Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → 3mpty
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ๐ฅ | 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | AnathemA | jam | Mood | 4.62 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | AnathemA | jam | 48 | 4.23 | 4.18 | 3.38 | 3.90 | 4.47 | 4.00 | 4.62 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Derro Delivery | jam | 162 | 4.01 | 3.74 | 3.68 | 4.51 | 4.25 | 4.09 | 4.01 | 4.23 | |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Criticality | jam | 221 | 3.93 | 3.65 | 3.68 | 4.02 | 3.64 | 2.55 | 3.48 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Stasis Break | jam | 441 | 3.75 | 3.71 | 3.54 | 3.73 | 4.30 | 3.81 | 3.68 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | soliloquy | jam | 3.21 | 3.14 | 3.41 | 2.92 | 4.00 | 3.25 | 3.25 | |||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | ๐ฅ | GAIZAN : JUSTICE WAR | jam | 276 | 3.71 | 3.75 | 3.07 | 3.26 | 3.81 | 3.63 | 3.43 | 3.68 |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Low Power - Energy Management RTS | jam | 250 | 3.62 | 3.41 | 3.37 | 3.75 | 3.75 | 2.86 | 2.53 | 2.82 |
Really felt fresh despite being based on an old formula, really impressed by the polish! In the end I didn't really pay attention to the orders and just matched as fast as I could and did pretty well... Maybe a bit too forgiving? Love the art!
Could really use some sound and a bit of visual feedback for each attack. I like the concept, nice presentation and good art.
This is really really good. Love the attention to detail and franticness.
My favourite game so far!
Love the concept, always wanted to try it. Music was sadly grating to the ears, other sounds were ok though.
Love the artstyle!
Love the art style. Game has a nice feel to it, the enemy designs are super cool. Mechanically was a little simple, kinda feels unintuitive that locking on to more enemies kills them slower, I feel like you should reward that behaviour with more damage or a combo or something since it's hard to keep lots of enemies locked on. The rotating camera kinda disoriented me a lot too. Really like it despite that stuff though, the enemy designs are super distinctive and cool.
Gun feedback was not very good, the sound is acceptable but the lack of tracers and bullet impacts really hurts the game feel. Enemies also don't react to damage until destroyed. The general art is pretty lacklustre too, a simple light source would have made the game much more visually appealing. Lack of variety in weapons and enemies makes this a very boring point and click adventure. Either polishing the existing mechanics by improving weapon and damage feedback, or adding more interesting mechanics than a basic hitscan weapon would go a long way for a simple game like this.
Game didn't start :(
Music is cool, I like the angular weapon swings. Little to no feedback on hitting enemies though, could really use a sound or a damage flash to indicate when someone is getting hit/killed. Really nice visual style, all this needed was a little more polish on player movement and combat feedback and it'd be excellent.
Music was good, I like the premise. Reading the crew logs was fun, but sadly there weren't many entries so it got a bit repetitive after the 2nd or 3rd system.
Game play is a bit slow, too much waiting. Combat could have used a bit more flair too, attack effects existed but weren't very showy. The crystal towers looked awesome and the unit designs were pretty good too. The dice rolling system was super cool though I wish it bounced off units/towers. The grid based movement system is super impressive and the game has a lot of nice UI features like zooming in/out and rotating which are super welcome, but I wish the gameplay itself was a little stronger.
Overall solid game. I like it.
I like it. Chill. UI could be a bit nicer (mainly everything is too hard to read, it's all so small!) a nice little fishing simulator :)
A little too easy and lacking depth. What is there is nice, the visual style is alright and the art is consistent. Sound is good but could be improved.
Design wise I feel this is far too simple, some bonus rewards for hitting multiple enemies in one shot would be nice, additionally a bit more complexity in enemy design and variety would go a long way.
Almost there, just needs a bit more to it
Decent use of lighting. The overall visuals were pretty nice but could have been a little less repetitive. Platforming was frustrating for the most part, finicky controls and glitchy platform collisions are pretty painful when every jump is costing you health. This game really would have benefited from a bit more time spent on improving platforming controls and making the levels flow a bit more nicely.
No idea what's going on but the art is pretty nice. Really liked the comic panel that popped up randomly (was that gameover lol?)
Wish it didn't make a PEW PEW PEW sound every 2 seconds though
Really visually appealing, simple but nice graphics and animations, menus etc. surprisingly polished too. Game itself is a little simple, could use a bit more depth. My main complaint is clicking is slightly unresponsive, sometimes i click but the tile doesnt rotate, losing me time which kinda sucks.
Decent game, nice level of polish.
Like the VA. I think for a simple concept like this working on more juice is a good idea. Maybe some screen shake, visual effects etc. to give the game a bit more.
Music was nice, but I didn't feel it was appropriate for the tone of the game though.
Lighting is really nice and used well to highlight where objectives are when offscreen, I really like that. The platforming controls on the other hand are very unresponsive wall jumping and sliding in particular is very finicky and inconsistent, a lot of the level design is repetitive and the extremely harsh spike hitboxes make it a bit of a chore to play.
Needs a lot of work on refining the platforming mechanics.
The art style was decent, and the portal/pickup design was nice and had nice animation.
Seemed really hard to gain energy, so I got stuck on the second level. I like the idea of expanding on asteroids on an interesting way, the player making their own powerups to pick up is cool!
Very difficult. I understand you're trying to send a message but it didn't really come through very strong in the gameplay itself, the game feels unfair rather than trying to teach a lesson. Pretty standard TD, build up resources, defend, etc.
The UI needs work, having the sell button right next to the power button cost me at least 3 towers, which I think is unnacceptable. If I'm going to lose it should be because of poor judgment, not because the sell button is right next to the power button.
Overall a decent TD. Would like to see it improved on.
Couldn't get it to work :(
Interesting little concept. Is the idea they tell you who the mutineer is on the first day because they're still loyal? Cause that seems to be the pattern. Excellent art.
Seemed a bit harsh considering how little view distance you have to plan and how thick the asteroid belt is. I really liked the visuals, in particular the aiming lasers for the projectiles had a nice feel to them.
Love the sounds, rare to play a jam game that actually makes me smile too, the humor is there but not overbearing which is great. Mechanically it's a bit eh, pretty simple just mash keys to get through. I didn't like the level design, getting trapped in a maze with no way out kinda feels bad, wanted to explore more of the game and a repetitive maze ain't so great. Regardless, I really liked this one, lots of fun and a great premise.
Really frantic once I figured it out, could use a little more depth but I like it! I don't like right trigger and right bumper being the only controls though, mashing them gets painful quick! Maybe next time use the left buttons and the right buttons rather than loading it all on the right.
Selection icon works correctly in the windows build, UI was build for 1820x1080, I tried to make it work on other resolutions but ran out of time to make it perfect. Sorry for any inconvenience!
Look to the north on No Mercy. The timer freeze isn't a bug ;) @drury
Press space to continue to the combat phase @tero-pulkinnen
Yeah it's a known issue but I don't want to patch it since the jam is over. Everything else seems to work, seems to be due to something with the viewport not matching correctly in webGL
@rubyleehs can you explain what you mean by tower placement OCD?
Yes. enemies are meant to continue during build phase.
I absolutely ADORE the artstyle, you nailed the prerendered PS2/PSX era 3d graphics with prerendered lighting and it's fucking GORGEOUS!
I can totally understand why you didn't have time for VFX because of that, but I really can't help but feel this game really needed some explosions and laser beams to really sell the action, keyboard input would have been nice too. Absolutely awesome game, I love it.
I like the visuals and the animal caravan mechanic felt pretty cool, bringing 20 animals along with you feels nice.
Really smooth gameplay, love the game feel, everything feels just right. You really feel squishy.
The gameplay was really novel and also enjoyable, it was nice seeing a kind of snake style puzzle game with a new twist, and getting myself in and out of sticky situations was nice.
Kinda wish there was some use for body length asside from the victory condition. I like that there are tradeoffs to be made and your body can be used to wall off enemies, but other than that it felt a tiny bit underused. Overall, outstanding submission!
Cute concept, wish there was a little more to the minigames, typing game felt very responsive and enjoyable to play though. Great art and sound!
Looks great, some really high quality effects here, the lock on system made it far too difficult to kill enemies though, so I just dodged everything.
I think the game pacing is a bit too slow, I didn't finish it because I think it would take a really long time to save up and each level is basically the same.
I'll drop a hotfix for the softlock at some point
GAIZAN: JUSTICE NEVER SLEEPS edition has been released which addresses most game breaking bugs. Download at your own discretion.
@jasond the movement rehaul got axed around 1am in favor of making the hud and intro sequence.
from your review I think I made the right choice ;)
@jason-lothamer levels are randomly constructed from a list of room variants, there are about 6 unique room layouts and each room has 2-3 variations with different spawns so there are around 15 rooms total.
enemy weapons are also randomized making each room play slightly differently
It looks great and I like the animations but I honestly have no idea what I'm doing, nor whether I'm making good or bad decisions... I tried 3 runs and lost on the 2nd sacrifice every time so I have no idea what I'm meant to do to move forward.
Love the graphics, interesting concept but buying things that pay out dividends makes you infinitely rich pretty quick.
Really needs a bit more oomph behind attacks (particles and sounds PLEASE!), and some more obvious feedback for what you're doing, highlighting the enemy you're currently attacking for example would go a long way.
I love the environment despite its lack of textures, some nice models here and good scene composition. The animations are nice too. Great job producing all that content!
Simple but effective, very polished, great sound design that was honestly pretty creepy. Good game!
I like how much art there is and while the sounds are classic sfxr, they're used well and feel good. Decent platforming controls, solid all around game
mood is good, art is wonderful, this game is way too unforgiving with rng mechanics, archers in particular seem to be able to shoot whenever they want and just get cheap kills on you since they seem to be able to shoot faster than you can block if they so choose. not very fun dying to archers randomly firing shots when you go for the attack.
Really impressed by the visuals and the number of minigames, I wish the minigames were a bit more fun in general but regardless, very impressive. The sound design was great and I quite liked the environment + lighting
Interesting mechanic being able to place your opponent, but besides that I don't really get it. I think the most important thing to work on here is controls, they are far too slidey and dont really feel good, so I would focus on that during your next jam.
Gameplay was a little monotonous, wish the was a bit more variety to combat, controlling the ship was also pretty clunky...
Gorgeous level design, I'd recommend looking into shaders to do some vertex wobble for the ocean next time ;)
I absolutely love the art style, the ships, the planet, the islands, everything works wonderfully together and it's super colorful and fun to look at!
The sphere system worked great, really impressive work there
that's not exactly how it works but maybe a subtle message isn't the point.
i liked it :)
Interesting take on the life sim genre, I like the idea of combining monster parts. Wish we saw more of the monsters though and some sounds would have gone far. Overall, pretty good.
Short but sweet, superb art and everything just works together nicely, well crafted and polished, sounds great, plays smooth. Love the ending
Really good sound art and animation, character control was nice and the level design was nice and led you down the right paths.
Didn't like the camera controls, it really spoiled the rest of the really good game. Also the controls are kinda whack, mouse based movement in a game like this feels really awkward.
Awesome work overall.
Also controlling a physics based skull is genius. Brilliant start to the game.
I love the art style and the animations are awesome. Didn't really understand combat though, possibly a bit hard? I was pretty lost.
Loved it, most fun I've had so far, kinda wish it introduced new mechanics a teeny bit faster and I didn't understand when the level would end, but otherwise it was great, awesome music and the sound effects are cute. Awesome game.
Good overall, lots of content, enjoyable hexen/doom homage.
I really liked the variety in enemies, not a huge fan of the animated delay on throwing a spear, and I extremely dislike the blood mechanic, honestly not sure what the point of punishing the player for killing enemies and exploring the level is. Those are the two most important things in a doom clone.
Overall very good, but taking continual free damage from the floor hurts it severely.
The sound needs work, very harsh.
Love the audio, cute art. Hopefully you can get further along in your next one!
Not gonna lie I laughed a bit when it just instantly shut itself down.
Super fun game flow, LOVE the music, and especially the USAGE of the music, it really sells the silly lighthearted setting.
I felt the time might have been a little harsh, but I guess I won on my 3rd attempt, so it wasn't overly difficult. The hex + shop idea is good, although personally I think the hexes might add up a bit too quickly if you fall behind which is a bit nasty...
The final boss encounter was incredible, I liked the part where he did that huge BZWEWEW attack, and the huge sweeping laser beam, not to mention the really clever thing I won't spoil here.
Gonna comment on the music again cause it was so good and so perfectly timed, I had a grin on my face the whole time. Great job!
Outstanding concept, unfortunately there were a few instances where the sound desynced for me, and when nobody did anything there was an awkward musical gap
That said, the core concept is AWESOME, when the system was working perfectly it felt really good having the music match up directly to the players actions, super super cool
The procedurally generated music is... interesting...
I really like the game feel, although the screen shake was just a little too high, made me feel a little dizzy. I like the combo system, but it was really hard to get a combo over 3 or 4, not sure how to fix that. I wanted to play aggressively but I didn't feel like I could?
The loop level generation is sweet! really cool concept, feels like there's genuinely something there. very trippy.
I went the wrong way at the start and died :P
Really nice concept, never seen a lasso used as a real weapon in a game before so that was pretty sweet Combat was mostly tight, some enemies were annoying to fight (ranged enemies backed against a wall are really hard to pry loose) The final boss was really cool and exactly what I was hoping for, a nice use of the mechanics coming together for a challenging fight. I had some huge lag issues on the last boss which I assume were due to some kind of leak? It seemed the more I used the lasso the harder the game lagged to a point it was unplayable. After a bunch of retries I got there using the lasso less and didn't encounter the lag.
The sound and art were great, overall an incredibly strong jam game that was really enjoyable
FYI both of the links to your teammates are 404ing for me
Alright, but extremely difficult The players movement feels a bit too slow for my taste, and enemy aim felt a bit inconsistent, sometimes they would snap on and delete you, other times they take ages to line up a shot, which makes it a bit harder to line up the kills. Potentially some kind of visible charge meter on their attack could help you time it? I'm not sure
Really cool concept and great graphics, solid game, I just wish it had a touch more polish and it'd be amazing. Great job!
I laughed my ass off as soon as I realised what was happening, hilarious concept for a game. The physics were a bit of a pain in the ass, possibly because of browser mode, but I was able to play after some practice. Love the humor, love the graphics, I love how I got so mad I mashed the keys and actually jammed one of them in the phone, I assume that's a joke but I still laughed my ass off when it happened. Great concept and pretty good execution, I just wish the physics were a bit less hostile.
The learning curve was really steep, but once I finally got it, it was a lot of fun.
One thing in particular, I kept dying around 1000 points, and the first 500~ points worth of enemy ships are way too easy, I felt like I was going from braindead to absolutely insane attack pattern instantly with no smooth transition
Otherwise the mechanic is really neat, and while really hard to get a grasp on initially is a lot of fun once you perservere long enough to actually understand how to use it effectively, there was a fair bit of depth that just came out of the mechanics of the map and enemy behaviour, which was awesome, I almost ragequit after 10 deaths but it was worth sticking it out when I finally 'got it'
@literally-void is that due to me renaming the folder? I think I can fix that
@malai I'll investigate tonight, thanks for the report! (I don't have a mac so I can't test these builds properly, huge apologies)
@aquanim thanks for sticking with it and getting through the whole game! it's definitely a little challenging but I wanted to really make the player have to use the mechanic to get through
@edalbung thanks for your comment! Enemies are intentionally spongey to encourage you to use the time warp, if you could just dodge bullets and kill every enemy without using the time warp it wouldn't really be as important if you know what I mean. Idk if there's a better way to encourage the mechanic, the scoring system rewards you for good time warp use but I don't think scoring systems are strong enough encouragement to get people to play in the most interesting way
@herman-chau thanks for the comment, and I'm really glad someone paid attention to the scoring mechanics!
(Scoring spoilers) Score is determined by a few things:
Kills (Kills that happen multiple times due to rewinding time DO count, so rewinding after a bloodbath can increase your score, each ship is worth 100*base hp points)
Reflecting bullets (when you phase back in, bullets near your ship turn into missiles, you get a multiplier for each projectile you reflect in one 'batch', so big reflects are worth more)
Picking up hourglasses (1000x the number of hourglasses you have after picking it up)
You lose 4000 points on being hit by an enemy
With these rules I'm not actually sure what the skill cap on scoring highly is, but I think a skilled shmup player (with a bit of practice) could easily smash my high scores, which sit at around 40-50k per level. Having an interesting score system was really important to me and I think I did an ok job, but I think the general audience of a game jam don't really care as much about score as more hardcore shmup players.
I wanted score numbers to pop up to make the system a little more transparent, but it got cut at the end in favor of making the 2nd level.
Really interesting premise, I like the idea of musical weaponry a lot. Maybe having weapon shots line up on the beat could be cool, instead of the player triggering them manually. This could let you have an actual song play.
I think a major issue is the ui is unclear, text on each cassette blends in (black on black) and I'm assuming the thing on the left was my health gauge.
I'm not sure if something was broken but I couldn't seem to deal damage or receive damage. Finally I feel enemies came onscreen too quickly and moved too fast, so there wasnt any time to properly dodge and engage them (had attacks actually worked)
Overall, a devent attempt, the core concept was good, hopefully you will be able to make something better next time!
Cool concept, great art (and really slick palette choice)
My high score is 9440 because I'm a badass who doesn't even need time powers and I just defused it first try by guessing.
Awesome reimagining of defender It felt really cool trying to aim shots at the enemies on the other side of the core I found the player moves so fast it was hard to move around safely, and enemy patterns would appear on top of me sometimes so I would get hit
Overall really awesome concept, I would totally play a full game of this, such a unique perspective on a shmup, it's awesome!!
Very cool, seems a bit easy but I guess maybe it'll be harder for later generations once resources like water trickle down. It wasn't clear how ore and oil are replenished so I didn't use them at all
More importantly holy crap you guys implemented a whole strategic base management game that looks good, even ignoring the multiplayer aspect this is extremely impressive stuff
Cute mechanic, I like the continual solver. The graphics are minimalist but effective and look nice. My main gripe is it's hard to click on moving planets, maybe a bigger hitbox for clicks would have helped. Overall solid little game!
Character moves a bit slow and I found the reset mechanic is more annoying than helpful. Possibly because of the movement speed.
Kudos for making a working harvest moon clone in 72 hours, really impressive
very cute the colors were a little washed out though, maybe try tweaking your materials and shaders in unity to make the colors pop more?
i like the mushrooms
Neat visuals, cool idea using the slice but I guess it's mostly for gore? Didn't really have an ygameplay ramifications.
I had severe performance issues in the browser, and the inverted mouse + mouselook speed being tied to frame rate unfortunately gave me a bit of motion sickness. I think looking at those fundamentals (mouselook in particular) and polishing up that code would go a really long way.
I like the toon art style, very stylised!
Cool mechanic I felt there were actually too many levels, many puzzles were no brainers I really really like that everything can be interacted with, buttons, physics props, doors, if it does something you can reverse it!
I like the concept, hit a bit too close to home with recent times and doing a game jam...
Great music and I like the consistent art-style!
I'm so confused Donut
I really love surrealism in games so this hit all the right buttons, the color palette choice is great. It's also really fun to try and go as fast as you can without falling out of the map.
Next time I think you should try experimenting with unity's material and shader systems to get some even more creative visuals, you can do some pretty exciting stuff just by playing around and breaking things!
This is the most experimental game I've seen for this jam The music slaps and the visuals are certainly something I'm not 100% sure what I experienced but keep doin' what you do cause it's working
@jakob-reborn I clicked through about 5 or 6 of the dudes in the tunnel then floated out to the big man in the sky and he shot some ufos out, not sure if thats the end but I couldn't figure out where to go next
Your tutorial popups and text in general was really hard to read because of the low contrast, generally it's better to consistently use 1 bright font color on a dark background without changing colors constantly, red text on black is also hard to read, and white text on a multicolored background is... a cardinal sin...
I wasn't really sure what the goal was for the first 3 or 4 loops, I thought I was dying when I hit the goal because I hit the red section and everything reset. I think a little fanfare would be good when you hit a goal, a particle effect or a positive noise could really make it more clear you did something good.
Lastly the rotation mechanic was interesting, it reminded me a bit of super hexagon in some ways. Congratulations on finishing your game in time!
I really like the visual style, minimalist linework is really good. One thing that irked me was some drawings had lines of significantly different scales (the birds in particular had really thin lines while everything else was thick) I think keeping the line sizes more consistent would make the already good art style even better.
Really impressive to have multiple minigames at once telling a story, that's bold for a jam and I respect it.
Finally I like the concept, cute little retrospective piece, I like it!
Weird concept, very difficult and easy to get overwhelmed, might have needed some mechanic that stops the player getting shot from 2 directions at once?
Love the art style and kinda surrealistic feeling of the game, very whacky and kinda silly?
Really good if a little disturbing, great art cute concept, a little too real perhaps
Bright and colorful, wish there were more obstacles maybe
Not sure why sprint is on a key when you always want to sprint, maybe just have the character always run next time?
Pretty cool, I found the intermission between rounds a bit jarring though
Why am I picking up green things again?
Very smooth and polished though, I like it
Looks and sounds great, the gameplay left a bit to be desired, enemies only spawn at the top and don't really do anything exciting, the players moveset is a little overdone, the players hitbox and weapon behaviour are also a bit clunky...
I think it missed the mark on the jam's theme but easily makes up for it with gorgeous sprite work. I can't stress enough how nice this spritework is
the art is absolutely gorgeous, but every item I picked up just phased out of existence, and I could walk through locked doors, really pretty but I have no idea how to play it or win
Simple fun effective, I like the minimalist visuals, really nails the retro vibe. I also have to say this is the worst planetary defense system in the history of planetary defense systems, why can it ONLY shoot at earth?
Really cool concept, I love the idea of driving around the moon, it's pretty relaxed and comfy which is nice.
I think a little music here and there could spruce it up, and maybe a little more interaction, it would have been cool to have a laser to mine the diamonds maybe.
The vehicle controls great and while it accelerates a little slowly it felt really good to drive in general, really impressive vehicle physics.
Interesting concept, I really like the subtlety of the mechanic I won't spoil for other users, although maybe it could have ramped up a little faster, I didn't notice it until objective 5.
Definitely a great twist on the normal text adventure formula, I like it!
Cool little sim, I really like the TTD style city that builds itself over time.
I found it pretty hard to balance structures, once a building was cold it was kinda a pain to warm it back up again, perhaps if a building has the right value it could slowly move back towards the correct temperature? You could still have that transition be really slow, so a skilled player could warm or cool the building faster, but if you're concentrating on other things you can trust a building will go back to the right temp on it's own.
I also found the input system a little confusing at first, I like that you can lay pipes in any shape you like, but I was often stuck in a ui mode without realising, because the only way to turn off a construction mode was to click the cancel button. I think right click or escape to cancel current action would help make it a lot more intuitive, as that's a pretty common pattern in games like this.
I really like the little village aesthetic and the music is spot on, loving the old sim game vibes.
Decent start to a geometry wars clone, art was ok, killing enemies feels good, the sound and screen shake make it feel good.
I think music would go a long way, and powerups felt a little bit too shortlived, but they were nice while they lasted.
Enemies were a little boring, some variety could help and maybe some different behaviour, projectiles, movement etc could really spice them up, particularly it would be nice if they got faster and more aggressive as time passed.
Overall decent submission, there's a working game prototype which is great, just needed a little more stuff inside it to make it shine, good work!
That was deeply unsettling, really creepy tone, great writing and concept. Urgh I have chills, I gotta get back to the bridge. Where am I again?
I think a key problem a lot of jam games have is not respecting the player's time. This game is an excellent example of that.
The core concept is good, the line of sight system is solid, there's nothing wrong with this idea of exploring a deep cave to find an amulet, it's perfectly good, but each room is huge, empty and nearly identical to the last and you have a gigantic endless maze for the player to navigate.
It took me 15 minutes of holding the up key to find the amulet and 15 minutes of holding the down key to get back out, during that time I wasn't engaged doing anything, there were no obstacles or complications, just walking.
It's ok to make a simple game, like I said this concept is totally fine and neat, I like the moving cave parts and I like the dynamic los as you venture in and out, but what I don't like is doing the same boring thing for 30 minutes straight. Please in future test your game, and make it the length it deserves to be, I would enjoy a game like this much more if it wasn't wasting my time.
Really awesome execution on a novel game design concept, really polished levels and a lot of fun. My biggest complaints would be an excessively slow cooldown on the protagonists ability and a camera that's slightly restrictive, but those pale in comparison to the really awesome game mechanic coupled with a really polished shell. I love that there's cinematics to really sell the mood and set up the premise better than any tutorial ever could. Awesome compo submission!
Hilarious, laughed multiple times, good stuff
Extremely cute game with some interesting puzzle mechanics. I think movement probably should have been constrained to a grid at all times, that would help the player realize the patterns quicker and realise the game is about puzzling out a solution rather than just wandering around randomly.
I love it, the cats are very cute
didn't receive a text on my australian mobile number so unfortunately I can't play this.
Fun horror game with some good atmosphere and some great writing, lots of laughs were had. Game kinda dragged a little at the end, maybe a second weapon, a different enemy or something along those lines could have spiced up the finale, but all around a very good submission!
Really awesome, a bit complex at first but after a few tries it clicked. I really like the visual aesthetic and I found the whole bridge command feeling awesome.
I think the VFX need a little more punch to really sell the epic space battle feeling, it would also help to see what's being targeted and dying if the vfx were a bit bigger and flashier.
Overall, impressive submission, awesome work!
Absolutely gorgeous art, decent game loop and I love the sound. Did I mention the art? So much of it! I have one major complaint though and it's the size of our strange robot protagonist, his sprite looks like 2x2 tiles, but his hitbox is more like 0.5x0.5 tiles, this makes movement really jank and confusing and it's super hard to estimate my jumps, I kept falling down because I couldnt judge jumps.
Man I'm just blown away at the amount of art and also levels, there were like, 4? zones with unique art and enemies, crazy amounts of sprite work and it all looks great, good stuff.
Time: 396.2807
Really cool and super ambitious LD game, love the art but the game was unfortunately really buggy so I couldn't really play it properly.
The bugs I saw were admittedly hilarious though so bonus points for that. Great attempt and I'm blown away at how much there is to this demo, maybe next game scope down a little to get a more finished product.
Great work.
Really interesting title, I found it a little easy but otherwise the concept is cool and the execution is polished and feels very complete. Awesome work!
Really cute! Got stuck in phase 2(?) not sure if it's even beatable with all the mushroom spam, which made me a little sad cause I wanted to know how it ends.
Overall a really awesome unique concept and adorable art, great music and all around a great concept.
Also I love that her hat blocks the cauldron, 10/10 big witch hat physics
Creepy little game, I like the core concept a lot and the driving is smooth. I beat the game but there was no real ending? Not sure what happened there. The game loop was pretty meat. changing stations and driving at night, extremely moody. It felt like it was just a little bit too long but other than that I liked it a lot. Good work.
Interesting kind of minigame, feels sort of like a point and click? I was surprised there were so many items.
The game loop itself seems a little narrow, there aren't many options for the player to take, just work and use the money for the shop...
Still an impressive display for compo to have a complete game, great work!
Really professional polished high quality game submitted for compo! I love the visual style and the whole game is solid from start to finish, my main gripe is gameplay is a little simple and repetitive, perhaps more enemy designs or a secondary player ability could spice it up but otherwise the main loop is a little repetitive.
Overall good submission and again I'm impressed at the overall quality for a compo!
@bangthewall Thanks for the comment, in development and testing the learning phase was by far the hardest thing to get right, I had 3 testers and all of them struggled to learn the mechanics... A lot of changes went in to improve the first time experience but it's very hard to offload all the required info... I think with more time I would build some tutorial styled scenarios that teach you mechanics one at a time, but it was out of my grasp this time.
Thanks for putting in the effort to learn and play the game!
@dunk there are actually idiosyncracies with the simulation along edge tiles, the build limit is to stop those anomalies affecting your reactor too much, i guess i could technically hide the tiles or color them differently but thats how it is.
@mrks thanks for confirming that input bug, I was never sure if it was real or not, not sure exactly whats triggering it sadly, something weird in my ui hierarchy must be breaking the click event.
@curleysam thanks for the feedback, balance was definitely very time consuming, playtesting sessions were over an hour long and I basically just watched someone else play while taking notes, the original build I made was very very badly balanced, so I think the important lesson here is playtesting is crucial!
@chao loans are an interesting idea, although I find in other tycoons they can make annoying patterns where your progress stalls because you are losing so much income to interest, or the loan caps out and you cant borrow any more, or worst of all the loans are basically infinite money. All of those cases kinda mess with the economy and punish the player with the worst punishment of all, waiting. I prefer this system of constantly having at least a trickle of income, it gives me finer control over the gameplay, and I feel like since powerplants are kinda a government project it makes sense for them to give you resources even if you aren't actually turning a profit. Certainly it's possible to run out of cash in this game but I tuned it so you can basically always build a uranium reactor within a minute or less of waiting and get back into the flow.
@debone I'm glad to hear that the simulation felt real, I had some concerns early on about whether the game would be fun or would feel totally unrealistic and it's good to hear I hit a balance. As for confusing behaviour on structures, key information is all in the tooltips, but I did keep a few subtle mechanics hidden a little bit intentionally, since while I was developing the simulation I actually had a lot of fun figuring out how certain variables interacted in ways that I as a developer didn't intend (but make sense when thought through) and I wanted to pass on a bit of that discovery to the player. Things like certain parts of cooling tower behaviour and what heat tanks really do are intentionally obfuscated to make learning how to leverage them a bit more interesting.
@pnikav thanks for the praise, but the team was just me :)
Also thanks to anyone else who has given feedback or praise, I'm really glad to see this game has clicked with people, I was extremely worried it would be too complex or confusing for people and most players would give up, so it fills me with joy to see virtually everyone seems to have built a working reactor or two.
Great game evoking devil daggers feelings, really impressive to get movement and shooting to a degree that good in only 2 days. The sound evokes the mood well although a bit quiet overall, pitch shifting the sounds works great.
The time warp feature works really well, super smooth and intuitive.
Overall I wish the visuals were a bit more punchy, some more vfx and juice would go a long way to improve the experience.
Interesting platformer very reminiscent of the old classic PSX/PS2 era platformers, very jak and daxter.
Love the level design with a lot of hidden collectibles, but the platforming needed work.
I had major issues with deadzone on the controller for the camera and the movement which also made the platforming feel a lot worse. A coyote-time mechanic on jumping could help make jumps a lot less frustrating.
I absolutely adore the character biography at the start, thank you for selling me the character of glenn so vividly.
Overall a decent attempt, more care definitely needed on the movement and camera mechanics next time to make the game a bit more accessible.
Fun concept, got some laughs out of me. I felt each level lasted a little bit too long though, particularly level 2 I was there for ages which killed the flow a little.
I appreciated the ending, a strong finish and a fun submission overall, the tone is great
Really interesting concept, I think the spore creatures have the much more exciting gameplay avoiding humans but unfortunately having to cover the map in goo is really slow and boring. I think more time being put into the combat mechanics would have made this much more interesting.
Really impressed that theres an infected and uninfected version of basically every sprite, theres a lot of art in this one!
Very nice visual aesthetic and the chaos is fun. I feel like theres something off with the gameflow though, I think maybe gathering each item takes a bit too long and it kills the pacing, it should feel frantic and rushed rather than waiting around annoyed for the damn copier to finish what it's doing (maybe theres another layer of humor there though...)
Maybe a cool idea to make it more frantic would be like, a quick 1-5 second minigame for each collectible, so there's something to do while you wait.
Overall very cute and silly little title, great submission.
Interesting little concept, I'm a big fan of weird experiences like this in jams, unfortunate that it wasn't quite in the final state by the end, but nonetheless a neat novel concept. I had some minor issues reading text due to the background, I think readability of text should trump visual aesthetics in general, even for mysterious stuff like this, but other than that gripe I think the presentation was fine (ignoring the slightly misplaced text)
Overall it definitely needed a bit more to get over the line, but the core concept is really interesting and the writing within was great, I like all of the poetry.
Really cool spin on a traditional exploration game, I love the zero g movement I've never really seen another game do that before. Cool concept and a fun twist at the end!
I kinda wish there was a little more gameplay, maybe a minigame or two to fix some of the ship issues, but otherwise a really nice looking game that's super polished, good submission!
I always love these kind of fever dream games, great touch having the bear get extra thicc. Short but sweet, I think my only complaint would be the lighting is almost grim, a little more lighting and color could really sell the circus feeling a bit more but that's nitpicking, overall another great acid trip jam submission
Interesting concept, the shop is so expensive!! I feel like enemies tend to spawn on top of you as you kite around the outside, it's pretty brutal.
Big fan of the accurate wizard lore, gave me a chuckle
Really cool mood and feeling, I really love the quality style and quantity of the art, but the gameplay itself is pretty simple and left me wanting more mechanics and just more to do in general.
It also performs extremely poorly on webgl, my PC is quite strong so I think you just need to work on optimisation to fix that.
Once again great art, super pretty. Good submission!
Fascinating game, really really impressive to build not just a full card game engine but also an interesting novel card game on top of it. AND it's all really polished.
Underrated gem of a LD game, I'm incredibly impressed by all accounts.
Really polished and solid, amazing to have this much content in a compo game, I'm super impressed!
I wish I could grab things a little further away though, and maybe have some other things to interfere with the physics to make the game a bit more chaotic.
Overall extremely impressive compo game
Really cool concept and I love the visual aesthetic if a stormy battle at sea, the aiming system is really hard and the game itself is also very difficult but overall the core mechanics are fun for a chaotic little minigame, multiplayer might have been a great way to make this game even more chaotic and exciting1
Very spooky with a kind of classic slenderman style game loop.
I wish there were landmarks to help me kind of have a rough idea of where I'm going and where I've been, and maybe make the sprint bar visible somehow to the player to help me manage my sprint energy.
The mood and sound of the game really sells the mood and I definitely got into the creepy atmosphere, I love the bizarre enemy design, not what I expected to jump out from the darkness but still scary!
I experienced a lot of emotions while playing this game, from sensory overload to panic and fear to a sense of peace and tranquility.
I'm not sure how to critique something this bizarre, so I suppose I won't.
Interesting little physics based game, pretty cool mechanics, I found it a bit too hard and long, minigames like this generally should be a bit easier and only a minute or two long imo.
Love the art and use of appropriate music, great homage to cuphead and the old style cartoons, great work
I really love the art and sound design of this game, the character design of the cat is great and I really like the concept of growing these planes of reality, unfortunately the RNG based nature of the game mechanics gets a little tedious and watching animations play out takes a long time which makes the game pretty frustrating to actually play.
Really love the sound and animation, the background and sounds and shaking all really sell the feeling of instability, it feels intense to play!
Unfortunately I had a lot of problems with dying, it doesn't really feel fair to have a bomb spawn underneath you and I even died several times because the floor fell after I jumped away! I died but didn't even fall!! One time I died and there was no gap or bomb near me at all. Truly a mystery.
I think this has the makings of a great little minigame, if the death system was more balanced this would be an easy 5/5 on the fun category for me, the intensity of the game really gets you in the mood for a fast paced action game, so it was a little disappointing to die randomly :(
Really cool concept, I've literally never seen a game like this before, it's like bizzaro-nuclear-pong.
The graphics are great and the sounds are just enough to sell it, I really love the chaotic feeling and the tone is on point, awesome stuff.
My only complaint is it's a little unclear what the lose condition is, I think it's temperature? But I was never sure when I was about to blow up, I think a 'health bar' of sorts could help make it clear when you're on the edge of blowing.
I also think it gets a bit too hard to recover when it gets too hot, maybe a limited number of abilities that can quickly cool the atom when it's overloading could be nice as a hail mary panic button.
Overall, excellent game!
Really awesome mood piece, solemn and somewhat relaxing, really nice level design and well built movement made for an extremely solid and pleasurable experience.
Honestly no complaints or criticism, this is a really great submission!
Fun little tower defence, really needed some more juice and hit feedback to make the combat a bit more engaging, hit-flash, particle effects, sfx and enemy death explosions are really what it needed to give it that extra kick.
Awesome to see it feature complete and basically bug free however, it's always impressive to me when I see a game that is functionally complete! Good stuff!
Awesome art and animation really sell the fun upbeat vibe of the setting but the gameplay is a little repetitive and it felt really hard to lose once I learned the basic mechanics, a lot of the time I was waiting for stuff to appear on screen which felt a bit mismatched for the fast paced upbeat vibe of the game itself.
Good work completing a game like this over ludum dare, very cool and once again I adore the animations, our goat friend is super cute!
Had me in stitches, great writing. When I lost and restarted it bugged out and I couldn't play again sadly, might want to fix that! I love how the buttons are placed just right so your fingers get in eachothers way, great game, so funny hahaha.
Super cute, love the art style, really neat game loop. No real complaints, just a really nice polished package, it feels very finished for a LD game. I actually wanted more by the end!
Pretty decent submission, I think some music would have gone a long way to help it out.
I really like the visuals, a cute chunky pixel style, I didn't even notice bullets until my 3rd attempt, so maybe they need a bit of a design rework to stick out more.
Overall very simple but very solid, good submission, great work!
Cool concept, sadly nobody had been playing when I played it so I was strictly solo. Maybe instead of a hard reset it would be better to have a limit on the total number of blocks, and make the oldest ones decay away? That way it stays fresh but the server won't melt ;)
Nice graphics decent music, I ran out of shinies to grab as I went up though. Shouldnt there be more shinies up high than down low?
Overall, neat idea, I liked it!
Nice looking game and very complete, I like how it has a bit of a storyline and some optional content, nice to see in a jam game. Not a huge fan of how incredibly short the platform timers are, I was barely able to think about what I was doing because platforms died basically instantly.
Cool quirky psychological game, I don't quit eget the plot but hey.
The combat definitely needed some more love, it felt very tacked on and attack hitboxes etc were really not clear at all so it was kinda jank to play.
As for the visuals, really nice monochrome visual style with the sketchy hand drawn sprites is pretty cool, really gives the game unique flair, good submission!
Really solid submission in general, well balanced, I like that enemies have patterns you can abuse and it's nice that it ends on a climax!
The visual aesthetic is great and I love the backing track, it all comes together in a really nice moody action title!
I feel like I'm playing foxhole again.
Really confusing game, particularly since you can't click through the application to stuff behind. I also found the json reloading was really buggy, you shouldn't really need to reload the entire game to reload json, it should be possible on the fly without too much difficulty. Also, the game should be able to handle json errors without crashing on launch, you could potentially punish the player by resetting the json if they make it malformed or something, but having it crash every time was really confusing.
Overall I get what you were going for but it didn't really pan out.
Very creepy atmosphere, lot of cool vibes, feels really solid to play.
Was not expecting a glock
Pretty difficult, I like how it's a fully featured fight that escalates as you get deeper. I think for a jam game checkpoints would be better than a full reset system.
In general for a game like this, a better player should be able to do more damage than an average one, but the dps appears to be pretty limited, you can only attack so fast and there's no weakpoint. I think adding a risk/reward mechanic such as jumping to hit the head for more damage would add a lot since the player would be able to play risky or safely depending on the situation.
Overall, pretty sweet to have a functional combat system and a multi stage boss, great work!
I love it, a really cool spin on lunar lander with a really nice aesthetic and hilarious level design, an absolute blast to play and even though it's really hard it feels good regardless. It's hard to pull off a game that has genuinely bullshit difficulty but is still fun and you've done it here, awesome game!
Insane game, very hard to critique something this downright mad... I think I would have liked more of a focus and a goal, and the gun itself doesn't feel very fun to use... Perhaps random weapons with random stats constantly swapping could have made it a bit more fresh but... well this game is what it is, definitely an experience.
Lots of fun, love the tone and the overall style the core mechanic is a little tedious at times and I felt enemies just were a non-threat which kinda is a bit of a let down considering how strong the tone and feel comes off at the start. Overall a lot of fun to play though and I love this kind of ridiculous over the top action movie concept.
Great submission!
I found the game to have a great surrealist feeling but I really didn't like the constant platforming. The character feels slow and his jump is really weak, that and the vaulting animation over every single obstacle makes moving around the huge level a massive chore. I think a much higher move speed and higher jump would have made the game much more fun to traverse.
Brutally hard game but very very unique and interesting, I kinda wanted to see some more in depth puzzle mechanics maybe moving other things or utilising buoyancy to solve some kind of puzzle. Overall pretty good game, it can be extremely frustrating but mostly it's a fun silly experience.
Huge bop, great song and I love how you kept throwing twists at me even past the tenth level, really fun and I totally got in the zone.
Interesting concept, would be cool if it interacted with the OS a little bit more, maybe by making you have to avoid existing windows or using popups as obstacles etc.
overall neat meta idea, I like it!
Very strange but interesting concept. I only figured out halfway through playing that the portraits were artificially generated which gave me a good laugh.
Overall the gameplay is... interesting. I found it a bit slow, 60 seconds is a long time between events happening. I think a shorter timer but with a pause button could be better, so the player can choose the pace rather than waiting for 60 seconds.
I got a chuckle out of the premise, it's fun to imagine witches playing gacha with the souls of the damned. This is my canon explanation for how witches reproduce now on. The lose state is also great.
I really like the core concept of a tactics rpg where the floor tiles are destructible, some small tweaks preventing getting locked from the objective would go a long way to making it more fun since losing by default makes you feel sad.
I really like the graphics and I'm impressed that you have a full turn based tactical engine going in just a couple days, bravo!
Really fitting the theme, gorgeous visuals and a really polished package. The sounds are great and I like the mixture of outward and inward threats to deal with.
My only gripe is sometimes RNG feels like it can put you in unwinnable scenarios, not sure how to really fix that though.
I got to about 200 seconds, was there a high score board I missed somewhere? Not sure what my exact time was.
I really love the art on this one, the concept is a bit done (QWOP is how old now?) but it's still fun to play around with a physics sim.
I think it's a little too easy to progress, the fact there's only one joint per limb makes it a bit hard to really control the legs to move forward, I guess that makes sense because it's a table but... yeah...
Musics great, the character design is great. The game feels very finished which is always good! Good work on this submission!
fun little concept, getting good with the platform felt great, it was initially really hard to use but I got quite good with it by the end and I became a bit of a pro
Art looks great in general and the game feel is all spot on. Overall a really solid, simple and complete feeling jam game, great stuff!
Fun game, I love how all the mechanics mesh together and I love the quirky theme, a lot of fun to play around with, great visuals to match the silly gameplay
Harsh review ahead, sorry in advance.
Games like this I really find it hard to critique because it's clear to me that you probably used asset store stuff for a lot of content, but I can't tell which content you used it for, and it becomes very difficult to give feedback that's useful for you, and reasonable from me.
The guns and characters and animations all seem to be 3rd party assets, so I can't really comment on that, which raises the question of whether the movement system, weapon system, shop system and even dialogue system was created by your team. At that point I don't know what is what and where I should give credit. If you wrote the movement, combat and shop systems then they are fairly impressive, but if they are 3rd party they are not great and add nothing to the experience.
A key problem with this submission is there is no vision, or idea behind the game. Every feature feels like an incredibly cheap knock-off of a AAA game, and doesn't do a convincing job on any front for being AAA.
A large issue here is scoping your project, a AAA game has all these features but has hundreds of testers and designers and developers and takes years to test and ensure those systems all inter-relate in an interesting way, and a key element of AAA games is that while they have all the features your game has, and those features have been seen before, they polish them to an insane degree, which helps those games remain palatable despite being fairly generic.
Which brings me back around to your game, you have all these features but none of them are polished, all of them are things I've seen before and none of the game's design works together or delivers a new concept. I've played third person shooters that were better than this, I've played survival games that were better than this, nothing in this is novel or unique. The game completely fails to be interesting on any front and that's honestly my biggest gripe. Not only are all of the features poorly implemented, but none of them are interesting.
I think priorities need to be straightened out and next time you contribute to a jam you should scope a project that matches your skills, and creates an interesting piece of art for other people to consume, the quality is not as important as novelty and soul.
I'm sorry to be so scathing but I have to be honest here. I believe you and your team can make something better and more interesting, and I'd love to see it next time.
Incredibly hard game, got the clear time in 8:10...
Great art particularly the backgrounds, I don't really like the idea of a timed lifetime, many feel bad moments caused by trying to figure out what to do and running out of time, maybe that could have been alleviated if the progression through each room was telegraphed with maybe arrows or brighter platforms to contrast with the background?
I also wish the hazards contrasted more, they can be easy to miss...
Overall, solid platforming, impressed by the wall jumping mechanic and the background art was really nice, wish I had time to appreciate it for longer.
After two attempts it seems to play out the same way each time, I'm not really familiar with particle physics to the degree that would let me know if I'm doing something wrong or not, I guess there's only one ending?
Great sound design and visuals, hopefully everyone got their antirad meds afterwards.
I really dig the silliness of the setting and the disturbing long armed protagonist, the amount of art and content is extremely impressive! I did find it a bit tedious to do the same thing 4 times in a row though, some more variety to the levels would have gone a long way.
Interesting basic concept, I think the way the player interacts with the ball is a little bit limited though. Perhaps a different shape for the players object would help them control the trajectory of the ball a bit better, I found it really hard to dodge the rocks from above because they are too fast to react to, and the ball slid around in a way that was hard to stop, if the player had some kind of small bumps on each end or maybe had another shape entirely I think there would be a lot more room for skilled play and quick reactions, maybe increased player speed could help too.
Overall pretty solid, everything worked with no bugs and it's a functional prototype which is awesome!
Great submission, fun well polished version of a commonly used concept with loads of content and a great backstory with some excellent humor, hilarious experience, and I especially love the easter egg.
Fun puzzle exploration game with no major issues, all the answers were intuitive or hinted at properly which is good, I wish there was maybe an inventory for notes so I didn't have to repeatedly check them but that's a minor complaint, the graphics got the job done and the reactor looks really cool, in general a nice little change of pace to have an environmental puzzle to solve, good submission!
I really like the cute character designs and the animations are all smooth and look great. Awesome little toy, I think the player moves a little too slowly and I'd like to see maybe a few more mechanics, I noticed enemies moved a little but not much, it'd be more chaotic if they behaved less. Maybe some enemies that roll etc. just more variety in general would go a long way.
Overall, it looks great and it's really cute, great job!
I had a lot of issues with the movement charging being really inconsistent to the point where moving around was virtually impossible. Sometimes the charge meter would fill up on the first frame, other times it would take 3 or 4 seconds to fill, which made moving around quite frustrating.
Love the sounds and the character design is uh, nice.
Solid game, wish the gameplay was a little less frustrating :(
I love the designs of all the characters, the art is great and the sound is awesome and most important the game is really fun! It's a well made and polished twinstick shooter with an interesting twist and everything is executed well, outstanding compo game!
Hilarious little joke game, I enjoyed reading the gibberish aloud. Overall a neat concept and a solid execution, great for a quick game. Great submission overall!
Good atmosphere music and art but the obtuse UI and confusing mechanics hurt it a lot. I don't really understand anything that's happening, nothing happens for 90% of turns other than notification spam and I really don't like the control scheme, mouse buttons do several different things and very little of the UI actually follows established UI design patterns, making it very confusing.
There's also a distinct lack of real visual information on what's actually happening, soldiers arrive instantly at their destination but are grey and have an indicator saying they are still in transit, why not have them visually move each turn? Why not have alerts on each unit showing their status? Why don't units have health bars etc. to show their state without having to navigate the extremely clunky UI to inspect them.
There's unfortunately some huge issues with usability here and the game despite being quite simple (deploy troops, gather materials, report home) is extremely obtuse and difficult to understand the current game state. A strong art style and tone can only get you so far and I think as a game this fails to deliver.
Impressive art but really leaves me wanting more in terms of gameplay and interesting ideas.
Really cute exploration game, impressive to get it fully complete in time! I'd like to see maybe a little more mechanically, perhaps a minigame or two to make collecting all the fragments a little more varied than pure exploration, I'd also recommend lowering the requirement to 95% of the shards, so you dont get stuck on the last one searching forever.
Overall really good work for a first time, huge volumes of art and a fully fleshed out explorable world is really cool to see!
Cool little proof of concept for a minigame survival, shame you guys only got one minigame in, I like the idea and I think it works well with the theme. I love our little engineers design, I'm sad you can't win :(
Gorgeous art, cute concept, the gameplay didn't feel like it matched up very well though, everything I did seemed to be wrong or have a bad outcome which kinda didn't feel right with a mood and setting for a game like this, I expected to heal not to drop my marshmallows in the damn fire every time.
The gameplay seems to be pure trial and error? I guess you need to play multiple times to learn the good cards and win, which is fine I guess but to me dealing with the cards your given is about making an informed decision between options outside your control. But that's just philosophical I suppose.
Gorgeous game, excellent submission, great stuff!
Really fun twist on a classic formula, a lot of fun jiggling through each level and the level design was great, there was a good curve of difficulty from start to finish and each level was just bullshit enough to be funny.
I like that there's a story and I'm really happy there was a happy ending for all 3 characters.
I really like the feeling of the game and the concept of watching a monitor with the actual action being kinda hidden.
I wish there was more feedback both in terms of sound and visuals to let me know when I've done something, e.g. fires pinging or glowing or animating away once put out, or bars filling as I complete tasks.
Conceptually really cool, love the music as well, and I like that the game is basically feature complete, great work!
Nice simple demo for LD, core game loop works and no issues, I like the concept (my game is based on the same thing!) and overall it's just a decently finished little demo, my only qualm is the audio is way too loud!
@nanixdev I'm Australian and it comes from the heart, this is the authentic experience.
@fnelix the car pulls right and is a bit of a junker intentionally :)
@cabjhegas thank you for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@kujoen it's a hard problem to solve, with more time I'd make a sound for when something falls out or hits the ground at high speed, but I spent a lot of time on audio already so I was out of time budget for it :'(
thanks for playing!!
@peterfiftyfour you can leave australia but australia will never leave you. you will never know peace, and the bronze sky will shine above you always. there is no escape, it's a prison after all, and good people don't end up here. but you knew that already didn't you?
@shane-gadsby ty for playing, didn't know manjimup was known for apples, more regional research is needed obviously.
Interesting little game, sadly I played solo so couldn't get the proper party game experience.
Would love to see a little more going on. More mechancs on the board and more mechanics in a battle. Not much actual interaction between players, maybe there should be ways to interfere with eachothers inputs etc.
Bizarre sound and art style, but that's a good thing sometimes. Definitely a memorable game, but I felt like it just needed a bit more going on.
Esoteric, weird, experimental, and chill. I really like this kind of out there presentation and concept. It's hard to define and give feedback on a game like this because it's just doing it's own thing, and I respect that a lot.
Great vibes, cute gameplay, love the cube bubbles. I should replay it sometime and try to max out my level :)
Amazing presentation and great work submitting a playable puzzle game. Difficulty curves and teaching moments are really hard to get right on puzzle games, and I think while this game stumbles a bit, it still does admirably for a jam.
The art and music are outstanding, and the gameplay is buttery smooth which is super great. Love to see it, and I'm jealous at the level of polish you've got here!
Good art, interesting concept, but ultimately gameplay is very slow and it's a bit hard to tell the gamestate at a glance.
Combat is a subtle effect and the sounds are always playing with no stereo to determine their source, so it's hard to track when combat starts and stops. Visual indication of this would be great. There's also not much indication for when or what combat is going to happen in the immediate future.
I really appreciate the full and proper tutorial, it's great, and the art style is super cool, love that pixel art isometric look, really nailed it.
Awesome awesome awesome visuals, love the colors, the concept for the gameplay is neat but slightly underdone, and the usage of the weird metalball rendering really give sthe game it's own super unique feeling. I cannot stress enough, I love it.
I wish there was a little more polish on certain features. Lack of audio hurts. the boss is a little half done and the grappling and shooting mechanics could use a second pass to get them really feeling good, but those are all small complaints, I really really like this game and it was a blast to play.
Cute concept, great presentation, I enjoyed getting to know the residents, I wish I'd been more attentive, maybe I'll replay it for the good ending sometime :)
I wish the detective action took place a little earlier. Theres some good deduction towards the end, but early on there is very little challenge. I do note that the puzzles are well designed though, each seems to have multiple ways of deducing the correct answer and I think that's great.
Overall super cool, I love the lighthouse.
I love the tight controls, the bike feels great to pilot and everything is super smooth, tossing the packages is cute but I think they were a bit too hard to land, maybe some auto lockon or a targeting reticle would help? It was really hard to actually line up packages.
The game itself is actually quite hard, surprisingly so. The erratic movement of the bike and the rapid pace of obstacles really keeps you on your toes. A slower ramp up would be nice, and maybe more than 1 life would have really helped the game flow better.
Overall it's awesome, a really nice little compo game and I wanna say again how nice the controls felt, the bike feels fun to control and the whole game feels super responsive, loved it.
Some neat ideas and some really sad misses! I'm really sad it's missing the objective system itself, having to take the cube to even random coordinates would add such a huge amount to this game and I'm sad it didn't make it.
Chill BGM is nice. The parts all look pretty good, I wish conduits could stack on conduits to make weird wiring easier. Lighting on the dark sides of the cube makes it really hard to place structures, and I found some minor issues where some tiles couldn't accept a tile for no reason. The metal economy feels a little bare bones and simple to manage, so wasn't super interesting to deal with. The energy economy was nice in that it operated on a very different axis to metal, but I'm not sure exactly how it worked since the game didn't communicate state very well, bringing me to my major concern:
The game is very uninformative, there's room for a game to let you explore of course, but mostly I felt like I knew what everything did, but didn't really understand to what degree. The force of each thruster, the metal generated, the energy cost of each component, how electricity flows, all of this was a mystery. It was nice that there's visualisation for active components which helps, but more info would be great. Finally, the middle mouse to rotate causes issues in browser! Gotat be careful with inputs like that and make sure your controls work on all platforms!
Overall really cool and unique idea, lots of fun, I made a cube that could fly around and turn in midair and it was super neato. I have a lot of criticisms above but I actually really liked this game and had loads of fun, the concept is super fresh and it was pretty functional all around, and delivered on the premise really well!
Really intriguing little game with amazing presentation. The art style is great, the mystery is thick and the puzzle elements.. Well ok the puzzles are a little half baked. But I love everything else.
The story was interesting, the characters were neat, I felt it was a little bit slow at times but overall it's super moody and really cool. I love the deep undersea drone vibes, I'm still not even sure what really happened, but it kept me thinking and I like that a lot. Great submission here!
Really weird but superbly novel puzzle type game. I really really like positioning my guys to access different areas they can't get to alone, I think theres lots of potential there but I don't think its a good fit for a harsh timer based game, feels more like a game you calculate and think about each move with to solve the puzzle.
But I really really like it, I was thinking hard the whole time and that was awesome, it really tickled my brain with how interesting the idea was, despite the fact that it's pretty simple conceptually it felt like there was loads of depth there.
Bizarre, cute and weirdly creepy? I really like it. The bizarre sounds and cute little purrballs really sell it.
Small, but memorable and lovely. I like it a lot.
Really really interesting concept but I just don't think it can work, it's just too hard to predict how things are going to work and formulating a strategy doesn't feel feasible since it's so hard to predict what will happen.
That said, I love the concept and I think theres a possibility for an interesting game here, but not with conways rules. I think starting from the ground up and designing your own set of more easy to understand and reason about rules is the way to go here.
Very impressive to put together the full prototype in the jam, theres a lot going on, so it's super impressive you pulled it off.
Absolutely bizarre. Defies definition and criticism, I love it. Absurdism is fun at the best of times and the tone is on point.
Really I think it just needs more polish, audio was a bit jank and while I don't mind uncomfortable sounds when done right, a lot of the issues were more like volume balancing or repetitive sounds playing over eachother.
Player movement was a bit unsmooth and could use work, and it was extremely unclear how the gameplay worked (if indeed my actions had any effect at all)
Overall I love what this game is doing, it's funny, it's weird, it's grotesque and it's great, but the actual implementation of a lot of the less bizarre side hurts the experience a little bit.
Really genuinely fun BoI clone, love when jam games actually want you to think. The enemy variety is just enough and the gameplay is tight despite being simple. Would really benefit from a difficulty drop, the dungeon feels slightly too long and slightly too hard for a game jam. I would love to see health pickups or maybe just a few less rooms to get to the end, I'll try and actually finish it at some point to get to the credits :)
Great art and music, love the variety in enemy designs, unique and identifiable, great stuff.
Fast, colorful, kinda funny and tight controls. Overall a really nice little simple game. Perfectly scoped, and I think 99% nailed.
I have some minor gripes about the camera being a bit of a headache inducer, and I think maybe the sounds were just a little over the top. But they are definitely minor gripes, really great job nailing the simple fast paced platformer concept.
Would love to see more juice next time! VFX! particles! explosions!
It's an ok platformer that really suffers from just not enough iteration. Loads of simple things could have made it much more enjoyable to play and I think thats the big lesson to learn here. Playtest more, playtest often and take easy wins! Fixing spike hitboxes, gravity speed and platform positions would have taken minutes, but would have made the final experience that much better.
Overall it's still a complete game and that's always worth celebrating, great job submitting and I genuinely believe next time you can learn from this and make something much better.
This game is a lot of fun and very novel, some great puzzle design as I had to think about each level exactly the right amount to solve, fun brain teasers all around.
The graphics are solid but sadly there's not really any sound which would have elevated the experience, but I was so enamored I barely noticed.
Lots of fun thinking about alternative paths and orderings and experimenting to see how they work.
The perfect being gives it's regards.
5878 is my best score.
The game gets much more interesting later on when blocks start coming faster, but the early game is frankly miserable, avoiding bats is basically pure luck and missing a platform drops you down way too far.
Falling a significant distance is also extremely irritating as the character fully goes off screen becoming essentially uncontrollable.
Once you get past about halfway the pace picks up enough that I'm able to combo through blocks and go a bit faster, but at that point mashing space becomes pretty optimal strategy which is also a problem, but at least it's pretty fun at that point.
I think more air control, more blocks earlier on, removing the birds entirely and tweaking the player movement/block sizes to make platforming feel more solid (i found myself constantly missing jumps by tiny amounts or bonking my head and losing all my progress)
Overall the concept is pretty neat and the visuals + sounds work nicely, but the frustrating early game sections make it harder to appreciate them.
I like the mechanic's concept and the art is really cute, the music is great and the game as a whole has a great upbeat mood that I love.
I think the mechanic has some minor issues, it's a bit tedious to move long distances so it would be nice if there was some mechanism to move with the player, the level design mostly avoids the issue and there arent too many long distances, which is great design and shows you were thinking about the limitations of the mechanic in level design!
Controlling the box is a bit annoying at times, I've seen similar games to this one use dual control schemes where you can move characters and the extra mechanic simultaneously which can be a bit overwhelming initially but is more deep and enjoyable once you get better at the mechanic.
Finally the level design is pretty solid, theres some nice platformer fundamentals here done well, many jam games have poorly paced levels, or jumps that are tedious or annoying or with poor metrics, I didn't see any of that here and both levels flowed naturally to me. I think level design can be one of those things you only notice when it's bad, so I want to call out the fact this game does it really well!
Great submission!
Cool and moody, impressive amount of content for a jam, especially in 3D.
I do think it's a little flat with just default textures and could probably benefit from a bit more environmental work to make the exploration a bit less repetitive, but I think if you had more time you definitely would have done that.
Great work, next time you'll be faster and hopefully have more time to go even further :)
You made a whole immersive sim in a weekend and that's absolutely incredible.
It's so cool how different features interact with one another, trying different ideas to beat the slime in different ways was loads of fun, sucking them out of airlocks, burning them with steam, but good old fashioned space lasers are clearly the way to go. The enemy design is amazing, a really really cool concept for an enemy in a tile based environment.
My only gripe is the control scheme on keyboard is absolutely horrible. I'll let it go because the game is great, but the amount of times I used or dropped an item at the wrong time because the keys are all grouped together was ridiculous. I definitely think tweaking the controls could make the game much more enjoyable.
Overall one of my favourite entries. Go rate some more games so people see yours on the games tab, it deserves to be seen!
Really cool conceptually and the mood and vibes are fantastic, the UI, flavor text, sound and visuals really work together to sell this mysterious universe. Reminds me of cultist simulator. I dig it.
Unfortunately the gameplay itself is a little flat which is a shame, it's mostly just picking the right room repeatedly and the tooltip telling you how tension will grow takes away any thinking anyway, which is a shame.
Really interesting concept and executed pretty well, just needs more depth. I really like it despite the gameplay problems!
Great work!
There's clearly a lot of effort in this considering how many features there are and how complex the mechanics are, but not enough of that effort was spent making things clear or improving the game flow.
The complete essay frontloaded at the start of the game in a color that blends with the background is not a great start, and the description on itch "Use Tab and QWERASDFGXC to control." does not really explain anything.
Some effort has been made to explain abilities as you try to use them which is great, but again the font color blends with the webs and is just an information overload.
I would say in future jams the best way to improve would be to slow down on adding features and ideas, and focus on making a small set of mechanics that work well and are easy for the player to pick up and understand. The game state is also quite obscure for the player which is a great place to introduce juice and feedback, walking into enemies kills them but also seems to hurt you, feedback such as sounds/vfx etc can be used there to indicate whether its a good thing or a bad thing. My gut says you aren't supposed to deal with enemies that way most of the time but it's not really clear to me.
Finally the game is very difficult, onboarding is already hard due to all the complexity but the enemies are relentless, fast and come early. A variety of enemy types, some easy, some hard can let you ease the player into combat without being instantly overwhelmed, and making sure there is room for failure early in the game to allow the player to learn are both simple but effective strategies for fixing those issues.
Great job finishing and submitting such a complex concept! I hope to see more iteration in future for a more approachable game. Congrats!
Great juice and use of sound + music, really nice art and lots of vfx etc and it all just feels great, I think it's really solid!
Unfortunately the design is pretty questionable, from the get-go it's kinda easy for the player to abuse the level design system to spawn all the enemies far away where they can't get to you, there's little incentive to actually build interesting levels and I think the biggest problem is the enemy designs don't quite work with the concept. It would be much more interesting to have enemies that could spawn, destroy or transmute tiles, so the level is changing not just because of the player, which would also mitigate the player being able to create kill traps. Another strategy might be to have enemies get stronger if they are close together to punish kill boxes. Leaning into mechanics along those lines would really elevate this from a juicy jam game with nice art to something much more exciting to play.
That's strictly a design complaint though! Everything else is great! It's solid and I have not much to say on anything other than the design because every other part of the game is so solid! Awesome work!!
exploit.png found a minor exploit.
That asside interesting attempt at a twin stick shooter, some unusual but fresh visual style to this one, weird choice to have enemies be clouds but it kinda works and it's neat.
Lack of mouse aim was a bit of a pain, had to go dig up my controller to play, the control scheme is kinda wonky and optimal play is to hold the shoulder buttons and triggers down permanently which is pretty uncomfortable to say the least.
The overall concept is interesting, losing floor tiles as enemies approach is a cool idea, but the enemies are so easy it never really came into fruition for me, I just slaughtered wave after wave, and since they don't target me in any way there's not much need for moving around. Eventually I quit because I was bored not because I lost :(
Some good ideas both design and visual wise, but really needs more polish and iteration to turn it into a proper game, very half baked sadly.
P.S wheres the JUICE!? sound and screenshake and hit feedback! Juice is like oxygen to a twinstick shooter!
Great job smashing out a game in a weekend and submitting! Congrats!
Really cool mixture of games that works pretty well but I do think the maze and the polyominoes needed to interrelate slightly more. But it's a lot of fun to play and I love the art + music.
The fact it should run on real hardware is so cool, great work :)
Very cute little game, nice juice on movement and super intuitive controls. I enjoyed it! Turns could probably end automatically when you are done moving, and also enemies were a bit hard to tell apart from my soldiers, more color or maybe a separate base sprite for enemies probably could have helped there, but pretty minor nitpick.
The sprites and music didn't stream well over the internet! i got ambushed 2 or 3 times by enemies that weren't visible because their sprite hadn't downloaded!!! the music also cut out repeatedly I assume because it was loading too slowly, it was a shame because everything else in the game was so solid.
Really great little jam game, I'm a fan!
Great concept and good level design that teaches concepts one at a time and has plenty of little surprises and clever moments which is awesome. Most jam games have very iffy difficulty in puzzle progression (I made a puzzle game for a jam and it's by far the worst jam game I ever made lol) so it's awesome to see a simple mechanic executed so well.
Great work!
Cool music and great concept, I think it would be cool if eventually sources/receivers turned off over time, so you are encouraged to redesign the factory to deal with changing conditions.
There are definitely some issues, it can be way too easy to lose at times even when you're doing well, and some spawns can just straight up murder your run, some small tweaks to make it a bit less evil would be nice in that regard, but overall it's fun and I really like placing belts.
The UX on placing stuff was a little annoying, it would be nice if I could click and drag belts and they would orient correctly, and I think underground belt entrances should automatically swap you to exits when you place one to make it a bit easier.
Finally the game state can be a bit muddy, better highlighting of which producers and items arent being handled would really help identify problems faster rather than hunting for the straight square.
Overall very cool and fun little minigame, loved it.
Bit of a strange game here, the visuals are nice and crisp and make the combat pretty clear, but I think isometric is just not a good view point for an action game or twin stick shooter, at least not without a lot of care to make it feel right. Bullets are hard to aim and dodging is tricky, mainly cause of the isometric camera, and wobbling the isometric camera around as you move is a camera no-no I've never seen before, but it's definitely a no-no.
I really liked the variety of colors and environments as I progressed through, it kept me drawn in as I was curious to see the next biome, not sure what happened at the end, the final floor never came I guess, I fell down and the boss did as well and we both died and kinda broke the UI? It is what it is.
A nice submission and I think the world shifting mechanic was implemented pretty well, asside from visual issues caused by the isometric camera I think it's a pretty good submission, great work!
Interesting idea, I like the visual designs of the planets and the overall aesthetic, the minimap is a good idea and dragging pods behind you is pretty funny.
The game is not communicated very clearly, I get that I'm meant to deliver pods but it's hard to tell when i have successfully delivered a pod or if it is destroyed or what have you, I spent most of the time confused about what was happening. There is also some kind of reputation mechanic that I didn't really understand?
Not a bad submission but I think more effort needs to go into making the game state clear to the player and helping them onboard.
Great work!
@manabreak I'm shocked to hear that because enemies can freely pass through trees. Glad you enjoyed it!
@olenikimid thanks for your comment, most of my jam games are a bit too hard, I tried to get the curve a bit more gentle on this one but obviously still needs a little work ;) I'm glad you liked the sounds! Getting them to actually help determine enemy direction was actually quite tricky! I had to spawn fewer enemies north and south since its much harder to tell which direction they are coming from in that case, but generally I think it works well :)
@ps1hagrid sorry! You can see I started to have input prompts and the aiming system was at the top of my list, but got bumped down due to some unforeseen problems towards the end of submission.
@olenikimid thanks for the link! I wonder how different this behaves from the built in directional sound in godot? I'll have a read, I need to learn more about sound in general, I'm very amateur at it still. EDIT: wow the videos alone are amazing. I need to learn this tech!
@hawkin thanks for playing :) enemy visibility while stationary is intentionally a bit hard, but it's a fine line between hard to spot and impossible...
1.02 has a gamma slider to make it a bit easier but even on the same brightness it would differ person to person. I think it's a bit of a cursed game design problem.
P.S. I'm an OG killing floor 1 fan which definitely indirectly inspires the enemy designs, at least philosophically. I'm a big fan of every enemy having a distinct flavor and purpose and I did my best to do that here :)
@constance thanks for the feedback! You can actually animation cancel reloads by aiming, but I probably should have just let you cancel with a normal fire if you have the hipfire perk for the associated weapon for consistency. The animation cancel has got many people killed as they were mashing M2 while trying to reload and never got a bullet in the chamber. I think a fix for this would be to have a reload progress bar on the cursor, but I didn't think of it before release :)
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@teto thank you for the in depth review! I am glad you liked the writing as I'm fairly shakey at it. I usually don't write at all so this was an experiment for me. There was a lot of editing of flavor text over the jam which I think helped, but even now I'm not fully happy with it. The only way to improve is practice though, and I'm pleased that it's received well :)
@ivan-b thanks for playing :)
that sounds like the upgrade store bug I fixed in 1.01, the store erroneously adds a rifle + shotgun + pistol to the perk pool every time you start a new run, even if they are already in there. This can actually make the game extremely hard if you keep dying because your pool of perks gets heavily diluted by pointless weapon unlocks you already have. Thankfully it was a fairly easy fix.
*psychically explodes your slug*
Interesting concept and very very polished, love the aesthetic and the music is a vibe. Great all around.
I do find it clunky mining and dragging and such, I know to some degree the sokoban-ness is part of the game but digging is quite a pain, it would be nice if it was slightly more easy to maneuvre and fuel up drills, but asside from that its a lot of fun.
Turrets seem rarer than gold and it wasn't obvious the player can just kill slugs by hanging out near them, I'd tweak those to make the on boarding process a little smoother and more interesting, but other than that it's really really solid. I had a lot of fun digging holes and pushing crystals, great stuff!
Simple but cute, I got all 27 cause I refuse to let the critters die.
Next time aim higher! The vibes were good with this game but it's so small :)
Really cool idea, not sure if the aggressive timer is necessary though, it's a pretty interesting puzzle to solve but I don't have enough time to really make good decisions.
Great work!
Onboarding is a little awkward, once I figured out what to do it wasn't so bad though. Pretty fun little masher. I love the animations on the character and he feels great to move around which is great, the basic idea is pretty sick but the game feels like it needs a bit of tuning as the optimal strategy seems pretty simple and braindead but also nothing can really go wrong after a point.
Great stuff, good job making compo!!!
Very cool idea and I love the graphics.
Taking it at face value it's pretty fun and unique, but design wise it is a bit unclear how you are expected to win and what will work and what won't. Some of the prompt words were pretty hard to work with too but I don't think either of these complaints are a big deal.
It seems like parsing your response is also partially through AI prompting so I guess that explains why the responses can seem so random, and admittedly you can't expect it to understand everything so I think it's important to acknowledge those limitations when I'm making these criticisms but yeah.
Really really cool.
Oh yeah and the art is incredible, it sells the situational comedy so well and really helps elevate the surreal conversations the AI loves to spit out into some really funny moments.
Amazing work.
I'm terrible at shmups sadly but this was pretty cool, I found a few things weird or confusing, after a few runs it clicked, but I think minor tweaks could really help the onboarding:
-There's no sound or visual when you take damage, making it hard to know when you make a mistake
-When you die the game stops immediately, so if you aren't looking at the ship/girl you won't actually know what hit you
-It feels like I should leave the yellow zone as soon as the centre of my character passes over it, rather than the entire hitbox.
-It's hard to differentiate enemy projectiles from their target position sometimes, I think bullets should look a bit different
These are pretty minor nitpicks though and I enjoyed the nice retro aesthetic of the chunky rgb colors and the tune was nice as well. Cool game and great work! Making shmups is hard in a jam! I made one a while back and making the levels was the hardest part, so great work there :)
Cool game, a bit easy to optimize but balanced well enough, it definitely felt like a close call at the end. The graphics are quite cute, theres some minor issues with overlapping sprites but it's not a big deal, great use of music and the build up to the end is great.
Solid cute and fun little game, great work!
Awesome little game, I love all the personality in all the animations, so much character in such a small package!
Really well polished fundamentals but I did find it hard to figure out how the mechanics worked, the hammer was really confusing for a very long time but eventually I figured it all out. A bit more explanation on the clock could have helped me plan out my season better too as I kinda got surprised when the game just ended. But the fun part was tending the garden anyway so it doesn't really bother me.
Awesome work, really good jam game!
A bit half baked for me, aiming and shooting requires rapid inputs to shoot the foe before you are killed and you have no possibility to kite or avoid him making the game a bit jank to play.
The visuals are not super cohesive with a mixture of art styles and texture scales which makes the game feel unfinished.
Skeletons spawning on top of the player is particularly unfair and I think easily solvable.
Hope to see a more finished and polished game in future jams, keep learning and good luck :)
An interesting concept but I found the lack of guidance for objectives pretty frustrating, the game is essentially trial and error with no direction or meaningful input from the player other than listening for foes and avoiding them.
Some neat variety in enemy sprites is nice, I saw a lot of unique enemies in my playthrough and the sound behaviour works pretty well.
Some nice environmental design even if the assets aren't produced by your team, the lighting transitions and visual design of the levels themselves was pretty pleasing.
In terms of platforming there are a few annoying close to pixel perfect jumps I'm not a fan of, and a few places where it's not clear you can make a jump until you try it, or you bonk your head doing a jump. All of these feel clunky and should be avoided in a platformer.
The character controller is a bit weird. I noticed a few weird issues where I would lose all speed while walking occasionally, and the character collider being a capsule makes corner collisions while platforming unwieldy. The actual accel/decel/handling of the character feels good, it's just some weirdness with collision that hurts it.
Another thing is the character animations feel very off? The timing of the animations doesn't really line up with the gamestate properly, for instance the jump and landing animations are much longer than it feels like they should be.
Overall a decent little metroidvania platformer, I think most of my criticisms are easily fixed by iteration so that's my main tip! Iterate iterate iterate! Play the game and make tweaks! Congratulations on finishing your game! Great job!
Really cool cosmoteer-like. All the weapons feel juicy and powerful and there's lots of explosions and debris and lasers, all around just loads of fun to play.
I do wish the player ship moved a little faster but it's a nitpick. Really enjoyed it overall.
Congratulations on submitting! Based on your blog post it seems like this was a big achievement for you, so please know it's never easy to finish something, and even a game as simple as this one is incredibly impressive to complete in just a weekend. Good work pushing through to the finish.
I think there's a lot to criticize about in your game but I don't want to rail on it too hard so I'll try and give advice based on your blog post and my personal experience rather than the game itself. (which I enjoyed by the way, it has a lot of flaws but the frenetic pacing had it's own charm that I enjoyed)
Perfection is the enemy of done. You need to ship something eventually, and overthinking stuff is a great way to get lost in the brambles. Especially in a jam context where there are no consequences for failure or bad code (asside from maybe a game that's buggy... but cmon its a jam) you can try and free yourself from trying to get everything right first try. Just get it done! I know it's easy to say that but genuinely the less you worry about correctness and efficiency in your work hours the more you will enjoy the jam and the better your end product will be. Don't worry about it so much next time, take it at your own pace and accept that no matter how good or bad the final product is you gave it a shot.
Second, research and learning are skills that you need to learn. ChatGPT is not the answer you are looking for. It can only give you answers to obvious questions that have already been answered a million times online. Learning to search, which resources are trustworthy, building relationships with people who can share knowledge with you, learning to read documentation (and find documentation), sifting through blog posts and forum threads and online wikis to find people trying to do what you want to do, these are the skills you need to build if you want to learn more effectively and not get roadblocked. Next time you have a question you want to ask chatgpt, instead google it, find a few websites and threads, and get better at research, trust me it will pay off dividends in the end!
Finally I want to remind you again that it's a great accomplishment to complete a jam game of any quality. Great job and good luck on the next jam, I hope you have more fun with it. Learning a new tool is scary and hard! I feel your frustrations regularly when I have to pick up a new skill for development or work, it's a fact of life but you can't let it win, and once you solve the problem and emerge triumphant afterwards, it will feel truly amazing. I hope you felt that joy as you submitted your game :)
Really cool concept executed pretty well, I love the vfx and juice but wish there was a little more in certain places, footstep noises and servo sounds would have gone a great way to making a good vibe an excellent one.
The balance is unfortunately an issue and the game is far too easy, the cannon is also plainly overpowered but the core concept and execution of it is great, I loved seeing the weapons physically on the mech and it was a lot of fun customising and upgrading.
Awesome submission great work!
Really nice visual aesthetic and loads of content but has some major balance issues, certain items are insanely strong while others are kinda useless. I'm also not sure what happens when the board fills?
I really like the core idea though and would love to see more balance tweaks to polish it up. The game would also really benefit from a bit more juice, item specific animations, more sounds and snappier movement so you aren't waiting for the character to move all the time. Given the already huge scope of content I definitely understand why some of these things are lacking though.
Awesome game, really really cool. Great work!!
Interesting game, a weird juxtaposition of political story and comfortable garden simulator which kinda works, but it feels a little mismatched at times.
It was nice planting stuff and watching it grow, and learning from my mistakes to tend my garden better, but I did feel it's still a bit overwhelming. I played a bit of sandbox after clearing the game and wasn't really able to fill the space which was a shame, I was hoping as I got better at managing my time I could fill the garden entirely but it's pretty hard to do.
The interface and gameplay was pretty well explained and understandable, I think the objectives were very harsh but maybe that's intentional? Tooltips were pretty good but it would be nice to know if a plant is going to wilt next day, it's hard to keep track of them all.
Overall I liked it and it was a cute little game, great job :)
Graphics are decent and the concept is cool but the game is ridiculously punishing and offers little in recovery options. It's possible to softlock yourself in any number of ways immediately which is kinda lame and there is no explanation for any of the construction options so you just have to trial and error to figure out what each thing does, losing entirely each time.
I don't think the game is complex enough that it needs a front loaded tutorial, just basic info for the player to make informed decisions early on.
Enemies also appear early, do critical damage and unless you optimise your build perfectly basically end your run instantly.
Overall a decent idea but I think execution is unfortunately pretty poor, I would focus on playtesting and user experience for later games.
Great job submitting! It's always hard to finish a game so don't take these criticisms too harshly! Keep it up!
Cute game, I think there's definitely some bugs though, I ended up getting 20+ customers in a row that just didn't buy anything which flooded my inventory and I have no idea what I was expected to do in that situation. One guy also got confused and just never left the store and half the time the customers would walk straight through the wall... A lot of stuff going on lol.
I like the idea and the cat is a great way to add dynamics to the pathfinding puzzle but for the most part the game was a bit too unclear in what I was meant to do but also at the same time very easy as I could just drop everything pretty much anywhere and as long as I didn't block the main path it was fine.
Cool concept needing more polish, great job :)
Cute little game, fun game loop I haven't seen before, mostly intuitive although the kraken was a bit hard to understand at first. I'm guessing the growing circle is a placeholder for an animation of the kraken approaching? or maybe it's meant to be a shadow under the water? I didn't really notice the circle until my 3rd or 4th death.
It's a little brutal and I wish it escalated more than being completely static? as far as I can tell the only progression was a point where the buoys teleported, its pretty rough in the first few seconds, but quite fun once you get a handle on it. I also wish there was a little bit of music to set the mood, but it's not a big deal.
I love the animations for the ship dying! They need a little elbow grease but the heart of them is there and it's super cute.
Nice submission, great work!
Cute simple game, would really like to see a bit more variety in enemy behaviour and spawning because the fundamental idea is good, encouraging you to be aggressive to keep combo meter up and prevent the girders closing in is a good core mechanic but the simple npc behaviour makes it a bit too easy to optimise.
Cool art and aesthetic, solid execution for the most part, great work!
Not the most fun or prettiest or best sounding LD game I've ever played. But it absolutely is the most disturbing. I'm afraid of rats now, thank you.
Very few horror games have really creeped me out from LD, but this one definitely did it which I find hilarious because the game is also hilarious. I love it.
Great work!
Really cool concept for a game I've never seen before, some minor ui jank with sliders not being ideal but overall pretty fun. I like that knowing the maths does actually help you reason out answers.
The music is pretty great and I love the transitions, great stuff.
Very cool arcade game, I love these super stylistic score attack submissions, there's some real depth to getting further in too which shows it was well playtested and thought through, different strategies have different strengths and weaknesses and it's definitely skill testing in the best way.
The music is great and the fact it's integrated with the game is awesome. Super fun entry, might play some more and try and get that top ten position I wanted so bad.
Nice graphics and functional but a bit straightforward and easy to beat without much strategy or thought. A few more simple mechanics would really help keep the game a bit more engaging.
I liked it and it's a finished jam game so great job!
Interesting concept but very hard to balance and it shows, the game is a bit too swingy and the RNG of the passive sinking can really throw a game into chaos outside the players control.
I think the main things that need to change here are balancing tweaks to reduce the swinginess, make the sacrifice mechanic more relevant, and more obvious future gamestate (in particular the sinking) so you can plan ahead more effectively.
The core ideas are great and I enjoyed playing it, great submission!
This game has gorgeous graphics, the visuals and colors pop and it's just a feast for the eyes. It's a shame theres no sound but it is what it is.
The game loop is pretty fun and I got a high score of 80 after trying a few times.
Really cool submission, I enjoyed it. Short and sweet.
I envision this would be an excellent minigame for a warioware style game. Very silly and very fun. I love that it's basically impossible to turn a profit. The only winning move is not to pack pickles.
Great presentation but definitely needs work on balance. Insanely difficult with zero breathing room.
Great sound + animation, good job. Go rate more games!
I really like the surreal visual style here and gave it my best shot but unfortunately there were so many progression blockers I couldn't complete it.
I think a greater focus on playtesting and stability to make sure the game plays and runs well is the biggest thing. Keeping the unique ideas and visual aesthetic is paramount because I think you have a very different design voice and that's awesome.
Hoping to play another jam game in the future with less issues and less clunky combat, but hopefully with just as quirky art and keeping the style you've got going, cause it's sick.
Very slick presentation and everything is smooth and well explained, loads of content. Really impressive work.
I have no real criticisms except I didn't notice the upgrade panel for over 10 levels!!!!!!! I don't know if that's me being stupid or what but I feel like a little more fanfare on it would be nice.
Amazing work!
Very cool game loop with some fun moments, events were a bit iffy but I understand why.
The balance was reasonably good but I think fixing degenerate strategies (running skeleton crew and never having resource issues) is paramount. The midgame was great where I was desperately balancing resources off eachother, but eventually I found stable equilibrium and smashed through the rest of the game.
I think there needs to be more ways for things to go wrong, more incentive to carry extra crew and probably some limitations on how much you can stockpile. The game is also paced a bit too slowly. Potentially turn based or at least a shorter timer would be much better I think, most of my gameplay time was spent waiting unfortunately. Oh yeah and it would be nice to color code resource icons to help identify them faster.
Great art and concept, solid execution too the actual interaction between systems etc. works great! No bugs!
Overall very cool idea, huge scope pulled off pretty well but needed a little more time to cook, great stuff!
Nice sub, would have liked a little more visuals like maybe some stars or something for visual interest but other than that the art is great, decent music and SFX and the gameplay is pretty fun. I got decently far but ran out of ammo. Scored 20 points.
It wasn't super clear what each item was initially but I figured it out pretty fast through trial and error. The cargo in particular wasn't really very obvious, I assume it's literally just what gives you score but it wasn't communicated by the game well, some juice on finishing a run to let you know you did well by bringing as much cargo as possible would be a great addition.
Great work!
Excellent polish and juice in this game, very consistently high quality pixel art and nice animations on everything! The core concept is a great starting place, but I found myself a little disappointed that the torch mechanic felt like it was encouraging me to explore and find stuff, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything to find.
I think the difficulty needed to ramp up a bit, I found a position on the map I could stand still and shoot basically every enemy approaching and never be in any danger which is a shame.
Overall it's simple, well implemented and very nice looking and feeling, I think it's a great submission, awesome work!
Bizarre but very funny and creepy. Love that this gives us the Ludum Dare lore we've been missing all this time.
It did feel a little telegraphed to me and to be honest I have seen this type of thing before but it was executed pretty well. Excellent audio-visual effects as well to sell the creepiness and clearly a lot of work went into creating the full sequence.
Great job!
It's so cute, I love it.
The jellyfish are so cute. I think they are my favourite.
The concept would work really well for some kinda warioware style game and the vibes are so good, I love the music and the art, honestly can't find anything to criticize, it's perfectly short and sweet. Great job!
Interesting idea, I think it would have been a bit more user friendly to have slots for buildings rather than trying to cram them in pixel by pixel. The economy also feels a little straightforward, not much to think about once you have food and water online.
There's also a bit of an exploit where you can place buildings in space.
I like the idea of having to destroy and replace buildings to manage needs, but the build time is a bit tedious for that and the clunky building placement makes it a bit annoying.
Congrats on submitting a game to LDjam!
the cats 1-53 better be sleeping or i'm going to cry
Interesting concept, some good ideas in here like indicating enemy spawn points. Variety in enemies was good and it plays fairly well.
The audio could use some tweaking, the guns feel a bit meh, it's serviceable but could definitely be better. The art has a nice style to it that I actually like, but it's let down a little bit by the boring grey background and the default looking UI. Simple art can be good if it's applied in a consistent way and I think if there was a simple background and the UI matched the characters you'd be golden.
Finally this type of game needs JUICE!!! I can't stress it enough! Screenshake, flashes, explosions, blood, damage numbers, however you have to do it, do it! With just a few minor tweaks your game could look and feel amazing so try and set asside time for it next jam!
Congrats on submitting to ludum dare, great work!
Interesting idea but mashing space is tedious and not knowing plant behaviour before you plant the first one is really irritating. Multiple times I spent ages saving up just for my plant to instantly die because I didn't know how it would work which is really annoying.
I also think the balance of the economy is off, it takes too much time to turn profit which makes the game extremely repetitive for no real reason.
Simple tweaks can fix all these problems and the core idea is good so I'd say the most important lesson here is to playtest and tweak the game so it feels smoother.
Great job finishing and submitting a game, well done!
Definitely some issues with difficulty here, instantly being thrown in with no time to get your bearings is a pain. I literally died in the first second of my first run which doesn't feel great.
The walls being color coded doesn't work for me, they all look so similar it doesn't feel like a meaningful enough difference for a first time player to absorb the situation around them and make informed decisions.
Overall just needs a difficulty tweak downwards, especially at the start to give the player time to find their bearings, difficulty can escalate as the game progresses but dying 5 times in the first 2 seconds is not ideal.
Some more animation and movement on different objects would also go a long way to improving the feel of the game, bright colors can work but the visual aesthetic is very flat and static, not much is happening asside from player movement, theres lots of room to improve there.
Great job submitting a finished game!
Neat concept with fairly good level design, nothing too hard and nothing too easy which was nice.
Protagonist is cute and I pretty much skipped through all the dialogue as it seemed to have no relevance to the gameplay.
Theres loads of art on each level which is really cool, a nice vibe and theme throughout all the levels really elevated the game.
A few too many pixel perfect jumps/teleports for my liking, I think most of them weren't really intended to be hard so I think the best way to iron out those clunky parts of the level design would be to playtest more, but this is a nitpick.
Great work, I enjoyed it :)
Awesome concept, sad I have nobody to coop with, the art is fantastic, the gameplay is fun, the puzzles were great and it's just very silly in the best way.
This is a genius idea, I'm shocked I've never something like this before! It feels pretty solid, the movement is a little wobbley but feels bug free which I think is impressive, it must have been tricky to calculate the movement paths.
Graphics are simple but nicely made which I think suits the game perfectly, a shame there's no AI so I couldn't really play it, but I imagine it's good fun. Hard to screw up a great formula like scorched earth.
My only gripe is the aiming system feels a bit clunky and unintuitive, I prefer the classic style where you manually adjust angle and force by holding keys.
Overall a great little jam game that nails it's scope perfectly, great work!
Pretty simple but nice presentation and idea. Would like to see a bit more decision making than just going to a thing to press a button, maybe some light resource management or simple repair minigames could liven up the experience.
Congrats on submitting to your first LD! Looking forward to seeing more in the future, good luck!
Really great art and the music is pretty cool, the background art is really really cool, the cute color palette makes the game pop so well and I was definitely jamming to the music.
Unfortunately it's not really playable? Grabbing asteroids was really inconsistent, I couldn't figure it out at all, and I'm not sure if you can win or lose? I got softlocked holding an asteroid I couldnt throw again after killing 10 or 12 aliens.
It would have been great to have a little bit of juice on the interactions to make them feel a bit nicer, explosions when enemies die, a sound when the player shoots or sucks an asteroid in, and some screenshake would be sweet!
Overall I think it's great looking and a really good concept for a game, it's unfortunate the gameplay wasn't quite there this time, but there's always another jam!
Really great art and all the functionality feels great, picking up and dropping boxes is super smooth, good feedback and juice on everything, fundamentals are A++ but the gameplay itself is just so boring. Maybe that's the point but idk it feels like a waste to have all this great game quality squandered on an incredibly boring game loop.
Great work, I'm really impressed, congrats on submitting :)
Should definitely have a mood rating on this one cause it has great mood. Nice vibes, cool mechanic, started a bit worryingly simple but thankfully the b-sides were there with way more depth and playing around with the puzzle ideas which I really liked.
Love the visual aesthetic, chill skycastle is a great place to put a game. Good stuff!
Fun little minigame with great juice and feel, upgrades felt a bit weak and it would have been nice to have some classics like multishot or some other kinda powerups or abilities to keep it a bit fresh but overall it's a great solid little game that nails exactly what it was going for. Great job!
Really cool and creative idea with some awesome art but the controls are really finicky and the fights feel overtuned. I'm not sure if I missed something but I couldnt delete any of the bosses after surviving long enough, and the word boss just kicks me out instantly.
I'm guessing those issues are just bugs or control scheme things I couldn't figure out, but I basically beat chrome and discord and really liked what I saw, just needs some more polish and tuning to make it more approachable and clear what to do.
Awesome work, I'm really impressed, great work!
Top notch art and presentation, some great animation and VFX, but the core gameplay is a little jank, the character seems to get frozen or something regularly and I got out of bounds twice accidentally... There's also a really long delay between turns that just puts me to sleep.
The core concept is neat so I think it's just an iteration thing, more focus on snappy gameplay and responsiveness and a little more testing to spot bugs and you'd smash it.
Despite the issues it's really well done and the models are so good. Awesome work!