Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Cupertino Game Dev Club
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Hungry Wilbert | jam | 3.59 | 3.36 | 3.40 | 3.90 | 3.90 | 3.50 | 3.72 | 3.65 |
Relaxing game, with beautiful art and music. A little bit difficult to target branches, since they keep swaying; maybe use snapping and have the can target a group of branches? Now that I think about it watering branches isn't a very common thing to do :P
Interesting aesthetic choices; thick font, bright and gradually shifting colors, retro music, and early PS style graphics make for an amusing experience. Gameplay and level design wise the game isn't particularly creative—of course bigger sights equates to less space to move around—and the inverted camera is a bit off-putting, but the dangers are clearly communicated (even if you've never played the game you can tell red sights are to be avoided) and the difficulty in the later levels presents a decent challenge. A fun game overall. Favorite part was the death sound; you really feel the screeching, so you don't want to die even if you don't lose a lot when you die.
I like how there's a little delay on the scyth's return so you can drag it around, though not so much that it feels uncontrollable. Movement is also relatively fluid. It's a little annoying that you have to move a bit every time you throw; maybe keeping track of whether the player is looking left or right would be helpful. It's also difficult to tell if you're dealing damage to the portals; I think adding the a sound effect for those would have been helpful. Also, for the music, I would suggest switching all of your E's to Eb's if you're going for a more conventional sound, though I don't dislike the music in its current state. Fun game; I'm a bit sad you won't be making more like this.
I see that you took that disco image on the twitter page to heart.
It's a little bit difficult to understand at first; it's rather dark and the brown square that indicates a line array doesn't stand out at first; perhaps an indicator of sorts would help. It also took a little bit to learn how to play songs, since the when I clicked on an active line array the first song it showed me on the menu required more trophies than I had; perhaps starting the list on a piece that requires 0 trophies would be better. The most important problem is that it's hard to tell what your police and the criminals are feeling. For an extreme example of what would probably be more obvious, you could color people green if they are happy with the music, and color them more red the less they like the music. Green policemen would break the immersion quite a bit though, so try something else to make it obvious. It is difficult to judge the mood based on masses of overlapping clouds.
In general, communication seems to be the main problem, though you didn't mess it up that much either. For example, you added indicators for the line array radii, so I could tell who was being affected by my music. Music tolerations also helped a lot in my decision making. Small note: you can't click on police behind buildings to check their tolerations. Overall a nice game.
Smart game! The mechanic by itself is already interesting, as there is an inherent difficulty involved with throwing your dog. The way you build on the grappling hook idea just makes it better, liking being able to pull spiders and disable them, making your dog vulnerable to damage (so whenever you try to kill an enemy you're taking a risk), and pausing them jump a bit at the top to allow players to aim their shot. The simpler graphics and color scheme helped me pick out what were enemies and what I could use my grappling hook on. The difficulty at level 3 made the game more engaging, and balanced out by the fact that you didn't punish the player too much for dying. Nice job!
Nice atmosphere; use of camerashake, music, and monochromatic color scheme set a rather bleak tone for the game. It took a bit to realize that the movement control swapping was intentional (I understood after I realized the screen seemed to be warping and I recalled that one of the characters mentioned nerve gas.) The sardonic dialogue is rather natural, if not the most humorous. Bugs make the game a bit difficult to play; I couldn't get past the nerve gas part because the terminal would ask me to input the passcode, I would input the (presumably correct) passcode, and the terminal would say that it didn't understand the command and the game wouldn't progress. Besides that, a well-designed game.
The best part of this game for me was the music. The entrance music was grand, the music during the game was intense, and the game over music was sad. Each piece of music fit. Gameplay wise the game is pretty simple, though making the player slow down when he's too big makes me feel like I shouldn't be picking up snowballs at all. There's also a lot of fire; that, combined with the fact that they grow quickly, makes them too difficult to avoid. Graphically simple as well, but I could pick the game up quickly thanks to those graphics. Pretty good game overall.
I swear the wind sound is just someone blowing through his teeth into the microphone.
The black-and white art is really nice and adds to the gloomy atmosphere, especially the main character; I also like the weird color fraying rainbow effect. Audio is also interesting
Gameplay wise there's not much to do except walk around and hope you run into things. Maybe you can present a little more information to the player by increasing the camera scope (but not the vision range!) and adding hints of some sort that appear in the darkness. Any way that you can add challenge while still maintaining limited vision will be nice.
I'm a little unsure what's supposed to happen when the fire dies. Do you teleport back and give the fire you souls, or do you actually reset the game?
Interesting experience.
In terms of controls and visuals, game is very simple, but that makes it very easy to pick up. Because of it's simplicity, you could probably easily expand the game if you had more time (or if you continue to work on it post-jam!). The sound effects make it satisfying to slaughter viruses. Good job!