Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → impbox
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Overall | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Smalltrek | compo | 4.57 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥉 | 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Ministry of Synthesis | compo | Innovation | 4.52 | |
| 🥇 | 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Smalltrek | compo | Fun | 4.50 | |
| 🥈 | 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Smalltrek | compo | Graphics | 4.65 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Wiki Vortex | compo | 48 | 4.09 | 3.92 | 4.08 | 4.30 | ||||||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Serpent's Souls | compo | 4.11 | 3.55 | 3.50 | 4.11 | 3.94 | 2.75 | 3.64 | ||||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Encumbered - Deckbuilding Inventory Action | jam | 49 | 4.07 | 3.88 | 4.05 | 3.61 | 4.17 | 2.98 | 3.36 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Netcrawler | compo | 168 | 3.66 | 3.68 | 3.62 | 3.71 | 3.42 | 2.13 | 3.08 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Cute Cats Daily | compo | 151 | 3.70 | 3.35 | 3.45 | 4.25 | 3.62 | 3.19 | 3.68 | 3.57 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Ministry of Synthesis | compo | 33 | 4.02 | 3.36 | 4.52 | 3.00 | 4.14 | 3.73 | 3.97 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Smalltrek | compo | 1 | 4.57 | 4.50 | 4.08 | 4.36 | 4.65 | 4.22 | 3.93 | 4.40 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Moving In | compo | 4 | 4.27 | 4.03 | 3.94 | 4.42 | 3.94 | 3.59 | 3.10 | 3.53 | 64 |
Nice gameplay mechanic, I like having to dodge my own bullets. Occasionally enemies spawned on top of me which was not ideal. Like the minimal graphics. Could have used some music and more variety of sfx. Maybe some variety of enemies, different heights / shapes that required bullets at different levels. Maybe an enemy that required two hits, one low, one high? could make it more interesting. Definitely potential here!
Sadly I couldn't play because no linux version, but watched the videos, it looks like a lot of fun and sounds really nice. Nice to see some tools being made for LD and it fits the theme well.
Really fun! Love the music. The physics is definitely interesting and takes some getting used to but that's quite fun too. Some levels are quite hard, got to level 5 so far. Will play a bit more if I can get past it.
Really enjoyed what I could play of it so far! Capslock issue blocked me from completing the game, my wireless keyboard doesn't seem to send through an event on capslock press. =( Art was simple but effective, vocal sound effects were cute and not annoying. Some music would have been nice but I didn't really miss it. Humour was great! I felt immersed in the little world.
Enjoyed playing it, lost the first round, won the second time. The defence spell seems OP, needs a longer cooldown. maybe each spell should have its own cooldown rate similar to warcraft/mobas. I'd prefer to press 1,2,3 to actually fire the spell at the current mouse location rather than switch to it and have to click. Some indication when you're under attack and how many towers you have left, something dramatic should happen when you lose a tower. Art needs a lot of work, the lightning was particularly disappointing visually, could be really cool. Not a bad start though!
Beautiful game! (Played on it in Linux via Wine and it ran great) Loved the vibe of it and the artwork and music. A few confusing things: Took me a while to figure out I needed to harvest crops manually and what was happening with the food upkeep.
Also, didn't use walls at all, nor see the need to. I don't think it really needed the combat stuff.
I'm not really sure what's supposed to be going on here. I can't say I enjoyed it. After a few attempts at catching a fish (they're outside the bottle, i'm in the bottle?), the fish all suddenly disappeared, a few seconds late it said "The End".
Gameplay was pretty uninteresting, just drive into the enemy to kill it and they're all the same. Controls were a little awkward, having a player character with a bit more obvious direction would be good. The art and bug animation was really nice. Sound effects were painful but the music sounded good. Maybe some different types of enemies would be good. And the enemy respawn was odd.
Looks great! Although made me feel a little sick after playing for a while, i think because of the sprite rotation. Needs some music and sound! Pushing the rocks in any direction but straight isn't very fun, i really liked the maze section, that worked great, more of that would have been nice! Some way to leave a mark on the ground for navigation would be nice. And definitely make the map wrap around, hitting those edges really broke the immersion. Great job though!
The idea is good, nice take on the theme. Implementation needs a lot of work as you're aware. Definitely need to improve the controls and handling.
Enemies should definitely be one hit kill as someone else said. It didn't seem to fit the theme. I liked the concept of starting with no abilities and picking up new abilities along the way although it wasn't clear at first that you couldn't jump so I spent ages trying to figure out which button made you jump.
While I didn't find it very interesting, It was okay for some mindless fun, but the collision detection needs work, I was being pecked and losing health when they appeared to be missing me.
Congrats on completing, I'll give some suggestions:
I played through most of it I think, I picked up the sword but I couldn't give it to the guy to get the money so I was stuck on 60 coins. (you should show the coins somewhere other than the title bar, also your inventory)
Make moving fun, add some smoothness to the movement, acceleration and deceleration, walk animation. Little things like that can make it feel much more fun even if there's no changes to gameplay. Add SFX! Very important, when I pick up a coin I want a little coin sound, and when I interact with something it should tell me what it is even if I can't use it yet. eg. I wasn't sure what a lot of the things on the map were at the start so I pressed space and nothing happened so I thought they were just background details.
This surprised me with how fun it was! I think the music really helped, it was so bouncy along with the bouncing sprites! I unlocked all the things =) Definitely could see some room for improvement though: - Show counts of each type - Show the reason why they died, whether it was old age, starvation, sleeplessness, currently I don't really know what to fix because I don't really know why they're dying. - Sleep you can't really control in any way so it seems a bit pointless, maybe add "beds" or something. - Make the scrolling of the shop panel more obvious.
Great work!
The physics and platforming felt very dodgy, feet would often go through the ground or objects and jumping against a wall would kind of make you float strangely. despite that it wasn't challenging. The dogs were cute and nicely done, but everything else looked very generic. Not being able to walk backwards was annoying. The quit menu didn't work, it opened but I couldn't click the button to quit. Had to force exit. I found 5 dogs, not sure if that was the end of thegame?
Looks quite nice and i like the tiles and the element combination. The random? blocks at the same time were sometimes confusing, was it random or related to what i did? Needs a goal, but I think you've got the start of something very nice here.
This worked quite well, nice puzzle game trying to figure out which order to pick them up in. The sound was very loud and jarring, had to turn it down. Movement was a bit slow. I liked the graphics, the truck was very cute.
Really like the art style, interesting controls and mechanics, but not sure it was that fun trying to move around for a fast paced game. Sound was nice, needed some music.
This one blew me away! So beautiful, atmospheric and immersive. I was under the printer's spell. I hope you guys keep working on this and make it a full game. Depth seemed to be underutilised, maybe just get rid of it unless you're going to use it fully? Also food and toilet usage was cute but didn't seem to impact gameplay.
Very clever! Seems simple when it's one thing at a time, I like the way you introduce each screen separately before starting to build up the speed. It gets very hard very quick though, I think making it less punishing, having multiple hearts or something so you can take a little damage before having to restart would be good.
Ran it on linux, it worked but I couldn't managed to get off the first piece of land. It looks cool, i liked the teapots. Sound was kind of annoying and repetitive.
Really like the pixel planets! They look great. I took over Earth! Doesn't feel like there's much new here, but with more work it could by quite interesting I think. Would be nice to see my Fleets.
Was far too easy there weren't really any decisions to make as a player. The one sound was very harsh.
Great game! Nice gameplay mechanic, i was immersed! my only issue is sometimes I seemed to be able to stretch a long way, other times not very far at all, I couldn't figure out the logic for that. Also maybe some indicator of your progress. It says you're constantly shrinking but I couldn't notice it visually. Sound was great too.
I played 2 rounds, I found moving left and right was kind of hard and there didn't seem to be any strategy other than luck. I like the concept of switching modes for the extraction, but if you fail it should give you another extraction attempt.
Cool idea, but think it needs some more work to make it a more enjoyable game. Other cars drive into you when you're not moving and you get penalised. Add pedestrians and people who actually buy from you. Make it so you have to try and find a busy area to get lots of money. Have people come out of buildings for their break time. I never felt like i was competing with the other trucks. The obstacles on the road didn't really seem to add much. Maybe block off ways with road works that change over time so you have to find new routes.
The mouse controls were awkward, keys would have been nicer, even as an option. Space was unnecessary. captured planets should heal you perhaps. AI was annoying and took too much to kill. Only managed to capture 3 planets.
@sean-s-leblanc
Thanks for the feedback!
Mmm I did encounter that bug once, It think it's related to stuff starting before all assets are loaded hence why refresh fixes it. Bad porting on my part.
Understandable about the launching audio, that was a bit rushed.
You can levelskip a bit! unfortunately it's not mentioned, but for each level you complete it unlocks 1.25 levels.
@icxon thanks! good find on that bug! you won the level but immediately moved into a non-winning position and I guess you couldn't move after that? I'll have to get that fixed. Your progress should be saved however so if you restart the game it should remember you were up to the start of that level.
Really enjoyed the art and music and sound and general mood of the game. The pacing was a bit annoying and I thought it was stuck when all he fished out was berries and was just sad all the time. I think the gameplay needs work to make it more interesting. Great work with the cuteness though!
The movement needs work, moving left and right and back is super slow, make it a similar speed to fowards, and the angular momentum when turning is a bit nauseating, maybe reduce that. Make it so you slide along walls when moving rather than coming to a stop.
Needs to be clear what the goal and end game condition are. You die for no obvious reason.
Why are you collecting the flowers, make it feel meaningful rather than just collecting things for the sake of it. Suggestion: add a hive where you start and must go out and gather pollen from flowers quickly and return to the hive before they run out, so the player feels they have a reason for it, if they don't the hive will die and they know they are counting on the player to get them quickly for them.
Really like the art and music, platforming didn't feel good though, and it wasn't really clear what the aim was or why you were doing it and the having to restart all the time was crappy. I think you could expand on the idea and make something really cool with this concept though.
My memory is too bad for this. Nice pixel art, but difficult to see what things are really.
Wow this is so very similar in many ways to my game SmallTrek.
A solid game, finished level 10! Sometimes it was a little confusing as to why animals weren't happy, my game had the same issue. When two animals are sharing a plant one is unhappy. Took me a while to figure out that animals were unhappy on desert tiles.
I think the tutorial is unnecessary, just introduce each new animal with a level and let the player figure it out, maybe add a little text and perhaps there are too many animals to keep track of, some seem quite similar. Allow clicking on a background tile to see what it is.
It would be nice to be able to use either just the mouse or just the keyboard, having to switch between both is annoying.
Also add a bit more time after you complete the level successfully so you have time to see WHY you won the level sometimes you move something about and suddenly complete the level but you don't get time to see why.
Great work on your game!
Mostly loved it, I noticed the input lag too, but I think the problem is you don't buffer the inputs. Say I press up then up immediately, it'll only move up once as it has to wait until you complete the first up movement. I had the same issue in my game but fixed it by queuing every keypress and then dequeuing them when i'm ready for another input, so pressing up twice will move up, then move up again. The calling people "Wife" thing annoyed me though and stereotypical gender roles in the town. Artwork was lovely, especially loved the overworld map and loved the "edge" effect. Having to be side on to people to talk to them was odd but I got used to it. Music was great. Sad I didn't get to explore the edge myself in the ending though.
I don't think this worked quite as well as your previous entry unfortunately. It looks wonderful though. The music and graphics don't seem to fit for me, I think the music should be darker to fit the dark visuals. Love the fog and colours. Collecting the orbs felt a little anti-climactic though and the actual gameplay didn't really do much for me, but it was a cool tech demo!
I would have liked to play more but the jumping physics kinda spoiled it for me. I gave up after failing a jump (top left area) for the 100th time.
Cute game, wasn't clear what used up my sugar, it would disappear without warning. Maybe have an alert when it's getting low. There wasn't really much strategy for being able to get to sugar other than luck it seemed.
This looks and sounds amazing, but sadly the game is very confusing, I have no idea even after all the tutorial levels what is going on as a lot of other people have found. But the art is so good! Hope you do something great with it.
Love the artwork and style of this, the motion made me feel rather nauseous and I didn't really feel like I could control what was going on or that my input really had any influence on where stuff hit.
Very fun little game! I like the mechanics but I think the fast moving balls didn't work so well though. I could just avoid them, I kind of felt like a lot of the time to succeed I just needed to "avoid the game" rather than face the challenge. Great music!
Update: realised I didn't know about the grapple last time, I don't know that it's really needed. But it's cool. Maybe it should rather than pull the spider to the ball, pull the ball to the spider to get things moving.
Platforming felt terrible sorry. Took me a couple of minutes to find the world to land on.
Very fun and cute! Really enjoyed it, quite tricky not to crush everything. Would be good to have some more levels. The sounds were nice but needed some screams, the music was a little annoying though but suited the mood of the game I think. Art was very nice, especially the feet.
You should totally make this a mobile game! And nice use of the theme too.
Really love the music and how it changes in the different areas. Like the mechanic of moving to different areas where things behave differently, unfortunately I don't think it was utilised very well and didn't really seem to affect the game much, or if it did there didn't seem to be much logic to which area to go. I think with some more work this could be really great. The colours were nice, the player, enemies and bullets all using the same square was unfortunate, some simple sprites could make things more interesting, or even just different shapes, square, circle, hexagon or something to distinguish them.
Cool idea, pity about the performance and bunching up of the water. I think if you continue work on it you could get it to be a nice puzzle game. I like the art. Needs some music.
http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2821 I used the same water mechanic on one of my jam pico8 games. It runs a lot faster and doesn't bunch up so much. Maybe take a look at the source.
Quite cute but not much to do or nothing that I could figure out how to do. Reminds me of megalomania a little. Would be interesting if the worlds connected (via the computers) and you could switch between them and they'd still be running. I like the idea with the links, it'd be cool if you could extend it and make something of a game out of that.
Wonderful concept, you really should add the mouse movement to the instructions, I was playing for a while trying to figure out how to get anywhere and thought that i was stuck and that was all the game had. fortunately I discovered it by accident and continued playing. got to the 3rd level I think where I got frustrated by the spikes when moving up and dying. But great concept and execution, art was really nice and music was pleasant and sfx worked well. Great job!
Looks great, the artwork is really nice, although seems a little slow, laggy maybe? I found the moving across the keyboard didn't work so well as a gameplay element, you use a 3x3 grid of squares, however keyboards keys are generally are staggered in non square patterns so it was very fiddly. Music was ok, a little repetitive. Maybe needs some sound effects to add some drama. I didn't really feel it fit the theme that well.
Always amazing work from you! Love the animal sprites and animations and the minimal tiles and aesthetic. Feels very abstract like playing a board game. I found it quite difficult and haven't won it yet, but I might give it another go now =) Like the ambience too.
Loved this game! The art is amazing and so cute!
Lovely artwork and vibe, looks very polished, the music was nice although a bit repetitive. Reminds me of Black&White a little. The main gameplay mechanic wasn't very fun unfortunately, it's difficult to see what's going on and moving things around doesn't feel very natural.
I like the story/overworld. the shooting game is not so fun though, I'd rather skip that to explore the story, it'd be nice if it had a consistent art style. Music is great.
Cool atmosphere and graphics and sounds. Gameplay felt kind of generic and boring. I was interested until the combat happened. I think ditch the combat and make something more interesting with it.
Love the graphics and style! Music was nice too. The instructions were misleading however, you should mention you can use the keys to control instead of trying to use the mouse to control one pedal or steering at a time which is nearly unplayable. With keys it was quite nice. Would be awesome with a bit of drifting too. Didn't really feel that motivated about the batteries other than to keep playing a bit longer, there didn't seem much goal to it.
@kamikaziuk thanks for playing, could you tell me what you were confused about so I can make it more clear? I'll work on adding a volume control for the waves.
@stevenjmiller thanks for playing! yes, in retrospect the timer doesn't fit so well and it was mostly for the theme, I should add an option to "keep playing anyway" after you run out of time. I'll add that in a post-compo version. Thanks for letting me know where you got stuck.
@pitpony thanks for playing! I'd like to rework a lot of the levels and yes, they do get too hard too fast. I think a big improvement would be to have an "always on" oscilloscope at the bottom of the screen out of the way so you don't have to turn it on or off, since it's very important to use it. Also being able to see multiple waves at the same time. It was difficult to show much on the small boxes since the resolution is so low. Thanks very much for the feedback!
@berserkerchris yes I should definitely add in a lot more tutorial style levels to each individual components and basics. This is the problem with a "compo" game, no one else has played it before release so I'm not sure what people will need more time with. But will definitely do that post compo.
@smbe19 you can press escape and use the menu with the arrow keys to adjust the levels. I'll update the description.
And you're right that the platforming is kind of pointless in this game. I had planned to make platforming more important later on but ran out of time.
@mortus thanks! yes, i had the same realisation that it's not very fun once the signals get complicated. I need to rework it quite a bit and focus on simpler signals, or better tools for comparing signals, since guesswork is not very fun. And yes I should have noted that the signals run from -1..1, I've now added some updated instructions on the itch.io page.
@cmlsc thanks. The idea of making a puzzle game with audio signals is something I've had in my mind for a while, but it came up again when I was thinking of power and electrical signals for this theme. Admittedly the gameplay is quite removed from the theme. And I've wanted to try making a platformer for a long time so I decided to add that too. But perhaps the mix is not so good, but I think I could continue work on it to make it work better, making more use of platforming mechanics in the puzzles as well as the signals. It's interesting that using the audio made it easier. I was hoping that playing the game would give people a better understanding of what different wave shapes sound like. As for the shades of grey, they have no meaning, just to make it a bit more interesting to look at.
@hitchh1k3r congrats!!! I think you're the only person to finish it so far! I admit it's way too difficult and requires too much trial and error, something I plan to fix in future versions. But thank you for playing it all the way through.
I didn't realise that the + and x would be confused, but in future I'll make that more clear, and introduce each module individually before combining them.
That platforming bug sounds correct, well spotted, I only reset the wall touching flag when you move left or right!
@zeknir thanks for playing, yes that level is very hard!
A splitter should not change the signal at all, if it did that's a bug, I'll try and reproduce. However I did test all levels are possible and have solutions before releasing.
Thanks, I like the platforming too, but I hope it make it a more important aspect of the game in the future rather than just a means of getting around.
@atkinssj thank you! yes I plan to make more levels that introduce each machine more slowly to give people a better idea of what each thing does and how it will effect the waveform. Thanks for the feedback!
@matita thank you! Yes, it's definitely too difficult, I'll be redoing all the levels methinks. I like the idea of a playground to experiment, I'll definitely include that in the final thing.
@manoloon thank you! I don't think it's ready to sell just yet, but I'll definitely consider it when it's done. You a can use arrow keys if that's easier instead of WASD. And eventually it'll all be configurable.
@nusan yep, that's a big issue, in the postjam version I'm adding the ability to freeze the scope and show multiple waves stacked to make it easier to compare phase and amplitude at your leisure.
@sleepless yeah the theme was mostly from the story, and "power" in this case being phases of electricity in the wires, but the "running out" was more related to the backstory which I didn't really get to fit into the gameplay during the compo unfortunately.
@gil4 thanks! good point about the replacing cables when it's already connected. I've solved this in a newer (unreleased) version where connecting to an already connected socket will swap them so if you're holding cable A and cable B is connected, cable A will then be connected and cable B will be in your hand. Seems to work much better.
video-2017-08-04T00-20-15.gif
@teammonumental I'd previously written a modular synthesiser https://github.com/ftsf/nimsynth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHomZLUE6As so I didn't have to research much for it. I used a lot of the same concepts from Nimsynth in this game but with a game interface.
@jtn191 currently the background music is just something I made on a keyboard and is playing on a loop, but ideally the music would all be generated by the in game synths. Maybe building up over the course of the game as you complete each level or something like that.
@jahndis thanks! I'm not happy with the level design at all, thanks for working your way through what was there. It should never come down to having to guess and should build up the skills you need more gradually. I think the filters and phase modulation levels are particularly tricky since they're a lot less obvious in how they'll change the waveform. I'm currently reworking all the levels to make it a better experience.
@raaaahman thanks very much for the honest feedback! I was aware of a lot of these issues when I put it out but sadly ran out of time, spent too much time on technical details.
The timer thing is obvious in hindsight, I thought it would add some intensity to the game, but it was a terrible design decision.
Yep, i'm currently reworking most of it, hopefully the new version will be a lot better.
@icylava thanks for playing all the way through! Order of filters is actually important, however the levels are quite rubbish and don't introduce this well. And yes, the spazzing out is a problem, mostly due to the boxes processing samples in a different order which means theres slight differences in the output, i didn't have time to fix this so i tried to make the testing quite generous, however it seems it wasn't always enough.
The camera movement is nauseating, and I wasn't able to walljump up the first section. I kept falling down. I think you need to work on the walljump more. The jump noise was very loud and unpleasant. Some wall slide friction would help as well.
I like the artwork, and the help overlay was good, but you should show it first before game. Could use some music. And add some particles or something when you make an action such as hitting an enemy so you get some response to your input. Hide the default mouse cursor, it's very distracting. Gameplay however, it just felt like I was doing boring work "click click click" for no real reason other than to keep the fire alive, but I didn't feel connected to the fire, money as a reward seemed unrelated to everything else. Maybe have the fire tell you a story or something?
Wow! That is an awesome puzzle game you've got there! A bunch of great mechanics that fit together very nicely. Simple art that is easy to read (although I think it'd be good if the player was a different colour or stood out more). Music was the only disappointing thing in this game, it didn't really suit, something energetic would be better I think. But anyway, awesome work! Best one I've played so far.
I like the idea, the explanation wasn't quite clear about how to give people what they need. But after a few attempts I managed to get them home alive. I wasn't able to hear any audio, is there supposed to be some? If not you should opt out of the audio category.
Hmm I found the instructions very counter-intuitive, "TAP A BUTTON", so I tapped as fast as I could, but you actually need to tap and hold longer with some rhythm to not die. Also it should be "mouse" button as keyboard buttons don't work. The lightning bolts were confusing too, I thought they might restore my power, but they didn't seem to have an effect. Maybe a stamina bar would be useful. As soon as it got to the snow level I died almost immediately. Maybe make the transitions between stages more gradual and say how it affects things.
I liked the art and introduction, very cute and funny. I'm glad I don't have a microphone because I'd die if I had to blow for very long, I can't imagine that being very fun. Otherwise seemed like a generic clicker (blower?). Needed some music to fill in the silence when there were no sfx.
I enjoyed playing it, nice fast movement and responsive control! I didn't feel the theme was very strong with this one, I never felt short on power. Some issues with hitboxes, seemed oversized when shooting bosses. Are the levels randomly generated? My first encounter was a boss which seemed a little strange. Sound effects were good, could use some music. Needs more feedback when you're hit by an enemy bullet, screenflash or something.
It was difficult to navigate using mouse + arrows, wasd would be better. Playing with the mouse on the html version it would go off the screen so I couldn't rotate properly either. The font was really hard to read, not sure if that's intentional or not. Also it seemed kind of silly just typing the questions you're asked directly to your friend. I ran out of time after 3 questions.
Pretty fun! A bit too busy and distracting visually. Too many particles (i know, what a thing to say!) Colours are not used consistently. Eg. yellow is used for bullets, but also energy powerups. Powerups look and move like bullets, give them a more floaty movement perhaps and a different shape.
I really like the art style. I spent a lot of time waiting around for enemy ships to appear with nothing to do. I think you should add a timer to spanw one so one will appear if one hasn't appeared in a certain amount of time. I found the controls a little difficult, especially in combat where it became a button mash with no chance of recovery if you missed. Having to wait while an enemy ship is destroyed is slow, let the player press Down on the ship's crystal to destroy it and let them run off while it crumbles so they can get a running jump and not break the flow of the game.
Beautiful game, nice mechanic with the absorption. Maybe randomise the target a bit to keep you on your toes. Loved the art and random enemies. Although some sprites seemed to have a different style to others (outlined vs non-outlined).
Pretty fun! I really like Netwalk so I quite liked this. I'm not sure about the moving tiles mechanic. Feels a little OP, but also very awkward. It'd be nice if you could plan more for being attacked. (Can you?) It was fun for a little bit, but got tired quickly. I love the use of the TNG theme on the outer area, but felt it didn't mesh nicely with the style of the tiles in the main play area. Making them all TNG styled would look a lot nicer.
Beautiful <3
Really enjoyed the music, the SFX when you complete a level is really really loud however. Double jumping was annoying, need to require another key press to jump rather than auto double jumping when you accidentally hold it down for too long. Never needed to turn the light on, not sure why it was necessary, and the platforming was very easy except for the above mentioned double jump, never felt challenged. (Asked you about this on IRC and now know that when the light is off it should be too dark to see the platforms, so just make the screen black when the light is off).
@sean-s-leblanc
Thanks! Interesting, picking up cats works in the downloaded version but not the web version. I didn't test that. Also the audio issue is a big problem on the web version, will need to fix that up.
I think I'll definitely slow down time to make it a bit easier after watching someone else play it.
@samdancer this seems to be a bug in the web version only, i'll look into what's going wrong.
@cmlsc sounds like it's lagging, shouldn't be any distortion.
Updated the web version and fixed some bugs which allow picking up cats and hopefully fix some of the audio issues. However still having some audio problems after long running, but added a menu to allow turning off the music.
I think _maybe_ the audio problem on the web player is fixed now. Let me know if you still get weird stuttering as the game goes on.
@fussenkuh controls were designed for 2 hands. Left = Z,X Right = Arrows.
@cmlsc thanks! glad that fixed it!
@nusan I agree, it's too overwhelming too quickly to the point it's really hard to make use of the adoption centre. I've added an option to slow down the rate of cats.
Adoption centre was one of the last things I added before falling asleep, so it's not very well done.
Wow! So similar to my entry! But really love your graphics! (Could only get the HTML 5 version to work so I couldn't hear the sound) Got quite stressful when they started to attack me! Beautifully done! The grandson was a great addition and quite amusing.
I enjoyed it, but the controls were a little annoying, it was difficult to immediately jump again after landing.
Looks quite nice but I don't know that it quite works as what is intended. The rhythm component seems mostly ignorable since you don't take much damage from lava and can just walk over it quickly, I think making it 1 hit kill would help with that. And the puzzle element seemed mostly ignorable too since you only need one of the two to get to the exit so you can mostly focus on one character and ignore the other and play it just like a normal platformer except for the annoying bit where if one character goes back to the previous level you have to redo it (which was more annoying than fun). I was confused why my characters kept making puffs of black smoke when they weren't near lava.
Was pretty fun, I wasn't always able to tell when a plant was fully grown though and by the time I had realised it had often disappeared. It'd be good to make it more obvious when it transitions to being ready.
Really cool idea, however I think it'd be better wtih maybe 7 and up since there's too many combinations it was difficult to make a hand with anything more than pretty boring things like a pair or occasionally two pair. Maybe add a way to restore health (cards in the suit of hearts perhaps?) maybe each suit could do something different, spades/clubs does more damage, diamonds gives more points? not sure.
@potondo Thanks for playing! Having no defences on the first hand doesn't matter so much as you can play them immediately as you get your second hand, which actually gives you an advantage since those defences last an extra turn.
@sean-s-leblanc yes it's a difficult one to explain how to play quickly for people who aren't already familiar with deck-builders. I wish I had more time to work on instructions and progression.
@stevenjmiller thanks for finding that bug! I'll fix that up. Yes I had wanted to add a lot more in terms of progression and increasing difficulty but ran out of time. I had planned to add more enemy types and a preview of the wave coming and show how the number of active links and servers would control the incoming wave so you could adapt your grid before the next wave.
@radical-dog the deteriorating towers thing was necessary in order for the deck-building to be important, so that it becomes necessary to cycle things and continually have useful stuff in your hand. However I'm considering increasing the max age of turrets to 4 or 5 and removing the automatic starting of the next wave, or at least add a post-wave period for you to complete your purchases and prepare for the next wave as currently the next wave starts while there is often still some of the previous wave in play.
@RadioactiveRambo i've got a lot of ideas for what I might improve/fix. I wanted to add more of a tutorial and sound and music and some more effects and different types of packets and turrets.
I'm currently reworking it a fair bit to make the difficulty scaling and completely changed the way you get income.
Art is beautiful. Weird having the A button to start instead of one of the ones you use to play the game. Unfortunately neither of the main things, jumping and shooting feel good and satisfying. The shooting SFX sounds really dull too. Respawning over pits isn't great either. Very keen to try out the engine at some point though. Hope you fix this up a bit!
Super lovely art! Some of the nicest pico8 I've seen. I enjoyed the music and sfx and dialogue too. I found the rhythm stuff quite difficult, but it seemed easy to cheat just by holding down the button. I'm not sure if the timing went with the music or not. I think there's a way to sync stuff to the music with pico8 though, if you're not doing that already it'd be a good idea, "stat(20) through stat(23) return the note number (0 through 31) of the sound effect currently playing on the four channels, respectively. If no sound is playing on the channel, stat() returns -1.". I died a few times and gave up but I'd like to play more, going all the way back to the beginning and having to redo all the dialogue was a bit annoying. But amazing job!!
Kinda hard to play with one player, but beautifully polished!
@randomphantom yeah, the more explanation would have been good, especially with the shop. I play with the keyboard (z,x,c,v or h,j,k,l), but the mouse was there as an option.
@matank I think this was one of the hardest things about making this game, trying to make the cards and items be connected, it's only important sometimes, kinda. It was very experimental and I think in retrospect I'd avoid that choice and it's super difficult to convey to a player.
@saoi-games yep! thanks I'm aware, forgot to remove it before releasing, it was handy when wanting to quickly test out new cards during dev.
@bart-huylebroeck yes, that's a good point, I should allow you to sacrifice sick people and maybe rebels, and also make the sickness spreading a bit less crazy. Thanks for the feedback!
@lazinix thanks very much! I'd love to keep expanding it and I'll definitely add a save function =)
@feilkin it definitely requires reading the instructions unfortunately, it's rather complicated. I'll try to make a tutorial system to guide you through the first few turns or something.
@chao thanks for the feedback! I actually had the same thoughts about a random event system (I'm adding that now), a "Destiny" deck of cards are drawn each turn (they maybe have random events or random demands from the Serpent God that you must fulfil) that you can use a Seer to peer at and rearrange or discard.
@christina-antoinette-neofotistou thanks very much! <3 I hadn't heard of Keith Burgun before, but I looked up their stuff and it's very interesting and helpful! I feel like this game is currently quite broken, but has potential to be really good. A lot of the game design I borrowed from a very underrated board game called "Time Barons" by Jon Perry and Derek Yu which is beautifully elegant, some of which comes through in my game, although I messed it up a lot. I highly recommend checking it out.
@castpixel It doesn't look like the link to your game on itch.io is active yet, maybe you need to Publish it? Looking forward to playing!
Before reading the instructions I was pretty confused, but after reading them I went a lot better. At first I found it difficult to tell which things I was supposed to pick up, vs things to avoid. I'd often try to pick up the Trash containers, and I'd tend to avoid the crystals which looked threatening. The ammo icon indicator was also confusing, as the "crystal" could look like scrunched up trash. It might be good to have the word "trash" or "crystal" written with it as well.
Flying around felt good but aiming at enemy ships is really hard, and when hitting an enemy my face seems to appear and look like i've been hit? I'm not sure if I've been hit or not, I'm assuming I don't have health other than my lives. I also couldn't figure out what the pink arrows were pointing at.
One thing I thought might be cool is if when you shoot an asteroid it gets pushed and you need to try and cause a chain collision to break lots of asteroids with few shots.
As always your pixel art in beautiful, the ships and faces, asteriods and starbase especially! Oh and I loved the music and sfx! Great work! Thanks for making!
Cool little intro, I like the idea. I found it difficult to see the obstacles, and figure out which things were decoration and which things would hurt me. I think giving the obstacles an outline or making them stand out more from that background would help. I'm not sure what the upgrades are for, I won without needing them. I think it could go deeper and add some other mechanics perhaps.
I really liked all the music! The voice acting to tell me there was no voice acting was odd, probably better without it, so I can read the text without distraction, though the voice sounds nice. The gameplay was a bit random and simple to be interesting and didn't really connect to the theme or story that I could tell. The art was pretty crazy and random and kinda worked.
Looks amazing, love the shadows and cave vibes. The controls are super confusing yet hilarious. I wish they were a bit more reliable, I love the idea of a caving game, having to squish my body awkwardly through tight spaces, but this felt far too chaotic and silly. But it is entertaining for a bit. But I couldn't figure out how to actually achieve anything useful with my limbs. Also I think there was a bug where I'd fly up/get pulled in to the air sometimes. Really cool idea worth pushing further I think if you can get the controls tight and reliable. Some SFX when you grab/release would be good.
The scanner was very cool and I like the story about going to rescue the hikers. It was fun exploring the caves. The lever puzzles seemed kinda pointless to me as they were, it didn't seem to add much, except for the dropping the rocks, that was cool, more physics puzzles could be fun. I didn't really understand the monsters, or why I was suddenly dying without any feedback. (you shouldn't rely on sound-only cues since not everyone will be able to experience it), even when I knew they were there I couldn't really understand their behaviour or how to avoid them, eventually I guess I just got lucky getting past them.
Interesting system for using tools, a bit confusing, also wasn't sure what the bar down the bottom was (eventually figured out it was the day-night cycle, but some more explanation would be good) I managed to build a fire and survive the first night, then got stuck on my second day. The ocelot didn't seem to have a large impact on the game, but maybe I'm missing something.
Another Wikipedia game! (I made one too!) Yours is very polished! Nice that you could do it in the usual browser, I had to make an Electron app. I like the scoreboards and fixed levels, I originally planned to do that too but pivoted to a different style. I think a lot of your levels are way too easy, even after 5 levels it was still ~2 clicks to the goal. Rarely had to explore the topic. I think you could make the levels more challenging to push people to explore more and discover new things.
@timujin yeah you could play it with a web-browser and a notepad for sure, all this does it kind of enforce the rules and gives you some direction with the quests.
@pancelor thanks so much, lovely to hear! <3 Yes, it's very tricky to find your way back if you don't learn about your starting page well. I made that mistake a few times during my playtesting.
@listonos the random nature of the Quests can give quite varied difficulty, I was thinking of adding the ability to draw more quests if you finish them all with plenty of steps left for more points or something.
@kevinworkman awesome! glad you made it back! I specifically didn't include Ctrl+F so you'd actually read the page and learn about it rather than quickly trying to find the exit, I know if I have access to ctrl+f I just skip over things. But I guess it could be a player option to disable it or not for people who just wanna rush through. I didn't know about "what links here", that could be useful for detecting start pages that would be too hard to solve. Thanks for playing!
@mahalis thanks, I only discovered it was already a thing after day 1 of the compo, so I started to shift my design away from the existing Wikirace implementations by adding the quests. I wanted to make something that gets you to learn and discover interesting things and use your knowledge to make logically connections. I liked the idea of a path you couldn't retrace and I used the quests to get the player away from the starting page so going back wasn't so easy. So hopefully it's different enough from other wiki games to be innovative and interesting. The "Quest" words you don't have to hit the exact page, eg for "Mammal" any mammal will do, or for Film any film will do, it uses the Wikipedia category system to match them.
@jupiter-hadley thanks Jupi! It's probably not the best kind of game for your videos as the session length is quite long, but thanks for showing it =)
@frogman thanks for sharing your screenshot! I love seeing these! it's so cool looking at the path people take. Yeah the wildly varying difficulty is something I'd like to improve in future versions. It's very hard when the starting page is very obscure.
Cool idea using the browser scroller, first thing i did was press End which you handled and it was funny. I then tried to do it properly but got the same message, not sure if that's a bug.
note: had to disable adblocker for it to load.
seems really cool so far, got the double jump. the shooty, the big jump, then got stuck (dropped my handhelds where i couldn't get back to them), didn't see a way to reset stuff, so I guess I'll start again.
came back and finished it! that was awesome!
great use of the theme.
enjoyed the music.
love the title screen of each game and how it gives you a hint.
could use a bit more to make it a more full game, maybe some more varied powers or combining powers, and the boss battle could be better, make use of more of the powers (i did it only using the shoot power, would have been cool to have to switch between powers to dodge attacks or something) but as a compo entry it's amazing! great work!
still jamming to the music.
I kept accidentally skipping the dialog, better to give some time before skipping if it's on the same button as the button the player will be using anyway.
The SFX were nice but the music didn't go well.
Tutorial could have ended after introducing the two modes. Didn't seem to be much difference between the tutorial and "arcade" mode. Having some objective other than not die would be good, things to get more points or recover temperature/oxygen perhaps. At some point I got stuck and got dragged off the top of the screen and "took a wrong turn".
Really well polished! Quite hard! A little slow and tedious, which doesn't work so well with the punishing difficulty and having to restart from nothing. The pixel art and effects is quite nice and the sound is great. I wasn't sure what the things I picked up did.
Nice art, cool idea, I wasn't sure what the point of the grey nugget was. I usually hit myself, maybe the nugget shouldn't collide with the player. Didn't really get much from the theme, maybe if you were trying to hit the nugget down an endless cavern and hit it to unstick it would fit more. Game got stuck/frozen on the 4th level I think.
I think I'd prefer if you hid the results of your actions, showing [-10 morale] or something on an action just makes me not want to pick it, if you let me pick it then i lose morale it feels more natural.
Background art was very nice, nice transition to coloured once you get the flower. Unfortunately the movement and platformer physics felt off and the footstep sound was way too loud. The puzzles weren't very interesting or challenging, some like using a key to get a key seemed pointless. Didn't really explore the theme that I can tell, perhaps taking the flower deeper and deeper once you get it and using it to bring life to the dark monochrome depths could add to it. Really liked the mood of it, Limbo vibes.
Lovely visual effects and mood, The mechanics were not particularly interesting or innovative but very well presented. At some point all the purple blobs just turned green and I picked them up and won, not sure how that works. Was problematic not being able to see my mouse cursor as when it goes off the edge of the screen you lose input and I couldn't get keyboard input to work, it would always follow the mouse instead.
Super cool! I love the idea, and the graphics are really cute! The net physics looks great. I found it a bit too hard to actually get fish in my net, often they would hit other fish in the net and bounce off, i think it could be a bit more forgiving. The basic loop is cool, go down get fish come back get money, buy upgrades. I didn't really feel the impact of the upgrades though, maybe they need to be more dramatic. Maybe a display to show how much your current net is worth so you know when to come back up. I couldn't really tell the fish apart and know how much they'd give me individually.
Argh this seems really cool and up my alley, but I can't figure out how to get past the second level. I feel like I'm missing something. How do I manipulate the stack to do anything interesting? Virtual Undo seems like the most important thing, but I can't seem to get it to do anything different from real undo.
I also did a Wikipedia game! I've counted 3 so far =) Looks like we've all done different kinds of implementations, so that's cool to see! I found the layout a bit hard to find the page content as it's the same colour as the main page, maybe different colouring would help? but I like that you removed all the extra cruft from the page so you can just focus on the main bits.
@kevinworkman thanks! yep just @rouge-dragon's one, I haven't found any others yet.
Great art, funny enemies, dig the music. Didn't really feel the theme from it. Art is really nice but hard to tell bullets from enemies and pickups sometimes. The wave weapon is cool.
It's really cool! It got way too hard for me and I got dizzy, but I really enjoyed it, glad you included a skip level button. The ending was cool too. Very nicely polished.
I found it quite hard to judge how I would move after a rotation, I'd sometimes seem to keep my previous velocity and some times I'd appear to retain no velocity from my previous orientation which I found difficult. Wall-jumping felt underused and also difficult to pull off in tense moments.
Super interesting so far! Love the visual style, I think once it has music it'll be amazing to finish off the moodiness. I got a game-breaking bug I think when "Boxer" kicked me out of the world, it seemed really interesting suddenly things started moving with physics and lockers falling over, it really surprised me and seemed really cool.
Score 365.
Very cool effect with the sonar sticking to things. Very efficient way to get great atmosphere. Nicely done! Enjoyed it for quite a while but it began to drag on, I think you need to show some sense of progression to keep players interested, different landmarks or something, change of terrain. I wasn't sure if the terrain was randomly generated or hand-made. It'd be awesome to see interesting things passing by, plants, animals, interesting shapes. Lots of cool stuff you could do with it in the future. The camera was interesting, constantly moving down and to the right at a fixed speed? It was problematic sometimes when I wanted to go down but the camera wouldn't show me below me.
Probably needs some instructions about how to play and your goal. I had a screen full of apples and I wasn't sure what was going on, I gathered I was supposed to keep heading downwards into darker areas, eventually I got into a hole with no exit (I guess that's a gameover?).
Fighting was confusing, my character appeared to jump around almost randomly, i'm guessing maybe it was enemies pushing me? But maybe it was a bug, kinda felt like inputs were being ignored or delayed or doubled up sometimes.
Love the art (i'd vote up mood if that was an option), the cat player character is super cute.
Super cool as always! Needs some music to tie it all together but I love the idea and seeing all the throw-backs to your other games is neat. Controls felt fine to me when inverted. I think the different levels could feel a bit more different, but the wobbliness is rad.
This is almost exactly the idea I started with for my game, but ended up dropping the player characters and rotations to simplify it. I really like the concept, I think the controls are really difficult to use though, especially doing both at once. Maybe would be fun multiplayer, but currently I think the controls break it. Great graphics and style!
hmm, i like the idea, was really excited about it, but the mystery kind of died? did I miss something? I like the art and style. Reminds me of Police Quest. I think you should continue work on this and expand it. Make a cool detective adventure game =)
Feels very slow and floaty, not fast paced at all, didn't seem that fun sorry. Artwork is cool.
Very cute! Enjoyed the humour and graphics.
works for me in browser, i like the art and the way the levels are displayed in the background and the back and forth mechanic. but the platforming isn't fun unfortunately. the jump doesn't feel right.
Didn't work for me.
Is there a trick to running it?
https://gist.github.com/ftsf/962c760c75de42e9b7e68d4eaea12ebc
I couldn't really figure out what to do.
I managed to pick up a flaming stick and make a fire, but then couldn't put it down or seem to do anything else except make loud noises when I pressed a key.
Might need some more instructions.
Was difficult to see the bullets and zombies against the walls.
I liked the parallax background and player character.
Pretty fun gameplay! controls were awkward but maybe that's part of the game.
Hmm i just stood in the one place holding down fire the whole time. I think you might need to think through the gameplay a bit more. Music was nice but not sure it suited the game. The jerky background movement was odd and I'm not sure why I was moving up, was it a timer, or was it the dead bodies piling up underneath me. What were the enemies?
Took me a while to figure out the summoning, but wasn't able to get past the second monster. Are items unlimited?
Nice mechanic, but needed something more to it. Very easy and just got easier as I got more allies. Audio was a bit painful. Pixels of different sizes looks bad.
Love the architecture and escher vibe, really interesting level to explore, but over too quickly! I like the shader and I thought the music and mood was pretty nice. Would love to see more levels for this. Liked that it was just about exploring.
I think the blue targets could look a bit more in-theme though.
Great job!
Very nice concept, liked the puzzle aspect of it and the different types of ghosts.
doesn't seem to load for me:
gets 404 when loading https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/339851/Release/WebGL.mem
Great work! Love the aesthetic and the jokes and references! Could have used some moody music, but otherwise a wonderful entry! Wonderful tech for Pico8 too!
Hmm, not sure what's going on, but my actions don't seem to have much effect and there doesn't seem to be much point to any of them. Maybe i'm missing something?
Nice artwork.
Great work! The mood is amazing, I had trouble with figuring out some of the logic and also it seemed the screen didn't fit everyone on it, I saw someone get lasered off the edge of the screen. Also it'd be good to show an indicator of which player you are, it's easy to forget after a few rounds.
must play! I want this with me in every chatroom
cool idea, but very difficult to grasp what's going on, maybe each direction could be a different color scheme? I fell off the world too, is that winning? =) Movement could be smoother.
Cool concept with the overlaying dimensions, but think it needs more to be an enjoyable game. I like being able to see the next dimension overlayed, but it's annoying having to release shift to press space first. could be interesting with something chasing you perhaps.
Wonderful art and music, enjoyable gameplay. Wasn't sure how Mana worked
Really fun! Very stressful! I only realised part way through that I could pull new boxes in too. Great job!
@Sean: "both fridges and lounges need an open space in front of them, but it doesn't seem like they can share this space" I tested they can (easily confirmed on level 6).
As for the desk needing a space free + the chair, both sides of the desk need to be usable. There is one issue here, if the desk has a chair and a free space in front of it, but the chair blocks access to the free space, this is considered a problem when it probably shouldn't be.
Thanks for your really nice feedback! I'd really like for people to be able to share their scores so you can see how you score is compared to others.
@Aurel
Sorry, I'll look into the OSX version, I don't actually have a mac to test on unfortunately =(
It's not actually a pico8 game, but it looks like one.
Thanks for your useful feedback! I would have liked to spend more time on puzzle design and ordering, but I had to rush that at the end. I'd like to add more item types and restrictions too. And the objects blocking stuff was certainly underutilised and never really feels like an important part of the puzzle.
Great to have some constructive criticism thanks!
Difficult to really experience without another player, but I like the music and art, looks fun!
Hmm, very slow to move around and the in belt is way too slow, felt quite bored playing it. Same 4 or so countries kept coming up. Might be better without the voice so you have to learn where places where based on their flags.
Love the effects of course! I liked the use of the Chomps, the ghosts looked a bit too much like the player character and sometimes the buttons were hidden behind the front wall which felt silly. Maybe some speeding up with each level, it didn't really feel like it got more intense. music could use more work also. But loved the floating in the void room. Beautiful!
Took me a while to get what was going on, but eventually figured it out. I like the mix of the crane and conveyor worlds, that worked very well (although the vertical offset is really confusing). I didn't enjoy the humour in the story, it felt too overt, would be nicer to be more subtly dark. I only played a few puzzles, but it definitely needs some kind of stats/scoring system so you can enjoy optimising solutions.
I have no idea what is going on. I'm not sure which things are friendly and which are enemies and I saw no sheep.
Oh wow! We have the exact same game almost!! =)
Same concept and same pieces! except my plants require window light. I like your puzzles! A lot more restrictive, I think only one solution per puzzle? Looking forward to playing more levels.
The platforming movement was a bit awkward for me and wasn't a fan of the SFX. first few enemies didn't seem very interesting, but the bosses did, would focus on just the boss battles (guess that's your intention from the name), maybe just get rid of the smaller enemies at the start.
I thought it was quite innovative with the tail and being able to shape your body to deflect bullets, otherwise it was quite difficult to play and memorise which things did what.
Yea, unfortunatly the controls are terrible, would work much better with keyboard input, or keyboard (for movment)+mouse (for aim and attack).
I'm not sure what I was doing, a lot of the time it seemed the input did nothing, other times it seemed to do something but I wasn't sure what.
Sorry, no idea what's going on in this game, instructions are very unclear, and not sure what any of the things are.
Appropriately depressing! Well done! Great art and music and mood. Not fun, but I doubt that was the intention ;)
Great work! Very challenging but fun. Book was a little hard to turn pages? some clicks didn't seem to work. The money aspect is interesting.