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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | pickens-inc's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 17 17:45:23 | Mushroom Conundrum | ♥ 3 | As usual, Cameron's games are adorable and excellent! What a hilarious and impressively polished little puzzle! I love the art style, and the little animations are great. It's the sort of game that doesn't even need a tutorial since it's so intuitive. I especially liked the way the music changed when entering the mines. I loved the stupid little mushrooms wandering around doing their own thing, the only thing I'd have wished is for is that they didn't put things in the summoning circle when I'm trying to make something, I fought with them a fair bit around the halfway point, until I individually moved all the nearby logs away. Overall though, absolutely lovely, well done guys. And it even had a nice little ending shot too. | |
| Apr 17 17:59:57 | 14m 34s | Church of Pain | ♥ 3 | As others have said, the graphics and atmosphere are what really sell it. The lighting is top notch, the use of the shadows and volumetric fog, how you had time to make all these assets is crazy. That last area is very cool too. I especially quite like the death animation for the ghoul things. I think more time could have been spent working on the game "feel". In old school shooters, the key aspect was to make the guns feel really nice to kill things with. That comes from stuff like punchy sound effects, splashy gore, and stuff like camera kick. I think the blood particles were fun, but in general everything could have been amped up some. I fully appreciate that audio is often a rush to get in during a jam, but I think a simple improvement would be fixing the starting pistol's sound, which is a little delayed. A solid entry with some juicy visuals and atmosphere. Well done! |
| Apr 17 22:38:17 | 4h 38m | Infernal Interns | ♥ 2 | It definitely felt like I was picking at random, and it was a little dismaying to get what felt like positive outcomes but zero gold reviews. But on the whole I enjoyed the concept of this! Loved seeing what I could make, and there were way more combinations than I expected! I especially loved that the results weren't in the form of numbers or anything, but little stories. Also kind of helped through replaying then, and I love that there is genuine replayabiltiy to it. Alas, I still ended with zero gold reviews after three tries, perhaps I'm just not meant for demonhood. Still, fun little entry! |
| Apr 17 23:12:09 | 33m 52s | Blåkulla | ♥ 4 | It's me again! Wow, I've not rated many games, and I always expect good things from Simon's team's games, but this has been the best one I've played so far. It's a totally complete experience with an insane amount of content in it! The UI polish is nuts. The card flip-flpping, the loads of spells, enemy variety, the cutscene. The little characters waxing philosophical. I lvoed the theming. Took me a while to realise that the cards were just reminders, and I could actually draw at any time, but once I did, I quickly found my favourites to use (the flame in the cloud was my MVP! Partly because it was one of the few I could always remember lol). Honestly my suggestion more would have been to cut down the number of spells a little, and make it a little more of a decision, trying to choose which spells to cast. But there was also kind of a chaotic joy in just panicking at the end and spamming squiggles, and happily getting some spells I'd forgotten about working. 5/5 from me, well done all involved. Quality entry. |
| Apr 18 19:43:03 | 20h 30m | The Unholy Rise Of Catthulhu | ♥ 2 | The art and themeing here really is spot on. Love the sprites for the characters, and the little story. Felt bad about taking out the little dogs! I am reticent about the idea of changing the balance of the game post-jam though, I think you should add an option to play it as it was submitted, as usually post-jam fixes are more meant for "typos" - i.e. things you'd have caught that are small fixes. But the game I played was solid and a nice enjoyable experience. Well done! Splendid job. |
| Apr 20 16:01:51 | 44h 18m | Manku the Magician | ♥ 5 | This oozes style and polish. The gameplay is simple but intuitive enough that it needs no words to explain it. It's incredibly cute and the animations are charming. I think some sort of scaling or duration to end the game would have been nice beyond the increase in carrots, but in general every aspect was quality. The music was lovely, the good and bad endings were very good, and I abslutely loved the chat and twitch donations coming in. Well done for a quality entry! |
| Apr 23 19:04:50 | 75h 02m | HellKiller | ♥ 2 | There's a lot of charm here, and a lot to like. You do a lot of things to nail the game feel, which is the most important and most often overlookedp art of a micro-game like a jam game, in my opinion. For a game like this, it's that snappy, juicy satidfying combat gameplay. I think you succeed in making all the projectiles feel really nice to shoot and killing enemies feels great - in no small part thanks to the gorgeous VFX. Some firing VFX wouldn't have gone amiss, and naturally the big area that would really help with it is more and punchier sound effects. But! That's often something we run out of time for during jams. I think given the emphasis on snappy, twitchy action gameplay, there's a few things that are done great, and a few things I'd change that I think are conflicting with it. I think the player has some nice weight to it, but perhaps a little too much weight. When you die so quickly, I want to be able to change directions immediately. I think on that note of death, being able to take more than one hit would be good - maybe just 3 hits and you're dead? I also would love it if the dash got buffed - I never felt like it really helped out there. I really like the variety you add by way of upgrades, some of them felt really great (I loved getting the fire rate one). However, I'd make two big changes personally - first, I'd remove the bad ones. I think it's a genuinely cool idea, but doesn't fit the game too well. I want to feel good about getting an upgrade, and it feels bad instead when I get loads of bad ones, and that I had to put myself in danger to confirm that. It messes a lot with the pace, and I think it would make much more sense that I should feel happy to see an upgrade drop. Then, I'd simplify the UI pop up to just say something like "Fire Rate+" or use icons, so in the heat of the moment I can see. Perhaps a voice over would help there. Over all though, I think this is a great entry, and there's some splendid polish in it. In the end I only managed 13th place on the board, but I was never very good at these games! |
| Apr 23 22:18:48 | 3h 13m | Exorcist Pianist | ♥ 2 | I try my best to play any music related entry I find, and this was the first time I got to dig out my midi keyboard to play a game! I love that concept. Loved the vibe and atmosphere too, though I'm no expert pianist, I've had my evenings spent cathartically playing notes as if letting out my own demons. I love that. I think any CC I have is probably already mentioned either by the comments or in your post mortem, but my big ones are that yes, it would have been great had it been more melodic (indeed since they were all in a scale, I'm sure there's a good way to have a backing harmony help make it sound like everything you play is in context. I think the fact it's free-metred and not a rhythm game is totally fine personally, my other issue is just difficutly. Took me a while to realise the difference between big A and little a, embarrassingly, but constantly having to peek up and down was a bit tricky, never managed it. Still, solid entry, be proud. Well done! Would love to see more games like this. |
| Apr 24 17:10:02 | 18h 51m | Veles Book | ♥ 1 | Hey guys, I'll definitely give this game a go tonight, but would you be able to tell me what you did to make the build run smoother? I'm experiencing the same issues you guys had! I cap the FPS, set the sclabality level, resolution scale and texture quality, so I'm really interested to see what solved it for you! Will definitely get to this and return with a rating today! |
| Apr 27 11:57:38 | 66h 47m | Throes of the Javelin | ♥ 3 | I'm stunned this was made in three days, the polish, ambience, and tight controls are all there. It's a simple mechanic explored so tightly. You even have a ready-made combat system built into it. The atmosphere is reat and i love the subtleties of the spear's weight, and the way it pushes you as you catch it, a mechanic in and of itself. The only CC I'd have had was perhaps a button to brace yourself on impact as having to compensate catching it on a small platform was a little frustrating, and also an option to tone down or remove the delay in camera smoothing, because it gave me a little bit of dizziness. This is one of the few games I'd 100% say you should absolutely build on, because this already feels like a premium product. Top notch work. |