Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Dovodx
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Tiny Summoner | compo | Fun | 4.63 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Pandora's Box | compo | 199 | 3.30 | 3.42 | 2.82 | 2.70 | 2.92 | 3.42 | 3.66 | 3.31 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Tiny Summoner | compo | 14 | 4.30 | 4.63 | 3.65 | 4.40 | 3.57 | 3.78 | 3.42 | 3.82 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Attack of the Robot Crabs | compo | 208 | 3.47 | 3.83 | 2.47 | 3.35 | 3.35 | 3.26 | 3.02 | 3.35 |
Neat idea. I'd probably enjoy it more if I could play it in fullscreen and have a better warning before my ship's color changes. There were a few times I just suddenly died and I wasn't sure why. I think it might've been the color changing while I was moving down a path that was my current color.
Interesting concept, but it feels very awkward to control. Some sort of visual element to tell me when I can press space to attach a piece of cargo would've gone a long way. A ping or some sort of effect on the ground to tell me that clicking is what moves my player machine wouldn't have hurt. I also don't see why the camera couldn't just follow the player everywhere rather than requiring me to manually follow with WASD.
This is really neat! I do wish the puzzles had a little more meat to them, but at the same time, not having things explained to you (and, therefore, having to keep the puzzles a little basic) is part of the atmosphere, which is really good. The audio and graphics are super clean.
Something I forgot to mention: when I played, it looked like the game was running at a high framerate (which is great!), but certain objects weren't interpolated, particularly the cubes. It creates a very jittery-looking effect when moving the cubes around which is unpleasant to the eyes. It should be fixable with the interpolation dropdown for the Rigidbodies. Not a huge deal, just another way to polish things up.
If you don't have a 120Hz+ monitor to test on, you can try temporarily slowing down the physics tick rate to something like 20Hz and see if things still look smooth. If they do, you know the interpolation is working. Then you can just set it back.
The concept seems fun and I like the neon graphics. I find it a little frustrating to play, though, because the mechanic where you bounce off of boxes & walls feels disorienting and gives the player little to no time to react to the new direction in which they're suddenly speeding. I can see how it provides a quick way to pivot, but I'd have preferred tighter turning, personally. Also, I think you could've made pretty serviceable "dumb" bots by just having them randomly change their direction. Understandable that you didn't get to that, given the time constraints and the extra UI work.
I like the concept and the game has a cool atmosphere. I found it a little hard to understand what was going on at first. It seems like the game just doesn't explain much, like how things will be shot out of airlocks or what I'm supposed to do when asteroids are approaching. I think I might've died because I ran out of energy, but I didn't see any more around the ship. I guess the intent is to stockpile things at the beginning before they get shot out, but that can lead to a guaranteed losing situation where nothing you do will prevent the inevitable death from running out of whatever resource. Since the player does so much carrying of objects, I think having a mechanic where the held object becomes partially transparent would've helped make navigating the ship a little more strategic and less frustrating. I do like this game, I just wish it were clearer what I'm doing that's right vs. wrong when playing. Also, as another commenter pointed out, having a setting for mouse sensitivity would be great.
A bit obtuse at first, but overall not bad. I like that clever use of dams can save some of your population, though this becomes much less of a factor after the water has risen twice, from what I've experienced. On my second try, I got the ship to 97%, but couldn't do anything during the final phase before the water overtook the ship because my population dropped to 10. It's possible I have to use the dams in a smarter way. I also felt like the camera could've been a bit closer to the tiles or had an adjustable zoom, since some things were pretty small and/or cluttered.
Decent concept. I like the artstyle and the sprites are well-animated, but I'd say my overall gripe with this one is the pacing. On one hand, enemies move and attack pretty quickly to the point where everything looks too fast, but then after I kill a few, there are sometimes these long periods of dead air while I wait for more to spawn. It doesn't seem like there's much I can do to kill the enemies without taking damage if I don't have arrows because they attack so quickly and sporadically. I can try to jump over them to dodge, but they can always hit me anyway. It feels like taking damage is guaranteed at some point. The short loop for the music also gets a little grating. Making it more quiet and/or low-key so that it serves as a break from the game's sound effects can be a good way to break it up so that it's not just the same 4-second loop nonstop (without making the track itself longer).
Took me a sec to understand how the throttle works, but once I figured it out it was pretty fun! Reminds me of the web games I'd play on a certain math-related website back in elementary school lol!
I like the art & sound, but the gameplay was a little frustrating. Not knowing where my sometimes suicidal player character is going to go makes some of the deaths feel cheap. I also felt like I had no choice but to spam-draw lines to cheese my way through some levels. It's not very clear when the walls I've drawn are going to be destroyed or hold an enemy or projectile back. I do like the concept to some extent.
Cool concept, great execution! I'm not a fan of the ship taking damage when the magnet bumps into it and some sounds definitely would've been the cherry on top, but this is super clean and well done. The tutorial also does a great job explaining things while also letting you get a feel for how the game controls.
@instanttrain The vertical aim actually does come into play if you make it to a score of 26,000. You get a jump upgrade there, which lets you jump high enough to avoid getting hit. Definitely agree on the variety aspect with weapons & enemies. Had 'em on the todo list, but I had to squash some bugs as best I could and get a proper menu system in there.
@seam00se I think I know the cause of that hurtbox thing. I believe it's a bug with my interpolation code that happens sometimes. I think I only saw it once when I was playtesting on the final day and wasn't sure if I'd fixed it. I'll definitely squash that one if this game sees more development, thanks for letting me know!
@smiley405 Just uploaded a linux build! I don't have a linux install to test it on, so big apologies if it doesn't work. Also tried a web build, but it didn't run. Fingers crossed linux works.
Turns out I misread the rules at first and didn't realize that I could fix bugs after the deadline and not just during the submission hour lol. The bug with the camera desyncing from the player's position has been fixed!
Great stuff! The aesthetics here are super well-done and the gameplay is really fun. I like how you can get combo'd and bounced around by the projectiles on screen after you die - got a good giggle out of that. I have only a few minor gripes:
-Movement is slightly sluggish (though it wasn't that bad once I got the hang of it). Imo, it takes too long for my character to get up to full speed & pivot/change direction. I wonder if it's that thing Unity does in the Input Manager where digital inputs have a ramp-up & ramp-down time by default. Might be worth looking into.
-The hitbox when the player attacks seems to be bigger mechanically than it is visually. Not a huge deal, but I was getting way closer to enemies than I needed to until I realized it.
Really solid overall! I also love the soft elevator-style music in the background. Gives the game a cool chill retro vibe.
I would describe this game as bizarre in both good and bad ways. The premise is really cool, but the execution feels really awkward in practice. I like the concept of either having awkward, limited movement OR needing a special ability to see the environment around you, but I think the combination of both just feels too limiting and tedious, since you can only do one at a time. The locator ability and the dark environment sort of gave me a horror game vibe, but that wouldn't work with the damage and awkward movement, since the only real danger to you, the player, is yourself. Cool idea, but personally I would've liked the challenge or danger to be something different.
The concept and the graphics are pretty cool. As others have said, the main gun doesn't feel good to shoot at all. Just too much spread and too little damage. For me, most waves were ending with the enemies just despawning because I could never kill them fast enough. I also didn't notice any sort of meter telling me how much jetpack fuel I had.
Also, something with the mouse and player movement felt REALLY off. Sometimes my mouse sensitivity would seem to jump way up and then go back down again. The mouse was even moving on its own a few times. Walking movement seemed to speed up and down as well. I wonder if maybe some of the physics logic is tied to the framerate?
@zungryware I was playing on Firefox. Tried again on Chrome and didn't notice any issues with the mouse or player movement. I can understand why that fixed the mouse issue, based on your comment, but I have no clue why the movement jank also seems to happen on Firefox and not Chrome. Maybe the browser messes with the frame pacing or something? My computer should be more than overspec for this game, so if anything my framerate would've been too high if that was the issue.
I also got further, thanks to those issues no longer being there, and I can definitely say the second pistol makes shooting feel better. It's kind of a slow grind until you get one, though. On the jetpack recharge, I think I didn't notice it my first couple times playing because it recharges so slowly that I didn't realize it was there, even with a battery (not sure if batteries stack, I only sprung for 1). I do also think the jetpack drains way too fast, especially given how extreme the gravity is. Making what seems like a small jump to grab honey got me killed more than once due to how fast I ran out of fuel.
As far as encouraging the player to move goes, why not have the enemies shoot at the player's feet some of the time? They seem to be content to shoot parts of the ground where I'm not standing, which actually doesn't really punish me for standing in place and shooting them. At the same time, the environment can be destroyed so granularly that I'd have to be looking at my feet a lot to make sure I'm not going to fall into a player-sized hole and lose a life just for that. Maybe the environment could consist of fewer, larger pieces that take a few hits before being destroyed, that way falling to my death wouldn't feel as "random", if that makes sense.
The bouncing bullets are a neat threat, but the first-person perspective and the game being in 3D make it difficult to meaningfully track and dodge the bullets. There also seems to be a bit of lag when moving with WASD. IMO it takes too long to get up to full speed when moving, especially if I need to be dodging fast-moving bullets everywhere. There also isn't much that can threaten you if you just stand in a corner and try to dodge the occasional bullet from yourself - the DVD logo method. I feel like the default goblins that just stand there could've been cut from the game or programmed to at least pose some sort of threat. It's also pretty much essential to include a mouse sensitivity setting in an FPS.
It seems like the boxes should be harder to destroy since it's easy to break so many of them that you just start farming points but not advancing upward. That, or it might make sense to limit or prevent the spiked balls from breaking boxes, cause they were breaking so many boxes that I couldn't keep climbing upward.
I like this, it's charming. I do think that the game takes too long to get going, personally. As far as I can tell, you don't have any real threats until about wave 12 when the grey guy shows up, unless you can fall out of the ring by taking too long to knock out the enemies. Personally, I'd have liked to see more quality over quantity with the waves.
I think the enemies just don't take enough damage. I wasn't sure the flamethrower was even doing anything until I saw the little healthbars on the enemy ships going down a little bit. Once there were a bunch of enemies, I didn't see how I was supposed to get caught back up. I also took a while to even realize where my own healthbar was because it seemed like I was allowed to take a lot of damage but I wasn't dying. With the drawing mechanic being somewhat complex, maybe other parts of the game could've been simplified a bit.
Brilliant take on "limited space"! I love the README and how the instructions at the start introduce you to the rotating window mechanic. The boss at the end was hilarious and so well-done. Also adored the Windows XP sounds sampled in the music. My only criticisms are minor: -The shooting sound is REALLY loud. -The eyeball enemies felt a little bit cheap at times. Some sort of visual warning for where they are, like maybe a faint pulse, would help. -There seems to be a bug where your aim doesn't go where your mouse pointer is sometimes.
The rules allow you to fix bugs post-launch. It's a bit late at this point, but definitely worth keeping in mind for next time (or even for this jam, if it's not too cumbersome). You just can't add any new features. The concept seems like it can work with more development, like some little animations for the enemy and player summon interactions (not something I probably would've attempted for a solo jam myself, I don't fault you there). Also a small QoL thing: it would've been nice to be able to exit battles with the mouse instead of having to press the escape key.
Simple and it works. Good stuff! Score: 304
I loved the little voices for the units. How the resources and workers functioned was confusing at first, but I was able to figure it out. The game was definitely too easy, but the charm carried it so hard. Loved the webcam bits.
Cool concept with great visuals and sound design. I think the main thing I would want to improve would be how you interact with summons. I quickly understood that my summons had their own healthbars separate from mine, but I wasn't a fan of how the summons would be gone until the end of the level after they died and I could only see the health of whichever form I was currently in. With the player's human form being so slow and weak, I think it would make sense to allow summons to regenerate after a cooldown when they die so that there's still a penalty for losing them, but you're not left high and dry in your weakest form, esp. on level 2 where you only have 1 summon to work with and the muscular dudes come in droves.
@linky439 Thank you for the feedback! Sorry about the crashing issue. For switching to opengl3, you're referring to the Compatibility setting in Godot, right? I gave that a run real quick and didn't experience the crash, so it might just be an old hardware or driver issue. I would be interested to try and fix it, though I'm not sure if I can.
@cheesepencil I tried a few times to get web export working, but unfortunately I can't get it to work despite following the Embedding Guide. Not sure if it's an issue with Godot 4.2. Sorry :(
Super well-tuned, amazing visuals and sound, love the rock soundtrack. Just a fantastic entry. I beat it and couldn't believe it was only 9 minutes with all the intense gameplay I experienced. Also great move putting a quick tutorial into the game itself. Some minor issues I found: - No pause button? - I believe I was playing the latest version, but I didn't seem to get the end screen. It went back to the main menu after I beat it. - I would like it if the player could keep moving even when the cursor is outside the playable area so that you don't get "stuck". - I don't see a particular reason why the summon book can't just pause the game outright. I guess it adds tension, but it discourages the player from learning about more than 1-3 summons because it's just more mental load when you have bullets coming towards you. - The different summon types are cool, but since none of them last long (as far as I saw), I don't see much reason to summon the more complicated ones. I liked summoning the guy that required all candles lit in a zigzag pattern, but I found it way more effective to just do triangle spam and try not to get hit so I wouldn't have to summon healers. I think DPS really matters here since moving across the screen and lighting candles takes time, and more time lighting candles means more time spent dodging and potentially dying. Maybe the more complicated/high damage summons could do more damage or require fewer candles to better tip the risk-reward so that they're worth using over the quick and easy 3-candle summons.
I really like the artstyle and the music. The concept of having the skeletons nullify the spikes was cool, too. I could see this becoming a cool puzzle platformer. My only real complaint is that the finale seemed impossible. I think the intention was that I needed to jump forward, dark star, and spam skeletons for my life before the lasers started, but I wasn't able to get that to work. Once the lasers were on, I was cooked and I simply couldn't get close enough to the mines to clear them without the lasers getting in the way. There was also one time where I got hit by a mine or a laser and then my character started moving really slowly for some reason. Other than that, I thought the 3 levels before were great. Good stuff!
I like being a fast fish. I found it very difficult to eat the other fish, though, and some audio+visual feedback when eating them definitely would've helped. I echo what the last person said also about it being hard to intentionally steer into the fish to eat them. The high speed and their small size also makes them hard to see.
Love the artstyle and the simple-but-effective concept. Silly goose status: confirmed. Music definitely could've been more varied and/or quieter. A better framerate would've been nice as things looked choppy as I moved around (interpolation!). And don't take this the wrong way... but my "bawls" got stuck in the maze area and I couldn't get them out! I was able to wiggle them free eventually, though XD
Needs a lot of work to be honest. The concept is interesting, but it kind of seems like you had too much complexity to work with doing both summons and the tile-based level building. I immediately made an unbeatable dungeon without knowing what tiles I was placing or that I could only have 1 instance of 1 summon. I think the idea could work if you had more time to make it, but for a game jam (esp. your first one) I think you would've been better served going with a simpler concept that you could polish rather than trying to make several complex mechanics all work together.
Some other general issues I noticed that are relatively easy to fix: - The game's UI does not scale with the display resolution. Playing on a 4K monitor exposed this right away. You can force whatever display resolution you want in the Unity editor to check for stuff like this. - The 45-degree slope I encountered initially was an instant death trap. I couldn't jump or run back up the slope in any capacity. You should be able to adjust your character's physics so that they don't slide down into the abyss. - Some might say this one's subjective, but I think the gravity is waaaaay too high. Jumping looked and felt kind of janky, even though it technically works. - The game seems to visually update only with the physics steps, meaning I could tell it was 50-60 updates per second or that the framerate was capped. Not a huge deal, but it is nice to have the game look smoother on higher refresh rate monitors. You also get less input lag with higher framerates.
I was a bit confused at first until I figured out how to play Go Fish on the spot lol. I really like the banter and artstyle. The characters definitely carry this one and the concept works. It reminds me a bit of Poker Night at the Inventory. Good stuff!
I never thought I'd play a game that was just crafting and have fun with it. Such a cool concept that embodies the theme so well! It does feel like it needs something else, like a purpose for the summoning, but even on its own I was surprisingly entertained. I wish more games would do their crafting systems like this, as a sort of minigame.
This looks like a concept that could easily becoming addicting with a little more tuning. The presentation is nice, very clean; The visuals and sound are spot-on. The gameplay feels a bit off to me, though. The ships averaging their direction based on the wind means I have a higher chance of needing to summon more than one gust of wind, as opposed to just fixing the direction of that ship and then moving on to help the others. This creates a compounding problem where I have too many gusts of wind messing up the other ships to the point where it makes it harder to fix where they're going, but I have to use more gusts of wind to fix them. The problem gets worse when I try to use a gust of wind on a ship that should fix it in one go, but it either misses somehow or connects with the ship much later than I expect, which contributes to the snowball effect of messing everything up since each gust continues until it's offscreen.
I think the cognitive load of having to keep track of all these ships at once is enough without the wind making it harder with its infinite range and less-than-responsive way of averaging the direction of the ships. I think better, more obvious/immediate visual feedback to tell me when a ship has been influenced by the wind would go a long way as well. The graphics and sound are great, just needs a little more fine-tuning with the mechanics.
Loved playing this. Almost makes me want to try making a game for a retro system. The sprites are gorgeous. I used mednafen to play it.
I really like this, but unfortunately got too frustrated by a bunch of (seemingly) little things with the controls. As others mentioned, the whip is just way too laggy. You pretty much have to press the whip button right after you jump, or you won't hit what you're trying to hit at the top of your jump. It also didn't feel right that I couldn't move or jump during the whip animation. Finally, my breaking point was sadly right after I got the wall cling upgrade. In retrospect, I think the intention was for me to jump back and forth between the two walls with arrows shooting out of them, but I wanted to cling and jump off of just the left wall, but the game wouldn't let me because it kept flipping my character the other way. This was contrary to what I'd just done to get out of the room where I got the upgrade. Losing all control of my character when I get hit probably contributes to the problem as well.
Despite my complaints, I really like the art and the other aspects of the game's mechanics. Coins being kept on death and the checkpoints are both excellent design choices. I really like how you took the whip and turned it into a traversal tool with multiple uses. The grapple points and wall clinging are fantastic ideas and could easily turn this into a more fast-paced precision platformer with more mechanical polish.
Pretty neat! I like how stopping to move and getting upgrades that let you shoot extra arrows at different angles encourages you to pick certain spots to attack, which all comes together with enemies being stunlockable (except the final wizard man, which is appropriate). I think some of the upgrades were either too weak sounding or had downsides that were ambiguous (ex: shoot extra arrows at this angle, but damage is reduced? Is that for all arrows, or just the new ones?) and some music would've been nice to round out the atmosphere, but overall pretty good!
I'm not usually a horror guy, but I liked this one. I think the monster's sounds should be less common. I really liked the sounds of a looming threat in the beginning, but after a few minutes I just kind of tuned the monster out. The visual appearances of it were great, though, making me do a double take or two. Maybe make the footsteps quieter as well.
I noticed the player moves faster diagonally than in cardinal directions.
I really like the art, but I think mechanically this turned out rough. I think this game could be upgraded massively by using an engine like Godot to create smoother movement and just generally more fast/up-to-date visuals, so to speak. The game only seems to update when the player moves and it feels janky. I also didn't understand what the eye above my head meant or how to refill my hunger.
That was a pretty neat concept and the visuals in the background were crazy. I liked it! Got a score of 551663.
That was amazing. It took me a while to figure out the solution and I almost gave up, but I got it! My only nitpicks are that the music volume gets reset whenever you click retry and some of the clips have audio that's too quiet or too loud (SNIIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF). I had a great time playing this, was laughing so much.
I like the atmosphere, but I think the game could make it easier to find what you're looking for next. I was also a bit surprised that I just insta-died when the oxygen timer ran out. I thought it would decrease my HP over time.
Good job on the aesthetics. I think the turrets have too much health and that the player could probably just have unlimited cannon shooting since I almost never could kill turrets after shooting at anything else right before they came into view. (Also, was this developed on an ultrawide? cause that window went BRRRR across my two monitors lol)
I really like the artstyle on this one. I echo what eloraju said; maybe a shadow underneath the player would help make it clearer where you're going to land. I got through most of this but honestly ragequit on the amber drop after I dove into it and it went sailing over the next platform into the lava lol. The slow movement just felt too slow for me to want to try setting it up again.
I like this one quite a bit, though I will admit I didn't have the patience to go all the way to round 100. I got into the 30s on the easiest and hardest difficulties. Even the hardest setting still feels too easy, even if my HP did get low at one point. I really like that you can make a chain going around the whole screen. I wonder if an overabundance of enemies makes it easy to clear them all out in one turn, whereas fewer, stronger enemies might be harder to deal with. Some food for thought.
When I saw that flying spike I was like "ohhh... so that's how it is" lol. I definitely agree with the above commenter that the spike hitboxes are absurd esp. with how big the player is. The web being able to block the spikes probably could've come in clutch if not for the bugs (the ones that aren't the spider harhar). Idk if the infinite jumping was intentional, but I liked it. Also, you can enable interpolation in Unity for smoother movement without having to increase the physics update rate. It's noticeable if you jump really high and let yourself fall down (at least, on a high refresh monitor, not sure how it looks at 60Hz).
I like the presentation, though I don't know if the anchor should be so huge and slow to move if it's going to destroy the platforms and the light sources that I need to collect. I think just getting stuck on a platform and having to move the anchor off of it is enough of an obstacle since we're on limited time before the light goes out.