Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Arcana
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Ten Seconds To Space | compo | 943 | 2.63 | 2.39 | 1.83 | 1.67 | 2.94 | 3.14 | 2.33 | 2.32 | 55 | ||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | The Painter's Cat | compo | 457 | 3.26 | 2.82 | 3.64 | 3.87 | 3.00 | 3.85 | 2.96 | 3.33 | 60 |
Arcana leaves an average of 24.0 feedback comments each event.
Pretty cool. Reminds me of Galcon, except not in realtime.
The UI feedback unfortunately was quite sparse and it made it difficult to identify what moves I was making or what I was doing. I think more UI feedback would immensely help this game so I would know what the game was going to do.
Wow, I have no idea what just happened or what I played or what I was supposed to do!
The graphics and colors were really funny though.
I did click on the help but I wasn't sure I fully understood what it said. I think it was supposed to be basically a game where you could go to the store and buy stuff or something and then get through the rooms faster? Unfortunately the game didn't have a "back" button out of the help so I had to quit and restart it.
I suspect that there were a handful of bugs in the game that led to a lot of confusion, for example I seemed to die randomly while moving and I think it's because I was colliding with hitboxes that weren't properly drawn over their graphics.
Congrats on entering LD though and hope that your next game will be much more amazing next time around! (And it's okay to use libraries. Really!)
Not bad for a first LD. I think in addition to what others have suggested, tighter controls would have been a benefit, like I was kind of moving halfway between things and only kind of fitting into some of the passageways instead of it being a solid tight fit. It's kind of hard to describe but maybe if you play it again you'll see what I mean.
OR, you could have variable-sized hallways, so that they don't always have to be the width of the player.
Good start with LD! Glad I was able to play this.
That was actually pretty cool. I liked the fact that the game really emphasized development of your army over the combat. It might have been nice to be able to move more easily but that's a small improvement.
I used the magic spells but I couldn't really figure out what they do.
This has probably been one of my favourite LD games so far.
Holy crap, that was difficult. Like the others I wasn't really able to tell if I was doing well or not. I do finger drumming on drum pads once in a while but I couldn't get through the four instrument types!
I do like the idea and I'm glad that someone submitted a rhythm game for this theme.
Holy crap, don't update your speed, it makes the game SO much harder.
Frame rate got really slow after a while for some reason, don't know why.
The gameplay is simple but it's fun. Great that you can get up and going so quickly. Liked the upgrades, great way to keep you trying again and again. I think my high score was about 2460.
Crap the game crashed while I was playing it! I don't remember what level I was on or if I had maybe pressed something by accident so I can't give you any more information.
Heh the game was pretty simple but solid. Holding down the CTRL button would have been so much nicer.
I like how the title was almost exactly the same as my game too :)
This feels more like a visual novel or an introductory story sequence than a game. It holds a lot of promise but the gameplay is a little shallow. I was playing more to try to make sense of the narrative (the 10 second text and the flashing texts at each screen were great, immersion-wise) as well as the visuals.
I don't know what kind of game this would eventually lead to (probably a platformer?) but I think there's some cool lore potential going on here.
This was quite fun, though I feel that it would have been more fun if you didn't have a 10 second limit. I felt that the game was trying to tax my memory more than my strategic thinking skills.
Great graphics! Sound effects were nice as well. I think more levels would have been fun.
As mentioned, sometimes doing the same thing twice doesn't always result in the same outcome, sometimes you'd have enemies defeat each other and have different amounts of health than when you were doing it one attempt before.
Liked the weapons variety and the big map and how the weapons would affect the environment.
The firing controls were a bit off in that the farther away your cursor was from the player, the faster that shots would travel, so it was usually advantageous to have your cursor far away (and thus increasing the chances that you'd click off of the game).
The physics mechanics were really cool! I liked that a lot. I especially liked that if you pushed blocks at different speeds, they would react differently.
I would have liked some more separation of controls (probably space for jump and then up for climbing). Left and right were a little loose as well.
I wasn't able to aim in Firefox. I see in the comments now that this was reported already.
Trivia was really cool. I also liked the shadow graphics and the different weapon types.
Adding features every 10 seconds is a pretty interesting and a very meta way to approach the theme. I enjoyed that.
The gameplay itself was a little simplistic though, some additional interaction or movement might have benefited it some.
For some reason the performance (on web) got really slow after a while, shortly after graphics and some enemy types were introduced.
This game had a lot of promise, but I felt like the controls were constantly in my way and it frustrated me. I think having a timeline on the bottom (or even "go back to start") buttons so you could click to rewind/forward and then using "click to select" your man would have both helped significantly for control. In the end it took me way too much time to assign commands for me to fully appreciate it.
I think the basic idea here is brilliant though, a side-scrolling Frozen Synapse, and I think a lot got done here in a short amount of time, especially the different weapons and the whole traveling backwards and forwards in time mechanic.
Lovely graphics.
And this game was so brutally hard, the first two levels were cake but the difficulty ramped up significantly in 3 and 4.
I liked the controls for the most part (dropping when you didn't press any buttons felt natural, moving up and down was fine) but it was annoying that you stopped moving at all when you were on the bottom of the screen. I think if you would have continued to move then it would have been nicer.
Music was a little minimalistic but had some promise. It seemed a little too industrial/electronic for the style though, I would have expected something more light and airy.
Overall the concept is promising and there's potential here with some tuning!
Pretty solid ideas for platforming, but the "floaty" controls with the character made it very difficult to navigate some of the puzzles.
I liked the "stamp" movement a lot, that was very satisfying to float above the button and stamp down quickly and get to that exit with a few microseconds left.
I think if the character moved a bit faster and naturally it would be much more solid.
A pretty serious game but a little too politically-charged for my taste though.
Also, it got really difficult to "progress" to different areas, it wasn't clear when I could click on or access different files.
Pretty silly concept, especially how it has all kinds of different game graphics and stuff. That was actually pretty amusing.
Dolphin was hardest because he was all floaty and I had problems dodging the parabolic squares.
Showing up in the default category still!
Oddly enough I was really entertained by reading the liner notes in the Jukebox, and absolutely amazed that you spent an hour and twelve minutes on the 200bpm 8-bar loop :)
Great graphics and audio work, the gameplay mechanic was pretty simple but it was compelling enough for me to keep playing. I think more variety in attack patterns and enemies as you progressed would have kept the game more interesting - I think every enemy attacked at the same rate so you got a good idea of how to effectively attack.
The upgrades and hyper mode were really fun.
Great work!
Holy crap I WON!
The two-laser jump screen was soooooo hard. And then I figured out the ezmode way to do it. I won't say if others here don't want to be spoiled.
Nice writing and humour. Great music. Hours of OHC paid off. I liked the time dilation story buildup.
The whole 10000 ms was kind of silly especially because if you ran out you just got a bonus, but ha ha :)
Awesome atmosphere. The 10-second theme in this game is because your "stability" starts at 10 and counts down.
I'm still not sure what all of the level tiles/walls did - there's so much stuff going on. I usually just bee-lined toward the exit.
Sound was minimal, but effective in this context.
You should be proud of this, especially of the art style.
Ha ha ha, the tutorial is harder than the first level.
The up-down-left-right holy crap was hard as hell for me. The explosion effects were awesome. The fluidity was great. Reminds me of a faster version of VVVVVV. I think the 10sec theme in this case was a bonus, since the game's a bit more "twitchy" style due to its responsive controls.
This is awesome. Needed a restart button. Super fast paced and fluid movement. I would have liked jump to be something other than 'up' personally but that's pretty minor.
Great use of the theme, great decision "tradeoff" about whether to stick around and kill more stuff or dash for the exit.
Could use music! But this is LD, music's always a bonus. :)
Highest score so far is 144.
Really nice narrative. You can actually infer a lot about the main character based on the way that he was responding to his hallucinations. The artwork, or what we saw of it, was great. I wish the "horror" was a little more abstract early on, we see that it's a bit fuzzy and faded at first before it comes into focus, but it's a bit odd when the character describes it as "a shadow" but you can clearly see a green cloak on top of a character.
I think it's reasonable that he might keep it all to himself - most reasonable people after all don't want to say "I see shadows at night and I'm scared". After all, he didn't tell his flatmate or his family about it, so it might be not his style to talk about these kinds of things to his friends. Perhaps some suggestion that he's a character who doesn't believe in any supernatural phenomena (or possibly mental disorders, though that's a little less PC) would help explain why he wouldn't tell anyone.
Good entry!
I tried this and I got the jump bug still. Still this is really nice for a first attempt. Too bad there wasn't any artwork and I confess that I thought the music was a little too short so the loop was a little too soon. The level's big though and the jumping and everything gives you a great start of a game.
Nice atmosphere and graphics. I liked the dungeon crawling. The time countdown was kind of obscure but eventually I figured it out. Kind of wished there were more enemies to fight. Agree with the others about the controls but you gotta work with what you're given.
Nice artwork, but this wasn't my type of platformer. Unfortunately I think the time limit made me rush and get all nervous, and subsequently I died a lot. I think if it was either the jumping/darkness or the jumping/time it would have been fine but putting it all together taxed my patience.
I would have liked more checkpoints for weak and impatient players like me!
Good mood and atmosphere though. I liked that a lot. The artwork was very fitting.
I'm getting a "MSVCP120D.dll" is missing from your computer message. I just installed The Visual C++ Redistributable 2012 Update 3, but it didn't seem to help.
I don't use my Windows computer often so it might be something I'm doing wrong. Can anyone advise?
What a great use of the theme. It was really fun watching other people doing their thing but I think I wasted my 10 seconds since I couldn't figure out how to attack like everyone else did. :(
Not bad, really gets you scanning and thinking, and also associating colors with RGB color codes! I could see something like this as being a cool training module for people who want to learn color codes actually.
This is one of those cool casual games, easy to get into.
It would have been nice to have a smooth view cone rather than a tile-based view cone. I didn't feel that it was rewarding enough either to fight monsters (or arrow traps as it were). I didn't even think I could kill arrow traps for a while. :)
The sidebar seemed really big and showed a lot of information that I didn't really need to know about - a more minimalistic (ha!!) one should have sufficed.
This is an ambitious project, feels kind of like a preliminary Gauntlet-style game.
Oh wow, this is difficult. I was playing the web version and I don't know if there was some latency or something. It took me about seven tries to figure out what the basic mechanic was, and then I was only able to pass the first level. The second level I played had like seven shapes, and then they'd all fire, but the last two delayed for like a second.
The tolerance for error is also really, really tight - if the shape isn't right on the barrier, you'd miss (the game says, "In the zone" but it's more like "activating the shield" to deflect them).
The fact that the notes didn't correspond to left/right, and how the shapes randomly appeared gave this game a really, really hard learning curve.
WIth some tuning, and more gradual ramping up in difficulty I can see this being really cool though. I really did give this game a shot, played like 10 or 15 times to try to get it but my mind can't wrap around it :(
The graphics were amazing. Artwork was great.
Game's super hard though... maybe I'm just not good at these things but enemy bullets were tiny and things took a lot of hits before they died. It was difficult to progress I felt. I liked the basic idea of the controls though, where you ran and shot in the direction of the mouse. They felt fluid but it was so much shooting. Jumping on another button would have been nice (spacebar or similar) rather than "up".
It's really hard to type when the capitalization is all different. Would have liked to have the typing bar clear out after you're hit, since trying to delete your contents if you typed "I love" instead of "i love" was a nuisance. Overall I found it a little frustrating.
I liked the artwork though, it was quite cute. I'm not sure what your character is... are you walking a dog? A spider?
Amazing graphics. Amazing atmosphere. Unfortunately it was really easy to get stuck - I got the dash ability and couldn't figure out how to use it, and the level disappeared around me :( I also fell through the ground very often. It was a little confusing to be able to jump, then suddenly to get dash and not be able to jump anymore.
The concept though is really cool. I wanted to try it some more but I'm not sure if I'll have the time for it.
Really liked the idea of being able to access emails and to see the story through that.
Great work here overall.
Very fun. Loved the multiplayer option.
I too found the instructions to be a little complicated, especially after figuring out that the game was actually a really simple concept.
Great graphics, especially.
Wish I knew what this was coded in!
The game takes a while to load so be patient.
As a creator of another Mondrian-themed game, I really, really, really liked this one. It's so polished and professional and dynamic, with beautiful artwork and lovely sound effects and really nicely matching music. In some respects I was hoping that what I built would be able to come out as nicely as this.
Great work. Much compliments.
Great atmosphere. I was impressed at the potential scope of this game as far as the development and story. Would have liked to see a bit more of the narrative.
Text speed is a bit slow in my opinion and it would have been nice to skip the "intro" to be able to explore the room like you recommend. I clicked on a few things but most of them weren't too interactive so I left to work but... the game ends :(
Particle effects were great. Definitely the highlight of this game in my opinion. Sound effects would have elevated this to a new level of cool.
I liked firing while charging, and charging during bosses, but waiting to charge while there's no one around got tedious. I died on the boss but didn't feel like trying to get all the way back there.
Really fluid and solid movement. Great audio design and concept here. I liked the sprite style because it's actually more reminiscient of 1980s-era Sierra and less like Nintendo-era sprites, with the vivid colors and really sparse use of pixels.
This game was totally hilarious. Sound effects and music especially, as well as the great voiceover at the beginning.
I tried to run it, I thought it bugged, then I read the source code.... ha!
My emotions when playing this game: "OH NO I PICKED UP AN iPAD!!... wait a second... wouldn't I want some extra iPads?"
Nice take on the theme and nice overall concept. I made it to the top with 17 items collected on my third or so try. I like that the game is actually "winnable" even if you didn't finish it!
Amazing atmosphere and style. I loved it when one of the levels actually was much, much longer than it appeared. It does put you in a contemplative mood. The quotes and presentation were great. One of my favourites so far.
Clever but I couldn't get it to "feel" like a game, I didn't understand what all of the numbers were saying to me. I pressed enter a lot and didn't seem to get anywhere. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
The frame rate was really high but it was really hard to see that I was attacking. I wish I had a bigger sword. :) My bridge though was certainly dying, but the "game over" was a little bit abrupt. A "retry" option would be good. I don't think I was taking any damage even though I had a life bar?
Keep it up. BTW I really liked the color scheme for the blocks on the ground.
Lovely music. Is it an original composition or something else?
The gameplay is solid but a little simple. I think one of the biggest improvements would be acceleration and deceleration of the ship, or some kind of mechanic related to the bullets.
Also, the P button to shoot was difficult because it's too close to the Arrow Keys and thus gets my hands cramped up.
Nice job, keep it up!
Leaving my comment here to come back to this since I can't play it today but I want to get to it tomorrow. I participated as a last-minute decision after hearing about this from you guys this Thursday so I gotta seek you all out.
Hey. I did Ludum Dare... mostly after you told me to "do it anyway". Can't check this out this evening but commenting to return to it later.
Great fun, the weapons are amazing.
Stellar music, but at this point we expect no less from you. ;)
Nice concept, would have been good to see more unit types. I didn't realise at first that you could aim upwards (but of course that's obvious now that I think about it). Shop was a cool idea. A bit too easy and the enemies were a bit slow. Good base for a game though. I think with some expansion this could be a lot of fun.
I really wanted to reach the top but I think the platforming was too much of a barrier for me. Really amazing visuals. Really cool "gliding" ability but it also took a long time to get used to. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the music and the overall mood.
And once you get the weapon (yes, it's worth cheating through to get!) it gets REALLY SCARY.
First level was a bit boring, but the second level onward was amazing. Very hard though, especially since the first level and the second level are so different from each other. I liked the psycho effects in the upper levels, though I confess that I cheated to unlock (but I'm glad that you put that in!)
I spent a number of minutes playing this to figure everything out. I'm still losing most of the time though - not sure exactly how to make it such that my units defend my factories. I played this a number of times though to see if I could improve.
I think the main issue I have right now is that it's difficult to see where battle lines are drawn since the units don't behave in a predictable way - you're not quite sure exactly where red units will go for example (many of them seem to charge out into the field). I think having the units behave differently as well as having certain characteristics will make this very, very interesting.
Fully innovative and really interesting to play/watch.
Web link seems to have "access denied".
I love going fast. This game gives you a great sense of speed. I wish the field was a little more spread out so that you could appreciate going fast a little more - get a feeling of just travelling quickly and feeling that thrill.
Mouse input would have been such a great addition to the game as well.
I enjoyed the graphical style - very retro but it's super-effective in this kind of game.
Interesting level design. I too agree that the noisy background got distracting. I'm not a gigantic fan of 2D scrolling games like this but this one was interesting. The level was amazingly long, but I missed a jump and didn't want to try navigating backwards for a minute to recover my progress. :(
Very cool, I especially liked jumping off of walls.
The music was nice and relaxing and it was interesting watching things grow. There's something satisfying about watching the flowers pop up as you plant them.
I had a hard time doing grid-accurate clicks on my mouse. Maybe it is a framerate issue on my computer?
Having a guide as to what you have currently selected would have been a nice bonus.
The style is interesting. I think some more variation in your available activities would have been good, or more action happening in the background - for example, seeing character dialog or similar as you moved through the city.
Great art. Great animation. Awesome humour.
I am trying to run this on Safari on Mac OS X but I'm having problems moving. I'm not sure if I can restart to the title screen either; restarting the brower and refreshing the page seems not to change anything.
Do you have any idea what the issue might be?
The concept is quite cool, it was confusing at first but I read the entry. I think the biggest improvement would be to shift the colours faster so that the gameplay is more dynamic - I found that I could just collect a few triangles and then wait for them. When I wanted to "go out and explore" I ended up being overwhelmed.
I was really hoping for a "I AM POWERFUL!" moment as well, when your swarm got so big that you could just faceroll everything. It was really exciting to watch your swarm grow over time and how you became dissociated from your triangle as the group got larger and larger.
I started with hard of course. The snow level was definitely the hardest. Too bad there were only three levels. The "hoorray" was a really cool sound effect.
I would eventually be thrilled to see the gameplay get deeper as you play more levels. I think you could probably tell an interesting story using just the pictures and the bit of text that you have at the beginning of each level.
Great surrealism there. It's amazing how much the comments substituted as a story, and influenced my state of mind while I was playing. I was expecting bad things on many of the levels and was almost doubting if I could finish the game. I eventually did though.
LD44 — Your life is currency (3)
Ephemera by atmospherium 2019-05-03T03:38:40Z ♥ 1
Nice song. Great visuals. I could totally imagine you making a killing if you managed to fit this onto video synthesis hardware because the effect is really awesome. Would be great is there was a little more dynamics in the visuals based on the audio parameters.
Vital Operations by TinyCastleGuy 2019-05-03T03:20:48Z ♥ 0
Music was great, I enjoyed the retro graphics.
I couldn't figure out how to play the game after four tries, reading the instructions, and checking the comments. I feel like I'm kind of missing out :(
Inflate Me to the Moon by DDRKirbyISQ 2019-05-03T03:12:33Z ♥ 1
That was rather beautiful. To be honest the gameplay wasn't that compelling, but the controls were super tight and really responsive and playing three rounds actually made me appreciate how good the response was overall. It felt like you were slamming coins.
I kept on playing as soon as I realized that the launch was the DuckTales Moon theme, because it was too fitting. All of the retro video game music references were great.