Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Gunzil
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Adder & Squoji: Daily Grind | jam | 174 | 3.72 | 3.56 | 3.36 | 3.64 | 3.32 | 3.55 | 3.67 | 50 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Feed The Birds | jam | 784 | 2.89 | 2.84 | 3.11 | 3.81 | 2.62 | 3.44 | 2.69 | 64 |
I wish there were more feedback than just getting it right/wrong but that might have defeated the purpose of doing a cipher. If your intent is to make it a puzzle game about ciphers, having the tips/instructions in game would have been a big help, also if you walked through an example.
Nice graphics, song was a little repetitive.
Really strong mood and visuals. Leaving everything up to the player to discover gave the whole game an air of mystery to it I didn't expect to see.
For the actual block placing, I fould it very difficult to draw straight lines, specifically drawing a bridge as I walk across it. My block beam would collide with the block I just placed and make an L shape instead of continuing to place blocks in a line. With all the lines you need to draw, I found this less than ideal.
Really strong theming and graphics, I like 80s DOS aesthetic and hideous palette. I didn't find the gameplay particularly interesting but you kept me for 5 rounds because I wanted to know what all the different item types were. I liked how the function of each item was not immediately apparent until you used it.
Nice little story, short and sweet. The sprite work is very good, though the text a bit small.
Despite having simple floaty platforming, you were able to make a little jumping challenge that contextualized the floaty physics with jumping on floating space rocks, and had it so you had to time your jumps when the rocks were at the correct heights, which was a pretty smart use of what you had. A death state when you touch the lava and a jumping animation would have helped a lot visually.
As a fellow duck-based combat enthusiast, I highly approve.
I like gathering your flock of ducks with bread. It would be nice if the ducks latched onto the golems like Pikmin so I didn't need to keep repeatedly clicking.
5 ducks / 5
A bit too hard to get the hang of, with too many things to track. There are three different points on the screen that require focus at the same time! Overlaying the directions to copy over gameplay would have helped a lot.
Moving freely while also pressing buttons to copy beats is still a lot of things to do at once, though. Limiting your available inputs when doing a rhythm game is a good idea because it lets the user focus more on their timing. Crypt of the Necrodancer does a good job with only having movement available, which occurs on the beat, forcing the user to make decisions on the beat.
But beside that, this is a nice prototype, and it's always great to see people experimenting with rhythm games! :)
The platforming was more difficult than it should be, and enemies would keep respawning in greater numbers if I didn't take care of them. They'd also only track me by x direction so they'd fall down directly on my head.
Drummer for checkpoint is cool, the guitar riffs integrated with the background music and attacks is neat as well. I'm a sucker for music integration with regular gameplay.
Had more fun going through the effort of roasting a marshmallow and feeding it to a zombie than what you're supposed to do, which was buy marshmallow bags and throw them into the spawner holes.
Lack of camera control was frusstrating, I switched to a controller which made it a better in that I had any control, but then the rotation speed was pretty slow. Binding camera left/right to A/D would have been helpful.
I liked how you kill the boss by throwing marshmallows in his mouth, it gives a progression from throwing them into stationary objects (spawners) to a moving one (the boss).
Graphics and music were charming, overall a fun entry.
Very nice platformer prototype! I found the double tap dash to be a too sensitive with a keyboard setup, I kept accidentally dashing when I didn't mean to. I also am not a huge fan of how you come to a dead stop when you start attacking, but do appreciate how you move forward as you attack.
I found enemies low to the ground frustrating to fight, probably because it was unclear if I was inflicting damage on them or not with the basic attack.
The placeholder character frames are very effective at conveying what the player character is doing as well.
I had trouble finishing the level, the game felt too punishing with enemies off screen respawning and the significant knockback from getting hit.
Novel enough concept for a puzzle platformer to keep my attention. It was more difficult aiming shots than it ought to be since I initially thought you were supposed to shoot the characters, not their state bubbles, which are also smaller and more difficult to hit than the character.
Given the iconography of Pause/Rewind/Record/Fast-Forward I was expecting the main mechanic to be recording movements and then have the characters mimic you, rather than have it be stop/left/jump/right.
Fairly impressive on a technical level in terms of having it be complete with a lot of levels.
The visuals are really good, they were some of the best I've seen so far out of the entries I've played, especially for a compo entry.
I think switching between targeted enemies and constantly moving toward them is an interesting control scheme, but without any extra interaction beyond pressing A to boost its a little simplistic. If it were possible to have a better perspective of what else is happening beyond what you're looking at there could be some strategy where you can target different enemies to move around the area and herd guys chasing you, but as it stands it was a bit too random for me. I couldn't really see anything and just relied on my reactions to boost at the right times to not take damage.
A playthrough video from my stream is forthcoming :)
No feedback on when you're allowed to spawn your puck was a killer for me, also the attract / repel radius is way too small. I had a really hard time trying to manipulate any of the pieces in the ways I wanted to.
Rate at which goal changes position is too frequent as well, so even when I did finally set up some attractors around a goal it would move. Since there isn't any way to know if the goal is about to move, it felt random as to when it would leave.
I like the concept, it reminds me of Atom Zombie Smasher, and all the pieces are there, but it needs some tweaks before I'd consider it enjoyable.
I initially found it confusing regarding which person I was. I think this was because there wasn't any feedback from paint cooldown and both players have the same colors. Maybe that was the point? It would atleast be nice if players had different footstep sounds so you know who is walking when. The paint effects and footsteps are really cool, though, especially how your footsteps slowly fade.
Simple little gameplay prototype. Combining attacking with movement is interesting, but overall it felt a too unpredicatable regarding whether I lived or died. You can potentially make some very fast, dramatic movements that can end in you just skirting past an enemy or running right into them. Both outcomes were usually not planned by me and just kind of happened. Visualizing the trajectory of the player before they shoot an enemy might help with this.
Good grpahics, I'm a sucker for low poly, especially when you have environmental elements pulsing to the background music.
There is no clear goal, I was able to figure I was supposed to just keep moving as few as I could by noticing a "distance traveled" gui item and a "time" item ticking down next to it.
I like the way the ship moves, and how you can do little tricks where it flies to the right or left. They're ultimately not very useful but fun to watch your ship do little tricks like that.
Having a more linear environment where you need to constantly be moving forward towards something would have given the game a much clearer goal. The obvious comparison here is race the sun.
Would have preferred the game not being so dark. If you use purples/blues instead of a black overlay you can convey darkness without making it difficult to make anything out. The font is also difficult to read.
Given the simplicity of the game it would have been better to make the game more intuitive than to have a controls page. I would not have thought that Shift would make me go up stairs, which could have been reserved for W since that jumping does not seem useful.
The audio is pretty good, the storm ambience is relaxing.
Didn't encounter a reason to do anything other than freeze things. Got stuck at the large square room where you have to go clockwise through a bunch of turrets and it's impossible to create a safezone.
Nice swinging mechanic, the multiple states where you have to grab -> swing -> throw gives it a nice workflow for executing attacks. Throws are difficult to aim since it's based on the enemy's velocity when you let go and the swing radius is pretty small.
I like how you can play it safe and just hit a skeleton with your currently held enemy directly, but it only kills just the one, while a successful throw can kill all the skeletons in a line.
Really good grpahics, I like how everything is a well textured box guy. The skeleton gibs are especially appealing.
Having your projectiles stay on the map the entire time is really cool, missing a shot is a bigger deal with lasting consequences, since they become a hazard you have to deal with.
Movement feels good, having a jetpack with little particles lets you have a low-effort movement system that makes sense contextually.
Graphics are simple but work well to serve the concept since you can easily identify everything on screen.
Music is a bit repetitive but it seems you felt the same given the description :P
Unsure if I got the correct anding or missed something, there was a noise and then the screen went to black with no text.
The walking is too slow, also you can walk outside the bounds of any of the screens.
The tone, music, and sound are all very high quality, though.
The platforming is not great. The jumps feel "floaty", since you jump very high. Holding the jump button shorter / longer doesn't influence jump height, which makes the jumps feel less natural as well.
The sunflowers and sheep enemies don't add anything to the gameplay really, the sheep are trivial to deal with and might as well have not been in the game.
I quit when you had to fall down a pit without knowing what was under you (other than a danger sign pointing down), and somehow not fall on things you cannot see.
The wall sticking doesn't have much to do with the theme, the jump is also so intensely strong that it downplays the wall sticking, which should have been the star, given the titular character.
I was having mad trouble with the voice recognition, but it's cool that it's there and the idea of using vocal recognition is very unconventional :)
I'd rather it have started with 10 citizens over 25, as once I wanted to find out what happens when you kill them all it took quite a bit to click through all the remaining civilians. Also the voice clips would keep queuing up instead of interrupting each other so I'd having the voice talking about guy I killed 3 civilians ago and I'd have to wait for them to catch up.
Overall it's very thematic and innovative. I streamed this game as well so a video is in the works :)
I tipped my trick over immediately upon starting up the game. There does not appear to be a way to retry so I refreshed by browser and drove around some more before falling in a hole.
Very stylish. The music track and weird camera filter over a truck full of gumballs certainly creates quite the trip.
This is more a toy than a game (no objective that I encountered, nothing to shoot/hit), but I would be interested in seeing a game come out of it! Shooting a gumball and then kicking it with the front of the truck is very satisfying.
The cheese progressively bouncing higher as you accelerate is a neat effect. I like the visuals as well.
The bullets are small and hard to see. They should really be about 4x their current size, but with hitboxes still around the same so you have to get hit by the middle of the bullet to be damaged.
I died in the first level and had to watch the first cutscene again, which wasn't great.
The enemies would benefit from multiple movement sets and shot types. Right now having them move up and down rapidly firing doesn't give an interesting use case for shooting them from behind.
The artwork is nice, though more animations would be a huge plus. Especially a firing animation on the ship if you're going to have them warp their shots to the other side of the screen. People often look to their character to know if their inputs have been recognized.
Standard top down brawler with melee, projectiles, and blocking.
Enjoyed the aesthetic and theming. Using the spoon mainly to reflect lazers was a cool idea. I wish the other weapons had spoon-related counters as well, like if you could pick up grenades with the spoon and throw them.
Hurt/death animations for enemies would have been a huge help graphically.
Props for having tutorial levels where you only fight one kind of enemy at at time.
Very strong theming and music, gameplay isn't terribly interesting. The mine evasion allows for interaction beyond literally walking to the exit, so it does augment the "choose where to go given different voices" theme, I just wish there were more to it.
Thanks for playing and commenting!
The money is just a score counter that indicates how many people you were able to hit before everyone left the scene. The envisioned usage was to spend it on upgrades and such but we wanted to keep things small.
The velocity of the bread you are holding in your hand mirrors velocity of the bread that is thrown, so you need to let go of the mouse button while it is moving across the screen.
Now that I've accomplished my goal of making a small game with a bit of polish, it looks like my next goal will be a game that teaches the player how to actually play it. Thanks for the feedback, everyone. :D
I like the gimmick and art a lot, I just wish there were more levels to it so the final confrontation could have more emotional strength to it.
Also all I could think was "This battery is probably replacable", attacking something more permanent would have made it work better.
I was unable to kill the guy at the bottom. We both ran out of health and nothing happened. Uncertain if intentional.
I enjoyed breaking blocks away with the juice, though it could have used some more depth.
The character handles fairly well, I enjoy how they rotate in the direction that they are moving. I managed to get a lot of jumps sometimes if I rapidly mashed the jump button, most notably during the fight if I kept colliding with the enemy projectiles.
Could not fart in anyone's face 0 stars
A silly game about fart-based propulsion.
I didn't understand success/failure was based on how many objects you broke. An indicator going off once you met par would be nice.
Having the L shaped pills wasn't particularly fun to play with compared to the traditional pills or possibly the Luigi style I haven't tried. Unclear if I'm intentionally destroying their teeth or fixing them also.
Nice audio and graphics, felt suitably gross for doing mouth work.
Needing to stop to type attacks didn't mesh well with manual movement for me. I would have preferred not needing to worry about movement and just focus on typing out attack names to deal with different kinds of enemies. The fact that it saves recent attacks made it more appealing to just keep spamming a set of saved commands rather than try out new combinations as well. I also wish the names of the different possible attacks were more accessible. Pressing F1 to access the attack list was not working for me so I don't know if it would have solved this.
Overall I it's a cool idea and would be a lot more engaging if you pushed the typing to cast part harder.
This game blows.
Perfect Score 5/5
I found this surprisingly enjoyable. Getting hit by specific projectiles to suck up bullets is a fun mechanic, though red was by far the easiest to deal with. It also takes a while to swap between all the colors. Only having two colors like ikaruga could make it easier to work with.
There is not a lot of room for error, and it's very easy to get into a fail-state, which isn't a good trait for first-person puzzle games.
The final level was very difficult, I am uncertain if there was any way to beat it legitimately. I ended up beating it by climbing out of the level bounds without using any pixels and climbing back in so I could skip a couple obstacles.
Being able to destroy obstacles with a thrown projectile does not provide the opportunity for many puzzles when they're just static environments you're moving through. It would have been more interesting to have more things you could potentially destroy so you'd have to make choices on what to hit so you'd still have enough by the end.
Good graphics, good music, good mood, good hands.
Actual gameplay wasn't that fun, it started out pretty easy and then I got overwhelmed once enemies started spawning faster than the shot cooldown allowed.
Didn't enjoy the control scheme, would have preferred something where you could just steer the cursor around instead of having a step based system where one key press is a single step with shift making it like 3 or something.
Good graphics, good audio, good humor, I dunno why a cow was there.
Surprisingly compelling ant simulator where you plead the random number gods to favor the ants in the direction of the red sandwich. Those ants never listen though. They won't stop touching my previous sandwich.
Nice visuals, fitting audio, good time overall. That road level is nuts.
Playthrough video forthcoming :)
I like the copious blood effects but they also made the game run slow :<
Having your ammo be represented by hearts was a cute idea given you're shooting people.
I would have preferred having better feedback for bullet control, it was difficult to tell how effective my attract / repelling was or if I was even doing it. Having an effect that shows how much each bullet is being influenced would help, or if you just made it so doing a repel on bullets your color mirrors their velocity so it feels snappy.
The AI learning was cool, though it mostly involved progressively getting more and more aggressive when I was playing.
Humorous writing that includes all the terribleness that games journalism seems to entail. I liked the picture that is painted for each game, where each has physical attributes, a culture surrounding it, and a corporate agenda behind it, causing the correct answer to become unclear.
I would have liked to have multiple screens open at the same time like how papers please has it, so the multitasking is more on the view's ability to absorb info instead of needing to move between a bunch of screens AND absorb information.
I'd like to be able to see player character comments even when viewing overlays, since once you get deep in NDAs and school assignments it's difficult to know when they even come up. There's a sound effect when tweets change, if there was something similar for player comments that would help a lot.
Need little toy experience. Since you're at the mercy of the random generator I felt the landscape I created was more random than something I had set out to build. Would have been nice to speed up time so I could choose to ignore pieces without needing to wait a while.
Collision detection on clicks is off, if I tried to stop a piece near another piece it would often cause the nearby piece to start moving again.
Online multiplayer unity game where teams crowd around a tiny room and shoot horizontal projectiles at each other ad infinitum. Clearly unfinished, there's no real hook to keep anyone playing. That said, I'm sure this can go somewhere interesting with some work. Multiplayer games are hard, so it's not surprising you barely got it working by deadline.
The visuals are really nice! I like the progressive changes in environments as you move between levels, they tell an implicit story about the journey your character is going on.
The character feels like they walk a bit slowly at first but once the environments get more dense this becomes less of a problem. I'd also like a way to go down vines quickly since dropping off will kill you at certain heights.
I like the tutorial signs with controls on them, it's a very natural way of easing the player into the game. Having the reset button and water button next to each other feels dangerous, though. Z is jump in some games. I was afraid I was going to accidentally reset the level a lot.
This game starts out difficult and gets even harder. The power-downs are especially brutal. I got caught hitting the very edge of the arcs sometimes, it would have been nice to have more lenient collision detection when you just barely tap one of the sides.
The music and brutal-fast gameplay make for a very hectic arcade experience. Quite nice.
Pretty chill game about watching an island rotate in space while you say yes to all construction projects and watch numbers get bigger.
Big fan of the low poly visuals and snowy aesthetic. It works well when zoomed out this far. The snow particle is a little big so it looks kinda like a the interior of a snow globe.
Gameplay wasn't very developed, I just pressed up to each question and waited for more resources to accrue while admiring my new building. Eventually the game ran out of signs.
Interesting premise and visuals! Having the pig constantly chased by a farmer with an axe gave a good motivation for constantly running forward. All the pigs running around the arena gave the setting energy.
I felt the colliders were not forgiving enough. The pickups seemed to have colliders that were literally the size of the object, which gave me a lot of situations where I would just barely miss an item. Typically colliders on pickups are slightly larger than the actual model.
I grabbed enough fruit where I thought I could reasonably get over the fence, but I ended up dying instead. I don't know if there's every a visual indicator that tells you this, but if there is not that would be nice so there isn't any guess work.
Pig sound effects came out a bit too often for me, could have dialed back the frequency a tad.
Overall very nice entry.
Cool idea, rolling a snowball that grows over time is very appealing to me. I like how you actually pick up snow off the ground as you roll as well. You don't seem to do that much other than grow by rolling snow and shrink by touching fire, though. Could pick stuff up by rolling over it and then drop it off by shrinking.
The music loop was too short and got grating after a while, it set the mood well though.
Good puzzles, good use of 2-button controls, good visuals / audio. I found there to be too many easy introductory levels at the beginning vs more challenging ones that take advantage of the mechanics established. It seemed like 80% of the game was just easy levels that introduced mechanics and then there was a 20% at the end where you had to do actual puzzles. The last level was also a significant spike in difficulty for me.
The intro really could have used a skip button, as it's about 60 seconds of listening to a voice and not being able to move. I really enjoy the black humor. I would have tried for more endings if it didn't take so long to get to the meaningful choices.
The audio / visuals are very impressive, it felt very much like some kind of underwater science base.
Sit in pools of water in order to grow just the right size for a judgmental yellow ring. Didn't find the gameplay terribly engaging, especially after accidentally growing too big, forcing me to restart. Would have preferred ways to mess with size via a shrinking pool, or having the goal be to suck up all the water in the level instead of sucking up just enough to pass.
Thanks for all the feedback! It is much appreciated :)
Being able to have both characters jump all the time is definitely a problem. Finding ways to make it so you need to only pick the correct character would help. Jumping on the wrong character would cause damage due to an attack going above them, for example.
I'm surprised nobody commented on the non-boss, there was going to be an actual fight originally!
Surprisingly good. The physics used to control the player are really fun to play with. I like all the little goop particles your character gives off, and how they smash into spikes just like your character does.
The environment and spike graphics are a bit plain, but the blob and title text look really nice with a lot of personality. Another pass on the environment would help a lot graphically. All the little messages the character says are cute as well. I like the use of emoticons :)
A game about vikings burning down a forest and murdering innocent squirrels. I got really bad luck so they wiped me easily.
I was interested in seeing where the building placement at the beginning would go but I couldn't tell the difference between each tree type so I just arranged them in aesthetically pleasing fashion and waited until they got destroyed.
The overwrought epic music being played on top of tiny pixel squirrels throwing acorns at vikings was funny, it was what kept me there until the vikings wiped me.
A post apocalyptic game about the never ending struggle between cups and mutants as the cups try to navigate a maze to maintain a single flower.
I found the platforming to be frustrating, both in the number of dead ends and how difficult it is to jump on enemies. You would think with only being able to move in one direction the collisions might be more forgiving, but that is not the case. I managed to get water to the plant once after about 10 tries and then stopped playing when I realized I had to keep doing it on the same level.
I appreciate the two button control implementation, only being able to move in one direction, but the platforming is already difficult enough that this makes it worse. Having a more normal, less maze-like level before the current level would have been nice. I realize the level is a maze so you can take alternate routes to the plant on repeat playthroughs, but that just seems like a symptom of trying to only have one level instead of multiple. Once I found a route that worked I only tried to use that one, anyways.
Cute, good use of two buttons by having the player mash to wiggle down the chimney. Would have been neat to see more mashing occur when in the house instead of just stopping on the specific beneficial set pieces. Initially when I saw this I thought cat Santa would specialize in scratching up furniture instead of getting distracted by it. Graphics were cute and audio fit the mood. Overall pretty good.
Very difficult for me to tell what's happening on the screen due to all the visual effects and shifting colors. I felt like I was going to get eye strain!
The music sounds nice but it was overpowered by the grating bullet sound effect playing on loop. The sound effect for the bullet really should have been a longer looping sound that represented lots of bullets being fired instead of hundreds of instances of the same sound, it could have been smoother that way.
I couldn't tell if the falling shapes did anything or not when I touched them, if not then they add more clutter to the screen. The actual ship bullets were very hard to see to the point where I just shot at the enemies without trying to evade anything.
There is potential here but you'll definitely need to smooth out a lot of bumps.
Found it took too long for the walls to finally reach my character. Also I managed to pass through a grey wall with no doorway and not lose a life. The camera effects seemed arbitrarily thrown in but they gave the game character.
This game is very difficult, and the random placement of spirit spores didn't help. One miss when branching to a spore and you're done, since there's no way to cancel back out of the spirit branch and keep growing the main one.
I found it confusing that the fire you're running away from is green. I thought it was good or part of the plant at first, and didn't understand why I kept dying initially.
I like how the leaderboards are integrated into the game, that's really cool
Had fun mashing buttons and watching the character sprites freak out. I wouldn't call this game good by any measure but I managed to have fun with it.
Started out unimpressed for the first couple levels but once the difficulty modifiers started rolling out this got pretty fun. :)
The grass and dirt seem very blurry, sharpening them up would make it easier to tell when you ought to shoot. Also the scoring felt disconnected from the game, since you only see your percentage at the end of the game. A visual indicator of your performance would help.
Water plants by strategically placing pipes for funneling water to crops. I'd be interested in seeing something like this in a Harvest Moon game. I only played the first 3 or 4 levels but the number of pieces provided seemed fairly liberal. The 15 second music loop got tiring really fast and unfortunately I closed the game early because of it.
Simple dungeon crawler in which you kill slimes to go down levels for reasons unknown.
Not a fan of how little you can see. I found having a very small viewable radius around the character to be unnecessary. If you wanted to denote darkness you could have the lit portion be 90% of the screen so there's still a small amount of darkness around the edges.
The visuals are a little rough and the music loops too quickly but overall a nice first entry.
Little game about avoiding big things and collecting small things while you grow bigger. It's short enough to what gameplay there is to get stale. Planets have cutesy faces on them so we can form an emotional connection. The explosions when you collide with other planets feel real good. Overall, simple gameplay with an interesting set of visuals.
Mash W and S to grow and shrink your line. Match the opposing lines hurtling towards you before it's too late.
Simple gameplay, it works fairly well and is well paced in terms of how quickly the lines to match speed up. Good background music and sfx as well. Not super complex but a good first shot at Ludum Dare.
Dino dating sim where you only date smaller dinos so you can eat them. Sometimes you can find true love as well.
I only picked dinos based on whether they were herbivores and relatively small since I didn't have an idea of what my character's strength and size are. Not a lot to the game other than picking yes or no on whether to attempt to eat a dino. There is some humor in the actual dino profiles.
Cute game, good weed particles effects. The pacing is a bit slow for a jam game, a higher speed of production / consumption would be nice. I like seeing all the dealers walking around the area.