Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Chris Dirkis
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | ~☆~ Nekolibrium ~☆~ | compo | 174 | 3.68 | 2.82 | 4.05 | 4.36 | 3.64 | 1.50 | 3.05 | 3.21 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Go to Heck 💀 | jam | 1302 | 3.29 | 3.42 | 2.90 | 3.13 | 3.50 | 2.61 | 3.16 |
Chris Dirkis leaves an average of 13.5 feedback comments each event.
Interesting story, a concept you can do a lot with, but the actual content was lacking. There were decisions to make, but I didn't know what was meaningful and what was not (like, should I cool by waiting at a warm place instead of using a coolant? should I repair my drill before it breaks?). Adding more decisions, and more visibility on the outcomes of the decisions, would help expand this a lot.
Interesting start, and a lot of game. There may have been value in polishing a smaller amount of game, instead of building out all the content. I think this style of platformer has a lot of promise
Love the style, found the micromanagment challenging and the dead ends (mostly on right Deeper) frustrating. Maybe if they were just a _smidge_ slower when uncontrolled, and a _smidge_ faster when controlled?
Great concept. Agree with the above posters that the difficulty in the second half hits hard quick, though it is nice to have the first half as a bit of a "learn how to move". A few more checkpoints would be rad. Love the music and the graphics.
Very cool concept. zoom/pan felt a bit clunky at times. Would have been fun to have more puzzle solving gameplay somewhere (over the guess-and-check nature of the current game).
Challenging and fun. Animations felt good, and the land movement was learnable (if a bit quick). I'd probably look to slow down the land movement a bit, and probably give the player either a half second to see where they died, or a ghost where they died, since the gameplay is otherwise so fast.
Art could use a little work, you want your damage zones to contrast with the rest of the game as much as possible. The bouncy mushrooms were a good example of this, and I wish the thorns were as bright. Loved the fish flapping anim though.
This is really cool! Simple mechanics, fun execution. Definitely more room for more difficulty, though I'm not sure how it'd be added. A combo system would be rad too.
Some thoughts: Hard to tell how far notes are along (meaning it's hard to tell with notes on alternating sides which is first), and hard to tell whether you've missed early or late on some notes. The detune is also a bit aggressive early -- I like it, but maybe at low health instead of not-perfect health.
Fun game, good style. There's not much punishment to button spamming. Since you need to be able to spam to hit some shots, maybe have the slice have a ~1s cooldown, but refund it if you deflect a projectile with it?
Great visual style. Didn't run amazingly on my computer, and there are a few places in the room to stand where you can't see your own character. Couldn't get the boxes out of the first room, and I'm not sure why -- box pushing was unfortunately pretty fiddly :(
Good concept, some good elements, but not cohesively put together. The hexagon attack pattern (the only one I saw?) has a place to stand still and not get attacked, so it was a little bit of a grind. If you want the player to move, you have to give them reasons too. Attacks to dodge are good, so are powerups, so are places to hide from attacks, so are non-uniform attacks.
LD49 — Unstable (17)
Meltdown by fusionnist 2021-10-12T02:48:48Z ♥ 1
Absolutely beautiful game, probably my favourite this jam so far :V Wonderful art, enemies and player looked great, and the music morphing through the sections really made the sense of progression concrete.
Probably the only changes I'd want to make would be to cap the fall speed, and maybe figure out a code way to make it easier to jump around a single block. I'd love to see more interaction with the enemies, but that's hard to do in 48 hours, so wouldn't hold that against you.
LiTransport by RandomDevelopper 2021-10-09T10:18:20Z ♥ 1
Fun concept! Definitely agree about the difficulty. With this game, it's easier to turn if you drive slower, but if you drive slower it takes you longer to get to the part where you're currently stuck, which is kinda frustrating. The opposite would be interesting: make it easier to do (some) turning when faster, which'll make players drive fast but give them less time to react and make decisions.
Train Tilt by mrjoshuamclean 2021-10-09T10:12:28Z ♥ 1
The physics of the thing are a little wonky, but it's pretty endearing overall. I'd have liked to see the challenge more up front, as it is it's pretty hard to lose for a decent few levels.
Treasure and Ice by KeyLime 2021-10-05T22:47:09Z ♥ 1
A cool concept, though busted if someone walks in a circle twice. Maybe making the cracking probabilistic could help account for that?
Meltdown by Ghost20000 2021-10-04T10:54:46Z ♥ 2
A fun simulator, but after I had 4 tricked out reactors and $8k or so I didn't really know what to do. Sure, I could keep making more reactors, but the manual management each reactor requires (refueling, remove rod and add more neutrons if it's out) would have risen, and there was no reason to make more money? Having an objective or automatic management upgrades or both would be rad.
Penguin Panic by munkkeli 2021-10-04T10:16:04Z ♥ 2
Cute game! Really thematic, and lots of decision making points. I'd have loved to have time to see the penguins get launched when the iceberg flips, before the finish screen. Main negative was that it felt like a test of my clicking speed, at some points.
I really do love the QOL features, including the "why you failed" iconography at the end. One usability thing: The buttons moving with the iceberg makes them harder targets to click, and I don't know if that's the sort of difficulty you want in your game.
Sable Untangle by ixchow 2021-10-04T10:09:28Z ♥ 0
Really nice examples of teaching in these puzzles, I agree. Definitely want more content, but what's there is clever and looks neat.
Apocalypse horse by p-r 2021-10-04T10:04:53Z ♥ 1
I don't really understand how much control I have over the simulation. I crack open a stable, there's horses of 3 colors... and I'm meant to beat the other horses? But I didn't really understand what a good way to do that would be. Take my horses to fight some other ones, then eat some trees, then repeat? I'm still not sure.
Unstable Dimension by Katanoueki 2021-10-04T09:47:51Z ♥ 1
A fun game, would make a good mobile game too! Some thoughts: - I'd love a bit wider viewbox - Dark level was maybe a little too extreme? - Screen shake was maybe a bit much? - Wasn't sure what to do with the white bar at the end Was really satisfying to play through, though. Loved the colour shifting and chromatic aberration, and the splats on rune death. Would love to see _harder_ enemies over _more_ enemies later, maybe ones that split or dodge? Still a really good base
Defend The Reactor by JudgeHeartwood 2021-10-04T09:38:36Z ♥ 1
Not a bad start, but not much decision making in the game itself. It'd be nice if I had different enemies I could deal with in different ways, or a resource I could spend that was more mid-term than my reactor's health.
I also was confused about the health bar, was that my health bar or the reactor's? If it was mine, I didn't see a need to not take damage except avoiding stuns, and if it was the reactor's, it still exploded when the bar was fairly full.
The end of the game is kinda a stat check, "did you avoid enough reactor damage early", since you're not going to be able to clear all the mobs. Kinda felt bad to lose at the end for mistakes I didn't know I was making at the start, y'know?
But I think with this architecture you can probably make a pretty fun game with few changes.
Critters by BeasRabbit 2021-10-04T04:05:43Z ♥ 1
A very pretty game, and well executed! I haven't gotten far yet, in large part due to the fullscreen requirement. If I could have it on the side and running (with Run in Background enabled in Unity), or have it in a browser tab, I'd be much more likely to keep it going while I do other stuff.
Junta! Police State 1981 by rjhelms 2021-10-04T04:00:51Z ♥ 2
Pretty neat, well executed little gta-like. The civilian physics were really nice. I felt like there wasn't much juice to squeese, at the end, though? You can deliver packages or disrupt protests, but I wasn't being told "hey, these guys are protesting because of X" or "these packages are doing Y". I think a little bit of story would go a long way here, and you could do it with little effort. Be specific about what the packages are, tell us what the people are protesting, and make it ambiguous as to whether the player is doing the right thing (in a very "Papers Please" way)
Equilibrium by freeworld 2021-10-04T02:58:40Z ♥ 1
Concept is neat, but I felt like the controls were more awkward than they needed to be; most of the time my problem was more about "figuring out which buttons rotate the board the way I want to" rather than "figuring out what rotation gets the ball into the wall". The other part was that it didn't feel like it had much progression, the levels were changing but I had no idea what was changing about them, only that they were different. Definitely can go pretty far with this concept, though, and I think you could make it work on mobile pretty well too.
Bitrunner by TimeLoad 2021-10-04T02:17:59Z ♥ 0
The VFX are simple but effective, could have used some more juice but were clear nonetheless. One thing I felt lacking from this game was limitations. I could place as many blocks as I wanted and clear as many blocks as I wanted. This meant that there was very little decision making, mostly just "can I execute this fast enough?". I'd love to see cooldowns for both actions, would add some depth to the decision tree without adding more "content".
Totally Normal Pong! by DevNugget 2021-10-04T02:12:13Z ♥ 1
Nice setup and art. I would have appreciated more notice for most of the effects, it did feel unfair sometimes. The opponent changing would also have been interesting, and you could build a progression upon that: the opponent gets more wacky as you get more points, or something.
ecosystem except there is no equilibrium and everyone dies probably by parafactual 2021-10-04T02:06:33Z ♥ 1
It was hard to tell what was going on in the simulation, so I didn't try very hard to make more bots to do things. It'd be neat to see the AI of the enemy bots written in the same psuedocode, or to be able to seed multiple bots and watch them play out against each other, I think.
Rise and Fall by Coelacanth Studios 2021-10-04T02:01:32Z ♥ 0
Fun and innovative mechanic! I didn't know that I could let the blocks die at first, so I was trying to keep all 4 alive, when I maybe didn't need to. I think the novelty would wear off in the long term, so I'd love to see some shakeups: powerups, different types of blocks, different stages, not sure exactly what.