Dillon

Alisa and captain Petrov by AleksandarDev 2018-12-28T23:46:27Z ♥ 1

Having a game be entirely presented through sound is certainly something I've not experienced before. Was certainly unique. However, there are some minor things that bugged me.

Given I was using earphones, for some sections the panning was either hard left or hard right, which as a result I found hard to listen to. The sections for targeting the signal and the missiles was hard to pinpoint, as there was no sense of up or down (as far as which way to move), only left or right. Given the first section for the signal wasn't exactly time sensitive, that was fine, but with the missiles it was difficult to perform quickly, especially since I wasn't even sure if up/down mattered.

The noise samples were a bit loud, and given both the robotic nature of the voices, along with how short the game was, the ending didn't really mean anything to me all that much. However, I also understand that getting voices in, and making it longer would not be feasible within the time for the Jam. Certainly something that could be expanded on at some point in the future.

One for Another - A tactical combat game by muffty 2018-12-14T22:11:24Z ♥ 2

For 48-72 hours, this game has a decent amount of options for the different classes, and I'm generally just a fan of low poly aesthetics, so I quite liked the graphics as well. Unfortunately, the fact that damage output seemed to either be a fixed number or a dodge meant that the result of a turn was fairly deterministic or predictable.

Sacrificing health for benefits in the game is a nice use of the theme, and makes for interesting decisions about who can afford to take damage for the benefit of the group. However given certain benefits affected everyone for a given turn, it incentivizes using specific classes as early as possible in the turn, so the class order doesn't really end up changing that much throughout the game, except when one of the heroes is in danger.

The gameplay loop gets pretty repetitive fast, given that there's no leveling, no gaining of stats that aren't just benefits from abilities, and the enemies behave very predictably. It felt like I was doing everything the same right up until I died against the demon, and I didn't really feel the losses of heroes too much, given their attacks were all very similar, and the enemies had a completely independent turn order. The only variety comes from the abilities, and using them is itself risky, meaning I would avoid them unless I felt they were necessary.

Little details seem to suggest that there wasn't enough time to fully realize the idea, like how the mage shoots arrows just like the bard and the ranger. It would be cool to see this idea expanded upon, or with more animation to liven up things.

City Building Similuator by stolA 2018-12-14T21:01:08Z ♥ 1

While the basic idea of placing buildings down and trying to keep a population alive isn't inherently a new idea, usually games will just simply put a population cap. The hunger system, and encouraging the player to sacrifice people before it's instead randomly chosen for them requires close attention, and either quick reflex or good spatial sense to figure out where specific colors are to be sacrificed.

That being said, while sacrifice is an element of the gameplay, given I don't exactly have a reason to care for the... villagers? Whatever they are, since they're just ultimately numbers for the score, and the random choice usually doesn't inconvenience too much, the sacrifice didn't really mean anything to me as a player, and I instead mostly focused on building choice. Although, that may just be because the population growth was too quick to have it matter.

Given the field size, and the lack of penalty for just stacking buildings right next to each other, other than a few instances of a person being in the way, the buildings were not functionally different from increasing a stat, or just pressing a button. Conversely, the need to move over a person to see their color, rather than a way to quickly cycle between them makes the act of finding a sacrifice enough of a nuisance to be discouraged from doing it.

To make the game more of a challenge, but still encourage sacrifices, I would make the field smaller, decrease the population rate, increase villager movement speed, and add buttons to quickly cycle between villagers, or alternatively, an indicator that shows their colors as they move around. You're free to disagree with my assessment though.

Minor, non-game breaking bug: Entering the build menu while an unbuilt building is still on the cursor, will result in text doubling up in the bottom bar.

Travel Light by Shivur 2017-12-15T06:27:26Z ♥ 0

I feel as though the main problem with this game can be boiled down to it's lack of zombie pathfinding. Since the zombies will simply try to walk in the direction of your player character, simply getting into a tight space or very narrow area can prevent all but a few zombies from ever reaching you. Even then, because the bullets are not random in their placement, it's very difficult to even accidentally create an opening for the zombies. There's a reason why it's common for monsters in games to move sideways as well as towards the player, to make misses more likely.

- - - by Mark Kennedy 2017-12-15T06:00:31Z ♥ 1

Normally this is where I would provide a small essay of feedback on a game. Instead though, this hit a little close to home, and I can't help but just love it.

Hesperidian Trees by jlauper 2017-12-15T02:57:14Z ♥ 1

I see what you were trying to do with this game, however I feel an implementation details got in the way of it truly fitting the theme. Namely, the later monsters, while they do more damage, moved slowly enough that I could simply avoid them. It got to the point where I managed to fill the entire screen with trees, and harvest them without taking a single bit of damage, which contrasts with the initial monsters which were fast and I had to deal with. The upgrades therefore only really helped in the initial stages where you couldn't avoid the monsters.

There was a bug I did notice with the menus: If you pause w/ Esc on the upgrade menu, then unpause, the game will resume while you stay in the menu.

I do think that if the monsters weighting and difficulty was changed it'd fit the theme a whole lot better.

No Coins Allowed by whooshy 2017-12-07T23:09:14Z ♥ 2

I went into this game thinking "Oh, it's a game where collecting coins kills you or makes you lose a life", which would have just been no different from replacing them with spikes. I really like that you didn't end up doing that, that you instead made it so that collecting the coins acts as a penalty, and that there is a puzzle in how you go about reaching the exit without touching coins.

The situations where you're forced to collect coins are a nice touch to make the player consider whether the time spent thinking of another way out is worth the quick exit through the coins. Plus, the situations where you cause a player to pick up coins if they're not quick enough to reset themselves between levels is also a nice touch. Could see this becoming a really neat puzzle platformer with some polish.

There was an issue I ran into [where the character started falling on the side of the screen indefinitely until I moved him away](https://puu.sh/yBAfx/5f30d68cc6.gif). Don't know if that's something you were aware of when submitting and couldn't fix, but it ended up being a minor issue, despite coming up one other time.

Always good to see a game with music in the Compo as well! The music here definitely fit the feel and urgency of the game, while remaining unobtrusive.

The character physics are a little bit...off. It's not that the jump height is necessarily too high, but that it's slow to get there and down, making the character feel less like a person and more like a feather - It lacks a sense of weight to it.

Some of the levels I would jump up through the ceiling and be confused as to why I was hitting my head. There should have been some clear way to tell that there was a platform sitting in the space between the top and bottom of the level, or should have been avoided if at all possible.

Hold Out by wareification 2017-12-07T06:12:25Z ♥ 1

Ahh this is a neat little twist on Tetris, that's for sure!

I was confused at first as to why "hold" existed, and it was only once I held something that fell into place did I realize that I could gain more points by holding onto the clears, but doing so makes it harder to deal with the board. It's nice to see something that both provides a challenge when using it, but is a compelling option to use for high scorers.

Personally I'm torn between whether the "aha!" moment I had was better than it possibly being made clearer going in as to why you would want to, so take from that what you will. Overall that twist fits the theme nicely.

I do understand straying from the source material, so I can understand the piece changes, but there are some things that are pretty standard in stacking games that I feel are missing from this that would make it a bit more playable. (Although, these are merely suggestions, and may only bug someone like me who plays **a lot** of Tetris)

- The accelerated drop seemed to only work if I mashed the key, whereas it's standard for holding the key down to keep it going quickly. The controls help leads me to believe this might have been the plan? I only know what I was able to get from this, and that it was frustrating to mash a button to speed things along when I know what I want to do.

- Pretty much every version of Tetris (except for maybe the originals) would let you delay the piece locking by rotating the piece around, although not indefinitely. Here it seems that the time it takes to lock is dependent purely on how long it is touching another piece below it for, which makes it difficult to put pieces into awkward positions. This also made it difficult to pull off t-spin equivalent moves.

- A ghost image to show where a piece is going to slot in directly down is really helpful for speeding up recognition in a player in regards to where their piece is, especially since it allows them to keep their eyes on where they want the piece to end up, yet still immediately know the position and shape of the piece they've received, which is especially helpful when there isn't a part of the UI showing you the upcoming pieces. It not being here was only a minor inconvenience though.

- I found myself receiving the same pieces several times in a row which made certain boards of the game particularly difficult to deal with. It's standard for the sequence generator to instead of just picking what a piece should be randomly, but to instead generate [sequences or bags from the set of pieces](http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator) to make it feel more fair to a player, and not like they're being screwed around by the RNG.

I am aware that just because something is standard, you don't necessarily want to implement it, or have time to do so in a particular version, and you might consider that some of these suggestions would not work in this particular game. I just happened to find them bothersome due to being an avid Tetris player, and feeling their omission made the game needlessly difficult.