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Dylan McCall

Games

YearLDThemeGameDivisionRankOvFuInThGrAuHuMoCo
201225You are the VillainAttack of the Crimson Plumberjam2782.482.412.703.222.411.152.002.3557
201223Tiny WorldSpace Bees Attack!jam2032.502.103.701.602.302.7820

Performance over time

overall score (left axis) percentile (right axis)

Scatterplots

Fun vs Overall

Innovation vs Overall

Theme vs Overall

Graphics vs Overall

Audio vs Overall

Humor vs Overall

Mood vs Overall

Comments by Dylan McCall

LD23 — Tiny World

Poiesis by Them Games 2012-04-24T04:26:00

The graphics are interesting! I like how it's pieced together from real photographs. Looks really neat.

I love how you managed to make a very delicate feeling using all the tools. It feels appropriately tense when I'm about to poke a hole in one of my little planets. I felt really overwhelmed with the keyboard controls, though. I feel like I'd prefer more mouse-based controls just because all the keys are hard to remember, but I'm interested in why you went with keyboard controls :)

Space Bees Attack! by Dylan McCall 2012-04-25T15:22:00

Oh, that's interesting. Looks like there's a bug report over here:
http://code.google.com/p/pyglet/issues/detail?id=456
There's a working patch, and I think it's fixed in the latest version of pyglet from its source repository. (I'm running the last release, which is a little silly since it's from 2010).

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I wish I had given myself time to work on the bad guys. I ended up rushing them because I needed at least some kind of conflict (however half-baked) if I wanted to call the result a game. Lesson learned: bad guys are tricky! The falling through barriers thing is likely because they die really easily. Once they collide with a barrier, they push it really hard and they die. (And when they die, they fall off the screen).

I think it might have been a nicer result if they were outside the physics simulation. That way I would have been able to control their movements more cleanly :)

Tondie and Zupe by Cosmologicon 2012-04-25T17:45:00

Wow, this game is brilliant! I'm really impressed you made something so long (especially that kept me hooked for so long) in two days. The progression is just about perfect, and I loved the story :)

The camera zooming is especially neat. It gave me a good sense of Tondie growing bigger.

It did feel a little easy to me. I think Tondie never dropped below 85 health (and I had placed / upgraded a lot of healers since they're pretty inexpensive), so the attackers never really gave me a sense of urgency.

MacroPong by LegacyCrono 2012-04-24T04:04:00

Really, really, really hard! Quite a clever little idea :)

LD25 — You are the Villain

Dark vs. The World by Lucas Schenck 2012-12-20T06:09:00

Good effort! Yeah, doing this around school is pretty tough :)

I was a little puzzled by the scoring as well. Once I understood that it was about the number of enemies you allowed to escape, it made much more sense. Another thing that took me a while was just learning what causes damage. I wish there was something to indicate when I take damage so I didn't need to refer to the HP counter.

I really like the idea with the teleporting. If you keep working on this, I'd love to play it again.

Attack of the Crimson Plumber by Dylan McCall 2012-12-19T05:31:00

Thanks for the comments :) Yeah, I was really hoping for something more puzzle-like, but I ended up starved for time so I had to settle on whatever arrangement was actually solvable. I'm excited some of that earlier idea shows through! (Also due to time constraints, I spent the last hour making the graphics reminiscent of an era where collision detection was frustratingly inaccurate and people put up with it. Funny what a little time pressure can do). Dropping spikes would be awesome! Nice idea.

Attack of the Crimson Plumber by Dylan McCall 2012-12-21T18:22:00

I guess I should explain why some people find it challenging and some don't, so you don't feel like you're missing something.

I made two somewhat silly errors with this one: I didn't think about timing code until really late, so I ended up with a lot of stuff built around the environment I was working on. I sorted out most of that near the end (at least so it would work the same on Firefox and Chrome on my own computers), but I also had some needlessly complicated math involving floating point numbers, and depending on the frame rate that math can become very imprecise. Therefore, jumping behaves subtly differently on different computers.

(And for the hundredth time I was reminded: never use floating point numbers unless they're completely mandatory, which they just about never are).

Thanks again for the nice comments :)

Crustacean Chaos by Komradus 2012-12-19T04:48:00

Your physics stuff here is really impressive! Nicely tuned :)

I love the unique visual style, too. Neat mix of 3D and 2D, and it feels a little like ink on paper. I found it a little hard to figure out, and I think one of the big problems I was that it was easy to just wander outside the interesting part of the world, and into an empty grey wilderness. Once I got used to staying close to the starting point, it made a bunch more sense.

You're a Bastard! by CappaGames 2012-12-19T05:00:00

Made me smile, and I liked some of the visual effects.
Would have enjoyed some kind of scoring (seemed to just kind of end happily even though I was terrible at the last minigame), but it did what it set out to do :)

Infected by SeriousCreeper 2012-12-20T05:54:00

I really like the HUD. Cool design.

Graphics were a little hard to deal with at times. Just not very easy to read. For example, the blue arrows between places were almost invisible for me, and the solid grey ground was quite distracting because it felt broken whenever I saw through to the background colour. A bit of flat shading might help to define the actual shapes ;)

It's definitely pretty ambitious, and I played it a few times. The little tutorial near the start was excellent.

ECHO CHAMBER by Loren 2012-12-18T06:06:00

Very clever idea. Nice sound, too!

I feel like it could have communicated what was going on a little better; it took me a while to figure out what all those heavy lines were telling me. Might help if they fade out a little during the retribution phase.

Once I figured that out, of course, it all made glorious sense :)

The goat that ate Christmas by lando walters 2012-12-19T05:09:00

Love the high score thing! Really hectic, in a good way :)

The controls were a little frustrating: my goat would continue gliding for about a good while after releasing an arrow key, which made it really hard to get to some places.

Anyway: Yay, goats!

Carnage by SXPanda 2012-12-18T07:06:00

Yep, the Linux build works great on Ubuntu 12.10. Thanks for making one! (Only oddness I noticed: the Carnage executable doesn't have executable permissions when I extract it. Nothing serious, but you can fix that and then people can just extract and run immediately).

Controls were a little odd. I lost track of where I was moving on more than one occasion. Pretty ambitious graphics, though! Not the prettiest, but it definitely fits together well. I'm impressed that you got that in such a short time :) I really like the leaderboard, and I found myself playing it a few times to improve my score.

A Natural Villain by ClownyBastards 2012-12-18T07:31:00

Interesting gameplay, and I'm a sucker for one-button game designs and this one comes _pretty_ close to that.

It took me a while to figure out that I needed to _surround_ other cells; at first I was just flying into them and being confused. That's partly my own fault for not reading the instructions :)

Age of Umpires by Tom 7 2012-12-22T19:11:00

This is AMAZING! I love how open-ended it is, so I can steal another player's stick or have my goalie suddenly leave the net and score on a breakaway :) Every sports game should be like this.

Space Lord by axcho 2012-12-20T06:20:00

I've always wondered where those ships were coming from! This is definitely one my favourite entries :D

I wish there was a way to slow down and think about each wave. Most of the time, I ended up just clicking as fast as I could without a whole lot of thought. Definitely lots of potential for neat stuff in here, and it's very satisfying either way. The Fun meter is perfect.

Unhappy Holidays! by GeorgeBroussard 2012-12-20T05:29:00

Awesome! I love how you managed to pack so much life into those static sprites just by the way they moved around. Very satisfying animations. All around lovely graphics.

I kept running out of ammo in the 3rd level, until I realized that the different enemies are, err, different, and I should hold onto those RPG rounds for the tougher ones. Or get into the habit of backtracking really aggressively, before it's too late. It's weird that bullet counting survival game elements only really become a thing in the last level, though. (If they were meant to be at all). Of course, since the good quality and endlessly amusing weapon handling meant I kept trying, so when I finally _did_ win it was pretty exciting.