Pizza Avventura by Chris_Grassi 2017-05-02T20:59:42Z
Couldn't really figure out how this one worked. It looks pretty well done, but more thorough instructions might be useful?
I lost 11.50 and made 27 cents :P
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Jeremy Ryan
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Overall | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | My Keyboard is Full of Ants! | compo | 4.62 | |
| 🥇 | 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Hope Falters | compo | 4.61 | |
| 🥈 | 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Fallowtide | compo | 4.45 | |
| 🥈 | 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Eleventh Hour | compo | 4.41 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | My Keyboard is Full of Ants! | compo | Fun | 4.55 | |
| 🥈 | 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | My Keyboard is Full of Ants! | compo | Humor | 4.53 | |
| 🥈 | 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | My Keyboard is Full of Ants! | compo | Theme | 4.55 | |
| 🥉 | 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Tiny Summons | compo | Graphics | 4.60 | |
| 🥉 | 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Tiny Summons | compo | Innovation | 4.59 | |
| 🥇 | 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Hope Falters | compo | Audio | 4.39 | |
| 🥇 | 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Hope Falters | compo | Mood | 4.64 | |
| 🥉 | 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Hope Falters | compo | Innovation | 4.70 | |
| 🥇 | 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Holding Out | compo | Humor | 4.66 | |
| 🥇 | 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Fallowtide | compo | Graphics | 4.66 | |
| 🥈 | 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Eleventh Hour | compo | Fun | 4.38 | |
| 🥈 | 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Fade | compo | Audio | 4.63 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Fillmore's Island | compo | 6 | 4.30 | 4.01 | 3.98 | 4.46 | 4.58 | 4.11 | 3.16 | 3.99 | |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | Hop, Skip, Jump | compo | 12 | 4.07 | 4.09 | 4.32 | 3.35 | 3.85 | 3.91 | 3.61 | ||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Pack | compo | 12 | 4.15 | 3.91 | 3.46 | 3.37 | 4.38 | 4.04 | 3.65 | 4.09 | |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | My Keyboard is Full of Ants! | compo | 1 | 4.62 | 4.55 | 4.50 | 4.55 | 4.45 | 4.31 | 4.53 | 4.26 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Tiny Summons | compo | 26 | 4.16 | 4.01 | 4.59 | 4.34 | 4.60 | 4.25 | 3.66 | 4.05 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Hope Falters | compo | 1 | 4.61 | 4.23 | 4.70 | 4.10 | 4.26 | 4.39 | 4.64 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Holding Out | compo | 6 | 4.39 | 4.26 | 3.70 | 4.28 | 4.65 | 4.39 | 4.66 | 4.31 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Fallowtide | compo | 2 | 4.45 | 4.00 | 4.13 | 4.40 | 4.66 | 4.34 | 3.18 | 4.47 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Eleventh Second | compo | 8 | 4.23 | 4.20 | 3.61 | 4.10 | 4.59 | 4.36 | 4.32 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Eleventh Hour | compo | 2 | 4.41 | 4.38 | 3.75 | 4.01 | 4.60 | 4.22 | 4.48 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Unstable Them | compo | 286 | 3.45 | 3.40 | 2.95 | 3.60 | 3.55 | 3.55 | 3.97 | 3.40 | |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Fade | compo | 15 | 4.24 | 3.92 | 3.45 | 3.18 | 4.19 | 4.63 | 4.48 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Spinnerets | compo | 29 | 4.10 | 4.15 | 3.55 | 3.56 | 4.26 | 3.96 | 3.51 | 3.64 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Broken Threads | compo | 45 | 4.08 | 4.01 | 4.11 | 4.09 | 4.59 | 4.35 | 4.35 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Ammodillo | compo | 13 | 4.11 | 4.01 | 3.78 | 3.76 | 4.46 | 4.01 | 3.68 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Microtransaction Mages | compo | 17 | 4.05 | 3.48 | 3.87 | 3.91 | 4.19 | 3.81 | 3.54 | 3.82 | |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Master Key | compo | 16 | 4.13 | 4.07 | 4.05 | 4.26 | 4.13 | 3.96 | 3.21 | 3.80 | |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Rampart | compo | 55 | 3.94 | 3.64 | 3.67 | 4.20 | 4.42 | 4.04 | 3.23 | 3.65 | |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Big Pockets | jam | 285 | 3.72 | 3.79 | 3.53 | 4.01 | 3.98 | 3.76 | 3.30 | 3.53 |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Mountaintop Groovy Robot Laser Battle | compo | 125 | 3.69 | 3.13 | 3.83 | 3.47 | 4.32 | 4.23 | 2.93 | 3.40 | |
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Seven Pillars | compo | 294 | 3.26 | 3.20 | 3.73 | 2.48 | 3.80 | 3.35 | 2.47 | 3.04 |
Couldn't really figure out how this one worked. It looks pretty well done, but more thorough instructions might be useful?
I lost 11.50 and made 27 cents :P
Had a hard time figuring out how this one works. Looks very nice, though, and I like the concept of mining/expanding between Earth and external energy sources. Sometimes controls weren't responsive.
Good submission!
Potto pls
Interesting game. A whole lot of graphics, which is impressive for 72 hrs. The fairies were an interesting addition, although a trackpad made it hard to use them while using arrow keys. The music and audio was suiting. Overall, nice job!
Beautiful game, hard to control. The concept was good, but it was very difficult to get the game to register you trying to rotate while jumping. Super impressed with everything visual.
Fun game concept. I found it really hard to survive night one (might just be my strategy or something, I tried going for two trees before campfire). Graphics were simple but effective. Nice job!
Took me a while to figure out how it worked, but I really like the game. Wish I had more laser cannons, it was tough protecting the planet from both sides. My strategy is just to buy a whole lotta cows, then use them to make a bunch of birds and then just use lasers. Not really sure what the moinks did, although I guess they were supposed to be a central part?
Overall well done.
Must play with audio. 12/10. I like the variety of obstacles and a lot of the visual effects... the table shaking, spray can particles, etc.
Also appreciate that you don't inevitably die, you can save your big spiders.
Very well done!
Fun theme. Level progression is reasonable but not slow. The physics are a little wacky but then again the game as a whole is, haha.
Very interesting game! I like the feeling of running out of time --- my first time I got stuck on the pink planet, but I'm starting to think that that's the happiest ending anyway. Really good execution of the theme. Additional puzzles/endings would make it even better, and if you had more time for the graphics.
Good job on this! Game played pretty smoothly, nice retro feel to it. I like the music and the assets you chose.
Wow. This game kind of just makes me sad.
Very well-made though.
Pretty, surreal mood. Procedural music was interesting. The sparkle orbits were really satisfying to capture and change color, I wish there was more to do once you were pretty much done collecting them.
Interesting game, I like the random snippets of dialogue and thought the random name generation was pretty neat. Not sure exactly what to do, so I just ran around coloring as many people as I could.
A couple times, the dialogue included a FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME instead of the name I input, don't know where that came from.
Overall, nice job, interesting take on the theme, and a nice little game.
Good game, played this for a while. Managed to kill three society members.
Generally not fond of text-based games, but this seems like it had potential if you developed it more. Nice job!
Wow, this is tough. Graphics are pretty polished. I like the fact that your bullets loop around and hit you from behind, but that makes it super hard to not die from them.
Top-notch graphics. Nice job.
Nice simplistic game. I liked the puzzles and the variety of powerups and enemy types. Instructions would have been useful at the start, I kind of had to figure out through trial and error and it took me a while to figure out that I could jump on enemies to kill them, or even that I was trying to kill enemies. Like the art style!
Love the animation considering it was done in 72 hrs. I tried to do a lot of animation for the Compo and came up short of where I originally wanted to be.
Levels come in a really good order and it's difficult but not impossible. Each one takes a couple tries.
I like the theme, most people immediately jumped on space theme but this was different.
I like the select-a-planet-and-teleport-there mechanic, can become super cool if the game ever expands to be bigger. Impressed at the number of unique sprites and levels for the short period of time. The actual fighting could be more interesting, but hey, you made this in a weekend. Well done!
Graphics are pretty. Game concept seemed really cool, although a bit complicated to figure out, even with the intro. Music was nice but could have fit the game a bit better. Overall solid submission! Seems like it has potential if you ever continue to develop it.
Very different from most entries, but I think it's pretty neat! It's simple, but gets the idea across.
The sprites of the sharks were well done, very easy to tell which direction they are about to go.
My only problem with it is that while it's turn based, collisions seem to happen somewhere in the middle of each frame? If an enemy is moving to the square you are occupying as you are moving away, you still die. It would be nice if you could avoid losing in these situations (i.e. the "turtle moving" takes place before the "enemy moving" in the game logic) to encourage riskier plays :)
Well done!
Amusing theme. One of those "what the hell am I playing games," but hilarious at the same time. Took me a while to realize I had to jump over the gnomes I shot.
Well done!
Cute little game. Graphics are nice and clean looking. Somewhat lacking in game design as far as how to lose, etc. but great job for 48 hour compo!
Aaaand came here to leave my rating. Very well done.
Amazing job for Jam. Graphics were polished, music was super suitable, gameplay was simplistic but with power-ups and things that added variety and made it more interesting. Amazing job, expect this to rank highly.
Fun game. The web build kept making unintended Ctrl+W/A/S/D actions, and my network blocked the Windows standalone, but I got the idea from playing in the web. Very fond of the ripple effect on hit, graphics are generally pretty polished.
This game is beautiful. My life is complete.
Cute little game. Plays very smoothly with the camera zooms and the splatters, impressed at the level of polish despite the super simple graphics.
Sound effects are funny. Nice job!
Cute little game. Plays very smoothly with the camera zooms and the splatters, impressed at the level of polish despite the super simple graphics.
Sound effects are funny. Nice job!
Sorry for triple post, site froze up on me.
Interesting little game. I like the art style, it's very consistent. I wish that you had made more iterations with more little differences, would give a really eerie feel. I played through like four or five "really there's no more stuff" messages haha.
Took me a little while to understand the game, pretty interesting. I noticed that the 2 and 3 buttons were switched for me. Best score was ~5800 from dropping only the heaviest balls. Nice job!
Interesting game, I had a lot of fun with it. It felt really dark, but unfortunately the audio didn't necessarily match with the *twinkle*'s and the *pewpewpew*'s. The assets you used were really good, overall well done. Impressive for 72 hrs.
And apparently asterisks italicize. Nice to know.
Only getting bright pink screen. Unable to play.
Reminds me of the old Pole Position games :)
A little wonky with the 3D rendering... the movement of the other cars isn't very predictable and it's really hard to avoid them (especially after recovering from hitting one!).
I noticed that being in grass isn't that much of a disadvantage, so you can just sit off to the side and spam up arrow with no drawback.
Other than that, nice job for a 48-hour game jam. Well done!
Charming.
Not sure if there was a way to lose the "race" part -- I just held down space and dashed through everyone. The egg phase was well made. Overall, nice graphics and overall smooth experience.
Interesting theme choice.
Very simple. Nice audio.
Well implemented and clean. Well done!
Fun to play around with, hard to see the really small things (do acorns even show on the screen?). Nice graphics, simplistic but still easy to tell what is what. I ended up mashing buttons to produce absurd quantities of rabbits.
Game was interesting. Took me a while to figure out the blue screen was a menu, not just an intro. Gameplay was fun, like 2D portal.
Not super related to the "small world" theme, but hey, it was fun. Great submission!
Overall fun game. Agario kind of feel to it, makes you want to play again.
Neat little game, pretty simple. Compo is hard, but good job on the graphics of the planet and enemies. Could use a little more gameplay complexity --- powerups, enemies that shoot, etc. Overall well done.
Beautiful game. Actual gameplay was simple and somewhat lacking, but the art was pretty. Once you turn into a butterfly, you can still use arrow keys to move sideways, causing your sprite to become a caterpillar.
Interesting game. Not quite sure how to control how much the planet spins, but it looks really polished and runs smoothly.
Plus, cows in space are pretty cool. Nice job.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll rename the file to prevent that problem for other people (I added the period so it showed up first alphabetically in the folder). I had a few problems with the game quitting unexpectedly at first, so I removed the ability to exit and never got around to fixing it.
@Talon Thanks for the feedback! I was going to implement an "incorrectness" (along with a score function...) but ran out of time and was running on ~1 hour of sleep by the end of compo. I'm very aware that the controls are awkward, but it was the most innovative thing I could think of in my short brainstorming period.
@Boltkey Thanks! The music was made in Sibelius. Sorry to hear about the lag. I know it gets dull after a while, especially since you don't have a score to work toward. I might consider making small improvements on it post-LD38.
@Tommyflower I do happen to play piano, I wonder if that is a coincidence? :P
@Eric Florio and @Hethsin Not sure where lag was coming from, framerate should be frozen at 30 FPS. Thanks for the feedback!
@Fouralex I took a fairly generous deviation from the theme. I figured that a lot of submissions will translate the theme very literally into "small planets" (a lot did, and a lot were really good), and I wanted something different. I interpreted the theme as just having a limited space, or "world", that the character can move in, which eventually evolved into the concept for seven pillars.
Probably not the most strict upholding of the theme, but oh well. I had fun.
Good idea, puzzles are fairly innovative. Wish there were more levels!
Cute little game. Audio really fit the "atmosphere" and added to the game. Graphics were minimalistic and well done. Getting into orbit wasn't that difficult once you got the feel for the gravity of the planet. It also would have been cool to add more obstacles; the single rock felt slightly out of place since it was the only one.
Overall, nice job! Especially for compo.
Beautiful. I liked bonking their heads on the ceiling and watching them get angry.
I clicked the "don't click" button and had to reload.
Intro was a bit slow, actual game was fairly well done. Could have had more variety (maybe with power ups, etc?) but overall nice and the cut scenes were pretty polished for a weekend of work. Well done!
Nice job. Game looks really nice and the interaction with other objects works pretty well (minus some glitchy physics, but that's part of the fun). Interesting take on the theme.
Fun game. Music is repetitive but suiting. I've actually been working on a randomized card game as a non-LD project and I know it's tough, but I like how yours turned out. It would be nice if it had more emphasis on strategy than on hope-you-draw-better-cards-than-the-other-guy.
Love the rotating bits around the planets! Great submission!
Not sure exactly what to do with this, but crazy that you managed this much in an hour. I like how the ceiling looks and the overall feel, just wish it was more... gamelike.
Love this game! Has a very QWOP-ish feel with the controls, but makes it really engaging. Very well-done AI's, very difficult at first. Game is a little laggy on laptop for web version, made it a little hard to aim dashes. Great work!
Wow. That was quite the experience.
The art is really nice, and combined with the music gives a really calm, peaceful feeling. There are tasks you have to perform, but it's relatively relaxed and low stress. Then the second phase happens, and you're thrown for a loop.
I really liked the seasonal cycling and the variety in tasks (bugs in two places, weeds, clouds, etc). I like how you introduce them in a subtle way, just by mentioning them in the quest book. Once the player knows what to look for, the interactions are intuitive.
I did have some trouble with the weed hitboxes (or perhaps I just couldn't tell visually whether they were fully grown or not). Other than that, the interface was smooth and intuitive.
Well done for 72 hours!
Really neat concept! I'm sure there will be a lot of "control the level" games this event, but this felt very fresh and not tedious (untedious?).
Sometimes it took a while to figure out what was going on in a level, especially involving switches and semitransparent blocks. The level design and progression eased you into it well, and the controls being displayed next to each obstacle was a good design choice.
I liked the fact that the ball continued straight from level to level, and that the music changed slightly throughout the game. I was disappointed when it looped around and I realized I had run out of levels.
It would be fun to watch speedruns of this if it had more levels.
Great work for 48 hours!
Nice entry!
I got all the way through, but I think some of the levels could be a little more lenient with the timing. Some were really tight!
I liked the overall level progression and introduction of mechanics, though. I particularly liked the series of levels early on where you removed a brick each time to show you can move the brick behind to the front, and then that you can move a single brick underneath the character perpetually.
Graphics were simple but clean.
Nice work for 48 hours.
Great use of theme!
I did catch one bug; if you reset with "R" during slow motion, it stays slow when you respawn.
Other than that, the game played pretty smoothly. The fast movement speed was tough to react to cars and obstacles when you're required to jump. I really like the slowdown on the body hopping, although the framerate got a bit choppy (perhaps you could have decreased the simulation speed, rather than the frame rate?).
Graphics and audio were simple but got the job done. Good work for 48 hours!
Great entry! The graphics and UI were on point, and everything felt really intuitive and responsive.
There was a variety of characters and plant types, which was nice. It was good that you were given some hints through the letters, or just from intuition (algae is probably going to want a lot of water, for instance).
The music was pleasant but got a little repetitive, especially since the game is slow-paced.
Great work for 72 hours and kudos to the whole team!
Neat entry! It's cool that you designed a variety of player characters and that you kept switching them off as you played.
Some of the hit boxes and animations were a little ambiguous, particularly on Strawberry's attack. I had a hard time hitting enemies without getting hurt. Mouth-made sound effects are always fun, but it gets a bit repetitive (especially on Blueberry).
Nice work for 48 hours!
Nice entry! The little animation and story at the beginning were great, and the game played smoothly. The audio was nice without being disruptive, and the narration was a nice touch. It did feel pretty difficult to avoid some of the obstacles at times, especially when there were several tacks flying in from the sides (it's hard to line up the balloon vertically since you can't knock it downward or horizontally).
Some kind of music would have added to the atmosphere.
@begocio @bigassopper @curiouslycory @acidviper
I apologize for the particular implementation, but I thought I'd try to make the experience as memorable as possible. :smile:
Thanks for playing!
@murrzipan Once you get to the shutdown, that's the end of the game's content. There should be a "thanks for playing" message if you start up the game again.
I'm actually surprised there aren't more angry comments to be honest!
@paul-merkamp Glad to hear the name reveal was impactful! It uses your windows login username so it seems likely to be hit or miss depending on people's setup.
@paul-merkamp I did notice that the speedy attacks from the top and bottom gave less time because of the game's aspect ratio, which I can see feeling unfair. Ultimately I decided to balance that projectile's speed from the left and right and use it from the top and bottom only sparingly.
The very end was not intended to be beatable, so no worries there! Technically there's an end, although it might get physically impossible before then based on the time it takes the shield to rotate... and then it just plays the same cut scene...
Thanks for the comment about learning projectiles! I'm glad that came across as clearly as I had hoped. An early version used purple projectiles in the middle of a wave, but it was very much not as clear so I gave them their own little moment.
Thanks for so much feedback!
@bereg Thanks for the feedback. I knew going in that it would be pretty hit or miss, and tried to eliminate the possibility of causing any harm with the various warnings on the LD page, Itch page, and on game startup. Yes, it's just a gimmick to try to add some more gravity to the experience, and I wouldn't have to resort to it if I was a better writer.
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to play, and I apologize for any inconvenience that resulted.
@blotosaur @gideonnf @iaredeaded Thanks so much for the kind words!
@lapisraider It's surprisingly easy. You can run system commands in Python, and Windows has one that schedules a shutdown. Running this in Command Prompt will do the same thing:
``` shutdown /f /s /t 0 ```
You can also add a custom error message and set the timer for whatever you want.
@shaolin-dave You should be able to run it from source code! It's using Python (3.6 or higher). The only dependency is pygame, and then you run game.py.
@jvdwijk Oh no! I didn't ruin somebody's stream, did I?
@jusw85 Ah, foiled by the virtual machine! (Or whatever Wine technically is)
I realized the username would be pretty hit or miss, depending on setup, but thought the payoff would be good when it happened to work. Thanks for playing!
@blubberquark Ah, I believe I'm only up to 1.9.6 on my machine. I guess I'll hold off on updating until some errors are fixed!
Glad to see other Pygame enthusiasts out there, especially contributors! Maybe one day I'll try helping out in that regard. I've been using it since my first submission in LD38. I wish there was an easy way to filter game by engine for rating.
@paul-merkamp Thanks so much! And congrats on your first Compo, hope to see you around in October!
Nice entry. As others have said, the UI could be a bit more intuitive, but I figured out what each of the units did after a few tries and had fun experimenting with different strategies.
It's a bit punishing that your towers get destroyed so easily; if you have a bad round, you don't only take damage to your base, you've also lost all your units. That being said, you provide some tools to help save your units by putting little shields in front of them or slowing down the enemies. My best was level 6.
Well done for a Compo, especially since it looks like it's your first LD!
Nice entry. The staring contest was hilarious, but I was remarkably bad at it... took me probably ten tries, then got through the rest a lot more smoothly.
Also how dare you not count this as a masterpiece:
masterpiece.png
Great points on humor, and well done for such a rushed entry.
Neat little game!
The art and animation you chose looked nice, but some of the styles clashed a little bit. It's nice that there were a variety of enemies and townspeople to interact with.
It was a little annoying that the hero can only take one hit (although it was nice that you could respawn at town for ten coins). The timing and hitbox on the attack animation were a little bit odd, and it took me several tries to get the hang of it.
Some (relatively) low-hanging fruit for improvement would be "game feel" elements on attacks and interactions. I'd highly recommend searching YouTube for "Art of Screenshake." It's probably the most useful 30 minutes I've ever experienced in terms of game design.
Congrats on making a thing in 72 hours!
Solid entry. Music and graphics were fairly simple, but clean and nice to look at. The animations were nice, but there was more latency on the player attack than I would have liked, and it was sometimes tricky to fire it before I learned the exact timing.
I never really learned what the advantage of sliding was, other than just traveling faster, but it was really fun to do!
Overall, great work for 48 hours.
Nice entry! It was really satisfying to build up a large number of balls at once and get combos.
All the graphics were nice individually, but it got a bit overloaded visually pretty fast. The contrast of the balls against the background was a little tricky, since they're lighter than the darker bits of the background and darker than the lightest parts. Combined with the fact that there was text scrolling across the screen made it difficult for my eyes to follow. In the future I'd recommend using a more muted background (again, the one you have looks great! It's just hard to track the ball against it).
The music was nice, and the different SFX for the different ball types were a nice touch. It would have been cool to see more ball types, powerups, etc.
Good work for 48 hours!
Really solid entry! The graphics were really top-notch, and there was so much content for a game jam game... procedural generation, a variety of enemy types and some NPCs, as well as general attention to detail and nice animations on everything.
My only quibbles are mostly with the UI. Most things are nonblocking, so you can (for instance) talk to an NPC while picking up the carriage. Or, when navigating a menu, you swing your sword. Some of the collisions were also a little odd. Relatively minor stuff.
The music was nice, but the track was short enough that it got a little repetitive. The SFX were nice (I especially like the wizard's "oho").
Great work for you first Ludum Dare, hope to see you back in the future!
Nice entry!
I know you opted out of graphics and audio, but the assets you chose to use were good.
It felt a little bad that there wasn't really an order to how the water enemies spawned, which meant there was a chance you would just take damage if you strayed too far away from the fire to collect wood. It might be nice if there was an indication for off-screen enemies, of something of that sort.
Nice work for 72 hours!
Really neat game! I was only able to save 16 people.
I like that it gradually gets more intense, but I think it could start out even a little bit slower. By the time enemies were pouring in, I hadn't yet figured out what all the equipment does.
I appreciate the detail of holding the "used" items and having to discard them.
Great work for 72 hours!
Really solid entry!
The art was really nice, and all the poses and expressions were very emotive (especially for the identical septuplets). As others have mentioned, it would be nice if the dialogue was skippable, since I was really bad and kept getting caught almost immediately.
I appreciate the sound design just being clock ticking and pencil scratching. Even with just ambient sounds you make a tense atmosphere, and the intimidating look of the supervisor helps as well.
I do wish it was a little more clear how his vision worked; sometimes I got caught with things I didn't think I should have, and other times I got away with things I didn't think I would.
Overall, great work for 72 hours!
Really solid entry. The concept is neat, and you use the visuals and music to establish a lonely feeling very well.
This should definitely have been a Jam entry given that you used outside textures and sound effects, but I've tried to give a fair rating on all categories other than Graphics and Audio. The work you did do in these areas was very good, especially the design of the city.
Well done for 48 hours.
Nice entry! I really like the one-bit pixel art, and the movement and controls were all pretty smooth. A couple times I died of hunger because I forgot I had to eat (it might be nice to have some sort of visual or sound indication if it gets too low.
Object permanence is great! We need more bunny corpses on this website.
Really solid entry! The art is simple but very clean, and there's enough variety to give the sense of a full world. When I stepped into the bushy area I had an immediate sense of "oh, there's more than just a bunch of levels in a row."
The audio is a bit simple, and got repetitive. It was nice that the player had a walk sound, but without other sounds to compete with it, it got a bit tedious.
I really liked the intuitiveness of the level layout; when I saw the branching path with the two gates, I immediately realized I had to beat two challenges to proceed. Similarly, when I saw the little corner in the top left as you're leaving the brown zone, I knew there must be somewhere I could go back there.
I did find Shmoop, then promptly lead him to the brain room to his death. RIP Shmoop, again.
Pretty smooth other than minor graphical bugs (shadow rendering over walls) and getting stuck in a corner on one run. Lowest hanging fruit for improvement would probably be checkpoints --- because your walk speed is slow, it feels really bad to have to completely restart and do the introductory levels again.
Overall, great work for Compo! Best of luck for the rest of rating.
Really solid game, and hilarious premise! I managed to pass the first sniper level by just flying over everything, then jostling the heart out of the basket at the end.
Nice work for 48 hours! The turret building mechanic was nice and felt rewarding as I surrounded my child with swaths of robotic firearms.
It would be nice if placing a turret had a sound effect; most other things do, but for some reason that was left out.
The artifact collection was nice as a goal and victory condition.
Art style is really nice and clean. As other people have said, it would be nice if the movement was faster; it felt like even when I was collecting bugs at maximum efficiency, the babies were still dying (I only saved one).
Music and SFX would go a long way in making for a more complete, polished experience. However, even without them, you do a good job and making the obstacles reactive and giving various animations for taking damage, hungry chicks, and provoking the anger of a goose.
Well done for 48 hours!
Nice entry! Too bad your engine doesn't support audio, it could have pushed the experience to the next level.
The one-bit art style worked really well, and you did a good job of using effects like negatives to simulate extra shades. Overall the game was very smooth graphically, and the environment was very reactive when you hit a tree or pick up an item.
The "long-term" interactions like the (spoiler) that leads to the (spoiler) were the cherry on top. I could see this expanded to include even more things, on top of having to maintain the central fire.
Great work for 48 hours!
Nice entry! I got to round 22.
My biggest quibble is that the audio playback when I repeated the rhythm was delayed by a fraction of a second, which made it difficult to repeat the rhythm (I assume the input itself was unaffected, but it was disorienting to hear the rhythm I was playing a tiny bit slow).
Other than that, neat idea, catchy music, and a nice atmosphere. Well done for 72 hours.
Nice entry!
As AdonisDevs mentioned, it felt pretty bad to be cornered by enemies, especially since there's no reset-level hotkey to my knowledge. I think the fact that the green enemies were long and narrow often meant it was more difficult than it seems like it should be to slip past them (as they turn and face you).
Apart from that, the game concept was really nice. You made a variety of levels with a few different mechanics and provided lots of opportunities to show how the game mechanics worked (the shooter level comes to mind, where you see enemies getting hit and killed in the second room).
Graphics are pretty simple, but hey, it's a game jam. You did have good contrast on important hazards, especially on the spikes. The turret bullets could have been a little big larger and brighter for better visibility. Adding some simple animations and effects to your future games could help bring them to the next level.
Well done for 72 hours!
Not going to lie, this is one of my favorite submissions that I've seen, despite literally not being interactive.
Nice entry! The monochrome pixel art aesthetic suits the gameplay nicely.
I was a little confused before I read the game description, but after playing a bit I got the hang of it. I suppose the idea is that you bumble into things a bit, map out the area, and then try to run through and optimize. This gameplay loop was nice once I knew what to look for.
It would be neat if there were procedurally generated levels, or more hand-selected ones.
Neat entry!
I like the concept of having to explore to search for wood, then return to your moving fortress. The lighting was nice, as were the graphics (particularly the sprite for Blazane).
As people have mentioned, the movement was very slow. I liked the fact that you got slower when you picked up logs, but the base movement could be multiplied easily by three or four times. Otherwise, it can feel bad that it takes you a minute to go and pick up a stick that gives you twenty seconds of fuel.
I do think the resources were a bit scarce as well, although increasing the movement speed would mean you would effectively have access to more as you can search farther. It was nice that it starts you out with a stockpile in case you get unlucky at first.
It would be really interesting to see this game be expanded to include more random landmarks, hostile enemies, or other secrets lurking in the dark.
Well done for a Compo entry!
oh
Nice entry!
The sound effects were really nice for getting the timing down for multiple balls, and it was neat that more challenges kept getting added as you went.
It would be nice if the paddle was semitransparent --- it sometimes felt pretty bad that you had to track the path of the ball while obscuring it with the paddle (or hold off until the last moment, then cover it, but I was bad at judging when that was).
Fun framing device with the selective breeding of ping-pong super-clones.
Downloaded and running, let's see how long I can keep this little dude alive. I'll be back later with a rating!
Is the music original?
Nice entry! The graphics and lighting were really nice, and the audio was a good fit for the experience. Really intuitive, as far as Rube Goldberg life support systems go.
Great entry! Good attention to detail with the sprites and animations. It was a really good design choice to have different enemy types that force you to interact in different ways --- for instance, aliens in the air and cabs on the ground that force you to move around a lot vertically.
The sound effects were appropriate (especially the nefarious "nyehehe"), but I think could be a good area to work to push games the next level. I think this game could have benefited a lot with exaggerated cartoon sounds, and by the end where there were a lot of enemies, it would get increasingly hectic. With mostly beeps and boops, it sounded a little bit empty even when there was a lot happening on screen.
It was really nice to have random levels! It kept each run fresh where it otherwise might have grown stale with a single hand-designed level.
Well done for 48 hours!
Nice entry! I made 75 seconds.
I accidentally tabbed out of the window at the beginning on my first run, and failed to catch that the egg was mouse controlled. Quickly figured it out for my second though.
I like that the enemy appearance is telegraphed really well. You get a sense of the location and the distance before it comes up.
Nice entry! I unfortunately couldn't make it past day 3 --- I think I'm better at this in real life.
The graphics were really nice, and the various descriptions and animations breathed some life into the game. Music could have brought it to the next level.
The randomized effectiveness of various tasks sometimes felt bad, especially if it results in you losing. I guess I just need to play safer and not let any stat go too low.
Well done for 72 hours!
All the sprites and illustrations, as stills, look beautiful. A few of the animations could have been more dynamic (for instance, the bat flying; because the body wasn't moving up and down opposite the wings, it didn't feel like it had weight).
The music was nice but got repetitive quickly because the loop was so short. Some SFX would go a long way to get immersed in the world.
The story was a nice framing of the gameplay, but proofreading the dialogue better would go a long way in making your game feel more polished and engaging.
Well done for 72 hours.
Wow. That was quite the experience. And it was, in fact, more glue than I expected.
Overall, it was a good experience. The cartoony art style and wacky story came together well, and there were a surprising number of illustrations for the various characters and backgrounds. The UI was smooth, courtesy of RenPy.
While the music was individually nice track-by-track, I think it could have done a better job at portraying the same mood as the narrative. Some of the more suspenseful scenes in particular would have been elevated by more suspenseful music.
Great work for 72 hours!
Nice entry!
I really liked how you learned the patterns over time and got better at the movement; it definitely started out very slow and clunky, with me consulting the codes very frequently and messing up a lot, but over time you develop mastery and memorize the codes and it goes a lot smoother as the levels increase in complexity.
My only complaint with the control scheme: there was clearly a very well thought out system for the movement, and it is very consistent for the most part. However, all of the "big" versions of the commands use all three buttons, except jump right! That one tripped me up for a bit until I got used to it, but for the jumps I had to continue consulting the instructions longer than the other commands before I got the hang of it.
Nice work, I would have liked a short "you win" screen after encountering >!the alien friend!< but I also get that compo has very limited time and you have to scope down very aggressively.
There was some tough competition this year, but I'm pleased to announce you've won the **Least Soflockable Pushable Statues** award. Congratulations!
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Nice work for such a short time!
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So I had a whole review written up about how much of a hard time I was having, but then I realized I missed the part that you could build your chains across colors (via connected suits), and immediately beat my high score. I guess it helps to read the directions!
This was a nice twist on the Match-3 genre, and I liked how puzzly it was with the optimal routing while still being an arcade game and not a puzzle game. I think the one thing that feels missing is the satisfying automatic daisy-chain of combos you sometimes get in Match-3, since you have to clear all the tiles yourself (with the exception of the black ones when they hit the bottom). But there was enough satisfaction to be had with the connecting mechanic.
I've crunched the numbers and decided to award you this *Smoothest Transition From Gameplay To Game Over Music Award*. It really just kind of blended right together. Congratulations!
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Very cute art style and wonderful little game as expected at this point! There's an impressive amount of variety in the objects you can throw and destroy, and the little hoard of dust bunnies was a very nice touch as well.
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And of course, after careful deliberation, we've decided to award you the **Most Variety of Boss Projectiles** award. Don't spend it all in one place!
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This one was fantastic. The idea, the presentation, everything. Games like this are the reason game jams exist.
My language didn't have all of those characters! But the closest I can get is: FAUCET ??? ALBERT ??? RAY
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We've been informed by our extraterrestrial sponsors that you are clearly the best game to receive the [̴̧̨͙͈͙̲̟̖̝̖̫̭̟̩͚̜̞̀͛͆̒̐̃͒̇͛͋̚͝]̵̛̜͙̱̦̟̮̬͎̞͉͍͎̯̝̟̔̎͌̈́̀́͋̊͒͘̚̚̚͜-̴̧̡̝̥̎̌̉̓̈́̾̃̓͘̕≠̨̛̛͍̠̝̭̼̯͔̓͌̀̋̓̎͗̆̓͛̕͘͝͝͝ͅ,̴̨̨̛̬͉̳̤͍̠̲̘̭̹̙̈́̇̑̅̂̓̈́͘͘͘ͅ.̶̡̱̝̼̟̰̻͉̖̱͓̞̀̽͂͑̇̽̀͛̒̌̀͐̄̽̊̚|̴̛͖͉̱̲̻̹̝͗̒̽+̸̡̙̜̲̈́̔́́̀͊̎̐̚ award. Congratulations!
Hey, I'm a big winner!
Right off the bat, this seems like a *bear* to program. Not only is it a big rewindable timeline with all your inputs, but it works for several completely different minigames. Extremely creative and ambitious premise and you managed to stick the landing. I can tell you had to scope back some of the graphics/audio in other parts, but sometimes that's necessary when you decide to program time travel in 48 hours.
For some reason I assumed that only the 7s counted as winning the slot machine, and when the last roller showed only cherries, I was convinced it would have one 7 somewhere and just needed to roll for 30 seconds or something. My fault, not the game's, I just don't know how slot machines work apparently!
As always, humor is great. I particularly liked the whole "To be clear, I'm explicitly asking you to cheat" bit. And the wacky design of the medically unfortunate game show host was great.
After careful review, I've decided to award you this **Most Unshootable Duck** award. Congratulations!
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Excellent work on this!
The art was great, and the game was very polished visually. I assume the music was borrowed from somewhere since you opted out of Audio, but the choice of music was good and went well with the mood of the game.
The story, while short, was powerful and bittersweet. It touched not only on coming to terms with death and loss, but also with the physical and mental toll being a provider or caregiver can be. You can work all day to try to pay medical bills, but that just means you are more stressed out and have less time to spend with your sister. The writing was simple but powerful.
I will say that it would have been nice to have a bit more agency over the story. It felt like there were a lot of dialog options, but the story didn't really chance course until the very end based on your choices. Although obviously there's only so much you can cram into 72 hours.
One final note, looking at the credits, I'm impressed that you had two artists on the team (one for UI) and had everything come together so smoothly. The UI and illustrations were so cohesive I wouldn't have guessed there were two separate artists, so great work there (and of course for @damakuno bringing it together with code).
@damakuno Aw, thanks! That game was a blast to work on and I'm glad you enjoyed it --- I'm sure the other developer on that game will be happy to hear someone is still enjoying it.
I also remember Moonshot Battles fondly, although I didn't play it until after jam rating closed. That one similarly has a nice bittersweet story.
Good luck for the rest of the rating period and in all your future creations!
Congrats on your final ratings, especially Graphics and Theme!
Nice entry!
As others have said, the camera seems to drift, and it seems related to the camera shake. Eventually you end up completely out of frame:
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As others have said, the music is excellent. The visuals are simple but very dynamic and make a nice atmosphere. It sounds like you ran out of time to fully implement the jump mechanic based on your other comments (compo is tough), but the animation is very nice.
Regarding the gameplay, I think the concept is very promising --- sort of a tower defense inspired game with player movement and placing mines. With only the mechanics implemented, it seemed like the optimal strategy was just to sit in one place on the track and let the enemies come to you... but I could see it being more dynamic with additional ways the player could combat the enemies or other objectives you could work on that occupy your time (and your mine placement) between waves.
I'm not sure the 'race car' style movement was the best gameplay decision here as opposed to more typical arrow key movement --- although maybe that would be different with the additional mechanics you envisioned (like the jump, which is directional). I will say that with this movement scheme you probably want your player sprite to be clearly directional visually so the player doesn't get confused which way they're facing.
Congrats on what appears to be your first Compo! Hope you enjoyed the jam, got some valuable experience, and are planning to come back again in the future!
Nice entry!
The concept is really neat (cat inside a bag of holding who gets to choose what to give the adventurer). I liked the variety of wacky items available in the bag, although I wish there were more scenarios written out for them (I would expect more extreme reactions to someone pulling out an entire shark, for instance). That said, game jam timelines are tight.
I will say that for similar games I've made for jams I've found it useful to put the dialog into text files parsed by the game. This means the writers can create, test, and modify the script without it being a bottleneck for the programmer. Not sure if this would have helped you get more writing in or not!
The art was fantastic, especially the characters. The UI was mostly nice --- my one gripe is the number keys for selecting items, and particularly the fact they're labeled in the top right corner which sometimes led me to hit the wrong one. I'd personally put the number above or closer to the center so it's very clear which number goes to which item (and maybe put 0 at the end since that's how it's laid out on the keyboard).
The dialog was nice and had a lot of character! Other than the fact that it would have been better with more content (as would all jam games), I don't have much criticism here.
The music was very pleasant! Simple sound effects for the UI would have been nice.
Great work for 72 hours and congratulations to the members of the team for whom this is the first Ludum Dare!
Awesome entry! Saw it on the @togis stream and downloaded it to try it myself.
First of all, the graphics and audio are really well done and very polished. The UI and animations are very clean and the spells feel very good to cast. The difficulty scaled at a good rate and felt very fair.
Great work for a 72-hour jam!
Congrats on the well-deserved final rankings!
The fire is inevitable and all-consuming, but I'll be damned if I let it take this pup.
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A great wacky game jam experience. The graphics and mood are great. There could be a little more in terms of gameplay, but what you have is already a pleasant experience.
I will say it would be nice to have an "out of bounds" that would return you to the map --- just about the first thing I did was wander into the ocean until I fell into the void.
Nice work for 72 hours!
Nice entry!
The pixel art was overall quite good. I do think they could have done a better job of signalling what different things did --- for instance, the blue and green clocks came in different "amounts," but it was impossible to tell how much it would age/de-age you until you ran into it. If you had the time for it, positioning the clock hands differently would have been a great way to show this subtly. I especially liked the patterned tiles and the tiles with Greek letters.
I also liked how the character visibly aged as you played. Obviously time is very limited for Compo, and adding graphics is competing with making levels and mechanics, but it would have been cool to have more phases than just "adult" and "old man."
The main mechanic was interesting and you spiced it up with some secondary mechanics like the falling tiles and the "push" tiles. The levels were generally designed in a way where it was difficult to get stuck, and you will definitely figure out how to solve it eventually. The game could have benefited from mechanics that could make slightly more complex puzzles that require more planning --- maybe teleports, locks and keys, a switch you could flip to make you age *backward,* etc. I think the mechanics you chose, while interesting, could have synergized better with the main mechanic of aging as you move.
Overall great work for a 48-hour jam and, as it seems to be your first one, I hope to see you around for more Ludum Dares in the future!
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Love the programmer art! The game is pretty easy once you get a few towers down, but it has a lot of character. I have no idea who these people are, why they have robots for hands, and why they're so intent on touching my phone, but I'm glad I could dissuade them for the time being. Glad you managed to submit something playable even if you didn't get to everything you wanted to!
Nice entry!
The concept is really neat, and once I got used to the movement and controls, it was quite fun. The balloons and crates made for very different resource types based on how you were allowed to carry them and how you used them. It felt like a balancing act trying to seek out both (in a good way) although it was sometimes a bit punishing when a balloon popped and all your hard-earned fuel plummeted into the abyss.
While I do think the movement was well designed, and quite fun for a jam entry, I do think that it could be improved a bit as others have said. Here are my first movement related thoughts:
- The 2D player sprite caused some difficulty with evaluating hit boxes, etc. - I think the grab area for balloons could be a bit larger. - I think the "hand" extending could be substantially faster. - I think it would be nice if you could go up through the bottom of your raft in the same way you can with clouds, as it requires some delicate maneuvering to get on top of the raft from the bottom - It might be nice if the crate throw was a little less forceful, or there was a "set down" button, since I occasionally tossed my fuel all the way off the ship
Additionally, it would be nice if there was some visual indicator for when your balloons were going to pop. I'd sometimes get two popping at the same time which was hard to plan around unless I was on the ship to fix it immediately.
Again, well done for a 72-hour project. The majority of my feedback has been critical but I really did enjoy the core experience and jumping around trying to beat my high score. This feels like it could be a compelling level that is part of a larger game with tighter movement and some more polish.
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@plixel Thanks for playing! Sorry to hear about the full screen issue --- it wasn't a problem on the computer I used for development. What's your monitor's resolution?
@pious I do usually write a post mortem! I'll probably try to put one out in a couple days.
@lee-reilly You must have liked it a lot, because it appears twice on your list!
Thanks for including my game, and for covering other jams the last few years (I was also on your list for Game Off 2020)!
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Nice entry! My best score was 99 in sicko mode.
As others have said, the tutorial guy and his speaking noises are hilarious. Overall the game has a lot of character in the graphics, gameplay, and premise, and it was very satisfying to frantically find the right tools of destruction to eliminate some hapless flower or shrub.
It would have been neat if there was more variety in how you dealt with plants other than just clicking on them quickly with the right kind of tools. Something timing related or tiny tiny mini-games would have been neat.
It sounds like you didn't make the music since you opted out of audio, but it was a very good choice of music at least.
Nice work for a solo Jam entry!
Nice entry!
First off, a few bugs I found: - The Sci-Lab map doesn't seem to display the player's current power level. - The game kept freezing for me as soon as I got around 2000 points. Not sure what the cause could be.
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The game was really charming and well made. It definitely had that "putting out fires" feeling and got really intense as you start losing rooms. The energy mechanic was neat and game the player interesting decisions. Should I go back to recharge now? Is it worth it to use my sprint to get to the malfunction?
For a compo game it's super impressive you made multiple maps! And they have their own colors even! I think it would have been neat if there was a bit more variety in map size, number of charging stations, etc, but even just different layouts like you had made the game a bit different.
It did feel like the big maps and the slow character did feel a bit punishing. The malfunctions start damaging the ship immediately, so there's not really that much you can do to prevent them completely (which plays into the theme, but is a little demoralizing in the moment). I found the best strategy was to find a small room near a charging station and guard it religiously, and let the rest of the ship die (grabbing bombs as they spawn, because they're worth a lot of points). Once it's down to just that room, hop from fracture to fracture as fast as possible until it eventually dies. That said, I haven't been able to push my score too much with this method because the game seems to freeze around 2000 points.
Great work for 48 hours, and congrats on finishing a Ludum Dare! Hopefully the first of many.
I think your download might be missing some DLLs --- I'm unable to run on Windows 10.
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My arm is sore from repeated clicking, but my pet is thriving and well provided for.
The graphics are simple but effective. The super simple pet and clearly hurried MS paint backgrounds were hilarious and full of character.
I do think the game values could use a bit of tweaking. I'm not sure if there's anything after the point I got to, but my last raise was at a couple thousand points and I've neglected my pet entirely for quite a while and it hasn't died yet.
I also recommend something slightly less physically draining for a clicker mechanic --- maybe limit it to X times per second or have a bar that fills. Basing it purely on number of clicks makes it tiresome and also very hard to balance --- since there's almost no limit and a wide range of what players will be able to do (and even higher if someone uses software tools). Agree with others that objective and progress could be shown a little clearer.
Overall great work, it's a charming Compo entry!
Always excited to see your games pop up on my Itch feed!
As always, the UI and presentation are incredible, especially for a Compo game. The colors, contrast, beady-eyed stick insect rabbit cryptid, little animations, all of it was top notch. Everything, even the banner and the trees in the background, were bobbing to the music.
And the music! The production quality was great, and I still have it stuck in my head as I'm typing this.
*:musical_note: Nostrils and tomato :musical_note:*
The gameplay was familiar but fresh. It was simultaneously more forgiving than Scrabble, etc. since you're allowed to place letters that don't form words yet, but it's also more punishing to accidentally drop a tile in the wrong place and lose the 10x bonus until you fix it (adding the Undo button was a good decision).
All this said, I do have some (very minor) criticisms:
- Sometimes through bad luck you ended up with too many vowels or consonants, which really limited placement choice. I don't know if you're currently weighing draws to try to even out the types of letters you get, but if not, it might help.
- The interpretation of the theme was perfectly acceptable, but not particularly inspiring. I did like the variety of power ups which added some strategy (although I rarely if ever used the "delay the inevitable" one).
- I think the gameplay is slightly "breakable." I found a strategy I'm fairly confident is the optimal one, but I won't share it quite yet so as not to ruin the experience for others (tee-hee!).
Overall, amazing entry, and I look forward to seeing how you score and all your other titles moving forward.
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(As a side note, what software/equipment do you use for music and sound effects?)
I guess this is far enough down the comment chain it's probably just fine to say the strategy.
I did the following: - Identify as long of a word as possible, with as many "inner" words as possible, and a common letter at the center, from my starting tiles (for my game, this was "SCORERS," getting ORE, CORE, CORER, CORERS, SCORE, SCORER, SCORERS) - Build out that word, but crucially, leave out the middle letter. - Identify a second word that intersects that middle letter, and build it out intersecting the first, leaving out the second letter (I did "STARTED" if I remember right, intersecting on "R") - Fill the remainder of the board. Importantly, make sure you include all letters you've placed so far in valid words to get the bonus as soon as possible. - Any time you're offered an upgrade, pick the one that increases bonus multiplier. - Save a copy of the letter you need to finish the two intersecting words as you approach the end, then place it on your last turn.
The way the multiplier system works greatly incentivizes stacking the multipliers, especially with the upgrades. As such, one very good turn will dwarf the amount of points you get from all other turns. My game I got well over 100,000 points in the last turn, and I think I got another 30,000 from another lucky "long" word I formed in the margin.
@antti-haavikko Roc and rocs as well. It's definitely possible to get higher with a better choice of words and better luck, but the fact I doubled the top score after trying the strategy once made me assume nobody had done it.
Regardless, a great game, and it was a pleasure to try to optimize it!
Got bored and made a script to try to determine the best-scoring word for a single turn, and my calculation pointed to "REVERTS," so I tried again until I could get the letters for two overlapping. Scored 235,000!
Amazing work! Congrats on the #1 placement!
Really cool entry, and an impressive amount of content for Compo! I found all the secrets.
First of all, the main mechanic is quite cool --- probably the most innovative I've seen so far this jam. The level design was quite good for exploring the mechanics gradually. The time reversal with the rising lava was a great interpretation of the theme.
The graphics are also quite good. The platforms and hazards have high contrast against the background but the color scheme is cohesive. I will say that at first I found myself accidentally touching spikes without realizing they were bad --- some sort of additional contrast, from color or shape, could have been an improvement here, since most of your regular floor and ceiling tiles also have bright orange in sharp shapes. After playing for a while my brain adjusted though.
It did feel like I lagged a bit when finishing a rewind, and I'm not entirely sure whether it was a performance issue with generating the ghost or if the slowness was deliberate. If the latter, I think it could be reduced, since it got a little tiring if I'm trying repeatedly to do the same trick (speaking of which, I think the hit box for the double jump could be just a little more forgiving).
The death animation and consequent rewinding animation, especially the first time it happened, was a real "oh wow" moment. Well done on the presentation there. The fade to white on game end was also very pleasant, especially with how it contrasted to the dark and orange colors throughout.
Great work on this, and very impressive for 48 hours.
Congrats on the well-earned 9th place ranking!
Nice entry!
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First of all, the concept is hilarious, especially the premise of level 7. Great use of the theme.
The graphics and audio are pretty simple but get the job done. Adding on the buttons and UI for the fictional GPS product was a nice touch.
I do think there are some things that could be clearer from a gameplay perspective. First, I was never quite sure what the car was planning on doing, and would sometimes get caught by surprise when it decided to turn and I anticipated it going straight so I could fill in more ground. Some sort of indication of the car's planned movement, and maybe a way to intercept it partway through turning, would have made those moments feel less bad.
Graphically, the cars turning around the corners looked a bit awkward, especially certain directions of U-turns that looked like they turned in the wrong direction.
Finally, the procedural generation was really impressive for Compo. Given that they were generated randomly, the levels were surprisingly varied but the difficulty felt similar for maps of the same level.
Overall nice work for a 48 hour jam!
This was a delightful experience! The graphics were nice, the movement felt clean, and all the bad jokes really added up to a well-rounded game jam entry.
You did mention the movement was a bit buggy, and I will say that when moving along the underside of something it was particularly noteworthy --- it felt like the controls were reversed sometimes, and it was difficult to recover from certain spots. But hey, it's a game jam game, it's not going to be perfect.
The slow metamorphosis mechanic was interesting, although I think it would have been neat if the wings didn't make crawling completely obsolete. Maybe you moved faster while crawling so it was still worthwhile sometimes. The levels were designed very elegantly where there wasn't all that much stuff, but still enough nooks and crannies holding muffins that it was worth exploring the edges.
Nice work for 72 hours!
The fact that the map was random was nice. The combat with the enemies seems a little underwhelming, it might be nice if there were powerups or other additional elements. It was a pretty solid use of the theme, though! I would have the potential to be really cool if you had more time.
Nice feel and look. It got buggy a couple of times, where I would shoot a zombie and not kill it, and then the zombie would teleport behind me. (web version by the way)
Liked the concept.
Interesting game, good use of the theme. Graphics are simple but fit the overall feel. I've never been good at this kind of resource-management game, but this is a very good use of one. Well done for 72 hrs!
Nice solid entry! Particle effects look nice, although it's difficult to tell what's going on most of the time. I mostly just spammed rockets and hoped the fireball dudes jumped off the edge.
Neat game! Level design was really nice, it sometimes took a few times as you found out which crew to prioritize. Appreciate the dying animation.
Nice concept, well implemented. Not buying the connection to the theme, but that's okay. Level order could be a little better; you don't shoot anything until pretty late on, so the mechanic is pretty confusing at the beginning. Controls weren't super intuitive but you get the hang of it after a while. High points on innovation. Overall neat game!
Good mood. Could be a little more engaging in gameplay and graphics. Would be nice to see the range where the enemies can see you; a little hard to tell sometimes
I'm getting this guy...
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Comment on my page when it's working, I'd like to play it! :)
(Win10)
Nevermind! Was a security thing. Got it working fine on Windows 10.
Got all the way through to the secret room ;)
Neat little game, the light mechanic is cool. I feel like there could be more enemy types to add variety to the level design. Graphics are plain but work, music could be better, but overall pretty good work for a weekend. Nice job!
Neat game! Plays very smoothly, great concept. Could be a little more variety in level design (maybe addition of switches or other interactive elements) but as-is really great for 48hrs. Didn't rate on audio because I'm playing without headphones.
Interesting game. I somehow managed to run out of batteries on the same tick that I completed the assignment, which put me in a weird ghost state with no background.
Other than that, well done! Soundtrack also suits the game.
Awesome. I really liked how you had to stand in the light to recharge the gun. I didn't realize that you were able to doublejump at first, though, and that caused some problems. Graphics are beautiful.
Neat little game, good use of theme. The soundtrack is very suiting. Only possible improvement would be graphics, but hey, its the Compo :)
Very well done
Interesting take on the theme. Was sufficiently difficult because you had to choose which resources to prioritize. Graphics were pretty good for a game jam. Overall solid game!
Wow, very impressive for compo. Good use of the theme, particularly impressed with overall look and level generation.
Music is decent and fits the feel of the game.
Nice concept, title screen face is hilarious. I like the voiceover.
Only problem is that after I collected the key once, it didn't respawn, even when I died.
Overall, neat game, well done!
Nice concept, title screen face is hilarious. I like the voiceover.
Only problem is that after I collected the key once, it didn't respawn, even when I died.
JESus ChRisT this game is so gOdDAMN BEauTiFUL what are you some kind of WIZARD!?
If this game doesn't get top three in graphics it's a rigged system.
Pretty neat game. At first I tried to do the super-evil-at-all-costs route but quickly found out that probably isn't such a good idea.
There aren't a whole lot of this kind of strategy game for Ludum Dare. Well done.
Game is awesome. Level design was very well-planned, art style was nice, and the main mechanic was great. Played to the end and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Awesome game for game jam. It looks really pretty and plays pretty smoothly. Only thing that would be nice is more variety to the gameplay.
Graphics and setting reminds me a bit of The Rock, The Paper, and The Scissors
Thanks all for the feedback!
@RootPew I've had a focus on graphics for both Compos I've entered, I've decided to go with the simple-game-that-looks-nice approach.
@WillData Intentionally programmed so that you can hold, mash, or press to the beat :) Most control with the last one though
@Pixel Programmer: Compliments on the animation means a lot coming from someone with "pixel" in their username :)
@Will Walters: Thanks! The background should flash somewhat to the beat of the music, as well as the health bars bouncing, it was hard to get something that was obvious but not overbearing in the visual indicator sense.
@Ashment: Thanks for the feedback! I did have a little bit of issues with the timing, and it takes a while to get a feel for it. One thing to point out is that when starting the game up it actually syncs the internal "beat" to when you press the space bar (it's a calibration, not just a gimmick!). If there is a big enough difference between the beat of the music and when the background flashes, it's probably because something weird happened in that step which can be fixed by restarting the game.
Hope that helps you, if you decide to give it a second chance :)
@SecondThread I'm not sure what that is... my friend had that as well, but got it working after doing the unzip again. It may have something to do with the extra files generated by Pyinstaller that allow the Python code to run, but I don't have a fix for it that I know of. Sorry!
@LittleLegend Glad you liked it! The second snake is pretty tough.
@jasperarmstrong Good to know --- I named it with a period so it would show up first alphabetically among all the assets in Windows. In hindsight, I should have just put all the assets in a different directory.
@Baski: Thanks for the good feedback, definitely been hearing a lot about improving visual queues and making the audio easier to match to the beat. First time trying to make a rhythm-based game, and I guess I grew desensitized to it through 48 hrs of development.
@Rocketship: Thanks! I definitely tried to make the soundtrack repetitive in a groove sense but hoped that it didn't get too repetitive. The control scheme was mostly a result of me originally thinking the character might move side to side, in addition to jumping and ducking, but it seems to work well with the attack/recharge too. Thanks for the compliments on the art; what about it is especially "unique" though?
Liked it. Voiceover was great. Clever use of the theme. Looks really good for a game jam. Well done!
Awesome game. The overall idea is awesome and fits the theme really well. I appreciate how your powerless corpses serve as a monument to your failure.
It's interesting because you play the same level over and over but you progress each time. It's neat.
Also how on earth did you manage to make all of those graphics in 48 hours? It looks beautiful.
EDIT: noticed Jam, not Compo. Still impressive!
Pretty fun. I appreciate the headlines that actually say what you said.
Wasn't exactly sure what the bars did, or which were good or bad, but I just messed around and hoped that something happened and it was a nice experience. Well done!
Incredible graphics. Difficult to rate on certain categories (such as "fun") because of its non-game nature. Would have been cool if you had incorporated more interactivity other than clicking to bless.
What
Incredible. The best part was the audio changing as the story progressed, I'm really impressed.
Hey! Noticed your comment on my game so I thought I'd respond here so you were more likely to notice it.
The song I linked in my game's description was **not** written by me, I linked it because it inspired me for the feel of the song I did write. I have since removed the link to avoid confusion, and instead linked the actual soundtrack :) you can find that here: https://soundcloud.com/user-565506175/fredericks-theme
You might want to adjust your audio rating accordingly!
Sorry for the confusion, just wanted to clarify things so I didn't end up getting a rating based on a song I didn't write.
Regarding your game, I liked it! It definitely has that classic 8-bit kind of feel between the sound, graphics, and gameplay. I only got to level 5, after which it's really hard to get everywhere fast enough to not die.
I like the little audio bit it plays when you progress to the next level, it reminds me of the beginning-of-level sounds for the "classic" mode on the GBA Mario games.
Well done!
EDIT: Oh wow, I didn't read the description before and didn't notice you had to pump the machine. That changes things.
Nice little game. The main mechanic is interesting, and there's a surprising amount of depth despite how simple it is. I like the video inro. :)
This game is pretty sick. Procedurally generated dungeon is really good for only 48 hrs. Good variety of enemy types, items, etc. Can improve graphics a little ;)
Smooth interface, simple concept. Biggest area of improvement is probably the graphics, but they really aren't that bad. You had a really clean UI (liked the health bar!) and had enough depth to be interesting. The game crashed for me after a while, probably because there were too many zombies.
It would be interesting to see this with more variety of weapons, or different enemy types! But obviously not something easy to do in 48 hours.
Overall, great job.
This game is really great. It's smooth to play, and has some replay value because it generates different levels. I'm impressed at the level of polish for Compo. The only improvement I could see is a greater variety of items (maybe changing jump, or running speed?) and more enemies, perhaps that get more difficult later in the level.
Incredibly polished, I like the whole aesthetic --- graphics are great, music is groovy, controls/objective is intuitive and smooth.
Great concept! I think the level design was pretty good; it escalated at a reasonable rate, and there was some amount of choice of where to go and what to do, but not so much as to become too much. The graphics are simple but effective for what it is. It was a little short, but hey, you made it in 72 hours so not too shabby.
Unfortunately, not playing with headphones, so didn't rate you in audio, although I'm sure it sounds great.
Fun game, got 178 :)
It would be nice if the words were more consistent; some of them are acronyms or abbreviations (exp, ld), some where names (claire, dave). If it were my choice, I'd only use full dictionary words.
It was a little frustrating sometimes to get the words out once you messed up --- I eventually got used to resetting with space, but it was still annoying. It would be nice if it just noticed that you were typing the beginning of a word again and reset for you.
Overall, well done! It was fun to play.
wordjuggler.jpg
Sorry! That should be corrected now. I forgot to link to the Itch.io.
That's because I forgot to make the Itch.io public. Sorry, should be good now!
@ProdicalSon Sorry to hear that! You should be able to lockpick any red doors, which should let you into the lower room from that first open area.
It sometimes takes a couple tries, as we didn't get the chance to iron out all of the bugs, but I definitely haven't encountered the case where the door just won't open at all.
This escalates really fast! It would be nice if there was another kind of feedback for when you don't hit the closest one (maybe a sound effect when an additional guy spawns).
Excellent use of the theme. It's a little unfortunate that your view is filtered to hell for most of the game, considering your little model house is really nice looking. Adding on more and more got really crazy really fast.
Interesting mechanic, where more light kills you. I didn't notice that at first, and just got as much as possible --- the graphics start to mess up around 10 light or so. Overall, game is pretty polished. The graphic style is nice. The force-based movement is a little weird, but it adds a little more depth to the experience because you have less fine control over your movement. Well done.
Like it! Played the Compo version. The graphics and controls are really smooth and nice to play. I appreciate the fact that you can shoot in non-horizontal directions as you jump.
Quality.
This is really well done. I haven't seen a text adventure with this much replay value on LD before. I couldn't defeat the dark lord...
Good use of theme. Graphics are stunning. Gameplay a bit lacking, but overall a solid experience.
@koala-squad It's an "unfinished" entry, so it doesn't affect rankings for Compo or Jam. Rate away!
Solid submission. Like other's have said, the movement could be smoother, but it looks, sounds, and plays really nice for a game made in a weekend. I think I ended up glitching it out though, because my second playthrough I just started out with about 60k money.
Ahhh! Thought I just lost and somehow score wasn't reset. That makes more sense!
Good amount/quality of graphics for a compo game! Polish is impressive too... interface/sound was on point. Appreciate how many of the sounds were made by your mouth.
Can tell you were really hoping for "dying planet" or "evolve" as a theme ;)
@handle @swini @bovandenberg Thanks for the feedback everyone!
@M8rix I've historically not had games with great "feel" so that was something I really prioritized this time around. Glad it shows!
@stephen-coley What can I say --- milk is the beverage of the gods.
@adrisj7 Thanks! You can definitely get a lot of points in one go by collecting 7 milk and just letting the arena fill up before firing; but you miss out on points in the meantime. The arena/landscape was one of the more fun things to draw, in addition to the milk animation. Glad you liked it!
@swordfish There are only two surfaces for the background; the arena and the sky/mountains. The paralax bit on that I hard-coded at the last minute because I thought it would be cool haha.
The particles, spritesheet handler, and camerawork (at least zooming and panning) are from a [set of pygame tools](https://github.com/jeremycryan/pyracy) I wrote and made public about a week before the event --- might want to check that out if you work in pygame. I'm using about four different PID controllers in this game, haha.
At some point I want to add something to handle generic "game objects", and maybe things like layers/parallax. Maybe in the weeks before LD43.
Don't have time to look at your game now, but I'll check it out this evening!
@BlueBlu Thanks, means a lot --- there's some pretty stiff competition ;)
@Lerc @Diablo Yeah, I ran out of time a bit for the "end game" situation; I was considering a mechanic where you could hit rocks three times, without milk, to break through; or a mechanic where you could extend your tongue to capture milk that within a square or two.
Alas, I prioritized audio, title screen, and figuring out how the hell to make an executable from python.
Thanks for the feedback though, definitely things to prioritize higher for LD43 and beyond!
@diablo Yep! Pyinstaller works okay, it's just I always forget how best to correctly deal with assets and fonts.
I've used it for three compos to date but it still inevitably takes me an hour or more to get to a final build.
@saoi-games Thank you! Sorry I couldn't catch the stream, but thanks for your comments!
@ursagames Thanks for the playthrough, lots of good comments! Sorry I wasn't on the stream when you got to mine!
@jupiter-hadley Awesome! Thanks for the play and feedback!
Nice game for a weekend's work! The combination of enemies was interesting --- the blue one stopped the "camp in a corner strategy" while the pink one made you really deliberate about which direction you moved to. Would be interesting to see an implementation with multiple levels of increasing difficulty.
Awesome game!
Seems pretty highly dependent on where the random points spawn... first run they were in really inconvenient spots, game two (screenshot attached) they were practically right next to each other.
Pretty good level of polish for compo game, would have liked to see sfx and maybe more usability/feedback stuff but overall strong. This would be awesome to see at larger scale with more tile types.
Capture.JPG
Highest rank on mood... I know you didn't make a lot of the graphics and audio, but the ones you picked really helped establish the game's feel. It's interesting that there isn't really a win or lose... just going up or going down. Nice work for 72 hours.
I like the mechanic! Took me a play or two to understand what I was supposed to do, and then that I could move toward the front if I'm not being pushed.
Appreciate the music and programmer art :) nice game for 48 hours.
Every time I press space, game crashes! I'll come back and rate you if you figure out what's wrong --- running Windows 1709.
Nice entry! Strong implementation of the theme, a real "oof" moment when I got the bluescreen. Probably not the best thing to play with trackpad...
Graphics and sound were good given the 48-hour limit.
Audio is nice, I liked the windows bootup remix. The collisions on the bullets could have been a little more forgiving; I found myself missing a lot of the time when I thought I would hit the enemy. Additionally, I'm not sure what triggers the end condition --- I just found myself at the blue screen kind of arbitrarily. Were there too many viruses on screen? Did I run out of time? Etc.
Solid game, I enjoyed playing it.
Awesome use of the theme! Main mechanic is brilliant, bombs add another level of strategy. Overall "feel" is really strong (wish you hadn't opted out of mood). Music works, but is pretty repetetive.
Really well designed! Graphics are simple, but there are a bunch of enemy types and all of the mechanics seem very well-thought out. Well done for a game made over a weekend.
Nice little game --- I like the variety in game types. I apparently would make an awful pizza maker. Room to improve on graphics and audio, but overall solid work for a weekend!
Really solid submission! Audio in particular was strong; I liked the music and the "warning" clip in particular. Controls and camerawork were pretty smooth, although the game got repetitive after a time. Nice job for 48 hours!
Really impressed by amount of content/mechanics for a compo game.
When I first saw the spiders, and they started pulling the screen in, I sorta flipped out. Excellent use of the theme for a mechanic, terrifying holding off of the inevitable.
Got a little easier at very small sizes, since you could pretty much just shoot in one spot. Well done for a weekend's work.
@M-1 @pov I submitted an issue to the LDJam Github.
https://github.com/ludumdare/ludumdare/issues/1761
I'm actually really impressed with this one! You do a surprising amount graphically, considering you only have 144 pixels to work with. The health bar and text scrolling are particularly well-designed. For a game like this, and especially at this resolution, I think you could have used a little more contrast against the background --- it was sometimes a bit difficult to tell in an instant what was background and what was me or enemy. Maybe lighter values overall for background, or light characters on a dark background?
Way to take a pretty worn-out genre and make it fresh and interesting. Good work.
Concept was fun! Art style is kind of refreshing and unique. Title is on point. Fair amount of levels too --- room to improve on some of the polish/hitboxes
No rate for audio because I don't have headphones at the moment, might come back for that later!
@jonahsenzel Came back for you, friendo! Particularly like the walking sound :)
Totally relate on the "didn't have time during this jam" ... always features/fixes you don't get to. I had a list of like 20 items for the last day, of which I got to about 5.
Good luck with the rest of rating!
I think there's a bug in the website --- won't let me rate 6 on graphics
Simple concept, pretty good execution. Could use some sfx and some polish, but not bad for a game made in 48 hours!
Nice little game of space golf with human bodies. Good level progression, got pretty hard after a while. Interesting mechanic to have to land on a wall to jump off.
Not able to run... UnityPlayer.dll not found. Mention me once it's up so I can try it!
**Awesome game.** Graphics were pretty, cohesive, and clear --- to be expected with three artists on the team :)
**Good use of "flare" effects**: particles, camera shakes, and other user input reinforcement.
I **wasn't super fond of keypress delay**... I somehow ended up simultaneously wishing the "lockout period" between inputs was shorter (when I knew what I was doing and hitting keys faster than it would register) and longer (when I would accidentally trigger the keypress multiple times and lose the level). I found myself "solving" a level, and then spending an extra run or two "executing" the level, which is a little annoying as a player. Maybe you can queue keypresses, and execute each after the animation, so none get missed?
**Audio and music were good** for a game jam. I liked the "reset" noise; it fit nicely with the music at any point in the track.
Gameplay-wise, you introduced and developed an **impressive array of obstacles** and interactions. When I first opened the game, I thought "okay, I've played enough GBA Pokemon games to know where this is going". However, it quickly moved past the more cliche crumbly-floor and pushy-block mechanics (I especially liked jumps as a resource, really making you plan out your route... good design). There were also just an **impressive number of levels,** and I didn't think any mechanic was really under-developed by the end.
Well done! High marks.
**Hello, princess. My name is protagonist. I have a gift for you.**
"Um, that's a key."
**Yes. It is for you. Wed me.**
"No."
Neat game! Pixel art is pretty simple, but you have lots of little details (lightning, flowers, different platform types and hazard types). You use a lot of dithering, and it looks nice, particularly on sky and geysers.
The story is nice, and I appreciated the parts where you had to do extra platforming to collect the story elements.
Well done, especially for Compo!
Cool concept. The graphics are pretty minimal but look nice; I liked the sword slash animation. The hit box for my attack was consistently smaller than I expected.
Sacrificing system is cool, although I ended up sacrificing my weapon several rounds in a row, and sometimes just ended up with a better weapon.
I could see this becoming a really neat game with more enemy types/waves and adding more complexity to combat. Well done for 72 hours!
Solid entry! Not going to lie, I tried to drop Archibald off the balloon toward the end. Not your intended solution, it would seem.
Graphics and music were minimalistic, but got the job done.
That first "Day 1" screenshot looks all too familiar :)
Neat entry. I like the visuals and the main mechanic. The puzzles were an appropriate difficulty.
Dragging wasn't working for me consistently in Chrome; switched over to Edge and worked fine :)
The game is really solid, but the art is incredible. There's so much work for a jam game, and the detail in the background or the President's animations really add to it.
Atmosphere and music are incredible. Fantastic work for three days. Puzzles were a good use of the theme, in addition to the overall goal/story.
Graphics are stunning, although it's a little unclear what was done during the jam. I'm assuming most of the textures/models were premade? Or did you make any of them during the 72 hours?
Great work!
Nice entry! The main mechanic is interesting --- you slowly get stronger, but have to sacrifice the stats you've built up to improve your score.
It took me a while to realize the correlation between (for instance) +Damage and the hand icon. It would be useful if the symbols in the HUD were labeled with stat.
The graphics are pretty solid, I particularly liked the main character and the interface elements.
@Bartosz Thanks for the feedback!
Yes, the music and graphics are mine, made for the 48-hour compo. Whoops on folder name --- I forgot which event number it was, haha.
@watdowtal Thanks! It's correct that you're not supposed to dash through walls, although it somehow slipped through my debugging.
If you're interested in pygame, I have some tools to handle sprites and camerawork you can feel free to use for future events! They're linked in my bio.
@jorgegamedev Thanks so much! All of the feedback is super appreciated, especially coming from you and your team.
I definitely had a lot of ideas for levels, particularly involving multiple altars, more complex puzzles, and ways to move without using movement keys (e.g. teleporters or conveyor belts) to add depth to the puzzles. Unfortunately, time is not on your side for the Compo, so I had to cut some corners to get the core gameplay as strong as I could in 48 hours.
Thanks for playing!
@Matoux42 Спасибо :smiley:
I like working in Pygame, because it's low-level without having to worry about weird graphics things. However, it sure is a pain to get into an executable, and you really have to worry about performance.
@thob Oh no! What version of Windows are you on? I'm using a kind of jank means of getting Python into an executable, so I'm still not sure what kind of limitations there are.
I've sometimes seen people have problems literally with the name of the file --- renaming ```.Game.exe``` to ```Game.exe``` may or may not help.
Solid game! The bosses were pretty varied and interesting to fight, and the sacrifice mechanic was a good interpretation of the theme.
I was having a little bit of trouble with the movement; I think some combination of attacking while switching direction makes gets you "stuck" running one direction. It usually didn't matter, but sometimes cost me a few HP when fighting a boss.
I have lost the ability to sleep. My family left me. I lost my job.
No worries, I'm caught up on my shopping and chores, and I'm still 5% happy.
I love the art and animation for this! It plays very smoothly, and the main mechanic and overall visual is super strong. Great submission.
Incredible, like your past entries. Consistent and pretty graphics, plus just incredible amount of content and visual features... down to the menus, options for enabling sound, and different sprites for citizens. Incredible level of polish.
Nice submission! The sacrificing mechanic works well, and it's interesting that you have to play the same level over and over again with fewer and fewer powers.
I don't know if there's supposed to be a "correct order" to sacrifice abilities in, but I ended up with just arrows at the end, and couldn't find a way to the exit until I phased through the corner of a wall (probably not intended solution).
Great job for two people in 72 hours.
Nice submission! I'm getting a lot of Super Hot vibes. It's really satisfying to pull off cool maneuvers, and the camera slowdown really adds a lot.
I did notice that you could heal off of dead enemies, which got useful on the harder levels. :)
Neat game! I had a little trouble getting used to the hit boxes, and had a few spots I thought I should have been hit (or thought I shouldn't have been hit!).
Graphics and audio are simple, but get the job done. I liked the little intro sequence, although it went on a little bit long.
My highest run was 10 coins :)
This game is an artistic masterpiece. The narrative has so much depth, and I can sympathize with Odie's struggles on a fundamental level. Also, that is one difficult walk home.
Too real. Never have enough time for debugging and polish.
@darylsteak It was fun, haha. I just relate too strongly to the guy in the game. I always run out of time and don't get enough sleep.
Points for realism!
Funny concept! It got easy after a while, since the only lose condition is killing a prince. It would probably be more fun with a little bit of time pressure.
Graphics and audio are pretty simple, but add a lot to the hilarity of the game. I appreciate the cannon mechanic.
This game's hilarious. I wish there was a bit more player choice; the characters don't seem to really behave that differently other than speed, etc.
The combat system was really interesting! It took a little getting used to, but the "chess platformer" mechanic was pretty well executed and developed.
The art style is pretty minimalistic, but visually consistent. You added a little extra character to each of the chess pieces that suited their attacks and their moves in real chess.
Nice entry!
Awesome game! Lots of little game feel elements --- slowdown, shake, good sfx --- that really contribute to the experience. Also just really fun.
Great submission! Lots of little "game feel" details, like the camera shake and enemy knockback. Graphics are nice; particularly like the main character and explosion animations.
Biggest area for improvement for me is probably the UI; game over and game win screens could be a bit nicer. That being said, time is always tight in game jams, and these are always the last things I get around to doing...
Well done for team of two in 72 hours!
Hilarious concept. It was sometimes a bit hard to tell where the bullets were depth-wise, just because of the perspective. Otherwise, visuals were great. Memorable use of the theme. Well done!
Nice entry, especially for compo! The sacrificing mechanic worked really well with the theme, and was really rewarding graphically. I can see lots of potential levels around it, especially since you can't use your sword while carrying a lamb.
Sound effects added to the game, although there were definitely certain places where more would have helped (e.g. attack/kill enemy effect). Obviously Compo is tight for time, and the game otherwise seems to be scoped really well.
Nice entry!
The art for this is amazing! I could tell you ran out of time to implement a lot of gameplay elements, but it was still amusing to run around and shoot the monsters.
Nice work for your first time using unity, looking forward to seeing what you make in future jams!
Neat game! There are still a few bugs; the movement is a bit weird, and unselecting features in the main menu doesn't refund the points under certain circumstances.
Art is great, especially background and bullet animation. I'm guessing you ran out of time to hit all the features and graphics you were hoping to, but really strong as a compo entry.
Well done!
Solid game!
Graphics and sound effects are minimalist, but work for the game. The main mechanic is solid, and you have some pretty good levels and puzzles built around it.
The physics were a little weird at times, but sometimes that added to the experience :)
Great use of theme! Definitely "no-legs" mode was easier than the other two for me. The game is definitely pretty difficult with short range and pretty fast enemies.
Especially good in mood, theme, and audio.
Nice game! The detail with item descriptions and dialogue variation was nice. It would be nice if the text didn't cover the platforms when a customer was speaking, but other than that it's super smooth and polished. Great work for 72 hours.
Got all four gems!
Nice map, it was surprisingly large, interesting, and connected for a compo game. I liked how upgrades were required to explore new areas.
It was easy to get disoriented and forget which direction the shop was; a map, indicator, or other extra piece might have helped with that.
Nice submission!
Beat the demon altar, but got the villagers killed ... rip.
Combat was pretty nice once I got used to the sword range (it's longer than it looks from the animation). Blocking was useful, but I think I sometimes had to click it multiple times to register.
Atmosphere is great. War drums / heartbeat that got louder as you get deeper? Hell yeah.
Nice entry, especially for compo!
Nice Compo submission!
The game is pretty simple, but it's clean and well-executed. I particularly like the PID on the little spaceship character (the game could, of course, mechanically work the same without the ship, but it adds a lot graphically and thematically). And the fact the ship persists into the menu.
Sound effects are simple but effective. They got a bit repetitive; having music behind them might have helped, but hey, it's a game jam and you don't have time for everything.
One of your strongest points was probably the polish of the visuals and the UI. The pixel art was pretty simple, but everything flowed nicely and it felt good to play overall.
---------------------
Side note, I read [your post on Imposter Syndrome](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/delta-fighter/imposter-syndrome) and have to say that I sympathize heavily. Especially in an environment where everyone is constantly rating and comparing games, it can be intimidating to compare yourself to all of the best submissions on the site.
I try to focus on a couple categories every event and see how good I can get those, then change focus for next event. The Compo usually has around 1000 entries, and maybe 500 of them end up with ratings at the end. Aiming for top 250 in a category means you did than average. Aiming for top 100 means you did really well. More importantly, seeing these numbers go down over the course of several events means you're learning and improving.
Hope you had a fun Ludum Dare, and hope to see you around for future events. Cheers!
First thing I did was say "no" to giving my life for kid, rip Ollo.
On restarting, played through. The old Gameboy aesthetic is nice, and paying in lives was a fun story element. Also, I have no idea how that child survived this long in the first place.
Nice job for compo!
Neat game. Enemy movement took some getting used to, but there's a good variety of enemy attacks and movement patterns. It would be nice to have a "damage" animation on the enemies, so you can tell your attack lands. Nice job for 72 hours.
Audio is top notch. Narrative is deeply engaging. I sympathize strongly with the need to hurl cats at high speeds into their enclosure while avoiding small children in hats.
Pros: - Music and SFX were nice - Different weapons felt different and resulted in different strategies - Novel interpretation of theme
Cons - Enemies persisted a bit after "death," which made it hard to tell who was still alive or not - The game is fairly slow to increase in difficulty - Some of the collisions/hitboxes felt a little weird, maybe just because people are vertical even though it plays like it's top-down
Overall, nice game! There are always a lot of arrow-keys-and-mouse shooters in LD, but this one was pretty thematic.
@tudvari Wow, thanks for the kind words! Wasn't sure how many people would play all the way through.
Originally wanted to make actual choices in the real world (e.g. sell car or refinance house), but I ran out of time in the jam so just had things get slowly darker.
@ursagames Thanks for playing!
Sorry I wasn't on when you got to my game, but I looked back and watched the video. Glad to hear you liked the art and music!
Interesting game! Combination of top-down shooter and investing worked oddly well.
Maybe my one gripe is that the player character was rather large and oddly shaped, which made it difficult to avoid the enemies. That being said, that was probably deliberate, and definitely added to the chaos.
Audio and graphics were simple but effective. Nice entry for compo!
Excellent game! I particularly like the graphics and movement.
On Chrome, I got a weird behavior where I would shudder for about a second upon eating a mosquito --- don't know whether this is different on other browsers.
Tongue grappling is amazing.
Neat game. I ended up breaking something, because at one point I had -3 sweat, 100k followers, and the Feed would crash immediately every time I tried to open it...
I like the flow of researching trends, buying parts, assembling creatures, and putting them in the studio. I felt invested in my misshapen blobs of octopus flesh.
Well done for 72 hours.
Love the art style, especially the shopkeep. Combat is pretty straightforward, but you have a variety of upgrades and items. Nice job for 72 hours!
Neat game!
The card mechanics were pretty nice, and it felt like there were a few resources to balance (health, enemy health, cards in hand, shields). It did seem to feel like the right thing to do was always to just play everything in your hand, so maybe the health cost could be higher, or get higher the more spells you pay in a turn.
The graphics and audio you selected worked nicely with the game. I could see the experience improved by other sound effects or little animations on damage or playing cards.
Nice submission!
Art was beautiful, especially the beginning area. The combat was a little bit clunky, but it worked. The idea of dying, then collecting souls to recover your body and get extra power is really neat.
Would have been amazing with some music and SFX, but hey, 48 hours is super short. Great entry.
Nice game! It was a little hard to distinguish enemies from doors at times (with everything being rectangles, that's somewhat inevitable). It might be clearer to have all doors be a very distinct color, like bright blue or green, rather than a brown that is similar to one of the enemy colors.
Made it to the boss, but couldn't defeat it :(
Nice game! Graphics are pretty simple but nice, and the mechanic of attacks tied to lives is pretty interesting. The level layout was a little confusing to me, but that was probably a design choice so you're forced to explore your way to the boss room.
Nice work for 72 hours.
Neat game. But man, am I bad at rock-paper-scissors.
Interface was intuitive. Music and mood were nice. Burning hellscape of the tormented in the background was a nice touch.
Would have been interesting to somehow infuse some overarching story over the course of a number of rounds, but I don't really know how that would work, and this is already a pretty big scope for 48 hours. Nice submission.
Really solid entry! The mechanic is engaging and the levels are really well put-together. Difficult but not punishing.
It was lagging really bad on my laptop (Ubuntu, Firefox), but I tried it on my roommate's same-model laptop (Windows, Chrome) and it ran super smoothly.
Music is nice.
I got unwrapped. Best game about a sentient bag of raisins I've ever played in my life.
Nice entry! Combat system is really interesting, and the story makes good use of the theme.
The music, and the battle music in particular, is really nice.
Great job for a Compo entry!
Incredible entry --- just in terms of delivering a narrative, probably the best I've ever seen for Ludum Dare. The graphics were top notch, the animations were smooth, and the cut-scenes were amazing. The writing was great; the character was defined very well, and his actions and motivations were clear.
On top of that, great tutorial and in-game graphics and animations. The gameplay was pretty simple, but varied, and the landing-on-all-fours mechanic was satisfying when you got the timing right.
Nice compo entry! Balance between HP and offense made for some interesting optimizations. It was sometimes hard to tell when you killed enemies successfully (to my knowledge, they never "died," just started running away?). Biggest room for improvement in audio and graphics, but hey, Compo is only 48 hours.
Well done.
Neat little game for a compo submission!
I read through the spell descriptions on the page, but it's still a lot to think about while it's going on. Some kind of visual indicator or animation to differentiate the spells might make it more intuitive.
I liked the pixel characters! The audio got a bit repetitive after a while.
(I just want solitude)
Me too, small blue-haired reaper of darkness. Me too.
-------------------------------------
Impressive amount of content/levels for a game jam. So many secrets, plus a minigame, story, and NPCs to boot. Excellent work for two people and 72 hours!
Awesome for a jam game! I don't think I've see a Twitch plays as an entry before.
It would be cool if there were more ways to interact.
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Nice entry!
The platforming from falling coins was a really neat mechanic, and it felt really good when you got a rhythm going. It felt pretty varied with random positioning and coin size, and while your health lowers faster the longer you spend in game, it feels pretty fair.
Graphics are clean. Audio is simple but works fine. My biggest gripe is probably that the music doesn't loop.
Solid entry --- can't go wrong with a bullet hell (subtle plug for my game)!
The autofire-pattern-building mechanic is really cool, although I feel like I didn't make all that many useful decisions about where things appeared in my attack pattern. It would have been cool if there were, say, bullets that did extra damage to poisoned enemies, so there was an incentive to build your pattern a particular way.
The sound design was nice, especially the voice acting at the beginning. I think some of the sound effects were a little more grating than others (the destroy sound for the ice bullet was particularly louder than the others and got a tad annoying).
I was impressed at the number and variety of enemies. I don't even think I got to anything (I stopped after the slime boss) but there were already a lot of different enemies. I think there probably could have been a little more variety to the upgrades, seeing as I maxed out my build pretty early, but the number of items you had was already impressive for a game jam.
I think the player bullet speed could be a bit higher (if you haven't already seen "The Art of Screenshake," I'd *highly* recommend searching it on YouTube).
Overall, well done!
@thevideogamester Thanks for the play! I was going to add a tutorial, but time constraints are obviously very tight for Compo.
@brandon-js-lea Thanks for the feedback! I agree that it feels a little bad that the enemies tend to bunch up, and given more time I definitely would have made more variations to that. **There is a "boss" on Wave 5** whose movement is a little more varied ;)
I was obviously not ready to be a parent.
Nice entry, cute graphics. A bit grindy, but so were a lot of games this event.
Neat little demo, graphics are neat. Would be interesting to see how a more developed version looks!
Nice entry! Only one HP and tight hitboxes are a little punishing, but the gameplay itself is solid. The animations are particularly nice. Is there a reason you opted out of Graphics?
Well done!
@sam-awk All good, just gave you my rating. Good luck for the rest of rating season!
Interesting take on the theme; game mechanics (building, shooting, infinite enemies) worked well together. The lighting and effects are nice, although it was occasionally hard to see bullets or units on the white background. Sound effects got a little repetitive.
Overall nice entry!
Interesting entry! I didn't realize at first that the behavior of the lines was determined by certain characteristics (like whether it's curvy or straight or forms a loop), but it was fun to mess around with and explore.
Audio was nice, but got a little bit laggy if I made too many little dots...
Overall, nice experience. You don't see a whole lot of simulator/sensory art games for LD.
gjsc1.png
Nice entry! Combination of story narration and actual gameplay is a nice touch, especially when things are changing as you read.
Combat could be a little smoother, but overall it felt pretty fair. Lord Gronthulus was difficult but beatable.
*Time to forsake the shackles of free market capitalism in favor of a cyborg utopia where it rains lasers.*
Nice entry! I think the shoot and punch upgrades are a lot stronger than the block, but overall the game was fun and pretty polished.
Excellent entry! Pixel art is great, particularly the backgrounds and effects. The zooms and freezes and transitions are incredible for a 48-hour jam. Well done.
Look out --- somebody else might try to steal this game idea.
Nice entry!
Great compo entry! The UI and little animations are particularly nice. There isn't a whole lot of variation with the cards that currently exist, so the gameplay got a little stale after a while, but the concept was really neat and I could see it becoming a full game with a little further development.
Nice entry! Some first impressions:
**Good stuff** - Pixel art is cute; particularly like main character and the ground tiles - Variety of items, characters, and some dialogue - Basic concept of exploring world, trading items around, and bringing them home to maybe earn the appreciation of your dad is a good take on the theme. I really like the item frame mechanic in particular; it reminds me of a grandmother pinning your drawings up on the refrigerator.
**Could use work** - Audio is a bit grating, especially since there are few sound effects other than the one you get when you hit space. It's also a little bit odd that this happens even when you don't interact with an object successfully; I would expect maybe a quieter, lower beep indicating that there's nothing to interact with. In general, it's useful to remember that audio isn't just to make your ears useful during gameplay, it also gives the player some feedback on what they're doing in the world and in the interface. - I think the design of the world could be a little more optimal for getting the player to learn how the mechanics work. Upon loading the game, my first thought was 'hey, a carrot, I'll go give that to my dad' before realizing that made it impossible to make any further progress. I'm not sure how you would resolve this (maybe just by making items removable from item frames), but it felt a little bad to have to go through the exposition again.
**Thanks for making this game, and good luck for the (brief) rest of rating season!**
Neat game, I like the line of sight effect. Could be improved with some music and sound effects, but hey, you made it in 48 hours.
Nice entry! Platformer where you make the platforms is a really interesting take on the theme, and the execution was great as well. Music is nice and atmospheric.
saloon.png
Nice game! Pixel art is very charming, had a variety of towers and enemy types. Saloon and Joplin vibes helped establish the mood.
If you haven't already, I'd highly advise watching 'The Art of Screenshake' on YouTube. The pixel art is great, but I think there are opportunities to add some juice and improve game feel. :smiley:
unlock_sc.png
Whew! That escalated quickly.
Nice concept, nice execution. It felt good to unlock things, particularly the visual ones (sprites, background).
@mildmelon That was my first try, but it was a bit challenging! I sort of had to cheese the enemies near the end (get them bunched up, then hit a bunch at once and back off), and almost died before I got the health regeneration unlock.
Good luck for the rest of the rating session!
Nice entry! Movement and explosions are really nice --- you must have spent a lot of time on the character controller. Dialogue, shadows, and music add a lot to the mood.
It would have been cool to see more levels where you had to chain explosions to reach the goal.
Nice entry, interesting mix of resources and economy. It took me two plays to get how it works, got 725 points on my third round.
Nice Canon in D changes in the music.
Awesome entry! I appreciate the technobabble, although I feel like I'm really unqualified to be plorking fweezers.
Very 'Canon in D' vibes from the music, fits the waiting room atmosphere nicely.
Solid game. Pixel art is gorgeous, controls are tight, etc, etc.
My only quibble is for slightly more generous "noob pixels"... e.g. making the hit box of your character slightly smaller when getting damaged. There were a few times I barely grazed the obstacles and was sad to not be within the threshold.
Nice entry! Platformer level designer mechanic was a nice interpretation of the theme, and graphics and voice acting are nice.
I got a few crashes on the HTML5 build, but I was able to get a good amount of gameplay in between.
gargolite.png
Nice game! I love the art, animation, and unique combat style. I think I played for long enough that I felt like I could keep going indefinitely, partly because it was easy to build up layers of walls and funnel all the enemies into one space to take them out.
I would be really interested in playing an updated/released version of this game! It would also be interesting to have additional scoring mechanics --- maybe enclosing a larger area gives you a gem multiplier.
Great entry!
It's a tad jank, but it has charm. :crab:
It took a while to get used to the movement, but I guess I just wasn't CRAB enough to fully immerse. Once I completely embodied the spirit of CRUSTACEAN, I was able to hone my exoskeleton and survive for 45 seconds.
Good luck for the rest of rating season, and stay crabby.
Nice game! It took me a little while to get used to the controls, but it was a good time once I got the hang of it.
Music is also really nice.
gjsc1.png
Nice entry!
Not a whole lot to it, but the execution was really good. The graphics are nice, and the music layering and building as you go adds a lot.
Neat entry. Very good job introducing the mechanics in the tutorial to get the player used to them before the main game.
The combat was a bit simple; it would have been nice if there was more variety in enemies and you had a larger range of upgrades to purchase that affected how you fight (e.g. range on your sword). But of course 48 hours isn't a ton of time to add all this stuff in.
Neat little game! Super simple, but very polished. Great balance of being difficult (requiring precise timing) and forgiving (you can just go around the loop again). The level progression is also quite good, with a new mechanic added every few levels to keep it fresh.
The music got a little repetitive after a while, but hey, it's a game jam.
Solid entry!
Came here from your LD46 entry! Awesome entry this time around as well.
Compelling main mechanic, lore, boss fight, and graphics and audio! You did an impressive amount of work for the Compo.
I will say that the hula hoop didn't behave as predictably as I may have liked, making it sometimes a little clunky to use, but I guess the whole point is how unconventional of an Ultimate Weapon(tm) it is.
Solid entry!
Nice entry! The art is really nice, particularly the character illustration. It took a while to figure out how the mechanics work and how that tied into the UI, but the concept is nice!
I did run into a few bugs, notably that the level occasionally freezes, and you have to restart level from the menu. The stakes also seemed to behave inconsistently, even when I had enough rope.
Music is nice and bouncy... Pokemon vibes.
Great work for 72 hours!
Unique take on the theme, and a super charming character and art style!
Some of the hitboxes and such seemed a little bit off, and I think I may have gotten one snake loop stuck in a state where it was "captured" but was still visible.
The gameplay is a bit slow, although substantially better once I actually read the instructions and started using the sprint button!
Great job, especially for Compo. There's an impressive amount of assets and great of attention to detail (like the snake's occasional idle animations --- looking around nervously and adjusting feet).
I like it! The mechanic is really simple, but the level progression is really good and you manage to keep it fresh without introducing a million new mechanics. Graphics were nice and clean (particularly liked the target spinning animation). I do wish the bubble transitions were a little faster... especially when you immediately die from your own foolishness in 2 seconds, it would be nice to be able to jump back in immediately.
Solid entry!
Nice entry! I'm impressed at the scale of the world, and there's tons of attention to detail, with various monuments, little monsters hidden away, and scenery.
The music was nice, but the loop was short enough it got a little repetitive after a while.
I was unfortunately couldn't figure out how to get to the higher level, which is sad because I was looking forward to storming DonutCorp.
Great work for 72 hours!
Gave 'er another play, and was not disappointed! Once again great job creating such an expansive playing area in 72 hours.
I'm so excited to see you guys back in Ludum Dare! I always look forward to playing your entries, but it's been over a year since the last one.
As always, @moski's art was clean and incredible. There are an impressive number of enemy, background, and player illustrations, and everything is adorable and has a lot of character.
Audio is also on point (I chuckled at the licking noises when you hit an enemy with the lollipop).
Gameplay-wise, I think the concept was pretty neat, and it was very satisfying to batter a bunch of enemies with various bludgeons. I was a bit confused when and why the weapon would actually come out, though --- it seemed like it only did when the player gets hurt, which seems like an odd design choice. I will say that the difficulty seemed a bit easy, but that's up to personal preference.
Great job, guys!
Awesome entry, and a large number of enemy types, backgrounds, and animations! The gameplay is really straightforward and satisfying, and there's lots of "juice" in the UI elements that bounce to the beat and the various squash and stretch going on in the attacks.
Is this a one-person team, or is there just one Ludum Dare account? Because this would be a truly impressive solo work for 72 hours.
Music is nice and catchy.
Great entry!
@overlook-studios Ah, makes more sense! Still a fantastic entry, one of my favorites so far.
Really neat concept! The hourglass mechanic was very cool thematically and has great puzzle potential.
I think the lowest-hanging fruit for improvement would be to speed up some of the transitions a bit; the hourglass flipping took several seconds, which got a bit tiring when you have to watch it several times per level.
The music was nice and fit the rest of the game well.
Nice work for 72 hours!
Very interesting take on "Stuck in a Loop." The graphics were charming, and the music was nice without being too distracting. I went through 1500 cats and nearly 15 minutes of life that I'll never get back.
Well done for 72 hours!
(Also, is the music from some royalty-free site? It looks like you've opted out of Audio, but I don't see a source or anything)
Really good entry! The art style is really nice, and there's an impressive amount of detail in the background. The the audio played well with the gameplay and visuals to produce the chilling atmosphere. There were a few really spooky moments that took me for a "loop."
> Daddy...?
Great work --- especially with such a large team I know it can be difficult to create a cohesive experience, but you guys did a great job.
I actually had a tremendous amount of fun with this one. The premise, controls, and intense music are all just ridiculous enough in combination to make a great experience!
I'm generally not one for button-mashing games, but this one is thematically appropriate, so I'll give it a pass. My fingers hurt after a while though.
Just a heads up that **you are required to opt out of Graphics and Audio** per the Jam [rules](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules) since you used outside assets:
> You’re free to use 3rd party Artwork/Music/Audio assets, or assets you previously created, but we ask that you OPT-OUT of the respected voting categories (Graphics, Audio). You can opt-out of a voting category when you submit your game.
@tenshi42 Unfortunately, yes. :slight_frown: It feels bad, but there's a large number of Jam games that make everything from scratch, and it's not completely fair to them to be compared to somebody who only made some assets.
You can still opt out by editing the game (pencil icon) and checking the right boxes.
Edit: oh, maybe not, I just checked with my game. They must have changed in the last couple events.
Nice entry! It's a neat concept, and the minimalist graphics and sound work well for it. The trailing arrows are a really nice visual effect.
I agree with the above comment that it would be nice to have the keys be a little more consistent when respawning. You could also afford to add some "juice" like particle or camera effects(Google *The Art of Screenshake* for an amazing game design talk).
Well done for 48 hours!
Solid entry! It took me a few tries before I realized you could shoot rockets (I must have tried level 3 ten times haha). The graphics are really clean and the mood is nice, although the hit boxes could be a little tighter (there were a couple times I didn't think I should have died, but alas).
Good work for 48 hours!
Nice entry! Reminds me of the Chrome dinosaur game.
Pixel art was simple, but got the job done. I particularly liked the sliding animation! It was a little bit jarring that different sprites had different pixel sizes (the main character was really "blown up" compared to the fireball and dungeon). A lot of times games will try to keep one consistent pixel size throughout, but not always.
I think the slide felt a lot more responsive than the jump, which was good for the slide. I think it would help to increase the speed of the jump a bit, so you have less situations where you jump too late and still get immolated.
I know you used other people's audio, but the choices you used were good ones and fit the vibe.
Great work for what appears to be your first Ludum Dare, and hope to see you more in the future!
Saw the little opening sequence, and immediately thought of Space Hummus. :smile:
Great animations and character design. The gameplay is really smooth, and it's a good take on the theme. Reminds me of the old flash game Chronotron.
One thing I wish was that there wasn't a limit to your skips; it seemed like a pretty good amount of my time was spent just standing around waiting for 60 seconds to expire.
Another great entry!
@firegamer3 Yeah, definitely a concern. I put "multiplayer" in the thumbnail so I hopefully waste fewer people's time (and maybe attract groups who are looking at games together).
@mikoziq @jonathanfdr Glad to hear you liked it! My wall collision code is certainly quite buggy (there's an Easter egg if you manage to slip outside the play field). Game jam code!
Definitely room for more powerups, terrain types, etc.
@manogugas Glad to hear you enjoyed it!
You can currently speed up the results screen by pressing your input button (one second each time) but that's certainly not apparent from the UI.
**Edit:** somehow misread that as the transition screen ("change" time? No idea). Charge time is good feedback! It's currently set arbitrarily to 1 second, or less with the green powerup.
@nitero I've never seen that game before, but it looks amazing! Definitely see a little bit of resemblance (and may have to wishlist that one).
@jorgegamedev @moski Glad you guys were able to get it to work, and thanks for the feedback! Hope to see you around next event!
*Edit: And that mandible power-up doubles your firing rate! I have snarky names and descriptions like "Slippery Socks" and "Mandible Lubricant" in the code, but didn't get around to implementing tooltips for them!*
I don't quite know what's going on, but now my computer is on fire. Great experience!
Neat little experience! Always fun to see more unconventional game development styles, but I'm glad you got a Windows build up and running. :smile:
Reminded me of [TrickyShot](http://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/trickyshot) which placed a few events back!
Wow, this was... terrifying.
Great level progression, with increasingly complex puzzles. The graphics and audio were great in terms of atmosphere, especially the fast footsteps and then
> *Crunch*
Really solid entry! Reminds me of the old Flash game "Chronotron", which had a similar time-traveling mechanic.
Level progression is good, introducing a new mechanic or approach or limitation (like max number of clones) every few levels. The game stayed fresh.
Art is very nice; I do think music and SFX would have added a lot, but hey, 72 hours isn't very long.
Great work!
Neat little entry! The main mechanic is interesting (reminds me slightly of [12 orbits](http://12orbits.com/)) and has a lot of potential.
The controls seemed a bit finicky, especially right-clicking to swap orbits. A lot of times it would take me multiple tries to get it successfully (maybe there's a threshold that could be a little more forgiving).
I didn't quite understand where the shooting fit into the gameplay, but I liked (visually) the variety of guns and projectile types!
@paul-merkamp Hey! Glad to see you're back after missing LD47! I'll make sure to play your entry as well.
@paul-merkamp Thanks so much for your thorough feedback!
Regarding the graphics, I definitely was trying a new approach for this one, and had some improvements that I ran out of time for (such as adding detail to the curtains and backgrounds, or adding other animated details like a cat in the windowsill).
I definitely agree that the "composition software" effect could be improved, and it's definitely more noticeable with MuseScore than Sibelius! I even considered recording it live from my keyboard, but with this volume of music that wasn't realistic (I did end up doing that for LD47). And if you have any recommendations for a cheap DAW and VST plugins I'm all ears.
Glad to hear that it wasn't devastating to reset to a checkpoint, and that you were able to make it in three tries. I was definitely worried that difficulty would be an issue (and it very well could be for others), as it's definitely tricky to self-playtest rhythm games as someone intimately familiar with the music.
@tjm My bad! Should be fixed now.
@mvasko2 I was considering posting a playthrough video, since difficulty seems to be an issue. I'll ping you if I do!
@tjm I agree that the number keys are a little less than ideal. I chose them because a couple years back I had someone unable to play my game because they had an AZERTY keyboard! This was simpler than adding control customization.
For anyone who wasn't able to finish the story because of my poor gameplay balancing, I've uploaded a full gameplay video so you can hear the music and see the ending. Thanks for the feedback, and I'll make my story-based games less brutal in the future!
@euphelys @mostel @wujood @adam-selker @tom-robson @tjm @mvasko2
@ty_ Are you on the latest version of pygame? You may have to run `pip install pygame --upgrade`.
@blubberquark Thanks for playing! And glad to see my LD46 entry didn't scare you away for good.
Do you have a link to a repository for the packager? I've been looking for alternatives to PyInstaller since Defender decided to universally mark it as dangerous.
The reason I opted for the number keys was a streamer way back in LD38 who had an AZERTY keyboard, completely throwing off my QWERTY-based control scheme. This seemed easier than making it configurable, with time limits and everything, but is there something slicker I could have done with scan codes?
Wow, that was... something!
The overall creative direction was hilarious, and the wacky control scheme added to the effect. That said, I do wish it was a little more forgiving (specifically, easier to move side to side). Occasionally you would get trapped by monsters with no way to realistically get through without taking damage, given your character's slow digging speed.
The art was nice overall, especially Uncle Jack. It might have helped to use a more consistent line thickness (for instance, the enemies look like they were drawn small and blown up, so they have thicker lines).
Nice work for 48 hours!
Nice entry!
The atmosphere and progression are definitely strong points. The first area definitely feels like "ah, I'm setting out on an adventure," and things get colder and more uneasy from there.
The graphics are nice, and you do a good job of distinguishing each area with your color and lighting choices. I like how there are enough tree variations that you don't notice them repeat unless you're really paying attention. I did notice some "seams" between textures in the backgrounds sometimes, especially when the camera was moving, but they were few and far between. The multi-layered background and parallax effect were really nice, especially starting out when the title scrolls away. The protagonist reminded me of [the wood spirits in Princess Mononoke](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-J8A0ofBvk9s%2FVcJZLKENmTI%2FAAAAAAAAAmU%2FNIavIQ8U0WA%2Fs1600%2F0082.jpg&f=1&nofb=1). It may have helped to have smoother animations on him, but it is a game jam and animation really drains time.
One graphical choice that was slightly jarring was the scaled-up light circle in the final scene; the rest of the game has a consistent pixel size, so it was noticeable when that texture was chunkier. The final moment was still very satisfying with the music and the animation.
The music was nice and definitely added to the atmosphere, especially as it grew more mysterious as the game went on. There were a little bit of popping in some places where the music started, stopped, and repeated --- I'd recommend using short fades in and out if you notice this, especially in places you're starting or ending a track in the middle.
The gameplay was pretty basic --- pick up mushrooms to move forward. It was appropriate for a short moody game like this but would obviously get tedious for a longer game.
Great work for 48 hours, and hope to see you around for LD49!
Knocked it out of the park as usual, @moski and @jorgegamedev!
The art is particularly nice on this one, with the space monster host looking disappointed when you miss a question or happy when you get it right. The board is well designed, and you have plenty of side mechanics (cards, coins, combos, teleports) to break up the monotony of rolling dice to move. It felt nice to get stuck in teleport hell and rack up a bunch of coins. The collectible pawns for progression was a fun touch as well, although at first I didn't realize what it was I was buying (I expected the characters to appear floating in space and decorate the board).
There seemed to be a pretty good variety of questions; at least I didn't play long enough to notice any repeat. The specific questions might be a weak point for this game; I noticed a few typos, one factual error (Ben Franklin wasn't a president), and overall there seemed to be a strange mix of very easy questions and very niche ones. It would have been neat to have a choice between a hard or easy question for a category (maybe hard gives more combo), or otherwise turn this variability into a mechanic. It is nice that you plan to implement loading your own questions!
The music was fantastic, and played well with the space trivia show aesthetic. I appreciated the attention to detail with different instrumentation depending on which menu you're in. Well done @zachary-blystone.
Beyond the deep space setting, the "deeper and deeper" theme could have been presented more strongly. Was there a mechanic change with the increasing "depth" meter?
And although it's obviously out of scope for the game jam, it seems like this game would be super fun with a multiplayer mode. Trivia games tend to play better in groups, where you can gloat about how much smarter you are than your friends (or vice versa).
Neat entry! Saw it on stream and came back around to play it myself.
The pseudo-3D really took a while to get used to, but I appreciated the depth lines. It was surprisingly intuitive to use the mouse scroll wheel to aim up and down, and for the most part I had a good idea of where I was relative to the enemies.
That said, the game is pretty darn hard. The limited space to move around coupled with having to quickly interpret the 3D space meant that the farthest I got down was in the 80s ("JARM" in the leaderboard).
A neat mechanic may have been making subs that are farther away from your level appear darker, as an extra way to intuit relative depth. I also would have appreciated a "bullet time" mechanic or extra lives --- but that's mostly because I'm bad.
Some music would have been a nice addition as well!
Regardless, nice work for the jam, especially in a custom language/framework!
Nice entry!
The inspiration from Oregon Trail, etc. definitely comes through. It was nice to be able to solve problems in different ways --- diplomatically, or with weapons, or with bribes.
I did feel like a lot of the game came down to random chance for your encounters. Sometimes, you just never got any opportunity to earn salvage for several turns. Other times, that happens with fuel. I invested almost all my resources in mining, but eventually ran out on jump 26.
The art is great, especially for the spacecraft. The UI is pretty barebones but gets the job done.
A larger set of events would definitely add to the replay value, and maybe other ways to specialize ships that play on different roles in the fleet.
Well done team, especially for what appears to be all of your first Ludum Dare!
Creating an MMO sandbox game for Compo seems like an enormous undertaking! And while the mechanics aren't incredibly complex, it was definitely fun for what it was. The wacky character customization and the multiplayer aspect definitely improved the experience.
The graphics are simple but get the job done. It would have been nice to have some extra "game feel" bits like particle effects or breaking/placing animations for blocks. The audio is a short loop, but managed to not get old very quickly (I played for over an hour, so by the end it was maybe a little tiring).
It might have been nice to have inventories or other ways to improve efficiency when mining, or have multiple stations where you could craft and sell. By the time I played, most of the material had been mined near the shops, so it was more difficult to collect. I imagine this will get worse and worse over time, but probably isn't the end of the world for something the scale of an LD game.
I got a score of 2497! It was a little bit higher than that before I built a ton of ladder to make a floating LD48.
Well done for a Compo entry! Had a blast.
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Your Windows download doesn't seem to be working. I think you forgot to include the data directory in the download; right now it's just the EXE and the crash handler!
Got the same error as @metalfox-dioxymore directly after the boss fight. Nice entry!
The graphics are really simple and one-bit, but they're very clean and do a great job of getting the desired effect across. The boss is particularly nice-looking. The enemies are varied enough that you have to approach each one differently, but they're intuitive enough you don't get surprised by them (other than maybe the first time the boss attacks).
It was neat that you even had a level system, an inventory, and a shop --- I just wish there was more content to be able to really see them in use.
Other than the crash at the end, I did encounter one bug; one of the bats just flew into a corner in the ceiling and wouldn't come down, which meant I couldn't clear the room it was in. This happened in both runs, but didn't prevent you from following the main route.
Simple music would have done a lot to add to the atmosphere!
Nice work for a jam game.
Really solid entry!
The shadows and lighting really brought out the spooky skeleton vibes. I especially liked the bones that get exposed when you dig up a coffin, as well as the shovel animation.
The combat is pretty simple, but gratifying. There are occasional moments that feel bad (like hitting an enemy in a corner, or into a gravestone, where they aren't knocked back and therefore attack you right away), but for the most part it's really satisfying. It would also be nice if there was an animation for getting hurt (like your character flashing briefly).
The sound effects fit the game really well.
I agree that later in the game the difficulty increases pretty steeply, especially since your shovel is the best way to avoid projectiles and it has a cooldown. I got $1132.
Nice entry!
Despite being a game about low-level programming languages, it's remarkably accessible; the on-screen documentation and stack/output information was surprisingly smooth for a 48-hour game. In terms of the IDE, the only thing I would have added would be a debug mode or at least a way to "underclock" to follow execution more easily (although I'm not surprised you didn't have time for it).
The puzzles were well-constructed and force you to tackle them in different ways, between the deep assembly language and the deep deep microcode. The language itself made enough sense, but the additional restrictions --- mostly memory-related --- made you have to think really carefully. It would have been nice to have a couple more ways to interact with memory, like maybe a separate stack for the inputs and general use, or a couple registers to store values. That said, just the stack was technically enough and certainly made the earlier puzzles more interesting.
Performance on Windows wasn't the best, and it took a couple seconds holding down delete to clear a line. I never expect great optimization for a game jam game though.
I still haven't beaten all the puzzles but I'll probably come back to it! Great work and creative use of the theme.
Nice entry!
First of all, this is a hilarious and inspired premise. There are 3500 entries so far for this Ludum Dare and I would be surprised if any of them did anything similar.
The variety of areas is very nice, especially since they all have mechanical differences rather than just being a reskin of the same level. The character jumping in a boat to cross the ocean was unexpected and the animation was great. My only gripe with the graphics is that there were occasional moments where I wasn't sure quite what the hitboxes were supposed to be; but they were generally pretty forgiving. The "LD" in the touchdown zone and jersey number 48 were nice touches.
The music was varied enough that it didn't get stale after playing several times. It would have been neat if the instrumentation changed based on the biome you were in (also PSA --- there's a Musescore 3 now!).
Nice work for 48 hours!
Nice entry! Agree with others that the level introducing ??? was quite difficult, and the rules are a little ambiguous there (do you just have to check up on him every so often? or should you be looking at him any time you're not actively doing anything else?).
One minigame change that would be nice is the one with the joystick and the triangles; there were times I would move the circle, then almost immediately after leaving it takes damage (presumably because a triangle spawned right next to it). Adding some kind of "safe area" around the circle where triangles can't spawn would be nice; that said, the health is pretty forgiving so it never made the difference for me.
Art is pretty simple but gets the job done. And the fact there were so many modules kept the game interesting. Great work for 72 hours!
I think this is the best strategy, at least against the AI:
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Game was fun and funny! Nice work for 72 hours.
Nice entry!
Strong points: - **Art and character design** - The frog looks great! I love the little details like his throat puffing out when he's eaten a radioactive pill. - **Concept** - This was a neat take on the theme and the main mechanic was interesting.
The clearest area for improvement is adding an objective of some sort and communicating it to the player. Am I just trying to survive for as long as possible? Then put a timer in, and have it display the score when you die! That way you know how to get better and can compete with your friends for a higher number.
For a game that largely consists of moving around, avoiding enemies, and collecting things, you definitely want to make sure your movement feels good and consistent. It took quite a while for me to get the hang of the movement, which doesn't feel like a traditional platformer (for instance, your jump is really floaty on the way up, then you fall very fast). There are also interactions with walls, etc. that make it more difficult that I imagine you would have fixed if it wasn't a game jam game.
Overall solid entry! Especially for 72 hours with a small team.
Nice entry! The aesthetic and camera switching was hilarious.
I think having tighter controls and a less "floaty" feeling might help; the purple boxes were a nice mechanic, but it felt like I didn't have enough control of the character to effectively time jumps. It just felt like I was getting lucky or unlucky with what state they were in when I landed.
Thanks everyone for playing!
@paul-merkamp I probably would have gone in a different direction if I had the full 48 hours (and leaned less heavily on the "so bad it's good" feeling). Glad you enjoyed it anyway!
@diego-escalante @human-writes-code The sound was actually me saying "neigh" and pitch shifting it up a lot... but it definitely doesn't sound anything like a horse haha.
@tomssuli You reset with the 'R' key! I just didn't write it anywhere...
Fun entry!
I will say that the difficulty is quite high. I thought I could get away with using a trackpad, and did so for level 1, but definitely needed the mouse for level 2. Level 3 had more to keep track of, but I ended up getting it in one try (after spending twenty minutes on the previous level).
The story is simple and fun. Three worlds of sci-fi/fantasy tropes start up their portals to save all (but one) of their crew. The animation across the top is amusing, although I sometimes wish I could watch it with more than my peripheral vision while I push buttons! And the sheer number of lore drawings you put in is impressive, and while they were obviously made in a hurry to be finished in 48 hours, they get the point across well enough.
I liked the music, and especially the way each story had its own theme that played differently during the gameplay and the game over screen.
Nice work - your games are different every event and it's always a pleasure to play them. Hope to see you again for LD50!
Really creative premise and clean execution!
The visuals, music, and gameplay worked really well in combination. I'm not sure what the little dudes were doing around the edge eying my cursor, but whatever it was, it was working.
Some of the perfect solutions were a bit out there. If you had more time, or a nicer dataset, it would be nice to limit it to, say, the 5000 most-used words for the puzzle generation (but still allow obscure ones as solutions).
I will say that, once I got the hang of the puzzles, it became a bit trivial to solve them. Save all your Hydrogen, divide duplicates and subtract one-offs to get more Hydrogen, then throw your least-wordy elements into the math blender until you have the pieces of a 3-6 letter word (and multiply all your Hydrogen away). It's definitely one of the more innovative word games I've seen for a Ludum Dare though!
Excellent work for 48 hours.
Nice entry! The premise and controls were hilarious (We had similar ideas around "unstable"). I saved all the friends!
Also - was this made in Multimedia/Clickteam Fusion? I recognize the lightning icon.
(and reminder that including source code/engine file is required for Compo!)
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Nice entry!
The premise was really neat, and was a great take on the theme. As the game progresses, it becomes harder and harder to keep the platform stable.
At times it felt like the platform moved unpredictably, and suddenly I'd have to move my entire character with five boxes to the opposite side of the lever to stop it from tilting (even though only 2 or 3 boxes had fallen). I'm not sure if there was some hidden information that threw me off (like different boxes having different weight) or if you're approximating the lever physics for the sake of making it work as a game.
The art and sound are simple but get the point across. I appreciate that you designed the background to have a very prominent horizon since it makes it easier to tell if you're slightly tilted.
Great work for having only a month of experience in your engine, and hope you come back again for LD50!
Hilarious!
I agree with @marvin-chong that the lowest-hanging fruit for improvement would have been sound effects, although unfortunately this is a theme where getting sound effects that would fit (like horse clopping) might be difficult.
The gameplay is fun and hilarious, although it did seem like you could get lucky or find a weird strategy that makes you do better. I found grabbing the tip of the horse's tail and then just spinning as fast as possible can get you 30 points or so if you get lucky.
It might be nice if the hands and feet grabbed as one unit, rather than two, since getting unlucky and having your hands grab when they're spread apart completely cripples your movement/reach until you reposition.
Great visuals and sound for a game jam!
Had a lot of fun with this one! Definitely had the vibes of COD zombies with the boarded windows and various weapons. I loved the goofy theme, variety of equipment, and juice when you blast a teddy bear with your shotgun.
The map was well-designed, and had a lot of different areas to it. I will say that boarding up the windows rarely felt worth it; there were so many entry points for the enemies that applying the board didn't really stop the flow very much. I think the most powerful equipment in the game was by far the razor wire --- it's permanent and lets you stop up the enemy movement at choke points. I had a lot of luck staying in the bedroom and just reinforcing the one area with wire and mines in case they broke through.
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The graphics were really nice, especially the dying animations. The cartoon-y aesthetic did a lot of work, since you were able to add lots of detail to the house like a fireplace and kitchen without having to do detailed modeling and textures, and it looks great.
The audio was pretty simple but worked well. My only quibble is that some of the levels didn't seem even (the shotgun was way quieter than the automatic rifle, for instance, and the turret was very quiet). There were probably a few actions that would have been nice to have sounds for, like placing a turret or when your loadout switches.
Moreover, I'm really impressed that the game is so cohesive with such a big team! It seemed like everyone was really on the same page and had the same vision for the final game.
It would have been nice to have an in-game tutorial, but I also recognize they're one of the most time consuming things to make and often some of the lowest priorities.
I drew Mr. Bear and added him to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this!
I had a lot of fun with this one! I love the illustrations, especially the little village with the buildings to upgrade. I think the player character blends in a little bit with the background, but the enemies are the most important things to see and they're very visible. Some animations for getting hit and dying, even basic particle effects, could go a long way in making your shots feel impactful (highly recommend watching "The Art of Screenshake" talk on YouTube if you have never seen it!).
The upgrades were fun and varied. The buildings even looked different as you upgraded them! I also like the way the camera shifted from the battlefield to the village between rounds.
From a gameplay perspective, I have two bits of feedback: - In my experience, it's almost never a good idea to limit player impact behind how fast you can mash a button. This is something that varies wildly between players and can hurt physically to do, especially if you don't get any breaks. There might be other ways to do upgrading, like limiting the rate of upgrades based on time, or having some minigame to upgrade (like something that requires timing). - I've also found that having bullet speed as an upgrade often isn't super fun. It usually doesn't make *that* much difference in gameplay, but it feels a lot better to have fast bullets, so slowing them down for the "unupgraded" state often makes the gameplay less responsive. I generally prefer to keep bullet speed pretty fast and have upgrades like fire rate, bullet damage, number of enemies they can pass through, shrapnel/explosions, etc. But this is also just a personal opinion, so your mileage may vary!
You did a lot right with the gameplay; I liked that the enemies had fast-and-weak ones and slow-and-strong ones. The fact that you had to craft bullets was interesting, and I really like the fact you gave the player infinite weak bullets once those ran out --- it's inoptimal, but doesn't just strand the player if they don't prepare enough. My best run was round 18.
I'm not *entirely* sure what your protagonist is supposed to be, but I tried to draw them! I've added them to the fan art collage on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this!
Fantastic entry!
The art style and character design are excellent. Beardadette is a beautiful and graceful protagonist, and all of the miscellaneous creatures have tons of character. I loved the little angry rocks and the sick lizards (reminded me a little of [Grubbs](https://oddworld.fandom.com/wiki/Grubb)). The art style of 2.5D worked great with the gameplay and mood, but you still put lots of extra graphics flair in like the section where you walk through walls, the 3D liquids, and the points where you move closer/farther from the camera.
The gameplay itself is solid. I liked the visual indicator for the upcoming hiccup, but I think it could have been even more precise (like an animation or meter refilling) to take out some of the guesswork.
I will say that the fun part of the game was the puzzles and the hiccup mechanic, but sometimes I felt like I was fighting with the physics of the game a little bit. Things like trying to throw a rock onto a ledge and having it roll back off. The windmills were also a little bit finnicky --- at one point one knocked out my rock, stranding me on the wrong side. It might be an improvement to make some of the objects less slippery and more likely to stay put, but this is a pretty minor thing. But for the purposes of a game jam it's still way above standard haha.
The music and audio were great, especially the hiccup noises. Would have been nice to have sound effects for some of the extra things like the knife-wielding bees!
I drew Beardadette and added her to the fan art collage on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Great job and look forward to continuing to play your team's games in future events. :smile:
I enjoyed this a lot!
A lot of the mechanics are treading familiar ground with precision platformers, like the double-jump beads, levers, and springs. When I reached the button, I assumed I was at the end, but you still had another level! The second level introduces the title mechanic, wind, and adds a lot to the gameplay. Now you're not only trying to do the platforming, but you also have to race to get the puzzles done in time to catch the next updraft to your destination. You definitely develop a bit, and leave the player wanting more --- which is honestly probably a good thing for a jam game! Two great levels are better than ten stale ones.
The music is very pleasant and bouncy. Even on loop it doesn't grow old. I listened to it for ~20 minutes after finishing the game while drawing and still didn't get sick of it, which is a great compliment for game jam music.
The graphics are simple but get the job done. Despite the low pixel count, the player's walk cycle and jump are full of energy and character; I particularly liked the detail of the player looking up while jumping up and down while falling. I personally lean away from extremely low-resolution pixel graphics, and while you executed them quite well, I think it could look even better with a little more definition (maybe 16-pixel tiles). And it at least seems like you would have the art chops to pull it off well!
One common criticism I have for precision platformers is death animations that take too long, and you definitely avoided this trap. The frequent checkpoints and quick respawn made me want to keep trying even after messing up a tricky section.
I drew your climber character and added them to the fan art compilation on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/).
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Nice entry, and look forward to seeing how you do in the results!
Had a lot of fun with this!
Definitely the best part was the goofy aesthetic and the fun controls. The split between water and land movement was really fun and flavorful with the fish protagonist. The land movement was just frustrating enough to be hilarious, but the game was forgiving enough it didn't feel bad (I think with a more difficult game, it might feel worse to have such unpredictable movement). This kind of wacky, innovative game loop is *exactly* what game jams are for, and your team nailed it.
The art was enjoyable and goofy. I do think there are a couple areas for improvement for readability: - *Trash* - it would be nice if the collectibles stood out a bit from the rest of the trash heaps. - *Water/Land* - A clearer border between the water and air would have been nice. The splash noise when you returned to water helped a bit, but it would have been even nicer if you had another sound when leaving as well. Some particles or a different animation would make it even better, but obviously you have limited resources in 72 hours, so you can't get to everything. - *Drowning* - I think there could have been a better animation for the fish drowning --- dimming the entire screen looks a little too much like what my laptop does when it gets unplugged! If you're going to do a tint, it might be nice if it was a color rather than solid black, or a pattern like a vignette. Or you could do something fancy like a bubble that slowly empties, like the swimming UI in Windwaker.
The art for the fish and octopus was full of character and goofy. I loved the little sound effects when you picked stuff up and handed it off to the octopus.
The music was also well done, especially the "bass drop" where the other voices come in. There is a bit in the middle that gets a bit repetitive, especially after the first few loops, but definitely very solid work for a weekend jam!
I drew Floppy and added him to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Nice work for 72 hours!
Nice entry!
For starters, the premise is enjoyable, and the art and sounds are charming. It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun with the cow sounds ("MOOOOOOOOO") and the sheep sounds (I think the voice actor started laughing at the end of one of the sounds).
There were a couple things that were hard to figure out: - The eggs care about key **up**, not keydown (probably nicer to have it do keydown, since that's how people are used to typing) - The cow gets milked by dragging its teat into the bucket (which is hilarious, but could be expressed better with the instructions) - The plants need to be pulled up (at first, I wasn't sure what the objective was, so I was just petting them and hoping they'd sprout. Some instructions would clear this up too.)
All the parts of the overworld were really well designed and intuitive, since they all had the controls over the objects that you could interact with.
I will say you aren't super incentivized to do different activities. The ten-second day isn't a very long cycle, so you can just sit at one station and wait for it to reset. That said, the theme this time around was pretty restrictive in that way, so you didn't really have an option to extend the day cycle if you wanted to.
I'm really impressed that you managed to make a cohesive game with this many people! It obviously has a bunch of parts, but everything "feels" like part of the same game, which is often hard to do with large groups. It seems like you had effective direction/project management.
I drew your farmer (and a little friend) and added him to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this, it was a fun little jam entry.
Awesome entry!
You can tell that so much love went into the details on this one. The pixel art is clean and full of character. I particularly liked the fact that the wings change direction when you've used your double-jump and the fact the dragon breathes!
The gimmick of the game crashing is fun and flavorful. The little "save icon" was a great way to work it in, and you really went all-in with the presentation ("don't turn the console off" for a web game).
A couple very small spots that felt less-than-perfect: - As others have said, it would be nice if you could reset before the ten seconds. A few times I messed up and just had to wait it out. - The platforming felt a little bit slow at times, despite you being forced to move really quick to get to the next checkpoint. In particular it felt like the character took a while to fall, which slowed things down when climbing "ladders" of stacked platforms. - It was a little odd that the game crashed when you hit enemies as well. At first I didn't realize what was causing it and thought the timing was changing.
Music was well-done and awesome to have different tracks for the title and several different areas.
I can't get over how funny it is to just shoot a dragon with a gun.
Great entry. I added the main character to the fan art compilation on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/).
Nice little stealth game!
I appreciate that you took the time to make a tutorial for each of the items in your kit. It made sure you knew all your tools before dumping you into the action. I will say that the smokescreen and club were vastly more useful than the coin. I almost never was forced to use the coin.
I really like the guard AI, and how expressive they are when they become suspicious or surprised. The torch lighting is also really neat visually. The lights turning on and off didn't really affect how I played that much. I'm not sure exactly what they did mechanically, although I did sometimes get caught even while hiding when the lights were on (but inconsistently).
The storyline was also fun. I like the good-natured nude protagonist who only wants to beat the crap out of armed guards and tuck the princess into bed.
Well done for 48 hours!
I drew a picture of one of the guards and added it to the fan art compilation on my [profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan)
I had a lot of fun with this! The map was large and interesting and felt "alive" with all the other drones in it. Once you learned the personalities of the different enforcers it made for really dynamic gameplay as you tried to sprint away from the yellow one and sneak past the blue one.
Obviously there's not much in the way of an objective/endgame/win condition at the moment, but I could see a really interesting full game here if there were objects throughout the map you had to collect/interact with.
The graphics were simple but clean. The line-of-sight projections worked really well, especially since you could see the enemy's field of view before you saw the enemy themselves. It's pretty subtle but I like how the lighting on the walls is brighter/deeper based on how close you are to the wall and how directly you're looking at it.
Basic SFX including an alarm, etc. when you get noticed would go a long way for making it more immersive.
Nice work for 48 hours! I've added the "inspector" from your game to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
Wow!
You guys did so much right with this. The cockpit-view and ominous space sound effects made for amazing immersion, especially with the alarm lights, moving joystick, and all the little details. It would have been great if you had managed to incorporate the other HUD elements like the radar scanner into the cockpit design, but that definitely would have been a lot more work.
The gameplay was really interesting. Navigating around obstacles you could only see every ten seconds was quite a challenge, but the coordinates and tether helped a bit. It did feel like you were incentivized to just move really slowly; some other kind of time pressure, like an oxygen meter, or threat of aliens/meteors/radiation, could help push the player to take more risks and feel a little more pressure.
@paul-merkamp Cool to see you've assembled a team for this one (including an additional Merkamp!).
I drew a picture of what I think the ship could look like and added it to the fan art collage on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Congrats on this entry and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice entry!
The graphics were really solid for a solo game. All the characters were animated, and the UI and health bars were clear and unintrusive. I really liked that all the attacks showed an area of effect when they hit so you knew what to avoid.
You injected a lot of small pieces of humor throughout, to great effect. The snage lasers in particular were hilarious and unexpected.
I do think the basic attack was a bit slow to start. It didn't matter too much, since you continued to get upgrades throughout the run, but in the early phases in particular the basic attack was almost useless compared to the axe tornado and a lot harder to time and position such that you wouldn't immediately be hit back. The anime punch was super cool looking, but also a bit slow for the animation, especially since you need to do it several times to take down the boss.
The music and sound effects were simple but effective, and worked together well. There were a couple things that would have been nice to have sound effects for (such as the slime's attack) but you definitely got all the important ones.
Overall really solid for a solo jam entry, plays well and has a lot of character.
I drew a picture of the snage and added it to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this!
Excellent as always! The graphics and polish are great, and the characters are bouncy and expressive.
I liked how different all the upgrades felt; I played a number of runs with different strategies and they all felt quite a bit different.
I will say that the homing movement wasn't very intuitive. I had no idea how the movement worked until I came to the comments and saw your responses. It's a little rough because the main failure case is going through more enemies than you intended, and the homing exacerbates that a bit.
The moving vs. standing still mechanic was an interesting tradeoff. You probably can't stack your multiplier infinitely because at some point you'll have stood around enough to advance to the next wave. Tying the healing to staying still was also really clever.
Music and sound effects were excellent as well!
I drew Breadalt and added him to the fanart collage on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this!
@antti-haavikko I think a line or arrow would definitely have made it clear.
@antti-haavikko #1 again! Congrats and well-deserved.
@william-derksen Batteries do become less common as you go up, as do regular platforms (and the ratio of batteries to platforms decreases). Hopefully the difficulty curve isn't too sharp --- that was one of the biggest complaints about last jam's game. I also have some number magic to prevent particularly bad strings of bad luck.
Thanks for playing!
@osh-studio Thanks for playing!
@thoastbot To be completely honest, because the menus and resetting were the absolute last thing I implemented and I just didn't think about it haha. "R" is common for resets, and I just didn't think about the potential annoyance until it was shipped.
Glad you liked everything else though!
@tomssuli There is a full screen mode! Press F4 to toggle it (there's a subtle label on the title screen that's easy to miss).
I will say I don't *think* there's a way to get it into a state that's impossible to move forward --- or at least I haven't seen one. It might require some precise timing to grab a low platform at the last possible second to scroll up. The platforms probably do get too spaced out toward the end.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
@tomssuli Wow, thanks for taking the time to come back to it!
Glad you liked the music. I was originally going to do something closer to [Eleventh Hour](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/eleventh-hour) and have a more intense, electronic sound... but ran out of time so decided to just record my keyboard because it was quicker.
(Speaking of which, thanks @juxipolo and @paul-nadan for the feedback on the music... I agree! Would have loved to have made something more suspenseful for the gameplay and kept the piano version for just the "you win" screen)
@alaah Thanks for the feedback! Platform generation is definitely an area for improvement.
The batteries had a flat chance of spawning (I believe 15% of all platforms near the end) but also a failsafe for bad luck (near the end, you can't get seven platforms in a row with no battery).
The platform spacing had a constant minimum distance between platforms, and the maximum increased as you went up (probably a bit too much).
See method spawn_new_platform() in [the code](https://github.com/jeremycryan/LD51/blob/main/frame.py) if you're interested! There was probably a better way to handle it, but I was implementing the difficulty scaling right up to the end so didn't have much time to fine-tune.
@persikan Thanks for playing!
I have seen that bug before --- I think it might happen if you grab the battery exactly as the time runs out. Unfortunately I ran out of time to investigate further because it seemed really rare.
> some text looks smooth, while some does not
I think this is because some text is being rendered by PyGame and some of the text is actually images being loaded in. I think I had antialiasing disabled in my image editor since I was doing pixel art. Oops!
@frogman Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for pointing out the "thousand feet" UI piece... I actually did have plans to add UI for that initially. The clocktower graphic in the intro sequence was originally going to be a little map on the side with a "you are here" indicator that goes up. Ultimately I didn't like how it looked in the mock-up and scrapped it, but definitely feel similarly about the need. Maybe a simple "out of 1000ft" on the game over screen would have done it.
And platform/battery generation is definitely a common theme. Definitely something to design more deliberately next time!
First, the black-and-white art style is great for the game concept. The game immediately starts with an "oh shit" moment that establishes the atmosphere really well.
The sprite and animation work were quite good. I especially loved the character design for the creatures, as well as the lamp posts. The variety of monsters was great and made you learn different strategies as you went.
I will say that the ten second timer for the lightning felt a bit slow (not much you can do about that with this theme, of course). It was often not possible to wait until the next flash to see the next area, since the chaser would get you before the lightning flashed. It also might have been nice to have enemy movement and the lightning timer reset to a particular moment on respawn --- there were a couple times with the spiders I spawned at the worst possible time in their movement cycle and don't think it was possible to win from that position.
Audio was really well done for a jam game. The music is frantic and spooky. I particularly liked the bells/chimes in the soundtrack and upon reaching a checkpoint.
I've added the "crawler" from your game to a fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
Nice work!
Congrats on #2 in Mood!
Nice entry!
I liked the voxel art and the amount of time that clearly went into the levels and environments. The three different "zones" all felt different, with different hazards and tricks to move around. The theme is amusing (time-traveling pizza boy) and fits the atmosphere of the game.
I have a couple small comments on the gameplay: - As others have said, the movement is a bit sluggish (particularly turning). Obviously this kind of game is about controlling your movement and momentum effectively, but I think it may have helped to make the turning a little bit more responsive since you have to dodge things with such precision. - I liked the isometric view, but it sometimes made it hard to line things up, particularly when jumping (and particularly with the girders in the construction level). The cyclist's shadow helped here, and I'm not sure what else you could have done, but it was a little bit of a pain point.
Other than that, the core gameplay was really solid. Dodging things correctly felt good, and you let the player restart early if it was clear you wouldn't make it in time (although I wish the "R" button worked on the game over screen as well). I particularly liked the bonus "PIZZA" letters hidden around the map. Were these originally going to unlock the night modes?
Music was pleasant, if a little short. It would have been nice to have other audio like car horns, pedestrian noises, and impacts when you jump and land, but obviously you can't do everything with 72 hours and a one-person team.
I drew the pizza guy and added them to the fan art compilation on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/).
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Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice little entry!
Loved the take on the theme and the gameplay. Getting rid of the clock after the first level was a nice touch and also made me realize how bad I am at internally keeping track of time.
The graphics and audio were neat and charming. Was that real cat purring?
Obviously this was a very simple entry since you made it in 6 hours, but it has loads of personality and I would have loved to see what it could look like if you spent the whole weekend on it.
I drew the cat (complete with mischievous appendage) and added it to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this!
Nice entry!
I really liked the general vibe and environment, especially the map that transitions from the groomed ski slope to the more difficult forested area with obstacles and less predictable slopes. It gave me PS1 vibes. The main character and narrative are fun and add to the experience.
I will say that I had a lot of trouble controlling the character. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since the main gameplay is managing your momentum and controlling your movement, but there might be a little more you can do to "cheat" for the player to make it feel a little better. Something like magnet-ing to the ground if you're going at low enough speed, since the skidding behavior is very difficult to predict.
I also *really* appreciate how visible you made the objectives and that you were a little forgiving with their hit boxes. That's one potential failure of games like this, especially when moving into areas with obstructions like the trees. The visibility made it so you almost always knew where the closest torch was, even if there was a bunch of stuff between you and it.
Low-hanging fruit for improvement --- add a "distance traveled" number on the end screen! I don't know if there were other "biomes" (I wasn't able to get through the forest) but having a number would help motivate you to keep trying if you're not seeing any obvious indicators of distance in-game. And it lets you see your improvement over time.
I'm planning on drawing fan art of every game I play this event and compiling them on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/), but I'm out of time right now so I'll have to follow up on yours this evening.
Thanks for making this!
As promised! Enjoy the rest of the jam.
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Wow!
I'll start with the obvious. The graphics and music are excellent. Every single animation on the plants and on the character were done very well and looked incredibly clean and full of character. I particularly liked the use of sub-pixel animation; everything looked very fluid despite being such low resolution. The music was catchy and fit the rest of the game perfectly. The sound effects were clean as well, although there were a couple actions I felt should have a sound effect (specifically when planting a flower, you get a little pop when you procure the item, but then it's silent when you slam it into the ground).
Gameplay-wise, I'm super impressed with the scope. You had tons of different plant types, cards, and upgrades. My first run lasted 20 minutes and I was still finding fresh content. The idea of a farming game where the plants attack you isn't completely new (see LD41 winner [Dark Soil](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dark-soil)) but this was definitely a fresh take on it and the game played very smoothly. I particularly liked that the arena grew as you played.
I also liked the use of cards; you have to keep using them or risk getting slowed down, but you still have choice over what spawns and where (and can weed whack the most troublesome ones). My one quibble with the card system is that I often didn't have time to scroll through and see what I was using in the thick of the bullet dodging, particularly with the scroll wheel which often isn't very precise. It might be nice if there was a button alternative to the scroll wheel for selecting cards. As-is when things got crazy I usually just blindly clicked around to play the cards.
I also wish the crystal-vacuuming was a bit quicker (as in, the crystals move physically quicker). During the peak of the chaos it's hard to focus on just the bullets with the crystals moving after you.
I drew one of the flowers and added it to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Excellent jam entry, and good luck in the rest of play and rate!
Great entry!
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The art and music style were bursting with personality. I loved all the little UI bounces and movements. The combat was really simple, but it was a very satisfying game loop to kill some veggies, buy some gear, and repeat until you're a tiny death machine clad in god-mail.
I will say the movement upgrades are way more important early on than everything else. My first run I picked up armor first, then died to carrots. My second run I picked up the basic boots and did much better.
I liked the variety of equipment, particularly the weapons, which are often not strictly better but have strengths and weaknesses (of course the shotgun was definitely the standout pick once you're upgraded enough).
Fifteen days did feel a touch long, since I was fully upgraded since round 10 or so. A nice feature could have been one-time use items in the shop so you could still do things with your money the last few turns.
I loved the visual, audio, and mood change between the day and night cycles.
Great work on this!
Neat little game! The graphics are charming, there's a variety of little denizens in the poo-filled world, and the gameplay loop is clean. I particularly liked the little gnome cart that sold upgraded weapons and the sparkles on the unicorn poo.
I will say the goblin AI was a little funky and I'd occasionally have to run around the map looking for the one that was stuck on a cow. If they moved a little faster and had more robust movement they might be a little scarier, but it was also fun to just be able to run around collecting poo without worrying too much about them.
The variety of weapons was a fun addition, and they're all different in more significant ways than just "1 damage," "2 damage," "3 damage," etc.
It's also really impressive you made such a cohesive game with such a large team! In my experience it's very hard to coordinate with more than 2 or 3, so you must have had some effective team/project management going on.
Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
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Nice entry! You guys never disappoint.
It took me a while to figure out the mechanics, since there are a lot of symbols and resources to keep track of and not everything is super obvious (the three cubes for duration/charges took me a while to get). Once you understand all the resources and how walls work, the game is quite fun.
I particularly liked the card design, the way it played with geometry, and the rotating ring structure that got bigger as you played. The walls were really neat, but it would have been cool to see even funkier combinations of edges (like a tower that is really good, but has three of four sides closed). Workers were a nice design decision to help the player get rid of outlying structures.
I did notice it was *very* easy to misclick. As your ring gets bigger, it eventually is behind your hand. I kept forgetting the cards were drag-and-drop, clicking one, and having it immediately place on the edge of the ring. (I also noticed it was possible to hold onto a card during a reshuffle, but don't really know how I got it to happen. That's probably some kind of speedrun tech though.)
Audio is really nice, the music reminded me a little bit of Risk of Rain 2 (probably just because that's the most recent space-ish game I've played). Lots of little polish in the UI like the button feedback when hovering over a card.
Great work, looking forward to seeing what you guys make next time!
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@honest-dan That makes a lot of sense. Definitely trust your decision if you actually tried it.
Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
@brainoid Not sure I'll be making fan art this event (last event it was very fun, but a lot of work). I'll see how I feel after rating a few games, but if I do circle back and draw something from your game I'll let you know!
Thanks for playing everyone!
@frogman Great feedback on the card visuals! I think I originally had a slightly larger "field," so your cards were covering it up when hovered. I defaulted to the behavior of MtG Arena and similar, but importantly, in most other games you can understand the card fully from just the name (not true here!). That's great feedback if I decide to make a card game again.
@alaah Thanks for playing! The randomness of the trash mechanic definitely leads to some feels-bad moments since you could end up having to trash one of your three best cards. I considered making it smarter, so it was more likely to choose "worse" cards to trash, but timelines are tight in Compo so I didn't get around to it.
@cobear25 Unfortunately, it's not easy to do with Python. However, you could download Python (3.7 or higher), install pygame, and run it from source if you were really motivated!
@tomssuli From the description:
> The game is not difficult, and there is no lose condition, so relax and enjoy the atmosphere.
I decided to focus more on the graphics, mood, and story for this one, so the gameplay is intentionally pretty easy and it's not possible to lose. Hopefully it's still interesting enough to keep the player occupied through the end though.
Thanks for playing!
@alchemic Thanks for playing and for making a video! Definitely took a different direction from some of my other recent LD games. Additional mechanics like adjacency and more "special" crops was a great suggestion, or some other kind of pressure to make the puzzle aspect more difficult/interesting.
@krassenstein Thanks so much for playing and recording the video! My friend let me know you were streaming, but it was late in my time zone so I wasn't able to tune in live.
Favorite quote out of context:
> We have to kill seven people. Do you know how long that's going to take?
@ditam Thanks for playing and thanks for the great feedback!
I agree with everything you said. I do think there's some risk to being less "on the nose" because people may just completely miss it, especially if they're only playing your game for ~5-10 minutes. Of course --- if I had more than 48 hours I probably could have worked in more nuance. It was nice to see a couple streamers play the game, and catch the "aha" moment.
As far as pygame --- it's lots of fun if you like building stuff (mostly) from scratch and prefer Python over other languages. For anything more complex than a game jam game, I'd recommend a "real" engine though.
-------
Edit: and regarding...
> I like that you decided to make it easy enough to make sure that players get to experience the mood and story instead.
...I know that was one of the chief criticisms of "Fade"... I put so much work into the story and accidentally hid it behind an impossibly difficult game! Definitely played this one on the safer side haha.
Thanks again for playing!
@philstrahl Thanks so much for sharing the video, glad you enjoyed it!
I loved your little breakdown at the end about the mood and story. To be honest, I wasn't about it too much, and mostly made a plague doctor because it looks cool and I'm bad at drawing faces.
Thanks for playing!
@0x-void-x0 That's amazing! Thank you so much!
This was quite the... uh... interesting experience. I feel extremely hydrated.
I loved the mechanics of the scythe, which could attack enemies and scoop up objects to dip in the delicious lemonade. The colors and effects were really fun, especially when you went underwater. I got some performance issues when some of the enemies piled up but nothing a little stabbing with my scythe couldn't fix.
Nice work making this in 72 hours!
As always, you've knocked it out of the park. This was absolutely delightful.
The variety of graphics and details for the different civilizations was extremely impressive for 48 hours, and the progression and UI were very satisfying. The multiple twists were incredibly twisty, and without spoiling anything, I feel very hydrated.
Congrats on a well-deserved first place!
Finally got around to playing yours!
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Nailed it: - The progression feels good. Especially when I force-feed my wizard enough books to reach level 20 and could shoot fireballs like a machine gun. - The character art is all really nice, especially for the player characters. - The environments are also very nice. I particularly liked the water and tombstones in the swamp. - You nailed the Tamagotchi aesthetic with the goofy little animations (I'm particularly fond of the little ballet movement for agility training) - You got a good amount of scope into the game --- the Tamagotchi minigames, the wave system, melee and ranged enemies, two different areas, a "boss", and three player characters that feel different. Impressive!
Room for improvement: - I didn't really "get" the progression system at first, even after reading all the descriptions (I thought feeding your hero had immediate benefits in Explore mode). An in-game tutorial or help would have been nice, but you already had a pretty massive scope without it and game jams are always really tight on time. - Certain parts were a little tedious. I think feeding the hero had some randomness in how long it took to feed, based on the position of the hero and the position of the food, and with an unlucky roll it was a little extreme haha. - The "2D sprites in a 3D world" look is hard to get right. I think it might help wed the characters and environment better if you went all-in on 3D (like Ten Seconds to Midnight) or had higher-resolution 2D characters (like Paper Mario). That said, you played to your team's strengths and this still looks great for a game jam!
Overall, nice work for 72 hours! Looking forward to seeing what you guys make for next event.
Well this was freaking hilarious.
The way you worked in the audio and the checklist was great. You kept the mechanics pretty consistent, but kept throwing in twists ("wait, you have no money? Just steal from your neighbor!") and the checklist would update accordingly. You even had contingencies for when the player did things out of order!
The few additional gags were also hilarious. The mis-communicated signage, the fact you had to eat every day, the title music, all of it was perfect and it never felt forced or stale. Definitely top marks for humor.
Also just the amount of content you managed to pack into a Compo game! I've been seeing your LD games here and there since Ultra Quest, and you continue to impress in new ways with each one.
Great work on this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
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Congrats on a well-deserved first place in Humor!
I have faith in the Ludum Dare rating process, but may have needed a torch and/or pitchfork if anything else came out on top.
Nice, polished game as always!
This was a really interesting take on the normal typing game formula. The movement of the little farmer guy meant that there was a bit of strategy to the order and positioning of the words you type. I will say I had the same quibble as @juutis and others about typing the first letter of a word that you happened to get from a previous word is penalized. Other than that it played very smoothly and the bouncy animations and bits of polish really brought it to life.
I will say this felt a little bit smaller scoped than some of your previous compo games. It would have been neat if there were upgrades or some other secondary mechanic to add some extra depth. But of course 48 hours is not very long and you already have a ridiculous amount of polish, a solid core mechanic, and *online high scores,* so it's hard to complain about scope all things considered.
Great work on this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
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This is a really fun one! Saw it being streamed a few days ago and came back to play and rate.
The juice on the slice animation is really satisfying, and the fact that you're just wide enough to grab two rows of wheat makes for some fun optimization of the levels. I also just think it's a hilariously intense mood for a relatively mundane task like harvesting wheat.
It would have been nice if there was a little more transparency on what gave the grades, like a timer that ticked down and showed the grade getting reduced as it ticks down (so you know how close you were to the next one). Or some kind of high score mechanic per level or for the total.
Nice work!
Nice work on this!
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It was really fun to play with a group and share/compete for progress. The progression was fun and there was a variety of upgrades and resources to spend, with the cosmetics at the very end as an additional goal.
One small downside is that with a lot of players playing at the same time, the limited resource spawning was a bit of a bottleneck. It would have been nice if multiple players could pick the same plant, or there was a larger map with different sections that grew the higher-level crops.
Great work getting networked multiplayer to work on game jam timelines! Everything worked really smoothly and there wasn't any lag or issues that I could notice.
This was a fun one!
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This was a really impressive scope for a 72-hour game. You managed to create an interesting combat system, a bunch of creatures (didn't count, felt like at least ten), upgrades, items, an intuitive UI, and a barebones story.
Speaking of the combat system, it was a really interesting take on the Pokemon formula. The fact that most status effects only lasted a turn meant that the priority of the moves mattered a lot (and improved as you upgraded your cards). The "mana" system was also a neat way to make games start slow and swing more near the end.
I do think certain cards were a lot stronger than others. Sonic Boom, for instance, was by far the best card I saw, with 150 damage in a turn for only four "mana." I also had a lot of success with getting global poison and burn in early and playing disruption/defense after that. It would be really interesting to see what dominant strategies/mons would be dominant if this were PVP! My team at the end was Chachomp, Cauldrn, and Crabbat.
The art was very charming, and I loved the creative character designs.
Great work for 72 hours! Had a lot of fun with it.
@randompickle13 @tanis @matthewdrake @rhewid Thanks for playing everyone!
@hacktic Had a lot of fun putting together the layered music, glad it paid off. And Gungeon was definitely a major influence (included it in the Special Thanks section of the game page).
@frogman Love to hear about the broken combos --- I was definitely aware that certain upgrades were more strong, or more strong in combination! I actually developed the "fix" that made the bullets from Deadly Dodge not count toward refund chance for Green, then undid it because clever players deserve a broken build every now and then. :slight_smile:
@waffleworksgames @wiredoverload @jcmonkey @ordineu @qusk2 Thanks for playing!
@no-whone Haha, awesome that you ran into this entry after I linked your game! Glad to hear you enjoyed it and definitely very useful feedback on balance and SFX.
@jdeedubs Thanks for playing! The music is original (not a cover), just drew inspiration from familiar jazz/bossa nova tunes. :slight_smile:
@pyspher9 Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed the little endgame mode. :slight_smile:
@qooorti There is a ~5 degree spread on your gun, so it doesn't always land exactly on the cursor. This might not have been a great decision in hindsight with the default fire rate; it's not really fast enough to get a sense for the spread right away... and it's especially painful with "Cricket" when the difference between hitting and missing an enemy is very significant.
> unfortunately it doesn’t last long with lag
Very aware of this, but decided it was still more entertaining to leave it in! I think a lot of the lag is coming from the zombie corpses and poorly-optimized bullet and enemy collision code that scales poorly with large numbers of enemies. There's no batching, for one. Hard to optimize for performance in 48 hours, especially since I only added the endgame mode in the last hour or two!
> are you.. using.. circular hitboxes in pygame..?
Yes. In the words of Gary... they're easier to code.
Thanks for playing!
@honest-dan Already thanked you on stream, but thanks again for playing!
Gameplay could definitely stand to be more interesting... Definitely a tricky balance trying to get enemies that are threatening while still being able to talk on the phone with them on screen. It was one of those jams that I frontloaded the art/audio and ran out of time for fine-tuning.
@elysiagriffin Thanks for playing! Congratulations on finding all of the cat ears and the super secret ~~playtesting shortcut~~ **cheat code.**
Was thinking about submitting to your queue earlier this week but your description said web games only. I hope my buttons were up to your standards!
A recurring theme I'm noticing in streams --- players sometimes don't notice they're supposed to interact with the phone again (happened your first run, which is why you were short on ammo). It probably would have been smart to add a very obvious indicator somewhere other than just the hold music going away --- one of those things that you only catch from live feedback!
@100th-coin Hey, thanks for playing! I was 100% aware of the phone issue and had an arrow/indicator as the top thing in my priorities checklist that didn't make the 48 hour cut.
Good point on players potentially missing the jokes. Definitely a little disheartening to see the mechanic actively discourage you from reading the voice lines during your playthrough.
Thanks for playing and for the video! Live feedback is always the most valuable.
I'm sorry, Mr. Salamander. If you wanted your mail delivered on time, you shouldn't live somewhere so remote and full of cactus.
As always, you guys knocked it out of the park. @spacey3d's character designs are consistently adorable and full of personality (particularly loved Elevander, the lizard, the mouse, and the giraffe). The environment is very well illustrated and has a great balance of detail and stylization. Music and sound effects were also very well-done.
Gameplay-wise, the movement is very novel and it feels very much like a "Getting Over It" sort of experience --- your task is relatively simple, but the unusual character movement makes it a challenge. The tutorial was very well designed to get the player accustomed to the controls. Once you start the full game, you're immediately thrown into the action and it comes with all the stress of your first day on the job.
I think there are a couple sections of the map that may be a little bit too punishing, particularly where there are low ceilings with a lot of cactuses. I had a hard time avoiding the cactus and kept bonking my head on the ceiling and falling into it, spewing my mail everywhere. However, a lot of areas you could avoid since the map often had multiple ways of getting between sections.
I drew Elevander and added him to the pixel fan art compilation on my profile.
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Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice work! It seems like every event you manage to make a puzzle game that is completely new, yet somehow instantly recognizable as yours.
The wind mechanic is really interesting; it feels similar to the traditional slipper ice puzzles (a la Pokemon), but the way the air streams interact and the fact you have to fly into them from an angle make for some fresh puzzles.
The art and music were very nice and polished. I particularly liked the animation for gliding and then flapping right before landing --- feels very lifelike! I imagine you looked at some reference to nail that down. It was also great you managed to get a live instrument into your soundtrack (I might have to try to do that in a future jam...). The soundtrack, relaxed gameplay, and clean art all complement each other.
I drew Anne-Marie and added her to the pixel fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Great job and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Congrats on 5th in Compo! I think the Audio ranking should have been higher with the live saxophone though!
Nice entry! My best time was 86 seconds and change.
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Strong points: - The overall vibe was really pleasant. The characters and background were fun and it was amusing to see a snail with a grappling hook spinning around and flying all over the place. - The level was well designed and the mail boxes require you to use the movement in new ways to get to them. If you came in at the right speed, you could often get a short swing from the lip of the box and fly right into it, which was really satisfying. - Adding a speedrun timer was a good move, since it encourages you to try again to improve.
Potential improvements: - Dropping your mail on damage was an interesting punishment (and suits the game much better in my opinion than, say, a certain number of lives). That said, the mail fell as fast as Lucky does, which sometimes meant your run was entirely over because you dropped your mail down half the level. It might be a tad less punishing if the mail fell slower, while still costing time to collect it. - The movement was a little finicky for me. I liked that you could build up speed over time and it rewarded clean play and cool maneuvers, but it encouraged a few intuitive play patterns, like repeatedly shooting and retracting the hook because you got a boost every time you shot it. It also felt like the hook could pull a little stronger, especially when you're trying to fight with wind to get out of a corner. - Music would have been nice if you had the time!
Overall, had fun with this one and always appreciate a good grappling snail. I drew Lucky and added them to the pixel fan art compilation on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/) (complete with cat ears).
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Good luck for the rest of play and rate!
Finally got around to playing yours!
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Best parts: - The soundtrack is catchy and hilarious! I especially love the "bass drop" that happens a couple minutes in. - The game felt like a good length and difficulty for a jam game. I was able to finish on my first try, but still felt the pressure from the meter on the side. - Once you got used to the player movement, it was fun to speed down the hallways, ramming into bacteria as you went. - The graphics, gameplay, and sound all work together to make a quirky overall mood. You had a team of six people but the game is really cohesive and there aren't obvious "seams" where different people worked on different parts, which is impressive for such a big team in 72 hours!
Areas for improvement: - The character controller is really slippery. Sometimes you zoom past a spawner at mach 10 and have to take a long time to stop and turn around. There might be a way to tweak it to still incentivize building momentum while not making it quite so hard to stop. Edit: I noticed there are actually brakes. Maybe I should read the controls *before* playing the game. - The world was very big with a lot of dead ends. This can be frustrating when you don't have a map and your only sense of direction is the blue arrow. I think it might play better if either a) you had a mini-map or breadcrumb trail with the location of the next spawner, rather than just the arrow, or b) the map was designed in a more interconnected way, with fewer dead ends and more alternate routes (less tree branch, more spiderweb).
Other random notes: - The medicine burst had no cooldown or cost, so it was almost always correct to just spam it as fast as possible while zooming around. - I never had a need to follow the green arrow during my run. - It's not really clear when starting what the end goal/victory condition is. I was starting to think it was infinite when I hit the win screen.
Overall, a fun little package with a good aesthetic and satisfying gameplay. Not bad for 72 hours!
I drew Lololol® and added him to the pixel fan art compilation on my profile (everyone gets cat ears this event because reasons).
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Nice work on this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Cute little entry!
The "don't backtrack" mechanic is pretty common for puzzle games, but the neat twist on the formula was managing the different colors of snails which could affect the possible paths of the other. The game is full of personality with the various mail recipients and the title song with actual live singing.
This is subjective, but I think this kind of game often works better without a timer. The hard part of puzzle games usually comes from evaluating your choices and making the correct decision, rather than clicking buttons quickly. It also can be hard to get your bearings at the start of a level if there's immediately a timer counting down.
I drew the snailman and added him to the pixel fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Nice work for 72 hours!
Solid entry! Loved all the characters and details, and the fact the music built up as you go up the elevators. It was fun to see little callbacks to your past games, and was a very fun surprise to see this!
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A couple quality-of-life improvements: - You can't switch lanes while holding left or right, which leads to some weird gameplay patterns where you want to build up speed, then swap lanes while you're coasting. - The "frame-based" horizontal scrolling sometimes means you get smacked by the wait staff or another robot that you had no chance to see coming. It would probably be a little nicer if the horizontal scrolling was also smooth, like the vertical scrolling.
Seeing the "esteemed customer" was a nice treat! I was not able to find any of the secrets, so either I'm incompetent or they were hidden pretty well.
I'm doing the fan art thing again, so I added your little waiter robot to the pixel fan art compilation on my profile! fanart53.png
As always, great work and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice entry! My best score was a hair under 60,000.
I really like the "push your luck" sort of mechanic, where you get more points the more envelopes you're juggling, but there's also a bigger chance of crashing. The controls were smooth and the gameplay was really intuitive.
I also like the 2D/3D blend, especially with the exaggerated curve of the earth with the houses and mailboxes slowly emerging from the horizon. The graphics are pretty simple but you did a good job making the menus, UI, and gameplay visuals all cohesive.
I added your delivery person to the pixel art fan art collage on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/) (complete with cat ears).
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Thanks again for playing my game on stream, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Neat entry!
First of all, the title art and visual direction were very good. I was reminded a little bit of [Townseek](https://whalesandgames.itch.io/townseek) by Whales and Games. The info dump at the beginning was a little overwhelming but once you jump into the game it's not actually all that complicated and was easy to pick up.
The routing mechanic was really interesting and led to some fun puzzles and tradeoffs for picking the optimal route. I liked that you could only make one "turn" rather than more complicated paths, and that you had the option to build fans if you got stuck. As time went on, there were more obstacles and higher costs so it naturally grew more difficult.
I drew a pixel art version of the airship and added it to the fan art compilation on [my profile](https://whalesandgames.itch.io/townseek). It was a little tricky to figure out how to add cat ears to this one. :cat:
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Well done for 72 hours, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
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Nice entry!
First of all, fun to see a game made in Multimedia Fusion 2 --- I recognize that MFA file extension and thunderbolt icon from anywhere.
I really loved the character design and overall presentation (it's a badger wielding a chameleon as a projectile weapon, what's not to love). The portraits for the beginning and end screens were particularly nice. Many of the animations are very smooth and impressive --- particularly the player character and the boss.
It did sometimes feel like there was a disconnect between the player/enemies and the environment. The enemies that move in paths don't really care about where the obstacles are, for instance, and the player can use their attack through walls (although I accept some of this is difficult to do in MF2 in three days). Some other low hanging fruit might be adding smoke particles and a sound effect when your character lands on the ground (or when collecting a honeycomb), or adding a damage animation to the boss --- even if it's just a single white frame.
I will say the boss fight was my favorite part. The dramatic opening and telegraphed moves made it very satisfying. For the first two levels, it was a little easy to get lost, and some of the sections didn't feel intentional about how they were testing the player. I liked the very first part of the second level because it forced you to do something new with the mobility you probably hadn't done up to that point (chain a lick and a double-jump together to get maximum height).
I drew Benjamin and Golden Eye and added them to the pixel-art cat-ear fan art compilation on [my profile page.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice relaxing entry!
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I really enjoy this genre of game jam game, where there's no real objective and you're just trying to relax and enjoy the experience. The visuals are beautiful, and the bee character is very cute. I liked the variety of flower types and the stylized landscape, and the visuals were complimented well by the music, which was very well done if a little short of a loop. The menu and UI were also really well made.
I will say that the game does suffer from the slightly funky camera controls. I think the camera took a bit too much time to speed up and slow down, while also having too high of a max speed. This meant I often overshot and had to frantically move it back and forth to get going in the right direction. The transition when landing on a flower was also a little jarring since it moves so tight over the player. Maybe something like the following could feel a little smoother:
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After tweaking the camera movement, I think this would really be close to the perfect game for relaxing, since that really was the singular piece-of-gravel-in-your-shoe for an otherwise beautiful and heartwarming walk along the beach (that metaphor got away from me a bit).
Overall, great work and especially impressive you made something so cohesive with such a large team! You must have had some pretty effective direction/project management.
I drew your spherical bee and put him in the pixel fan art compilation on [my profile](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/) (complete with tiny cat ears).
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Awesome work for 72 hours, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
One of the most fun entries I've played so far!
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The basic premise and gameplay were really fun. The character's movement and mobility were really goofy but also rewarding to get right. The tongue mechanic felt really good when navigating across obstacles, especially where it required tight timing. The game was a little short --- only two levels --- but for a game jam game that's usually not a bad thing. It's way better to make two great levels than ten rushed levels where the player gets bored after level five.
First thoughts on potential improvement on the gameplay side: - The movement felt a little slippery, which usually doesn't feel great for a precision platformer. I liked the fact that you were slow to build up momentum, but the character could stand to stop faster when trying to turn around or stop. - The wall jumping was a little finnicky, particularly the very last section where you had to swap back and forth rapidly. I kept bouncing off the walls slightly. - I really liked how the second level had a task you had to complete *after* picking up the pizza. If you had time for a third level, it would have been interesting to pick up the pizza very early but have to navigate multiple obstacles afterward without access to your tongue.
The graphics and audio were also very enjoyable. The graphics style was pretty simple, but the goofy character art and special animations for squishing against walls, etc. made it feel great to play. If you had time, it would have been great to add a little bit of squash and stretch when jumping and landing on the ground for the extra little spice.
I drew your delivery toad and added him to the cat-ear pixel-art fan art compilation on [my profile page.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice entry!
I loved the music, sound effects, overall mood, and the sheer *scale* of the city. There are sections that are inhabited by different enemies and the different genre lead to different combat interactions. The bouncy animations and silly dialog also added a lot to the experience.
As others have said, the game is *very* difficult. The best score I got was 3 packages, and I think I got lucky with the placement. It could be nice if there were areas you could stop (and maybe look at a map) to rest and get your bearings, since a lot of time I was too busy not dying to find the next address. Another quality-of-life improvement would be to make the gun automatic rather than tied to how fast you can click the button.
I added your delivery person to the pixel fan art collage on my profile!
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Nice work and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Turns out I'm quite the moonrat!
Graphics: The character art was well done, and the UI was very clean! Some of the in-game visuals got a bit confusing; I was never quite sure which pieces of space junk were very dangerous and which could just be pushed out of the way. It might be nice if there was a consistent shape or color language for which things are most hazardous (e.g. everything that immediately damages you is red).
Audio: Music was great! Especially liked the menu music, although it only had a short loop.
Gameplay: The main gameplay consists of pushing or maneuvering around space junk while trailing delicate cargo behind your ship. I liked the utility areas that could spawn (the one that gives you extra vision is clever) and the variety of hazards. I never ended up figuring out exactly what the gravity ball does. The long levels can be a little tedious, but there are usually zones to stop and recharge and it's nice that you get something for completing the level even without cargo. I liked that there were different kinds of cargo that could withstand more or less of a beating and it affected how you approached the game.
Overall, solid entry! Particularly impressive that the game is so cohesive with such a large team since they are often difficult to coordinate.
I drew Zoey (or Zara?) and added her to the cat-ear pixel fan art compilation on [my profile page](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/).
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Good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice entry!
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The "don't pass through a tile twice" puzzle is familiar (see Pokemon ice puzzles, etc.) but you definitely brought some freshness to it, especially with the ability to cross your own path and intersect corners! The other mechanics like pushing eggs and barriers you had to open also spiced things up.
I think my biggest quibble with the overall game direction is the way it handled navigation and backtracking. Usually with puzzle games, each room is self-contained and represents a unique problem the player has to solve. However, some of the levels in this game are impossible at first; then you have to come back the other direction to solve them. This is potentially frustrating for players since it makes the problem space much larger and adds some ambiguity over whether the puzzle is actually possible or not. (Side note: backtracking is pretty common in Metroidvanias and some RPGs --- but it's usually very obvious that an extra path or secret is not available the first time, whereas with a puzzle like this you might just be missing the solution).
The graphics are very clear and cohesive. I liked that all the switches and barriers had matching symbols and that the egg barriers showed how many eggs you were missing to get through. Some animations (like bubbling lava) would have brought thins to the next level - but also Compo games are very tight for time so it's understandable to scope this out.
I added your long snake to the pixel fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
I unfortunately didn't get the chance to play your game during regular play and rate, but circled back to it afterward!
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As always, you have a distinct character style, a high degree of polish, and a good amount of humor injected throughout. Professor-Doctor Smarticus was hilarious (in your words, the dialogue was extremely dumb --- meant as the highest possible praise). The boss fight music was also amazing, especially since you worked it into the narrative and used the same tune for the title! Second favorite song in the soundtrack was definitely the music played from the extremely small speaker, though. (Other humor highlights for me include "I've been studying your jump height, Terry").
Gameplay-wise, the main mechanic was super interesting and led to some neat puzzles, especially the ones where you had to be in mid-air during the camera shift. Unfortunately I think the problem space is pretty limited with just the one mechanic, and many of the later levels felt similar to earlier ones. It might have benefited from one or two secondary mechanics to make you think about it in new ways (e.g. adding lasers that you can throw bombs through but not walk through, or other objects/enemies that you have to position in addition to yourself). Of course, timelines are very tight for the Compo and you already packed a lot of content into this as-is.
The boss fight was a nice twist on the mechanic! I think I got a bug once where it centered the camera not directly below the boss? Which confused me for a bit, but I never got it again, so I wonder if I just got confused or something.
Tiny audio suggestion; my first thought would be to run the voice lines played over the TVs through a high-pass filter to make it sound more like it's playing out of speakers (I do that for the hold music in my game when the player doesn't have the phone picked up: [Normal](https://github.com/jeremycryan/LD53/blob/main/assets/sound/please_hold_full.ogg) | [High Pass](https://github.com/jeremycryan/LD53/blob/main/assets/sound/please_hold.ogg) ). Of course, there are plenty of reasons you would not want to do this, especially if you think it would affect the delivery (hehe) of the voice lines.
Congrats on your excellent ratings, and as always, look forward to playing your game next event! I don't know how you managed to get 2nd in Humor with such a hilarious game; whoever scored higher is clearly a cheat and a charlatan.
END TRANSMISSION!
Nice entry!
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It's really satisfying to upgrade and grow your empire, and the game is well paced with the rewards and the three "acts". I didn't realize you could upgrade the nodes during the second phase, so sat for a while without upgrades without realizing it, but once I figured it out it went smoothly from there.
The art and sound are simple but clear, and you managed to get a lot of variety in building types, etc. so it doesn't look too stale (and were the maps procedural?). Music would have been nice, especially if it built up as you expanded, but it's obviously hard to squeeze everything into 48 hours.
I drew your delivery guy and added him to the fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
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Overall, great work! Reminds me a lot of [Boba](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/boba?ref=superjumpmagazine.com), last event's Compo winner.
@100th-coin Thanks for playing and for the gameplay video!
One interesting design problem is that the problem space is so big --- it's like a game of chess, where you change one move and the game becomes totally different. I playtested with a couple friends during the jam and had to strategically change some words or add extra blocks to prevent particularly troublesome red herrings.
All that to say --- I managed to solve your puzzle in a *completely different* way with the word "hout".
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There were a number of "cursed words" in the giant txt of English words I used that I had to individually remove because they broke puzzles or would confuse players - but clearly missed "hout", "ish", and likely many others.
Thanks for making a level! It's always really cool to see other game designers riff on a puzzle system. Maybe as a post-jam project will make a nicer method for making and viewing player-made levels.
@frogman Thanks for playing! Not sure if this was the intended solution, but I managed to get past the banana, with the help of "cursed word" GRA:
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@jdeedubs Thanks for the kind words; I went in a very different direction than most of my past Ludum Dare games, but I'm happy to see it resonated with people! I forgot exactly what steps I took to beat your puzzle, but this is where I ended up:
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This one was particularly interesting in that you don't even *start* with "hope." In hindsight, there's no reason why you need to, although I designed my twelve levels that way.
@mathstr0fficial @arnenia @digital-bacon Thanks for playing!
And @n-feofentov, I just fixed the link... good catch!
@wiredoverload Thanks for playing!
The comment about level design is interesting because most of the people I've seen play have struggled a lot more with "Nothing is impossible" and "Theseus" than "Open-ended."
Of course, everyone's brain works differently and that makes balancing puzzle games really hard (and playtesting is only useful if the person has never seen the level!). I did make some changes to Theseus and to Open-ended partway through the jam after preliminary playtesting, mostly by adding obstructions and changing out words to avoid red herrings.
Glad you still enjoyed it and made it through to the end!
@alchemic Dang, that was tough! Although I still don't think I ended up solving it the intended way since I didn't use "FAE" and used a couple cursed words like "NTH"... got the last two letters via "YAP" and "ADE". Thanks for taking the time to make a level!
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@pious @nick-baggett @daxtear @alexascher @vidarn @jordantanner Thanks everyone for playing and for the feedback!
@ditam Glad you liked the "deep breath" level --- I decided to throw it in at the last second and wasn't sure it would translate well. I don't think the graphics were inherently a scope reduction to fit everything into 48 hours - I mostly had a hard time picturing "looks" that would fit well with a board full of letters.
@honest-dan Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Of the twelve levels, there are really only three "hard" ones --- "Nothing is Impossible" being the first. Puzzle games are obviously very tricky to balance on jam timelines, and the difficulty curve seems to be hit-or-miss from other feedback. I haven't made a true puzzle game since LD43 so all the feedback is very helpful for next time!
> Had you come across a word puzzle like this before> or you make it up?
As far as I'm aware, it's original --- I haven't specifically played any word games like this. But I don't play a ton of word games, and this is a pretty straightforward concept, so I also wouldn't be surprised if somebody has done it before!
Freg party freg party freg party!
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This was a really neat take on the tower defense genre. At first, I thought it was unsatisfying that you can't always place towers when you want, but I quickly realized that you are supposed to use your food and fregs as shields to protect the temple. The weapons all felt fair; the one that took up nine tiles was very strong, but also took up nine tiles. There were some fun gameplay decisions like how to place your units to maximize fregs in a row, while not leaving your fregs completely unprotected.
I will say that "limited space" felt like it wasn't a huge concern until very suddenly I couldn't place a unit and lost. It's difficult to plan around since you don't know what towers are coming up.
As usual, the game is very polished and charming. The art is very cute, particularly the fregs and the big statue. There were little bits of juice like bouncy hover text, and satisfying sound effects and music. The one potential flavor miss is having tongue-based weaponry like traditional frog-vs-insect combat (then again, these are fregs, not frogs).
Great work all around!
@honest-dan Thanks for the clarifications - if you end up taking a post-jam balance pass I would love to be pinged so I could take another crack at it!
I really liked the gameplay for your LD52 game, and this felt a bit similar, but with that extra spacey3d magic. Definitely a favorite for LD54 so far. :slight_smile:
As usual, you've made an extremely clean and satisfying puzzle game!
This was a really nice relaxing experience. I appreciate the real-world inspiration behind the mechanic and the cute character art. And I can't stress enough how nice the undo button was from a quality of life standpoint --- there were a few times I made one wrong move very deep into a level, and it would have been painful to start over completely.
I will say I feel like I "got" the mechanic fairly early on, after which the puzzles weren't very difficult. While the one mechanic is really interesting and clean, I feel like it may have needed *just a little something extra* to get a satisfying ten levels out of it. But obviously time is a very scarce resource for Compo and the game is very complete and impressive as-is.
Thanks for making this!
Nice job finishing something in Godot if you just started using it!
This was actually quite fun! Games where you control one thing with the keyboard and another thing with the mouse are actually a really underappreciated category. And the walls closing in helped spice up the gameplay until the player inevitably gets hit.
Graphics and audio were simple but got the job done. Obviously this is "programmer art" but everything is communicated very clearly and the giant score in the middle of the screen was a cool approach to the UI (it might be nice if it was behind the player, as if it were printed on the floor, so it's less likely to confuse your movement though).
It would be nice if there were an indication of enemy health; I noticed some enemies seemed to take more hits with the fireball than others, but there was no way to tell visually.
My best score was 71... no idea how good that is. Thanks for making this!
Nice entry!
The premise, art, and "flavor" all contribute to a really fun and goofy game. I got a kick out of a number of the jokes (like the skeleton on the difficulty screen, packing "the cow and all of its belongings", and the Far Side reference). This fit well with the gameplay of frantically throwing animals and objects into a box under time pressure.
I will say that I found myself fighting with the physics a bit, which could be a little frustrating in a game with pretty tight timing. On the other hand, you did have an untimed difficulty, where I could practice and satisfy my desire to actually pack things optimally. It might have been nice if this was an option you could use for all the difficulties, so you can try the difficult levels without the time pressure.
Would have been nice to have some sound effects and/or music, but of course it's very difficult to scope everything into a Compo game and you had a lot of other content in the form of levels and objects.
Good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Played on Pomo's stream, had a blast!
Loved that there was something to do while dead, which is often a failure case of battle royale games.
Make way for the mall. It's nothing personal, foliage.
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This was a fun sandbox and set of levels! Remminds me a lot of Powder Toy, Noita, and other pixel-based simulation games. I appreciate how everything you have to do is extremely mundane for the most part.
Unfortunately it did feel like most of the levels were very narrow, and the tiny leyline area meant there were not *that* many options for what to do. Most of the time you didn't have much control beyond picking the right combination and ratio of ingredients and hoping it works. Of course, you also added a sandbox mode to mess around in if you want more freedom.
I got levels 1-5 relatively easily, but couldn't figure out level 6.
Nice work for 48 hours!
Nice entry!
The core game loop was really nice: kill ghosts, buy upgrades, slowly get the arena smaller and smaller until you eventually die. Tying the size of the arena to character improvements was really interesting, especially since they also went the other way --- you can grow the arena, at a cost.
A little bit of feedback on some particular mechanics: - I think it's rarely fun to have "bullet speed" as an upgrade. It usually makes very little gameplay difference (the enemies are walking toward you, they're going to hit the bullets anyway), but it makes the projectile *feel* a lot worse when it's slow. I usually like to start the bullet speed fast and leave room for more interesting upgrades like the ricochet, firing speed, etc. - This one isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but making it so you can only fire in the direction you're moving can make combat unsatisfying. You generally want to shoot toward enemies, but move away from them.
Of course, this is all very subjective. You know your game better than anyone.
The audio work is great! The sound effects are punchy and the music was really pleasant. The character designs are nice and I liked a lot of the little graphics details like the on-hit effects and "turn around" animations.
Nice work for 72 hours!
Wow, this was awesome!
The title mechanic is obviously very neat (I unfortunately haven't played Ribbon 1, but I might have to go back and try it). I particularly liked the use of grates and elevation in the puzzles, and the fact you could customize your ribbon as you go to unlock new abilities.
One minor quibble is that you don't really *need* to use the ribbon for a lot of the puzzles, or at least the interesting parts. The bounce pad is effectively a double jump, and the key is effectively the same as it is in other games.. In fact, I was able to complete this "100% minimum enters" speedrun where I only entered the ribbon once:
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As usual, polish and audio are great for a Compo game. I loved the little Easter eggs like the bonus ribbon, trophy case, and "we got a sequel" banner.
Great work on this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Awesome concept, and very clean execution. It was really satisfying to build a tiny machine and walk it around the map. The antigravity mechanic was a little unintuitive at first, but made for some interesting puzzles once I got a good sense of how it worked.
The pixel art is very cute and clean (the threaded rods reminded me a little bit of the airships in Super Mario Bros 3!). All the important bits in the level were distinct colors and were communicated very well. The building menu was also very intuitive.
Audio was simple, but got the job done. Music would have been a nice addition, but obviously time is very limited for the Compo.
Nice work, and good luck during play and rate!
Had a lot of fun with this one! The main mechanic is really interesting, and it makes for some interesting choices of when to use your limited spells to get the most out of them and not mess up your spellbook too much.
Right now it does feel like it's rarely worth it to intersect words or play them diagonally; the safest strategy is just to stack them to conserve space. It would be neat if intersecting previous spells gave some kind of bonus to incentivize it and make a more interesting crossword (maybe you get a copy of that spell, or it makes that spell fade faster, or you just get bonus points).
Graphics and audio are fairly simple but are cohesive and readable. I like the bouncy characters and the variety of animations for the different damage types. It's a nice touch that the player and enemies actually respect the perspective.
Nice work for 48 hours!
Nice entry!
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This was a really interesting halfway point between Match-3 and a frantic putting-out-fires game. I really liked how you built the raft up as you went, and that it slowly filled up with junk faster than you can combine things leading to very hectic gameplay.
I do wish that time stopped or slowed while you were placing new raft segments. Near the end, with a large board, I would frequently get random builds at inopportune times, and be forced to navigate the UI for a couple seconds while the raft explodes around me.
Art is charming and the tiles are well-designed so that the different objects look very distinct. Music also fits the mood of the game very well. I'm always impressed with games that feel very cohesive made by large teams; you must have had some very effective communication/project management to keep eight people on the same page.
Great work for 72 hours!
@monika You are certainly welcome to add it to your list if you want to, but I don't think I need the traffic as much as other games might (I'm already at 20 ratings).
Definitely had features I was hoping to add, like showing players on teams, but had to cut some scope toward the end of the jam. :slight_smile:
@thyoi Aaaaah thanks for playing and for the amazing fan art! Love the little frogs!
Had a lot of fun with this one! I absolutely love the premise, character designs, and jazz soundtrack. My best strategy seemed to be getting a critical mass of cookie monsters which would kill just about any other enemy on sight (and a few gobblers to tank damage if needed).
As others have said, a little bit more "oomph" to the combat system could have gone a long way toward making it more satisfying. Maybe some particles/screenshake on hitting an enemy, or a brief animation for spawning in a minion, etc. Of course there's not much time in a game jam and you added an impressive amount of content as-is.
I drew a doodle of Rakodi:
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Great entry!
I liked the primary block placing mechanic a lot, and the levels were designed in a way that took good advantage of the mechanic. I could see the same concept stretched even farther if there were environmental hazards that affected how you played (like regions you couldn't place blocks in, forcing you to be creative about positioning and making blocks fall). Of course, it's hard to scope extra stuff into a jam, especially as a solo developer.
Pixel art graphics were charming and the UI was very clear. The music you chose fit the mood well, although it would have been nice to have simple sound effects as well for at least the core actions of jumping, placing blocks, and removing blocks.
Always good to see more pygame developers in LD! Don't forget you can port to other platforms after the jam is over, if you wanted to experiment with getting a build in web with [pygbag.](https://github.com/pygame-web/pygbag)
I made a little doodle of your wizard:
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Good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice entry!
Lets start with the things I really liked: - Character design and animation were great. The hero, scientist, and void monster all had very appealing designs and the animations were smooth. - Level layout. I really liked the progression from tutorial zone, to hub with NPC, to four individual routes you can do in any order that lead back to the hub. I felt like the layout was intuitive without a map or marker and never got lost.
And some areas for improvement: - Character controller. Some of the platforming and movement felt a bit awkward, and the player felt a little slow. I'd highly recommend checking out GMTK's [Platformer Toolkit](https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit) for some tips and tricks on making platformer movement feel good. - Camera. A few times it was frustrating when I couldn't see directly below me and it turned out to be a hazard. If the player had a way to look around or the camera was just a bit more zoomed out, that could help.
Overall nice little game with a lot of personality. Congrats on finishing what looks like your first LD, and hope you come back for more!
I drew a doodle of the Void Beast:
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Cute rhythm game!
My first time playing, the audio and visuals didn't sync right and it made it difficult to play (visuals were lagging behind by half a beat or so). Not sure what happened, but restarting fixed the issue right away.
I really like the character designs, the dance animations, and all the fancy effects that happen over the course of the ritual (and how they line up with the music). The rhythm game felt appropriately generous with the timing without being *too* easy. I would have loved even more positive feedback on a successful hit, like some screenshake or an animation on the arrow you hit, but obviously only so much you can squeeze into a weekend project.
After getting the cake I went back to see what happened when you lost, and I loved the animation there as well!
The music was very pleasant and I liked the distinct movements where the style shifted a bit. I really liked the melody, but think the game could have benefited from slightly "punchier" sound overall since you're trying to line up your button presses with the notes --- perhaps slightly different instrumentation or other changes in the audio software could have taken it to the next level.
Enjoyed this one a lot, good job team!
I drew a doodle of the dancing cat for you:
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Caught this one on stream and had to go back and play it.
The main mechanic of the javelin is the epitome of an "easy to understand, difficult to master" game mechanic. The momentum management that is secondary in many precision platformers like Celeste is this game's bread and butter, and the open-ended obstacles tempt you to try different approaches and develop mastery. I particularly like the fact you get a momentum boost when recalling the javelin, allowing for really interesting setup-and-payoff moves to cross tricky jumps and scale ledges.
For a jam game, the art and audio are off the charts. The visual direction is very distinct and legible, with tons of little bits of polish like particles, parallax, and the various effects on the javelin itself like the ribbon and wobbling animation upon hitting something. It's clear the team was in extremely close communication and had a shared vision for the game to be able to execute on it so well.
I've participated in 17 Ludum Dares, and this is on my short list for favorite entries ever. The actual ratings for LD are unpredictable, but I would not be surprised at all to see this one in the top ten or even in the top spot. Excellent work to the whole team!
I drew a doodle of the main character:
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Had a lot of fun with this one!
I like the 2.5D look, and the camera movement felt very fluid and was easy to use. Moving around the units, building towers, and the slowly escalating carnage were really satisfying.
One nitpick is that it felt like the units could have been "smarter"... often I had a tower completely surrounded by troops, but some zombies were at the base of the tower damaging it because they hadn't actually collided with any of my units. It would be nice if they had some range they would attack zombies within without direct instruction so you don't have to micromanage quite to the same level.
My best score was 104391!
I drew a doodle of the friendly unit:
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Nice entry!
I loved all the wizard and demon illustrations, and the lore in the locations and descriptions. As others have said, the timing is super tight to be able to complete the tasks when I want to read all the descriptions! It might be nice if the first 2-3 jobs were untimed, and only after that you started having to do the tasks on a timer once you learned about more of the game.
I really appreciate that key parts of descriptions were highlighted for easy skimming. While I like the spooky font you chose, it was a bit difficult to read (and read fast) in the large bodies of text.
Music fit the vibe very well and I liked the demonic sounds when you start up the game!
Here's a doodle of one of the characters in your game:
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Good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice work as always!
There have been so many Sokaban-style games at this point that it's surprising that this one feels so unique even though there are only really two changes to the core game: - You suck instead of push - The blocks need to be arranged in a certain way
It turns out those two things make a big difference! Along with good level design, they led for a number of "aha" moments and head-scratcher situations where a deceptively simple problem required several steps to execute on. A slightly awkward byproduct is that you could never bring the blocks quite to the edge, since you're in the way, but you play this to its strengths by designing levels where you have to avoid boxing yourself in or where you're separated from the blocks by a big chasm anyway. But there are some moments where this feels a little weird because the level looks very open but plays like it's cramped --- and you have to mentally subtract the one-block border to find navigable paths.
Graphics and audio are charming, I like the lizard wizard as a protagonist! Here's a doodle:
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Nice short entry with a lot of character!
I really liked all the character designs and the funny premise of a demon who just wants to mow his lawn but keeps being summoned to fix others' problems. The gameplay itself is pretty simple but that's fine since it's secondary to the narrative.
I did have a couple small areas of improvement, mostly relating to polish: - The character sprite on the lawn mowing section is scaled down, resulting in some artifacts. All the other sprites look very crisp so this one sticks out a bit. - The transitions between scenes are a bit abrupt. It might help if there was a short crossfade for the audio and/or some kind of simple visual transition like a wipe or fade. - The summoning situations were all very interesting, with fun characters and situations, but I didn't really get to look through them because I had to click through them so fast! It might be nice if it took a little while for the dialogue to read out, without being able to click through, so you could get the full experience without having to play suboptimally.
I liked the music, especially the contrast between the two phases, good job to the composer.
I drew a doodle of the grass demon:
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Nice work for 72 hours!
Nice entry!
As others have said, a little more tutorialization would have gone a long way (or just more instruction on the game page). It took me a while to figure out the basics like running into flowers to collect them. After playing for a bit, I was still mostly clicking random ingredients because I didn't remember what the different combos did even though some of the creatures seemed much better than others.
I loved the look and feel of the island, the little wobbly sprites, and the 4-bit color. There were enough tiles and types of behavior from the animals and settlers for the island to feel "lived in" despite everything's behavior being very simple.
I'm not sure exactly what the druid is supposed to be, but the sprite looked sort of bird-esque so this is how I drew him:
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Great work and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
This was a very entertaining and unique entry! There was an impressive number of birds and the "signal processing" side worked surprisingly well (although there were occasionally sounds I feel like I nailed but still got rejected).
I appreciate all the little details like the birds approaching from the trees, and the victory screen at the end.
I drew a doodle of the owl:
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Finally made it to playing yours after dodging it on at least one stream to avoid spoilers... and it was worth the wait!
As always, the characters, writing, and humor shine through. I'm always impressed by your ability to create games that are extremely different from each other while still being instantly recognizable as a Chris Siebert game.
Highlights for me: - The first ~30 seconds of the game that set up the premise, the characters, and the delightful exchange of "Oops, I exploded!"//"Yeah... can we talk about that?" - The freeze frame on every single exploded - The design of the necromancer - The a capella boss fight music
Also a relatively small detail, but I really liked the objective recap at the beginning of each level. Especially since you're being told to do one thing by the characters in-game and another thing by the game, it helps that it's laid out very clearly and there's never confusion about what your goal is. (I also like that the dialog box has demon horns)
The gameplay itself is pretty barebones, and sometimes led to some feels-bad moments where you narrowly lose because Henrick is too fast. But it does its job well enough since it's primarily there in service of the story and premise, and it switches up frequently enough to not get stale.
The player's focus on the graphics side is often on the characters and props, which are intentionally in a very simple black-and-white hand-drawn style, but I found myself looking at the environment a lot because it was so well done! I particularly liked the look of the trees and the grass.
Great work, and good luck in the rest of play and rate!
I drew a doodle of the demon:
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Nice entry!
As others have said, the magnifying glass and mirrors are a novel neat spin on an otherwise fairly straightforward tower defense game. I really liked how you could get really good coverage with the magnifying glasses at the cost of consistency, since you had to add or remove mirrors to make sure they continued to work across rounds.
I had to restart the first level a couple times because there were ways to spend your money that just made you lose (like buying a flyswatter, which can't quite take the first wave on its own), but after a couple false starts I was able to make it through all the levels without any more problems. Part of the issue is also that bugs just continue to eat your picnic until you're dead, unlike most traditional tower defense games where leaking one or two units just costs you part of your health.
The music and graphics were really cute. I enjoyed the creativity of some of the enemy designs, especially how they got more and more intense over time. I liked the chainsaw bee in particular so I drew a little doodle of him:
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Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
@ategon Absolutely, go for it!
Had a lot of fun with this one!
I'm impressed at the number of towers and units you guys were able to make, and how balanced it felt. Everything felt like it had strengths and weaknesses and there were a lot of ways you could conceivably win. The tiny pixel dudes were really charming and the game as a whole had a great vibe.
The strategy I ended up going with was discounting goblin village as much as possible and making tons of them --- it was weak to the electric towers, but given enough time they were able to get past them. Here's a "screenshot":
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Thanks for making this and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
Nice work as always! I continue to be impressed at how you manage to make a novel puzzle game every event and this one is a worthy addition to the collection.
I really like the premise of this one; take a bunch of simple creatures, give them unique movement mechanics, and try to position them into the right spots.
If I had one piece of criticism, it would be that the early levels felt a little too straightforward. You could usually figure out which pieces needed to end up in which goals because of the movement restrictions, and get pretty close to the answer by just moving the units closer without a specific plan. **However,** this changed with the stag beetle! That helped introduce some fun contradictions ("wait, it's impossible for the frog to move there!") and realizations ("but if it was one square higher...") that shine through in a good puzzle game. In my opinion, if the game had cut a few levels and introduced the stag beetle earlier, it would still have been a satisfying length but would have gotten to the meaty levels earlier.
Graphics are as cute and clean as ever, and I appreciate you bringing back the live sax for the soundtrack.
I drew some of the little critters (less polished than usual since I'm rushing to get some last-minute ratings in).
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Thanks for making this, and good luck for the results!
Really funny entry! I appreciate the premise of fighting little bugs that you can only see through the magnifying glass, and as others have said the voice clips and music are great.
Made a quick mite drawing for you!
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Had a lot of fun with this! I like the silly honey physics and the overall game loop of exploring the dungeon, fighting baddies, and recruiting your friendly bees to form a little Galaga swarm as you go deeper.
I think the only issue I ran into is that you often spawn directly in the middle of the action and lose most of your swarm right off the bat when going into a new level. Having a somewhat space area to start off in would probably help a little bit!
I drew some bees spitting honey:
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A lovely game with absolutely nothing sinister, unnerving, or otherwise deeply unsettling in an aesthetic way at all!
**I̶̮̓ ̷̖̚c̸͚̔a̷̙̿ñ̸͈ ̵̰̈́f̴̮͊e̵̩̾é̶͜l̷̛͓ ̸̙́ṭ̵̈́h̴̟͘ẹ̴̋i̴͓̒r̷͉̈ ̷͇̓e̸͖͋y̵̮̔ē̶̡s̵̗͝**
Gameplay-wise, this was a fun twist on the typical automation game, because it also had 3D physics --- this led to some fun contraptions and interactions that let you solve the puzzles in unintended ways. I liked the variety of little creatures you could build and the fact that everything in the game seemed vaguely sentient. The only hitch I ran into was that the vertical shooters would sometimes clog if you tried to route too many eggs through them, but that's probably my fault for making the biggest mess of a rube-goldberg monstrosity possible.
I drew the little springy guy:
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Finally getting around to rating games, so naturally had to start with yours!
As always, you've delivered an impressively scoped, polished game bursting with personality. Puzzle games are super difficult on LD timelines but to me the pacing and difficulty felt just about right, which is no small feat!
Graphics and UI are high-quality and legible. Once again I'm super impressed with how good the trees in the background look! I do think the background and foreground elements clash a little bit, since the background has so much depth of color (especially with the light rays/shaders) while the character and creatures are comparatively simple and flat.
Audio is great as always, and glad to hear you're continuing your a capella streak.
Fan art is quick and dirty this time around because I'm doing all my play and rate in the last couple days. Here's the guy (I gave him arms so you don't have to):
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Thanks for continuing to make awesome games!
Super cool concept and smooth execution! I love just how simple this is, but how much it allows for player collaboration and creativity. It also is really good at solving one of the big issues with multiplayer jam games --- having multiple people playing at the same time --- by making everything asynchronous.
Great work everybody!
Nice entry! This was a fun concept executed with just the right amount of silliness.
The depth-of-field mechanic was cool in principle, but in practice it was difficult to interact with, especially when there were enemies closer to the camera than you were since they covered everything up. I also felt like some of the gameplay values could be tweaked --- it felt like enemies took a lot of hits to kill, while at the same time I was never in meaningful danger (I didn't even notice the bar filling up until the boss fight, when it got to maybe 10 or 15 percent).
The art, voiceover, and overall vibe and storytelling were fantastic. I really liked the juxtaposition of the frantic shmup gameplay on top of completely irrelevant jokes and quips as you're hurtling into hell, and the art style matched that feeling perfectly. I particularly liked cute little sheep satan.
Thanks for making this and good luck for the rest of play and rate!
I didn't get to finish making my shrimp tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura tempura...
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As always amazing polish work, all the little background items you could interact with were fantastic. The build up of the game's base systems to more and more absurd ends was great, and the ending was the cherry on top.
Great luck in the jam, this is definitely one of my favorites!
I really enjoyed this one! The climbing mechanic felt very original, especially with the different lengths for the tongue and limbs!
I really only have two bits of negative feedback: - Sometimes with two limbs you could get in a tug-o-war, making it hard to accurately control anything. - Resetting completely on hitting an obstacle is *very* punishing. A checkpoint system would have been a big help.
I really like the character art, atmosphere, and little frog and water sounds.
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You've done it again! Your collection of games is a testament to the fact there's still a rich design space in block-pushing puzzles in 2025.
As others have said, the tutorialization for moving fish probably should have been in the first level, since I spent 5 minutes making a fool of myself before I realized I could move them.
I really liked the game of "keep these groups separate" while solving the block puzzle - it added a really fun extra layer of problem solving beyond just getting the blocks to the right places, since the in-between states were all important too. I know you mentioned there were fewer levels because of time constraints, but I actually think this was a perfect length for the existing mechanics - but maybe if you managed to squeeze in some kind of extra twist you could get a few more levels out of it.
Visuals and audio are nice as always, and the acoustic guitar was a nice touch!
Looking forward to the next zucchinibread sokoban for LD58!
Amazing entry! I loved the clean visuals and UI, simple premise, and neat puzzles in one polished package. Add onto that that essentially every level had unique art for all the objects, it's own animated geometric background, and often a cohesive overall theme/look and this was just a lot of "stuff" for a compo game.
I did have a couple times when a picture didn't seem to work how it was supposed to (kept falling "behind" one of them when I needed to land on it). But after shuffling around the pictures a bit it worked fine.
Well done!
@rinevard @clintor24 @ordineu Thanks for playing!
@angry-fridge There is no rotation option, I scoped it out because it would mean a lot of items would need to be redrawn to a different perspective. The fixed rotation is also a tool to nudge the player toward particular solutions by removing potential red herrings.
@lyamgtt They probably ended up underneath the suitcase - you can close the suitcase and move it out of the way to check! "R" also restarts the level, although that isn't actually shown anywhere...
@lereveur Oh wow, I didn't really expect anyone to actually try those, good job!
@alchemic I absolutely should have made "Unpleasant Teapot" be just a hair smaller than the other cards! I apologize for this terrible error.
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**Oh no! Someone's blown a hole in the comment section!** Looks like a job for...
Fantastic as always, you always have extremely large-scope compo projects that still manage to come together and feel complete and polished. I really appreciate how you handled the movement in this one; it was really satisfying to zip around gluing things together since you could just slip through completed pieces, while still having limits that you could use to make the player do the correct sequences.
As always, the characters and voice acting were top notch. I particularly liked the "Yellow" bit and the incredible pun that is Necro-moon-cer.
Fun little game with an interesting main mechanic! The movement is a bit finicky at times but it seems like this would be a fun speedrunning game.
Plus it has a pirate fish, which is always a plus.
Very cute entry! I believe I collected all the furniture and tablets, but the counter for furniture wasn't quite accurate (said I only had 20, but I had much more than that). And I got 50/49 tablets because I collected the big one twice!
Loved the gameplay loop of swimming around looking for things and then decorating the apartment.
Delightful entry. I loved the peaceful atmosphere, procedurally generated world, and wide variety of bugs to find. My one complaint is that some areas with grass and trees are not super pleasant to navigate because your camera gets blocked so much --- perhaps making the trees taller so you're just interacting with trunks, and the grass shorter so you can see over it, would make it a little more seamless.
I love the little bug collection summary at the end, it makes it pretty clear about how many there are still left to find! It might be nice if there was just a little more information, like what habitats you're more likely to find certain ones in, that could let you fill out the holes. But very small detail in the scheme of things for a 72 hour game.
Nice work!
Fun little game with a very retro PS1 feel (ever play 40 Winks?). As others have said, it would be nice if the rock pickup radius was just a little bigger since it was sometimes tricky to grab them during the combat segments.
I appreciated the particle effects and the little bits of gold that slowly roll after you if you don't pick them up immediately. The little bits of humor in the notes was fun (I like to imagine the boss literally wrote "(bossfight)" at the bottom of one of them).
Fun little entry and extra impressive to be made from scratch!
This game was absolutely lovely, reminded me of playing classic arcade games. It was quite difficult (authentic to the arcade game experience) --- I failed the first level ~3 times, but once I got it I was able to beat the game in one go.
I will say there was generally too much going on for me to think strategically about how to use the enemy ammo, so I just primarily used my regular gun and occasionally mashed the special ammo button when I needed something extra. And I avoided the red bats because they killed me more than anything.
Loved all the little creature designs, everything had so much character and the whole package was just a wonderful experience.
I really liked this one! I did have to go into the description for hints for how to play (once I read "they only see adjacent gems" I figured it out pretty quickly), but once I got the hang of it, it was a really fun puzzle and felt a bit like minesweeper.
Are the levels procedurally generated? They definitely look different every time, and this seems like a game that would not be too impossible to implement that in Compo timelines!
Loved the overall vibe of the music and sinister laughter when you lose. I made it to level 10 a few times but didn't end up getting farther because I kept making small mistakes - restarting from the beginning is maybe a little bit too punishing, although it is probably necessary early on to make sure the player actually learns the rules correctly.
Well this was absolutely delightful. Loved the goofy characters, creative gameplay, and little details in the newspapers. Also the "real" art illustrations were just really pretty in their own right!
My only real quibble is that the gameplay was a bit easy. It would have been nice if there was one challenge level with more than three components, although it seems like it would be difficult to fit anything else into this game since it is already scoped so high for a weekend jam.
Loved the little nod to Captain Peggles in the paper!
Fun little parody game! Only managed to get 10/16 because I didn't realize what the goal was until I had already spent most of my money.
The UI is a little buggy in parts - I think the link for games changes the cursor when hovering the name, but you have to actually click the capsule to go to the page.
Loved the joke of FACTORY never going on sale, and little nods to Hungry Knight, Fantastic Fist, etc.
Oh, and pineapple for sure.
Yay, I'm someone's favorite person!
Great entry and well deserved win, felt extremely "Daniel Mullins" in the best way.
@zubspace Thanks for playing! And you can use Backspace to undo just the last move. :slight_smile:
@thisisspy @100th-coin Thanks for playing!
@thingus I actually designed them inside my image editing software (Paint.NET). In the game files for the download version you can see that the level geometry is just saved as an image. And Paint.NET shows you the length in pixels when you use the line tool, which let me pretty easily calculate the line lengths and locations of coins!
I don't know why I jumped into the pit. It was clearly a trap, since it was labeled "spike pit" but the bad guy called it a "bottomless pit." Which is it, bad guy? And why is a tricorn a hat anyway, instead of a horse with three horns?
Another fantastic entry, it seems very difficult to make a point-and-click of any satisfying length for Compo and you managed to pull it off. I liked the meta "respawn" mechanic, although it admittedly took me a couple tries to realize I could jump in the corridor before the "boss fight."
Loved all the little jokes and puns in the dialogue and environment, and leaning into the absurd tropes of detective stories ("You knew the song I was singing while committing a crime?"). Already looking forward to whatever you cook up next.