Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Cosr
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | untitled no.10 (seconds) | jam | 405 | 2.85 | 3.07 | 3.00 | 3.44 | 2.68 | 2.44 | 2.68 | 48 | |||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | An Empty Room | compo | 349 | 2.67 | 1.92 | 3.83 | 3.44 | 2.78 | 3.07 | 2.00 | 3.58 | 2.42 | 77 | |
| 2011 | 20 | It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This! | how to be a girl | jam | 14 | |||||||||||
| 2009 | 16 | Exploration | I Never Missed Anyone Until They Were All Gone | compo | 113 | 2.00 | 1.38 | 2.71 | 2.57 | 3.71 | 2.55 | 21 |
A rather sweet little story. Quite enjoyed it.
I know you said you would have liked to fix them up, but I thought the sketchy, uncoloured style of the art furthered the contrast between life and day dreams, more so than just the pixelization.
Throwing sharp things is always a good use of energy.
Good puzzling and the ending was entertaining.
Martoon: I probably can't help you there, but the original LD20 jam version did not have any music. It was added in the post-jam version, so maybe it was the version you were playing.
matthias_zarzecki: Yeah, in addition to the slow movement speed and whatever, I figure I probably drag my point on for a bit too long.
I really liked the core player 1 defends a helpless player 2 mechanic. It could be interesting to expand on it; particularly in a way that emphasizes cooperation/coordination.
Showing some actual numbers for the monsters (health and whatever) would have been really nice.
I'm not sure using an item to directly capture a monster really goes with the idea of capturing their soul. Maybe it would be interesting if you used the rune to bind their soul, and then still had to defeat them normally after. Or something.
Good humour. I found the repetition of the daily tasks started to drag a bit.
That was amazing. Good everything and really solid; can't think anything more constructive to say.
Though I did think there's was a bit too much delay before going to a new area after walking off the edge of the screen in the afternoon.
I found the controls, particularly for wall jumping, rather awkward for some reason. It maybe would have been nice to be able to shoot backward while moving.
Very simple, but the sliding objects adds some panicked fun. Might be interesting to expand on the physics so the pile starts to topple if unbalanced.
I love me my medication.
It's fun and the music is nice; just kinda grooves in the background.
I found it a little difficult to tell where exactly the hit box on the player is, which is maybe important in this kind of game.
Hmm...manipulating weak people into being your friends...
Solid game. It's a little difficult to find home again if you stray to far.
Fun game, and I really liked the simple graphical style.
I do kind of wish it was a little more strategic; as it is it seems a bit too luck based.
I found the humour in the opening to be a bit off, but it's just probably not my kinda thing.
The car horn sounds got really annoying after a bit.
I found the metronome sound effect really irritating at first, but after a while it just sort of became monotonous background noise I could zone out to.
I do think it does start off a bit too slow though.
The fact that the enemies didn't seem to react until after I had hit them first made me feel like a bit of a jerk. 'Hey, look, it's a guy minding his own business, I'm going to go and punch him.'
Also, I found it a little weird that apparently the enemies can punch each other.
Definitely needs a bit more polish. In game key-bindings list and such. One big thing is that attacking does not update your health (I don't think) so if you're duking it our with a troll and getting hit, say, you don't know what your health actually is until you wait of move.
Also, I managed to reach a blank map when I was around level 5.
Looks wonderful and the music is pleasant. It takes a bit to figure out how things work, but the game is set up in a way that you can finish it without understanding how to play.
Rather than explain everything in a blunt way, though, it would probably be better to make things longer (maybe expand level like mentioned previously) to give the game more time to sink in.
The end boss was a little irksome to fight, because he just kept walking and you had to chase him around (as opposed to him getting stunned when hit or something). Not sure how you would change it exactly, but when it's not exciting anyways I don't think the fight should be too long.
Good game though, simple and amusing.
It's a little bit annoying to start all the way back at the beginning when you die, though the game isn't really very long. The movement speed seems a bit sluggish for a platformer, to me.
Yeah, I also had the game crash after plating for a little while. Cure idea though. From the little bit I got to play there was some good physics based puzzling potential.
Silly with gratuitous sexiness. Good stuff.
I found that the player needs to get too close to the edge of the screen before it scrolls. Which can easily result in a bee getting the jump on you. I agree that it would be improved if the camera was a bit more centered on the player.
Both the graphics and sound were simple, but great.
Looked great, sounded great. Played great, but it liked to freeze for me every so often when I was carrying Tim on the liftable platforms.
I believe TellusE's point is that the rules say all content must be created by you in the 48 hours of the competition.
Tricky, but definitely a fun mechanic. I sadly gave up on the puzzle with the twin cannons and didn't see the end. Might try again later if I feel like it though.
I really liked the monochrome graphics, in general.
Man, this game is unrelenting. It would be really nice to have a way to take inventory of what you have in stock.
I liked how the tilting became more erratic and extreme as the game went on. Good way of increasing difficulty.
Music would have been pretty ace, if you had time. The sole sound effect of dying was a little lonely in there.
Very nice. I like how the environments were very surreal. That and the girl's Picasso-esque appearance really helped the dream-like feel of the game (hooking a fish with the moon? sure. perfect sense in dream-logic).
Noticed a few little graphical bugs. Mainly, the flower was already laying on the path by the rabbit hole before I put it there, and the rabbit never appeared visually. And the bird didn't seem to leave my inventory, I swapped it for the moon after putting it on the cactus. Certainly didn't detract from the experience though.
The gameplay was very straight forward, but it didn't matter because the game was interesting enough to keep me going. Definitely going to have to play through this a few more times to see more of the branches (and I look forward to doing so). Lovely little game all told.
Hah, that ending was gooooood. Great game.
I find it funny that I figured out how to finish the game while reading the guide, before I actually read the bit about how to finish the game. I had the game running in the background, then all of a sudden there was this sound I had never heard before.
Took me a couple more tries to actually beat the game though.
I don't think I would have figured it out normally. My first time playing I was always sleeping well before nightfall, not because I figured night was bad, but because I was always out of energy and that was the most obvious and fastest way to recover.
Once I knew what to do, it was a little tedious, having to stand around so long for things to happen and my energy to recover enough to chop down another tree.
Yeah, the way the game's set up, with the numbers I used and all, eventually the things scratching at the walls will break through. More and more just keep spawning, so they break through faster, and the effect of the volume on them drops off quadratically (with distance), so you can only push them back so far before you're not screaming loud enough. I didn't really leave time to tweak the gameplay at all (not that I would have made defeat evitable anyways).
Aw yeah. Limiting my audience is almost as good as alienating them.
Hmm...that's a good idea. Better than how I did it. My roommate had the same issue with his mac's mic, but the levels work well on my laptop's internal mic, which is what I tuned it for (I hit about 60% easy on an average yell).
Or maybe give the player an option to adjust flash's microphone gain before starting or something. I cranked it down, because, with my mic, basically anything would put it up to 100% on the default gain settings.
Foolish to assume every mic would give the same results I guess. I had a second, decent quality usb microphone that I used to record sound effects, but it never occurred to me to test the game using that.
Thanks for all the great feedback. I'm glad I ditched my first idea. I think this turned out far more interesting than my original plan ever would have.
Fair enough on the not-really-a-game comments. I'll likely continue to call it a game myself (I already use the term incredibly loosely).
Great game. The grappling hook, with changing gravity, is a nice mechanic. Just the orientation and pulling blocks wouldn't really be enough to take the game farther, I don't think, but it's very solid for such a short game.
I think just adding some animation to the player, where he aims up, might be enough to make it clear to the player that they can shoot upward. Adding visual cues like that might be a better way to show the player's capabilities than more tutorial text.
That was lovely. Great on mood and humour. The writing was generally very well done, nice dialog overall, and the few typos certainly don't ruin it. I'll have to play through again sometime (not now because there's more LD games to play) to see more of the dialog.
You say in your post-mortem that you felt you could have been more expressive if you were writing in French (or something like that). If you were to do a French version sometime in the future, I'd be interested in playing that (French is supposed to be my second language, but I'm crazy out of practice).
This is a very nice start to something. I really like the look of it.
The movement seems sorta jerky, or something...I don't really think it's too slow, but something about it feels weird.
Falling out of the world (entering right most room at the top from the left) was fun. I wasn't expecting elevators to kill you if you ride them too high (this seems like a really strange thing to do). The transition to the title screen when you die is also way too sudden, but you probably already knew that.
That was really nice for what it was. What it was being really short.
The graphics were pleasing and the presence of music was a nice touch that added a bit to the atmosphere of the game. It's always nice when someone finds time to add some nice sound to an entry.
It took me a while to figure out that I could use the power of heart to defeat the enemies in the second room. Before then I kept trying to jump over them, and found that the respawning after death was a bit too sudden. It also felt like the collisions between the player and the enemies was a bit too unforgiving, but that feeling could just be a consequence of the sudden respawns.
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.
Really impressive for 48 hours' work. Very interesting idea.
It's fun, though at times it can be a little too frustrating to control the ball. It would be nice if there was an easier way to change directions with the ball, rather than having to run around to the other side of it, then accidentaly bumping into it and sending it rolling away because the player is too close when they try to turn. (if there is a way to do this, I'm missing it. Maybe it's possible using the tap space to control thing, but it would still be nice to have a quicker way)
I loved this (maybe that sounds bad). Took me five or six tries until I was able to live. Sometimes it just doesn't seem like enough positive words spawn to be able to survive. I think I'm mostly ok with that, but it does seem a bit too random (considering when I finally survived it seemed pretty easy).
Little annoying to have to refresh to replay, but that's a tiny niggle, and having a replay button would probably ruin the mood.
Well done, good job with the theme.
I think the lack of theme is an acceptable sacrifice for such a wonderfully proper mental game.
It can be a little hard to tell how exactly the player's input is affecting things at first, and I can't really figure out the mechanics of the second final section (the bouncing section before the high five section). But that doesn't really matter because the game really runs on that what-the-hell-is-going-on sort of vibe.
Also, I like the fact that it doesn't display score. Fits the because-it's-awesome attitude.
Very good game.
I only read the last data log thing, that was lying around. I noticed them early, but didn't actually think I could intereact with them because I didn't get close enough to them at first, or something. Is the interaction range on them shorter than on hte hacking panels?
Going up and down vertical shafts was a little awkward. I think it would have been better if you had went full out zero gravity, so that there was no real up and down, and the game's up/down was always orientated to the player (so you could end up upside down, or sideways and do 360s, etc). That would make guiding yourself into a vertical hall easier.
Well done for the time spent on it. The lighting was effective, if a little rough, and I liked the particle effects from protectiles. The game might be more interesting if the zombies weren't quite so static, like if they wandered slightly or something.
Great game. Cure graphics. Had a lot of fun with it.
Aiming was a little awkward at first, and it took some getting used to. For whatever reasons I think I keep expecting the projectiles to originate from the arrow rather than the character, so I instinctively use the arrow to judge throwing arcs. Maybe if you had a little arrow orbit around the character, rather than rotating beside him.
I really liked the item variety, good humour there. Throwing 'Australia' at someone got a laugh out of me.
Well done, I quite liked it for the most part.
I definitely would have preferred something other than up for jump. It makes jumping and moving a little awkward. It was also rather unclear what exactly I could stand on top of when platforming, and it was a little too hard to see some of the pipes that reach out past the building.
I realised on the second day that I wouldn't be able to keep both me and the cat alive until rescue and resolved that if only one of us survived, it wouldn't be me. That only helped to drive home the loneliness of the game. Well done.
I am curious how they managed to keep five other people sustained on only those systems though.
(Spoilers?) When the game restarts after ending, you keep your previous resources (so you can stockpile food, if you finish with extra). Is this part of the trick to properly beating the game, or an exploit?
Really great, and nicely complete. I only tried it once, but couldn't find all the lanterns. Didn't feel up to going through the world again, though you managed to make a nice variety of small environments.
The sounds were generally well done. The jump sound effect annoyed me a little at first, because it sounded too much like my headphones were popping with static or something. It wasn't really a problem though.
Well done, nice level generation. I got to level 10 before dying, and I'm pretty sure I died because the monster spawned on top of me (or at least it seemed like he did).
Are you supposed to respawn on the same level when you die? I also assumes the game never ends? I stopped playing on level 12 (two levels after I died) because wandering around the same empty caverns couldn't keep me interested any longer.
A bit of environmental variety, either more environments, or more things to see in the one environment, could go a long way.
Overall, very well done. Very complete and it felt polished. The tiling style looked really nice.
In general I'm not a fan of enemies respawning immediately offscreen. Maybe if you want enemies to return, it would be better to have a higher distance required for them to return, or only have them respawn when the player dies or something.
It would also be nice to have a way to heal other than dying. I think having the save points heal the player would work well. That would avoid the situation where the player is at a save point, but almost dead, so they might as well commit suicide before continuing.
Also, it's a bit of a shame to have most of the spells only be used once for a single situation. Though at the same time, having the same obstacles over and over again would get a little repetitive.
My biggest complaint is that the actual gameplay doesn't really live up to the narrative/voice acting (which is honestly a little melodramatic in a not so good way at times). Some of the sections, mostly the first and a little bit the second, go on far too long for what they offer.
Well, I ended up getting stuck on level 3 (the flag was so close I could taste it).
I found the controls a little finicky. I seemed to have trouble dropping things when moving and jumping at the same time. And the timing for a low jump was way too short. Haven't tried the new web version to see if it's any fixed.
It was fun and silly and cute though. Very well done.
Huh.
I actually quite enjoyed this. The game got a chuckle out of me.
Might have been nice to see where you could have gotten this idea with the whole weekend to work on it. As it is I think I would have preferred it without the bogus 'order full version' second level. It would have felt even lonelier that way.
I love what you've got started here. Neat little world to explore.
The graphics are very nice, but the colour at evening is a little odd. I think it might be too light a shade or something, like everything's getting brighter as the sun sets which is strange. My first thought was that the island was being nuked or something, rather than the approach of night.
The transition between map squares can seem a little sudden. Particularly going into water squares, where you're suddenly swimming with no shore (the rest are fine, really). It makes sense on the map, but is a little weird in play.
The clock in the top right can be a little hard to read...it took me a fair while to figure out what it was and how to interpret it.
Funny and depressing at the same time. Nicely dark humour, with a jab of truth. Good puzzles done with only a few simple mechanics.
It's a little tedious having to euthanise each puppy after every level, rather than having a button that put them all down, particularly in the later levels with more puppies. It wasn't so bad once I figured out you could just hold the mouse button and drag over all of them, but that took me a while.
It's fun, but it would of course be nice to see a bit more variety.
I think I got to around 100 on my second try (forget exact number, though). It's fairly easy to get the enemies grouped together in one spot and circle strafe them. The main threat is when they first spawn on all sides of you, before you can get out of the middle.
Not sure how I feel about the way the shields recharge while you're being hit. As it is, it's impossible for a single small robot to actually hurt you.
Alright, that was cool. Loved the dynamic music, even if the rest of the game wasn't quite as interesting. Started it up again a bunch of times after I beat it to play with the sound.
The short draw distance actually worked quite well as it was rather disorienting.
Simple, but very finished feeling and well rounded, only really missing a bit of music maybe.
The graphics were really nice. The music was good too.
Nice little narrative for such a short game, but at times the flow of it (puzzle, alone time, rinse, repeat) felt a bit repetitive, but overall it wasn't really a problem and worked well. If you wanted to expand the game it might be interesting to add a bit of narrative development to the alone times, to make them more significant (would be a nice fix to any repetitiveness I think).
I feel this was probably just too ambitious for a jam project. No one part of the game really feels polished enough. As a result, there's just not enough there to hold much interest.
None of the dialogs or little events seem developed enough to really immerse the player or give them much of a sense of what they're doing.
Not bad by any stretch, but it really shows that the scope was too much for the time frame.
Solid little survival roguelike, particularly for 48h.
Rather despairing when it starts fading to black and you just can't find any islands, or there's none of the supplies you need on the island, or you die just as you reach an island with a wealth of the bottled water that you so desperately crave, almost within reach.
Managed to beat it on my third try or so.
A little rough around the edges, mostly in a good way, but also in a few not so good ways.
The inclusion of mouselook was very unclear, so it was annoying trying to pick up items. I didn't read the help until after getting stuck in the first room because I didn't notice the button, and even when I did read the help I did not pick up on the mouselook thing. Also, opening the menu to look for a help screen is not something I typically do when I start a game.
The sounds got a little grating after a while.
Good job overall, fairly solid game.
It was good, but I think the movement could use a bit of tuning. It took me so long to get up to that upper level, jumping up those little one tile blocks, that after failing my first return journey, I didn't really feel like trying to get up there again. There was only a couple of events left by that time anyways.
The music was simple, but really helped the mood. Tee simple art and use of colour was effective.
When you're at the edge of the screen some of the kittens thoughts are long enough to get cut off.
The audio really made this game. The graphics were good, the narrative was pretty basic, but the audio, voice and music, really added so much to the atmosphere of the game. And the atmosphere was great.
The sound was really well done. I currently have the game still running on the credit screen and am listening to the sweet noisy music.
Loved it, until it became too repetitive. The different ways your character tries to smuggle out the art were great. But once I had stolen one piece of each type, there wasn't really much incentive for me to keep playing. I did anyways, but the longer and longer treks to get another art piece became more and more tedious. Could do with being shorter, maybe, or having some way to limit the amount of times the player has to keep returning to the same rooms to clear the place out.
I finally gave up playing a little while after a guard who was chasing me got stuck and it wouldn't stop playing the chase music (annoying because it doesn't loop cleanly. AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! wasn't noticeable with the stealth music, but it really got to me after listening to the chase music for a while).
Nice little dungeon crawler with a decent wealth of things going on.
It would be nice if there was a way to gauge the strength of enemies, since it seems some have the same appearance but different levels or something and it can be hard to tell how strong they actually are until you're in trouble.
That was nice. I liked it. A bit of sound, particularly some ambient sound for the environments (maybe not music, not sure music would necessarily work well) would have added a lot the the atmosphere.
I didn't really like having the eye as the default cursor. It meant that it was hard to tell whether something would have a little monologue description or not and so it led to a lot of random clicking on my part.
Love the style. Could really use with some more sounds (I'll have to try your updated version). Really liked the little monologue news-ticker across the top.
My first time playing, after eating, I spawned outside the room, so I couldn't reach my cup of joe. Guess the LD version is a little buggy. Also couldn't seem to progress past getting the email about cannibal Larson.
Liked it, but couldn't beat it.
Water was a bit too close in colour to the background. You also had to squint a bit too hard to see some of the secret passages, though making them lighter might make them too obvious.
Very lovely game. Took a while for the mood to set in, but there is an overall sadness and loneliness to the game, told quite effectively through the music and the old worn down environments.
The ladders were a little annoying, but other than that I didn't really have any complaints.
Yeah, running windows 7 and the fullscreen wasn't working for me either.
I don't really like how you get money for destroying wall sections. It rewards you for putting up with the tedium of destroying all the walls after you beat a level (and you would end up significantly more powerful for doing so than if you only destroyed the one wall you need to move one).
It would be nice to be able to autofire by holding down the mouse button. Having to click so much is annoying. And I would have much preferred to use the number keys to change weapons, rather than pressing 'e' to cycle (in fact I kept trying to use the numbers to change weapons the whole time I was playing, and then had to think for a moment about which button I was supposed to be pressing).
It was fun beneath the complaints, though, and I liked the weapon names. Could have done with some sound effects to go with the music.
I played up to level 5 (I think), tried it once, then quit. I only got that far by mining all the walls in most of the previous levels for money (see above).
Also, sometimes when your score is really high, the number will wrap down to a new line and overlap with your HP.
I found the music kind of nice, but also kind of annoying at the same time. Which, in itself, makes the music interesting.
Tough game, though. I found when I tried to change direction back and forth really fast I would end up stopping (I think because I was pressing one key before I released the other, or I was pressing one key, pressing another and releasing the second key without ever really releasing the first or something).
It looks nice, but the game is really rather rough. The jumping, with the sudden speed change down, feels really jerky. I also fell into a spike pit once, moved into the wall of the pit and the character slid up to the top of the ground, warping to safety instead of being impaled.
It's also rather unclear what the deal with the ghosts is. Sometimes the run from you, turn transparent without hitting you, but I never figured out what the cause was.
It would be nice if there wasn't such a disconnect between the gameplay and the little loneliness monologues of the character.
Interesting, but could use some balancing, etc. It's hard to get the balls away from the cats and not get murdered very quickly when everything just spawns so close together in such a cluster.
I found it was a little awkward to use the same input for aiming as moving. Though I suppose it does make sense that you can only shoot towards where you're moving, given the effects of your shots.
After playing around in the instructions level I really liked the way the colour balls swirled around you as you moved.
Well, that was silly. Very simple, but enjoyable enough that I tried it multiple times. Couldn't get to the boss, though. Which is a shame. I did manage to get slightly farther each time, however, so maybe I ought to give it another try sometime and see if I can beat round 5.
Hard to have a whole lot to say from what little is there. The tower looks really odd without any tiles under, or behind it or whatever (the blank black bits).
It would be nice to have a bit more feedback from the game, particularly in terms of how you're moving, as in direction and what sorts of speed you've got (the sun as a reference frame would make sense). I think an arrow pointing in the direction you're moving would be more useful than one pointing at the sun. The sun's big and not that hard to find if you look around.
Basically, I think this needs more of a hud. Normally I like minimalistic displays, but it doesn't really work here.
Good job with the emptiness of space though.
I like the mechanic. Might be nice to see it taken further. Riding around on the chairs was fun.
Solid little game. It's a little strange that your energy goes down when walking over logs, even when you aren't dragging them. Also, the fire dancing was weird, but not really much of a problem.
Funny game, but overall it was far too random. A little annoying just standing around waiting for a refigerator that will just happen to fall in a place where you can push it into position to use as a step. And occasionally there's not really enough of a noticable warning before you get turned into gooey paste by a refigerator. Pulling the camera back a bit, so to speak, might give the player a bit more awareness so they have more warning to dodge, but that might not be the best solution.
The falling damage is also far too sensitive.
Not really a fan of the oversexed leading lady. I suppose it's a personal thing (I generally dislike that sort of thing on principal), but I never thought a game about a girl shooting stalkers could feel quite so...sexist. Hopefully that doesn't sound overly harsh, just being frank.
I like the way the player is forced to juggle their different weapons. I think I would have preferred to use only the keyboard to play. I don't really like using the mouse only for clicking, since it's not used to aim or anything.
I'm also curious as to why the nerd's death animation is so much more gruesome than the others.
I thought it was a little dull at moments. Just a bit of music would help that greatly I think.
Overall it was neat. I liked how you did the dialog display, but in certain situations the player's dialog could obscure what someone else was saying. Not a huge problem overall though.
Really really like the concept, but I only gave it a try on Firefox. Don't currently have another browser, and I don't feel like installing one right now, so I can't play the apparent proper version (so I'll refrain from rating).
It's nice, but it sort of feels like an idea that hasn't been developed enough. A bit too simple.
I really liked the animation of the main character. The flowing looked great. Overall the graphics had a really nive feel to them.
The clicking to pick up objects seemed a little imprecise or innacurate. It was also a little annoying that, I guess, the player was picked up for selection, so that you couldn't pick something up if you were on top of it.
Well, then I'm not sure what the cause was, but for whatever reason I thought I was having trouble picking up items when the player is directly over them. Replaying it now, I might have been imagining things though.
Nice concept. I definitely would have preferred keyboard control or something for the windows build rather than clicking the arrows on the screen, but that's a very minor issue.
I think with the limitation of only being able to move left and right, there isn't really enough depth to the puzzle solving/exploration potential of the mechanic. It would be neat to see the light scattering mechanic expanded more.
It's a little weird to have all the little light seeds disappear, especially mid flight, when you fling more, instead of fading on their own. Though making the player able to just fling more ad infinitum wouldn't really work out because they'd be able to just saturate the entire level.
I loved this. A few of the puzzles were quite tricky, but they were all well done. Very effective at telling a little story.
I really liked this, and wanted to finish it, but didn't. After hitting a switched that told me I moved something, and being unable to remember anything I had seen that might have moved, I couldn't bring myself to wander through the entire tomb again looking for it (though I do remember something I hadn't thought to check now, but I'd have to start over again).
There was a nice variety of environments to explore, but it might have been nice to have a few more features to them.
Would have been really nice with a bit of sound.
Overall, well done.
The sonar seems a little inconsistant in counting the number of squares in a direction. Sometimes it would delay longer between blips and skip some.
When I first played the game I was expecting the floating text to go away and be left with a black screen, and it took me a while to realise I was supposed to be playing. I think I might have prefered it that way, with a blank black screen (and fullscreen).
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.
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.
Good game, good pixels, good sense of humour throughout. Decent polish and feels nicely complete.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's just cool.
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.
@Lianne Booton :(
Weird, I don't know why that would be. What archive unzipping program thingy are you using (was packaged with 7-zip)?
@ghRibacki o_O
(which version was this?)
@jomomomo: Could maybe get a Mac version going when I can get someone to build it for me, but certainly won't be before the end of judging.
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).
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.
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).
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 ;_;
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Short and simple, but still good. I found it unintentionally hilarious (in a way I really liked) when I misspelled my final message.
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.
so cool
Love all the glitchiness. Am going to need to remember to come back to the post compo version sometime.
Game looks amazing; great art. I how having both characters control slightly differently made the dual platforming more interesting.
*I liked how having...
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. :(