Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Aurel300
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | dearest friend | jam | 206 | 3.88 | 3.14 | 3.58 | 3.62 | 4.50 | 4.12 | 2.33 | 4.51 | |||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | BTW: Beneath the Waves | jam | 53 | 4.16 | 3.83 | 4.15 | 3.88 | 4.50 | 3.81 | 3.24 | 4.05 | |||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Why Deliver Y ? | jam | 39 | 4.27 | 3.92 | 4.20 | 3.72 | 4.22 | 4.15 | 4.47 | ||||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | abundance | jam | 59 | 4.08 | 3.80 | 3.38 | 3.37 | 4.32 | 3.68 | 4.25 | ||||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | DRILL BILL | jam | 25 | 4.30 | 4.21 | 3.98 | 4.14 | 4.47 | 4.24 | 3.53 | 4.16 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | doctor concoctor | jam | 208 | 3.94 | 4.15 | 3.52 | 4.00 | 4.26 | 4.13 | 3.26 | 3.91 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | improbability engine | jam | 25 | 4.33 | 4.04 | 4.23 | 4.14 | 4.59 | 3.62 | 3.36 | 4.22 | |||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | two tapes | jam | 56 | 4.22 | 3.60 | 4.37 | 4.15 | 4.40 | 4.34 | 3.40 | 4.32 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | JarHeads | compo | 178 | 3.82 | 3.87 | 3.91 | 3.83 | 3.83 | 3.72 | 2.75 | 3.38 | |||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | wallpunch | jam | 86 | 4.06 | 4.00 | 3.93 | 2.54 | 4.26 | 4.17 | 2.67 | 3.91 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | Arcade Wars | jam | 144 | 3.87 | 3.82 | 3.52 | 4.15 | 4.21 | 3.71 | 3.40 | 3.66 | ||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | Temple-based Sacrifice | jam | 502 | 3.44 | 3.02 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.84 | 3.68 | 2.53 | 3.28 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Runnink out of Space | jam | 110 | 3.92 | 3.48 | 4.12 | 3.73 | 4.05 | 3.69 | 3.58 | 3.83 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Advance Cookwares | jam | 550 | 3.48 | 2.92 | 4.03 | 4.25 | 4.07 | 3.69 | 3.30 | 3.63 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Ignorance is Bliss | jam | 113 | 3.94 | 3.34 | 4.19 | 2.98 | 4.41 | 4.21 | 3.05 | 4.45 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Batterycorp | jam | 30 | 4.19 | 3.98 | 4.17 | 3.89 | 4.08 | 3.64 | 3.98 | 3.96 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Planet of Babel | jam | 486 | 3.19 | 2.63 | 3.72 | 4.00 | 4.14 | 2.90 | 1.87 | 2.57 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | one rooms | jam | 15 | 4.27 | 3.89 | 4.16 | 4.49 | 4.22 | 3.95 | 4.28 | 4.34 | 75 | ||
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | R. Lastey, archaeologist | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Nightshift | compo | 204 | 3.53 | 3.45 | 2.63 | 3.36 | 4.16 | 3.51 | 3.34 | 3.60 | 58 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | hARBOuR | compo | 456 | 3.26 | 2.83 | 2.44 | 2.91 | 3.89 | 2.58 | 1.97 | 3.36 | 89 | ||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Primary objective | compo | 35 | 3.97 | 3.30 | 2.78 | 2.78 | 4.42 | 3.74 | 3.28 | 4.08 | 81 | ||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Cell #327 | compo | 50 | 3.90 | 3.58 | 3.06 | 3.94 | 4.25 | 3.61 | 2.71 | 4.33 | 100 | ||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Elemental | compo | 204 | 3.58 | 3.25 | 3.52 | 3.29 | 3.95 | 2.68 | 2.29 | 3.27 | 87 | ||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Thade | compo | 471 | 3.14 | 3.00 | 2.72 | 3.32 | 3.57 | 2.53 | 2.11 | 3.15 | 96 | ||
| 2010 | 19 | Discovery | Niribu X | compo | 211 | 2.10 | 2.00 | 1.50 | 2.80 | 2.80 | 2.40 | 5 |
Thanks everybody...
I want to finish this one, implementing the more time-consuming ideas as well.
Yes, the framework is mostly done, although I think I might make the physic simulation a little bit faster (for now it simulates our hero as a VERY big object, increasing the speed will basically make him relatively smaller) which will in turn make the controls less slippery.
Sorry for the top jump :D
The Mac OS X version does not work and the Love version is actually 'The Ohter Side'. Please fix.
Thank you everyone for your feedback. Skip cutscene and reset minigame buttons have been added.
The mini-game does not have to be reset, you can double-click the numbers to reset that zone.
You can restart the game from after the intro by pressing R on the game over screen.
Not there anymore :>
A bit slow for my taste, and the ghost was kinda cheesy :D
Nice job, but a bit laggy (US servers?), and not a lot of players online, so, I couldn't get to test it very well :/
Still, I can see the work that was put into this.
Mac OS X, didn't run. (quit unexpectedly)
Fun! ... Very challenging, the 'WORK' button was a bit small.
Well that was . . .
Very nice! At times got completely lost, because it was so chaotic ... But yet, somehow I was killing baddies and collecting goodies.
Fun!
Nice intro :D ... Couldn't get it to restart on Kongregate, though :/
A well-polished game, though sometimes hard to control and the theme was implemented a bit, ... loosely.
Nice game, bit hard to control. The camera was a bit too crazy.
I like this game, the idea ... But somehow, ... I can only find three clues in VVVVVV? Two on Up and Down, one on Must be Allergic. ... Sadly, because the game seems very nice :/
This game made me a bit sad :( ... Poor kittens!
I like the way the camera moves. ;) :D
Very nice! I sucked at the game, but it was well polished and all :)
Thank you all for your feedback.
Yes, I'm aware that the fights get a little tedious, I was worried about this during the development, but it was too late to change it. (@Tanner)
@Ellian the enemies die, after you attack them a couple of times. There are no health bars, which makes it difficult to see, but, in general, the minor guards take two perfect attacks to kill.
@plash Fixed the bug, was a typo.
You can skip your turn with the hourglass, if you really don't like it.
Thank you for your comment.
I'm sorry I couldn't really play your game, it doesn't work under wine either :(
It was a bit difficult to navigate around, some indicator of nearby planets (or zoom in/out? or map?) would have helped.
Fun, I can see people going for high scores.
I would appreciate a quiet moment before everybody starts shooting right after I enter the room, so I know where I am, etc.
More versatile enemy AIs?
I loved the music at the beginning :)
@elijahlucian Thank you too, was fun working with you.
Very nice! Although the end was somewhat unfair, based on memorisation + trial and error, really :)
Kinda fun, … Didn't manage to collect all the letters though :( It gets laggy after a couple of seconds, then it's very easy to crash.
Also wouldn't mind having some kind of closest letter indicator, searching was somewhat tedious.
Unplayable as well, too big for my screen.
Not a bad game, but there are a couple of bugs … Potentially game breaking, they kind of put me off playing this otherwise fun game.
It has potential … Unfortunately, I find it quite hard to control. And at first it was hard to tell what was going on.
This is a neat game, but really nothing to do with the theme :)
I wish this one worked for me, but it didn't …
I tried both the OS X version and the Web version, both launch and show the little TV leaving the house. Then I cannot leave the title screen… Am I supposed to press 1, 2, 3? I don't have a numpad, and the numbers at the top don't seem to work…
It is a neat idea, but I'd loved to play it realised more completely.
The screen 'effect' … Almost annoyed me, it was very fake :) I'm sure you could've made it bend at the edges and generally made it look more genuine.
Simple enough, okayish for killing time. Not much else to say :D
Pretty neat.
Good job explaining the various mechanics one by one.
I thought the jumping was a bit floaty at times, would be nice to be able to control the height.
Got stuck on the big slime level >.>
(no audio? tested on wine under mac)
Nice. A tiny bit confused at the beginning (no explanation for what to do), but easy enough to figure out.
A fair game, not very related to the theme and not very well polished. I'd happily disqualify you for all the spam.
Nice game. Could use a lot more polish.
- the monster vision is too … green, makes it hard to see a lot, and the footsteps are barely visible - maybe change it to a path in the air, like following the smell?
- it's hard to navigate the dungeon, have a map?
- too dark, low contrast
- the humans AI is kinda silly - you hit them, it only makes them go towards a chest faster
- no instruction in game
...
But I liked the music :)
Good job! I liked the challenge. I wished the checkpoints system were a bit more constant, sometimes I fell down in the tower and had to kill myself asap, to make sure I didn't lose my checkpoint. Nice music, too. But, a very simple game.
Nice :)
I didn't realise at first I was actually supposed to react to what they were saying, but that was just my silliness. It looks simple, but has a certain charm to it, and the music is pretty good (and fitting). The concept is somewhat innovative, even though I had to repeat the first level a couple of times, it didn't feel too grindy. Though maybe (for the first level / tutorial / easy difficulty only), it would be nice to give some feedback to the player when they fail, so they know how many they've got right.
The credits were fun :)
Has potential, I see that the feedback, the feel of the moves is quite good (would be even better with some sounds to go with it, I guess)
The bullets are a bit hard to dodge, the dash should make you invincible to them?
Enemies should maybe appear a bit faster, especially if your screen is cleared, so that you can keep the combo up.
And then obviously more graphics, music, etc :)
Good job.
Not bad, was waiting for it to pick up speed, though.
As I already told you, well-polished.
Good music, clean graphics. (the 'punch' was kinda funny)
But definitely trying too hard to push a message. I would love more gameplay where you actually make decisions and make a difference rather than an 'interactive' movie.
Pretty nice. Fun at the beginning, but got boring rather quick, needs more variation, enemies, etc.
Explosions got pretty loud, but the music was nice.
Controls are a bit awkward - WASD + click is slower compared to the 'dragging' method, but that one is a bit more chaotic.
Also, the barrage of bullets in later levels got impossible to dodge.
You didn't add any link to your game, we can't play it!
Good job! Very well polished. (Only pet peeve: the pixels were sometimes deformed. Maybe it's a limitation of your framework, but still, so close to perfectly clean graphics! :)
Quite calm indeed. A bit easy, too, though the step up to the various gunship was very steep. I think it could use more control over the monster (make it more agile), so it's actually possible to dodge the various missiles (which I couldn't see most of the time, very annoying). Nice music though.
The laser sound gets quite annoying, it's too loud / high-pitched. Sometimes waiting for the next wave got a bit tedious, too long.
Simple game, but quite nicely polished and fun. Very nice feedback on attacks, good timing and all :)
Nice game. Could use more types of traps / lures, more levels and mechanics. Overall it was too easy, but it's not a bad concept.
Very nice. Couldn't figure out the correct rhythm though > _ > I suppose the little arrow in the left part is supposed to be the hint, but … Trying to synchronise my key press with the arrow moving / the monster pulsing almost never worked, always got 'bad'. I just had a run where I lasted until the second level, got a couple of perfects, but I can't really say I felt it was with the rhythm of the song. Maybe add a visual tutorial, to make sure I know which sound cues to respond to? :/
It's a very well polished game, and it makes me sad that I can't figure out the timings. I like DDR games and the like.
Not directly obvious how to get this running. Had to go to your source folder, in the LudumDare33Submission folder, download all the files therein, run them locally. So I see that you finished the web version, but it would be nice of you to actually host it somewhere (so it is truly a web version, runnable in the browser)…
Anyway, the game, simple, but obviously can be improved a lot. It can be very punishing if you miss even a single archer in a wave, because immediately another wave comes. It's easy to get overwhelmed, the difficulty curve is a bit too steep. There isn't much incentive to ever step out of the river, so you can always replenish your stones. The carts could possibly be a solution to that, but they are too rare, in my opinion. Naturally, you could improve the graphics, add audio, have additional enemy types, power-ups, polish, …
But, we all have to start somewhere :) Keep on LD-ing!
It was fun getting this thing to run. I don't see why the ruby is necessary? I guess you're just used to the framework, but eh. I just copied the parts in the two layouts into an html file, put it on a local server, changed the permission of all the files required… And then I could run it. You should find a place to host it (without the unnecessary ruby) online, itch.io for example.
As for the game itself, less fun. Lots of bugs, lots of grinding, art not very coherent (I'd assume none of it is yours based on the looks of it). I got through to what I assume was the end when I beat Fear.
For 50 hours and a team of five, I'm not very impressed. But keep trying :)
I liked it, was cool that I could use the bodies as a meatshield.
Very nice :) (never heard of Pico8)
Nice! Very satisfying, though I think it's hard to dodge bullets effectively. Needs a frantic soundtrack to go along with it, maybe? :)
Nice. The yes and no sounds were surprisingly fun. Also I wish the decisions you make weren't so transparent. Of course you pet the kitten. Of course you don't say no to the grandma. (if you want happiness) Et cetera :)
Very nice. Although the last level felt a little bit too button mashery. I guess I could see it being a full two-button rhythm game, with holds and doubles and such?
Nice. The only thing that I worry about with this sort of games is the fact that some levels are beatable in a trivial way, probably not the way the author intended. Like in a couple of levels with the pink / blue tiles I could get to the exit without having to worry about them. But oh well, 24 increasingly challenging levels is a good number :)
Very nice. My only complaint is the fact that I had to use my trackpad as well as my mouse (Magic mouse doesn't allow both buttons to be pressed at once :I) to do the later levels. Maybe add a workaround for that? But otherwise very fun :)
Lovely. Quite simple, but relaxing, and with pretty visuals and audio. Sometimes I wasn't sure why the computer was happy / sad, cause it looked like it would make a happy face when I lost hp, but it was really because I killed the caterpillars. I think.
Just did a killing run … Felt really bad at the end :I
Very cutesy.
Solid entry, though I wish it was slightly more clearer. And I wished there was a way to win :)
Nice game. Some thoughts:
Putting two 'clear dust' objectives back-to-back is a bit disappointing to the player. Why does it say 'decrease dust to 200', then when I do, I get rewarded with 'decrease dust to 150'?
Later on, the game got quite boring, because there was nothing I could do. The ball rarely got to the paddles, usually just bounced around the trees. And when it got to my paddles, the best thing to do was to just let it fall in between so that it gets shot high up. Maybe add more paddles? More ways to control the ball, in mid-air, or on some sort of flying platforms? Most pinball games have multiple sets of paddles.
I unpacked some saplings before I got the objective, I grew some trees before I got the objective. Maybe prevent the player from doing that earlier? I dunno.
The game was a bit slow for a pinball, so it wasn't very exciting.
The music … I think what makes it so plain is the fact that the 'melody' / the main instrument is constantly playing. Have multiple sections, with different lead instruments, different melodies, sometimes solos and pauses. Now it felt like a randomly-generated piece of music, which isn't too good :)
I'm sure you noticed some / all of the above, but if not, hope this helps. Anyway, good job.
Cool, though it took a second to get used to the controls, maybe they could use some tweaking?
Nice :) An interesting idea, pinball with progression.
Neat, though I wished there was more to it. Every level ended up being 'attract the magnet, then reverse the polarity when directly underneath the target, rinse and repeat'.
Very nicely polished game, lacking maybe some tutorial steps. The biggest problem for me is that it gets too easy / boring very soon. Maybe introduce additional enemies or obstacles? Force the player to move on elsewhere (though then you'd have to have some sort of inventory as well, or maybe a vehicle). Anyway, very well done!
Quite fun trying to work out the controls.
Very nice! Took me a second to understand how to progress. At first I didn't realise that timing my shots carefully would actually destroy the guns :D
Then I liked the idea that there is no real 'game over', just an end to your combo / green thing / whatever.
First of all, this is a Jam entry, using somebody else's music.
As for the game itself, there's not enough to it to keep me entertained. It's all just go around the place, bring back this colour, repeat. And with the bugginess (resources falling through the floor) it's even less interesting. :/
Looks pretty and sounds nice … The gameplay is somewhat lacking, though :/
Pretty cool, quite well polished. I wished there was more, though, like levels, more 'moves' (double press, hold, rapid pressing), and the space ship could be fighting enemies based on how well you do, avoiding stuff, etc. Also I though the sound effects for when you press the buttons are too loud, making the music too quiet. But other than that very well done :)
It's a nice entry, but it really is … too Risk of Rainy. Like it feels a bit like a copy / rip-off.
Very retro, like the lander Flash games of the 00's :) Lost it at level 8.
Not bad … Though I really didn't like the music choices for the second and third level :/ … And, even though they were supposed to be higher difficulty, they didn't feel more challenging.
What an odd idea for a game. But it's fun, I like it :)
Not bad. Was sad to see that it was just a single level. And the AI sucked, so a multiplayer version would be pretty neat.
Wow :) Never thought writing pretentious poetry could be so exciting. Enjoyed everything, had the right kind of retro feel to it. Not just the graphics and audio, but the concept of the game as well.
It's not bad … The music got kinda old quickly, and the theme wasn't really there.
While nice looking and quite well polished, the gameplay for me seems a bit lacking. It doesn't get frantic enough, or maybe it's missing additional challenges. As it is, it is very easy and gets boring quite fast. But other than that, nice music, pretty graphics, you know. :)
Uh. The only reason this game is interesting is the fact that it's for an arduino. Which it doesn't really have to be, either. Other than that this seems to be a minimal-effort snake clone. Sorry :/
Nice effort. But lacked in many way – no clear explanation of the controls (an odd wall jump was possible?), no sounds or music. A lot of polish, really.
Nice. I guess it needs some polish, but the idea is quite interesting. This really should be a multiplayer game, or at least hotseat 1v1. Also, it seems to me one's victory is determined simply by collecting all the power-ups, which is a bit … random? I dunno, I wished there was more strategy to it somehow.
No sense repeating what was already said, it just isn't much of a game. But keep trying :)
Pretty fun. I wish you could also skip the cutscenes in the middle.
This game unleashed the full potential of my mouse button. Score: 25
Quite nice. Though somewhat hard to achieve anything, as walking into the villagers often does the exact opposite of what you want, and if it does what you want, then the effect barely makes a change. But is's a neat idea.
Very fun. I guess this is what being a barber feels like! I liked the beard growing effects, too. Kind of scary when you got really close. And there's a lot of polish to be done, but I guess you know that :)
Quite simple, but nice. I can imagine you could make it more interesting by adding levels with e.g. multiple belts, additional categories, different placement of the pistons - because that was what added the fun difficulty.
Not bad, took a second to understand the concept (should be explained in-game), then I was somewhat disappointed that playing in the 'Engage' screen seems to be just for the high score?
Nice! Somewhat brutal, but I enjoyed the game :)
Nice engine start, but yeah, missing content…
Simple, but kept me interested till the end. I was worried it would become too long with the money farming, but that phase ended very quickly. And the boss was a fun surprise :)
(worked fine under wine, tested on OS X)
Charming snake clone, relaxing in a serial killer kind of way :)
Although the simplicity of it might appeal to some, I wished there was more to it. Could've been introduced in a different game mode. Enemies, combo with a timer, power ups, obstacles, different levels, etc.
Very nice! Almost got the top score. Almost :)
I muted the music on my second run, it got very boring very quickly. Also I wish the difficulty picked up a bit faster. Right now it's more of a concentration game, where making one mistake (likely) makes you lose all 3 lives, maybe it could be made faster, so it's more about … reflexes?
But otherwise very nice aesthetic, and nice multiplayer.
Sorry, I couldn't finish … This could have been a neat game.
What killed it for me was just how tedious it became, almost immediately. (Of course I want to pick up all the gems, but that's beside the point! :) ) The checkpoints should've been more forgiving, or every level, honestly. Or there could be an option to go faster when you already did a level ten times.
Oh well, it's pretty.
Well done! Very easy on either mode though :>
Fun little co-op.
This is quite an enjoyable entry … The shapeshifting via combos was a nice touch, although I think there could have been more 'timing' challenges, like the ones with the disappearing platforms and the lasers … Which, by the way, were a tad bit too difficult very close to the start of the game. However, it did have a nice, almost metroidvania progression to it. I think what hurt the game the most was the lack of polish. The graphics served their purpose, but weren't too good, and the scaling down with anti-aliasing was distracting. Likewise, the story at the end seemed a bit random, cause there was no exposition, no plot in the game, just a block of text at the end which didn't seem to relate to the game much. But that's all just polish, the core mechanic was quit nice :)
By popular demand, I added a slightly easier version :)
Not bad, … the om nom song got very annoying after a couple of times. Would prefer a visual timer for the duration of my fatness, and maybe just a single nom sounds when eating the burger?
Other than that, a simple, somewhat challenging puzzle / quick movement game. Sometimes the boulder pushing felt too sensitive.
Always flashy with your particles :)
Enjoyable, but didn't really see any reason to ever shift shapes, the triangle ship seemed sufficient for everything. Maybe force the player's hand every now and then? But nice :)
Had to try a couple of times to manage the snake shift, the timing was extremely tight. And a lovely twist at the end :)
The guy in the corner is indeed very nice, rather smoothly animated and even funny at times. :D I wish the rest of the game was polished, coherent, etc.
And it wasn't clear to me at first that a train that stopped wasn't automatically derailed, it just stopped. Which is why level 3 seemed like a manic nightmare at first, trying to get the J piece down there. (Even then it was very long)
Interesting. Reading your comments makes me wonder what the 'solid clue' was. Good use of the theme, somewhat simplistic graphically though.
Nice job. :)
Very nice, a good mood to it. The audio was very quiet, even though it added to the atmosphere.
Good job :)
Well done, a nice room escape. The ideas were easy enough to follow, although 'There's something missing' is not a great hint. The biggest problem was the bugginess of the game – the inventory was acting out, sometimes display the item I just got in the upper left corner of the screen, then not allowing me to interact with anything, etc. I had to reload twice before I could finish the game. But oh well. :)
It's an okay entry, but it's really too buggy (at least the web build is). Phasing through walls, not teleporting, etc. Also it feels pretty unfair and tedious to reset all the pizza slices every time you die. But it's good you've enjoyed the jam!
Could be interesting with more levels / more focus on puzzley level design. I tried to do the last level without reading the description (and without realising I can turn enemies into cacti), … so obviously needs some instructions, etc.
Simple, but enjoyable. I also though that ws / ad should have been reversed, but I can see you've responded to that already :) The music is just a drum loop, but I thought it was somewhat annoying that it always had to restart after dying – it could just play non-stop in this game. Also, the restart delay and the before-the-timer-starts delay were upsettingly long. With an endurance / reflex game like this, you can assume people are gonna lose a lot, especially when they're just figuring it out. So the restart should be instantaneous. Maybe make the difficulty curve slightly less steep? The signals before the lasers could be longer at first.
But despite all that, it is a very nice, addictive score attack game, especially for such a short amount of time. Good job :)
(Thanks for your comment)
We played it with @Danae123 and indeed took a couple of minutes to work out what the terminal says and we tried a couple of words. I guess that whatever word you type is used as a 'seed' for the creature (?) that comes out? I wish there was more to it :/
The art style is not too bad, and the less random / squiggly bits are not that far from pretty, minimalistic pixel art. Also you should make interactivity more obvious, even / especially with a tiny game like this. If there's very little content, I think every detail matters.
Good job :)
@facelesstheone Thanks :) But wait until tonight, still working on the Jam version!
@Devark, @Crashtester, @MatoMiku Thanks :)
@fenwick, @toadheart Sorry :v To be fair, there was a very steep difference between the difficulty of the first lightchess and the second one. It was either music or more puzzles, and I chose music for once.
@monchang I can see your point. With an actual mouse I sort of enjoyed the dusting, and the effect seemed pretty enough, so I didn't tweak it much. I realise now that it's probably impractical for trackpad users. And anyway, the original concept was quite different – with the dusting and reading being 'casual', as in, everyone will finish it sooner or later, but with a rating system based on how accurate and fast you were. Sort of like Cooking mama, I think? (never actually played it :D)
@Vaiaphraim Good points, of course. With this game, being unrated and jam and all, I didn't go for seriousness and coherence and all that (obviously), so there's plenty of silly ideas mixed with an assortment of vaguely puzzle-ish minigames (I really enjoyed Myst and similar, which is why I'd like to make this sorta genre as well). The original idea was actually humans in the far future exploring distant alien worlds, where they discover *ancient* alien *technology*, so you have to decipher it and solve puzzles, and then the plot twist is a rickroll as an alien prank. I realised it would work just as well with an actual ancient temple, but then never got around to properly composing the melody (did it very terribly by ear), even though the music sheets were easily available. I decided to put the vine-relief spiders to make it less tedious, because too many vines. I think hotkeys for the three tools could have helped. As for the feeling of 'putting everything together' I think it could have worked better if the challenge was available at any level, but discovering new letters and pictograms would show you your progress after you finish a level.
Anyway, thank you all for your comments and feedback! Happy to return the favor.
@wooltech, @LoneSpelunker, @Drury Thanks!
@g12345 I know, I should have re-done the melody for the last melody puzzle!
@MiniBobbo Thanks, I mentioned the problem with making levels for that puzzle in my post-mortem. ;)
@sftrabbit Yeah, I like to put lots of little minigames in a game … But usually I am less successful than this :D
@axoona I know, I did consider removing the vines, … The problem was, I had already spent too much time on that minigame, didn't want to just discard all that work. With the spider invaders I removed some of the tediousness of the vines. If I had time, I would probably have a different minigame in each level. Pipes, mazes, puzzles, preferably all related to vines graphically or thematically.
@juxipolo True. I noticed, and tried to add cues for the player – like the little sliding thing in the bottom left of the screen saying 'x new letters!' or the sound effect playing for each new letter … But, highlighting the unknown ones would probably have been best, and the most obvious, too.
@DDRKirby(ISQ) I didn't know Professor Layton, might have to check it out someday. I definitely need to try harder with audio next time. It was more of an afterthought during the extra Jam day. Even so, it was the longest I spent on making music so far! And I'm actually working on a DAW (that's a big word) that should hopefully be finished by LD 37 :)
Thank you everyone for your feedback!
Pretty cool. I gave it a couple of attempts … It's good for Ludum Dare to make the 'rare' events (like the fireballs, sieges, etc) happen quite often so that people who only spend a short time playing know that they are there. However, I think these should be less frequent on subsequent runs, they seem too destructive too often.
I also wish there was a bit more I could do. Some resource management, options to speak to my advisors / architects / workers, etc … Although I know that would be quite complex :)
And the graphics were pretty, (although, a little pet peeve of mine – pixel-art games where the sprites don't line up with the pixels of other sprites !!!)
Good job!
Interesting game.
My first impression was that the graphics remind me of N (the game). Simple gray tiles with slopes on a light gray background. Unfortunately, that likeness only went that far. Right away I thought the movement is just terrible. Clunky, no momentum, gravity absurdly fast. Fall damage? Really? And the camera should have been much smoother.
But, I played on, got used to the clunkiness a little bit, and eventually discovered the somewhat unique mechanics of the game. They do have potential. And discovering the little dialogue bubbles was also fun, made me smile a couple of times.
Then I wished the game wasn't as chaotic. The only way to get a little bit of an overview is at the bubbles. Maybe this was done on purpose, but exploring the same bits multiple times (albeit with more powers) is not a lot of fun for the player. I know it's very similar to the core mechanic of exploration in Metroidvania games, but I think this game is missing something in that respect. It's not as satisfying to discover new powers, especially when it's not immediately obvious how and -where- they can help you. I know guiding the player all the time is also tedious, but this feels too far on the other end of the spectrum. I would consider
- adding a map
- having arrows pointing towards interesting areas
- having an arrow pointing towards the original gravity direction
- separating the game into smaller, more manageable areas
The music is subtle, maybe too much so. It feels a bit overshadowed by the loud sounds. Also, collecting the colour triangles, I seemed to have too much red at once, making the graphics a bit painful to look at. Maybe add actual grayscale areas and only use the collected colours as highlights?
But anyway … Although it seems like I only spoke about the problems, the game was still enjoyable. So I wish it could be improved :) Good job!
Beat it at last! You saw me playing it a little bit on @Danae123's stream. Very nice game.
(Not sure you've ever played these, but this game reminds me of those really old puzzle games you could find on LEGO.com. Inexplicably they got some real gems in their online games sections, including Spybotics: the Nightfall Incident, and there were some more programming-heavy ones, forever lost in the sands of time. It's the music, the atmosphere, the challenge. But I digress.)
The puzzles are all nicely constructed, with the difficulty increasing slowly but steadily. I think there are multiple solutions to most levels, which is a good thing. Although quite often it was too obvious what the solution was 'supposed' to be, with the symbols exactly matching an important address.
As it is, the game offers a lot for 72 hours of development. Still, I would be quite happy to see (or even contribute to) a full game like this. More levels, more commands / tools, more things to do. Multiple sloths in the level, literally being able to walk in the stack region, modifying the code more profoundly. Good job there!
I know it might be detrimental to the gameplay or to teaching the player how to play, but I wish the stack represented the game state more accurately. Right now there has to be an address marked red, which is something the player cannot change, for it to mean 'laser turret'. If the 'objects' had prefixes meaning 'sloth', 'turret', or 00 for no more objects, then the player could modify these as well. Even breaking the level completely could be useful. Also I wish the stack pointer travelled over a continuous region in the memory. Right now it jumps every 4 bytes to stay in the column on the right-hand side. I imagine with a bigger game arena the stack could be at the bottom (or the top) of the address space, making the jumps unneeded.
As for the graphics and the music – already commented on those, they create a very neat, somewhat dark atmosphere, as simple as they might be. However, I didn't feel the text bits / the story added much to the game. There are the clichés of the umptillionth generation reaching sentience, the AI seeking to understand the world, and the AI 'saving' the world by eliminating the human race. But these sound very abstract and are not connected to the game at all, maybe they contribute somewhat to the atmosphere. Also, there is no satisfying conclusion to the story.
(A little bug I've noticed: 0x55 + 0x55 + 0x55 = 0xFF. In level 0x08, however, adding 0x55 to itself twice resets the value directly to 0x00. >= instead of > ? :))
But anyway! Thank you for this, one of my favourites this LD.
Got some 18000, was fun enough. I don't think you need me to tell you that you could have added lots more content, music, etc, so I'll focus on more specific bits.
The upgrade progression felt nice enough, I was a compelled to pick up as many orbs as possible, just to see what the next weapon is. I think the triple spread is all there is, though. The enemy progression was nice at the beginning, too, but then I quickly realised the patterns are gonna be the same just X times as many enemies in them.
Unfortunately the latter introduced some serious performance issues. (The game tried to spawn a giant block of purple pyramids, was extremely choppy and I crashed into them :( )
The sound effects, while functional, are a bit too loud / strong, maybe more variance / subtler sounds?
Anyway, it is a nice score attack shmup! :)
I think you've heard it enough – the soundtrack is pretty nice :)
BUT!
I think (next time or whenever else) you should try to get out of your comfort zone a bit. It feels like you spent 95% of the time on making the music, and it's good, because you know how to do it, and you made 5 solid tracks in 48 hours. Then the 5% on the rest … The graphics and some parts of the gameplay hurt the overall experience, obviously.
And I feel an unrated LD jam could have been the perfect occasion to try new things, getting into graphics, focusing on pixelart, hand drawn, vector, whatever. Trying to make the gameplay have that really satisfying feel to it, with screen shakes, good hitboxes, good feedback, on-cue sound effects, score and reward systems, etc. Polishing the menu system, investing time in having a nice layout for the menus, a nice layout for the controls (it is a bit all over the place).
Just recommendations and nitpicking, I guess. :) Still, good job!
(Thanks for your comment; sorry za rickroll kámo :D)
The screen shake is real in this one.
It is indeed a fun SCB clone, even without the crates. The satisfying feeling of destroying the Romans and all the screen shaking would have been perfect with some sounds, even simple sfxr-made ones, and a little music loop.
I see you must have spent *some* time on making the bullet bounces, because they ricochet off the walls. And yet, it's a detail that's barely noticeable in-game. It's nice to put in little details like that, but makes me wonder if you couldn't have spent your time a bit more usefully – improving the palette (it is a bit bland), adding sounds, making the bullets more visible and prettier with particle effects, etc.
Also maybe an infinite mode (with more weapons, obviously) could be interesting for score attacks.
Good job :)
You've seen me get 5+ on @Danae123's steam, now 6.38 :) (thanks for your comment)
If there's anything that really stands out in this game, it is the addictiveness! Something just kept me going for a number of runs, trying to beat my score. The difficulty curve over time is just right, the challenge seems very skill-based. The enemy waves aren't based on crazy RNG. All good!
(Actually, there is one problem I have with the controls – in the later stages I often pick up a different object than I intended. Wanted the spike ball, picked up the egg instead – wasted a perfectly good egg that I really could have used later on. And vice versa. I think something highlighting which object is currently 'selected' would be nice.)
Although you've managed the crucial parts of a game – the gameplay, the fun, the controls – extremely well, I still wish there was more to it! The graphics are polished enough, but very simple. The enemies and the weapons all play their respective roles, but I wish there was something more still. 'Unique' enemies every now and then (or at predetermined times)? Additional power-ups? Enemy debuffs? Stealthy enemies? And so on. Maybe the beauty of this game is in its simplicity, but it's hard to tell.
The music is quite nice, seems more complete than the graphics. But I can see that this style fits the graphics you've got better than the usual chiptune sound.
Good job overall! :)
Another very pretty game by your team. I think a little tutorial would help a lot, although I managed to figure it out pretty quickly. The challenge was pleasant, took me a couple of tries before I got to the goal! Some minor glitches with the music, and the control delay wasn't ideal. But well done!
I enjoyed that! A nice idea, the story telling was simple but clear. I wish there was a bit more, or that the guy would get impatient during the first bits of the game.
The aesthetic you had going on was also very nice, reminded me of … zefrank's games (like http://www.zefrank.com/buddhist/index.html) for some reason! I really hoped the platforms for the platforming bit would come out the back of the room, just like the walls did in the beginning. But oh well :)
Well done!
Not bad! The puzzles were okay, although SI+TOO was a bit too far-fetched, in my opinion. I wish there were more puzzles.
The music is weird and sort of fits the game, so that's good. I wouldn't say this game fits the theme very well, though.
Good job overall! Always fun to play more 'lateral thinking' games.
Not bad. I think it's missing some feedback. Like screen shake, HP display more intuitively (with a health bar instead of numbers), particle effects or something when hitting enemies, and especially when you get hurt (a sound as well), etc.
The upgrade screen is not very nice because in the later stages of the game I kill the big ones in the middle of a large wave, and as far as I could see, the screen only slows down the enemies. Maybe enable the player to do it when they choose to, at the press of a button? Like this I couldn't really read the upgrades, which have their pros and cons.
I didn't understand the Blood lust spell, it just made me stop shooting. Was I supposed to run over the blood puddles or something?
Overall, quite fun. :)
This is nice. I wish there was music, and especially more types of weapons. Maybe a level select with a weapon selection as well, to try to beat the levels with each type of weapon. I think there was a lot of randomness to the success (or lack thereof) in a level, based on the enemy spawn points and the weapon you got. Also, the galaxy weapon seemed like genuinely the worst in the game. Part of it was the fact that it would make the game extremely laggy if I spammed a couple of projectiles, maybe that's a wine thing though.
Good job overall though, kept me playing for quite a bit.
Nice! It would have been nice to mention that there are only three points of view, and to differentiate the two side views somehow. Still, a nice perspective manipulation game. The randomly generated levels work surprisingly well :)
I'll be honest, I think the best part of the game was the music, which I guess wasn't yours. :/ It is pretty, but it is missing the gameplay. If you were aiming for a twinstick shooter, then these are the issues that come to mind:
- there should be no delay between me pressing the key and the hamster actually shooting
- I'd personally make the shooting + cooldown much faster, make the enemies have a lot more hp, but allow the hamster to move while shooting
- the reloading adds nothing to the gameplay, and the ammo counter is super easy to miss
- shooting up and down is faster than left and right for some reason?
- the monsters should absolutely not spawn on top of the player (or at least let the player know it will happen, so they can move out of the way)
And then of course – more weapons, enemy types, sounds, etc. Still, congratulations on your first LD entry!
It is quite an interesting mechanic, but the presentation is lacking. I wish I could change my selection, locking it in only introduces a bit of artificial difficulty (in my opinion).
The game also needs a bit of balancing. As in, sometimes I spawned directly on top of the exit, or it was right next to me. Sometimes it was on the other end of the map. Sometimes I would get -1 turns on both my item choices, multiple times in a row. Maybe you could have an actual progression by starting with small levels, maybe even completely visible, so that the player understands what each item does.
Again, the mechanic is quite interesting!
Pretty nice. I think I really didn't like the fact that the edges of the room would kill you. And there was one (rare) bullet pattern that I couldn't dodge no matter what (when three red dots started shooting a wide fan of bullets at the same time) – I'm not sure what the hitbox of the ship is like, and it's even harder with slightly floaty controls.
But the enemy design was pretty clever, the random (I assume) rotations seemed quite intentional at times. The graphics are pretty simple, but they work well enough (although the blood seems a bit too … thin? I would either go for a more blobby look, or no blood at all). And the sounds were okay.
Well done!
I've played all of your LD entries so far. While I enjoyed each of the puzzle types a lot, it felt as if you had a format that you felt comfortable with, then you always did a puzzle like that – a puzzle game with narration and calming music in the background, with a minimalistic aesthetic.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that you did something a little bit different! The graphics could use a bit of improvement still. (Personally, I would use a lighter palette, the darks blend together a lot, in the room, but in the puzzle sections as well. Also the anti-aliasing on the font doesn't look so good when it is scaled up.) But it wasn't the same format, and I think it's good you try to get out of your comfort zone.
As for the puzzle itself, it wasn't as obvious at first as the others. I didn't realise every tile has to have either blood or water in it, I thought 'empty' was a type of its own. I didn't realise the constraints would turn red only when all the tiles they concern are filled in, or that the tile itself doesn't count for the constraint. (After I figured it out,) I did see that the hint thing explained the puzzle much more, but I didn't even think of looking there. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the constraints should me more intuitive, the difficulty curve less steep (= more levels, yay), and the UI more clear (lighter colours again).
The 'riddles' were clever, though I didn't figure out all of them before clicking on the cover. A nice touch nonetheless.
The music, as always, very nice and chill, goes well with thinking.
Good job overall!
Nicely polished game, the music was chill and the graphics minimalistic (perhaps too much so), but at least it was obvious what was going on. Well, [SPOILER] except for the first bit where the player was supposed to guess that the room would change when they walked a bit further. But the controls were spot on, the gameplay felt good.
Not bad. Like some people above me, I couldn't find any of the third resource, the 'cyanish things' according to the walkthrough? I don't think they ever dropped. Other than that, the GUI is … minimal, so much it is confusing. I didn't realise what I could click at first, only when I got stuck and started clicking everything I saw. The +'s didn't look much like buttons, the resources required / the shadow buildings didn't seem very interactive, etc.
Not bad. It wasn't very obvious from the beginning how to control things – I tried the fishing rod, the flashing bits showed (X or V???), didn't help. I figured it out eventually, but a little tutorial / explanation screen would be nice.
Other than that, it's a nice little multitasker. There is no challenge once you know the game though. I got to 2200+, then I just got bored, because there wasn't anything else happening. Maybe add other functions to the boatroom? More enemies? Increase the speed? Etc.
Pretty nice. The game looks very lovely, the music is good, maybe some sound effects?
I think it could use a lot more explanations, as well as things to do. At first I thought it was extremely difficult, because the waves of cold would make me freeze even though I had a fire going – I didn't realise you can put more wood / bamboo in the camp to make it even stronger. When I figured that out, it was just farming. I never really felt the 'menaces' added anything to the game. I got rid of them, but I never touched them – do I die if I do? Can't I just jump over them?
I imagine there could be lots of little things that could be done – more plants? More places to find? Use the generator to unlock inaccessible parts of the room? I don't know. Simplicity is always nice, but this has potential :)
Well done though!
It took me a second to get how this worked, the tutorial message scrolled away too quickly :) Other than that, maybe could have had more controls to play with? Sort of like the bombs in Keep talking and nobody explodes.
But the extremely limited communication through the typewriter was also very interesting. Maybe if it was a bit slower overall, giving the player time to react and think about what is happening, or if the messages were more varied, or if the player could 'bluff' in ways other than the controls.
Good job :)
I like the idea in this one … And the graphics are clean enough. I wish there was more to it, though! Like, I don't know … unicode support? :D Just kidding. Maybe multi-character combinations that would create something unique? More letters that do stuff? A way to connect levels vertically? Sounds, music?
Just some ideas. Even without them this is a very solid entry.
Feels like a very nicely polished game … If only there was more content! I assume that's a very time-consuming part though. But anyway, good job!
The aesthetic is very nice, I wish there were more minigames or 90's looking effects to go with it. And of course music, maybe the usual sleep / eat to survive as well? Well don though!
Not bad. The story was okay, but the text was a bit hard to read (small red font on a brown background). Could use music and sound effects, of course, and the little visual glitches (animations happening too late) are a bit distracting. Could be much more interesting if the story was interrupted by progressively more difficult action sequences. As it is, spawning more portals added virtually no difficulty to the game.
But, well done :)
Very nice.
Technicalities: Had some problems getting it to work as well. The OS X download is not an application, running it from the terminal didn't seem to work because asserts failed? Dunno. Resorted to the win version with wine. I thought pico8 games could be run online? But anyway …
The puzzle itself is nice once you understand it, although the way the difficulty is scaled is not particularly pleasant – just throwing 2x as many pieces of furniture every level gets dull. I stopped around level 10? 11? I wish there were additional constraints and types of objects. The 'moving objects into place' problem never seemed to really be a problem. Sure, you had to shuffle bits around in the corridor beforehand, but when there's only one thing to do, it's very obvious. Maybe I didn't get far enough though.
And the music was slightly old by the end of it, but it was still a nice track to listen to. Overall, a very enjoyable puzzle game!
Not bad. I don't know if it's just my computer, but the game would get quite laggy when a couple of monsters were in the bottom part (lava, I assume?) – the sounds of them taking damage were also very annoying.
Other than that it's pretty neat, maybe you could add a strafe key? Or go full twin-stick with the controls. But good job!
Not bad :) I wish there was more to the gameplay. As it is, it is just a game of chance. Sure you can keep knocking down a particular wall until you hit the 'warning' sign, but you have to start somewhere. So it's not a very fair challenge. The whistling was fun at first, but got old very quickly. I actually liked the non-whistling music though, reminding me of old pc platformers. Nice job :)
Very nice. The graphics were lovely, I wish the music developed more. I liked discovering new enemies and environments, although at times it felt too slow / repetitive. Sometimes x + arrow didn't work for me even though the border was flashing? I had to hold it for a bit … Maybe there was an enemy between me and the wall?
But those are details, this is a very solid entry. Well done!
Very fun! The help screen didn't work for me for some reason, but it was really easy to figure it out anyway. Gets hectic and challenging quick, it feels like a particular type of rooms is more demanded in each level? It usually took me too long to realise that :)
The gameplay is very simple to understand and so are the controls. With this kind of games I always wonder if more types of challenges (even harder multitasking) would work better than just straight up increasing the number of people and rooms. E.g. more types of rooms, more elevator shafts, different types of requests?
But, this was fun, well done!
Solid entry. Took me a minute to figure out the puzzle, but didn't feel extremely satisfactory. Although … "The annoyingness serves a purpose." ? Does it really? I'm not sure what you meant.
Other than that, the graphics are pretty nice (although, mixing different scales of pixel art and having the graphics move on non-integer coordinates is a big no no in my eyes), and the music is pretty moody. I could imagine the game being more intricate / darker with that sort of music :)
Well done!
Not bad. A bit too simple / short maybe! The music when talking to the scientist was pretty nice. Other than that, not being to move after jumping was a bit annoying, especially for the finale.
I think this game needs better level design … Having to memorise the level by dying repeatedly is not difficulty, it is just annoying. There are many leaps of faith, and I'll be honest – when I reached a dead end after the 'S' like section, I just gave up.
The black character would also sometimes be very far below the player character, so much so that I couldn't estimate where the death boundary is.
Nice :) It's good to see you trying different genres lately. Tried a couple of times, I guess the strategy is to keep productivity high by keeping food, energy, and motivation as high as possible … Completely unlike (my experience of) Ludum Dare :D
But it's a cool resource management game. The little choices when working on something are nice, the randomly generated names and ideas are also fun.
The music is, of course, very enjoyable. The GUI could have been more unified, maybe?
Overall … Well done!
Nice. One detail I really liked was the way the magic music was layered on top of the normal music, synchronised and everything.
Standing at the left edge is almost a winning strategy, feels a bit cheaty :)
Pretty cool, but the chatting got somewhat repetitive … It became a collectathon sort of thing, and nothing was really any different, just going through the contacts one by one, sometimes having to return, but that was it. I must admit, after getting to an ending like this I was not interested in getting the other two! The walking animation was a bit slow too.
But the music was nice (though I guess not yours) and the graphics pretty coherent. Maybe it would be cool to have a map on a notice board, sort of like you get with police investigations, with pins and photos and stuff? :) Then the progress would be very visual and it would be easier to mix various contact methods.
Well done :)
@anarbitarymustache
Thanks :) Yeah, it is not super clear. There is a timer at the top of the screen, running in sync with the global server timer. Players choose their actions and whenever the timer resets, all chosen turns are taken. Unfortunately, any time the timer resets, tiles and units deselect.
@ibispi @torcado Yeah, the multiplayer is sort of hacky because it was added quite late. It was either always close everything, or actually check if the unit you had selected was moved / killed / hurt / etc. The former was simpler :)
@adamalexander Unfortunately, the server doesn't get a lot of traffic, so it was probably barren :D It can be quite fun (imho) when you connect at the same time with a couple of your friends.
@axoona The starlight is purely random, so there can be times when you don't get any … The game was originally supposed to be much slower-paced, a couple of minutes per turn, better balance … And players could keep their units even after disconnecting and reconnecting. But that didn't quite happen :) And I'm a sucker for dithering, but you're not the only one who thinks it is a bit too busy visually :)
@nardandas I wrote a blog article about this game, and its graphics. Feel free to check it out! http://www.thenet.sk/game/0015/post/0000
Thanks everyone for your feedback!
@unidaystudio @earthcollapse @spacewarp @mrerdalural @neontropics Yes, a tutorial or a guide in a game like this is very necessary. I tried to make the description here (and on the webpage) detailed enough, but I agree that's not as good :)
@hamdan Hah, I'm glad at least one person noticed that silly detail :)
@baraa-marwan Thank you for playing :)
@local-minimum Sorry about that, it is fixed now. The server dies every now and then, probably whenever a certain number of people have connected??? I'm not sure :)
@m-1 Yeah, I was considering putting a bot there for some time, but didn't want to do it after LD and didn't even try to think of the details during the LD, had enough to think about … The game would probably have been better off with some bots, if they weren't too expansive. And Safari was never an intended target, it works on Chrome and Firefox. Thanks for playing! :)
A fun concept, but the airports were too similar, there wasn't much motivation to keep going. The synth voice was somewhat amusing :)
Very nice.
The controls were indeed too floaty / slow. I know Metroid wasn't particularly nice about its destructible / ghost block placement, but in this game, it was really too arbitrary! Having the map right there helped, obviously, but I felt the difficulty it introduced was too artificial. Same goes for the ghost block labyrinth at some point, it mostly seemed like a time delay.
I loved the second track :)
Neat game, but needs lots of work in the UI and instructions. Maybe a short tutorial? Also games like this really benefit from having something like a debugger / stepper, so you can see what your program is doing step-by-step.
Pretty 2.5D. I wanted to enjoy this game – it had a lot of things I like, pixelart-y graphics, fake 3D, puzzle solving, and exploration. But it had its problems, too. The renderer, while neat-looking, was terribly optimised. I know the pains of dealing with sprites and rotating / squashing them as needed, but a couple dozen trees on screen should not cause that much lag anyway. I wouldn't mind the map being much bigger than it apparently should be (if it was the size of the surface of the planet) – but the map was just a rectangle, with invisible walls all the way around. Why not make the player wrap around the edges? The puzzles were cute, although a bit too obscure, not much indication of success, these definitely need more feedback. Same goes for the chests – I'd expect to collect the carrots (and other objects), not just see the chest opened with the carrot still in it. A carrot counter / inventory would be nice. And of course, some sort of calming / ambient music for an exploration / puzzle-solving game would be ideal, sounds as well.
I think this game is very well done though, I just listed my little problems with it :)
Not bad. I could really hear the Czech accent :D … Some sound balancing would really help. Also, movement on the overworld was quite slow.
The fights did indeed get quite boring very quickly … But hey, got to the boss :)
Very frustrating, the super calming music plays an important role in this one :)
I guess a lot of this was already said, but: indicate the losing condition (stuck at the edge / stuck at the highest tile height) with a flashing R for example, it is very sad to see the rabbit die of thirst and have no way to prevent it. I know it might change the end game a bit, but maybe make the entire world collapse one level down if the two bottom-most levels are completely full? Also there is a visual glitch when fighting stuff on a tile to the south (the tile is drawn over the rabbit), but that's a very minor thing.
Overall, simple but well done!
Not bad :) I appreciated that my progress was saved, because I had to stop playing at some point. The controls were fine, the difficulty was reasonable – took me a couple of attempts for each level, and every obstacle was well-defined, so I couldn't really blame the obstacles for my deaths. On the other hand, some of the difficulty was in the form of memorisation of the levels, which seems a bit artificial. Some minor improvements: the tennis balls could be green or something not as similar to the background; the music (which was pretty nice) could loop seamlessly.
Nice job overall!
I like the idea :D And the player's voice was quite amusing.
It also made me wonder about things you could do with a game where you can manipulate the RNG. Would be very interesting in an actual multiplayer setting where some people can secretly control the RNG …
The music was quite nice. The game itself was simple, maybe too much so. Some eye candy and juicing would be nice – like combos, better feedback for individual "notes", multiple types of notes, etc.
But well done, it's hard to make a playable rhythm game, even this simple :)
Cool little concept. I was actually "lucky" enough to spawn with no way to get to the enemy on my first play (there was a big ravine), so I was really confused :D
The intro was somewhat interesting … But the cutscenes were (almost) too much :)
I'm not saying you should not try to develop a story, however complex … But in some cases, including a game like this, less is more – for example, I would have enjoyed this game a lot more if the story was played through, not just told in somewhat incoherent text on black background :) Maybe even try to tell the story without words? That would make the cringiness, as you put it, less strong!
It was cool in a way – I hope the end was the bit with the angel, and it wasn't just a random game freeze :D
As some people already pointed out, the pixel blurriness was distracting, I think you should have had vector graphics or something, so it would all look smooth and coherent. Nice little game overall.
It's an interesting twist on the twin stick shooter genre. The bullet hell in the later stages was somewhat enjoyable at first, but it just gets too samey too quickly! But nice job :)
It is a nice game at its core. I can't but wonder how much better it would be if it were multiplayer somehow :) Also lacks a lot of polish, like prettier menus, HP bars, visual cooldown, tutorial, music, etc etc.
But, once again, the gameplay is very fun. Well done!
It's cute. After spending some time in the game, I'm not convinced you speak French … :D
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: The Singularity Wars](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=23m27s)
Cute little strategy. You might want to spend more time getting rid of bugs next time though :D (different cost of units for the two teams, inability to attack from certain spots / move into them, UI glitches in the sidebar) … Apart from this the balance is probably off – whoever gets extra factories first has a very large advantage. Maybe add other elements to the game, e.g. you need to use resources other than energy to build units in factories? I was also unsure about the very slow battery recharging on units, though maybe I was just too impatient.
We had fun playing the duel though, so good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 2: eDrive](https://youtu.be/xNYgWLuDa-Q?t=34m12s)
Fun little game, I appreciated the cars changing lanes in the later stages :) I hope your racing sim is at least this much fun! :D
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Robo Drainer](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=36m56s)
I admit I abused the "jump from below and drain" glitch a lot. I think that other than that the only safe strategy is to drain one enemy, go back to the girl, then repeat. A single shot drains my battery, and the controls don't permit enough manoeuvring to avoid the bullets. Another issue was that the goal was not very clear, and the game over screen was confusing – did I win? Was it because I killed all the robots? Filling the girl's battery had no effect… But the graphics were cute :) Good job on submitting a game!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Tiny Explorer](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=48m30s)
This was a simple "walking simulator", but it was a simple, chill-out experience. I enjoyed it, the sky (with the Moon, oops) was pretty, the darkness and the following morning, added a nice atmosphere. In the morning I especially liked the glossy, low-poly ground, weird as it sounds :D
Good job!
@james-greenleaf Sorry, I should have made that possible too! You actually have to drag the key onto your character to pick up the key (as it says in the box) :)
Edit: I did fix this just now for the sake of convenience (although it's technically not a completely game-breaking bug).
@stracker, @connor-hagan, @jasperdev Thanks :)
@rogue-studios So with `shake0.pzl` you were shaking the wrong thing :) And yeah, `rapid0.pzl` can be difficult, especially on a trackpad (even though I didn't develop or test the game with a mouse). You could try the other version, there might be some framerate issues (as in, running faster than intended :D)
@simone There is only one key :) And I'm glad you got it in the end :D
@rulojuka Yeah, the bottom left trapdoor was a bug, sorry!
@sokette No spoilers :)
@xsior Thanks. Codes are entered on the ending screen.
@udo I was a bit worried about that, though I did develop the game using only a trackpad (so the speed seemed reasonable to me). The JS version might behave slightly differently on that puzzle, see if playing the other version helps.
@kapricorn-media Thanks! As it says in the ending, don't expect too much from the "good endings" – they really are just glorified easter eggs :)
@blksocks @devastus @pixelformedstudios @omriysh @remzo @mack101dog @badly-drawn-rod @lamm @baconsenpaii Thanks!
@freedom-is-slavery Haha, I didn't realise at the time, but yes, the idea was to have progressively more and more indirect controls in the `lockpk` series :)
@lerpish Thanks, it was fun watching you play my game!
@smbe19 Yeah, I would recommend playing the JS version in Firefox. I've seen some streamers play the JS version in Chrome without any problems, but I guess it's not 100% reliable.
@rijnswand Thanks :) You can get back to the inventory by double-clicking your character, but oh well :) I could have made the inventory window uncloseable.
@krathya Thanks :D … I guess the music is not for everyone – I did include a music volume slider in the settings though.
@pilly Yeah, it would be too annoying to expect players to go through the entire game once again just to get the two little silly things :)
Late reply but … :)
@pio @vasco-rodrigues @bombjack @c0nst4ntin @axoona @pcmaster Thank you for playing!
@vkmicro I agree, I should have made the inventory not closeable … It does say in the instructions that you can double click yourself to open the inventory, but I've watched a number of people play the game and pay absolutely 0 attention to those particular instructions :D
@eremiell There are *technically* 4 endings … However, the last two are just additional "screens" you can access from the good ending. Congratulations on getting the good ending, you weren't missing much with the extra two :)
@g12345 Always nice to see a fan :D (don't have many yet) Yes, with this one I did try to make the puzzles meaningfully accomplish something in the story (i.e. fixing fuseboxes). In R. Lastey they were there but apart from the alphabet puzzle there was not much connection between what the player was doing and what the puzzles were like. Thanks for your support :)
And one last thank you to everyone who played / rated this game, I'm very happy with the ratings. See you in December! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Yo Ho Ho](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=3h24m21s)
Fun game. As has already been said in the comments here and in the stream, it reminds me of FTL. Where it diverts a lot from FTL is the lack of control over your crew during the individual segments. I feel the game would be more interesting if you could either move the crew around during the segments (could be limited to e.g. 1 crew movement per league point), or if the segments were shorter (but there was more of them). This way it felt like success was too dependent on RNG / luck.
Cool game anyway! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Space Warrior](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=1h5m1s)
I don't know how much of it was intended, but the gravity effects were pretty hilarious. Watching the enemy ships come out of nowhere and slap themselves against the Earth did not get old :) The gravity-affected shots were also interesting, maybe a bit too difficult. I feel like I got lucky when I actually managed to win the game.
Good job, it was fun to play this!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Kings](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=1h47m10s)
The rules of the game *seemed* complex (I don't know just how balanced or fair they really are). We didn't have enough time in the stream to actually explore the mechanics deeper. However, the graphics and the UI could really use a lot of work. Maybe a walkthrough tutorial in the beginning, maybe more obvious card slots. Also, as you said, the events get a bit repetitive as the game progresses. I lost my child every second turn!
But still, cool sim game! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 4: Pain That Binds Us](https://youtu.be/Dywcua-3b8U?t=1m19s)
This was an enjoyable (although sad) story presented somewhat interactively. It was indeed mostly just a walking simulator, but oh well :) The graphics and audio worked nicely, the story telling was minimalistic, but it accomplished its goal. And again, why opt out of Humour? It was a bit funny at times :) Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Eat pray live](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=2h35m33s)
This game is very coherent in its art, music, concept, and execution. The overall feeling is of a grotesque farce, and it is appropriate for the gameplay :) While it was a lot of fun, there are still ways I think it could still be improved – online leaderboards, local / online multiplayer / duel. I also thought the challenge was random for the most part – i.e. there is no guarantee a church will spawn anywhere nearby. This seems to go against the tropes of "Big Fish Eat Little Fish". Maybe add an indicator pointing towards the nearest church, but introduce another level of difficulty to balance it out? Anyway, very polished entry. Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 2: Plasma Arena](https://youtu.be/SeUiu4ynC54?t=1h06m20s)
The movement in this is really spot-on, I wish my quake skills were a bit better :) The ammo runs low really quickly, and the red cubes don't replenish a lot. I wish there was a HUD with my current ammo and the number of skulls left. It would make the progress in the game much more measurable.
I had fun, good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Keep Your Sanity](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=2h3m22s)
It was not always very clear what was going on in this game. Obviously the darkness should hide a lot of the enemies, and that's alright. But I didn't realise the meter above my head was my sanity. I suppose the flashlight losing charge was a scripted event? Reading the description now I can see you explain some of these mechanics, but it would be nice in the game as well. A UI for displaying all the weapons I am carrying along with their number on the keyboard would have been nice. A lot more variety in the enemies – as far as I can tell, there were only two types, and the second was a very short appearance. Little problems like this made the intended horror atmosphere less visible. Making the enemies much more rare and individually stronger, adding shadows cast from objects, adding line of sight, hiding areas of the map which aren't visible (i.e. behind the walls), varying the map a little bit (different floor types, more house-like / dungeon-like layout), having to conserve ammo – all of these could potentially make the atmosphere better. And a proper ending of course :) Having said all of that, I still enjoyed beating the game. Good job :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Last Hope](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=1h29m32s)
This is mechanically quite an interesting game, but it suffers a lot from the random gravity glitches in certain places of the ship, and the lack of a very clear explanation of what exactly is going on. I did things that seemed right, randomly picked up a wrench (didn't actually know I needed it), figured a vacuum is probably good to keep generators cool, hit "Source of the problem" with my wrench … :D I was happy to see that my guesses seemed to work and lead me to victory, but at the same time I feel like I just got a bit lucky there. Still, the atmosphere is quite interesting; with more mechanics, and a clear tutorial (e.g. splitting the game into several levels, where the first is a very simple ship with only a single generator, then adding more and more difficulties in the following levels) this could potentially be as fun as Keep talking and nobody explodes – a 2-player co-op would have a world of possibilities! Good job :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 3: Travel](https://youtu.be/5SMgmMwZhJg?t=24m20s)
This one is extremely fun, although quite difficult for me :( As you could see, I could barely reach the boss. The overall hectic feeling is intended I'm sure, but at times it might be too much. Also I didn't understand at first that the weapon power ups were not enemies, and you had to explain the yellow / purple bar to me. Maybe a slower tutorial / more levels with ramping difficulty? :) But still, this was very well polished and the game was very coherently put together. Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Energia](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=1h56m30s)
It's a cool little game, but it is in dire need of good UI feedback! I would like to know which power plant I have currently selected, which skill does what by means of tooltip (instead of having to go to the separate help screen), when I gain skill points. I would like to know which of my power plants is under attack, without having to look around the whole map, same for attacks. Plants hiding behind the sidebar are a problem.
Other than that, how about some variety in the plants themselves? E.g. some could be "large", some "small", and the small ones could only perform two of the three utility / defend actions, etc.
It's a simple game (with a cool soundtrack!), but good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Last Question](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=4m42s)
This game has a nice atmosphere to it, and its concept could work. Its visuals are pretty well suited to the game, too. I probably would survive longer on further attempts, but the difficulty is still quite unforgiving (which might not necessarily be a bad thing :D). Some bug fixes which would make the overall experience much smoother:
- make sure the text input always stays in focus (instead of having to click on it every now and then) - make the drones switchable by command - make sure the camera shows the drone in the window (the camera slowly drifted higher and higher for me)
I guess the original intention was for the drones to only capture their environment with their own cameras (or when the player uses `render`), why was there an overhead view anyway?
As for the audio in the background – it's a cool little idea and the story fits the theme, but its charm gets lost when it's so quiet / non-stop. I know the story, but I'm not sure I would know it if I only played the game. It would be better if there were subtitles, or an option to make it stop / progress line by line / make it louder. I would expect something like this to be unfolded in breaks between chapters of a game (see for example SpaceChem story telling).
It's still a very interesting game, so good job! :)
Very nice entry (as always :) ). It took me a second to understand the control scheme properly, but I suppose it was part of the fun. One little thing I wish you'd fix was the text in the top right – when I'm in the vessel and I switch between items, the text in the top right stays the same, so I can't really tell which item is selected when they are all stacked on top of each other.
Other than that, it was a lot of fun exploring the various items and enemies. I was wondering what might lie in the depths below (then I got there and I couldn't really do anything with the huge towers, maybe there is something I can do if I use an item?). The game reminded me of Spelunky (as well as Spelunker) in some ways, not the least of which was the difficulty.
The low-rez art with the extremely minimalistic palette went well with the feeling of the darkness enveloping the vessel steadily. The sounds were fine, but I really wish you would invest some time into a soundtrack. A little ambience in this one would add a lot to the experience, I think.
I enjoyed this :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 2: Powering Down](https://youtu.be/xNYgWLuDa-Q?t=22m14s)
This was a lot of fun to play, even though I tried to go as low-energy as possible all the time :) The momentum-based movement and how the enemies would be pushed back by my bullets felt amazingly satisfying. Same goes for the sounds. The graphics were also very pretty. I wish there was just a bit more to the game, maybe more enemies, more challenges, power ups, etc. ?
Great job overall!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 2: Power Outage](https://youtu.be/SeUiu4ynC54?t=11m53s)
Neat little game, but needs a lot of work! The jump, while you might have intended it, seems very buggy. The rats seemed generally way too fast and I didn't realise that I could stun them with my flashlight for a long time. The darkness could be made to look better if there were e.g. things glowing in the dark – little LED lights, corners of platforms, rat eyes, etc. It would make the game a bit easier, but the difficulty introduced with the darkness doesn't seem very fair, especially when crossing spike pits.
Still, a nice game :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 3: All Systems Online](https://youtu.be/5SMgmMwZhJg?t=2m40s)
This was fun, although a lot could be improved, obviously. If I were to suggest the first thing to make the game feel more "fun" to play, it would be to increase the tempo – make the default movement speed faster; make the bullets dodgeable, but more damaging; make the enemies move more actively (actively trying to ram you after losing turrets / building their own); make stronger enemies appear as time progresses. Also the camera viewpoint is very tiny, maybe a zoom out option? As it is, I am sure people will be happy to spend an hour perfecting their ships, although there isn't as much incentive to do so in my opinion :) Still, good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 2: Deflection](https://youtu.be/SeUiu4ynC54?t=21s)
Nice little puzzle game. It really needs some polish, but the core mechanic could be interesting. The largest problem I had was that I didn't know *when* my lasers hit the targets (it only said "at the wrong time"), so I had to guess quite a lot. I wish there was a proper simulation mode, where I could pause, or step-debug my program tick by tick.
Apart from this, I understand this is a gamejam game, so it is not easy to actually use a mechanic to its fullest potential, but – there need to be more levels, that offer more interesting challenges. Right now every level seems quite obvious and there isn't much creativity involved in coming up with a solution. Good level design in a puzzle game like this is crucial.
Anyway, thanks for the game. Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Nex Machinan](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=25m53s)
As simple as the genre is, this game was quite fun. The visuals were coherent, the overall look quite polished. Of course adding more power-ups or mechanics would be good. I did see some of the enemies had a red aura around them, although I never stayed alive long enough to figure out what it did! Good job!
(Go rate some games! This game deserves a placement.)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Power Runners](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=2h21m58s)
Nice and simple. As I said in the stream, the rockets were a bit too unforgiving :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 4: Alienation](https://youtu.be/Dywcua-3b8U?t=10m50s)
This game is simple, but well polished. I expected something else after reading the introduction, something less moody. But that's not a problem :) The game had a nice aesthetic to it, using very few colours and interesting shading for the walls. The controls and the camera were smooth. I only wish there was more difficulty over time – the game wasn't much of a challenge from beginning to end. Overall, it was quite a chill experience! Good job :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Eclipse](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=2h51m10s)
This was interesting … The art is quite lovely, but I'm not sure I would call this a game. I wish there was more experimental gameplay, not just the maze, which was more tedious than challenging.
But, nice job :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 4: The Shutdown](https://youtu.be/Dywcua-3b8U?t=25m40s)
(sorry, (J)RPG's are not my favourite genre and we certainly didn't have enough time to showcase enough of it :D)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 2: Point of View](https://youtu.be/xNYgWLuDa-Q?t=15m5s)
What can I say :) It's a nice little clicker game, the texts are funny, but I wish I had more time to read them (they could stay on screen after I lose). Good job for such a short time. Amazing graphics!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Dim Wit](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=10m40s)
I really liked this, as simple as it was. The controls were kind of creative, while very intuitive of course. The challenge was enjoyable. If I could suggest some improvements, maybe a less steep difficulty curve (don't make the timer so short so quickly), and definitely online leaderboards.
Thank you for the game!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Climate Clicker](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=2h38m44s)
Sim games are not my forte, but I could still enjoy this game. It is a nice mixture of cute, chill, and terrifying (when everything is going wrong and you have no idea why). The game reminded me of Populous for obvious reasons. I think I would appreciate a tutorial level (as well as a more goal-oriented campaign mode) to learn the mechanics slowly. As it is, it is quite confusing at the beginning – even though the tooltips are helpful and quite clear, I feel like I should be saving my people, not waste time reading the tooltips.
The simulation itself seems to have many facets (temperature, wind, water, bears), but the map is too simplistic to let this show. Maybe add mountains, forests, biomes? Also, while there are families which have names and their own little stories, I have no time to investigate this or connect with them emotionally (though maybe that's good, considering their unavoidable fate). I wish there was a speed setting, including a pause mode, to strategise, and to explore the world.
All in all, good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 2: Charge](https://youtu.be/AXdZR4HVHxc?t=40m13s)
(yay I'm in the leaderboard)
This was a cute game, and the overall experience very satisfying. The game felt simple, but polished, with the visuals and the music fitting together quite nicely. If only we ignore the morbid nature of the little creature's life ;) Also at the very beginning I was confused by the Android UI at the bottom, took me just a second too long to realise that was the intended aesthetic … Oh well :D Good job with the game!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Plug Me](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=2h13m8s)
Excellent game! Well polished, good job actually using your central mechanic in various ways to have more and more challenging levels. It is rare to see such good level design in a gamejam game. The music was fitting, the death streak was a nice touch, the graphics were cute! What else can I say :)
Great job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Power Hungry Robot](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=2h7m26s)
Sweet and short, the challenge was reasonable :) I wish there was more to it though!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Power](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=1h13m29s)
The game can easily get quite hectic, which is good – I had a lot of fun with it. You might want to consider a short (5 – 10 second) one-time tutorial at the beginning to show the player what the individual commands do (instead of telling them), and also that the coordinate system refers to tiles, not gridlines. Speaking of which, it does look quite "organic" when the servants position themselves at various places in the tile, but it would still be nice to see more clearly which tile they occupy to avoid confusion.
The low accuracy of the servants' shots, while somewhat fun to watch, is actually pretty frustrating – does it add that much to the game? The challenge of the game lies in trying to type commands quickly and somewhat accurately, which gets difficult in its own right. Having to worry about the servants hitting my own hexagon in addition to that seems a little bit unnecessary :)
Anyway, very fun. Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Manual Mech](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=4m25s)
This was the first game we did though, so watch only if you enjoy awkward commentary (from me) :D
I enjoyed figuring out the control scheme, although maybe it would have been nice to visually display the trajectory for your jump? I felt getting out of the pit next to the drill in level 1 was near impossible. To be fair, it was a pretty obvious trap so it was "deserved", but still. In short, it seems the biggest problem with the game right now is difficulty balancing. Good job for a jam! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 2: MoonBall](https://youtu.be/SeUiu4ynC54?t=0h58m56s)
Nice little start, but can of course use lots of polish. Graphically, the ball could rotate, the darkness could be less total – it almost impedes gameplay as it is. The soundtrack is cute, but I don't think it fits the game very much. Gameplay-wise, there is not much – not much challenge once you know where to go. I'm sure you could add more interesting platforming, less linear progression, enemies, etc.
Nice game :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Battery Low](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=1h12m49s)
It took me a minute to figure out the appropriate matching of phones and chargers. In particular, having two variants (black / white) of both the horizontal and the regular chargers made me think these are very different. After that initial confusion, however, this is a very fun game of multitasking and micromanagement. With a whole bunch of additional polish (music, better UI, combos?, etc) the core gameplay would shine. Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: AI; ace intelligence](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=2h52m51s)
This was an interesting idea. While the "How to play" screen certainly explained the rules, it is probably not very appropriate for such a complex set of rules – in this type of rules, a (skippable) "walk the player through the first couple of turns" type of tutorial is much more effective. The interface was simple and usable, maybe the indicators (turns left, swarm size, power, power usage) could have been more obvious on the screen. It was also not entirely obvious what the two cards in the top right were – I assume they were the last card played and the rest of the deck? It would be nice if you had custom graphics for most of the cards. I can imagine a stylised deck with e.g. power cards (mostly hearts suit if I recall?) with an obvious energy-like symbol on them, swarm cards with a symbol of a bot, etc. As it was, even if there was a correspondence between suits / numbers and functions, I could only tell what a card did by looking at the tooltip. While it is nice that the game is essentially playable with a regular deck of cards, its game presentation doesn't have to follow the same format. I would also be interested in how this could be modified to be a 2-player duel game. Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Cyclades Travelling Sailor](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=1h31m22s)
Very simple and in need of a lot of audio and UI polish, but still somewhat engaging. It would probably not fit the theme as well, but maybe the levels could have a "par" solution, being the TSP optimum, while the players could also solve the level with a "subpar" solution of their own? Then e.g. unlock additional levels based on the current point total.
Good job :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 2: Escape Velocity](https://youtu.be/AXdZR4HVHxc?t=12m40s)
A simple concept, but still fun to try. Maybe it's not super replayable, but that's okay :) The minimal UI and audio actually helped this game, it made it feel quite space-y, in a genuine / realistic way. I really liked the chromatic aberration effect on the UI and the models (I think). Just a little detail that made it look a lot more polished :D One thing that worried me was the gigantic space station though – according to the velocity readings it seemed to be hundreds of metres across. Scary. But good job with the game :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: TRIAL OF THE 3 SUNS](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=2h38m53s)
Nice concept, although the shooting mechanic felt a bit underused to me. As hectic as it could be, I wonder what it would be like if the arrows that you have to hit charge up your power bar, which you need to stay alive, move, and shoot. I also expected the game to be more rhythm-based when I looked at the screenshot first, but oh well. The graphics and levels reminded me very much of the 2010 flash game, Tower of Heaven.
Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 2: Spark Runner](https://youtu.be/SeUiu4ynC54?t=23m19s)
This game is quite cute and challenging. I wish there was some music, suitable for the cute, slightly frantic nature of the game. Also, while I enjoyed the difficulty for the most part, there were some parts which felt very unfair – blind falls, leaps of faith, etc. The controls were okay, even though the wall jump was a little bit finicky – I get that I need to "stick" myself to the wall before jumping again, but maybe it could be just a little bit more tolerant.
Nice job :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: POW](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=2h21m40s)
As said on stream, this game is very well polished and it's hard to find flaws. Maybe the biggest is that it is a bit of a cliché puzzle game :D But of course the actual puzzle elements seemed quite interesting. I wish the game was actually separated into levels, so that mechanics and strategies could be introduced in separate levels. It would add a sense of satisfaction to the progression. Balancing is extremely difficult for any game jam, so I don't mind this as much: the overall difficulty could have been higher. There is a lot of potential with many arrangements of the obstacles, but many of them fall into conceptually very similar categories (e.g. place the gadget on one side of the path, then take the other side to avoid spikes, bombs, teleports, etc.). It is hard to design a good, difficult puzzle level, but I'm sure it could be done :) One mechanic I would probably change is the gadget charge – why is it time-based? I feel a movement-based countdown would have been much more natural in a puzzle game. This could even introduce additional layers of "puzzle" challenge (instead of "move fast" challenge) – e.g. some levels could have a gadget with a really short countdown, so the player movement would have to be perfect.
So in summary, a lot of potential in an already very polished game. Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Rats will kiss the gunner's daughter](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=50m24s)
Interesting concept. Sadly on stream we completely failed to take notes properly so we didn't get the mutineer :D But I can see the appeal of a logical puzzle of this sort, where the player has to figure out who is lying and how to ask the pirates appropriately. The graphics were also very nice and funny (although serious pet peeve: mixing pixels of different sizes, makes it look a lot worse than it could have been!), and the music appropriate. Very well done!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Saito's Transgression](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=53m30s)
This game is quite pretty and feels polished. It tells a part of a story, but its gameplay is somewhat lackluster. It feels like it could easily be an animated movie instead of a game. There is of course a lot of potential – the animal capturing mechanic, while not unique, can easily be used to implement all sorts of puzzles. The story can lead the protagonist to a variety of locations, etc etc. The very first thing I would probably do differently, while not requiring that much more work, is to make the "walks" more interesting – stray from the "horizontal line" format, make the player a bit faster, make them climb ladders and move vertically to create a less obviously linear experience. The story can be linear while feeling compelling if you just add little tid-bits of dialogue here and there when the player interacts with whatever is on their path.
Just my two cents :) Good job with the game!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Meltdown](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=1h35m39s)
This was quite fun, thanks to the various voiceover lines. Maybe it was part of the challenge, but it was a little bit frustrating when I hit E but nothing happened (because the crosshair was not lined up with the button well enough). I could see the levels getting more interesting, e.g. more complicated platforming (but more time to do it of course), ladders, jumps, … Or, more complicated controls, i.e. not just hit the button, but hit this sequence of buttons, pull this lever, turn this knob, etc etc à la Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Automated Explorer](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=1h14m22s)
Very nice game with a metroidvania feel to it. The progression and puzzles were quite typically metroid-y but still nicely balanced (considering it was a compo entry). I didn't try the "optional" power-ups, some did look really difficult (the row of turrets shooting criss-cross). The graphics, while they have their charm, could probably be a bit more involved though ;)
Very nice!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Powerless Miner](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=2h56m52s)
Very nice puzzle concept! I can only say, it was a bit too easy overall :) The levels only started exploring the various things you can actually do with the gameplay rules towards the end, and then the game was over. It is rare to find a lot of well-designed levels in a gamejam game though, so this is hardly a criticism.
Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Step out of the light](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=1h38m11s)
Very cheesy / corny, but fun to play and discover the various jokes. As mentioned in the stream, while it was probably there to make sure the game fit the theme, I didn't feel that the running out of power mechanic added anything to the game – I simply had to keep going back and forth instead of solving the puzzle directly. Also, I would have loved the ending music track to be the actual soundtrack (with fewer "jokes" to interrupt it) – it was pretty good.
Overall, good job guys :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 2: Funkotron 5k](https://youtu.be/AXdZR4HVHxc?t=49m42s)
This was super cheesy, but still fun. The procedural animation was very fun to watch :) The movement didn't feel very responsive though, probably because I was walking into large buildings too often. Might have been interesting / more entertaining to make the large buildings topple over, then the Funkotron would walk over them. Also, when I watched the stream again, I did see the bars were indeed beating very different rhythms every "funk level". When streaming, I didn't actually notice this, so I just kept clicking with the same monotonic rhythm as the very first one. It would indeed be much more challenging / fun to actually have to follow the rhythm. Maybe also indicate the rhythm with a DDR-like / Guitar-hero-like UI (where beats are coming from the top of the screen towards a spot at the bottom, which is when they need to be hit)? Anyway, a fun experience. Good job! :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 1: Dont ask me to stop being a outdated junkrobot](https://youtu.be/bhOEvC7XxZo?t=2h19m25s)
This game can be quite fun and intensive, though I felt it was a little bit buggy when restarting – sometimes the shift key would "stick"? Also I wish the intro "tutorial" was just a bit more intuitive, I didn't realise the shift clicks applied to one and three bars respectively …
Other than that, it was a very fun experience. The music fitting, the graphics seemed quite polished. Quite addictive, too – maybe add an online leaderboard? Overall, good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 2, part 2: CowPow!](https://youtu.be/SeUiu4ynC54?t=35m57s)
This was fun, the frustrating kind of fun :) The inertia-heavy movement and difficult handling of cows could be slightly tuned down. I'd say players would be much happier to play the game if it was more "accessible" – i.e. getting the first cows would be basically guaranteed, because the handling would be easy and the collector would be very close, but then the game would get harder over time – the collector could move further away, the cows could start moving around faster, etc etc. As far as the graphics go, the hand-drawn art is fine, but I'm not sure the spacey background fits – go all out with the art style if you decide on one.
Good job, it was fun to play this :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Leaf Runner](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=38m39s)
This is a nice concept, but the execution could use a lot of polish. The streets felt bare with no decor, other cars, pedestrians, police cars chasing you, etc. It seems you have put some thought into the trading system, with different prices and times, etc. I wish this was more clear to the player though – there is not much indication of zone boundaries, of any "reason" for the price fluctuations. The best I could do was drive to other places (terribly, cause the curbs kept hitting my car!) and hope the prices are better there. I would suggest limiting your scope a bit more next time, to get a less complex but more polished game.
Good job though :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: DRAIN](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=19m55s)
The game looked pretty, and I took the time to beat it. I wish there was more to the gameplay, though – I mostly stood in front of the enemies and held down the mouse button. The movement without strafing was kind of weird, but it wasn't necessarily bad. It could probably be used creatively when adding *something* (parrying? more strategic usage of power?) to the gameplay!
Good job overall!
Thanks for streaming my game also :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 2: Fleeting powers](https://youtu.be/AXdZR4HVHxc?t=12m40s)
Simple, but fun. Trying to get a high score is always more fun with an online leaderboard! I wish the powers were a bit more deadly, mostly because I couldn't use them properly I guess :D Got way too many vortex spells. Other than that the controls were nice enough, though it wasn't immediately obvious to me that the rock one you can "draw" a wall with. Good job overall :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 2: Pixel Driver](https://youtu.be/AXdZR4HVHxc?t=26m17s)
Simple mobile-like game. Fun trying to reach the top score, it's nice that you took time to implement an online leaderboard (without names but oh well :)). Controlling the car was mostly okay, though it really seemed to me the acceleration / deceleration are off – the acceleration is very slow, while the deceleration is too abrupt. And finally, even though it's a game fit for a mobile platform, the popup asking to subscribe to a newsletter was certainly not appreciated! But oh well, good job making a fun game :)
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Rocket Barrel](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=3m40s)
Cute little game, I wish there was a bit more variety in the barrel types / jumps / angles, etc etc. It was interesting to see the various stellar objects in the background, a little motivation to try to get further :)
Nice job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 3, part 1: Guiseppe's Kidnapping](https://youtu.be/LN1svjCl2z0?t=3h1m44s)
This game is very dark, and the combination of the cute little creature and the macabre bleeding mechanic is interesting. The music fits the game very nicely and the window fading out slowly is a nice touch. The level design could probably benefit from making the levels a bit less expansive and instead introduce more puzzle mechanics. Maybe also make the blood bags last a shorter time, so the player really has to count their steps! As it was, the last levels were mostly about patience. Also, the lack of ending is … depressing :D
Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae plays on Twitch. :) Here's a link:
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 3: Shipyard power struggle](https://youtu.be/5SMgmMwZhJg?t=40m10s)
Not a bad start for an RTS, but it needs a lot of polish. And of course, balance :) Overall the feeling I got from the game was hopelessness, with no chance of getting enough energy to defend myself. Probably needs resources or something other than just building units. Good job anyway :)
@voxel Well … I'll be honest, due to a bug, the v-numbers which you can technically discover don't show up in the phonebook. Having said that, there are no dialogues for the additional v-numbers, so you lose nothing x)
@CMLSC As we discussed in the IRC … you need flash player, and apparently a somewhat better computer :D Sorry! I might do a desktop build if I extend my library, but no promises.
@HDtv, @vkmicro, @micahtron, @rik-thunder, @boorik, @Laguna, @gamepopper, @galan Thanks for playing :)
@devastus Yeah, the part where the music changes was a weak attempt at humour. Oh well!
@caramelcode Yeah so … My library in theory supports Javascript builds. I was planning to release both a Flash version and a JS version (because the latter might not have very good performance depending on the browser / computer). During LD however, one of my JS builds would freeze the browser a lot - I think it has to do with the way the city map is rendered (pixel-by-pixel software renderer), which is something I haven't really optimised for in the JS targets of my library. Not to mention the game relies a lot on gapless audio loops for the music, which is something that is not easily possible in JS right now. Sorry!
@honest-dan Thanks a lot for being super patient on stream with the game anyway. Hopefully you can experience it without the lag at some point :)
@fireslash I agree. The saddest thing is that I actually developed most of the game with a debug mode where the text scroll was more or less instant. I should have made that an option / triggered it automatically when the player double clicked. Thanks for playing!
@umsingelopugmanco Thanks :) I noticed the overflowing text but didn't really mind - it was the cell tower for all the residential apartments and that was pretty obvious x)
@ciaranw Yeah so … Initially the theme was meant to be incorporated with "the more -information- you have, the worse it is". Not only because you are uncovering the conspiracies of the city you are overseeing (while being part of one), but also because as an AI you are becoming more and more sentient the more contact you have with people - eventually leading to you becoming "sentient" / rampant after a period of feeling more and more trapped in your mission. But, tick tock. :)
@edmond00 The OST for this game is all original compositions made by @eidovolta. There is a single track which you mention that samples Deus Ex - UNATCO as a tribute. :)
Thanks everyone for your comments and feedback!
Ta-dah, I placed items into the back pack :)
Also, I never knew there was a mouse-option for PICO-8 games :O
> wait a year
I found it interesting how the feeling of a dystopia could be felt from the very first lines, even before the catastrophe happened. What a sad, sad little world.
Went into Tetris-- I mean quadrofall auto-pilot. Made a line of four. Nothing happened. What a twist!
@wheffle Hmm, that should not be an issue. Make sure you've got the correct answer typed in (the game tells you when the word is right). Then it turns into a little rectangle card. At that point just drag and drop (i.e. hold the mouse button down on the card and keep it held until you move it to the inventory :D).
A quick way to test this (spoiler alert), in the Social Room (the room just below the Starting room), the answer to the left guy is "hey". Try if this works?
@crabcrabcam @udo @adonisdevs Thanks for playing and for the comments! :)
@wheffle Glad to know it worked eventually. Yes, I realised that the backtracking is just too annoying a little bit too late. I mitigated it slightly with the double-click to warp but it's not enough for sure. If I ever do a post-jam version, that is the #1 gameplay change I would do.
@MZA Yeah, tutorials are not my strong suit x) At some point I was considering having separate maps (the first one being tutorialised), but at that point it would already be a large code change. And having a single large world opens up a lot of possibilities for interesting puzzles which use multiple word operations. So in true spirit of old-school point 'n click adventures, the player has to figure it out themselves :D
@steffo Thanks! I know the game is not super friendly to non-fluent speakers (English is not my first language either), but I don't think word puzzle games like this can be made "internationally" accessible, it just goes with the genre. And, I was waiting for our stream (with @DanaePlays) for rating other people's games, don't worry.
@kapiteinkoekwous Haha yup, I was there. I must say ArjenDesign played the game surprisingly well!
@zicboy Maybe :)
@norrimo Yup, old school (inspired) games are what I do for the majority of Ludum Dares. Also, there is a [walkthrough available](http://ludum.thenet.sk/ld42/walkthrough.php) if you're stuck and want to see the rest of the game :)
@g12345 Yeah, I realised after the jam that `spill` is actually a much more natural answer there. I added a couple of letters because I had to admit it wouldn't be a reasonable riddle otherwise. Thanks for playing :)
@chris-coe Thanks! Taking notes is encouraged of course :) The one individual in the social room? Are you talking about the medicine guy? What other solutions did you think of?
@saoi-games @rahim-pxr Thanks for playing :)
@bustosman It was perhaps not the most direct way I could phrase a riddle for that word. Still, I think if you know army ranks, it is not that difficult.
@logicon211 Thanks. I'm glad people can actually spot the theme in the map / inventory mechanic as well. Way too late I realised there is not that much need for having all the rooms discovered, providing you with a lot of free inventory space. Starting room for example :) But I knew it would be easier for people to find the correct paths from green words to yellow ones if they actually had the words in their inventory so they could look at them. I guess it is a trade-off.
@glock00 Hah, thanks for the comment, even if it is not your type of game ;)
@phlip45 Yeah, in about the last ~2 hours I realised some of the words would require way too much backtracking. Being able to teleport using the map would be a very nice solution, but I was worried about implementing it improperly (in particular, there is a short period of time where you are locked in the lower third of the map without having access to the rest – I wouldn't want the player to be able to teleport out of that). So instead I implemented the next best thing I could think of, double-clicking to warp. In a post-jam version, should there ever be one, I would have the player actually take the transformation with them, so they can change the words in their inventory, without having to go to the room where they found that transformation.
@matank I'm actually not sure what you are talking about, since you cannot actually click to move in the game, other than on exits. Maybe your player character was climbing up a ladder and you were trying to start the interaction? I know this is an issue that I didn't quite have the time to fix. And thanks again for mentioning me in your post!
@axoona I'm aware of that – but I think for a challenging puzzle game centred around words this is simply unavoidable. Sorry it spoilt the fun for you, but I hope you enjoyed the game anyway :)
@laurim This came up in one of the streams actually … That particular transformation was added very much last-minute into the game (because I didn't realise blind has an "n" and climb has an "m" :D), so the text doesn't explain it very well. It is not bugged, and it is not meant to transform m -> n, it actually does mi -> ni :)
@shakedimus Thanks; the double warping happens when you double-click more than once. I noticed it, and it was too late to fix it, but frankly I kind of like it :D
@wrenpirate Sorry for that – I updated the walkthrough with a specific instruction for (3, 4). If you don't warp around by double-clicking, you should notice that your robot slips on the oil on the floor, so you cannot "stop" at the interaction point. Thanks for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed the humour!
Not my type of game (puzzle-sim?), but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Some graphics polish would be nice, especially when the cities get extremely cluttered with ? and ! – maybe you could go for a slightly stylised view of the countries you chose instead of geographic accuracy? Something like metro maps. One thing that I have to wonder about, since there are leaderboards – how are the goods spawned? It seems like it is a randomised process, maybe it should be seeded so that each level has the same blocks spawning? Otherwise it takes a couple of attempts before you get a "good run", although I guess a good strategy is still key :) But good job overall, the gameplay is solid!
Nice. The puzzle mechanic itself is great, the rules are explained with the levels in a smooth enough way, but I didn't feel any level was particularly difficult. Having the stats after each level is nice, and it shows that there isn't that much variance across solutions for the majority of levels – not totally unexpected given the rules.
As for the graphics, they were not terribly interesting, but it was clear what was happening. Still, I wonder how this would have turned out in crisp 2D :)
Very cool. Minimalistic but pretty graphics, fitting music, and a lot of interesting level design. My only gripe is that the rule for when blocks can be moved and when not was not really explained. It looked like they could only be slid so that they form a closed / gapless column or row? Once or twice I thought I had a solution to the level only to find out one of the moves was impossible. Even though without explaining this rule explicitly the game is much "cleaner", perhaps it is not worth it to sacrifice the explanation just to keep the atmosphere. Nonetheless, great job overall!
Lovely game :) I wondered if the lack of clear spaces in the titles / instructions was intended.
I tried to play this game with a trackpad, so it took be a bit longer, but I don't think you can be blamed for that, it is clearly a drag and drop game :)
The graphics were very good, the music was not too distracting. There is a lot of variety that could be found in "drag and drop" puzzles, the checkmate one being a nice example. Unfortunately, I didn't see the theme expressed very much in the games themselves. The tweet one was perhaps the closest?
Well done, it was fun to play this!
Nice little puzzle game :) The levels were interesting and the difficulty not too curve (or high). The core gameplay is quite simple and although there are some levels where certain tiles are predefined, I wish there were more mechanics, e.g. levels where you can only place a certain thing, or levels where the check list has slightly different rules, and so on. A town puzzle like this can have lots of interesting rule sets, of course :D
Some polish would also be nice, like a level selection UI or fancier in-game HUD. The audio is somewhat repetitive but it fits the game I guess. The faux 3D is a nice effect though it adds nothing to the game.
Good job overall!
Very solid metroidvania / puzzle game. The main puzzle sounded just cryptic enough, but was not really difficult, just a little bit annoying due to backtracking / lack of me also drawing a map in my notes :) Also, I kind of wished there was a visual indication when I got the fifth signal block in the right order – I was pretty sure I got the solution right but not having *some* sort of sound was a bit worrisome.
The graphics were cute, though simple, same for the music. The latter got a little bit repetitive, maybe
I wish there was more of this game!
Nice! The core mechanic was interesting and the various knights presented interesting difficulties. Some things could be improved, I feel – in the explanations, you say something like "if surrounded by 4 tiles, then X" (for the knight deaths and the warping). I found this quite confusing since at first I didn't realise that if a knight is surrounded by corrupted tiles on two sides and there are empty tiles on the remaining two tiles, the knight dies. Same for the warping.
It might be good to visually display what a knight's turn speed is. At any point you only see its current turn counter and you have to remember what it resets to. Perhaps show the different knight speeds with different graphics? E.g. a slow knight with turn speed 4 wearing heavy armour, a fast knight with turn speed 1 wearing light armour. While you're at it I'm sure there are other variations that could be introduced, e.g. knights that only attack horizontally, knights that attack diagonally, knights that move like the knights in chess, etc.
After all the knights in a level are dead, it is kind of satisfying to fill out all the uncorrupted tiles, but at the same time, it is just busy work. Perhaps make the dark lord automatically and quickly do this when all the knights are dead? There is no challenge after all. Would be more interesting if there are special tile types, e.g. ones that can only be walked on a number of times before they collapse.
Anyway, good stuff :)
Nice! It felt a bit laggy but maybe that's just the web version.
The level design was good for the most part, though the mechanic was really extremely simple. I am a bit unsure about the choice to make the gameplay not-quite-turn-based and not-quite-realtime – the player's movements are turn-based, but the falling platforms are not, nor are the spikes. Maybe this adds a bit more challenge but I think I would have preferred an actual turn-based puzzle game. Having said that, the versus mode might not work without the realtime component.
The graphics looked simple but they were nicely polished. I was happy to see "Optimal" show up when I finished some levels, but then I was disappointed that I could not go to a level select screen, and try to score "Optimal" on all the levels. A missed opportunity to make the game more attractive to perfectionists! :)
Good job!
It's a cool puzzle mechanic. My number one suggestion, perhaps even more important than having a tutorial, is to animate what is happening. It is difficult to keep track of the whole screen. Additionally, from the description alone I did not realise that it would sometimes take two turns for a die to be removed, which is what the cracks mean? I could see this expanded into more of a level-based puzzle game, rather than an infinite mode only.
So right away I noticed that this game seems to borrow a lot from Kentucky Route Zero, with its desolate / chill mood, dialogues that let you choose but don't really matter, driving, exploration of places that often doesn't lead to a goal, etc. Similar games: Oxenfree, or even (LD30) Hempuli's [Badland Quest](http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=491). I quite enjoyed KR0, but while this game is similar in many aspects, it suffers from the same problems: the world is a little bit too big and too ambitious to feel interesting after being explored for a little bit. There is no reason to return to places, and fetch quests with lots of backtracking and random wandering really don't help, since I won't find anything else.
I haven't managed to finish the game, I got three faith increases (burning bush, mould, blacksmith), but I guess that wasn't enough, I assume I was missing something with the static mountains … But at that point after checking in the HQ that my faith wasn't enough (which doesn't actually end the game), I wasn't interested enough to keep playing anymore. I feel this game would be much much better if you limited your world size and instead of making it so expansive focus on making it "deeper", i.e. tell a more interesting story at the existing locations, add new ones, incentivise re-visiting the same locations, etc. More complex puzzles! (I visited the Mine before I got to the Miner's house, and there was no way to leave until I got the correct path by trial and error!)
The character selection in motels is a little bit annoying, it takes too long for the next character to show up when you click the arrow, and there is no indication of how many there are until you have all 4 of them. Also, some of the "abilities" in the character descriptions seemed untrue? Maybe I needed to place the characters in the driver's seat, but e.g. the Druid says no fuel is used and yet my fuel was going down as usual. Same for the Wizard's Service Station warping. It made me think that the game is incomplete in many ways – same goes for the "darkness" which never seemed to actually approach and time progression did not matter.
I did not see a very clear connection between the theme and the game. I understand that the story vaguely references the theme, but this is not really reflected in the game. If anything, as long as you are driving with the cartographer you are exploring more and more of the map, thereby gaining space rather than running out of it. There should be a more concrete connection with the theme in the actual mechanics of the game as well.
The graphical style is simple and minimalistic, but perhaps fitting. The ASCII stuff is not bad, but I wonder why mix ASCII characters with hand-drawn art? As for the music, I spent most of the game listening to Raindrop FM, and I feel that this kind of "music" is the most fitting for the game. The other radio stations perhaps not so much? But I suppose it is good to give the player a choice.
But overall this is a very decent entry.
A lot of levels!
At first I was going to comment on the fact that some levels seem to be too "obvious", i.e. there is only one path I can reasonably take and it is not too difficult to spot it. But as the levels progressed, I was pleasantly surprised to find more uses of the previously introduced mechanics, in slightly less obvious ways. Towards the end a lot of the levels devolved into counting step triplets :) So the puzzles and level design is great. The difficulty curve is not too crazy, though some reshuffling of levels might be appropriate, just to keep the pace steadier.
As for the graphics and the audio – I'm less happy about these. The graphics are functional basically, but the walls do not stand out very well from the floor tiles and this can be slightly confusing if the room is not a simple rectangular shape. Some animations of the trapdoor tiles or the moving X's (what are they even?) would be nice, since the player character is also animated / transitions from tile to tile smoothly?
As for the music, the tunes are alright, but get very repetitive quickly. I would say that for a puzzle game such as this a more chill, lower tempo music would be more pleasant. One sound I really hated was the high-pitched produced when moving under coffee influence.
Good job :)
Very cute! The music and graphics worked together, the levels were designed cleverly. The game looks like you managed your scope extremely well and focused completely on the one mechanic, and explaining it properly. This is very good to see in a gamejam :) At this point I would say the next step would be just to have … more! Levels, graphics, music, mechanics, whichever you could manage without sacrificing the overall quality ^^ Good job!
Yay, got there in 2796 years. Not the best score I see :D
As for the game – I usually dislike cookie-clicker-type games. I think part of the reason I dislike them is that even though you have setbacks whenever you make an investment, you know that ultimately it is worth it and you will get your money (or cookies or whatever) back given a bit of time. There is no challenge to it. With your game, I felt my resources were a bit more important and so I was reluctant e.g. to mine out a lot of the space, reluctant to nuke the hives, etc. Not knowing what was coming next was great, it had a bit of discovery to it.
Apart from that, the graphics are cute enough, nice to see the progression as you level up your tech.
Nice game :)
Nice work.
One thing I hated very much: the pixel scaling. If you go through the trouble of making pretty pixel art, why ruin it by mixing it with non-pixel-arty effects? I get that the character looks more expressive if you do a stretch / squeeze tween, but there are ways around that – scale with nearest-neighbour so the pixel size remains the same as that of the background, or draw more frames (more work obviously). I know I'm just a bit purist in this but still :)
Now, apart from that: great game. The graphic assets themselves were fitting and coherent. I noticed a graphics glitch where a trapped wall could move behind a golden idol even though it shouldn't have but oh well. It was generally clear what I was looking at and this is very important for a puzzle game.
The music was pleasant and didn't get old, the sound effects also worked nicely.
I had a minor gripe with the controls: a lot of the time when I would jump, the character would move an extra tile in the same direction as the jump AFTER the jump. I think given that the jump is a rare commodity and this is a turn-based game, so moves should be careful, I think it would make sense to never allow multiple moves like this. Maybe add some sort of short delay where inputs are not processed immediately after a jump?
As for the puzzle mechanics, they are nice and simple, though I've seen the exact same gameplay (with some more involved block pushing mechanics) in [CubiCo](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/cubico) for this LD as well. The levels followed a nice and smooth difficulty curve for the most part. The only level I was stuck on for much longer than the others was level 19. I think it wasn't clear to me from the previous levels that a mummy walking into a wall would stay in place? Apart from that I would actually enjoy more challenging levels – making a level larger is not necessarily the way to go, but it can be frustrating, especially when there is no way to scroll the camera so you can see and plan ahead. With the mechanics you have there is already a lot you could pack into a tiny level :)
Overall this is great, I think you will get good results!
Nice game, fun to play to the end! The controls felt very responsive. The final enemy was a neat change of pace, I wish there were more interesting / difficult enemy variations like that. Well done!
Well polished, though the lack of audio was a pity. I liked that the sheep platformed around, having to jump, grab ledges and so on. One really annoying thing was the controls – up to jump and space to kick seemed counter intuitive. Something like A for jump and S for kick would have worked better for me. This game actually fit the theme pretty well also. Good work!
Nice … Got 1st place for my game, surprisingly – makes me wonder how this is actually calculated, given that other people in the comments got that as well :) The webcam at the end was a nice addition, although I was expecting the screen to reflect the individual features we worked on. Granted that would be a lot of additional graphics work. Had a laugh at the random comments at the end as well.
The idea of using Google Forms seems cute, but not all that different from CYOA systems – at least not to the player.
The plot was fun; it felt as if each segment was written by another person only knowing what the previous one said. At points it seemed a bit too random though. Also I would have enjoyed re-playing the game more times if the choices really mattered, but the "wrong" choices either loop back to the mainline, or end up in a loss. Fully branching story would be more time consuming to write (though if taking the "random writing" approach, not all that more difficult), but certainly more rewarding. Perhaps you should have made a prototype on paper (i.e. sticky notes and string to make the fully branching tree) before rewriting everything into Google Forms?
Looks very well polished, the graphics were cute. I wished there was more variation in the levels – different mechanics, switches, etc. As it is, there is a nice amount of levels, but they start to feel monotonous after the ~sixth one. Also I wasn't sure about the timer – the restart button resets the timer, so you can keep clicking it until you know the solution (if you really want to bother abusing this …). For a puzzle game like this I would think a turn counter would be better. Good job overall :)
Very nice! Nicely highlighting that there are always multiple ways to accomplish the same thing in Linux :)
There were some little problems – `man find` showed a stub with `cat` (presumably a template for `man` pages). After the second or third level of the second loop (since the levels were the same?) the game stopped and by the CPU spike I assume there was an infinite loop somehow. But these are minor, terminal games are fun. Well done!
@gamepopper Thanks for playing! Honest Dan got the same softlock on his stream, unfortunately. It is fixed now :)
Pretty! I liked how the individual parts of the music worked pretty well on their own. Maybe the bass a little bit less, but that one clearly wasn't meant to be picked up first given the rest minefield ^^ I felt the turning radius of the bird was perhaps a bit too large, so I ended up flying into walls more often than I wanted to. This is more of an issue since the map had a lot of narrow corridors. (I think I would have like the first power, velocity, more if it made me turn faster.) Speaking of the map, I see that the aesthetic was kept very minimalist, but perhaps there could be some subtle ways to make parts of the map feel unique? As it is it was easy to lose track of my position in the world. After picking up the first songbird, I returned to the clef, where I expected to be able to drop the bird off, I didn't immediately realise that I have to return with all four. Anyway, very nice entry overall, quite relaxing.
Nice game! The graphics were nice, the music was good, the gameplay felt good for the most part. Level 6 is where some of the pains showed a bit – I get that the escort mission-style play was for the theme (although is the hostage really an "it" :thinking:), but escort missions in games are rarely fun! The red VIP got in the way, or was too slow, and I generally wished I could just tell them to stay put in a corner while I clear the room; or alternatively there could have been a tactical mechanic for "protecting" the VIP with my own body, or by pressing a particular button to shove them on the floor or something. The slight auto-aim was nice, but sometimes a little bit unreliable (it felt particularly weird because of the slow turn speed I think). I liked that the gun had a limited clip size and reloading required to slow down. It was both funny and sad to see how often the enemies shot each other down. There was a minor graphical glitch: the bullets were visible through the walls (but such a situation is rare since there is not much shooting off-screen or from behind walls). Some more variety in the level decor, weapons, and enemies would be appreciated of course!
Very nicely polished, great graphics, nice audio work. I really hate this type of puzzle, so the title screen was harder than the rest of the game T_T I was just commenting on [Tiny Fragments](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/tiny-fragments) that room swapping seems very common in Ludum Dare entries!
Interesting mechanics all around, some could use a bit more gentle introduction. The last level for instance made me stop for a second. I also felt the enemies and cannons didn't play much of a role.
Lovely aesthetics!
I agree partly with @celia14 – it might be good to indicate more clearly what the behaviour of the … rectangles? will be in the level. I knew that it said in the top left, but I also assumed that a red rectangle will always keep going forward, so I was briefly confused when I encountered the level that looked exactly the same as a previous one, but had a different behaviour.
The mechanic of picking up an instruction after it was placed could make the game a lot different (turn it from a puzzle game into a puzzle+reaction game), but it seems to have been used only in the one level.
Great music, very nice minimalist graphics and UI, nice puzzles but I would wish there were more levels.
Fun! Lovely combination of pixel art and hand-drawn graphics, reminded me a bit of some older Nintendo titles, particularly on the DS or GBA. Very cute sound effects too!
I found this one first via itch.io, so I accidentally played the post-compo version first. I replayed the original, which as far as I can tell only has graphics improvements? The gameplay is pretty nice, although I am not sure the theme shows here. Really I am killing a boss. I guess I am keeping the heart alive but it seems not much more than just a slightly strange HP indicator. It would be good if the heart played a role in the gameplay; now I see you already said that in a previous comment :) How convenient that this megabrain is using its hands to aid us!
(By the way, you should set your itch.io page to link to here.)
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=04h07m07s) (approximate timestamp)
This was fun, reminded me of some desktop toys in the 2000's. The turn from a cute bear into a disgusting monster was interesting. It would have been nice to have different ways to grow the bear if fed different foods. (And maybe that is the case but we only played it once!)
Addictive gameplay! Top score: 32 \o/
I think the timer starts flashing a little bit too early, it distracted me a bit when there was really still quite a bit of time left.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=01h22m51s) (approximate timestamp)
I really enjoyed this one! Shooting down enemies off-screen was very satisfying. I did mention this during the stream – the aiming was a little bit weird with the mouse. Maybe having a normal cursor would make the game too easy, but who knows. Right now the aiming seems like it's emulating an analog stick on a game pad. Also the RNG! :angry: The meteor showers were a nice touch, I would love to see many other kinds of encounters.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=01h55m36s) (approximate timestamp)
That was fun. As I said on the stream, my biggest problem with this one is probably the fact that I actually cannot choose a different path. I played the "bad" ending to begin with, but then that was the only ending. :slight_frown: But at least I got to choose the joke!
That was very cute. I like the kind of puzzle, although had the story been any longer, more variations on the gameplay would have been nice. The dialogue was cute, in an almost-cringey-teens-falling-in-love kind of way. "Don't mean to bug you" was almost too much :D The graphics and audio are nicely polished, the UI is very pretty. Good job!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=03h41m08s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game! I am not sure how necessary the mechanic of walking towards the plant to pick it up was, it only rarely seemed to play a role. Most of the times I got hit I was ready to just lose the round and I felt it was only RNG when I did not. Otherwise the game felt quite coherent, the music was pleasant, the gameplay simple but satisfying.
Fun stuff! I like that the theme is represented in two ways. It confused me a little bit that mines were not active whenever I entered a new level but haven't picked up the dog yet (but the rock traps were active!). I think it would also not hurt the gameplay to actually show the number of messages (as well as the limit at which the game ends) even when my phone is not out.
At first, as I was typing, it was not really clear to me what my typing does, since sometimes I re-opened the phone and my "score" was at 0 and my message count was also at 0. I think showing a little graphic like "-5 :envelope:" whenever you close the phone would help to convey what just happened a lot.
The dog looked a little bit like an elephant to me! I get that it has a black nose, but that black nose is also as black as the background! The music variations were nice and made the game feel a little bit less repetitive. Good job!
Very nice. Room fragment swapping seems to be a pretty common idea in Ludum Dare :)
The graphics are very clean and well polished. Same for the audio! The fact that the cursor went into a little "wait" mode when the character was going through an animation was a very nice touch, reminded me of 90's games a lot. Being able to pause the game by simply lifting a fragment almost made the game a bit too easy. Perhaps there could be a timer? Or just drop the fragment if the player hasn't managed to move it before the character went off-fragment?
This was … painful. I like the game, and in the beginning it seemed pretty good. The platforming is a bit too jumpy for my taste (as in, you don't really get control over your arcs, there is no real acceleration, etc), but that's fine. The laser timing is a bit quick but oh well. Then I found out that the bullets bounce, and the physics aren't exactly reliable. I hit my fishbowl too many times just trying to shoot a button or a fusebox.
But then came level 10. I think most of my 243 deaths happened on level 10. The majority of the failed attempts were because the launchpads launched the fish wrong. There is no skill involved, it is just (unintentionally I hope) artificially difficult. The level would have had the same amount of real difficulty (as in, skill-based) if there was a fish tube that simply transfered the fish from the first floor to the next. Almost all other attempts failed because I got shot down by the remaining turret because I got stuck on the ceiling when jumping or something. Ironically, on my final, successful attempt, the fish was launched by chance directly into the fish bowl next to the exit. But, enough about level 10 :angry:
Also no pun on "microfiche" in the intro?
Great game, nice music and pretty graphics! Got to level 15 :)
I wish there was a more robust score system, or a global leaderboard. The controls are very confusing, especially after playing a lot of tetris. Alternative control schemes or even key rebinding would have been helpful. More involved combo chains could have been interesting, though I'm not sure how they could be implemented. Also not sure how I feel about the "surprise" drops, it messes up the flow of the game a little bit.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=04h37m33s) (approximate timestamp)
Good engine test ;) Aiming at the sun was really difficult (for me), and it was hard to keep up the satellite shooting while maintatining the battery!
Interesting gameplay idea! It was counter-intuitive at first that the score was how many platforms I destroyed rather than how much I climbed or how long I survived, but I guess it allows for interesting strategies. Maybe it would be nice if the player spawned in a more platform-dense area to begin with, since sometimes it seems hard to make even the first jump. Doubly so because even though the screen wraps around, the camera does not reflect this (@notan-lemon's idea would help here). Oh, I see in your comments now that there is a "fast fall" by holding down. This is not indicated in the description! Still, this was pretty fun!
Incredible levels of ***juiciness*** and polish, and it's a compo entry! :open_mouth: Very addictive gameplay, and the leaderboards only kept me playing for a longer time. The aesthetics and music are great, and I would not be surprised to see them in a full indie title or at least a very popular mobile game. I appreciate a lot of the little touches, like the faces on the … circle-shaped scenery, the fact that I can deflect the enemies with my boost-poop, the combo-encouraging score system.
I do have some nit picks:
- When the enemy destroys a lot/all of my flock at the same time, the sound is rather unpleasant and loud to the point of clipping; maybe it should be "throttled". - The various (randomly-generated?) arena layouts are great, but many of them feel extremely unfair, especially ones with a narrow V-shaped tunnel, or a more enclosed notch. - It would be nice to be able to restart the game without submitting, when I know my score is much worse than my best and I don't want to wait for the submission (not that the server is slow but still!) - I really don't understand what makes the second enemy spawn, my best guess at the moment is that it is just random; when it spawns, it might as well be game over, the game becomes a lot more difficult! (My best attempt on the leaderboard is one where the second enemy never spawned?) - The camera feels nice and dynamic, but sometimes it cuts off important parts of the screen, it is very annoying to have to collect food that is off-screen. - The fact that the enemy speeds up towards the flock when destroying birds makes winning and losing more of a binary decision, I am not sure if that is good … And combined with the loud sound issue it feels doubly punishing. - Sometimes I start with 2 birds instead of one? Sometimes after collecting food a bird spawns pretty much in a random spot on the screen? - Some of the level scenery feel too thin to be colliding – the pipes that stick out are colliding obstacles while the hanging chains are not (yet they are visually similar).
But really, these are mostly minor thing, overall this might be the most polished game I've seen this LD. Great job!
Nicely done, a cute twist at the end. The light effects are pretty, although a couple of times I felt they almost impeded the gameplay, particularly when the spikes blended into the surrounding terrain when not inside the light radius. The controls and platforming felt good enough, although there were a few quirks – I think one Z key down should correspond to one jump. The walljumps seemed like they were checked periodically when I was holding Z, rather than when I actually pressed the key? Anyway, great entry.
I can only agree with @dummydojo's points here. I would have welcomed one or more of the following: a way to create campfires or a way to move my campfire around; a larger inventory; a non-procedural map (I assume the level was generated right?) that has a better progression in terms of rising difficulty, required items, etc. The first key I got was nice, but then I just got too many, and not enough time to go to the relatively distant places where I saw locks. And unlocking areas also didn't really feel rewarding, since it was just more of the same stuff. Also I think sometimes cutting a tree down does not result in any wood?
Amazing audio work!
The gameplay felt nice enough, although not extremely innovative. The first steep climb (after a couple of caves with tar) seemed very close, I lost twice on that section (rain RNG?), then just barely got it on the third try.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=01h47m05s) (approximate timestamp)
Cute! A little awkward with a mouse. Would be nice to expand with more interesting room layouts, different kinds of infections, ways to place temporary barriers for people, etc etc.
The audio was fun at first, but then it turned pretty painful, especially with all the intense pew pew going on! Other than that a cute, simple tower defense.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=00h07m47s) (approximate timestamp)
Well done, very Overcooked-like. Swapping items could have been a nice improvement (for example, interacting with a washing station that has finished while holding dirty diapers could swap the two items). The clutter is to be expected in a chaos management game like this, although I am not so sure about the walls obscuring a lot of the view. While playing I think I noticed that the "need" indicator for a baby showed one need (change diapers), then it switched to the more recent need (feed) – but immediately after feeding the baby it showed the less recent need, now in red. I think more recent needs should never obscure less recent (more urgent) needs!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=04h27m28s) (approximate timestamp)
This was great! The agonising cries of the mage created an interesting atmosphere x) As with many physics-based games, I got ~~a bit~~ very distracted trying to take a shortcut, and failing miserably.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=04h23m27s) (approximate timestamp)
Cute game. Although the mood was pretty solid, I am not sure that the gameplay fit it very well. In some ways it is a tower defense game without the strategy or much of the challenge.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=02h23m49s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game. As mentioned in the stream, the biggest problem with the game seemed to be the fact that the difficulty curve is the other way around – it gets easier (and less interesting) as the game goes on!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=02h52m11s) (approximate timestamp)
Very nice, the graphics are preetty and coherent. From the start I was clearly trying to help the people, but it was a bit disappointing to see where that lead. In some rounds it took me a second to understand the goal, but maybe that was kind of the point. Bees and getting killed by detonating nukes both felt quite punishing.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=02h31m58s) (approximate timestamp)
Good fun. Global leaderboards in a (jam) game are always nice. The enemies were maybe a bit too dumb but simultaneously too strong, so the best strategy really seemed to be to try to snipe them from afar.
Well, it really is not a game, but the writing was fun :)
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=01h51m53s) (approximate timestamp)
Cool game! The piece of music playing during the more tense part of the game was very nice. The aesthetics were coherent. For less of a visual novel experience and added challenge it might be fun to have all the interaction buttons on the screen at all times! (And appropriate reactions to the player screwing up the mission.)
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=03h26m54s) (approximate timestamp)
Ambitious! I think this could benefit a lot from some quality-of-life improvements, e.g.: better indication of HP loss, direction indicators for the collectibles (if it was purely RNG, it seemed the latter two got put too far!), invincibility frames when spawning close to home, more visible bullets, timers for waves attacking the Orb, etc.
Nice game. I wish the gameplay had a bit more – as it is, I could beat each round by simply spamming QSLP all the time. It would be more interesting if there were penalties for pressing the wrong buttons, and if the button combinations changed within a round.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=00h28m03s) (approximate timestamp)
Well done! Clearly very much FTL-like. I understand that this is a score attack and so the end of the game is always about the player getting overwhelmed, sooner or later. Still, the difficulty curve could be a bit gentler, maybe more types of encounters could be added. As it is, there is a relatively obvious best strategy.
Clever idea. It's great that the "passive" task of making the heart beat actually has an impact on the gameplay and even fits well into the setting. The bottle-breaking sound was a lot louder than the heart beating, and since I adjusted my volume in the beginning to the sound of the heartbeat, it was a bit painful. Maybe the heartbeat should start much louder, then fade out into the background? Sometimes I felt the camera was a bit too restricted. I did not get a nasty surprise immediately after panning, but a slightly smoother transition (or showing a bit beyond doors) might be helpful.
I agree with the points @fiakaiera made. DAS/ARR is familiar to me but if it is there, I would like it to be configurable :D
For the first two games I didn't realise I could move sideways, it seemed clear to me that I am bound to the rails. Looking at the LD page now (I got to the game via itch), I see there is a gif of the game with the player in the middle of the rail, so I guess it's my bad. But, the left/right movement is not very useful when the game speeds up, since I can't catch up to packets! The left/right movement speed should scale with the game speed.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=04h02m19s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game! As you heard me say a lot during the stream, mixing pixel-art resolutions is a big no-no for me ^^ As for the gameplay, the bashing and baby-bouncing was quite fun, but I felt the game should have been a lot shorter. Towards the end I did not feel that the game was more challenging, just that I had to face more waves of the same(ish) enemies.
Simple and polished. I really enjoy multitasking games. My biggest gripe is that the difficulty curve might be way off. After 20 minutes I just stopped playing, because I didn't feel that the game was getting any more difficult. Some ways I can think of to add more difficulty when all 9 organs are present: shuffle the boxes around; trigger organs more often; make the brain think more complex words; hide the "tutorial indicators" (space next to the heart, drag next to the guts, etc); hide the interior of the organ (for the bladder and the stomach); add temporary challenge organs.
@henrycgs Yes, running Mac, so can't try the desktop build atm! And that explains that x) I am guessing the first time you play the game it automatically goes into Easy mode, since I don't recall seeing the difficulty selection last time? Maybe the selection (apart from Hive Mind) should be accessible the first time you play? Anyway, yes, medium and hard are much more interesting, and hive mind is fun, though I understand they are post-jam only. In the WebGL build it also seems that typing is a bit strange/delayed. Two more little things: the dragging inside the guts feels really unresponsive, maybe it requires too much precision given the setting? Also if a brain is in the lower left, the word can be obscured by UI.
Great stuff! The graphics and mood remind me of OS's like Mac OS Classic. The game was nicely challenging and had cute desktop-related ideas. The level of difficulty is fair, but I think I would still appreciate a slower start and the opportunity to explore the desktop a bit, read the e-mails, get used to everything. In terms of UI, I guess you could argue that less parcticality is good, since it adds challenge. Even so, it was strange that the game is trying to emulate an OS but lacks some very common (even in the 90's) features, e.g. double click to open, slower double click to rename. I kind of wished I could just delete the rockets! For the keygen part I had to look at the screenshots. What threw me off was the fact that the browser could not be opened with a double click, so I assumed it just does not work. Would be great to expand this somehow to have levels, a progression, a much deeper featureset in the OS, etc.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=04h16m43s) (approximate timestamp)
Simple, but a lot of fun! The fact that the chicken can make it through after the farmer dies was a very nice touch.
What an interesting way to depict server loads and server management! It would be neat to show a plot of server load over time, and generally add things that you would find in a server management console like DO. There were some minor bugs – the very first time I started the game the tutorial screen somehow didn't show. Also when I died the first time and restarted without reloading, the game speed was kept from the previous run. Towards the end, even when holding spacebar, I couldn't keep up with the money influx. Might be good to add options to buy 10's (or more) servers at once. I also really appreciated how the requests were generated in clusters rather than just flooding (ha) the screen uniformly, and how the various load balancers stacked on top of the screen. They got stuck at the bottom when I had a very long stack, so maybe they could drift upwards once there is nothing stopping them.
Screen Shot 2020-04-26 at 12.43.20.png
I guess you could add more variety to the types of incoming requests to increase the difficulty, since at the end I just abandoned the game, I didn't feel like I would lose.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=02h12m56s) (approximate timestamp)
Very well polished! The game felt complete, even if a tiny bit predictable in terms of the "stacked" fetch quests. Mini rhythm games were unexpected, but welcome. (Nit pick: the rhythm game music playing at the end mixed a bit weirdly with the final music.)
This is nice, like a Simon Says with words. In the current state it feels more like a "toy" than a "game", since there isn't much of a challenge. I was also a bit confused when the game "ended" after 3 verses, I haven't realised that the story would continue if I play again. The growing audience is a nice touch, but I don't think it motivates me enough to keep playing. The wacky sounds when words were spoken were fun.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=01h10m17s) (approximate timestamp)
This was a lot of fun, I think it is one of my favourites this LD. As mentioned during the stream, not having an N-key rollover keyboard introduces some unnecessary difficulty – which is really unfortunate, since the held keys added variety.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=00h13m10s) (approximate timestamp)
Neat game, it really reminded me of one of your previous entries (Soundscapes). After the initial novelty of the game, it was maybe a bit too RNG-based.
The core concept in this one is really interesting. As for the game, there is a lot to improve! The 3D view made me want to scroll around the map, unzoom, or otherwise reposition the camera. Some introduction to the game, descriptions of the "turrets" would both be nice, even if it is on the LD page! I don't know that selling turrets in this one is particularly important (except when I urgently needed to stop giving coffee to the boss, since I think that drains the hydration bar). Also would like to see the range of my turrets, doubly so when the map is not super clearly defined to begin with (again due to the 3D camera view). Oh, and all the plastic pollution…!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=03h51m31s) (approximate timestamp)
Fun game. Some UI and control awkwardness maybe (e.g. I keep moving after opening the shop). I really didn't like the fact that the cats could just spawn at the bottom of the room. Also that the furniture was so easily pushable by the cats! Maybe a clearer indication that I actually hit a cat would help, since they slowly turn around and then run away. And added to that, the fact that the cats still hurt while running away felt a bit punishing. I appreciated the voice overs!
(Sorry, realised I didn't rate during the stream, done now!)
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=04h50m19s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game! The biggest problem I can remember is the hitboxes were a bit unforgiving. Making the guy walk over a set of bars always seemed like a close call. Having a way to pan the camera would prevent some "leap of faith"-type artificial difficulty.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=00h59m29s) (approximate timestamp)
Fun game! I was not totally clear on what to do to begin with – I expected the challenge to be more about delivering the patients to the correct buildings, but as far as I can tell, the only patients that were not just "go to the hospital" were the food and medicine ones? A somewhat faster progression in terms of areas might have been nice, but maybe I was just rushing due to the stream. I liked the secret medipacks around the map, and the verticality of the mountains and buildings offers a lot of options, similar to Roundabout. Sad that I got stuck on the roof x)
https://youtu.be/hqL7NjlJpoI?t=1792
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=00h43m09s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game. I would have welcomed a bit more variety in the methods used to dispose of the notes. Speaking of which, I am not sure I would have understood that I need to get rid of the notes without being told – I was trying to order the notes to solve a puzzle.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=03h12m30s) (approximate timestamp)
Well done! Towards the end the biggest issue (for me) seemed to be managing all the drops. Some structures to push around drops would be very helpful!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=02h56m15s) (approximate timestamp)
I love this type of games, although I certainly did not do very well x) The concept is nice and simple. My one big issue is maybe the fact that it was not clear to me that `KEEP` was a check box rather than a button. I expected the letters to be kept when I pressed it. Also it seemed to me that the game did not check that a new word can definitely be made out of the letters provided?
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=01h41m50s) (approximate timestamp)
Dark, eldritch, horror game. :grin: Just kidding. The game might have benefited a bit from being shorter, or of course, having more variety in the gameplay loop (which is of course more difficult during a jam). Perhaps some enemies to actually dodge?
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=01h33m56s) (approximate timestamp)
This is well done, and for all I know on par with many popular VR games. It is a bit hard to rate the game, since a lot of the fun comes from a good choice of song. It seemed a bit strange to me that missing a target but doing so on-beat would not break the combo. There could be more obvious signaling of the rhythm than just the small cursor and the indicator on the bottom of the screen – perhaps making all of the scene lights actually pulse with the rhythm? I think this is especially necessary when the rhythm is auto-detected and may not exactly line up with what the song beats are.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=01h16m40s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice job, well done on finishing a game with such a large team for the first time. My biggest issue with this one is probably the physics. The platforming is a bit floaty (although it behaves better than many "floaty" LD games). The fact that the character literally floats above the ground really doesn't help! This, combined with the slightly too large hitbox made for some (IMHO) slightly unfair platforming challenges. On the other hand, there was a nice variety of types of platforming challenges – timing, moving platforms, spikes, winds, rising lava.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=00h25m37s) (approximate timestamp)
Very nice aesthetics. It was a little annoying that I could not quite get all the drops, perhaps they should be higher value and despawn? A larger pickup radius? Not being able to water while holding a seed was also a minor gripe I had. The difficulty scaled pretty well. Maybe there could be an indication of what type of seed I am holding (a little preview of the mushroom that will spawn)?
The game which reminded me of yours, which I was trying to remember during the stream was [Atomicrops](https://www.atomicrops.com/), although that game is primarily a twinstick shooter and the crops are not turrets (although you can get turrets I think).
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=00h58m26s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game. It was fun to use various objects as weapons. The mechanic of switching bodies did not seem very important – except for the boss fight, most of the game was fairly easy to beat without using it. And for the boss fight, I was stubborn and didn't use it anyway x)
Great game! Very simple but difficulty curving well (enough :D), attacks are telegraphed clearly. The music, even though it's not yours I'm guessing, is a great choice.
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The difficulty increase around 150 is surprising, the increase around 200 is insane!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=02h39m11s) (approximate timestamp)
Very polished! The poetry was perhaps a bit lost on us during the stream. It is not often that I see a gamejam game made in Unreal actually make use of the engine graphically (rather than just dropping simple assets into the pretty, default shaders). In terms of gameplay, there are some places you can almost get stuck, and I think sometimes I wanted the camera to move a bit differently than it did, especially when I happened to go behind a building. The overall product feels quite complete though!
I really enjoyed this! Got to 137 :tada:
The sudden turn into eldritch emotion-feeding monsters was very nice. I appreciated how us/the intern just reacted the same as to everything else. It also made me wonder if there would be any more. For more evil difficulty maybe you could ask about e.g. "food for Goldie" and mix in answers to "music for Goldie".
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=02h08m49s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game. Towards the end I was a bit unhappy that there was not much variation. The strategy of being far from the enemy planet and strafe-circling when the enemies were around was pretty much all that was needed. Perhaps the enemies could have different shooting patterns? Enemies that actually try to lead their shots? Kamikaze enemies? Etc.
I saw this game on your stream and was really interested to see the strange control scheme that seemed to work so well on a gamepad. I played the first mission with the "regular" ship, that was fine and controlled well enough but it was not very exciting. I would point out that you should really allow arrow keys + space, which is much more common for keyboard-based shmup games.
You said in the stream that the keyboard controls for the second ship were kind of meh. That's an understatement! WASD arranged in that pattern is extremely painful. I would really like to see how this would work with e.g. Q/A for the left thruster and O/L for the right thruster (the upper key accelerates, the lower key goes backwards), plus space for shooting. I feel that would map much more closely to the gamepad control scheme.
Anyway, apart from the controls, the music was great, the art is nice, although I much prefer when pixels actually line up and aren't just used as vector art. I would expect the game difficulty in this game to really stem from the control scheme, so it feels really easy when playing with the non-twisty ship. Even so, in many parts of the levels there is just not that much that you *have* to do (e.g. in level 2 there are waves of horizontally moving enemies where you can simply park your ship on top of the client and shoot threats down without moving, since many enemies just don't come near the client).
@arity Pixel perfection (or the lack thereof) is a pet peeve of mine, and many people really don't care. Since you used Unity, [here](https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/03/13/2d-pixel-perfect-how-to-set-up-your-unity-project-for-retro-8-bits-games/) is an article that has some good examples. In particular I dislike the look of multiple sprites on screen when their pixel size is different (e.g. in this game the ship and its charge up animation); and when pixels are rotated and you end up with rotated squares rather than actual big, blocky pixels.
And thanks for playing my game :) (I think you get more karma for commenting on other games rather than responding here!)
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=03h11m59s) (approximate timestamp)
Lovely game. Trying for the bad ending was heart-breaking! Also I was disappointed I could not actually take care of the cute little bonsai.
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599171054?t=03h32m23s) (approximate timestamp)
Nice game! The concept is pretty clear. Maybe the most obvious thing to imporve would be better UI feedback, and allowing the player to select targets by clicking the name rather than the graphics (which seemed a bit unreliable). Also could use some actual casting animation rather than just the small countdown above the cleric's head.
This is a nicely polished game. The platformer physics are solid for the most part, very rarely janky when I hit the edge of a platform or a launchpad. What I mind the most is probably that a lot of the challenge is "trial and error", i.e. you are almost guaranteed to die in a new part of the level because you need to know how to react to obstacles ahead of time. Checkpoints or a way to see the whole level would be of some help, although with the emphasis on momentum it is hard to do this. The music was great, even though after dying many many times it got almost annoying and overly cheery for my mood. The graphics are nice and suitable for GB. As was pointed out in one stream, the 3D effect on crates might be a little bit confusing at first. The optional feather pickups probably made me die a lot more than I needed to, but I just **had** to have them! Some indication of overall progress would be nice, after a bunch of levels I was just hoping to see a victory screen. Good job overall!
We streamed your game with Danae: [link to Twitch VOD](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/598538752?t=03h51m56s) (approximate timestamp)
Very cool! The aesthetics were very coherent, and the mood of airport travelling was communicated nicely. The difficulty curve seemed to be a little bit too gentle. I would have welcomed the timers getting less forgiving (compensated for by an increase in walking speed, for example), or additional challenges (a "pee bar" was a great idea in the chat).
(Congrats on the high score in my game, sorry I couldn't get to you during the stream!)
This is fun! I haven't beaten your score yet, unsure if I will at this rate x) The minigame combination is nice, each one is easy enough to understand. I think the game could benefit from some UX improvements: showing the meters at all times (like @zoarfy suggests) to know what to prioritise, just flashing the button red is not clear enough; sounds for succeeding or failing tasks, in particular with the caretaker I was not always sure I selected a good candidate; allowing keyboard-only controls (1 2 3 4 to select the screen, arrows and spacebar for example). The idea of a repulsive, offensive alien to take care of is neat, pity there was not much time to actually see what it says due to having to be in the minigame sections at all times.
Fun concept! The gameplay is a little bit lacklustre, but at least the game is kept rather short. The graphics were nice and simple, though I wasn't sure what the red thing + the brown ball were? Great title also :)
Nice that the fire was both something to protect and the weapon. Some things were a bit annoying: the fact that the embers that dropped from enemies hurt the player when not holding the torch (very often the torch is close to where the enemy died), the fact that there were no invincibility frames, some ledges were overhanging a bit so you could get a bit stuck under them. Even though there were few levels, restarting the game from the beginning felt a bit punishing.
@bredera @mark-kelly @sevenlevelgames Thanks for playing!
@appoxgames Yeah, sorry, it is more "realistic", but also I felt you would need to fully rewind more often (because you messed up a puzzle and want to quickly rewind/reset both tapes for example). You can still do precision timing by clicking twice kind of.
@mateusboga How is it underrated when there are no ratings yet? :thinking: (Thanks for playing!)
@anant-ahuja Yeah, I would like to see more. I also made a couple of point 'n click games in previous jams if you're interested :D (one rooms, Cell#327, Primary Objective)
@ghuyajil Yes! There are 4.5 endings to find! I think I'll post a little walkthrough x)
@copito That's a nice point about the right click dragging (or just dragging anywhere to move the camera I guess). Sorry about the buttons, I should have made the dialogue system not wait for user input in that specific case.
@spawncampgames @josephdevelops @roikku @sebastianscaini @animaster @tricky-fat-cat @invader @pixel-maniacs @lohreck @justcamh @blue-pin-studio @gamesplusjames Thanks everyone for playing!
@jefvel Yeah, I have seen many people struggling with the rewind/forward buttons now. There is clearly a lot in that bit of the UI that could be improved. As it is I went for some kind of "realism", but maybe it should have just been one click = one tick back (resp. forward), and optionally hold for more ticks.
@jose-bonilla "The only thing I would improve [...] is the camera rotation thing." – could you be more specific? Is it the mouse controls for the turning? Is it the intertia? Is it that it can't be done with the mouse by dragging? For the record I think all of the aforementioned could be improved, but I am wondering if you meant something different still (:
@shelvid Thanks for your patience! It was nice to see you persevere.
@blotosaur The communication could certainly be improved. Still, it is difficult to balance the "retro" with "usability", given how obscure some classic point 'n click puzzles used to be!
@marcmagus Thanks! Yes, communication and UX needs to be worked on, I agree!
@ursagames Thanks for playing! I appreciate you spending 1+ hour on it, despite getting stuck in places. I remember you actually making it through my LD 42 entry ([Runnink out of Space](https://ludum.thenet.sk/ld42/)) with similar dedication, glad to see that's still there :D The weight sequence you noticed in the walkthrough is told to the player after solving the second part of the 3-button puzzle, although it seems a bit arbitrary in the walkthrough.
Very nice! I really like this style of controls.
I don't know if the game really needed two buttons to control, as I always held the right arrow key pressed unless I was aiming left. I also wish there had been more variety to the gameplay. Unfortunately I died just shy of the level 2 goal, but the only difference between levels 1 and 2 was just the goal distance, right? I enjoyed the sound effects but not so much the music loop. The idea of this gun-nosed, armless man was funny. :D
Nice game! I got to round 26. It was good to see the variety in the guns, and that the chests still had some value once all the guns were collected.
In my first game I got the Zeus 9000 and a Marine rifle in the first chest: it felt a bit OP because I could mash Z (weapon swap) to get the big Zeus bullets all the time. Maybe the cooldown should be maintained for each gun instead of resetting on weapon swap :)
The auto-lock was appreciated towards the end. But the gameplay also got a bit less interesting: hold down X with whichever gun selected, run away. I guess this wouldn't work indefinitely because the player is bound to make a mistake and I'm guessing the monsters do eventually overwhelm the player, but still, the beginning of the game was more interesting. Maybe more variations should be introduced later on.
I wasn't sure about the camera system. I guess not scrolling the camera unless the player is near the edge of the screen is good to reduce motion sickness? Still, at first I didn't realise just how much I could explore, later on I didn't like the system because moving towards the edges was dangerous: I couldn't see what I was walking towards. Maybe it would be enough to make the zone where the camera does not move smaller?
Nice little metroidvania. Could be more polished with sounds and more than the bare minimum (albeit clean) graphics, of course, but the concept works. Given that the instructions say "dash (when available)", I think there is a bug (maybe leftover from testing?): the dash is available from the beginning of the game. It also explains why it is possible to get to the goal without picking up the red key or the "D" powerup. And it's also why I had to play for a second time, to get to the secret screen ^^
As with many games this LD, having an early restart button might be convenient. When I missed a jump, I knew that I wasn't going to make it to wherever I was going, I just had to wait for the respawn.
The music was cool, reminded me of Environmental Station Alpha somehow.
(By the way, I see you have very few ratings: you should rate other people's games and/or submit your games to streams to get ratings for your game...)
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Nice and simple, balanced well enough that it's probably possible to play forever :) I guess it would be interesting if there were further additions to the gameplay after a point.
Nice game!
I liked that the movement of the gun around the area very literally represented the 10 second timer. The little monsters were cute, and it was cool that each type had its own kind of movement. The music was great, I wish it didn't restart when I died :)
The gameplay was ok, but some things could have been improved. The beginning of the stage was extremely important, perhaps too much so: you could miss an enemy that is already in the path of your gun, or you could do badly with your shots overall, getting flooded with too many monsters as they eventually multiply. On the other hand, once the arena was down to 4 enemies or so, it was a mostly tedious process of making sure all the enemies are frozen all the time, then lining up shots to remove them. I also found the loss condition of a monster running into the gun a bit random.
Oh no the pun...
That was fun, easy to lose a lot of time trying to reach a high score :) I did manage to show up on the front page at least. With very large amounts of bread the game got a bit laggy (but the hardware is a bit old now). I have no idea how your score is attainable.
It took me a second to understand just when the potions are actually used (I need to wait just a bit). I am also still not totally sure why Breadalt is following weird trajectories: is it that each sandwich has its own "gravity" to it? I guess without something like this the game could be too easy, but sometimes it felt too arbitrary.
Graphics, music, overall juice: all well polished of course. Great game!
Also the timelapse was nice to watch, thanks for posting it!
Nice! If I have one gripe with this game it is that it is too slow. There doesn't seem to be much pressure to do anything once the order is given. On the other hand, misremembering anything from the call is very punishing.
Managed 2876 so far.
Fun game! Definitely kept me interested in trying to get higher and higher scores. The gameplay is interesting, the overall idea feels rather unique.
I felt there are some things that could be improved. Most importantly: the visuals are very busy! Don't get me wrong, they look good, the animations are fluid, etc etc. Still, I think the blocks-to-be-removed could be indicated without adding one "clock" for each tile + one "scared face". In the late game it gets really tricky to find spots which will not be removed (if any), so adding more elements over top of the enemies + powerups + blocks is not great. Speaking of which, when there is a block to be picked up on top of a tile that will be removed, it is hard to tell: the block covers the visuals! And: it's nice that there are variations of the tiles (plain vs checkered vs battered), but this is even more visual noise. What about indicating the tiles which will be removed with a colour tint? Simple, easy to spot, hard to cover up. Overall I got a bit of an Earthworm Jim feeling from the graphics: they look great, but they sometimes make the gameplay worse.
As for the gameplay itself, it took a while to get used to all the mechanics and what I could and couldn't do. Eventually I figured it out enough to reach a (I hope :D) good score, but:
- What if the player landed when a block was placed? Every now and then I got caught off-guard thinking I had placed a block (but actually hit an enemy) and so I was safe to keep moving in the direction I was going. It's safe when I'm on the ground, but not when I'm in the air... - I am still undecided about the jump button = block place button. On the one hand it makes the controls feel fluid and intuitive, on the other hand I sometimes wished I could just place a block without having to jump. It's related to the previous point, I simply felt safer when I was on the ground. - The delay between the skull and an enemy actually spawning was long enough that it took me a game or two to actually spot that the skull means "an enemy will spawn here". Maybe a more obvious indication and a clear point of time when the enemy *is* there? - Maybe I missed this because of the busy visuals, but: does the game really eventually get to the point where *all* blocks get destroyed? I guess there is a way to survive this still (by keeping a block equipped, jumping just before the timer runs out, and placing the block afterwards to land on it), but if this works, it is *very* finnicky. It's easy to hit an enemy and simply lose at that point. Maybe increase the difficulty a bit slower, and always keep some tiles safe?
Anyway, even with all that said, it was very fun. Oh, and I'm also glad there were multiple music tracks, it kept the game sounding fresh.
Fun game! I found myself holding down the mouse button for most of the game, which was not very pleasant: maybe following the mouse pointer could be the default behaviour? I don't think I made use of the split fire very much anyway. Having a bit of warning for when enemies will arrive onto the screen would be nice.
I figured out the mechanics as I was playing but the "tutorial"/intro text didn't explain things very clearly: for example, that the hourglass must be touched every ten seconds (at first I thought this was the "charge"), or that the hourglass can also be used to kill off large numbers of enemies.
Nice game! Felt polished and mostly complete.
What I missed the most was some difficulty. There was nothing puzzling about the levels and the difficulty was pretty much only in *some* tight jumps. The 10 second timer was a good motivator but it was a lot less interesting once I saw that there is still a long grace period before the crusher actaully reaches the player on most levels.
Two small bugs I noticed: one, the player can be "beaten" just as the crusher gets to the cat, in which case the "Level clear" window shows, but the level is still restarted. Two, if you clear a level, but then click to go back to the level selection screen, the next level is not unlocked, you need to replay the level you just beat (only noticed this because the Z key drops you back to the level select).
The graphics were clean. Audio-wise stuff sounded alright (meow meow meow), maybe the SFX could have been a bit quieter compared to the music.
When I saw this on a stream, I instantly knew it was a game with Euler in the team :) Something about the very simple B/W graphics and heavy use of foley.
It was a cute twist on a point 'n' click adventure: no pixel hunting, no attempt to explain something about an object, just the name of the object on screen. (Even so, words like "carpet" played with the format a bit.) For the most part, the puzzles were fairly understandable. Some were perhaps a bit surprising, e.g. that you need a hook for a hole, when that hole could have been any size really (why not climb into it? etc).
I'm not sure how I feel about the 10 seconds to teleport. It puts some pressure on the player to remember what is on each screen, to try to quickly figure out what to do, which is fine. But once I knew what I was trying to accomplish, I found myself just waiting for the teleport to the room that I needed. A "skip to next room" would alleviate this, but I guess that could also easily be abused to basically stay on one room for a long time. :shrug:
Anyway, nice game!
Tenuous connection to the theme! The second level felt a bit Portal-y (as did the overall vibe and the sticky notes), the third one felt a bit too chaotic. Great music, nice puzzles.
Interesting twist on a classic pen and paper puzzle ([train tracks](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/tracks.html))? The challenge is a bit unevenly distributed: the first ten seconds matter the most, to try to figure out the solutions, the rest of it didn't really matter. For that matter the snail/UI also felt a little bit slow once actually playing.
This was a clever idea but I feel it was almost ... too clever? I think it would have been good to introduce the player to the various mechanics one at a time. Why can you switch time direction in the first level? How do you know that you can collect the orbs with any blue or orange object? What do blue objects even do? And so on. I see now that these things are explained in text in the description, but it is so much better to let the player experience them first-hand.
(For that matter I felt the blue objects were somewhat inconsistent with the game's own rules: at the start of the level they are static for 10 seconds, but for every other cycle from then on, they will spend those 10 seconds reversing through their motions.)
It's nice that you note in the description that there are unintended solutions, but I think I solved more levels unintentionally than intentionally :D That also makes me wonder if there isn't too much freedom in the system vs constraints in the level design.
I think I would have spent more time trying to solve the remaining levels had it not been for the platforming: it was way too floaty and jumping from the diagonal platforms was a very bad experience.
The visuals and audio were quite polished. Playing music like this in reverse is always an interesting sound, and it didn't get old too quickly.
Nice, a very cleanly executed, polished game. Pretty pixel art (with unique enemies), nice music. Worlds 1 and 2 felt quite easy: I didn't feel there was much strategy involved other than match as many blocks as possible. Stage 3-2 felt like a very sudden jump in difficulty.
Another thing to improve would maybe be the tutorial: it might have been nicer to force the player to acknowledge what is going on rather than just go with the timer as usual.
Cute game!
The graphics are simple but clean, the palette is nice. For the initial couple of loops the music felt great and I was looking forward to the variations of both the music loop and the drumkit (+ the movements of the little dude).
The gameplay itself could have been improved. The reference and the user input are far away so it's a lot of semi-tedious back and forth without much real challenge to it. The timeline bar is also far away: maybe you could add an indicator of time on the right-hand side?
The graphics, audio (+ voiceovers) were good. The idea of a person saving themselves in the limbo world (or whatever you want to call it) is interesting.
The theme was indeed there, but I am not sure if it supported the game or just introduced an inconvenience. Switching back and forth between worlds is cool, but more often than not I knew what I had to do and so the seconds spent in the normal world were just wasted. I guess it was time I could spend talking to people but that was mostly about getting some hints. (Nit: the indicator that you can interact with something/someone could be a bit more visible.)
I wish the overall game were longer. There were just two "puzzles", one of which was to open a window, the other to place the tray. The latter was stretched out to feel "longer" by having to fetch the tray from the other side of the screen... I guess making the gameplay more substantial and longer would go against the story you were going for, but I'm sure there are lots of cool puzzles you could go for with "one world influencing the other".
It's a cute game, although I wish there was a bit more to it. The graphics, the legs, the overall design is nice and silly. The gameplay is quite intuitive but I don't know if it is particularly skill-based. With more ways to actually influence the way to ball goes etc this would make for a really fun 1v1 (local) multiplayer game.
Great game!
It took me a second to understand what to do, and for example that I should be attacking the place where the enemy will be, not where they are. Once I got it it was pretty fun, a little bit frantic when there were many enemies on screen.
Although the visuals were mostly clean and not trying to cram too much information on screen at the same time, I would have appreciated a little bit more guidance when starting. Also were there meant to be items in the game? I can't figure out what the three tiles just below the game area represent.
When I lost one of my units (the soldier), I felt the game actually became easier: the overhead of managing one more unit was not worth its abilities, it seemed :)
Cute game!
The visuals were clean and consistent (nit-pick: I enabled pixel-perfect mode but the "squashed" character looked a bit off, not scaled with nearest-neighbour scaling?), it was always clear what was going on and how to continue.
The two different weather events were neat, although maybe some more variation could be added. I was happy to see that the wind was eventually used as a positive/necessary event, not always as something to be avoided. The red clouds for speeding up the next event were a nice way to avoid having to wait the full 10 seconds. On the other hand, I think the game was almost too "perfectly" balanced: there was always plenty of time to get to the next checkpoint or safe area, but trying to be fast or trying to get through two checkpoints in one cycle was almost never possible. Towards the end I wished the game would have been just a tiny bit faster overall :)
The audio was sparse but added to the atmosphere. Playing notes whenever the weather event happened was a nice touch.
Very cute, I liked the minimalist vibe. The "conditions" on the platforms were clever. The platforming was nice (although there were some tight jumps in there), maybe the worst thing was to get stuck inside a platform even though it was just the legs that were stuck: unsatisfying!
Neat game. Tthe controls are not very enjoyable. I would have much preferred to write the letter on my keyboard, or to click the letters in order. Trying to drag them around, with no visual feedback as to where they will end up, did not work.
This looked and sounded really good! Reminded me a bit of The End is Nigh. The platforming has a bit less air control than I would have liked, especially given the types of levels you created. I was hoping for more of a plot resolution than "a nuke goes off", but why not :)
Nice game. The art is sparse but consistent, sort of minimalist. Music was also nicely moody. Gameplay-wise what I was missing the most is more/better control. I would rather shoot the bullets on click when I need to, not on an auto cooldown, and the bounces didn't seem to be useful. I also wanted to hear when the dash is ready (maybe to even see a timer for it), I didn't really feel like using it unless absolutely necessary.
Neat game, but I feel its beautiful art and nice music is a bit lost in the not-so-fun gameplay. Moving and jumping feels alright, but it seems really arbitrary as to whether an enemy will hurt me or vice versa. Are the bells which shoot projectiles to the sides even possible to beat? I've tried that level a dozen or more times but I always get killed by the bell (which somehow takes 2 lives at once). I think just *once* did I damage it, but then was killed immediately after. Sometimes enemies just ... disappeared? And as noted in the comments already, the camera should let the player see to the left too.
A Zachtronics game in a gamejam is not easy to manage. There are many things that should be added: some way to debug, a better indication of what is currently executing, fast forwarding, much clearer tutorial, and so on. Jumps, of course :)
The fact that the "input" was hardcoded into the description without any randomisation makes this feels more like a toy/sandbox than a game, because it's only up to me to decide whether I really fulfilled the goal or not. That's fine for some of the programs but for the "digging" for example, it can be interpreted in different ways: do I just drop all the values? Do I need to keep them on the stack, in the same order?
Moving the manual into its own PDF is a lot of effort and might seem a bit esoteric but for these kinds of games it really does make sense: have an actual "document" to consult while playing the game in another window/screen. On that topic the text needs to be more clearly structured and proofread otherwise it can only lead to more confusion.
The card stack system takes a lot of space but I didn't find that much use for it, why not just make the cards longer? Thematically (as in, every 10 seconds), it fits I suppose? Also it makes more sense as a stack of punching cards, but it is also just a bit inconvenient for the player.
Cute game!
I appreciated the polish, like the menu screen, the different "voices" for the characters, or the rotoscoped farmer-punch. Graphically the game was nice, although maybe a bit bland. Some extra decor or "bonus" veggies could have been nice. The music and audio overall was great.
Gameplay-wise it all felt pretty good with minor exceptions. (One of them was my fault, playing on a low-end machine, but the arrow sequences started feeling unresponsive; the game wasn't actually laggy, it just had more, inconsistent input delay.) I found it a bit annoying that I couldn't pull any more veggies when the farmer was coming, I think this could make for a nice high risk/high reward situation (maybe with bonus points?). I thought it would be nice to visually distinguish a hidden robber from a regular vegetable, although maybe remembering where they were is part of the challenge -- but if so, once again it would be nice to have a more distinctive look to the places in the map other than the fences and a general feeling of direction. Oh and I thought it a bit weird when I hid all 3 of my robbers that the game just sort of... faded out.
@jward @coke @goldenxd @jajakeim @lila-pause @maytch Thanks for playing!
@zwodahs Well done. It feels like 2 logs are indeed harder to get than most. Maybe I'll release a spoiler-ful map for the game.
@silentphil Thanks! F pressers? :D
@zahkros Yeah, I should have used another button, or allowed multiple controls (just like the movement scheme).
@hmrpf Hah yeah, I think I made the protagonist accidentally a bit like Conrad.
@joshedev Maybe there originally was meant to be a (late-game) reason for the vine cutting, but you know :) I'm also glad I kept it.
@daitli Yeah, maybe a controls summary tab on the PDA would have been good!
@klinsmannhengles Thanks! The engine is my own, mostly just WebGL and shader set up on top of Haxe. I also spent maybe a day this jam setting up shadow maps for the light effects ^^
@antti-haavikko Thanks for the review! Re: the graphics glitches, I didn't even notice this transparency one, whoops. By dithering I guess you mean shadow acne? I noticed than and partially solved it by casting three different lights from the player at slight offsets, but I couldn't get rid of it completely. I'm glad you noticed the coyote air, I made sure to implement it properly this time :D I remember you were upset in your Levitatium comment that it didn't work (but actually there was exactly 1 frame of falling *before* the coyote time was allowed). I didn't notice that particular death zone, I even hoped the bounces + iframes were generous to the player in most cases. Re: the logs, it's only the items (knife, double jump, suit) that need to be picked up again, the logs remain in your PDA. Re: the 2.5D aspect, yeah, I can see how it is a bit confusing. It is a bit clearer when the camera is always centred on the player, but then it is harder to set up separate "rooms", everything feels a bit more mixed together. The player is in the very front with the actual terrain because that's the layer that is pixel perfect, and I would have hated to see the sprites get squashed in ugly ways. I guess I could have had a bit of "3D" also in front of the player and made the middle layer be pixel perfect. Next time :)
@jeremyfa Thanks! Sorry to ask but, have you already collected the knife before hitting C? I listed the full controls in the game description but at the beginning of the game you can only jump with X. When you find a log or item the game lets you press Z (or Y on a QWERTZ keyboard).
@phillip-scott @chompdev Thanks for playing!
@kuviman I fixed the crash you discovered during the stream :)
@tricky-fat-cat I added a link to a (spoiler-ful!) [full map](https://ludum.thenet.sk/ld52/minimap.png) of the game, if that helps :)
@accatosh You can, the fullscreen button is "U", or you can also enable fullscreen from the options menu in the PDA.
This game reminded me of Autoball, then I saw it was from you as well :)
Interesting mix of farming and golf, of all things. The gameplay is easy to get and there is some strategy to it. But I still find the dirt loss to be extremely punishing! Losing the mud balls when they don't hit a gap is quite discouraging but I suppose it makes important.
It's quite satisfying to reach a large number of golf balls where things become *almost* automatic.
I'll stop for now, but I'll have to return :)
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It's a nice little puzzle game with some chess-ish elements. The random level generation is good for replayability and the score variance is not too bad. Very rarely I feel it gives a somewhat unfair level start (e.g. two betafish and not many crates nearby). Discovering the rules by introducing the different species one at a time was nice, and most of them telegraph what they will do nicely, such as the jellyfish with its two turns of "targeting". I was a bit worried when I saw a new species in a rather late level since I was aiming for a good score, but it was easy to see that the greenish fish simply moves like a chess king.
What I wouldn't do for a "pass move" button :)
Neat game. I like the idea of telling a story by gameplay and actions rather than scrolling through text, though I think in this game that story could be conveyed more "efficiently", i.e. with fewer levels/less filler content. Given that the "gameplay" itself is just about drawing lines, it might have been nice to have more of a puzzle aspect to the levels, e.g. to figure out the correct sequence of hitting targets or something similar.
Nice point 'n click game! I expected the ending to happen when it did (would be very surprised to see such polish otherwise!) but it was still a shame that there wasn't more of a game before: more twists or tasks to solve before the homunculus is woken. I enjoyed the audio, both the ambiance and the "speech", which was a nice touch. Graphically the game was quite pretty and consistent, though I would have liked to see more animations, even if they were not strictly necessary, e.g. for pouring the potions into the vial, or for moving about the room (maybe too cliche but still a staple of point 'n clicks for me!).
In terms of gameplay there wasn't all that much and if my previous games are any indication I get the feeling that you spent a long time setting up the "system" for dialogues, items, etc rather than using it. A possible improvement to make would be to highlight interactible items. There wasn't really a point where I was pixel hunting, but I could see how the "lever" could be easily missed, for example.
One thing I wished I could do was to create the other potions in the alchemy book. The game allowed me to pour the ingredients into the vial, but then I couldn't light the torch -- of course I had to "reset" the potion by adding another incorrect ingredient and only make the correct one.
Good job!
Very addictive! 3rd place for now but I think I'll return! "tzardom" was a fun word to type for the first time in my life.
The game is clean and polished. The looks are nice and the music is great, it doesn't get old too quick. Gameplay-wise I think I agree that zooming out might be nice, although I do also like the "strategy" of remembering words so that you can ping-pong for max distance bonuses. Still, you could do this by consciously choosing words that are far from each other when you can still see them :) It does suck a bit that you cannot see words which are filling up your overgrowth bar, maybe you could just control the farmer to move that way? The score popups that show whenever you harvest a word are nice but occasionally they get in the way of other words that I would like to see. Likewise I think words which were already typed (yellow) could be made smaller to reduce visual noise.
Oh, another thing that I think should be changed: if I already typed the first letter of a word, then type that same letter again, it cancels the progress on that word completely. So, I have to type that first letter for a *third* time, then continue writing the rest of the word. This is especially annoying when I "accidentally" start writing a word because it starts with the same letter as the last letter of the previous word. Since I am still typing that last word in auto-pilot I don't really want to think of the shared letter(s) as I am selcting the next word to type on screen.
Got it :) Sorry for the duplicate entry: apparently entering the same name on a different machine makes the entries separate.
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The idea is interesting but also a bit awkward! I can see there being interesting way to use the central mechanic but as it is, there is little reason to not simply put as many shoot/harvest blocks in a row as I can, depending on what I am currently facing. This is a kind of puzzle gameplay element, which would (maybe) work better if the game was split into separate levels, where I get to see what I will be facing and can choose my gun sequence but then cannot modify it as I am playing the level. Also, since the gun sequence executes so fast and the enemies aren't really all that aggressive, I can just snipe them from afar without getting hurt very much.
(Nitpick: the sound effect for harvest had some kind of very high frequency whine in it which was a bit annoying to listen to on earphones.)
Very nice game! I enjoy this type of puzzle: is this based on an existing pen-and-paper ruleset you know of, or is it original? (It feels like the latter!) The levels were all quite nice and the difficulty was balanced well enough.
It would have been nice to have the usual bells and whistles for this kind of game, for example to be able to mark which tiles must definitely be red or blue, even if the exact tree shape is not yet clear.
The graphics and animations were cute. I also experienced the tiny spritesheet glitch: it feels like maybe a piece of the adjacent sprite is being shown, in which case just spacing out the sprites on the spritesheet could help?
It was fun to try to get as many squirrels moving on the screen at once, e.g. in level 9 where I could make three start moving with a single new branch. I realised after a couple of levels that I don't have to wait for the squirrel animations (only the branch ones) before I can make my next move, which is nice especially for the easier levels.
It was fun, I won't tell anyone the secret :zipper_mouth:
Cute game. I think this *really* needs a tutorial or a guided explanation. I probably got the gist of it but didn't ever feel really in control or like I was making much of a difference to the bottom line, before being presented with another choice of another set of crops that I haven't seen before.
Fun little "Papers-like". The voiceovers and the variety of characters were very fun and increasingly absurd. I was a little disappointed that purposefully failing the audits did not make the farmers happy, so there was no ethical dilemma :D
Cool idea, but of course the game is not finished :) There should be more of a tutorial, but it was nice to figure out that you need to usually have `lef` or `righ` in the buffer, allowing you to toggle movement by pressing `t` or deleting it again, and inserting `up` in between. The spike hitbox was a bit too wide on the left I think?
(By the way, don't forget to link to this LD page from itch.io as well.)
Very fun! The intro was very cute. When I started playing I initially thought it's an interesting way to combine a racing game with a farming theme… Then the enemy CPU happily crossed over to my field and started harvesting my crops! D: That was a very fun moment. I am sure this game would be more fun still when playing against a friend, but I was glad to see that the CPU actually feels quite smart (but still quite easy to beat, unfortunately). Maybe it was just cut off on my screen, but there is no indication of my current score, is there? Anyway, very well polished, fun game!
Cute. Got 55, didn't realise in the first run that hurting takes away one of the collected pieces (for ever). Gameplay was alright and the encumbrance system made sense, although even so I felt the controls were a bit too twitchy: very easy to fly/fall into some spikes in a split second. Maybe giving the bird a bit more inertia overall could work?
@gary-the-enchanter @floralvikings Thanks for playing!
@zahkros Yeah, the theme is… there-ish (:
@antti-haavikko Thanks for the comment as always! I'm glad I made you enjoy a sliding puzzle, I don't generally like them either :D The mechanics indeed could have been utilised more, I did not manage to actually work on most of the levels until relatively late in the jam (with ~6 hours to go or so). Clearly some levels could have been a bit more balanced/polished! I realised the flashlight button was a skip turn indeed, and it was my intended solution for at least one level. The music is mine, yes, I just noodled on the piano for a couple of minutes and it sounded ok as a soundtrack. I considered recording a drum track over the piano as well, but I am not as good with the drums as with the piano. (Also the jazzy brush sound is a bit tricky to replicate on electronic drums.) Yeah the font is not intentional really, I should have turned off the outlining instead of setting it to the background colour. The rank at the end of the level is either "hard-boiled" (because you're a hardboiled detective) or when you lose it is "fried" (because egg pun). I forgot to make it "poached" if you get jailed.
@gametrodon Thanks! Yeah, I considered timed lockpick puzzles. On the other hand, it would have been the first thing that is actually time-sensitive in an otherwise turn-based game.
@michael-darling Good point. I made sure to make the tile swapping much faster for the enemies when there were too many on the board, but there could have been something for the player as well. I agree the "end of level" sound was a bit jank but I didn't want to record more :D
@daivyishere I'm glad the combination worked out. :)
@dxk2294 @shane-gadsby Thanks for playing!
@tricky-fat-cat Thanks! It's always nice to catch the LD regulars during streams also.
@wendel-scardua Really happy that someone noticed the pun :sob:
@honest-dan Diolch am chwarae'r gêm! (I hope Google is not making me insult you somehow.)
@roroto-sic There is a cheatcode to unlock all levels just in case!
@seshoumara Ah, thanks for trying anyway! If you find the time to return to this: the lockpicking is a "mouse maze". After you click the lock icon, don't move your mouse just yet. You need to move it slowly to avoid the walls (which only show when the cursor is near them), navigate the maze, and reach the goal.
I really enjoyed how the game progressed (at least for me) in that I thought about how to optimise the various tasks more and more: at first (before the timer started), I just moved the pieces one by one, which was of course really boring. When the timer started I realised there will be a challenge and I tried to stack pieces of the same kind, which worked. Later on I figured out that the stack can actually be arbitrarily large and can contain mixed pieces, so I should plan the full figure out. And then of course, planning *too much* means I might spend too much time just picking up the pieces and not placing any. Very simple and pretty fun!
Fun for score chasing, although the build up is a bit slow.
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Some things to improve: I don't think the health should replenish over time, at least not without killing something. This way, when there is just one enemy left, it can be easily exploited to regain full health. Maybe there should be a timer for advancing the round automatically, with or without killing all the enemies? I played on an older machine and the web build, so maybe this is just a problem for me, but with large amounts of the homing enemies, there was quite a lot of lag. This is also what killed me in the end, all the homing boxes spawned and I got like 1 FPS so I couldn't really dodge.
Great high score game! At first I thought, what's the point of the music toggle? It's easy to handle all the orders... But then it sped up (:
That was fun, neat one-button controls for a variety of mechanics.
The only thing I found a bit off was the very beginning: I thought at first something was broken and the box was not supposed to land the way it did; that maybe the little envelope in the corner would have explained the controls etc had I collected it (but then there was no way to go back); that I was supposed to see a claw or something—it was the only other thing that the description mentioned after all!
Anyway, once I got the game, it was fun to go through the levels, although sometimes collecting the letters felt like a chore rather than a challenge. The graphics were cute, the music was really nice.
I can't explain it but the thought of the entire world being made out of slugs is horrifying somehow. Anyway, very interesting idea but slightly painful in some places, due to physics not being perfect, due to the slugs being a bit dumb, etc etc. Felt very atmospheric, the music fit nicely into the gloom.
Fun game, glad it wasn't too long (clickers get old). I found it funny that the only thing not automated was the "I'm not a robot" checkbox itself. Chill music, cool graphics. Could have used more variety towards the end! I was going to ask why it took so long to load and I just read your response… oof :D
Cute, I like games with unusual combinations of mechanics and story elements. The clicking didn't feel terribly interesting, but there was never too much of it. I think it would have been a bit nicer if the layout of the world was a bit more complex, so that the clicking could be spent on actually exploring the map, but as it was I quickly found the landmarks and often needed to just click through, walking in a random direction, to get the next message. On a similar topic, it would be nice to be able to start working on the next message as I am reading the current one: I don't really need to see the world while I am reading a message.
Was I supposed to be able to walk over the empty space in the middle? I couldn't cross it completely but I still got some way into it and floated…
The story/messages were nice to read, though sometimes a bit waffly: it feels a little disappointing to put effort towards decrypting a message only for it to be "Sorry"! (Nitpick: I think you were trying to avoid gendered pronouns in the writing, but "Melakio are" seems wrong since Melakio refer to themselves as "I", not "we".) More complex puzzles to progress the story would have been good—there is a lot you can do with the format if players are presented with enough information. I think the story explains that there is no actual two-way communication but some acknowledgement of the progress I was making would go a long way. Maybe there even could be an actual time limit (number of steps?) and a good ending/bad ending?
The graphics are neat, although the shaders/postprocessing are clearly doing the heavy lifting :) The music fits the mood. More sound effects would have been nice, especially for the milestones, like activating a pyragon.
The idea is kind of funny (in a dumb way :D)! The game itself is also alright, but it gets old quite fast. I wish there was more of a difficulty ramp up later on: once there are 5 or so monsters on the screen, it feels like you can simply keep going forever unless you make really *major* mistakes. All you need to figure out is that you can hit multiple monsters with the same attack, and that's hard to miss given the relatively small space of the arena. I died on purpose after some time because nothing new was happening! This is a shame, I think with more powerups, enemy variety, obstacles, etc this could be really fun to compete for high scores.
It looks neat… But it is a bit too chaotic at times, I think. It is frustrating to die because the game is blurring, blooming, and post-processing the screen to the point of not being able to tell where you are or where the walls are. So as a game, although I tried it a bunch of times, it was not as much fun as it could be with a couple of small tweaks: the player should move faster, be more responsive; the bounces could be reduced a bit; it happened too often that I got stuck in between walls and could not really do much. (Of course not seeing anything just makes this more annoying.) The shapes that spin very fast are especially difficult to deal with. Sometimes it's possible to cheese the game and warp through walls but that doesn't feel great either.
I don't know if this fits the theme because I can't reach the goal (:
Actually I found the music much stronger than the visuals. The track for the title screen is eerie in a good way; I'm sure it reminds me of a movie or something I have heard before, but I can't place it at the moment…
(Edit: I remembered what I was thinking of! The intro to Another World, and more specifically this cover by Master Boot Record (at around 0:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPyvLin3n6E)
Looks great, the music was nice and funky, and I appreciated the little dynamic touch that it changed a bit when scoping. I thought the penalty/slowdown for carrying the box was a bit too heavy. I could have been tossing the box around more I guess but that's also a chore if it bounces the wrong way (as it did with the little robots sometimes). The puzzles were cool but I guess there is only so much you can do with a side scrolling level. There might have been more but some bugs forced me to stop on this level:
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I don't know if it was triggered by restarts or something but the laser beams went completely off the rails (moving to the left part of the level, sometimes moving rapidly without any beam, and most importantly, getting stuck and staying forever on the right side just before the button so that I couldn't actually beat the level.
@spacespytv Sure, I can replay it once it is fixed :)
@spacespytv Indeed, baby delivered!
Fun idea. I wish the lines were actually funny! (sorry :D) (Maybe the endless mode has more to offer?)
One thing I would improve is: although the word wrap makes sense for the line itself, it is a bit distracting when the wrapping of the target is different from the wrapping of what you have typed so far. Most of the time my letters exactly cover the target, but sometimes they are at the line above.
Interesting idea! Unfortunately I got lost obtaining the qwoissaaaan. Where's the path? Who can tell me where to go? Is anybody there? Help?
Very fun concept! I think I enjoyed trying to decipher the instructions more than providing a map, although I have seen some that were just too cryptic (incorrect? :D)! The safety check of having to follow your own map is cool but of course when you understand the game you can memorise your treasure location and do whatever :thinking:
That was interesting!
As you say, it's more of a tech demo than a game, but it was still a nice experience. Both the audio and the video were pretty solid (though the titles/font could have been made to fit a bit better ^^). The method of exploration worked fairly well, though for the most part I only used the bouncy balls. I guess I can see the appeal of the raycast, but you get almost the same thing (just half a second later) by sending a bouncy call that way too. It was cool that the maze had interesting shapes in it and differentiating the walls by colour made it much more navigable. I made a whole circuit around the lower section before I thought to start looking for a way to climb up :D Oh actually, being stuck in front of a ledge and trying to navigate with the rubber balls is a bizarre experience: without a point of reference it is hard to tell that you are *not* moving even though you think you are, so it suddenly feels almost like the walls are moving away from you!
One minor thing: maybe at the very beginning, it would be good to give the player at least *some* idea of the camera orientation etc. If this were part of a larger game, maybe the maze entry still has lights or something. I got the idea of where I was actually looking and how sensitive the camera was to mouse movement soon after I started spamming the bouncy balls, but there are some of the things that are just different from game to game and doubly so in gamejam entries :)
Thanks all for playing and commenting! :heart:
@alvaron I just watched the VOD, I wish I had been there. The box in the bottom right of the screen says "Click here to continue", and you clicked everywhere but not there ^^ Should have made it more obvious, leorean's comment mentions the same issue.
Great entry!
The experience was very well polished, the graphics were great, the music was a *jam*, the amount of levels made for a satisfying experience start-to-end, well done! It's one of the best entries I have seen this jam, so the following are mostly nitpicks:
* The weapons were interestingly varied, but I was not always happy to see each. (Looking at you, spreadshot.) There were situations where I would have clearly preferred to use one over the other, but this was left basically up to chance: did I happen to have a good weapon equipped for this section? What confused me a bit more was that in a couple of places there were side-by-side weapon pick ups (both at the start of a level IIRC?). This would make a lot more sense if the player were given the freedom to actually switch weapons, which IMO would make for more interesting/strategic gameplay, too. * The early levels were quite easy and not *super* different from each other. Maybe the difficulty curve could be a liiitle bit more steep. * The boss, once I got to it, turned out to be a little disappointing! Just shot it a bunch of times, it just had a simple pattern with one wave of sending some bats after me. Should be stronger! :) * I wish the shop had more exciting things to offer! I looked through the line up and for many things I thought: yeah, this looks ok, but there was nothing that I really actively wanted to save up for. In retrospect, the orb of ow was probably the most fun upgrade of the bunch. * The screen scroll was a bit frustrating at times: the levels often had two parallel paths on the left and right, and gems to pick up on each side. Once the branches connected I wanted to collect gems from the enemies/gem clusters at the top of the other path, but having got to the top, the screen already scrolled a bit. Now, there was a little bit of grace because you could still stand on the platforms that were *just* below the screen, even though you could not see them. I guess I understand that this mechanic exists to support some of the more tricky platforming sections in the later areas, where the player is punished for falling off of thin platforms, but the side effect of not being able to collect what you want in the earlier levels was not the best. * There was a strange stickiness to aiming upwards? I expected it to only last as long as I helt the up arrow key, but it was not quite that. * I had to restart once because after respawning from falling off of the screen, because the player character was placed on a ledge, but then could not move or shoot. I could only press the arrow keys to aim, but that was it. :)
Welcome back, it's been a long time since you participated in LD :)
Very pretty, both in graphics and music. The music in particular had rather different-sounding sections, which was interesting.
The gameplay itself is pretty intuitive, though for some buildings I must say the text explanation wasn't quite perfect, I really had to see what the effect was like when I placed the buildings down; but that's of course no biggie, there were not too many types of buildings and taking a run or two to get familiar with the rules is to be expected. The core mechanic reminded me a bit of the scoring systems found in some board games, in particular [Sprawlopolis](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/251658/sprawlopolis). :)
After losing a run, I wish rather than the "end screen" I could see my city! The camera could do a pan over the full run. It would also be nice to show a visual indication of the max depth reached in a previous run + the score, to have a bit of a goal to work towards with successive runs. I don't know how I feel about the "rank" given to the score. I guess it's cute, but without context it's a bit hard to tell which one is "good" and how much further I could improve!
Quite fun :) I haven't seen a strategy quite like this, where to build things you balance not only the current amount of resources, but also the income/spending of those resources. (Then again this is not really my genre so what do I know.)
The graphics were simple, but pretty and consistent (and with a nice colour palette!); the music was suitably calming and "deep" feeling. Some bits of the music reminded me of Startopia's OST, in particular the [Biodeck themes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHi2fDzJrS4).
It took me a minute to understand what exactly I was supposed to be doing: I should have read the description, but the text in the menu/pause screen was actually enough. I never quite reached whatever the radar dishes were pointing at, even though I built like 15? O2 towers reaching towards the signal (on easy difficulty). I wonder how the terrain generation is balanced? In some places there was mostly space for houses and very few spots for mines, in others there were *only* "depths" for mines but no houses.
Finally, the random danger that attacks you is cool but somewhat inconsequential. Losing one building doesn't change all that much, and even then it's sometimes possible to temporarily put up a radar.
Cool! Nice little Metroidvania-ish puzzle platformer. The art really reminded me of An Untitled Story (from Maddy Thorson). The core idea was simple and there was quite a lot of content to explore.
In terms of level design, sometimes it wasn't very clear which direction I should be heading and needed to "brute force" a bit to see where there different exits might lead. I tried a couple of times to cross the big gap in the pink area above the start but couldn't, until I found out that just falling down leads to an area I hadn't been to before. Some *subtle* way to lead the player might help here.
What also didn't help was that sometimes the mechanics felt just a liiitle buggy. For example, exiting the ground close to a wall is a little janky: Drilly kind of drill a bit into the (vertical) wall, boosting my exit jump, but I don't think that's intentional? I also couldn't always tell whether my drilling would continue or not. I guess it all comes down to how many blocks there are between the ground and the ceiling (or vice versa), but it was very much vibe-based.
I got to the end and had fun with this, good job!
I'm guessing the big box with the "warning" was the end? And my wizard moonwalked there...? :D
Cute. The "dash" mechanic was not what I expected just reading the tutorial, so at first I assumed the game is going to be *much* more challenging (it would be without any way to slow down ^^). The voice acting was technically very good, and it was good there were *some* variants for the lines, but it still wasn't great that the same-ish lines were repeated upon dying again and again. There was also a place where the exact same line was repeated back-to-back.
The actual "level" was mostly fine, the moving spike balls provided some more interesting challenge. Although it looked nice, the walls could have been more clearly delineated, once or twice I ran into what I thought was a gap at first when it really wasn't.
Very solid Wolfenstein-like with plenty of content and a nice "story"!
The graphics were interesting: it's clearly meant to look like Wolfenstein(-era games) but there are some differences, like the jittering shading in the corners of walls and on my own weapon. The textures were simple but charming, as were the sounds.
It was cool to see there were even secrets, and the one time I was told, at the end of the level, that something was hidden at the gross toiler I had crossed earlier, I wasn't even super annoyed at having to backtrack :)
The enemies were for the most part not super challenging: the blue-uniformed ones used hitscan but were easy to hide from around the generously provided corners. The "more difficult" enemies which attacked with orbs of enemy were, by contrast, easy to strafe around. I knew I entered the final level when I was given a boatload of every ammo type and lots of food :)
Very nice and polished experience! I enjoy your puzzle games and this is another great entry in the series :)
The graphics were simple but very cute and consistent. The block selection highlights, as well as the rock blocks themselves actually, really reminded me of fun freeware games circa 2000-2010. The music was alright, was fun to hear a kind of jazz-standard chord structure somewhere in there, and *mostly* didn't get too old, at least not for this many levels.
The levels themselves were all very nice. For me personally, 9 was a peak in difficulty, with 10 taking less time again. I guess including a turn counter would have been nice, but it would also make the game feel a lot less relaxing. The concept of little fish in danger and blocks moving etc also reminded me a lot of [Fish Fillets](https://fillets.sourceforge.net/) :)
In terms of controls, it was all good and the block sliding felt fine: I wondered though why make the distinction between controlling fish/sharks (click to select, click to move) and controlling blocks (drag to move)?
Overall a great job, thanks for the experience!
Cute game! I was surprised to see a game from you not focused primarily on sounds somehow :)
The core mechanic was interesting but suffered a little bit from unpredictable physics sometimes. For example, two square blocks placed next to each other, forming a flat surface should behave as one block, but sometimes hitting the exact point between the two squares would result in a rather chaotic bounce. I think overall *some* way to give the character a bit more control of the bounces would be good, but I don't know exactly what this would look like--maybe some subtle air control up/down depending on whether the attack button is still being held or not, similarly to variable-height jumps in platformers?
The different areas were somewhat varied and it was nice to explore a different enemy mechanic every time. "Wrath" was maybe the most frustrating due to the enemy shots, which could be shielded of course, but which could also have been telegraphed a bit better? Also in violence, was the bottom-left enemy really subtly different with a smaller chase radius? Seemed a bit strange to be the only such case in the game.
The music was nice, and the graphics were very simple but cute. Maybe it could have been more clear what the attack radius and cooldown are.
Great entry! This is all incredibly polished and smooth. The graphics are pretty, the music is great, the mechanics are interesting and you present quite a few variations throughout the game. Well done! Reminded me a lot of Nitrome games or the like.
If there is anything to nitpick, it might be that, smooth/low-friction as the levels are, it is usually very clear what you have to do. I can almost just keep going and taking the obvious/only moves to guarantee that I get somewhere, without *really* having to think about what I need to do ahead of time, because the levels are set up so cleanly. Sure this makes the player feel smart, but it also removes the feeling of actually figuring out the puzzles in a puzzle platformer :) I guess with more time/scope I can imagine this being more of a metroidvania with different areas to explore, giving the player more freedom in choosing what to do/when to do it.
Very neat concept! I liked the audio and tried a couple of runs to reach ~900m. I think it could use a bit more balancing to make this really fun. Some notes:
* the game starts quite abruptly and assuming Clippy is there to "tutorialise" was wrong: it always says "type (X) to (what X does)" for the latest word you pick up", but whatever, the game is quick to restart and is meant to be a score attack anyway; * once the speed picks up, auto-repeating spacebar or backspace is quite important for being able to move around quickly (but I assume this may depend on the user's keyboard configuration, no?) and even then it takes a while for it to kick in; * enter is also incredibly useful but somewhat situational, though I'm glad it at least places you on the leftmost *valid* place (at the time you hit it); * the variety of words is cool, but some of these sure are long! I don't think I will ever use "insurmountable" in a reactive fashion, only as a precaution; * your inventory blocks the screen! I guess the game could be shown in a non-square aspect ratio, with a sidebar dedicated to the inventory?
This looks and sounds beautiful! The animations are smooth and the art is all quite clear and consistent, though I wasn't sure how best to see it (during the intro) without butchering the pixel ratios. In the game it seemed fine though. The music is very calming and I *really* liked the fade to a different track when looking at the tablet(?) pieces; very reminiscent of some classic point 'n click games.
Beyond that, although it was easy to figure out some of the main things I could do, such as build various buildings and what they did, I did not manage to do "enough"? Like I did not seem to get anywhere with some of the tiles with glowing eyes nor build the building that's in the bottom-right corner of the selection wheel (it kept bouncing my gray resources, but I had plenty?).
The visuals depicted on the tablet as well as the various inscriptions on the walls in whatever cipher/alphabet made me wonder what might be going on and how to unravel the story, but unfortunately the game didn't give me quite enough to pursue that... Perhaps this is how the game is "unfinished" and "overscoped" as you say :)
Good job!
Nice :) It's a simple concept and the idea of delving deeper and deeper into inspiration/madness is neat. I really liked the music, with its different variants, and the more drum'n'bassy end to the third version was surprising. The changing background (called "Balatro background" by elZach :D) was also cool. Maybe it could have a more difficult mode?
It's a Lode Runner clone ^^ (but strictly turn-based)
Cute. There are some things that bothered me: the constant sound as my character was falling was not great, and I think more love could be given to the graphics overall: some animations, more variety in the tilesets. The music was ok but I wish it were a bit longer. I got to 409m and was't actually sure what to do: it seems the box must get stuck in the first ladder hole?
Fun twist on the classic fish-eat-fish games. I had to look at the instructions to see what the "fake" behaviour is after a couple of tries (for example, for the basic fish I thought it had to do with up/down movement). I think it's a neat idea but some of these "quirks" are a bit too much, I don't think I would realise e.g. that the fake carps don't visit all 4 sides of the screen :) I guess the real/fake behaviour should be spottable based on observation, even if given just 5 seconds to do it, rather than however long it takes the carps to make their visits.
Cute.
As mentioned by others, the music should loop! Other than that, I wished for a minimap or radar or something, it was easy to get lost. I got 3 emeralds and found the goal, so I win I guess? The goal should be made a bit more clear to the player I think: just "go explore" is not great if you don't also provide smaller sub-goals or rewards. As it is, there are:
* the enemies and mines: I can shoot them for them to stop pestering me/to clear the way, but otherwise I get nothing out of this; * the oxygen orbs and repair orbs: allows me to keep exploring; * the emeralds: well, it's shiny?; * the goal.
The controls are mostly tight enough and I was glad to see that the walls didn't cause contact damage, though making the player be stunned for a bit when they are hit is quite annoying! Oh and a small bug: when you shoot a mine, it explodes, but there is still a hitbox for it as it is exploding, so you can run into it and take damage even though you just shot it down.
This is a very pretty and atmospheric game! I would love to see more of the areas the lift is passing through, but restarting from the beginning, combined with no arrow key controls made this a bit frustrating after a couple of tries. Racing the purple fog to the lift, and the moments where the lift is *slowly* gaining speed as the fog recedes was a very nice gameplay moment for me. I might return to this, but I would really like checkpoints or something: I like a challenge, but the first seconds/minutes of the ascenscion are just repetitive.
I think some numbers somewhere need some tuning :) After a bit of confused playing, I was being chased by blobs (bad???), but my constant wave attacks (good?) sometimes got rid of them and sometimes my HP bar got to full (good?!) as a result. They were spawning too fast for me to really do anything about them so I just went along my way for the most part.
I would probably enjoy this more as a kind of semi-casual "climb down safely" game where I just need to look around and pick reasonably good distances to drop, maybe with a time limit.
Great entry!
You know, I thought I was somewhat good at platformers. Now, some 48 minutes and 584 deaths later, I am not so sure :) I got to the bonus levels and decided these are not for me right now, but watching your walkthrough is quite impressive. Is that a reference to classic Ogmo I see in bonus 4?
This is all very nice. The gameplay is tight and unforgiving. The mechanics aren't original--maybe with the exception of touching ceilings to regain double jumps? I haven't seen this one before--but they are tuned well and the levels nicely introduce them with a mostly smooth difficulty curve. (Maybe with the exception of the sideways jump from a 1-block tall gap in "Secret of the Blue Key"? It was nice that that jump was completely isolated to this level and not punished, I guess?) Showing the timer across level transitions and *only* across the level transitions is enough to make the player think about not being TOO slow (assuming they can survive the level ...) but not pressure them throughout the game.
The graphics are simple but cute; though I think the palette in the bonus levels looks a bit less pleasant. The music is neat and doesn't really get old; the intro to one of the lead passages reminds me a bit of some of VVVVVV's music.
trans vibes :purple_heart:
Very tight arcade gameplay loop, though I guess by design you can't quite reach an equilibrium state where you can keep going indefinitely(?). When the text started appearing after a bit of playing, I was surprised, but it worked :) Still I found the contrast between the text and the ridiculousness of a girl bouncing around cave walls with magic hover abilities funny.
The smooth-scrolling cave, the coins, and the pickup effects were all very pretty; the sound effects were fine, maybe the music could have been a bit more interesting!
Very fun twist on Tetris!
I really like Tetris and so I was immediately curious how this variant would feel. I missed the controls I'm used to (e.g. from Jstris) where you get buttons to instantly drop and also ones to turn the piece the other way or to turn it 180 degrees... But I was glad at least the "Hold" was there ^^. It was an interesting challenge and some of the behaviour felt quite surprising, especially that the piece only removes ground once it is *fully* submerged.
The music was nice, the ground tiles with fossils + the excavation "depth" are a cute theme. Got to 37m :)
Very fun! I really appreciated the animations of the two characters interacting. The game itself is a cute concept -- thinking of your own mnemonics for an unknown alphabet of symbols. I kind of wish there was a little bit more interaction *with* my words though, e.g., let the army guy form a sentence (somehow? insert dummy words? idk). Alternatively, logging what words other users have assigned to each symbol (and some good automoderation I guess) could be fun, so I could see the army guy say something like "other scientists believed this symbol to be 'blank'". The game is just long enough to not get boring, though some kind of challenge mode (time-based?) might have been fun, too.
Cute experience. Would have like to see this pushed a bit further with even more items and ways thie objects are trying to get my attention -- I think listening for a particular word (or voice) in a busy stream of words is an interesting challenge. I wondered why the narrator delivered the lines with such a tragic-sounding reading ^^
@debugman18 @universeflow (and all) thank you for playing!
@sebastianscaini "narrative" is a big word for what it is! (:
@m2tias aha, it was certainly not my goal to make the player uncomfortable. If there's a "point" to this it's that reaching out to people, in time, might be good (:
@tkap1 thanks for playing on stream and sorry about the memory leak!
@euler-moises the voice is mine so I appreciate this a lot (:
@euler-moises and @ribout-horace the "star 26" at the end is simply the signature I currently use for my actual drawings, i.e., a stylised version of my name (Aurea), and made in 2026.
Cute! As with many LD point 'n clicks the game suffers from being basically one screen with very little actual puzzle solving: matches -> furnace; wrench -> gears; then "find the gun" which is just "click all objects again in case the results will be different now", but it's fine since there are so few objects.
The art is nice and the voice acting is good. Some lines, such as after killing the monster, maybe don't quite carry the emotion fully, but that's a big ask (: The seaside ambience in the background does a lot for the mood.
Nit: the line "But... I didn't have a choice [...]" is not voice acted?
Nit: entering full screen ruins the pixel art by scaling unevenly and not aligning the layers anymore...
Very clever! I did, in my initial brainstorming on the theme, write "Signal, the messaging app" mostly as a joke ^^ But yeah, this is a great twist on the theme. I really like the idea, kind of breaking traditional "walls" of what the game actually is.
The actual core experience, i.e., a platformer, isn't all that interesting, it's everything around it that is. Makes me wonder where this could be taken: interacting with the chatbot during the game to ask for help, to give it puzzle solutions, etc...; making the experience a longer-term one to be more of a "chat"; involving other players since it *is* a mesaging app that is being used... (Obviously LD time limits exist and maybe the latter is not the kind of game you wanted to make or play anyway.)
Though I really appreciate my playing the game doesn't burn LLM tokens, ironically, the chat bot could probably be more interactive and "interesting" if it *were* an LLM actually twisting knobs that affect the gameplay. But then I also wouldn't be playing the game ^^
Lovely!
I saw your screenshot on Discord showing the wip script and I wondered just how much story this would turn out to be (: The UI work is very nice and makes one appreciate just how much goes into making a good CRPG dialogue system. The "actual" world you walk around in is pretty, I guess also quite static, but it's a good use of the assets. The music is unobstructive but very appropriate for setting the mood.
I appreciated how all the characters you interact with have a distinct personality and feel, though they are caricatures/exaggerations. I would have loved to see more of these characters, or maybe more moments where they somehow interact or acknowledge each other (the moment Jayda talked about Phylis comes to mind). I wished that filling out *the new form* were more of an event/dialogue also rather than a single sentence that you get after Scott restarts the router.
The RNG mechanics don't play all that much of a role, I almost wondered if they should have not been in the game at all? The bonuses/penalties you get all affect the odds by 10% I suppose? But still it goes with the Disco Elysiumness of it all (:
Nice (: I appreciated the "twist" with the father who needed to talk...!
Cute take on the theme! But also a little brutal :) Even with the reference sheet open on the side, it's a bit hard to get started and it feels like sudden death if you miss one letter and then can't catch up for the rest of the word.
If this was meant to be a game to genuinely learn flag signals from scratch, then consider what language learning apps do -- start with a very limited vocabulary (or here, very limited set of letters), then repeat those multiple times with spaced repetition. When learning a new alphabet, the apps also just ask for individual letters instead of going straight to words.
I guess that's not a challenge for someone who already knows how to read flags ^^ But it could be a separate learning/tutorial mode.
Cute puzzle! Love that it feels relatively polished, given how simple it is/how little time you had to work on it. Like the bassy thumps of the blocks landing on the field (: I think it would be nice to colour the chain a different colour when a match is "legal"? Oh and I noticed that holding the start of a chain (legal or not) pauses the timer, which can easily be abused ^^
I saw the itch.io article and knew I had to play the game (before reading said article)! I see what you mean by the first level and therestofthepuzzle. The puzzle of figuring out the first symbols was fun enough, and I really wish there had been appropriate clues to keep the rest going.
I wonder: since you didn't have the "hints"/images to explain the various words, what made you choose these words in particular? Or did you have drafts of images you would have liked to add to the game? Since in the article you said
> most of the symbols were only created as I needed them
then I assume "needed" meant you knew you wanted to use the symbol already (: I guess I'm asking because I can see this game feeling more finished with a *much* smaller dictionary of words but more images to hint at their meanings.
It was also fun to see you mention
> arrows are rooted in our own ancient weaponry and may not mean the same thing to anyone else looking at it
but then still use the arrows in the symbols ^^
Small nits regarding polish: words that you gathered from a message are once again underlined when you re-visit the message. Also after finishing the first five symbols, the five symbols you have figured out appear once again in the dictionary of symbols but they cannot be placed over the words they represent.
Anyway, I enjoy games in the style of *The Case of the Golden Idol* or *The Roottrees are Dead* and adding a (con)language aspect to it is really lovely!
Aha, I love a game that requires you to read a long PDF file! (Genuinely.) And it's a conlang :purple_heart: I wish there was more! I wish I needed to make some sentences, somehow! As it is, the puzzle of figuring out what the message is saying and how it relates to the people I have seen around was fun. The language is also designed well enough that I did not feel lost in trying to understand most words, e.g., things like "more" and "less" are easy to remember.
Nit: "this" and "that" have a yellow bar on top but are not on page 6 (:
I got 6931! Fun game, though it doesn't seem to get any more difficult after a certain point. As noticed by others ( (^: ) the arrow keys don't help with keyboards that don't support N-key rollover, but also I feel like it would just be more comfortable to have the 4 keys laid out in a row (say, D F J K to have two keys per hand), because the up/down chords were the most error-prone.
Fun game! I wish there was a 100 BPM track, since 80 feels a bit too easy and 120 still a tiny bit too hectic. In particular I wish there wasn't as much stuff obstructing the next signal during countdown -- there is the previous cloud fading out, the letters + line underneath adding some noise, and the 3, 2, 1 countdown distracting while this is going on ^^
This is *fun* but a slow-burn kind of fun. It's neat to interact with the tools and to get better at figuring out how to use them quickly. But then... I thought I was in a terminal and used ctrl+W (delete previous word) and closed the tab I was in :') (I'll get back to it.)
And getting back: I got further, but it is somewhat frustrating that missing certain transmissions can soft lock you and you just need to restart the game and play from the beginning again. I was reasonably happy with finding the key
!> obscurity
and I assumed clearly I should use this with a cipher that accepts a key (vigenere) before I listen to the base... Then I used that and transmitted some code but I assume what I should have done was transmit the key in plaintext and that would have told me the next step? :/
Cute clicker! As @limered mentioned it was sad that you cannot click in the overworld once you unlock the modules (: I would like to set up a module system in each tower and click maybe? Then again with the shared pool of modules that seems less optimal than just using all the modules in one tower and using that one tower only.
I beat the game, though towards the end I felt it was getting a little too long. Some of the later levels felt like filler, in that they didn't introduce new mechanics or challenges really, and some bits felt just artificially difficult (thinking of "three portals, guess which one is the correct one!").
Similarly to Hagamos above I found the core mechanic a little confusing. Generally I guess I didn't really "want" to interact with the traffic signal because the timing was a little narrow and I could just use the auto-advance anyway (but of course I didn't know I was playing for a time-based leaderboard...). The blue gems were fine but it would have been nice to have an indication of the two free turns somewhere in the UI. ~~I got a bit more confused due to the enemies -- it seems like slashing and killing an enemy has the same effect as the gem in that I get some free turns? Or is it three turns when I kill an enemy?~~ Yup this is in fact explored but went by too fast x)
Unfortunately the free turns for enemies encourages one to just get close to the enemies, then camp to kill them all, then move on with the rest of the (possibly enemy-free) level.
Other than that I would like if the graphics were just a *little* bit more clear about where the grid is, so it's easier to plan jumps etc for farther tiles.
Cute! Neat interpretation of "signal" and a futurustic training twist around it. I got all four endings -- the three "bad" ones reminded me a bit of one of the "bad" endings of Violet by Jeremy Freese, where you try to force the narrator/game to break down (: