Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → killscreen
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | Soul Toll | jam | 931 | 3.00 | 3.20 | 2.87 | 2.10 | 2.56 | 2.70 | 2.72 | 2.41 |
Very engaging! The level design showed surprising depth, and the upgrade mechanic worked well for me. Graphics are cute as well! Ran into some of the same collision detection issues noted above, but it didn't detract from the experience. Well done!
ZzFx, yum! Entertaining and challenging; the difficulty progression felt spot on. Great use of effects to keep the simple graphics visually interesting.
Such fun storytelling! Zoltan is a true hero. I thought the art, animation, music, and *most especially* cat sounds were all super charming. The simplicity of the mini-games limited the challenge to figuring out which abilities mattered where. I was nonetheless delighted the whole time!
This unfun game turned out to be a beautiful piece of art. The fontography, music, and artwork were all so gorgeous to look at that I was able to tolerate the sparse mechanic. The generated questions felt like filler while I was playing, but the ending actually made me second-guess some of the choices I made along the way. Thanks for this.
Love the aesthetic! The feel of the game was nice as well; normally I dislike games where the difficulty comes from the controls, but I felt like this was well-balanced here by the stupidity of the children: It just seems true to the experience of being the Kindercatch that getting your own floating butt to turn around would be the hard part. I found myself wishing for a little more depth to the gameplay, but more in the sense of "this is fun, I want more" instead of that there was something missing.
This game was so delightful! I was very impressed by the amount of content, and the use of the game as a storytelling medium. I'll remember you Ollo!
Purrfect use of the theme! Very short game, but consequently has a high amount of replay value; *of course* I had to try it with all the different powerups!
Loved it! I could relate to the characters and the storyline. There's not much depth to the game mechanic, but that simplicity was well-justified I felt. Well done!
Very smooth platforming, and lovely art - every pixel put to good use! I'll echo comments above about the map screen (wasn't sure what I was looking at); it didn't detract from the experience in the end, but the game would have been just as good without it. Nice work!
Lovely graphics and sound! I found the gameplay to be a bit inscrutable, though; one of my robots just grabbed a sheep and held it near the truck, the other would just keep wandering off. Getting automation into a game jam is ambitious, in any case, so I'm still impressed that it works as well as it does!
Agree with the others that the wall-jumping was the standout feature here; it felt really smooth, while still being just hard enough to pull off that the execution felt satisfying. When you come back around to this game, I think having some animated visual cues to help with the timing of those jumps would reinforce that feeling. Really nice work!
Nice game! Going *double-jump*, *transform into spider*, *grab onto wall* was really satisfying. I was comparing the movement mechanics favorably to the NES Ninja Gaiden series while playing. The art and music were both lovely, and it felt nice to be playing.
The "input smoothing" for the spider worked fine for me once I figured it out, but still didn't feel like entirely natural, especially when I needed to go from one floating block to the next; it took a few tries to figure out I needed to stop holding right, then press it again to execute that maneuver. I think having the wall-to-wall maneuver triggered by a different button (maybe space? e.g. let go to grab on) would have helped there, because otherwise the input smoothing did feel useful.
One other minor point is that the hit boxes on the thorns felt just a *tad* large to me. There were several times, particularly on the last stage, where I thought I was landing a jump safely but went splat. For "thorny" sprites with a lot of transparent pixels around the edges, I think it is helpful to shave down the hit box a bit to account for the visual perception that the entity is "smaller" than the actual top-left-most/bottom-right-most pixels might suggest. (The piranha plants in SMB1 are kind of an extreme case of this.)
The game design overall was super clever, and it was clear that this mechanic could be taken far. This was a really impressive game jam entry and I'd be very interested to see it expanded into something bigger, with more souls!
Loved this one! Super cute art, adorable music (reminded me of Puzzle Bobble, in a good way), fun dialog, slick visual effects, and a clever core mechanic. My one gripe would be the slow aiming relative to the firing rate of the enemies, especially given that aiming can't be changed on ladders; at times I felt a bit too frustrated by the controls to enjoy the challenge that had been designed into the levels (mostly near the end). Very excellent work all the same, and an impressive amount of satisfying content was delivered here. Hats off to you both!
Hehe, this made me flashback to [Sigilia](https://github.com/killscreen/sigilia), a game I wrote in grad school; it also used the "draw to cast spells" mechanic. Unfortunately all I really have is a pile of Android sources now, but you might be interested in comparing the sigil-matching algorithms: I used a [delta-based similarity metric](https://github.com/killscreen/sigilia/blob/master/Sigilia/src/net/rowf/sigilia/input/gesture/DeltaSequence.java#L58).
What I loved about this entry (aside from familiarity) was the mood. The music is lovely, and the simple pulsing artwork for the enemies matched it well. The experience established by the two kept me playing.
My one critique would be that the sigil-matching is sometimes finicky. It's hard as a player to know "why" a symbol isn't recognized. Sigilia had similar problems and I never really solved them, but in hindsight I think using a classifier-based approach and thinking in terms of "most similar" instead of "similar enough" might have helped. (Haven't checked your sources yet so not sure how applicable that would be here.)
Nice work!
Cute main character! I liked the sounds as well. Gameplay didn't make sense to me until I read the instructions; maybe there could have been some visual differentiation to indicate what to seek and what to avoid? I think Scratch was an interesting platform to choose (I hadn't seen it before, so thanks for introducing me to something new!) and totally appropriate to the simplicity of the game you decided to make.
Neat game! Really liked the graphics and the classic RPG vibe. There's a good mix of abilities, and it was fun thinking on my feet about what to use when.
The "sloth" icon made me giggle! Top-notch art and sound. Cute use of the theme!
Nice artwork; really liked the spotlight effect and blurred background to establish mood! My one critique would be the combination of dark rooms, dark enemies, one hit kills, and being sent back to the beginning; on their own those are all great, but together they felt rather punishing. (My own entry deserves some similar criticism. :smile:) Still very much enjoyed the interesting mechanics of coin and chest management, and the related puzzling. Nicely done!
> I would’ve enjoyed it much more if it just restarted the current level.
@blobo Great suggestion, that would've been much better! I'd left out the idea of "lives" to avoid confusion with the "soul-collecting", but for whatever reason didn't consider doing unlimited continues. (TBH I'm happy that anybody wanted to keep playing past one life!)
I'll echo others: The cut-in-half mechanic was *super clever* and made good use of the theme. It really felt novel, and I was eager to keep playing in order to more of it being used.
The controls felt really frustrating, unfortunately. Every turn carried the risk of *the dreaded half-tile turn of doom*; by the time the levels got interesting, I had to give up because I knew there was no way I would execute that many frame-perfect turns in a row. Speaking for myself, I know I have a tendency to get used to wonky controls during development; I had some similar issues in my entry and only caught them thanks to a friend who play-tested.
That said, it wouldn't have been so frustrating if the main mechanic hadn't been so engaging! I still thought this was excellent work overall.