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henk

Feedback comments for LD60

Timestamp	Since previous	Game		henk's comment
Oct 19 15:45:44		Up a Tree	♥ 1	I think sacrificing some of the effort put into graphics and sounds to instead focus on designing more levels would have been a better use of the available time. The movement speed was also very painfully slow for me, not sure if that was intentional.
Oct 19 16:05:47	20m 03s	Ultimate future: spaceship laser adventure, the new-age shooter	♥ 1	Perfectly short and to the point. I can definitely think of a few ways it could have gone lower-tech than a text adventure, though! The gun shooting off-center was a bit awkward, but I guess that wasn't an issue for long.
Oct 19 17:01:31	55m 44s	REWIND RAMPAGE	♥ 0	Instant death in the final phases made them a bit more frustrating than I think was intended. I'd exit a charge only to get immediately owned by one of the enemies who happened to be nearby. The random texts all over the UI were very distracting as well. Some had important information and appeared only briefly while others were clearly just meaningless filler. I died several times in a row early on because I was distracted trying to read them. I liked the main theme and thought it was catchy, but since it only played in the easier parts of the game most of my time was spent listening to the "boss music," which I liked a lot less.
Oct 19 17:18:11	16m 40s	Semaphore	♥ 0	I feel like a town shouldn't need a semaphore warning about a giant monster after that monster has already reached the town :P The game is pretty solid, and I managed a score of 26. The difficulty doesn't appear to reset properly when you restart from a loss so I had to refresh the page each time.
Oct 19 17:44:17	26m 06s	Forgotten Device	♥ 2	Not bad! I think the spooky atmosphere was a bit of an odd contrast to the "help me find my..." style of gameplay, but it gave it some character. The camera switching felt like it was on a hair trigger, and I found myself rapidly flip-flopping back and forth between the same two cameras. Perhaps there should be more distance between the trigger locations for entering and exiting an area to give it some hysteresis.
Oct 19 19:47:12	2h 02m	It's About Time for Murder	♥ 1	I liked the music and visuals! I think the gameplay could maybe use a bit more variety. It seems the core loop is scanning newspapers for a couple of minutes followed by waiting for phone calls for a couple of minutes, after which you solve the puzzle then wait couple more minutes for the time to line up. It'd be nice if I had an incentive to switch between the various tasks rather than just waiting things out. For a deduction game, I'd prefer if it were possible to solve the puzzle without leaving the game window. For something simple like this all it would have taken is the ability to "eliminate" suspect entries using a red mark or something. As-is, I have to keep a separate text document open to write down all the phone hints. Two bugs: 1. The "sleeping" graphic is misaligned and I can see my character's feet behind it 2. On my second playthrough I somehow caused the game to freeze when picking up the phone immediately after hanging it up, forcing me to close the tab and restart. It only happened to me once, so I'm not sure what the exact cause is.
Oct 19 20:28:17	41m 05s	Oops! No Floor!	♥ 1	Reminds me of spleef! The enemy player doesn't seem particularly smart, haha. If I wait long enough they tend to walk off the edge on their own. It'd also be nice to get some reward for dunking the elephant in the water.
Oct 19 21:14:11	45m 54s	Cyber Cquabble	♥ 0	I got to Wave 10 a score of 270734. I have no clue how to rate this. It accurately reproduces everything awful about older arcade platformers, but is clearly doing so intentionally. I want to give you points for that but somehow no category seems to fit (humor?). That said, I don't think the homage feels complete without music and sound effects.
Oct 19 21:48:40	34m 29s	The Last Chance	♥ 1	Won the game with all boats saved I liked the graphics and audio, although the music loop felt a bit too short. Sometimes when I enter a correct command the game will show what I entered but do nothing like the timer on the walkie-talkie gets stuck: screenshot of the above-described issue
Oct 20 02:33:50	4h 45m	Shmatari Shmidden Gems	♥ 0	Tennis was my favorite. I was hoping there'd be something more, though. The fact you can only win Ping by breaking it made me think it'd be cool if each of the games worked that way and you get something special for breaking all 6 games. Also I'm not totally sure but I think displaying multiple screens full of text like in the Lamentation of Jeremiah was straight up not possible on the Atari. At least, I've never seen an Atari 2600 game do that. Maybe if you filled nearly the entire ROM with font glyphs you could do it?
Oct 20 16:22:48	13h 48m	Stars and the Sea	♥ 1	I managed to find the island! It took me a bit to realize the large stars were the only ones that mattered, and the clouds made things a bit frustrating at times, but other than that I think the gameplay was solid. The lovely instrumental music helped keep me engaged. It'd be nice to have some more onboarding in the game itself, even if it's just a quick text blurb explaining the controls and objective.
Oct 20 18:00:53	1h 38m	The Athanor Estate	♥ 1	I got stuck and had to look up the answer. Room descriptions don't update when rooms get new items in them, so I didn't realize that the "linens" I pushed through the chute were actually called "laundry" and thus couldn't find the handkerchief. The copper key also confused me since its description said it could be used to open bottles but it did nothing when used on the whiskey bottle. I think it's unlikely I would have figured out the final solution even if I'd made it past that point (I wasn't even aware that escaping the mansion was the goal). I almost got stuck at the balcony, because I don't generally expect a "look" command to have side-effects, and instead tried several variations of "use hemp rope" to get off the balcony before eventually figuring it out. Miscellany: - I'd like a way to check inventory - Dropping an item and forgetting where you dropped it means losing it since the room descriptions don't update - You can't drop the crowbar in the same room you picked it up (a bug, I think)
Oct 20 19:53:51	1h 52m	Echo Chamber	♥ 1	This is fun! I managed to beat hard mode, but it's a bit unfair since if the timing of the enemy spawn happens to land on the exact moment your gun runs out you're screwed. If I could stop firing the gun or something to control the timing of that it would have been helpful vs just trying repeatedly and hoping I get lucky. Also it'd be nice if I could click and hold to fire continuously rather than needing to spam click, especially for the rebound gun.
Oct 20 20:49:03	55m 12s	Use the Shovel	♥ 1	I'm so used to staring at Unity/Godot loading screens at this point that I almost got jump-scared by how fast the game started. The hard cutoff on the fog felt a bit weird and could have maybe used some dithering if you didn't want to sacrifice the 1-bit style. The texture pixel size was also noticeably inconsistent in some places which I think detracted a little from the aesthetic.
Oct 20 21:17:22	28m 19s	Merry & Bright & CRI ≥ 95	♥ 1	Beat the game Somehow before clicking on that link I knew it was going to be a Technology Connections video. There's just nobody else on youtube I can think of who'd make a 20 minute rant about Christmas lights and CRI. I thought the game was too easy at first, and then I ran out of blue lights and had to go back and re-do all my puzzle solutions. Congrats on the challenging puzzle.
Oct 21 15:38:38	18h 21m	SnakeSketch	♥ 0	To clarify the issue people are having with the controls: your game starts a timer on key down and then waits for the timer to elapse before triggering motion. If the player releases the key before the timer elapses then the snake won't move. An easy fix would be to move the snake immediately once, then start the timer (and also be sure to cancel the timer on key up).
Oct 21 16:29:36	50m 58s	Lady DeBugger	♥ 1	I enjoyed this a lot, it seems like there haven't been that many platformers submitted to Ludum Dare this time around. It took me several tries at the final level before I realized I only had to kill 1 bug :P Random notes: - The sfx volume seemed a bit loud relative to the music - I'd like to be able to simply hold down the spacebar to bounce off the bugs rather than needing to time it - I felt like I had very little control over the character while flying through the air. My most common mistake was to jump over the thing I was trying to land on Also I can't help but point out the irony of using manila folders as a computer-themed sprite for the terrain...
Oct 21 17:39:48	1h 10m	BoilerKeep	♥ 0	I struggled a bit to run the game on my machine. The live url didn't work for me, and the linux binary requires a newer glibc version than I have. I managed to play by running the web build locally. IMO the gameplay itself is somewhat boring (and that game timer should be much shorter), but I just love the visuals and audio. The little synthetic waltz is so simple but really works for me. It's also apparently all generated at runtime, which is awesome (although CPU spikes would trigger audio stutters, which is unfortunate). I'm definitely taking notes. The minimal textures and SSAO make the visuals look kind of messy/incomplete, but in a way that I think actually works really well. It's like one of those noisy preview images you get in path traced renderers crossed with the muted bendy-and-the-ink-machine look.
Oct 21 18:28:10	48m 22s	Auto Chair Annihilator	♥ 1	Sure was fun having all of the interesting stuff in the game happen off-screen to the left while I clicked squares on an upgrade screen :P. Putting status messages over in the left view also meant I mostly never saw them. I'd know when I "died" by the temporary loss of mouse input. The interaction for dragging the upgrade tree around using the camera is not one I've seen before, although I can't say I hate it. The FOV was pretty tight, though, which meant sometimes information about the upgrade I'm looking at would display off-screen, requiring me to drag downwards so the bottom of the monitor would be in view when I hovered.
Oct 21 20:54:17	2h 26m	Reinvent the Wheel	♥ 1	This is the most fun game I've played so far this event. The music was a bop as well. A couple notes: - My wheel selection seemed to reset every time I lost. I didn't want to go into the main menu every time I needed to retry, so I ended up just sticking to the default wheel design. - The attack seems to work best when spam-clicking into a large clump of enemies, but that means when the upgrade menu appears I immediately accidentally click on something without seeing what it was. - Speed upgrades seemed mostly useless? Going faster just creates more chances to accidentally roll off the edge. - I once got "flattened" while flipping end over end over a pyramid enemy even though I hadn't landed or stopped moving. I think maybe the wheel hub collider is the trigger for the loss and it grazed the tip of the pyramid?
Oct 22 17:18:42	20h 24m	Slam Duck	♥ 1	I gave up trying to beat this game. Maybe there's some strategy I'm missing, but I can't get to a point where I can reliably avoid dying. The ducks move randomly, so a well-aimed ground pound is still guaranteed to occasionally miss, and landing directly next to a duck will occasionally result in an instant death if the duck happens to shoot at that moment. Once you get to the levels with like 20 ducks in them, these small chances add up to make the level mostly impossible unless you happen to get lucky on timings. Combine all that with the fact that the hit-box on the ducks is tiny, that ducks can shoot you from the opposite end of the map, and that the ducks are laid out in groups of up to 4 (where even a successful kill still exposes you to 3 other unkilled ducks' bullets) and this game becomes massively frustrating.
Oct 22 19:51:19	2h 32m	NewHouse™	♥ 1	There are so many great little details in this game that help tell the story. Here's a screenshot of the last room where I interpreted the "lock the doors" message maybe a bit too literally: Added a bunch of doors to level 6 Two notes: - It took me a bit before I realized the beige looking thing next to the control hints was a delete button - It took me a while to realize what the "door" piece was supposed to be
Oct 22 20:09:40	18m 21s	Tech Tree the Game : Car edition	♥ 1	It's a solid foundation, but I don't feel like I had to think all that hard about which options I clicked. Maybe I just got really lucky or something, idk. I thought it was funny that red paint increases speed, but was a bit confused when the catalytic converter also increased the speed. I don't know much about cars, but I'm pretty sure that's just a thing they put in the exhaust to clean up emissions?
Oct 22 22:50:23	2h 40m	Plug and Pray	♥ 0	Making the map and fps view something you have to juggle along with weapons and armor is clever, and not something I've seen before. A bunch of thoughts in no particular order: I think there are way too many items in the game for what it is, many of which have highly overlapping capabilities. For example there were like 7 or 8 camera modules I think, most of which became roughly equivalent once upgraded. You can try to collect modules and equip them whenever they're useful but then you run into 4-inventory slot limit (although there's a bug where you can just ignore the inventory limit that I was happy to exploit). The difficulty curve jumps up dramatically for the boss in the ossuary (hollow saint IIRC), whose bullets are way larger than they appear to be in the first-person view. I died fairly quickly to it on my first go despite being told that I was well prepared. On my second go, beating it felt like it took ages, most of the time spent hiding behind the pillars. I had to give up in the furnace area because every time I took damage the hurt animation would get stuck in a loop and tank the framerate to the point of making the game unplayable. I never figured out how to harvest the "veins" or access secret areas. I got a pickaxe at one point that didn't appear to do anything. The UI has a major issue with information overload (with most of the text having a noticeable AI voice). This isn't the first heavily ai-generated game I've seen with this problem. Is putting text all over everything a claude-ism or something?
Oct 23 15:10:43	16h 20m	Across The Meridian	♥ 1	Very spooky, I did NOT see that coming! It started messing with me just as I was getting the hang of how to use the merkhet too, so my unease felt very authentic. That said, by the time the plumb is pointing straight up I started to wonder why my feet remained planted on the ground... Your game taught me something new as well, so thanks!
Oct 23 16:12:51	1h 02m	HELL TOOLKIT	♥ 1	beat the game This has got to be one of my favorites so far. Good puzzle, good atmosphere, good ending. These kinds of "figure out the mechanics" games are always going to be a bit risky in a jam. Some notes: - The audio struggled a fair bit, but it could just be firefox + my old laptop that's the problem - I think it should probably trigger a loss instantly if there are any demons left in the room after the cycle ends. Every time I failed I had to sit there and wait for them to bash down the door, which made the game a bit less fun (although I just now realized I could have probably opened the door myself to speed it along). I think the door should just open automatically when the cycle ends no matter what.
Oct 23 16:44:24	31m 33s	My Little Robot	♥ 0	Not bad! I was able to squeeze past the boxes at the entrance so I never got tipped off to the fact that I hadn't noticed the slingshot on the ground. The game is quite easy, I think reducing the amount of available health would have given me more of a reason to dodge the enemy missiles, rather than to simply charge through them, which is what I ended up doing. I think some basic sounds and animations would help a lot as well.
Oct 23 18:08:18	1h 23m	Tuny and Volty	♥ 1	This is really solid and well done. The difficulty seemed fair. I struggled on one or two of the puzzles, but only because I'd forgotten about a mechanic introduced in an earlier puzzle. You only get a brief glimpse of the rabbit-jumps-log mechanic in one level before you're asked to use it several levels later, for example.
Oct 24 17:05:03	22h 56m	Punch Corp	♥ 1	I've never played Human Resource Machine and only know about it due to that famous "Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo" video which featured it heavily. This game felt pretty easy to me as somebody who's already comfortable with assembly programming, although I can imagine somebody new to programming concepts maybe struggling a bit. Some notes: - I think there should probably be fewer instructions. Many were not needed and mostly served as distractions. - In the instruction documentation "MEM" is used to refer to both an instruction address and one of the 8 registers, which is a bit confusing. I think it would have been better to have a separate "INST" mnemonic for instructions like CALL. - REPEAT and JUMP both take arguments but are not documented to do so in the summary on the left.
Oct 24 18:31:55	1h 26m	Terminal Stasis	♥ 1	Always fun to find a game with proper voice acting in it. IMO the controls seemed a bit inconsistent; some things accepted wasd + mouse while others required arrows/enter, which meant my right hand was moving on and off the mouse a lot. The minigames also felt, idk, a bit mean? They all seemed to have a "theme" of playing wack-a-mole with a PRNG, which can be a bit frustrating if you happen to get unlucky. I managed to beat them all, but playing them felt kind of like being on the losing end of a game of keep-away.
Oct 24 19:06:23	34m 28s	The DogWood Hill Funicular	♥ 0	I love the idea that the customers who get impatient are stealing a bunch of money and then running away as opposed to just leaving. It was not obvious to me that the game had a win condition. I was right about to give up when the win screen suddenly appeared at around $1000: win screen If I leave the game open after reaching that screen it eventually triggers a game over as well :P
Oct 24 20:02:49	56m 26s	The Last Tumbler	♥ 1	The gameplay was pretty tedious. Since incorrect tumblers move at a different speed I was hoping I could maybe "test" them by pushing on them once but even a light touch would reset the entire lock. The story started out ok but mostly repeated itself with each new level. The pretty line art should redeem this but even that repeats itself: the "winning" graphic of the grandma smiling is the same as the one used to introduce the character at the start. I think this would be made much better by simply removing all but the last level and condensing the little per-level story snippets into a sentence or two that get the point across. Having the grandma frown in the first pic might also be enough to make the smiling grandma pic at the end more rewarding.
Oct 24 20:50:05	47m 16s	Radio Host	♥ 1	I think you meant to submit this to the JAM category, or at least to opt out of ranking in graphics and audio (you can do this by editing the game page using the pencil icon in the bottom right). The story idea is pretty neat; it feels like something out of SCP foundation. I feel like the interior space was much too large, and it was occasionally difficult to figure out what the game wanted me to do next. I played and got both endings, but I think only having the "bad ending" would have also been fine.
Oct 24 21:05:29	15m 24s	Prayday	♥ 1	I think this is a good start, but the whole thing seemed a bit easy to me, even in "hard" mode. I didn't have any trouble getting super high scores by the end and never felt like I needed to remove anything. I would have also loved to hear some sound!
Oct 24 22:17:01	1h 11m	You... Bastet	♥ 2	This is brutally difficult, but still fun enough for me to play it to the end. On my first playthrough I managed to get all but one of the orbs, but for some reason all of the pedestals unlocked. The exit didn't unlock though and after I went and got the final orb it wouldn't accept it and I had to restart the game from the beginning. My final score (fairly good thanks to the "practice run," lol) 60 deaths and 15 minutes That music is quite good.
Oct 25 18:52:33	20h 35m	Argo	♥ 1	Idk why they'd even send the ship back in the first place given what a risk it would be. If it was to throw the Steward off their scent then they could have at least faked some evidence of their deaths. The lack of corpses seems like it'd be a dead giveaway that the life support didn't just fail... I can't say I'm a fan of needing to keep track of codes externally, but hey at least it made it easy to try both endings. A couple of things I think would have improved the game are some landmarks in the various hallways to help me get my bearings (even if it's just a poster or something), and an actual viewport in the bridge with some stars to look at. The reactor core was nice because it broke up the monotony of the corridors and terminals, and I think more stuff like that would have helped to make the environment feel more like a space ship and less like a bunker.
Oct 25 22:37:02	3h 44m	Primitive Logistics	♥ 1	Somewhat frustrating, especially with the wonky gravity-defying physics, I but managed to make it to the end. I think there's some sort of latency problem. Logs trail very far behind the mouse cursor when dragging them, and I would very frequently notice a log start to roll away and try to catch it only to find my click not registering.
Oct 26 17:49:24	19h 12m	Link Up	♥ 1	I gave it the college try, but the pinball part made me give up. I got the stairs to open but when I ride the ball to the top everything moves way to fast for me to even figure out what's going on much less intervene well enough to land in a good place. When I failed it often also meant needing to re-do all the tetris stuff. To top it all off, the game would randomly fling me when the pinball game reset. I'm not sure what it was trying to do but I think it was trying to set me back on top of the ball. Most of the time though it'd just launch me over the edge and back down into the tetris area. I think the idea here is to be a sort of "chained together" clone but with retro games? In this game though it seems both players aren't meant to cooperate but instead to scale the levels independently of one another, with the only interaction being when one of them gets too far ahead. At that point it seems like the game should have been singleplayer with an optional multiplayer mode rather than mandatory multiplayer.