Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → bearcage
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | traceroute | jam | 209 | 3.87 | 3.89 | 3.56 | 3.94 | 3.89 | 3.16 | 2.13 | 3.53 |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | 👥 | Crazy Trashy | jam | 418 | 3.48 | 3.39 | 3.19 | 3.93 | 3.96 | 2.89 | 3.89 | 3.43 |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | 👥 | Deep Mech Salvage | jam | 241 | 3.79 | 3.63 | 3.22 | 3.76 | 4.51 | 2.45 | 3.82 | |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Little Friends | jam | 528 | 3.57 | 3.21 | 3.35 | 4.14 | 3.20 | 3.65 | ||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Indistinguishable From Magic | jam | 591 | 3.55 | 3.33 | 3.22 | 3.41 | 2.93 | 3.43 |
This was a fun one! The overall structure was reminding me of the gauntlet dungeons in the For The King series (in a good way) — the balance of conserving mana vs trying to avoid taking passthrough damage from leaving archers alive an extra round was a fun source of tension.
I'd have loved to see some kind of an upgrade or progression mechanic — maybe choose between more hp or more mp every N fights or something?
This is super cute, and I'm a sucker for a classic platformer but I am not good enough for this one, it's tough! Thanks for sharing your game!
Adorable dog = top marks from me!
This was a fun one, I like the theme and had fun with the spellcasting mechanic. I eventually got myself cornered behind the dog with one baddie too many, and down I went, but I had a blast along the way and got to say the phrase "summon a bath for the dog" which is great.
Fun retro vibe, feels like I oughta be playing quake on a CRT in my buddy's basement in 1999! Overall I had a good time playing it, but I thought I'd leave a couple of suggestions in case they help for next time!
I struggled a little bit with the default sensitivity, though I'll admit playing an FPS on a trackpad on a web-publish is perhaps not my finest moment. The demons are a little bit spongier than I might've hoped — I think it might feel more satisfying if you could clear them faster, but maybe keep the same "just on the edge" feel by balancing that with having more of them and getting less reward from each?
This was fun! Like one of the other players, I was saving up a bunch in anticipation of a big bossfight, and particularly loved each time the difficulty ratcheted up. It's satisfying to see the biggest cluster of two colors of enemies yet and drop in a massive 8-click ball of each counter to just chew them apart. Thanks for sharing your hard work this weekend!
This was a fun one! As always with jam games, I find myself wanting some more of it — great work and thank you for sharing!
This is a fun twist on the theme, and I always love a physics sandbox! Got a good laugh out of me, especially before I realized it was possible to gently put things down.
I know this is always the hard part with jams, but I wish there were a couple more tasks, or maybe a second or third list with a few tasks on it!
Great spooky ambiance, and serious kudos for doing bilingual VO and menus in a 72-hour game! I wasn't able to finish this one, but I still had fun attempting it.
This was a fun one — always like seeing more puzzle games, and this felt minimal in a very clear way. I struggled a little bit with the patterns on cards / outlines on the final level, moving me directions I didn't quite understand (maybe I'm rotating?), but was able to finish anyway. Thanks for sharing — glad you were able to get this out for the jam since I enjoyed playing it!
The surprising highlight/card combo: Screenshot 2024-04-15 at 8.40.12 PM.png
This game's pretty, and the background tunes are nice too! I struggled a little bit with the second level, trying to figure out the chalk/cauldron/stones, but had fun nonetheless. Thanks for sharing your game!
Pretty game, nice music, — this was fun! I have a feeling I didn't get to the best parts of the songs since I'm not great at rhythm games — I hit the difficulty cliff face-first and fell right back down!
Super cute game — thanks for sharing your hard work this weekend! The overall flavor is great, well-matched to the theme, and pretty. I struggled a little bit with the mouse-involved minigames (tricky to do quickly with a trackpad), and at first with understanding the fuse-and-bomb indicator for the timer.
Super cute game — I loved the setting and the mood of it, and the punny title is a win in my book. Like another commenter, my first run I thought the baddies were, in fact, my buddies at first and hadn't realized I needed to go to the summoning room / balance my time between that and running around the mansion. I also noticed an odd interaction where if I summoned a ghost and he got to a room at about the same time as a baddie, my ghost got 2 full rows of stars immediately and the baddie despawned. Finally, I think either I'm not very good at this or the spawn rate on the bad ghosts might be a little too high to keep up with!
PS. Firefox worked for the web embed, but safari threw the webworkers error other folks mentioned.
Cute game, and a fun set of abilities to play with! It took me a couple of tries to work out how to progress (didn't spot the mana bar at first, so I didn't understand it was about conserving resources), and (embarrassingly) I didn't realize I could jump, but once I got it, I was able to get going! It's always fun to be able to combine movement mechanics like this -- teleporting or summoning midair, etc. The summon block tutorial outline was a nice touch as well.
Thanks for sharing your hard work this weekend!
Oh, and I forgot to mention, thanks for making/uploading a mac build! I'm playing on that platform, so this was one of the few submissions I could try out natively vs on the web!
I like the pacing and simplicity, and the sketchy visuals work well for this game! I struggled a little bit to understand when to hit vs when to push my enemies to the edge, and what the filled/outlined states convey, so I'm not quite certain how to use those mechanics just yet.
Thanks for sharing your hard work this weekend!
Super cute game — I particularly appreciated the overall message (though I confess it was a little text-heavy for me in the dialog sections). The effort you put in to the visuals, especially the effects on the skills, really shows nicely.
Like one of the other commenters, I got a little turned around at first and inadvertently did the second quest first, which was a little bit confusing since it teleported me to a different location. I also didn't realize immediately that you don't have to stick to the paths, you can just have a wander if you like, which was a fun discovery!
Thanks for sharing your hard work this weekend
Great entry — congrats on completing the jam and thanks for sharing!
I love the premise, and lumibot and the city are adorable. The music is a fun earworm too!
I struggled a little bit with the mouse controls, since (at least on my computer, a mac in safari on the web build) the cursor doesn't grab in fullscreen mode, so the area I could aim in was a little bit limited. Also, it turns out _my aim_ is more than a little bit limited too...
Congrats on completing the jam, and thanks for sharing your game!
You got the spacing between torch refills juuuuuuust right, really started to feel the creepy crawly walls closing in, especially by the last couple turns of the maze. It might've been cool if the baddies had a little bit more complexity to their behavior — some sort of midway between what they're doing and full-on pathfinding, like maybe a random jitter in their movement or a back-off-and-charge loop.
Also, fun to see a jam game in Crystal — you don't see that every day — I'm on a mac so I needed to compile it, but that was pretty straightforward since you included an easy makefile.
This is an impressive amount of game to ship in the compo, great job. I second the "Remy plays Overcooked" vibe, it's great!
A couple little bits of feedback:
I had some trouble with the physics collision bits — at one point I had accidentally backed up a line out my door and was hopelessly in the weeds — my culinary rodentia were cooking and plating up a storm, but my legs could only carry me fast enough to keep one table fed at a time (the one nearest the door). I know a big part of the challenge in the game is that the chef's not exactly a speed demon, but I think he might benefit from being a little faster or having a little "dash" he can do to scoot around quicker (Overcooked is a great precedent to draw some inspiration from there!).
My first playthrough I didn't realize I needed to staff each station with a rat, so I wasted a bunch of time trying ot figure out how to do the cooking tasks myself. A little more aggressive tutorializing, or starting with a rat-in-hand or right on the sewer might help!
There's a couple spots where the colliders interact a little strangely with the player — when carrying a rat inside, you have to aim yourself juuuuuuust right to squeeze between the bottom left table and the wall.
All super minor things though, this is an excellent game and an impressive result for compo!
I got an error trying to fire this one up, unfortunately :-(.
It looks like the godot export problem covered in the [embedding guide](https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/) (requires some js file search-and-replace surgery inside your export zip). The error was "Service Worker is disabled because the context is sandboxed and lacks the 'allow-same-origin' flag"
Congrats on finishing the jam and thanks for sharing your game!
I'll admit I spent most of my playtime making my little almost-formed dinos dance around before linking up, just vibing out with the music and environment. Great work making something that came together cohesively!
I had a little bit of a hard time with the mouse sensitivity in the web build — it doesn't capture the cursor, so you've gotta work within the little embed box, so turning the camera around can be a kinda slow process. Super minor accessibility bit of feedback, but holding a button to dig (or fewer clicks) would be a little easier to use!
Adorable characters!
This is a great entry, super engaging and simple to get your head around. Nice work and well done finishing the jam!
A little bit of feedback:
I was *not* prepared for the level of focus it takes to keep up with the sped-up 3 track challenge! It's a pretty quick ramp-up, it might be nice to have shorter runs with less of a change in between each (or dynamically speed up as the run goes on).
I didn't realize I could get back to the explanation intertitle from the game at first, but once I did and got the hang of it, I got sucked right in. If you have the time to next time, maybe see if you can tutorialize it a little in-game (e.g. drop right in instead of doing the explanation card, but have little pauses with explanation text in the right moments)?
Nice job getting to the finish line without a prefab engine, that's always a challenge! I had a fun time with this one, and it's a pretty unique take on both the genre and the theme.
This is an interesting take on the survivor genre, with the world background having HP too — clever idea! I didn't feel like I had a _ton_ of control over how much damage the body took, though, in part because it seemed like the germs were allllll over, pretty uniformly, and I didn't have much in the way of tools to do clear them via anything but kiting. Maybe it would help to do some more active upgrades (change attack mode / different projectiles?) to make the player role a little more active.
Congrats on finishing the jam and thanks for sharing your game!
I had fun with this one, though it took me a hot minute to realize that the web build wasn't rendering text on my computer (macos in safari, if it helps). I was dragging upgrades around, but not seeing the stats or costs at first, and (surprisingly) did okay even so.
Tower defense is a clever genre idea for a jam, and y'all did a great job with it!
I wish I had a little bit better of a sense of how much damage I'm doing to the little swarm (maybe some kind of indicator of overall kill rate, or some kind of indicator per little guy on how far done they are). You might've had this and I just couldn't see it, too, because of the web/mac combo issue above — if so, awesome!
Congrats on finishing the jam and thanks for sharing your game!
This was a tough one — I only managed to make it a couple levels in. I think I might've done better if I understood which cannon would fire when I pressed x (also, didn't realize you could wrap edges until pretty far in!). I think a little bit more tutorializing, or maybe some more obvious indicators of which direction an attack would come from, would help!
Congrats on finishing the jam and thanks for sharing your game!
Cute game — my favorite bit is the cat sprite though, which sorta makes the first level hard-mode — it's tricky to keep him on-screen without dying :-P.
I noticed an oddity around mid-air collision: it seems like when you come into contact with a wall it zeroes out both components of your motion vector as long as you're holding the x-axis movement key into the obstacle, even if you're midair. It seems like maybe it's setting velocity to zero instead of just velocity.x?
Some of those jumps were pretty tricky to get just right — I also enjoyed the bits of dynamic puzzle with the other rat and the falling trap — with the quick levels and fast retry times it's satisfying to run repeatedly and learn the timing.
Congrats on completing the jam and thanks for sharing your game!
The little goober is right in between creepy and adorable, well done with him! Also props for doing your own music!
I struggled a little bit with the controls — it seemed like my camera was getting stuck on something or jittering a bit. I did get a decent sized goobermari going though!
Really creative concept, and super ambitious to go 3d in a weekend! I had some trouble with falling through the floor that made it a bit tricky, but still managed.
For anybody else playing on macOS, I used these apple docs to launch the game build: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from-an-unknown-developer-mh40616/mac
I had a blast with this one, sunk half an hour and beat it!
Like the others, I wish the initial ramp up to "you don't _have_ to click anymore" was a little quicker, but overall this was a great entry. Quite polished, too.
Thanks for sharing your game!
Super pretty game, I love the juxtaposition of antialiased ui, bloomy lights, and low-rez-rendered model/mini polys. Like others, I needed to play the windows version to get it going, but once I switched over it was well worth the effort -- a lot of fun!
I think I did break it just a little bit in the end by accumulating a ton of troops directly on top of the well, but it was so fun to watch the arrows fly I wasn't even bothered.
Thanks for sharing your game!
@sepjani sorry, by "Break" I just meant I had gotten out ahead of the difficulty curve a bit.
Specifically, when new tokens spawn, if they don't get booped out to the side of the well and stay on top, they can mass up there. When that happens, they're able to fire out without hitting each other, which reduces the incoming damage pressure on my tokens to just damage-from-baddies, so by the last 3 waves I had an insurmountable advantage over the incoming baddies.
Very satisfying core loop, funny flavor to the game (how did those birds get in that hole?!) — I definitely didn't keep pace with the baddies all that long, but a couple plays and I had the hang of it.
Thanks for sharing your game!
That was fun, great job taking on something so ambitious (3d, three different control modes, *and* thonk-y bat-to-squid combat)!
I had a little trouble with gravity, I think I might've entered the ship a little fast or at a strange angle -- had to off myself by mashing x to get respawned. Gravity stayed slightly sideways, but not so much so that I couldn't get through another mining trip.
Thanks for sharing your game!
This was a fun one! I got a little stuck a couple times, but in the grand tradition of point-and-click adventure I just needed to do some good old fashioned pixel hunting. I particularly liked the gear puzzles! Default sensitivity was a little high for me, and I wish the inventory menu closed on leftclick, just to save the extra tab press.
Thanks for sharing your game!
Rhythm mechanics _and_ VO in a jam game is ambitious, super cool to see!
The beginning bit started off a little slow for me, but I had fun — thanks for sharing your game!
That was a fun one -- at first I didn't realize I needed to swallow the ants, but once I got that I managed a respectable score. I did have a little trouble getting the tongue to stop where I wanted it to, to drop down -- I wonder if you might be able to hold the "next" input direction, i.e. press and hold left to go left, then hold down to take the next downward turn on that leftward progression? Just the same, I had fun!
Thanks for sharing your game!
This is a really cool concept, and a lot of fun to explore! I know you probably had a tree as long as your arm to map out all the possibilities, but I'd have loved to see a few more snarky replies to the goofy combinations, if you decide to keep hacking on this.
Thanks for sharing your game!
@zungryware / @wheelsx thanks for the O2 bug report! We accidentally put an old build link in the web player at first, so y'all were playing a copy from way earlier this morning... Oops!
Visually very cool — the desaturated colors and shading are great for the theme!
I had a little trouble with the controls — my mouse for some reason got stuck enabled in fullscreen, so it kept opening the dock on the left side of the screen when I went to turn left, but it's perfectly playable only going right!
Very satisfying to fix the cracking windows in the nick of time with the tape (or TP roll?)
Cool concept, and the visuals are gorgeous! It took me a minute to work out how to place points and that I needed to pan the viewport, but once I figured it out I was plotting away and seeing the world.
Thanks for sharing your game!
Okay I had a blast with this one -- the music's great, the retro vibes are _spot on_, and it's really satisfying to play. I'd play the crap out of that on an arcade cabinet. No notes, y'all, great job!
Super cute main character, solid wall-climbing/jumping/riding mechanics, and a satisfying rock toss -- I had fun! I needed a couple tries to learn the flow with the baddies, and I couldn't manage to kill 'em, but I did reach the end screen by careful jumping to dodge.
Thanks for sharing your game!
Thanks for sharing your game with the community! I had a few good moments of panic-firing-everything-I-had, but I got to a win with a second attempt at the boss.
This was a fun retro throwback, and tough as nails! I kept really wishing I had checkpoints part of the way through each screen, maybe at the points where I was standing on steady/stable ground? Either that, or sliiiiightly more forgiving platforming, maybe a hair less gravity accel (or a lower max fall velocity).
Thanks for sharing your game with the community, I had fun with it!
Just leaving this alone made it make progress. Wish life's problems were the same.
Jokes aside tho, nice work and thanks for sharing your game!
I wasn't able to get it running in crossover/bottles on macos, unfortunately (it throws an assertion after logging loading level1 at winevulkan/loader_thunks.c:6203 -- i.e. someplace in wine's wrappers), but I'll circle back on a windows machine. Very cool that you made something from scratch in the jam period, and I love to see folks using glm and sdl, they're great libraries!
Great work — the commentary works for me, base mechanics are solid and felt exactly how I'd expect, and a great sense of humor. Hard for me to pick a top highlight, but the music (esp eastern region and credits) and the philosopher/ur-questgiver are both up there.
Thanks for sharing your game!
Thanks for sharing your game with everyone! I don't think I quite finished collecting everything, but it was fun to trot around the village. I think it might've been a little more fun to move faster through the space, since there's some kinda long stretches of jogging — either that or maybe a smaller village?
Cool concept and I can imagine with the direction it's going it'd be pretty adorable, thanks for sharing your game with everyone!
I had a fun time with this one! The cursor moves a little quick for me to track it (I might've had an easier time with a slower cursor and proportionally smaller target areas), but once I got the hang of the timing I was able to make steady progress each day. I kept trying to fish up the trash on the seafloor, too, might be a cute way to hide an easter-egg or two :-)
By the final day I was pretty much hopeless at every minigame but soul collection w/ the trackpad I'm playing on, but I managed to hit the goal just the same!
I couldn't quite figure out how to play the pickpocket minigame, and definitely struggled a bit with a couple others (shopping and grow/pick in particular were a struggle)
All around though, fun game and lots of creativity in the minigames!
This had a great vibe to it, between the motion, sounds, music, and theme — thanks for sharing your game with us all!
While I'll admit I didn't manage to beat Good Luck, I had fun trying! I particularly enjoyed trying to keep my spin momentum up while moving around dodging things.
Thanks for sharing your game with everyone!
This was a cool concept, and the printer-noise nostalgia is real. Nice work!
Very chill experience, and a cute reason for doing it — great job, and thanks for sharing your game with everyone!
Super cute! I didn't manage to work out how to "turn in" / complete getting all the colors, but I'm pretty sure I did manage it. Great work with the overall feel and mood of the game, and my dog and I both got a kick out of the squeaky-toy duck grabbing sound and animation
I didn't manage to win one (not quite sure if I was moving the trash to the right spot or not, I tried out a couple different approaches) — had a fun time grooving to the music and enjoyed the visual theme just the same!
The sfx cracked me up, as did the fact that you leave trash behind on lawns — great flavor to this one, nice work!
This was a fun one, y'all got a solid core loop and the world flavor around it was great. I wanted to know more about the baron, and the firefights that one customer kept getting in!
Nice work, especially for a first jam! Many of us don't even get to playable our first time around, so I think you ought to be proud of yourselves with this!
I think some quick sfx would really liven it up next time (sfxr is always a good option), give the interactions a little more impact without having to do animations for all of 'em.
That was a fun mashup!
Poor melancholy robot, gotta use that self-awareness to make a new life!
Solid entry — roguelite upgrade system + a working survivors-like with a few upgrade paths, and some baddie behavior variety, nice work! I def got myself in trouble with speed stars before I had the speed to outrun 'em myself, but other than that little difficulty bump I felt like I stayed right at the sweet spot all the time I spent with the game.
I sorta wished there were a few impact effects (a tiny knockback on hit, shake/wiggle on death, cam-shake on your own death) to give the presentation a little bit more oomph — I liked the simple shapes and thought they read clearly, but I think it'd help to make the damage boost etc upgrades read a little more if they tied in to something like that.
I already sunk a bit of time in and I'm looking forward to another run to flesh out my upgrades!
This was a cool one — it's been more than a few years since college differential equations, but it's really fun to get to play with combined functions hands-on like this. I struggled a bit with the three-planet systems, but still had fun giving it a go. Thanks for sharing your work with us all!
Super interesting! I'm not sure I quite got everything, and it def took a little time to get the hang of how long a dash needed to be to recognize, but I had fun trying to internalize some morse and work out a bit of the mystery!
This is a cool idea, I really like the memory / hint-of-whats-inside angle on the theme.
It took me a few tries to understand the interface and get the hang of what's gonna kill me (or maybe kill me) vs not — I wished there was a way to heal (or maybe there was and I just wasn't lucky enough to find it on either of my good runs). Thanks for sharing your work!
I had a good time with this one, and kudos for doing cards for a jam, that's tricky! Like another player, I had an issue with itch where it only drew in the top left quadrant, but otherwise everything worked well.
I managed to get my infantry _behind_ the trapper, which was a bit of a surprise!
Cool mechanics taking shape in this one — I didn't quite get my head around the rules for when I can/can't push a tile into a blank to make floor vs hover it there, and I don't think I quite understood the second-to-last floor, but I did finish the game twice, and I had fun doing it!
The embedded player def seemed to struggle more than the one on your website, so I'd encourage others to try the html link version.
Also, big props for doing this with raylib+emscripten, not easy to do a full game in this timeframe while battling with the C-to-web build toolchain!
Thanks for sharing your work, I had fun with this one! Really high level of polish on the art, and it was fun to get into the moody scene of the post-experiment!
Super ethereal mood to the music, a whole vibe on its own! The art has a ton of character too. I struggled just a little bit with the typography in reading the scenario text -- a little more width in the lines would've probably helped me. Once I got the hang of manipulating the boats their motion was really satisfying too.