Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Dan Livings
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Lights Out | compo | 562 | 2.85 | 2.26 | 3.01 | 3.81 | 3.30 | 1.23 | 1.50 | 2.62 |
Very fun to play. The music and gameplay remind me a lot of *Super Hexagon*, but with its own unique spin. If you were to borrow some aesthetic and rhythmic elements this would be a great spiritual successor. Nice work.
It was pretty fun to play. I survived nearly five minutes by exclusively growing cash crops and burning vast swathes of increasingly expansionist alien weeds, all the while the amount of debt was still going up faster than I could pay it down. Nice work.
I didn't think I was going to get very far until I discovered the age-reversing mechanic at just the right time. That was a nice touch! Also the art style and music are not only good in their own right but complementary to each other.
I found the wall-jumping a little bit difficult to use effectively. I thought that holding down the R key to reset was a good idea to prevent hitting it accidentally, although I think you could get away with having half the time and still avoid that.
Overall, very good work.
Nice concept and cool art style. I did have problems with some elements disappearing after a few retries though - usually the background is first to disappear, then after another retry colours on the clock start to go missing, and then finally only the clock hand is visible. Also, it would be helpful to have colours be more visually distinct from each other and the background - at one point I had a dark blue picker hiding on a dark blue triangle and it took me a while to figure out the colour I needed.
I could see this being adapted to a casual mobile game quite easily if you wanted to take it down that route. Nice work.
Very polished - cute art style complemented by the music and sound effects. Nice difficulty progression as well. When I found out that I could still move while blocking the cars' splashes I did a lot better at the faster parts.
Great work.
This is pretty fun to play and has been executed well. I like the way some of the sticks of dynamite split in two to spread the fire further, and the icons to indicate offscreen threats is very helpful.
A few minor issues that I noticed:
Firstly, the web version of the game doesn't appear to have any support for scaling. As a result, by default a lot of the main menu is cut off and if you go fullscreen then it doesn't adjust the game size (probably not noticable on 1080p, but on a 4K monitor the game is completely surrounded by massive black borders).
The other thing was that you're forced to submit your time to the leaderboard in order to play again. Personally, I think it'd be better if you either made it optional or have the leaderboard name in the settings and do it automatically.
Apart from that, I thought this was some really good work, well done.
I really like the art for this one, and a unique take on the theme. I think it could have been made a bit clearer to the player how the incoming hands move though, and sometimes they make you lose the game even if they're not overlapping your limbs. Otherwise, really good concept, nice work.
This was pretty fun! I got 120 points overall, but 72 in one level where I got lucky and managed to get the little plant guy to have to walk through half the maze back and forth by just moving a single wall.
I found it a little frustrating in places because the only worthwhile move would have been to close off the fruit entirely, but that wasn't allowed. Perhaps if you were allowed to rotate walls as well it would make more options possible without being forced to take a totally useless move.
Other than that, it's a cool concept. Nice work.
In this game you play as the embodiment of the gigachad sigma grindset and sacrifice cheerleaders to protect your grandma at all costs.
As well as the hilarious concept, I enjoyed the isometric art style and the way the infinite scrolling for the world works.
Great work!
Cool concept and nicely executed, feels very polished. The visuals have a lot of character and the different effects are fun. Great work.
Good execution of the concept, and a lot of visual polish. It feels like the hitboxes when fighting enemies could be tightened a little bit. Other than that, excellent work.
Fantastic artistic direction for this, and a really cool concept. Fun to play as well, although I did get stuck at one point.
I think if you were to take this forward, having some indication of the clocks off screen would be helpful to the player and also instill a sense of urgency. Being able to see a bit more of the sky might be helpful as well, as the sun seems a bit of a small target at the moment considering how central it is to the gameplay. Also, the clocks chiming (I think that's what that sound is) as noon approaches are quite loud compared to the the rest of the audio and is a little bit jarring.
Excellent work.
This is a very pretty game. Unfortunately, I was too busy placing down machines to get enough CO2 for the plants to actually have a real chance to enjoy looking at them. I think buffing the machines a little bit so the player can have a breather and introducing some mechanics that disturb the balance occasionally (e.g. random fires if the oxygen levels get too high, or a hull breach that causes a partial depressurisation) would really help do this concept justice. I'd like to see this get continued development.
Interesting concept. It caught me out a few times, like when I'd just figured out that the different clocks have different effects and I paused to think about my route only to have the tile I was on give way underneath me! I think if you were to continue this then some of the tiles would need to have their effects more clearly demonstrated through the level design. Overall, quite enjoyable.
Took a couple of tries to figure out how to get past the beginning stage, but after a while I got the hang of it. So close to having a billion Sand Dollars...
ld50-ants-in-an-hourglass.png
There's a bit of a balancing act, too - I almost ruined this run because I made my ants too strong and there wasn't enough free sand in the system to flow.
Nice work!
Great concept, and very well executed. I agree with the other comments that some more abilities would be nice, as well as being able to look around the board. An indication of the Reaper's current range would also be helpful to see when considering planning your move.
Excellent work.
You really can't go wrong with glowing geometric shapes!
I enjoyed how the controls work, after a little bit of practice it's possible to drift around corners which is super satisfying. More types of upgrades would help keep the player a little more evenly matched with the ever-increasing number of enemies, e.g. firing multiple shots in different directions, homing bullets, or splash damage.
I really enjoyed the sense of humour and the meta nature of the framing narrative. Had a couple of minor issues, like where the cat would fall off the thin poles when it felt like it shouldn't, and a minor visual issue where a row of pixels from the background were visible underneath one of the sets of spikes. Other than that, nice work.
Cool concept. I did feel like the choices I made for the responses didn't make any difference, apart from "judgemental" being universally poorly received. Maybe having to balance your reputation with your mental state might make it a more engaging game, where each option will change them based on the patient's reaction (with some indication up front about how the patient is likely to receive it). However, using the portrait to provide a rough idea of the player's mental state was a nice touch. Good work.
Good choice of colour palette and art style, and a simple yet bittersweet story. Nice work.
I love the sickly yellow-green for the background, very appropriate for a game about radiation! The abstracted models for the buildings works quite well with the isometric tiles as well visually. The background music is spot on as well.
I think I agree with @jess-from-online that communication with the user could be clearer. I also had a problem unzipping the game using the Windows file manager - although I could using 7-Zip.
Overall, very nice work.
Nice take on the theme! Unfortunately I couldn't get past level three as I'm too slow. As has already been mentioned, the help text could have been clearer - it's also difficult if you have to read things multiple times because you have to move the papers about to see the bit you're trying to understand. Another nice-to-have would have been transitioning between the levels when you've completed them, but I understand that time constraints make small things like that hard to get in. A very charming game that's reminiscent of *Papers Please*.
A cute take on the endless runner concept - "you have been squeezed" when you lose made me laugh. I also had a similar problem to a few other people in that my eyes started to hurt a little bit because of the movement. I think maybe a small amount of motion blur might fix that - not enough to completely obscure the background, but enough to let your brain know not to try to focus too hard on individual points in the world. Good work.
@lupercalia Thanks for the feedback, those are all fair points. Originally I had plans to introduce more mechanics, such as tiles fading faster the more there are, as well as a set of black tiles being fully enclosed by non-black tiles all becoming white for a score boost. As you mentioned, time constraints are real and I wanted to submit something rather than nothing.
@cruise-elroy Thanks for your suggestions. I'm thinking of continuing work on it for the currently running [Black and White Jam](https://itch.io/jam/black-and-white-jam-8) on Itch, and I've got some ideas for it to be a bit more of an actual game.
The difficulty curve for the levels could do with some balancing. Level 3 is much harder than the ones before it - I get the impression that you would only be able to complete that level with almost perfect play as the timings are so tight. However, I like the art style, and it's a cool concept overall.