Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD60 → Feedback comment stats → JustinMullin
Feedback comments for LD60
JustinMullin's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | JustinMullin's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 19 20:40:03 | defrag.exe | ♥ 1 | Cool aesthetic! I like the theme, and the interactions were well implemented. I'm not sure if it's a bug or a misunderstanding on my part, but I've played about 10 times and keep getting completely stuck. I've had games where I clear at least one column completely, and games where I clear all columns at least to have a space at the top, and in both of those situations I get stuck. There's no indication that I'm stuck - I have to reset the game completely to try again. Am I interpreting "at least one empty space in the sector by the time you run out of moves" incorrectly? | |
| Oct 19 22:17:30 | 1h 37m | SnakeSketch | ♥ 1 | Cool idea! I like the mechanic of spending points to get more attempts. It was interesting trying to decide how much I would risk to avoid shaking the screen. I was a little annoyed by the responsiveness of the controls - tapping a direction often wouldn't move the snake, so fine movements became a game of holding in short bursts, but sometimes it seemed the snake would move twice quite quickly when tapping for just a minute, and sometimes not at all. I got the hang of it after a bit, but it didn't feel especially predictable. |
| Oct 20 13:13:53 | 14h 56m | Little Bug, Big Computer | ♥ 0 | I did it! bugWin.png Fun level design here! Lots of creativity packed into a small area. The platforming felt slightly delayed to me, like pressing a button didn't have immediate effects sometimes, but I quickly got used to it. The dash is really cool! I loved how much speed you can get off of it. It did make a couple of the straightaway parts of the level a bit easy, but it was really satisfying. The art and sound and music all work together pretty well too. Nice work! |
| Oct 20 13:37:39 | 23m 46s | Real Intelligence | ♥ 2 | Cool game! Always fun to see Twine submissions. The art was fun. I _think_ I found all the endings, but I might have missed a branch or two. |
| Oct 20 14:41:00 | 1h 03m | Amiga 12000 | ♥ 1 | Wow, this is cool! A very well put together logic puzzle. Simple and short, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The planets are absolutely _beautiful_ - what was your process to build them? |
| Oct 20 15:05:13 | 24m 13s | DeadLine | ♥ 2 | Very cool! The aesthetic is quite nice, though I had some trouble reading some of the line numbers at the beginning, and it was a little difficult right away to see which line a flashing light was for. The rules started to become clear as I played and I was pretty invested in getting things right. Unfortunately I did make a lot of errors, and it wasn't always super clear to me what error I'd made - I'm sure with a bit more play I could get it right though. This seemed like a nice balance of complexity for the scope of the jam. My first run ended when I encountered a bug where a light was flashing somewhere but I couldn't see it, unfortunately. |
| Oct 20 16:32:39 | 1h 27m | Lexitron | ♥ 1 | This was SO COOL! Extremely creative, very well executed. Some of the puzzles really got me thinking, and even taking notes, which was very fun. I have very little to complain about, really only one (slightly spoilery) annoyance: !> It was often unclear what synonyms/antonyms would actually pop out, and I didn't always appreciate having to build a whole layout just to test a synonym that turned out not to work the way I thought. That said, for almost all of the puzzles here, when I found a solution it clearly felt like the "right" one. The only exception was SAME->FEEL. For that puzzle I turned SAME into IDENTICAL and DIFFERENT and had a complicated dissection of those words to grab the letters I needed. I'm assuming there's a more elegant solution I missed. Still, this was the biggest engineering challenge I faced, so it was still a fun time trying to get that solution to fit on the grid properly! All in all, I'm extremely impressed, and I spent way more time on this one than I usually would during the jam, just because I wanted to experience all the content. Well done. |
| Oct 20 17:28:54 | 56m 15s | Punchcard Robot | ♥ 1 | Very cool! The atmosphere is really great, I liked the security cam angles at the start of each level, and the animations were pretty smooth. I enjoyed the puzzles - towards the end I was whipping through them. Something pretty fun about having the numbers all memorized and just rapid firing out the punch card solution. Nice work! |
| Oct 20 19:21:50 | 1h 52m | Mindscape | ♥ 2 | Well, I don't think I'm going to finish this one on the first go here. There's a lot to dig into! I'd like to come back to this at some point because I want to see where it was going, but I spent about 30 minutes on it and need to move on to other games. Very cool what I've seen so far - I love these sorts of pseudo-ARG experiences. Some spoiler-y discussion of what I've done and where I'm stuck: !> I can get to Mustard's room to the east, but can't do anything there. It just says I enter the room, and no other options. !> I have gotten the A1 LED to turn on. !> I have decrypted the passwords, and logged in and scoured the drive as all the other users. Mustard can see the services files, but all interactions with those files fail, so I'm not sure what else to do there. Scarlet's sequence B files allow me to input a code in the hatches room that lets out smoke, but no other sign of what that's done I've been able to find. !> I see watch in the lobby, and the game seems to want me to grab it, but I can't !> I have a bunch of other half leads that I can't figure out All in all, I'm happy with the experience that I got out of this, but I'm intrigued to see what I missed! |
| Oct 20 20:23:18 | 1h 01m | No Replacements | ♥ 1 | Very cute! The gameplay was simple but effective, just enough to motivate things. The real shine here is the awesome character, lots of fun art (I especially loved seeing all the splash screens as the consoles booted up!), and great writing. The writing was really nice, and the ending is touching. Great submission! |
| Oct 20 20:31:30 | 8m 12s | Don't turn it off | ♥ 1 | Neat! Not a ton to the game, but I enjoyed what's there. The effects on the screen are pretty overwhelming, but honestly I feel like that's part of the charm - the difficulty is getting into a zone where you just press what it says, but the whole game wants to distract you from that task. It's interesting. 20k is my top score so far, and I needed to take a break at that point. 😅 |
| Oct 21 12:31:03 | 15h 59m | Psychoscope | ♥ 1 | Awesome! Loved the creepy "found footage" basement shots. That is a spooky space, hah. Once I got past the point of realizing I had to turn the thing _on_ it was smooth sailing - a fun little puzzle, not too complicated, but I enjoyed following each step, and the reward of seeing a few more of the photos was great suspense. |
| Oct 21 14:49:33 | 2h 18m | Siege Engineers | ♥ 1 | Very cool! I stopped playing on day 5, but part of me wants to see how much farther I can go if I get more time to play. The mechanics are simple but work well. It took me a while to understand how to build bridges properly, but things mostly worked well after that. The biggest thing I needed that I didn't notice the game was trying to explain to me was pressing shift to string together bridges - this is crucial later in the game! I thought I needed to place the supports first, so was having a lot of trouble. Impressive entry! |
| Oct 21 15:24:32 | 34m 59s | Chort Harvest | ♥ 0 | Neat! This is pretty well polished, and I really enjoyed experimenting with all the different weapons. The ram was pretty anticlimactic when I got there, but hey. The barrel seems to be waaaay stronger than the rest - I beat day 6 without the militia firing a shot because of it, hah. PS: looks like you used open-source sounds. That's great, but don't forget to opt-out of the audio category as a result! |
| Oct 21 15:39:45 | 15m 13s | LOKOMOTIV | ♥ 1 | Neat. I like the aesthetic a lot, though it was quite difficult to see everything at times. The sounds were pretty good, and it was very immersive! Would be cool to see an expanded version. Nice work. |
| Oct 21 15:43:23 | 3m 38s | Trick Or Retreat 4 | ♥ 1 | Some cool stuff here. The motion of the saucer is very smooth, I enjoyed just flying around. It was fun to dodge cars and try to play fast. Unfortunately I kept dying randomly, and was never able to figure out why! |
| Oct 21 19:41:31 | 3h 58m | Lots of old files | ♥ 0 | Checking in here because I've put several hours into this one, and I need to move on to rate some other games too. This entry is wonderful. I love a good intriguing mystery, and this is truly unique. I was hooked from the initial download, at least once I got past the point of convincing myself this wasn't a ZIP bomb or nefarious virus that I was extracting. ;) The writing is really nice, and the story is extremely touching. I shed more than a few tears as I read through it. I'm going to put the rest in spoiler text so I can talk about where I got: !> - I've found all the parts of the Python script, and successfully used it to decode ciphertext.txt with the key 'ELENOR' and read testament.txt. Quite an elaborate way to write a computer program! !> - I believe I have all the diaries, project logs, and other plaintext story bits out of the tree, including letter_final.txt !> - I found the cat(?) image and followed the pointer there to a folder, but I haven't been able to get any other information out of the image. !> - I found corruption_log.txt, but have not been able to find a use for the arrows puzzle there. !> - I've found another folder reference to testament.txt in project_log_112.txt by overlaying the & locations from the tool script fragments, which was a bit disappointing. Overlaying the # locations produces "ERSNAME", which is neither meaningful to me (yet?), nor does it decrypt to anything useful that I can see. I've banged my head against the dead ends enough times that I'm going to take a break, but I'd really like to get to the end of this one, assuming I'm not already there. There are enough clues I don't understand that I suspect I have more to go, so hopefully I find the time to return and figure it all out. Thank you for sharing this beautiful entry. =) |
| Oct 21 21:13:53 | 1h 32m | Lensor | ♥ 1 | Wow! This was very tough, but the game was so fun I had to play until I got it. The gameplay is totally unique as far as I've seen, and the presentation was a fun sort of over-the-top that really sold things. I'm not sure it's perfectly balanced, and I certainly got screwed a few runs because of really unlucky placement of mirror blocks or obsidian, but it was fun to work around these problems too. Great work! |
| Oct 21 22:27:52 | 1h 13m | Temple | ♥ 0 | Not bad for 8 hours! I was able to solve both and get the cat. The netwalk one was definitely hard to see, too dark on my screen, but it didn't take too long. Very cool that this is running your own engine! PS: I was walking _very_ fast when pressing WASD - did you perhaps forget to https://gafferongames.com/post/fix_your_timestep/? 🙃 Anyway, thanks for the game! 😅 |
| Oct 21 22:46:43 | 18m 51s | Nightguard | ♥ 0 | Hey this is really cool! I love games where simple interactions are fleshed out past "press R to reload", and this was pretty well executed. Lighting that very last lamp was quite a task - felt like the yellow monsters were practically spawning in on top of me. I managed to do it though! Really enjoyed this, nice work. |
| Oct 22 15:37:42 | 16h 50m | Nitro Lancer | ♥ 1 | Very fun! I was a bit worried when I saw progression was tied to combo strings, since it felt like that would be too dependent on where the enemies spawned, but I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly the respawns work to facilitate long combos. I never found a way to game the system on respawns, but there was always a combo opportunity when I needed one, just not necessarily in a spot that would be easy to utilize. I will say the nitro system did not feel especially critical, which was too bad. I had the best success with being slow and methodical, rather than boosting around. I found I mostly only use the boost to make up momentum after a mistake. The controls were a fun balance between tight control and totally chaotic. At the best of times, I felt like I was careening wildly about out of control, but still hitting all my marks, which was a pretty fun feeling. I assume the auto-aim was partially responsible for this - it's subtle but really helps a lot with making sure everything flows well. Animations are fun - as usual, some really nice touches that work well to give a crunchy feeling, especially the frame stop on collision. Really feels like a nice punch! The art is really cool. I love the clever interpretation of the theme. It certainly feels hand-drawn (and I realize it essentially is!), but not in the typical way. I'm not sure I've seen a style quite like it before, which is a cool achievement! Definitely curious to hear more about the workflow you used to get here. Fun entry! 😅 |
| Oct 22 21:35:59 | 5h 58m | Subvivor | ♥ 1 | Pretty cool! I definitely like putting a twist on the ubiquitous "mini-putt" game. This had a nice look to it, and felt quite nice to coast around in the early levels. The later levels were a bit annoying for me - I didn't like the exploration being pretty trial and error, and would have preferred navigating a difficult path that I could see ahead of time. The mechanic to manually ping was interesting but unfortunately contributed to the problem of having poor visibility. Initially I played quite cautiously and tried to carefully maneuver, but after a while it became clear that oxygen was infinite, and I could even recharge my oxygen while waiting for my sub to move around, so in the end I was pretty much always just launching around without a care, even in the vicinity of mines, because I knew I could easily get all my health back. Not a big deal, but it did affect the balance of the game for me. I had a lot of fun with the first 5 minutes or so of this game though - very cohesive atmosphere, and it felt very "sub-like", and not at all like a golf game, so it was really cool to see the mechanic reused so successfully. Thanks for the submission! |
| Oct 22 22:47:02 | 1h 11m | WHACK-A-TONY: Super Platformer | ♥ 3 | Wow! This is so incredibly creative. I went into it thinking "okay, neat, it's a platformer but you're playing it on an old CRT," and I was prepared to see some cool shaders and whatever, but this is so much more than I was anticipating. Everything is polished to a T: I was especially impressed by the death effect, the frame stop and the zoom and everything just works _so well_. This was just about the right length too, to show off tons of cool stuff with the mechanics, but not drag on too long. Absolutely loved it. Honestly my only complaint is that the actually platforming itself isn't _quite_ as crisp as I wanted it to be, but with the strength of the level design and the totally unique mechanics here, that is a minor complaint indeed. Well done. |
| Oct 22 23:06:24 | 19m 22s | Feed the Boiler | ♥ 0 | Kinda cool! The progression worked well for me in the early game, but the recipe tree is weird - the fourth recipe seems to require you have unlocked the entire tech tree (including the 5th recipe) before you can actually use it, which seemed unintentional. Spamming the 3rd recipe (retro mix?) for the entire game wasn't something I especially wanted to do. The art is pretty nice, and I liked the feel of the game. |
| Oct 23 15:56:20 | 16h 49m | Sputnik-1 | ♥ 1 | Wow. Wow. Wow. What a masterpiece. From the moment I saw the KSP-style simplified orbital mechanics show up I knew I was in for a treat, but this game kept surprising me with how deep and solid it is. The aesthetics, the depth, and the polish on all the little bits are just incredible. The story text was difficult for me to understand often, probably a translation thing, but even so I really enjoyed the storyline. It was very evocative of rebuilding and stirring up hope. I see from the comments that you've used AI considerably here, and no surprise, as this was an astounding amount of content and functionality, but everything worked together quite well, and I was able to play through the entire campaign while rarely feeling that something wasn't thought through, functional, etc. There was very little chaos here. I had anticipated running into some areas that felt slapped on, or stereotypical "slop", but really it all worked and felt nice. I'm especially amazed to see a nice little assembly programming mechanic, and it's even _used to good effect_ later in the game. The first time I programmed a solution, it actually turned out to be unnecessary, and there weren't too many tasks that really required full on programming, but in a longer game I could see using this feature quite a lot, and it's very very cool. Having lots of documentation available for all of the functionality really helped this to be accessible and not a pain to figure out. I had a few complaints, little note that are really not very critical, but I will list them anyway in case you plan to work more on this game: - The auto adjustments from the helm usually seemed to spin the wrong way, making what should have been quite a small adjustment if you had manually gotten things close, to a huge adjustment to spin into place - Some larger orbits were difficult to see exactly how far off the apoapsis/periapsis without zooming in, and that map isn't especially pleasant to zoom/pan, so it got a little annoying for a few approaches - The assignment to switch a pair of batteries from parallel to series was a little touchy, as the circuit didn't quite work the way I anticipated - possibly my own ignorance of EE, but the rest of the game was generous with hints and this one tripped me up for a bit All in all I had a wonderful time playing through the missions that are available here, and I kept thinking that if this was released on Steam as-is I would consider purchasing it. Please do report back if you expand this entry into a full game, as there is so much promise that I see. In particular I really think an expanded game to move towards a persistent world where I can decide what to do next would be very exciting - I can picture scanning wrecks to collect parts and upgrade my ship, completing tasks and purchasing components, etc., and that really sounds like a nice game. Of course I can see that this game is probably quite niche, reading through the comments and seeing that many felt it was too complex to get into. Thanks for your submission - this is one of the more memorable Ludum Dare experiences for me. I realize AI is controversial, and I myself am hesitant to congratulate too heavily a work that may have been largely generated "by the machine", but I'm inclined to believe you put quite a bit of yourself into the project as well, as I believe "vibe coding" a game like this would land in a much less cohesive result, so I hope you're proud of what you've put together, and thank you for sharing it. |
| Oct 23 16:39:32 | 43m 12s | Melody Machinations | ♥ 1 | Beautiful art! The characters are so cute, I love it. I experienced the same frustrations others are noting, especially the randomness of the flight organette leading to many many many crashes that I couldn't have avoided, because I just am not offered any letters to press. I'm very good at typing games and was excited to speed through that mechanic, but unfortunately it's more a test of my luck in being offered letters to type, and it seems the dice are skewed considerably towards crashing. That said, the nice aesthetics and the fun theme kept me going long enough to get past these annoyances, and I did make it to the end eventually! I'm actually still not sure what music has to do with the flight theme, but that's okay, the world was whimsical enough that I didn't pay this too much mind. 🙃 |
| Oct 24 14:47:41 | 22h 08m | LaserWyrm | ♥ 0 | 502s for me as well - will drop back to try it again later if it's back up! |
