Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → monika
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | I am a wizard and my shoulder hurts | jam | 377 | 3.75 | 3.70 | 3.91 | 3.74 | 3.65 | 3.15 | 4.00 | 3.80 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Watch Wizard | jam | 791 | 3.30 | 3.00 | 3.88 | 2.75 | 2.54 | 2.80 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | 👥 | Fellow Campers | jam | 513 | 3.51 | 3.19 | 3.71 | 3.10 | 3.57 | 3.30 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Blind Trust | jam | 335 | 3.66 | 3.63 | 3.95 | 3.30 | 3.45 | 3.50 |
Interesting. I enjoyed it.
For the controls, I get historically why jump is often a separate button from the d-pad, but I find it weird and awkward on modern keyboards when up isn't jump, especially in this case where the non-arrow buttons are, in order, (move modifier) (attack) (move action).
The platforms near the bottom where I ended up were also pretty small and I appeared to be hitting my head on their undersides when trying to jump between them. I would probably make the platforming elements a little less awkward if you want to focus on the collection elements, but if you're looking to make the platforming hard, that's also a valid choice.
:) Customizable key mappings might be the way to go.
Cute! Of all things, the thing that came to mind when I was playing it were the powerups that messed up your opponent's controls in Yoshi's Cookie, so bonus points for bringing back good memories :)
And just like that game, if I were going to play this game more, I'd probably be training myself to play better with the curses active :D
Balance felt right and you came up with a good variety of curses.
When I started, I was like "I sure hope that dot gets worse at walking as the night goes on!" and sure enough, it did!
Nice!
The suck window seemed kind of small (especially given that you only had one shot per box) which gave it the feel of a rhythm game without a beat, and now I'm wondering if adding music timed to the suck windows would help. (Not intended as a suggestion, more just as an experiment to see what it would do to scores.) The belts being non-rectilinear to the screen also added to the difficulty in a way that was unexpected but not bad.
This game is gorgeous!
Got a few people to show up by posting to the main feed :)
Controls fairly well, but being on a falling thing and not getting a good jump off of it feels a bit too heavily punished. Perhaps it could use a double jump mechanic or maybe limited-use checkpoints (where the uses are pooled so it gets harder with multiple people?). Maybe some recovery platforms in the holes. Or even just having the character fall faster than the block so I could get another try? (Not 100% sure this one wasn't in there already.)
Capped out at (as of now), three people playing at the same time, with no communication. I *liked* the no-communication angle, but it feels like it would need a critical mass of players to work. I might try it with voice communication later with friends.
The biggest issue with the no-communication thing was knowing if someone was coming back or not, or on the flip-side, knowing if the person you were with is waiting for you farther down the course. Little arrows and distance markers for player locations could help with this, and serve as a mid-point between no communication at all and voice chat.
Thumbs up.
Oh, and a weird bug from a later run...
This was after I had been sitting in there a while, so it might just be a bug that happens after a lot of time, but there was another player in there who was invisible. I could see the effect the player was having on timers and bridges, but couldn't see the player character itself.
::waves to my invisible friend::
Nice! I second the complaint that balls could too easily surprise you with how small the camera view was compared to the size of the balls. The ball physics also seemed unpredictable, almost but not quite as if the floor wasn't actually flat. Still not sure what was going on there.
Lots of fun though.
No joke, this is my favorite take on the theme so far. I might have to go back to all the other games I've rated and knock them down on theme to make room for your score.
I liked it, but a tutorial and ui improvements would help a lot. I spent a few seconds staring at a "7" before I realized you could add more than one die to a spot, and I'm still not 100% sure why a character disappeared on me. Did she die? I'm not sure. Probably.
Fun, but I agree that it's hard with a touch pad :)
I wish I had more feedback about how well (... poorly) I was doing. I feel like I only missed one or two things the first time before it was telling me to cry. And if you are going to work on it more, I agree with the earlier comment about the stroke length being the same no matter the actual click, but I do feel varying it is the way to go, not removing it.
Good work, and cute story.
@lereveur Ah yes, that looks like a typo. Sorry about that, and thanks!
I did keep using Other (document) as my choice, but it kept changing back every time I edited the post. I must have missed it on the last edit :)
That was great!
I felt so inadequate every time a sheep drowned. Come back, sheep! Don't drown!
The coin noise mechanic is really cute - love it. The art feels really polished (and as a result, the whole game does) and deliberate. You knew the look you were going for and it shows.
Oh wow, I really loved this one.
Graphics were simple but effective (and I loved the little details like the parallax buildings). Audio was amazing. I'd say the difficulty was about right, but I'd recommend switching it up a bit by having the influence last longer and balancing it in other ways, like having the guards move in ways that affect what paths you have to take. (There was some of this on the second level, so I know it's already on your radar.)
Weirdest thing for me, and the only thing to actually rise to the status of a complaint, is the circular, unforgiving hitboxes for moving around other characters. I'd often find myself blocked from moving in a direction because I was just barely touching an npc. The trio standing in a small triangle with just enough room to move in and get them all was especially annoying, and I ended up just taking to them individually from outside so I wouldn't get stuck if I accidentally hit up or down on the way out.
Very pretty!
I had the additional awkwardness of playing on a laptop touchpad which wouldn't let me rotate. Scroll to zoom in and out seemed very sensitive but that might also be the touchpad.
The hit boxes on the building seems small, and possibly also had a distance component? Not sure. It was hard to knock them over. The need for precision was the thing that went most against the feeling of calm.
Looks great and I enjoyed it.
Very cute, love the low poly graphics.
Really enjoyed that, especially early on when I didn't know what things were worth and the end would be a race between my very slow walk and the cops.
(And to be fair, real life lava lamps are also surprisingly heavy.)
I should have figured out what happens if I get caught before I got almost all the upgrades. Sitting here waiting for the cops just to see the bad ending.
Fun! Got up to like 15 before I started accidentally killing some of them flying past them to reach the ones on the other side.
I found it a little confusing that the colors went orange - green - red, since that made it a little hard to tell at a glance if the planet needed more sun (orange) or less (red). A different color for the orange might make this bit easier - perhaps a greenish yellow?
Good work!
The water looked pretty nice, especially at a distance. I was about to say "Right up next to me, the rigid grid pattern was a bit much. Varying the position in addition to the height would help with that, but it's a good start." but on a second run-through, I realized the grid pattern is just on the underlying ground, so the solution would be a bit different :) (Maybe some opacity changes in the water? Or smoothing out the land.)
I had the same issue with moving in a straight nine that other people had, and then tried it on a lower graphics setting. Movement was much easier that way, and it didn't make the game noticeably uglier, so there's probably room for optimization there.
:) My feedback has mostly been covered already (and some of it already fixed in the post-jam version) so I'll just say that it took a moment to wrap my head around negative faith (a deficit of faith!) caused by gods showing up, and I'm still working on what negative potatoes means.
Saw your post and my first reaction was "That looks like... what was it called?"
"Heavily inspired by an old Flash game I remember fondly, called The Space Game."
Thank you so much, that would have been bothering me all night.
Good use of the theme, and a good game in general. My leaderboard score doesn't seem to update with additional plays though, don't know if I'm missing something or if that's a bug. Didn't get to 100% but also did way better than my first 10% on the third level.
@jimbly Yeah, it was a lot higher percent, but definitely took more time, so maybe the order it's checking things in is weird?
I got all the bones! Wasn't sure if there was going to be an end screen, because I got the last one right after a switch, and it waited several seconds to show me it. (Not sure if it was tied to the warping or not.)
Very cute collection of little puzzles. Took a while to get my head around how to remember where things were, because the jumps were so fast, and it might have been nice to have bone markers on the map for bones we've seen but not collected, and maybe even one for bones we have collected to help with that, but it wasn't too bad once I finished one of the maps and only had to remember things in the other two.
Very fun! I love a timed element on a puzzle game. It was slightly too easy to push things against walls with a single misclick and have to restart a level, while a little more padding before that happens would add to the good pressure of needing to do something fast without feeling so punishing, but that's minor. Overall, fun, cute, and atmospheric. Good job!
Beautiful! A lot of my feedback has been covered by other people already, so the one new comment I have is that it would have been nice to have explicitly marked "leave" buttons on the screen, both to make them easier to find early on and also to assure players that they're not missing anything. I spent a bit of time in the hallway trying to figure out if there was another direction to face or something like that to talk to more people. You absolutely nailed the mood here, super cool.
Pretty good implementation! My biggest complaint was that many of the trees had bigger hitboxes than they looked like they should have (or perhaps my hitbox was too tall?) so I kept bumping into them when I thought I was clear. The steering took a little getting used to, but was fine (up until I hit a tree I wasn't expecting to hit). The location indicators worked pretty well but a little bit more indication of how far things were might have prevented a few early turns, and maybe a constant reminder of what you have picked up already would be nice. There seemed to be something, but it would flash quickly under circumstances I couldn't pinpoint. The low poly tree models were fantastic.
@phoenixofforce :) I was tempted to add a small buzzing noise and tiny little screenshake when you hit buttons on the port to replicate the fitbit's vibration button feedback. I know it's capable of some sound, but I've only seen it used by the voice assistant app to read back my alarms softly. Even the meditation app that comes installed tells you to listen to synched audio from your phone for guided meditation. I assume it just absolutely eats up battery life.
(Just did a quick google, and the public SDK doesn't seem to include sound functions.)
I took some screenshots of the emulator sideload process but didn't want to make the instructions above too busy, so I'm putting them in the comments. Sorry for how unhinged my arrows look.
Inkedsideload1.jpgInkedsideload2.jpgInkedsideload3.jpgsideload4.png
@baylock Can't do sound effects on a fitbit, unfortunately.
@broodjethomaat Yeah, they spawn off screen a bit and there's less than a 25% chance you'll see them if you keep running, so you usually have to circle back to look for them, and the game doesn't tell you that. I need to add a chest location indicator or change spawning behavior. Thanks for the feedback!
@steffo Interesting, thanks for letting me know! I only tested it on Chrome.
If you have a moment (no pressure), does this demo work for you? https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html I'll give firefox a look after work.
@steffo Interesting. My code is a subset of that, so maybe it's just Firefox returning weirdly scaled numbers or something. Gonna investigate and I'll let you know if I figure it out.
@steffo I have figured it out and it is *incredibly unsatisfying*. itch.io has this mechanism for asking browsers what's allowed using its own keywords, and most browsers ignore it, and Firefox is like "I don't know what any of these words mean, so no." If I put the sensor-js on itch.io, it doesn't work either, with the same error message: Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “gyroscope”. (There's also the warning that "Use of the orientation sensor is deprecated.", but apparently Firefox has been saying that since 2017 because it has been expecting W3C to write new specifications.) I don't think I'm going to find new hosting at this point, I'm just going to point people to Chrome for now. Thank you so much for letting me know!
Cool idea, and very ambitious for a jam game! Is it possible to attack your own queen by accident? If so, that explains what happened to my run. (oops!)
Fun! But please let me type through my typos. I'm already hitting backspace before I hear the ding, and now I'm getting two annoying dings and my brain is going "just delete more." (This is a common thing in many typing games, but it's frustrating every time.) Very cute and polished, good job!
Nice solid tower defense! I don't think I've seen that tower that replicates itself in other games. Is that a completely original idea? One moment that had me confused was that after my first loss, when I started a new game, I had lost my additional cards and was put back in the same level. It became clear later that the levels were not in any order, but at the time, it felt like they might have been, so it felt more punishing than it was. Also would have liked a pause button because games went kind of long. There were a few times when a wave would be suddenly a lot stronger than the one before, but in general, it felt nicely balanced and polished. Good work!
Pretty fun! And yeah, suddenly coming up with a story premise to go with a mechanic is always such a huge boost to motivation for me.
Love it! Reminds me of some of my own mixed-success plant attempts. I too have to be very careful with making sure plants are cat-safe; my cat will chew on any plant I get, with the exception of my catnip plant, of all things. (She's actually had more success propagating my string of hearts by ripping it up than I have by intentionally dividing it.)
I'm currently stuck on "lots of different colors". I can't seem to get more than three. Am I missing a trick there? (I was also having trouble getting lower flowers until I started taking out my frustration on the top ones and the game was like "Good enough!")
Fun! Takes me back to goofing around on school computers in the 90s.
Nice way to deal with the theme! I agree with previous commenters that it would be nice if crewmembers remembered where they were going and didn't need to be told to keep going there every turn, and would add that an indication over them of what they think they are doing and if they've moved this turn would also be nice, but game jam games have game jam scopes. The soundtrack is great. Good work!
Really nice tight game loop and a lot of polish! The favorite instruments thing is a neat trick, really cool feature!
Really cool! I threw it in a lightweight javascript emulator and it worked great, but I'm realizing as I'm scoring it that it wasn't playing sound. Does the game have sound? (Anyone have a video to save me downloading a better emulator and playing again to rate sound?) Correctly placed tiles disappearing was frustrating in a way that would get me to play faster, which would make things even worse, but that's not a bad thing, and helped with the "this is a gameboy game" feel a bit. I'd also mess up the controls because I'm mentally moving the tiles into the space, not the space itself, so it would be nice to have reverse controls as an option. Anyway, good work!
@acdimalev I was using https://gb.alexaladren.net/
Nice! I've always wondered what an unfiction / arg kind of thing would look like at a game jam scale, and you nailed it.
Any update on releasing this as a .iso file? I have VMware Workstation 16 Player with vanilla TempleOS running fine on it, but I couldn't get it to work with your .vdi file, and I've seen it mentioned that that was phased out a few VMware releases ago.
The ISO-based installation went smoothly with the newest generation of VMWare 👍
Is there a goal time, or do you just keep praying every 10 seconds until you die? (Which is perfectly thematic, just want to know if I should keep trying for an end state.)
Would be nice if the game over screen showed your score and had a way to restart the game. I tried closing out the game and restarting it, but the OS locked up, so after that, I ended up just rebooting the machine whenever I got a game over and wanted to try again. (That probably has more to do with unfamiliarity with the OS than anything else, couldn't get menus to work properly, stuff like that, but an in-game obvious way to restart would be nice regardless.)
Perfect! I've gotten to ~130 with mouse, but I need to come back to it on touch screen later.
[Weird, a few of my reviews from yesterday seem to have disappeared, including this one, so I'm writing it again. Hope my old one doesn't appear again later...]
This was fun and well designed. I *love* the foot wiggle and the turn toward the camera, really effective animation for how simple it is. The puzzle designs are good, and the quick restarts after a fall are great, since you can get right back into it after messing up, and even use dangerous jumps as part of your strategy. The one exception to this, my biggest problem with the game, was how easy it was in some later levels to fall through the screen and accidentally land on a starter platform in an earlier screen, making that your new reset point. This felt way more punishing than other types of falls, but it did help me realize I was missing some earlier cabbages, and that I had to look for them harder. (Perhaps the sparkle effect could be turned up on them?)
I was looking online for emulators, and found this, if you are looking for a way to make an html5 port: https://www.emulatorjs.com/snes.html has instructions for how to embed an SNES rom and emulator in a simple webpage. Could probably host that on Itchio, but I haven't verified. I thought it was weird that all the online SNES emulators have the games loaded in them already when other online emulators let you load roms, but it's because they're all using this method. (I'll get it played on a downloaded emulator and rated in just a bit, but thought you might find this helpful.)
Love the art! The theme implementation was giving me a headache, so I had to give up after half an hour, but I'm curious to see where this goes. I was at the point where I "needed a good reason" to shoot out a thing, but I thought I had one, but I'm wondering if I just restarted the game at some point and the game doesn't realize I've read things I've read.
You mentioned you are working on a more polished version. Are you planning on keeping the auto switching, and if so, can you make it wait for interactions to finish, or even only count time between interactions? I also noticed things would unlock if you got the combo right once, but require you to enter the combo (even wrong) to advance the interaction. You're probably already planning this, but skipping the combination if it's unlocked would make those interactions shorter, and thus easier to get through before a sudden switch. I would have also preferred the number selection carry over cursor position between numbers, but that was pretty minor, just a thing to get used to.
Do you know if anyone's played this on video? Have you posted a walkthrough anywhere?
I don't know about anyone else, but I formed a strong attachment to my paintings, almost all of which were just frowny faces and maybe a stick figure in the background. Surprisingly effective emotional manipulation for a fun little humor game. Good job!
Beautiful game! My main complaint is the same one I have with so many games with typing prompts. Please let me type through typos and go back and correct it, instead of halting everything until I get the next character you want. I lost so many runs to being confused about why the game appeared frozen when what had actually happened was I had capitalized "I" and the game wanted me to immediately redo it and I'd already typed the rest of the prompt before it registered. Also, and this might make the game *too* easy, a keyboard shortcut for getting in bed would help a lot, like, as an accessibility feature. I loved the creature design and was not expecting it at all. Great work!
Very cute! Got the "wrong ingredient order means you can't see some of the ingredients right away" bug that other people mentioned, but it did get me in the habit of playing in the correct order. Also saw weird behavior after going back to the main menu and trying again. This got my cravings going; gonna hit up a boba shop in the morning.
Oh man, it took me way too long to get that first key, and then I IMMEDIATELY glitched through the floor and had to restart the game. For the key issues, it was totally the fault of my coordination, but I do have an explanation - I was having to hit jump way earlier than I thought I would need to and dash way later than that. For the floor glitch, I think the game gets confused if you are dashing when the rewind happens? (I watched the reaction compilation afterwards and it looks like some people were trying to use that to glitch through doors, but I didn't see any successes.)
Rewinding exactly 10 seconds every 10 seconds is beautifully frustrating in the best way. The path through the puzzles is also really well done. Some of the mechanical preciseness was a bit too difficult, and I agree with other commenters that head bonks on low ceiling corners were really frustrating, but along with, like, jumps feeling a little slow (at least in part because of the coyote time thing you mentioned you had heard already), that's all just little tweaks for polish, and it's already got a lot of polish for a jam game.
Good work!
Absolutely beautiful. The vertical spiked columns were brutal so I admit I gave up and watched @100th_Coin to see the ending. Not sure if it was an issue with controls or if it's just been too long since I've done a lot of platforming. Amazing work though. Cute story, great art, good fit for the theme.
Fun! I REALLY like the detail that humans who want the cookie you are holding will start to bounce up and down. Cute AND functional. I thought I had a bug at first because I was only getting four humans, but it was because I wasn't panning the camera, in case anyone is reading the comments wondering the same thing. (Could be a thing to fix up, make that more obvious, but "making sure everyone understands the controls" is always a hard thing in game jam games so it's understandable.)
Great first game! I agree with the other comments that the map is too big and that it's unclear what kind of danger the enemies pose. Might be a good idea to have one in a cage you can observe on the way in like a little tutorial. (There might have been something like this, and if I missed it, it's because the map is too big :slight_smile: )
Pretty fun and great art! Movement while near objects seemed a little wonky, but apart from that, no major issues. Good work!
Fun! One thing that seemed a little weak was the variety in the upgrades. In my first run, it was a while before I saw anything other than damage boost, movement boost, and gun rate. I eventually saw the second weapon, the spinny one, and then died shortly after that. On my second run, I got a lot of spinny weapon upgrades near the beginning, before I got the weapon, so I don't know if that was a bug (where the spinny weapon unlocks the upgrades but that doesn't reset on a death) or if I just got really unlucky with draws two games in a row.
Nice idea! It was sometimes hard to tell where collision in a level was, like I would bump into a cabinet's side far away from the actual cabinet art, and as other people have mentioned, it was also hard to tell what was dangerous to touch in a level. I also wasn't sure what frenzy was supposed to do. There was a level where I couldn't advance at first, and I figured I was supposed to let the cat get frenzied first and then move, which I thought was a really cool idea, but then when I hit the frenzied state, I just kind of slowly drifted backwards into a spike.
Fun idea and an absolutely brilliant execution! I love everything about this. I made my cat watch it.
Others have mentioned that the third case seems too easy compared to the second one, but if you changed the order, then fewer people might decide to play the fantastic museum one. I don't have any real solution for this except completely reworking the third puzzle to be harder or have more gimmicks, but that's obviously not a useful suggestion.
Nice! Kind of gave me Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk vibes at some points, with all the trying to do every day tasks while dealing with intrusive thoughts.
Nice! A few of the games felt a bit too finicky (e.g. very small hitboxes on the rocks in the first one, too easy to overshoot in the second one with not enough visual information) or unfair (second one I would lose a few rolling off the table before I started, and it was hard to actually grab the rings and gems on the last one) or undertutorialized (I was tracing the shapes on the gems, not on the guide, at first) but in general they all felt good and polished. On day two, I had a guy assigned to a task but I still ended up having to do the task myself and I don't know what I needed to do differently.
The sound design is very good and satisfying. Good job with that. The graphics are also great and it all feels like a moody day working at the moody mine, so good work with all of that.
Absolutely love it as the start of a game, and would love to see where you would go with more levels. The honk sound is very satisfying, and the graphics are perfect. Congrats on keeping your streak up :)
I recorded some footage that I need to edit (long chunks of not playing the game, like for changing controllers and stuff), and I stupidly forgot to make sure the microphone was recording too. Oops! I'll get that to you when I can so you can at least watch what I was doing.
So first off, everything here has a "but it's a jam game so it's understandable". Everything here is quite an accomplishment for a single weekend, and nothing I'm saying is meant a harsh criticism.
I tried it first with vive controllers and two problems - first, locomotion. Vive controllers have touchpads instead of joysticks, and lightly brushing against them would send me zooming around the room. (More on locomotion later, this is just why I had to switch controllers.) Second, they don't have an "a" button, so I just gave up on them at this point. You're in good company - Phasmophobia had the exact same problems, which is why I also have index controllers.
On index controllers, the biggest issue was that the resting position for my hands was an awkward position to hold the book and wand. But the buttons all worked as intended so I stuck with these. (I also don't have a third set of controllers so it was going to be one of these two.)
Bunch of issues here. Joystick to continuous motion is really a bad idea. Teleport is a lot easier on the stomach, which is why it's seen as the best practice default motion for VR. I noticed you did a good job making sure I couldn't walk through walls so I wondered if you might have done smooth motion to avoid problems there. (In a pinch, I would have preferred the teleport option with an honor system for the walls.) If you still want people to physically move through the space, I would suggest a ski pole option like gorn, where you drag yourself through the world by swinging your arms. Might need to make the world smaller.
Wall detection was strong and I couldn't break through them even by pausing the game and moving in my actual room. (Putting my headset on the ground would let it clip through the floor, but I didn't see a use for that even if I wanted to cheat.) But it was also a bit too strong, so I couldn't move close enough to gates to look through them, for example. They would push themselves away from me when I tried, which added to the motion sickness. For that, I would recommend vignetting the field of view or even blacking out the screen. I can think of good examples if you want. (Haven't done VR in a few months because I haven't had the space.)
There was something weird with the floor, especially in the suspended bridges section, where if I was looking down at my feet, I couldn't step up onto things. I had to look up to step up. Looking down and trying to step onto things would even push me back a bit like trying to look too closely at the wall.
I did end up feeling a bit too motion sick by the button / cheese puzzle, so I'm taking a break there to write this and then I'll watch your vid and see if I should go back for more.
Tracing was a little weird and wouldn't always register. The wall drawings would usually start upside down, which might have just been a controller thing. The biggest issue was the star - do I need to start in the right spot? Because it's rotationally symmetric except for how lopsided it was, and the lopsidedness of the one in the book didn't seem to match the one on the wall, so I would just keep going around until it registered. The others were easier to tell where they started and stopped.
The imp also posed some issues. He'd spawn in walls sometimes and the first few times I got him to spawn on the other side of the gate, he would zoom back across the gate towards me and then not be able to cross back. Not sure if it's intended, but what finally worked was him spawning above the cell and then coming down.
No real issues except that I had to quit the cheese one before I could solve it. One thing I want to call out as really cool was hitting the spikes respawned me where I could see the target :thumbsup:
Ran out of room right as I was finishing, but to conclude, good work! Could use some tightening up and polish and such especially because small mistakes in VR can so easily cause motion sickness, and because when people are in VR, it's hard to do things like check guides and stuff, but it generally worked well and I was impressed by the types of puzzles you were able to put in that work in VR in such a short window.
Okay, I watched the walkthrough, and: - OH! It was a sponge! Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I wasn't sure how cheese was going to help. - You were doing a lot of summoning on the floor, which I found awkward, which would have also helped with the sponge puzzle. - I solved several puzzles with fireball that were intended to be solved other ways, which means you made an immersive sim. Congratulations on making an immersive sim :)
@shadowbrain "The book does have little numbers indicated where to start/end the tracing but I agree it could’ve been a bit more clear." I got that part and it works fine on everything else but it doesn't work on the star at all because the symbols show up facing an arbitrary direction (based on head position relative to the wand? Not sure) and the only thing that might indicate which way it's facing is that one of the points is slightly bigger than the rest but I'm not even sure the same point is bigger in the book and on the outline.
I did all the editing and then couldn't get the video to export successfully and I needed my computer back, so here is a screen record of the preview of my edited video.
https://youtu.be/Weq8pQexgIg
Too bad this didn't get finished, because the graphics, character design, and sound design are all amazing. I especially love the weird hissing sound when you move. Collision detection on the narrow corridor was a little too unforgiving, but everything else there is a great start and it left me wanting more.
Super cute graphics! I had trouble figuring out the controls at first because it feels like it should be keyboard only, so I didn't think to try clicking on things until I went back to the listing and studied the gifs. I think I also might have appreciated a list of unlocked recipes somewhere, but it also didn't matter much as long as I was summoning something that did something. It was fun that way. Good work!
The card designs are amazing. Love it.
The balance seemed a bit off at first, as with your starter deck you are very unlikely to be able to kill anyone or explore, just trade in for advanced exploration, which helps a bit with exploration but makes killing even harder, and then when you can kill people, they just get replaced and you build up bad cards. But then it dawned on me that the strategy is to leave cultists alone until there's no room for more of them, and just keep exploring. The balance seemed correct after that realization. The game was still hard and still had meaningful decisions to make, but it was beatable.
Minor UI quibbles:
- The tooltip appearing to the right of the card made it appear that it was for the card to the right of it and there was a cursor alignment problem. Maybe above / below the cards would be better based on their position, and with a little triangle like a speech bubble pointing to the card it's about?
- Maybe add something to indicate that max health is 80, so people don't waste heals?
- There didn't seem to be any downside to collecting all the cards if you planned to collect any of them, and especially since the cards recenter after every click, a "collect all" button would have been a timesaver. There are subtleties to work out around the cards that draw more cards, but I think you can just add those to the hand and people can click again, and if you expand on it and add cards with penalties, people can manually click instead of using the button.
- I didn't know reaching a new level heals you and removes the existing exploration cards, and didn't see that in the instructions, and it would have helped.
This is honestly one of my favorite entries this LD, and I would love it as a printable card game too. Good work!
Beautiful game, impeccable mood, and the final summons gave me a chuckle. Some of the tips from the walkthrough were necessary to get me going and I can kind of see things in the notebook that might have been trying to push me that way like "10? 100?" for the ratio thing. I see where it was going even if it wasn't quite there, and I'm glad there was an external hint system. Good work!
Love it! The pixel art is fantastic. Lost one run because my real cat was demanding attention, and my second run had different starters but a same middle evolution - do you have the full evolution tree somewhere?
monster.PNG
@usenrame Have you tried the webplayer directions? You should be able to play it on a regular browser by creating an account on PlayDate and accessing the Pulp dev tools.
@hamsel First time and I started learning it Saturday during the event. I used Pulp instead of just the raw SDK because I figured a scriptable engine would be easier to learn on short notice, but there are things about it that are so limited, basic programming goes back to being complicated. Might do a writeup and I'll make sure to send it to you if I do!
@fupi Fantastic question! :D
Two ways time passes: - Time moves from morning to afternoon if you either talk to the grocer or enter the forest. - Several of the endings are triggered by an event several seconds earlier, but then I give the player a bit of time to take in what's happened or change the ending before giving them the ending and kicking them to the title screen. For example, you can enter the forest and the forest ending countdown starts, but if you leave the forest fast enough, it is cancelled and you can get a different ending. That one's the longest one at 10 seconds because I really wanted it to feel like the player was choosing to skip out on the gameplay and chill in the forest just like the character.
How many endings did you find? I made a video walkthrough if you are curious about the ones you missed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iY7VmIQqBo
@fupi People noticing the rabbits is the main being-weird-at-the-party ending, as it makes your roommate decide to move out. He's really just concerned about you impressing his girlfriend's parents, and you get to keep trying those conversations until you get them, though if you are moving around, you are also building up either rabbits or pain.
Nice! A little hard at first for reasons you probably know, like it's hard to mentally convert the string of symbols into a pattern on the pentagon, and it wasn't immediately obvious how summons would be placed and then where the best place to place them is. After I took some notes so I didn't have to look at the book, and engaged in cheese tactics by placing all of them in one big lump in front of the city with a lot of harmonics so I was always full of crystals, I was able to beat it pretty easily. So I guess the question is how much you want to discourage cheese tactics and note taking, and how. (I know you already have ideas for how to change the spellbook layout so people won't need notes, so you're already on this.)
Possible bug I think I saw when I was taking notes - restarting from the menu after you die might not reset everything correctly? (Edit, yeah, I went back to look at something and all my guys from the last run carried over to the new run.)
It's a little hard to visually identify the different units and remember what they do, even when they aren't all in a clump. They're too similar, like they are all blue haired blue football jersey guys? So the character design could use some work for playability. They do look good though. It all generally looks good, just a bit hard to read and it could use some polish for cohesiveness.
The song is fun and it's all fun to play. Good work!
I liked it! It's a good start and good idea for a fuller game, and the idea that the only way to get gold is to charge your own workers their tips is ~important social commentary~ in a cute little way. Do more portals get you more missions? I had just a few workers but wasn't getting enough missions to keep them paying me for food, and then I tried one more portal and it seemed to work but then the next refresh with like five portals was back to not enough. Not sure it was really bad luck or if it doesn't matter.
First pass:
The idea is great and I love the graphics. I'm a bit confused though because I solved the puzzle correctly, hit "summon", was told there were no mistakes, and then it takes me back to the puzzle and doesn't let me do anything while two guys (in level 2) move across the screen? Are the X marks mandatory? (They usually aren't in other nonograms so I left them out because the starter puzzles were easy enough.)
Second pass:
Went back to try after typing the first paragraph and see that I missed that the score page is also a store page. Is there a way to get back to it after you close it? If not, it's possible to get soft locked pretty easily like I did the first time, but I'm not seeing a way to open it after closing it.
But yeah, really enjoying this. Fun take on nonograms and fantastic art. Good work!
Nice! Love the "this was a quick sketch" art. Came out really good for what it is. Gameplay is nice too, like a reverse Dr. Mario. I also missed the "you can remove things" thing the first time and it could have been more prominently tutorialized, but otherwise, it was easy to understand. Good work, especially for a compo game!
The little guys are so cute!
At this point in the LD scoring phase, my mousing elbow (not shoulder!) hurts a bit, even with my ergonomic vertical mouse, so I might be recommending this for basically every game, but I would have loved some keyboard controls, even if it was just four keys to summon the little guys and still mouse only for upgrades. Maybe a visual timer on the guys too? I know I lost a lot of assistants right before a crystal and often wasn't able to summon a new one until I had just missed it.
Apart from that, it felt good to play and felt fair. Beat it my first try and then lost a few when either my cat was distracting me or I was experimenting with weird builds like prioritizing the top row upgrades too much. Do you know what the fastest possible time is, or the best anyone's gotten? (I'm a bit tempted to start throwing numbers in a spreadsheet but I should probably wait until after the scoring period.)
Lots of potential here. The bee physics, the way you sink in them and the way they get pushed down when you jump off them, is amazing. The controls were a bit hard to handle at some points. I had hopes for a moment on the "follow-up" level that they could carry me while moving and though I was a bit disappointed that didn't work, the mechanic that was there was probably better and made more sense.
Also absolutely love the hair on the beekeeper.
aristocrat.PNG
Fantastic!
Is it possible to add the user names who have joined each team directly to the game screen? (And remove them when they leave the stream?) I found it hard to keep track of how many people were on which side.
I'm also starting up a list of games with weird setups that I'll post to the main feed every few days. The comment system gets mad if I post the link in comments so I won't, but do you mind if I add you to it?
@jeremy-ryan Of course! It's also to benefit players. If people already gathered people for multiplayer games, they can find a bunch in one spot.
Very important recording:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DcRaUocL8UJ4jFaf8fOV0GSceNegeyX-/view?usp=sharing
I think she actually got Eagle-2 for me.
I kind of wish there were a push-to-talk option because there was construction going on outside and it was often hard to get it to register me starting a call. I also would have loved more visual feedback on what I was doing wrong, even just as a user-accessible debug tool. Apart from that, really nice. Love the graphics and the gameplay.
Love the graphics and the color palette! I found the controls a bit finicky (and my platforming skills are a bit rusty), so thank you very much for including the video walkthrough so I could see what needed to be done and watch the parts after I gave up :)
I thought for a bit the web version didn't work because it says "press any key" and several keys weren't doing anything. Space worked. Might want to mention that (or fix it)?
Fun and engaging, fast enough that it kept me on my toes without feeling unfair.
Hitting esc to back out of a selection was a bit unintuitive even though I knew about it, so might I suggest mapping <- / a to cancel if you are already on the leftmost row of enemies?
Also 🤘 to the font.
The doodles are cute! I couldn't quite figure out combat and would've loved both a better explanation of it in the tutorial and something that explains how the round went after each match to help me figure out if I don't understand something properly. Does position matter? I tried both the same position (e.g. bottom left for bottom left) and the mirrored position (top left for bottom left) but I didn't have enough information to go on to see what made a difference.
I like the aesthetic but it can be a bit hard to read sometimes. Looks great though, just could use some polish to make things stand out a bit better.
I like a slow paced game but this dragged on a bit too much. Like, movements and stuff were slow and moody, but then on top of it, I'd have turns where everyone on the board just went back and forth between two adjacent tiles, making it even slower. I'm not sure exactly how selecting the blue tile works. At first I thought it was picking where the summon would go, but it might have been instructions? I am still not sure.
Sideways maps could have been zoomed out so more was visible, and head-on maps could have been sideways, just to make it all a little easier to parse out, again. I like what you were going for but it would have made it easier to play, and the friction didn't seem necessary.
It's a good start and aesthetically quite nice. Good work!
Gorgeous art and the game is quite fun. The AI opponent was tough to beat on the smaller maps but on the larger one, the difficulty felt right. (This might be unintuitive for new players - I know I kind of assumed smaller maps would be easy, and the ordering on the menu didn't help.) I also couldn't see which direction I was placing things if they were behind other things unless I pulled them out to rotate and then put them back, which wasn't too bad but a mild annoyance worth fixing if you polish this up more, I think. The fun voice acting was the icing on the cake. Love it.
I'm a bit confused by the UI on the tower panel. The top number appears to be gold needed to build it for the turn, but it would say "4/6" when I had 25 gold, and there didn't appear to be any other way to assign gold to the tower-building process, just put in the right number of build units to build. Was this a bug? Was I reading it wrong?
@matthieu-riboulot Perfect, thanks! I'll try again knowing that.
Really nice work! Apart from the bit of confusion and the bug in the UI, the graphics and interface are super polished. Recruiting peeps and assigning them to things felt super satisfying. Everything felt very balanced, and it was always fun to see the new types of recruits upgrading my prestige would unlock.
One small thing that kept tripping me up was that the panel display order and the skill display order were different (which, of course, one is a grid and one is a list) and I would look at the wrong one when starting to assign people. I'm not sure what the fix for that could be - bigger color-coded circles on the panels? Finding an order that reads properly? Not sure.
Thanks for the help with the UI issue! I am glad I was able to enjoy this fully with that knowledge.
The art is so good, the "NO :(" is amazing, and what is there works as intended. It may not be a full complete game but what is here is a very promising start. I'll have to check out your other jam entries when the scoring period is over.
Another PlayDate game! Can I add you to my list of uncommon hardware games to make it easier for people to find you? (edit: Not sure when you'll see this so I'll add you and if you wish to be removed, let me know.)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/i-am-a-wizard-and-my-shoulder-hurts/uncommon-hardware-unusual-setup-games-list
Also I know this isn't Pulp so you can't use the Pulp webplayer, but you might want to include instructions on getting the emulator from the PlayDate Website so people without a PlayDate can try it.
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Looks great on device. 1 bit is hard to work with but things are mostly clear and all look good.
IMG_20240417_133525416.jpg
One question I had about the art - when I hit ships, they seem to change sprites, but not to damaged versions of the same ships, but to smaller different ships. Were these intended to be the same ship? Was this just a time crunch problem?
Not entirely clear how much I am supposed to crank. Cranking constantly wasn't ergonomic so I tried cranking just under ships. The whirlpool graphic seems to speed up when I crank. Is it possible to crank it up and then chase ships without cranking?
Quite fun for what it is. I enjoyed it.
The font for the numbers was a little hard to read, and the light source was in a weird position, so the shadows for the numbers relative to the actual numbers was wildly different based on their positions on the screen. This made it harder to play but in not a meaningful way (like, for example, more difficult math problems would have been). That kind of stuff can be hard to fix in a jam setting, so it's understandable, but would be something to fix if you go back to it.
The 4:3 aspect ratio
chefskiss.jpg
I stopped before the end because I was getting a bit of motion sickness (which I get from a lot of very normal 3D games, so I don't think it's a problem with your game) so I'm wondering if you have any videos or streams that you know beat it so I can see where it goes. Thanks!
Fun! Played enough to get a new hat before I started feeling a bit motion sick (a known me problem) and now I'm *listening* to the sardines game on Ategondev's stream. Might try again in top view in a bit. I don't know if the lack of back face culling was an intentional choice or not, but I don't hate it. Feels right for the game. Love the sprites, love the collectables, love the music. Good work!
Simple but really polished for what it is! The background music is such a fun little bop. Difficulty feels right and the projectile bones thing is a nice twist on a classic.
Scored 4280
This is cute. I could see it being a fun memory game with more polish and pressure. The art is nice and it mostly feels good to play. The chanting is very satisfying.
Notes: 1. Text is very dark and low contrast. It was hard to see things. 2. I would have liked to be able to turn the pages with the keyboard. Don't know if I missed it or if it isn't there.
Nice! 5/5 on mood for sure. I found the architecture critic last and kind of wish I had found him sooner so I could look out for what he was talking about. I might go back for it.
The camera jumping around sometimes was a little annoying and Unreal kept complaining about memory and performance even though the game was running fine. No major complaints, just a nice chill melancholy game that ends in a fun little party. Love it.
Very fun! The right click left click thing is a little awkward but the most obvious alternative would be constantly re-clicking on your source, I guess, which would be worse. Maybe hotkeys or a modifier key? I don't know. With more time it might be worth testing a few options, but a game jam is a game jam.
The balance is a little weird because only the early game is hard, and then you quickly can afford to buy enough wizards to keep a bunch in the middle to deal with the tower and still assign a bunch to each task. From the last image in your game listing, I can see you know about this :)
Graphics are great, music and sound is great, and the game is super fun. Good job!
I'll come back to try again later, but is there a way to switch back to the face from the cross? I tried a bunch of keys but didn't find anything.
I was having some problems with the UI that might be a bug but I'm not sure. After I got the field hospital and gardens up, when everything was very crowded, I noticed the witches were not heading to the games, and I had tried dragging them there earlier and that didn't work. I wanted to try to drag them to the piers that were under the games but the games were in the way, so I zoomed in and out a few times and then the games relocated to south of the piers instead of blocking them, and then suddenly I could drag to the witches to the games. Was I supposed to be able to drag witches to the games the entire time? Is there more past the field hospital / garden unlock? Is there something that tells you when the game ends?
Thanks! And good work on the game. The graphics are super cute.
Love the graphics, and the music was both funny and fitting. It takes a lot of luck at the start to get a good build going, but after a few attempts, I was able to beat the game. I'd be curious to see the rules for how things stack, because the attack speed powerups didn't appear to keep improving my attack speed.
Nice and meditative, good work :)
One thing that felt a bit like a layout issue more than anything else is that when you're reading it for the first time, the "how to play" section doesn't make much sense until after you read the "scoring" section, because you have no frame of reference for when you might want to pick specific dice or save some for later and why. The way to play this to get a good score is to understand the scoring and what a good result looks like, and then work through how to get it with the instructions. So while it may seem weird in general to put scoring first and then how to play, it would make sense in this instance. Or maybe add a "goal" section with an in-universe explanation of what a good summon looks like above the instructions, and keep the more straightforward scoring section where it is?
Overall, solid work. It took a couple reads to click but that's common with pen and paper games and we are all spoiled by tutorialized video games :)
(Sorry for the late comment. I started writing it a few days ago and then got distracted and have way too many tabs open.)
Beautiful artsy little game!
I found the scroll wheel controls a little too fickle and prone to overshooting, especially with the bandeau dress rockabilly hair enemy, but I got through it. I would have appreciated arrow keys as an accessibility option / alternate control scheme for people with touchpads or things like that. (But it's a jam game, so no worries.)
The artwork is generally fairly readable (with the aligning-the-shield part being a little weaker than the rest but still fine) and the artistic direction and resulting mood was very strong. Good work!
Fun idea and I absolutely love the title. It was hard to tell which wizards were mine and which were attacking me until my guys were dead and the ones attacking me could all get to me. Having the wizards spawn directly underneath me was a little weird too because I couldn't tell if my summon worked unless they immediately ran out to attack someone.
Is there an ending? I think I got through like 5 waves that all seemed similar.
Love the art, especially the out-of-time end screen! The platforming could use a little work (I kept getting stuck on the sides of ledges, for example) but it's a really good start. Platformers can be hard to tweak during a jam and I've seen a lot worse :)
My favorite art of the jam so far, a lot of strong personality in the sprites! Game generally plays well though I wish it were possible to angle the shot, not just choose where it's coming from.
One game-breaking but probably rare bug - Shatter Bogey can potentially get stuck in infinite bounce patterns, so might want to add a timer to him.
infinitebounce.PNG He's been at this for like 20 minutes now.
Great work!
Nice! I especially liked the last level where what you had to do was so tight that the most obvious first thing to try would kill the thing you wanted to kill and then immediately kill you. I got it eventually and the difficulty was appropriate and fair. The weird frog / body thing design was great too.
:O A Fantastic-Contraption-like! That's fantastic. I love it.
Your "known issues" is right that being able to iterate on a design instead of starting over each time would be a big improvement, but apart from that, everything is super tight and polished. The animations and art are super charming and everything feels good. I love this kind of physics-based transportation puzzles, and even within those types of games, this one is a standout, especially for how good it looks.
Fun game! I'm a sucker for locations on an overworld map being represented by short little cylinders but the art is absolutely fantastic. Gameplay is snappy and fun, even if the balance is a little off, and the storyline was funny. I think there's something wrong with the volume controls though?
Amazing art and music, and I love the characterizations of the musicians.
I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing wrong in the recording session, especially with the bits that are three keys and a single green timer. Zero points from those buttons, and no feedback on what the issue is. (Just realizing maybe I need to press them together? I don't know. Coming up with ideas to try after I've closed it. Maybe I'll try again.) So that part maybe needs a little more explanation, including having the guy explain it if you mess it up instead of just telling you to play better.
But even with my difficulties in the recording section, I can tell there's something really special here, and I would love to see a post-jam version. It's already very polished and close to perfect. Good work!
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Edit: The thought I had while writing the review about hitting all three buttons was correct, if anyone else didn't get that the first time either.
I love Sokobans and this is a beautiful and innovative addition to the genre. Congratulations on such a strong first-ever jam entry! The summoning mechanic to switch characters reminds me of early Keke levels in Baba is You.
One thing I would love to see added is a level counter up by the level name. I know there are 19 levels, but what level am I on? (I'm on the garden maze level and plan to come back to it after I've slept off the LDjam brain.) Perhaps you can post a text list in the description since it's too late to add it to the game?
Great work!
Very pretty graphics, and the music is fitting. The idea is good too but it's too much clicking. A built-in autoclicker would be a VERY useful accessibility feature here. The summons were a bit too weak and infrequent so I tried the "souls chance" upgrade and it didn't seem to do anything. I then tried the "just get the damage upgrades" path but still became overwhelmed before the second upgrade, and now I need to rest my wrist. Good work on the general aesthetics and core idea, and I hope you do a balance pass.
Lots of fun! Biggest suggestion is toning down the terrain tiles so the units stand out more, but that was fairly minor and didn't really change how I played the game since I didn't need to manually control the units.
Both visually and aurally, it reminded me a lot of SimLife, the 1992 Maxis game. Little pixel critters running around on square tiles making both low and high pitched repetitive noises really hit that specific nostalgia trigger.
The early game was forgiving enough that I had time to figure out the controls and strategy while playing the game, which was nice. Middle and late game felt slightly too easy but in a fun way where you can just have way too many units going and you can just watch your little dudes run around be little dudes. It's satisfying. Gleeful. I giggled playing it.
Good fun, good work!
I like the idea of the story, but there are some problems with the platforming.
The window to climb a tree limb is very small so you basically have to mash the jump button and hope it catches. The tree to get on top of the first hill (before the witche's house) was frustrating because the first time I tried to land on the hill, I fell through, so I thought the whole thing wasn't solid. Turns out it was, but the visual hill is a lot bigger than the collision box or something.
It's also frustrating that you can't get out of the king's room even if you haven't talked to anyone, knowing you will have to do the platforming again.
There's a door that doesn't open in the battle field. Am I supposed to talk to someone? Is it bugged?
I eventually ran out of places I could go besides climbing up the big trees more, and I have no idea if anything is up there and my hand was starting to hurt, so I gave up. Do you have a walkthrough, or a video of you completing the game?
Thanks!
Really fun! I liked the way the mechanics available grew over time and were tutorialized between levels, with one exception - the "click to hold" mechanic maybe should have gone before the first level to make it feel more fair and more like the player had control over the outcome? I think a bunch of people might fall off after the first level assuming they had to beat it without knowing enough about how it was going to go.
Good work!
Nice! One thing I would suggest if the controls to spawn things are FGH, it would be easier to play if the controls to pick tools were RTY instead of up and down to cycle through them.
Ah, a fellow find-all-the-endings entry! I absolutely love the art, especially the unfolding of the demon. The most annoying part (quite minor) was that so many different paths would lead to the same ending, but apart from that it was enjoyable and a real treat to look at. Good work!
I like the art style and the direction you were going with it. It would help a lot to see the runes either after you click them or after the round ends so we could see what we did wrong. Good start and hope to see you in future jams!
Great art and **funny**! The first puzzle was in a way the hardest because it didn't quite get across how precise you had to be, but after that, they were all the exact correct level of hardness, I'd say, and the mechanics you introduced as it went on were a great ramp-up. (I got a chat hint from you on the last level too which saved me a bit but I think I would have gotten there. Was thrown off by the position in the notebook, which you obviously expected. But maybe a single in-game hint for each level for people who don't have you to chat with? (But jam game, no worries.))
Nice! Had some problems even with the walkthrough because some of the hit detection was weird (took a long time to figure out how to look in the bathtub, and trying to light the candles kept registering as looking somewhere else) and parts of the map didn't seem to hook up correctly (left from the computer didn't work?) but I got through it. Nice art, fun little puzzle, a good start!
Fun arcade-y experience! Kind of wish it displayed your highest level and score so I could post them, but I got through maybe six of them? Hit box on the portal seemed a little big and it would be frustrating when demons slingshot around the portal and across the screen wrap to escape the portal, but other than that, it generally felt fair. I like the music and the character designs a lot too.
Absolutely beautiful 1-bit art!
Game plays smoothly, looks good, feels responsive, and has nice little details like seeing a much later chest behind a wall when you walk by it early on.
Only feedback - if you are watching the corner arrows when you are summoning, there is no visual difference between correctly finishing a summon and messing up the last step of a summon, and you have to look or listen elsewhere for confirmation. Holding on the last arrow or doing a little visual flourish up in the corner might be more reassuring.
Good work!
Beautiful. I hope my 5/5 on the theme can help balance out the people who didn't get it. In a genre dominated by "funny in a gloomy way" games, this is funny in a really really funny way. The gameplay is snappy and satisfying too, and the loose nature of the scoring text makes the weird rulings sting less :D
My roguelike clicker for everyone "Fuzzy Buzzies" did significantly better than my adult puzzle visual novel "Butt Puzzles", but, though I'm disappointed, I'm going to keep making the games I wanna make hrumph.
I like this a lot and tried both versions.
My biggest issue was that the map kept moving around underneath me. (Now that I think about it, I think this might have been because I was in the windowed version, which was the default option when I opened it...) That and the controls in general seemed like they could use some work, and I would love to be able to control more things with the keyboard.
It was also slightly frustrating that the instructions were considered part of the giant cut scene and if you skipped the cut scene, you didn't have a chance to look at them. There was something I wanted to reread in them, but I wasn't going to watch everything again. Might do it later when I have more time.
It could also use a little UI work for things like "You can't build here because..." types of things. The first time I had a road to a windmill and a building that needed a windmill, I spent a good minute trying to figure out where in relation I had to build it, because directly on top wasn't working. Turned out I couldn't afford it, and since that's a pretty standard thing in this genre, once I realized that was what was going on, I was able to adjust pretty quickly. A little gold piece with a red x through it might have clued me in faster. A "denied" sound effect also would have helped me realize it wasn't because I wasn't clicking hard enough (which at least this time around made sense since I'm on a touchpad and have a bandaid on my second-most-used clicking finger, but in general is a subconcious reaction I tend to have to games with no audio feedback).
Really good work!
I won by walking right and clicking on something that said "pick up 3 soup!!", which made me a little sad because I wanted to play a stealth game. I had to purposely try to get caught to see what would happen.
The visual style looks amazing and line of sight (both how it looked and how it worked) was pretty smooth.
This game's look is really polished. There are a lot of great little details in the art and I love it. Good work.
Very nice! Looks good and controls smoothly.
It was sometimes a little hard to track things on the screen. I'd be focusing on one character and tracking the other in my peripherals, when suddenly I'd find myself tracking a smoke effect that was as large as the character. I don't know what the best solution would be - perhaps smaller smoke or characters that stand out more? I don't know. Like I said, it looks great. Just a little hard to track.
Solid work. Good job!
That was so so good but is McBeef's wife okay??? Tell me she's okay!
Kind of wish the dialog went faster, and had some trouble with wall jumps where I'd get stuck on a wall and couldn't jump, but that's it. Best game I've played this LD so far.
You should be able to host the html5 build on itchio. https://itch.io/docs/creators/html5
That was cute, but the console sections got a bit tedious. I felt frustrated that the player character was typing so slowly and not doing basic stuff like tab complete, which broke my immersion and made me dissociate from the character I was playing.
The computer *sounds* were spot on though. Good work on those.
This was really nice!
The controls seemed a bit wonky. Not 100% sure why so this is a guess: it felt like it was reacting too fast and too much to the controls but would also hit a cap on how tight you could turn too fast, so it was hard to do anything but turn at that radius in alternating directions. (I was playing the web version if there's a difference.)
Winner #17 here. That was amazing and I'm glad I found it. (I'm a sucker for minimalist anti-games.) It was simple, but also polished and detailed, and I hope you do get your 20 votes in.
That was fun! It reminded me of the final challenge in Organ Trail for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. (It's not just the zombie thing... Perhaps the zombie ai behavior?)
This is going to sound hyper-nitpicky and I'm sorry, but a lot of my feedback has already been covered by others and I don't want to repeat too much :)
I wandered away from the ball once and it was super weird. I didn't like that at all. I think I was expecting that when I got close to the powerup, which had a glow and was visible away from the ball, that I would get some of that glow on me, but I realize that is a silly thing to expect. :) This is not something I'd expect to be fixed (but I would be really happy if you did). Just sharing my moment of being weirded out by something.
I know it clearly says that it's a trail you have to blaze and that we are supposed to use the ball's glow radius to estimate our distance to the goal, but there was a moment near the beginning where the path stopped being straight, and at that moment, there were some weird features along the back wall that made me think for a moment that that might have already been the goal and the map was soccer-field shaped. I'd consider making the wall more boring there, and if people as easily confused by walls as I am are still confused, maybe putting an arrow on the ground letting them know that that's where the path turns and they should expect the path to turn. It's early enough that it would feel like an integrated tutorial to let you know how the game works, instead of some condescending hand-holdy design, I think.
I actually liked the clashing graphics style (though shadows to ground you would be nice). It reminded me of Rebuild 2, so you're hitting all the good zombie game memories I have :)
I was very good at knocking the things with the front corner of the ship and sending them spiraling off the screen!
I agree with the comment about how hard it was to line the rows up. It might be possible to improve this without actually improving it, but by adding in some visual feedback about where it's going to end up if you don't touch the controls.
Controls felt a little sluggish and I wasn't sure, but it felt like the ship would drift a bit when I wasn't expecting it. I also didn't feel like I had enough time to kill most things and dodge asteroid shards when I got them. Perhaps it would play better in a portrait aspect ratio?
Good job!
The use of pickles is a nice touch, a shining example of the level of detail and thought that went into the game. Well done!
You really captured the whole look and feel! Good work!
Fun fact - in the original Tamagotchi, if you never played with your tamagotchi and only gave it candy to keep it happy, it would eventually turn into the "secret character", a lazy adult human head on stick legs.
Ooh, saw some names I recognized!
One thing I liked that I haven't seen mentioned was that when it started to go just a tiny bit wonky, I rationally knew it was part of the game, but I also viscerally felt like I hadn't slept well enough in a few nights and my insomnia and ongoing sleep deficit were catching up with me. That's how well you nailed the mood.
For everyone who says mouse controls are bad, I just played this on a touchpad and... yeah, I need to go get my controller anyway, so I'll go do that.
I kind of find myself wondering how this would feel if just touching the sword killed the slimes. It might be more satisfying, but it would also be harder to keep chains going. (The spinny sword thing I could do by spinning my finger in a circle looked like it would have felt great as an attack.)
It's polished and very cute, but other comments have got that covered, so ::thumbs up::
Biggest complaint is the font choice, but that might just take getting used to. I spent a good several moments wondering what "cdsn"-ing in my chain would do. Was it some terminology I didn't know? the keyboard equivalent for the control pad part? OH, CASH. CASH IN MY CHAIN. I'd have felt silly but I felt pretty safe blaming the font.
Again, really well done. I'll definitely come back to the download version with a controller when I get the chance so I get the full experience.
@LeReveur :D We know. We keep making them because we enjoy making them though.
We hope to make a video soon. In the meantime, you're right, the bits on the screen that tell you where to start and what to do *are* a little less attention-grabby than they should be, so I've added a quick start guide here. Let me know if you think it helps.
(And here's a secret - if you don't want to use a cell phone, you can open the player window in another browser window on your computer. You won't get the touch screen and the layout will be wonky, but everything is there.)
@HS_Dave We intentionally removed the remote game option - the game requires being in the same room as people and physically watching them play.
(Also, {campname} is just because we didn't finish that bit :) )
Love it! It reminded me a bit of Card Thief.
I often found myself too distracted by good match-3 moves to pay attention to my health. I wasn't 100% clear on how level progression changed the maps, but it might have been nice to be able to continue from where I was with some reminder / light punishment for this distraction, like a life system.
I also at some point ended up on a screen with no key and I needed the key, but I wasn't sure if the level had started out that way or if the key hadn't registered or what. Sorry! I wish I'd caught it so I could file a better bug report.
Nice! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mazeBotGame , a bot that provided a text-based maze on Twitter from a few years ago. It didn't give any visual feedback, and early on, the human players kept walking in circles, until someone else made https://twitter.com/MazeBotBot , a bot to display the first bot's maze as pictures and suggest the best direction to explore.
Fun little game!
I wish I had a little more time to process how and why I died. A small pause, maybe a little death noise, just a second or two before I'm back at the beginning and have to get reoriented. You don't want this to be too long - you want a fast turnaround - but no time at all leaves me wondering what I missed and gives me no chance to think about what to do next time to fix it.
Mistakes also felt a little too expensive, but that might have been fixed by adding that pause on death. Another option might be a small sub-life system (like big / small Mario) so only a second or third mistake completely resets the level.
The game flowed well and I liked that I could easily switch between levels when I couldn't figure one out. ::thumbs up::
This reminded me of the C64 game Cave of the Word Wizard, where you played as a small child trapped in a dangerous cave, and every few minutes, a wizard would pop up and demand you spell a word.
I have fond memories of Cave of the Word Wizard, so good for you :D
By the time I got to the second question, it was already getting hard to properly aim for the correct letter, but it felt intentional-ish and drew attention to how incompatible the platforming system is with the quiz system.
Good job on the art, too.
::whispers:: It's not a pop quiz if the teacher tells you about it.
The street lights pulsing on her face is an amazing touch. The whole thing is amazing.
I wanna give it a shot on a touch screen at some point. With a touch pad, I'd occasionally lose control and I wasn't sure if it was something in the game or if it was just my hand getting tired. Occasionally also, it would advance the text as if I had clicked. I don't know.
The game was HARD (entirely because of juggling the two parts of it, too, which was nice and thematic) and I am glad it was obvious that there were check points, or it would have been frustrating. So thanks for making that clear early on :) (Also some of that might have been the touch pad.)
But yeah, amazing work. Top marks.