Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → GoogleFrog
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | π₯ | Traffic Control Publican | jam | 602 | 3.32 | 3.31 | 3.37 | 3.73 | 3.22 | 3.32 | 3.32 | 3.34 |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | π₯ | Trading Postage | jam | 85 | 4.00 | 4.00 | 3.90 | 4.30 | 3.60 | 3.46 | 3.12 | 3.79 |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | π₯ | Journey to the Centre of the Ocean | jam | 392 | 3.62 | 3.74 | 2.84 | 4.00 | 3.00 | 2.95 | 2.66 | 3.22 |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | π₯ | Deadly Trails | jam | 313 | 3.78 | 3.70 | 3.88 | 4.08 | 3.26 | 3.08 | 3.47 | 3.60 |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | π₯ | Euclid's Elementals | jam | 322 | 3.80 | 3.71 | 4.30 | 3.82 | 3.45 | 3.71 | 2.97 | 3.52 |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | π₯ | Compact Domain | jam | 91 | 4.13 | 4.11 | 3.56 | 4.09 | 4.34 | 3.47 | 2.76 | 3.68 |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | π₯ | Seeds of Civilisation | jam | 91 | 3.97 | 3.88 | 4.00 | 4.05 | 3.60 | 3.71 | 3.61 | 3.70 |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | π₯ | Regular Railway | jam | 222 | 3.87 | 4.00 | 3.63 | 3.94 | 3.33 | 3.31 | 3.20 | 3.48 |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | π₯ | Flickerlight | jam | 98 | 4.08 | 3.45 | 3.45 | 4.17 | 3.97 | 3.93 | 2.97 | 4.21 |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | π₯ | Three Miles High | jam | 132 | 4.04 | 4.16 | 4.06 | 4.33 | 3.79 | 3.93 | 3.79 | 3.75 |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | π₯ | Polyomino Prospector | jam | 478 | 3.78 | 3.78 | 4.11 | 4.31 | 3.50 | 3.69 | 2.88 | 3.36 |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | π₯ | Crocodial | jam | 646 | 3.60 | 3.81 | 3.86 | 3.78 | 3.30 | 3.18 | 3.75 | 3.50 |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | π₯ | Vivere Computatrum | jam | 600 | 3.76 | 3.28 | 3.73 | 4.21 | 3.52 | 3.00 | 3.15 | 3.63 |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | π₯ | Warp Trash Flotilla | jam | 28 | 4.25 | 4.24 | 4.43 | 4.32 | 3.67 | 3.65 | 3.61 | 3.98 |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | π₯ | To the Last Drop | jam | 496 | 3.45 | 3.33 | 3.38 | 3.92 | 3.43 | 2.66 | 3.16 |
I really like the design behind the mechanics. The jump is simple but has a lot of uses. The mechanics are introduced at a reasonable pace. Nice hybrid of a puzzle/action game.
One issue: Some levels confused me because I would enter the level and have it complete 'automatically' a few seconds later. In later levels I realized that the aim was to kill all the henchmen in some levels. Was a bit confusing to start with.
Great game. It took a while for me to figure out how to use the double click attack but since then I really like the mechanic.
I think the single biggest improvement would be more feedback for actions. I am still not quite sure how poison works, there should be throw animation, hit animation etc.. Same for knowing what killed you. The red circle for double click is some great visual feedback.
Nice grab physics. I cannot handle the camera movement though. Whenever I picked a 'surprise package' it disappeared so I thought I had reached the end.
I like the core gameplay. The ship movement feels fluid and controllable. Picking up the particles feels good. Not competing on graphics or sound seemed like a good choice.
It's cool that you can sacrifice some health to dive through the walls. Apart from that I don't see why I would sacrifice anything. It's not clear what the timer that counts up does. Space and Right Control are not two keys I want to have to press with the same hand.
The linux build seems to be suffering from a fatal packaging error. The linux devs have gone to sleep so I'll remove the download for now.
Excellent game. The prayer system doesn't feel retrofitted and does more than just prevent 1-car. Running over pedestrians creates a "soft loss" condition which scales up faster than the hard loss condition of crashing all your cars. Without the loss of control I worry that the number of obstacles would need to be increased dramatically or the game would go for far too long.
The car movement, swerving, and crashing physics is spot on. I never felt like cars were crashing due to minor impacts, and they tended to crash when they should. This allows for some fun stuff such as making rafts of busses that keep each other aligned when one falls asleep.
My biggest piece of negative feedback is that, apart from not losing, it does not matter what you do in the early stages of the game. Put another way, the difficulty of the game scales with your score. This means that a player seeking a high score has nothing to do in the low difficulty parts of the game. I like the solution suggested by @wilhelm - a score multiplier based on the number of cars (although he was not solving quite the same problem).
Other than that I just have quibbles. Selecting cars can be finicky at times. It takes a while to notice the effect of running over pedestrians.
It takes a while to get going as the firing feels bad without the first fire rate upgrade. After that it is pretty smooth. I'd like to be able to move with the mouse instead of WSAD.
I like it. The sequencing is not strict and there are some red herrings so it is a well done reverse metroid. The puzzle at the end was surprisingly fun given its simplicity. Giving up your powers is really on-theme.
I know it is hard in a LD, but a little more polish would help, especially for informative feedback. The worst offender is rocket as it appears to do nothing for the first few seconds. This could be fixed by shaking the player sprite during the charge-up.
I can't reach the platform under the clock, it's quite early in the game.
Great idea. The exploding crown is a nice touch to make the game just complex enough. I like how the relatively coarse placement grid saves the player from obsessing over precise placement.
Bugs: My camera became mostly stuck once and the cursor was a cancel sign when I tried to move it. Level 9 seems to be a duplicate of level 8. I have no sound.
Nice theme and polished graphics. I think it would be improved with more sluggish vertical movement. As it is, your position changes too rapidly to react.
If I get too friendly with Zeus a cloud appears and steals my breeding pairs!
It would be nice to have the controls visible in a corner of the UI. On my first run I went in, picked up some animals and moved them around. I couldn't sacrifice an animal (it was the wrong type) but I thought there might be another button to sacrifice. With the controls visible I wouldn't have had to exit out to check.
Sometimes the RNG depopulates a species. Otherwise, great.
I like the idea and the gardening is well implemented. Placing and replacing the blocks on the altar can get a bit frustrating. The blocks rotate when I move, making them hard to place. Once I placed a block too high and was unable to jump high enough to pick it up. I passed the first two levels. Very polished.
On my first attempt I planted the shovel under the altar, dooming me.
There are some nice elements, good music and sprites. Unfortunately there are too many bugs and it is unclear what to do. About 20% of the time the exit to a room does not work (I just walk through it offscreen). Some of the combat works but often it lacks feedback. I have not been able to kill a red transforming person.
I like how the game sticks to exploring what can be done with the core mechanic of throwing bullets back at enemies. The game is carried by its puzzle-like level design. I would only wish for better graphics and something that allows me to skip the early sections when I keep dying on the later ones.
The graphics are really good. The respawn checkpoint system was a bit frustrating as it seemed a bit inconsistent and I sometimes had trouble escaping the far reaches of the map.
This is really fun for how simple it is. The design of the sliding rewarded me for thinking about the problem and planning my build pattern to get better scores. My best score is 67.
What really surprised me about the game is how much it held up to an autoclicker. It is a different game, but still quite fun, and by no means easy. The UI seems to have some sort of delay or hitbox jankyness that caused the blocks to always slip from my grasp. My best autoclicker score is 142.
The animations and music really brought the kindgom alive, and I had fun managing my resource balance. A few more options in the endgame would have been nice.
I download page just has an exe. It crashes when it starts because it is missing SDL.dll.
Interesting approach to "keep it alive". I won with only 200M survivors. The imperfect control over the population and the ship are what make the game.
Neat game. The graphics and audio are quite polished and I'm a sucker for tile placement puzzles. I like how the score system encourages me to surround villages early, but the balance between villages and land seems to be a bit off. I found the best strategy was to make a big wall around almost the entire map, then to use all the mine income to wall off the rest. https://i.imgur.com/hzplVA5.png
I really like it, and it doesn't even need a goal beyond messing around with cubes. The collisions on the dance floor create nice procedural music as they inject some variance in the repeating commands.
The fling slowdown and physics is really satisfying. One of the best games I've played so far.
Neat idea. Selecting what you were trying to posses with the arrow keys was a bit finicky, but otherwise quite well done.
As far as tower defense design goes, I really like how the ubiquitous AoE damage in this design removes the targeting AI issues that someones affect tower defense games. It makes the game play smoothly and overall is well implemented. Overall it works very well, except sometimes the chips on the screen would stop moving. Perhaps my maze broke them. https://i.imgur.com/btxODxc.png
Thanks for all the feedback. It takes a bit too much poking around to figure it all out since we had no time for tutorialisation. All the monks stopping is probably due to running out of food, which will eventually cause a loss due to battery power, but we did not get around to detecting when food will lead to a loss. I've added a 'Help and Hits' section to the game description.
I couldn't resist fixing a few bugs that sometimes crop up in monk behaviour, as well as doing a few minor things that make the interface a bit clearer. I managed to resist making any changes to the underlying game mechanics and balance.
Fixes in v1.2: - Fixed a bug that caused monks to be less interruptible by the player than intended. - Fixed a bug that caused some blocked task types to not advance the job queue in some situations. - Fixed "Cancel and keep current skill" hitbox. - Added a defeat message to deal with the loss condition of everyone starving (or having nowhere to sleep). - Reworded Controls and Objectives slightly. - Made the help screen say the title of the game. - Darkened the Rest and Satiety bars when the monk is neither rested or satiated respectively. - Replaced "Carrying" with "Busy With", except in the rare case where carrying does not make the monk busy. - Made monks be "Busy With" Eat and Sleep. - "Monitor Batteries" -> "Gather Batteries". - "Demolish Construction" -> "Cancel Construction" and made the construction deconstruction slightly less confusing. - "Order" -> "Assign" - Changed the Order/Assign text colour when the monk is busy - indicating that the order will not be acted on immediately. - Fixed some UI clickthrough. - Fixed a UI discrepancy with Power Consumption For Next Battery.
Thanks @twobitadder and @ordineu I'm glad you like it. I've found myself fiddling around and playing it when I should really be rating other games. In the interest of not keeping all the fun to myself I made a post-jam version for those who are particularly keen. It can be downloaded here: https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD46/releases/tag/V1.3
This version has two more challenging modes in which the laptop requires more upkeep and the rate of discharge can grow without limit. The basic objective is harder and more urgent, but I am also really looking forward to seeing how long I can survive with unbounded charge requirements. The first mode can be enabled by typing 'challenge' and seems doable. I am not even sure if the second mode is possible.
Years are minutes, and 36 is pretty quick. Monks seek out their needs at 30% depletion. Delaying their sleep makes them sleep for a bit longer, but you are right that we probably could have rescaled everything so they sought out their need at 0%. There were plans to make bad things happen at 0% (slower movement, maybe even death) but the game turned out to not even need it, which I found to be quite neat.
Nice concept. I like the combination of an arcade-style flying game with a management/spreadsheet game as they are two very different tasks to manage. My main critique is that adding more planets does not change the game much. I can let a few turn into snowballs while focusing on the rest, and once a few are enlightened I am essentially playing a previous level. To make the game more engaging beyond a few levels I think the number of enlightened planets or complete wastelands should impact the game globally somehow, or there should be some sort of soft clock on the level. Besides any issue with pacing after 30+ minutes of play, great work!
Thanks for all the feedback. We've made a post-jam version, the main changes are: - Spiky rocks are easier to see, and rocks don't spawn behind trees. - Adjusted the post-rival scaling to keep up with spell scaling (playing enough to tune the post-game has so far been out of reach during a jam). - End stats (press 'tab', it is prompted if you get far enough). - More bees.
Link: https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD47/releases/tag/v1.1
I worry that the game may be a bit hard as I like to err on the side of challenge. The bullet hell aspect is a bit deceptive too, as it is more a game of clearing waves faster than they can breach your shields than it is a game of dodging everything. I find it hard to be particularly sad about how that part of the balance shook out because I think shields are a core part of wizard battles.
Very cool and tightly balanced.
I really liked the feel of the jumping and dashing. The accelerations are well tuned and I like the animations. Unfortunately they worked a bit inconsistently as the character would often get stuck in the wall or floor after a jump, requiring a bit of control fiddling to become unstuck.
The levels throw a lot of new mechanics at the player and don't explain what many of them mean. I would have loved to see half the mechanics (this would have still been plenty) with twice the attention paid to each one. I died several times before realising that there even was a spike near the start (it has a similar colour to the background), and I wasn't sure when I could kill enemies or when they would kill me. More animations/effects to tell the player what the world is doing would go a long way.
There is a good charming core of a game here, so I hope you keep it up.
I love the way it escalates and the simple set of enemies and weapons.
Nice puzzle progression and I like the ending. The numbers at the end even made me play it a second time, which was cool. The collapsing tower caused a bit of lag and the platforms were a bit hard to understand initially, maybe they needed a 'waiting' graphical state. Overall really neat.
Super solid. There is just enough there (three terrain types, four gem colours, three mining tools) to make for a great quick-decision arcade game without overwhelming me with choice.
mine.png
It started off a bit slowly before I had a level 2 drill, but after that it has a nice flow to it. The difference between drill level and drill speed was unclear. Otherwise, it's a really smooth game with quite a bit of polish - the art is good, excellent sound design, good platforming controls.
It's quite challenging and a nice puzzle. I would have liked a bit more freedom in moving my pieces left/right, or alternately, more time to position my next piece before it enters the field. I also made a game that grew from "What if reverse Tetris?" and it's cool to see this take on it.
Very cool. I noticed everything speed up when I near the black hole. How much physics is here? I don't think I've ever seen black hole time dilation.
Some sort of velocity display on the UI would be nice for feedback.
Thanks for the feedback. The rules for digging were hard to dial in. In the end we settled on a piece digging when: - It has no tiles poking out into open space, or - It hits a rock (and doesn't have enough diamond drills), or - It is about to fall off resources by itself (ie no player input), and would fall onto fewer resources than it is on at the moment.
I'm happy to hear that it is mostly reading your mind (doing what you intend to do) and agree that it is a bit opaque. I tried removing the resource-dig rule and making Enter force-dig the piece, but it felt a bit clunky at the time so I dropped the idea. Resource combos seemed like a central satisfying part of the game so we wanted something that made them a bit easier to get.
I really like being able to play the non-shop part of the game with just the arrow keys. It's a tradeoff though, and the straightfowardness of a force-dig key may have been worth the extra controls. Having your piece die to a stray bit of coal is a bit annoying.
I love the concept and polish. My only gripe is that it wasn't clear to me where my water was coming from each turn.
Amazing! Really well paced and responsive. So much risk-reward was enabled for the player with the simple combination of grey keys and stacks of grey doors. There is a good mix of obvious and not so obvious traps. I like how the spray system is chucked in as an aside, and it ends up being useful.
Nice entry. The simple mechanics are explored in a decent number of puzzles and the sound/visuals are nice and clean. I really appreciated the level selection button as without it I would have had to restart the whole game. What happened is, in one of the later levels a homing red blob pushed me against the wall in such a way that I couldn't move (not enough force) and the block was in the way of shooting the enemy.
Great moving and shooting. I love the pixely lireo-style graphics. I got to 364.
https://i.imgur.com/OGO0TQj.png Absolutely amazing. The idea is simple but seems difficult to implement without being frustrating. The physics here is spot on and pretty forgiving. That and the funny pieces and music make for a great game.
The wavy saw room is really brutal. Otherwise a fun puzzle with a bit of movement skill up until then.
Great take on the theme and I like the look.
I like the absurdity of the stuff falling from the sky, and the bouncing of the blocks makes them able to spill over platforms if they pile up.
Nice platforming with good pacing and difficulty. The main improvement I'd make is to add space to the bottom of the screen, so that my jump target is visible when I double jump downards.
Great game. I was ready for a frantic blocking game but instead it's a nice slow puzzler. My favourite levels are 6 and 7. I think three characters is a nice middle ground.
The first two levels were a little confusing. The first one involves wraparound so it took me a few restart to correlate the disappearing lion with whatever happened on the left of the screen. The second level suddenly introduces four characters, which is a bit overhwelming. Overall a nice take on the theme though, and I like this form of puzzle.
highScore2.png Very nice game. I'm always interested to see cellular automata used in games but it's rare to find one that fits so well. The rule for when the life counts as "dead" is a bit unclear, but I imagine that was one of the hardest parts of the game. The rule is pretty robust, whatever it is, since I discovered a small two-ant oscillator and a way to make a diamond that slowly grows arbitrarily large - and the game did not give me score for either of them. It is a bit frustrating to lose while a ladder is being built on a collision course with another ladder, but I suppose that is just the rule of the game.
Thanks @k4m1, I wouldn't expect the mac version to work well since we just take it on faith that the mac build works well. Nobody tests on mac.
Amazing. I like the variety of upgrades.
Nice game. It could have been a bit more satisfying with clumped enemies. I liked managing the timers for the budda and my attack.
I like the alien feel of the tournament built over a simple concept. The last contestant gave me flashbacks.
Nice! Very hectic so it took me a little while to figure out what was going on. I would have like a bit more leniency in rotating the large block and maybe it would have been neat to have the player build up a deck of large blocks that they keep using. My best score was 1335.
Thanks for all the feedback. We've made a post-jam version, partially because we can't seem to stop making levels, and partially for the practice. It has a full map editor with custom level loading, a few more levels, and trains that can reverse in blocked junctions to switch track. Also more fire. Here it is: https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD51/releases/tag/PostJam4
The possibility of giving the player more breathing room at the start of levels came up, but we also really liked having the beat of the music line up with train spawns. This complicated things so we weren't able to find a good solution in time. Not spawning trains unless the first piece is placed (suggested by @patomkin) works really well, so the new version has it.
@triangletriangle and @chao we often have a problem with steep learning curves, or with mechanics that are a bit hard to get used to. I like to see progression in games but it is hard to remember that the whole game is new to someone seeing it for the first time. Level makers also seem to find challenging levels more interesting create. If we had more playtesters it could be worth only bringing some in on the last evening. Anyway, to cement the lesson I've made the first few levels a bit easier and added an extra early level to smooth out the curve.
Trying to make more forgiving placement was an interesting problem. We were aware of the annoyance of suddenly routing a line into the forest but lacked simple solutions. Trains can't be destroyed as that would undermine the challenge of the game. Junctions seem to be the worst offenders, so I have modified junctions to let trains reverse and change track if blocked. It would be interesting to put the modified game in front of people to see if this is a good enough solution.
@nardandas trains being on fire isn't an automatic loss. I've seen a lot of victories with trains on fire in some corner of the map. So I wouldn't want fire to cause a loss directly. However, fire is a clear loss if it blocks a town that still needs resources. So this now causes a loss, and sets the town on fire for good measure.
People kept making levels after the jam was over, just for fun, so I added a full level editor and custom level loader. I was also curious about how to save and load external levels in Love as I hadn't done it before. The result looks a bit too much like Dwarf Fortress for my liking, but it works. levelEdit.png The jam version of the game has a rudimentary level editor that consists of changing a global constant and copying formatted tables out of the console. This led to more levels than I was expecting in the last few hours (even a basic level editor is really useful). I considered making a custom level system at the time (just loading, not editing and saving) to distribute to playtesters, as some were relying on manual builds which was slowing things down. I couldn't find an immediate way to do it though, so dropped it. Now that I have a level loading system it should help with future games.
The refresh button can only be clicked every ten seconds (to be on theme) which strikes a balance nice between just clicking refresh until you get what you want, and refreshing occasionally to clear a shop with nothing you can use.
Thanks @molpe. We made a game for LD52 too. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/seeds-of-civilisation
The grunting and art style is great for the mood of the game. I like that trees can be set on fire too. I was a bit confused at the start because I expected the bonfire to relight my torch when it went out, but collecting wood quickly made it clear how the torch works. I could only play for a short time because the camera made me nauseous. Overall very moody and fits the theme!
Excellent game. The ammo and level design are well balanced against each other and having to dive into a pile of bugs to get ammo from a dying turret is great.
Very nice hectic game. I like how it is possible to run out of a few types of pieces. It makes the game switch back and forth between trying to send planes to airports, and just trying to send planes to pick up pieces. I would have liked to be able to drop pieces back into storage (without spending them) as I lost a lot of pieces by picking them up then changing my mind. My best score is 22.
Looks good. Running over the aliens is satisfying and I like the use of lighting.
I like how all the plants seem to have a life cycle. Even the plants which are dealing the damage, so I would keep them around if not for their effectiveness dropping off.
At some point waves stopped happening. I killed a large wave of snails, was that the end?
Neat game. I managed to get a good ending on the post-jam version by focusing all my attention on South America. It has a good grouping of countries that can support one or two colonies, to spread out the hostility. I mostly made embassies and colony claims. Screenshot 2023-10-14 142941.png I was only able to do this with a bug. It was still a fun challenge though, as in this state as it seems just barely possible. The embassy balance is pretty fine in this region, too many and people starve, too few and colonies get destroyed.
Anyway, the bug is that Establish Covert Base, Establish Embassy, and Claim Colony can be done without the required resources. The resources are still spent if you have them. Also, Trade Minerals for food and Negotiate Colony only check the resources at the start of the turn. This meant I could do two Trade Minerals with 10 stored minerals and receive 20 food. It is also possible to do Negotiate Colony twice with only 15 minerals banked, although I ended up not using this since Claim Colony is mostly free. With this in mind my strategy was as follows: - Trade my first 10 minerals for 20 food. - Place embassies in countries I will want to claim colonies in, ensuring all my embassies overlap Brazil (there is a spot which covers Ecuador and Brazil). - Claim about five colonies as the first ships start to arrive, because this action is only free when you have zero minerals and settlement generates minerals. - Combine early fleet settlement with Mine Asteroids, to give me at least 10 minerals to turn into 20 food next turn. Otherwise large fleets will starve when they arrive. - Claim colonies here and there when my minerals hit zero, filtering in extra embassies when countries get a bit too hostile. - Make sure I can settle large fleets in one go, as they drain a lot of food in orbit.
I might have found two other bugs, or they might have been intentional. The first is that fleets in orbit seemed to cost food and starve even if they are being settled that turn. This contradicts the Elder text that says fleets will starve unless settled. The other possible bug is that doing two settle actions with two fleets in orbit will only settle one fleet. The second action seems to do nothing. Oh, and the UI seems to break a bit. I sometimes had a country tooltip stuck in the top left of the screen, and things that I didn't mean to place would sometimes end up under the buttons in the top right.
In spite of all this, I still spent a few hours playing around and trying out different approaches. So the game holds up underneath. Using the real earth is a nice touch as it lets people use their geography knowledge.
There is a good amount of variety. I think by the end of the game I had driven each type of car, which was nice. I thought the ice level was nasty, then I became a policeman.
Nice take on asteroids to really limit the space. By level 8 I started wondering whether collision damage was needed at all (except when crushed against the bottom of the screen) because pushing through is hard enough. I beat level 10 but then couldn't see what changed in the "+" levels.
It is a little dizzying. The audio is very nice. I found something weird happens with bounce physics if push a cat sideways, are they attracted to the edge?
@lofar42 individual tiles are drawn from a cycling deck and combined into dominoes. Some second choices of tile are skipped over (eg Sawmill-Sawmill isn't allowed), and a domino that can't be placed anywhere is discarded and a new one is drawn. The "Out of space" loss condition is just this processes giving up after a few dozen iterations, rather than entering an infinite loop.
Funnily enough, we were planning to implement a tech tree, but the domino drawing system ended up doing it automatically. You can't place a sawmill without first placing a woodcutter because sawmill needs a nearby woodcutter, so any candidate domino with a sawmill on it is discarded. So we just chucked a static set of tiles in (depending on level) and let the tile generator figure it out. Unfortunately, if you have nowhere left to place an Outpost, it won't give you any. Which can be a bit confusing.
Thanks @flyingkaida. Most buildings need a resource and a worker living nearby. Workers can travel four tiles from the home, but if there are few workers in an area and a lot of jobs to do, then they will only find time to do the ones closest to home. Outposts need to be sent a plank every minute or so to keep them usable.
Wow @langotriel, that's great to hear, although I hope you didn't need those hours for sleep too badly. That is the last level, but if you still want more I have added the link for a link to the post-jam version. While it doesn't have extra levels, it does have a difficulty selector that can be opened with Ctrl+H. Apart from that, it has some visual and UI improvements that didn't make it into the jam version. The mechanics of the base difficulty are essentially unchanged.
There is also a level editor (also in the jam version) that can be opened with Ctrl+E, if you really want to mess around. Note that scout thresholds have to be modified manually by opening the level files in a text editor.
Great game. Very polished graphics and I'm a big fan of unusual shapes for tiles and abilities. The limited space is really felt.
The thing I would improve is to make it more obvious what portals do. I thought each portal produced a certain number of critters, and I just needed to have enough portals to man all my towers. I only learnt how they really worked when I placed a tower late in the first level and saw each portal generate a single critter. So the mechanic is at least somewhat discoverable.
Screenshot 2023-10-05 131932.png Also I am not sure how the game ends. In each of the levels the king dies and a horde appears, but nothing happens afterwards. Waves come but I seem to be able to defeat them forever. I got to around 100k mana in the first level then deleted a tower to lose.
Neat game. Shooting to propel yourself around felt good. I didn't realise there were keyboard controls until I checked at the end though. Not rotating the screen with the player was the right choice. I would be sick within a minute if it rotated.
The soundtrack works really well and the variety of enemies and upgrades is impressive. The stage generator is very capricious though, sometimes being fairly harmless and other times essentially killing you. A more static progression could help.
I like the soundtrack and the movement is good enough for dodging. Sometimes I felt like RNG killed me though, by blocking off part of the level with a removed tile, so some control over which tile disappears would be great. For example, the tile beneath the player could disappear to incentivise using the edges early to preserve the middle.
I like the idea, but something about the way the background moved made me nauseous.
After hours trapped in the karmic cycle, I came to prioritise organising my problems over solving them. Screenshot 2024-04-21 011337.png Things I learnt: - Sometimes problems solve themselves. - Spinning around in a circle while looking at the sky is not entirely random, but not entirely reliable either.
Screenshot 2024-04-17 105818.png I like the feel of summoning blocks into the void and the 3D aspect really adds to the mood. I got locked early on my first attempt because I naturally went for ground rather than water. On my second one I have a bit of an economy, but my gold goes up very slowly, and everything I haven't build costs belief, but I generate no belief.
I don't even know if I could generate enough belief since my town is almost dead. At this point the blocks almost cost more than my maximum storage of them, and things I could build to expand my storage fail to pay for the block they would need to be built on. So the economy needs some work. It was also a bit opaque as to how my houses etc drain my food.
Making the terrain itself for a city builder is a neat idea though.
I like it, quite a tight game with a lot of polish around it. I would have been nice to have some UI transitions that emphasised the fact that the two non-selected tiles were kept for the next round. Also, the icons in the weakness square look a bit dissimilar to the creatures on the board, which caused one or two unforced errors. But it's great overall, those are the only two issues I ran into.
fraction.png @drgcandle a fragile mix of respect and disrespect for mathematics. To be fair, the more extreme approximations were only used while debugging to check whether I was going insane.
Technically, it seemed to run fine performance wise. But on some browsers the sound didn't play, on others the mouse wasn't captured, and no solution allowed the game to be played in anything larger than a tiny window. So it just sucked.
Thanks for all the great feedback. I found a way to reproduce a triangle that fails to be detected as a sigil, and fixed it. I've made that the recommended jam release, 1_05_Bugfix, because it a small and pretty unambiguous bug. We have also made a post jam version that fixes a few effects and adds animations that did not make it in. Mostly for practise and our own amusement.
It's a nice punchy game with smooth movement. I was impressed by the power of the simple effect of the shadows/buildings, as it gives depth but doesn't get in the way. In terms of pacing, perhaps the final summoner could have gone berserk and turned into the final boss or something, because otherwise the game gets easier as you progress.
A great game that got even better when I realised upgrades could be combined, then machine gunned the last few waves. I'm really impressed by the variety of upgrades and mechanics that you came up with over three days. Spores and fruiting. There isn't just an economy upgrade, but three distinct economy upgrades. The upgrade that boosts neighbours was a bold move but very satisfying, and switching upgrades around was great.
Very cool. The balance of attack vs. defense and the various upgrades will make or break this sort of game, and here it seems close enough to balanced to work. Having previous players act as the opponents is great and keeps the opponents fresh and challenging. I wonder what the opponents will look like in a few weeks time.
I have defeated Anny and am waiting at round 100 for the next challenger.
I also found a bug with selling and buying many things at once. It possibly also felled Anny.
Double post (site error)
image.png The bug happened when I sold all my fingers and refreshed back up to this setup. There was a ghost ring on my ring finger that couldn't be sold and was blocking placement. So I clicked play and then instantly died, without a battle. Still a great game though. I had a setup that looked very similar to Anny, but won each time due to how the numbers panned out, and it wasn't even all diamonds. So it should be quite a challenge.
It was fairly confusing at first. The people on the side of the road could wave, or something, and there could be more warning. But I got the hang of it. The best score seemed to come from squashing the big bugs.
The movement mechanic is very interesting.
Excellent. I wouldn't change anything, except that on the last day you shouldn't be able to buy anything. I got to the end with just over 1000 gold, but seeing the shop I thought I had another day to go for a better score. So I bought a few cheap cards, clicked "0 Days Left" button, then lost. Otherwise, things like the way the requests come in during the day, and the lack of any aid for the summon tree, are great.
A great puzzle game. I like how there is a mix of physics and more restrictive door-based puzzles. I think I "broke" a few puzzles by absolutely spamming dudes, but that was half the fun.
Fun game. I skipped the tutorial then played a few rounds to try out different things. Keeping your living army from round to round is weird, but works pretty well. The music and sound effects are great (ant). I think there might have been a bug with on-death effects not triggering.
Very chill, but I played for far too long and would have been nice to know whether the game has an end. Great pixel art.
Great game. I really like how it starts out looking like mini golf, but then it becomes clear that the whole map is in play.
Great entry. For some reason, I was surprised when the sun started to explode, and that was when I really started reading the UI to figure out how to optimise things. The puzzle felt well balanced and I made it out in the end. I only really have two minor gripes. - The art spent most of its time covered by the UIs, but this is tricky since UIs are really necessary and I appreciated their size when using them. - All the zeros at the ends of the numbers made them hard to parse. I counted digits a few times to check whether the income load was enough to satisfy demand. I could have easily misread the number and received 1/10th the progress I expected.
That's all minor stuff, overall it's great.
Nice game. The balance is really important, too slow and there isn't much to do, too fast and it feels impossible, but I think you nailed it.
Nice game. The buildup is good, if a bit unclear within the game itself, but I like how searching for blueprints encourages you to walk around from time to time. My favourite part is how the physics of the creatures (the bouncing, slowing down) makes it feel like a bustling and organic hive of activity. I am not sure whether it is possible to get past 99% progress, I tried twice.
Level 8 was not messing around, I liked it.
Very cool. I like the environmental storytelling that unfolds as you explore the rooms.
I love it! The completely invisible map is an interesting challenge, but the movement mechanics gave good feedback on what was where. I built up an idea of the shape of it by the end. The way the ants sprawl everywhere is hilarious. The battles near the end were epic. I only found the wasp, anteater and fightable firebug. I couldn't find the slaver though, perhaps it was the slaver wasp?
Really great idea and well executed. This game taught me things about the wiring of my keyboard that I hadn't investigated before. For example, FRJIN is one of the only five-letter combinations that can be registered on my keyboard simultaneously. It was enough to complete all the levels, and added quite a bit to the puzzle.
Great game. I really like how the frantic pace keeps things moving and makes me just go for jumps. At one point I thought checkpoints would be nice, but the stage is short enough that I figured they weren't needed. The platforming can be tough, but not unfair (with one exception), and by the end I found that I was breezing through most of the game.
I had some trouble with the air vent at the start. It wasn't clear what was going on, why I was going up, so it took a few ties to figure out the mechanic. Something that might be solved be some visuals. But once I figured them out, the air vents were interesting to use. They often meant that approaching from below was the better option. I particularly liked the puzzle with the first sun.
Some sort of ending would have been nice, but it is perhaps the least important part of the game. It was also not clear what the powerups did. I figured out that the caduceus gave me a speed boost, but I don't know what the meat or the suns did. I tried collecting all three suns and winning, since there was a giant sun at the end. This gave me the one bit of platforming that felt a bit unfair: the third sun.
In terms of bugs, I was unable to die to Imps and Tridents, however this was a plus, because if those were active the game would probably have tipped over into being too hard for me to persist. Overall though, it's the most fun I've had with a platformer so far.
Great art and an interesting platforming mechanic. Checkpoints would have been great. The enemy hitboxes were also quite uncompromising, to the point that I avoided jumping on them entirely. Overall a nice platformer.
I like the balance of armies. The first few levels were straightfoward, but the last few took a bit of figuring out.
The cell physics really makes the player feel like a single cell. The post processing also looks great.
Great game, and I am also just impressed on a technical level. The physics is really well tuned and the procedural generation does not look easy.
I like the look of the game, but it doesn't run. With the command line: ``` Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: view/DepthsDisplay has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 65.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source) at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source) at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source) at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(Unknown Source) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.forName(Unknown Source) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.jarinjarloader.JarRsrcLoader.main(JarRsrcLoader.java:61) ```
My Java seems to be up-to-date. java -version: ``` java version "1.8.0_441" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_441-b07) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 25.441-b07, mixed mode, sharing) ```
Screenshot 2025-04-09 120451.png I got it working! I really like the puzzling involved. I think there is no bound on the attainable score, so I stopped at 35.
Wow, extremely cosy. I really like the subtle humor in the placement of items, just when I thought I had repacked the cat dolls for the last time.
Very elegant. I liked just scrolling around and watching the art.
@rack47 I think you may be right! Although it might also depend a little on the type of driving you are doing at the time. I think we started out with a slightly different game where W/S made more sense as pitch controls, and discussed whether to swap them (because some playtesters played flight sims). But by the time the game approached its final form we had forgotten to reassess whether these are the best controls.
Nice entry! I like how the abilities are tuned, with jumping being nice and high, and the hook having a bunch of uses. There is a decent amount of strategy involved in digging such that you'll be able to return without too much trouble. I was a bit incautious at first, but eventually made it all the way through.
I really like the puzzle mechanic. The platforming got a bick tricky for me by the time I had three dashes though, so I only got to near the end of screen two.
Amazing entry! I like the push-you-luck aspect of gathering souls on the way down to absorb damage on the way up.
What a great idea, and well executed. From a design perspective I love how much of what happens in the game is text and audio (plus one ominous camera move). Squads taking longer to reach new areas, closer to the end, raised the stakes. It added more tension, I like it.
Awesome game. I like the little mechanical extras, such as ongoing explosions still being deadly, and blocking torpedoes. As well as the way depth charges can be turned after firing them. The controls were a bit tricky to start with (I ended up on WSAD and <>/), but I eventually managed a score of 7598.
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The fish and environments are great. I was not sure how to defeat the blobfish.
Very nice. The launch controls felt good and I liked the extra twist added by the rope. The cute music fit the visuals perfectly.
I get an "out of stack space" popup. ``` B:\Games\LudamDare\LD57\SerpSpicyHotChocolate>java -jar game_win2.jar WARNING: A restricted method in java.lang.System has been called WARNING: java.lang.System::load has been called by org.lwjgl.system.Library$$Lambda/0x000001935f00ce00 in an unnamed module (file:/B:/Games/LudamDare/LD57/SerpSpicyHotChocolate/game_win2.jar) WARNING: Use --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED to avoid a warning for callers in this module WARNING: Restricted methods will be blocked in a future release unless native access is enabled
WARNING: A terminally deprecated method in sun.misc.Unsafe has been called WARNING: sun.misc.Unsafe::objectFieldOffset has been called by org.lwjgl.system.MemoryUtil (file:/B:/Games/LudamDare/LD57/SerpSpicyHotChocolate/game_win2.jar) WARNING: Please consider reporting this to the maintainers of class org.lwjgl.system.MemoryUtil WARNING: sun.misc.Unsafe::objectFieldOffset will be removed in a future release java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Out of stack space. at org.lwjgl.system.MemoryStack.nmalloc(MemoryStack.java:321) at org.lwjgl.vulkan.VkExtensionProperties.malloc(VkExtensionProperties.java:208) at org.lwjgl.vulkan.VkInstance.getAvailableDeviceExtensions(VkInstance.java:82) at org.lwjgl.vulkan.VkInstance.getInstanceCapabilities(VkInstance.java:45) at org.lwjgl.vulkan.VkInstance.
B:\Games\LudamDare\LD57\SerpSpicyHotChocolate>java -version java version "24" 2025-03-18 Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 24+36-3646) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24+36-3646, mixed mode, sharing) ```
Nice game. The messages teach the game well and the controls are no more complicated than they need to me.
Excellent entry. I died to a crocodile around day 4 or 5, then tried again and made so much more money. It really is a rich-get-richer situation, but it was still lots of fun zipping around depopulating the ocean on the last few days.
Really well put together. I spent a while trying to move the dinosaur with the mouse. The extra challenges were a great way to have the player explore the game a bit more.
I like the aesthetic. The embedded game was bit choppy in my browser though.
Cool use of the theme for a puzzle mechanic.
Great game. I really like the movement speed, the powerful rocket really rewarded planning out good mineshafts. It was a bit hard to control at times though. The progression early on was also really good, one of the best paced digging games I've played so far. I had two problems though. The first is that the hitbox for the emergency warp was really tight, so I lost a load of ore or two, and then was so cautious that it took me a bit of time to find the upgrade shop. The second is that I couldn't buy mining upgrade four, which might be why the latter half of the game dragged a bit. The yields got so high that I ran out of things to buy.
Nice puzzle game. I preferred the button levels to the arrow levels because the arrows were sometimes tricky to time. C1 and C2 felt less tight than the earlier levels. The As and Bs were great, and the first few levels used the basic mechanics well. The arrows in the last room of C2 were a bit annoying. Also, the 8 hours on the music were well spent.
I thought it was a bullet hell until I accidentally discovered the collection mechanic. Then it turned into a reverse bullet hell. Really great game.
@dendi-life what is your OS? I have had games built in the same way not work on Windows 7, so it could be something like that.
Thanks @dendi-life, do other Love games work for you, such as https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/$420743 ? It could be that my particular build process does something wrong, or needs updating.
Hmm I'm not sure then. Could you paste the error or send a screenshot? What exactly happens when it doesn't work?
Nice entry. This is possibly the best digging game I've played in the last 6 months. The tile inventory system adds something, and the upgrade system is interesting. I liked how the game shifted from surface digging, to making staircases halfway down, to strip mining the bottom half of the map.
Great chill game. The stakes don't need to be any higher than forgetting which town to go to, or accidentally peeling a duplicate stamp. I like how it is effectively a set of interlocking minigames that support each other really well.
I liked the process of mastering the controls, and the challenges spread around the place.
I really like the feel of this game. The truck drives well with a few upgrades, although it crashed when I got the second turning circle upgrade. The damage system was a bit unclear because car would inconsistently damage the truck when I ran into them. I'm not sure if this was a bug, but it was great for the game, because I ended up just driving down streets recklessly, hoping that the flaming wrecks left in my wake would not cost too much health.
Great frantic driving. It left me really wanting a autodialer upgrade, or at least with a progress bar to say how close the phone is to failing.
At first the inflation seemed a bit extreme. but I came to like it for how fuzzy and precarious it made the trades feel. I would have liked commas in the large numbers, to help me tell trillions from 10s of trillions. At around 10^10 my money seemed to overflow as the operations on it stopped making sense (and would often display zero). Overall, a nice take on trading.
I love the laser.
Neat game. I mainly want to see which abilities I have, and be notified when they work. It got a bit messy near the end (level 9).
Neat idea, I like how the signal represents and teaches a bit about something real. My only issue is that the snapping on the sliders made it impossible to enter close enough values somewhere around survey 8.
Fun game. Inverting controls really helped me too. I was struggling to get to Saturn, but then made it to the end after the switch.
That was really nice to play and the art really sets the mood. I had to get my head around the QWOPness at first, but then it was satisfying to send streams of traffic flowing across the screen. The only issue I ran into was a soft lock state where crashes pile up off-screen and stop a lane from fiddling. That and my sleep-deprived confusion that the cars were crashing at all (I've spent three days debugging crash-avoidance behaviour), but that is on me.
Really great. The controls were a bit unclear at the start but I soon got the hang of it. The progression through the stages works well.
To whoever thought of using such a short depth of field: it works really well.
Great game. The levels are well done and the graphics of the revealed tiles really sells the mechanic. It got slightly fiddly towards the end, but that might have been my keyboard, because picking the direction of the charged abilities did not always seem to work. But other than that, it was really neat, and even had a bit of light puzzling in it.
Nice game, I liked the puzzle of trying to match the values. I only made it 8 or 9 signals in though because I hit a bug that permanently stuck a few items to the antenna. The stuck items were too low-value to make up the requirement, so I could not continue.
Screenshot 2026-04-22 095515.png
This is a nice simple strategy game with a satisfying loop. Pausing periodically to place cards was a great way to add some structure without being overwhelming.
Nice game. I liked how the story was implied by a few quick scenes, and the module arrangement was fun. I wish there were a few more module types and enemies.
The gameplay here is tight. Some might say too difficult, but I like how thin the margins are and how I have to plan around the merchant only having limited wares on each day. There were times I would make swords that I could sell, but it would be at a loss on the cost of the materials, so I ended up saving them for the king. Economy games often suffer from ridiculous growth that trivialize the strategy, this game avoids this really well. That said, I didn't ever manage to sell anything with mithril in it for profit, so perhaps there was a busted route.
The requirement that the swords at the end be unique is great. My only complaint is that the king would not accept my shoddy magic swords. The text at the start only says the blades must be unique, whereas at the end I had a bag of around 13 swords, but most included copper or iron, so they were not accepted.