David J. Michalak

The Keep! It's Alive! by minibobbo 2020-04-21T00:56:34Z ♥ 2

@minibobbo @jamesolivermusic. This game is AWESOME! Super fun game play and design, and fantastic 8-bit music by James. Great levels, love the background changes and audio design: love the 8-bit downsampled geese and wildlife sounds. Everything is perfect. I'll be coming back to play this again for fun! :)

Dark Soil by Pietro Ferrantelli 2018-04-30T06:27:55Z ♥ 1

Hi Dark Soil Team,

This one is great. I really like the animations, art, and music. Props to your team. I really had a lot of fun playing this one. It took me a little bit to get used to the controls, but I really like the idea of having various seeds, switching between planting, watering, and attacking their offspring. Really fun idea here. The powerups help keep things interesting. Again music and sound really help keep the player engaged.

My only comment is that the text goes way too fast. I can’t read read half of it before it goes away. You can lengthen the time by 2x or 3x to help the player.

Great job guys!

Best,

Dave

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rex-mcfury-public-defender

CONFESSIONAL by Rodrigo Denúbila 2018-04-30T05:21:38Z ♥ 1

Wow! What a creepy and scary horror game. Great idea to view it as the victim but play it as BagHead. Fantastic art direction on the room and also on the details of the character and bag.

The music is fantastic. Did someone on your team compose it? Great job creating such an atmosphere. The piano on the title screen is especially haunting, and I like the metal-sword scraping sounds throughout the game track. very memorable score.

Game play is pretty good, but somehow I got stuck behind the oil drums at one point and I couldn’t get out without a restart.

Considering some of the violence in this game, the sound effects for the baseball bat and hammer could be a bit more severe. I also like comments by @Paul Avallone and others about adding some screams or other sound effects.

I like @listonos idea to add a backstory. But as opposed to other comments on not showing things as needed for horror - I think that works in movies, but not necessarily games (for control reasons). To me seeing the chainsaw cut of the arm is traumatizing and more powerful than not. Also, it would only be frustrating if you couldn't see where you were going. So for these reasons I think removing visibility (which normally works for great horror movies) may not port so well here.

Anyway, fantastic delivery on this game! You have really achieved something impressive here!

Best, Dave

(p.s., I did the voice for our game submission https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rex-mcfury-public-defender and also the singer in my band is a very talented voice actor – drop a line if you would like to chat about any of your needs. – I will share your game with my singer – he very much loves horror things like the game you achieved here).

Knife Throwing Gallery by Vipaka 2018-04-27T05:17:37Z ♥ 0

Hi @Vipaka, this is a fun little game, congrats on getting a successful build! I agree with @Weekend Panda that the dragon was a nice touch. Since it came so infrequently, i wanted to play often to see how I could keep getting it to come back.

I agree with (@TomPendergrass) that the vases were a little too fast, but really the only frustrating thing for me was how often the lamps would float totally below the screen and then often go outside to the Left and Right before raising up enough to shoot them. If you could make sure the tether stays within a slightly shorter range, that would help. Otherwise, I do like the variety of physics (and challenge level) you put in to game with all the various items: the easy U/D/L/R bullseye targets, the more challenging swinging lamps, and the fast cruising vases. That helps make it accessible to people of various skill levels

I couldn't tell why I would win or lose in some play-throughs, so helping the player understand that could be good. Also, I never seemed to run out of ammo - so whereas I started out shooting conservatively, I soon learned to just release rapid fire. Perhaps putting a more conservative ammo limit there would force some more tactical playing.

Sounds effects are good. The music is good and meshes with the theme, but it does get a little too repetitive after a few minutes of playing. To me, I feel the limiters to playing for an even longer time were the repetitiveness of the music and not quite understanding the rules. But that said, I feel that you have made something I would go back and play often. So kicking it up a notch and making more playable levels with different music and different themes could lead to a commercially successful game.

Great job!

Best, Dave

Tactical Texting by Braden Bodily 2018-04-27T02:45:34Z ♥ 1

Hi @bdorman and @Braden Bodily,

I too had quite some issues getting started even with your help in the post above. The sound you get when typing sounds like you are doing something wrong (like the old mac fail sound), maybe choose a typewriter sound during input so the user doesn't get confused. Also, if you could see what you are typing into the black box that would really help as well. I stumbled quite a bit to get started.

but, ah ha! I found that typing "help" brings up a list of commands. For some reason it's not allowing me to post a screen capture with this post, but that could really help other players.

OK, now I'm starting to get going. Aside from the issue with the input controls, I really like the graphics -- looks like an old computer screen, and I like the background drone. It makes things creepy as you get into the game which is nice. I also like the creativity of having the screen shake when you run into something. the fire sound is awesome. But for now I'm stuck slamming into something. You get a few too many slam messages such that you can't see the results of commands. So I'll probably restart.

Anyway, with a few tweaks to increase user control this could be quite a fun one!

best, Dave

Foods and Sorcery by dinosire 2018-04-27T02:19:26Z ♥ 0

Hi Food and Scorcery Team. Like what @XCVZXC said, congrats on the multiplayer game in a single screen.

I like the graphic: sprites of the characters, fruits and even the background is cool, though could maybe be a little more details to match the details of the characters and fruits.

Finding some music for the background we certainly help with playability. Increasing the speed of the players would help as well. Would it be possible to add some capability to fight each other off. Maybe with too much attacking (and it could be some randomly generated amount within a range), the offender will warp back to their starting point to give the other some free time to basket a fruit. Something like that could add a new dimension to the game.

But anyway, great job with a successful build and creative game. Dave

Platjectile by imake 2018-04-27T02:08:02Z ♥ 0

Nice game, Platjectile team! I think this has some potential to go viral if you make many more levels and could port it to a smart phone, it reminds me of an inventive new idea on UnblockMe games that were quite popular.

It takes a bit of time to get the feel for controling the ball. While it is really great to be able to control the ball while in the air, the motion is a little too extreme. Could you dial down the amplification on that? I think that would really help.

Otherwise, the pictures look cool, the levels are fun and inventive. I like that you can get yourself stuck in a collapse. It's nice that you added a reload button for those stuck situations.

The music is quite nice! Good job with that. The tracks are quite long, so it's really nice that you loop the music over top of all the various levels so you can hear the whole track. (I also scored longer tracks than were needed for the game play time and were unique for each level.

In terms of sounds, the spring is a good sound. It might be nice to have some block falling sounds.

Anyway, this is great build for the time. I think it could really go somewhere if you keep building on it more and more interesting levels.

Good job guys! Dave