Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → James Laird
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Waltz Royale | jam | 1075 | 2.80 | 2.50 | 3.80 | 3.32 | 2.55 | 2.70 | |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Castaway Crates | jam | 1156 | 2.78 | 2.45 | 3.47 | 3.20 | 2.97 | 2.45 |
There's a compelling simple game in here; drag-and-flick envelopes to get rid of smiley faces. Clear as many as possible. Use missiles to clear clumps. Don't let the envelopes you need get buried when you need them! I found drag-and-flick to be very finicky with my mouse; maybe this would work better if I were playing it on a mobile touchscreen, and if the envelopes were a little bigger.
Reminded me of Sonic Spinball and other games where you adjust the course of a bouncing ball. Camera shifts made me feel like I wasn't always in control.
Reminds me of other swarm control games, like Pikmin and Overlord. Good mechanics to force me to avoid enemy AoE attacks with my Michael horde.
What a great game! Solid small-scale point-and-click. Fully voiced, lots of art.
Graphics are really great pixel art. Gameplay is compelling; reminds me over Overcooked and Among Us. Agree with some other commenters that the tuning seems pretty stiff; it's easy to run out of parts very early on, and hard to get much value out of coffee or other scientists.
I got a crash when leaving the all-forest town, which was shame because I was having a good time! Definitely achieved the feel of DQ-style exploration (exploring in progressively more-difficult biomes). I was surprised that the items weren't consumed when used; once I had the right item to defeat a particular enemy, that enemy becomes trivial to defeat. Definitely liked the feel of needing to find the right items to traverse each terrain type, and feeling the map unlock for me. Likewise, the encounter rate felt pretty high; I ended up doing a lot of "grinding" just as I traveled (which feels worse than in DQ because I'm not gaining XP from the fights, so they feel like a waste of time). Would happily play more games like this!
Soundtrack, and graphics, and gameplay make for a great retro-arcade feel! I'm pretty sure some deliveries take more time to make than you gain seconds for making them, which is not a great feeling as a player. I'd enjoy seeing this game developed more!
Guitar music is a big plus! I found the minigames a little frustrating; the card game sometimes doesn't register when the card is in the right position. I still don't know how I got past the delivery location. Truck-driving was fun until I lost and had to restart from the beginning. Thematically, I was a little confused by the minigames. Why do leaves rotate my credit card? Why are there bubbles in the way of my delivery truck? Don't mean to be too negative; props for building and shipping a game, and the "series of minigames" structure is working in a good way.
Was able to play and understand what was going on without trouble. Simple trader game; if you fail an obstacle, you lose some or all of your reward. Short and fun; extending the game would have meant having some kind of permanent upgrades, or some routes that were much more dangerous but more lucrative. I was a little disappointed that there was always exactly one obstacle during each trip; it would have been a good way to differentiate the routes (safe but low-profit routes). Still, a fun, functional, shipped game. Good work!
Delightful concept, great art! Ending screen for the first character made me lol. Not deeply interactive, as others have said. Skip option is my #1 ask. I can imagine a version of this where the player has more possible interventions.
Bite-sized but really nice for what it is. Thanks for sharing!
Not a ton of gameplay, but a solid small-scale experiment where interactions all branch based on whether you've opened the letter. Delivering letters between players is a nice take on the theme.
Clever! Really innovative design. There's room for a little confusion about how the controls work; do left/right rotate the player? Game breaks if I don't completely understand what the basic rules are. For a game with no graphics, audio needs to be great and it is.
Agree that the learning curve is pretty rough; my first two games I died pretty badly. I can imagine players bouncing off of this, which is a shame, because I really got into the game. I really like the mechanic of describing a quest but leaving it to the player to remember; I can figure out which town is Twin Pines Town and which is Lake Town or Mining Town just by looking at the map. In its current state, it seems like the best strategy is to replay it a lot, and probably the story suffers when I know what all of the outcomes are. But the mood is great, the pixel graphics do a lot without needing to be high-fidelity.
Turning is really loose; I don't know whether that's by design or not. It's certainly easier to crash than playing GTA 2! I wish I got multiple offers at once; it seems like it's usually correct to accept an offer because otherwise I'm burning time. I really liked how the bushes slowed but didn't stop the car. Also liked the arrow that changes color based on how far the target it.
Controls are deeply frustrating; jump starts only when I release the button, which is not what I expect after years of playing Mario games. Getting over that, this is an interesting game: what if a platformer had a new, difficult control scheme?
Worked on Windows for me (May 3rd). A complete game with combat, an upgrade system, multiple attacks, multiple enemy types, and an ending, props to the team for shipping. The guide-able spear attack in particular was interesting to play with. I wanted to see more development on this theme! I beat every enemy by simply spearing them to death and ignoring their attacks; didn't seem like I had a way to block or dodge the archer's arrows, for instance. Attacks costing health was an interesting mechanic, but the answer was still just to kill enemies as quickly as possible (so they couldn't deal more damage). Always only one enemy on-screen.
Really fantastic mechanic of trying to avoid spending durability on your cards!
This is incredibly compelling! Arcade-style game with multiple packages and delivery points. Should I detour to pick up another package? Drop off one of the ones I'm carrying now while I'm in the neighborhood? I wished for a minimap or stronger distance-tracking for the offscreen indicators, so I could plan my routes a little better.
I've played a number of similar "pick up a package and drop it off" games on LD; this game convinces me that all of those other games would have been more fun with multiple simultaneous packages and destinations.
Solid, slightly bare-bones trader sim. I think there are some interesting market dynamics under the hood (you can glut a market and drive the price up/down).
I've done a slightly-updated version where the happy/sad faces influence the narration: https://twotrees.itch.io/castaway-crates (Leaving the current build on Unity Play as my LD entry, since this update was done past the deadline.)
All text was generated with ChatGPT except the intro paragraph and the item names. The "problems" you encounter were also hand-seeded, but ChatGPT will describe them a little differently each time.
Agree that the responses were a little long. Getting ChatGPT to do basically what you want is easy; getting it to do exactly what you want is a lot harder. :/
Very solid, well-executed spot-the-difference. Hard to criticize, except to ask for more! If I *were* asking for more, I'd ask for more story or mood. Why are there so many dangerous objects in the mail? Hard not to compare to Papers, Please, since PP does story and mood so well. Thanks for sharing!
Upgrade loop is compelling--"just one more flight" syndrome.
I was able to start a game and drive a truck; I saw that one of the people on the map was marked but couldn't figure out how to "deliver" to them (shooting them, interacting, ramming with the truck didn't seem to help). I found the truck controls to feel very strange, maybe broken; the brakes were either very weak or didn't always register my inputs. Hard to test multiplayer games, unfortunately. :( Building a working mutiplayer game in a jam is a big deal!
Solid game. Only complaint is that it's too simple; game becomes a race to earn food faster than delivering uses it up.
Great first entry! Very smart to focus on the animations and humor; gameplay didn't need to be groundbreaking for this to be a fun play.
I also had some issues where my mouse clicks were being detected with an offset; resizing my browser window made the game resize itself and I was able to play fine.
Cute, fun, "cosy" puzzle game. I'm not sure I mastered it--I guess some plants just "like" to be next to some other plants?
Gameplay was fine; I also had a lot of trouble with click detection, unfortunately; couldn't get small suitcases to stack, couldn't drag things onto the floor even when there was room. Unpacked my first shelf, dragged it to the floor, then couldn't drag the second shelf at all.
For some reason, the white background kept flickering for me--made it very hard to play without getting a headache. :( Very nice game, though! I'm sad I couldn't play more. Is there guaranteed to be a solution for each level? Some of the infinite mode levels were real head-scratchers.
Thanks for the feedback!
* Yeah, it may be that having the camera rotate so your view is always over-the-shoulder would have been more correct/less confusing. * It's definitely a losing strategy to always press whichever move gives the most twinkles; my *intent* was that just like in real dancing, the right move is to sometimes do a simple box or rotation (or just hesitate) to buy time and set up your next step.
Short, simple, but amusing text-adventure game. I chuckled. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing this! I told a story about a village with strong religious ties to a central (but distant church), that struggled when an outcast joined the village as a productive member.
Overall: I had fun, thanks! Feedback: There are lots of events in the deck, but as the storyteller I felt sometimes like I was wrestling them into telling a cohesive or thematic story. I wished for something like: a cycle in the game where I reflect on how the village has changed; or stronger theming to the cards (they're *all* about how missionaries interact with the village); or 1-2 mechanic reflecting how prosperous the village is and how it views outsiders (for instance).
I'm spitballing here, so take as "this is the kind of thing I mean" rather than "this is actually a good idea." BUT...
Right now your ending is, "does the village survive?" If that's your theme, I'd try to focus the events around things that threaten or benefit the village. A bad harvest, a treasure found, etc. Maybe some events are always good or bad, some are neither, and some could go either way based on the die flip (an omen... is it good or bad?). Maybe you keep a running Prosperity score which is just the total of "good things" minus the "bad things", then at the end you roll a die, add the running total, and that tells you whether the village survives. So you get a story about a village that's struggling to survive, and in the end we find out whether it does.
OR, you make the theme "tradition versus change" or something. You keep similar events as your current game, but for each one you ask, "What changes in the village? What stays the same as it's always been?" Or instead, each time you flip a coin, it's to answer, "Does the village accept this change or not?" And then in the end, instead of a coin flip maybe it's just a reflection on "how is the village different? What has been lost, and what has been gained?"
OR, you focus tightly on a cast of characters--maybe one family, maybe you name ~5 families in the village. Then you can ask questions like, "A stranger comes. Which family do they stay with?" or "Someone leaves the village. Who is it?" This way, the events are tied together by the named characters--when an artist creates artwork, it's so-and-so whose father died in the last event.
Reminded me of Papers, Please in a good way; the game systems push me to overfill my boats and recreate the same tragedies that happen in real life.