Clockwork Cat by patrickgh3 2013-09-16T18:54:00
Really lovely game! Nicely balanced, great story, difficulty, mood, great everything.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Local Minimum
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | What's that signal? | jam | 51 | 4.15 | 3.50 | 4.21 | 4.11 | 3.91 | 4.17 | 4.13 | 4.22 | |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | 👥 | Stampede Philarun | jam | 147 | 3.87 | 4.03 | 2.76 | 3.67 | 3.22 | 4.03 | 3.75 | ||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Treasurefall | jam | 625 | 3.28 | 3.47 | 3.45 | 3.21 | 2.76 | 2.89 | 2.75 | |||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Don't Scratch That Itch | jam | 417 | 3.66 | 3.34 | 3.92 | 4.33 | 3.59 | 3.65 | 2.96 | 3.90 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Worst Day in Hell | jam | 393 | 3.73 | 3.34 | 3.26 | 3.65 | 3.91 | 4.02 | 3.15 | 4.02 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Broken Robot | jam | 900 | 3.17 | 3.16 | 3.92 | 3.44 | 2.40 | 2.40 | 2.70 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | BHAIbOEN | jam | 1090 | 2.97 | 2.68 | 3.37 | 4.06 | 3.87 | 3.41 | |||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | Glorious Pancakes | jam | 263 | 3.70 | 3.36 | 3.48 | 3.87 | 3.73 | 3.50 | 4.26 | 3.78 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Pumpkinz | jam | 2.64 | 2.08 | 2.64 | 3.21 | 2.07 | 1.58 | 2.07 | 2.42 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | 👥 | Hold Time | jam | 1213 | 3.04 | 2.60 | 3.87 | 3.35 | 2.64 | 3.02 | 2.89 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | Perhaps a Friend? | jam | 837 | 3.46 | 3.25 | 3.85 | 3.94 | 3.24 | 3.78 | 3.25 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | The Fistula Cleaning Crew | jam | 1425 | 3.21 | 3.42 | 3.20 | 4.05 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.63 | 3.29 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Accelerated Assistant | jam | 1138 | 3.26 | 2.59 | 2.76 | 3.11 | 3.31 | 3.13 | 2.43 | 3.75 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | The Olympic Flame: 2420 | jam | 1852 | 3.21 | 3.18 | 3.80 | 3.78 | 3.00 | 3.71 | 2.88 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Mastafoon! | jam | 468 | 3.54 | 3.38 | 3.58 | 2.82 | 3.04 | 2.65 | 3.21 | 3.23 | |
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Don't Kill My Cat | jam | 1126 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.94 | 2.85 | 3.00 | 2.96 | ||||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | Model Trains Inc | jam | 322 | 3.64 | 3.23 | 3.57 | 3.44 | 3.71 | 3.15 | 3.88 | 3.26 | |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Brain's little symbiont | jam | 1022 | 2.97 | 2.86 | 3.24 | 2.43 | 2.87 | 3.41 | 3.19 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | 👥 | Birder x Runner | jam | 1034 | 2.93 | 2.91 | 2.89 | 3.45 | 2.34 | 3.14 | 3.34 | 3.02 | |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Babies! Babies! Babies! | jam | 404 | 3.60 | 3.21 | 3.66 | 4.36 | 3.95 | 3.73 | 4.00 | 4.16 | |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | 👥 | My Dream | jam | 611 | 3.07 | 2.39 | 3.58 | 3.22 | 2.42 | 3.87 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Fancy meeting you here | jam | 321 | 3.46 | 3.32 | 4.03 | 3.74 | 3.35 | 3.16 | 4.07 | 3.49 | |
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Room 753 | jam | 389 | 3.41 | 2.88 | 3.57 | 3.89 | 3.44 | 3.44 | 2.95 | 3.85 | 59 | |
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Fireworks Grandmaster | jam | |||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Abs 'n' Ads | jam | 988 | 2.74 | 2.67 | 2.88 | 3.04 | 2.62 | 2.50 | 3.88 | 2.81 | 54 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | You and your parasite | jam | 398 | 3.43 | 2.98 | 3.67 | 3.69 | 4.04 | 3.33 | 3.57 | 3.76 | 91 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Don't get caught in focus | jam | 527 | 3.21 | 2.87 | 3.62 | 4.03 | 3.15 | 3.11 | 3.32 | 73 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Where's Manno | compo | 296 | 3.46 | 2.85 | 3.72 | 3.06 | 3.78 | 3.79 | 2.52 | 4.03 | 69 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Velvet Warrior | jam | 816 | 2.81 | 2.61 | 3.03 | 3.39 | 3.35 | 2.47 | 2.59 | 2.57 | 58 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Little Beetle Saves The World | jam | 500 | 3.04 | 2.94 | 2.89 | 2.38 | 2.77 | 2.74 | 2.41 | 2.72 | 85 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Fistula Foragers | compo | 1203 | 2.31 | 2.29 | 2.32 | 3.02 | 2.45 | 1.48 | 1.94 | 2.08 | 74 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | The Turmeric Jam Jar's Only Game. | jam | 269 | 3.09 | 2.49 | 3.28 | 2.45 | 3.98 | 2.69 | 2.49 | 3.57 | 100 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Run with the Revolution | compo | 660 | 2.96 | 2.98 | 3.39 | 2.98 | 2.38 | 2.50 | 1.78 | 2.50 | 96 |
Really lovely game! Nicely balanced, great story, difficulty, mood, great everything.
For one with a very troubled relation to fb this was quite satisfying. The mechanic was also a quite new take on the 10 seconds theme I think I haven't seen so far. Some suitable music to it would of course helped set the mood even further.
Woo that was fun. I think it would have benefited from showing how many buildings you had left (or what the original number was) so that one had a clearer view of how long time it was left on the level. A small bug: some monsters got stuck in the river, but that you might know. And finally it would have been nice if the monsters did some victory dance at the end rather than just stop where they were (just have a tweened empty game objects they can run around after). But in all, great work!
Just came back from the pub, which may make me biased, but this was one great game!
I liked how the instructions came into the game so that the difficulty wasn't about what to do, but simply managing to do it.
Fantastic little contraption, though I'm not clever enough to solve all the riddles but still impressive. It made me want to do a stop-motion game as well, maybe next dare.
It so should have music/sounds, one per button that goes forward or reverse depending on how you have clicked them! Nice puzzle.
I like the sound and the visuals, but I couldn't really play it because I never figured out the controls. Got S for down and Z for up or something like that - which was very confusing.
Cool take on the theme, and nice glitches. A bit hard to see enough, but maybe that's just because I didn't turn all lights off before playing...
I liked the physics of the arm, the controls where a bit to awkward for me, why not have all the claw commands on one row so that you can have the hand still? Eg. Open, Left, Right, Close.
Couldn't run, same error as Jimanzium
It took me a while to figure out the pad thing, but then it got scary. First time I was so scare though that I never got to hear the voice... which is a pity because then I would have been more scared. Nice work.
Liked it alot, nice and simple graphics.
I would really have liked to invoke rotation when I saw fit (as others have commented), and unfortunately my skills weren't good enough to do very well with the precise maneuvers needed. Maybe have difficulty settings based on character to block size ratio? That said, I like the concept though I'm a bit biased as it is by far the most proximate mechanic to my own entry (mine from FPS perspective instead).
Nice little thing, though the game element of the game kind of passed me by. The created story, maybe should somehow be evaluated by other players and its fame be the mechanics / game element? Just a thought.
Woooo superb, fantastic and I just want to play it over again and again... does that make be a bad person?
Thanks, I know the controls are an issue but I didn't have time to figure out the built in character controller. If I would fix one thing, it would be controls. And more deliberately designed levels
I never had a console in my life, but I guess I gotta check out that Monkey Ball thing then now that several of you have mentioned it!
Btw, if you didn't make it on to the in game high score, it's still a good chance you made the top 100... http://unknownincubator.com/local_minimum/RunWithTheRevolution/
@mrspeaker my first reaction to your comment was that it won't be possible given the way the world rotates around its centre. But then you got me thinking and I realized I could just as well rotate around some other point (e.g. where the pad that activated the rotation is located). So we'll see, maybe I'll include it in the next version.
@Chinchilla thanks for the tips. Many of them already in the next version. I'll see what I'll do about alternative paths as it puts more requirements on level design planning and difficulty balancing (since everything centers on gaining points, simply skipping a level wouldn't benefit the player). It's still a nice idea. Maybe even more so if I add some parts of the world that stays put and don't rotate.
And every one else. Thanks for your comments.
Good serious entry and nice graphics!
Wow, loads of cred for achieving that in such short time. Liked the top too, and great to get to play an unusual type character.
Great! Absolutely the best submit I've played this far.
As a micro biologist I must say I don't fully recognize the microbes, but it's hard not to like the combination of python and microbiology. (I was first pressing WASD, which made the game crash, so you might want to look into that.)
Got the same error as zlowrance
I like how one could stay on the bottom side of the blocks as well as on top of them. There should be some bonus if you manage that long enough. I think the difficulty progression could be worked on a bit, wanted it more challenging after a while. In all a nice game though!
Just a comment, I could fly in under the health bar area. I general a nice game.
Absolutely awesome, though it took me a couple of times to get started, this was the most fun of all 70+ games played thus far.
Fantastic art. Never figured out how to not die though. Two comments. When the intro drawings explaining the scenario are showing one can actually play and pick up the snow etc. The different drawings pass by rather quickly. It would have been nicer if one got to click in the lower left corner or something similar. In total though, really beautiful little point and click adventure!
Those enemies were hard to kill (if even possible). Played a couple of levels. Could become a nice game with some work on the mechanics.
A general comment, you really should rate some games. The idea is that everyone rates at least 20 games (and preferably as soon as possible). If you do your game will get promoted so more test it!
I got to level 2, not sure what I did on level 1 to progress. On level 2 I managed to click on some blocks that disappeared and some that turned my color. There seems to be at least one death-block, but I'm not sure what to do with it because if I click so I only have my color blocks, remove the ones I can and I'm left with a single grey block. If I click it I die. If I don't nothing happens. In other words. I think you need to include clear instructions about the rules and strategies of the game. Otherwise it seemed like a nice puzzle, a bit reminiscent of minesweeper.
To be it was very pleasing to just play with the arrows and the let the tailed cubes swoosh over the screen and land in ordered patterns. Order was much more fun than disorder. I think the cosmic janitor bit was somewhat unnecessary. It might be my very strong aversion towards mysticism and religion speaking, though. Nice experience away from all these one-shot games.
I'm sorry I don't at all get the mechanics. I think you need to explain how the entities work and interact. All I managed was to remove one block with the scroll but as it seemed like I couldn't do more than push the dudes around... I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do.
Nice game. A little issue with enemies being able to spawn almost directly on top of the character, which is a bit unfair.
Quite nice little roguelike! Got myself killed but that's mainly my fault. With some music it could become really cool. Didn't play more than two levels, but I would expect that you would need some levels to be special boss levels and such things, if you were to continue development.
I'm interpreting this as a "war on sports"-game, and for that you get extra stars. We were a bit surprised that we forgot to ridicule sports. I was a bit uncertain about how I was participating and to what extent my actions, whatever they actually were, affected the outcome. But, given the general theme of the game, I'd say that it might even have been a plus.
I like the use of the theme in a quite novel way. However I found it hard to see what the enemies were holding in their hands. I tried some times, but never got very far.
You did really well on the graphics, but shouldn't the text have been in Greek? I think an added explanation initially for how the labyrinth works (I got the hang of it, but it was really hard to navigate), and maybe UI-map to assist. Further, to really make this game fly, I think each room needs to add some to the narration - so that the game tells a story...
Couldn't play, gives error about tinysound
Throwing babies was really great, and I did enjoy the game even though I died quite a few times. My demises were mainly due to the controls being a little too hard to handle.
I thought I didn't like tower defense games (if that's the correct label for this) but I did find it very appealing. Nicely done, great consistency in the art. Didn't get through very many waves, but I think that says more about how I feel about TD-games.
I much appreciated how different this game was to most I've rated so far. I also never got to play Populous as a kid because it wouldn't start on our PC way back when. A technical comment, sometimes when the mighty hand is grabbing the follower and the screen starts scrolling the hand sprite and follower sprite gets separated.
I used jetpack for most levels. Some of the gizmos like the cube, the bomb and the teleporter I never found any use for. Got stuck on the LD48 level, not sure how to complete it. Nice little game though.
A general comment. You really really need to rate games, the way the system work you get rated if you rate. And I bet you'd like a fair view of what how good your game was. As it is now, you only have 6 votes including this one.
Quite quirky little game. I didn't quite get if there was a way to complete it. Another technical thing, I got stuck in a Mike Tyson / Dead body loop without being able to get out of it. So if you somehow add a sense of progression or a complete state I think it could be a really nice little interactive experience.
A general comment. You haven't rated any games, and the way LD works is that you get rated if you rate. As it is now, you only have 6 ratings including mine. I bet you want a fair view of how your game was so hurry rate some!
Hey, I get you feel like you didn't complete the game, but the base mechanics was really quite cool and promising. Refreshing to see an ASCII game as well. Got to the end of first level, but not sure if you implemented level-complete and more levels.
A general comment: You should really rate some games! Rating others' games is half of the Ludum Dare. Most fair for everyone when people at least rate some 20 games.
Really well made game. A bit hard to play without a controller, especially the wall-climbing parts. Got a couple of levels into the game at least though. The sprites were really well good and the music fit great.
Heck, this is one great start of a game. It's much too hard for playing with a mouse as it is. First level should probably be a no-kill level to start with. And then a couple of one ball levels before the stressful two ball level. And several two-balls before the first three ball. Etcetera. But what you have in mechanics and effects is just superb. Simply make more easier levels.
Then a general comment: You haven't rated any games. This is a shame when you've made such a great game. You will get some ratings now because someone was nice enough to mention your game as a really good one, but the way Ludum Dare works you must rate to get rated. And this game really deserves a fair rating, so hurry rate twenty or more games. And be sure to leave comments as that tends you make people rate back!
I was a bit skeptic to start, but after a while when it became clear that the protagonist was I and that I was banging my head against the table, then I think it worked. I would have liked to be able to interact with some of the things popping up, but maybe that would have defeated the purpose of the game. 500 hits down I decided to save my wrist for some other games (maybe add an auto-hit button after say 100 hits so that one can watch it play out?).
Couldn't play, no servers up
Really great concept and what a feat to do it in such a short time. Got stuck right about where your main screenshot is taken. So I think you could develop this further with a smoother progression of difficulty and more levels. Also maybe have a bit longer (or introduce) a grace-period to decrease the number of resets?
Really nice little puzzle. Got to score 16, suppose it's not super-much but it got a bit crowded and crazy there. Fun though. A technical comment, it would have been nice with a window so the game could be moved and a quit-button inside the game.
A general comment: They way Ludum Dare works, you must rate to get rated! This entry really deserves a reliable rating. For that you need to get going and quickly rate some games. Twenty or so at least. Leave comments and make sure to always rate those that commented on yours.
I felt like there were too many options to get an overview, however at the same time I would suspect you could fit them all into the screen so there's no need for scrolling? Maybe also only show those progressions that are valid question (hide or inactivate the nonsensical combinations). I think the pictogram way of communicating could be quite awesome if you work a little on it. I did retry quite a few times, so I take that as an indication of you having something good going.
Wonderful graphics and great take on the theme. Not the world's easiest character to control but with some practice...
A lovely game, got to the deja-vu bit but got stuck there. In general I think the levels up to that one worked very well even though I wasn't entirely sure what triggered the doors when. A graphical comment, I don't know if it was intended, but the cat walked behind the fridge on one of the outdoor levels.
A nice game you've got here. I liked it enough to try it a couple of times over. But I would have appreciated to know that the round-kicks had any affect on the enemies (other that them hitting them... it was unclear how much I would have to kick to disable or gain anything from it). And what did those apples have to do with the milk? Not that it really mattered. A nice play all in all.
Quite the dramatic touch on a card game and I did win.
That's the first Justin B game for me, nice first entry. As some have noted before, the controls aren't very responsive. I also tried to walk between two shelves, one tile wide passageway. It seemed like there would be enough space, but I couldn't get through. Maybe one has to hit the exact right position. It would be better if the game allowed for some errors and pushed the player in place.
Maybe I did something wrong, but I never got enough to get to any upgrade. It seems I got robbed every night (or at least money reset then). I kind of liked watching the game play itself though.
The exploration with that annoying ghost was sort of nice, but I would have liked to know why I was in that house and what I was supposed to do. At least some hint of that I reached the end. Maybe there was such thing, but I didn't find it. I would also suggest making an alternative key-binding to the arrow-keys with ctrl or something for doors for us left-handed.
Really great work. I didn't see how I could upgrade my fist because I never got back to the dude at the start. Well balanced and challenging. Some levels allowed for staying put and rocket fisting a lot of enemies without them noticing me, so maybe rocket-fist range vs enemy vision needs some calibration. But in all, a very complete game.
Stunning graphics and I suppose I only have myself to blame for loosing, since I did declare that war on purpose (so I replayed and got some peace). I found it a bit annoying to have the instructions hide/show on up down button as I was inclined to press those going back and forth between base and forest.
Crazy cube attack! It was sort of fun, with some work still need to be done, but an FPS in 48h is impressive.
A general comment: The way Ludum Dare works you must rate to get rated. So to get a fair judgement of the game you really need to get going and quickly rate at least 20 games. Rating others' games is half of the Ludum Dare. As it stands, you only have 6 ratings including this one. Be sure to leave comments as people generally always rate back.
Nice little game with an inherent conflict of wanting to dare devil pull as many as close as possible for each blast. Yet that is of course dangerous. With some sound effects and more varieties of enemies you have something nice going here.
I think that one thing you could do to improve how worth it is replaying levels would be to shuffle the actors around. If you want, at present you can simply shoot someone and see who shoots you and then replay and kill that one right away. I think the game was nice though. It's a bit to stressful to read all the info with the timer but all in all quite nice.
Nice little concept. You need to include instructions one how the game is played though (sufficient if you write it here).
I really like the graphics and the mood.
A general comment: The way Ludum Dare works you need to rate to get rated. Currently you only have 5 and that won't make a fair assessment of the game's qualities. So hurry rate at least 20 games now!
I really liked the music and that you could gather nothing. However I didn't get to interact much with the NPCs. Some seemed to react to e.g. wine, but they just followed me for a little bit. In other words, the game needs to show a little more how it is supposed to be played. Also the text was really absurdly tiny on my computer, so being able to scale it up some would have been nice. A good start though.
A general comment: The way Ludum Dare works you need to rate games to get rated! Currently you only have 5 people rating your game because you haven't rated any yourself. So to get a fair assessment your game's qualities you need to hurry and rate at least 20 games. And be sure to leave comments as people tend to rate back!
Nice but quite difficult to make it to the far end. At least I got to see it but never survived the mayhem. It would have been interesting to have some different types of weapons maybe or a dash or something to give more flexibility to the fighting.
Really nice graphics, and well written story. Didn't get too far, but that's probably my fault. The intro back-story could be made a little shorter.
A general comment: Currently you only have 5 votes. The reason is that you must rate to get rated. That's how Ludum Dare works, so hurry rate at least 20 games. And be sure to leave comments as people will tend to rate back. With this few raters it will be very random what rating you get!
I liked the tone in the text, it felt a bit long, the character training with too few ways to influence the how one progresses. It was hard to know what stats were good, so some general indication would have been great. A nice text-game though.
I didn't really get the hang of the game, but I managed to become Game Over at that woman's place answering questions. Nice effort for 48h, but I think the game needs to show a little more clearly how you are going to sort things out with Santa before exposing the player to large risks (such as "death").
I was about to complain about the controls and some climbs being too steep until I noticed... very good.
I had absolutely no chance completing that list, but I'm also one of those who don't celebrate Christmas (in part because of exactly this insanity you show here)... Superb little satire.
Unfortunately I found the game too hard (at least in this state of being sick), the fecal cubes gave very little time to move out of the way. I like the game concept though, running towards myself, and I retried quite a few times to get to play some of it at least.
You obviously know how to work your art tools and I think this could become a really addictive game, but I found the combination of too unforgiving mouse-clicking-while-looking-navigation and the slow pace made me not want to retry more than two three times before giving up. So my suggestion would be to add a run-option and maybe to think some on the possibility of improving the mouse-steering. I guess this especially applies to the web-player were the mouse doesn't get centered on the screen, but stuck somewhere close to where it happened to enter.
The game wouldn't run in firefox.
A general comment. The way Ludum Dare works you need to rate games to get rated. Currently you only have 5 ratings and have rated none. So to hurry rate at least 20 games and be sure to leave comments as most people tend to rate back!
The difficulty progression was really good. Played until Beta Cruicus (Or something like that). Really good type of puzzle, simple but very effective graphics. Could of course had a little more sound/music to it. But in all really impressive entry.
Not sure about those links you provide, why not use Google Drive or Dropbox or something like that so I understand how to download?
Further, you currently only have 5 people rating your game. The reason is that Ludum Dare works by promoting those that has rated. So hurry fix a new more common way to download your game and secondly you need to quickly rate at least 20 games. And be sure to leave comments as people tend to rate back!
Very nice and simple little game! Dueling has never been this fun.
The liked the game and defeated the evil boss (had to replay), but figured out the second time that the yoyo aspect really punished y-movement as it pulls down fire rate unless you catch it immediately. So second time around I simply avoided y-movement at all cost and it became much easier. Thus I would suggest to either have enemies move vertically at the left side of the screen more often and more aggressively, or to give the yo-yoing some positive effect so it can be used more as an asset. Or both. Nice game though.
Good. It took me a while to get the upgrades and when I did I didn't have enough time to do anything rational so I just hammered on the Q W and E. That is, maybe give some initial feedback for us non-TD gamers that one can now buy e.g. Firerate.
I guess I'm lucky getting this as my first "you only get one shot" game here. If all others are like this, then maybe the theme was OK after all. A small comment. For us with laptop + left handed right hand on WASD and left on mouse is a bit uncomfortable.
Sorry, can't run it due to missing dll (MSVCR71.dll). Tried installing the link above but didn't help.
As you sort of pointed out (I think), it felt like the game lacked some components such as things happening in transit between planets. For it to become more fun, there would need to be more clues and interactions with the uncle and more variation between the planets. A good start though.
I think the game worked pretty well. Not too many one plays to the end. With some elaboration of level design the placement of the blue block wouldn't have to be as obvious as in the current levels, which I think would make the game a little better.
Nice game. It took me a great while to get started though because the color change on the bait button was too subtle.
It could have been really great but after initially loosing some points it seemed as the game lost interest in my hand. I'm not sure if it would be easier but what if the objective was to poke the 1s with an extended finger?
Nice work with audio and mechanics. Sometimes one had to wait a little for the square to get its queue to send the player away. A small comment on that note. While waiting it didn't seem like there was a chance to regret/override a direction given. I think that would have been nice. Maybe also some indication about the proximity of the target circle. Some examples could be visually pulsing out a light every other beat, or auditory by letting it be the audio source for one of the sounds. Just a thought. Anyhow a really nice little game.
@skysthelimit Yeah we had to scrap working on the controller and camera, forgot some animations that we actually had and never got around to give the character some assisting thought-bubbles. The deadline was really hard on us... we're collecting a list of easy improvements that we probably will fix later on...
We're going to take all the "strange" and "unsettling" (though we never aimed for the latter) as encouragements. And as this was in part an experiment to see if I could get my friends to join me in making a game, I think I've got'em hooked. Judging by the comments so far, I think what you like is their oddity-contribution. So next time we might actually actively aim to do something disturbing, odd and... and beware!
@Atmospherium I finally got a bit better after a long harsh cold and started by having the wise men animate and play the instrument they like as they get it. I hope that will make it feel less of just trying around. Other than that, I'm not sure how to improve on that puzzle.
To everyone so far, thanks for all the nice comments.
For those of you commenting on the controls, I agree completely. The originally submitted version had really crappy controls. A lot of that is solved in the updated post-jam. The key-mappings were, I suppose partly based planned to fit my left-handedness but as it is unity, if you play any of the platform specific versions you can remap any keys before launching the game at the screen resolution dialogue.
It labyrinths were really much too unforgiving. I got to save a handful of the crew and started some destruction sequences, but I think the complexity of the mazes took away attention from what I was supposed to do. And so I mostly focused on going to new places and pressing E every now and then.
I think this game could become something with time. As I read the narration suspense is quite vital -- the player needs to be scared of the guards and the cameras. Sneak, hide, pick locks and blow stuff up. As it stands now the NPCs are too simple to lure into a wall to make it fully enjoyable. Nothing a little more dev can't fix, and as you say you want to continue, I'd say that's where your effort will pay off the most the fastest.
Great mechanics, even though it requires some leaps of faith, most of them made sense and the game was forgiving enough to allow for missing when switching colors. Some of the 45 degree slopes where a bit hard to move and jump on, but that's fine tuning stuff. Great work for a LD! Very polished.
First off I would very strongly encourage you to play and rate others' games. Else you will get very few rating yours (4 so far, 5 with me). I got to the end of the second level but Juan wouldn't squeeze down the underground path and nothing happened at the end on top. I really like the way J. runs, actually quite similar to how our protagonist moves.
I got to the final protocol but couldn't complete it, might give it a try later on. This is the game I've enjoyed the most playing so far. The voice was very much like Portal's, which is one of the best game narrations if you ask me.
Nice work! Hard for someone with not that good feel for pitch. I also could see my self annoying fellow passengers on the commute train trying to get the sequences right.
Art and sound department did a brilliant job. The controls were quite hard to master, but the game was forgiving enough so that it didn't matter too much.
Great graphics and nice version of the game type. A little too often I found myself hiding at the top of the screen, but maybe that was good, because if it had been any harder it would have been too hard for me.
Because the instructions said I was supposed to vaccinate people from the virus, I ran around for the longest time giving shots to healthy people. As vaccinating the sick shouldn't work. Then, finally as I was about to give up -- I didn't see how my action had any affect, and it was outright impossible to keep track of which grey dude I had previously given a shot, I tried vaccinating the sick. So aside for the oddity of the biology involved (you could develop it into being able to use zombie-blocking medicine for sick and vaccine for healthy in the future though to expand the game. Vaccinate to make grey turn green with some fitting chance e.g. 70%), I think it was a pretty cool game idea and well executed compo entry that could be elaborated into something really nice. E.g. also adding more behaviors to the people and zombies (walking, running, scared, etc).
Very nice and quite complex game from a simple set of rules.
Lovely! Though I wasn't particularly swift, I did it without pollution. I would have opted for leading zeros (and trailing after the dot) for all the values so that the text stays in place.
Superb graphics, and great walk-jumping of the bird. (Of course an extra star for it being bowerbird-themed). The obvious things to add would be some music, a different sprite for flight, and maybe the bird should just jump around in place when the user is not doing anything (because that jumping was so good).
I also got stuck at the jump into bit, but I really liked the audio and camera as well!
Never got to figuring out how to escape, if it indeed was possible but enjoyed all the gruesome failures that came my way. Really nice little point and click!
I liked the graphics, but the controls were a bit hard to handle in combination with the level design. Most times I never managed to jump up onto platforms and once I managed to get stuck inside a platform. Great start for first time entry though!
Very nice game. I felt like for most stages the objective was to get the 3D view as soon as possible and that little could be gained by 2D. That was a bit of a pity. Would have been more fun to be strategic in the switching. Also in the battery discharging field where you have to jump for batteries I happened to press R. I said no to restart the game, but when I got back I couldn't get any battery power from jumping up and collecting them. Really a great start for a game that you could build on.
Angelina seems really good at creating an atmosphere with both sound and visuals. But the game part of it seems a bit lacking still.
Really quite amazing to have put this together on such short time. You really need to put up a web-version though so people will play it. Also, WASD is not very left-handed-on-laptop-friendly. You already have arrows mapped so it would be a small effort to put reload on right control or similar.
Got to 1270pts and if that's not much I'm gonna blame it on being sick while playing. Anyhow, a really nice game. A good introductory difficulty and progression towards harder customers. I wasn't quite understanding when or why I got new stars, but that doesn't matter much. I'm a bit skeptic about the hygiene of that establishment, but the customers seems happy (Washing the fork could of course be an added complexity for later stages).
Superb little puzzle game with a great mood and nice increase of difficulty combined with hints allowing you to understand how to use the mechanics. Got to the last level but didn't finish it. Either it required more timing skills or I didn't understand how I was supposed to complete it. Obvious thing to improve would be to add audio. Maybe some more sadness to the blocks that are not in use or sacrifice themselves. In total a great game.
It was hard to figure out this game even with the reading the first spoiler. And as a few seem to have attested below, it wasn't only me. I like the idea though. But to make the game complete and more fun, the game itself would need to assist the player in understanding what the player should do. I was about to comment on the fact that the score and the lives doesn't scroll with the player, but that could indeed have been used more clearly as an indication of what the objective was. Maybe the character should look at the objective some times. And so on. Good start though.
I've never played a game so slow, nor a platformer without being able to jump. However this is one of few games I've played to the end here. Intriguing to have so much unused level design. Very well made game.
I liked how you got more points for being reckless, and the particles + sounds. I kept dying quickly though, so I would suggest that one gets more than one fail before death and maybe ease in the player a little with slower expanding things to start with. If the sound effects from the clicking also made themselves more into a song as one progresses, it would be awesome.
Took me a while to get started but once I got flying I must say that was a really interesting mechanic.
I was much to slow a typist, wasn't sure if I could change the difficulty on the fly.
Utmost disturbing. I feel shaken after having played through, trying consistently to avoid. Good serious entry.
Nice graphics and not too may point and clickers on these LD:s. A little hard to know exactly what to do after grabbing the first pieces of evidence.
I unlocked one ending, got stuck on the others. I think you have a simple mechanic here that you could continue on. I would have been really great though if the block movements and other changes stayed between resets.
Nice little puzzle. A bit hard at times to see what level the different bricks were at. When you get some sound in it I think it will add a lot to the atmosphere. It would have been nice with a web-version, since it's unity it is super easy to fix (and you are allowed to upload ports after deadline), and a quit button inside the game for when not playing the webversion...
Fantastic game, haven't played your dad's but I'm sure you won the competition between you. Never got passed level 4, but enjoyed switching outfit and trying. Sound effects were great. So if there's anything you could consider improving it would be making the controls a little more forgiving for us with not so great reaction times.
Great concept. But it did prove too hard for me. Maybe though in some levels after having introduced all movements that don't require too much perfection of the controls from the user? I think the game is a bit too unforgiving as it is right now.
My reaction time could be a bit slow due to sleep deprivation from the weekend. Also, you actually have arrow keys for movement as well (was about to complain that mouse + WASD is not really friendly to left handed ppl with laptop). Good graphics with nice sound effects though!
Perfectly executed. Maybe you should add to the recommendations that one dust off the screen before as well. Got a bit hard to see towards the end.
Nice graphics and control. Got a bit tricked by the tree to the far right because I first didn't understand that the branches were platforms. Fun game!
I really liked the concept, but I found the levels much too unforgiving and it took me a great while to complete the second one (and when I did, I did so in not the planned way). So I think you have a really superb game here that could well be made for phones and tablets. But I think you need to work some on the progression of how hard it is.
Probably the best use of a theme I didn't much appreciate. The controls were really smooth and kitteh a reliable companion even if it went astray at times. Kittehns tend to do that though I suppose.
Nice graphics! Got a hang of the controls only first after pushing various buttons before stumbling onto P (so maybe add some "How to play" to the menu). A little comment to the girls comments also, it would feel better if they come after the animation is completed rather than as soon as one e.g. presses the combination for playing dead. I all a nice little game though.
I liked the graphics and the audio, but I didn't really get how to use the combination to survive so I kept failing a lot and mostly navigating visually and guessing where you might have put the traps. However I really like the idea, I just think the game needs to be more clear on how to use the audio. What I mean is it needs to show the player in the beginning exactly how it works. Also a small comment on keys. As left handed on a laptop, having the right hand on WASD + E + Space is really bad. In all a really impressive entry.
Nice idea, but after exploring the world a bit, being quite systematic, I got the feeling that it was quite the big place. Such that more auditory queues would have been needed to help (e.g. maybe a resonating sound effect depending on the size of the current room).
Wonderful graphics and great concept game. It felt a bit scary each level as the blocks moved outside the screen in some parts. Like, "what if it's the wrong resolution and I can't complete it". But I got to the end. Besides adding music as an obvious improvement. It felt like all levels used the same math formula, and that could of course be extended if you decide on continuing with the development.
It would have been awesome if you were able to reach space, maybe you are, but it didn't seem like it.
I really enjoyed the caverns hairiness. The game was a bit unnecessarily hard to play due to key-mappings (very unfriendly for left-hand mouse). The platforms did not carry the player for x-axis movement which with the mappings made them almost impossible. The one shot you're dead, I see as part of fulfilling the theme, but I think the game would have been more fun if one got to take some damage... In all a really nice game though.
Nice graphics and audio. I didn't learn which token represented which perk but that was sort of OK since it said in text once I had them. It might be good to make all enemies and tokens stand out slightly more so that one doesn't have to run around trying to interact with a lot of sprites that do nothing (if more things said stuff or so, then that would void by comment). Good entry in all.
Very good and well made game. I played it much longer than most other games. I try to come up with something constructive about the game, but I'm stumped. You could of course make the game even harder with the match only showing the local area around the girl (but maybe for a little longer). Don't know if it would work as well though.
The microbiologist in me obviously like cloning, nicely executed puzzle. Hope you'll give it some more levels.
It felt more like a quite linear narration than a game, but that said, I enjoyed it very much. Especially the last part.
Way too hard for me. It could be eased by giving the player the customary 3 hearts and taking half for each hit. I would have liked to play it and see what you've built, but I kept dying.
Artstyle and camera effects were really refreshing. If they had been any less absurd the controls would have felt very funky with that jump (especially if you bounced upwards while jumping). But now it was just fine like it was. I found a bunch of flasks but no one super special and thus I quit. In other words, the game lacked progression after a while, or indications that I was progressing. Also you actually had arrow-keys bound as well, which is more left-hand-friendly. But no alternative jump button close by. All in all a really nice experience though!
It was a bit surprising to find out the zombies didn't care at all if I put myself in the way of there progress towards the tree, but then I figured it could actually make for a nice aspect of the mechanic -- shoot and block.
I found the controls really hard to handle, or rather the controls in combination with the physics on the main character. Some of the answers were partially outside the visible area in the web player. Sound effects were really nice though.
Absolutely mega-fantastic graphics feel. Love the arm when pointing and the character in general.
The connection to the theme felt a bit vague, besides taking the elevator down...
I would have liked something more than the game just closing after the head-on-smack-thing too.
But for a 48h thing this is really impressive. And a really solid style that would do great with some branching story and just more of everything.
I did as most, slided around and had a bit of control-issues. Got up the elevator and went both direction (a bit annoying to not be able to jump across and have to go down to pick a new elevator).
Btw you could have instant spawn of elevator without any serious delay as one could just jump off if need be.
The graphics was nice, didn't solve the first puzzle of the lights in any way I noticed. So an easy introduction to the rgb-components and how the different aspects of the game works before presenting puzzles that has effects outside view (if I understand it the screen-shots correctly).
With some polish, this could become very nice.
Nice puzzle game. I didn't get very far but played it for quite a while trying to figure out how to combine different digging strategies to get to the stars. It would have been nice if hovering an monster let you know what number of swords it needed or some little legend of what each thing did (more useful than the dig-history). Also how many hits the shield took and so on.
But as I said. Since I played it for quite a while it definitely did something right.
Nice little puzzle. I guess the controls were made for touch even though they worked with mouse, the whichever was selected was a bit subtle. Once I also looped an area about half-ways through by making a P-shape. Which seems to be allowed, and there were ways out of the cut but game stopped without saying I lost.
As the final cut I cut a big part of the face and it said game over and something else at the same time. It felt like I had removed all pieces but maybe I missed one.
Anyhow that was the tech-part. The style was nice. To increase the cutting-feel you could try having the user stay close ahead of the red dot to keep cutting and not burn a hole in the head and not move too fast so the cut becomes dashed, not skid too much to the sides of the target line. And so on.
Great content made for such short time-frame. I got stuck a few rooms in because I didn't find the control-thing to try my code on. Speaking of which. They could be made simpler to interact with. First times I clicked around without them spinning. Wasn't even sure they should spin. They are really hard to spot too.
A minor thing. One of the lamps in the room with the portals that light up when passing through doesn't work. Not sure if that was on intension.
Another thing, maybe change the slope that the character can walk uphill on, because it feels a little too easy to get stuck getting out of water.
Also you failed to mention right-click and space in the controls.
Other than that. A really nice and impressive puzzle.
Nice and simple graphics. It took me three tries until I got some sort of hang of it (doubt 15 is very impressive score).
That the enemies could just run into you felt a bit unfair. They should also need to launch torpedoes, I think. You could also give the player torpedo in the water feedback.
You could add ability to drop some debris in path of enemy torpedo to avoid the blast and other tactics seen on submarine movies.
I liked the game. The effects and attention to details. The main issue to keep playing, I think is to make it feel as the game is fair and it is up to the skills of the player... maybe ease it up by giving more time bonus early on and the less and less as time progresses. You could also play with the size of the game, to every now and then have it zoom out a bit and make it more difficult...just some ideas
The sound and sprite animations as well as sand-winds were really nice.
It was a bit hard to figure out exact tactics with the beacons and the worms. In that regard some very fast adjustments would be to have a rest option while playing if the beacons all failed. You could also simply add 3 beacons at the top-left corner and hide one for each thrown. It wasn't clear that they were limited or how many they were.
Nor how many worms there are.
I don't know if it was for me changing the preferred graphics settings, but there were some glitches between the tiles, showing black bars and to the left of the world there was a black area.
I got lost running a while with little worm action so what if worms were a little hotter on the beacons and on you as well (especially when you still have beacons on you)?
Interesting start for a game.
(Also I would like to ride a worm...)
Great tunes and fun game being that dolphin. I bet controls are much more intuitive with touch, but worked fine with mouse.
One comment on the coin/rings. What did they do? As for the score it seemed like only meters mattered. So if coins were to boost speed or just add extra joy that would make them understandable, make you make the surfer do cool tricks. Get applauds. Yay!
Second thing was that it would have been nice to get a warnings about the oxygen level of the diver.
And finally, at least add a personal high-score.
Great game! More dolphins!
Great evilish evil root fun. Though I never managed the 3m my best strategy was to halfway through abandon one side and just cut on the other. They never seemed to sprout right on-top of the the seed making it quite a lot easier to have one side pest-free.
I would have liked a stronger "you are standing in the thing your are cutting"-indication. Or actually being repelled back some.
Many shots, especially those going up, seemed quite harmlesss. It would have been cool if they could seed new plants.
Really great game though, had fun trying and dying.
One of the better doctor games I've played, they seem to pop up no matter the theme. But as other pointed out, in this case it was really a great use of the theme.
Love the graphics and the speech and disease - treatment logics for their ailments.
Mode/story telling was definitely the strong points of this puzzle. I much enjoyed playing through until the map with the different light. I got stuck there. As puzzles go they were quite well balanced up until then.
The one thing that was a bit annoying was the controls and the collisions. The character was very slow to come to an halt and easy to get stuck. I also once managed to mount the drill through a wall. So if you fix controls and some other minor glitches you have a rocker game!
I think I would have been much more intrigued by the game if it was deceitful. If in fact, it didn't build on the stereotypes of life -- that the instructions "get a job" and "start a family" were only there to fool you. If interesting stuff started to happen when you experimented with the sequence of available "tasks". If life expanded in some cases. Shrunk in other. If strange stuff outside the scope of what seemed to be the game started to happen. If the stereotypical path actually never could even reach to death. And so on.
I think it still worked as it was now too. I got the two messages to light up as green. And the basic layout of the puzzle, the game was interesting.
I like the dusty effects and the nice little story. I would have liked some choices along the way to make it a game and not only a story.
Hard game, but nice idea. Would have liked it to be a bit more forgiving, especially in the beginning. Alternatively if there were frequent checkpoints and a progress-bar to next checkpoint.
A twist on it that could increase the puzzle aspect would be if the two characters could get out of sync by use of obstacles.
And of course more effects, more juice. But as you say you are learning unity I guess that will come. Shake some cameras, put some particle emitters upon landing. I might also consider doing the collision boxes a little smaller so player can get away with touching spikes and balls.
I really like the glitchy out of focus feel. The audio was really nice as expected. If you decide to work more on it, putting the enemies in different layers that move in different directions in relation to player movement and maybe never have them fully still when player is still would improve the game-play part of it I think.
@kbm it requires Javascript 1.7 for a solution I made while implementing the algorithm for fistulae creation, at least in Chromium it doesn't work and since I don't have other browsers I put it as only FF rather than having tons of complaints about it not working. I'll try to find energy to work around that later today. Think that's the type of bug allowed to patch according to the rules. Could even be considered porting it to new platform...
@Martin Vilcans, I'll give my cat some extra attention to thank her for lending her fur to my game.
Nice to hear the game works in all browsers now!
@tripleVisionGames: the bottom of the fistula/tunnel has a yellow thing to be picked up to the surface.
@borrismoose: yes it is randomly generated using a field, some noise and a general direction. Haven't fully nailed the generation yet.
@recursor: animations, enemies and more I unfortunately had to cut (uploaded 6min to deadline), but I'm working on a v1.1 that will have all of that.
@FatJoe enemies are on the way in my 1gam-version. Three types done, shooting and then some. Will post a post-dare version here after voting is over.
@BoaHeck_ArtGent, music is definitely one thing I will add for my updated version.
@pandavigoureux It was actually rather the other way around with idea first and decision to use Phaser later on. That tutorial did help, yet reason for my game being so lacking in those other respects were difficulties in implementing the details of the ship-control that makes it slightly different from the example.
But enough of that, first I read your comment as a critique of the ever common way controls affect the main protagonist (in my case the ship). And I thought that, but for an other game, could be interesting. If you only affected the walls of the level and the ship kept sinking along whatever path it decided. Somewhat like dungeon keeper (or what it is called) but fighting for the ship rather than against it.
@d__adee That was how far I made it during the compo. Would have been nice with a great "YOU WIN" or even better to have that story around it all that I'm working on now.
I had very fun and as a fellow Phaser, this is a source I'll be looking at to learn some of those tricks you implemented.
Really awesome and simple game.
The only critique would be that the controls were somewhat floaty and that I missed some jumps due to that. On the other hand, since the game was so nice in checkpointing your progress it really didn't matter that much.
I really enjoyed the mood of the synthetic speech. I would be happy if that was a constant voice over. Nice game to play through, could definitely get expanded on.
The controls were a bit unintuitive at first. If I understood void correct, it only worked when blue bar was full? It would have been nice to have a 'V' icon next to the two meters showing up when voiding was possible.
It also seemed like I could climb the pillars, but didn't fully grasp that mechanic.
An interesting glitch happened during the intro, when I upped the sound (loosing focus of the window), text continued scrolling but sound paused. When I clicked the menus, text stopped but sound continued.
Over all a nice game. Nice with an easy platformer for once -- to once in a while be able to complete an LD-game.
Really like the graphics and it was nice diving around. Played quite long upgrading things close to max I would expect.
I think it shouldn't be possible to loose by over-buying, but it be denied. However if one forgets to refill, of course. On the refill, it would have been nice if the cost to refill also went up for increased air capacity.
I never really noticed either, but the further away I hope I got more for the things I caught.
There were some places that look as if they would be trapped air, so I kind of expected to be safe there, time not ticking.
Finally, since you had a nice warning tick about running out of air. It would have been nice to have a very distinct half-ways sound as well.
Interesting idea, I like these alternative takes on controls that pop up every now and then.
My major reservation would be the collision detection for those with swords. Sometimes I could walk right through them (if either one had recently been in the air).
It was also a little too random, at least the feeling of too random that one was soaring through the air and a spear-walker came and not so much to do about it except accepting fate to come. Or I didn't get good enough at the game.
The symbols in the upper left corner I didn't decipher, so they could to with some clearer explanation or indication of when they are changing.
Nice game with well structured random placement of obstacles. I like having the restriction on how far you can turn like that so it becomes hard to avoid all rocks and the carrots were fun.
However, I think the game was a little too easy for much to long. I killed myself 7000m down because difficulty was increasing too slowly for it to feel challenging.
I think you forgot to put the nice music on repeat by the way, because about 5-6000m down it stopped.
If the drill could take damage it was very little happening to the meter. Drilling through the rocks I only heated up.
So to sum up. I think the game needs to escalate in difficulty faster but other than that, it was a really nice little game.
Really absolutely fantastic graphics, mood, music, humor, story.
The puzzles could have been a little more challenging, right now they felt more post hoc to make it a game and not just a scrolling story.
But really, the level of detail and the quality of the work makes my reservation more like a request. Please make a longer adventure game with branching story, and well worked puzzles. Please.
I'm on to you -- you like animals! I remember your bowerbirds from last time.
This vole has much better play-feel and nice animations going. I really liked the way the ground got bent. It did take me a little while to actually figure out the way the game worked, but while at it I discovered some minor things you could adjust:
First off, the leaf -- I'm not understanding it's purpose, and it get a bit weird that I can knock ground so it comes below the surface yet still I can't catch it.
Second, if I knock the surface (btw I want a thud-sound for that) in the very left end of the knock-able area I can make ground discontinuous, so you probably want to extend the flex-region at least one step outside the knock-able region.
Then, instead of the "go!" button, (because it is annoying to have a to switch between keyboard and mouse, make a special knock-area under the nut that will just dislodge it.
When the nut is rolling, there's a loose condition when nut doesn't reach/pass the hole which lacks logic for game to detect it (zero speed nut).
The win seems to be lacking as well.
Hope you enjoyed the comments, I sure enjoyed the game! And yeah, you and your son should put links in your descriptions to each other!
I wanted to be a mermaid scientist and massacre but this was great fun as well.
It would have been nice with a loading bar or something because it took some time to load for me and I wasn't sure if it was just stuck or still loading.
The dehydration seems to just lock the game if you run out, I got no death-screen and no chance to restart.
Also, since the game forces you to retry many times, I would opt for either not showing the intro every time or a more responsive/fast skip.
Had great fun though. Fantastic music and at least once I got pretty far (maybe 10 doors or so) before getting caught.
I had fun time above the surface though I never found a shield (didn't much seem to need one).
The boss fight needed more explaining. It took me some hits to realize it was hold D to charge and release D to do what exactly? I didn't figure out what to hit unfortunately. Which was a bit of a bummer.
Nice game otherwise. Smooth graphics and fun tower defense. I usually don't like them much at all, but this was good.
I like your colors, and the ink-feel of the back stuff.
I wasn't so happy with the yellow-dot controls reactions when I got out of the game-area (which happened a lot since the dot was close to the edge). There could have been a springy-feeling to the dot so it stopped going further away from shark when it reach the maxSharkJump amount.
It took me a while to realize it really wasn't a game about eating birds but eating boats -- point-wise too.
One way I think the game could improve a bit is if the shark would start its next jump from where it landed. That way, how you handle the boats becomes a bit different. You could simply have the shark wrap around the world on the x-axis. And on that matter, it was a bit frustrating to have the shark go out of screen and would have been nice to have the camera track the shark as it flew high up.
Finally, I didn't understand or see any meter for the number of jumps left. A nice way to show that could have been to have the sun set a little every jump made (or go by play-time).
(And btw, I like lengthy comments)
Really nice little game with many well-worked detail. Impressive for a compo to say the least.
Got stuck some levels down, but the first 2-3 were really nicely balanced in their difficulty.
Don't have so much to comment on, maybe giving the back-pack options some further love as they don't have the same standard as the rest of the game.
The graphics were nice and good use of the theme. Your phaser skills are obviously better than mine, but as a framework it is very promising.
For gameplay's sake I would consider having clouds at different height going at different speeds and in different directions. Also making the shadow less transparent so to make it clearer where it is. An animation of shady burning when exposed to sun.
If bottom layer of the dark-zone was patrolled by people with flashlights it would also up the gaming experience I think.
Maybe even a dark/light cycle on the above world where night implies safe roaming but fewer people or so?
Nice start, but some more work on the game-aspect so it's not only about running around in a circle.
First I thought the red things were supposed to be collected. They looked so shiny and nice. Quite soon realized my mistake. But before that it took me a while to figure out how to steer the ship at all (some quick symbol of the arrow-keys when entering steering mode would have been nice).
Once I got the hang of it was really fun. At first a little slow, (wanted to speed up drilling), then really hard and fast and no chance crowbaring out the fires. Got 150ish as score at least.
Impressive amounts of assets made in the 48h!
Nice game.
Fantastic audio and really nice kicks. I totally failed though, but it was a nice flesh-pealing animation in doing that!
Great little scratch game. Either I never managed to kick the bats or there could have been a nice little ouch-thing on the bats when hitting them. Either as sound effect or as animation on the bat (just as with the player).
Fun to play a kicking wiz, they so often just stay in the background and wave their wands and never get into fights for real.
Quite fun and challenging little game. The pace started out quite high and difficult and I was no where near escaping into freedom. So maybe have difficulty scale a little more forgivingly in the beginning?
I quite often had black tile glitches going back leaving me to just guessing. I don't know if that was a FF-thing.
As other pointed out, it sometimes got very hard / impossible to pass by some parts. One way to help with that and make the game more capturing could be to have obstacles fit the music. Like Bit Trip Runner or an inverted Guitar Hero. I'm not sure if that's possible with Phaser though.
The way the spaceship was digging its repairs I really liked!
The controls were OK, but the jump felt a little stressed (too much gravity or something). Else, I would really have liked air-pockets, some enemies and maybe some transmitter on the modules (as simple as ping-frequency showing distance but not direction).
Nice entry though.
I would really urge you to write a fuller instruction on how to play the game or even better a tutorial intro level, because I had to reload 4-5 times to just figure out how the building stops and connecting worked. The limit of lines per stop (even though there seems to be a bug in that number if you make a circular line). Never found any undo either.
I think I got it down, but I didn't find any speed up the pace at which the game runs so I don't know if I got any revenue unfortunately. There was no clear indication that my lines were in operation either.
Some dudes stopped walking, don't know if they simply were too upset. Clicking on those to the left side made their info come outside the screen.
I think this could become a fun game, but for me there was a bit too much troubleshooting to even get to playing. Unfortunately.
The instructions weren't so clear. Since shooting moved me I first thought I was supposed to shoot myself around. That actually kind of worked for a while. When realized I could move I went ahead and tested not clicking but holding mouse down and then it felt like I had the controls nailed down. So controls a bit more explaining.
The game itself had a lot of fun shooting, and very nice effects on that part. I never got a hang of any story or tactics other than kill everything and avoid getting stomped. So if there was more to it, maybe some explaining that too since it gets so hectic it's hard to learn what does what.
I went around some, got quite easily stuck in walls and with no strafing it made the navigation a bit hard. Did find a key and it opened a door, but either I didn't understand the premise or it needs some more explanation.
Solid game mechanics and everything, though my eyes hurt having protons out by the electrons. The scientist in me cries out that this is not at all the Bohr's model. That apart, a really solid game as I said.
Would really have enjoyed it if the mechanics was to balance the charges of the atoms and have the electrons in the correct layers so that they don't emit to dangerous photons or even electrons or fusion events. That would have been absolutely awesome.
I'm really hoping there's no way to win. Not for the sake of any pride but for the sake of the inevitable creepy aspects of how the actions you force me to make builds into a narration that says that as long as I have the magic string of phrases whichever girl on the subway will find me attractive. Like they are locks to pick. Only reflecting your actions, no volition on their part.
Nice graphics, style, effects and interactions with the texts.
I really would have liked to have the music in the menu inside the game. Maybe even coming from a single computer and nothing more. The red thing, could have been buzzing too. Some more stuff like that to set the mood stronger.
Then I might have enjoyed more running around investigating the computers. However, there too, I would really have like to have some easier way to get away from them. Like clicking left mouse button again. Moving the hand from the WASD to click Esc on each of them made me stop after 5.
I think you definitely have the blender-skills to do an interesting moody and slick-looking game. But the interactions, sound-scaping and game-logic need some love as well.
That's very nice art. Pity there wasn't more of a coherent story built through the exploration though to up the mood.
For me the speed (using FF on i7 computer) of moving that blob made it really really hard. The absorption needed to be quite perfect and many times I actually absorbed (got a point) but died at the same time. That I think also was part in having to stay and melt the falling thing for quite long before one was allowed to move on. Which was quite confusing since the score was already up. So that needs some tweaking.
Otherwise, fantastic graphics. Nice sound and sweet idea. Liked it and tried it a couple of times. Don't know if it speeds up, adds simultaneous drops and dual absorbers and other possibilities down the road, never got further than 5-10.
Games like this makes me ask myself why I'm never manage to make games like this! Fantastic. Replayed it and sent it to all my friends.
The only thing obviously lacking is MORE. Eternal amounts of more content. Branching absurdities. More.
Keep making games like this! Makes the rating experience so much more worth it.
For a first game in unity, you really nailed a lot of details with particle systems and such. It was quite fun swimming around, but a little too hard to direct the shark. Especially since it seemed like you would only green-eat when hitting prey head-on with the mouth. An alternative way of control worth testing would be to let the shark home in on the mouse/touch pointer. Nice for pads and such if you have those ambitions.
A bit clearer explanation about the importance of the mouth and that all things can hurt you would have been nice. In fact it felt a bit unfair that shark always took the hit if collided with any object (not with mouth). At least both should take damage. Or none. To make it fair.
Another thing to consider is to start out with fewer animals in the water and have them become attracted to the blood so game gets progressively harder yet can start at something relatively harmless (like you and a surfer and a gull).
Nice first game. Hope you liked the LD-experience and will do more.
The swampers quite often got into some kind of cult hugging and pyramid building. Made for excellent target practice and fun. I never managed any type of pest control strategy, it seemed as if shooting them only made the swamp produce more.
Never managed to light up all of the beacons, but it was fun running around in a really nicely built little world. The mini-map was really great as well.
It would have been more horrifying if the swampers were homing in a bit on the character too when they got close.
Impressive amounts of original assets made during the 48h. Nice work.
The game got a bit hard for me, so I can only speak about the very beginning of the first level. So I don't know much about the story that would unravel, but it looks promising.
Now instead to why it got hard, and some small things that would improve that.
First: controls. I would have liked an alternative controls so I could have arrows to run around and X and C for jump and shoot. In other words have controls for both left and right handed.
Second, jumping. If you add a short period after player actually leaves ground allowing jump as it will feel more "right" and along with what is expected in controls. Also relating to jumping. As the player looses jump-force when bouncing against a wall or whipping it is impossible to get two blocks up if jumping up against them. I haven't solved jumping in unity myself when doing unity games, but my best solution is to have 0 friction and let player-speed decrease manually by some decay-factor when not forward is pressed.
And finally, easier to start, to have more safe time to get to know the controls and enemies before getting killed over and over by them... it is kind of hardcore at the moment.
Really enjoyable, fantastic art and please extend this some more!
I got hit a little too often by the police, maybe have a slightly larger mini-map. When playing the game you know exactly the police patterns but we don't so it becomes a little too much trial and error since there's very little time to get away when spotting police on the mini-map.
Great game, give me more murder!
I'm sure this was the demise of the dinosaurs. One got a jet-pack and some religious epiphany and extinct they were.
It would have been nice if the game got progressively harder.
E.g. different sizes of dinos making them harder to push up or the vulcano becoming more and more demanding so you got less and less time.
The graphics was nice. Really loved the simple dinos. It would have been nice with some massive eruption at the end, some smoke all along and especially when tossing in. Maybe some splatter too.
The background would also help if it had some texture because now it is hard to know how high up you are or what speed you are traveling at.
The image got me thinking I was going to slime my way along the walls and be that green thing. So it was a bit confusing to start. Would really have enjoyed starting out as a simple slime mold, sliming along walls until finding the relic and then breaking free with control over gravity.
The gravity controlling was fun though.
I had some issues getting stuck along walls. First being able to slide past one block then sticking on next. Same thing but different effect when it was a slime-side. Being able to pass safely by first tile but death on second. It would have been nicer if the collision was on exact squares instead.
Got to second or third level where there was one room I just died 3-4 times due to collisions described above and then gave up. But the playing was nice up until that.
Still think it should start before gaining control over gravity sliming along walls.
Also the first help text, or what it was, was outside screen when starting and disappeared before I got to it.
440 was my best. Took a little while to get used to the swan-control but it was surprisingly fun once I figured it out.
I would guess if something be added it would be soundtrack and giving the foods graphics a bit more love, water surface rippling effects so food doesn't simply appear out of nowhere, some shakes and the general stuff to spice it up even some more.
There's nothing like an on-line leader board either to get peoples attention.
Nice puzzle script, got a couple of levels into the game, but got a bit bummed when I had played a on the second of the small screen-shots and only had the last bubble to transport to get the second chest onboard. There had been no explaining of how bubbles pass through the red-white things. So either have player fail by bubble passing through red-white early on the first level it is used or clearly show how all objects interact.
I happened to double-step a few times, but I guess that's up to puzzle-script and not so much you can do about.
Fun experience. Might have tried it all way through if not for that mishap.
I agree with the others in that the strategy element is a little too weak. If you added e.g. foods and have hunger as a currency and allow player to rest for hp but become hungry over time then that would be solved without adding anything more than a separate rest button. Maybe also a climb up button if one got ahead of oneself.
Other than the, well polished and nice.
Lovely graphics, nice little pod with fun water drilling motion. But I never really understood the controls nor the O2 mechanics. I found it easiest to continue below the surface without O2 and hard while having O2. It also ran out so very quickly.
Air-pockets, sharks and more of that to make it into a full game. But really nice start.
As a yeast researcher I had to try this, but I'm not going to comment about the sciency reservations I have -- after all it is quite hard to make a game where the protagonist have no volatile motion.
I didn't really get how score vs alcohol worked, wasn't alcohol the score? And I never really saw the health of my yeast after digesting some of that ethanol.
Other than that, a simple and quite fun little game.
The art was really nice, the controls were hard with mouse. The bubbles were not so cooperative in following my lead so I had to fight a lot to get the stuff growing. Actually on that point. The introduction was too simple so that it took me a bit too long to understand what I was supposed to be doing when the real level came. And that level was a little too long for the first level. It would be nice to break it into shorter pieces so that one feels progress and achievement more.
Don't get me wrong, I played for quite a while and it was a nice experience. It just feels like there are some very minor tweaks that would make it much more enjoyable.
That the stones can shadow the seed pocked requirements is also a minor thing that may be better changed around some.
Great music. And fun game.
I would have liked the first time to say something like "DIG = Space" or so and "BUY = Space".
I would also have liked the patrol to randomly start with a safe distance and to have rounded corners on the beachers colliders so I didn't get stuck as much.
Then I might have gotten really stuck.
It also feels like the score maybe shouldn't be just money but intoxication * money or something. Or just sunburn. In fact that would be cool. Have the dude remove shirt after some drinks to increase burn and anger of patrol.
Really fun and well made game. On second try I actually won.
A graphics, computing thing: When going up from the bottom, the bubbles move faster where they really should go slower since the diver is going in the same direction as the bubbles.
Of course, it would have been interesting to have a oxygen meter and more creatures, jellies doing more of a vertical swim as an example.
But really, as an arcade type of game the most needed feature would be more levels I suppose. I would opt for the girl doing the second dive to not just have her standing there as some trophy, but to sum up I really enjoyed the game. Nice entry.
Meta is great! It took me a while before I got to place my own marker. I don't know why it failed the first time around. And it was sort of hard when there were so many other markers around... Really enjoyable gamification of rating and commenting on games. It would have been nice to have some stats about percent of world covered and percent of games played. Possibly also percent of markers seen within the fog of war of the games you've played.
Nice game! I even made it through winning against the dual sword guy. Rare thing to actually play a LD-entry to the end. The germ-looking enemies were my favorite and if anything, having the entire setting of the sleep-mode be more disease-themed would have been great.
Great style and mood for and smart puzzle-platformer. The one thing that pulled down the experience was the lack of control when jumping. It was too easy to miss the intended landing spot and it didn't feel like that complexity was really suitable. So I would suggest giving the player better control while in the air as the main point to improve.
Other than that is a really promising game.
Great idea for cross-over between to classic games. I had very little chance against the computer AI but that's really more cred to you for programming a good one. It feels like a great foundation to build a full game on.
I clearly don't rock at conversations, but that wasn't much news for me. Nice game. I managed to loose a lot and get negative scores, so I must have been missing some key features or I am to slow at the moment to have my attention divided between all the people drifting away.
It is a good start. I really like the idea of having a weapon that will also hurt you. That could definitely be explored with some more hours of devtime. Death didn't reset the game for me, but I suppose that might not be news. The graphics were nice, though I would have favored a more zoomed in view.
I didn't get the timer part but this was surely a unique and interestingly narrated entry! The space for selecting door was a little unintuitive (why not just collision?). That aside, this is the most inspiring game I've played so far.
Though I had no clue how to actually win, I had a blast just flying around.
I liked the style of the game a lot and tried a couple of times getting very low scores. But it was fun. You could imagine having the play-field smaller and simpler and the data package move slower in the beginning and then at each turn dynamically up one of the two. (Or maybe the game had that and I just never managed to get anywhere).
They style of the game is really promising and I love the little characters movements. So it is a pity you didn't get further into the possibilities of things to do in the game. But it is really promising in style so keep at it!
Most of the art was absolutely brilliant and the puzzles were challenging too. I enjoyed playing, but would probably have stayed longer if there was a reload current level button. And less problematic, but still a bit annoying: that levels didn't progress automatically upon completion.
Graphics-wise everything was so slick and smooth, so I was a little surprised that movement between tiles wasn't animated (especially when pushing).
Other than that. A really nice game.
First couple of rounds I was sure I would never get better than a score of two. Then all of a sudden I got three and from there it was a small step to 30.
I like the fracturing of the asteroids and all the mess the shards make. The glow on your planet's shards when you die.
One thing that could have been nice would have been to have the star not rotate as fixed around one of its arms. Maybe also to have stars disappear if player takes too long before collecting them. (Look at me suggesting making the game harder)
I did like the little fellows moving around the second level and the music in the intro. But. The main issue here, to me, is that the size of the levels in comparison to the effects and wtf-moments and general stuff the player encounters. The intro is also really quite long without being clear it is a cut-scene. If I hadn't happened to see that comment I would have though the game broken and shut off there. I like strange games, but this one simply didn't work for me and it wasn't for its strange parts.
Really nice and hard entry! Lots of good work on the effects, shakes and though-through style of the game. Got a couple of waves down, but playing with touch-pad that was about as far I deemed possible. I'm hard pressed to come up with something constructive other than praise, but one possible thing that might make it more fun would be if one could re-up the health. Either by low chance spawning hearts from killed aliens or by long cool down health station.
I also get the Java Exception
It was a bit hard to know what I could pick up to gain fuel and when I was able to place turrets. For the latter it would have been nice with some indicator showing when I had one ready. If I could pick up all stuff from the buildings, then the collisions need to be a bit more forgiving.
Other than that, it was a nice defense game with good graphics and music.
As many others say, great audio and graphics. It was a bit short to get immersed in it fully the part that it was, was really great.
Absolutely stunning entry. I'm glad to have tried it out. Don't have anything more constructive to say than: keep it up! Maybe try implementing controls that work on mobile and release it?
A pity, well those that have a different shade than the others are the ones that bridge the worlds. Maybe it got a little too hard too early.
Yeah lvl5 requires some daring, it is quite possible (just did it with 25 shards left)
@43iscoding that was surprising to hear, most other players seem to be having a lot of issues with even the early levels and I know the later ones e.g. lvl15 I find quite hard myself.
I've continued development in secret (hopefully) adhering to all those very true critiques so far gotten. The one thing that unfortunately is quite hard to do anything about given javascript is the smoothness of the game, I think I'd have to rewrite it somewhere more efficient.
@OFF: You have some new very valid points in the conflicts between different aspects of the game not working towards the same goal. If I decided to redo the game I would probably do it isometric (was thinking of it when I scribbled the tiles), smooth and more alive with low-key effects. But as always with LD, it was time that caused it to become what it became. The jumpyness from inefficient code hogging the computer resources, a little worked story and thus little coherence in the aesthetics.
@Cake&Code I guess I need check some benchmarking tools for since this little beetle almost requires an i7-cpu to run smooth. I'll google around some, but any tip is welcome.
@Oddly Shaped Pixels: I did some seriously bad feedback which made (almost) everyone miss that the shards in the lower right corner are ticking down and when you run out of them, you die. So the game is also a game of speed, not only to outrun the enemies. I have fixed that though in an updated version. But I'm not a fan of posting post-jams while voting is still going on, but I'll do that as soon as its over.
The game won't fully download for me, gets stuck on the very last bytes (windows version).
I finally got it downloaded when I switched to chrome (tried twice on ff with no luck).
Really nice low-poly style of the game. I enjoyed walking around and listening in. But I never managed to pick anything up. So something I must have missed.
I would have opted for Enter or Space or even X to start playing the game, was about to give up when I figured Esc was start.
Great graphics, fantastic structure for a puzzle platformer and really fun and smooth playing. That said, one thing felt like a real pity and shadowed the experience. You set out with a nice symmetrical love scenario. My problem is the gender biases and the heteronormativity. Especially in the first couple of levels the female character lack agency, especially on level two when she is put in a pit. For all or most levels you start out as the blue guy. None of this is really inherent in your symmetrical premise. Rather it is completely unnecessary. Don't get me wrong. This was a really good game, and I rated it high in general.
My three step suggestion program:
1. Randomize which character gets placed in which position.
2. For each character, instead randomize independently if it is blue or pink. Which would give a 25% B-B 25% P-P and 50% B-P/P-B outcome.
3. Randomize all character decorations not only color independent of the other decorations. Specifically, have the eye-lashes equally probable on blue as on pink.
Quite fun space-bussing. The one thing I would consider is to not repeat info when replaying. Or have a toggle info off set to true when replaying. Might also keep the info really short (players hate to read, I've learned). Else it was quite nice.
It seemed as an interesting concept but the game was generally too hard for me. I would suggest either having easier initial level or allow player to accumulate damage when hitting the green areas rather than instant death.
Really really nice entry. I didn't quite get what was the condition for chain-breakage. So maybe some indicator on the chain to show the forces. That would assist the player in learning to avoid breaking the chain.
Other than that, a really great beginnings on the audio (as far as I got to hear), as well as fantastic juice and visuals in being brought into the game.
The way the chain almost looks like those cheap plastic toy-chains just heightened the focus on its fragility in a nice way.
Great, I must send this to a lice-researcher I know. The concept/method of fighting wasn't super clear, but I enjoyed just being a lice enough that it didn't matter that I probably did some stupid decisions.
I had a great time playing it. Simple enough what to do and such. The character control could need some more workings. Especially fixing cursor lock (http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Screen-lockCursor.html), but also the jumping was a bit floaty and it was hard to predict where one would land. These are details though. I really liked jumping around and the flipping of gravity.
Wonderful graphics, music, effects. Wonderful most of it.
I did however have a problem with <space> not seeming to activate the lever, so I got stuck there, or if it did activate it, I never noticed and couldn't jump the distance.
A pity since I was enjoying myself.
I must admit I was a little disappointed that there was no little critter as main character, but after that disappointment it seems like a really nice game to port for touch device suitable from quite young age. One way of tuning the difficulty would be if aliens only showed where they wanted to go for a brief time. There were also some dialogs that never got removed.
To sum up, a really nice start for a game!
I like the premise, but I think it would do better with the arrows being turnable in both directions, having the creatures start in more varied locations and most of all having the arrows shift orientation at will every so often. Now I just locked the cute and the evil on a row and had my self trapped between a pair or -> <- while feeding on the carrots.
The music was really good, and it was easy enough to understand how to play.
I must say this is impressive, the ambition, story, voice acting -- the whole deal. And it is a really good start. I only wish the nodding worked much more smoothly. I was frantically trying up-down and side-to-side but several times they got me wrong and many times they didn't notice my actions. So helping the user see what answer the user is currently giving according to the game as well as making the game better at understanding the user is desperately needed.
I played it a while but even though I read the instructions I didn't quite get what I was supposed to do. So some sort of illustrated instructions would have been helpful.
I really liked the way the character was walking but I simply did not understand what to do / how to navigate the ship.
Good game.
I was about to quit because jumping was so silly when I discovered that it is doable on the other mode. Some in-game assistance to that would have been nice.
The controls were very counter-intuitive on my keyboard. I've never heard of shooting on shift niether using B and V. I would opt for allowing people to set the controls themselves and use standard keys for English keyboards (note: I don't even have English keyboard myself, but still think it is the right thing to do).
It took a while before I got that (hopefully) there was one point of interaction and the other three things happening when people were comming were helps to make a good decision.
It would have been nice if the speed at which poeple were arriving increased with the rage.
Else a nice game. Didn't get to win though. Maybe my morals are different than Yond's...
I tried quite a few times and only got about 1k in score. So since my reflexes aren't lightening fast, I would have liked it to be a little easier in the beginning. Quite often there were bars I though I could pass under but they just barely hit me (so maybe be a little friendlier with the collisions).
If you toss in something like speed, so that the stuff keeps coming faster and faster you would really have a game that would have me destroying my spacebar.
I like how your games develop. This time it was much easier to understand what the objectives were. The double jump mechanism on the second level was really evil but after some tries I got so good I even managed to jump over the goal and get a bit lost at the far right side of the screen. So if I'd give you an advice, it would be to draw a clear goal-zone for each level. But that's a minor thing, it was a really good game.
It was interesting to play but I didn't really grasp how to progress in a meaningful way. Tried to catch a fly but without success. It would probably benefit from having a start where it's less hard to die and the player would get a sense of objectives and how to play.
I think this could be an absolutely great and addictive game, and for most parts it is already fantastic. But the controls, unfortunately the difficulty they add just takes all the joy away. I would opt for other type of control like click to place block, mouse scroll to change what type of block that lastly placed block is or other way around, first select block and then place it.
Really like the game, completed 4 levels but "space 1" I gave up. I needed one hint, but that was because I didn't realize the numbers next to the levels also indicated keys I should press. Maybe the game could track if the player has used the number-trick and if not and died 3 times on "Ice 1" then have a nice little arrow point out that this would be a good time to start using the numbers.
It took me a little while to get started but once I realized it was a twist on mastermind and that the appearing features were usable (the last was the largest obstacle) it was really quite nice. I played solo, and nothing happened once I had solved all the four features possible solving, so if there was more to it, it should probably be made clear and if that was the end, a "Congratulations" would have been nice.
Anyhow, a really great entry and a great start for a larger game.
I had fun flapping around and helping the eco-system. It is a good start for something that could become an interesting mechanic given more variation in the landscapes and the landscape reacting the cross-fertilization job the player is doing.
Really cool idea, though a bit annoying to have the two games in separate windows (focus toggling and simply clicking outside quite a few times takes away some joy). That aside, it is a really nice idea to have a puzzle guide the stage-transitions. One very minor detail: I think the black arrow for the yellow tile is in the wrong spot on the map in the blue world.
I managed to get three letters out of the six and passed by some letter places without figuring out how they worked (e.g. red world (first alt image above). Also didn't get the yellow world. The white/black world had some really smart mechanics to it, really liked that.
So, since I mostly mentioned what I didn't get, to sum up:
This is definitely among the top 3 best games I've played so far.
Nice puzzle, it took me a while but finally I think I connected them all. Nothing happened then, but maybe that was the bug you talked about. Liked the experience. Maybe add some more effects when connecting two pieces and a soundtrack.
It was a nice game. The one thing that was slightly confusing at first was that connection/planet was not lost until noise-wave had reached the planet's center. I would guess that as soon as touching is what most would expect.
That apart. I got some way and then I got stuck. Nice game though.
Really nice style. And interesting mechanics. I would have liked shorter levels to start with so that failing didn't come with such a big cost. I did enjoy my failings though.
Fantastic visuals, but I would really have wanted to be able to run around faster. Climbing that colored ramp too for ever. Which was a pitty, because I would really have enjoyed it if the running was faster.
I like the take on the theme. I was toying with that type of interpretation myself before opting for a different path. The ecosystem was really robust, which made the game play itself for a great while. I got to 11 species and had very little trouble keeping them in line. Then I decided that grass would rule it all, trying to get it to overshoot. But I never managed how much I tried. After that I got rid of all animals, which was a challenge. And they kept popping back. So I decided to KILL ALL LIFE. Which was really the most challenging and game-wise interesting way of playing it. Doesn't work too well as a moral in the story though, but clicking to keep ants at max, spiders at minimum and cutting down all plants was really fun. (And I succeeded, totally destroying the ecosystem.)
Really nice game with a simple idea, great narration and really not so much to comment on/suggest. I would maybe opt for some audio and/or visual effects when bouncing the balls as well as hitting obstacles.
Really great game.
This was a quite nice and relaxing experience. I played until the 128* level. I figured it would take a whole lot of time to complete. So if there is something, I would suggest not using $-target as much as the frequency of railroad problems to increase the difficulty.
Else it was, as I said a nice relaxing experience.
After a first miserable attempt I managed to win. Towards the end it was a bit tedious to eliminate the last few enemy worlds, so I would suggest win condition to be at a slightly lower percentage. Else, I really enjoyed playing it.
It was a quite nice parallel worlds jumping back and forth, but I really got confused when the combination of extra-jumping and world switching. One thing that could help would be to make the collision detection on the extra jump a little friendlier, so that it only requires touching it. Else a really nice little game.
Pigs rule. The detail and work put into this game is absolutely mind-boggling. The planet that seems so little was surprisingly large. I don't have much to say, but that the pigs tended to herd into a nasty mob, which in part made it easy if I just kept running but also hard if you happened to run into them.
Really nice puzzle game. I got a few levels in the goal was really caged in by the orange blocks and I couldn't figure out how to use the one dude that was there. The way to play was easy enough to understand, though it wasn't entirely clear why the low dark bars would free you from possessing a human. I'd loved to have seen more levels where the elements of possessing and getting out of possessing along with box pushing were woven together in a smart way. Great beginning of a really nice game. Should work with touch as well...
Really nice game. The issue of where to focus attention was really interesting. As long as one kept it to the left panel it was sort of easy, but then it got hard quick.
Though I was really bad at UFO control I had quite fun playing around with it. Used arrows instead of WASD, which might be good to point out that they work too.
Fantastic concept game. To keep the interest there could have been some objective after collecting all the stuff on your noodle/self or some progression from bowl to bowl. But highly enjoyed swimming around for a while.
Absolutely mindblowing graphics! And the way the ship/beast moved in reaction to the controls equally fantastic.
Now my complaint would be something very rare on LD:s, it seemed too easy. I flew for a long time and just hitting things to see how death looked and it took me a good while to die. I was about to give up on death. So my suggestion would be to vamp up the difficulty a notch or two and also add a clear display how far the player have progressed (either as part of stage if such exist or else just a time survived).
To sum up, a really stunning game, and a great starting point to build upon!
I agree with the others that the controls were a little rough, especially the jumping often lead to bouncing around more than once. There was also a fellow looking just like the guy I was controlling a bit to the right.
But it is a good beginning, just fix nicer controls and a count-down on the stars.
I got to level 10 and it was really challenging and great fun with a superb and distinct interpretation of the theme. Some quirks to the game that would make it much better:
* Disallow placement of new circles while level is loading and before markers are visible
* Have a hover-explanation of the markers in case one forgets.
* Have a counter that says how many circles you have on the level
* Have a retry-button so one can quickly reset when one realizes the failure.
The game is one of my favorites so far this LD, so don't take the comments the wrong way.
Most levels difficulty was also realized by the X-marked things. It would have been interesting to have other logical operators, especially <difference>. It would make the level design much more flexible and difficulty even more interesting.
Hope you continue development and you should definitely do a mobile/touch game of this!
First time I didn't get that whatever world I was on would attract other worlds. Plus, I was unlucky that it was a rather abandoned place without neighbors. I hit space and flew off thinking it might work, but nope. It took quite a while too before I hit the edge of space. So I would recommend having some limited oxygen supply or so when out in space so you can't space-travel that far.
Second try, my initial place was more suitable and that made it much more intuitive and fun to play. So besides that first run experience, a really nice game!
I love the graphics, and the controls we easy enough. It was hard though. Hard enough only jumping correct when one side needed jumping and impossible for me when both needed attention. But I enjoyed it as far as I got. I would consider giving them a little larger jump-margin to make it easer for the player or have very clear jump queues in the music for each side.
Never fought with eyebrows before. Nice game. The humanoids were really funny looking with a silly gate. I might have opted for making the controls a little easier, e.g. auto-target closest one. Else a nice entry.
The controls had an interesting floaty feeling, which also made it really hard to be precise. It took me 5 - 10 times before I managed to collect all stars on the first level, but getting the the end of the level... not a chance. So the game is really quite a bit too hard in the beginning if you ask me. It was very fun playing, but the instant death and the complexity of the moving enemies patterns on the first level... hope you make a more forgiving version in the future.
Interesting concept of having players re-write a famous book under very disturbing and stressful circumstances. Would be really interesting if it was a coop-games where you get a random start position in the book and try to type as far as possible and the objective is a joint re-write of the book. To connect with the content of the book I would have opted for the disturbing effects to be more psychedelic and music too.
Really nice idea though.
Superbly executed game. All aspects really well worked. Rare to such a game in LD. I'm very happy to have played it. It didn't matter that it was quite short. To actually get to complete one or two games is truly rewarding too. I usually find something to complain about but I don't feel like there was anything, except maybe a re-play button and some easter egg thing on the final screen...
I really enjoyed the visuals and the controls were nice, but I never got anywhere near connecting my planet to one of the others. Quite a few enemies need killing to do that. So I would suggest having a little easier start, maybe some hearts one can kill for life-refill?
Interesting idea, but really hard to play. Kept hitting the black holes. I would suggest making the first level be much easier with fewer obstacles and shorter distance to travel.
I would have really liked it if when you have to triceratops they couldn't fit on the same side of some obstacles so you had to push both left and right to split them up.
A solid game. Great job
Really fantastic game! I got stuck on lvl18... couldn't figure out how to include one of the mites in the lower right. Feels much Totoro-inspired in the mites in a good way. I'd don't have much I critique other than getting stuck on that level :) A favorite so far!
Quite nice lunar landing game. I liked the music, when it played but it felt a little empty at times when it was not playing. It could definitely become something with a little more effects that help give you the feeling of swooshing through space and planets having more individual character. It is a good start though!
Really nice game and some serious character animations done for a jam! I really like you could hold and shoot, but it was a bit hard to see the shots, and maybe they should have been themed to fit with the snowmen. But that's really a minor detail.
What made me give up was that the box shoving felt unnecessarily difficult. I would have opted for a much wider box collider that only collided with the boxes one were supposed to push around.
Other than that, a really good game.
Flying a mosquito was awesome. It was a bit hard to get a grip on the position of the mosquito and direction of flight in relation to the humans. Part of it may have been that I never use inverted Y axis on mouse... so I would recommend adding the ability to toggle that. I also suppose the way the camera moved around is optimized for VR?
I liked the panic screams and the work on the graphics is really great.
Great game, really fantastic and nice use of those pro effects too. I never did manage the first wave but I had fun dying and though I was failing miserably I was having fun. Music was really superb in combination with the aesthetics and mood.
Things to consider:
Esc to quit the game.
Have the menu/introduction disappear with mouse click or add instructions on what button to click
Add a recharge meter under the hexabot for the blast.
Maybe add some repair kits as well for us less talented players.
Very nice game indeed. Played it for quite a while, didn't get to the end of translating everything but it was a really nice combo of space flight and communications. Mood just fantastic and in perfect tune with the sounds and music. Character animations were also very cute.
In the beginning it took me a while to realize what was buttons and that things actually happened when I clicked stuff. If there was a tint effect on hover or similar it would have helped a lot. For changing the aim when clicking planet, a clear visual feedback on that the aim was changing would have been nice too.
Equally it took me some tries to understand the language rune system. That I think could have been solved by a vertical etching running through each column and then bending to the position in the rune display relevant for that column.
I don't know if the coords meant anything. I took them as mostly atmospheric, and nice as such. So if they were important, maybe they need to clearer indication of their use.
I very much enjoyed the game, so I hope you take the comments the right way. I've been yearning for good explorative and non-fighting focused space games. Being an interplanitary messenger rather than just space mining astorids in EVE might be on the track of what I was truly longing for...
I like the idea of the leaver, and the attempt to fit an entire rpg in a weekend.
I think though that you needed more space for the "And..." or maybe even better remove it entirely and have the and stuff attached to the end of fight etc in the main area.
A health bar would have been great and some way to play it smart and recuperate health. Now it was a bit too random and sudden death for me to be able to progress in any serious manner.
Plus one for three genders.
Amazing work on graphics and nice type of gameplay but I didn't really get the strategy and how to use my defense UI. I completed the first two levels without a clue about what I was doing. So if you would consider further development I would suggesting introducing fewer items in the first levels and maybe some hover info about each as you mouse over. Great use of theme though and it really seems to be a solid entry with loads of care put into detail. Something few of us ever manage to do within the confines of these few hours.
Fantastic graphics and sounds. The controls took me a while to figure out, especially since the controls settings in game seems not have related to how I was to control the game. So I think that could ave been clearer when the game started. Like the little bug saying "click on me" or something.
The swarming was really neat too, unfortunately the game crashed after a while without much information about what was wrong. Just the standard Windows thing about it having stopped working.
The gameplay is really interesting though, but I think picking up all bug pieces should be optional and that after killing the last bug it should just give 2-3 seconds until level stops.
Hehe that sure was some programmer art! It was fun playing though. Tried quite a few times until I finally got to 165. It really was quite a fun concept.
Since it's a really fast game where you have to retry a lot of times, I would not have a specific start button but click anywhere to restart feature. Keep the players playing!
I would also consider making the hit circle for the ball (not for colliding with object but registering the force) about 1.5x the actual size of the ball for it to be more friendly. To elevate difficulty as the level progresses, just decrease the size of the ball. Make the room smaller, add another loop or a ball bouncer. You could also play with physics dynamically, rotate the room with the camera a bit so that the player doesn't see the rotation happening.
Then, the loop, I'd consider randomizing where one the x axis it starts. It also was a bit friendly in giving point even if the ball didn't pass through, so maybe place a trigger on either side, well separated and require it to enter one, then both, then only the other.
I can imagine this to be perfect for touch interaction. With some visual feedback on where the force press appeared. Camera shake when ball is bouncing against walls and so on. Get yourself someone to do the graphics, add some music and work on difficulty progression and that juice and I think this could be a great game.
Nice execution of classic bejeweled type game. I think all parts, music, graphics and game play came together nicely.
I, of course, got really stressed quite soon and never obtained any great score, but one thing (I think) I noticed was that the balls seemed more and more reluctant to register my clicks the harder the game got. I don't know if that was by design, if it was just my stress speaking or some quirk of having more balls in play. If it was meant to get harder, maybe visually display the shrinking hit area on the balls.
Also, maybe due stress, I never figured you if the magic balls were surprise balls that you couldn't know what they'd produce or if there was some way of being smart about them. If the latter, maybe have a ? on them or something...
Very nice little odd adventure. It would have been disturbing with the floaty controls and not too perfect collisions (e.g. turning around close to wall) if it had not been for the trippy plot. In fact, the game might even have benefited by even weirder way of walking.
Thing to consider:
The proximity to the radio to be able to interact with it was rather short, I was about to give up before I walked right up next to it. Volume could be cranked up quite a bit.
Upon completion it would have been nice with something clearly happing on the screen. Maybe actually a game like pong appearing.
More random stuff throughout the world that didn't aim towards completing the game. Like ears that wouldn't listen, some rude bears and so on. Some of them with options in the interactions, like the radio. The option don't need to mean anything. Just more stuff to explore and experience to distract away from the quite linear and straight story.
Much fun farming simulator cow tower defense or what exactly the classification of this game should be. I'm not very good at that type of 4D aiming and not very good at the wave defense games either, so the fact that I managed to survive quite long (according to my book) and still feel challenged means it had a great difficulty progression. I didn't get much time over to feed or shelter the cows, but I suppose that was sort of the balance you were aiming at.
After a while I noticed that the cows had levels and that it actually mattered. So I would suggest having a clearer visual feedback on cow level up and at least for me it would have helped to give the player a breather by a short slow motion passage as that happened.
If I got it right, the cows would die if they got pushed out in that black void. If would have been nice with some animation for when that happened (maybe there was one but I was too focused on the remainder of my herd). And maybe hurting cows could have a "Moo" speech bubble or something to assist player in where the most pressing trouble is.
All in all a very nice game to play!
Controls:
We almost didn't manage to coax the physics to allow the reversal of direction at all and we had to use this flip mechanic as a desperate measure to get it all to work. We completely agree that they're... bad.
OSX controls:
Haha shows how little I know about mac. You should be able to set the firing button at start up though. I'll try and make a new build to fix it.
I think I got to the end of this tread mill story, but it is hard to know. I found it really enjoyable and interesting to play through. The music effect was very nice too. If it was playing in reverse going backward it would have been fantastic.
It would have been great if the game was a bit more forgiving for when it was allowed to jump and not. On the other hand it sort of fed into the story that it was a bit awkward.
If you had allowed for voting I would have like this in several categories. As I said on twitter some days back, I think this looping of platforms could be really good mechanic if one wanted to make a more typical skill based game. There are so may of those though, so I was rather happy noticing that this was not.
I like this game a lot. The minimal music along with the graphics was a perfect combo. For some reason the music and sounds went away after a while though, but the fact that I managed to make it to the second floor of a game like this. I usually die instantly means that you balanced the difficulty in a very good way. And that takes a lot of skill.
One thing what was a little odd to me was that it seemed like it was OK to collide with the plus shaped enemies. And it was really hard to read in the menu and introduction. Other than that, a really solid entry.
It was a really hard game. It is however OK that it is. I would put it in the fold of flappy bird-likes, if there is such a type of games. They should be hard, and have controls that are all but easy to handle. Maybe you should try and port it to phone and use the gyro as control...
I got to 5, and I'm going to be happy with that.
I liked that thorough simple esthetics's.
Fantastic graphics and a great idea. My donut was clearly spinning out of control quite fast though, partly because it was rather hard remembering what did what as well as even though I was spamming D, I failed to remove weeds fast enough.
I think having some UI at the top or bottom with icons and keyboard buttons would be good.
For the weeds and probably seeds as well, I think the hit boxes should be larger, maybe 1.5 or even 2x the sixe of the sprites. Else it become too hard way to fast. At least for me.
But all in all, I found this a really interesting idea and great artwork.
Wow that game demanded full concentration. I love the animations on the snowmen, in fact, the entire game has seriously well worked graphics. I got to nine twice and that I'm going to consider a feat.
Things I would consider:
It felt like the random progression of flakes was a bit too random and hence evil. At least for being so early on in the game. What I mean is that if felt like it could happen that there came two flakes of the same color to close in time but distant in space that they'd be impossible to collect. That's not good, it's important to keep the illusion of that it's the player's fault. So I'd put some restriction on that.
I would consider starting with three snowmen or even two and introduce the others as the player progresses.
I think I got a bug, because when replaying some snowmen wanted to run to the right without me pushing that button and they continued until I pushed right.
Then finally, to make this game as addictive as it could be, I think it needs a catchy tune.
I think this was a really great entry, so hope you take these comments the right way. And I think you could make it work with touch controls *wink* *wink* (tap to select and swipe to move).
I like the simple controls yet very challenging game. The graphics were nice and the dizziness effect really suitable. It's really hard to stop spinning once you've started though.
Some potential things to consider:
Warping around screen if you fly out of it or some visual warning when you are approaching one edge, like a fuzzy red flash along that edge.
It could have been cool to have a radar/sonar that indicated closeness to object. Even better if there was a soundtrack and the music became hectic as object approached.
On complaint, or something I didn't understand:
The score said something like 4-5k but gamejolt didn't show any high score for me...
And to sum up. Sweet and well worked game.
Got to about 15-16 but had a blast playing. Really quite fantastic and extremely well executed game. Music, graphics, controls all came together more or less perfectly. I try priding myself in these comments to have some constructive critique, but it is a bit hard this time around. There's not much I would consider changing or tweaking...
If anything, I failed to understand the controls the first two times around, but since the game was so quick at restart it didn't really matter. You could test having the first two passes in a slight slow motion. Or even have the whole tune be one of those that increase in speed over time. Might be so now, but that I didn't get far enough.
The second thing I came to think of, though it clearly wasn't an issue for me was that the paths existing now seems to be rather few. It could be possible to add 360 turn around and some other paths while still keeping the style, width of path and general resolution of the game.
Full starts all way through.
Yep, really, really great. As usual. I've never quite seen a game like this. Graphics well much more perfect than can be expected in a jam. I did however give up quite soon because the combination of the screen distortion and quite demanding controls to start with... I simply fell at the same place too many times. By demanding controls I mean that they didn't give much air control to adjust a bad jump. I'm not sure, but maybe also a bit unforgiving in that it took the bird a little bit to stop the momentum. I mean, that's how it should be, but with the distortion it got a bit too much for me. I didn't really agree with the twigs either. I managed to build one nest but couldn't manage the second or failed to remember how to pick up twigs. Could be just me, but maybe twig introduction could be a bit clearer...or a friendly help for recap for us forgetful.
The whole idea and how to fit a lot of content onto one screen (though to be honest the mechanic would work fine even if everything didn't fit on the screen) was just brilliant.
I generally suck at tower defenses but I could manage this one. That I found very nice. The graphics were nice and it was all rather intuitive.
Some thoughts:
The green color for the cost was really hard to read. It would also have been really nice if one got a visual feedback on the icons for which one affords. Also, if I'm not mistaken they don't come in cost order, which was a bit confusing.
It would have been great with some feedback on the health of the base.
When I got to install the most costly defense the enemies died by one shot which made me wonder what happened as I didn't get to see that I hit them. Of course, adding some shooting animations for all defense systems would help, but also adding an explosion on all killed enemies would have been great.
Also, when I got to that stage of protection the game sort of played itself, which is to say that the later waves need to have harder enemies to keep the game interesting.
But it is a great start and hope you are happy with your game.
I left the game play itself up to wave 120 something and if you get more than 99 waves the wave number falls outside the screen. Also if you put the deadliest guns along the upper left edge you never get to see the enemies...so maybe a safe zone for enemies and right adjusted wave number text...
I get dll error, so unfortunately I can't test your game. Let me know if you get a fix on that.
I was also quite lost with the way the controls worked. I tried three times with little luck really understanding the game mechanic. If I understood it correctly, the color coding explained how I should interact with the ppl. I think it would have been easier to understand if each color type had a very clear effect once one had clicked on them and that the effect would give me a clear understanding of what just happened. Now, all I got to was click on red. But that didn't really help me understand how to succeed.
The graphics was great and the sounds fit really well and made a very good mood for the game.
Great music! I liked the little cat too. Sometimes it felt as it had two heads when moving through the dark areas. I think those dark areas need to be much less dark so that you can see the area around you. Maybe have a light source over the cat or something.
The game was quite too hard for me, got to 1k as a record. So I think the mines and such were too many, at least in the beginning.
Never saw any recharge either, so I think the disco floors should recharge health much faster and as a counter effect they could themselves have a timeout so that they go dark after a while and you have to get to the next floor. That would also better justify the whole reason for moving around. Top that off with some killer cat dance moves if player stands still on a dance floor.
Difficulty can be successively increased with denser enemy spawns the longer the cat survives.
I think that could make for an interesting dynamics. Good start for a game though.
I didn't really understand the animals' instructions, I found some warm spots, but I suppose those were not the targets. Basically it is way to hard first level, how to interpret the characters need to be introduced with very easy mazes before something as complex as 19x19.
That thumping sound that comes (also now when writing since web version is embedded) is really quite horrible, I'm sorry to say, and what it is supposed to indicate is all but clear.
From the, what I think are brain displays of the cat and the dog, I guessed I should listen more to the lazy cat, but it too was not agreeing with itself, so even though I tried to use the hints of the animals, I was basically just pushing different directions. Maybe the parrot should say things like "Bad" and "Good" instead of "Cold" depending on what how good the player's move was.
Deadly hard but fun and that's a great lot of game fit into one screen and one Ludum weekend. I never did rescue the pet but I had fun running around getting slain. It was great that it was so easy gaining levels. And great that the game allowed for click and hold.
One thing you could try is to give the character some awareness of where enemies, potions and coins are on the map in the area close to the player and visual feedback on picking up the the trail. Because I was at least a bit too stressed to read the thing about the scent.
Some suitable music on top of everything at you have a very good game.
I think I never played a surveillance camera before, and I think that is a neat idea. Given the extremely short time you spent making this game it is really impressive. I think it would have been good to have put a light source in the scene though and just some different colors on the materials, because it took me a while to understand the mechanics of the game because it was a while before I at all saw what was happening.
One thing that could have been cool would have been to have some characters not steal stuff and some top down camera where you only saw who was leaving and you would get big minus for all that you stopped that weren't thieves. But that would have required more than 1.5h dev.
So for time spent, good results.
Nice take on the classical sokoban type of puzzle. I like the 3D effects on it all and the difficulty progress was really nice, though I got stuck after a while. Sounds and music also very nice match to the game.
Things to consider:
It took me a while to understand the mechanics of the many of the intractable objects. E.g. the blue and those that canceled each other. I think it would both be clearer and cooler if you added some lerps or tweens and some A and B negates each other effects. That way the mechanics should become more accessible.
It was nice with a retry button and really nice that the levels had checkpoints so retry didn't always mean from the beginning. The graphics of the button didn't really match the rest of the game though (very minor detail), and more importantly, it would have been nice if 'R' invoked the button. Some levels you want to hit it often and you shouldn't force the player to use the mouse when it's not used in game.
Finally, it would have been cool and clearer if the tiles of the playing field flipped over at the end of each level (rotating 180 deg on whatever axis, maybe by random or some order) to expose the next. At the end of the first level I was kind of confused by one of the disappearing symbols and though I was supposed to remember their positions.
All in all a great game and some fun playing time.
I liked the graphics a lot. I didn't get if the game had an objective. The clock and kills kind of implied that but I killed enough to fill the entire screen and it seemed not to make a difference. Getting that many dead also made me notice that I would collide with the UI elements (clock and kills) which was sort of surprising. I think if the dead attackers were clearly lighter than the player it would have been easier not to get stuck in the mass of bodies. If not getting stuck was important to the game idea, then that would have needed some more tweaking of the stuck mechanics and the over all objective.
But all in all a quite enjoyable game.
Simple instructions, interesting combo of skills and really sweet music in the menu. It would have been great if that tune played in the level as well. Great work on the art on the character. I've tried it five - six times now and my record score is 1... so I think it's too hard to start. My suggestion would be to give much more time at start. Say ten times as much, and then let the blocks to be collected give as much bonus as they do now. That way, everyone, from leet to noob gets a fair chance and a challenging experience.
I didn't get to understand what the shooting was for, but that may have been me failing too soon. But for the bricking I was experimenting with more interesting patterns than the one image you have above and it feels like it would have been nice to be able to control where around the player the brick would appear. Maybe with mouse aim.
But I think you have the basis of a really great concept and you are obviously talented with those pixels so hope you give the difficulty a tweak and have a round with the controls.
Great fun. Very well made game and great effort put into animations, characters and props. The particles and camera shakes were also more or less perfect.
Things I would consider:
Remove the ability to jump. It seems not to serve that great of a purpose and caused me to wander around aimlessly a while at the first level because I though rockets were for shooting things down.
Actually it would be good to have the character run across the menu/title screen and execute a rocket jump so that all players know what to do.
I only played the first and part of the second level and what kept me going was the frustration of not being good at controlling the character. I think this is exactly the feeling you should be aiming for. But what struck me as odd was the order of where the targets were. Especially for the second level, the third position was clearly the most difficult place.
All in all a very solid game and I hope you feel very satisfied with what you accomplished.
I really like what you did with the lighting. And the assets all looked great.
I died quite a few times in the beginning and it was a bit annoying having to wait for the level to reset. I wanted to fast click, space something back to get to try it again.
I think the controls were OK, though I missed quite a few shots and died from not remembering how to walk. When I finally got the hang of it a bit and survived to kill off many it kind of became apparent that the difficulty progression was rather reversed. It started quite hard and then for a long time (since I'm not that good of a sniper) it just kept getting easier until it got really hard again. Maybe there's another spawning mechanism possible, with smaller waves of enemies and have the waves go per shots fired or time or something so that difficulty in the beginning works more intuitively.
I was also surprised that several features was possible to walk through for the enemy (like the house and guard tower).
But in general a really well made game and I enjoyed playing it!
I like the games I play to objectify beards, all sorts of beards, not just dinosaurs'. It was a nice game, but some things I didn't manage to figure out:
When or what made the dino turn around?
When was the dino hurt? It seemed like colliding with opponents was not a problem. Also tried having several blobs waving their swords at me and for a while I was staying at three hearts unaffected and then all of a sudden I was dead.
In that respect, warping to next level, it would have been friendly with a bit of a safe zone around where you ended up.
In all though, a nice game.
Nice game, really hard to navigate that ship but I did get quite far one time. Since it's a game where you die a lot, I would highly recommend having space rather than P start the game from the menu so that the player doesn't have to move around on the keyboard. You want the players to keep trying.
Getting time to shoot the ships was hard too, I found it a distraction and that the best option was to fly past them quickly. It doesn't matter so much though, but maybe reward killing them more by having them die faster.
A solid entry all in all.
I really enjoyed the combination of being in one place and pushing walls apart. I'm not a fan of having to spam buttons though, and whould have wished for an option of just staying in the zone to get points rather than hitting space.
In the beginning I found the wall pushing placement kind of counter intuitive as up meant horizontal push. I get why you opted for that solution but maybe if it was possible to hint before placement so one could regret the decision. Say give it a 2 second delay before it starts to fold out, during which you may redirect it. Maybe also using IJKL rather than arrow keys to let hands rest symmetrically on keyboard.
The target positions for gaining points could also move around during later phase of game. Could be fun.
Great game though, tried it until I got more than 1k score, even though the space hitting.
Insane controls and great fun. Some times it was just impossible to get my head around how to get from where I was to where I wanted to go and then when they all started spinning as well... oh so hard. Hard, but fun.
I think the game would benefit from more psychedelic effects, e.g. have the painting you do on the background work not directly on the seen background but as it would if seen through a rotating kaleidoscope.
It was a little too much trying to keep an eye on the lower right corner so maybe add an up direction arrow at the center of the screen.
Though nice that the enemies pushed you forward to the next level and that time's up didn't punish you more directly was a bit confusing, maybe better to have enemies spin the world orientation or something...
Great and well worked game. Had loads of fun playing.
Cute retro styled game with simple enough mechanics but quite challenging, at least for me. I had a hard time hitting the throwing back through the portal thing when carrying the dinos so I died a couple of times. The area around the portal should probably have much larger area where throwing is possible. It also happened that I jumped when trying to use throw through the portal. But as you said, there were some bugs to work out. It was a really nice game though. I would have liked some warning about the rocks (like hanging on top of screen or a shadow on the ground where they'll hit). Maybe the rocks should dazzle the dinos also, but only very shortly...
Fabulous! Such poems I constructed. I didn't fully read or understand what made a poem good or bad according to the crowd, but that didn't really matter so much. Most fun was in the poetry slam itself anyhow.
The text was a bit hard to read though. If the font had had some border around its characters to make them stand out a bit better and maybe collect the completed lines float up to the top so you could easily read them without being covered of the next line's composition alternatives.
It should also come with a handy screen-shot button if a poem turns out particularly good. Also, if there was a place for the best poem ever written according to the games metric...
Stunning game! Most fantastic. I did get stuck on the part where it said something about trusting your abilities. Maybe same place as you have your primary screen-shot from. So apart from that the novel mechanics there that I didn't get that could have been introduced in a kinder way, I really enjoyed the game. The introduction of how to play, the difficulty and its progression. Maybe add a white ring or some other distinct color around the slime level indicator since it doesn't look like a UI element when empty. I was wondering what that black dot that was following me was doing.
I really enjoyed playing this game. Great work. I didn't play all the way through though and the thing that made me give up wasn't really that it was too hard or that I didn't understand what to do. The character kept moving after letting go like if it was on an ice level. It should break the speed much faster in my opinion. There was a place in the beginning of the second or third level where you could get trapped and need to reset the level (supposed to drop a black box down a hole to open door). I think giving the user a quick reset level key would be nice (e.g. R) and in this particular case there was really no reason why the jump back should be impossible.
The best part: The jump animation. I could jump all day.
I didn't bother too much with the fighting mechanics, I was having too much fun just seeing how you built your mounted animals. Gorilla with pug as weapon seemed hard to beat. Naturally. Very fun. Only a pity one didn't get to see the clash and the looser flying away. I didn't really get if there was a limit to how many cards could be drawn from the deck to fill out the hand and since I didn't see any limit to it, the draw two cards seemed no so useful. If drawing extra cards cost something more obviously. Or maybe add a card that allows for other cards to be trashed while still maintaining the turn? I got to 6 victory points, and it would have been nice with an indicator showing the first to (now) 7 in game. But other than that, a fantastically fun game.
This was way way to hard. Especially as beginnings goes, but also with respect to collision detection on the spikes and such. Needs to be more forgiving towards the player. I really liked the bird feeding as weapon and I would have loved to get to play with it, but I didn't get past the introductory phase. And while I'm not a great platform-player, it's far from the first one I've played. Since I saw so little of the game, I can't give more feedback, but I did really like the birds!
Right when I started I thought: OK, I will need to complain about the controls, I won't be able to play this. 16 levels later showed that the controls worked surprisingly well though they were so hectic.
I didn't find the first levels too easy at all, but maybe you could offer the player an option to skip the tutorial part and go directly to the chest and also jump some of the easy levels. E.g. express elevators. Character could say something about it when if player approaches.
I really liked the character and the enemies. The audio fit snuggly and the effects were really nice. A really good entry.
I was about to get ready to complain about the difficulty but somehow I managed to complete the game. And I'm not that great of a gamer so it can't be that bad. It was nice. The fighting was a bit too random and it would have been nice to know the range of weapons beforehand, not only when hovering enemies. That the units didn't really move on the grid was a surprise and it might have been better to display a circle, showing the range of each move action. When you are down to only have one unit you can be lucky to get two turns in a row with that unit (I think) and that felt a bit unfair.
A good game though! After all I played it to the end.
Good game. I like the idea to physically alter your environment very much and it feels like it has potential. The controls, or more specifically, the physics of the robot was a bit funky. The ability to get stuck to vertical features due to the friction of the rigidbody seemed to not fit the expectations. I would opt for removing the friction completely and instead decay velocity as soon as the player lets go of the horizontal axis. I played it to the end and it also felt like the stages were lacking in puzzle design or enemies or count down timer or something. It was a bit too straight forward. For the gun, if the resizable block don't allow for stacking several shots, it'd be great with some feedback (i.e. animation) that indication transition and readiness besides just the size change. Don't get me wrong. It was a good game and I had fun playing it.
Really nice graphics. The audio felt fitting, but it was a bit odd and annoying that it started over for each new view in the game.
First rounds the opponents were really quite easy but then there came one hurling all sorts of things at me in rapid progression. So the ramping of the difficulty could do with some tweaking.
Nice simple little fighting game though.
This definitely is a weapon in my book, and a really cool one at that. I had some issues about the collision mask since I kept aiming at the fellows rather than the indicator on top of them. It seemed more intuitive to me. When it got to not killing them I got stuck, didn't figure out how to do that. It was so much easier to just keep them running off onto the spikes. I really enjoyed it that far though, the mechanics and the art in particular. There are some tweaks that could be made so that the jumping is a bit more forgiving and that clicking on the Fire-button when the level title is showing (really cool display btw) doesn't fire an order but removes the title. Because after a few retries on a level, you really don't want an extra because you just instructed someone to the wrong death.
Hi there! You made it through the ordeal too. Great to see. I agree with you that the game got a bit easy after a while. But just the face that I could just keep space pressed and not have to hammer on it did help a lot. One tweak would be to have the mental frailty cubes be much weaker so only one or two enemies gone by would destroy them. Some weapons upgrades could be replaced by downgrade/fatigue. Possibly tied to loosing a cube. Like down 3 steps in weapons coolness. Along the lies of crazy ideas. What if the enemies came from all directions and you had to use up and down keys to rotate the board? Shots should probably be using global space in that case.
I think the mechanics could make for an interesting game, but it feels a bit unpolished (though definitely playable). I think it would do the game good to have the trigger for when a blue enters the light to be much larger than it is at the moment. It would also be good if the beacons were removable (e.g. by clicking on them). If you make the global light much dimmer and make the range to the target light larger and placed a bit above ground you would get some mean shadows that would kind of remove the need for the particle system you currently use. Just some thoughts. Nice game mechanics though!
Fantastic again. First I was a bit surprised. I was running around for quite a while and feeling like it was not that hard of a game. Felt like I had missed something. The civilians. The do need a lot of that blood. Never got past saving two of them. But I'm pretty sure they don't deserve saving since they are so sloppy at maintaining their own blood.
Here's an odd suggestion, odd in that it would make it harder. If the towers were slowly rotating. Now they are kind of safe. It would have been fun to know how many civilians one failed to save too.
Graphics as usual. Stunning. Very smooth gameplay, though I agree with the other comments on that aiming was a bit hard.
I really didn't understand the mechanism when shooting but apart from that, the volume on the music and that there was a bit too much intro text, this game was a blast to play. It was weird and strange in a very nice way.
It's a very interesting idea to play as the sun emitting flairs but minding not to scourge the inhabitants. Just annoy them as much as possible. It could be the beginnings of a game where the goal is to use a multitude of powers to get the inhabitants of a planet really upset about their massive bad luck. Just as long as they don't feel directly targeted.
@Borkleby I updated the instructions here to hint the functionality of the weapon
@Jakob37 I must have forgotten to properly lock the mouse, I can see that annoying clicking outside happening since the head turns rather slowly. And finding Manno is definitely worth it, so hope you give it a second try.
@DKoding & @Jadernak I was indeed considering putting up a warning about motion sickenss. I suppose it wouldn't have hurt to give the player a chance to scale it back a bit if it was too much so it stopped people from enjoying the game.
@Ludipe I totally forgot to include the instruction that left shift makes the character run! And since quite a few people have suffered nausea while playing I'll add a "Take it down a notch" option after the voting. Must be I'm pretty immune to motion sickness. I didn't really think of nausea being an actual problem in non VR games.
@SimianLogic @TeamFlare @paulfysh @Crefossus and most everyone, I've added instructions to the wiki (see link above) for how to get to Manno. I think this shows that I need to have made the first light source in the start room more obvious to the player. Many get it without noticing. Probably there needs more/better queues on where to find the next part. I'm thinking of havining player rotate towards the source of the voice each time it calls out. Maybe change the "You are not Manno" sound clip to something that more clearly indicate that while it was the wrong thing, you/the character is progressing.
I liked the red lines running through the things. Could have done without the macho tone in the introduction. As for what the others said, I felt like I was maneuvering a battle cruiser. Never got passed the first button because I couldn't find my action button. Pressed all buttons on keyboard and mouse, yet nothing happened.
I got around a corner with a recycle thing arrow pointing back and a monster I couldn't pass. And I so so dearly didn't want to get stuck. Really interesting feeling and style for a platform game. You should seriously consider extending on this and making it ramp up the difficulty a little kinder so people like me can get further. It wasn't always super-clear what was an obstacle and what was not and since space is kind of a default jump button compared to up it did hinder a bit. I would rather have liked X and C for jump and shoot. The mechanics for throw/shooting was really nice though! Brilliant to have hit, if not hit the catch and if not catch get back to where you started. I think this might be the best game I've played or if not the best then certainly top 3! Get working on a full version. Now! Please
The mirror and the graphics was really really good. The difficulty and the action speed of the character could do with some further tweaking. Maybe a visual effect showing what can be reflected in the mirror. I downed some monsters, but it was quite hard. One idea could be that the mirror actually consumes the enemy it reflects so that you can temporarily incapacitate one and use against the other. Only that leaves the problem of getting rid of the last one.
And the obvious, it would do very good with music.
It was a nice play.
Wow! Great game, top notch actually. One of the best games I've played this LD. I might be a little biased since my game feels mood kinship with yours. Really nice work with the effects, both graphics and visuals. Got to level 4 and I tried it several times before giving up. It was also great to see such diversity in the enemy behavior. The thing that I kept thinking though was that I would have wanted it as a rogue-like and just add a recuperation factor that sets in after some seconds without enemy contact. Really happy to have played it and hope you continue working on it afterwards.
I didn't appreciate the plot, but the basic premise, speed chatting up people like a hurried detective has some promise too it. As other's said, you probably need a second walking dimension. If not 2D movement at least doors to press up to get into other rooms. Then I wonder if the mechanics wouldn't be more fun if they were made more general. Finds three clues and discover a suitable weapon (should probably be a visual hint of what is a suitable weapon upon getting the third clue). Then get the revenge before time runs out. So finally, the plot: I think my fun-meter would go up 10-folds if the revenges were specifically for things typically not "needing" revenges.
I liked the choice of the protagonist and in the beginning it felt quite intuitive, but then I kept getting reset to the beginning of the stage without really realizing what had killed me and why it was dangerous. It was a bit odd to walk on floating pee but that didn't matter so much as why it dragged me to its center after i jumped off it. Still, I kind of enjoyed the game and the basic movement controls worked nicely.
Not surprising that your graphics looked really nice. Great job. If there was a setting 2x2 pixels per pixel it would have fit my screen snuggly and I could have marveled the details even more. I tried playing it twice after reading all the card descriptions. And I guess I was a bit unlucky or unskilled so that I never got to draw new cards while playing. Maybe it would be nice if the player could sacrifice something or put themself in a problematic position to be able to continue playing? E.g. skip over next two three waves (no points) and get max 3 new cards. Alternative, though not exclusively so, solution could be if the deck building remembered the 42 cards you previously selected so that you can just test your build again. A quick-build of the deck would also be sweet. In two versions. Random add cards from the ones selected as far as that is possible. Random select from all cards. It felt like the building aspects could be better balanced with such additions. It's a bit too much building and reading stats versus playing and having enough influence over how the play runs for my taste as it stands right now. However, in general. I liked it! I seem to most often like your stuff.
It felt like a nice setting, feeding things in hell. But I found it way to hard to get even one piece into their mouths. And I'm not sure I like the fat pigs snoring stuff. For the game-play, I guess it would do good to not have a physics based test of if the food gets inside, but use a trigger and a test for if the mouth is open enough to warrant a successful throw. The way the food just flew through behind the counter was not very intuitive, so maybe add wall/collider there so missed food gets back one the counter. It might also do the game good to start with very few guests. All in view. And then either as the level progresses or at later dinner parties, add more sinners.
I had a really hard time moving about on the first level since the left movement was only possible after jump was initiated for jump left. Not very much seemed to happen either, the thing swarming around me didn't seem to have an effect. But maybe I didn't really understand the game, I'm sorry. So I gave up rather early, on the second level I suppose it was.
It started out very overwhelmingly. It would have been nice to get some idea about the movement before the first enemy and then some mild introduction before all the chaos. I liked it though. The music was good, but tunes very short so the menu sound got a bit annoying (while writing this comment). I found myself at the bottom of the first level but I didn't really get what the exit was before I died. A good start for a game though.
At first I was moving about (really liked the way the camera looked and moved felt similar to looking in microscopes) trying to find clusters of things to drop the bomb/seed on. However I then just tried dropping it in the center, and that gave me much better results. So I think the game mechanics could be improved by having much smaller primary blast and that targets doing secondary blasts if hit with enough force. That way it would allow for much more game-play. Good start though. And work on making it all feel like a microscope setting ^^
Really cool game, somehow though my mind could not cope with learning what button for slash and what for jump and so on. Probably makes much sense if you have a controller and has played a lot of games like that. I wonder if it would be possible to reduce it to only two given that you can't jump with the light-thing. The first levels worked really smoothly, which says a lot since it introduced a quite unconventional mechanic.
It is really interesting idea. And I think it could be built upon to make something truly fun. But it will be a narrow road where the details of how easy it is to climb a vertical wall or if it feels frustrating. One thing could be to let the character not move physically realistic, but let the character hover a slight moment before start to fall. It would be interesting with tilted surfaces as well. In general, it will be interesting to see where you take this. Good job!
I tried it and first I didn't notice anything particular happening, but that was because I didn't have enough planks. I think it would have been nice to disband a tent and get a new one after a while. I would have liked to be able to control the speed of time too. It was moving way to slow when I was happy with my composition of the work-force. It has the beginnings of a nice micro-management game though.
Nice little game, the level design could do with some tweaking to make it more puzzly. Or if the enemies remembered seeing the player for some turns after player left sight. That would also make it more challenging. I was about to complain about that GB and M were an odd set of keys, but I never used M so it kind of worked. I see that it was nice with the letters relating to the things they invoked, but I still would switch M for space at least. The music was nice and I liked the glue a lot. Fun game.
Great explosions! And the way the waves already shot moved when you moved the gun. Nice. The eternal mode was kind of unbalanced though. It was really hard in the beginning, but as soon as I got into a corner and focused the beam a bit it was all really easy.
I think a nice touch would be if the focus of the gun drifted so that you continuously had to tweak it. The level design could have had some more work put in to it, but in general it is a great foundation to build upon.
Starts good. I never heard of graphics settings _Maybe_ before. The part I figured out about the fighting was to keep the monsters on my right side and press against them. I think though that the player needs easing into the game a little more. Have a simple monster solo to start and some health to regenerate right after. Basically the ramping up of the difficulty was too harsh. I liked the 2x1 tile size and the graphics a lot though, so I think it comes down to some level design and improving on the general difficulty.
Those graphics! Loved them. Can't say I got the feel for what I was doing or why, but it might just be me not being so disco. I had fun!
Superb arcade game. Very much fun and well balance and... I don't know, kind of perfect. Well, it'd be nice to have a clear indicator of which bubble is up to pop if one just places a new one. It took me one retry to figure out what made the meteors explode at times and that the purpose was to divert and/or shoot at the others. So it might be good with a first time play instruction about the rotation and shooting. Not on every replay though. Got 1165. Don't know how that stands. Oh it would also be cool if there were bonuses for e.g. trapping two in the same bubble and then using both to shoot down two different meteors.
The music was nice and fitting and most of the graphics too. The game was both quite easy and hard. The latter mostly because of the collision detection for bumping into the enemies and when the hoop caught someone. It wasn't really clear to me. If I understood the right side it was completely passive except the "choice" of when to spawn someone through the hoop. But since everyone was running around on the left side it seemed more like a random factor I had very little control over. The play on the stereotypes of girls wanting to be still and have tea parties while the boys likes to run around. That these are different worlds. And so on. It really didn't sit well with me. I'm sorry.
Played to quite a bit down before I died because I was guessing I wound move before the enemy and thus morph to rock before the scissors got a chance to cut my bad. I was wrong. In general a surprisingly captivating simple game. The AI worked, but was a bit predictable. Beside the hunt or feel modes I would have been nice if the different types had different behaviors. Good game!
The music and how well it and the concept/art played together was the thing I liked the most. But there was some sort of reaction to the mouse, though not really (or maybe just an illusion of it) so the controls need working with. Really feels like something that should either have mouse + keys or one set of keys for each hand. Then the world design... just having added some more in all directions of the content you created would have added a lot to the feeling. I started out heading down left through the whole and almost thought there were absolutely no more features than the ones I saw at the beginning. The water meter was rather sluggish too. So I think instant refill would probably have worked better (or very fast refill) given the few sprites used. I would also suggest having the meter empty to signify empty. But it was nice, and the growth animations were really nice. So if you added more assets, maybe switched to procedural world building. You could add a loose-condition for having gone without seeing green for too long (which would entail keep finding water and making plants grow).
I liked the style and the fact that the game was rather 2.5D when the movables turned. The weapon was great and so was the mood/music integration with the visuals. The shooting of cameras was a little annoying since it was hard to know where to stand to hit them, maybe add some UI assistance for the throw-trajectories if the pixels need to feel gravity. In general a very solid game. I didn't get really far but I did enjoy the experience.
Most things great about this one. It was a bit hard to play with one hand (my cat had claimed the other). Music was extremely well made and most details of the game taken very nice care of. The phone intro to mechanics was a nice touch too. I wonder if the game could have been restricted to three buttons though (might have been my one-handed playing thinking), but to just have left and right and action and that action would cycle between umbrella fold out and smash-collaps to free fall. It could be worth a try at least. Great game. Hope you had as fun making it as I had playing.
I've seen typing games before as LD entries but this felt very new combining it with classic arcade game. I agree with the others that some more feedback on what to type might be helpful and also increasing the font a bit. Maybe have the current character to type slightly larger than the others too.
I don't know if it is a good idea, but what if you could save up your shots. Either because you don't need to shoot at the moment or because the shot becomes extra powerful if it is a two or even three word shot.
Oh almost forgot. Nice feeling with the words, the colors and the music.
Great take on the theme. Quite fun game. The music got a bit annoying and it felt like there was lacking some indicator on how well or bad I was doing. One thing to play around with would be if they cried out their orders to reduce the running a bit. Nice game though.
It was quite fun, but I was very close to just abandon it due to the webplayer here on LD being too large so that the RETRY was out of view. I had to refresh the game page and start from the beginning once before I found it.
I think I would consider forcing the player to let go of the right button before registering it as an intention to move when switching scenes. It was way too easy to get out of the safe zone. And if it is the intent that one should try many times, connect something like R to retry or just reload after 1-2 second of the fail symbol.
I agree with those other comments saying that it would have been nice to get some clearer indication of danger. Part of that problem could be solved with better retry mechanics. But you could also consider having the character indicate the danger somehow.
Solid entry though!
It loads, music starts playing but then it crashes. Graphics driver lost contact with... something.
Stunning! The animations, the style, the music and the feeling of the dash-hit with the mouse. Perfect. I think I played through the game almost without using WASD, just moving with the weapon. Since it was so much easier to hit when standing still and since most places didn't need moving I just skipped it. Which is a bit of a pity since it would have been a nice extra touch to the game play. Part of this could be fixed by tweaking the level design a bit and another part would be to have the character aim better while running so that there's less of cost running around. Still great entry.
Superb mood and visuals, and audio to that. Very interesting stuff. As a concept game I'd say it is close to perfect. I'm quite envious, wishing I had similar CG skills. Just add a cursor lock to the web-version and more exploration candy. If there was a way to combine this with procedural generation of content, it could become something truly amazing.
Why do I like clickers, I don't know. But it seems like I do. I liked the combo of managing auto-generation and clicking, but it took me a while to notice that that's how it worked. So having a separate background for the wolfman area would probably be good. It also was a bit annoying not to know what you needed for the next level. So maybe just show next unlock victims, but without showing who/what it was.
Very consistent how the audio and visuals work together. The controls where sort of hard in terms of staying alive. But I expect that was not the point of the game. I really enjoyed it. Must have been a lot of work going into it. I would have liked to encounter more story parts than just what I got from the bird and the death. I think the game could be really awesome if the story evolves over the course of one dying and dying and dying. Anyways, very beautiful and inspiring game.
So, I was not really understanding the game mechanics while player. It seemed like my station was huge and I had loads of space left when all that had value had been stored. So it felt like I hadn't understood at all what I was supposed to do. Which means it felt like I hadn't or had not need to bother making a relevant selection, just clicked around a bit. I think that was a bit unfortunate in regards to the end of the game. I think also the experience could have been made stronger using some freely available music and if the discarding of crates was an active move (with some crashing sound), rather than passively letting them just hang there until time ran out. That would have driven home the point even more, I think. Interesting concept though.
It looks like a fantastic place to start building a monster sim from! The selector hand was a bit hard to see in the left-most toy-area dialog. It also seemed like the dialog was below some other UI elements, which made it partly shadowed in one case. Other than that, very cute animations, a nice fitting tune and something that deserves further development! If nothing else, if you make it public, you could always use it as a starting point for the next ludum...
I liked the graphics, but I had a really hard time with the controls and the audio. Sorry to say.
It was hard to stay in the rhythm of the rotation as it accelerated as fast as it did, but it really didn't matter since you had balanced the difficulty so well. It is a fantastic game you have created. The visuals, audio and the fact that the content really is mostly about experiencing and not adrenaline of figuring stuff out -- it fits perfectly together. I would have loved some animation upon reaching the end of each level. Like if the letter-appendicies floated off you and then the eye faded out or followed after. Something. As I think the casual style fits very well and since I do hope you will make this into a full game, I hope you keep challenges on the easy side and instead work with discovery, dynamic events and embed a non-verbal slow-paced story to evolve alongside the progression through the game.
Very slick looking game. Well produced and I like the back story and theme abuse (if there's such a thing). It was quite challenging game, especially when encountering new enemies. Not knowing how they would behave. With that in mind I think it would help not punishing the player so hard as having to replay everything every time. Simplest solution is giving the player the ability to take three hits. Maybe actually changing the stats of the ship so it becomes more jittery or inefficient or something. Maybe because I liked my idea of getting pushed to the left by a negative flux (animations that now blow in game), I can't really let go of it. I think it would add to the game. Making you have to not pause too long in any place of the stage. As some others have commented, the target wasn't that readily visible and I think it didn't really follow the otherwise very consistent design. To work with the story and graphics is would suggest having the target as an unstable tile that flickers between the two colors used in the stage. And finally, at each stage load I think it would do good to have half a second where input doesn't fly the ship, because I often started flying before I had noticed the stage.
That was a long comment. But I think this was a very well made game. Having proc gen work that well and having found such a well worked expression in a weekend. Really great.
The scale problem for the protagonist is really quite interesting. I think there could be a lot of interesting gameplay in it. Say you eat the humans instead, and eating makes you larger, so it becomes ever harder to pinpoint them. Still you gotta eat to survive. Or simply fending off swarms of annoying critters in general. Interesting emergent feature of the game. The shadow and the other assets in the game were very nice. It would have been cool if the camera shook some when a boulder hit the ground. Or you walked. And if that affected the humans. I would have liked some indicator of the aim, but not deadly important. Worse was that while the mouse was hidden (good) it was still active to stuff outside the window. So when looking down trying to hit people close, I accidentally got out of the game. I didn't figure out what the blue bar was, so some text or icon on it explaining its purpose would have been nice. The buttons were very huge in size too and could have been scaled down a bit (especially given the scale-thing with being a giant). In attempting a new engine, it was a very good entry.
Unfortunately I was really struggling with the controls and I can't really put my finger on what it was, but I just couldn't get to go where I wanted to in any ordered fashion. I found one coin/collectible, killed a sheep and activated a spawn point. But then I just got no where more. I also almost got stuck between the spawn-pad and its fence. The game shows a lot of promise though. Both music and style felt really good.
I particularly liked the first mini-games calling out to the ship so it flowed backwards. The second one, I did press the correct letter when over the correct tile, but maybe it wasn't centered enough. If it needed to be centered, I think that should have been made clearer. This was the only part I never completed. I general a good game and well worked graphics.
Really good graphics. I didn't find that the car reacted to any increase or decrease in speed that I attempted. I might well have misunderstood something. It felt very tempting to hit all cars, but after a while I assumed it might not be the point, so I used them to make the police run into them instead. But without being able to accelerate and if it was supposed to do it on its own, it was too slow. (Could have been interesting, quite rapid acceleration and you must run over cars to slow down.)
@q2k2k The spotters may need some time to notice nessie, especially if they aren't that interested in her from the beginning. That may also be why loneliness didn't change much. Some spotters simply don't give that cozy warm feeling of being appreciated.
@mboaj Nessie really yearns for attention, she needs a whole lot of it to survive her loneliness. And you are right, when posing at the surface, she is much to busy trying to get seen but not seen too much, that swimming is not an option.
@aberdeenphoenix I totally agree. We simply had to scrap play-testing and balancing the game since we only got to that part about 1h before submission. And then we were much too tired.
@internetpaulicy I though I had put a tight net of colliders around the lake! must have been a spot between two of them or something.
@Infininete science comes and gets you when you reach max renown. We didn't really have time to do an in-game capture event. Each time a pop-up occurs, you have been seen, and thus you feel a bit less lonely. As to the other question, we can neither confirm, nor deny the existence of such game mechanics.
The graphics was really great. And I liked the game. It wasn't until I got the first snack I realized that the moving speed was only temporary and I did some exploring about before finding the snack... so it felt really sluggish and I was about to give up there. In other words, I think the snack should come earlier on. Also, since the music builds up with upgrades (cool feature), the first two parts should really be short, or music at a really low volume. Else it becomes quite tedious to listen to. If you plan on making a post-jam version, I would consider putting the tongue origin more towards the mouth of the creature. It also at times felt like it didn't orient properly towards the mouse position at all times (maybe hide the actual mouse pointer and give a cross-hair aim indicator). I think it is a promising game. I got killed by a cop, don't know if I actually could eat him, it seemed like not while trying.
The sound and the terra-forming beam was really cool. That I was moving around so slowly was really annoying, but I suppose that's the cost of being so powerful. It was also interesting how burning up things (or so it looked), made them green. I got a bit confused when I had turned all 9 blocks green and the game still continued as it said that the target was to bring down the city. I simply though the timer was the time I had to do it in, else I would loose. So the aim of the game could have been made a bit clearer. It was a good game though, I enjoyed beaming around.
Very good graphics indeed. And the effects, sound and visuals work very well together to build up a solid atmosphere. It only needs more game-play. Either by making it arcady by having a ferocious hunger or by having a large world with villages, mountains and what not to explore. Have humans react to people missing/slain. Stuff like that. A great starting point for a very interesting game though.
Nice entry! Like how you worked on the visuals. I walked and walked and if day or night, not one princess seemed the least inclined. They did replenish my life though, I think. It would be good if that was more visible somehow. In general a good game, but I think it either needs to end sooner or have more sense of progression (in whichever way the story is intended to progress).
I mean, being a microbiologist, the whole theme of your game is obviously cool. It took me a while to understand what I was supposed to do in the blood stream. I tried swimming into the blood cell, setting my on top of it. Until I figured I should click on it. I think I it would have been nice if the virus showed that it was tracking the mouse position or something to make it more clear. The interaction on the DNA I didn't grasp at all. I understand the puzzle, but I couldn't see anything selected on the DNA. If I should work from the top or the bottom or so. And nothing happened when I clicked the colors. Again, I must really have misunderstood something. Otherwise it would have been a really cool game.
I really liked the animations. Very well done. There was something with the how the difficulty ramped though that made me loose interest in getting the high score after a while of playing without getting hit, so I just went around eating and not bothering too much about losing health. Maybe the enemies were too easy/and hard to know if they were armed or had thrown their spear or it was that they did too little damage at a time. Something in it could be tweaked though, to keep the player a little more on the edge.
But other than that, a good game!
The graphics and the sounds worked really well together and it was a really good game. The cinematic effect of changing camera boxing while burning the bridge was really good. It would have been interesting if things got a bit darker/crazier for every bridge brunt.
Very well executed game indeed. My only wish would be that it had a fullscreen mode or adjustable hight. Playing on my TV (which claims to be 720p), I can't fit it fully so I couldn't see the healthbar if I wanted to see all the way down. I think the gameplay worked very well and minion management while not having any cool abilities yourself... it was very nice. I didn't notice, but if killed enemies became minions, that might be nice. The one thing that would make this game even better is to work on level design more so that it becomes harder to figure out which was is best/optimal to go. In part this can be solved by having the optimal way needing some backtracking or having forks in the road where both ways seem equally good at start. But more importantly, a dynamic world. Having some enemies walk around, give enemies a visual field. Stuff like that. Very good game though. Hope you do continue working on it.
The combo of the music and the sound effects were just marvelous. They really worked with the game and each other to build up the feeling of having very fun poking the boats. The graphics was also very well worked. The one place that felt quite neglected was the screen for when the game was over. It didn't give any feedback that the score was submitted, and for a post-jam version I would suggest giving that some more love so that it becomes a reward in its own when you've died. For the game itself I never got to a point where I figured out any strategy, besides kill all things. I was guessing that it was bad to let things reach the middle and bad to have appendage up and exposed, but maybe there's a possible improvement in the early phases of the game to make it visually clearer what the player should focus on.
But don't get these comments wrong. I loved the game. It was mega boat poking-fun.
How on earth did you manage to get that good behavior on the humans in a game jam. That is extremely impressive. The game was very smooth and all parts, graphics, audio and such seemed to work very well together. The times I played it, I got about the same score each time. It might be a reflection of my skills, but also I found it really hard to do anything constructive about the humans shooting. The grenades/dynamites one could predict, but I was too busy hunting to see any clue on the gunners. So maybe giving them a laser pointer or something?
To sum up: very very good entry.
Very very good game indeed. A bit hard however, or I must have misunderstood something. The boss' communications skills aren't all there after all and I feel like I kill the adventures as they spawn. Still the boss just complains as tells me to get back to work. There's some tiny text on top of the enemies, but it's just impossible to read. If it's very bad to say ruin some of the cave features, then it would have been nice with some clearer feedback. In all some better feedback about when one is upsetting the boss or making him happy while playing would have been nice... Besides that though, insanely well made game. Very polished graphics, audio and those camera shakes... Great entry.
Interesting use of webcam for the game. I would have liked the image to be a bit pixelated to work with the general style. And I'm not sure it needs to be longer, but maybe give the monster a health bar that the player has to hack down for a while. Monster still as passive as now. I liked the game.
Cool idea for a game! Wish, as many have pointed out, that where were more actual levels after the tutorial to play. Also, though tutorial was really neat and since there is an undo anyway, it would have been nice if there was some indicator or the ghost's intentions/behaviors. Or if first time you press e.g. '2' you only select the second ghost and that shows a short bio to the side of the playing field. I didn't try to see how many regrets one had (but it might be cool to limit them to undo last five steps or so). In that case some reset level would be perfect. Final thought, the shift+right was rather awkward, I think the next level should load with a 1-2 second delay upon catching pacman. In all though, a very interesting game mechanic that you should consider furthering some more.
I liked the game. Well designed puzzles, even if I solved the elevator before I had even seen it. It would have been nice if the interaction controls were simplified. Either using no mouse and selecting interaction with arrow/wasd when in interaction mode. Or having mouse button down open the menu and the icon under mouse button up be the action selected. Each time getting caught, it all happened so fast it was disorienting the first times. It would have helped with a big "CAUGHT" splash over the whole screen and a short pause before game resumed. But as I started, I liked the game. And I particularly liked the ending. That was a very nice touch.
It really looked like a promising and fun game. Well made and great music/audio to go with the graphics. But it really was much much too hard for me. I played several times before I caught my first skier, and that is the only skier I've ever caught. So I think you need to add different difficulties where the skiers simply go slower. Or have the skiers get better/faster over time. I see from the high scores that others are better at it than I am. But only running around and failing wasn't so fun. Other than the difficulty though, it looks to be a superb entry!
Impressive! That's one of the best games I've played this LDJAM so far. It wasn't entirely clear to me from the start if being good would be the right thing to be to get the party going or not. But that was totally OK as I wanted to explore all outcomes anyhow. The art was just perfect and well the only thing is it could have been much longer and have a more in-game ending. It could be nice to have it so that some things should be dismissed (being evil). It could also be very nice if at some points one could choose either and the game would go down different paths for a while. But I get that the explosion of possibilities and the load of work. However I really hope you continue working on stuff like this.
Nice solid Nessie entry (as I did one myself, I'm now on a quest to play all Nessie games). I had fun playing. If there was something, I didn't realize how (if it was possible) to control the camera-position, so it felt a bit random trying to avoid the visual field cones. Besides that, fun game.
I had fun playing this. As a scientist, I must say that those in your game are very sloppy about keeping track of their subjects. Great game though. Fantastic art style and fun how the story progressed. If something, I think the controls need some tweaking for after unlocking the super jump. They are floaty and it's hard to control. Other than that. Really good game.
I liked the audio a lot and the interaction with the game went smoothly. Sometimes it did feel like I had to wait a while or press space several times before I could actually roll the dice on my turn. But it wasn't any real problem. I have a hard time enjoying this style of board game IRL though, and on computer as well. Simply because it doesn't allow for tactics or agency on part of the player. So I would really appreciate if there were ways to be smart about things, like getting to add or remove dots on the dice to a limited extent. Given some pool of such ability. That would also help dealing with the short-cuts that the monster finds, it was really hard for my monster to ever get to the later half of the playing field. So I think it has a good start, but it needs to give more control over the outcome to the player.
For clicker game, it felt quite hard. Especially reaching the final goal. It would have been nice to be able to restart the game from within the game. It also was not so much one could to about the missiles, and it required quite some clicking. It was interesting though, that it really didn't get any easier due to the increase in price. There's something though that needs to be tweaked with the difficulty or such so that it keeps the fun up so that one just wants to get on going. I think it lies in having the ability to affect the missile somehow. Besides that, I liked the graphics a lot and it was a good game.
I really liked the way Nessie was floating up and down in the water. It was confusing at first that there was a particular area within the cone that was good. The reason, I think, was that Nessie could enter the cone without it starting to change color. So I didn't notice the red, and hence not the green. If it had turned red directly, it might have helped, but it might also have been just confusing because the expectancy on the such a cone in game is very much that the entire cone is the same thing. Once I got a hang of it, it was kind of easy, especially since all the humans were standing still on a shore that was very straight. So I think it is a good start for a game, but it needs some more work on the game aspects and the feedback to the user.
In firefox I just get a long long error pop-up trying to do anything in the menu, in chrome it loads the first level, but unless I missed somthing I could not do a thing. Just look at the screen as time ran out. I see that others are not having these issues so there might be something wrong on my end.
The thing is, it is really quite a fun game. And taken into account the short time you had, very impressive. I could easily see this expanded by a procedurally generated bubbles to jump up on. A rising death from below and some meter for how far you've gotten. And high-scores to that. Then you have a nice addictive mobile app, or annoying rage quit arcade game in general.
It is a good start and congrats to first game in unity! It would have been good to lock the mouse and work some more on the players movements so it was easier to navigate around. The sand castles and their destruction was really nice. If the NPCs stopped a little while before their castles appeared it would have help the feeling of them actually building them. One way this could become really cool if you had to destroy as many castles as possible without anyone spotting you doing it. That is, give the NPC a visual field...
I tried to play the web version, but without cursor lock it was next to impossible. I tried moving around on the floor I spawned but got reset back for no apparent reason. Then the next time I tried jumping down the shaft and I shot at some moving dudes, I think I got points, but nothing seemed to happen to them. Then I jumped down the shaft again and seemed to fall outside the world. So while it seemed like you've built a rather vast world, which would have been fun exploring, I didn't really understand it nor begin to manage the controls.
Great idea! Fun audio but a little hard. The graphics needs to be worked on some though, like the 'hiding area' sprite that feels not fitting the style of the game. I think the game could be made easier and reducing the need for explaining who is who by introducing them one at a time. Like having a first scene with only the lead actor and the monster's task to stay lurking in the shadows. But in general, a superb idea for an entry and something you should continue working on.
I very much liked the music and how it felt it reflected the level of hunted I was. Graphics was nice too. I had some issues with the controls, it was sort of hard to get a good feel for them. I don't know if this was true or not, but it felt like getting light on you while having up velocity on you sort capped that jump. Which made the start of a level a bit in really annoying. But in general, the game was really nice. I would have, to increase the feeling of being hunted, liked the music to never decrease in stress level. Only increase and increase for every level you manage until you die.
It seemed to be an interesting game, but either the interaction and feedback from the game must get clearer, or the concepts of the game have to be introduced slower. I got to build a wall, threw some rocks at random, but when it was time to aim for the people it seemed like I couldn't throw any more. It does look like the basis for a good game though!
I liked this game, and pacing would have been nice too for me, but I couldn't fire the employees. Having that blinking red bar I put them next to me over the door, I tried the way they were coming in, but I couldn't get rid of them. So that way it felt like it lost some game aspects to me. Unfortunately. But in all other aspects. A nice game. If one could reorganize the workers by difference efficiency philosophies, hire motivational coaches to come "cheer" them up etc. Those would be cool bonuses of bad-bossing.
It took me one try to figure out I needed to fill up hunger completely. The thing with hunger going up when eating was confusing in general. I so wanted to eat a villager, but never managed, but playing was kind of fun. It was interesting how humans made it easier to find food, yet more dangerous. I didn't really understand how the defense worked, if there was some way to be smart about it or if you just had to take some damage each encounter. Nice game though.
Hope you enjoyed your first LDJAM. It was a hard entry, which fits the genre of the game quite well. I really liked that I could hold down Z and not have to spam it. I don't know if it was possible to kill the enemies or just destroy boxes. I don't know if I killed any. So to make it clear what you can kill I think a health bar next to stuff you just hit would be neat. Either that, or powering up the weapon so you kill almost everything with one or two shots. Good feel in general besides that.
I enjoyed the game much. It's always nice getting to the end of LD-games and it's a hard thing balancing a game when you are so stressed about just completing it. I solved the final boss, since I was too stressed about staying alive, but just waiting for the correct mask-matching to come up.
The music and graphics were really nice. I think the sound FX were a bit loud though. Especially since the game started without music and only the very harsh effects it felt a bit rough (and since the volume on my speakers was quite high I got a bit scared).
The play-instructions could maybe just show up around the character the first seconds of play rather than at a separate screen. It took me a little while to get going and remembering the controls.
To sum up: well made game!
Hello fellow Nessie-monster maker! Hope you had a fun first Ludum. It took me a while to understand that the arrows only directed her and space made her swim. I found it a bit too hard even on the first level, but that might have been because I tried to stay out of sight entirely. So maybe at least the first level should be easier, or it should be made clearer that it's OK to be seen a little while (if that was the case), just not photoed. Good entry though and quite similar, yet very different from my own take on being Nessie.
I really liked the art in this game. The fight was a bit hard though, and after having attempted several times and got three-four hits in one go without any indication of how or if that progressed the game, I called it quits. However, it is a stunning entry and just needs to work some one how it communicates with the player. I also didn't find any way to exit the game (played the original version). You might have fixed some of these issues in your updated version.
Way to go gamifying your PhD! Though all but subtle, I love the contrast of engaging players in something they are used to as fun and then showing them that this might not have been only fun. I'm not 100% for those haha-what you didn't know twists, but besides that little thing. I enjoyed the game, very well made. Graphics especially. Well, the use of the theme was very good. One day I must do a game about watching yeast grow, just to have gamified my PhD.
In all, really good work!
Simple game, very well made and well it is rare to have music like this and such level of attention to details in a LD-game. Fantastic work. If there's one place where I feel like the game could be worked on some more, it would be the mechanics or weights on rage. I felt like I too early on just was heading to end of outing. And one miss was the end of it. As a player it made it so, it didn't feel like it was up to me if I got to pet more or less animals. So if rage penalty wasn't as steep and if some animals gave more rage reduction. Maybe also ramping up difficulty with time (and if there was such a thing, doing it slower). Then, of course, if there was more variation on the photos and comments would of course also be a plus. But that's a lot of work. And so, for a LD-game, I think your entry is close to perfect in all categories! Great work!
Interesting game. I got a bit confused when I reached zero infected while it said that I would win given that. So probably the bottom text should say something like "Get down to zero without killing innocents" and when reaching zero either let the player win directly or change text to "Now just stay free of infection for X days". I liked that the cards moved when you killed someone, but I would have preferred some other logic to that movement (e.g. "fall" up if possible, then fall columns left if empty space). At any rate, it would have been nice if that transition was a little slower so it was easier to see the movement. I think the game would also benefit if some cards moved around between days to make it harder to track who was the infection source. The move should be easy to see though (as with the other move). In all an interesting game.
Very well done game. As I've discovered I love sad games, this was a perfect fit for me. In some locations I must have run a little further than expected so the hunters were spawning from right under my body, which was a bit odd. Other than that, it was a very good entry.
Very well worked game, especially how it all worked towards a common mood. The controls/camera got me a bit disoriented at times and made it hard to chase those friendly targets. I think a mouse/touch follow would have been really perfect.
I swam around picking up a following, testing to kill the baddies and so, but there wasn't any clear indicator of progress or goal or if I had actually understood it at all so I let it be after a while. I don't mean to say that there needs to be a 70% done-bar, but if the background, music, others clearly showed a progression... And showed me if death meant reset from beginning or just reset without the shield of your minions. But in all else, a very good game.
I really love those swim animations and the whole initial setting with looking down the water reflection - very nice. As you wrote in the comments, I can really see that you spent a lot of time on the graphics, and they turned out really great. Because we had her "posing" in our game, and since you have to good animations, it would have been cool if pressing up while already at the surface made her show off some. I might not have figured out exactly how the mechanics worked. I just got loads of photos from the tourists, but no Jack or any on the beach. So I might have been doing something wrong. Sometimes there was a seal in the photo too.
I had great fun tumbling around them sheep and progressing through the foul names. Nice graphics and who can say no to raining, tumbling sheep. Maybe the should have been a bit more bouncy too. For extra fun. I played it to the end and I don't have much to complain about. Well, maybe the hint shouldn't have popped up every time I touched the red area and maybe the lvl up should have been more clear, it took me a while to notice I was progressing. Great entry though!
It was really hard to get anywhere playing solo. Graphics is very well made and though it is an exercise game (I generally don't enjoy such), the circumstances here are very forgiving. It would have been nice if the shift keys also got the game started, so one could be prepared and ready.
Great graphics and solid game. I'm not very good at those games it would seem though so it is much too hard for me, even the first map. Maybe it would be more encouraging to keep on failing if the same level just quickly restarted as soon as death sequence played out.
My monkey wasn't very talented, but I had fun never the less typing away. Brilliant entry.
I sincerely dislike those bunnies. They are evil! Great game. Quite hard to manage the controls and I think as for the quality of the game, it would improve and become even better if you make a version with more than two buttons. I liked the progression. Art style is just fantastic. The thing that was a bit annoying was that if you had managed to cut down your sword really short you had to wait for spawns before you could activate bridge to next area. Or so it seemed.
In the title screen I had the feeling that some of the text might have ended up outside the display area/camera. Probably just a small fix. It would also have been nice to exit the game somehow.
Great entry all in all though.
The only thing I can't understand is why you wouldn't want to have pigs in the conga. But seriously well made game. Took me a try before I figured out how to circle people to lure them into the line. There might be a need for some tweaking though to make it perfect as a game because it was really hard (if not impossible) to come back from capturing a pig. It could also be interesting if the entire conga helped draw people near but that the momentum was dropping faster the longer the conga got.
I took me some to get started but then I was off and away. Really great game and interesting mechanics. The visuals, with time passing as fast as it did, was really nice. It would have been interesting if stuff could interact with the vine. Like for example, birds. Or if day-night cycle was important. Weather. Etc. It got a bit repetitious while climbing alternating balconies, and after that it got dead hard. So maybe some more variation to about equal difficulty sections and then a slower progression towards the super tricky. I really enjoyed playing it, if there was a reasonable way of making the interactions for mobile and maybe add an elevation-score... it would be a very nice relaxing game for the commute to work.
I much enjoyed this game. The controls took some getting used to but then they were really nice. It was interesting with a game like this to be able to play it quite slowly without that causing any problem. On the other hand, it also quite removed the feeling of it being an actual challenge, so I think there needs to be something more in the game that successively makes it harder. The one thing that comes to mind is to have a counter-current that progressively becomes stronger so that you are forced to become more and more rapid in-between your strokes. Great entry though.
Well made game. The controls were a bit hard to get use to though and that made the whole finding all the enemies quite a job. So I guess my suggestion would be to make the levels smaller and/or make the enemies easier to find. But all in all a very good game.
Great game and great twist to pinball games. I much enjoyed playing around and it sure had me fighting myself over switching color and using paddles. In a fun way. It was a bit disappointing that the game considered it "Game Over" and not "You made it to the top". A high-score (if only local top 3, would have been nice). It was nice that the game was so forgiving toward not being talented, but it also made it a bit tedious to get stuck half-way. Tedious and not very exciting since there was no real risk. In that sense, maybe a kill-floor that is raised as you progress (starting to be below the lowest point) would be nice to keep the excitement up even when struggling through somewhere in the middle. Great entry though.
I think I usually end up attempting to do way to large projects for LD, but this is quite insane. Very impressive to have drawn and implemented everything that made it into the game. It brought back memories of EOB. I got to a place like the final screenshot above, but it felt kind of random how I got there and I couldn't move while I was getting killed by some invisible enemy. Other than that. Great game.
Very fun to play this entry. Hard controls, but in a good way. Something not very easy to achieve. It would have been nice with some sense of progression (how far up the level one had gotten) or if it is an eternal runner kind of game, just the altitude (including high-score). Also, I would suggest adding a way to exit the game nicely when running it it fullscreen (esc to pause and in pause mode ability to close).
Fantastic art-style. I can see the similarities to the other game you are developing, though much happier and brighter here. The first two levels were kind of easy, but on the third I just never got high up after passing the person/cloud so I just kept jumping back down. It got to be a bit too frustrating, so maybe the controls could have included the ability to turn by oneself. E.g. by shooting right before landing. Also the wall-climbing for us with lesser button skills felt a bit too hard, if one gained a little more hight each jump would have been nice. Those things apart, the game really looked fantastic (as expected). And it was fun playing it.
That was fun. I was trying to only collect hats but it was really hard. In general it was very hard to actually collect stuff too, so it might increase the fun if the collision-boxes of the pick-ups are a bit larger. Entertaining entry.
I really enjoyed the visual feel and flying in the canyon was cool. Though it was a bit slow in the beginning, it picked up pace/challenge quite nicely afterwards. The second phase was very confusing and after being destroyed (?) there was nothing I could do but exit the game. It is a very nice start for a racer-type game though so hope you dev some more on it.
First time I played it I was like "it would have been really nice if the music and the world was like building up the more of those white things you collected". Second time I played I found out how marvelously it did just that. With that in mind though, I would consider making the pick-up collider for the white things a bit larger, because it would seem to me it is a game about soothingly drifting around and experiencing the evolution of the surrounding. And as such should be very easy. I don't know if I got the biotope maxed out, but in any case. If you consider doing some more work on this entry, I would recommend adding more progression to the music. Including adding a evolving the ping on collecting the white stuff. I'd loved some rain as well as budding flowers on the bushes and trees. Maybe morph the ship too, giving it more and more complex shape? It would be neat if the evolution of the game progresed over some sort of narrative phases: From deserted waste planes, to basic topology, rocks, small shrubs, trees, weather, wild-life. And then maybe decay after that. And who knows what. Also, maybe add Esc to quit the game.
After this inconsistent rant, to sum it up: I absolutely enjoyed the experience of playing the game.
I can't click on the shout in the street button, I get the hover for the buy a sign. I'm running FireFox. Disabling uBlock doesn't seem to make a difference.
Now I got to work in another browser. My store it accumulating wealth as I write this. A nice little clicker-entry. I think it would have been nicer if one could see all future upgrades per section as it would allow for more strategy. It feels quite slow too, much wait or not enough gain from clicking. The feedback from the upgrades was a very nice touch though! However a bit hard too to see if one should/could click the larger buttons. Nice entry in all.
I tried, but only left side stick was reacting in the game. The right side did nothing, so I could only fly up and down and look around.
Very interesting coop game mechanics idea of doing mutual avoidance and then finally matching up the pieces. It felt a little empty and/or short as it was now though and I think it would add a lot to the suspense if each play-through has 3-5 hearts to start and if you have levels with increasing amount of obstacles (and potentially larger in size too) so that it is not only the matter of one single matching but also deciding if it is worth squeezing out some more points on the level while risking a heart or collect the points and move on to the next level. The sounds were really nice and the graphics did their part nicely. And again, very interesting concept for a coop game.
I played for quite a while (think I got around 50 crystals before giving up). The main problem really is that it is very hard to know if you missed some and to remember on what level they might have been. Especially since the 'level id' was easy to miss (only noticed it after about 30 levels). In fact I only understood the concept of the hue and that the portals told me which direction I was going based on their color. All these things could have been helped by having difficulty-modes. Start out by giving the player 8 colors to collect. Next difficulty, give them 16. And so on. 64 is a big commitment from the player and since the player will be a bit lost in the beginning backtracking and getting everything right makes it even more so. Other than that, I liked the controls. The game could have done with some music and effects. Consider porting to mobile devices?
OK this was evil to have to survive to get the score... but then when I finally made it (161 score) I was not logged IN! Good entry. Frustrating as usual. It would have been nice to be rewarded a little more when you made it to the end of the timer. Oh, and here's a crazy idea: time runs slower if you are really quick on the treadmill!
Fantastic art and music. I hope you get around to tweaking the controls. Especially making the character stop faster and not keep the momentum up. There were glitches about where you got if you left some rooms too, e.g. got back to the beginning of the game. Only got to the 4th room, but would have enjoyed playing this game for its style, if only the controls were more manageable. Great entry though.
I very much enjoy the style of this game. The controls felt very well made too. Very smart reload-feature. It might have been good to make the modality be even more visually obvious, e.g. like tinting the entire game red. I found the enemies quite hard though, never got passed the first encounter. So I would urge to make it easier, with only one or possibly two (the flanking) enemies in the first encounter. The sound for it was fantastic though, so I didn't much care that I kept failing -- like some sort of scare-joy.
It was quite difficult to get a hang of. After a while I did get at least to the place where you drop down in the underground. Had some really large weapon, but it didn't seem to hit the enemies anymore. I think for controls you should consider turning up the gravity some and for physics remove the friction (or make it like ice) of the rigidbody so it doesn't stick to walls.
I must admit this type of game is not really for me, though I played my fair share of it as a kid. The controls work nice. It would have been great to have a combo for blocking too. That way it'd be more dynamic of a fight.
The game had a good feel to it, and I played it to the end (3-4 tries before I got it). However, though the use of the theme was obvious, the game felt like fighting the controls. And not in a good way. Like the theme destroyed the quality of your game. The amount of enemies was also rather large with respect to how hard it was to steer the little character. I did enjoy the graphics a lot and those camera moves where really great. It did happen though that the camera went one way and the character another at some stages... and that would need to be fixed. So, I think the basic layout of the game, its stages, the hit and run type of dealings with an hostile alien world. I think all that could be a marvelous setting for a game like yours, just with more normal controls. A good entry though.
@Tuism, we really would have wished to build for web, but Unity doesn't support that and both Linux and Mac builds are just crashing for whatever reason... We'll try to fix it...
@AzureAspect it is worth replaying so you get to talk to different characters, and yes there are various endings to the game. 3 in all.
Thanks everyone for your very encouraging comments! Mac version coming any second now.
@Jakob37 We totally agree, in fact we talked about this yesterday before having read your comment. So we'll definitely fix that in a post-jam version.
Very nice entry. I kind of figure that the point of the game is that you can't win. I'm all for that. But it would have been nice if the illusion of the possibility of managing the country was a little stronger. Basically coming down to having more cards and just making sure that there's a general surplus of negative effects. I played a few cycles and it might be I was unlucky but I never got any chance to gain power. Right off the start I lost one and then I never saw any +1 power card at all. Good entry though.
I really like the style and the idea behind it. There are obvious issues with collision and the fact that the "enemies" just stand there minding their own business. That aside, I played for 6-7 levels because I enjoyed the feeling of it so much.
I liked the mood and most of all the painted style of the game. It might have been nice if the character moved a little faster and that one didn't have to repeat as many times during the quests. But in all a nice experience.
The puzzle was quite hard, but seriously so well made that it didn't matter. I just kept swapping around and enjoying the whole thing a lot. It would be super crazy cool if the tiles kept track of how often they had been turned and so if someone like me isn't doing that well the game would present novel variations on the graphics of the tiles. If the music also reflected the relationship between the two tile types... As for the levels, since I was playing so badly, all three first levels became equally hard and the next one too difficult. I would suggest increasing difficulty more slowly and starting with simpler levels. Like starting with a hex tile that only has every other neighbor possible (4 tiles in total). Great game though. Really stunning. I guess you've though about it, but in case you haven't... controls would work very will on pad/mobile.
Very well made and quite hard game. I got to the end, but was close to giving up at an early stage. I would recommend easing up the difficulty acceleration in the early part a bit. The first level that introduces the red blocks is rather hard for someone still struggling to manage the controls. Equally so with the up and down moving balls, quite a bit to get through especially since they are moving vertically and thus when the player pushes a button to move past them the player will go up a bit and before you are used to it, timing it is really difficult. I wish there had been some music to it though. And finally, if you make left-side of screen go left and right-side to right, then you have yourself a mobile game!
It really looks stunning and I liked the atmospheric sounds, however I tried a full game and half without managing to make a single firework explode. So I think that there's a desperate need to either make the game more forgiving/increase tolerance, include visual instructions on how to do it, and/or have dynamic feed-back while playing showing when you are on the right track and when you fail.
I got to the second level but then got a bit bugged by the narrow platforms in combination with the floaty jumps. I would suggest you increase the gravity to make it easier/more "normal" jumping behavior. The first level had quite nice design, I would kind of have liked some "Follow the lights" instructions because before I figured that out there were a lot of jumps that needed to be done in blind faith. Good start for a game though.
Very nice simple and soothing game. I enjoyed the feeling of floating around the the world. It might have been nice if the targets sent out a long-range ping of sorts to help guiding towards them, but it was easy enough on the levels I played that it wasn't necessary. The ease of flight, I would say almost made me feel like there should have been a negative effect on colliding with any wall, not just the spikes. The shooting seemed a bit wonky right if one got hit first, but that was no big thing. Also the particles kind of felt like they didn't come from the engine of the ship (especially when turning). Besides those small details, it was a very well made and enjoyable game. Great work.
Interesting way to build up a puzzle and make the most out of two buttons. The stomping/heavy drop was really nice. Great work on models in general. I didn't really get if the game was meant to look a bit glitchy on some tiles or if it was a technical issue. I'm all for glitch though, but the game didn't look like a glitch game. A way to exit the game would have been nice too. Interesting start for a puzzle-type platformer, it'd be nice to see where you take it if you decide to continue dev on it.
Cool idea and in general interesting concept. I enjoyed playing through the game. Graphics and music worked flawlessly together. My one concern would be that the beard and character controls weren't very easy to get right. I'm not sure what exactly felt lacking there, but I couldn't really get the feel. Then of course it would have been great if the game had been longer. But given that it must have been rather tricky to implement that beard mechanics, it is very understandable. Hope you find time to continue work on it.
I found it interesting yet confusing. I couldn't really work out what the color-coding on the actions and the action below the action and stuff like that meant. I started reading the instructions before playing, but they were kind of long, so I would suggest having a step by step introduction while playing instead. Since it was very seldom I got a chance to move forward at all it seemed very hard to reach the goal. It also was very confusing why the armies scaled differently when entering battle mode compare to how they were represented on the playing field. Other than that, an interesting game. But sincerely I think the game, given the number of instructions possible, would do better outside the 'two-button' theme or have the controls reworked so one gets to select between slightly more options.
I liked the game. It was quite challenging. One of my main objections though is that it was hard to see the score I got since the game reset so fast. A little delay would have been sweet. Or a screen, with high-scores and such. As for the pattern matching, it was quite hard when you accidentally erased some other worm than the one you were focusing on. Typically trying to get rid of the closest one of a certain pattern and triggering a kill of some worm hardly in sight. So maybe the game should have a proximity zone and not kill the first matching worm if there's a longer pattern still matching for the proximity zone. Just a though. The rotational controls, since the buttons were so close, made it hard to use the rotation to avoid the worms. That way I just let them stand still and focused on clicking. One way to make the rotation more worth while might be if the buttons were further apart. Or if one could adjust the distance (maybe actually have them always rotating and the keys only adjusting distance between the buttons). Have a look at the ld30 entry for an example of the rotational control http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=21449
Very nice game entry though.
Very well implemented sloppy controls! I really mean that. It is very hard to make controls that are this annoying yet it feels like it is my fault I fail. Managed to get through the level. So the obvious things would be that there should be a win-condition. There should be more levels. Sounds. Bump effects and the work. I think it could be well adapted to mobile too. Hope you continue working on it. I could see myself addicted to it. Maybe add different vehicles. Have moving blocks and maybe actually don't have just blocks but a city grid with pedestrians and traffic and roadblocks and what not. Or some other setting, but a setting. Still very great as it is.
Nice little game. It was a bit kind and/or evil at times right at the start because you could have an enemy or food come up you within the first second of play. So having a safe area around player spawn would probably be recommended. If one opted to warp around the playing field, it felt like one was out of sight rather long (especially if using the corner where the HUD was placed). Other than that, relaxing little arcade game.
I go 0 score, didn't really get the instructions and the feedback from the game. But other than that, a fantastic visuals and a great idea.
I found the idea quite interesting. The UI was a bit confusing, before I realized that some cards were skipped due to not being applicable at the moment. This could probably be helped if the arrows around the current card weren't visible all the time, but only when the action was permitted. Also the color coding wasn't very helpful on the arrows (red is so often associated with cancel and quit). I would have liked words 'play' and 'save' next to the arrows to assist the understanding. (At least in the beginning) Another thing about the cards/scrolls was that I found myself almost only read the center text which made it confusing when there appeared minions on the board at times. So probably the title part of the card should attract more focus (maybe glow).
It was nice to be able to build a deck, but as I didn't know how many I kind of felt like quitting it after 10. It would also be nice to be able to randomly assign a full deck or rest of the deck.
The indicators at the top and bottom that I suppose reflected the size of the deck or something wasn't at all clear. And in the end I just got single cards drawn from the side. Not sure what that was about.
I enjoyed playing though, and I won my match.
I dig the music and how it fits with the game! Enjoyed climbing the face of the building too. Took me a while to realize one could destroy some of the feature though. They could maybe have had a hint or something on them. I clicked up the "How to play" on the webgl version but then couldn't find a way to get back to the menu. Small thing, but easy fix. More importantly, I really didn't understand exactly how my actions made the vine grow slower or faster. I got that if I did turn it turned. Of course. But as for speeding up the vertical climb I didn't really get it. So that probably needs some better feedback too in the game. That said, I'm not really complaining. It was a really good game!
Amazing. I played with a 360-controller and though I have no flying skills and little controller skills, it worked very well. I much enjoyed exploring the world and navigating it. It was a bit strange that it wasn't the glider, but the camera that should collect the orbs, but once I had figured that out it was OK.
I built myself a raft and headed west. Towards home. But weeks later and no turnip in sight, I'm starving and utterly lost. Poor and lost without an island in sight.
Great entry as usual. Very stylish. Controls worked fine, though it was a bit confusing in the beginning with the same button for use and drop. The whole instructions part was a bit scary and really, since the in-game help was so good there wasn't that much need for them.
The way the brightness in the day-night cycle clips your field of view is brilliant.
For the growing bit, maybe because I didn't take the treasure hunting seriously enough, there was way more food than needed. 16 days without eating before it becomes a problem may be a bit too kind. The sleep cycle maybe also should in part depend on how far the day has passed. If you don't move you have full energy in the morning hours.
Great game in all though.
Very competent arcade game with nice controls. It took me a while of playing level 1 to realize that it is in fact a very short level I you just fly fast. I was flying carefully just above the death-cloud collecting all that came at me. So maybe add a level-progression meter somewhere. I didn't really get what the collectibles were, but once it felt like I ran out of juice, so maybe that was it. The second level was very much harder than the first for me. And though several attempts, I failed to get past it. So maybe have fewer balls in the second level. To build up the feeling in the player that 'maybe I could get a little longer next time'. If the thruster-meters have some problem-state (e.g. out of fuel), it probably needs to draw even more attention than the current version since the game is rather stressful and I at least didn't really have much over to notice what was happening to them.
I did have a very good time playing it. Great entry!
Btw now we have a Mac version up an running of out game if you want to give it a try.
Built upon, I think this could become cool. I think the basic concept needs expanding a bit to be come more fun. If, for example, the problem of the game is to keep several conversations going in parallel and not send the wrong message to the right recipient. Maybe identify the target of a message by shape. Or maybe even better to use several types of information (color, shape, fill-pattern) on each message and each target and have to send to receiver that matches one. Upon reception mutate that feature of the receiver. Or something. Anyhow. The simple layout and focused style was really neat vehicle for illustrating a conversation.
It was kind of fun flying around, but not knowing exactly what I was doing the first time, I was kind of helpless as I got a bad start. The second time I wiped out the fire really quick and then just had to wait for the end. So I think there could be some balancing in difficulty somehow. Like for example that a tile recently burnt but put out can't burn for a while again. Second, I think the win-condition should trigger on extinguishing the last fire. On that topic too, it would have been nice to at least be able to return to the menu or so after the game was over. Nice little arcade type game though.
Very good entry! Great use of the theme, lovely graphics. I swam around accumulating a bit here and there enjoying myself too much to not think about the timer and game-mechanics. It would have been nice if it was easier to get more varied topologies of the trash-self. But in general very fun game.
I think the game would have benefited from an interactive tutorial explaining how to build a plant and some stronger feedback about the resource economy I figure was at the base of the game. Like a clear meter for water uptake capability and a clear meter for energy production. Do green stems produce energy for instance.
Very well made visuals and fitting music. Really appreciated that there were different bowls to grow from. There were some interaction-issues though. One you did mention about clicking the stem too early. I would suggest adding a delay upon resetting the game during which the game doesn't respond to clicks to avoid the state where it looks like the game is stuck. Also I think that if you had left clicked something and then tried to left-click another branch. If you missed the second branch, you would grow again on the first branch. This could probably also be fixed with some minor adjustment. Finally, it did happen that I grew out of view. It would have been really nice if the camera enlarged its view when parts where starting to fall outside. In all though, a very nice experience.
Great graphics and generally well designed games, though the controls were really hard on the first and last chapter.
I downloaded the windows-version but when I click on the magic-garden executable all that happens is a Chromium window that says "NW.JS". I couldn't get the web-version running either.
6890 (share that with someone else I see)! So first time around I totally missed out on how it worked, but that was fine. Second time I started upwards and was thinking like, "this is a neat idea, but it is a little bit simple". Then came the wind...and after a while it started to become very hard. Great game. Stunning graphics. A pity that you didn't have time equally stunning music. Because that would elevate this game quite a lot. I could also see the potential for a mobile game. Either tap on left vs right side of screen or have the vine on auto-growth and use the gyro (and have wind push what is up according to the gyro) to define grow left and right. Of course there could be other annoyances than wind too, like a bird temporarily resting on the vine pushing you down a bit. When it comes to the score/energy system, I think you should consider not resetting energy to 55 upon collecting a sun, but instead give a +30 energy. Or even +20, cap energy at 95. Because as it is right now the only thing that matters right now is the number of suns collected. How efficient or fast or slow you were for each "stage" has no effect. And that I think lessens the urge to play again.
Great game!
Interesting way of implementing the two-button control in a way that really only needed one button. I like that. Fun little play-through.
Oh also, forgot to say that our game now has a Mac-version...
The graphics were really stunning, and I played it a few levels. Mostly to see more of the graphics. The dialog and such was also nice. The controls however I simply never got to get a grip on. And fighting the controls felt frustrating rather than fun. Sure I understood their premise, but the way the boat reacted if doing e.g. left and right in swift succession... Also with the controls frustrating, I think it would have been nice with the triggers for the checkpoints a bit larger. So while I like the idea and almost all the stuff you implemented... it is a really very well made entry, I don't feel like the theme at all helped the game you made. Not complaining at all about you not using the theme, just saying that I think your game would have been much better without the theme.
I never quite got the hang of how to time the jumps. Somehow I managed to get to the second level but there it became impossible for me. For one thing, the view ahead was really short. I think it would have been nice if the character was placed about a fourth of the length from the left. There was some odd ability to glide in the middle of platforms too (it saved me many times). Nice little start for a game.
It was a pretty hard game. I only got to level 3. But I liked it. The thing that was bugging me the most was that there was no snapping to the balls so it was hard to know what was within the tolerance of the specification. I think too it could be made more fun if set in a proper setting, like building molecules. If the number of angles the new ball can attach to previous balls the problem could also become in which order the balls need to be attached for it to work. It would be nice too if the evaluation if it is possible to build the target was done after each new ball so one doesn't have to play the level to an end each time. Good entry though.
Really cool idea! I'll have to try the post-jam versions later because it was really a bit too hard to maneuver around for me. I got past the first puzzle easily enough, but the second one stopped me in my tracks. Way to early for such an original and cool-looking idea!
Cool idea! It would have been great to have some clear feedback on all eat-decisions. If they were productive or not. But I get that would have been a lot of work. Maybe have the bad (if they existed) or neutral ones have a small screen-shake or such. The game kind of ended a little abruptly too, would suggest adding at least a end-screen. Great entry though.
Really cool idea and ambitious to try and pull off for a Ludum. I really would have liked some camera snap type of effect for when storing a space-time position and some indicator showing that the next action would be a rewind. An easy level reset button would have been nice since there where ways to get quite stuck and the space action failing to do anything (pressed like 5-6 times without anything happening). Finally the controls were hard to deal with. Maybe the colliders should be extended a little for all platforms, maybe lack of grace-period allowing jump shortly after left platfrom, maybe there was some momentum in the character or a lack of gravity. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was slightly off. So if these things were attended to, I'd say you have a winner concept for a puzzle platformer!
Really tricky controls to get the hang of even if they were simple. I liked the game though. Fun and all. The heart section kind of needs tuning though as when you grow bigger it is actually impossible to avoid the white blood cells most of the time. Music really great.
It is a very interesting start for an interactive experience or more gameified experience. But without having any restrictions on planting the palms and no variation or dynamic events reacting on what the player does, it feels a bit bare. I would suggest considering button press be inducing 'growth' and that 'growth' would be context dependent on (a) color/type of surface under the cursor, (b) surrounding growth, and possibly also (c)duration of play. A really neat scenario would be if growth would mean increasingly complex ecosystem so that first you grow vegetables of a variety of sorts and then when enough of those exist and you press 'growth' some grazing animal would spawn. When enough of those, predators and so on. Maybe also humans and civilizations. Of course this could not be done fully within LD. But it would be the direction I would go with what you have here. Finally, I think a game like this really needs music that reflects the state of the world for the mood to be well established. Nice entry though, especially the graphics.
It was a very fun start on a game that feels like it wants to become something much bigger. Nice work. It would have been nice if the interaction with the voting machine was mapped to buttons close to the keyboard controls so one didn't need to use the mouse. If the chat didn't clear on voting would have felt more "natural" too, but maybe insert a status into the chat "* You voted YES on prop 1420" or something. I would love to see this voting economy-dystopia continued into a full adventure/exploration game.
I wish this game was much easier. It looks like something I'd like to play for a great while, but I have no chance. First off, I think it would help a lot if the player was given a priority listing making the most critical problems clearly stand out. Second, I think it must be much easer. Especially in the beginning. Sometimes it felt like I didn't get the type of piece I clicked on. If this was a critical fail at e.g. building entertainment, then there's a need for feedback saying that. I think the basic idea is very promising. I would have liked to see different dynamics to different types of problem too. Like entertainment isn't that fast acting, but makes people grumpy for a long time. Maybe they don't like having to walk too far between their food and home and entertainment. And so on. In space, the space shouldn't be the limiting factor really. Great start though and very ambitious for a LD entry.
Very nice graphics! The narrative worked nicely as the game progressed. I didn't get very far though. Something about having only 2 people thus why they would require more than one hut and when the snakes came everyone died. That part felt a bit too sudden. The first encounter should basically be safe I think, and if huts produce offspring independent of population size, then that kind of needs to be explained I think. Great entry though.
Hi. I'd love "Random LD34 game" collection (working on tag). Maybe actually trending tag or something in general. It is a bit annoying to have tabs open in the browser as it works at present, but I guess this is just an interim thing. Great work though.
Absolutely fantastic job. Very well made. I quite didn't figure out, or actually didn't really want to understand the actual mechanics of the game. I just wanted to enjoy it. That was how good it was. The jumping really didn't feel like a necessary addition to the game and with it you had the vertical drops in the landscape that kind of felt like they broke the general awesomeness of the style of the game. For post jam version I would remove those and if need be for variation would make a topology that can be walked without the need for jumping (most of the time) and built from grassy stuff that fits nicely together. Great job though. Seriously great job.
Great controls and nice graphics. The timing of then enemies was also really well made as well as the difficulty progression. I got to 19 kills. Would have been cool with some global ranking for it of course, or at least personal high score.
That one actually had to kill the archers were a bit surprising first time I failed to do that, though it makes great sense from the difficulty perspective. It would help with some animation of the archer whipping the character over the head as he falls down. To make it more logical.
One thing I would urge you to fix too would be to either automatically with a bit of delay just restart the game upon death or have either of the two buttons used to play also allow to retry. I find it critical in these types of fast play-fail-retry type of games to minimize the effort and time between plays. Don't let the player escape wanting to just play one more time.
In general a very solid made entry.
Very very very good puzzles you've made here. A nice cylindrical structure to explore. I sometimes got the feeling that maybe if I hadn't understood the puzzle correctly that could have pushed a block to where it wasn't retrievable. Maybe it wasn't true or you'd thought if it. But in any a case, I think it is important that the player can't end up in a fail state. The difficulty was perfect for me. Having to think some, but not getting frustrated anywhere. For there teleporters, it would have been nice if there was a trigger around them a bit larger than them that displayed some 'awareness' effect so that the player could know where the player would end up before jumping in to it. My one reservation would be that, while the effect of the other character following you up as you go up was really nicely done, the plot felt quite unnecessary. And even if deciding to keep the lovers' embrace in the end, if the player didn't know if it was a lover or an enemy monitoring the players progress, it would make for a more interesting story-dynamics while playing.
Great game though.
Fun little idea for a game. Since one could press the red and green buttons many times while the dino was presenting its ideas, it would have been really nice to get some feedback on that it had at all accepted my suggestion. Also to make it more playable, if there had been some sort of reaction from the dinosaur so the player can learn what was helping growth or not it would be nice. And a meter showing the time left (maybe one should get a little extra time each time you answer a correct answer). Just some suggestions.
Great graphics and very ambitious project. Walked around trying to eat the various things. Generally nice written dialog, but it would have been nice to be able to skip forward with space when you happened to repeat something.
Played it on windows. Liked it. It was a bit slow, it could have been nice if holding both buttons would have increased the speed a bit (maybe at the cost of increasing in size). Another cool thing would have been if there wasn't splatter from hitting the skiers, but that they got stuck and for a while made the ball a bit bumpy (until new snow had rounded it off again), making it harder to control the path. Also, of course, different types of skiers: some slow like those you had now. Some faster than the ball coming from top of screen. Etcetera. Good game though.
Great graphics and an original take on the theme. I didn't manage to tease out if there was sort of better or worse paths through the game, which I think, for the purpose of the effect the game tries to evoke was nice. I didn't much care for the audio. The sound of a clock could have been a simple replacement. More interestingly to have sparse sounds from the different stages of life as one progresses through. The game, true or not, kind of teaches you to say no to certain questions about death and I liked the twist that one of them gave. But it would also be nice to play that twist the other way around. As for the questions. Graphically, I think another font would have suited better. To fit the style better. To me too, life isn't all or sometimes not even much about the types of questions your game poses, but much more trivial and mundane questions. It would have been nice to have these in too. I liked the entry, good job.
I really like the idea, even if the controls was one furious wiggle-session (not typically to my liking). Really enjoyed the art style and the setting. Would have been so nice to have some growth-related music. Maybe a tune build from four tracks, one per player and have the current score be reflected on the volumes. It would also be interesting if there was a way to increase the level of dynamics in the playing field as there's a very short early phase when one grabs land (very important) and then one defends that land. More or less. Cool entry though.
I really liked the graphics in this game! Very much. The setup with the controls worked nicely too. However it felt like the game was a bit too brutal on the player (not the contents in itself necessarily), it was way too easy to die in the beginning leaving the player with a sense that there really was only one way to play the game and that was unfortunate. I get that the combinatorics of a fully branching story is just very quickly impossible. But I think a better way to solve it is to allow the story to converge on the same points throughout the game and allow the player to take different routes in between these. Thus giving the player an illusion of writing their own narrative. And only have a few deaths along the way.
I played well over 10 levels, didn't get to the end though. It was kind of nice game. Would have been more so if the player had better controls. I'm mostly thinking of the power in the jump. It felt much like the Time.timeDelta was too important or something like that. At times I could jump so low I didn't lift off the ground and at times roughly the same duration landed me a jump that was too high. If a jump-power meter was included it would help with that. I also didn't notice at first that the jumping could be extended by holding the button down. So the meter would kind of help the player realize that too. It also felt like the spikes had too large of a collision area (or the player). At times the spikes were facing the wrong way. And maybe most of all, if I had known how far into the game I was by some "Level 13/24" it would have been nice. Those things aside I did play it for quite a while so there's something nice about the challenge it presents. And as with all two button control games -- have you considered doing the left side of screen jump left and right jump right and port it to mobile?
It was an interesting feature that the enemies stayed dead between plays. And uncommon way of killing them with the dashing. It was quite hard though, I didn't get very far. And as that, it would have been nice with a little quicker death-sequence to respawn. If the game would have started a little easier too, it would have been better. Being surrounded by 3 enemies right when you start isn't very friendly ;) Nice entry though.
Great walking game. It took me a while to at all grasp the controls though, in general they were not very precise. It would have helped to lock the mouse cursor and tom have a collider that didn't get stuck on small height differences. Simple way would be to have a capsule collider and set physics material to have no friction. I was really about to give up getting across the water due to this. When I got there, the camera got glitchy/started fog most things out because, I suppose, of the max distance it rendered. Besides these small tweaks that could easily be fixed. A very enjoying experience. It would have been really cool if you when little got pulled by Dr. Madman if you didn't follow in the circle and then progress to a stale-mate when a little bigger and both were equally strong to when really big you are out walking with Dr. Madman dingeling in the air.
I enjoyed the idea of the inflatable birds very much and I suppose being more than one player would have made it more fun. It did seem to me though that there was a sure way to not loose and that is to never inflate yourself. So I wonder, given that, if the controls shouldn't work in some other way, e.g. that pressing your button boost the inflation speed. Also the birds were pretty good at tipping backwards and out off the island on their own. I figure they shouldn't be too forward heavy, but it would probably be nice if they weren't that suicidal. Interesting entry though.
Nice game with generally interesting puzzles. I got frustrated with the clouds jumping though and gave up. Good use of the theme.
Hmm I'm pretty sure I wrote a comment, but it must have gotten lost on the way over Internet. Anyhow, I really enjoyed the visuals and walking around. The use of the theme was really smart too. I have some issues with the obstacles and puzzles though. I pretty quickly figured out how to deal with the three elevator puzzle, but it took me a jolly long time of trial and error to actually get the levels right enough so I could get up. It might not be the puzzle, but that the controls need more work. Or the elevators need to give some feedback for when they are correctly adjusted (like one push on a button elevates to a certain level, not progressively). The same controls-issue I had with the clouds. It was hard to know exactly where you were standing, hard to stay on the cloud. Especially when it turned (which was really fast and without warning). So after attempting 5-10 times, I gave up. Which was a pity, because I really wanted to know how the game would end. For the clouds, to help stay on them while turning it may be better to use an AnimationCurve for the lateral positioning so it's easy to make a soft turn. To me, a game like yours is more about experiencing than being challenged by the puzzles and obstacles & in this case they got a bit in the way of the fun for me. In general though, a very good game indeed.
Fantastic entry. Just fantastic. I enjoyed playing it very much. Music and graphics and game content working smoothly together. If there was one thing, it would be that the controls were a bit hard when carrying stuff. And possibly, the marker for picking up stuff felt a bit of a contrast style-wise compared to everything else in the game. Really great though. Fantastic work
I see this is a really well made game, and I wish it was a little kinder on me, but something just makes my brain not get the jump-fly-flap-switch-jump-switch-fly-flap thing and I just die and fail and fall. So I wish it would have been much easier and forgiving start. Or maybe there are some tweak possible to the details of the two states to make it easier.
They way I felt playing you really never benefited much from the humanoid state, more like an evil necessity between the flaps. So maybe that could be balanced if the human state could generate higher speed when running. Just a though.
It is an ambitious project and most UI interactions worked nicely. The zoom level was a bit annoying though, so if the view of the camera could be adjusted with the mouse middle wheel, it would have been really nice. As for the strategy aspect of the game, I didn't get any feeling for what types of strategies that was preferable so the way I played it, I just tested some different settings and let the game run by itself. So to up the game-aspect, I think the game would need to be better with the feedback (progress bar on research, short-time death and shape shifting trends).
Nice short little puzzle. I liked how the game managed to convey the mechanics with very few words without being confusing.
That easy mode was really hard. I did manage to get 2/3 in at least. Fun game, but quite challenging and I didn't really figure out any obvious way to confuse and/or trick the monster to make it easier to drop the pieces. The way I "solved" it was by swiftly moving in from the closest edge.
@Sean, you are correct. We figured the fun was more centered on the experience (getting a nice body and the 2D springs and hinges physics workout) than the actual gamified aspect so we decided to make it easier than it appeared to be.
Really well done entry. Hard but well done. I managed to get to the forth level somehow. Would have liked to spend more coins on buying hearts. It would also had been more interesting if it wasn't the typical prince and princess framing. Controls worked really smooth. Took me a little while to figure out the brushing in the mirror as the other actions were showing their selection/action more directly. Enjoyed playing.
Really very some superlative great! The visual effect on the transitions the puzzle of navigating (a bit on the hard side, especially the first bit). And then the mood of it. If I were to complain, I think it would be nicer to drop the right mouse button for directing the gaze or not use the left mouse button to select. I didn't get to the end, I think, because I think I couldn't find a key. But the game was very good indeed even if I didn't get to see the conclusion.
Cool concept, some parts took me a little while to figure out but really nicely done. It would have been nice with the cursor locked and not visible on screen, but that's just a minor detail. Simple and well executed.
Neatly done! Reminded me of playing games on a Vic 20. I played it with keyboard, but I guess the controls would have been smoother with a controller or a classic joystick (if they even exist nowadays). It wasn't super obvious what the distinct abilities were so adding some text or icon UI somewhere to indicate what you just acquired would have been nice. Really good entry though.
Nice game. I got a couple of levels in but then it seemed impossible to progress further. I liked the puzzles though.
The cat was cool, but it would have been nice to get rid of it. And I don't know about the steering, pretty soon it just didn't seem to react to my input very much. Other than those things though, an interesting driving concept!
This was dead hard. Mostly because you could make almost no mistake, had to get close without knowing how close and had to successfully get several hits in a row. I managed to become a snake though after trying a couple of times. It would have been nice to know the range of the attack too. I didn't try it with a controller (if that works), but that might make it much easier. Nice game though. Liked how the sizes of the hearts told you about their level.
To decide to make a point and click for LD and actually finishing it, is rather impressive. Nice work. I managed to get rid of one of personalities but the cat refused be afraid of water/I couldn't shower it off and ice wouldn't be hair-dried. But that's the sort of issues tend to be part of the point and click genre as a whole and not particular to your game.
Though the effect of how the text was written was cool it was really quite impossible to read while it was writing since the positions kept getting updated.
Other than that a really nice entry.
Really well made. Fantastic use of a single model. And very well designed level. I got to about 3:19 in your video. So pretty close. It would have been nice at that place to have some read hands attacking from the right too, to show that up was still the way to go. I hesitated, missed the jump and lost my final life. I kept feeling challenged while experiencing the world all through the game. The zoomed out part with the the fists were a bit annoying because the rabbit didn't have much power to jump, but that's really just a minor detail. Fantastic work.
Really liked how your idea allowed for some nice puzzle design. Enjoyed playing through a couple of the levels. It is definitely a core concept that could be expanded upon. Besides the audio being quite minimal, it would also be nice if the wizard wasn't so slow and jumping more followed the "normal" pattern of elevated gravity to make jumps snappy. All in all though, a very nice entry.
I love this. Simple and interesting game. Nice pacing of difficulty. Love the graphics and how the audio is integrated with the game. I usually pride myself with trying to come up with some constructive ideas about the game, but don't have much more to say than add some global high scores and ship the game.
I know I'm not often driving cars, but I have a license. This was hard though. Partially it felt like the car was really really light. I also managed to get stuck into a curb. The clean and nice low-poly look was nice though.
The art and mood of this just begged me to understand how the puzzles and the controls really worked so that I could get lost in the game for a while, but I really didn't figure it out. My suggestion would be to add a clear explanation here and for the future consider easing the player into the game by introducing the shifting and the abilities in small steps - levels that are so easy they hardly make a puzzle. Fantastic style though, would really have wanted to play this game for a while.
Fantastic artwork, great attention to detail and the interactions worked really nice. I outpatted a bunch of cats, gained some levels but I didn't find any use for the noodles. I was also really unlucky to get a very stubborn cat early that I only did 2 points on each pat and it had almost 1000 pats before giving up. So the randomization needs some tweaking. I really liked the audio and graphics though.
Stunning and charming and just extremely well done. I don't know what more to say. I played maybe ten levels or so. The only thing that may possibly be something to work on if you plan to make a full release of the game is the variation of the puzzles. Most levels were kind of solved more or less the same way. But for the scope of an LD game I am by no means complaining. The fact that you could walk with A/D when your feet didn't touch the ground if your head/body was grounded was also a bit surprising. Great game. It could easily be extended by also serving different types of food and that these have requirements on how they need to be balanced. Or add time to it so you have to stop the customers from wandering off. Just some thoughts.
I played the jam-version as it seems the most fair to use for rating and evaluation.
So though the game seemed quite clear on what to do and I found the first limb easily accessible, then it became obscure. I like the setting and mood, all the props made, but I couldn't find any more body parts. I think I looked everywhere, jumped on and even through some. There was a jar on a top shelf, but when I managed to get up to it I couldn't interact. Maybe all these things are clearer in the post-jam version, but if I'm missing something then I do think some more explaining in the game is needed.
I did like the experience though.
I played against myself, which probably takes away a lot of the game-part of the game, but it felt like a couch multiplayer game. It was a bit odd (but I guess necessary for push-game play) that the turning was so hard yet one just bounced on the walls. Maybe it would have felt more natural if one warped around the sides and have a surface on the top?
Nicely done! Those moving lasers were really hard to handle for some reason but I got past the first set after trying quite a few times. It is a really great core mechanic, and I much enjoyed playing it. The inability to move backwards was a bit annoying when one missed the base of some stairs and so on. I ended up only using the peak-shiftning and maybe that was why it was so hard to get past the lasers. Something with the ball-throwing didn't set right with me. Don't know what / maybe clearer showing where the effects start, when they expire if not used and so on.
I found the pitchforks, became a horse and found a cow but couldn't really figure out how to use the pitchforks (If horses do at all use pitchforks). I did however find a hole in the ground and fell through so I think it should count as breaking free.
I tried the web first on Firefox but couldn't move the character for some reason. On windows it took me a while to get going because the button element was way to the left of the text. Minor things though. I agree with the other comments that some smoothness to the camera tracking would have been nice, but all in all a quite playable little game.
I very much enjoyed this. The peaceful walking around looking for things. I got a bit annoyed when I hit a dead end and figured I needed to trail back, but instead tried the trees and what do you know I could walk between them. Very nice. At one point I trailed out of the forest but decided to turn back so I didn't chance upon a dragon or worse. At one point I felt like it would have been good to get some feeling for where the initial clearing was located compared to where I were and how many more thingies I needed to collect. Just about to say, enough when I got one more. The last one I needed. And then heading back was surprisingly easy. So very nice indeed. Really balancing on the edge of where I was about to dismiss it and quit early, so maybe some stronger feedback about progression and orientation. Possibly not needing to collect all discs but only a fraction of them (and then destroy the remaining). Also I much liked the walking animation, but it felt like it didn't always properly show the direction I was heading. Just a minor complaint. As a whole a very good game.
I really liked the way the game explained stuff as I needed to know it. It got a bit too much when the crab grabbed me (ran through a bunch of messages that kind of landed on top of each other). Fun concept, but that crab pinched me to death.
I like the way it is the same level but the platforms shift between iterations. I would have liked the controls to be a bit more snappy. Jump a bit higher while having higher gravity, stop faster when letting go and so on. Kept falling off and it felt like it wasn't my fault but the games fault (which made me stop on the second level). Good idea for a game though.
Very nice experience, floating around in and out of the walls. I found some special green things and collected a few but I think I was doomed to haunt the world and walls for all of time as I seemed not to find the resting-place.
Really nice animations on the ghost and I liked the zoom-in effects of the camera too. Great work.
Really really hard game about as fun as it was annoying to fail over and over again. It actually took me quite a while to figure out that I couldn't use the rotation to rotate the characters so they faced the direction that seemed logical but that finding the right orientation was a challenge itself. Or if that was not intended, we definitely don't agree on the expected rotation pattern. The fish I kept trying to point its head by using the left control, the giraffe, its head (so their origins are 90 degrees rotated in my mind). If what direction on the left stick maps to what rotation was intended as a puzzle too, then I would suggest adding that complexity a bit later in the game and add some more time between the first couple of patterns to help people starting out with the game. Nicely done though.
This is a fantastic concept and getting to the stage of having working procgen in a Ludum game is very much respect. As others have mentioned the controls would be great if they were tweaked. I think would be splendid to build upon this concept and make a proper game out of it. Enjoyable as is too, but please make it grand ^^
Wow this was hard. I liked how the style of the game somehow reminded me of the '90s, but I'm not quite sure exactly of what. I think the game needs to slow down quite a bit for me to stand a chance. It could help to a guiding ballistic trajectory for the shots and basically start it out much easier. Let it be possible to kill the Walkman safely from the first platform on the first level, as an example. It also felt like I got hit by the music even when I was still standing on that platform. Since music is sort of the enemy, or the player is the enemy of music, a cool death sequence would have been if the player started dancing. It could in fact be something happening while playing too, showing the 'health' of the player. Interesting entry.
I agree with @Pierrec, this is so insanely hard! But really nice. It'd be nice if there were level numbers or something so that one could show off to friends like 'I got to lvl 3' bet you'll never get past second. I got to the level that is your last screenshot and I'm quite proud, but I gave up there. I think you should make this into a post-jam version and mainly tweak the controls some (and support controllers).
For the not-snake it would be really great if the character didn't have as much momentum when one lets go of a button. It would be nice if there also was a small grace period after leaving a platform when jumping was still possible.
For the snake, it felt quite non-responsive, like it would be impossible to to sharp turns. The game is hard enough as it is and it's important that the player feels like the mistakes are entirely theirs.
"Yes they do", to answer your question. Cute little game. It was a bit surprising that I could drop through floors with down key and I also managed to leave the game in one of the rooms so I had to restart it. Besides these details quite fun little puzzle.
I saw a gif of pipe-flying and I don't know what super-human you are or how many times you retook that gif because for me this was a bounce-bounce-bounce-mania off of all walls. But I loved it, I'm not complaining, don't change a thing, let them be as they are. The game is superbly made. However, as I launched it from the itch-app, I would suggest adding something about 'z' for action on the first/title screen (at least after a little while). Just add the beautiful description you have on the itch.io page. I had to press around the keyboard to find it. On the same theme, your page doesn't work in the itch-app at all. I very much appreciated that the enemies were only hindrance but not hurt (otherwise I would not have been happy with all the bouncing I did), quite uncommon for the game type. I haven't said anything at all about the graphics, marvelous. The whole aesthetic is so well defined.
The movements are really cool and in combination with the color palette make a really unique style. I'm a little sad there was no way I was going to touch the storm. If you consider working with this I think that the eye-inspection somewhat broke the expected style of the game. It might have been mostly on the horse there the sharp and non-outlined left and lower edges of the texture were visible. So just ensure with placement that they are hidden as a minimum. It would probably to good to dim out the world a bit too. Best would though perhaps be if the camera could zoom in on the detail instead while swapping the animation... but that might not be technically feasible?
Fun machine to play around with. I did have some interaction problems with it though that I doubt was intended. When I clicked with my mouse typically the game considered that I pressed a button about 2cm to the right on the screen. I could offset for that in my mind, though it did kind of take away the feeling that I was indeed interacting with this strange machine. The very abstract machines/games like this are rare among Ludum entries, but I cherish them each time! Great fun!
I played about four levels down until I decided to stop. The textures, models and particle effects are all done with extreme care. Sound effects makes it feel like there's actually a fire on the torch being re-kindled. When it comes to interactions, it would of course been even cooler if the torch rekindled depending on the orientation of the player and not based on the coordinate system of the torch. But more important, neither the flames nor other interactions allowed to be too close which was kind of annoying. The puzzles were really quite simple but required rather a lot of manipulation and walking. For me they worked negative on the mood and I kept playing in spite of them rather than because of them. I would have been happy with the darkness and sparse lighting -- with the sounds and textures... I would have enjoyed if the game centered around nurturing the flame on the torch and had very little of the lever and light-ray puzzles (not saying they should go away all together, but sparse and concise to add to the mystery and mood). To sum up: the details and level of polish on those really impressed me, they created a great mood.
I really liked the sound work on the explosions and the particle effects on exploding stuff. The game was beautifully made and it was a very nice experience playing it. It was nice that I had enough time to find out on my own what the objective was (didn't read about red) and figuring out how to select the different locations with the arrow-keys. It wasn't entirely intuitive for one of the locations which key was mapped (being typically 4 directions but only 3 locations I would suggest mapping the last key as a double to the one that makes most sense). As far as the game aspect (I think the game was very enjoyable with or without it), I found myself mostly staying in the top position, because it seemed to have the best vantage point by far. The time was a bit too long to if considering in this perspective. Also there was a sense of progress in the score but no indication of how I was doing relative to some set goal. If even there was one. So if you consider doing some post-jam fixes, and want the game parts to be core to the experience, I would suggest balancing the value of the different positions and giving a sense of how well you are doing as the first steps.
Very enjoyable and relaxing experience though. Nice entry.
Fantastic idea. I was right about to give up when I finally realized that it wasn't the arrow symbols but the numbers used to toggle between SEND and INBOX. It makes no sense since the arrow buttons are used for proximate things, but I guess that is how it was. I would recommend though that you'd add the ability to navigate that menu with the arrow buttons too. Impressive too that you managed to have time to add all the detail to the experience such as calculator, composer and snake! So very cool entry. I would make the game hide the mouse cursor though because sometimes it was confusing (felt like I was pressing a button but the game thought I was above it). It also breaks the feeling of being the hand in the game too. Still, very cool idea!
Fantastic graphics, music, mood and quirkiness. It was really hard after a while, the stone face seems to require a lot of it servant. I think I got to about 25 seconds left on the timer, and I would really have liked to see what happened in the end... but so hard. I wouldn't change anything but maybe make it a little bit easier to win, if it was the intent that the player should be able to win. I'm all for games that can't be won, so don't get me wrong. Also if one could have the clock burn through the darkness as one looses so one actually gets to know how good or bad one did so that one got a sense of progress from time to time (or not). But then again, maybe it is actually better as it is too. After playing this I feel a bit sad that we did such a normal game this time, when several times we've made stuff looking like this one. Which is to say: very very good stuff, I liked it a lot!
Is there a way to get to play the game without installing it? I don't think I'm alone here, but for me web games is really preferred (read next to mandatory). Self contained downloadable games acceptable, but it makes me grumpy. However if hosted by itch.io I can use their app and then the experience is equal to a web-game, if not better. In extreme cases third party dependencies from reliable sources can be installed, but the game really should be self contained. But this probably makes it a roll higher than 17 on a D20 die to succeed/be done. Games requiring installation is simply not going to happen and that is what I got from looking at the zip.
From the comments, I would have liked to try it out. So let me know if you make another type of build.
Interesting casual fireworks puzzle. Since we did a fireworks game ourselves, I had to check out the competition. I like how the complexity was introduced gradually, but on that note. I didn't see if there were any target level of satisfaction needed for each level to progress. I think a big satisfaction-meter that you have to fill before times up (another progression bar next to it), would have been great for the game. A few times I clicked the status of the firework rather than the actual sprite for it when trying to select, so maybe it could have been nice to have the entire thing act as a button. For the part where they have preference, I think they need much higher bonus for getting it right. I simply played by activating any firework over where it was most densely populated at the moment rather than loosing valuable time and that seemed to yield the best result for me. Which means that I didn't bother to satisfy as many as possible, but rather a few most happy. So to improve on the game-aspect I think the right way to go besides upgrading the color matching bonus would be to have 3 states. Happy, Grumpy, Angry. Where people spawn as grumpy and if they haven't seen any fireworks in some seconds they become angry and start to drain your satisfaction pool.
All in all though, a very nice game.
It is a magnificent piece of work this entry. The style, the music and visuals and sound fx from rain. Very very good. A bit too hard though. Didn't figure out how much of how to solve the puzzles. I was about to give up on even making a call because I interpreted the instructions as that the game would present me a number pad visually to press on. To avoid that confusion I would suggest that clicking the phone actually brings up the dialing with a pre-entered 555. Even better, if the numbers learned on the info ui could be clicked to be entered automatically. So to sum up: Fantastic in almost every way, but I wish it was a little easier in the beginning.
I liked the idea and would have enjoyed seeing some splashing to send messages back but there really were too many issues. First and foremost many things fall outside my screen, both in the view-port (native aspect ratio and size of the game) on itch.io and in full screen mode. Second I think you should be kind enough to the player to have the ABC button translate the by the player input binary into the character. The player can do the math or press the button depending on choice. The button could just append to whatever is written in the notes field (which really should be wrap/multiple lines).
Nice chemistry! And much more realistic take on fireworks mixing than we did. The controls a bit hard in two ways. Both the camera's perspective made it difficult to see what the fellow was actually selecting and then to navigate from the perspective of the character added confusion. I think these two could have relatively easily been solved with having the character simply follow the mouse cursor position around or making the character go by global directions of the keys. In both cases letting the character rotate itself towards its goal automatically. The selection could have been helped by having the boxes show that they were selected somehow (lamp, animation, particle effect or such). I liked playing around with it though, not really complaining. It was a fun experience. Just could have run a little smoother so that the challenge was more of the mixing than the controls.
I enjoyed walking around, very beautifully made. I got to a river and waded in it but seemed like there was no way out of it, so I sat down and rested and let that be my new home.
I got 15 on my first game. In the beginning it was quite confusing interaction. Something with not being able to drag the markers when not clicking a tile. Maybe this could have been helped by having them lay still until one clicks on a hex and then only circle those that can be interacted with. Or ideally potentially the other way around: I click to drag a water marker and this zooms me in on an aqueduct tile that is close enough. It felt a bit evil too that the importer was positioned so that I could only place one conveyor hex in proximity to it unless I'm mistaken. Since the importer is useless before one has played such a tile anyhow I would suggest moving its position to the top tile of the middle column of '1' hexes. Once I got past the confusion though it was a nice challenge and I could see it extended to a nice mobile game. I really liked having the option and possibly the need to destroy cards. When the game ended I wanted to retry it and not waste some of the initial rounds on not understanding the game, but the game just ended with the brown background. So I hope you do a bit of post-judgement fixing and it's seriously impressive to have done this in pure html from scratch. Maverick, but impressive.
I tried it a couple of times and most cases died from falling. At least that is what I think happened. I really don't know why, but the fall height death setting kept surprising me. It felt wrong. There was something with jumping too, a bit of combination of feeling sluggish and not having any/enough grace period after actually leaving platforms. Hard games can be really fun (though I'm extremely demanding when games are hard), but the harder they come the more critical it is that everything with controls and level design is absolutely right else it just feels like it's the game that is doing it wrong, and hence not me, the player making the mistakes. Sorry that came out a bit harsh, I simply mean to say that it would have help the game if the platforms and jumps had been made forgiving rather than needing precision as the game is right now. Then I would probably have enjoyed jumping around collecting the pieces and firing the weapon.
Fantastically well created, animated, sounds and style all fit as if they were part of an old animated short. Very picky date though, and hard to get everything just perfectly right. I gave up after 4-5 times, but being a vegetarian I really don't have much perspective on how to cook meat.
Maybe the game should allow for one thing missing to get to the success ending since it is such a short game and it becomes a bit repetitious to try and retry. Also the main pleasure of the game is just experiencing it, and the stress aspect of getting everything in order comes across anyhow. Other than that just a marvelous little gem of a game.
We were talking about making a social awkwardness game the night before ludum, but couldn't see a way to fit it with the theme but this you really succeeded. Much enjoyed the whole scenario and the dialogues. I kept confusing the interactions though, for some reason my brain wanted to left click where the game intended right click and vice versa. Also when I tabbed out of the game to read up where I got stuck the game got all weird in colors and only filled up left half of the screen. Don't know what happened really. Anyhow, interesting story and yay for socially awkward games!
I really like the walk cycle and enjoyed the graphics. I don't know if it was intended but the way the character jumped really high when getting hurt was sort of surprising, but since the design had a bit of silly in it, it didn't disturb playing that much. After a while I figured out it was best to back-stab since they were moving slower when turning. But to be honest, I didn't feel like the game got very engaging, probably because one could walk around so freely and the enemies came to few in relation. I also would have been nice to have a visual feedback of where the end of the room was. Still, the walk cycle, I really enjoyed that.
Very much enjoyed walking around. The darkness and how well the lighting worked and the sense that the game was encouraging me in that I was progressing and doing the right stuff even if it was very sparse with information and hard to see yet I never felt lost. It was quite hard to find all four check points and maybe there was a final thing after that, but I missed it. One of my favorites was leaving the map. It also helped a lot with finding the checkpoints. I don't know what should have been made differently or what could be improved, but possibly have an even larger but diffuse trigger for when one is getting closer but can't yet hear the checkpoint. Also if there was a true ending then the 4/4 message should probably be tweaked or some clear effect happen to the game world to hint it. Great entry though.
Because I was too quick to start playing I missed the instructions on how to shoot, so it took me some tries. It would have been nice if they were written out here. The enemy spawn was really hard but after that they were kind of manageable to herd around. So maybe it would be nicer to have less dense wave to both keep it interesting while running with a trail and not having it that hard during spawn. Another small thing, I would have liked there to be some delay between death and replay, or that previous score was visible somewhere in the game afterwards. Other than that I quite fun and challenging arcade game. It would be cool if the shadow was important somehow (regain health in it or something).
@n42k That's really strange. It runs on Linux for us (using Firefox). Maybe it was simply problem with allocating memory? Too many game up and running at the same time or something?
@MirrorPolygons we might do something to the Sloth speed, but after the rating. Let everyone learn to hate the Sloth equally.
@RockhopperGames and @Bobsleigh, we've found the drag and drop bug that made that interaction quite horrible at times but because we've also tweaked some more stuff we'll wait until after rating.
And to most everyone else, we'll probably make the customers a little less picky with their orders and change the whole level progression a bit, but in general we're very happy and very happy that most of you seems to enjoy playing it.
@komilll The fireworks are 'simply' Unity's particle system, though not so simply. I wasn't the one that wrote the code but it basically looks for collision with a 3D mesh (made in Blender). I think the magic happens here: https://github.com/local-minimum/ld36_atech/blob/master/Assets/Scripts/HandleExplosion.cs#L43
@n42k yay it worked!
I got to the boss. Nice trip back in memory lane. For a while I thought I couldn't go up and down while shooting, but then I figured out I couldn't pass 40% from the top or something. It would have been nice with some sort of feedback that it was that and nothing else. The explosions also covers ships which added a bit of difficulty not intended (I think). But in general a good game. Didn't manage to kill the boss, but at least I got some shot on it.
Interesting concept and it starts out very nicely, however even though I see how the push and set tools affect my stack I don't really understand how to use them to solve the puzzle where they are introduced. So maybe some even more simple introduction of these somehow would be good. The graphics and cross between world and binary and hex was really cool though.
I love how you worked with the color lines to indicate where I should go and visually they and the blocky features were really good. The lines reminded me of The Stanley Parable. I don't agree with this being a puzzle, rather it is focusing on skill challenge. I was about to give up on the blue room and then on the red I failed the last obstacle. But I made it through finally. The shift in music was also really good as well as the particles that were pulsing to the beat. It was a bit evil to lock me into a room once passing the door. I would have liked to give up on the blue room and get back to it later. The high jumping height was a big plus.
It was a very nice game. Really impressive amount of content and not many very rough edges.
Since I don't have the gear, speaking about the Gif. It looks quite cool. Really like that you included the idea about elongation of the pad to the VR setting. I hope it is full of fitting music and fx pings when the balls hit the bricks.
While my bots are working for me to take over the moon I start with the review here. I'm a sucker for clicking (and just letting it tick). One detail that would have been nice would be if the game fit the view port here on the ludum. I like that there are new click levels when you gain enough dollars. Good job.
Cool stuff and a bit of history lesson too. I didn't do very well and the boss probably rightfully fired me and fired me again. Still it would have been nice to have a nicer boss in the beginning at least. Maybe start with a smaller switchboard. And for the larger ones have it more hectic from the start with the number of calls coming in (maybe there's a call in to a radio show and everyone wants to connect, as an example). First time I didn't really see the listen-in button, but possibly it was just me being confused.
As always a pleasure playing your games and well made like ever. I got a bit over two cogs made, but the game is part-wise really quite hard even with controller. Still enjoyed it very much. Interesting puzzles made from the simple components. Could have been cool with a big machine, cogs and such in the background too.
It's poetic somehow that you choose to only build it for Windows even if it should be a piece of cake getting it to run on all platforms since it was made with Unity. It was a unique game, and interesting way of progressing a story. Sometimes it got a bit stressful getting to read the file names when the copy dialogue came on top of everything. The animations were really nice and the nostalgia very real. Great work.
I really enjoyed the music! And once I realized how to use the arrows it was rather easy to play through. But I did die like 5-6 times before I got the mechanic. First I though I should just click for the number of moves in each direction, which also made it unsure if up/down indicated turning or the new direction. Then I thought that maybe I had to press the buttons while on the right tile, but that was both too stressful and didn't work. This is to say, it would be nice if first level indicated the that you should drag the arrow to the right spot somehow.
While actually playing it I would have really liked the robot having a joyous animation to match the sound. And have one per direction of movement. And everything, pipes, doors and such too. The music was really great but the rest of the content should match that mood too, I think. (I get it is a lot of work for LD, but in case you plan to work more on it).
The puzzles were really a bit too easy, they didn't allow for mistaking the solution but just increased the number of steps. Again, I get this might reflect more of the time challenge of LD than your ideas for the game. However possibilities to consider if you decide to make this into a full game:
* Have the turn tiles care for the entry directions (making it 8 turn tiles in total, possibly more if you include U-turn). To not make the tiles too many you could just have 'turn left', 'turn right' 'u-turn' and let the user rotate with mouse scroll before and/or after placing. This would allow running over a turn tile without begin affected and much more complex solutions with the same number of tiles in level.
* Have limited number of tiles so that you have to reuse, and actively manage tiles while the robot is running. This line of thinking also introduces time as potential challenge, that a level might have to be completed within a certain amount of time. This can be managed by starting to run the robot before the path has been fully laid out. It would also be possible to introduce a 'speed up' tile that boosts the speed of the robot for a couple of tiles.
I could see me playing many many levels of this game once taken to the next level of completion! In other words, great start, now go finish it ^^
This game explains so many mysteries of the past in one fantastic go. But I must say, for being intelligent they sure constructed a very precarious escape pod. I made it out though, on the second try. The ping-sound of cracking the glass shell was a really nice touch. One thing, I first didn't understand how to control the rocket at all, after a bit of trial and death I got it flying. So maybe start the game with showing some hint on how to propel it.
really disco! cool game. Basic interaction on how to move them around is really great and after a while I realized one could optimize for poly-relationships to get the best score. The corner dancers never get to move though, and that's a little bit sad. So it would be an interesting next step to the game if the disco floor kept evolving over the course of the game too... just a thought. Great music, great interaction with the music and very cute game.
6900 points! I'm going to consider that quite a good result. It took me a while before I realized I could pull down people and logs and rocks from the top half. I could probably have kept playing with one guy one rock for a long while, but adding more rocks and logs and people seemed like more fun... so probably from a game mechanic, the game should not always wait for you to drop a rock or add a person but "help" you out. Quite fun game though.
Lovely art style, great lighting and a big plus for the fact that there were no apparent goal or gamification of the experience. The world was also really quite huge with surprising doorways and several stories high so to say. The music emanating from below as a guide. Very well done. If I toggled to control more than one bot I could have the ones laying on the side or upside down move about freely, which might not have been intended but was much appreciated comic effect.
Two very minor details, it would have been nice to be able to toggle cameras on the 1-3 buttons or assign camera and motion control to right hand side of the keyboard.
The game's view-port or whatever the thing is called on itch was too small for the game, there's a setting to increase it on the game's page.
Enormous amount of assets you managed to make during the jam! And nice looking too. I'm not really a fan of undertale but I did enjoy talking to these obsoletes. I basically only talked. And I think it would have been enough with just Fight, Talk and Run. Maybe even omit fighting because really why should they. It was a little confusing after I collected the last upgrade before I saw the Nokia, marker. It could have been clearer hints and maybe a really big Nokia in the center of the street instead? The world was small though so it wasn't a big problem. Cute game. Nicely done.
First time around I didn't really get the color thing, because I didn't read the instructions, second time though I got it working and ended up scoring 25. Probably quite modest but good for me. It could have helped if the game always started with say red color and two read people spawning first before any other spawn. That way when the third person comes and have a different color the player shoots but nothing happen and you'd realize that the color has to match. Same thing with the ammo boxes, they should probably not spawn right off in the beginning but after about 5-10 people have spawned (or if user has been shooting too much after half ammo depleted). Simple design though yet really quite hard puzzle. I would have liked the controls to be a little bit simpler (just show with mouse where the rock should land and clicking like they were, or a pure keyboard input system. On the a11y, topic, it would have been nice if colors also had texture so colorblind could play the game).
Absolutely stunning visuals. Those glitch effects that relate to movement are just superb. The game mechanic is also very cool. To go around cataloging things you find and get to see what others have called it. I went to where the post-it directed me as a first stop, quite the trip. And had to do some trial and error before I realized space is digging. It would have been nice to be able to click on the selected tile as an optional dig action.
It was a bit overwhelming with everyone that had logged that one and here I think it would be nice if the output only followed the schema '[Date] has been logged as [Description]' when there's only one log. If there's more than one, it would be cool if the most frequent description presented first as 'The consensus hypothesis is that this is [Description]' followed by 'Alternative hypothesis [Description]'. These should in my view only show unique description and show them in descending popularity.
While constructing the descriptions yourself it would have been really nice if one could just hover the mouse and scroll to toggle the options.
Once I had logged the first find (and that I traveled that long before noting a find also supports this suggestion), I kept hammering space to find stuff for quite a while until I realized that there was in fact an indicator that told me when I could dig and not. So since you are masters of cool camera effects I think you should have some effects on this UI so that the user's attention is drawn to it. Possibly also really add effect if this is a novel find.
Then of course I would have liked to see many more naming schemes. And thus get the ability to make goofy descriptions. In fact, while I really like the open exploring system with very little gamification, it would be interesting if one did unlock new naming patterns with increased logging experience. Give the first after naming something like 3 artifacts to let user know there's a progress.
So to sum up: really very well made and interesting game!
Cool game flying around. Nice flight and flight animation. It took me a while to realize that most of my gold got stuck in the air and never caught up with me. Once I realized that I simply flew back and forth to the closest village and hovered within range attacking with my claws. Still, as I said, cool game.
Really nice monsters and graphics and a cool idea for the ball weapon. I'd love to play a game like this more, but the game is a bit too hard from the get go. It doesn't allow the player to learn and get acquainted with the abilities, instead you have to use double jump almost at the first jump and you start off where you are exposed to a monster. It felt a bit awkward too, that the ball was controlled by both mouse and keyboard. I think a better design would be to have the ball move to mouse cursor when pressing left button, have the mouse right button active current action. Then let scroll or other button toggle attack mode. You could have the ball shift shape and or texture to indicate mode. Finally, returning home could just be a timer so if the ball has been fully charged for one second without use, it will return. Then make the controls a bit more responsive and don't have the player have aim out for a platform that will be out of sight most part of the jump and needing double jump. At least not until the last level. I also agree with @Tygrak even if I have not visual impairment, those arrows were really hard to see, and in the arrow frequency in early game way too high. First get the players invested and addicted, then start making them suffer (if you really must make the player suffer). So that was really a bit more of critique than intended, but the reason I write this is that I really very much liked your style and liked the ball mechanic and think you are on to something good here with a bit of more work.
Cool concept recording player actions and delaying them in proportion to level of intoxication. It would have been really cool with some camera effect too to give a bit of feed back on how bad things were. Still very enjoyable and I managed to clear all but the Hamburg level. So much evil water. It actually took me a while to realize why the little fellow so quickly were running all around the place the more drunk I got until I realized that it reflected that I was pressing keys longer waiting for stuff to happen. So it also visually got a bit strange that I was running faster (though not progressing faster) the more drunk I got. Something to test would be to slow down game speed a bit with alcohol too.
I really liked the sound design in this game. I wasn't up to the "fast" challenge but was pleasantly surprised that the people phoning in were quite patient with me. The interaction was quite clear and easy to work with. I would have liked the whole game slower and as with @xesenix, my game crashed due to too much phone action. Maybe the hectic pace would work better on a touch-device. Well made entry.
Playing, for a while I wasn't sure if it was online of single player. I like that confusion. Running around getting the ammo to be able to shoot was kind of fun. Nicely made.
It really is the beginning of a great mood here. I like what you did with the graphics, the light and the flat but solid props. I wonder how much you would want to focus on gamification and how much should be on mode though. It was fun to through a duck and it kind of seems reasonable to collect a star, but lighting up like a Christmas tree might be a little too much game. I don't know though.
Again, nice feel.
This is a manual labor horror game! Running back and forth like crazy trying to pick and throw things into their respective bins. I think it would have been more rewarding if the character didn't simply drop the contents but actually threw it. It was also quite hard to pick things up once dropped. Tossing things around feels like it would have fit the feeling of the game. I managed to scrape up to a box and fill it up, but once I used it once it felt like it got lost and that mean I went -5 on buying the box. Maybe it would eventually return or was but I lost it. Any way, it felt like a bit of a bummer after having worked so hard for that box. Since there were different things on the lines and several target holes and the game was called recyclinator, I was also expecting my job to be sorting the incoming goods, which made the start a bit confusing.
Cool concept though and I think with some more effort it could become a quite hilarious physics management manual labor simulator.
I wouldn't have expected to enjoy this as much as I did. But instead I found myself a bit saddened about completing it.
Some things I thought about in no particular order:
* Give your jar-file a proper name, we are all playing many Ludum Games.
* It would have been neat if one could use 'e' to also toggle out of explore mode.
* I really wanted to burn or dig up be bushes. Maybe buying something from the shop for a lot of coin.
* On one level I bought the map, but I instantly regretted having done that since the dynamic lighting was so nice and the whole exploration kind of got ruined knowing the map.
* I really enjoyed that it was non-violent, but it would have been cool with more types of interactions and possibly dynamic changes.
The music and mood was really good so I'd say you have a really good start here.
Annoying little things changing direction right as I'm about to click! I felt like it would have been nice if the hit-box for clicking on them were a little bit extended. For those of us who don't have lightening reflexes anymore it would be making it feel a bit more fair. The problem wasn't so much finding the odd colored but managing to click it. Kind of fun game though very frustrating.
This I liked. The feeling of it was building up to was nicely constructed. How it wasn't sure the level of evil the friendly robot harbored. The fact that it didn't really look like I was in space. Well played.
It would have been nice if the UI of the screen didn't shine through doors (e.g. use a world canvas instead) and it would have been nice to play with the players height or height of the terminal a bit so that one could click the actual button and still see the progress messages completely.
Well made game!
I really enjoyed the game, though it got a bit too hard towards the end. I found some trees but got quite confused about what to do there. The style was fantastic and I loved the music that came with the game. It would have been really nice if one didn't have to enter the computer tile to trigger the ability to warp in the cases when one spawned right on the spot where one wanted to go. Just a very minor detail. I don't know if there was a way to drop through the platforms, but it felt like there should have been. Really great entry though!
To be honest, I was looking forward to play this with the graphics in the screenshots but the game-play feels very half done. There's nothing wrong at all with the premise, can you maintain your health, sanity doing work from your room. The core of the mechanics, to select what you do each day and then get some stat-changes afterwards. It is also fine. But there's some drive missing here, the progression needs be intriguingly narrated and/or the game design/choices and management be made more interesting. I don't know if there was something wrong on my side, but I didn't get any audio, and I think that would really have helped with the mood and engagement.
I did watch the scene for comparison and while your game was satisfying and well made, the movie was something else entirely.
I liked how your voice acting didn't really seem convinced of the line, much like the original. The 3D props really well created and the lighting nice. It would have been an extra plus if the camera had some of that cheap budge film feeling.
I got 101 as score, but really score didn't feel that important.
Nice and well crafted experience!
I really dig the concept of the game and great work on getting the portal system to work so nicely. The shader really gave the game an Escher feel too! It felt a bit hard on the eyes though, so I would not have managed to play a much longer. It was really a nice experience just walking around and feeling the confusion and marvel at what direction the stairs may actually be going. Really well made.
The puzzle aspect felt like it should need some more work, in case you decide to keep working on it. The final thingy that I activated was the one located over the gate and I solved it by jumping from a ledge higher up. That kind of felt like I was breaking the premise of the game. The other things needing activation was also quite easy to reach and didn't take much thinking about things. However, as I started, I very much enjoyed the experience and the strangeness of the place and I can see a superb puzzle game in the making, should you continue working on it.
Interesting mix, but I must really have misplaced my tetris skills. It was really hard keeping in mind that up means instant drop of the block, probably because up is just one of the navigation keys in the other mode. So I would really have preferred some alternative keys so that shoot button did the drop and down sped it down but not dropping while possibly up did rotating. Or something. Nice game though and really well made with regards to style.
Well made puzzle. I did a couple of rounds of it and it was really quite complex in an interesting way. I wish the story text didn't animate like it was because I basically looked away or clicked through waiting for it to be done. Not really sure why it felt so hard on my eyes. The sofas also kind of looked like they had room for three people so there was a bit of confusion in the beginning before I got the hang of the tile system. I did enjoy solving the levels I played through though.
Nice game all in all.
I like the way you actually made a simple game for once without all the stress and rage and "Just one more try". Really cool mechanic this warping around thing and the way the character kind of melted into the floor. I very much enjoyed playing it through to the end. And I think it fit the game very well to be easy to complete.
I quite well managed to reduce religion and army while building a welfare state. That was all that mattered.
The tool-tip kept hiding under text and was even simply hiding entirely at points. In a way I don't know if getting to know beforehand the outcome of the actions in exact detail was good dramatically though.
After a while the tasks were repeated without variation, and I get very well the problem with content in the context of Ludum, but I think it would have been beneficial to limit the length of the game a bit with respect to this.
@oskardevelopment Sorry about the headache! We really wanted somthing more than that simple ending but well, we ran out of time and energy. What cats? ^^
@Davision Working never pays, except with more work
@ThatSnillet Oh, you must have backed onto an elevator tile. Never considered that. Will put it on the todo-list
I very much liked this game. I liked how there weren't any obvious ups and downs in the life of the character. It all just kind of blended forward in a very predictable way. I got to the third day and then, I must say I don't know if this was intended or not, I got stuck working at the computer and while the game told me I could use space, all it did was make me work some more. The touch on the escape was really fitting though. So even if this was not an intended ending it was a good one and I'm quite happy with it.
Great job!
First off, just to be sure. I didn't hear any music or sounds on Firefox. Just in case there's something wrong with your web-build, as there was the option to rate audio.
I made several thousands worth of negative dollars on the first 11 levels. And I think it kind of broke the setting of the game that you lost coin just thinking about the solution. I'm OK with loosing for selecting each letter I selected (in case I did wrong), that bit felt right. The hint would also cost even when it didn't actually hint (in the case you were spelling the wrong word). So for this scenario, I think it would have been fair to either just reset the word entirely and give the user the first letter, or without a cost just indicate that the user was on the wrong track. The friendliest version of the hint would be that it would erase your suggesting up until it got in sync with the solution and in case there were some letters left, possibly also add the next letter. Because in general I feel like the game should make it hard to get negative results, because having played ten levels and just loosing more and more told me that I sucked and it and that didn't make me wanna continue playing.
So don't take it wrong. It is a neat spelling game, but I think it needs to be a little easier on the player and motivate the player to keep playing by giving the player points in most cases unless the player has failed 2-3 times on a room. If you want to keep speed as a feature, I would have bonuses for being fast instead of punishment for being slow.
Even though I must say I object to spider killing games, it was very well made. I let them have a free all you can bite round for fairness. I did really like how you played with the lighting, as well as increasing the amount of spiders, making the game ever harder. Possibly you should limit so player can't get negative scores (or have the laser overheat/be out of order for a while if you hit zero). A bit of combo bonuses and some general online high-score would also increase the reason to play more. You had a variety of speed on the spiders, but you could also have some rare spiders that are more laser resistant. Nice game though, even if it had me killing spiders.
Fantastically innovative idea really. And many of the levels were quite cool to play. It was, when I looked 2.5k levels so given that, it would be very nice with some way to scroll to the bottom really fast. I actually didn't manage to get to input anything myself, something I must have misunderstood, so possibly making that a little easier too. As always though, a treat to see what you come up with!
Hexagons are really nice and you used them well to make a quite complex puzzle game. I played a couple of levels (4-5?) before the game got the better of me. It took me a little while before I noticed the different enemy-types, but that could have been my fault not paying enough attention. Once I figured out I didn't have to deal with all the enemies in the same way, the game became both more understandable and interesting. Having doors to the room also confused the game objectives on the first level. Or was escape also an option? Nice puzzle game.
I built a spider-sanctuary out of the furniture and watched is run around with joy while I marveled at the graphics. The spider will live for ever in my version and very well organized room. Moving furniture around was oddly satisfying.
I really like the idea of alternative controllers for games and so I would assume it makes much more sense there. I would imagine it will be a bit unfair as the layout is now for whoever sits to the left will have better view of the cup approaching. Maybe some chair swapping if you do bad or so? What happens if you drink from someone's cup after they were done?
I didn't understand why there were more than one button bound per player or if that made any difference.
Interesting concept though.
24650 I got on the final endless thingy. I did die one or two times getting there but was happy to see the game so kind as to let me keep my cash and try again at the same level. I really like how it started out easy also. I decided to spend all my points on upping the gun and its fire rate. In the beginning I was also clicking the mouse for each shot but again really happy to notice that the game allowed me to just have it pressed. I was on edge throughout the play, and I typically don't fancy these kind of tower defense/survive waves of onslaught type of games. This time was fun though. So great work.
I played the game to the end. It got me thinking of Tomb Raider but without the adrenaline. I liked the sound effects of the birds and the sea. The graphics was really neat and reflected the feeling of being inside the boat looking out through one of its small round windows even if the game was top-down.
It was quite slow and peaceful and in that sense it was a bit confusing that there was so much thunder going on. A while it felt like it was guarding the artifacts. Depending on the way you want to go with the game, I would either reduce those quite a lot or if this is to build up to a storm, that the waves would be felt on the boat and its direction. Maybe one could sink if one doesn't care for the direction of waves. But I get, that it is a lot to ask for a Ludum.
I enjoyed the narration and the navigation. But on one side I kind of feel like the world was a bit too large for the current content, on the other hand I did sail it to the end. So I'm obviously confused on that point.
Anyways, I much enjoyed playing it.
You seem to have broken your links...
I really like this idea even if I was a bit skeptic to start due to my inability to figure out the rubic's. But your version was much more forgiving, at least in the easy-mode (though I actually played it without rotating so I guess it should qualify as hard-mode.
One obvious problem with the game is the ability too see what is happening around you and it feels like it would work better in VR that way. I got many points behind my back from simply being a bit irregular about how I shuffled things.
Still I was enjoying myself and playing it to the very end.
So I think, though I've yet to try VR this side of the year 2000, that it would be more natural in that setting.
It would be quite easy to expand the concept, just as you did with the moving animals, one could have the task of making sure that some in-animate halves turn animate and that the right sorts collide in the right way.
Great idea really!
I finally remembered checking the game out while on Linux! So here are my thoughts.
I guess I could have read the instructions better, but I thought that 'X' was the button I was supposed to press for fire starting aiming.
It would have been nice to have a modal legend that let you know what you were seeing only when you were seeing it in game. I did like the modal aspect of the aiming itself.
In the same vein, it would have been very nice if player, non-player turn was visible somehow in game since non-player turn took a little while (possibly change floor-tiles and/or player).
"_" wasn't explained, and I kind of wanted to loot it but there was no looting. I did get that it was dead alien though, but should probably be included.
When it comes to feedback, whenever health changed it would be good to flash it. Took me a while to notice I was getting hit. And here it would also be good if there was a feedback on hit. E.g. change background color temporarily. Also when hitting walls. After playing I wasn't clear on if all shots hit or if there was some chance involved.
On difficulty, because there were many things to get acquainted with, it started out too hard. I barely made it out of the room I started in. Downed a handful of aliens, but I would recommend first level be much much smaller and easier, so that you give the player a sense of progress and investment until you start to really corner and challenge them.
I died without understanding why, as others' have reported.
That was a long post of thoughts. Don't mistake them for me not liking the game though. I did like where it was heading!
I must say that the thing I appreciated the most was to sound of the closet as it was walking around. As with all your 3D models this month, very cool thing with the animate inanimate household stuff.
It was a bit annoying swapping to small size somehow, maybe have it be modal to toggle small/big on pressing rather than having to keep the button pressed.
Really quite amazing to have those people procedurally generated and dressed/undressed during a Ludum.
Great work!
I really dig the 3D assets you managed to create for the game. Even the little paper scraps. The dream sequences were of course the favorite, however it would really have helped to have an icon in the center of the screen when/where one could interact (with the bed). In the last dream sequence I played I fell behind the desk and then could never wake up. Possibly this was the end of the story, it could well be, but it should probably be made a bit more clear in that case. There were also some assets that I could walk into as little (pillow, penguin). Really enjoyed the game though, just putting it here in case you keep working on it. (Don't give up on 3D! And teams are great things!)
I got past the first stage, but not very far on the second. It was a bit too evil to have the first wall to wall climb/jump thing be over lava. It would have been better if the player got to be acquainted with the mechanics in several increasingly difficult steps and simpler repetitions before demanding such skills. I don't really know if I understood how it worked because sometimes the fellow was climbing up the wall for a while and if that was intended it would have been really good to understand. Managing to actually jump back and forth or just jump and grab same again or get on-top was really tricky. Tricky in the sense that the controls need to become easier or more intuitive for the player.
The camera transitions for going up felt a bit abrupt too.
Otherwise I can see it being a fun platformer.
I really dig the bounciness in the game. I wish it was a little bit easier to be rewarded with extra powerful jumps and bounci-bounce from jumping while impacting with a wall. It would also have been cool it the players would be bouncing off one and another and if bouncing one the wall (either by one of the fired missiles or the players) could cause other missiles to change directions. In other words more chaos.
I actually managed to loose against myself (the character standing still won)!
It was quite confusing on the start screen that I couldn't used WASD if I was using the controller.
Quite promising game if one had someone to play against.
As I kid I used to be better like games like these, but now they are really hard! First play-through, I didn't notice that there were two barrels I could collect water and it felt a bit strange having filled up the one I thought I had and have to keep running around and eventually loosing. Second time, I noticed the second barrel (maybe there would have been more after filling that one up too?). In any case it could have been nice if all barrels with remaining space would light up as you were collecting water. Possibly switching color to indicate if you could put part of what you have in the bucket but loose some if you put it in barrel A but in barrel B it would still all fit.
Cool arcade game, and with some online high-score board it could turn out quite addictive.
I got down to the icy levels where I finally could not evade the enemies any more. The game was challenging and quite fun. The character animation and references to other games in the enemies very nice. It took me a while before I figured out how it worked and then I played it keeping X pressed (though I really didn't understand what it was doing). It felt a bit unfair (but maybe that was part of the challenge), the way each level started. It would have been nice with a bit clearer visual feedback as to what corner you spawned in. All in all a very well made game though.
I found it hard to control the salamander and couldn't really get over how the jumping stopped the momentum. I fell down the hole some times before giving up.
I think the first color-gate puzzle should be made safe, and be less complex and all changes happen only to items that remain visible to the player. Right now they swap mostly (only?) out of view, and that adds a level of complexity that isn't really fair to the player at the beginning of a game.
Interesting concept though.
Alright, that was extremely hard, but I managed to get to wave five at the least. I didn't fully grasp if it was me being hit the made the room smaller or me being bad at slaying. Not that it fully mattered, but it would have been nice to get better feedback on that part of the mechanics. Sometimes the enemy spawned a bit too close to the character so that I basically didn't stand a chance, it would have been nice to have them start a bit further away (say 50% of possible max distance up to possible max distance). Maybe there was some indicator on when a gun was ready to be fired again but I didn't see it. That would have been nice given that the gun was so frustratingly (in a good way) slow to start with. A "reloaded"-sound would suffice.
Fun entry!
I really liked how the ships started hovering in the title screen and then too their feel during the game, but as others have noted. It was way way to slow speeds and the AI fell behind very quickly because it was so slow and thus easy to maintain near perfect heading.
I think it would be nice if the ships had a boost that was recharging over time and that also made it more precarious with staying on the track/not flipping around and generally being able to do anything but going straight forward.
On my screen I couldn't really see the UI elements when standing ready to start, so I would suggest having the camera be more distant when the ship isn't moving and closer later. Possibly the faster you go. Possibly also changing field of view with speed and/or acceleration.
The ride was also more bumpy than I would expect from hovering. Maybe this would solve itself with higher speeds...Else, whatever mechanism that causes the ship to stay on the track should probably not accelerate it that fast towards its optimal position when overshooting it.
Good start on a racing game though!
I kind of enjoyed playing this game. It did feel kind of impossible to grab the full meter-thingy but quite easy to lead. I think my actions didn't really affect the opponents which was a bit of a pity, because it would have made it more engaging. E.g. if you are not connected to your origin, you die. I also think the want to keep playing would have increased if I had been able to reach the full meter or get really close. What if when you max your meter, the game levels up and enemies move faster? And some rewarding feedback and score. Also something showing if the game actually resets your score each time or if you are progressing and making more and more total. I would opt for the latter.
To sum it up: Cute and fun arcade game.
First I was very confused about how the turns actually worked, and who actually was me and who was enemy on first level. But once I had that and got how the system worked it instead got a bit too easy to manipulate the enemies. I liked that there was a joint action pool for all different strategic options but for the game to become interesting, enemies must probably have some conditions on when they go for a lure. Simplest: go for whichever is closest (and go for player if equal). But rules could be extended to make game more dynamic. The initial confusion may be helped if there was a clear meter for remaining action points and possibly have shooting in the same 'turn' as movement, only that if you select a weapon and aim it on a tile you automatically end your turn there. Possibly it would have been nice to see the range of enemies movement too during the turn to better plan the actions. Interesting concept though, to have to aim for where the enemy will be. Good work!
First I tried the original upload but that was entirely unplayable madness with the car more or less turning sharp 90 degrees on first steer and motion blur enough that there was nothing but color patches in view as soon as I wasn't standing still. With the updated version I forced myself through the two laps and it took me 8-9 minutes, but it was at least doable. It might be that you've designed the game on a powerful computer with big screen and so on, and that it runs smoother there, but on my laptop all the effects and the steering didn't really work well.
The graphics was otherwise really nice and it would have been cool to actually see all those 3D models better and not just curse them and their abundance when you got stuck on them again. I think I managed the most 3-4 seconds between running the car into stuff. The side of the track, the blocks, I think it was unnecessarily evil to have their colliders as blocks too that quickly rotated the car. I think it would have done better with a kind smooth collider and physics that avoided rotating the car. Otherwise I liked the concept and it made remember playing Micro Machines all these years ago.
Wow that was hard. I would really have liked to have some health that would have allowed me one or two hits. The background also made shots hard to see and when the ball jumped and just landed on me, I would have liked the pause before it came crashing down to be a bit longer. Nice entry though.
I tried it some times but my dexterity doesn't really allow for this type of game-play. I like your take on the theme (I did work during the early parts of my PhD with petri dishes and the fear of contamination during hay-fever season). As some others have commented, the sound was to loud. One of them in particular overshot the volume in a really nasty way. I would have wanted some easier game mechanics though. Maybe your trail was toxic to other cells and you had to kill them off that way? Or something else. Cool concept though.
I had fun in a peaceful fun way while playing this. The audio really helped setting that mood. The mechanics was really well implemented and the way they were introduced - both the pacing of new features and the clarity of them was very nice. On some of the later puzzles with anti-gravity in them, it felt like there were alternative routes not really planned and the positioning of the beams kind of hinted the same, so while kind of fun feature maybe it needed some restriction like "can only flip once per flight" and/or "can't do rotational controls in flight after flipping". In general though a really well made game.
Nice ship! :wink: More seriously though. I liked the interactions and the stuff that managed to get into the game. It was a bit annoying that keybindings worked for WASD in everything but dialogue option. The music and the little sound effects really made the mood. The camera sliding helped fill the scene that was otherwise a bit void of life. The ship kind of felt like it was floating in front of a backdrop rather than being out in space. But I'm not sure exactly how that should be fixed except perhaps making the hull darker except for own light on the hull. We are supposed to be pretty far out in the solar system. I would have liked to get to know where this game was heading if it had more content. And if it had more content perhaps ease up on the pacing of the amount of information introduced at the beginning. But as a glimpse into a world that has yet to be, it was enticing.
Honestly, I can't get enough of your graphics style and animations. They are really quite special. It was quite straight forward game and the simple color scheme really helped in guiding you towards your goal. Except for first usage, you probably could have skipped displaying the X help. Not that it was too much either since the game was so short. Some of the X transitions, like starting to balance the rope could probably also just gone automatically. But again, the main point was the graphics and animations, and they were superb as always.
@avavt, yes the mini-games really all could use some touch-up to make them more easily navigated... It was a rather large scope to have three games and the main story, so we kind of decided to incorporate the confusion into the story and hopefully that way, they partly illustrate the feeling of experiencing such conversations...
The bug you had should be solved now in the patched version.
Absolutely fantastic! The part about throwing cash on people so they start talking to you, splendid. That would be an interesting concept on its own right. The muzak feeling you nailed 100% and there's really not that much I'd want to see different except perhaps the mall get more stalls and that the peoples dialogues correlated with what I had bought. I really want to have more constructive things to say... but this really is one of my top favorites this far.
tried to play but it only said `connecting...`
I really wanted to give you a high grade for the audio, but even if it wasn't yours (guessing) I must say you put it together really really well. That phone and the TV! I really enjoyed the game even if it was a bit slow at times, which kind of made sense in the game world. It would have been nice if things you did affected the rate of time. Watch TV made it go faster. Going to bed to early or standing watching the clock made it go slower. I really would have liked to be able to use the toilet too. But I guess there were things you had to cut.
A small detail or two. The character should not be movable when changing floors. If you press arrow while using stairs it made character not exit stairs in the right place. In general floor transition could be made to take a little time to reflect age of protagonist. With all the texts, I think also it would have been nice to be able to use `E` as alternative way to click through them too.
Fun and well made game!
The audio was fantastic and made a great part of the mood for this game. I know you've gotten comments about the controls already so my quick fix would be to just swap them around and even better just leave right-click to be 'abort/no' and do everything with left-click. Because while the mood from the music was really something spectacular and the text promising. The fight with the controls made it kind of hard not to loose track of that mood. A very small comment about the style. The intro font/style was a bit surprising given the style of the rest of the game. The first type of puzzles seemed to revolve around finding keys too which seemed to not give so much story as they were about clicking around. I think the game is really the beginnings of something rather great. But here's also a very personal opinion about story and mood driven adventures in games. I enjoy solving puzzles, and like puzzle games. But if the story gets me hooked, I really want the puzzles to take a step back and be carefully weighted as to not interrupt the flow of the narrative. And while I don't really know how your game plays out, I looked around the lighthouse some and didn't see anything obvious that I should do, I think the narration-puzzle balance doesn't work that well for me. Still, as a LD entry, I think it is very impressive and the way it built up the mood in the beginning was very well done.
I really like the idea/setting of this game. The graphics was nice, but it was a little bit too diffuse selection effect so that I didn't really see it in robot selection and it took me forever to realize that I could swap weapons. I never really understood how shooting worked either. If it was chance or some timing. So better feedback in game on that would have been great.
I had to play this game against myself but even so I found it almost as hard to hit the other player as it was easy to hit myself. So I wonder if there should have been something more to the controls or help like seeing the expected trajectory before firing or so to make it work easier for unskilled players.
It could probably also work really well on a pad with touch controls!
Nice entry.
It really feels like magic the way it swaps that content! I just keep spinning it around and around and it is a very satisfying feeling. The toy, as you name it, also stands out compared to other entries I've seen so far and will probably be something I'll remember from this LD as a whole. I'm not sure if I agree with myself on if that rather drastic silence when you've turned it so that it is swapping is brilliant in how it builds up anticipation or if it could have had somewhat softer transitions? Perhaps based on rotation speed. Because one should not be fooled to believe it is about the graphics only, the sound I find extremely important to the mood of this toy.
Some thoughts after that intro:
* It seems the game was plain random selection of scenes and that was fine, and kept me wondering for a while if it was altering between barn and other scene, but perhaps shuffle an order at start and then run through in the order or other semi-random solution. * On that note it is easy to see how the scenes could have been carefully selected and ordered to tell a story, even if that story was only a vague sense of some emotion * And if you really want to add a player into the mix, of course your rotations could affect the scene and as a consequence which will be the next scene.
That isn't really needed though. Because this is brilliant as it is.
The thing I really liked with this game was the zoomed in dialogue views. They were really slick! But at the same time, it did feel like that style broke some with especially how the map looked like and the interaction icons. Never the less, really impressive amount of work and content in this game for a LD-game. The `Dammit` `Biche` joke I didn't particularly enjoy and I think the tone, content and fun in the game didn't really need it.
Good work.
I like the idea of battling city-planners, but really the smallness of the starting world (and was I really playing another human or groups of) made it a very slow battle over a single traffic light and it took really quite some time to get 5 credits to just build a single road. The general idea is really cool though but I think as a first step the world need to start a bit more complex or that you be given a bit more credits when you join so you can do some planning and get something going.
First try I was hopelessly last, second time I kept jumping and jumping and then managed to come second. The instructions should probably make it clear that it is important to jump a lot. I kind of like that it is hard while at the same time it looks like a very friendly casual game. The solar balls that light the path, first I though I would get some bonus from collecting them, Nintendo and the like have taught me to expect this. But even though they didn't grant me any obvious speed bonus (I don't think they really needed to), it would have been nice if they reacted to player's closeness somewhat.
As always it is rather fantastic the visuals you manage to create and the dandelion are really quite spectacular. I much enjoyed this game. I would have been happy with just a game about the dandelions, but this was great.
That makes sense! It would be hard to compete for the single line of yellow dots though if there's more than one of that character type and gaining the balls actually consumes them.
It would have been nice to see the track afterwards or so, because I was so focused on just staying on track in general that I had no idea what kind of overall path we were running.
Also, it would have been nice to get to race to the goal and actually claim the second place rather than it stopping as soon as one got to the goal.
I enjoyed playing this, though it ran rather sluggishly on my i3 laptop. I don't know if it was intended or due to my laptop barely coping with the game, but if the death star "found me" there was no way for me to outrun it or do anything and I could see no hint of me approaching it. So it felt a bit unfair that sometimes it just appeared as I moved to the edge of the screen and then I was dead. Otherwise I really enjoyed flying around. I enjoyed the controls and the game is nicely done. I would probably have played more times if my deaths had felt more fair.
Also, as a minor comment, if `Esc` had exited the game at the end.
As a whole, well done!
It took me a while to get a hang of it. I didn't even understand who was I and was about to give up on round 1, so more obvious UI on showing where you can do stuff with your cards. The game kind of felt like RISK to me but with the -1 +1 things. And I didn't really understand them. -1 what? Die? Dots on die? Did -1 defending mean you get negative effects when you are defending? It would have been nice to know exactly what unit type combos gave what effects when selecting attack units too.
When I got attacked it would have been nice to first see some effect on a map and then get into the dice rolls. I had to guess where the attack was coming from.
It did get me quite hooked though and I played for quite some time. Maybe for LD the board could have been a bit smaller to make the game shorted (also fit the theme that way) to give player a reasonable chance to complete it in a handful of minutes.
I really would have wanted to truly play this, but the mouse sensitivity in the original setting was ridiculously sluggish and made me not feel like a cat at all and there must have been a bug with the cursor visibility toggling because I could only see the cursor as a black square when _not_ in the mode to set sensitivity. I like the idea though. But I didn't get the chance to swat a single item. One feature that would be cool would be if time slowed down slightly when you made quick turns and attacks to kind of indicate how fast you are as a cat.
I like the simple graphics and the 1 bit colors. To make a game about being almost alone and make the game feel really quite empty without feeding off that and making it a game about fear is kind of daring. That every world is marked up as they were gave it a bit of an eerie feeling, as if they were prisons. The one thing that didn't seem to fit was the axe. I guess it was in hope of getting to add more content? In general though, I appreciated the experience of the game. Well made.
I really dig this game. It had a very well worked graphical style and cuteness. The audio fit superbly to the rest of the game. Starting out, I confused the beginnings of the hut with being a fireplace. So it was a tad bit confusing with if I was suppose to light it and cook the food on it. I also was about to quit before the end since there wasn't any visible progress in keep feeding your friend, but I was happy to stay and get to the end. Of course it would also have felt a little better if you couldn't walk on top of the hut. That blanket, I thought I needed to pick it up but the beets kept being in my way. These are just details though, it is a really fantastic little game!
Nice game! It seems strangely easy at first, like I was missing something. Knowing how your games usually plays out. But then all of the sudden I find myself accidentally at the edge of the world. Or I'm out of water. I never made it to boss fight. Max got 23 tiles left. So I might have missed some part of the strategy, but anyhow: To me it seemed strange that the game didn't notify me when I reached a place where there rabbit was stuck. Other times I died of starvation, and the game did leave me a bit uncertain if it was I that lacked planning or if I simply had a streak of bad luck with what tiles I got handed. I did find it very easy to avoid enemies all together, but maybe me avoiding them was what got me killed? It didn't seem like it. So I wonder if they need some rules like (not all at once though, hehe)
1. Not allowed to place enemy on top of other enemy. 2. Not allowed to place enemy next to other enemy (4-cross neighbors) 3. Enemies follows paths just like rabbit does
I liked the game and played it a couple of times. Great job!
Really solid arcade shooting game. I managed to survive quite a few waves in one go and felt really good about myself doing it, which probably implies that the game was well balanced and controls tight. I liked the story, but maybe I missed how the UFO fit in except for perhaps being in space and such. The way the shots accelerated towards me was really nice, or horribly stressful whichever way one sees it. The one thing that was kind of confusing in the end was if there was any progression. And it would have been nice with some sense of progression. Instead. some waves around 7 or 8 came without the planetoids bouncing around which made the wave much easier to work with. I would have liked to feel like I was getting closer to earth to tell that earth straight to its face that it was not nice. I would probably have kept playing if there was some indications of if my resources could run out etc or if I were really progressing. Nice game for the scope of a ludum dare entry though!
That character really knows how to overdo their jumps! Nice game once I got the hang of the controls. Controls worked well, but I only realized on the boss that I could shoot upwards and even then it was a bit weird that I had to run for the upwards aim to work. Nice graphics and well made entry.
Oh well I hope that ending (as the other comment posted) was intentional because it sure was a nice twist to the take on the theme. The controls were a bit rough, but since there were nothing hurting you and all the time in the world, it didn't matter so much. It could perhaps have been made more fun if the controls on purpose were a bit wonky and you had yourself bouncing off the walls trying to get all pieces. And if you wanted gamification to that, just add a count-down clock were you get a little extra bonus time for each little crystal or for each shrinkage. That would of course need to handle the end in some way that would be respectful and fun to the player...
In all I enjoyed playing it.
I really liked the thorough focus on all the little pieces of the day as a way to build up a fitting pace for the game and then use these mundane things to show how the protagonist was feeling. Great work with that and the story in general. The tone, the very imperative instructions about what to do as well as the dialogues. Lighting a bit dark sometimes where it was hard to see the door on the bus and some other details. For example first time I showered, it thought the game was stuck because I started the shower facing directly towards it making the screen more or less completely dark. So maybe for the exit out of those sequences, it would have been nice to have a default direction. It also makes sense with in particular showering, that you exit facing the room. I played the game on my laptop, and for most (but not all scenes), I couldn't turn while walking. which made it all a bit of a struggle in a way that didn't really help the story. The same goes for the quick acceleration walking. It would also make sense to the story if the player wasn't that fast on their feet. The absolutely best part of the game though, it was the wake-up sequences. That was a really powerful way of conveying the story.
Very cute game and fun idea, but as been commented on before, you spend a whole lot of time holding and waiting for matching to show up. So some way to fast-forward the planet would have been nice. I also managed to have one grabbed to the far right of the screen and then it wouldn't pair when I picked up the matching. Really good job though.
Really cute and cool puzzle game idea! The graphics was really nice and quite fantastic the amount of detail put in during this short time. I think you did comment on the controls and I had quite a hard time even grabbing some objects and sometimes impossible to get them where I wanted. I think it would have helped if the game showed where it considered the mouse pointer was even outside the flat.
I'm guessing that all your content is full 3D models and since the flat gets quite crowded, it would have been nice if you could rotate the flat too or possibly if it rotated slowly by itself (that rotation could even indicate a time of day thing if you wanted to add stress to the game).
Because I had such hard times with the dragging of the furniture, I for a while thought that perhaps you weren't allowed to say drag the fridge through the bed but had to place without crossing the paths of other furniture. And indeed this could also be something interesting to test. Especially if you limit the order by which stuff gets carried up to the flat. Oh also the sound for grabbing and dropping stuff was really nice! It would have been even cooler if at least the humans had distinct sounds.
The UI was really neatly worked too, however once I had "organized" the flat I got a task to make the mother get the milk out of the fridge and I though I would have to move things around inside, but instead the flat just cleared out. Oh also, as final part of making the flat, you could have the user place the door. And then then one task could be "kid goes to school".
Because the controls were so unwilling I quit after apartment cleared out. Plus it wasn't really clear to me if I should still get milk or if I accidentally fulfilled the requirement at once. On that note, there must probably be randomness in order of tasks, else you can learn and plan ahead on second play-through. (Maybe there was). On the tasks, the 'mother gets the milk' felt like a bit of unnecessary stereotyping, unless it was random composing ofc.
I see a very pleasing game in this idea once the controls are fixed. If you could combine the sokoban like shuffling of furniture with building relations and caring for the inhabitants it could be a hit. The interactions should translate well to mobile too. So great work really!
Yay another socially awkward game! Funny concept and well executed. The option to choose gender of yourself and your interests was very good, though as some have pointed out you could have allowed for the player to make any kind of combination there really. Also it would have been nice if the game remembered what setting I made and not defaulted me back to man likes women. Still very good to have the option at all. In the game, I would have liked there to be a danger-zone before the caught-zone perhaps the exes could start follow so you have to run away from them? But the main point is that I was spending most time looking at the mini-map instead of looking at the world. And that was kind of a pity. I would have liked to also get to deliver wrong one or two times without loosing. That getting caught was death, that I agree with. In general. Good game and really nice game idea.
That was a really great game! Very nice idea to let the player get to be part in authoring the game world. The music transition in and out was also really nice. The fractured player and the fractured world. I like most things in the game really.
I was a bit confused the first time about the placement because I didn't understand the tiles that I had in the lower bottom wasn't part of the map. And also after I understood that, it would have been nice if there was a more marked difference between placed tiles and tiles you had and could place.
On the last level I tested to build a world that just went down and I wasn't allowed to go as far as I had built. So the rules for where and how the player is allowed to go needs some tweaking.
The controls could also do with some more love, but platformer controls area really hard.
If you decide to work more on it, I also think you need to consider how to add challenge. If it is just a puzzle, if it should have enemies, or if the enemy is just the world that keeps falling apart however much you try to stitch it back together (probably more fun idea).
Great work!
I made it to the very end. And enjoyed the trip, even if the protagonist didn't so much. Nice writing and I kind of liked how the content didn't require me to solve any puzzles and such. For where the logs were and I think there was a similar list of links in some other place, it would have been nice just to have them numbered clearly because it was easy to get lost about which I had read and which I had not. So be proud that you wrote a 15k story in a weekend!
I don't know if this is where you ran out of time but I happened upon a part where it seemed incomplete
With the ill-mood in the air, few people want to talk today.
Get to know...
The (if:) command should be assigned to a variable or attached to a hook.►Nina and Aurora
The (if:) command should be assigned to a variable or attached to a hook.►Rick...
Anyway...
Cool concept and that audio really built a great mood for the game. It took me a while to understand that you had different types of options for different tiles and most importantly, it took me a really long time of not getting the crystals before I saw that you needed two people for them to harvest. So the UI really needs to be more interactive in that sense, and in fact, as far as I can tell there's never any good reason to place a person in the world alone trying to make crystal so the option should only be available if there are two people available and should force both on it or off it.
I'm not sure where I stand with regards to the falling tiles. In one way I would have liked some indication of which would be next. I guess you either hard-coded it or used a rule like choose randomly among those with least connected edges. If the latter, it would be nice if those that were at risk got a marking so you could decide if you wanted to chance/sacrifice to obtain a resource or move people off. But it might also be good as it is.
In general a really nice and short (in a good way) strategy game. The UI / user interactions need some more work to make them easier to understand.
Interesting concept. It was sort of fun looking for components and it would have been even more fun if most combinations actually produced something. As it was now, they were a a little too far apart. I also agree that while the interaction was easy to understand, some keybindings for at least toggling the different interactions (1=break, 2=build, 3=swap) would have been really nice.
It felt a bit annoying too that the larger blocks were fixed on a specific grid and not free to be placed as I saw fit. I get that it would make completing the whole area impossible, but it would have helped finding out combinations a whole lot.
It was really hard to play, just to remember what the different blank buttons may have been doing or not. I think I kind of figured some out, but not all of them. I wasn't even fully sure why I could and could not select some of the buildings. What I'm saying is that if this wasn't the intended focus, I think some very minor details like putting a letter on the buttons or a color or something to help player remember what button had what effect would really have helped. Otherwise it seemed like an interesting challenge and I liked the choice of protagonist!
I really liked the plopping sounds and maybe more, the fact that it was a very slow and easy and not really that complex game. Really well made. I must say though that with the presentation about the rules in the game it looked like it would be very complex and somewhat annoying to play. Which it wasn't at all, it was a really smooth and simple game in its interactions. It took me a little while to realize that the thing that looked like a logo actually explained the game and perhaps it would have been helpful to have it larger. Maybe even combine the 3 types of cures UI with the icon, so you pull the cures from the icon itself. I got the price at the end and again a very enjoyable play-through. It is always very satisfying to get to the end of LD-games. The puzzles, if they are to be challenging (they don't have to be), may need more rules or more complex layouts. I'm not really sure, but in general, each time there was a single-color one they limited the complexity since they told me where I needed to put that color and could not have other colors. Last puzzle proved a little challenging since it surprised me that...
Spoiler: !> putting all colors of cures next to each other didn't overdose on the cure-tiles / overdose !> could only happen on tiles where you hadn't put a cure on.
One way to increase complexity would have to limit the number of cures available on each level. Perhaps introduce big-cures that reach the next tier of neighbors. Or similar rules. Tiles that make curing behave differently, or viri that modify spread resistance.
Very well made game!
Interesting concept, but while I got to level 4, I'm not even sure I understood the basic constraints of the game. After moving one astronaut and not getting it to its end I got a fail sound and then got to move the next? And if at the end of that turn I had them in the correct spots, I completed the level? If that was true I would have liked to have a distinction between end of moving one astronaut and not getting to end and fail at the end of all astronauts.
I'm also guessing now, but was it the astronaut that was being moved that was the resolver of constraints or the one walked into?
That you could walk outside the world felt a bit weird. I would vote for either stopping astronauts from walking outside or killing them.
Otherwise it was a nice game and interesting puzzle mechanics. It would also be interesting if the player got to choose the order of the astronauts.
Wow, that parallel worlds and the psychosis taking over with each and every interaction you need to have with the world was really quite powerful. The fact that the real world was unintentionally (?) glitching while this happened, I think just added to the experience. In fact that is something you could work with. I lost track of the panic-meter because it was that far out of view and perhaps it would have been nicer to have a line running through the screen for where you'd panic if the dark view took over that far.
The menu was a little confusing, I didn't really understand the duplicate `start games` and second play-through I hoped the `start game` would skip the intro.
In the game, it would probably have been nice to get an indication on exactly when you enter the trigger of each enemy by flashing/pulsating the divider for a brief moment before it actually started to move. It wasn't really clear either how/where you could walk in the world and I guess what I'm saying is that the controls there could have been a little better made.
I didn't mind failing though, because this was a really interesting game. Very well done!
Very well made game in almost all its parts. I like the premise too which feels like a metaphor for real life; only when in a good place can you learn to adopt skills that will help you when you are not. The world was rather large (not as a comment to theme), but with regards to game play and it wasn't entirely clear if the exit swapped day to day or only at start of game. It felt like I had checked most all of the map after the end of day two, but still I hadn't found the trapdoor. The enemies were also rather easy to simply avoid, but that may have been fine. However from a game-mechanics point of view. If you find the exit, all you have to do is to stay put and then wait for night? It feels like it would be more fun if during day you need to find out how exit looks like and then during night you need to find that exit (possibly you die if you don't). So finding during day, in that scenario should be made easier. E.g. with some ping/radar or similar. There's already a trad-off anyhow during the day in accumulating friends or finding the exit.
Still, again. Very well made game!
I enjoyed the game once I got the hang of the rotation of the cannon. I missed that and couldn't pause and had to click through the intro to try again. That was kind of annoying, so skippable intro or just a replay current world would have been nice. The dragging bit, to me it seemed like you only needed to drag once in the beginning to make it aim the rest of the game and I think that was good, but there really was no need for the dragging to start with. I also got one shot to go the opposite direction of what I was aiming when I aimed to the far left so some math error there, or simply clamp the angle a bit. Nice game though, I liked the style and the tone and it would have been great with some music and audio on the robot, ship, aliens.
The game was really huge! I ran for quite some time and passed two or three green things and it almost seemed never ending? I think it would have made more sense to limit the size of the world and author the obstacles with more care. A while I thought I had landed on the surface of the moon and that I was outside the game world, walking right. Then the blocks appeared again.
I liked the premise of getting people to stop doing sports with things you care for and have to run away from them and I didn't really mind the glitches in the controls that terribly where sometimes I got some mega-jumps that shot me far up. Neither that the jump felt rough. It was fine that the sporters just kept spawning around even if there was no real reason withing the game world why they were allowed to do that and kind of fun when they got stuck in blocks. It was a bit unfair when so much time was falling and enemies spawning that it was really hard to not be shot by them, but on the other hand life was really plenty.
However, to really make the game stand out, I think these issues would need attention. One thing that could be cool would be to give the player a sprint (with cool-down) followed by shorter slower than normal speed.
Good work.
Hi! Ambitious project to do a strategy game for LD and to do it with that little support from libs and game engines. In light of that, I think the experience was really smooth and well done. The music was very nice. With regards to the game itself, I'm sorry to say that I was mostly confused. First, my reaction was to click on the planets rather than dragging the piece. This could be resolved with only swapping cursor on the ship-piece and not the planets. I also found it to require quite a lot of clicking and since you needed to mine a lot to really get anything of worth, I think it would have been nicer if the game ran on time and mining planets automatically mined. That would of course change up the game quite some. Alternatively the economy could be a bit more friendly because I only ever got to buy one attack card and not that many more others. I died once before even noticing the opponent, and this meant re-spawning and that made me quite confused about if loosing ships really mattered. And what indeed was the goal. The very short line of sight/fog of war could probably have been extended to include neighbours neigbours to allow for some planning. I would have liked to be eased into the complexity too but I get that the game was structured kind of like a board-game and perhaps it therefore isn't possible. So sorry for this rather unstructured stream of thoughts... I hope you find them useful
It really looks quite fun, but I can't for the life of me make much of progress. In a way I suppose that was part your take on the theme though. I got scared and run over and it would have been nice with a little friendlier first level really. About fifth try I though I spotted someone who could fit the description and at times there was a grey heart about them but also that angry flash symbol. And then they killed me. I like the concept for the mechanics though and the take on the theme. Maybe at start, there should be many that fit a rather general description and then later descriptions should become more vague and also limit number of NPC that are correct? Anyways interesting game.
For me, the best part about this game was having zero-timing. But you hinted that the game had more levels. I would have wished this was an impossible game where whatever you did, you never had any comedy in you. I liked the mechanism of interaction, but the dialogues were so quick that I really didn't follow the narration (might have explained the lack of timing). Still interesting concept.
Ps. I would have liked to select who I got to hit with fish.
I died of hunger. Quite a few times. But my record time I both managed to get fishing and axing but still died of hunger. The first couple of times I just didn't understand what to do, which was because the crafting-button was outside the window when playing defined resolution on itch, but when I fullscreened it I got it in view (though quite obvious there were some layout issues), and after resuming normal size the UI worked as expected. I liked the game premise and concept, first couple of rounds though it would have been nice/realistic to know how hungry you were and how much time you therefore should spend on gathering food. Then I saw the health bar. Might have been outside screen too! Still with it there, it was really unfair to not say somewhere that you had to leave before eighth day (and there was no reason why in game world). I think it would make more sense to make the player run out of food over the days so that it becomes impossible not to leave on the seventh day, if there's a real reason to force the player to leave by that time. Nice game in general though.
Agree with some of the other commenters that the intro was rather long and perhaps it could have been better broken up in parts so you don't invite everyone in a single long level either, but rather back and forth between play and story. Some parts were rather humorous but the game part was a bit too difficult. I could probably have managed if I had tried one or two times more. And I might even have tried that if the game quickly dropped me back into the start of inviting right after game over. I can see the retro references in how the game level is built, but it sort of didn't make any sense to me why the cars were so haphazardly placed. A pity, because running around under the radar of the adults to invite to super secret mega party could have been a really great concept. But don't take my concerns too gravely, perhaps its just been too many years since I faced the same problem.
Interesting but hard game! Especially, I found it quite evil that the second level started you running into a block. In general I think this could become a really addictive pass-time game. There are some stuff I would consider in that case:
* Make snake speed depend on length so that it starts slower on each level and then becomes increasingly hard * Actually give the player a fixed amount of lives and let them start from level 1 afterwards to raise the stakes. * The camera should probably be ahead of the rotation when the snake is about to turn the corner * Possibly also add a bit of slowdown on each turn. * Add music or something! At least a little positive sound for each block you eat.
I would also say that you made it really hard for us players to have to download the game waiting for google to zip it and such. Consider some site to host it or at least give us a pre-zipped thing to download (the names weren't readable for which version was which on the folders).
Nice game all and all though!
I really enjoyed this game, I got to the end but the game seemed to stall there after I had collected all six crystals. The music and how they fit the world and the mood was really great. I liked the simple yet challenging puzzles though there could have been some clearer instructions about how focused/not distracted one needed to be while solving them. I had info from start that this was a puzzle, but if I hadn't, I could have easily missed it. So it would have been nice to introduce the idea of how the puzzles are solved in a much more minimal setting before the content in the current version of the game. I liked the twist with how one got to one of the crystals on the icy world, that it used some of the quirks of the game to its advantage and built it into the puzzle. Great work!
The puzzle around the Spinx was really good and I think it is a great feat that you managed to implement the puzzles and the portals during the weekend. It took me a while with the third to the last around the Sphinx and actually cheated on it. I hadn't actually considered a key part of the mechanics of the puzzle. So if you had spent seven years making it, I would have said you could have tweaked some of the earlier puzzles in the series to hint this key part a bit more. For being made during the a Ludum, I'd say you did a great job with these puzzles. The room after though, felt really like an anti-climax (especially since there were more than one way the player could have gotten the right idea without it being accepted by the game (without saying too much, I hope)) but I understand that coming up with more than one great puzzle mechanics during the weekend is really really hard. So great work over all.
Really really well made game! Interesting concept, and nice mood/style/audio in it. The controls were mostly good but I found it really hard to know where my feet were when I was when I was large. Also while being up-scaled, the walk speed felt much too slow compared to my size. With a little more work on this, it could be a really complete nice game.
Nice game. I liked that there was an initial tutorial, but that one also kind of indicated that there would be feedback on succeeding on the tasks. The rose disappeared and plant disappeared as well as the volcano. In the real game after, it was only plants that gave feedback on to the player and I think it would have been nice to have seen in some way how dire the need of water or cleaning was as well as the other side of the scale: this volcano is spotless - stop clicking on it. I know there was text and that it told me what to do, but frankly I was too busy tending to the planet. The planet movement that dubiously was speeding up, I think? That was great. I don't really know for how long I survived and exactly what item did me over either which would have been nice to know. So perhaps just letting the world play on half a day more without allowing player to interact and showing somehow that it is game over, before switching to the text. Or perhaps just putting the text in the same scene while the world is still spinning below. In general though, nice game.
Interesting game! I really like the idea, but as a rookie operator, I would really have liked my job to start out a bit easier. Say you could have that many slots but not as high need for docking stuff and then because the people don't know what is in their best interests they would have kids and waste resources and over time the docking operation would become more complex. Because you need to manage more quickly to dock things.
I would also really have liked to have an orange warning on 0 in the container like there was for negative.
And finally, you could have the game support touch and you swipe in and out containers.
Aaand more finally, you could test auto-docking if velocity is low enough, game is hard/fun as it is without it.
But again, really good game.
Really nice game! I got 100 as best score and that was really tricky. The combination of needing to be quick and cut corners while absolutely not colliding with everyone. That was a very well balanced challenge. One thing that would elevate the game some more with regards to game-play would be if each species had slightly different swimming properties. Not only shapes. The music could also have been a bit less repetitive or at least put at lower volume to ad some more sounds of swimming of perhaps better, voting.
Well executed classic arcade style game. First time I got hit by that massively shaking wall of fire from the first boss I thought it was actually a bug, but then I realized that perhaps that was the easiest attack of all. I'm not very skilled with these sorts of games, but at least I got to second boss. I liked the way you handled the theme in it and enjoyed the graphics.
Cute! And fun. I got to the :tomato: but the :bird: was much too difficult for me. In some ways a very true reflection about how it is to garden. In fact it was rather hard to swap around the different tasks in general, but in a good way. At first, I was a little confused about how the game worked. Maybe simply expanding the areas a bit where digging and pushing stuff is triggered and make the keyboard button icon a bit more visible / attention grabbing. In general, the difficulty progression worked really well and I was having really fun jumping around attending to the plant. Great work!
I played it to the end and really quite enjoyed myself. The true joy was not so much figuring out how to solve each level but to see what the painting was and with that in mind, the last level sort of wasn't as much a reward to the player as a punishment. The level-complete condition, to both be on black tile (next to each other?), I didn't really get why that would be the complete-condition and I would suggest simply meeting up face to face would do. Really nice game though!
Where to begin! First thing first, this is truly a gem! Wow. So there's almost not much to say beyond that. The narrative through the landscape you crafted and the props you decided to include to make the story. There were so many details my head is almost spinning around trying to understand how you managed to make so much with so little time. The music that builds up the experience. Looking at the hand. Walking into and shoving things around!
Some details:
It would have been nice if the music AudioSource was on a GameObject that wasn't destroyed when going from the menu to the game. It was kind of abrupt there. It could probably have been faded in or out some, true, but that cut felt a bit hard.
Spoiler !> A bit into the railway/subway cart I happened to look out of the window and then saw ahead how they !> would start going down before I encountered it and that would have been nicer if they were invisible !> or something up until transitioning into the room where you get to enter them.
Spoiler 2 !> I kind of also really want to use the coin on the vending machine instead, but !> perhaps it was more rewarding to feel that conflict than to be able to act on it.
Pressing `Esc` brought up a menu but the cursor remained hidden and that made it impossible for me to exit the game in orderly fashion.
With regards to the narrative anchor in Greek mythology, I see the point, but I also think what you made was that good, that it didn't really need it. That it would have stood completely on its own.
So I'm really happy I got to play this. One of the best games this LD in my book! And @grim thanks for your comments on our game.
Also +1 for the :ok_hand: consistency
Cool puzzle little planet you've created. I liked the humor especially the ending overly thorough in explanation screen. There was probably a way to be smart about the game and how to solve it but after I realized that:
Spoiler !> You can go back and click the original button so that you can actually visit all sides
It kind of became a nice walk around to get to parts without having to think too much about the puzzle. And that was nice. However it should be made clearer somehow that this is a feature. Especially since there was no obvious restart feature which would have been handy when I got locked into a dead-end first play-through.
Since it was a bit hard to navigate the character, I think it would have been nicer if the trigger zone for button activation had been quite a lot larger. In the same category, though the rotation transitions were really cool they were a bit fidgety to get right.
Never the less, I really enjoyed my second attempt at the game.
Chuck walked around being quite content. Nice game.
The collision with obstacles felt a bit too strict at times. It was actually rather hard to get Chuck to do their work, almost down to it mattered which direction I entered the tile decided if panting was allowed. So it would have been nice if that interaction was made smoother.
I would have enjoyed getting to end the day by going back to the start position. The next X days could have been with tasks like: "Watch plants grow". That'd been nice.
Goot work.
In a way it was kind of poetic that when starting up the game you got the option to exit it, but then when you played and died and died and then there was no option to quit the game again from the death scene. There was only the option and try and try again. The game itself I found really hard and I never got further than between the first set of two barrels and the single barrel after that. So for my sake it could really have been a bit easier to start at least. I could hold my ground fairly OK for a little while, but shooting and progressing was too hard. The shots seemed to not relate coming for me seemed not to relate to the number of Nazis on the screen either which took away from the feeling of success of having cleared out all for a brief moment of time. It also felt like the hit-box on the character could have been a little smaller so that it was at least fairly possible to jump over the shots. It was quite addictive game though, and I tried quite a few times. I like the music! Good job.
Well made entry!
A bit strange to feel so slow walking around, because in these kind of games. Like nuclear throne, it feels more common that the character can run quickly. I'm not saying I'm necessarily opposing the slowness of the movement though.
The way you were allowed to keep mouse pressed and then only had to release for overheat was a really nice touch.
There might have been a meter for it, but it felt a bit unexpected each time I ran out of power-up.
First time I played, I died because I assumed that you could pass the tree at the top of the island, because it really looks like it and that was a bit evil.
But besides these comments, really well made and enjoyable game.
farout.png
I'm betting this little planet is at the edge of the currently known universe. I must say, the screenshots you posted don't do justice to the experience. But I get that it's hard, since the experience comes from user creation and you gave us the tool. I really enjoyed placing planets, following the paths that one other player had created and then finding the little spec at that very very far distance and setting out on the hunt. In the beginning the game must have been pretty empty though, so I'm happy I came upon it this late.
There are some quite obvious things that would possibly make this even more fun such as better sense of flight, more planet types, some neat scan effect for discovering planets (the youtube "Making stuff look good in Unity" has one about the No Man Sky scan effect), and nicer UI for creating (especially if you only want to clone place the same planet type over and again).
Great game though!
First it felt like it was impossible. Then I figured out I could just drive along the surface of the planet and that made it somewhat easier. However it would really have been nice to more of a sense of flight into the game and perhaps lowered the fire-rate of the space animal spew out the homing rockets so that most people would feel slightly challenged but also managed to complete the game. Nice game this far though.
I wish there was a weird voting category, but I'm substituting mood for that. First try I didn't even get what I was doing. After that I think I figured out the main thing was keeping people flying but not too high. The graphics was really great, music was nice and controls worked alright with mouse (I'm guessing the feeling on a pad or similar makes much more sense). In general a very well made game. I think perhaps it could have been made a bit more clear what made for new humans to play with / how many were still left. I'm still not really sure how the game worked really. Not that it mattered too much. The total experience was still very positive. I would have liked to get to play longer. Maybe spawn humans a bit depending on the need for new play-things. At least in the beginning. Some sort of progression or build-up would also have been really nice. Especially if that happened in tune to the music.
Really great game and most importantly it had magpies in it! I really only have two comments. The color for non-selected option made it really hard to read. When selected it was nice but the other option could have had more contrast in it. Also, if the music and the sound effects weren't mutually exclusive would have been great. It was a little abrupt and strange to loose the music while getting sound of birds.
Quite amazing the amount of content, graphics and text included. Well written and well drawn.
Very small side note, if you could update the itch.io page to flag each download with the correct OS so they work in the itch-app.
I would have said loudly that __there's double-jump__. Because before I noticed it, the game was near impossible. Besides the issues you mentioned and (here I am guessing) that there's no goal in the game yet, it was kind of a neat platformer with the crumbling blocks. For LD, I would have suggested adding a sprite with text right at start that gave an objective like "climb to the top" and then at the top put another sprite that just said "you made it". Maybe there was something like that but I did get to the far right (I think/hope) and I climbed up a little bit.
I do really hope they were not thinking of having that many kids, because if they were I don't know I want them to succeed. Cute little game. The controls were sort of hard using the mouse and it would have been nicer to get to use keyboard, or probably even better to use touch. In that case you could also tell a story with the buttons and their placement. First staying below the characters and as they get more and more into each-other the buttons could start to float around the lower part of the screen and an in their motion illustrate the feelings of the characters. Nice game though!
Interesting idea for a 3D puzzle, but I had a bit of a problem with the controls. And in the end, the way I played it I simply grabbed a box and held on to it while running around and that made everything easier but kind of broke the puzzle mechanics in some ways I think. So perhaps it would have been better to have a rule that only blocks that were touched by boxes should be stopped.
Very well made mini-games and good general message and consistency in the overall experience. I would perhaps on the each mini-game have gotten a bit of a pause first time each type appeared so I could read and understand the instructions before I got to play. For the tiger, and probably the turtle (had I ever gotten far on it) success was rather abrupt as you were focusing further down on the screen so many times I had fail when I actually survived the whole mini-game. That could be fixed by only giving hoops for the duration of the mini-game challenge and not continuously. Generally very fun and well made!
This experiment (I'm guessing the way the experiment looked like something that could have been earth) needs to be shot back into a proper size was a really good and funny theme interpretation. It took me a little while to get used to the controls as they were a bit unusual for flight-controls. The effects were really nice, but once the planet had shrunk it was quite hard to see compared to the black background. A simple expansion of the content would be if the planet refused to stay small so you needed to continuously maintain it. May be it would seed another world and then you have to maintain proper size of both.
Really daring game this! I make games myself at time where people don't get it, but this was really brave and innovative. And the graphics I liked a lot too. A bit weird hand placement at times but maybe that was intentional too. The shoot mechanic, there was really no way to react to it, so I adopted the strategy of just hammering the shoot button all the time and that kind of made my action relate to what the protagonist was experiencing. I didn't manage to get to an end though. There was a bit into it a place I got snuffed over and over (tried more than five times). I might have missed some hint from the psychology scene, but in general there it seemed a bit unnecessary that I had to review that previous scene between each attempt.
In total I really enjoyed this game. Great work.
I really liked the sound on this one. Well the graphics was of course also very nice. I'm not sure resetting was really needed, maybe if there were more variation to the pond (not really needed). Also, I would argue that you should have all mouse buttons spin and probably arrow keys too. Because if you just start up the game and don't read the instructions it is unnecessarily easy to miss.
Very nice pond
4000 something is my record after a bunch of plays (it is a bit annoying to have to reload to really have a chance at seeing that score but there was a massive influx of enemies). On the other hand it was nice to get jolted right back into a new try. The controls took some time getting used to, and most dangerous enemy was definitely my own shots. Maybe they should have been going a bit faster so the risk of running into them wasn't that high. Especially since the controls was unusual to start with anyhow. But on the other hand, the challenge was fun. The whole game was fun. I liked the art style too. I mostly stayed on one side of the planet as went side-ways back and forth and that way managed to get most enemies. On that front it would have been nice to know how many hits the planet could take. As a whole, really well made arcade game.
Quite an impressive amount of content in this short time. I'm guessing you are using your in-house game engine to get all this in place in such short time. Still, I would probably have enjoyed a more concentrated and focused game. It was sort of a humorous comment to questing with the grab 20 trees (knocking them was a really nice touch), but when grab 5 flowers came around, it sort of spoiled that part. Shooting down some ships was nice, but the message about grabbing upgrades while ship was sluggishly slow and no upgrades visible sort felt like a broken promise. So while I'm really deeply impressed about the amount of content and how nice things were animated, the transitions, effects etcetera, I think it would have helped to have it shorter.
Cool concept! Very nice looking game. It was a bit hard to actually see where a key would land though, so perhaps also show at the bug-level where to keep out. It was quite hard too. But in general very enjoyable game.
Really interesting idea, but really hard game to play. I think that could have been made easier it you got the turn-thingies to show on mouse hover and perhaps also aid the player by in-game warnings when good or bad collisions are approaching. Because the reading and keeping names in mind, finding them and making the relevant characters turn towards or from each-other was a bit too much. For first level or so, I think it should perhaps only be 4 characters out of which 2 want to meet and then slowly add complexity.
The speech-bubbles were a really nice touch! And as I said, the game idea feels like a neat idea if worked on a bit more.
_Absolutely fantastic visuals!_ And a great game in general. I really enjoyed playing it.
Some thought in no particular order:
* Maybe have music on GameObject that doesn't get destroyed between scenes. * Some messages come really quick so I don't get to read the fully before they disappeared. This was particularly true about the instructions on how to play each mini-game. And inversely, because I had to retry first fight three times, it would have been nice to click through instructions faster. * The first two games were timed. While the last was not. And on laptop it made the first seriously really hard with touch-pad. But I did manage. So perhaps changing order on first and third game would have made a better progression. The two word-games were best since they more directly fit the theme. The middle one could have been helped by having negative words thrown at you instead of balls. * I think the star particles felt a bit off from the rest of the style and feeling of the game. The second game you can click yourself to death before the game has actually started. * Since the game had well written story, it was a bit surprising that it was the same piece over and over in the world-scene * Some words are not obviously good or bad, which is perhaps fine.
Don't mistake this long list, the game was really really great. :thumbsup: :star:
I made it with 00:01 on the timer. I really liked the screen shake. The controls were good and well it was really quite fun game. It would have been nice with something more key-esque instead of green area and if the boxes flew around during shakes. Also if there were horrible sounds coming from the closed doors and such. But escape-games you don't see that often, and I think that is a really nice concept to build games around.
I'm very happy I discovered how the shrink ray acted on the people! Nice touch. I got to the 6th level but getting passed the wall of stuff that needed cutting got a bit annoying. It is a very nice game and really well made for being a LD entry. My main suggestion is to make it easier for the player to retry, abort and so on. It is a keyboard only game so one should not need switching to the mouse and several clicks to retry using the same design. Possibly holding down R and a filling up a RETRY and at the full do the retry, if one really wants to do it fancy. Maybe allow to store some layouts so you don't have to drag out two main rockets and two side thrusters each level. As someone else commented, to make the craft-designing as easy and fast as possible. Why not allow player to start playing directly from the test-mode or possibly even better allow refuel/redesign and level reset by landing on the design platform and skip the test-mode entirely (needs some timeout or something else to ensure it is not accidental). Then the main pedagogical problem for me as a player, since the objects attached rotated kind of freely around the craft, it didn't feel like it mattered where and how I placed them until it kind of did matter and then I hadn't really learnt anything from previous levels about how to be strategic in the design of the craft. I'm not sure how to resolve that though.
In general, again, a really nice entry!
I really didn't quite understand what to do in this game. It took be quite a while to figure out that right-clicking existed. That might have been because of the initial text with that color-scheme really wasn't readable. I think the game desperately needs some showing and incremental complexity rather than telling the player what to do.
It's always nice to try out your games for your very unique style. In this one the power of the battery ran out a little too quick, but it was very nice that I got to play around at zero battery and find all the things the game requested me to find. It would have been nice if something happened as I completed the tasks (maybe there were if I had managed before battery ran out). The fact that I could play with zero battery was a bit strange, even if I really liked that I got to explore the game without the stress. The whole restart of the game and that there was no exit was a bit wonky. In the calendar, it kind of looked like the calendar shone through the text about the events for some reason (not that it really mattered). I was a bit surprised that I couldn't click on the Saturday for the party in the chat and I clicked to about 40 in the game and I would have liked getting some Easter egg about there. In total, as always, an interesting experience.
@simonhutchinson It should just be a matter of allowing the javascripts, perhaps something is blocked?
I really how selection of options worked and the text was well written. The bonus press coverage between briefings also really nice. One thing that was a bit weird were the words that looked like the words I could select in the text but were already filled in when I started and weren't interactable. Otherwise really well done political game!
Can't play, gives error about `ucrtbased.dll`
I got a few levels in, then it got hard or I got too tired. The register programming to get where you need go was a nice puzzle mechanics. It was a bit odd when I dragged around instructions, I would have wanted the thing dragged over and occupied register to remove the existing, rather than the one I dragged being removed.
Really nice audio atmosphere! As others have commented it was a bit unclear what made and didn't make the rightmost bar increase, but i did figure out how to increase it and upgrade all the way to where it disappeared. I get that it wasn't to focus, but some visual feedback on that mechanics to not distract from the mood with feelings of confusion. Why the rightmost bar disappeared wasn't clear either.
Took me a play-through to figure out what to do exactly, but then at least I managed to stay alive for 15 days. It was a bit annoying to have to go all the way to the button to activate a type of action. It would have been nice with hotkeys for Archers and Repair and Food. Btw, since it is a webgl game you should probably change from windows to html on the game link.
As always, really well made game. I played the web-version with touch screen and it was quite nice interaction even though I shadowed some of the lower regions with my hands. Still it was much easier than using alternative inputs. The twist on tower defense, that you kind of have automatic turrets but the problem is keeping power up was really interesting, and that could have taken further to incorporate humor into the game. That your job was more of maintenance, shutting down system that kept insisting that they needed to be up. Still very well made entry, even though not as addictive as many of your other games. The way the game ended was a bit weird. I'm not even completely sure what the fail-condition was, but I got the feeling that the game entered pause-mode and the next key press would send it to the "menu" again. Two things were odd with it. I didn't quite understand what caused the death, and for the starting of the game and the play, I could do with touch/mouse, but it seemed like I needed to press a button to reset the game. In all though, a really well made game, with the disturbingly slick graphics and nictunes. So don't take the comment wrong, it was a really well made game!
First I tried to manage peoples opinion and that went rather poorly, so I spent fifty to a hundred years shooting everyone close to the center square and when the population had gotten more manageable I jailed people and killed them as soon as they got out. Really awful moral there! Interesting concept game and interesting in how hard it was to play it well and still remain human in any form. One minor detail. It would have been nice if the panning around was a bit more aggressive so that when mouse came close to edge the camera would move. Also the UI with stats seemed to capture the click events and block me from jailing people if I didn't re-pan the view first. In total: Really good and interesting game!
I liked the graphics, the 3D assets and how clear the minimal UI assisted. It was kind of dark though, perhaps my screen having low contrast on. That made it really hard to see anything in the dark places and eventually I felt a bit too lost. It would have been nice with a bit of assistance in orienting. Either from tweakable light settings; some mapping or pings to navigate after; or some trail that showed where I've been. I get that you had limited time this time around, and with that I think the feeling and the detail put into the minimal UI was really nice.
I really liked the opposing interests of gaining power to keep alive and adding zombies to have more health, but as others have commented, once power got below a certain number of brains you were dead, because there was no way to regain brains. Or maybe there were...?
Cool concept. I don't have a flashlight at hand and more importantly, the computer doesn't have a webcam. So my suggestion is to allow for alternative game mode where you can trigger light by other means.
I liked the idea, and the style of the game. I had a really hard time playing it because of key-binding. Pressing Ctrl+Space felt really awkward. I tried it with the 360 controller and it sort of worked there but the jumping was on 'Y' and the boost on 'A' which kind of makes no sense either except making the player's cerebellum and fingers hurt. So I would have wanted to enjoy running and jumping around, but now it was mostly a struggle and then impossible as the game ramped up its difficulty. The way the camera flipped that quickly back and forth made me kind of dizzy at times too. It should probably have a delay before it transitions to the new direction to ensure it doesn't flip back and forth like crazy because the player just wants to quickly look left-right-left. So in total, I think it has the potential of being a neat game, and should you decide on a post-jam version. Do something about the keys and the camera ;)
Interesting concept that the game was really hard to fail at while really quite hard to get the full bar. I was about to give up, when I finally pushed the meter to the max. It would have been nice to get some rocket launch sequence as a reward. Other than that, the one thing that kind of disturbed me was that the sequence I needed to get changed when I failed to match even if I hadn't matched the first one in the sequence. I get the reason for and need to change when you are halfway through or have started on the sequence, but if you just completed one and see what's next and happen to run into the wrong icon it was a bit too easy to miss that it had changed again. So I would suggest leaving sequence if nothing in sequence has been matched (unless the game thinks the sequence should be made easier). But in that case it can just strip icons to match from the right.
Nice game, and extra fun that I managed to complete it on the second try and manage to win against the large entity. First time, I didn't really understand how the recharge worked because I got to your itch-page from twitter and just started playing. So perhaps first time running low on power, it would have been nice with a hint about how to claim it back. Otherwise I really appreciated the conflict between shooting down enemies to make the world less hostile, conserving power, and saving harvest for upping the fuel. Really well made in the design and the transitions from level to boss area. In all, very skilled/well made game.
I had this thought on the way to work (thanks for the very kind feedback btw) that perhaps it would be really cool if different enemies have different length/speed on the recharge bar. I also wonder if it could be more exciting if the bar-progress didn't move with even speed but kept accelerating to make hitting the sweet spot more challenging and exciting.
End of addendum.
I really tried to figure out how to play the game, and I managed to construct a crafting pod, but then I was out of resources. And there seemed like no way to obtain more. I don't think I could afford to build anything else in the beginning. So unless that was the point of the game (which could be really cool if you ran with it a bit more), then as others have said: instructions please. I also found it really easy to click the main menu button when I was viewing a pod (there were no button for going back to the space station view), and so I think I accidentally restarted the game more than 10 times. If the main menu is actually intended to restart the game, the button should really say 'Quit'. I did like the sound and the concept of space station management, but unfortunately I didn't get very far with the game.
The art-style of this game. And the very bare sounds. That's 100% what makes it. I had fun playing. And it would be really cool to see what you would do if you worked with this style for a slightly larger game and not only standing put. The standing put could be part of being scare, and needing to feel powerful again before gaining courage to walk. As an example. Great execution though. Well done.
I like the protagonist and the narration and if I were you I would focus more on those and make it less puzzle dense and jumping not being so much a skill check as something for the player to have fun with. So while it is always fun to jump around and the controls were nice, I think you would benefit of making the character overpowered compared to the obstacles and focus more on exploration than figuring out which order would unlock the path to the end. I did really like that you could power up systems and completely drain yourself, but the interaction/trigger zones could be a bit larger. Very nice game, and I'd love to see how something like this would turn out going more for mood/story/exploration!
I would have liked to try the game, but running the game required making changes to my system according to windows, which is a no-go for me (Windows 10).
I got 423, don't know if that qualifies as good or bad... Having a highscore on the game would be an obvious suggestion. The game ran smoothly and was quite fun. The graphics was nice and in general a really well made game. The music could perhaps been more reflective of the rage or even better of the rage level of the character. That the higher tiers of attacks were on keyboard was a bit annoying, but OK. It would have been nice to keep it consistent in that way (perhaps easier if all attacks were the 1-4 numbers). I would also have had a more visible notification when any of the 2-4 attacks were ready. It was easy to miss. The second attack, I wasn't either fully sure what determined where I went. Which is maybe OK in the sense that it was just a blur rage, but it would have been nice if it were usable as a dash. All those things aside, it was a really fun game to play. Well done!
When I try to install the game on windows through the itch-app it doesn't install at all for some reason.
@juan, if you tweet at the itch-crew they will probably help if you don't manage to figure it out.
I finally managed to install it and play, though it wasn't as easy as just downloading either because 7zip gave an error when triggered from within firefox. I could unpack it from the file manager though. I'd suggest not using rar to start and repackage the game.
Now to the game itself. It had splendid graphics. Really well made. And that was mainly what I enjoyed. It was nice that the game wasn't super impossible to start, but pretty soon I stood no chance. Well executed game. Perhaps make the ramp up of speed a bit slower so I could feel more invested and annoyed when I finally die. Perhaps not killing on first crash but losing a lot of power. Perhaps a highscore system.
I liked the mood and the feeling of being in that little compartment and how I could/needed to look around before choosing a direction to go. The harpoons were a nice touch and in general very well made game. I would suggest easing up on the story, especially that early on when there's a want to just look around and see what's out there. Or trying to record it and have it play out. Or break it up into smaller parts. I didn't really figure out the sonar, and perhaps the treasure should have been giving off a beep or something (maybe only per distance). So you had a sense of where to go. In general it felt like the world was a bit too vast for the content and so maybe setting it inside some trench or cave system to limit the mobility. Or increase the distance traveled by each click. In general very well made game though, and the way it is constructed, I am surprised you did not have a VR version for it.
For a big chuck of me playing I thought the stuff on 1 and 2 were actually deactivated and needed some condition to be used due to the color on these. It was also a bit wonky that there were no click-drag indicator. Otherwise I found the idea really cool and the while I didn't really get what my interactions were doing or not doing, the game does stand out quite a lot from the other games I've played. And sciency games are always a plus. So good work!
The graphics and audio in this game is really impressive! It took me a while to get a hang of the game-play and part of it, I think was simply because there was no clear visual feedback on when the game recognized that you had selected an enemy to attack. Then I just kept attacking some horde and using the power as it recharged. But still loss, so I'm not really sure what I did wrong or how the strategy part was intended. Still, as I said first. Impressive amount of assets and art. The cracks in the barrier was a really nice touch. Good work!
I like the basic idea. It might have been in the dialogs, but that the direction mapped to WASD, didn't fully dawn on me until starting to write this comment! My initial though was "Why is WEST upwards!" I did fail at poetry, that girl that pretended to sleep but didn't sleep... in general there were a bit too many different things to do right from the start. So it would have been nicer with a simpler first class where you just had to answer yes/no and had an easy plug to get to. I tried to do some homework, but never got to complete it and there it would have been nice to have a feedback about that you were doing it right (especially since it was so long). In general though, a cool concept and a really nice idea for interaction design.
Great work with the voice audio of the movement assist thingy/mech armor. When I saw the instructions it all looked very daunting and confusing but in game it was really neatly explained. So I would almost suggest you'd trim those from the description of the game because I could see myself thinking "this looks like a way to complex game for me to play right now". I would really have wanted to get to play the levels you had created too, because I did really like the style/tone of your game but I could not figure out how to jump over the first hurdle. Jumps only went up wards and they didn't use any of the forward momentum set. So I'd strongly suggest you think about re-balancing how hard/easy it is to perform forward jumps. And perhaps the feedback for what you are doing wrong when the jump is not going forward. The narrator/mech suit could well have said "It looks like you are trying to jump forward..."
That was really hard! Mainly my surprise was that the collect-area of the power-up was smaller than the character sprite. I would indeed expect the opposite. The collision area for enemy shots was nicely small though, so please keep that. I finally managed to survive the two initial enemies, but what came next was just like "nope, that's not happening." So what others have said, the difficulty ramp up needs some love.
Very stylish game, but I'm not quite sure I fully understood it. I managed to recharge the first building to 100%. Then I stood for a while at the center defending the position, and that seemed quite doable to just wait for that first building or whatever caused the main meter to increase. But after a while I figured, I rather chance going to the second building in the far distance. But there was a trench that was invisible to me before I fell down and the game had not really hinted that there'd be trenches running through the city. After walking around in the trench a while, I fell off the map and there the game froze. So it did have a very nice feeling and looked really well but the rather giant leap from the first to the second building. The way I wasn't warned about strange city-planning. And that I could walk off map, well the game needs some tweaking in easing the player into the experience and showing the player what to expect and do before they are fully exposed to the adversities of the game. A really well made entry though. So don't take my issues like I'm very negative, just hints about where I'd work on the game.
Well balanced classic arcade game! I managed to clear the final boss with just a little bit of power left. I'm not sure, but it kind of didn't feel like shooting & flying cost any energy and that was a bit of a surprise. Not saying the game should have been more difficult in total though. For a while too, I was also slightly confused about if I was supposed to stay and protect my piece of space (if there were anything worth protecting) or if I was intended to go somewhere. It might have said something in the instructions, but that was a bit too much text right away there. But that was just a minor distraction, and the tight warp made my confusion not matter so much. So again, well made game!
The thing I absolutely liked the most in this game was the power beam/lightening and how it interacted with the music! That was just great. The character design was really great too. I didn't really understand what I was supposed to do with the other character when I met them. The first time the interact help showed it did so by a bird, but I never figured out if I could interact with them. I did find the recharge tree things though. So the game needed to be a bit clearer with what it wanted me to do. The high jumps were that came before the pillars region were a bit awkward too. But in general a nice experience!
Graphics were really great. First it felt a bit weird that the dialogue didn't fit in the bubbles but after a while I kind of wanted it even more chaotic than it was. Unfortunately there was so little to do (but die) in the game and so long build-up to the total experience got a bit wasted. So I would suggest letting the player in earlier, figuring out the difficulty and just keep at that style you've got going!
Cool concept! I didn't quite figure out what the end goal was, but I enjoyed roaming around the dark corridors. I would have wanted the light-cone to be a bit more cone-shaped and also gotten a bit better warning about proximity of enemy. Now it was mostly: "Oh you are dead". Alternatively, the enemy could drain your power rather than instant kill. So you would survive first attack by shining on the enemy, but then you'd have to be really careful not running out of power.
I like the idea for the game. I didn't really quite understand when and to what extent I had control, but that didn't matter too much. But it would have helped with some audio indicating the character doing something other than what was planned. The game felt like it required quite a lot of space when it could have been compacted to better fit the browser view on a reasonable screen resolution. You should probably also update your game-page to have an actual game link to the game and opt out of audio (at least I didn't hear any). In general a cool concept though.
I also think speed is a bit of an issue here and just making you and move about quicker and the enemies not take so many hits while moving quicker too would definitely help. If you rather keep the current pacing then I'm not sure but something needs to be tweaked. Still quite enjoyable experience. I would also suggest making sure all loading-colors are clearly visible. I totally missed that the towers were loading for a long while.
I liked the camera effects when shooting a lot in this game. The game was a bit confusing in it's feedback though. Stats and meters seemed to show that I was doing good but then out of the blue the game told me _Game Over_. And after that, rather than allowing me a retry, it was _nope, you failed, you have to quit_. The last bit, was, while surprising, a quite interesting twist but maybe not optimal for your game. My main concern though is that the HUD really didn't communicate the aim of the game or how well I was doing with regards to that. Otherwise, I quite enjoyed playing.
The crashes were really nice, and I'd say the global stats/highscore is essential for the experience. Without it I would probably not have played more than once. The controls were nice and speed/difficulty too. It felt like my bad judgement rather than the game made me crash. So really quite fun game. I also liked how you get right back into driving so you can't give up and call it quits. __Just try one more time__. It would kind of have been nice to get a bit of a __GO!__ indicator when the race started, but not that important. The use of coins as power-ups is a well established trope, but I think it would have made more sense to have petrol or batteries or such. In general a really fun addictive game.
I really don't often play flight sims so I'm not really the one to know, but it felt like your game had a really nice flight controller. It felt real and smooth. I didn't manage to take down the base but got pretty far in the second wave of targets. It would have been nice to have a clear indicator about the distance to the target when it wasn't in view to get a better feel for the direction to it and distance. So that you know when you have enough distance that it is worth to go in again. Some feedback on the damage of the target and some. A bit of a shake and some warning sounds about hit or if enemy has me in target would also helped with the mood a bit. Great entry though!
At 22m, Icarus flew again! Wow, that was really quite hard game. Those birds just kept not wanting to donate their feathers. Well executed and really fun game. I would really have liked the fall height numbers to be larger though. Also to indicate more clearly if I was going faster or slower downwards. On that topic, some up-winds and other similar effects that help or hurt you depending on how far you've gotten with the feathers would be nice (those probably needs to be visually represented). Maybe different types of birds (an eagle that you have to avoid). But I get those requests would make it more than a LD-game. Very well executed, and as I said really fun game.
The idea of an a Katamari with inverse objective fused with tetris is a really cool idea. I would think that the objective would be to avoid generating tetris tiles or at least not doing it too fast. I also don't know if it should be as organized as two normal tetrises, but that the pieces that are falling would do so a bit more organically. It makes removing rows rule a bit complex though. Next thing that also would have been fun would have been if there was a gravitational zone that expanded beyond the red area that grew large the more pieces in play you have / larger you are.
Really really hard. I got 2500 score at best. I was more skilled at killing people and fly into stuff than doing anything at all looking like rescue. It was fun though. Great game for that short time developing.
I played a couple of days. Trying to figure out a bit about how the system worked, but found the interactions a bit cumbersome. It would have been nice if all tiles around each interaction point that were reasonable to view as that item would have triggered it. Not just a single per interaction. It took me a while to figure out there was scrolling because the color of the scroll-bar was so faint. It also felt like the number of days and the happiness rewards made progress too slow early on so that it felt like I would have to play really long to see anything happening. While at the same time, it wasn't really clear how the challenge worked. Some solve similar issues by making the game a clicker. Or at least building up a progression. Maybe you would not even consider most options until you've reached some level of happiness?
I made it through the entire game. Though it really took some time on that last level. It was fun and challenging. I kind of didn't move the cats too much. Until the last level. Some things I thought of while playing:
* It was a bit weird that you could kind of move cats between zones but not very predictably. I suppose it wasn't really meant to work? * If you put a lot of tape on the floor it is a bit annoying finding out under which piece there's still dirty floor. But maybe that's my fault for putting it all around and everywhere. * It someways felt too easy/kind that I could pause the cleaning robot. It might be more fun if you could only pick it up to make it temporarily safe?
Wait a minute. I think I've played that dentist game as someone's submission...
First I tried playing on FF but the view on the game page was too small and upload didn't work. Playing on itch worked fine.
I didn't get very far though since I didn't want to publish. But I really like the idea of games breaking out of their boundaries!
The horrors of social network and christmas shopping! Simple and fun game. Was a bit confusing to start and could have helped with some easing into it. Then it got easier to understand. Never quite got why there was a second conveyor belt in the other room. So perhaps simplify that too in the beginning. Didn't quite understand if there was any benefit in giving someone nicer/more expensive gifts or if it was all about spending as little as possible on as many as possible so that you got more loot to sell after christmas. Fun premise though.
The style, made me remember playing games in the late eighties. I made it to a full glass but then I ran into too many people and things. Nice game.
I liked the setting and I enjoyed playing through all the levels. Some were really hard, so I had to leave quite a lot of luggage behind. But I very much appreciated that the game allowed me to progress never the less. One thing though that was a bit annoying was that if I got crushed by a ball (or died by other means), I had to press `A` to replay, which meant when I started the level I started with a jump. That jump on some levels made it quite a lot harder than it really should have been.
Very nice game though!
I didn't make it to the end. I played a couple of times and I did enjoy it quite a lot. Maybe I'll come back to it one more try later on to try and get a bit further. The sounds and the art was really nice. As well as the UI and its interactions. I enjoyed the story but it wasn't the most compelling part for me. All in all it is a really impressive work you made for this LD.
One suggestion would be to help the player some by not letting the accidentally commit suicide. So if an option is available but would put you at 4 in some category maybe have a generic "but wait, this is suicide" vs "I'll do it anyway" type of warning.
Very good game though!
Interesting concept of adding the functionality as you go and letting user bind the keys while at it. It might have been a bit too much to require the steering binding each play-through, and I managed to several times bind those in the wrong order. One way to fix the former would be to allow retry to start after steering has been set. The latter could be fixed with needing to hold key pressed for a short while before accepting the binding.
I didn't get really far. My high-score after a couple of retries was 4200. But it was fun.
Some other comments:
* When having dual shields, it was hard to see what shield(s) were active. * You could easily die several times in a row because collision detection was done before you even got to see your new ship. I would suggest adding a invincibility time after respawn.
I liked the enemies and obstacles and it was nicely done the way it warned where the cheese was coming.
Great team effort! I liked horror of the game. It was quite wonderful. The audio was a bit stressful, but then again, that was the purpose. And as always it is fun to see what wiggly creation had been spawn into life this time. Quite obviously it would have been fun with more options and paths to explore, but it didn't show too much on the first play-through.
@cyberpunks we're a bunch of people in our 30s and 40s, all child free and most or all not particularly interested in creating more humans. For some reason the ideas kept getting back to babies. "Baby Aspic" (not really sure what that game would be). A game where you start out with dreams and visions about what to accomplish in life and as you get more babies you resign to wishing for just five minutes of peace, a full night's sleep. A platformer where you play as Santa but instead of collecting coins or presents you just collect babies and put them in your sack.
We had other ideas that did not involve babies, but there you have it more or less. How we ended up with this idea.
@happysloth I wonder what is the issue with the controller there. But in general I do agree that both the character controller and the camera controller are far from optimal. I'm the one guilty and in the end I settled for "at least this kind of works" and a "next time we need to make a simpler game so we can spend more time on content." That we've been saying for 14 LD now. You also correctly spotted the coffee icon and the loading sprite behind it that is just one of the default assets in unity. We were very close to fixing that but on Monday I was kind of giving up on it all... it's a sad thing that thing that happens when you know something should be fixed, and it is not hard to fix it but for some reason you just let it slip.
As for the bug. One thing that springs to mind is that it may relate to release version of Unity used. And it may also relate to remapping of Input.axis made...
@sean-s-leblanc if I get my will through, each LD will only become more [fill in suitable word].
@liquidream always keep the fire burning, just in case :fire: :baby: :fire: :tada:
@randomhuman we're happy to serve.
@kevin-mooney most everything in the game is from photos. But some, in particular the animated bits are photos that then have been manipulated rather than stop motion capturing the walk/crawl cycles.
@simonhutchinson you should have picked them up holding them while playing to get a super immersive experience!
And everyone else, thanks for all the great comments.
I enjoyed the glitchiness that came over the game over time. And the general structure. Unfortunately I did spend a lot of time dying because I couldn't really get the jump-timing and physics of the world. On the other hand, it was relatively OK to just bounce around and die and die again since the game was so fast at getting you right back where you should be and since the glitches were a nice reward.
Fun little game. It was simple to understand what to do and though the control scheme sounded really complex it wasn't at all that bad and could easily be played on my laptop.
Some thoughts and comments:
* It was easy to distinguish the darkest and fairly easy the lightest but the in-between could probably have been more distinct. Not only the hue but depending on what type of establishment this bar is you could expect to have different glasses for some special beers.
* It wasn't really clear what the meter was showing at the top and if it even was a good or bad meter. The red color and name of the game kind of hinted that it showed the general level of rowdiness from getting wrong beer. But then I would have wanted a clearer feedback/connection to the times I did bad servings. The worst case should of course be when I served nothing at all. But since the angry customers left just like the happy, the game didn't really convey that narrative either. So one thing would be to have customers stay until the get satisfied. That would also definitely make it worse the more angry customers you have.
* Now as the game is right now, that suggestion would be a problem due to the waiter only shooting beer in straight lines. It was already a problem in the game some times when I had served a customer a correct beer and the customer took their sweet time drinking it and behind them were another customer wanting a beer and getting upset before I even got a chance... So first simple solution would be to let the waiter move along the bar sideways. Second alternative option would be to allow non straight line-throws.
However some of these suggestions might actually not be that good since they could make the interaction/control scheme more complicated :shrug:
Anyways, this became a long comment. But in general, fun game. Made it to 1:30. If that is good or bad I don't know.
Very nice graphics and a quite unique setting / style for the clicker game genre. I enjoyed playing it to the end. Of course it would have helped a lot with some aquatic industrial sounds and music. Also if there were a bit more feedback on the click-interactions. I quite quickly stopped clicking, maybe I would have helped the factories a bit more if I felt it was rewarding effects of actual clicking. Fun game though, and particularly nice in how it interpreted the genre.
Nice game! I, as others commented on also found that one of my greatest enemies were the controls. I also found it a little unfair that the game started as you reset it and not when you started moving. I got a couple of levels in and then got stuck. I would probably have continued trying on the level if it wasn't for the controls opposing my attempts at figuring it out.
For the first levels it also felt like there was a first initial paradox conflict that needed resolving and that when you got that one right, there was really no remaining problem on the level but it might be hard puzzle design to make this more intricate.
I was also wondering if the followers didn't come to quick in succession. At least in terms of the first levels. But spacing them out some more may make it easier to make puzzles where you have to double and triple back on the same path.
Great game! I really loved the execution, the take on the theme, the style and how well made it was. I only played your compo version so some things you might have fixed, but:
* On the title screen I didn't figure out at first that space was what would start/select and I never got what would have allowed me to see credits and such. * It would have been nice if there were more than one fail sound that the characters made. Especially to differentiate between getting cut/bleeding versus forgetting a piece of hair. A variety of success sounds (e.g. "Arigato") from the different characters would have been nice too. * It would have been nice to know how far you were in the progress of the level/song. Maybe there was some meter, but I didn't see it. Would help keep focus and go for perfect cut and such.
Really liked the jazzyness, the graphics were great. Didn't so much understand how I could be smart or good about the fights so unfortunately it was more or less a long hopeless way towards loosing. So perhaps to make it more satisfying, have the opponent not be that cool for the first fight?
I played quite a few times over and over. Mostly for the music but to be honest also a bit of frustration with being so bad at the game. In part I blame my keyboard which has enter in the middle (it was hard to serve and be ready to paddle) and would have made `L` and `.` a better combo on the right side. So I would suggest maybe adding more alternative buttons for all the interactions to help those who don't use standard keyboards.
I really liked the sounds of the particles. Well the music was really well made too as I mentioned in the beginning. I liked the visual style with the glitches and the simple retro feeling. For me it would probably have been more reasonable to play it as two people or have a slower/easier optoin.
In a way, this is like our game. Just swap out the hotdogs for babies. I think I got to the end of the track (lots of hotdogs). My right foot was all glitchy and spinning in an upset manner, which apparently meant it also wanted a hotdog. Because when it got one, it settled down. That I liked. For the game play, I think it would do with some more speed and of course sound (both music and effects). Interesting idea.
Nice storytelling and nice mood. I like the cute text effects and really all I could wish for would be more episodes and perhaps a bitsy little more rewards for going off track exploring. I had fun playing it. And I think it was just about the right length for the contents.
I loved the graphics! Wow. The game played quite nicely too, but I never got beyond jump boots and sword. In particular I felt like I knew what to do if I could get back to the boots area from the sword area but I gave up finding the path. Very nice game.
Nice in its pointlessness. I think I would have enjoyed it even more if the entire game was about clicking your way through a never ending EULA. With more and more frustrating conditions. But this was fun (well maybe fun is an odd word here) too. The way the stuff already on the board kept jumping around a bit made it somewhat hard to follow what happened, but other than that, no real complaints.
Others' have said it, but mobile! That clicking is a bit uncomfortable. But if I could tap/touch it would probably have me going even more. Aaand I got to 4100 on my first attempt and feel quite proud about it. But something that would be cool around 5k or 10k would be if the amount of cars started to slow down just a little and then when the player is thinking: Pew that was nice to get a breather. Then the camera zooms out and now you've got to manage four intersections!
I got to 3 loops, I think I could have managed 4 if I really stuck with it. And this was really quite the tricky game. It was hard, especially in the beginning and I was about to give up before the first loop basically because I had no indication of how far I needed to go. So that would be my first suggestion, to add a progress-bar for that. The graphics were lovely. Everything about the game was quite lovely.
So now some thoughts:
* Add a score that is basically the distance you've traveled on the current loop, the more you shoot and the number of double jumps. Then let each loop be a multiplier for that base score. So the harder you make it on yourself the better score, but also it might be worth getting low score on first loop and aim for many loops. If you fail the loop, you get to reset the value of the score for the current loop. Alternatively you may also loose a loop if you fail too many times in a row. * The double jump effect that kills you from previous runs should have a warning phase to allow you to get out of harms way and also explain why you died. * At the start, the game should not start until you press a key. * Online high-scores. * Maybe different levels. Basically make a shorter level as an alternative. Maybe there's a max loop depth per level when you've completed it no matter how good and smart you are?
Superb! I loved it. I got to the bit with the inverted logic where you were supposed to type the letters to kill off the logos rather than avoiding them. One thing that I would have appreciated would have been a death-state that persisted (at least for a little while) so that I could see my score. Maybe I would have to type something to restart the game? Maybe have a bit of high-score? Otherwise I found it more or less perfect.
I really liked the idea. And some of the moves where really fun. It was very cute how the jocks just ran wherever the ball went. They were a bit greedy for attention though. The hand-holding furries were much easier to deal with. And skaters falling in-between. In some way that seems like a fair way to structure the game.
I also liked how I got to practice with easy type before trying out getting everyone happy.
Now I might not have figured out how you were to throw that ball, but it was very tedious to get the individual jocks to appreciate me. And skaters moderately hard. So it basically took too long. I would instead suggest making it easier to get popular, still retaining the differences in how you interact with the distinct groups. But if that isn't difficult enough. I would have everyone slowly loose their status over time too. I think that would be a better way to balance and make the challenge fun and rewarding.
Interesting exploration. I enjoyed scanning the different inhabitants. And I don't know if this was real, but I felt like I was shrinking (or they growing) with the scanning. Unfortunately I jumped down a hole hoping to get a angel-like demon, but well at the bottom I couldn't find a way out again. And that was a bit of a bummer.
I liked the style, and those eyes with the sounds were really nice. And that you had time to get the demons into cute animations in the scanner was really cool.
I was mostly running to the right in panic and somehow managed to get to level 4. I'm glad I could just keep running. And perhaps the controls could have been further simplified that way... The game was fun and well made. I would have liked a little more time in the beginning to learn what are actually the edibles and such because later on I really didn't have the time to learn about it. There in particular were some fungi looking things that I was not allowed to eat and that was a bit confusing. But in general a really nice game. Solid music. Controls easy to understand.
I liked the idea, but apparently I have no herding capabilities. So either I missed some important tactical step or the game could do with a bit of simplified way of making the sheep go where I want them. Maybe some could be solved with hot-swapping between dogs using tab or similar and have the active dogs just head towards the mouse cursor without clicking or anything. It would also have been nice with an indicator of where in general you should be heading.
Interesting idea. I managed to get to the hive making sure I was just one bee. I have no idea how I would be supposed to navigate the more than one. Keeping the pace slow and health up was a bit too much too so I opted for health and letting the final obstacles hurt me. So I think the idea is neat, but for me it would be challenge enough if the more bees just kept following whomever was the furthest towards the hive.
It was interesting playing. It would have been great with some bug hunting sounds to get the mood right. Otherwise it was solid play. A bit hard not getting hit on the head by one of the bouncies.
I walked around some and got some useful pieces to my inventory and purse. But after as while I got stuck. Both in the sense that I didn't know what to do in the short term. Long term goal seemed to be:
!>murder my parents or similar.
But all I had was sleeping pills/medicine. And two rooms. Maybe there were more but I didn't find other ways out.
I tried reading the text, but in particular in the hallway it was impossible since part of the hallway graphics shadowed the text for me.
Otherwise I liked the setting and mode of the game.
Cute game and good. Art was really nice. And I died so many time yet kept trying, so something is definitely right with the game. But something is also for sure problematic. The shadow, to show where you are, it needs to be more helpful. The controls were generally good, but it was a bit too easy to run too far, and more problematically I think either you should be allowed to jump after leaving ground (for a little while/longer) and/or possibly having the colliders be a bit larger than the platforms.
In general though, a really good game.
I got past first conversation and battle. But I have no idea how I really navigated the world. I would have needed some warning or information about the coming of obstacles and how to get past them. And possibly making the world simpler, at least the early bits. For the conversation and fights I also didn't really know what I was doing. But I was enjoying myself. Still I think that with a bit more hand-holding for the player it would be more fun and immersive. The start game difficulty in how much the player had to understand and have a feel for the game was probably more balanced for end-game difficulty.
I can answer the question. My cat was OK with the first 20. Then she got off from the sofa an required to sit in my lap to be sure that everything was fine and no cat-astrophy was upon her. I enjoyed the game, and she seemed to be fine with it too in the end. Nice humor and weird way to bully your neighbour.
Very pretty, but also very hard. First I tried to play with my controller (since the keys were mapped) and that was just pure impossible. I swapped to keyboard and my best score was 6. So for us not so cool drifters, it would be nice if the game started out simpler. Otherwise I really liked the game loop, the idea and how well it was made. If there had been a warning for each second left when less than 10 seconds remained would also have been both fun and useful. Finally, there's no way to exit the game from within the game. In general though. A very good game.
I found it easiest to get most score by just doing a quick series of shots reaching 9 score max. Basically my problem with playing a bit smarter was that it was too hard to know what faces you might be having behind and around you. So some sort of mini-map or audio/visual queues to help me know where they are would have been needed.
Also it would have been nice if Esc or so quit the game.
Otherwise it was a simple and a challenging game.
I recognize the art style from your previous games. I liked the twist to the classic game and in general the way all bricks and walls bounced when hit by the balls. One thing was the upper left corner brick on the second level was a bit hard to discover since it was partially below the UI.
Well made game in general.
Really simple and very well made. Well it wasn't that simple to play. But I managed to stay 1/xx for many laps using that default 200 cars setting. I don't know if there was an end, but I feel like 10 laps was enough for me and I would have enjoyed getting some award for that from the game. The way all the cars were just wrecking everything was very good and it increased the driving challenge in a nice way. I didn't much use the indicator of where to go, and I think it could have been omitted without any negative effects. The music/sound was a bit repetitive. Oh and it would have been nice with more violent feedback (music/effects/camera) when wrecking things.
Well made game!
I don't know if it is because I have two monitors, but the game didn't fit on my screen. Which made it hard to figure things out as some text ended up outside. I like the premise, but I must admit that I was mostly confused about the interactions and what I was doing. In part because the white text was a bit quick and hard to read and in part probably because some things where outside my view. I managed to make a game though.
Fun challenging puzzle. This would have been so good with party music to it. It was a bit hard to keep everything in mind from the start, so if anything I would have suggested starting with 2 rooms and 2 types/rules and then add on as you go. When you have X happy dancers in 2 rooms, you gain a new room an new people-types comes to join the party.
The style and art was very neat.
Nice game. I played to level 5 and it was fun. I did find the effect showing the reach of my sounds to be a bit too hectic as were the movements when swapping tiles. So if anything I would suggest making those smoother and slower. Otherwise a nice game.
Fun game. I won with $1,400M or something when I retired.
Though it should have been obvious, it took me a while to recognize that I could have multiple projects running in parallel.
I also kind of didn't bother to switch over to the news tab after a while, so it would have been more fun if new news showed on the actions-tab as they happened.
It was a bit annoying that options that you couldn't afford got removed from the list, because that meant what I wanted to click on moved up whenever that happened. So I think it would have been better to show them as deactivated if you didn't have the time for it.
I played on laptop with limited screen size, cat on my lap and I'm going to blame it on the cat that I only got 7 glasses across. While I really liked the sound of the crashing I kind of would have expected something like a raised eyebrow or other polite discontent from the judges. Swapping between touchpad for placing the glasses and the dual keyboarding was a bit annoying but on the other hand the physics and placing the glasses on the trey was half the fun. Letting them fall to the ground was also fun.
First time I made it across with any glass I thought I might need to manually place them on the table. But I was simply a little too eager. So the sign confused me and might be better if it only showed after leaving off some glasses encouraging to run back (or moonwalk). To get more.
Interesting game. I found that I wasn't that encouraged to swap card-deck to flip cards from even when having the spy-on feature. Basically it took longer swapping around than it was worth in win. I'm not entirely sure what would change that in an easy way.
I found it a bit hard to pick up the carts. I could throw out the chain, and a few times I managed to pickup a cart. Though mostly I failed and the few times I picked it up I didn't really manage to deliver any poor souls. It was kind of fun to just go around the place, avoid torpedoes, or not avoid torpedoes :grin:. The graphics were nice. The corrals and the sea floor.
I made it to floor is lava. Really nice game. Well made. I wish there were sounds. Especially for the leader. But also machine sounds and sounds of the workers. Music would have been a plus, but not as necessary. The controls were OK, but a bit annoying. In particular with when it recognized that you were on platforms and when not.
I really liked the characters in the game. They were a fun bunch. I didn't quite understand how much my choices affected the outcome or if there was a strategy I could have used at some time. It was more of click and see what happens. But that was fun. So I'm not complaining. :)
Simple well executed game. Grabbing more than two hearts at a time made it a bit spammy to get upwards. But it was perfectly fine going up and down several times. It took be a while to realize I could pop the enemies' balloons. And that made it much easier. It would have been nice with some progression. If only adding more and more enemies each iteration you live through.
Wow, that was hard. The mechanics simple enough once I spotted the `X` *and* arrows for angled bouncing. But basically I found that I never had a chance to bounce one off to the side without the next falling down costing me a life. That was I managed to get to level two, but then died promptly. One way to fix this would be if the pipe gave a warning that the package was on its way. So I had time get back to center. And also to have packages for first and second level come much less frequently. At least give me three extra bounces not really needed if you know what you are doing per package on the first level. And maybe the packages in the beginning should have parachutes?
Fun idea though.
Those animals really wanted to die, but I somehow managed not to kill them too much. Just enough much. Simple fun game.
133 cats!
It got a bit hard in the end or rather it felt like there wasn't much I could do to be a better cat hoarder.
In principal, in the beginning you have too much food so it is hard to know what the purr-pos is. The cats are generally happy and there's not that much to do. Where the food ends up while throwing it felt a bit random and perhaps it would have been a better feeling if the food was actually thrown a bit further out from the character.
As the cats amassed I still had the same delay between feeding so there wasn't so much I could have done before or while things were getting all cat. So I think the game would benefit from removing the restriction on time between feedings but have re-up stations somewhere so you have conflicting objectives of feeding everyone and refilling what you carry with you.
After having played many attempts at strategy-games through the years of participating in LD, I'm really impressed with the amount of content and functionality you managed to get in during the weekend. The graphics was really nice as was the mood and the setting. As for the balance in the game, after the initial buildings there wasn't much of a challenge. (I didn't mind for the scope here though). It was also a bit awkward that the only way to explore the world was to build your way around it. So I started building a chain of towers going south until the game crashed:
ld_rattendorf_error.png
But in general a really nice game.
I enjoyed playing through it. It would have been really nice if the music reacted to what I was doing in game (getting drained) or bumped up by white orb. It took a while in the beginning before I recognized the way you were supposed to handle the flight. Then also another thing. The glow effect on the text in the instructions made it almost impossible to read. And that was a bit unfortunate.
I played a couple of times, but I was about to give up on doing anything the first time. Basically the interactions is a bit odd. Having that grid to walk around at start, you really expect arrow keys would work. And I would have swapped the mouse buttons there too. The walking is a bit too slow too.
I got to play 3 minigames but the only one I completed was robbing the house. The ball-balancing was impossible, the begging, I didn't see any progress on when the minigame was over so I quit and restarted.
So I like the idea, but the interactions in and outside of the minigames needs work to make the game accessible. Unfortunately.
Wanted to play, but the game required to make changes to my computer to run when installing through the itch-app and that is a no-go.
Very good idea and really good graphics! I enjoyed playing this.
Some things I thought of in case you continue:
* The menu should respond to interactions like clicking the buttons. Kind of felt like the game had frozen. * The menu should allow for controller interaction. * The camera ends up inside the ball when the ball gets too close, which kind of ruins the feeling of trying to escape it and also makes it unclear how close it is. I would suggest forcing the camera into looking back on ball-mode when the ball is too close. * One play-through was really hard, it felt like there was no explosion-help anywhere and no way to avoiding getting all cluttered down with objects. Maybe make it a bit less random. * Some of the smaller obstacles where a bit hard to see. * Maybe both you and ball should accumulate speed over time so game becomes faster and faster to give a progression to the challenge that way. * If the helpful exploding thing had a different color to its pickup radius marker it would be nice. * It would be good with online highscores...
Great entry though. Very good LD-game.
Cute and relaxing. Well my cat did twitch some when I caught the first rat in the game. Easy to understand, and easy to play.
I really liked the look of this game. And the theme. And that I was more skilled at fishing up stuff I was not supposed to fish up...very well made. I don't know how the game plays on a big screen but on my little laptop it was hard to get an overview and much plan the boating. That might in part explain my net score 0. Or I'm just evil that way and want to have all the turtles for myself. I think the game would have done really good with some sounds of the sea and music too. Really nice little game. And very good graphics and theme.
Interesting concept. I got to 4 islands before letting myself getting slimed to death. In a way the game got easier with more islands since the slimes headed straight for me and would just fall off the other islands. But that might change if you survive longer. For that to be interesting though, the islands has to come more often and probably the slimes need to be smarted about how to find you.
Cool idea and execution. I liked the general principle and the game felt good. The thing with more friends makes it worse was something we also considered. I never had the time though to read the instructions for the selfie and didn't figure it out. So I would suggest that when running with tutorials that you speed down time while giving instructions so the player can learn. Otherwise very good game.
Tower defense isn't really my thing. But it was fun to zap the zombies. Some comments:
* The mouse aim didn't really work well except close to the house. (This could have been helped by hiding the cursor). * My house kept loosing health without there being any visible zombies in sight. Anyone behind the house? Or invisible zombie? * It would really have been nice with a score or some kind of win / loose condition.
I didn't get very far. The x dropping only worked once as far as I noticed. And I found it quite hard to get up and down in time too capture the loots. It was an interesting cute concept though. How the loot kept making you heavier and heavier.
Very well made this game. I enjoyed playing through it to the end. It was a bit slow at time when there were really too many sheep and you just had to sit and wait for a while before you even saw the right one. So the theme might not have been optimal driven to that length there if you ask me. I think I would have preferred to have a maximum number of sheep around 12(?) and then for the more difficult nights to keep populate with new sheep as you click them away.
Out of the blue. It might also have been cool if some sheep were not your thoughts and were not meant to be clicked. But maybe that would just have been confusing.
I would have liked playing more of this, but I only managed to get one fruit. I just could not deal with the controls. And I did try at least ten times without getting beyond the third platform. Basically, the character needs to stop running much more quickly (without physics) when I let go of the forward key. Jumping should probably be a bit higher too. The game could also need some initial less challenging parts before getting hard.
I let the monsters have the people. They didn't seem to be doing much good. And the way they forgot about being chased right the second the monster focused on something else. Surely they didn't deserve to survive. The game was quite fun for a while. But the rifle needed quite a lot of shots to kill a monster. And there were so many of them that it did feel quite futile. So perhaps make the rifle more effective? Then I might have felt like I had a chance to keep some of the useless people alive. And if I had felt like I could do that, it might have made it more engaging in the long run.
I liked this, and played it until I got the destiny I deserved. Very well made and fun. Easy to follow and figure out what to do while still challenging. And there's something about games with rooms like these, the camera transitions and everything. It brings back memories.
For extending upon the game I would suggest having more sounds in it. Especially from start. As it helps with the mood. Not only music but sound fx too.
I kind of never really used the gun. And I get that there was a bit of point to it, but for the scope of the game at the moment. It really didn't need it.
The jumping did take a bit getting used to, but nothing major there.
Great entry in general.
Could not play, no room up and no way of knowing what rooms there may be...
I gotta say that it is seriously bold to make a game with exponential growth-rate in it. I made it to auto-planting and then quickly decided it was best to shut down the game before it got all my resources.
The seed sounds when you had about a 100 of them jumping up and down were freaky.
You should probably put in some constraints there...
Cute fun game!
I completed the game, though not getting all cats on all levels.
First things first though. The game needs a quick reload feature. On first level I got stuck and could not find any reloading and had to restart the game. Could even have a HUD "Press R to reload" if the player didn't complete the level within the first 15s. And that is the other real simple fix. There's no way to exit the game.
Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed playing the game.
The first level, the last "platform" could have been more forgiving (that's where I got stuck). It was the first level after all. And jumping off platforms, I had to replay many times just because I didn't agree with the game how late was OK to jump. And I'm expecting you could improve this with allowing player to jump a small time after the player has actually left the platform.
Good work. Really nice style and fun to play.
Are you sure this got worse the more you got? :) I played for a while (on Web) and after a while it got quite silly with my line of shots stretching from one end of the screen to the next. Kind of fun though for a while. Some of the sound effects got a bit too loud when they happened too close. The camera was a bit too jerky when swapping aiming direction. Other than that, the 3D/2D combo worked nicely and the game ran smoothly.
I liked the concept. I played until there was a wall of enemies. The graphics and effects on completing levels were very nice.
It was kind of hard to notice the slowing down of time and while I like the concept, I think there would need to be some other feedback on that this is happening. Camera effects maybe. Vignetting or changing field of view perhaps.
It didn't really feel like I got hit sometimes. Probably the collider for getting hurt was a bit too large.
It would have helped to have music for the mood, especially if that music slowed down as you played.
Easy game to get into (even if the instructions to start kind of made it sound more complex than it was). I though the sound effect for when the change appeared was enough warning. One thing that surprised me though was that I actually only needed to know which was the best. I kind of expected it to sometimes not offer the best and thus force me to select the second best (or worse).
I played for a while but I think I was stuck in a balance between not being fast enough, or slow enough so nothing really seemed to be happening in the game. Since there was no sense of progression I stopped playing. So I would suggest that if it runs on time and that you have to survive for a certain amount of time, to show that progress somehow. You could also try and make it start out easy, get harder and then finally end on being easy. That would make sense from the narrative of the game, give a progression and make it end for everyone.
Good simple game! And I liked the use of barnacles. I never made it to the end, but record was 169 meters left with only two barnacles on my hull.
Fun idea going out hunting stars who are not. I would have liked to move around with a bit more ease to go further and further from safely. But for me I was depleting a bit too fast.
So many ways to not to manage killing off just about the right amount of crew. And then humanity vanishing. Very nice game. I like the take on the theme. While the interpretation you used kind of hints that the game would be hardest in the beginning. Which might not be optimal as there are so many ways to try and set the ball in motion. It would probably have been more fun an experience if it got harder the fewer there were left. So most first murders would be fine, few second, only one third. Then I don't know, because I never managed to make it. But I would have been inclined to have solution (or at least on of them) be excluding the captain yet managing the goal of only having two left.
Well written and a good atmosphere.
The graphics and the mood is just fantastic. The audio playing a big part in that. The gameplay felt relatively simple but also unfortunately somewhat confusing. I gathered there was an economy and something telling me how much I had to build for. But, I found that hard to grasp. So would recommend indicators for when you regain and loose ability to build the different types of cannons. The other thing was getting stuck going from ramps to platforms sometime.
Other than that, it was a splendid platform tower defense game.
Just a tip to start. You should probably mark the game as web instead. And if you upload it correctly to itch, it should be playable in the browser. People don't generally attempt to build games from source if the person making them didn't.
As for the game. It was simple and enjoyable.
'Placeholder' could almost relate to the theme! :sunglasses:
What a brilliant puzzle. It started to get really interesting after a while but the uneven cross that perhaps is called "Dead End" was too much for me. I hope the name means it was impossible to beat, but it was still a bit evil in that case. Maybe there was some rule I hadn't figured out. Or maybe I just wasn't smart. Great fun and challenging. It would of course be even better if there was a wordlist or something so that you weren't allowed to type nonsense. The sounds for the typewriter and the graphics/music set a great mood. In general very well made and nice game.
@blinry I made it!
The puzzles were a bit challenging but at last I managed to get 3 crystals. In general very well made and structured game. Not really much to complain about, except perhaps that it was punishing sometimes, that if you explored down one alley you had to loop back and redo some old puzzle again before reaching the fork in the road where you accidentally took a wrong turn.
@peachtreeoath Thanks for the feedback. Bitsy was really interesting and hard. I just used the core, and that left me with very few options of gamifying the experience. Not that it was high on my list of priorities. I had no experience going into the LD. Except for checking in some dialogues if enough items of certain kinds had been picked up all coding was limited to a single variable `q`. This meant that I could spend the entire time (almost) writing dialogue, playing around in the editor and doing pixel graphics (not really something that comes natural to be). So while I might not want to do it each time it was very much worth the experience.
@danielbarca I agree about the theme, I was more "inspired by" than actually attempting to follow it (which is kind of how the theme is intended after all). Gamification was really hard to achieve in the Bitsy editor without extentions since there's next to no coding possible and very little manipulation of the game world. There are probably smart things that can be done with the little available that I didn't think of... but the point of using Bitsy was to have very little focus on gamification and code. Instead almost all time was spent on pixels and text.
@powlow-paolo oh that's a very nice game to be associated with!
@simonhutchinson very glad you liked it and I do agree that if I hadn't given myself the restriction to only use core Bitsy (a bit a lazy thing to not have to deal with sound I should admit) there would have been sloshes, splashes and ambiance all around. I really should have done that, shouldn't I. I might actually steal that "Bringing to light the horrors of the human condition" to be my mission here on LDJAM.
@vinvirinvi thanks for the feedback! I did get a bit on the fence a bit there in my previous comment. :wink:
@wesxdz Thanks for the feedback. I agree with that there could have been better ways to use the theme, but the editor in its basic for (which I put as an arbitrary limitation for myself) don't really allow for much. Only one character and that's the only thing that can move. Things that can be picked up, things that can be talked to and walls. I was thinking of having a space close in on the player by swapping scenes but that was a ton of work and didn't turn out that well.
@blushine I think they're better now :wink:
@coal-creek-game-devs I know I broke a rule there with that on some occasions what might have looked like walls, where kind of secret passages. But I also didn't want my world too blocky. With only three possible colors in each scene (and another limitation of the engine, no sound) I wasn't smart enough during the jam to figure it out. Sloshy sounds would have been awesome, but also not included in the engine/my set limitations.
@tom7 it's strange that you got blurry pixels. I would have expected the bitsy-engine to have sharp pixels as a core value. All sprite data is pixeled. The dialogues were also controlled by the engine, and I agree that they do break up the flow. (Bristol is the best scale)
And to everyone not mentioned, thanks for the feedback. I do think I have thing for breaking some rules about expectations on form and throwing the player in and letting them orient themselves. But of course it would be nice if people don't get too confused. So if you have ideas on what could have helped in that regard, I'm all ears.
I'm a bit unlucky that my mouse's left click is more or less wasted, slow and sluggish so the game got really hard really fast. But I like the cut-scenes and how the game cut back to them mid-fight too. That's something you don't see very often in LD. I must also say that I'm a bit envious that you've made a series of games with the same character. Sound effects were nice too. And the way the game spawned you right back at the start of the fight when you died urging you to have one more round, also a really good detail.
Cool idea. It could really get me hooked, but I feel that it would be a better loop if score wasn't simple time, but perhaps you got 100 for each first row brick, 200 for next and so on. Maybe a bonus for when you manage to build up many bricks in one go without the ball returning to the ground that sort of thing. And highscores. Personal and online.
First it was a bit confusing with how the rooms didn't stitch together in the expected way but when I figured that out it was just a matter of finding the path that unlocked new areas. The lighter tiles were really inviting to try and walk on, and perhaps it could have added to the fun if they weren't walls.
It didn't work on Firefox for me but I could play it on Chrome. I like the glitchy chaos of the bunnies, but the game-play was way to hard for me. I read the tutorial and then I started clicking on some stuff but I didn't really understand what was happening and it didn't feel like I was doing much of a difference. My mouse button is a bit slow, so that might have been part of it. I got the impression from the tutorial that there would be carrots, but I didn't see any, so I clicked on the pie button because that one was lit up. So I would suggest slow down the initial pace and then let it build up momentum as a way to making it accessible to more player.
I really like the graphics! And how the physics really didn't bother trying to imitate our world. I forgot to bother about the aim of the game, just having fun with it until probably half of the timer, then I started capturing fish. The other boats got stuck upside down to the far right, but I didn't really mind that too much.
consider marking the windows download properly on itch so it's playable through the itch-app.
@iluvatar if you mark your game's download as for windows on `itch.io` then I can run it in the `itch`-app. It's on the settings page right next to the download file.
So now for some more useful comments about the game: I really liked the art style, that it didn't really look much like any other LD game. That was really nice. There are also way to few adventure games. Theme was interesting in combination with how adventure games tend to become harder the more things you are happening to be carrying at the moment. Unfortunately I didn't really understand the games logic so I got next to nowhere. I made a CPU chip, but there was no place to put it. I also made a metal bucket, and it seemed reasonable to fill it with the only liquid there was around but it was not possible for it to take oil. The dropping of items was also quickly making me not want to keep trying since it didn't respect what I had selected as thing to drop. Instead it dropped in order of being picked up. Which meant that if I had made the bucket and picked up the oil, I couldn't drop the oil without it first dropping the bucket and then I had to start over again with the bucket.
@iluvatar oh don't take my comment too harshly. I know all too well about the limitations of the jam. My first LD I did without having even tried out anything in the game engine (Unity) before the theme was announced and boy did I struggle. Take the critique as the points I found most hurting what might otherwise have been an excellent experience. One possible improvement could have been to have given a really simple task to make me as a player more invested in my own progress. Another one, that is sometimes found in adventure games is that the character or the world starts helping the player by hinting stuff like "I wonder if the bucket couldn't be used to carry something with some quality to repair the window" or similar after it had detected that I tried to bucket things for a while. But you already had an impressive amount of text so it would be asking a lot to fit that into the jam.
Graphics in this was fantastic. I had a hard time grabbing things (might be my mouse button), but even so I think it would make sense if you pickup whatever you walk into and have an easy time throwing it. Most time I could win without being the arsonist though. Really cool concept that could be further explored in many ways.
Fun little puzzle. Even if I'm not young anymore and don't hang on tumblr, I consider my self quite versed on internet culture and could spot quite a few of the references in how to combo things up to make stuff look cool. Still, the game almost required you to fail in the beginning to learn the mechanics of it and I think it would have made it a somewhat better experience if the first level had much fewer stickers (3-4) and sort of the easiest ones that everyone should know. Pineapple and pizza. And very low requirement. If you'd run out of backgrounds to stick stuff on, just repeat them. Because there were so many combos I had to learn basically on the first level it became more of "Oh that also gave me points" "Why didn't that?" when I just comboed something without thought. But in general a very good little puzzle.
It might also help to start each level with a sticker in hand, that way space is only "place sticker" and not "activate first" too.
I enjoyed myself even if I had a hard time coming up with a successful strategy. My best bet was to get some penguins lying down on the side as that made them not jump into the water. But other than that, I think I would really have liked some way to affect the direction of the spinning of the ice. And maybe be able to make a larger wave by holding button pressed longer and/or having the force decrease slower by distance. Anyways fun and interesting game mechanics.
Evil and fun. I got 1400, and sometimes the game actually helped me. The only gripe I had was that dropping the pieces with space didn't always work. There should probably also be a clear way to try and play again
Really nice card game. I really like the idea of card count being what triggered end of turn. I was also interesting that the position of some card were important, but that also made it a bit vague at times what 'next' meant and where cards should be played (on another card, or on an empty slot). So it would have been nice if there were two types of highlights, and if they weren't only the card slot but the area around the card too so that it was visible when there was a card in the spot. For two colors I'd like a green to say "this card could be useful here" and yellow to say "this card can be played here but will have not effect" (playing damage on empty slot or playing a 'next'-card on a slot where there's no card next to it). Since I only drew up to 6 and 5 meant end of turn and if I remember it correctly I carried cards between turns, it would also be nice if I could use an entire turn to swap out all (or any number of cards). Anyways, with some balancing, some better feedback and animations of the actions, it could be a very nice pastime mobile game.
I know the link above just says linux, but when I check on the itch-page there were versions for windows. For some reason they crash though. Says something about `Python.exe` missing.
I'm not sure which one, I took the one that the `itch`-app offered me. It didn't give any choice.
Interesting. I really like that hand. It was really hard getting up to the right level even on the first level and when I did, I couldn't find my way out of it, I was stuck next to the roof in a corner. Like some workplace hell. :construction_worker: The instructor voice was a really nice touch but he sounded a bit on the kind side given to working conditions that followed. I think making the first level a bit easier, making sure to reward the player for success. and giving a clearer way out of the room when reaching the goal. Maybe that voice could say something about loitering and taking breaks, and rush the player to the next room.
I got as far as filling up my cargo with level-ups, maybe I could improve things there too by discarding old and replacing them, but when I reached that level I was already doomed by the thing I was running away from. As some people have commented on, it would have been nice if the movement was a bit more fluid. Not full speed - full stop. The mechanism of being stunned was interesting too, but it was a bit too easy to get stun-locked and then die. Basically it felt like if I got hit once I was dead. So the components are there for a really nice arcade game, but the core mechanics would need a bit more work to really hook the player. The line graphics, I really liked too. Not often you see that in LD.
nice game. I didn't survive for very long. perhaps it would have made it easier if I didn't touch the mouse... but the controls were a bit hard to get a hang of, as well as the size of the ship/collision sphere around me. I think I would have liked that one smaller, or actually seeing the ship a bit from the behind.
Nice and simple mechanics. My left mouse button kind-of almost doesn't work, so it got really hard. It was easy to understand the objective and I had managed to build a nice little thing to catch the enemy in. But my mouse's functionality was in the way. It would have been nice with keyboard binding for the clicking.
It was a sweet experience. I felt perhaps that some turns in the mood between the different dialogue pieces can a bit drastically, that perhaps it shouldn't have been transitional dialogue to build up for the change, but just more space. A bit of walk in the near void.
On the final screen, the empty room. I would really have loved it if there was a timer outside of Bitsy monitoring that I as a player followed the hints of the instruction and let the character rest for a while and on that event just dissolve the character by shifting the color, or editing the sprite. That would of course go beyond the capabilities of core Bitsy and as someone who put that limitation on themselves I shouldn't really suggest that you had broken them :wink:
Anyways a really nice game.
kind of tricky puzzle with how the movement worked. I got something like 5-6 levels in, didn't count but then it got too precise for me in what needed to be done that it sort of lost the fun, so I think there is a balance there between ramping up the difficulty and making sure that the game stays fun and I'm not sure that having narrower openings with less blocks to push off from is necessarily the best way to go. Perhaps moving things would add more fun. Maybe something that limits the player like time or power in the jetpack.
Really nice game. The audio was really great. The visuals nice too. The my life = my space was a good use of the theme. It got a bit too hard for me though, and part of it could be solved by the enemies shots having a bit more limited range or if you killed them by fewer shots to make it easier to get rid of them (maybe allowing them to spawn a bit more often). I realize now that maybe I was supposed to be shooting away their space rather than shooting them? As a side note, you might want to mark the download on itch as for windows so that it can be installed through the itch-app natively.
I think I got about 12 as score. In the beginning it was a bit slow and then it got really quite fast towards the end. It was very hard to keep those strange character sequences in memory and then to not have access to backspace. That was evil. :wink: I think the need to use mouse/touchpad didn't add much fun to the challenge so I would opt showing all available codes without needing hover. I think it would also be more fun to the player if it was easier to keep the codes in memory. E.g. if they were three sets of three character blocks and maybe also limiting the consonant-vowel patterns in the blocks to things that frequent in many languages like `cwc`, `cww`, `wcc` and so on. That could also add the potential of randomly getting fun codes with strange meanings. It would allow for typing in the codes faster and thus staying in game longer.
Really well made game. I'm not good at these types of games, but I was happy to complete the easiest level the second time I tried. The idea of growing up the arrows due to the pile of trash making you have a shorter time to react and I presume have to catch them out of sync with what might else have been easier was a really cool idea.
First time I played I lost after having filled up only the bottom two levels and the game didn't give me any warning that it was a fail condition. Maybe it said something to the side, but I had no attention to spare, so if there's a limit where you loose that is further down than the top-most possible, I think there should be something of a dashed line to let the player know what type of margin they have. It also helps staying more focused if and make it more exciting if you _know_ that you can't afford a single mistake.
really well made game. I like how the ground texture got glitchy as pieces started to break off. I managed to get to the end and it was fun all the way. The challenges came kind of naturally, which was nice. The camera control on the mouse was a bit hard to control though. It was really easy to have it spin half way around and get lost as to what direction I was heading. The other small issue was the timing of dialogue options. Well actually they weren't option, but just your replies (I think), and it made it a little odd that they appeared at the same time as the NPC started to talk. And since my option was much larger. It was often that I read my reply before I read what they were saying. So I would suggest having dialogues from the player appear in sequence to the NPC dialogues. However, in general, a very well made and good game.
I played without VR as I have none. And I didn't really understand the interactions. I saw some shape spawn in a room, then clip through the floor and disappear, on the back-side of the room was a cat but the one shape I managed to grab before it fell to oblivion wasn't obvious how to stick it in the cat and when the color of selector changed and I figured something must be at least semi-right, the shape was released and fell away too. My issues might have been due to not running in VR, but they made the game very hard and quite confusing. I like the description/story and idea though.
I liked the sound effects the most in this game. Quite cute. It was a bit hard knowing if I was doing things right. If the missiles hit or got dodged, but the enemy disappeared after a while and I was still there so I guess I wasn't doing too bad. But the feedback of the missiles were hard to understand. And if all hit me, then it was way too hard to dodge them. The game also ended very abruptly and got me back to the menu which left me wondering: "Did I win?". So a simple "Yay you made it" would have been nice.
It was a while since I worked in care with some of the elderly being very close to what you managed to capture here. This was a very beautiful game, sad and beautiful. I cried a bit, which happens way to seldom playing LD games. The audio, graphics and the environmental story telling in the little bits lying around was really great. The only thing I can think of from my own experiences working with dementia is that what I saw then was more frustrated, violent and angry but in your game I also didn't explore selecting those answers so maybe the game had that involuntary darker loop in it too. Anyways, very happy to have played this.
I managed to pick up everything except the cup, I simply could not find it. I like the idea and how the game structured as a continues story you scrolled. The interaction with the image was a bit hard though.
Hi.
I found the game disorienting the first time I played it. Basically because the oxygen meter is a tiny thing in the left corner and as you start playing the world spins around and well there's nothing that draws the player's attention to that corner. So the game felt very unfair. I also wondered how I would use fire-extinguishing tubes when there was no fire. Until I saw that they said oxygen, which was strange. And then they didn't seem to do much about the oxygen level anyways.
I also agree with that movement is too fast or at least too controlled.
Then there are the two issues that a lot of people have discussed. I'm a LD veteran and part of the dev-team behind the site. It doesn't mean I decide how the rules should be read, but please concider that you are asking way too much of the player to give you a fair rating in the categories you've not opted out of. Let's say you used someones music track but did a whole lot of audio fx recording and audio design during the event so you really want to stay in the audio category. The way I'd do it, and expect it to be done is to have a large (almost blinking) text in your description stating exactly what should not be rated and what should be rated. As it is done now, you leave it way too easy for someone playing the game to miss that all is not your work and then grade you not based on your efforts. And that's why we urge participants as a general rule to opt out (it's still not too late).
I'm not sure what I liked, that you made yourselves unfortunately. But I'm a sucker for scifi and I don't mind the brevity or "lack of gameplay". Games can be short and whatever they want to be and shouldn't be criticized on those two conditions.
The worse problem is that which have been reported about generic comments on other's games that indicate that you might not even have played their games. That is way worse, because that is actually stealing other peoples visibility. Degrading their efforts, both in that they don't get valuable feedback they deserve on their game that they made. And because you are now forcing them to play and rate extra much to regain their ranks in visibility. Even worse for those who care for their final position/grades, a single off vote in a category will have a rather large effect in the end if you only got a few votes. So I sincerely hope it was all a misunderstanding, and if it wasn't you really really really ought to go back to all those games and replay, re-vote, and write new comments! Use https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/my/grades to get a list of what you've played so far.
Fun game. I'm not that great at these types and my left mouse button don't work too well (but I was pleased to notice I could keep it pressed). I kind of forgot about different weapons, being too occupied with staying alive. I mostly died from falling off, and this wasn't really because I was running out of space, but because it felt like the edge wasn't where I expected it to be given the visuals. So I would suggest having the edge-collision or however the game works be a bit further out compared to now. If the red thing is supposed to burn rather than be the edge of the world, then I think it would be better if it didn't insta-kill but instead delivered hurt per second.
Very solid entry. It didn't work in Firefox for me (just a black screen), but in chrome it ran without a glitch. The pixels were a bit blurred which made the text somewhat hard to read, but on the other hand, there was actually a tutorial. Very nice. I was more of a chaotic gravedigger who was appalled by straight rows of graves and that made the business of keeping corpse count low rather hard. And well that could be something to explore in the expanded areas. To have non-destructible obstacles that one has to plan around. It was a bit vague too when grabbing the corpse to pull it to the grave, so some little feedback there could have helped. In general though, very nice game.
Cool idea. It was a bit confusing with some stuff like a TV that if you picked up, there seemed to be no relevant space to place it. And as some others have discussed, it was a bit slow and repetitive at the same time. So one way I would go about fixing that would be to make it more of slapstick, having the character run around at full speed knocking around stuff, grabbing and throwing whatever, more chaos and mayhem.
Hello, welcome and congratulations on completing and submitting your first game to LD! Before I get to the comments about your game, I'd like to talk about the rating process that we are now doing. I'm both a veteran and one of the people making this site. The 3 weeks of playing is a vital part of LD. To many of us it is even more important than the making of the game. Some like to see what score they get. Competing against others as much as competing against past own records. For that to work well, we all have to strive as a community to give every game we play a real chance or two or three and then give fair grades based on the merits of the game. Some don't care at all about the score and just want to get as many good comments as possible. And by good, I mean thoughtful, specific comments that relate to the game they made. They don't have to be all positive, they shouldn't I would say. But respectful, fun, insightful, useful. Something like that.
You might see where I'm heading with this... :wink:
When I see that you have played a lot of games and left very short generic comments, many identically repeated... and on mine you had a little more elaborate than on some, but you praised the audio in my game... My game has no audio, it is silent. Well, I get a little worried. So if you appreciate the feedback you are getting here so far. Both the good and the bad feedback. Then please consider the games you've rated this far -- if it wouldn't be a more positive action towards the community to go back and make sure that the grades and feedback you gave on all those games you've graded this far are valid.
To us that have been around a while, the repeated generic comment is kind of easy to spot... we've seen it before. And, well... some might not take too kindly towards that type of behavior since a sloppy grading/commenting on a persons game is basically stealing their visibility and destroying the effort they put into thoughtfully playing and rating others' game to get good feedback themselves.
You can use https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/my/grades as a means to easily go through the games you've graded so far.
I'm not trying to call you out. First time on LD can be quite confusing, I didn't even realize I should vote. I just want you to know the vibe your comments give.
Now to your game, and I want to point out that I've tried my best not to be influenced but my worries above in rating and commenting:
When I started the game and read the instructions about using the wheel, I thought I would be able to use the mouse wheel. It didn't take long to figure out that this was not the case, but it left me wondering if it wouldn't have been a fun/odd interaction to bind mouse-wheel as a way to control the ship too.
I also got issues with dizziness playing on full screen. I usually never have that and I'm not sure what triggers it here exactly, but it might have something to do with that the boat if absolutely fixed, which also takes away a bit of feeling of turning, as well as with around what point the world rotates, and the slight stutter in the waves animation.
I played for a while, first turning here and there going in circles and such, but then I decided just let it go straight for a while (also so I could keep playing more without nausea from the turns) and that seemed to be a better option than my first strategy. You said that you were working on improving swimming AI so that might solve it, but if you add islands and stuff that needs avoiding... and I don't think I ever saw any gas, so it would be nice if there was a radar UI indicating direction of proximate gas. Well those two things together would force make the player not just run straight.
Fixing these core issues, I think the mechanics could make it a quite fun game. But the setting, running over swimmers in the ocean with your boat... you might also want to consider that in some parts of the world where we have a migration crisis, like in the Mediterranean, it can be rather offensive. The mechanics should be easy to re-skin to other settings though.
Fantastic game. I really love the graphics and the humor in the audio. Really well done. My only concern is that even if the redness on the floor indicated when it was getting dangerous it was kind of hard to know exactly when the tile would disappear. So I would suggest something like the redness flashing a second or two before it would go, then I would probably have been able to be strategic about it. Now that part felt a bit unfair. It was also a little bit hard to understand what happen as the breaking down of the tile didn't give any visual feedback. And give how well made the rest of the game was, I was really expecting it :wink:. But I get, it's hard given the time restriction.
@vulture-42 When I wrote the original feedback I somehow didn't grasp that this was all claymation! I mean how could I have missed that. Terrific feat in getting all that claymation done on this LD. We've done some claymations in the past and it is a lot of work for a LD. Claymation ftw! More claymation in LD! And again. Great work!
I quite enjoyed this adventure. It was well written and engaging. The plot twist was kind of abrupt, but I get the need for it, wanting to stay with the theme. Perhaps there could have been some foreshadowing sprinkled earlier on, though I'm not sure exactly what that would have been.
I really like the idea of the theme and the reload mechanics. The game was way to hard for me playing with only a touchpad but it did help that I could use space to shoot at least. It would have been nice with full keyboard controls. It was hard to notice when the monsters were hurting and they were a bit too quick on the attack. So I really never got anywhere near running out of space, I just ran out of life. My suggestion would be to have the monsters take bites rather than continuous damage and have a clear effect each time that happens. Also make them easier, at least at start, so that the challenge is actually the management or space/reloads. The tiles ought also reflect how damaged they are with cracks or similar. So I like the ideas quite a lot but the feedback and balancing needs some work to make them shine.
Very simple but much fun. Surprisingly hard too. One time though it felt like the game really didn't give me any chance to win when it dropped hats on 5 columns in a row. My guess is that the drops were random and so maybe it would be good with a restriction there. Also the visuals got me thinking about loop synths, and it would probably add to the experience a whole lot if sound was based a bit on how the hats and green were landing and such. Maybe also increase the speed of the drops or frequency a tiny bit on each multiplier wrap pass thing.
Hi cool game idea to play the alien. I didn't get very far even with the help of the console. Not escaping the lower levels.
A tip about spoilers. The markdown supports `!> Spolier`
!> Like this
But you need to leave extra blank line after a spoiler or else it will be included.
I couldn't open the grate and I couldn't pickup the weapon nor did I figure out how to drop anything so I got stuck. I would have liked depositing my eggs in warm bodies.
With regards to the language. Since the player is the alien, I think it would have made more sense and perhaps been more fun if I understood the alien but the human English was all weird.
That was a really ambitious scope for a LD and it sort of hurt you a bit in the end :wink: But what you managed to get in is still impressive. Some things I would consider:
* The task list, since it updates each return to shop it be good if it showed itself for a few seconds when leaving mothership * If each item being returned indiviually gave a visual feedback of its worth and if there was a bonus for completing the task list, that it show too.
The flying was mostly smooth, but perhaps it would have been more fun if the craft lowered itself slowly unless up was pressed, making it a bit harder to keep a vertical level. The vertical speeds were also a bit to fast I think.
Cool game. It was a bit on the hard side playing with touchpad and took a few ships getting used to all the different mechanics. Finally I managed to collect some humans but I didn't understand the saving bit until afterwards. Dying was a bit too easy and sudden. I think I would have liked to have some hurt/shield that slowly regenerated or something. Music was nice. I would have liked keyboard bindings.
I really like the sound effects. The game implementation and mechanics was nice too. It was really quite evil with a full reset on death. Especially in conjunction with where you had to get deep into enemy territory against enemies you haven't met before and they all activated on getting the key. I saw that you were fixing checkpoints, but I would also suggest letting the player meet the each new enemy type in a relatively safe environment first time so you get a chance to figure out how it works and only after that put the player in some real danger. In general it could probably do with being a bit easier level design giving the player a bit more space in some narrow corridors and also making sure that there's like 1-3 seconds upon entering a new room when the enemies never react to the player.
Thanks for all the nice comments so far! As several of you have commented, the pedestrians are really quite suicidal and there's very little you can do about the casualty count. If we had more time, refiguring how they should fit into the game better would have been the priority.
@duzzondrums Awesome that the game was suitable and fun for a 4 year old!
@peachtreeoath High Five!
@mr-chocolatesalmon You must have gotten a rogue copy. That can absolutely not happen. Look: nostealingtrain.png
It can't be done.
I particularly enjoyed starting on the audio right away. That the game reflected the progress of the protagonist in the game itself. Neat. I wonder, if I had chosen to work on the idea and the game if there would have been puzzles and such in the game too... Anyways, some texts that came after each choice (not that list of your progress, since it changed, but the one about a game needing many parts) got a bit repetitive. But I can see that it might have been difficult with the engine to insert variation there. It would also have been fun to learn more about the protagonist during the jam. Injecting some forced distractions, cooking and such.
nice balancing game. I think the main things I liked was the texts and that the game didn't make a big fuss about not being able to balance life.
Really interesting style using tilt brush. And great to focus on health development. I would say that I would have liked the game, to put me closer to the assets and their unique style. To be among them. Here the camera was at a bit of distance and a lot of the screen was used to show flat images of the characters. And I think that was a loss when you had something really unique going with those brush strokes. What I'm trying to say is that I think letting the player feel and experience that painted world is more important and should be the focus rather than having focusing on gamification and mechanics.
The audio crescendo as the progression in the game was really fantastic. Superbly crafted. I would have liked the game to be a bit kinder so I could focus more on just building and building the music and not have to care too much about the enemies. A simple way to tweak that would have been if getting caught just sacrificed some of the music you had built up so that it no longer was perfectly amping up. Or just set you back some. Another thing would be that the game is in a rectangular shape (at least web) and the way the player positioning inside that box worked, when moving vertically there was very little time to react. And the fast blocky motion of the enemies made it so I had to move about much more carefully than the game otherwise felt like it wanted me to do. So making the player stay closer to the center of the screen on the vertical axis might help some, or make enemies less jumpy or jump shorter.
Jesus seems to be such a nice fella, very keen on getting most people killed and trying to give a "helping" hand... oops that other car. Definitely not my fault. Bad building coming out of nowhere. Very fun. Great style and very hard. But I didn't really feel like it mattered too much if everyone died or not. It was a great ride failing each and every way possible.
First couple of tries I didn't make it to the people needing rescue so I was really wondering about the theme and the idea of the game. It could be a bit dangerous in LD to hide the true idea of the game that far into it.
Then it was a bit confusing since the spikes and such were not really an issue once you had the shoes, so I didn't really understand why there even were spikes. I think the issue there was that for all the problems facing the character, I got the solution before rather than after facing their matching challenge. You could have to jump sets of spikes before getting shoes. You could have to jump red blocks before getting to shoot them. You could have to fall down a hole before learning to jump over it. The second issue was that the hit-boxes for spikes and boxes felt a bit too large.
So when I died when I felt like I hadn't hit anything yet. That it was so easy to die kind made me want to have a checkpoint in the large room where the giving away of abilities started. Or the giving away and gaining could have been mixed up with each other from start. The receiving new abilities and giving them away was an interesting concept.
Good work.
@blubberquark game ideas are hard! And yours is a really tricky one to implement and get right, I think. We were also discussing things like this but decided it was too ambitious for LD for us.
I liked the mood o the game, and the pace. That I could walk around and find out what was happening without running out of time or life or light too quickly. I agree with the other that perhaps the game would have benefited from concentrating on those pieces and not making the world overly large.
Nice game. It took me a little while to get used to the controls. I think it would have helped if it was just WASD and not also the mouse. Because at least for me, as soon as I stopped trying to use the mouse I could make then character go where I intended. I also think that even if there was a progression in the sense that you had to go further and further to gather sheep, I think that the stress build-up of the game compared to the setting and the music was a bit off, so after a while I took a stroll to see if I could get to the end of the world. And I could! One way to make it more interesting would be if the fire pit changed location each 5 sheep. So that you had to try and find it again before you could continue sacrificing.
Another train game! Yay. Also, yours were much better interpretation of the trolley problem than ours. It took me a death or two to figure out that the switches were not just switches but that according to the game the other track didn't exist. Perhaps that could have been made clearer by making the inactive track even fainter. I would also have liked to see the entire board at start, because having to make a strategy in the hopes of how the tacks would be off camera felt a bit unfair (even if they were as I was hoping).
Cool puzzle. I got a some levels in. My greatest enemy was the sound. It made such a clear beat that I wanted to wait until the sound to press the buttons for changing how to walk rather than before the sound. And when it didn't make the beat when absorbing a companion... It might have been fun to experiment with giving the player more room to move about. Not have everything be that deadly and for the first levels allow multiple solutions on how to reach the goal. Well executed game though!
Thanks for letting me have this experience. It's a very beautifully made little game. I don't think I got to the very end but spoiler (start row with `!>`):
!> I had something like a book in my hand but couldn't find anything to interact it with. It also seemed like it was always highlighting itself.
First time I played I got stuck on the piece you helped with above. I think I tried to highlight the thing the first time but I must have missed the cursor. So it might be that the cursor could do with some clearer or adaptive outline to help guide the player.
Another possible improvement:
!> First when cutting the grass I happened to be facing the back of the first couple of graves. Perhaps the graves could orient themselves to face towards where the player is cutting them up from.
The rain was very beautiful. That's what pulled me in. I stayed for the whole experience.
As in real life, being early in the game lets you get ahead easily. After accumulating overwhelmingly most dollars I set off for the void. I hope no-one will find me. The game was simple enough to get. It would have been nice to discover an island of coins while wandering the void. The one technical minor detail I discovered was that it was real easy to get the text selected when clicking around, but that doesn't matter too much.
I much enjoyed the graphics and the tongues, though they were horribly efficient. I kind of thought that the glass of water would at least be an obstacle for it, but no. So I never managed to rescue a single one. The music was quite awesome too, so if I would have felt like I had a chance (there's probably something I misunderstood), I would have found it quite. But for me the frustration of trying and trying again without ever getting a single point doesn't really fit that well with the quirkiness and humor of the game. I think in this type of game it's more important to make sure that the player feels like they are succeeding (at least for a while), rather than challenging them. So while it had some really great components, the difficulty kind of cut things short.
@randomhuman maybe the game should right at the start have a slower tongue and the people in the caged are shout "Take cover behind the X" or something to teach the player the core idea. I know it's hard to make a game easy enough, but my rule of thumb which might not be enough is to take what I find balanced and make it twice as easy. On my silly game, I cut the waiting time in half right before submitting which was probably very good. In any case, for fear of making it to easy, I think it is generally better to still give the player an early success and making it more difficult later. The player will feel good about themselves and also be more invested to keep trying.
As always your graphics is really a treat. I simply don't understand how you get so much life into the animations. As you said you didn't have much time, but what I'm lacking the most is something that would evolve the character or progress the events to help the player fill in a narration of what is happening.
I tried playing on itch (the app) but it just opens a terminal window and immediately closes itself down. I see no error logs or similar either.
I played a few levels and I enjoyed the dialogue quite much. The distinction between combat and move turns had me confused a bit in the beginning, but I figured it out quite quickly.
@kuro I don't remember exactly but I think it was after the second time one could buy stuff and got spawned near the corner and yeah there might have been the first level with red tiles.
Fun game. I made it to the seventh wave before it got way too crowded and I tried to stay on top of my last diamond to defend it. I think the thing I appreciated the most was the general goofiness of the game. One of the major obstacles in throwing the looters around was my own body which I guess isn't that surprising but seemed a bit strange.
Challenging game. No chance I'd get out of debt. Got to forth level, but then the spikes got too evil. The coins worked quite well to keep me playing a bit more than I would probably otherwise would have and they also worked to elevate the challenge by increasing the reviving cost, but it also means that the game gets harder for those with less agility/skill rather than harder for those with high skill and that is probably a bit unfortunate. Always fun to see what you come up with.
As I tweeted at you, I hope you fix so it's easier or people to get to try this game out (https://gumboot.itch.io/nomanholiday).
First play through I went to bed and I don't know if there was even a way to get out of bed, maybe it would be nicer to the player if the princess tried sleeping for a while and then get out of it refusing to give up hope of a better day.
I found a small bug after that, because restarting from title screen made the tiara be on the cupboard when the game started and the message when hovering the cupboard was the one matching if the princess would have had it on.
The game is really beautiful and it was fun driving around town.
Well made! Very good mood and overall experience. I got to the same place as the screenshot above. I think fixing the bug there is well within the rules https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules. (I would also suggest marking your file on itch.io as windows so it can be run through the itch-app)
I really loved this game. Fantastic graphics, great story building. And that panning camera was very nice way of giving life to the scenes. I didn't find all the ends but what I found was great. On one of the later play-throughs I think I fell out of the dialogue tree on the bed on the topic of seeking help there seemed to be nothing happening after I clicked one of the options.
I liked the backstory and the coin animations was really nice. The second level was way too hard for me though. I could manage to get up, after much struggle and wobble roll two or three grid spaces at the most. So either the controls need some helper feature that lets you get up standing on the edge easier before you start rolling. Or maybe the coin could get wider/thinner with progression to gauge the difficulty as the player gets more skilled. I also think level 2 should not introduce three new problems (bouncing balls, rolling, going uphill). One of them would have been enough, and I guess rolling downhill should be easier than uphill, so it would make sense to have that first.
Really wonderful art, cute story and music that fit very well. I enjoyed this world a whole lot. The one gripe I had is that sometimes that dialogue got obstructed by the surroundings and since you had the fancy shader effect for being indoors, it might have been nice to make sure the player could always read the text.
I got to room 3, that was as far as I could manage. Maybe there could be some difficulty settings like either giving you more blood to start or if the early rooms you encounter enemies that require less variation on keys to press. I'd also really would have liked, and probably would have tried more times, if I didn't have to use my mouse. The menus should have (Q) (W) (E) hotkeys and in particular the ones inside the game like 'Next Room' and 'Pay or Fight'. Since I only have a qwerty keyboard, I don't know if the game properly detects and allows for other layouts too. I'd also really would have liked to be able to press some button to get out of 'You Died' thing since if you only get to room 1, 2, 3 then it happens too often and takes too much of the time.
The graphics was really well made, everything extremely polished and well put together. Music fit the mood well. So I enjoyed it even if I barely got to see any of it. I liked that I could kill myself in the shop too!
I was a bit confused too first time I tried it, so I think that the premise and mechanism could be a bit more explained to the player. Second run I had some grip on it, but my first thought of buy low sell high didn't work at all. They seemed to be always decaying in price. So I guess I didn't fully grasp the economics.
I'm furiously screaming to my cat that **EVERYONE NEEDS TO PLAY THIS ONE NOW**!
Fantastic really. There's not much to say other than that. It would make for a great online experience if there'd be someone else playing the other character. If I have one complaint it's that it might have helped a bit if the game hid the mouse cursor since it didn't match the position of the hand exactly. The most beautiful cannibalism love simulator I've ever played.
:egg: :mountain: :house: :evergreen_tree: !! I wanted this to just keep growing, expanding and becoming more finding more and larger things! A really great feeling in this game. I liked making mountains most, because the sound there was very nice. The egg was also really nice sound but it didn't feel like I could do much to it. So besides perhaps hiding the smaller things and focusing on a larger scale once the world had grown a bit, the most important improvement to me would have been if the game also felt like it was building up more and more sounds, becoming a bit of a musical instrument. But then the sounds would have needed to be longer or been repeating or echoing a while.
Using own 3D engine is really extreme version of LD! I liked the game premise and the tone of the minimal dialogue. I would have liked the music and perhaps effects to more strongly feed the same mode. The main character animation was also really fun. There are some obvious areas of the game that would have been nice to have gotten more focus, but using your own engine, that's very understandable. Good job!
@peachtreeoath Thanks for the great feedback. I agree that the laser level was the hardest if not the one with "just" three patrolling cones. I kind of wanted to include the arch since I had coded it and I had some nice tools making it real quick designing them. However balancing difficulty... that's always the most time consuming. I think the reason the cones seemed intelligent (?) is that I think I failed coding it. It should have been a very simple logic of "1. Keep turning the same direction 2. If not possible turn the other way 3. And finally do a 180 if you have to", but for some reason the spider seemed to have messed that up.
@snailrhymer :laughing: consistent style. The cones have a bug in their AI that I never got time to fix which made them turn in ways I don't even understand myself, but I want to say that it kind of makes sense as it happens when they encounter spiders and get really scared. And yes you were on the last level. I wonder what could have happened though.
@jezzamon Unity gave it an extra touch of horrible in that it decided to add artifacts when built to the web that wasn't there before! And are you a secret speed-runner finding exploits like that :smirk: !?
@sharbelfs I agree about indication on how many steps the thing could move, where exactly it would move given the current conditions or the area it could possibly reach. I ran out of time though and I was also not sure exactly which of these would make the game most fun.
@detectivelosos maybe I should have made the player be forced to pick up the spider first time since people and cones have strange ideas about spiders being scary and not fuzzy and friendly :spider: :hugging: Reverse one step/action should probably have been in there, quite a few times I pressed E when I meant placing the item in slot 5 myself. So that's a really good point.
@very-high-ping I agree that the last level wasn't that thought through unfortunately. I think there were solutions that didn't need too much waiting, but I should really have planned it a bit better.
@landosystems Maybe the door in the game should shake or something when the player enters the area from which the door can be opened? Or something like that to help the player understand to try go that way? Glad you gave it an extra try and got out of the room. I would have loved some music in it too, but music making is even less of a strength than drawing :sweat: And I did most of everything myself with just a little help recording sounds in the game.
@annie-owl Oh that's it! I couldn't really understand why I kept dropping things myself! How silly of me. I think @detectivelosos suggestion to have a one action/move undo would have been really good.
I almost missed the pdf for the pain text because the plain text ended up as first option on itch! And while it contained the same humor, I think the more personal touch of the illustrated version elevated it several notches. It would also have been fun if it was made in style of a card-game and card-game instructions you might find in a store. I'm a bit at a loss as to how to properly rate this, but I do enjoy the absurdity of it.
I really liked running it on 10x speed when all upgrades were in place. What a mayhem! I was intuitive and easy to get started. It took me a little while to figure out the speed multiplier and in the beginning when not much was happening it would have been nice to speed things up. I thought it was just an indicator for the score multiplication first and only clicked it when I got upset that it didn't change as I upgraded the multiplier. My computer wasn't struggling with the web version, but I can imagine it could become an issue. Well done.
I like the idea with the nothing bubbles as weapons and it would really have been interesting to see how you were planning to have that work.
I got off on day 14! Really good game with the balance of randomness and strategy. Also liked the detail that you needed those mice to get rid of the tigers (which I noticed after eliminating them and having 4 tigers all the sudden taking up space). I like that trade-off strategizing though! I had a bit of an issue that the arrows having the opposite meaning to what I expected, so I wasted a few critical actions here and there because I see them as the direction you want to spin the wheel. I also built a rap trap before day 3 because I could before I realized they had no use until after you get rats. So perhaps not allowing the player to waste actions they have no use for would be a good idea. For the meaning of the arrows, I'm not sure short of allowing an undo of one step. The graphics was nice and it was really easy to get into the game. The interactive tutorial was a really nice touch too, but I happened to start the game on step 2 before reading step three... oops! By I guess my :slot_machine: skills were all right. The (in order) bit on the last got me a bit scared because I got worried the icons had to be placed left to right in that sequence just as I had gotten the light bulb in place. I was happy to note there was no particular requirement on it.
No link :cry: ?
Very cool game! I got as far as @ongomato's image above before I gave up. Very simple mechanics and simple objective. And very well defined controls. It took me a while to figure out I was actually supposed to get the ball upwards in the beginning, but it wasn't as I was about to give up before I figured it out either. So I don't think that is a real issue. If anything it could perhaps have been nice to see the ball a second before it drops, but on the other hand the game restarts so quickly, I don't know if that is needed.
It also feels like something that could become a quite addictive mobile game.
I was confused for a while, I thought the first option at start was the easiest and I just kept getting nowhere. When I figured that out and got to play some more of the game it was quite nice. I felt a bit at the mercy of whatever the cards were going to give me, but maybe I just didn't get some of the strategy. It also felt a bit unfair that the game ended when I got to 0 even if I by getting to zero got enough resources (that according to the game wouldn't cost me any more) that would have allowed me to sell and gain back some coins.
Interesting concept. I liked the idea but for some reason I felt like I had to spam space and most of the time the character refused to jump, so it was really really hard to play for me. Left and right keys worked fine. I ran it on Firefox v69 / Windows 10, if that helps.
It worked well on Edge for some reason. Well, now that I could get some where, I feel like it could become a really fun addicting game, but there are two conflicting issues for me. One is that sometimes I just had to wait without having much to do and sometime I felt like I lost because I was unlucky and the bricks just dropped on my head too quickly. And without warning. Without getting enough time to react. The latter would kind of be fine if it was much later in the game and you were now supposed to be an expert. The suddenness could be addressed with having the pieces appear at the top a short while before they drop. The first issue, I'm not so sure what would be the best course of action. Maybe if the player could push blocks around based on some rules? I'm not sure. Or just gain points for moving around and jumping up and down different block levels?
I demand you make more! I want to see where you take this. The sound and dramatic design was really great in each of the little episodes, but it needed more to build a general story arch (where I mean story very loosely). It felt like there was a lot of power in the pieces you put forward together, but as a total experience it didn't fully get there. I really enjoyed it though!
I don't quite think I understood the puzzles, but maybe I wasn't patient enough. I liked the environment though and the interactions were clear. I would suggest making it much much easier for the player in the beginning, showing them how to solve a puzzle by having a trivial code, before giving them real challenges.
Cute game. I much liked how the character got happy as it filled itself up. My main issue was that half of the time when I pressed a direction I moved two tiles rather than one. I think this might be because you track if the button is down, not if the button was pressed. The former is OK and can be nice if there's a limit on the speed that it registers to about a half second or so, but now I almost destroyed my chances to solve the puzzles several times because of this.
kiss.png Very interesting entry. I really liked how the color flowed out when drawing. It had a very nice feel. Also got very happy with the twist for the rogue as I happened to make it the correct character. As someone before pointed out, I would have wished for a less gendered story to make it perfect. There was also some cases where it felt like the z-order of the drawn sprites and the sticks weren't matching when many were in the same spot. Another graphical detail was that they perhaps were too much in the same place sometimes and that the most important character in the group didn't get put on top. But those are just minor tweaks. Overall a very very well made game!
A lovely feeling, wonderful art, nice music to go with it. I never really understood if I was solving some puzzles or if it was just enough clicking and poking around that got me further. I don't mind that too much though as it was a very interesting beautiful experience.
Really well made game. Interesting to both use your thin dimension as a defense but also the wide dimension of the enemies to have an easier time hitting them. Also a fun challenge that the projectiles moved so slowly that you had to lead the aim quite a lot to hit them. Very well made and stylish. First time I played I survived for quite a while and that was because even if I moved around quite a lot I never found the add UI box. So the game got a little boring after a while. Next time I did find it and then a bunch of other boxes after that which made it quite hard instead. It's a bit hard to figure a way to help the player without also breaking the premise of starting with nothing. But perhaps the game world could have been a little smaller in the beginning and grown to become larger the more populated it became and the more tools the user has at their disposal to navigate the world.
Fantastic visual style, and audio to make a great mood. Interesting interaction to use scroll as move, it had a very tactile feeling but I do think that, at least with my scroll settings that the animations/transitions were a little too short and the fading in of things too abrupt for the general feeling of the game. I had to carefully scroll myself forward and I still felt that many things happened too suddenly compared to what I think they wanted to happen.
Cool, though I got stuck with the slush planet, I tried a whole lot of things, but now I realize I forgot to try and drink it :tropical_drink:. Maybe that was the solution... I get the insane amount of work it would be to get to the flexibility that the player doesn't feel like it's the game that doesn't understand the player and still keep it a challenge... but at the same time, I think, I kind of need that amount of understanding from the game for me to not get frustrated with the format.
Very fancy entry! Both in the setting, but also in the detail to menus, text and UI and world objects. I spent the majority of the time myself hiding in the pool before I found a way out. Though the premise was simple it wasn't that clear what was valuable. Were the chairs around the dining table valuable? They kind of looked expensive. Or maybe they were just meant to be used to break things. If breaking was your strategy. The game said I trashed a whole lot of things but I blame it on the garden hose, because as soon as I picked it up it went bananas glitching out with insane speeds clipping through walls and such. So that could probably be a strategy for getting a good score. I also think the game could have had more than two minutes to it as it takes some time just getting used to the movement. And maybe simplify the controls to always be running, since that makes more sense in the context of the game.
I got a couple of levels in, but it was quite hard with the wonky physics (friction on lateral sides making you stick to platforms, though that also helped sometimes because you could wall jump that way). I also think you should consider increasing the gravity to make it behave more like most platformers. I enjoyed it though, and the corporate slogans felt very authentic!
Great graphics and well made game! It was very well made. There was some quirks with the shooting and movement that could have felt a bit more spot on to be perfect, and the key-bindings weren't great for people who want to have the mouse in the left hand. So I ended up on the most precision levels to use left and for A/D and Space on right hand. Then taking pauses to shoot when needed. And that kind of disrupted the play feeling a bit since it felt like the game in general wanted you do just jump around fast and fun. One way could have been to shoot the ink base on the motion vector of the character with some key. I'm not sure, though, how that would feel.
genesis.png
A very nice genesis!
Lovely experimental game.
The dropdowns were a bit glitchy but nothing really that bugged me greatly.
Good work. I couldn't figure out where the screenshot ended up so I took my own.
Well made graphics and audio indeed. I walked around the first area shining lights and got some extra text to trigger once, but I honestly wasn't sure of what I was supposed to do or how to progress into the veiled areas around me that obviously had things in them. So perhaps scaling down the complexity of what the player encounters at start and making it initially more obvious what is the path forward and when the player has learned how to play the game, you can make it more vague and challenging.
I had a bit of an issue with the time it took for the spaghetti throw to execute, I think it could have been made a bit easier by having it happen faster and also indicating clearly when you had a new spaghetti ready to throw. The music was fun and it was kind of interesting jumping around, but I really didn't understand if I was progressing or even walking in the correct direction, so reducing the complexity, perhaps making smaller level with less things to learn at once would have made it easier to get a hang of. Interesting game though.
I liked the art, the music and the voice acting was a rare touch very seldom seen in LD games!
I enjoyed walking around and discovering the story of the main character. The house felt very real, as it might have been someone's and that is quite a feat for the time that LD affords. I almost gave up on the game on the first inspection because using right mouse button as only way to get out of the inspection seems very unusual. I would suggest a hint in game on that or allowing revisiting inspections and having any button exit inspection. Well made game!
I'm sorry, I tried to start a two player game and I think I did because there were two players there but it seemed like non of my keys I had bound did anything?
I really enjoyed how well the music fit the game. And it was quite fun running around. I never found the helmet though, and that made me a bit sad, otherwise I had the running boots and the cape so I think I got most of it. Perhaps, since the power ups were a bit discrete it would have been nice with a 6th goat sense that would help the player navigate to them should the player, like me, be a bit lost. It was a ton of graphics you managed to get done in a very short time! Very well made.
Great style and mood. I feel I got stuck in the church, but had a fun time walking around it. Very atmospheric. One thing that for me made the navigation harder than it needed to be was that I couldn't use A/D to move laterally.
I played the v1.0 version as the others seemed to have too much fixes beyond what the rules allows and most of my concerns seems to have been addressed. I did however only discover two levels, so if there were more, it might need to be made clearer in the game how to find them. As the character was quite hard to control in the first version and the collision with enemy a bit too strict and sudden, I almost ran out of coins completely and also on my second attempt I felt like not re-spawning the coins made it feel like a chore to run back and forth between the shops, so I would suggest having coins come back at some rate so there's still some fun and reward in traveling the distance between the shops. It was a cute game though!
Very well made little game. It took me a little while to get used to it and the +40% IP bit kind of confused me because I though that it was some passive generation of IP. I didn't quite get to an end, I got a few fights in and had learnt three or four attacks but then I ran out of stats. Because as far as I understood the game you get IP from defeating enemies and the other two stats from sucking statues? First time I played I tried to be sneaky and avoid all fights and got pretty far, was just about to reach the third statue but then a fight triggered and I had no attack that could hurt the enemy so I had to let it play out before the game restarted. So perhaps there should be some sort of restart/surrender option too.
This game was hard! I think part of it was that the collision boxes for the dangers were all too large. Even if they were the exact outline of, say the fire, the expectation from this type of game is that it should be a little more forgiving than that. It also felt a bit unfair because the game reset me right away to the starting position and that way I didn't see or feel that I had actually hit anything. I was about to even give up on the first fire, because there was no way to jump over it, until I finally after 10 or more attempts discovered that there was a double jump. So that could have been more clear and it should probably not have been needed to double jump to get past the first obstacle, and if you didn't want to put more text in the game the obstacle should make it clear that there was no way to jump over it without a double jump. Now the jump length was such that it seemed almost possible to make it both to the platform and directly over the fire. So both those things kind of said that there's no double jump, you should be able to do this in a single extremely well timed jump. But don't take this long paragraph as me being overly negative, just some tips.
An important thing though, you submitted this as a Compo game, and the rules state that you must supply the source code, so you should probably upload that.
Congratulations on your first LD game!
I really loved the cat animation and the clean color scheme! The wall jumping felt really cat-like too. The main issue seems to be the initial sluggishness of movement and limiting the maximum speeds, because boy-howdy did that cat go fast sometimes. Cats are lazy beasts and they can be very purposefully slow , but if they decide they need to jump they don't need no time getting started, they pretty much are at max speed at once. At least that's what my cat currently sleeping in my lap would say. So a few tweaks to the speed curves and maybe making the cat moody so that it just sits down and cleans itself after having sprinted a while. That would be awesome.
Congratulations on getting to a playable state for the first time! :cat2:
I enjoyed playing this entry. For a while at the start I was confused because I hadn't read any instructions and I would have guessed at least arrow keys would have worked too, not only WASD. A neat little experience as a whole.
First I was very close to give up because nothing ever happened... I didn't understand that the hamster was below that first instructions sheet. When I got around to play the actual game it was a trip down memory lane for me to. I remember playing some of those games! Very nice idea to make a meta-game about all previous games one has made.
Very nice mood and feeling in the game! I liked the little bits of story and it was hard not to see some reference to the ongoing pandemic. I must say though, those people need to learn proper placement of ladders! If that's how they ran their society, they pretty much deserve a living in bunkers now :laughing: Controls were easy to understand, everything looked and played nice. Would of course have been nice with a bit more of a dramatic arc in the narrative, but it's hard to find time for such things during LD.
That was some nice dance moves! And I really enjoyed the animation upon failing to keep the party alive too. The interaction and game mechanics could probably have benefited from some rhythm based mechanic or at least a clear escalating difficulty.
@peachtreeoath thank you so much for the comment! I assure you that we, who made the game, are all 100% certified ordinary citizens.
The game mechanics was inspired by the board game Roborally (it's a total mayhem of confusion and mapping out paths in your mind), but then adapted to single player and a computer game.
This thing about bodies flying everywhere is news to me. That wasn't intended and I haven't spotted it on Firefox at least, but Unity was really messing up my builds right towards the very end before submission when it made it impossible to walk to any but two tiles. So I wouldn't be too surprised if there are other quirks in it.
As for how far the dev team have gotten, I'm not at liberty to disclose, but I can say this, that if one forgets that the game is running and leaves for a lunch break and come back to the computer, it will have progressed quite a bit on its own. In fact, the way the rules are set up, the robot will always reach the goal by its own. Given enough time.
@immortalitybh I agree!
@indiebin what do you mean. We all love the robot! We all must love the robot!
@lamasaurus I do wish we would have had time for music too but unfortunately the one in the team with such skills had to focus on other things after the creation of the magnificent robot.
@franklins-ghost we actually had a running animation (the one in the game is just the idle one). It never exported properly and we didn't have time to fix it and fix logic for switching between the two so we opted for the idle. It was looking rather hilarious though (a gif from before we styled most things):
11.Running.gif
@cg-fred yes I was thinking about having the main menu as a tutorial but just ran out of time and energy. Making the start much easier and having the slowest card speed be even slower and the current slow speed be middle card speed would probably have helped.
@jojopalambas Oh no, another build and/or browser bug. I just checked and that checkpoint works just fine inside Unity and there's nothing different with it compared to the others.
@azathothep The cards are supposed to be infinite! That's a bug I didn't know about. I have some unexpected deck-size numbers when I let the game just run, but nowhere near getting close to zero when running in unity.
@spectralcascade I agree with that the sliding should have been smooth instead of jumping. I wanted to fix that but Unity decided I needed to use up my very last energy fixing a build bug late Monday evening that broke the entire game. The hack solution I have now cards really don't slide, but swap values, which aggravates the trouble with "I didn't pick that card up" and "that's not where I dropped the card". Multiple robots fling up after death? I'm not sure what Unity is doing with my game builds but that wasn't meant to happen. Though sounds comical :laughing:
@lukvasando I should really have made the slowest speed a bit slower and the start a bit easier. Mapping out the level wasn't even very time-consuming with a little `OnDrawGizmosSelected` showing how the tiles were connecting.
@boxedmeatrevolution The game design process was pretty much "What if we do something like RoboRally but tweak it for our ide." The sliding, I so wish I would have had just a few more hours and drops of energy to deal with the horrendous hack of an implementation that it is right now.
@fernando-tonon-de-rossi Playing with a trackpad that should be some next level difficulty :rofl: Maybe better if I added keybindings, 1 - 8 and first press is card to pickup and second is place to put said card down?
@whiteseraph it's made like a board game. There's a draw deck of shuffled cards. The hand/feed you see and a discard pile. It's not really intended to go smoothly without any mishaps, but at least the first three checkpoints should be very possible to get through with even the worst of luck by stalling in smart ways.
Superb :mouse: :gun: :cat: game! The feeling was spot on, and voice acting very authentic. Music with the heart-beat. All very well made. I got through first gang with keeping right mouse down and hitting things as I passed them but quickly realized this was not the way to go with gang two! That added complexity to the game I wasn't really expecting but unfortunately it also got too hard there and I didn't see any "Skip to next checkpoint" so I could progress with the story and see where it would end.
I made i through the first loop but got stuck on the second one. It felt very well made and I didn't have any issues with the controls. Or, rather, the issues I had was I kept hitting the walls but it didn't feel like the game's fault. So that was all good. It was a bit annoying that I had to press something to respawn the bird-worm. It kind of felt like the game indicated that it would autospawn after say three flashes. So I found myself staring waiting for the next chance quite often.
Great music indeed! The game was quite fun to play, but it felt like the collision boxes were a bit unfair, especially for the second phase, I'm sure I died when in the frozen screen no pixel of mine was touching any pixel of the obstacles.
The crate punching was very satisfying. In the beginning I tried planting and kicking bugs but pretty soon I realized I could just as well keep running in a circle planing and picking and not mind the bugs at all. So there probably needs to be some balancing there in the gratification of hurting the pest and the risks in letting too many spawn without dealing with them. Very well made little game though!
Really funny and humorous. I just sat down at the computer after planting a few seeds even so very on topic for me! First time I played I tried clicking on the pump to get more water, so I had to replay before I understood that mechanic. The meters on the flower water levels were a bit hard to see, but they were so very dramatic themselves that it didn't matter too much after all. Very well made game!
Funny game! Why wouldn't pirates want to knife potatoes? :knife: :knife: :potato: It's in their nature after all. I got a toast into the mix and decided it was a potato as far as I was concerned. Was I right? Yes, I believe so.
I suck at keeping a rhythm and I was a little confused, well I still am. And part of that is probably because I miss every other beat. If I got it right each arrow was one of the band members but I could also move everyone by jumping with the up arrow three times? That seems odd since it was already assigned to one in the band. If at each bounce of the ball there was a slot for a key icon and it showed the one I pressed if I was within accepted error, and if the character moved right then when pressing the key, that would have made it easier for me to understand what I was doing right and wrong.
Hahaha :rofl: what a game! I wish I was better with hitting those projectiles and being able to keep track of what food is where on the wheel. But I was having a blast anyways. Sometimes the cars ended up ontop of my own blocking out the view for a while. I also really didn't notice I could look around in all directions and I have no idea why I would need to since I was absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of cars to feed in just one direction. Great game.
I should add that after playing this I wanted to yell at every streamer on Twitch playing some FPS using projectiles that they ought to use Food Chuck :hamburger: :icecream: :shrimp: instead of some boring Kovaak's as aim trainer and warmup!
Cute game and fun idea for keeping it alive!
I played the jam version, since we're still voting, so you might already have attended to it in your balancing version. But I found that the game was rather unfair when you start a level the first time as the police come up on you rather abruptly. I should say I didn't see that there was a sprint key so that meant I needed to be 100% undetected. Anyways, this doesn't matter too much on the first level, but it feels rather unfair once progressed to the second level and beyond, as it drops you right back to the first level. I would consider either letting the player restart on the current level or at least give the player three lives before dropping them back at the first level.
Otherwise a really neat experience.
Fun idea for the theme! It was a bit on the hard side for me. In part because there was no visual queue for when one could shoot the ping-pongs and the control scheme didn't really feel natural. Twin-stick controls would probably feel more normal. I would also have liked the computers to give me a little grace period or simply decay slower because it felt a bit unfair that I never got to shoot enough ping-pongs on level one before at least one was offline.
Cool game in general though!
Cool style! That car was really hard to control though! And I'm guessing the white meter should have been the car health? It never moved for me. But in general, though I wish it was a bit easier to control the vehicle, it was very well made.
I found the mood was great and a big part of that was the music and sound effects! The core mechanics was a little bit confusing at first, because I figured they were attracted by light rather than line of sight. And that injecting pills to strengthen the light therefore would be both beneficial and make the game harder at the same time. But when I tried not picking up the first light pill right at the start, the monster was well outside the visual effects of the light yet it came and came as fast as with normal lighting. If there was a difference, I think it needs to be more pronounced.
I played a couple of retries and got quite a bit further, but I think the experience would benefit from having the start be easier where you actively have to do something stupid to get caught and then build up the puzzles.
It also felt like if I lost control of the situation, even on the first monster, there was never really any way to save the situation. And that felt a bit unfair to me.
But in general a very well made game!
I really liked the cuteness of the game! I did very bad at flying though. My mind just won't accept the inverse y-axis if it was what I was having problems with. I got to save one island from drought though, but 10 bugs was just impossible to hit. I got three in total and that was almost all fuel and water for just the three. Well made world and it was fun flying, even if I was really terrible at it.
I really like the idea that you pick up the tree and can never leave its proximity. It was a bit confusing about the area you were transported to, was there a way to get further, or was it only to stay alive as long as possible in that place?
(To get more feedback and out of the second part of LD you really need to play other people's games, vote and in this LD most importantly leave comments)
Took a second or two to figure out the mechanics, but then I was having quite a lot of fun. The art and animations were really well made as usual! I think it did get a bit stuck on the boss because I had no ghosts to suck and blow left but the timer kept ticking down, so perhaps one or two never got released between the rounds?
I really love where you took the theme and graphics and music was really nice. I ended up just circling tightly around the tower and it seemed like quite a good strategy though it kind of took away the fun in the interaction. If there was a strong benefit in leaving the tower, e.g. to buy repairs (how do you get paid?), then it would probably feel more dynamic game-wise.
Great character animation and very obnoxious little chick, I'm, or it is very good at getting itself killed. I swear it's not me. It might be nice to start it a bit easier, either with slower cars or more zoomed out so that everyone can get going and start to feel invested. Now my chicks all died at less than 10 points, several even at 0 points. The controls were easy enough, though I might have preferred to have the call on something different than left mouse button.
Graphics, audio and humor were all splendid! The controls quite unique and I ended up using both hands, one for forward backwards and the other for rotations. Once I got the hang of that way of playing it felt quite natural, but would have made more sense if it was A + D and J + L with how I played.
I didn't play it to the end even though I would have liked to, but I got to the key? behind the toaster and then I didn't really spot where I was supposed to go from there even if I got there several times. The second reason was that while there were auditory queues for where the eggs were coming, it felt like my only strategy was to keep moving (which maps badly with being confused about where to go).
I think it would have been nice with some visual queues, like an egg's shadow indicating where the next bombing was going to occur.
Great work though! Really a first class entry.
Really cool game and well made game that got progressively more challenging. I didn't get very far though, and for some reason, while playing the web version in Firefox I could only play 3 times before the game crashed with an index error. Reloaded page and play 3 more and crash. I like the art and the music/sounds.
As someone who as played very few JRPGs it was a little confusing at first. After a while I figured it out some. It felt a little odd that I could use offensive actions against my own team and I guess I could do defensive on the enemy. Some hint on what each would do could also have helped some. During many rpg:s and games in general you are eased into the complexity by adding people to your squad and adding abilities as the game progresses. I also ended up on some occasions to have all slots the same action. I was trying to figure out but I'm guessing it's pure random. And I'm guessing which one I select doesn't affect the probabilities for next round. Some tweaks on that would have been nice, e.g. if you have 25% chance to get a first aid on the first card and you do get it, then the chance to draw a second should probably drop to 20% and so on.
I did really like the UI, the camera and graphics! It all was very smooth. I was kind of hoping for some final animation upon being defeated. Great work.
That was really hard to keep focus on both and remember what jumped and what shot. I think it would have been nice if it started out a little bit slower and easier so you didn't need to do too much at the same time in the beginning. Fun idea though!
I really love your style, and the little effect when moving the cursor around making the scenes feel more alive. There were some quirks with the text, one fell outside its bubble and I think I happened to click pass one or two messages. The amount of work and personality that has gone into the drawings and the story though! Phenomenal! For a while I was thinking that contrary to your previous entries that I've played, that this one was so happy and positive!
You should really upload a cover image and something here on the game page so people find it.
First time the llama and coyote collided I was surprised and thought "Wait! Did the llama eat the coyote?!" It would probably have made more sense to leave the coyote, perhaps have it be still in place for a short while and re-spawn a llama somewhere on the map. Otherwise it was a quite fun and cute game.
I love the characters in this game! It took me 3 tries before I saw that I was actually recharging with the F interaction and that screech sound. It would have been nice with some stronger feedback about the power level. Maybe lowering pitch of audio when running out and winding it up again when getting juice. I didn't manage to get home though, I got the book in the right place even though I could actually make the jump with the magic elevator close to it. But what to do with the knife(?) or if there was anything else to pick up... I didn't quite figure out.
Solid FPS play. I like that everything was the same currency. It feels like the game could be a little kinder in the first encounter. That was the hardest one on me as far as I got. It was nice that the robot used its health to walk the extra paces, but it felt a bit sad that when I got a bit too far behind, I knew I couldn't reach the pile of downed enemy to continue. So to die I had to continue after there was no chance and even if I was fast and economic in moves and shooting I couldn't turn it around. So perhaps there should be two types of energy blocks? On from the shot down, that within a range get pulled to you and others that spawn and stay where they are. Or perhaps all blocks within a radius could be pulled towards the player.
I played through a few doors, maybe four? And I enjoyed the slowness of it all. I didn't understand the robot eye hint, so playing through that far took quite a lot of repetition. Solving the puzzles by brute force was kind of tedious. I only got through a little faster because I guessed you were going to try to keep the patterns as different as possible yet probably not just a straight line. The robots were a little quick on the draw so you could get shot before even noticing them, on the other hand they were slow to rotate so moving sideways made them always miss.
Nice work on graphics and music!
@neithernathan I saw that you said on itch that you have updated the game, but please note that only very few types of fixes are allowed after the jam/compo ended and that for this reason it is customary that people upload several versions of the game. So is the version on itch.io now the one eligible for voting on?
Upload the version you had when jam ended too and mark it clearly as jam and perhaps also update the description here to make it clear which should be used for voting. Then let me know when you are done so I can try out your game :wink:
yes just call that one something like post-jam or so
I see why you wanted to update on it.
I really like the absurd, dark setting. The beating heart and the gramophone. Great mood.
I also tried out your updated version after voting and if I understood it correctly (I'm not at all sure I did), it's about balancing the heart-breaking records and chess-piece euphoria. Not getting too much of either while exploring the dungeon.
Hello and welcome to LD!
I didn't really quite grasp what I was supposed to do exactly so I headed out to one of the spots on the map, and when I reached it, or somewhere around there, the flower disappeared. Was I delivering/planting?
The controls where kind of nice when I got up some speed but sometimes I felt like it didn't really want to go as I expected it to.
I think some more explanation would have been great.
You really should also change your link type so it doesn't say `Source Code` because it sounds like I would have to compile the game to try it.
Finally, if you want more comments and votes, you really need to start playing other peoples' games, vote on them and leave comments. That gives your game visibility on the site.
I like the art style a lot! It was a quite chaotic game to say the least. I don't think I'm a very good bear in hell. I didn't really understand the building bit the first try so it could probably have needed some explaining. It would have been nice if the game started out a bit easier too so I got to orient myself with it instead of having water all the way up to the pot after the first second. I didn't quite understand the souls in the pot counter either, if something was meant to happen at 10 souls. I found myself with more than that quite a few times.
But again, very nice art-style!
Cute drawing style. I found out attacking from behind was the best strategy for not getting hurt too often by the soldiers. Or at least it felt better and more evil. I think a simple slow increase in frequency of soldiers or speed of soldiers would have done much for engaging the player to keep playing. Especially if combined with a clock or score showing how long time one managed to keep the princess alive.
Hi and welcome to LD!
I really liked the happy way the robots walked!
I ended up spam clicking the mouse button while close even though the mana and the animation indicated that it might be intended to hold for a kind of magic flow of attack. Moving up and down the spiral was really hard since there was no collider on the central column. But since the game was very forgiving and easy to complete, it didn't matter so much that there were some obstacles.
Finally a tip, if you want more comments and votes you need to play others' games and then vote and leave comments.
I really like the music! The game was a bit confusing though. The projectiles that the crabs shot looked more like water and the loot was rare enough that I kind of killed myself a couple of times before I got a hang of that. But then I got lost in the portals until the sapling died. Perhaps it would be nice with some map or simply a key to return.
I got to about the same time as your screenshot before I accidentally sacrificed myself for the heart. :rofl: I must say that the mechanics of shooting the syringes were very satisfying and well made. A bit surprising that I also repelled the health drops, but it also made it interesting to not overshoot. :syringe: :syringe:
It would have been nice, I think if the obstacles weren't simple rectangles but had a V shape to them so that virus got stuck on the far side quite often. If the world could go through various phases with obstacles appearing and disappearing could also really have improved re-playability.
In general though, a very well made and funny tower defense.
I played it for quite a while and gave the world 20+ servers. I even let the US get their first one but I thought that was the win-condition but nothing happened. I think it would have been good with a meter saying how large the running network was and what was still needed to win.
It also became a bit tedious switching between the play and pause mode. Perhaps hotkeys for selecting the tools would have helped a lot, and the game could even auto-play after each snip or each build and so on so you'd have to be quick to snip snip snip. Just to keep the core loop a little bit more fluid.
Solid game-play though.
I like the concept but it was near impossible since the game kind of refused to register jumps. I had to spam space for it to just sometimes jump. I got a few levels in still, and I think it could be an interesting game if the controls were just a bit more responsive.
I very much enjoyed this experience. The music and the dialogue/voice acting were fantastic. It would have been nice if I could have reset the mess or had some end-game condition (at least I think I put everything somewhere). The stove was a bit loud and when I forgot to turn it off it was a bit odd that it was equally loud in the bathroom. Great game though! Cooking and toilet "cleaning" were my favorites.
Nice mood, art and storytelling. I got to General Mines and maybe some tweaks are needed to keep the interest going. Or it might be that I'm playing after a day's work and it was so gentle an experience.
I was confused in the beginning that the keys indicated up and down too, but in the end I only pressed forward.
In sum, a very nice experience.
Nice looking game, and well made audio. I got to the redirect energy bit, but I didn't really feel like there was enough feedback about how many cycles of repeat pattern was needed nor if I actually succeeded in repeating it. So a bit more clearer interaction would have encouraged me to try and beat it. It also felt a bit more difficult than it needed to be.
My first reaction was: Why do I want to shoot spiders and why aren't they moths instead? Though I would rather pet than shoot moths. :laughing: But that probably more reflect my status as friend of small animals.
I got a few rounds into the game but only after I had given up I realized that the "home" icon was actually not something to take me to a menu or such, but a shop icon. And that I could upgrade my lighthouse! I think it might have been beneficial if available buys were listed on screen directly. There seemed to be enough space.
Equally, it took me a while to notice if anything happened when interacting with the generator. I was expecting changes in the world or something more dramatic (or at least that it was that yellow arrow that should be moving), but a simple fix could have been to have the UI for the lighthouse fuel levels be on the right side / same side as the generator.
In general though a quite fun game.
A really superb game! I got a bit scared when I read nuclear throne, but even I got a few sections into the game. The character and its movements brilliant! The very simple and well made tongue mechanics - all great. I was also very pleasantly surprised that the game actually does random order of rooms for that extra replayability. The one time I got the furthest though was a room which did kind of a U-turn with a sharp angle in it and an enemy surprised me by being able to shoot through the double wall. Eating up the dialogue was also a fantastic move! I wanted the replay to be in world frog-interaction too: with its last breath it vows to never give up and try again to save itt by slowly flipping out the tongue and landing it on the replay dialogue.
The mechanics of the buoyancy was great. I might have gotten to the end after a kind of tube that went right to left, or if there was a way to gain speed there I didn't figure it out. It would have been awesome to have audio with it too, especially some queues on when you were being lifted up and not. Also if the surrounding world was less blocky or was contextualized into something that gave it a reason to be that blocky. Really interesting way to navigate a world though!
(I see you are both new to LD, so a tip: if you want more votes and comments, play, vote and comment on some others' games and yours will gain visibility)
I had absolutely no chance. I suck at rhythm and I'm bad at fast paced survival games like that, but this was really well made! And I managed to get some beats right but there was so much at once there was no way I could notice any overall objective or how poorly I was doing. So I was having fun. Nice effect, graphics, and tunes.
Love the stop-motion -- the art and the feeling in the animations. I wish there was more. But stop motion takes so much time! The story, I didn't fully grasp how to progress or if it was a very short cycle. Any way, I think it would have felt more natural if the text was more hand-written in style and a bit larger. Maybe some scratching sounds as it was written out.
(I see this is your first entry to LD, so if you want more votes/comments you should check out some of the other's games)
Graphics was really nice and the use of the theme. But the character felt a bit too slow walking around and it was a bit unclear interaction selling the matches. Very nice idea on well made animations though!
Lovely idea! And very nice plants. It's kind of like a clicker game, but slow and without the clicking. Giving them names was was brilliant. Would have been nice to be able to water them, speak a little to them and such. I wouldn't have needed to make any difference in the progression but increased the immersion.
Really well made character and world. Took me a retry to get a hang of it because I got lost and ran out of time. Some indicator of the direction of the fire might have been nice. It was also a bit strange that it was hardest in the beginning and then after unlocking all tools there wasn't much challenge left. I'm not sure if I was supposed to explore further to find some final resource though, but since the world stretched out equally in all directions it kind of made that question too general for me. If there had been a clear direction and some indicator that there was an incentive to push on in a certain direction, I would probably have tried some longer.
Nice game though!
I enjoyed playing this. I might at one or two points accidentally double-clicked (maybe add something to make it hard to accidentally do that) and thus missed some of the content, but what I got was really nice!
I really liked the bird and its animations. Felt very real. It felt a bit awkward that the enemies only accumulated and pushing, feeding and stunning wasn't very easy. So finally I decided that it was best for the both of us if I pushed it over the edge.
The lighting of the matches was really nice, but I really got confused by how the game worked and she seemed to panic even with the candle lit.
I really loved the graphics and the effect of the player passing by the plants. I got to the end, and though it was a bit of searching, it was easy to see where I had been before it really didn't feel too long. The music stopped after a while, so you should probably put it on a loop since it takes a while for a new person to get around. It would have been really nice if the power plants and oil pumps also crumbled down after the last tower guarding it got destroyed.
Really solid entry!
Finally, welcome to LD, I see this is your first entry here. To get more votes and more comments you need to play more games and vote on them (and leave comments, that's super important to gain visibility).
Unfortunately the first page I got was a page 0 that I tried 10 or so words on several of which were annotated as frequently tried, but I was all stuck. Interesting idea though. As there's no restart, or none I've discovered, I'm not sure what to do.
I liked having to charge up the shot but unless I'm mistaken there's no real way to keep fending off the enemies after about 2-3000 score? There seemed to be too many enemies comming to fast that even if I just stood still in the middle and shot fully charged shots I stood no chance.
I love what you did with the theme! And very well made game in almost all its aspects! The character animations, the music, the mood that came from all of it together. And it was fun to play to. I got through it all, even though it took me long enough to figure out that the scene warping effect correlated with the distance I was from my loved one. I think I also managed to be outside the screen somewhat on one of the maps. Somewhat hard with the controls, but getting it exactly right is so hard. Very well made entry!
:rofl: how much attention does that :cat: require!?
Funny game, impossible to keep creativity flowing in that setting though!
I found that all but the cat distraction went away by a single click. I didn't really notice the cat becoming better with fewer clicks either so my egg had very little chance. However it didn't feel all wrong, it kind of felt like a game were the only possible outcome should be that you fail.
I wish there was a fake online number you could call so that I could try this out and get frustrated :smile:
I tried to launch the virtual phone version (both in itch and in firefox), but either something doesn't work or I don't understand. Am I supposed to enter a phone number to start or just press the green phone icon? If I press the green phone there's a quick ta-da sound and I see some requests going out that get 200 responses but then nothing happens. Pressing number buttons gives no sounds.
@jezzamon that explains it! I though it was one of those systems where it speaks and I press numbers as answers and I didn't have a mic connected to the computer so perhaps it was just sitting there waiting for me? I'll try talking to it then :laughing: But maybe, for silly people like me, it could have been helpful if it greated everyone right from the start?
Interesting game. I really loved the sound in it and it was easy enough that even if I didn't fully grasp exactly how the time-rewind mechanics worked I could manage my way to the end. The color shift in the visual effect when rewinding was very nice. I got the feeling that some objects behaved differently to the rewind than others, perhaps it would be nice if they were explicitly marked somehow. I was also quite confused in the beginning since rewinding when the arrow symbol appeared didn't really seem to help solving the first obstacle / people. I did at times forget to read the story when I was focusing on getting past the obstacles, so if something alerted to it a bit stronger or if it was voice acted... but time is short during LD and this was a very nice game.
@peachtreeoath thanks for your extensive comment and you were getting quite close to completing it. Or rather, it's a bit left after the server room, but it is the last hard puzzle:
**spoiler**
!> The server room is the room directly to the right from the start position. !> It teleports between two locations and once you've gotten it back to its !> start position with its door open, you can just walk through it.
I think I accidentally coded the early bits to be the hardest / most confusing / require the most counter intuitive solutions. It should of course be the other way around!
@parkuhrmd I agree that the monster could have been teased or that the early puzzles were easier and the later harder so that one is more invested. And so that one kind of always escapes the monster early on if one doesn't intentionally want to try death. The door sounds open/close sounds were placeholders we unfortunately didn't have time to replace.
@annie-owl Thanks for playing. And weird that the chairs allowed you to clip through the walls, but I guess I should put a simple box collider around them just to make them safe.
@garfsnacks Thanks for the detailed description of your experience. I think it comes down to me having made the solution too complex / counter intuitive. Especially in the beginning. If we make a post-jam version we will definately make sure to start hinting how to progress. The falling door sound indicates as you are walking towards the start position, that a trap-wall has fallen down behind you.
@ava-skoog Thank you soo soo much for your comment. I really managed to make the game much too complicated :cry: We wanted to have some interactions with the machines and more apps on the phone (a selfie cam that pops up if the monster is behind you as an example). Oh I also didn't realize I had to make sure the pumpkin office door got closed when the server room teleports.
Here's some hints for after leaving the sever room the correct way
Hint 1: !> Exiting the server room's back door there are two rooms inside an 8-shaped corridor. You have to enter and explore one to not be eaten by the pumpkin in the other.
Hint 2: !> The exit is on the other side of where the corridor is blocked.
Hint 3: !> First go straight and take the door on the left to enter the cafeteria. You can leave either door, but the pumpkin will patrol around it clock-wise.
Hint 4: !> Get to the other room and enter it from the server room side. When you exit, head to the right.
@ava-skoog you should of course prioritise playing sub 20 votes games!
I made it to the end! I liked the text and figuring out the puzzles. On some of them I didn't even need all the stickers - maybe that was intended or perhaps I was lucky in finding solutions. The way the robots looked at the dishes of the right color was really nice.
I liked the style, the graphics and its effects. There was a nice feeling to how the world curved with where you were and it was nice how color returned to the world. I had to play it in two sessions though because at one point I happened to fall through the world.
Very slick and well made. I'm no combo master though. I got to the fourth tutorial, I think. I just never manage to land a sequence three times in a row on that level. The hit-condition on that buster-dunk was too hard for me.
The animations and precision in the controls were great though!
I liked the concept, and made it through to the end. I had to retry some on one or two of the levels, but in general the difficulty felt balanced. It did feel a bit odd that I basically had to waste the first run just to explore on each level before I got to actually try and solve it. I think that could have been helped, either with a minimap or a sweap over the level before it started. Nice entry!
I mostly enjoyed the sound effects and music, unfortunately the game left me rather confused.
I tried running into the first control room and grabbing the card and whatever exactly the other things was. It felt odd that the beam would reach me in there through walls. I could make it up to the locked door and navigate to where the second thing was (where the pass code was displayed). I couldn't force open the grating and time was running out.
Waking up I tried to make it up to the door again but there was a fire and I hadn't seen any thing that would put out a fire. So I figured maybe the beam should kill me by the grating so it would cut it and I could use it as a new way, but no. I tried hurling a can but the turret just killed me instead.
So I force quit the game (there's no way to exit), and started again and skipped the part where one learns the code and just entered it, but there still wasn't enough time. And the blocking fire would appear again.
I liked the visuals and even more so the audio! Navigation was however very confusing to me. It took me a while to even understand what the look at the other side of the train was referring to. And even knowing that it was just a look to the left-look to the right, that it came with a flip of the x-axis of the game made it hard to navigate. It felt like being teleported to a random place each time. I didn't figure out if there was something hinting the solution with the switches either, but the monster leg was kind of cute and spidery. In general though, a very stylish game.
I really enjoyed the mood, which came mostly from the visuals, the way the lamps lit up and the sounds! I opened one of the three boxes (the right-most one), but then I found nothing more to interact with, the other two cottages that didn't give a key, I had already visisted and had no interactions left in them. The pull-back effect was really neat!
Great entry! Very well made. I almost got stuck on the first laser, it felt a bit unfair in its collision box and didn't give that clear feedback when a ball was rolling in front of it or not. I never managed past the conveyor belts where a cube should be elevated. Well made puzzle game though and lots of assets and interactions! I quite enjoyed playing it.
Very nice style and audio in this game! I got to the puzzle that's the last in the images on your post. I couldn't quite figure it out and then unity crashed. The interactions took some getting used to though. Especially on the first level where the retry-level and the tile to place were about equal.
I tried it out, but I absolutely don't understand the time mechanic (I haven't voted because it didn't seem fair). I can only adjust time it when runs out and that rewinds the player position back to the start position or somewhere inbetween which makes me gain nothing with regards to progressing on the level.
I really like the music with the game. I only got the first (?) speed power up and then I couldn't figure out what next to do. The martian theme suggests a bit floatier gravity and controls but it was a bit tricky to get my head around them. Nice first entry though!
Quite fun little game. I tried it a couple of times and got a few cycles out. It did feel a bit unfair sometimes when it came to retrying a level, there was a bit too much rng in the first second where the enemies were and such, so perhaps give the player just a little time at the start of each level before the triangles light up their search-lights. Maybe they all start small? I also once got two triangles almost on top of each other refusing to move and guarding the exit. Otherwise very well made game and cool level-transitions.
I liked the humor and tone in the narration. It was a bit hard to hear everything all the time since the voice levels were mastered quite a lot lower than the other sounds. They could have spoken directly into robots brain instead of via speakers as an expanation for not using localized sound. I didn't so much mind the pace of the game, but on day two while still in the charge pod thing I jumped before the first task of the day and that said task completed and then I was stuck in pod while expected to do sorting task or something without the ability to move. That I was frozen first day before released and got powered down while charging felt like it fit with the world and story, but that I couldn't move at all times during the days did feel wrong. Nice entry though.
Quite fun game. I can see that game loop becomming addictive. I think though, it's a bit unfair at present when stations and entire loops can spawn off screen and one has to hunt around for them. A mini-map or a border hint indicating where something new is happening would solve that. Perferrably also a faster way to navigate to the new stuff would be great.
I got to about 400 points by keeping loops rather short until they got the third station.
Very well made first jam entry!
Interesting game. I made it to loop 8. In the beginning I was taking care to shoot things, but towards loop 6 or so I realized that it wasn't really neccessary and it actually became simpler when I focused on running fast past everything. The idea of the auto-shooting rifle was interesting though, even though I was annoyed until I noticed what it was doing. It wasn't clear to me either which shells I could pick up or not, or if the collision was a bit strange on it. Maybe there should be a stronger insentive to kill enemies too? Making next loop more crowded than otherwise if you leave too many behind. Give extra shells or health or something? Give the dash ability once per kill?
Really cool inception game idea. I can't say I got to the end, but at least a few games deep. It seems like you really got a lot of content in, but I had some issues with the controls. A bit too easy to fall off without jumping and a few times having to jump out into the void hoping not to collide with bats. The holding on to various games to gain power ups was brilliant.
As a side note. The game would not load in Firefox for me, but that might have been me having restrictive settings. The console said that google analytics and your game js failed to load.
I enjoyed sailing around collection boots to start my own store of unmatching pairs :laughing: The game was really pleasing and the feeling of the ocean with how it rocked the boat was great for the immersion. If there was one thing that I didn't really like it was that I couldn't set the throttle and just control the rudder and changes to the throttle. My hands are weak and prolonged pressing hurts and while it sometimes may be warrented by the game mechanics or setting, it would be more fitting here to set an engine power and let the boat run at that. I got to the end and enjoyed all parts of it, though. For a while I got a bit unlucky with the boots but then at the right time I got the next treasure. Well made! Always a pleasure to see what you come up with.
@ava-skoog turning isn't that important or wasn't for me because I set out in a direction until I saw an X or was about to hit an island. So for me the quickest most important change would be to have W increase and S decrease power/speed and skip the return to zero attraction. The game doesn't really require you to be able to stop, but if it feels needed you could add another key or a button on next to the throttle to stop the engine.
@ava-skoog that sounds like a good compromise!
very nice looking game and generally well made. I got about halfways before I ran into some unreasonably rough hooligans that shot me to pieces in no time. I was struggling from early on, but that felt in line with the story. I don't know if the encounters were fully randomized but I happened to get several of the same type in a row and I guess it would improve the feeling if the layout of the map strongly discouraged accedental repeats of scenarios. Good work though!
As always very interesting and very pleasing to the eye. The trees were fantastic, well the hands entering the postcard and doing things were magnificant. I wish there was more and that there was some sort of narrative to it. Perhaps that the postcard gets written a bit with every interaciton performed?
@jakob-willforss you get a score when you reach the bottom of the fistula. I figured a mute the :notes: was needed :laughing:
@zyrjello at some point I was thinking of having a %cleaned and progress towards the bottom, but I forgot to write it down on my todo. And avoiding bouncing is very optional unless one wants a really high score
@peachtreeoath could it have been that you were going so fast that you didn't really land, but just bounced off the ground? The game requires you to be pretty stationary at the fistula floor before evaluating your landing. Perhaps there should have been some feedback explaining it, as it might be the cause of the confusion. As for a third fistula game, lets hope the theme's are willing!
@peachtreeoath if I make a post-jam release, I'll be sure to make clear feedback to the user upon getting close to the bottom that they should make the vessel rest at the bottom.
Very nice looking game, though a bit too dark, I think. The protagonist could have had some lighting on it so it became more visible. I also felt like I got a bit stuck on pillars and the like a bit too easy, so if corners had been a bit rounded or friction less, it might have felt more fluid. I only got to level three, but that's more a testament to my skills than anythin else. Overall though, it was fun trying it out.
I managed to get to the second planet, and it was quite fun getting there, but at the same time quite a few things seemed a bit broken or missing when I played it. Most annoying was that the digging only sometimes registered what tile I was hovering and the character was often refusing to pick up the loot though I had space left in the inventory.
Back in the upgrade menu, the level of each item didn't at all align with the buttons and I would really have liked to be able to see how much the next upgrade cost.
And I needed 1000 before I could upgrade the rocket to go to another system even though I had most of it left after the upgrade (which left me very confused).
On the new planet I somehow managed to get down to where the stuff was and got the character to pick up two items, but back in the ship they didn't count for anything, so I gave up.
I ran the game in Firefox on Windows.
I managed to get to level 3, but honestly it sort of was overwhelming keeping track of enemies and being strategic about it all. I guess, I'm not good at all at this sort of game. The mechanics was new and interesting though!
I realized one thing that might have helpt me some, if the marine icon vibrated or in other ways attracted attention when it was being hurt.
Well made game. I got my divination on the first try, basically focusing on going fast downwards and only picking up the enemies that were easy and close by. So it felt like I cheesed it a bit, and perhaps it would have benifitted if there was a counter balance like making the game substantially tricker further down. It also felt like transporting oneself laterally was quite challenging. Nice game though and very coherent style.
I feel like there's something, I'm missing, like how does my turn end and how to get new resources. I just manage to place one or two tiles and then nothing happens.
I really liked the mood in this one. But I had to play it twice before I understood it. First time I just used left and right and totally missed the notes since there really wasn't anything telling me in game that I should interact with the bottle. I tried shooting it but nothing happend. So I got to the V shaped place with a bottle at the bottom and that was when I realized I should have hunted for them. Similarly, I totally missed that I could jump for a good part of the first dive (the text on the page would be helped with some bold or similar emphasis on what the keys are). The second dive was much more fun when I had understood how the game works though!
Love the visuals and the sounds making it into a very comlete experience. I played the angry scientist version, but I found it kind of cute with the molecule mixup. :wink: I had some issues with the controls. I felt like I should be able to get up easier swimming, but all I could do was some sort of semi-controlled falling down deeper and deeper pits. Great entry though.
Nice game. The Interactions were very clear and intuitive and the metaphorical falling animation added to the experience. I also enjoyed the narration, but it kind of felt like it ended a bit to abrupt. I know from having tried to have text in my entries some years that it can be really hard to produce it though. But even if the phone call were mostly some "..." back and forth interspersed with some generic phrases. I think, that for me it would have been a bit more well paced and perhaps end with hanging up and getting a final closing remark option.
I think this is my favourite so far. What a game!
I really dig the visuals, how it interacts with the audio and the feelings of the protagonist. I love how awkward it made me feel in such a short time. The song... it was fantastic. I got some lines right, but most wrong. And that felt exactly like it should be. The visuales for the typing was perhaps a little bit too unclear, especially over some backgrounds that it was near impossible to see the progression and the time-bar. But, I really felt like the true experience of the game involves failing and so it didn't matter much.
Most of all I really enjoyed meeting the supervisor and the neighbour/friend. Good work with face-parts! Really good. The mood and style of the game was really great too. I liked how I got annoyed by the banging on the door and the insistant phone ringing and that the protagonist had the dialogue option to express the same sentiment. It's a pity you didn't have time for more progression and a more complete narrative arc. Very well made entry.
WOW :heart_eyes:
That was a fantastic trip. So many great components. Tardigrades! Fantastic mood, incredible work done even for such a large team.
If I'd critique something, it'd be that my brain likes to believe it understands french, which it doesn't. And so I missed quite a bit of the podcasts. In part due to my confusion about what languages I understand, but also that the subtitles could have been a bit more prominent and perhaps also use up roughly 60-70% of the screen width.
It would have been interesting if the tasks, at least after things got strange, were conveyed not with text instructions but in the world with various visual and auditory hints. As an example, the CCTV cameras could have been looking towards the next task when you stared at them, or perhaps looked at the task when you weren't looking directly at the cameras and at the player if the player looked at the cameras.
It was also a bit confusing that the marker changed color right at the start when I hovered the computer screen, but there seemed to be no interaction. It happened in a few places.
Overall though, it was a fantastic experience and I'm really glad that I downloaded it and played it even if I'm lazy and generally avoid games that aren't web-games or playable through the itch-app.
I really liked the audio in this game. It kind of reminded me a bit about Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. I found the cheezy strat for the upper part of the decent to roll the craft on the side, activate downwards facing shield and cannon and just let it fall. The controls feels like they really would have needed a controller to be intuitive. Well made game though.
I must admit that I didn't really partake in the exercises, but the audio was really soothing. I really enjoyed the ambient noises in the audio track. They lend a great feeling of authenticity. On my resolution the camera started with the text half out of view and it was a bit odd that looking up/down manipulated the volume controls. But since the game wasn't really about such things, it didn't matter to much. Very good use of the theme too!
A very well made game! Cool effects and graphics and the music/audio also added a lot to the mood. The hyperspeed effects and the hover effects were really nice. If I was to complain about some things, then parts of the universe was a bit on the dark side. It kind of makes sense that they'd be dark but perhaps a bit more ambient light could have been useful or some help in finding the objects.
I had to hunt a quite some time to spot my first smiling planet. And while that was within my limit of frustration, I'm sad I couldn't complete the game. The teaspoon seems to be the needle in the cosmic haystack. I think I took various photos of the clocks from the side and they sort of looked like spoons, but no.
I had to give up on the spoon after several minutes of searching. So some sort of ping from interesting objects or simply spawning them in in higher frequencies if the player seems to have problem finding them. I feel like I saw clocks and pawns and other tea parts hundreds of times. Also a bit annoying was the use of `P`. Everything else about the controls were neatly packed for one hand use but `P` is on the other side of the keyboard.
In all a great entry though. Very well made. Sort of looks like a VR-game (though I haven't ever tried modern VR at all).
I really wanted to get to the end of this game. It took me about 10minutes. Very nice that the game allowed you to retry levels freely and reset your battery. Even a bit unexpectedly kind that I didn't have to get the battery a second time if I died on a battery level. So very well made and planned out game. It took me the longest time though to discover that I could see the pods bouncing :laughing: but once I got that, it made them quite manageable too. I had fun playing.
Really nice looking game with smooth controls and I really wish I was better at flying. Don't know how many times I tried, but couldn't make it past the forrest part before the cave. I lost too much lift the few times I made it that far. I found it a bit hard to know how large I was/my colliison box was. The same for the pickup of the checkpoints. Some sort of viusal feedback and/or music effect would have been really nice. I also would have loved if there was an easier mode for those of us that really aren't that skilled that allowed a few collisions (though that would really not have helped with the lack of lift in the forrest). It felt like crossing that part sort or required having had a perfect flight prior to that, or I missed some aspect of how to regain lift.
After watching the clip, I realized I never got one before and well that sort of speaks to my confusion about my own size. I guess I felt a lot larger than I was. I tried gain, now in the web player to also keep W pressed in most of the time, but it felt like I had to look above were I was going to maintain altitude then and the A/D movement felt off so I couldn't really make it past the first gate.
First things first: Why don't you have a nice screenshot from the game here to attract players to try it out? And if you don't have a cover image, you really should fix that too.
Now about the game. I really liked the arty style and high contrast, but I found many things confusing. I could not accuse anyone, enter wasn't responding. Also a visual dot/circle/crosshair to be able to locate things. Now it was quite annoying trying to get the hover text. Then picking things up, I'm pretty sure the game said to click, but it was right-clicking for me. I would suggest either would do and if one needs to bring the object to the table (?) then perhaps better to have a click pick up and a click drop rather than needing to hold button down to carry.
I liked that the game was basically black, white and yellow, but the text really needs a border or shadow because it was near impossible to read when over white surfaces.
The style was great, and it might be a really nice detective story, but I really couldn't progress more than to have a look around the apartment.
I also was confused the first round why the characters didn't move until I made the complete path, but on second playthrough, I knew what to do. It might also have been nice if the target location was a bit clearer, perhaps by each of them having a different shape and a bit larger display on the characters. Good game though!
I really liked the audio and the feeling the audio conveyed in this game. I really didn't quite understand the controls though. I could hook things but after hooking them all I could do was let them go again. The sonar, the lights and the ink were permenantly off and didn't respond to button presses so it got quite dark without being able to do much about it except if I just stayed at the surface. So looking at your gifs, either something was broken for me (web-build in Firefox on Windows), or I simply didn't understand how to play the game.
I really enjoy playing games with graphics the deviate from the more common forms! The first part of the game seemed to have had some intended parts cut out of scope. The trader seemed to be out of office for example. The mining economy was also very kind (a gas station that doesn't care how much fuel you want!). I didn't mind that too much as it allowed focusing on depth and just buying/upgrading all sorts of equipment. And well not to spoil:
!> This all felt like a very good build up to the end crashing through the floor of the world. I think it actually makes more sense having the game part like that to sort of point out that the big reward of the game is the drastic and funny turn with the hellish end credits.
It took me a cart or two before I even noticed that there was a clock ticking, and that was about the time when I also developed the strategy for spamming F. My main reason for doing that was also that some of the smaller things were a bit too hard to spot really and the learning part of what things opened interactions with other things were either not intuitive enough or too fast (too much complexity added in each cart). Good entry though.
I'm not sure what happened when I was playing it, but the controls kind of didn't respond at times and then worked like normal controls, so the different modes that were dispayed didn't seem to have any effect. And each time the new effect came up, all obstacles were cleared. This might have been on purpose but it always happend before the character would reach even the first obstacle, so it really didn't matter where it was falling, nothing ever touched the character. I let it fall to about the score 500, but I suppose there was something wrong with my experience? Running in Firefox on Windows, not fullscreen.
I guess I didn't really understand what to do. I got a bunch of creatures to follow me around, I found the pink flower looking thing but there was a wall blocking the passage in the cave and there seemed no to happen anything when pressing the keys. I also fell off the world on several occasions. The art style was very cute though.
Interesting idea of having the two types of interactable objects, sort of allowing the player to decide how much of the narrative to explore as each depth. But with the slowness of movement, I would not go hunt for more white backgrounds if I found the red one early. So I think the charcter controls were problematic for that reason. Also the sprite had very little direction visually and since one can move equally fast in any direction it didn't feel much like a human walking to me. I associate the control scheme with games wher you have to navigate around while shooting in all directions at the same time, but your game really didn't need that so perhaps controls where the character walked in the direction of the mouse would have been enough.
I enjoyed the game. Must admit that I'm more of a cat person than a dog person though :cat2: :heartbeat:. All parts of the game worked very well together. I did have some issues landing jumps and the jump kind of looked like it would be easy for a solo doggo to get over the bone but I never succeeded. Got to the second to last level and if there's one gripe I'd have with the design its that if I first spend some effort gathering enough dogs and then make a simple mistake so that my active dog gets the bone... then I have to start all over again. So level design, to make that feel fair seems very important.
Great entry as always though!
Really cute game! And a great idea on the theme too. The scoring, what is just the number of rounds survived? I found it a bit confusing if there was something more to it. Like maintaining a fancy structure between the rounds. It wasn't either entirely clear what the exposed condition of the pig was to me. Just a short explanation for confused people like me would have helped. I really liked the humor in it. The way the wolf ran out of air and was jumping back and forth!
Very well made!
@javier-belmer I must admit I ran out of energy and time attempting to balance the difficulty late Monday night and I think the game would have been much better if it was easier to get going, just very hard to keep on track and stable. With the cameras, I also agree. I wanted to try making a game with stationary / cameras not being part of the player controller. But I got lazy and should have at have more of them and closer to the robot. On the third and fourth levels they are at least that.
@peachtreeoath thanks for the detailed comment! First I though about giving the player means to cycle back to designing and redesigning as part of the game. And perhaps I should have focused more on that and making sure the player gets to clearly see their contraptions. But then I got sucked into writing a story and it didn't really fit anymore.
@playerdeer If I decide to do a post-jam version then cameras will be high on the list of things to fix. I was considering letting the player select camera, and perhaps that would have worked quite fine with the current setup using maximum 5 camera per level. But if I make the cameras stationary and bring them closer to the robot, then I need to figure out something smart if the player is to control them.
@ava-skoog I agree, I desperately increased the weight of the body quite a lot right before making the final build because it was almost impossible to not constantly flip over before. I need to tweak those parameters better!
@angela-he I also struggle what to call the robot thing :laughing: Glad you liked the dialogue! The world definitely needs much more weird stuff. Though it's been too long since I made something truly weird on my own scale of things.
I had fun playing this game! I kind of got lost at 100 coins and about 3 stars around the cactus and wooden fences. Didn't see any clear way forward there. My dimensional work was mostly along the z and y axis and only occasionally, through accidental key presses I grew sideways.
Perhaps to teach the player in a bit more controlled fashion, the different elasticizes could have been unlocked progressively so that the player better learned what did what.
Very fun concept game though!
Very cool idea. Those :heavy_minus_sign: got really scary! I've never been as afraid of the :heavy_division_sign:. At least not since 2nd grade (or whenever that was introduced). :laughing:
I feel, I got some really strong opponents so I didn't manage to get to the final round. Very ambitious though to attempt a multiplayer game and in a way that actually would work well here being asynchronous.
It was obvious that the water was bad, but it wasn't really clear how bad. Could I forfeit a round by ignoring the game say to me I should avoid it? It would have been nice with a bit clearer feedback what that mechanic was.
The battle after was a bit random, well extra so since you didn't have time to implement actual results of the opponents. But even so, I think it would make the game feel fairer if I had some idea what I was up against throughout the level. So ideally, I think it would make sense to show the current recorded live standing of my selected opponent. If the game shows their sum, the player has to continuously compare that to their own (which the game shouldn't provide) and you'd have even more educational value there.
I agree with @wedgiebee that having 3 number slots and 2 operators was a bit much in making it feel like I had control over my destiny. I think there's enough challenge in 2 numbers and 1 operator. Perhaps allow numbers to be negative too so one can outsmart those pesky negative operators with a double negative?!
Another way to make the game progressively harder would be to require the player to rank above a certain position in a larger group of enemies.
And again, really cool math game idea!
I must admit. To someone with my skills... it was much to high a challenge. I managed to get over the first spikes perhaps 5 times. I fell in many many more. What I never managed was to climb the rock right after the spikes.
I do well understand that it's supposed to be one of those infernally hard games, but I think it could do with some easier progression in the beginning allowing the player to encounter each new problem in isolation and learn how to manage it before having to do combos.
But from the very little part I could play, the controls felt solid and I liked the style of the game!
It's always a treat to see what you cook up, but before I get into how fantastic the art style is, and how fast the narration hooks me and hooks me hard.
But, I think I ran into a bug or got very confused.
Spoiler: !> I got out of the room, encountered something in the bathroom. Went downstairs after the one making popcorn, but couldn't find anything to interact with on the lower level - kitchen all empty. As I got back to the movie, I said something weird had happened, but then after that, there seemed like nothing more would happen.
Yet, with the bits and the little pieces of narration, it's impressive how I could feel the characters take shape and have a distinct feel to them. The narration felt very natural.
And oh, the art. The amount of it. How well made in that little time that 72 hours affords. And it adds a bit extra that one sort of can follow your entries over time here and they very much fit together aesthetically.
If there's more to the game after what I described in the spoiler, please let me know (and any trick getting to it). I really want there to be more!
Oh this time I got to the end. I had to save and exit and continue from save at one point:
!> Beiging left alone in the room after the movie I could not exit. I might have been tied to playing with a controller.
Very satisfying to get to the end of the story! Marvelously done as usual.
I really enjoyed the building my castle. A bit a pity that in the end, I couldn't zoom far enough out to marvel at the monstrosity :laughing:
It was a bit puzzling and figuring out how to place things to make the generation of resources gather up momentum. While I whole-hardheartedly loved that the game allowed for me to take my time and not rush things... it might have added some excitement if there were winds at times shifting the balance even further so that one might have to quickly - or at least not leisurely - react and build to balance.
I noticed moving the tavern room over my already built castle that it sometimes passed in front of and sometime behind rooms. Nothing important, but the active-to-place room should probably always stay in the foreground.
The music and sounds worked really well with the game. All in all, very well made!
Well made simple game! I got to the end of it. Perhaps there could be hot-keys or such to select the blocks and for play and restart so it goes faster between the modes.
Great graphics! And cozy game. Not what I'd expect after your previous entry :laughing:. I found the game quite intuitive even though I was slightly confused first time at the radio because I though I would give the coordinates there too and it wasn't obvious to me I should `Esc` my way out of it.
I really like walking sims and it very much feels like one!
First I took a lap outside the lighthouse and noticed that I could interact with something in the dark. A later day I tested with one of the light fuel canisters and it disappeared. So I went inside and noticed it was the refueling station. Doesn't really matter, but perhaps there needs to be some tweaks to collision boxes for that ray. It also felt a bit too generous that I could peak up between the gaps of the stairs and interact with things very far away. On the other hand, one might not want to force the player to walk all the way up to every station to be able to interact...
Anyways, solid entry.
Extremely fun and well made game!
I liked how the more tricky parts were quite forgiving in not having to go too far back to retry a jump.
The humor and in particularly the buttons that just fell off. Very good.
On some levels I was a bit confused how I actually progressed, but I don't feel like the premise of the game needs me to understand all my progression at all times. So that's fine too. And the levels neatly ensured I was never lost going in circles.
The `TODO` notes were really fun.
The character and 3D models were really great and almost a bit too satisfying breaking things. I was a little sad I couldn't swim in the fountain :swimmer: :tropical_drink: It did very much give a feel of being intoxicated. But together with that I didn't really have much ability to counter the stumbling episodes, it didn't feel like I could do much about the score and time. I would suggest giving the player a bit more control with the ability to somewhat counter-balance those episodes. And perhaps in contrast increase the default unevenness between the episodes.
I really enjoyed the original play-inside-a-catalogue and the very well made humorous graphics style. Quite unique, don't think I've played anything similar in all the 20 something LD events I've participated. The minigames were of course simple kind, but to me it doesn't so much matter given how well made everything was and how apart the game stands from the other experiences encountered here at LD. Well done!
I wish I was a bit more skilled! I love how even though at a cost of substantial amounts of kittens, I managed to get a few levels in. Extremely well made game! Music and graphics were really nice, but most importantly controls felt very exact and the game fantastically well made.
A kind of wished there was a counter on each level for how many cats I'd lost so far attempting the level. Perhaps also a total counter.
This was as far as I got though, but I really enjoyed every bit of what I could manage. kitten.png
I got to the end! It was really addicting. First I thought it had hung while starting it... so probably it should say something that about that it takes a while to load sounds.
The first play-through, I didn't understand I was supposed to go somewhere particular and the distance is kind of a smallish thing in the corner. Perhaps place it closer to the vessel and/or make it visually more obvious when one goes the wrong way by perhaps color and flashing.
I had a lot of fun though, very well made and the audio was very nice!
I liked the long sailing parts of jumping, but I'd really would have liked to have some control aiming the car in the air too. I managed the firs jump once so while that was really satisfying making the first landing hard to miss and slowly building up the difficulty would have been nice.
I got to 12 pieces of evidence before I abruptly died. I liked the story and the setting very much, but the controls were really taxing. It hurt having to press for each tile move. In combination with the level design forcing a lot of backtracking and being lost searching for what was missed it really lowered my enjoyment and was about to quit several times. If the key-pressing is needed for the retro-feel, I would still urge for a game-mode where key pressed keeps moving or even better binding that pattern to a controller :video_game:
Interesting atmosphere in this game. Very good lighting and fog. I agree it was a bit confusing with items remaining after having looped through its sequence. At least on the jam-version, the certificate was rotated 90 degrees when interacting with it. I'd also would have liked some sort scene there when picking it up. But we all know about how hard it is to fit all the ideas into the 72 hours!
Good game!
Cute little game. I think the swim controls of the jellyfish was very nice. And it was very nice that the checkpoints were so frequent that the inevitable fails didn't punish me too much.
The unstable orbs were interesting. And it made sense that they added to the uncontrollable state. But I think it would have been more fun to the player if that state, like the light-bar, was something that clearly wore off over time. As it was now it felt like if I got more than one, it was just a matter of waiting for a respawn. Perhaps the bad orbs also could give a bit of light so there's a benefit to them too.
Anyways, nice relaxing game!
Great music and very cute game. First try I survived about 2 seconds in happy weather. But that really was just me not having figured out the sensitivity of the controls. Well made, simple game. The combination of unstable emotions and waters and balancing at the same time. It would be hard to fit more theme into one game!
I liked that it was easy and quick try again, but perhaps the game should be even more sneaky and just restart by its own within 2-3 seconds of showing the results! For even higher player retention. Forcing another attempt.
It would also add a bit if the boat felt the waves too, especially since if one opts not to touch any key in the beginning and the moods are the easier, then the boat just stays calmly upright without any assistance.
All in all though, a very cute game that begs to be on mobile!
Really cool audio and humorous game! I tried a couple of times, but couldn't really get the hang of it. I think what most confused me was the death-condition. If it was clear to me what triggered the level resets, then I'd might have gotten a bit further.
Cool idea though and welcome to LD! Hope you had a blast.
At first I was a bit confused because I didn't read the instructions and were clicking on the weathers and being quite unsure what I was doing wrong. Then I realized it was the icons :face_palm:
Very calm sim!
I would have liked the non-active weathers to fade out a bit more (both audio and visually), to give a stronger sense of the mood. The scene listening device was on the camera it seemed so if I rotated to be from the wind perspective while having sunny it really sounded windy. The same, it would have been nice if everything grew substantially darker when it rained and brighter when sunny.
Finally, if there had been a bit more dramatic plant signal that it was fully grown would have been nice. Some large pedals to fold out and some auditory queue. :sunflower:
I really liked the style of the icons, the wind animation, and the haze in the scene.
Running it though the itch-app worked fine for me.
The jumping was and controls were a bit floaty, but I didn't mind too much since it allowed me to be bounced around a bit by the swings and still get to the end of the level.
It would have been nice with a shadow below the cube to better get a feel for where one was landing. In particular with higher elevations during the later parts of the levels it was really hard.
Cool little game though, and it's always nice with games where one manages to get to the end!
I was a bit confused in the beginning by the shaking snakes, but when I understood that it felt quite solid. Perhaps when bitten, the cards lost should not insta-vanish from the hand, but do so with some animation to make it a bit clearer what happens with the hand and how that relates to the new cards appearing. I also wonder, I'm not sure exactly how it works now, but it seemed to me that non of the appearing cards could be snakes or bombs... which makes it less interesting flipping those cards since they all can be safely picked. But all in all a solid game!
Very well made game! And great graphics. I made it about 1000m on my record run. Slap some high-score on it and a bit more progression and it could be a hit. Might even work on mobile?
So much brown - I love it! The visuals were really great and the music good. But I felt like it needed a bit more narration, both building up to each option but even more so after the choice. I'd love to know more about the outcome of the choice and why it was good or bad. Perhaps in steps so there's a bit suspense if I did right or wrong.
Impressive to dare a multiplayer game. Unfortunately for me no-one was a round to help when I was playing. I mostly tossed myself and yarn at the cat. The jumping things I didn't understand what to do with and I found no twigs. One thing I noticed was that when I ventured a bit out of the absolute proximity of the cat it wasn't that easy to find my way back since there was no directional guidance.
I love the names of the companies and such! I had a laugh and never before have I wanted to work for any of those companies.
It's a very bold move to make a game were failing is the only possible outcome.
I think it might have added some to the feeling if the happy music got skewed some as the interviews turned sour. And if the interviewer started to ask more and more inappropriate questions too.
I really like the build up for the game, but it was exceedingly hard to aim and hit the emu because either the bullet hit the truck itself or it flew out of screen. Kind of wondering if the calculations there didn't take variance in performance of different computers into account (i.e. use real time passed to calculate the power) so while I managed to hit some emus a couple of times I only once by pure luck managed to hit the same enraged emu a second time. Which meant that the absolute best strategy I could come up with was backing up to the far left and never firing the gun. And while this might have been a funny major point of the game's critique of french weapons and Australian-French relations, it seemed a bit obscure to have been intended.
@kurrik thanks for the feedback! I added two images here thanks to you explaining a bit better how the mechanics of the game work. I think when I was developing the game, I had a more letter-box view and thus one could see a bit further ahead, even though there might still have been a few jumps of faith.
@peachtreeoath Wow thanks for the feedback. (I'm feel a bit guilty that my brain blanked out after playing yours, maybe it just zoned out with that happy upbeat feeling) It's a weird thing making a game in a genre that I haven't ever played and don't think I would particularly enjoy myself. :laughing: It made me smile with the "got stuck on that jump for FORTY years", I didn't think about how well the age system worked with that frustration.
Really cool chess-game! It was super well made really. One thing that might have been clearer to me though was which pieces my shotgun was going to hit as I accidentally killed myself several times by revealing say a rook behind some pawns when I wasn't directly aiming for that pawn. Besides that, very good game!
Wow what a lovely game. I really enjoyed the animations, the style of the drawings, the attention to a lot of detail in both of them. It was a nice touch to really make the player want to spread out unlocking things in every scene so that there was some crystal gaining always. Even so, I let it take some time and leveled up the pen in the first world to level 30 just because it felt right. A treat from start to end.
I feel like I usually have more detailed comments but it really did what it set out to do and it was just long enough for the content and the narrative progress in it all.
Cool sim! I really like the idea with the rising water. My main gripe with regards to that though was the inability to destroy things like roads to build more dams. Everything must be a dam. And similarly, it would have been really nice to be able to rotate the perspective since stuff could occlude other things.
The buoyancy feeling of jumping into the water was really nice and a cute platormer as a whole. A bit hard on what I expected was about as easy as it would run (slider far to the left). I forgot to check since description said nothing about it, but this type of game feels like it would have been very nice with controller support.
I am intrigued, and hopefully I'll be here for the tour.
I updated my itch version of the game as there seemed to be a new version but when I applied the update it now says I should update my version though it is running the latest.
Wow what a game! This was fun playing and very nice to have it working with controller. I somehow managed not to invite anyone to the party, but it was a superb party to have all to myself.
The character was really cool and the game very nice graphically. It was a bit hard to precisely double jump with them though and landing on small blocks, but there were plenty of coin-balloons around so I wasn't too disturbed by it.
In the store it was a bit odd that it wasn't possible to navigate over the things I had bought in a straight line and it took me a while to notice that music on the second row was really inexpensive. I just assumed because first row was increasing in cost that there was no point looking on the second row until much later. And that's a bit of a pity, because of how much cooler the game gets once that is bought.
Great work in general.
This game was really fun, and the art style is just fantastic! I played on a controller and found that interaction much nicer than on a keyboard, but unfortunately the restart didn't really reliably work pressing :a: on the controller and sometimes I got into a weird state where I could continue playing while I had the game over screen on top.
My main complaints would be that it was really hard to gauge the height of the plane with regards to the speed buffs and colliding or not with obstacles. It almost felt like it was the camera colliding with bridges rather than the actual plane.
The trail sprite for the plane also didn't fit the very cool and nice papery graphics of the rest of the game and felt wrong that it updated with the plane's rotation. If it was a guiding effect on where the plane was heading it would have made sense but I think it would have made more sense now to have the passed track in global space.
I also think it would have been nice if the plane hung in the air when you started until you gave a clear input to the game so one didn't have to loose height right in the beginning from not being fully prepared.
Unfortunately I never completed the last(?) / third level even though I got pretty close some times.
I really love the visuals and audio in this game. It's also really hard. The cool camera movements, splatters and the general style of the game. Very impressive.
For the game mechanics, it was a bit confusing at start. One main thing was that I couldn't focus in on the target (click-hold) as soon as the enemy drops into the game. Maybe there should be a visual / auditory signal for when the round actually starts. Then it wasn't really clear to me if there was any benefit to holding for a long time or just clicking when the piece hits the red square. Except that it was more cool to be focused. Then finally it also took me a few fails to understand that I also had to release on the red square way before it moved off it. So something visually and/or auditory to help clarify this moment would have been helpful.
Perhaps the camera could also in the focus mode follow the piece a bit because when it got to the closest corner it was almost out of view, or the on the very edge.
Great entry all in all though!
Really weird game in a very good way. It had a very whimsical feel to it and I think that worked very well with how unexplained everything was. But while there seemed to be some sort of checkpoints with a death layer to re-spawn oneself should one fall off the edge in a bad way, I felt like the game really lacked a way to unstuck oneself/trigger that re-spawn or better boundaries for where the character could go. As it was I happened to end up in the wrong place quite easily and needing to restart from the beginning and that took away quite a bit of wanting to explore the game to the end.
I enjoyed playing the game. Though you opted out of audio, I think it was really well designed with the thrust sounds kicking in as the ship started to accelerate.
Though it was nice to have clear visuals of the progress, I think the placement would have been better in one of the lower corners or perhaps even a semi-transparent overlay dead center when reaching a milestone, because the way the map and the game worked, the upper left corner that it occupied now sometimes obscured what was ahead in a way that didn't feel intended.
In a way (maybe it said so and I missed it), but the main focus for the player is really reaching the next checkpoint and while not knowing exactly how close you are is beneficial for suspense, getting some indicator for closeness to next save might also improve the suspense and will to retry should one fail. In the same vein having some health to the vessel perhaps combined with limited retries from checkpoints may also increase the intensity of the game.
In general though, a very well made entry.
I got to the panda/bear enemy before giving up. The game-loop felt innovative and I liked that the theme interpretation didn't imply stress though it kind of looked like it would, but instead was a matter of space. The spells felt quite tricky to line up well to maximize the output but at the same time it felt fair. It took me a little while to notice the two track meant the two different spell casters, so perhaps some sort of more feedback beyond localization of the spell to show indicate their meaning could have been great.
Very good entry!
I must admit I got a bit confused with how the time loops back as you clone yourself and how that affected what parts were done or not in what cycle of me playing at first. Very trippy experience and a good lesson in the complete confusion that time travel would cause (though your game doesn't explicitly call it that).
The art style and visuals were great.
I had quite a few of my earlier rather useless selves in the way confusing me but that felt as part of the charm, where as I now when I have a better understanding of how the game works it would probably be possible to do things quite organized instead.
Great entry.
I really liked the character design! The flatness but still not completely flat head. The game was a bit disorienting at start but became simpler and simpler the more flower were picked which was nice but also a bit unfortunate as it's generally better to add complexity as the game progresses.
It was generally easy to understand though, and the objectives were clearly marked visually so that compensated for the disorientation. It might have been nice if the transition between worlds took a bit longer and faded from one to the other. Though I get it would be much harder to construct.
Finally the lotus was a bit annoying to pick up since I ended up below it without the pick up trigger activating.
Fun little solitaire carcassonne. The 10 seconds game loop worked really well and the integrated music cues with time running out was very nice.
I noticed two things:
- It felt a bit odd that the first true game started off of the pieces I had kind of randomly placed during the tutorial... I think it would be better to restart with a clean table
- At one point the game didn't feel sufficiently zoomed out when I wanted to build up right under the current score UI so I had to place a tile in another spot on the same row that I wanted to have it expand and give me room in the center.
Otherwise really well made game.
Wow that was a great puzzle game. I was about to give up on a level until I read the text page intro once more and realized there was a hint in it. Still some of the levels really had me thinking for a while before I figured it out.
One UX thing that I noticed though was that I got lost about which pane I was on quite a lot, so perhaps the effect on the active rabbit was a bit too subtle, and perhaps the active pane should be standing out more too.
Another minor thing was that on one of the levels towards the end with a lot of panes and quite a few positions within each, the sprites got really really small and might have benefited from a simplified more stylized version.
Over all though a really great game.
I tried it out and I love the setting, art and music but I was very bad at being werewolf and managed only to get burnt and throw toad stools around. I then read up on you instructions and at least managed to lure out some of them, but they were to quick for me.
The trees that were helping me to hide were also obstructing vision quite a bit, which makes sense but made it hard to navigate. And on the sides the area with cover was rather thin. So it might have been nice to be able to partially see through the closest tree at least.
I really appreciated that the game could be played with a controller as are easier on tired arms.
And also I just realized I missed out on your game last LD! Why did I do that?!
@ava-skoog the game was easy on the wrists so no worries there. I know the feeling of trying to get everything to stick together and just not having time or energy for that little final thing called level design. Yeah last LD was quite stressed and I guess that made me more or less skip the entire playing and voting bit.
@annie-owl Thanks for the feedback! (I think I was venting my frustration about having spent too much time on the controls that ought to have been pretty simple and still didn't work like I wanted.)
@ava-skoog What do you mean, isn't taking your siblings life for granted a universally high mood thing :laughing: Very glad you got through to all endings.
I'd so much love to play back your games, but I think my laziness at not getting out my old wacom and instead drawing everything with the mouse made my wrists really sad. And they still hurt :crying_cat_face: so I think I have to wait some more days before I can try out everyone's the games.
@peachtreeoath glad you liked the shadows, I really wanted them in, but it was hard to get the lighting to agree at all and on first exports things got really crazy and looked completely different than when in the editor so I was quite surprised the game seems to be working for everyone.
@starboihooch yeah the berries are kind of evil.
@boaz4 glad you liked it and played through to see all endings! I totally agree that the hit-boxes could have been much better, but doing the game in 3D with basically sprites on quads in unity I was a bit lazy and just added a bunch of box and sphere colliders to somewhat cover the areas that I though most natural... but thinking on it I should probably have shrunk them all a bit to give some more tolerance.
@sciman101 I was really happy I figured out a simple system for the game to react when members die, but I didn't make it smart enough that I could have it dynamic transitioning between objectives so the two oldest and the youngest got most of the dialogue... but since it was quite a short game, it perhaps wasn't enough to elaborate everyone's different personality.
@pegasys Glad you liked the game. Perhaps the bug you felt was a combination of that the family member doesn't heal up between levels and that if you stand on or right next to a bush when it shrugs (or rattles) then it does damage and flings you away?
And to everyone else, thanks a lot for all the great feedback
@hayricakir that's odd, maybe I missed some state there. How many fights in are you? Perhaps it works well if you restart it? (Though I understand that is a bit annoying)
@hayricakir That's really weird because, mild spoiler, you should have more ants at home there in the beginning... When I try and start it on Firefox it starts up nicely and I get past the first scene without a problem... you don't happen get any console errors?
@hayricakir thanks, then at least I know where to look should I find the motivation to add the last planned boss-fight and get the controllers like I would have wanted them. But for the few hours left I don't think I'll be able to find a fix. My only suggestion then would be to clear cache and see if that helps or play in a private tab or something like that.
@hayricakir thanks for going through so many trials to be able to play the game!
I tried to let the web version load for a couple of minutes (at least 5) but there was just a spinning loader and nothing happened unfortunately.
As someone who might not be able to say they are on expert of scythe handling, but uses it regularly every year, I must say that this character has quite the peculiar style and needs to cut more strands with each swipe or they'll be stuck on even the smallest plot for ever :laughing:
Relaxing little game though.
Simple fun little game! I'd say, one thing that might be worth considering is that I can wait for how many passes of the line I like before I attempt the cut and the game might be a bit more interesting if one gets a bonus for cutting on the first pass, or cutting on the first pass several times in a row might trigger a fantastic cut. Perhaps if one doesn't cut on any of the first three passes it's a fail too.
Fantastic graphics really! And really great mood with the little flutter sound adding a lot. Some more music and perhaps sounds from the flames and such would have been great.
I was taken a bit by surprise the first time I failed because the weakness meter in the corner both didn't sufficiently attract my attention when it was filling up and wasn't entirely clear when exactly it would mean game over.
While starting each level felt a bit strange that I was zoomed in on the people and needed to flutter to get to see myself.
Very well made entry and hope you can gather some more votes the game these last hours.
Cool hostile game! I didn't last long enough to get the option to give up or not. After a while I tried interacting with the little settings-looking cogwheel in the lower right but it didn't do anything and mashing all keyboards produced no discernible effect either.
I liked the concept but I would have wanted to escape at my own leisure.
Wonderful leaf picking game, and I actually by chance had a cup of oolong tea next to me while playing! The mechanics was simple to understand and satisfying each time I managed to toss them monkeys around in a smart way, but I wasn't very good at it...
Two things I thought about.
Because the first branches are a bit ways up in the tree getting well off the ground is actually one of the hardest parts of the game and where I spent a lot of the energy and it feels a bit odd to make the player face that right off the bat. So perhaps give the monkeys a bit of platform to start on or let them spread out in the bush from start...
Then the grab area for the tails could be a bit wider in the early phases of the game to make it more forgiving that way and shrink (possibly quite soon, like one or two leaf rounds) to the size it is now. That way we who are not that good get somewhere each time and makes you more invested to keep playing with a bit of sunk cost.
Great entry!
(The simple interactions might lend themselves to mobile :wink: )
Fun arcade game. I played on the controller and it took a little while to get a feel for forward on one stick and turning left-right on another. For me the speed would have felt more natural one on each bumper and then the turning on the left stick. But not a big issue.
Enjoyed the game, great feel on the title screen and fun to play.
Great entry! I must admit that the first level took me a while to complete but then it got easier once I understood the mechanics. Lovely graphics and funny sound effects. Very well made.
I played to something like the 12th level without loosing a life. Quite fun, but it seemed like there was no particular benefit to eating most of the crop or letting the harvesters clean out the field. Which felt a bit strange too. I also never saw any of the special crop. Not sure if there was something I didn't understand there. I played the Jam version.
Fun little game. I liked how it started with the vignette and freeing you to play by removing it. It was quite deceptive though to say that one should harvest all things when rocks were bad and tanks couldn't be harvested. Perhaps clarify that it's all the living things / animate things.
Love the illustrations and a really nice story to play through. I especially loved that it was a very causal game so I could play without stressing my exhausted wrists. I think I figured out two recipes, and liked that the game gave me an option to study them by brewing for myself every now and then. So in a way that became one of the main objectives, and could have been played on more, to find paths through the game where I got to drink most tea myself.
It was great that there was a save and load feature, but it could have been a bit clearer (even though it said I died) when the game reached an end and needed load or restart.
The little twist about the poster in the epilogue was great too.
But I have to ask: What it really thymus (lymph organ in animal bodies) that I served everyone? I mean that does make the game a bit more spicy, or was it thyme (herb) that it was supposed to be?
I played it until everything was maxed out. As a biologist, I must say it felt a bit odd that the fruits came before the leaves and it was a bit confusing too in the beginning that the progression meant I had to start the tree over and over. I thought I did something wrong the first handful of trees. But then I enjoyed it, had a good feeling to it, but a bit sad that each tree had to die as soon as it got beautiful.
Fun worldbuilding! I found myself (on computer) trying to drag the option to either side at first because of the example you had included here, which didn't matter too much but was a little confusing first. Perhaps you could disable text selection of the story-decision content.
I also got a bit confused about what the time was supposed to do. What it might be counting up to, if something was to happen at a certain time... that type of thing. Perhaps it should be counting down instead so one knows the dreaded 0? And perhaps each decision gives some extra seconds? But also people read at very different speeds to combining reading with time/stress might be problematic.
Anyways interesting world you created.
The graphics were really great, but I didn't quite understand the game-play. I got hurt without understanding why and didn't know what my progress was against the enemy.
Interesting game, with well written narrative. I don't know if I missed some strategy, but I didn't feel like I was given much chance to optimize the ability to make as many people as possible to move on. But I did get 4 of them at least after the intro bit. I don't particularly mind though, it felt quite fitting to the game that it was short and that there really wasn't much to do to get more than a few seeds. (Or I was unlucky)
Great harvest spin, and simple arcade game. I played against the AI and won. It feels though as there was some lack of strategic depth or skill in the game due to where the lorry was placed and how all people converged around the door so it was possible to just stand still near the door to max collection speed and then run to the deposit area and then back.
I found the shooting felt nice too, but I would have liked to not have to click it each time after a while it felt annoying. For the longest time I also thought the crafter didn't do anything because it looked like I selected and unselected things without knowing what it meant. So first thing there would be to indicate what can be crafted and make it more obvious when the user has actually crafted.
Nice entry that with some work, perhaps a bit of controller support, could become really nice.
I liked the style and music. I didn't quite understand the puzzles, and thought there were some obvious solutions that for some reason the game said was wrong. And there were some characters I couldn't really give anything. Or so it seemed. Not sure if there was a benefit to having a timer on it. Could have just as well have gotten free time to run around and try out the combinations. That way it wouldn't have mattered as much when I didn't agree with what was correct or not. But cute game all in all.
Really unique game! It took me a while on the first painting because I though it was red enough there in the middle so was about to give up on it... so in that regard, it might be worth considering making an even easier first level where there's no almost right alternative just to let the player know that when they've done right they also get that visual ring around the circle feedback.
I really loved the twist in how after a while there was some gravity, and I feel like it could be expanded with different fields or areas behaving slightly differently. But not at all to make it a hard game or anything, but to add some more variation to add to the joy of navigating around the paintings.
As someone who barely ever manages to add music, and many times have made silent games, I should perhaps not say this, but I think some experimental music or if music was created based on movement of circle and its coloration would have added a lot to the mood of the game.
Very happy I found it and got to try it out
I didn't quite understand how to save any humans, but I loved the walking animation bits and the graphics in general had a nice feel to it.
I feel like it was a bit too hard to find all the resources. I think I got all but one of each kind and I had walked about quite a lot so it didn't feel fun to have to find the very last.
I think in part this could have been solved by having a couple of extra of each kind scattered around.
The game area also seemed a bit too large without that or some assistance, e.g. fog of war minimap or similar to let you know where you've been.
I don't know if I missed something in the tutorial, but there was absolutely no way I could harvest the grown crops myself. I clicked on everything with all buttons but nothing happened. So I cheated and got harvesters and robots, just to see how it would work when upgrading and then the harvester could harvest some, but it had great difficulties and seemed restricted more or less to the plot that it spawned in which was problematic when the planter ufos filled up fields. I also feel like the initial planting is a bit too tedious. If I select a seed I ought to be able to repeatedly plant it or plant entire rows of it at ease with as few clicks as possible.
The graphics was really nice though, the game looked great and the sound were also great.
At first I was a bit confused about what to do, or rather I was harvesting a lot of seeds but there seemed to be nothing I could do with them... then I found the bucket but that didn't help. So I had to read the instructions to find a way to work the fields, by that time I had almost 100 seeds :laughing:
So I think the game has to help the player a bit more in finding the tools need by some means, the character could say something like "Where did I leave the pitchfork?" if one doesn't get it and has accumulated a few seeds.
Then, perhaps because my game was so unbalanced by many seeds, it sort of felt like the bucket could have lasted for watering more than one field.
Perhaps the monster veggies could mutate the crops too so that they become monsters rather than something to be eaten if one doesn't keep them off the fields that are growing or if one takes too long before harvesting crop that is "ready".
I also found a bug, perhaps. When retrying a second time, I already had all the tools and kept all the seeds from my previous attempt.
Well written and with voice lines! that's something one doesn't see often i LD games. I can't say I understood all of the instructions, but at least I got a star, and almost reached the second. But it does feel within the lore of the game that investigating the tax returns should be somewhat confusing and that one shouldn't be able to ace it at first attempt. Well made!
Cute little game. The attack and accidentally harvest mechanism was kind of fresh, but it was also very confusing each time I accidentally harvested a teleportation fruit. In general the plants were not distinct enough or didn't sufficiently convey what they were doing from how they looked that I never learned which did which. In part this might have also been because one has no control over what one plants.
But in general a cute little game.
Very interesting controls. Unfortunately they didn't work very well for me and my setup. I played the web-version with a single mic and headphones. While setting the level I could hear myself through the mic so it was the right mic selected, but there was a huge delay on the sound and it kept repeating itself and I had to put it on next to the background dB level for it to at all register shouts. Which meant that with the but of the sound coming back over and over made it so the big character kept screaming once I got it screaming and there really was no way of controlling it.
I managed to get some apples though and it was a very cute art-style to it too. The nice music at the start screen could well have continued in the background during the game too.
Again very interesting concept
Interesting simple arcade game, with surprising depth to it (though admittedly I'm not the type that would be sucked in to try and get better and better score here). But I think it would be possible to increase the how addictive it is by stopping for a second on death and making the score a bit clearer and adding a high-score.
Personally I would have liked to have some extra lives and limiting the monster so it could only hurt you once per bounce or something like that (give the player one or two seconds of invincibility).
As this is a clicker, I was having fun. But it was a bit easy and all upgrades were pretty much available from the beginning in contrast to how one normally needs to progress a bit to unlock some of them.
I tried about a while and was actually about to give up on it before even managing to activate the scythe even once. And it wasn't so much that it's weird that I had to move as that there weren't actually any instructions what button to use, neither for the use of arrow keys, and that there was a jump. I didn't quite understand how to activate the shift thingy. My meter in the bottom right corner was full and I had reaped all people I could find.
I think I died a couple of times, the game did at least restart but I wasn't able to interact with the growing red meaty things and all of the sudden something said 0 percent at the top. I did manage to read the note on the wall though and I liked the feeling the game was giving off but I never got anywhere.
I must admit I'm really confused how this game works. It looks really neat and has a good mood, but I finally manage to place some workers and harvest some materials but had no clue how to activate the factories.
I had to try it myself too. A pity I couldn't harvest the other player! The sideways flying birds were funny.
Really cool entry, I like the controls! Feels like I haven't seen stuff like that before. And though I've never lived with a robot, the movement felt quite realistic and worked well with the feet.
It would have been great with some hectic music and maybe the character could say stuff when the robot isn't doing the right thing. Like getting stuck at the wall for a bit. Or if there seems to be no progress in specks collected or real progress towards closest speck being made. That would have added a lot to the mood and humor of the game.
But as a very interesting puzzle I liked it a lot.
Nice game. I got them all to allow me to harvest them. I did miss one dialogue though because I clicked forward to the next part in the same area that a button appeared and that made me accidentally select that button. So perhaps it would be nice to ensure that buttons can't be clicked the first parts of a second that they are shown. And that they aren't only triggered by button up, but require button down on them first too.
I'm also confused, after looking at the instructions a bit I managed to plant quartz in some locations and select matching buildings and place them on the same plot but they seemed to sprout as a flower rather than quartz or the building. And clicking on the flowery thing made it disappear without me earning any money back... so I'm mostly quite confused.
I liked the mood in this, and played it to the end. Some parts felt a bit slow with how little happened and so, but I also get that it was intentional and it definitely was within my tolerance. Fun story, but would have been nice if one had some pets and perhaps kids too, to prolong the story a bit.
I got to the end. The game explained itself nicely and there was some strategic depth to the two types of tiles, but I feel like the problems that the player faced in the various levels were quite similar, so perhaps it might have benefited from having a bit fewer levels and introduced more configurations that challenged the player in different ways. Or perhaps there was a need for other tiles, or more fields in the same level to harvest to keep increasing the complexity.
There was also something about the countdown to zero, which I completely understood, but it also felt a bit unnatural. Perhaps it would be better if it was counting down to one and and didn't mention moves but e.g. days because it's not really the move that harvests but where you end up after the move.
Still a very nice puzzle game and getting the game done is always the most important thing!
I really liked the art style of this game. And tried it until I had unlocked all four types of trees, but then it felt like there was missing some progression to the clicker to keep me wanting to play.
I also got a bit confused in the upgrades. It felt like sometimes I could and could not buy even if I had enough money. And it took a while until I saw that there were tabs and then I already had enough to buy all kinds of trees and max out the upgrades (or so I think because I could not buy more even if they only cost e.g. 30)...
One way to sort of prolong the game would be if each successive upgrade of a certain type cost 10x more than the previous. E.g. 6 > 60 > 600 on the apple upgrades.
First I was about to give up on the first level because I didn't understand how to start the simulation, then it also felt a bit odd that I had to go back and forth between the levels to be able to reset them. I also made some sort of spinning monster where all tiles had rotating white arrows on the first real level and the animation happened so fast that there was no way of learning much from its progression. Maybe that was because when I couldn't get the simulations to start I increased the speed to max... :thinking:
Interesting concept though!
I got to casting the "Find Evil" potion but then I walked around a bit and nothing seemed to have changed. I spent each level more or less systematically walking north east until I got the final potion and I'm not sure if the find evil triggered a diamond shape and perhaps that was meaning to show direction? If so it was pointing towards south west and I walked for quite some time in that direction but there was nothing and the diamond didn't move or change in any way. If I was supposed to go to some specific place, then the world would have to be much smaller or that place needs to spawn in relation to where I'm at when I cast that spell.
I liked the premise and the game-play with the fifth potion doing something special each time. But I was quite surprised first time and could have actually missed that central mechanic so I think the special potion needs to stand out a lot so the player knows they need to cast it (and for the final? level that there's no point in casting it more than once (or if there is a point in casting it more than once, show it clearer)).
It also felt like the enemies that I needed to make the final potion were way to far in between or random. I think I got 3 at the same time at one point and then had to walk for ages until I saw another.
All in all though, a good entry.
I managed to get to the end, which with these types of entries doesn't happen all too often. That I did manage with full health says something about it being kind of on the easy side at the moment. But I'm not complaining. The controls were nice in their simplicity and it was very satisfying to be able to wack with both arms at the same time.
For increased complexity one could imagine a second row of crops though it will add two keys... or zooming out to have a bit more slots where they can appear. But it was fun and a bit stressful as it was now.
I managed to get a couple of points, but it was really tricky to start pushing the squares. For some reason I only managed to push them first down and then along the bottom and if I lost them for one second I sort of had to reset by getting them to the lower left corner of the screen.
That said, the pushing was kind of neat and could have been made really fun if, for example the mouth was moving around and was not at all into eating the stuff one was pushing its way.
The fastest clock got me! Fun puzzle, quite easy to understand the controls, but obviously I didn't fully grasp the implications of the rule set since I got stuck.
It could have been cool if the game kept track of number of attempts made and number of tiles used in the solution and such to give you a grade.
Nice puzzle entry!
Rare to see a educational game and also at the same time a game that escapes the expected boundaries and uses the developer console to play itself.
I wont repeat the feedback I gave on discord again, but a tiny other thing was that for a short while I was a little unsure about how to accomplish the end goal on the last level, but since it was the only option more or less, it wasn't much of a problem.
I won! But we both struggled quite a lot. There was quite a few things to take in at start. At round 3 or so I think I had it figured out quite well with selecting which keys / arguments to use depending on the audience and attempting some combos in there. Perhaps put a bit in the description about how the audience interacts with the scoring and clarify how the rounds carry over (or don't) and sum up to a winner.
I'm not sure if the game got harder and harder, but it would fit the theme quite well if the pace picked up with every round and the need for precision increased too.
The graphics was neat controls worked well and all in all a very solid entry.
@malcolmdjgr :face_palm: now it should work
@ava-skoog oh I should ofc gotten bad AI-generated music and sound effects too. Why didn't I think about that. I think I was a bit too put down by the theme, too much pollen in the air and that the game didn't feel fun that I didn't have the energy to work on the controls. And as usual, when I try, who knows how it works, I hit around 50% of the babies or so. For everyone else, I expect that they are quite hard to manage and there isn't enough reward for failing.
I got to convince my partner to help me play your game seeing as it is two-player, and I'm so bad at rhythm games that attempting it solo will be very hard.
@apple-dash thanks for the thorough feedback! I didn't really want to opt out of graphics, but how I read the rules and Mike's comments on the subject, I think that's how things stand at present. Agree with the women, I did make them catch a bit up in the air but I should have at least doubled that hitbox. And my first intent was to have them actually try to catch the babies but I ran out of will to continue and figure out reasonable predictions about where the babies would end up.
@misterkeefe You are right, maybe a re-used baby should be allowed but count as 0.5 delivery or something like that :thinking: The morals here are tricky :laughing:
@a-huua glad you found the art and style uncanny! Even though the gameplay mechanics needed _some_ tuning.
@studiocherno thanks for the feedback and are you _The Cherno_ of the Hazel engine and youtube channel I've been watching on and off these past couple of years?!
Glad you liked the elevation based camera zoom and weren't too disturbed by how unbalanced / janky the controls were :laughing:
I managed to get to day two, but was also confused by some buttons seeming to withdraw money without doing anything and also that it seems the view area should have been larger since the workers exited the screen.
@glaciereclipse I'd recommend putting the instructions and such in the post up top so everyone will see them. Last minute tweaks are always very dangerous :laughing:
I played it through twice just to make sure I had understood things, and I noticed on the second time that I had not at all the first play-through. Or it depends, I was a very bad comedian the first run and that felt quite in tune with the game. Interesting mechanics with score depending on timing and getting the feedback from the audience between the jokes.
But it was quite hard to know exactly what was a good delivery or not and it would have been nice if the game did give you more hints while performing as it in its present form doesn't really encourage that much retries.
Several times I accidentally started telling the next joke right after the previous, so it would have been nice if there were some stuff stopping that a bit. E.g. needing to press space and extra time between jokes and/or a bit of time when a new joke is revealed when you cannot start telling that.
Nice vibes! I liked flying around and delivering packages.
I should say though that I was about to give up, because for quite some time I didn't understand how to fly, that there was a double jump to activate it... I don't think I saw any instruction on it.
Also I spent quite some time just flying around before I realized that I should press Q near people to activate their dialogs... I was expecting something to happen with those I could interact with, some prompt or such.
With regards to the controls, since it was such a restful game and since one needed to fly rather far, I would have liked if while on the broom I didn't need to press down W to keep going.
On ground it also felt like the turning radius was more of a flight thing than reasonable while walking around, which made it a bit harder than it should to walk up to people.
I managed some minor bugs too like running in the air while on the broom and flying on the ground without the broom.
The music was relaxing, the landscapes neat and I opted for ending 1... though that place some where far off seemed tempting.
All in all though a very solid entry.
Fun entry. I must admit though that I was quite confused about the delivery rules on the last part of the game so I just mashed all XYAB buttons when close to the lit-up house. Perhaps it wasn't even the house but the mailbox that was the target?
Splendid graphics, audio, atmosphere! I found it extremely hard to navigate about at all so the first moving enemy was much too much for me. I would have liked to continue and I like the idea of how the uncoordinated controls work but it just was too hard for my brain. Perhaps if the character wouldn't be turning on the spot when walking one leg forward, but dragging the other leg after and slowly turning, then it would have had the same principle but easier to get where one wants :thinking:
Really great entry. I think I got to level 7 before giving up, or was it 6? The one after abilities had been taken away. I must say I enjoyed the slide jump kill jump kill things but I didn't figure out I should do a slam after that or such which meant there were quite a few leaps of faith with just luck the times I didn't land on enemies. But on at least on level I managed to stay airborne from the start to the goal more or less. Controls were nice and well polished game overall.
This was really really hard. Just trying to pass the package about and knowing which robot was which... but well made and interesting use of the theme. I managed to complete the first level after a bunch of attempts, and with that in mind I would suggest making the first enemies - or enemies on the first levels a bit easier. Perhaps only taking one hit and slower to shoot.
Nice game though!
Cool entry. I don't know if I missed anything but upon pollinating the 3 flowers in the cave I wasn't quite sure what next to do. Well written and fun to play. There were some glitches with loot not being interactable if, e.g. if it ended up too far down on the screen and such and was unsure if there was any way to know or decide how picking up skills would replace which existing and so on.
That car really did sharp turns! Love your use of the theme, but I noted that if I drove up to random people that were not on my list and just kissed them twice the game thought I was doing the right thing.
Cute game.
Beetles! I enjoyed the art style and the game was very easy to understand and play which is great. The controls were quite good, but it's extremely hard to make great platforming controls. (Personally I always fail catastrophically)
I was sort of hoping things would get really weird there in the end and was a bit disappointed that the game didn't continue after ingesting the treat. And I wish I could jump on the mushrooms.
But all in all a solid entry.
Great entry. There should be more kittens in LD in general, much to few kittens. I doubt I got a very good score, but I enjoyed jumping around and pouncing on the yarn. I should say I forgot about gliding as soon as I didn't need it and it would have been fun to have a reason to explore that mechanic in depth.
I really liked the swimming walking transitions, very neat. Visited some bubbles and managed to get up on the roof, but I didn't find anything much to do. The camera was a bit annoying at times that it put you into the ground and such so it was hard to see where you were going, especially when swimming
I must say, I'm a little confused, just to be sure I didn't miss anything. The game ends right as you stand up and view the forest? And it says the demo is over?
The art style was nice, the interactions clear. I didn't hear any music or sounds either, but perhaps that was a missed opt-out?
I really liked the visuals in this game. It took me a couple of attempts to complete the first level and it would have been nice with some clear indicator of how close I was getting to success... e.g counting up towards a `x / y` saved. It got really stressful managing all paths on the second level already so I'm not sure I even want to see how the third looks :laughing:
First time I played I spawned right next to the tent and tried shooting the gun some while in the tent until I ran out of bullets, then I jumped around a bit before I wondered why the compass couldn't make up it's mind about what was north, so I walked for a while towards the red arrow, but didn't find anything but a whole lot of enemies. And since I couldn't shoot them it got a bit funny with me launching them into space and them sending me flying every now and then.
I force quit (was there a nice exit?) and retried. This time the world looked completely different, so procedural generation was really diverse in outcome for a game-jam! This time there was no tent nearby and since I didn't find anything in the north/red direction of the compass the last time I walked some in the blue direction. I didn't find the tent though.
The graphics was really neat, though when surrounded by more then ten enemies it got rather bright. :laughing: The controls worked well, tried both with controller and on keyboard. It was a bit hard knowing what to press on controller since the guides were for keyboard only.
An interesting bug using the controller in the menu pressing down and up sometimes I could press up several times in a row and it still had controls selected (or at least made the effect of it being selected).
Nice entry overall!
Nice casual game! I couldn't make up my mind on if I should focus on getting as little travel time or as few gold spent but I ended up with a compromise at about 112 days and 269 gold
I was thinking about such interpretations too but more along the lines of removing or outlawing male servant uniforms... I loved the sounds and the graphics were need. It would have been more fun if there was obstacle or challenges while moving the liver. Perhaps the scalpels that were lying around could have been happily dancing and needed to be avoided. The liver could have had a bit of mind of it's own and the target tray could have been on a rickety cart that sometimes shifted position. Stuff along those lines.
Great break from all the usual deliveries though!
It took me a little while to get the hang of the objectives in the game but after a few attempts, I managed to collect 5 people. It might be good to explain how to play the game here on LD (collect heart -> then collect old person, avoid happy people)
The driving controls took some getting used to but were interesting. It became too challenging together with the short time available when I got unlucky and a heart spawn right next to two happy people. I think either allowing for a bit more maneuverability (smaller turning radius) or more time would be good.... or the spawning of hearts and old people should avoid sectors with happy people as much as possible. You could divide the area into a grid and only consider squares that have the lowest occupancy number as potential spawn places. Then the hearts and old people could spawn at random within the selected squares each round.
Graphics were nice with that reduced palette and in general a cool game
Great atmosphere, really nice visual style and good suspense building. The game plot does leave some questions that perhaps doesn't have to be answered since it's a bit dreamy, but... perhaps the voice in the game could have said something about the missing passengers while walking back in the train. Like "Maybe everyone else got off" - "Is it only me left?". That could also help with answering the question if going back is the right way. It builds a progression, while hopefully not ruining the spooky buildup. The game was genuinely scary. Perhaps the doors going back in the train could have had a clearer locking sound too to explain the need for keys and perhaps the character could have turned around and pointed that out the first time it happened. But everything doesn't have to be explained either.
I had the visual glitch on the itch.io build in Firefox, the vignetting effect didn't show up as darkening but clipped out the train cabin and showed the outside. Fortunately it's dark and gloomy outside so it didn't disturb me.
The sounds also clipped a little, not sure if it happened when they started / ended or if happened when they were switched out by other sounds.
All in all though, a really really great entry!
Very well executed Scanner Sombre entry! I very much enjoyed navigating the maze and found the way to the exit. I mostly used the right button scanner because I felt like the left one was a bit concentrated cone of particles to be much helpful. It was just about the right size for the content. Of course it would have been nice with some storytelling in the game, but that is hard to fit in with the limited time. One type of storytelling would of course have been to leave object that the player can discover while scanning without any need to text or similar narration.
If I had one gripe, it was that there seemed to be no, or almost no coyote time (allow jump just slightly after leaving actual ground) while jumping and that made me have to retry some obstacles. Fortunately not one of the later that was a really long sequence.
One idea that popped into my head when reading the quote upon completion was that it could be cool if the scans weren't driven by clicking but by voice input using the base frequency, volume and such to shape the scans.
@ava-skoog glad you liked the mechanic! The `calm` command was one of these things I spent a bit too much time on and that wasn't really needed with the levels and obstacles I managed to put into the game. Its basic idea was to give the player a bit more time on individual complicated parts, but the game became much more boring with it activated too so it should probably have been scrapped. There were so many things scrapped, like mutating which letters gets locked and unlocked throughout the game -- perhaps while playing, passing through a scrambling ray the player would have had to hastily organize their memory again before something bad happens.
@juicybrucey the command entry really could have gotten some more love if I had any time and energy left. Perhaps if the user could toggle input direction row-wise <-> column-wise by repeated clicking on a selected cell it would have helped some. At least it wouldn't have been as annoying inputting vertical words. And perhaps also not filling out non-locked positions from start.
@fraanns it very much was a rushed entry :laughing:
@igor-morgun yeah I really liked the idea of having the player be part of the mental functions of the character too.
@lincolnsalles admittedly it is a bit obscure, but if you enter the words that are shown on the ground either by rows or columns you activate buttons right below the letter field and you can press those to control the robot
@geckoo1337 @bad-fetus I was planning to include an antagonistic and ironic narrator that would help the player understand all the unexplained things. But time and energy ran out. For example the ability to click on letters in the inventory to skip to the one you want to change rather than typing until you get to where you want.
@neowedge If you enter both MOVE and LEFT (and/or RIGHT). You can fit them all at the same time. You get buttons that control the robot. The robot is EXCITED (when you start) so it will repeat the last received command, making it a little challenge to maneuver it around the trap to the flag.
Cool idea, and well executed game. I like the graphics and the absurdly impractical interactions and physics. I did wish for some minor jump or throwing things up a little bit higher but all in all a very nice experience.
Great Sudoku variant. I managed to beat a board on normal mode at least and it perhaps I shouldn't say too much as I didn't try it on hard, but I feel like the:
!> single bit numbers seem to give a lot more information than others and greatly limits the possibilities.
It was great that the game was helpful in showing the bits of all numbers, else I would probably have given up.
At times I would have liked being able to take notes about possible values in a cell without guessing but within the scope of the compo, I very much understand why it would have been one too many features.
It also felt a bit like cheating that the game let me know when I guessed wrong, and I would have liked being able to disable that and instead only get evaluated when the board completes.
Perhaps you should submit it to the "Cracking The Cryptic"-youtube channel...
Coprophagy just doesn't appear as often as it should in LD games. When I saw what came out by the end of the first passage, I though to myself: "I hope this game takes me places". It did.
Very interesting game to play through.
It took me a few retries but then I finally managed to fill out the grid. Nice word puzzle.
Nice interpretation of the theme. As the others, I both was confused with wanting to use the key on the lock of the box, expecting the exit to be there about. It would have been nice if there was a vague proximity effect on the portal like a pulsating sound or similar that vaguely tells the distance.
The interaction was also a bit annoying at times, especially that I had to rotate and place all tiles even those I wasn't interested in placing for where I wanted to go. This would probably be greatly helped with hotkeys or drag an drop tiles with rotation on mouse scroll wheel or similar.
The monster was also rather hard to get caught by, I get that it might be problematic if it's too smart and aggressive since the player can only move one step at a time. But the game would have felt more interesting if it seemed like it was actually hunting me.
That was a great entry. I got stuck on the cubes, I did have the right idea, but it seemed to finicky and hard to get them stacked that I gave up and thought it must be something else. So perhaps making them just slightly smaller and giving the monster a line or two that sound positive when the player puts one on top of the other and when picking up the third. Just to hint them in the right direction. The password sequence up in the air, I don't know if I understood correctly, but I did solve it fairly quickly by listening to the feed back and some mild brute force.
I really enjoyed the game, very well made!
I must be missing something, I can punch some things in my cell, but not the guard and they block the exit and don't enter the cell looking for me when they cant see me.
I love clickers more than I should and adding a time constraint with a world that gets smaller and smaller it just made for great game play with tension building up towards the end. I just managed to get the rocket off a few seconds before the island would have disappeared. Great work. The game looked beautiful. My only wish would have been that it was a bit clearer which tiles could be manually mined and not. And from an accessibility standpoint I need to conserve my clicking because of weak wrists and while it wasn't that heavy on clicking, it would have been nice with some feature to not have to do as much of that and perhaps a building or excavator that could prepare space for the coastal buildings.
I must be missing something. The fly does not have enough energy when I play to reach the exit pipe of the first level / room. Neither by flying directly over towards it holding right button and up, nor by landing on the floor and resting up and then trying to get the right elevation. Also doesn't work to let up go intermittently while flying forward. And there seems to be no reset of the levels so I have to reload the game fully to retry.
On level 1 I just end up on the floor, nothing kills me, nothing happens, there's no way to get up to the exit pipe.
Just to show you in case it helps.
Holding right and up pressed from the pipe until power runs out: theboxfly-frompipe.gif
Trying to get enough elevation by holding up pressed after landed on the floor until power runs out: theboxfly-bottom.gif
Tested both in Firefox and Chrome and tried playing in fullscreen as well as original size.
Yay, now it worked and I don't feel silly for not being able to fly better :laughing: I really liked the fly and it's animations. Though not really working with the theme, I think the mechanics of the controls might have been more exciting if you had to fly longer distances with intermittent falling / resting while avoiding electrocution and other fly traps.
Cute game, I had to retry some on a few of the levels but in general the balance was very good. It feels like there's a ton of possibility to make great levels with this limited rule set. Feels like the it would have been great if it not only introduced a set of mechanics but also continued to build on it. E.g. the jumping on to the turtle's back to gain the needed height wasn't a trick I had to reuse and perfect.
Fun twist on the classical puzzle. Unfortunately the game crashed on the third or fourth level when I placed my third marker it stopped responding to any input. I'm pretty sure that I placed it on the correct spot, if that helps.
I liked the dialogs and the graphics, though pacing-wise it was quite a lot of information and dialogue in the beginning and it might have been nice if it had been broken up with some small example of what was being explained.
Really cute and lovely game. I didn't play too focused, but I think I got into a bit of a pickle the second time I played where I all I got was 3 blue seeds and the game spawned a boxed in blue flower in the corner with no valid placements for it. Perhaps I had a chance with the knowledge at hand to play it differently before, but it did feel like I was actually just unlucky... so maybe the game just uses a simple random and doesn't check that there is some possible way forward given the information that the player has... if so it feels a little bit unfair.
But that would be hard to code for a jam though.
Graphics were stunning and mood very nice. The game was very clear except for one thing. It could have informed me that it was game over and that I didn't have where to place the seed.
And also, when I got my highscore, I accidentally pressed restart when I was about to look something up in the book... so perhaps that should come with a warning or something or not be located next to the book.
Really well made game. A lot of attention payed to various details making the experience feel very fleshed out. Can't have too much of bad puns either, and that it's a destructive building sim was also cool. I got 9 of the achievements, I think and tried to figure out how to get some more, but with very little to no hints it felt a bit too much try and retry figuring them out. Though not achievement kosher, but since achievements were kind of the end goal of the game, perhaps it could have said how many new ones of them were still possible at any given time in the play to hint at different ways of playing.
As always very interesting game!
Something quite odd happened to me though. The first time, I played on Firefox (in a private window, if that matters) and I ended up in a cursed world after the first level or so where there were no flags to reach. It was all very strange. You can see it in my playthrough below.
Then I rebooted it in Chrome and I got the real levels.
Unfortunately I forgot to hit record again as I got too busy trying to beat them.
It was fun, and frustrating, how summoned players often assumed (probably so did I) that they need not wait a bit and just rushed to the the button or what they assumed would be closed trap doors without giving me much time to react to what they were doing. So it often took two playthroughs at least.
There could be some quality of life improvements there. The game could restart the level with a slight delay when everyone is dead. And it would be nice if I could see who I summoned last attempt somehow so I don't have to memorize that person X dashes towards the button and Y goes for the traps.
The last couple of very intricate levels I got by very easily because I accidentally discovered a cheat. The buttons and spikes don't cover their entire tiles, so you can just walk along the edge without triggering anything. That should probably not be the case.
If someone what plays after me summons me on those levels they'll be quite perplexed at first as I just ignore what's in the way.
Very cool concept though. Well made.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ecKmBVZsnJ8
Absolutely stunning graphics and great audio work makes for a superb mood trip!
You should know better with the scoping though :laughing: Seriously ambitious.
Again, graphics where great, not only the details in it but the visual effects placed on-top. The font seemed very fitting choice, but if there's one thing with the style, it's when we get to the presenting evidence phase. The logs honestly don't look as great as everything else in the game. And given that as far as I could tell, I didn't really need them to solve the puzzles, I think they distracted a bit more than they added.
The story was cool too, though I must admit it was a bit confusing at times since the drawings where so suggestive and I'm honestly not sure if it was all linear or they came out in order responding to how I clicked on one or the other person. Really hard to pull off without being a bit confusing so I'm not complaining really.
It also took me a little while to figure out that I could click on things in the photos. Or rather to find the stuff that was clickable. I think I did search them a little at first but all I found was the time stamps. I'm guessing those were meant to be incorporated in further puzzles but time ran out? Basically though, perhaps it could have been split up with a super simple first confrontation where it is really obvious what should be clicked in the photo to teach me the importance of really scanning them.
It wasn't any serious issue, it just took me a couple of attempts to get it.
Very well made entry! Always interesting to see what you cook up.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/nXFWK7V_Crs
Fun game! Easy to understand and kind of hard but not so much that it became a problem.
I first tried with controller and I must say it felt like the movement / bindings were a bit unnatural / off there. When I switched to mouse and keyboard it made much more sense and I could get further. It might honestly be something like the shots and actions being a bit too fast for the sensitivity I had when playing with the controller. But I didn't fidget around with the settings.
I did end up outside the map at one point and had no way to get back. And that was on my thus far best run. It kind of sucked that I couldn't restart that level with my current health and that I had to close the game and reboot it.
I think? I kind of got to the end when I got a level with just clones of me, so I figured perhaps I should shoot them and something will happen. But what happened was that the game crashed / Godot froze.
Otherwise the graphics were neat and clear. Levels were well made in size and complexity. Sounds were also good. All in all, well done!
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/cabQWTrpabo
@magnusfurcifer Yay you got to the fishing! Glad you found navigation worked. I'm guessing that seasoned dungeon crawler experts fair a bit better with spinners and instant movements.
I think you correctly summed up the whole story. It didn't make so much sense, and as for the wall texts, one of the main points for them were that all mice where numbered so that there was a way if one missed any of them to notice and go back hunting for it.
One thing I am considering for a post-jam version is to add a bit of difference on the ground or wall tiles on each loop of the game, or at least for each exit out of the pentagram hub room so that it's easier to identify which way to go when stepping of the pentagram. (And to not start the clock until you leave the pentagram tile)
@jezzamon yes that was the one and only ending! good work getting there!
@annie-owl So the blod-clouds were "fireball" style traps that damages you / steals your time. I didn't get the interactions perfect and they move kind of slow (so that you have time to run up towards them), which also makes it a bit too easy to run into them. And then in general when time ran out you were sent back. If I hadn't run out of time/energy the last day, I would have added a nicer transition when resetting to the spawn and also added a sound on each second when time was getting short.
@footlettuce thanks for your feedback and... did I forget to update the platform versions and only update the web one with the final version?! Because there should be no difference to them really... That'd be unfortunate. Perhaps I should hide those versions then and only let people play web-version! I'm not sure I understand your comment on reading the text making your disoriented though
@footlettuce thanks so much and glad you enjoyed it. The tile there, with the hint on the floor is a spinner that rotates you 90 degrees upon entry to the tile in the direction of the hint animation. So to get past this particular one you'd press forward to enter it, it turns you 90 degrees to the right, then you turn left to counter that rotation and continue forward.
The thing about graphics is that my skills are in that department are very limited. But I've learnt a few tricks. For this game I selected 3 colors (near black, near white and a red) and that's the only stuff I used. All other shades comes from lighting of the scene. I also used the same limited set of brushes while painting. Adding fog to the camera, a bit of vignette and some noise and that's pretty much it.
@detectivelosos thanks for the feedback! The funny thing about the room you got stuck in is that the room proper is just 5x5 tiles and the entire game isn't larger than 23x23 tiles in total. But I also got a bit stuck there in that room when I wasn't careful. I actually didn't plan on having the spinners in that tricky room spin you in the direction you probably should go. But when I noticed that what I had done I kind of liked it. That if you get lost there it's because you don't listen to where they point you. But it's a bit evil since the first spinner you encounter in the game is the opposite. So the game isn't exactly helping the player there.
@ava-skoog
!> Did you miss the button right by where Lennie the Third was placed? Pressing it should open up both a way forward and a short-cut from the original room. From the spawn room, after clicking the button, the short-cut is visible if you turn right when reset to the pentagram.
I don't think I can spoil-tag images...
@ava-skoog spinnerroomhint.png
@ava-skoog Thank you for being so persistent! You are right that I might have slightly overdone the number of spinners... and thank you for pointing out that they are spinning in the wrong direction! I don't know how I could have missed that all the times they've spun me around.
I'm planning to use this project to try and make a nice smooth transition dungeon crawler controller so with that instead of instant stepping, I think it will help with the spinning a bit too.
There was a bug with the "fireball" collision detection too that didn't raycast in the direction of the movement, but in the direction of the camera, which might have been some of those odd "why did that hit me" moments.
I did this entry in the middle of the voting period for a very nice dungeon crawler jam on itch, which in part probably explains the density of spinners and traps, but I also kind of wanted to see how much of it I could get away with. And the answer is that in particular in the 5x5 room where I think you and most people got lost. Three spinner might have been one too many with the low amount of decorations and instant movement that the game has now.
Well made puzzle game!
I got to the tenth deamon and there it both felt like I didn't really get it and that it was unfair to what felt like symmetry to me! But as a whole a very good entry.
I found it a bit fidgety removing lines at time and knowing exactly where the smallest and largest circle would be. But other than that the controls were smooth and the feedback while playing the game really nice. The hover help on the categories what also really fancy and useful. It could perhaps have triggered when hovering in the graph showing the alignment of the summoning circle too.
One thing I noticed though was that after a couple of levels, I started by trying to clear what was given to draw my own, and since it was a bit hard removing stuff it would have been nice with a wipe the slate clean button, or clearer removal hitboxes.
At time, though I understand why there wasn't any such feature, I found myself attempting to drag the nodes along the circles while keeping their connections. But I guess that would interfere with connecting nodes. It would be sweet if that was a thing though.
Feels like something that ought to be ported to mobile...
Very good entry.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/alKZdNu4Ru0
Short and sweet game!
I really like the concept of it all and there's an obvious path to extending it into a proper dungeon crawler deck builder.
I think some minor tweaks could increase the drama a whole lot, like taking longer time to draw a new card so that it wasn't really possible to lazily click the same all the time.
I also got the feeling that they were drawn at random with a flat rates. While if it worked more like a deck that gets shuffled, it could have been really stressful drawing 3 healing cards in a row, because wasting them means there will not be any new healing for a while.
Controls were nice and dungeon camera perspective felt perfect to me (though I'm no real connoisseur).
I think the cauldron perhaps should not be a tile where enemies could go, because it made it quite confusing there in the beginning. Especially since their corpses lingers.
I think I would have liked the game a bit larger. Perhaps not that the level would be larger, but I think there might be something to this idea that ought to be expanded.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/LwnWmjEaYkc
Stellar graphics, and atmosphere. In general a solid entry with much flair to interactions and almost everything working smoothly.
It did take me both a failed run and several attempts after that to fully understand the upgrades. I didn't understand that the gem-like things at the bottom were my buys. And I just thought the pulling surprise star towards me was a way to open it. Since you don't pull the selected in the star to buy it, I didn't at all understand for the longest time how to spend the last buy.
I bought the finger restore crystal as first, and I must say all finger restores are quite overpowered since they are extra lives basically. And I found a bug, I think, because you can have more than 5 fingers with these restores so that if you afterwards should loose one it just snaps right back after the cut.
There were quite a few "neighbors get get +5" and while I guess there might have been some shards that did something with their own power, it seemed to mostly make that one shard basically be worth ten more than its given value. So I didn't quite understand the strategy in that one. Equally the legendary 60 shard seemed to effectively mostly be a 30 shard (unless you actively skipped its neighbor places) and while it said -15 to neighbors at least once it for sure subtracted more than that for some reason.
In all though I enjoyed the game, though it seemed quite risk-free after I had gotten the finger gem since I mostly had 5 or more fingers on my hand. I would have played to the end, I was pretty far, but then I played a shard that should draw 2 shards and the game just didn't do that and everything just stopped.
Very solid entry! Well done.
Cool tetris variant!
I got a bit confused because Z/X selection is not my habit and it never said anything in the instructions on how to start playing. :laughing: So I was about to give up there.
Then when I finally after pressing all buttons on the keyboard managed I played without realizing the Z/X for rotation so that was kind of a hard mode.
Finally I understood the controls and got playing.
I didn't realize though that the 1x1 was a bomb and that you had to snuff it to explode it until afterwards. But I think I accidentally made that happen once.
It's an interesting mechanic to only clear by fire and thus having to avoid placing in certain areas. I didn't get very far but I enjoyed playing.
It feels like some highscore system would have helped me stay at it and audio / music. I'm not sure if there should have been any since the rating option is still available but the game was completely silent for me.
Not understanding menu: https://youtu.be/lVI7CRL9paw Playing without rotation: https://youtu.be/KvZQdwJFqwY Playing with rotations: https://youtu.be/Hrk1R2lsrec
I had quite a lot of fun playing this to the end.
I must say though that level design wise, the progression and fine-tuning of each could have been a bit better. The first levels were very simple, to the point that I though there would be no puzzle at all to the one in the middle where you had to be quite precise with a limited number of attempts to catapult the fish across the screen to the later all chaotic but actually simpler levels. That the initial level(s) were trivial could be fine, or even great, especially if there was more intent in the design of the later levels. Then it could make the game really shine.
The simple controls could be a good fit for a mobile port.
Once I had no more fish left on a level, or not enough fish to make the goal, it really should have been really clear that "[R]eplay" was the way to restart the level.
I think the graphics and the fish movements and designs were super well made. It was a bit hard to scroll to the right one and not over-scroll it. So making the selected stand out a bit more would have been nice.
Very well made entry.
The game is seriously beautiful! But unfortunately the puzzles didn't work for me. In many ways.
One of the main reasons was that walking was so slow and jumping felt very off. It didn't even jump the majority of times I pressed space and when it did jump it didn't feel much like a jump.
So... the puzzles that were the main thing in the game.
I pretty quickly fixed the water so I could see the Rosetta stone. But some of the symbols where kind of similar and with movement being a chore, I'd really would have liked to see them while entering the code and see them clearly. There was no fun in walking a back and forth and figuring it out that way. I mean I could have sketched out those on a paper but...
I also didn't get at all get the first puzzle. My mind went:
!> Earth, Wind, Fire
After getting to have the translations in the ring. It did solve the part of moving about, but it kind of also ruined the mystic aura a lot.
When I finally made it to the back site, it took me a while to figure out that I was looking for the plus marked. It also, while using the same prop totally subverted the function of the disk-thing compared to what the game had taught before. It recognizing a lot of words and reacting to all of them, it kind of would have needed to not look like the other consoles to indicate that it was universal.
Me and my wife together could not figure out what one of the `+++___+++` words were though and as there also were a whole bunch of words that were not recognized I gave up. A lot of my progress had also been by looking up hints and solutions outside the game.
So I think, with better walking and jumping and with a bit more hinted solutions in the game it would have been a really neat entry.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/6YuStyd6Fkc
@thetatautau Time is such a hard thing to deal with in the jam!
I, well I was very stressed out trying to play this. I did a couple of attempts and at least managed to get more than 2 slain in the end.
The sound was a very good fit for the genre of the game and the graphics was clean and fancy at the same time. Though it would have been nice with more effects hitting the enemies and some positive feedback (with bonuses) if you managed to kill say 5 without taking damage, and perhaps every 10 kills you got. Stuff like that.
I didn't get super far, so I don't fully know how the game works. But it would also have been nice with some progression. Perhaps if at every minute mark all enemies are wiped clean, but what comes spawning after that includes more dangerous enemies. What I'm trying to say is that if there were more ups and down dramatically that naturally came from the game, it would be much more enticing to stay focused.
I also felt like the mouse sensitivity was set very high from the start though I did notice by chance that I could adjust it. So perhaps it would have been good to lower initial sensitivity and/or actually include it in the start menu.
There could also be parts of the world that changes, or falls off battle royal style. More drama, more progression.
And I want a big "YOU BROKE YOUR OWN HIGHSCORE" flashing over the screen when having stayed alive longer than before or slain more enemies. Online highscore would be nice too.
So I enjoyed playing it for a while. But the genre isn't really for me, and very much not for my wrists. It was nice that it could keep fire pressed though!
Movement made me feel like I had a jetpack and perhaps a bit of a spacesuit on. Which I think was fine with the environment the game was set it. But perhaps it should either lean in heavier towards that in the environment/story or make the controls a bit more snappier.
I must also admit, I'm not sure what killed me in the end, so perhaps there needs to be stronger visual and/or auditory feedback when things are going south, and in what way.
All in all, a great entry.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/qVdmFa2RrCM
Really fancy looking game! All those different effects really elevated the feel of the game. I got to the second to last stage, I think.
First time around I killed myself, because I didn't notice that summoning cause a candle to go out. Perhaps the lighting of the scene could have become a bit darker or more focus had been put on it so that the player doesn't miss that. Which also led to me killing myself because I was summoning away a bit too eagerly.
As with the stages progression, given that you presented more or less perfect information from start, it kind of removed the need for choice there almost. Or so it felt. It didn't seem to be a strategic benefit to do fights so why chose those that had more fights?
If I the paths were a bit more interconnected and you only got to know the options for the next step once you completed a stage, then that might have made for interesting choices on the stages view. Basically I didn't see much of risk-reward going into it. So it could just as well been a linear path.
The game was hard too, and a bit unsure what really I could have done better in the end. My thinking was summon as many as possible, use heal so that all of them get new health and hope for the best. I don't feel like my timing was that off so what I'm angling for here is that I'm wondering if there's some balancing of the difficulty that is a bit off.
To be clear, the actions down to the details of how they were implemented were really nice. It's more that when I lost, I didn't feel like "lets try another and see if I can get it better" because I didn't really understand what I should have done differently.
Really solid entry!
I think the idea was fun, the game admittedly is really quite stressful from even the first level while the controls takes some getting used to. I was too busy trying to shuttle souls up and down to really notice the information on the right side, so I think there need to be clearer UI right in the middle of the screen that helps the player know that they have saved X of Y that is needed and Z that will spawn on the level.
I'm guessing that the need to jump into and out of elevators was for later levels, but that one needed to keep track of which way to exit felt like an uncommon mechanism, and I wonder if it couldn't have been simplified to just exiting while remaining on the elevator position and then being free to move about. And elevator only picking you up when you enter the elevator tile. An, I'm guessing unintended aspect of how this worked was that it's entirely possible to lock oneself out of playing any level by exiting the wrong direction twice when at the level select screen. That could have been fixed by having the elevators start descending after not having been in use for a couple of seconds.
All in all though, a good entry!
Really fancy shader work! It was a bit hard to navigate around in the world and read the objects, walls and such. But not impossible. One detail that could have made it easier would have been if the circles were attached to the objects rather than the screen. If one strafes now with some object in view it is very clear that the circles are on the screen, as if it is one's own vision/sensor, rather than an effect on the objects. So if they could parallax it probably would ease parsing the world a whole lot.
I also enjoyed the initial narration.
Hi could you please tag your downloads properly on itch so that it knows how to present it properly: itch-taggames.png
It will probably also help with people playing your game in general
I really liked your art-style. It felt very consistent and that little detail when you press play and the camera drops a bit as you get ready to play.
I didn't understand the IJKL keybinding though. It seemed to me like punches auto-targeted nearby enemies and directions didn't really matter. So that was a bit confusing. And my first tries, it felt like I ran out of punches and nothing happened even if I pressed the buttons. So unless I'm missing something with the IJKL part, could it not be replaced with a single attack button that just varies the punch directions? Or was I missing something in the strategy?
When I died on my good run, I also felt like I had a lot of health and I suddenly got stuck and then I was dead.
I think a lot could have been won by giving the enemies and character some slight animations if only a bit of stretching and compacting of the y-axis so they were digging the music. And build up to more and more feedback on hits and getting hit the further you get.
A quite small detail, during the start screen, it seems I have to click play with the mouse. And that's not great when the game is played just with keyboard and you want the player to try just one more and one more. If you want to be really evil you just have a countdown from 3 - 2 - 1 and restart from the beginning again.
I had fun playing though! So very good entry.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/OS07apkEWcc
Wonderful art! Really fantastic work with that. It was all very thought through.
The one thing with style though. The font looked really nice... with the exception of the apostrophes... they were really off:
badaphos.png
The humor and narration was top notch. It feels a bit related to my own entry, though coming from an entirely perspective with the botched summoning ritual. It had a smile on my face all the way through.
Admittedly the game play was very limited, but the interactions in the mini-games where very nice and tactile. It was a bit odd each time they started though. As if the game was wanting me to do something when presenting it but not reacting and then it started. If it was just a delay, then I'd consider shortening it and perhaps adding some effects of feedback if the player is impatient like me and starts clicking it.
Very good entry.
I'm, I'm not that good at tower defense games. And well this sounded like it would be more of a tower offense, but it soon had my force outnumbered and not too much it seemed I could do about it.
Maybe there was a difference, but if there was, I didn't notice, but it could have been fun if there was a building that perhaps didn't summon the best of mobs (or non at all) but in drastically expanded territory. Kind of like secondary towers. That also need defending, but allows quickly stretching out the domain, so I could reach settlements and murder them.
My strategy was mostly, oh I can build that, lets build that.
Perhaps I expanded too much north too fast, but then there was a swarm of ranged enemies that just destroyed me and I had no chance at all.
I also think it would have been nice if it was easier to see which were my mobs and which were enemies. Perhaps by limiting color palettes for each and making them distinct that way. Perhaps the unit and building health bars could have been color coded too.
I enjoyed playing! Good work!
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/3zkZpPS186I
Great style really! It's a pity there's no full screen button so I had to play in the viewbox that is a bit too small for the game.
At first play-through, I think I rapidly and accidentally got soft-locked out of any progression. I soon found myself only with fins and claws and no matter what I did in combinations or numbers I only got the claw-producing and fin producing animals.
Second I got much further and could probably have completed the game. But I must admit I kind of ran out of steam after a while. It might just be that the genre doesn't get me very engaged. But having to re-summon creatures and farm up coins to get the next thing and such. There wasn't really a risk reward. And the split between managing your herd and exploring possibilities kind of went in opposing directions.
The game loop could perhaps also been a bit sped up with simply summoning when you click to do so and not require another confirm on the summoning scene. I'm also wondering if the management after each summon could be a bit more streamlined or more involved.
But all in all a very good jam entry, and as I started out, the graphics is really great!
I liked the art! The mechanics was a bit awkward to be honest. I managed to select no card at all as well as getting one card left when all opponent's cards had been played. It seems to me to be entirely a game of chance without any strategy to it, which does take away some joy of playing. A small change that might be interesting to test would be to show the opponents hand but not their pick until you've selected yours. That way you know their distribution of cards and it might give a bit of strategy and agency to the player.
Really cool concept of gathering critters as bullets! They were cute.
I had a major problem with the keybindings as my keyboard doesn't have arrow buttons in a configuration and when using WASD there's no way really to use Z and X comfortably as action buttons. Some alternatives on the right hand side of the keyboard would be nice.
I for some reason missed the swap critter type action but I don't think that was the reason, but I felt quite softlocked after getting my first orange one very far down to the left. There seemed like there was no jump or a need for two orange to be able to get any further.
There were also some glitches on the tile rendering (playing in firefox) jessglitch.gif
I should perhaps almost be ashamed of myself for how much I enjoyed placing the dust motes right in front of the roomba again and again. The different cameras was also a delight, in getting close-ups of them being sucked up.
I didn't manage to place any boxes though. Not sure what I did wrong there.
Hope you feel better soon, and great work getting this done while being sick!
Also what is this water color looking larger game you are working on?!
Alright today boxes worked fine! I guess I was mostly playing with more close up cameras to see what was happening when the dust motes got sucked up and then I guess it was hard making box area large enough to fit one. I agree it would have been nice with a color indicator for area is too small to fit object.
This was a concept game. I was sort of hoping for some reveal too at the end of the quiz. It started out very strong with the first two colors sounding like normal options and then the color blend and very opinionated last option gave a taste that I was hoping would get even more evolved by each question. And then that the voice might start questioning the choices or such thing. I did have a fun time playing through it.
I want to try this but the first has four red blobs and no way to cycle through them.
blobbybridges.png
AHA! I didn't realize they could morph together! That was a very good puzzle. Very hard puzzle. I got to level four before giving up. One thing that would have been nice would have been to be able to hold down backspace when wanting to go back more than a few moves, but not wanting to give up. Another thing that might have added a little clarity and juice to the game would have been to swap out the face sprite for the active blob to give it a bit more feel that it was the one you were controlling and not only pan the camera to it. Very good game!
@sockenpuppe hope you enjoy your new fear :wink:
@frib glad that you like disturbing, would have been a bit odd if you didn't considering the game you made yourself. 119 is a very good score!
@slippers very intentional creeping... if I only wish I went a little further with it :laughing: I'm quite the expert on non-intuitive game mechanics so I'm very happy that this one seems to have been more understandable than most.
@jimbly Glad you liked the title screen! the zooming in and out starts after 20 seconds I think and then trigger on random intervals. It was a bit awkward to get working though as the colliders around the edge of the screen are attached to the camera and needed adjusting when zooming in... and i made some mishap in the calculations that made those edges grow inwards as well while zooming. but i figured why not call it a feature, rather than trying to find what the issue was.
@david-york And that you too liked the title screen. by the sound of it, my creepy intentions hit just right. it is a tricky thing to design a non-standard physics based strange controller like that... I guess if I had time and energy it would have been good for the game to be a bit clearer about when the player did wrong, or at least say "nonono!" when the hand accidentally hovers a rash. so that the game could explain its own mechanics a bit better. and to answer your question with another question: could the hands perhaps be very small?
To everyone who got the urge to scratch their own skin, I'm very pleased the game transcended the fourth wall.
@mrspeaker I was considering a custom cursor at one point, and then forgot about it. But you are right that it would have signaled that the hand isn't the mouse clearer.
@annie-owl I hope you recovered from the experience :laughing: I tried to work an unnerving feeling into all aspects of the game.
@a-bond That game looks like it shares quite a few ideas based on the screenshots!
@brendan-milos thanks for the feedback! I agree that the ability to play it smart and trigger the scratching oneself is rather limited. I didn't really want to give the player much more control though simply because there's not enough content in the game, not enough progression, to allow the player to play very long. And I didn't want anyone feeling like they beat the game and could continue for ever.
@ava-skoog That's a very impressive time!!! And glad you liked the graphics :laughing: Funnily enough, the sighs were and are the most disturbing to me. Both recording them and having to hear myself playing.
@lcstark thanks for the detailed feedback! I added those camera movements and zooms precisely so that it wouldn't get too easy for skilled players and also add some sense of progression. Also to hide that the game probably wouldn't be too fun to play for much longer per session than where you got your record. A very good highscore indeed.
I agree that it looked rather scary at first and it took me a while to understand how to tweak the different settings to maximize possibility of getting the coolest / most expensive exotic. Honestly though, I promptly forgot about the part about which settings affected value and was mostly focused on achieving full understanding of optimal settings for all compounds. And I needed about all probes there were to get there. So I never really got to the true $$$ optimizations. I guess that felt like a more reasonable first step. And maybe, instead of the lower part affecting prizes, it could affect dynamics of the fishing game? I was also, since I forgot what drives the prize wondering if the relative value of what I got up depended on how perfect I did the fishing / how damaged the probe got.
I really liked the graphics of the probe sinking through the gas giant, but even though i never lost a single probe, i was very much staring at the gauges. it would have been nice to be able to look more at the beautiful effects... and of course a bit more variation and or challenge to the fishing game.
Music and sound effects were also really nice.
Interesting game. It took me a little while to at all understand which were my critters and to figure out the controls. Perhaps there could have been a UI element showing the area of influence around the mouse and also perhaps some reaction from my units when I was too far... I also wish there was some strategy in zooming in and out. Gaining larger area of influence for mouse when being zoomed out for example.
I must admit though, that I found it quite tedious slowly guiding the little critters. I got to the third or fourth level.
Interesting concept and idea though!
I played it to the end and enjoyed my time with it!
When I first started to play and a little critter spawned very near me, I tried to flee and it was really hard staying away from it. I guess this is a very stressful game, I thought. Then I noticed they didn't close the final gap, and I realized they were my friends. I don't think there was anything in the instructions or lore that said anything about having friends, it might be good to add that.
And speaking of adding. After having played a while I noticed a very small text in the upper corner that I could order and recall my friends. That should probably be mentioned in the controls too. Especially because of the cute sound bites that played when performing these actions.
Over all, I think I liked the sound of the game the most! Really good work on all the effects and the background music.
The graphics were very nice too. There were some cases of erroneous tiling when the grass borders weren't correctly placed and I think it would have been nice if the world edges had been uniformly and nicer handled. This is of course details... so I'm not really complaining at all.
I didn't fully know what the end goal of the game was. First I figured it was collecting coins, but after a while I guessed it was getting rid of the slime. The instructions say to avoid getting slimed. It might be good to also mention that the goal is to clear all slime.
In the end I had missed two slimes and it took a little bit of hunting to find them. It wasn't too bad, which I guess was a result of the world size. It could have been nice with some visual or auditory queue about the direction of the closest slime to avoid the final slower pacing of the game.
I also didn't fully understand the coins, in particular the coin UI meter that for a long while said 2 for me and I guess this is what I bought friends with, but I think I had more at some point than the 2-3 I had when the UI said I had two coins.
All in all though, a very good entry! Good work!
I selected byte difficulty because I assumed things were gonna be hard, but I think - it felt - like it was rather hard to die on that one. Which isn't too bad at all. There was a whole lot of content and I liked the setting and graphics the most in the game, I think.
In the beginning it was rather hard to hit the enemies at all, but then shooting got upgraded to do explosions and it was much more satisfying. That early progression can be a bit tricky in a game jam, there's a risk of people giving up before the weapon turns satisfying. However, while I was feeling powerful, it was quite sad that with more projectiles, there was no aim anymore. The shots just flew at fixed angles and that feels like a breach of the introduced early game logic.
The next thing that didn't feel great on byte level, maybe it isn't the same on the harder ones, was that I got level up for every second or third enemy shot. And that really interrupted the flow of the game. I would much rather have had more powerful upgrades or get 5 upgrades in a row at larger intervals, if more powerful upgrades would have been too difficult to pull off during the jam.
Since I got rather overpowered, it also was a bit annoying that there was a dead-end to the level and that it wasn't a linear gauntlet. The layout of each segment was open and the early parts were all in a line so it taught that it's just going straight to get to the end. And then I had to backtrack. It might have helped if the map was a bit more zoomed out, or if there had been some reward for going to the dead end. What were the white things on the map mean to indicate by the way? I didn't at all understand those.
The big boss was a really cool asset and I liked how there was a progression in the boss fight with the smaller mobs appearing and making things harder. However the boss was quite the bullet sponge, and being over leveled, I could just run around it keeping to its rear end and not care too much about what was happening.
All in all, a really stylish game, a lot of content and very good work!
I loved the poem and the trippy style of the game. The way the hidden messages appeared was also very neat environmental story telling. I heard the narrator say something about not going upstairs before done or such thing. I couldn't get up at all, so I'm guessing it wasn't available and that I wasn't missing out on anything. I took a stroll around the house too, it would have been really nice to have been rewarded by another bit on the back porch.
Very good, almost Lynchian feeling to the game.
First time I played. Well before I played, I read the instructions, but I didn't spot the letters, nor understand the placement of inner circle creatures. So that run didn't go too well. But reading up, I figured out that I had only played half of the game.
I did have a bit of a problem with the keys though. It seemed like every other time it didn't register that I pressed the correct key to kill the inner circle intruder. It worked some times but others my presses were just ignored. I played on Firefox, perhaps there's something there with the timing but it made it very hard to progress very far.
I think my record was slightly above 1k.
The claymation was adorable! And I liked the effects and feedback that the game gave too. Perhaps the letters around the circle could have been a bit larger.
As for progression, I probably didn't see much of progression in the game, if there is any. The early part was quite balanced for difficulty, I think.
As for what could be made to elevate the difficulty over time, of course speed could be increased and spawn rates as well as how erratic the behavior is of the evil creature that comes floating in towards the circle. But those you probably already thought of.
One evil thing that could be done is to start rotating the inner circle so that W isn't always up...
Another could be to have those spawning in the circle jump around once or twice before having their effect.
I really enjoyed the art and style of this game. It was almost more satisfying to "accidentally" pop the morsels. The game play loop felt like it did lack a bit of progression though, that there wasn't much things happening or getting harder or that the pace of that ramp up was a bit too slow. So by 20 something morsels I switched to popping them on purpose to get to see the ending.
I also found it a bit confusing at first, though I get why, that when the hand picked up the morsel it did so from the center of the bowl no matter where it actually was when I released the mouse button. That made me wonder quite some in the beginning if I was failing or doing things wrong. I think it would add quite a lot to the understanding of what is happening and to the feeling that it's me picking up the little things if they got picked up where they were when I was clicking on them.
All in all, very good arcade-styled entry. And very good visual presentation.
@brendan-milos totally understandable. The way I handled limited game play in my own game was trying to force the game to be short (around max 100 seconds). And hopefully making people try more than once that way to beat their record.
I had a wonderful time playing this game. It feels quite unique, both style-wise and game play-wise for game jam games. I enjoyed the dialogs and walking around the world exploring all its parts. It really is quite impressive that you managed to pull this whole game off during the jam. I have no idea how you got all those elevators and collision boxes or navmeshes or what you were using to work so well in that short time.
Of course there were some issues, like having to jump up over what felt like very small steps (notably onto elevators). The text was clipping through the world and being partially hidden, but I think I could guess what all the prompts were. There were also some cases of sprites not being in the right layer, like the cut surfer that is visible inside the cave in the rock too. Quite a few times I also accidentally talked to the same NPC again and again when all I wanted was to end the conversation.
It was very cute with having the inventory trail me. One of the items, perhaps it was the tinderbox I didn't quite recognize for what it was. They also ended up hidden below floors sometimes, but again that's details compared to the whole working game you managed.
I think the quests made a lot of sense too, so as you can probably tell, I had a really good time playing and decided to set up camp on one of the empty rocks in the large bottom area. Presumably where the surfer would have been.
Great entry! Really lovely art style, fancy small transitions and animations everywhere. Cool characters. And interesting game mechanics.
The presentation on how to play it, both reading before starting and then looking through the tutorials (Impressive to have that many and interactive tutorials!!) made it look very complex and scary. While in fact it was rather simple and straight forward once I had started playing. It would be hard to do something about that within the time constraints of the jam of course. But I could see myself skipping and not playing the game because of that first impression and that would have been a pity.
I opted for the small adventure, to have some challenge but also because by the descriptions and from how far I got by each tower in the tutorials they seemed like rather long challenges already from the smallest one. It was a reasonable length though, but I don't think I would have wanted it any longer than what it was either. And this was mainly because of balancing and progression.
Starting with 2 characters it was a real challenge not to take damage on the early towers and it felt a bit hectic while learning the ropes, but in a fun way, to take a bit damage and do some panic upgrades when I really wanted another hire. Such things.
But after the first couple, the actually difficulty dropped substantially by just hiring as many as possible as fast as possible. When I ended I had full health, 10 fuel, and over 80 coins because I hadn't needed to do anything but pressing next / going on attack directly. So why bother with upgrades and why re-roll when you already succeed.
That could have been helped a lot by just having higher target values later in the campaign even on the easier difficulties so that the player needs to play the game. Perhaps some towers also could have nothing that they are sensitive against or even some things they are resistant towards.
All in all though, a really good entry.
I played for the good ending, it seemed like the one I wanted, and the intended too considering the click away the doubt/depression critters all were about revealing those options.
The graphics was really great and the story well written. I enjoyed the experience. And it had a reasonable length for both the story it wanted to convey and the gameplay contained in it.
I played a handful times, and got about 15k as my best settlement. I don't know if I got any story ever though. I know there was at least one on the table but I couldn't offer enough in the needed exchange, I think.
My first play-through, it wasn't at all obvious how randomized or not the game was. Nor how much content there was. So when my first encountered festival was an illusion that cost me resources without any gain, I kind of assumed festivals are bad and should always be avoided for the rest of that and the next 2-3 runs. Before I once again dared try a festival... and while this might be a correct life lesson :laughing:, I think it was the wrong lesson for this game.
I would also never have realized there was a benefit of revisiting an evil location unless I happened to stumble into a dead end on the map and needed to backtrack and found that the evil snake was gone. So that time, the map helped me overcome my faulty assumptions. But perhaps something indicating passage of time a bit clearer in the game could also have changed my faulty ideas about the game being kind of static.
I think though, that my favorite creature that I encountered was the menacing squirrels. I wish we could have a stare contest and then been grumpily accepting each others presence and that it would have been the best new home.
After a couple of tries, I was not so much reading the encounters anymore but rather trying out different locations and funnily one of the best ones I had was settling right next to where I started.
I played the full experience without any censoring. As it should be played, I think. It had nice graphics and the weapons felt nice too. I had a bit of an issue shooting down the last gnome, but I think that rather says more about me than the game. Perhaps the hitbox on the ax could have been a little larger since it wasn't really a precision game and I think I was too close once or something. The same could probably have been true about the arrows.
One thing that slightly confused me first was that I not all gnomes bled. I guess it makes sense that when falling out of the sky, you didn't have control over where they landed so they needed to be dead directly. But as I ran up to the first I downed, and it didn't bleed, I first thought that I needed to ax them too.
I think the gnomes are fine btw, if anything the protagonist kind of have to explain themself. Why they are slaughtering an entire village just because of some rudeness.
I liked the concept of solving puzzles by eating up the dirt around the enemies and such. I played the game to the end. The controls were a bit annoying at times though, especially when trying to move upwards. Jumping and eating a block one step up and to the right, while absolutely not eating the one directly to the right... I had to restart levels a couple of times... and since it didn't feel like it really was my fault it wasn't great. Later with the water, this became a bit better, but still not super easy to control the little guy.
So, I did play it to the end, and the main reason is that there was a fun core. There's a good game in there I think. One simple change in level design, refocusing on digging down and digging deep rather than back and forth and taking away the need to go up except where there are helping blocks or water. I think that could make the game very interesting. Avoid having the crabs following you and falling on you the deeper you go.
Walking down I was like, oh there's a cute rat, I wonder what that poor thing is fleeing from. And then there were more, none of them seemed scary or even interested in me. I got to the bottom and the statue and there was a change of sound. But I got distracted by that there seemed to be no collision detection on the statue and that I could clip through it. When I got out of it the rats were all there looking at me expectantly but respectfully. I started walking back and they followed me, but didn't really seem scary. After a while I did wonder if I should be doing something with turning the flashlight on and off, but walking backwards for a bit with it on it didn't really seem like they were gaining on me. So I turned around and walked back up, got to be next to the door and the screen turned red. I'm guessing by the rats killing me.
I think there were some parts missing here in driving home the feeling of being scared. One part was just how the rats interacted with me. I think it would have been better if they were not running when I was walking down. Just loitering about, maybe looking at me. And then when they presumably turned on me, it would have been good to take the control away form the player to force me to see that they were a threat and coming for me. Perhaps also forcing the flashlight to turn off every now and then and force the player to look back over their shoulder. To see the danger.
First I played the game carefully trying to not get shot at all and that very much was the wrong way to play the game. I was rather slow like that honestly. But then I was like, let see how the game ends if I just fly straight at the enemies and that was when I discovered how the game should be played. And it became immensely more satisfying.
I still struggled a bit with the controls. Being a spaceship, my mind kept wanting to press buttons relative to the forward direction of the ship instead of giving absolute directions. It was also a bit too easy getting stuck on the terrain in the narrow passes. I'm thinking that if the colliders of the blocks were a bit (more) rounded and / or if the size of the vessel (or at least its collider) had been a bit smaller compared to the blocks... something like that could have helped a lot.
Still very enjoyable! A very nice feeling flying straight at a cluster of bugs, knowing that they can hardly hurt you.
Yes, I misunderstood the circle at first. I think that in the very beginning I just dismissed it as there's a red circle here, I don't know what it is. Then I thought it was my shield because at some point it felt like it disappeared momentarily when I got hurt. I only understood it as a weapon after I had been flying at the enemies a little while trying to die. :laughing:
I played a couple of endings, sometimes accidentally making the wrong god happy according to what I was planning, but since the play time between first choice and end was rather short, it didn't matter too much that it sometimes was hard to predict the outcome of the options.
I also noticed that the web version was larger than my screen, but the full-screen mode seemed to solve that. The game presented some warnings at various occasions too in the upper left corner.
The capybara was the natural star of the game for me. Very good inclusion. If I'd critique the pacing, the introduction phase was rather long until I got to interact with the world. I get the point of introducing the gods first for me to form an impression and liking/disliking. But perhaps it could have been made really short and instead allow us to design several worlds rather than one, getting to know them from their reactions rather than having to reload the game to try different paths.
Cute bugs. I got a couple of levels in. It was interesting that it was a physics based puzzle and that it wasn't entirely predictable what would happen. But it also meant that it was a bit frustrating at times too. The way the critters didn't have any or almost no friction was something I sometimes could exploit but other times also forced me to restart levels. It felt a bit odd that they could glide that much.
So... personally I would probably have swapped out the drive home that this is a bad person targets from lgbtqi+ demonstrators to something universally agreeable to be stomped on such as babies. I'd be much to scared to have it taken out of context, and story-wise I didn't really see the plot going there. In general, I feel the plot could have benefited from being a bit more specific about who the player was, what this legislation was and so on.
Game play wise I was confused about it feeling like a success stomping on the dudes. both via the name of the game and the sound effects. it took me a while to understand that it was bad. I also think it would have been interesting to have combo-bonuses for the more that you were hitting.
Quite soon it got so very crowded though, and with the delay in the stomp, that I sort of gave up on very much trying to avoid them. It would have worked better if the aim was to stomp bankers and politicians and other high value targets with that crowd density. Then a combo bonus would have been very sweet. Could have super extra bonus multiplier for only stomping people of one kind.
I was very happy to see that there was a game mode for those of us who didn't feel like being stressed. I played a couple of rounds and I must admit I wasn't so much planning while collecting the little critters as just walking around and doing their word challenges and then afterwards trying to figure out what kind of word I could make.
Some minor details:
- Since the game could be played with just keyboard, it would have been nice to not need the mouse at all. Binding Done to long press of enter perhaps and having navigation of menus with WASD. - Sometimes the prompts when collecting the creatures, their word dialog could end up partially blocked by the scenery and I had to guess what the exact word was.
Really nice entry.
I like the graphics but I get stuck. There's something odd going on with the game where there's the itch fullscreen button and then that just fullscreens the non-fullscreen version of the unity game. I get to the first dream sequence and if I understood it I was to make things sprout in the three bouldery regions of the labyrinth. This was very hard to trigger, especially the one in the bottom.
I wish WASD also worked in the dialog (A/D) and it seemed like the text on some, but not all could be fast written out (because I got stuck and wanted to try again to see if it worked better the second time I wanted to skip through up until first dream.
Then I ran to the opening to the right but I just run off screen with nothing happening and having to restart the game: runoffscreen.png
Fun idea. It was very hard though. But impressive given the very tight time constraints. One thing that I'd try is to remove the colliders from the hind-parts of the vehicles, since the camera perspective makes it very hard to see when the player has actually passed the obstacle it feels a bit unfair getting smashed just because there were some pixels left on the car to the side. Then of course, if the vehicles were also moving towards the player would have been great.
I loved the meaty textures and the atmosphere in the game. I was glad that there were undocumented numpad bindings too because space is only available on the right part of the keyboard for me which meant I needed two hands on the keyboard and I guess I could have attempted steering the mouse with my chin or something :laughing:
I got to the level with the very small ramps and that was honestly too hard for me. The controls were very sensitive with a single tap moving me quite far in comparison to how small those bars/ramps were. Perhaps their hitboxes could have been a bit wider while still keeping the visuals the same. I'm guessing, but I feel like the game didn't fully teach me, that I needed to collect all the power up thingies before the exit opened? At least there seemed to be a cheeky exit close to the start on the following (?) level that closed right as I approached it.
I also got a bit lost on the jump around corners level at first, with the darkness and coming from above finding out that I needed to go back to where the white blood cell was patrolling and go the other direction.
Cool atmosphere though and interesting concepts for the level design.
I always love myself a bit of an unreliable narrator! Simple and nice game. I think if there's something I'd critique it be that the triggers for the narration / progress were sometimes a little narrow, which together with the relatively slow walking could have been a bit more allowing. I hope I got to the actual end, but with these sort of games it's really hard to know and it would have been nice with a simple credits scene to indicate that I was done. Or was I?
Good game, I enjoyed playing it!
I recorded myself playing it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw0ZFFxcn2I
Interesting to make a physical game! We used a parasite deck to play: ldes.jpg
Some comments about the PDF:
I set it up as you did in the image, but it should matter a bit to the game if one starts on a dark square or not (given that you get cards on entering light squares)
The instructions about the challenges say nothing about all dice being equal as far as I could spot but in the flow-chart, if it's the a :diamonds: challenge, you get stuck in a loop in the top of the flow chart never reaching the end of the player's turn:
Not discarding -> All dice equal -> Not diamonds -> Draw one card if you can and first time -> Repeat.
The game itself was very much back and forth, I managed staying with two dice almost the entire game, yet for a long time my partner got ahead of me with her three dice an had a chance at winning while I almost backtracked the entire board towards the start.
Finally I got myself to the victory though.
Interesting in how relatively balanced it was to have unequal number of dice, and there were some interesting strategic decisions to be made about what cards to be played when, but it also felt a bit too exposed to chance for our taste. And from a psychological point of view, I would have liked to progress much more often than stepping back and rather have a longer track to walk. But not sure how to do that exactly.
@annie-owl I was also wondering about the backstory of Sully's and John's friendship / history / relationship?
In general very well written, fun little bits of story. Extremely beautiful cycling scene and great audio with it too!
The only thing that bugged me a little was the selection of where to go, that it didn't feel like I was progressing there and that I wasn't sure if the game had a good ending or if it was "try and see how far you can get before you die".
It made me want to get a cup of tea. So I should do that! Very cozy and high quality game!
Oh and yeah here's a recording of me playing it: https://youtu.be/XqQY6iGyAns
@jimbly totally agree. So I don't like the triple-whammy myself either, but it was inexpensive dev-wise and my first attempt at a range aoe attack (fireball) didn't work and it was already late monday night... I had originally designed the enemies with 20hp and only giving 3 coins per rabbit. then the triple-whammy had more use placing 3 of a kind of a low value or even a pair and odd third dice. The game was rather hard on those settings and i got scared and changed the difficulty quite drastically and now it was almost too casual, i think.
Thanks everyone for the comments, I've been awol doing another jam.
@lllarso I totally agree across the board. Thanks for the detailed feedback!
@annie-owl yeah I had a list of actions I wanted to include, in particular some ranged or reaction actions. But alas, time is short in LD.
@breadstick I didn't actually design the game about getting such a broken dice set as the player get towards the end, it was more an happy accident from not having time to balance and add more enemy variation. But you are probably very correct in that the aim in a fuller version should probably be that the player at intervals gets a fully broken set of dice.
@mechanicallife yeah that bug I didn't know of but someone managed also to use the same die several times in various actions by just slotting it around. Totally forgot to lock them dice after you activate the action.
@chuchugeralt you can sell the dice shop dice? :laughing: I should really have realized that. And agree that all of the sides of each die should have been listed in the shop and also when you decide which die to defend yourself with.
@papaver I wanted the player to question the actions they were giving to the character and feel a big guilty, this is why the bunnies get slaughtered. :laughing:
@ava-skoog So glad you found it fun. Fun has always been my weakest category on LD! I've not gotten around to play your game yet, I'll try to make it, I promise. Interesting that it showed the wrong numbers, I had such persistent bugs about the whole rolling of dice that I ended up not actually rolling them but apparently that wasn't enough... Agree that there should have been a prompt when the attack doesn't play out automatically. It was a rather late addition to have them attack automatically so didn't really think of how it would be for players who had never seen the manual mode. The door was actually relatively simple, I had just learnt about how you can fragment a mesh in blender and then I just had a solid and a fractured version and put rigidbodies on the fragment with an explosive force centered on the player when they break through. Getting the camera into decent positions and the dice and room visible (the dice are in normal world space in front of the camera... bad choice) that was the most annoying bit!
lovely style and interesting mix of story and maze walking. Personally I feel like the mazes got a bit too large though, and especially when they got intricate, I would really have liked to have the collisions not get me stuck on the walls but glide around corners and such. I sadly didn't get to the end, but I think I got pretty far. There were some balls I saw but couldn't figure out how to get to / one seemed completely boxed in and the other would have needed a much to large loop.
Nice entry though.
I tried it twice without reading the instructions. I think, I managed to figure out most of the mechanics. I didn't manage to beat the game but at least I got a little bit better the second time around. The thing I was struggling with was to remember the rules I had figured out when there wasn't a matching configuration in play. Which made me do some unnecessary flips. In the very beginning I was a bit confused with that I got selection marking around the non-connected balls and there was no interaction I could do with them... it might have been good to have some sort of disabled styling when there's no action to be taken on a ball.
I liked the simple palette, the music fit well with the style and gameplay. Oh yeah I also recorded my mumbling attempt at figuring it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDFIIjDIeU4
@jimbly yeah I never got the full strategy depth, which meant that it felt like a lot of configurations left me without a chance to improve the situation. Or at least, that was how it felt. I also, after I discovered the undo button promptly forgot it because it was so far off from the actual game area... might have been better if it was attached to the drill somewhere.
I very much enjoyed playing this. The controls felt nice, and it was very interesting mechanics of collecting and also avoiding to collect specimens while trying to harvest all plant matter. I failed one run and then realized I could cheese it a bit on my second attempt by repeating the first level more times than what might have been intended.
I had a bit of initial confusion since diving mechanics and a bar going down usually means oxygen is running out and you have to go back to the surface. The "end run" mechanic of going up did have a bit large hitbox too because I accidentally triggered it a few times. Which would not have been too bad if I wasn't playing on controller and the menu interactions only worked with mouse.
I'd also would have liked stronger visual feedback on the connection between getting hurt and loosing time as well as the game clearly telling you with sound and visually when you've reached the required target.
It could have been cool if getting hit also damaged your haul a bit, because right now, as soon as you did hit the required $$$ it didn't matter too much taking hits.
Here's me playing and commenting a bit while doing so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8se5uGPH3mo
Awesome graphics and fun little game! But why am I so bad at it? It took me forever to even discover the first letter. I did find 6 ladybugs though. First I played in firefox, but something about the click detection became off and when I spotted the first A no matter how much at or around it I clicked, the game never counted it.
In chrome it worked nicely though. But I never found the last or first A. You are really good at hiding stuff!
Very good entry!
I'm not very good at this, but I had fun. And tried and tried again. The controls felt very nice, the atmosphere and the the character model were fantastic.
It would have been very nice with some positive scoring too like flight time, max speed, distance. Especially with highscore or similar to push you into trying over and again. If you could see the shadow of your best flight to have something to chase would also have been epic.
Here's me playing the game, failing over and over :laughing: with some thoughts and comments along the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rawNHXCG2-w
The game looks cool, but I really struggled with it. And I think it wasn't only me. At least half of the times I got killed by the thing at the bottom right at start even if I pressed W as soon as I saw the ship. I just didn't gain any speed.
It would probably be good to have a second or two before the game starts, or that it start when you press W.
I never got to try the special ability, but I got the meter up to about half height once. So it's a pretty hard game, for me at least.
Though the lava/thing at the bottom probably was fair in a sense, as a gamer I would have expected the hit box to be a bit more lenient. So that I could skirt the edge without taking damage.
There were some neat bits, and it could become an addictive thing trying to get further and further, but with the start of each attempt being so unreliable it was unfortunately quite hard to get into it.
The sound and graphics were very cool though.
I must say I'm a bit confused, I tried to play the web version of the game and it gave me 90s of standing on the platform with no enemies, nothing to pick up, or do beside shooting the gun in the air. I got various prompts to press E for things, but it didn't seem to do anything. Then after the 90s I got some enemies, but I still could not perform any of the interactions except for the reloading of the gun. There were things in the blocks but they seemed totally accessible.
I almost completely died in the first wave of enemies, it was a bit confusing with my own projectiles from the platform and theirs, perhaps they could have used distinct color pallets or such. It probably also wasn't helped that my keyboard isn't normal and space is nowhere near WASD so I needed two hands on the keyboard for all the actions.
I think binding wise, since mouse did all the gun stuff it would have been nice with reload on the mouse as well.
And it would have been nice to be able to force the platform down when you were just waiting.
It looks like there's a lot of cool stuff in here though, so I'm probably just missing something essential.
Hey! It was a lovely experience doing something good and cleaning up nature. I liked the cute animations on the trash and the music/sound/mood. I ended up completely cleaning out all the trash. The car mechanic with several parts was really nice. I made a recording of me playing and stuff I was thinking while doing so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONQ3px3ex4
I liked the simple interactions and the visuals and audio were very high quality. I did accidentally chose the right path without falling off anywhere on my first try. So it only took a couple of seconds to play the game. :laughing: That made me a bit confused too.
I had to reload the page to try again and fail some. It would have been nice with a try again button once getting to the win screen.
After failing on purpose one time I then actually failed 5-10 more times before reaching the goal again. And that play-experience was much better than accidentally completing the game on speed run time. So perhaps the game could have been a little longer to lower the risk of accidentally completing it on first go.
Other than that, I think it did what it set out to do very well. Good entry. (I was recording myself playing but I'm an OBS noob and accidentally recorded the wrong window so unfortunately no video of me playing)
Yeah same here I get 404 about missing index.html:
``` Uh oh!
If you're seeing this error, it means I can't find your index.html file.
This usually means you created your .zip file by zipping the entire folder, and index.html is somewhere like MyGame/index.html. If you recreate your .zip with index.html file in the root, this error should go away.
See the embedding guide for more details. ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/ 404 Not Found ```
Simple and fun little game. Most memorable experience when I caused a real corpse buildup in front of me.
The game does need some balancing within the levels though to make it more interesting. Instead of spawning all zombies at start and just making the level easier over time, it would be much more interesting if things ramp up for a while and the final easier bit is much shorter. Since the zombies take two or three hits, it would have been nice with some feedback that you were actually hitting them.
Nice game though!
Playthrough and more comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhs2rfsbGN0
I'm still holding out, hoping there will appear a game :fingers_crossed:
Ouch that sucks getting the flu.
The game turned out great though. A very cozy, casual little walking sim. In particular I liked the postcards and the scripted events with the animals were really cute.
Don't really have much to complain about. Maybe it could have said what button to use to drop stuff somewhere when I was holding a rock prematurely or if I could have picked up a twig and dropped the rock with the same action.
The puzzles were simple, yet satisfying. And especially with the interactions with the animals as a great reward after solving the puzzle. So overall a very good game!
Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSvrkR5uYBs
I'm very much intrigued by game that are a bit antagonistic to the player and the foreshadowing of "how hard can it be" got me hopeful. And it was indeed quite hard! And fun.
The game could really have done with the title screen staying until I actively said I wanted to play (the game started when I tabbed out). And I would have liked to getting back there after completing the game.
But all in all I enjoyed my time with it, and I think it had about the right length for its content and idea. So well done.
Playthrough with some more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOTHKfmqrHM
Nice little game!
I think it played very well. I would really have liked bindings for WASD though as arrow keys aren't layout very comfortable on my keyboard.
I liked the story after each level was completed, but I totally missed it on the first couple of levels because the text was so small!
Playthrough with some more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-2HnFAL9L0
@gold-daniel thanks for the feedback, yeah that camera, I really wanted it to be part of the obstacles that the player needs to manage... but it might be that it's just going to feel annoying to most players.
@kamilah I'm glad you enjoyed playing it and by the sound of it wouldn't have minded if there were more levels to it.
@anderson-job-loeffler Tbh, I felt a bit self-conscious about that staaamps sound after I had recorded it, but now I'm glad I kept it in.
@annie-owl Oh I didn't know about Balance, part of my inspiration was [Marble Madness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Madness). The idea of collecting varied actual stamps and then having them dance in the background is such a brilliant idea. I was running out of time and energy, but the 3d model has a separate material for the picture part so it would be relatively simple upgrade. I think though, that you would only keep the stamps you collect if you reach the level goal though. Else you could just take the first stamp over and again until you have collected everything.
Also thank you for the recording and I'm happy you made it to the very absolute end. I'm just wondering if I did mess up which became the final scene there though, but it isn't a big difference...
@frib Glad you managed to get through. From the feedback I'm getting, I think I should at least have included an option to have the camera dynamic / adjust to player position rather than only scripted in its progression.
@jimbly It's always good to follow instructions :laughing: Yeah that camera. I should really have... If I make a post jam version, I'll for sure look into making it dynamic by default.
@t-c thanks for the bug feedback. I'll move that block over a bit to make sure there's plenty of space to fall down :laughing: And possibly have a reset button too. The camera auto-scroll, I'm not sure, I played Marble Madness once or twice about 35 years ago so can't really say, but I think it didn't care much about how fast you were. And it was also a time saver of sorts (unless having a fixed offset from player always, that would of course be the easiest but probably a bit dull).
@budaniel glad you liked it! Yeah that bonus level, I made it really quite hard. :rofl:
@rosday Woo someone likes the camera! Glad you enjoyed the game
@freeworld Thanks for the kind words! I'm very glad my distractions worked and kept you playing when it was getting tough! That was the plan :smile:
@apoly Katamari Damaci was part of the inspiration, though I've actually never played it, for the stamps making you uneven. I didn't have time to figure out how to do that procedurally though, so I just made six different versions of the ball with different collision-shapes :laughing: And I hear you about the camera. My thinking was it was meant as yet another obstacle for the player to plan and play around. But I'm thoroughly convinced it wasn't the right choice as almost everyone has mentioned it. :sweat_smile:
@geckoo1337 Glad you liked it! Yeah, more work on graphics would for sure be up there on a todo list post-jam version.
@elfb0y glad you enjoyed it and my "staaaamps!". The camera actually doesn't care at all about the ball in the current implementation, and if I do a post jam version, I'll be sure to change that since almost everyone didn't like that... :laughing:
@fiordarancio STAAAMPS! Very glad you liked my voice acting!
@ava-skoog Lol. Maybe "Dinosaur Stan!" will have to be my next LD game. Hope you are feeling better btw. I've been hammering away in Godot now for a couple of months but this was my first jam game. And it went mostly smoothly. Don't think I've ever had such good time management during a LD! The one gotcha I stumbled upon was that there was an enormous stutter the first time a particle system fired, so I had to sneakily put them all in the level-select level where it doesn't matter and you kind of don't notice as much as it happens right when the level gets loaded. There was music btw, maybe you had it muted with 'M'? There could have been more varied music though. Very happy you got to all the ends!
And to everyone else, thanks for your feedback!
Fun game. It started out quite easy, almost too easy so I didn't really learn to be strategic at all :laughing: But getting higher level gems did require some planning. Most of the time my greatest enemy felt like it was myself accidentally getting too much progress too fast before I had upgraded to quality enough.
There were some quality of life improvements like changing the cursor over buttons and perhaps also warning when taking a mining action would empty out or fill up a bar before clicking it. I know there was a chance aspect but just not having the player do the math and let the UI inform the player that it could happen.
It didn't feel like I was playing the game for an hour, but apparently I was, so that says something about its design being satisfying, collecting stuff... but maybe it is a bit on the long side for a jam and the variation it has in its current state.
If some available ores one could select from were rare and extra hard it could also have added to the game loop a bit, I think
Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klwm2Dypak8
I played quite a while before I realized I needed to customize the deck and only did notice it right as I was about to quit. And that made a whole lot of difference. I still think it could do with some balancing, but it went from being quite tedious to being fun. So I think forcing the player into deck customization after gaining cards could have been better than having it as a button.
But I'm also quite sure that even when I understood customization of the deck, that some of my reward cards were never available. Don't know if that was a bug or not.
Otherwise the game did play really well. There were some oddities that took some getting used to, like attacking an enemy with a card that had no attack stats just to activate it. And maybe the end round should have happened automatically at zero souls and no 0-cost cards or something like that. Or at least draw attention to the button.
Overall a very nice entry!
Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O_Mv_ecOTU
A really good idea building scrabble into a slight maze. I played several of the levels, but not all as it took me a while to get through them. I find it very interesting a game, but I also feel like something in its structure doesn't make me want to engage with it in the right/intended way.
The reward of seeing score go up is a bit too low without a highscore, or dungeon features that only unlock once you've reached certain value. One idea I had was adding doors that only unlock after 50 or 100 or such score. It could also be that you need to pickup a key to be able to unlock a door. There could be enemies that discards the remainder of your hand if you place ontop of them... basically more stuff that makes it interesting to interact with the dungeon.
As the game stands right now, I found the most joy playing it just disregarding everything about score and bonuses and just trying to get to the end as fast as possible. So the wall layout, was the only thing that worked as intended for me. But those walls were great obstacles.
The rules for the blank was a bit odd too, or non-standard at least, in that they could have two different meanings when placing (one letter horizontally and one vertically). And you could on subsequent additions mutate the meaning of the blank as you saw fit.
So a very interesting start and with a little work could become a very engaging game.
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5d8iaxFGjg
Very nice game! I got quite far, and could probably have used my re-rolls to push it even further. It was interesting though to have them as a currency that one might want to hold on to to gain higher scores.
Some of the rules for the paintings were a little unclear and some a bit too complex that there would have been good with some more feedback that showed the outcome of the placement. Either showing the calculation of the last placement or in the case of getting scores per duplicate and original, it could have highlighted each thing as it was getting scored.
The rule "+1 mult" could also have specified that it only was for the next placement. My thinking was it was going to be for the remainder of the paintings I had available in my hand (that is the next two).
But I think the most important feedback would be to show on the grid where you are about to place the painting before placing it rather than showing the outline as you drag it along. I had to keep reminding myself all the time that I needed to not look at the outline but at the cursor position.
Over all a very nice puzzle game!
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HwTSOCeYBs
I really loved how the the quite calm but yet still at times stressful flying about. Especially since I never really could learn what direction was which (even though it really made a whole lot of sense). The way my craft evolved between collection runs. Sometimes compact, sometimes minimal, sometimes with long impractical arms. That was really neat and neat how it affected the mechanics of navigating.
It would really have been nice with some sort of progress UI, since the game takes a while for someone like me to complete. And there were some sound issues with the connection sound being almost inaudible at times. And a nice space tune in the background too... but yeah all in all a very enjoyable game.
Playthrough (though I turned silent a lot of it concentrating on how to steer the ship :laughing:):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kUuMrAB-w
I really liked the graphics and the quite casual difficulty felt right to me. I guess it would have been possible to chase beating levels without playback-retries but not at all for me. I didn't really fully understand the rules of the ship-mechanics until a while after completing the game... I think at least? But that wasn't too much of a problem when it was so forgiving on retries.
A full-screen mode would also have been vary nice. But all in all a solid game!
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OD8srhvUtk
Superb little forest walk sim. I loved the dynamic audio track, it honestly made a huge part of the game. The art was also very nice and game-play, after the first slightly jarring moments, very easy to understand too.
In the beginning though, I was not at all expecting to be on a train ride so to say with only the option to look around. But once I understood that, I think it was a great choice. I don't know if there's a way to ease the player into it better either. :shrug: It would also have been really neat if I could have used the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and out.
But all in all very good jam entry indeed.
Playthrough with more feedback:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BtzOkKla2U
A nice little point and click detective game! I enjoyed playing it all to the end. Well written and well drawn.
There were some quality of life improvements, in particular being able to see what options you had taken, and the interaction options not triggering if you already had your mouse pointer in the right place when they become active. I also found the game very silent and didn't even realize there was any rain sound! So mastering everything so I wouldn't have to put volume dangerously high for other sounds would have been nice.
All in all a very good entry.
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84oYrs4KRI
PS:
!> Starting a paragraph with `!>` makes it a spoiler. So you should probably update your game description making each step of the walk-through it's own spoiler.
First I was a bit confused what the white line was and why I didn't get on the board :laughing: But when I got that, it was quite clear how to progress. I must say though, I didn't like so much how I got stuck on the obstacles, it did feel quite unfair. I'm guessing the colliders could have been more rounded and maybe have some physics material to permit a better flow while playing.
I tried a couple of times and managed to get 138.
Nice little game with the constraints you had of the 48h and kids and work!
Playthrough with some more comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ZWp2Giv44
Very well drawn game! And the characters were funny too! I do wish the collections they were presenting were a bit more personal and was used to further build their characters rather than what it seemed like, quite random. I got multiple characters offering the same three things. I also struggled a bit because I not only didn't always find the common denominator, but I also didn't agree with it when it was presented. Which makes the puzzle a bit problematic.
I did enjoy playing though!
I had some issues with the UI. The buttons weren't really where it looked like they were.
But all in all a very good jam game!
Playthrough and more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4-IecCzOd8
I got to the end of the story, but not the end of the bonus levels. They proved much too hard for me. It is a nice loop though, where I said I was gonna end and then I probably tried ten more times. :laughing:
The controls were a bit jarring, and it wasn't very clear how when exactly I could fire the gun, even though I think I understood the logic behind it. It could have been very nice with a controller, but it didn't work with my x-box one at least.
I did enjoy the story up to where it ended. So all in all a nice game.
Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZkcAOcvHYM
I very much like the graphics and the calm relaxing mood of the game. Birds are also a plus.
I did have a lot of problem figuring out the call mini-game, and exactly what the rules were in general. But I managed to snap a couple of photos in the end even though I didn't really know why the birds appeared near me as they did. Or rather, I understand the game logic, I just didn't feel like I was doing anything better or worse with the call imitations when they did.
So there's some feedback there needed for someone like me to grasp and learn from failures in the call attempts.
Very nice looking game though.
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUtPgA086e4
That was fun cleaning. I think I see the appeal of cleaning sims now. The upgrade system was nice. It did suffer a little bit in the beginning that it wasn't too clear that I was actually cleaning anything off the floor being that low powered and having so small range. But with some upgrades it became very clear. So not really a critique. One thing though, I would have liked to have enough credits to max out everything and maybe at that stage get a new unlock to make the cleaning quite silly so I can just for a last level run around and clean everything within seconds, maybe even clean away the walls and the floor. That the game ended before I got to max out all my stats felt a bit like a dud. But I also understand, and agree, that with the current content the game shouldn't be much longer. So it is a tough balance to strike.
I thought at first glance it was going to be a vampires survivor cleaning sim somehow :laughing: but this more relaxing cleaning was very nice. And I liked the storytelling with the paw prints and such.
Very nice entry!
Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq3mMMWLYTs
Very good looking game indeed. The characters, the UI, the world and visual effects. There were some issues, like the target of a fight being too far up on screen that I couldn't inspect their dice and the outer boundary walls would really have looked better if the corners were filled in.
I gave it a bunch of tries but for some reason my best attempt was the first and never managed to get anywhere close to that.
I think, unfortunately, the game suffers quite a lot from being too exposed to randomness and leaves very little agency to the player besides planning routes as a means to affect the outcome. To me, the most obvious first thing to try would be to have everyone that is on adjacent tiles take part in the same roll rather than having them one after another. I would also make sure that tied rolls meant something. My suggestion is to increase the stakes of the next roll.
Overall though a good entry. Very good looking!
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qo-Az7unL0
I really do like the premise, but I feel like the game-play doesn't work too well at present. There seems to be no progression exploring the rooms. From what I can tell, the only thing that happens is that you slowly loose health taking hits. The lack of something to pick up, or even just a kill counter, or an exit to get to in combination with rewarding us with unlimited loot to start makes it a bit unclear what the player is supposed to do.
If rooms had a little loot and you gain more after clearing the rooms it could be very interesting though. And adding a sense of direction, an end goal with roaming around other than death, then it could be have me playing for quite a while.
The graphics was neat though and the movement control felt good.
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjjCw0l60JQ
I think the graphics was great! It felt very personal. It was really hard to play on the controller for some reason and I was about to give up, but switching to keyboard made it much easier to play for some reason.
I still had to struggle a bit, in part because of hitboxes being a bit large and the lack of coyote time on jumps. I also managed to escape the game on the second level and had to restart. But my biggest gripe was having to use the mouse to restart and being stuck while the character was saying they wanted a bike. With a game that makes you try and retry, having such obstacles each time is problematic.
I did manage to get the bike in the end though. And I did enjoy playing it. So overall still a very nice game.
Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nfrjTEALoE
Splendid game! It is very beautifully drawn and it has a nice puzzle mechanic to it. It did take me a very long time to understand though and a large part of that was the UI being unclear. I think I also managed to collect 3 colored things but still not get a proper ending, which was very confusing.
At last I did manage to find three endings, I think. And I'm happy that I did. I would have liked the game though to not only remember my collected endings, but help me out while playing to indicate the things I've already used. Either graying them out if each can only be used for a single collection. Or if they could be used for multiple, add a small portrait of the ending that I had discovered their use in next to them.
Very good mood and art, and a nice puzzle mechanic, so with some UI improvement, interaction touch ups, and quality of life improvements I would probably have kept hunting combos a lot longer.
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yObAN66KtO4
Very nice game! Very calm and soothing. I got to the end and became a master collector, though it took a while of waiting for the final flower.
There were some smaller feedback things to the player that could have been a bit clearer. Like, I think the book (?) gives you the button in the upper corner to learn about how to grow the plants. The progress circle/flower could fill out the leaf a bit more attention grabbing when you actually have the fully grown plant and same for when you loose it. It's placement could have been a bit more central too. For the book, it felt oddly stressful that the little Bumk kept coming around with stuff while you had it open, so perhaps Bumk should be away while reading to keep with the cozy vibe.
It would also have been nice if the game increased the probability of me getting the stuff I was waiting for towards the end so it doesn't turn into a waiting game.
But over all a very very good game.
Playthrough with some more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5slc28_Kt8
Please mark you download on itch.io with the proper operating system so that it can be run through the itch app :pray: nocompatible.png
It took me a while to at all understand how the level worked, but once I did I managed to get all but the last rainbow potion. Those blue shooting enemies were the worst :laughing: Felt like they were predicting my movement.
There were some obvious graphical glitches, like the game only using part of the screen and that some of the tutorial boxes were just sticking around and being in the way without a way to dismiss them. I also felt like the hitbox for the character was a bit too unforgiving. It probably was the outline of the sprite, but fair feeling would have it shrunk in a bit in my opinion. It would also have been nice to toggle auto-shoot to not have to hold mouse button pressed.
All in all though, a fun entry. I think if the collisions weren't feeling a bit unfair and if it wasn't so fidgety to put stuff into the cauldron while avoiding the enemies, I would probably have attempted the rainbow at least one more time.
Playthrough with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qkAgKXjEY0
I enjoyed playing this puzzle-game! There were some questions and unclear things, like what the actual placement rules where and more so what effect my placed rooms had after I had placed them. Because of course I forgot their rules as soon as I had done the placement! :laughing:
The graphics was nice and clear. Very much liked how there was both pattern and color to distinguish the sets. There could have been some more feedback on how I was progressing before completing the sets and some animations with dealing and discarding rooms to make it clearer what happened there.
One thing that left me uncertain though: What happens if I only pick 3 different sets but multiple copies of the same set, does that mean I cannot win the game?
But overall very nice game!
Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aflkkmU9uZs
Very interesting and good game. I played through it twice to get to see different parts and I must say I think the is genuinely a very good idea to build something upon. The text, maybe particularly the font and the solid blackness of the color felt a bit off with style the game and the content (maybe make it partially transparent and not perfect black, and shop around for fonts?). In contrast, the word "RUINS" that you screenshot above felt more like how the text should interact with the story. It would have been very fancy if the text was moving and such on some of the dreamy parts. The controls of the character and how the ends of the more abstract levels were indicated could be worked on. But now it's starting to sound like I was displeased. And that I wasn't, it was a really marvelous entry. Very well done!
That's a very incompatible combo and very ambitious to make a mobile and computer game. I didn't quite understand how the rules worked on `baedar`. I just got faces with comments and a yes/no button and no indication that there was any strategy to what to do. In `ULTRA BAE` I got past a couple of ladders until I lost the last of my life. Very interesting combo though. It would have been even cooler with swipes on the phone-app. And perhaps if the computer game was made a little more clearer, maybe top-down? With some tweaks I could see this as a quite fun coop game combo.
What an obviously good combo of themes! Very good setting. And good fun game too.
In the beginning I was just shooting drones, because I had forgotten about that other button. And then when I remembered and started planting I almost had them die on me before I figured out the watering. Perhaps because the water ball wasn't iconic enough to recognize from start. A simple mouse ui showing the two actions would have been helpful with that.
Really well made game!
It was kind of fun how it felt like some characters were really screaming at times due to their texts being short "Kong doesn't know!". The 3D assets were really well made. I consider hiding/locking the mouse cursor. I kept clicking outside the game all the time. And in general the camera got confusing as a result of that.
Consider properly tagging the downloads on itch (Windows), so that they can be played in their app.
I never solved the murder, but I enjoyed playing.
Thanks everyone for the feedback so far. I'm happy you like the scoreboards, I lost the better part of a day setting it up.
@simonhutchinson You might be on to something, I'm having the same issues, with our own game too. There might be hidden reasons why some genres are generally not combined :wink:
@randomhuman I saw you rob me of my :medal::s lurking on the highscore service. And you are very right, we were missing some of our highest level weirdness consultants this jam. When that happens, sometimes you can't help but making your own :tractor: _The Straight Story_ :tractor:
@RockhopperGames In real life it is much easier I've noticed. I've steadily climbed in my species of bird per kilometer score. Last one was 3.26 species/km. Still it is a bit dangerous when you get distracted and forget to look where you put down your feet.
@Altron I updated the description above to more clearly indicate exactly how _Birding x Running_ was calculated. I will update on itch too. Thanks for the heads-up, it's so easy to think everything is 100% obvious when you're the one designing it :sweat:
@sean-s-leblanc I agree with you more or less 100%, though inverting some that is relaxing and making it stressful (or perhaps more interesting the other way around), I think is a good tool. I promise next game will focus on absurd and wacky again.
I tested around against myself a little and it seems really complex and challenging game to be good at. Cool idea. I almost gave up before coming to the game, which might be a pico8 thing but having enter give you a reset kind of option in the menu was really confusing.
Interesting idea. I had a hard time getting past the part with two blocks, though. I think it would have been better not to both increase the speed of the character and the complexity of the puzzle at the same time. With games like this that have a really quick loop, it is also very important to put the player back in the start position for another round as quickly and easily as possible. And right now it was the opposite of that since you had to let go of the keyboard and click the mouse. First times with the blocks I also thought it would work like tetris and was surprised that I could move through the ground, but more importantly though, it would really have been nice to add a feature where I could manually lock the piece in place too.
One feature that could also be cool for a game like this would be if you gave the player jump control too, so that you don't have to put the pieces perfectly but just good enough that you can also jump were you missed. But maybe you already had that and I didn't get to it since I couldn't manage the two-piece puzzle in time. Anyways, I would add such a feature not from the start but after the player has passed some puzzles.
Interesting game, and sometimes really challenging when you couldn't come up with words or the ones you did come up with were not known. I didn't mind the leftkey/backspace. But I wasn't focusing too much on trying to be very fast. It would have been fun if customers returned and remembered what the got the previous time and had ideas what they wanted next based on it.
Fun game! I might not have gotten very far, but made it a bit into the level with the things I were supposed to shoot while in the air. Perhaps it would have increased the fun a bit if first level with those was a bit easier. I was happy each time I managed to shoot the first obstacle while the level was resetting me.
Nice game. Well made and solid basic aesthetics. I played a handful of levels. It would have been nice to have more audio, if only effects on pressing the button to move, landing and being swallowed by the goal-thing. It was really surprising that there was only one sound and it was for changing level to play next.
Some minor UX details. You can start playing the game without dismissing the text, which is kind of good when you have to redo a map that you failed, but then the text should disappear if you do. It would have been nice if the level-selector automatically selected the next level or even better if you just got to it. Leaving people out of the next challenge means you give them a chance to stop playing. Inside the level, it felt a bit odd that the elevators dragged me along when I was just next to them, but didn't stop me if I was flying past them. I think it would make more sense if they only dragged me if I landed on them.
Consider properly marking the game as windows on itch.io so that it can be run in their app.
Wow, like I was playing this peaceful game, not exactly understanding the complete aspect of it, how the rhythm aspect worked, but enjoying the shooting puzzle being kind of relaxed. Not caring if I was playing optimally or not. Having turned the volume up. And then :bomb:, I died and that loud effect almost scared me off my chair. So you can almost add surprise-horror to the genres.
I think the game could benefit from some feedback as you pass a wall. At the basic level, just how many you got by, but perhaps better some score reflecting how well you did on it.
Really nice game.
Cool start. I liked very much how physical, it felt with a the shots. The graphics were also great. It was a bit annoying to only be able too shoot left-right and at times it felt like the controls were a bit slow compared to the monsters. At least for level 1. On the other hand my shots traveled a bit too far, I think because I was hurting things I couldn't see. Speaking of which, it was btw possible to leave the visible area of the game. I wonder what treasures were hiding out there...
I really liked the graphics of the game, and audio was nice too! Jumping was a bit too hard though, especially when I got those `jump --- jump - jump - jump --` bits. I also found that the best strategy was to enter the texts for all commands and just arrow around, which kind of was opposite to the game idea. My suggestion would be to only allow repeat the last command (if any) and rather make the game easier. At least in the beginning.
Even if I got helpful texts (very nice), I would also have liked to have a command to list commands. And the command `PLAY` and `EXIT` in the menu. Because really there should be no need for a mouse in this game.
Another thing that probably would have kept me trying more would be if there was a score (time survived or such) and possibly also a local or even better global high score.
Very nice game though!
Cool game! I got to the second round. I must say I focused mostly on what I could draft and trying to remember which would cause both drafting and playing the card. The scores I never saw really because they were too far off to the right. So I would suggest moving them to the drafting area to give the player a chance at seeing how they are doing while being busy typing. Some times I got stuck because I didn't realize I was missing a space on a card that I just had happened to fill up partially while dealing with other cards. So perhaps it wouldn't hurt a bit to not include space in what is needing typing. I general a really well made game though!
I was quite confused how to rate this game for 'fun'. As a concept game it was near perfect. I really enjoyed it, yet in some other senses it was rather the opposite of fun.
I tried to read some bits in the beginning. And it was really quite hard. When the texts got longer... I can't say I didn't do too much reading then... I might never have appreciated double-jump as much as when I discovered it was a thing here.
It would have been nice with some player shadow or similar because it was really hard to get a sense of where ground was for myself. But on the other hand, this game was everything about making it hard for the player, so perhaps that was perfect as it was too.
Very good use of the theme! And an interesting experience.
I think I found like some others have commented, that the feeling of and therefore the aspect of being drunk was a bit out of context and would have needed to be more integrated than just the blur. Though the blur looked nice. The running and the ball worked nice, but I would have liked a bit of a reset time after goals. The bell was good, because there would have been too hard to remember and notice some of the rules. I don't think I ever had anything other than the goals and the 10s rule. And since time between goals was that short in general most of the time, I would suggest reducing that complexity to goals only. If you really like the 10s rule, I would amend it to be 10s without touching the ball or something like that. One neat thing that could be quite possible would be that you start to see two semitransparent opponent when you get more drunk making the game effectively 2 vs 1.
I really liked this entry and what you did with the theme. The absolute slowness of the game and everything up until the end. It would have been nice with a little more poetry or just being able to circle through as I might not have played it the fastest way. The game got quite silent after it was gone. Some ambient wind and ocean sounds would have also added a whole lot. The ending was very good to, and it would have been even cooler if the poetry foreshadowed it a bit. (Maybe it did and I didn't pick up on it.) I really like clickers in ld-games and I love me a walking sim. So this was a near perfect combo. I played Dear Esther, but can't remember if I completed it. It was nice not having to click yourself to death with it too. Mostly everything with this game was very nice. One little detail with the poetry. It would have been nice to have it on a special button close to WASD.
Fun game! It took me a little while to see the +1 for the shots and realize you gained by shooting but then I was all onboard. First waves I also felt a bit like you could cheat the game by just clicking and not triggering the aliens. Until I hit the level that they didn't wait at all for me. But still, perhaps they should be on a timer on the first levels to not let the player exploit that they are waiting? I really liked the graphics and the audio. Some minor things with the graphics though. It would have been nice with a larger in-game cursor so as to make it easier to keep track of where I was aiming. And the UI for selecting different options was a little buggy. There was some option behind the others. I tried upgrading the speed of the shots and with autoshot and this was good, but I also didn't see what else would help me gain more speed with the generation of shots after a while and reaching to the 500 to open a door seemed a bit too far off. So perhaps, I would suggest tweaking the power-ups and the stats. Maybe making more of them visible at the same time, maybe hiding some that you are too far away from anyhow. I'm not exactly sure which way to go. In any case, really nice game!
I quite enjoyed the rag-doll ball shooting competition. It was challenging and interesting. I did win the tournament, but it didn't feel easy. That's a really hard thing to pull off in a LD, so well done there!
Though, it felt that it made it slightly too easy that the mouse cursor wasn't hidden, I could just make sure it was over the ball. Perhaps hide the cursor and if anything is needed, then have a cross-hair at a fixed distance from the gun in the direction that you are aiming. In contrast, the bullets could be a bit more visible, maybe leave a trace or simply be a bit oversized.
It was also a bit too workable a strategy to just sit in the back corner and shoot at the ball. Not the best strategy, but too good. (I found it better to shoot myself into the air and then hit ball straight on.) Anyways, that corner hugging kind of didn't match with the feel of the game and one way to fix it would be to make walls bouncy.
As for the stripping, I don't think it added anything and I agree with @jshaffer94247 that it needed something interesting and unexpected that inverted the tropes of striptease to justify its inclusion. Or that it somehow fed back into the game-mechanic, i.e. clothes were a hindrance and you/the opponent get better with less clothes. Not sure why that would be though.
I tried a couple of runs, and it's an interesting combo. I never got very far until I had 0 score and then it seemed like I could no longer play the 3 in a row game yet the car kept running. I found no retry either so I had to restart the game. If zero score was a loose state I think the feedback from the game has to be clearer. The match game should probably also not respond like it does when you can move stuff around when you can't. I would also suggest giving the player more score if score was a currency for the match-game to make it a bit easier.
Surprisingly I found it really hard to find a date that was willing to fight me, and that would have been a really nice twist if it was near impossible... then finally getting into the fight, I did loose. So I can see why people weren't bothering to much with me, seeing I would not be much of a challenge.
I was kind of abrupt end and the transition from being on the ground, beaten up to the rather upbeat music in the title/instructions screen.
It would have been nice if the name of the other fighter carried over to the fighting scene and possibly that they'd yell some of the shit they believed in.
I tried launching the game through the itch-app but I only got a grey screen and nothing happened. (On Windows)
Interesting game idea. I really liked the audio and what it did for the mood. I agree with @Pixelome, I was about to give up on taking the rest because it felt like space was not responding, so hitboxes should probably be about 100% larger. The way I understood the game was that I got to interact with one of 3ish items and select one of 3 options and then wait and see if dude got happy. After I needed to rest. My problem was that I tried three times and happened to choose wrong 3 times (different furniture). And if I understood the game correctly, you immediately lost if you didn't to all things right. This is way too hard on the player to keep the player interested. Some ways to change this is that you give one negative score for failing and a positive for doing good and have the game end when you get to -3 or +3. Another tweak you could do (possibly at the same time) is to have very few bad moves the first day(s) and then over the course of days ramp up the difficulty with introducing higher frequency of bad options. Though this only works if you have a very clear idea of what the dude's personality is and manage to convey it to the player.
Nice first game and hope you come back for more jams!
Nice educational speed based game. I would have liked I highscore though to keep me playing it. First attempts I didn't quite understand the controls, but then I figured out how it worked, and it kind of made sense and also made it more pedagogical that if was guessing wrong about a word, I got more attempts at it. But since it is a rather unusual control pattern, it would probably be good to have it explicitly explained in the game.
Gorgeous game, stunning really. I got to the third level and I know I could have completed it, I just got a bit annoyed the fourth attempt while taking down the cone and falling off the grid because I though I was one off from where I were. And I'd say that is the one thing I'd focus on: Improving sense of height and sense of grid position-position. The first made it hard to know if bullets would hurt or not. Here one way to illustrate that more clearly would be to blur bullets that are on different height. Or work with their colors or something like that. The light effect showing height over ground was really nice but it was still hard to know if I had landed or not. Basically just hoping that I was on ground rather than feeling sure I was. Perhaps making that height effect a bit more exaggerated and have a specific landing effect (could be audio). That would probably also resolve the grid position-issue.
Another thought, perhaps be nice with gold and silver medals (or similar) based on the clock-time it took to complete the level.
A really great game though. Very well made.
What a delight to play this game! Wonderful assets and just about the right level of difficulty for this type of puzzle-light game. I did struggle a bit with the interactions and I do really wish the camera would have panned up so that my character wasn't half-ways out of the screen. I also managed to create an unholy vortex at one point but fortunately I could sort that out.
Play-through with more feedback: https://youtu.be/IhwqCZnIlDM
Interesting stress test of my short term memory :laughing: But after quite the stumbling start, I got into the flow and could zoom through most of it.
I found the moving UI quite awkward and for my main screen it was all too dark... some brightness slider would have been needed. I could only make out the eyes.
And of course some atmospheric music and sound effects along with the blam! and so would also have elevated the immersion.
But all in all a good game!
Play-through: https://youtu.be/4dmFuVSiShM
Unfortunately I didn't manage to get past that final boss even with a couple of tries. I'm gonna blame the input keys not being very optimal for my keyboard layout (number keys are spread out over the two halves of the keyboard). Absolutely not a skill issue :laughing: Would have been nice to have alternative (WASD) keybinding included too, maybe controller as well.
Over all very well made game, the platforming controller felt good. I really liked the story and voice acting. From accessibility standpoint subtitles would have been great.
Play-through: https://youtu.be/hd8GzxXDNAk
It took me an embarrassing long time to start and figure this out! But I finally got it. I really liked the atmosphere in the sound design. Once I finally figured stuff out you got me a bit scared in the end with the sequence being that long, that I would mix something up and have to restart! :laughing:
Play-through: https://youtu.be/Ml_TgF8HUio
@ava-skoog I think the discovery part went really well in the end, just a little of the UX when first not even knowing when and how to press could have had a little assistance yeah. Also I knew you've been here at Ludum for a great while but I didn't know you were the shared 6th-most jammer of all time :wink:
That was a blast, I do like how friction-less an experience the game is, cohesive and well done and yet it asks of us to whip out some pen and paper to keep track of our lies!
The animations were really great. I do wish that the intro didn't start as soon as you pressed play though but that is a very small detail. I also got a bit confused about how to actually start because I tried to press the start symbol.
The only other thing was me wanting to think about the word choice and having a long message that started with new words made it a bit hard to look up and remember and plan. But it also made sense in the game world that it would be hard.
So very cool indeed.
Play-through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Zx03hnPTw
To everyone thanks for all the nice feedback so far!
@frib oh you found that spot! :laughing: And thanks for the encouraging approval of my voice acting
@zedgame glad you liked it!
@annie-owl The ASMR aspect was honestly quite uncomfortable for me to make in the beginning when there was only one or two of them :laughing: And then ending for sure is quite sad. I only described the game in general to my friend who provides me with poems so it was a surprise to me too but that the game would be that sad. But I think it fit very well.
@batisdark interesting that the umbrella bugged out, I will for sure look into that. The Firefox bug is for one in three or something and I have absolutely no clue how it happens. And of course glad you liked the game!
@oxnh At first when I developed the floor, wall and ceiling text also moved but I could feel my stomach start to have opinions so I turned that of. VR, I don't even want to imagine what type of vomit speed-run this would be.
@weglove Thanks for the feedback, but could you specify what was the perceived issue with the audio and perhaps what browser you were using
@100th-coin What a feedback! There's only one thing I can do and that is give you:
feedback_award.png
@christina-antoinette-neofotistou Thank you so much for the praise! There were indeed quite a few recordings, about 60 of them. The most time went into the poem, naturally. I guess my trick was just closing my eyes and whisper into the mic and almost always accept the first recording however awkward it felt to me. I also made about the same amount of models, keeping them simple in most cases. But since the game mechanics is very simple on purpose, I actually had a very relaxed jam making it.
@kaijiro I was considering a slider for how much would have moving text, but I honestly ran out of energy to put it in. I've got it ready for when I release the post-jam version though. I had no issues with the sounds myself, but admittedly I've got a new quite beefy computer. I could probably do something similar for whispers as for moving text.
@blubberquark yeah I should have put in a slider for how much text moves...
@aurel300 pushing it further, you have my attention! But yeah this was the amount I barely managed to create during the jam. It would be interesting to follow the protagonist a couple "days", each with it's own challenge or version of the same challenge.
@jimbly Thanks for playing. Honestly I never thought of footsteps, and now I feel like that could have been a very cool shader to add ontop with a wave of `STEP` shouting across the level.
@kanity Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! The correct final spot is indeed hidden visually, so the player either needs to just walk around until bumping into it, or using the audio hints.
@t-c I hope it didn't hit home too hard. The game setting was partially inspired by my time working in elderly care in the early 2000:s, but also came together in a creative happy accident :laughing:
@zizi Thanks for the feedback! As you might have guessed, I was very much aiming for maximum everything (besides polygon count on the 3D assets).
@ava-skoog Glad you liked it! The post-jam version that I have ready for when the voting end has a slider for amount of scrolling text to help those that find it a bit challenging to play.
@dis0rder Thanks for the feedback! I did on purpose keep the game-play complexity very low this time and focused on experience and you are right that this very much could be expanded upon. :thinking:
@sheepolution It was very hard to listen to myself whispering in my head too :laughing:
@oddballdave Oh your comment made me figure out what the bug was! The trigger area for proximity to the false signal checks if the player is in the correct room, and that area spilled over into the kitchen and then it didn't actually process when you went into the hall and approached it!
@hagamosvideojuegos I haven't tried playing it blind, but it is interesting idea i might have to try out some day. I did consider dark-mode when making it as that's generally how I set colors in apps, but somehow I didn't feel it was entirely right for the story, to be in darkness. It is something one could also play with using the same shader and cycling the background color over time for a different effect.
Very interesting visual/auditory novel. The graphical style was great and it felt very fitting with the audio recordings. I was a little confused by who the protagonist really was, and at times who was speaking. The space where the entity said things was the same as giving instructions on actions to the protagonist. And the place where the protagonist was speaking/thinking also was used as a place for info dump and other things.
Some clarity/visual indicator would have been nice.
I also think some of the mood/feeling/vibe that the game was building up very well was cut a bit short by how the transitions were handled one scene to the next.
Over all a very nice experience! Happy I played it.
More on that and other things in the play-through: https://youtu.be/URQY-1tbf9Y
What a beautiful game! I really loved what you've done with this visually. At first I thought it was going to be a fairly simple interactive fiction, but then you tossed in some quite hard puzzles there along the way!
I did unfortunately have to restart twice because of bugs? I hope they were bugs. I ran out of guesses with the audience and I had to pause on the phone puzzle because I got a phone call which made the right side panel just disappear. One of the mini-games I wasn't sure what the objective was either, but I seemed to not get stuck, so perhaps that was fine.
All in all, a very nice experience!
Play-through:
https://youtu.be/n-8ugUL3zx8
I kinda knew I wasn't gonna be any easy thing for me. Not my strong suite at all :laughing: But I did manage to get a bit of income each day and a full chaos drone of complexity running around the map. So I can see the depth in there even though my brain says nono just place a little and see what happens.
Play-trhough with more comments:
https://youtu.be/rtTrDX1VSV0
I really respect the wordless game trying to make you understand as you play. I think, it might have been a bit too vague or hard for me to fully get how it is supposed to be played. In the end I figured out quite a few of the meters but it became a loop of explore some, run out of fuel, reset. And that loop felt like it didn't really leave room for too many mistakes, which given how purposefully non-verbal the game was, made it feel slightly hopeless.
The graphics was really neat, the controls worked well and the enemy behavior was interesting. So it had a lot of good stuff going for it. Just give me an easy mode :laughing:
Play-through: https://youtu.be/RnnDvo9UsTE
Really neat visuals in this game!
At first I was highly confused, mostly from the lack of feedback from the game, both about what were the towers that could be rebuilt, that I actually needed to, and the scanner and I weren't the best of friends so I stopped using it. And it seemed to work just fine walking around not building towers.
Finally I actually managed to build a tower and it was quite neat, though I was struggling with the UI/interactions.
I did lack a sense of progress towards any objective, especially with the map huge like that. And with my health situation. So in the end I unfortunately gave up.
But again, really strong visual style in the game!
Play-through that shows and goes into more detail of the troubles I had :laughing: https://youtu.be/71W1DqnxxFw
I enjoyed playing this to the end. The music, sounds and the vfx in the transitions/animations were probably what i liked the most. I did have some hickups. Like I missed the piece of dialog that said how to build turrets and had to force quit the game and restart it. The mouse cursor was also not jailed to the game so i accidentally clicked on my second monitor and lost focus for a while. A larger crosshair cursor would have been really neat there.
I did very much find it interesting how you sort of were inclined to grow yourself large (but i don't know if there was much of a benefit to it) but that being long meant it was near impossible to guard your tail and thus you became more vulnerable. I think it could become a really great game it explored that dynamic deeper.
Unfortunately I found the dialog very hard to follow because my focus was so much on the snaking and shooting.
Play-through with more comments and proof of the embarrassing long time it took before i realized why i lost pieces of myself sometimes: https://youtu.be/lSxHhU_NQrg
I hope I didn't miss some obvious things but I kinda struggled. Was it possible to actually build? That button didn't seem to do anything. I also found it impossible to hurt their chopper. In the end I found an almost winning strategy of not attacking infantry and just let them starve. :laughing:
The graphics was nice and clear and I liked the idea of the signals intelligence aspect, but I found the scrolling near impossible and the gain of decoding the messages relatively small in the current iteration of the game.
Play-through with more feedback: https://youtu.be/rVx2rqhF41Y
I like the puzzles in this game a whole lot and the interaction with painting/erasing/digging things out was very nice. I found the graphics signalling a bit confusing at times. What could be dug through and not. And I'm not sure i solved the final level the intended way, but if i did, then maybe there should have been one or two shorter and less complex levels before that taught the two novel mechanics needed for the last level. But it might also be that i didn't understand its solution and found an unintended one.
Very nice puzzle game though!
Play-through with more thoughts and comments: https://youtu.be/z3xNDzGlnKM
Such a creative way manipulating the game's play-through frame by frame. There were several occasions where I was like, this cannot be done within the time window given, but hey of course it could. I should have re-read the controls a bit though because I forgot about the A/D stepping frame by frame until very late in the game. I'm wondering if there was a way to give the player a friendly reminder to actually step frame by frame, though it wasn't really needed either.
The first couple of challenges were all solvable with the same solution:
!> Pause, click back a bit, place cursor. !> Well except for googling. I did love that voice-line there!
But then the game does switch it up quite a bit
!> and the shooting game's solution was something completely different that hadn't been hinted before. !> Even with the voice-line hint I thought it was about shooting the duck when the host wasn't looking.
So I'm wondering, for a bit more smooth game experience, if there could have been one mini-game earlier that did build up to that solution a little. Not sure exactly what it could have been though.
Even if
!> the boss-fight also required new lateral thinking, I didn't at all get as stuck there !> probably because the gun-challenge had primed me for it.
Over all, a splendid game-jam game! I had a lot of fun playing it
And for maximum feedbackiness: https://youtu.be/B3zAEm7g-7s
The only thing I don't like about this game is its length! :laughing: I so would have wanted a bunch of more levels to play around in and see this idea taking to its final conclusion. Really great little re-imagining of billiards. Make me more levels :8ball:
I was a bit confused about the controls at start but once I figured it out it was quite smooth. Some hit-boxes I felt a bit unfair and accidentally re-launched me when I sonar scanned to late once.
Play-through with more comments: https://youtu.be/s3ydbymylDk
I absolutely loved this little game. The visual design, limited colors, the graphics assets, vfx, sfx well the whole atmosphere and aesthetics of it. If anything I would have loved seeing the phase II after establishing contact be explored a little more too. And I was somewhat confused about getting full signal without being able to make the call in some places.
As a co-host of a classic first person 90-degree turns dungeon crawler jam, I'm also a bit partial to the game format.
Play-through with more comments: https://youtu.be/iVfdqxEe7H4
A very nice collection of puzzles! And I did enjoy the art-style a lot. There were some puzzles that was a bit confusing at first (the power ones), in part because of how some batteries were having their connector pointing the wrong way, in part because the goal wasn't obvious (and remained obscure because the puzzle ended so abruptly when you solved it). Some of the brick puzzles felt a little like busy-work, especially the one with all the cats.
But over all I did really like my stay with the game and played it to the end.
Play-through with more comments: https://youtu.be/UzITztoEsGw
That was a very well made little game. The consistency in the presentation, clean graphics and all was very well made. The sound was also good.
I did not understand entirely how the game worked for the first round or two in all aspects and so I think there were some things with the UI/UX that could be somewhat improved.
Over all a very solid game
More thoughts and feed-back in the play-through: https://youtu.be/7HIDyL4CQ-I
Really authentic retro point and click style going on here. I really like that together with the falling rain effect (visual and sound). Gave a strong mood. The text was very hard to read though, so it really slowed me down quite a bit. I understand it was an aesthetics choice, but from accessibility standpoint it would have been good to be able to swap it for something more legible.
The puzzles, I think I mostly brute forced rather than really understand them. Though, tbh this is kind of how I think of puzzles in many full release point and click adventures.
Impressive amounts of painting for a jam. I liked the style a lot.
Play-through: https://youtu.be/7NTTDg_KTvU
That actually explains a whole lot about the puzzles! I agree that some thing showing where you came from would have helped a lot in several locations. But yeah time is very short during the jam.
The fint was cool, I would rather argue to have an option to toggle to a simpler font when in need. Like almost all released games have text in fancy and fitting font but also allows you to see the text in clean font with a button press.
I got stuck a bit in unfortunately, but I did enjoy my stay after the initial and somewhat overwhelming experience. The style and atmosphere was really cool, the sim aspect very nice. I did wish there were some QoL improvements like press up to rework previous command (especially when trying to rotate the directional antenna correctly). And I do wish I could have had the instructions in the game a bit more, maybe a manual next to the screens, to not break the immersion as much.
Play-through with more thoughts: https://youtu.be/kDc-UfJ65BU
You got me really interested in where you were planning to go with this entry. The way the world reacts to player movement, fractures and coalesces, and dances around you is quite mesmerizing.
I played the linux build inside a VM and I only use the WASD input. Mouse and controller didn't work.
Play-through: https://youtu.be/fpb6wdksTRU
That's strange, I've played plenty of godot games in that vm... :thinking:
It is a indeed a very personal and beautiful presentation in this game. The mechanics of flying around the city and catching the dream waves are kind of simple, but the voice acting and the graphics very much weighs up for it. I particularly liked how the hand drawn texts were laid out around the dream content image.
I do, really do, wish there was a way to scale the game a little, because it was _tiny_ on my 4K monitor, to the point of it being hard to see the drawn stuff and text and such. I would say it was restrictive enough that it bordered an accessibility issue (though i could ofc gone and scaled the whole monitor).
I did very much enjoyed my stay with the game.
More feedback in the play-through: https://youtu.be/Ze55VHAdD_Q
You can probably test toggling `canvas_items` or `viewport` strech-mode in `Project Settings > Display > Window > Stretch > Mode` and try resizing the game window when running windowed mode to make sure it scales properly and that should be it.
It is quite possible that the "Press Enter" is needed, and it would ofc have been even more asset creation needed to have that hand-painted too. Possibly it could have been a little delayed.
The same thing with the mini-game instructions, that at least when i'm entering a dream for the second or at least third time, perhaps they don't need to be shown anymore. But it is scary to not have instructions and allowing for players to be confused and lost. So I'm not sure there at all.
As for purple, I might have gone for it consistently because it was purple :laughing:
I hate tower defense games :laughing:, and I'm also notoriously bad at them. But I did quite like this even though I felt a bit hampered by the deck building balance between exploration and offense and had the game snowball on me twice feeling rather helpless at that time. Maybe I started going north too early, but if that is the case, maybe the level design could have been helped a bit by a mountain range or something forcing me to explore the other areas first.
Play-through with more comments: https://youtu.be/-Pw-5mv6X-U
It was a very visually coherent experience indeed. And the sounds were nice too. Having a bunch of smaller mini-games/challenges is also a very good structure. But I do have some opinions. First of all, I feel like some of them are just thrown in without much world building sense. At least to me. Especially the math homework? It gets me really wondering who the subject in the story is. Then I also got confused by the packet sending mini-game. I got passed it without ever figuring out what indicated where it needed to go. And sometimes packet got lost without any apparent reason. But the big offender was the 500 clicks game. That meant there was no way I was playing the game to the end. I would have probably done 50, even though that's too much for me from an accessibility stand-point. That also made me less inclined to attempt the other tasks where I got stuck.
I did enjoy writing a little story and the wave surfer mini-game was interesting.
Play-through with more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pxvapjutno
That Nok... ehrm sorry, Kekia model is really well made. Kinda wish i could click on the buttons too and all that! I think I got a decent score with 154 given how awkward the arrow keys are placed on my keyboard. Multiplication with shift 8 didn't work for me cause the 8 just ate the input. I was also sort of wondering if there would have been an easter egg if you input 6 + 7 or something like that :laughing:
Nice little game outside the phone too.
Play-through: https://youtu.be/K9mT__plATY
Very cool art-style and coherent mood. I liked that a lot.
At first I was very confused about the what I was doing as a player. The wording made me think I was going to scan frequencies to have improve the music to noise ratio and not at all direct shots with the antenna. But once I figured out the game-play it became very understandable.
More feedback in my play-through: https://youtu.be/7DbVRtr5eWA
This is exactly why Ludum Dare is great. You get to experience stuff like this outlandish game. I absolutely love it. The visuals are fantastic, even when they are desperately horrible. It just fits perfectly.
I was feeling like the prayers were dragging on a little, but when I figured out I could parse part of those messages in-between and thus see the progression, it was fine. Also this game very deliberately is quite high friction, and I think it works. So I don't think I have much feedback other than maybe consider not...
!> using the same years early on so that the player if they hear that bit don't dismiss it as always the same year as I falsely did...
Play-through: https://youtu.be/6DlzHtYBE-A
I like the vibe of the game very much. I do wish the mouse sensitivity was a bit lower though, but i played it with touching the mouse as little as possible as I also needed both hands to move and jump (due to my silly keyboard where you cannot reach space from the left hand half of it).
I climbed to the top, and hopefully that was the end so to say, but it left me a bit confused since nothing happened up there.
Play-through with more comments and thoughts: https://youtu.be/HzVXIJpTtR0