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Jeremy Penner

Games

YearLDThemeGameDivisionRankFuInGrAuPo
20057GrowthLD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - JeremyPenner results and commentscompo2.883.692.073.003.19

Comments by Jeremy Penner

LD7 — Growth

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - Aggrav8d results and comments by Aggrav8d

Couldn't see any miner names to find myself, unfortunately =] The game kind of amounts to "draw lines through the big squares and wait", unfortunately. It could've been made more interesting, if still a bit slow, if the mineral deposits weren't visible until you started digging around them. Growing a mining business should be about gambling and lucky guesses, rather than resource management -- I mean, come on, the whole point of the mining is to deplete the resources at hand. Add a few bars to adjust both worker wages and the prices at the company store, but be careful not to cause a worker revolt. That kind of thing. (BTW, thanks for directing me to the games store in Gastown -- it's fantastic!)

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - Allefant results and comments by Allefant

What got me about this game was that you die, constantly, for fairly arbitrary reasons. Nice that you recognized that by making "game over" not actually be "game over", but it's still frustrating. Manouevering and aiming is a bit of a pain; especially since the knights are so fearless (read: walk relentlessly towards you). I'd much rather be eating these knights, than trying to whip my head around at the right angle to breathe fire at them. Actually growing the hydra is actually pretty pretty enjoyable, and it's nice that you obviously get stronger as the game progresses. The extra heads were a nice touch, too; I like how when you grow them, it's instantly obvious how much bigger you are now than when the game started.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - CalvinFrench results and comments by Calvin French

I really rather enjoyed the text and backstory for this one. I especially enjoyed getting hungry and eating peasants. Well-written, funny stuff. The only problem is that your game mechanic is literally watching flax grow. =] It's slooww. I don't find that the game really encourages me to reach any particular goals, but then the text encourages me to just chill out, so that's fine. I just wish there was a little more to do than wait. Maybe fertilizing to produce better crops that sell for more?

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - Deepflame results and comments by Deepflame

I'm afraid you're at a bit of a disadvantage with me, since I never cared for Grow in the first place. I didn't "get" it, and I don't "get" this. I think I may have gotten a bit of an "aha" moment in the "grow the civilization" stage (I got the dude walking up to the storm clouds, and it hit me that I should be trying to get him to discover electricity), though, so I'll give you points for that. My problem is that, even with that aha moment of realizing what I should be doing, I have no idea as to how to go about it. So it becomes clicking on buttons and failing.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - DrPetter results and comments by Dr Petter

This is just excellent. Docked a couple of innovation points because it plays pretty standard, though the grappling hook is really well-integrated and the never-ending beanstalk provides an excellent base from which to build randomly generated levels. I thought your graphics were gorgeous before you redrew them all, personally, but they're still excellent now. Music and sound effects fit in perfectly with the low-fi theme and don't get old. My biggest complaint is that I seemed to "run out" of ammo at random, especially when doing battle with a fast-approaching pig. This made the pigs a lot more annoying than they should've been. The only other improvements I can really think to offer are things that would be basically new games; like, what if you ditched the pigs and made the plant grow a lot faster and maybe reworked the grappling hook more so that it was more about fast-paced swinging from leaf to leaf? Yeah, good luck fitting that into your last couple of hours and finding out it didn't work so well anyway.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - ErikJohnson results and comments by Erik Johnson

I, for one, didn't hate your control scheme, though it made my arm hurt; I treated my mouse like a sticky trackball and just went at it. It works, in its own peculiar way. It's a reasonable port of Katamari Damacy to 2D; I especially enjoyed eating my own path through the flowers. The graphics are.. ugly, but they do the job required of a game design that utterly relies on visual presentation, and the programmer art has a certain amount of charm to it. There's a serious lack of polish that gets in the way, though -- the game just quits when you run out of time, it doesn't save your progress, and there's no way to skip to a later level. So if I wanted to attack level 5 until I beat it, I have to keep slogging through levels 1-4 to get there. I'm not even certain level 5 is finishable, since I'd collected everything small and still couldn't manage to roll up the beach balls. Maybe has something to do with the random level generation? And it's trivial to quickly finish level 3; even more so than level 1, where nothing is bigger than you. The balance is really off.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - GerryJJ results and comments by Gerry JJ

As others have mentioned, the theme connection is tenuous. It's a fairly enjoyable little puzzler anyway, though.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - IvoDanihelka results and comments by Ivo Danihelka

Not really a game here, I'm afraid. In addition to there being no challenge, it quit after 30 seconds of gameplay with the word "DONE". I did like the way the snowmen avoided both the snowball and each other.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - JacobGohlke results and comments by Jacob Gohlke

Enjoyable little RTS, but it's way too hard to get into a state where you can become self-sufficient. If you accidentally built an extra fighter to help protect your minerals before you build a mining station and a miner, you're just completely hosed. A bit disappointing in that the game isn't really about managing swarms of nanoresources as the name would suggest. Once you get past that hurdle, it's fairly enjoyable. I like that the units are mostly autonomous, so you can just build a few warriors and they'll protect your minerals.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - JamesHofmann results and comments by James Hofmann

There's a really interesting game in here someplace, clamouring to get out. Turning Tetris on its head is a great idea, but the time limit just doesn't work. Being able to hold down the down arrow and win is seriously game-breaking. Playing the way it's intended is fairly amusing, but it's hard to visualize what the nail is actually going to do. Maybe take a page from Bridge Builder and have the thing fall apart if the player's not building stably enough? Kind of like Tetris meets building a house of cards.

LD48h#7 unofficial and pending votes - drZool results and comments by dr Zool

Oh God, it's Snow! I just about fell out of my chair at the theme music. Ends up being a touch overused, though. This one held my attention for a while. It's quite well-paced; by the time you get tired of what you're doing, the game has given you something else to do, which is welcome. A nice range of goals and strategies. I wouldn't have minded being introduced to more kinds of plants with different growing patterns in later levels, though. The graphics are nice. The sound effects are workable -- certainly I wouldn't have noticed the difference between "seeds!" and "lots of seeds!" without them -- but sometimes very quiet for no reason.