FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Summoner Training Simulator

Summoner Training Simulator

By brainbetter

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1453.5830
Fun1463.5030
Innovation1023.6430
Theme654.0530
Graphics2133.2630
Audio713.7029
Humor913.3829
Mood2213.1430

Comments

comfylenny 2024-04-15 09:34

cute little puzzle game, very cozy music - i kinda like that you have to figure out the compatibilities yourself, but at the same time i caught myself just brute forcing around the glyphs until it works out

xakkar 2024-04-16 22:05

Nice puzzle game)

lelek-hunor-kadosa 2024-04-16 22:09

I couldn't figure out how the runes worked. I only solved every level by blind luck. A love the texts and the humor.

kleinzach 2024-04-16 22:10

I liked the writing, and the puzzles were fun! I don't think there were quite enough levels to teach some of the glyphs, but I eventually got it with a bit of trial and error. Well done!

redmori 2024-04-16 22:14

Once I started really considering why certain combinations work, I began fully appreciating the puzzles. Fun to play around with the glyphs and nice snippets between the puzzles.

magnat 2024-04-16 22:17

Nice puzzle game, but I would have liked more levels and one with way more elements to place

vaustxiii 2024-04-16 22:21

That was pretty fun! Guessing the rules kinda reminded me of "Understand". The color scheme could be improved a bit in my opinion and sounds bugged out for me sometimes. But other than that, it is a really nice game with a cool concept!

coffie 2024-04-16 22:26

Great puzzle game! I loved the small details (especially the music changing when connecting incorrect pieces). I unfortunately couldn't figure out the solution to some of the puzzles and the website keeps refreshing on Safari due to "using too much memory" (I'm on your side, I don't think it is).

And yet, this is one of my favorite entries so far!

talon24 2024-04-16 22:27

Cool puzzle game, i felt like those graph theory courses are finally paying off Good audio as well, only qualm is sometimes i had multiple element symbols stuck on my cursor

brainbetter 2024-04-17 05:27

Reading everyone's comments while I'm at a tech conference and I'm really glad for all the feedback.

A few replies to things: * I agree that there should be more puzzles! My plan was to write more once I got the deployment working, and... that took me right to the end of the compo. Making games is hard! Once we're safely done with LD I hope to go back and add more levels to a "post-LD" version. A few of the folks watching in my Twitch chat also had ideas for levels, which I asked them not to share until later because I was doing compo and that was too close to teamwork for me, so I'll hopefully get those in as well. * The memory issue on Mac browsers is unfortunately a Godot 4 known issue. It means I can't play it on my laptop, either! I'm hoping it will eventually be resolved, but I only discovered it in the final hours of the compo. * The multiple glyphs on the cursor was an issue I encountered during testing and fixed on my machine, but clearly I didn't fix it everywhere! If anyone experiences it, I'd love to know what environment you're playing in, and ideally what you did that got it to happen. I'm using the same dragging behavior in my non-LD games, and so I really want to make sure that particular bug is eliminated!

Thank you all for the feedback; it means a lot to me to know folks had a bit of fun with my game.

laulau 2024-04-17 16:17

really fun! took a while to figure out the neighbour thing, but from then on it was just pure mental power. bummer to see it was so short!

patrick-pang 2024-04-19 03:09

It really looks like some of the programming teaching software I use hahaha. Nice concept design, I love this game!

kinart 2024-04-20 03:16

Man, what a tight little puzzle game. I can't say that I figured out the logic, but I enjoyed brute forcing each puzzle so much. I think it was really the sound design that made it so satisfying. That was a great thought.

jk5000 2024-04-20 07:02

A fun and well made little puzzle game. Well done.

hexy 2024-04-20 12:08

Great audio design with a solid puzzle mechanic that takes a while to fully learn how to appreciate. Before then, it did feel like stumbling in the dark. Of course given the time limit it can't always be easy to teach a player the inner workings of a puzzle but with more work spent on this after the compo is over I can see this having legs to walk on. Well done! As for the cursor issue, I experienced it on the WebGL build in Chrome and it tended to happen if two glyphs were close to eachother although it would also sometimes happen after placing a glyph, hope that helps!

fabula-rasa 2024-04-21 00:02

It's the best compo entry I had a pleasure of playing this jam. Music is very nice, and fitting to the atmosphere. SFX are also good. The visuals are not complicated (and obviously, I would not expect them to be), but they are pleasant, communicative and have good color choices.

The puzzle mechanics work well - you are given pointers and left to discover what works on your own. I like sch experimentation approach. Maybe we are missing some penalties for mistakes. But on the other hand, that would change the vibe of the game. At the moment, it's a chill experience. And an amusing one as well - the writing is very nice.

I didn't encounter any bugs (or demon bugs) during my playthrough. Very well done!

And now I'm off to summon a demon that looks like a giant rabbit (*strolls away*).

vivid-hallucination 2024-04-21 01:17

Feels cozy. Lesson 6 took me a minute to break down. If I'm honest I hadn't entirely internalized the logic of the different elements until then (I was sorta flailing about and guessing successfully) so that felt like ending on a real test. It was satisfying to unwind.

Loved the humorous bits of *history* and *science* interspersed.

dimesto52 2024-04-21 09:12

this game looks a lot like a MasterMind for me ^^ it was very nice to find the right combinations

dzejpi 2024-04-22 07:33

Great humor and neatly executed. Music fits extremely well together. I would certainly welcome some further explanation with the stones, it was mostly a guessing game for my smooth brain. Some people mentioned having some issues on Macs (but still being able to play), which made me curious - it seems that you're using Godot 4. I thought that web exports don't work on Macs there at all, and that's why I use 3.5, so, I have to check that out, would be happy to move to 4.2 for jams too. :)

pebkac 2024-04-22 16:01

It very much nailed the tone it was going for! I could solve all the puzzles by just shuffling around the sigils, I didn't really get a feel about what symbols would want what neighbours. Not sure if that was the intended method of play. The buzz when symbols were conflicting, I could have done without... Still, neat to see you managed this many puzzles!

brainbetter 2024-04-23 16:43

@dzejpi I would not say that Godot 4.2 "works" with Macs. During the last two hours of the compo, I got a pile of folks testing it on various machines (a benefit of streaming the dev process!) and it didn't quite work properly for anyone. I think one or two people were able to interact with the game, but failure modes ranged between "the browser hangs for a very long time" and "things outright crash." I did get a small number of reports of "merely" very bad lag followed by some playability, but I'm not sure I'd rely on them - especially given how very non-real-time my game is, I suspect anything with a more active play loop is even more prone to failure.

If I'd realized the 4.x web export was this broken on Mac before I started, I would not have built this on the 4.x line.

dzejpi 2024-04-23 18:19

Ah, @brainbetter, good to know! I tried it on my personal Mac and it hanged too, but I was like: "This machine works weirdly anyway," so, I dismissed it, haha. Thank you for the detailed info. Then I will rather keep sticking with 3.5 for the jams. I sure hope that web exports will be resolved and improved soon; Godot 4 has fantastic things in it and it's a bummer that HTML5 exportrs are plagued with this many issues.

hexstart 2024-04-25 22:20

I feel like I stumbled through early puzzles by trial and error and didn't gain enough understanding to tackle the later ones. Maybe the game could use a couple more "onboarding" levels? I liked the overall idea and the way audio cues were implemented.

brainbetter 2024-04-26 01:30

@hexstart I'm certainly hoping to put together a post-jam version of this with a bit more of an intentional difficulty ramp, and more ways to help folks get to know what the glyphs do. One unforeseen consequence of doing all my development on a stream was that the friends I got to playtest the final version had all been around for some of the design conversations, so nobody was truly coming at it from a blank slate. Definitely something I hope to improve in a version 2!