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henk

Feedback comments for LD59

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		henk's comment
Apr 20 14:32:00		LiliesPond	♥ 1	I had the game window in front of a solid-black terminal window when I first ran it, so I missed the screenshot aspect at first. I think if more color from the screenshot made it through into the background of the game it'd be easier to recognize. I think you've got a good core mechanic and I didn't get immediately frustrated by input latency like I often do with rhythm-based games, but I would have liked some more variation in the music, the level, the number of bugs, etc.
Apr 20 14:50:11	18m 11s	ULTRA-RADAR	♥ 1	While I think the radar-style visibility mechanic is cool, it seems a bit unfair at times since an enemy ship can get super close by the time the radar hits it. A strategy I found that worked was to simply spin around in circles while no ships were visible spamming the shoot button in the hope that any invisible ships would get hit by accident. When the radar beam sweeps over an enemy ship, it'd be cool if the ship were "revealed" by it using clipping or something rather than for it to instantly pop into existence. My brain had trouble making the association between the radar beam and the enemy ships at first and I think something like that would have helped.
Apr 20 15:15:00	24m 49s	Propaganda and Rhetoric	♥ 1	I have restored balance to the Ducknasty. This is certainly a unique experience! I think it would have probably been better to hand-pick where the links should go in the news website rather then having them be random. The last three links all appeared in roughly the same spot on the page for me. Also: flipping back and forth between the game window and a website was a bit awkward. Since your graphical needs are simple, I probably would have forgone the COTS engine and done the game entirely using JS and WebGL. That way you could integrate the "news website" much more seamlessly into the game (or vice versa).
Apr 20 15:41:21	26m 21s	LOUD TOWN	♥ 1	Very nice! I liked the sound design a lot and I think the pills and shooting mechanics were well balanced. By the end I had ungodly amounts of health built up (I may have bugged the health meter, I think? The left number was bigger than the right number), which made things somewhat less stressful. Something about the graphics put a bit of a strain on my poor Laptop, so I had to shrink the window size a fair bit to get a decent framerate. This also brought the full map back into view which was clipped at my usual browser window dimensions.
Apr 20 16:30:01	48m 40s	Snowstorm	♥ 0	I tried all four cardinal directions from the broken tower and still couldn't find a signal. Is that meant to be the end of the game? If so you may want to indicate that to the player somehow. Otherwise, I liked it. It felt solid and the storytelling held my attention the whole way. I love the spiders being introduced with a casual off-hand mention. It's a scary surprise to the player but somewhat mundane to the in-game characters, which is a funny contrast.
Apr 20 16:48:59	18m 58s	HeartW@rd	♥ 2	The visual design is really great. It adds a high intensity that you wouldn't normally expect from the "nethack" aesthetic. Some random notes: - Needing to navigate all the way back from the start whenever I died wasn't very fun - The cursor doesn't move when the camera does, only when the mouse does, which looks a bit strange - It'd be nice to have a visual indication of what the "current cycle" is when in circle-cursor mode - The enemies would get caught on corners while pursuing me, making them nearly impossible to shoot. Walking around the corner to get a better angle frees them, killing me instantly.
Apr 20 17:17:27	28m 28s	Licence to Fine	♥ 1	That is some turning radius! I managed to beat the game, but ran into a couple of issues that made it more difficult than I think was intended: - When not in free-look mode, scrolling the mouse wheel does nothing. Free look isn't very useful on its own, so I almost didn't notice this. - Some of the waveforms (low-frequency/high-phase) are nearly impossible to match to one another due to temporal aliasing with the framerate. It would have been nice to have some secondary visual indication to go off of rather than basing it purely on the timing of what to me looked like randomly jumping horizontal lines.
Apr 20 17:36:41	19m 14s	Detect Metal	♥ 1	Most of the "signal-tracking" (I don't know what to call this mechanic) games are very slowly paced, so it's neat to see a different take on the idea. Random notes: - Neither the score nor the dig radius seem to get reset when the game does. - I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do when there are no more items to dig up. Do I win? - I think the enemy hitbox is fine, but requiring multiple hits to kill an enemy seems a bit unfair given the sheer number of enemies and how difficult it is to land a shot.
Apr 20 19:27:43	1h 51m	Chatos Control	♥ 2	I got "averted homicide" before I even realized homicide was on the table. Naturally I had to play until the deed was done. The amount of content is impressive, but I ran out of steam before getting to all of it. Going through the same dialogue in parallel over and over was a bit tiring, and it was very difficult to mentally keep track of all of the combinations I'd already done. I think some visual indication of progress through different paths or maybe a way to save individual messages for later reference might have helped.
Apr 20 20:20:53	53m 10s	Radio game :3	♥ 1	I compiled it from source. The game window doesn't seem to fit on my 1080p monitor, and there isn't much in the way of gameplay. I'd recommend slowing down the rate of square generation by a lot (since after a couple of seconds my input becomes basically useless) and then adding a way for the score to go down or for the player to lose (otherwise I can play by just sitting there doing nothing).
Apr 20 20:38:23	17m 30s	Static	♥ 1	I liked it! It's surprisingly good visually despite seeming to have very few textures. Two things: - It wasn't obvious to me at the start that I could walk under the radio tower - I would have liked to be able to click-and-hold the left mouse button to fire continuously rather than spam-clicking.
Apr 20 21:11:16	32m 53s	After The Fact	♥ 1	...and yet, you submitted to compo, where it's against the rules to ask for help :P. I liked the puzzles, although I think a couple of them relied a bit too much on glancing collisions/misses of light beams and other obstacles. Also, while I suppose it doesn't matter as much in a puzzle game, momentum-based movement isn't all that hard to implement and would feel much nicer than the fixed-speed movement you have here.
Apr 20 21:39:02	27m 46s	Juxtaopposition	♥ 0	Clearly this is the work of Herobrine. (wake up)
Apr 20 22:37:15	58m 13s	Remote Mars Raider	♥ 1	I managed to beat this, but I fear a lot of people won't really have the patience for it. I feel like the codes for "leap right" and "hop right" should have been swapped to mirror how "move right long" and "move right short" worked. The fact they were different hurt my ability to memorize them a bit. The game would also be a lot better with some sound effects (a tool like sfxr can help you make some basic ones in a few seconds).
Apr 20 23:25:08	47m 53s	Eat. Poop. Love.	♥ 1	### Game 1 Very clever, and quite challenging for a game played with a single button! The RNG would sometimes screw me over but the game otherwise felt pretty fair, and a little bit of caution/patience was enough to beat. I giggled at the mother's smile instantly vanishing when you refuse what was offered :P. ### Game 2 Also a clever use of a one-button game mechanic. I thought I'd get something special for making it past a minute since the first game made a big deal of it, but it indeed just seems to be a high-score thing. The game could use some sound effects!
Apr 21 19:01:44	19h 36m	Inside a Sun	♥ 1	"The prime directive says no contacting aliens, which I interpret to mean killing any I find." Unfortunate, indeed... On my first playthrough I somehow bugged out the beam meter, which forced me to restart the game. I can't make it happen again, so I'm not quite sure what I did. > I actually just used Godot’s CSG combiner node with a few cylinders set to subtract! What a strange feature to have in a game engine. The Godot documentation is plastered with warnings not to use it for anything, which makes me wonder why they went to all the trouble to implement it in the first place...
Apr 21 19:54:53	53m 09s	Saving Private Morse	♥ 1	Clever! I think some audio would have helped; I instinctively expect a beeping noise to come from a telegraph button. Getting reset all the way to the start when dying in a game that is so slow to progress is pretty painful as well. Doubly-so given the fact that you hid a very difficult-to-notice mine very close to the end.
Apr 21 20:24:44	29m 51s	Signal search	♥ 1	Good idea and a solid implementation. Two things: - I move faster diagonally for some reason. This isn't too weird on its own but the effect remains even when walking against a wall (so for example starting in the top left of the map, if I hold right and down I move faster than if I only hold down) - The modal interface for interacting with the radio doesn't seem ideal. Maybe wasd could have been used for movement so that the arrows always control the radio?
Apr 21 21:21:05	56m 21s	Schick	♥ 1	Oh dear, that recording at the end was very relatable. No video game has been able to make me more angry at my own fingers than 10 minutes with a guitar. It's an impressive number of levels for a compo game, good job! I initially didn't realize that LMB and Space did different things so I was confused when my exploding balls wouldn't "pick up" the square in that one level.
Apr 22 00:32:19	3h 11m	Crazy Driver (concept Submission	♥ 2	Solid concept. The deadline may have passed but you should try to implement it anyway. Post a link here or in the main ldjam feed and the people here will probably still be willing to play it and give feedback. I know I would be happy to.
Apr 22 00:59:54	27m 35s	Star Traveller	♥ 2	Wow! The audio really makes this, IMO. I tried the web build and ran into audio crackling issues at first (probably just my computer being old and Linux) and almost muted it but I'm glad I didn't and instead ran the native build (where the audio was fine). You could kind of see the time travel coming a mile away but the whole thing was entertaining regardless! The only thing I'd complain about is that it didn't really feel like I had a whole lot of agency. The bed and the tea chair ended up just being fancy "next line" buttons, and despite me deciding to turn back the ship continued forward anyway, which makes me think my choice didn't matter.
Apr 22 01:21:46	21m 52s	SOL	♥ 0	I give up. I can't make it past phase 1. I know it's possible because I managed to accidentally do it once, but even if the game were just picking a random continent then I should at least be getting it right one out of every four times I try, and that is definitely not happening. I went to check the source code to figure out what I was doing wrong, but you haven't actually posted the entire game source, only the *.cs files, which I believe is against the rules (the source should include everything required for somebody else to build your game).
Apr 22 18:37:43	17h 15m	Signadle	♥ 0	I liked the interactive tutorial screen. One of my challenges was "5 purple guesses" which I don't think is actually possible for the potentiometer or the orientation without getting lucky? I also didn't really know what score I was shooting for or when to stop playing.
Apr 22 19:45:03	1h 07m	Awaiting Response	♥ 1	I'm starting to think these arrow signs don't have my best interests at heart! I'd ignore the people bouncing off the game; a lot of them are just trying to rate games as fast as possible. The trick isn't really that hard to figure out, and there's value in letting the player come to that realization on their own. That said, my first death was right at the phone, so I initially assumed that was supposed to be the end of the game, since it felt pretty conclusive. The note on the game over screen about trying again was what made me give it another shot. The real nightmare is all the doors opening from the wrong side...
Apr 22 20:25:35	40m 32s	First Contact	♥ 1	I liked that a lot; it felt like it ended way too soon! I needed the hint to understand that "thumbs up" meant "alive," and the last one took me a while before I realized I needed to say the whole sentence and not just the one missing symbol. For the notepad, I think it should automatically add an entry for every symbol shown so far, along with a blank next to each so I can type notes. Trying to scribble in there and needing to delete everything if I make a mistake isn't great, so I ended up just using screenshots to remember what I'd seen.
Apr 22 20:45:13	19m 38s	DOT-DASH-Protocol	♥ 1	That last circle coming in from the left was a bit of a troll... My winning strategy for this was to just spam the spacebar whenever the codes changed to give myself enough time to re-learn the new stop code :P
Apr 22 21:43:24	58m 11s	Without Brakes	♥ 1	Oddly enough, this reminds me of some of the minigames from the Looney Tunes Back in Action game made in 2003: backinaction_minigame.png There's nothing to dis-incentivize the player from spamming the space bar at all times, so the little cars don't really end up being much of an obstacle. The music also doesn't appear to reset when the rest of the game does.
Apr 22 23:02:36	1h 19m	Sleep ArthonBru, Sleep!	♥ 1	6/8 was the best I could do: arthonbru_best.png Having the button arrangement be random makes it unclear to me whether the game is always beatable, both in terms of "can I get 8/8" and "can I make something that doesn't sound bad." I'd also like some way to more precisely control the timing rather than needing to click at just the right moment. Otherwise, this is quite clever and I liked it! One issue I ran into: while I was playing one of the buttons bugged out somehow and I could no longer disable it, forcing me to restart.
Apr 23 14:59:42	15h 57m	Ludum Dare 59 - Cell The Signal	♥ 1	I don't think this game is possible to win? You can't win customers in buildings with zero approval and all of the little houses in the upper right drop to zero approval within 2 months, way too quickly to build the two towers needed to cover them.
Apr 23 16:35:03	1h 35m	transmission.nil	♥ 1	I loved the ending! Unfortunately I worry not many people will have the patience to reach it. The UI also isn't too far off from the IRL version of this.
Apr 23 17:13:03	38m 00s	suno pi tomo tawa (Traffic Light)	♥ 0	Not bad. I don't know much about CHIP-8 but I assume it's a very constrained system to program for. sumo_hs.png
Apr 23 17:36:12	23m 09s	Speed Signal	♥ 2	speed-signal.png - The audio was really pleasant and made the controls feel much more satisifying. - There's a bug I ran into where wall bouncing close to the ceiling gets me stuck in that corner somehow. I managed to break free eventually, though. - The jump distance control felt weird in a way I'm having trouble describing, the best word I can think of is "heavy," like I'm getting sucked downwards the moment I release the key - I probably wouldn't have minded the re-use of level geometry across levels, but did it have to be that floating island thing on the right? It was hard enough to beat the first time, but it was doubly frustrating to have to do it over again (and again!).
Apr 23 18:33:28	57m 16s	Traffic Control	♥ 1	Not sure which score was the one to optimize, but I went for the green one and this is the best I could do: ended_traffic_3.png It wasn't obvious to me at the start that looking at a car tells it to go rather than to stop. Most of the challenge seemed to be in stepping out of the way fast enough to signal the next car to go before it gets rear-ended (I totally gave up trying to protect the pedestrians).
Apr 23 19:39:39	1h 06m	Signal Strength	♥ 0	I thought the trees looked pretty neat and I managed to purchase the first 20% speed upgrade before the game ran out of memory. - The indicators on the map don't correspond to the correct tower locations. - The player movement seems totally broken, to where I found the only way to move at a reasonable speed (or at all) was to point the camera up, travel diagonally, repeatedly jump, or some combination of those things. - Jumping causes the camera to wiggle around strangely. - The whistling became unpleasant for me fairly quickly, and I had to mute the audio.
Apr 27 17:20:24	93h 40m	CODE RGB	♥ 0	My poor laptop keyboard doesn't have enough rollover for some of the more advanced color combinations. One possible solution might be to map some of the color-changing controls to modifier keys or mouse buttons.
Apr 27 17:36:53	16m 29s	ECHO signal	♥ 1	You should add a cover image so more people will be interested and take a look at your game. While the scanning is a neat idea, it didn't feel like an important part of the gameplay since I could just keep buying and mining rocks unconditionally without ever scanning them.
Apr 27 18:37:51	1h 00m	Morse Fishing	♥ 0	The game soft-locks for me after a bit and I'm not sure what triggers it. My first run (on the ldjam website) I managed to get the first two-star objective but the diving viewport vanished and I couldn't progress (maybe that's the win condition?). On subsequent runs (on the itch page) I couldn't even get that far because the diver simply wouldn't move no matter what I told him to do. More notes: - Since tapping out morse code is your core game mechanic, there should have been more effort put into making the game detect letters automatically. The fixed pause lengths were pretty painful, even after tuning the delay to match my natural tapping speed. - A fixed delay before I can start playing is frustrating if I've already played before. - Clicking the bottom of the screen to look back up from the button is not intuitive. I assume you're borrowing this from FNAF, but that game had on-screen prompts to make the controls more obvious. - Needing to click around to view the different things in general felt kind of pointless. There would have been plenty of room on screen to fit most of it. The reason FNAF had a modal UI was so that it could put jump-scares in the UI state transitions. - One of the two stars in the first level would sometimes spawn on top of the diver, collecting it instantly. It's probably best to simply not have the star positions be random at all. - The instructions mention "star" and "fish" commands, but stars are collected automatically so I'm not sure what those commands are supposed to do. - I fail a lot, so hearing the same jokey "what are you talking about" voice line gets old pretty fast. Replacing it with a sound-effect after multiple failures or rotating between multiple different voice lines would have likely helped.
Apr 27 19:37:53	1h 00m	Diamond Synth	♥ 1	This looks awesome, but after trying in Firefox, Chrome, and native (under Wine) I can't seem to get it to work without unpleasant audio crackling. Maybe my computer just isn't powerful enough :( Aside: it'd be nice to have more range in the part of the keyboard that's mapped to my laptop keys. In most soft synths I've used they use 4 rows of keys: the numbers + qwerty for an upper octave and asdf + zxcv for a lower octave.
Apr 27 20:39:25	1h 01m	Pulse	♥ 1	I liked this a lot. I noticed that you could fire from inside the barrier to the outside but didn't notice the increase in damage. When playing the game again with that knowledge, I don't really find that it changes how I play all that much. Is it normal in shooters like this to freeze the player for a second or two when they get hit? I found that mechanic very frustrating.
Apr 27 21:35:44	56m 19s	Signal-Tied	♥ 1	Most of the weapons seem pretty underpowered compared to the minigun, so I ended up just sticking with that the whole way. Also sorry to go off topic but what's with everybody here calling this a roguelike? It's clearly not. Is it because the weapon upgrades are randomized?
Apr 28 15:28:31	17h 52m	Adriift	♥ 1	The space I was navigating was large enough that most of the gameplay was just staring at a black void and holding W. That said, the game started so quickly it jump-scared me, which is quite refreshing compared to the usual Unity loading screen. > There’s no support for SPIR-V in WebGL I admit I haven't looked into it, but isn't WGSL supposed to have a 1:1 mapping to SPIR-V? I'd think you could use that if GLSL doesn't have what you need.
Apr 28 16:16:53	48m 22s	Mixed Signals (using DOD)	♥ 1	"using DOD" is an odd thing to have in the title of a game :P. I'm also not sure how relevant it is to the gameplay: even in your "stress test" you only have, like, a hundred or so entities on screen at once, which doesn't require any special performance work to achieve. The idea seems like it has potential but as-is I was switching between very bored in the early levels and overwhelmed in the later ones.
Apr 28 16:35:35	18m 42s	In the Crib	♥ 1	Listen, I don't know what you want from me, baby. When I was your age I would have been happy to have half this many unicorns.
Apr 28 17:37:32	1h 01m	Signal Box！	♥ 1	The enemies were more likely to end the game by boxing me in so I couldn't move than by taking my HP to zero. I tried to solve the box puzzles in the rooms with enemies, but the enemy behavior didn't seem predictable enough for that to be worthwhile vs simply killing them all.
Apr 28 19:10:39	1h 33m	Round-a-doodle-doo	♥ 1	I made it to 20:12 before losing intentionally: Proof My strategy is to have left-hand on WASD, right hand on mouse, keep all crosswalks disabled by default and periodically enable all 4 at once for about a second before disabling them all again. This leaves plenty of time to go around clicking the crime chicks as they appear.
Apr 29 15:23:15	20h 12m	Martian Masher	♥ 1	This is great! After I got the hang of it I found that my score seemed to be somewhat dependent how unlucky I got with the monoliths, though. reached 281.7s and scored 5780
Apr 29 16:49:15	1h 26m	Signal Hunter	♥ 1	You've been following Handmade Hero, I see. I liked the crisp shadows. I think having the enemies die in fewer hits would have made up for the awkward aiming controls. I ended up just orbiting large groups of them taking pot-shots until they were all dead. I looked at the source code and found it funny that you seem to be using the "Modern" OpenGL API only to wrap it in your own functions that work the way old-style immediate-mode OpenGL did.
Apr 29 17:27:40	38m 25s	Connect the Universe	♥ 1	I don't know what it is about games that rely on really precisely timed mouse hovers/clicks but they tend to be very frustrating for me. Maybe I'm just bad at using a mouse. I made it through the first 12 levels before I realized that the game was infinite; it would have been nice to have an ending of some sort so I can know when to stop playing. That said, the fact that I made it so far without realizing the levels were random is a testament to whatever algorithm you're using to generate them!
Apr 29 19:15:27	1h 47m	PAIN SIGNAL	♥ 3	This is great! Rapidly flipping between multiple separate views you need to manage is oddly reminiscent of FNAF, although without the jumpscares. I managed to get to where I could keep going without stopping, which I guess counts as winning? My thoughts: - The upgrades don't feel like they add anything to the game at all. Keeping the boat running indefinitely is very achievable without them and they just seem to make the game easier over time, which I don't think is very satisfying. - The clicking is a bit finicky since I had trouble understanding where the "hot point" is on the various hand cursors (also sometimes the entire game window would get highlighted which was frustrating) - I never even realized you could burn your hands until I started intentionally playing around with things. The mechanic doesn't really impact gameplay that much since you're already trying to address engine issues as quickly as possible. This is the strategy I ended up using: - Use up all of the initial resources you're given immediately - Run the engine at half-throttle until you reach top speed, at which point set the throttle as low as you can get it without touching the bottom - Do the following on loop: - Collect items out the front window for about 15-30 seconds or until there is nothing left - Check the engine - For eyeball add gas if pupil dilates too slowly - For finger add coolant if level is below half - For oil if there's any heat at all add 3 barrels
Apr 30 16:50:48	21h 35m	There Were Signs	♥ 1	ok, so.... I won the space battle. I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to do that. My wrist hurts.
May 2 18:40:42	49h 49m	Signal Reassigned	♥ 1	signal_reassigned_win.png What a wonderfully tense experience! At the start I felt like I had to be very cautious and strategic but by the end I was panicking tossing flares into the cell and making a run for the button. The whole "playing through a camera" thing and the added static when the baddie was close reminds me of slender the eight pages, although the horror in this I feel relies much less on startling the player than that game did. Some more notes: - The motion blur and depth of field effects were a bit much, IMO, although I thought the lens flare was nice due to how it affected visibility - The mouse sensitivity was way too high for me playing in firefox. I managed to do ok but any higher and the game would have been unplayable. - The noise sound-effects you're using for ambience, to indicate when the anomaly is close, and on the game over screen were all very unpleasant to my ears. The sound is critical to the mechanics so I couldn't just mute the game, but I had to unplug my headphones to be able to play it comfortably. A simple low-pass filter over everything probably would have helped, as well as maybe adjusting the volume downwards on the game over screen, specifically.
May 3 15:52:34	21h 11m	swpr	♥ 1	I wanted to give you points for humor due to the little face but couldn't \[. .\] I think having the super granular difficulty isn't great, because as a player I'm not going to know what to set it to (and the default of 2 is way too easy). > but it was only half-working in my browser (working but also triggering the right-click menu) and couldn’t troubleshoot it on time. You need to call `preventDefault` on the `contextmenu` event. Not sure how to do it in the game engine you're using but it would have been enough to add the following to the html file that it outputs: ```html <script>document.body.oncontextmenu = (e) => e.preventDefault();</script> ```
May 3 19:04:52	3h 12m	Trailwork	♥ 1	Visually this is really cool, and I really want to see all the game has to offer, but the game just doesn't seem to want me to. If I understand correctly, I have control over the player only when standing on something and otherwise need to wait until I'm pulled over towards one of the orbs. The problem is that making it from one place to another almost never works. Leaving the first hallway typically gets me stuck at the short ramp thing with nowhere to go. Doing a running leap out of the hallway like you mention in the description sometimes gets me to somewhere new, but then when I try to go anywhere from there I either progress backwards or get stuck in permanent orbit and need to restart.
May 4 00:37:43	5h 32m	Free wristband (lots of work)	♥ 1	radio: "speaker's broken, is this your fault?" me, intentionally not fixing any of the speakers: collapsed under stress with score over 200
May 4 16:07:22	15h 29m	Pulse Escape	♥ 1	This reminded me of Flood Runner Armageddon (which apparently is still playable? There goes my evening...).
May 9 16:06:33	119h 59m	Boba’s Love Story	♥ 19	You should mention Claude Code in your tool credits.