Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD60 → My First Game Ever
By sameh
🤖 AI-Assisted
| Percentile | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | LD60 | Ever | |
| Overall | 4 | |||||
| Fun | 3 | |||||
| Innovation | 4 | |||||
| Theme | 4 | |||||
| Graphics | 4 | |||||
| Audio | 3 | |||||
| Humor | 3 | |||||
| Mood | 4 | |||||
congrats on a first game after three weeks of learning! the gear train idea is a good fit for the theme. one practical thing: the build is fixed 1920x1080, so on a normal laptop the itch embed cuts off the bottom and i couldnt see the end of the tutorial. a fullscreen button or smaller embed size would fix it
Congratulations on this. Very unique and interresting take on the theme. For me I could not really understand what I needed to do. But well done.
Congratulations on making your first-ever game! It's great that you joined the LD community.
At the moment, this first experiment feels more like a prototype than a fully fledged game, but that's completely normal. We all started somewhere!
Here are a few things I'd suggest thinking about:
1. **Give the player a reason to connect the gears.** What is the goal behind arranging them in a particular way? Maybe each level could be a new, increasingly complex mechanism that you need to get running. You could communicate that with background artwork alone. Once there's some context, each puzzle can become more emotionally engaging too.
2. **Introduce the mechanics gradually.** Use the first level, or the first couple of levels, to teach the player the different aspects of the game one at a time.
3. **Reduce the room for unintentional mistakes.** Right now, it feels as though roughly 90% of the available actions lead to something that doesn't work, with very few that do. I don't mean incorrect puzzle solutions; I mean how placing and connecting the gears works. For example, you can put a gear anywhere on the screen, even somewhere it won't connect to anything or do anything.
One possible solution would be to create fixed axle slots that the gears snap onto. You could arrange those slots so that gears placed on them can mesh with neighbouring gears, depending on whether their teeth actually reach each other. That way, the player can focus on figuring out the mechanism rather than struggling to find a valid placement.
4. **Give the ending an emotional payoff.** It would be great to finish with something that gives the player a sense of closure. There are many ways to do this.
For Example: - You could establish who the player is, develop their story through the levels, and bring it to a conclusion at the end. - Alternatively, building on the idea of mechanisms, each level could involve repairing a separate mechanical device. After completing the final one, you could reveal that all these devices are physically connected and show them working together. The player would realise that, step by step, they've repaired something much bigger: perhaps a production line or one large machine made up of all those smaller mechanisms. These devices don't have to exist in the real world, either. You can invent something completely imaginary, as long as the way it works makes sense. These are just examples of how you could create that final payoff. There are countless other possibilities to brainstorm!
Good luck with this jam, and especially with your future projects and jams. Come back and join us again, and **welcome to the gamedev!**