UhUhUhUh Staying Alive by Josh Ayres 2020-04-23T22:27:37Z
good work! I like the difficulty of the second song, and the difficulty ramp from zero to nothing haha. core mechanic is enjoyable
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → acgaudette
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | droidathon | jam | 259 | 3.95 | 4.03 | 4.06 | 2.92 | 4.05 | 3.43 | 3.77 |
good work! I like the difficulty of the second song, and the difficulty ramp from zero to nothing haha. core mechanic is enjoyable
I enjoyed the visual aesthetic here! fun theme and audio. I think this would benefit a lot from decreasing the damage necessary to kill an opponent. the combat feels a bit repetitive--one way you might address this is by iterating on the AI behavior a bit to reduce the amount they group up so that the player is forced to change cover more often. as a side note, I worked on an FPS as well and haven't seen many of them in the jam so far--it's fun to play one. good work!
neat concept. the visual style has rust/gmod vibes. cool diagetic server screen, you might (or might not) want to carry this over to the other resources in the game, e.g. the planks and fuel canisters. how the canisters are filled was a bit unintuitive for me at first since I conflated the "recharge" (might want to use another word here) percentage with the progress of filling the canister. the core gameplay loop felt a bit like a chore since I didn't feel like I had to make any risky choices or balance any major tradeoffs. but I had fun! good work.
hey there! I just tried on windows and was not able to click on anything. then I noticed you had the source up. surprised to discover it's made in rust--cool stuff! and with gfx too. unfortunately, when I built from source, the input problem persisted. let me know!
love that rotated effect you have on your pixel art; it made the game for me. well polished and paced, in line with your other work!
your system design is well done! it needs some balancing but the torch mechanic is neat and the upgrades feel good. what's lacking the most here is game feel--some work needs to be put into making the combat and movement feel smooth. good work.
solid art direction, great work there! the core loop feels rushed and needs tuning--I played for quite a while and felt like I was on autopilot the whole time. a deeper inspection of your constraints might work to your benefit here in order to offer more tradeoffs and challenges per turn. on the other hand, the creative element to building your own world and using the goals as a jump off point seems promising and I would love to see more of that if you can expand the emergent properties of the tiles. excited to see where this goes and keep up the good work.
good work! I liked the diagetic interaction, being able to roam around your ship and especially the rendertexture in the cockpit + the OS sprites. fun voice acting. the environment immersion is going in a good direction. I might focus a bit more on the elements of the ship and how they interact with each other for a more emergent experience.
just a note: you are going to want to leave reviews on other games if you would like to receive more feedback :)
good work. I was able to reach the end, although it did feel a bit random. the group movement felt unintuitive and at first I couldn't figure out that you had to unselect a character to move. once I realized this though, I found the "array your squad within the circle" mechanic intriguing! as the group became larger, reviewing all the statistics quickly became cumbersome, especially without a pause button. these are simple UI problems to solve, however, and are not that big of a deal. I never used the "skip night" button and found it to be superfluous--how does this input expand the interactivity of your playable space? I also never really found a reason not to accept a new member. ultimately, this game has a lot of interesting systems that I am excited to explore, but you will need to massage and balance the experience such that player choice within these systems has more of an impact on outcome. I really did enjoy swapping items out between characters to fit their stats, and micro managing all the squad members. I also appreciated the "figurine" art!
simple concept, well done! enjoyed the experience of keeping an AI squad alive. my biggest comment is that it needs more visual feedback for just about every action in the game. the short narrative was hilarious though
well done minimal prototype here. this has strong potential for a worked out release! keep up the good work
tight level design! expressive pixel art. love the rain/platforming concept
I like the dynamic camera angles. you might want to look into some cinematographic techniques for exaggerating scale, although it looks like you already used a couple of those (: adding some more visual feedback would go a long way
I really enjoyed this game. the concept is innovative and simple. the tone feels dark and authentic. the physicality is understated but ties the whole experience together. reminds me of old crypticsea or wolfire games.
as you observed, the core loop needs the most work here to feel tight and challenging. however, after some thought, I feel like you would benefit more from going in a different direction: keeping the slower pace, and treating this like a farming/maintenance game--mostly slow growth and world exploration interrupted by short moments of tension and fear. the tone you have feels like something I would like to live in. great work!
since you made a point of noting this was your first jam game. will drop some TMI and unwanted advice. your scope was more or less OK. the closest jam game this reminds me of is that old mojang one--catacomb snatch (although I think they had a larger group). you executed well on what I perceive as the mechanical concept/visual tone and you should not be disappointed! in addition, you achieved style cohesion across your visual elements, which many jammers mess up. what is missing here is not more content or mechanics. try and avoid the trap that many jammers fall into of not sprinting towards a playable loop that feels good from day one. you see a lot of games here that look nice but ultimately feel unfinished because the love put into the actual start to finish player experience was rushed at the last minute. this trick works for audio as well: if you get placeholder assets in at the beginning, they will be a forcing function throughout the jam to make incremental improvements. if you don't, it's easier for you to push them off until the jam is over and you run out of time.
this is a great simple execution of the theme and the pacing of the wave combat/defend from all directions feels good. asset work is pretty solid! some juice would go a long way for you though in terms of feel. shooting feels very repetitive after awhile since there is essentially no reason not to shoot--a risk element there would work well, e.g. trying to avoid friendly fire or shooting the items. the tactile feel kind of reduces to clicking as fast as possible, which is a bit tiring since the game builds slowly. I might rebalance the enemies towards a greater number of lightweight mobs so that the player can feel as though they are accomplishing more. just my 2 cents--good work!
hey jonah. congrats on the game! refreshing take on the visual novel. your small, orthogonal interaction design feels great. wouldn't change a thing--it's your expression. have always loved working with you. KIT!
I enjoyed this. I think it works as a micro experience. you don't need to explain the systems to people--discovering how it works is part of the mood. I would work on tuning more of the little embedded tradeoffs, and perhaps make the trees more emergently unique and "shareable" by players.
this is a really solid concept for a platformer. level design is going in a good direction, good room for expansion here. had great fun. I really like the background art! feels a bit at odds with the rest of the visual direction.
enjoyed the pixel art. I think you were close to the finish on this one. a bit of work on making the AI feel more lively would go a long way. the lack of strafing felt good for the combat, in my opinion.
edit: removed duplicate post
solid pixel art and lighting! the core gameplay loop of grinding for upgrades to something you are feeding has promise, and you executed on this for sure. the pacing struggles the most here--way too slow compared to the immediacy of the controls. the movement feels pretty floaty, and combat seems to reduce to spamming Z as quickly as you can--some tradeoffs here would be nice. I really like the upgrade system! the level cap on the upgrades is unfortunate though, I think leaving that open would have made the gameplay more flexible to different play strategies. but that's a simple fix.
neat content-focused rogue lite with some fun dialogue. good work! the difficulty curve feels more random than intentional, but I enjoyed that it took some time to beat. the font is a bit difficult to read for such a text heavy game, but that's only a minor gripe
@letiguaxinim can adjust the mouse sensitivity with `[+]` and `[-]`!
thank you all for the kind words and helpful feedback! due to popular demand, we uploaded a patched version with volume settings. the game now launches at 50% volume, and you can adjust this with `[` and `]`. @hangarter @frozedon @guilhermesouza @letiguaxinim
this game looks neat. I played through a few times. wasn't sure what was going on, but I was able to play tones by dragging the UI icons onto the lines. interested to hear more about it.
congrats on the game! any game with suzeanne in it is a good game ;)
neat idea around the theme! really like the visual style of the levels. AI and difficulty needs a bit of tuning, I think. would have liked it to be more difficult
big fan of this game, small and tight concept done well. great art and persistence too! and fun progression. giving little boosts to the global timer depending on how fast you make correct choices might be a fun lite mechanic addition
solid minimalist concept carried by level design; good fit for a jam. would play this at a party. who did you playtest with?
@zabaman > But yeah, a lot was just my left hand
have been there before and I totally know what you mean. great response haha. dropped you a follow on twitter.
congrats on your first game! cool concept and I like the art on that caravan. might need a bit of polish on the UI to make it consistent with your visual style
interesting concept, I like it. exploring an underwater world with a time limit is a great tense setting. the pixel art for the character and world is nice as well! the movement feel needs some work--getting past obstacles feels clumsy and the input seems to be mutually exclusive. some inertia here might be nice. maybe play off floating/diving of scuba IRL, i.e. the more air you have in your tank, the more you float. since movement is the core mechanic here, further exploration of that seems like it would work well for you. good work!
needs some balancing, but love the swamp animations
neat idle game, fun concept. is there a penalty to resetting the state? it seems like a mechanic in its own right. once you get to a certain accuracy you can reset and grow a perfect mountain!
I like these kinds of little AI management games. the concept works here and makes sense. the pacing is good. sfx were hilarious. my only gripe is that the core mechanic (clicking and placing) begins to feel like a chore after awhile, especially since your level of control over the agents feels tenuous and it is difficult to really make a mistake here. binding each food to a key or number might improve the ergonomics. anyways, great work on this! also, the text is unreadable haha but you know, I don't hate it.