Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Brainbetter
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Summoner Training Simulator | compo | 145 | 3.58 | 3.50 | 3.64 | 4.05 | 3.26 | 3.70 | 3.38 | 3.14 |
This is a great start! I can see where you're looking to go from here, and I really hope you build more. Getting a working slice like this is a great accomplishment for the jam. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Took me a few tries to find a strategy, but I had fun doing it. Liked the visuals and the music! Thanks for building this!
I very much liked the experience of drawing the lines - that part of the interaction felt really good, and I liked playing with it in particular.
Really appreciated the sound design on this one. Nice background synths, and satisfying noises on the towers!
I realized partway through playing that you'd developed a new-to-me tile-matching mechanic, and finding one of those is rare. It's small, in that way that compo games inevitably are, but I really hope you'll explore this mechanic more. There's a lot of interesting stuff that this hints at, and I'm sure there's room for you to explore here.
This game is so cute! I wanted to like my dog even while he was standing around letting me get eaten, or mauling me because I couldn't cast the food spell.
The spellcasting starts out quite tricky for the number of enemies in wave 1; in a post-jam version, I'd love to see a slightly gentler difficulty ramp to ease players in. But still, best doggo.
There's a lot of interesting stuff here, but the game is so difficult at the start!
I had a lot of trouble predicting when I'd be allowed to put something into a spot and when it wouldn't work.
I also think it would be helpful to have a bit more "pulsing" in the difficulty curve - one thing many games like this do to support this sort of hectic play is to have the difficulty get harder, then easier, then harder, so after making it through a very hard period you have a few moments of "rest" to get yourself back together. A good example of this is comparing classic Tetris (which just gets harder) to Tetris Effect, which has that "pulsing" challenge, and lets you train for harder difficulties before the game is there consistently.
Oh, that's amazingly tricksy. I did the tutorial and regular level, realized what "hard" would entail, and noped out, but I had a big smile on my face when I did.
Such a cute use of theme, and really evokes the feel of herding.
I'm really glad I played this! The art was cute and the music had a nice upbeat energy.
But I'm particularly glad because some of the mechanics didn't quite "work" for me. Having the mage/towers have a fixed finite lifespan made it hard to do much forward planning, and ended up feeling like I should just place towers wherever the enemies were at this precise moment, since otherwise I'd be wasting summoning power.
That's not something I would have intuitively realized if I hadn't played this! Sometimes the best experiments are the ones that don't quite pan out, and I'm really glad you tried this out.
@epb9000 Yeah - maybe if the units clocks don't tick down when they aren't actively firing at an enemy, so there's a bit more room to plan, but you still can't build "permanent" defenses. It was really interesting, and I'm glad you tried it!
I had so much fun with this. Would definitely play a longer game exploring these mechanics. The charming art did a lot to carry the feeling along.
As someone who regularly plays word games in English, I had a lot of fun with that. Definitely found myself speed-typing and trying to remember what letter combinations I'd eliminated!
Enjoyed the visual feel and the design. I could not get the hang of the controls well enough to make any meaningful progress in the first(?) zone, so I gave up, but the orb-and-character interaction felt interesting. I'm not particularly good at action games so I may not be the target, but I'd be curious to play more with a gentler difficulty ramp if this game goes anywhere in the future.
Got my 1840 on the scores (as verified by the devs hanging out on Twitch chat!) Had a lot of fun playing this one. It's got a lot of charm and some interesting dynamics in the placements and powers. I'm curious to see what this could grow into!
I was uncontrollably giggling while I played this, which is (I think) exactly what was supposed to happen.
Really nice twist on "summoning." Charming everything.
It was cute! It took me a few tries to work out the way that the commands are expected to be given; an example might help a little.
One thing I was a little sad about was that there was no real way to "fail" a summoning - if you're trying to summon the wrong cat, it just won't let you. I tried to deliberately summon cats that didn't meet the request, just to see what would happen.
Overall, though, it felt nice and everything in it was very consistent and clean. Figuring out exactly what was needed was a very light puzzle, but just enough to feel like I was doing something.
Loved the oontz and the vibe in this one. I had the same issue as some other commenters that I wanted to treat it like a rhythm game and time my button-presses to the crossover point, but it was quickly fixed.
There's a ton of great visual polish here. I've stopped playing, but the music is still running in my head and my toe is still going to that beat. Nicely done.
Enjoyed the music, and the control scheme was a neat experiment. Add my voice to the crowd that would like a crosshair or some other targeting indicator. I also noticed that my fire rate when I held down LMB was very inconsistent - sometimes it was firing at about the pace I could reasonably press the button, but other times it was much, much slower. Autofire is a nice QoL feature for those of us who are trying not to get injuries from repetitive motion.
Also, the music was really solid. Nicely done.
Cute concept, great visuals. I ran into some small bugs when interacting with runes, where sometimes multiple runes could disappear together, and I ran into the Lord of the Pit issue as well, but overall I had a lot of fun poking at it!
Reading everyone's comments while I'm at a tech conference and I'm really glad for all the feedback.
A few replies to things: * I agree that there should be more puzzles! My plan was to write more once I got the deployment working, and... that took me right to the end of the compo. Making games is hard! Once we're safely done with LD I hope to go back and add more levels to a "post-LD" version. A few of the folks watching in my Twitch chat also had ideas for levels, which I asked them not to share until later because I was doing compo and that was too close to teamwork for me, so I'll hopefully get those in as well. * The memory issue on Mac browsers is unfortunately a Godot 4 known issue. It means I can't play it on my laptop, either! I'm hoping it will eventually be resolved, but I only discovered it in the final hours of the compo. * The multiple glyphs on the cursor was an issue I encountered during testing and fixed on my machine, but clearly I didn't fix it everywhere! If anyone experiences it, I'd love to know what environment you're playing in, and ideally what you did that got it to happen. I'm using the same dragging behavior in my non-LD games, and so I really want to make sure that particular bug is eliminated!
Thank you all for the feedback; it means a lot to me to know folks had a bit of fun with my game.
@dzejpi I would not say that Godot 4.2 "works" with Macs. During the last two hours of the compo, I got a pile of folks testing it on various machines (a benefit of streaming the dev process!) and it didn't quite work properly for anyone. I think one or two people were able to interact with the game, but failure modes ranged between "the browser hangs for a very long time" and "things outright crash." I did get a small number of reports of "merely" very bad lag followed by some playability, but I'm not sure I'd rely on them - especially given how very non-real-time my game is, I suspect anything with a more active play loop is even more prone to failure.
If I'd realized the 4.x web export was this broken on Mac before I started, I would not have built this on the 4.x line.
@hexstart I'm certainly hoping to put together a post-jam version of this with a bit more of an intentional difficulty ramp, and more ways to help folks get to know what the glyphs do. One unforeseen consequence of doing all my development on a stream was that the friends I got to playtest the final version had all been around for some of the design conversations, so nobody was truly coming at it from a blank slate. Definitely something I hope to improve in a version 2!
There's a lot of love and charm here! I get that the third-party music invalidated audio as a category, but I really, really wish I could have rated the adorable noises the demons made as you did anything with them.
Charming game, nice art and good writing.
I wish the call center mechanic didn't discourage reading the text in depth, because it's quite funny - the game's writing is its strength, and having the mechanics push you to skim was a bit of a loss in my opinion.
Also, as a fellow sufferer of the Godot 4 Mac Bug, my sympathies. Hopefully Godot folks can fix this before next LD rolls around.
The controls were tricky, but I spent a lot of time laughing while I was being demolished by adorable woodland creatures. Very stylish, and nice polish.
Played through one path. I found a rather positive ending by happenstance and thought that was a nice place to end things. Extremely atmospheric, and lent itself well to being read aloud - which I did, since I was streaming it while I played.
The cadences and shapes of the writing felt good in the mouth, and worked well with the subject matter, dark as it was.
That was cute and fun! I really liked the little monster characters and the biting animation.
I would have liked to see some reminder of the elemental strengths on the gameplay screen - I was trying to remember if I understood them from the menu. Alternatively (and maybe cooler) would be to see a little bit of the bonus / penalty as the creatures are fighting.
I also noticed I was being scored on the quality of my summoning drawings, but I'm not sure what effect (if any) better scores had.
I had fun!
This is a great little concept! The cute summoning art is definitely the star for me.
There's a nice squishiness to the sounds, but some of them can be a little piercing on headphones; I found myself turning the volume down to about half my usual to help with that.
Some of the harder challenges feel like they'd work as untimed puzzles - just figure out how to draw this combination of shapes in a valid way at all!
I really liked the shared-placement constraint. Once I realized the way that the hell world was an overlay of all three, I really started appreciating the strategy of where to place my towers for flexibility in each of the levels. I'd love to play a more fleshed-out version of this with more of these multi-level triads.
Sometimes it's not about the game, but about the experience of the playing it and the trash talk. This is absolutely one of those times. I do not think I have enjoyed playing Go Fish for a very long time, but this was a blast. The different characterizations of the opponents really added everything.