Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Fryer
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Ejected | compo | 243 | 3.53 | 3.58 | 3.78 | 2.58 | 3.56 | 2.67 | 2.90 | 3.58 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Build with Haste | compo | 515 | 3.44 | 3.64 | 3.72 | 3.20 | 2.38 | 2.00 | 2.13 |
I was confused about what to do first because the little square friend looked like it was a bullet shot by the enemy square, so I ran away from it. :(
I figured it out after a while and found the exit. I think it would be more fun if the friend square and the enemies were faster, or if the player was slower so I didn't have to wait for it.
I like the idea, but the progression throws a lot at you fast. I barely got past the 4th level before being overwhelmed.
The art is nice, but the game was very short. I would've liked to see more than just dodging a bird. The mechanics were a bit harsh too. If I held up I'd bounce against the surface, and there was no way that I could see to tell if the penguin was about to drown. I think I got stuck on something at the end, because I had to dive down a bit to get unstuck and win, but when I did it said "game over, you win", which was a bit confusing, as "game over" usually implies you lost.
Cool idea. There seem to be a few bugs with the mechanics, sometimes the creature wouldn't die when I placed the trampoline wrong and it hit the ground, and at one point it walked into a trampoline, got boosted really far up, and fell down and splattered all over my screen.
I'm not sure if having physics on the objects you place really does much for the gameplay. I'd rather have the objects stay where I place them.
The jumping off ledges also took me by surprise a bit. I was expecting it to just walk off, so I placed a trampoline near the bottom of the ledge, but the creature just yeeted itself over it. :D
The little one is cute and that rolling animation just makes it better. Very nice graphics overall.
The combat was a bit tricky at first, but when I figured out the attack pattern it almost became a bit too easy. Another enemy or attack would make it more interesting, but I understand that there's not a lot of time to add infinite content, and a well designed combat system on its own is already impressive.
I wasn't sure if comforting was doing anything at first or if there was a hitbox for it. A sound effect as feedback to know it's working would be a nice addition. Also maybe flashing the fear bar to bring attention to the effect it's having.
It was fun to play and platforms burning because you're fire was interesting. The controls felt very unresponsive at times though, which caused me to die a few times. Not all water killed me, the first and a few of the last waterfalls seem like they don't do anything.
Nice mix of asteroids, shooting games, and keeping it alive!
I played the web version and it has a problem: Ctrl+W closes the currently open tab, so I had to avoid going up and shooting at the same time. If there were more alternatives for shooting that could be avoided.
The concept is nice, but I feel like the mechanics don't really fit the challenge, and things could be better explained. At first I didn't understand that you could create moss with right click, and that it killed beetles. When I saw that it worked as a shield I tried using it like that, but sometimes the building wouldn't produce moss, and I saw no indication of when that would be possible. It felt like I was rolling dice, and if I got unlucky the bugs would kill my buildings without me being able to react. At the end I figured out that the way to win was to just rush through the level and not even use right click at all.
Also, there was a lot of green and contrast, and even the cursor almost blended in with the background.
Interesting game, and I really like the pixel art. The spawn timing for the bats seems very random, and I was wondering if it would even be possible to win at one point when they kept coming as I tried to open a chest, but they calmed down after a while. Then I discovered I could light fires in front of chests while opening them to keep the bats away.
I was scared of walking anywhere else than in a straight line from the ladder at first, but then I figured out I could use kindling as waypoints. I don't know if that was intended, but it lessens the need for a big arrow pointing to the exit, so that the spooky big cave atmosphere can remain.
I tried to let the fire die out just to see what would happen, and it just kept burning, but with almost no light. I think if you were in that situation and didn't have any kindling left it would be a bit annoying, because finding more would be almost impossible. Maybe it's better to just let the player die in that case.
Very nice game. I froze a few times before I figured out the right flow, the balancing of body heat and keeping the fire alive is well done. I noticed the fire bar would slow down as it got lower, letting me get back after collecting a few sticks without panicking. The tracks were also a nice touch and helped both to find my way back and see where I had gone before.
The tutorial was well done, I didn't feel like there was anything I didn't understand how to do in the game after going through it. I did manage to keep my TimTam alive into old age, but managing everything was quite stressful, and I couldn't find time to train it. Maybe extending the play time a bit and making it easier at the start would help ease new players into the stress that comes later.
As for the graphics and music: I think the crunchy backgrounds in the UI were a bit over the top, I'd tone that down a bit. The music seemed to stay on a single chord forever, which I guess added to the feeling of stress somehow, but more movement there would be nice so it doesn't get too repetitive.
I liked the pixel art, the batteries were cute and it was funny to jump around doing battery things.
Something was wrong with the volume controls though, both sliders adjusted the music volume and the sound effects were **very LOUD**, so I had to turn down my system volume until I couldn't hear the music. :(
Beautiful art style. I would've loved to play it in fullscreen mode with more space around the planet to be fully immersed in the experience.
The game felt a bit easy, so I tried to play it without shooting and only collecting stars, but that didn't work. I would've actually enjoyed if it was possible to do that as a way to play the game on hard mode. :D
I like physics games like this, and I've experimented with some very similar ideas in the past, so it was fun playing a game based on those ideas. The fuel mechanic was nice, and I think it could be better if there were fuel tanks you have to navigate to rather than it automatically refilling. That would force me to move around more rather than hovering in the same place all the time.
The physics seemed to be a bit odd, moving platforms didn't really move the drone when I landed on them. Sometimes the drone would tilt in a weird way and it seemed like I needed to use a lot of rotational force to get it back up, as if there was some ghost force acting against my control.
I love cats. That said, hitting cans out of the air is probably one of the funniest game mechanics I've seen. I like the attention to detail with the cans being drawn upside-down when they are flipped over. The pure chaos in easy mode (CANS EVERYWHERE!) was hilarious, but I wanted a challenge, so I tried hard mode too. Having to clean out old cans so the cat could get to the new ones was fun, but trying to flip cans over so the cat could eat from them was a bit tedious.
The cat AI was trolling me a few times I think, it would start going for one can, then it would switch directions to another can for no apparent reason and starve. :'(
This game sent me into speedrun mode, trying it over and over until I got an almost perfect run. The graphics are simple, but the gameplay is fantastic. Variable jump height that feels right, music that made me want to go fast before I even noticed the timer, and excellent level design. I even tried to get some extra momentum from landing a jump on decline slopes, which I noticed would push me forward a bit right after I landed, but I'm not sure if that contributed much to my final result. And I obviously abused the level 4 bug, egg teleport! :D
speedrun.png
There was one falling platform that landed on the ground, and when I jumped on it again it would sit there and shake. There's also a bug with the music when you restart while it's playing: It keeps playing and overlaps itself when you get to the egg. I got about 4 of them playing at once when I was restarting trying to get a good run.
The start seemed to be more trial and error than puzzle, but after I got through that I liked the puzzles. At the memory maze I just ran straight through the last part, but then you added a hard mode with insta-death, which I thought was clever, but now I'd have to trial and error it even more because I didn't do it right on easy mode and every bad attempt means death!
Nice art and ambience, felt like I was in a deep vast ocean. It would be neat to have some more challenge, like funding for food running out perhaps, or some additional external threat to your robofishies. And I like the fishies' mouth, can't tell if they are happy or sad, and would catch myself projecting an emotion onto them depending on how low their hunger bar was. xD
Robo fishies will save earth! (Or destroy it, who knows what happens when they run out of trash to clean up :thinking:)
I defeated the giant manbearpig!
Fun game. Would like the boss more if it had less health or charged at you once in a while to mix things up. The (randomly timed?) waves of smaller enemies did help it feel less like a grind though.
The controls were a bit tricky, but it was a fun game when I got used to it. The only thing that was a bit frustrating was losing control over objects you possess after you disable a trap, and the object then being able to kill people. Dying from running into a cone or trashcan seems unlikely. :D
The graphics and audio are great and the style is coherent.
Enjoyed playing it enough to play through all the waves. It was pretty easy though, and it got easier later even though the enemies were tougher because I got more money than I could use. :D
Being able to walk around and shoot enemies myself was a nice change from normal tower defense games.
Very nice graphics and audio, the atmosphere made me feel like I was the last hope in a world where there's only darkness left. I didn't manage to defeat the octopus nest, and I'm not really sure how close I was either. It would help if it was more obvious what my attacks were doing I think. I saw a lot of shiny stuff flying around, but I'm not sure if it was dealing any damage.
Thank you all for the feedback so far! This is my first Ludum Dare, and playing everyones games and having my own game being enjoyed is making me want to do it again next time. :D
@camilo-quintero You can rotate blocks with the mouse wheel or the arrow keys.
@1stepcloser Nope, no sound effects, that's why I opted out of the audio category. It's not something I'm very confident with, and I didn't have a lot of time to experiment.
@lamossus Thanks for the advice and feedback, I added a gif of the gameplay. And I think you're right about opting out of humor, I'll put more consideration into that if I do this again.
Cool style and game mechanics, but it felt almost impossible because the enemies seemed to spawn faster than I could shoot. I figured out I could hide under the z shaped platform to lure most flying enemies into a corner though, so I survived a while doing that, but when my rockets ran out it was all over. :D
Simple and fun game. The start and retry buttons are very small (in fullscreen mode). On my first time playing I didn't realise I had lost when one of the eggs fell over, because the game kept on going.
Going between the modes of plant keeping and finding resources was a nice game idea, and seeing the plant grow up at the end was satisfying.
I feel like there should be another way to lose other than dying to the spiders, like the plant drying out after some time or maybe some other threat to the plant's survival, so that you're fighting more to keep the plant alive than yourself. It was also pretty easy to avoid the spiders, and I think they could be placed closer to the main water collecting path in the level to make it more difficult.
I've played flight simulators a lot, so I liked this. I was wondering how broken controls and going through hoops related to the theme, but somehow didn't expect to be stuck doing loops with the plane. It was a bit tricky to figure out, but I started getting a hang of it and got through 9 hoops before getting overconfident and crashing.
I think the shadows do a decent job of giving me a clue about the depth, but maybe tweaking the camera FOV to be a bit wider (looks like it's orthographic as it is now) would make it more obvious.
The graphics are very clean. Sure it's simple shapes, but they're nicely colored and blended. The sound effects and music fit nicely with the gameplay too.
I was a bit confused the first time I played about if there was a health indicator, and it was hard noticing it because the game just kept throwing stuff at me and it was very subtle. I didn't see the controls anywhere either, so I hope it was just A, D, Space, and I didn't miss anything.
The movement deceleration felt a bit too slow, which made it hard to precisely control when the tight bullet pattern appeared. Being inverted at the top threw me off a bit, so I mostly stayed at the bottom of the loop. It'd be interesting if there were bullet patterns or anything else that forced you to go around the entire loop.
I went into the settings and saw music and effects volume controls, but there was no music or sound there to test different settings.
Whew, I saved the server and data! That was a very hectic, but fun experience. I really like the idea of restricting the order of actions, while still being free to time everything however you want.
I can see the potential in coming up with strategies for different levels if you plan on developing the game further. I managed to beat the current level by prioritizing health and shooting, and cheesing it by spamming dash to get back my attacks quickly, so having more layouts to make each card useful would really bring the whole idea together nicely.
The music and the player character both feel very wholesome, and then you're fighting all these mean viruses, and I don't know where I'm going with this, but I liked it.
First time I played I gave up on my run because I didn't know what I was doing and made the game really hard for myself by building a bad deck. Maybe some way to change it without restarting the entire game would be a good idea.
One thing I didn't notice at the start was that the platforms didn't block enemy bullets, so me taking cover wasn't helping my chances of surviving. I'd also like to be able to slash viruses below me while standing on the platforms. I think that would make the slash card feel more useful.
I love this game, best one I played so far, I just wish there were more levels so I could keep playing! The puzzles were not very hard, but one of them did take me a while to figure out. That ending was great too. I walked into the room and thought "I know exactly what this is!" and it was just a satisfying as I wanted it to be.
All the mechanics pretty much explained themselves as I tried doing different things, and I didn't run into any bugs or soft-locks.
Interesting idea to have an artifical gravity space station be the loop, and nice docking cutscene.
I got to the 3rd space station, but I don't think it was possible to clear it because aliens kept coming from both directions with no real way of avoiding them other than climbing up the ladder.
I couldn't finish a single project, but I guess that was the point, sad times. Funny meta idea to make a project about the struggles of finishing project. I think that's something a lot of us can relate to.
On my first few playthroughs, I didn't realise that you could create more than one project at a time, and kept only getting to 83%. I had to read the comments and check the screenshots again to realise I had missed an important aspect of the game. Part of the problem I think was that the new project window spawns on top of the project manager window, so I thought that was all there was to it. Making the windows offset a bit so that the new project button is still visible after creating the first window would fix that. Also, colorizing the title bars, perhaps even highlighting them when you hover over them and changing the cursor could help make it clearer that you can move the windows.
I like the out of memory mechanic when you try to create more than 5 windows. It was funny, but also stopped me from trying to cheese the game by abandoning my current projects without penalty. On my last attempt I tried closing projects as they were returning less "joy" and managed to get to 95%. I'm not sure if the game is winnable, but I'd like to see the penalty for closing projects being decreased slightly, so that you can get to 100% (unless that is already possible and I'm just bad).
The sound effects were very satisfying too, just what I expect from a clicker game.
This idea is great, I'd love if the difficulty curve wasn't so steep though. I gave it a few tries and couldn't get more than 167 coins. The bison seemed to come in groups, which made them almost impossible to deal with, especially when there were rocks on the road and vultures circling above at the same time so early on in the game.
The art style is nice and coherent. The only thing I'd add there would be shadows. Some funny sound effects would definitely help bring everything together and make the experience awesome!
There was a lot of dead space on the bottom of the screen. I think if you shifted the camera forward a bit it would make it easier to deal with rocks before you're attacked by all things from all directions.
Today I made a difference in the world. I helped people through their struggles, guiding them to happiness. That's how it feels playing this at least, really nailed the mood, while also definitely giving me a laugh over how it's styled like a petition website with stock photos.
Anyway, the amount of level design that has gone into this and how each level has a unique story, and how it all fits into this narrative of helping citizens with their troubles is very impressive for a jam game, great work! And the music really helped immerse me in the role.
I also like how you really only need to solve the issues in the petitions, any other unrelated disaster caused by that goal is irrelevant. Almost reminds me of how things work in the real world sometimes... :joy:
Very creative level design with great difficulty progression and step by step introduction to the game, and nice use of the theme to create a unique platforming mechanic. Good job adding moving platforms and moving and rotating loops!
The movement was a bit wonky with the slow acceleration and deceleration, but the variable jump height was nice. Sometimes after landing on a platform after being boosted, the jump wouldn't work immediately, which became very frustrating when the levels started getting harder. I'm not sure if ducking was useful for anything.
The sound effects were all fitting, all that was missing was some intense music to really set the mood.
It's an interesting concept. Never played or saw anything like it, and it fits the theme well. I found it very hard to jump while also focusing on the hula hoop though. The arrows when I was close to failure helped a bit, and I'd like if something like that was visible constantly.
Since the game mechanic is very different and a bit hard to get a hang of, it would be nice if the difficulty curve of the levels was a bit less steep. After the first jump there was a left jump, and then a trap that I didn't notice that reset me to the start.
I'd suggest using a different instrument for the main melody, or softening it a bit. I had to turn down the volume a lot! :sweat_smile:
It's a fun idea, but it feels like the mechanics are a bit unreliable, like I don't always know what wall I'll end up on when I jump, and sometimes Moku even does an extra tiny jump after I land. I think some levels also depend on the timing of enemies and obstacles when you spawn, which gets a bit frustrating if you end up with unfavorable timings several times in a row.
The graphics and music are great (especially the music), and I like the story in the beginning.
I'm not sure if it was a bug, but when I died on one level after completing it, it looked like the game ended, but then I checked the list of levels, which showed me there was a lot more. I didn't know which level was the last one I played, so I had no idea where to go from there.
I didn't understand that you could click the icons at the top to build structures at first. I thought they were inventory slots or something, but after overcoming that misunderstanding I started getting resources and slowly rebuilt the planet.
One thing that'd help a lot would be some sort of indicator on the machines you build showing you what resources they give you. I kept forgetting which machine did what, and the silhouettes weren't giving me much of a hint about what to expect, so I wasted a lot of resources at the start.
Numbers showing how many of each resource you have would also be nice. The floating trail of icons gets a bit crowded after a certain point.
I love these types of endless dodging games. This one in particular is extra hard because of the perspective, but that just makes me want to try harder. I thought I'd figured it out and gotten in a flow a few times, but the game just kept throwing weird combos at me, and getting the timing right for the moving obstacles while also planning for what was ahead of them was brutal. I played until I got to 10 laps, but I might revisit this game later to improve that score.
The only thing I can think of to do differently would be the slowing down and speeding up. Instead of having 3 different speeds to think about, it would be a bit easier to have just a single key to go either faster or slower.
The blind game idea is very interesting, and this game executes it great. I like how you played around with getting platforming to be varied when you can't really sense more than what's immediately around you. I was a bit confused about what was going on near the end section until I figured out the right head bumping technique, but solving it was very satisfying.
I think the wind sound was a bit loud compared to the ledge sound, so I had to really focus to hear when I was close enough to the first death pit to jump. Other than that the sounds were pretty clear, and it didn't feel like any part of the level was unfair.
Some thoughts after looking at the map after I played: The first ledge that you had to drop down was made clear by the narration, but the second ledge felt just like the death pit before it, and I didn't want to risk dropping down and restarting, so I jumped and probably almost landed on a snake instead. I realise now that the wind sound had to be present to mean there was a death pit, but I didn't understand that while I was playing.
Fun game, started out hard, then got very easy when I upgraded to one-shot bullets, then started getting harder again because so many zombies spawned. In my attempt to escape them I picked up a super speed power-up and managed to glitch through the fence, but the power-up ran out and I couldn't get back in. So I started shooting the zombies on the other side of the fence, got one kill, but then the zombies started pushing eachother through the fence. I ran away from them for a while and the game crashed. :joy:
The collision seems to be a bit buggy in general, especially when the bullets go straight through zombies without hitting them. In that case I'd suggest using something like raycasting to make sure bullets can't skip things between updates.
The power-ups were nice, but that speed power-up was definitely too fast and hard to control.
The music was fitting and didn't feel too repetitive, and the sound effects (and all that blood, so SO much blood!) added to the satisfaction of killing the zombies. The upgrade sound effect was a bit loud compared to everything else though.
I really liked the level design on this one. At first it felt like just any other platformer, then I realised that "oh, this is going to be the same level over and over with small differences? OH right, the theme is stuck in a loop!" Knowing that it was going to be the same thing again and again, but with a few small things changed, made me oddly excited to find out what the change was going to be each time.
I thought I'd actually get stuck eventually (not in a loop, just because the puzzle seems complicated enough that there would be a mistake somewhere), but I didn't, and managed to finish the game. And the ending was funny when I did! All that trouble to get exploded... :joy:
The music was great too.
I can't find any serious flaws, so here are a couple minor details that could be a bit better: - Blott almost blends in with the background. - Jumping up on 2 block walls wasn't very smooth, so it was a bit scary when there were lasers right after a 2 block jump and I had to stop completely just as I reached the top.
Wave 69 with 13 zappers, felt like a good point to stop. :joy: bzzzt.png
I realised after a few minutes that my towers could break eachother. Some health/damage indicator on them could probably make that clear, as I was very confused at first why I had fewer towers than I had placed.
The slime and fire towers weren't very useful, but I guess tower defense games take a while to balance properly, so I won't expect that much from a jam game. I'm not sure the zappers were really that useful either, but they're cool enough to use anyway.
The best strategy seemed to be just placing a bunch of towers facing straight paths and making them shoot only on that path. With that in mind, the actual gameplay wasn't that much more different than a regular tower defence game, except towers can now only shoot in one direction. Just recording actions and having them loop didn't seem to work reliably enough to do anything fancy, so maybe something more needs to happen to make those loops consistently have the same effect on each wave, but I'm not sure what that would be.
I answered no on the first question and died immediately. And then I died in every possible way after that, and I even had to restart the game to go left at the start because I forgot to do that the first time I played. I had more fun finding different ways to die than winning the game, so I wish there were even more traps. The random saw blade out of nowhere made me jump, so that was my favorite, but I also liked the sikes and the cows.
Since there was a lot of respawning, the slow death and alive screens became a bit annoying after a while. It would be nice to be able to click past them.
I tried going through all the walls, but one of them let me go a bit inside it, which I thought was just a random glitch until the game told me there was a hidden door there.
I wasn't sure if that flat rock looking thing was supposed to be a button to activate the first trap, because it seemed to activate it even if I didn't quite step on it.
Nice first game. The platforming and collision seem to work without problems, so good job on that!
I thought some of the jumps were impossible, but realised I could double jump, which made it easier. Some indication that double jump is possible would be nice, because if I hadn't thought of that I might've just assumed the game was flawed.
Nice and easy game with lots of potential that could be expanded on in many ways. More levels with different obstacles and targets, score for best time and accuracy, longest distance, adding several hoops and trying to jump through several in one jump, and so on.
A clear indicator of when you win other than the sound effect would be a nice addition.
Nice graphics and music, and the platforming was interesting, especially the 3d rotating platforms with 2d gameplay.
The rotating platforms seemed to have a bug, causing them to break the 2d spell. If you walk up onto the bushes while the platform is rotated 90°, then wait until it's normal, walk to the end of the bush, and wait for another 90° rotation, you'll have been pushed far enough outside of the regular 2d gameplay plane that weird things start happening: bug.png I did this twice. The first time by maistake, and I tried to ignore it and just jump to the next platform, but it was small and I was at the wrong depth, so I missed it. I also think I missed the death collider, because the level didn't restart. The second time I did hit the death collider, but the camera went crazy trying to reset.
Nice art style and music.
I didn't realise at first that there were wheels and skulls to indicate which path I should take, but after I figured that out i managed to get to the caravan. Maybe some tracks or other more obvious clues would help with that, unless the point was that you had to figure that out.