Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → mdsalomon
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | 👥 | The Core | jam | 94 | 4.06 | 4.15 | 3.33 | 3.92 | 4.19 | 4.01 | 2.56 | 3.95 |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Hundreds & Thousands | jam | 67 | 4.15 | 4.02 | 4.02 | 4.35 | 4.46 | 4.20 | 4.04 | 4.06 |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | SUPER ULTRA HYPER COMBO REMIX 64 Σ DX+:REMASTERED LIMITED EDITION ORIGINS ONLINE | jam | 116 | 4.08 | 4.32 | 3.52 | 3.95 | 3.93 | 4.54 | 4.14 |
A cute concept and a solid base to build on, but I was missing a cool way to synergize all my spoders together besides making them explode with every jump. Whenever you go through an S-shaped piece of the map you tend to lose one or two and then have to cycle back to get them. I think there's plenty of ways this concept could evolve, from adding extra movement options (wall crawling and web swinging immediately come to mind) to maybe changing the focus from 5 equal spoders running around to either unique characters with different abilities or maybe a main spoder who has the ability to corral the others. Regardless, I hope you keep building on it, this is a great initial effort!
Incredibly professional, looks and feels like a retail game! Starts off a bit slow but once you get enough speed in your attack and movement you become extremely destructive and it feels great. Upgrade UI was a bit confusing initially, but I appreciate the willingness to stick to the theme. Awesome work!
Simple design but really good execution. Visuals and audio were charming and as a whole it all seems very polished. Things get a bit too hectic after 5 mookies but it never loses its charm.
For a while, I thought the bad guy was my character, to be honest. The art and music are extremely charming, and all it needs is a little more feedback to feel complete. The game itself is a bit too short and straightforward, in the sense that you get to the end feeling like you've completed the tutorial. The good news is that it's a decently enjoyable tutorial and I'm sure anything you build on top of it from this point on will just make the game better.
Might be my favorite game so far. Loved just getting progressively more deranged, tossing weapons aside and switching to more destructive firepower as I hunt down the last of the fellas. Absolutely hilarious, though in the back of my mind I was constantly worried that at some point a real big fella would appear and just destroy me. This game's given me a clear understanding of how Desmond turned his life around, and just for that it's already worth it. Excellent job!
Surprisingly unsettling, the atmosphere was great. Movement felt a bit stiff and it takes a while to get to the action, but once you leave the initial area the game truly starts to shine. Great concept and execution!
Really impressive! Visuals look great and the constant focus switching between getting the minigame down and collecting meat kept the pace enjoyable. I wish you had another main goal that you were attempting to complete while keeping Wally's mood in check. The entire game over sequence is brilliant. Awesome work!
This is wild. I can't imagine the amount of effort to make something so polished in such a short amount of time. Mechanics were clear and worked well, all the art was solid and there's a lot more content than you'd initially expect. Impressive work!
There's a ton of personality here, from the design of the cards to the theming itself. Wish I could see the rats' cards, but I generally won so I won't argue with the dealer.
There's a ton of charm in this game. I really liked how the bigger planets had a noticeable gravitational pull and could cause me to kill myself with my own projectile. Ended up not fighting too much but I loved slingshotting myself around black holes to skip checkpoints entirely. The entire physics system works really well, even if more often than not I was throwing myself out into the void. Really nice work!
Very creative concept! I was shocked at how much freedom you had in building your little guy up. Some more variety in enemy design or other pixels that you can use like weapons would make this amazing. I hope you keep adding to it.
What an amazing opening cutscene, you hardly needed a game after it. Everything moved and interacted well, and the visuals are great. The cooldowns are a bit harder to predict than I'd like, but I still had a lot of fun spinning around, putting out budding civilizations and punching everything. Great job!
Awesome work! Really punchy and fun, and the effort put into the audio and visual flair really made a difference. Simple mechanic done well, and everything is pretty intuitive.
This is really impressive! Makes me wish you could zoom all the way out just to see the entire path. A little bit of audio would go a long way, but it's still very engaging without. Managed to get a few to the end, but never the golden one.
Really cool project! The atmosphere and theming is unmatched, and chaining mushroom jumps felt great after the initial learning curve. Solid work all around
Awesome concept, it's very similar to the game my team made for the jam, same focus on sorting tiny creatures by color or shape and then smashing them. The ramp up in difficulty is great and the gamefeel is on point, even getting fired is exciting. Great job!
I feel like you undersold it. Even with the simple art, the game shows a ton of dedication with the amount of voice lines, alternate faces and mechanics in play. It's quick, funny and enjoyable. This is a great base to build on and I hope you keep at it.
I like how almost everything moves, you get a good feel of life and in turn the game becomes a bit more engaging. There's a base here, and I feel that it could turn into a very solid tower defense game, but there's also a lack of clear instruction or focus. The UI is far too small and it's not initially clear what the difference between different towers/obstacles is. You also gain an obscene amount of money per wave and can just spam the enemy path with insects and traps. For a game like this, it'd be valuable to start out small and allow us to get a feel for our interactions with the path, then grant us more options.
Real professional work here, the art, music, theming in general is excellent. I love the concept of a cordyceps witch and all the mechanics that can sprout from that. The idea of using different creatures to alter your abilities works really well and lends itself to some interesting solutions, even if I took a while (and a couple of resets) to realize that one of the abilities always killed the creatures. Movement is a bit too slow and inexact in certain parts(jumping with the witch, digging as the worm), but there's a really great base to explore. This could easily be expanded into a full-sized game.
Great work on the art and cutscenes. The game itself is a very standard platformer which was begging for a twist or unique mechanic. I'm glad you're going to keep working on it, I'm sure you'll come up with some amazing things
Really cool. The concept is very similar to the idea my team initially had for our game, with similarly violent results. Although crouching on shift instead of ctrl took me a while to get used to, I got to a point where I could circle the house, running through furniture and other bouncing physics objects with a wave of ants behind me, desperately reloading my shotgun to clear them out. It felt great. A bit more feedback on the reload (like a progress bar) or the option to manually reload would go a long way. Still, a sandwich health bar is a genius idea in its own right, so everything else was just bonus.
Starts with a bang, but movement and general detection is clunky. Was constantly getting stuck on the scenery as I tried to run away. Concept is solid and the art is extremely charming, but I wish there was better telegraphing on the spikes, jump vents and so on.
Rhythm is a bit wild but once you get into a flow of seating and serving it all starts to fall into place. Art is really charming and the concept is earnest and cute. Would be great if it was possible to get orders mixed up or accidentally sit two rival species together and lose their business. Good job!
Solid work! Mechanics were interesting and worked without any issue. I feel like there's still a lot of space for this concept to expand and develop, I hope you keep building to it.
This is a really cool concept, and the art in general looks great. I love the UI work and all the interactivity that was added. Hope you keep working on it and upload a final version later on
The visuals are great and there's a good amount of love given to the turtle's movement. I wish I had more space/stamina to spin around everywhere and that the initial pacing wasn't so broken up with cutscenes. Nonetheless there's a ton of effort that can be felt in the final product and I hope you keep adding to it.
Love the concept and the audio. Certainly the game that got the most laughs from me. Wish there was more urgency or just a faster pace in general, since for a good while you're just waiting for the turtles to follow your light. Stepped on way too many turtles accidentally, which was a great addition.
There's a surprising amount of content here, each character has a ton of dialogue and there's clearly a lot of love put into it. I wish there was a bit more variation to the fishing, or that the house upgrades were more relevant. There's a solid base here that would become something amazing with some more time and polish.
Shocking how cute you managed to make a parasitic worm look. At first glance I assumed this would be a puzzle game, but the focus on platforming turned out to be far more interesting. You can tell that a ton of work was put into the creatures and environment, I just wish the camera was a bit further away since at times it was hard to tell which way I should be going and the red arrows were just out of sight. Great job!
Awesome atmosphere. Seeing the ship evolve and building up resources for the next leg of the journey was great fun. Feels a bit overwhelming at first with all the information but turned out being very intuitive to play and explore.
The idea of 3 different depth levels with different attributes is surprisingly unique. Feels like something out of the first bit.trip games. It's a little hard to grasp at first but eventually becomes very interesting to shift your focus depending on how fast you want to go or how far ahead you want to be able to see. This feels like it still has a lot to give, but there's clear intent behind it, I hope you keep adding to this idea.
Screenshot 2025-04-18 180434.png
Really well executed. Took me a few tries to understand the strategy but it was smooth sailing from that point forward. Polish is exceptional, and despite it being simple, the art looks great. Deserves more attention!
This might be the most mechanically interesting game I've seen in the jam. Atmosphere was on point and the latency gimmick created some honest stress in the final parts of the game. Even the death screen was engaging. Was kinda shocked when the game just ended after collecting enough treasure, since there was still others to collect deeper still. Might be a bit too abrasive for more casual play, but I felt it was a solid experience that fit the theme perfectly.
I love the visuals for the basecamp. The entire game reminds me of the early 2000s infinite digger flash games. Things are a bit confusing at first, especially movement, but you eventually fall into a nice rhythm of collecting points at the surface and then making a mad dash for the depths. Wish there was more variation as you went along, or some way to increase your vision cone, since most of the game just ends up being pitch black, but nonetheless this is a solid entry.
cool concept, I really wasn't expecting deck management in a jam game. Very simple for now, but with amazing potential to become something incredible. I think the biggest hurdle was getting used to the QERF selection for cards, my brain always defaulted to 1234 when I saw them lined up like that. Making it so you deck has limited shuffles or maybe make shuffles a resource that you have to collect/sell cards for would also add some interesting tension.
Finally some peace and quiet! Fun twist on what you'd usually expect about a game in the depths about dwarves. Like most people, Space didn't seem to work for me, but I still managed to make short work of all of them
This game already gets 5 stars just for the arachnophobia mode. Amazingly impressive stuff for a game jam, some truly unreal polish, from the enemy portraits to the 3D dice. Hope you keep adding to it, as this could easily be a premium game.
it's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it. Loved the chill vibe and elevator music despite all the safety violations. Great humor and solid platforming, would have liked more timed puzzles or twists on the keycode/personality test idea. Awesome work!
Really cute puzzle game. Could use a quick restart if you messed up, or a way to take back your last move, but other than that all you need is to add extra levels and you've got something really fun on your hands
solid effort, art and effects look great! Kinda wish the side walls wouldn't damage you since that's where most of my deaths came from. Slowly getting your health and arrows back was a cool idea which made the entire resource management concept work, which makes it so that the tight turns that you can't pass without taking damage or enemies in bad positions feel more like challenge than an error in design, would be great if we could see how long we had to survive before recovering resources. Nice music!
Really brilliant take on the theme, one of my favorites so far. I'm usually too dumb for these sokoban-styled puzzle games but this one was really engaging, I would love to see more levels being added.
very cool twist on the downwell experience. Physics were surprisingly consistent and the game got a lot less stressful when I noticed I could hang on to the walls for a bit, even if the frogs are evil. Things got a bit too violent when the mushrooms appeared, I wish I could reel in the bucket a bit just to make some last second dodges. Alternatively, I feel like a game where you actively use a bucket to smack down creatures would be pretty fun as well. There's a lot to play around with here
A cute take on the VN experience, even though it was shockingly easy to softlock yourself. The depths idea applied to the many floors of a hotel is a clever one, I just wish it wasn't so linear, some random elements would go a long way
surprisingly chill game, mood was great and the guitar just made it all better. Took a little while to figure out how the resources were used, but the game was never frustrating. Just consistently fun to fly around and blow stuff up. One quick thing to consider would be to push your UI elements to the top of the screen. Since we're constantly digging down, I found my vision of what came ahead blocked by the resource windows at times.
Really clever take on the theme, I don't think I've ever seen a word game employ so much tension. Some example sentences or a clearer direction on what counts as a good or bad sentence would help a lot. Very creative entry!
You can always tell when there's artists on the team, every asset looks amazing. Game was fun and immediate, even if I wish your dash was a little more dramatic, just so you had a last chance to jump out of the black hole. Highest score I got was 2705. Great work!
This is wild. Simple mechanically but unmatched in tension and atmosphere. Had me running around spinning plates and panicking the entire time. Awesome visuals and sound, and a haunting sense of scale, I just wish every thing you fixed had a progress bar like the windows being taped up. Really solid work!
great atmosphere, makes me think that a deep rock galactic styled game in 2D would be really fun. Loved being able to pull out a huge gun to deal with enemies. Super impressive work, would be great if there was a greater incentive for exploration or alternate paths to take, as my instinct was to always dig straight down whenever possible.
There's heart here. Moving around is as responsive as it needs to be and the resource management is a nice angle to play with. I wish both that the spikes were a bit more visible, if not larger in general, and that the death/reset was clearer, since it looks very positive and it took me a while to realize that I had started over and not teleported to the next level. Music is fun, some sound effects (for dashing, item collection, death) would really round everything out. Good effort!