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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | pkenney's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 21 02:18:01 | Necrocraft | ♥ 1 | This was fun! Interesting that I can combine the runes in a wide variety of ways that made the creatures useful in different situations or combinations. It's an especially nice touch that their attributes determine their graphics, so you can SEE that huge helmet for all that armor, etc. I think, for me, the nonstopping realtime made it a little bit overwhelming, but it also made the game a little more unique and high-pressure. So it's a tradeoff. But it kept me from getting to really explore the strategy as deeply as I would have liked. My first run, I was trying to look carefully at everything and got totally run over. The next game I just clicked one rune, then space to play, then the summon button, on a loop. I vented all my mana quickly onto the board, and while I still lost I did a lot better that time. Then I started hitting a middle ground, which is where I think the game is most fun. I started to skip things to dig deeper into the store to find the runes I wanted, and build the guy I thought I needed. I did get burned once when I build a guy with huge armor, and then when he arrives he was a 1/1 and died instantly... Ooops. I read the rules and learned why! Green drops became my go-to and I managed to win by crafting every green-drop I saw, and digging deeper into the store to spend my mana mostly on that. Art was very nice, especially the dynamic summons, and the music, vfx lines and little battle sfx kept the game feeling really lively. Nice work! | |
| Apr 21 02:56:26 | 38m 25s | Protect the Summoner | ♥ 1 | Wow the audio nails the mood so well! And the mood is well-supported by the gameplay, which does get tense. The art is a great fit, too. It was cool how the angle changes the situation -- it's safe enough to travel left/right, but much more dangerous going up/down. Sometimes I would charge the eyes in a rush, or a a sweep back and forth. Other times I would stay still and just move up and down a bit like a pong paddle. Few small splinters I'll mention but nothing that got actually frustrating: just walking, your summoner will get hit with eyes that simply spawn into him which felt a little unfair, when doing a left-right back and forth sometimes one of the summoners would pop out IN FRONT of my shield unexpectedly and take a slew of damage. I enjoyed this and played to the end, with a few retries needed on level 4. Just the right length. Great job! |
| Apr 21 15:40:27 | 12h 44m | Candles of Doom | ♥ 3 | Very cool, art looks great, nice sound/music, and the difficulty is right in the sweet spot. I found myself skipping my attention all over and trying to decide where to invest my clicking, which I think is just what you want! One towner confused me, sitting watching the clutch candle-walking downer, standing next to a full fountain and not doing anything! Traitor to the great tree. downer.png If I could add one small thing to the game, it would be a little UI/SFX feedback on the state of the mouse/water interaction (mouseover, filling, done). Sometimes I would put my mouse on the water (I thought) and then assume I was filling, and use my eyes to scan the screen while waiting, only to find I was never filling, so a little confirmation fx would help that. Nice entry! |
| Apr 29 19:38:48 | 195h 58m | Alien Crab in the Extamaze | ♥ 1 | Whenever I play a game with grid movement, and a lot of backtracking, and lerp/animation to show the character moving, I always do a test I call the "three-finger roll." I hit right/up/left in a burst of ultrafast inputs, and I see where my character ends up. Some games just ignore input until animations complete and only process one input. Some games queue one additional input, and process two. I always appreciate it when games, like this one, process all three inputs. To me, it's a sign of craft and attention to detail when you make sure your game remains responsive to inputs despite having turn-based movement and animation. In fact, overall I felt no splinters playing this game. I spent quite a while with this, and destroyed both main generators. My total level score ended up at 36. I liked how the maze's challenges ranged on a shifting spectrum from obstacle to resource. Some aspects reminded me a bit of Desktop Dungeons in that way, except here it was a multi-level resource with backtracking, which reminded me in a really pleasant way of this obscure "traditional" roguelike I really enjoy called The Ground Gives Way. This entry felt really complete, with very strong design and fleshed-out systems and polish. Art and the basic-but-effective sfx totally had it covered. I really appreciated the infinite undo, which I needed on two occasions: once, in a long string, when I learned what the slime's trail does, and once when the shortness of the re-fire rate on movement brought me into an attack I didn't intend. An impressive amount of scope that feels fully realized here, great job! I really enjoyed it. |
| Apr 30 01:02:00 | 5h 23m | WWWWW: Wily Wazza (the) Wizard's Wacky Wadventure | ♥ 0 | Ok this game... this is the rare sort of game that has jank, but it makes that jank into an ADVANTAGE instead of a disadvantage. It's like punk rock... the raw unpolished edges are what make it fun. The character controller is kind of loopy, it goes very fast but also has heavy inertia. There are blind jumps, which are sometimes pits full of monsters, and sometimes fine, and sometimes bugs where you fall off the bottom of the screen never to return. There are monsters that lunge out at you suddenly and one-shot-kill you out of nowhere and restart you all the way back at the very beginning of the game. Usually this would all be feelbads, but instead this game somehow makes it good! I didn't mind being reset because I could cruise/surf the level with my high speed and inertia, and it felt fun. Yes there were insta-kill monsters, but the ability to summon things at any point is also really strong, so it's a savage speed battle of who will kill first! Or dodge if you hilariously get a pebble instead of a boulder! Oh wait, did I just kill both of us because a car spawned, squished the monster, but then tip over and crush me while I was busy fist-pumping at my success?? Yep. There were some real heart-stopper moments ... I remember one time, I had to use my momentum-laden character to leap across a nearly-max pit only to overcommit and slide right into the attack of a lunging one-shotter... I twitch-spawned and got a boulder that splatted him just in time. Another time a monster was vibrating left/right frantically because he was on a sky platform that had just come into view, so his pacing range was 1 pixel. I couldn't spawn on top of him because the WebUI buttons from itchio were right where I needed to spawn, so right-click opened a context mean in the browser rather than taking an in-game action to spawn. I took one step right to open up some free space, and the monster launched himself right at my face with terrific speed. In a terrible panic I spam-spawned as I dodged. I felt like a matador. Any game that can create moments like that is GOOD STUFF in my book, so I really enjoyed this entry, despite the fact that it seemingly breaks some of the traditional rules of how things "should" be done. Well done. Also, the graphics look nice, and feel cohesive. |
| Apr 30 02:25:48 | 1h 23m | BLOOD MUST BE SHED | ♥ 1 | Very cool music, and the art style is nice too. Game dropped me into a world I didn't quite understand, and I was running all around just to see what I could find. A lot of different things happened! To the right there was a sort of Zelda-inspired land. To the left, some more mysterious lands that reminded me of when you get outside the bounds in an old NES game. Then when I thought I had seen all there was, I stumbled into a door. Then another, and some stairs. Sometimes I just died instantly (yea I did go north-east, that one was my fault!). Another time I found an angry cloud miniboss. It was all a little chaotic, but it was fun to explore and had more going on than I expected. This created a nice feeling of mystery that encouraged me to explore for a while, nice! Glad to see you back at LD! |
| Apr 30 02:37:06 | 11m 18s | Afterlife Taxi | ♥ 0 | Cozy experience with a nice vibe. Music did a lot of work creating the mood to support the story, and I liked the length. I did have one small splinter, I was trying to hit "space" to advance the dialog and skipped past my first choice. Nice work, I appreciate that there are some of these slower more thoughtful games in the jam. |
| Apr 30 02:52:29 | 15m 23s | DESUMMONING | ♥ 1 | Really cool outer surface to this game - the music is great, the art is fantastic, and the intro was really well done. The play of the game handled well, too, but the mechanical core of the card-game rules was missing something... it felt like I didn't have much to drive any specific decision around which card to play. Maybe even something as simple as borrowing from Slay by showing what hand lemon would play next would let me feel like I can hoard high cards for the tough moments, although obviously you'd have to make lemon stronger to counter-balance that. Really cool and well put together, a strong entry. But had that potential to be a REAL banger with just a bit more meat on the card game piece. Nice work. |
| Apr 30 03:57:52 | 1h 05m | The Last Ritual | ♥ 1 | Visual style is great! The flat colors make movement a bit disorienting, but the nature of the gameplay makes this into a plus, where in most games it might be a minus. Nice choice. The sound also does a lot to add to the strong mood here. Ambience is simple but effective and feels cohesive with the rest of the experience (tho it did have a little "clip" sound when it loops). The few jump-scare sounds on certain words is also a nice touch, had me whirling around a few times. Thank goodness you had the hints. I had solved the final puzzle but it had not triggered, and only looking up the hints saved me, I never would have re-entered already-done items otherwise. Oh, I did experience some inconsistency with the game responding to my jump keypress. It would just ignore me about half the time. This was not a problem at all but thank goodness there was no platforming. I enjoyed this cool and unique entry, well done! |
| May 1 01:59:39 | 22h 01m | Across The Bounds | ♥ 1 | HELLO BOYS! Great job with the mood. The dark art, the physics-driven bones, and of course that fantastically creepy audio all really came together. But the gameplay itself also helped -- the short sight distance, the total inability to fight back against the angels, and OHMY that jump from the cymbal-crash stones!! That thing was INSANE! Loved rocketing up at top speed. Definitely got freaked out and nervous a few times here. And the game didn't overstay its welcome -- length was just right. |
| May 1 02:23:27 | 23m 48s | Spirit Edge | ♥ 1 | Brutal, in a good way. Lot of nice tiny touches go into the polished feel of something this fast and brutal but fair, it's impressive. I kind of stunk at it. I really needed a sound that told me "yes yes, you did just hit that guy." As I was learning the ropes I was often unclear whether I was landing my shots or not. The initial sleeper is a nice touch to create a down moment that's in-game, lets me gather myself before the next 8 second battle. The sounds and music were really nicely paired. Gave me that lean-forward-and-dig-in feeling that helped me not mind the difficulty. Very informative yet ultra-fast restart loop was extremely wise, a blunder there ruins the whole game but you nailed it. Great work. |
| May 1 03:48:20 | 1h 24m | Too Many Minions! | ♥ 3 | This was great! Such a simple interface and core idea, extended with just the right amount and variety of obstacle to keep it interesting. I NEARLY beat the final challenge, but lost heart, it's hard to repeat that final level too many times. It was tense to send JUST enough guys to take something down, but hold as much in reserve as possible for the next assault somewhere else on the map. And the chaos was just enough that it keeps things spicy. Sound effects were nice, especially given how many times the "spawned a minion" had to be played. It came across as a pleasant rumble of productivity. Art was basic but really cohesive and clear, so it fit the game well. Very well done! |
| May 1 21:00:14 | 17h 11m | Summon-a-Spot | ♥ 0 | Really well done! Game presents me with an excellent "fun-awkward" control and asks me to perform difficult tasks on a tight timetable. The tension is very real -- gotta go fast except that bumping things, overshooting the space, spinning out, and flipping over, are all very real risks that create a fun counter-force to "just go fast." Really enjoyed navigating the balance. But I do think this game makes one really terrible design mistake... the retry loop is WAYYYYYYY too long, and even requires that I take my right hand off the arrow keys, modally shift from "keyboard controlling game" and reach over to grab my mouse to click a button. And after that, there is even a very slow camera pan, and then a quite long countdown. Given that A) the game challenges me to break time records which require me to rush but not make mistakes, so you are basically asking me to repeat attempts over and over and over and B) I often know within a few seconds of starting that the attempt is a fail, it's a significant repeated source of heavy friction to have such a slow retry loop. It's 100% fine to have fun-frustrating in the game controller, but I don't think you should have it in the UI. If I were to go for the golds, I think the vast majority of my play time would end up being "waiting for the game to restart" as opposed to fun playing. I think this entry is very good, and I really enjoyed playing it. But I did not try to beat the medal timers, because of the slow retry. I would have spent easily 20x more time playing this game if I could tap "r" at any moment and be INSTANTLY restarted without UI, timer, or countdown. If you're worried about kicking off the clock too early, find a solution that doesn't PREVENT going fast, such as only starting the timer once the car initiates motion or something. Anyway I don't mean to over-emphasize that one splinter -- I only go into that so much because this game has such great potential, and I would have LOVED to play this game with fast retry, it would have elevated the game from very good to amazing! Controls are great, art looks great, and the sound effects carry the vibe and info well. Great job! |
| May 1 21:24:04 | 23m 50s | daydream | ♥ 2 | Great mood, good outer story layer, and the Zelda part was well done. Movement was responsive and the balance against the enemies in terms of having to get in and swing felt fair while creating some tension. The art was strong, in particular the harmonious colors that fit the vibe really well. I did stall out early in the second memory dungeon, because it was the same enemies as the first, and it's mandatory to track them down and slaughter them. The disappearing guy who makes you stop and wait for him is a bit grindy to exterminate, and while at first this part was great, it did overstay its welcome given that there was no skipping it. It's a shame because I was curious to push further and learn how the story unfolded and what the next boss was going to be like! This is a nice, well-rounded entry! Just a small smoothing of grind and I think I would have spent a lot more time with it. |
| May 1 21:35:18 | 11m 14s | Sorcerer's Steps | ♥ 2 | DAMNYOU BATS!!! Fun sounds, and hand-art. Definitely did NOT find the game too easy, but maybe I was playing too timidly. The bats were a little difficult to spatially locate at times, but the fact that they had a really clear sound effect was really really helpful. I was not able to complete the game, I played a while but eventually just lost heart. Those darn bats got me good. |
| May 2 01:31:33 | 3h 56m | CephaloClash | ♥ 1 | Well done! Nice touches on the game feel. The pickups have a generous hitbox while the enemy bullets give a touch of leeway, resulting in a nice feel that getting hit is MY FAULT even when I'm caged in by bullets. Music is great and really adds a lot, nice job with that one! If I could add one thing to the game, it would be fullscreen mode. But that seems to be something very few Godot games have, is that a limitation of the engine? Art was nice, and the pedestrian names for violent space aliens who ended up impressed by me was funny. I had fun with the game, nice work! |
| May 2 01:37:46 | 6m 13s | summon that star manz | ♥ 0 | No matter how perfect I try to draw the circle, I can't get anybody but starman! Even if I add a cool pentagram like I saw on a TV show. I've heard it's hard to draw a math-perfect circle. I'll keep practicing and try azgain. |
| May 2 02:16:43 | 38m 57s | Void Magus | ♥ 0 | Really fun! I felt like I was wildly OP compared to the challenge, but the way the game felt to play, and how much stuff was going on at once on the screen, it just felt FUN so I didn't care that I was crushing it. I did have to think through, but once I could stand on (and later create) mana tiles to spam out an army of ghosts/bats/OMGORBS I felt unstoppable! Played to the end and enjoyed it all the way. Nice graphics, slapping music, fun game. Well done! |
| May 2 02:35:14 | 18m 31s | Patty Panic | ♥ 0 | "This is going so smoothl... Oh wait, is that A LINE OUT THE DOOR??" 10,900 and I enjoyed the experience! Tight movement, great tutorial intro, clear UI/graphics that look nice, and pleasant surprises about combo-actions such as picking up multiple burgers (thank goodness there was no customer-specific ordering!) or leading a customer to a table where you're about to collect (thank goodness there was no need to clean/set the table!). No splinters, except maybe a very slight one where a few times I wished the corners of the table were rounded in terms of the collider (or maybe the player was a circle) so that I could slip around the edges instead of jolting to a stop. But so well put together, really impressive entry! edit: saw that the music was not created during the 48 hrs despite being compo - that music really did add to the vibe! Appreciate you disclosing and opting out of audio. I docked a half-star on "overall" rating for coloring slightly outside the lines there. On the other hand, respect for running on your own engine, impressive, nice web experience. |
| May 2 02:46:30 | 11m 16s | LD55-summoner | ♥ 1 | Nice moody atmosphere! Art and sound, and the way the grunt guys move, it all really works. Shame you ran out of time, I would have been curious to see where this one could go! |
| May 2 02:53:25 | 6m 55s | Readybuns | ♥ 1 | Congrats on making something on your phone under heavy constraints! Way to keep alive that nice LD streak you have going. I got the buns in the car in 12 honks. |
| May 3 01:46:51 | 22h 53m | On Hiatus | ♥ 2 | NO DON'T MAKE ME PLAY! MY STREAK!! |
