Alone by Dark Acre Jack 2012-01-10T01:24:00
Nice. I regret not playing it in the dark. Don't know why I neglected to do so.
I was a little disappointed with how you handled the mental state thing. Having the questions directly effect your mental state, and having them be more or less the only thing that did so, didn't really make me feel any sort of descent into madness. It makes sense from the perspective that the answers to the questions determine whether you were insane to begin with (given your situation), but displaying the player's mental state and having it drop like they're taking damage doesn't really vibe with that. Might be more effective to keep the mental state hidden, and make a reveal at the end whether the player is insane or not.
I was fine with the slow walking speed, but the slow turning speed was too much.
The audio was a bit too sparse. A few ambient sounds for the whispers to jump out from would have been amazing.
LD27 — 10 Seconds (23)
Notes on departure by kristoffer zetterberg 2013-09-16T20:42:00
Short and simple, but still good. I found it unintentionally hilarious (in a way I really liked) when I misspelled my final message.
PROBE TEAM by Andrew Shouldice 2013-09-12T03:49:00
Great game, very polished and complete. I loved the aesthetic, the visuals and audio and everything together were very evocative and made exploring a joy.
The deactivation sounds of the probes were so sad ;_;
10 by Benn 2013-09-12T03:22:00
Really cool, nice platforming twist. It's tricky, but the level design was pretty good.
Narcoleptic Chicken Kid by Lianne Booton 2013-09-12T02:53:00
Beautiful game, just wonderful all around. I especially love that wonderful contrast between the cute and the gruesome.
Noticed a few bugs. If you press the arrow keys fast enough, you can do extra moves (and if one of those extra moves takes you into a wall, your used time will go down leaving you with an unused move when you shouldn't have one). Also, if you continue (password) on the wolf only level (which I assume is the last level, and if so I love the bleakness there), you get a divide by zero error when you inevitably lose (presumably because you've collected 0 out of 0 corn?).
Also, I think the music/audio might be mixed a bit too loud. The audio kept clipping on certain songs (more so when other sounds were layered on top).
Midlands Noire by Ysty 2013-09-12T02:06:00
It's simple, but reasonably effective for what it tries to convey. The use of the money counter to sort of show what other have and then take it away from you was compelling.
The storefront text was pretty cool too.
SliP by Sakuyan 2013-09-12T01:35:00
Wonderful graphics. The game could use a bit more polish in a few places; maybe slightly more forgiving hit boxes on possession, and the level transitions are a bit too abrupt as is. Slight changes in elevation in the ground maybe don't stand out enough visually (little bumps were kind of hard to pick out), but that's not really a huge issue.
Good game overall, with a neat mechanic.
Feather & Son by Carduus 2013-09-10T15:45:00
Game looks amazing; great art. I how having both characters control slightly differently made the dual platforming more interesting.
GLITCH by TravisChen 2013-09-10T15:31:00
I loved this. There's some really sweet glitchy stuff this compo (which gets to be extra unique since it wasn't the theme). Visuals and audio were both great.
Found a skelington thing, and it...killed me? Or was me? But it doesn't matter, cause it was a cool experience.
I wish I had an oculus rift so I could damage my everything playing this.
Fugit by jerombd 2013-09-10T15:16:00
Simple game, but I like it. I dig the aesthetics, and putting the level inside an hourglass is just cool. And amps up the difficulty nicely as you get closer to the bottom and the level gets narrower.
Hold My Beer! by Lars Faust 2013-09-10T15:07:00
Nice game, I really like the style and the way the minigames divided visually.
The game sort of lacked feedback, mostly in the fight with the bat-dude. It was hard to tell if you were doing anything to him or were getting hit yourself.
Starting from the very beginning after every failure was a little annoying, but mostly fine because it the game's not very long anyways.
SecondsXsecondS by SaintHeiser 2013-09-10T14:51:00
Really cool, love the concept, though it's reliance on trial-and-error really does bring it down somewhat.
The issue is the way the game requires you to choose the correct ability for a given situation before even knowing what obstacles are ahead. The design requires the player to just throw themselves in blind until they encounter a roadblock, then restart and bring the ability that will let them past it. Then they encounter the next roadblock and repeat. And again, and again, and again. This leads to repetition where the player is not learning skills or improving at the game, just trying things until they find what the game wants. This leads to frustration and such.
Much of the initial difficulty comes from the fact that players will generally not have the mere capability to overcome an obstacle when they first encounter it, so will fail through no fault of their own. As opposed to having the capability to overcome an obstacle when they first encounter it and having to retry because they just weren't good enough. I personally gave up on level 3, when it started requiring trickier timing and platforming abilities in combination with the trial and error.
I like how the abilities lend the levels to being more like puzzles, but with no foreknowledge the player is very unlikely to have an appropriate ability the first time it's needed, meaning the solution can only be found through the aforementioned trial and error. So, bad puzzles. Doing something like showing the player an overview of the level before they select abilities (or while they select), would go a long way. This would allow the player to plan ahead and prepare, give them a sense of which abilities might get them through the level, and allow them to tweak their ability set when it doesn't work out until they get a solution that works for them, emphasizing the puzzley nature.
In retrospect I think Solifuge got at a lot of what I'm trying to say in his suggestion #1, only a bit more succinctly.
I did like the game though, possibly more than my critique lets on (gave a pretty good rating for what it's worth).
BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS by mcc 2013-09-10T13:41:00
so cool
Love all the glitchiness. Am going to need to remember to come back to the post compo version sometime.
Party Time by JayProg 2013-09-10T13:17:00
Controls just felt way too sensitive, but at the same time I'm not sure the game would be possible otherwise (took me a while to beat it).
It's a fun concept, but I ended up *wanting* to like it more than I actually did like it.
glitchme.exe by Sos 2013-09-09T02:05:00
Yeah, that's just cool.
Proletarian Ninja X by deepnight 2013-09-09T01:51:00
Great game. Getting the grove of a level and just blasting through it leaving a trail of body bits in your wake has a really good feel to it. Sometimes you gotta work a bit to get that balance between going fast enough, but not too fast (so you don't misclick and run past someone (which is thrilling on its own if you manage to recover from it), or that guy down the hall doesn't spot you despite having your shuriken in his face), which has sort of a rewarding thrill when you get it right.
Legend of Troll by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou 2013-09-09T01:06:00
Lovely pixel arts and an intriguing mechanic. I'd love to see where you go with this next.
Aside from more content, it could use a bit more polish in a few areas. If you go back to the menu after the initial cutscene and restart the level, the ingame music does not start again. Also the queen's movement is rather wonky. I played a couple times, and my second time doing the correct solution she failed to step from the first rock up onto the ledge, turned around, said her 'unacceptable' spiel and left (and I of course had no trolls left).
Also, as good as the arts are, it would be nice if there was a bit more connection between the visuals and the mechanics. What I mean is, the ground in the centre of the level is the brightest, so appears best lit and thus the area that's exposed to sunlight visually, but it's the edge of the play area that counts as being in sunlight for the mechanics, which appears shadowy compared to the centre in contradiction to the (albeit excellent) sunlight warning sign. Just a little something that could make the game more cohesive.
Detective Awesomepants by xel 2013-09-09T00:27:00
Good game, good pixels, good sense of humour throughout. Decent polish and feels nicely complete.
TRUSTY SWORD by noffle 2013-09-09T00:07:00
Hmm...if only I had another person on hand to play this with. Seems like it might be worth some fun.
Gamepad doesn't seem to play properly for me. Player 2 always seems to look/aim to the right when not actively moving (when they'll aim in the direction they're moving). Moving with the left stick, aiming with the right would seem ideal to me, then remaining facing the last direction aimed in when not actually pushing a direction on the right stick (which is not the current behaviour).
I like the dashing charge the sword gives. I'd be curious to see how they balance up in actual play, or whether maybe the movement speed needs to be upped to better enable missile dodging (or maybe if balancing needs happen, the map could be reworked to offer more close quarters opportunities). Then again, maybe charge speed is enough. Asymmetry is awesome, but needs more playtesting than I can do for you by myself, without a player 2. I do feel like both weapons should offer a fair chance, impending switch aside. Oh shit, wait, the sword can also block rockets.
Not sure I'm a fan of the hold and release to fire the rocket.
Aw, the blood spatter fades away. :(
EcoStar vs Aeronox by DreamTeam 2013-09-08T23:32:00
Nice game, loved the art. Took me a little while to get the whole elements thing (cause why would I bother reading instructions, right?), but once I did I liked it.
Something about the feel of the movement seemed a little off to me. Maybe the player's too fast or the bullets are too slow or something. It seems like the player basically moves at the same speed as their own bullets, which is weird, and I kept flying backwards into enemy bullets that had gone past me which, well, whatever, fine, but it just had sort of a wrong feel to it. Maybe it's that the player's horizontal movement speed was too fast. I dunno.
Castle Clocksworth by My Sweet Whomp 2013-09-08T22:48:00
Pretty solid game. It could use a tiny bit of grammar polish.
I felt some of the hit boxes were a little off, particularly concerning the electric zappy things. I kept getting hurt when I put the gear into the one in the third room (first one you encounter I think?). Seems the hit box for the zapper extends past the boxes beside it. It's like a lot of the objects in rooms look like they have a uniform tiled size, but their hit boxes don't match up to that (I think the tiles that push you are a little off too; got stuck on one when I managed to step on it while still be blocked by a red block beside it). It makes the gameplay feel just a bit less polished than it could.
Might have been interesting if the 10-second-reset was a bit more integrated into some of the puzzles (though too much of this might be hard to design), requiring the player to use their knowledge that the room is about to reset to solve them (or even simpler things, like in the bit where the player has to go into a little area to kill a robot, and then can push some block to get out; why bother making the block pushable, when the player is about to be reset to the beginning anyways?). Make it a bit more interesting than just an arbitrary requirement to do some things fast.
Clockwork Cat by patrickgh3 2013-09-08T16:36:00
Cute game, pretty fun with a nice style. I liked the tying of the moving platforms to the rewinding of time, and I felt a couple neat puzzles came out of that.
Dinosaur Jr. vs the 1960's by devi ever 2013-09-08T16:24:00
Really short, but I loved it. The screen shake and the stompiness gave a pretty good feel to it. Nailed the whole being-a-psychadelic-rainbow-trex thing.
(I did notice the stompy screen shake still happens if you're eating and not moving. That I noticed this could be a sign I'm playing it too much, though.)
The Duellists by jay griffin 2013-09-08T16:04:00
Fun game, with a nicely non-standard interpretation of the theme. It took me a while to get how the accuracy worked, and even once I did I found I mostly shot quickly and inaccurately anyways and just hoped the shot was close enough to target, because standing and waiting for a certain shot just felt kinda oddly slow for a pistol duel to me.
I liked the use of a mouse gesture to cock the gun, that had a nice feel to it.