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nathmate

Feedback comments for LD55

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		nathmate's comment
Apr 15 02:36:21		Summoning Solitaire	♥ 1	2024-04-15-122530_204x188_scrot.png It's a shame the view was so zoomed out, the sprites looked interesting but I couldn't really make them out. The gameplay seems lacking in meaningful decisions for the player to make. I just spammed out the entire deck as quickly as I could, since more units on the field will kill enemies more efficiently.
Apr 15 02:51:06	14m 45s	Jury Summons - When Duty Calls	♥ 1	Charming visuals and sound. The gameplay felt a bit tedious, since it's just there as an excuse to show off the art perhaps a more streamlined UI would have worked better? Have three questions per juror to select from, automatically move onto the next when you're done, to cut down on the clicking around through menus.
Apr 15 02:54:32	3m 26s	The Travelling Salesman	♥ 0	Your executable links are giving 404, and I don't see a LD55 file in the repository. So unable to play.
Apr 15 02:55:22	50s	Zoomancy	♥ 0	Itch link is giving 404.
Apr 15 03:16:06	20m 44s	Ecaroh's Mecharoh	♥ 2	2024-04-15-130913_800x454_scrot.png I didn't realise the crystals are what charged the electrons at first, only noticed when I looked at your gif. It gets quite difficult by the end, enemies spawning directly in front of you combined with not being able to easily aim your attacks is a nasty combo. I did find myself running into a freshly-spawned enemy I couldn't see every time I went behind the tower. Cute art and sound design, love the colour palette. It's maybe a touch dark but that does help the light effects pop off more.
Apr 15 03:32:23	16m 17s	Abyssal Ascent	♥ 0	The core kill enemies, get upgrades to kill more enemies loop is a solid classic. I mostly just wanted to be able to move faster through the rock and see further. The invisible walls, slow move speed, having to run back to base for energy, and the screen flashes when taking damage were all quite annoying.
Apr 15 03:42:20	9m 57s	Patty Panic	♥ 1	2024-04-15-133538_412x417_scrot.png Fun take on the travelling salesman. Very tight design, it feels like there's nothing you could add or take away from it. Only critique I can think of is to call a bit more attention to customers who's demand bar is about to fill up, as they all blur together a bit when there's a lot of them.
Apr 15 04:04:24	22m 04s	High School of Conjuration	♥ 1	Nice concept, the combination of route planning and platforming is fun. I found the controls a bit 'sticky', had to completely stop to summon or jump, which was frustrating.
Apr 15 04:25:13	20m 49s	Genomancer	♥ 1	Great juice. Smooshing my dudes together to make the stats go up and see them headbutt the other dudes was very fun. There didn't seem to be a ton of strategy involved beyond maximising stat increases and beneficial traits, and that seemed mostly based on the RNG of what you summoned, but I didn't really mind. Was a bit annoying if a new summon overlapped another, I accidentally buffed up the wrong skele once.
Apr 15 04:41:01	15m 48s	Abyssmal Painter	♥ 1	I'm guessing that different glyph combinations do different amounts of damage to different enemies, but can't say for sure. If that is the case the game ought to communicate it to the player, and which enemies are weak to which glyphs.
Apr 16 04:04:04	23h 23m	The Cherished Boulder	♥ 1	Cute and fun. The music was nice too. UI The resolution being slightly higher than 1080 was annoying, I couldn't see the entire UI at once. Also the tooltips for what new units cost ran off the edge of the screen for the later ones. You can symbols above the units heads for what they were carrying, I would have put that next to the corresponding top left stockpile readouts, to make it clearer what was what. Balance I died and wasn't sure what I could have done differently, I was already spamming protectors. The late game constant drip of enemies seems hard to get around, maybe more of a wave system would allow you to still get some resources in and rebuild a little. The Protector AI also seems to lead to them clumping up, leaving the units on the other side of the map vulnerable, leading to a death spiral. Critiques aside, I did like the gameplay loop and general vibe of the game.
Apr 16 04:40:33	36m 29s	The In Between	♥ 1	2024-04-16-143617_1920x1080_scrot.png Cool game. The teleporting pair seem a bit OP. Ended up running it on the faster speed and just pausing every time a new input-output pair spawned. It got quite hard to track where the new portals were appearing once it zooms out a bit, and the indicators of how quickly the inputs were triggering and how often the outputs needed items were too small to see.
Apr 16 04:48:09	7m 36s	Aphantasia	♥ 2	Cool zoom indeed. Pretty art. The abilities need an in-game tutorial, their control scheme was a bit clunky.
Apr 16 05:01:11	13m 02s	The Art of Pixel Summoning (TAPS)	♥ 3	Guessing the right element counter and still having a chance to lose the fight felt bad. Cute concept overall.
Apr 16 05:23:13	22m 02s	Inner Workings	♥ 2	Beautiful sprite work. I did get stuck in between pixels and vibrate back and forth sometimes, was a bit unpleasant. I didn't like summoning health\mana as a mechanic, just felt like busywork.
Apr 16 07:11:04	1h 47m	Dreambound Metal Fan	♥ 1	my fields! back to hell Incredible VA work, had me grinning ear to ear. Gameplay-wise it would have been nice to have some ways to slightly incentivise your units in certain directions, like Majesty (I'm meeelting), as otherwise it's kinda just about spamming down spawn buildings. Cool concept, good execution.
Apr 16 07:20:42	9m 38s	Jimmy the Wizard vs the Meaty Mushrooms	♥ 0	Good art, fun game. The early game felt significantly more difficult than the rest, which is kinda opposite to the difficulty curve you want in games normally. The boss mushroom scared the hell out of me.
Apr 16 07:51:19	30m 37s	Speed Demons	♥ 2	2024-04-16-174840_1920x1080_scrot.png On the leaderboard first try 😎 It would be nice if there was some indicator of where the next boost portal was if you were on the wrong side of the tube-track-thing. Feels like the game's about chaining them, as they seem to spawn not too far away from each other around the tube, but if you lose the trail it can be tricky to get back on it.
Apr 16 08:03:59	12m 40s	Apprentice Binder	♥ 3	Not being able to see where you need to go next is quite annoying. The early levels I seemed to have a limited number of cards, but later ones you just get random ones? I wasn't sure. It felt like having just enough cards of just the right kind, in the right order, would make for a tighter puzzle element.
Apr 16 08:12:36	8m 37s	Elemental Surge	♥ 2	2024-04-16-181106_1538x863_scrot.png Fun game. Cute art. Music was a bop. I mostly just spammed summoning on whatever the largest clump of enemies were, so it didn't feel very strategic. Still fun to play.
Apr 16 08:38:09	25m 33s	Horizon Assault	♥ 3	2024-04-16-183451_1920x1080_scrot.png Nice juice. Love to see a tutorial in a jam game. I think if a Shooter Tower hits a bunch of units on the same pixel they do splash? I spammed a bunch of marksmen and they seemed to die instantly, idk. Not sure how the right button control was meant to work, maybe should have been in the tutorial. Fun game.
Apr 16 08:50:21	12m 12s	Summoning bodys	♥ 3	Cool art. Couldn't figure out what to do, I assume it's unfinished.
Apr 17 06:04:20	21h 13m	Conjurer's Cup	♥ 1	Interesting game, feels like a cross between foosball and pong. The mana income felt a little too low, most rounds you can only get a single unit out. I can see how the different units counter each other, but there's usually only one or two on the field at any point, it would have been nice to have more interacting at once.
Apr 17 13:40:09	7h 35m	SUMMONING	♥ 1	I liked the addition of having to stay still for the bonus pentagrams, shakes up the usual "run forever" gameplay of VS-likes.
Apr 17 14:06:08	25m 59s	Golem Guardians	♥ 2	The enemies were extremely menacing. Agree that the shooting golem seems straight up better than the others.
Apr 17 14:35:46	29m 38s	Underworld Kitchen	♥ 1	Fighting the skeles felt good, but the input randomness of whether you get a skele or an ingredient from the portals I found annoying. The lack of any sense of progression meant I wasn't compelled to play once I was done soaking up the atmosphere. Which was great, the art and controls were very nice.
Apr 18 08:03:08	17h 27m	Mammon & Sons	♥ 5	2024-04-18-175823_1920x1080_scrot.png Do you need to complete 10 5-star missions to get the victory screen? I'm not sure where I was up to, but a demon jumped out of a completed job directly into a new one ruining my streak. It was funny every other time that happened, but quite annoying in the endgame trying to get the 5 stars. Similarly not being able to tell if a job was a 1-demon or 2-demon one without putting a demon in was frustrating. Other critiques were that all the time gating felt too slow to me, I'm already paying 2 HP for training plus the 10 Soul investment, why a timer bar too? Also as demon HP was always 4 I think a "chunked" HP bar works better than a continuous one. Matching the right demon to the job is also a bit of a pain with them running around all the time, a drop down UI to pick an available demon or being able to put them in pens to keep them from mingling would be nice. Otherwise I really liked the idea and general sense of progression. The "biblically accurate" and\or hellraiser demon visuals but still having cutesy SFX was a nice touch.