Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → LiGHTHOLDER
By wolkp
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 22 | 4.35 | 70 | |
| Fun | 20 | 4.32 | 69 | |
| Innovation | 250 | 3.75 | 68 | |
| Theme | 531 | 3.69 | 67 | |
| Humor | 544 | 2.94 | 63 | |
| Mood | 162 | 4.03 | 68 |
This is very polished!! The animation of objects when harvesting is so cute and satisfying!! I love the mood you created too! A lonely watchman defending a lighthouse, helpless. The difficulty progression and its designs! WOW! Good job!!
DAMN I LOVE IT for REAL The game cycle is superbly designed seriously, I was very impressed
Really well done. I may come back to play more, now I want to know what the "special resource" is. I unlocked it but didn't get to see it... had 4 days left when I died :-(
An incredible game. The idea is good, and the setting is nice and the game design is very good. The progression is perfect. Very good game.
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It's so cool! Good job!
Seriously super great work. Everything feels very intentional and well thought out!
image.png lovely game !!!! Feels like a mobile game in the best way possible. Everything was neat and nice, felt maybe a little easy, but also the early game felt difficult enough. I would love to play a larger version of this with a stronger spike in difficulty. At the beginning the limited space theme didn't seem to apply that much until it actually started affecting me cutting off parts of terrain and resources. Fantastic game!
The game has alot of polish and it seems that you have managed both to finish building the game but also tune and polish it. Great work.
So cool game ! it's very fun and the progression is very great. Good job !
Awesome game! Made it through. Was really fun to play. Loved the mood and the overall asthetics. Great job!
Nice work! Very funny and vibing
I'M SHOCKED!! This game is perfect on so many levels!!! Is so polished and the game flow is incredibly well done!
**I LOVED THIS ONE**. The resource managing, the sound design super satisfiying, at the start I didn't understand much about the limited space, but when the "sea monster" started eating the island I got it.
Everything is so much fun! I loved it. Here is my score:
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Cool game, I've loved watching it progress throughout the jam in your blog posts!
This was really well executed, from the graphics to the sound design/implementation! Simple yet addictive and kinda gave me Monkey Island vibes minus the humor
all of that in only 72 hours??
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REALLY nice work here. Top level of visuals and game feel. I gave it a few goes and got to 5 days left, but those "asteroid" style baddies that split into two got me :D Lovely entry. Well done.
Game design, aesthetics and sound is really neat! The idea is cool and can be a foundation for a bigger all-platforms game. I enjoyed it all the way through and it also managed to feel tense. Great entry!
Incredibly fun game
Very well done! Had me hooked until I beat it.
Really fun game, reminded me of dome keeper well done! I enjoyed the challenge of the early game but once I had lighthouse upgrades the monsters stood no chance :laughing: image_2023-10-03_232727846.png
Wow, this is awesome! I love the lighthouse light beam being your weapon, it makes total sense. VERY satisfying to hit multiple monsters at once with it, too, and to mine multiple things at once. Very good execution of the loop — it didn't feel too long or too short either way :D I wish there was some music for the day and night!
The game loop feels great and all the polish makes it really satisfying to play. Great job!
This is fun and challenging. I really like this. Cthulu-lite.
Really like the art style, the visual effects, the sound and music -- all great. gameplay was fun! Really enjoyed using the light as a weapon. Nicely done!
I managed to do it but pfiouuu it was so hard because there is so few ressources at the end ! Great job it was challenging and some VFX were truly great !
And gathering was really smooth, I felt like it was the best thing here.
I loved collecting resources and fighting the waves of mobs. The game feels well polished. The comic book style "omnomnom" texts really added a nice touch.
That said, I fail to see how the fact that the floor is disappearing is supposed to affect anything. It doesn't hinder movement, nor does it noticeably impact the resource generation, so I don't think the mechanic has much of a point as it currently stands, apart from trying to forcibly fit the LD54 theme into the game. Another thing that wasn't clear is what the bar at the bottom of the screen was supposed to be.
Thanks guys! Thanks @grizeldi for pointing out the negatives too! Initially I just wanted to make the game on the small space with resources that respawn after a long delay. But found that to not be enough and I thought of the monster that could eat parts of our islands too, forcing us to strategise more. But I see your point, it could be improved to impact the gameplay more!
Nice gameplay loop you got there! i enjoyed the talent tree and two phases mechanic, the lighthouse beam has a nice effect, but imho it feels a bit slow to control, great job!
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Saw your post asking for the bad stuff, so here I am! :D
I played the game once, got a score of 4820. It's a solid game! Not much to critique on other than lack of instructions and game balance, so I'll just do that now :)
The game itself is simple enough to understand (collect resources, upgrade lighthouse, destroy baddies) but I would've preferred it if some of the information was presented up front, rather than unlocked through gameplay. I could always just play it again with the new knowledge gained from a previous session, but I feel like this knowledge should've been presented to me already. I'm talking about the upgrade tree showing new upgrades when you unlock one, and maybe even what the big red X does on a tile (even though the impact is minimal in its current state).
As for gameplay, I never really felt threatened. I did get some chip damage in the first two nights due to figuring out the lighthouse mechanic and realizing it's quite slow. Then I learned about and unlocked the slow effect and speed rotation, and from that point onward there was no threat at all. I managed to unlock all upgrades except for one (mining speed iirc) and enemies were just melting away easily with the birb, cannon and thunder.
So I'd love to see some more variety and skill in the lighthouse combat. The mechanic is neat, but too simple to be engaging and threatening. I'd like to see more choices as well, since unlocking (almost) everything means you just have to prioritize a select few upgrades as early picks but after that you can just do whatever you want without having to commit to a certain direction.
As for the resource gathering, it's pretty simple and a bit dull to be honest. Basically my gameplay loop was check which resources I need for an upgrade, then gather the closest resource trying to dual mine, deliver, upgrade, repeat. Not a lot of thought went into it as there was no scarcity. There was only one instance at around night 8 or 9 that I couldn't harvest a resource that I needed, but it showed up again next day so I never really ran out of anything.
All in all, it's a pretty good game! Just a bit too simplistic for me. I enjoyed my playthrough but (like many LD games) the gameplay loop is not interesting enough for me to want to play more of it. I'm not saying it's balanced poorly, but for me it felt too easy to be truly engaging.
If you didn't ask for the "bad" stuff, I'd just comment that it's a great and polished game that looks amazing and the lighthouse with upgrades was a fun way to blast monsters :D
Final words, you should be proud of what you created! It certainly is an impressive game!
I think it's great. It's wasn't easy for me, I kept dying, but I enjoyed the game. The guy moves really cute :) Killing monsters with the light is👍
Wow cool, thank you so much @frib for taking the time and writing so many great observations! Definitely will help me in designing improvements for the future updates!
Awesome game, had a tonn of fun playing. Last day got a bit hectic because I wanted to buy the cannon expecting the suprise tentacle mosnter bossfight :smile:
very solid entry! but since you ask for critique, here are some points: - resources seem to be unbalanced towards wood being required too much - i don't think it's intended that two resources can be mined at the same time if you stay close to both - if tentacle monsters would devour their items quicker when the day starts, it would help player distinguish those lost resources from ones that should be salvaged from the next wave
I enjoyed this game quite a lot, I like that it have a skill tree type system to upgrade the defences and stuff. I think being able to dash when not carrying anything would be a good addition.
this is a solid game! its basic game loop is eerily close to Dome Keeper, especially with the stationary lighthouse turret and automated defense stuff. I liked the feeling of dual mining, and how the upgrade tree grew when I bought something, that both helped make the initial overview less intimidating, and made the progression and build direction (focusing on mining or combat for instance) feel more tangible in a UI sense.
I found the regrowing of resources was the most unintuitive part, especially since resources like rocks and minerals don't regrow irl, but I quickly got the hang of that
The destruction of tiles meant that resources actually became more scarce as the game went on, but the movement speed upgrades counteracted this, which made the resource gathering efficiency never rise or fall, which felt unengaging
but yea this was really good and fun!
This was an awesome game! The gameplay was addictive, very well balanced, and a lot of fun. The amount of upgrades is impressive, and also it's great that there's upgrades such as the seagull friend that are not simple variations on existing things, but a completely new thing. The sounds are very good, especially I enjoyed the whooshing of the enemies. Picking things up could have made a little louder sound and it felt also like it was on a slight delay? But it's very hard to think of anything to critique, as everything works so well and is very polished.
Harvesting resources and dragging them felt perfect. It was great that you didn't need to drag them all the distance to the lighthouse, it was fun that they went the rest of the way automatically. This made resource gathering fun and rewarding. Really good work.
If you added longer progression this would make an excellent mobile game as the controls feel very friendly for adapting to touch screen. And another would have been to add difficulty levels, for example on hard, the monster eats more and more area to make it very difficult. I played the game twice and both times won, second time easily, so I might have played more if a higher difficulty setting was available. Of course balancing multiple different difficulty levels would be also more work. And, extra difficulty options are not as important as the very well made gameplay loop you already have.
Congratulation! This game is super addictive!
I won on my second attempt:
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Very lovely game, nice pacing and everything just works. Aesthetically solid, though perhaps could have a day-time labor music, something harmonious and then a wild sea track during night. Graphically perhaps monsters could have been more sea themed in a way to fit more, but that's for after-jam. Like some evil little cthulu octopus like things, mermaids, sirens who would perhaps scream from a distance- so you would need to focus on them first. Zombies wise a nice little look would be if a ghost ship brings them there~
Upgrades were really neat, there's a lot of routes to improve on which is nice and I can imagine so many possible updates about it, using the mouse for some special abilities for some monsters who are weaker to it and so on.
Overall loved it, was a really nice experience with so many options open to it.! lighthouse.png
Oh my lord! The amount of polishing in this game is insane, and you even did all of this under 72 hours! I'm totally impressed. The graphics is very well done, you even got animations for everything. And the sound effect is just chef-kiss, they're so crunching and satisfying so hear, at first I think it's missing some music, but the sound alone makes that doesn't matter anymore. One thing that bothers me was the wood requirement for many of tasks such as buying upgrades and repairing the lighthouse, it was a little bit too much compares to stones and irons, which makes it seem unbalanced because I had lots of stones left before the game ends.
Overall, this is definitely one of my favorite entries on LD, super well done! Can't wait for the postjam version if you ever planning to do so, it just has so much potential.
Well done! I was thinking "Where is the issue really?" and after a few rounds, by really blocking my way I understood, maybe I would have done it with less space to really make it happen before those situations where you really feel like you have limited space.
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Well done! Take a candy! :candy:
Coool coool.
This is a *professional* quality game. I had 2 runs - the first I died. The 2nd I beat it. But the fact the UI (and UX) is *so* good shows that you knew what you were doing. Professional quality, as mentioned - everything is *easy* to understand - what needs to be done, for which I say congratulations! As UI is not less trivial than anything else.
Game is beautiful, fun (addictive) with great sound and graphics. The only complaint? Not really a complaint, but ones you get the hang of it (a few crucial upgrades) - it becomes easy as others mentioned. That's fine by me, to be honest.
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You know what I am thinking? Another element, randomization element - this would make the game even more fun and *less* predictable. Don't know where it shall be put though. **Maybe**.. just an idea - every game has a different set of potential upgrades. **Maybe** these upgrades are randomly picked before the game! And you are made to use only them. Maybe. : )
Very solid and polished game! I like that the gathering is just proximity based with no button click, that it works if on all resources that are close enough, and that there are lighthouse upgrades that help with either resource gathering or defending. I can see this expanded with larger levels with more complicated paths, with a bigger upgrade tree, and with harder enemies. I'd be curious to play the next version of this!
Really good game. With some more variety in upgrades, enemies, content in general, I can see this being something I could pay a few $ to play with in an evening or two. It is quite fun and addictive but a little too easy - doesn't feel like there's a reason to replay it after finishing it. I'd make the difficulty slightly different (adaptable perhaps? So you're always on the edge of being killed) and scoring a bit clearer (right now, even with that end screen showing numbers, I have no clue what should I do differently to get a better score, so I don't feel motivated to retry). That's just nit-picking though. Really good game, I enjoyed it a lot.
That's a great game, especially impressive in 72h. There is nothing strongly problematic, if not the lack of instructions at the beginning (a usual problem: for the creator it's obvious, but the players are always stupid and impatient).
**The graphics** - First impression: "it's a farm simulator" when I saw the screenshots, knowing you have to collect resources. The character with his strawhat looked like a farmer rather than a lighthouse guardian, and there is so much vivid green. Maybe have more sea-oriented colours rather than pretty but generic bright colours (it's like the default in toon-shaded 3d, I don't know why). The more subdued colours of the menu seemed more appropriate (albeit with the risk of being too dull).
**The controls** - First impression: I was disturbed by the mix keyboard-mouse, and disliked how you can do everything with the keyboard but have to select the upgrades with the mouse. - It would be useful to have a "control instructions" button on the menu, the kind no one really look at, but is reassuring and gives an idea of what keys you will need. - I first struggle to turn the beam of light on its left since it was indicated "press A or D", but with my not Qwerty keyboard, I had to press Q instead of A. Small detail, but useful to keep in mind.
**The interface** - The font is not bad, but I feel like it could be better. Maybe because of the constrast with the logo font, more blocky and with more personality. - Overall, the buttons are fine, but I feel like they may be too boring, like not even so-neutral-you-don't-see-it. Maybe it's the contrast with the more vivid colours of the game. It's better than hard-to-understand or hard-on-the-eyes, though. - Most of the time, there is the right amount of padding, but it was taken aback by the buttons on the pause menu (too squeezed with the text too big). I also got this impression with the "Continue" button when you win or lose (also, it seems a little bit out of place in this context, being the only element with this yellow background, and there could be better words than "continue"). - First impression in the game: too much things. These elements (day bar, resources amount...) are obvious when you get a hang of it, but at first it's kind of overwhelming. This is when you understand how soothing are these banal obvious screens (an arrow pointing a highlighted interface "this is your healthbar, keep it from reaching 0"). It could seem superfluous and is superfluous for the players 15 seconds later, but this is why "skip" buttons exist.
**The resources** - I really like how spontaneous the collect was, especially when you were conditionned by Minecraft (and because of it I was expecting tools to be made). Also the way you bring items with you. - It would be nice to know how many items you can further take (maybe with a "capacity bar"). - I did never use the "drop" option, and it seems superfluous, at least with how the game is right now, since you kind of need all the resources in a limited time. It may be more useful in further releases if these are more inequal. - Unlike others, I was not bothered by how much wood you have to accumulate. To me, it's normal to have a difference between easy-to-get (wood) and rarer (iron). However, I don't know if stone is meant to be equal or slower to get than wood. - To know how many time you have to stay, a life bar could be useful (also for the ennemies), or better yet: different images to reflect the state of the tree or stone.
**The upgrades** - A more detailled description would be helpful, for example with percentages ("you get 50% faster"). - It would also help to know how the "allies" (thunder, seagull, canon) work. At first I was afraid it were a new mechanism to take account of, but was relieved when I discovered they were autonomous (though for futur release it could be interesting to combine autonomous allies and new weapons).
**Miscellaneous** - The fact I don't even notice the particles feedback is a testament of how good they are. Also the sounds. - It would be nice to have a day-evolution light, so you really feel the night coming. - The difficulty of the attacls. At first I thought "it's really easy", and then got killed. Monsters really do damage if they reach their destination, but once you are wary of this it is easy. - I did not immediately understand how red squares mean next destroyed. I thought than the attacks of the sea monster would be rising waters style. - I didn't feel very threatened by the missing space. Maybe there could be more missing chunks? Or have the missing zone deadly and you have to avoid it?
**Nitpicking** - In the menu, you can see aliasing between the 3D and the sea - At the night coming, you are rushing to the lighthouse, thinking being too late will be an immediate Game over. So it is funny how you can always collect resources, and how you can push the zombies. - Also I placed myself on the zone the sea monster will eat, telling myself it could be a good way to lose (but not expecting it since in the scope of the jam, this is a detail). Fortunately, I was not blocked. - Not really corresponding to the theme.
Well, very long comment this time. But it was so fun I was not bothered by testing and testing.
Thanks guys for giving me useful feedback and for the kind words also! I will develop this game post-jam so the things you mentioned will help me a lot <3 Also @aaln, wow thank you for such an extended and well-structured feedback! You have a very good eye for game design & testing - there are so many useful points I wasn't aware of and will help me a ton to improve the game!
One of the best games that I played! I managed to get 2580 points! All the things were very polished, the upgrades were very good and it gave you focus for each day on what things to gather. Absolutely wonderful! Good job my friend! Keep up!
Very good game, really interesting upgrade system. Really a game I'd enjoy to see fully developed
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By far one of my favorite games of the jam. A lot of polish and had all the functioning of a proper game. The game loop is fun too and continues to ramp the difficulty so that it is challenging but not frustrating. Very well done
This game was very fun to play. It instantly reminded me of Dome Keeper. The difficulty/balance was designed very well. I really liked the upgrades and the surrounding system. Each upgrade felt meaningful and I instantly had an idea which upgrade I want to follow next. Overall the game feels really polished.
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Beware the tentacles!! :smile:
Really fun game, I like tower defense games and I liked this one too. Managed to grind my way to repair tool and I saved my team! I might try again now that I know the game and try to get a better score and strategize better.
Lots of potential here to make it a full game. Well done!
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Very nice game, it's a lot of fun to play. The upgrades are also great. Above all, it looks very polished.
Congrats on scoring so highly in the Overall and Fun categories! I had a blast playing this one and I really love the mining/collecting polish and the upgrade tree. I honestly think this could be a really good base for a successful Steam game if you decide to expand it and add a larger variety of levels and enemies. Great work on the jam, and I hope you add more to the game soon!