Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Alloyed

Alloyed

Games

YearLDThemeGameDivisionRankOvFuGrAuCo
201637One roomA Discordant Crowdcompo
201534Two Button Controls / GrowingTiny Chase DJcompo4303.303.263.533.8236

Performance over time

overall score (left axis) percentile (right axis)

Scatterplots

Fun vs Overall

Graphics vs Overall

Audio vs Overall

Comments by Alloyed

LD34 — Two Button Controls / Growing

A Tale of Two Peters by Recursiveanomaly 2015-12-19T19:27:00

+ The fact that the game doesn't try to score you, at least not directly, to be refreshing. Since the game revolves around your moral compass it's easy to fill in the scorecard with your own ethics instead of the game designer's
- The traffic phase felt consequence-less to me. I found myself ignoring it entirely to get to the next bit of dialog, and since drivers will effectively kill themselves randomly it isn't really possible to a good job indefinitely

BeatMan by Fervir 2015-12-14T05:26:00

+ I like pressing things in time to beats
+ The enemy animations and the way they fell apart made them feel unique and interesting to fight
+ Good sense of personality
- There are distinct seems in between the bars where each sample begins and ends. distracting.
- Game is hard. I never got use a blue command and see if it gives you double moves or it just is for cool points
- Looking at the attack animation in particular had a bad effect of throwing me off. It feels like it's timed to respond to the offbeat instead of instantly, which mean I pretty hard to not look if I wanted any hope of sustaining my combo

yaschiki by nuprahtor 2015-12-16T03:44:00

+ Enemy design is real good: they look properly otherworldly, convey the way you're supposed to attack them very well, and (importantly) don't need much animation to be believable
+ The two-button controls, in particular, don't seem as hamfisted in as a lot of the other LD games. Instead of feeling tedious they just feel hard, and they feel like they fit in well with reloading/the enemy chase mechanics etc. I would have liked more visual indicators, like maybe a first person weapon, but that's more juice than substance.
* I had some issues with how the camera chooses to center itself: in particular during reloads it seemed to recenter itself to the top right of the screen, which isn't helpful
* permadeath is bad mmkay
- When the enemies aren't in your field of view they might as well not be there. Sound cues would have helped a lot with letting your player know where they are in relation to them
- difficulty pacing is a bit off: you introduce both enemy types in the first fight and then all the rest of the fights up to the boss is that except more of them. then the boss starts out with mooks instead of getting them midway through the fight. These sorts of things frontload all the difficulty up-front which makes bad players bail early and good players feel like the game is too easy
(I didn't finish the boss so I might be talking out of my ass here)
- The dialog was incoherent, to me at least.

killer7/8

Dynamica by CivvyThePandaTM 2015-12-19T18:27:00

I didn't finish, mostly because felt the UI made the game too tedious: I don't think the puzzles were too hard, necessarily, but without more feedback I'm stuck in an endless loop of slighlty moving a planet, and then waiting 10-15 seconds for the simulation to finish. Placing a line along the predicted arc would have made feedback from my changes immediate, and while it would have made the early levels much simpler it gives you more room for later mechanics IMO.

Gravity Glide by Tragon 2015-12-19T19:50:00

+ A game where you control gravity
* I seemed to be shooting all the time, so for me at least it was a one-button game :p (webplayer on firefox)
- I felt there was a lot of psuedo-variety, ie. stuff that you normally put into the game to introduce gameplay variety like powerups and bosses, that didn't _really_ change the core gameplay loop any. I never really noticed when I picked up score or a powerup, and the bosses weren't didn't have particularly lethal patterns so I just juggled near their center. Doing less of that and focusing more on the individual enemy patterns would have made a much stronger game within the 48 hours imo

SAAAM by Ogniok 2015-12-19T19:11:00

+ I thought the environmental storytelling was very strong. The barren living quarters, and the fact that the AI uses the sprinklers if you don't shower give a good strong first impression that you're just a meat puppet and nothing you do is of consequence.
- The long intro sequences and evaluation sequence feel like missed opportunities, since one locks you into a single position and the other don't provide you anything to interact with. Long monologues are usually used as excuses to give the player an excuse to look over the environment but since you can't do that it just wastes the player's time.
- The fact that all of the choices are binary prompts really kills my impetus to explore for more endings: I already know roughly what dialogue I'd hear, the order I'd hear it in, and where I can deviate from that, so I don't feel like I could be surprised if I just try playing it one more time. It feels more like a Telltale game, with a single story that has a bit of variance, instead of the Stanley Parable, which is an environment where you play hide-and-seek with the dialogue triggers, if that makes sense.

Super Space HexaGUN by pk 2015-12-16T04:32:00

+ the fact that most of your stats are visually represented in your ship feels like a great bit of show-don't-tell.
- I don't like getting shot offscreen, and
- I don't like shooting things offscreen based on a magical rader dot. both of these make combat feel super impersonal and uninteresting, and are both relatively easy to fix by limiting the weapon's range and increasing bullet size. You still effectively convey long-range battle in this sort of situation by making slow moving ships with "zoomed-out" sprites and keep the same effective range

Puzzlerun by velddev 2015-12-14T04:31:00

+ Aesthetic is coherent and most of the gameplay bits are easy to read
- the death sound is REALLY LOUD
+ I like the idea of a path-recognizing game, and being in a position where I knew which moves I wanted to do ahead of time and then getting to execute them rapid-fire felt very satisfying: but
- The fact that the only way move downwards is to let the timer run out, and that it can sometimes be your only valid move make for a very bad combination: it encourages people to wait for the timer instead of having fun in the game.

My Dino by Reggianito 2015-12-14T03:35:00

I like the core conceit: it reminds me of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, where the indirect control basically means you have to pay extra attention to things that would be pretty simple with direct controls.

It kind of doesn't lend itself well to be this unfinished, though. Since the game isn't beeping and shaking and all the other things a finished game would do to direct my attention it's made harder then usual to notice what I'm doing and what effect it's having on the top screen.

It's probably because of my weird resolution(1366x768), but as I played my dino ventured further and further from his tank into the airy unknown. It was kind of endearing tbh

Bullet Strain by homph 2015-12-14T03:53:00

It no work boss
$ java -jar Bullet_Strain.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: engine/Main : Unsupported major.minor version 52.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:800)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:449)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:71)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:361)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:355)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:354)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:425)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:308)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:358)
at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:482)

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_91"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea 2.6.3) (Arch Linux build 7.u91_2.6.3-1-x86_64)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.91-b01, mixed mode)

Bullet Strain by homph 2015-12-14T04:53:00

I can't edit my comment, so have a second one:

my first problem was just that I wasn't using java 8 and Java doesn't happen to have a very good error message for that case

* I never got tumbling to work, for me pressing space did nothing, and I only accidentally rolled once when I clicked away from the window
* larger bullets seem to have janky hitboxes: I never quite got to screenshot-sized bullets because it became too easy to miss with only slightly bigger ones

+ The shooting does have a good sense of weight to it: even without upgrades I felt like I was wielding a scary thing that just annihilates trees (because it does)
- I didn't like the "ancient" back-pack thing: it was too big to get around without rolling (which I didn't have) and even if I could roll around it, it would discourage exploration and taking risks in fights because an enemy might spawn near it.

Luxurious Panama Hats by RainFrogs 2015-12-15T02:36:00

+ Reminds me of World of Goo/other 2d boy games in a good way: it has that same visceral sense of growth and improvement when things are going well and panic when they aren't
- Controls are bad. This probably isn't a surprise, but it really does unnecessarily slow down the flow of the game
- I don't really understand the hand's behavior: sometimes they will go for the thorns, other times not, and I still don't know if they will go for a thorn you placed after they showed up on screen

Growcoon by alek345 2015-12-19T19:34:00

Got a blank screen in Firefox. Worked fine in Chrome.
Without maintenance(watering, fallow etc) it doesn't feel like much of a game. There isn't a way to do better at it besides figuring out the cost/sale/time ratio of plants and exclusively planting the best one.