Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → chaotikza
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Grove Guardian | jam | 1944 | 3.17 | 2.75 | 3.27 | 3.23 | 3.42 | 3.33 | 2.15 | 3.05 | |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Fool's Gold | jam | 623 | 3.39 | 3.46 | 2.91 | 3.30 | 3.37 | 3.30 | 2.88 | 3.39 | |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Don't Fall In Love | jam | 2.71 | 2.71 | 2.81 | 1.81 | 3.14 | 2.29 | |||||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | 👥 | Final Flight | jam | 762 | 2.79 | 2.30 | 2.90 | 2.84 | 2.00 | 2.78 | 2.37 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Save A Small World | jam | 2.20 | 1.80 | 1.40 | 1.50 | 2.20 | 1.00 | 1.50 |
chaotikza leaves an average of 10.0 feedback comments each event.
Very nicely put together!
Too hard for me though - I raged out at level 6... The killer tiles could definitely be a bit more forgiving, surely the edges shouldn't be deadly?
The music annoyed me at first, but then it grew on me... 🍃
Excellent use of the theme! Perfectly executed! There is really nothing to criticize... 💕
Very cool little shooter! Enjoyable and with a nice twist on the genre.
I kept trying to click the scrap at first (in spite of reading the instructions - maybe I'm tired) - anyway, figured it out eventually... 😅
Managed a score of 750 on my 5th or 6th try.
Is it based on missile command? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokIGklnBGY
That game seems to have had many ideas for dealing with the excessive that you have discarded, for example only having one base that can fire, so effectively only one life... That combined with using one quarter of the vertical space on the screen for the units you're defending and fast moving enemies makes for requiring very quick reaction times!
Still, this may have some potential - it's very nicely polished! Good entry.
Don't see much of a connection to the theme unfortunately...
"We're the ants... sent by king ANTony! We're coming to help... King Graham!" Sorry! King's Quest V reference...
Antexander - great name!
Really enjoyed the game, although it was a bit tricky - I almost gave up after my first two failed attempts. The somewhat indirect control was interesting. Having the camera move ahead in the direction you're going might've been nice as you can't really disengange in time unless you very carefully move, stop, wait for the camera and then move again.
The music was very nice!
Seems completely broken to me... no ammo, no seeds, no idea how to get either...
Liked it overall. I thought there's a lot of potential here - the balancing is just not very jam-friendly.
I was very annoyed when I died for the first time after saving up for $400 worth of upgrades - not doing that again... for an arcade game like this permadeath should probably be an option the player chooses, especially with such a long grind for upgrades.
Good attempt! Keep up the good work.
I love this - this is a piece of art! Well done on graphics, audio and gameplay!
I think making achievements get a bit more in your face would move this more towards being a game, for an example of I what mean: you just sung a murderer into being, hey you can try to get the murder achievement by singing a victim into being... and then once he's done murder you can bring justice by getting rid of the murderer with your Zeus powers.
A very good effort! I was stuck on the power wires for the longest time... a hint that I should select the next colour would've been nice.
Felt a bit sad at the end that I couldn't actually build a world, but enjoyed the experience of figuring that out.
Some sound and music could really have elevated the mood in this game to the next level (it was quite good even without any).
I went through about 4 or 5 puzzles (it was time to awake), then when I restarted I accidentally clicked New Game instead of continue... 😭
Very pretty and sounds great!
I don't really like the real-time deflect things with your sword gameplay for a puzzle game - plus the tutorial telling me to attack and the attack animation made it feel like this wanted to be a fighting game rather than a puzzle game?
I have no idea how this game ties into the theme?
Forgot to say, the restart to resume seems like an interesting and innovative idea for a mechanic, it's just not terribly clear to the player what's going one - looks like a crash.
Now I have trees, carpal tunnel syndrome and 16 more games to review... 😭
I agree with commenters that said we need an indication of progress - it takes extremely long and clicking is not an inherently fun mechanic. Some juice like sound or sparkles would also have made the process a bit more enjoyable - even just a recommendation for good auto-clicker would've gone a long way to improving the experience for those of us who don't play the genre.
Looks interesting but did not finish, already a half-hour spent, need to move on...
Hey, wanted to try this - looks very good from a thematic point of view, but unfortunately the game crashes on start for me on Windows.
See the stacktrace below:
I think this is a the first text-adventure I've ever played while reviewing LD jam entries - well done for trying something different! The basic find and exchange items mechanic that forms the staple of the genre is strangely compelling, making your entry fairly fun, even though very few of the exchanges actually made sense to me. For example: an eel? Why?!
Your game would've been much better if the world exhibited more internal logical consistency and gave some more motivation for doing things... why am I escaping? Why is the man in the warehouse destitute? What is he going to do with the trap? Who was the merchant and why did he like books so much? So many questions - none of them answered...
Also, the theme was start with nothing: I find pants in the first scene... I was convinced I should equip them somehow before I go anywhere, but turns out I must've had some already because my only option was to give them away... 🤣
Very atmospheric game! The art, music and sound of the hourglass sliding all worked together perfectly!
A way to see what SPACEBAR would do to the level would've been nice - that would make it a bit more puzzly and less trial-and-error.
Loved the idea! Got frustrated with the execution very fast... It took a lot of patience retrying to finish the game.
Graphics are reasonably good and the fart rocket is fairly satisfying from a control point of view (if a bit overpowered as someone else noted).
I really thought the first box should be pushed onto the alien's head so I could get to the bright-red valve thing against the wall... imagine my surprise when I do what seemed like the obvious thing and get a game over?! Maybe consider using the bright colours for the intractable elements next time and rather have background elements be in the background.
Once I figured out the boxes and buttons my next pain point was just running out of farts repeatedly leading to a game over - I understand that you did it, because likely the player was now in a situation now where they couldn't finish, but sometimes I was just going to fetch more food and would've been fine, so it felt a bit punishing... Having to manually skip the tutorial each time didn't help.
Save points or a more forgiving fart mechanic could maybe help with this. Maybe a continuous fart bar that runs out the longer you press it, that charges up to a minimum point automatically (for small jumps), but that needs food to be fully charged.
I love turn-based strategy games, but I find making them extremely challenging - you've created tonne of TBS game play in a very short time and the story was quite interesting - so well done!
My main criticisms are just that the theme connection is a bit tenuous and that there were a few too many rough edges for my taste: - No explosion animation for the bunker busters. - Unclear how much damage is being done to your characters. - Webs don't seem to do anything. - Friendly characters couldn't path over the crossroad on the 2nd last level. - Sometimes vine pull wouldn't work and it wasn't clear why. - No lasting consequences to losing a character. - Lack of animations were already mentioned by others.
I think half the levels with twice the polish would be better as turn-based strategy games are completely reliant on all those tiny little polish details to sell the action and keep the player informed of what's going on.
Very well done!
The only two problems I experienced were the slight lag when the window resized and that I had no idea what to do to the boss (had to come search on here while Mr Bear stood quietly in the corner of the boss level).
Very nicely done! Captured the feeling of anxiety at a party perfectly.
Only issues I had were that I couldn't figure out the surprise and that letting the cat out of the house was broken (got an achievement, but the cat didn't leave and the dialog didn't go away unless I chose the other option).
A very well executed 48 hour prototype!
I beat it on my first try without knowing much about Trumpology - went back to play again and couldn't get past the Trumpology level in 3 tries - so the randomness might need a bit of tuning.
A post-jam version with either progression that skips unknown topics or single-use power-ups like "show me the wrong words" or "cooldown my brain" should make this an awesome little time-waster for mobile. I'm guessing you could churn out hundreds of levels fairly easily just by coming up with word lists?
The two of you take the award for the toughest review I've had to write yet this jam! 😅
My cousin @Cyberwiz told me to play this as one of the best entries he's played so far, so I went in with my expectations pretty high... I only have about 1 hour a night to review games at the moment, so I went straight to the _"Normal"_ difficulty setting...
Let's start with the __good__: - The art is great! Emma is super cute; the dungeon, darkness and monsters are all nice and scary. - The music is a good fit and the effect of fading it in as the light runs out was brilliant at setting the mood and creating tension. - I liked the story, it kinda reminds me of a Hayao Miyazaki movie, in the sense that it takes you back to the dimly remembered bits of your childhood when monsters and magic were still real. - The platforming controls were quite tight. I didn't like them at first, but the speed with which I got through the 1st level on _Hard_ on a second play confirmed that they allow for quite skillful control of the character and that I had in fact improved at the game in the hour I was playing. - This is your first / second / 1.5th game jam?! Well done - great job! I've participated in many more jams and my games are still probably quite terrible in comparison... - The pacing and introduction of new mechanics was quite good.
Sounds great so far right? So why the Good, The Bad & The Ugly format? Well I thought there were a few things that were __bad__ from a gameplay perspective: - Those one block platforms! Sometimes under time pressure and in nearly complete darkness... Tight as your controls were, if I have to do 6 tricky jumps in a row I'm bound to screw one up sooner or later. - Failure to let me fail fast... By which I mean that when I do screw up in the above scenario I now have less time and less light making me much less likely to succeed on a 2nd attempt... so now I have to waste my time on a doomed 2nd attempt?! Better to kill me immediately on failure so I can try again with the same chance of success (better chance if I learned anything from the last attempt). - A difficult sequence of darkness clouds to dodge followed by 5 moving one block platforms that each catapult me so high into the air that I can't see the next platform that I need to land on?! 😭
Which brings me to the __ugly__: - There's a save point just after the the moving one block platforms of doom, but I somehow missed it on my first 2 successful attempts at crossing the moving catapult platforms of doom area... So I probably spent about 20 minutes trying to get through a 3rd time, because I had started on what looked like an interesting end-game puzzle, but failed to finish it the first 2 times.
Sorry if this review is a bit negative, but I feel like your game had all the ingredients of greatness, but then difficulty for difficulty's sake dragged it down into mediocrity... your ending was heart warming, but by the time I reached it I was raging too hard to appreciate it. You clearly did a lot right to hook me into playing for more than an hour, but what was intended as difficulty often seemed more like punishment and I think that undermined the story you were trying to tell.
I'm about 2.5 hours into the 1 hour I had to review games tonight and I'm not sure if I've done a good job of articulating the feelings your game awoke in me, so I'm calling it quits now to go sleep - I hope there is at least some constructive criticism that you can take from this review... if not I leave you with a few videos I ran across while trying to understand what I wanted to say (as well as a link to another entry that was thematically similar, but a bit which I found less punishing).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Y6y1MOoEo
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/a-night-at-grandpas
Great job!
The micro-management was a bit rough, but you did capture that old-style RTS feel perfectly! As others said the big wave attacks were perhaps a bit heavy - I couldn't summon the patience to finish it after dying at 10 minutes for the 3rd time...
Gave you 1 / 5 for humour - just for having a game called __Orcs In Space__ that doesn't seem to contain any orcs...
This is an amazing little horror game - very well done! Art and sound combined to set the mood perfectly and the controls were great!
I just lost the last half-hour of my life trying over and over to get a better ending to no avail... is there one or am I mistaken that the key room is the key? If it is, maybe that room is a little too hard - feels like a need another second of battery power to make it possible...
Great job for your first jam entry! This is miles better than my first entry...
The music and art worked quite well together even if the art was a bit inconsistent. I assume from the fact that you're not asking to be rated in __Graphics__ and __Audio__ that you were using assets off the internet, in which case the inconsistency is understandable - I only really started creating my own assets since LD37 so I know finding consistent assets online can be very difficult.
Only issue I had with the running out of power theme is that I was never in any danger of running out of power... most enemies could be avoided instead of fighting them.
Very nice! I was having quite a lot of fun spamming random miracles - even though I was uncertain whether I'm gaining more followers than I'm killing! Nice juice!
Crashed out in the 2nd desert level when using a miracle to get to the next one... specific error message was: source/lib/sti/plugins/bump.lua: 149: Layer not found: power2_way
Good effort! Just a bit too hard - I couldn't finish it... I got stuck on that jump for the very tall wall just before the 3rd tesla coil.
Liked the art.
Didn't like the jump mechanic... something felt off... I got stuck on corners a lot and jump height did not seem consistent, so I sometimes failed what looked like easy jumps and got tesla-coiled. I also often got extra jumps when it seemed I was still in the air, which I'm guessing is a mismatch between your player model and the bounding box - I'm guessing the bottom of box is actually below where the character ends visually? Got around some of that by using a capsule bounding box and having it's bottom slightly inside the character sprite last time we tried to make a platformer (by capsule I mean box with half-circles on the top & bottom end).
Battery was a bit of a brutal timer - might've been nice to have lower or no power consumption while idle and then increased drain when jumping or running.
Graphics and audio were both great, setting the mood very well! Respect for trying to do an adventure game on a jam timescale - it's very hard to get the difficulty right for those...
Your game has nailed that 90s adventure game feel, but it's just way too hard without a mechanic to let the player resume after dying... In those 90s puzzle games I could at least save at the hard parts and try again without having to replay the game from the start. Saving or a restore point mechanic would've helped a lot.
I found the 2nd jump extremely difficult - there was no hint whatsoever that holding space longer would make me jump further - it just escalated straight from an easy jump to a hard jump that requires maximum distance and timing an obstacle! A gentler escalation of the difficulty with a bit more hand-holding to teach mechanics would've made the game much more playable.
Thanks for the walk-through - I can see there's much more that I didn't get to before getting frustrated, which is a pity...
Wow - really nice entry!! Reminded me an awful lot of http://store.steampowered.com/app/349100/Notrium/...
I was very flustered the first time it started to turn dark and then about the 2nd try started realising that the light level is tied to my health / power - having just the one resource was quite an interesting choice.
I found it quite easy to survive for 3 minutes or more - mostly by running away - didn't use the items much, they were a bit too clunky to activate while running away and the short durations made them not feel worth the effort... Likewise with the light particles from killed enemies - it wasn't worth running into the mobs of ranged enemies to fetch the particles, nor was it clear if killing and harvesting was a net gain of energy.
The biggest issue I have is that the game is all tension all the time... some form of pacing would've been nice, like escalating waves with breaks in between or perhaps some higher level objectives like kill all the monsters; kill all the monster generators; or have a certain amount of rocks turn glowy.
Really promising entry though - lots more you could do with this one...
LD46 — Keep it alive (12)
Lumina Vitreus by lilkrit 2020-05-11T15:45:10Z ♥ 0
Very bloomy indeed! Agree that the spinning platform was slightly tricky, but it didn't take too long to figure out.
The last moment right at the end where I had to pick up the item and insert it into the reactor vividly reminded me of ALIEN-8 - after seeing your entry I would definitely do loads of bloom if I ever tried to remake that!
[Alien-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDhSH-GJDqE)
Lifeline by mlkvr 2020-05-10T10:06:02Z ♥ 1
Cool idea! Nicely captures the late-90s adventure game feel.
Space Jam by ReallyQbert 2020-05-10T09:43:57Z ♥ 2
Much better than my first LD attempt - heck probably thank my first three LD attempts! So great job!
Did find it a little bit too easy: once I stopped dodging and taking potshots to just spam shots at large clusters of enemies I could generally still easily find enough energy to keep myself comfortably alive. Also discovered that colliding with aliens often recharged energy as they still drop energy on death.
Something extra to shoot for like a number of kills or high score would've been nice to motivate players to keep going a bit longer.
In The Flesh by LandoSystems 2020-05-09T16:35:40Z ♥ 2
Great idea.
Boss fight was cool!
Only complaint: as some people already, noted the jump felt a bit off, but the punch was great and very satisfying.
Farm Life by jomoho 2020-05-09T16:23:55Z ♥ 0
Great job!
I couldn't keep up with the poo in the compo version, but in the jam version the addition of the wheelbarrow makes it just barely manageable to keep the whole thing going. I also invented poo-soccer as a way of trying to deal with two pieces of poo at once.
Guardian Duty by robotabc773 2020-05-09T15:52:56Z ♥ 0
Great entry - I quite enjoyed that!
Perhaps a bit too easy for those that read about how to get mana back, but I'm not going to complain too much about that - many more games to go play...
Some sound effects would've been great, but other than that, great job!
Plantsitter by FloYams 2020-05-09T15:38:05Z ♥ 2
Didn't find this peaceful at all - it was hectic from the start with more people demanding me to take more plants when I already struggle to keep one alive!
Perhaps the game's pacing could benefit from being slower paced, maybe even turn-based? Let the player do whatever they want at their own pace and choose when to go to the next day.
Great job on the polish though!
Lightest Dungeon by gagouman 2020-05-09T15:15:16Z ♥ 1
I got 890 in 65 weeks!
Felt a bit grindy and lacking in variety, but nice to see something a bit more strategic or with RPG elements.
Seemed to be more saving the princess than keeping the princess alive - maybe you could use the princess's health to drive the player to risk more dangerous missions, would also be nice if you had a bit more variation than just pass / fail - maybe get the reward but lose a hero or something like that.
Leif Kellenberger's Tazing Challenge by pudding 2020-05-09T14:45:13Z ♥ 2
That was indeed hilarious!
Loved it in spite of everything that's wrong with it in terms of controls. It might also be a bit long at 15 points to win and it's unfair that eliminating the enemy team doesn't give an instant win to the player as well.
Great effort!
Passing Flame by FallingFlatStudios 2020-05-09T14:21:02Z ♥ 1
Nice little game! Loved the fact that the light radius got reduced as you ran out of flame. Music was very atmospheric.
Felt at times either too easy or too hard (once they are too close to you there's nothing you can do).
Keep the GameBoy alive. (on GameBoy Advance) by Timo Strating 2020-05-09T14:11:16Z ♥ 1
Wow very interesting! I can get to about level 5 or 6, but then stuff happens too fast for me to follow, so didn't get beyond that. Level select rather than playing through the previous level again would've been nice for seeing more of the levels.
For Ducks' Sake by Rolph 2020-05-09T14:06:09Z ♥ 1
Great work - very nicely polished. Loved the gnomes and the ducks - the gnomes look so happy when they manage to grab a little duckling!
Some more gameplay would've been nice, but nevertheless very good for the tight deadline.