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henk

Feedback comments for LD56

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		henk's comment
Oct 8 22:44:52		Look	♥ 1	The best I could do was 11 (which I felt much worse about until I read the comments :P). I think this puzzle would be hard for me even if I had a top-down perspective on it, but the 16 super-narrow-fov cameras make it quite a bit harder. "eery concertina" is a new sound for me, but I dig it.
Oct 11 19:22:34	68h 37m	Karma Keepers	♥ 1	Just a heads up, I think you may have forgotten to update the itch.io version with the performance fix you mention in the comments. That's the version I played, so the real challenge for me was to beat the game before running out of RAM :P. I tried playing again on the jam page version and found the game much more satisfying, so I think the performance really makes a difference. It took me a couple tries to realize that you have to ignore almost all the upgrades until you can get "eternal grace", since the game is basically unwinnable until you've gotten that one.
Oct 11 20:45:58	1h 23m	tiny_sim	♥ 2	My little magenta square seems to die randomly even when it's nowhere near any red squares. I thought I might be the victim of wraparound or red squares hiding under blue squares, but neither seem to be the cause. Is this a bug? Or a mechanic I'm not understanding? Aside from that, I thought it was fun. It might be good to have some sort of visual indication of the number of lives, though. I started on "chill" mode and didn't realize that meant "no death" until several minutes had passed.
Oct 11 22:04:13	1h 18m	Red Planet Reclaimers	♥ 1	I survived for 8:35. Super fun, although it was stressful needing to glance back down at the upgrades menu to check the prices and pick hotkeys. The whole game felt like a tribute to Doom, and I think it does a good job of that. Some here have said that the early game feels too slow, but I don't really agree. Both in terms of literal movement speed and overall pacing I think the early portion of the game feels about right.
Oct 11 22:43:44	39m 31s	Office Pets!	♥ 1	I liked the visuals, but it feels like the gameplay runs out a bit too soon. The game sort of pushes you towards growing as many pets as possible, but nothing changes when you do and the framerate doesn't withstand it for long. Also: needs sound! Basic video game bleeps and boops are super easy to generate with online tools, and it would have made the game feel a lot more finished with not much effort.
Oct 12 13:30:24	14h 46m	Dream Quest: Land of the Living Wishes	♥ 1	The graphics and sound are quite impressive; the whole thing feels very complete. It took me a bit of experimentation to figure out what the different colors of orbs did. It might be nice if there were a legend somewhere that explained it. Perhaps color-coding the stats screen?
Oct 12 14:49:13	1h 18m	Bermuda	♥ 1	I think one of the hints said "waxing gibbous" when it meant "waning gibbous". The death animation was quite nice, although I think some sound for that would have helped. There also didn't seem to be much of a point to the creature having 3 status bars instead of just 1. I got the "speedrunner" ending, but I wasn't able to unlock the "secret" menu music. I'm not sure if that's supposed to unlock randomly or if there's something I need to do to trigger it.
Oct 12 16:24:07	1h 34m	Light Cave	♥ 1	This was just too hard for me; I got to the level with the vertically moving firefly before I had to give up. IMO some of those jumps require waaay too much precision. Graphically, I thought it was nice, and the movement felt solid. I would have liked to hear some sound or music, though.
Oct 12 17:03:20	39m 13s	RiboJam	♥ 1	It seems you can keep playing even after the game has ended, and it subtracts from your score appropriately. My final score is -10866 :P
Oct 12 18:12:15	1h 08m	gmO-	♥ 1	I liked it. The play time was short, but the rules seemed well balanced. Not sure why people would find it suspicious for a farmer to slaughter pigs, though... There should have been a particle effect when harvesting the animals. A shower of blood would have been both satisfying and hilarious, I think.
Oct 12 20:26:34	2h 14m	GravelHeir	♥ 1	Very unique! The story raises so many questions... I really liked the use of color, and how the dialogs for each character read like sinister contracts. The gameplay didn't seem to require much strategy, though. For example, after planting sprouts there didn't seem to be any reason _not_ to spam the bed over and over again to make them all grow up. Maybe potential heirs could decay/die over time?
Oct 12 21:06:29	39m 55s	Pot Life	♥ 1	If I let the game play out without interfering, the red bugs kill all the plants. If I kill only the red bugs, the pot becomes overgrown and the framerate drops. It would seem the winning strategy here is to kill all bugs indiscriminately :P. > Just out of curiosity, what interactions would you guys like in the game? I'd like some way to more precisely control where the plants grow, so I could spell out a word or something. Maybe a way to direct the spawn location of bug eggs, or a way to seed new plants on empty dirt?
Oct 13 12:06:49	15h 00m	David vs Goliath: What the government doesn't want you to know	♥ 1	I don't know why, but it was the stock-photo explosions that had me laughing out loud. I agree with others that the game is too easy. You can just ignore all of goliath's bullets and you will still kill it well before it manages to kill you. You don't even have to care about which weapon to use, really.
Oct 13 12:59:52	53m 03s	Flea or Flee Arcade	♥ 0	I'm on linux, so I played the .py version. Things not already mentioned by others: - There are three lives, but the rat dies on the first hit. I assume this is because the lives are depleting once per tick while in contact with a flea. A common solution to this problem is to make the player invulnerable for a short fixed period of time after losing a life. - The rat moves a fixed distance per tick when pressing an arrow key, but in real life objects need time to accelerate. Implementing this usually means having a "velocity" vector and adding to it once per tick when accelerating, then dividing it by a fixed amount per tick regardless of player input. You'd then add the velocity vector to the position once per tick rather than moving a fixed amount. - The game window was much taller than my 1080p screen, and would not allow me to resize it. Having a non-resizable game window is ok for a jam game, but then you probably want to make sure it's small enough to fit on most monitors. - Some have pointed out that you should package the game as an exe rather than as a Python script, but I'd double down on that and say you should avoid Python altogether in the future for programs that you intend other people to be able to run. The language is just not a good choice for that, sadly.
Oct 13 13:49:01	49m 09s	Cheeese Watch	♥ 1	Super fun! My high score is 418. The difficulty scales quickly, which I didn't like at first until I realized it forces you to rely on combos early on, which is actually great. You may want to consider locking the mouse and displaying your own cursor; I would frequently accidentally click outside of the game window in the web build.
Oct 13 14:23:43	34m 42s	Astral Plunge	♥ 1	Wow, the swarm of squids is super terrifying! I'm on an older computer, so I had to download the native build for this to be playable. I also didn't realize the game was beatable at first, maybe some sort of progress indicator would help there.
Oct 13 18:12:55	3h 49m	Prince Charmony	♥ 2	Too good! I don't know if it's because I'm on an older computer or because I was running under wine, but the input latency was super high for me, which made the "double-jump" regions somewhat frustrating. This was with the LightGPU version. Still managed to beat it, though!
Oct 13 19:12:02	59m 07s	BOULISH - straf'in the city	♥ 1	I had a lot of trouble seeing things in the dark, and the player movement was quite strange/floaty. Specific things related to movement that I noticed: - the camera doesn't rotate about its center, but seems to be positioned somewhat to the right of the center of rotation - This isn't a purely visual issue either: player collision moves with the camera, so rotating the view with the mouse is enough to fall off of ledges, even when you're not otherwise moving. - Pressing the jump button seems to "queue" the jump for later, so that pressing it while mid-air can cause a jump when you later hit the ground - Much of the level geometry is narrower than the minimum distance that the player can travel, so tapping a key to do a slight adjustment sends you careening over the edge.
Oct 13 19:42:16	30m 14s	Tiny Friends :)	♥ 1	Neat! A hexagon is an odd choice for a rolling object :P
Oct 13 20:30:50	48m 34s	Dollhouse Blaze	♥ 0	>You: Help me, firefighter! I'm trapped on the fifth story of this building and it's getting difficult to breathe! > >Firefighter: \defenestrates you\ There's a lot going on here for something made in such a short time frame! While the randomly generated levels are cool from a technical perspective, I'm not sure how much the gameplay benefits from them. About 50% of the time both the fire and a fire extinguisher spawn close enough to let me end the round within a couple of seconds. I also didn't really end up needing many of the more advanced mechanics like smoke management or floor tunneling. Maybe if you couldn't grab people but instead had to forge a path for them to escape on their own? I tried playing with a self-imposed "no grabbing people" rule, but they don't seem to be smart enough most of the time (most just stand there and die, and one walked _into_ the fire).
Oct 13 21:42:44	1h 11m	(o o)	♥ 0	I shudder to think what a screen reader would make of this. Most "gimmicky" games that get submitted to Ludum Dare aren't much more than the gimmick, but in this case the game is quite good even before you consider how it was made. Congrats!
Oct 14 21:12:23	23h 29m	The Rubber Room	♥ 1	The difficulty ramps up pretty darn quick with this one. It'd have been nice for there to be some time allocated to get used to the hoop throwing mechanic without also needing to juggle the cheese and rat murder at the same time. There's a bug where when you throw the cheese, it sometimes never registers as having landed, so that the rats continuously go after the player instead. I may or may not have used that to my advantage...
Oct 15 22:02:07	24h 49m	Puny creatures	♥ 0	- The design of the golem looked quite nice - The game requires a tricky amount of coordination, which I think is good, but it's a bit too easy to simply let one side die and follow through with the other. I'd like it better if you lost when either side died. - The telegraphing for the fist slamming down and a boulder dropping are a bit too similar, IMO, especially since both fists can occasionally slam down at the same time - Could use some sound/music
Oct 15 22:24:35	22m 28s	Dust Mates	♥ 1	Love it! The animations/cutscenes are much more than you usually see in 3d submissions. Besides an in-game explanation of the controls, it would have been nice to have some sound/music. Even some low-effort sound effects generated with online tools tend to improve the gameplay experience quite a bit.
Oct 16 22:43:32	24h 18m	Snake Sleuth	♥ 1	I always had trouble enjoying candy-crush-like games since it never feels like I'm actually strategizing much, just noticing rows of 3 and getting lucky. That said, the metal sound when clearing rows was pretty satisfying, and I also liked all the little visual details like having the snakes "pulse" in and the little sliding animation between levels.
Oct 16 23:16:11	32m 39s	Tic Tac Trillion	♥ 2	The potential strategy here seems super interesting, but I don't think the the AI does it justice. I still enjoyed discovering the various mechanics and thinking about how to best use them.
Oct 16 23:34:34	18m 23s	Critter Slayer	♥ 1	Not bad. The baddies shoot from the hip, so there's a spot near the top-left where if you camp and continuously shoot to the right you never get hit, since the baddies come at you from beneath. I was going to exploit that to get a super high score, but alas! There is no score.
Oct 17 20:50:34	21h 16m	Tiny Lab!	♥ 1	The level of detail is super impressive, and the game is highly enjoyable to boot! Unfortunately, once I started building things on the second level, the path-finding seemed to freak out: the little people would get stuck trying to pass each other on the stairs and a bunch of them stopped moving almost entirely, eventually starving to death.
Oct 17 22:07:01	1h 16m	Tinyzilla	♥ 1	I liked this a lot, but boy was it difficult! I think it maybe relies a little bit too much on randomness, so that even without making any mistakes it seems like a bit of a coin toss whether you win. That said, maybe there was some element to the strategy I was missing. tinies.png
Oct 18 21:37:53	23h 30m	A Taste for Nuts	♥ 1	I liked the determined look on the mice's face when they're interacting with something. Some notes: - Once a mouse has grabbed something, its inventory is instantly full, so there's nothing reasonable to do except return to base. Either the mouse's inventory needs to be bigger or they should auto-return without me needing to go find and click on them. - The mice are starving while you read the instructions, which is a bit stressful - I didn't see much point to making more mice. Two is plenty to collect enough acorns in a reasonable amount of time and each new mouse increases the rate of food consumption.
Oct 19 10:58:38	13h 20m	INFESTED	♥ 2	This is excellent. It's clear a lot of thought went into the level design, and I think the music was great at setting the mood. It was a little too easy for me, but I don't think it's possible to satisfy everybody on that front. The door numbers were pretty forgettable, and I would have liked if they were color-coded or something.
Oct 19 11:53:12	54m 34s	Dreadzone	♥ 1	This is super fun, and I still have the music playing in the background as I type this. Best I could do was 24950; things seem to get pretty impossible once you get the minigun. Two thoughts: - There doesn't seem to be much point to _not_ sprinting, so maybe the player should just be always sprinting without needing to press shift - Bug speed doesn't appear to reset when you get a game over. Trying to pick off minigun-level bugs with the starter pistol is quite the extra challenge.
Oct 19 13:22:54	1h 29m	Shikigami	♥ 2	Clever take on the genre, although this reminds me of a lot of some of the ideas people came up with for "summoning." The introduction of the little fast ones catches you a bit off-guard, so it took me a couple of tries to get past level ~20 or so. It seems the winning strategy is to invest everything into defensive upgrades like speed, health, and armor before moving on to offensive ones like capacity, damage, and spawn rate. Stopped at level 400: shikigami.png
Oct 19 14:01:59	39m 05s	Niblo and Mubbit	♥ 1	A fun short story! I managed to get both endings. At first I thought there'd be a special ending if you crushed the little creatures with a rock, but alas, it's not possible. The hand should probably be bounded to the screen space, since it's possible to move it off-screen and then forget where it is, forcing a level restart.
Oct 19 14:32:43	30m 44s	Ant Ascent: journey to the top	♥ 2	Not bad! You may want to find a way to calculate collision based on the level data rather than hard-coding the dimensions of each platform. You can do it by looping over `boards` similar to how you loop over it when drawing the tiles to the screen. Additionally, when you do detect a collision, you should reverse the player movement that triggered the collision. For example: ```py self.rect.y += self.yvelocity if self.is_colliding_with_terrain(): self.rect.y -= self.yvelocity self.yvelocity = 0 self.rect.x += self.xvelocity if self.is_colliding_with_terrain(): self.rect.x -= self.xvelocity self.xvelocity = 0 ``` There are more advanced things you can do to improve movement/collision but something like the above should fix the "phasing through platforms" issues people are seeing.
Oct 19 14:52:09	19m 26s	Cicada & Les Grenouilles	♥ 1	The music was a bop, and the whole thing had a nice retro-arcade vibe going. Navigating ladders felt bit fiddly, but the platforming was solid otherwise.
Oct 19 15:42:46	50m 37s	Chlorella Warriors	♥ 0	I loved how all of the levels were in the shape of various creatures. While it seems like there's a lot of opportunity there with the game mechanics, I feel like all of the levels had pretty trivial solutions, so there wasn't much thought required to beat the game. At one point when I tapped R to reset the level, it wouldn't reset the player position for some reason, and I got stuck.
Oct 19 17:01:37	1h 18m	Bug Attack 2	♥ 1	This was great! It's well focused and feels very solid. It's such a minor thing, but I especially liked the fireflies on the interstitial screens. If I had anything to complain about it'd be that the UI was a bit too clunky for my taste; lots of clicks are required to set up the troops and there's no obvious way to undo an individual decision or re-order things.
Oct 19 17:28:33	26m 56s	Tinymon	♥ 1	While it's neat being able to see other people's drawings, there doesn't seem to be much actual gameplay here. I sure showed "pepperoni" who's boss, though.
Oct 19 17:48:29	19m 56s	Olives with legs	♥ 1	This reminds me of Lemmings. You couldn't kill lemmings by dropping poo on them, though, so in a way this game is better. I'm not sure if this is a bug or if you just never got around to implementing it, but hitting "next" on the final level doesn't seem to do anything. It took me a bit to realize that meant I'd won.
Oct 19 18:16:58	28m 29s	Critter Catchers	♥ 1	I liked it a lot. The dialogue and reveal reminded me a lot of Daniel Mullins' stuff. The content warning in the game description ruined the surprise for me, sadly, but the execution (so to speak) was still pretty fantastic. I played the Linux version on Ubuntu 20.04, and managed to crash the game somehow near the end of my second attempt (I was spam-clicking pretty rapidly, so I don't know if that was related): ``` Godot Engine v4.3.stable.official.77dcf97d8 - https://godotengine.org MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0 Vulkan 1.2.182 - Forward+ - Using Device #0: Intel - Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500 (BDW GT2) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) Segmentation fault ```
Oct 19 18:47:52	30m 54s	Tiny Car	♥ 1	It took me around 12 minutes to beat. The physics feels rock-solid, which is pretty surprising when you consider the scaling mechanic. It would have been nice to have a climax to all the build-up of having stuff shake like that. Like an explosion or something.
Oct 20 13:33:27	18h 45m	Swarmcore	♥ 0	I got to stage 88 before I stopped. This is oddly addicting in a "staring at fire" sort of way. There's an issue when you have a large number of creatures where they'll sort of get "blown" off of the screen. I almost thought I'd soft-locked myself until they eventually came back after several minutes: swarmcore_lagdeath.png
Oct 20 13:52:22	18m 55s	The Bow River	♥ 0	I enjoyed this. Eating ants was a bit of a jump-scare. It's been a while since I've used scratch, but if I remember correctly you can get much smoother keyboard-based movement by using a "forever" loop and checking for keyboard input on each iteration, rather than relying on the "when key pressed" blocks.
Oct 20 14:37:01	44m 39s	Llort	♥ 0	This is the funniest compo game I've played so far. The contrast between the super aggressive goblin attacks and the pathetic little kick to one-shot them is hilarious.
Oct 20 17:39:56	3h 02m	Impish Descent	♥ 2	Beat it on the hardest difficulty! I ended up using a similar strategy to @frogman of combining the holy scepter and summoner to get massive damage and near invulnerability. The "courtyard" level where you're surrounded by ghosts seemed just about impossible with all the other strategies I tried. impish_descent.png Some things that frustrated me while playing: - It seems difficult to get melee imps to attack downwards, like the range is much shorter in that direction - Ranged imps near a wall aren't able to shoot because their bullets die instantly - The telegraph for ghost bullets is the same color as the bullet itself, making it difficult to know when it is and isn't safe to touch it at a glance - Ghosts can still fire at you for a brief time after you've defeated them