly easily when bouncing off walls while turning and somewhat limits the ability to perform tight maneuvers. |
| Oct 6 22:06:23 | 22h 20m | Mousetropolis | ♥ 1 | I had fun playing this. I especially liked the various models and the little mouse voices. It'd be kind of funny if the log sank or something once you went above a certain population level. Right now you just sort of have to give up when all the space is used up, which is a bit of an anticlimax. |
| Oct 6 22:56:17 | 49m 54s | Limited Space Rescue | ♥ 2 | This is much calmer than the other games with floaty/inertial mechanics that I've played so far. It actually felt fairly easy to me, since you can take the levels as slowly as you want, and below a certain speed there's some damping that slows down the pod and gives back some control. Maybe after each level you could give the player a star rating based on the time and number of deaths so there's more of a "goal" to shoot towards. On the other hand, even without a goal I found myself playing all the levels over again just because of how weirdly satisfying it is to control that spaceship. |
| Oct 7 11:51:33 | 12h 55m | DEFRAG-MENTOR | ♥ 1 | Not bad! I like the aesthetic, although I wish there were more animations to make things feel more lively. I also feel like there wasn't much of an incentive to buy anything other than the 10KB antiviruses. You can put them directly on the track so that they always make their shots. Maybe if that were disallowed and the mines were a little cheaper, that might encourage buying more of the alternative options. |
| Oct 7 12:32:43 | 41m 10s | If I Fits, I Sits! | ♥ 1 | I love how seamless and "finished" it feels. That, combined with the unique idea and fun gameplay make this just great, overall! |
| Oct 7 13:32:25 | 59m 42s | Trash Compactor | ♥ 0 | There's a message here with the trash compactor crushing so many recycling containers, but I'm not sure what it is... Interesting take on 2048! It seems somewhat easier than the original in that pressing an arrow key will spawn new items regardless of whether anything actually moved, which allows you to avoid having to slide things away from the "hot corner" and risk something spawning there. It would have been really nice to have a sliding animation, though, since it can be disorienting when items move and spawn at the same time. It would have also been great to have some sound to accompany the little smoke animation! |
| Oct 7 14:30:14 | 57m 49s | Loot Goblin | ♥ 1 | I liked the calm atmosphere: the soft colors, gentle music, and self-paced gameplay. The art was very clean. I think being able to replay the same level over and over again kind of breaks the game, since you can get an arbitrarily high score that way even when just mashing "take" and ignoring the value and weight of all the items. I didn't "get" the gameplay until after I voluntarily limited myself to one go at each level. Once I did that, it felt much more balanced. |
| Oct 7 17:05:08 | 2h 34m | Ex Automata | ♥ 1 | This sucked me in for about an hour until I forced myself to stop. I think I could see myself dumping a very unhealthy amount of time into this, so congratulations. I especially like that it's (apparently) all deterministic, so it really should be possible to figure out all of the rules with enough patience. The visuals are also very beautiful. I wanted to confirm some of my guesses, so I downloaded the source code to check, and it was interesting to see what I got right vs the things I missed that were staring me in the face. I'm not quite sure how one would go about building your game from the source code, however. I think it's a Unity game? If so a lot of the project files seem to be missing from your dropbox link. |
| Oct 7 18:28:35 | 1h 23m | Sheep Birder | ♥ 2 | The mechanics remind me a lot of this old PC game: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(video_game%29) Although it's much harder to control the sheep in yours on account of the birds (and because in Sheep they had a "grouping" mechanic where the sheep would tend to stay near one another). I think the core gameplay here is really solid, and I like the way the vases, scarecrows, and fields add to the game, but I wish there were more variation in the levels themselves. Something like this I think would benefit greatly from deliberate level design rather than relying on random generation. I also seemed to run into an issue in later levels where a large number of sheep would get stuck near the middle of the screen and remain uninfluenced by the crows. |
| Oct 7 20:41:49 | 2h 13m | NarrowLabs Rumble | ♥ 1 | I haven't seen any FPSs so far, and this one is quite fun! It took me a few tries to get through the whole thing, which to me is about the right level of difficulty for a game of this size. The robot models were cool, and the space felt tight and cluttered, which believe was intentional. I agree with the other commenters that a crosshair and a sound when the bullets impact the other robots would be helpful. The robots also seem to make a beeline for the player, which is unfortunate because rather than enter the rooms to fight them I would get swarmed immediately and resort to slowly backing down the hallway while shooting and dodging. Maybe the robots could be "powered off" when the door opens, and "power on" once the player is well within the room? |
| Oct 7 21:25:50 | 44m 01s | A small town | ♥ 1 | The cowboy capsules were hilarious, and this is one of the most fun compo games I've played so far. I also got shot at by flying cowboys, but I laughed so hard when it happened I feel like they should be left in ("Wait, what? where is he!?" \*BANG\* \*play field zooms out to reveal jiggling sky cowboy\*). |
| Oct 7 21:55:51 | 30m 01s | Elevators Go Boink | ♥ 1 | Hilarious! Sadly I couldn't find my character in the bedlam (the text in the top right distracted me long enough to lose track), so I restarted and gave it another go while paying better attention. It also turns out you can just wait to press space the first time until after you've already reached the button, which makes the whole thing a lot easier :P. Some have complained about the controls but to me they were part of the fun. Definitely needs sound! |
| Oct 7 22:24:24 | 28m 33s | KosmoPod | ♥ 1 | Other people are complaining about the web version missing the walkable tiles, but it seemed to render fine for me at least. I liked the models and sounds. I would have expected "sci-fi" type button panels and crates, but I think having everything just be basic furniture is better: it's like the pod is the little robot's studio apartment. I think the controls are a bit weird, though, and found myself getting turned around a lot of the time. Maybe something better would be traditional arrow-key movement and then shift+arrow for the attract action? |
| Oct 8 13:58:42 | 15h 34m | Happy Lockin' | ♥ 1 | Fun! There are a bunch of different ideas here, and I think they work well together. The music did a lot to set the mood, and was fun to listen to. There were a few places where I wanted to use the bouncing bullet mechanic to get an enemy from afar, but the bullets rarely ever seemed to reach, unfortunately. |
| Oct 8 14:38:15 | 39m 33s | Jurassic escape | ♥ 2 | Not bad for a first game! Ludum Dare is kind of the "hard mode" way to learn game development, I think. Others have mentioned the lack of diagonal movement, but I want to point out something that I think is also super important: inertial movement. Basically, instead of linking arrow key presses to velocity (displacement per frame), you want to link them to acceleration (change in velocity per frame). To cap the player speed at a maximum value, you would also need to add a damping acceleration (i.e. acceleration opposite the direction of movement). The code for these things is quite simple but has a massive positive impact on "game feel" not just because of the added realism, but also because it gives keyboard-using players better control over the player position. |
| Oct 8 16:09:53 | 1h 31m | Unlimited space | ♥ 1 | I like the creative use of emoji for game UI, and I chuckled at the similarities between the various passenger types and the emojis used to represent them. Some animation would really help this, I think. Moving between squares is discrete and instantaneous, for example, which somewhat breaks the illusion of traveling around in a large space. |
| Oct 8 19:52:32 | 3h 42m | Fairy Tale 2: Big Trouble in Pixie Hollow | ♥ 2 | This was a challenging puzzle, and took me a couple tries to beat (especially since at first I didn't realize there was slightly more space there when you zoom out). One thing that confused me was that it looks like the fairies aren't pulling everything out of storage on each turn, even when the giant is still hungry. For example, on hard mode I had 420 satiation, 450 storage, and four fully-grown plots on the last turn, which I would think would have been a win, but the fairies didn't pull anything out of storage and the giant died anyway. |
| Oct 8 23:26:59 | 3h 34m | Rectangular rhythm selection game | ♥ 1 | I like the gradual build-up. I felt like I had a pretty solid understanding of the rules as they were introduced, which I think allowed the later levels to be much more exciting/stressful than would have otherwise been possible. In the rotating level for some reason I thought the x0s applied to the whole score and not the amount added, so I would take drastic measures to avoid them and keep hitting the -10k accidentally. I'm also curious what the rotating levels are like for different aspect ratios. On my 16:9 monitor it took a while to learn that putting boxes near the left and right meant "losing control" of them when the play field rotated 90 degrees. |
| Oct 9 21:45:08 | 22h 18m | PSI | ♥ 2 | The movement felt really weird to me, almost like the blasts weren't pushing on the jar's center of mass. The thing would absolutely refuse to roll, preferring instead to skid along its main axis or tip end-over-end. Was this intentional? The sound design worked quite well, I think, and the monochrome visual aesthetic was an interesting choice. |
| Oct 10 21:29:48 | 23h 44m | Space: 10000km | ♥ 1 | This is wonderfully detailed for having been created in such a short time. The only thing I can think to recommend is to maybe have some sort of on-screen prompt with the controls. I kept trying to use LMB to interact with everything before I came back to read the game description. |
| Oct 11 21:45:20 | 24h 15m | Ultimate Wall Dropper | ♥ 0 | The audience reminds me of the little crowd of miis that would cheer you on while playing wii sports resort. I had trouble figuring out a good strategy for defeating the AIs. For the first two I used the "shove to the end of the field and punch once" strategy, while for the last few I just spammed the "fast punch" and prayed my attacks would be be slightly faster than theirs. I think it'd be nice to have some more agency: - Maybe the AIs could telegraph their attacks so the player can predict what would be the best next move - Or maybe a successful block could stun the AI long enough for a counter-strike - like in the fencing game in wii sports resort :D |
| Oct 12 21:04:52 | 23h 19m | Cabbage World | ♥ 0 | Neat! It's a shame there don't seem to be enough people here to really test this out. Maybe you should schedule times in the game description for everyone to go online at once. It'd also be nice to have some keyboard controls for those of us on laptops/desktops. :P |
| Oct 13 19:51:12 | 22h 46m | Indcosmus | ♥ 1 | I think all of the different enemy types worked really well together. The exploding slimes were especially unique, and I like how they forced me to re-adjust my jumps mid-air based on how the pieces landed. Some people are saying it was too hard, but I think the overall difficulty was about right. |
| Oct 14 17:49:54 | 21h 58m | Limitris | ♥ 1 | Fantastic idea, I feel like the game incentivizes you to do the _opposite_ of what you have to do in tetris: keep the blocks/holes spaced out from one another so you can recognize their shapes when you're given an opportunity to convert them back to flat land. I think I found an exploit, though: limitris_score.png My strategy: limitris_exploit.png The ghosts move slowly enough that you can just kite them around in the middle :P. |
| Oct 14 18:36:38 | 46m 44s | Stone Heart | ♥ 1 | The time pressure was a bit of a surprise; I guess I was expecting more of a "cautious exploration"-type experience than a mad dash to the center. The controls felt super solid, though, and it's a good entry overall. |
| Oct 14 19:55:27 | 1h 18m | Negative Space | ♥ 1 | The concept works quite well. While the text-based graphics are a unique approach, I think a little sound and animation would go a long way. As-is, I might as well be playing over ssh (then again, maybe a terminal-based version of this wouldn't be such a bad idea...). |
| Oct 14 23:13:13 | 3h 17m | Rough Weather | ♥ 1 | I liked the attention to detail in the graphics, sounds, and animations. I couldn't quite figure out the strategy to get past the pumpkin things without dying, but the checkpoint system was very forgiving so I got to see the ending anyway :) |
| Oct 15 12:30:26 | 13h 17m | Space Stitcher | ♥ 1 | I'll be the dissenting voice and say I liked the difficulty curve on this one. It trades quantity of levels for the amount of satisfaction you get from solving each one. This is a good set of puzzles, the platforming is solid, and I like the little animated astronaut made of circles. The music felt a bit repetitive after a while, but I think the other sounds worked well. |
| Oct 15 13:20:15 | 49m 49s | Clear the space | ♥ 1 | Major points have all been ticked off, so I'll add a few minor ones: - I like the room switching animation, and that you also were able to use it for the main menu as well. - The music could use some work; to my ears it just sounds like random notes on the pentatonic scale. - I think the game could benefit from some sort of random variation: - Maybe some walls could be indestructible? - Or maybe rather than needing to build the recyclers and chargers, they're distributed around the map and need to be discovered? - Perhaps some variation in the number of red pellets per room so it isn't exactly enough to build one new thing each time? |
| Oct 15 15:28:11 | 2h 07m | Brainspace | ♥ 1 | Engrossing and educational! It's kind of meta that the game is training my personal neural network to understand how neural networks work. It'd be nice to have some more visual understanding of what's going on, though, since I'm often in a situation where I've come up with a wrong answer but have no clue _why_ it's wrong. Maybe some numbers or shaded cells or something so I can see what the weights are or what data looks like when it passes through the nodes. Some other ideas: - I think there should be a "response function" dropdown on the "layer" node rather than just a "response function" node, since I'm almost always going to add one after each layer. - Maybe an option to manually set NN weights? I'm often desperate to know whether what I've built is just training poorly or if it's not capable of representing the solution at all, and I think a way to input my own weights would help with that. Also: Since it's possible to create an exhaustive list of test cases for some of these challenges, it'd be interesting to see what would happen if you threw _literally everything_ into the training data and tried to make a neural network that's 100% correct. |
| Oct 15 16:44:22 | 1h 16m | Plate of War | ♥ 1 | Addicting! I like the little noise the bugs make when they die. It would be nice if the larger "boss" bug had a health readout or something. I couldn't tell while fighting it if I was dealing large amounts of damage or if I needed to try another strategy. |
| Oct 15 20:16:54 | 3h 32m | Volatile Village | ♥ 1 | It took me a few attempts to notice that studying how to adventure gives more experience than actually adventuring :P I think this is great, and surprisingly well-balanced for something made in such a short time. The little building-placement puzzle worked well with the other game elements and didn't feel shoehorned in. I kind of wish I had more of an idea why certain adventures ended in failure, though. It'd be really cool if there were a mini simulation of the adventure, even if only in text form, to make it clear what's happening. Alternatively, maybe the dungeons could come with descriptions of the kinds of items/abilities which would help in each, or even a percent likelihood of success. As-is I was mostly guessing whether each dungeon would be worth attempting, and just "maxing everything out and praying" on the final one. |
| Oct 15 21:55:19 | 1h 38m | Matrioshka Containment | ♥ 1 | I love the aesthetic and ambient music. The game is very forgiving towards people like me who aren't very familiar with 6DOF shooters (perhaps a bit _too_ forgiving). You mentioned in a comment that there's an "invert-y" option on the pause menu, but I couldn't find it, even though I was running the exe version. |
| Oct 18 20:55:53 | 71h 00m | Distant Horizons | ♥ 1 | Not a bad concept. It was a little frustrating to have movement input be blocked on the square's sliding animation. If you want the player to be slow when moving around, then it may be better to either: 1. use continuous movement, rather than grid-based movement 1. let me hold down the movement buttons so I'm not forced to impatiently mash them or 1. have the buttons control an on-screen cursor towards which the little square is constantly moving |
