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Feedback comments for LD58
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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Koolruz's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 7 00:24:17 | ingest|digest | ♥ 1 | ate-it-all.PNG I really liked the sound design here! The particle system is also very neat - It seemed like it kept making fractal shapes as I got bigger, and I was really curious if that was an actual mathematical occurrence or coincidence! My one piece of constructive feedback is that it might have been a good idea to skip the first round where you're just collecting abstract shapes and go straight to the second phase. During the first phase, I had no idea if there was more to the game than just collecting the shapes, but once I hit phase 2, it felt like things really picked up steam in a much more engaging way Overall, this is really cool stuff for just 33 hours, especially being built on a custom library! | |
| Oct 7 00:38:47 | 14m 30s | Pelmeni's Magic Lab | ♥ 1 | win.PNG This was very fun! I definitely felt overloaded by information when I first started the game (for example, I had *no* idea what was going on when I was drafting sets to start the game), but I quickly picked things up and figured out what was going on - It might be a good idea to add a key to your description page giving folks a primer if they need it! My only other piece of feedback is that I had a hard time remembering which tiles belonged to which set based solely on background color - I knew which tiles matched each other, but I had no idea (for example) which tiles belonged to the holy or warlock sets, when they were being referenced on other tiles Overall though, this was a very cool game, and those are minor UI nitpicks that can easily be solved! |
| Oct 7 00:55:24 | 16m 37s | WonderBot: A Lofty Return | ♥ 4 | I love how adorable WonderBot is! Upgrades unlocked just fast enough to keep pulling me back in - I would think that I was going to wrap things up, and then I got (for example) the jump and there was so much more that I could reach! I wasn't sure if this was a glitch or an unfinished feature (jams are so short!), but every day started with a requirement to gather 0 dust, and I wasn't sure if this was a glitch, or if it was unfinished (jams are so short!). I checked the description, but I didn't see anything there, so I figured I'd let you know :) Overall, fun and cute! I just wish there was some audio - I can just imagine how great some crunchy, clackity sounds would feel as you vacuum up all those little bits and pieces! |
| Oct 7 03:40:24 | 2h 45m | Gibberwave | ♥ 2 | FYI, it looks like your text assets might not have made it into the game! All text boxes are just showing text keys text-keys.PNG I didn't leave a rating, because it wouldn't be fair to rate you without any text! I just wanted to give you a heads up! I'll try to remember to come back and check things out again later though - I really like the art! :) |
| Oct 7 03:51:50 | 11m 26s | Deck Collector | ♥ 2 | I also really liked this concept a lot - It took me several rounds of combat to eventually figure out what was going on, but once I did it made a lot of sense. The only real piece of feedback that I have is that I didn't feel like my cards were building synergistically with one another, and sometimes they ended up interfering with each other (as they all required mana, and only the card with the lowest mana cost would ever fire). Instead of just always firing the card that was ready first (which always ended up being the lowest mana value card), I would have expected that the order that I placed cards down would have been the order that they were played (for example, the second card in my list would only start counting its timer down after the first card in the queue finished, no matter how long that first card took to fire), which might have been a fun way to set up multi-stage combos. Overall though, this is a really cool twist on the deckbuilder and autobattler genres, and I like the idea a lot! |
| Oct 7 13:31:13 | 9h 39m | Star Reaper | ♥ 2 | I loved how it felt to break the asteroids apart - The pixel destruction and subsequent particle explosions were super satisfying! I also loved the Sinistar homage :) I *think* I beat the game, but after destroying the Star Reaper, nothing happened - There was nothing left on the map, so I assumed this was the end, but it would have been nice to have a victory screen pop up just to make sure I didn't quit the game too early! beat-star-reaper.PNG The one thing that I struggled with was the controls of the laser - It felt great when I was able to hit an asteroid with it, but a lot of the time I was just spinning back and forth trying to narrow in on it. I'm not sure if this was an intentional part of the difficulty, or if I was just missing something - Was there something I was doing wrong here? fast-spin-2.gif Overall though, very cool entry! :) Well done! |
| Oct 7 14:15:58 | 44m 45s | Squirrel The Collector | ♥ 1 | This was cool and cute! I haven't seen anything like this before, where you're moving in a pseudo-turn-based way locked on a grid, but everything around you continues to move in real time - Based on the description, I had assumed everything would move when you moved, but this was a very interesting alternative! The only thing that felt frustrating as a player was that certain hazards were inescapable - I always had the health to tank a hit from a bear trap, but it would have been a really bad feeling to get far into the game, and then die to an unavoidable bear trap. As it is right now, some of the bear traps don't feel like they're adding to the puzzle solving gameplay, they just feel like they're a way to force the player to lose health with no decision-making involved, which didn't feel cohesive with the rest of the experience. If the bear traps were optional risks a player could take on to grab extra collectibles, they might feel more at home with the rest of the gameplay :) I sadly didn't get to the end, because I managed to get myself softlocked pretty far into the game :( After picking up the gun, I couldn't progress from this spot. It looks like the tree may be misaligned, so I never collided with it when I was moving from space to space (or I may have simply been missing something obvious) tree-stuck.PNG At least the music there was super soothing :) It was a nice little zone to get myself stuck in! |
| Oct 7 15:06:30 | 50m 32s | Benny's Quest | ♥ 1 | 11-out-of-10.PNG Benny is absolutely adorable and must be protected at all costs. This whole game was so cute! I really liked the signage and cute little pieces of text that you sprinkled throughout the level - the "wait" was incredibly charming, and the "almost home" was a nice little checkpoint to give me a sense of how much more there was in case I died. There were a few blind jumps that made me anxious, but I was really glad that the signage didn't lead me astray, except for the absolute last jump for the bonus flower - I had no idea where I was supposed to land, jumped off the cliff instead of dropping, missed every piece of terrain on the way down, and went flying straight into some spikes way down below :( The music also did a really good job at setting the mood! I had a lovely time picking flowers :) I agree with the other comments saying that a checkpoint system would have been really appreciated - I had originally collected all ten flowers without dying, and I really wanted to see everything there was to see, so I figured I'd give it one more run; the game was short enough that I didn't mind the lack of checkpoints when I had to restart. That said, "one more run" quickly turned into five or ten more runs as I would forget a flower or get impatient and die at the last jump (I think I cleared the game with 9 flowers three times in a row). I don't think that the game was too long to try to beat without checkpoints, but it felt a little bit punishing to try to 100% it without checkpoints. Replaying that intro section 2-3 times per run (in order to drop down and collect all the flowers down below) started feeling a little bit repetitive by the end. That said, I hope this doesn't come across negatively! I had so much to say because your design was very clear and well executed, which makes it easy to provide constructive feedback! Overall, very well done! :) |
| Oct 7 16:05:56 | 59m 26s | Blossom Fox | ♥ 4 | This was really cute! I loved how, when you start the game, it teaches you how the gameplay works - Hit space, and you'll jump! It was a really effective little "tutorial" that didn't require any explanation, and fit perfectly as a transition from menu to gameplay as well! I did have some trouble with the hunger mechanic at first, but I eventually figured it out - I didn't realize I had to actively use my claws to grab birds and bugs! I also love the sound effects you've made! Everything feels very crunchy and satisfying! Overall this was really cute, fun, and sweet! |
| Oct 7 16:11:22 | 5m 26s | A suspicious game | ♥ 1 | This was *not* what I expected when I read that I'd be a mouse stealing things from a house, but it *was* very funny. I had a great time looting the house, and my only regret is that there was no way to steal the car - Well done! |
| Oct 7 16:19:56 | 8m 34s | 1100 Dots | ♥ 1 | i-win.PNG I liked this, and it is very cool to see a rust/bevy game out in the wild! Bevy has been on my radar for awhile, and I'll be sure to check out that post mortem you wrote up :) The physics were very fun to play with - It felt really satisfying and intuitive, even if I couldn't quite enunciate the specifics of how the system worked. In fact, that it felt so intuitive and vibey without being something that I could describe in words was a really neat feeling! |
| Oct 7 16:46:17 | 26m 21s | Super Fruta Sort | ♥ 1 | Oh man this is *impossible* in the best, most fun, way that I could mean it. I went from thinking, "This can't be too hard" to cracking up as everything fell apart in about three seconds. It was a hilarious blast trying (and failing) to wrap my head around the multitasking My only real feedback is on the life system - I would have much preferred to have my score penalized for a missed fruit, rather than have to end the game prematurely, because of how often I'm missing fruit. The way things are set up right now, I can only ever play for ten second bursts or so, because of how quickly I crumble π It also might have been nice to have additional branches lower down so that you could scramble to try to "save" a fruit that's going down the wrong path right off the bat. It was a bummer when I would miss a few fruits going down the wrong path at the first branch, and have nothing I could do but wait it out - It might be especially chaotically fun if those hypothetical lower branches all shared the same keybinding, so whenever you tried to save a lost fruit, you were putting all your other plans in jeopardy :) Overall, great job! |
| Oct 7 19:12:07 | 2h 25m | Florence Memories | ♥ 1 | This is so incredibly sweet - I'm hesitate to offer *any* feedback, because it's such a lovely dedication for your child. There are minor suggestions I might offer, but I honestly don't know that any feedback is warranted because any feedback I could give doesn't feel like it would be hitting *the point*, nor does it feel like my place to be giving constructive comments here This was a lovely moment of mindfulness after the game jam :) Thank you for sharing it |
| Oct 7 19:30:37 | 18m 30s | A Lifelong Hobby | ♥ 1 | caught-em-all.PNG I really liked this vibe - I feel like it's a really accurate portrayal of how packs of cards go from being such a fun exciting experience when you're younger (or new to card games), and eventually lose their magic as you get more into the game, and the initial joy of exploration fades. Instead of becoming excited by *any* card you open, it becomes disappointing if you don't get any cards you want I was originally going to offer a suggestion that you might want to randomize the job minigames and throw them at the player in a zany WarioWare-style experience, but as I kept playing I realized that the monotony (and slow progression) of the jobs was an important part of selling the whole experience. Well done! :) |
| Oct 7 20:09:20 | 38m 43s | DRUNK HUNT | ♥ 3 | duck-hunted.PNG I really enjoyed the graphics and loved the pastiche of the duck hunt scenery! I agree with the other commentators that things kick up a little bit too hard on round 5/6 - Round 4 felt manageable, but on rounds 5 and 6 it felt like there were sometimes unavoidable hits that you had to take. Multiple times, the round would start and I was immediately shot without any time to react - It would have felt a lot more fair if there was some logic in place to prevent you from being shot within a frame or two of the round starting (perhaps always spawning the duck and the reticle in fixed locations, to give some minimum time before you can be shot?) Overall though, this was really good! Well done! |
| Oct 7 22:25:46 | 2h 16m | Hottentottententententoonstelling | ♥ 2 | Oh man, this was *so* much fun - I honestly probably could have sat there drawing for a lot longer, if I hadn't kept accidentally losing my pencil under various other UI elements π I kind of want to play this game in an analog format with some artist friends, it was just a blast I'm so glad that I went in blind like that comment suggested - It would have been so sad to have the twists and turns of these creature descriptions be spoiled! drawings.PNG |
| Oct 7 22:54:57 | 29m 11s | Final Buppo 64 | ♥ 1 | buppo-2.gif I have completed Buppo. This was a lot of fun! The last level really made the asynchronous multiplayer aspect shine - Because you couldn't see one of the rings at all from the center, I stared at where I roughly knew it was, and waited to see where someone else shot their buppo before shooting mine to make par :) That was a really cool feeling Since you asked for any technical issues, I ran into a few weird lag spikes, seemingly correlated when a different shot fired off, but not *every* time a different shot fired off, which made it hard to diagnose further. It didn't make the game unplayable by any means, but things would freeze for about a second or two at random, and it was moderately frustrating when it would happen mid-shot. I also ran into lag spikes whenever I would hit R to reset, but I suspect that may be loading-related, and those spikes didn't really impact gameplay - It was easy to just wait for the level to fully reload Overall, really well done! I had a lot of fun! :) |
| Oct 7 23:39:26 | 44m 29s | Ludumon | ♥ 1 | ludumon.PNG It's always fun to see a familiar face each jam! :) This got very hard, very fast lol - The Akaimon level felt the most brutal to me, because I had no idea what I was looking for (and then the twist where two of them were simple recolors, but the third was the correct color and a different shape *really* messed with me) I agree that this felt a lot like a virtual Where's Waldo, which was very cool! It might be fun to set each stage as a little diorama with each Ludumon scattered throughout it doing various tasks, rather than showing a grid of Ludumon, if you decide to keep working at this. I also loved the little Pokemon homages baked into the sound effects! :) Well done! |
| Oct 8 00:34:36 | 55m 10s | 99 Shotguns | ♥ 1 | labbinac.PNG I had a *blast* running around trying to take enemies out with as little ammo used as possible - By the end, I had just become a walking pile of guns. The guns felt extremely juicy to use, and it was extremely satisfying to clear an entire hallway with a single click. Well done! |
| Oct 8 00:59:51 | 25m 15s | Taos K.O. | ♥ 3 | I really loved the pog style and general aesthetic! It was a great use of the theme, and pogs being used in an autobattler makes a lot of sense! That said, I had a very hard time figuring out how to construct a useful team - Some of the character descriptions were very funny (I loved End Is Near cat), but not particularly helpful in building a cohesive team It also would have been nice to have a fast forward function for the fights - I had a few fights that really dragged on because my team was full of the bubblegum lady, who definitely could not take out a team on her own, but prevented the enemy team from doing much at all for quite some time I also was *really* hoping that there would be a section before the battle began where you got to flick your Taos around (maybe you could launch them into the arena, rather than have them spawn in at your zone?), because of my inner 90s kid. Overall though, very well done! :) |
| Oct 8 01:20:44 | 20m 53s | Marble Trouble | ♥ 5 | marbles.PNG This was *so* good. The character art was incredible. The concept was incredible. The way that it tied into the theme was incredible. Move over deckbuilders, this feels like it's establishing a new genre of roguelike marble-collectors. Just these four predetermined marbles had so much synergy built into them, and I can imagine how it would be so much fun to start building up a synergistic toolkit of marbles, and pull them randomly out one by one for each fight. My only constructive feedback is about the arena design - The way that the random non-marble objects got pushed around often caused them to trap marbles in unfun ways, and they weren't something that you could predictably try to move around, due to their heavy weight and strange shape. This led to me sometimes just throwing a bomb to randomly shift the board around, rather than try to use my marbles strategically. I also ran into a weird bug on my second playthrough while writing up feedback - My marbles slowed to a stop, but I wasn't prompted to continue. I'm not sure if there is some floating point math causing a marble to get stuck with *just* barely more than 0 speed, but it might be something to look into. |
| Oct 8 02:42:22 | 1h 21m | The Key Keeper | ♥ 1 | Really nice looking one-bit art! I agree with manabreak above that the camera shake started to get to be too much after awhile - I don't suffer from photosensitivity, but such a heavy effect happening every time you jumped started feeling a bit over-stimulating near the end of the game My only other complaint was the extreme low light made it really hard to see where you were supposed to go sometimes - On the level with the two elevator blocks, I spent forever looking high and low for the way forward, because I couldn't see the switch from the left hand platform that had the key. Lowering the intensity of that effect might have helped make the game more readable Otherwise, this was very well put together! I didn't run into any technical issues, the audio was nice and crunchy, the death animation was very cool looking, and there was a lot of juice packed in! Well done! :) |
| Oct 8 03:20:24 | 38m 02s | Rune Rangers | ♥ 2 | This was really cool - I could see this being built out into its own expanded concept for sure! The only thing that I found a little bit frustrating (and this might have just been me not understanding the rules) was the way that each creature had their shapes made available seemingly at random - I never felt like I could look at an enemy board and immediately know how I wanted to respond to it; instead, I had to do a lot of trial-and-error while looking at my creature's current available moves. This might just be a skill issue though, as I have a notoriously poor memory, and could not keep track of which creatures could use which shapes π I've never played anything like this before, and it's really well done - Good work! :) |
| Oct 8 04:14:29 | 54m 05s | I Hath Slain the Dragon! | ♥ 1 | This was very funny - The image of the knight hunched over slowly taking tiny steps to get out of the cave with a shield full of gems cracks me up. Well done :) I did unfortunately seem to run into a crash on my second playthrough - As soon as I got near the end of the level and gems started spilling out to my horse, the game froze up. I vaguely remember a hand appearing to take one of the gems, so I wonder if there was some null reference where the hand was trying to steal a gem that disappeared to the horse (or vice versa)? It's such a short game that the crash really didn't impact my enjoyment (I could just try again!), I just figured I'd give you a heads-up! :) Overall, this was a very funny and charming little game! |
| Oct 8 04:18:37 | 4m 08s | The Headpatting Cat Collector | ♥ 1 | I have no feedback to offer, but this was a very good collection of very good cats |
| Oct 8 04:30:52 | 12m 15s | Last Minute Shopping | ♥ 1 | I was really getting some backrooms vibes from this store, in a kind of cool way - I loved the uncanny feeling of walking around these weirdly placed shelves. That said, is it meant to always be possible to beat each level? I played several rounds, and on some playthroughs I checked every shelf several times, but it seemed like the store was just missing some items on my list every time I played. I wasn't sure if this was a skill issue, an intentional choice to make the vibes feel even more uncanny, or if it was possibly a bug, so I figured I'd ask! :) |
| Oct 8 15:59:32 | 11h 28m | Before I Go Blind | ♥ 1 | I love how you've made such a polished tiny game, which has a single experience that it's selling! :) FYI - On my first playthrough, the camera couldn't scroll at all, even after the update you pushed out to try to fix it - No matter how much I pushed the phone towards the edge of the screen, it just got locked into place. I knew there *must* have be some way to scroll, based on the gifs that you shared, so I did give the game a second playthrough and it worked perfectly on the second attempt. I'm not sure exactly what was going wrong, because it felt like I took the same steps both times, but I did get to play the game as intended on my second attempt! I really love the dynamic art style that you have for the scene, the little bit of jitter on the player's hands really adds a lot of life to the presentation. In terms of presentation, this is the *tiniest* polish nitpick, but the way that you're currently revealing text can lead to awkward jumps as the text box reformats itself whenever a word becomes too long. It looks like you're adding each character to a text box one-at-a-time, but a different way to achieve the same effect is to start with the full string of text rendered at 0% opacity (or the same color as the background), and then change the font color of each character to be visible one at a time. This gives you the same character-by-character text reveal, but it locks the layout of the text into a preformatted block because the *contents* of the text box won't change, just the font color. This prevents those jumps in layout as text is revealed. Hopefully that makes sense? The reformat that I'm talking about happens in the attached gif as "would" and "12:00" are revealed. breakpoints.gif That tiny nitpick doesn't change the fact that this is a lovely polished little game! :) You've put a ton of care and attention into all the little details of the scene (having the camera album button was such a nice touch!), which is why I bring it up, because I can tell you really care about the fine details! Great job overall! |
| Oct 8 17:06:57 | 1h 07m | Mutiny's Last Reward | ♥ 2 | pirate-victory.PNG I *really* love this idea - I'm a huge fan of Puzzle Bobble, and this is such a unique execution on the concept of aiming and shooting to make combos that I've never seen before. It definitely has potential as a full-scale game! When things were going well, I was having a great time - It was super satisfying seeing the combo meter keep filling up, and to keep maxing out my score. The combo meter was so juicy and satisfying, and once I got to multi-hook levels, I was having a blast firing nonstop. The one place where things felt like they fell flat for me was the time limit - I would have much rather have had a shot limit than a time limit, because I found it incredibly hard to do what the game wanted (make cool trick shots) while under such a tight time pressure. Once I got to the below stage, I genuinely thought I might have to give up, because I was playing for about 20-30 minutes trying to figure out what angles would allow me to get the points I needed. At first, I tried to play it legitimately, but after a certain point, I felt like I had to start playing in an extremely unfun way in order to succeed - I just kept grabbing the potion so that I could see my trajectory, then repeatedly spent all 20 seconds trying to figure out how to maximize my points, memorizing the exact cursor placements I needed to win in a future round. It didn't feel like I was still playing the game at that point, which was a bummer because the game could be so fun! difficulty-spike.PNG The next level when the multihook power-up was introduced re-*hooked* me, and I was immediately having a lot of fun again, because I was no longer feeling the pressure to maximize my points per shot. On the subject of the timer, I think the lack of feedback around the timer ticking down also may have impacted my experience with it - Oftentimes, I had no idea if I had ten seconds left or milliseconds left, so I was in a state of panic throughout the entire level. Giving a visual or audio indication that the timer was near expiration may have done a lot to alleviate this timer-related anxiety. Additionally, letting the player finish any shot that is in progress when the timer goes off would also do a lot to help the timer feel much more manageable - It felt so rough to make the final shot that you needed to win, but have it be cut off right before you grabbed the gem. Hopefully this feedback doesn't come across as negative, or as me disliking the game in any way! I *really* liked this game, and the fact that the game is so well designed with such a clear vision makes it easy to come up with constructive feedback. This is a great entry, and you should be very proud of it! Well done! :) |
| Oct 8 18:23:01 | 1h 16m | Go Be Collector Somewhere Else | ♥ 2 | cat-victory.PNG What a cute game! I was very worried the cat sounds were going to wake my sleeping cat in the other room though hahaha (he thankfully remains sound asleep on the couch) The character controller felt really good - The buffered jump inputs were super helpful in making those split-second jumps you needed to make in later levels, and it was great that you had coyote time implemented, because otherwise I would have driven myself crazy trying to make the jump on level 5 π That one jump is probably my only piece of feedback about the design - It felt really unintuitive that you *needed* to use coyote time in order to duck under the shelf and clear the jump. I spent most of my playtime on that one jump, trying it again and again, until finally I realized I could probably do it via coyote time after dropping off the platform. I suspect the average player might not have that realization though, and would think that they'd have to jump from the platform, not from the air slightly below the platform π Overall, well done! It felt good to control, the graphics were cute, and I had fun! |
| Oct 8 20:31:33 | 2h 08m | Collect or DIcE | ♥ 2 | dice-win.PNG This was really right up my alley - I love deckbuilders, I love dice, and it had enough variety to keep things interesting throughout! The art was also great! My only real feedback is that UI elements were overlapping each other during the tutorial (the dice tooltips were behind the instructions), which made it a little bit annoying to read, but it was only a very slight inconvenience. Well done! |
| Oct 9 14:35:02 | 18h 03m | Little monster makehouse | ♥ 1 | I really enjoyed the rapid-fire minigames in stage 2 as I was assembling my monster! It gave me a similar vibe to playing a WarioWare game, and I thought all of the minigames were really fun under the time pressure. I didn't quite understand stage 1 though, even after the tutorial - It felt like sometimes I would be given an impossible to fulfill request (I took a screenshot of one request that appeared to be impossible), and sometimes I would receive a request that was possible, but clicking the correct option didn't do anything - In these cases, I had to resort to randomly clicking around on the shelves, and there didn't seem to be any feedback telling me what was going right or wrong as the game jumped into stage 2. It might help to add a slight delay before starting stage 2, (and maybe give the player a score like you do for the minigames), so that the player can see which parts they've picked and understand how well they did at picking the parts. As it was right now, I didn't feel like I was getting enough feedback to understand what I was doing wrong during the assembly process impossible-request.PNG That said, I still had fun, even if I was confused :) I loved seeing all the different little monsters that I was assembling, I thought the music was really good, and I loved the hectic minigames - I would have loved to play even more of them! Well done! :) |
| Oct 10 00:36:47 | 10h 01m | Blood and Bounty | ♥ 1 | I had a lot of fun with this! I *loved* the animation as the level started, having the cacti and little details fall in at the end was such a nice little touch, and added so much charm to the game :) I did have a very hard time understanding the range of my pistol at the start - It might have been helpful to show its range on the grid when you hovered over it while it was disabled, so that it was clear why an enemy was or wasn't in range. I eventually figured it out, so it wasn't a huge deal, but I definitely played a few rounds knife-only because I just didn't understand how to use my gun. Overall though, really well done, and a very cool game! Great job! :) |
| Oct 10 00:52:35 | 15m 48s | Monsters in Jars | ♥ 1 | monster-jar.PNG This was a lot of fun - I was disappointed when the game ended! Once I started getting more and more creatures to build my deck with, I was getting very into the strategy, and wouldn't have minded one or two more fights, since I felt like I had started to hit my stride :) I did run into one weird behavior that I couldn't understand - Most of the time, each side had one monster take a turn, then the next side had a monster take a turn. Occasionally this pattern would stop, and the enemy team would all take a turn in a row, wiping out my board. A couple of times the same thing happened in reverse - My team all would take a turn attacking the enemy. I wasn't sure if this was a glitch, or a mechanic that I didn't quite understand, because it did seem to happen when one side had more numbers than the other. Overall though, this was really fun! Well done! |
| Oct 10 02:42:23 | 1h 49m | Mr. Fungi | ♥ 2 | This was really relaxing and it was strangely satisfying to watch Mr. Fungi collect mushrooms and vibe to the bloops and blips :) I also absolutely loved the crunchy sound effects as you ran around, they were so satisfying! I wrote this response semi-live as I played through the game, because I thought it might be interesting for you to see the full progression of a random player's first impressions as they played - Hopefully it's useful! :) I did have one really rough point of friction early on - The structure of the skill tree didn't seem to have a logic that I could follow. Because there was no consistency to what would be upgraded when traversing down a branch, I didn't feel like I was able to make meaningful choices to influence how quickly I could gather mushrooms, and by the time I unlocked Rare mushrooms, it was really unclear what I was supposed to be doing to progress - I had been trying to follow the skill tree to unlock more types of mushrooms, but felt like I kept going blindly down dead ends: where-the-mushrooms.PNG If the other skills felt more impactful (or if I could consistently upgrade certain aspects of Mr. Fungi and come up with a strategy to gather mushrooms more quickly) this might have felt less frustrating, but because most available skills didn't change the feel of the game very much, I felt like I had fallen into a rut where I was just waiting each day out until I could try going down a different path. This was compounded by the fact that the epic mushrooms were hidden behind two speed upgrades, which seemed to be the least important stat to upgrade, as I never felt like my movement speed was holding me back from gathering mushrooms on any given day. I spent about five minutes stuck in this loop of going down the wrong path, and then waiting 2-3 more days to try another path. muchroom-more-fun.PNG Once I had unlocked Shroom Boom, things felt like they really picked up in speed, and the game became a lot more fun again :) I was consistently able to get 1-2 upgrades per day, and I started zipping through the rest of the tree, up until I needed to finish the last objective, at which point I was overloaded with rare and legendary mushrooms, but couldn't find epic mushrooms for the life of me: need-more-pink.PNG This was a problem that I had experienced relatively frequently throughout the upgrade process - For whatever reason, I felt like the balance of mushrooms that I needed always left me with an abundance of certain rarities, and none of a much lower rarity. I suspect this might be because of the "see X more frequently" perks, but I would have expected those perks to be additive, where they just increase the overall pool of available mushrooms, rather than subtracting lower rarity mushrooms from the pool. win.PNG It took me three more days of mushroom hunting to finally make it to 100% mushroom, but I got there at the end (with a truly silly number of leftover mushrooms of every other rarity). All in all, it took me about 30 minutes total to beat the game, not including the time I paused to write up my impressions. Hopefully this was helpful! Also, hopefully this doesn't come across as me disliking the game in any way! :) I wrote all of this up because I realized it was drawing me in quite a bit, was engaged with the game for so long, and wanted to make sure that I could give you as much useful feedback as possible! Overall, it was a really satisfying chill mushroom picking adventure with great vibes and good humor. Well done! |
| Oct 10 17:25:28 | 14h 43m | Circus Puppet Theater | ♥ 1 | clown-collectio.PNG Your new out-of-game tutorial worked really well - I had a very clear idea of what to do, between that and the game page's description! I loved the clown designs, and I really liked building my clown stack higher and higher with turret clowns, so that the game became increasingly quick as you became more capable - It was a really nice touch that you let each clown stay friendly after you had picked them up once, because it made returning them to the spotlight much smoother than I feared it was going to be! I did run into one bug at the end of the game where I had filled all the spotlights, but didn't get the victory screen - I filled the top spotlight last, if that helps track it down. I spent a bit of time trying to puzzle out what I was missing, then I picked the rock in the bottom right up, and put it back down, and got the victory screen. Overall, well done! |
| Oct 13 16:50:11 | 71h 24m | Wavelength Collector | ♥ 2 | Woah, very cool rendering technology here! I definitely struggled with the camera controls being inverted, but because this was a tech demo with no fine-grained movement required, it wasn't a huge problem. I loved seeing the way the different wavelengths cast light and shadow across the world (the attached screenshot just looks *so* cool to me) light-reflections.PNG I am super curious how the R+G+B light emitters work, and if the white light that they create is happening naturally as the scene is rendered by three different pure-color light sources (and thus has all the strange quirks of non-full-spectrum white light), or if you have any logic in place to additively combine the multiple colors. In case you're not familiar with what I mean by the quirks of non-full-spectrum light, there is a really interesting Technology Connections video on this subject, where he lights a variety of scenes with RGB and full-spectrum white light, and the differences are really astounding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYbdx4I7STg Again, there is some very cool stuff here, and I'm excited to see your next jam project to see if this gets expanded upon! Well done! |
| Oct 13 20:00:47 | 3h 10m | Mushrooms | ♥ 1 | mushroom-finished.PNG I absolutely loved the vibes here :) The writing was so charming and full of whimsy, the GB-style graphics were gorgeous, and everyone can use a reminder to please be kind! I also weirdly *loved* how pushing a rock over the path would dig up the path - It was ridiculously charming to me in a silly way. Great job :) |
| Oct 14 17:18:00 | 21h 17m | The Internet Collector | ♥ 4 | eggs.PNG This was very cool, and very engaging! I loved reading all of the little cat jokes constantly littering the screen as I was hacking into each system, and the payoff at the end where this was all for some eggs was funny! I do agree with the other commenters that it was very hard to get started - The first screen has so many interactive elements, and most of them are dead-ends, so there was a lot of trial and error to get to the bmail login prompt. At one point, I had the credentials that I needed, and kept trying to click and drag them into the browser or console when I was getting "Access Denied" from bmail; I didn't realize that I had to try the admin login domain instead, because it wasn't clear that the credentials that I had were admin credentials. The fact that the tutorial/intro was the only iteration with a browser GUI alongside the consoles definitely added to the onboarding confusion - Specifically, the fact that there were so many things that I *could* try clicking and dragging on, which all seemed to have no effect, made it really hard for me to understand what I was *supposed* to be clicking and dragging. Once I got past that initial wall (which took me about 15 minutes of fruitless clicking), I got into the game and had a lot more fun with it - My only complaint is that the later levels stopped feeling like I was unraveling a puzzle and logically making my way through a maze, and instead kept giving me hints about what to do next, before I even got stumped. By the end, I felt like I was just following a script where each hint told me exactly what to do next, and I never got to leverage any knowledge that I was gaining in order to solve the puzzle, which was kind of a bummer :( I also ran into one bug while I was playing - I discovered that if you click on an element multiple times, it seems to interrupt the bounce animation that plays when you reveal a new clue, and gets stuck mid-bounce π This wasn't a huge deal, I just figured I'd let you know in case you wanted to fix it in a future version! :) squish.gif Please don't take this as an overall negative impression of the game - I genuinely liked it a lot! You have a very clear vision that you're paying off on, and because of that it was easy for me to give feedback on any pain points that I ran into as a player, which may have been contradictory to that vision! Hopefully this was useful - Very well done, overall! :) |
| Oct 14 18:26:42 | 1h 08m | Sticky Turtles! | ♥ 2 | Holy cow this is *diabolically* hard, and so much fun - There's such an interesting logic to the mechanics, and the way that you've designed the level, which keeps me coming back to try again and again. Whenever I make a mistake, I can immediately see where I went wrong, and I immediately want to retry to do better next time. My only complaint is that the undo button isn't super helpful for solution exploration, because of how many moves you might have to undo, once you've realized you've gone down a dead-end - It would have been *really* nice to have an "undo to last turtle" button as well, because the time I spent undoing meant that it would be faster to restart 90% of the time instead of hitting undo. But dang, this is a *ton* of fun. I spent about a half hour playing so far, and I *will* be back to try to 100% all of the turtles. :) Great job! |
| Oct 15 13:54:11 | 19h 27m | Meowlloween | ♥ 1 | I agree with the other commenters that the cat is so cute! I definitely clicked in because I saw a cute cat lol It took me an embarrassingly long time walking in circles after round 1 before I realized there was a "next" button in the upper right corner - It would probably be a good idea to highlight that a little bit more when it appears, to draw the player's eye :) Overall though, this is a sweet little game! :) Well done, especially for a first jam project! |
| Oct 15 18:27:58 | 4h 33m | Piggybank goes forth | ♥ 1 | This is a cute little game! The sound effects gave me a good laugh when I first heard them :) I wanted to play to the end, but unfortunately I was getting some really bad motion sickness due to the camera movement - I see what you were going for with the camera, and I think the idea is really neat (you can see a lot more of what's ahead of you when the camera pans like that), but the implementation unfortunately made me feel extremely nauseous :( I think that there's potential here though, and the camera movement could be a neat feature if you had more time to iterate on the idea! If this were a fast-paced game like Sonic, giving the player that extra view of what comes ahead is a really cool idea, and I want to see where you might go with it! |
| Oct 15 20:02:04 | 1h 34m | ECHΓRA β The Silent Painter | ♥ 1 | balance-song.PNG I *really* liked the vibes here - I just wanted to spend more time relaxing and unwinding here. Great job! That said, I think the vibes could be kicked up to an even higher level if the gameplay encouraged more flow through the level, and naturally pushed you towards making sweeping loops, rather than encouraging you to stop moving andbacktrack as you revealed fragments. Oftentimes, I would send out a sonar pulse which revealed a fragment behind me, and the most efficient way to collect it would be to just stop on a dime, and immediately change direction on the spot. This took away from the serene feeling watching my mote swirl through the level with its slowly evaporating trail, and I think the movement would feel so much more free-flowing if the player were constantly moving forward, and could only change the direction that they were moving by rotating which direction "forward" is. This would naturally give the player smoothly curving loops of movement when they swing around backwards to collect a newly revealed fragment, and that would add so much to the already lovely aesthetic that you're building. I actually naturally started playing in this fashion after awhile, because it felt so much more relaxing to do so. Please don't take this as me disliking the game in any way - I loved it, and that's why I wanted to pass along the feedback! You have such a great mood that you've set, and you should be very proud of your work :) |
| Oct 17 17:44:32 | 45h 42m | Bubble&Lasso | ♥ 0 | I really loved this throwback to those little toy games that you'd get as a kid - Lots of great polish on display, and a lot of fun playing with the rings! I did run into a few physics-quirks that got in the way of the experience while playing - The way that the rings would settle into place felt strangely floaty, even taking the fact that the game was underwater into consideration. I'm not sure if it was the low gravity or the friction of the rings against one another, but the rings would often get stuck against one another in unintuitive ways, and tilting the machine to try and free them didn't seem to have any effect to free them stuck-rings.PNG I also had a lot of trouble getting the tilt controls to behave how I would expect - Moving my mouse a tiny bit would send the machine rocketing in one direction or the other, and I didn't seem to have any way to get to any in-between angles. I would have thought that clicking and dragging would have tilted the machine with a 1:1 ratio to my mouse movement, and because that didn't happen, it felt somewhat unintuitive. Playing around with it more, it seems like *something* happens as you rotate which changes how your mouse movements impact rotation, so making the same move up and back down doesn't leave you in the same position as you had started, which gets very confusing. Overall though, this was a *very* good game! All of my feedback comes down to nitpicks that can be smoothed over. This was extremely well polished, the graphics and audio were great, and the concept was great. Well done! :) |
| Oct 21 16:48:46 | 95h 04m | Alex's Taxes | ♥ 2 | I did it! made-it.PNG First of all, this is *awesome* - It's especially incredible that this is your first Ludum Dare! You should be extremely proud of what you built. I've got a lot of feedback, but that's because the game is already extremely high quality, and the little details are what would really bring it over the top In addition to being awesome, this was also *brutally* hard lol - It took me about an hour and a half to beat, and I love tough-as-nails platformers Other folks have already discussed the controls, so I'll just echo that I unfortunately never got used to them - I'm not sure if it's because I'm using a US QWERTY keyboard, but trying to use the arrow keys, L, M, and Space was extremely awkward, as was WASD, L, M and Space. I ended up using WASD, Space, and the right mouse button, while *always* holding down the left mouse button, and this was the only way that I get past the more difficult challenges. In terms of visuals, I loved the parallax effect in the intro area, and the sprites all individually look very good! My only feedback is that it would feel more cohesive if sprites were drawn with a uniform pixel scale. It was strange seeing background elements with huge pixels alongside foreground elements with tiny pixels, and it was especially noticeable when one element would have differently sized pixels inside of it - One example is this small tuft of background grass - If pixels were all the same scale, everything should be lined up on a 1x1 grid, but somehow things get offset by quarter pixels throughout the grass tuft: pixel-grid.png Were you drawing your art in such a way that one pixel in your program of choice didn't represent one pixel of the finished sprite? Generally, the easiest way to create pixel art is to draw at a 1:1 scale, and then upscale it with nearest-neighbor interpolation by 1x, 2x, 3x, etc to fit your target resolution. That will easily give you consistently sized pixels, and sticking to whole number scales will avoid any artifacts from upscaling :) In terms of level design, there were some challenges that felt great to clear, and others that felt very frustrating - The best challenges were the ones where death was an opportunity for learning, and where nailing the challenge rewarded me with some really fluid platforming to enjoy. The most frustrating challenges were the ones where I had to thread an incredibly tiny needle, and had to very slowly and precisely set up each attempt. unfun-challenge.PNG The above area is an example of that second type of challenge. I was banging my head against the ceiling again and again trying to hit the finicky wall jump to get through this gap, and it was really unclear *why* the game was asking me to do this. It wasn't particularly fun movement, and there wasn't an interesting puzzle to solve; it just felt like precision for the sake of making things harder on the player. Whenever you create a challenge, it's best to think about the experience you want the player to have, and build the challenge to provide that feeling. :) Finally, I did run into one physics bug that unfortunately *really* negatively impacted the game feel: Physics seem to be nondeterministic, and the same inputs can produce drastically different results. This was particularly frustrating to discover at one of the last sections of the game, where I could only make the last dash *sometimes*. I suspect that the issue is that you're updating the player's velocity (or a timer for dash length) during update, but you need to be doing physics calculations like that during fixedUpdate or they will be unstable. The below gif shows what I mean: dash-height.gif Overall though, this is a *very* impressive game - Please don't take this as me disliking the game in any way! It was awesome, and you're already crushing it. I wanted to provide so much feedback because I spent so long with the game! Great job, and very well done! |
| Oct 21 18:48:18 | 1h 59m | Rain | ♥ 2 | Nooooo, the "To Be Continued" ending left me in so much suspense! I was really hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery - This was really well written, and I was thoroughly engaged by getting tiny tidbits of lore and trying to puzzle out what might be going on! Great job! I never needed the guide to progress to the end of the game, and all of the puzzles felt like they had a very logical progression to them (as opposed to some '90s point and click adventure games I could think of π), so really well done! I know other folks have mentioned a few quality of life improvements, and seeing which options you've already taken definitely would be welcome, but even more than that I think it would be great to change the "Capture Essence" button in some way (color, add a symbol next to it, etc) when you can capture a creature's essence. Right at the start, I had somehow missed that I had learned enough about Fatigan to capture his essence, and went around in circles talking with everyone again and again before finally just trying to capture his essence out of desperation. Changing the button in some way to indicate that you were now able to capture their essence would be a good failsafe for dummies like me who may have missed the dialog event saying that you could now do so π My only other suggestion would be that the art would really be complimented by a retro pixel font - Seeing such a high resolution UI over the sweet pixel art felt a little bit incongruous (but that is such a nitpick!) Overall though, really well done! I loved the art, the writing, and the gameplay :) This was great! I think this might be my favorite of your games that I've played so far! Oh, also, I genuinely laughed out loud at "She's nonplussed. Not plussed in the slightest". The writing really tickled me :) |
| Oct 21 19:47:44 | 59m 26s | PEPATE | ♥ 1 | The art and animations are really nice! There's a lot of charm to the characters that you've developed, and the little things like the moving background really add a nice layer of polish to the game! :) That said, I may have been missing something, because it didn't feel like there was any strategy I could develop for choosing rock, paper, or scissors - It felt like it was pure luck when I won. After I beat the first fight and got the "Heal 3 if you play 3 paper" ability, the game wasn't about luck anymore, but was reduced down to just selecting paper each turn. Rather than trying to have the player play a straight game of rock/paper/scissors, it might be more interesting if you treated this more like a traditional roguelike deckbuilder, and had the player build a deck of rock/paper/scissor cards. Then, you could let the player see their opponent's next move in order to be able to counterplay against them, without guaranteeing the player's victory each round. For example, Slay the Spire lets you see exactly what your enemy is going to do, so you could theoretically block every point of incoming damage, but the difficulty comes from the fact that you need a synergistic deck in order to guarantee that you have the cards you'd need each turn. You could do something similar here where you draw a hand of 3 cards by default, and the cards that you draw have extra abilities tacked onto them that force you to make interesting decisions about which cards to play against which of your opponents moves. For example, you might have a "Double Edged Scissors" card which always deals 1 damage to both players, in addition to acting like a traditional scissors card, or a "Bandaid" card which heals 1 health while acting like paper. I think there's something really cool here, and it needs a little bit of iteration to get to its final form - A rock/paper/scissors roguelike is a great idea for a game concept! :) |
| Oct 21 21:59:19 | 2h 11m | Tamago Bill | ♥ 1 | eggs.PNG This was very fun! Juggling the basket and the shooting gallery was an unexpected challenge, but kept me thoroughly engaged throughout the entire play session! The only real feedback I have is that it was a bummer that shooting your last bullet ended the game immediately - It basically means that you have one bullet fewer than the display indicates because you can never gain anything from the last bullet. It might be a good idea to only move onto the next screen if the last bullet missed, and otherwise let the player catch their last egg. Overall, well done! :) |
| Oct 24 01:48:45 | 51h 49m | Lost In Taxation | ♥ 2 | I liked the writing on this! It gave me the same vibe as non-combat events in Slay the Spire, Faster Than Light, and other roguelikes of that sort, and drew me in for a surprisingly long time even after things started repeating, because I wanted to make sure that I saw all the different scenarios :) My only wish is that the scenarios and dialog were randomized via a grab bag (where it won't repeat until you've seen everything), instead of being truely random, so it would have been easier to see them all! It's also very cool that you've been building `shit.js` for so long! I know exactly how you feel about the double edged sword of a custom engine - I really love how you can bake in low-level support for game features in a custom engine, but then you find that a simple feature that you're missing might send you down a rabbit hole for way longer than you expected to implement. It's fun finding the balance of building the engine out while still working within its limitations :) |
| Oct 24 20:46:40 | 18h 57m | Travel to Uranus | ♥ 1 | mission-completed.PNG Jumping from asteroid to asteroid felt *really* good when they lined up correctly! I had a ton of fun frantically trying to keep myself on-screen in my early attempts before I had figured out that the best strategy was to play patiently and carefully, which makes me think that there could be a *different* very fun minigame about just trying to keep yourself on-screen in that chaotic asteroid field! :) My only real feedback is that I wish there was a tiny bit more control over the rotation of the asteroid that you're currently on. If it would automatically spin up to speed like the center asteroid, or you could have some control over your positioning on the asteroid, there would be a lot more opportunity to enjoy those rapid asteroid jumps. As it is right now, the unpredictable risk of a fast-moving asteroid encourages patiently bouncing back and forth to the slowest moving asteroids. Overall though, well done! :) |
