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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Jaco van Hemert's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 7 17:58:56 | Blobbies | ♥ 1 | The non-grid based match 4 certainly plays interesting. It became a sort of mad click and pull situation, and got pretty frantic by the end. I think I got to about 15k score before I eventually lost. I kept wishing I could pull groups of blobs together, but perhaps that would run counter to the core mechanics. Anyway; nice, polished game with a lot of charm! Also, I see you can chuck the blobs out the sides of the play area, which I don't know if it was intentional. | |
| Oct 7 18:19:37 | 20m 41s | Flea Patrol | ♥ 2 | The visual of the fleas jumping out of time with each other in a chaotic scramble looks so good. Like some others have mentioned, it's really hard to feel like I had any real control over where they were going. But maybe that's fine, given the infinite supply. Perhaps having some kind of indicator as to which fleas are frontrunners (i.e. ones that will begin the jump) would have been helpful in feeling in control? And/or a way to stop and start the flow of fleas so that you don't end up with a bunch of them bundling into corners at the bottom of a jump puzzle? (Though that might reduce the effect of the fleas visual.) Anyway, cute art and great visual/animation, and some interesting level design for the mechanics! |
| Oct 7 18:42:13 | 22m 36s | Ant Samurai. Polergus | ♥ 1 | This was such a fun game. I really liked the dash animation (and the enemy getting hit animations), and it just felt nice to play. Sometimes it felt like the hitboxes were a bit off (i.e. it looked like I dashed through an enemy (i.e. just a bit off centre), but then the slash misses. The upgrading was interesting, though ultimately the more attack seemed too strong to not pick. Maybe if the dash cooldown penalty was bigger? Anyway, great game! I made it to the end on normal difficulty, with one death. Edit: Oh, also, I liked the ominous tone of the story, though I'm still not sure what the ending means? |
| Oct 7 18:56:19 | 14m 06s | Tiny Submarine Doctor | ♥ 1 | You really managed to produce the labyrinthine feeling of blood vessels, though I wish the controls were more forgiving/refined. I had a lot of trouble moving around and kept getting ganked by viruses from behind. I also had an issue where my camera kept drifting to the right, which made aiming a bit more annoying than is ideal. Also, having a little picture of what a virus looks like tucked into a corner might have been useful? E.g. a "wanted poster" style thing so you know what you're looking for. |
| Oct 7 19:06:40 | 10m 21s | Pan-galaxy!!! Deadly Beasts Obstacle Course Grand Prix | ♥ 4 | I'm not entirely sure what the goal of the game is, and it took me quite a while to figure out how to make the race start at all. I think I'm betting on a racer and then sabotaging the others, but I seem to just get money randomly anyway, or when I pick up a banana peel, so I'm not sure what the point is? Feels like it could be interesting if the controls were a bit more obvious and easy to use, and if the betting worked the way I'd have expected it. Anyway, an interesting entry, if a bit hampered by control issues. |
| Oct 7 19:24:18 | 17m 38s | Olives with legs | ♥ 1 | Cute game! The mechanics were well implemented, as were the movements of the olives. I liked the push/pull mechanics as ways to herd them where you wanted. There's quite a bit of jank in how the olives run around (e.g. getting stuck in little corners). In level 8, the fact that you can't hold objects over the pits made it a bit hard to manage the olive pushing. Also due to the fact that you can't hold the repellent on the other side of olives at the edge of the map very effectively, which can sort of jam them into a corner very effectively. Also, level 2 is either really hard or I missed one of the mechanics, because it took me forever to manage to catch three of the little suckers in the cup. Anyway, I had fun playing this. Nice job! |
| Oct 7 19:47:28 | 23m 10s | Botany Blast! | ♥ 1 | This concept feels pretty novel -- combining a bit of shooting with cosy gardening. It feels like it would benefit from having a bit more things to aim for (though I don't fault you for that, being that it's a compo game); e.g. other plant types or whatever, so it seems worth going through the maintenance of shooting off the bugs. Perhaps the bug shooting would be more fun if there were fewer bugs but they run around so you have to try a bit to hit them? |
| Oct 7 20:07:51 | 20m 23s | Lice To Meet You | ♥ 1 | Quite fun to play, but the jumping indicator is both a bit hard to read and seems to sometimes just straight up lie. I had quite a few instances where I massively under- or over-shot my jump because the indicator seemed to show something other than what happened. I'd have liked to see some more goals (e.g. getting into a certain area via people patrolling around or whatever) over just the distance maxing. |
| Oct 7 20:21:36 | 13m 45s | Antventure | ♥ 4 | I liked the idea of having to sift through various items for things that are useful for the particular purpose you're after. Though the inclusion of ice as a food, but banana peel not, seemed a bit strange. I also would have liked some more content / a longer experience. |
| Oct 7 20:32:48 | 11m 12s | Ant of War | ♥ 1 | I got quite stuck trying to beat this. The anteater seems to basically grind the game to a halt, since the only good strategy seems to be to wait for it to fill up on enemy ants and then try to rush past. (Or am I missing a mechanic?) Since ants are so expensive, losing two ants basically nullify your chances at winning -- there's not nearly enough leaf drops to fund multiple ants. Also, you can easily softlock yourself by losing your last ant with less than 10 food left, which can lead to you having to sit around and wait for the enemy ants to send enough ants to get past the anteater. |
| Oct 7 20:51:04 | 18m 16s | Nano - Nautica | ♥ 3 | This feels like it has a very cool core, and I really wanted to like it, but the difficulty and tediousness of the controls just didn't mesh well with me (mind you, I can imagine that some people would enjoy it a lot more than me). My biggest complaint was that you have to look away from the window and the compass in order to move around, which made it really hard to go where I needed to. The atmosphere and visuals are great, and I enjoyed the complexity of the control scheme (e.g. the fill front and back stuff for pitching up and down). I just got a frustrated one too many times at struggling to find where I needed to go. |
| Oct 8 08:09:06 | 11h 18m | Sewer Tales | ♥ 2 | Had a lot of fun with this. Great graphics and sound, and the concept is good. I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to do (i.e. what the end goal was), so I just sort of wandered around aimlessly. While I really liked the different kinds of rats, it would have been nice to know what it is they do (e.g. I assume the big rat does more damage, but what does the lab rat do?). Also, sometimes there were like 2 or 3 cats in an area, which was basically just a death sentence. Even one cat is basically guaranteed to half my rat population (or worse). I essentially just ran whenever I could if I saw one, but sometimes the rats would still suicide themselves against the cat for no reason. I would have liked if I could pull them away from combat more easily. Anyway, this is a great game, and I hope it does really well! |
| Oct 10 22:24:10 | 62h 15m | Tiny Tails | ♥ 1 | First off, the visuals and sound in this are great and really sell the scenario. I also liked the story elements and how the many vs one aspect came out in both gameplay and narrative. As for the mechanics, while they're interesting, I definitely got frustrated. As others have mentioned, not knowing what guy is coming next messed up my ability to strategise. At some point in Chapter IV, I started placing guys with the sole intention of getting the next archer in the right spot, but then I'd sometimes just get another pikeman, and the only spot that would have given me the right placement for the next archer is taken and I'm entirely screwed. To that point, up to the last chapter, it felt like all the units were kind of useful, but that was mostly because I didn't entirely understand how the archers worked. With the difficulty spike in that last chapter, I finally figured out that I could do blocks (not just lines) to massively increase their damage. Which was great, except that it essentially made me disappointed and/or annoyed every time I got a pikeman or bard. They just felt like a waste of time and a way to mess up my placement of the archers, who were the only ones capable of doing real damage. I think my problems with the pikemen are that they're capped at 6 damage, have very strict placement requirements (compared to archers who can just shoot from anywhere), and two of them have to just sit around and do nothing until all three are in place. The bard's ability, while useful, can be emulated (and improved) by just placing more archers, since it lets everyone shoot once again with greater damage. I finally, after many attempts, managed to beat the last chapter, but the only way I managed was by placing all my archers in one block, and using the bards and pikemen purely as ways to set up the next archer (except where I could actually get a benefit as well), which is presumably not the intended way to play. Overall, an aesthetically nice game that played pretty well before the difficulty spike, where the luck factor got turned up a lot, and made it hard to feel like I was in control. |
| Oct 11 17:27:03 | 19h 02m | Shrine | ♥ 1 | Aesthetically, this game is stunning. You've created an incredible atmosphere and mood, and the soundscape definitely gave me a sense of gravity and looming power. As a caveat, I'm not really a big fan of idle / clicker games, so that'll colour my opinions. The gameplay wasn't very *fun*, per se. The mood really helped to make it feel worth it, but I ultimately just built a bunch of candles (so many, in fact, that I got an index out of range error) and then clicked a million times. I didn't even realise that the followers going out to go get extra essence was my doing, until I read it in the comments here. I.e. perhaps that would have helped a bit to make it seem more interactive. I agree with tuism above that I would have liked to have seen an expansion of the map or some greater visual change for each level of the shrine (beyond just the shrine sprite) to build up this sense of expectation. And other than that, more things to do would have been nice. Incredible mood and art, for sure, which does a lot to make up for the issues I had with the gameplay. It was an overall very positive experience! |