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Feedback comments for LD57
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Koolruz's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 8 02:49:34 | Fall Off | ♥ 2 | I love that this jam reignited your game dev passion! I know the feeling well - Somehow working 30+ hours in a weekend makes me realize how much I love building games :) I had a lot of trouble surviving past the first obstacle, so I'm not sure if I was missing something or if I was just bad 😅 I didn't feel like I had enough time to react because of how low on the screen I was, but I might have just been totally missing a crucial control. If there's something I'm missing, I want to come back and give things a try again, so let me know! Congratulations on surviving and finishing your first jam! :) | |
| Apr 8 03:43:22 | 53m 48s | Where's My Pants?! | ♥ 2 | FYI, the web build seems to crash when you hit play - Bummer, because I really need to find my pants! |
| Apr 8 03:49:57 | 6m 35s | Awakening | ♥ 2 | The atmosphere was so soothing - I was feeling extremely lost as I wandered the maze, but I couldn't bring myself to stop playing just because it was such a pleasant environment to be immersed in. Well done! |
| Apr 8 04:16:53 | 26m 56s | Hyperspacedive | ♥ 1 | Woah, these are some extremely cool visuals - I loved the dithering and genuinely got mesmerized by level 7 or 8 and died while trying to pick apart what I was looking at 😅 Great job! |
| Apr 8 14:04:17 | 9h 47m | Deep Fisher | ♥ 2 | high-score.PNG When I got into the flow of it, things felt really smooth and fun! If I could stay in the zone, I was able to zip around quickly, maintaining my momentum, and it felt really great. That said, I'm not sure if this was a "me" problem, but I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the vertical controls - I would try to swim down, and instead get stuck in place going slightly up. Similarly, I'd try to shoot my gun down to give me a quick burst of momentum upwards, and would end up gaining far less speed than I did when shooting left/right. These discrepancies in how my momentum controlled made it a lot harder for me to get into that flow state where I was able to smoothly zip around, because my intuition about how I would move was incorrect and I had to give conscious thought to what I wanted to do when rising/falling, and if I just went on instinct, I'd get stuck in a corner. Again, this might just be a me problem - Maybe the controls match other folks' intuition and maybe I'd get used to them with more practice :) Overall, great job! I was able to form an opinion about the minutia of the movement controls, because the rest of the game felt so smooth and fun! I also loved the little homage to the Sonic drowning jingle that you threw in when your oxygen is low :) |
| Apr 8 14:51:15 | 46m 58s | God Veins | ♥ 1 | Really moody and creepy (in a good way)! I loved the CRT scanline filter you had going as well. I agree with the above commenter that you might want to give the player a hint that they need to open the closed elevator doors, because I definitely skipped day 1 as well. Other than that, my only real critique is that the events started looping before the story progressed further (if there is an end-state to it), so it was unclear if I ought to keep playing to get to the end, or if I had seen all that there was to be seen! Also, the first time I opened the elevator doors and there was nothing to be found there (nor any acknowledgement from the game), it hit hard - Great call just letting the doors open silently, instead of adding any text telling the player that they got no response/a crewmember had died. |
| Apr 8 15:16:00 | 24m 45s | A Present for Ama | ♥ 1 | I also ran into the same issue as Gordo - I had to refresh the game after every level. I'm on Windows Firefox if it helps :) Aside from that, this was really charming and refreshing little game! I really liked the audio As for whether folks found the button navigation intuitive, I had a hard time with it, but I'm not sure how much of that came down to the refresh issue! |
| Apr 8 16:04:36 | 48m 36s | Faith-e-vator | ♥ 1 | victory.PNG I liked this short and sweet lil game! It took me awhile to get used to the controls (Using WASD plus J and K felt weirdly cramped on my keyboard), but I really liked how you let the player refill their health bar by slaying demons! With wave attack/survival games like this, I often will take a hit or two early on and feel like I'm playing from behind for the rest of the run, so it was really nice to be able to play precisely and get back to a clean slate after building up a combo. It made it so that the game was testing my ability to string together combos of clean gameplay, rather than being a fight against atrophy. Great design choice! :) The art style was also very appealing |
| Apr 8 16:14:10 | 9m 34s | pachaction: A pachinko rogulike | ♥ 1 | This is the start of something that could be very cool, and is a really neat idea! I definitely see the appeal even in an early form like this! I've never played anything like it before (aside from maybe the bonus stages in Sonic 1 on the Sega Genesis!), but I could see it turning into a very satisfying game to chill out with, once some objectives, limitations, and obstacles are added in. Well done coming up with this idea, I'm a little bit jealous! :) FYI, I also had to click the link that dstoc posted above to play the game - The embedded version wasn't working on Windows Firefox either |
| Apr 8 16:25:00 | 10m 50s | Diggy Diggy Shroom | ♥ 3 | The web build got super laggy for me (about 4 frames per second) as soon as the first wave of enemies spawned, which was a bummer because I was digging (pun intended) the concept! I didn't get to give the game a full try so I won't leave a rating, but I figured I'd let you know in case it was something you wanted to look into! :) There were some cool concepts on display from what I was able to play though! :) Impressive work especially for a very first jam game! |
| Apr 8 16:41:21 | 16m 21s | Scares on Schedule | ♥ 3 | I was coming to write a comment, and realized that I agree with everything that @tobius pointed out - They took the words right out of my mouth! So, I'll try and elaborate a little bit more and avoid repeating them. :) First off, I absolutely loved the art style that you have here - Everything was super cohesive and polished, and nothing felt out of place. It felt like the work of someone who really knows their craft, great job :) I also really struggled with the minigames at first - The musical one, for example, felt impossible to me until I played and failed it several times in a row and got used to the scale of the notes. Starting with a smaller scale would definitely have helped, but also introducing the player to the scale at the start of the game would help give them a mental map for the memorization portion. In my case, I would often remember the pitch of a note, but have no idea which chime was mapped to that pitch because I didn't know the extents of the scale. The matching game was also super hard for me at first because I didn't know what I was looking for during the memorization period - It wasn't until my fifth or sixth playthrough of the minigame that I realized there was a matching pair of cards that I was supposed to have been following (my original understanding of the game was that I had to click on the cards in the order that they had first appeared), and even once I knew to look out for the matching pair, I would often not find them before shuffling started. Making the matching pair have a distinct bright color would have made the objective a lot more obvious I think. Hopefully this doesn't come across as being super critical of the game - The opposite is true; I thought it was very well made! It felt so polished and finished, with a clear vision that it was offering, that it made it very easy to offer (hopefully) constructive feedback. Really well done! |
| Apr 8 16:52:23 | 11m 02s | Voidwood | ♥ 6 | I thought that the game was cool and looked nice while I was playing through the first section, but then I got to the second stage and it really kicked things into overdrive! The chromatic aberration looked *so* good, and the sudden vibe shift was a (good) kick in the seat. I went from thinking, "This is an interesting little endless scroller" to, "Wait I really don't want to die, so that I can see what comes next and keep soaking in this atmosphere". That was a great twist, and my only concern is that folks might not get there to see it, because it really makes the game sing! Gameplay-wise, I did feel a little bit like I was at the mercy of the generation sometimes - I had a few runs where I was sucking every water pool that I came across dry, and still died before the end of the first area. I'm not sure if there was something that I could have been doing differently, but it was a frustrating way to lose because it didn't feel like I had any other choices to make, I was just starved for water. Overall though, this was a really cool entry, and I'm glad that I played it :) |
| Apr 8 17:05:12 | 12m 49s | Crab Royal | ♥ 1 | I agree with Mega Marlon that this is a very brave game to make - Boss battles are hard to do, especially on such a tight time crunch! Good job! :) After playing a few times and getting the hang of things, I realized that the best strategy for the descent was to just hold down and get to the boss fight, which was a bit of a bummer, so I figured I'd pass along that feedback! It might be nice to either skip the descent after a player has encountered the boss for the first time, or to let the player power themselves up by exploring during the descent, so that it feels more integrated into their objective of killing the boss! I didn't run into any issues, and the game ran smoothly in Firefox for me. :) I was sadly never able to beat the crab (I got it down to around 25% health at one point), but that may just be a skill issue on my end ;) A quicker restart definitely would have helped for me! Overall, well done! |
| Apr 8 19:55:18 | 2h 50m | A Final Deed | ♥ 1 | I was just coming to the comments to let you know about that bug - I was super confused during my playthrough about how the indexed keys worked because I ran into it as well 😅 I thought I must just not have understood the mechanics because of the patch notes saying it was fixed haha |
| Apr 8 20:52:28 | 57m 10s | HIM(1).Locked | ♥ 3 | I'm also super stuck at the last two files - I had to come into the comments already to get a hint to look in the bin For feedback on why the recycling bin was so hard for me, the bin was the first thing I checked when I started, then when it was empty I never went back to it, especially because it always had the "empty" icon - Changing the icon to represent that it had files in it definitely would have made it more intuitive that I ought to look there again It's also tricky that the files require a specific password to progress, because I've typed permutations of the correct answer for previous locks (adding a space where the game didn't expect one, for example); I'm not sure if I just got unlucky and hit the one case that you missed, but it would help to be more forgiving if the player has the right idea, and ignore any spaces/capitalization in the passwords they type. As it is, I've been re-typing every permutation of what I think the correct three-word answer might be, and coming up blank, and I'm not sure if I'm totally off-base, typing it into the wrong file, or if I am using incorrect punctuation :( Edit: It turns out I did in fact need to change up the permutations of punctuation that I had. I am now just down to HIM(1).lock :) |
| Apr 8 21:32:07 | 39m 39s | Tout au fond (at the very bottom) | ♥ 2 | beat-it.PNG Absolutely loved this entry! The upgrade system gave me flashbacks to Gradius, where you'd lose a life at the hardest part, and suddenly had to beat it without any upgrades, but this version felt way more fair, because of how generously placed the diamonds were! The fact that enemies dropped diamonds also meant that if you lost an upgrade to a group of enemies, you could likely get it back by defeating them, which made for some really fun tension :) I also loved learning the enemy patterns and figuring out how to bait/react to them - At first, I thought certain enemy attacks were impossible to dodge, but by the end I felt like I was well-equipped to tackle any of them. Great difficulty curve :) My only real constructive critique is that the controls took some getting used to - It would have been nice if whatever button you pressed most recently overrode any other button presses, which would maintain the uni-directional movement that you have going on, but make it feel a little bit more intuitive to control. At first, I lost a lot of upgrades to the fact that I would tap down to dodge an attack while also holding left or right, and the sub would ignore my down input to keep moving left/right. Overall, great job! |
| Apr 8 21:56:00 | 23m 53s | Spider Cave Offensive | ♥ 2 | I really liked this game, and survived for a few minutes (and hit the boss with several bullets and a few charge attacks), but I think my arm might fall off if I try to beat it 😵 The fact that you had to keep tapping buttons to mine gave me an intense forearm workout - It would have been nice if I were able to hold the arrow keys down and keep walking/mining in that direction! Overall, this is a really cool concept (I agree with the above commenter that a combination endless runner/boss fight is a great idea!), and I've never played an endless top-down game before, but it works so well here! Tons of fun, even if I couldn't finish it! Edit: Just kidding, I played again and beat it :) |
| Apr 9 03:06:19 | 5h 10m | Depth of Field | ♥ 0 | Woah, this was incredibly charming and well polished - Great job! |
| Apr 9 04:00:16 | 53m 57s | Pawndemonium | ♥ 1 | I also had a lot of fun with the concept once I properly understood what I was doing! I beat the demon king on level 3, and was kind of bummed out that there wasn't more to play - Well done! :) |
| Apr 9 04:20:50 | 20m 34s | Bunker | ♥ 1 | FYI, the camera controls were super finicky with my screen resolution/mouse sensitivity - If I moved my mouse a couple millimeters in any direction, I would do a 360, which made controlling the game very uncomfortable and turned the vibe from spooky to over-caffeinated. It's probably a good idea to add a sensitivity setting, as I suspect other folks might have a similar problem :( I only made it down a few floors before getting very freaked out and falling off the stairs - This was *not* a game I should have been playing past midnight, but well done on the creepy vibe! (even with the mouse sensitivity issue I ran into!) |
| Apr 11 17:11:23 | 60h 50m | Worm Quest | ♥ 2 | Oooof this took me over an hour to do, but I got there! sweet-sweet-victory.PNG I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on here! I really liked how you traversed down and back again, and by the end you kind of had that metroidvania feeling of zipping back through an area you'd already been through, but with new powers to trivialize some of the old challenges! There were a few pain points that made the game way more frustrating than probably intended I think if I had one piece of advice to give, it would be to zoom the camera out and let the player plan out their route in advance - There were a lot of blind jumps (or blind rises) that you had to make, and you could end up locking yourself out/restarting an entire section if you made the wrong choice (or simply didn't think to bring a seemingly unneeded block with you through the level). Adding a little bit of signposting for the player (maybe a trail of collectibles, maybe removing "fake" paths, etc) could also help smooth those out, but I think these puzzles would feel so much better to solve if you could plan your entire route out through each screen! :) fake-path.gif I also ran into some weird issues with the enemy AI that made certain parts of the game harder than perhaps intended - For example, in the last screen of the level, instead of taking the (presumably intended) path where you could jump up on the right, I had to take a circuitous route involving several dashes to get around this enemy whose patrol put it right in my way during the jumping climb. It was a fun route, but it didn't feel intended, because you had that nice staircase of 3-block-high jumps to the right had-to-make-my-own-path.gif I also kept running into a strange bug if I landed directly after dashing where I couldn't jump again unless I tried to mine first - It seemed like somehow the game didn't realize I had landed back on the ground when a dash ended directly on a tile. Overall though, please don't take this feedback as me disliking the game! There's a clear vision on display here, and because of that, I was able to develop a lot of thoughts as I played through! |
| Apr 11 21:19:37 | 4h 08m | Race Through the Depths | ♥ 2 | I love speedy and difficult platformers, so I was excited to give this a try! Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to complete the course 😢 The vignette effect made it so that I couldn't see where to turn next, and moving quickly often led to my death as I hit an off-screen lava pit, which was frustrating. I managed to figure out path up until these moving platforms, but once I got up to the top of them, I couldn't figure out where to go next - There was a wall to the left, and jumping to the right just led to my death. blind-jump.gif I haven't left a rating, because I don't want to rate half of the game, and I'm happy to come back and try again later, but I wanted to pass along that feedback in case it's useful! Let me know what I'm missing 😅 |
| Apr 11 22:20:21 | 1h 00m | Where it Ends | ♥ 1 | Oh man, this was not at all what I expected, and I really liked it :) The mechanics felt really nice, and like someone said above, I'm sure the message is going to hit home with someone who needed to hear it. Great job all around! |
| Apr 12 16:06:23 | 17h 46m | Bedrock Rush | ♥ 2 | This is a ton of fun - Absolutely loved so much about it, and accidentally spent way too much time playing this morning 😅 It went from, "Let me finally check this out while I drink my coffee" to, "Oops, my coffee is now lukewarm, but I did manage to snag #44 on the leaderboard" Despite playing for so long, I really only have one piece of feedback - I wish there was a quick reset button! Because this is a time-attack based racing game, I kept wanting to reset my run if (for example) I wiped out early on, but the only way to get back to the title screen seemed to be to hit refresh. Unfortunately, hitting refresh meant that I had to go through the slow-motion tutorial again, and the timer doesn't slow down during the tutorial! 😢 That meant that, no matter what, I was spending at least 20-30 seconds to reset and start a new run after a mistake, which felt brutal. A corollary to that is that it felt a little bit strange to have randomized levels in a time-attack game - Sometimes it felt as though a certain track layout was just slow (for example, starting with a long hill climb), and you just had to wait it out until you could reroll a new track. Those are jam-related nitpicks though - The game is still a ton of fun :) It feels great to play, the sound and music were great, and I had a great time with it! |
| Apr 14 18:06:13 | 49h 59m | A New Hell | ♥ 3 | got-to-the-end.PNG This was really tricky, but a fun concept! I did unfortunately run into an issue relatively frequently where I would beat a level, then the next level wouldn't load when I exited. This happened on the title screen, on level 7 twice, then on level 8, and I had to replay the boss fight multiple times before it let me progress to the end. It seemed like maybe I had missed the loading trigger as I fell down the hole, because it seemed to happen whenever I came down with a lot of velocity at a strange angle. If I hit space, I could hear the attack sound playing, so presumably I was in freefall below the stage. no-next-level.PNG I think there's a small tweak that you could make that would really amp up the game feel - It seemed like your attack hitbox only ever lasts *exactly* as long as the animation played for, but if you kept the hitbox around for a few frames after the animation finishes, I think the timing would feel a lot more consistent for players. Because of how quick the animation is, you don't really have a good sense of when the exact end of the animation is, which makes it really unclear when your hitbox is going to disappear. This lack of clarity makes tight attacks feel frustrating to execute, because there isn't enough time for your brain to parse that the animation had ended if you die; When you can die the frame after the animation finishes, there's very little perceptual difference between an attack hitting, or an attack getting you killed. Even if the attack's actual length stayed exactly the same, but the animation played 2x faster (so that there was some dead time after the animation finishes before you start getting hurt again) I think it would make the timing so much easier to understand, because your brain would have time to catch up and see that the animation had fully completed before you died :) It also might be a good idea to make sure that the player always has some minimum speed after a collision - During the boss fight, I often found myself making this exact same slide again and again, as I came up from the bottom area. It felt very confusing when my bouncing would stop dead slide-2.gif Finally, I also absolutely loved the palette swapping! It's so much fun to see the level change as you progress! Overall, this was fun! Please don't take the fact that I had a lot of feedback to give as a sign that I didn't like the game - I tend to give the most feedback to games that I spend the most time with! :) Well done! |
| Apr 15 14:53:18 | 20h 47m | Eurydive! | ♥ 2 | beat-eurydive.PNG This was fun and *very* cute :) I absolutely loved the sound design in general, but I especially loved the way the music changed on the way back up - That song was stuck in my head all morning! I really enjoyed the shift in gameplay style on the way back up as well - Staying somewhat in control of the frantic swinging physics was a lot of fun :) Well done! |
| Apr 16 15:04:32 | 24h 11m | Captain Peggles: That Man's Chest | ♥ 4 | Oh man, this was absolutely so much fun - It's like nothing I've ever played before, and it was a blast! The only thing that bummed me out a little bit is knowing that I'll never get any feedback about whether or not my map that I drew was used/successfully got someone to the treasure! That might be a great future update, getting some sort of reward whenever someone uses your map to find a chest. My only other complaint was how huge the eraser was, when I was trying to make tiny adjustments to my lil pixelized palm trees Overall though, it was extremely satisfying to both draw the map, and then extremely satisfying to parse someone else's map. Great job all around! :) |
| Apr 19 03:20:43 | 60h 16m | Cave Escape | ♥ 2 | This game is great :) I love the art, love the music, love the sounds, and the gameplay feels very good! Well done! I especially love the visuals - Everything is super readable, super clean, and super vibe-y |
| Apr 23 16:36:51 | 109h 16m | Dyamid | ♥ 1 | Absolutely loved this, and I have very little feedback to give! My only critique was that the double jump felt very finicky and awkward to use - Every time I used it, it felt like I was exploiting a bug rather than using an intended mechanic to solve a puzzle, and at some points that led me to question whether I was sequence-breaking and heading backwards/going down the wrong path. That small critique aside, this is one of the best games I've played this jam :) Very well done! |
| Apr 26 00:31:23 | 55h 54m | P(urple)thulhu vs SHIPS: Tentacle Trouble! | ♥ 0 | This was very fun for awhile, but I do agree that it got repetitive - I wasn't sure if there was an end state or not, but after beating about fifteen levels, I didn't feel as though the challenge was progressing any further so I put the game down. I was hooked for fifteen levels though, so I think there's something very cool here! If you expand on the mechanics as the game progresses, and add an end state (or drop the idea of levels and turn it into an endless score-chase to let folks get into the flow state), this would be really cool! I also loved the tutorialization in the first level - Good job! |
