Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → henk
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Outpost | compo | 137 | 3.51 | 3.11 | 3.36 | 3.51 | 3.87 | 3.09 | 2.74 | 3.80 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | The Bends | compo | 176 | 3.37 | 2.46 | 4.19 | 4.27 | 3.24 | 3.73 | 2.51 | 3.72 | |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Howard and the Ants | compo | 231 | 3.24 | 3.15 | 3.03 | 3.62 | 2.87 | 3.34 | 2.56 | 3.08 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | The Cleansing | compo | 188 | 3.42 | 3.26 | 3.09 | 3.50 | 3.66 | 2.81 | 2.74 | 4.07 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Defrag | compo | 146 | 3.65 | 3.48 | 4.02 | 4.37 | 2.82 | 2.15 | 2.60 |
Addicting! I like the little noise the bugs make when they die. It would be nice if the larger "boss" bug had a health readout or something. I couldn't tell while fighting it if I was dealing large amounts of damage or if I needed to try another strategy.
This sucked me in for about an hour until I forced myself to stop. I think I could see myself dumping a very unhealthy amount of time into this, so congratulations. I especially like that it's (apparently) all deterministic, so it really should be possible to figure out all of the rules with enough patience. The visuals are also very beautiful.
I wanted to confirm some of my guesses, so I downloaded the source code to check, and it was interesting to see what I got right vs the things I missed that were staring me in the face. I'm not quite sure how one would go about building your game from the source code, however. I think it's a Unity game? If so a lot of the project files seem to be missing from your dropbox link.
I liked it a lot! The sounds were especially entertaining. I ran into some performance problems in firefox starting from the level that introduces Moby, although playing in "slow motion" gave me somewhat of an advantage for later levels :P. The "island growth" mechanics did sort of feel optional to me. Maybe some more levels would help give room to flesh that out.
I love the aesthetic and ambient music. The game is very forgiving towards people like me who aren't very familiar with 6DOF shooters (perhaps a bit _too_ forgiving). You mentioned in a comment that there's an "invert-y" option on the pause menu, but I couldn't find it, even though I was running the exe version.
@shigor Hmm... here's what I see when I press escape:
matrioshka_containment_esc_menu.png
Maybe there's something weird with the build I'm using? It could also be my setup. Running games under Wine often does funky things...
Engrossing and educational! It's kind of meta that the game is training my personal neural network to understand how neural networks work.
It'd be nice to have some more visual understanding of what's going on, though, since I'm often in a situation where I've come up with a wrong answer but have no clue _why_ it's wrong. Maybe some numbers or shaded cells or something so I can see what the weights are or what data looks like when it passes through the nodes.
Some other ideas: - I think there should be a "response function" dropdown on the "layer" node rather than just a "response function" node, since I'm almost always going to add one after each layer. - Maybe an option to manually set NN weights? I'm often desperate to know whether what I've built is just training poorly or if it's not capable of representing the solution at all, and I think a way to input my own weights would help with that.
Also: Since it's possible to create an exhaustive list of test cases for some of these challenges, it'd be interesting to see what would happen if you threw _literally everything_ into the training data and tried to make a neural network that's 100% correct.
Very fun, played to the end. I like how there's time pressure without an explicit timer because of the spontaneous multiplication. Platforming felt mostly solid. I like how it can get out of control if you're not careful, but I wish you could get to way more dudes on screen before that happened, since I think it'd be satisfying to clear them all out.
Oh boy was this frustrating to play! It's hard to pin down exactly what makes the last level feel so impossible, but two things I noticed:
- The rotation force is absolutely tiny. For me this meant I was barely able to control the ships orientation, especially after accidentally bumping a wall. Since orientation is tied to horizontal movement, that becomes difficult to control as well. - The ship can lift the magnet, and the magnet can lift the containers, but the ship paradoxically can't lift the containers. This makes it really easy to accidentally get "pinned" under a container and need to restart. It also results in instabilities: - Landing on a container with the magnet draping over the side can cause the entire container to flip over due to the slight upward force on the magnet by the ship. - On the last level, trying to drag the container over the middle part risks it smacking the ship from behind, which causes the ship to fly forward and yank the container even harder.
A good entry nonetheless!
I like the sound design, and the idea itself is very neat. The graphics were good, but It would have been nice to have some animation as well, even just a simple sliding movement when going around the board or when the force fields close in.
The audience reminds me of the little crowd of miis that would cheer you on while playing wii sports resort.
I had trouble figuring out a good strategy for defeating the AIs. For the first two I used the "shove to the end of the field and punch once" strategy, while for the last few I just spammed the "fast punch" and prayed my attacks would be be slightly faster than theirs. I think it'd be nice to have some more agency: - Maybe the AIs could telegraph their attacks so the player can predict what would be the best next move - Or maybe a successful block could stun the AI long enough for a counter-strike - like in the fencing game in wii sports resort :D
I had fun playing this. I especially liked the various models and the little mouse voices. It'd be kind of funny if the log sank or something once you went above a certain population level. Right now you just sort of have to give up when all the space is used up, which is a bit of an anticlimax.
The concept works quite well. While the text-based graphics are a unique approach, I think a little sound and animation would go a long way. As-is, I might as well be playing over ssh (then again, maybe a terminal-based version of this wouldn't be such a bad idea...).
I like the gradual build-up. I felt like I had a pretty solid understanding of the rules as they were introduced, which I think allowed the later levels to be much more exciting/stressful than would have otherwise been possible.
In the rotating level for some reason I thought the x0s applied to the whole score and not the amount added, so I would take drastic measures to avoid them and keep hitting the -10k accidentally. I'm also curious what the rotating levels are like for different aspect ratios. On my 16:9 monitor it took a while to learn that putting boxes near the left and right meant "losing control" of them when the play field rotated 90 degrees.
I liked the calm atmosphere: the soft colors, gentle music, and self-paced gameplay. The art was very clean.
I think being able to replay the same level over and over again kind of breaks the game, since you can get an arbitrarily high score that way even when just mashing "take" and ignoring the value and weight of all the items. I didn't "get" the gameplay until after I voluntarily limited myself to one go at each level. Once I did that, it felt much more balanced.
I liked the attention to detail in the graphics, sounds, and animations. I couldn't quite figure out the strategy to get past the pumpkin things without dying, but the checkpoint system was very forgiving so I got to see the ending anyway :)
The sound, graphics, and animation gave the whole thing a "gameboy color" vibe to me, very neat!
I seem to be able to cheese it by hammering in a little three-tile circle, but I'm not sure how you'd fix that. Maybe you could have the chests spawn randomly in the whole space rather than only within tiled portions (so a larger island gets you more chests), or maybe the tiles could have an "angle of repose" where a stack that's too tall automatically spreads into a wider area (sort of like the sand or liquid physics in those 2-d pixel sandbox games).
I had some difficulty trying to run this game. Here's the list of things I tried: 1. I tried to launch the linux build, but it depends on libglew 2.2 and I only have 2.1 (Ubuntu 20.04) 2. Not discouraged, I downloaded the windows build and tried it under wine, but I was missing the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Redistributable. I installed it in wine, but it looks like my version of wine is missing some APIs the game uses, so it crashes on launch. 3. I then tried building from source. This gave compilation errors on my machine because `Lazynput/PrivateTypes.hpp` contains a declaration of `StrHashmap
The game is super neat! The movement feels super smooth and the whole thing has a nice feel. I wish there were a "person-v-computer" mode, though, so I could get a better feel for the mechanics. The turning radius is a bit wide, but I think that adds nicely to the challenge and could imagine getting more skilled at controlling the snake. I think it might be better if it weren't possible to accidentally clip yourself, though, since that seems to happen fairly easily when bouncing off walls while turning and somewhat limits the ability to perform tight maneuvers.
@sentmoraap Thanks! Disabling those two defines got me far enough to see what was going on in the debugger, and it looks like it just couldn't find the `assets` folder (I was building out-of-tree). Copying and pasting that folder into the build directory got the release build working just fine.
Other people are complaining about the web version missing the walkable tiles, but it seemed to render fine for me at least.
I liked the models and sounds. I would have expected "sci-fi" type button panels and crates, but I think having everything just be basic furniture is better: it's like the pod is the little robot's studio apartment. I think the controls are a bit weird, though, and found myself getting turned around a lot of the time. Maybe something better would be traditional arrow-key movement and then shift+arrow for the attract action?
This is wonderfully detailed for having been created in such a short time. The only thing I can think to recommend is to maybe have some sort of on-screen prompt with the controls. I kept trying to use LMB to interact with everything before I came back to read the game description.
Fantastic idea, I feel like the game incentivizes you to do the _opposite_ of what you have to do in tetris: keep the blocks/holes spaced out from one another so you can recognize their shapes when you're given an opportunity to convert them back to flat land.
I think I found an exploit, though:
limitris_score.png
My strategy:
limitris_exploit.png
The ghosts move slowly enough that you can just kite them around in the middle :P.
I love how seamless and "finished" it feels. That, combined with the unique idea and fun gameplay make this just great, overall!
I couldn't find items 1 and 4, so I killed emperor littlefin with the star shield :P. The damage from hitting the walls felt pretty unforgiving, but once I got the heal item I could just power through everything by spamming "3". Perhaps it should have had a cool-down like some of the other items? Sound and music would have really helped, I think, in addition to some more visual variation in the cave terrain. I like the 2.5D style, and the movement felt pretty solid, although it seemed more difficult to navigate diagonal passages than vertical/horizontal ones.
Happy to report no technical issues over here on Ubuntu 20.04. Good job with the game, it feels very complete in all dimensions, which is rare, I think.
Fun! There are a bunch of different ideas here, and I think they work well together. The music did a lot to set the mood, and was fun to listen to. There were a few places where I wanted to use the bouncing bullet mechanic to get an enemy from afar, but the bullets rarely ever seemed to reach, unfortunately.
Neat! It's a shame there don't seem to be enough people here to really test this out. Maybe you should schedule times in the game description for everyone to go online at once.
It'd also be nice to have some keyboard controls for those of us on laptops/desktops. :P
There's a message here with the trash compactor crushing so many recycling containers, but I'm not sure what it is...
Interesting take on 2048! It seems somewhat easier than the original in that pressing an arrow key will spawn new items regardless of whether anything actually moved, which allows you to avoid having to slide things away from the "hot corner" and risk something spawning there. It would have been really nice to have a sliding animation, though, since it can be disorienting when items move and spawn at the same time. It would have also been great to have some sound to accompany the little smoke animation!
The time pressure was a bit of a surprise; I guess I was expecting more of a "cautious exploration"-type experience than a mad dash to the center. The controls felt super solid, though, and it's a good entry overall.
I like the creative use of emoji for game UI, and I chuckled at the similarities between the various passenger types and the emojis used to represent them.
Some animation would really help this, I think. Moving between squares is discrete and instantaneous, for example, which somewhat breaks the illusion of traveling around in a large space.
Neat idea. I like the back and forth rhythm of the meteor showers and the resource management. Some of the mechanics confuse me a bit, though, like I don't quite see what the incentive is to create more houses, for example. I also ran into two issues: - After losing and restarting, some of the planet's state was carried over into the next round, like crater and building positions. - After playing for a little while, the game will sometimes get stuck in the "asteroid defense" mode with no asteroids on screen. I think it's maybe triggered by getting hit by too many asteroids? I had a strategy for a little bit where I would invest no resources into turrets and just rotate the planet so asteroid impacts always landed on an existing crater.
The cowboy capsules were hilarious, and this is one of the most fun compo games I've played so far. I also got shot at by flying cowboys, but I laughed so hard when it happened I feel like they should be left in ("Wait, what? where is he!?" \*BANG\* \*play field zooms out to reveal jiggling sky cowboy\*).
This is much calmer than the other games with floaty/inertial mechanics that I've played so far. It actually felt fairly easy to me, since you can take the levels as slowly as you want, and below a certain speed there's some damping that slows down the pod and gives back some control. Maybe after each level you could give the player a star rating based on the time and number of deaths so there's more of a "goal" to shoot towards. On the other hand, even without a goal I found myself playing all the levels over again just because of how weirdly satisfying it is to control that spaceship.
Major points have all been ticked off, so I'll add a few minor ones: - I like the room switching animation, and that you also were able to use it for the main menu as well. - The music could use some work; to my ears it just sounds like random notes on the pentatonic scale. - I think the game could benefit from some sort of random variation: - Maybe some walls could be indestructible? - Or maybe rather than needing to build the recyclers and chargers, they're distributed around the map and need to be discovered? - Perhaps some variation in the number of red pellets per room so it isn't exactly enough to build one new thing each time?
Hilarious and unexpected! I was also surprised at how easily the puzzles stymied me with only a handful of pieces and the same target shape each time. Unfortunately the "press space" video didn't play for me for some reason in firefox on linux, although the network pane showed the video file downloaded successfully (and I could still press space to skip it). I'd assume autoplay was the culprit but I'd allowed autoplay in the site settings and none of the other videos had any issues, so I don't know.
@dennis-magnusson Maybe. It played fine when I loaded the video url directly, so firefox is at least capable of playing the file. It looks like there's a null reference exception in the console, but when I checked for it again just now the video surprised me by playing just fine for the first time despite the error still appearing, so maybe it really is just some finicky autoplay-related thing.
I think all of the different enemy types worked really well together. The exploding slimes were especially unique, and I like how they forced me to re-adjust my jumps mid-air based on how the pieces landed. Some people are saying it was too hard, but I think the overall difficulty was about right.
It took me a few attempts to notice that studying how to adventure gives more experience than actually adventuring :P
I think this is great, and surprisingly well-balanced for something made in such a short time. The little building-placement puzzle worked well with the other game elements and didn't feel shoehorned in. I kind of wish I had more of an idea why certain adventures ended in failure, though. It'd be really cool if there were a mini simulation of the adventure, even if only in text form, to make it clear what's happening. Alternatively, maybe the dungeons could come with descriptions of the kinds of items/abilities which would help in each, or even a percent likelihood of success. As-is I was mostly guessing whether each dungeon would be worth attempting, and just "maxing everything out and praying" on the final one.
Not a bad concept. It was a little frustrating to have movement input be blocked on the square's sliding animation. If you want the player to be slow when moving around, then it may be better to either: 1. use continuous movement, rather than grid-based movement 1. let me hold down the movement buttons so I'm not forced to impatiently mash them or 1. have the buttons control an on-screen cursor towards which the little square is constantly moving
This was a challenging puzzle, and took me a couple tries to beat (especially since at first I didn't realize there was slightly more space there when you zoom out). One thing that confused me was that it looks like the fairies aren't pulling everything out of storage on each turn, even when the giant is still hungry. For example, on hard mode I had 420 satiation, 450 storage, and four fully-grown plots on the last turn, which I would think would have been a win, but the fairies didn't pull anything out of storage and the giant died anyway.
The movement felt really weird to me, almost like the blasts weren't pushing on the jar's center of mass. The thing would absolutely refuse to roll, preferring instead to skid along its main axis or tip end-over-end. Was this intentional?
The sound design worked quite well, I think, and the monochrome visual aesthetic was an interesting choice.
I'll be the dissenting voice and say I liked the difficulty curve on this one. It trades quantity of levels for the amount of satisfaction you get from solving each one.
This is a good set of puzzles, the platforming is solid, and I like the little animated astronaut made of circles. The music felt a bit repetitive after a while, but I think the other sounds worked well.
Fun and educational! I think the level of difficulty was perfect and ended up playing through the whole thing (tbf I do already know a wee bit about orbits). I also laughed at several of the little "taunts" for when you crash. It's a bit hard to know when the intro blurbs are complete so I'd often launch prematurely; it'd be nice to have a more explicit "go" button or something so the player is better prepared.
The mechanics remind me a lot of this old PC game:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(video_game%29)
Although it's much harder to control the sheep in yours on account of the birds (and because in Sheep they had a "grouping" mechanic where the sheep would tend to stay near one another).
I think the core gameplay here is really solid, and I like the way the vases, scarecrows, and fields add to the game, but I wish there were more variation in the levels themselves. Something like this I think would benefit greatly from deliberate level design rather than relying on random generation. I also seemed to run into an issue in later levels where a large number of sheep would get stuck near the middle of the screen and remain uninfluenced by the crows.
Nice idea. The platforming felt solid, and the last level managed to stump me for a little while. When resetting, it might be nice to initialize the checkboxes to whatever the player last set them to, so you can get right back into the level with one click. The level with the moving spike boxes took me several tries, and it was a little frustrating to have to re-click the same ability choices before every attempt.
Hilarious! Sadly I couldn't find my character in the bedlam (the text in the top right distracted me long enough to lose track), so I restarted and gave it another go while paying better attention. It also turns out you can just wait to press space the first time until after you've already reached the button, which makes the whole thing a lot easier :P. Some have complained about the controls but to me they were part of the fun. Definitely needs sound!
Not bad for a first game! Ludum Dare is kind of the "hard mode" way to learn game development, I think.
Others have mentioned the lack of diagonal movement, but I want to point out something that I think is also super important: inertial movement. Basically, instead of linking arrow key presses to velocity (displacement per frame), you want to link them to acceleration (change in velocity per frame). To cap the player speed at a maximum value, you would also need to add a damping acceleration (i.e. acceleration opposite the direction of movement). The code for these things is quite simple but has a massive positive impact on "game feel" not just because of the added realism, but also because it gives keyboard-using players better control over the player position.
@dsfan that's not quite what I'm talking about, no.
1. Including frame time in physics calculations results in non-determinism, which you probably don't want. Thankfully the "delta" godot passes to _PhysicsProcess seems to be constant, so including it in the physics calculation shouldn't help or hurt (others can correct me on this since I'm not that familiar with godot). 2. In your `Player` class, try adding a `private Vector2 vel = Vector2.Zero;` and then something like the following to `PlayerMovement`:
```cs _currentDirection = direction; var isMoving = direction != Vector2.Zero; if(isMoving) direction = direction.Normalized(); PlayAnimation(isMoving);
var acceleration = 3.0f; var slip = .7f; vel += direction * acceleration; vel *= slip; MoveAndCollide(vel); ``` You can tweak `acceleration` and `slip` to change how the movement feels. `acceleration` can be whatever but `slip` should be between 0 and 1.
I've been trying to complete a pacifist run of this game. I think it's possible, but the more dudes you have on screen, the more likely a balloon shows up in the middle of a group of them, so it may take a bit of luck to do.
The game is very satisfying, and I like the feeling of released tension at the end. I agree that an O2 meter would be helpful since it's hard to know how much time you have between O2 zones. I think with upgrades carrying over between rounds, you can kind of get away with not building up a whole lot of skill and just waiting for the upgrades to start overpowering the enemies.
I haven't seen any FPSs so far, and this one is quite fun! It took me a few tries to get through the whole thing, which to me is about the right level of difficulty for a game of this size. The robot models were cool, and the space felt tight and cluttered, which believe was intentional.
I agree with the other commenters that a crosshair and a sound when the bullets impact the other robots would be helpful. The robots also seem to make a beeline for the player, which is unfortunate because rather than enter the rooms to fight them I would get swarmed immediately and resort to slowly backing down the hallway while shooting and dodging. Maybe the robots could be "powered off" when the door opens, and "power on" once the player is well within the room?
The game felt very complete, and I liked all of the creative little details. When I change the mouse speed to "insane" the cursor jumps off-screen to the bottom right, so it took me a while to "find" it afterwards. I'm not sure if this is just a limitation of the tool, though.
Not bad! I like the aesthetic, although I wish there were more animations to make things feel more lively. I also feel like there wasn't much of an incentive to buy anything other than the 10KB antiviruses. You can put them directly on the track so that they always make their shots. Maybe if that were disallowed and the mines were a little cheaper, that might encourage buying more of the alternative options.
- open browser console (ctrl+shift+i then click "console" tab) - paste this: `cell_inf[4].color = 'grey';` - swap the number (0-4) and color ([full list](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color)) for what you want - hit enter - the colors will update on the next mouse movement
- 0: yellow - 1: limegreen - 2: cyan - 3: magenta - 4: orange
@dennis-magnusson Thanks for the feedback! The 54 is just sort of meant as a target to shoot for, not really an upper limit, since I think a bare score by itself would be hard to interpret for people new to the game :P.
Unfortunately the sound effects seem to be having some latency-related issues in some browsers. What's your browser-OS combination? I think Firefox on Windows may be having issues in particular.
Right click does clear the selection. Was it not working for you? I suppose I should mention it in the instructions...
@recher Thanks for the feedback.
> Also, it’s quite frustrating to be obliged to use two turn when you just want to shift a file part for some tiles. You have to put it in a complete empty part, then put it back to the shifted place.
While the source and destination regions must be non-overlapping, that doesn't mean there isn't a single-turn way to do what you are trying to do.
The linux build crashes on launch for me with the following error: ``` LowLevelFatalError [File:.\Runtime/VulkanRHI/Private/VulkanUtil.cpp] [Line: 1131] VulkanRHI::vkDeviceWaitIdle(Device) failed, VkResult=-4 at .\Runtime/VulkanRHI/Private/VulkanDevice.cpp:1408 with error VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST Signal 11 caught. Malloc Size=262146 LargeMemoryPoolOffset=262162 CommonUnixCrashHandler: Signal=11 Malloc Size=131160 LargeMemoryPoolOffset=393352 Malloc Size=131160 LargeMemoryPoolOffset=524536 Engine crash handling finished; re-raising signal 11 for the default handler. Good bye. Segmentation fault ``` This is on Ubuntu 20.04 with intel integrated graphics. From what I've found online this is likely Unreal's fault and not yours, but I just thought I'd let you know.
This is great! I love the long, satisfying play time. The edge scrolling was a bit tricky for me, so I found myself just holding down space and right-click to zip around the place. I never used the smaller turrets, and didn't realize how to use the (shield, I think?) until I was already seconds from winning. Other than the lack of sound, this feels very complete.
Also: the source you posted seems to be missing most of the project files and assets, so I'm not sure how I would compile and run this locally. I may be misinterpreting the rules, but I thought it was required to post all of the source files needed to get the game to work, not just script files.
It's the start of something good, at least! The little noises the minions make are really entertaining, and it held my attention for much longer than unfinished games of this size typically do.
Your username is apropos :P
I like it! It's neat to see an entry with procedural generation, and I think the visual style and sounds work well, too. I wish the play time were a bit longer; the single small level left me hungry for more!
A small thing, but I think it'd also be nice to have the map fill out all the squares in the player's field of view, rather than just the ones the player is standing on. It might make it easier to see which areas are still unexplored.
This is great; the platforming was just challenging enough to be entertaining, but easy enough that I was willing to play again until I got all 4 endings. The sound design was also fairly good. I do wish player horizontal movement were momentum-based rather than fixed-velocity, since fixed-velocity makes the controls feel rather stiff and unnatural.
Some spelling errors: - "To be honest I invited you here today to make a *decision on whether to fire you or not" - "I trust you'll make the *decision that's best for the company" - "left click on a spirit when close to summon *its essence"
Also, to go on a bit of a tangent, you mentioned: > the game uses some gimmicks that makes a Web build impossible
Godot may not support it, but opening multiple windows that can talk to each other is actually a well-supported (if well-hated) feature of the web. Most browsers require a user-engagement gesture of some sort before opening the window, but your "enter the spirit realm" button would probably count. I'd be curious if any game engine would consider adding support for something like that.
I liked playing this, and made it to the end; the level design felt especially well done. One criticism: I'm not sure having the player take damage in the non-springified level portions added much value to the game. It doesn't seem to affect strategy much at all, and doesn't add enough difficulty that I was really thinking about it all that much, especially in the later levels.
_"This is a simple test. To pass, simply summon anything other than a rock, boulder, car, or refrigerator."_
_"..."_
_*summons car above teacher_
This is great. The controls were a _bit_ tricky, but it reminded me of games like fancy pants adventure where managing your momentum is part of the challenge.
A funny and simple game. The friendly smiling demon at the end is a great punchline. Unfortunately one of the "broken" phrases has 4 possible alternatives, while the other has 2, which means the game takes up to 8 attempts to win if that's the _only_ thing you're unsure about. I was also unsure about candle placement, though, which meant the ceiling on the number of required attempts for me was closer to 32. A hint about what specifically you got wrong when you fail might help with this. The "abomination" was also covered up by the book when it appeared, so to me it just looked like a particularly sad dude.
A neat twist on the VS mechanic! It was a fun discovery moment when the first skeleton spawned. It would have been nice for the game to have an ending of some sort, since by the 20 minute mark it wasn't hard anymore and I had to decide on my own when to stop playing.
After enough levels, it stopped giving me any symbols and just gave me a circle over and over again. It would be nice if there were some sort of win condition or a score or something, as the game is somewhat unsatisfying without it.
A unique idea. I think the arrows add a nice extra bit of strategy. I had one run where I did pretty well, I think, but after a while some of the squares became un-clickable, forcing a lose. The final score display is also broken for me, which makes it difficult to know how well I did.
Sadly, I gave up early trying to figure out what the 4 aspects did and went to check the source code. I regretted it immediately, though, since the mechanics are actually quite well-considered, and I would have had a great time trying to figure them out. After spoiling them, I still wanted to play for quite a while afterwards and managed to get a high score of 33. Maybe a hint or an explanation of the basics with a big `SPOILER WARNING` above it might be helpful for the less patient, since I think the game is still fun, stregy-wise, even when you know the mechanics.
All in all, a great entry!
I'm really awful at this, but there's no score, so I can pretend I'm actually really good at this.
Overall very fun, even if it's lacking some music or a score. I think the flashy bullets add a lot, and the little hopping animation the cube does is funny as well. It'd be a great to be able to play something like this against friends who are equally bad at it, rather than NPCs that keep owning me :P.
This is quite addicting - and hard! I'll have to bookmark this to play some more later, since I don't think I've quite got the best strategy figured out.
Just a heads up, but I think the "play in browser now" link at the top of the page is pointing to the wrong game.
The visuals here were pretty well done, and I think there's something mildly terrifying about the little red priest floating across the gap to the little green priest (although I suppose in this case I'm playing as the terrifying thing).
Ahhh, rust. Nothing like waiting 6 minutes for a game to compile before playing it :P.
The ending got a chuckle out of me (I think the panic on exit was intentional?). I liked the visuals, and though I don't know what language the recipe was in, it didn't take me too many guesses to pick out the important words. It could use some sound!
Fun entry, it got pretty hectic by the end, there! I found the sounds entertaining. It could use a bit more of a challenge, though. As is, I was able to win by randomly clicking around without putting much thought into it.
I feel like after summoning 15 zombies you'd have an inkling that your relative ain't going to come back the way you remembered them...
I loved the online features, but missed them on my first run because of my ublock settings, so I had to play again. You may want to have some sort of indicator for when the game's running without a server connection so unusually paranoid people like me notice when we've broken something :).
Some have criticized the randomness in the fireball targeting, but I feel like that's where most of the game's fun is coming from. Otherwise, killing the zombies would start to feel somewhat mechanical after the first two or three. With the randomness you have to strategically combine targeting and kiting, which makes for much more interesting gameplay.
> I wonder what the old man is for. > > Maybe he wants a log to sit on. > > ...no? > > These stones need a combination. > > Perhaps if I give the old man this bucket of water he'll give me the combination? > > ...no. > > Ah, I see! A hearty batch of mushroom stew. Surely the old man will love this! > > ...nope. > > Perhaps if I bring him some string to help tie his shoes he'll ...oh. Oh dear.
At least I managed to feed him some mushroom stew in the end :P
The sound worked super well on this one. I didn't think the difficulty was too high, but I guess with jam games people don't have a whole lot of patience.
I'm still not sure what the big rock was for. Maybe to press the pressure pad? It seems I didn't need the rock to go through the passage, though, but maybe that was a bug?
I spent more time in freeplay mode than I did in the actual game :D. Everything about this feels perfect: sound, graphics, animations and gameplay. I didn't realize "summon a horde of bodies" could have a puzzly aspect to it! It's also super polished compared to most of the entries I've seen written in plain C.
A unique idea, and I liked the art. A couple things: - A score or a win condition or something would be nice. After the first few successful summons, I wasn't quite sure what to do - `init:cat` seems to be totally optional; not sure if that's intended - Sound would help a lot. Even just a basic "clack" sound when I type, or an occasional mew from one of the cats. - I think there was a missed opportunity here for easter eggs/hidden messages. I typed "init:dog" and was disappointed :P - I'm having trouble finding the link to the source code. Have you posted it somewhere?
I think the visual aesthetic of this game is solid, and I loved that you were even able to add some voice lines (although I accidentally skipped one of them by walking straight into the laser :P). Some things: - The collision/player movement felt _really_ wonky to me. Walls seem to have infinite friction, and trying to walk onto that moving platform in the second level without immediately falling off took me many tries. - The puzzles could have used a bit more variety. I feel like there isn't much thought required to complete the levels once you know what each of the summonables does.
This is a fun premise, and it'd be nice to see it fleshed out a bit more. For me, the "battle" portion was a bit too hard, and I couldn't make it past the second wave of gremlins (and not for lack of frantic clicking). Another thing I noticed is that the viewport size seems to change with the window size, so using a smaller window means I see less of the play field.
Funny! It'd be nice if there were a bit more of a challenge to it, like if the cards you picked impacted the dating sim or the outcomes of dates affected which cards are drawn. As it is, winning is pretty inevitable once you've figured out the mechanics.
I liked the visuals, and the puzzles had me stumped for several minutes (I played the fixed version of the game you linked), good job.
I was a little frustrated by the controls, though. If I tap a movement key three times, I expect the character to move three squares, but instead it seems if I tap a key while the lich is moving, the input is ignored. My next instinct was to hold down movement keys for continuous motion, but that also didn't work. The puzzles were good enough to keep me playing in spite of that, though, so I think what you have here is super neat.
Like others, I also missed that the skeleton needed to be collapsed on the sigil for it to work. It's obvious now, but for me, the "Ascend" graphic appeared to be depicting a normal skeleton and not a pile of bones.
I feel like there's a certain special tension to working on something with a lot of tedious detail that you have to keep in your head. I suppose for programmers that's basically part of the job description, but it's interesting to see it leveraged for horror purposes.
Having a game with a lot of detail in it like this also seems like it'd be super hard to pull off in the time limit. In spite of that, you've managed to have good sound design, decent graphics, and a satisfying ending. Good job!
A good entry. My left hand was a bit sore by the end there, though :P. The enemies' bullets felt a bit unfair at times, since I'd often find myself in a position where I couldn't dodge them, even when I react quickly enough. It wasn't frustrating enough to make me stop playing, though, so I guess I can't complain :).
This had a lot of depth for a compo game, and I liked that there was quite a bit of humor sprinkled in as well.
So many questions, though: Do all rocks have ghosts? Do all inanimate objects have ghosts? How does a rock "die", exactly? If I split a rock in half, does that count as killing it? Are the two halves each new rocks that get their own ghosts?
I love the music and sound effects, probably the best quality I've seen so far in a compo submission. I also tried "colorblind" mode to see how it was different, and it felt a bit like enabling easy mode :P. The numbers above the imps' heads should probably rotate towards the camera, though: sometimes they end up facing backwards or sideways, which I think maybe increases the difficulty unintentionally.
I was also hoping for a secret ending if I refused to summon myself, but instead I got to summon a coworker, I guess.
What a fascinating game, I'm not sure whether I'm meant to be spooked or chuckling. I think you may have an off-by-one error on the month in the computer date display, or maybe that's part of the whole thing somehow and I just don't get it.
It's a funny take on the theme. I'm disappointed there are only three endings, though. With the "accuse" option on the final dialogue I was hoping there'd be an ending where the witness is executed instead of the defendant.
I've never played Carnage Heart, but I like the programming and combat simulation idea. It's also impressive how many features you were able to pack into the game given the time limit. It didn't _really_ feel like I had much control over the ship, though. Trying to strafe the enemy bullets using nothing but random offsets feels pretty limiting, and I was heavily relying on flaws in the enemy strategy when making programming decisions (something which did _not_ help me in level 6, which I was unable to beat). I think it would help if there were some math operations available, like addition, subtraction, scaling, dot/cross product, etc. Some other thoughts and things I noticed: - "rotate towards" often taking the long way around is pretty frustrating to deal with, since it felt like it was pretty much random whether the ship would move in the way I wanted it to - The tooltip delay seems a bit long. It might be better to simply not have a delay before the tooltip appears, since I needed to check it frequently for things like weapon range and timing. - I couldn't really tell what units the lengths were in, so it might have been nice to have a message like "the arena is X units wide" or something, or even an on-screen ruler. - It'd be nice to maybe have a way to look at the enemy software/hardware before the round starts - I couldn't tell which weapons were thermal weapons vs the kinetic and energy weapons just by reading the description, and it was even harder to do so for the enemies' bullets, which are just barely-distinguishable colored dots. I had to do a series of test runs with each shield type to see which one was actually the most effective.
All in all, though, it's a solid entry.
What a clever game idea! I like how far you were able to get while using the same shape for all of the levels. The "encore" caught me off-guard, but I managed to make it to the end.
> ...the camera would sometimes jump, which I’m not sure if it was intentional...
@darkwolf What do you mean by "jump", exactly? Like it rotates suddenly or something? That's definitely not intentional if that's what's happening. What is your browser/OS combination?
@outstar
> I also had the “camera jump” issue...
I'm still having difficulty reproducing this, unfortunately, even after trying several things to trigger it. What's your browser/OS combination? It might help me narrow it down.
> ...the monster hiding in the corridors...
Those kids and their pets! I told them to put that thing on a leash!
@outstar @darkwolf Thank you both. I believe this is caused by a bug in chrome when using a mouse with a high polling rate (i.e. a "gaming" mouse). I have pushed up a patch which I hope works around the issue. Would either of you be willing to try the game again (after clearing your cache) and confirm that the problem is fixed? I don't have a mouse with which to reproduce the issue locally.
Decent game, it's cool to see something made with C and SDL. The mechanics of placing the dog and the box felt strange until I realized that it places on mouse _up_ instead of mouse _down_, which I think is somewhat unconventional. It would also have been nice to have some audio.
I like the cut-scenes, menus, and original music. It would have been nice to maybe have some more variety to the gameplay; it felt a little repetitive after the first two or so enemies. The boss fight was a good addition, but I think it either needed more stages to spice things up or else less health to help move the battle along more quickly. Other than that, solid entry!
I got to level 13 before I had to stop; my cortisol levels were getting too high... This is definitely great, though. The idea is good, the platforming is solid, and the challenge feels "fair" enough that I was blaming myself for failing rather than the game for killing me.
Some issues I ran into: - walking into a pillar doesn't cancel horizontal momentum, so you kind of get "stuck" in it for a fraction of a second before you can turn around. - Some of the spike balls don't seem to actually kill you. I almost don't want to report this one with how many times that saved my bacon :P - On my first attempt I somehow got the game stuck in a mode where the player character wouldn't stop walking left, and had to restart
I think the LMB/RMB for the side walls was a good choice. Besides the issue with Q/E you already mentioned, I've played platformers which use those keys and have frequently run into issues caused by the low key rollover on my laptop keyboard.
I wish demons had as strong of a preference for milk as my customers.
This is quite featureful compared to the typical "custom game engine" entry; I noticed particle effects, models, textures, positional sound, rigid-body physics, and a camera raycast. I would have thought this was a Unity game, had I not read the description.
Random thoughts on the game itself: - Blurry texture upscaling is pretty ugly to my eyes. I think using something like GL_NEAREST would be much nicer visually, even if the "pixelated" look lacks realism - The "electrical hum" sound should always be the same frequency everywhere, assuming the shed isn't in a different country from the shop - The twist was funny and caught me off-guard, since I wasn't reading the task list and just wanted to click the customer to figure out what they wanted - That time limit is just a liiitle bit too tight, I think. When you're _constantly_ moving from one second to the next, you start to get super frustrated at the little things like getting caught on corners or the ever-so-slightly-too-short raycast distance when trying to reach the magazines - For how stressed I was by the end, I was hoping for a bit more of a satisfying ending :P
Good job!
I liked the determined look on the mice's face when they're interacting with something.
Some notes: - Once a mouse has grabbed something, its inventory is instantly full, so there's nothing reasonable to do except return to base. Either the mouse's inventory needs to be bigger or they should auto-return without me needing to go find and click on them. - The mice are starving while you read the instructions, which is a bit stressful - I didn't see much point to making more mice. Two is plenty to collect enough acorns in a reasonable amount of time and each new mouse increases the rate of food consumption.
Just a heads up, I think you may have forgotten to update the itch.io version with the performance fix you mention in the comments. That's the version I played, so the real challenge for me was to beat the game before running out of RAM :P. I tried playing again on the jam page version and found the game much more satisfying, so I think the performance really makes a difference.
It took me a couple tries to realize that you have to ignore almost all the upgrades until you can get "eternal grace", since the game is basically unwinnable until you've gotten that one.
This was just too hard for me; I got to the level with the vertically moving firefly before I had to give up. IMO some of those jumps require waaay too much precision.
Graphically, I thought it was nice, and the movement felt solid. I would have liked to hear some sound or music, though.
I always had trouble enjoying candy-crush-like games since it never feels like I'm actually strategizing much, just noticing rows of 3 and getting lucky. That said, the metal sound when clearing rows was pretty satisfying, and I also liked all the little visual details like having the snakes "pulse" in and the little sliding animation between levels.
Too good! I don't know if it's because I'm on an older computer or because I was running under wine, but the input latency was super high for me, which made the "double-jump" regions somewhat frustrating. This was with the LightGPU version. Still managed to beat it, though!
Love it! The animations/cutscenes are much more than you usually see in 3d submissions. Besides an in-game explanation of the controls, it would have been nice to have some sound/music. Even some low-effort sound effects generated with online tools tend to improve the gameplay experience quite a bit.
The music was a bop, and the whole thing had a nice retro-arcade vibe going. Navigating ladders felt bit fiddly, but the platforming was solid otherwise.
This is the funniest compo game I've played so far. The contrast between the super aggressive goblin attacks and the pathetic little kick to one-shot them is hilarious.
This was great! It's well focused and feels very solid. It's such a minor thing, but I especially liked the fireflies on the interstitial screens. If I had anything to complain about it'd be that the UI was a bit too clunky for my taste; lots of clicks are required to set up the troops and there's no obvious way to undo an individual decision or re-order things.
The graphics and sound are quite impressive; the whole thing feels very complete. It took me a bit of experimentation to figure out what the different colors of orbs did. It might be nice if there were a legend somewhere that explained it. Perhaps color-coding the stats screen?
This is excellent. It's clear a lot of thought went into the level design, and I think the music was great at setting the mood. It was a little too easy for me, but I don't think it's possible to satisfy everybody on that front. The door numbers were pretty forgettable, and I would have liked if they were color-coded or something.
The potential strategy here seems super interesting, but I don't think the the AI does it justice. I still enjoyed discovering the various mechanics and thinking about how to best use them.
I had a lot of trouble seeing things in the dark, and the player movement was quite strange/floaty. Specific things related to movement that I noticed: - the camera doesn't rotate about its center, but seems to be positioned somewhat to the right of the center of rotation - This isn't a purely visual issue either: player collision moves with the camera, so rotating the view with the mouse is enough to fall off of ledges, even when you're not otherwise moving. - Pressing the jump button seems to "queue" the jump for later, so that pressing it while mid-air can cause a jump when you later hit the ground - Much of the level geometry is narrower than the minimum distance that the player can travel, so tapping a key to do a slight adjustment sends you careening over the edge.
I liked this a lot, but boy was it difficult! I think it maybe relies a little bit too much on randomness, so that even without making any mistakes it seems like a bit of a coin toss whether you win. That said, maybe there was some element to the strategy I was missing.
tinies.png
It took me around 12 minutes to beat. The physics feels rock-solid, which is pretty surprising when you consider the scaling mechanic. It would have been nice to have a climax to all the build-up of having stuff shake like that. Like an explosion or something.
If I let the game play out without interfering, the red bugs kill all the plants. If I kill only the red bugs, the pot becomes overgrown and the framerate drops. It would seem the winning strategy here is to kill all bugs indiscriminately :P.
> Just out of curiosity, what interactions would you guys like in the game?
I'd like some way to more precisely control where the plants grow, so I could spell out a word or something. Maybe a way to direct the spawn location of bug eggs, or a way to seed new plants on empty dirt?
I survived for 8:35. Super fun, although it was stressful needing to glance back down at the upgrades menu to check the prices and pick hotkeys. The whole game felt like a tribute to Doom, and I think it does a good job of that.
Some here have said that the early game feels too slow, but I don't really agree. Both in terms of literal movement speed and overall pacing I think the early portion of the game feels about right.
I don't know why, but it was the stock-photo explosions that had me laughing out loud.
I agree with others that the game is too easy. You can just ignore all of goliath's bullets and you will still kill it well before it manages to kill you. You don't even have to care about which weapon to use, really.
Super fun! My high score is 418. The difficulty scales quickly, which I didn't like at first until I realized it forces you to rely on combos early on, which is actually great. You may want to consider locking the mouse and displaying your own cursor; I would frequently accidentally click outside of the game window in the web build.
The level of detail is super impressive, and the game is highly enjoyable to boot!
Unfortunately, once I started building things on the second level, the path-finding seemed to freak out: the little people would get stuck trying to pass each other on the stairs and a bunch of them stopped moving almost entirely, eventually starving to death.
Clever take on the genre, although this reminds me of a lot of some of the ideas people came up with for "summoning." The introduction of the little fast ones catches you a bit off-guard, so it took me a couple of tries to get past level ~20 or so. It seems the winning strategy is to invest everything into defensive upgrades like speed, health, and armor before moving on to offensive ones like capacity, damage, and spawn rate.
Stopped at level 400: shikigami.png
Beat it on the hardest difficulty! I ended up using a similar strategy to @frogman of combining the holy scepter and summoner to get massive damage and near invulnerability. The "courtyard" level where you're surrounded by ghosts seemed just about impossible with all the other strategies I tried.
impish_descent.png
Some things that frustrated me while playing: - It seems difficult to get melee imps to attack downwards, like the range is much shorter in that direction - Ranged imps near a wall aren't able to shoot because their bullets die instantly - The telegraph for ghost bullets is the same color as the bullet itself, making it difficult to know when it is and isn't safe to touch it at a glance - Ghosts can still fire at you for a brief time after you've defeated them
The difficulty ramps up pretty darn quick with this one. It'd have been nice for there to be some time allocated to get used to the hoop throwing mechanic without also needing to juggle the cheese and rat murder at the same time.
There's a bug where when you throw the cheese, it sometimes never registers as having landed, so that the rats continuously go after the player instead. I may or may not have used that to my advantage...
>You: Help me, firefighter! I'm trapped on the fifth story of this building and it's getting difficult to breathe! > >Firefighter: \*defenestrates you\*
There's a lot going on here for something made in such a short time frame! While the randomly generated levels are cool from a technical perspective, I'm not sure how much the gameplay benefits from them. About 50% of the time both the fire and a fire extinguisher spawn close enough to let me end the round within a couple of seconds.
I also didn't really end up needing many of the more advanced mechanics like smoke management or floor tunneling. Maybe if you couldn't grab people but instead had to forge a path for them to escape on their own? I tried playing with a self-imposed "no grabbing people" rule, but they don't seem to be smart enough most of the time (most just stand there and die, and one walked _into_ the fire).
I liked it a lot. The dialogue and reveal reminded me a lot of Daniel Mullins' stuff. The content warning in the game description ruined the surprise for me, sadly, but the execution (so to speak) was still pretty fantastic.
I played the Linux version on Ubuntu 20.04, and managed to crash the game somehow near the end of my second attempt (I was spam-clicking pretty rapidly, so I don't know if that was related): ``` Godot Engine v4.3.stable.official.77dcf97d8 - https://godotengine.org MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0
Vulkan 1.2.182 - Forward+ - Using Device #0: Intel - Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500 (BDW GT2)
ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) ERROR: Can't take value from empty array. at: front (core/variant/array.cpp:335) Segmentation fault ```
This is super fun, and I still have the music playing in the background as I type this. Best I could do was 24950; things seem to get pretty impossible once you get the minigun.
Two thoughts: - There doesn't seem to be much point to _not_ sprinting, so maybe the player should just be always sprinting without needing to press shift - Bug speed doesn't appear to reset when you get a game over. Trying to pick off minigun-level bugs with the starter pistol is quite the extra challenge.
Wow, the swarm of squids is super terrifying! I'm on an older computer, so I had to download the native build for this to be playable. I also didn't realize the game was beatable at first, maybe some sort of progress indicator would help there.
A fun short story! I managed to get both endings. At first I thought there'd be a special ending if you crushed the little creatures with a rock, but alas, it's not possible.
The hand should probably be bounded to the screen space, since it's possible to move it off-screen and then forget where it is, forcing a level restart.
This reminds me of Lemmings. You couldn't kill lemmings by dropping poo on them, though, so in a way this game is better.
I'm not sure if this is a bug or if you just never got around to implementing it, but hitting "next" on the final level doesn't seem to do anything. It took me a bit to realize that meant I'd won.
I got to stage 88 before I stopped. This is oddly addicting in a "staring at fire" sort of way. There's an issue when you have a large number of creatures where they'll sort of get "blown" off of the screen. I almost thought I'd soft-locked myself until they eventually came back after several minutes:
swarmcore_lagdeath.png
I shudder to think what a screen reader would make of this.
Most "gimmicky" games that get submitted to Ludum Dare aren't much more than the gimmick, but in this case the game is quite good even before you consider how it was made. Congrats!
Not bad. The baddies shoot from the hip, so there's a spot near the top-left where if you camp and continuously shoot to the right you never get hit, since the baddies come at you from beneath. I was going to exploit that to get a super high score, but alas! There is no score.
The best I could do was 11 (which I felt much worse about until I read the comments :P). I think this puzzle would be hard for me even if I had a top-down perspective on it, but the 16 super-narrow-fov cameras make it quite a bit harder.
"eery concertina" is a new sound for me, but I dig it.
I think one of the hints said "waxing gibbous" when it meant "waning gibbous".
The death animation was quite nice, although I think some sound for that would have helped. There also didn't seem to be much of a point to the creature having 3 status bars instead of just 1. I got the "speedrunner" ending, but I wasn't able to unlock the "secret" menu music. I'm not sure if that's supposed to unlock randomly or if there's something I need to do to trigger it.
@trogdor-20x6 Could you clarify what you mean by "flickery"? Also, what is your operating system, web browser, and graphics card?
@trogdor-20x6 I am sadly not able to reproduce this issue on any of the hardware available to me. What's your model of GPU?
Regardless, I've added a little hack to the shader which might fix the problem. Would you be willing to check again and let me know if the texture bleed issues are still there (be sure to clear browser cache)?
@fusionnist What is your browser/os/gpu combination? Also, can you confirm whether the issue you saw is still present in the latest version? The recent fix included some floating-point precision updates.
You'd think drawing a square grid of tiles would be simple...
Thank you for your help, @fusionnist and @trogdor-20x6.
I had some friends reproduce the issue for me, and have uploaded a new version of the game which I believe fixes it. Would either of you be willing to test again and confirm?
I liked the visuals, but it feels like the gameplay runs out a bit too soon. The game sort of pushes you towards growing as many pets as possible, but nothing changes when you do and the framerate doesn't withstand it for long.
Also: needs sound! Basic video game bleeps and boops are super easy to generate with online tools, and it would have made the game feel a lot more finished with not much effort.
I'm on linux, so I played the .py version.
Things not already mentioned by others: - There are three lives, but the rat dies on the first hit. I assume this is because the lives are depleting once per tick while in contact with a flea. A common solution to this problem is to make the player invulnerable for a short fixed period of time after losing a life. - The rat moves a fixed distance per tick when pressing an arrow key, but in real life objects need time to accelerate. Implementing this usually means having a "velocity" vector and adding to it once per tick when accelerating, then dividing it by a fixed amount per tick regardless of player input. You'd then add the velocity vector to the position once per tick rather than moving a fixed amount. - The game window was much taller than my 1080p screen, and would not allow me to resize it. Having a non-resizable game window is ok for a jam game, but then you probably want to make sure it's small enough to fit on most monitors. - Some have pointed out that you should package the game as an exe rather than as a Python script, but I'd double down on that and say you should avoid Python altogether in the future for programs that you intend other people to be able to run. The language is just not a good choice for that, sadly.
I loved how all of the levels were in the shape of various creatures. While it seems like there's a lot of opportunity there with the game mechanics, I feel like all of the levels had pretty trivial solutions, so there wasn't much thought required to beat the game.
At one point when I tapped R to reset the level, it wouldn't reset the player position for some reason, and I got stuck.
Neat! A hexagon is an odd choice for a rolling object :P
Very unique! The story raises so many questions... I really liked the use of color, and how the dialogs for each character read like sinister contracts.
The gameplay didn't seem to require much strategy, though. For example, after planting sprouts there didn't seem to be any reason _not_ to spam the bed over and over again to make them all grow up. Maybe potential heirs could decay/die over time?
I liked it. The play time was short, but the rules seemed well balanced. Not sure why people would find it suspicious for a farmer to slaughter pigs, though...
There should have been a particle effect when harvesting the animals. A shower of blood would have been both satisfying and hilarious, I think.
- The design of the golem looked quite nice - The game requires a tricky amount of coordination, which I think is good, but it's a bit too easy to simply let one side die and follow through with the other. I'd like it better if you lost when either side died. - The telegraphing for the fist slamming down and a boulder dropping are a bit too similar, IMO, especially since both fists can occasionally slam down at the same time - Could use some sound/music
Not bad! You may want to find a way to calculate collision based on the level data rather than hard-coding the dimensions of each platform. You can do it by looping over `boards` similar to how you loop over it when drawing the tiles to the screen.
Additionally, when you do detect a collision, you should reverse the player movement that triggered the collision. For example: ```py self.rect.y += self.yvelocity if self.is_colliding_with_terrain(): self.rect.y -= self.yvelocity self.yvelocity = 0
self.rect.x += self.xvelocity if self.is_colliding_with_terrain(): self.rect.x -= self.xvelocity self.xvelocity = 0
``` There are more advanced things you can do to improve movement/collision but something like the above should fix the "phasing through platforms" issues people are seeing.
My little magenta square seems to die randomly even when it's nowhere near any red squares. I thought I might be the victim of wraparound or red squares hiding under blue squares, but neither seem to be the cause. Is this a bug? Or a mechanic I'm not understanding?
Aside from that, I thought it was fun. It might be good to have some sort of visual indication of the number of lives, though. I started on "chill" mode and didn't realize that meant "no death" until several minutes had passed.
I enjoyed this. Eating ants was a bit of a jump-scare. It's been a while since I've used scratch, but if I remember correctly you can get much smoother keyboard-based movement by using a "forever" loop and checking for keyboard input on each iteration, rather than relying on the "when key pressed" blocks.
This is great! There was an issue I noticed in level 5 with the snake and hook where when I fall on the long flat part of the hook image from above, sometimes I'd fall behind it while sometimes I wouldn't. I think it might be velocity-based, but I'm not sure. I had a hard time in general understanding the rules for when the player does and doesn't pass behind an image, so that issue especially confused me.
I love the model-work and overall sense of scale; it made the ending feel super satisfying. I'm not sure if it's possible to get all the rings, but I tried my best and managed to score 214399.
My RAM can't handle a game with such high-end graphics. I made it to the end but attempting to take a screenshot was enough to make my OS kill the process.
I think the level design here is really good. I started out thinking getting all 21 would be impossible but it's actually not that difficult at all if you're careful and quick on the "restart" key.
I'd prefer it if that first long jump were a _little_ bit shorter, though. I couldn't make it reliably, which meant if I made a mistake in a later level I was punished by being made to re-try that one jump over and over again.
high_16.png
The best I managed, haha. 25 definitely seems reachable, even if very difficult. It took me a bit to realize the laser fish are similar to Minecraft's "guardians" in that you can survive them if you interrupt the line of sight (although I think for the latter it cancels immediately rather than waiting until the moment of firing). The real bastards are the anglerfish, since they take 8 bullets apiece and appear to be immune to the mines.
Two exploits I noticed (I didn't cheat to get the 16, though!): 1. If I go upwards at the start instead of downwards, the oxygen doesn't start depleting and I can still shoot bubbles and crystals 2. There doesn't appear to be a world border, so I can go outside and under the world and start picking off fish from underneath
Maybe I'm just weird but I actually loved the player movement in this. It had a sort of derpy octodad/qwop-type thing going which made it hilarious without being too frustrating.
I think it would make more sense to allow the player to click "in a direction" rather than requiring the cursor to exactly line up with the hit target. It's difficult to click on a moving target, especially when camera movement, player movement, and mouse movement are all somewhat independent and the target (in the case of the enemies) is moving quickly. Clicking to grab/hit things felt very finicky.
I liked the music too! Something about that main melody really jumped out at me for some reason.
This is excellent! I played all the way to the end. I love the the background music muffling when I'm underwater. There were only a couple small problems I noticed: - Interacting with a ladder while underwater can get you stuck in a wall, although you can unstuck yourself by mounting and unmounting the ladder - Some of the conveyors in one of the upper areas don't move the player. One of them doesn't do the conveyor animation, either. - I think the map shouldn't show trinkets you've already found. I didn't get burned by this, but I could imagine walking past one accidentally and having it show as reached on the map, preventing me from realizing I hadn't gotten it.
Mine eyes hath feasted on flowers.
Not sure what the goal was, but I enjoyed myself (found the gem, too!).
This feels a bit familiar, haha. Not sure if my game from last year was the inspiration for this but if so I think your take on it is much better than mine was :D. I also get a strong "Lemmings" vibe not just from the character but also from the various environments and music, which is great.
These were the steps I used to run on Linux, in case this helps someone: - Install ASP.NET core runtime version 8 from microsoft's website - Copy `
I flew up into the air and nearly drowned while caught on the upper side of the boat, but managed to save it in time. It's very fun in the qwop sort of way where the little dude flails around in circles while you mash buttons, confidently screaming "I GOT THIS," and fail horribly.
This feels like the start of a good game, but there doesn't seem to be much to it. The core gameplay feels like a basic test of your reaction time to the point where there isn't much strategy and I don't see my score increasing with each run. I can consistently reach a score of around 30-40 by targeting the pluses, but I can get the same score by just spam clicking randomly and hoping I luck out.
I also think some sound, music, and animation would help a lot.
The music was very fun. The game felt a little RNG-driven in that I'd struggle through a few attempts at a level only to luck out and get some incredibly overpowered combination of power ups that let me charge straight through. I also agree with others that some sound effects would have been helpful, especially something for taking damage as I'd frequently die without realizing I had hit anything at all.
I thought an anglerfish's light was supposed to _attract_ prey :P. Overall the game was quite solid. This is the first time I've seen dead reckoning used as a gameplay mechanic, and it's more fun than I would have expected.
While the visuals were nice, I would have been fine with worse visuals in exchange for better player movement/collision.
Additionally, the game seems to have issues resetting after a game over: - The current "realm" that you're in doesn't reset when you restart the game - The final text prompt with the score doesn't display the second time you lose, and "space" doesn't work to restart the game
For sounds, check out sfxr or one of the many online clones of it. It only takes a couple of minutes to make some basic bleeps and boops and they can help the game feel a lot more polished.
The art was very pretty! I don't think you learn enough about the story from the little spheres to get very emotionally invested in Daniel Radcliffe's character, but it's a tight time constraint, so good job regardless!
I think there should be a background graphic to help get a sense of vertical motion. When I tap the up arrow, sometimes my fish would appear to move upwards much further than I expected, as if I had held down the button, but I couldn't tell if that was a bug in the controls or if the camera was moving in a way I couldn't see.
It's also not very difficult to make it all the way to the top even if you ignore the larger fish when grabbing the smaller ones, making the game not very challenging. Perhaps that was the intent, though.
This felt painfully difficult to me, but based on praise from the other commenters maybe I was just super unlucky? Even on "normal" difficulty baddies wouldn't drop enough loot for me to afford shop upgrades before the difficulty scaling got beyond what my little sword could handle. I eventually gave up and switched to "easy," but it still took what felt like an excruciatingly long time before I could afford a ranged weapon (which you need after a while as enemies can spawn in places where it's impossible to get close enough to hit them without taking damage).
That said, I liked the visuals, especially the choice of color palette, and once I _did_ get a ranged weapon the combat became much more interesting.
I am shocked that it's possible to have _that_ diverse and interesting of a soundtrack while still having time to work on the game itself: well done. The game itself was very ambitious, but quite buggy for me, unfortunately. Here are just the issues I noticed: - the "you don't have anything selected to sell" prompt doesn't change when I select an item to sell, only when I walk away from the booth and back - All of the UI on the right of the screen is totally cut off in the web build - I can take fall damage from very short drops, but often it will only make the noise, not actually deal any damage - The player sticks to the walls when colliding with them, which makes some of the jumps more tricky than they ought to be - In the mushroom area I got stuck inside one of the large mushrooms and had to restart - Many of the onscreen text prompts overlap one another, making them impossible to read - I can't exit the surface of the water without swimming down and acquiring upwards momentum first - Some items become non-interactive after dropping them on the ground in certain areas - Items sometimes collide with the player and sometimes don't. I don't know exactly what causes that but it could be they're moving in the Z axis slightly?
Other non-bug issues: - The font is very difficult to read - Some of the "sprites" are actually cubes with textures on all 6 sides, which looks weird with transparency - Having the whole game reset when I die is incredibly frustrating, especially in light of the fact that some of the ways to die are very surprising - Having to walk all the way back to the "seller" booth to get money for items is very tedious, especially given that the first part of the game is spent just doing that and I have to re-do it all over again after every death.
Once I got to the mushroom area, I didn't know what to do. I checked the guide and it says there's supposed to be a "double-jump" mushroom, but I wasn't able to find it. There are mushroom items, but pressing R while standing in front of them consumed them and did nothing.
I can't beat this. The camera is hypersensitive to mouse movement, frequently oscillates forwards and back to dodge obstacles, and for some reason can't be tilted upwards (effectively blinding me whenever I need to go up). Meanwhile, rather than giving me time to line up the camera so I can jump to a place I otherwise wouldn't be able to see, there's a thing shooting at me :(. I don't own a controller so maybe I would have been less frustrated had I used one.
Other than that, I liked the audio and visuals. The music especially strikes me as much more complex than what you find in most compo games.
@lucasito the windows version runs fine for me on Linux using Wine.
Quite unique! The gameplay felt a bit tedious at times but the graphics, audio, and winch mechanics are all very impressive. I would have appreciated spending more time scavenging than dragging the cube around, but the latter took much longer and the items were very far apart.
I beat all the levels. Good puzzles! Two thoughts: - I'd like it if the 4 dynamites were different colors or something so I can tell them apart without hovering - The background music seemed to cut out part way through while I was playing. This could just be because I was running under wine, though.
My strategy for this was to duplicate the rock a bunch of times before starting and line up the duplicates at the edges of the holes. At that point it might as well just let me click a hole to drop a rock in it rather than requiring the extra step of carrying it over. Alternatively, you could somehow make the manipulation of the rocks more relevant to the puzzle, say by limiting the number of duplicates or adding physical barriers.
I managed to beat it though! It's a great idea and a good length for a compo game.
Besides being a clever idea, this was also well executed: I loved the design of the level, and felt proud whenever I managed to get a good picture.
I had to give up after getting too frustrated. Even after several tries, my success on each run largely seemed at the mercy of the random enemy/item placement and randomized shooting directions of the turrets.
The slow back-swing feels similar to the whip from spelunky, but spelunky's whip is waaaay faster than that, allows you to turn around between the back and front swing, and has no gap between the back and front swing during which you can't deal any damage.
Additionally, in spelunky the enemies are less frequent and have more predictable behaviors, the viewport is much larger, and the game has multiple ranged weapons. All of these features together allow the player to plan paths through the level without taking any damage, despite the whip's limitations. By contrast, in this game I see no way to reach the bottom without taking _some_ damage, barring some stroke of luck.
The cover image and overall look and feel reminded me strongly of [roll away](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kula_World).
I miss the ability to clear all cells around a number, and I think the "auto-clear zero" might be a bit bugged (a few cells wouldn't auto-clear despite neighboring a zero cell). Other than that, it's a solid game of minesweeper.
I also didn't realize what to do once I was at the bottom with the buckets and had to look at the comments.
I like the take on vertical movement, sort of a Dwarf Fortress-style "slicing". The game felt super short, though! I would have loved to see more content/puzzles/whatever, but maybe that's just because I cheated myself out of figuring out the main puzzle :P.
After a certain point the difficulty stops increasing, which is kind of an anticlimax. I think either the difficulty should ramp up for much longer or there should be a win condition of some sort.
That said, hitting the gold bricks in this is so addicting I ended up playing for way too long anyway:
drill_down_dog.png
I loved it! In the darksouls section the boss fight reminded me strongly of the Olmec boss fight from spelunky.
One bug I noticed: When I jumped into the hole after the dragon, the dragon briefly re-appeared before the transition to the next section.
Quite complete for a compo game! The statues made me think something crazy was going to happen when I grabbed the heart, but the game just ended :P
I noticed three bugs: 1. Some of the walls have z-fighting issues (pointed out by others) 2. The shelves in one of the rooms had no collision on them, so I could walk straight inside them 3. Somehow by the end I ended up with extra copies of two of the statues. I was in the secret bookshelf hallway when I apparently reached through the wall just behind the bookshelf door to pick them up
I didn't notice any issues with the camera, even though I'm also using firefox on linux (and intel integrated graphics). I played via the itch.io link.
That's quite the twist to have the animations play backwards like that :P. It was super fun seeing everybody's creations.
One issue I noticed is that the textures seem to load in after the game starts running, which was a bit confusing at first. I would have been happy to wait on a loading screen while the images took their time to download if that meant the game would be ready to go when I started playing.
Very charming! I liked the little instrumental interludes. The "rainy" areas were also a very pleasant surprise that helped break up the level a bit.
The double-jump felt a bit off to me. Maybe I'm just not used to having that combined with jump "cancellation" when releasing the spacebar. To maximize jump height I needed to press, hold, then do a quick release and re-press, which I'm not used to.
This was pretty great, I like the music and all the juice. It'd be nice if there were something motivating me to stay on each level for longer, since from what I can tell the best strategy is to make a beeline for the exit.
I notice the source code for this game is not downloadable without paying for it. The compo rules require that you provide source code, and I'm not sure charging for it is in the spirit of those rules.
That's quite the download time for a couple images and some text; I think Godot might be a bit overkill here :P
Player movement felt really painful, which made the final level especially brutal. For many of the puzzles I couldn't tell whether I'd found the solution or exploited a bug. That said, a Fez-style perspective-shifting mechanic seems like it'd be hard to implement under the time constraint, so well done!
This is super fun. Success is a little bit too luck-based for my liking (sometimes you just get a gigantic horizontal stretch of nothing with nowhere to drop-shortcut to), but other than that this is one of the most entertaining compo games I've played so far.
I had trouble extracting the linux build: my computer doesn't have a program which can extract .rar files (or at least not this particular .rar file). A .zip or .gz would have been more convenient.
There were a lot of fun mechanics here. Some issues I ran into while playing: - When I die I lose all of my oxygen cylinders, which is enough of a handicap that I would just give up when that happened and refresh the page to start over - Moving long distances requires a lot of button mashing which is a bit unpleasant on my fingers - When I've lost all my cylinders on death, the shop disallows me from restocking, even if I have the money for it. - At some point the "compass" arrow broke and started pointing in the completely wrong direction, forcing me to restart. - If your oxygen is almost out by the time you hit a cave, the cave won't refill your oxygen - Buying one rope gives you infinite rope. If this is intentional, then it's not clear why I'm allowed to buy multiple ropes in the first place.
I love the art! I could imagine something like this being used to train people how to use a mouse :P. I managed to score 86!
> I won’t update the submission ‘cause it would be unfair...
You might already know this, but in case you didn't: the rules explicitly allow you to fix game-breaking bugs after the deadline as long as you document the fix.
> Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke > or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the > deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission > (a short change log). You probably wont get a 2nd chance with some players, > but at least it wont be a problem for future players.
> Btw: Are you familiar with Brazilian Baião music?
@andruid No, but after giving some of it a listen real quick I doubt I came so close by coincidence. I was exposed to a lot of jazz music as a kid and a bunch of it no doubt got lodged in my subconscious somewhere.
Thanks for the pointer, though! It looks like I have some listening to do :).
The audio was a bit unpleasant, and it wasn't totally clear to me what the goal was. The grey fish appear to be enemies, but if I avoid them and let them go off the left-hand side of the screen they never come back. I've seen worse from people with more than a month's experience. Keep it up!
The presentation really made this one; I feel like my heart rate cranked up a notch when the question count overflowed. I managed to get a final score of 100 on the first try (along with what I think was the "true" ending), although based on the other comments here it's possible I just got really lucky.
On the itch.io page in the "main" question menu some of the UI was cut off on the bottom of the screen for me. I also had to zoom out a bunch in browser to even fit the entire game window so my guess is the game was tested on some resolution higher than mine.
The best score I could get is 27. While the idea is fun, I quickly reached a point where losing seemed inevitable regardless of what I did. This was with or without paying mind to the color of the passenger.
I love the visuals! Player movement felt very solid as well. The lack of checkpoints angered me at first, but given how short the game is it actually makes sense (and makes the traps funnier).
The visuals are pretty impressive, and I like how the reduced visibility at the top and bottom of the stairs plays into the story. I think the game was a bit too easy: the puzzles could be solved in seconds and it wasn't hard to guess what you need to do to get all three endings, so the majority of the gameplay for me was just slowly walking and clicking through the dialogue. Otherwise, good entry!
Some of those animations/particle effects are very impressive.
Some issues not already mentioned by others: - The second jump in a double-jump adds to the y velocity when I typically expect it to set y velocity to a fixed value - Besides the health not resetting, if I play again after winning, the "floor" is still gone and satan and I battle above a void - While the intro sequence is super cool, it blocks you from starting the game until it finishes, which can be frustrating when restarting after a loss - The edge of the hole is actually an overhang and the player is allowed to go to either edge of the screen, even though the graphics initially convinced be that the outermost walls would be solid - Whenever I reach the bottom there's always one last purple dude I hadn't managed to kill yet. This wouldn't be a problem except that it and its fireballs move relative to the player while satan and the floor do not, making things very visually confusing - Demons can sometimes launch fireballs after dying
one_dollar.png
I like the line plot. It seems like an obvious thing to have in an idle clicker, but I can't think of another one which does it (maybe universal paperclips did?).
As a player, I'd expect the "beg VC" button to grant some amount of money based on the current price of the coin. Based on the source code it looks like it's supposed to grant an amount based on the number of times you've clicked it. Neither are true, though: it always grants around $2. Because of that, there's really no point in ever clicking the button (or the "coin miner" button, unless more coins is the goal, in which case it's all the _other_ buttons that are useless). All funds therefore come from Grandma, which makes gameplay somewhat boring. Perhaps that's part of the joke?
Also: the UI layout appears to shift left and right as the price changes, I assume because the left area is getting content-sized to the width of the price, which uses a proportional font.
This took me a few tries to beat; the gameplay is kind of puzzly in the sense that once you figure out what works and what doesn't you can complete the game fairly quickly (though with slightly raised cortisol levels :P).
The controls felt a bit unintuitive to me, especially given that they change between when you're inside and outside the sub. I would have appreciated some on-screen help.
Final note: the submarine reminded me strongly of [Archimedes](https://watchmen.fandom.com/wiki/Archimedes).
- The player on-boarding in this was really good. I never felt confused, and everything properly set you up to turn around the way you're supposed to when the time comes - I love the David Szymanski-style user-triggered jumpscare. They're more risky than the traditional "baddie grabs the camera"-style jumpscares but are way worth it in my opinion - Tilting the camera when I rotate felt a little odd. I guess that was just a stylistic choice but it made me a little confused for a bit.
The puzzle design here is really clever, if a bit cruel, and some of the hover texts made me laugh out loud. I got burned by the soft-lock glitch a couple times but persevered anyway and managed to get a sandwich out of it :P. I think this would have been great with some extra effort put towards polish.
ok, so.... I won the space battle. I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to do that. My wrist hurts.
radio: "speaker's broken, is this your fault?"
me, intentionally not fixing any of the speakers:
collapsed under stress with score over 200
Good idea and a solid implementation. Two things: - I move faster diagonally for some reason. This isn't too weird on its own but the effect remains even when walking against a wall (so for example starting in the top left of the map, if I hold right and down I move faster than if I only hold down) - The modal interface for interacting with the radio doesn't seem ideal. Maybe wasd could have been used for movement so that the arrows always control the radio?
The space I was navigating was large enough that most of the gameplay was just staring at a black void and holding W. That said, the game started so quickly it jump-scared me, which is quite refreshing compared to the usual Unity loading screen.
> There’s no support for SPIR-V in WebGL
I admit I haven't looked into it, but isn't WGSL supposed to have a 1:1 mapping to SPIR-V? I'd think you could use that if GLSL doesn't have what you need.
speed-signal.png
- The audio was really pleasant and made the controls feel much more satisifying. - There's a bug I ran into where wall bouncing close to the ceiling gets me stuck in that corner somehow. I managed to break free eventually, though. - The jump distance control felt weird in a way I'm having trouble describing, the best word I can think of is "heavy," like I'm getting sucked downwards the moment I release the key - I probably wouldn't have minded the re-use of level geometry across levels, but did it *have* to be that floating island thing on the right? It was hard enough to beat the first time, but it was doubly frustrating to have to do it over again (and again!).
I liked it! It's surprisingly good visually despite seeming to have very few textures. Two things:
- It wasn't obvious to me at the start that I could walk under the radio tower - I would have liked to be able to click-and-hold the left mouse button to fire continuously rather than spam-clicking.
Listen, I don't know what you want from me, baby. When I was your age I would have been happy to have *half* this many unicorns.
I don't think this game is possible to win? You can't win customers in buildings with zero approval and all of the little houses in the upper right drop to zero approval within 2 months, way too quickly to build the two towers needed to cover them.
I managed to beat this, but I fear a lot of people won't really have the patience for it.
I feel like the codes for "leap right" and "hop right" should have been swapped to mirror how "move right long" and "move right short" worked. The fact they were different hurt my ability to memorize them a bit. The game would also be a lot better with some sound effects (a tool like sfxr can help you make some basic ones in a few seconds).
...and yet, you submitted to compo, where it's against the rules to ask for help :P. I liked the puzzles, although I think a couple of them relied a bit too much on glancing collisions/misses of light beams and other obstacles. Also, while I suppose it doesn't matter as much in a puzzle game, momentum-based movement isn't all that hard to implement and would feel much nicer than the fixed-speed movement you have here.
signal_reassigned_win.png
What a wonderfully tense experience! At the start I felt like I had to be very cautious and strategic but by the end I was panicking tossing flares into the cell and making a run for the button. The whole "playing through a camera" thing and the added static when the baddie was close reminds me of slender the eight pages, although the horror in this I feel relies much less on startling the player than that game did. Some more notes:
- The motion blur and depth of field effects were a bit much, IMO, although I thought the lens flare was nice due to how it affected visibility - The mouse sensitivity was way too high for me playing in firefox. I managed to do ok but any higher and the game would have been unplayable. - The noise sound-effects you're using for ambience, to indicate when the anomaly is close, and on the game over screen were all very unpleasant to my ears. The sound is critical to the mechanics so I couldn't just mute the game, but I had to unplug my headphones to be able to play it comfortably. A simple low-pass filter over everything probably would have helped, as well as maybe adjusting the volume downwards on the game over screen, specifically.
I liked that a lot; it felt like it ended way too soon! I needed the hint to understand that "thumbs up" meant "alive," and the last one took me a while before I realized I needed to say the whole sentence and not just the one missing symbol.
For the notepad, I think it should automatically add an entry for every symbol shown so far, along with a blank next to each so I can type notes. Trying to scribble in there and needing to delete everything if I make a mistake isn't great, so I ended up just using screenshots to remember what I'd seen.
@benskca oh, whoops! it seems I was playing on hard mode without realizing :P
That is some turning radius! I managed to beat the game, but ran into a couple of issues that made it more difficult than I think was intended: - When not in free-look mode, scrolling the mouse wheel does nothing. Free look isn't very useful on its own, so I almost didn't notice this. - Some of the waveforms (low-frequency/high-phase) are nearly impossible to match to one another due to temporal aliasing with the framerate. It would have been nice to have some secondary visual indication to go off of rather than basing it purely on the timing of what to me looked like randomly jumping horizontal lines.
I liked this a lot. I noticed that you could fire from inside the barrier to the outside but didn't notice the increase in damage. When playing the game again with that knowledge, I don't really find that it changes how I play all that much. Is it normal in shooters like this to freeze the player for a second or two when they get hit? I found that mechanic very frustrating.
I loved the ending! Unfortunately I worry not many people will have the patience to reach it.
The UI also isn't too far off from the IRL version of this.
Very clever, and quite challenging for a game played with a single button! The RNG would sometimes screw me over but the game otherwise felt pretty fair, and a little bit of caution/patience was enough to beat. I giggled at the mother's smile instantly vanishing when you refuse what was offered :P.
Also a clever use of a one-button game mechanic. I thought I'd get something special for making it past a minute since the first game made a big deal of it, but it indeed just seems to be a high-score thing. The game could use some sound effects!
I made it to 20:12 before losing intentionally:
Proof
My strategy is to have left-hand on WASD, right hand on mouse, keep all crosswalks disabled by default and periodically enable all 4 at once for about a second before disabling them all again. This leaves plenty of time to go around clicking the crime chicks as they appear.
I got "averted homicide" before I even realized homicide was on the table. *Naturally* I had to play until the deed was done.
The amount of content is impressive, but I ran out of steam before getting to all of it. Going through the same dialogue in parallel over and over was a bit tiring, and it was very difficult to mentally keep track of all of the combinations I'd already done. I think some visual indication of progress through different paths or maybe a way to save individual messages for later reference might have helped.
Wow! The audio really makes this, IMO. I tried the web build and ran into audio crackling issues at first (probably just my computer being old and Linux) and almost muted it but I'm glad I didn't and instead ran the native build (where the audio was fine). You could kind of see the time travel coming a mile away but the whole thing was entertaining regardless! The only thing I'd complain about is that it didn't really feel like I had a whole lot of agency. The bed and the tea chair ended up just being fancy "next line" buttons, and despite me deciding to turn back the ship continued forward anyway, which makes me think my choice didn't matter.
This reminded me of Flood Runner Armageddon (which apparently is still playable? There goes my evening...).
I'm starting to think these arrow signs don't have my best interests at heart!
I'd ignore the people bouncing off the game; a lot of them are just trying to rate games as fast as possible. The trick isn't really that hard to figure out, and there's value in letting the player come to that realization on their own. That said, my first death was right at the phone, so I initially assumed that was supposed to be the end of the game, since it felt pretty conclusive. The note on the game over screen about trying again was what made me give it another shot.
The *real* nightmare is all the doors opening from the wrong side...
This looks awesome, but after trying in Firefox, Chrome, and native (under Wine) I can't seem to get it to work without unpleasant audio crackling. Maybe my computer just isn't powerful enough :(
Aside: it'd be nice to have more range in the part of the keyboard that's mapped to my laptop keys. In most soft synths I've used they use 4 rows of keys: the numbers + qwerty for an upper octave and asdf + zxcv for a lower octave.
6/8 was the best I could do:
arthonbru_best.png
Having the button arrangement be random makes it unclear to me whether the game is always beatable, both in terms of "can I get 8/8" and "can I make something that doesn't sound bad." I'd also like some way to more precisely control the timing rather than needing to click at just the right moment. Otherwise, this is quite clever and I liked it!
One issue I ran into: while I was playing one of the buttons bugged out somehow and I could no longer disable it, forcing me to restart.
That last circle coming in from the left was a bit of a troll... My winning strategy for this was to just spam the spacebar whenever the codes changed to give myself enough time to re-learn the new stop code :P
You've been following Handmade Hero, I see. I liked the crisp shadows. I think having the enemies die in fewer hits would have made up for the awkward aiming controls. I ended up just orbiting large groups of them taking pot-shots until they were all dead.
I looked at the source code and found it funny that you seem to be using the "Modern" OpenGL API only to wrap it in your own functions that work the way old-style immediate-mode OpenGL did.
Not sure which score was the one to optimize, but I went for the green one and this is the best I could do:
ended_traffic_3.png
It wasn't obvious to me at the start that looking at a car tells it to go rather than to stop. Most of the challenge seemed to be in stepping out of the way fast enough to signal the next car to go before it gets rear-ended (I totally gave up trying to protect the pedestrians).
Visually this is really cool, and I really want to see all the game has to offer, but the game just doesn't seem to want me to. If I understand correctly, I have control over the player only when standing on something and otherwise need to wait until I'm pulled over towards one of the orbs. The problem is that making it from one place to another almost never works. Leaving the first hallway typically gets me stuck at the short ramp thing with nowhere to go. Doing a running leap out of the hallway like you mention in the description *sometimes* gets me to somewhere new, but then when I try to go anywhere from there I either progress backwards or get stuck in permanent orbit and need to restart.
I had the game window in front of a solid-black terminal window when I first ran it, so I missed the screenshot aspect at first. I think if more color from the screenshot made it through into the background of the game it'd be easier to recognize.
I think you've got a good core mechanic and I didn't get immediately frustrated by input latency like I often do with rhythm-based games, but I would have liked some more variation in the music, the level, the number of bugs, etc.
This is great! After I got the hang of it I found that my score seemed to be somewhat dependent how unlucky I got with the monoliths, though.
reached 281.7s and scored 5780
I compiled it from source. The game window doesn't seem to fit on my 1080p monitor, and there isn't much in the way of gameplay. I'd recommend slowing down the rate of square generation by a lot (since after a couple of seconds my input becomes basically useless) and then adding a way for the score to go down or for the player to lose (otherwise I can play by just sitting there doing nothing).
I liked the interactive tutorial screen. One of my challenges was "5 purple guesses" which I don't think is actually possible for the potentiometer or the orientation without getting lucky? I also didn't really know what score I was shooting for or when to stop playing.
I give up. I can't make it past phase 1. I know it's possible because I managed to accidentally do it once, but even if the game were just picking a random continent then I should at least be getting it right one out of every four times I try, and that is definitely not happening.
I went to check the source code to figure out what I was doing wrong, but you haven't actually posted the entire game source, only the *.cs files, which I believe is against the rules (the source should include everything required for somebody else to build your game).
This is great! Rapidly flipping between multiple separate views you need to manage is oddly reminiscent of FNAF, although without the jumpscares. I managed to get to where I could keep going without stopping, which I guess counts as winning? My thoughts: - The upgrades don't feel like they add anything to the game at all. Keeping the boat running indefinitely is very achievable without them and they just seem to make the game easier over time, which I don't think is very satisfying. - The clicking is a bit finicky since I had trouble understanding where the "hot point" is on the various hand cursors (also sometimes the entire game window would get highlighted which was frustrating) - I never even realized you could burn your hands until I started intentionally playing around with things. The mechanic doesn't really impact gameplay that much since you're already trying to address engine issues as quickly as possible.
This is the strategy I ended up using: - Use up all of the initial resources you're given immediately - Run the engine at half-throttle until you reach top speed, at which point set the throttle as low as you can get it without touching the bottom - Do the following on loop: - Collect items out the front window for about 15-30 seconds or until there is nothing left - Check the engine - For eyeball add gas if pupil dilates too slowly - For finger add coolant if level is below half - For oil if there's any heat at all add 3 barrels
The game soft-locks for me after a bit and I'm not sure what triggers it. My first run (on the ldjam website) I managed to get the first two-star objective but the diving viewport vanished and I couldn't progress (maybe that's the win condition?). On subsequent runs (on the itch page) I couldn't even get that far because the diver simply wouldn't move no matter what I told him to do. More notes: - Since tapping out morse code is your core game mechanic, there should have been more effort put into making the game detect letters automatically. The fixed pause lengths were pretty painful, even after tuning the delay to match my natural tapping speed. - A fixed delay before I can start playing is frustrating if I've already played before. - Clicking the bottom of the screen to look back up from the button is not intuitive. I assume you're borrowing this from FNAF, but that game had on-screen prompts to make the controls more obvious. - Needing to click around to view the different things in general felt kind of pointless. There would have been plenty of room on screen to fit most of it. The reason FNAF had a modal UI was so that it could put jump-scares in the UI state transitions. - One of the two stars in the first level would sometimes spawn on top of the diver, collecting it instantly. It's probably best to simply not have the star positions be random at all. - The instructions mention "star" and "fish" commands, but stars are collected automatically so I'm not sure what those commands are supposed to do. - I fail a lot, so hearing the same jokey "what are you talking about" voice line gets old pretty fast. Replacing it with a sound-effect after multiple failures or rotating between multiple different voice lines would have likely helped.
I don't know what it is about games that rely on really precisely timed mouse hovers/clicks but they tend to be very frustrating for me. Maybe I'm just bad at using a mouse. I made it through the first 12 levels before I realized that the game was infinite; it would have been nice to have an ending of some sort so I can know when to stop playing. That said, the fact that I made it so far without realizing the levels were random is a testament to whatever algorithm you're using to generate them!
Most of the "signal-tracking" (I don't know what to call this mechanic) games are very slowly paced, so it's neat to see a different take on the idea. Random notes:
- Neither the score nor the dig radius seem to get reset when the game does. - I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do when there are no more items to dig up. Do I win? - I think the enemy hitbox is fine, but requiring multiple hits to kill an enemy seems a bit unfair given the sheer number of enemies and how difficult it is to land a shot.
Very nice! I liked the sound design a lot and I think the pills and shooting mechanics were well balanced. By the end I had ungodly amounts of health built up (I may have bugged the health meter, I think? The left number was bigger than the right number), which made things somewhat less stressful.
Something about the graphics put a bit of a strain on my poor Laptop, so I had to shrink the window size a fair bit to get a decent framerate. This also brought the full map back into view which was clipped at my usual browser window dimensions.
Clever! I think some audio would have helped; I instinctively expect a beeping noise to come from a telegraph button. Getting reset all the way to the start when dying in a game that is so slow to progress is pretty painful as well. Doubly-so given the fact that you hid a very difficult-to-notice mine very close to the end.
You should mention Claude Code in your tool credits.
I wanted to give you points for humor due to the little face but couldn't \[. .\]
I think having the super granular difficulty isn't great, because as a player I'm not going to know what to set it to (and the default of 2 is way too easy).
> but it was only half-working in my browser (working but also triggering the right-click menu) and couldn’t troubleshoot it on time.
You need to call `preventDefault` on the `contextmenu` event. Not sure how to do it in the game engine you're using but it would have been enough to add the following to the html file that it outputs:
```html ```
Oddly enough, this reminds me of some of the minigames from the Looney Tunes Back in Action game made in 2003:
backinaction_minigame.png
There's nothing to dis-incentivize the player from spamming the space bar at all times, so the little cars don't really end up being much of an obstacle. The music also doesn't appear to reset when the rest of the game does.
The enemies were more likely to end the game by boxing me in so I couldn't move than by taking my HP to zero.
I tried to solve the box puzzles in the rooms with enemies, but the enemy behavior didn't seem predictable enough for that to be worthwhile vs simply killing them all.
Not bad. I don't know much about CHIP-8 but I assume it's a very constrained system to program for.
sumo_hs.png
The visual design is really great. It adds a high intensity that you wouldn't normally expect from the "nethack" aesthetic. Some random notes:
- Needing to navigate all the way back from the start whenever I died wasn't very fun - The cursor doesn't move when the camera does, only when the mouse does, which looks a bit strange - It'd be nice to have a visual indication of what the "current cycle" is when in circle-cursor mode - The enemies would get caught on corners while pursuing me, making them nearly impossible to shoot. Walking around the corner to get a better angle frees them, killing me instantly.
Solid concept. The deadline may have passed but you should try to implement it anyway. Post a link here or in the main ldjam feed and the people here will probably still be willing to play it and give feedback. I know I would be happy to.
I thought the trees looked pretty neat and I managed to purchase the first 20% speed upgrade before the game ran out of memory.
- The indicators on the map don't correspond to the correct tower locations. - The player movement seems totally broken, to where I found the only way to move at a reasonable speed (or at all) was to point the camera up, travel diagonally, repeatedly jump, or some combination of those things. - Jumping causes the camera to wiggle around strangely. - The whistling became unpleasant for me fairly quickly, and I had to mute the audio.
I tried all four cardinal directions from the broken tower and still couldn't find a signal. Is that meant to be the end of the game? If so you may want to indicate that to the player somehow. Otherwise, I liked it. It felt solid and the storytelling held my attention the whole way. I love the spiders being introduced with a casual off-hand mention. It's a scary surprise to the player but somewhat mundane to the in-game characters, which is a funny contrast.
Most of the weapons seem pretty underpowered compared to the minigun, so I ended up just sticking with that the whole way.
Also sorry to go off topic but what's with everybody here calling this a roguelike? It's clearly not. Is it because the weapon upgrades are randomized?
@mr-flower You can debate what the exact definition of "roguelike" is but I don't think any game which gives the player random upgrades from a fixed set automatically qualifies. Examples of games I consider to be roguelikes: - Nethack - Spelunky - Balatro - White Knuckle
Nethack is my reference point. If playing a game feels like playing Nethack, then I consider it a roguelike.
If I were to try to list what all those games have in common: 1. There is an inventory that the player controls (and choices about the inventory matter) 2. Every run starts from zero 3. Every run is unique (in a way that matters for player strategy) 4. The world is dynamic; things can interact with one another in useful and occasionally surprising ways
Of these, your game only has #2, IMO.
While I think the radar-style visibility mechanic is cool, it seems a bit unfair at times since an enemy ship can get super close by the time the radar hits it. A strategy I found that worked was to simply spin around in circles while no ships were visible spamming the shoot button in the hope that any invisible ships would get hit by accident.
When the radar beam sweeps over an enemy ship, it'd be cool if the ship were "revealed" by it using clipping or something rather than for it to instantly pop into existence. My brain had trouble making the association between the radar beam and the enemy ships at first and I think something like that would have helped.
I have restored balance to the Ducknasty. This is certainly a unique experience! I think it would have probably been better to hand-pick where the links should go in the news website rather then having them be random. The last three links all appeared in roughly the same spot on the page for me.
Also: flipping back and forth between the game window and a website was a bit awkward. Since your graphical needs are simple, I probably would have forgone the COTS engine and done the game entirely using JS and WebGL. That way you could integrate the "news website" much more seamlessly into the game (or vice versa).
You should add a cover image so more people will be interested and take a look at your game.
While the scanning is a neat idea, it didn't feel like an important part of the gameplay since I could just keep buying and mining rocks unconditionally without ever scanning them.
Oh dear, that recording at the end was very relatable. No video game has been able to make me more angry at my own fingers than 10 minutes with a guitar.
It's an impressive number of levels for a compo game, good job! I initially didn't realize that LMB and Space did different things so I was confused when my exploding balls wouldn't "pick up" the square in that one level.
"using DOD" is an odd thing to have in the title of a game :P. I'm also not sure how relevant it is to the gameplay: even in your "stress test" you only have, like, a hundred or so entities on screen at once, which doesn't require any special performance work to achieve.
The idea seems like it has potential but as-is I was switching between very bored in the early levels and overwhelmed in the later ones.
Clearly this is the work of Herobrine. (wake up)
"The prime directive says no contacting aliens, which I interpret to mean killing any I find." Unfortunate, indeed...
On my first playthrough I somehow bugged out the beam meter, which forced me to restart the game. I can't make it happen again, so I'm not quite sure what I did.
> I actually just used Godot’s CSG combiner node with a few cylinders set to subtract!
What a strange feature to have in a game engine. The Godot documentation is plastered with warnings not to use it for anything, which makes me wonder why they went to all the trouble to implement it in the first place...
> I think their main intention is for quickly prototyping things
Yeah, that's what the docs say, but I'm not sure I believe them. Making a CSG engine is a lot of effort to go through just so devs can avoid opening Blender sometimes.