Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD60 → Dialup Debug
By maxwe59 and robertbrown
🤖 AI-Assisted
| Percentile | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | LD60 | Ever | |
| Overall | 15 | |||||
| Fun | 14 | |||||
| Innovation | 16 | |||||
| Theme | 16 | |||||
| Graphics | 16 | |||||
| Audio | 14 | |||||
| Humor | 10 | |||||
| Mood | 14 | |||||
I liked the concept, and the visuals and controls felt smooth. I struggled to figure out how to play, though—the tutorial didn’t make the goal or the main mechanics clear to me. A short guided example at the start would help. I’d like to give it another try once I understand it better!
The graphics and the mechanic are insane! Love it!
at first it was quite confusing, but i think i enjoyed the brevity of this game. maybe on startup you could've shown both Monitor and Keyboard. I was confused by the on screen keyboard at first. All in all a good fit for the theme and a nice package.
The graphics are nice and the concept intriguing!
I didn't quite understand what I could do aside from try keys, and hope I get lucky finding the letters I'm looking for, and that the letters I needed weren't too far from each other. A lot of info is thrown at the player right away, so maybe just start in split mode, and make it clear all you have to do on level 1 is type a short word. I'm not convinced the scrambling is a good mechanic here. I think it'd work better as a movement puzzle on a keyboard with mechanics that get more complex over time. But maybe I'm missing something.
Overall, very cool game!
Peak game, it's so polished, the split mode was particularly cool and the gameplay was pretty fun :)
The concept here is quite interesting, and I really, really think the graphics here are great. There isn't a single part of this game I don't enjoy looking at, and I appreciate especially how the help system is an always-accessible window on the PC screen.
I do think the puzzle here is genuinely too complex. I don't know if it's randomly chosen or if it's hardcoded, but I found myself unable to discern any sort of pattern in level 2, which is the first level where there actually is some scrambling that takes place! This gave me little hope of progressing, so I simply gave up. I realize you didn't have an in-game tutorial, but you could pull a page from what other puzzle games do and make the first few levels very simple and teach one mechanic at-a-time. For example, level 2 could be only one change that's extremely easy to visualize (row swap, opposite letter, etc.), level 3 could be a different swap on its own, etc. From there, later levels can start to combine them, now that the user has the pattern down. If level 2 was already only one mechanic, I genuinely think that mechanic is too complex as the first one to show the user.
On a more minor note, the beeping of the monitor became quite annoying quite quickly. I think the game could benefit from having it not beep while looking at the keyboard to allow one to focus.
Overall, I think the idea here is extremely solid! I mainly think it needs a pass from a first-time player experience standpoint before it's able to really shine.
love the UI and graphics! the audio really adds to the ambience too
I love the concept of this game, but I feel like it needs balancing. Normally, I love letter puzzle games, but this one initially just frustrated me. And I don't think that needs to be the case!
Firstly, the move cost of the lady bug seems too high. Even if you have the right answer, you might not have the moves left to enter it. A simple answer like "cow" already costs 17 points, and that's if you can enter it right away. For an answer like "antartica" you have to play near perfectly just to be able to enter it in. This feels overly punishing.
Additionally, having the hashmap in alphabetical order hurts rather than helps. Perhaps for some codes the alphatical order will help, but for the simple "ABC-order" puzzle it made things much harder for me. Even when the game gave me the answer, I struggled to double-check it. In a second playthrough I ignored the hashmap entirely and solved the third puzzle much more easily. Perhaps you can provide the player a few different ways they can view the order of the letters, including one that's a translation from QWERTY?
You can also consider zoning the puzzles to only include sections of the keyboard, especially at the start of the game. That way you can more gradually increase the difficulty level and even offer a wider variety of codes.
Overall, I liked the tactility of making the ladybug hop around and having to switch between screens added to this tactile feel. I also enjoyed, to some extent, needing to be smart with how I had her hop to my destination (I enjoyed it less when I could see that I'd run out of moves no matter how I hopped :P). I also think there's a basis here for making many more puzzles than are in the game currently. I just wonder how you might adjust the difficult to be more welcoming and forgiving.
Oh, and the switching views with ESC didn't work for me on Chrome! On Mozilla it worked fine.
Really cool idea! I honestly didn't expect to see a game where you play as a little ladybug trying to fix a broken keyboard. That's such a creative take on the Old Tech theme! I especially like how you turned something as simple as typing into an actual puzzle, where you have to figure out the scrambled keys while carefully planning your moves.
The whole retro computer aesthetic fits the concept really well, and the little ladybug makes it even more charming. I think having a proper tutorial inside the game would help a lot, since the mechanics can be a bit confusing at first. But the idea itself is genuinely interesting, and I love seeing unusual puzzle mechanics like this at Ludum Dare. Nice work, guys!