TINY PACK by xk_the_name 2024-10-08T00:42:12Z
I could see this being the demo of a steam game. Playing to the end is an enjoyment.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → ejunegao
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Mining Deepa | compo | 2.83 | 2.50 | 3.20 | 3.76 | 3.38 | 3.00 | 3.07 | |||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | 👥 | Plain Sight | jam | 64 | 4.13 | 3.57 | 4.37 | 4.27 | 4.47 | 3.89 | 2.94 | 4.15 |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Welcome to the Jungle | compo | 316 | 2.56 | 2.64 | 2.14 | 3.02 | 2.64 | 2.50 | 2.39 | 2.50 |
I could see this being the demo of a steam game. Playing to the end is an enjoyment.
Great job! This is the game that I spent the longest playing. The concept is so unique and the gameplay is fun, although a bit grinding! I'd love for there to be some music when I am playing the game because it does take a lot of holding left click and waiting.
After getting the last upgrade, I wonder if the shadow realm also once had a god, who once upgraded for them, but then abandoned them.
The story actually links the theme with your gameplay perfectly together, and it's a story I really like. Back when I just went to college, I actually struggled a bit being a member of the "tiny creatures" since I'm 5'8. My friends would actually sometimes make jokes about it. They were all friendly banters but it did get to a point where it got a little annoying. Until one point, I realized that height is something I cannot change, and it really doesn't matter that much. In the case of David, he dodged the attacks because of it, so there are even pluses! In real life, I don't know, maybe it helps dodging toxic relationships.
In terms of the gameplay, there's really not much to complain. I especially like the art and feedbacks you created, such as when defeating Goliath. One suggestion I'd make is with the attack patterns, as all attack patterns now seem to be encouraging safe and ranged plays. Maybe it would be fun if Goliath would target on further ranges, and encourage the players to come close and take risks.
Good job! I had fun playing this game. It must be hard to balance all the ants because there seem to be so many design decisions to make with all these types of ants.
There are two thoughts when I was playing. First, balancing was destroying some possibilities for strategies. I could see some possible strategies from the ant combinations and they would seem fun. Until I realized the power of carpenter ants. I actually waited long to build a bullet ant, only to be destroyed in around 4 to 5 hits, which made me determine into making 50 more carpenter ants to finish the game. Personally I feel like a easy solution to end carpenter ant meta is to have an AOE solution.
Second thing was that, upgrades further push the players to focus on one archetype, which might not necessarily be fun in this type of game. Players would be encouraged to build more of that upgraded archetype, and it's again likely to be the carpenter ants.
Still, it was a fun experience learning how each ant functions, trying out each ant and finding out a strategy to win!
Love the art, and the music does fit well with the theme! The game feels complete, and the fact that Pseudo requires 2 Bacillus nearby to be built did require me to do a lot more micro-decision making while setting up my defense, which seems to be a great way to introduce some quick decisions for the player.
My game did die when fighting against the second wave, so there could have been a bug happening that stopped the game. It wasn't very obvious what the cause was, though.
Style point is definitely a 10. The slimes are so cool! The mechanics are bold and kind of reminds me of my Chinese kindergarten and elementary school. The teacher would lead all the kids in a line, just like these little slimes haha. It's impressive that you could make the mechanics work in such a short amount of time, plus the coolest slimes!
I like how the difficulty slowly ramps up as you get to later levels. Great job on the level design! The art style is unique and lovely, too!
Game feels very nice to play! The art, feedback, and music are all very great. Pacing is also great--the game never feels easy as the speed ramps up fast, which makes it exciting to play! I also do enjoy having two hands that go for our Remy. I feel having two hands that drop down makes the dodging a bit more strategic and differs this game from other games in this genre.
Great work! I really enjoyed playing Nom, what a great game! From the get go, the art style is simple yet elegant, so is the game control. They're very intuitive and capture the feeling of a huge fish preying on small fishes very well. In real world, if big fish makes a bad maneuver, I guess all the small fish run away. In this game, I felt the same disappoint from breaking the streaks. Also, the game is well polished and the feedbacks of every player action feels right on point.
The only improvement I felt was from the streaks. Sometimes I would have just caught the fish from the airplane, and feel that I had played the game perfectly, only to see my streak breaks. It's a little unpredictable in that way. Audio also feels a little weaker comparing to all other aspects of the game, as it is neither serene, nor is it exciting. It is kind of in the middle, which I personally feel would help shaping the game's mood more if the audio has a bit more character.
I definitely learned a lot from playing Nom. Hopefully that one day I'd design a game as elegant as this. Thanks for the work!
Love the gameplay and art! It's so impressive that you pulled this off in just 48 hours, great job! I thought the UI was blocking me from clicking the ores, only to find out that I wasn't reading the instructions that I could drag the UI with right mouse click, oops! Also I could not build the king despite having enough resources (10 woods and 50 gold I think?), don't really know why. Other than that, there was nothing to complain about! Definitely a better clicker game than Lord of the Salted Fish.
The relaxing music fits the game's mood very well. The gameplay is simple, but surprisingly addictive as controlling multiple objects and avoiding the traps take some attention and skill. I agree with the previous post that a lose condition would make the process more fun, as the player would more accurately judge how well they're doing, and therefore feel more challenged.
I really love the art, the big slime is soooooo cute. I spent the first run understanding the mechanics, which was understandable because it's a card game and the concept of brigade is a little hard to grasp at first. Overall I think the gameplay is really fun and engaging. Great job!
Hey! I actually just saw your other work, Summon Dots the other day. Glad to see you in this jam as well! I think you're onto something with the game, and it's reasonable that with the time scope, things won't always end up perfect sometimes. There's no need to feel sorry and I'd say you're already doing an impressive job completing this!
Observing the "little creatures", slimes, and affecting them from a human perspective is such a great idea, and I love the vibe you're creating with your art in this game. The change of the shades and time goes by, the passing clouds...they're shaping up a great mood. Player agency is something I would like from the game--how would my actions matter? I see that the slimes are having their life, eating stuff, mating and dying. Perhaps if I do something, I would help more slimes to survive, or a colony might grow, instead of die out because of my actions? All in all, I love your art style, and the concept behind this game definitely has potential. Good job!
@look-for-happiness 没错！一起加油~
@zwartraider Thank you for the kind word! This was my first time making my own asset, so I was definitely not very confident going into this. Glad you liked it! In terms of the apples, it seems like they should respawn them earlier. I'll make sure little slimes got enough apples in the update!
@dooskington Definitely! Music stop was intended to highlight the "footstep", but when footstep is too far, the player hears neither. I see the confusion here. Thanks for the feedback!
@look-for-happiness 感谢，都是很实用的建议！能做一点动一动的动画的话，画面应该会生动许多，我这段时间偶尔做一点试试，下次加到游戏里！另外苹果那里我完全没想到可以啃几口爆一点，感觉那样的话会很有趣哈哈！其他的gameplay建议我也很赞同，谢谢~
@captaindreamcast Seeing your comment really made my day and thank you for it! I'm really glad that you liked the gameplay and sound design.
@nazariglez I just realized the health bar and XP bar went out of screen, oops! Let me fix that real quick. Thanks for point it out!
@cliff-coffee I made an attempt in fixing the bug in the update, thanks for the help!
The voiceovers are awesome hahaha. I also really like your design of tutorial levels. They conveyed the game's mechanics well, and the process of learning them by example actually feels awarding. The last two levels did require some thoughts, too. Overall, I really enjoyed the vibe of this game and I believe the game elements are having a good chemistry with each other to create it (especially the voiceover imo haha)
This is something special! I love the art, they're super cute. And this made me laugh out loud when I see the big creature hahahaha! Good work!
Hallo hallo! I'm here from RED xDD. I like how the gameplay uses match-3 as an inspiration and innovates from that. Instead of clearing out everything, our goal is instead to save the pal, which feels new to me. The claw adds some tension into the gameplay that is needed. It also makes me feel like I'm in a claw machine, which is pretty interesting as well. In the end, the art style also works well with your gameplay. It's cute and relaxed. Overall this is a complete and well-rounded entry. Great job!
Got my head bopping after I got a hang of how the notes work! Great job on the music! The font is a bit hard to read in dialogues.
This game is just really well done! I'm usually not a puzzle game fan and at the beginning I thought I wouldn't last long. However, the mechanics are super intuitive, and I feel like the challenge curve is so well layered that at first, I wasn't immediately scared away. And then I saw some more challenging levels and I was able to do them as well and it felt accomplishing. By the time there were some hard levels, I started to think, "well I'm already here, there's no turning back!" All in all, my experience just tells me that the challenge provided to the player is designed so well here.
I also really like that the game seems to have a more lenient range for passing the entire game if I'm not mistaking. I remember that I didn't figure out how to do the right bottom level, but still managed to pass the game with 14 triangles.
Lastly, the art and audio too are very well done. The robots are so distinctive and the art definitely helped in the mechanics being so intuitive. I especially like the yellow robots. The color taught the mechanic here well by grouping these bots.
The art, music and sfx are done super well! It's satisfying to see the little monsters' corpses lying around.
Gameplay wise, when I play, I felt like wanting something like an area attack because I thought it was interesting how the shots don't damage the enemies but attact them, and signal shot in an area. But without any area attack upgrade, it was unwise to do so because I could only shoot one at a time anyways.
I probably spent an or more hour trying to beat the game. Much more than any other game lol because this game's concept is so intriguing. The complication lures me to try to figure out what's going on. Furthest I got was 2 bars away. I wonder if the shapes below the symbols mean anything? But I just can't piece out the clues and find a solution. Also, when we draw a line between symbols, depending on the timing, every time it could be different which makes it really hard to try different solutions because getting the connection to the colors you want would take multiple tries. Although I wonder if this is because we haven't found the real solution yet? Is the solution supposed to be like perfectly positioned where no matter what timing you click them, they always make the color you want?
I really wonder if anyone has beat the game. Is it the game or is it me, lol. All in all, great job on the game!
I love the art. The jukebox being the theme is super catchy, and the clubber silhouettes are simple and work well. The game mechanics are simple but effective. One thing that I'd loved when I played was getting feedback each round instead of at the end of the game. I could feel that I was getting faster and faster, but I don't necessarily see any feedbacks from the game other than clubbers leaving. It would be nice if when we do it really fast, some clubbers join, and when we do it slow, we clearly see stages of clubbers leaving. Currently, I can feel that I'm getting better and there's intrinsic motivation coming from that, but some validation from the game would definitely reinforce that.
I see "blacksmith" and I instantly clicked. I've always wanted to play some cool blacksmith game and it's super cool how you incorporated the theme with signal and theme is incorporated perfectly here in my opinion.
I love the concept of a master/teacher that slowly becomes less reliable. It's a humorous and fun design. The removal of signal and addition of noise can really be felt in each level which is well done. The music accompanies the mood well too.
@ellaris Really happy to see that your insights about the upgrades! I totally agree with your points. The upgrade curve and balance could definitely use some work along with the level of challenge the enemies provide. Rotation perhaps could be tweaked a bit to make it feel smoother to rotate and look around.
@domenixius Thanks for the advices and I'll definitely take these into my thought when designing future games. The enemies were likely a bit tougher than I wanted. When I designed the game I thought that the method to deal with them was kind of smart, but it definitely turned out less intuitive than I wanted due to multiple factors one of which being the signal giving out conflicting information to the players. And yes I'll definitely be more mindful of repetitive sounds and make important visual cues a bit more dramatic in future!
@ellaris That makes sense!
@euler-moises Yes they are. Sorry that you only saw bad bad robots :( I guess I could've done some work to the generation so that happens less.