Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → const_arch
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Social MediƦty | compo | 173 | 3.46 | 3.22 | 3.43 | 3.75 | 3.11 | 4.00 | 3.16 | ||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | š„ | Hocus Poquest | jam | 160 | 3.95 | 3.77 | 3.13 | 3.20 | 3.65 | 3.38 | 3.70 | 3.52 |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | š„ | Light at the Museum | jam | 257 | 3.88 | 3.70 | 3.84 | 3.66 | 4.13 | 4.00 | 2.91 | 4.20 |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | š„ | Timmy's Very Bad School Day | jam | 41 | 4.26 | 4.28 | 4.02 | 3.48 | 4.03 | 4.26 | 4.47 | 4.18 |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | š„ | Far Fetched | jam | 59 | 4.24 | 3.97 | 3.46 | 4.02 | 4.46 | 4.53 | 3.63 | 4.24 |
I don't seem to be able to take damage or die. Probably not intended? The depth effects are really nice. It does actually feel pretty 3D. Music gives good ambiance. Minor QoL things like making cliffs you've already passed transparent if you're under them would help.
I'm still just getting an error when I run the game, "Strong name validation failed."
I gave it another go, but I can't figure out why I'm dying. At a certain point, despite being in the life support bubble with nothing nearby, I start taking damage and end up dying. There doesn't seem to be a visible threat on screen while it's happening, at least.
Ignoring that, the core idea is a good base. It runs out of depth pretty quickly as is, but I could see this being extendable into a more complicated system. I do wish there was more of a goal.
Great job! The UI looked great, the puzzles were a good difficulty level, and everything felt smooth. One of my favorites so far this LD.
I beat the game, but ran into a lot of small issues while doing so. The core concept is good, but the platforming could use some improvement. Here are some thoughts: - Platforms should be freezable before they begin to fall. I would frequently stand there repeatedly clicking a platform until it started falling. - Spikes should only kill you if you hit them from certain directions. If you bump your head on the bottom of a platform with spikes on top of it, you die. - Coyote time would be very helpful - I would sometimes ricochet off platforms. They should probably just stop my velocity when I hit them unless you make that a useful mechanic. - The air dash feels inconsistent in length/speed - Most air dashes in platformers use a fixed velocity and distance for air dashes, and gravity doesn't affect you during them. I don't think it's necessary, but it would feel more natural and allows for levels that have linear gaps since you can dash straight through them.
Pretty fun concept! I do wish I had more meaningful choices to make, though, and that I wasn't waiting quite so long for my potions to complete. It's quite cute, and was fun for the first couple potions.
More fun than I can remember having on a labyrinth game. Not my favorite base concept and very well trodden ground, but the level design and controls were pretty good, and the graphics were pretty solid for a jam.
I made it very far, although not quite to the end apparently. I got to a very long stretch of jumps where you could fall all the way back down if you weren't careful, alllllmost made a jump super far up, and proceeded to fall all the way down to the bottom. It did make me quit the game, but it was also great to have that sense of significant risk. I had a lot of fun making it as far as I did, quite an enjoyable mechanic. I'll probably come back and replay this one some time, I wonder how close I got.
Had to give this one a shot since I follow Formula 1 and I had a lot of fun with it. I went straight into the full game, and it took a bit to read through the tooltips, but everything except the wing tooltips made sense to me. I had a lot of fun with it, played through it twice. Never got better than 5th, though. It's kind of like F1 yahtzee.
Also lmao American Russians being the slowest team is a great joke. Maybe they'll be better in the new regs...
Pretty easy, but quite pleasant. I appreciated that the only failure mechanic was the instability, it gave me a lot of room to enjoy myself upgrading my capabilities. It was a little too simple to win, but it was still very enjoyable. The first tier potions seem more useful than they probably should be.
The presentation is a lot of fun, though the gameplay was pretty simple. Perhaps a leaderboard would've made it interesting to play for longer.
Took me a while to finish it, but it was a pretty fun time. I really liked this one a lot, one of my favorites so far this LD. One thing that I'd like would be to make hitting 'z' undo your last action.
I'm pretty lost on what to do/what the controls are. I fired up level 1, and I can open and close the duck's mouth and rotate the camera, but aside from that there didn't seem to be anything else I could interact with. What am I missing?
@shreemp ah thanks, got it!
Turns out you can zoom in, it's scroll wheel while holding right mouse button, oddly. However, the text isn't any clearer on zoom in. All the art and UI was impressive for a jam game, but as others have said, this game could do with some additional guidance for the player.
@randomphantom Sorry about that, I figured out what bug you ran into and fixed it. There's a second half to the game that never triggered for you, unfortunately.
I enjoyed the graphics and most of my time playing, but I ran into some issues with the mechanics. In order to maneuver over some of the ingredients in dyslexia mode, I had to move my mouse outside of the game window, and then clicking no longer registered, so I wasn't able to complete the potions.
It could be fun to have a global leaderboard for this, and some more complicated potions.
Pretty fun, although the upgraded rock drop seems kind of self-defeating. Doing extra damage to a ton of the platforms ended up being worse more often than better, I'd rather have the precision of the first level strike most of the time. Managing the platform stability seems like the most difficult aspect, so it feels bad when you can't damage the flying fire guys without just obliterating your entire map.
Aside from that, good game, really solid for a jam.
It was an interesting game to play, and I think it probably does capture some of the book in the end. It's not a particularly fun game, but then that doesn't seem to be the point.
There are things I could bring up in terms of bugs, etc, but I think the main feedback I have on what the game is actually trying to do is that it's too easy for the player to disconnect what they need to do to move on from what is actually happening. I found myself trying to figure out how the game's systems for cigarettes worked, trying to figure out if it was necessary to hit the atm and store every day, etc. When I'm thinking this way, I'm thinking about the systems as entirely abstracted things, which doesn't really click with the experience the character is going through.
You could pose it as representing the players numbness in some way, but I don't think that disconnect really feels similar since the player has such a specific goal at any given moment. I think the key thing is to establish more of why the player feels they need these things rather than just giving the player a set of goals that must be accomplished to sleep. As is, I have a much more concrete goal and focus than the character.
I'm not really sure how you would go about improving that aspect, but it was interesting to think about. Thanks for putting this experiment together.
It's very simple core gameplay, but the wrapping around it is all a lot of fun. The animations and backstory add a lot to the game.
That was a fun little puzzle game! I do wish it was longer, but it's pretty understandable given when you started it. As with some other comments, my primary criticism would be that there aren't enough meaningful choices in each puzzle, which makes them easily guessable. Great job for your first jam, keep it up!
I always like seeing these, played another dosbox game last LD, too. This one was pretty fun, I appreciated the map layout and the second use for one of the items. The interactions were all pretty straight forward, which has its pros and cons. I didn't run into any issues while running it.
I enjoyed that! Would've been fun to have something more at the end, but it is a jam. Great vibe, timing felt tough but manageable on the last day. You probably could have cut out a day in the middle.
That was a pretty funny mix of very different settings, I had a good time. It's simple gameplay but with the time pressure and two things to manage they work together really well. This was well balanced and polished for a jam game, thanks for putting it together!
I'm going to come back to this one, just hoping for a patch for one issue. There are black bars along the top and bottom of the game that appear to block parts of levels, so some important parts of the levels my character would go off camera for.
Repulsors were surprisingly tricky not to get yourself killed with, so I mostly got by on accelerators. The core mechanics were well put together, and it took me a couple tries but it was a fun learning process and the games were quick enough I didn't feel overly punished for learning via mistakes. It could use some polish, though.
It's a fun twist on the genre, and it's well polished for a jam game. I especially like the graphics, nicely done!
Wow, nicely done! There was a surprising amount to this game given the time constraints. It seemed like I should just get 5 heroes out, but then the spikes and double wave advance prevent that from working for too long. The balance felt good and I had a good time, thanks for putting that together.
Nice job getting it to look as good as it does! Some of the interactions were nice touches, too, like: - I swerved away from a spike trap at the last second and a cop car behind me plowed right into it - Cop cars hitting each other and rolling off the road
That said, I do wish there was more to this game. I ended up closing it out without losing around the four minute mark since I seemed to have seen it all, and it didn't seem to be getting harder. I also wish the cops that were right on my tail took more to avoid than just changing lanes. Felt weird for them to just pass me by on the left like I wasn't in a car chase.
Nice job! I was having a good time, looked over, and was already at S rank. I wish it had more complex interactions and more tiers of cards, though.
That was a fun one! I liked the way the ending screen worked, although it took me a bit to find, since I was mostly going for distance to start with, since it's a paper plane. It's simple, but the mechanics work well together, and the upgrade timings felt well balanced.
I really like the idea of making a game based on a specific painter, and I think the resulting art ends up looking quite nice. The gameplay could use some expansion, though; it was very quick to see everything the game had to offer. I personally enjoyed Chapter 1 the most.
Fun core mechanic! I like the art and effects, as well. I did die accidentally due to the camera motion; I think you could get away with just using a fixed angle camera and it would be a bit easier to control.
I beat the game! A few thoughts on how to improve it: - The start of the game is really slow. In general making sure the player can get upgrades on their first couple runs and then making it take a couple runs for later upgrades works pretty well, but this game has the opposite going. Once I started getting to the larger creatures I was rolling in money, but the initial upgrades felt like a slog. - The audio is pretty grating - The blue orbs seemed basically not worth using. I beat the game with only one health upgrade, and by the time I got hit I was basically about to die, so topping up on health didn't really help me. I spent the first few runs trying to get them before realizing they didn't help me at all that early on, and then basically ignored them the rest of the game.
Pretty simple, but everything worked and the core mechanic was fun enough. It was nice to have the combo bonus, more variety in that vein and on what you jump to would be a good add.
My total score was 88. That was fun! I hadn't seen it before, which is even better since it's got a very simple core concept. Plus, it matches the theme really well.
On the critical side, it took me reading the instructions on the LD page to figure out what to do, and I think the wall art didn't match up to the rest of the it. Overall though great job!
Finally got S rank! Took a few tries, the RNG is a bit punishing, but landing the big monument deals felt pretty great. The music is a jam, and the way the new entries are timed felt really good to me. The character's expressions were a nice touch, and the background matched the vibe well. Thanks for preventing actions right after new entries, I would've accidentally lost a lot of money a few times otherwise...
On the critical side: - I do wish that my buildings could've been always on screen, so I didn't need to bring down a drop down that covers up the deals. - The prices going up and down didn't feel impactful enough. It was a fun thing to manage, but it made barely any profit compared to the base profit of selling an unusually cheap property to an unusually wealthy client. - The racy end screens felt a bit out of place.
Overall, the most fun I've had yet while reviewing LD50 games, nicely done.
I'm kinda surprised I haven't seen something like this before in LD! It worked really well to have it on on one monitor while trying out other games on a different one, thanks for the suggestion.
@fireslash Yeah, we should fix that, sorry. You can warp to the last checkpoint at any time by pressing R in the meantime.
@silas-reinagel The switches that you don't press are activated by light and the shadow chasing you. Lanterns both protect you from the advancing shadow, and cast light to light switches.
@fireslash We've patched the out of bounds issue, thanks for letting us know.
Got a 2700 thanks to putting big people directly between the ball and the person holding it, which would launch it away for a bit. It was fun to mess around with the physics, although the small people seemed difficult to use efficiently. A wider variety of things to buy that had tradeoffs relative to each other would be a fun extension.
Someone on my team suggested doing something based on that reddit post during brainstorming! I'm glad you ended up doing it, it was fun to see it in action, and I think you did a great job with the setting choice. The snail and trail graphics were great, and the way the trail slowed you down was a nice mechanic choice. The controls were pretty intuitive.
A few points of critique: - Trying to place objects on the surface in front of you would sometimes result in them warping through the surface (goodbye forever, toast), raycasting from the player to determine the held object location would prevent that - It took me too long to figure out where the orders were listed. I was probably just being an idiot, but if they stood out more it would be more idiot-proof. - It would be nice to be able to click into the baskets to pick up objects in addition to the current system of clicking on the floating version above the basket. - The goal seemed a bit pricy for a jam game. I didn't make it all the way to 50k. - My first time playing I bought some bread while figuring out the game, and then realized that since every order had at least $1000 in material costs, I had lost.
I see I'm not the first one to free myself by accident by building too far away. It's a nice core mechanic, although it could use some more to do and some polish. I wish I could see what tile I was about to pick up/place into, and that I couldn't place things two tiles away while standing at the edge. Music was nice, and everything felt smooth.
This has such a great vibe to it, well done! The mechanic works well for a jam game. It was pretty short, but enjoyable while it lasted.
Capture1.PNG
Picking just one or two group seems to demolish the opposition, which seems kind of depressingly relatable. This is the most interesting concept I've played so far this LD, uncomfortable, but seeing what approaches the simulation favored was cool.
Wow, I really would not have guessed that that took me 17 minutes, I was pretty zoned in! Nice job. The controls were a bit awkward on my keyboard, but it didn't take that long to get used to. The voice acting was great, and getting pranked got a good laugh out of me.
That worked well, and looks really nice! I'd prefer if I could click on four different parts of the tile to pick which arrow direction I wanted, but it wasn't a problem.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I put up a separate POSTJAM version with a couple quick fixes for the issues you ran into. @ryan-dotsikas I switched the upgrade vs gun drop rate to scale based on how many empty slots you have, and @thedude3600 and @firebelley I changed the camera centering so that you can see equal amounts on both sides of the player. It's not a complete fix but I think it makes that menu obstruction issue feel a fair bit better.
That was a nice, chill time! I liked that you didn't restrict the player from spamming a bunch of shots and watching them interact, it was a fun mix to take some precise shots early and then spam out the last orb and watch the fireworks. The game crashed for me the first time through on a level switch, but the second time I made it all the way through with no issues. A bit more distinction between the indigo/violet and orange/red pairs would've been helpful, I shot the wrong one a few times.
Having a game about distractions during mundane tasks is an interesting use of the theme I haven't seen yet! My playthrough took 285 seconds. Of the minigames, I liked the duck hunt one the most, because doing it quickly could save you a lot of time compared to letting it expire. The emoji drop one I couldn't figure out how to finish early, or whether my actions made a difference.
I'm happy to see something more on the puzzle side of things, the theme made most people go in the other direction. That was a surprisingly unique take on the minesweeper mechanic, and I really enjoyed it. More levels that took the concepts further would've been interesting to see, but there's already plenty here for a jam game. Nicely done!
Capture2.PNG
Barely managed to best one of your high scores! Took a few tries. That was pretty fun. I tried doing a pacifist playthrough as well and got to around 60. Pretty fun to go around footstooling everyone.
That was pretty fun, there was a good balance of difficulty relative to the time. None of the levels were frustrating but they still took a few tries to figure out a good route. +1 to some quick death effect, it would've also given the player a chance to switch directions before the respawn happens.
Wow, that was a huge map to make in three days, good job getting that much done! I wish there was a bit more to do, but the game was really pretty. The firefly locations generally felt pretty good, it occasionally took two tries but never three, and small touches like the fireflies themselves putting out a light aura when the pulse happens made it a lot nicer to find them.
The variety of different door conditions is nice, it made me mix up my gameplay a fair bit. Everything seemed fair and functional, and the level layouts provided a lot of opportunities to combo a bunch of enemies, which was satisfying.
almost.PNG
ahhh I noticed I was almost at 100 and immediately died
That was a good time, really simple but it works so well. The shapes were easy enough to figure out some association with, same with the early colors, the later ones where it forced the name on you were tricky, but in a good way. This game really packs a punch for its complexity level! The music slaps, too.
That was so satisfying! Just really pleasant. I like that you can build a wall up front to keep everything in back protected, and that you can occasionally repair it when the big waves come. Really makes it feel like actually building sand castles! I wish you could stack things to build upwards and could dig moats, too. Making art knowing it's going to get destroyed is kind of freeing.
The game looks great! Really nice job on the models and animations. The controls felt a little delayed/squishy but it didn't cause problems. I'm glad that the maze had so much crossover between sections instead of having four more individual mazes like I expected, it was nice to find a familiar area again.
That was pretty fun! It does seem like randomness is a big part of how long you can stay alive, though, negatives after divisions are brutal, and -50 also hits like a truck. It would be cool if you could expand or shrink yourself with a key, since sometimes you're trying to vacuum orbs and sometimes you're trying to dodge like it's a bullet hell game.
Nice job getting it done! It would be nice to have a couple cylinders or something where my feet are to make it easier to tell how close to the edges of things you are.
Congrats on finishing! I died due to strange jumps a few times, but aside from that had a good time. The pig death was pretty funny!
Pretty straightforward and enjoyable. Movement being linked with aiming was fun, I like the little direction swaps you could do to sneak in shots. Switching between worlds every 10 seconds in some other games has been annoying because you've had to reorient yourself in an entirely new position. Keeping the general layout the same between the worlds made it way easier to keep track of what's changing between the worlds, good call.
I got a good laugh out of the twist, well done on that part. I enjoyed the gameplay for a while and beat the 50 level. 50 was enough of a scramble for me, so I tapped out there.
Oh my god, that was so good! You did such a good job with the details and making the game have a really strong vibe to it.
I did have one issue where my game became stuck at this point. Capture25.PNG Mousing over the dialogue options changed the cursor, but clicking them did nothing. This happened after tabbing away and then back, for some reason. Second playthrough went smoothly.
what did I just play
Capture27.PNG
Balance was actually pretty good, I'd say. I liked the way resources moved a lot, it made for some interesting factory building, and the game stayed performant all the way through. I'd play an expanded version!
I really like the concept, and I think the art is great, but there are bugs that are making it unplayable, unfortunately. I tried four times, and all four times eventually new targets would just stop showing up. My lil reaper intern also just got stuck on the side of the map and hung out there forever.
Capture23.PNG
Ah, only bronze for me. Fun entry, really chill.
Capture24.PNG
Wow, I really enjoyed the gameplay on this one. Figuring out how to manipulate the garden layout had just enough player agency to it to keep it interesting but not bogged down. Nicely done!
I made it to around lap 60 three times before losing. It seems like the audience gets increasingly stingy with their free time boosts, and I never found a good way to hype them up enough to keep them from stopping. The extra time per lap from buildings was useful, but eventually wasn't enough.
Still, I had fun with it! I just wish there was a way to keep going forever if you were playing well enough. Maybe there is and I'm just bad lol.
A quick run: Capture28.PNG
A full run: Capture29.PNG
Everyone's already said it, but +1 to the auto tools blocking you. I just avoided them entirely until late game after my first playthrough.
Once I got the hang of the mechanics I got into a pretty good flow. Some sort of score would've been nice, so I could tell if I did better than my previous try.
Heads up that if you try to fullscreen it on an ultrawide it cuts off some pretty important information.
Thanks for the feedback so far everyone! I'm glad you're enjoying the writing.
Yeah, I probably should've put the current Normal difficulty behind a third Hard option. It's doable (oh god how is there 200 day run on the leaderboard), but requires quite a bit of advertising combined with the other boosts. Easy is more flexibly balanced if you'd like a chiller time.
The initial ramp up period was meant to be a time for players to toy with edicts and acolytes to figure out their basics, but it kinda just feels like dead time in hindsight. I think lowering the minimum ad price to 100 would've probably made this time period feel less bad, although yeah just starting you off with 500 followers could've also bypassed some of the problem.
@unentokku Sorry about that! Looks like the renderer I exported with isn't supported by your GPU. I just uploaded a couple "-OpenGL-Fallback" versions that use a fallback OpenGL renderer instead. Hopefully that will work!
@horda Uh oh, sorry about that. What OS are you on?
@horda Thanks for mentioning that it was on an event! I tracked down a division by zero in two events and put up new builds with that fixed.
I think there's accidentally some debug code enabled. I start with 10 money, but then when I place something down it immediately jumps up to over 300, and I suddenly have enough money to build all the way to the end without going through days.
Once I realized and pretended I didn't have the extra 300 it was a good time. I would've liked it if there was the option to pick an action for every town at the same time to speed things up a bit.
A bit on the easy side, and you could grow way more weapons than you ever needed, but I like the concept and it was pretty engaging.
I played through twice because I wanted the good ending, and I really botched the start of the first run because my mouse sensitivity was too high. I had to drop it quite a bit to play this, but once I did it was a lot of fun.
Controlling my little astronaut was pretty tricky. I think I got stuck in some sort of infinite spin, but I could still mostly navigate by timing my movement. Good job getting it done!
It's simple but it ran perfectly and watching all the cannons go to work was satisfying.
That got pretty interesting once I started to abuse phasing as much as I possibly could. Sometimes it seemed a bit too straightforward.
It would be nice to see what the best possible score on each level was once I'd beaten it to see if there was more for me to figure out.
I bought a couple of each upgrade, but I stopped once I noticed that I wasn't making enough extra money off the upgrades to keep up with rising costs of the upgrades. Being able to hold E to water and collect and to sell all the wheat at once would've reduced a lot of the repetitive pressing in the game.
Oh my god this game is hard
Capture26.PNG
The second phase of that tomato turns him into quite the monster. It killed me the first four tries, and then on the fifth I got curious if I could spam click him down and win by killing him despite having his minions kill me. Super did not work lol. Try #6 I finally got him though. That was fun, and I loved the voice acting and the animations were so good!
I wish I could've skipped through some of the earlier bits to get back to the tomato, though. Also, missing a shot when the tomato goes underground for his second phase feels kinda punishing.
The fight descriptions were consistently plausible, and it reacted well to bad input, but the correlation between the text and the change in health was sometimes shaky, like when it said "In the end, neither fighter was able to gain an advantage, and the round ended in a stalemate", but I lost a lot of health and the opponent lost none. I generally didn't feel like I had much influence on the numbers, but the focus was on the story anyways.
It's fun to see stuff like this start to get used in jams, I'm looking forward to seeing how far people can take it.
The music seemed desynced from the button timings on my computer, but it was still fun. Good music!
That took me a while, but I really enjoyed it. The puzzles were really well crafted, and I haven't seen anything like the ripening mechanic before. Thanks for putting this together, I loved the challenge.