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Feedback comments for LD55
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | ZungryWare's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 16 05:00:54 | The Summoning at River's Edge | ♥ 2 | I seem to have a real knack for getting the worst ending on the first try when I play one of these choices matter sort of games. Does that say something about me? Although I’m not sure it was entirely my fault this time. When I got the bad ending, I couldn’t think of a single way my choices could have had an impact on the outcome in the context of the story. I didn’t really do anything that affected the outcome and neither did the girl I brought along with me. I later found it was because of my lack of doing things that doomed all of society. Whoops. In the trolley problem, am I a bad person for not pulling the switch if I didn’t even know the switch was there? I liked the alternate telling of events between the good ending and the bad ending. The unreliable narrator is one of my favorite narrative tools and this was a cool use of it. I don’t need to be told how to feel about the ending I just experienced. You shouldn’t need to say, “You should feel good about this ending because it was the good ending!” It should speak for itself. This was the only eggregious example I found though. Overall, I think you did a good job with show don’t tell and let the reader learn about the events through dialogue and description of events. | |
| Apr 16 05:40:16 | 39m 22s | Elemental Path | ♥ 0 | I think some of the cards are mismatched from the actual effect they have in the game. The early levels in the game are very easy. I kept randomly stumbling into the correct solution until the last level, where I didn't yet know how certain mechanics worked. Generally, when a puzzle introduces a new mechanic, you want to make it so the player cannot feasibly beat the level unless they fully understand that mechanic. Maybe it's a problem of solution space. When a level has three cards (which is a decent amount of information for a player to remember already), there are only six different orders to play those cards. I enjoyed the subversion in the fourth level. That is a good example of a puzzle that teaches the player how multiple mechanics interact. |
| Apr 22 05:32:55 | 143h 52m | Game of the Name | ♥ 1 | This is a really neat concept! I love the discovery that can come from these sorts of systems, where you write down the names of your best guys to use in future fights. My main complaint is that there are a lot of things to look at for each beast you summon. It would be nice if there were more visual representations of the stats. Like making the font size for a particular stat get larger if that stat has a higher number assigned to it and giving the special abilities visual symbols that represent their functionality. That would make it a bit easier to understand how my typing is affecting the beast's stats in real time. Nice work! |
| Apr 22 05:49:08 | 16m 13s | Dicey Demons | ♥ 6 | Very polished entry with some fun ideas. The dice throwing and battling all had great animations and visual design. I wish the deckbuilding aspect had been expanded upon more since I never felt as though my dice ever synergized with each other. I also didn't bother picking a specific order for my creatures since it never seemed to matter. I mostly just stacked axolotls and deleted my early game dice. |
| Apr 23 02:35:12 | 20h 46m | Master of Elements | ♥ 3 | The cloud attack makes gameplay very sluggish. It's an extra chore that you have to stop and do between platforming bits. But it has nothing to do with the platforming since you can just stand perfectly still while you guide the cloud to the enemy you want to kill. Take Mario for example. The combat is intertwined with the platforming because you have to land on an enemy to kill them or line yourself up diagonally to hit them with a fireball. Here, every enemy challenge is the same since they are all solved by flying a cloud over to them from complete safety. As others have mentioned, the spikes very often blend into the background and it is not immediately obvious that they should cause damage at all. Also, the hitbox is very unforgiving. The character felt good to control, though the super fast speed and high bounce of the cloud meant that the platforming wasn't terribly challenging. The visuals were nice. Good colors and textures. Although I would warn against mixing multiple sizes of pixel in a pixel-art game. |
| Apr 25 03:12:33 | 48h 37m | The Culling | ♥ 0 | I enjoyed the visual design of this game! All of the trippy visual effects and animations made the game come alive. I would have appreciated a timer in addition to some other visual effect to indicate when you're short on time left. And the messages on end screen could be a bit clearer. I don't understand why "Pure Evil" is the best result, while "Bad Blood" means I lost. I was only ever able to get to level five. I'm colorblind so I couldn't consistently make it past any round that asked you to discriminate based on color. |
| Apr 25 03:36:59 | 24m 26s | Demon Cards | ♥ 1 | Nice jam in the background! The difficulty starts pretty high and I was just frantically trying to combine cards together as fast as possible before the enemies got too far. You have a lot of information that gets frontloaded into a long tutorial screen. I think it explains the concepts well, but it's a lot of information at once and it would have been better to let the player unlock new mechanics over the course of the game. I couldn't play for very long because I would very often become softlocked when the game would not let me place the building I had just created. If you fix this bug, I'll gladly come back and give the game another try. |
| Apr 25 04:16:59 | 40m 00s | The Witch's Dungeon | ♥ 1 | I love seeing procedural generation in a game jam game! Nice work on that. And I like the idea of summoning ever stronger monsters as you collect resources. However the different characters didn't feel very distinct. They all had the same attack just with slightly tweaked stats for the most part. The projectile direction is a bit off from where I aim my mouse. This was especially frustrating when playing as the archer with his slower fire rate. I cleared out a dungeon entirely and nothing happened. And I couldn't return to the hub since there was nothing left to kill me. The game freezes after enough time playing. Here is what I saw in the console: summonerror.png |
| Apr 25 04:50:56 | 33m 57s | Dark Dominion | ♥ 0 | Good work on the pixel art and monster designs. It has a nice cohesive style. The main issue, I think, is that the shape-drawing mechanic pulls you away from the actual battle. I got through the whole game not paying any attention to the battle going on in the background at all. I just kept selecting the largest minion and drawing shapes until I beat the level. Not only does this mechanic not ask you to be aware of what is going on in the battle, it actively distracts you from it by giving you an ever-present and unrelated task that covers it up on your screen. There is a similar game I've played called Quest For Power. It has the same basic gameplay where you summon creatures that walk forward toward an enemy you want to kill. But in that game, you can hurl rocks at enemy monsters through a catapult you have to aim yourself. That's a mechanic that asks you to pay attention to what is going on in the battle, while still giving the player something to do other than watch the fight. My point is, the solution to this problem is to make the player-interaction mechanic require the player to react to things that are happening in the battle and create moments of tension where the player might fail the level if they are not able to complete that task quickly enough. |
| Apr 26 00:25:01 | 19h 34m | Replicate-You | ♥ 1 | What a cool idea! With some more work, this could make for a fun playground to teach people about reinforcement learning algorithms. It would be cool to give further tools to experiment like editing training data to remove mistakes, saving and combining different sets of training data, and adjusting the amount of training that gets done as well as other hyperparameters of the network. It would also be important to have more complex tasks that require higher order decision-making. I think there may be a bit of a disconnect between the training environment and the test environment though. I don't think the AI has any concept of waiting. I tested this by training the AI to only ever move right and just try to get to the right edge of the level while waiting to dodge enemies. But the AI just zoomed to the right at full speed and then turned back around again upon reaching the other side of the board. I tried to account for this lack of a wait action by training the AI to walk in circles until the path is clear of enemies, but that just got it stuck wandering around in the same corner forever: stuckincorner.png |
| May 4 01:18:48 | 192h 53m | Nuki and The Cookbook | ♥ 0 | Good puzzle game with some fun mechanics. I enjoyed thinking through the possible ways forward by considering the order in which I would have to take the gems. There were a good number of levels and they were able to explore the use of all of the mechanics pretty well. Nice work! I do have a lot of notes though, especially for useability - Does the game really need separate keys for "pick up" and "use"? I don't think there is any situation where you're able to do both at the same time. (More on that later.) - E and F are not particularly sensible keys to use in this case. Space would make much more sense unless you're optimizing your user experience for a person with no left hand or right thumb. - Putting your Restart key (with no confirmation menu) right between those two use keys is just asking for people to hit it accidentally. I'm astonished I never made that mistake during my playthrough. - The movement feels a bit clunky. You should make the player character snap to its new tile more quickly. Also, if you press one direction, the player is prevented from moving perpendicular to that direction for a certain amount of time. - I know it's not always easy to implement, but an undo button does wonders to improve your game's playability. Any game without one where it's also possible to get yourself into a unwinnable position makes the player feel unwilling to experiment since any wrong move could force them to redo several dozen moves. An example of this: I figured out the solution to the color-mixing level pretty quickly, but actually executing it took me five tries after that because I kept making one single mistake. (Oops, I forgot I have to pick up blue first when mixing colors. Oops, I forgot to pick up the recipe before mixing the colors. Oops, I put the second bridge on the wrong river by mistake. Oops, I forgot to pick up the recipe again.) - Having to wait for the goblin thing every time I use an item is clunky and adds to the annoyance of restarting the level. - The recipe book is a bit annoying to have to constantly reference, especially since it blocks most of the puzzle while you're looking at it. I think it would be better to have an always-visible UI element that shows all of the recipes. - Why am I unable to craft things until I get the recipe book? I didn't bother to pick it up one time since I had written down all of the recipes on a piece of paper. Then I crafted a bomb and nothing happened. Even picking up the recipe book would cause the bomb to become crafted. This puzzle had a pretty nasty catch. I figured I could just pick up the blue gem once I had crafted the key to get it out of the way. The game never makes it clear that you cannot pick up a gem while holding an item. annoying_gem.png |
