Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Feedback comment stats → pkenney

pkenney

Feedback comments for LD54

pkenney's games and stats for all events →

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		pkenney's comment
Oct 11 01:42:08		Spectra	♥ 2	I made it to 54.5s, just after the square-box mini-boss. Wow, this had a great vibe! The cycling colors, the shifting shapes, the tight controls and the chunky graphics all really came together nicely. If this had great crunchy sfx it would have really gone to 11. I think I would have played more if the restart loop didn't go so far backwards on hit, but maybe it had to be that way. Difficulty was well-balanced though. Game's telegraphing did a great job of letting me see a moment ahead, and yet still created many VERY close calls. There was also a nice non-uniform pacing that emerged... if I stayed on top of keeping everything clean, I could keep it under control. But once I missed one thing, it threatened to snowball.... until I cleaned up again and got back to baseline. Then, the game had waves that were tougher that would force such spikes on me even if I didn't mess up, so the pacing was never flat. Well done, really nice entry!
Oct 11 01:52:10	10m 02s	Turtle Gatling	♥ 1	WOW those guys are tough stuff! Really felt the theme with my huge body on the tiny screen, and THEN THE BULLETS! Slayed some bomber guys but always boxed myself in eventually. Cool idea and it was fun to blast away.
Oct 11 02:36:22	44m 12s	Super Shop Keeper Turbo	♥ 1	WOW What an entry. So many things I like about it, and it all really comes together nicely into a great package. This felt like a complete game covering all the bases. The music was a real stand-out, with strong sfx as well. I was already impressed with the level one theme, but then you topped it with that jammin sax tune on level two, and brought it home with the creepy finale song to complement the blinking eyes and moments of terror like this: super-shop-terror.png The character animation really worked well and added a lot to the feel of playing. Controls were solid -- sometimes the box-grab on the corner didn't quite work how I expected (there's a zone where you wiff if you're either TOO far into the platform, or maybe if you start too close and are already overlapping as you enter?) But for such a tricky mechanic, I was impressed that it worked very intuitively. Levels were tough but not unfair, and the threat of losing all my items made it worth it when I nailed it. I accidentally bounced up into the exit of level two right away in my first play through, and the song/feel of that level was something I had to go back and experience, so I did another play through. super-shop-victory.png The fact that I could progress without a full kit also helped take the edge off frustration with some of the blind-faith jumps and other tricky parts. When I fell down the well with the bounce-walls, I was like "COME ON NOW" but actually I nailed the ascent on my first try, another cool moment. Congrats on this entry, I think it's really good.
Oct 11 02:51:10	14m 48s	LD54 - Limipea	♥ 2	I really liked the overall vibe, the graphics and music were nice and made me want to jump right into the game. The fast fluid movement was also nice. The big-commit jump was interesting. Sometimes it really worked and created a nice feeling of fluid, powerful movement. But other times I felt a bit disconnected from myself and out of control. I couldn't tell when I was successfully hitting the enemy, or when they were hitting me. I wanted to look ahead at the enemy, but also wanted to look over where I was jumping to, but also wanted to look down. I was never really able to fully process the information, and often was surprised that I had an enemy chewing on my leg or when I fell into a hole in the ground. There's a lot of very good potential here and it could be extremely cool. There's just something left to work out about how the perception and movement flows for the player to really capitalize on the strong idea and well-done vibe. I played a bunch, though, and enjoyed it -- nice work!
Oct 12 01:17:05	22h 25m	Boxed Boxes	♥ 1	Very nice game! Made me think back on some of those talks from Jon Blow where he talks about a designer creating the rules and then exploring variations on them to learn what's possible, and communicating what they've learned to the player through puzzles. I especially started to feel that way when the dotted-boxes that you are NOT inside could be pushed to pass through most solid matter but not the grey blocks, so you see them from a whole new angle. Very cool stuff that kept revealing interesting new things throughout. The only splinter I had was the gamefeel of the double-jump, which I never got fluid at, but which became core to some of the puzzles later in the game. The revelation of trapping a dotted-box to walljump off was a cool moment, but the pleasure of those puzzles was slightly diminished by the way that wall-jumping fails took me out of the flow state. Fortunately I could usually jump spam past it. Here's a montage of the times I got stuck... which somehow didn't actually bother me, just seemed sort of funny. BoxBox-Stuck.png Generally the feel was really nice, and the mechanics were intuitive. Respect for not having to use any text to explain anything, I really appreciate that approach. Nice fully-explore novel mechanic right on theme... well done.
Oct 12 02:28:15	1h 11m	Cybermaze	♥ 1	Great foundation for an entry here, but felt like you didn't get a chance to capitalize on where it was going. The music and graphics are nice, and the combat feels solid with the hitflash, knockback, and the nice big colliders. You got that core idea and the polish/control nice. Sorry you ran out of time! I got to the You Win, and then decided to see if I could delete myself from my own memory. Almost... cybermaze-delete.png
Oct 12 02:49:37	21m 22s	Sewer Survey	♥ 0	Well THAT certainly ran a wave of chills down my spine. I knew it was going to be that way, too. Still worked. The atmosphere and the pacing (and the dead .. possum?) got me into the mood. Lulled me into a zone where I can get whalloped and have it pay off. Great creepy vibe. If I could tweak one thing it would be to reduce the brightness of the flashight hitting the side of a nearby wall, which made the edge of my screen uncomfortably bright.
Oct 12 03:01:13	11m 36s	Space Shark Inc.	♥ 1	Nice little distopian nightmare/adventure! I got a few of the endings but I wasn't good enough at dodging to get what I think we all wanted. Background music and art were enjoyable. The small play area made it worth exploring and since you can only explore some directions in one life it wasn't even bad to get game over except in fights. Flying felt pretty good. It was "just" a click-to-go-there scheme, but something about the peppy motion and the little wake of circles really sold it being a ship for me, and I found it pleasant to fly around. Unique entry, nice job!
Oct 12 05:20:28	2h 19m	Nuclear Arms 9: Tower of Time	♥ 2	MELTDOWN! Didn't take me six hours this time, either. I'll admit I was initially worried. Of course I was hoping you'd enter for 54, but, see, my toddler drooled milk into my mouse (don't ask) and it's only been registering left-clicks about 80% of the time ever since. So I figured it would be challenge-mode-plus this time. Except that you made it a keyboard-friendly control scheme! What could go wrong?? Barrels is what. I got mopped up hard by the barrels. They even taunted me, where one barrel appeared in the center, and then just as I was about to manu- manouv- maneuver (man my French is bad, is that your part of Canada? Did I ever tell you about the time I went to a house party in Montreal and they had converted their living room into a halfpipe? You guys are nuts, I love it) into position to kill it, another barrel popped exactly into the spot left-of-center. I had all the time in the world, but this is a total barrel-lock: every space will take damage, and no space can clear them. Damn those bears! After some surfing I realized it wasn't the bears, it was those pesky robots. I started clearing them first, and that cleared the way to victory. Boss had me worried and was a narrow battle, but I did take him down the first time. His trash-fist homage move that limited my space was a lot to handle, nice touch. It totally boxed me in a few times, and if I didn't have some of the defensive mutation (which I ignored my first few runs) then I don't think I could have soaked up the hits to win. Overall this was very cool, especially after I settled into the pattern of how I wanted to play. In the past I have sort of enjoyed the megaman battle-network formula, but it never fully clicked for me. An example is "One Step from Eden" an indie game that seems like I should love it: roguelike deckbuilder meets battle network. But it's totally overwhelming! I just can't think my moves through, or even multi-task dodging with reading the "next card" and processing what it means in time to act. As a result every opportunity slips by in a blur and I am not left with that so-important roguelike feeling that losing was all my fault. But I had a different experience with your game. It took a couple of surfs, but I figured out that I can use the 'E' queue menu/pause moment to plan the next few seconds of battle carefully. I even learned that the UI has some limited support for keyboard input, and if you realllly look carefully you can see that there is a selection which you can move around via WASD and activate with return. So I would pause, line up my next few moves, and think "okay go 1 left then drop the barrel, then move up and double-spam." And this would actually work most of the time! That's really the first time one of these battle-network variants has let me STOP AND THINK and plan, while still also retaining some of that sweet "oh shit oh shit" realtime dodging fun. Really nice work!
Oct 14 21:44:51	64h 24m	Beach Brawl	♥ 2	Top score 65. I started doing better once I realized my health and my sandwich count are different, so I started by standing away from the sandwiches and firing, then once I was almost done I stood over the last sandwich to bodyblock with my health. That way I didn't die until I really had just one resource left. Simple gameplay, but it's short and quick to retry with cute art, and a jammin little tune, did you make original music? Very nice.
Oct 17 03:13:34	53h 28m	Depthe	♥ 1	Completed the game, but with only 5 of the apples, 32 deaths, just under a half hour. This game really drew me in. The art, sounds, music, and mechanics all come together into a really cohesive experience -- very well done! The game does a masterful job of revealing the rules through "oh it must be like that" and not having to explain itself. And I can always experiment through trial and error. Took a few experiments to get down with how moving onto a currently-showing hazard is okay, for example stepping onto a fully-extended spike, is okay because the hazard will cycle away before you step. Snakes were the only tricky bit because stepping into them is NOT okay if you step in toothward, which took a few experiments to get right (did I get it right?) I know from experience that the timing of multiple "simultaneous" turn-based actors moving on a grid like this are NOT in fact simultaneous, and that different orders-of-execution of the actors can cause certain subtle counter-intuitive side effects... but this game did a great job of sidestepping that problem and making it super easy to pick up and play. Only timing weirdness corner case I was able to generate was moving into a ladder as a snake was going to bounce off a wall and enter the same space. I think both the level-complete AND the snake-killed-you executed, because I climbed up the ladder, heard myself die, and started the next level with a skull underneath me on the starting square: Depthe-Skull.png Even the drag-move controls, as opposed to WASD, ended up a nice choice. In these plan-then-execute games I often find the lag of animations annoying if I'm spamming WASD controls to execute a plan, and the mouse-move forced me to be as slow as the animation, which sidestepped this problem, too. With such nice polish and zero splinters, I really ended up enjoying my time with this game and played the whole thing in a trance. Very well done. Did you make all the sounds and music, too? I know it's jam so either way is fine, just curious. I rated you for "yes" because there was no credit to any sourced sounds/music. If so, really nicely done, and if not, really nicely selected. They were a great fit.
Oct 17 03:22:53	9m 19s	Ghosts	♥ 1	I played this blind without reading instructions, which I prefer to do. Nice job with the music and vibe. Leaving "upbeat" playing while I type comments. I lost the first run, it was a cool feeling to start to notice "wait a minute, is this screen getting dimmer? YEP!" So I started to perceive the risk, and then sure enough, game over. On my second run I was more careful to keep my pace up and managed to get all of the ghosts. This entry was simple in terms of the features presented, with just a few button presses and some basic traversal of space driving some variables, but the art music and vibe made a lot of what was there. Nice job! Wait, reading the instructions now, I see there's a map? I didn't use it, I think I enjoyed the feeling of being lost and not being able to systematically explore that well.
Oct 17 03:43:47	20m 54s	BLOCKO 2000 DELUX MEGA PULSAR BIG THING XTREME..! .. Maybe not.. .. .	♥ 1	Savage little puzzler, in a good way. Brutality of no "undo" or "disconnect last block" at first felt like no big deal. A few puzzles later it was a big setback. Later I realized it was the heart of the late-game puzzles. Interesting feeling how that snuck up on me. But it made me feel clever toward the end, when I did some big planning and solved a couple of levels with no mistakes, or just a dexterity mistake. Usually WASD grid movement with a plan-then-execute paradigm rams me into the frustration of trying to play faster than the animations, which means the game is dropping my inputs. This game does drop inputs if you input them too quickly (try a double-tap or a three-button-roll if you don't know what I mean) but the pace of the animation is such that it was almost never actually a splinter in the gamefeel here, so good compromise between smoothness-imparting animations while still being brisk enough to respect most quick inputs! I finished the whole game, and felt like it was just the right length. Actually, I probably could have played a few more puzzles if a new element was introduced and the music had a little more variance. Nice core idea and solid execution, well done.
Oct 17 03:54:17	10m 30s	Deckit	♥ 1	I had fun smashing my cars into the others trying to knock them into the water... especially once I got my BUS out! Look out, here I come! All I needed was a bit of celebration/credit when I knocked "enemy" cars into the water and I think I could have played even more. I never understood what the "percent" was counting toward or why game over came, but it didn't seem like that mattered too much, because I could just have fun either smashing people off, or trying to fill the area with my cars.
Oct 17 05:35:28	1h 41m	Unlimited MACE	♥ 1	I dig the frantic pace! It's too much going on with too little feedback and too-tiny bullets and too-fast turning for me to care about specific surgical details and instead I just leap into the fray and enjoy the wild ride. The combination of absurdly fast turns and the swinging mace and the overwhelming horde of enemies really integrated nicely. And the music captured that flowy state of play very well. Add to that the quick retry and the fact that the game did not waste time grinding back up to difficulty, and it was easy to play "one more time." I don't think I ever got very good, but I enjoyed my time.
Oct 18 03:37:06	22h 01m	One Step Further	♥ 0	I really liked the nodes-and-lines art style! I would have enjoyed some additional feedback about the effect of my actions.
Oct 18 03:56:36	19m 30s	Get Off My Seat!	♥ 1	I lasted for 132 seconds, during which I came to believe the following: This game is an exploration of the importance of, but also the ultimate futility of, first-strike doctrine. All I needed was room to sit in peace, but if I was not extremely aggressive then my right to space would be trampled. The only way to take a mere sufficience of space for myself was to aggressively and constantly take ALL available space for myself, mercilessly stomping faceless dehumanized neighbors. No friendliness here, friend - we all know where that leads. Instead I will SMASH YOU and take this entire bench, nay entire subway car, nay the entire WORLD for myself! Until my neighbors-turned-enemies amassed against me in such a large and relentless horde that no amount of frantic aggressive button-mashing could hold them back from smothering my rights and snuffing my candle. Well, man was made to mourn. Thank god for that beautiful crunchy sound effect. Interesting entry - I enjoyed.
Oct 18 04:18:05	21m 29s	Gridlock: A Tiny RTS	♥ 2	RIP tastosis but at least RTS is still alive! This is such a fully-realized but still jam-scoped entry. Really well done. Everything is here, from the plot to the unit controls/types, great voice work for each unit (plus overall story). Dropped me right into the game, let me explore, gave me some moments of feeling like I dominated and some moments of worrying I was about to get overrun... And then just before anything got stale the game was over. Just right. Excellent work.
Oct 18 04:34:37	16m 32s	Ludum Dare Solid: Limited Space Action	♥ 1	Nice job! Great music, with cohesive clear art and sfx. More importantly, I think you threaded the needle on the difficulty. There was a lot of memorization of moves and special blind squares I had to remember to stand on in certain moments, and there were several times I almost ragequit the game, but the feeling of accomplishment stayed just ahead of the difficulty, and the aesthetics and small levels carried me through the moments where I nearly lost heart. I ended up playing the whole game, and I thought it was the perfect length. If I could tweak one thing, it would be a slightly-faster restart on death. Very nicely done.
Oct 18 04:52:46	18m 09s	Smasher	♥ 3	Fabulous polish! Art, music, and voice-acting were all super-impressive.
Oct 18 05:06:00	13m 14s	LazerPhaser	♥ 1	I enjoyed these puzzles. I really liked the music, although the bass did eventually wear out its welcome, I think exacerbated by the high-pitched laser sound which was also repeating a lot. The smooth-move animation was a nice touch, and it was interesting that I couldn't rotate in place, which had ramifications for how I needed to do my setup. Then there was the timing issue of placing the mirrors and quickly spinning then in the breaks between laser shots. Created an interesting mix of realtime and grid-step puzzle feel.
Oct 18 05:24:44	18m 44s	Perse Auki Aavikolla	♥ 2	NAILED the aesthetic, great job. The cover art, the slapping music, and those beautiful in-game sprites and backgrounds are all really nice. Gameplay controls felt solid, and it was nice that I could kill by either ramming or shooting. I think I must have missed how to loop into enough gas to keep the game going. My games often felt like they ended suddenly... even the game where I thought, wow, I am getting so much gas this time, I will live forev-GAMEOVER?! It didn't matter that much though, because I could just hop back into the fray and keep fighting. I really did wish that I could just restart with the keyboard, and not have to switch over to use the mouse to click through multiple menu screens in this keyboard-only game. I probably would have played twice as long if I could just hit R to restart a new round instantly after viewing my gameover/score. It sounds like a small thing, but I was dying a LOT so I guess that restart loop really impacted me a lot more than the dev getting 666 points! ;) Overall very nice job. Super impressed by the polish and variety of features here.
Oct 20 15:07:23	57h 42m	Daydreams	♥ 2	Congrats on hitting a checkpoint in time for the Extra so that you can keep your LD streak going, you just hit 10 straight. I can confirm that the rating-stars are shown for your entry. But I won't rate b/c I didn't play -- didn't have time for trying to be an official pony!