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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Aurel300's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 21 16:45:00 | Flag Fanatic | ♥ 1 | Cute take on the theme! But also a little brutal :) Even with the reference sheet open on the side, it's a bit hard to get started and it feels like sudden death if you miss one letter and then can't catch up for the rest of the word. If this was meant to be a game to genuinely learn flag signals from scratch, then consider what language learning apps do -- start with a very limited vocabulary (or here, very limited set of letters), then repeat those multiple times with spaced repetition. When learning a new alphabet, the apps also just ask for individual letters instead of going straight to words. I guess that's not a challenge for someone who already knows how to read flags ^^ But it could be a separate learning/tutorial mode. | |
| Apr 21 18:26:48 | 1h 41m | Signal Slasher | ♥ 2 | I beat the game, though towards the end I felt it was getting a little too long. Some of the later levels felt like filler, in that they didn't introduce new mechanics or challenges really, and some bits felt just artificially difficult (thinking of "three portals, guess which one is the correct one!"). Similarly to Hagamos above I found the core mechanic a little confusing. Generally I guess I didn't really "want" to interact with the traffic signal because the timing was a little narrow and I could just use the auto-advance anyway (but of course I didn't know I was playing for a time-based leaderboard...). The blue gems were fine but it would have been nice to have an indication of the two free turns somewhere in the UI. ~~I got a bit more confused due to the enemies -- it seems like slashing and killing an enemy has the same effect as the gem in that I get some free turns? Or is it three turns when I kill an enemy?~~ Yup this is in fact explored but went by too fast x) Unfortunately the free turns for enemies encourages one to just get close to the enemies, then camp to kill them all, then move on with the rest of the (possibly enemy-free) level. Other than that I would like if the graphics were just a *little* bit more clear about where the grid is, so it's easier to plan jumps etc for farther tiles. |
| Apr 21 18:51:02 | 24m 14s | Mixed Signals | ♥ 1 | I got 6931! Fun game, though it doesn't seem to get any more difficult after a certain point. As noticed by others ( (^: ) the arrow keys don't help with keyboards that don't support N-key rollover, but also I feel like it would just be more comfortable to have the 4 keys laid out in a row (say, D F J K to have two keys per hand), because the up/down chords were the most error-prone. |
| Apr 24 12:32:32 | 65h 41m | Pyre Lookout | ♥ 2 | Lovely! I saw your screenshot on Discord showing the wip script and I wondered just how much story this would turn out to be (: The UI work is very nice and makes one appreciate just how much goes into making a good CRPG dialogue system. The "actual" world you walk around in is pretty, I guess also quite static, but it's a good use of the assets. The music is unobstructive but very appropriate for setting the mood. I appreciated how all the characters you interact with have a distinct personality and feel, though they are caricatures/exaggerations. I would have loved to see more of these characters, or maybe more moments where they somehow interact or acknowledge each other (the moment Jayda talked about Phylis comes to mind). I wished that filling out *the new form* were more of an event/dialogue also rather than a single sentence that you get after Scott restarts the router. The RNG mechanics don't play all that much of a role, I almost wondered if they should have not been in the game at all? The bonuses/penalties you get all affect the odds by 10% I suppose? But still it goes with the Disco Elysiumness of it all (: |
| Apr 24 14:17:22 | 1h 44m | Suit Yourself | ♥ 1 | Cute puzzle! Love that it feels relatively polished, given how simple it is/how little time you had to work on it. Like the bassy thumps of the blocks landing on the field (: I think it would be nice to colour the chain a different colour when a match is "legal"? Oh and I noticed that holding the start of a chain (legal or not) pauses the timer, which can easily be abused ^^ |
| Apr 24 15:04:58 | 47m 36s | Operation Alien Translation | ♥ 4 | Very fun! I really appreciated the animations of the two characters interacting. The game itself is a cute concept -- thinking of your own mnemonics for an unknown alphabet of symbols. I kind of wish there was a little bit more interaction *with* my words though, e.g., let the army guy form a sentence (somehow? insert dummy words? idk). Alternatively, logging what words other users have assigned to each symbol (and some good automoderation I guess) could be fun, so I could see the army guy say something like "other scientists believed this symbol to be 'blank'". The game is just long enough to not get boring, though some kind of challenge mode (time-based?) might have been fun, too. |
| Apr 24 15:32:53 | 27m 55s | yAI presents Himari, the Beautiful Super Genius Artificial Intelligence | ♥ 1 | Very clever! I did, in my initial brainstorming on the theme, write "Signal, the messaging app" mostly as a joke ^^ But yeah, this is a great twist on the theme. I really like the idea, kind of breaking traditional "walls" of what the game actually is. The actual core experience, i.e., a platformer, isn't all that interesting, it's everything around it that is. Makes me wonder where this could be taken: interacting with the chatbot during the game to ask for help, to give it puzzle solutions, etc...; making the experience a longer-term one to be more of a "chat"; involving other players since it *is* a mesaging app that is being used... (Obviously LD time limits exist and maybe the latter is not the kind of game you wanted to make or play anyway.) Though I really appreciate my playing the game doesn't burn LLM tokens, ironically, the chat bot could probably be more interactive and "interesting" if it *were* an LLM actually twisting knobs that affect the gameplay. But then I also wouldn't be playing the game ^^ |
| Apr 24 15:52:54 | 20m 01s | Terminal Espionage | ♥ 1 | This is *fun* but a slow-burn kind of fun. It's neat to interact with the tools and to get better at figuring out how to use them quickly. But then... I thought I was in a terminal and used ctrl+W (delete previous word) and closed the tab I was in :') (I'll get back to it.) |
| Apr 25 20:38:08 | 28h 45m | What's that signal? | ♥ 1 | Cute experience. Would have like to see this pushed a bit further with even more items and ways thie objects are trying to get my attention -- I think listening for a particular word (or voice) in a busy stream of words is an interesting challenge. I wondered why the narrator delivered the lines with such a tragic-sounding reading ^^ |
| Apr 25 20:57:13 | 19m 05s | To walk on Strange Roads? | ♥ 6 | Aha, I love a game that requires you to read a long PDF file! (Genuinely.) And it's a conlang 💜 I wish there was more! I wish I needed to make some sentences, somehow! As it is, the puzzle of figuring out what the message is saying and how it relates to the people I have seen around was fun. The language is also designed well enough that I did not feel lost in trying to understand most words, e.g., things like "more" and "less" are easy to remember. Nit: "this" and "that" have a yellow bar on top but are not on page 6 (: |
| Apr 26 10:52:20 | 13h 55m | The Lighthouse | ♥ 1 | Cute! As with many LD point 'n clicks the game suffers from being basically one screen with very little actual puzzle solving: matches -> furnace; wrench -> gears; then "find the gun" which is just "click all objects again in case the results will be different now", but it's fine since there are so few objects. The art is nice and the voice acting is good. Some lines, such as after killing the monster, maybe don't quite carry the emotion fully, but that's a big ask (: The seaside ambience in the background does a lot for the mood. Nit: the line "But... I didn't have a choice [...]" is not voice acted? Nit: entering full screen ruins the pixel art by scaling unevenly and not aligning the layers anymore... |
| Apr 26 10:57:42 | 5m 22s | Peter's divine intervention | ♥ 1 | Nice (: I appreciated the "twist" with the father who needed to talk...! |
| Apr 26 16:52:40 | 5h 54m | Tower Signal | ♥ 2 | Cute clicker! As @limered mentioned it was sad that you cannot click in the overworld once you unlock the modules (: I would like to set up a module system in each tower and click maybe? Then again with the shared pool of modules that seems less optimal than just using all the modules in one tower and using that one tower only. |
| Apr 26 19:31:32 | 2h 38m | Smoke Show | ♥ 3 | Fun game! I wish there was a 100 BPM track, since 80 feels a bit too easy and 120 still a tiny bit too hectic. In particular I wish there wasn't as much stuff obstructing the next signal during countdown -- there is the previous cloud fading out, the letters + line underneath adding some noise, and the 3, 2, 1 countdown distracting while this is going on ^^ |
| Apr 26 20:02:18 | 30m 46s | Untroubled Bliss | ♥ 1 | Cute! Neat interpretation of "signal" and a futurustic training twist around it. I got all four endings -- the three "bad" ones reminded me a bit of one of the "bad" endings of Violet by Jeremy Freese, where you try to force the narrator/game to break down (: |
| Apr 28 11:38:42 | 39h 36m | Adventures in Xenolinguistics! | ♥ 0 | I saw the itch.io article and knew I had to play the game (before reading said article)! I see what you mean by the first level and therestofthepuzzle. The puzzle of figuring out the first symbols was fun enough, and I really wish there had been appropriate clues to keep the rest going. I wonder: since you didn't have the "hints"/images to explain the various words, what made you choose these words in particular? Or did you have drafts of images you would have liked to add to the game? Since in the article you said > most of the symbols were only created as I needed them then I assume "needed" meant you knew you wanted to use the symbol already (: I guess I'm asking because I can see this game feeling more finished with a *much* smaller dictionary of words but more images to hint at their meanings. It was also fun to see you mention > arrows are rooted in our own ancient weaponry and may not mean the same thing to anyone else looking at it but then still use the arrows in the symbols ^^ Small nits regarding polish: words that you gathered from a message are once again underlined when you re-visit the message. Also after finishing the first five symbols, the five symbols you have figured out appear once again in the dictionary of symbols but they cannot be placed over the words they represent. Anyway, I enjoy games in the style of *The Case of the Golden Idol* or *The Roottrees are Dead* and adding a (con)language aspect to it is really lovely! |