Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → JustinMullin
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | Reclamation | jam | 482 | 3.50 | 3.20 | 3.65 | 4.12 | 3.68 | 3.41 | 2.74 | 3.84 | ||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Verdant | jam | 35 | 4.19 | 3.93 | 4.07 | 3.93 | 3.93 | 4.09 | 4.18 | ||||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | Router Runner | jam | 81 | 4.14 | 4.09 | 3.77 | 3.87 | 4.36 | 4.09 | 2.66 | 3.98 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Tension | compo | 324 | 3.61 | 3.67 | 3.58 | 4.08 | 3.04 | 3.27 | 2.27 | 4.12 | |||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Benefice | compo | 23 | 4.09 | 3.92 | 3.95 | 3.78 | 4.00 | 4.06 | 3.00 | 3.78 | |||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Apparatus | compo | 114 | 3.79 | 3.39 | 3.78 | 3.79 | 3.39 | 2.66 | 2.25 | 3.12 | |||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Utility Station OR-152 | jam | 156 | 3.79 | 3.31 | 4.07 | 3.67 | 3.50 | 3.14 | 2.35 | 3.68 | 81 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Wellspring Wanderer | compo | 28 | 4.10 | 3.83 | 3.58 | 4.18 | 4.13 | 4.26 | 3.07 | 4.23 | 79 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Close Encounters of the Word Kind | compo | 243 | 3.53 | 3.36 | 3.71 | 3.51 | 3.22 | 2.88 | 3.00 | 66 | |||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Derelict | jam | 241 | 3.53 | 3.17 | 3.68 | 3.77 | 2.89 | 3.14 | 2.59 | 3.63 | 87 | ||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Aduno | jam | 16 | 4.03 | 3.74 | 4.05 | 3.37 | 3.86 | 3.41 | 2.59 | 3.29 | 100 | ||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Mechanical Menace | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Nanofactory | compo | 34 | 3.93 | 3.77 | 3.50 | 3.27 | 3.55 | 3.56 | 2.90 | 3.76 | 75 | ||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | The Last Shadow | jam | 73 | 2.69 | 1.85 | 3.62 | 2.54 | 3.23 | 2.92 | 1.50 | 2.55 | 2.08 | 45 |
Kinda cool, the puzzle aspect was interesting. It's been beaten to death here already, but checkpointing would have kept me in the game longer. The trial-and-error nature of the fights didn't bother me so much, but since there's clearly a single solution to most fights, playing through them again was a bit annoying.
Hmph...sorry to hear you can't play increpare! Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure why it's not letting you past the title screen...all you should need to do is click the Start button. If anyone else is having troubles getting into the actual game, if you could post your environment here that'd be great!
Haha, love the sprites! I love these sorts of resource-feedback-loop style games...pity the stone/iron stuff didn't work out, but nice work on what's here!
Also...I do believe I will develop carpal tunnel from too much tree clicking now. xD
Reminds me of Transformice (http://www.transformice.com/)...wonky wall jumping and all. ;)
I've always been TERRIBLE at peg solitaire, so I've never had much fun with it, but the diagonal jumps allowed me to pretend that's not the case. ;)
Also I think this is quite possibly the happiest game of the lot here...those smileys, so infectious! xD
Nice, this one's got style! ...who doesn't like playing saxaphone off into the wee hours of the evening, seriously.
Pretty solid, and fun to play! You have the ability to do what many of us wish we had, and that's to round something off, fix the bugs, and call it good instead of always just "adding one more thing". Maybe that's laziness, like you say, but it means you get a finished product that doesn't feel half baked. Nice job!
Awesome! Love the theme, and the "warding off" with the lantern works really well. I did get stuck in the level a couple times, and the graphics are a bit wonky on my machine (jaggedy white lines in a circle around lights, making it a bit hard to see sometimes), but I like what you've done!
Looks cool and different. I'm not sure if this is just supposed to be an "experience", or if there's something to do. I AM sure, however, that that is the tiniest lizard I ever done saw.
Nice art! Very ambitious for a LD entry...I don't blame you for running out of time.
That was wonderful. You managed to squeak out an incredible amount of interesting and creative content from just a few simple mechanics...job well done, sir! Also, the "mood change" levels...you are a genius. xD
Not bad! I wasn't sure what to expect going in, but punting guys around was surprisingly satisfying. xD I like how the wreckage of vehicles does collateral damage.
Fffffffffffffff. xD I love this concept, and you've executed it well. Nice!
Haha, awesome! Very clever idea...and I love the physics on the missiles spinning off into space. I wouldn't worry about the player hurting planets...just adds to the challenge. ;) Nice work!
Definitely a cool idea! The massive space in between everything, combined with the close-in camera made it kinda hard to do much of anything properly (and I kept smashing into those spikey red aliens...rude little buggers) - a minimap/radar is definitely seconded. Pretty cool though! I like the art style too.
Awesome. I love the well thought out, consistent (but still a bit unpredictable) disasters - there's randomness, but it's randomness you can plan for a bit. Beautiful art, fun to play.
My only complaint is there are a lot of clicks to do most things...I'm not sure if the answer is hotkeys, or a more streamlined UI, but it felt a bit clunky to build workplaces, etc.
Overall, though, very very nicely done!
Neat effect, especially when the planet regenerates. I get the feeling this game is secretly here to give us all repetitive stress injuries though. ;)
Neat! I could see this being a really cool game to watch if someone got really fantastic at it...as it is I'm only so-so, but it's still a lot of fun. The first 30 seconds were like "er...I don't understand how this is entertaining", and then it clicked and I couldn't stop. xD
Yeah, LASERS! I have a soft spot in my heart for any game that has a good, solid, old fashioned laser in it.
The rest of the game was good too. ;) I especially like the teleportation effect. Nice work!
Nice art! And props for getting wall-jumping right...too many platformers completely botch the wall-jump, causing no end of frustration.
Hrm...clicking only works about 20% of the time in quick play, and clicking doesn't do ANYTHING on the world map.
Pretty fun - it was a lot more interesting when I forced myself to fly above the ground, so I'd definitely like to try the game out again when building collisions are back in. The art style was neat, and I love the gravity on the shots - adds a lot to the gameplay.
Neat! Very very fresh and original take on the space trader...love it! I agree with the common opinion here that there's not much drive to continue playing, but the core gameplay is well thought out and creative. Nicely done!
Wow this is hard. =P I have to admit, I can't beat the first level...neat idea though. I can't give you points for the sound since it's not your own, unfortunately.
Usually this sort of game feels very buggy, but the physics were super solid/fluid. Nice!
I'm not really sure if I was contributing meaningfully to the life and happiness of my ants, butAUUUUAUUAUUUUGGHTHEBIRD.
I had -26 ants, and then I won. So that was cool.
Nice art, I like the style you have going. It took me a while to really understand what was going on - kinda reminds me of dogfighting games, how fights are a matter of who can stay on whose tail. It definitely has an unfinished feel to it, but I enjoyed what's there.
Apologies to anyone having troubles with sound...I think I screwed something up with the .wav loading in the build. I'll try to get that back online ASAP.
Okay, fixed the build problem. Sound should be back online...let me know if you experience any troubles.
Hey m4c0 (and other Mac users) - I forgot to include this in the description and in the game tutorial, but Spacebar works instead of right-click to rotate pieces. Sorry about the gimpy mouse. ;)
@siasa: Yeah, you're not the first to have lib path issues. My apologies...I've been (incorrectly it seems) assuming most people won't have specified a library.path.
Huh, crazy! No, I've never seen "Net" before...I had the feeling the idea was just simple enough someone had probably done something similar before, but I've never come across that type of game. Thanks for the link!
Nice! Cool concept - sometimes the boxes were a little bit buggy when growing, but other than that, the mechanic works out very well.
Very nicely done. Love the art - hand-drawn is hit or miss for me, but this was totally hit. Neat idea!
Haha, awesome. I love the premise...it's a little easy (I think switching up the shot patterns would help a lot with that), but lots of fun. Nice work!
My only question is WHERE IS THE KICKSTARTER.
My clicking finger hurts. ;) I'm not sure if you're meant to do anything here but restock houses on food. I was a bit afraid to experiment with random clicks after I smote poor 11 year old Tayoj Marome...
Fun atmosphere, and I like the ambitiously large world. I wasn't quite able to experience the whole game, 'cause I hit the freeze people are mentioning here (when you leave the green area).
The exception is "org.newdawn.slick.SlickException: Failed to load sound: res/song_5.wav", by the way.
Huh, pretty cool - I'm not up on my tower defense, but I've never seen the "melee towers" thing done before. It's a nice twist!
Neat! I like the conveyor system, it works pretty well. I keep stranding myself or dying on the planet though...guess I'm not cautious enough. xD
Nice! Very solid execution on the premise - I've seen a number of people now riffing off of the "circular world" thing, but you've got it down pat here.
And man...as someone who's not used to thinking in circles, dodging a bullet on a curved path is HARD. =P
Spectacular. It's tough to judge innovation when the game is so similar to Triple Town, but you did add a ton of quality to the game, and it's clearly the superior. Nicely done, and I love the art!
By the way, your goal succeeded: if you play to the "end" you definitely have a work you're proud of. =) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52019586/veryPreciousLand.png
I got a little bit of vertigo at times. xD Not bad - I like the feel for sure.
@TehSkull It could be made WAY more obvious, but you do get a new tank for picking up the treasures. There are at most 3 per level though, so you won't get 5 more.
I agree with john_conder9 - the art and animations here were SO awesome and polished, it was tough to accept that there was no sound to go with it. I'll live with silence though to get fantastic visuals like this. =)
Solid platformer, nothing new there, but you nailed it.
Very nice! Took me a little while to understand why things weren't dying very easily, and I didn't have a health bar. I so very much prefer the way the game works to the way I initially thought it worked. =) Awesome presentation, and super fun.
Very clever. I like the clicks system. It encourages playing through the game, as you can just take a sub-par score and continue, or be obsessive and hunt for the most efficient solution. Nicely done!
Overall, beautiful. The "dissolving?" takes too long when you make mistakes, but the movement is nice. Concept is fun, but right away I was avoiding all light, not just specific colors. I will play again however, so kudos.
Love the art!
Love the art, and very nice music. The gameplay felt a bit light, but I enjoyed it. =)
Loved this one, I'm keeping it up here so I can go back to it. Wish I had speakers on this machine, but everything else was very well executed. Kudos!
Huh, that's pretty cool! Seems there really *is* no accounting for taste. ;)
Hah! Awesome. The presentation was flawless - I kinda wish I could start on the last level I played, 'cause I'm really bad at this and can't get past the first couple levels, but it's very fun.
Pretty fun - I like the concept. The interface was very clunky, which kept me from playing farther, but I enjoyed it.
Very cool. I felt this had a very good difficulty curve - it was enough to keep me feeling like I was improving, but without making me frustrated.
Very clean presentation, and I loved the sounds and music. I do wish I could somehow direct the "guests", as they would often hang around in corners and make me wait forever on them. Other than that, very cool.
Huh, crazy. At first the game seemed SUPER complicated, as I was overwhelmed by all of the icons on the screen with no text. Then I discovered the help button, and all was well. ;)
Pretty fun little puzzler! The music got kinda annoying, but it's cool that it's dynamic.
Not a bad little shooter. Kinda got frustrating that the enemies kept spawning behind me. The pull back of the "menu" room to the battleground area is really cool. =)
Hah! Awesome. And now I want a chocolate bar. =(
Super cool concept, and masterfully executed. Closing my eyes regularly helped a lot. I thought this would be LOT harder, and tons more frustrating, but after starting to get the hang of it, the stereo nature of the heartbeat really helped me get my bearings. The map at the end is spectacular, and really makes it all worth it! What would really be fun with this is to have another screen (hidden from the player) show others in the room where the player is, so they can watch as you stumble around blindly. =)
Love the idea. It gets old kinda fast, but that's the nature of the beast. Very clever, and nice presentation.
Great art and music - motion sickness kicked in overtime with all the spinning and pulsing, but it was fun while it lasted. =)
Love the graphics, and the game is pretty fun. The music was crazy. xD
Fun little physics game. I got a little annoyed with the arbitrary distance within which I could place things, but that's a minor quibble. I had a lot of fun. =)
While beautiful, it's hard to understand what my objectives are. I only saw the first room, and after that it was falling from platform to platform. I really liked the look of everything. The controls were straightforward and solid. I'll have to play more to see if I missed anything.
Getting invalid data file. =(
Very cool. Good difficulty curve, and very creative.
Beautiful. It was the music that sold it. Very relaxing atmosphere, and the gameplay wasn't bad either.
An interesting twist on the Sokoban genre. I like it!
Neat perspective and visuals - the controls and movement were very wonky, but not enough to break the game.
Graphics are good, but the black on white at that speed made me have to squint. Couldn't rate audio (no speakers) Overall though, I liked the idea, too bad there was only the level. Story idea is fun, I imagined "The life of a Tetris piece" pre-Tetris. Nice game, I want more.
Nice graphics, story is intriguing. Would love to see more.
The idea is fun, I couldn't seem to get the actual play consistent though. Controls worked well, but it was difficult to catch my initial prey easily. Good start, keep at it!
Hah! That's awesome. I don't think I've ever seen a fishing game where you pull the fish around like that. =)
Also: the music totally sold it.
Neat concept! I, like many others, am having a hard time progressing very far due to the difficulty, but I really like what you have here.
I'm not usually a fan of Qix spinoffs, but this was well executed, and worked well with the (very popular, it seems) Mondrian theme. The mouse controls work really well for this, too, I think.
Cool art style, and a pretty well executed concept. I'm not sure what's the use of buying skills though? They seem to all do the same damage.
I definitely like the "pheromone" movements, it adds a nice emergent layer to the game. It's pretty simple tower defence past that, but a well polished and fun take. =)
Fun mechanic. I kinda feel like I would have prefered to click+hold to move the ball around. It seems with the single click, you have to do a LOT of clicking to maintain constant control. Still, this was very fun to play.
Hah! I love the idea. I agree, when playing for real, you don't get the experience of the taunts, but the game is fun without. The art and sound/music fit really well. Nicely done!
Can't rate audio, sorry (no speakers) Graphics remind me of the old Atari games, ahh nostalgia. Controls are solid once you know what's expected, checkpoints are well integrated and feel natural. Difficulty ramps nicely without being too difficult too soon. Very solid entry, lots of fun!
Never seen anything like it before. It's very fun. I didn't catch initially that space controls the forcefield - that made it a lot easier! Still a good difficulty though, I think.
This is SO hard. But that's the point then, isn't it?
Neat idea, and enjoyable! It wasn't clear to me that Enter restarted the level, so I quit to the menu the first time I reached zero and checked the controls. Everything else was made clear by playing the game though.
Neat idea. After a few minutes I thought the enemies had stopped spawning, but it turned out I just had to hunt down the last one in a corner somewhere.
I like the music!
Neat! Progression was a little slow for my taste due to the small "inventory" size, but I really like the game. There's definitely a strong drive to keep on climbing.
Awesome art and animation. The sound and music is spot on, and the pan up to see the flower bloom totally sells the whole package. Love it!
Very cool. The only thing I'd add would be a touch of sound and music - with a game this polished and complete, the silence is more jarring. That's a minor quibble though; the difficulty was spot on, and you managed enough content to really show off the idea - hard to do in 48 hours! Nicely done!
Nice proof of concept. Would like to see more. Didn't get to play against anyone, but overall, good entry!
Can't rate audio (no speakers) A maze in the dark huh? You'd think it'd be impossible, but the way that things are revealed and disappear works very well. Mood is solid exploration is fun, even when I keep running into things. Overall, really good execution!
Fun, if a little repetitive. Inspired by AaAaAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity?
Overall fun, the controlls seemed a bit stiff, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Liked the colors and physical interactions. The levels progressed nicely and didn't get too hard too quickly. (No speakers so no audio rating, sorry) Nice entry, much fun!
Looks like I'm mostly repeating things that have been said before, but my main gripe was just that the player didn't move with the moving platforms. Other than that, this was pretty fun, and the music was pretty cool.
Very cool. I didn't understand how to restructure the cubes at first, but once I figured out that concept it all clicked. It's an extremely interesting mechanic!
I like the art style. The sound effects are bordering on annoying, but much better than silence. I think I did more damage to the defences myself than any meteors did - at least in the early stages it seems more effective to just act as a mobile shield. Fun though!
Neat little premise. I absolutely love the animations on the little ball thing you control, especially the jumping! I don't think the time spent on music was ill used, it fits well and lends a lot to the mood.
No speakers so I can't rate audio (sorry) but overall a blast (pun intended) Graphics are nice, game play is fun. Weapons are varied, but each is fun in it's own way (preferred the big gun) Nice entry!
Very interesting. I love the look, and especially the animation of new enemies appearing.
I really really like the concept.
I definitely think your dictionary is way too small. It missed a lot of the words I threw at it. I'd recommend checking out http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/w/Long_List if you're looking for word lists in the future, those both seem to be useful resources.
All that aside, though, this was a lot of fun, and very creative!
Liked the hidden info. The helper wasn't obvious at first, but once I found him, it was nice. Good use of the concept. Liked the exploration factor. Nice entry!
This is a very fun, very quirky take on what effectively boils down to "defend this thing." There wasn't much to the gameplay, but I didn't much mind because I wanted to see all of the crazy stuff that would happen. xD
Took me a couple minutes scanning the screen wondering where the gunfire was coming from to realize it was the footstep sound effect. ;)
Other than that, an excellent entry, lots of fun, and an awesome art style.
Very cool - I'm impressed with what you managed to put together here in 72 hours. The Portal influences are clear, but this feels fresh and new. Nice work!
I love the concept, and it fits the theme well. Nicely done!
Very cool set of rules, and the game is extremely polished. I don't have anyone to play with right this moment, but I'm already extremely impressed just playing around with the mechanics alone. Looking forward to pulling in friend to try this for real!
This is so very very cool. Everything is super polished, and all of the graphics and sound are totally spot on. I love it!
The scratching/petting thing wasn't so clear - I ended up discovering it by accident. I haven't really played any Tamagotchi-style games before, though, so maybe it's a fixture of the genre.
Anyway, the art and animations are awesome, and bleed character. The sound is awesome too. Nicely done!
I am very very bad at this game. xD It's a fairly generic scrolling shooter, but it's enjoyable, and I like the 3d perspective you've got going here.
Thanks for the positive comments, all!
Madball: no, there's no end. I'd love to set up a concrete set of levels so there's clear progression and something to work towards, but alas, only 72 hours.
Jonny D: I'm not sure I've gotten that good at the game yet. There's definitely a difficulty ceiling once you've got the hang of it, but I still take a while to solve the later puzzles.
Hey mtthwcmpbll - thanks for the heads up. I'll see if I can't set up a version with a bundled JRE. Sorry in the meantime, OS/X+Java 7 users!
Hey, no one ever said "Minimalism" meant minimal graphics! The theme is open to interpretation. =)
Yes, the game is supposed to be infinite, and puzzles are randomly generated. Some of the later dialogue hints at that fact, but it's not made explicit. I'm sorry for any pain that may cause for those who just really really need closure. ;)
Pretty cool! I'm a big fan of sliding puzzles like this, so this ticks the right boxes for me. The audio cues really helped teach the puzzle the first time through.
I didn't read the description first, or really look at the screens, so I was very pleasantly surprised when the game started to pick up in complexity. Very fun, and really impressive!
Awesome atmosphere going here. I'm not sure about the sudden dive into cornball humor in some of the endings, but for what little gameplay there actually is here, it's very engaging.
And I've always wanted to learn Morse. ;)
Extremely cool. I think this is just about the right number of levels to get a solid feel for the game, and show what can be done with the mechanic. I would have *loved* to play more, but given the time constraints, and how hard good level design is to crank out quickly, what you've got is awesome. Nicely done!
Super awesome! Painstakingly reproducing a difficult work and getting rewarded really well for it is a great feeling. I definitely like how the rewards are heavily weighted towards very close reproductions - makes it really seem worth it to work slowly and carefully instead of just churning through sloppy work to make money.
There are so many things that are incredible about this game, I don't even know where to start. I laughed, I cried...10/10, have all of the prizes.
Awesome. I didn't *quite* get the pathfinding through my head, so I routinely discovered a way through by accident, but that didn't keep it from being fun. The ghost trail when things move is super simple, but oh-so-attractive. Really pulls the whole look and feel together.
Very nice. Nothing groundbreaking here, but everything feels polished, intentional and well thought out. A super solid entry.
Challenging for sure. Good entry!
Huh, very cool. The physics on the snake thing make it very interesting, and add a lot. Well done! My only complaint is the sound effects were a bit jarring.
Nice use of simple graphics, fun game. Amazing what you can do in such a short time.
Very creative. I think you win the award for most bizarre entry I've seen so far. ;)
Somehow everything got blurry, and I couldn't figure out how to correct that, but until then I was having a blast. Very funny concept and theme. Execution of the levels was simpler than I hoped, but I still had fun. Good entry!
Super fun, solid entry, and about as minimal as you can possibly get. Very nice.
I'm not sure I really understood every puzzle (solved a few accidentally), but as far as I did understand, I really enjoyed it. =)
A little buggy, but I enjoyed the combat.
You nailed the look of this game (the map, etc. are lovely), and I love the setup. The actual driving bit is maybe not so fun, but the concept is so novel I didn't really care. =)
Love it! I rolled my eyes at first, having played far too many "move the little dot around the map" games, but it quickly became apparent this game had enough personality and clever tricks to merit a full playthrough. No crashes here, the whole thing played nice for me.
I got rekt. =( Wish I could get further, this seems like it'd be a fun game to get really good at, but I'm just awful at this sort of thing.
Simple, enjoyable - I had fun and was motivated to play through to the end. =)
The ending: "Oh. Oh, okay."
Cue "Inception" *BWAAA!* (http://inception.davepedu.com/) My mind was sufficiently blown, thanks Tom 7.
Joust with a teleport? Neat idea, though movement felt a little clunky, and occasionally a little bugged. The title screen and music were spectacular!
Definitely unfinished, but I appreciate the quirkiness of what's there. I was "served" and then got stuck, so I assume that's the end.
Hah! This is deceptively fun and deep, and feels really great when you get into a good rhythm. I love the animations and the quirky premise.
Love the storytelling setup. Nice use of voice, and the platforming was an interesting concept. I think you may have opted *in* to Humor instead of *out*, so I can't vote on anything else - the form changed from opt in to opt out at the last minute.
A fun and polished little shooter. =) It seemed very eash to me (though I can see how folks would have had trouble before you added mouse controls). I eventually quit after about level 15 having had my fill. Unfortunately it seems from your comments I was pretty close to when the difficulty ramps up, so I should've stuck with it.
I'm a big lunar lander fan, and this was a fun little lander game with character. I loved the random level generation, but it did tend to give me a freebie every once in a while, where the terrain directly below a snowman was flat(ish). Didn't detract from the enjoyment though.
The evolution bit was neat - I was very confused when I was playing a lightbulbs game after seeing the screenshots. xD
I got deaded. =( I am very bad at this game, but I love the music!
Tricky controls, but fun to master. I didn't quite understand what energy or resistance were, and the water only seemed to work on one part of the lava? The instructions were appreciated, but very confusing to figure out. Anyway, I felt it was an accomplishment to beat the game. =)
I'm not usually a fan of the "clicker" games, but this one was pretty fun. I was glad I stuck around for the surprise ending, until it turned out to be WAY too hard. <.<
Clever use of the theme! I like the magnification effect, though it ends up getting in your way and making it so you can't see where you're going. Maybe that's by design, but I felt very claustrophobic only being able to see a handful of pixels in front of me. =)
Solid Metroidvania, clever use of space to fit the whole game into one screen, and it's pretty to boot. Nice!
Hah! This is terrific, and oh-so-very clever. Love it!
Fun little Asteroids clone - it was a little too easy, I think. It felt like my score was limited by my stamina, not necessarily by my skill. Still, I enjoyed the experience. =)
I'm always up for a good word game, and this one didn't disappoint. Unfortunately it didn't seem to let me pass level three, I landed on both of the colored circles, and nothing happened. Maybe I'm misunderstanding a mechanic? Still, I had some good fun here.
Does not start up for me on OS/X, says it can't load the LWJGL library. Stack trace is here, if it helps: http://pastebin.com/w3G8fr3Q.
This is very very cool! I had some problems with motion sickness (makes a lot of games rough for me), but stuck with it anyway, and you definitely have something here. I'm very much enjoying going for green streaks (my best is 39 so far), but I'm struggling to see how to control a run going for gold streaks. I got to eight just spinning one direction and trying to avoid red guys, but eventually they just pile up and it's too much to rely on that strategy. Any tips?
I've added a Windows EXE (which bundles a JRE) for those who can't or won't run a JAR file. Hope that helps for some folks. =)
Probably the most polished Space Invaders clone I've played, though also one of the easiest (though the difficulty does ramp appropriately after some time). Love the particle effects.
Very cool premise, and deceptively hard to keep track of everything! I very much appreciate that a rule glows when it takes effect, really helps emphasize what's going on.
Fun little game. I was having a *very* hard time staying alive until I picked up a bow, then the game got a little too easy I think. Still enjoyable though. =)
Interesting rules! Actual gameplay is fairly slow, so it's kinda tough to make it through a whole game, but there are some cool mechanics at play here.
Hah! Loved the ending. =)
I like the "cheating is encouraged" prompt. xD This was a fun little distraction, the sort of thing I could see spending way too much time playing with a few punch-drunk friends.
Very cool! I'm impressed how much you packed into what's effectively a very short game. There's enough here to show you can do cool things with the mechanic, and it's not cluttered with anything that would get in the way of the major point (unnecessary jumping puzzles, etc.) The "aha!" moment when I realized how to reason about how to get where I want was awesome. Loved it!
Nothing new on the gameplay side, but this is incredibly polished and nice. Well done! Am I hearing rubber bands?
Hah! xD This is awesome, thanks for a good time. =)
Hah! This got ridiculous (in a good way) fast! Was not expecting the cannon to scale up that far. I finally died not because I missed any targets, but because I simply didn't have enough bullets! I had fun. =)
While the gameplay wasn't exactly anything new, this was a very polished and tight rendition, and I loved the little animation touches. Nicely done!
The crab-with-six-extremely-long-arms-drops-eyeball-critters-into-the-garbage-chute-like genre is a little crowded these days, but there is something about this game that just makes me want to like it. Bravo.
I had a good time with this one! It gets hard quickly. The balance between melee and ranged is great, with both equally useful in different situations. The nuke effect looks pretty spiffy!
Neat idea, very hard. Random level generation was cool, but also seemed fairly unfair. Still, the fast paced nature of things meant if I got a bad level I could just play again. =)
Always fun to play a new twist on tile-matching - this one was pretty fun, though I really would have liked to have a preview of the next tile to plan ahead a little better.
I'm not crazy about the platforming, but this game had a nice feel to it. Very pleasant soundtrack! =)
Interesting take on snake - I didn't really get the mechanics at first, and was confused when I started shrinking/losing points, but it was fun figuring out the "proper" way to play.
Nice! It's a solid little game, feels really tight to play, and gives the feeling that it could be fairly competitive if you got good at the mechanics. I like it.
Pretty tough, but I definitely started to pick up some idea of how to properly avoid the ghosts. I love when you run into a ghost while digging - it's very much a "well this is awkward" moment as you sort out what to do next. xD
It's no surprise to me that the game made in Processing is very pretty. =) The white light mechanic was cool, but a little hard to understand.
This is pretty cool! The concept of maximizing your dungeon crawl by planning a path through boot icons is new to me, and makes for an interesting experience. Even after your explanation I don't think I understand the boss fight enough to really figure out if I stand a chance, but it's enough to just say "oh, I got pretty far, I probably have the stats for it now." Beat the boss, and it felt like an accomplishment. =)
Hah! This is the best game about peeing dogs I have ever played, hands down, and I don't say that lightly.
I like the idea here, but boy is it hard! First time I played I didn't realize there were multiple floors, but lucked out several levels in a row when the thief was on the first floor. I thought there was a bug when it said someone got away with a theft, 'cause I was positive no stealing happened on my watch. xD
Very pretty, but I';m not sure how it works, even though I (think) I beat the game. Is the object just to keep the sun from going all spikey?
This is very very cool! The tutorials didn't really explain much, but limiting the mechanics allowed for some discovery, which was fun. The physics are tough to master, but that adds to the charm. =)
Neat line of sight effect. It was kinda hard to move and drop bombs at once, but the movement felt smooth and responsive.
I'm getting an exception upon trying to run the game, stack trace is here: http://pastebin.com/vYQQPnJ7. I'm assuming you left a flag on that triggers texture packing at runtime?
A little susceptible to button mashing, at least until the later difficulty. Had a nice smooth difficulty curve and a pretty good pace.
Random cave generation is cool - I did get stuck once, but mostly got pretty interesting levels. The music works well!
I love the "alternate" ending!
There were a few little quirks, but I think this is the best "hardcore" platformer I've played for LD. The sound and music fit great, the difficulty was spot on, and tracking user and developer times added a big oomph to the replay value for what's an (understandably) short game. Very nicely done!
Very hard, but this game is oh-so-stylish. Love the graphics and the audio.
Neat mechanic, though a bit frustrating. Level generation is cool, but I seemed to get trapped fairly easily. Overall I had a really hard time progressing, but it was still enjoyable.
Spectacular art and animations. Really top notch. The gameplay was a little loose to me, seemed fairly spammy, but I enjoyed figuring it out. I'd play this game just to fiddle around with the evolutions though, great stuff!
Hah! This got crazy fast. I survived with one HP. =) Kinda strange having nearly infinite money towards the end but nothing to spend it on, but I had fun.
The bouncing bullet was a cool twist, especially when you get things set up in a loop and knock out a bunch of lights. Nice job!
Hah! This is amazing. The mechanics are a little iffy at times, but the concept is awesome.
290,736 - http://imgur.com/NBICws5
I chuckled more than a couple times at the premise. The gameplay was a little thin; I'm not sure it's useful at all to move left or right, or to get any upgrade but straight wind power. I enjoyed myself, though, and the game was fairly polished and a good length for the format.
Cool idea, but very very hard in an unpleasant way. Might benefit from mouse aim rather than relying on 8-directional shooting?
I'm not a huge fan of tower defense, but I had a lot of fun with this. The "towers" were unique and I liked the fact that they needed to be aimed.
I had a hard time figuring out what to do here, but once I had the mechanics down it was an interesting concept. Nice job!
This game was much more interesting than I had initially supposed. Once I got the hang of how the mechanics worked, I spent a long time building up my skills. I guess there's nothing to shoot for past that though? Anyway, even without a proper goal in sight, I had a good time.
Now I know how I will survive in the zombie apocalypse! Requiring the mouse to be still before shooting was an interesting touch.
Super awesome. The actual game is a little light, but I love that you managed to take what's a pretty nice little musical toy and built a game around it.
I'm still not entirely sure how I won, but I had fun doing it. xD
Loved the theme, and the terminal display was awesome. I appreciate that you have to explore the game to figure out how it works, though I didn't really have much opportunity to do so my first run due to what I think is bad luck - I added the only two targets I received to my botnet, but still lost the game by going broke. The second run was much more enjoyable.
Dropping flowery ground across areas you've completed is neat, and the run/slide animations are awesome. Unfortunately this is just too hard for me, after several frustrating deaths I was unable to complete the game.
What a great idea! Execution is spot on too. It's evocative of Hammerfight for sure, but it's its own game as well. I like it!
Very clever! A little light on gameplay, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. =)
Nice art and animations! I like the music, but you should opt out of the audio category if the audio assets are not yours or were created outside of the event. =)
Very cool game. Much darker and more puzzle focused than I originally suspected. The art is gorgeous!
The art and music is nice - it sound like you didn't really finish, but this was a cool start!
Very neat game - as seems to be consensus, it's extremely difficult, but fun to play. I think I prefer the color matching and shooting to the jumping game, but it's a unique challenge to try to do both at once.
The particle effects were great, and the lighting was phenomenal. The first time I played I encountered the gravity bug (hadn't read your description close enough). It's still a very difficult game, but much more playable with gravity on. Nice work!
Beautiful and quirky and polished and fun. I love it! I'm floored by the amount of content you squeezed in, too, and it's all enjoyable. Little nuances like the scaffolding outside the window as the town grows, the piles of coins effect...this is great!
Super tight controls and mechanics. The jumps become natural really quickly. I don't think I really got to the point of mastery (reached round 12 or 13 I think), but I really enjoyed the twist and the execution was spot on. As with every Breakout variant, landing that perfect hit to sneak behind a big row of bricks is quite the feeling. I appreciate how the "four strikes" mechanic lets the game go nuts with speed without becoming too punishing immediately or breaking the action to reload a ball. Also: the sounds when you clear a combo of bricks are awesome and super satisfying. I remember really enjoying TURN it UP in LD31 too - I'll have to check out your other stuff. =) Very nicely done!
Grats on the gold. Well deserved!
Super great. The art is absolutely beautiful, and there's so much charm oozing out of this game. Movement was pretty tricky to do accurately because of the speed and momentum of the sword, but perhaps that's part of the character of the game. Love it!
Super super clever. It's pinball with linear progression! I love it, especially the use of the orange/blue toggle in addition to just using it for flipper manipulation. Nicely done!
I love this so very much. It's extremely time consuming (I definitely didn't finish) but little things are so satisfying. I think in the end I love the concept more than I love actually playing it, but it's just SO cool! Very polished, and the lighting effects are a really nice touch.
Clever restriction on two buttons! I love lander games (my entry's a lander too!) so I was bound to like this. Pulling off frequent 360 spins to correct course was pretty neat. I love the difficulty - It's obviously very hard, but I was able to progress with a little practice. I do think restricting to three lives was fairly overkill, though. Overall I definitely enjoyed this.
This is super super cool. The split timeline option is really interesting, but got too confusing for me to keep track of, so I ended up playing through the "traditional" way to two victory conditions. Are there more? The actual gameplay is light, but the mood is awesome, and I'm extremely impressed that you managed to condense a point'n'click down to two buttons. The illustrations are great and add a ton of interest. I went back through a second time just to enjoy the art. Also: I laughed pretty much every time a game over screen gave me a choice on which way to die. xD Overall, great submission and very clever.
Terrifying! The mouse was very sensitive, but I was able to make it through a couple levels.
Dang, this is really cool! I wasn't sure what to expect from the screens and description, but it's clever and really polished. Nice job! Using one of the elements when nothing is held is a great touch to bring it to two buttons.
This is great! Love the presentation and the music is awesome. It did feel like the timing was ever so slightly off, such that if I tapped in time with the music I always got "good" rather than "excellent." It's possible I'm just bad, but I *think* I have a pretty good sense of rhythm...anyway, reading from the visual indicator I was able to play just fine, but it was a little jarring.
That's not to distract from the fact that this is an awesome entry with some great polish. Nicely done.
Loved the animations! Well polished, and I appreciate the live high score.
This is cool! It's really hard, and I started to get motion sickness from the rotation, but I like it. Kinda want to see a video of you playing, though, 'cause your screenshots show a point in the game and a level of mastery I'm quite positive I'll never be able to reach. Seems like it'd be a fun game to watch an expert play. Anyways, nice job!
I like the idea. I didn't quite understand how to deal with the robots - most of the time they just exploded harmlessly I think? I also abruptly lost without quite understanding why, but I must have been killed. Being able to use number keys to jump to an item would help simplify the controls a lot - I found myself scrambling with the scroll wheel very often. It's definitely a very nice looking game!
This is amazing. It starts out fairly mind blowing, then you start to learn how to manipulate all the angles and it becomes like second nature. I really really enjoyed this. It crashed out of memory just before I completed the final connection, but I'll call it a win. =) Great submission!
@Reggianito: The EXE version also requires Java, which is probably why it's not running for you. Sorry!
Thanks for the great feedback all! Really appreciate it. =)
This is great! The two-button controls are just lovely, intuitive and deep. I loved learning how the enemies work through experimentation. It kept me coming back even after a few rage-inducing moments with the drill-worms. Love it!
Just wanted to let you know, this is the only game so far I've come back to this LD to play just for fun. That's a rare thing, so kudos for that!
Pretty cool! Love the art. It's definitely a lot like...that other game. ;) Still, it was enjoyable and this game is *way* better looking. Nicely done!
Very cool! It took a while, but I played through to the end (or at least I have to assume it's the end; I got the treasure at least.) I love the maps, and the final map that shows just a zoomed in picture was a really cool idea. The day/night cycle was really neat, but also a little frustrating once you get a hang of it. I found myself chopping trees on occasion just to progress the time. A way to just sleep until dawn would be a welcome addition. Overall I really enjoyed this.
I love the art and animations! I also really appreciate that it's playable with a gamepad. It's definitely short, but I had fun with the world even though there's not much to do in it.
Very cool. This is super polished! I love the transformations of the creatures, the physicsy touches, and little nuanced features like the player leaving holes in the smoke when you walk around in between levels. I didn't realize until the final zone that I could charge up my weapon, but that made combat much more enjoyable. Overall this was a very nice entry - gameplay is solid and fun, there's a fair amount of content, and nice presentation. Well done!
Hah! I love the plants all struggling to reach the light. It was pretty hard to figure out how to balance the modes of the sun, but I did manage to get quite a bit of energy.
Hah! I was not prepared for the Super Beard effect. xD Shooting feels good, vulnerability while dashing for ammo works well. Nice.
Awesome art! The game was pretty easy, and I'm pretty sure button mashing will just always win, but it was neat and enjoyable.
Awesome! Love the theme, and it's really quite fun. It seemed extremely difficult to catch anyone in mid air if they start jumping in, which was a little frustrating, but I learned to stop them before they reached that point. I knocked more than a few villagers into the flames accidentally...whoops!
Very neat. I was surprised at the large number of things you can do with just those two abilities, and you did a nice job highlighting them with the level design. I appreciate that while the game is definitely very challenging, it's not overly punishing with no way to die and frequent "safe" spots to return to after missing a jump.
Wow these stakes are high. xD Loved it, especially the pure simplicity and tension of the betting game. Nicely done.
I had a moment of panic when I didn't know what to do, but figured it out really quickly. I thought it was fairly intuitive. Love the art, and especially the animation on "Springol."
Very cool. The fairly significant momentum/slow deceleration on the character adds a lot, I think. I liked the frequent new abilities, and though the difficulty was pretty reasonable, though it's definitely annoying to restart from the very beginning.
Hrm. I'm not sure I totally understand how to play, even after reading through the instructions a few times. I did finally figure out that I have to wait for the resources to make it all the way into the middle, and then "fusion" does...something. It was a little upsetting that the shield doesn't always work.
The feel was nice though, nice looking particles.
This is great. The games were so much better than I thought they would be - it's not just a gag, there's some nice design here. I especially loved Vomicats, the jumping between platforms bit was a cool touch.
Neat! I liked the idea. It was a little hard to understand how the zombies moved, so solutions felt a little more like luck to me than skill, but I did enjoy manipulating the paths to make things work. Nicely done.
Fun, nice theme, and I love the animations of the despair creatures! Gameplay wise I found I could pretty much just hold right button and mash on the left button to fire constantly. I played for a while without this as it felt like an exploit, but then did finally complete the game using that strategy. I'm not sure I successfully rescued any captive souls - perhaps I did and didn't notice, or perhaps I just didn't understand the description of how to do that. Either way, I enjoyed the experience. =)
Hah! Amazing. Love love love the art and animations. The camera effect on top of the 2d sprites works out great, and all the distortion effects are perfect.
Fun while it lasted, but very short. I didn't quite understand at the start that explosions would hurt the baby frogs, but eventually figured it out.
Physics on enemies was neat. This was much much easier than I was initially expecting from the first minute or so due to plentiful powerful powerups. I had a good time though. =)
I love this. The art is spectacular and all fits together so well, and the sounds are all great. I didn't *quite* make it to the end after a number of attempts, but I had a chance to feel the mechanics really start to click. Very cool!
Nice little defender game. I liked having a ranged and melee option available from the start, it opens up some fun flexibility. I agree with others, the large enemies were a huge spike in difficulty, and it kinda feels like they're just a death sentence.
I'm a little confused. Each time I thought I'd found a way out the game appears to just reset. I'm assuming this is its way of saying "hah, nope not that way!", but it's a little unclear if I won or not.
One suggestion on the physics: it seems objects are still updated while you're holding them, including keeping track of linear/angular velocity, so when you let them go they'll often go spinning/flying away rather than dropping where you place them. It would be a lot easier to manipulate things in the room if they'd just have no velocity while being held.
Awesome interpretation of the theme! This fits so nicely. The cheating segment was great as well.
Neat idea. It's brutally hard, and I don't think I have what it takes to complete it, but I appreciate the concept.
Having trouble clearing the second puzzle, but it's a cool mechanic! I'm interested to see where it goes.
There's a lot of world building going on here! It wasn't entirely clear to me if I could do more than just progress through the dialogue and walk around the room, but the premise was fascinating, and I loved the characters.
Love it! Very simple, but the art makes it, especially that cat. When I figured out how to pop up for maximum button pressing, I couldn't help but grin. Nice work!
I loved the music and lighting effects. The noise/grain texture adds a lot of visual appeal here. The gameplay was very slow and frustrating, so I had a hard time getting through a ton of it, but you've put together a nice piece.
I loved the music and lighting effects. The noise/grain texture adds a lot of visual appeal. The gameplay itself was on the slow and frustrating side for me, so I struggled to get through much of it, but you have a nice piece here.
Oh man, I just can't stop laughing after playing this. The idea is so simple, but it really does do an excellent job making you feel like you're an old guy who can only barely putter around. Love it.
I didn't immediately realize I could move around, so I spent a while in the middle wondering why shooting off the edge of the screen was killing so many targets. xD
It's a bit easy (I will admit I eventually killed myself when it became clear I would never lose), but fun for some target practice.
Super ridiculously grindy, but nice presentation!
Really nice little mobile puzzle game. It could be released today without more polish, but it looks like you have more planned. Nicely done.
This is just full on ridiculous (in a good way)! It's pretty tough to control the houses in a way that felt like I wasn't just making myself lose, but I love the concept and the wackiness.
Love the art, and the variety of buildings is really cool. It seems like there are a lot of turns, so there's a lot of building and I'm not sure how important all the little choices are, but it's fun just to populate a city slowly with all the nice looking buildings.
This is very very cool. Super clever idea, fits with the theme perfectly, and the execution is nice. It's very difficult, but I feel you could become competent at it with some experience. The perspective rendering effect is neat, too. I'm impressed by the creativity all around!
Poignant and interesting. Not a ton of gameplay depth, but keeping the walls up definitely evoked a feeling that fit. Nicely done.
Yeah! I got a big platform! Lots of unique character here, nice work, I enjoyed it.
Please opt out of categories for which you did not produce the assets during the competition, however. =)
Very very cool. I played on Android and it worked great. I'm a sucker for landers, and this one was a very playable 3d lander. I think I got each pad, but there wasn't any indication other than I'd played 10 of 'em. Really enjoyed this!
Really nice looking game. The pixel art and particle effects are great, and the combat is simple but satisfying. I enjoyed it a lot!
You appear to be hosting the post-jam version in the main web area, though, which is bad form. Better to add a link to the improved post-jam version so we can vote appropriately on what you were able to accomplish during the 72 hours.
This is a very pretty game. I love all the shader and particle effects, and the Geometry Wars vibe. Nicely done.
The two button controls work well for mobile here - I had a good time trying it out on Android. A few frame rate issues when shooting lots of projectiles, but I had fun. Nice work for such a short time!
I love this so very much. The art and animations are sublime, especially the explosion animation, and the puzzles are all very cool. It's surprising how many puzzles you were able to get out of just a few small props. Very impressive!
Stellar art and animations, love the whole design of it. Difficulty is a little low for my taste, but it's a minor quibble. This was a very nice brawler with some really cool abilities. The laser in particular feels really slick. Nice work.
Very cool! Is this inspired by Hoplite? I'm a big fan of this sort of game. The difficulty seems spot on to me; when I lost a baby it always felt avoidable, if I'd just planned ahead better, and some of the bigger moves (especially with the longer jumps, which feel great) are very rewarding.
It's not often that I come back for a second or third try on a Ludum Dare submission, but you have a knack for providing infectious little gameplay hooks that keep me thinking later on about how I might improve my play, and I think this submissions's going to have that effect again.
Nicely done!
Really neat idea, I appreciate that there's a lot of information given so you have to approach the entire scene as an exercise in drilling down to the important facts. The discrepancies about the cook smoking lead me down the wrong path for a while. The controls were a bit confusing at first, but only took a minute to figure out. Overall this was really cool, nicely done.
Brilliant. Nothing else to say. I love it.
Really nice graphics and setting. The mood was well done. I had some issues with the click targets not being placed accurately, but other than that it was a nice little escape the room game.
OSX build works great. This was a fun, simple little labyrinth game. It was short but enjoyable! I love the drill.
Cool idea. It was a little tough to play, the key presses kept failing to register for some reason. Neat concept though!
Neat idea! I really like the concept, and the art is nice and minimal. I think I would have liked to have a way to identify the characters aside from just trial and error, but it was easy enough to sort it out.
This is fantastic. Super ambitious, but everything was totally polished even given the surprising length for the format. Very well done, I'm impressed.
I love the intro bits, and this is a nice looking game! I had a fun time with it. I played a couple levels but didn't get far enough I think to unlock wardrobe items.
Love it. The perspective effect and effective mobile controls (playing on Android), plus the awesome of a dodge roll, makes for a nice fun little shooter. Gets hard fast!
Nicely done! This is a very polished entry, and the gameplay is fun if not particulary original. I love the art and animations!
This is fantastic. The graphics work well, the gameplay is tight and well paced, and everything fits great. I think I may have given myself carpal tunnel from all the frantic keyboard mashing, but the precision and speed of being able to enter exactly what you want to do really makes the game feel good. Later levels are crazy, but when you get in the zone and fulfill a bunch of wishes it's a great experience. Love the whole thing!
This is great. It's a bit hard sometimes to tell if you're going to get caught for an action, but it's a pretty fun little "stealth" game.
Interesting idea. The collisions were kinda brutal, if you get trapped by multiple aliens it seems you basically lose, but it was neat trying to match up the colors, and after memorizing the pattern the colors change in it helped a lot.
Aw man, this is so depressing! Nice art, I enjoyed this.
What sticks out to me here is the animation out the window. There's something very atmospheric about the way you can kinda see the trap going off and tell it's a big thing that's happening, but without having to show all of the effects. It works well. The game itself was very easy - to test I tried playing with only the rock slide trap, upgrading it every time and just mashing space on it forever, and I eventually quit because it looked like I wouldn't lose with that strategy. Definitely a neat take/perspective on tower defense though!
This was fantastic. Audio and music are great and fit perfectly, the gameplay was really enjoyable (and pretty closely matches with my LD experience), and it seems pretty replayable. Love it!
I love the surreal mood of this piece. It's a neat take on the theme, jumping in and out of the same room. Lots of cool graphical effects, the portal especially. Nicely done.
This is a really neat idea, and fits the theme perfectly. I'm pretty stressed out after playing, but definitely enjoyed it. Nicely done!
Cool idea, and nice implementation. I got pretty frustrated about collisions with edges/corners where there's literally no opportunity to see what colors you're going to need, but I enjoyed this.
I love this! Super cool to see a word game available on mobile that doesn't involve typing. The physics were solid and the difficulty ramped great. My only quibble was I frequently accidentally clicked to go to the next level instead of seeing which words I learned correctly. Really nice entry!
Oh no! I'm sorry to hear that @danilo-chiarlone. Certainly a bug, though I'm not immediately sure what crashed things. Sorry you lost your progress!
Cool little puzzle - nice, clear, elegant mechanic without any unnecessary fluff. Gameplay was really smooth and fast, too, which I really appreciate for something like this. If I failed a puzzle I was able to retry quickly and fix my mistake. What's really cool about your presentation is I started to be able to feel out solutions at a glance, just intuitively, which is always a really cool feeling in a puzzle game. The sounds fit well with the lo-fi aesthetic without being disruptive. I don't usually push through to the end of puzzle games on here, but this was just the right length to show what you could do with it, without being forced on length. Really enjoyed it, thanks!
Cool art, and I like the idea of it. Are the levels random, or randomly chosen from a curated list? There was quite a bit of variety which was nice. Physics were pretty unforgiving, but it's cool that the player character is so fast, 'cause I could see getting quite good at zipping through if someone played a lot. I did end up for a little while just going in and out of the edge of one screen to try to farm some of the easier levels. ;) Overall though this is pretty cool, and I'd be interested to see how the high skill cap on the movement could turn out. Some of the loot names made me chuckle too. =)
I had a hard time really getting into the gameplay itself, and it definitely felt a bit incomplete trying to play through the game, but _man_ I just really really love the look and feel of this thing. I was excited from the start splash screen, but was absolutely blown away when the first message box popped up with dialogue, just the sounds and the UI graphics, and the nicely rendered planets, it all feels so great! Would really love to play a full game with this quality of interface and polished graphics, so please keep it up!
I'm impressed that you managed to fit so many puzzles in here, and they all felt pretty thoroughly designed. Nice little animations too. My only complaint about the implementation was just that movement was so slow, particularly when I knew the solution to a puzzle and just wanted to walk through it. Difficulty was right on - took some thinking to push through, but nothing was so hard I had to bash my head against it to win. Fun, clever mechanics, and generally it all made sense pretty quickly playing through with a bit of observation. Nicely done!
This is amazing. I love the deliciously bizarre ships' crews, and it played very nicely. Difficulty ramped a bit slowly for me, but it's a really nice execution, and a neat design. Very nicely done! Oh, and the voice acting is superb, really adds a ton, particularly in that intro!
Really cool mechanic. I saw your WIP post during the competition and was really curious where it was going, but also wondering how the mechanic works. Is it something like, check for spaces in the direction you're trying to go, pathfind a cell near the front edge of the blob that direction, then remove a cell on the back edge? The way this plays reminds me a bit of one of my favorite old DOS multiplayer games, Liquid War, which has a kinda similar "blob pathfinding/physics" feel. If you're up for it I'd love to read a little postmortem post about how movement works.
I was a bit confused why I had to WASD instead of arrow keys when there aren't any other controls, and I had to restart a couple times to get the first popup to show for me (I think it was clearing 'cause I was holding a button?). I also didn't manage to figure out that I could smother small blobs the first time through (though I did accidentally kill a couple anyway). I think I still don't really understand what triggers the arena getting smaller - is it just time based? Generally the mechanical things all felt natural enough though that I had no problem discovering them as I went along - that organic discovery is up my alley anyway.
In the later stages of the game the claustrophobic feel is neat, though sometimes I get pinched in by the monster blob and don't feel I have many options left to me. Trying to sneak past it through a small funnel though, or trying to maneuver such that it goes for one of the other blobs, just feels really awesome and strategic. Like most of your games this one manages to set its hook in with little complexities and strategies that I want to try out later. Really enjoyable gameplay, and nice pacing too, as it ramps up quickly enough that I don't feel any fatigue starting over and over again; probably that rhythm is part of what makes your stuff so compelling .
Oh, love the faces too, particularly the munching face on the pink monster blob. Man that thing is terrifying, hah! There's a lot of fluid movement evoked with just a few animations, and everything goes ticking along without a hitch.
Overall, super solid, and really fun. Nicely done!
Very nice! There's a ton of polish here that you almost never see from Ludum Dare entries. I had to do a couple of double takes - nice looking cutscenes (the dropping in animation at the start was awesome), smooth animation, great sound effects. Combat felt visceral (though hitboxes were a little shaky at times), and there were just so many nice touches. Very impressive!
This is fantastic. I love everything about it - the puzzle is really clever, the levels are nicely ramped, the art is just superb, the sound effects fit nicely, and all the interactions are perfectly polished. The only trouble I had was it's hard to find out how far the minus happiness effect of the utility buildings carries, so I had to do some trial and error to determine it.
Phenomenal job here, this is the sort of gem that really makes clicking through LD entries exciting!
Really great visuals, nice particle effects - I particularly liked the lightning when it started to strike. Lots of little polish touches visually, really impressive. The gameplay itself was extremely thin, but I don't think that was the point.
Fun puzzle! Only issue I ran up against was the movement back if I dropped a piece slightly off from where it should fit was very slow. The fact that you need to shuffle pieces around on the board added a lot of interest to the typical pentominoes puzzle, and fit really well with the theme. The Star Trek flavor was awesome too. Also it worked really well on mobile which was nice!
Neat effect at the edges of the screen - it really gave the illusion of depth more than I'd expect. The difficulty was pretty low, combined with a slow pace meant it was tough to stay engaged. Cool 2.5d work though!
Super cool idea. It was a little hard to correctly manage the rock+paper+scissors attack sequences, but I really like the notion of using the puzzle board as the "controls" for a space battle. Nicely done!
Really smooth platforming, and I'm a sucker for anything involving wall jumps, which you've implemented really nicely. The limited jumps was an interesting mechanic, and the dash felt pretty great too. I wish there had been more levels (and was confused for quite a while when I reached the 6th level and couldn't find the exit), but I understand the time pressures of course! What's here is really polished, and I hope you get a chance to do more with platforming in the future, 'cause your physics here are spot on.
Love the atmosphere! No pun intended! The musical sounds connecting stars together really made it feel great to draw constellations. =)
Really nice little puzzle. It's clever, I haven't seen anything like it, and I can see how it might be expanded if you chose to do so. Nicely done!
Really really cool idea, and I love getting a chance to dig out the old gamepad during Ludum Dare. Aiming was pretty tricky as the hitboxes were so unforgiving and the projectiles travel so slowly, but I got used to it. I also wasn't a huge fan of how slowly the player walks. The space allocator gun is one of the cooler things I've seen in a twin-stick shooter for sure. Very cool. In general I really enjoyed this one!
Super cool. I like the look a lot, and the bomb just looks awesome. My only complaint was the character I'm playing didn't really feel like it was in the 3d space, and it was hard to know how far above the ground I was when jumping around. Overall pretty impressive!
Huh, this is really cool. I was initially very confused because the description initially said "turn based" but it in fact plays in real time. In my first battle I spent quite a bit of time waiting for the yellow mech to finish its "turn." ;)
The "fire when you finish moving" mechanic is really interesting, and has a really neat rhythm to it. It did a great job of evoking the fast-paced mech battles I'd picture in my head, with a much more lo-fi aesthetic. It also led to some interesting mind games - you want to fire just about when the enemy mech is stopping to hit it, then dodge their shots, which ended up a neat little dance. The various different weapons and things are interesting - I'm not sure I ever really figured out how to properly select what I was going to shoot, but it was fun playing around with the different powerups I could find.
In the end I think the AI was too easy - I won every match without much trouble, as it was pretty easy to evade and dodge any shots that came my way, but I really like this, and would love to try to play a more complete version if you ever made it.
Cool mood, and the character's animation is really nice. Returning to the campfire to heal was handled really well too, as you don't really notice how much the curse has been growing when you're away, and it feels really cleansing to have it all removed at the fire.
I'm a fan of the art and the layout of the spaceship is cool - it was neat just to walk around the ship a bit. I'm not sure in the end I really understood the gameplay, though I did grow some tea and brew it in the pot? I enjoyed playing around for a little bit to figure out the mechanics!
Huh, this is really neat! It's like a cross between a lunar lander (always a soft spot in my heart for those) and a gravity-based platformer. Took me a while to get the hang of it but I really enjoyed zipping around once I did! Would love to play a time attack or something with this mechanic.
I like the simple little tune and the look of the rabbits. Something about the constant cloning and the rabbit sprite feels very "mischievous hacker" which was great. I didn't initially realize I had to defeat all of the enemies to move on (even though it was spelled out clearly in the instructions, I missed it), so the first couple times I did very poorly, trying instead to avoid large groups of enemies. In retrospect I'm actually not even sure you can be hurt by the enemies!
Neat. Feels pretty complete in what you were going for, and the execution is really solid. Kinda stressful on the later levels, but that's okay!
Huh, what a super cool idea! I really really like the way the area pulls in, it just feels so interesting. It was pretty annoying to die instantly if you get anywhere near the edge, but that's a minor gripe. The ability to attack+strafe felt pretty nice too. Nice work!
Oh man, what a great idea! Solid execution, and fun to boot. I particularly love the "game over" screen. Nice unique take on the theme!
This was a fun little twin-stick shooter. I liked that the enemies were more of a hindrance of space then an immediate threat, and the floor was the "real enemy." Kinda adds an interesting element to the whole thing. Some of the noises (particularly the dialogue noise) were way louder than the rest so I ended up turning the sound down low pretty quickly, but I appreciate having sound+music for sure!
Upgrades worked nicely, and I liked the pacing of deciding when to unload and when to try to conserve ammo. I definitely enjoyed myself!
Awesome. Felt very smooth, easy to pick up, and nice difficulty ramp. Took me a while to figure out there were pickups towards the edge, though I'm not sure the bombs were all that necessary anyway. A few times I thought the hitboxes on the thrown bones might be a little off as well, I got hit a few times when I thought I had dodged successfully. Those are minor gripes though, it was a lot of fun to hack and slash through all the baddies, and the piling up of coins on the floor was a really cool mechanic to slowly make the battlefield into more of a tactical thing. Really nice execution!
This is really cool! I didn't initially realize that zips and folders could just be dragged over other files to pick them up, but once I'd figured that out it got really fun. Difficulty takes a little while to ramp up, but wow does it get hard if you let it run! The only minor issue I had was that the trash bin / cleaner / defrag were slightly off the left of my screen - close enough I could see and read them, just partially covered. Other than that everything worked as described, and was really smooth. Neat design, and quite fun! I really loved the blue screen, too, it's a cool glitch-out effect.
Nice little shooter. It's really neat that you're using a homegrown engine too!
This is awesome. I love this genre, and this was a really fun take on it. Between the restrictive placement of the pieces and the non-deterministic physics making it difficult to know if a piece is working properly, I had a hard time getting into the swing of things, but it was still fun experimenting and playing around. I particularly appreciated that you can hover with a block to see how it functions a bit before committing. The graphics are great, just right for what you're doing here, and the music fit well. I really like the packaging - with a bit of tweaking to the physics and maybe a bit more balance on the blocks, this could be something really great! Definitely one worth some iteration after the jam if you're into that. =)
This is SO cool. I am super into these Zach-like automation games, and the execution and presentation on this is just marvelous. I love the visuals and the feel and the writing on the research projects. It felt really great to progress, and I was _so_ excited to get into complex builds and the later stages of the game. There's a lot of really interesting content even just early on, combined with the promise of a lot past where I was able to get, and I feel like I missed so much of it - unfortunately after about an hour or more of repeated restarts, I need to call it a day on this one. There were a couple of big issues I ran into that prevented me from finishing:
First, I got the fatal error listed above a few times, though I believe I figured out that it's triggered if you jump straight into the first ash-related project instead of starting on the meta-photography line. Definitely took me a few attempts to figure that out, but as stated above this game is really exciting to me, and I was motivated to force through it!experimenting
Secondly, after experimenting for a while on the first pressure mixer project, it seemed the pressure mixer just stopped working entirely. It would accept input but nothing ever came out. I removed the machine and it seems I managed to dump a slide of ash onto the floor of the lab, but couldn't remove it successfully no matter how hard I tried. Re-building the pressure mixer didn't help; the next mixer also failed to work properly.
I have some other quibbles with the execution here which helped me to bounce off: the small, fixed resolution made it very difficult for me to read the text on my screen. Nothing preventing me from continuing here, but it was definitely something that took a bit of focus to get through. The controls also are very awkward; it took a few minutes at the beginning just to figure out how to use them properly, and even after an hour of play it still feels very difficult to work with what's there. I think a few small changes would help a lot: the biggest one for me was being able to remove buildings with the "remove conveyor" tool. I didn't understand why I would need to drop out of that tool, select a building, and then press X to do that. In general there were a lot of places like that, where it was required to back out of a screen before continuing onto something else - just contributed to lots of (non-intuitive) button presses to do most things. I also would have really liked to have numeric hotkeys or something similar for the buildings, as the arrows and scroll wheel were tedious to use. I agree with justcamh as well that it was really hard to know why things weren't working sometimes - while I do think there's some charm in discovering everything for myself, when things behaved seemingly inconsistently it was hard to know what was a bug and what was design.
Okay. That's a lot of words. Let me pause on that and come back to my first and most important thing: this is SO cool. Honestly as I type this I'm sorely tempted to go back in for another hour to try to power through the bugs. Instead of doing that, though, let me just say this: you've made something really unique here, and I so hope that you continue with it. Please mention me in the comments here or catch me on itch.io (JustinMullin) when you have the post-compo release out. I want to play this again, I want to finish the content you made for the jam, and I want to buy the finished and polished product if you go for that.
Very cool! I played about halfway through before remembering there was a "c'mere!" button, which really made things a lot less tedious. I did find the difficulty fairly low (it's relatively easy to lose the monsters around a corner) but it didn't detract from the tension of stumbling on a monster around a corner, nor the thrill of the flight when you're trying to lose it. I like the layer of needing to lead the monster on a chase that avoids your other people as well, especially in cases where that means stumbling through the dark elsewhere.
Because of the lower difficulty I didn't find myself very motivated to explore and find extra people after stacking up a couple early on, but knowing now that there's a score to play with does provide some motivation to go back and try to maximize the number of people I saved. Forcing the monsters to sit and digest their meal after a kill definitely ticks the "strategic sacrifice" bit, and I'd be interested to see how the game plays if it kept ramping to more numerous and/or more dangerous monsters to force those sorts of sacrifices a bit more. As it was it saved my life at least once, but I didn't have an opportunity to use the mechanic profitably, it was more of a grace period on the game's part than something I was able to capitalize on.
I found the strategic nature of the darkness really interesting as I got a better feel for the game; I learned to intentionally leave areas of the map unexplored in order to maximize my cover - maybe I was drawing the wrong conclusions, but it seemed like line of sight for the monsters could be abused that way since monsters can't see out of the dark either. Lots of interesting tactical stuff if that's true, which I like.
The procedural levels were cool, and felt high quality. I also really like the effect of the darkness and the little animations, and I chuckled at the ending too with the bucket of free clothes. Neat stuff!
Very cool! This is my favorite take on the "sacrifice lives to make platforms" thing so far. Using the path taken through an area as the pathing for the followers was a really neat effect. Nice simple visuals with matching sound effects and a catchy little tune wrapped the whole thing up nicely. Great entry!
Really cool concept - I played for a long while and didn't seem to be making much progress though. It was a bit strange to me that there was so much friction stopping me from coasting to the outer limits of the system, and that there was no gravity from the planets, but it worked out okay. The sound and music are just perfect, and I really love the look of this game. The sounds when getting close to a satellite were super atmospheric. Even though I never found what I was looking for I really enjoyed exploring. =)
Hey, this is pretty cool! Looks really nice, I like the voxel ship and the heavy use of bloom. For me having the roll/pitch based flight controls was refreshing, but I can see how others would be frustrated. Controlling felt very smooth, definitely a bit challenging to navigate in close quarters sometimes, but once I figured out I could use shift and space to adjust my throttle it got a lot easier. It seemed like the initial primary weapon (the yellow lasers) weren't always targeting correctly, but once I got the upgrades, particularly the big green constant laser, I was able to clean things up pretty quickly. Cool entry!
Very cool! I love that there's so much content here - not really sure what's the fixation on frogs, but hey, it was fun! I'm not entirely sure it's possible to lose, just seeing how many resources I had at the end of the game, but maybe you weren't going for the Oregon Trail "everyone died of dysentery on the third day" feel. ;) There were a few flubs; in one instance the result of an event told me I'd lost many members of my party, but I actually gained that many. Minor things, nothing that compromised the experience. I love the overworld map, and the animations on the oxen/wagons! The music was nice too. Great entry!
Games like this make the LD rating experience so much sweeter. I enjoy the loop of playing lots of games of various qualities, leaving constructive feedback, participating in the community, and all of that, but most games just..._are_. They're neat, they're creative, they're an awesome endeavor for 48 or 72 hours, but okay cool now I'm onto the next one.
Every once in a while a game makes me sit up straight and smile, and sticks with me for a little while. Usually I don't even know what _exactly_ it is, there's just something different. It's just that this game is different. This game is _special_.
Akimbear is one of those games, and I wanted to let you folks know. Every little bit is so finely put together - I love all the visual touches, especially the reflections and the RGB-distortion damage effect, that wonderful Vlambeer screen shake and time stretching fanciness, the awesome animations, the character and style oozing from everything, and the super tight gameplay. There's not much here in terms of novelty that sets things apart (though honestly now that I say that I can't immediately think of an on-rails side-scrolling twin-stick shooter off the top of my head...), but it just doesn't matter. It's fantastic entirely on its own merit, and it's just plain fun to boot.
One of the intangibles that shines here is the way a particularly well aimed shot, or perhaps a big desperate barrage fired to fend off a large group of enemies, feels like a personal accomplishment. The mechanics are simple, but the execution and responsiveness is so spot on that I feel I can take pride in the waves where I do well, and I know what I should have done differently when I fail. For me that sets hooks in deep, and is super compelling.
Thanks for this game, and I'm looking forward to seeing more in the future!
P.S. I didn't initially notice controller support and yeah, wow it's _so_ much easier with thumbsticks. The keyboard controls did feel pretty great for what they could provide, though, so kudos for polishing that up as well!
Cool game! Lots of polish for what's here, real clear explanations and good ramp into the mechanics. I was hoping to get to a puzzle that was a bit more challenging, but that just means I was enjoying myself. =) Love the graphics, and the splitters were a neat design. Well done!
This is so incredibly cool. I underestimated this severely when I first popped it open due to the appearance, but this is such neat puzzle design, interesting mechanics, and surprisingly deep interactions. I just about lost it when I noticed you could stack up minions carrying each other! I hope I get some time to come back to this because I know there's more content I haven't gotten to. The main thing I found myself wanting was some solid keyboard controls - the mouse controls were really fiddly, and I'd be much more comfortable with the keyboard. Seriously though, this is something special! Nicely done!
Cool game! The strategy in choosing what color weapon to sacrifice was interesting - definitely feels neat to sacrifice a weapon knowing you'll be strong against the enemies next time. I found it a little strange though that some weapons (the really slow double-ended spear thing in particular) just do a ton more damage, as that kinda downplayed the rock-paper-scissors effect. Sadly after a few attempts I never managed to get a weapon different from the starter (aside from various colors) before I died. I do think a mini-map or dedicated pop-over map would have been very useful, as I found myself getting lost and doing a lot of backtracking.
Anyway, I liked the notion here and had fun even with the limited amount of content that's here. Love the music!
Cool stuff! Nice smooth platforming, clever mechanic, and good execution. Short but sweet. The only thing that bugged me was I thought the count was "extra lives" but in fact it was "number of zombies" so I kept thinking I had one more than I did. Anyway that's an extremely minor gripe - nicely done!
Hah, the animations and everything are so great! Dragging the candies around feels great, though it was a little strange to me that I couldn't get the chain of candies into the goal all together, and had to drag each in separately. That's a minor thing though. Apart from the fact that I'm now guilt-ridden about candy murder, I'm quite pleased with this little game. Bite-sized puzzling, not too long, and well polished. Nicely done!
Oh boy I was not expecting those suicide animations, heh. Cool use of the mechanic, and the physics were really solid. I particularly appreciated that holding jump would bounce pretty much the same way for each grape, so I could span gaps consistently between lives. The only strange thing to me was later levels seemed to require less sacrifice and more platforming, though I can't really complain as the size of the later levels would have been very punishing if you had to get many grapes through to the later bits. The cutscenes were awesome, fun graphics and very polished. Nicely done!
Love the graphics! The buggy platforming was tolerable; actually the jumping and movement felt pretty good if the collision was just buttoned up a bit. Once I realized I could walk past the enemies, it was just the sheep who couldn't, it became way easier. Previously I thought it was waaay to hard for me, but I completed it pretty quickly after that. Anyway nice feel to the game, and lots of good building blocks for next time, this was a great first entry!
Ahhh, this is so cool! I love the concept and I'm impressed how much you managed to get out of it in the scope of the jam. Everything worked perfectly, the sounds and music were just spectacular, and there's tons and tons of polish. I particularly love the way the buttons pop in on the body. =)
I don't usually see tight level design in LD, but this really flowed well. I'm curious how much the skill of making a snowman would get locked in over just a little bit more time - I felt like I was advancing at just the right pace to match the content, but it was definitely a bit of a struggle on the last puzzle. I might succumb to temptation to come back to this one later and see how quickly I can zip through. Always a sign that an entry worked!
I think my only complaint is that I frequently wanted a way to switch which snowball was focused. It's part of the charm in some areas to have it set organically, I think, but especially in the later puzzles it just bugged me a bit. A minor thing - so many things to love here! Wonderful entry!
@fre I agree having all the snowballs roll at once was important, and felt great, I was thinking only of the camera focus. I was initially picturing a cycle left/cycle right button (or even just a "next snowball" button) that would just focus another snowball with the camera. The auto-focus did the right thing most of the time, though, and I wouldn't want to see that functionality sacrificed (hehe) for the sake of a fiddly input thing. Honestly thinking it through maybe if the camera would do a bit of a zoom to ensure that each snowball is visible, that could help; I think my discomfort mostly came from losing some snowballs off the side of the screen sometimes if I was spread very wide. Probably something where my intuitions are inferior to feeling out a tweaked system, but there's my two cents. Looking forward to trying a post-compo version some time. =)
Love this! I'm a total sucker for card game mechanics, and this scratches that itch well. It's difficult, but in a way that pushes that "one more run" button rather than frustration. I enjoyed learning the mechanics and finding my way deeper and deeper. One small thing that really threw me off initially: I got the lava protection card early on, and seeing only light and dark tiles, assumed the light ones were lava. Turns out avoiding the light tiles is a _really_ bad strategy, hah! Once I figured that out I had way more fun.
Great submission, I really enjoyed this one!
Oh, and I may as well share my best score:
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@pkenney @peachtreeoath Thank you for the kind words and thorough feedback. =) I'm glad my intention showed through of trying to get away from the more frantic Spiderman style grappling hook mechanics. I love those games too, but I wanted to experiment with a more cautious and precise approach here, so I'm glad that came across as deliberate!
I like the notion of a very ammo-constraint top down shooter like this. It was very satisfying to land those charged shots on the eyeball. It took me a while to figure out that if I just kept falling as far as I could that I would out-run the monster. After a while I realized the best path was for me to grab a powerup, wait in strategically chosen spots for it to catch up, and then pop it in the eye quickly and run away. Interesting combination of mechanics here!
Nice low-key treasure hunt, I enjoyed this. I do wish the sub was a bit faster, but I think maybe I was meant to relax a bit. =) I laughed the first time I heard the "Jaws" theme as a shark came onto screen. Love all the character in the environment!
Oof, this is a bit stressful! Hah, I did really enjoy this one, but I need a break after a couple intense runs. I'll admit my first playthrough I finished feeling like I must have missed some other feature, because I hadn't quite "gotten it" and was playing pretty naively. Once I felt out the mechanics a bit more with a second go it started to click, and this one does scratch that itch of great action puzzle games, where once you're "in the zone" it starts to become a bit of a Zen experience.
I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but if it was, the combo meter going exactly to 4 is a bit of a master stroke of design. I avoided the spoilers in the description successfully, and I had an "aha!" moment when trying to figure out how to keep the combo running. Initially I wanted to let columns stack up so I could just dig straight down, but you can only preserve the max combo for one block that way, which was a letdown. I started thinking about how else you could possibly stack a combo, and that led me to the third trick in your spoilers list above, pretty critical for score.
As usual, this one is probably going to sit in my head for a bit and then beg for a quick replay later, to see if I can get a good score. For now the beet red blocks are consistently my downfall. I think this is the best score I'm gonna get for the moment:
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I had a lot of fun with this! My only complaint is the music is very loud. Jumping worked really well, and I definitely replayed quite a number of times trying to get a high score. I was going to exit having gotten a bit of entertainment out of it after 9-10 runs, but then I realized I hadn't understood the "medical expenses" line. Once I grasped what was going on there I had to try a few more runs. I really love the touch of being able to decide when you've had enough, and preserve your points! It adds a really cool risk vs. reward decision to the whole thing, and I thought it was really clever!
Here's my best score. =)
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So cool! I love when novel puzzle concepts come up in LD, it's crazy to me that there's still space left in the "simple tile puzzles," but this is fun and I've never seen anything like it! Would definitely play a full mobile release. Maybe this is the next 2048? =)
I think there's definitely room to better communicate the rules so people can get up to speed more quickly, but I was able to figure out the rules within a single playthrough, and definitely felt after my first run that I wanted to go right back into it and try again with what I'd learned.
Awesome game, minimalistic and enjoyable. Nicely done!
This was fun and totally cute. I don't know what it is, but I really enjoy the way the helicopter flies. Something about having the different lift settings just feels nice to pilot. The level design was pretty simple, but it set a nice feel for the little villages and things. The 1-bit feel is fun, and it fits really well. Nice entry!
This is a simple atmospheric little game. I like it. The music was very nice, and the background effects transitioning deeper and deeper was pretty unique. Nice work.
This is very nice! The sounds and music work great, and I love the visual effects that start to come in as you get deeper and deeper. =) The different mechanics between pulling in focus and pushing away distractions were neat; I had a few cool moments where with one large sweep I could simultaneously pull and push away a number of bits, and that was really satisfying. I would be very interested to see what this game looks like played at a very high level. It's funny that, as you say, playing this game is not a very meditative experience, but it's definitely an exercise in focus!
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Nice graphics and sound! The lighting is nice, and the drilling sound works really well. The gameplay is a bit light, without much motivation for the drilling, but as you say, as a sandbox it was fun to just play around a little bit. I kinda wanted to see the drill able to go sideways or something to avoid the tedious nature of raising the drill back up, but that wouldn't be very realistic I suppose. =)
Well that was wacky. It took me longer than I'd care to admit to figure out how to actually wind up the machine, and then a bit longer still to figure out that I could hold the button to wind it further (for a bit I was just clicking it so it would wind for half a second), but once I had it down this was a fun little jaunt. Just about the right difficulty. I definitely smiled once I figured out why each of the machines was "helping" me, hah. Loved the intro/outro images. Well done.
Interesting systems here! I enjoyed this. I was not expecting from the description to be facing unarmed...whatever they are, charging me, hah. This played smoothly, just a few hiccups in the line of sight system. It was very difficult until I learned my enemies were only close combat, and that I can effectively fight them by stepping away while firing. Cool visuals that really help with the claustrophobic feeling. Nice piece!
Nice aesthetics. The sound and the art mesh really well here! I frequently wished I could climb back up the rope _just a bit_ when I overshot something, but I know that's part of the design. I love how fast paced this is, and having to shoot the gun to swing is pretty unique. Overall I enjoyed this, thanks for sharing your submission!
@deepinthewoods oh nice, interesting trick, I'll try it out!
What a beautiful game! The music and the art bind together so well, and the simple animations are just right. I love it. The gameplay itself is pretty limited in this submission, just kinda scratching the surface of the mechanics, but what's cool is I can see how this could be extended into a longer puzzle game with the elements you've put together. It's just enough to get a taste for some interesting things. Great exercise in minimalism and quite a touching little story. =)
Love this. Truly creative. I did encounter a bug where the final step before the start didn't quite work, and I had to do some proper debugging of my own to track it down, but that added to the mystique. =)
Some of the bullet hell segments were really challenging! Very cool entry.
Wow, very difficult, but I love the art, the mood and concept. I tried a few times to get to the very bottom, but at about 80% of the way through it seems you pretty much have to man the torpedo controls full time to keep the ship alive. I would have liked to be able to repair the ship while shooting (start the crew member repairing then switch them away), as later on there's just not really any down time to repair anyway. Very cool submission!
Awesome atmosphere. It took me FOREVER to get any sort of read on where I should be focusing my efforts, so I did a lot of blind wandering, but that lends to the claustrophobic feeling, and the simple tool of dropping flares as a breadcrumb worked pretty well. Very moody piece, simple but well done.
@pawciu Yes, I just managed to point myself in exactly the wrong direction and didn't see a cloth for quite some time. Bad luck! Definitely didn't ruin the experience. =)
Hey, this is awesome! It's very short, but well thought out and polished. Lots of nice writing and world building, and the puzzles were pretty solid too! I was especially impressed by all of the "tooltip" descriptions of things in the world, I've not seen that level of detail in point'n'clicks for LD before, and it really added a surprising amount of interest to the environments. Made the images feel less static and more alive. Great atmosphere with the minimal moody music, and I definitely ended it wanting to see what was in act 2. Great entry!
Wow, that was quite something! Every time I thought I was at the end of content there was a bit more I discovered one layer down. The slow descent into insanity was quite a trip. I love the polish here, the flavor of the whole thing is just exactly on point, and everything clicks. I only ran into one (very small) bug, where I couldn't turn around if I had my back to a wall. Everything else is tight, put together, and has a remarkably unique feel to it. Spectacular work!
This is fantastic. Serious Valve vibes here with some of the "show, don't tell" puzzles, and the voice acting and sound really pull you in. I got super stuck on the password puzzle because I only had 2 of 3 pieces, and didn't realize it. It was pretty frustrating, but I really wanted to see the whole thing so I powered through it, hah. Really cool setting and execution, and you pulled off a ton here.
Put me down as another one that got a bit of motion sickness from this, especially if I stared too closely at the portals when walking through them, as it seems they're static cubemaps or something so they only react to view direction I think? Super minor thing! The portals were really nice looking, and it's impressive that you pulled off a proper portal in Ludum Dare!
I have a weak tolerance for creep factor, but the atmosphere here was sufficient to make my skin crawl a bit, so well done there. I'm very relieved there wasn't a jump scare or something with the talk of "echos" doing weird things, but the writing was very evocative and really got my imagination going for what you might pull next.
All said, this is a really great and ambitious submission. Nice work!
Cool little game! It was quite a bit tougher than I expected from the first level. I eventually decided after trying and failing to effectively kill the monsters on later levels with the rock that it was easier just to frantically search for the exit, hah. I love the touch where the monster eyes glint in the dark every once in a while. Super cool bit! Nice work here. =)
Hey @southpawdevelopment, I really wanted to try your game, but after ten attempts to make it to the shop as you've described, I was unable to get there. Each time my character gets stuck at the left or right edge of the map, caught up against a block, and without any ability to air dash it seems there's no way to avoid this other than sheer luck.
If you're not aware, the LD rules allow for post-compo bugfixes if the game is effectively unplayable in its submitted state, so if this is something you're able to fix without adjusting any other features, I'd encourage you to do so!
The rules exception properly quoted: > Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission (a short change log). You probably wont get a 2nd chance with some players, but at least it wont be a problem for future players.
Yes, that worked! I was able to get past the first attempt now. Incidentally it seems after completing one run by dying, the bumpers and walls started launching me rather than just kinda bumping me a bit, and I never got stuck again after another 10 or so longer runs.
So, this is a super creative idea! I am not the expert on this, but I'm pretty sure this is the only Plinko dungeon crawler in existence! The gameplay loop of purchasing items for future runs worked really well, and kept me playing for a bit. Having an air dash really improves the feel of the game; even with only one dash it lends a sense of agency and I felt a lot more interested in what was happening when I felt like I could maybe do something about it.
I think with some more items and maybe some extra crunchy polish (some particles and a nice money sound when getting gold would go really far!) this could be something I'd sink a bit of time into as a full release, which is cool and something that doesn't come out in every LD submission. Nice work!
This game is absolutely beautiful. I love the particles and the lighting. It's great. I dig the procedural levels and gradual unlocks of items, though I unfortunately did run into many unwinnable situations, usually spawning in a hole so small any blast will kill me, or on a sheer cliff too far from other surfaces to attach a rope. One particularly memorable spawn was in a narrow corridor with a laser robot staring me down at the other end! All said though, the game is very forgiving to death; just respawn and try again. This kept the frustration from creeping in too far.
One bug did drive me up the wall, maybe literally? It seems if you run towards a wall and press up against it, the character model gets somewhat stuck from jumping. This made it very counter-intuitive to escape from bombs and enemies; I found myself trying to land just shy of a step up, for fear of getting caught on the wall and being prevented from climbing higher. Most of the mechanics were very smooth, but this left me feeling a bit uneasy about the platforming. In general I wouldn't mind if the character was a bit more nimble as well; maybe it was an intentional design decision, but I felt once I ran into an enemy my options to evade were very slim. Total avoidance was more productive, especially with the laser eyes that appear impervious to damage.
I hope I encountered all the items available, because each addition added a bit more interest to this game, and I really liked the mystery of wondering what the next crate would hold. The rope was a super cool feature, especially after upgrading the length! At the start it seemed only a bit useful, but once I got the hang of it and upgraded it, I was navigating areas on a ton of rope bridges. Eventually I stopped seeing crates and the game got too difficult for me to press on much farther.
All told, this was a very enjoyable experience, impressive and super polished. Awesome work!
Very interesting! Making a note to come back to this after a few weeks and see how much more fleshed out it is, but this was very fun to explore a bit, and especially to find places where someone had already answered the same way. Nice job!
MINI GAMES! Hah, I love when these submissions come up. This was a fun light entry. For some reason the rock paper scissors game seemed off to me, I thought I'd won a couple of times (paper covers rock), but it gave me the red screen. Anyway, I really enjoyed this. Good fun. Thanks for sharing!
This is really neat! I love how smoothly it plays, and the slow motion feature works super super well. Unfortunately I'm also rather bad at it, but I really enjoyed trying to see how quickly I could whip through the early stages. Nice work!
Fun little loop! This is a pretty hard game, and I think some runs I didn't have a chance due to a high concentration of sharks, but I played quite a few runs. I think it's interesting that after a certain point, purchasing things from the shop wasn't actually helping me, as I wasn't skilled enough to make use of any of it, hah. Nice work. =)
A bit buggy, but there's an interesting base here and I enjoyed planning out when and where to use the better pickaxes!
Very creative interpretation of the theme! I found this very overwhelming, but I suspect that was by design. I can't really tell after a handful of playthroughs if I'm missing some better strategies, but it's clear I'm very bad at this game, hah. I'm not fast enough to direct investors to the end with much regularity, but sometimes it seems luck allows me to progress farther. Anyway, this is all a very accurate description of what would happen if I tried to run a Ponzi scheme in real life, so...very realistic! This was a unique entry. Nice job!
Hey, this is pretty cool! I wish I understood the mechanics a bit more clearly, but I enjoyed a bit of experimentation. I think there is a bug with the root growth where if you grow two roots from the same point in quick succession, the first of the two will grow immediately. I started using this tactic to very quickly grow out, but I'm not sure if it was cheating or not.
The whole time I was playing I was hoping I'd be able to see an overhead view of my root system, so I was really excited to get that at the end. Super awesome that it looked somewhat realistic at the end of it too! I guess I make a decent plant?
Hah, well this is something! Been a while since I've played a rapid clicker game. I liked the aesthetics, and got through a few levels, but unfortunately this quickly progressed past my ability to defy physics, and I'm concerned that I need a new mouse now. Very unique. =)
Nicely polished entry! I wish the difficulty scaled a bit more, as it was difficult to keep playing after the 15 levels I tried without more being layered in, but everything here was very well put together. I loved the first level that had 10+ carts stacked. Great moment!
Super moody. I just love the music here, and it fits so well! I experienced a number of little visual bugs with text, but nothing that got in the way of the gameplay. I enjoyed exploring a bit and the writing drew me into the world. I especially loved realizing that this was a fictitious world towards the end, some cool worldbuilding there! Nice work!
I'm very impressed by the sheer amount of content and thoughtful level design here. Each time I picked up a new item it was fun to experiment with it, and the areas immediately before and after each unlock lead really well between sections. I did eventually (as is tradition with Metroidvania games) get completely turned around. A map would have been really useful, though of course I understand the difficulty of implementing that in a time crunch.
I wavered quite a bit at the start between "normal mode" and "easy mode" and finally decided that I would rather experience everything this game had to offer rather than be beaten down by difficulty if it was too hard, but ironically I found "easy mode" to be quite a challenge on its own. The healing runes are few and far between, and I struggled a lot with the control scheme (especially the confusion of having "move up" and "jump" be the same button - I kept trying to use "W" to move up in a pinch, but maybe you were avoiding it to better support AZERTY layouts?
Overall, this is a nice entry that really jumps past its first impressions.
This is pretty cool! I bounced off of this after 5 minutes of trying to figure it out, but I didn't want to just let it be; reading your explanation in the comments here of how the game works helped me out a lot, and I was able to take over the map armed with a bit of knowledge. At least I think I won - the game doesn't seem to have recognized my victory. =)
With a bit more of a tutorial experience in the game and bit of balancing (maybe mostly AI work as you mention), this would be a pretty solid and novel strategy game. Nice work!
@reditect quite possibly a "me" thing - I'm still learning the ins and outs of the Godot engine's windowing and viewport system. You might try maximizing or resizing the window to a different aspect ratio to see if that helps?
I love this! Strong "Enter the Gungeon" vibes, probably that was intentional. =) The gameplay is very tight, large variety of enemies kept it fresh, and the difficulty scales very nicely as well.
My main complaint here is it was very unclear to me most of the time what each new upgrade was doing for me, which cheapened the feeling of upgrades a fair amount. Sometimes it seemed I just got greater damage, but without health bars or any indicators even that was a bit hard to judge. This is doubly true for the end-of-floor rewards, where I got to select from three options, but pretty much just had to choose blindly. I would love to have felt like I could steer into interesting combos at this stage!
Overall though, just treating the upgrades like a basic progression system that I couldn't control, the game worked really well. I played for quite a long time across several runs, and I enjoyed each one. Very polished entry and very complete. Well done!
Congrats, and well done managing to get a submission through with a newborn in the house!
This is tuned really well, very satisfying to get things just right, and it has a very nice property of being pretty natural once you get a good feeling for the physics. I really enjoyed this, and it's just the right length, though my heart sank when I realized there was going to be a fifth spotlight to hit on the four crates level, hah!
The graphics are just right for this, set the theme straight away, and I love the "Amazing!" refrain, especially at the end. Great little submission. =)
I really loved this. Tons of fun to play and master.
The slight random factor on the jumps was completely infuriating though, especially on the section with the little platforms all in a row; I'm convinced it's possible to fail that section even with perfect play just because the game shoots you a bit too far or short. It also came into serious effect with the tall vertical drops at the very end, where I'm pretty sure the best plan is just to sit completely straight vertically right at the edge of the gap and _hope_ that the game gives you a little tip, so that you don't get randomly pushed too far if you have a slight angle to hop in.
Anyway, it's easy to forgive that issue given the charm of the rest of the game. The presentation is so simple, but it fits perfectly and jumping around just feels great. Excellent work!
Neat concept here! Floating across the level when gravity is totally reversed was a neat feeling and sometimes worked really well. Unfortunately I would frequently get caught in the floor when gravity went to the side; perhaps if the player was also rotated to be able to walk properly on walls?
The voice acting was fun, and it's always nice to see someone go that extra level with sound.
It took me quite a while to find the shotgun - I know you put the button for change weapon in the game description, but I totally forgot for a bit. The rocket launcher is very powerful, but the splash damage was so unforgiving I ended up using the shotgun exclusively to avoid killing myself on a surprise collision with a wall.
Nice entry, I restarted several times to try for a higher score. =)
I don't understand why clowns are so difficult to balance until I have two of them stacked up on my index finger. I suppose it is just a fact of nature and I should not be so questioning of clowns, but it is an observable fact: just one is a slippery nightmare to balance, but two of them stacked on each other in any nonsensical configuration somehow begin to balance each other out in equilibrium. I wish they would launch themselves into the air in pairs, but alas, they don't seem to listen to my complaints.
I don't understand why some clowns bedevil me with ill-timed leaps directly to their doom. They endanger not only themselves, but also their kin who they throw to the ground along with them at great speed. Do they have a death wish? Are they simply deluded or incompetent? I cannot know. I have no time to ask these things in their very brief moment of peril, and they can never answer me again after their fated stunt is finished.
I don't understand why this audience is so insistent in ruining my work, my masterpiece of circus engineering. Don't they realize I am Atlas The Clownlifter, whose finger raises worlds of harlequin art that their minds will never completely comprehend? They pay for the privilege to share this tented space, and they need only to sit in rapt silence while I conduct the work that I, and only I, was born to do. Instead they throw vegetables with deadly and malicious aim, and I despair.
I don't understand many things about this accursed act, but I do understand this: this game seems to want me to despise it. This game is a bit buggy and more than a bit unfair. I'm halfway convinced this game *hates* me, and me in particular, and yet...I can't help but love it. Thank you for sharing this game.
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Wow, this was really cool! It took me a couple peeks back at the instructions above to understand properly how the game was played, but once I got the hang of it I really enjoyed my time through. I kinda wished I could use the "rewind" potion to just rewind the dice of my choice; maybe that's too powerful for how you've balanced the game, but it seemed spamming rewinds until you get the rolls you need earlier on is the best strategy. I really like the progression aspect of the game, and I could see jumping back in to try to get the omega potion as quickly as possible. I definitely played inefficiently the first time through. Nice work and a clever idea!
This was really fun! I played with a keyboard but I might come back and try it out with a gamepad for the properly nuanced controls. Tapping 'S' to stay level was a little tedious after a while. I loved the zaniness of some of the cargo in this game, and the flight mechanics were solid. Crashing was a lot less punishing than I expected, and I didn't initially realize I had to fly low to pick up and drop off items, but once I had the hang of it I was cruising around and thoroughly enjoying myself. Nice work!
Very cool. The art and the acapella sound track were excellent, as was the writing. Gameplay was good, each boss was relatively unique which was fun. I did find myself a bit helpless at times, the difficulty seemed just about right but sometimes I felt I was just lucky with the way the saber bounced, and on occasion it seemed I would die to something I didn't have much opportunity to dodge. Maybe I'm just bad though. =P I really enjoyed this!
This is pretty incredible! Lots of interesting puzzles, each felt like a new opportunity rather than just stretching content. Pretty much every combination of reagents felt like a useful thing at some point in the game, and I feel like that's quite the accomplishment! There's license to be creative here, and several appropriate solutions to most puzzles. The writing was fun too to boot. This is an excellent specimen, nice work!
PS spoilers: !> I'm really sad I didn't find a good use for honey+healthy MEGA BEES
Nice polish, the particles were integrated really well and the game plays nicely. I really felt the lack of a thrust-down option though; often times the only reason I was using the boost was so that I could turn around properly. It works out, but felt a bit uncomfortable. Anyway, nice piece, I enjoyed playing and the leaderboard worked really well.
This was very hard! I only managed to rescue 2 eggs on my best run; that walrus is just so fast. It seemed my best strategy was simply to dash for the nearest eggs to the start, hope to harvest 1-2 before the walrus got there, and then from there the thing was on top of me forever. Maybe I'm missing some more effective strategy though! The initial dive from the cliff is a cool moment, and I like the sliding mechanic for sure. The animation on the penguin is great as well!
This is by far the most compelling "match puzzle" style game I've seen in Ludum Dare, and honestly with some tweaks a contender for most compelling match puzzle I've seen period. These games so often suffer from combos popping in randomly or other sorts of variance that make them relatively mindless unless you're really dedicated. This game had me planning a few moves ahead consistently, and I felt like it was worth the work. There aren't flashy chain-reaction combos like in some games, but collapsing a long chain of tiles across the board was way more rewarding for how much it felt like I was the one who set it up rather than stumbling into a nice pattern by chance.
My main complaint here is just the length of the game; others have commented on this as well so I won't harp on it, but I struggled to see the game through to the end after I'd started to succumb to too many metal blocks, just because I knew I wouldn't be getting too many points but the slog of clicking through all the little 1-2 tile chains was a lot. I played for a very long time regardless.
The art and music are great for this too, very satisfying to clear tiles, and the "heartbeat" music track was very conducive to a focus mindset. =) I especially love the shine animations, a nice little touch (though I did keep thinking the movement out of the corner of my eye earlier in the game was a sign that the game was progressing while I took some time to think, leading me to rush a bit before I realized it was just an aesthetic touch).
I would definitely return to this entry for a version 2!
Love it! Short, but super moody and I love the art. Lots of variety in the level design too. I especially liked the static effect you had applied here. The animations in general were great (I'm partial to the reaching tentacles for the creature art), but the sequence with the drill reaching down and scanning was really cool. Just generally polished all around. Nice work!
Well that was dark! Simply incredible polish, all of the animations and effects are jaw dropping. I especially loved the first time the ship went to top speed to the moon. Great stuff here! The gameplay itself was pretty tedious, I found myself wishing I could just have the back and forth trips automated away so I could watch the pretty game. It's relatively short though, and the eye candy and nice audio was plenty to keep me occupied through to the end. Excellent work here!
This plays really well, everything is quick and smooth, and I didn't run into any bugs. I kinda got some Starseed Pilgrim vibes from the game, which was cool, a simple but mysterious game world where you learn how things work by watching closely. The "shuffle" effect as the flying disturbance or whatever it is moves around is neat. The game is pretty hard (I struggled to get past 15 or so), but the world is predictable enough that I could see the skill cap being pretty high. I could picture an expanded version of this game with different sorts of blocks to encounter being very interesting. Overall I really enjoyed this, and it's definitely got me thinking which I love. Thanks for the submission!
So I'm not sure if I was playing to the right "rules" here, but I had fun trying to stay in the middle of the game world as things fell apart and shifted around, which at least *feels* like the right thing to do. I managed to get to the end of the timer and I'll consider that a success. =) I like the chill music!
Wow, this is really cool! Very polished, fun to play, and I was impressed by how it kept layering in new features. Couldn't believe there was a final boss too! Excellent work. =)
Very simple, but well polished! It took me 4-5 tries before I figured out I was supposed to be slamming down on the debris to continue to climb. It's very hard, but satisfying to get a good run. I found myself pretty frustrated sometimes by how quickly the screen scrolled down, where I couldn't bounce on a piece of debris that had left the screen, even though I could get the altitude to keep up with the screen scroll if I were to hit it. It kinda forces a more aggressive play, which was fine but a bit uncomfortable for what was initially most natural/intuitive for me. Overall, nice pure game-play and well executed.
Nice little platformer, and the random room conditions was an interesting mechanic (though it seemed to clear on death, and I'm not sure if that was intentional?) I found the fourth room (I think it was #4) to be way harder than the rest; after that point I was able to cruise pretty quickly through the others. I ran into a couple bugs with the moving platforms resetting my jump even though I didn't land on top of them, but otherwise the platforming worked quite well in this. Nice work.
This is so cool! I love how simple and effective the orbital mechanics are, and the prediction lines are just right, enough information to play without overdoing it. The "collision warning" was an especially nice touch. I especially loved the moment where I thought I had it all under control, and just when I allowed myself to feel proud for a moment, one satellite nicked another, and the debris took out the whole lot of 'em in 5 seconds or less. I didn't initially realize the satellites had fuel, so it was a fun twist to have to play around the one satellite I'd been overtuning for much of the game.
I think my main request or nitpick is that the adjustments are very touchy; I think I would have liked to be able to make more fine tuned changes to the orbits to get things just right. That said, I wonder if you tweaked it this way to ensure that the player can quickly make changes without being limited by speed? It works quite well as is, but I often got a bit finicky with trying to get an orbit just right, tapping back and forth to try to center something out.
I wish I could have spent a bit more time reading the news feed during play, because I really liked the flavor of it all, but of course those pesky satellites took all my attention. =)
Love the game, thanks for sharing!
Nice base here! I'm not 100% sure about this, but it seemed I may get more points for carefully shooting just one block off the top of the tower at a time. Either way, interesting way to progress and I liked that I got more block types as time went on. Because there's not really much way to rotate them, it seemed easier to just stack the regular cubes up at a certain point, but I had a bit of fun trying to build a couple extra shapes nonetheless.
This is pretty unique, and it's always nice to see a bit of voice acting in the scope of a Ludum Dare too.
It took me a while to figure out how all the rules worked. It didn't occur to me initially that the words had to make some sort of sense in addition to following the beginning/middle/ending rules. Once I figured it out the puzzles were pretty easy, but I can see how it might be fleshed out into a deeper puzzle game which is cool.
This is a creative platformer twist that I haven't seen before! A couple of the puzzles were interesting as well, I liked the clever use of falling platforms to line up for the bat's flight in multiple places. I didn't read the game's description very carefully and got a bit lost after reaching the end of the game thinking there was more, but there was plenty here to show off the basic mechanics. Nice work!
Delightful.
The nuance of the difficulty curve as the hand spins around is really something interesting. I had to really fight the urge to get more aggressive about popping lower balloons when the hand is high at the end, as I get into a groove of being able to dip down pretty low. Interestingly, patience seems to be a much better approach for what *feels* like more of a panic game. You can often grab all the balloons in a wave if you pause and think before jumping.
I did find myself *really* craving a pkenney signature **_cOmBo mEtEr_**. I can pop all the balloons now, but can I score mega points by popping everything in a wave in one jump? I can only guess. The other thing I tried a few different times was timing jumps on the balloons to launch higher. I don't think the game _needs_ any more, but I thought there might be a mechanic I was missing.
Anyway, really enjoyed my time with this one, and as usual, it's a tight and challenging piece. Something about the tick tock sound just gives this game a unique feel. Neat entry, thanks for sharing!
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@pkenney lol I came to your page to review your LD52 submission and ended up on this one, which I guess was the last compo. I'll check out the latest one next! xD
Pretty fun little racer. There's something endearing about a racing game where your top speed is about 45 mph. I had a hard time getting the hang of it initially, but after playing around for a bit, felt pretty good. I guess I have the top spot for now. =D
The environments were nice, and the track was well designed, put me through the paces a bit. Nice work.
Thanks for the great feedback all!
@toosalty0000, I've just added an HTML build on the Itch page, if you'd like to test that out now! It's working well for me but I can't promise it's completely bug free. =)
https://justinmullin.itch.io/verdant
@pkenney I'm glad you enjoyed it! I agree there is some bug with the Creeping Death + Spiraled Echo combo, I have also noticed it doesn't seem to trigger appropriately. Maybe that is for the best, because as your last post shows, I think the combo of those two spells plus Watchful Eye for sight of the map is pretty clearly the strongest strategy all told. This one just seemed to come together at the last minute, with some lucky guesses on balance doing enough heavy lifting to keep the game from falling apart.
Thanks for playing and for all the insightful feedback! =)
Thanks for the tip @lenaschimmel (and the kind words) - I'll have to take a look at my Mac build process in the future to streamline that.
Slick and snazzy. The sound effects really make this. Getting a good run of tomatoes going all at once is so satisfying, with the clang clang clang clang as the reward (not to mention the satisfaction of a job well done). It took me a good number of tries, but I was able to beat day 5 with 23 tomatoes. Could I repeat that feat? Okay, probably not, but it felt great.
There's something that clicks quite well about rolling a group of tomatoes down the ground. Even though it felt pretty chaotic how they would bounce, eventually it started to become second nature to jump at the right time to kinda corral them in on their way, and I lost many fewer fruits to funny bounces. I'd have to experiment a bit to figure out if there's some pattern to the direction the tomatoes bounce when the come off the vine, but sometimes I felt like there was just a bit too much luck in whether they set themselves up nicely next to the can, or if I'd have to chase them down. It was especially annoying when one would land on the platform with the plant itself, although I'm not positive this wasn't my fault due to bumping one the wrong way.
Initially I was trying really hard not to let the plants wither completely, as I thought I might actually lose the level, or the plant wouldn't regrow again. After mistakenly letting one go I realized that they bounce right back with a bit of water. It seems the best strategy is to let them go until a bit after the last minute, given there doesn't appear to be much of a penalty if anything at all for the speed at which they produce fruit the next time.
Anyway, I enjoyed my time with this one, and felt a really strong sense of improvement as it increased in difficulty, which is always that hook I'm looking for. Nice submission. =)
Yeaaaah! Psyched to see you show up in the top three, congrats!
Very cool. This game is hard, but plays very smoothly. I especially loved the little bit of a slide the character can do on ground (and doubly so the sliding on ice). It all works out very well. Something about the greenish yellow fruit with holes in it though...eugh. I couldn't die fast enough. =D
Nice work, very polished and fun.
This is lovely. I played it a lot longer than I should have. The art is perfect for it, the music is just wonderful, and there's just enough here to hook me in and wonder what would come next. This might be one I come back for after the jam, if you do decide to add some more features. Well done!
Beautifully done. The art, sound and music work incredibly well together here, and I really enjoyed it through and through. The game itself is interesting, though not quite fleshed out enough here to stand on its own I think. Of course it serves mainly as a platter on which to serve up the story and mood of the game, and it works well for that. I love the plant animations, just lovely. Very cool submission!
I had a nice time with this. The flat shading graphics are cool, it plays pretty well, and there's a ton of content here, with some interesting level design. Some of the later levels are extremely tough!
The only down side to the visual style was that it was sometimes difficult to see, when moving very quickly, whether you were in front of or behind objects, due the orthogonal projection. I'm not sure how to remedy this, and it didn't cause too many problems, but I did notice it from time to time. My only other minor complaint was a lack of visual feedback on when I can boost again after landing; sometimes I would die because I thought I was ready to launch again, and just drive off an edge. One time I landed upright on top of a brown wall, which was kinda neat, hah.
Nice work, it's quite polished and complete feeling!
#### The Ballad of Eric Hernandez, Cattle Rancher
** Verse 1 **
Out on the range, where the sun shines bright
There's a man they call Hernandez
He's a cattle rancher, hardworking soul
That's what all the folks in town says
** Chorus **
Oh Eric Hernandez, he's a sight to see
Stackin' cattle high as a tall oak tree
He's a cowboy at heart, and all the long day
He rides the range, stackin' cattle like hay
** Verse 2 **
Now some folks say it ain't natural
Old Eric laughs and tips his hat
He says, hey, it's just what I love to do
And I ain't one to argue with that
** Chorus **
Oh Eric Hernandez, he's a sight to see
Stackin' cattle high as a tall oak tree
He's a cowboy at heart, and all the long day
He rides the range, stackin' cattle like hay
> P.S. - I enjoyed this
Nice work. The different shapes was a fun twist on the traditional tilting maze, and I liked slowly completing all of the different jobs around the board. I was pretty frustrated after the first couple of times tossing out a crop I didn't need - I had to get rid of a total of 9 tomatoes to finish the game, and one time got four in a row. It took some willpower to push past that. There was also one situation where I had an eggplant and lemon remaining to complete, but the eggplant spot was in the way of the lemon spot. I got a lemon first, and just decided to push it through rather than ditch the lemon attempting to roll an eggplant. Oh well!
The physics worked really well on this, it was solid and without bugs, and I enjoyed my time with it. Thanks for the submission!
This is quite fun! Cruising around the planets to pick up a ton of wheat is a great feeling, and there's a nice challenge to dodging the hexagons. In general I found that aiming at speed was tough enough that it was better to just avoid the enemies, though that might not hold true in the later stages that I am not skilled enough to reach.
Well, I think the winning strategy here was probably to be more cautious and not plant a whole field of deadly monster plants, but I had some fun tossing caution to the wind and just doubling my profits as much as possible. Neat concept! I'd be interested to see this fleshed out a bit, but I love the animations and had a bit of fun playing around with this for a few minutes.
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Fun and educational. I think most kids nowadays don't have the slightest idea where that Grammy SugarⓇ on their table comes from, which is quite sad. This game could start to change that.
Hah! Well I'm not a bot, but that's just what a bot would say. Here's some actual game feedback:
- I found myself wanting additional grammys to drop to up the challenge, but at least as far as I could progress, that never happened. - The sound effects are great. - Sometimes the bounces would be _way_ faster or slower than I expected. I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing, but it made it difficult to feel I was in charge. I figured out that moving the bouncer does impart some velocity to the grammy, but I'm not sure that's the entire picture. In the end I resorted to trying to shoot the grammy at as high a speed as I could at the right angle, which seemed a decent strategy. - I very much enjoyed the writing and the theme.
@papabirb, no unfortunately I was not able to progress past the level where there are ~8 grammys and you need 75% yield, so I never saw the bonus round. Maybe I'll take another spin through and see if I can get that far.
Cool theme, I can picture this in a more complete setup being really cool, and the percentage based population harvesting was interesting, I can imagine that could be some unique choices forced if you need to try to pick the areas that are most likely to give you the resources you need. I totally get not being able to implement everything you wanted; I enjoyed fiddling with what's here though. The animation for combat is pretty effective at adding tension to a coin-flip mechanic, and the sounds work pretty well for it.
Cool to combine combat and farming together like this. After a certain point it seemed I had enough of a system going that I wasn't going to die any time soon (max seeds and hp, killed all the monsters), so I did eventually just quit the game. Nice work.
Pretty fun little shooter. I love the animations for the plant, especially the movement animation and the death animation. The game seemed to expect me to be moving around a lot, but I found that staying in one place and just clicking a lot was the best strategy for me, which was a pity because movement was pretty fun and cool.
I found that I'd have liked to see some sort of visual indication of the HP for the enemies - it was a bit frustrating to have some die in one hit and others in three, without knowing which were which. Because of the speed of the game, this just meant I fired three times at each farmer regardless, as I didn't have the time to wait to see if they died the first time.
Overall I enjoyed playing through the levels, and found the interludes to be a nice layer of flavor on the game.
I'm a sucker for a good old fashioned farming game, and there was some interesting stuff here to keep it fresh. I enjoyed the writing a fair amount, though it did get pretty old by the 15th-16th time for some of the interactions. I have a few minor quibbles about the economy (you actually lose money feeding carrots, and growing plantlings is profitable for carrots and cauliflower, but loses a ton of money for any other plants?), but other than that this worked pretty solidly. A couple of small bugs. Towards the end it was pretty repetitive, but I wanted to see that golden carrot, dang it, so I pushed through it. I absolutely love the art on the little veggies. They're adorable! Fun little entry, nice work, and I'm always pleased to see folks making RPG Maker work for them in game jams. =)
Hah, the ending. Fun little game, there was enough variety to keep it interesting through to the big finale. Nice work!
I like the presentation here, the idea is fun and I especially appreciated the action of picking the plants. Unfortunately it devolves into a lot of trial and error pretty quickly, and for some reason I was never able to find one of the items in the "others" section, despite trying (I thought) literally every possible combination of the other items. Still, I like the art, and there's some nice stuff here. I just want to know what that last thing was! =P
Simple but enjoyable. The interludes between combat to plant souls were a nice little refresher, though I'm not sure there was actually a gameplay purpose to the flowers? It felt nice to grow them regardless. I do wish the aiming had been a bit clearer, as I really struggled to gauge where my soul would be planted.
I found myself wishing the difficulty would pick up a bit more so I could grab more souls, I wasn't getting hit on most of the first levels so it started relatively slow. I had fun throughout though, it was nice and short and the hook of trying to make as many flowers as I could kept me motivated.
Cool stuff. I love the ASCII aesthetic. This was really fun and relaxing to play. It reminded me of the joy of tending to a zen garden, fittingly enough. I may have stayed longer if there was some hook about selling and buying more crops, advancing the farm, all that usual stuff, but honestly I think I love this game more for not driving me down that path. I thought a bit about how I would like my farm to be, and then I grew it that way. The journey was enjoyable through and through. Thank you for sharing this. =)
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Very cool, I love seeing a digital card game on here, and this one worked pretty smoothly.
I have some quibbles with the rules and balance, but I understand it's a tall order to balance something like this in short order! Still, I'll list 'em along with the feedback, as this IS a feedback section.
* Others have mentioned there aren't enough shovels or turns to really see a strategy through, which I'll echo. * I don't think it helps the game to have shovels work on anyone's plot. It's difficult to justify spending a card and an action on planting something that I'm less likely to harvest than anyone else (as I always have to wait a full cycle of other people's turns before I get a shot). Maybe a rarer card that can do it, but the (hopefully more common) shovel just works on your own? * The recipes were really cool pay-off cards, but I wish I'd have been able to sell them for 1 coin, as they tended to gum up my hand with no way to get rid of irrelevant ones. * I'd be interested to see how this plays with selling being a "free" action; it would help planting/harvesting feel more worth it, and also allow players to dig through the deck a bit more. * I really liked seeing the implementation of "interrupts"; it seems to work well, though it took me off hand the first couple of times I was holding a pitchfork, trying to understand what I might be cancelling. * It was cool to see many different flavors of bots (even with backstories!), though maybe a bit weird that some (just one?) of them straight up give away cards, hah. * Exactly once I managed to pull off a big 10-coin recipe, and it was great. Cool way to handle a payoff card!
Nice work on this one, I enjoyed playing, and played a few extra rounds just for fun after getting a good feeling for it. =)
Awesome work. The art and animations are wonderful, and really work well. I love the palette you chose, and the combat is quite fun. I was a bit disappointed that the strategy that worked best for me against the final boss was swordplay, given the game puts a lot of emphasis on the bow, but the sword animation was very satisfying so it wasn't too much of a loss. I really like the design of the mantis, and it was neat to have a basic crafting system to incentivize fighting the enemies. Overall, great piece, I enjoyed it quite a lot. Well done!
Very very cool. I love the art, the character is great and the 3d style is simple but effective. I'm impressed by how solid and polished the 3D movement controls are. The "hold to rotate" controls worked really well. I did have to tweak my camera controls a bit to feel comfortable, but I love so much that you included camera sensitivity and inversion of both camera axes. That helped SO much in getting the controls feeling good.
The puzzle itself is incredibly hard for me, though I was able to solve at least one layer without _too_ much mess. I'm actually quite curious how it would look for someone to solve the whole thing proper. It seems like it would be very satisfying. The first time I toggled the "preview entire volume" I had a bit of a panic attack at how much thought would have to go into solving it entirely, but it's cool to think that it's possible to solve it exactly!
Nice work on this one, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
This was very challenging, but strangely compelling. I didn't quite understand how the doors worked for some time, unfortunately because the game window wasn't quite wide enough for me to see they were closed at the start, and the food I was chucking at them was just going to waste. Once I figured out the door had to be opened, I was fulfilling a few orders before long.
I don't think I like very much that the buttons open the "wrong" doors - it didn't really add too much to the game other than annoyance. I would also maybe have liked to see the ability to request new deliveries of food. Sometimes I would not have the food I needed for a certain order, and just had to wait while precious time ticked down.
Overall, I enjoyed this for being unique, if a bit buggy. Thanks for your submission!
This is really cool, awesome art and animations, lots of visual polish all over the place. The shooting especially feels very solid, though a bit less so on the shotgun, which seems a bit too "splashy" and unpredictable? I'd really love to be able to progress past the second wave, but it seems I just randomly die when the crows start attacking, despite apparently being clear of all enemies.
The death animation is just wonderful though, so it was a pleasure to die a few times trying to get there. =D
* Update *
After coming back to this game a bit later, I realized that I was taking hits from crows eating the crops I'd harvested. It wasn't very intuitive that this was the case, since it directly takes out my hit points when it happens, but after this discovery, I was able to play through the rest of the game and beat the game. Very nice work, I like this one a lot!
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Nice look and feel to this game! The waving grass and the fog effects were especially nice, and I enjoyed the music as well. This could definitely get spooky if I wasn't, y'know, just picking tomatoes. Not a ton of game here, but I enjoyed walking around in the world a bit. I do hope my character is getting paid for all this though...
This is wonderful. It's very short, and there's not a ton to it, but the polish and the style waay more than compensate for that. Looks like you might not have made the sound/music/graphics, but they were integrated very well, and the whole thing plays very smoothly. Well done.
Thanks for the feedback all!
We struggled quite a bit with tuning how many puzzles should be in the game before the end, as we wanted at least some players to make it to the ending, but didn't want it to feel too thin for players who took the time to read through the books and understand the puzzle. This was probably the most rushed I've felt during a Ludum Dare - probably we were too ambitious with how much we tried to accomplish, as we had to make some really hard cuts towards the end.
@alex-de-la-cour funny you mention it, as scrapping a letter was _right_ near the top of my TODO list to implement at the deadline, and it just barely didn't make the cut. Glad you enjoyed the ending!
@daliamha thanks for playing, and sorry about the lack of fullscreen. With lots of scrolling and parallax effects, we struggled more than we should have with getting things to scale and lay out correctly at many screen resolutions, and ended up with a fixed resolution (though it's _supposed_ to be scaling up 2x, 3x etc. if you have a large enough screen). Given more time and familiarity with the engine (Godot) I wish we'd have been able to fix that.
@pkenney thanks for the detailed feedback and for sitting with it 'til the end! It's really nice to be back to Ludum Dare. It's been a busy handful of years, but I really hope to make it back into a regular thing.
@borealteuthidia Wow, thank you so much for the kind words and the feedback! It's really nice to hear the ending worked well for you, and that you were able to get caught up in the game world. We put a lot of time and energy into trying to figure out just the right way to tell the story in the time available, so it means a lot to see it's landed properly for some folks. It was a bit terrifying to launch the game knowing it's effectively unplayable unless you're willing to sit down and digest both of the books properly, so it's also a big relief to see that not everyone TL;DRs their way out of the game once they see all that text. :upside_down:
@skiddings thanks for the suggestion! I've uploaded PDF versions of the two books to the Itch.io page here: https://justinmullin.itch.io/reclamation - hope that helps a bit!
Hey that's cool! Very unique gameplay. I'd be really interested to see a full analysis of all the strategies that crop up if you got really good at this game. It's quite fascinating. Reminds of me Wolfram's and Conway's cellular automata rules, where it might actually be quite complex. Thanks for the game!
Hey, this is really cool! I quite enjoyed figuring out the ebbs and flows of it, and once I understood I could mix colors, I had a lot of fun building up a bit of mastery. I did find it quite easy with a small amount of practice - I ended up quitting after about 1,000 points as it didn't seem to be getting any harder.
Very unique mechanic though! Have you ever played Ikaruga? It's a very different game, but has a similar sort of bullet hell dynamic where you change colors to protect against a certain color of bullets. I was wondering if this was inspired in part by that game. Either way, neat submission, thanks for sharing!
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This is great. I was constantly being pleasantly surprised by the little things in the level design that were carefully thought through to give nice places to bounce back around after making a mistake, which helped a lot with the frustration of missing a key jump. The focus on finding things to flip my character around kept triggering some neuron built from WAAAY back playing the old 90s game Lemmings.
As usual for your stuff, things are polished to a T. Sounds are appropriately crunchy and on point, the character controller seemed flawless (though I did notice the enemy got stuck on a corner one time), and all the art looks very nice - the tileset turned out really well too! I especially loved the dithered backgrounds. That was a nice touch to lend some depth to the scenes, and the one level that's just a straightway was a great moment to pause and admire the backdrop.
I'll share a few memorable moments:
1. My first time finding a wall jump. I was staring at that segment wondering how in the heck I was supposed to make the jump, and then it dawned on me _just_ as I reached the wall that I could wall jump, and I nailed the segment the first time. I won't pretend to have landed all subsequent wall jumps, but it felt great to grok at the last minute what was going on and pull off the mechanic.
2. I got in a juggling war with the enemy on one of the levels my first run for about 3 minutes. I kept missing my jump and dropping the banana, then failing to time my attempt to grab the banana until a point when the enemy wasn't there. If this happened a lot it might be a bit frustrating, but as it only happened once it was just hilarious.
3. I kept getting annoyed when trying to shave off time at this point on (I think) the third level, where I really wanted to turn around earlier than the end of the ground area, and repeatedly failed to utilize the walls to do a jump and reverse:
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Then I _finally_ managed to find that there's a very thin margin jump where you can carom off the very bottom of the first wall, as long as you do a very very tiny tap so you don't bounce right back up where you came from. I didn't spend that much time optimizing the other levels, but it was really satisfying to find a (maybe?) optimal path on this level after much experimentation.
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Great work - thanks for the game!
Congrats on the great placement!
Cool! I'm a sucker for a grappling hook, so I was excited to play this. It was fun to swing around, and there were some good platforming segments. I would have liked to see a bit more momentum and speed with the grappling hook - it seemed like in most cases swinging was not productive, and instead I was meant to pull myself up with LMB. Not a problem per se, but I like swinging!
Finding a signal with the radio was a bit tough - I felt I did more random exploring rather than following the signal, but once you find a bit of an indication it worked pretty slick.
Nice submission.
This is wonderful. Thank you for sharing it!
This is really cool! I didn't realize it was going to be so fleshed out when I first clicked into it, but there's really a lot going on in this game. The tutorial is well written and explains most of the things well, though I did end up getting a bit confused when no more trains were coming later on, not realizing that traffic would pause if trains were stopped waiting somewhere indefinitely.
This gets really hard quickly, and the performance is a little choppy running in a browser for me, so I had a hard time progressing much past the point where you have four stations all crossing over each other, but it's fun to try to make it happen.
Very fun, nice work!
Very neat. I had a ton of fun seeing all of the different kinds of vessels for the first time. The trireme rolling up was especially funny to me, and the whale is great too. Tons of character. The game is a little tough at times, and a little easy at others, but it made for a fine pacing because things move relatively quickly in general. It took me longer than I'd care to admit to realize I had to click right on the ships to move them, and I lost a couple out further than I thought I had to be watching them, but in general I had a lot of fun with this.
Wow, this was very cool! I did get a bit tired of the gameplay loop about halfway through my playthrough, as it was a bit tedious to constantly be driving back, and I wasn't sure how conservative I had to be with metal, so I probably didn't place bases as often as I might have been able to. I also really would have liked to have some indicator of how far the signal poles stretch, as I made some pretty big placement mistakes early on that felt brutal given the small amount of metal I had by that point.
That aside: the aesthetic in this game is wonderful. The hard-mounted camera works super well to give a real feel of driving a fly-by-wire rover, and I absolutely love the way you nailed the feeling that you're watching a screen in-game. The little things in the periphery of the main view that remind you you're looking at a monitor with a video feed, the pan over to the map, etc. work really well. The static effects are extremely high quality too - I loved that the music fades out and is replaced by static.
Wonderful atmosphere, and a fun ending. Thanks for the game, and nice work!
Very cool. I am terrible at lights out, so probably spent more time on some of the puzzles than I would have liked, but they were small enough that I kept cruising through the game. The writing was fun and the ambience was great. I especially liked the title screen. Nice work!
Incredible.
I had a few small complaints with how fiddly it was to go back and grab a bunch of wires and try to nab the ends that are bouncing all around, as there were quite a few moments of annoyance fighting with the UI on that, but overall those quibbles were very small.
I'm a sucker for any game that has me playing around with physical controls like this, and your implementation of the patch cables was super satisfying. The levels were very well designed to introduce the new modules without holding my hand too much, and I really enjoyed how minimal the modules were. Having only a "compare" box and not an "absolute value" for example was a great choice. On that final level I really had to think hard about what I was doing, and forcing me into using the 1/2 signal to hack a solution was brilliant. I wish I'd have taken a picture of the beautiful mess of cables that was my final puzzle solution. It was delicious chaos.
Very very fun, and extremely innovative. Nice work, and thanks for the game!
This was excellent. I love games that give you lots of knobs and dials to play with, and this one had plenty of stuff going on. All the little puzzles were simple, but the time pressure did a good job making it feel like the learning was spread out a bit - each one took a couple of tries to get the hang of it quickly. I really enjoyed this!
Well, not every day you see a multiplayer submission for Ludum Dare! I'm impressed you managed to pull this together. The game itself is a bit wonky, movement animations are a little stuttery and the weapons seem wildly imbalanced (takes about 30 seconds of unloading to kill someone with the pistol or machine gun, but the shotgun one shots), but everything _worked_ and I didn't find any bugs while I was testing it out. Very cool at least as a tech demo!
Wow! This may be an Overcooked clone through and through, but it's executed incredibly well. The animations and art are all extremely polished, all the little interactions and combinations (slipping the plate under the food works, slipping the food onto the plate works, etc.) were well done, and you even got to some of the niche mechanics like restocking on supplies and throwing things in the trash. Very very impressive to do this in 72 hours from scratch. I'm a huge fan of the genre and this ticked the right boxes to be a lot of fun. I enjoyed playing through it a lot.
Oh man, I love rhythm games, and I really like how this pairs mouse input with rhythm. I'm a big fan of the general flow of these levels, and there's some nice design for the built-in songs too. I enjoyed this quite a bit, once I figured out how to actually play. I didn't realize there were instructions on the page here, so going in blind, I failed once trying to use the arrow keys in time with the cues, then failed twice trying to use WASD, before realizing I needed to hover the mouse too.
My one complaint is the timing is thrown off quite a bit by the feedback clicking sound being out of sync significantly from the music. Pressing a key in time with the beat meant the click was off, and I was never quite sure if I should be timing things so the click was on beat, or so my tap was on beat. I just tried my best to ignore the click and tap in time with the beat most of the time as that felt a lot better, but it was quite distracting.
The ability to load in custom music is very cool too! I haven't played with the ability to create levels, but it's neat that you have both of those options available.
Cool puzzle! I've not seen a game mechanic like this before, and you implemented it pretty well. The graphics and sound were very chill and cohesive, and I really loved the music, it fits great. I spent a bit too much time trying to figure out one of the blue tower puzzles because I had misunderstood the explanation and thought they had to be activated simultaneously, not just in one "emit signal" button. Once this became clear the later puzzles were significantly easier. Nice work!
Very cool. It's very short, but packed with character and mood. Punching the cards felt very satisfying. Learning I was doing it inefficiently by not stacking the cards from the comment section here...less satisfying. :upside_down:
I really enjoyed the playthrough. There's a lot of mystery, and even though there's not really a reveal or anything there, the ending was quite powerful.
Thanks for the game!
WHEW! That was a blast. It took me at least an hour to get through it all, but every puzzle was engaging in a unique way. I was very impressed by the initial puzzle mechanics and already prepared to gush about the game, but the later mechanics just continued to add interest. Inverting rows is _diabolical_ but so very fascinating to piece together. That final puzzle threw me for a loop several times, but was the most fun I had out of the whole set. I suspect every puzzle could be solved through deduction without backtracking, but for the first half of the game I was definitely doing a fair bit of guessing. I really enjoyed hitting the point where the puzzles were too challenging to guess by default and I was forced to get smarter.
I did frequently find myself wishing I had some way to mark cells as "must be lit", or rows and columns as "must be inverted/not inverted", as I ended up needing to take notes outside the game a couple of times to record that information, but this was a minor thing.
I loved that the only way to know what letter belonged in a row/column was to hear the morse code. It really helped to cement in the theme, and I found it fun as a refresher on a bit of morse too, even though learning the letter associations wasn't actually important to the puzzle at all.
The art, sound and music are all very simple, but fit quite well and none were distracting. All the interactions worked perfectly for me, and I didn't find any bugs at all. Solid entry, extremely enjoyable, and very impressive. Nice work, and thanks for the game!
Oh man, this is excellent! EXTREMELY crisp platforming and combat, lovely graphics, and a really nice difficulty - hard, but not overly punishing if you need several tries. I don't often find myself wishing a LD entry had gone on longer, since there are so many games to play and rate, but I was a bit sad when I realized I'd beaten the game. Very very fun. Great entry!
Even though there's no game finished, the art and animations you've shown off are really fun!
Ahhhh, it's so great! I'm really glad you decided to do the "Extra" submission. This is really cool, and the smoke signaling works really well. The sound effects and the animations are so cute! It was fun to challenge myself to memorize the signals before playing, and then not refer to them during play. Thanks for sharing!
Wow! Super cool. I've not seen this mechanic before, and you implemented it pitch perfect (pun slightly intended). These were some nice level designs too, and I'm impressed by how many variations you managed to implement in a short time. The graphics and sound are fantastic, especially the echolocation effect. Everything about it just works.
Top notch entry, well done!
Wow wow wow. This was just incredible. It took me a decent while to get into the swing of things and get a feeling for how all the mechanics worked, but once it started to click, it really clicked.
All of the little interactions work so well. Tuning in the radio is very confusing at first, but one you start to get the hang of it, starts to feel very natural. I'm not sure I love the overheating mechanic, but it may be that I was misunderstanding how it worked. I thought going slower and waiting a while after motions would help, but sometimes it seemed to overheat after quite a while of inactivity. Eventually I just learned to allow the radio to overheat, then quickly reset to the settings I had previously. Maybe that's not intended, but it worked well for me.
The typewriter is _extremely_ cool. It feels so immersive to go typing actual text onto the page and have things _just work_. I was entering the wrong time format for quite some time before I realized that I had the months and days reversed, which was a bit frustrating, but easily remedied once I noticed what was going wrong. I'm still not completely sure what sort of content is supposed to go in the keywords field, but it works pretty well to just note any words that seem like they _might_ be keywords, and once I stopped worrying about making the page look "pretty" and just entered all the stuff I saw that might be a keyword, things went much better for me. Sometimes the radio would be just out of tune enough that I missed a key letter in a name, which was a little annoying, but generally on the next scroll things would be clear.
One thing I really wish I could have had was the ability to scroll back through the output paper logs. I was a bit surprised when I tried to do this and couldn't, actually, just because the paper feed really _feels_ like it's scrollable. It was a minor complaint all told, as there's lots of time given for each signal to record it all.
Overall the whole package just works so well together. The music and sounds are perfect, and the whole mood of the ensemble is extremely tight. I have not gone back to replay the game with the skills I learned in the first playthrough just because of time constraints, but if I end up with some spare time another day, I'm seriously considering it, as I'm curious how/if things would be different if I got a much better report.
Extremely impressive. Thank you for sharing, and I hope you're proud of what you put together here!
Congrats on the top 15 for theme! Well deserved. =)
Fun little game. I loved all the character in the interactions you added. Switching to a space suit when going to the alien planet was an especially fun touch. Nice work!
Huh, very interesting! I've seen a lot of iterations on the roguelike deckbuilder lately, and "actually roguelike" is not something I've seen, which is wonderfully ironic. This is a fun take on the idea! In several playthroughs I was not quite able to complete the hack, though I did get close. I can see enough synergies in the cards provided that I'm sure I could make it with a few more tries, which is a great place to land on balance during a Jam.
The art and sounds are nice, simple but effective, and everything's weaved together pretty effectively all together. Fun and creative - nice work!
Very cool. The meat of the game is very polished, and the animations, sounds, and art are all really nice. I loved the theme, and enjoyed the puzzle of trying to memorize what's allowed and what's not. I ended wondering if I should reject everything, which...perhaps that's the point?
I did run across one bug where a day started and the first 4-5 pages were just blank. Didn't ruin anything, I just rejected and moved on. I haven't yet been able to successfully make it past the first day after the trial period, but it makes sense in theme to have the difficulty be quite hard if you're actually trying to let "proper" letters through.
Great entry!
@shakirovich Oh, I didn't realize the game always ended on the fifth day. Yes, I played a few times and must have gotten the bad ending each time, and just assumed it was because I was doing poorly enough my run just immediately ended. That's good to know that it's not that. =)
@shakirovich, yes unfortunately I did get the "you were fired" screen each time. I was playing a bit too quickly, probably. One thing that probably hurt my score is I would sometimes "redact" when I meant to "burn," and I don't think there's a way to highlight over a word the other way. There were also some situations where it was slightly ambiguous what I was meant to do; for example, on the first day there are flagged names, but no indication of what to do with them. Later the instructions are to report if there are multiple flagged names. Are letters with only one flagged name meant to just have the name redacted? Little things like that I'm sure stacked up a bit against me if they are treated as mistakes.
Very very cool. The concept is super unique, and I initially figured this would be more interesting from a conceptual perspective, but the execution is really tight as well! I had a lot of fun playing through the game, and the length was just about right. On my first playthrough I thought the game was too easy, but then suddenly found a critical chain of towers destroyed at an inopportune time, and watched a lot of the game crash down relatively quickly. It was cool to see the game humble me so quickly because of a small mistake.
There were a few small things I found myself consistently wishing for: either a hotkey to press to place a tower of a certain sort, or for the game to keep the tower selected after placing one. Moving the mouse down after every tower built to go select the tower button again was a bit onerous for longer chains of towers. I also often wished I could keep the view open that shows all tower connections - it was a bit difficult at times to quickly determine if there was a gap in my defenses.
These are tiny complaints though - overall this game was extremely well put together, lots of polish, and thoroughly thought out. The art is nice, the map in particular. The sounds work well. The tutorial is simple but gets the job done. Most importantly, it's quite fun!
Well, that was an experience.
I'm lowkey not this game's target generation fr, so my first reaction was big yikes. I thought I would get the ick or find it cringe, but highkey this game was pretty based. I'm a bit of an unc so I'm pretty washed and died a lot, but I took a couple dubs, not even cap. Not saying I'm cracked, but I might be entering my mid era.
Anyway, enough yapping. Just saying: you understood the assignment. You locked in, sat up straight, and you cooked until it hit different.
<*ahem*>
What I mean to say is: well done. This was fun!
Neat concept! I love a good classic roguelike. There wasn't a ton of depth to the game past the implementation of the theme, but I found the echolocation idea innovative. It was pretty easy - I finished my first run with six of the extra life items - but I enjoyed the playthrough, and the different sorts of weapons were a neat thing to play around with.
This is really cool! Very unique feel for what sorta boils down to tower defense. I love the minimalist art and the gentle little sounds. It all works really well together, and the loop of the gameplay was satisfying. It took me a bit to get used to driving the boat, and it never really felt easy per se, but I eventually got the hang of it enough to finish. I liked balancing the need for upgrades to survive with the need to save up fish to win the game. It led to some tense moments that played nicely. Great work, thanks for the game!
Very very cool. It did take me quite a while of playing around with the pieces to figure out what the first steps were, but once I got a signal into the signal analyzer I felt I had enough direction to go on at each step. I do wish a bit that the signal analyzer output would have worked as a passthrough, so I could keep routing all signals through there after the noise reducer. Just a minor complaint.
The pacing of this game was quite slow, but I really loved the immersion of needing to interact with all the bits and pieces manually, and the mystery of decoding the signals was well executed. I loved especially the weird messages with radio signals and images that didn't really do anything except give an uneasy feeling. The lo-fi aesthetic fit perfectly.
In an expanded setting I could definitely imagine having a lot of fun with a more complicated setup and a longer game, though I think a lot of things would need to be streamlined slightly, as moving all about to swap wires around was a bit onerous in the end. Having the player character move extremely quickly was nice to keep the game from plodding too slowly, but was also a bit jarring.
All told, I was really impressed by this. It's very different in a good way, and exploring some game design space that I'm really into in general. Nice work, and thanks for the game!
Very fun. The graphics are super cute and the animations of the supervisor putting strikes on your file was extremely fun. I laughed the first time I noticed the animation where they angrily just scribble all over the file because you failed. The jump in difficulty between stage two and stage three is enormous. I played probably six or seven runs and only made it past stage three twice. The cars run out of patience very quickly. This combined with how easy the first two stages are made it a bit difficult to replay very much. Still, I did play quite a bit. Wonderful art, sound and music, and the whole thing drips character. Very nice submission. Thanks for sharing!
I really enjoyed this! I've not seen a game mechanic quite like this, and while it wasn't especially complicated, it worked well for the scope of the short game, and I had fun the whole way through.