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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Matt Giuca's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 8 07:46:37 | Deep space journey | ♥ 1 | I love the setup of this. Just chilling on your ship while your home slowly fades off into the distance. It has a very "pale blue dot" vibe. Music would have really helped with the mood (even some off-the-shelf music). The twist at the end was neat. I wish there was a bit more either in between or afterwards, though I like the ambiguity of the final moments. I found the game very jumpy, as in, moving the camera around would jitter a lot, also the shadows were very low definition. Could it be that the earth is the origin in 3D space and the ship is flying away from the earth, thus the player is subject to floating point rounding errors as you get further away? If that's the case, look into origin shifting: here's a recent video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQw-UVmInE (the earth should be moving away from the ship, which rests in place at the origin). If not, then I'm not sure what's causing that. | |
| Apr 8 07:53:49 | 7m 12s | The Hole | ♥ 1 | Nice idea (golf where you have to collect coins as you go). I really feel like this would benefit from hand-crafted levels where you can set up each scenario with interesting obstacles and an appropriate par, whereas the procgen approach makes each level the same but longer. Still, I appreciate the procgen algorithm worked well enough that I always knew which direction to go in. |
| Apr 8 08:09:23 | 15m 34s | Icebreakers! | ♥ 2 | Very adorable! The writing style is spot on. It has a very Undertale feeling of being in an ominous place of monsters who just wanna be your friend. I like the them of not just exploring the "depths" but also having deep conversations. |
| Apr 8 08:24:16 | 14m 53s | SINKING | ♥ 3 | Neat game, I like racing upwards to solve the puzzles while the water is rising. Maybe checkpoints would be useful, since I did die a few times and it was a bit of a chore to get back where I was. Also I found some unused items, like an extra torch (maybe it was just for redundancy but it was a little, "unclean" that I didn't end up using all my items). Also once I fell off a ledge into the water, which felt quite unfair since I didn't lose against the clock, just instantly lost because I was walking carelessly. Perfect length, nice vibe. |
| Apr 8 08:41:19 | 17m 03s | DungeonDescent | ♥ 1 | Matching a huge chain is very satisfying. I like the idea of pairing it with a roguelike. The balance probably needs work - I didn't really concentrate on learning the mechanics (just picked things at random) and actually found it pretty hard to lose; I was healing more than I was getting hurt, without really trying. I think the skulls strength should grow a lot more over time. I also did not remember the briefing screen and couldn't understand a lot of mechanics, for example, I never figured out which of the skull's numbers was their health and their damage. Tooltips would be good. Great work for 2 days. |
| Apr 9 11:21:28 | 26h 40m | Help! I'm Trapped on The Torment Trapeze. | ♥ 1 | This is such a cool concept, my first few moments with the game my jaw was dropping with the gameplay possibilities. Unfortunately, after 10-15 minutes and countless restarts, I found it too annoying to continue. I didn't feel I was able to really use the mechanics to progress. For example, swinging on another dude just caused me to wildly swing around, and I can't really think of a reason to want to do this. The reverse gravity was similarly interesting, but I could never figure out how to use it to achieve anything, because I would have to time the guy picking up the arrow precisely with the guy who needs to use it to go upwards, and it would also mess up everybody else. Maybe I just suck, but I just died a lot, and ended up becoming frustrated. Really cool idea. I think it would be great to start off in a space where there aren't spikes everywhere to learn the mechanics. Great work on the art and music as well. One more thing: on the web build I couldn't figure out how to go fullscreen, which would have really helped with the mouse interface (I was often clicking near the edge and clicked buttons on the web page). |
| Apr 9 12:05:11 | 43m 43s | Depth Dive | ♥ 4 | Haha, I just had to comment that my game (Deep Dive - click my name if interested) has almost the exact same structure (dive down to the centre of the earth and avoid obstacles). Pretty fun setup, I like the commentary. It gets extremely hard from the second level onwards, I gave up after 40 deaths on the dinosaur level (I don't know how to not lose 2 health from the pterodactyl). Great art style. |
| Apr 9 12:33:55 | 28m 44s | Scares on Schedule | ♥ 3 | Game looks and sounds amazing. But it is way too hard. Not just a little bit too hard, a lot too hard, in multiple respects, to the point of being super frustrating. I just played for about 15 minutes (over about 6 runs) and managed to get 2 scares during that time. The fact that there are multiple villagers coming that each need to be scared three times before they reach the end which takes about 90 seconds... even if you play all the minigames perfectly I don't see how you could scare more than 2 or 3 villagers before becoming overwhelmed, and then the game says "villagers are coming more frequently now". The minigames themselves are all too difficult and require a lot of mouse dexterity. The fact that I don't have any choice of minigame (since I *have* to attack the frontmost villager) means I need to be good at all of them. - Hover: Probably the easiest, but I still managed to complete it only about half the time. - Boo: The first ~10 times I tried this I couldn't get it, and couldn't even figure out what it was asking for. When I finally did manage to click at just the right time, I kind of got the hang of it and can get it right more often than not, but the fact you have to do it 3 times means it wastes a lot of time even if played perfectly. My people were often off the screen by the time I completed it. - Music: There are way too many chimes (bars) and they're too thin, unnecessarily requiring mouse dexterity in a puzzle about memorization. I could cope with memorizing a sequence among 5 chimes, but my brain can't cope with remembering whether it's the 8th from the left or the 9th from the left. - Extinguish: Almost impossible to click more than 1 before the time runs out. - Match: I can just about cope with these "follow the hidden card" game when there's one card to follow. I can't imagine ever being able to follow two at a time. I didn't feel there was even enough time to identify the two matching cards before they flip over, let alone follow both at the same time. I never beat this one. I like the idea of this game but if I could balance it, I would drastically lower the difficulty (then maybe ramp it up after you've been playing for awhile). 1. Make each villager start with just 1 scare needed, and ramp up to 2, then 3, over time. 2. Have a health system so you don't have to stop every single villager, that way if a villager needs a scare I don't like, I can just let it go through. Heal back up if I scare a lot very quickly. 3. Hover: Reduce the time I have to keep it going for. 4. Music: Reduce the number of chimes (bars on screen) to 5 and make them fatter. 5. Extinguish: Triple the amount of time available. 6. Match: Just ask me to pick one card out of three (not match). OR don't do the shuffling (just show 5 cards, two the same, flip them after a short while, and ask me to match the two that are the same). Not both. |
| Apr 10 06:09:38 | 17h 35m | Apprehension | ♥ 3 | This game hooked me with its incredible vibe, drenched in atmosphere. I love the tile-based movement combined with low-res but bump-mapped walls, the spooky music, the little peeks of the monster. Plodding through the halls not knowing when it will show up. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of a maze of walls that all look the same. After awhile, it stops being scary and just starts being a chore to navigate (about half way through the second level I was getting more frustrated than tense). It doesn't help that the monster would seem to grab me immediately after I take a photo, some of the time. I'm not sure if that's supposed to happen or if I'm doing something wrong. The third level didn't introduce anything new so it was kind of boring, and I was relieved that it was the last level. I can't state enough how much I loved the atmosphere of the game though, and for that it deserves high marks. |
| Apr 23 02:58:51 | 308h 49m | Abyss Prison | ♥ 2 | Well done making an actual Gameboy game for a game jam! The art and music work really nicely. I clicked and saw a lot of codes but sadly did not have the patience to try and solve the complex puzzles, but I wanted to give a rating anyway because it looked like a lot of effort went into this. |
| Apr 23 03:06:03 | 7m 12s | Swoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooord!! | ♥ 1 | Fun setup, but I didn't really understand the mechanics. As others have said I couldn't really make it more stable by adding more to the bottom, so it just seemed to be about getting tall, then building quickly and being lucky that it didn't topple over. I managed to beat it once, but I didn't feel that I mastered anything, just tried over and over until I got lucky. |
| Apr 23 03:23:57 | 17m 54s | Deep Space Misfortunes | ♥ 1 | What a cool submission. I love how detailed the systems are, and the risk/reward of going up and down hyperspace levels. Some feedback: - I couldn't see the "max HP" of systems which made it hard to know how damaged they were. - It kept saying "you can't change levels if your bridge is broken" but there was no "bridge" system to fix, so I never figured out how to do that. (Perhaps "navigation" is bridge?) Also "I guess I'll fix it" is misleading since it implies that choosing that option will fix it, but it's really just saying the player should fix ... I think "navigation" but I'm still not sure. - I don't think there's a way to get more ingots, which means once you've spent your two extra ones you have no way to bribe cops or aliens. That is kind of frustrating, I would expect if there's a resource I can use to bribe that I could obtain more of it somehow. Still, I managed to win on the first try so it was enjoyable and not too hard. |
| Apr 23 03:35:33 | 11m 36s | The Abyssal Trenches | ♥ 2 | Great mood. It's very tense having such a limited field of vision with only brief bursts of light possible. My main criticism was the normal issue with "collect all of the things" games which is hunting down the last 1 or 2 sucks. Would be better to have a quota and not have to collect all of them. Also the squid sometimes blocked the exit making the game unwinnable (like the screenshot above). I beat the first level but it didn't seem like the second level was very different, just longer. |