Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Nathan Wiles
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Shot Clock | compo | 309 | 3.44 | 3.75 | 3.41 | 3.19 | 3.76 | 2.94 | 2.85 | 3.00 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Ghost Loop | jam | 3.70 | 3.70 | 3.80 | 3.15 | 2.60 | 3.00 | ||||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Critical Freight | jam | 375 | 3.87 | 3.78 | 3.35 | 4.03 | 3.73 | 3.38 | 3.56 |
The sound design and aesthetic were very nice and worked well together. The stick mechanics all felt very good too. I had a lot of trouble finding journal entries, though. I found about three journal entries but left them because I wanted to get back to feed the fire. I never was able to find them again and eventually the fire died. That may have just been bad luck on my part. Either way, very cool game. Thanks for sharing!
Such a cool idea. Saw your game played on @ursagames stream and had to try it myself. It's a great challenge and so satisfying once you get in the groove. The music sounds very good too. Awesome job on getting so much done in the compo!
Loved just about everything about this! The PS1/N64 style graphics were very satisfying, and once I got the hang o of the controls I found the gameplay very addicting. Thanks for including flight inversion, I had a lot of trouble before finding that setting, so I was so happy to see that you took the time to add that.
Hey, it's ntwiles from your twitch stream! I had a lot of fun playing around with the existing mechanics. It's well done if not a complete game. Great job especially on the UI system for such a short period.
This is such a fun game! I'm not going to beat a dead horse with feedback, everyone has already addressed that the gameplay can be a little slow after a couple playthroughs, so I won't harp on that. I've never designed a boardgame, but I've always imagined that it would be incredibly difficult to design something both fresh and fun, and you've done that here. It has the feel of one of those timeless games like tetris or chess. In fact, it does feel very much like chess or checkers with a greater element of randomness to it. That's helpful for new players and even the playing field, but it doesn't do much right now to reward skill or experience in the game (that I can see, at least.) I could easily see myself playing this for hours if you could find a way to tweak it to do that. Either way it was very fun and I played several games. Thanks for sharing!
What a great game! The flight is satisfying and fair, but still challenging. The look and sounds are beautiful and merge together very well. The finished product is very calming. If I had to pick something to complain about, it would be that there were times when I would fly for long stretches without finding any food, which made me feel like my success was more down to luck than skill. I'll be honest though, I was diving up and down looking for both worms and insects in the trees, so it could have been that my strategy just backfired. Thank you for sharing this great game!
Please keep up with this! There's not much to do now but I love the feel of this world and would sink so much time into an RTS in this style. Great job so far man.
Great job on this! Those socks came a long way from two blocks slapping together.
Great art style, funny writing, satisfying simplified FTL style gameplay. Overall this is a really good cohesive game. Great job on this. I did run into one scene where I think I was hacked and the body text was removed (which is a great idea), but the message explaining that seemed to be cut off mid-sentence, so it wasn't really clear to me for a second what was happening. That's my only gripe. I did nap mode to test it out, but I had so much fun I'm going to go back and try for a coma run later to see how far I can get.
This is addicting, man. I ran into the laggy slider too, which probably saved me from sinking an hour into this game. Hopefully that's an easy optimization because I want to play more of this. I will say that it can be unclear sometimes if a house is going to get hit by the storm. Maybe it would help to make the lines thinner, or maybe apply a highlight of some kind to houses in danger? This would be great on mobile if the UI could be made to work. I would play this for hours dude. Keep up on this one!
I loved this game! I felt a little weird hurting cute pink unicorns, but the ending explained that a little bit better. You guys did a great job all across the board. The gameplay was fun and a good challenge but it always felt fair. The wand is really satisfying to use. If I had to give feedback on something, I'd say it would be nice of the unicorns telegraphed that they were about to attack, but really whenever I got hit I felt like it was my fault for playing too aggressively. Thanks for sharing!
I did experience a couple crashes. I had one directly after dying and one immediately after my second wave started.
I wish I could have spent more time with this game, I had a lot of fun with it. The build / defend gameplay loop is satisfying, the art looks very solid for a compo game ( the UI is especially nice, I'm a big fan of it.) It's definitely open to cheesy strategies as mentioned above, but I think different game design decisions could nudge this into a very polished title. Do you plan to keep working on it?
This vine mechanic is so cool. The way the player interacts with the vines is very well done and wouldn't have worked nearly as well with any other set of rules. I think I did everything. I collected the three seed shards but couldn't find anything to do after that. The worldbuilding in this game is so cool. I hope you keep working on this and turn it into something with a larger map and more depth. Would be a very cool puzzle adventure game.
I put a lot of time into this game and had a lot of fun with it. I was a little confused about the torch going out and I think I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to get another torch before realizing that it was just a temporary holdover until you could get the helmet. I think maybe a tooltip on each item describing what they do would help there. Once I figured out the mechanics, I loved the atmosphere of the game, especially the character design and world elements. I got really hooked on the story too, and wanted to see more, but the gameplay was very slow and I eventually hit a point where it was impossible to go any further because I'd mined all the wood in the area and couldn't get across the bridge. I got a little demoralized at that point and didn't try again. I really like most of the elements in this game. I know you did the fire mechanic as a way to adhere to the jam theme, but I would scrap that going forward so that wood only acts as a form of currency and not a consumable item, so there's never a way to get stuck. I followed you on itch.io, I hope you keep working on this game. I'll keep an eye out for updates. Thanks for sharing man!
Take that, pop music industry! Metal is the world. This game was hilarious guys. Great job. Challenging and you kept mixing it up with the mechanics so each level felt new. It would be nice if the two powers were more different from each other, so playing as each hero had a different feel, but that's my only complaint. \m/
I'm so into this art style! The scenery and character design are so very satisfying and also very unique. It makes me want to play more levels to learn more about the world. Once I got through the tutorial, the game felt very fair and the tricks were satisfying. I wasn't a big fan of the tutorial stopping me to show messages. I wonder if there could be a way to avoid that. I'd spend a lot of time playing this game with more levels and maybe some variation to the tricks you can do by combining the trick button with arrow keys. Lots of great ways you could expand on this, but it feels very good in its current state.
This is a great idea and really well executed. There's a lot to understand, so thank you for putting out great tutorial content both on your page and in the game. I'm shocked I won on my first attempt, since I was just fiddling around through for the first half of assembling my team, but I got the hang of it near the end. I think I'm going to play again and see if I can get gold icons on all four. Thanks for sharing this!
The drone is fun to drive around and the story makes sense and gives a real sense of purpose. I liked the sound a lot, too. My only real complaint is that the game felt a little on the easy side, since I really didn't see anything keeping me from remaining in stealth mode the entire time. All in all great submission, thanks for sharing!
Very cool theme and great execution on it. Love the setting. Really well-done gameplay loop too, I like the rotation between resource gathering and defending the caravan. Made it all the way to the end on my third attempt and had a lot of fun. The camera and the controls were tough though. I really wish the camera rotated with the player, and shooting in the direction I wanted with only four-direction controls was tricky. I would have liked either mouse shoot or and automated point and click kind of deal like Diablo. That's my only gripe. This is the kind of game that I hope people keep building on post-jam. Congrats and good luck!
Great job on this one. Killed it on the art and the voice acting.
Wow, I really loved this! I was very confused at first and almost quit, but once it finally clicked what I was supposed to be doing, I was addicted. I was disappointed when the game ended. Great music and very fun mechanic. The hopping around controls are a little weird, I would have rather been able to walk around the island, but maybe that was done as a time saving measure. Following you on itch, I'd love to see this game grow into something bigger.
I like the kind of puzzle feel to this game. It's kind of a trial and error thing. Each play through I had, I understood a little more about the game and how it works. It was really challenging to keep the battery powered even when I had the idea figured out pretty well. I think the key is learning where the batteries are and grabbing them in the right order. Great job on this man!
The finished parts are looking great! Can't wait to see how this turns out man.
Great job on this one man! Really addicting. Good choice on the combo timer to force the player to keep moving.
Thanks for the comments, everyone! @b-golda that's concerning to hear. Were you playing on the Mac OS build by chance?
@nillard Thank you for playing and for your feedback! Were you playing on the Windows build or the Mac OS one?
Thank you so much for the great feedback everyone!
@tengii they were inspired by what I figured I could mock up in ten minutes with ProBuilder, lol, but yes I think subconsciously I was pulling from a desire to shoot at Claptrap. There's actually a reference to him in the dialog after you get the gun.
@pilarius I would have loved to have, but I ran into a game-breaking bug in the WebGL build which couldn't be fixed in time. It had to do with raycasts not registering, which is apparently a known issue.
@sugarsores wouldn't have looked as good without your help on the lighting! Thank you!!
Really unique idea for a game! I'd love to see more to this. The flower growing effect was especially nice. I would have liked to have been able to move around while the tutorial dialog was playing, but it was well written and funny, so that helped make it more palatable than it normally would be. Great job on this!
The intro had me rolling. This was so funny. Great job on the audio man. But the rest of the game had interesting UX and was well balanced. Very challenging. I wasn't able to balance enough to make use of the widget in the bottom-left corner, I kept dying after about 2 and a half minutes, but I might come back later to see if I can get further. Thanks for sharing!
Spoiler warning.
Beautiful game as mentioned above. My system was able to handle it fine and I don't have an especially powerful gaming rig. The gameplay itself wasn't that interesting in a vacuum, and I was a little confused if I was doing the right thing, because I missed a couple pieces. When the other people started showing up though, that was a good clue that I was doing the right thing. Overall, very intriguing experience with great atmosphere.
My best guess as to what happened is that I was performing some kind of ritual before sacrificing myself? Is that right?
Simple but polished, with great humor! Had a lot of fun with this. I agree with some of the comments about coins hiding behind asteroids and it being a little too easy to collide with an asteroid, but it looks like you already plan to address it. Great game overall!
So difficult but so satisfying. The difference between my times on my first and second playthrough were huge as I learned the timing and got into the flow. Got down below 2 minutes but I could easily see myself getting a lot lower with practice. Great job on this Piggy!
Great job on this! Love the artwork. It took me a second to find the clues, but they were a nice surprise and paying attention to them added to the difficulty.
Man, that gets stressful fast! I love these kinds of typing games and this one is really well executed. The UI is very pretty. It's a little touch when the words begin to come in upside down, but that seems like a problem without much of a solution (except maybe words could be drawn in a list beside the play area so that players could also type from that list? Either way, great addicting game.
This looks stunning from what I can tell so far, but there seems to be some kind of bug on the WebGL version (macOS tried on both Brave and Safari) that renders the game much wider than fullscreen. I'll check back later to try playing again in case you're able to fix it.
Glad I came back to play this, had a lot of fun playing. The pixel art totems look awesome and the UI is clean. I will say that it became very difficult as more technology was unlocked, I think the game might benefit from slightly fewer resource types, or maybe a slower ramp, but I know how difficult these kinds of games are to balance. Trying again now to see if I can get any further!
I love the art and storytelling! The design also was very nice, it's a simple premise that works well. In execution I had a lot of trouble very early on and kind of felt like my ship moved too slowly and my fire rate was too low to feel like I was doing anything impactful. I may have been doing something wrong though in how I was playing, because the game felt very polished. Thanks for sharing and good luck!
This looks so pretty I wanted to just fly around the scene and check stuff out! The environment and UI feel very polished and interact really well together. It was really fun watching the environment evolve as the game went on. Great work on this!
This artwork is stunning, great job! I love this little idle clicker game. I managed to climb up out of the map and into the white space above :D.
This is such a clever idea! I would love to play a full length game like FTL issuing commands this way. You actually feel like the captain prioritizing where to send his men. Great work on this.
I absolutely love the artwork and color choice. The controls also feel very good. As people mentioned, the gameplay is very simple, but it meets the theme well and has a nice challenging memory aspect as you try to recall which shredders are still available use. Great game!
Lol, this is great. The voice acting is top notch, the writing is funny, and I really liked the song at the end too.
You know how to make addicting action games. This one is very tricky early on but once you figure out the patterns it's very satisfying to fight the zombies. Each stage was a bit like a puzzle in that you had to figure out what to do with the door. The trickiest one was figuring out how to destroy the blocked door in time, for a while I was trying to kick it. Also loved the cinematic ending. Great game!
Haha nice @str8griz! That's a very good one. My best is 1:59:59 and I want so badly to hit 2:00:00 now.
@rasblo yes I find myself running around like a fool trying to catch the ball in real basketball, so I wanted to emulate that :D. Lol thank you for playing!
This is very clever and the artwork is great. I love that new cells are spawned along with the music. There's an element of timing because you don't want to try to be connecting two nodes while a cell spawns (since they might move out from under your cursor) so the audio hints are a nice tough.
This is a great game. I love little turn-based puzzle/strategy games like this because the discrete set of options make each choice feel meaningful and they let you plan a couple of moves ahead. This game is no exception, it gets very addicting. I wish that there were fewer drops that help you move around quickly (I felt like I could move around well already) and more that removed water, but that could have just been bad rng luck on my part. :D
I love what a polished product you've been able to make with so few pixels, the environment and the UI look great and the controls feel good. It's tough though, my best run was about 1:22! Great game, good luck!
I love this atmosphere. The glitchy surreal art and effects made me feel like I was playing a game made on an alien planet. This is a simple idea but the execution really elevates it. I did have some trouble with the crate physics, they seemed to want to fall into the ground as often as they could be pushed back to the shelter, but I still had a lot of fun with this.
Very nice submission. It's bittersweet in the perfect way. I loved the colors and the choices made in dithering that added an interesting effect.
The art was just stunning! I especially loved the harsh black shadows on the hab establishing shot. It really made me feel like I was on an unforgiving moon base. The gameplay fits the theme perfectly, though I would have loved this game even more if failure wasn't "inevitable" and that with enough strategy you could find yourself in control of your situation and flourishing with your new upgrades. Great submission, good luck!
I'm in love with this artwork. Especially the earth and clouds, just chef's kiss. I didn't feel like there was a whole lot of strategy, I actually did best just spamming clicks and repeatedly buying the first thing I can afford, but I know how super complicated difficulty ramps are to maintain for these kinds of games, let alone in 48 hours. I would love to play a longer term game based on this, great job!
The presentation was very nice, I loved the pixel art. As others have mentioned, I think the difficulty took away from the game a bit, but the controls themselves felt nice and it was still addicting despite being maybe a little on the punishing side. The black hole art at the end was stunning and I love the little vignettes you run into throughout. Great job!
Now that's a cool mechanic! Haven't seen anything like this before. It took a second to get an idea of what I should be doing, but then I was addicted. It's definitely a game that rewards practice and skill. Great job!
Nice, I haven't played Orbiter so this mechanic was new to me and it's very fun. Your art is nice as well which adds to the experience. Great job!