Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → djcoil
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Could You Sit Still For Five Seconds? | jam | 1239 | 3.10 | 2.76 | 3.59 | 3.47 | 3.32 | 1.71 | 3.29 | 3.04 |
Loved it, lots of fun and very cute framing/audio. My only complaint/feedback was that on a few occasions I would get stuck under an object and unable to get free.
The warp pipes were super clever. (: And great decision to make Birdbird wrap/respawn rather than penalize the player for falling. It gave me a lot of freedom to move however was most convenient.
Nice work. Good presentation and the final level was a nice challenge. I feel like you could have pushed a little more at the "unstable" theme - while hitting a mouse did result in a very satisfying glass volcano, there were really only two states for the tray of glasses: stable and empty. Adding some physics to the glasses (or perhaps destabilizing them as you hit mice, with far more mice to hit) would have really nailed the theme.
As glenugie said, a little more visibility that *I* was the source of the explosions would have been good (maybe make the sprite blink in addition to shaking).
Well tuned, fun art - lots of nostalgia for us 80s kids in the various items, and the horse avatar was great - and solid physics. Good job!
I had the same issue as nerdandas, playing in Chrome. The ingredients appeared fine, but the room graphics were all corrupted.
I was able to play through a bit of the game anyway, but ran into the same issue as Wendel regarding dilution - I couldn't figure out how to make a 50% Y potion.
I think there's a good hook to the "unstable" theme in this, but it needs more narrative dressing to sell it. I want to be a kooky witch throwing "eye of newt" and "fuzzy bat wings" into the cauldron while it bubbles, then just as the cauldron's about to explode I ladle out a fantastic potion and hand it to some creeped out villager in the doorway. The core mechanic is solid, though. (:
Nice work! The volume of enemies also added a bit of chaos to the gameplay, which upped the ante with unreliable controls. I enjoyed the visuals and audio too.
The immune obstacles you have to fly around could benefit from a different color border (perhaps white or light blue, instead of the enemies' red) to make a little more apparent that they are not killable.
Some of the block structures had graphical glitches that made them a little hard to read. I would have liked more small (1-3 blocks tall) pieces so it felt more like building a brick wall. With all the 4-high pieces I usually just resorted to smashing it in wherever I could get a free slot. The 2x2s made me feel like I was playing cleverly.
Impressive work for such a short time. (:
That's a lot of content for one jam, nicely done. The weapons had a nice variety of functions - the bowling ball in particular was fun for yeeting enemies off platforms, and a bomb into batteries was a nice bit of chaos. (:
Jetpack was hard to control - better air control with WASD would have been good. And the enemies' AI (impressive, again, for such a short time) would occasionally have them unloading the gun into a wall.
Cute and chill, though my three races (one died out quickly) didn't seem to have much to do apart from slowly going extinct. :cry:
Nice work. The sprites are simple but evocative, has a strong retro Atari feel to it, and the need to keep focus on three different screen spaces (attacking birds, sparks underfoot, balance meter) really sells the instability of it all. (:
My only complaint is that the combat hitboxes/animations are unclear - the range at which crows can attack is unclear, and they do so without animation which means you don't know when you're in range to preemptively swing.
Letting the player manually walk around at a ground level (and discover the broken ladder) does an excellent job of explaining *why* you're walking across a trio of high-voltage wires.
Definitely impressive for only six hours. My favorite part was the narration; there was a deadpan humor to it that made me really curious what the rest of the story was.
After finishing all the tasks I let the reactor tick down (the timer was pretty generous - having it tick 2x or 3x as fast would have upped the ante a bit). The instability in the reactor and the timer were entertaining. Nice work.
Great job, loved the art and animation. It definitely has that clicker urgency, though I wish the big attacks were worth using on the boss enemies - maybe as a snare/stun? The time it took to activate them was better spent spam-clicking.
Clever and pretty, but confusing without better tutorialization as others have said. Nice work.
Well done. The Notes chapter confirmed my hunch about the main story, but it's a solid little tale and I love both the visuals and the ambient audio. The police sirens kicked in at just the right moment to creep me out a little.
You've definitely got a good setup here for a bigger story, if you wanted to pursue it further. Seeding a few "secret" entries in the text would be a great way to start spinning it out into something bigger.
Nice work, good proof of concept. Some thoughts: - as others have said, the bales tended to clump on one side or the other for 4-5 in a row or so. I don't think the player needs to be able to move the spawner, but being able to move the whole "platter" could be fun (A/D controls the pin balance, left/right controls moving back & forth?). - Varying the rate of bale drops (or increasing it over time, if very slowly) might also help for both the clumping and to increase the dynamic feel of the gameplay. Reaching equilibrium is boring :grin: - Purely aesthetic: I understand the gameplay reason for the bombs (abruptly change the balance), but it feels bad to watch my hard work "destroyed" even if I still got the points for them. What if instead of a falling bomb, a horse walked by and grabbed a bale to munch? - the physics seemed to struggle a bit if I managed to get more than 8ish bales on the plate; the pin would get hard to move reliably. That's actually what cost me my game at around 55 bales.
Very cute and clean execution. Hitting the wheel is a lot of fun, whether by accident or because I'm trying to tilt things into a better position. I could occasionally get into an angle & trajectory where I could just hammer a 3x bucket for points - having additional targets (crew, machinery, etc) or even random waves would increase the instability and keep the player on the move.
Nice work!
Entertaining and funny - it's a great hook, and I think with a little polish could be a lot of fun. Right now it's *hard* (I only managed to pass the first stage, on my second try), but there's a lot of humor in the failures.
Some polish ideas: - A preview of all the pieces to add each round would help the player plan their "build" better. - Some kind of feedback (but not too much?) on where your balance is before each attempt - Ability to place items beneath existing items - Some kind of influence once the walker is in motion (tilt controls on a mobile device would be funny as hell)
Well done. (: A polish item might be to have a very quick "robots melt ice" action after each player action, to make more clear the order of operations.
Interesting design but I also struggled to parse the rules for movement and mostly went by trial and error. Tying the shapes to their rules would have helped to reinforce them within the game space, and more space to tutorialize would have helped as well.
@mistercheezymoon thanks for the feedback! Feedback and sounds would be a nice upgrade for sure, and I do plan to polish it down the road. The "angry" state is deliberately ambiguous - the pup might be hungry or bored, but you're just a human, you have to guess which will fix it and which might make it worse. :D
The clicking code could definitely be cleaned up a little, too (delivering a treat/toy currently also triggers a move action, oops).
Nicely done. I can feel a lot of potential in this design; the core mechanic is well-executed.