Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → andrewkennedy
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | That Underground Level | compo | 34 | 4.00 | 3.88 | 3.37 | 3.88 | 4.16 | 4.07 | 3.63 | 4.21 | ||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Bug-Bash Buggy | compo | 48 | 4.00 | 3.87 | 3.70 | 3.95 | 4.21 | 3.52 | ||||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | HEXX | compo | 25 | 4.17 | 4.10 | 3.77 | 3.69 | 4.16 | 3.36 | 3.63 | |||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Embers | extra | |||||||||||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Dive & Dig | compo | 255 | 3.69 | 3.46 | 3.86 | 4.19 | 3.95 | 3.60 | 3.70 | 3.43 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Santavania | jam | 189 | 3.70 | 3.55 | 3.35 | 3.60 | 3.50 | 3.24 | 3.00 | 36 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Bomb Boy | compo | 141 | 3.69 | 3.31 | 3.28 | 3.43 | 4.00 | 3.21 | 3.00 | 3.56 | 51 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Much Ado About Pirates | compo | 212 | 3.58 | 3.47 | 3.07 | 2.96 | 3.67 | 3.18 | 3.14 | 3.42 | 100 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | The Two that Should Not Have Been | compo | 110 | 3.76 | 3.74 | 3.32 | 3.18 | 3.82 | 2.61 | 2.42 | 3.14 | 85 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | The Spyware Who Loved Me | compo | 19 | 4.14 | 3.94 | 3.51 | 3.40 | 3.89 | 3.47 | 2.46 | 3.64 | 49 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Treasurequest | compo | 49 | 3.80 | 3.33 | 3.53 | 2.80 | 4.38 | 3.55 | 2.33 | 3.67 | 67 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Daisy | compo | 136 | 3.58 | 3.36 | 3.42 | 3.30 | 4.00 | 3.47 | 2.81 | 3.26 | 55 | |
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | essentia | compo | 406 | 3.31 | 2.78 | 2.84 | 3.00 | 3.92 | 1.12 | 1.84 | 3.16 | 60 |
Thanks for the encouragement everyone! It seems that the ending was a little too open-ended though. Next time I'll be more deliberate!
Hilarious, simple, and well executed!
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I've just uploaded a video playthrough on Vimeo (link up at the top). I know the loading time is long so I'd like to give people an alternative way of viewing the game if they don't have a Windows machine. Give it about ~30 min as of this post, it's still being processed by the site :)
@ddionisio: It's the sprites. They're pretty inefficient. I am new to 2DToolkit and had some issues using the Sprite Batcher. I'm going through right now and trying to optimize things so everything will load smooth. Right now every sprite is its own object, which is a HORRIBLE way to do things!
Optimized it a bit this morning, looks like everything is loading a lot quicker now. Thanks for your patience.
Brilliant idea!
After seeing Budget Squad, I knew whatever you made in the future would have my attention. Nice work!
Best game I've ever played in my life.
I love the name!
Cool art style! It would be nice if the wizards didn't spawn right behind me, they shoot before you have a chance to react.
Pixel art isn't usually done very well in a 3D context, it was nice to see someone get it right!
Nice artwork, I especially love the whole feel of the game, very arcade-inspired.
Ok, I got too dizzy when it started to spin (maybe that's just the lack of sleep...?) but overall I can see how this would start to ramp up and get really hard!
This kid's not happy with anything I bring him! Pepper spraying people was fun, but I felt like the jumping was a little too difficult.
Pretty funny premise, but my granny kept running into the fairy if I didn't put enough food down, and her tooth fell out if I put too much :(
The black ghost completely freaked me out when it started pushing me around!
Cool aesthetic, really liked the platforming/puzzle solving - it usually doesn't work that well in First Person cameras, but this game manages to pull it off rather well.
For the boss: If you hit the boss 5 times, he'll die. I'd recommend face-tanking the boulders and healing with the potions, then throwing the bomb as you pass him.
Boss fight is a bit sloppy, my head was swimming at that point from lack of sleep :S
It took me a little bit to really understand how to control the asteriod, but once I did, it was pretty neat!
The boss cracked me up!
Doesn't look like it's playable?
It's like having a tomogatchi only with heavy saracasm and dire consequences, I like it!
Nicely polished, and fun to play. good work!
Heh, funny premise!
Woah that was dark...
Nice to see people doing good text adventures, keep it up!
I learned that I should never be a doctor :S. Cool game though, definitely was hard to keep up with!
Pretty solid game, but it would have been nice to have some strategy other than spamming the attack button the whole way.
I liked destroying the buildings, but is that what I was supposed to be doing? I think maybe I missed the connection between singing and smashing things.
Text was pretty hard to read on that background, but I really like what you have going here. I'll bookmark it so I can play it when I'm more awake :S
Fantastic work!
Really neat idea, I could see this being used as an educational game some day!
When I try to run the exe, it just gives me an error saying it can't be found.
Good visuals, I really liked the mood you were able to portray!
Took me a minute to realize what was going on (Can't move for a minute or so when the game starts?).
Once I got the hang of it it was good though. I liked the enemy AI - it seems simple but the strategy behind it gets a lot deeper!
Hey Vector.
Have you checked out the gameplay video? One thing I've noticed from watching some friends play is that some people aren't realizing that the speed boost carries over even after you've gone past the green code. That is - as long as you hold down, you'll keep the speed forever.
It could be a problem with the physics though. The controller that I use has a bug where the drag is not calculated properly. I noticed when doing something processor intensive (screen capture recording, for instance), that the character would actually not move as far.
It was all bright and cute - then I dug in the ground :(
Good art - I loved that you were able to make a resource management game in such an unconventional way!
Nice work as always! Cool mechanic and nice graphics.
This was hysterical - I loved every minute of it. The ending was fantastic. (PS Did you do a lot of fishing in Animal Crossing?)
It seems like a cross between Dig Dug and a DOS game called Jetpack. Pretty sweet!
Did you take some inspiration from Stanley parable? The narration was funny :)
Clever use of the theme!
This reminded me a lot of Solar Jetman (NES game). Nice colors and atmosphere!
Oh man, this reminds me of the old games I used to play. Thumbs up for nostalgia!
Neat idea. Pressing that button up on the wall and jumping with the other guy at the same time gave me a lot of grief :P.
What a clever idea! It's probably the most meta thing I've ever seen. I'll be bookmarking it so that I can keep checking back!
It was a nice, enjoyable platformer. Would have been nice if the girl's spell would have stayed on the screen a little longer.
I loved the art! The animations, environment, and music were all very charming.
Nice guitar :). At first this was deceptively easy but then I realized it got deeper!
That was pretty fun, but once there were too many guards I wasn't good enough to make it past the border anymore XD.
Really fun game, I can see the Portal influence! You managed to keep things fresh and interesting for each puzzle. I enjoyed the audio as well.
Quite a bit of polish in this one! Puzzle games aren't quite my thing, but the design of this game was really solid. The game mechanics really reflected the theme.
Chrome identifies this as malware (and didn't give me an option to ignore the warning). If you use the "save to my dropbox" button and then download it from there, it seems to work ok.
The game was pretty neat after I figured out what was going on. The wind feature confused me a bit as to how it worked, but eventually got the hang of it. Some audio would have really made this perfect.
Well you were right, it's definitely complicated! The multiplayer take on the "connected worlds" was a pretty nice idea.
I'm still a little confused as to how it all works.
Cool idea, though I felt that the controls were really hard. Nice guitar :)
Super fun, I really liked the back-and-forth style of the level design. Really nice art and great sound (it was so fitting!). You guys knocked it out of the park!
It was refreshing to see a text based game! I'm glad that you have options to click on the right - I was never good at remembering the commands to type. When I used the gyroscope I was like AW HECK YEAH!
Felt a lot like Lunar Lander, only a lot less frustrating :D. I liked the Hitchhiker reference (I didn't see the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast thankfully).
Also please tell me that Sunnydale was a Buffy reference :P
Nice game! I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would from the beginning. Nice Star Trek sequence :)
Oops, the boss was a little rushed at the end and I forgot to add a hint sign.
Try spinning to reflect the spell :)
To those getting stuck with the boss, try spinning to reflect the attack back. Think Gannon fights from Zelda :) I've never made a boss fight before and I did it in like 15 min before the competition ended :S
@mactinite my LD entries are mostly thinly veiled attempts to rip off Zelda and Mega Man and get away with it :D
@Macocco That's one of the things I intend to fix in the post-compo version of my game. If anything too bad happens you can hit R to get unstuck.
@Miziziziz - I actually don't visit the Unity forums really, except for one of jnamobile's threads. Thanks for all of your comments!
@RookMage - That bugs me too! One of the ideas I had was to take the environment textures into SpriteLamp for normal maps, but as you can probably tell I really ran out of time. I think adding more varied tiles and effects (like the torches) could help that, but I'm open to some more suggestions!
@Will Edwards - I actually wrote a shader a while back that draws any occluded object on top of its occluder with an alternate texture ( so you could draw a shadow, silhouette, transparent character, etc). It's a cool effect, but time, etc, blah blah :)
Would have been nice not to have to start over again when dead, but it was fun nonetheless!
The persistent enemy death decals and screen shake added a lot to the polish!
Groovy music, and so much charm from the characters! One of the few great humor scores I have given out :)
I realized it was a little easier to just ignore all of the enemies and jump past them. If there were more incentive to make you fight the enemies, it could be a lot more engaging!
I had fun knocking the enemies off the platforms :P. Justice!
There was more strategy to it than I thought at first! I won the affection of my neighboring planets to fuel me a lifeline of hearts so that I could crush another planet. But then we both kinda sat there and he wouldn't love me or attack me.
Really neat game, cool use of the theme!
I didn't have anybody to play with either; I really wish I had. I miss Battle Tanks
The instant death is pretty brutal, but it was refreshing to see a racing game for LD! It was very reminiscent of micro machines :P
Pretty, pretty game ! I'm going to check out the blog post on how you did the random generation - I really appreciate the time taken to explain it!
WOW what amazing music! The game itself was a little difficult for me, maybe if the thrust was going towards the mouse it could be a little easier to maneuver.
It feels like smugglers run in space :P
Wow that was pretty difficult, only ever managed to make it to the 3rd box! Still, the hamburger guy was a pretty groovy drummer. Fun concept, and good job on completing your first LD Game!
There wasn't much in the way of gameplay, but the art and music were phenomenal!
Really nice. I was thinking "this is kind of like Thomas Was Alone and Impossible Game's lovechild" then I read your post. Definitely nailed it :)
Not my cup of tea, but well executed! I can see you put a lot of time into making sure the timing of the animations and text lined up well.
That was cool! It would have been more fun with 2 people because I was not mentally coordinated enough haha.
I can tell you've seen your fair share of deck building games :) Good graphics and a really well thought out game!
I bought a gun but then went crazy after not sleeping! You should call this "ludum dare simulator" haha.
Thought it would be easy - turned out to be way harder! Nice graphics and intuitive gameplay. Could have used some sound to really put it over the top!
Hilarious :P. Saw this on EmotionTheory's twitch and had to check it out for myself!
Ok, I was too bad to actually beat it, but it had a lot of polish and I had a blast playing it. Some sound would really be the icing on this cake!
The car eventually got easier to control as I got more familiar with it. I kept running out of cable but then the game still let me connect houses :O
It was fun! At first the graphics looked a little simplistic but there was some nice polish to it, especially the house collisions.
The graphical style worked really nice , and the movement was really fluid. I flipped out when I realized right mouse shot sideways :P
This was pretty difficult, but I had a lot of fun and the art was nice! Maybe a mouse-based click to move system would have been easier to navigate?
I couldn't quite make it all the way to the end, I wasn't super good at figuring out where to move the mouse.
One of the best theme-based games that I've played so far!
Unfair mode was true to its name. Finally got it after like a billion tries! The art was really clean and minimalistic. Fun game!
The graphics were really nice and I like the idea of the game. I just build a giant lava cube though and the zombies couldn't get me. Maybe consider putting some kind of rudimentary liquid system for the lava would make it harder to cheese the game like this. Or some sort of objective so that walling yourself off is a bad thing!
Ok, that was hilarious! I loved every minute of it! Great graphics and a brilliant twist!
I liked the idea, but I waited for a while and my movement commands didn't seem to work.
The game was a little easy if you were attentive to the right side. I let some asteriods creep by though to see what it was like and it got hectic fast! Really clever use of the theme!
I can definitely tell you've played Bastion ;). The world building was nice, the environment has a nice cozy feeling to it. The dialogue system seems solid too.
For moving forward, having the movement based on the relative position of the player and camera would be nice. When it went into some of the hallways it became kind of hard to figure out which direction to press.
It was nice to have something to do in a TD game other than sit there and watch the creeps go by! Good use of the theme.
Also, nice job with the music :)
Nice touch of humor at the end screens, it's like playing with Glados :). Once I learned to shoot at where they're going to be rather than where they are at, it became a real challenge! Nice work!
The gameplay itself was really nice and the art was very charming, but the movement was so slow.
I got rekt by Bizzaro :/ . The game had a very Wario-ware type feel to it, which kept each level interesting and engaging!
Today, I learned that I am really bad at controlling two things at once T_T. The title screen had really nice music, it would have been good to listen to it in game too!
I felt so bad when the squares turned frowny :(
Neat, I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to shoot the blue guys first and then realized I was killing all the survivors 0_0
Really solid artwork! Also fantastic music - it really fit the underwater theme!
I got a little lost - but it was a pretty neat concept!
Hilarious, love the name and concept :P. I did think controlling the boat and ladder was a little tough.
Pretty fun game, my only gripe is that using space / up scrolled the webpage for me.
I like your title, the Dr. Strangelove reference is appreciated :D.
I had trouble getting past the beginning part though - I kept shifting but it looked like I couldn't make the 3rd jump or so?
I wanted to see where this was going with the different skills, but I poofed out of the second level (along the right wall) and then couldn't get back in. I kinda feel like I was playing a game on my old win 3.1 machine back in the day, very nostalgic sounds and environments!
It was pretty difficult (I couldn't get through it all the way) but this is among the best theme tie-ins that I've seen!
Nice art! It was interesting but I couldn't get past the food part.
Couldn't get past the first level :( It would be nice if the guy moved just a little faster, I found it really hard to dodge the crystals.
Still, it was some hectic fun while it lasted! The audio really seemed to fit the mood of the game.
Good atmosphere - the music really helped it along! Nice way to tie in the theme too. A little bit of animation would have gone a long way.
I failed massively the first time, and did MUCH better the second time around! Relaxing atmosphere, good music, and charming graphics :)
That was really fun, and there was an incredible amount of polish! I only wish that the difficulty ramped up just a tiny bit slower.
Pretty neat! I liked the music. Cool little story, but would have been nice to have a little more actions to affect the story.
This game is giving me anxiety! Haha I was so jumpy while playing because the obstacles came so fast.
I appreciate all the work that went into the polish that people don't always realize - bouncy graphics, tweens, etc. It was a simple concept but executed in a really clean way. I also liked the dino sprites!
Game won't load.
Love the idea for this game. Asteroids was one of my favorite games way back when.
Absolutely gorgeous art. The attention to detail that you put into the animations was really great. Especially liked the digging animation.
It almost felt like a mini-Animal Crossing. Crushing rocks. Trading stuff with your neighbors. Great work!
Great work! The gameplay reminded me a lot of your Steam Rogue GB.
I used a theater/curtain effect too! (Yours was way better though haha).
Decent game an pretty good controls. The fact that bullets cancelled each other out actually made it pretty hard to even damage the enemies. It made grenade spam the only viable solution at first. Which actually isn't a huge deal since it was fun using the bombs!
I loved the music and the artwork. I did a theater theme too, but you definitely pulled it off waaaay better than I did haha. Really nice play on light and shadow. When the music picked up and the villain came out, it made me like, way happier than it should have.
Congratulations to the soon to be newlyweds!
Music is actually pretty cool! My only complaint is that I had to twist my fingers kinda weird to be able to hit LD31 keys quickly enough haha.
That's a pretty hardcore punishment for not reaching the computer though...
Great idea for a game but the controls are really difficult on QWERTY setups.
Having an arrow key control scheme as a backup might be a good idea for the future!
I love it! Good pixel art, really fitting music!
The snow powers were both really cool. I'm partial to the bouncing snowball myself!
So jealous of your art skills!
Phew, this game is hard! I like that using the conveyor belts can be a really good thing (avoiding enemies) or a really bad thing (suck you into the spikes).
The player and enemies could have used a little more contrast to make them easier to separate visually from the background.
Hehe, somebody really wanted to do that avoid the light theme! I liked the visuals, they were pretty nice! Music fit pretty well with the mood.
I would have enjoyed more uses for the stomping mechanic, would have been really cool.
Great idea, but it really needs some balance. It's entirely possible to play 'perfectly' but lose in the first 10 seconds.
I had a little luck when I got the laser early, but prior to that it was a little painful :S. I also agree about the varying art styles. It would be nice in the future for you to create some kind of style guide and have everyone stick to that in order to establish some consistency.
Super hard to hit the U key while fighting for your life, maybe having something like right-click or a rest period between rounds would have made buying upgrades a lot easier.
Pretty solid game though. The beginning is hard but with enough upgrades it becomes pretty fun to mow down hoardes of enemies with your little pistol :)
Gah, the puzzles are so hard! I love the music, and the art is really good.
I'm ashamed though... the best I got was 2 pieces stuck together XD
Hm, was there anything except just copies of the same room? I probably am missing something.
After a couple rooms everything got so small that I couldn't really tell what was going on.
I think I see where you were going with this game, and I like the survival aspect of it - especially being caught in some endless dungeon that you're trying to escape from.
Can't believe I actually downloaded a C64 emulator to play this :).
I had a lot of fun being all nostalgic :)
Fun game! I saw your updates on the front page and knew I had to try out some robot-beheading action for myself! I got stuck on my way back to the door by jumping on a guard's body and got stuck in the floor :/
I really liked the music!
Interesting idea, shame you weren't able to work on it longer. I like the idea of exploring the emails/using a virtual "computer". I found the hitboxes for the icons to be kind of weird until I realized I had to click the corners.
Haha, that was pretty funny. I like all of the different descriptions for the channel name.
The character design was not my cup of tea, but the art was all very well done. Definitely a very nice aesthetic going on here!
I really enjoyed the concept. It's a shame that spamming ended up being the best approach. Maybe a good way to avoid that would be some circles that you shouldn't pop?
This game really reminds me of Toto Temple Deluxe! I imagine it would be a lot more fun if I weren't playing by myself, but great job nonetheless! The controls were tight and dashing felt really good.
That was pretty sweet! I'm a huge Zelda fan, so naturally I had to try this. Wish you could have gotten all of the dungeons implemented, but there's still an impressive amount of content nonetheless.
Oh wow. I thought that it would be super easy and then I screwed myself over by blocking myself from ever getting enough snow through a narrow entrance. There's definitely a deeper puzzle aspect here than first meets the eye!
Fun music and nice little puzzle game you've got here :)
Great graphics! I really like the aesthetic that you went for... certainly brings me back!
Like others have said, it would really benefit from a lose condition.
Nicely done! The shop screen was incredibly well done, and I loved how you use the same mechanics in game to purchase the upgrades! Being able to re-launch yourself with the cannon was unexpected and fun!
Great concept, but I felt the controls to be a little unfriendly to the gameplay. It was overall a pretty enjoyable game. I liked having to sort of memorize the layout of the rooms before proceeding. It seems like it should be simple but it's not so easy to dodge spikes that you can't see!
The controls felt very nice and responsive! I ended up getting levels that had a bunch of cacti, which I felt was kind of difficult. Funny sound effects :)
Love the arcade feel, the music, the sounds... everything!
Totally dig the distillation of a dungeon game down into a one-screen game.
That was fun and also pretty challenging. I couldn't make it to the end, but I did have quit a lot of fun failing over and over and over and over :). Great use of the theme. Very fitting music as well.
A little simple, but fun nonetheless. Didn't look like the score was working? It seemed stuck at 42 no matter what.
I tried boxing in the ball shooter but then the balls just kept popping through the walls D:
Fantastic. That was really fun!
The difficulty curve felt very appropriate, and the controls were tight and responsive. Great art, fitting music too!
I loved being able to choose the different vehicles! I kept losing because the zombies were killing people and I wasn't good enough to keep them away haha. I don't quite see how it fits the theme though.
Pretty solid work, good job!
Clever idea, but the game sort of locked up for me. I clicked on the phone and then opened a washer and both UIs were open. Then I could never leave the phone screen.
Woah this was pretty hard to control - but that was also part of the charm! It felt like QWOP ninja haha.
The slow-motion made for some hilarious action moves. Great job with this!
Phew, you definitely didn't make it an easy game! I got a few of the decorations off, but got a little lost after that. I think maybe the clues that I needed to find were behind the Christmas decorations haha.
I did really like the fact that guessing right/wrong had different audio effects. It provided good feedback to the player.
Hey, a quick GIF guide showing the key locations is on its way. I figured it might get frustrating to find the keys if you're not into that sort of thing.
I made a guide showing the locations of the keys if you get stuck: http://imgur.com/a/N2M8y#0
Holy moly @badlydrawnrod, that would have been hilarious and perfect! WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?!
@March. The curtains were done in maya with nCloth. I couldn't find an easy/quick way to get ncloth or even vertex animation moved over to Unity, so I did a rendered video.
The water is stock Unity water.
@mrexcessive
Hm, I wonder why that would be, it really shouldn't be taking that long. Did you try the first web link or the second? My website should load it faster than gamejolt, but it might not hurt to try both links.
@alfadur Yeah that came up a little too late in my playtesting/level building to properly fix. All in all, I'd really like a chance to redo the camera mechanics since they feel a little off to me now.
A lesson to keep in mind for next time I suppose.
@AdventureIslands Thanks for sticking with the game all the way through.
@Grindstorm That's my favorite one too!
@MiniBobbo I feel your pain. I wish I knew a way to lock the mouse inside of the window. It probably exists in Unity actually and I just haven't looked...
@Anachron You're very welcome, and thanks! The jump mechanic is something I wish I had explained better in-game. You can see examples of it in the gameplay video and key walkthrough linked above if you're still curious.
Clever idea. First time seeing Lycos in like... over 10 years haha.
I found out that you can fly forever. That combined with no damage/hp made it a little easy.
Hm, there were quite a few problems with collision detection it seems, or maybe I'm not just attacking right?
Also it would be nice to have Santa start moving immediately once you hit left or right. At first I didn't even realize I could move.
Good first start, I'm sure you'll come back and do even better next time!
Wow you just made level 7 impossible didn't you?!?! I can't get above 30 even when I'm at my best.
Such a funny idea. Loved the music and the different poses for the pirate captain.
Also... Pirate-Game-Developers unite!
Nice music. That and the text transitions really added a lot of nice touch to the game. I found the double jumping to be a little finnicky at times, but overall the platforming felt pretty good!
Neat idea. I like the animation for the cutting - and the programming you did for that is really neat.
When I move the mouse though, it seems like the cuts are really random. And either the camera zooming in is a bug, or it's just really fast - I'd maybe tone that down a bit.
Pretty cool breakout clone. I would have preferred that the movement of the paddle not ramp up in speed, but rather be constant since it was a little hard to be precise. That could just be me though :P
Pretty sure I lost several good years of life on my keyboard after this game, haha. What a cool concept - and sometimes the pipes played some really nice music!
The lighting is very pretty! I loved using the torches. Game felt a little slow paced to me, but that's just personal taste.
Kinda neat. It's more of an interactive application than a game though.
Cool concept for a game. It would be great if there were certain traps - like if you dig under yourself you might fall into a trap, or if you dig above something falls on top of you. Right now, you can just kind of keep clicking everywhere since there's no shortage of fuel to be found.
I'd definitely keep developing this idea, because it could turn into something really cool. Like an infinite Dig Dug!
Oh, and great music :)
You have to put the HTML file in your "Public" dropbox folder if you want the site to work.
Just saw this game on Ludum Dare to Believe and had to try it out myself! Really fun concept, I can definitely feel the Zelda influence.
I would love to see more done with this concept, I think you have a really good base going here if you were to develop it into something further!
Haha I got to around 100 and then they started falling SO FAST! I liked the music choice. The game, as others have stated, was pretty simple but it worked well.
One suggestion I would make is to have some "bad" gifts that you have to avoid picking up. That way you would have to think about which ones you're grabbing. Could make the game a lot more engaging with just a simple change like that!
Fun game! I liked that it got more punishing the longer you left the speakers alive. Those green enemies were super annoying!
It would have been so cool if different music tracks went away or even just the volume had gone down when you killed the speakers.
Oh my goodness, I played SO MUCH BATTLEZONE when I was a kid! The graphics were pretty nice, and it was the first time I've seen the fisheye lens used that really helped out the game!
A little contrast between background/player would be helpful, but other than that I thought it was great! I like the fog of war touch - that combined with the procedural generation really made it feel like anything could be around the corner!
Good work! It was kind of confusing at first until I got the hang of it. It would be nice to be able to lose the guard's attention by hiding out of sight.
Oh nice! I made my game in a theater too!
You've got a good dialogue system going for this, good work!
Cool light mechanic! There were some interesting gameplay choices when you had to decide whether to cross the screen to get a torch that might die before you got there, or try to wait for one that might be closer.
Getting hit by a lot of monsters in the dark was kind of annoying since you couldn't really see them, but I suppose that was the point!
Great game. You really nailed down the Metroid feel on just one screen!
I was also quite a fan of the speed boots!
Mmm. Beveled pixels, glowing sparks? Must be deepnight :)
Another great entry as always. Controls felt good, and the escalation of the police force was a really nice touch.
I was slightly disappointed I was unable to steal a police car though.
Hah! Great job again guys! This was pretty funny, I had a good laugh flipping the car over and sending all of the objects flying around the room :)
I really like the art!
Nice! I saw the updates on the front page but forgot to bookmark it so that I could find it again.
My only suggestion would be to slow the character down a little bit. It's pretty hard to do precise platforming when he moves so fast.
I really liked this. Clever use of the theme with time-travelling. The art was nice, and it was fun just sort of peacefully reading about the owl family!
Really fun idea! I'm not very good at puzzle games like this so I wasn't able to get very far before I gave up (sorry!).
I'm a big Zelda fan, so I love the feel of the game. Cool otomata music :)
Ah, I made it a little over 700. Cool game, but I was starting to get really dizzy after a while.
Maybe if the game was more zoomed in and the radius of the circle was larger it would cause less motion sickness?
And I don't care if it wasn't good for anything - I loved being able to throw my head!
Awesome game! I wish I had a second person to play with.
Aw man, I really wish there were other people to play with. The in-flight controls felt really nice. I liked the randomly spawning crates with upgrades in them - feels like playing Worms again :)
For some feedback on the controls, I would suggest that when the player hits the planet, they sort of snap to it and don't have to rely on the rotate keys to make them stand upright. It felt a little weird to me.
Other than that minor gripe, I liked the game! I'm going to keep checking back to see if more players are on so that I can actually give it a rating.
Nice job with the map generation, but I kind of agree with seledorn. In the future, it might just be better to do a front page blog post about your experience, challenges, goals, etc. That way you can still show off your work. As it stands right now, you're kind of setting yourself up to have a lot of negative comments written.
Go ahead and publicly publish your code framework for the procedural generation and next LD you can pick up where you left off with this idea! I like the map - looks very much like an above view of a city/street layout.
I enjoy the hand-drawn feel of the art. Everything's really cute and violent :)
Sonic 2 Special Stage! Loved the art. It was pretty fun, but it started to get a little repetitive and easy after a little bit. Maybe increasing the speed over time would add some more challenge?
Heh, I loved building the snowman! Simple point-and-click game, but fun nonetheless!
Hah, that was a pretty funny game. Disco music was nice. I thought it was pretty difficult to tell what was going to hurt me and what wasn't.
The disco colors were great. We could all use a little more neon in our lives :)
I really liked the art style - it was a really clever way to do a top-down game! The audio really helped set the mood.
I definitely was a little lost on what to do. I could never find anything to wipe the hammer off with and it didn't seem like the sink was going to work for that. My life as a violent criminal was rather short lived :)
Hm, I like the idea but there was nobody to actually play it with. I'll have to check back later.
Usually if you wanna do multiplayer for LD, it's a good idea to have bots. That way more people can play and rate your game.
Loved the art, and the music was really fitting for the game!
I had to play both characters at once so it started to get kind of confusing playing both of them haha.
Unfinished? It's already got some pretty solid mechanics functioning. I'm not a huge text-game guy myself, but it looks pretty well laid out. Having the different colored areas for missions/buildings/people makes it pretty easy to identify what the sections are for, but a heading for each would be really helpful.
Ok, you REALLY stumped me on some of these puzzles!
The mood is really nice, and I love all of the little sounds that the gems make. Good work!
Pretty fun idea, I especially enjoy being able to put up a wall barrier and throw across it. Take that elves!
The movement/throwing/gathering felt a little too slow or unresponsive to actually stand a chance against the elves. In the future, it might be better to speed up these actions that the player is going to repeat a lot.
Overall, good job!
Heh, pretty funny use of the 'unofficial' theme!
This reminded me very much of old DOS games. The gameplay and audio were pretty simple, but it really fit the mood of the game. It would have been nice to have some more difficult enemies, perhaps even just different colored slimes that were tougher.
Haha, that boss :). I'm getting strong vibes of the World's Hardest Game.
Really great job, I love difficult fast games like this. My only little gripe is that the audio repeated quite an awful lot.
Interesting guessing-game concept, but it would be nice to have some kind of subtle cues to help you know what answers to provide. I like the substituted names for name-brand products, pretty funny!
Unless I was missing something, isn't "ask boss" always worse than just guessing? It costs you 1 point but so does guessing wrong.
I think that it would be more fun with a timer to see how long you've lasted.
That being said, everything else about it felt pretty well polished. I particularly liked the little jelly pieces left on the ground after the character had exploded.
WE TOOK OVER THE INTERNET! Dorothy and I are in love forever.
Great game. Really funny! There should be more dating sim style games like this on Ludum Dare!
Hah. I like the homage to Return of the King. It would have been nice to have more things to interact with, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Good job!
I got a C!
Love your character design!
Clever idea, and the music was very fitting. I really enjoyed the art of the planet.
The jumping mechanic really needs some work though - That combined with the bouncing as he walks makes the game frustrating instead of fun.
Good job with the game overall! If you clean up the jumping mechanics, this would actually make a really nice mobile game, if you're into that kind of thing.
That was a really nice experience :). I really like the color pallete, and that character is just great!
Fun little puzzle mechanics. It would have been cool to have more of those gravity-based sliding blocks, but I know you only have so much time to do things during the competition time.
I'd definitely play more if you developed this further. Great work!
You had some really good mechanics - the physics felt nice, and the screen shake+time freeze when enemies get hit big was a great touch. Obviously, as you said, it's not quite finished but you have a good base to keep working on in the future.
Great game! I'm really surprised that was just the first one you've ever made!
I liked the art, and the mood was well done also. The only thing that I'd really change is that some of the blue dots were really difficult to find (more specifically, the paths that lead to them).
I would love to be able to play this and give feedback, but I don't have an Android device :'(
This would make a pretty fun little mobile game! I wish I had an android to test out the apk. Fun game - you should definitely think about cleaning it up a little and submitting it to Google Play.
I like it! I think that if the players revealed just a little higher radius of vision it would have been more fun, because otherwise you have to move rather slowly.
Being able to lay down your own traps was quite a fun touch.
I got to 62!
I like the little slowdown mechanic when the enemies explode, nice touch. Also consider turning the music down a few notches, it's pretty loud at the moment.
Pretty good start for your first LD, congratulations! I think the game was overall a little dark (I found it hard to see my guy sometimes). The ledge/wall climbing was a pretty neat feature.
Haha, that ending. Simple, but pretty funny. Also, I liked the "failure" screen :)
Great idea to have themed levels! The music and art were both really cute. The game felt like a variation of Mario Bros (the old arcade one) but with a gun twist!
Random question - do you happen to use the 2D Platform Controller by jnamobile?
Ahhh wave 4 started to get serious!
Really fun game. Loved everything about it. The music was really fitting, and the mechanics were well polished.
Pretty funny game. I'd love to try it out with another person.
The W attack didn't feel like it did too much, I had better luck just flying up in the air and falling down on my opponent's head.
Your music is always great :) The game was pretty simple, but fun nonetheless. The graphics remind me a lot of DOS games. Jetpack specifically!
I've played an unhealthy amount of cookie clicker. Looks like I'll be playing an unhealthy amount of this too haha. Great job!
I couldn't make it to the bottom - I kept losing by reading all of the names. It might not be everyone's kind of humor, but it's definitely my kind :)
Fun game overall, good job!
I am a magical wizard who can jump through walls to take showers! Pretty mellow atmosphere, I liked it. I got a real Sims vibe playing this. The humor was well done also.
Clever idea for a game. Spam-clicking was a little overpowered. Perhaps making the ducks much stronger and adding a bread throwing (clicking) limit would have made it more strategic.
The game was pretty confusing - I had a really hard time controlling the character. It seemed to move REALLY fast and then not respond at all. The theme of the game tickled me though and the graphics looked nice. Solid job overall!
@TheMeorch - Thanks! I'm pretty green when it comes to doing 3D games so I'll definitely keep that in mind for next time
@Elemental Zeal Games Studio - Thank you very much! Wish I had more time to do proper models and textures though. I was sick during the weekend :(
@feldenthorne - I probably could have made it a little more clear that you have to turn in the gems to the village elder. Then the Orange guy by the wall teaches you a new trick where you become an 'unconventional weapon'. You're right, my theme was preeeeety weak this time though haha.
@benmcnelly - I've been spending waaaaay too much time trying to figure out how to optimize webgl (deleting every possible mesh that I can). if only it was as easy as the web player we're all used to...
@SuperPokeunicorn - Collectathons are one of my favorite genres and I've always wanted to make a mini-version of one for LD! Definitely could have been more productive and introduced some better gameplay. Next time!
@richiebranson - One of my favorites too! Just don't compare my game to it though or you'll leave very disappointed haha.
@RHY3756547 - Man everyone hates the tank controls. Maybe I grew up in the wrong era - it's hardwired into my brain haha. I'll remember to include alternative movements in the future.
@kabutakogames - I hear ya, I'll work on a better movement scheme next time!
@teirce The darn web player... (Actually it was my really poorly optimized models that I built last minute, but don't tell anybody!)
@Pat Kemp Oh, there was a small bug I fixed with the camera's X rotation not being framerate-independent, which definitely was causing that problem. I must have forgotten to update the Mac/Linux build. I'll do that ASAP!
@Hambone Thank you very much!
@ermrk Wow that's a game I haven't thought of in a long time...
@sebasRez Glad you enjoyed it!
@TheScopelessOne Could you let me know which version you've played? All of the framerate problems should have been fixed by now.
Great submission! A bit of lag time between the clicking and the shooting, but otherwise it was a lot of fun.
Fantastic entry! The camera made me a little dizzy, but I can overlook that.
Your games never fail to disappoint! I died quite a lot but really enjoyed the times where you had to change the bullet's trajectory more than once.
You guys did a really nice job with the art!
I came for the glowy beveled pixels. I stayed for the atmosphere and clever dialogue. You definitely loved the theme this time haha. It was short but sweet!
Very polished game! Really liked the game. The art style was really nice - you even worked hard on the menu buttons!
Great atmosphere and cool voice acting. It was just too frustrating to have to keep walking down the hallway again and again.
Always look forward to seeing what you're going to do! The visual style was pretty neat (I liked the fading as you got further away from the relic. Like others have mentioned, I wasn't a huge fan of the ZXC controls.
Neat idea, but it would have been nice if there was a bit more variety between the different volcanoes.
Fun game! The art style was definitely the most impressive feature. I had a hard time getting the hang of the gameplay.
Overall it was a really fun game! I got stuck eventually (I'm not great at puzzle games).
You must be a Battlezone fan :). I had fun firing rocket-cylinders at my enemies!
Huh. Haiku is certainly an unconventional weapon! I really appreciate games that work the menu/ui into the level design. Really nice work!
Hilarious game! Had trouble getting out of the room at first despite the glowing instructions telling me what to do >_<
Wow, really great voice acting. Even though it took longer to download than it did to play through, I'm very glad I did. Pretty funny/dark premise.
Well, it was definitely lethal. I died so many times haha. Would have been really cool if I had a second person to play with!
Fun idea but it would have been neat with more enemy types. Some basic mazing made it impossible to lose.
I loved it! Really fun and the music, as always, was phenomenal. I found it a little tough, but maybe it's because I wanted to keep jumping with the rhythm haha.
Funny game, though it wasn't very intuitive at first for me. There were maybe too many people in the room at once - it started getting kinda laggy. But also kinda fun because of how hectic it was XD
Great idea - loved the setting an awful lot! Found the combat to be a bit uninspiring (winning wasn't all that rewarding and dying didn't feel like your fault). The environment was cool, and picking up the letters was a nice touch. Great idea for the start menu by the way!
Really clever idea for the theme! I found the movement to be a bit jumpy, but I can look past that. I spent waaaaaay too long figuring out fun attack patterns!
Really liked it! I couldn't find a better strategy than move both robots at the same time (since left-behind enemies were re-making the spawn points) so it led me to question why there was a second, slower robot?
Awesome stuff as always! Cute story, and the games were all pretty fun!
If I remember right, you have put in a "input lag" setting in other games, is there going to be one in this as well? It seemed like my key presses were always being registered too late.
Thanks for the heads up, I had the file path wrong. It should be working now.
Thanks everyone!
@Squid Blink Games, WebGL should run on everything, but Unity Player no longer works on Chrome.
Good stuff, I eventually learned that tapping the left mouse button would let you spin much slower and the aiming got a lot easier. Go team Cowboy!
Still had some difficulty controlling which direction I was facing, did I miss something?
I'm cracking up, this is too funny! Your games never disappoint: Love the art, love the music! Keep it up!
Sweet game! Felt like an Alchemy clone, but with a goal and needing to find each ingredient to craft. The ONLY thing I really wanted while playing was an auto-complete feature for known recipes.
It looked like the best way to win was just pressing the green button a bunch? Regardless, it was a pretty cool "choose your own adventure" kind of experience.
I agree with what others have said, it felt kind of arbitrary that you could only go forward and turn. I ended up getting stuck by a ramp because I couldn't back up.
The aesthetics were nice, the colors fit nicely with the models. I especially liked the star particles coming from the car!
Great game! I used to play Nibbles a ton as a kid and this definitely brought me back.
Made it to world 2... then it got too fast for me :P
Nice simple idea, the space key changing kept it from getting stale.
Wish it didn't take so long to get back where you were after you died, it started feeling a little frustrating.
I did it! I thought you were supposed to collect all the stars at first, but then I gave up because some of them seemed too hard to get. Did the flies do anything? I couldn't tell if my score was going up when I ate them.
One thing that I think would have made it a little less frustrating would be to have less blocks being placed. Often I felt like it was just luck that let me skip ahead by a big chunk.
Pretty dang good. I played it over and over again but kept dying in the second world.
I found it very hard to block the non-projectile attacks because it was hard to tell when exactly the impact happened.
Superb art and animation, really liked the music, too!
Capture.JPG
This was really enjoyable! A nice combination of Mario Party and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
I could have kept playing for a long while, but I figured level 6 was a good place to stop :)
The cards could have been almost double in size in my opinion. They were a tad too small for me to read.
Great work!
The first level was a bit rough, but after a few restarts the game "clicked" for me and I had a good time. I *almost* made it past level 5. I was a bit too cavalier with my use of morale early on, and that really hurt me.
My one bit of feedback for improvement would be labeled sections on the board similar to how physical board games would separate card stacks ("Hand", "Tasks", and "Layers" or something like that). At first I interpreted the "Tasks" card as the "current" card that I had drawn, which was confusing until I realized my mistake.
Solid strategy game overall! If this were turned into a physical card game, I'd buy it!
I had a lot of fun with this one. The boss fight got pretty stressful, but I managed to beat it on my first try with ~10% hp left (I stacked attack speed and vampirism right at the very end). Reminded me of old WC3 custom game builds.
The tileset generation was a little stagnant on my playthrough - I got the standard brown/green right up until the last segment. When I restarted the game, I got a ton of variation. It would have been cool to introduce some bias so that each of the different worlds has a better chance of getting selected.
Great work!
Clever and fun! It was the perfect length, and didn't overstay its welcome.
The limitation to just HTML and CSS was an interesting constraint.
Good work!
Fun shoot 'em up game! And the intro dialogue was pretty funny.
I had to try a bunch of times to get past the first few enemies. It was basically a death sentence if you didn't kill all of the enemies.
Good job!
This was a great game!
The Zelda inspiration was awesome. Loved the shop between each level.
I did think the hitbox on the monkey was a little too big. I died to lava a couple times that I thought I was clear of.
Good work!
Clever platformer! Splitting up and recombining your party was really cool.
The level tilting mechanic made me quite dizzy, so I wasn't able to play for too long. One suggestion for feedback would be to have a little progress bar showing how "charged" the characters jump would be.
Good work!
Fantastic game! Nice, tight scope. Clean graphics. Great mood and audio.
I had trouble interpreting the key controls, but I found out pretty quickly that Z and X were the ones I needed. My only suggestion for improvement would be to add a little bit of camera smoothing when the torch returns to your hand. The instant snapping felt a bit jarring.
Throwing the torch was really fun, and the movement controls felt nice. I feel like I play too many LD games where the controls are way too sensitive or jumps are hard to pull off. This game felt like a lot of care was put into the movement speed relative to the level size.
Great work!
Out of all the diving games, this one I probably played the longest!
I enjoyed the peaceful approach, rather than everything trying to kill you. And automatic resurfacing when you run out of oxygen is a really forgiving mechanic that I appreciated. Also really liked the approach you took to pseudo-random generation.
I found a fun bug that lets you launch yourself by [dashing into enemies](https://i.imgur.com/HCqzf4s.mp4). I probably spent 2-3 oxygen tanks just playing around with that.
I do wish the bigger upgrades were a little cheaper or you had more incentive to unlock them. I got to around 200m and had everything unlocked except for the 3 most expensive items.
Good job!
Absolutely fantastic. Hilarious concept and solid execution. I love the inclusion of a leaderboard!
Just wanted to stop by and say thanks for playing my game! I don't have VR, so I can't play yours unfortunately. A gameplay video would be a cool addition to show off your work to those of us without a VR setup.
I had a few extremely long horizontal lines of rocks that were generated, it let me get big really quickly. Once the worm gets big, it's super fun to zoom around and eat everything. It's a shame that part only lasts a couple seconds.
Nice work!
Hey, you decided to upload it! The visuals are really clean and effective. Solid interpretation of the theme. I think my only criticism is that the left/right controls got confusing when fully upside down, but that is probably a matter of taste.
I've been a fan of your games since the Sun and Moon entry a few years back. Glad to see you're still doing great work!
The art and music were phenomenal. There was just enough detail to be interesting, while not being overly distracting. I absolutely love the old nautical chart style.
I had trouble making it past the third pattern. Something about moving with my left hand and doing the music with my right hand was just too much to process haha. Should I have focused on the beat more? Perhaps, but I couldn't leave the money behind!
Great work, I love to see rhythm games done well on LD jams!
Really clever use of the theme! I like the structure that the quests provide. Nice job!
I always look forward to seeing what you come up with! Loved the fire effect. Putting out the flames with the fire hose was extremely satisfying.
I would definitely love to see a post-jam version! A suggestion: having some movement while the hose is going, even just a slow walk, would have been a good addition. Spraying the hose around felt so nice, but having to stop walking to do so didn't feel so great.
For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to get past the room with the blue keycard. I tried several times, but kept getting a :fire: at the door.
Great work!
Really clever use of chess moves to create a puzzle game!
I liked the balance of difficulty. I'm horrible at puzzle games AND chess, but I was able to play this with no problem, haha. The enemy pawns getting "kinged" at the end and becoming MUCH bigger problems was so cool!
Awesome work!
I made it slightly past the halfway point:
Capture.JPG
The game was pretty good overall. I didn't realize the oil spills were a speed boost until several minutes in. It looked like a hole in the ground, so I was trying to avoid it. A bit more visual clarity on that would have been nice.
Good work!
Really fun, and clever twist on the Tetris formula! I think a little bit more padding at the start would have made the objective clearer - I died a bunch before the gameplay clicked.
The difficulty definitely ramps up at a nice pace. Here was my highest score:
Untitled-1.png
Great work!
This was a cool concept, and after reading the spoilers, I really think you have a clever idea. I also wasn't quite sure if my "green" responses mattered, or if it just needed to be "not red" while I was playing. I wish I had read the spoilers *before* playing. I think a little bit of an intro describing the characters prior to interacting with them would have been helpful.
Good work!
I loved the time travel mechanic!
One technical problem I had was that the text was difficult to read at 4k resolution.
As a few others have said, it was tough to know what to do. I had to use the walkthrough on Github to make it through the game.
Good work!
Phew, that was hard!
Untitled-1.png
I have nothing but positive feedback. This is staggeringly good, and an example of the perfect jam game. Great connection to the theme, unique mechanics, cute art, and amazing level design. Very well done!
Reminds me of the DOS games I grew up on. I also liked the Bubble-Bobble-style level transitions.
Having to restart over on a death was brutal. After dying on the 4th/5th level a couple of times, it completely killed my motivation to continue. Just that little change would be a huge improvement!
Overall, good work! I like both coffee and space :)
Both funny and clever! The art was really solid, and after picking up a few ingredients, I started to pick up on the color mixing mechanic. Great work!
I can't seem to get past the title screen: dv.JPG
I've tried clicking, pushing buttons, and yelling into my microphone. Any suggestions? I'd love to give this game a shot.
@mdotedot Hey thanks, that worked! Firefox did not want to behave.
The flying pig was hilarious. I struggled a bit to control the character, but overall it was pretty fun. Really good interpretation of the theme!
I loved the interpretation of the theme, and using nested levels not only as obstacles, but as platforms themselves, was a really unique mechanic.
As others have pointed out - the difficulty is pretty brutal. Especially dying or falling in one of the "outer" levels, having to redo the "inner" levels starts killing your motivation to keep playing really fast. I made it a little over halfway until I goofed up and had to start all over.
Really fun entry!
This was really well made.
The audio and the speed of the movement *really* sold the weight of the elevator. Just sliding it around from floor to floor was really fun.
The game started off really slow, but by the end there was a surprising amount of quickness / memory needed in order to complete the levels on time.
Really good work!
Great use of color, light, and darkness! Audio was both simple and effective. On my third attempt, I made it down to level 33 before getting got.
The platforms with the teeth kept tricking me every time!
Good work!
I managed to get a score of 230 on my second attempt after sprinting towards the 2 caches of materials early on.
A bit of visual feedback on the turret placement and turret health would have gone a long way towards improving the UI. It often felt random whether or not I could place down a turret in a specific location.
I also couldn't get the WebGL version to load, either on Firefox or Chrome - I downloaded the exe.
First tower defense game I've played so far, kudos on making one that fit the theme!
I liked the simple art style, and the platforming was tightand enjoyable. It played really well on a mobile browser (Android + Firefox). That's my first time seeing that gameboy interface - it actually worked very well
Like many others in the comments, I really struggled with the orb. After getting it and drowning, my motivation to continue was dead after I had to restart all over again.
Great work! It was cool to see a PICO8 game!
I really liked the art style - gave me DOS game vibes. Ditto what @100th-coin said about the repeating puzzles. The concept is solid, but some variation in the design would have gone a long way to make new levels more interesting.
Overall, nice work!
Really creative take on the theme, and super interesting puzzles!
I felt so smart on that second level when I realized I had to take one bag into the other!
I do think the difficulty ramps up a little too quick. I'm notoriously bad at puzzles, and by the 4th level I was completely stuck.
Amazing job!
A maze game! I just finished one a couple weeks ago as a side project while working through the *Mazes for Programmers* book. Never thought I'd get excited seeing the words "recursive backtracer" in a LD game description.
It would have been fun to add a bit of challenge, like a timer or some limit to the number of times that you could pull up the map.
Also loved seeing a PICO8 game! Good job!
This was great! The fish AI felt realistic , and the movement was super fun.
Try as I might, I couldn't figure out how to defeat the boss. At one point in time, it looked like it took a hit of damage when it swam through a jellyfish, but I couldn't replicate it afterwards.
Awesome job!
I like the idea of zooming into and out of the different biomes. Feels like it could be a good overworld mechanic for a game!
Even without a gameplay loop, I think it could have been improved with some way to interact with the environment. Also, Python's `print()` function is quite performance intensive to run every frame - I would recommend taking that out for a final build.
Good job!
The audio was great, and the low-poly environment was nice to explore. I did think the one-hit crash was pretty brutal, especially with the low contrast. I often died not knowing that I was about to hit a wall. Stronger contrast between FG/BG, or stronger lights on the submarine could help with that.
Overall, nice experience!
(Regarding the performance, optimization, the game ran great in fullscreen on my end!)
Your game reminds me of the Special Stages from Sonic! The art and the music were both very pleasant. Oddly enough ,I feel the dizziness more *after* playing than while I was playing.
I can see a lot of thought was put into the level design. There were times where I would miss my intended path and try to panic-turn my way out of it, only to get sent into a spiral of dead-end corridors. This spot in particular got me quite a few times:
Capture.JPG
My only complaint is that the red button was really hard to notice due to it being way up in the corner. I actually walked all through the level trying to hit "space" on different objects because I thought I had missed something.
Great work!
When I reached the first big open area I thought "oh, I beat it!" but how wrong I was...
This was a fun game, I enjoyed unleashing torpedo-y vengeance against the fish. The little screen flip at the end was a nice touch. Well done!
This was fun! I really enjoyed the color masking you did on the lights, and the way that it reacted not only with the ore, but with other background elements as well.
My only frustration was that due to the slow changing of direction, it got annoying to dive down to the level of an ore, scan it with the light, then move back up ~5m to go pick it up. I think if the lights were aiming at a slight down angle, it would have been a more enjoyable experience.
I also died 4 or 5 times at the beginning from the depth, because I didn't realize I wasn't seeing the full UI. Once I fullscreened the game, I saw what was happening. You might want to put a bold disclaimer in your game description letting people know to fullscreen it.
Depending on how you were doing your UI in Unity, you may be able to solve this in the future by changing the UI scale mode to "Scale with Screen Size" (or "Constant Physical Size" with a reference to the camera). Capture.JPG
Good work!
Cute, funny, and fun!
The echolocation effect was really nice, and I liked the discrete steps between columns, rather than having to aim between really tight spaces. The ability to speed up and slow down let me adjust the difficulty level to my comfort, which is huge in these "fall continuously" games. A lot of them are either too easy or too hard, but this lets the player set that balance for themselves.
I did have a bit of trouble telling whether some rocks were directly against the wall, or if there was a gap that I could squeeze through. I think maybe knocking one or two columns out and increasing the overall width (and scaling up the rocks to match) would make it easier on the eyes, and easier to read the positioning. Also, some very subtle vertical striping in the background that indicates the column positioning could also help with that.
Great work!
I was looking forward to playing this after seeing your blog posts. Really solid puzzle game! It was just the right amount of difficulty for me. The music and art style really made the game feel polished.
Great work! The end screen made me feel happy :)
Untitled-1.png
Great concept! I made it down to 111m before I accidentally walked into a volcano and died :(
I liked the concept a lot - great connection to the theme. Really nice use of Voronoi patterns.
I did find the transitions to be a little trippy looking, and it would have been cool to see a more "literal" animation of that transition.
Good work!
This game gave me Solar Jetman vibes. I was able to get the second package, but kept dying to the laser robots on my attempts to find the third one. Good work!
Firefox had the UP key held down all the time for some reason, but switching to Chrome resolved the issue.
I really enjoyed the damage to the ships being taken out of your paycheck. It was also pretty funny that destroying a ship was a perfectly acceptable way to "solve" the level.
Loved the Millennium Falcon appearance, of course.
I found that the gravity was a bit too quick to really make use of the weapons fully, and I was pretty bad a steering with the afterburners on, so it was easier for me to just dodge everything and drop the ships into the goal. It was helpful to clear out the mines though.
One thing that I would have loved to see would have been different speed, weights, turning, and thrust on the different ships, or perhaps an incentive to strategize depositing certain ships before others. So the only real criticism I have is that it felt like I was playing the same level over and over depending on how many ships there were. Seeing as how you mentioned accidentally wasting time on different weapons or AI for dogfighting, I assume you probably had that stuff in mind too.
Really good work!
I love the work you put into a full 3D environment, with NPCs and branching dialogue. I will say, with the pauses between each sentence and the inability to skip to the next line, the pacing did feel very slow. I would recommend letting players skip to the next line.
Nice work with an ambitious entry!
One thing I've learned from having lots of feedback on my projects is that if you find something difficult, annoying, or are trying to avoid it in your game, you can assume the players will feel it to an even more acute degree, and you should lean into it. I still struggle to remember that myself though!
Really nice! The controls are unique but intuitive, and it's something that you can jump right into and start playing within a few seconds.
I would have preferred a volume slider to just a mute button. An alternate control scheme for the mouse (left click for laser, right click for hook for example) might be something to consider.
Great work!
I won!
I really liked the idea, and haven't seen anything like it before. The weapon icons give you an intuitive sense as to how they work, which is great when they're constantly changing.
The weapon usage did seem to teleport me around, which was weird. I gained the most ground by just clicking near the bottom of the screen, and it would teleport me pretty big distances forward.
There was also a ton of screen space, and the weapons carved out really big paths, so it was really easy to avoid the squares. A bit more difficulty in that regard would have been nice.
Great work for your first compo entry!
Absolutely outstanding work. The artwork, sound, and voice acting is top-notch. It's almost hard to believe that this is a game jam entry.
I had to play through a couple times just to see the different planets and hear the dialogue. I enjoyed the balance you struck in the resource management - it was important, but not overly complicated to understand.
Really stellar work!
The controls were a little esoteric at first, but I caught on after stumbling through the first couple levels. After that, I really enjoyed it. I love the isometric design, and recruiting your enemies was super fun.
Some clearer controls and more signaling as to what the enemies were going to do would have gone a long way towards making this easier to pick up. I tried playing through a second time to level up my death rabbit, but alas, he was too squishy to survive.
Great job, I enjoyed playing this!
As others have pointed out, I could have used a vertical line or some other indicator to know where I was aligned on the screen.
There were brief moments where I really picked up speed and just started crushing through the white blocks, which was super fun. The speed (even before picking up the green) did make it tough to dodge anything with any real precision - I was mostly just moving left and right and hoping to get lucky.
Overall, I enjoyed the simplicity of the gameplay and the graphics - it let you jump right in and start playing immediately. Nice job!
Nice UI! As a menu/text driven game, it's nice to see attention paid to the color palette and layout.
I do think the premise bordered on funny, especially with the puns and fake company names, but the actual situations you dealt with were kinda depressing. A bit more over-the-top depressing might have actually pushed this over the edge into a really funny game.
Good work!
I realized I was accidentally dropping my items! I was trying to drag them on to the players to equip them. Overall, a solid concept but the UI did make it a bit confusing as to what was going on.
The art was nice and the game had a good relation to the theme. I liked the variety of enemies and the introduction of new mechanics from level 1 > 2.
The ranged attack volume needs some balancing - it was really loud compared to the background track.
I also would have liked to see a checkpoint system in the game. I died 3 times at the end of level 2 during the part where you fall through the vertical spike part, and at that point my motivation to go back and finish the level was spent.
Pretty solid for your first compo entry, Good job!
Impressively huge level, and nice looking graphics. I'll echo the above comment about the ladders - the transitions all being the same made the mechanics a little unclear. It was tough to know when I was on the same layer as the rabbits, which led to me getting caught several times. I think a bit more contrast when you're "hidden", and using a different transition for ladders would have helped clarify that.
I was most pleased with the fact that you made a stealth game that wasn't painfully slow. *So* many stealth games make you wait an eternity between moves, and it gets old fast. While playing your game, I felt encouraged to pause briefly, and then sprint on large sections, which mostly worked out for me! Also, your choice of music really helped to sell the mood. Good work!
@fadrikalexander , Visually, all the transitions fade to black, then fade you back in a new position. This made it feel great when going through a secret passage, since it felt like you were hiding. But using that same visual transition for ladders also gave me that "secret passage" feeling, and I had to remember that I wasn't hidden just because I traversed a ladder.
I enjoyed the beginning quite a bit. Once I started putting points into speed, it became very difficult to steer, even when I invested most of my money into turning. I realized steering was probably a pointless endeavor, so I started just aiming my drill at the beginning, shooting in a straight line, and hoping for the best.
I started hugging the left wall at the beginning to skip most of the dense rocks, then collect the expensive gems deeper down. My highest score was right at 1000.
Fun game, good work!
Great art, and I loved the atmosphere. I had *almost* saved my cat wife, but I died to fish right before returning to the surface.
I played v1.0.1, and thought the gem collection was a little slow. Since I had killed most of the enemies in my way, it felt like a slog having to wait for it to follow me. That was my only real major complaint.
I'm really glad that you were generous with HP and oxygen. I've played a lot of diving games so far that were brutal with instant death if you weren't extremely conservative with your resources.
Great entry, I enjoyed it!
Having a series of different mini-games is something I don't think I've seen much, if at all, in a LD before. Quite ambitious!
I really enjoyed how cohesive the experience was. Every step of the way, it felt like you were playing as the same character facing different challenges.
I did run into a bug with the hitboxes in the liver stage. I think being too close to the enemies was causing the sword to miss. I survived with just 1 tick of health left!
Great work!
This was really cool, but I'm not sure I quite understood the mechanics. I eventually just started placing jobs down randomly and that seemed to work ok.
I got a nice Lemmings vibe from this game. Would definitely play an extended version with more player feedback. Great work!
The ambience was great, and I enjoyed the art. The sonar looks particularly slick! I do think the submarine could have been a bit smaller, or the gaps in the terrain could have been a bit bigger.
Loved the graphics and the concept. There were some fun platforming challenges!
Unfortunately, I couldn't play very long due to the curved screen effect. It made me really motion sick. It would be nice if there was an option to tone the effect down, although I do acknowledge that was part of your intended design.
Great work!
The movement was fun, and I loved the dashing!
The dash could probably be toned down a bit - I was dashing into spikes a lot at the beginning until I started only dashing in areas that I'd already been to. I also interpreted the walls by the checkpoints as "doors", and wasted a lot of time running around looking for how to open them.
Good work!
This is the craziest game I've played for LD48 so far, and I mean that in a good way. I tried over and over again, but couldn't quite make it without hitting an obstacle or two. Once I decided to turn completely vertical and try to race to the bottom, it got addicting.
Really good work! Now I want some pancakes...
I loved the atmosphere, and piecing together the story from the notes was intriguing. This feels like it could be used as a compelling formula for the intro to a longer game.
I loved the shopkeeper's dialogue, and the art style was charming as well! Ditto on the pockets - I started to view the small diamonds as more of a negative than a positive. Diving deep down for the big gems was fun.
Good work!
I really liked the color palette you chose. It definitely pushed the visuals out of the "game jam art" realm and into the "stylistic art" realm.
I also found the little cheat to sneak off the edge of the screen. I made it to ~700 without it, but it got tough with the enemies being nearly invisible.
Good work!
That was fantastic! I got to the boss fight a few times, but kept forgetting about the floor :rage:
I really liked how the relative simplicity of the different mechanics came together to make an engaging and challenging experience. The whole thing was really well done.
Excellent job!
Wow, I see a lot of games that try to be "deep" that end up failing and being cringey, so I'm always a bit wary when I see one. This is **not** one of those games. You did a phenomenal job at making the gameplay match the story. And the mood was well done.
Since we're strangers on the internet, I'm not sure if this story was personal to you or not, but nonetheless it was profound. I'm sure it'll hit people differently depending on their experiences, but I think you also kept the dialogue heavy on feeling and light on specifics, so I hope people are able to insert themselves into the story.
Very well done!
I definitely see the atmosphere you were going for, and I like the idea of everything slowly degrading around you. The mood, with the music, crunchy sound effects, and black and white art was well done.
I got the same problem as @hpa97 , where I just hit Enter on the TV a bunch until an elevator showed up, and then I guess I was at the end of the game? I had to check the comments here once I was on the body, because I wasn't sure if I had reached the end of the game or not.
Good job finishing your first LD!
Clever twist on the match-3 formula. I enjoyed the clean minimalist art. It really felt rough when I had to match tools to get more tiles. Despite my best efforts, I went deeper and deeper into debt. Good job!
Glad to see you fixed the gun aiming - that went a long way towards making the game feel interactive. I kept getting blinders on by trying to shoot the sharks in the distance, and failed to notice the ones sneaking up behind me.
I think overall, the pacing feels a little slow. Maybe some variation in the shark approach patterns and sizes could have helped that.
Overall, pretty solid game loop, and cute graphics. The small bubbles really gave you the reference for feeling that you were falling. I've played a lot of diving games where the descent feels static, because there's nothing to reference for movement.
Nice work!
The art was amazing, and overall it was pretty well executed for such an ambitious jam project. I realized that there was no wall collision with the bullets, so it ended up being easier to just shoot all the enemies around the corner. They didn't seem to want to shoot back.
This was such a cool entry! The idea of cards decaying and turning into different things was a novel idea, and I liked the optional quests.
I do wish there was a zoom function - the UI was pretty small on my screen, and it would have been nice to see the text a bit bigger.
Good job!
The 3d visuals blended with pixel art looks nice. Like others have said, it's tough to see the traps. Some other visual indicators (like where the wall platforms will appear) would be a nice touch so the player knows to wait for them.
For a first attempt, especially as a team, this is a good entry! Good work!
On my first playthough, I got softlocked between two platforms: Untitled-1.png
I fell through the ground on my second. On the third try though, I reached the end!
A few small changes could go a really long way towards making this feel less frustrating: 1. Zoom out to cover at least 2x as much screen space as we can currently see. Since we're traveling down, this often leads to blind jumps which aren't fun for the player.
2. Increase the contrast between the background and the foreground. Especially when entering the cave, it felt impossible to know what the ground was.
Good job on finishing your first jam entry!
Absolutely hilarious, I loved it! Once I realized it was layers of fetch quests, I was fully on board. The art style was nice, and the environment was fun to explore.
It would be nice if the timer paused while you were in dialogue with the NPCs. I died the first time, but beat it on my second playthrough by mashing through the text. The dialogue was the charm of this game, so it was a shame to have to rush through it in order to win.
That nitpick aside, this was a very solid entry. Great job on this game!
Cool take on the theme! The art and audio made for a very immersive experience. The game was tough!
I'll agree with some of the other commenters, in that the different resources and stats could have been communicated more clearly. I would have also cut down the scream volume by about half - it was very jarring the first time I heard it.
Good work!
I think you had a solid idea with the "1D" platforming, and I thought a few of the blind jumps, and one backwards section that I found, were kinda cool.
The mouse sensitivity was way way too high, and the text was pretty difficult to read. It made the game hard to read. Checkpoints also would have been nice, because after dying a bit of the way into the game, it kinda killed my motivation to keep going.
Good job on completing your first LD entry. Especially with the really short time frame, it's a big accomplishment!
Excellent work! The art was amazing, the main character was really cute, and the swinging mechanic felt really nice.
This game is so good, that I'm really stretching to find areas of improvement. I did notice 2 small things while I was playing that would be good to fix if this is going to be developed further:
1. The art was so good, that the inconsistency in the level tiling was jarring at times. Capture.JPG
2. Occasionally, I couldn't tell where to jump. This was telegraphed to the player at times with the overhanging branches (almost like a hand pointing "go over there"). At other times however, I wasn't sure whether I needed to climb down the side of a wall, or take a huge leap to the other side of the screen.
Really solid work. Good job!
Really nice ambience. I liked the effect of the glow against the otherwise dark level and character.
The attack mechanic was a little buggy, but I was able to get used to it.
Good job finishing your first LD!
I made it *just* under 5 minutes.
Capture.JPG
Fun game of tag, but I think the sprint could have been a tad bit faster. Once the Ore Boys were out of reach, the sprint didn't really help to catch up to them. In fact, I had an easier time walking around so that they fell asleep faster.
Good job finishing your first LD game!
The sparta kick was a great intro to the game! I wish it was more useful later, because most of the enemies had to be dealt with by the gun quickly, or the turrets would kill you.
I think the jumping and jetpack controls are too touchy. Unless you just barely tap them, you fly up super fast. Personally, I think the game could have been more fun with just the shooting elements and no spikes, or vice-versa.
But wow, for only 5 months into a game development journey (and writing your own engine to boot) this is a really impressive accomplishment. Congratulations, and I hope you keep coming back for future jams!
So cool, I love it when people do homebrew games for LD!
Loved the art and the music. It really did feel like it was designed to run on the DS!
The gameplay itself got dull after a while, since it seemed like there wasn't anything to do but just catch more fish.
Great job on your first compo game!
Really funny concept! The gameplay is simple, but fun. Kinda like Pac Man extended to its logical, gluttonous conclusion...
I got to around level 21 or so before I threw in the towel. Like some others have posted, ramping up the difficulty as you got heavier would have made it more compelling.
Great work for your first LD entry!
Really great work for the time constraint - I was not expecting to go underwater at the end of the game!
The mood was great, and I loved the moment where you walk into the hallway and see the whales. It would have been *really* cool to have a scripted moment where the leviathan swam by.
The shotgun did feel like a downgrade due to its rate of fire, like a few others have said. Still, it was fun to switch it up so that my finger didn't get tired from clicking super fast.
Good job!
Unique take on the theme, and brave choice on the subject matter.
I feel like it was a staple of a bygone era of games where you could "talk" with any object to get a description of it. I appreciated that element in your game, where there were extra objects to interact with, even when they didn't progress the main story forward.
Great work for your first entry!
@pvp @ian-kettlewell @impbox @goodgamesjames I hear ya on the dialogue boxes / tutorial. I scrambled to finish the tutorial last-minute and really should have given that more attention. Thanks for the feedback!
@johnnysix I had a lot of that stuff planned, but had to cut it due to time. I started implementing mining lasers, but ended up disabling them in the final build [(Laser Video)](https://imgur.com/s2CAoa4)
@jgur When the theme is announced, I usually toss out my first couple ideas because they're very cliche. I had no good ideas though this time around and realized everyone was probably going to make mining games or diving games. I figured I could at least get a laugh out of people (or an eye-roll) by making both.
@andykswong @lajbert Thank you!
@goutye Yep, I did notice that happens around 300m, and I'm not sure what the culprit is. I wrote the block generation in about 30 minutes, pretty late on Sunday. To be honest, I'm a little surprised it's not _more_ broken :sweat_smile:
@wolfier @shawn-moore @zwodahs @koningmathijs Yeah, the dialogue box skipping was just a poor oversight due to time. When I play, I click and don't let go, which means I never skipped dialogues. As soon as my wife sat down to try it (after the jam ended), I realized she was skipping them too. Oops. I really wish I could fix it, but that doesn't feel within the spirit of the "bug fix" rules.
@goutye @1minatur @1minatur I was able to fix the bug! Doesn't necessarily make the game any more fun, but at least it's not horribly broken haha.
For sure, if I decide to take this past the jam, there's lots to fix. In the spirit of following the rules however, I don't want to edit my jam entry while voting is going on:
[Additional Notes for both the Jam and Compo](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules) > Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission (a short change log). You probably wont get a 2nd chance with some players, but at least it wont be a problem for future players.
I don't interpret the dialogue box behavior as a bug, it's just something I ran out of time to do.
@civmaniac Haha wow, you've beat my own high score of 1117 :sweat_smile:
@fictions @scruffylooking2121 I rushed through that tutorial text so late on Sunday, I didn't have enough time to think of a character. I was just channeling my own inner sarcasm haha.
Thank you all for your feedback, suggestions, and kind words!
@okaylobster @pennycook , @darqweful , @retrome , @infinitycore You all are right on the money there. I actually wanted to do a non-pausing dialogue system, but I had neglected to think about where it would be positioned on the screen. By the time I was implementing the tutorial (~3h before the compo ended) I had run out of time to rearrange the UI to accommodate for that. It's something I will definitely keep in mind for the future.
@feralpoodles Having little "weak spots" in the walls was the original plan. Unfortunately, the block generation was only barely implemented due to time. It's something that could have used a lot more love for sure!
Thank you @pijamar ! There's no ending - the block generation gets a little more aggressive each 100m, but the end result fell way short of my original plan. It had been years since I had done a game jam, and I forgot what "scope" was.
[(There were lasers at one point)](https://imgur.com/s2CAoa4), but I disabled them because I didn't have time to make the sea monster and giant worm that I was planning haha.
@jorgegamedev Thank you for the extremely detailed feedback! I had so much more planned for this game, and had to cut almost all of it due to time. It was my first game jam in ~5 years, and I totally forgot how much time everything takes.
Pretty fun entry! I think a way to telegraph the enemy's movement patterns would have been helpful. I died to the spectres several times because they were just teleporting around the screen, and I didn't know where they'd end up next.
I met a bull at ~68 m and died.
The art was clean and effective, and I love how the gameplay is so intuitive that you can just jump in and start playing. Good work!
Good take on the escape-the-room genre! I definitely didn't get everything right (I was too eager to try the scanner and make wild guesses at first).
It could be my monitors resolution, but I had a lot of trouble reading the sticky notes.
Good job on your first LD entry!
I struggled to make it out, but I did have laser powered flies at one point, which has always been a dream of mine :).
Pretty solid idea. I liked dodging the vertical lasers the best. I think you could have taken out the flying enemies and spent more time on the laser patterns, and it would have been a bit more engaging. Having to decide whether or not to stop or go based on the terrain would add an interesting element of decision making.
The movement speed in the air was much faster than the movement speed on the ground. In general, players expect to have the same speed. I was bunny-hopping my way through most of the levels in order to go slightly faster.
Good job!
That would actually be a really cool twist!
Loved this meta comment:
> Now this really suprises you. "48 hours, that's a really long time to work non-stop!" The Admin Robot only chuckles. "That's what you are saying now, but the time will fly by, I guarantee it."
I was so ticked when I got charged for loan fraud haha.
I really enjoyed the humor and the overall game loop. I had a suspicion from the intro text that it would be impossible to actually get out of debt. Is there a way to "win", or is it just continually depressing? I got up to Level 5 before I had to clock out.
Great work!
Loved the artwork and the moodiness. Although it was a bit depressing, I think it was handled well.
As you mentioned in the game description, some of the puzzles did feel a little hard to interpret, but overall I think it was spelled out well enough in the dialog.
Nice job!
Once I got into the rhythm, I got up to 31! It was a simple game, but I enjoyed it.
One thing that would have made things more interesting would be to start zooming out over time, forcing people to choose between branching paths that might have more or less gold. Even just having to calculate 2 or 3 steps ahead would be a really interesting challenge.
Great job on your first LD!
Good work! This is the second Widipedia game I've played, (I played impbox's game yesterday) but I was impressed that this ran in the browser. I legit didn't know something like this was possible!
I enjoyed the time constrain as a difficulty mechanic.
Nice graphics and audio!
This felt like a good, solid NES-era platformer. I did find the hitbox on the character to be a bit large. I think you could shrink it down by one pixel on all sides so that it's not quite so punishing. There's not a lot of room to work with on the screen, so making quick movements past enemies (especially the medusas) was really tough.
Good job on your first LD entry!
I really loved the procedural generation! I threw procedural block generation in my game at the very last second, and it didn't turn out so well haha.
I played through 3 times and didn't find any uranium. Maybe I just got unlucky? I would have loved to see that scattered around more. At first I thought "This game needs a way to regenerate power" until I read your description in full.
My second playthrough, I got stuck in a huge chunk of earth that I dug straight down from ~65% power until 0% power without finding any gaps or minerals.
Overall, I had fun with it, I just wish I could have found more resources. Congratulations on finishing your first game jam, and on returning to the game dev scene!
Simple, but tried and true formula. As a few people have commented, I found the speed boosts to be a hindrance, rather than a benefit.
The models were nice, but the background could have used a little something to show movement.
Really nice job finishing your first game! My first finished game was also in a jam years ago!
Oof :)
I made it to 1708 on my best attempt!
Nice, simple game with a pleasing color palette. I think if it had started off a *little* slower, it would have been easier to pick up. I died a bunch right off the bat until I got the rhythm of the game.
Good work on finishing your first tame!
I was able to make it to Level 2 a couple of times, but the big jellyfish kept ruining my day! I enjoyed zooming around, and the music really added to the frantic feeling of running away from a bunch of enemies.
This was good work, especially for a game done in one day in a new program. Congrats!
Really fun concept! I wish I had played this with another person - I imagine that's where the gameplay really shines.
The first time that I grabbed onto the ceiling and swung with the second player was a really cool experience.
I think a nice feature would have been the ability to "piggy-back" on one player, so that you only had to control one character at a time during certain segments. It would have made the "mundane" platforming sections a lot less frustrating.
Great work!
Oooh, I had fun with this one!
I liked the torch checkpoints to keep the flame alive - it added an extra element of challenge beyond just "fall as fast as you can."
The speed was just a little fast for me. It was tough to dodge the obstacles as I was falling.
It would have been incredibly fun to try co-op as well! I tried co-op by myself and it... didn't work out so well haha.
Great work!
Cool game! I got a bit of a Lemmings vibe from trying to keep the wandering woompers alive.
I had to read comments and the game description to really understand how to play. Some more visual indication of what the woompers were trying to do (or when they needed food and fire) would have gone a long way towards making me care about them. As it stood, I kinda just kept digging down and left them to die if they couldn't keep up, haha.
Great work!
This is an excellent entry for your first jam!
The enemies were just the right amount of predictable and random to where you had to decide whether or not you could make a risky move, or play it safe. I ran away my first attempt, went full aggressive on my second, and tried to strike a good balance on the third.
I managed to make it to level 3 on my third attempt. Accidentally backed into a corner being too reckless.
The classic Rogue mechanics, sans stats, puts a lot of emphasis on positioning. I would have liked to see variety in the types of enemies and level layout. Also, some way to get back HP, such as one more life every 5 levels or something, would have kept me playing longer.
Good job!
Hm, it seems like there were supposed to be audio cues, but I couldn't hear anything when I got near the gates. I just walked through and randomly died. I eventually just did trial and error until I beat it.
The music was a freakin banger, I loved it! At first I thought it was a bit goofy, but it started feeling really epic the longer I played.
My biggest struggle was the controls. The *movement* was good, but I couldn't train my brain to touch the controls in the right combination. I think maybe removing the attachment between the modifier keys (X, C, Space) and the arrow keys could have made it more straightforward. For example, I kept pressing Space and C to do jumps in the direction that I was facing, forgetting that I needed an arrow key as well.
Definitely some good guts here, just could use a little polish. Great work for your first LD entry!
Absolutely stunning work. Great music, as always. The whole experience was just touching and lovely, and made me feel good.
I don't have a single thing that I would improve (other than touch-screen controls, but I see a mobile port is coming in the future!)
This was both fun and funny! I enjoyed that the mechanics were easy to understand, and you could just jump in and start playing. It was also a good take on the theme.
I noticed quite a few jokes in the code. Wish I could have slowed down a bit to read more of them.
I was not a fan of the scroll bar. It was quite tough to hover over. If there was a way to capture the scroll wheel, as well as make the scroll bar larger, it would have been a more enjoyable experience.
Fantastic work! I lost my first time through, but on my second playthrough I was able to stack attack speed and lifesteal. Kinda felt like cheating, but I was proud that it worked!
I liked that you kept drawing The Inevitable in your hand before you were strong enough to beat it. It helped drive the theme home. If there had been a way to opt into draw extra cards to _avoid_ fighting the boss, it would have really punched up the theme tie-in even more.
I grew up on Sim City, so when I saw your progress posts a while back, I knew I had to check this out!
I echo the statements made by a few others - the UI and camera perspective were the biggest obstacles. By the time I got into the rhythm of the game, I had sort of boxed myself in. It seemed like there would be plenty of room to grow, but due to the perspective I couldn't continue building roads on the backside of the mountains.
Still, I was proud of what I had made! Eventually my wall got high enough and I couldn't see my buildings anymore.
Capture.PNG
I would definitely be interested in playing a post-jam version of the game if you decide to continue with the idea.
Good graphics, and nice game concept. I was enjoying my time, and trying to rush the main goal while ignoring the gates, because it looked like I might be able to make it. But then suddenly a gate went from 17% down to 0% instantly and I loss. It was a bummer to end on a sour note like that, but I was having fun up until then!
Nice work putting a spin on the trolley problem! I'll be honest, I was going to give up on level 10, but was pleasantly surprised!
I also liked the Baba Is You art style - that was immediately apparent when I started playing :)
Fantastic! It started off looking like it was going to be kind of bland, but I quickly fell in love with the concept. I'm not sure if there was supposed to be an obvious "end game", but I bought all of the upgrades, talked to all of the guests (I think) and found the secret party in space.
Awesome job!
This was such a funny take on a wave survival game, and it fit the theme really well. I managed to get 560 after a couple attempts. The music was fantastic, and the sound effects really punched up the humor.
My biggest gripe was that I kept losing the mouse against the bright yellow backdrop, and ended up missing a lot of shots. An aim indicator with a lot of contrast would have helped a lot.
Great work! I followed your account from your previous Ludum Dare entry, and was happy to see that you'd released another game!
I liked the mechanic, and while a few of the early levels made me think the game was going to be super easy, the latter half really made me think. Particularly level 7 where I had to put the brick on top of the wooden box to bridge the gap - I thought that was really clever.
The controls were pretty tough, even in pollinator mode. I think significantly clamping the amount of speed applied when you click would make the game more interesting. As it stands, it felt like any energy I regained was accidental and I never really grasped the movement.
I _did_ enjoy the art and the music!
Similar thoughts to a lot of others - difficulty in knowing what I was supposed to aim at, and the recharging of energy wasn't fun to wait on.
What _was_ really fun is that there's a bug with the "multiple small meteors" that doesn't check your energy level, and will let you go negative. Spamming that was actually a ton of fun. If you continue working on this game, it would be cool to be able to spend resources on faster energy regeneration.
The gravity mechanic was neat as well!
I got a score of 139!
Backstory time - when I was a kid, I used to love the arcade game Asteroids, but I never knew you could fly around. So I always played at the center of the screen, just spinning in circles trying to shoot anything that came my way. This brought me back to that!
The graphics on the Earth were really nice, especially considering you did it in PICO-8.
I do wish that the player moved a tiny bit faster around the Earth, but that probably would have negated any of the difficulty.
Well done all around!
As some others have said, I also struggled with the collection animation - I was holding down the arrow keys to move, but I had to let go and re-press it in order to resume movement. Just updating that one thing would have felt way better.
I did like that you made walking slow, and jumping fast. It felt quite like a frog.
The art was great. In fact, it was so good that it was almost distracting at times. The background really pulled focus away from the important foreground elements. I would have liked to see the bg trees and clouds use the same blue color palette as the sky, so that they blended in a little better.
Really great work, this was an amazingly clean game - _especially_ for a compo entry!
@herryfabien You're absolutely right, I'm sorry there is no alternate control scheme. This is something I need to be more sensitive about in the future, even for quick tech demos.
@madbarron Thank you for the feedback! Movement happens a lot, so it's important to make it feel good. I'll keep that in mind.
@albertnez You beat my own high score and have _way_ more patience than I do, haha. Thank you for playing!
@djtequila @vicsparkz @bufalloo @oroshix @cyzaine @jakobthequizguy Thank you all for the kind words. I spent a lot of time thinking about the look and feel of the tile reveal. As a game atom, it's one of the things that the user will experience the most, and it's good to know that others find it as satisfying as I do.
@oroshix @cyzaine @olafstromberg @emaigualmc2-art @machwerx I super appreciate the critical examination, and that you took the time to share the bits that were frustrating and/or confusing. I share a lot of similar feelings (and expected most of these comments). This is great feedback for future work, and exactly the kind of input that I need at this stage.
@prakkus thank you for the kind words! I'll keep your feedback in mind - a lot of others have expressed similar opinions and you're all totally right. A future version of this game will have a lot more information be less opaque to the end user.
@markopolodev In this game (and in general when I need to store grids of "infinite" size) I used a dictionary. Looking up an arbitrary tile has a negligible performance impact, and you only really pay the cost in memory (which is frankly - pretty cheap).
The trick is to only update the tiles you need to. In this demo, we only check the surrounding tiles at the beginning/end of a player move. In the work I'm doing now , I'm trying to break the world up into "regions" or "chunks" - so I only ever need to look at a fixed number of hex tiles. If you move too far away from a region, it can be unloaded from memory until you get closer to it.
@joe40001 I opted out of ratings for the Extra category. I'm more interested in getting feedback, and rating other folks' games.
Oh snap, yeah that seems like a bug. There is a checkbox when submitting Extra games that says "Opt out of ratings" so that's probably happening to a lot of other Extra participants as well. I'll file a support request so that the issue is logged.
I've had this bookmarked to play after seeing your progress update!
The color palette was top notch. I can tell you put a lot of work into the main character - the fire trail looks so nice. Wall jumping was a nice surprise (although it was a little tough to pull off with the keyboard).
I loved that the movement and the fireball ability were both tied to your health. It tied very well to the theme. Perhaps if the player went back to the prior checkpoint, or incurred a serious movement penalty when their health ran out it would feel more consequential. Right now, it felt like it wasn't a big deal to lose all of your health, because it was really easy to get it all back.
Great work overall!
I managed to get 19 calls before I got fired! Awesome humor, and a lot of great subtle polish that made the core gameplay loop satisfying. I liked the animation on the letters, the little pops it made when it changed color, and the audio feedback when typing as well.
I managed to get 2655 as my high score!
The art was cute, and the game was quick to pick up and start playing.
It was neat that you put the two core gameplay mechanics (climbing and regenerating) at odd with one another. You needed to do both to stay alive, but couldn't do them at the same time.
If you could have introduced more player choice, it would have been even more compelling. As it stands, the correct choice was _always_ to climb to the top of the screen, and regenerate until you could jump to the next platform. The projectiles later on in the level did help offset that a bit.
Well done overall, solid work!
Oh heck yeah, this was a lot of fun! Very juicy and polished. I found myself playing a lot more rounds than I thought I would.
Although I only made it 75 seconds on my best attempt, I think you've really captured the theme well! Putting "Panic" in the title was apropos... I was mashing the space bar so quickly that my wife yelled from the next room "What are you DOING in there?"
In all seriousness, the game itself was well done. Good work!
I like the atmosphere. The fish tank inspiration is very evident, and I was impressed with the way the swarms of fish behaved - it was very realistic.
I'll echo what @chris-mcknight said - the WebGL build had a lot of stuttering. I also ran into an issue where my main character kept disappearing (and I couldn't shoot anymore) but I still had control of the camera. I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be the end of the game, or if something glitched out on me?
After a couple attempts, I found it easier to just move forward a little bit, and then sit stationary above the UFO and fire at the spiky pink things (which I think was the goal?). An indicator of where your shots are going to go would help the game feel less frustrating.
Good work, and thank you for sharing!
This game has a great look - what's not to love about neon lights and hexagons in cyberspace?
Naturally, I completely flopped on my first game, but I played it twice more and had a lot of fun. 4 players was a lot more fun, because you're really fighting to establish control over the board. I really liked that you get to control how much power to split, but you're forced to go all the way in a straight line. In my first game, it got me into trouble because I boxed most of my points deep into enemy territory.
One point of improvement I would give is to have some way of shaking up the status quo after the first few turns. If you can establish a nice barrier in your starting area, the outcome of the game is pretty much established in the first couple turns, but you're forced to play the rest of it out.
Really nice work, and it was cool to see a game done in Bevy!
(Now I want to go play Battle Sheep!)
Congrats on finishing your first "real" project in Godot!
I'll echo the sentiments from MrWarranty - I died twice to the Necromancer without understanding why, only to realize that the green particle effects that I was standing in were his attacks - I thought it was something I needed to stand in to collect. A bit more visual clarify on that would have helped.
Good work!
Another exceptional Daniel Mullins game. The polish was top-notch, the gameplay was engaging all the way through, and there was a surprising amount of gameplay for a LD entry (I think it took me about 15 minutes).
My only comment for improvement is that the randomness of the jury selection made my first run after the tutorial impossible to win - I rerolled until I could get a single guilty voter, but then had no money to buy them. I ended up restarting my game and just throwing the first 2 mock trial cases to build up money, and then steamroll the rest of the cases. That strategy worked so well that I just did it for the rest of the game.
Good job!
(P.S. - really capitalizing on that Steamboat Willie public domain!)
It doesn't look like the game has been uploaded, was this intentional?
Yo, the intro cutscene immediately sucked me in - your art is great! This is an incredible amount of work for a compo entry.
Building up each piece as you progress though the levels was satisfying.
I ended up getting stuck after getting the snake piece and couldn't progress. It would be nice to be able to cheat with a level select just for the jam, because I really would like to see the rest of the cutscenes and other levels.
Great job!
This was a really solid roguelike - visually striking, nostalgic, and fits well with the theme.
I will say, I found it difficult to understand the summons' attack patterns. Ended up spamming snakes because they were much stronger than the wolves and the spirits. But most of my spirits went in a straight line and died, so I think I didn't quite understand how they were supposed to work.
Good job!
I'll applaud the bold choice to be experimental/confusing. Game jams are all about experimenting and getting outside your comfort zone!
The posterized graphics is a nice look, and fit the moody theme of the game.
I made it quite far several times, and each time I got knocked back down, it was just more rage-motivation to keep going higher!
It wasn't immediately obvious that the orbiting pentagrams were doing something - I think something small like flashing a different color when they shoot a projectile would have helped it read better.
Overall I really enjoyed playing this game, good work!
Such a strong entry. The first game that I've played that _really_ made the theme a core part of its identiy.
The walkthrough was helpful. I was so stuck after the knife because I didn't realize I could click on the stuff on the table. Once I understood that, the rest of the game was just the right level of difficulty.
The length was perfect, too. It had enough content to feel like there was something to discover, but it didn't overstay its welcome.
And great color palette choice!
The dichromatic color scheme works nicely, and the theme was well integrated.
My only issue was that it was very difficult for me to think beyond one or two steps ahead, which made the game super hard for me: I wasn't able to get past level 5. I think an "undo" feature might have helped with the difficulty, without ruining what makes it fun.
I enjoyed how simple and well-polished the game is. You understand how to play in about 2 seconds, and that made it super approachable.
Great work!
I loved the voice acting and the humor - you've got an obvious talent for this. Henrick especially was just genuinely solid work.
Of all the humor, the "Look how long this cutscene is - I could have easily prevented this!" had me cracking up the most. And of course, the genre subversion of intentionally trying to die during an escort mission is quite clever.
I tried the dynamite level (the third one?) over and over but couldn't figure out what to do after I had gathered the dynamite. Some more feedback about that would have been nice. I only advanced because I got hit accidentally - I was looking for a way to actually craft the explosive after collecting the ingredients.
But I'm so glad I stuck through to the end because that final level was a thing of beauty. The acapella was wonderful, and using the enemies to solve platforming challenges was a great payoff.
This is another one of the very few games I've given 5 stars across the board. Really good work!
I think there's a good game loop here with some tweaks. I wasn't able to summon more than 1 mining demon, and it seemed like after a while he was gone, and I couldn't make another one?
300 did feel like too many crystals to collect, but I could see it being a lot of fun if you could spawn multiple demons to collect the resources, and keep summoning distractions to protect them.
I occasionally had a bug where the mining minigame had the selection bar go off the left instead of bouncing back and forth: Untitled.png
I am sliding-puzzle-challenged, but I gave this a shot because the screenshots intrigued me!
Technical feedback - not sure if I just didn't make it far enough into the game, but there were some weird green squares on the embedded itch.io web version:
Untitled.png
I wasn't able to make it past the 2rd level, but rather than thinking of it as a "skill issue", I'm choosing to believe that I've been "carried away by the corruption" ;)
Good job!
My guess is that it was supposed to be a candle?
Alright, my day job is troubleshooting technical issues and I can't turn that part of my brain off.
I tried downloading the game and running it locally - got a ton of errors. Example: ``` Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at file:///C:/Users/andrew/Downloads/mdld/asset/audio/Victory.wav. (Reason: CORS request not http) ```
Not sure what engine/platform you're building on, but maybe it's a CORS issue with embedded content itch.io? I'm running Firefox 124.0.2 on Windows 11 if that helps you at all. I tried Edge, but got the same error.
(I'm a web noob, so maybe this is not helpful info :grimacing: )
Loved it! The the gameplay was solid, and although there were just a few enemies, they offered a good variety of challenge. I loved the moment when I realized that the flying enemies would also work as platforms.
I really don't have too many complaints. The biggest one is that the Atari-era graphics were working so well, that the crisp high-res text did a big disservice to the visual consistency. The horizontally-stretched checkerboard pattern also took me out of the moment a bit.
There was a bug where getting hit by the first enemy in the game would leave him stuck to you, but wouldn't kill you until you jumped to leave and re-enter the hitbox.
Screenshot 2024-04-15 121541.png
This game was so freaking weird haha, I love it.
I got to the second level a few times, but kept dying to something I couldn't see.
I liked the "figure it out" nature of this game - it's pretty risky and tough to get right, but you pulled it off well.
The big exaggerated animations worked well for the theme, and it's one of the better character animations I've seen in the jam so far.
Good job!
Glad to have the signs - there was a lot of to do, and it helped to not get overwhelmed. Resource gathering with a laser is something I want more of in games!
I, too, had difficulty figuring out what the goal was. Once I figured out how to walk around and craft, it felt like that was all there was to do?
PS - The tiled background on the itch page really clashes with the game itself - makes it kind of hard on the eyes.
The voice over was outstanding - great quality audio capture, and a believable performance that came off as genuine.
I found the first round to be way harder than the next 2 - the stair-step pattern read very obviously to me as the row, but I never quite grasped the symbols in the upper-left corner.
I would perhaps recommend not locking the cards until they're all in the right spot. My first attempt I got a bunch wrong, and when resetting the board, I realized that the correct cards were locked in place. This made it really hard not to just drop each card in each spot, since it would guarantee that you would find the answer quickly.
Well done!
Everything about this game is just really nicely polished.
I really liked that the _distance_ to the pieces didn't matter, just the alignment did. It made it easy to get the general idea of how to solve a level immediately, but made it so you had to experiment a bit to figure out exactly where they go.
Level 6 was really deceptive - it _looks_ easy, but was actually a bit of a head-scratcher.
The pacing was good too. Awesome job!
I was never able to find the demon I was looking for, but despite that I enjoyed myself. (A lifetime of playing Zelda and I'm still bad at bouncing projectile attacks back at them).
A bit of enemy variety might have kept me on the hook longer. I really wanted to try to throw a defeated enemy back at a second enemy to see if that would hurt them, but never managed to do it.
Overall I think the gameplay loop is solid. The donut-shaped arena felt like it was just the right size. I wish I was better at the game so I could have seen more of it!
I really enjoyed this game.
I mean, I know it comes with the territory when you're on PICO-8, but this really captured the feeling of the platformer games from the DOS era.
It would have been helpfulif the summoned skull was a different color than the rest. A few times I killed myself because I forgot I was standing on the one I summoned. Luckily each level was small and easy enough to start over, but it was frustrating a few times when I was close to the end, and only died because I forgot which skull I had placed.
The level design is excellent - I was hooked, and the only reason I stopped playing is that I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to get past this level:
Screenshot 2024-04-15 093859.png
There were several times where I thought "wow I'm glad that level is over" and then level 12 happened :o. Unfortunately I couldn't beat it, but I had a ton of fun. It's cute, quirky, and fun.
I loved this - reminds me of Kye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kye_(video_game)
I got stuck on level 6 and had to skip it - I agree with PapriGames that it should have been the last level because it was by far the toughest.
Including a level editor is truly above-and-beyond effort for a compo entry. Nice work!
(PS: Bummer about the antivirus warning - my game does that as well.)
I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do the first time around, but I was able to get a 80% completion the second time. Pretty funny, and the controls of the character definitely felt drunk without being super frustrating.
I did notice some weird physics when bouncing against some of the lightweight objects - it would occasionally send me reeling sideways quickly.
FYI, you don't have any categories to vote on - is that intentional?
Alright, this was worth the wait! After seeing your progress post a few days ago, I knew I had to follow your account and play this game when you finished.
The writing was great, and the level of difficulty was right in the sweet spot - most of the questions were simple to answer if you were paying attention, but a few I had to think about.
An area of improvement I would give is that this was a text-heavy game, but the text boxes were being populated/updated in real time as each letter arrived. This causes a jarring visual effect when the words wrap to the next line. I found myself double-tapping the space bar to make the text show up all at once to avoid that, which caused me to miss the judge's question a handful of times. (Being able to see the question he asked at the bottom of the screen when you were picking your answer may have helped).
Your entry is one of a very few I've seen so far to use a really minimal color palette to a great effect. The artwork was minimalist, but still detailed in the faces, which is where my attention was mostly drawn to.
Oh, and I can't end my review without mentioning the amazing double-entendre of demon summon/jury summons. Remarkable work!
The art was top-notch, and the gameplay was fun and quirky!
Unfortunately, the inconsistency in the input was _so_ frustrating that after I died a second time due to missed inputs, I ended up giving up. I frequently picked up the wrong ingredient after thinking I had deposited the previous one, which led to a lot of errors. It's a real shame because this would have been close to a perfect game for me if not for that issue.
Still, really great what you guys were able to accomplish!
Cute game, good art, and I really liked the idea. I agree with others about the text-heavy introduction being a bit of information overload. Still, I think it explained how to play pretty well.
I'm not sure if I encountered a bug, but after getting my first 100 coins, I made a big red slime, and then never sold a potion after that. I tried all sorts of combinations until I had over 300 fire elements collected, at which point I gave up.
Hah I love the pixely hands, it reminds me of early FPS games. I also agree that it's a bit easy being able to just summon a platform below me.
Very clever, I liked it! It was immediately clear what I was supposed to do, but that little bit of trial and error in figuring out what the commands were was quite fun. And after a few times of looking up the commands, you can start whipping out cats really fast.
A _tiny_ bit of audio - even just a little keyboard clicking sound when typing - would have really punched up the polish. Also, adding an element of increasing difficulty would have kept me on the hook longer. I think I had one request that was "A white cat named X misses her sister", which I thought was clever - would have loved more indirect clues such as that.
Really solid work!
There's a lot to like here. The bold choice of the super wide aspect ratio worked nicely for the gameplay. The mouse wheel mechanic was unique, and it became a lot more challenging and engaging than I thought it might be.
I agree with pres2300 that auto-walking would have been better. And since there was no downside to just holding R the whole time, I would think you could also scrap that input as well, and only need to focus on the scroll wheel.
Or, for some more depth of strategy, you could limit the amount of time you can hold R, which would force you to play chicken with the timing of the enemy attack.
Great work!
@vegeo @altaf-creator Thanks for the feedback - Did you happen to get any info in the crashes? It's okay if not, but I'd love to nail down what was happening when the crash occurred.
@altaf-creator appreciate it! On Linux, the logs should be in `~/HEXXLD55/CrashLogs`
@vegeo Thanks so much! Uploading a fix now. (Ironically it's the logging causing the crash, go figure :shrug: )
@altaf-creator Perfect! Same crash as Vegeo, so I think it's all sorted out now. Thanks for helping me catch this early.
@alanbrook , the DOS game is Hexxagon: https://dosgames.com/game/hexxagon/ , one of my favorite games as a kid!
@goodwincek My intention was to have two wizards standing on either side of the board (hence all the empty space), and to include a few more variations on the gameplay in the form of extra summons - like being able to remove an opponent's piece, or placing a piece anywhere on the board. Of course, time got in the way, and I was _just barely_ able to implement the core mechanics in time. I might do a post-jam version once the fatigue wears off!
@owtuvammo Ah yeah, there's a small possibility of a soft lock that I didn't realize until today (if your only free move is to move into a "starting" tile for the opponent, you're unable to do so, but the "turn skip" detection sees it as a valid move).
You can forfeit games with Escape, I really should have put that in the tutorial.
@leiv-erik Yeah, the antivirus problem is super frustrating. Although the options on my end are limited, I'm looking into some things that might make it less annoying in the future.
@nondisclosedartist I compiled the game and my own computer flags it as a virus, so I get it. Thanks for the feedback - it's seriously valuable to me. This is my first game I'm releasing on my own home-grown game engine, and knowing these sorts of challenges to the end user is good (albeit unfortunate) feedback for me. I'm looking into ways to make this a better experience in the future!
@samh Was it [Hexxagon?](https://dosgames.com/game/hexxagon/)? That was the inspiration for this game :)
I got into the 50s a few times, but never managed to make it past that. My inclination was to protect the crystals generating power, but I realized that wasn't important. I did a lot better when I just clumped my helpers together and spammed all my electrons.
Despite the difficulty, I had fun and played it a few times.
If I were going to improve on something, I would say that skipping/ending the tutorial should give you full electrons. It's possible to just sit at the beginning and gather power when you're in the first step of the tutorial, so being able to skip those few seconds would be a nice touch.
This was so much fun - during the first level I didn't expect to play it to the end because it felt kinda slow. By the 3rd level however, I was hooked. I honestly think you could drop the attacking mechanic for the player character and just lean into the summoning entirely.
A few levels in, I realized I could start running around the ranged enemies to distract them, so that my summons could kill the melee enemies faster without dying. That was a satisfying feeling to realize that I could indirectly make my summons stronger by splitting the enemy focus.
Really loved what you did here, great work!
I'm also picking up the final fantasy vibes. The music is good!
The UI could have used some more clarity. Even after reading the game description here, it wasn't super intuitive what I was doing. After I played around and defeated my first boss, I got the hang of it.
Also I think there's a bug when trying to summon multiple things at a time - it cancels anything in the queue and only summons the last thing clicked on.
IMO, the game was at its best in the levels where the blocks appear or disappear depending on if they're in the tunnel. There are really some clever levels in the back half of the game - I think you could introduce those earlier.
Just a bit of feedback for the graphics - the transparent layers of the background + parallax really do the artwork a disservice. A solid background would be easier on the eyes and help with the signal-to-noise ratio. Maybe something to add in the Accessibility menu in the future.
I feel like someone was really wanting the "Tunnels" theme to win :)
Nice work! I was stumped at the beginning trying to figure out how to gather resources, only to realize that I had started with several.
The game looks and plays nice. I love having to pay close attention to the multicolor enemies in order to know which element to switch to.
2 nitpicks - first is that having to click on a small target to summon, while also looking at the center of the screen for the current element, made it tough to make decisions quickly. Maybe if the icon was overlaid over the summon portals themselves, your attention wouldn't be divided.
The second is that I had a really good run going my second playthrough, and just suddenly died out of nowhere. I'm not sure what the reason was - maybe I touched an enemy? Some feedback on why you died would have helped.
Screenshot 2024-04-15 114718.png
Alright, this was pretty funny, I dig it! The simplicity of the gameplay loop combined with some light competition really does have you going "just one more game, I can do better next time".
One thing that I would have liked to see would have been collision between the two vans. Being able to push the opponent out of the way to grab some candy would have led to some great moments.
Overall, pretty solid work, great job!
Holy cow, amazing. It's your first game jam, are you kidding me?! This is the first game I've given 5 stars across the board. Not only does it have great gameplay and a solid theme tie-in, but as soon as you realize how the body parts change the boss behavior, it hooks you in and makes you really want to see all the combinations.
The _only_ bit of advice for improvement I can think of is that more variety in the level layouts would have been nice. The middle section made me really have to think about the boss patterns and the way to approach it in the limited space that was given. I would have liked more of that.
You should feel very proud of this entry. Outstanding work.
This was really fun! I chuckled at several of the opponent names and descriptions, especially the bishops. I know this is a contentious rule in the hardcore checkers community, but being able to jump your own pieces for greater movement options would have really been cool, especially since you were up against greater and greater odds.
My biggest complaint is that the enemy AI seemed pretty random a lot of the time. Often I would just charge recklessly into danger without getting my pieces captured, and this aggressive strategy worked a lot better than playing passively.
I used the level select to try Level 9 several times, but was not nearly good enough to beat it.
On my best honest attempt, I made it to level 5:
Screenshot 2024-04-15 123339.png
Honestly, you should have opted-in to the humor category just for the instructions!
I screwed up badly my first time, because I didn't really grasp how to play, and I got my screen super cluttered up by moving pieces around unnecessarily. I feel like my next few attempts were more successful, although I never managed to level up.
This was a really unique idea, and well-presented. The only thing that is hurting it is that the gameplay doesn't feel super intuitive unless you read the instructions. Some more variation on the pieces that were generated, and a slightly more uniform distribution of pieces would have made it even more engaging.
Well done!
What's this - Mega Man Battle Network in my Ludum Dare?! Loved this game, there's so much done well. The gameplay is solid, the music is _great_, and the art is delightful.
The only bit of feedback I have is that the attacks were kind of hard to read. I think slightly longer delays and larger projectile sprites (like 2-3x larger in some cases) would have been a big improvement in your ability to react.
Monat kicked my butt the first time around, but I just managed to scrape by on my second attempt!
Screenshot 2024-04-16 191844.png
Great job!
It was fun! I found the random numbers to be more hurtful than helpful, so once I started avoiding them, I could win pretty consistently.
A point of feedback - I noticed that your movement range got longer the larger you get. That kind of means that the first person who gets a big number will always win, since they can gobble up all the big numbers to keep the advantage. It may give an extra layer of strategy if you were faster when smaller, but started slowing down the larger you got.
Love the pun with the theme ;)
I struggled a bit to understand how to play. It was especially confusing that the enemies could walk through walls, but I couldn't.
The gameplay was decent once you get the hang of it. I think the fast turn rate combined with the slower momentum-heavy walking made it feel a bit awkward to control.
This was such a cool idea! I love that you included midi controller support. The rain and CRT effects worked really well with the simple color palette.
I did find the game pretty difficult - I played it through 4 times but couldn't get to the end.
Great job!
Clever take on the theme! I think the art was definitely your strong suit - the character sprites and environment were gorgeous, and it's clear you spent some dedicated time developing the characters and story.
Also, I'm a sucker for seeing 2d sprites reflected in water, so that's always going to win my vote ;)
Gameplay-wise, I think there's some room for improvement, but mostly on the technical side. Particularly I noticed that the double-jump would almost always get triggered unless I was tapping the spacebar super quick. I think perhaps the double-jump check was looking for the space bar being helled, rather than the space bar being pressed that frame. It would have made the platforming a lot smoother if that wasn't so precise.
I didn't make it to the end, unfortunately it was just really easy to die and it kept me from wanting to go back and try the same section of the level again.
Technical issues aside, a pretty good entry and I had fun playing! Good job :)
This was so cool, such a clever take on the theme. As a forever-DM, I've spent an awful lot of time pouring over character sheets, and I never get tired of it!
Some feedback is that the frequent transition screens hurt the flow of the game for me- making them snappier would be a big improvement.
If I could have given a 6 for innovation, I would. Such a cool idea, and executed really really well.
The ability to take any word and pin it up to the board was so novel. And the patience meter and _really_ felt like working in tech support (It was a little bit _too real_ at times)!
The audio was a mixed bag for me - the sound effects were good, but I think the music detracted from the rest of it. I would have liked to been able to mute the music. Also, the split screen felt a bit claustrophobic - although I did like how it felt kind of cozy going back and forth between the items on your desk.
Overall, really great job!
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but just right-clicking on the Camera Roll takes me to a level. And then before I can react, it looks like the level is over and you win automatically?
After picking up the controls, I started to really like the game. The possibility of different interesting puzzles you were able to make with such a simple mechanic makes it a really solid base for a game.
The stone floor texture is giving me huge nostalgia vibes for the DOS games I played as a kid.
The thing that hurt the game the most is the resolution - it was really tiny and didn't scale on my screen. I had to put my face really close to the screen, and that made the third level incredibly difficult. Fixing that would go a long way towards making the game a more enjoyable experience.
Great work!
This game is infuriating and addicting. Even after telling myself I would be super careful the next time around, I just keep accidentally finishing combos in the WRONG SPOT!!!
It's so simple at first, and then the "oh no" moment kicks in once you realize that you're stuck with your placements forever. Brilliantly designed, and really well executed. Great job!
Screenshot 2024-04-17 175338.png
This was great! A really good amount of polish for a compo entry. The art style and UI are very consistent, and the game is easy to understand and start playing right away.
My only gripe is that I had to keep hovering over the cans again and again in order to try to memorize their values, which made the levels get more frustrating the more difficult they got. I'm not sure how you'd be able to display all that information at once without being overwhelming, maybe making the can's color palettes have some correlation to the RGB values?
Good job!
This was pretty good. I'm not sure if it was due to the randomness, but the first game I got absolutely destroyed, and the second game I won super easily.
Solving the sliding piece puzzle in the corner during a real-time game is actually a great idea, because you're juggling multiple small tasks that aren't difficult by themselves, but become challenging when you're constantly task-switching.
I think giving some reason to be more aggressive early on might help improve the game. During my second game, I sat there and just waited for the enemy to get close to my home row, then summoned pawns and instantly killed them. At that point, I had so many pieces on the board that the opponent couldn't do anything about it, and I won.
This is really great for a first jam entry!
Engagement starts to drop after the first few ships because the difficulty never really increases, so once you figure it out, it's a tough sell to keep playing. It would be neat if the amount of ships started increasing, or there were moving obstacles to avoid. Or even pirate ships that are in pursuit, which would make you have to change the course of one of them without affecting the other.
The visuals from the screenshot drew me in, and I was not disappointed! The wind effect specifically was just really cool looking. The audio was simple, and effective.
I like the concept - I feel like with a bit more polish it could be even greater. The momentum makes it pretty hard to be precise, and this game is all about precision platforming. I got up to 5 stars before I couldn't make it any higher.
The control scheme was difficult on keyboard and mouse - it does feel like this would be better on a controller.
This is pretty good for such a short amount of time spent on a niche development environment.
I was really determined to get over 100. Got *so close* with a best score of 98. I think it mostly came down to luck with the rock placement.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 114506.png
Nice work, it's really cool to see a project that's able to run on obscure hardware. And kudos for the work you did on the documentation. I think that's a really great contribution especially in a game jam that has education, sharing, and open source as part of its core values.
P.S., it might be nice to link directly to a download page for the emulator. I had to search around a bit to find one, and it might put some people off from trying your game out.
I did it!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 120049.png
Quirky is definitely the right descriptor! I liked the fake-out at the beginning where it felt like you had lost, but then all the fairies showed up the next time around. The goofy audio effects and the flying text was fun as well.
It was a bit difficult to understand what to do. I collected fairies and filled up the cannon, but then the progress reset, so I had to do it a second time. Maybe that was intended? I also avoided getting squashed by the foot for the longest time, but then no more fairies were spawning, so I got hit, which caused more to spawn.
And I didn't understand what to do with the mouse click (it shot copies of me as a bullet?) but I had fun shooting it around as I collected my fairies. A very unique entry, great effort!
Hilarious and very fun. I loved the absurd humor, and the silent film title cards worked really well. There was even a boss fight! Great work :laughing:
I enjoyed this! The music and detailed descriptions of the environment did a really good job grounding me in the world and making it easy to navigate. There was just enough clues and back-and-forth navigation to make the puzzles enjoyable without overstaying its welcome. The Easter eggs of your previous Ludum Dare entries was a nice touch.
Some graphics may have punched up the effect of each room, but honestly the game is fine without them.
Out of all my achievements, I liked petting the jelly beans the most. I did a quick second playthrough to see what happens if you click them an absurd amount of times:
> You petted the beans 2436 times. They love you! 🥰
Great job!
That was fun! No real complaints, other than I wish there were more levels.
I love that the tiny creatures got to have a beach day after all that hard work :smile:
Also... I feel called out:
Screenshot 2024-10-07 202004.png
Fun little game! Just as I was on my last life a few minutes in I was thinking "It would be cool if the tractors started coming from the left side, to make it more challenging." And then, well...
Screenshot 2024-10-08 184641.png
Great work!
I tried so many times but couldn't get past the 4th level.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 210932.png
The art was great, the game was cute and quirky, and it fit the theme really well. Great job!
The gameplay feels solid; the art design and audio work really well together to convey the mood. Design-wise, I thought it was nice that your one "gameplay verb" (shooting things) was a constant trade-off between fighting off attackers, and mining for resources. You couldn't just focus on one, because you needed to do both. Each subsequent attempt I made was more satisfying because I understood how to strike the right balance.
I'll echo the sentiment about it being too dark. The darkness combined with the low contrast between the creatures and the ground made it pretty difficult to see what was attacking me at times. I mitigated this challenge somewhat by upgrading the firing speed, and spraying bullets into the darkness until I saw a health bar.
On my 3rd attempt, I realized I could just start drilling down through the walls to get to the purple material faster. I cornered myself and ended up dying, but it was a fun attempt nevertheless.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 120049.png
Good work!
This gave me quite a few laughs!
The gameplay was fun enough - nothing groundbreaking, but it gave the narrative something to latch onto. Something that may have made the combat a little more engaging would be to remove the damage from the gun, and have it be just a means to expose the weak point, and then force you to use the spear when the stance is broken.
I also love that you compiled this for the Dreamcast. Fantastic work!
Cute game, and nice music! I thought the ending was pretty funny - definitely wasn't expecting it to end that way! Good job!
Mission accomplished!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 124101.png
This was fun to play. Something about the clinking sound of the footsteps combined with the soft glow of the visuals made it feel strangely relaxing, even though I was getting shot at.
The first time gravity flipped when I double-jumped, really hooked me. Flipping back and forth between the platforms, and even being able to jump clear to the other side of the level was really fun. It was also cool that your own bullets hurt you (and the enemies bullets hurt them), so spamming bullets wasn't a super great option for me, since I inevitably got hit by my own shots when trying to reach the exit.
My only complaint is that the jumping was inconsistent while I was moving. It only seemed to trigger about half of the time, which lead to some frustrating deaths. I started always double-jumping, because that seemed to be a consistent way of getting off the ground.
Overall, great work, and a really fun exploration of the movement mechanics!
This was fun! I feel like I had a pretty good run with 6th place. The leaderboard is a cool feature!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 184921.png
I enjoyed the game loop of having to switch back and forth between the vampire and bat forms. The bat form was pretty satisfying to fly around in.
I think the thing that confused me is that the health potions were hurting me? My HP bar kept turning green (I think from killing the poison zombies) so maybe that was it?
Really solid entry, nice job!
Clever take on the theme. The game looks really nice, and plays well. There was never a moment where I felt frustrated by the control scheme or camera, which I feel like is a really good feat for a 3d platformer made in 48 hours.
I started it up a second time to see if it was possible to beat without splitting up. I found a ledge near the first small opening and was able to get over the wall.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 192254.png
Of course then there's a part where you have to hit 2 switches. And even though I could get *really* fat, I wasn't able to hit them both.
So I tried to climb up the tree and see if I could jump the gap to the goal. It was possible to get on the tree, but the gap was too big to jump.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 192425.png
Thus ended the dream of beating the game without taking damage. It was quite a bit of fun. Good job!
I always love seeing the puzzle games you come up with! Nice, simple mechanics with some good depth as you progress. Top-notch art as well.
The stag beetle was a great mechanic. Up until level 7, the puzzles kinda solved themselves if you just looked at the end spaces, but once you could push pieces off their starting paths, it really opened up another dimension to the game.
A small bit of feedback about the audio - I think the sound effects that the pieces made was really satisfying, but the music was almost too loud to hear it. Bumping up the volume just a tiny bit would have put them at a better balance IMO.
Great work!
Kitten compiled successfully!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 130306.png
This game was so weird and charming, it's exactly the kind of creativity that I love about game jams. The purring sound for the cat scanner was particularly funny to me.
I can tell that there was a lot of work put into the environment. A few times, I had to jump up on the furniture to avoid getting hit by the roomba, and then jump over them, or run around them. That felt really fun, and it's where this game was at its best. It had me wishing that the roombas were faster, and that there was more furniture, so that the game could have been more about that. Being able to sprint and jump over them almost trivialized it.
Really good work!
Woah that is one thicc mouse.
It took a couple minutes to get used to the movement controls, but once they clicked, I really enjoyed the game. The movement was very quick, and there weren't a ton of safe spaces to try out the movement, so it was quite challenging until I got that down. I thought the level was very well designed - there were lots of secret passages that were well-placed so that you would feel very clever when you found them.
I thought I was doing pretty well, but ended up running out of time trying to get a particularly stubborn bit of cheese, and I think that ruined my score.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 160633.png
Great work overall!
NOM NOM NOM!
This was great. Really simple, but satisfying to go from running away from the enemies, to devouring them with a large swarm of little dudes.
I thought the game was getting easy until...
Screenshot 2024-10-07 195255.png
My web browser slowed to a crawl, but eventually we prevailed. Overall I enjoyed my time with the game. I would have enjoyed some more enemy variety that made the game a more challenging ramp-up to the boss. Nice job!
(I wish you hadn't opted out of the "Theme" category, I would have rated it a 5!)
@pietmichal all good - I updated my vote! :thumbsup:
Cute, and fun! A trash-rummaging stealth game is a great idea.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 132355.png
I couldn't tell if the light made me more noticeable, but I did like that you could hide in the bushes to shake off a pursuer. That being said, the decision making was a bit binary: it was either do the minigame super fast while no people were around, or just wait until they patrolled past the trash can. It would have added some extra depth if we had to constantly put ourselves in riskier situations for each new level.
I also enjoyed the narration between each chapter - it was a nice touch! Great work!
Thank you all for the amazing feedback! I'm doing my best to play/rate/comment everyone's game.
@william-corrin @chariot @julester You have no idea how much that car jitter when it's near to the mouse bugs (hah) me. The current control scheme was my "temporary" movement that I threw together in ~10 minutes so that I could test the game, until I had the time to implement proper acceleration, steering, etc. You can see how well that turned out :sweat:
@budster16 @eerongal @balimaarthebassfish @sviborg @pschichtel @olsonexi Yeah the difficulty curve is absolutely borked. I apologize that it goes from super slow, to extremely difficult. I ran out of time and had to throw most of the waves together during submission hour. Didn't even have time to play test it.
@jejkobb @sirblazealot Thank you, it took me like ~10 years of competing on and off to realize that a solid tutorial is one of the most important things you can do to give users an enjoyable experience from the get-go.
@patomkin OMG that is such a perfect name, I wish you were around when I was trying to come up with one! My first thought was "Roach Rally," but the game didn't have cockroaches in it lol.
@jarrrkob thanks for checking on Virus Total! My LD55 game gave quite a few people a hassle with Windows SmartScreen, so I preemptively uploaded my game to [Microsoft's malware analysis](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission) portal. I've heard that this is a good way to build up a trusted reputation for an unsigned application, but not entirely sure if that made a difference.
@wo-ri-gou-le I opted out of Audio ratings because I want to be respectful of people's time and get intentional feedback on the other categories. I already know the audio is a weak point in this game, and figured people would appreciate not having to rate every single category.
Hope that makes sense!
@ategon Go for it. Good luck with your tournament!
I had to lose a couple of times before I really got the hang of it, but my last 2 attempts were pretty enjoyable. I found it to be a really good strategy to just gather a ton of resources right next to your base at the beginning, and then try to take over all the enemy bases at once. It never worked, but on my last attempt, I took over about half the map from my starting base, and it felt really good.
I do think that having a fixed camera with the scrolling removed would have made the game a bit more fun to play. It *almost* fits the entire map at once, and it would have been nice to see all of the bases to keep track of how many resources the enemy was working with.
Good job!
Behold the wheatpocalypse!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 170128.png
I starved to death my first playthrough (didn't realize that eating food was automatic, and I needed to keep unsold food in the barn).
The second playthrough, I realized how efficient it was to upgrade the tools. Made absolute bank off of all the wheat, and was able to last through the first year and upgrade everything to max after that.
Overall, it was a pretty chill farming game, and I enjoyed it. Great work!
When I realized that I could only plant wheat in Autumn, I decided to stock up at the end of Summer. I wasn't sure if the other crops would die when the seasons changed.
It seemed like the Catmint was the best bang for your buck, but I didn't have enough money to be able to plant it all.
Also, I forgot to mention this, but I really loved the art style. The hand-drawn look was really nice. I actually played most of the game zoomed in because I wanted to see all the details. Really well done!
Really creative implementation! I'm sure it won't last long but I got a decent place on the leaderboard!
Screenshot 2024-10-08 191818.png
I thought the difficulty ramped up at a really nice pace. Great work!
Definitely unique! I couldn't even beat the first level though :grimacing:. I tried a few times, but it was really hard to grasp how to play. Any chance you could upload a guide? I think seeing a successful attempt would help the rules click.
So clever, I've never seen anything like this in a game jam before! The voice acting was great, and the simple find-the-object gameplay worked well with the story.
I think my only gripe is that some of the "jumps" from location to location were too big, and it got a bit disorienting. Very glad that you included the map, because it helped me build a list of locations to deliberately visit.
Congrats on finishing your second game jam!
The art is really slick, and I enjoyed the music! The concept seems solid enough, I like the idea of an asymmetrical platformer where you have 2 characters that have to work in tandem playing towards their strengths.
Unfortunately, the movement mechanics really prevented me from playing much of the game. I'm not sure if it's intended, but the player slips through the platforms, and it's really hard to jump from one to the next. I had to hold down the space bar and just hope I got lucky enough to reach the next one.
When I got to this section, I simply couldn't make any more progress:
Screenshot 2024-10-07 155122.png
Let me know if there's something I missed with regards to the movement, I'd really like to play this one til the end!
My boy Tiflos really squandered all the expensive gear I gave him by driving backwards the whole race :laughing:
Screenshot 2024-10-07 182600.png
This was pretty cool! I didn't realize at the first race that I was trying to get *all* the mushrooms to finish well. I really like games where you kit out a character, and then it auto-plays. This vaguely reminded me of some old game I played in the early 90s, but I can't seem to figure out what it was.
I'm not sure if there was a way to "win" or "lose" - it seemed like each track just unlocked after each race? Let me know if I missed anything there. It said there was a new track unlocked after the 3rd race, but I only saw 3 tracks.
Good work!
Insane, weird, funny, and unique. The noir storytelling was wonderful, and really sold the absurd humor.
Gameplay-wise, it would have been more interesting if there had been more of a challenge. I realized I could just walk away to get the upright bass to respawn, and then kill waves of cockroaches pretty quickly.
Keeping a history of every dead bug at the end was a nice little touch. Good job!
Great puzzle game! The mechanics were immediately obvious, and it felt really fun to play. The amount of progression between levels was perfect.
I particularly enjoyed this level, where I had to pay attention to where I clicked, to avoid the blue guys dying. This level is where I think the game mechanics are their strongest.
Screenshot 2024-10-07 101345.png
Some sound effects would have really put this entry over the top. And I encountered a bug where some of the little dudes got pushed off-screen and wouldn't come back, but the levels were short enough that it wasn't too big of an issue to retry it.
I think this game has potential for a post-jam version with more exploration of the game mechanics. Nice job!
Simple and fun. I like your interpretation of the theme, and the Game-Boy-ish color palette worked well with the art style.
After a couple tries, the winning strategy seemed to be: do a big loop around the outside to get all the people herded into the middle, then stomp on them all at once. I feel like I got a pretty good score!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 211747.png
FYI, it's within the rules to port your game to new platforms after the jam ends. I recommend spending some time in the PyInstaller docs (or py2exe, or Nuitka) so that you can distribute an executable build. Otherwise it's going to be tough to get enough players to reach ~20 ratings.
I use PyInstaller, and make liberal use of the `--add-data` option to get all my assets and libraries to be bundled properly. See [this section in the docs](https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/usage.html#what-to-bundle-where-to-search) for more info.
At the very least, I'd recommend adding a readme specifying the Python version compatibility, and a `requirements.txt` so that people who have Python available can easily set up a virtual environment.
Congrats on your first game jam! I was certainly not expecting to hear Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in an ant game!
The controls were nice, and the game has some promise! It would have been nice to see different obstacles other than things that slow you down. The game reminds me of the top-down Micro Machine racing games from back in the day.
I also noticed a bug when retrying where your laps wouldn't reset, which prevents the game from ever finishing.
Good work!
Beautiful game! I loved the music and the relaxing pace. Pretty sure I got the photo album bug, because I took tons of purple jellyfish pictures, but it never got added to my collection. I even started the game a second time, but still had the same issue. Regardless, I had fun!
Screenshot 2024-10-08 145546.png
Were the fish placed randomly, or did you hand-place them? I went to the sea floor to find crabs, since I figured they would be walking around on the ground, and I found a bunch of them. It was cool being able to reason out where I would be able to find the fish.
Great work!
Interesting idea, and good take on the theme.. I liked the day/night cycle idea, and needing to finish everything at the appropriate time. It didn't feel like there was any penalty for failure though, since the cycles were pretty short. Nice work!
As others have pointed out, it's pretty simple, but the artwork is well done, and it's a creative idea. Some more gameplay choices would have been nice - since you only had the option of upgrading the eraser, I don't see how you could really "lose" unless you just choose not to upgrade it. I did run around the level a bit to see if there were more objects to interact with, but couldn't find any.
Great job at finishing your first game jam! And especially being so new to game development, this is really a great accomplishment.
That got dark... :grimacing:
Screenshot 2024-10-07 181006.png
Really clever - I think this works really well and definitely nails the theme. I saw the tiny platforms when the game booted up and had a feeling I would be shrinking multiple times, so it was cool to be able to scout out the level early on.
I think my only complaint is that it was a bit too easy. I never really felt threatened by the the enemies, and when I was at the smallest form, I realized I could just run through all the enemies without taking enough damage to die. Of course for a game jam, it's better to be a little too easy than too hard.
Especially for your first game jam, this was a really solid entry. Good work!
Hey, a fellow Python dev! You did a killer job with the background artwork. It was actually so well done that it was kinda hard to pay attention to the action! Overall a pretty simple game, but it was nice to switch up the expected mechanics by earning more points for playing dangerously.
Good job on finishing your first game!
I don't think I got a super great time, but I had fun doing it!
Screenshot 2024-10-07 205954.png
The art was lovely, and the puzzles were just the right amount of difficult. It would have been nice if the bee moved a *little* faster, but that's about the only criticism I have. Great job!
I love the Dwarf Fortress inspiration! The world generation and worker AI feel pretty solid.
It felt a bit slow at first, until I realized you can click and drag to select multiple tiles. That really sped up the gameplay, and I was able to carve out large sections of land.
I set up a few hubs and farmed a lot of materials, but after a while it seemed like there wasn't anything else to discover. Something that might make it more interesting would be some hazards, requiring you to plan your expansion more carefully.
Good work!
The visuals were surreal, to say the least! I thought I had the hang of it at the beginning, I was collecting resources from the dirt-tornado. But any time I went to the store, it would show me a death screen, so that was confusing. Was there a way to go to the store without dying?
The effects of the bubbles coming up at the camera were really cool - it almost offsets the pain of losing a section of your base.
I actually liked the minimalism aspects of it - only having to make a choice between an upgrade or healing instead of worrying about money felt nice for a game jam scope.
It was tough to tell the impact of the different upgrades. I think having the health of the enemies visible would have helped with that. After several early losses, I eventually went full in on damage and that proved to be the best approach.
Overall, good work! I got really close to 1 million points:
Screenshot 2025-04-07 124929.png
So cute, so clever! First game I've given 5 stars across the board so far. The audio and UI animations were so juicy that it felt really good to play, despite being very simple. I actually laughed out loud when she turned into a ghost!
"Depth of field?" is a question I asked during my brainstorming phase but couldn't come up with a game concept, I'm so glad to see someone do it, and to do it so well!
Phew! That took me quite a long time, but I finally got it!
Screenshot from 2025-04-10 19-58-30.png
After I got past the second level, I realized I needed to use the glow sticks liberally, and be a little more stingy with the shovels. Whenever I died it was frustrating, but not because it felt unfair, rather because I realized I had been rushing too much. This was very much a "slow and steady wins the race" kind of game.
Your art style is gorgeous. The 3-color palette looked beautiful, and I love the dithered pattern for the blocks at the edge of your vision.
Usually I like to leave a bit of constructive feedback, but I honestly can't think of anything that this game needed more of or less of. Really well done!
The intro itself was already great before I even started playing!
I was _really_ confused at the controls. When I was casting my line, I thought it was showing me a preview of the direction the line was going to be cast. By accident, I hit a fish, and then it clicked. Perhaps if you included a GIF of that in your description and/or itch page, it would be a little easier to parse than the text instructions.
Once I figured out that I could catch multiple fish at one time, I spent more time than I should trying to get a huge chain of fish in one cast. Making a huge zig-zag shape with 10 segments, and then scoring tons of points after reeling it in felt really nice. Although the shark was my proudest catch, the swordfish was my favorite design!
Art-wise, the cool icy color palette was super pleasant, and the contrast-y orange sky above is a nice touch.
The cherry on top was all the Mario references as treasures! I have a feeling you'll enjoy my game - check it out if you get a chance!
Overall, great work!
(Also I didn't know that I could win at vacation, but I'm here for it!) Screenshot from 2025-04-10 19-03-13.png
During brainstorming I though "Color depth? Nah you can't make a game based on that." Well, here I am proven wrong. Fun to play with, and a clever way to leverage the tile map project from your streams.
FYI, I hit an error when double-clicking the title bar to maximize. I'm not familiar with Game Maker, but it's possible the rendering target isn't being re-allocated on certain types of window events. If you're interested in digging in, here's the error I got: ``` ___________________________________________ ############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Draw Event for object CTRL_gridboard: Trying to set a surface target that does not exist. at gml_Script_draw_grids_to_surface@gml_Object_CTRL_gridboard_Create_0 ############################################################################################ gml_Script_draw_grids_to_surface@gml_Object_CTRL_gridboard_Create_0 (line -1) gml_Object_CTRL_gridboard_Draw_0
```
Here's my creation!
vid.mp4.gif
I had fun with this! There were some days where money was tight (after hiring too many adventurers too early) and I had to stock the shelves immediately after they returned or I was going to miss my third payment in a row. I made a hasty choice to fire my best adventurer, thinking it would get me some money back, but that proved to be a mistake. I limped along and finally lost on day 12. Good job!
I replayed it several times looking for the "good" ending but I'm not sure one exists! I even tried to run in the opposite direction of my objectives, only to find out that space was, seemingly, under construction :laughing: .
My only criticism is that the combat is the most fun part, but it's a lot safer to just ignore it, which makes the game pretty short.
Overall I like the setting, and the story screen illustrations were quite nice. Good job!
(P.S. The Windows build worked good for me on Windows 11)
Keyboaaard cowboys! What a fun intro :smile:
This was really awesome. You managed to make a platformer without a "jump" button, and that alone is impressive. You also managed to keep the game challenging and fresh by introducing new mechanics at just the right intervals (spinning blocks, resizing blocks). The water effect was nicely polished and the music was really good!
If I had to nit-pick to find an area for improvement, the only thing it was really lacking was controller support, but that's just a personal preference.
If you kept working on this to expand it into a full game, I would definitely play it! Outstanding work.
I did horribly on the leaderboard, but I still had a lot of fun!
Screenshot 2025-04-08 212150.png
That was fun! I actually enjoyed the slow pace, though I admit the "speed compensation" made it a lot more enjoyable my second time around.
I was having a blast making incremental progress until I finally had enough money to buy a bunch of defensive drones. Unfortunately, hubris was my downfall and I arrived back at the submarine to find it almost dead. In a frenzy of clicking, I died and then immediately hit the "Quit" button by accident. It looked like there was a "Continue" option as well, and I wish I wouldn't have had to start over!
Great job, really enjoyed the atmosphere, and the character's animation was well done!
The graphics and sound were super charming! Through the first 7 levels, I felt really clever when I figured out the solutions. Level 8 seriously kicked my butt though, and I couldn't get past it. Good work!
Great music and artwork! I've already played so many games about digging down, it was a nice change of pace to dig upwards. Unfortunately RIGHT before I got to the top (like 5 blocks away), the game ended up freezing.
Very clever idea! The concept clicked right away as soon as I saw the colored enemies and the buttons. About halfway through when the different colored bars started shrinking to 2 or 1 segments it became a lot of fun trying to figure out the route I needed to take in order to survive the level.
I do think that the pacing could use some work. I died on the very last level and starting all the way over didn't feel enjoyable.
A little bit of variety could have _really_ put this over the finish line. Perhaps as the adventurer went to new levels and faced new challenges, new obstacles could pop up for the therapist. That would introduce some challenges as previously-traversed paths would become more dangerous or impossible, requiring you to navigate a different way.
Great work! I think you have a solid concept here that could be iterated on and polished up for a really cool post-jam project!
I'm so glad I stuck with it, thank you for making this! 2 questions if you don't mind me asking:
1. How did you achieve the digging effect? I dug quite a deep hole but never ran into performance issues. 2. I got to a point where I strongly believed was the end, and that there were no hidden secrets. Earlier in the game I realized you could right-click to add dirt, but it was kind of slow progress. Was it possible to climb up at that point?
So clever to combine pachinko and tower defense! I thought I was doing pretty good but got destroyed on level 10. Unfortunately I was clicking to try to collect a coin and skipped right past the end game screen to check my score!
I made some pretty bad early game decisions because I thought the board was going to get cleared for the next level. Of course, revealing the earth below was much more thematic, but it would have been nice to be able to re-plant over top of existing nodes. I think in particular the area of effect plants would have done well near the top, instead of the 4 layers of sunflowers that I ended up with.
Good work!
Very moody! The smear effect for the transitions worked really well.
I didn't get a ton of use out of the extra powers, since the movement pattern of the enemies made Grief almost always the best option. However I did make a couple cool shots with Loss, and unlocking Hope was pretty cool thematically as a protective ability.
After figuring out how to abuse the enemy movement near the end, it became a little easy to win by just walking into a corner until the enemy movement lined up with your position. Perhaps adding a movement counter or a timer would have made the latter levels more challenging.
Overall, great work!
Okay, dang, you weren't joking about the gigantic numbers! After letting it run for quite a bit longer than I needed to, I ended up here:
Screenshot 2025-04-07 211938.png
Although it was a simple game, the joy of seeing the numbers grow exponentially and the drilling machine wiggling at an insane pace was fun to watch.
There's a bottom?! Okay I'll try again tomorrow!
@kirsybuu I got it!
Screenshot from 2025-04-08 17-34-55.png
Beautifully simple and funny! It's amazing how much the audio, animation timing, and camerawork really punch up the humor.
I tried over and over again to get to 60m, but I don't think I'd be able to do any better without just getting really lucky with the random letters.
Screenshot from 2025-04-10 20-12-48.png
Great work!
@polymathld @baknik @spexxilove Thanks for the kind words! I put a lot of time into making the first part of the game feel polished enough that you wouldn't suspect what came next.
@baturinsky Yeah you had gotten through most of the game at that point, there were a couple more short sections afterwards. It wasn't my intention to make any parts of the game too difficult, but as always, that can be challenging to get right without others available for playtesting.
@delunado @clare-chan1738 I really wanted to prioritize audio instead of leaving it to the last minute like I usually do. I ended up really rushing the music an hour before the Compo ended, and while it's not what I had in mind at the beginning of the jam, I'm still pleased with the overall effect it had.
@bangkerpow Thanks for uploading a video! I'm so sorry you got stuck in the ground during that screen transition. Once I realized it was in the game, submission hour was looming and fixing the logic would have been too risky for all the other screen transitions. Luckily I see you found the self-destruct button :wink: .
@ugly-robot It makes me so happy to hear your reaction! I was afraid the game might come off as cheap nostalgia bait to some, but all of the references I made are of games that hold a special place in my heart.
@captaindreamcast I'm glad you enjoyed the music! The idea to do an Undertale reference stuck with me early on, and that informed the decision to keep all of the musical cues consistent.
@jake-g @cure Saying you'd like more is just about the biggest compliment I could get! I would love to work on a longer version of this, hopefully I can get that started next year :slight_smile:
@sam-gorman I definitely wish I had added secrets and better continuity, the game would have been way more interesting!
@henk Spelunky was in my list of level ideas during brainstorming! Olmec would have been a fun cameo. I'm actually surprised the boss wasn't _more_ buggy given how exhausted I was when I programmed him :grimacing:
Despite being a relatively simple "number gets bigger" game, it was enjoyable. I reached my goal of one-shotting the rocks at Level 50 and stopped after that. Some cozy music or sound effects with some light particles on the mining action would have really taken this across the finish line. Good job on finishing your first Ludum Dare!
I was intrigued by the goal changing to "weird ???", and thought I got a bad ending, so I played through a couple of times to see if there was a secret I was missing. Ended up finding an impassable wall after digging in a straight line. Overall, it was short but well polished.
Also, I thought the audio was pretty good, but you opted out of the category?
The artwork was nice; I enjoyed the fleshy organic look of the walls. Even the death animation had a lot of polish to it (and yeah... I saw that animation many times).
I was trying to kill all of the bugs, and several times ran out of ammo during the boss fight. It seems that ammo dropping is random, and sometimes you get less ammo back than you spend. I tried conserving bullets by using the melee attack, but I don't think I understood how to do it right, because it almost always got me killed immediately. I eventually won by getting a lucky run where I avoided shooting as much as possible. And I had so much ammo that run that I took my revenge on every last bug in the room. The revenge was well earned. After many, many tries, I had finally saved reality:
Screenshot 2025-04-07 201526.png
Great work! Also, hehe:
> and the sheer will to bee victorious
@balimaarthebassfish The procedural generation was good! The only time it ever stood out as odd was a time when the level was literally just 2 rooms with the goal right there. And I needed all the help that I could get, so I wasn't mad about it haha.
I absolutely loved this. The gameplay clicked right away, and even though these kinds of games are an exercise in frustration, most of my deaths felt like my fault for being too impatient, rather than the game being unfair. The only thing I disliked was the A/D controls to lean felt very imprecise. If you could tilt the mouse left and right to lean and line up a jump better, that would feel really nice.
Unfortunately no matter what I did, I couldn't get past this part:
Screenshot 2025-04-07 103934.png
I'd encourage you to keep workign on this after the jam. With some polish, I think this could be really popular. Congrats on finishing your first compo!
For your first game jam ever, especially after just 1 month of learning pygame, you should feel very proud to have a finished product. That's a big step to take!
As a fellow Python dev, I'll give you some advice on distributing your game. You need to build an executable or most people are not going to bother trying to play your game. I recommend [PyInstaller](https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/). DaFluffyPotato has a good video that explains the process specifically for pygame: [Making an Executable from a Pygame Game (PyInstaller)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTxaran0Cig)
Looking at your project folder, I'm also taking a guess that you are not familiar with virtual environments or the `requirements.txt` convention for specifying dependencies. This is useful for maintaining a consistent development environment, and also sort of helps solve the distribution problem (although anyone who isn't familiar with Python development won't get any use out of this). This is a great place to start learning about that: [Install packages in a virtual environment using pip and venv](https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/)
Good job and best of luck on your gamedev journey!
Simple but fun! The bullet shield really saved my butt during the final boss. I got a kick out of the sign at the beginning ensuing us that the enemies were, in fact, evil.
Screenshot 2025-04-07 194403.png
I was worried that this might be a little too gross for me, but after seeing the GIF of the sushi I just had to try it out! Here's my experience:
- This gold tooth is hilarious. - Why the heck did this guy swallow so many bottle caps? - I don't know what this fluid is shooting across the tunnel as I slide down, but I'm not the least bit surprised that this guy has holes in his GI tract. - Tapeworm?! - Uh oh, don't go towards the light!
The slide parts were my favorite, although a bit more control over the character would have been nice. It got frustrating on the last part knowing what I needed to do, but being unable to execute the proper jump or slide to avoid the last obstacle - I think I overcame it by sheer luck than anything else.
Overall, a very funny game, and a good theme interpretation. I love the heavy lean into absurdity!
I liked the double-take on the theme: not just the "bottom of the ocean" setting, but the gameplay was about digging deeper for a story.
It would have been nice to show a little (+X) or (-X) next to the score after each question to see the impact each had without having to remember what your score was on the previous screen.
At the end of the day, he ended up walking out after I pressed him too hard about the Elixir of Life at the bottom of the trench. Worth it.
``` Story Points Earned: 0 Fun: 20 Aggravation: 155 Unease: 190 ```
Well done, that was a cool experience!
It took me a few tries but I finally got it! I thought the stability meter was a clever mechanic that made sense, and added a nice risk vs reward aspect to the gameplay. My only critique is that it was sometimes really tough to tell a difference between the background decoration, and walls that would kill you. Having a more obvious contrast would have made some of my deaths a little less frustrating. Overall, great work!
Screenshot 2025-04-07 091512.png
(I liked the core at the end :slight_smile: )
@protzz please take a minute and read this. I think the amount of pushback you're getting is because of your behavior, not because of your game.
Your description reads like you've been working on this game for a long time, and wanted to throw people off the scent by preemptively defending the fact that you made everything in 48 hours, pixel-by-pixel, with no sleep. The inconsistent visual styles _does_ feel AI-assisted and/or created from asset packs. On top of that, seeing you excessively promote the game, and getting into arguments in your page here is not a good look.
I'm not going to accuse you of that, but you do have to acknowledge why it smells fishy to a lot of people. This is a community of people who get together and share their work for the love of game development. Even the appearance of being dishonest is a big turn off to a lot of people who come here for community and personal growth.
If you want to earn back the goodwill of the community, my suggestion would be to edit your game and change the category to "Extra". As it stands now, you dishonestly submitted your game in a category without following the rules of providing your source code, and that is just not in the spirit of what this jam is about.
You have a good game idea here, and I would love to see you take it further and sell it on Steam. I think I speak for a lot of other people here when I say I'd buy it on launch day! Please take a moment to reflect on the situation, and I think you'll feel a lot better about the whole thing :slight_smile:
Some feedback about the lighting (that I've received many times myself), you can make a room feel dark through contrast and color choices, without actually make it pitch black. For example, it could be 50% lit up, but bright light from the TV or lamps could make some spots 100% lit up, and that would make the room feel dark. I struggled to see anything on a color-accurate sRGB monitor.
I do like what you were going for, despite only being able to find one tape. I was about to give up, but then I found the hidden door in the cabinet and was hooked again. It made me search around in the darkness for a few more minutes, but unfortunately couldn't make any progress.
Congratulations on finishing your first Ludum Dare!
You know you've done something well in Ludum Dare if you can get someone to replay your game 3 times to get all the endings. Ending 2/3 was definitely the coolest. The ambient audio and clever use of lighting worked really well to create a compelling atmosphere. Good work finishing your first Compo!
"Everything is perfect" what a lovely ending haha!
I really liked how each day the text got just a little bit more uncanny. After the second day, I had a suspicion that there was going to be some kind of twist. As soon as I got the "dig me up" message, the realization hit me, and I was blown away at how brilliant of a twist that was.
You also just _really_ nailed the Stardew Valley look, well done!
I played through it twice but think I got the same ending both times, would love it if you could upload a "spoiler" text file for how to get all the endings!