Babylon Prime Delivery by DustyRedBird 2023-05-10T00:35:37Z ♥ 0
Really fantastic mechanic of trying to avoid spending durability on your cards!
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 | 3.33 | 2.55 | 2.70 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Castaway Crates | jam | 1156 | 2.78 | 2.46 | 3.48 | 3.21 | 2.98 | 2.46 |
James Laird leaves an average of 15.5 feedback comments each event.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Bite-sized but really nice for what it is. Thanks for sharing!
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!
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.
Solid game. Only complaint is that it's too simple; game becomes a race to earn food faster than delivering uses it up.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Upgrade loop is compelling--"just one more flight" syndrome.
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.
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.
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).
What a great game! Solid small-scale point-and-click. Fully voiced, lots of art.
LD54 — Limited Space (6)
Prison escape by Game addict 2023-10-18T14:51:31Z ♥ 0
Short, simple, but amusing text-adventure game. I chuckled. Thanks for sharing!
Space, Ltd. by Madbarron 2023-10-15T16:04:24Z ♥ 1
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.
Urban Jungle by Shess 2023-10-15T15:51:16Z ♥ 2
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?
Space Inserters by Jeff Kerman 2023-10-13T19:50:32Z ♥ 1
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.
The Crater Village Game by September-XYZX 2023-10-13T17:40:19Z ♥ 1
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).
Mediterranean Smuggling by TTKayttis 2023-10-04T16:44:44Z ♥ 2
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.