ixchow

Housing Crisis Island Wars by piscythe 2018-08-14T07:16:25Z

Housing Crisis Island Wars is one of those node-based RTS's, like https://www.kongregate.com/games/gamezhero/tentacle-wars or Eufloria (is there a better name for these?). I like the twist of being able to build different structure on the nodes, and also the idea that population is what kills you. All the pieces of a neat game are here, but it could use some more balance. Right now, it seems there is just one 'best' strategy (build 2's, then 1's when you have to), though it's not enough for me to conquer all the islands...

Where the Cloud Lives by Tattomoosa 2018-08-18T13:26:06Z

Impressive level of polish!

Freezing Sky by Zeriver 2018-08-18T13:01:02Z

Everyone survived! This is a solid management game. I enjoyed the mechanic of having two levels open at once, but knowing that the top one wouldn't last forever; even with the small set of building here, this offered a lot of depth.

pushes you by dimesto52 2018-08-18T13:09:08Z

I love that it's not just a "twin stick shooter". The pushing mechanic and the fact that the enemies' shots can push each other makes for interesting plays.

Gnome Miner by SDC 2018-08-14T07:33:09Z

This is a micro-version of the inventory-space problem in every RPG: trying to carry the most valuable haul you can out of a dungeon. I was able to get 2040 (all pink gems) on my second try, so maybe it's too easy?

Dot Connector by spots1000 2018-08-14T06:57:58Z

Dot Connector is an abstract puzzle game in the vein of Two Dots, Chat Noir (http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/chatnoir/chatnoir.html), Lights Out, etc. Here, the goal is to draw paths connecting selected dots. Because the dots are selected (seemingly) at random by the game, scoring feels arbitrary. I'd also like to see a click-and-drag style interface. On the plus side, the concept is cool and could be something great with a little clever tweaking,

L.D. Noire by karlipoppins 2019-10-07T03:10:49Z

Hmm, similar experience with the certificate here; ended up manually changing to an [http:// link](http://nicolasbize.com/LD45/).

Also, gosh that cursor brings back memories.

Hungry Hungry Spiders by bendmorris 2019-10-07T03:08:10Z

Surprisingly engrossing. The spider-spider combat is tricky -- once three spiders get into it, a sort of feeding frenzy can emerge. (Also, great domain name.)

DesertTamer by svyatozar 2019-10-07T02:08:15Z

I tend to feel that -- from a design perspective -- unskippable cut-scenes are best avoided. They are most effective as player punishment, and if you need to punish the player, perhaps something has gone wrong with the game already.

That said, I was about to be very impressed with an LD compo game that had an actual intro!

Deadrun II by jcmoyer 2019-10-07T02:02:03Z

Nicely done, especially from-scratch! It's always hard to put together the full package of sound, gameplay, and art.

A few more detailed comments: - It was hard to understand the attack range of the enemies. It seemed like I could run past them most but not all of the time. Very odd. - At least on my setup, the rate of view rotation feels very fast relative to the rate of motion. I could see slowing one or -- my preference -- increasing the other to get to a more consistently-spry character. - It seems like the sword image stretches to fill the window, which made it awkward with a close-to-1:1-aspect browser window (the hand image doesn't seem to scale). - The wind-up on the casting might be better clued with some sort of art or animation (e.g., shaking the hand sprite might have been a low-drawing-time effort). - The collision code let me get very close to the walls. (Close enough that I could see through them.) Using a larger bounding circle for the player might be a good addition.

Gridwords by ixchow 2019-10-07T02:49:36Z

@kazatan this was also a problem for my playtester; I think the constraint of always starting with 'nothing' was a big problem in putting together a level to teach the idea.

I went so far as to put support for help text into the engine, but decided to comment it out because I'd rather show than tell. (Look in '[levels.js](https://github.com/ixchow/gridwords/blob/master/levels.js)'.)

Scrap Attack by TheseusInABottle 2019-10-07T02:27:52Z

Odd mix of lit and unlit assets. Nice robot model, though. I always like the look of a corner bevel on things.

It seems like the main strategy here is to camp at one deposit spot; perhaps a way to spice things up would be to provide some bonus for depositing sets. (I guess the unequal scrap sizing is perhaps another way to do that? Hmm.)

Star Twit: H. Nothing by ogre 2019-10-07T01:51:00Z

Overall, I really like it. Connects well with the theme and has some puzzles I like the feel of. Some more detailed thoughts: - I found it odd that the bouncy-ball cannon didn't have any sort of "kick" when fired. - The center-of-gravity of the ship feels "off", though it might be because of the camera motion rather than because of the ship motion itself.

From Space by AskingQuestions 2019-10-07T02:17:13Z

A nice game in concept and execution. The simple and abstract graphics are a nice look, and a good choice for the format.

I agree with other commentators about the slippery movement -- I think a slightly more damping could be good. I would also have appreciated a bit more telegraphing of when and where damage was happening.

Overall, however, a solid concept and one I would play longer. I think there could be some good depth here if a system for re-arranging rooms (or, at least, feeding different active areas of growth) was made available to the player.

WEAVE-SNATCHING SIMULATOR by S a m 2019-10-07T01:42:01Z

The second level is quite difficult -- I had trouble judging the criteria for being spotted (and, for that matter, seems quite hard to jump over the characters).

The art style is quite good for LD.

afdsfgs fgsdg sd by Tacokhun 2019-10-07T02:22:17Z

Nice take on the eat-and-grow genre. I like the bright colors and procedural tail animation.

It definitely feels like a bit of a grind at the start, and the one-hit-deaths don't help in that regard. It also bugs me that the background hexagon is slightly vertically stretched.

Shape Invaders by GeruGames 2019-10-07T02:36:12Z

The idea of an arena-less arena shooter is an interesting one. In my (score 101 -- so rather short, I guess) run, I never found myself in that frantic mobbed-on-all-sides sort of situation that one gets in (e.g.) SmashTV. I wonder if it is possible to create that sort of feeling without walls, or if having the ability to forever run in a given direction basically shuts that down.

Also -- a small note -- the zoom control feels reversed to me.

Start Powerless by rob1221dev 2019-10-07T02:43:43Z

A nice idea and a nice stack of levels to show it off in. With movement controls that were a bit less twitchy (i.e., give the player a bit of momentum and perhaps slow things down by about 15%), I could see myself playing and quite enjoying a full 50+ level single-screen platformer built around these ideas.

Rim of Zitra by Listonos 2020-10-05T01:07:23Z

The HTML5 version is hanging on the loading screen for me -- anyone else experiencing this?

John & Terry by cleitoneldorn 2020-10-05T01:01:47Z

The change-up! The *double* change-up!

Loopy Boy by rex64 2020-10-04T23:59:18Z

Seems like a solid puzzle concept. Being able to adjust the loop in "real time" seems a bit like cheating though -- seems like it might be more satisfying to make it so that a loop needs to be constructed in advance and then executed for the entire level.

Falling Forever by dk5000p 2020-10-05T01:11:07Z

Keyboard controls don't seem to work for me in the web version, not sure why.

Synthætica by ixchow 2020-10-04T22:32:04Z

FYI, here's my solution to the game: https://ixchow.github.io/synthaetica/?ACAAiIiKmZnIjIgViJgI0OwscUTUzAAADAAMwNDVhZeZGJjIz7kIiMHN7AyIwMDAwESImYmRiIiYkYiImE3fz+zM

Tank Fall by PetTurtle 2020-10-05T00:56:11Z

A nice little racing/shooting experience. Really nice job on polishing the graphics and sounds -- feels like a complete thing, save -- perhaps -- for a bit of balancing on the difficulty.

Ufomen Ride Again by Samps 2020-10-04T23:47:56Z

Nice job scoping and polishing. Feels like a good length with a nice set of levels.

Stacks by ping78 2021-10-08T20:18:51Z

I appreciated the eclectic object types in the stack. I, initially, wasn't sure what the small count-down timer was after objects dropped off the central platform.

SIRTET by Aggrathon 2021-10-04T04:25:29Z

An old but fun formula (I'm reminded of Cryptic Sea's Blast Miner, which at its core is "squishy block tetris"). This is also nicely polished in its presentation.

Un's Table by IndigoWolf 2021-10-03T23:39:53Z

Love the creative theme [mis]interpretation; always one of the fun parts of LD.

Bitrunner by TimeLoad 2021-10-04T04:19:54Z

Agreed, the itch.io page isn't working -- the URL also has "/edit/" in it. Perhaps there is a "publish" or "make public" button that needs pressing on itch?

Dominion by Shootboots 2021-10-03T23:46:10Z

Very nice polish overall -- consistent graphics; AI to play against; sound effects, etc. Took a bit of experimentation to understand the ability buttons (I didn't scroll down on the itch page until after playing.. oops).

Competitive Skyscraper Construction Simulator 2021 by Nick Barrash 2021-10-03T23:35:24Z

The opposite-colors-repel really adds something to the "make a stack" formula. I definitely felt the theme when my tower started to popcorn apart in a cascade of color collisions.

Multiple levels also adds a nice structure and prevents things from getting stale.

I expect that I won't be on the leaderboards for very long.

Unpredictable Processes by Denatus 2021-10-08T20:02:31Z

Interesting concept. Controls feel awkward; perhaps because landing on the bottom edges of the capsule can result in getting stuck. Also, grounded acceleration feels a bit slow.

Seems like the default strategy on green platforms is to constantly jump to avoid decay. Would be interesting to see if other types of decay (touch once; decays over time but returns; linked platforms where as one decays the other appears) would lead to more varied level designs.

Sagittarius A* Defence by Jellybean 2021-10-03T23:48:40Z

I got a similar javascript error to the above.

For a space game, I'm surprised how much fiction/viscosity the ship physics have -- it feels like there should have been more momentum.

Unstable pathing by arachnid56 2021-10-11T22:25:58Z

Reasonable puzzle system -- felt like it could use "one more thing" to really get a variety of levels going. Maybe some sort of moving platforms?

Two notes on controls: - it feels like there is a short lag between when you start a move and when the move completes, during which pressing a key again doesn't trigger another move. This can feel like the game "eating" inputs and is especially annoying in a situation where I'm focused on entering a string of keypresses quickly. - in discrete-steps puzzle games, I prefer "Increpare Standard" controls (have both "undo" and "reset" and undo can undo resets). There's a debate to be had about whether having "undo" stands counter to the performance aspect of this puzzle (needing to make a choice within a few seconds of stepping on a red block); on the other hand, I found the performance aspect of the puzzles to perhaps be the most frustrating.

(Also, much like a poster above, I definitely got tripped up by the "Play" non-button on the start screen.)

Overall, fun enough that I did complete it, so that's saying something.

UNSTABLI by ALAN001 2021-10-04T04:17:35Z

Also stuck at 90% loaded -- looking in the console I see "Syntax Error: Invalid or unexpected token" at "LUDUM_DARE_49.framework.js.br:1" which suggests that perhaps my browser is trying to execute a Brotli-compressed file directly as javascript.

This unity forum post seems relevant: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-2020-1-invalid-or-unexpected-token-error-from-compressed-framework-js-file.839587/

Perhaps the answer is to turn off any "compression" options in the HTML5 export.

ecosystem except there is no equilibrium and everyone dies probably by parafactual 2021-10-04T04:41:33Z

Working well for me in-browser (had to press the "play" button in the lower right). Was helpful to open up the source code in the other window so I could look at the grammar while trying to make little bots. Speaking of, the example code was *very* useful.

Is it the case that every new bot gets added and then re-run from tick zero? Would be nice to have things work on their own timelines so they aren't (e.g.) constantly resetting to (0,0).

`move find dead -> eat` was a useful scavenger to have around, maybe without the `dup random` though (okay, `dup random` does seem to slow down the web version a fair bit).

Would be useful to have some way to introspect on the agents in the field -- who is actually succeeding?

Might be nice to have some sort of speed limit on the agents, since they sort of just warp around.

Fun next step: generating random programs and playing them in a tournament against each-other, mutating the winners, and repeating to "evolve" good agents.