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NBumgardner

Feedback comments for LD59

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		NBumgardner's comment
Apr 20 20:16:14		Signal Loop	♥ 1	Nice animations on the robot bobbing up and down as well as jumping into the end portal. Given more time I feel like being able to draw notes notes on the walls would be cool and fit the tone of the art, especially for the 4th level where I wanted to trial and error how to dodge each enemy perfectly. It also seemed pretty creative to have multiple levels cap out at the 30 command limit.
Apr 20 20:28:25	12m 11s	Signal-Tied	♥ 1	I was pleasantly surprised over and over by the details of this game. Lots of particle effects, a variety of enemies, and feedback when you are outside of the safe zone. I almost expected the folding chairs to be destructible.
Apr 20 20:37:03	8m 38s	DOT-DASH-Protocol	♥ 1	A quick to learn game with a cute setting. At first I thought I could continue text with Spacebar, making it truely a 1-button game. I like how the robot pauses while you type. In a longer game I think it could be funny if a super long message pushes the moons away or does some Easter egg music.
Apr 20 20:59:05	22m 02s	NORTH-5	♥ 0	Nice job tying together gameplay and text into a story. Not a big fan of the faint CRT lines yet the SFX were quite satisfying.
Apr 22 20:00:10	47h 01m	Mixed Signals (using DOD)	♥ 1	I like the smoothness of the rotation animation. It makes me imagine a rhythm game, especially if SFX were added for shooting and receiving balls. To improve the browser build, I recommend disabling the outer expand button in the bottom right corner. The blue button worked for me while the clear button does not. Additionally, you probably want the game's Quit button to just back out to a start menu for browser builds. For the gameplay, it would be nice to be able to control both receivers in the level 3 missions. Maybe with an extra keybinds like Z and C for the second receiver. Congratulations on finishing your first Ludum Dare game, I look forward to seeing what you make in the future!
Apr 22 20:02:54	2m 44s	Dead Light, Green Light	♥ 1	The people heading toward the signal was interesting, they reminded me of fireflies with all of the lights. I was not able to find the hospital or hear the audio, but refreshing the page did fix the blurriness as reported earlier.
Apr 22 20:08:37	5m 43s	Beacon of Hope	♥ 2	A cute, memorable, point-and-click adventure with some movement. The cutout art-style was a great idea, and the puzzles were challenging enough to get stuck a few times, but it helps extend the life of the game since each playthrough would be the same. Performance issues were fixed by escaping or changing the game between full screen and not. The game first halted when lighting a fire. The SFX were pretty comprehensive, the SFX for fire going out reminded me of someone softly snorting out from their nose. I look forward to seeing what you all make in the future!
Apr 22 20:12:19	3m 42s	TellyBuddy	♥ 3	Tense and with good storytelling. I'm not usually one to hit the side of a T. V. but I sure got used to it! Nice idea on using stock footage for background. A couple things for a future version, is the chin hitbox could be larger in case the user is not looking from below, and some more shortcuts could be always available from the beginning of the game. Great job, its always a pleasure to try out your team's games.
Apr 22 20:17:08	4m 49s	RedFlag：SOS	♥ 2	Good storytelling with a main gameplay antagonist. After I was told to play it was a test of patience. Other than the story, my favorite part was playing with the lettuce to see if it could block line of sight or have some other use.
Apr 22 20:19:30	2m 22s	GraveBell	♥ 3	Fun army gameplay with a twist on limited lifetime per unit. For the text display, growing the text from the center was too hard to read until it was fully spelled out for me, compared to writing from left to right. For the gameplay balance, the 3rd unit's very short time seemed too short, unless it has area of effect I did not notice. The glow and art are pretty too, it fits with the setting and makes the pixel art look more lively.
Apr 22 20:34:22	14m 52s	Signal Weave	♥ 1	A great game that fits the clicker genre except its about strategically updating your logistics network. Given more time, dragging a click to connect multiple nodes in a row would be great for speeding up gameplay, especially in the late game.
Apr 29 15:21:30	162h 47m	Pawn Patron	♥ 1	Well done making a tight game with animations and audio that match up with each other. The move system is clever. There are 4 moves, 1 randomly omitted at the beginning, then the missing move is restored by replacing the chosen move. So the game always cycles among showing 3 of 4 choices. I'm not sure if it would fit what you have in mind, but one way that could make the game easier is to have all 4 options shown in a big spaced out 2x2 grid, then shoot out the chosen instruction(, kind of like a shuriken being slid forward,) leaving a disabled ghost behind. That could teach the players how the move system works intuitively, and touch users still cannot accidentally make the same move twice in a row. The current system and timer feels more arcade-y, so maybe the above system would feel less fun? But it definitely reminded me of great board games like Scythe or worker placement games where you cannot repeat the same action twice in a row. It also would not fit the arrow key shortcuts, so it might turn into more of QEAD shortcuts or something to represent diagonal choices. Also clever idea of having the ending screen's button link to this page for rating the game, I like that a lot.
Apr 29 15:25:36	4m 06s	Baywatcher	♥ 2	Great concept and execution. Listening to the sea chanty music and zooming in on the background through the light fog was fun. Given more time, adding more feedback on ship crashes would be helpful, such as arrows on the edge of the screen, or making a bigger spectacle of a game over so the user can tell where the mistake happened. Being able to pause with the main menu would be nice too, clicks were still registering through the pause menu buttons. Still though, having menus and reset choices is great and doing more for options and audio controls is just polish on top. Glad to hear the team had fun using source control and working together! Looking forward to seeing what you all make in the future.
Apr 29 15:31:55	6m 19s	Twisted Pair	♥ 1	The SFX and pulse line animations were good to help the user have reminders and context of the game logic. Labeling the levels as A, B, C, or with numbers, or otherwise letting the player know the game looped might be good to set player expectations might be good. I had similar feedback 2 jams ago so just passing that along. The mood of the bulletin board and graph paper textures was nice too.
Apr 29 15:37:32	5m 37s	Radio of the Last Day	♥ 1	Although art and audio are not part of the rating for this game, there are nice graphics on the radio controls. I was not sure what cues to listen for unless I try the game multiple times. The green dots were nice in the tutorial first day, would be good to have those for every day. The speaking voices were probably just for flavor, and not meant to judge characters by. Nice job setting up the daily cycle of events. I look forward to seeing what games you make in the future.
Apr 29 15:42:47	5m 15s	🐶ㅤ	♥ 1	Nice reuse of game mechanics for throwing items from different angles. Given more time, it would be nice if clicking during the in-game instructions skipped to showing the text all at once, similar to the gameplay storyline. Being able to hold E to keep picking up or holding Space to throw multiple times would also be good, as long as it does not make the game too easy. How much of the game was destructible surprised me, nice job on making sure the player can always find more items to pick up.
Apr 29 15:46:26	3m 39s	Enigcremental	♥ 0	Nice title and thumbnail, they helped me find the game. The cost curve for the upgrades feels good and makes me curious what the source code would look like. The SFX sound good until there are too many clicks, so the volume controls at the top were a good idea. I also could not always buy the $10M dial when money was shown at $10M, probably due to rounding. The bounce and turning green of dials felt satisfying to watch and hear. Looking forward to playing the next game you all make.
Apr 29 15:55:58	9m 32s	Signal Breaker	♥ 1	Nice title, thumbnail, and gameplay. It fulfills a fantasy of lining up a perfect shot in pool or other trajectory games. As an alternate way to play, it could be nice to have an option where the 3 shots with the most impacts and unique results are offered to the player instead of manually hunting for them. Not sure how hard it would be to code though. Gameplay wise, buying more slots felt expensive since I could only buy 0-1 new items per level, but maybe it is protecting me from myself to not have too many items on screen? A few hopefully easier things to fix in a future version are some minor typos: - Crusher Wheel description: Should say "... add a charge ..." - Bottom-right predictor: Should say "... coming." Rarely squares can stack on top of each other with different rotations, I think they still worked though. Lastly I also noticed a syncing issue with starting a new game still showing the older _Depth_ until you finish firing your first shot. Allowing the game to reset is great though, saves the user from having to refresh the browser page. Overall great game, and I look forward to seeing what you make in the future.
May 6 13:56:31	166h 00m	Shooting Stars in a Blocky Cosmose!	♥ 1	A fun, unique, and innovative game. I had to read the sniper controls and try them out before understanding how to get positive points greater than 1. It might also be nice to have an additional button for sniper mode instead of just the right click for players with 1-button mice, however I did not have any problems with right-click in the browser which was great. Good job on the immersive sound effects and listing the tools used too.
May 6 14:12:10	15m 39s	Moon Moth	♥ 1	The game feels like a poem turned into a video game, it trusts the users to look into its deeper layers and has unique art/audio. Writing the instructions into the foreground of each screen is clever. The starting menu's _Press Space_ could be made more bold, white outlined, or maybe have an outline appear when you mouse over it to be more eye-catching and obvious. If you go for the outline approach, you could do the same thing for the 5 moods to hint to the player yellow is stars, purple is horror, and so on. For the scenes after collecting dreams, it would be nice if the player has the option to skip in case they have seen the dream before, either in 2 steps to show all then move on, or just move on immediately. It was probably out of scope though since in your original idea there was more persistence between levels. Also great job on balancing the audio without overloading the wind or being too quiet with the voice lines. I can almost imagine the background trees and TV dishes swaying with the wind sounds.
May 6 14:17:36	5m 26s	Trainsmission	♥ 1	Congrats on the detailed art and combat system. If there are multiple levels more than level 0, then they seem long to get to the next part. Nice touch on having the characters complain when hit by friendly fire.
May 6 15:05:34	47m 58s	Dragonia Siege	♥ 1	Great game jam game design where the game is quick to finish, replay, and discover secrets within. Thanks for letting me know the manual characters were made with Gen AI so I could ignore them while rating. Given more time, instead of quitting to a black screen on Esc, I think escaping to the title screen would be preferable. The current design is good for quickly muting the game, but requires a page refresh even though finishing the game normally lets you retry from the beginning. Nice touch on making the audio slightly muted while indoors, and the humorous character writing.
May 6 15:09:54	4m 20s	Gasp Away!	♥ 1	Thanks for the tips of ignoring the timing bar that was fixed in the post-jam version, it affects the gameplay feel and understanding a lot for new players. In the post-jam version, the word count should instead say letter count or count differently. The number was always zero on the jam version, so it never came up as counting the wrong thing before. The post-jam breath circle was a good idea, it just makes the options controls slightly harder to use since it is rendered there too. Some ideas for end/post game: - Could be neat if a giant pelican saves or eats you depending on if you harmed any birds and got far enough. - Would be nice to be able to scroll horizontally after game over to see what you spelled. Lastly, good idea to have the birds fly behind the title of the start screen.
May 6 15:12:47	2m 53s	Radio Survival	♥ 1	The game was difficult and fun. The monsters made me jump, even when I knew they were close. I think the charging monster attack SFX helped contribute to it. The audio was relaxed and engaging.
May 6 15:14:55	2m 08s	5G Crash	♥ 2	The game made me laugh and smile. Using a mouse-over control felt great to reduce clicks and auto-target compared to similar giant-tower-defense genre games, while also fitting better into the Signal theme. I wonder how many levels and enemy types there were. The crawling enemy's attack animation was my favorite.
May 6 15:22:21	7m 26s	Beacon	♥ 0	Felt great to play. It is a hard game to balance, unless you give free partial/full heals after every fight which would make it easier to see the end game with multiple strategies. Nice job including a game over screen that leads to the main menu. Playing a second time I did much worse by straying from high-defense cards, because losing health snowballs into having less damage to survive further. Some other thoughts about the game I had are: - Would be nice if you no longer drew cards for fully missing groups. - Surprised the _... Hold ..._ card still works without defenders. - Could make giving up Defenders early more interesting if the Defend cards were removed from your deck of cards. Maybe removing Defenders would make the game too hard though if I cannot block. - Swapping columns 1 and 4 does not do anything when the 4th column is empty. I would expect it to not be able to be played, kind of like when the cards that move a defender forward cannot be played when an enemy is in the way. - Fun to strategize with. - Not sure what the best deck would be, maybe taking the Close Shot and lots of defense, since blocking is difficult and often needed consistently. Great job overall. I look forward to seeing what games you make in the future.