Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Feedback comment stats → LCStark
Feedback comments for LD55
LCStark's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | LCStark's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 16 20:38:13 | South City Worker Exam | ♥ 2 | Interesting entry! It's amazing how much worldbuilding you've managed to put into it! And the world seems really interesting, a nice mix of scifi, fantasy and horror (among other things! :D) put together with some thought, so it doesn't feel disjointed. Others have already mentioned it would be great to get a final score or even the result of the exam, and I agree. I've played through it twice and was a little bit disappointed I didn't get anything "special" for completing the second attempt with 100% correct answers :(. Thankfully the game has impressive amount of story, so it didn't feel too bad for the lack of an ending. Also, if you'd have a final result, I thought it might be a good place to put some more lore behind different game endings, based on how well you did. It would also be a nice reason for players to replay through the game. Maybe another thing to add some replayability would be to modify the responses you get based on which answer you select. There's definitely a lot of ways to expand on it, you can tell the game made me excited enough since I'm sitting here, thinking about possible continuations, instead of fixing my game's bugs. :D | |
| Apr 16 21:10:59 | 32m 46s | Summoned Army | ♥ 1 | A cool little tug-of-war RTS! Reminded me a lot of cool old Flash games I've spent a lot of time playing. :D One thing I think it could do better is on the visual presentation style. On one hand, by making the game scale so the game area fills the entire window. Right now everything takes place in this tiny square area in the center, and the units are so small it's sometimes difficult to figure out what's going on in small areas of the battle. Another thing would be some better player feedback, maybe explaining game elements a bit better. For example, I've figured out the inside of the unit is it's health bar (as it dropped on taking damage and got back up when healed by the Healer), but a lot of times it looked to me like the unit didn't have any HP left, yet it remained on the field, still able to take several more hits before going down. Also, it looks like units can be selected (as hovering on them puts a thicker border around them), but is there any point to it? You can't control them, and selecting a unit doesn't seem to affect its attack or health in any way. Also - did you submit the game in the wrong category by accident? You are using a CC music track from external source, which is allowed in the Jam category, but not in the Compo category. Overall, it's a pretty cool entry! The rock/paper/scissors mechanic of units gives it a pretty good tactical depth, and while the game is easy to get into, it gives you enough challenge after a few levels to keep you interested. Well done! |
| Apr 16 21:26:05 | 15m 06s | Reverse Rituals | ♥ 1 | I really like the idea of a reverse-summoning, it made me laugh. :D Others have already mentioned things I wanted to write about, so instead of repeating the same things I'll just mention that the variety of characters you get is great. So far I've got Joy Junior, Sinister Sam and Max Fury. It kinda makes me want to keep replaying it to find them all. :D |
| Apr 16 22:05:11 | 39m 06s | Summoner's Emporium | ♥ 4 | Really cool game! It immediately made me think of Slime Rancher, but with some other elements mixed into it. And the result is pretty interesting! The tutorial is pretty long, it takes some time to explain the game systems to the player. It would be good if there was a way to skip it - first time playing the game it was fine, but on the second and third time it meant having to click through it all to start. It's nice that you have a way to exit the interface using the Escape button, but on one hand it would be better to have it as a button on the screen (making it more obvious), on another it should probably be bound to a different key, since in WebGL builds Escape is first used to exit the fullscreen. In a best-case scenario, you have to press the button twice to exit the interface, and you'd have to re-enable fullscreen every time you do it. Having the slimes produce everything for you means the game doesn't feel so grindy, but it has a small problem with downtime - several times I found myself just sitting there, waiting for currency to slowly trickle in so I could buy another crystal or a brewing stand. It would be nice to have something for the player to do in the meantime, maybe a way to manually generate at least a small amount of resources by clicking a crystal yourself? Overall it's a pretty cool game! I like both the concept and the execution. It has a few small bugs, but nothing game-breaking and all should be fixable. There are a lot of mechanics which work pretty well as they are right now, and each one of them can be expanded in interesting ways if you plan to continue working on it after the jam. Well done! |
| Apr 23 18:26:10 | 164h 20m | Necro Jam | ♥ 1 | Fun little game! Plays like a bullet hell, but instead of shooting enemies directly you spawn skeletons to attack them, which is a pretty cool concept. :) It could use a bit of explanation on how to play it, though. I kinda expected the spawn skeletons to attack enemies near me, but they seemed to be always targeting ones far away (do they simply select first enemy on the list by ID or something?). Another part I got slightly stuck on was the shop - it took me a while of randomly pressing buttons before I've figured out how to buy anything. A prompt with the key, or even controls in the pause menu or in the game description would have helped greatly. There are also some bugs - you can spawn skeletons outside of the level, a lot of times buying items in the shop doesn't seem to do anything other than reducing the amount of diamonds you have, a few small others. Overall it's a nice entry! The sprites looked nice and I liked the little spawning animation. Looks like a decent base to expand on. :) |
| Apr 23 18:50:13 | 24m 03s | Fedora Fury | ♥ 1 | Funny little game! :D I really like the concept of getting defeated enemies as summons. If you keep working on it, having a big enough roster of enemies to fight and collect could make it really interesting, adding some tactical choices of selecting the right summons to combat specific enemy types. One bug I found in the main menu - after clicking on the `Controls` button, I couldn't get back to the main menu. Clicking the `Back` button didn't do anything (I don't think its interactable at all), I think it might be because of the big brain sprite shown over the right side of the screen. In fullscreen it works fine, though. The artstyle is pretty cool! I especially enjoyed the sister flailing her arms wildly to attack things. :D The music is also great, really matches the mood of the game. I got to the end, found the scroll and possibly created the worst superhero ever. I fear what he'll do next time... fedora.png |
| Apr 23 19:23:10 | 32m 57s | Nexus | ♥ 1 | Really cool concept! I've always wanted a game about managing quests and choosing the right heroes to complete them instead of doing all that busywork yourself. :D There is a lot of waiting, especially later on when you get to the challenging and hard quests. I enjoyed reading all the little info texts telling you what the heroes are currently doing on their quests, but it feels like there should be something more to do in the Nexus. Perhaps just adding more quests and tubes would help solving the issue, but it might also be better to add something for the player to do in the meantime. Maybe a way for the player to help the heroes with their quests, like sending buffs or equipment? The deployment mechanic was a bit clunky - it took me a moment to find where and when to throw the hero capsules. During my first playthrough, I've spent a lot of time just throwing them off the edge, as apparently they didn't get detected by the tube colliders properly. Props for adding a teleport-back mechanic, both for the items and for the main character! (A couple of times I got a bit too close to the quest screens to read the text... Oops!) The graphics are really impressive for a compo game. I especially enjoyed the globe revolving in the background. :) The music is fine, sounds exactly like something I'd expect to hear in a management game like this. Overall, it's a great compo entry! And it's a pretty good base to expand upon, I think this idea is worth working on beyond the LD time limits. Well done! |
| Apr 25 13:43:33 | 42h 20m | Come By | ♥ 1 | I love PICO-8 games, even though I'm always terrible at them. And this one is no exception. :D There's a lot of stuff to unpack here, congratulations on managing to complete so many things in the compo time! Having a separate practice level was really good, tough it almost felt like a trap :). At first I had some trouble with getting used to the controls, so I used my character to direct the sheep... Which was brutally taken away from me in the hard level :P. The controls are pretty difficult to get used to, and really difficult to master. Some more feedback on the actions would definitely be a nice thing, like maybe showing small icons for current action? Few times I got my dog out of the level bounds and couldn't really remember which combo was to call him to come vs to go away, so some form of marker would be useful. Also, the timing needed for the double commands feels maybe a little bit too short, and quite often I found myself apparently taking too long to press the other button, so instead of moving the dog just changed its stance. This might be a skill issue, though, as I think with more practice I'd be using the controls much quicker, but I think it could use some tweaking to make the practice a bit smoother. The audiovisual side is great. As with all great PICO-8 games the graphics are simple, but clean and easily distinguishable. The sounds on actions match pretty well, though I must say I wasn't entirely certain about the "pet the dog" sound. When I first heard it, I thought you might have added both petting the dog and accidentally stepping on it, which made me feel terrible for a moment. The title music is fun, kinda wish it played during the levels, too. Overall, it's a well made compo entry! I've had a lot of fun playing it. :D |
| Apr 25 15:13:08 | 1h 29m | Patty Panic | ♥ 0 | A really cool entry! It feels kinda like a streamlined version of Plate Up! The graphics look relly cool, the artstyle looks great! I love all the little icons and animations. There's a large amount of variation in customer looks, so they don't get boring either. One tiny bug I've discovered is that sometimes the customers waiting in the line don't show the `!` icon and there is no visible timer for them, but I haven't managed to figure out a way to reliably reproduce it. The gameplay loop is easily understandable, and it eases you in slowly to get into the rhythm. It's a pretty good idea to start with just one customer, so the player has a chance to observe all the actions you need to perform in order to completely serve one person. The audio side is cool as well. All actions have their own sounds, giving good feedback to the player. The music sounds pretty good too, but it makes me wonder if you've perhaps wanted to submit this as a Jam entry and submitted as a Compo instead? According to the Compo rules, all the music should be created within the 48h of the Compo, while the Jam allows you to use previously-made music (with opting out of the category). Overall, it's a really good entry! All the more impressive given the fact it's made in a custom engine. Well done! patty.png |
| Apr 25 16:10:29 | 57m 21s | Court Summons | ♥ 1 | Cool compo entry! :) There were some problems with loading the web build. At first, the progress bar went to full, got replaced by the loading circle animation and got stuck there, repeatedly printing in the console: ``` still waiting on run dependencies: dependency: wasm-instantiate (end of list) ``` After a few refreshes, it added another error before those: ``` Loading failed for the \<script\> with source "https://dishwand.github.io/dishwand/LD55/main.js" ``` Fortunately, after 10 or so refreshes it suddenly loaded. Not sure what went wrong there, I guess it's just one of those issues caused by Godot 4 not fully supporting HTML exports yet. After that, it worked well for several playthroughs. Really impressive work you've done there. While the concept itself is pretty simple, you've added a lot of variation to the types of levels and targets to find. Mixing them both makes the gameplay never feel boring and it keeps you interested for the whole duration of the game. I've done pretty good with the first act, but started getting some difficulties on the second and had to restart it twice. For the second time I've enabled the colorblind mode (which is an awesome thing to add, thanks! :D) and I've managed to finish the game with it. One thing I'd like is to have a way to restart the game without having to reload the whole thing, but it's a small issue, as the game loads pretty quickly. Letting you skip through the dialogue is also a fantastic thing, it's pretty easy to miss and leave the player having to wait through it all, especially on repeated playthroughs. The graphics look pretty cool. I liked the little variations in imps looks, the shapes of their eyes, ears or horns. It made later acts more difficult, as having to quickly find three imps of the same type gets really tough when everybody is constantly moving. One thing that sometimes felt unnecessarily difficult is when an imp stayed turned away from the camera for a really long time, it might be nice to add something like a "nudge" mechanic with the mouse to force them to move. Also, while the colorblind assist really did help, I think it really should stay always oriented towards the camera. Quite often I found imps irritatingly moving sideways, so I couldn't see the numbers at all :P. Oh, and I also enjoyed all the little descriptions on the summoning orders, quite funny and - again - quite a large number of them, so they don't get boring. :) The audio side is pretty well done too! All actions give good feedback with their own sounds, and the music track is a good background for the gameplay without being too attention-grabbing. For a 48h game jam, it's a really impressive game. Well done! |
| Apr 25 16:32:20 | 21m 51s | Fury Duty | ♥ 2 | Really cool take on the theme! The game was pretty easy to get into, so it didn't take me long before I could say "justice has been served!". One thing that was missing was some sort of ending, if not some sort of MK-style Fatality, then perhaps just the voiceover saying "K.O.!". The graphics are cool, and the music is absolutely banging. Nicely done! :) |
| Apr 25 16:49:41 | 17m 21s | Temptation Summoner's Aprendice | ♥ 1 | Really cool idea! A tug-of-war game, but instead of playing as one side against the other, you play against both of them and have to balance their fight to get as much for yourself. I love it! :D I agree with others before me that it could definitely use some more feedback to player actions. I'd also add that having a visible cooldown indicator on the temptations is really needed, as without it it feels really confusing as to why you can't place them anymore, or when they're ready again. |
| Apr 26 18:04:26 | 25h 14m | The Great Salmmoning | ♥ 1 | Haha, that story idea is ridiculous, I love it! :D What works really well here is turning a failure into more help for the player. If you're not doing good enough and fail to feed the bears, they turn into salmon, giving you more opportunity to feed the rest. Brilliant! The graphics look great, I love the artstyle! There's clearly a lot of effort put into it - everything is animated, you've even added a distortion effect for things underwater. One thing I was especially grateful for is the off-screen bear indicators, they're really helpful! I also loved how clearly you can see the state of each bear, through the ritual having visible progression. One issue I had was with the bears catching hitboxes, as sometimes it was pretty difficult to figure out it the fish will get caught or not. It seems like the hitbox goes quite high up, so the bears easily catch fish flying over their heads, but I'd guess it could be extended a bit more to the left, as this appears to be the side I'm misjudging most often. The sound effects are good, fitting for the game. All it needs is some light music in the background to reinforce the mood of the game. Well done for letting the player skip the dialogue at the start faster, it makes it much easier if you're starting the game again. Though since you can't skip the animations, it might be good to add an overall "skip intro" button to move immediately to the "press space to start" screen. Overall it's a really cool game, very impressive work for such a short compo time. Nicely done! salmmoning.png |
| Apr 26 20:03:40 | 1h 59m | Curse of the Mystical Mushroom | ♥ 1 | Really cool game! It feels like a crossover between an incremental game and an autobattler, filling a really nice niche, I think there's a lot of potential for this style of games. The artstyle is pretty good, and I like the style of billboarded sprites in 3D space, kinda make me want to make a game like that myself! :D The animations of the forest felt weird at first, seeing everything - bones, logs and living trees - move in unison felt somewhat uncanny, but I guess that added some weird mood to the game. Did you experiment with having every object have a slightly different animation speed to make them look like they're all animated independently? The music is nice, really fitting for the mood of a witch stuck somewhere in a forest. I really liked that your mushrooms retarget when there's a ghost nearby instead of just continuing to attack their current target and take a beating. Well done on adding that one small but important piece of AI! :) Overall, the game is really great. It feels good to progress, and once you upgrade the max mushrooms high enough it gives you that real sense of power, especially when you start seeing them quickly obliterate the low-hp targets. I'd say all that's left to do here is some more balancing on the upgrades, as for example the "free premade mushrooms" upgrade is practically not worth it after the first level - I've played a lot, but I don't think I got the cost returned for anything beyond the second upgrade. I thought I might play till I got all the upgrades, but the final few got a bit too expensive for me to try and grind for them: mushroom2.png Also, for my first playthrough, I've focused on getting the time extended as much as possible, and it made me feel like it would be nice to have something for the player to do during the level. Perhaps some buff / debuff spells you could cast for a small energy cost? Another thing which would be nice is to add some bonus reward for returning home before the timer fully runs out. Oh, and while we're on the subject on the timer, I've discovered one interesting thing - fullscreen apps with media playback should prevent screensaver from appearing, yet while playing your game mine still activated. Not sure if it's a Unity bug or if perhaps there's something you've missed in the build options. It would also be cool to have a max button for the buying mushrooms - clicking individually or holding the mouse button takes way too long once you get your max mushroom count higher up. One small bug I found - the furthest mushroom on the right has its HP bar displayed behind its sprite: mushroom.png I thought that it might have been the bones behind it, or a spawning ghost, but once everything was cleared, there still was an HP bar partially obscured right until I've destroyed that mushroom. Overall, it's a really fun and well made compo entry. I hope you're going to keep working on it, as it is a cool idea, and I can see many ways in which you could expand it further. Well done! |
| Apr 28 20:37:26 | 48h 33m | Air Fried Ice | ♥ 1 | Pretty fun card game! I love the visual design, especially the board and the creatures. The chill music in the background is also pretty fitting. :) One thing I'd add as a small improvement is maybe zooming in on the card you are picking up, so you can look at it more closely before placing it - it's not really important for the gameplay reason, but I felt like it would be nice to see the creature design more clearly. Not much more to say here, others have already pointed out the same issues I had. One thing I want to add is an idea for possible expansion - maybe it would be nice to have the different creatures somehow influence the gameplay as well. Maybe something that would make each round last a bit longer would be adding hit points to the creatures and making some creatures take more / less damage based on which of the three creatures hit it, e.g. the fire snake taking 1dmg from the butterfly, 2 from the bat and 3 from the owl. Or maybe instead of hitpoints have some sort of crit system, which would regenerate one peek if you manage to get it. afi.png |
| Apr 30 21:05:32 | 48h 28m | Necromancer 101 | ♥ 1 | A really cool jam entry! Made me think back to all the time I've spent playing Chrono Trigger and old Final Fantasy titles. :D I'm not sure I'd agree with others commenting that the mix of 2D and 3D didn't work. Sure, you could go for either a fully-2D or a fully-3D game (which would definitely be easier), but I think it could definitely work and make the game pretty interesting-looking. Right now the biggest problem with it is that they seem to have totally different aesthetic, but that's something that can be fixed with more time. I'll agree with the other sentiment, namely that the world is too big for the current method of travel and character speed. I don't know if it's just a bug or an intended thing, but you can pull enemies from a group and defeat them one by one instead of having to fight the entire group. On one hand it is interesting, in that it makes you move more carefully, on the other I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a game about precision movement :P. It also makes the game ridiculously easy, especially given the fact your army gets fully replenished after every combat. The game definitely needs a lot more player feedback. For someone familiar with jRPGs it should all feel pretty intuitive, but it still feels like you need to stumble into the right thing to do a couple of times. It wasn't really clear how the game works and what it wants you to do. For example, when I found a village with some enemies and an entry to the castle town, I didn't know whether it's better to keep going forward, or maybe explore the current area and build up your army first. In the end it turned out to not be needed. In a much bigger game it might be alright to leave such a thing for the player to discover, but I think in a jam game it should probably be more straight-forward. Kudos for putting two entrances to the town on both ends of the map, though, making sure the player definitely won't get lost! ;) The turn-based combat works really well! The only issue with it I encountered was that I didn't always know when my summoned units would act - it feels like sometimes they could take action immediately within the same turn, and sometimes they were delayed by a turn. Not sure if there's a bug there, or it's just an issue with the lack of feedback. Other than that, it felt pretty nice! I enjoyed the large variety of different attacks and status effects, and all of them were pretty intuitive for me to quickly get what's useful in what situation. necro.png Oh, and one more thing - I liked that all the units had their own specific sound effects, that definitely made the game feel more complete. And bonus points for having the most realistic wolf sound effect ever. :D |
| Apr 30 22:03:59 | 58m 27s | Pulse of the Ethereal | ♥ 1 | Wow, now that's a really impressive compo entry! Well done on making such a well-built game in such a short time! I can only imagine how much pain it took to figure out all that vector math. :D In my first playthrough I've managed to get to the Thinker, which thought me to death I guess. But in the end I got my revenge, even though it took me a few more goes. pote.png It felt nice to have two separate kinds of weapons, with the rockets being a more special kind, with limited ammo, forcing you to use it sparingly. I also really enjoyed having the shield - quite a literal life-saver! One thing I'd perhaps add to it is some feedback on how long it's going to last, maybe make it blink as it reaches the end? Maybe fade it out with transparency? I've also encountered the bug with auto-shooting sometimes being interrupted. I'm not sure what the cause is, but after looking at your code one thing I'd try is to move the cooldowns from the `_process` to the `_physics_process` method. I found it's better to have the gameplay-related timers be based on a constant delta instead of the FPS-dependent `_process` delta. Definitely makes it all more stable and predictable. I'll agree with other commenters that aiming can be difficult, but I'd guess that's something that can be solved with some more time. Maybe adding a crosshair will help, or maybe it would be better to have something like a laser pointer shooting straight out of your ship? Tough to say, I guess that's something that needs some experimentation. ;) The sound design is also pretty good. Everything has appropriate sounds, and there's a cool tune playing in the background. It does feel a bit arcadey, but it actually reminds me more of some techno songs and remixes from the late 90's and early 00's. :P Overall, it's a pretty cool StarFoxy game. I had a lot of fun with it, it made me want to replay it until I got good enough to finish it, and then some more for a good measure :). Well done! |
| May 3 19:59:03 | 69h 55m | The Department | ♥ 1 | Hey! Nice to see you back doing LD! And also having switched to Godot, nice! ;) You've used a really funny idea for the game, running a departament in a company that generates all its income from internal meetings and watching slides. I think I know some people that do actually think this is how it works in the real life. :D An idea for an expansion - give the player several different types of actions to perform during the presentations, like "add a motivational slogan" or "throw in a funny quip". On one hand, that would give the player something else to do during the slide show instead of just waiting for a timer to fill. On the other, you could use that to have people with different personality types, so some would react better to certain actions while others would ignore them, giving the player several options to balance the entire team. Oh, on the topic of actions during the meeting one idea just came to me - have some of the losing focus people occasionally start doing some things like tapping on the desk or clicking their pen, which makes others lose focus faster and you need to look at the person to make them stop. :P The graphics are cool, I loved the idea of having an avatar generator! Having several different slides for us to see as we make our presentations was also nice to see. All that was missing was some sound and music to round everything up. At first I thought the game would be too easy, as people lost focus too fast and I rarely needed to change even a single slide. Then I got more employees and things got really tough, nice balancing mechanic! And it's always great to see a compo game have a built-in tutorial. :) departament.png |
| May 3 21:09:06 | 1h 10m | He Who Sleeps | ♥ 1 | Fantastic compo entry! Probably the best atmosphere in an LD game I've seen in this event. It has some pretty nice level design, showing you early on where you'll have to go later once you unlock some upgrades. In one or two places it was a bit difficult to see which parts of the wall you could go through and which were solid, but I'd guess that's a colorblindness issue. Plus it wasn't too bad, after hitting an unexpected wall once I took a closer look and that was all I needed to notice what I was missing. I'm torn in regards to the lack of music. On one hand, it would be great to have some nice dark ambient theme. On another, the silence made the subtle sound effects work really well for mood. I loved that after you get the second sheep you immediately get teleported back, it cuts out a lot of time retracing the same path over and over again, and keeps you more invested in the narrative. Smart move! It felt really good when I got to the "bigger sacrifice" section, as doing them in rapid succession made me feel really... evil. And then you made the player retrace that path one last time with the final victim, which really gave me this feeling of doing the one last big action before the end. Such a simple thing, but it does enhance storytelling greatly. I've played through it twice and I loved both times, great LD game. Well done! |
| May 3 22:53:39 | 1h 44m | Haunted Forest | ♥ 1 | Whew! That was a tough one! Thankfully, I've managed to finish it before the rating time ended. :D I love the artstyle, the 1+ bit graphics work really well to build the atmosphere. One thing that could perhaps be improved is to use the red a bit more often, but on this one I'm not certain - it might make it feel a bit more special when used really sparingly like that. The movement works fine, but I have a bit mixed feelings about the attack. Having to use move + interact to attack gives you a nice way to attack in a specific direction, but it also makes it difficult to time your attacks precisely to push the enemy away. More often than not I found myself just spamming it and hoping for the best. It might be the combination of the key control, game perspective and maybe the hitbox colliders not being adjusted well enough that made it feel awkward. On the topic of enemies, they do seem to be a bit too difficult to me. The camera is confined to a pretty small area, so it's extremely easy to accidentally get into aggro range, especially when moving vertically. Decreasing the aggro range might make it a bit too easy to evade them altogether, so I think giving the player a bit more visibility would work better here. While I hated the deer, the bear-wolf-like monstrosity was great, I even tried playing fetch with it, but it never brought the stick back. :( haunted2.png I'd agree with previous comments that the interaction indicator would probably work better if it was shown in-world near the object you can interact with, but it gave me another idea. When I first saw it, I thought that it might be something like a "danger sense", letting you know how close you are to the nearest enemy. That might be one way to give player better ability of evading enemies without making it too easy - just have an indicator that increases in strength the closer you are to an enemy. You'd be able to see that your getting close to the deer guys even when they weren't yet visible for you, and it wouldn't be too easy, since it wouldn't tell you their exact direction. The sounds are pretty cool. I was thinking that maybe some music would nice, but actually the lack of music works well to enhance the sound effects here. If anything, any music you might have add would have to be rather light to not detract from the current atmosphere of the game. While it took me a while to finish it, mainly due to being rather tired and not being able to remember where everything is (I really need a map today, lol), I finally managed to complete the game. Worth every minute! :D haunted.png |
