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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Ava Skoog's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 18 11:08:13 | Summonion | ♥ 3 | "GET GOOD, GET GET GET GOOD GOOD, GET GOOD, GET GET GOOD" was all I could hear the kid saying as I was struggling time after time with the final level :') I finally beat it tho and it was worth it for that ending. ``` ha ha ha ha ha ha ``` Liked this a lot, made me laugh a bunch! Music is good and I like the mouth sounds. And yeah, third level was difficult but not too bad. I did initially not realise mouse and character were completely separate and thought I had to move the character between spots before placing things there but I got it soon enough. Slingshotting felt good! I did seem to get stuck on the li'l onions sometimes which was a disaster when trying to avoid rocks, think I would've preferred no collision. All in all probably the best type of game to make for a jam: simple but polished and a lot of fun! Maybe one day I'll learn too B) | |
| Apr 18 13:15:29 | 2h 07m | Eye for Mischief | ♥ 4 | Super cute and super polished! Did feel a bit easy. Maybe HP should've been a little less abundant. The way the buttons change after beating the game was fun. Nice to see so much work put into the menus, instructions, credits, all of that. Nice sounds and graphics in game too. Honestly difficult to add a lot when there isn't really much to criticise, very cool game :) |
| Apr 22 12:03:34 | 94h 48m | Worst Day in Hell | ♥ 0 | I feel so thick, but I'm completely stuck! After Leah the fourth I'm completely unable to find anywhere new to go to. I really want to finish this so any hint would be appreciated :( |
| Apr 26 21:37:00 | 105h 33m | A Heavy Crown | ♥ 1 | This was fun (and funny)! :) Took a while to go through and explore all the options. Was a little unsure about the differences between the general and the sergeant at first, but realised accidentally later that there were tooltips, so would be good to mention those in the description. The way you wrote it, playing many times was also fun in that you got to see things in a new light, like seeing what the bishop had to say about the assassination after learning from the sarge that the church was behind it. No perfect route without any minuses, correct? Also seemed like the sarge wasn't the best option for anything? Still really cool how you took the time to figure out what each character would do in each situation. Fair amount of work for compo! The voice acting was a lot of fun too. I only wish I got to see more of the king, as the text box was covering him a bit :') Agree with others that the font was a bit hard to read (maybe should've used it only for the titles and a more standard serif for the rest) but overall I liked the UI, like the hover effect on the cards. Nicely done! |
| Apr 26 21:53:13 | 16m 13s | A Long Hello | ♥ 1 | Big on the mood, very unsettling backstory and in-game narrative alike. Really good music. Quite similar to your previous LD game but despite what's been said in the comments I felt this one was easier to navigate actually. Still, I did not find the hidden keys right away, I like how you did those. And how you represented things one screen at a time like the staircases. I like the noisy graphics. The portraits are again very unsettling in this context but nicely drawn. Don't have a lot to add, nicely done. |
| Apr 29 10:37:31 | 60h 44m | Evocation | ♥ 2 | Hey, finally got around to it, sorry for the delay! Very unnerving, very well made. Feel like there were some clues as to why it was so unnerving, still pondering. Really impressed with how much stuff there was, with all the drawings and even voice acting! You did a great job of setting the mood immediately on the title screen. I started out playing on speakers and the cat on my desk got very startled, only to run away altogether once I started playing and there was knocking. I put on headphones after that which probably enhanced the experience anyway! The intensity of some of the voice lines was great. The puzzles themselves were good. You did a good job translating and explaining them for everybody but knowing some runes and Slavic words beforehand I was already guessing at stuff which was intriguing. You also got me looking up and learning some new things afterwards. I did figure the secret ending out after learning that it existed, so that felt good! Trying some of the not-so-nice paths did not feel good (pressing the slab down) but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything. In terms of criticism, I'd hoped to have to input the longer combined spells by myself and not just the short ones. I was even taking notes on a piece of paper only to end up not needing them, which was a little disappointing :') But overall I can't criticise much, it was really good! |
| Apr 29 10:55:29 | 17m 58s | Honse | ♥ 1 | Fun and funny! Fortunately for me but perhaps unfortunately for you in terms of seeing first-time reactions I'd already seen the game on stream so I kind of knew what to expect and ended up doing well enough on my first time that I was able to play for about 10 minutes and get 51 points π The graphics are nice and it's fun to see the game within a game and even the stuff on the TV. I'm sure you're well aware of the jank (like the boy sometimes ending up in a weird position on the chair and the mum aligning with the angle of the stairs) but I don't even know if it's a negative for such a humour-based game! Falling out of the house I'd say is actually bad tho, but luckily it didn't happen to me. The controls are wonky but workable. I mainly just turned with the mouse and pressed forward at all times, or sometimes backward if that was faster! I don't know what to think about the fact that the stuff on the plates and the stuff in the toilet both look the same but I'll settle on mum throwing excess leftovers in the bowl because the sink is full...... Audio is fun. I like hearing the dog! It's so neat that the soundtrack is actually coming from the computer and how that helps you know when to run back when you get the danger beeps. The poster on the wall to explain the game on the PC is also such a neat "diegetic" thing, if that's the right word. I'm assuming there's no actual win condition and the goal is just to get the highest score, which is very fitting for a game featuring an arcade-style game inside. Liked this one a lot :) |
| May 1 12:50:42 | 49h 55m | Penguinology | ♥ 1 | Played twice and read all the comments so I'm satisfied I didn't miss anything hidden... I hope! Really felt like I was onto something when I climbed up the level and checked behind it but nope, for sure? π Regardless, fun and a little scary! Nice effects. Cool mood. Made me wonder... π§ |
| May 1 13:07:30 | 16m 48s | Do NOT Summon the Kraken | ♥ 1 | Amazing! Even with three people this is super impressive for a jam. It wasn't very difficult but the game is so full of character, atmosphere, writing, voice acting, music (even for the musician), ship tilting back and forth, lighting... All the character designs! And a bit funny. Very cool. My main criticism would be the controls, or maybe just the description of them: I wasn't able to get keyboard (E or enter) to work reliably for advancing dialogues but luckily I figured out the mouse works too. You should add that to the list of controls C: Overall really impressive! |
| May 1 13:47:52 | 40m 22s | The Ritual | ♥ 2 | I mastered the arts and was punished! I still can't believe it's a compo game, and made by you only. It's too good. Super polished, sounds and looks and feels great, and the hint progression is really good, self-explanatory to begin with but quickly forcing you to have to think for yourself quite a bit. I felt so clever when I figured out how to get the dark goat :') I guess there's only a "bad ending" where I was mean to all the creatures, since I don't even know why I was stabbing them, but mechanically this was super satisfying. My only complaints are that 1) the book doesn't stay on the page you left it, and 2) you made me spend 15 minutes trying to figure out meaningless (I think but please tell me otherwise!) tengwar :'( But seriously, wow. I'm so impressed, and I had so much fun. |
| May 1 15:01:38 | 1h 13m | Crypt Decrypt | ♥ 0 | It's cool! I got stuck unfortunately, and I see I'm not the only one :( I did make it past level one, but level two stumped me. I tried all sorts... 1.PNG 2.PNG 3.PNG Would be great to get a hint on how to get further. Regardless, I'll rate what I did get to experience so far! Nice musi. I see you mentioned a menu musician and someone on sound effects in the description, but did you not make the level music and is that why you opted out of the audio category? I like it all anyhow. There's a nice sombre mood to the whole thing with the music and the purples. Really nice sprites. Cute skeletons! Neat animations. Like others have said, the mechanics felt a little janky. Difficult to get skeletons where you wanted, weird that the player character can push the crates at all but barely (but I saw in the comments that was because you were struggling with the physics). The icons/buttons to focus on spawned skeletons stuck around after they despawned? I did run into some weird bug on the first level and had to restart the game because the button to open the gate didn't work after I respawned at the checkpoint. I also randomly got 5 bones a single time but it never happened again π I really did like what little I was able to play however, and I never got far enough to see the catapult in action, so it would be great if I could get a hint/explanation of level two and figure it out! Some issues, but there's definitely a lot of nice stuff here :) |
| May 1 15:15:07 | 13m 29s | The Art of Pixel Summoning (TAPS) | ♥ 1 | I won! Really like the concept. In practice it was a bit confusing to tell, using common sense, what some of them were supposed to be, but after a while I started picking up on the game's own logic I felt. Like how the half spheres seemed to just mean "pure essence of element" unless I misunderstood that after all π I like that it was randomised since I had to replay a few times before I got anywhere. Would've been more boring to redo the same set of steps every time by memorisation without understanding, so that was good. The graphics mostly do their job well (besides the confusion I mentioned) but are a bit inconsistent in terms of line widths and so on. The music is nicely tense and the sound effects are fun :) It was nice, and with some polish and clearer representation of the elements I think it could be really nice. |
| May 1 15:33:31 | 18m 24s | Aphantasia | ♥ 2 | Very cool zoom indeed. And a good game! Graphics are cute, audio is sweet, and puzzles are fun :) I like how the painterliness of the graphics match the mechanic with the palette, and the little details like bushes and other things on the ground moving. I guess it would've been nice if there was more of a connection between the colours and the stuff they enabled you to make to really lean into it. Really relaxing music and nice sound effects. Good puzzles. Was fun exploring the combinations. I think all the signs made it a bit too easy. Getting a new colour leads to trying new combos out anyway so I feel like you don't need to hold the player's hand that much. One thing that confused me or seemed inconsistent was how in the first level the correct solution was to put boxes on the floor spikes, but in the level that introduced the hourglass, landing on the box if placed the same way would hurt you? Overall quite polished and nice! Could definitely do a lot more with this post-jam. |
| May 1 15:55:29 | 21m 58s | Summoner's Arena | ♥ 2 | This is really good. Difficult but not so difficult I had to keep trying and trying for hours. Very satisfying. As someone else said, the only big annoyance is that there's no reset button for when you get completely stuck in a corner and have to wait potentially a whole minute to try again. It's very pleasing to look at. I like the red shadows. Great character designs and animations. And very funny! Not sure I've ever seen a cylindrical character ragdoll before and just roll around :') Music is good and fits very well with the intensity too, and good sound effects. Feels so polished overall. I'm not sure I liked the auto pickup. I kept instinctively pressing space anyway and accidentally wasted stuff. I guess options are always nice, but it's a jam, and I got used to it anyway, no big deal. On the whole very impressed, very entertained, well done! |
| May 1 17:33:48 | 1h 38m | Haunted Forest | ♥ 1 | Really, really liked this one. My favourite so far. Spent well over an hour on it and finally finished it. I very much appreciated the wordlessness. It added a lot to the atmosphere and made the puzzles more intriguing. I did struggle to understand what some things were until I figured out what to do with them and the interaction or sound effect made it clear. I thought the bucket was a mushroom and the brick thing was a house ruin until I brought them together and realised it was a well. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing! Amazing atmosphere. The simple (but very well done) graphics and sparse sound effects do a lot of work. Black and white plus red isn't exactly new but you made good use of it and chose well when to go for the red. I really liked that the snow on the ground still wasn't pure white while the snow in the air was. Made it feel all the more cold and sparkling with icy crystals. I'm still pondering the story. My character wasn't exactly being very nice so I figure the "monsters" are forest guardians trying to prevent me from causing death and destruction? Like someone else I tried to bring the soup to the person with the cane but of course the actual solution was much grimmer :( High ratings from me, really good! |
| May 1 18:18:06 | 44m 18s | the eye | ♥ 1 | VΔritΔtem vΔ«dΔ« π This was cool and quite unique! Very difficult. I was about to give up on my fifth try, when I miraculously made it with five seconds to spare. Truly I was blessed by the Eye. From the screen ratio I assume this was mainly meant for a touch screen and it must be a lot easier on one. Most of the focus circles were way too fast for me using a regular mouse. But I kept reclicking and hoping for a slower one. Really nice audio with the chanting. Nice contrast in the graphics. Sprites were a bit mixed, I feel. Nice feedback when you complete an incantation. But the main draw is the gameplay itself :) This game is definitely one that calls for actual pen and paper. I liked that. I was bamboozled on my second try by the fact that it was randomised, but that's good. I seemed to inevitably take almost two minutes at the beginning every time just to jot down what I needed to do, so that made the actual focussing and chanting all the more stressful. I would've liked it if I were able to type instead. Flipping through the words was very slow and sometimes I accidentally selected the word when I just wanted to move over to the other arrow and go back because I went too far. But again given this seems to have been mobile/tablet first I get why it is the way it is. But it would've evened things out a bit I feel: easier to focus on mobile, easier to chant on regular computer. Of course the ending made me laugh! Overall this one was really cool, well done :) |
| May 1 18:37:55 | 19m 49s | bergs | ♥ 2 | This is so good. At first I was thinking there couldn't possibly be any challenge if you can just spawn as many as you want, but you quickly proved me wrong! Especially on the levels with red areas you won't get anywhere even if you spawn 50 of them if you're not clever about it. Simple graphics but in such a nice way. Looks so nice and consistent with the vibrant colours and complete adherence to rectangles. The bergs are so cute with their li'l faces and different variations, and of course the size actually matters to the puzzles too and you introduced that well early on. Great music that fits well and of course the recurring "BERG" is iconic. I agree with a comment I saw that WASD + E was awkward, at least when you needed to freeze a berg at a specific position in the air, but that was easily solved by just moving with arrows instead, so that's another victory for options :) Finally the puzzles themselves were a lot of fun and you ramped them up well. Very nicely done. |
| May 2 20:04:58 | 25h 27m | Sacrificed | ♥ 1 | I liked this one a lot! Custom engine is always fun, too. Really great atmosphere. Goldeneye vibes. The droning from the lights was a great touch and I really liked how each day more ritual-related stuff started showing up. It was challenging but not frustrating. It was probably good that I looked around on the first day before customers made things more hectic, so that I already knew about the stuff in the shed before I needed it. It actually took me a little while to realise there was a backroom with the actual pentagram :') I only failed a day once. It was nice that things were the same on the retry so that I knew not to drop the drill and serve the customer at the very end, when I could just sacrifice the drill first and then the customer wouldn't need to be served due to the, uh, circumstances... I also appreciated the time to breathe between days. Can't really criticise anything except the ending could've had more to it, but that's a big ask for LD, and this was already impressive for a jam, fair amount of modelling work! Appreciate at least a nod to consequences for killing the customer in the end text. Very cool, really nice job. |
| May 2 20:27:30 | 22m 32s | Ballad of Lead Shroud | ♥ 1 | ASFKJALSKJFNALSKJNFD indeed. I liked this. I see what you meant in your comment on my game. Very cool premise but not much gameplay. It's still neat to experience a short story in a slightly interactive way like this, and I enjoyed looking around and trying to find more interactions before moving on, like the ones on the vases or the one on the sign. The chromatic aberration is nice and fits. I did not like the headbobbing one bit I'm afraid, especially not how much there was even when standing still :') Overall very nice visuals. I think if the characters had been put into the initial environment they would've clashed, but they fit in the weird, dreamy space you find them in. It's a cool contrast. Good effect when you speak, altho the width of the text should probably have been limited as it ended up spanning my entire monitor so was a bit hard to read. The music was nice and I liked that the interaction sounds were based on the same piano. Nice sounds after the ritual when the corridor got ominous. Overall very interesting and well made! Still wondering about the backstory, very mysterious. |
| May 2 21:00:37 | 33m 07s | Ancestor Rain | ♥ 2 | VΓ€ga hea! Love me a tiktaalik. Enjoyed this. As a rhythm game I guess it's nothing really new but the premise/story and the type of music really set it apart and do a lot for the mood. The setting is very pretty and atmospheric. Nice colours, and the fire and night go well together with the drums and sombre flute. Yet there was also some humour with the false notes and the "wrong creature" I managed to summon on my first try :') Little details like that add to the polish but so do the various options. I saw you had delay settings as well but after it got all out of sync on web I decided just to try the native build and it worked great. I'd've liked a third difficulty setting. It felt weird that not every note from the flute was accompanied by a key to press even on the harder one. In a way that actually made it more difficult, since I wanted to press but couldn't. Overall super nice and fun. Really well done! |
| May 2 21:23:45 | 23m 08s | Summoner Survivors | ♥ 0 | It's quite nice, just lacks something I feel! Looks and sounds great (music is very motivating) and it's satisfying to get rid of mobs, but it kind of feels neither strategic nor quite arcadey. There didn't seem to be a lot of reason to drag units around (was helpful against the big mobs but otherwise they did well on their own I thought) and I didn't see a need to use my own sword and risk my HP at all when my units were doing what I needed. I liked the variety in the enemies and the big one definitely caught me off guard the first time! But things just kept spawning way faster than I could deal with them until even my decent computer was struggling to keep up. There probably should've been a cap π I assume maybe you were playing using a numpad but I don't have one so having to let go of my WASD grip to summon units while I was trying to run away from a hundred enemies was awkward. Overall pretty nice, just needs some balancing/polish to figure out what it wants to be :) |
| May 2 21:50:11 | 26m 26s | Helloons | ♥ 1 | Very cool idea! Maybe there should've been more of a game in terms of succeeding or failing, but there's something to be said for how all the hell creatures are so polite and content no matter what I give them. Love the music. The laugh is a nice touch. It was fun to read about the different creatures. My favourite is the squonk. It's a little janky but I wasn't sure whether it was actually intentional sometimes, like how the text would move to a new text box for just one more word even when there was plenty of space in the one before, because it seemed to kind of fit with the vibe/humour of the game :) Had several crashes unfortunately: once when pressing backspace (at the same time the game had also failed to clear the previous balloon when moving on to the next task), once when pressing the summon button in the book, and once as soon as I started the executable. Overall needs work but of course you did a great job implementing the main mechanic and it would be cool to see it polished! |
| May 2 21:59:35 | 9m 24s | Bobblevision | ♥ 0 | Props for the cool shader, and the fact that you shared the code too :) Not much of a game as you said yourself but it would be cool to see expanded on. Right now it's not easy on the eyes in motion, and you really need some kind of crosshair because it's as good as impossible to pick up the smaller flasks. But I'm sure it can be solved and turned into something really interesting! I like that you took the time to put in the voice lines. Neat experiment. Like exofrenon I thought it was 2D first so it was very trippy before I realised what was going on. Cool stuff! |
| May 3 19:42:23 | 21h 42m | Soul Dungeon | ♥ 1 | Really nice-looking and nice-sounding game that feels quite polished! Just one fatal flaw in that it's very difficult and so having to redo the whole thing every time is incredibly punishing and frustrating :( If each level was a checkpoint I think it would've been nearly perfect. But yes, nice colours and sprites, good animations. I thought the beat on the tutorial level got a little grating so I was happy to hear that in the rest of the game there was more to the music! The sound effects are good and fit well. Nice variation in enemies and the twirl when you capture them is satisfying. Like someone else said, it seemed unnecessary to capture them most of the time before the final level, and on the final level doing so would even prevent you from progressing since you needed to jump on them. I think that's fine, but that's why it becomes a problem starting over all the way from the beginning again if you mess up; if you always restarted the current level, I'd feel encouraged to experiment and even use a reset button if I had one :) On the whole very slick, really just need to fix the restart issue and I think you're golden! |
| May 3 20:16:32 | 34m 09s | Horrors from Beyond - The Bayou | ♥ 2 | Buen juego! Very atmospheric, very impressive with the intro and the voice acting (in two languages!). I do wish there were subtitles, as it's easy to miss something if there's a noise or a moment's lapse in concentration. I liked the 2D/3D combination. I guess at least a simple walking animation would've been nice. The character seemed a bit blurrier than the foliage. The way you showed the crocodiles using bubbles and spatial audio was really nice, so I'm glad I played with headphones. At first I was terrified to even go near the water, but then I realised I had to wade through it to progress. Eventually I got overconfident about how close I could get to the bubbles and was eaten π Tensions rose once again! The puzzles were simple but nice (again the main challenge was the scary water), however I too was confused about not having enough time to reach the cross when the boss started following me, so I had to read the comments. Took me another couple of tries before I felt I understood how it worked, but I was able to beat the game twice in a row after that. I wasn't confident enough in my Spanish to try it the first time, since I wanted to make sure I caught the whole story, but I selected it after beating it in English, and it felt like it was the way it was meant to be played. Cool stuff! |
| May 3 20:30:03 | 13m 31s | Jury Doody | ♥ 0 | Funny, got a couple of laughs out of it. Did not feel like there was too much of a correlation between my replies and the outcome, was there meant to be? π The music fits well and I like the typing noise for the talking. Fun to look around at the characters. I guess the graphics are a little mixed in terms of style. I like the textured walls and floor. Overall needs some work to really be game but it's fun to mess around with and hear all the different questions and really good for a first jam :) |
| May 3 20:50:47 | 20m 44s | OverSummoned | ♥ 0 | Really neat premise. I liked how many different parts you came up with and how they seem to combine well no matter what part of the body they go on. Cute animations and it's cool that the creations actually start walking around the room. Good amount of speed to the music too. It's so difficult tho :( I'll admit it's on me that I didn't immediately realise some things, like how different body parts of the same colour come from the same orb, just depending on at what time in the sequence the orb is placed, but maybe it could've been clarified a bit. I kept looking for the red legs and only found the red head and kept trying all the other orbs before I realised. I think the main issue is that you have so little time and so many things to keep track off, while it's difficult to get quickly between the orbs since you have to walk around the furniture, and the fact that if you mess up you have to just get some junk orbs before you can start over, since you can't take orbs off again. Sometimes the walking creations would stand in the way and block me from taking the shortest path, and I think there might've been a bug because sometimes orbs just wouldn't respawn? Sorry, I feel like that was a lot, but I just want to clarify what I struggled with, because I think this could be really cool if it got a bit of fine-tuning! :) It's really nice how much detail you were able to add to the room within the limited time of the jam and I really do think it's a very pretty game that could be a lot of fun if it was a little easier. |
| May 3 22:05:38 | 1h 14m | Spectral Fingers | ♥ 0 | Very cool! It's typical that this is the first game I play after moving from the stationary computer with a mouse to the laptop with a mousepad, but I powered through it anyway :') Equal parts moody and humorous, with the silly dialogue and how messed up the words can get combined with atmospheric music and dark silhouettes. Felt pretty good to play. I guess it would've been nice if the sudden resistance was telegraphed a bit more ahead of time as it went from being easy to move to immediately super difficult. I didn't get the future year on my playthrough but I'm glad I saw the comment about it. Cool that you accounted for that as well. Overall very cool, nicely done! |
