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Feedback comments for LD55
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Skleembof's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 17 03:51:26 | Phone Homies | ♥ 1 | Maybe I'm dumb but that was way too hard. At first I tried analyzing a single aliens patterns and thought they were like flipping the order of the first 4 characters and then sliding them to the left, but their next message proved that incorrect which made me believe I was overthinking it. So then I thought it was a simple substitution puzzle and tried to get an alien to say earth by translating their symbols using my previous response as a reference. This took a while because the symbols are kind of hard to identify at a glance and my message is offset from the alien messages in the chat box so I cant just directly compare them. After spending a decent amount of time converting the aliens smiley faces, atoms, molecules, stars, saturns, and black holes to my smiley faces, atoms, molecules, stars, saturns, and black holes, while also translating each individual color, the alien replied with complete gibberish. At that point I gave up. While I might be too dumb for the puzzle, I think the main issue is that you didn't give any real instructions or hints, so I had no idea if I was over analyzing, trying too hard or not trying hard enough. I also think you added way too many variables to start with. 8 unique symbols, 6 unique colors, and then the randomness of having 6 aliens who might or might not respond to the message. The idea is cool and the graphics are really nice, but the gameplay is either way too difficult or there's just too much information thrown at you at once to be able to easily figure out what to do. | |
| Apr 17 18:18:22 | 14h 26m | Circle of Life | ♥ 4 | I think you should allow the player to move the gems after placing them since it's very difficult to visualize the angle of the lines ones they're slotted. The player is already limited by the pool of gems they have access to, they shouldn't be penalized for not properly visualizing all the possible combinations of angles. I felt like I couldn't really experiment with the summoning mechanics because of how limiting this was. I liked how the monster you summon is based on the stats, and how the maximum possible stats you can get into a summon increases as you kill monsters and get stronger gems. It gave them game a good feeling of progression. The difficulty curve is a bit intense though. It starts off slow but then explodes rather quickly. I thought I'd summoned a really powerful monster and was ready to see him do some damage but he got obliterated by a giant skunk thing. Seeing that was pretty disappointing. I think you should make the enemies smaller and weaker like disposable mobs so that effect of different stats between your summons is easier to visualize. I think this would make the game feel more satisfying and engaging. The graphics and audio were very nice and the game felt very polished overall |
| Apr 17 19:17:37 | 59m 15s | The Unlikely Messenger | ♥ 5 | You guys made an impressive game in such a short amount of time. Creating both a fast paced shooter and an almost cinematic narrative experience is an impressive feat on its own, but the look and sound of the AI assets contrasts so hard with the rest of the game that it makes it feel rushed and low effort. I have to agree with the others, the use of AI in this case totally overshadows the rest of the game. I think you should consider opting out of sound and graphics as your submission goes against the spirit of the jam (and also the rules since AI did the majority of the art and sound work). There are hundreds of artists making games by hand putting their skills to the test and you guys are disparaging their effort by making them compete with an AI, and you're even betraying your own efforts by making the AI assets the most impressive part of your submission. |
| Apr 17 19:34:10 | 16m 33s | Library Fighter II Turbo | ♥ 2 | I liked the idea and the presentation was great, but I think the gameplay needs some refinement. I thought it was going to be a tactical experience where you could plan out your moves to counter your opponents actions, but I ended up just spamming fighters across the board making sure they dont kill each other. It didn't even matter what each fighter did, just send them out and hope the enemy randomly steps in their path. I think the problem is that both you and the enemy have too much freedom to move and place fighters. There is nothing to force you to think about what your doing. If you're out of fighters, just pick up a new page. If there's an enemy in your way, just jump around and wait for them to pass. There's no risk in just waiting for an opening. I think it would've been better if you had to protect like a base or something at the end of the board. That way you can't just wait for a strong enemy to pass, you have to counter them and put yourself at risk by stepping in their line of fire to send a fighter out. This would make the game a lot slower paced and more tactical but I think you could keep the pace close to what it is now depending on how you implement it. Maybe you could have strong fighters and weak fighters and the players can only summon a strong one after a few rounds or something. That way the small fighters can keep the pace high by forcing the player to dodge and intercept while the game slows down and becomes more tactical when the strong fighters are summoned. |
| Apr 17 20:12:02 | 37m 52s | Fiesta De Las Quimeras! | ♥ 3 | I got the same error above using firefox but only on the LD page, on itch.io it worked fine. As for the game, I loved the presentation! This is one of the most unique looking LD games I've played in a while. I did find one major issue though, the tutorial doesnt explain how to summon chimeras and demons. It left out the part where you have to click on the tombstone. I tried to spawn things by spamming animal spirits until they all lit up but that didnt work. I then tried filling the circle with only the exact number of animals needed but that didnt work either. It was only when I read the itch.io page that i saw you had to click the tombstone lol. Maybe thats on me, but I think the tutorial should have been more specific. Once I figured it out the game became a lot more engaging. I didn't really like the offerings system though. The randomness was kind of unsatisfying and I felt like i was just sitting around waiting for the right items. I also think you should have some kind of limit on the number of spirits you can have summoned at a time because without it you can just keep spamming summons until there happens to be the appropriate number of animals on the circle for a chimera. I felt limited only by the speed at which the offerings get randomized. Overall though, a cool unique experience and very polished for an LD game |
| Apr 17 21:54:14 | 1h 42m | Life of a Summon | ♥ 2 | I love your take on the theme, I don't think there's any other game out there like this. The graphics are ugly in a beautiful way, and the fact that you used your own custom game engine is very impressive. I think the game needs some kind of goal or some kind of risk. It would be really cool if you had to fight the other wizard when summoned to really sell how stressful the life of a summoned creature can be. |
| Apr 17 22:05:26 | 11m 12s | Sorcerer's Army of Summons | ♥ 2 | Nice simple game, I liked the feeling of progression. The lighting was a bit dark and it was hard ton differentiate the characters. I think a game like this could be really fun with some polish and more fleshed out mechanics like rpg stats and equipment. Obviously out of scope for a game jam though. Great job on the overall presentation and graphical work |
| Apr 17 22:26:30 | 21m 04s | Sumo Honing | ♥ 5 | Exceptional overall presentation. The graphics and audio were very charming, but the gameplay was a bit tedious and got exhausting after a while. The idea of creating a character by summoning body parts and features with cryptic runes is an awesome idea, but not much of a game on its own. I got ending 3 and wanted to see what other endings were like but having to play through the whole game again and redo all the symbol matching sequences kinda put me off. Great job on creating a truly unique LD game, I doubt there's another ritualistic sumo wrestler summoning game out there 😆 |
| Apr 17 22:42:51 | 16m 21s | Summoning Station | ♥ 1 | This was way too difficult. I love the idea though, it took me a while to make sense of how it worked but once I got it, I had a lot of fun. I think you need to make the character move a lot faster or slow down time because it felt impossible to keep up with the pace of the clock. The problem might be that there are way too many events in the station schedule. If they were more spaced out you could actually have time to clear a zone or plan for future arrivals and departures. Maybe changing the mechanic from picking up people to having them follow you or something would work better. Maybe you can do something like the calling mechanic from pikmin to gather passengers based on their symbols. Good job putting this together in 12 hours, I know balancing a game takes a lot of time and is basically impossible during ludum dare. Also, I agree with @codbaade that performance is an issue. Idk if its just an Unreal Engine thing but it made my fans spin up to 100% and ran poorly on my laptop. That might put some people off from giving your game a fair shot. |
| Apr 17 23:55:50 | 1h 12m | Breakout | ♥ 1 | It sucks that you weren't able to finish it. My first playthrough I fell through the floor trying to climb the stairs and I saw that there was a giant outside area with trees and stuff in the game, so I was kinda disappointed on my next playthrough when the game abruptly ended at the elevator. I love the take on the theme though, very unique idea. |
| Apr 18 01:32:26 | 1h 36m | Witches Brew | ♥ 1 | An absolutely riveting experience. My only issue with the game is that its very hostile towards speed runners. I tried a number of creative routes to get to the ingredients but I kept getting blocked by the giant tree colliders and little props that i couldnt jump over. Other than that, it was phenomenal. |
| Apr 18 01:42:47 | 10m 21s | Color Jumble | ♥ 2 | Good job on your first godot game, it can be a little weird at first because of its concept of nodes and scenes being different from something like Unity, plus a number of other quirks This is a tiny game but the one puzzle it had was well made and I would've enjoyed playing some more if you'd had time to make more levels. |
| Apr 19 22:37:58 | 44h 55m | Conjured | ♥ 3 | I really enjoyed this, but it clearly needs some more time in the oven. I'm one of those people who loves vampire survivors and this felt a tiny bit like that, but with a twist. I think you might have to add one more layer to the combat to make fights with sorcerers more interesting because currently the AI just spams towers and the occasional little dude. The only winning strategy was to run away to a distant corner of the arena and just spam soldiers. This both gives you a powerful army and allows the AI to kill each other off making for an easy win. I think you should allow mana to just keep filling up endlessly or maybe just cap it much higher than where it currently is. Holding off on spawning soldiers while being attacked so that you can summon a stronger unit or a bunch of weak units at once would be a very satisfying risk reward mechanic. The current cap is very unsatisfying and since the ai just constantly spams units, you pretty much have to do the same thing in a fight. I know good balancing is impossible during LD, but good job creating a unique little game during the jam. Idk if you guys plan on working on it some more, but I feel like its very close to being a fun little experience, it just needs a bit more refinement |
| Apr 19 22:54:58 | 17m 00s | City Frustration Beer | ♥ 0 | What was the idea behind the motivation bar since it doesn't do anything? Did you plan on doing something with it but ran out of time? The gameplay was very simple, but the atmosphere was creepy and the writing helped make the world feel more real and interesting |
| Apr 20 01:44:06 | 2h 49m | Think Or Be Thought | ♥ 1 | this is a really cool idea, but it wasn't exactly clear what it meant by digits. I thought I was just getting a fixed number of points or something for unique equations but i couldn't figure out how that worked. It took a few playthroughs to realize i was getting a point for each character in the equation which includes the operators. I was tempted to leave it running in the background but I think it really needs some sort of big flashy point font or animation showing me all the points I'm getting. oh, and I just used tab to switched between the boxes which worked fine. |
| Apr 20 02:07:33 | 23m 27s | Night 333 | ♥ 1 | Very well done, the AI felt like they actually knew what they were doing and I think this is the first game I've played with hover cars that actually feel like they're hovering! I was driving over trees and everything lmao By the way, i think the turning right bug is a gamepad thing. My first playthrough was with a gamepad connected and I ran into the turning issue. I could still play by pushing the analog stick forward and countering the turn. I then decided to try it again with my gamepad disconnected and I didn't encounter the bug. Restarting with the gamepad connected made it happen again. |
| Apr 20 02:18:15 | 10m 42s | Bloud | ♥ 1 | Very unique art style! Kind of reminded me of classic neopets games. It's pretty difficult but the simple gameplay kept it fun for a few playthroughs. The HTML version has some issue where the game doesn't scale properly. My first playthrough the game felt really cramped which made it more difficult than it already is. I downloaded the desktop version though and it was fine. |
| Apr 20 02:43:09 | 24m 54s | Frogs of the Round Pebble | ♥ 2 | Screenshot 2024-04-19 223451.jpg I thought nah I'm not going to awkwardly hop around this giant ass map as this janky frog. Boy was I wrong. I did indeed hop around the giant ass map as a janky frog and I enjoyed every second of it. Aside from the awkward animation blending and difficult to control camera, that was a very enjoyable experience and honestly felt more like a complete game than most LD games I've played today. I like how well implemented and unique the summoning challenges were. I kinda want to see more of these frog knights and their frog king so I was a bit disappointed when nothing happened at the end. Great job putting together such a cohesive experience for ludum dare! |
| Apr 20 02:47:13 | 4m 04s | Boneworks | ♥ 1 | Nicely put together, but I agree that it's way too difficult in its current state. The only way I managed to win was with @happyglitch's strategy, so thanks for the hint lol. At the moment, it feels kind of like a puzzle game more than a strategy game. Anyways, I like the overall presentation and the concept is simple, but solid. Tweak the difficulty a bit, and it could be a fun little strategy game. |
| Apr 20 03:46:29 | 59m 16s | Nectar Nexus | ♥ 1 | Beautiful graphics and overall presentation, but the gameplay is just way too unintuitive and frustrating. I think that because there is only one solution to each screen and each solution requires so many steps, it takes way too much trial and error for the player to make sense of the mechanics. Level 4 was very confusing. The only way to learn the mechanics for rotating the bee that you will need for future levels, you basically just need to click the bottom flower when happen to be on the right tile. If you click it early, you'll see that the bee just moves forward instead of rotating which can mislead you into thinking you need to be directly above it to rotate downwards which then makes the level take longer. Also, I accidentally clicked the back arrow once which kicked me out of the vase and I lost all my progress since I had to restart at the first screen. I feel like there's an awesome puzzle game here, but you might need to either rethink the mechanics or just do a better job of communicating them with the player. Also, holy crap this might be the most content I've ever seen in a ludum dare game! Great job pumping out so many levels and unique art in such a short amount of time |
| May 1 00:19:11 | 260h 32m | Purrfect Portal | ♥ 2 | Very impressive entry! you guys put a lot of effort into making this feel like a full game. I loved how effective the interactive tutorial was at teaching me how to play the game. The balancing felt fine as I was playing the tutorial, but after unlocking the final 2 buildings, it became very hectic and difficult to figure out what to do. It also felt a bit pointless since the bugs didn't pose any real risk and there was no goal to shoot for. I think a simple counter of how many games you completed would have worked to motivate the player more. Overall I enjoyed my time with the game but with no difficulty it got old fast. I also think I found a bug where the Boo! game wouldn't complete but the counter would go higher than the 7. Untitled.png |
| May 3 15:48:08 | 63h 28m | Birb World Tour: Royale | ♥ 1 | That was fun but a bit awkward. Idk if this was a glitch or intentional but in my first race I was like 60th place but when I crossed the finish line it said I was first. It was also kind of annoying missing power ups or catapults because they were floating above the terrain. Overall though very fun and with some more polish to the mechanics and presentation and a real online mode, this could be a hit |
| May 3 16:00:09 | 12m 01s | Amazon-Void | ♥ 0 | The idea is good but the implementation could use some work. I agree with the others that a tutorial area or just starting the player off easy in a section with no enemies would have helped. I had to die like 20 times before I figured out how to get to a higher level and to learn the timing. Don't underestimate the value of a simple tutorial as it can be the difference between a player quitting in frustration and actually getting a chance to enjoy your game as intended. But of course, creating a tutorial and polishing gameplay during ludum dare is nearly impossible. Good job putting this together with such little experience! |
| May 3 16:27:37 | 27m 28s | Summoning Tower | ♥ 0 | Music, art, and overall presentation was very nice and the gameplay felt well balanced and like a proper game but it did have some issues. One thing that bothered me was the disappearing souls. This is not a good mechanic for these types of games in my opinion because it makes it difficult or impossible to balance properly since you can never know how prepared the player will be in later stages. If you miss a few souls in early rounds it could make it impossible to win in later ones which would end up feeling unfair. You lost after all the effort you put because you didn't have time to pick up a few souls on the opposite side of the track. To be fair though, I lost in level 2 and it wasn't for this reason so this opinion is more theoretical and based on my experience in other tower defense games. It wasn't exactly clear where I could summon towers on the map. I figured it out later but I think the player could use a clearer indicator of where the towers can go and like a radius showing how far from another tower they can be placed. I really liked the summoning mechanic, I can already see how hectic it could get if you had many tower types and you had to learn and execute the combos as the time is winding down. On windows there was an issue where the cursor wouldn't lock to the game unless I did alt+enter to fullscreen which fixed the cursor but didn't full screen the game. Also, I might be wrong about this but I think having an aiming mechanic for melee attacks is pointless and frustrating as it can get difficult to aim your very short range melee attacks when near a group of enemies. At least in this case where the enemies are just moving on a fixed track, it seems unnecessary to have to aim at them. |
| May 3 16:44:10 | 16m 33s | Necromancer 101 | ♥ 1 | Movement speed was way too slow for the size of the world. The graphics when it comes to lighting and textures could have used some more love as it felt like the realistic terrain textures and volumetric lighting clashed really hard with the look of the character. I like the idea of a 3D world with 2D characters like in Paper Mario, but the execution felt more like it was quickly slapped together than a deliberate art direction. Of course this is ludum dare so there's never any time to really polish anything. The combat had an impressive amount of work put into it, and while I didn't play long enough to unlock all the summons (due to the painfully slow walk speed), the fact that there are so many, each with unique attacks is very impressive. I did run into a glitch I think where the skeletons would attack the wolf that died and miss the living one even though I had it selected. It was also kind of confusing at first figuring out how to attack enemies. It wasn't clear that I had to click on the enemy to target them and that the order my summons would attack was fixed. Because of this I kept clicking and targeting my own skeletons trying to select them. |
| May 3 16:58:29 | 14m 19s | Soul Pact | ♥ 2 | The graphics, the audio, the gameplay, the puzzles, the overall presentation was very well done. I think the craziest thing about this is how you managed to coordinate 8 people to put together something so polished in only 72 hours! I can't imagine how hectic discussions were or how difficult it was to make decisions. This is basically a complete game. Some more content, polish, and maybe reworking the graphics a bit to get a more unique style/direction and you are very close to a shippable product. Great work guys! |
| May 3 17:52:49 | 54m 20s | Crypt Decrypt | ♥ 0 | Cool concept but I agree with all the other comments about the lack of clarity and the awkward mechanics. I thought I was cheating by moving the box a millimeter at a time, but it seems thats the only way to progress. The UI is very tiny and difficult to read and only visible when fullscreened, and the instructions said I could pick up and place skeletons with right click but I couldn't get that to work, it just opened what looked like a little context menu with no items. Clicking the skeletons also didn't make them do anything. I know bugs are inevitable in Ludum Dare, but I feel like they really hindered the game in this case and made it almost unplayable. The graphics, audio, and concept are great, but the execution is what brings it down. I feel like you guys were so close to creating an awesome little puzzle game, but it needed just a bit more time in the oven |
| May 3 18:09:17 | 16m 28s | Cummon Summon | ♥ 1 | I had a lot of trouble understanding the mechanics. The combat was simple to figure out, but I had no idea how to use the ingredients. I clicked them and nothing happened, I clicked the summon button and sometimes a monster would be summoned other times it wouldn't. The sell button didn't seem to work so i couldnt buy upgrades. I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be some visual indicator showing which ingredients I have selected, but maybe because of a glitch I couldn't see it. I just kept clicking summon and monsters appeared. I managed to kill the eye-bat, the wolf-person, and the cat-octopus, but then I guess I deselected an ingredient or something and I couldn't summon anymore. Overall, I like the art and the idea but the implementation made it difficult to enjoy the game. I played the webgl version btw |
| May 3 18:25:23 | 16m 06s | The Deep Madness | ♥ 2 | I like the unique setting and concept. The feeling of building up speed was well implemented but I wish there was a visual indicator of your stats so you can track how fast your going and how much power and distance you added to your harpoon. The music was great and the final bossfight felt sufficiently badass. |
| May 3 18:36:12 | 10m 49s | Heaven Divers | ♥ 0 | This was very confusing and I think the tutorial made it worse. What is a CD time? What are the green and red boxes under the arrows? It took me like 3 replays to make sense of everything. I think putting the unlabeled cooldown boxes under the arrows is very misleading as it seems like you have to wait until the boxes fill up to complete the combo or something. It took way too long to realize that they were just the cool downs for the individual spells. Overall this is an interesting game with unique concepts, but its uniqueness makes it really confusing without a clear tutorial. |
| May 3 19:33:21 | 57m 09s | Siela | ♥ 0 | The atmosphere, graphics, and audio are nice as is the voice acting and narrative but the gameplay is just one simple fetch quest. It's basically an extremely simple walking simulator. With some more work though this could be something cool as the setting is quite unique. Impressive amount of work nonetheless for a 72 hour jam. good work |
| May 3 19:41:57 | 8m 36s | Genie Cleany | ♥ 1 | This is a really cool idea, but also very difficult. After the 1st phase when I started racing the Genie, I couldn't clean a single lamp. I enjoyed the gameplay overall but with the pressure of having to quickly clean lamps before the genie got to them, I started to get frustrated with the mechanics as it always felt like there was a tiny spot I couldn't get to. |
| May 3 19:49:14 | 7m 17s | FERRYMAN | ♥ 0 | Cool idea but definitely too rough around the edges. I really liked the idea of summoning creatures to gain new abilities but the triple jump was totally op. Overall though you guys did a good job realizing a unique idea during the 72 hours. I think with a bit more polish you could turn this into a fun experience. |
| May 6 14:27:29 | 17586h 38m | 𝕲𝖗𝖎𝖒𝖔𝖎𝖗𝖊 | ♥ 1 | The game definitely needs a tutorial or some in game instructions explaining how it works. My first attempt to play was very confusing and I thought it was just broken. Pressing enter on the book screen did nothing, and then the fight started but nothing happened for like a minute until a little spider creature moved across the screen at the end which resulted in...nothing. I think most people are going to have that kind of experience when they first play your game if you don't explicitly tell them what they have to do. When I realized I had to type out the spells it started to make sense, but clicking to spawn a creature takes a few seconds for anything to happen, and watching your creature cross into the enemy territory but NOT visually do any damage just made the whole thing feel really unresponsive and unsatisfying. It's a cool idea, but without more feedback for the player it just feels too undercooked. Aaaaand I just realized that the ludum dare page glitched out and showed me games from LD 55 instead of LD 59 lmao. So if you're confused as to why your 2 year old jam game got a review, thats why. |
