GameCarpenter

Protect Thy Cargo by Luke Parker 2020-04-24T04:20:27Z

The whole personal shield mechanic, and positioning your ship to block seemed quite good. The elemental shield mechanic of the carrier however, I didn't have a very good understanding of other than put up the shield when being shot at, and drop it when you're not.

Is the large delay between waves linked to the shield cooldown? Maybe you could immediately drop and refresh the shields once there were no enemy bullets left instead to increase the pace.

Heal Shield Peel by GameCarpenter 2020-04-24T01:35:18Z

Yeah, I can see how this could be confusing. I wanted the first few levels to be tutorialized (hence the staggered skill access), but I didn't get around to it. I can see that some feedback for why you can't use a skill would have helped. I normally would have done that with a sound effect, but I was trying to stay focused on mechanics for this jam.

The red health bar across the top represents the enemy team. The small squares in it represent the number of enemies. The health bars along the bottom represent your allies. The white line under them, represent the ally which is selected.

After you use an ability, you can't use it again for a period of time. The squares along the bottom represent these 'cooldowns' and when you can use you the abilities again.

Q applies a health regeneration buff on the ally that you have currently selected. They will start gaining health over time. It is associated with the green square on the bottom. When the square is green, you can use the ability. You can use this in every level.

W applies a shield to the ally that you currently have selected. It is associated with the blue square on the bottom. When the square is blue, you can use the ability. You can't use this ability until the second level.

E applies a 'peel' for the selected ally. In the context of the game, this means that the selected ally will take damage at a slower rate. Allies get into danger over time and start taking more damage. It is associated with the purple square on the bottom. When the square is purple, you can use the ability again. You can't use this ability until the third level.

R activates your 'ultimate' it acts as a panic button. It applies all three of the above effects to _all_ allies. It has a very long cooldown - you won't be able to use it again for some time. It is represented by the red square on the bottom. When it is red, you can use the ability. You cannot use this ability until the fourth level.

Heal Shield Peel by GameCarpenter 2020-04-24T01:35:18Z

(Edit, double post.)

DANGER! Alien Cow Thieves! by Shredmer 2020-04-24T21:56:49Z

Ack, review got eaten, but anyway here's the TLDR. Fun, chaotic, with some target prioritization strategy elements. Odd jump mechanics add to the chaos, no time for deliberately picking up coins. Cows don't obey gravity, possible for player and cows to get stuck to bottom of platforms. Some level/wave mechanics would be nice. Some sort of positive progress and goals other than score. Maybe an eventual victory condition.

In A Game Wherein by SSStormy 2020-04-24T01:16:55Z

The mood is cool, and it's kinda amusing in a meta way. I was thinking of doing a collection of minigames at one point, in a way this outlines the issue with that - not a lot of time to spend on any of them =P.

Aqua Qaos by AlbionBrown 2020-04-24T03:19:34Z

If you're in my state, you had best hope to live in NorthWestVille, cause every other city is straight up doomed. Simple enough idea, though at this speed, I think I could maybe handle 2 cities =P. It would be better if things just burned to the ground / flooded, slower. A level system where one city is repaired each level (ala missile command) would be nice. Then you could slowly scale up the difficulty as well.

I used a select and act interface, and I think that would work well for this also if you wanted to do keyboard controls. Select a city using the numberpad even, then choose an action. Or select cycle counter clockwise / clockwise with left / right, and raise / lower with up/down (or the wasd equivalent.)

Dragon Breeder by imhanner 2020-04-24T05:48:35Z

The graphics were quite nice. The only sad thing is that I didn't have a lot of time to look at the malady descriptions / images because I was too busy playing the game. Maybe they could have been used as a next event preview so learning them would have gameplay relevance for that mastery element.

I saw in the post jam version you added in progress counters, which was needed. It also felt like the difficulty levels were tuned a bit better? It felt like in the jam version Skilled was tuned a bit on the hard side - either that, or those progress counters really made a difference.

Very good.

Bon Bon and Eggward by moonblaststudios 2020-04-24T02:49:51Z

Punishing, but pretty fun. Needing to throw the egg in order make jumps is pretty tough. There was an area with two spike spawners on the ground, and two grass platforms in the air, one on the right you need to double jump to, and another area across the way that it seems like shift jumping is the easiest way to get to. The spike area above there is as far as I got. I'm pretty sure the door to the conveyor belt in the area before that is supposed to be open - getting the egg through those triple spawners is tough =P. Really would have been nice if the checkpoints worked XD.

Bit buggy with the gravity occasionally being disabled or something, and it seemed like some spikes the egg could kill, and some killed the egg, so that was a thing. I thought the conveyor belt areas were the most thematic. Getting to the egg to warm it up before time ran out. Those were my favorite mechanics. There were situations that I found myself waiting around for the egg to warm up though, and that was not the best experience. Was that going to be an additional function of the checkpoints? Some of them seemed well positioned for that.

Overall quite enjoyable.

Friendly Fire by Revetoon 2020-04-26T03:01:03Z

Fire blocked the selection text that was telling you that you were actually selecting the fire. Made it difficult to actually feed it at some point. The fun of the mechanics all seemed to be in doing things you ought not to do =P. The objects found mechanic which felt like the main progress(?) wasn't very clear as far as I could tell about what a thing to find was, and when you found one.

Match Shooter by Gipzo 2018-04-23T09:38:40Z

I sorta understand how you're supposed to play, I was successful in getting SOME matches, but I found it unreasonably difficult. You're really pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and really combining the genre's fearlessly. I think the game would have been a lot more fun if the enemies just showed up at a much slower rate. The bird and alien looked to be a pretty similar color on my PC I thought I might be able to match them. The graphics are just functional, and not really unified. The sound is balanced loud for me, and in terms of content, just passable. Overall an impressively ambitious attempt at the theme.

Speed Phoning by TimBeaudet 2018-04-25T03:22:01Z

I had a really hard time at first, but once I got the idea what was expected of me, I was able to complete it. It was actually a pretty intense experience. This was one of the genre combinations I was considering, but I never considered a real-time implementation - I just didn't think it would be reasonable. This not only has real-time racing, mixed with puzzle solving in a way that really highlights how incompatible they should be as genres, but ties them together with similar sensible mechanics on both ends.

The graphics are good, and functional, if a bit barren looking. I liked the perspective choice. The racing car look, however, while appropriate for a racing game, does seem to contradict the mood of the rest of the game. Namely the common issue that using a cell phone while driving represents, which is re-enforced by the target speed is given as 30mph. It would have been more in line with the mood to have some beeping sound effects rather than an admonishment to drive faster, and ideally a more urban looking setting would have worked better than a race track if you had time.

The sound is missing an awful lot. No music, limited sound effects, and very rough ones at that. Despite the dash of humor they possess, their flat delivery makes them fall flat at doing either.

Once you realize what's going on, the gameplay is incredible. Don't think I've played such a stress inducing game without having jump scares involved somehow. What I found particularly amazing was that even though all you need to do while driving to keep going is move one square randomly back and forth; because of the way the controls work, I still found myself messing up and veering off the road when all I was trying to do at that moment was just keep driving for a second =P.

Legendary Alien Race by Rahtainka 2018-05-11T11:00:21Z

The excellent audio and art work together to portray a solid mood. I think you could have done something more with the background, and I did have some occasional odd camera angles after chaining together long sequences, but that's about it. Might have been nice to color code the movement lines based on the movement speed selected.

I think the combination of the two genres was obviously present, and handled in a cohesive manner, but it was a bit odd in that it feels like it takes away from the game, more than adds to it. A speedometer might have been a nice touch, but I'm not sure if that would be a positive change or not, since judging your speed was an important component of the challenge.

For me the worst part of this in terms of fun. It's not that it wasn't fun, but that it really pushed the short play aspect of LD to its limits. Despite being in first most of the second race, I felt like I still had room for improvement, but there just wasn't any point to playing it again. That was another issue with this genre combination. Having no real execution requirement makes doing it again feels inevitable. This is one case where even a simple High Score table (for 'fastest' in game time) would have added a lot. A proper time trial mode (with splits and such, maybe a ghost) would have been even better.

Overall this is a very well presented game with clashing genres that only falls short in just how incompatible the genre's are, and there not being enough of it to enjoy.

The King's League by frozenfire92 2018-04-24T05:26:38Z

My favorite aspect of this game was how you designated each tier of weapon with a specific color so that you knew what was the best for you to use. The downside however, was that the weapons had a distinct hierarchy. They all felt like they attacked at a similar speed, and had a similar rate of fire, and did similar damage. The only difference I noticed, is that it seemed like the bow allowed you to move while shooting, whereas the magic missile seemed to have a distinct delay between firing and moving again, although I rarely noticed it. I was hoping that the bow would fire significantly faster than magic, and that the sword would do bonus damage compared to other weapons in the same tier. Something like that.

The beginning is crazy and fun, with you needing to run and hide tofind a weapon advantage and survive. This is the best part of the game. Once you have your weapon setup down, (that is, you have gold magic) the rest of the game is an exercise in patience more than anything else. You simply need to go around and find all of the enemies and kill them. The mini-map was a nice addition to help you do that, but an indicator of the direction of the nearest enemy would have been more helpful as you approach the end game, as you hunt down and execute the mostly defenseless enemies.

The bugs I noticed were that for some reason, there were occasionally pairs of floating hands around shooting bolts of magic. I think they left their bodies nearby doing nothing, but I can't be certain. The other thing is just a matter of visual feedback - the edge of the map is impassible, but there's no indication of this, which just makes it seem like you can't continue moving in certain directions for no apparent reason. A visible wall of some sort would have helped there. Finally, it seemed like enemy archers didn't bother updating where they were aiming after firing a shot, so they ended up being ineffective despite their range.

The weapon placement seemed very haphazard. Sometimes it was difficult to pick up a weapon because two of them had spawned in such close proximity. There were also a few times an enemy picked up something I wanted, and it would have been nice for them to drop at least the best of their gear on death.

Overall it felt like this game, while it starts strong, really falls off quickly as you immediately win the arms race. With the enemies having no real ability to engage in ranged combat or group tactics, they have no chance of damaging you any longer. At that point, the game becomes a slow walk toward your inevitable victory.

Dash and Slash by Bookworm31 2018-05-10T12:45:14Z

Very fun game. The card mechanics felt a bit odd as implemented since there was this strong feeling that you really wanted your hand to consist of one of everything all the time. Usually I ended up just using whatever I had duplicates of in order to cycle to having a full set of tools available at all times, but that meant I sometimes dashed into an enemy spawn, which changed up how I had to react to the random level generation. The random level generation mixed with that added a lot of replayability. There was some stagnation in that the situations tended to play out identically if I just walked up to the sections, but occasionally, whether it was part of the setup, or just from dashing, enemies would end up in slightly different locations, so I had to be careful not to do something silly =P.

The graphics were pretty simple, it was nice that there were some animations though. The red slime did look a bit odd in the air sometimes, but it was all functional. The grass tiles blended well, which oddly, because the game was so strategic, was a bit of a problem until I learned how to read the tiles. It would have been nice for the terrain to continue off the edges of the level. It also would have been cool to detect cases where blocks were stacked directly on top of each other, and have solid dirt instead of grass underneath them. The slash and jump cards weren't immediately obvious from their graphic, but it was easy to understand what they did once you used them.

The graphical style felt consistent, and the mood was decent, if somewhat generic in places. Vaguely reminded me of Adventure Island on the NES. Doors were a bit out of place though. Could also have really used some light music to help lock in the mood. The sound effects were functional; they were representative of the actions, and well-balanced in terms of volume.

What I really liked about the implementation of the theme is that the game really plays a lot like an action platformer / runner, with the 'wait' card being a discretized version of slowing down. This really clicked for me when I saw that using the jump card in midair has no effect. Even though the UI and mechanics have the feel of a strategy/puzzle game, the underlying mechanics are bound to action conventions.

One bug I noticed fairly early on is that the game over screen doesn't properly display what level you reached, always listing it as level 1. After a few games, I also noticed some odd things involving hitting slimes in unexpected ways. The green slimes disappear without a sound when you land on them. If that's the behavior you want, it feels like it needs a squish sound effect to go with it. Because of this, I messed around with the red slimes too. If you 'land on' red slimes, you just pass through each other. What I thought it was even more odd is that jumping up into a red slime doesn't kill you, instead, it 'blocks' you and just treats it as moving forward. I was kind of surprised that you don't need to actually touch the door to exit the level, which again makes me think that a door isn't really the right choice here, even if it is sort of the generic level end object =P.

In any case, it's a very good game, since it's a lot of fun, and a nice example of combining two genres, with some really interesting interaction with, and integration of, the component elements.

Type Dungeon by roy 2018-05-12T09:49:57Z

I enjoyed this, probably because my typing is decent. I used my Colemak keyboard layout for playing this, and was pleased that it didn't seem to matter since everything was random anyway.

The level generation worked, but it had some problems. Uncommon letters showed up much more often than their usage frequency would suggest. It might have been nice to weigh them toward more common letters. It was also a little disorienting, but not game breaking, when two characters with the same letter showed up next to each other.

The rating system at the end seemed sort of arbitrarily cruel. I think awarding 'titles' like goblin slayer, orc slayer, giant slayer, and so on, would have been a better choice and helped incorporate more of that dungeon crawling theme (and probably easier to do more variety with). Everyone is going to be somewhere different in terms of typing strength, and just saying, the equivalent of "you're bad" isn't going to encourage further improvement. Another option would be an adaptive system, but that only works in certain contexts, here it might be too abusable.

It was nice to have a dungeon-crawler-esque vision system, but it was quite an unusual implementation. It wasn't really the pseudo-line-of-sight based vision I would expect from a dungeon crawler. The key placement could have had some extra logic tacked on as well. Sometimes it was visible from the very beginning of the level. Other times, the key would spawn directly on a time piece, which is kind of annoying in that it basically removes that piece from the level.

The graphics were simplistic and generic. Sometimes I found the letters difficult to distinguish from each other though. I wonder if a larger size, or darker color would have helped. The sound effects were okay, and if you're going to do them every step, music isn't as important as usual. The 'miss' sound effect was (understandably) a bit extra loud, but in general the volume on them felt good.

Personally I would have preferred if the timer didn't start on a level until you pressed your first key as I expected from both a dungeon crawler and a typing game. It helps make the game a little more reliable in that you don't have to worry about the time you spend to find yourself, and it also adds a bit of strategy in that you can plan a route. Those benefits though are at the cost of pacing and action, so I could understand choosing to start the timer right away as well.

Typing is a common genre crossover choice, although usually you have less real interactivity than with this game. It would have been cool to get more of the typing features (like here, characters per minute) or dungeon features (like some dungeon crawl-y combat) in there as well.

Overall, I felt like the game was carried by being fun. Getting in a good generation system, and the heavily execution-driven gameplay gave it a lot of replayability as well. I just wish you had better assets, and explored integrating the genre's more fully in the game.

Code T by good.enough 2018-05-12T06:20:24Z

I thought this was a decent amount of fun. I ended up beating the game - almost got stuck, not on the last password so much (which I came close to guessing from context before I found what I needed), but on finding the computer that I hadn't entered the correct password into yet to get to the underground section - I ended up just following the wall all the way along until I saw it. Would have been nice to make password computers, especially ones you hadn't entered a password into, more distinct, or glow like quest objectives or something. In any case, I enjoyed this.

Yeah, the theme falls slightly flat, in that this has a very escape room feel. It is kind of a cross with a story game, or book or something - that is to say the mechanic by which you escape is pretty unique. There also isn't platforming to speak of, despite being a platformer. I did like the platforming mechanics that were there though. Especially that holding down doesn't shoot you through ground platforms. It was nice to have that added bit of control. There was the problem with colliding with the floor from the side stopping your jump, that could have been better.

I liked the way that irrelevant parts of the level were closed off as you progressed. It made it easier to navigate the areas. It's one case I would have especially liked some sound effects, so you could hear areas closing when you opened a path - just so you weren't confused later on. Would have been nice to change the coloring of the background wall to further divide sections of the level as well, to help the player keep their bearings a bit easier.

Of course there's no audio that I could detect, and the humor was only in the 'random = funny' sense of learning minutiae about coating processes. The mood was reasonably good, computers and hidden passwords, secret doors, and laser grids. Even the silence wasn't too out of place in a game that should theoretically be stealth oriented. I really would have liked if our protagonist was more of an agent type though. Something a bit sunglasses and suit oriented maybe =P.

The graphics worked well, but most of it was quite simple. The font was a bit problematic at times, especially the 'a', whose tail was too long, and some of the capital letters were a bit low on detail, and thus difficult to make out clearly.

I actually wanted to use something like this in a game (looking through books to find information), so it's interesting to see an implementation and get a feel for what the gameplay experience might be like. I found it surprisingly challenging to pick out the relevant information, although it helped a lot to form a general idea what each 'book' covered, so I would know where I might find the information I'm looking for.

Overall, I actually quite enjoyed this, it was a really good amount of content, and the gameplay was unique enough to keep me interested. I also like _Choice of Games_ titles though, so I may be unique in the amount of reading I enjoy in my games =P. In any case, good effort.

Bloom by LuckyFeathers 2018-05-11T09:52:32Z

The core concept is really the most interesting thing about this game. Having a like/dislike system based on appearance and shared hobbies in a civilization building game sounds great. I love the idea that this also has an effect on the neighboring rulers (somehow). I can imagine how you could use an envoy system, maybe work on breeding a perfectly suitable match for the picky sods to create an alliance. Or have the strength of your alliance be ultimately determined by which nation's diplomat is the best match for them.

As weird as it sounds, the one thing I think could have improved this game, is not giving the other players any units. 90% of the game is having the computer controlled factions spread (densely) out of control. Then eventually as you approach turn 40, the turns take so long as to become indistinguishable from the game freezing. The worst part of that is that their units don't seem to actually effect the gameplay. Not to mention that meanwhile I only have 5 people to move around (I did manage to get a couple together at least), compared to up to 80 of theirs (visible). If I had managed to be moving around 80 units, I probably could have used the break but... oh well.

The audio was another spot where the game did well. The light fanfare music hit the mark for a generally upbeat medieval setting. The sound effects were good as well, if a bit sparse.

The main problem is that the game just isn't fun - especially for a LD game, where most people would only play it for a few minutes. I think I could get a lot more done in a second playthrough now that I understand all the mechanics, but its just drudgery. Who knows, maybe all it needs is a really good tutorial, or a touch of streamlining or optimization, but it's way too slow to want to try another 40 turns from the beginning.

The graphics were okay, although the character art was simultaneously amusing and bizarre =P. There was an fairly high amount of seemingly unintentional humor in the game despite the more serious general presentation. The humor was a nice break, but did make the game feel a bit disjointed in that sense. Most of the comedy was in the various leaders, and their odd, vaguely offensive comments about whatever random innocuous thing they hated (I'll agree murderers aren't the best though). It would have been nice to have had the dialog in boxes, and get little arrows and such. I didn't realize the text was to be clicked on for a bit.

Overall, it's a really interesting idea with some good elements, that because of pacing, the computer action lag, and the time commitment it requires, didn't really come together for me into a fun experience.

Burger Flipper by GroverTheGrovekeeper 2018-04-26T11:09:46Z

This game is great, I completed it twice, assuming that the level with 3 pizza ovens shooting heat seeking missiles, and two of the burger projectile plants is the last one. It would have been nice to have an ending screen or even just loop back to the beginning. It was an impressive quantity of levels for a game. The tutorial seemed tacked on compared to some of the other elements, but having a tutorial at all is well beyond the scope of the game, although I thought pressing L was an especially odd choice.

This game did a great job of meshing turn-based, and real-time mechanics together in a single game in a rather innovative way. The humor was good, but it didn't work all that well for me. Perhaps part of it is that the game is so awesomely intense, that there doesn't seem to be a lot of time to appreciate it. Additionally all the little things that could be done with audio to enhance the humor is missing, as audio is something that isn't in this game.

The graphics are very good for the most part. The 'machine gum' isn't super clean looking, and in my first playthrough I kept trying to target squares to move to because of the floor pattern, despite the fact that my movement radius was clearly a circle. I didn't really get that into my head the first time through.

For me, the trickiest thing about this game was evaluating the audio, basically that there wasn't any. Ultimately, I had to ask how leaving out audio effected the game as a whole. The one issue I had that was core to the game was that sound would have been very helpful in knowing when you took damage. I would constantly come out of a skirmish only to have to check my remaining health. Often I wouldn't know how I suffered the damage I had taken. Did I dodge too early? Did I let an enemy get too close to me? While the animations did a good job presenting some of that information, it was still a problem; especially when dealing with pass-through projectiles.

Overall it was still a quite excellent game despite that. Probably the most complete feeling LD game I've played so far.

Skaart And The Cursed Woods by Kwisarts 2018-05-11T07:30:18Z

First, have to say that the graphics are good, probably too good in a sense, since the gameplay suffered terribly. That's one of the interesting things about this jam though, everyone has their own strengths, and that tends to influence what they spend the most time on =P. The only thing 'negative' I have to say about the graphics is that it would have been nice if you had put more variety into the paralaxing background layers. I didn't actively notice them my first time playing, and while in some sense that might be desirable, it's also a graphical feature, so it would have been nice if you could have added in some more contrast between the layers of trees to draw more attention to it.

In terms of clarity there were a couple of issues. Sometimes when you were low health, it could look like you had no health. The heart arrow would simply be colored red, and the health bar it was pointing to would look completely empty. The bullet icon, as it appears in the slot, is too cluttered to clearly make out what it is at that scale (for me anyway.) It's obvious once you select it and it zooms in however. The bomb, while obviously a bomb, is ambiguous in whether it will be a good or bad thing. Both of these are one-time problems though, you pretty much learn each of them after one usage.

I actually thought the audio design was quite nice in this. The echo-y tone of the text/talky noise, while loud, was very thematic to the mood of the forest and the little spirit fire creatures. The way the game over screen sounded like sort of a detuned variation of the main music loop was a cool effect too. Many of the sound effects were a bit loud though, for me, I want to be able to follow the music even when a sound effect is playing.

My favorite game mechanic was the huge amount of knockback when you hit the trees (and their relative slowness). That struck me as appropriately sensitive to the amount of time needed to successfully line up a shot with the slot mechanic. I did notice a bug of sorts associated with that though, when you shot a tree it would move backwards based on its facing direction - not based on which direction the bullet came from so if you tree in the back it ends up sliding toward the bullet. It was also really unusual how much horizontal movement you got in the air. The biggest frustration though, was that unless you got lucky, you had to learn the pattern of each new wheel as it came up which took way too long to fight without cheesing the geometry. Having a small 'deck' of set wheel patterns the game picked from, the player could at least learn to recognize them quicker over time - kind of like the matching card game in SMB3. I also had one roll with no bullets =P. Its a shame that not only were there only three items, but only two of them were implemented. It would have been better to do an easier to implement item (heart instead of coin) or put in a coin counter and a cost for 'playing' slots and skimp on, say, a few of those ground cover art assets =P.

There was a nice touch of self-depreciating fourth-wall crushing humor in this, which I personally related to a lot =P. Still you got more done and with better quality than a lot of games. I could sort of see where you were going with this. I just wish I could have really experienced your vision for how to make those genres come together to make a fun game.

Skaart And The Cursed Woods by Kwisarts 2018-05-12T00:30:15Z

@Kwisarts Yeah, I noticed that the heart empties too, it's just the visual effect as you're looking at it. It looks empty with a red heart icon saying "see, here's all the health that you have none of" =P.

Yeah, I think the game over music was just really stylistically similar to one of the other pieces. At first, I thought it was the same music playing pitched down and in the minor or something (which isn't a bad idea, and would be kind of cool, especially if you're tight on time). I think there being three different music tracks probably just confused me when I tried to understand what I had experienced the first time I died =P.

Based on my file time stamps, it took me about 3.5 hours for the two short tracks I did for my game, I can't imagine doing an extra music track without having an area for it to play in first, but that's probably just an indication of the direction in which I make games =P. I'm more likely to have a mechanic with no graphics/sound than graphics/sound with no mechanic. I think it worked well for me though overall. Its easier for me to scale back on the amount of time I put into music and art, compared to code especially, where it kind of works or doesn't =P.

I understand what you mean about the bullet sort of not fitting as a slot piece. There are all sorts of things you could try with color and thickness to make it stand apart from its ornamentation, but I'll leave that to you =P. The border idea is a decent choice in general, especially to help make the game feel fair. I'm guessing those lines that are sitting there were meant to animate with the slots eventually? In any case, something along those lines would be a good idea, especially if the player can see for themselves which slot they stopped on.

One thing I left off last time is that the control choice for the slots felt odd to me, but that might be personal preference. If you use J and K (presumably to avoid using Q and E since E is close to R?) then I would use J to take out & put away the slots, and K to activate it. That way you're using the characters left to right, they each have a clear function, and you get to type JK every time you want to use your slot gun =P.

Skaart And The Cursed Woods by Kwisarts 2018-05-12T16:43:50Z

@Kwisarts

Unusual way to think of those keys, but I guess it makes sense if you're using them instead of arrows =]. In general, I like to use Q and E if I'm using WASD, or with only one key space. For me, I'd rather keep the mouse available if possible.

If I were treating it as arrow keys, I'd probably do something even stranger =P. Maybe up to raise the gun, down to lower it, and left and right to shoot left or right XD. I guess I just really like to do that one to one thing, as long as there are enough buttons XD. Now that I think of it, hold and release would be a pretty good feeling way to do it if you wanted to use one button.

Who knows, maybe I just don't like it as much because I've gotten used to Colemak and my Qwerty skills are slipping, or maybe I don't have a good grip on slot gun lore XD. Anyway, interesting stuff to think about =].

Modern Art Critic Hero by jeplmr 2018-04-23T05:20:04Z

Just beat the game. Sometimes it felt like you got marked wrong arbitrarily, maybe that's because of the lack of order in the falling blocks, or the way you are scored. This was a bit annoying since the scoring is rather punishing, although that can otherwise be good - it prevents you from beating a level without mastering it.

I wonder if it would have been better to allow failing out, and in exchange lock you into the game otherwise, so you could use wasd for both moving and the rhythm game.

I don't know if it was the intended strategy, but after beating the balcony straight up, I did the other two scramble boards by placing my fingers in a way that would be more intuitive to play with - which I really liked, as a lateral puzzle element. I was hoping to find a reflection of that backwards one somewhere, but I guess flipping my keyboard worked just as well =P.

One thing I found ironically funny is that because the picture has nothing to do with the game elements, you find yourself ignoring it completely, which is actually a bit of a shame. If the game triggered from actually looking straight at the painting while standing in your place for a few seconds, maybe you could actually get more into the art-gallery element of the game.

It didn't feel very cohesive, although that made it easy to read what was going on, it also made it feel kind of like you literally jammed one game on top of another. Could have had the material on the 'statues' be marble with colored veins or something, and gone more posh with the flavor instead of rhythm game trope-y, it would have been more cohesive.

As it was, the humor and the mechanics made the game fun to play. It was odd not have any (classical?) music in it, but maybe that makes a kind of sense. It could have been confusing to hear music while playing an unrelated rhythm game.

Discorc by rodel77 2018-05-02T06:38:43Z

This game had some good humor, definitely very story driven as well. It addresses the theme well, and it's an innovative idea. There's some gameplay potential to this idea, even if this implementation isn't that engaging. As it is the rhythm aspect mostly feels like a slow, but reliable control scheme, since the music sync was clean, which is impressive. I just wish more rhythm game aspects could have made it in to the game so that it added a bit of fun to the menuing. If a game has a one-button restriction for some reason, this would be a great solution.

There were a lot of ditties, with different rhythms, which was nice for variety. Quite often though, the music didn't fit the mood of the text in game. It would be cool if the story beats and the songs were tied to emotions so that each story beat could get its own music, or subset of music. Its difficult to give much credit to the graphics since it's a text game. The pulsing effect was nice, but I didn't notice the ratings even existed until I saw the comments for the game. I found it difficult to tell which color was highlight at first, but the crossover highlighting for the title helped with that.

The ratings don't seem to update until the end of a conversation, if that's as intended, it makes them a bit limited in their usefulness as feedback. It's unclear if they do anything else. It's not exactly a bug, but there was an orc who thought they'd ask me for advice about some Orc they're in love with after we set up a date, which is not cool =P.

Real Time Tower Defense by rigdonware 2018-05-07T03:24:58Z

This is an interesting combination. While all the pieces could have been taken straight from an RTS, putting the tower defense logic on top of it does make it feel much more like a tower defense game instead. I have played some unit based defense games, and this feels a lot like them in that sense, except that you don't usually have as much control over their deployment as this game gives you.

It was quite rare I was in the position to use the units and the towers together, which is probably the most interesting part of the gameplay. Sometimes I wanted to retreat units, but that didn't seem to be supported, which makes sense for tower defense style gameplay, but takes away from the strategy available to the player. In general though, since the enemy units didn't get any stronger, while your fortifications constantly improved, there was very little in the way of challenge once you got a few towers in place.

The one thing I felt like this game could use was some sort of reliable aoe attack. Maybe something with light emission to take advantage of the decision to use 3d assets. It feels like you aren't getting much benefit over using 2d sprites with them. Maybe some muzzle flashes would help along those lines too.

Speaking of which, the setting feels confused. You have two types of soldiers robots(?) and autonomous defense turrets, fighting over medieval castles. The other side could arguably all be creatures summoned by a wizard. In a way it fits with the blending of the tower defense and RTS genres, but it doesn't seem to tell a cohesive story.

It's a shame to not have any audio for this game. It feels like a little generated gunshot pop sound effect would go a long way in this game given how many things are constantly firing, but it might be tricky to keep the cumulative volume under control with all the overlapping units firing simultaneously.

Overall it's an interesting idea, with decent execution, but rather lacking in gameplay.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-04-23T09:53:54Z

Thanks for the feedback Hyorvenn - Glad you enjoyed it =]. Was it the controls that were troublesome when you started? I heard that the momentum based turning took some getting used to.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-05-11T04:43:33Z

@Kwisarts Thanks for letting me know about the feedback system. As you might have seen, this is the first time I've (successfully) participated in LD.

It does seem to be a pretty consistent compliant that labels (or tooltips) are needed for the upgrades. I guess it was one of those blind spots for me in development, thinking that I could sufficiently convey enough of the effect with the icons.

I have a big wishlist of things to do for a post-compo version, and you touched on a lot of it =]. One thing I was considering was to do was to break the reward system into equipment, earned by spending money mostly gained from race completion with a performance bonus, and the skill tree, which would be based on experience gain, mostly earned from defeating enemy cars. I also thought adding little quests would be cool too to bring out those RPG mechanics a bit more.

You touched on the one thing that I personally really liked about the game, and that is that there are basically three things that impair your movement from checkpoint to checkpoint - your cars ability to move fast, other cars getting in your way, and slowing down in grass. Each section of the tech tree is meant to address one of those things: increasing your acceleration and top speed; making you slow down less, or damage enemies more; and getting better control of your turns, and be effected less by the grass. I think that's what makes the effect of the upgrade system work so well; you're breaking each rule in the game in degrees that hinder you from accomplishing your main goal.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-05-11T05:01:22Z

@jk5000 Thanks for the comment on the music =]. The racing theme was done in LMMS, it's the first time I really successfully made use of that - wish I had more time to mess with it =]. The upgrade music loop was put together in bosca ceoil. I was pretty pleased how they both turned out all things considered =P.

The enemies do get way too fast as the number of runs you do gets high. In the post-compo version I'm working on, I capped their top speed. Eventually I might find a more elegant solution. The first race is also especially brutal, since there's no countdown, no tutorial, and the player hasn't had the chance to practice with the controls. It's definitely on the challenging side in general as well. Unless you're doing cheese strats to just kill everyone, in a single game it wouldn't be uncommon to only get first once, although top three should be within reach for the first 6 races or so =P.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-05-11T05:22:07Z

@Slashee-the-Cow When you say they pass through you, do you mean they somehow move through you without colliding? If so that might be because I didn't cap their top speed, so on very late levels, they might move unreasonably fast in a single 'step' - and end up teleporting from one side of you to the other without touching your car =P. I capped their top speed in the post-compo version I'm working on, which should take care of that.

They also do temporarily go invincible / intangible for a short time after you hit them to prevent double hit type shenanigans. In the post-compo version, I made this more obvious (and increased the intangibility duration). There's a transparency effect in this version while they're intangible, but I think it's too understated, so it might be unclear whats going on.

If you meant that they don't slowdown / stop when they hit you (espc from behind) that's mostly because their driving logic is extremely simplified, you slow down, and they ignore everything (they plain cheat in those curves =P). I'd like to give them nicer AI and have them drive intelligently and have proper collision effects with other cars, but that is going to be beyond the scope of what I want to do in the next iteration of the this.

Thanks for the comment.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-05-11T05:46:44Z

@LuckyFeathers Yeah, I think this game could easily have used 2-3 extra menu screens. I especially want to add one for the main menu with a how to play option. A post race screen is a high priority for the post-compo version, even if just to tell you where you placed. One of the issues is that I didn't commit the time toward implementing a proper reward system, so you just get 2 more upgrade points every time you finish a race =P. For the rest of this, you basically hit the top 4 items of my current to do list for the post-compo version XD. I agree that it'd be really nice to do countdown on start, its just annoying that it really requires graphics, sound, and coding to do a proper job of it... and then I feel weird not putting in some sort of turbo start reference =P.

Thanks for the comment.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-05-11T23:19:14Z

@PeachTreeOath I'm glad you like it =]. I liked that upgrade line having an in-game effect too. I wanted to figure out a way to do something like that with all the upgrades, but as cool as it looks, the trail color change was the easiest idea to actually implement in the time I had =P. I'd like to do something with tire tracks for the green upgrade set, and do visual stuff 'on' the car for the yellow set. The top speed is a tricky one - without putting a speedometer in the UI, I think the best I could do are engine sound effects - maybe have every upgrade to top speed literally give you a new gear XD.

I have a post-compo version in progress that should coming sometime after the end of ratings. Don't know how much is going to end up going into it, but it should have some improvements in a few areas.

RPG Racer by GameCarpenter 2018-05-11T23:37:59Z

@Kwisarts Hmm, maybe with time I could have designed icons that were clearer, but its hard for me to judge since I know what it is already. There's one upgrade in particular that I'm pretty sure no one even knows what it does. As it is an RPG crossover, it would be cool to give like hard stats for the upgrades in a tooltip, but adding a label with some short names below the pictures would help make sure they were clear. That's the most likely thing to actually get done =P. Until then people will be stuck with the 'fire gloves' upgrade XD.

Thanks for the invite to the discord Kwisarts, I think it'd be a nice place to hang out while developing. I know I found it easier to develop my game while other people were working on theirs at the same time =P. I'm not great at community involvement, but it's easier when I'm talking about something I know really well =P. I'll probably stop by at some point.

Ten1Z1 by Lumous 2018-04-23T09:00:31Z

Really nice game, pretty challenging.

During my play, I felt like the strong shot was pretty much useless, maybe a lob would have been better?

The Zombie spawning patterns reward winning a game at certain times of day. Since the day/night cycle is real-time instead of turn based, you can strategically hold your serve to win the game when the zombie population is at its peak.

Serving is one of the weaker features of the game really, since the AI seems pretty much incapable of returning a well placed shot. If you want, you can play it like a shooter of sorts by continually re-tying the game on the serve while alternately taking down zombies.

The Art is very cohesive and I really like the style it has going for it. The sound effects that I noticed are good, but there isn't any music, and I feel like the audience and zombies could be more vocal. I found the tennis itself quite challenging, at least on the return game. It would have felt more complete if there was some form of victory / defeat, whether that be at 100 zombies 6 games, or whatever. I really liked the way this tackled the theme though, you have zombies being zombies, tennis players being tennis players, and a game win mechanic which helps unify them.

PongCraft by meskaline 2018-04-23T19:56:19Z

It feels like the champions should deal more damage to compensate for the extra risk you're taking on by summoning them instead of spending your gold as fast as possible. The way the ball bounces off gold can feel really unpredictable, it feels like sometimes you'll pass right through it and collect a bunch of gold on the way, or you'll collect one gold and it'll bounce right back at you.

Thematically it's pretty consistent, the paddles being castle walls, and the summons being units for each side. I don't think I ever hit 50 wood while playing against the AI, so can't comment on that. Maybe requiring less wood for repairing (less?) would be a good idea? Kind of odd keyboard hotkey choices (for single player) also imho, would have thought wsd would work for up down and summon respectively.

The AI being pretty much perfect was annoying. Would have been nice if there was a delay from your paddle hit to his action, or he just temporarily forgot what was happening in the game, and maybe a delay on summoning enemy units would be nice. Little things like that to make it feel more fair.

Notified ! by Bigaston 2018-05-12T03:45:04Z

The one good thing I can say about it, is that you had some decent ball-paddle collision mechanics in the breakout game. Too many games don't give you any control over the ball direction, in your game, if anything, your control is a little too good =P. For the most part this game frustrates me, since it feels like it could have been so much more, but as it is, there's not a lot to latch onto other than promise.

The breakout game was decent, as was clicking around seeing what everything did. I wasn't really keen on the game opening links based on in game actions though. It might have been cool if you were doing some sort of AR thing with it - putting a text document in the github with a 'Gogle' search term for the phone, that sort of thing. As it is, it felt like an exploration game, where you were punished for exploring with pop-up ads. Maybe they should have been on a second screen which was clearly marked as external links.

I think I get the idea of how you were trying to approach the theme, but there wasn't a lot here to demonstrate were going. Looking at this set-up, I get this feel like it has a lot of potential, but needs more to really make it gel: some interconnectivity between the elements; some form of progression; and some progress in exploring the mystery of the phone, if that's what this is supposed to be about. A dummy high-score table in breakout that would allow you to search a name on Gogle[sic], that could give you an email address to send an email to, that would let you get a new notification with a reply. Conceptually, those are the sort of mechanics I'd expect within the framework you have here, to make something cohesive out of this.

The icons looked good, except that they were all basically copies of existing brands, except for breakout, for which I have no idea what the icon is supposed to represent. The patreon page looked good as well. I liked the pseudo text there.

As far as I could tell, there wasn't any audio, and other than 'Gogle', not much in the way of humor. The mood was solid though, in the sense that it consistently felt like a smart phone simulator.

Overall though, it still had some fun in there, even if it was mostly just from the little breakout game. It seemed like your theme choice may have given you more to do than you had time for =/.

Escape by Gamekrazzy 2018-04-23T19:29:28Z

Just finished the game. Two issues I ran into were that the game sometimes ate my jump, especially at the corner of boxes. I would even get the sound effect and still not get the jump. The other issue I ran into was that if you lose and try to start again, you start with the game exploding the world, which makes for short playthroughs XD. Once I realized what was happening though, it was easy enough to refresh the page.

The little puzzles were good, in general, moving platforms over spikes caused most of my time losses. I really liked the mouse sprites especially, and the screen read very well, even given the restricted palate. Conceptually, the final door at least, could have been set up so that it was locked with a different code each time (the digits could have been chosen dynamically. Text skip might have been nice, although I may have missed the first clue if it was in =P.

Maze in dark by Richnou 2018-04-23T06:42:17Z

I played this through finding the remote. Not the most fun game, but perhaps that's part of the point. Has a very serious mood, feels like a commentary game, putting you in the shoes of someone who can't see their surroundings, or read written text. I was excited to see this game as I've wanted to do something similar, but with a more game-like feel.

Its a bit of a stretch as far as the jam theme, it's basically just a simulator. It is rather unique in that many games are graphically driven, so it's quite a departure.

The audio clip for a collision is odd, it sounds almost like a ceramic tap, when I would expect to hear something more solid most of the time. A nothing there (swish-y or tappy) sound would have been nice also, just for more feedback.

This games shines more as an experience than a game. It's not something that is really fun to play, but rather something that you might find enriching to have played.

Save Your Assteroid by Hyorvenn 2018-04-24T23:04:55Z

Installation was a bit of a pain, but I have been wanting to look into python, at least for AI, so maybe I'll take another stab at it =P. The ready to run version didn't have sound, but it was easy enough to make the Github version work. Graphics were nice, except maybe for the 3/4 player ships. Don't know how I felt about the background just being scaled down foreground elements, kinda minimalist in that sense - still, what was there (in the 1 and 2 player modes recommended) looked good.

The gameplay itself was good, the quantity frequency and spread of boulders felt pretty fair, and consistently challenging. The instant death at the edges of the screen was pretty aggressive though. I died several times after moving toward the edge of the screen to pick up a heart that had spawned on the edge. Some mechanic to make that less punishing would have been nice. Simply bumping the player back in bounds, or disallowing further movement in that direction perhaps. It would have been nice if the powerups moved down-screen - when they spawned near the top they were quite risky to go for, and when they were control reversing powerups and spawned nearer to you, they could stay in place near your critical moving path for a long time, making them less about recognition and one-time avoidance, and more like mine spawns. The core game is a very simple dodge the things game, which made it hard for me to engage with it. This isn't helped by the super-clean control you have over your ship. There just doesn't feel like there is a lot of depth to the game. The powerups helped in that regard, but they mostly ended up being more of the same kind of ship maneuvering gameplay.

The one bug I noticed, is that the score doesn't seem to reset from one playthrough to the other. This even seems to carry over to multiplayer, with all players taking snapshots from the same, unresetting score variable.

I think the sound effects could have been quieter, other than that they weren't bad. Would have been nice to have some music for the game - it's completely quiet when you are busy just successfully dodging meteors.

To me, this seemed to be a straight-forward dodging game. If there are two themes, it seemed unclear what they were. It's quite similar to other games I've played before.

On The Fly by qkjosh 2018-04-25T07:27:14Z

The graphics in this are incredible, maybe even too incredible, sometimes I think my poor PC was having a hard time rendering the stream at speed =P. The water, grass and sky are all great, as well as the little bird.

I played the game one player, so it was, perhaps, not the best test of the game as it was meant to be played. One player it worked well, although with probably less confusion than you might get with two players. For example, in one player its probably easier in one player to see what controls what fairly quickly whenever you want to know. It felt like it was in the gameplay itself where it fell slightly flat for me. There was, I guess I'll call it a visual bug, where if you missed a bug because you were aiming too high when it was right in front of you, it would fly right through your body, which was quite annoying. If there was an end to the game, I never found it.

There was no music, but for once, I didn't mind, since the game was teeming with environmental sound effects constantly, and they fit the mood perfectly. In fact everything was extremely thematic, with the possible exception of some of the dialog, but there was nothing outrageous, and who am I to say how conversations between birds go?

The game executed on the theme very well, and was a creative choice, working together the two genres that you normally wouldn't think would interact in a seamless manner into a cohesive game with each aspect of it flowing together naturally.

Project 'X' Malfunction by L14 Game Studio 2018-05-09T07:36:57Z

Strong entry. Good gameplay, nice length for the format. Has an interesting combination of turn-based and real time elements. Graphics are simple, but mostly clear. One thing I really liked was the refinement to slowly fade in the music loop at the beginning of the game - It gives the player a way to adjust their local volume on the fly as the game starts to match it to their setup, while avoiding just blasting them with whatever volume you assumed the game would be played at. Very nice little trick I should keep in mind =].

Some trouble areas I noticed are that the help screen has no mouse control to turn it off, and the relevant information on how to do so doesn't stick out. You can also use the displayed hotkeys to continue to play the game with the help screen up, which is a bit odd =P. I also found a bug/exploit. By trying to use my moves from my next turn right away to dodge incoming fire (in a similar manner to the enemies) I found that the game allowed me to go into negative moves, at no cost, immediately, before later resetting my moves back up to 2. In no time I was unloading strafing fire, and other ridiculous things that broke the cool gameplay =P. The game over sound effect also seemed loud, and the game over text should probably use 'begun' instead of 'began', in this case, but that's very minor.

The graphics were quite clear if a bit simple. The exceptions were: the fast-forward button, which I never bothered to use anyway, since shooting pretty much dominates it; and the exit door, which didn't seem to have a visible difference between locked and open states. I also had to check the door the very first time I played to see if killing all the enemies was required or not. A small lock icon, or a variant with one, would have made things clearer. A clear room sound effect similarly would have been nice to have along those same lines. Thinking about it, with the current game state, the door doesn't add anything, since you only ever interact with it when there is zero risk. Turning off the turn counter when everyone is dead was a nice touch though. The art design on the walls is probably the standout. Were those done with tiles, or programmatically or both? In any case, other than those exceptions the graphics are quite serviceable.

One thing I really liked was the mood of the game. The font, music, and even the stark art style worked together to bring out a militaristic feel. Obviously there wasn't really any humor in the game, but that's to be expected with the serious mood.

When playing the game as designed (without the aid of the negative actions bug) the game demonstrates a clear and very effective blending of real-time and turn-based elements. It can be a little frustrating to maneuver around in a safe manner, but for the most part, it's a lot of fun.

Burger Rage by krzymsky 2018-04-26T01:42:31Z

Everything in this game is focused on telling a unified story, and in that sense, the mood of the game is excellent, and probably its best feature.

There's a real sense that the time crunch effected this game pretty harshly. There are all these cool ideas in the scene, a sink, a frying pan, and a range top that never got used. Perhaps as a consequence of this, the game is so easy, that it's not that enjoyable. Having to spend time washing off ingredients after you've thrown them, (maybe reheating / retoasting in the pan for the burger / bun) might have limited the players free time enough to make it a bit more interesting. Similarly I had no difficulty making a burger as I felt it should be made. You could certainly enforce some building constraints, or acknowledge the difference between a stack of ingredients, and ingredients in between two pieces of bun, although it is funny to make a 'burger' that is completely ridiculous like that. My favorite part of the gameplay is that the progressing toward the main goal by putting burger pieces on the plate, directly conflicts with your other goal, where you need those burger pieces available to defend the burger you are creating. I found a few times that I would have liked to simply drop pieces somewhere for future use. If the game were a lot harder, a side table or something for that purpose might be nice.

The graphics are quite good, it's clear what everything is, and it makes sense for it to be there. The setting has more of a professional kitchen feel to it, with the big doors, and massive amounts of space. In that sense, it feels like it would be more natural for the main character to be a chef, which his outfit doesn't indicate, but that's a minor detail. There are, however a couple of things I think would have helped out a bit. First, the enemies are all identical. This is a shame since you could have gotten a little visual variety, with some quick recoloring, to at least make it appear that they might not be up to 4 of the same person. The other thing that would have helped is a little visual indicator around the plate when you are holding an ingredient to indicate that ultimately, that is where ingredients go. I suppose I should also mention what ends up being some combination of a graphical glitch and game logic bug. When you throw objects at enemies who are just coming in, when they run off, the ingredients end up on the 'door' tile, which doesn't make a lot of sense visually. On the nice to have side of things, making ingredients that have been thrown look worse, or gain a fly particle, or some other silly consequence to having thrown them would have been a nice touch.

The humor in the game was very good, the entire situation as it's presented was pretty funny. I think you could have done more with the audio especially to drive the humor more. Have the enemies whine on their way off-screen, thicken up the impact sound when an ingredient is thrown, maybe have different impact sounds based on which ingredient is being used. That pickup sound is also very generic, and would have been another opportunity to emphasize the idea of going around scraping these ingredients you've probably already thrown at people off of the floor. There also isn't any music, which is especially detrimental given the relative sparsity of the sound.

This game is a solid representation of the combination of two genres, and tying them together by using a shared resource between them was an effective way to bring them together.

Overall, I think that this is a good game with some excellent potential. With some work on the audio and enhancement to the gameplay, it could become a very good game.