Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Feedback comment stats → Local Minimum

Local Minimum

Feedback comments for LD56

Local Minimum's games and stats for all events →

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Local Minimum's comment
Oct 7 14:37:28		DWARFS	♥ 1	I agree that it looked rather scary at first and it took me a while to understand how to tweak the different settings to maximize possibility of getting the coolest / most expensive exotic. Honestly though, I promptly forgot about the part about which settings affected value and was mostly focused on achieving full understanding of optimal settings for all compounds. And I needed about all probes there were to get there. So I never really got to the true $$$ optimizations. I guess that felt like a more reasonable first step. And maybe, instead of the lower part affecting prizes, it could affect dynamics of the fishing game? I was also, since I forgot what drives the prize wondering if the relative value of what I got up depended on how perfect I did the fishing / how damaged the probe got. I really liked the graphics of the probe sinking through the gas giant, but even though i never lost a single probe, i was very much staring at the gauges. it would have been nice to be able to look more at the beautiful effects... and of course a bit more variation and or challenge to the fishing game. Music and sound effects were also really nice.
Oct 7 14:53:49	16m 21s	I Have Put The Creature Into My Gun	♥ 0	Really cool concept of gathering critters as bullets! They were cute. I had a major problem with the keybindings as my keyboard doesn't have arrow buttons in a configuration and when using WASD there's no way really to use Z and X comfortably as action buttons. Some alternatives on the right hand side of the keyboard would be nice. I for some reason missed the swap critter type action but I don't think that was the reason, but I felt quite softlocked after getting my first orange one very far down to the left. There seemed like there was no jump or a need for two orange to be able to get any further. There were also some glitches on the tile rendering (playing in firefox) jessglitch.gif
Oct 7 15:13:44	19m 55s	Are you listening?	♥ 4	I played for the good ending, it seemed like the one I wanted, and the intended too considering the click away the doubt/depression critters all were about revealing those options. The graphics was really great and the story well written. I enjoyed the experience. And it had a reasonable length for both the story it wanted to convey and the gameplay contained in it.
Oct 7 16:50:08	1h 36m	Don't turn around, bugs	♥ 3	Cute bugs. I got a couple of levels in. It was interesting that it was a physics based puzzle and that it wasn't entirely predictable what would happen. But it also meant that it was a bit frustrating at times too. The way the critters didn't have any or almost no friction was something I sometimes could exploit but other times also forced me to restart levels. It felt a bit odd that they could glide that much.
Oct 8 16:27:03	23h 36m	G'nope	♥ 3	I played the full experience without any censoring. As it should be played, I think. It had nice graphics and the weapons felt nice too. I had a bit of an issue shooting down the last gnome, but I think that rather says more about me than the game. Perhaps the hitbox on the ax could have been a little larger since it wasn't really a precision game and I think I was too close once or something. The same could probably have been true about the arrows. One thing that slightly confused me first was that I not all gnomes bled. I guess it makes sense that when falling out of the sky, you didn't have control over where they landed so they needed to be dead directly. But as I ran up to the first I downed, and it didn't bleed, I first thought that I needed to ax them too. I think the gnomes are fine btw, if anything the protagonist kind of have to explain themself. Why they are slaughtering an entire village just because of some rudeness.
Oct 8 16:46:08	19m 05s	The Germinator	♥ 1	I loved the meaty textures and the atmosphere in the game. I was glad that there were undocumented numpad bindings too because space is only available on the right part of the keyboard for me which meant I needed two hands on the keyboard and I guess I could have attempted steering the mouse with my chin or something 😆 I got to the level with the very small ramps and that was honestly too hard for me. The controls were very sensitive with a single tap moving me quite far in comparison to how small those bars/ramps were. Perhaps their hitboxes could have been a bit wider while still keeping the visuals the same. I'm guessing, but I feel like the game didn't fully teach me, that I needed to collect all the power up thingies before the exit opened? At least there seemed to be a cheeky exit close to the start on the following (?) level that closed right as I approached it. I also got a bit lost on the jump around corners level at first, with the darkness and coming from above finding out that I needed to go back to where the white blood cell was patrolling and go the other direction. Cool atmosphere though and interesting concepts for the level design.
Oct 8 17:20:50	34m 42s	Fairy Haven: The Search for Home	♥ 2	I played a handful times, and got about 15k as my best settlement. I don't know if I got any story ever though. I know there was at least one on the table but I couldn't offer enough in the needed exchange, I think. My first play-through, it wasn't at all obvious how randomized or not the game was. Nor how much content there was. So when my first encountered festival was an illusion that cost me resources without any gain, I kind of assumed festivals are bad and should always be avoided for the rest of that and the next 2-3 runs. Before I once again dared try a festival... and while this might be a correct life lesson 😆, I think it was the wrong lesson for this game. I would also never have realized there was a benefit of revisiting an evil location unless I happened to stumble into a dead end on the map and needed to backtrack and found that the evil snake was gone. So that time, the map helped me overcome my faulty assumptions. But perhaps something indicating passage of time a bit clearer in the game could also have changed my faulty ideas about the game being kind of static. I think though, that my favorite creature that I encountered was the menacing squirrels. I wish we could have a stare contest and then been grumpily accepting each others presence and that it would have been the best new home. After a couple of tries, I was not so much reading the encounters anymore but rather trying out different locations and funnily one of the best ones I had was settling right next to where I started.
Oct 8 18:29:48	1h 08m	CYBERGERM 9001	♥ 1	First I played the game carefully trying to not get shot at all and that very much was the wrong way to play the game. I was rather slow like that honestly. But then I was like, let see how the game ends if I just fly straight at the enemies and that was when I discovered how the game should be played. And it became immensely more satisfying. I still struggled a bit with the controls. Being a spaceship, my mind kept wanting to press buttons relative to the forward direction of the ship instead of giving absolute directions. It was also a bit too easy getting stuck on the terrain in the narrow passes. I'm thinking that if the colliders of the blocks were a bit (more) rounded and / or if the size of the vessel (or at least its collider) had been a bit smaller compared to the blocks... something like that could have helped a lot. Still very enjoyable! A very nice feeling flying straight at a cluster of bugs, knowing that they can hardly hurt you.
Oct 9 15:41:57	21h 12m	Hooverfield	♥ 1	I should perhaps almost be ashamed of myself for how much I enjoyed placing the dust motes right in front of the roomba again and again. The different cameras was also a delight, in getting close-ups of them being sucked up. I didn't manage to place any boxes though. Not sure what I did wrong there. Hope you feel better soon, and great work getting this done while being sick! Also what is this water color looking larger game you are working on?!
Oct 9 16:00:11	18m 14s	Those Darn Nanobot AI Will Be The End of Us All	♥ 1	First time I played. Well before I played, I read the instructions, but I didn't spot the letters, nor understand the placement of inner circle creatures. So that run didn't go too well. But reading up, I figured out that I had only played half of the game. I did have a bit of a problem with the keys though. It seemed like every other time it didn't register that I pressed the correct key to kill the inner circle intruder. It worked some times but others my presses were just ignored. I played on Firefox, perhaps there's something there with the timing but it made it very hard to progress very far. I think my record was slightly above 1k. The claymation was adorable! And I liked the effects and feedback that the game gave too. Perhaps the letters around the circle could have been a bit larger. As for progression, I probably didn't see much of progression in the game, if there is any. The early part was quite balanced for difficulty, I think. As for what could be made to elevate the difficulty over time, of course speed could be increased and spawn rates as well as how erratic the behavior is of the evil creature that comes floating in towards the circle. But those you probably already thought of. One evil thing that could be done is to start rotating the inner circle so that W isn't always up... Another could be to have those spawning in the circle jump around once or twice before having their effect.
Oct 10 16:11:48	24h 11m	Home place	♥ 2	I had a wonderful time playing this game. It feels quite unique, both style-wise and game play-wise for game jam games. I enjoyed the dialogs and walking around the world exploring all its parts. It really is quite impressive that you managed to pull this whole game off during the jam. I have no idea how you got all those elevators and collision boxes or navmeshes or what you were using to work so well in that short time. Of course there were some issues, like having to jump up over what felt like very small steps (notably onto elevators). The text was clipping through the world and being partially hidden, but I think I could guess what all the prompts were. There were also some cases of sprites not being in the right layer, like the cut surfer that is visible inside the cave in the rock too. Quite a few times I also accidentally talked to the same NPC again and again when all I wanted was to end the conversation. It was very cute with having the inventory trail me. One of the items, perhaps it was the tinderbox I didn't quite recognize for what it was. They also ended up hidden below floors sometimes, but again that's details compared to the whole working game you managed. I think the quests made a lot of sense too, so as you can probably tell, I had a really good time playing and decided to set up camp on one of the empty rocks in the large bottom area. Presumably where the surfer would have been.
Oct 11 12:07:28	19h 55m	Tiny Creatures Creator	♥ 1	This was a concept game. I was sort of hoping for some reveal too at the end of the quiz. It started out very strong with the first two colors sounding like normal options and then the color blend and very opinionated last option gave a taste that I was hoping would get even more evolved by each question. And then that the voice might start questioning the choices or such thing. I did have a fun time playing through it.
Oct 11 12:18:33	11m 05s	char chase	♥ 0	I was very happy to see that there was a game mode for those of us who didn't feel like being stressed. I played a couple of rounds and I must admit I wasn't so much planning while collecting the little critters as just walking around and doing their word challenges and then afterwards trying to figure out what kind of word I could make. Some minor details: - Since the game could be played with just keyboard, it would have been nice to not need the mouse at all. Binding Done to long press of enter perhaps and having navigation of menus with WASD. - Sometimes the prompts when collecting the creatures, their word dialog could end up partially blocked by the scenery and I had to guess what the exact word was. Really nice entry.
Oct 11 12:38:50	20m 17s	Godcademy	♥ 1	I played a couple of endings, sometimes accidentally making the wrong god happy according to what I was planning, but since the play time between first choice and end was rather short, it didn't matter too much that it sometimes was hard to predict the outcome of the options. I also noticed that the web version was larger than my screen, but the full-screen mode seemed to solve that. The game presented some warnings at various occasions too in the upper left corner. The capybara was the natural star of the game for me. Very good inclusion. If I'd critique the pacing, the introduction phase was rather long until I got to interact with the world. I get the point of introducing the gods first for me to form an impression and liking/disliking. But perhaps it could have been made really short and instead allow us to design several worlds rather than one, getting to know them from their reactions rather than having to reload the game to try different paths.
Oct 11 12:57:26	18m 36s	Pompeii, Bubbleland	♥ 1	I loved the poem and the trippy style of the game. The way the hidden messages appeared was also very neat environmental story telling. I heard the narrator say something about not going upstairs before done or such thing. I couldn't get up at all, so I'm guessing it wasn't available and that I wasn't missing out on anything. I took a stroll around the house too, it would have been really nice to have been rewarded by another bit on the back porch. Very good, almost Lynchian feeling to the game.
Oct 11 13:27:16	29m 50s	Juicy Little Morsels	♥ 2	I really enjoyed the art and style of this game. It was almost more satisfying to "accidentally" pop the morsels. The game play loop felt like it did lack a bit of progression though, that there wasn't much things happening or getting harder or that the pace of that ramp up was a bit too slow. So by 20 something morsels I switched to popping them on purpose to get to see the ending. I also found it a bit confusing at first, though I get why, that when the hand picked up the morsel it did so from the center of the bowl no matter where it actually was when I released the mouse button. That made me wonder quite some in the beginning if I was failing or doing things wrong. I think it would add quite a lot to the understanding of what is happening and to the feeling that it's me picking up the little things if they got picked up where they were when I was clicking on them. All in all, very good arcade-styled entry. And very good visual presentation.
Oct 11 13:42:59	15m 43s	PODVAL The Game	♥ 4	Walking down I was like, oh there's a cute rat, I wonder what that poor thing is fleeing from. And then there were more, none of them seemed scary or even interested in me. I got to the bottom and the statue and there was a change of sound. But I got distracted by that there seemed to be no collision detection on the statue and that I could clip through it. When I got out of it the rats were all there looking at me expectantly but respectfully. I started walking back and they followed me, but didn't really seem scary. After a while I did wonder if I should be doing something with turning the flashlight on and off, but walking backwards for a bit with it on it didn't really seem like they were gaining on me. So I turned around and walked back up, got to be next to the door and the screen turned red. I'm guessing by the rats killing me. I think there were some parts missing here in driving home the feeling of being scared. One part was just how the rats interacted with me. I think it would have been better if they were not running when I was walking down. Just loitering about, maybe looking at me. And then when they presumably turned on me, it would have been good to take the control away form the player to force me to see that they were a threat and coming for me. Perhaps also forcing the flashlight to turn off every now and then and force the player to look back over their shoulder. To see the danger.
Oct 11 15:16:17	1h 33m	Circuit Breaker	♥ 5	I selected byte difficulty because I assumed things were gonna be hard, but I think - it felt - like it was rather hard to die on that one. Which isn't too bad at all. There was a whole lot of content and I liked the setting and graphics the most in the game, I think. In the beginning it was rather hard to hit the enemies at all, but then shooting got upgraded to do explosions and it was much more satisfying. That early progression can be a bit tricky in a game jam, there's a risk of people giving up before the weapon turns satisfying. However, while I was feeling powerful, it was quite sad that with more projectiles, there was no aim anymore. The shots just flew at fixed angles and that feels like a breach of the introduced early game logic. The next thing that didn't feel great on byte level, maybe it isn't the same on the harder ones, was that I got level up for every second or third enemy shot. And that really interrupted the flow of the game. I would much rather have had more powerful upgrades or get 5 upgrades in a row at larger intervals, if more powerful upgrades would have been too difficult to pull off during the jam. Since I got rather overpowered, it also was a bit annoying that there was a dead-end to the level and that it wasn't a linear gauntlet. The layout of each segment was open and the early parts were all in a line so it taught that it's just going straight to get to the end. And then I had to backtrack. It might have helped if the map was a bit more zoomed out, or if there had been some reward for going to the dead end. What were the white things on the map mean to indicate by the way? I didn't at all understand those. The big boss was a really cool asset and I liked how there was a progression in the boss fight with the smaller mobs appearing and making things harder. However the boss was quite the bullet sponge, and being over leveled, I could just run around it keeping to its rear end and not care too much about what was happening. All in all, a really stylish game, a lot of content and very good work!
Oct 20 15:41:24	216h 25m	Crazy Critters	♥ 2	I played it to the end and enjoyed my time with it! When I first started to play and a little critter spawned very near me, I tried to flee and it was really hard staying away from it. I guess this is a very stressful game, I thought. Then I noticed they didn't close the final gap, and I realized they were my friends. I don't think there was anything in the instructions or lore that said anything about having friends, it might be good to add that. And speaking of adding. After having played a while I noticed a very small text in the upper corner that I could order and recall my friends. That should probably be mentioned in the controls too. Especially because of the cute sound bites that played when performing these actions. Over all, I think I liked the sound of the game the most! Really good work on all the effects and the background music. The graphics were very nice too. There were some cases of erroneous tiling when the grass borders weren't correctly placed and I think it would have been nice if the world edges had been uniformly and nicer handled. This is of course details... so I'm not really complaining at all. I didn't fully know what the end goal of the game was. First I figured it was collecting coins, but after a while I guessed it was getting rid of the slime. The instructions say to avoid getting slimed. It might be good to also mention that the goal is to clear all slime. In the end I had missed two slimes and it took a little bit of hunting to find them. It wasn't too bad, which I guess was a result of the world size. It could have been nice with some visual or auditory queue about the direction of the closest slime to avoid the final slower pacing of the game. I also didn't fully understand the coins, in particular the coin UI meter that for a long while said 2 for me and I guess this is what I bought friends with, but I think I had more at some point than the 2-3 I had when the UI said I had two coins. All in all though, a very good entry! Good work!
Oct 20 15:47:26	6m 02s	Blobby Bridges	♥ 1	I want to try this but the first has four red blobs and no way to cycle through them. blobbybridges.png
Oct 20 15:59:52	12m 26s	Fear Unbound	♥ 0	I like the graphics but I get stuck. There's something odd going on with the game where there's the itch fullscreen button and then that just fullscreens the non-fullscreen version of the unity game. I get to the first dream sequence and if I understood it I was to make things sprout in the three bouldery regions of the labyrinth. This was very hard to trigger, especially the one in the bottom. I wish WASD also worked in the dialog (A/D) and it seemed like the text on some, but not all could be fast written out (because I got stuck and wanted to try again to see if it worked better the second time I wanted to skip through up until first dream. Then I ran to the opening to the right but I just run off screen with nothing happening and having to restart the game: runoffscreen.png
Oct 20 16:22:06	22m 14s	Stomp	♥ 1	So... personally I would probably have swapped out the drive home that this is a bad person targets from lgbtqi+ demonstrators to something universally agreeable to be stomped on such as babies. I'd be much to scared to have it taken out of context, and story-wise I didn't really see the plot going there. In general, I feel the plot could have benefited from being a bit more specific about who the player was, what this legislation was and so on. Game play wise I was confused about it feeling like a success stomping on the dudes. both via the name of the game and the sound effects. it took me a while to understand that it was bad. I also think it would have been interesting to have combo-bonuses for the more that you were hitting. Quite soon it got so very crowded though, and with the delay in the stomp, that I sort of gave up on very much trying to avoid them. It would have worked better if the aim was to stomp bankers and politicians and other high value targets with that crowd density. Then a combo bonus would have been very sweet. Could have super extra bonus multiplier for only stomping people of one kind.
Oct 20 16:34:36	12m 30s	Bacterium Imperium	♥ 0	Interesting game. It took me a little while to at all understand which were my critters and to figure out the controls. Perhaps there could have been a UI element showing the area of influence around the mouse and also perhaps some reaction from my units when I was too far... I also wish there was some strategy in zooming in and out. Gaining larger area of influence for mouse when being zoomed out for example. I must admit though, that I found it quite tedious slowly guiding the little critters. I got to the third or fourth level. Interesting concept and idea though!
Oct 21 19:17:02	26h 42m	Terramunch	♥ 1	I liked the concept of solving puzzles by eating up the dirt around the enemies and such. I played the game to the end. The controls were a bit annoying at times though, especially when trying to move upwards. Jumping and eating a block one step up and to the right, while absolutely not eating the one directly to the right... I had to restart levels a couple of times... and since it didn't feel like it really was my fault it wasn't great. Later with the water, this became a bit better, but still not super easy to control the little guy. So, I did play it to the end, and the main reason is that there was a fun core. There's a good game in there I think. One simple change in level design, refocusing on digging down and digging deep rather than back and forth and taking away the need to go up except where there are helping blocks or water. I think that could make the game very interesting. Avoid having the crabs following you and falling on you the deeper you go.
Oct 22 15:51:59	20h 34m	TUSK	♥ 2	Great entry! Really lovely art style, fancy small transitions and animations everywhere. Cool characters. And interesting game mechanics. The presentation on how to play it, both reading before starting and then looking through the tutorials (Impressive to have that many and interactive tutorials!!) made it look very complex and scary. While in fact it was rather simple and straight forward once I had started playing. It would be hard to do something about that within the time constraints of the jam of course. But I could see myself skipping and not playing the game because of that first impression and that would have been a pity. I opted for the small adventure, to have some challenge but also because by the descriptions and from how far I got by each tower in the tutorials they seemed like rather long challenges already from the smallest one. It was a reasonable length though, but I don't think I would have wanted it any longer than what it was either. And this was mainly because of balancing and progression. Starting with 2 characters it was a real challenge not to take damage on the early towers and it felt a bit hectic while learning the ropes, but in a fun way, to take a bit damage and do some panic upgrades when I really wanted another hire. Such things. But after the first couple, the actually difficulty dropped substantially by just hiring as many as possible as fast as possible. When I ended I had full health, 10 fuel, and over 80 coins because I hadn't needed to do anything but pressing next / going on attack directly. So why bother with upgrades and why re-roll when you already succeed. That could have been helped a lot by just having higher target values later in the campaign even on the easier difficulties so that the player needs to play the game. Perhaps some towers also could have nothing that they are sensitive against or even some things they are resistant towards. All in all though, a really good entry.
Oct 22 15:59:35	7m 36s	Mosquito Simulator	♥ 0	Fun idea. It was very hard though. But impressive given the very tight time constraints. One thing that I'd try is to remove the colliders from the hind-parts of the vehicles, since the camera perspective makes it very hard to see when the player has actually passed the obstacle it feels a bit unfair getting smashed just because there were some pixels left on the car to the side. Then of course, if the vehicles were also moving towards the player would have been great.