Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → CBdeVilla
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Claustrophobia (the walls are closing in) | jam | 410 | 3.55 | 3.16 | 3.01 | 3.97 | 2.86 | 3.27 | 3.47 |
I see a good basis for a puzzle game here. The few levels and features the game had were interesting, though it would of course be nice to have more puzzles to play with. The difficulty curve seems to work out pretty well, with each element being given its own dedicated introduction level. I thought the graphics were perhaps too minimal for a game that took up the entire height of my screen. But all in all, pretty good work.
Once you figure out how wide of a wall you need to block off the opponent, the AI becomes pretty easy to beat. I do wonder how this sort of game would work out if you had a _human_ opponent, though.
This game is dangerously addicting. A satisfying twist on the match-3 genre that has a rather unique take on the theme, based on other games I've seen so far. I noticed that there were times where you were collecting fewer items, giving you time to clean up your inventory, and other times where items came quickly, pressuring you to work fast and keep up. This is good, but I feel like the latter bit could be pushed a little harder, as it seemed like it actually took effort to lose the game. (For the record, I stopped somewhere at level 9 to see how losing the game happens.)
I'm definitely keeping a copy of the game to play for later.
I tried the game with keyboard and mouse controls at first. The mouse sensitivity was too high, making it hard to aim, but I managed to get by. After that, I thought using a controller would make things feel more natural. What it actually did was make my aim go from bad to worse. I could fine-tune my aim with a mouse. With a controller, the high turn rate made it near-impossible to aim, and anything I did hit was the result of spray-and-pray. I kept wishing for some sort of target-locking feature that would, say, point the weapons at an enemy for you as long as you can keep it in a certain area in front of you.
The visual effects were nice, though. I particularly enjoyed looking at the glowing trail my ship left behind.
Boy, does this game feel intense. You rarely have a moment's reprieve since the floor falls out from under you if you ever stop for a second. But the lighthearted attitude of the level descriptions adds enough levity to keep the stress from boiling over into pure frustration. And it helps that you can instantly start over anytime, no need to jump off into the void and wait for a respawn if you mess up.
I'm surprised at how much mileage you got from just the 4 tile types, but their use in the various levels shows quite a bit of creativity. You've done an equally good job of slowly introducing the game elements and strategies one by one, and combining things in later levels. The last level does pretty well as a final exam of everything you learn to do in the game, which is how final levels should be.
If I had one complaint about the game, it would be that the pickup radius sometimes feels pretty unforgiving. Maybe a larger radius would help, or maybe visible feet so I have a better idea of my positioning?
The pixel art is good, things are easily recognizable, and everything is cohesively retro. Unfortunately, this is a very rare instance where I have to rate Innovation pretty low because, let's be honest, the meat of the gameplay was Pong and Snake (and I'm assuming the unfinished one was going to be Breakout). I quite liked the premise for playing a bunch of minigames, but I wish the minigames themselves were more original.
But it's not all bad. It did leave me feeling nostalgic about old classic games, so there's that.
The ability to use rocks as a jumping point while they're still falling is an interesting mechanic, as is the ability to intentionally let the water catch up to you as a jump boost. The player avatar changing color is a nice and subtle way of telegraphing how close you are to drowning.
The difficulty curve starts off a bit _too_ difficult, in my opinion. Maybe I'm just not skilled at this sort of game, and my best record was just shy of 50, but the experience mostly ended up being about a minute of mild frustration per playthrough. If you can adjust the terrain generation to be more generous with ledges for the very first segment of the game, you can make it feel like you at least make some progress before the game tosses you off into the deep end.
You sneaky little devils, pulling a bait-and-switch like that. But then, that has admittedly worked well with the tone of the game. My first reaction was confusion, then the realization of what's going on, followed by frantically trying not to get crushed, and finally resignation as my impending doom approaches. Much like how I imagine our "chairman" would feel in this situation. The controls were weird at first, and in any other game I might have said hitting a movement key should move you farther. But for someone tied up in a chair trying to nudge themselves to safety, the current setup is actually more fitting. Everything about this game, even including the sound effects and the music, is designed to put you in the mindset of nearly-helpless victim making a mad scramble for survival. Yes, even the deceptively-cheery game description. Kudos on making an absolute gem of a game.
A good, short Sokoban-based puzzle game. Since the solar flare only advances when you move, you have time to survey the scene and plan your next move. The graphics are very low-res, but there's enough detail to convey what's going on. The level is short enough that starting the game over isn't that much of a hassle, especially since you can easily breeze through each section after you clear it the first time. The story is pretty simple, enough for the player to understand the situation but without getting bogged down with too much detail.
If I had to nitpick, I would say that the turn-based mechanics kind of come into conflict with the premise of an approaching solar flare. From a pure mechanics perspective it works great, but thinking about it realistically, you wouldn't really have the luxury of stopping to plan your next move. That said, I can suspend my disbelief for this and enjoy the game as it is.
I feel like this could be the start of a full game, if it had more levels and a more fleshed-out story.
I like the surreal vibe I'm getting from this game, from the hand-drawn style of the art, to the vast empty void, to the strange walking legs outside the fence. I feel like I'm in some kind of dream, and I'm left wondering what everything means. Who are the people in the photos? What are the giant walking legs outside? Who does the person in the hat represent? (And why do I enjoy tossing his hat into the wind so much?)
I don't want to criticize too harshly given that you admit this is unfinished, but I will say that it's really not clear what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm sorting objects and then deleting them, but... why?
It feels strangely uplifting to play a game that tells you that you saved thousands of lives after you perish. I didn't quite feel the sense of urgency in putting out fires as I expected, though, but I'm not entirely sure how one would fix that. All I can say is that I tried a run where I let everything burn, and apparently still saved almost 20,000 people. Aside from that, I enjoyed looking at the hand-drawn style of the art in this game.
Finally, it would be a good idea to have some form of instructions somewhere. Ideally within the game itself, but at least somewhere on this page at the minimum.
An enjoyable little puzzle game with a pretty unique mechanic. It took a while to figure out what counted as a valid loop, but I managed to figure it out not too long into my first game. If this game ever gets updated, I think it would be nice to have an indicator that tells you which blocks are connected.
The graphics are pretty solid, and the different colors help to differentiate the arrows at a glance. The background gives you something to look at when you're not staring at the game board, while not drawing too much attention to be a distraction while actually playing. The sound effects are alright, but it would have been nice to have some music during the actual gameplay.
It's a nice little start for a tactical game. I feel a bit bad for the archers since they're really only used as bait. Might be nice if they could snipe at units from range or something like that. Anyway, I know it's not always easy to make a reasonably-intelligent AI, so good job on what you managed to come up with. It knows to back pieces away when they're threatened, but will also go in for the kill when they see it. With more development and more varied units and strategies, this could be a solid turn-based tactics game.
I like the feeling of pressure I get while playing, trying to get all my resources up before the waters rise and undo all my hard work. There's also a sense of escaping to higher ground that the game's mechanics inherently suggest. The strategy I came upon was to build the less efficient low-tier structures closer to the shore so that they're the first to go when the waters rise, leaving me space on the higher ground for the better structures.
The camera felt a little too slow for my liking, and with the time pressure involved, it doesn't feel worth burning precious seconds adjusting the camera to get a nice view of my island. The terrain also starts to disappear if I scroll the camera down even though it's still well within the screen. I would also suggest some indication of how much time I have before the next level of terrain starts getting flooded, and how each type of building available influences that.
But overall, I feel like this could be a really good game once the features are all complete.
The graphics and sounds really mesh well with the concept of the game. Bonus points for Clippy being their usual annoying self, while also being a subtle way to tell the player how to start the game. The entire intro sequence in general is just a big barrel of humor and nostalgia.
An issue I found was that when the game lags, the player slows down, but the spread of the red tiles keep going at the same rate. I got stuck at a certain level because the slowdown always stops me from making it past a certain area before I'm cut off.
First thing that stood out to me right away was the music. This sounds like professional-quality soundtrack music. I spent a good couple of minutes at the menu screen just to appreciate it.
I was confused by the instructions saying WASD to move when you can really only move left and right, and it's the spacebar that lets you get off the ground at all. But admittedly, that's a very minor issue.
Top marks for clever implementation of the theme. Not only do you run out of space _by pressing space_, you can get space back by pressing _backspace_. I like how the rewind mechanic works, especially with the way the coins retain the same spawn pattern as long as I'm jumping back to the same rewind point. Whenever I feel like I can collect more coins in one jump or maintain my vertical height by ending on a platform, I can rewind freely.
Platform edge collisions seem a little weird sometimes, like I can sort of slide up top of one by pressing myself against the edge if I only just miss it.
Finally, I rather like the endgame bit when you're on the last row. You can rewind, of course. The game won't stop you from going back and doing something (or everything) over again. Or you can accept your fate and let your last space run out. I feel like there's a good metaphor to be made here about facing the end of things, whether that was the intent or not.
For some reason, my controller is being weird and only letting me shoot left and right instead of in 8 directions, but the game is still quite playable despite that. At least, I _think_ it's my controller? I rarely use the thing because I don't often play games that require one.
Great implementation of the theme. I can really feel the room getting cramped as the enemies pile up and the space to move around gets smaller and smaller.
The random zoom-ins and especially the title screen leave me feeling a little bit dizzy, though. Kinda deters me from playing for any extended period.
This game evokes feelings of dread and terror as you try to escape from the creature pursuing you. The creature is silent, so you never really know if it's getting close unless you turn to look behind you, but then you can't see where you're going. The closing doors leaves you fewer places to escape to over time, and you start to worry whether you'll run into a dead end. And you will, inevitably.
I'm not sure what the use of the flashlight is. I can see pretty well even with it switched off, and as far as I can tell the creature is unaffected by it? Or if it is doing something to the creature, I never noticed.
This is an enjoyable little puzzle game with an interesting implementation of the theme. The simple matter of having a "move backwards" instruction opens up some interesting solutions to some of the levels. I would love to see how much farther you can take this game design with more levels.
A critique I have for the graphics would be that the icons for the instructions are not immediately obvious. Until I played around for a bit, I thought the up arrow might have been "move upwards" rather than "move forwards in the direction you're facing". Also, the way the view centers on the player prevents you from seeing the entire room all at once in larger levels such as the final one. This hinders the player's ability to plan ahead, which is not really ideal for a puzzle game. Especially since here, once you start moving at all, you should already have a plan in mind.
Also, this is more of a technical issue than a game design one, but I played on the hosted version since I'm on Windows, and the game doesn't fit vertically on my screen even when I make my browser fullscreen. (For context, my screen resolution is 1366x768.) The game is still fully playable, but it's not ideal.
Overall, I like the mechanics used in this game, and with some more polish, I think it has real potential.
Nice work on this space shooter. The shrinking borders keeps the game from getting too monotonous by making you pay attention to the charge bar. The enemy ships can be a little difficult to spot, to the point where I sometimes end up ramming them by accident. It may help to change the stars in the background to a medium or dark shade of gray, that way they don't draw attention away from the game objects that the player needs to keep track of.
The art style and the music work well together to set a nice eerie tone for the game. I think this could be enhanced if you could make the area darker when it's outside the radius of the fire. I also encountered unusual behavior when the character managed to walk past the ring, and I completely lost control of the character's movement as it started speeding along in random directions.
The idea has potential. But there are just too many aspects of the game that cause frustration. First and foremost is the lack of information about how to play the game. Just the menu alone is a puzzle. Do I need to click what I want? Use WASD? Arrow keys? Okay, arrow keys move the cursor, how do I select?
In the game itself, it's too easy to randomly lose the game. Sometimes it's overspending on resources, which the game doesn't stop you from doing. More frustrating is the way RNG will throw a pollution tile right on your position. It makes the game much less strategic and more like an elaborate Russian Roulette.
Like I said, this concept has potential. I really believe there's the seed of a good game in here. The mechanics just need refined to let the idea shine through.
This game is very hard, but it's generally the good kind of hard. The kind where you need to know the path you're going to take and the timing of when to jump or take a swing at an enemy. However, I feel like a game like this could benefit from having tighter controls. For example, I don't mind having an attack animation take some time and stop the player from running, but the time delay between the mouse click and the attack actually hitting makes the attack options unwieldy in the not-so-good sort of way.
The limited visibility lends itself well to the dark atmosphere of the game. There's just enough light that you can kind of see where you're going, but you'll still need to have a path memorized if you want to clear a level before the spreading corruption catches up to you.
Other people have mentioned checkpoints already, but yes, please add them to the game. Checkpoints in the right places are crucial for a game like this. The game demands many, many retries of each section for the player to learn the layout of the terrain and the placement of enemies, and to do that, players need to be able to quickly get back to the area they're trying to beat.
Lastly, when I'm getting off the broom, it sometimes gets stuck at some point in the animation and it completely prevents me from jumping. Lost many times from this, sadly.
But overall, I think this has the potential to be a most excellent game, and I would love to see a more developed version of this, if and/or when that happens.
Great work on the audio. There's no sound effect besides the ding when you get a new message, which is good because there's nothing distracting you from the core gameplay. The background music sets up a tense mood, and I notice that the mood of the music seems to escalate as you get into the last minute of the game.
Graphics-wise, the blurred background helps to immerse you into the premise of being in a room somewhere (doesn't really matter where) trying to keep your phone from breaking down. The interface seems intuitive enough, I could tell what things are and what I need to be doing even without a tutorial. It would be nice if each contact had a unique photo, but it's not a big issue.
The ending is hilarious when you win. This poor guy should probably just stick with handwritten notes.
The look and feel of the game is very well-polished. Having the music cut out when the meteor falls between days adds to the tension of watching it land and praying that it doesn't hit something important.
However, it seems like the meteors are bouncing off of antennas rather than destroying them on impact. I'm assuming that's not intended behavior? In fact, side effect of my spamming them as soon as I can afford to...
eternal flame.png
...this tends to happen. The meteor just tumbles over the top of an antenna, gets wedged between a pair of them, and sits there forever.
The paper-and-handwriting look really suits the premise of the game and gets you immersed into the role of a student trying to balance their time studying for all the exams. I would suggest having a version of the instructions in a more readable font that I can view as an alternative option, since handwriting can be hard to parse sometimes at smaller sizes. It would also be nice to have an indicator of whether a piece fits or not before I try to drop it. But overall, it's a pretty unique game that I enjoyed playing.
I understand wanting to make the game on the easier side to keep it accessible to most people, but right now I can easily build enough prayers so that parishioners literally only show up for one frame before they're done. The music works well at conveying a sense of urgency and desperation as you try to save as many people as you can before the end comes. Theme-wise, I can see where you're going with this game, but as it is, there's enough room that it's actually a challenge to fill up the space.
I found the puzzles in each room to be interesting enough, especially considering that size matters. Like, you want to do the piano room first because it's hard to hit the right key once you've grown, but the speed room gets easier down the line because you can just jump the gap instead of climbing the ladders.
The colliders for the stairs need some adjusting to better match the graphics, though. As it is, you start ascending long before your sprite actually reaches the steps, making it look like you're floating above the stairs rather than climbing up the steps.
Made it to 50 meters by the power of pigman friendship and underground rivers, before going mad trying to fix my leg that keeps getting chewed on by moles.
I like that there's alternate ways to make progress based on which stat you favor for restoring with sanity. Strength helps you win more fights that would otherwise make you lose progress. Intelligence helps you win friends to help you climb faster. Agility helps you make slower but consistent progress.
The game feels like it drags on after a while, though. A lot of encounters don't really do anything after some point, for example the golem and the gnomes after I've already gotten treasure. And you rarely ever have a one-on-one fight, since you're most likely to encounter pigmen (1d6 or 3d6) and moles (1d6). My first combat was against 16 pigmen, which I lost at the 5th. And I rarely won combat against such massive numbers, the only times I succeeded were against a single mole, a pair of them, and a lucky break against 6 pigmen.
I would recommend reducing the length of the game somehow, and the size of the encounters. You can always make a fight tougher by increasing a creature's strength. Maybe also make persuasion against high intelligence creatures worth doing by increasing the reward to 20 meters or so?
@ratstail91 The mechanic of losing stat points when you fail a test (and sometimes during random events) is enough to convey the sinking feeling, in my opinion. The problem is just that after a long enough time and a ton of dice rolls, the mood devolves from that into plain fatigue. I was almost tempted to give up midway, but I wanted to give the game as fair a review as I could.
(Actually, now that I think about it, a big chunk of the second half of my run was spent not making any further agility tests to climb because it had gotten too low to be reliable, which became a monotonous string of mostly ignoring everything that aren't pigmen, moles, or underground rivers.)
This is just my personal playstyle, but I'm not usually a big risk-taker, so I never attempted to get help from the gnomes. They're a 50/50 chance at best since your stats never go higher than 12, and failing means I lose intelligence for any further attempts. Safer to leave them be and get help from pigmen instead. As for the treasure golem, you don't have it marked as "Can Talk", so I didn't think you could get help from it.
This is a fun and frantic sorting game, with a length that I think hits the sweet spot of being just long enough to be satisfying while short enough for you to say "just one more go". I like the way the music accelerates as the game speeds up, at first suggesting that you should pick up the pace, then eventually just saying that it's time to panic. And the sound of things breaking lets you know that you're in the danger zone and need to pay attention to what's piling up.
Others have mentioned the way a parcel sometimes catches on the edge of a chute, forcing you to have precise aim. Unless you're going for the leftmost or rightmost one, in which case you can mostly just slam the parcel against the wall and let gravity do the rest. In combination to that, I found a way you can mostly cheese the later stages of the game by intentionally letting packages break, and only sorting ones that have already broken so you can focus on just the leftmost chute. I think there should be some penalty for parcels that get broken due to player negligence, like not getting points awarded for sorting them.
Overall, I consider this to be a great entry. Well done!
The game could benefit from a more elaborate tutorial. As it is, I spent the first run being completely lost on what to do, then I had to intentionally burn 2 or 3 more to learn how the UI worked and what the upgrades did. But after that, I was able to get into the flow of the game.
It's very frustrating to have a planet come in near the corner of the play area, and try to send a shuttle to it only for the planet to disappear off the edge before I can click on it. I feel like a more square-shaped play area or maybe even a circular one might help? That, or if you could target a planet by clicking its orbit trail.
Overall, it's fun to play, though a new player will need to spend some time getting used to the system.
Thanks for the feedback so far, everyone! I truly appreciate it.
@melmo @alexfalkenberg Sound levels shouldn't be too hard to tweak, I can include that if/when I update the game. As for changing the firing mode, I'm not sure how I feel about it, I would probably also have to playtest that method myself before I can formulate an opinion.
@zozol Fullscreen actually sounds like an interesting idea for a future version. Thank you for suggesting it.
@balka Ah, you're the first to actually spot (or at least report) the gameplay bug. The enemy bugs aren't supposed to go away like that. It's an issue I've known about for a while, and I've been trying to figure out how to fix it. I'll update the game when I figure it out. Thanks for playing!
@melmo @alexfalkenberg (and anyone else who's watching) You may be interested to know that I've made my first update to the game, including (among other things) that click-to-shoot mode. Devlog [here](https://cbdevilla.itch.io/claustrophobia/devlog/46437/claustrophobia-11-the-bugfix-update) if you want to read about the changes, or just head back to the itch.io page to grab the updated version. Thanks again!
@mza Thank you for your feedback. Can you clarify what you mean by that? If the game is ending immediately after you hit a bug, that should not be happening. If this is the case, can I ask what platform you're running the game on?
I like how coherent the different elements of the game are. It's a simple game that's quick and easy to play, to the point where I'm tabbing out to play a few rounds every so often as I'm typing this. It can be hard to predict when the bullet is going to charge at you, but I suppose that's part of the challenge. It's not immediately obvious that you lose points for being hit by your own bomb's projectiles, but you get enough points hitting the bullet that it's usually not that much of a deterrent.
Ah, this game appeals to my love of bullet hell.
Aiming with the mouse was confusing at first. I assumed the usual "point to aim" system and thought it might be bugged because it was pointing every which way instead. It wasn't until my second or third try that I noticed that moving the mouse left and right corresponded to turning your character's aim. You may want to consider pointing that out more specifically.
Good use of 3D graphics and animation in an otherwise 2D game. Seeing the character actually turn around to face the other direction and physically pull out a vacuum cleaner to clean up files makes the game more interesting to look at. Gameplay-wise, it seems impossible to do anything useful with any cluster of more than 2 folders because of the way the text overlaps when you scan their names, and with how finicky the vacuuming mechanic seems to be. You need to be at a very particular range to clean up folders. If you're too close, it doesn't get sucked in. I did have a bit of a laugh at the end-of-game review comments, though, so humor points for that.
The different speed controls are an interesting twist on a running platformer. I'm not too good at these kinds of games, though, so I never got too far in. Also, I like the look of the little alien's sprite.
I like the cute pixel art used for this game, particularly the witch character. I feel like the game's feel could be improved with better visual or audio cues so you can quickly tell the difference between ingredients and trash, and so you know when you've completed a potion without having to stare at the little item box.
I like the way the theme shows up on both a gameplay and a narrative level. Also, unless I'm mistaken, it looks like a pair of the clues in the first puzzle makes it physically impossible to solve? If it is, I'm going to assume it's intentional, so you can't just take the ship that lets everyone escape to safety.