Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Ferellia
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Crow Keeper | jam | 632 | 3.50 | 3.35 | 3.35 | 3.21 | 3.51 | 2.94 | 2.62 | 3.42 |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | Seven Trains | jam | 895 | 3.28 | 2.70 | 3.83 | 4.24 | 3.39 | 2.56 | 3.58 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Garbage Cat | jam | 2112 | 3.05 | 3.16 | 2.96 | 3.30 | 3.50 | 2.98 | 3.04 |
This one was pretty challenging! Was fun to see all the different new post office workers. Thought the dichotomy of protecting your house with your cursor vs moving it out to collect power ups was pretty neat as the mail got more intense.
I like this take on the theme! I definitely felt a strong preference for guessing over recording.
This is awesome. Feel like I'm playing something from the re-imagined future of arcade games.
I liked checking out the different stuff that had descriptions. Def felt the need to check out all the diff corners and stuff to see if there was hidden stuff haha.
I loved this! Definitely seeing the mini motorways vibe here. Was definitely fairly challenging to start out (I tried 3 times, didn't get to the mopeds/vans), but I'm starting to see some cool strategies. Vibe and style also v on point. Do kinda wish there was a mute button. Music was great for a short session but I'd probably put on my own stuff if I was gonna play longer.
This was adorable! Go Anna! Also, was surprised by the mechanical depth, played side by side with my friend for high scores and those carrots absolutely ruined my run :( :(
Reminded me of my AH days in wow, but in a way more fun and wholesome way. Had a lot of fun seeing all the items pop up in my room.
Very retro LoZ arcade vibes.
Core mechanic is solid, I like it. I would have liked to see some levels with a mix of the enemy types? Not sure if there weren't any or if I just RNGed into not seeing them. I also think that from a balance perspective, the crystal enemies are disproportionately more costly to deal with. They're not more difficult but it takes a lot more time to clear all their orbs than to defeat the other enemies.
There might be some wonki-ness with the sword hitbox? I couldn't exactly tell but some stuff looked like it should have hit but then didn't.
I thought the enemy designs were nice and clearly differentiated, and the health scaling (which was kind of unclear to me at first) did a good job of making enemies more difficult to deal with. Also I liked the music, was chill.
Big fan of the sprites! There is some artifacting on the slimes, but other than that the animations were really nice and I also thought the flowers were a nice tough as well.
As far as the gameplay goes I kinda....didn't really see the point to killing things or picking up relics? It seemed to just heal you for a tiny amount and give you no sorts of upgrades? I just ran around the arena avoiding enemies for the first 4 rounds. The hitbox of the short sword swing felt really bad to use and disengaging felt like a better use of time. The hitbox of the player body also felt off? At round 5 it felt reasonable but still not really...profitable to kill enemies? I guess I get that getting relics is the "point" but seeing how many waves I could survive and collecting relics seemed like opposed goals. The crazy lag/slow down at round six kind of made me not try to make it to the next round so I died around the end of that round.
I really liked this, but I didn't finish the level (not sure if there were multiple?). I had around 30 crystals collected, got to the start of the first purple crystal.
I'm not a huge fan of this aesthetic on a personal level (the eyes kinda freak me out), but I thought it suited the project well, and esp for a low-animation project, the various effects did a good job of making characters feel not stiff.
I liked the music. It was pleasant.
I think the conceit of the game is really well designed and plays well into the theme. I really enjoyed managing my various party members encumbrance vs their combat value in an upcoming fight.
Balance wise: I think the bard should have a slightly stronger attack (as far as I can tell, it's supposed to be the de-facto tank of the party) OR a slightly larger bag. The high AP weak-hitting attack implies that the class should be good at either clearing small mobs or softening up larger mobs that can be almost-one-shot by higher damage classes, but literally the only situation in which this is relevant is bard + archer vs golem, which leaves the bard w/ a single extra 2 dmg attack. And that extra 2 damage attack is irrelevant unless you get yourself into the same bard + archer vs golem situation again on the next 2 turns in a row. If the bard had 3 attack it'd be able to actually care about its 3 AP, otherwise just give it 1 ap and a 6 damage attack to save player clicks. Alternatively, giving the bard the role that the assassin has with a big inventory would make thematic sense (bards are historically utility characters), and make it so the assassin isn't carrying double duty as the party's stronger attacker and also its best loot gobbler.
I also found the game a little too easy, esp the early camps. The fact that the enemies don't really push you at all on a macro level, they have so much less movement than the player, and they can't really threaten big one shots or anything, means that it was fairly easy if a bit slow to just kill enemies one by one and back up and play super safe. I did find that this improved a bit around the start of the first purple crystals as enemies were placed much closer together and covered each other a bit, which I enjoyed.
QoL wise: I would have really really really liked camera WASD controls. Like, to the point where I think if the game had WASD controls I probably would have finished it since it made moving around the edges of the screen so much more tedious. The fact that camera panning was RMB which was also the button to use abilities making me de-select characters to move the camera was not a fun UX thing.
I also think it would have been really nice to have M.O.S.E. move up as I got further up to various crystals so that I didn't have to slog back for my turn ins. I think if there had been some kind of attrition mechanic (a timer/food/enemies spawning/whatever), it would have felt like an additional element of challenge, but as is it just felt like extra walking that I didn't really want to do.
Also I got kinda sad when I read the druid could burn down forests but then I realized it just meant deal damage, not burn down walls :(
All in all though I really enjoyed this one! Probably in my top 3 that I've played so far this jam. (I also really liked the narrative of the corporatist elves invading the forest lol)
Cute! I liked the vibe and style a lot. Definitely agree that the lack feedback (specifically SFX) on the laser made it feel kind of weird to use. Only played a couple of levels, but enjoyed the level design for the most part. Found the drone airducts a bit un-intuitive to look for though.
I don't really feel like the limited inventory fit super strongly here? Going in I was expecting a bit more of a pick-and-choose kind of thing, but the fact that you're just selecting which type of loot you want made the inventory management fall a little flat for me. Would have enjoyed something along the lines of "you have 3 inventory slots, each upgrade/scrap is a 1-5 star item w/ corresponding value" so that way I would keep exploring and maybe have to choose if I wanted a 5 star scrap item over a 2 star upgrade item, even though it was early and I wanted upgrades more than scrap.
Also wasn't really sure if $ was meant to be spent on something, or if it was just a high score mechanism? Felt kind of arbitrary, esp since there was an upgrade to increase how much $ you got per scrap.
This was super cute! And honestly thank you so much for the insta-boss kill button, this game was clearly designed by people who love and have a lot of experience in the bullet hell genre.
I am historically terrible at bullet hells and I couldn't even clear the first boss without using the cheat button T_T
I love the art, and I think the bubble mechanic was a super clever take on the theme and the balance between offensive/defensive play was such a natural thing here.
I liked the music a lot, and sound effects felt on point, although the meow-ing was a little loud for my liking.
Congrats on finishing your first game jam!!! It's a big accomplishment, and you should be proud.
Done > Not done.
Also, writing dev logs is good! I highly recommend reading over your dev logs after the fact (I like to read over mine around a week later), because you can get some really neat insight putting your thoughts down and then also reviewing them.
Onto the actual game: I actually really like this design! The escort mission-bullet hell hybrid really works and is quite fun. I didn't get it at first and instantly died as I was trying to kill the pixie but as soon as I got it, it was very fun playing inside the circle trying to get more pixie dust. I also felt like the balance was pretty solid (this game was hard and I enjoyed that) and felt like the right level of anxiety inducing over time. Similarly, I thought the music selection helped with that, so good pick there.
Sprite wise I thought everything seemed serviceable and the style was consistent, so that was good. Aiming was very awkward, especially diagonal shots. Not sure if this was intentional or not, but it made certain enemies (mainly the frogs) at certain times extremely difficult to deal with. Also, I couldn't tell if there was a way to direct the fairy to go towards a specific direction, or if it was random? Because there were a lot of times were it just wasn't going towards pixie dust that was just out of reach and that was a little frustrating. This esp made it difficult because of the shrinking area over time as you failed to gain additional pixie dust, since it means you had to leave the safe zone to go collect dust sometimes to get more space so you could dodge, but the fog deals so much damage that you can't afford to do that as fast the circle shrinks. Personal recommendation: I would make depositing pixie dust heal you to full instantly, make it so you can roughly direct the pixie by standing on a specific side of it, and/or decrease the rate at which your circle shrinks.
@jobecr We very much had the classic issue of "the devs become too comfortable with the game and it becomes really hard to tell what's laughably easy vs appropriately easy for the difficulty curve"
@zeit That name may or may not have come up a handful of times in our early design discussions after settling on a crow protagonist :p
@jason-shapiro The buildings lose hp! It can be hard to notice in the early waves, especially if you're not using tab to check their health between waves, but in later waves it's very easy to lose multiple shrines a wave if you don't clear enemies fast enough. (and less buildings = less stats)
@chusmimax this a completely accurate and factual assessment of balance atm >.>
@pro4 The ghosts are actually there to encourage the opposite! You have to go hunt them down or they'll take out your shrines from afar.
@pawel12 Thank you so much for all the feedback! I slowed the camera down a little bit shortly before putting up our upload, and it felt fine on my local Unity editor build but I agree that it feels ungodly slow in the game for some reason :( Definitely a very easy fix if we end up uploading a patch! We also had a lot of discussion on just exactly how slow the crow should be when not flying (the intent is that most of the time if you want to move, you're flying), and I think there are definitely some major tweaks I would want to make to base movement speed and gliding movement speed moving forward (and also subsequently probably the size of the play area?)
@pseudonym404 @billy-s <3
Ty so much to everyone for playing and leaving feedback, it means a lot!
This was really fun! I got 154 points on the seed 385323. There were definitely a few things I didn't understand at first (and still don't after playing one map), but honestly that's kind of expected for this genre of game I think? I like figuring things out over time w/ trial and error and found the UI sufficient for most stuff.
I would have really liked to mouse over/click a building that I had placed to see what bonuses it was currently giving me, and found the tooltips for adjacencies to be a little bit confusing (I don't think it specifically says anywhere that solar panels give you +1 power per each adjacent solar panel, just that placing them together is good? And I could be wrong about that, it just seemed to be the case when I was paying attention to it). Similarly, some of the building restrictions were a bit confusing. Mines I understand, but windmills were kind of weird (on a mountain, not adjacent *except* if it's a different height level?), and I had an issue I couldn't figure where I thought I should have been able to place a solar panel but couldn't.
There were a couple buildings I didn't really understand from a balance perspective: roads??? I'm not really sure why I would place a road instead of just placing another building tbh. I guess they don't cost power or people, but I don't really see how that would be an issue considering if you just build solar panels + residencies you'll be positive on both power and population? Similarly, parks seemed kind of not that good either, but they made a little more sense I guess? I also didn't really understand the difference between points granted "when placed" vs "on completion".
Overall aesthetics, graphics, and vibe were very nice, reminded me a bit of As Far as the Eye vibe!
Edit: looking at other ppl's screenshots maybe it's the following is a bug? You can just connect buildings through each other to the HQ without using roads at all, and I'm starting to think maybe that wasn't intended? It makes for a fun game either way (very civ 6 district organization kinda stuff), but worth looking at I guess.
[Screenshot 2023-10-04 022402.png](///raw/eab/13/z/5f844.png)
This is super clever, and the core game mechanic is very expressive. I got to a score of about 40. I kept trying to build some kind of cheesy defensive position but after a little experimentation it felt like just running around was safer so I didn't accidentally crush myself with my own roof.
I got a score of around 40. Would probably enjoy continuing to play this one. Biggest thing that felt lacking was a more cohesive visual theme, but mechanically I'm a big fan of this entry.
I kept being surprising and impressed by the enemy variety! I cleared it on my 3rd try. First time I got mostly health upgrades and only 1 fire rate upgrade and was just kinda overwhelmed by basic mobs. Second time I made it to the boss but got stuck and died immediately. Third run I realized you could actually clear the giant lasers by shooting the top and cleared it.
Overall had a lot of fun playing it!
I liked the vibe a lot. Would play on my phone while waiting for the bus.
I also thought that eventually we were gonna get multi-platform dash challenges, which I would have enjoyed and could have extended the longevity for quite a while I think.
I think I got to like level 20 and I only stopped bc the game crashed tbh. (I didn't really care about my points, it was just satisfying to dash)
This was super cool! I definitely managed to get myself hard stuck a couple times moving tiles around incorrectly and blocking myself in. Very much felt like my fault, but I wish there had been checkpoints at each of the crystals so that I could have picked up closer to where I got stuck.
Super cute! Really relaxing vibe and the complexity scaled up pretty smoothly. I'm not a big puzzle-platformer kind of gamer, but I can definitely see this appealing to people into the genre, feels like a very natural puzzle mechanic.
Didn't get into the B-sides so maybe it's already in there, but would be really cool to see a puzzle that incorporates existing blocks from a previous puzzle or some stuff that's more mechanically taxing in terms of the platforming elements.
This was really cute! I wasn't a fan of how I couldn't move while there were speech bubbles, and the text was a little small, but I liked the idea of the backwards themed stealth elements and I found some of the dialogue fairly charming.
I'm not a huge fan of body horror/creepy stuff, and the audio kinda freaked me out, so good job on that, definitely seems like you're hitting the right tone for your target audience!
Gameplay wise second portal seemed broken (unless I missed something?), enemies didn't really seem to do anything, and you could just hold down the sword attack button to rapid attack which was both really effective at clearing enemies and also really loud.
Does the money do anything? As far as I can tell being negative or positive money didn't really have any effect? Would be really cool if I could spend money on something like upgrading storage space or changing the shapes for certain products or something.
Kinda felt like an idle game w/ a tetris theme bc of the fact that I couldn't speed up time at all, and it didn't feel like optimizing my space usage really let me do more/better contracts at a time, but I also might not have been trying hard enough to notice?
Also there was a weird bug where if you started a contract but picked up another without hitting "done" on that contract, any items you put in your storage would be stuck permanently.
Generally really enjoyed the aesthetics and theme.