Back Four Seconds by madalaski 2020-04-22T01:48:13Z
This was great to play. I enjoyed the way it made fun of the butterfly effect to make extremely mundane actions like getting coffee or stopping a killer death robot feel a lot more important.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Isiah Brighton
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Dragon Defender | jam | 1033 | 3.56 | 3.52 | 3.09 | 3.40 | 3.40 | 3.47 | 3.20 |
This was great to play. I enjoyed the way it made fun of the butterfly effect to make extremely mundane actions like getting coffee or stopping a killer death robot feel a lot more important.
This is a very interesting inversion on the "puzzle platformer." I have to say I really admired the way the levels teach you all of the mechanics organically and sequentially. In my experience this is no easy feat for a jam game.
This required a lot more dexterity than I expected, which I think might have hindered my experience. I'm not sure if it'd be better if the character moved more slowly though, because I think its current pace kept it from getting tedious when it was time to wait for the character to get into position. I really enjoyed that all of the levels were brief, too, because that helped that feeling immensely.
The environmental storytelling was pretty strong. The town with NPCs whose dialogue is sometimes helpful and sometimes just flavor made it feel like a real place I had a role in. There were a couple pieces of text I couldn't completely read because they fell off the screen, scaling down the text or breaking it up into multiple lines would help.
The game felt contemplative. Not bright and cheery but not really sad, either. I really like that for a small moment in a larger, sad event. Having gone through the death of a loved one, there are so many small moments of things you need to take care of that you just sort of do them without them evoking any real emotion. Even in tragedy, tedious tasks are still tedious. And that gives you time to contemplate. I feel like this game really captured that experience, in a positive way.
Very fun! There was an issue with the first time enemy penguins and eggs were spawned at the same time, where the progress bar got longer than its own box and the game didn't end. I'm sure this has something to do with the progress bar incrementing in chunks when the other penguins spawn - if another penguin spawns before I defeat the final one, it increments beyond what it's supposed to.
I really like this system for bullet hell. Getting hit by bullets is okay if you can recover quickly. The fact that eggs go away when they hit me meant I could even shield my fish from the eggs, which led to being able to make a lot of interesting decisions within this small field.
This did a really good job of balancing the feeling of being lost in the darkness and still having a generally good idea of where I am/need to go to return to the feeling of safety. I almost feel like, given the way you use the closest items near you and have to go farther and farther out every time (plus accidentally throwing in the lantern, RIP), making it colder that final time isn't necessary to make it harder (at least for me).
I lost with about 30 seconds left because I underestimated how quickly the fire would go out while I was away (I was juggling about 5 objects).
I don't know what it is: the frantic pace, the sound design, the fact that the sheep seem to want to die - this is the funniest game I have played in a long time.
I thought if I used an item at the shop it would sell it and instead I gave the mewbie something it hated haha
I love these kinds of puzzle games. The one thing I will say is that it felt weird to have things like hanging/removing/moving baskets require you stand on the tile you needed to be on, while making the goat sit/stand required being *next* to the goat and facing it. I kept wanting to do one when I was supposed to do the other.
This was pretty cool! I really enjoyed the bit where you follow a long trail of water droplets and find a big clump of water tiles at the bottom. I think this game has an issue where the way you lose energy over time when you're not doing well makes you really want to spam the "wait" button when you're winning so you have a big stockpile just in case, and unfortunately that means the player ends up not exploring as much.
This would probably fall outside of the scope of the compo depending on how you programmed it, but if I were to fix it it would be by lowering the upkeep cost of of roots (to maybe 0.1-0.2) while still making it cost 1 to explore, and by making the water give diminishing returns (so 10 the first turn you land on it, 9.9 the second turn, 9.8 the third, etc) until it eventually gets sucked dry. This would make it so the player can't stay in one place for too long, but the reduced upkeep costs also mean they don't have to.
I'd also probably place a few more water tiles toward the top so the player lasts their first round long enough to feel like they learned the game.
I really liked how once you grow it it asks you if you can do better than the amount of days it took. That made me want to play again and do it a little smarter. It's a small thing but I think it helps discourage "cheesing" the game by waiting for a thousand turns.
That was fun! I think it would be helpful to explain that the mines explode when a black square spawns on top of it and it destroys nearby black squares, since that caused some confusion at first. But I got the hang of it and had a great time afterwards.
@congusbongus I was the lead programmer and the music composer, Swarnava was the designer and secondary programmer, and David was the artist
I love the simplicity and the depth of it. This game is seriously fun.
The meteor telegraphing felt so right. I loved the moments of "Hey is the ground more red than normal? Oh no."
I loved the BGM! And this is the most invested I've ever been in a Scrabble-like game.
I like the system of watering the plant inside and giving it sun outside. Through just level design that means you can only take care of one of its needs at a time. I was confused by the rats outside and the 0 in the HUD at first but they made sense after a while.
The picking up/putting down mechanic worked extremely smoothly, it felt very natural. But there's never really a reason to put the plant down. There's nothing you can do with the plant on the ground that you can't do with it in your hands. I wonder how the game would play if you had to manage two plants at once?