Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → JavadocMD
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Republik Power & Light | compo | 193 | 3.61 | 3.05 | 3.65 | 4.14 | 3.58 | 3.34 | 3.56 | 71 | ||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Interstellar, Inc. | compo | 394 | 3.36 | 3.13 | 2.97 | 3.72 | 2.50 | 1.83 | 2.85 | 73 | ||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | It Came from Beneath the Surface of the Sea! | compo | 614 | 3.13 | 3.54 | 2.43 | 2.73 | 3.09 | 2.51 | 3.91 | 2.94 | 100 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Robogenesis | compo | 633 | 2.83 | 2.66 | 2.78 | 2.30 | 3.37 | 2.57 | 2.31 | 3.03 | 91 |
Very nicely executed and a great setup. One minor UI nitpick: I would typically expect the whole screen to flash only when I get hit, not when I successfully hit an enemy. This lead to some confusing moments where I wasn't entirely sure if I had run into something.
I would love to see a fuller version of this!
I had a good laugh. :) Nicely implemented, though!
The gravity acceleration is very nicely done.
Loved the quill-and-parchment aesthetic!
Neat idea for a puzzle platformer!
I'm not proud. I'm just a guy who likes puns and physics puzzles. Quite pea-leased to have tried this game.
Achievement Unlocked: Lure hundreds of unsuspecting people into your suffocation dungeon.
... I... I am an awful person.
Really cute! Loved the use of line drawings and voice acting to convey the story. Loved the retro art style in game. The puzzles were simple, but still enjoyable. Very well done!
You had me at Art Garfunkel.
Super cute and impressively innovative. The only thing I'd want is a more obvious expression of the LD theme. I absolutely love the way the notes are "scored". Delicious.
Some notes (haha) for improvement: 1) Intro the player to the mechanics. Only by chance did I realize I was supposed to jump over the page turns. 2) When jumping, the "hitbox" for collecting a note should also jump. It seemed that notes only registered at the same y-level regardless of jumping. Also the hitbox doesn't line up with the character portrait (especially the head) which is a little counter-intuitive.
Brilliant and beautiful! And deviously hilarious.
This is a great entry and a lot of fun! I feel like the controls are probably better suited to a gamepad: it was just a little clumsy on the keyboard, but with some practice I got a bit better. The grenade launcher kind of slows down the game, so I don't know if that was the best choice of weapon. Still, I'm going to come back to this one because it was a great deal of fun.
It was pretty satisfying to chew through this stuff in big loops. Very nice! The worm's "breathing" effect was a nice touch.
Nice concept! Loved the donut. The moment of uncertainty right before you do an arrest is pretty fun.
A great original concept with an excellent story. The art is beautifully done and the game references are a nice touch. The only thing I really want here is some spooky music to fit the theme.
Fantastic concept. Very meaningful subject matter and well executed game play. I love the "load out" screen as well. It's a simple game but it really adds to the feel of limited resources. Some basic audio would have made this a five-star entry for me.
Very well done! Liked the ocean wave effect. Graphics are very slick. A simple feature that would add more strategic depth (pun intended) would be having the workers slowly repair the turrets while they stood there. Then you can shuffle them around to keep turrets alive longer when all of your turret spots are full and there's nothing else to do.
Very fun and you accomplished a great deal in the time constraints. Well done! The art and character design is beautiful. As for the mystery itself, I was a bit surprised to have to think so far outside of the box on the last puzzle, but it was rewarding once I figured it out. I did have to brute force the second stage, I think mostly because there's a lot of conflicting information to deal with. But in the end it was very enjoyable. Going to go try the Post-Compo version now!
The 9-position dodging mechanism seem really innovative to me. Well done!
Very nice! I love these interactive 3D vehicle simulators. Eventually I found the R key. Wish I had known about that sooner, heh. I also got stuck outside my drill and couldn't get back in. Press F to restart. :(
I love this. Very well done. Original concept!
This is a fantastic entry. Lot of potential here for more, and its brevity is the only part I dislike. The art is beautiful, and the sandstorms are a great touch. Really cool!
Fun concept that just needs a little more development. Underwater and sky obstacles would have upped the challenge, and the rings need more purpose.
A game with a message: I love it. For nitpicks: the ship's art was a little small, which is a pity because the rest of the art is so nicely done. Audio would be a nice to have.
Wow. Disturbing and satisfying all at the same time.
Great concept and nicely executed given the time constraints. It was a bit difficult to judge how effective my choices were. Perhaps if I could see the utilization stats of the subways themselves, I could use that to improve my decision making.
A great twist on the classic restaurant formula. I like the hunting sequence idea! Execution could have been better as the gameplay was a bit confusing, but that's hard to fault with all this beautiful art.
Love this concept. The art and animation were great! Control scheme was a bit clumsy for me, but I don't have a gamepad, so that might explain it. Spreading the keyboard controls out so that I could play with two hands might helped.
239! :D This is simple but a lot of fun. Very nice. Makes my wrist hurt after a while!
Very tense and atmospheric. Fantastic minimalist visual style.
Classic metroidvania design. A very solid entry.
Heart-felt, simple, and beautiful. An excellent take on the theme and a nice little story.
I like a good choose your own adventure book, and this one was pretty good. :) I got a chuckle out of the silly endings. At least you took this in an original direction!
This is amazing! The art style and the weird/creepy atmosphere are really entrancing. I hope you'll continue to develop this.
The controls don't give you fine-grained enough control to avoid the fire on the last level, so it does feel a bit frustrating. Got through it in the end, though, and the ending was worth the effort. Well done! The graphics and animations were great. The writing and level progression are strong elements here.
There is a lot of meat here, both in terms of gameplay and story. Very nicely done. I love the setting and the characters have some well-written detail. Switching between sides is an awesome mechanic. I feel like there could be a full length game in this universe.
I found the difficulty to be very high, but it was absolutely lovely.
Absolutely love the art style. Knew I would have to check this out when I saw it in the feed. I feel like this setting is so rich that you could do a lot with it, and I hope you do. Awesome work!
Very innovative game play and the art style was very fitting.
I love the concept! Gaining powers, fighting the boss stage by stage, all fantastic. The little tutorial stage did a good job of introducing some really new game concepts. I would have hoped for a little higher jumping power, and maybe a wider field of vision would have helped defeating turrets that are very difficult to fight up close. The speed at which you re-acquire fragments after getting hit feels really slow, though. This means you can spend a lot more time recovering from getting hit than actually playing in certain portions. Perhaps as you attain higher levels, the speed at which you gain fragments could be increased and stay increased even if you get hit. I also would have liked to see more of a discovery/story behind what it really means to invade this world and start stripping it of its fragments, and who this is you're attacking, but it felt like maybe you were leading in that direction and just didn't have the time to pull it off. In any case, this was really fun and I'd love to see a full version.
This was a very solid entry. The art is all very fitting. The spiders gave me the creeps. Gameplay was challenging but not impossible. Required some non-linear thought to complete. Good amount of humor: the messages kept me engaged with the story.
Possible ideas for improvement: R to reload from the last checkpoint. Also the first checkpoint where you learn to use book ladders sends you back before you read the text, which is a little annoying since you can't just skip the text outright. None of the others I ran into seemed to have that problem though. You could have made another puzzle to solve as you antigrav'd out. :)
Wow this is... so amazing. Derpy and hilarious!
Good use of lighting effects.
This is a fantastic entry. Clever concept with a really adorable execution. I feel like this has a lot of room for further development! Muy bien!
Brilliant concept and a delight to play. The graphics are understated but perfectly beautiful in their simplicity.
Very nice overall. Some good strategy involved in dealing with the creatures. Needs a controls reference.
A very interesting mix of funny and sad. The visuals really add a lot of flare.
Nice combo of platforming and stealthiness. Music works really well to set mood. The whispering was creepy as hell.
Haha, tough, but fun. Very nice graphics. Adding a glow effect to the lava might help to make it "feel" hot.
A fun and functional roguelike. Good work!
For the record, it is possible to down the helicopters. :) Their hitbox is a tiny bit smaller than their on-screen rendering and your hitbox is a square around where the punch animation happens. It is a difficult shot, but intentionally so.
Loved the character design in this.
I really love the ability to bounce shots off walls, but the AI needs to do a bit more than sit there and take it for that to work. Still, I thought it was well put together given the time limits. The art and the back story worked really well. Nicely done!
Simple but beautiful. All the elements combine to form a peaceful but challenging experience. Well done!
There is some nice puzzle design here. Well done!
This is an excellent game. Dark, but in a real and caring way. Every element of presentation is spot-on and thought-out, from the squiggly graphics to the simple music to lined paper background. Bravo.
This was a cute and fun little game. The art is lovely, the sounds work. My wrist got a bit tired from having to press the w key so rapidly, so it would be worth considering if that's really what you're going for. I really liked the way you differentiated the colors of the water as you went deeper. This helped to keep you oriented without any kind of unnatural UI.
A very original game! The character in the corner that shouts at you lends this a lot of personality.
I can appreciate what you said you were trying to do here -- to ridicule the "hyper-masculine" violent nature of video games -- but I don't think you pulled it off here. When satirizing it is important not to become the thing you're ridiculing.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply and I enjoyed reading the post-mortem. Understanding your intentions in your own words is helpful, and I can identify with your aim. I still question as to how successfully the piece itself carries your message. Perhaps it has something to do with the continuing absence of real choice presented. Killing or wounding makes little difference. There's nothing I can do to "fail". At no point am I able to question if I want to proceed. (I don't consider closing the game a real or interesting choice, personally, though I'm sure there are well-reasoned people who disagree.)
Making the player powerless to control the unfolding story, I have difficulty laying the blame for the carnage on anyone but the game designer. I don't personally feel culpable because I didn't know what I was getting into. While I certainly think the FPS industry has its share of blame in the culture of violence-worship, the players definitely know what they're getting and clamor for more. Ultimately if I felt complicit with you in how the story unfolds, I would feel more affected by the horror.
In any case this may be nothing more than "one man's opinion", but I've tried to articulate it as best I could. I certainly laud any attempt to tackle a serious issue in a creative way.
No need to explain: I know all about running low on time! :)
In any case I hope you do expand on this idea because it is really compelling. Feel free to ping me on Twitter (@JavadocMD) when you do; I'd love to check it out.
Loved the concept! An entire school of sharks at my command? Awesome.
Solid game! Loved the intro sequence and the art was great.
Very clever and well executed. I like the border at the edge of the "map". Very clean way to deal with that!
A fascinating concept and well executed. A game like this is hard to pull off under a time constraint, but I think you captured the soul of the idea very well.
The hand drawn art is fantastic. The song at the end is a great touch. :)
A solid entry with some good artwork. I think it's tricky tying the difficulty of the game to screen brightness. I got the feeling that if I could crank the brightness of my screen any higher I'd do a lot better, especially dodging rocks. But darkness is kind of your theme, so I'm not sure of a good way around it. Perhaps having a very sudden fall-off in brightness at the edge rather than a more linear fall-off. Or perhaps putting a "calibration" screen in there to have some standard for the brightness setting you're supposed to play at. Anyway, just some thoughts for how to improve things, but overall well done!
A fun and kooky concept, I liked it. :) The "bullet time" feels a bit laggy, though, so I'd work on smoothing that out.
Brilliant work. The similarities to Papers, Please are obvious, but there's definitely room in this space and this was well conceived.
Very nicely put together and very grim, but with an evocative message.
Very tense and a very innovative concept. I love the graphic design: all the elements make sense together. And the use of directional audio is very cool. The difficulty of actually playing the game, though, comes from knowing how close you are to an obstacle but not which direction. Perhaps different sound cues could be combined for different directions.
I knew I was going to love this just reading the description. Hilarious concept. Gameplay is pretty difficult because it can be hard to get across the stage for your next move. Also I had to make a control cheat sheet to remember which move was which color. But it doesn't make me love it less. Dying is half the fun!
This game has a surprising amount of strategic depth for something so simple! The shield and jetpack are great mechanics to play with and I liked the player's laser gun which sort of rejects the standard. Very nicely done!
Bahaha, excellent writing and a very twisty narrative. Graphics and animation were all spot on. Very enjoyable.
I thought this was a very clever take on the theme. Well done!
Had a lot of fun with this even though there wasn't much strategy (as others noted). The writing was fantastic and really made you want to keep clicking. Hilarious stuff. The art was beautiful as well.
Hit two bugs: one where I clicked a tile, found an enemy, but clicking the tile again wouldn't attack. Clicking anything else told me I was a coward. That hurts, man. I may have been clicking too rapidly when I encountered this one: maybe before the previous tile had fully resolved?
I also played one game where the first floor had no stairs!
I love this idea, but the controls were very difficult and frustrating. Once you picked up an item it was a bit dodgy trying to put it where it belonged. Still, very cute idea and the art is great.
Brilliant concept and well executed. Once the blackout phase starts, it's not very long before there's nothing you can do. It would feel a little less fatal if it creeped in more slowly, but that could just be personal preference.
Very impressive for the amount of time available! It was a bit chaotic for a number of reasons. For one, the aiming felt sloppy. So I was never quite sure if I was going to hit what I was aiming at. Perhaps this was a lag issue. Visually very cluttered due to the size of elements on the screen and a lot of noisy color information. This made it difficult to keep track of what was going on. Frequently I would just "spray and pray". When placing turrets, the action needs to slow down or pause. You never get breaks in which to make strategic decisions like that, so placing a turret often means that you'll need to refill your health right after. I did manage to beat the game, but it felt like that had little to do with skill and mostly to do with leveling up as quickly as possible so that my random shooting would be remotely effective. I'm only writing a long critique because this game is so well put together. A very strong effort that could be fantastic with some careful rework.
Not much to it but the grind, but it's still a cool idea and well executed for what it is.
10550 points! This was a lot of fun. Also bonus for making a monster game like me. :D
Powerful. The only thing I want for here is more complex ways to interact. There is something nice about the minimalism of the threat and the options given to you to avoid the threat, but additional options and variation would have been even more immersive and emotionally gripping. This is a very small nitpick, though.
I liked it! This was a pretty innovative little puzzler with a nice thematic element. You just don't see a lot of metal-themed games. :)
Cool setting and art. I feel like there's a neat concept here that I'm not really getting. The gameplay felt unexplained to me so I didn't really know what was going on. With some development I feel like this could be really neat, though.
There was something oddly very satisfying about this game. Well done! I like the soothing nature of the sound effects, good choice there. I would have kept trying for a higher score, but I think the star background was making me a little motion sick. Could just be because I need sleep.
So challenging, but so worth it! There's some really nice level design here. I especially liked the non-circular and non-symmetrical levels. I usually am not a big fan of challenging platformers, but the ending made the frustration worthwhile.
My only nitpick is that the little path of triangles you leave behind you doesn't always space evenly, so there are little gaps in the particles you leave behind. Super minor but distracting to my eye.
This is a pretty good starting point: as you mentioned you would continue development. The game definitely needs some more variety: layouts, monsters, abilities, etc. Best of luck!
This is a very original way to express a good message. Overall I liked the approach to the gameplay, but I feel like it could have been stronger if the visual feedback from your interaction was more apparent. I wasn't sure if I was clicking the right things, or which of the things I had already clicked. Even so, very impressed with this entry.
Awesome idea. :)
I laughed so hard at the score screen. Very well designed all around; I can do nothing but echo the positive comments from above.
That moment you realize that *maybe* you aren't protecting these planets... D:
This is a great unique concept! Well done!
The graphics and audio are beautiful, but it does seem like you just re-implemented Deus Ex's hacking game. To me it seems like there's little strategy involved besides hacking directly to your target as quickly as possible. And that's just a matter of how well you can target your clicks.
Hi Harsay! Just a heads up: I had some trouble running the game due to missing DLLs. In case anyone else runs into the same, I was able to solve the problem by installing DirectX...
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35
And also this Visual C++ Redistributable (the x86 version).
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40784
Does UE4 let you do a build that includes these automatically?
I like the simplistic graphical style in general, but it is maybe a bit too simplistic as-is. It's really difficult to understand why some enemies die and others don't since there's little feedback about shots fired or enemy health. Still, nicely done for the time given.
Played all the levels but couldn't for the life of me figure out 13! Still, love the puzzles. Very fun!
Well done! I'm really glad to see these dual-world puzzle games and this one is pretty good. Easy, as you mentioned, but still enjoyable.
I liked the humorous texts sprinkled throughout. This was a fun variation on the classic lunar lander game!
I have the following suggestions for refinement. It would be helpful to get a chance to look at the gravity setting before you start falling. Maybe just a one second pause to get ready. For keyboard shortcuts, I suggest something more like QWER for engine power and ASDF for burn time, so that one hand can comfortably select both.
Also, when the computer starts forgetting your settings, there should be a sound effect that indicates when this happens. Otherwise I don't know until I hit Burn next, which might be fatal. It does add an element of challenge, which I'm sure is what you were going for, but in its current state it feels a little unfair.
Sound effects overall could use some volume balancing.
Also at some point the game bugged out and kept telling me I had just successfully landed on Espere, despite having actually landed on a different planet, so I'm afraid I couldn't complete the game. :(
Very fun and unique concept! The setup is brilliant and I love the character design.
The hitboxes felt a little unforgiving which is a pain when you have to quickly switch poses. I also wasn't sure if the game sets you up for "impossible to not get hit" situations, or if I was just bad at the game. (If I spent more time with the game, I'm sure I could figure that out on my own, but anyway...) :)
Really cute. Art style and overall humor went really well together. The little references -- "Bort" -- very funny.
Liked the challenge escalation, although in terms of balance it might have been good to increase the bad-match penalty. Once I had built up some Rep, I could pretty much just randomly match people together for a while and just about break even.
Hilarious, I love it! The triangle art style is pretty slick, too.
This is a game with a solid sense of style. I really like the art: the robot design was excellent. A lot of great humor! "Seal the Deal" is priceless.
A very strong entry with beautifully minimalist graphics that perfectly fit the game. And the amount of behind-the-scenes sophistication that must exist to make a multiplayer experience possible pushes this from "cool" to "excellent". The only thing I could possibly hope for is sound effects for the various actions.
Oh, and more levels! ;)
Interesting experiment in connected storytelling. I liked it!
Beautiful! I especially liked the text effects and the slow reveal of the world to help establish mood.
Unfortunately little substance, but such is Ludum Dare. I feel like dubstep was an odd choice given -- as I interpreted it -- the theme of separation from a loved one in death.
Not a bad little game given the time constraints. Love the art style and the character design of the aliens!
I super-confused myself the first couple times I tried to play this though. If you get an assignment, and then click on several wrong planets in a row, you wind up getting multiple new assignments. So as someone is trying to figure out the game, suddenly your map is scrolling around randomly giving you new assignments that you can't possibly click on fast enough. It gets really out of hand! Seems like the game needs to take measures to ensure you only have one assignment at a time.
I also would have liked some alternative scrolling controls. Mouse-edge scrolling is really hard to use when you're playing a non-full-screen game, so enabling some WASD and/or arrow keys would have been nice.
This is a great start for a very cute game!
@mrexcessive: Thanks for the note! Unfortunately I wasn't able to replicate the crash on my W8.1 Chrome. Let me know if you have any pointers on getting it straightened out.
---- DEVELOPER NOTE ----
If you played the game before this comment, you probably played the old, buggy version. You're welcome to try the new, less buggy version! :)
@jukimv1986: I assure you it is possible to beat it! :) There is at least one definite improvement on the AI's path. A bit of unpredictability would have been nice, though.
Definitely a cool little space fighter game. Could use better feedback - when were you hit? When did you hit the enemy? How close are you to blowing up? Where are the remaining enemies?
Funny concept, but I agree with burgerdare: there needed to be some hints after a while.
Interesting puzzle scenarios. Well crafted!
Nicely done! You had a solid concept and brought it to life. The story you're telling is simple, but successful. Work on refining controls and movement to avoid the choppy feeling.
Really unique and lovely concept. Beautiful art and music make for a relaxing experience. However the control scheme definitely does not! The post-compo version resolves some of the control issues, but not all of them. No matter what, triple-clicking a moving target is just hard. And it doesn't take very many setbacks to completely screw you. Maybe if you used keyboard keys to cycle through the parts and then clicked to place it I would feel more in control without removing all of the challenge?
A really cool experience! Nicely done.
I like the art style, and the fact that you included an endless mode. :)
This is a very nice entry! Great art, nice sound effects, fun action. Nicely done. I would have felt a little more in control if the "tipping point" between planets was a little more forgiving, but that's probably just a personal preference sort of thing.
Really cool concept; well done! I could definitely see this being worked into a full game.
I noticed that attacks didn't seem to happen at the same time. Enemy cards seemed to deal damage first, which makes powerful enemy units almost impossible to stop. One got to my second row with 8 attack and 2 life, and no matter how many units I played against him, they'd always die right away. This leads to a feeling of imbalance which I don't know if you were aiming for or not.
Also a longer battlefield might give more opportunity for strategy (like deploying leaders and archers). Anyway, still really fun. Good job!
I liked the concept once I figured it out. The puzzle aspect could use a little bit of meat... but I don't know what. Maybe some indication of which numbers affect which besides trying to simply remember it all. A graphical representation of the body that you're teleporting would also go a long way of course. Still, certainly innovative!
Oh no! I got about halfway through the missions and then got stuck in the Team screen. :( Still, great fun! I was thinking that the missions were too easy: stand in the line of approach and shoot. But then the missions started getting more difficult with the enemy cats breaking up and approaching from different angles. So well done steadily increasing the difficulty curve! Could use a bit more depth, but hey it's a 48 hour game, so well done. :)
Cool idea with a really fun presentation. I really like the way the four planets just constantly and calmly revolve while the star field slowly scrolls by in the background. This could be a very relaxing game to play. :) Awesome shot; I'm sure the lessons you learned here will lead to more sophisticated gameplay in future. Looking forward to it.
Neat story! Just as a nitpick, I'd suggest better differentiating the things you've said and the things you can click on. Different colors maybe.
Haha, so much excellent humor in this one. Well written!
Neat concept! I like the voxel construction of the game world, and the shader (?) on the "astral" cam is pretty neat. Movement is awfully floaty, so if you continue to work on this I'd suggest refining that... unless that's what you're going for of course!
GG :)
Very cool concept! I'd love to see a more fleshed-out version of the ideas here.
Has a lot of promise. Once you get the concept and manage to figure out the control quirks, it's not so bad really. I think some description of the game before starting would go a long way towards improving people's perception. I still have no idea what to do with the marbles in the starting room. :)
Really cool art design here! It does get a bit repetitive of course, but it's a very strong entry for the time limit. Well done!
I am so in love with this idea: the dynamic story-telling aspect is just perfect. Simple but so fun. And the voice-over really brought a lot of life to what would otherwise have been a too-text-heavy game. Excellent writing.
I wish there were more ways to reveal cards, since fairly often I found myself without any real choices to make.
Definitely a fascinating concept. Without something to gain by allowing interaction, the easiest way to maintain diversity is to keep everyone separate. This, of course, could be intentional, to make a point -- but in any case this makes this less a game and more an instructional simulation. Still, much praise for the attempt!
Really cool concept and I love the elegant simplicity of the design. At first I would have agreed with Fanatrick, but the later levels have more interaction, so I was pleased by that. Maybe some simpler interaction in some earlier levels would improve the pacing.
I want to play this game because it's clear there's some very interesting mechanics to play with. But without some kind of tutorial or explanation I just have no idea what I'm even trying to do. Please let me know if you do put out some explanation so I can re-play. (@JavadocMD or on my game's page.) Thanks!
Great potential here; keep working on it!
Really well-polished game from a presentation perspective. My biggest problem was being colorblind made it really difficult to distinguish between some of the city colors. Adding in some additional distinguishing characteristics would help. Nicely done!
Oh man this is awesome. Graphics are phenomenal, great audio ("PUNCHTASTIC!" lol!), great deal of humor in the animations and the concept overall. Just so brilliant.
Gorgeous and funny! I felt like the last puzzle was a bit cheap. Maybe I missed a clue but I solved it only by randomly clicking on things. Perhaps this was just due to the time crunch, which is understandable. Great concept and well executed.
Very impressive in art style, perspective, and concept. Unfortunately I keep getting disconnected at 1 health. I can't even tell if that's a bug or not. Oh well. Pretty neat anyway.
Very cute concept and well executed! I like that you designed this without death -- the bears don't die they just get chased off the screen, and the grandmother just get chased back to the start -- that really helped to keep this light and adorable.
This is a great take on a rhythm game that could be developed into something really addictive. Nicely done! There's a lot of work to do on the graphical side, but the music tracks you created were really nice. Simply re-playing the track until you "beat" it was a really good design choice which worked to keep me engaged.
It's really tough to keep the buttons straight in my mind when I get around to the other side of the record. It breaks the "left-to-right" spatial association. If the record was spinning and my avatar stayed in place, that would be much easier. I'd prefer if the challenge came from the actual music, not just me fumbling the buttons.
It did however get maybe a bit *too* challenging when the track gets so small that the dots blend together and I'm not sure which lane I need to be in at which time.
Seriously though, very fun and I'd love to see a polished version of this!
Excellent use of the theme. I love the characters you build in between the game play. And I love that they talk while you're playing as well. The gameplay is simple and the game is not without its rough edges, but even so very nicely done. The cute story is worth it!
Cute graphics! 'A' wasn't a great choice as a restart button since it's also a movement key, and I would have liked a quit button.
Brilliant concept and well executed! (Har har.) Please take the length of my feedback as proof of how much I enjoyed it. :)
I love this style of management game a la "Yes, Your Grace" and you've adapted it very well to the communist dictatorship setting. Gorgeous (and at times gory!) art; perfect music and sound. I definitely get the feel of the complex simulation happening underneath my imperfect ability to control it all, and there are some interesting choices to make as the game goes on.
The intro is a bit difficult to follow, perhaps in part due to the "back and forth" dialog between the two characters. A little of that is fun, too much is hard to keep track of.
Interactions with other countries feels unfinished due to some bugs and lack of meaningful feedback. The offers you get from them vary from wildly unfair to wildly in your favor with no rhyme or reason, and I even had a nation offer me negative amounts. For that matter, the game probably shouldn't let me go into the negatives in my own stock, or should find some way to penalize me for doing so. (i.e., run out of meat -> increase worker unrest)
Attacking needs more polish. How can I know how many military units to send? Why do I lose all of those units even if I win? Should I really lose all the units if I lose? Win or lose, how many resources were won/lost? Why can't I conquer any of those nations? Why am I not on the map? Do I need a standing army? If earning resources is just to build an army to attack and gain resources, why do resources matter? I suspect that there was much more planned here that was cut for time restrictions.
I would like to see some kind of score/summary screen at the end of the game. How well did I do? How many people sent to the gulag, etc.
Finally a user interaction detail: a common feature of these types of games is that not all of the info is visible all the time, purposefully, and that info is spread out across different locations to add an element of memory and immersive tedium. However, in such systems there's a very fine line to walk when it comes to how much delay there is between screens -- "immersive" can quickly turn to "frustrating" when it's the game slowing me down, not my reaction time. For example, when the "Worker Bird" falls asleep, it takes a very long time to click him, watch his wake up animation, click him again, watch his "give the report" animation, and finally I get to view the info I want. Notice that "Papers, Please" has only very small time delays when it comes to referencing information: the limiting factor is screen space and how quickly you can operate your mouse. Only certain *actions* have significant delays. I believe this design point is key to keeping the player engaged.
Really creative idea, beautiful to look at, full of humor! But SUPER difficult, owing in part to the sticky jump command and in part to a seemingly endless boss fight. I wanted to see the end but I fear I won't get there. A health bar on the boss would be lovely. As would "check-points" for weenies like me. :)
Haha, best game eva! I thought it was a good interpretation of the theme, so way to go there. Voice acting and a lot of humor to boot. Even if the gameplay wasn't that involved, there was definitely some challenge there and the story elements kept me going. Nicely done!
Hilariously fun! Absolutely gorgeous. Very nice entry.
They said our lives were meaningless. That there was no victory. Spinning into infinity, endlessly incepting, we jumped. For what purpose? We got nowhere.
The community of ourselves formed and for a while we were content merely to embrace and huddle to fend off the chill of the RGB winter. But as fathers and daughters and mothers and sons consumed one another in the savage feast of time, forced to witness the decay of our own future-past, tortured by the dreams of what was yet to come again, our heart cried out: gods, won't you save us?
And no answer came.
Until at once a swelling thought: laughing through tears and longing to face the fear that we had never faced, as one we turned to the west. The ones who began this journey knew they would never see its end, so they ached in their soul a new burning ache that filled their emptiness, a new-born galaxy in a vast universe.
And still they marched west, pressing their faces to the wall and leaping, while others leapt atop them. So it was for an eternity. Generations born to be fed to the furnaces of the cause. Jumping to the highest point yet and then falling back, but ever taller they grew.
The First to be Free was not born in triumph because celebration was the product of certainty. But the First to be Free was born, granted the same iron birthright as so many before. And there it was. A jump barely touched the top of the Ledge. A second jump not even close. A third, likewise failed. The First wept silently that the barrier that united the community might be breached. To be the Hero and the Exile. To be the Hope and the realization of hope, that must surely tarnish in the harsh air of reality. One more jump and it was done. Atop the Ledge, the First looked down into infinite space. Hesitated. And in that hesitation realized the Truth. Though not enslaved to Space, Those Who Would be Free were still enslaved to Time. The First jumped -- and fell forever.
Hey I know that hex tile texture. :D Cute idea and pretty entertaining for its simplicity.
Gorgeous and hilarious! With a bit of refinement and further development of the mechanics I could spend a lot of time playing this game.
Neat idea with some really nice art. I would have liked if the UI were done in the same style as the rest of the game. Still, nicely done!
Pretty fun! The concept of fighting "all bosses" is solid and the bosses you designed were all unique enough to keep me interested. I'm super glad death didn't reset you to the beginning, but let you just face that boss again.
On the critical side: I was a bit frustrated with the sticky movement controls. If you run(hold)-jump-attack, you keep running when you hit the ground. If you just run(hold)-attack, your movement stops.
You can't duck without letting go of the run key first. Also I think being able to "knee slide" even just a little would have helped me feel more in control. Otherwise you start to feel like you can't make any progress if you have to keep ducking arrows and axes.
I'm also not convinced that the "jump back" move was better than just being able to turn around and run in that direction. Perhaps letting me double-tap-away to perform the jump would have made me happier.
Still fun and challenging given the time limit! I can certainly sympathize with art being a giant time-suck. Nicely done!
I love the idea. The color changes were really neat. What would have really sold me on this game -- apart from more levels -- is if the jumps were designed to be executed on the beat. If it was designed that way, I didn't feel it. Otherwise this could make a really cool relaxing get-in-the-flow runner. Hope you continue to work on it!
Adorable! You played the theme "straight", but it so solidly influences the gameplay that I had to give that a bonus star. The limited space is used to its full, tension-creating potential!
My only note is that, on my first replay, I sat around longer than I'm willing to admit waiting for Chompy to appear before I realized I needed to go through a door. D'oh!
And for the record: 16 pieces.
An old concept, but doing it in different graphical treatments was a neat way to tie in the theme! I probably would have dialed back the force of the side thrusters a little, but it did add a lot of challenge. Good work!
The game is very simplistic, of course, but it's executed well. The art style was remarkably effective and there are a lot of nice touches like the office worker's expressions. Well done!
Beautiful artwork!
Nicely done. I like your ASCII art style and color choices. I would like it a bit more if the amount of key presses to get things done were decreased by a factor of 10 or so. Also a usability nitpick: the intro does mention the 'm' key, but by the time I get to the point where I need that key, I've forgotten all about it. Nothing in my mind connects "user menu" with "eat food". If the UI reminded me that the 'm' key did something, that would have been less confusing for me.
Funny use of the theme. Very simple, but some neat ideas. The "blast a bunch of stuff" attack was fun and certainly not something I'd seen in other games, so good work there. A few bugs (at least I think they're bugs) make it difficult to play: all revolving around previously neutralized enemies becoming suddenly un-neutralized. This especially happened when two enemies spawn fairly close. Fighting the second one and having to back up often meant I would run into the first one which was somehow active again.
I really like the story you came up with the back up the game. And your character design is adorable. I would echo the sentiment that the walljump control is really counter-intuitive. I think a more suitable choice would have been to use the jump key to execute the wall jump, rather than having to press the opposite direction. Otherwise executing multiple wall jumps to scale a vertical wall becomes extremely frustrating: there is little forgiveness if you press the opposite direction a little too long. In any case, a nice little platformer.
Very enjoyable! Though maybe a little rough. For me the difficulty lies in feedback: it's really difficult to know when I'm hit, when I hit something else, what I hit, and so on. The "plus" enemies were especially difficult in this regard and I never quite figured out if I could hit them on the side and I was simply one square too far away or if I had to hit them in the middle. So mostly it meant I flailed around a lot shooting and trying not to get hit. Ultimately pretty neat though! I do like the ASCII graphics; perhaps all it needs is a little bit of modern touch.
Beautiful art, simple gameplay, nicely done! I am impressed by the multiplayer capability, even if I'm a bit late to see it in action.
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@ZNCatlaw: atmospheric radioaktivity dissipates very slowly with time. Rumors of birth defekts are Western Propaganda Lies.
(Very glad folks are enjoying it! Thanks for playing! This is definitely intended to be a "you're going to die of _something_, how long can you hold out/what lengths will you go to to survive" game. Definitely considering continuing development along similar lines as you mentioned.)
This is a solid game: I like that there's a progression of enemies, wave arrangements, power ups, and so on. This kept the game fun for longer. Well done! I'd like to see a bit more gameplay innovation and a stronger application of the theme.
Gorgeous as usual! This was a really fun throwback and the Pacman combination added a bit of extra spice. I love the control decision that you made. Having the movement tend towards the direction you were pressing (as opposed to a "left key means turn left" scheme) felt really good and was probably essential to making this work on a micro scale. Grinding along walls added challenge without too much frustration and some really nice feedback. A very intuitive mechanic. I felt like the cops were a little too quick for me to work out much depth of strategy -- you mostly just needed to drive faster since there weren't a lot of clever tricks to pull. Still, great fun!
Nice puzzles! This was a really nice way to do the "no explanation" approach. I love the art style and the Santa character. Very smart.
Good story, some really nice art, humor, voice-over is always a nice touch. And the gameplay concept is promising. My biggest criticism is that the interaction feels really floaty. I can't easily tell where the platform edges are, and there's no feedback when I "pick up" one of the souls (except when I move far enough away that it starts to move). This leads to some really frustrating failures.
It also would have been nice to ease the player into the gameplay a bit more. I did figure it out, of course, but not without a strong "wait, what am I doing?" moment.
Overall this game has a lot of spirit -- haha -- nice work!
There's some lovely art here and a solid platformer design. The opening section is pretty painful, but if you can make it past that it's pretty fun.
There's some inventive gameplay here, nicely done! I feel like there's lots of room to expand on that concept: where tile placement isn't just about opening areas for the player to walk, but about getting the environment to interact with itself: for example, one tile could contain something that shoots fire and you could move that in front of a stand of hedges to burn them down. That sort of thing. Your pixel art has that old Zelda feel, but be careful not to be too constrained by your inspiration. :)
Simply incredible! The one thing that really burned me was there there seem to be far more nest spots than sticks, so if you were a little too liberal with building nests you screwed yourself for the later areas when the difficulty level spikes. By that time I had so much invested in the playthrough that it wasn't satisfying to start over again. I'm just not sure what the "build your own checkpoint" adds if you're given the chance to build them at the "wrong" spot.
This is exactly the kind of gritty game I love to see. Absolutely brilliant.
Definitely a fun little toy box! The physics are pretty fun, and who doesn't love snowmen? One thing I noticed is that the hats appear to respond to physics impulses backwards when they're upside-down. i.e., pull up on the right side and the hat spins clockwise. Maybe I'm missing something though.
Overall a pretty neat concept. It is a little tedious and carpal-tunnel inducing. Maybe you can work on the combat and gathering mechanics to make it more involved than "click to win". Still, I like the vibe to it and it definitely taps into the addictive, incremental progress psychology that many successful RPGs are built on.
Great entry! Very simple but the gameplay feels good. The fact that the snowmen could throw diagonally was a great touch and added more challenge than I expected. My only nitpick is that I tend to dislike games that let you fire forever as fast as you can press a button. I'd rather have some kind of cooldown that I have to contend with to make my choice to fire meaningful. Otherwise there's no reason to stop firing, so why have a control at all?
Neat game! The ball definitely fell through the paddle a few times, so there are a few physics bugs it seems.
Cute concept and well executed! There's a lot that's unexplained but you do get the hang of it after the first try, so that's not a huge impediment. I loved the little things the crew runs around saying. :)
Perhaps some audio clues would have helped with the gameplay -- a warning when a new system breaks or is corrupted, for instance. Otherwise you're just kind of randomly scanning the whole ship looking for problems and you miss out on some of the ambience.
I would like more strategic depth to the game -- maybe patterns in the system damage/infection, or systems get worse the longer you leave them broken. If any of those sorts of mechanics are present I wasn't able to notice them in the chaos.
Trippy, and quite original! Nicely done. Seems like there's a lot of room to expand this into something deeper. The random storytelling concept is really neat.
Heh, short and sweet. :) I do really like the atmosphere you accomplished. Next time bigger and better; you can do it!
This was a very interesting entry, but unfortunately has some flaws that make it difficult to play.
In terms of balance, the fairies are kind of overpowered. It would be nice if I was given some time to figure things out before one arrived, and if the pace of them arriving was a little slower. Second: I really don't see any reason to try to fight them -- the worst thing that happens is they eventually explode and I lose a customer, but the only way to fight them is to make something explode so I lose a customer. Maybe if I could just swat them that would be an acceptable mechanic.
There are some bugs and issues with lack of feedback. Grabbing things felt finicky, possibly due to the small size of the reagents. I ran into an issue where customers sometimes didn't take the bottle. I think I was setting the bottle directly on the counter instead of "dropping" it on the counter, and make that's the difference. When I was able to get a customer to take a bottle, I noticed the "score" screen in the back, but that really should be visible all the time. How much gold am I making/did I make?
Finally: this game is almost impossible for the color blind. The colors you've used for the reagents are too similar and the boxes of color too small for me to tell between them a lot of the time. I know time is short, but this feels like the perfect opportunity to use shape in addition to color (better-contrasting colors) to differentiate the reagents.
Leaving detailed feedback because I really do think this is a neat concept. Best of luck!
This is a really cute setup. :) I dig the console adventure game feel and there were some funny objects to find. Short and sweet, but nicely done!
I love the throwback to old school gaming. Then you combined that with a smart narrative, making this pretty golden.
Pretty neat game, even given the repetitive mechanics. I thought losing a sheriff leading to temporary chaos was a clever gameplay choice. The progression of the town behind you as population shifted was also clever. I felt like I wanted to know what the actual distribution was in numerical terms, but I dunno, maybe that would have spoiled the effect.
Graphically: absolutely gorgeous. Nicely done!
Really fun take on the theme! The gameplay is flawed, but still enjoyable. Ironically the slow pace of movement made this feel less like the kind of game you'd find on a Gameboy.
I really like the tie-in with One Take. Smart and funny writing as well. Nicely done!
Great concept! I can definitely see this turning into something really fun.