FoonLudum Dare ExplorerUsers → Linear

Linear

Games

YearLDThemeGameDivisionRankOvFuInThGrAuHuMoCo
202557Depths👥LD57 - Spade Invadersextra
202250Delay the inevitable👥Horrible Night For A Curseunfinished
202148Deeper and deeper👥Plunder of Goblin's Grovejam4433.803.643.203.174.123.663.063.76
202047Stuck in a loop👥St. Exton's Nightjam3853.803.373.523.064.243.683.153.94
201945Start with nothing👥Lost Temple of the Monkey Godjam2993.703.573.102.984.154.07
201944Your life is currency👥Assault on Crown Archipelagojam2723.713.543.152.933.934.033.373.81
201843Sacrifices must be made👥Scapegoatjam784.023.613.573.834.294.383.344.11
201740The more you have, the worse it is👥SCRAMBLEDjam3473.653.342.913.064.053.912.923.63
201739Running out of Power👥Fallenjam3.002.402.402.803.603.404.00
201637One roomQuest of the Wizardjam3503.493.123.212.853.593.693.113.73100
201636Ancient TechnologyThe Summoner's Belljam
201534Two Button Controls / GrowingStar Jumperjam10732.472.332.532.202.8849
201431Entire Game on One ScreenThe Broken Seeing Glassjam4683.242.703.393.133.383.193.3967

Performance over time

overall score (left axis) percentile (right axis)

Scatterplots

Fun vs Overall

Innovation vs Overall

Theme vs Overall

Graphics vs Overall

Audio vs Overall

Humor vs Overall

Mood vs Overall

Comments by Linear

LD31 — Entire Game on One Screen

Hard Winter by Taldius 2014-12-12T05:28:00

Interesting concept - the concept of a tower defense where you're actually running around and collecting the 'towers' is definitely interesting, but I would have liked to see some mazing, maybe a wall or something around the crystal that would let you place the towers more strategically, because by the 5th wave I found it was just monsters from all four sides and no end to them.

I like how you incorporated the theme, and the game ran very smoothly and very quickly. The colors were a bit vibrant for my tastes, but I liked the blood and the ground decoration in the central room.

I found it easy to shoot enemies through the walls.

Serenity by rxi 2014-12-10T22:26:00

This is such a great start to a game! The graphics and sound are very well put together, I just wish it was finished. There's a few issues with getting stuck in various rooms with no way to reset the level, and of course, no player health.

Also, please opt out of the 'Humor' category if your game isn't supposed to be funny. It's kind of confusing how to rate your game based on humor.

Knock 'Em Trees by purplelilgirl 2014-12-10T16:32:00

Hey, heard you had trouble making trees, so I made you a little tutorial:

http://i.imgur.com/kS3tU1s.jpg

Resize by haloflooder 2014-12-12T06:14:00

Apparently when I played, resizing the game so much broke the Windows Desktop windowing system and caused a memory crash due to how much resizing, haha.

The concept was very cool - definitely a unique twist on the game, but it could have used something in the levels to spruce up the game (pick ups or something along those lines).

Now Serving by kidder 2014-12-12T03:37:00

I am not sure how the theme factors into this?

One Does Not Simply Walk Into More Doors by Wertle 2014-12-19T18:49:00

This was simple, but really enjoyable. I really had a fun time playing around, something that's hard to say about most LD games.

The Broken Seeing Glass by Linear 2014-12-09T22:31:00

@Andy: This is our first upload, and unfortunately it is rife with bugs. A list of things you probably experienced, currently on our To-Fix-And-Reupload list:

- Music on the title screen is at full volume for whatever reason after building.

- To our utmost astonishment, the bouncing pumpkin enemies DONT DIE when you cast the Woosh spell on them. They make a satisfying "pop" when you Woosh them into a wall, but only when you run the game from the editor. As soon as we build out the game, they're immortal.

- Moving platform sounds are stuck at full volume regardless of distance to player

- Shards don't seem to propagate state between levels (although all other things do?)

- We've noticed that the game is extremely dark on some peoples' screens. We may have to add a gamma correction setting. Not sure if this falls within the rules of bug fix re-uploads, but it makes the game unplayable when its too dark. Stupid mistake on our part for not testing on different brightnesses.

- We left in a debugging "Spell" =/

- Statue enemies work fine before building, but walk sideways (!) instead of towards the player when we build the game. Arrgh!

The Broken Seeing Glass by Linear 2014-12-10T15:30:00

@Catwheel: Yeah, unfortunately, there's no "Win" condition yet, and although we're going to fix a handful more bugs, I feel like adding a "Win" condition is adding functionality. In reality, we just ran out of time, so the game is unfinished =(

But hey, we tried. This was the first Ludum Dare submission for most of us =D

The Broken Seeing Glass by Linear 2014-12-10T21:33:00

Last set of fixes applied:

- Tweaked sound fall-off parameters on things. The horse breaking sounds were only audible from up close.

- Fireball explosion sound was barely audible at all, increased volume.

- Blue hearts restored either 2 or 3 hearts, and if you had less hearts to restore than a blue heart would give, you could heal multiple times before the pickup disappeared. Fixed a glitch in the script causing these strange issues.

- Fixed some hearts bobbing through the ground (raised them up).

- Fixed boots spell disappearing upon level change (although you still had the boots, the HUD just said you didn't).

- Fixed bouncing enemies seeing the player only behind them.

- Fixed bouncing enemies dying when hitting the ground instead of having to be splattered on walls.

- Fixed seeing around the spike pit into the skybox in second level.

- Fixed disabled particle effect on teleporter to next level.

- Fixed ability to see into skybox near teleporter to next level.

The Broken Seeing Glass by Linear 2014-12-10T23:11:00

@Nekith: That's a nice idea we didn't think about! You can see certain things outside the Seeing Glass--mostly fog and light coronas, but having an enemy you could only see in the peripheral vision would have been cool.

As for the room with the Boots: basically, the boots just allow you to jump higher (and jump over spike pits, as a result). To get out of the room, you have to Woosh the crate inside the room onto one of the two switches, then stand on the other switch, and the door will open, allowing you to return to the previous area.

Thanks!

Monster Buster by AsixJin 2014-12-12T03:31:00

Still can't move to the right after fighting a slime. This doesn't happen all the time, but about 30% of the time after a battle, moving right is disabled.

Catspoutine versus Evil Snowmen Army by MrMordem 2014-12-12T06:09:00

Fits the theme well, but wasn't really an interesting or innovating take on the theme. The goal kept changing, which was really annoyingly hard. The pacing of the game was a bit slow. I found it took forever to advance at all, and I don't know why you chose to use snowmen of all things as the enemies here. Game was interesting, but could use some tweaking with balance and pacing, ultimately.

I Am Technician by Murchurl 2014-12-11T01:59:00

Amazing idea! Although if this were an actual technician simulation, I'd be long fired for trying to figure out how to hold my screwdriver.

Floating Bullet by FlyingBoat 2014-12-10T05:28:00

Finally beat it in 500 seconds!

A few things:

- It doesn't run well in non-fullscreen graphics modes. Part of the level is cutoff, and I couldn't find my character. Once I upped the resolution, it made more sense.

- Picking up the key from behind (the left side) seems to spawn an invisible wall and the player gets stuck.

- Dying near bullets seems to sometimes get you stuck in an infinite dying loop

Snowman vs. Boxes by DistantRed 2014-12-10T21:55:00

Folder is missing. Please re-upload.

Can You Defeat Them? by overallcyber 2014-12-10T05:34:00

I'm not sure if I was briefed on how to use the sword... Ctrl, Enter, Space, and all the keys I tried didn't work =(

Monsters by Rulrite 2014-12-12T05:58:00

Technically while the concept itself was not that innovating, using something like this for this theme was amazing. I was a little bored during Game A, but once I played Game B, I had a blast.

Squint Maze by AlSweigart 2014-12-17T07:43:00

MY EYES

Two Steps from Darkness by Ashalah 2014-12-10T22:12:00

This is one of the most fun games I've played so far. Very well done with the way the level wraps around on itself! The only points you lost were that you didn't have sound, which affected the mood.

Rage Game--Survival by Rowan123 2014-12-10T05:41:00

I wish there was some sort of scoring. Just having a scoring system would make this loads more awesome. Also, occasionally enemies spawn so close to you that you immediately die. Not sure if that's intentional, but one time I died because an enemy just about spawned inside of me.

Dark Vaimanika by d3garcia 2014-12-10T23:35:00

Had a tough time trying not to die. The health wasn't really that useful, since the best approach was to simply ignore the turrets if you hoped to finish in time. The worst part was that sometimes touching the walls killed you, sometimes it didn't. You would usually not dying if you set the ship down gently on a wall, but sometimes you'd explode anyway. It would be nice if you just lost health when you collided with walls.

Let's Roll In Love by rameshkannan 2014-12-10T05:49:00

This... is a very strange game. I'm not sure why the energy drinks with rings around them kill me. I'm not sure why I need so many energy drinks. The recommended maximum is, like, four in one sitting O_O

Testsubmission by ashok007 2014-12-10T05:53:00

Graphics were ok, but audio was lacking. 1/5

LiliLight by Carduus 2014-12-10T17:37:00

Probably the best game I've judged so far.

LiliLight by Carduus 2014-12-12T04:50:00

If anything, I hope you guys win.

LD34 — Two Button Controls / Growing

Star Jumper by Linear 2015-12-15T14:23:00

Please read description. The link is there, but it doesn't render on the page because the URL has a '#' in it. Or something. For whatever reason, links to mega.nz just don't work on here.

Star Jumper by Linear 2016-01-04T22:58:00

Reuploaded to Google Drive. It should show a link now. Mega links still don't work for whatever reason.

ZZXXX the Gremlin by Thingo Studios 2016-01-04T22:06:00

Hey, I tried out your game, but it produced an error immediately:

"The version of this file is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher."

I am running on a 64-bit machine using Windows 7. Thanks.

Repair Runner by sirikan 2016-01-04T22:38:00

A lot of empty hallways, unfortunately. I wish they were filled with something. Anything--scenery, random objects, some nice tapestries. I felt like I was mostly just getting from place to place slowly.

Fight Till The End by DragonGino 2016-01-04T22:17:00

Was very short. But nice music!

supesuatakku by moisesjbc 2016-01-04T22:11:00

I... don't know what to make of this game. It is very strange.

The True God by MacDocBros 2016-01-04T22:23:00

There's an interesting bug where if you jump on top of an enemy at just the right angle, your character falls over sideways, and then it's reeeally hard to get him back upright.

Anyways, nice game!

Lumber Jacques Cousteau by Spiria 2016-01-04T22:46:00

I really like the mood and the sound of the game. The graphics are pretty decent too, but I am frustrated by some of the gameplay issues. First, cans and fish spawn randomly. They don't come down from the surface or spawn on the right side of the screen. They spawn somewhere closer towards the middle, making it impossible to stay in the middle of the screen for fear that a large fish will spawn. More importantly though, your size is constantly shrinking, leading to a problem where it's very likely that a fish will stop glowing green a split second before you eat it. Also, the cans and fish can spawn inside of you if you are too close to where they spawn, making you immediately pick them up, running the risk of making you too big. If these issues were addressed it would be much more enjoyable.

LD36 — Ancient Technology

The Summoner's Bell by Linear 2016-08-30T17:09:00

@steph88 -- definitely feel free to use our game for your showcase video! I'll upload it tonight on indiexpo

LD37 — One room

Eyball Room by DBRalir 2016-12-24T23:03:00

Does not run for me. Start it up and it immediately exits, no window, no logs, nothing.

(Windows 10, GTX 1080, i7-6700)

Eye in the Sky by doublesquare 2016-12-24T20:49:00

Interesting take on the theme, however, it would've been nice if the points I earned meant something or if the people didn't sometimes wander and stop on the layer inbetween the camera views.

Dwarfsplosion by fabsy 2016-12-24T23:02:00

The Lava was terrifying. I'm not sure why I would ever choose to dig instead of use the explosions themselves

Painted Red by V0odo0 2016-12-24T20:34:00

I found the graphics a bit bare without textures, even though I know that was the effect you were going for. Maybe up the ambient light and switch from gamma to linear space lighting to counteract the increased brightness?

But really enjoyable concept. I end up playing until I finally beat it =)

The Light by rbit 2016-12-18T05:01:00

I don't think I entirely understood the mechanics. What happens when you run out of sanity/light? For me it just gave me back all the light/sanity whenever I would run out. Also, I ran away from the clones but they didn't seem to attack me or drain sanity any more than just standing far away from them seemed to.

Nice job though!

flwr truss plus by wscones 2016-12-18T04:41:00

Well, you definitely win the mood category. That was the most strange thing I think I've ever played...

DarkLight by Minato4th 2016-12-24T22:09:00

I think it was really frustrating to figure out where anything was... once I got to the level with all the blue and red lights and you couldn't see past the walls, it was pretty much impossible to figure out if I was looking up or straight ahead or which way to go

The Studio by KevinTheTuna 2016-12-18T04:55:00

Very well done man. The graphics maybe could have used a bit of work, but a very pleasing game overall.

Room by benjamins 2016-12-18T05:08:00

I managed to get this to run and connected to a localhost server. But the game seems a bit unfinished. I can't see any sort of health on my character, and the default button controls are really strange! Forward Arrow to move forward, D to turn right, Q to turn left, and S to move backward. O_o

Neural Escape by Kroute 2016-12-24T21:44:00

Definitely an interesting take on the maze-game. I've never seen something like this. The game felt a bit luck-based, as it was really hard to figure out what the optimal strategy was, or where the items were even coming from.

Executioner by Fuad 2016-12-19T18:49:00

Wow. This was definitely a very innovative game. I got to about Day 10 before I finally ended my life. This game is WONDERFULLY depressing and really evokes a fantastic mood. Bravo.

Switch by valax321 2016-12-22T06:33:00

Nice work! Massive points for innovation, the concept was very unique and you guys pulled off the actual Parkour mechanic pretty well. There were a few lingering control issues, but nothing to complain much about since it rightfully takes ages to tweak motion.

Played around in your code a bit, and it's definitely cool to see someone write their own player controller script.

Overall you guys did a lot of things right but the outside ground texture is the work of a madman.

ENRUM by JimmyTheHack 2016-12-20T08:45:00

Link seems to be broken, still.

The Worlds Room by bellum128 2016-12-19T07:47:00

Great start man. Nice concept.

Lantern Warrior by BlazeCell 2016-12-19T08:02:00

Good mood, but it seems quite unfinished. I couldn't figure out much to do besides hit things. There wasn't any health or score.

Turn the Lights On! by Outbreak 2016-12-24T21:01:00

So, I wanted to give you an honest critique here.

Here's what I think you did well:

- You modeled an entire room full of furniture, etc. The scene fit together properly because you made all the stuff to make it convincing.
- The music fit the setting pretty well.

Here's what you did wrong:

- There's really only one objective, to find the lightbulb. Nothing that you find along the way seems to help you find the lightbulb, so the entire objective of the game is to search for one thing in the dark, and then you win. There's no buildup, there's no challenge and reward (with the exception of winning the entire game in one move), etc.

- Dark is a bad mechanic. It's frustrating to bump into stuff in the dark constantly. The light the player had was very faint and fell off too softly, so you could never truly look at something in full brightness without bringing it to within 2 centimeters of your face. You also didn't capitalize on the light for aesthetic purposes. The fire from the lighter didn't flicker or cast shadows. You could have switched the lighting to linear space (instead of gamma space) to give the player a very harsh circle of light that fell off very quickly, making the first several meters in front clearly visible but everything beyond that would be extremely dark. As it was I could barely see enough to orient myself in the level.. the light was very faint and diffused out far into the room, so that everything was just pastel colors with no contrast to delineate where floors ended and walls began.

- There was no crosshair. I couldn't tell what I was looking at when I was pressing E. Is it the fridge? Is it the counter? The object I was pointing it could have become outlined to indicate I was about to interact with it.

- The particle system for the flame was very unconvincing. The particles didn't have a high enough spawn rate, so that you could always see gaps between individual particles. Considering the player is forced to look at the flame the entire time they're playing, it would have made sense to focus more effort on making it look more polished. Likewise with the way the lighter appears.. the light seems to bleed through to the underside of the lighter cap, which didn't seem correct. The lighter itself was also attached to the player controller, not the camera. If it was attached to the camera, looking up and down would have appeared more natural, with the lighter always staying in the same place on the screen. As it was, looking up or down at things would always leave the lighter (and thus, the light source) hovering in the center in front of you, making it difficult to see things up high or down low.

The Library by Stending 2016-12-24T20:30:00

Definitely one of the more polished games I've seen this LD. The "hard" variants of the songs were definitely more enjoyable than the easy ones; my only complaint is that it was that the music was so orchestral that it was oftentimes hard to feel a beat or rhythm to it, which made it hard to time. The other thing, is that there is no penalty for pressing the wrongs keys, or all the keys in order to just get the notes correctly. All in all, was super fun.

Quest of the Wizard by Linear 2016-12-20T21:07:00

What were some of the bugs you experienced, out of curiosity?

Quest of the Wizard by Linear 2016-12-21T17:18:00

@zenmumbler: Excellent criticism. I think we chose to do something a bit too ambitious and it was all we could do to hold back the flood of bugs leading up to the final deadline. Quite a few things still need several hours of tweaking and fixing...

Quest of the Wizard by Linear 2016-12-27T02:00:00

Yeah we noticed the floor fall-through bug. Apparently it's actually a bug in Unity's CharacterController (and any first-person controller that uses CharacterController at its core) where if you have a lot of colliders in your scene, some of them magically stop working. Because we didn't have time to rewrite a controller of our own, we instead opted to reset you whenever you fall off the level :)

TheExperiment by ElStevo 2016-12-19T07:53:00

What a strange game...

Legacy by rojo 2016-12-24T21:59:00

Absolutely Excellent!

I beat it :)

Motel 37 by alxm 2016-12-24T20:59:00

I think a bit of audio would have been nice to help set the creepy mood. Interesting game, but it was a bit confusing to understand why I was killed by a zombie.

There was also no indication that the treasure was in one of the marked graves vs the unmarked graves

A Magical Night by holgk 2016-12-24T21:33:00

The controls in this were extremely infuriating until I was finally able to see the Use Inverted Controls option when I hit escape to leave it. Once I inverted the controls my brain clicked and I was able to go through some of the obstacles, but the game was, nonetheless, frustratingly tough.

Shush Prowler by Zemmi 2016-12-24T21:16:00

Was a bit tricky to figure out what to do, but after that, it was really quite enjoyable. The graphics are quite pleasing and work very well for the bizarre world I was shushing.

Extreme Bug Fixer by sroelandt 2016-12-24T21:57:00

I think it would've been nice if there had been obstacles in this room, or some way to avoid / hide from the bugs, but alas. Played it a few times, and got a score of about 3500 before I died :D

On Air by longshorts 2016-12-24T22:01:00

It seemed rife with bugs of all sorts. I was getting days with zero stories, and then the game would end constantly. I think with a little bit of polish and bug fixing this could be a fun little game.

Taken for Granite by nwestninja 2016-12-24T22:53:00

The idea was... strange... and definitely weird. However, I was very confused by how two maidens can have a child. I don't know. It just left me on edge the whole time.

Sir John and the Cursed Castle by ikarus 2016-12-24T22:31:00

I think I was a bit infuriated by the lack of any diagonal motion. Just controlling itself was bit frustrating. I went about 6,7 levels through before all the doors started being open... I'm not sure what was going on. The music was nice and fit the theme very well.

Lily's Adventure by resty 2016-12-24T22:44:00

I played through the whole thing and ended up beating it, but the biggest improvement you could make is presenting the player with some guidance about the control scheme. I had difficulty starting the game, since you had to press 'K' to start, and I had to pound down on the keyboard until something happened. I was expecting arrow keys or WASD for movement but it turned out movement was A and D, with K or X for jump. These are extremely strange keys for a PC game!

Overall though, it was very well made.

Roum1 by Stormer 2016-12-24T22:56:00

I'm very confused by where up is, and where down is. I had no idea how to orient myself.

Zombie Fight by burnedkirby 2016-12-24T22:58:00

I wish I had had a score, or some form of end condition. There felt like there was no goal, or progression through the levels.

Behind The Wallpaper by LeafThief 2016-12-21T02:36:00

That was absolutely incredible.

I had to try it twice as the game kept crashing at night, but I can't recommend this enough. I think some of the scenes needed some audio, but I think that the way that the musical intensity grew with the progression of the story was just incredible.

Stream of Time by Ivan Sukhanov 2016-12-22T09:53:00

Hi, it looks like the link that's up seems to be broken as I am unable to play your game.

Puzzling by monkeedude1212 2016-12-22T05:42:00

Congrats on your first shot at a 3D game. Allow me to offer some constructive criticism.

First, the good:

- The music helps the feel of the room.
- I think the overblooming creates an interesting mood.
- The puzzle idea was pretty nice, and I like how it always gives you a random one you haven't seen before.

The bad:

- The textboxes were very glitchy. I read your instructions to the letter, but I noticed that if you walk up to the word puzzle in the middle and type in an incorrect answer, you cannot get out of the textbox, even if you click out and hit enter, etc. You're just permanently stuck.
- I pressed the arrow keys while using a textbox and the game crashed. Pretty consistent/reproducible.
- The click sound was extremely loud compared to any other sound in the game.
- There was no good feedback for line-of-sight. As in, there was no crosshair, and the buttons didn't glow when I moused over them, so I always had trouble figuring out what I was actually pressing, especially with the puzzles that have several buttons closely bunched up.
- You needed more material variety in the room. Most of the room was pieced together with a basic white brick material. By far though, your biggest sin was in reusing this material on BSP/brushes of different scale. So the floor bricks are large while some interior walls use the same brick texture scaled down, and some places stretch the texture horizontally but not vertically. When you scale up materials, you magnify the details and wash them out. Try to maintain a "constant pixel size". As in, the ratio of "pixels per meter" should remain constant for all objects in your game.

Oh, This Room Again by slarrimer 2016-12-21T03:21:00

Reminds me a lot of the Lost Woods from Legend of Zelda. It was fun for a while, but it was pretty hard to actually figure out where the endings to the levels were.

I fell... by arkanos 2016-12-21T03:38:00

Nice idea, but I think the execution needs a little help. The ladders had colliders on them that would occasionally knock you off if you were walking along the edge. A lot of things had a Rigidbody attached with the same mass regardless of size, so I was surprised to be moving large barrels as easily as small objects half my size. The ladders also had rigidbodies, which caused problems... one of my ladders almost fell entirely, making the puzzle unsolvable. Above all though, it would have felt a lot better if there were some check points.

Homes under the Hammer by Tijn 2016-12-20T19:04:00

That was surprisingly delightful. Did notice a slight bug (you can click on the Buy & Renovate button multiple times accidentally, and end up losing a lot of money while the house is loading)

The Last Heretics by Captain Awesome 2016-12-22T22:31:00

Sadly, because you guys used both previous code and artwork, I have to judge a bit more harshly. It was a nice attempt, but several things which were vital to the game (and relatively easy to implement) were missing. For example, there was no way to tell how much health your character had, or how many lives you had remaining. I kept fighting off waves of enemies and there didn't appear to be any sort of win condition. There was no way to interact with anything besides enemies. A health pickup would have been great, or maybe one hard enemy in the group could drop a better sword, or maybe you could pick up his armor and take reduced damage from the little guys from that point on. There are many things that I feel could have improved the gameplay for little time/effort cost. There were also some weird glitches. Movement was a bit buggy. Sometimes after attacking I couldn't walk until I released all of the keys I was pressing. A lot of times the enemies would just stand still for no reason. I could move while dead, and sometimes I could even attack while dead. Additionally, I could move and attack during the opening cutscene. From a storytelling perspective, where did the naked people go? Where did the knights come from? Why do I always teleport back to the middle of the room and knights magically appear as soon as I killed the last set of knights? This was a source of confusion for me as a player.

Besides all of that, it has some potential. I would love to see how it looks after some extra polish.

Alter Void by fafastudio 2016-12-21T08:28:00

Once I finally got the hang of the mechanics, this was actually pretty enjoyable!

Studio Apartment Simulator by EmptyThroneTeam 2016-12-24T20:01:00

Link is broken. Could not play

Bubble Tea Cafe by urfbound 2016-12-21T03:51:00

You should consider not having the edge of the map bow out, because it's really easy to get the white ball stuck bouncing back and forth forever, and ever, and ever.

Rune Forge by Languard 2016-12-22T05:24:00

Cool idea, but ultimately I think it needs a lot of polish and an actual goal to become a viable game.

One big improvement you could easily make is to avoid using the default Unity first person controller footstep sounds. It seems like everyone is using them, and it makes everyones' games feel the same because those sound effects are overused.

Junk in the Bunk by roaringcatgames 2016-12-21T02:55:00

Was pretty hilarious, but like others, I end up getting stranded on the third floor.

One Room by Rainbow 2016-12-19T07:41:00

A clever idea, but I literally just walked forward to a bird three times and that was it?

To The Death by waterytart 2016-12-24T22:25:00

I noticed I kept gaining points after death. The zombies were easily killable with just holding shift and mashing the space bar. I also noticed that the left mouse button didn't seem to actually trigger the sword, even though the instructions said it did. The art assets were gorgeous, however, but the bugs made the game a bit frustrating. I also hit the same bug as the others where the game gets in a broken state after death.

I Lost It by nicruo 2016-12-26T19:56:00

It was pretty tough to get past some of those levels, and I think some feedback would've been nice to know that I took damage or whatever else it might've been. Interesting idea, though.

Roomckey by matiz982 2016-12-19T18:35:00

It would be nice if you could actually see which puck belongs to which side, and to see the score a bit better. I had no idea there was even a score until very far in. Some background music also would be nice to help with the mood.

Room Crafter by Thirrash 2016-12-22T06:50:00

I like where you were going with this, but there are a few things that really made the experience worse than it needed to be:

- A lot of things were misspelled, such as "Colse" instead of "Close".
- The player controls were very frustrating to use. It seemed like you wrote your own script for moving the player, and it ended up being worse than the standard Unity player controller. It ignored my mouse sensitivity and I could only rotate my camera very very slowly. It would also vibrate horribly whenever I walked into a wall. Instead of Update(), you should have moved the player in FixedUpdate() or LateUpdate().
- The menus looked very unpolished, and the description box at the top could have been hidden when I wasn't looking at anything, since otherwise it took up a big part of the screen.


I see the potential here, but it seems like this would need a lot of tweaking to become something enjoyable.

Death Dash by kepons 2016-12-24T22:15:00

I was pleasantly surprised by how smooth this felt and how the controls felt. I would offer one thing: reset all the elements in the room upon death. It's really hard to learn muscle memory if the elements are at different positions after succeeding with a hard jump. I think having the elements all reset themselves after a death would've made it a bit tighter

Detective Ludum by theSand 2016-12-22T07:03:00

Not bad for an entry made in such short time.

Things you did really well:

- A crosshair. You would be surprised by the number of people who forgot crosshairs in their 3D games.
- Good visual cues for when you're looking at something important.
- Consistent art style

Things that you didn't do well:

- I played this game in fullscreen mode. When looking at a note, I had to press 'Escape' to reveal the mouse to click on a button to submit my answer.
- I got the same note in the same place 3 times. So effectively I ended up solving one riddle once and another riddle three times in a row to win.
- The riddles were multiple choice. If they were fill-in-the-blank they would have been much more effective and challenging.
- Hard mode didn't work when I clicked on it? Maybe that's the trick. Maybe part of hard mode is figuring out how to enter hard mode...

Schrödinger: Story of a Ludum Dare failure by kardfogu 2016-12-24T20:15:00

Honestly, I can't say I enjoyed it. I feel like there's potential for games that make fun of themselves to be fun, but this just screams "I made this in two hours". You had 48 hours man... you could do some amazing stuff in RPG Maker in 48 hours.

DOOR. by jaytechmedia 2016-12-23T01:50:00

Needs a victory condition, and score :)

Frog Test by groverburger 2016-12-24T21:49:00

Took me a while to get it working with Love, as @bellatrion suggested. I think you need to tweak some of the movement mechanics in order for it to feel... smoother.

Bank Escape by Corniflex 2016-12-24T20:36:00

I'm a bit confused... I could just walk through the walls, and the guards didn't ever chase me...

Pinch by synthetic-entropy 2016-12-24T22:40:00

That was very, very innovative. I really liked the fundamental premise. Unfortunately, after about 5 different attempts of getting myself in unsolvable positions, I gave up. That said, it was still wonderful.

Some music would've been nice, as well as some tweaks to the Player's direction as sometimes I couldn't throw the orbs in the right direction

Learning by The Nintendo Fanboy 2016-12-24T21:53:00

Tried really hard to get the game working, but nothing I did seemed to work.

Sleep by Aidan Markham 2016-12-22T22:46:00

Not exactly a game, but I still enjoyed it all the same! Nice concept!

Zombie Lockout by wviper3 2016-12-24T20:01:00

Link is broken =/

Last Stand by UncleGubbsy 2016-12-24T21:08:00

I played it a few times, but I had the following feedback:
- The music drove me insane
- It is almost impossible to make sense of where the hitbox is on the sword. I just kind of mashed E until they died.
- Sometimes the hearts would spawn at unreachable high positions that I could not even jump to.
- There is no way to heal the king

Saving Christmas by TCD 2016-12-28T06:55:00

I got to about 522 on my best game. It was actually surprisingly more fun than I was actually expecting. The addition of the powerups also was a nice touch.

Goocer by stuffed 2016-12-24T20:43:00

Sorry mate, but your link seems to be broken.

The Button by mjomble 2016-12-23T02:06:00

I gave you almost perfect scores. This is pretty much the best Ludum Dare game I've played, across six different Ludum Dare competitions. Very polished, bug-free. The artist knew what they were doing, very consistent art style with a lot of attention to detail.

My only lament is that there isn't a fancier "you lose" cutscene... maybe an explosion or something other than text.

Took off one star for audio, because it would have been better with some sort of background music, especially the further you progressed in survival mode. Other than that, absolutely perfect!

Error: 4004 by MissVioletVi 2016-12-24T21:24:00

Man, the music honestly took away from the experience. If the volume of the music was lower, it would have been better. As it stood, it was unbearably loud!

LD39 — Running out of Power

Lights Out by MikomiKisomi 2017-08-04T05:14:51Z

Cute little story. My only lament is I couldn't figure out what the turning on/off lights mechanic was for. I could still see everything in the dark, and nothing in the game forced me to turn them on, so I just left them off in all the rooms.

LD40 — The more you have, the worse it is

SCRAMBLED by aurel 2017-12-28T00:30:19Z

@themonsterfromthedeep Thanks for your detailed response! I find all of your criticisms entirely reasonable. I admit we've had to do numerous bugfixes after the deadline to get it to the point it is now (if I remember correctly LD rules allow post-deadline bugfixes). The level, the birds, the eggs, everything was already in place at the deadline but it was all so buggy and badly connected that it was basically unplayable. Alastair used Lorelle's jump sounds. The spear didn't even work correctly. The player started with jump boots for some reason.

That being said, the things we didn't fix are the balancing issues. Birds are just altogether too annoying. The spawners for them are hidden in the trees, which we thought would be clever. But instead, it makes the birds seem to come out of nowhere and swoop down. The bird sounds are too quiet to hear them coming, and making matters worse is the fact that they sometimes fly through walls by accident. Bucket knights had similar problems. They have a knack for pushing the player through the level and although they're supposed to deal 2 hearts of damage, they usually just kill the player instantly for some reason.

This is probably our worst-looking texturing/lighting. Ambient light accounts for most of the lighting, which makes all of the textures look like poop. The bloom doesn't pickup anything because there's no point lights anywhere, and we decided to save on time by not making normal or specular maps for everything (to avoid the situation we had last time with our LD39 entry 'Fallen' where we had impressive art but shallow gameplay).

We always choose something ambitious to do and pay for it at the end :)

If you're interested we're going to post a timelapse video sometime soon.

SCRAMBLED by aurel 2017-12-28T03:24:28Z

@alexrose Funny you should mention Morrowind. I remembered the issue with Morrowind rendering their weapon to be always in front of the frame, and it looked weird when you approached walls (the weapon appeared to shrink because it stayed the same size as the wall grew bigger). So I decided to shove the weapon on the same camera as the rest of it, but then it clipped through walls. I then went back and tried out other games like Overwatch and Skyrim to see how they did it, and it seems like it *should* be in front of everything else, *but with a low field of view* to prevent the weird appearance when you're up against a wall. Funny how you don't notice these things as a gamer until you have to do it yourself.

Team or Greed? by Poller 2017-12-28T17:04:51Z

I seem to encounter a crash every time I reach the top of the level =(

Maze Crawler by Hilvon 2017-12-27T20:42:41Z

New Text

Pirate's Escape by BobbyTables 2017-12-28T00:56:50Z

Actually very enjoyable! I gave you straight 5's in everything except mood where I'm giving you a 4. I think if you really nailed the look of the water it would have sealed the deal. Maybe even some bobbing up and down of the ships.

Torcher by RiverPirate 2017-12-27T19:34:35Z

It would have been nice to get a controls listing, even in the description for the game. I didn't know that you could even attack for a long time. Also, the game is altogether too dark, even on the brightest lantern setting :(

LD43 — Sacrifices must be made

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-04T18:10:43Z

All issues are fixed! Sorry about the lever problem, we've got a working build up now

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-10T19:40:46Z

@skosnowich funny you should mention Disney. The person who did our sound/music has a girlfriend who sings professionally at Disneyland. We were fortunate that she wanted to help out with the intro :D

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-12T05:57:30Z

@bificommander yeah, there's a lot of issues with the LD version. The post-LD version fixes a lot of that. Originally, the two pressure plate puzzle had a requirement where both pressure plates had to be held down to keep the door open, and the carrots on the trees didn't grow back due to a bug in our code. So you could get horribly stuck very early on. We ran out of time pretty hard so the level was basically untested =/

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-16T18:08:06Z

@simanis yeah that's fair. The falling boulders were initially supposed to be areas where we loaded a different scene. But level loading turned into a nightmare, so instead of removing the falling boulder effect, we said "nah, let's keep it, it looks cool". Originally we weren't planning to do keys. Keys and doors were actually introduced at the last second, and we didn't really account for the fact that the boulders (or even the vertical drops, for that matter) would leave you unable to go back to retrieve a previous key.

That's actually why in the post-LD version we've added a lot of extra keys. It was a band-aid fix but it seemed to work. We also noticed that a lot of the streamers were having issues with the pressure-plate puzzles in the beginning. Funny thing is, we're all used to playing first person games like Overwatch and Unreal Tournament, so when we were playtesting, the puzzles seemed easy. But when others played them, they found it difficult to time the dropping of the goat to keep two pressure-plates weighed down at the same time, etc.

And yeah that's a good point about the dive. I guess we forgot to include a mention of the dive controls because it wasn't actually a game mechanic. It was just an 'accident' that you could jump out of the water and re-enter the water, causing you to dive for a moment. And then I decided to use that feature to hide a key underwater but didn't tell the person making the intro screens... yeah, there was just a lot of chaos in the last few hours

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-17T06:56:29Z

@jeremy-ryan Most of the base textures came from textures.com, although everything was recombined with a lot of perlin noise maps and combined into materials (i.e., most materials used multiple diffuse maps combined together in some way, not just a single texture straight from textures.com). The goat was handpainted by Angie. All 3D models were made during the 72 hour jam. Goat was rigged and animated during the jam as well. Basically everything except for the base textures was authored during jam.

For prior jams we used to start with me driving around taking pictures of things and processing them into textures in Photoshop, but the trouble is that Ludum Dare starts at 9pm EST when it's dark out, so we have to wait a full 12 hours before we can start on artwork, and that always put us way behind. So this time we decided to create composite materials from 3rd-party base textures. We figure it's transformative enough to be within the rules.

As for tools though, we've greatly accelerated our development by using level-building tools we worked on ahead of time, in addition to bits of code we reused such as the player controller, a system for managing game and camera state, etc. We have custom plugins that integrate with Modo (the 3D modeling application we use) that allow it to load materials from Unity if their names start with an arrow such as "->Grass1" and a custom AssetPostProcessor that automatically links the material when the FBX is imported, just so we don't have to relink materials inside of Unity. Basically we have a whole suite of things that speed up everything we do to maximize on time.

By the time the jam starts we usually have a ton of base code ready to go for things like a first-person controller, a skeleton Unity project properly configured with a git repository, a Trello board for task tracking, etc. In fact, for the final round of theme selection, we actually create a shared Word document detailing what kind of game we'd make if any of the final 10 candidate themes was chosen, so that when the theme is announced we know exactly what we're making instead of sitting around brainstorming.

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-18T15:39:19Z

@derek-volker hmm... yeah that's probably a bug. There are two known ways to get the goat to the bridge:

Crank the elevator-with-goat up to the top of the bridge, then stand on the bridge, crouch, and grab the goat from the lift while standing on the bridge.

Or, walk past the gate that requires 4 keys, and there's a path on your left that loops back down to the bridge room, with a pressure plate that opens the bottom portcullis. Afterwards, you can just grab the goat and walk back the way you came. This only works in the post-LD version though, I believe, as we changed how the portcullis works there to make it easier to get the goat where you need.

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-19T21:27:13Z

@andrazg For sure dude. It's a never-ending battle of "what do I have time to do?" each Ludum Dare :)

Scapegoat by aurel 2018-12-19T21:27:45Z

@elysiagriffin Elysia, thanks for playing our game!

Cult Under Construction by Neon 2018-12-23T02:52:37Z

You know, it's incomplete, but it definitely has promise. Like, if you continued on and make a Post-LD version, I wouldn't mind playing it!

Catapoultry by Eric777 2018-12-31T17:54:13Z

Always a pleasure to see what the chicken-leaning teams come up with.

The game is a bit on the safe side in terms of a jam entry, but that works in its favor in terms of polish. I managed to get 12 chickens in before the game restarted.

Spirit Dungeon by Tarcisiotm 2018-12-31T19:02:03Z

There have been several games based around this concept, but what I like about yours is that you executed it a bit better. Most entries based around taking away player abilities make the mistake of never teaching the player about their abilities, so when you get to the checkpoint and the person says "I will now remove your ability to doublejump", you go "wait, I could doublejump!?"

But here, you're removing things like vision and light, so it's immediately obvious what has changed. That being said, I loathed the spikes with a passion. The trouble with the spike puzzles is that they got very repetitive and later on you had to stop in exactly the right spot in between two spike tiles in the dark. It was a challenge based on your ability to adapt to the player character's movement speed and acceleration, not one in which prior skill or problem-solving capabilities gave the player any advantage.

Tribu 43 by FiloGC 2018-12-31T18:28:03Z

Excellent entry.

Petman. Petman has seen some shit. As a level 17 ranged soldier, he has seen virtually all of his friends die in battle in front of him. But, with 1% of his health left and a badly bruised tank whose name he does not recall (best not to get attached), he limped out of the swamp, victorious.

Be Near My Little Ones by Gumboot 2018-12-11T00:09:47Z

Your graphics are top-notch and there's a very good atmosphere. Unfortunately I had a lot of gameplay issues.

The biggest issue I feel is that it's very difficult to employ stealth. The camera locks you into a nearly top-down view where you can't see very far, and to add to that, it's dark. The enemies are completely silent, so you really can't see or hear them until it's practically too late. I died twice because an enemy that somehow saw me from off-screen ran at me at ten meters per second. There was no warning despite me panning the camera constantly looking for enemies. The levels are so sparse that you have to sprint anywhere, which affords you little use of the sneak button. Basically, I found sneak to be the button you used only if you happened to run into an enemy that somehow didn't see you first. If you sneak around everywhere all the time, you end up wasting a lot of time as the level is very vast, and you give the patrolling enemies even more time to catch you out in the open.

I couldn't find a use for the rocks. I threw them near enemies and at enemies. Perhaps I should have thrown them at bushes to make distant noises? A tutorial level or screen would have helped explain their rightful use.

I really liked the different girls at the campfire being different lives (I think that's what was happening?). There was another game that did that on Steam called "The Path" based on Little Red Riding Hood, and your game reminded me heavily of that.

In all though, besides the gameplay issues, I found the graphics and animations very well-made and with a few control/gameplay tweaks it's a solid game. Great job man!

The Village Sacrifice by Bizbud 2018-12-10T22:11:21Z

Pretty decent game but it's rough around the edges. The UI is a bit simple, there's no menu, and I would have really loved more than 3 levels. Most of all though, for those of us who want to play it sneaky-beaky, there's no audio besides music. There should be grunts or footsteps the golem makes, or the camera should shake more and more as he approaches.

Goat Life by redream 2018-12-23T03:05:24Z

Catacombs were pretty cool, but I ran out of things to do pretty fast, and Q didn't seem to work for sacrificing additional goats once I resurfaced.

Lonely Wanderer by Andreadbx 2018-12-06T17:30:12Z

Honestly, it's a great concept, but the implementation was a bit of a miss for me. The skull drops the second that it touches anything, and if it starts rolling, it's impossible to pick up until the rolling stops. Would have been better if you just parented the skull to the Main Camera while it was held (sure it could protrude through walls that way, but honestly, that would have been less frustrating gameplay-wise). The double-jump didn't always go off, so sometimes I fell short of where I wanted to jump. There was almost no air-control, so once you jumped, you couldn't change direction in the air (which would be fine in any other game except one with jumping puzzles). I also didn't realize that the lava that you drop the skulls in mattered on my first run, and got myself stuck when I sacrificed the first two skulls in the same lava pit, although that's just me being dumb so it's not a huge issue.

The graphics and mood were spot on though, and the text really helped to sell the atmosphere. One stylistic suggestion I had: if you're going to use shadow mapping in a game like this, you should consider making your point lights move around a little bit (might as well make your shadows dynamic if you're using real-time shadows). Having all the torches flicker and sway would have made things real eerie.

Abbey Massacre by Sempiternal 2018-12-06T17:11:08Z

Great game, but a bit hard, since someone who is off-screen can see you being up to no good. I think it would make more sense if being spotted wasn't an instant game-over. Instead, you could enter another phase of the game where police enter the building and start looking for you. That would give you more opportunity to continue sneaking around (albeit with more enemies to dodge).

Wizard Malikens spell failed by rohezal 2018-12-10T23:19:30Z

So I sat down and played this for 30 minutes and couldn't figure out any of the puzzles. I found the panties and gave them to the fox. I dropped them in front of the fox, I talked to the fox while wearing them, but nothing came of it. The rabbit was hopping between the house and the garden, so I searched the entire garden for a key, but found nothing. I climbed on roofs to look for chimney entrances. I tried every door and every animal, but just couldn't find a way to progress forward.

For future, I would advise against using hiding as a game mechanic. It's very tricky to balance scavenger hunt games, because as the maker, you know where everything is, but as a player who has never seen the game, it may be infinitely more difficult to find the item. We ran into this problem during another LD entry ourselves, where we had keys and locked doors. Lots of strange things came out in play-testing. For instance, if you have a level with two locked doors and two hidden keys, a player may find one key, and instead of assuming the existence of a second hidden key in the same area for the other door, the think that they have to make a choice between one of the two doors. Then they get to the end of that area, and they're totally confused where to go, so they restart, find the key again, and choose the other door. It takes a long time for them to realize that both doors need to be opened and that they just haven't found the second key.

A better approach is to place 'hidden' items in easy-to-find places that are out of reach, like a key that's hanging from a chain on a ledge somewhere high up. That allows the player to realize that the key exists and that it's an important item. In your game I'm still not sure if I was supposed to be looking for keys, or if I needed to turn the animals back into humans and then they'd open the doors to their houses themselves, or if I was supposed to find a clever way to break in through the roof, etc., because I never saw so much as a single key or witnessed an animal transforming back into a human. So I didn't know which approach I was even supposed to be taking to get into one of the houses.

Point & Sin - Ludum Dare 43 edition by Simanis 2018-12-15T18:19:58Z

I think the art was excellent, but the level design and gameplay needed a bit of work. I think allowing arrow keys or WASD for movement would have gone a long way towards making the combat more manageable. Your fireballs didn't travel very far, so you had to get up close, but when you're fighting up close, moving with the mouse is very tricky.

Additionally, the level design suffers from an issue where you can't really see a clear delineation between walls and floors. You could in some spots, like on the ladder over lava or while on a bridge, but there were a few times where I got stuck because it *looked* like there was rubble in my way, but I could in fact walk over it.

In all though, I definitely got the Diablo 1 feel from it. I think that with a bit more work you could make an awesome post-LD version that would be a lot of fun.

Ritual of the Seeds by haharo 2018-12-31T17:45:50Z

I actually could not figure out how to play. Neither the arrow keys nor WASD appeared to move my character. I didn't know what on the screen was *my* character and what was the horde. I only ever saw two characters on screen and could move neither. They both seemed to move on their own until eventually a pop-up came on-screen saying I survived 0 waves. Then it takes me to the title screen where I can restart, and upon restarting, it immediately says I survived 0 waves and restarts again.

There are no written instructions or an intro of any sort either in-game or on this entry's post. Without that, I'm afraid I have no idea how to rate this entry.

Altar Dodge (best experienced in VR) by special_bonus 2018-12-28T00:26:44Z

In your download link, you've posted the 633 KB executable file... but not the much larger data folder that actually contains all of the game data like the models, textures, scripts, etc. Your entry is actually unplayable. It's a shame because I wanted to try it, and now it seems you won't be able to get the required number of ratings to proceed to scoring =/

Fight For Your Light by Raivk 2018-12-06T16:59:39Z

Game is very nice looking and the music is good, but the mouse sensitivity, combined with the really, really slow fire rate, made it very frustrating to play-through. There's no affordable upgrades before the first wave, and by the end of the first wave, I only had enough light to spend repairing the generator that went down because I couldn't shoot the enemies fast enough. So yeah it definitely needs so balance, but there's potential there. It looks like with a bit of tweaking it could be something great.

Skeleton Key by Zigg 2018-12-06T18:26:30Z

The graphics were pretty good, but the character controls could use some work. Whenever I would pick locks or operate levers, my character would slide away from the object as if on ice. I like the puzzle gameplay, but it was a bit on the easy side.

Drained by ThorPalsson 2018-12-15T21:27:00Z

I think this is an overall excellent entry, and it is because it's better than most that I wanted to critique some finer game design points:

I think that the idea of spending blood to open doors works on paper, but in practice, when presented with two or more opaque doors, there's no real choice to be made, because there's no information to make an informed decision with. You either choose one or another. So if your choice actually matters (i.e., it's important to open one and not the other), it becomes frustrating because the player is punished with a removal of blood over a choice that can only be made via trial and error.

To compensate for this, you guys added lots of blood packs so that you could never really run out of blood. However, that also invalidates the game mechanic itself, since at that point, you're not really sacrificing anything of value if you can just refill blood from a million different places, so blood just becomes a resource you have to tediously manage, much like stamina. If you use too much (and you have to), you are obliged to sit around refilling it from a blood pack for a while.

So you've designed yourself into a hole with the blood mechanic because if you place too little, it's frustrating and you get stuck, and if you place too much, it's too easy, with virtually no middle ground.

I would recommend solving this by making bloodpacks scarce while also making sure that there's intelligent ways to manage blood. That can be as simple as making the doors have grates that you can peek through. That way, you can make an informed decision as to whether or not you want to open that door at all. For instance, maybe the door leads to a hallway full of other doors, but you see a bloodpack on the wall, so it's a low-risk door. Or maybe you see no bloodpack, but there's a pentagram shrine, so you'll come back to that once you're sure you have enough blood to spare.

Maybe blood could even come back / regenerate, but it happens slowly. So if you ever really mess up and run completely out of blood packs, you can sit around and wait for it to come back--except you can't sit in one spot because the patrolling enemies will eventually get you. In that way, blood could be like fuel. With it, you can move quickly, open any door you please, and feel rewarded for your wits and budgeting. Without it, you're a coward, hiding in closets and hoping the enemies don't clobber you while you're trying to regain enough blood to open that door that you should have opened earlier.

An additional way to make blood scarce without making it completely frustrating is to put some bloodpacks in easy-to-reach places, while placing others in rooms full of enemies or other difficult challenges. That way, it's not just "oops, that was the last bloodpack", but rather "okay, this is the last bloodpack, except for that stash in the basement I read about.... I don't want to go down there, but I don't have any other choice." This way, you can punish the player gradually for mis-managing blood, with each punishment becoming more severe than the last, by sending him into riskier and riskier areas to get the remaining blood.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on the big dudes. They seem unkillable, which is fine, but there appears to be no way to break the chase and hide from them, and stunning them with blood doesn't last very long. I think if the blood stunned them for longer, like 1-2 seconds, and they stopped chasing and started searching for the player once line of sight has been broken, it would be much better. As it was, I was killed because I couldn't loop the evil dude around the hallways long enough to crank the portcullis open, and quickly gave up on trying to stun him with blood since throwing blood at him slowed both of us down, not allowing me to gain any real distance over him.

Anyway all that aside, this is a great entry! I think overall it's got some promise if you wanted to do a post-LD version.

Maze by sillyman987 2018-12-10T21:54:01Z

So, since this your first LD, thought I'd offer some suggestions. This may be a lot of criticism, but don't let it scare you away from doing another LD, I just mean to help so your next game will be even better.

If there was any one thing I'd do differently, it's that I would use a different, less obscure game engine next time. Engines such as Game Maker, RPG Maker, Unity, and Unreal are a bit trickier to learn, but they also have a much larger online community of people willing to answer questions and help out. The [r/unity3d](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/) subreddit is a huge community, so despite larger engines like Unity being trickier to learn, it's also easier to find answers to things when you get stuck.

Additionally, you'll want to make sure you leave extra time for testing and packaging your game. Firefox does not appear to run Maze at all (you just get a white screen), and Internet Explorer runs it, but without music. A few test builds while you're making your game go a long way to making sure your game is playable once it's time to release. When you're finished with the game, you're only 75% of the way done. The other 25% is testing, getting your friends to test it, fixing bugs, etc.

Many of the games people do during LD are similar enough to other games, or have similar game mechanics with some creative deviations. Your game is no exception, and that's not a bad thing. However, for each game mechanic that you borrow from another game, you'll want to find your favorite implementation of that mechanic in an existing game, and try to recreate it. Take, for instance, your character's movement. He seems to have an acceleration and deceleration when you move him. That causes him to slide all over the place and makes it difficult to avoid the lava. There are plenty of GameBoy games where you navigate pits and lava with an overhead 2D character (the 2D Zelda games come to mind). I would have mimicked their controls, which are a lot tighter and leave no room for sliding. In turn, that would have allowed you to make more complex challenges with the lava, since you're no longer forced to place lava so sparsely to account for the character sliding.

Also, pay special attention to your UI. Starting with level 2, the "Level 2" text at the top stays at the top and scrolls off-screen when you move. Additionally, the black text is very tiny and difficult to read with such a busy background. Surrounding the text with a white bubble would have gone a long way towards improving the quality of the UI.

As for the stuff like level design, graphics, and animation, it would be unfair to critique as this is your first game, but again I highly recommend picking an existing game's art style and doing your best to mimic that. Usually before a Ludum Dare me and my team sit down and make a design document detailing the style we're going for and the art assets that are going to be needed to get the bare minimum of level functionality working. The theme doesn't get announced until Ludum Dare starts, but you can still pick a style and general concept of a game ahead of time.

Hope this helps man and welcome to Ludum Dare. Congrats on your first entry!

Wastage by andrejsch 2018-12-10T23:39:48Z

I got stuck towards the end. I was out of ingredients and nobody needed anything (there were no orders), and the game wouldn't end. But it was an interesting experience!

Baby Grenade by publicidadeba 2018-12-06T18:16:00Z

This is the worst game that I have ever enjoyed so much. I don't even know how to rate this...

Also, it's damn hard to survive past 30 seconds.

Great job guys!

LD44 — Your life is currency

Assault on Crown Archipelago by aurel 2019-05-07T20:03:41Z

@360 everything that was required to be made in the 3 days was made in 3 days (all artwork). The only thing that may have been a grey area here is we used a water shader (which we tweaked). It was more or less procedurally generating the look of the water, so we sort of considered it code. We didn't write the shader, but we did adjust a few things on the resulting material. Is there something specific that caught your attention? All of the 3D models, game mechanics, and artwork in general was made during the competition time. We do carry over non-art elements in an "LD kit" we keep around. That's things like the player controller, the interaction system that allows the player to press 'E' on things. We have a generic main menu and settings screen we reuse, etc. We also have a very nice level editor that we use to speed up the level-making process. But yeah, all of the art and game-specific code is made in the 3 days. Base code, bug fix builds, and ports are done outside of that time (as per the rules).

We are going to release a timelapse pretty soon. We didn't capture all 3 days because we occasionally forgot to turn the timelapse capture on sometimes, but we'll have most of the process covered so you can see the proof :)

Chimera by Omiya Games 2019-05-07T03:51:45Z

It wasn't much for gameplay and the player controller was very rough and too fast/agile, but it was weirdly enjoyable collecting so many arms :D

And your menus were so nice I could cry. Like seriously, #menugoals. There were even multiple languages, and a How To Play section. You guys definitely got the delivery down.

Noir Vampire by Dioinecail 2019-05-06T23:10:25Z

Very ambitious project. I think honestly the execution is holding it back, but it was a very good attempt and I loved the mood. The noir look was just right, and the rain added a lot to the experience. The random props and the "CHICAGO" lights set the scene perfectly.

Some quick little suggestions:

1. Swords seem to do damage even when enemies are dead. When you animate, be sure to use Unity's "events" to trigger things happening at a specific point in time. So, trigger an enabling of the hitbox on the sword during the start of the swing animation, and disable it at the end.

2. The camera angle was a bit rough. It was straight overhead, which made it hard to tell which way characters were facing or even see the characters beyond their headwear (I feel like I am playing a hat wielding a sword)

3. The voice-overs could be a bit more polished. The pitch-bend was too much and made them seem... demonic? It didn't seem to match the character's look.

4. I noticed that you guys don't use avatar masking for your main character. He's either walking or attacking in the animations, even though he can move while attacking. With avatar masking and a second animation layer in Mecanim, you could make his upper body attack while his lower body continues to play the walk animation.

5. I wish the "dash" mechanic (pressing space to move faster) was mentioned somewhere. And I wish it had a distinct animation :grin:

That's all. Great game man, congrats!

LifeCoin by Dmitry Nichiporchik 2019-05-07T04:58:53Z

Ya'll done with this yet? I'd like to pre-order.

LD45 — Start with nothing

Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-19T19:47:30Z

@adhesion Yeah, the rolling ball puzzle may have been a bit much. The proper solution was to turn the ramp at the bottom until it's pointing backwards (so the balls have to roll back up-hill as they shoot out). That slows them down enough so they gracefully fall down onto the horizontal 'ramp' below.

Glad you enjoyed the atmosphere, it was fun to work on :D

Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-20T04:37:49Z

Yeah, we tried the WebGL version. We ran into a slew of problems in the WebGL build that we tried desperately for a week after the jam to fix. We finally got a fix up but there were side-effects. We use a 3rd party sound engine called FMOD, and the latest version seems to be not working properly with WebGL. Also our volumetric lighting plugin (Aura) doesn't work in WebGL and it didn't look as nice as the Windows build. For the moment it doesn't meet our quality standards and we decided to take it down :(

Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-22T13:32:06Z

@cydouzo Yeah I agree. We ran out of time, so instead of fixing it we figured "eh, the player can get there one of two ways, so even if you get the ball horribly stuck you can always swim down the star-shaped pool once you get the diving ability"

Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-27T04:58:38Z

@scsc This is really good feedback. To answer some of these:

1. So honestly, the crouching tunnel thing is... well, a bug, or put another way, we ran out of time and thought we fixed it but each person thought someone else fixed it :smile: The pot pieces do get smaller and disappear when you're not looking at them, but that is not well conveyed to the player.

2. Very valid points. An intro area that teaches the E key would have been wonderful.

3. Thanks for pointing this out. Normally we reuse our menus from a previous game, so we pre-test them, but this time we made a new one, and failed to test it properly.

4. The old menus we used to use had a mouse sensitivity option, but we... forgot it this time :/

5. So, this particular issue is... a big one. Unity ships with an occlusion culling that works in theory (and we did use it), but each shadow-casting light seems to slow down the scene, culled or not culled. I think this is because Unity re-renders the entire scene from the point of view of the light (6 times for a point light!) to generate the shadow maps, and due to how big light radii are for a decent-sized lantern, they rarely get culled out. There's some nice optimizations we could do, such as bake our lights with a shadowmask setting, so that it fades between baked light in the distance and dynamic shadowmapping up close. Honestly, we just didn't want to deal with baking lightmaps in an LD entry, since getting those parameters dialed in takes time, and baking lightmaps each time you update the level also takes time. It was easier to just write a nice level transition system and split the level into pieces. The splitting of the level also made it easier for different people to work simultaneously on their own part of the level without having to share a scene file and worry about scene file merges. Hopefully the loading areas didn't affect the experience too negatively. We tried to make it as seamless as we could, but you know, LD only has three days :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for all your feedback, there's some great takeaways here! Good luck on your score!

Open Ocean by joe40001 2019-10-19T20:06:16Z

Lots of barrels and palettes. Tried roping them together, but even with the rope tool, you couldn't get much of anything going. Everything just sort of bobs up and down vertically no matter what you try to do. Wish there was more here.

GitGud by Ranner198 2019-10-19T21:22:00Z

So, I went through it all and beat the game, but it was kinda frustrating. As a fellow software engineer, I found the commands I'm used to not working the way they are supposed to, and my intuition of how things "should be" actually got in the way of beating the game.

For example:

"rm -rf" needs a path, but here it's just "rm -rf" by itself. Even still, when I logged into Dr. Coleman's computer, I found no files. "No problem" I thought, "I'm probably just in the home folder. Let me navigate to root and see what's here". "cd /" doesn't work. "pwd" doesn't work. Moreover, when I run "apt-list" from all the other computers, they all have the same things installed that I do. It seems almost like nothing changed, except that it says I'm connected to another computer and the other computer never has any files. Aside from that, all of the things I've installed on my computer still show up (despite it actually being a different machine).

Additionally, "ssh 192.168.1.1 22" seems to throw a bug, and there's a missing step for nmap ("nmap 192.168.1.1" is not mentioned anywhere in the list of steps, and given how it was your own special version of nmap, it took a while to figure out that I could do that. There was no "nmap --help" or "man nmap".)

The "public ip" shown in ifconfig confused the heck out of me. Is it the default gateway? Why does nmap show "https://mit.edu", when "https" is a protocol and "mit.edu" is a DNS name? I haven't used nmap since college but I was certain it only showed IPs.

Anyways it's a cool concept but I would have loved it better if you just bundled a premade bash simulator from some open-source library online and wired it up to your game.

Celia's Lightmare by Aj Jones 2019-10-19T19:06:23Z

You guys really nailed the mood here. Great job!

Wanted to leave some feedback, as it looks like this could make a great post-LD game. Not going to leave any feedback about the graphics/art style, since that was pretty solid, but as for gameplay:

- It would be nice to see and hear your health. By "hear" I mean, whenever you take damage, to hear different sounds based on the amount taken or how close you are to dying. (For reference, Overwatch does this sort of thing.) In a fast-paced game, it's nice to be able to hear how close you are to dying. - Especially in a fast-paced game, I recommend putting UI elements in the middle-bottom or middle-top region, since the corners of the screen take longer to glance at. If you do put things into corners, try to use "virtual corners". For instance, use the corners of the largest square that fits in the middle of the screen. The issue is that some of us have very wide monitors (mine is 3840x1080) and I practically have to turn my head to see the corners. - The more light you pick up, the brighter the circle of light around you got--but it wasn't enough. I wish it got dramatically brighter the closer you were to full. - The message to press 'F' should be a bit more prominent. I missed it the first time and spent a while wondering what 'F' did until the next level (maybe I lost some light and the message went away again? I don't know) - The enemies seem to get faster and faster each level, but having them outrun you makes it basically impossible to fight them, as they always take the same amount of damage to kill (from what I could tell), and the level is a giant open area. Additionally, it was difficult to hit enemies at a distance between you couldn't see or hear them until they got closer, and the vertical auto-aim seemed to stop snapping to them once they were outside a certain range. A good idea here would be to take some ideas from Dead by Daylight. In Dead by Daylight, the killer is faster than the survivors, but less agile. For instance, the survivors can jump through windows or over palettes, while the killer takes more time to go through them. You could do something similar by making some ramps that the player could jump between, or corners that the enemies take longer to go around than the player, etc. That way the player could 'plan their route' while fleeing from the waves. - I would pull the camera back a little bit to give the player a bit more vision behind them. In addition, I would lower the 'sound size' of the enemies ([AudioSource.MinDistance](https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AudioSource-minDistance.html) in Unity). It seems like the size of the sound is 1-2 meters, meaning that the source of the enemies' sounds comes from a 1-2 meter sphere around them. If you lowered the sound size to zero, you could tell with pinpoint accuracy where the sounds are coming from, which would help with hearing how close enemies were behind you. - It's a shame we couldn't explore the intro area :( There was a saw and some side rooms and other interesting things.

Mission Start With Nothing by Benjamin123 2019-10-22T03:07:21Z

congradulations.png

Congradulations :D

But yeah, good concept, but here's what needs improvement here:

- Soldiers don't shoot until they face you, making it possible to circle-strafe them. - Shadow distance is too small in some areas (especially the end-game room). Suggest changing it under the Quality Settings in the project settings. - Maximum number of pixel lights is too small (also under Quality Settings), leading to some weird lighting seams and flickering lights. - For the effect you want, I'd suggest Aura or Hx Volumetric Lights (from the Asset Store). The global fog would be better w/ volumetric lighting. - No jump (why not?) - Ground badly needs texturing of some sort. It's hard to tell how fast you are moving in some places because everything is solid green underneath you. - The arm animations are... well, they are strange. It feels like I am playing a cow. Which is, you know... Heck if I ended up with a cow arm animation, I'd just be like "alright we're doing this. Player is a cow" and work that into the story. - Mouse cursor is hidden, but not locked, making it difficult to turn, even in full screen (the mouse just hits the edge of the screen and you can't turn any more, or it goes out of the window and you click outside the browser in non-fullscreen mode)

Cavern Train Heist by microgravitydan 2019-10-20T23:19:06Z

I legit could not stop being pushed outside of the train when grabbing a barrel :(

I collected about 2 barrels each time I tried before the third would inevitably lever me outside of the train and into a dark tunnel I couldn't return from.

Rebuild of Edge by Twelvoo 2019-10-22T01:43:37Z

This is an absolute masterpiece. I enjoyed every second of it!

LD47 — Stuck in a loop

St. Exton's Night by aurel 2020-10-27T20:12:06Z

@sakura-magika Yeah, our aiming/shooting mechanic was really the weak part of the whole game. We do have a setting in the settings screen that allows you to toggle on a trajectory outline of where the arrow will hit, but unfortunately we didn't default it to on before uploading our final build.

There was so much rushing at the end that we pieced the level together, dropped some pickups, and more or less prayed that it was balanced. I think at one point the player started with 10 arrows, but it was too easy. Now, with 1 arrow, I personally feel it's too hard.

Ah well, it is what it is.

Alice by Michael Feldman 2020-10-27T04:21:12Z

Hey, Mac user here. The Mac build doesn't seem to run (corrupt?). I'm on MacOS Catalina.

Neverending partyween by imod 2020-10-27T06:18:17Z

My favorite game this entire jam :)