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Doctor_Zeus

Feedback comments for LD58

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Doctor_Zeus's comment
Oct 6 22:57:46		Bog Bailiff	♥ 2	⚠️ Quick heads up, for me the tooltip info for equipment is always cut off the left half of the screen ⚠️ I do like a good strategic battling game! The idea that you can only change the items equipped to your inactive loadout is neat. It adds a bit of fun planning and mouse dexterity to gameplay, since you can think about your ideal organization as much as you'd like before clicking. The collecting loot idea fits the theme well, and I like the silhouette interface used to show off what kinds of items you brought back from your last play. Related, the artwork on the whole is really fun. our main frog's design is pretty whimsical (feather sword? no wonder the pen is mightier!) and the insectoid enemies are fitting antagonists. In the small chunk I played, I was very interested to see if the equipment swapping would become an important "active" part of play, but it didn't end up working out that way for me. Could be that there are incentives to do it that weren't clear to me yet - with more info or improved understanding I might have tried pursuing it more. There could be some pretty blunt ways to incentivize swapping during combat (items that only recharge while inactive, items that are stronger the first time they hit) but it might be a bit of a balancing act - fiddling around with pools of inventory constantly might distract from the higher-level decisions you want to focus on. Not sure. I know that games with abstract interactions (not-action-ey ones) can involve a lot of code work behind the scenes. Deciding how to communicate info is hard too, and I think you invested good effort to make this stuff understandable & interesting to play with. I don't exactly remember the jam's policy on post-submission bug-fixes, but if you're able to get that tooltip info somewhere more central on the screen I'll definitely come back in and try diving more deeply into the bog... to see what strategic terrors wait within.
Oct 6 23:22:49	25m 03s	Trash Game	♥ 3	Pick up the trash!!! Are we going to get a single released for this jammin' background song? Gotta get it on album with some of your other game-jam hits (I'm specifically remembering the crab game one). I like the inclusion of turbo and handbrake. The level design is fun to drive around in - I know I kinda abandoned my trash delivery mission after a bit just to see where I could drive. I'm going to have to give some shots at the downhill course, Initial D-style 😆 The models for the environment, cars, etc. are clean and very readable. This kind of lower-polycount style always makes me think of the Katamari games, which I have a very soft spot for. No picking up cars in this game, unfortunately... maybe next time. Some feedback, probably not anything too unexpected: There are some things that don't run so smooth for me in the browser - any time particles load for the first time (boosting, handbrake, barrel). I like the "swoosh" sound from picking up trash cans, explosion sound and "get that cash" was fun. In general, visuals & sounds were good gameplay feedback, made the game feel more responsive. Having some kind of squeal to accompany the burned rubber from the handbreak would've been nice too (though maybe you walk a fine line of trying to not be too annoying). I would've liked lower-pitched, bassier sounds for impacts & boosts if possible - the ones in the game do a good job of communicating what's going on, but it'd be nice for the audio to help sell the heavy, unwieldy nature of the majestic trash truck more. Controls felt fine to me - a little hard to steer, but that makes it feel good to navigate the roads just right. I have the impression that boosting actually helps your traction when you're just going in a straight line, which is an interesting dynamic. Some combination of small turns & feathering boost probably mitigates a lot of the steering trickiness. I did have a few situations in my first couple plays where the camera got locked at a weird angle on my truck. It didn't happen every time, so I'll fault my poor driving & wall-running-into skills for doing some kind of irreparable harm to the cameraman. I'm not well-versed in 3D design considerations, but maybe having a "reset viewing angle" button would help mitigate it? I like the scope of the level design, and like I said earlier, I had a good bit of fun just driving around. I'm not sure how I feel about the placement of the garbage drop-off spots. My first couple plays I didn't really run into any besides the initial one, but maybe I was just driving very poorly. Later attempts let me confirm there were other spots to drop off at, just needed to find them. Having a floating arrow in the sky or a classic trash truck radar pointing toward nearby points would be a nice enhancement to make the learning process easier - I figure if you really go hard-core into playing a game like this you eventually just have the whole map worked out in your head, more or less. ### Closing Notes Overall, I think it would be fun to actually try competing for score, even if it's just a little bit. I'll have to do some more attempts and post my results later. Sound, art & gameplay landed solidly for me, and if we get some high score competition going on here I'll get even more fun out of it 😄 Nice work on this one, I'm glad I had the chance to play it!
Oct 7 04:20:04	4h 57m	Hoarder's Remorse	♥ 2	I had a similar experience - at some point your bombs will damage every enemy as they spawn & then you're riding the gravy train. I like the assets you put together here. The look & sound of the game is clean & consistent, and the soundtrack matches the action well. The one-screen structure keeps the scope small, and you've got the boss encounter for a change-up. I like the arrow aiming indicator too, it's a nice touch that I've liked in other games too. Gameplay-wise, the mechanics are pretty familiar. Moving to group enemies is normal twin-stick shooter kind of feeling. The active items you trigger are neat, but I didn't end up finding much need to use them. (some are quite strong, though. The spike item makes you immune to contact damage?) The game's scaling took me out of control pretty quickly, so I didn't end up needing to use something outside of normal bombs after a little while. Maybe throwing in one more type of enemy with different behavior would have given me use cases for the items. Since the ones we've got always chase straight at the player, maybe having some that launch projectiles in a static pattern (not directly targeted at the player) would create some extra interest & tension when the player's trying to kite the swarming bad guys. There's probably a lot of ways to tackle this, though, and battling time constraints is always a challenge. A minor additional note: For my personal taste, I think making the game have a definitive end (rather than scaling to infinity) feels good for a jam game. Even better, throwing in a little timer or something like that gives players a feeling of completion, and maybe sparks a bit of competitive spirit in folks. If you've got the time, throwing an exclamation point at the end of a short-and-sweet experience is my preference. But that's a matter of personal preference. Again, good work with the spread of assets you made, the scope you selected, and the way you pulled it together into a complete package!
Oct 12 14:56:13	130h 36m	Tiles Collector	♥ 0	I really like the concept here. I especially like how there are emergent "rules" I started to build in my head as I played: in the 3-color mode, for example, there should be 1 pair of each color & exactly 3 instances of each color tile. I got faster at scanning rows for issues as I played, and it was fun to mentally rearrange the rows to figure what might be possible. After recognizing these derived rules, it also became clear to me that the generated puzzles were not "perfectly" solvable - any row that generates 3 matching tiles in a row will be missing points, as will one that (in 3-color mode) has 4 instances of a single color. On an instinctual level, the puzzle not having a "correct" solution feels kinda wrong, but after thinking about it some more, I think it's probably okay. Especially in a compo game, I don't know how practical it'd be to generate a system for guaranteeing perfect solvability, and even if you could it wouldn't necessarily make it a more-fun game. If it made the puzzle too repetitive, it might actually make it less fun! With all of that in mind, the inclusion of the scoreboard is a very good idea. You can see what the puzzle's current best score is to have an idea of what the upper bound will probably be. It's probably possible to determine what they highest possible score could be, but I don't think it's a bad thing for it to be left open-ended; proving that your solution can't get any better could be a part of the fun. I do think the satisfaction of finding the "perfect" arrangement of numbers in sudoku puzzles & similar logic games is an important element of that whole genre. So even with the upsides I outlined above, the not-perfect-ness of this game's puzzles may still be a detriment to folks' enjoyment (or at least a barrier to entry). That said, sudoku sets a very high bar - to create a puzzle concept that draws comparison to it in 48 hours is a great result! Nice work on this one, I'm glad I got the chance to play it! Bonus feedback lightning round: * The color-picker selection method was intuitive, I liked click + drag interface (and would work well with mobile) * Having an option to clear a color would be very useful, as would "clear row", "clear column", and (maybe most importantly) "undo" * In the tutorial, being able to hide the pop-up to review the game state hidden behind it would be very useful. Sometimes I finished a tutorial, but would've liked to review the solution after reading the message at the end - a way to confirm my understanding of the concept is complete. * Experimental idea: letting player specify a "best score possible" for a certain row / column could be useful - kinda like marking a square with a flag in minesweeper, it helps the player remember logical deductions they've previously worked through. * Having more-clear distinction between player-filled & pre-filled tiles would be very helpful. When doing sudoku, my terrible handwriting is very clearly distinguishable from the nicely printed pre-filled numbers; this helps me understand what can be rolled back & undone vs. what must stay. Maybe having a textured crayon / colored-pencil look for player tiles to contrast flat pre-filled boxes? * Dots on the problematic edges is good for readability when I got used to puzzling. * Reading the score display on the right side was a bit tricky. Some grouping of the tile-pairs may be helpful: separate rows / columns for each leading color would make it easier to review which type of tile is underutilized. * I bumped the escape key while submitting my score and lost my progress 😢. No biggie given the time constraints, but having some confirm pop-up before losing the puzzle stuff (or just removing the hotkey) would be a-okay by me.
Oct 12 15:50:11	53m 58s	Random Walk	♥ 2	Before I get into a design ramble, I want to say I think the presentation of the game is great. The interface is clean, the Baba Is You-style graphics are appealing, and the little question mark particles are fun. I also like the little text effects on the right side, it brings a lot of visual appeal. Quick note, the option of hjkl navigation made me smile, but it seems like the 'J' key doesn't move the character? Might be a little bug. Nicely selected scope, and good implementation of your vision. I'm glad I had the chance to play it! 😄 ### Design Ramble Quick disclaimer: I don't want to come across as too pushy, because I know this is your game - this is just me doing a lot of thinking out loud. I'll have opinions about design, but I know that it's just my perspective, definitely not intended to be presented as a authoritative. Anyway, on with the ramble. The concept of Unfair Flips is very interesting to me, mostly as an introspective experience. A meditation on randomness, and the kind of unreasonable expectations that folks generally have about randomness. What's especially appealing to me is that the core concept "flip heads 10 times in a row with this coin" intuitively sounds very hard to accomplish - the odds must be very very low, especially if you have a "bad" coin at the start. What's neat, though, is that even though I think the odds are bad, the reality of how bad the odds are is many, many times worse than what I imagine. Like, I don't have a good mental framework to imagine how bad it is - by default my brain has some baked-in assumption that it'll happen sooner or later, it just might take a little bit. That gap - the fact that I think it's unlikely to happen, but I'm still overestimating how likely it is to occur - is super neat to me, and thinking about how I evaluate odds & probability is a fun result of interacting with that game. In terms of mechanics, the function of this game is essentially the same - you have to win a series of "confusion flips" to get your character to move in the direction you want to win the game. If you win enough flips in a row (and don't accidentally press the wrong direction like I did a couple times 😆) the game is cleared. My mental response to it, though, felt quite different. There are probably a lot of factors at play here; for example, when I control a character with directional inputs it doesn't feel like the kind of action that should be random. My experience with coins is that flips are 50/50 odds, but my experience with walking around in games is that (generally speaking) I move in the direction I want 100% of the time. Relatedly, usually when I'm walking around in the game, I don't need to take an arbitrary path to reach my goal - if I happen to reach it in one way or another, the movement has achieved its purpose. I think these pieces of dissonance (walking direction normally doesn't feel random, pathing normally isn't strict in top-down walk-around-ey games) make the game feel more unfair & arbitrary than the coin flip game. When a coin flips tails, I can say "well, that's the way coins go". When I walk closer to my objective but not on the path the game prescribed & get reset, my instinctive response is "that doesn't seem quite right". This doesn't really matter in a mathematical way (it's all just coin flips behind the scenes) but I think this kind of game / experiment is probably most interesting when it plays into & exposes fallacies in the player's flawed expectations. Though I have played plenty of games that involve a character walking around in a top-down view, the idea that the character moves randomly & that the character must follow a particular path are both unique to this game. I can still have some fun poking the buttons & seeing if the character reaches the end, but I don't think it has the same kind of impact for me. Becomes a more general meditation on the Skinner box-type behavior, I guess.
Oct 12 16:43:17	53m 06s	Office routine	♥ 2	I did it, I earned a non-negative amount of favor! boss_favor.png I agree with other folks' feedback about the game's difficulty (especially right at the start, when the layout of the space is unclear). The strict timers means it's not always practical to do the tasks you're given, even if you do have a good idea of where they are. An extra wrinkle that makes things challenging is the fact there are repeated elements in the office - there are stacks of documents, printers, computers, plants, etc. in the top & bottom halves of the office. I got the impression that the "flavor" message attached to the assignment could reliably indicate which location you should interact with (I think "pet the plant" was always the one near the coffee machine) but having instructions that help identify the specific location would help ("fix the printer in the finance department" or something like that). On a related note, making the different "regions" of the office have distinctly different visuals can be a good way to direct the player. If the top half had red-colored cubicles & the bottom half had blue-colored ones, hints could be something like "fix the red printer". Maybe a more thematic option would be to have finance department has charts on the wall showing profits, engineering department has blueprints or schematics, etc. Extra assets like that take extra time, though, so it's not necessarily practical within the jam. That said, I do think that this kind of gameplay can be pretty fun. Trying to solve routing puzzles on a static map gives you a cool feeling of mastery when you get good at knowing exactly where to go. Letting multiple tasks stack up at once is good in that way, I think, because it means you're trying to figure out the best way to hit a cluster of tasks all at once. In this genre, I especially like having fun movement options or special shortcuts for the player to find, since they'll open up new kinds of strategies once they're discovered. Couple of suggestions if you're planning on going further with this idea: * Consider making the impact of success or failure more significant (maybe make the "boss happiness" bar have a few chunky segments) so you get strong visual feedback for success or failure. Also introduces more tension when you're in obvious danger - the boss bar value mostly stayed near the middle for me, + and - changes were very slight. * It could be nice to give the player a limited-use action to extend the deadline of individual tasks. It could create a nice strategic layer: I'm going to extend this South-side task now because I have to work on the North side - then afterward I'll run down & get a bunch of South-side things done all at once. Nice work putting the game together, I had fun playing!
Oct 12 21:23:09	4h 39m	Collectore - Ludum Dare 58	♥ 1	I had fun! Enough fun to play multiple times, and enough fun to reach a sort of no-win state (the first key picture is fully off-screen so I just have to guess the first input every time): level_18.png ### Gameplay Talk The shop was what really had me hooked. After playing it a little, I wondering if there was some strategy I could use to buy the "reset to 1 letter" shop option. (I even paused in the middle of writing this to try one time, which got me to that level 18 attempt). I did eventually succeed, but it was thanks to exploiting a (fun) bug - more on that later. I realized letting the letters expire naturally makes them explode into a much larger number of coins than if you "collect" them into your bottom bar. There's a tradeoff there, since collecting a full set of letters gives a pretty hefty boost of cash (25/50/much larger number, I believe). My not-rigorous evaluation after a handful of attempts is that it's basically correct to ignore everything but the common letters, and spend coins to finish the common word if you're down to 1-2 missing letter types. What broke the game wide open was the realization that clicking a letter in the middle of a "set completion award" duplicates the payout. Though this is definitely unintentional, it sparked a whole new kind of exploration: how could I most-effectively exploit this to reach the long-awaited "reduce arrows to 1" purchase? I ended up adopting a strategy where I'd fill up my normal "collector" word until it was fairly close to full, then purchase some letters to leave it with 1 left. Then I'd rush as many combos as I could to stack a bunch of normal letters on the screen (usually 3 was my limit, I could get 4 on screen if the sequences were very short) purchase the last common letter, then quickly click to collect all of the on-screen letters before they expired. This would duplicate the 25 coin reward for each letter I had on-screen, netting 75 - 100 bonus coins. It was pretty interesting, because even though I could get ridiculous amounts of money, I still had to think about how to sequence my purchases. Especially important was the timing of the "reset to 1 arrow" purchase - you wanted to get a combination to nearly complete & have as many common letters banked as possible. Basically as soon as you reset to short sequences again, you needed to try to score a 3-4 duplicate (or higher) right away to refill money reserves. Short arrow sequences make the duplicate bug much easier to exploit, but you're still at the mercy of RNG to try to get common letters (ironically the rarer letters are worse, since they don't duplicate the reward). There's probably extra nuance about how you could optimally exploit this bug, but with my strategy I was able to effectively go infinite (I looped back to 1 arrow sequences a couple of times & passed level 30) level_31.png So, all of that is to say, I had a lot of fun playing this game! ### Feedback Notes The rewards from the shop were very simple, but the incentives they ended up creating (with the help of a little bit of bug-exploiting 😉) was very fun to strategize around. It is a bit unfortunate that the rare letters didn't seem to be worth collecting for me - my strategy was so centralized on the common letters that they were mostly a downside. Maybe a mechanic where rare & legendary letters cycle through a couple different letters before disappearing would be interesting - you can leave them waiting, but you'll want to pay attention to whether they swap to a value you can actually use. Also, bug stuff aside, I did really like how tracking which letters you already picked up was important, and how splitting your attention between collecting letters & typing sequences was key to maintaining a steady income. The presentation of the game was nice. The music kept me in the groove & the background matched the feeling of the music well. Little bits of polish (the screenshake & visual effects of letters being entered) were great. Thanks for making this!