mildmojo

Year	LD	Theme	Game	Division	Rank	Ov	Fu	In	Th	Gr	Au	Hu	Mo	Co
2015	32	An Unconventional Weapon	Pedestrian Mining Corps	jam	725	2.98	2.73	3.12	2.92	3.29		2.95	2.67	73
2014	30	Connected Worlds	Disc Jockey Jockey	jam										49
2013	26	Minimalism	Sequence Initiated	jam	439	2.70	2.18	3.18	3.31	2.84		2.11	2.40	80
2012	23	Tiny World	Single Cycles	jam	160	2.80	2.71	3.40	2.97	1.85	2.30	2.65	2.52	63

The Last Adventurer by Cosmologicon 2012-01-04T23:02:00

Very nice! Definitely gave me that "one more play" feeling, especially on the jelly cube massacre stage. You got a lot of mileage out of the sprite x/y squishing animation--I'll have to "borrow" that technique at some point. =)

Highlighting characters was tricky. I think I would've skipped the isometric circle in favor of a player-facing rectangular lasso. In particular, the circle grew strangely if you started it near the bottom of the screen.

My frenetic clicks to move the party out of harm's way were often interpreted as drags, deselecting the whole group just in time to get nailed by an enemy. I'd suggest increasing the minimum drag distance to start a new lasso, or leave the current highlighting intact until a new lasso touches the first character. Whatever RTS games usually do.

The shadows were immensely helpful in figuring out where a sprite was in relation to the party, but I think the mana/hp/xp balls should have bigger hitboxes or lie on the ground. Sometimes a ball would pass through my entire party even though the sprites touched.

On the whole, this is a great HTML5 example. Congrats for designing & cobbling it together so quickly.

Alone by Dark Acre Jack 2012-01-04T17:52:00

I watched the playthrough since I don't have Unity. Really nice work on the writing in the questions! I was eager to read each one after the next, and the choice at the end was always like a smart punchline. Now I am THIRSTY.

Final Trip Soccer by Benjamin 2011-12-21T18:44:00

Very nicely done. Interesting control mechanic. It got easier after I figured out that you could charge up a kick with magic sparkly power. Still very difficult.

Most of the time, I was running up to position for a kick and the ball would roll out of range by the time I started the kick or I would get too close and nudge it away before I had a chance to kick it.

I think it might work better if you could run around holding space. When you got close enough to the ball, the character could stop moving, stop the ball, and begin a kick.

Minicraft by Notch 2012-01-03T15:04:00

I grew wheat, I baked bread, I swam in the ocean, I crafted tons of weapons, I dug holes, I found a staircase surrounded by impenetrable rock... and that was all I could do. Quite nice implementation, but I wanted it to have a goal or an ending or an indication of progress.

Minicraft by Notch 2012-01-05T18:30:00

Okay, I gave it another shot. Turns out the staircase I found in the first game is the one up to the sky for the final battle, and I just never discovered a staircase down. The object is to progressively go down to the third (?) sublevel and mine enough gemstone to forge a gem pick to crack the stone around the sky stairs so you can battle the air wizard, I think.

I played the god mode mod to see how the game progresses, and I can't imagine spending the time to collect all the sand and iron and wood to build enough lanterns to find both staircases to get to all three sublevels to mine enough gems to get to the end.

Godmode mod: http://justawesome.webs.com/index.html

Solitary Sand by Cross 2012-01-12T07:39:00

I've wanted to do an audio-only 3D game like this for years. Nice work, though I agree that a smaller, more closed-in environment would work better

Bodge's Island by Peter Cooper 2011-12-19T15:58:00

Did you post any journal entries? The journal links on entry pages have been broken for a while.

I've built some Ruby+OpenGL games, but cross-platform packaging and distribution was always a PITA. I've been interested in the JRuby + Java game libs stack for a while now, but haven't had time to play with it.

What did you think of that combination? And how did you package it? Warbler?

The Square by FrozenCow 2011-12-19T19:16:00

Animation and arrow controls seem really fluid.

Needs to disable typeahead find for the keypresses to work. Every time I press 'A' to jump, the find-in-page box captures all further keystrokes. (Firefox 8.0.1, but any browser w/typeahead, really)

In general, this means returning false from your key handler functions. If you're using a framework, it probably has a disableTypeAheadFind() method of some sort.

LD23 — Tiny World

The Story of a World by Mårten Jonsson 2012-05-01T04:40:00

Pretty game. It was cool seeing the new bits pop into place, but I didn't have the patience to try enough combinations to unlock more than 3 or 4 achievements.

ONLY US by Datamosh 2012-05-13T22:49:00

Great job. I love seeing fellow HTML5 games. This one's very polished, no ugly bits showing through.

I was never able to build the driller. Even in a wide-open screen, it told me there wasn't enough space.

When I was finally able to build the health tent, that solved my loneliness problems. Emoting at the checkpoints only recovered loneliness a hair at a time. I'm really glad you restarted near where you died, keeping your rocks.

I liked the videogame ending. =)

Nineties Holywood Hacker by Casino Jack 2012-05-13T19:11:00

I played until I hit an impossible map, like Tomalla's screen shot.

I'm not sure if you scale the percentages of red/orange/green squares scales as the player progresses, but you should. The orange/red squares are really difficult with the starting ship.

Enemies often spawn too close to the room's entrance, which doesn't give the player a fighting chance. There should probably be a minimum spawn distance.

It felt like the silver/gold coin drop rate was independent of enemy difficulty. It'd be nice to get more gold coins from difficult enemies so there's an incentive to build through red squares.

The upgrade mechanic kept me playing for about 30 minutes ('til I hit the impossible level). The upgrades felt pretty good.

After a few levels, I figured out how difficult different room shapes would be and I could place them in smarter ways. I liked that second-order strategy.

Overall, nice work!

Tinysasters by Volute 2012-05-01T05:28:00

I had to restart a couple of times when I ran out of a resource (without which I couldn't build a workplace to get more of that resource). Once I figured everything out, the hard difficulty was the most interesting and still completely winnable.

I really like the 2.5D tiles and the terraforming-through-sliding mechanism. It was like a distilled version of plate tectonics.

It was a little hard to see the workplaces and shrines in denser areas, forests particularly. It was also a little difficult to tell the levels of workplaces and shrines apart.

By chance, was this inspired by the board game Taluva? Very similar concepts. You're forming a landscape by placing mountain, desert, lake, forest, and grass tiles, building huts (cities) and placing shrines, and there are occasional volcanic eruptions...

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24508/taluva

Tondie and Zupe by Cosmologicon 2012-04-26T04:11:00

Wow, super polished entry here. I had the same locking problem in Firefox. The main screen stopped redrawing, but the build/upgrade buttons still lit up as if I was moving around the surface of the planet. I was able to switch to Chrome to avoid that issue.

I'd never heard of the UFX library (I used CraftyJS), but it looks like you've put it to good use. The animations were nice & smooth, and the graphical style was consistent & cute. Great job on all the tower types and effects.

I do wish you'd been able to add a few sounds (sfxr!) for things like jumps and enemy deaths. And I really wanted the character's first jump to be higher--early in the game, you have to let enemies get uncomfortably close before you can hit them.

Nice story. The exposition seemed to trigger when I was in mid-air, though, which was a little jarring. That's where a sound cue would help, I think, to warn that gameplay's about to be interrupted.

Tondie and Zupe by Cosmologicon 2012-04-26T04:12:00

Very slick! I love playing the other HTML5 entries.

Macro Marines by JonathanG 2012-05-02T03:54:00

I like the concept, but the AI seems punishingly difficult. Maybe it would help if you had some control over the speed of the game, at least in the beginning? I did manage to eke out a win one round by surrounding my headquarters with arrows pointing away from it and getting lucky with the positioning of my airfield relative to the enemy headquarters.

Laser Coin Planets by mortehu 2012-04-24T22:47:00

It looks nice, but you need to prevent keypress events from bubbling up to the browser so you don't trigger typeahead find. In FF with typeahead find enabled, pressing letters opens the find box instead of controlling the game, so it's unplayable.

Fortunately, the fix is easy. jQuery example on pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/tvzQqWxv

Laser Coin Planets by mortehu 2012-04-26T22:11:00

Pretty nice. It doesn't look like the typeahead find fix is in the bugfix version, but I played through the original in Chrome. It plays well. The mouse aim is pretty tough on a trackpad. =)

I noticed that you were resetting the gravity source on each teleport; bullets would follow you from one planet to the next. Having worked on a planet-hopping game before, I completely understand the decision. Still, you might have bullets keep orbiting their original planet until they crash.

I got a little lost after a while; a minimap or an arrow pointing to more coins would be helpful in clearing the level.

Laser Coin Planets by mortehu 2012-04-26T22:12:00

Your code looks a lot cleaner than mine, too. =)

Dude, where's my planet by Zamando 2012-04-30T22:34:00

Like everyone else has said, beautiful art and great difficulty progression. It took me forever to get through the last level. =)

I really liked the tentacle monster as a pressure mechanic, and you made a great choice in keeping its collision area small. Several times, I was nearly engulfed in tentacles, trying to push the arrow key through the keyboard, going "aaaaAAAAAH!"

I'd make the cannon tip/fire animation run a lot faster. It should be a really gratifying reward at the end of a stressful level, and it feels a little sluggish right now.

My GGJ entry (Flare) was a planet-hopper and my LD23 entry (Single Cycles) is a one-button planet racer that penalizes you for building up too much speed and taking off. So you could say this game's up my alley. =) Nice work.

Microscopia by azurenimbus 2012-05-03T03:57:00

Hey, this is nice. The minimal graphics fit the microscope theme really well. You've distilled the essence of big Bomberman games where you can't figure out which character you're controlling, so you try to find the one that's responding to your input. =)

I got as far as the level where the four corners split into pieces and every sprite is controlled by the player. I ran a bunch of them through the center, but apparently there was still a "special" one that I had no hope of finding.

Drill It!: Demolition Co. by Julian Spillane 2012-04-28T04:44:00

Tough to play with a trackpad (as with any mouse aim games), but I like the tension between drilling and distractions.

Lililput by Incredible Ape 2012-04-29T23:16:00

Nice work! I got to 3'06". Then I accidentally typed the first letter of a *huge* word that had *just* started coming on screen, and I couldn't find a way to cancel it so I had to watch as the advancing army had a field day with my base.

It's kind of like a bizarro Revenge of the Titans typing game. =) Pretty polished. The only thing I'd change would be to add a way to cancel a word so you could switch to a closer one.

Muffin Time! by mr_tag 2012-05-03T04:54:00

Nice job with the concept. I liked how you had to complete lower levels to unlock areas in higher levels, and the muffin-stealing self-destruction timer was great. Slowing the timer down in the lower levels was a nice touch.

The wall jumping was pretty punishing. I was constantly getting hung up on the edges of platforms, or clinging to a wall or box that I happened to stand near. It would've been great if you could smoothly transition from the side of a ledge to the top of a ledge. Especially on the lowermost platforming levels which could be extremely difficult.

I didn't make it all the way to the end. I kept getting stuck in the topmost world trying to get past crates while I ran out of time.

Tiny Card World by Pisti 2012-04-25T03:57:00

No windows here. =/ Good to see a card entry, though.

Ant Command by Aaron San Filippo 2012-04-25T03:50:00

Nice scene for the anthill. The gameplay progressed well, though it wasn't clear why or when my ants were dying. Maybe a different sound effect would've helped? The little bits of food were a nice goal, but I really wanted my ants to carry them back to the colony instead of wandering all the way out to the grass.

Tiny Journey by Evil Sandwich Studios 2012-05-13T22:03:00

I played the compo version. I had to rely on the walkthrough for several sections, including the final verb (I was trying to use objects instead). I didn't think I could take the rocket plans in the starting room, but it turns out you have to stand in just the right place for it to work.

The art is lovely (the keys, in particular, are beautiful). The music was nice, though it became repetitive. The ending was nicely done, though the framerate dropped through the floor.

Difficult, but very interesting. Nice work!

spectrumTrap by sugarlollipop 2012-04-26T04:32:00

I didn't really feel your premise expressed in the game. Since all the dots were flashing rainbows, I didn't see "issues of color". I think it would've been interesting to present "issues of color" in a less abstract way; perhaps have some non-rainbow dots appear that affect the player's movement or the rules for creating new dots.

That said, I'm really glad you put something together for the competition!

Watercolour by Super Soul 2012-04-26T04:15:00

I really liked the snapshot mechanic. I feel like more games should employ that personalized end-of-game review.

Kumiho by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou 2012-05-13T23:06:00

Nice vertical shooter. Good to see more 2D Unity games, too. The teleporting mechanic felt like a new twist, and you concocted complex bullet patterns that really exercised the teleport button. The final boss battle was really tough, requiring a precise move/fire/teleport pattern to get through.

The graphics were great, and I really liked the checkpoint title cards. I do think you should've had an end-game screen, rather than just kicking back to the main menu.

Nice work!

Kumiho by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou 2012-05-13T23:13:00

Attack of the Tiny People by Catmoo 2012-04-24T06:40:00

Quite a stream of bullets from the enemies. Nigh impenetrable at times. I played the HTML5 version, and it played quite well for that environment, sound and all. I appreciated the inline help screen.

T in Y World by Tom 7 2012-04-25T04:30:00

The applet window is too tall for my screen, even with the browser running in fullscreen mode (my screen's only 800 pixels high). 10" netbooks may only have as little as 600 pixels in height, so you might be better off limiting your height to 500px or so.

The title screen song is hilarious. I let it play all the way through before I started the game. Ctrl+M (OSX) didn't work to mute the in-game music which, while pretty good, got repetitive pretty quickly.

I got a little confused and skipped the tutorial levels thinking I'd already been through the tutorial after the introduction. Even going back through the tutorial levels, I never completely figured out the rules notation. I got stuck in the tutorial.

The in-game music got a little overbearing after a while, and ctrl+m didn't seem to work (OSX).

terminus by zillix 2012-04-25T05:01:00

Nifty world-in-a-box. Killing friends and then raising them by dark magic was pretty cool. I wasn't sure what to do on my second playthrough when I'd blown all the axes on chopping through the rock. The third time through, I got everything in the right order and let my minions gaze with empty eyes at the battle raging in the heavens while I turned my eyes earthward and chopped mercilessly at the mother tree. Totally made it out alive.

Super Strict Farmer by Benjamin 2012-05-13T23:58:00

Really nice! I wasn't able to win a game (damn AI), but I had fun playing. It looks like you have different buildings available on each play, which is cool. It was tough keeping track of what everything did, and it seemed like the AI opponent was able to magically conjure lots of food from the pond (or my buildings??). I never figured that trick out.

Very polished. Nice job.

Memento XII by deepnight 2012-04-28T02:25:00

Fabulous. It gave me chills. The transitions, the recollections, the socketed items as portals to other memories... And the ending was very cinematic, with the darkening room and the character looking at the letter, then looking up. Small animations, huge emotional content.

This one's my favorite.

Hamster Bowling by tfendall 2012-05-15T22:13:00

This is hilarious. Ludum Dare needs more FMV games. Really nice work.

I hit 'R' to restart the game, and the second playthrough seemed buggy. The video didn't match the score on a number of frames and one time the video just went all corrupt and blocky. The first playthrough was fine.

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING by JigxorAndy 2012-04-26T16:33:00

Excellent controls. I love platformers with a bouncy kicking-ass-and-taking-names feel. You even managed to include a couple of long shaft falls, one of my favorite bits from old 2D run-n-jump games. I'm glad you chose to give the player infinite lives, too, ensuring that most people will play all the way to the end.

I did think the boss dialogue should've been moved closer to the boss--it kind of looked like the computer was talking. But the ending was still fantastic.

Audio Land by triplefox 2012-04-24T06:31:00

Runs well, good audio, nice old-school ASCII interface. Plenty of options for the musically-inclined. It's probably about as accessible as ScreamTracker. I could see it being used to make actual tunes. In a post-compo version, maybe add a way to share songs through encoded URLs? That way you could show off some of your own work.

LittlePlanetBigRocket by daredevildave 2012-04-24T17:08:00

Really, really like this. I haven't seen a cube-turner before. Excellent work. I do think it'd be nice to have at least one "freebie" hit with temporary invulnerability so you don't have to play each level completely perfectly to progress.

The game froze halfway through a cube rotation animation when I got a few levels in. It was on the first level with the waves of super-fast bad guys. The browser's still responsive and there's no CPU spike, so it seems like the game logic just failed.

Especially good use of web tech here; the PlayCanvas platform looks pretty nice.

TinyInspiration by Shigor 2012-04-25T03:39:00

Pretty nice work. Good to see an adventure entry.

I want to turn the heater on by Andrew 2012-05-02T04:10:00

I totally thought the blue thing behind Miguel was the bed he stole. Had to check here to find out it was the pot.

Nifty warping bit. I like how you occupy the same location in each nested world; you could totally use that for some navigation puzzles.

A Super Mario Summary by johanp 2012-04-27T18:46:00

I gave it 5/5 on innovation even though the source material isn't original. I love what you've done here, and I hope it spawns a new genre of summary games.

5-4 was *haaard*. =)

The first couple of levels really captured the essence of the game. Stupendous work in the 48-hour window! I read through your post-mortem, too; congrats on the press!

All That Are Lost Will Be Found by R3ason 2012-05-03T03:15:00

I'm afraid the game was too dark for me. I had a hard time keeping track of the box's movement because I usually had no visual reference. I tried it on a mac, and the first time through the ctrl key worked. Then I fell off the map into infinity. =/

Second playthrough, ctrl stopped working, so I had to use the trackpad, and Apple's trackpads need actual pressure to click, which is pretty awful. So I wasn't really able to spam the light. I eventually got to a place where I couldn't move and was surrounded by evil eyes. I'm guessing that's an end-game state (not a bug), but a little on-screen text would help.

I also tried the post-compo version, and it was still too dark for me. I would've liked the ambient light radius to be at least 2x as large, I think, to get some sense of the environment. I did make it to the ending, but it was mainly through button-mashing.

Wall climbing worked well when I could see where I was. The monsters were great; I love how the monster eyes are tiny and they appear much larger when they hit you. Creepy.

Single Cycles by mildmojo 2012-04-25T06:36:00

Thanks for the feedback, guys! I made a couple of tiny bugfixes for badly broken liftoffs under high CPU load, broken player names, and to make the names actually show up during the race. If that's overstepping the 'minor fixes' rule, I'll call it my one 'bent' rule for the Jam.

Single Cycles by mildmojo 2012-05-02T05:52:00

@jwolf: Thanks! Networked play would be cool, but I think I'd have to run the simulation on the server to make it fair. Separately, I've been playing with a small lobby system plus the Faye pub/sub async messaging framework, which might be enough for multiplayer.

@R3eason: Wow, incredible praise! Thanks for trying it out! I agree, it's tough to keep track of the players. Fixing Crafty's tint feature would help (tint the sprite, not the background), as would a larger planet. I haven't figured out the right way to scale my raster graphics with CraftyJS yet.

Single Cycles by mildmojo 2012-05-14T00:02:00

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. It's been a pleasure seeing what other people think of the game and I've had a blast playing/rating all the other great games from this compo.

Defend My World by Awennor 2012-04-24T16:55:00

I'm afraid I don't have Windows. Good luck, though, and congrats!

Defend My World by Awennor 2012-05-02T04:50:00

I got through to the end, but I agree it would've helped to have a multitouch interface for setting the attack point and moving around the planet. Or maybe you could've added keys for rotating around the planet and left the mouse for aiming?

I had the most success by sitting near the sides of the planet and setting my attack points before moving.

Tinyverse by Permanent7 2012-05-01T05:39:00

Really not suited to a trackpad. =) It would've been nice to have key equivalents for the mouse buttons to make dragging easier. Better feedback to show you're dragging people would help, too.

A little too frantic for my hardware, but it looks solid. Totally agree that it'd be well-suited for a touchscreen.

Tinyverse by Permanent7 2012-05-01T05:40:00

Oh, and the instructions in space (a la kinetic text) were quite nice.

Zephyr by cadin 2012-04-25T07:19:00

Zero-button game! Nice! Just need to change the starting and finishing clicks into gestures. =)

Very nice artwork, animation, sound, and music. All the assets are splendid. The gameplay was definitely challenging on a trackpad. Some of those little sprites just came rocketing down from the sky, and juggling a half dozen was fine until a flower closed or a bug came flying through. Nice mix of plausible elements.

It'd be nice if flowers didn't close when a sprite was in proximity, kind of like how a Piranha Plant will stop coming out of a pipe if Mario's standing next to it.

Gulliver by DDRKirby(ISQ) 2012-04-29T23:03:00

Really polished soundtrack. Thanks for making it available. I think "Cavernous" is my favorite. By the Bandcamp discog, it looks like you've had some experience with this. =)

I liked the theme of continually shrinking to fit into smaller spaces, though I found myself staying minimized and dodging enemies rather than engaging them. I think there could've been a better audio cue for getting hit--I was always surprised when I died.

Escape from Minimars by Adhesion 2012-05-02T03:34:00

I may have to take a closer look at melonJS (or just your code), the performance in FF 12 OSX was phenomenal. Smooth, always 50+ fps, didn't even engage the laptop fan. Pretty much played like a native game. I racked up 460 kills, so I'm a monster. =)

Excellent job on the art and sound. There could've been a couple more sfx for the robot walking and people coming on screen, but it was good as is. I can't believe you had the time to design 10 decently-sized levels. Gameplay was pretty easy; I think the platforming mechanics could've been stressed a bit more. As is, it felt a little like Stompy Robot Canabalt with Lasers. It would help to have clearer landmarks when you need to double back on your path, too, so players don't accidentally leap into the void.

Fun game, very polished.

Tiny's World by tacograveyard 2012-04-26T22:41:00

Finally, a game based on "Fallen" with Denzel Washington. =)

You forgot to keep keypress events from bubbling up to the browser, so WASD trigger my typeahead find in Firefox instead of controlling the game. The fix is pretty easy, something like this: http://pastebin.com/tvzQqWxv

Since it was also *really* slow in Firefox, I gave it a shot in Chrome. Still a little slow, but playable.

My first time through, I thought I had to march everyone through the tulips, and then I thought I'd met everyone and failed to get some of them into the flowers, so I restarted the game. I figured it out the second time through. It'd be good to call a lot of attention to the flower bar when a flower disappears for the first time to really communicate the goal. And because you need to mentally keep track of whom you've seen, it would help if the character sprites were all unique.

I liked the ending. Very cute. Nice outro, too. I liked that one of the buildings was named after your LD handle.

Tiny's World by tacograveyard 2012-04-26T22:42:00

(cool to see another CraftyJS entry, too)

Mr. Butter and the Infinite Bread by heitortsergent 2012-05-03T04:30:00

Great name, and I like the concept. Having Mr. Butter shrink as he runs low on butter was a great idea.

It would've been a little more satisfying to have the butter fall through the holes and shrink away from the camera.

I got to 44340. =)

LD25 — You are the Villain

CYBERQUEEN by Porpentine 2012-12-17T08:50:00

Well-written and really uncomfortable. Wow.

I liked the way a few scenes let you select the same option over and over again while the action progressed. Made it feel less like a choice/branch and more like performing an action or pursuing a goal.

"Lantern of pain" stood out.

LD26 — Minimalism

HELPME_ by Sestren 2013-05-17T06:14:00

Cool mechanic! Tough with a touchpad, but that's true of most keyboard+mouse games. The lo-fi graphics felt just right, and the indirect controls felt pretty good. Miniature baseball collection was genius.

Libelle by Verrazano 2013-05-08T05:06:00

The Linux package seems to contain the Windows version. =(

Stargazers by Cake&Code 2013-05-03T16:30:00

Very polished. The art is fabulous. I particularly like how the stargazer waves her hand at the stars as you draw constellations. The moon waxing and waning makes a really inventive timer, too. I appreciated the game references and the art gallery. That seems like a really advanced feature to have in an LD entry.

Replicating those constellations, especially the ones with crossovers, was difficult! I think it took me four or five tries to complete the origami killer.

Playing with a touchpad, I really wanted to be able to just drag between stars and have them connect the dots as the cursor went over them. That would be nice to add.

I think the game would play beautifully on a touch-enabled device. It could be interesting as a two-player tablet game, where players sit on opposite sides and draw constellations competitively or make designs that merge together in the middle.

I think the music could've been softer or perhaps sparser to fit the mood of the game.

Composition with Yellow, Red, and Blue by DaveDobson 2013-04-30T20:32:00

Good to see another CraftyJS entry. =)

Great use of simple animation to make the game feel alive during setup and level changes. I like the physics a lot. They're a bit floaty but it makes the control feel good.

I'm guessing you skipped sound, which is understandable but unfortunate. It'd be great to hear some blips when the square bumps into walls, even if they're just sfxr-generated.

Gods Will Be Watching by Deconstructeam 2013-05-10T22:15:00

You guys must've borrowed the random number generator from FTL. It took me 5-10 tries to beat the game; I'm pretty sure some games were unwinnable when you get a terrible streak on your therapy/hunting/predators/medusa rolls. When I finally did get through it, everyone survived. =) Moderation in all things. We spent the last night huddled around the campfire, ammo and meds to spare, telling stories and enjoying a plentiful meal.

This was fabulous, end-to-end. Things I loved:
- Moons shifting as time progressed. So subtle.
- Links between characters: the engineer and the psychiatrist, the soldier and the dog
- Using the act of talking to characters both for exposition AND meaningful gameplay
- Scaling action points with the number of active characters
- Multiple paths for everything important, each with a tradeoff: repairing the radio, restoring sanity, hunting food
- Authentic animations linked to character state

There were a few UI quirks that felt awkward. Sometimes I'd try to click a character but the click would dismiss the message box instead. The text could use some proofreading, too, but I gather English might not be your first language.

F*** This Job by Casino Jack 2013-05-13T00:59:00

This worked out really well! I like that there's a fair amount of jump height variability and some of the puzzles boil down to adjusting your timing by using different jump heights. Good variety of enemies, nicely-designed levels, and an awesome replay feature a la Super Meat Boy.

I'd like to see the replay screen use a delay or a different color scheme to identify itself. I found myself reacting to the replay as if it were the actual game, which meant I skipped replays I wanted to see. The sound lagged behind the action just a bit, too, but that was a minor distraction.

Nice work!

One fine morning our machines are gonna cut us down by netmute 2013-05-06T19:47:00

Nicely done! Very *complete*. It reminds me of Pax Britannica, actually, the one-button real-time space fleet battle game. Roughly the same difficulty level, I think.

Worked fine in Firefox desktop and mobile.

It would be helpful if there was some UI sugar to tell the player where their ships were going and to highlight idle ships (or maybe an idle ship sound effect?). The way it is now, I was clicking planets and enemy ships repeatedly just to make sure nobody stayed idle.

Mini Pirates! by josefnpat 2013-05-12T21:30:00

Nifty. It took me a bit to figure out the abbreviations (e.g. Crew versus CannonBalls), but I got the hang of it. Finished with 61 treasure. Nice simple gameplay. Impressive that you got it all done in 4 hours. It usually takes me that long to get good text handling figured out. =)

Good representation of ship power using the number of masts.

The music got repetitive pretty quickly. Sounds like you used iNudge, maybe? I love the tool, and it lets you use multiple patterns pretty easily. But that would've taken more time.

Better Triangle by Jiddo 2013-05-07T07:46:00

Really clever and very complete! I love that to win, you have to become your enemy. It took a while to reliably collect parts without surrendering them back to the boss, but I got through it eventually. Nice work!

0 by Cosmologicon 2013-05-21T21:01:00

Lovely style, animation, and sound. Wicked puzzles. I got everything but the final right-half-circle puzzle. I can see the symmetry, but I can't make it work.

Insert Name Here by Syawra 2013-05-13T01:15:00

Nice work. Clever, semi-challenging, great sense of humor.

Since it feels like it would be quick to add more elements, I would've liked to see just a few more levels or challenges.

The Ethereal Stage by Brassawiking 2013-05-12T00:57:00

Wonderful piece of kinetic fiction. There were a few spots where the next step wasn't evident, but thankfully there wasn't any penalty for doing the wrong thing. The journal filled out nicely with bits of story, and the lost soul was enigmatic enough to keep me wondering. Quite a lot of content for a compo entry!

I peeked at the source and it's pretty brute-force. Way to optimize for programmer throughput! =)

Where therefore we go by pjchardt 2013-04-30T05:56:00

Fabulous use of multiple windows and simultaneous control. I love the way the "family" builds and retires. It's not a game you can attack and cruise through on your way to playing all 2300+ LD games; it's really rewarding to finish.

Lovely art, music, style, design. The exploration part in the middle reminded me of the middle of Frog Fractions.

Great work, here.

Stalker by The Consul 2013-05-11T06:33:00

Reminds me of the old Mac adventures like Osmo's Cosmic Adventure. Very nice overall, though I wish you'd picked a non-system font for the text.

DeaN by Sakuyan 2013-05-08T06:54:00

Beautiful art and animation. Gameplay's pretty simple, but that's okay.

I watched the video of your story mode, but it didn't match my gameplay. In both game and story mode, obstacles just stopped showing up after a little while and I could walk forever. FF 20, Linux.

For Victory! by Back to Browse Entries 2013-05-17T07:27:00

Cute idea, but it would feel better if each "win" had a little more ceremony to it instead of just feeling like an ever-increasing score.

Newborn by Lowlet 2013-05-03T18:03:00

You should totally click the Linux button and make a build. The page just showed up black & blank for me, not even the little reminder to go download the Unity plugin (which isn't available for Linux anyway).

XYZ by ataxkt 2013-05-12T17:33:00

I'm glad someone took this idea and ran with it. I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince someone at our meetup to try it out.

I played the Linux build. Your default resolution was huge, wouldn't fit on my 1600x900 screen. Since Unity's Linux build doesn't yet have a resolution picker, I had to futz with command-line options to get it down to a reasonable size. A good default might be 800x600.

When I played, the graphics were completely greyscale, unlike your screenshots. Not sure why.

I wanted to have a perspective view of each model and more freedom of rotation so I could get a sense of what the object looked like in 3D so I could plan a proper orientation to fit the outline. As it was, I could recognize when the shape needed to be flipped 180 degrees around an axis (mirroring), but otherwise I kind of had to punch keys until something worked.

::.::::::. by rwos 2013-05-11T23:38:00

You've got a bug in your input system; your key handler needs to call the keydown event's stopPropagation() and preventDefault() methods to keep keys from bubbling up and triggering browser commands. I've got my browser set up to use letters to start its typeahead find feature, which takes focus away from the game and consumes all further keystrokes, so I couldn't strafe.

Really nice game. Great minimalist take on raycasting. I liked the way the rendering got jittery and ghosty as you took damage, though I got a bit of a headache trying to focus on it. Excellent idea to tint the whole page background when shooting, killing, or taking damage.

Fragments of Him by Aceria 2013-05-08T06:40:00

This looks really nice. Do you have a Linux build?

CHAMELEON RUN by Split82 2013-05-08T06:36:00

Unity? Can has Linux build? Thanks!

50 years by echa 2013-05-03T17:13:00

It took me three tries to beat it in easy mode. =)

Year 33 I got hit with 3 swordsmen, 3 archers, 1 knight, 1 ballista, 5 (!!!) champions, and 1 mage. I fought back with 15 swordsmen and sent the whole village of 27 peasants to back them up. I lost 13 swordsmen and lived to tell about it. That was the second game that I hit a wall around level 32-33.

There's something really charming about Lemonade Stand style games that are all about min/maxing a simple simulation. I do wish the role of each building was clearer; I never figured out what Town Halls did, and I was never prompted to build more of them. As such, it would've been nice if I lost those to raiders before I lost by blessed chicken farms. =P

I think the game could've used a touch more polish. It would've been nice if it allowed me to back up and make a different choice when I did something invalid (like trying to buy 18 peasants when I only had 400 gold). Likewise, most games I've played like this give you sane defaults at each prompt so you can just hit Enter to get through them; using Esc was a touch awkward. I would've liked descriptions of the special game modes, too. I tried mad peasants, which seemed to make all attacks be 100% peasants. That was cute.

50 years by echa 2013-05-06T20:55:00

I tried the post-compo version, but normal mode is still really unforgiving. I think you need a 5-year attack-free window at the start of the game before the random number generator takes over. Even in easy mode, I played multiple games where my 2 peasants couldn't take on a swordsman who attacked in the first year!

The building explanations were nice, but didn't help a lot. I *think* the barracks are the limit of how many swordsmen you can train in a single year, right? The barracks also mentions it can train archers and knights, but that feature doesn't seem to be in the game yet.

The Town Hall says something about training peasants and getting upgraded to a keep, but I don't know what it means to train peasants and there doesn't seem to be a Keep upgrade feature.

Experience-related rewards are great. Since you can effectively only get 3 per game and you've built 9 of them, it takes a while to figure out what they are. One powerup referenced mages, but I never found a way to get mages. One affected knights, but knights only seemed to be available through one of the other perks and it was unlikely he'd survive until you leveled up again.

50 years by echa 2013-05-09T05:41:00

Wait, there are buildings other than the three listed? Whoa.

The Last Soul by Gaeel 2013-05-13T00:42:00

Seemed like a charming platformer with nice music, but it locked up on me twice, each within about a minute of the start of the game. Had to kill -9 the love process.

Mag by alexfalkenberg 2013-05-17T07:33:00

Nice animation, great palette.

I played the web version, but the input handler has a bug where it doesn't prevent keys from bubbling up to the browser and triggering built-in features. On the key event objects, the javascript needs to call .stopPropagation() and .preventDefault(). In my case, pressing 'a' popped open my typeahead find, taking focus away from the game and eating all further keystrokes.

Mini Epic Adventure by frogmaster 2013-05-03T17:49:00

I played in Mint, too. It would be better if the game started in window mode since you don't use any conventional keys to exit. I had to drop to console mode and kill the process the first time I tried it (and before I read the manual).

I wish I had the patience to see everything you put in. I love the concept of a lo-fi presentation with a huge manual to explain it, but I didn't have much fun past the first couple of times I looked up a message.

I couldn't figure out what I was seeing in the initial room, I just sort of hit arrow keys and looked up messages until I found a way out. The dining room made a lot more sense. I never did find the castle; I think I was eaten by a wolf.

It would be great if the manual showed a few screen shots with labels/explanations written on top of the pixels. Or, if you could live with the compromise, it would be great if the pixels were labeled in-game until you defeated your first enemy. Or maybe all pixels could be labeled, with a "hardcore" mode to turn the labels off.

Untitled Part IIIa by hnjslater 2013-05-03T18:00:00

In Mint, the pygame package was called "python-pygame".

It plays pretty well, but it's really hard. Tower defense usually gives you a little breathing room to build your defenses between rounds. Now I know why. =) Moving and replicating the base feels a little unfair, especially when it goes to all 4 sides of the screen and the enemies completely neglect your previously-fortified bases in favor of the new positions.

Have you looked at PyInstaller (http://www.pyinstaller.org/) or cx_Freeze (http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/) for packaging the game cross-platform? I haven't used either, but I know I've played packaged pygame games before.

dotLife by ddionisio 2013-05-12T21:09:00

I played the Linux version. Good controls, nice flower art, felt a bit like the PC/XBLIG shooter Compromised with the exploration and flocking enemies. The sound effects and pixelation to represent damage worked well. At some point I guess I explored everything and ran out of things to do.

Just two things: it'd be great to have a key to quit (like Esc), and please use a more standard archive format like zip instead of RAR.

The Parasite by jahlgren 2013-05-11T06:20:00

Excellent controls, very much like Super Meat Boy. Much harder than SMB, though, with the hunger/stamina mechanic. I tried a bunch of times but could only get halfway through. Watching the playthrough, there are some good strategies for getting through some of those levels quicker.

Very complete; I don't know how you did that in a day. =)

Disk by Lokno 2013-05-03T16:12:00

Congrats on finishing! Runs great in FF 20 on my i5 laptop, but it's a recent machine.

Not bad. The animation is fluid and I liked the snaking enemies. The scrolling background added a good sense of movement.

I never felt the need to use bullet absorption. For one, I typically killed enemies before they fired a shot. If I chose to farm them by letting them fill the screen, I could grow pretty large (albeit slowly), but that didn't seem to give me any benefits. It would be great if there was a solid incentive to absorption, like a higher-power burst attack.

Funky Lincoln Saves the Day by TheCze 2013-05-07T08:06:00

I love offbeat typing games. Never realized how hard it is to type the word JUMP. That index finger has to hit 3 keys!

I feel like I just barely beat the game. The JUMPSLIDE was really satisfying. You did a great job at teaching new mechanics and then leveraging them in complex and difficult patterns.

(Follow the) Line by Chman 2013-05-08T23:02:00

I started using the left and right arrows, then realized you could use all 4 arrows, then realized it didn't matter what key you were pressing. Heh. Should've read the instructions.

Very nice art style and color palette. I had a helluva time beating "Almost there" in challenge mode. =) I like the way you can see the level being drawn ahead of you in infinite mode. The whole game reminds me a little of Sophie Houlden's Swift*Stitch.

I think some low audio tones would be great when you're navigating each level.

Run or Splash by Yacodo 2013-05-11T23:07:00

Nice work! I didn't realize that the timer was resetting on every level at first, so I was rushing through. Then I realized it was more about walking over as many tiles as possible before exiting.

The potato-eating shark with the McDonald's logo on its dorsal fin was great.

It would be cool to see other kinds of obstacles or challenges, or maybe emphasize tile completion by rewarding (or requiring) a certain number of tiles before the exit opens up.

Consumerism by RadioLemon 2013-05-07T08:24:00

Your Linux link is broken; looks like a copy/paste error. You can fix it by editing your entry.

I read through your help system, but I didn't really understand the relationship between work and income. Having a work schedule that was every other day made it hard to travel between work and shopping to maximize both. I didn't do very well; I couldn't make enough to keep up with my spending habits. =)

You put a lot into the game in a short amount of development time, which was nice.

The Minimalism Quest by Pol 2013-05-12T21:15:00

Nice art, good interaction variety. I like how after a few more complicated stages you just blow the car up. Boom. Simple. =) Kudos on the sound, too.

With a touchpad I couldn't get beyond "meh". A mouse let me get up to "fairly simple".

Space, Space, Space! by shinestrength 2013-05-08T23:29:00

Unity? Could you put up a Linux build for those of us who can't run the webplayer?

Block Disco by Jubjub. 2013-05-17T06:09:00

It took me a few tries before I figured out I could walljump. I never quite mastered the exploding blocks. Looks like a solid climber. I only got to about 28m. =)

Potato Dungeon by _Rilem 2013-05-03T18:44:00

Fantastic game.

I was a little frustrated by a game-breaking bug in your input system. You're not calling preventDefault() or stopPropagation() (or both) on the event object in your keydown/keypress handler, so pressing a key to move bubbles up to my browser (FF 20) and pops open my typeahead find feature, taking focus away from the game and consuming all further input. I make HTML5 games myself, so I'm super-sensitive to it. =) I had to switch to my backup browser to play.

Very polished. Love the character art and simple level design. You packed a lot of content into such a short development cycle. I noticed you pretty much had to attack the pigs from the left since their swords reset to the right after a hit.

Bringing in the horse with a sword and providing a riding option was awesome.

It's a lot harder to play with a trackpad since the game rewards you for swinging your sword back and forth. It would probably work well with a twin-stick controller.

Potato Dungeon by _Rilem 2013-05-09T05:38:00

@lotusgame: Note that only the Compo rules say the game "must" follow the theme. The Jam rules say the game "should" follow the theme. The Jam's a lot less strict than the Compo.

TOOM by PoV 2013-05-02T02:20:00

Beautiful art & music. I like that you added so many clickable things, but I sort of attacked it with the click-everything-with-everything strategy @VDOgamez mentioned.

The ending didn't really fit the tone of the rest of the game.

Brutaliz'Art LD26 by lotusgame 2013-05-08T23:39:00

Love the use of other games' screen shots. And the sound effect for the Strip Potato was priceless.

Prototype by OnlySlightly 2013-04-30T06:00:00

I really respect some of the design decisions you made here. In particular, making the player the same speed as the blue block, but starting slightly behind, making it impossible to catch up. Great foreshadowing of stompy death, too, teaching the player what's next.

I do wish there was more! =)

OggOrbis by Michael Hall 2013-05-10T15:26:00

Cool mechanic. Quite a lot of ways those balls could bounce depending on slight variations in starting position. I'm glad you introduced a lot of different wall behaviors to keep things interesting.

You had a pretty dense credits screen with an autoadvance timeout; I would've liked it to wait for a click so I had time to read everything. It also seemed like the framerate could've been improved (downloaded for Linux). The game got much smoother when there were maybe 4 or 5 balls remaining, and I've got a modern system.

Enneadeca by Rongon 2013-05-03T17:29:00

Wow, really hard. I wanted the controls to be QWE/ZXC so it would feel more like a box with corners. =/

You've got a bug in your keyboard handler: you need to call event.preventDefault() and event.stopPropagation() inside your keydown/keypress callback to keep those events from bubbling up to the browser. The first time I tried to move, the keypress popped open my browser's typeahead find feature which soaked up all further keypresses and took focus away from the game.

Excellent concept. You could probably scale the difficulty by varying the number and speed of the enemies. The hardest part of these puzzles on paper is not retracing your steps, so the permapower was a nice addition.

Orbicular by metalcan 2013-05-12T20:52:00

I made it down to 26 after 3 games. The one-hit restart was enough to keep me playing it to completion, but I don't think it's an invalid design choice. I liked that you essentially reset the game in place, putting the player back into action immediately.

Nice use of plain shapes, color, and lovely music. Very nice overall.

Pure Green by Christina Nordlander 2013-05-06T21:07:00

Hah! Interesting use of Twine. I beat it on the first go 'round, but replayed it to push its limits. It's definitely the kind of game that would benefit from lots of hidden tricks or combos to add depth within the frame you've built. Maybe some branching by hopping down a hole or climbing a vine. =)

Tic Toc Tac Toe by delfino 2013-05-06T21:02:00

Using the grid lines as timers is brilliant. Excellent micro/macro mechanic with lickable presentation. I do wish the opponent was a little smarter or the game sped up sooner, but I love it as-is.

OktumBoktum - A minimal adventure of a boy and his crazy pet by imagnity 2013-05-17T07:23:00

I got to 923 by changing their colors simultaneously. My brain couldn't handle left/right mapping to big/small characters. =)

The game animates nicely, and the difficulty ramps up at a good pace.

Terminally ill by Sebastian 2013-05-08T04:23:00

Unity? Could you please push the button that makes a build for Linux? Thank you!

Get The Potato by invaderJim 2013-05-08T05:57:00

It took a long time to figure out how to get past the potato behind glass. Then I remembered I had a mouse.

I never did get past the potato behind glass under the two panes of purple glass.

Nice work on the audio and the premise.

The dark maze by OfficialKoolingGames 2013-05-12T21:17:00

Looks like you can download the file without signing up for anything by clicking the filename on the share page. But still, it's worth using another file host.

Bayou by paulmcgg 2013-05-08T06:37:00

Unity? Got a Linux build?

Bayou by paulmcgg 2013-05-19T23:45:00

Brilliant mood. The visuals, an inverted night scheme, really did it for me. Excellent, beautiful audio work, too--a very complete audio environment. I liked it a lot when the rain intensified. =)

I have to admit, I couldn't tell whether the spear's crazy looping, gravity-defying, target-avoiding flight was intentional. I have to assume it was, but I had trouble figuring out exactly what it meant.

Arena by rogueNoodle 2013-05-17T06:04:00

Nicely realized! Very polished art style and animation. I had a hard time mastering the isometric orientation mapped to the arrow keys, but that might come with more play time.

In your input handler javascript, you need to call .stopPropagation() and .preventDefault() on key events that you're handling to keep them from bubbling up to the browser and triggering other functions. WASD were triggering my typeahead find, which takes away focus and eats all further keystrokes.

Duds by nexantic.com 2013-05-10T18:56:00

I wish there was more, even if it just restarted the map with an extra NPC. =) The gameplay was solid, though the enemy was no match for the player. I never had to change command modes.

I'm not sure what the resources did. I collected them all on the first game and not at all on the second. It also felt like the path faded too quickly, but I guess I could have drawn it more slowly. =)

QbQbQb by rezoner 2013-05-08T06:29:00

Nice work! I hadn't seen CanvasQuery before, looks like a nice little framework for getting canvas apps up and running.

Fluid animations, pretty butterflies and meteors, good stacking gameplay. I wish the rotation was tied to keydown rather than keypress, though. It felt weird when I held down an arrow key and the planet moved one notch, paused for my key repeat delay, then continued rotating.

Fauna Fight! by theoriginalcm 2013-04-30T06:06:00

This plays really well with two players. The ducks' animations are perfect, the body slams are satisfying. More characters or character names would've been great, but I know how short the time gets. =)

You might want to edit your entry here to list the controls; I don't remember if the game shows them to players.

Mind the Gap by shiprib 2013-05-08T06:55:00

This looks great. Unity? Do you have a Linux build?

28 Pixels by TobiasL 2013-05-12T17:35:00

Since it's Unity, could you post a standalone Linux build? There's no webplayer for Linux. =(

Title: Subtitle by Liz England 2013-05-13T01:11:00

This looks really cool, but I'm on Linux. =(

Dieter Rams Memory by PixelArtM 2013-05-12T21:44:00

The art was nicely done, wish the sound effects reflected the device they were coming from! I'm familiar with the gameplay, so I didn't play very long.

Double Hydra by CosmicAdventureSquad 2013-04-30T20:46:00

Cool mechanic, like a minimal medieval Ikaruga. The circle-based vector art is lovely; kudos on the style.

At some point I got down to about four stacks of gold clumped at the bottom of the screen, and at that point it wasn't too difficult to defend them and disregard all the activity at the top of the screen. It feels like maybe you're limiting the total number of enemies on the screen?

The dragon's tail initially made it hard to tell where my hitbox was and where I'd be spitting fireballs. It might be helpful if the tail was shorter or transparent.

Lookin for Love <3 by Filth and Money 2013-05-06T21:13:00

The collision detection seemed off to me. I died a lot when I didn't feel like I was anywhere near a potato. The game is way too tall, too; I couldn't fit the whole thing on my 1600x900 screen, and that's taller than most sub-14" laptop screens (especially macs). It would be great if it scaled to fit the screen height.

I think the mechanic is solid and the gameplay was nice 'n' twitchy. Just needed a little more playtesting on a few different PCs.

Lookin for Love <3 by Filth and Money 2013-05-06T21:17:00

If there were platforms, they didn't render for me. Looked like a black screen with the green guy moving back and forth in the midfield with hearts and potatoes dropping at lightning speed, all on a black background.

I figured out that zooming my browser out on the page let me see everything.

Unfurl by TeamEagle 2013-05-13T02:17:00

I really like the scroll unfurling mechanic. The ambient windchime-like music and the sound of paper unrolling is really relaxing.

I agree with others that once you've figured the scrolls out, it can be easy to brute-force the later levels without really using the pre-printed symbols. I played until level 32 when the game froze. No long repsonded to input, but the music kept playing. Was there an ending?

Unst by Milo 2013-05-08T05:02:00

Wow, nicely done! Those are some fiendish puzzles. Reminds me of the Klotski/SameGame style of puzzles. That last level took some clever movement to solve. I felt like I was thinking sideways and relying on intuition.

Found through the 10s video.

PRISMA by Dark Acre Jack 2013-05-10T17:52:00

Nice job. Minimal, clean, performs well. I like that you included music that synchronizes when you have the right cubes lit.

I never quite figured out what I should be doing next on the multicolored levels. There was a progression of colors, but I felt like I was trying things at random to get them to complete. It would be good to explain that the lollipops (or joysticks, or PS Move controllers) give you *control* over which color you activate using the up/down arrows. I found it by accident after trying to light 4 red cubes simultaneously.

Some notes on the standalone version:

- Ship it in a zip file, not a RAR, please. Most operating systems can natively open zips but not RAR files.
- You only need to distribute the files in an individual build directory. Everything you need to run in Linux, say, is in your Builds/DALD26_LINUX directory. You could just zip that up and distribute it as the Linux build, and it would take a third of the time to download.
- Add a way to quit the game instead other than closing the window. The escape key's a good bet.

PRISMA by Dark Acre Jack 2013-05-12T17:28:00

I tried the game again to figure out why I had a hard time learning the color switch mechanic.

When you collect the red bulb, you do get up and down arrows on the screen. You don't need to switch colors to finish the level because collecting the bulb sets your color to red automatically, but you do need to go up and down the nearby ladder. I thought the arrows described the movement needed to finish the level.

Maybe it would've helped me if the cubes refused to spin using the "wrong" color, or if the level teaching up/down used a color-switching puzzle before exposing ladders?

Four Scepters by Benjamin 2013-05-17T07:19:00

Great work. Very difficult, very replayable. I like the character classes and their cooperation a lot, though I wish the thief's ability was more than one-use.

It feels like there's very little left to chance, which makes it more of a puzzle game. I did find myself in one situation where a portcullis shut behind me and I was stuck in just two rooms with no items or monsters or a way out (may have needed a key).

Floating Point by 7Soul 2013-05-08T05:35:00

Novel use of local storage and the two tabs/windows. I hadn't seen that trick before. I wish there was more! It was cool to bring stuff across the gap to see how it would behave in the other world.

Dream Fishing by Sophie Houlden 2013-05-12T00:01:00

Delicious game. Excellent concept. The instrumental tones for walking and splashing were inspired. It took me a bit to get the hang of casting, pulling, and reeling, and I consistently cast my line too close, but I got pretty good at retrieving fish by the end. The fish looked great in motion.

I played the standalone version for Linux. I use an inverted Y axis in 3D games, so this was a little tough for me to navigate. Luckily, there was no time pressure (unless there's something special for catching two fish at the same time). The text also rendered off the left side of the screen, like it was sized for a higher resolution. It wasn't cropped much and because it appeared slowly I didn't have any trouble reading it.

Dream Fishing by Sophie Houlden 2013-05-12T00:05:00

Oh, and I wanted the reeling action to be reversed so I felt like I was pulling the fish toward me with my trackpad or mousewheel, but maybe you use a mac with backwards scrolling. =D

Phlux by vrld 2013-05-10T19:18:00

Nice work! The speed controls were an excellent idea, I spent a lot of time in 4th gear waiting for my small flow advantage to pay off. I love the way the circles spin up as they accumulate energy.

There's no limit to the effects you could add, really.

LOOP by vandriver 2013-05-20T17:35:00

Nicely done. I didn't find the hidden ending, but I liked the progression of time a lot. The snow, in particular, was an unexpected surprise. The fire effects looked great within your aesthetic, too. And the music & sound sounded perfect.

The details, like lighting on gravestones and vocalizing, were really nice touches.

Dock Zone by Farfin 2013-05-08T23:28:00

Nice work. The first time I played, the second level kept repeating. I think there's a bug where if you press the space bar on the "level cleared" screen before the boat reaches the middle of the screen, it'll repeat the last level.

Excellent time pressure with the sinking platforms. One or two of the levels had me just about treading water to get to the boat in time. I liked the level that was all planks; that was a cool switchup. I liked that the game and its instruction sheet fit into my browser window, too.

I had a really hard time reliably picking up the planks. I'm not sure how it was implemented but it felt like you had to be moving, then press space, then collide with a small part of the plank. If you did any of those things out of order (already standing near the plank, space before moving, etc.), she didn't pick it up. In addition, if two planks' ends were close to each other, I couldn't pick either of them up. I had to make sure I left one plank out of the way of another I wanted to move.

The pyramid sound effect was a touch loud and jarring compared to the relaxing footsteps and seashore sounds.

Sequence Initiated by mildmojo 2013-05-03T04:47:00

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. <3

Now that I've had a chance to breathe, you all are entirely right about that third level. Opaque as all get out. I handed the thing around to meatspace folks on a tablet, and it was not intuitive to anyone. Fail. Description updated.

I did realize ex post facto that I made enough of the widgets to throw together a few more levels I'd paper-prototyped, so I'm going to try to put up a second post-compo version this weekend with more content.

@rwos: You didn't miss anything. It's supposed to be an abstract control experience, akin to sitting down at a Star Trek LCARS interface or Steel Battalion or Artemis, where there's an action sequence you have to devise to prep the system for launch. My intent was to create levels that don't boil down to "try all the combinations", but to give actions visible feedback so players could take an observation-driven path through the sequence.

@Jiddo: Yeah, I realized too late that every level was just "flip every switch". Heh. I build the middle level first, then the intro level, then the bad level last. I thought it would be the easiest of my sketched-out levels to build, but it was totally flawed.

Saishou Sentou by Joshua Douglass-Molloy 2013-05-07T08:33:00

Congrats on your first finish! Love the aesthetic here. It took some experimentation to figure out that I had to stop to pick up the items and that I could "hide" from the bad guys just by touching the green symbols, not completely moving behind them.

It crashed at the end, but it looks like you're aware of that. It would be great to see more levels!

Checker by nikolaiwarner 2013-04-30T06:36:00

Checkers was the first game I tried to write in C. I remember the rules being a thorny mess to code.

I laughed out loud when I made my first move. Heh, I need to go find a chessboard, a lazy susan, and a double set of black checkers to do this in real life.

I don't think it would stand up to tournament play, though.

134 bytes by amodo 2013-05-08T21:40:00

I'm with alts. This and Floating Point have given me tricks to file away in the vault for future work.

I would've liked to see just a touch more depth here, to validate the delivery concept.

LD29 — Beneath the Surface

Hot Diggity by DragonXVI 2014-04-29T22:25:00

Hard to believe this is your first Ludum Dare! I'm jealous! This is insanely fun. I kind of wish the monster descended more slowly so I could build a massive driller. Really interesting way of handling the bolt-ons, too, requiring you to build from the core of the ship outward.

It's like a cross between the old 2-player DOS game Tunneler and Captain Forever. =) This could be a lot of fun split-screen local multiplayer, too.

Hot Diggity by DragonXVI 2014-04-30T05:52:00

I think I've hit my best score: 1379.10m.

It's interesting how the coolant loses its effectiveness over time. Or maybe it gets hotter the deeper you go? Either way, a machine that handles its heat just fine at first will eventually begin to overheat.

Hot Diggity by DragonXVI 2014-05-01T21:52:00

I keep coming back to this one. I think the RNG was kind to me on my last run, and I hit 2016m. Finally broke the 2K barrier. So much fun.

Volleyball Moles by pjchardt 2014-04-30T06:54:00

If you don't have four controllers, you may be able to emulate controllers with your keyboard or smartphone/tablet.

In Windows, some combination of PPJoy and/or GlovePIE should get you virtual controllers powered by the keyboard:

http://ppjoy.blogspot.com/
http://glovepie.org/
http://www.jim-melton.com/tag/ppjoy-windows-7-64-bit/

I once used PPJoy and x360ce to drive a virtual Xbox 360 pad using keyboard keys. Heh.

There are a whole bunch of gamepad apps for Android, probably some for iOS too. Quick googling turned up these Android apps:

http://www.addictivetips.com/android/droidpad-use-android-device-as-pc-gamepad-mouse/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/bt-controller-use-android-as-gamepad/

LD30 — Connected Worlds

Nexxuz by rustybroomhandle 2014-09-03T18:03:00

Voxel Zaxxon! Nexxuz looks terrific. You put together a bunch of great-looking levels, here. Wow. The city, in particular, has an incredible amount of voxel detail. I appreciated the Zaxxon homage level, too.

Adding the warp columns halfway through each level was a wonderful idea. Before you figure out how they work, you spend some time bouncing between levels that you might not even have the right equipment for, and these shortcuts keep you from wasting time.

I did find it pretty difficult to locate my ship over the terrain. I think Zaxxon used a shadow; a static shadow or even a hover light projected straight down from all flying objects would help with that.

I'm pretty sure I destroyed all the bosses; does the game end? I flew to the end of bossless levels a few times before I quit.

Rift Knight by SecondDimension 2014-09-11T19:16:00

Really nicely done. Great flow. Triple jump, sticky walls, and crazy flying horizontal attacks feel incredible.

The World Within by Oxeren 2014-09-03T17:32:00

Nice work! Incredibly pretty graphics. I liked the tie-ins between the real world and the imaginary world, too. It felt very complete.

I would've liked to see the text in a nonstandard font, which is a really minor nitpick and common to most LD games.

SWARM by Kate Kligman 2014-09-02T05:58:00

95200 w/133 kills. Cute game! Near CGA palette. Looks like you picked a simple mechanic and got the job done.

Once enemies start spawning in large numbers, they appear as a dense horizontal wave. They could maybe be less like waves and more like rainfall?

Sinister by Joe Williamson 2014-09-02T04:59:00

Really, really pretty. My Haswell i5 laptop isn't fast enough to play it, though, so I won't score it.

Dominions'n'dominoes by Benjamin 2014-09-04T21:58:00

This is really great. I love board games, and this feels like a well-planned game. It took me a while to realize that what a world "wants" is not what it needs to operate; just needs to be colonized.

This would probably be more competitive if I tried it with friends. Like other role-taking games (San Juan, Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy), a lot of the strategy is in taking roles to deny other players the benefit they most need, and the AI doesn't seem to do that.

This is a great example of a computer board game. IRL, those directed graphs of trades would be difficult to score every round, but the computer makes short work of it.

There were a few UI issues that I think others have mentioned:
- When other players are taking their turns, you can hover over their cards to get descriptions. Not a huge deal.
- Each planet's production/consumption should always be visible, IMHO. Hovering is kinda sorta okay, but there are times when hovering *doesn't* show planet info (like when placing a new planet), and that's frustrating.

Nicely done, overall. Hard to believe you made it in such a short time. =)

Space Breakers by DJWizardCop 2014-09-04T19:36:00

Very pretty graphics, great selection of enemies and powerups. I'm glad the blue ball bounces off the bottom of the screen, much less frustrating. I found myself only moving side to side as if it were a regular breakout game; too much muscle memory from hours of Aquanoid and Super Ball.

The enemies were difficult to target with just the ball and paddle. I wonder if there are other enemy movement patterns for which the ball + paddle would be a better weapon?

Stanley Squeaks and the Emerald Burrito by Two Scoop Games 2014-08-27T06:45:00

Were the log removals random? I got an unwinnable version of the last level three times (all logs removed between the rightmost two stone platforms) before a winnable version showed up (some logs not removed). The first time I played the level with the black platforms and the burrito below the start, the skull didn't destroy anything after I collected the burrito, making the level unwinnable. The second time worked fine.

I wanted the hamster's jump to have a little bit more suspension time, but otherwise the controls felt pretty good. The art was lovely. The skull in particular was nicely made and the character animation was well done. I liked the decision to freeze the character when collecting the burrito.

The world needs more gemstone burritos.

Disc Jockey Jockey by mildmojo 2014-09-01T17:20:00

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement, all. I'm still working on it and making some slow progress. Bugs are dwindling. I'm trying to hold on to the "get it done" mentality of the jam, which is tougher once the pressure's off and real life creeps back in. =)

Disc Jockey Jockey by mildmojo 2014-09-02T15:27:00

Thanks again, still, for the encouragement! You all are why I love this competition so much. <3

@PaperBlurt, liquidminduk: You're right. While it was non-functional at the deadline, I'm not the boss of you, you're a grown-ass human and will do what you want. =) Description adjusted.

@Cheshyr: A single station definitely would've cut my development time. Besides the recording/editing time (around 2 hours per station), I spent several hours on Saturday trying to work out the DJ scheduling algorithm, which I wouldn't have needed for a single channel. I would've had to figure out how to keep players engaged, though. Less than a minute of DJ followed by a couple minutes of music is a pretty low interaction rate.

Disc Jockey Jockey by mildmojo 2014-09-16T04:10:00

Thanks again for the encouragement, everyone. Post-jam development is still in progress.

It turns out it's really hard to load 98 minutes of audio into the browser in a way that: a) doesn't use all the RAM, b) doesn't use all the browser's disk space, c) doesn't make gameplay stutter horribly while audio loads, and d) doesn't make the code a spaghetti mess of callbacks and timing bugs. Given the post-jam hours I've spent, I never had a chance of getting this working during the jam. I'm about to start my fourth rewrite of the asset loading system.

Disc Jockey Jockey by mildmojo 2015-03-29T21:48:00

I'm still working on this game. Porting it to Unity 5 since I never could get all the audio to load in the browser.

The most promising method was to store the compressed MP3 files in the browser's IndexedDB storage, retrieve them as blobs on demand, convert the blobs to object URLs (createObjectURL) without decoding the compressed audio, then creating new HTML5 Audio elements (new Audio())and using the object URLs as the element's `src`. HTML Audio elements can be connected to your WebAudio API node network with `audioContext.createMediaElementSource`. The net result is that you can cache all your audio to browser storage, then play back large MP3s without decoding them to RAM first by streaming them through an Audio tag. I just never quite got it all working together.

Disc Jockey Jockey by mildmojo 2015-04-13T02:14:00

The alpha version of the game is finally complete. I showed it to the public at Chomp the Bit, a Kentucky/Indiana game developer showcase on April 11th 2015. You can see a GIF of the core gameplay here:

https://twitter.com/mildmojo/status/587038436835594240

Of course, this is an audio game, and the GIF is silent.

Disc Jockey Jockey by mildmojo 2016-06-02T05:29:00

Oh man, it's been a year!

The game looks like this now:

https://twitter.com/mildmojo/status/735537828491362304

And when I take it to events, you play it with real hardware faders:

http://imgur.com/ZgJwLk0

Disc Jockey Jockey was selected for alt.ctrl.GDC this year, so I got to show it off to a ton of awesome fellow developers in the middle of an amazing group of alt.ctrl games! Then, because of that, I was invited to exhibit at IndieCade East 2016 in New York. I built an automated tutorial so I didn't have to stand next to it the entire weekend. Again, I felt like such a rookie around a lot of accomplished developers with much larger and further-developed projects.

There's a non-gameplay teaser!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmI0Bxc3WXM

And a website, with a press kit!

http://discjockeyjockey.com

And a Twitter account!

https://twitter.com/DJJgame

Now that show season is over and I don't have any more events on the horizon, I'm back in design/development. I'm prototyping a new game mode where you build a radio ad to spec for an advertiser. It's less time-management and more puzzle.

Gotta stay motivated to keep working on it. It's not a chore by any stretch, but it's still a long project and there are plenty of distractions. I'm guessing late 2017 for a release on Linux/Mac/Windows, then probably Android later on. Though, at the pace I've been moving, maybe that's optimistic. =)

Literally nobody is reading this, and this is a terrible place to host a devlog. Need to start a real one of those. =)

Trappy Tomb by jimmypaulin 2014-09-04T17:57:00

Lagged a bunch in Firefox, but played fine in Chrome. Nice work! Good variety of traps, and I like the way the bats track you in a periodic, Jumpman-esque way.

LD31 — Entire Game on One Screen

Snowball juggling Olympio by Benjamin 2014-12-08T19:18:00

Top notch entry again this time around. =) High degree of polish, lots of clever game modifiers in challenge mode, beautiful animations and art everywhere (not least of which on the snowman's face). The groovy "GAME OVER" graphic was my favorite.

I'm not even sure what I could criticize. The mechanic's hard, but not unfair. It took me a couple of plays to develop a strategy, but I settled on pressing, holding, and releasing "throw" and "pass" in unison.

You Have the Con by OccamsRazor 2014-12-08T08:14:00

This is the sort of game I'd like to make. UI-heavy starship con simulator. I hope you've also played Artemis Bridge Simulator and Spaceteam for mobile. If not, you might enjoy both. =) Ace job.

Space Diggers by arg-games 2014-12-08T20:18:00

Cool game. Kind of like an RTS without the pressure of an enemy bearing down on you. It took me a while to figure out the interface. Things I had to figure out:

- Clicking a spot mines it for resources.
- The red bar is your stored resource capacity; expand it with silos.
- The resources shown beside unit types in the help panel correspond to resource icons in the resource panel at the bottom of the screen.
- Energy (E) units are the solar panels you need to escape.
- The small progress bar above the resource panel at the bottom of the screen tracks your progress toward enough solar panels to escape the surface.

Once I got past all that, the game was pretty nice. I liked the way a single square of terrain had strata that yielded different resources as you dug down.

I think the game could use more explanation. It might help if the speech bubbles said "MISSING <resource icon>" instead of "MISSING RES".

And here's what it looks like with a lot of miners. =D

http://imgur.com/O2sFFy8

Orion by feiss 2014-12-11T01:23:00

I'd be happy if the entire jam was all games like this. Love UI-heavy simulator-likes (Steel Battalion, Spaceteam, Artemis). So far I've only found your entry and "You Have the Con".

Really pretty pixel art. The rocker switches in particular look great. The screen shake and blur effect is perfect and the soundscape is very complete. I do wish you'd had time to finish the mission to mars, or have the goal be to achieve stable orbit.

I played in Firefox for OSX, but the game would be perfect for touch devices.

LD32 — An Unconventional Weapon

ＢＥＤ✰ＨＯＧＧ by 01010111 2015-04-27T19:42:00

Lovely brawler. This handles really well. I like the way you need a pillow to fight and the pillows are consumables. Everything looks great, especially the feathers floating around. I like how you have to "get your points and get out", too. I guess that's the *hogg part.

Excellent work.

Ice Princess by pinkmonkeyhead 2015-04-26T19:34:00

Cool idea and aesthetic, but the controls really get in the way. =( Trying to walk in reverse just makes the camera flip out. Turning feels too fast; this might be less of an issue if the camera position was elastic with respect to the character (lerp to position/rotation) and if the character's rotation speed was absolute, no acceleration. I frequently detonated my children prematurely because it's difficult to execute a right click on a buttonless touchpad without it getting interpreted as a left click occasionally.

I'm not sure what you were supposed to do with the enemy. After half a dozen deaths I gave up because the dialogue was unskippable and there was a significant trudge back to the fight. Improving the character controls and drastically shortening the delay before child detonation would probably help there.

The tilt/shift effect was nice, but a little too extreme. The candy characters were cute, but it was also tough to tell which way a round character was facing. The candy box art was fantastic, and the ground surface was nicely textured. The exercise-induced growth and reproduction was a great idea.

With better controls, this could be really nice.

OPERATOR 42 by TravisChen 2015-04-26T01:01:00

This game has everything. Perfect art, great animation, great voice work, automated voice response satire, fire suppression systems, dials, levers, buttons, wires, gauges, fake corporations, Parisian destruction... Premise and execution are top notch. The voice script was detailed and felt expansive.

I really liked the option to extinguish myself but leave the console afire. That was a highlight.

A couple of the voice segments didn't sound like they had the same band pass filter applied as the others. You probably processed the audio files outside the game? Do try Unity 5's new audio mixing stuff if you haven't already. It lets you do things like high-/low-pass filters this in-engine in real time. I'm using it for a game about managing radio station audio streams and it's great.

A few of the clicking bits had fiddly targets. The grid of 9 buttons liked to double-read single clicks, and the bank of levers often moved the wrong lever when I clicked.

Those are pretty minor complaints, though. This is probably my favorite jam game so far.

Ice Story ( koori monogatari 氷物語 ) by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou 2015-04-23T07:12:00

So this is gorgeous. I'm a long-time Bubble Bobble fan and this hit the spot. =) The music was cute and the sound effects were great. The little floating "HURRY UP" animation was lovely. And a million points for having a tutorial intro. You packed a lot into 72 hours.

I think the stunned dinos recovered a little too quickly and their collision boxes were a little too small. I died a lot trying to get to them before they recovered, and it felt like Nya's sprite was on top of them when they flipped back to life and killed her.

I don't know why, but my brain *really* wanted Z to be jump and X to be fire. Like others, I found that holding Z and pressing X worked way better than trying to hit them together. Something to note in the future: on AZERTY keyboard layouts (Europe?), the Z and W keys are swapped which makes Z/X tough to use. It's worth also binding W or using X/C.

I'm not sure if it's a configuration option with Construct 2, but the game didn't properly capture the Z key, so it kept popping open my typeahead find box and taking focus away. The X key was captured fine. Maybe there's someplace you have to tell it which keys the game uses?

Anyway, nice work! Really polished!

Ice Story ( koori monogatari 氷物語 ) by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou 2015-04-24T01:51:00

Checked out your other LD games and I totally remember your LD23 game, Kumiho. I envy your body of work. =)

Search & Destroy by highlyinteractive 2015-04-24T05:53:00

Really clever ammo system using search terms. Not allowing reuse was a good decision but makes it that much harder. Thankfully most strings of characters produce search results.

I thought at first the ammo count was dependent on the number of search results or popularity, later realizing it's based on health. Given how your mobility's restricted when you're carrying ammo, I think the capacity/health penalty is a little stiff.

That anthem music comes on really strong. It fits the theme, but might be better used sparingly.

The level layout seemed good and the game over screen was funny. There could be a little more visual feedback when you take a hit so you know when the game over's coming.

Keep it up!

DAGDROM by Ditto 2015-04-26T18:55:00

Too beautiful. The sound design works so fluidly (ha!) with the gameplay. Sounds like it's mostly mouth sounds, including the music, but the organicness fits with the paint dripping everywhere and the squishiness of the wall jumping. The twinkles where the paint can stick are a top-notch touch.

It took a while to discover the paint-as-thrust. Maybe that could be introduced in a spot where the paint pushes you off a tiny platform into the void, communicating that there's force coming from the expulsion of paint?

DAGDROM by Ditto 2015-05-05T20:08:00

I noticed this other game, Ink, that released recently. Ink's paint reminds me of this game, though the super-hard platforming makes it a different sort of experience.

https://twitter.com/ZackBellGames/status/595670929574866944

I am Gonna Smack You With My Words! by Marcos Rodrigues 2015-04-24T23:27:00

Cool typing game! I always struggle with these games that make me think up words on the fly. =)

The sound got the job done. The impact sounds were good, but the music was pretty repetitive.

I liked how the word display highlighted correct vs. incorrect words (though I found a few it doesn't know). Letting players skip a hard letter was nice, too. And the character art was nice. I liked the way the protagonist flapped his jaw when he was speaking the attacks.

Soundkraft by 02fc.exe 2015-04-21T17:24:00

Music as a weapon reminds me a little of Harmonix's unreleased FPS, Chroma.

The sound is good. The gun's dubstep is appropriately wub-wubby and sounds powerful.

Really nice pixel art and effects. The glows and particles work really well and the color palette is cohesive. The game looks great.

The controls are a little strange. On a mac, the browser went weird when I tried using modifier keys to shoot, so I used the trackpad (not ideal). I could tell there was a double-jump, but couldn't make it work reliably.

It doesn't look like you can dodge enemy bullets because their firing rate is so high, so it's more about wading into the fray and then retreating to find health packs. It'd be nice if the successive waves upgrade your weapon's firing pattern so you could hit them from above (sound grenades? bass drop?). And are the black blocks left behind when enemies die supposed to keep firing at you? That was odd.

Nice work!

Hugline Miami by Figglewatts 2015-04-27T01:48:00

Hot stuff! Great aesthetic, fantastic look with the scanline shader and the deformation around the edges and the CGA-like palette. I love all the characters with slightly different abilities, though my favorite is "hugs are more effective". Hug grenades! And this is a compo entry? Wow.

I might've had the "issue with player movement" you describe. After a while the character felt pretty sluggish, though the NPCs still moved freely.

The theme's kind of a wink and a nudge, right? You're still firing projectiles at nameless enemies, they're just called hugs. Remote hug projection technology.

I CRUSH YOU by grillaface 2015-04-28T04:12:00

I know the skit but I've never actually seen it. This was a cute implementation. The hand looks really nice! I think I crushed three heads and then the people stopped showing up and I just had an empty landscape with a floating hand. Not sure if that's what was supposed to happen. Cool entry.

Crump Rush by OnlySlightly 2015-04-26T20:29:00

I played the web version hosted at itch.io, which doesn't seem to record your high scores to display on the level select screen. I'll have to secretly know that I beat one of the developer times. =)

I had a problem where the HTML5 build didn't seem to consume key repeats properly, so they'd fall through to the browser and trip my typeahead find box, taking focus away from the game. It only happened when keys were held down, not if they were repeatedly tapped. Maybe there's some setting in Game Maker where you have to define what keys it should eat? In Javascript you solve it by calling .stopPropagation() and .preventDefault() on the key event objects.

The attraction beam to the circles looks great, and the physics feel good. The character feels like it has weight, which is nice. The environment tiles and the character sprite look very good, too. I like how you can destroy the anchor circles with your gun.

Playing on a webpage, it was pretty easy to overshoot the edge of the screen and wind up clicking or right-clicking on the surrounding page. The camera could be zoomed out just a little more for that environment to make the buffer wider.

Like most of your games, it feels good to play. I can see where you could get really good flow through some of those levels. I had a few satisfying moments where the attraction gun applied just enough force to arc over a spinning sawblade toward the goal.

Space Deuce by tiagosr 2015-04-26T01:35:00

I tried the WebGL build. I saw the monster on the horizon at the start, smacked a few tennis balls into him, and he blew up. Then it was just a steady stream of tennis balls from nowhere. I didn't see a way to move the player side to side like the screenshot. I smacked a few more balls into space before quitting.

The art is quite nice. I'm not sure if the game had a bug or was just incomplete.

What Have We Created?! by Ranmara 2015-04-26T19:57:00

Cool idea.

The monster building part was nice, though it was difficult to tell by looking at a piece which way it would attack. I understand the green border system, but it didn't quite communicate enough to me. Pushing the armor art more toward the edge of the tile might help.

I had a really hard time using the parts I rolled to make a monster with more than one leg. The minimum height of a leg plus the armor block joining it to the body means you can't effectively attack short buildings. When I finally built a monster that had enough pincers to do some damage, I spawned in a city that was mostly short houses that I couldn't reach. It might help to have the city be all tall buildings, like Rampage.

The art and animation was good. The lab screen served its purpose, though it could use a little more polish and maybe some animation. I'm glad I was able to re-roll the available monster parts, but it often took too long to find what I needed.

I think a better strategy for the grid would be to allow you to place monster parts anywhere and remove them on the fly. When you hit "launch", any disconnected parts could just fall off. There were a bunch of times when I knew where I wanted to use a part, but I didn't have the intervening parts to get there yet. I wanted to place the part in the monster grid and use later parts to build the connections.

The text and the UI could be dressed up a bit. Using a non-system font would go a long way, and Unity's new UI system is really nice for creating good-looking HUDs.

Once you get a monster built, it's satisfying to see them tear through the city (at least when they have enough teeth). The "build it and watch it go" element is fun to play with, and you could spend a lot of time designing monsters if you didn't have the supply limit in place.

Nice work on the art and the monster building in general, though. That's a lot to get done in a short period.

Billy McMath Solves Problems by Manky 2015-04-26T20:57:00

There's a lot more to this one than I expected based on the screenshots. Great job with the whole script and voice acting, even for the failures. I played it a few times to hear everything you had. That football scene kept kicking my ass, even on easy. =)

My favorite art part was the pirouetting football players. There were lots of clever background gags, though.

It's a pretty straightforward series of linear scenes with math problems in place of quick-time events, but in that respect they were tied into the theme of the game pretty well. Cute adventure.

Symmetric Torpedo by francoisvn 2015-04-21T09:25:00

This is lovely. The UI is beautiful (I'm a sucker for control panels). It took me a few games to get the hang of the symmetry and to learn to look at the damage and accuracy meters and launch when they were "good enough" rather than trying to squeeze every last bit of perfection out of the tube.

The sound did a nice job of keeping the pressure on, and I like how the auto-replenishing "reserves" limit you from just firing off endless mediocre torpedoes. I haven't been able to get through the second wave, but I'll come back to this one. =) Congrats.

Space Boy by Hyoga-3D 2015-04-24T23:46:00

Wow, nice work! Very challenging. It took me a few tries to get to the UFO boss, but I didn't make it through. Good world design, enemy and player models, sound effects, and particles. The music was a touch loud compared to the sound effects and got a little repetitive, but the tone was right. Reminded me a little of Starfox music.

I played with a keyboard and felt like the WASD and arrows should be the other way around since arrows are more common for movement in PC games, but it worked fine as is. I didn't use dash much because it seemed more dangerous than helpful. A little like warping in Asteroids games.

I felt like the shield powerup should have a different color than the weapon upgrades, but that's a small thing. The weapon tiers were good upgrades in effectiveness.

It's awesome that you made this alone! Congrats!

When Planets Collide by EncryptedCow 2015-04-27T04:17:00

The controls weren't listed here or in the game, so I just jumped in. It didn't feel like I could make the planet move with the mouse or keyboard. So I read the comments here, which mentioned radar and very high mass. So I gave it another shot and still didn't feel like I was controlling it.

Then I figured out that the red/green dots weren't moving like the starfield, and figured out it was a radar overlay. That really wasn't clear. Then I spotted the blue dot which was definitely moving in the universe, even if it didn't feel like it on screen. So there was control, just very slow.

I never managed to make my planet intentionally collide with a smaller body. I think the force applied by the controls needs to be higher.

The idea is sound; this is basically what Solar 2 does, but they make the galaxy density a little higher and the gravity lower so the matter doesn't all end up consolidating into larger bodies in short order.

Higher force, lower gravities, and maybe some more material in the universe would get you on track, I think.

TUGBOAT by lucentbeam 2015-04-25T06:53:00

Well, the game looks nice, but I couldn't figure out how to engage the tractor beam with a PS4 controller. So all my scores were zeroes. =) A little bit of instruction or demonstration in the game would help.

The art is nice and colorful. The music gets repetitive, so I turned it off. Good variety of sprites for enemies.

Hitchhiker's Tales by Tangible Games 2015-04-23T04:21:00

Hey, this plays really well. It strongly reminds me of old arcade games the way you have everything contained on a single screen: instructions, HUD, and marquee graphic. The art style inside the play area is really cohesive. I like all the SMB2-style picking up and throwing of things.

It took me a few plays to figure out that staying in the air as much as possible was key. Pick an alien up, double jump, throw to kill. Try to take out another alien if you can. This is a game that knows what it is and does it well. Good job!

TUNDRA by PaperBlurt 2015-04-23T06:14:00

This has mood in spades. The backing audio of howling wind really puts you into the world. The soft static of the radio is perfectly understated. Great air of mystery to the whole thing. I really enjoyed the bunker, but I got stuck. I think I clicked on everything twice and explored the whole facility and all the floors (1 & 2 were all but closed off?), but I didn't find a way to progress or a place to use the key or get a fingerprint for the safe. I would've liked to find out more about why the installation exists (though I have suspicions).

Some of the Twine tricks like climbing the ladder or the opening text sequence were a really nice use of the framework. I feel like I'm missing something by not completing it, whatever that means.

Dreamfisher by Tanser 2015-04-23T04:26:00

It's a small thing, but I'd recommend against RAR files for distribution, especially for a jam game. Every major OS has a native ZIP extractor, but not a one of them comes with a RAR tool. I'm on a borrowed machine with neither a working java nor a RAR tool, so I'm afraid I'm hosed on this one. =(

The Calcannon by igorfelga 2015-04-23T04:35:00

The difficulty ramps up really quickly on this one. Entering a number and then right-clicking and left-clicking (on a trackpad!!) was kind of awkward. Plus the game didn't capture the minus key so it popped open my browser's search box and took focus away (I use typeahead find).

Sometimes two expressions would end up on top of each other, which made them really hard to read. Using non-integer fractions (even though you use an integer answer) was a mindbender.

The idea is pretty good and kudos for working on something that could be good for reinforcing arithmetic skills. It just needs a little better pacing, streamlined control, and a little polish.

New Grafflebog Colony by monika 2015-04-26T01:13:00

This is a cool idea. I think it was too far gone by the time I tried it, though. The text on the Town Hall page said there were instructions to the right and menus above, but there was nothing to the right of that column and there were no menus above. I checked out the newsletters (#1 requires a google sign-in?) and the other location tabs and it seemed like stuff was coming from somewhere, but I didn't see a way to breed plants. The description mentions a library card and the game referenced forged library cards, but I didn't see any way to get or make use of those things.

Great idea, great flavor, but it didn't seem to work?

GAMUBòRU GUMBALL!! by Robber 2015-04-21T21:21:00

Man, you nailed the physics on that truck. Got any resources for making good vehicle physics in Unity? The truck is really satisfying to drive. I love how the driver sways back and forth when you corner, too.

The details like the loader/shovel on the front flipping gumballs in the air and the signs and traffic cones are great. It'd be cool to see where you could go with this. Maybe a wacky take on firefighting? Give it the Bossa Studios treatment?

Delightful music, too. I need a little more of an objective to keep playing, though, even if it's just exploration/discovery.

Udom Nebdon by pLaw 2015-05-06T16:57:00

This is fantastic. The fixed camera perspectives were gorgeous, really dressed up an otherwise boring corridor with an interesting camera angle. The whole visual style was beautiful and consistent. So, so nice.

After the first enemy near the first pool of light I was exploring and thinking to myself, "oh, you could totally throw a monster in one of these corridors and make the player lead it back for a kill," and then that totally happened. =D I never played "Alone in the Dark", but that moment felt a lot like the early pursuit in "Out of This World" (aka "Another World").

I picked tank controls because I'm not sure how direct controls would let you move backward. I tried replaying with direct controls, but the game didn't recognize any inputs (HTML5 build embedded in the submission page). Might have to reload it.

It really feels like this would lend itself to a larger game, if you were so inclined.

Badass Inc by deepnight 2015-04-22T17:26:00

This is so complete it hurts. Love the attention to detail, all the bits of description for environmental stuff that isn't core to the solution path. Art, effects, UI are all perfect. The setting and environmental art in particular is top-notch. So much mood. Mixing in a little gunfighting was above and beyond.

I don't even know what to criticize. Yeah, it's short, but so's the compo. Great vertical slice. This could turn into a series of vignettes where the assassin has to complete more and more unreasonable assassination puzzles which all end with a gunshot anyway.

Only a couple of typos I could see (since you asked):

"You notice a woman perfume" <-- "woman's perfume"
"washbassin" => "washbasin"
"cigaret" => "cigarette"
"what its name again" => "what is its name again"
"shitiest" => "shittiest"

Genemon by Pietro Ferrantelli 2015-04-23T05:18:00

The version on the submission page rendered the playing field as mostly black with a few bright pixels for the creature spawns (FF 37), so I used the "doesn't work" web link which seemed to work perfectly. =D

Great concept. Combining units to progress through the tech tree was really cool, and the larger sprites and mutation animations were very pretty. The sounds were a good mix of combat and semi-creepy scifi.

I played on a touchscreen since it was easier than trying to use a trackpad, but dragging moved the page instead of the cursor in game. Not sure if that's even a problem you could solve in the browser.

If I played more, I probably could've figured out which units were most effective against an incoming attack. My noob attempts were mostly frantic clicking and whizzing around picking up DNA seahorses every time I ran out. The pacing was quite frenetic. I would've liked a little bit slower gameplay with a little more emphasis on strategy.

It feels very complete, though. Nice job.

Time Bomb by Deozaan 2015-04-23T04:08:00

A pacifist shooter; I like it. The time bubbles worked really well and those one-touch-kill robots were super creepy. I'm glad they stopped following you when you were out of sight. It took me a few tries to get through and I had to dig out a gamepad, but I made it. I really appreciate the control rebinding and inverted Y option; the stock settings didn't work well with a PS4 controller.

It would've been helpful if the robots made some noise to let you know when they were closing in behind you. Even just some soft whirring or something would've helped. It felt like the projectiles didn't collide with the enemies, either, just the floors (yay Quake rocket splashes). It'd be a little more satisfying if you could peg them in the chest to slow them down.

I wanted a little more environmental art for the teleporter. Maybe just a few shafts of light to show teleporter pads.

Cool idea, though, and you totally pulled it off.

Bubbles by thaaks 2015-04-26T19:16:00

Great non-lethal puzzle platformer. It's a little light on the puzzle part, though. =)

Good variety of platforming elements. The charm with floating hearts is nice; reminds me of stunning Vorticons in Commander Keen. Bubble blowing is cute.

I would've liked to see the bubble floating used as a puzzle element, like needing to float bubbles to locations you can't access or having bubbles directed by wind flow. Still, the game's very complete as-is. Good work!

Mass-X by hexagore 2015-04-26T18:39:00

Whoa. Nice puzzle platformer. So much action. Beautiful art, great sound, great sampler of the level design elements. The falling+teleporting bits are a little frustrating, but that seems intentional. This could totally be expanded to a much larger game with just the elements you've got on show here.

And it's a compo entry! Well done!

keyTD by foolmoron 2015-04-25T23:17:00

I think I just took 50% off the life of my keys. =P Wishing I had a keyboard with n-key rollover about now.

I quit after wave 35 because of time constraints. And my wrists were hurting. =P That's intense! Cycling through the waves of abstract enemy types was great. It was cool that you had support for a bunch of different key layouts, too.

I love the minimal presentation. Everything's clean and nicely tweened, upgrades are shown with simple color. The layout's attractive, there's great feedback when you hit keys. It seems like you probably spent a lot of time polishing.

The sound is entertaining, with the key clicks and little laser sounds.

I never really used the area-of-effect upgrades. They weren't powerful enough for the cost of occupying a finger and locking out a bunch of other random keys on the keyboard (the '90s shareware local multiplayer problem).

The disabled keys could've used a more obvious indicator that they'd been destroyed. In the heat of battle I usually couldn't spot them, only at the end of a round.

The round should probably end after the last enemy dies, too; killing a boss early meant you just had to wait out the 10-15 seconds left on the clock.

But I really, really like this entry. Excellent work.

Uprooted - a carrot simulator by Two Scoop Games 2015-04-23T05:47:00

The art is standout here. So is the idea of a carrot burrowing into the dirt and springing back out again. Sound and music were good and fit the presentation.

When I pressed the arrow key to land, I usually held it down long enough that it counted as the start of another jump, which always got me in trouble. If you hold the arrow down to fully charge right next to a rabbit, you're just screwed. It would be really helpful to have a way to cancel a charge.

The random number generator could be harsh, leaving you leaping into an area with 70% gaps that you couldn't see until you were falling through them. A little bit of air control might've helped, though it would complicate the controls.

The game was unplayable in Firefox. As soon as the carrot came onscreen, the browser basically locked up. =P Chrome was better, but still dropped some frames here and there. On the initial how-to screen where the carrot leaps out of the block, the block sort of flickered black after the leap. I didn't see any tile flickering in-game, though.

A distance counter! My kingdom for a distance counter! =P Nice work, guys.

fateOS by ThommazK 2015-04-21T16:48:00

Mood 5/5.

Really nice kinetic fiction. The best examples make it feel less like you're exploring content and more like you're a part of the progression, which this does. It looks so good, too. I sort of wish the other desktop icons did something, even if it was just displaying a window sprite that you could dismiss.

The music sounds great. It has a nice somber tone and rhythm to it. It's not "we're winning" or "we're losing", more like "this is happening, deal with it."

Only two small criticisms: the email body font was a little hard to read, and the delay after clicking a response should've been much shorter. But those are tiny things here.

Excellent mature story that we don't often get from game jam entries. Did not expect the ending.

fateOS by ThommazK 2015-04-21T17:07:00

What I'm trying to say is, I wish I could make a game like this. =)

Flail Rider by jushii 2015-04-25T23:52:00

Cool game. The flail reminds me of Velociraptor Safari, but that's probably going to be true about any game with a vehicle towing a large mass behind it. =)

The graphics look great and the flail feels good. I think the crashing was a little unforgiving, though. Giant indestructible flail, itty-bitty tissue paper car.

You mention powerups in the description, but I don't think I saw any in the game.

Anyway, nice complete and polished game. Great entry.

Coder VS Bugs by Cliff Lee CL 2015-04-26T20:06:00

This is like an arcade version of keyTD (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=36186).

Quick experience. Very frantic. Debug mode is a cool addition. It would be helpful to have some sort of health indicator on the incoming bugs so you can tell how tough they are. The first time you notice a bug not dying in one hit, you start to worry.

I didn't last long. =)

Audio Assault by Docjekyll 2015-04-26T18:26:00

This is really cool, so I'm going to start with some criticism. =P

When starting a song, it wouldn't recognize my keystrokes until I clicked the applet with the mouse. This was after clicking through the menus, so it wasn't a focus issue in the browser. It meant I always missed the first few notes.

The notes approaching each turret should really look different from each other. You might be able to reuse colors/shapes between the left and right halves, but one side should have different sprites for each location. The two green bars (S/F and J/L) really confused me.

It looks like the game doesn't penalize you for false presses and doesn't pay attention to timing. I played hard mode on the first song and mashed all the buttons the whole way through and got 324/408. It would help to reward the player with feedback about how well they hit a note (like the DDR perfect/great/good messages) and then use that data to make a comment about the player's performance at the end. It would at least be good to show more feedback when a note is hit or missed.

It looks like you're from the FTL School of Difficulty Ratings, where Easy is Normal and Hard is Impossible. =P Easy could use another 10% nerfing for new players. Impossible seems to throw you into the deep end with chording, which is pretty advanced. Some keyboards may not be able to hold down more than a couple keys at a time, too, which might get in your way when using a lot of chords.

On to the good stuff. Cool rhythm game! Hard to believe you had time to compose 3 songs during the compo, let alone create the note timings. According to your source code it looks like you made it easier on yourself by picking a straightforward BPM and time signature. The tunes are great. I'm still listening to the music while I write this. =)

The game is very complete. Menus with on-hover effects, full loop from menus to gameplay and back. Interesting choice to hide the score until the end. I think it makes me really want to finish a track to see how I did. I couldn't detect any de-syncs in the music, either. All the notes seemed spot-on.

I like the concept of a rhythm version of Missile Command. Defending your city with rhythm. The menu and game art looks good. You could go further with the city and the theme of neon EDM-driven nightlife.

Top notch entry! Nice job!

Audio Assault by Docjekyll 2015-04-26T18:28:00

Oh, and timing feedback would also help players figure out where they're supposed to hit the buttons. I *think* it was when they crossed the red line, but I started playing thinking it was when they hit the buildings.

Audio Assault by Docjekyll 2015-04-26T18:30:00

(And maybe I should read the comments before I post. =D)

SHiFT by Fanttum 2015-04-21T06:05:00

Reminds me a lot of VVVVVV, with the gravity flipping and flip-flying. Not bad. Using the webplayer on this page, the game popped out of fullscreen mode every time I clicked it (Firefox). It looks like you left a development console turned on, too, which was always open with a note about a NullReferenceException. And the game froze on me in level... 3, I think? When I died at the first exploding dude.

It's got potential. The mechanic feels good, so it comes down to making interesting puzzles out of it.

THUMP by Steffan 'Ruirize' James 2015-04-23T07:22:00

This is nifty. It sort of like extracting table nudges from pinball and making it into its own game. The thumping felt great (though it took me a bit to realize I wanted to shove fro the opposite side from my target) and your font selection was time well-spent. =)

I think I let everyone escape from that bottom left corner. Never figured out how to angle them into those tiny diagonal death boxes.

Clean design, good feel. Nice work.

Deadly rain by Sublustris 2015-04-22T18:26:00

Okay, I give up, I get it: there's no safe place in war. =P I assumed there wasn't an end, though comments seem to say otherwise.

Random number generator from hell. There were a bunch of times when a missile would explode and leave you with no place to stand. Or you'd have to wait forever in one spot because you were in a Tetris pit you couldn't jump out of or there was a gap too wide.

The visuals were excellent, sound was great, mood was good. I'm not sure where I stand on holding the jump button to bounce; it led to a lot of unintentional deaths as I finished a jump and bounced right into gunfire. Nice work overall, but more frustrating than I like.

Mein Sheep by Detocroix 2015-04-23T04:59:00

This looks really nice. The little sheep are cute and original, and I really like how they're branded with the credits on the main menu. The DOF effect is really nice. The font was pretty hard to read at small sizes, especially in the webplayer version.

I'm not sure I quite figured out how to play. The different darts will cancel each other out, the blue darts just slow sheep down (?) and the red darts make them eat whoever's nearby? I only made it past the first level; it's pretty hard to right-click on a touchpad. =P

Cool idea. The gold sheep level might've been better with fewer black sheep so you had less chance of them going all cannibal on you. =)

Tourist Trap by Pajama-Llama 2015-04-26T01:52:00

Cool idea. It took me a second to realize that I needed to hit the keys when the circle closed around the buttons. And I'm glad you had the buttons positioned accordingly around the band, too, since they didn't match the keys I was using.

The hand-drawn art is really pretty, and there's a lot of it. I like the style a lot.

I made $300!

APT: Advanced Persistent Threat by Toby Pinder 2015-04-26T00:28:00

I think I got the hang of what was going on, but it was hard to see what effect your actions had on your performance. I can see that going into a hack you have odds for or against you and you can get boosts with exploits, but it was unclear how adding team members helped. ZeroDays never worked for me. I pressed Enter on them during a hack and nothing happened.

The mood is lovely. The execution of the terminal UI is very good, with a draw rate that makes it feel like it's coming over a modem and some screen color flicker and garbled characters when things get tense. The text and terms were pretty legitimate, too. Maybe not important to the game, but more than placeholder sci-fi jargon.

It took me a bit to realize I had to move the cursor down to the bottom area to inspect the sitrep and hosts.

Sometimes the same job would show up twice in a day, and it would add the same host to my hosts list twice. I only had to take down one of them, so I guess that's a bug.

I refused the opening offer the first time I played just to see what happened, and I'm glad you made that an option.

I lost after 40 days.

Giant Spiky Ball of Death by RobotHoboDanceParty 2015-04-26T01:30:00

Did you see Flail Rider (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=40591)? It's a little like a 3D isometric version of this with a car.

It was pretty weird using my left hand for controls. Arrow keys are pretty standard, no? Three key layouts and no arrows. =P

Hard game. I kept running into everything. At least the AI isn't smart enough to avoid the ball on its way to get me, so I could sometimes let them come to me. I like how the ball reflected laser shots from the pink boxes. Adding the big dumb box that takes a couple of hits to kill was nice, too.

The instructions written on the center of the arena were a nice touch.

Giant Spiky Ball of Death by RobotHoboDanceParty 2015-04-26T16:35:00

Looking at the gameplay GIF again, the splat animations are really slick. I don't think you notice how good they look when you're in-game.

Crossy Hell by RoryD 2015-05-05T20:20:00

Nice work! The little piano hits on dropped packages were a good choice. I like the way the packages detonate and blow away the oncoming zombies/ghosts.

I wanted a more concrete indicator of my health than the smoke. I played until it told me I couldn't play anymore (86 dispatched entities). It was a little tough to match the in-game package icons to the oncoming enemy models, too, though you eventually just learn which is which.

Concrete Escape by Davikin92 2015-04-21T05:48:00

I got run off the road by an indestructible cop car on its roof. Ha!

Could use a little improvement on the driving physics and the control layout; I'm guessing arrows + space + mouse might work better for southpaws?

Bottle Toss by RedSorrel 2015-04-27T04:25:00

Congrats on your first submission!

This is a pretty solid level. The bottle ammo reuse is a nice feature. Given that everything in the game is pretty slow moving, it could be difficult to aim well.

This is a pretty solid first level that introduces a few creature types. There's plenty of vertical real estate if you wanted to add reefs to climb or something.

The audio did the job. The music loop was pretty short and a little obtrusive.

Hope you had fun. Keep it up!

Umbrellespionage by Ilseroth 2015-04-27T03:59:00

This is really nice. I don't usually enjoy these kinds of stealth games, but this one had a nice style to it. Movement felt pretty fluid, the environment looked good, the sparse guitar spy music was a pretty short loop but it sounded great and fit the atmosphere.

It would be cool to have more levels, but that one looked pretty big. And based on your timelapse, it's actually built in the scene, not data-driven, right? Using a level definition file might increase your level design throughput.

The umbrella animation was a little bit slow. I read some advice recently that said to make weapon attacks happen in one (maybe two?) frames and add some sort of trail or blur to the weapon to indicate that it moved. It sounded good to me.

I wasted my darts really early because I was just trying them out. There aren't very many; maybe there were parts of the level I didn't see where they were important?

Really cool, solid entry here. Nice work.

Umbrellespionage by Ilseroth 2015-04-27T04:04:00

I thought it was easy enough, but I was cautious and maybe a little lucky. I don't think any of the guards ever alerted on me.

Difficulty might come from having more complex patrol patterns for the guards or remote tripwires or noisemakers that might make them come running. Losing because you alerted a guard you couldn't see doesn't feel as good as losing because you knew what to do but made a mistake in execution, I think.

BodySlam!: Oil Wrestling Simulator by ss64games 2015-04-25T01:32:00

Cute game!

Can you actually win or lose? The first time I played, I got so big I covered the whole ring and the CPU got stuck in the air near one of the corners where I couldn't slam it. The second game, I intentionally let the CPU player slam me into oblivion, but the game never kicked me out. After a while I felt a little undirected.

I thought the slamming felt a little slow. It seemed like the titular action should be a big, decisive, splashy affair, but it was a little floaty. If it was a matter of giving the other player a chance to dodge, maybe the block could fly off screen but leave its shadow as an indicator before slamming down at high speed.

The movement felt pretty good. I liked the powerups for size and speed. The bouncing crowd sprites were a nice touch. The sound effects were cool. All that slamming could use a little screen shake. =D

Lawyer Golf by kevinthr 2015-04-21T05:43:00

This is so cool. Two problems up front: in Firefox, it only rendered a strip at the top of the page, maybe 15% of the height. Switched to Chrome and it rendered full-page. But turning seemed to be using keypresses instead of keydown, so you could only really turn your character by holding still and keeping the key pressed, waiting for key repeat to kick in.

Otherwise, this is great. I only got to hole 3 before the darkness came over me, but man... The humor's fantastic, from the parking job to the conversation. The putting is pretty solid once you figure out that you can give it a pretty good whack. Love the art style, too.

So long, Space Hero. by factorial 2015-04-21T05:58:00

This is pretty cool. I like the way you get in between the spaceman's "cells" on your way to the heart. I didn't know what the goal was when I started, not knowing what the heart looked like. But I totally found it and eliminated that dude.

It's pretty hard to move inside the body at first since everything's so tightly packed. Maybe that's a tactics issue for the player to solve. Once you're playing, there isn't really any way to get your bearings to the heart. A minimap, even if it didn't actually show the heart's location, would really help when you're zoomed in that far.

Don't Choke! by Big Cow 2015-04-25T05:26:00

It was a bit of a panic to find the cursor and get it to the right word on time each round.

Cool idea to use timed dialogue trees as the core gameplay. Simple, but effective. The rap sound effects were amusing and the character graphics looked good. Congrats on your first game!

Ex-Sword-Stential Crisis by Team Ex-Sword-Stential 2015-04-25T06:33:00

Rolling a sword around has got to be the least efficient way of cutting your lawn. =)

The actual physics of the sword made the controls really unresponsive. Even with all the speed upgrades, I really wanted the sword to change directions faster.

The sound effects and the visuals were great. The world looked cohesive and the visual effects were nice. The world looks great, with its large area and varied terrain.

Killing animals has a nice effect, but it took me a long time to realize it also cost you cash every time you collide with an animal.

Overall, cool idea and pretty polished execution. Just need to tighten those controls up a little.

Pedestrian Mining Corps by mildmojo 2015-04-21T17:01:00

You all are quick! Thanks for the feedback so far. I had plans for more: progressive waves with different asteroid patterns, a finer-grained resource accumulation system with different-looking asteroids with different compositions, alien attacks, multiplayer, pedestrians shouting their random names when they launch... So much was scrapped for time. Happens every time I work alone. =P

@phi The launch and gravity forces probably need tuning. I didn't have much time to playtest. Too much launch force or too little gravity and the little people whiz past the asteroids instead of orbiting.

@Big Cow, the pedestrians are from Mini Mike's Mini Metros (https://mikelovesrobots.github.io/mmmm/). I'm using 70+ of the people for variety, but the pack has a lot more stuff like vehicles and buildings. Great resource. It inspired the game, actually.

@ss64games Hey, man! Thanks for trying it out. I didn't even think of going voxel for the planet/asteroids, but should've looked. The 2D spinning sprites looked ridiculous so I just went with it. The aesthetic might be straddling serious/silly too much. Asteroid spawning could definitely be tuned.

Pedestrian Mining Corps by mildmojo 2015-04-25T22:10:00

@TeamCalcium, PaperBlurt, thanks!

@Fanttum Maybe one day I'll learn how to texture a cube and have real 3D planets. =) I usually make 2D games, but the voxel assets from Mike's Mini Metros looked too cool not to use. I didn't do the music, it's by Rainbow Kitten (see credits).

@Ryusui Thank you! I had designs for multiple asteroid types and different resources to be collected each wave, but no time. =) The astral bodies are 2D because it looks silly and I can't make 3D assets.

It sure is difficult to escape the gravity well of several asteroids clustered around Earth. Maybe find a way to spread them out? ;) The confusion between "active" pedestrian and "inactive" workers is real, I could've added a highlight to show the one on deck.

Ally VS Wild ! by LeReveur 2015-04-26T00:33:00

This was alright. I can see you were strapped for time. The bug art is cool and the character looks good, though the animation could be a little smoother.

Ally has a pretty wide spread with that gun, huh? I guess that helps since there isn't any targeting indicator. Her hitbox seemed larger than it should be. She'd sometimes strike a sullen pose when there was still a decent buffer between her and a bug.

ScarKrow by Carduus 2015-04-23T03:29:00

First, a couple problems: keyboard input didn't work at all in Firefox 37 for Windows. I haven't had that problem with a flash game before. Chrome worked. Unfortunately, keyboard + mouse control schemes work pretty terribly with a trackpad. I got through the game with a touchscreen, but it was pretty tough and I was fighting just to stay airborne.

Besides the controls, it's really nice. Great visual style, very interesting enemy art and behaviors, nice weapon arc animations. The sound effects and music fit perfectly. It felt like there were several ways of getting through each level, and the tutorial levels did a good job of teaching the player how to move.

Turbo Moon Hero by Photon 2015-04-25T06:38:00

Makes sense. Looks nice. Hard. I want that planet to move just a little faster.

The smash sound is nice, but it could use a little company. Maybe a little music or a few variations on the collision sound.

Your game's goal is the opposite of mine. =) You want to keep the asteroids away, I want to bring the asteroids home for mining.