Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Ian Kettlewell
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Blueberry Bounce | compo | Fun | 4.46 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | The Man Who Never Retreats | compo | 2.75 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 2.75 | 3.50 | 2.50 | 4.00 | 3.00 | |||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Bouncy Farm | compo | 3.25 | 3.00 | 3.25 | 3.50 | 3.00 | 2.75 | 2.00 | 2.75 | |||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Last of the Sky Folk | compo | 388 | 3.30 | 3.69 | 3.75 | 3.34 | 3.37 | 2.10 | 2.21 | 2.85 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | THE SUBMARINER | compo | 212 | 3.75 | 3.65 | 2.98 | 4.23 | 3.35 | 3.16 | 2.68 | 3.55 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Wonder | compo | 71 | 4.00 | 4.24 | 3.53 | 2.97 | 3.35 | 3.36 | 3.06 | 4.23 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Solitairey Life | jam | 418 | 3.56 | 3.56 | 3.67 | 3.19 | 3.64 | 3.83 | 3.47 | |||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Blueberry Bounce | compo | 4 | 4.38 | 4.46 | 3.88 | 3.52 | 3.80 | 3.23 | 4.29 | 4.00 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Noah's Help! | compo | 23 | 4.08 | 4.05 | 3.24 | 3.97 | 4.41 | 3.58 | 3.64 | 3.85 |
Ian Kettlewell leaves an average of 12.9 feedback comments each event.
What an adorable little game. I love so many of your design choices. The way the music and experience blend together is excellent. Thank you for making this!
Incredible game! The polish is absurdly good from the companion character to the animated tiles to the music. Very well done!
Edit: And the character watches your mouse! This is too good!
Fun game! I love the polish. The music and audio is also great, I particularly like how it gets more intense once you're hit. I did feel the difficulty scaling was weird. For the first 120 seconds it was too easy and then it was really difficult for a bit and then really easy for a few minutes more. I was having a bunch of fun when it was difficult!
I had fun with this! I The chicken was really cute and the music is the best in any game I've played yet! I also liked the parallax on the star background.
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I couldn't find the last fish. I went down and back up and down again looking around. I must have missed it somehow. :(
But it's a charming game! I love all the animations flourishes you put in: the scanner animation, the tweens on the icons, the bubbles near your mouse cursor.
How did you make the level? Is it one giant illustration zoomed in?
Charming game! I like the music and it's cool you had time to create multiple animated characters. The little fish character is cute. My score was 21.
Quite charming! The game feels really crunchy (in a good way!) The subtle sound effects and screen shake are excellent. It did take me a little bit to get a hang on how the controls worked. I was trying to rev up the drill on the ground, and even later it seemed a bit weird that I had to do a tiny hop whenever I wanted to use the drill.
I'm also a fan of the cute pixel art. Great entry!
Super moody! The control scheme is definitely an interesting idea as well: easy to learn, but I found it tricky to get used to when quickly executing commands.
I quite enjoyed the mood and atmosphere, the graphics / sound come together really well! The first time I saw an enemy approaching it felt legitimately scary.
Really cool mechanic. I'd love to play a game with this mechanic more fleshed out. An aerial slow-motion FPS like this would make you feel so cool! While playing my goal as a player was to never touch the ground, which made it a lot of fun.
This is my favorite sort of jam game: one that takes a wild gameplay concept and proves how fun it can be. Well done!
Most polished game I've played so far! The visual details are really great, eveything felt cohesive. The mechanic is also a great choice and I like how the level design explored different uses of it. Definitely feels like the mechanic could have even more fun uses in a larger game.
I'm great at this game but my girlfriend's terrible! Although I ran out of breath and crashed into the ground eventually. Really creative idea!
Love the visuals and audio. The particle effect bubbles and the fish schooling are particularly great. The lighting is also quite well done.
Great job!
Wonderful graphics and sound! The effects feel really crunchy and the music really drives me to keep playing. Feels like the base of a very satisfying arcadey game.
I can totally see people getting tripped up with how the tutorial goes back to the total screen to continue, so be ready for some confused comments!
Truly incredible visuals and character design! I love the world and atmosphere you've made here.
I like the minimalist aesthetic of this! Only wish the hitbox were a little bigger when collecting food.
Fun game! I like the that the game has a only few simple mechanics, but there's actually room to try new tricks and ideas within those mechanics. After losing a few times I found I had some new ideas for how to approach things.
Repositioning felt a bit hectic using a trackpad, I didn't feel quite quick enough to rearrange as much as I would like. But I liked that there was no punishment for rearranging, it encouraged trying out different arrangements.
So far this is the jam game I've given the most tries after losing, because I actually was enjoying trying to figure out how to win.
Really like the art and aesthetic, feels like an illustration!
Very pleasant little game. Excellent visual and sound design! The motion blur effect is really great and left me wondering how it worked!
A fun little game! After playing it on my computer I made sure to play it on a phone too. I feel like the difficulty ramps up really fast for me. I couldn't clear one of the waves.
Very nice use of effects like the screenshake, sound effects, and coins popping out. Definitely a fun experience!
A really put together game for a gamejam! I was a little confused at first about how to place towers. I didn't realize I had no crystals, and then the animation for crystal clicking was kinda slow so I didn't notice I was picking them up. I spent a while clicking around to figure out how to place towers.
I liked that you could block enemy paths with the towers, it's cool when tower defense games allow more flexibility like that.
Also the art, assets, and animations are really impressive for 48 hours! I really liked the detail of the fish under the water. A great aesthetic!
Really good for having only learned Unity 2 weeks ago!
I had a really hard time blocking the laptop that comes in from the left, it's so fast! But for some reason that made me want to play more to defeat the flying laptop.
I really like this game! It's silly fun. Love the cube dog.
Love the aesthetic of this! It really captures the imagination. I particularly like falling down to the bottom and running alongside the giant. For some reason that just feels really cool. Little moments like that stick with you, even if they're just from a game jam game!
Wonderful job setting the mood and creating such an imaginative slice of a world!
I enjoyed this game! I liked the creepy music and slightly ominous mood. My favorite music so far! The game definitely strikes a strong mood even with the simple graphics.
I'm also a big fan of the enemies that float all over the place firing projectiles. Navigating an environment that's increasingly difficult due to spawning enemies makes for a urge to rush that's not time pressure, and I found that pretty interesting. It's a cool way to pressure the player to hurry up, but if they're really skilled they can still survive even as lots of enemies spawn in.
Also the twist of the computer turning against you is definitely cool, and seems to fit into the mood of the game. It's an interesting small story. Unfortunately I was confused at first because I didn't realize my shots were damaging it. I just flew around for a bit and then died just as I realized.
But overall I liked it a lot!
Really liked the glowing effect when picking up objects, and I can see the physics based gameplay of building a fort for the bees being pretty fun. It was tricky to build things because the objects weren't constrained to 2D, but I still found it fun to stack stuff!
For the time you spent on this it's really cool. I'd love to see where you would have gone with this because there are some really great details. The camera zoom out to reveal the full planet is really slick and a great effect. That initial zoom out is fantastic 2D camera work
The aesthetic is a really well put together one for a gamejam as well, and I could see it working very well in a more fleshed out game.
I really like this game. Simple mechanically but quite enjoyable.
The snake animations are wonderful and every component of the game feels well polished. I'm a big fan of the music / sound effects. And the fly shadows are fantastic!
I also like how your meter completely refills with each fly. It encourages you to not gobble all at once, but to be strategic and save flies until you really need them, which is a fun mechanical discovery to make.
I really like the attached balloon physics. I'm also a fan of the background art in the main level, really nice looking. Making the player invulnerable and protecting something else is a smart way to spin the theme.
Are the larger balloon upgrades strictly bad because they make it easier for your balloon to be popped?
Cool game! I really like some of the little details. The fire shader is really great looking, I was immediately impressed by it. I also liked the spacing you put on the dialogue, I always love it when games have that feature and it's cool to see that type of polish in a game jam.
I like the mechanics. It's fun to start to get good at "juggling" the egg by throwing and then quickly running. I got stuck at one of the yellow walls, but I spent a while playing with the mechanics to get better.
A cool game! I had a lot of fun with it.
I love the aesthetics and sounds of this game. It reminds me of something like Animal Crossing for some reason. It just feels like a little game world I could find myself visiting to relax. So great!
I really love the wobbly characters and props. They have so much charm and life!
This game is soo good! I love the bossa nova music. It's so pleasant and fits the mood so well.
It's also a fun premise and there's all these little details that really make the game stand out. Incredible job!
I enjoyed finding some of the hidden secrets and messages! The mood and music were also pretty great.
It's fun there's so much to explore and figure out!
I enjoyed the music and gameplay as well. It feels much more like something I'd want to play more of than most entries!
I can't really figure it out, but I want to chime in and say I really like the aesthetics as well!
It's a cool look that reminds of the craftwork style of something like Blue's Clues.
I like the exploration driven gameplay. There's something satisfying about just navigating environments and finding stuff. The audio and particularly music were really great!
I did feel like it was frustrating to find a powercell and then have to back track to recharge.
Really slick music and the gameplay works really well.
I'm very fond of the mechanic you introduced for decreasing the amount of health you get if you don't pickup the health quickly. That's super clever! It incentivizes some risky gameplay.
I like the background audio, but my favorite thing is the goofy business person visuals. I really like the briefcase swing animation as well.
Cool aesthetic and audio! I feel like this could be pretty interesting with a few more mechanics to discover.
It definitely is something that grabs your attention immediately and makes you wonder about how the game works, so if there was more there to play with it could be a lot of fun!
Some of the bullet patterns were cool!
This game could be fun with some polish (like transitions between the enemies).
I managed to beat it! It was rather tricky to use the keyboard while dragging with the mouse, but that's an interesting thing to try out in a gamejam.
I enjoyed the music and guitar sounds, they set the tone for the game and made it a pleasant experience.
One thing is I didn't totally understand the relationships the animals had with each other, and if I should place more or fewer.
I couldn't play it in my browser. Is this expected?
Cool game! I liked the music a lot and it reminded me quite a bit of the early Zelda games.
I actually enjoyed the few levels you've made!
It's a simple mechanic but it's fun to play with. It's fun that the failure state is sort of goofy to watch. I feel like this game could be really fun with more dramatic failures. Like maybe involve explosives? And just add a bunch more physics objects?
It'd also be fun to arrange things that are bigger or different shapes, so you'd have to think more about how you place things and you could get more creative with the threats to the character.
All of the bird models were really cute!
Really cool atmosphere and polish. Great game!
This felt like sort of a mini metroidvania in some ways, which is a cool concept. As you got upgrades new routes and strategies opened up and allowed you to learn more of the environment.
It was cool to be like "Ok, I'm not going to win this run, but my goal is to harvest gold before I did to get more upgrades". Overall I really enjoyed beating this one!
I can see this being fun to goof around in with another player!
I wish the coins spawned faster so I could construct more stuff though. It'd be fun to build a bridge with blocks, or build a little fort.
The graphics are super cool. I love the sort of educational scrapbook vibe. A really clever aesthetic for a gamejam.
I also appreciated the realism and carefully researched bird facts. This is probably a game people should play before they go on forest walks.
Throwing peasants was grimly satisfying. I liked how you could learn to be efficient with the cows by bouncing them off multiple big guys.
Overall a fun little game!
I could not figure out how to beat violence, it seemed like its health just wasn't going down?
For the bit I was able to play I really enjoyed this. The music really set the tone wonderfully and kept me driving to go forward. Honestly the music was the star of the show because it was so good. It elevated the epic feeling of this game dramatically and somehow lent more character to this version of hell.
I feel like the music made me think about the setting a bit more and made the main character seem more interesting. I really enjoyed this game and may revisit it if I learn how to beat violence!
Combining RTS and tower defense mechanics is pretty cool! But it quickly becomes just a regular tower defense type game once you get enough jellies.
I really like the mechanics and idea though and I wish there was more challenge or mechanical variance in the late game! I found myself able to basically get infinite jellies as time went on, but I enjoyed figuring out how to play the game optimally at the start.
This is an incredible game. If it doesn't win in like every category I'll be shocked. I really started to enjoy it mechanically. I wanted to find more synergies with the cat. There are so many brilliant decisions in this game. Being able to smoothly look between your hand and the board in a first person perspective is genius. The scales to represent life is an amazing choice that simplifies the mechanics of card games very well (my only complaint is you don't know how close you are to winning). The aesthetic works wonderfully well. This game should be studied for how to do a game jam well.
I found it cool how I found myself waiting on sacrificing a creature in case I needed to use it as a blocker.
One thing, is the warren card bugged? It seemed to generate infinite rabbits if I just clicked it.
This game is brutally hard. It feels like a Ludum Dare version of getting over it.
I fully intended on beating it, but after an hour+ of trying I have conceeded (for now).
That said, the game's controls are suprisingly sharp (even with WASD which I played with). Moving the cube around feels like it has a lot of nuance, and you do feel like a cube. On the 2nd level I found myself learning the nuances of every little bump. As I repeatedly retried the level I learned how to do little tricks to balance myself out or to scale a corner. What's impressive is the depth in the controls and the level designs that force you to learn that depth.. There are very few 48 hour games that you can play for over an hour and still feel like you have more to learn.
It's clear the objective of this game was to create satisfying controls for manuevering a cube, and it clearly succeeded there. It took an original concept and explored it well, but I wonder if anyone will be able to beat it?
Very cool game! It's crazy how polished you made this within the timeframe. The music is great, the sounds are satisfying. I love the zoom in when a player is killed. I also love the round start animation. The environment is beautiful as well!
Amazing work for a 48 hour gamejam!
You got quite a lot done within the time availble! I can't believe you made a bouncy coin animation, and a sheep! I kinda wish there was was a chance to see those up close. I'm also impressed you got any sort of AI done in the timeframe.
I feel like the gameplay could have a lot of depth with more design iterations. It would be cool to think about the throughput of the different parts of the "graph"
I also love that you can mess with your opponent's plans. If this were expanded further the ability to mess with your opponent's carefully setup plans, and have them mess with yours, seems like it'd make for really interesting gameplay.
Well done!
This game is super well executed. Very slick aesthetic, sounds, graphics, gameplay. Everything seems to have come off well!
My only complaint is that on my Macbook keyboard diagonals are super tough to hit. I basically instant lost the game at that point.
I like the simple tiled look of the world. I feel like the simple tile aesthetic gives a lot of room to expand something like this mechanically!
It's hard to make a game like this in a game jam because it can be really tricky to properly balance things. This game does it quite well! Great job!
This game is very hard! It has cute art and I like that you made bird controls!
The sound effects on the spider moving are amazing. I thought it was playing music notes in a certain order at first, and I love that effect when it's used in games! I'm not sure if that's what you're doing here, but it's awesome anyways.
The animations and sound effects are all really well done and punchy. They help inform the gameplay. I could time pressing space to correspond to the exact moment an enemy spawned, based on the animation.
I really liked how you made simple choices that make the gameplay have more depth. Your attack and ability to restore the web being connected makes for more depth of choice. Not being able to turn also lends more interesting mechanical depth. Same goes for the recoil one tile. Immediately this game is more interesting than most just in the way you move and interact with the environment.
I felt like the difficulty ramping was pretty wonky. On repeat plays it was boring for the first few seconds (which isn't so bad) but then it gets difficult really quick. I never really felt like there was time to learn to get really good at the mechanics because I went from not threatened to overwhelmed so quickly.
Overall I really like the polish and mechanical depth of this game though! Excellent job.
I enjoyed this simple aesthetically. It felt weird in an interesting way. It was very unique!
It also was pretty fun mastering the jumps. I liked the "aha" momenet where I realized I had to go backwards after getting the jump.
It'd be cool if the enemies couldn't go through walls. Then it would introduce more strategy to when you shoot. You might want to shoot to kill, or just shoot to stall.
Fun idea though!
A satisfying game! I like fighting waves of enemies and pushing my luck with collecting a few last resources on low health near the edge of the universe
I actually really like the controls. It feels responsive and I actually feel manuverable. I never really enjoyed stuff like Star Fox a ton because the ship felt a little bit like it was lagging behind my inputs, but this feels snappy like I could do some cool dodges and manuevers.
I wish there were a way to push the walls back! It'd be cool to have that risk/reward thing going where you're trying to get a power up to push the wall back but also make sure you don't crash.
A fun base for a game! :)
I like it! I was really frustrated by the first level, but I enjoyed the second and third levels. The pixel art was charming and once the gameplay felt a little easier I enjoyed the experience more.
The second level felt easier and it had more of a sense of exploration, and there were more mechanics. (Walljumps are cool!)
I was really amused by the space-cats being how you showed a planet was uninhabitable. I also liked that you can name the planet at the end!
I enjoy the tone and mood of this game a lot. It's mechanics are simple but leave enough room for plenty of potential "ah-ha!" moments. I only played a few levels into it, but I like seeing games with such potential mechanical richness in short gamejams. Nice job! :)
Cool little concept!
When I jammed spacebar to shoot in quick succession I couldn't shoot anymore. Is that a bug?
I really like the premise of this. I love thinking about the potential chaos that could break out as you try to manage your physicsy brain. If the jellies were foods or something that would add more to the style of it.
I wish this were more fleshed out, because it could be so silly and fun and it's a great start!
I played this for far too long.
The art is really charming, watching the cars go by is a nice touch and your skyscraper actually starts to look legitimately satisfying in a cool way as it gets taller.
However I feel like I missed instructions because I had no idea what was going on. I didn't know what "tolerance" was and that it was basically my health and I had to figure out the mechanics over the game. I thought (incorrectly) that the beams were good and the red things were bad, rather than both being good. I thought this because when I threw the red things on the ground they exploded and because 'tolerance' dropped so slowly I didn't seem to be penalized for my failure. Eventually when the tolerance began to drop more quickly I realized my mistake and corrected my actions.
This game has a fun sort of appealing chaos to it. As you mess up there are burning helicopters and fires around on the ground. That said I only crashed one helicopter (because I didn't understand the game).
I feel like this game could actually be deeply satisfying with a few small-ish tweaks.
First, it's way too long per play session. I was playing for like 10 minutes before I lost. I don't know if it's my playstyle (trying to release the stuff almost immediately) or that's how the game is tuned.
Second, I feel like you're battling the camera angles more than anything. If the helicopter was moving parallel to the camera and the camera locked positions when the helicopter arrived this would actually be a really satisfying game about "flicking" cargo onto a building that I think people would really enjoy.
Overall a really cool base for a game. I feel like it might not review well because it's got a few flaws, but it actually has really cool potential and some seriously impressive art given the time frame. Nice job!
I like the weighty feel to the player character and the visuals of the path line behind the player! Definitely makes the game feel way more substantial having that effect vs. just plane cubes.
The music is also interesting in this weird way, and the combination of the ever increasing UI size and the off-breat music makes this game sort of unnerving.
I feel like this game could be a lot of fun with playtesting and polish, the blocks exploding in a sort of cellular way makes me feel like there could be really interesting enemies and intense fights with these mechanics.
I really like the spaceman animations and the explosions. This game also feels fun, but it hits hard fast!
If you toned down the difficulty I feel like I'd have more time to orient myself. I also felt a little confused about how to do some stuff. Like I only discovered by chance that you can loot exploded ships.
Definitely has a cool vibe though and some pretty snazzy artwork. Cool game!
This could be cool. Even though its just basic cubes and shapes I didn't really notice at first. I was just like "this is a cool lofi aesthetic" I was onboard with whatever was about to happen and then nothing happened! Like if touching those cubes expanded the platform and you recorded how long you last, then you have a game!
You could still finish it for the jam!
My first two jams I never finished a game because I felt like my games weren't turning out well. Months later I looked back on the unfinished projects and they actually weren't bad at all. Don't give up!
The cutscenes are amazing! Seriously, the cutscenes have better camera work than most real games, and the subtle animations in them are wonderful.
The music was also great, and I'm just really impressed overall with how much you managed to get done. Nice work!
I like this a lot. It's polished for what it is, it explains the game to you, and it's fun. It has a funky weird aesthetic that pulls togethers its strengths. The silly voice sound effects work well when paired with the strange aesthetic that feels half arcadey and half vaporwave-surreal.
It's also deeply satisfying to click an object as it's flying out of the box. A great entry! Super cool execution on a simple idea!
I like the music!
For some reason the controls felt reversed to me using keyboard controls. Am I insane?
This is a very cool game. At first glance it seems like it's not going to be very good, the presentation doesn't give you a good sense of how much depth there is to this. It's a satisfying blend of what feels a bit like solitaire and a strategy game.
I can see something like this being immensely addicting and satisfying with polish.
A good game immediately makes you consider your options and strategies, and in this game you learn so much and many different strategies jump out on the first playthough.
Immediately you notice that you may want to run away so enemies jump near and then you kill them in one blow.
As the level becomes more crowded you start to realize that statues are useful defense, but as it becomes really crowded the statues also change the way you have to approach the game. At some point you're overwhelmed by statues and unable to do much at all.
A game like this could easily be played for hours and still feel satisfying.
Very impressive game mechanically!
Very fun! I was immediately impressed when I could choose my vehicle. It reminded of F-Zero for some reason.
I like the weighty ships, they're fun to handle! I felt like my opponents were weirdly intelligent and I enjoyed dogfighting them! It reminded me of IO games, and I wanted my opponents to be real, but they acted intelligent enough!
I actually liked how at the end when everywhere is dangerous the game became about managing collecting powerups in "sudden death", that was actually an interesting spin mechanically. One thing I wasn't as fond of was how I felt at the end that my opponent and myself were unable to really damage each other enough to make an impact, it basically became a stalemate. Overall excellent though!
Very cool! This feels quite polished for a compo game. Lots of unique art and I'm really impressed with the main song you made. When the horns kicked in I was like "woah". Overall I like it. I like the quirkiness of trying to rapidly park the cars while crashing into stuff. I was very amused when I boxed myself into a corner with a car.
Unfortunately on my second playthough I literally only had one car show up over the course of a few minutes, it seemed like a bug. I'll probably revist this one later if you fix the issue because I actually think it can be a lot of fun to play!
I like this game! It has charm and lots of polish for a gamejam game. The music and sound effects were quite charming. Nice job!
Fun little game! This is giving me Flaskbacks to meteos.
I can see myself actually being really addicted to this if I could drag a planet multiple tiles at once and if it sped up faster. I was also sad I couldn't connect three pieces in a corner shape to break them.
Very cool though, good work making it in just 14 hours! It has charming graphics, good sound effects, and I like the simple premise.
Great game! I wanted to make sure to find this one after a beautiful gif you posted on the blog
Lovely postprocessing effects, and piloting such a weighty ship is really fun. The music was also really charming and helped give the experience a more joyful feeling when it could have been too serious otherwise.
LD52 — Harvest (1)
Asteroid Rush by Aarimous 2023-01-27T05:05:29Z ♥ 0
Fun sounds, and I like the minimalist aesthetic!