Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → michaelsonbritt
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | The Tree of Bounty | jam | 619 | 3.37 | 3.07 | 3.78 | 3.48 | 3.25 | 2.93 | 2.36 | 3.48 |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Crunch Time | jam | 558 | 3.46 | 3.19 | 3.99 | 3.74 | 3.34 | 3.08 | 3.29 | 3.26 |
This is fun. Played without VR and yeah, the controls are tedious, but the fun of creating an assembly line makes up for it. Enough operators and controls to feel like a small but complete set. Much of the fun comes from the sheer amount of mess lying around the floor after tinkering for awhile, you feel like the messy apprentice in the master's workshop, guilty fun, heh.
@erik-brendel, if you're willing to install Processing 3.3, you can run from the source. Open the .pde file and click "Run", no compilation required, just works, and has a good reputation on Linux, Mac and Windows. The binary package was created using Processing's "publish" tool, but neither us of had time to publish from a real linux machine. So those binaries are "use at your own risk". Haven't seen the error before, must be some kind of sound compatibility issue.
@ryusui, agree, we wanted to shorten the backup sounds but it was fifteen minutes before submit time and because of my hacky code we decided it was too risky :)
@ryusui, I always assume those kinds of nicely twitch-tuned action games are a delicious mess under the hood. But so delicious. Cursed Gold has nice action feel, bullet sounds, and animation, and totally satisfying the way enemies slow down when hit.
@JoramWolters, it's definitely a joke game aimed at people familiar with software development in a corporate environment; people who would read Dilbert. The first two screens present the game mechanic in its simplest possible form plus there's tutorial text to explain. The mechanic is to pick one square from the left area, then one from the right areas, and the graph on the left gets pasted to the right. When pasting, it's only allowed to replace *one* right-side box, the one you clicked. The pasted graph can't replace more than one box on the right. Boxes flash red to indicate this.
Can you suggest how to present the mechanic more clearly? Because I am interested in interface design and presentation clarity. But I still want to give the player room to discover and avoid spoon-feeding them. We chose not to include too much highlighting and cues, because part of the puzzle is that a player will overlook certain valid connections at first. So the game is designed to withhold cues that make a solution too obvious.
@amras0000, you can't place Server over Receiver because then Source node would clobber the Sender node. You're only allowed to clobber one node on the right side, which is the node you clicked. That's what the tutorial text means when it says "No other class may overlap", but it seems to confuse a lot of people. The Sender node flashes red to indicate it's conflicting. Not sure of an easy way to make this rule more clear, but I'm definitely open to thoughts. Just goes to show how important it is to QA the learning process, for a game with nontrivial rules!
@soldierbear, it's funny how we used the same idea for background sounds, but approached everything else much differently! Do you have any advice to earn a nonzero amount of money when releasing a game in Revenge of Feature Creep? I feel pretty stuck.
Lighting and mood are nice, the sword swing and dash animations are good. I was having fun trying to perfect a dash swing.
On Windows, the game can be run from the command line with: java -jar "Nicks Lava Lamps LD40.jar"
Really captures that old-time Final Fantasy feel. Nice fire effects and really excellent music with thematic progression in the music too.
Fun game, quality parody. The audio works nicely and the voice-nav gps is pretty innovative. I managed to bank $220000 with five seconds left, it didn't seem like steering is too much more difficult with a heavy load, since I found it was necessary to drive pretty slow all the time. Enjoyable, well executed and good concept overall. Only real gripe is camera handling, it's too low to see the cab, and felt wonky for some reason hard to explain, never felt clear enough where the truck was steering.
The collect-expand-collect reward cycle works well here, the upgrade system makes sense and I like how the monsters upgrade as your character progresses. It's a solid foundation of a game.
Fun concept, I got a bit addicted trying to build up a big party! The idea of picking up party members for a separate defensive team then attacking with an offensive team is pretty innovative.
Great work, music is fantastic. Controls are just difficult enough to be rewarding. Very tense at higher levels (got killed on level) in a good way - felt like being a robot superspy in some moments, running, hiding and shooting. Brings back great memories of classic 8-bit pc games.
This town has a really high birth rate and weapon carry rate. It's like, what if an entire town was populated by Monty Python and the Holy Grail rabbit monsters?
Really great. Love how food gets stuck on the sides sometimes. Everything about this game is so gross, but genius. Good mechanics, innovative game design, good graphics on the stomache elements, and great sound. Only gripe is that fullscreen would be appreciated, I kept clicking outside of the window by accident.
OMG, could play this for hours! If I wasn't trying to review a zillion other games. Stellar work for a solo jam, great level design, great action feel. A pure and effective take on the theme.
The "radio com" sound processing on the voice clip was great given the setting.
Wow this is difficult. I'm glad nobody needs cereal that badly to survive in real life! Good humor angle, good concept, and innovative the idea that health packs can only be consumed after clearing the enemies around it. Actually just the idea of a "time attack" fps is nice and fresh and could be great for a casual game. Solid foundation here!
Muah ha ha. If only real stoners got that much exercise out of the house :) Love the shader effects here.
I love the concept of the game, good play setup and sound. But every game released earned zero money, and had a zero rating on IGN. The progress bar always decreases with only small increases no matter what. Really want to get into this game more but feels like I'm missing something?
Finally I understand the game mechanic! My understanding: The green bar reduces to indicate progress. When it reaches zero the game is safe to ship. It increases when employees get ideas, slowing down production (opposite of Game Dev Story) and the concept is they're introducing feature creep; the game might be better but it's slower to ship. Hitting crunch mode eliminates all ideas so the green bar ticks down steadily afterwards. In the first level, the yellow and green move down almost equal speed, so you need to hit crunch mode almost as soon as the level starts. After you've made some money, it's much easier. You can let employees have a few good ideas to boost ratings, while slapping away bad ideas, and you don't need to hit crunch mode as quickly.
I noticed only first three employees ever provide ideas. Is that a bug?
Wow! Several really innovative improvements on classic Arkanoid, it used to be one of my favorite games. I'm not sure how I feel about freezing up controls, but this "core critical" mechanic is really promising.
Yeah, roster management is a lot of fun. I like the idea of micromanaging a team of monsters and choosing optimal quests to pair them with. Like XCom with the fighting automated. And I really like the idea of constructing quests from a "dungeon master's" perspective, as opposed to selecting and completing quests from a hero's perspective. Your approach is a fresh variation on Dungeon Keeper, and the idea could be pushed really far.
Nice particle and glow effects. I like the idea of a fast-paced puzzle and matching game that incorporates an ingredients system.
Nice structure having an ongoing activity inside the house, then areas to explore outside the house.
Why am I so thirsty for lemonade all of a sudden? Strange.
Nice touch how harpoons affect both sharks and items, liked the music, and the selection of rusty items falling from the sky is well done too.
Really interesting and innovative. One of the only jam games I found truly relaxing and enjoyable and wanted to play for hours. There's the fun of making experiments to see what happens, the fun of destroying and bouncing things around, and the fun of puzzle trying to figure out a good drop sequence. And nice physics that are fun to watch. As a complaint, I find the "time to drop" does not behave intuitively, or maybe it is buggy. Sometimes dropping a ball makes this bar go down instead of up, so you lose instantly after a drop. I never have more than maybe six balls on the board, so I don't understand how the drop penalty could be so extreme, it seems like a bug. Just wishing a session could go on for hours to a get lots of interesting combo strings!
1348 gems, lolz. You know it's a ridiculous game when you're spamming the SHIFT key so hard that windows pops up the sticky key warning. You seem to be unable to use a keyboard correctly, would you like me to enable some special accessibility options?? Hilarious.
Great music, and great title art. The idea of clicking on different resources with various timing considerations for each click, it's not a bad idea. How about with fast pacing and a wide resource variety from the outset?
Super great. You cracked the code and figured out how to turn Unity's chronically wonky hit detections into a truly hilarious mechanic. Scattering garbage all over the floor ... picking up wrong items constantly ... leaving stuff on the edge of the bin because it won't fall in properly ... dropping items on the ground in order to dash for more followed by regret when accidentally picking up dropped items at some critical later moment. All in all, the game leaves me feeling like a derpy, inadequate first-gen robot just desperate not to get fired. And that's pretty hilarious.
Playable here, I copied the Love files into the folder from another game (Cursed Gold) and it's working fine.
I like the playfulness of this, it's just innocent fun, and appreciate that there's nothing like a scoring system. Reminds me of the classic LocoRoco for psp, and I'd love to see this pushed further with a few other mechanics and larger level area.
So if your most valuable possession is a grand piano, you're pretty much safe from thieves. Especially if they work alone.
Neat idea, a coin collecting arena where the coins themselves get shot by turrets and respawn, I like.
Awesome game, really great art and music! Lighting effects are incredible. Love the use of voxel technology.
Game has an awesome action feel. Number of projectiles and splosions is very satisfying, and possibility of strafe shooting in an arc is really unique, wish I had time to perfect that!
Link broken as of midnight 04 Dec 2017. Looks like it wasn't uploaded yet?
Just wow. Absolutely polished right from the title screen. Only possible gripe, is that I'm not sure how I feel about a mechanic where the camera doesn't move fast enough to track the city's needs ... and also houses can't be demolished. But I guess that's how being a real mayor would feel! Excellent pacing and the idea of a time-attack version of SimCity is just brilliant. Gorgeously execution.
Oh and, very nice touch writing a post-mortem blog post. I'm too lazy for blogging myself :)
The rar file isn't extracting here. Corrupted upload?
Hilarious! I can hear a narration by David Attenborough in my head. At first I tried micromanaging different parties but finally just created a single big wheat-ganking goose orgy. Got up to 20. Nice work!
Oh noes! The video looks great, but no links. Is it finished?
The social element is a nice twist on classic memory games. Nice work creating a variety of characters.
@shubart we spend quite a portion of our time designing the tutorial text at the bottom. Which part did you find the most confusing?
@raganvald if you get both a bird and squirrel onscreen - and they stay put - then consider yourself a winner! We probably should have added a "Challenge" message for this.
@shubart what's not clear in the tutorial text is a "length 3" constraint on branches. So, a branch of thickness 1 can have a length of 3 tiles, before you'll need to thicken near the trunk. Then, to make a branch with a length of 6 tiles, you'll need a row of three thickness 2 branches, and start moving up to thickness 3 near the trunk, which gets expensive. It looks and feels intuitive to me ... but I can see how confusing it is, now that I'm writing it. Thank you for the feedback, and I hope this helps!
@Arqcenick it's like Conway's Game of Life, where things appear and disappear every turn according to rules. When a tile is ... - Empty or leaves, with two adjacent tiles that have leaves, it turns to flowers ... Flowers require at least one adjacent tile with leaves to remain, or they die - Empty, with two adjacent tiles which are flowers, it will become a beehive ... Unless that tile was already about to die for some other reason ... Beehive requires at least one adjacent tile with flower to remain, or it dies - Empty or flowers, with one adjacent beehive & two leaves, it becomes berries ... Berries requires one adjacent beehive and one adjacent leaves or they die - Empty or flowers, with one adjacent leaves & flowers & one thickness upgrade, it becomes nuts ... Nuts require all original conditions or they die - Empty with two adjacent berries, it becomes a bird ... Birds require all original conditions (two berries) or they leave - Empty with two adjacent nuts, it becomes a squirrel ... Squirrels require all original conditions (two Nuts) or they leave
Some things do NOT auto-upgrade. So for example, you might need to delete leaves - add moss then remove the moss - before it becomes a beehive.
You're right it's complex. Would be nice to have an illustration showing all the progressions. We were just happy the rules seemed to balance and work once you know them! Learning experience.
@philstrahL, thank you for the awesome video review! Really nice of you!! It's so interesting watching people playtest The Tree of Bounty. The same difficulty happened with a friend of mine who works for a game company ... people are obsessed with clicking everywhere and don't read the entire sentence of the instructions or the warnings. The challenge text says "click a branch to make it thicker", and the warning says "too many thin branches in a row, click to make thicker". But ... you never left-clicked on the branches near the trunk to thicken them.
It's an interesting lesson in *tutorial design*. People today expect information presented in a very specific way. As a game designer, you want to create innovative mechanics, which people have never seen before. But new mechanics demand a slick tutorial.
We could have made an "mouse click icon", hinting to click on branches near the trunk. Pretty expensive for the time budget of a game jam! We'll keep trying!! At least, this game is *slightly* more intuitive than the last one I worked on, Crunch Time from Ludum Dare 40. Still lots of room for improvement!
@esben-jensen, thank you for trying it out!! We tweaked some rules to reduce blinkers. That's why sometimes you need to add moss and then remove the moss to get what you want. So it's not the same rules from Conway's game, only roughly inspired. But yes, it's still rather blinky-blinkety. Glad you appreciate that!
Best run $4.69 and getting brutalized. Tough but worthy.
It's a cute little SimCity / Black and White design. I like the idea of adding Faith and Happiness to a SimCity or Civilization type design, so the player becomes an agent or persona in the game.
What engine did you use, is this written from scratch?
Thought provoking. Great music. Great analogy to real governance too. I like the fact that it makes you think about rioting, protest, calling for social change, and the consequences of small choices within that domain.
Poor cows, just tryna enjoy some grass. If the humans don't getcha, the alien saucers will. The game is fun and cute! I'd like to see the pace a bit faster though, like maybe speed upgrades would be huge and cheap at first, but with strong diminishing returns.
I like the theme of hunting for pictures and the social critique here. Clearly I don't drink pumpkin spice or avoid homeless people enough to be popular in the interwebz.
Congrats for thinking outside the box, and creating something completely outside the world of computer gaming! Creating a board game with friends is a really fun, creative, social process, something I'd love to do more often myself. I hope you had a lot of fun, and create more inventions in the future!!
OMG, I'm traumatized!! Brings back memories of how I almost lost a lush salary career because Diablo 2. Dammit! :) The game-in-game is really well done, great graphics and music. But it's the humor outside of game takes the cake. So amazing! Great job.
Dude, you are getting maximum scores from me, hands down. This is just so genius, though I'll admit to being an excel geek to begin with. It's what games jams should be all about, unexpected, outside-the-box experiences that make you think and see the world in a new light.
I did manage to reach 365 days finally. Looks like I'm not spending nearly enough hours per day working out in real life!!
I feel dirty about myself, but ... I definitely geeked out cost-to-value ratios here. "Come on dude, you're only 24, more strength training for you!"
I'm not seeing the message about needing two controllers, and play doesn't work otherwise. Looks beautiful and would love to try it!
The point at the end is well received, but (maybe I'm missing something) I didn't see any kind of gameplay or a manner in which answer affected the experience in any way? I spent the majority of the game spamming the spacebar.
The overall aesthetic is beautiful. It would be amazing the graph in the background grow and evolve with each answer, so you fell like you're creating something, and weaving a life drawn a graph.
An interesting idea. No pause button, runs kinda fast! But it feels innovative to the focus on just picking missions without details of running each mission. I guess, it would be nice to add just a touch of detail. If there was at least one sub-choice in each mission, or if there was a meaningful difference in which district a mission originates from, to add some more diversity.
Did I miss something, or does the game just involve talking to five people? Any case, the humor is well appreciated and the thematic / setting works nicely.
Really enjoyed this one after understanding the mechanic. Got to 453 points, wave 15. Pretty much all catapults.
Liked: - Leading enemies through traps by exploiting their path finding, bwahaha - First person makes the mood claustrophobic and scary - Trying to reach mount points near the enemy spawn has a great risk and reward sense of challenge.
Didn't like: - Catapult upgrade costs are prohibitive in price, so it's unrealistic to perform more than one, ever, should be 200-250pts maybe - Laser upgrades don't seem to do anything - Not enough mount points located in pairs, for creating choke points, thus the slowdown tower seems useless - Personally I'd rather have it third-person, still with an avatar that enemies chase, I think that would feel more strategic and tower-defensy - No ability to gain money in the middle of a round - No ability to gain life except waiting for end-of-round (did I miss something?) - Camera movement with controller is painfully slow, with mouse is painfully fast. Even cranking sensitivity all the way down in options, mouse is still fast - Please put the map layout on the minimap! Eventually I memorized the map, but it too awhile
Overall it creates a good tense mood, and reaching higher wave levels feels like an achievement.
Interesting concept! I like the 'v' hotkey. But it seemed impossible to reach the upper area, the jumps aren't long enough, even will full leg strength. But yeah, imagine a game like Deus Ex where the player has to deal with not only permanent upgrades to themselves but also the threat of permanent downgrades ... lots of potential! The shooting mechanic works nicely, but the jumps are slow and enemy bullets are spaced closely, so it doesn't seem realistic to dodge enemy fire. It would be nice if downgrades only take place when you're hit, since right now hits seem to be inconsequential.
I'd love to see a good typing game, other than "Typing of the Dead". The world needs this, my typing has always sucked. Maybe it if forced you to use actual punctuation and capital letters, it could make the world a better place. Nice music and interesting so far.
Beautiful art and music! What kind of engine did you use??
I'm glad that getting hit by blimps is not a problem in real life. To beat the last level, I downloaded a tool that presses spacebar a hundred times per second. Using technology to win a game built with technology, that's about rejecting technology, heh. Challenge is rewarding though.
A really well envisioned atmosphere and experience. Congrats!
Holy cow, after ancient years of flight sims, it blows my mind pressing the "UP" to travel upwards.
Otherwise, looks very nice, and beautiful music. The second level asteroid belt felt like a genuine challenge in a good way.
Liked the art design and theme. Just need a little more play balance, more levels, bit more details. Would like to have clearer indication of where the level boundaries are. The animations are nice especially on the main character. Good work!
For those who don't have a twitch channel or aren't familiar with the platform, is it still possible to play this? Any instructions?
Nice sounds. I know from experience these things are hard to balance, but the drop frequency and amount should be tuned. Overall shooter mechanic feels slick.
The life drops are just inconsistent, and probably too small in value if you want a casual-ish game. The player should have some kind of guarantee. For example, consistent drops to ensure they can soak 20 bullets in Round 1 and be back to full health for Round 2.
Circling around enemies ftw! Died on stage 7, so not very far, but basic idea is pretty engaging. Yeah, tried again and still can't beat that level 7, darnit. But I think the mechanics and balance are good.
Hey, our game is also about Conway's Game of Life!! It's called The Tree of Bounty. And testers say it's just as unpredictable, hehe. I really like the idea of cellular automata for this year's theme, but achieving a sense of balance, fun, and intuition is pretty tough. Interesting angle with the predators. Maybe the game could be about trying to outsmart them and buying cells? Is there a way to buy cells in this game, or only to sell them?
Definitely a lot more fun once I understood the time limit and the upgrades. Do plants and animals tend to spawn near others of the same kind? Meaning, is it poor strategy to reap all animals or plants of the same kind? I hope that is true, for strategy reasons. And I'd like to see the effect highlighted better so the strategy concerns become more clear. Maybe reaping an animal would like seedlings behind that turn into plants later or something?
Spent way longer playing this than I should have. Gorgeously beautiful, the large purple structures in space are amazing. The costs and payoffs are well balanced, which I know is hard from my own game. Favorite aspect is that, you need to eat to survive, but once you're too large it's impossible to chase the smaller prey, perfect analogy to the natural world, genius.
Blender game engine? Interesting. Piano music is nice. This game emulates kinda how I feel as a software contractor ... "here robot, here's a chunk of money (not very much), go eliminate all those bugs out there, and don't come back till you're done, chop chop"
Wow, very difficult. Those darn door-camping sharks!! Nice work on the random level generation.
Frustration is seeing instructions for "shoot" and "dash" commands which aren't available at the beginning of the game, attack is short range, plus all upgrades are too expensive to purchase at first. The gun is unpredictable to control and hard to obtain. Otherwise input handling, immersion, overall quality is good.
I like the graphics! Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything to happen by pressing (1) or (2), or by clicking on the mount points, or any combination of those actions. Is the game ready for play?