Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → DaleP
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Official Planetologist | jam | 766 | 3.47 | 3.35 | 3.80 | 3.75 | 3.50 | 2.83 | 3.11 | |||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Politics and Power Grids | compo | 468 | 3.00 | 2.40 | 3.46 | 3.60 | 2.60 | 3.15 | 3.06 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | FLÅTPAK | jam | 800 | 3.19 | 3.30 | 3.35 | 3.51 | 3.13 | 2.52 | 3.83 | 3.02 | ||
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Chatty | compo | |||||||||||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | CthulhTunes | compo | 558 | 3.03 | 3.00 | 3.38 | 3.56 | 3.03 | 3.63 | 2.83 | 2.90 | 59 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Captain Spacebeard in: The Centauri Run | compo | 616 | 2.86 | 2.79 | 2.18 | 1.68 | 2.93 | 2.21 | 2.16 | 2.30 | 50 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Time Loopy | compo | 538 | 3.07 | 2.78 | 3.41 | 3.48 | 3.19 | 2.19 | 2.77 | 2.52 | 44 |
Great idea, maybe a little too rushed but it was fun to see how the split-second decisions turned out. Minor nitpick: the story at the end started in third person but then switched to second person which made it sound a little awkward.
The graphical style was well executed. Mood was well done. However, enemies sort of clipped through me when they got close enough, and the mouse was too sensitive to aim effectively (though that's something I've noticed on a lot of Unity games for some reason).
The simple (yet beautiful) black and white graphics, lack of background noise, 10-second movement, and general feeling of lost-ness (even though that was a bit frustrating) all worked to create an amazing suspenseful mood. The subtle audio cues when the scraiths and orbs were nearby were perfect.
Great game, I'm pretty sure my keyboard won't last as long anymore. ;)
My only complaints were that the fireballs were a little hard to see in the desert, and I would have preferred if the controls were spread out to make it easier to use two hands. I especially liked how all four abilities were consistently called for; there wasn't a useless ability and it was fun making quick decisions on which one to use.
Good looking and well executed Elite-like game. Impressive for 48hrs. I'm not sure that only having one life added anything to the game, but then again, I still kept playing it more after each time I died to see how far I could progress.
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
You Only Get One ability/weapon on your ship - seemed to me like that fit the theme pretty well.
Unique and challenging puzzle game. Apart from the somewhat vague hint about the blue block on the first level (maybe there also should have been another level before with nothing but white blocks and the super-obvious solution of dragging one into line, to teach the win condition before teaching more complicated elements like the blue block), it generally did a decent job of teaching the player as they go (i.e. the game is its own tutorial; Portal is another great example of this).
Sometimes it felt like some of the starting arrangements were misleading. E.g. on level 5, I kept trying to come up with a solution that involved placing both blue blocks in the same corner since that's where most of the blocks started out. One arrangement I tried almost solved the level but was off by a block or two, so I kept trying different ones and ended up accidentally making some crazy self-moving automata that somehow ate the red block (I then felt like an idiot when I realized how simple the actual solution was). Maybe that's just me though.
Great writing; I got a surprising sense of the characters and world even in such a short and simple game. On my first playthrough I accidentally wandered into the common room immediately after finding the transformer (since the rooms were all identical from the outside) and had to make the decision before I had a chance to talk to anyone. Still, it was good enough to make me want to play again to see the rest of the dialogue that I missed.
Took me a few deaths to realize I could collect drops from the enemies to increase my health and ammo, but once I got into it, it was really satisfying to run around blowing things up while being chased by increasing numbers of tanks and helicopters.
Turns out the coworker has some interesting... preferences regarding drugs and gore.
The interface, graphics, and basic mechanics were nice and very polished, but more interesting gameplay would have been nice. It quickly became a repetitive waiting game after nuking the first foreigners, because all of the civilizations were identical (just giving each one a character graphic and a different line of dialog would have made a huge difference) and none of them offered any challenge other than trying to find them.
The tire tracks and trees bouncing when you hit them were nice touches. Like another commenter said, the pacing was good, but I thought it would have been nice to see more variation in mechanics as the game progressed (understandable for a 48hr game, though).
The game “feels” amazing due to all the little touches like the tentacles sizzling when they touch lasers, the variety of sound effects everything makes, polished graphics with nice lighting, etc. Music was awesome and I wouldn’t mind a soundtrack download. The final boss was difficult but beatable. My only nitpicks are that it seemed like the controls weren’t precise enough for the heated tunnels in the final level (I did eventually get past them after some cursing, though) and I accidentally skipped the ending text because I was still mashing keys from the boss battle when it came up (consider not using “press any key” without a delay before it accepts input).
Great art style, unique interpretation of the theme. At first it was hard to tell where the rod was going to hit, and the ability to aim would have been nice since both hipsters and greasers often passed by at the same time.
At the moment I’m not able to play it because the web version seems to require a login, and when I try to download the standalone, Google Drive errors out (infinite redirect loop). Any chance you could upload it somewhere like Itch.io or Dropbox so it’s publicly available?
This is a very challenging game but it’s also addicting to keep practicing and getting better at dodging each obstacle type. The music and graphics work really well together and get adrenaline pumping. I thought the controls seemed a little too twitchy as I’d often crash into the side of openings while trying to line myself up, but I don’t play endless runners much so maybe that’s just me.
Pooped so much I propelled myself out of the level. Poop/10 would poop again.
Just the right level of challenging to be satisfying when you finally win. For some reason I really love the sound the beam weapon makes when it’s charging. Dialogue was wonderful both during the intro and throughout the game. 420 blaze it doritos no scope formation!
Charming game! Even though it’s a fairly straightforward platformer, jumping on paragraphs to move words around is a clever concept that I haven’t seen before. Good storytelling.
Interesting stealth mechanic that was easy to learn but still allowed for challenging situations, which is good. The graphics were mostly clear but sometimes it was hard to tell between the different kinds of boxes in the heat of the moment. Since the streetlights didn’t really cast a light onto the sidewalk it was sometimes hard to tell whether they were on or off or how close I could safely get.
I get the same error as increpare using safari on OS X, but it works fine in firefox. Very interesting and beautiful sandbox game.
Surprisingly well balanced for a LD game, felt a lot like the opening stages of Age of Empires or Galactic Battlegrounds. Especially early on, I could have used more feedback (graphical and/or audio) as to what was and wasn't working, who was getting attacked, etc instead of having to follow the text going by while things were happening.
I got as far as the jail cell and couldn't figure out how to progress. I assume I'm supposed to use the sharp piece of metal to cut the rope tying my arms, but I couldn't figure out what command to use for that.
In general I had a hard time figuring out what words were available in a room (I think the hardest example so far was "frames" in the workshop, since the text when examining the room didn't explicitly say the items were frames), but I found the story intriguing and enjoyed the mixture of text with pictures and interactive graphical elements.
I want to keep playing, so I'm going to leave the game minimized in case I think of a solution.
Great use of physics for humor. If you had more time to tune/balance the gameplay it would be nice to have a way to recover from mistakes or maybe control when the pieces drop — it seemed like once you had one piece fall off, the others would drop too late and slide off no matter what you did. I agree with the other commenter that it could make a great mobile game, especially if you could involve the device's gyroscope in some way.
@Ghen @olkeencole The server crashed due to a bug which should be fixed now.
@8Keys Studios – The AI should be a little quieter now. The sidebar was only meant to be a “status” area for yourself, not a user list. I had originally planned on players being able to receive and trade items that would show up as pictures in that area, but canned that feature due to time restraints, so it’s just a big empty area now. A user list would have been a good idea, though.
Ooh, I love seeing games make use of user-generated content like this. Would be awesome to be able to see a library of all of the glyphs people have made.
Impressive scope and polish for 72 hours of work. I found the cursive font difficult to read and it was hard for me to distinguish the state of the red/green/grayed out buttons, but other than those usability issues the UI and color palette were beautiful and captured the historical feeling very well.
The music, screenshake, twitchy controls, and sudden switches between a typing game and a platformer made this just the right amount of hectic to be exciting. Well done.
One technical suggestion though: see if you can override/block the backspace key. It defaults to Back in firefox and I found myself instinctively pressing it whenever I pressed the wrong key in the typing portions. I don't know if you can do this within Construct but you should be able to catch the keypress event in javascript and call preventDefault() on it.
Nice simple mechanic applied in an addictive way. A couple bugs I noticed:
1) Lots of graphical glitches on Linux Mint 18. Whenever a conveyor belt was moving, the crate and items flickered like crazy. To your game's credit, I kept playing for a few games anyway and made it up to 2:24.
2) Sometimes I would drag the lid onto the crate and it would snap into place, but not send the crate away until I took the lid back off and tried again. Not sure if that was intentional or not, since I didn't get the lid exactly centered.
This is really polished. I do think you could have simplified the interface to just "click a tile to build" and "click a truck to set a route" without having separate modes for each, and made it easier to see what would happen on the next turn without having to mouse over each building to see production.
Was there any point in choosing where to build stuff? Might be interesting to add effects where people e.g. don't want to live next to industrial plants or dumps to add another layer of complexity to planning.
About two thirds of the way through I think I clicked on something during the turn animation and it froze with the error "GwtApplication: exception: Cannot deposit trash af"
The art and music were well done and worked well for the style of the game, but I thought the gameplay was a little simplistic (good start though!) The enemies stopped coming when I got to 355 XP, not sure if I missed something I was supposed to do in order to progress or if that was the end. With the two enemy types, it's too easy to just kite around and throw shuriken at them while they get into a big cluster trying to follow. I didn't even realize I had a melee attack until after I had killed them all, so showing the controls somewhere would be helpful, along with more enemies/attacks that would require different strategies.
One other note is that the player can move faster diagonally than straight up/down/left/right, so that might be something to address if you continue working on the game.
Any chance you could make a light version of the game board? Printer ink is more expensive than blood.
(if not it's fine, I'll just draw it out)
This was really fun! Nice short and sweet game that would be easy to introduce to people at a party.
It seems like the length of the game can be adjusted as desired by increasing the number of people who have to be dropped off to win along with the cost of buying cars, which is nice.
Overall the rules did a good job explaining things, but we did notice a few possible omissions: - How much money should each player start with? (after reading through the rules we tried $5 per person just to make sure nobody went broke on their way to their first passenger and it seemed alright) - Does it matter which street around your HQ you put newly bought cars on? - What happens when you draw a commuter that will spawn on or right beside their destination? (we just re-drew a new commuter if they were going to spawn on their destination, but if they spawned 1 block away we placed them and used them for nearly-free money)
Great graphics, music, and general atmosphere. A couple issues with the gameplay made it less fun than it could have been for me:
1. Spamming the spacebar got annoying quick. Even after I figured out you could avoid the elves, it didn't seem like there was ever any reason to *not* be pressing spacebar except for brief moments when dodging elves, so why make the player do it manually in the first place instead of just constantly dropping presents at a set interval? 2. The physics seemed odd. When you're not pressing left or right the presents dropped straight down relative to the sleigh, retaining the same momentum as the sleigh flying through the sky, but when moving left or right, they didn't inherit momentum from the sleigh's movement. This made aiming at the houses counterintuitive. Also, sometimes presents would just unpredictably shoot out in some random direction.
Sorry to be that guy who complains about weird distro-specific Linux issues, but the .rar file can't be extracted on ElementaryOS because "parsing filters is unsupported".
I'll definitely come back and play this if you can upload it in a more compatible/standard archive format like zip or tar.gz.
You might want to list the Linux build on this page even though it's the same link as the Windows one.
The graphics are stunning and the music and sounds create a really nice atmosphere. The enemies were a little easy to kite around once I got used to them (seeing the giant one on wave 4 was a nice surprise though). After playing for a little while I stopped taking any damage even if I just sat still and let them attack me.
> did the levels work for you?
Level 1 was a good introduction to the mechanic that let me get a feel for how everything worked. 2 was fun to plan out how to get in and out and what to grab, but there was so much stuff in that one room (with the safe, pokeball, etc) that it didn't really make sense to go through the rest of the house other than just grabbing what I could on the way out. 3 was a nice way to get me to be meticulous with my item use and a good final challenge to end the game on.
I didn't really like the fact that if I wasted some items and then got caught, I had to farm previous levels with no variation to afford the items again.
> was the sound mechanic clear and balanced?
Yes, the way sound carried between rooms made sense and the graphics represented it well.
> how did you approach level 3 (if you did)? it is super basic, being created 60 minutes before the finish line
First I tried luring them to the other side of the map and stunning them. This didn't work well because only one wanted to chase me and he was faster than me. What worked for me in the end was: run in, flash bang, grab oscar, hide in box while the guards recovered and went back to their normal spots, flash bang, run out.
> which items did you use, and which not, and why? :)
- Smoke - didn't really use. I tried it in house 2 and didn't think it slowed them down enough to be very useful. - Moss - I tried it once in house 2 to sneak out of the treasure room without the TV watching guy hearing, and it appeared to only cover a few tiles which wasn't what I needed to get out of that room. - Flash bang - Yes. As currently implemented, they just seem like a better version of smoke with no downside. - Box - Yes. Good for stopping and getting your bearings or planning the next move. Also good for getting everything in the treasure room in house 2 since TV guy doesn't give you enough time to grab & go before he walks in.
Good challenge. The decision of whether or not to open each safe was quite impactful to the difficulty later on. This is a concept I could easily see being expanded upon with new mechanics like the ability to drop coins and maybe pick them up again later (something I kept wishing I could so so I could scout the area a little more safely), rooms with echos, a chance of evading guards if you run fast enough, etc and eventually becoming a full, complex game.
Even though it's sort of a sound-based game, I thought the actual sound was its weakest area. The jingling sounds didn't seem to quite match what the circle was doing and like another commenter said, they got repetitive fast. A few times, I found myself getting caught because I was focusing on the jingling sound (thinking I was safe because of the delay between occurrences of the sound) instead of noticing the motions of my circle.
This definitely needs to ramp up in difficulty more slowly so you can make sure the player understands each mechanic before moving on to puzzles that depend on understanding the basics.
You might want to look at other puzzle games to see how they introduced similar rules and mechanics to players. The Witness has similar abstract puzzles but devoted a lot more time to introducing mechanics to the player. Basically, each individual mechanic had a whole series of levels devoted to teaching it. Flips tried to introduce multiple mechanics/rules per level, so chances were high that a player could choose correctly and progress without understanding why that choice was correct (this is what happened to me when I played it).
I think there are also some issues regarding the terminology and graphics you used. For instance, the term "level boundary" is kind of confusing (does it mean that two stacked tiles of the same color will match each other, or that tiles of the same color will match if they are in the same row/column but different vertical levels?).
The first level told me to "flip a tile" but clicking a tile doesn't actually show an animation of it flipping, leaving me wondering if I did the wrong thing by clicking on it (the "x" might also throw people off because an "x" in a square usually indicates a clickable delete or close button).
It also wasn't intuitive that "flipping" a tile would mean disabling its color, since the tiles are depicted as being the same color all the way through (I wonder if cards might be a better physical analogue than tiles, since people already know cards have two different sides).
The music, art, animations, and actions you take in the game all work together to make this really creepy. In some places, it just becomes easier to wipe out everyone in a room indiscriminately, which adds a lot to the dark and disturbing mood but I'm not sure if that was your intent or not (if it was, bravo, you've done far better than most games that advertise "moral choices" because it was so easy yet made me feel like a complete monster for doing it).
The lack of animations for climbing stairs made it impossible to keep track of people when there was more than one repeatedly going up and down the same set of stairs.
Simple but well done. The character starting to wobble was a nice touch and the controls getting slower to respond was a good twist on the classic game mechanic.
Watching the stuff just pile on the ground and sometimes get thrown in the air when I bought another loot box was all the reward I needed for clicking a button 300 times. :thumbsup:
I’ve never had more fun being set up to fail at running a nuclear power plant, and I don’t think I ever will.
It didn’t seem like it was really possible to do a good job of keeping the reactor rods down, but it was hilarious to try. So many extra little humorous details thrown in – the bananas for gauges, the fact that occasionally a banana would get launched into the reactor (and the sound effect), even the banana guy that walks out the door when you click Exit…
Seems pretty realistic to me. Really captures modern enterprise-grade™ software development.
Having a market for RPG stats that both the player and enemies can trade is an interesting way to handle enemy scaling. With the frequent market fluctuations it’s pretty easy to become as powerful as you want to be without actually leaving the starting room, which made actually fighting the enemies pretty irrelevant. I found it kind of difficult to see some of the enemies in the forest area.
That was nerve-wracking (in a good way)! Felt like I was in an episode of Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica. Took some trial and error to work out a strategy and figure out some of the nuance of the different systems (e.g. I’m pretty sure each turret you activate lasts forever, but the fighters get destroyed pretty easily although they’re faster to activate. Finding the right shield timing to block bombs was kind of annoying. etc), but it’s fairly intuitive to learn. The game does a pretty good job of providing the feeling that you can stay mostly on top of things early on but as the waves build up, the shit really hits the fan and you have to scramble to make a last-ditch effort.
I could only see the lower left corner of the cockpit in the HTML version. Not on Windows, so I couldn’t try the downloadable version.
Ran fairly badly on my computer (AMD Radeon Pro 5300M GPU, MacOS 11.6, non-VR) although it ran smoother if I looked up a little, but seeing as how I’m apparently the most mindful person in existence I finished it anyway. Off to go live like a monk!
!> For some reason I always love games that let you feel like you’re rebelling against the game in some way.
I enjoyed reading the crazy events and testing different options, and thought the music did a good job setting the stage. I do wish there was more time to read and appreciate them, and I also would have liked to see more of the unique events with fewer repetitive “political faux pas” and “truth exposed” events (side note: I was able to go into negative influence if I bribed too often – not sure if that’s intentional or not). At first I was a little confused because I thought the goal was to gain world domination *without* letting the countries get all the way to 100% destabilization, since it took them “off the board” so to speak. Maybe it’s just because I played using a laptop trackpad, but it would have been nice if the click areas for some of the countries were more generous.
Just a heads up – your mac zip archive seems to have incorrect file permissions. I had to run `sudo chmod -R 755 /Users/daleprice/Downloads/Megalomania_Mac.app` after unzipping, before I could open the game.
Took me a few tries, but I made it across! I kept wishing I could slow the hunter down by leaving holes in the ice behind me. IMO the best part of the game was how it became a game of self control because the hunter created tension that makes you *want* to run fast, but you have to do the opposite.
Just a heads up, when I played the the web version on a mac, the sound didn’t work in Safari but the gamepad didn’t work in Firefox, so I didn’t get to experience the gameplay with sound at the same time.
Nice added mechanic to sokoban! I thought the puzzles were the perfect balance of challenging yet solvable with good planning. I did discover an exploit for some of the earlier levels: !> if you walk into a wall while standing on a pressure plate, it inverts the pressure plate’s logic and lets you keep a door open without using a box.
I assumed that wasn’t intentional because it completely bypasses some of the earlier puzzles, but isn’t actually required to beat any of them as far as I could tell.
This was hilarious to play – the graphics, music, dialogue, and general feel of the game work really well together. It’s amazing that you actually composed a sea shanty for a Ludum Dare entry and I like that you included the jukebox feature.
The mac build seems to have incorrect file permissions – I had to run `sudo chmod -R 755 ~/Downloads/v1.4-bugfix-mac.app` before I could open it.
@bamberga & @eli-delventhal, thanks for your feedback. UX/player guidance was something I didn’t really get to complete during the compo, but I’ve revised the description above to (hopefully) better explain the most important things that aren’t explained in the game.
This is a really thoughtful tribute to Van Gogh. The “you found x of 14 secrets” at the end was a nice reminder to go back through and reflect on everything again in addition to finding the paintings I had missed.
This was very short but a fun bullet hell. Good animations, and the controls are just floaty enough to make it feel more chaotic without being too frustrating (for me anyway). My only nitpick is that it wasn’t immediately obvious how to escape after eating all the apples. I had noticed the path in the corner early on, but tried to go through without eating all the apples and there wasn’t any feedback, so I thought it was just part of the scenery. It took me a minute to realize that it would let me go through after eating everything.
Side note, you might want to mark the link as web/HTML5 so people who aren’t on Windows realize they can play it.
This is a really good physics puzzler. I was hoping for more levels and was a little surprised when it ended. If you came up with more chapters and put it on Steam or something I’d pay for it.
The sheer chaos permeating everything adds so much to the experience. Once moment you’ll have a gun you like, the next you’ll be tossing it away and jumping up a magma geyser to kick a pterodactyl because obviously that’s what you do with pterodactyls.
A little too hard for me. You’ve made breaking things with explosions fun and satisfying, so I thought there should have been more opportunities to do that, like breakable walls, enemies packed closer together to use splash damage on, maybe ways to set up chain reactions using some of the potions lying around (although I wasn’t able to get that far into the game so maybe that’s all there and I missed it).
Finally made it to 90 (exactly) with 36 dice on the fifth attempt. The dice I have are pretty rounded so it was a challenge. What ended up working for me was to build the tallest, narrowest, shittiest tower I could as quickly as possible (ended up being 5 high), while using the dice that didn’t fit into it as the foundation for a tall enough tower to let me coast to 90 with the remaining rounds, then sat the extra dice from the last few rounds around the base so as not to disturb anything. The points boost from the early tower allowed me to not have to build the main tower as high as I attempted on previous tries. IMG_4351D.JPG
This is pretty nicely polished for this complex of a compo game (it has a tutorial, everything works, most actions have good sound feedback, the UI is complete…). I liked the “race against time” aspect with the decay, but eventually it got frustrating because it seemed like what slowed me down the most was having to hammer WASD to move the pieces one block at a time (and then sometimes the rotation didn’t work near walls/corners). I want to say mouse-based block placement would be ideal, but even just being able to hold the movement keys would help a lot. Anyway, it seems like an idea that should be expanded on with some minor fixes for the frustrating bits.
It was fun to balance being able to steer with collecting enough to sell. Like others have said, I thought the rhythm of the game was good in that I always had something to be doing (except for short breaks in between areas of fire and the slow motion near the traders, which were both a nice break), but never felt like I couldn’t keep up. Having to carry increasingly large stars was a nice way to ramp up the difficulty. It would be cool if the portal that the player is supposed to collect stars for was actually shown in some way.
I’m intrigued by the concept but couldn’t figure out what was going on in the game – I think I might have run into some bugs.
- the instruction page was microscopic on my screen (Macbook pro, same in both Firefox and Safari). - As shown in the screenshot below, during gameplay, the numbers on the cards were off the bottom of the screen (regardless of full screen or windowed). From the instructions it sounded like the numbers are supposed to be visible so you can see the effects before playing them. - I tried to play some of the cards blindly and it rotated them (???) but the only numbers I could see were zeroes.
Screen Shot 2021-10-03 at 10.21.45 PM.png
Cute graphics and animations! This is basically a cautionary tale about how unregulated capitalism disincentivizes having enough reserve power for spikes in demand, right?
I thought the music and sounds were well done but had to turn it down because I was getting a nasty (*very* loud) popping sound after placing a generator (Firefox, not sure if it was the game or a browser bug).
This is definitely one of the best entries I’ve seen, and it’s from the compo! The minimalist style did a great job of encouraging the player to fill in the gaps with their imagination and also added a sense of mystery (oh, a fire! Wait, are those human footprints? Who are they? Oh, they’re attacking me, fine, I’ll defend myself. Wait… did they think I was coming to steal from them? Was I the aggressor there?) The lighting was stunning, and set the mood perfectly.
A few minor nitpicks: - I fell down the bank of the second pond once and couldn’t move any more. - Having seen the screenshot of the game, I was pretty sure I was supposed to go up/forward, but since the game started out looking down from above with no hint at where to go, I decided to be one of *those* players and try exploring the other way. I got kind of far but there was nothing there and it was slow getting back on the right track. I would suggest either blocking off that direction or hiding a reward back there, maybe just a weapon upgrade or something. I’m *not* suggesting having the camera point forward from the start, because the landscape/palace reveal when the camera first tilts back at the oasis was breathtaking.
I like how the art style and music come together to create a nice atmosphere. The game is nicely polished with lots of little added graphical details. My main issue was that the pieces seemed to lose all their sideways momentum when dropped, which made it kind of unintuitive at first (for me at least) to judge where they would fall. It was fine once I got used to it, though.
The mac version doesn’t seem to be a file type that my mac recognizes – it just tries to open the downloaded file in a text editor. Usually, mac games should be a .app bundle (i.e. a folder with the extension “.app”, containing the executable and some supporting files in a certain folder structure), which itself would be compressed into a .zip file for players to download.
Well that was an experience. Playing it was certainly more fun than actually carrying a microwave down 3rd avenue, from what I gather.
This has a surprising amount of depth with the sometimes conflicting goals of stacking the peppers into a stable pile, keeping the scale from tipping over, and accurately measuring them to get the orders right.
I think the game balance could use some tweaking – it does feel like cash gain is too slow at first. There needs to be more of a penalty for shorting the orders, because as it is you can make a profit just by dropping a single pepper and pressing enter for every order. And there needs to be some more immediate feedback at the end of each order (it would be nice to know, without pausing to do math, if you're being penalized for getting an order wrong, or wasting money by putting too many peppers in an order, or getting a bonus for accuracy, or whatever).
Like another commenter I also had no audio in Safari, but it worked in Firefox. Great work on the intro text giving at least a basic tutorial while also setting the tone of the game. Maybe it was there and I missed it, but I found clicking and dragging to move the camera to be tedious – scrolling and/or keyboard based movement would have been nice. I wasn’t sure what the plow was supposed to accomplish, and there were a few times when it said I had helicopters but nothing happened when I clicked on a tile to send them.
All that said, I love the retro style and the avalanche was incredibly satisfying to watch. I appreciate the moral about how you can be selfish and benefit from others’ destruction but eventually the same fate comes for you.
Very chill and atmospheric. The art style is simple but visually pleasing and made it satisfying to find new things. I had the same problem as some other commenters where I couldn’t really tell the difference between some of the scanned and unscanned items in the logbook, especially the striped fish, whose main color blends in with the logbook so I thought it was just showing the stripes as a hint that I needed to find a striped fish. That might be a good suggestion actually – instead of showing the entire outline/silhouette of unscanned fish in the logbook, just show a partial shape or single characteristic as a clue and then fill in the entire thing when the player scans it.
Quick question, what engine/library did you use for drawing graphics? Just wondering because your game actually looks nice and sharp on my laptop’s high DPI screen, unlike the usual Unity/Godot/LibGDX web builds that render at low DPI and end up blurry.
The loading progress bar stalls around 90% in Safari, with the following error: ``` [Error] Unhandled Promise Rejection: RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded. (anonymous function) (WebGL.loader.js:1:5865) promiseReactionJob ```
Worked fine in Firefox, except the Hint button seemed like it just turned on some kind of debug mode where it printed the function names by each option.
The art style is amazing and I liked how the puzzles were just the right amount of obtuse to be hilarious and call back to classic adventure games while still making sense to me as a player.
@steffo Re: Mac file permissions, it absolutely isn’t normal to make the user mess around with file permissions to open your app on MacOS. The OS has its own system for asking the user if they trust downloaded apps, called Gatekeeper, and it expects the file permissions to already be set by the developer to whatever they need to be for the app to function. The files inside the app bundle (folder with .app extension) aren’t really supposed to be touched by the user.
I don’t mean to sound argumentative, that’s just how MacOS works.
Really enjoyable and funny writing, and good social commentary. Packed more into 2 minutes than most games.
Your mac build doesn’t open (using MacOS 12.3.1). Just says ‘The application “ZomBeware_Mac” can’t be opened.’ I think that’s usually caused by some file(s) having incorrect permissions in your zip archive.
Fun game about the pressures of business. I liked that the interface was clear so it was immediately obvious how to play and what effect things would have. Although, with the decisions getting repetitive after a while, and getting fired being semi-random, it seems like there isn’t much of a reason to keep playing beyond a certain point. For a game where the goal is to see how long you can keep going, (for me at least, I guess I’m a novelty-seeking player) there needs to be more motivation to continue playing.
@rowlna Can you be more specific? The link looks correct to me.
@3bt Make sure your browser is up to date (I added the required versions to the description above) and you don’t have any extensions blocking scripts on the game’s page.
When I pressed space on the “delay the inevitable!” dialog, the music got lower pitched and then it went straight to the “try again” screen. Safari 15.4 (MacOS 12.3.1)
Thanks for making the HTML5 build! I had to try a bunch of different browsers (kept getting `abort(74) at jsStackTrace@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5588206/Builds/Build/Builds.framework.js:2:16070`…) but finally got it to work in Microsoft Edge of all things. Still, a few of the videos froze partway through and I could only advance the game by clicking Skip. Also, eventually I got to a point where new conversations stopped appearing and I couldn’t do anything except advance months as the gods got unhappier (but nothing more happened).
At first I had no idea what was going on with the whole building aspect of the game, but eventually (I think) figured it out. Having to work around my earlier placement blunders was part of the fun, I guess. The videos are well done and hilarious and I’m going to play again to see if I can see more without the aforementioned problems.
I lost it when Al Natural’s thumbnail at the bottom changed to him sic’ing his bird on me!
Really impressed by the rich and coherent art + audio style! For some reason, I found it difficult and a little disorienting to fly around; I think something about the camera movement combined with the parallax background made it seem like the ship wasn’t rotating around a consistent center point. I think if the camera movement was based on the direction of travel rather than the direction the ship is facing, it might work better for me. Still, I love how polished this is!
Just a heads up about some technical issues with the web version (I’m not on Windows): the embedded size was larger than my laptop screen, and the game area blocked scrolling, so I had to struggle to scroll over to the fullscreen button to shrink it down. Also in Safari, after clicking Start, the game opened up to a screen of tiny black and white flashing squares. I tried Firefox and I guess it worked, but where I assume there was supposed to be a tutorial or intro, it just showed some scrolling clouds and a Skip button.
I liked the art style, but didn’t really understand what was happening in the game. I could eat plants, but I didn’t see any indicator of my hunger level. I could dig left or right (lol, tiny dino arms), but the digging controls seemed unreliable and I couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to press or hold E, or if I was supposed to be able to dig up or down. After digging for a little bit (why was I digging? I dunno), it randomly told me my dino died and I’m not sure why. This seems like it has potential, but you need to put some work into providing more feedback (or “juice”) for the player’s controls and actions in the game, and better convey what the player is supposed to be doing (e.g. hunger level, a reason to dig, some kind of visible threat).
Played this on my phone and enjoyed it. Found myself racking up a lot of massive combos unintentionally. I like the hand-drawn style and the animations (esp. the monster’s movements, also the feedback for your swipes) add a lot to it.
Doesn’t load in Safari, spits out the following error to console: ``` [Error] Unhandled Promise Rejection: RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded. (anonymous function) (WebBuild.loader.js:1:5776) promiseReactionJob ```
Worked ok in Firefox.
Lots of fun despite the frustrating keyboard controls. Funniest part was when I tried to grab something that moved behind the guy and ended up grabbing his own tie to put on his head (and then he had another tie underneath, like he planned for this! Had to use that one too, of course). Only suggestion would be to leave more time with the score and the guy visible for taking screenshots. I thought I managed to do something… sort of stylish(???) but it faded to black while I was reaching for the screenshot keys.
Just a heads up, your Mac build still doesn’t work for me (MacOS 12.3.1 on ARM). For one, it’s a rar file which the native macOS archive utility can’t open (zip is standard). After using a third party tool (The Unarchiver) to unarchive it, the app is simply called “Mac” (ok, but why not something like “Live Long and Prosper”?), and it refuses to launch no matter what I do. It just says "The application 'Mac' can’t be opened.” regardless of any security settings. I think usually this is the result of the executable not having the correct file permissions in your archive.