Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Kent Lizardo
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Grid Knights | unfinished | ||||||||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | demaker.s game | compo | 51 | 4.01 | 3.63 | 4.48 | 4.27 | 3.44 | 4.03 |
This is an incredible pico-8 game. The art style and tone of the game feels super warm to play, and the gliding animation is so cute! Great job! Only thing that needs work is some of the platforming and ladder-climbing, as it is a bit hard to adjust to, but other than that, it was really fun to play.
Amazing game. The graphics are super neat and all work well with each other. The system works really well, the gameplay is fun. Doing things in this game feels fun and satisfying! The simple 3d rendering style is incredibly cute. I love it. The UI is also super clean and works well with the overall tone of the game! Anything I would add would be some accessibility tweaks such as text readability, (the fontface is thin and the style lacks a little clarity. Maybe a drop shadow would help!)
The art style is really cute, I appreciate the enemy and player sprites! However, the art style overall is a little weird, usually with pixel art, a uniform pixel size is better, especially with the differing size of the particles. In a platformer, usually you'd want to enable restarting without refreshing the webpage ^^. Good job!
Oh wow! It took me a second but I like the audio design of the jumps. I originally thought it was part of the music, then thought you made a system for it to select notes based on the song playing, but I think I just got naturally synced up when playing the game haha. The tone of the game is such a vibe, and really relaxing, but I think the sudden death thing is a little immersion breaking. I do agree with the other comments about the difficulty, I'm just terrible at platformers, and I did not think it would be such an intense platforming experience with the limited lives. I think the easiest tweaks to make are the limited lives, and maybe death wouldn't feel so punishing if I didn't have to restart the game every time. The platforming puzzle is fine. There is a bit of clash in tone of "deliver thee unto death" when I just want Shallotte to get to work on time ^^, but you could probably turn that into a comedic and humorous tone if need be. I think you should make a choice to commit to the ethereal vibe that the music, art style, and level design give off, or do the difficult platformer where the death animation is really funny. I understand the Compo struggle, especially with a limited amount of time, so really, great job on finishing your game and publishing to the jam!
The concept is nice and the delivery "jobs" method is a good way of carrying out the theme! There are some nifty shader effects you're using like the 3d outline and the torch effect. I do think it would be better to focus on other areas of polish; however, since the collision detection of the player feels really spotty at some moments, which I think matters more since players will be focusing on delivering the packages and sorting them. (I also found out you can just walk out of hell, on accident :P) I also think another good area of polish would be the player's movement, since it doesn't really feel as snappy as it could be. It feels like you're delivering packages on ice, which I think takes away from the important part of the game loop.
I do love the package scanner feature! It adds more depth than just picking up and sorting packages. Maybe you could also add more tools like that like a "parcel repackager", or a "fragile shelf", which could add more nuance to the game loop!
Overall, good job on the game!
Fun game! I really like the simple control scheme and gameplay. But the best thing about this game is the usage of color identity and shape identity for delivering parcels to the gods! It might be unintended but the emergent accessibility feature from just the small bit of design in the art assets is sweet as hell.
Only thing I would say is to not call them "mess ups", maybe like "lives" or maybe "gods favors", but the language of using "mess ups" in your instructions makes it sound a little unpolished, and maybe unclear. With the red font, I thought I was messing up every time at first, not that I was being allowed them. Maybe you could turn that value into a fractional format?
Overall, it's a good and fun game!
The gameplay is cute, and the movement system is really unique and fun to play. The sound effects are also really funny!
This game is one of my favorites out of all the ones I reviewed! The mood is very entrancing to play, and the gameplay loop is well designed! I really love the whole orbiting the planet system and the fact that you're just a little seedling obliterating these meteors and birds. Only thing I would complain about is falling back down feels like a slog, but I do understand you're supposed to collect the suns on the way down. Great job! The music is also really really good!
The gameplay is fun. I like the stealth loop and the levels are designed well! The art style also meshes well with each other and the theme! Overall, a pretty decent game. Only thing I would change is the depth and perspective of the tiles and movement make the game feel slow to play. I think a faster paced game would make the stealth loop have a lot more tension, just by having to make decisions faster.
The art assets are really cute, but for accessibility purposes, the colors are really unkind to sensitive eyes. The gameplay and physics aspect are well-done! Especially the audio!
This is really cute! I love that you made the score a tip section! Especially with the delivery theme! I also appreciate the pixel art of the pizza slices in the top left corner. I like that you can be lazy and not deliver all of the slices. Good job!
This game is very fun. The one-button playstyle is very enjoyable. I do really like the art assets used for this game, and I think the music also makes the game feel complete. The touch of effects whenever you actually use the action are very well animated and designed. Although, one thing is the graphics don't feel very in tune with each other, and the game loop is a bit shallow. Maybe a combo meter or counter would make you have a reason to keep going!
@bad-b4dguy thank you for the advice! I was hoping the forward and back only movement wouldn't be that bad haha. It is only the first console you actually adapt into the player's modules. As you get further in the game, you unlock more forms of movement. It is a reference to how old First Person Games like Wolfenstein used to do their movements and controls. You aren't stuck with that past the first level ^^. Thank you for your review and playing my game!
@cogent-invalid YES YES! I did want different controllers to have different strengths. I really wanted their to be different playstyles like a Quake playstyle and DOOM playstyle that had their own strengths. I originally planned for there to be 5 levels and 1 more controller but with the time-span I had, I had to cut down on my original plans. Thank you for letting me know it is difficult to perceive damage sources, I'll look if I can solve that in a future build!
@karlthecool A faster swap would make the combat feel a lot more tighter, you are right. I wanted to put screen shaders for the consoles too ^^. I didn't want to use anything I didn't make though, because I wasn't sure if the Compo had really strict rules with that because shader references are usually just dumps of code :P. Thank you for playing my game!
@cinterre omg thank you!! I'm surprised someone went all the way to the Switch room!!!! Thank you for playing my game that far! There is an end screen... I just forgot to toggle it back on when I exported the project in Godot. The download(with the actual end screen) is in itch.io but I didn't want to mess with my LD post in case I messed it up. But thank you for playing!!
@zungryware DS is my favorite handheld of all time, it was originally why I wanted to make the game! I simply could not get all the consoles I wanted implemented. The death mechanic is pretty bolted-on, I just needed to put something for when the player had died but I couldn't figure out how to re-initialize the level states in the time before release.
For the turning and strafing modes, I think I have a solution in mind! I didn't want the turning and strafing to be disabled, and instead you just respawned after the core features(as a set of movement, and looking) were damaged, but with the way I had the subsystems implemented I could not figure out how to do that in time.
The bullet collision is seriously messed up, I do agree it was kind of frustrating while I was playtesting. I could not figure out for the life of me how to figure out the collision to be consistent. I think I might have to watch a couple tutorials :P
Thank you for playing and reviewing my game!
@zenbreaker you're right! The problem of getting stuck without a solution to the level is a cursed one indeed. The pg-down to damage yourself was just a band-aid. I'll work on it in the future! Thank you for playing my game anyways ^^.
@zungryware woah this is so helpful! I'm actually blocking out the full version of this game right now, and this advice is really good. Thank you!
@zefphyer Ooh! Nice catch, I didn't realize the text typing sounds would get repetitive, maybe I'll have a an accessibility setting for that in the full version. The infinite loop of dying is probably due to the lack of implementing level-resetting and hard-lock preventions. I'll see what I can do to make the controls have an easier difficulty climb. Thank you for the review!
@dishwand I appreciate that you noticed the class names thing ^^. I'm glad you had a fun experience playing my game. Honestly, I finished the levels 2 hours right before the end of the compo, so it is what it is, hopefully the full version's levels are more robust. I also was learning blockbench right as I was doing the models and tried it for the first time during the jam, so I'm glad you liked the modelling!
@ixil-miniussi Thank you for telling me about the viewport issue! I was also having trouble with that since I wanted the game to originally just take place in the portable consoles by themselves without the background. So then I adjusted the FOV of the consoles so that it would match the background, but it seems I sacrificed a lot of the visual clarity and awareness of the player. The last room should have been a faster fire rate you're right! I found in my playtesting the sword works wonders in the last room :P. I'm glad you were able to enjoy my game ^^.
@pizzasgood oh yes, I planned for there to be visual indicators on all of the consoles! Actually, I didn't consider that adding dash or HUD indicators for visual indicators as well would be important. I figured it would just be for the health of the subsystems, but I could totally do that as well. Ty!
@karlthecool @zungryware @dishwand @ixil-miniussi Sorry to ping y'all again, but I'm working on the full version of my game, and I just posted a dev log for what I made and upgraded during the several days after the Compo! Hopefully the link works here, but if it doesn't, the devlog is on the itch.io link in the actual Ludum Dare post downloads itself. I'm kind of glad at how it looks right now, and I think with the way I'm structuring the systems without the deadline, it'll be a lot less of a mess than before ^^.
(ahhh that's right, I'm still being spam filtered... the itch.io link should bring you to it though !)
https://klizardo.itch.io/demakers-game/devlog/525875/starting-work-on-full-version-alpha
This game is very fun, the physics engine is really fun to play around with, especially with how the game is designed around it. The sprites are very cute, especially with the pixel art. The level design is also well made! If I were to add anything, maybe more in-depth mechanics and entities would be interesting to see added.
The retro graphic art style is super well done! The only thing I don't like about it is the giant light blue square staring me in the face, but you work with what palettes you have :P. The platforming is really well done, I also appreciate the directional collision!! That's so neat! Maybe the only thing I would tweak is the background color if there was a kinder option available, and maybe the clarity of the lava tiles' danger zone, as they match the heights of the tiles around them. Other than that, the game is super fun to play. Great job!
Very well done! The graphics are great! And the skiing shaders worked really well! It looks great, the art style is very uniform, but I do think it's a bit difficult.
This game is super neat! The level designs and puzzle system are really well designed, and it's super innovative too! I do think a simpler art style, and a way to pan the camera around instead of just orbiting in degrees would help a lot more. The lighting feels a little drab and dark for the mood of the game and the skybox and textures also make it feel like that, but other than that great game!
I'm not sure exactly what is going on in the controls, I tried to use the arrow keys as instructed but it would not really do anything in my game. I do appreciate the art style and very innovative way you implemented the player's movement behavior and AI.
This game feels very clean and well-made! Only thing I'd have to say are the controls and game loop are pretty unforgiving for someone who isn't used to this kind of thing. It took me a while to get used to it, and even then I was still struggling. However, even with such a difficult input to player-movement "agency", it is still enjoyable and fun to play.
The art style and level design is pretty shallow and repetitive, and the physics is pretty difficult to actually get a hang of to deliver the milk bottles, but you do have a potentially good game if you adjusted the controls and AI of the enemy trucks a bit more!