Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → JoshAnthony1990
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Summon the Worms! | jam | 908 | 3.27 | 3.22 | 3.47 | 3.00 | 3.36 | 3.56 | 3.22 | 3.50 | |
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Impact! | jam | 1045 | 2.83 | 2.70 | 2.97 | 3.29 | 2.97 | 3.37 | 2.79 | 2.87 | |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Sanity Wars | jam | 842 | 3.00 | 2.94 | 2.55 | 2.46 | 3.00 |
Great work! Great polish, great use of the theme, loved the weight mechanic. The throw seemed a bit clunky to me, though. Holding to charge didn't seem to scale (or maybe I just held too long each time, but it's hard to tell without feedback). I think this is a good, solid base to build from, though!
I liked the play on the Oregon Trail. I found myself bored as I kept going on, perhaps the game could have been shorter.
The theme was definitely a factor here. It was tough making sacrifices to keep things going. The polish was also good. Excellent effort!
I didn't think this was too difficult. There's a few hard spots, but nothing some repetition can't get through.
This has the best death sound I've heard yet from a Ludum Dare game. :) Overall, it was fun to play, and I think you did a great job!
Great concept. The hurt animations often let me glide over gaps without having to actually jump.
Good use of the theme. I feel like the lack of music and sound fx made it feel a little boring to me. I also wished there was some more feedback in-game for when things happened, like patient death (took me awhile to figure out that tiny bit of green at the bottom = death).
I had fun playing it, but it's hard to tell where you are with regards to making progress towards a victory condition. I liked the narrative and the Lovecraftian atmosphere.
Hilarious game, loved the concept and it was well-executed.
Good entry. Not sure if the snake-things were supposed to hurt you, they didn't seem to do anything to my character. The 8-bitish art looked cool. I enjoyed playing!
Honestly, I found it to be a bit boring. I basically just click spammed on every non-white bloop and made it through the game. Maybe add some punishment for clicking on a healthy bloop?
This is a great game. The theme application was hilarious and yet somehow realistic. ;P I loved the art style and the sound effects as well. The gameplay was good, though my one gripe is the enemy hit logic seems to do damage even after you shoot them down.
Overall, an awesome entry!
Cool concept. I eventually figured out a way to succeed, but it seems like some things you interact with change for reasons I was not able to readily determine (the same action, in two playthroughs, brought me failure and success). Well-polished, though!
Fun game. I liked the concept, but felt the steering was a little loose in mid-air. I thought you also got a significant amount of levels in for the time you had, great job!
A well-polished game, which is very hard to pull off in such a short time. Took me a few tries to figure out the significance of the Twist mechanic, but once I did it was fun to play. Good job!
I think this is one of the cooler executions of the sacrifice as progress mechanic, and I really enjoyed it. Good polish as well. My only complaint is how grindy the last level got. I know that's part of the mechanic, but it felt a little long for my tastes. Didn't take away from my overall satisfaction, though!
Interesting concept. The jump felt a bit loose for my tastes. I also wasn't fond of having to hit the snowpeople with a melee weapon. Most of my attempts to do so wound up with me landing on top of them. I liked the idea of doing a sacrificial jump to spawn new platforms.
Well polished, fun gameplay. Wish I could've had more control over how I threw the snowball, instead of a single arc. Also, the integration with the theme was...interesting, but it was meh for me.
@flying-dog-fish Yeah, that was a gameplay choice I made when I was still trying to induce a terror-ish atmosphere, to reduce the amount of vision you get. It didn't really play out that way, though.
@casey-macneil @sketchycode @justalocalhero Thanks for the feedback!
@meenners @mania @jharler thank you for the feedback!
Those of you with control issues, could you elaborate a little more on what specifically made it tough? I'm looking for feedback so I can implement improvements to the engine.
Interesting concept. I feel like it needed some additional variables to make it more difficult, such as a morale reaction to the sacrifices (I mean, we peons get figuratively sacrificed by our work overlords, but if it started happening literally you'd think we'd notice!). I also think the opening pixel font was really hard to read when it's blown up large like that.
A good effort, though!
Excellent atmosphere. It took me awhile to figure out what to do for the endgame. Overall, the mood was amazing. Great jump scares, and the blood resolution drain mechanic was an excellent idea.
I liked the vibe and the atmosphere, but I didn't notice anything to regenerate health and the gameplay wasn't compelling enough for me to keep trying.
Clever game, great use of the theme as a mechanic. I loved it!
Great artwork, good audio. I enjoyed it for the first few waves, then it did get a little boring.
Awesome concept, well-executed, excellently polished. Great entry, guys!
I feel like the interaction was confusing. I had many moments where I tried to do what the game wanted me to do, and got no response. I also wish I could skip through the dialogue once I'd finished reading it.
I really liked the way the theme was approached, in a narrative way of defining sacrifice. I think some of the dialogue options were confusing, especially the one at the end. Both options could have been defined as a sacrifice, making it hard for me to identify which action went with the choice I was trying to make.
Overall, a good entry.
Apparently this didn't happen for everyone, but for me I couldn't progress past the second stage because there was a gap the character wasn't allowed to run through at the bottom. Weirdly, it seemed the character could run through other gaps that same size.
Nice visuals and music, though. Not sure what the story is supposed to be or how the theme fit in. Other than that bug, good job overall!
Well done! It was a simple game to pick up and learn, and complex enough to keep enjoying past the initial gameplay. The atmosphere was well-presented, good music and art. I loved it! Great job.
The audio and visuals looked great. The collisions sounded satisfyingly ploppy, and the retro music fit the retro graphics really well.
I had trouble with the steering at first. It seems like you can improve the graphics on that as you go on, but I found myself getting frustrated with timing out because I just couldn't position the car to grab an item or crash into people.
It was still fun overall, though. Good work!
I found it hard to play, with the limited movement and the size of the boss. Perhaps I'm just not skilled enough, but I couldn't ever get close enough to land a hit on him, and I didn't feel compelled enough to keep trying to do so.
The environment and models looked great, though. I enjoyed how everything looked!
I liked that you attempted a flight simulation game. That's pretty bold for a LD game.
I think the flight itself felt clunky. It took me awhile to get adjusted to the flight systems, and having to keep flying the ship while attempting a recovery made things more difficult for me. There were plenty of occasions where I had the targeting reticle nearly lined up on a passenger, and then the ship twisted away right before I could fire.
The audio was alright. I think adding some kind of engine noise would've been really cool.
I like that you came up with names for the passengers. I liked even more what happens to them if you start running low on food. ;) Surprised me, for sure!
You picked a good control scheme. I wasn't fond of the inverted flight, but it wasn't difficult to adjust to.
Good effort, overall!
Beautiful graphics, you nailed it there.
Kudos on getting three tracks into the game. For me, I found it hard to go fast and stay away from the edges, which encouraged me to go slow and pretty much avoid using the boost. The sacrifice was a cool idea, but the gameplay discouraged me from wanting to use it.
Great job!
Fun hack n' slash. I liked that you used Godot, I used it for mine as well. ;)
(Godot-related question: I noticed that the screen would flicker random black patches when I played with the game maximized, which is similar to something that happened in my own game. Did anyone else notice this?)
@eduardo-yukio I don't use that setting. I used GLES2 too. I developed on Linux and never noticed the flickering there. It was only after playing on a Windows machine that I saw it happening. I was wondering if the Nvidia card had something to do with it, after noticing the setting in the Project Settings, but I haven't started to really investigate yet.
Good to know my game isn't the only one, though, so it's not solely related to how I did things. :P
It also only seems to happen when the window is maximized. I didn't see it happening when the screen was sized to the game's default setting.
(Jam version.)
The graphics looked good. I also didn't see any bugs, which is a tremendous accomplishment for a jam game!
I liked the progression of increasing your income. I think if there was something to spend the money on beyond the upgrades, or maybe some kind of timing system for how quickly you can mobilize your income, or just some objective in general, I think that would've made it more fun for me.
What sound you did add to the game really helped it not feel too monotonous.
Good effort overall!
Going for an adventure game was a cool idea. I loved the take on currency as electric current, that was one I hadn't thought of!
I pretty much had to use the walkthrough to get through the first two levels, though I solved the final puzzle by myself. I think part of the issue was the controls weren't always responsive and intuitive, so I had trouble knowing whether I was actually doing something or not.
There were a couple of cases where I had to restart the game because one of the items I was trying to use got "lost" when I switched to use some other action (and I needed the item to continue).
Music was pleasant. More audio would've been cool, but at least having good music helped prevent the game from getting boring.
Good effort overall!
(Also big plus for using Godot! I used it as well. :) )
Nicely done! The power/life mechanic balance made me approach each area cautiously, knowing I couldn't afford to miss. The art was great overall, though the animation on the main character felt a bit off. The level design is good.
Nice job pulling off a card game! Once you understand the rules, it's pretty fun to play. The music was good, too.
Good atmosphere. I agree with the others about the difficulty of the controls.
@udo The envelopes are an enemy type. They drain your health when they get close to you.
On a side note, I added a list of controls to this page. You can also see the controls list from the pause menu.
Yeah, we had a lot we wanted to put into the game, but simply ran out of time. There's a whole slate of enemies and animations that didn't make it in, and there were some UI elements that missed the cut as well that I think would've explained things more clearly.
@copper-aardvark-games That was a regret we had as well. We had more story planned out, but ran out of time to put it in beyond a single wall of text.
@untitled-studios The decision making was basically picking which door you wanted to go through. I don't think we did a great job highlighting Impact Score and that getting a high score was the point of the game, but alas.
@jackson-makes-games Thank you!
@eduardo-yukio If it helps, there was no "path", per se. When you clicked on a door, the event which appeared was purely random. The place you teleported to after accepting the event was also random. One of the things we'd wanted to do was have events "themed" to the different environments, and have those themed events take you to their specific environment (i.e. work-related events take you to an office), but we ran out of time to implement that. Both keyboard-based accept/reject buttons and a tutorial were planned, but got axed due to time (the common refrain, alas).
@bustosman Agreed. We only had time to implement less than half of the planned enemies, and of the ones that did make it in we ran out of time to properly saturate the level with them.
@pawciu Sorry about that, thank you for the compliments! What could have been done to help you better understand what to do?
@m0dsat Thank you!
@aurel I agree, we had planned a tutorial level as an intro, but ran out of time. Thanks for playing!
@pawciu The envelopes were actually an enemy. They drained life when they got close to you. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to making a clearer attack state (they were originally going to try to hit you, and then fall to the ground afterwards).
Really good game. Getting a strategy game up in three days sounds very daunting, and I think this was pulled off exceptionally well.
I liked the atmosphere, the gameplay, the music...just about everything, really. I died on my first couple of attempts, and then figured out my winning strategy and just kept building it up and expanding upon it. I thought the balance got skewed in my favor towards the end, but the early game strategy is crucial to getting to that kind of dominance.
Honestly, though, I didn't find myself using spells much at all. I liked the idea of tying blood to both building units and casting spells, but for me I got to the point where I literally never needed to use my spells because of how dominating my minions were.
The theme use was solid, with a fitting narrative theme tied to it as well.
Solid effort, I really liked it!
Really good game. Getting a strategy game up in three days sounds very daunting, and I think this was pulled off exceptionally well.
I liked the atmosphere, the gameplay, the music...just about everything, really. I died on my first couple of attempts, and then figured out my winning strategy and just kept building it up and expanding upon it. I thought the balance got skewed in my favor towards the end, but the early game strategy is crucial to getting to that kind of dominance.
Honestly, though, I didn't find myself using spells much at all. I liked the idea of tying blood to both building units and casting spells, but for me I got to the point where I literally never needed to use my spells because of how dominating my minions were.
The theme use was solid, with a fitting narrative theme tied to it as well.
Solid effort, I really liked it!
Really nice graphics. I liked the ancient Egyptian trappings.
I think the lack of response when you hit an enemy (other than death) made it frustrating for me to gauge whether I was even causing damage. With the amount of health these enemies seemed to have, that was annoying.
The mechanics were alright. Kill enemies to get coin to get upgrades. I didn't feel like the implementation of the theme really stood out to me.
I really liked the atmosphere in this game. Superb job on the graphics and the audio. Things felt appropriately creepy, and I really enjoyed the presentation.
I had trouble with playing the game. The narrow paths make it hard to dodge the enemies. Victor's slowness and being forced to wait for him to be physically moved to restart locations made this particularly difficult to work around. I also didn't see any indication of whether I was making progress.
Good effort, overall!
Graphics and audio were awesome, great job on that.
It felt a bit boring and repetitive. I didn't see what the value of sneaking was, since everyone's all on the same level with you anyway, so for me it boiled down to stabbing guys as fast as possible to try and keep them from reaching me. I didn't make it past the second level, so perhaps this is just my poor gameplay.
The animations also weren't in sync with the audio, but the sounds were helpful in figuring out when attacks landed.
Good effort!
@the-blue-hatted Okay, that makes sense. It just didn't seem like it would prevent them from seeing me when we're all on the same open space at the same horizontal level, so I didn't guess that.
I like the graphics and the audio. The ships and asteroids looked cool, and the sounds felt convincing. Well done, there.
Gameplay felt a bit bland to me overall. Most of the time, my most effective course of action was to just dodge everything and not try to shoot.
Good effort, overall!
Cool concept! Platforming got a bit difficult for me on the later levels, but I think with more attempts I got better at it. Solid effort overall!
Good game. I had fun playing it.
The only real gripe I had was the camera would sometimes get buggy and move when it shouldn't, resulting in me not being able to see the character. I had to restart once due to this.
That said, I liked the rooms concept in general, and paying to go through the doors was a solid application of the theme. The premise was interesting, and I'm impressed with the amount of content you were able to get into the game in such a short time.
Thanks for the game, I had fun! :)
I had fun playing this game. It felt fairly simple to rack up followers, make a mass-sacrifice to gain lots of blue stuff, then steamroll my way to victory, but that was also kinda fun.
The music and sound effects were great, too. The colored dots were also a nice touch.
Good work!
It felt like a standard defense game. Place units, fend off waves, repeat. It got boring after awhile. I'm not sure what the difference between the two units were, so I wound up just spamming the goblin over and over again as soon as one died, until I got overwhelmed.
Lack of audio also contributed to the tedium, I think. Having some background music would help things feel less boring.
The graphics looked good, and I didn't notice any bugs, so the execution was solid.
Funny game, it let me be relaxed and just chill planting cacti. I was able to prevent the zombies from doing anything to me by walling in, not sure if that was intentional. Music and audio were good, and I liked the mechanic of using your HP to pay for everything, then harvesting the cacti to recover HP.
Good job!
I didn't hear any audio. Was there supposed to be?
I think this was a cool concept for the theme. I didn't really experience it in gameplay, though, beyond just rapidly dragging boxes at enemies. I didn't get much time to read the text, and I couldn't tell if dragging the memories had any impact on anything other than the death enemies. That would be something cool to expand upon.
I also had issues with being able to click on the memories sometimes. Seemed like it happened primarily on the lower half of the box.
The art was solid.
Overall, I think you have a neat interpretation of the theme, but the gameplay didn't engage me. Great effort!
I think this was a good attempt. The game mechanics were interesting, and once I figured out how to make it work I enjoyed playing it.
I did wind up getting stuck at a point where I had three captured points, but couldn't make enough headway to capture the remaining three points. They kept getting reinforcements faster than I could curse them out, and I couldn't really tell where those reinforcements were coming from.
Good effort, overall!
Reached the edge of the map, but nothing indicated victory. (I also got there by tunneling straight for the edge instead of doing the intended gameplay.)
I think the digging mechanic is interesting, but there wasn't much done with it to feel like it was anything more than an annoyance. The movement also felt weird in the tunnels; sometimes, I'd stop moving forward without reason, only able to move if I shot my weapon at the same time.
Good effort, thanks for making the game!
Really enjoyed this game. A jury take on "summoning" is very clever, and I like the packing and selling mechanic. The art style looked good, the noir storyline was fun. Great work!
Sudoku with summoned monsters. I like it! I like the simple presentation, and the interface is pretty intuitive.
One improvement would be to pause longer once the player solves the puzzle. Since I solved a lot of the puzzles from intuition, the quick fade to black didn't let me linger on enjoying my success. Not a big thing, but I think it would help with presentation.
Good job!
Cool idea! I liked the camera shake on dropping the stone cube, but there definitely needed to be a squish sound when crushing the red blobs. :P
Good job, thanks for making the game!
I like the premise. I enjoy deck builders, and I enjoy created creature combat. For a jam effort to attempt deep strategy, I think it was a fair effort, and I had fun with it.
At its core, this combat mechanic of this game is Magic the Gathering, but creatures only, and no control over who attacks what. That lack of control was my biggest frustration, because it didn't let me prevent losing scenarios (like targeting archers first so I can reduce player damage). Even something like having a creature that forces blocks (e.g. Hearthstone's Taunt keyword) would give me some amount of control over attack targets, and that would've been more enjoyable to me.
Again, though, for a jam effort, what you got in there was fun. With some refinement, I could see this being a game I'd pick up.
I liked the concept. I think the balancing of the numbers felt rough, there's a point where no matter what I do I feel like there's just not enough money to upgrade my defense.
Not sure if this was intended, but when you restart a game you keep the existing towers. That actually made the game more fun for me, because I could build on my existing infrastructure with the early wave money. Let me last longer.
I had fun playing. Thanks for the game!
The art and sound were awesome! Presented a cool atmosphere.
I couldn't figure out what the goal of this game was. I brought people to the pier. Sometimes, I was told "he needs more", sometimes I saw him wear a party hat. Was the latter the goal? Was there something more? (Also, were people supposed to disappear at the pier? If so, that never happened for me.)
It felt frustrating to gather a crowd. If I have a crowd, I can't get individuals, and calling a crowd would lose any individuals I'd already gathered. Maybe there's some way to monkey around with the calls and releases to get larger crowds, but I wasn't able to intuit it.
Overall, though, good job!
Cute game! Gameplay was fun, enjoyed learning the game and strategizing around the powerups.
The art and the sound were good. I found myself not able to pay attention to what the upgrades were because I was too busy staying alive; either time needs to slow/pause or the upgrades need to be much easier to read quickly. Since I had no idea what the perks were (or even if I was acquiring them), I didn't progress far into the game's strategy.
Thanks for making the game!
@nymroot I updated the page with a more in-depth gameplay explanation, if you want to give it another shot. Thanks for trying it!
@josion @yule4ka Thank you for playing!
@player04 @martenj Thank you for playing, and for the feedback!
@nymroot Thanks for giving it another go! Yes, the score can get pretty high. :)
@battlecat I agree, previewing moves would have helped a lot, that's definitely something I'd look to add if this game gets expanded upon. Thanks for playing!
@spexxilove I'm curious, how many worms did you rack up? Also, did you play multiple rounds, or just one (it's randomized for each run)? I definitely agree that more challenging things are needed. Had ideas, ran out of time to implement them. :( Thanks for playing!
@mcgiants Agreed, it sucks if you just don't get good dice, so would look to improve that experience for sure. Thanks for playing!
@nathan123 Thank you for the compliments. :) And thanks for playing!
@iolis-lui I'm curious, what was broken? The design itself, or the program? Thanks for playing!
@hadik Agreed, the concept needs to be more intuitively communicated. Thanks for playing!
Love all the compliments on the visuals, music, and sounds, the people who did them were excellent. :)
@khaotom Thanks for playing! There actually is a thing called worm charming, which is what this game was based on, but I ran out of time to work more theme elements into the presentation. :(
@artonix Thanks for playing! Agreed, it should've been fullscreen. I just couldn't resolve the UI layout bugs in fullscreen in time. :(
@tod-semple Thanks for playing! Good thought with the drop shadow, agree that better communication on that interaction was needed.
This was a wild idea. It took me awhile to start figuring out what I was supposed to do, and even then I never really felt like I was controlling the game. Eventually, the number of units got to the point where I just dragged what I could onto the portal and hoped for the best. I also couldn't tell if there was a goal to work toward or if I was just endlessly feeding the portal.
That said, a strategy game of complexity is tough to pull off, so kudos on the attempt! I enjoyed it before it got overwhelming.
Copying the forms of fallen enemies is an intriguing concept. For me, I had trouble avoiding taking damage, so I couldn't get past the second level. Good job!
I enjoyed the concept, and playing it was fun overall. I did feel like my spawns died a bit too quickly, but not outrageously so; I could blame my poor skill as well. Liked the sound effects. Good game!
This was a game that felt a bit bipolar to me.
One the one hand, the swarms of enemies felt overwhelming, and I eventually reached a point where I stopped caring about whether I stopped them from reaching me and just focused on placing towers. On the other hand, the consequence for this was only resetting my current progression, so that afforded me the time to get away with this.
On the one hand, it was impossible to read the tower stats, and the placement interface didn't let me cancel out of unintended decisions; if I triggered a tower summon, I had to summon something, and if I placed the wrong resources, I couldn't take them back. On the other hand, once I got to a point where I lucked into enough towers to stop enemies consistently, I was able to just spam more towers and build on top of that.
In summary, I think you had a really cool concept. The resource collection influencing what kind of towers to create was awesome. For me, I think I would've preferred a slower-pace beginning, to give me time to strategize, instead of placing things ad-hoc and hoping for the best.
Overall, I enjoyed playing!
This was a massively ambitious game to pull off for a jam! Polish-wise, this is top notch! Art, SFX, and music are fantastic.
This falls short on the theme, for me. There's not any difference between "summons" and "hire for cash", and I feel the theme could easily be absent and the game wouldn't be any different for it.
Mission 1 felt way too long; it took 10+ minutes before I got to the fleet action part of it, and with so many enemies I went down to 1 badly-wounded unit, which ensured my demise on the next mission.
Overall, great job!
Interesting idea. I couldn't figure out a working strategy to get out of the starting room without getting killed.
This was fun for a few rounds. I think I'd have preferred a keyboard input instead of the mouse, and it would've been nice to have a way to recover health so it reduced pressure to be perfect. Overall presentation was nice, good job!
I found myself enjoying this game more than I'd expected to, for how simple it looked. Having trailing squares be able to capture was a brilliant idea. There's potential in this concept, with more polish.