Crocodial by David-Liddelow 2020-10-08T09:12:13Z
@noteworthy there should be music playing! Sorry you missed out :/
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → avareii
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | Traffic Control Publican | jam | 602 | 3.32 | 3.31 | 3.37 | 3.73 | 3.22 | 3.32 | 3.32 | 3.34 |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Euclid's Elementals | jam | 322 | 3.80 | 3.71 | 4.30 | 3.82 | 3.45 | 3.71 | 2.97 | 3.52 |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Compact Domain | jam | 91 | 4.13 | 4.11 | 3.56 | 4.09 | 4.34 | 3.47 | 2.76 | 3.68 |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | Seeds of Civilisation | jam | 91 | 3.97 | 3.88 | 4.00 | 4.05 | 3.60 | 3.71 | 3.61 | 3.70 |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Regular Railway | jam | 222 | 3.87 | 4.00 | 3.63 | 3.94 | 3.33 | 3.31 | 3.20 | 3.48 |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | 👥 | Flickerlight | jam | 98 | 4.08 | 3.45 | 3.45 | 4.17 | 3.97 | 3.93 | 2.97 | 4.21 |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | Three Miles High | jam | 132 | 4.04 | 4.16 | 4.06 | 4.33 | 3.79 | 3.93 | 3.79 | 3.75 |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Crocodial | jam | 646 | 3.60 | 3.81 | 3.86 | 3.78 | 3.30 | 3.18 | 3.75 | 3.50 |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Warp Trash Flotilla | jam | 28 | 4.25 | 4.24 | 4.43 | 4.32 | 3.67 | 3.65 | 3.61 | 3.98 |
@noteworthy there should be music playing! Sorry you missed out :/
Simple, nice and clean. Took me a minute or two to see the PICK UP button, but that's me, not you XD.
Nice concept. It was interesting how quickly the behaviour of the plank became less predictable as more pumpkins happened.
Had a great time stacking hats XD! The lack of a jump is counter-intuitive at first, but made a lot of sense once the controls clicked for me. Well done on this project! :)
Strong I Wanna Be The Guy vibes xD. Just like with that one, I found this very engaging.
Loved the atmosphere, and what you did with the background audio. The mechanics were interesting, too.
The sound effects are pure gold xD
Liked the animations. The movement system was a bit floaty, and the attack action oddly delayed, but the game was certainly playable. Couldn't make the jump for the artifact above the starting position (off-screen, quite a ways up), felt a bit too tight.
Playing on an ultrawide screen (3440x1440), the background didn't span the entire width of the screen, instead going down the middle of the screen with grey stripes at the edges:
dragon game.png
Cute game! The jump being linear rather than parabolic took some getting used to, but I got the hang of it and finished the game in the end :)
Having the mouse look and the physical turn be separate and unbound to each other was very distracting, but also lent the game a frantic atmosphere very in line with the theme. I couldn't tell where I was going half the time (until I found the minimap) and found the cactuses as hard to dodge as the enemies XD. Lots of fun to play, though!
Probably a bug: hanging around an already open stable door plays the sound effects for opening the door again. Not sure if this comes from the open door, or from the nearby closed door that I can't reach because it's behind the open door. Still, minor nitpick.
I got the first two or three spells, but regrettably my alchemy was not up to snuff and I had to use the cheat sheet for the rest. Great fun! I was particularly impressed when many of the incorrect spells had well-fleshed-out background effects.
94 attempts to get 8 landings. Nicely done! Loved the art style, and the controls were smooth, responsive, and clicked quickly for me.
I sort of got the hang of it, after some time? I managed to get as far as turning my sacks into beer, launching a couple of rockets and buying more sacks. Still not sure quite how uranium burn quantity or rate correlates with beer or explosions.
Loved the graphics, though. Consistent and polished, with attention to detail across the various sections of the game.
Okay, wow. A deep, coherent, and well-made visual novel as a compo game. Well done!
Of course, the art is a bit sketchy, but that just adds to the vibe, and there's some grammar issues but that's normal for a novella written in 48 hours. But the mood, wow. I got drawn in in the first minute or two. I liked the fitting music and the visual metaphors in the character designs.
Got bad endings: 'locked in' and 'isolation'. Saved to play more later.
World's most picky volcano XD and the sound effects were great!
Couple of quality of life things I noticed: - It was hard to determine how much of an effect my attempts were having on the volcano, because I never saw the volcano image go back a stage. I dumped everything in at once, but there was no way for me to tell whether throwing things in at a slower pace would have worked better. - In a similar vein, there was no obvious warning right before the volcano exploded. If there had been, I might have had a chance to try to quickly drop a few things in as a last ditch desperation move. - Given that I threw everything in immediately, it was very obvious when things spawned on the empty screen. Having them wander on from the sides would have looked smoother. - Sound effects aren't all the same volume - the OI is particularly loud and startled me once or twice.
Good effort, though! Had a fun few minutes playing it :)
I adore the art style!
It took me a bit to figure out there was more than one direction (other than the laptop) that I could look in - I thought this was progressive disclosure at first, but it turns out I just didn't notice one of the arrows XD.
I agree with some of the other comments - the balancing is a little unforgiving. Some things I would try: - Leave the bar where it is when you turn away, rather than having the email regress when you're not holding the button. As it is, the emails undo themselves when you're not looking. - Auto-select each new email as it comes in. - (I assume you wouldn't have had time to implement this anyway <3 ) Rank the emails by urgency, and allow the player to right-click on the less urgent ones to 'apologise' and buy more time. - Panning the cat sound to indicate where to look for him.
Thanks for making this! It made me smile :)
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! There's always that moment of tension before the first comment - but now I know exactly what's wrong with our game and I can relax! ;)
@hansj @taaada @otterfaelure that's a fair point about the dialogue - I got so caught up in balancing tension vs. readability that I completely neglected usability. Also, every line is manually timed - which is great for attention to detail, but bad when sleep-deprived people (like me) forget to update timings during dialogue edits and one line ends up hanging around for 5+ seconds.
Next time we do dialogue, we'll put in a 'next line' or 'skip interaction' button. Some of the interactions are kind of verbose, but I think a lot of them could be condensed into a summary paragraph for people who aren't into dialogue.
Certainly we also didn't expect the game to be as long as it ended up being. I thought to myself - 20 minutes, max. Instead, if you use up all your resources as intended, I suspect it could last about an hour plus (edit: I had a good run that went for 43:42; I think 50 minutes might be possible, but I don't think 60 is). Regrettably, we didn't have time to properly test all the interactions between fuel harvest/consumption rates etc. But this means I can play the game myself (semi-) blind later, so ngl I'm pretty stoked about that :)
@vgel the game is designed to scale - once you find tools for things, you can hand them to people to do treecutting/mining jobs - or task them with wandering around and finding these tools themselves, provided they are close enough. Unfortunately, we lacked time to polish this progression so as a result there's a bit of a barrier between early game and late game that requires either luck or concerted wandering around.
@truebach thanks for playing! I'm not the guy to help with optimisation, but I'll boop one of our other devs and he might have suggestions. LOVE can be a bit temperamental and chuggy sometimes depending on how it's run. In the meantime, all I can recommend is to try the Windows version, if that's not what you've been trying already.
@leolferraz that was meeeee <3 I'm glad it had the desired effect! We tried something new this time - the moment we had the theme and mood more or less nailed down, I put the music together Day 1. This allowed us to use it as a guideline for the mood over the rest of the game. You guys are the final judges, but I think it helped.
Given that my usual approach to music is sitting down at 6AM on Tuesday (Australian time) in a panic, this approach was definitely more relaxing (and I could stress about other things instead!).
(I also wrote bgm for when you see the stars, but we didn't have time to put in the triggers for it. I put it up on my soundcloud [here](https://soundcloud.com/shoulderdrake/flickerlight-starry-sky-bgm). The default bgm is there as well.)
@baka hahaha haha haaaaa - no, I kid, this is actually a really good idea. I just wish we'd had enough time to do stuff like this. As it was, we didn't even consider scoping it in :)
Thank you all again for playing! I'll put up a post in the next day or two outlining all the scope creep that got cut last minute :)
@truebach thank you very much <3 your comment made my day! In case you missed it in my previous message, you can find the track [here](https://soundcloud.com/shoulderdrake/flickerlight-main-bgm).
It may also please you to hear that we've slowly started poking at a post-jam version of the game :) no ETA or details or anything, because there's still a lot to do, but the work is being done!
[Blog post!](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/flickerlight/the-looming-spectre-of-scope-creep)
@kitkii thanks for playing! As much as a character falling into depression and refusing to talk further fits the mood, I'd love to add more complexity to these guys in future. Maybe they mutter to themselves about something, and open up if you bring them a specific item?
@realtanhen did you know, I threw together a list of 50+ things to polish and add in post-jam, and job animations weren't even on it? Thanks for the reminder XD this would do a lot to help immersion!
I found the dialogue loop aesthetically pleasing, and the bgm/sound effects complemented the game well. I'm glad that other commenters mentioned an ending! I recursed once and assumed an infinite loop, and it was rewarding and amusing to find that there was a true ending after all.
My only gripe is the forced full-screen combined with lack of UI scaling made the game a little awkward to play on a large monitor, but /shrug I had fun!
Loved the voice acting, the concept, the story and the 3D effects. This game was a lot of fun to look at :)
Triple-jump was a strange choice, but I found myself getting used to it pretty quickly. I liked the platforming mechanic as well, thought it's very difficult to recover from a missed jump - which is particularly grating when you're 15+ platforms in.
It feels very much like someone implemented the horizontal part of the gravity parabola, but not the vertical part - the more you fall, the slower you move sideways (?) rather than dropping faster. Same effect, but it feels very punishing, especially since this means it can take 30+ seconds to die following a failed jump.
Also, there's a zoom function. Why is there a zoom function? It's very disorienting XD.
Thanks for making this :) no matter any mechanics issues, I enjoyed playing the game.
A clever little concept, like Sokoban under pressure. I can see it being a good source of clever puzzles. Unfortunately, I didn't make it too far because it's the end of the day and my brain is wiped, but I can definitely see the potential.
I liked the cute chiptune music loop, and the graphic style was neat, if a bit of a stark contrast between the main puzzle and the encroaching wave.
This was very nicely done - I liked the music and the art, and I thought the mouse control scheme was a neat addition. However - maybe I didn't make it far enough? - but on the innovation side of things, this looks like a literal clone of Doodle Jump.
Still fun and well-implemented, and you did well with the aesthetics, so props for that :)
Straight up my favourite movement mechanic of the jam. There's a little gap at the peak of the jump where you could probably use some invincibility frames, as I died this way almost every game, but the rest of it is just _smooth_. The graphics and the music/sounds are simple and good enough to support the concept. Having trouble not playing this over and over instead of whatever I should actually be doing _grumble grumble_.
(Also a 'you have a jump' indicator would be nice, because after 10+ horizontal dashes and various jumps it's easy to lose track.)
Really clean and consistent look. The little additional mechanic where you can sit on a wall and wait for the time to run out is a great anti-frustration feature.
EDIT: also, thank you so much for binding the arrow keys, as my WASD-mapping is non-standard and this makes quite a few of the games in this jam hard to play.
[blog post](https://ldj.am/$308670)
Very difficult. The floaty jump physics add to the difficulty, but I think that's part of the charm.
Some minor background positioning issues at extreme resolutions.
coke.png
A cute idea. The question where you had to multiply two numbers to four decimal places was frustrating to see, as most of the rest of the questions can be done in your head in the allotted time and that makes this one feel a little unfair.
Also, playing in 5120x1440 resolution on full screen I was unable to select an answer. Understandably, this was probably not tested for :)
My first playthrough was the same, couldn't figure out why the hatchling count wasn't going up. Also, regrettably the 'final score' (i think?) display appeared and disappeared before I could read it - but I think I did ok on my second run.
dragon.png
Consistent graphics, smooth and balanced gameplay, thematic music. Great offering :)
Interesting concept. As mentioned above, it does suffer a little from a lack of visuals, as you're trying to represent an environment rather than tell a mostly linear story. Text-based games aren't really designed for that without supplementary information like a map, node list or inventory.
I did notice that all the people I ran into were in a variety of moods, which didn't really seem to affect their behaviour - whether I got fed or not seemed wired directly to RNG without confounding variables like mood or location. Same thing for e.g. 'Escape' - if it didn't work, I could just try it again repeatedly and eventually it would take (maybe chance of success increased with each attempt?). There was one case where I tried to escape repeatedly and it didn't work out, so I stayed of my own free will instead, and the person got distracted and let me wander off.
Some of the events also have odd triggers - I can rock up at someone's house and they'll ignore me, and I can wander off, but if I specifically 'flee' then I get caught? I get the impression that 'flee' and 'hide' are the main interaction commands, and characters don't really take action unless prompted by my actively trying to look more suspicious than usual.
Once I got past these design choices, though, it was good fun exploring the setting and finding all the interactions. The 'Awareness' meter helped a lot with keeping track of what was going on, though at about 40% I started having trouble remembering who I'd encountered and who I had yet to meet. Again, in text form, schedules are hard to parse and keep track of, and I resorted to waiting around in locations until people appeared.
Overall, a solid stab with a pretty complex system that kept me engaged for a good while. Thanks for putting this together!
Very clever concept and clean implementation! I enjoyed the oppressive visuals, the totalitarian overreach and the apartment with the unbroken windows :) Pity about the lack of audio - it would have added a lot to the mood.
I found an issue where if a typo appeared too close to the left edge of a document, I wasn't able to stamp it:
img01.png
This was really hard, but a lot of fun!
I very much enjoyed the cohesive art and audio presentation. I don't know exactly what the technical limitations of the TIC-80 are, having never worked with it before, but you've certainly done a good job within those constraints.
At first, I thought you had to get the fruit _into_ the basket, though soon enough I realised that just tossing the fruit _at_ the basket would do. Even then, I never quite managed to master the bounce angles and ended up only making it to level 5.
I'll take another stab, and see how I do. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone developed a better strategy than mine, which ended up mostly just being 'flail and pray'.
EDIT: OH THE SPOT WHERE IT BOUNCES DETERMINES THE DIRECTION. Middle goes up, the further left or right you go the sharper the angle. Once I figured this out, I got to level 9 :)
Neat game! It took me a moment to figure out that the way to get lower denominations was to get money right after it spawns; at first I thought the money on the trees randomly cycled through denominations over time, rather than 'maturing' into higher values.
I feel like there's mechanical depth in the double jump + dash mechanics that I didn't manage to get my head around. I'd love to poke at this later and get a higher score - I managed 525 once I figured out the monetary lifecycle.
Neat game, liked the music, and the graphics worked well. Cthulhu is kind of hard to dodge, but the fact that you only lose 1 (?) soul per hit makes it manageable.
One thing I'd love is an indicator showing you where the closest cat is, even if only toward the end of a level - especially once you're a few levels in and have a massive maze to search for a handful of cats. Fortunately they mostly tended to accrete in the corners of the maze over time, but there were still one or two right up in the middle that were a pain to find.
Overall, enjoyable and holds together well. Well done!
- Pros: could mow cows with any part of my cow mower, not just the front. - Cons: cow mower has a massive turning circle and handles like a cow. - Cows: 33 - Verdict: there's not a lot there, but it's engaging, and I'd play it again.
I enjoyed this a lot :) very chill. I can definitely confirm there are side-effects on non-standard resolutions though XD
img03.png
Can confirm that it would have been great to see the key labels in the game, as my touch-typing ability apparently doesn't respond to keyboard-shaped objects. However, in that case, it would also have been awesome to have a DVORAK layout available, which I take it is not very common.
The game itself was great - the pixel art looks great, the music matches well, and there's quite a bit of skill involved in not just locating the keys, but also timing keypresses to not interfere with each other.
I did extremely poorly the first two or three times, until I realised I had to allow plants to ripen prior to harvest. After I figured that out, things went a lot better :)
img04.png
(yes, I know plants ripening is described on the game page, I just can't read lol)
Most satisfying thing I've peeled this year. Fun little game, does exactly what it's designed to do.
Looks to me like this is supposed to be hosted online, and doesn't want to run off my PC directly. I got the following error:
img02.png
Please @ me in a response if you remedy this, and I'll happily give it a shot :)
Very nice game. I liked the minimalist colour scheme and the parallax scrolling implementation, and the music matched it well.
As people have said above, it would have been cool to have more varied beats, e.g. syncopated rhythms over the top of the chill music. Additionally, the rhythm of the trees isn't quite synched up with the BPM of the song, and wraps around every so often.
Would love to see more of this down the track, it's a solid start and a good effort!
I liked this one a lot. Well done! My team and I have a bit of an appetite for difficult games, and the difficulty here ramps up quite solidly. I managed 9 points before (I think?) I got spawn-killed by a spinning blade, though there was so much going on at that point I couldn't tell for sure.
The controls are a bit slippery, as mentioned above, but I think that adds to the experience - it made me pay much more attention to my surroundings and forced me to be much more careful when planning routes.
I wish there had been levels and level goals, but that's a personal preference, not something the game strictly needs.
After I click 'Next' on the initial screen, the screen goes blank and nothing happens.
Please @ me if you remedy this, I'd love to give this a proper shot!
Nice little game! I enjoyed the retro windows OS aesthetic. Regrettably, there were a few places where the enemies got stuck in walls, like so:
img07.png
Just to confirm, is there supposed to be audio? I didn't hear anything, but you haven't opted out of the Audio category.
Nice game! The visuals were consistent and very pretty, and the change in perspective as you progress really brought that out. The audio complements this nicely. The intro music (Emancipator - Darkest Evening of the Year) fits perfectly, though I wish you had transformed it somehow to not be immediately recognizable.
Downsides - the gameplay is a bit samey, and the terrain has procedural-generation-type peaks and dips - I'd occasionally go for a while without finding anything, but all the same I knew that if I wandered far enough I'd find something eventually. Unfortunately, this makes this game a bit more of a walking sim than an actual game per se, but that matches well with the mood, and the experience as a whole is still a good one. The perspective changes offset the monotony, but not quite enough given the length of the game. I did like the ending visuals, though.
Bonus points for making a game that scales correctly to my absurd default resolution! There were a few issues with the angled perspective toward the end, but nothing I couldn't work around.
img05.png
Neat game! You've pitched (at least for me) the difficulty perfectly that I got it on my second try, yet it still felt challenging and rewarding. Obviously, I don't know what happened during development and whether this would have been feasible, but a few more 'levels' with more or less tanks or aircraft positioned differently would have been cool.
The art is cute and well-implemented, and the 'fire what you abduct' mechanic was fun. Well done!
yip yip eyh yap blub blub
seriously though this was so good, i guess you could build on it if you wanted but it already has kobolds and kobold noises so i don't really see what you'd add
@valintone I did it!
(for context, most of the work I did on the game was sfx and writing, and I didn't really get the chance to playtest it until now)
Here's my victory screen:
level 4 victory.png
What I did was focus the scouting outposts next to the fog of war, then - once I opened up the first area and half my outposts got cancelled - built blacksmith as close to them as I could for upgrades. Two outposts, one upgrade per outpost = 4 scouts.
For reference, this took me four or five attempts.
I think the problem here is that it wasn't clear to me what 'upgrade' meant; I didn't know whether blacksmiths upgraded a scouting outpost's population or range, and spent a game or two under the impression that it was range and that I could make outposts stretch further by building more blacksmiths. Then - surprised pikachu face - I cluttered up my whole island without the deck spawning any scout outposts because there wasn't anywhere valid to put them.
Game threw an error :) I assume this is because it ran out of levels? I _think_ I got three crystals on each level, but it's hard to tell when you get the white wizard as full and empty crystals look the same.
I really enjoyed the minimalist approach to UI, as well as the smooth and consistent art, the sound effects (wizard noises hhhnnmm) and the calming background music.
There were definitely 2-3 levels that were real stumpers. Well done!
mage matrix error.png
I absolutely _love_ the coherent aesthetic you guys have gone for. The bitcrushed tune and the dark colour palette and the 2D sprites in the 3D setting. Excellent effort - I really enjoyed this one.
Gameplay wise, the game seemed very easy to win, and some of the controls were unintuitive; could have used a short tutorial telling me exactly when and where to click for what.
Also, the 'You Win' screen is a bit hard to read.
triumvirosis.png
Really clean and neat little game :) even understanding how the demons move it takes some serious skill to get a decent score.
_monkey's paw curls_
Loved it, really clever twist on some established concepts. Clean and consistent graphics, nice music and sfx. I didn't notice the Prefix list until halfway through the game XD but that's on me.
Encountered same error as @human.
@just-a-cat possible that I grabbed an older version, I had the tab open for a while XD. Will report back.
Got it working! Some neat jumping puzzles, the graphics are cute and consistent, and the music is nice.
I got stuck in the same spot as @willby due to a combination of the invisible platforms and my inability to come up with a solution that didn't involve casting Summon in mid-jump, which I am very bad at.
apprentices journey.png
I had thought at first that the invisible platforms were a side effect of the platforms I placed with Summon, but they turned out to be present anyway. They made the first part of this level very easy, at the cost of making the second half impossible.
Good effort, guys :) I enjoyed trying this one out.
Cute little project, with good and consistent art. More of a walking sim than a game, though. Some music or sound effects would have livened it up. Also, it was difficult to tell whether to press I or 1 at first.
(If there's a way to get to the conversation in the first screenshot, I couldn't figure it out.)
Very difficult to play on high resolution, and there appears to be no option for a windowed mode.
fellwand screenshot 1.png
Otherwise, seems promising, and the platforming is clever. Wouldn't mind giving it another shot in windowed mode.
Re. 'Windows complaining' - note that Windows uses 'number of downloads' as one of its heuristics to determine whether a downloaded file is likely to be malware. For a game jam like this, almost all software is going to be recently uploaded and will only have a handful of downloads each. As such, many games are likely to run afoul of this - just click 'More Info > Run Anyway'.