Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → mjau
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Overall | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | 4.13 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Graphics | 4.54 | |
| 🥈 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Timelapse | 4.35 | |
| 🥉 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Food | 4.14 | |
| 🥉 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Fun | 3.83 | |
| 🥉 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Polish | 4.13 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Po | Cm | Te | Jo | Fo | Ef | Tl | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Beam Islands | compo | 173 | 3.65 | 3.43 | 4.08 | 2.36 | 3.16 | 2.53 | 2.05 | 2.77 | 52 | ||||||||
| 2010 | 19 | Discovery | LD19 Planets | compo | 235 | 1.64 | 1.70 | 2.31 | 2.00 | 3.23 | 1.17 | 1.14 | 2.58 | 7 | ||||||||
| 2009 | 15 | Caverns | mjau's entry (unfinished) | compo | 135 | 2.03 | 1.56 | 1.63 | 2.43 | 3.70 | 3.50 | 1.71 | 2.78 | 36 | ||||||||
| 2009 | 14 | Advancing Wall of Doom | Hello | compo | 68 | 3.13 | 3.08 | 2.79 | 3.65 | 2.54 | 3.65 | 4.04 | 3.38 | 2.95 | 2.11 | |||||||
| 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | 2 | 4.13 | 3.83 | 2.83 | 4.46 | 4.54 | 3.00 | 2.75 | 4.13 | 2.79 | 3.60 | 4.14 | 4.35 | |||||
| 2007 | 10 | Chain Reaction | Shrapnel | compo | 13 | 3.50 | 3.41 | 2.05 | 2.76 | 3.86 | 3.73 | 1.82 | 3.59 | 3.00 | 4.13 | 4.00 | 3.25 |
Interesting idea! Was a bit confusing at first, but after I figured out that the reason I couldn't pick anything up was that you can only carry one thing at a time, and that you use scrolls with C (neither of which is explained in your help screen), it went a bit better =). It was actually pretty fun for a while when I got the hang of it. A bit too simple to last for very long, but still a nice game.
This was much more enjoyable when I started paying attention to the bar at the bottom rather than trying to memorize everything that flashed by at the start. Fits the theme better that way, too. Would've been better if the bar didn't flash all the way to black though, it can look empty sometimes when it shouldn't be.
This is pretty hard, not sure if precision jumping on ice was a good idea. Seems a bit buggy also, got caught in walls all the time and completely stuck (had to restart) twice. Tried again the first, didn't feel like it the second (when it happened past the wall-jumping section). Both times getting completely stuck was when going down a screen.
Music, uh, needs work.
Also, I don't see any relation to the theme here, though I didn't finish the game. Did I miss something?
That aside, well done completing a game! First one's always the hardest. Keep at it =)
This is pretty hard. No way to defend yourself that I could find, and I kept getting stuck on walls (being able to slide along them would be a huge improvement). Tried both sneaking around and running for it, and always ended up getting stuck, trapped or ambushed. It's pretty offputting how you lose all progress if they so much as touch you.
That's a pretty small window! I guess you weren't kidding when you called this Mini Ghost Hunter ..
The difficulty curve seems a bit uneven at the start. After the first two ghosts I had big problems surviving anything else, which tended to kill me in only a few hits since I was injured from the ones before and there was no way for me to heal yet, and there wasn't enough magic to kill them faster with a spell. After the random number generator decided the first two ghosts mostly missed, I managed to survive and completed the game without any trouble..
Music got pretty repetitive after a while.
Oh also, ran into a couple bugs. After I got a game over and started another game, I got two instances of the music playing on top of another. Also, when upgrading my stats at the purple orb my money display got bugged and suddenly said I had more than 7000 coins (although I couldn't use them to upgrade, so I think it was just a display error), and earned several thousands for battles afterwards. Might have been a few orders of magnitude more actually, as it went off the right side of the screen. Also ran into a couple invisible ghosts, not sure if that was intentional or not.
Anyway, apart from the issues, it's a nice game =)
Nice idea, but it seems a bit buggy. It doesn't always recognize when you do a pattern, even if it should be correct (indicated pattern without doing the same line twice, right?), and sometimes I thought the lines cancelled very fast. The last level was particularly troublesome.
(Also.. using music loops you didn't make yourself technically isn't allowed for the compo, unless you consider them samples/instruments.. kind of a gray area here, I guess..)
Interesting idea, but the implementation could be better .. the speech pops up so fast you have to REALLY run for it to not "get caught", you can't see much of where you're going if you're going upwards (that huge speech box blocks a lot), and you don't really have any idea what someone will say before they say it. That's last bit is part of the discovery, of course, but it might be nice with some hints about what you were going to hear, like the person's general opinion about the grandfather, or having several snippets of text that you could walk out on at any time (maybe even walk away mid-sentence), and then later continue from there with someone else -- you kinda have part of that with the multiple persons telling the story thing, but the way you did that feels really disjointed, since the next part is told by a seemingly random person for no apparent reason. It felt artificial. Actually the entire story I got felt pretty disjointed, and this only amplified that, I guess. I think just having several choices of which person to go to next for a particular story would improve things, along with giving various people a bit of personality so you'd have some vague idea of the direction a particular person's tale was going to take (though you might get surprised, of course).
Nice idea. Was a bit confusing whether I actually managed to reconstruct a wall and move to the next level, or if I got killed by the enemy (scary thing, btw!), since it always seemed to be hovering nearby whenever I got the angle right, and the jump was very sudden. After a few jumps I ended up outside a square room with solid walls and no way in or any outside fragments that I could find. Was that the end?
It's very minimal, but it certainly fits the theme =). It was nice to just walk around for a bit and discover the place.
Some atmospheric audio could do wonders, btw.
Might've been nice with a more zoomed out view or a map or something so you could (attempt to) plan your shots better, it's a bit random now since you have no idea where you're going. I guess that would've gone against the theme though, and probably wouldn't have been as funny =)
Anyway, it's still fun! I like how all the planets have unique names.
Also, the scoring system is a bit odd. I got more points for a short run discovering only 7 or so planets than I got when flying all over the map with lots of combos, discovering 27 planets.
That was awesome. I love these kinds of games! Would've been nice with some sound, and navigating ladders was a bit harder than it could've been (had problems jumping off them sometimes, and lack of autograb when holding up/down and flying past caught me a couple times too), but otherwise I don't really have any complaints. Great gfx =)
Btw, there's a duplicate of the no turning back scroll in the "small well" room (through the upper door in the final room). It was probably supposed to say something else?
Behold the mighty Duckboat! http://www.draknek.org/dance/?dino=28bg
It's a nice start, but could really use some mixing up here and there (something related to the theme, perhaps). Since all the levels are essentially the same and the difficulty as far as I could tell never changes, you can just keep on going forever. Into the cave. Mm.
Managed to find all the gems somehow, just when i was about to quit. That last one took me a long time though. Total playtime was around 18-19 minutes, and more than half of that was just the last gem. When i found it, i was mostly just glad it was over.
I think one of the most important things about exploration games is that there's something to discover, apart from collectibles like gems. Your map doesn't really have much to offer there, though -- it just feels... random, like it's partially randomly generated. There's really only two landmarks: The skull, and the LD room. Those were nice to discover, but everywhere else is mostly just the same. You start to recognize some of the formations after a while, but it's still just piles of dirt in the darkness. Not very engaging on their own.
Landmarks are interesting, but they're also clues that help the player remember things. Have they been here before, or is it someplace new? They give purpose. "Let's try *this* path now, i didn't go up there last time. I wonder if there's anything there?". They don't have to be big, impressive things, just something different. Give a place an identity.
Keep making games =)
First time i played this i just spammed bullets everywhere and suddenly was unable to shoot, so i figured i'd run out of ammo, and it'd be a better strategy to try to actually aim at enemies and take them out with a single bullet, if possible. So i tried to do that.
But that didn't feel right either. I felt like i spent a really long time just sitting there picking out enemies one by one, never in any real danger.. occasionally there'd be a flurry of a bit more threatening activity (when i levelled up, i think?), but it'd die down again soon enough. Level progression was very slow. Ammo(?) in the lower right didn't seem to deplete at all, but if i was shooting more often it did, and it didn't seem to go back up, so.. i don't know. You're supposed to just sit there and carefully aim at things, i guess? But it's so sloooow..
So yeah, i think that hurts the game. You have more interesting moving enemies further in, and i like those more, but to get to them you have to put up with all that slow waiting and picking, and even when you do there's just a few followed by more waiting.
In short, i think this progresses too slowly. =P
The game started pretty suddenly after the intro, i thought. I was just watching Neptune come closer waiting for the intro to end, and then before i knew it i'd crashed into the ground and died. I didn't press D there because i thought it'd skip all the rest of the text of the intro, not just that one box. Also, when the lander appeared on screen, it wasn't really clear that the intro had ended and the game wanted me to control it.
There's not a lot of contrast to the text most of the time. It's all readable, but too similar colors makes it harder to read than necessary.
Mouse only menus and keyboard only ingame controls makes the menus and game feel like they're from different games. Failing is more disruptive and punishing than it could be too, when you have to keep switching back and forth between inputs. (It's usually best to use the same control method for both menus and ingame, though you have to be careful to avoid accidental menu activation if it pops up when the player presses jump or something when you do that.)
At one place I was jumping while going down a slope (where it says "to further investigate..") and died from the fall. Restoring from the last checkpoint restored me to a point in the air, still falling to my death. Had to restart the game and not do that again to continue..
The light doesn't really illuminate things, and if you have both the light and can use the jackhammer, the action button toggles both at once. Would be better with a dedicated key for each, i think.
Controls overall felt a bit floaty.
The ending was also a bit sudden. I mean, there's the cube and all the knowledge pouring in (nice scene btw), but i kinda expected to get to play as supercosmonaut for a bit, or maybe explore somewhere completely different for a bit. Instead there's just a screen telling you what happened, and that's it. Show, don't tell! (I guess you ran out of time?)
Sorry if this sounds overly negative! Don't take it too hard though, i think you just need a little practice. Keep making games =)
I liked the speech effects.
I, uh.. i kinda covered the entire surface of my planet with a slowly thickening layer of pipes (..since, you know, price increases with *depth*..). I don't think that's how you're supposed to do things? ;)
But yeah, it felt a bit odd that pipe construction is completely unrestricted like that. I guess it'd be better to be more selective in what to mine despite increased costs, but "my" way seemed effective enough really
Anyway, tried it again playing a bit more "properly" this time, and that felt a bit less pointless =)
Accidentally submitted a bit too early. But yeah, as i was trying to say, just needs a bit more incentive to do things "properly", i think. Something to keep people from sabotaging their own enjoyment =)
Also, it locked up Firefox (linux). Works great in Chromium though.
Hi, it's me again
Apparently my Firefox locks up on all kinds of pages now and not just your game, so never mind that =]
You should include libfreeimage.so.3 and libglfw.so.3 in the download to make it easier for people to play your game =P (and maybe some of the things they depend on, too, if it's anything nonstandard. objdump -x file | grep NEEDED to check deps. don't include system stuff like glibc)
You can get the runtime linker to look for libraries in the executable's location by setting the executable's rpath to $ORIGIN when linking it*. Or if you can't set an rpath, provide a wrapper script that people run instead of the executable that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH**
It's better that you fix that once for everyone than everyone having to hunt down dependencies before they can play your game
(I didn't try your game yet because Ubuntu doesn't have glfw3 in the default repos and i didn't feel like downloading and compiling that from source right now. Might try again later.)
* with gcc, you do that by passing -Wl,-rpath,$ORIGIN when linking, but you'll have to escape "$ORIGIN" from the shell and maybe your build system too depending on what you use. you can check if you got it right with ldd. in a makefile, you'd write -Wl,-rpath,'$$ORIGIN'
** here (if the executable's called "Shadows Below.bin"):
#!/bin/sh
cd "$(dirname "$(readlink -e "$0")")"
env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" "./Shadows Below.bin" "$@"
I like the style =). Nice music.
Yay, i won =). Had fun with this for a bit, but it'd be nice if there was more variety as you dig deeper into the ground. You've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer right away, only thing that changes is how long and fast you can keep digging. I mean, they're nice upgrades, but it doesn't really lead you anywhere new.
Still, it was nice for a while =)
Played the Linux version btw. It works fine, but the executable in the Linux zip doesn't have execute permissions, so people have to add that manually before they can run it. I don't know how you made that zip, but if Unity did it for you, someone should get them to fix that =]. If you made the zip yourself, you generally have to use something that understands unix file permissions to get that to work (like zip on Linux or OSX)
Also, found some bugs:
- I dug all the way to the right edge of the map once. The light didn't follow the drill to the edge of the screen, so it was drilling in darkness there while the middle of the screen was illuminated.
- Sometimes the drill kept going forwards after breaking (at the shop screen)
Very nice start! Lots of little details. Movement is a bit stiff, but i guess that's just part of the unfinishedness.
This is neat =)
Not a lot of replay value though.. it's a bit too easy, i think. There's tons of fish, and you can move pretty fast, so there's never really any problem getting a decent score. The "forks" seem a bit superfluous, too -- i guess you could get a bit more fish by using them right, but since you collect fish just by crashing into them too, and you move as fast as you do, there didn't seem much point.
Nice presentation.
The collision detection is pretty unforgiving.. it'd help a lot if you made the bounds of the fish smaller, i think.
Also, the controls felt a bit imprecise for some of the things you're asked to do. The collision detection doesn't help, but i think it's also due to the speed of the fish. If it had some slight inertia (not too much!), so it didn't jump straight from zero to full speed, it'd be easier to position the fish more accurately.
Bug: Horizontally moving spikes has a bright line flashing on the left hand side (web version in chromium)
Anyway, it was still enjoyable =). Thanks for the generous save spots =)
I'm glad i tried again after the first attempt. That took an unexpected direction =). It did get a bit tedious going through everything for every retry though -- maybe you could've simplified repeated sections a bit on replay, since you already detect that anyway? Stuff like not having to check the list of what's wrong again and such.
Also, i got ending 5 twice, in two very different situations. Second time i'd actually managed to save the sub and some of the people in it =), but the first time was when i just went for a swim straight away, leaving everyone to die. I don't think that's right?
Would've been nice with some ambient sounds.
Nice game. It got a bit frustrating when i was caught between a bunch of level-turners in one level though.. i just kept falling and turning, and the easiest way out was into a dead end that lead right back into those turners. Almost didn't get out at all. Also, the second timed challenge didn't reset the level orientation when the time ran out, so i had to do the entire level upside down.
I played the jar version on Linux. The game popped up an empty gray window and then took a loong time to load.. Maybe put a note about loading times in your description, so people give it some extra time? I was pretty sure it had froze when the title screen finally came up.
Anyway, the game's ok, but you've pretty much seen it all within the first minute. Nothing new ever happens past the first time you have to surface for air. It's nice that there's different kinds of fish and that, but there's no real feel of progression there.
Was a bit odd that you have to use WASD to control the whale, and can't use the arrow keys. Movement is a bit stiff i think, some slight easing in and out of full speed (just a little bit) would help with that.
Oh also, if the game's controlled with a keyboard, it's nice if the the menu can be used with a keyboard, too, so you don't have to switch back and forth.
Simple gfx, but the whale's cute. I like that you put a chewing animation in there =). I'm really not a fan of the gradient in the background though.. Doesn't fit with the rest of the graphics (gradients rarely do..), and the flashing is just unnecessary.
The options menu said there was music, but i didn't hear any. The only sound was crunching when the whale ate stuff. (Terminal output said something about midi being unavailable, so i tried setting up some midi emulation, but couldn't get it to work.)
Would've been nice with some sort of indication when the whale is out of air.. it's easy to miss all your hearts draining away if you're not paying attention =]
Tried playing with an Xbox 360 controller, but it didn't work (Linux version), so i used the keyboard instead.
Anyway, it's pretty minimal as shooters go.. Keyboard controls are a bit weird, but ok. I think the biggest problem is that the random enemy placement isn't very exciting, and it doesn't really change over time either. The game... works, does what it's supposed to with what it's got.. which is good! But there's no sense of progression or anything, it's just kind of there.
The music is nice! But.. you credit someone else for it, and the 48 hour compo is a solo competition, so i can't give you points for that. Sorry.
Good job on meeting all your set goals though =). More games should have parallax scrolling.
This is very hard but also pretty fun! I feel it's my own fault when i die, which is good =). Some of those rooms can be very quick to attack you the instant you enter though.. i missed being able to escape in panic to the previous room.
I like that you can choose between killing everything to be safe or try to dodge your way through.
Down key to fall a bit faster might be nice. It's fine without it really, but when you game over a lot and have to fall through a lot of rooms to get back to where you got to last time, it'd be nice to get there a little faster.
Both the title screen music and ingame sfx disappeared after a while. I liked it while it lasted though.
Didn't complete it, but i think i'll try again later!
It's a neat idea, but not really very fun as is.. you just try to find the path with all your clicks, and if not, probably run into a wall and die.
Would've been nice if there'd been some kind of incentive to reveal less tiles (score? or maybe some tiles would be dangerous to reveal?), and some alternate but less reliable ways of telling where there's floor (floor marks, shadows, other things walking around, etc), so you'd have to decide if you could tell without revealing too much, or if you'd rather pay the cost to be certain.
Anyway, well done on completing and submitting a game =)
I like this, but yeah, the skulls in the compo version are way too hard. It felt like it was mostly up to luck if i'd be able to clear any particular level -- several times there'd be like three or four skulls coming at me in a row, each one almost impossible to dodge (specially with the field of vision reduced..). Just one skull wasn't too bad, but they had this habit of ganging up on you.
(The skulls in the post-compo version are a lot better, but they're almost too easy again.. not the skulls themselves, but i think they take off less health, or you get more health from the stardust, or maybe there's more dust? either way, you recover pretty quickly even after getting hit)
I wish there'd been more variety to the levels. Maybe i didn't play far enough, but they pretty much felt the same. I think there was a bit more debris in later ones, maybe? It was pretty subtle though, and as for skulls, i got a ton of them in level 1 a few times, and only one in later levels other times, so that seemed more up to the random number generator than the level.
I liked how some 1x1 corrupted blocks looked like corrupted skulls. I don't know if that was intentional or if i was just seeing things, but the first few times those went by i was wondering if they'd suddenly wake up and come after me. Would've been nice if some of them did! (Well, not *nice*, but, you know =))
There's not really anything to comment on here.. but on the bright side, with what you learned this LD*, you're better prepared for the next one! Yay! =)
* here's one thing: put flash on the web! not in a 7zip archive =)
I stopped playing after only two moves. If only there'd been like a twist or something!
Nah, it's neat =). I like how the twist forces you to think ahead. Some of the levels felt a bit like they were just there, but the more puzzle-y ones were nice.
I wish the crab moved slightly faster and that i had more control of it in the air though, or at least that there was some momentum leaping off an edge, so you could float across small gaps if there's enough vertical space. Just dropping like a rock like it does feels a bit unnatural.
Oh also, it felt a bit like i was exploiting a bug when i discovered that i could dig while falling (mostly because of the lack of control while falling otherwise, i think) - i guess you're supposed to be able to do that though? Had to do it to get past at least one level, anyway.. but it definitely felt like i was breaking another one when i just went outside the edge of the screen and dug in =P
Also, you can dig two blocks at once if you stand between them just right. It only counts as one for the twist counter when you do that.
Graphics wise, it's inconsistent between flat pixelly (crab, +) and higher res shaded (apple, block), but i guess that's just a case of stub graphics never getting updated. Common LD problem =)
The controls (switching in particular) felt a little imprecise and unresponsive at times, but i think that was actually mostly because of the lack of a "shadow" in the top half. It's more difficult to tell where you are without that, and there's no feedback to tell you if you tried to switch into a wall. Some audio would've helped there =). The first ring was by far the hardest because of that, i think.
I got eaten! And i was tasty! Yay!
It's a bit weird that fireballs just.. stop you, instead of maybe bouncing you off or something. It's easy to get captured on top of a row of fireballs, and little you can do about it except shuffle a bit, wait and hope you pop back down.
The music is nice, but doesn't really fit the situation. I suppose you went for the humor category there =]
The menus are mouse only and ingame is keyboard only. It'd be nice if the menus could be controlled with a keyboard too.
I like the little comic in the instructions screen =)
Couldn't figure out what to do in the second room. It doesn't help that the parser doesn't distinguish between words it doesn't understand and things you can't do, and it's pretty strict in what words it accepts in each situation..
examine door - you cannot do that!
look at door - you cannot do that!
look door - (description of door)
look rock - you cannot do that!
push rock - (pushes rock)
So if i'd tried to "look rock" before "look door", how would i know that "look" was a real command, but used on an object that didn't support it? It makes it hard to learn the vocabulary of the game. Maybe i'm trying to do the right thing and just using the wrong words, or maybe i'm on the wrong track entirely and should try something else. Who knows?
I know, it's limited how smart you can make a language parser in a weekend. Just distinguishing between "not understood" and "understood but can't do that" would help, though.. Also, if you look up input words in a table of synonyms, that could also remove words like "at" if you don't need those. Little things like that help a lot.
Anyway, the presentation's neat. The typewriter effect, little touches like the sliding text at the start and the way the border pulses a little (you can imagine holding a candle in a cave).. sets the mood =). I like the music, too.
This is a really neat idea, but it's very... minimal. I guess you ran out of time.. I'd really like to play a more complete version of this though! There could be fish, waterfalls, whirlpools, currents, various mechanisms, other things making waves... tons of possibilities here =). Would probably need designed levels though
Bugs: Sometimes large-ish waves pass straight through the ball without affecting it much. Also, it generated a level where the flag and ball were in different pools, disconnected from each other.
This is pretty neat! The gfx and ambient music creates a great atmosphere. (wish the music didn't suddenly cut off like that though)
Those two greens are very similar to each other. It wouldn't've hurt to separate them a bit more, i think =P
You know, it's interesting how people's interpretation of subtext is different.. Take "Don't worry about it" - you (or your game) interprets that as deliberately withholding forgiveness, but for me that could just as well mean that the "forgiver" really *wouldn't* hold the transgression against the other, or even that there was nothing to forgive in the first place, from their point of view. So then you can get awkward situations where one person believes it's been dealt with and everything is fine and the other thinks they've not only done something wrong, but been denied forgiveness! Highlights the importance of clear communication, i think =]
Of course, a ton of this depends on context and facial expressions and the previous relationship between the people involved and all those other things, none of which are in this game! ([smug] I forgive you.)
Well, you could say they're beneath the surface, i guess. I'm sorry.
The game itself isn't too interesting (i mean, all the levels are basically the same even if the monsters look different), but i really liked all the text! Sets the mood nicely =)
The background/foreground tiles are a bit busy and very obviously tiled. A few alternate tiles to break up the monotony can do wonders =)
This was a lot of fun! I really like how you go back and reconfigure things as new parts of the level are unlocked, and yet all that going back and forth never gets tedious. The checkpoints help a lot with that, leaving you free to try things without fear of screwing up. Awesome! =)
(Maybe mention the checkpoints in your description though? They're a lot better than undoing and i could see how someone might never dare pressing R)
Sorry, but this is unplayable (Linux version). No matter if i play windowed or in fullscreen, the mouse cursor is visible and not locked in place, and the camera stops turning when the cursor hits the edge of the screen. I also tried playing with a gamepad and with the keyboard, but that seems to rotate around the wrong axis/center or something. Couldn't get anywhere.
I'll skip rating this for now.