Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → netguy204
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Raccoon Tycoon | compo | 240 | 3.23 | 3.21 | 3.52 | 2.18 | 2.68 | 1.50 | 2.77 | 2.47 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Sim Tabloid | jam | 897 | 3.10 | 3.19 | 3.51 | 2.69 | 1.31 | 2.43 | 2.77 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Spongy | compo | |||||||||||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Equals 1 | compo | 366 | 3.17 | 3.00 | 3.44 | 3.52 | 2.33 | 2.83 | 2.31 | 45 | ||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Life of a Photon | compo | 170 | 3.52 | 3.31 | 3.36 | 3.55 | 3.28 | 4.00 | 2.58 | 3.26 | 50 | |
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Press Z | compo | 596 | 3.13 | 2.95 | 2.85 | 3.74 | 2.49 | 2.45 | 2.22 | 2.88 | 68 | |
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Little Mischief Makers | compo | 341 | 3.13 | 3.02 | 2.76 | 2.96 | 3.00 | 3.55 | 2.65 | 2.98 | 77 |
Very nice graphics, particle effects, and sounds.
Fun too! But, it really needed a bit more explanation. I had just written an review complaining about gravity only being down and not getting my reward for landing on the moon.... then it occurred to me that I may have missed the point. I played again and realized the goal.
Good work.
I have an HTML5 game as well.
Very solid entry. I enjoyed it.
I thought the gameplay, the sounds, and the graphics were really in good balance with each other. It all fit and nothing looked over or under polished in comparison with anything else.
Hey! And it was fun! Darn humans... so many of them and they're so quick with their new cities! Mahr rahr raaar!
Excellent work!
Excellent first game! I hope LD was a good and rewarding experience for you!
I thought it was clever and funny. I got pretty bored collecting bombs (why was I collecting bombs, anyway?) But, the goal seemed near at hand enough that I was willing to slog through. The nail DID look painful.
Way to include sounds. Nice details with the backgrounds. Nice sequencing of events. This is an impressive first go at game design. Keep it up! Keep having fun and giving your creation such personality.
I don't see a link to the game. Where is it? I wanna fly a moon!
Aaaahh, it's gaaaaining on me!
Neat graphics style. This definitely took me back to a puzzle game I used to play on Windows 3.1. Great humor too. I laughed.
But... wow. Sheesh. This is a complicated and intimidating game. It's hard for me to embrace this level of apparent complexity given that the reward for success isn't clear. It made me realize how important it is to be gentle to a new player... to give them confidence in themselves as players, and in you as the creator.. In this case, I haven't really had the gradual progression of increasing difficulty to also gradually increase my trust that the game is worth my time.
I thought this was a clever use of the theme and a well done mini-world-simulator. Your explanations of the effects of each of the world components was really helpful.
The pace and lack of options, for me, meant the experience wasn't gratifying enough to keep playing. It actually would have really helped me to see plots of the different levels over time and markings on that plot for when I inserted trees and rabbits... I'm a nerd like that. I also wish the music wasn't so repetitive.
The graphics were excellent and appropriate and I really thought this was an innovative take on the theme. Good work!
I was actually most entertained by the story (though I enjoyed the game too!)
Clever collecting/avoiding game. The fact it happens on a circle is a nice twist (hah, I made a pun!) It was also a touch nauseating.
Good work!
I thought this was a very clever interpretation of the theme. Creative and innovative.
The pickyness of the platforms robbed some of the fun for me. The transformations were an interesting element. Loved the sound. The music and the graphics and the sound worked together really good for a solid mood.
Good work.
Got the alien beat down. Challenging game.
Loved the music and the duckies of dooooom.
I can double jump! Mind-bloooown!
:-) Good game. It was fun.
Cute, addictive, entertaining. Loved it! The powerups and difficulty ramp really make the game stay fun over time too. Excellent work.
Cute game. I enjoyed the music and the graphics were good.
Not very challenging or interesting after a few minutes of play though. That's fine for a casual game.
I feel like such a newb having to google "ZBlorb" to figure out what I was dealing with. Cool stuff!
I made it to Tiny World. Do I win?
Entertaining take on the theme. As a physicist ever never thought about going up to a top quark... I will now.
I thought the use of the zmachine was innovative. But, again, Ima newb.
Fantastic game! Graphics were excellently done as was the audio. I really like your concept.
Darn fun!
Where's the source?
Ah, sorry, nevermind-it's a Jam entry. I was hoping to find the source so I could build the game for mac. Looks awesome!
Haha! Loved it. Great use of the theme. I enjoyed beating down those nuclei with my electron of death!
The sound was cool.
The background was boring. You could have done something interesting there (along with some music) to help establish more of a mood to your game.
Garraaaahahaha! Daggum last stinking orb!
it took me quite a while to figure out why I was dying. The lighting, which does wonders for your overall mood, also made it very difficult at times to figure out what was happening.
The animation was very well done. I loved the feel of the wall jump (though, strangely, it seemed to offer more height per bounce than a normal jump.)
The music was... terse.
If I hadn't read the intro text in this post I would have no idea ho this related to the theme of tiny world. Who knew that the insides of red blood cells provided such hazardous working conditions? I hope they at least have good health insurance.
Nice game and well done.
It's incredible how frustratingly difficult it is to type slight mutations of words that I recognize. Your game was like a research project being executed on my head!
I laughed. I emailed a link to my wife. I thought it was really clever and well done. The music and art go very well and I dig the blowing-away-the-critters animation. Very well done.
Innovation is low because, other than the very clever using-words-to-abuse-my-brain angle... it's a typing game. It's hard for me to label that innovative. Fun and hilarious? Yes! Innovative... hm.
Very solid game, good graphics, good sound, great mechanic. Tons and tons of potential!
But, getting owned by red dots in < 1 minute no matter what I do isn't fun.
Very solid entry.
I loved the music. It was so different and totally appropriate and key to the game mood. It's stuck in my head and, for me, the most memorable part of the game.
The graphics were very clean and appropriate. Nothing was distracting. Everything was on point. The camera work was a very good bit of polish and queue to the player.
It made me laugh. I like that.
Over all, a very good entry.
Ambitious indeed.
Sadly technical issues (horrible flicker) kept the game from being enjoyable to me (OSX 10.7, java 1.6.0_31).
Wow! That was a lot of fun to play!
I love the teleport mechanic and how your level design forces me to discover it and then learn to use it like it's second nature.
Dang this was hard.
The graphical style is nice. I enjoyed your writeup about how you achieved it as well.
Excellent work!
This game was wonderful!
It's so polished and well thought out and FUN!
Wow. I feel like a giddy schoolboy.
The music was good. The audio cues were great. I felt rewarded when I did good things and confident that the game would help me learn to good things. The signs were very helpful. The movement was smooth and solid. The map design was very very good.
I did almost put the game down in frustration before I noticed that I could stick to walls... I'm so glad I didn't.
Wonderful work!
I like the original gameboy-throwback graphics. That was my favorite part.
The one button control is definitely innovative... but also astoundingly frustrating given the puzzles you present to the player. For example, anything involving enemies is a timing challenge but I have no reasonable way to control the timing of the encounter.
Very Innovative, but the single button control coupled with the level design = frustration for me instead of fun.
Clever idea. I felt like I kept hitting some kind of spatial distortion and getting all flipped around.
Physics tweaks would help.
Good idea
Quite a literal take on the theme. I mean... man! This world is small! Like, tiny!
I liked the simple green running man style. Build out the level and tell a story about the tiny green man alone in a giant dark world full of 12 story ladders... or something.
Sadly there's not much here for me to rate. I'd like to say more but there's not much more to be said about a world this petite. :-)
I'll be happy to play again when you continue your work here and I do look forward to the post-mortem.
Loved it!
This is really a fantastic entry I'm very impressed and happy this game was born.
Very polished product!
The ant surfing mechanic is fun and a creative use of the theme.
Best of all, the game made me feel like ONE BAAAAD DUUUUDE. I like it when games make me feel like that. And a bad dude that rides an ant no-less.
It was actually challenging to decide what to rate low... but I felt like I should do that so that I could provide some kind of dynamic range to my feedback. The graphics were great and I felt like stylistically they were right on but could have used a bit more polish. The "pew-pew" sound effects were perfect. The music was good but got repetitive quickly--I would have liked a longer loop.
The game made me laugh. I like games that make me laugh. Thanks!
This is a good prototype of your mechanic and I'd say you have a fun idea in the works here. I think it's worth putting in more time to flesh out a post-compo version. I also hope you write a post-mortem. It would be neat to read about the challenges you faced.
This is a good start.
Excellent idea!
Launched a rocket, read some text, then saw some gibberish on the screen. Gave up and crashed. All in a days work.
Very nice entry. I loved the graphical style and the bird's walk animation. Very polished and complete entry.
After laughing my way through killer carrots and other sundry evils... I laughed more. Thank you for the moments of entertainment.
I liked the art style. It was interesting to read your post-mortem on how you accomplished it.
The music was nice. The sounds were nice.
The dialog was very amusing and brief enough to be read even in the attention span of an LD game ranker!
Good work! I enjoyed your humor.
dr_soda: yeah, the empty hand doesn't do anything. In my devplan it's for unplugging lamps and messing with the light switches. That didn't make it to production though. I agree on the discoverability. I need to do some clever intro level design to force the player into situations that make them think about what's in their bag.
Interesting. I'm glad you made it and I'm glad I played it.
It captured the smallness of the theme almost by making commentary on the smallness of humanity. Or maybe I'm reading into too much here.
Strategically, I felt pretty limited. I'm guessing my goal was to make lots of people and I'm guessing the best way to do that is to cram them together at a food source. But, if that's correct then it's really a test of my ability to click... a bit more breadth/depth in the simulation would make this a much more interesting game. By breadth I mean things like: Kinds of food, people who produce food, food affecting characteristics of people. For an example of depth: when people die maybe people who knew that person don't want to eat where he ate anymore...
What you have, in my opinion, is an interesting starting point for a game and I hope you pursue it.
Love the music. I left your game running for a good while and enjoyed the tune.
Congrats also on finishing the compo with an actual game (which, I define as having a win condition, a loss condition, and some player influenced progression to one of those!)
The controls were frustrating. More than half of the time, when I pressed a button, nothing happened. That non-responsiveness made it difficult to tell if I was making reasonable requests of my vicious red arrow.
I appreciated the strategic component to the game. It took me a while to discover what orientations were effective and why I was getting killed. I didn't appreciate how hard it was to tell when bad things were happening though... I think an animation cue or a sound effect would have made discovering the right way to attach the evil blue arrow much more satisfying.
The theme is really only present in the color-text. There's really nothing tiny or worldly about these arrows. It's also hard to point to a particular mood in the game though the color-text is certainly a quirky and amusing premise for a game--though the game itself doesn't REALLY relate (other than i'm controlling an arrow... i do get that.)
Overall, I was frustrated but eventually entertained and I dig the music.
It made me laugh... first game of the compo to do that. It was pretty intuitive once I realized what things were good and what things were bad.
Poor kittens. They never seem to fair well in these compos.
Great work!
Yeah, that was pretty great!
I enjoyed the strategy involved in deciding whether to hack my way through aliens to get another monolith or to stand back and defend my home. Giving me decisions like that that actually matter to the outcome of the game is what makes this stand out.
Overall, it was a good and enjoyable game. I had fun playing it and dominating the solar-system with my astroids of doom!
The graphics were ver nice. The gameplay concept was original and fun. The implementation was good. The physics felt jittery though... like things were being stepped at the framerate instead of with the system clock.
The music got annoying in a hurry.
I enjoyed playing the game! I think it would make a good casual game on one of those sites that specialize in that kind of thing. I'd encourage you to pursue that if you're at all interested.
I liked it. You may chalk it up to 2 AM level design but I'd say what you have here is a game ABOUT blind jumps (and remembering which one killed you last time.) The infinite retry and restart points are all conducive to that play style.
I thought the graphics were good. The story was lame but sufficient for pulling me through the game. Sound would have been a coolness multiplier. And, most importantly, it was fun. Brief, but fun. I liked the use of the theme in the scaled up and down worlds under the worlds.
Good work!
Good job taking on this challenge!
Nice graphics and way to build a world that kept with the theme and was consistent with itself. I liked it! And, good job giving the player clear goals.
I couldn't help but wonder if there was some deeper psychological joke in your game since you were manipulating the player to want cheese no matter the cost. I felt kind of like a mouse in a maze.
Good work! Keep on stretching to bigger things!
Wow, that was really tough. Very original and innovative. I've never seen a game to compare this to. The graphics were excellent and the audio was very appropriate.
The side to side scrolling of the window wasn't intuitive to me for some reason and was frustrating to have to discover. I lost thoroughly before I found out what was killing me. I still lost thoroughly once I knew... but at least I had purpose!
Overall, to me, because of the difficulty, the game wasn't fun. I think it could definitely be fun with a more gentle introduction and I think your concept is fantastic and has a lot of potential. I'd love to play a post-compo version.
My game if you wanna try it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5044
Loved the audio!
The clicking + keyboard interaction was actually pretty frustrating. My arrow keys and mouse aren't really located in places that make them conducive to being used together.
Graphics were cute and colorful.
It took me a while to figure out how to make moves but once I did (and once I discovered multi-push) it was fun. I liked the audio. :)
This is a really nice little puzzle game.
I'll presume your game is just so astoundingly innovative that my tiny brain cannot grasp its wonder. I don't have a blazing clue what to do.
But, if you wanna rank an HTML5 game, that's what I wrote too!
Nice work! I was happy that the story was both brief enough and interesting enough that I could stick through to the end. I like your random world generation!
And, I'm happy to see a fellow Clojurescriptian!
Darned cats!
Clever.
I wished I could fly over walls (I'm a fly, right?) and get away from the darn cats. The controls were so fast that I had no hope of really diving into my hole to get away from them so once I activated a cat it was game over.
Clever concept. I hope you add build!
Nice work!
The music was super classy. I liked it. It will be in my head for the rest of the day at least. The graphics looked good and the glowing orbs in the foreground and parallax background really added some nice depth. I really liked the painted background. That looked superb! I also really liked the random characters that gave me tips along the way.
You used the theme well. I wouldn't say it was an innovative use of the theme or innovative gameplay but it was a clear use of the theme and the gameplay was complete.
The controls felt slow to me. Somehow that made the experience less adventuresome.
Excellent work! It was nice to look at and enjoyable to play.
Darn fun! Pew-pewing things is just so delightful sometimes.
Good use of the theme. I love the tiny wizard / tiny word / giant friggin huge tower!
The graphics and the sound and gameplay all compliment each other very well. I'd say the whole experience is very well balanced and nothing distracts from anything else.
The gameplay was very good, responsive, challenging, and rewarding.
I wasn't a fan of hitting tab to change hats given the distance that is from spacebar.
Excellent game!
Overall, an amusing game.
The concept of collecting circuit components and using them to open doors is an interesting one. I don't know if I've ever seen a take like that before. It has the potential to be a really interesting little mini-game inside your game. If only I could open any door in real life using only a 2V battery and a ... light thingy.
Good use of the theme too.
For me, (OSX) there was a constant flicker that really hurt the game play. It was distracting and made the experience unpleasant. No points off for that because I'm assuming you had no way to test that. But, the jump controls were genuinely frustrating and the collisions didn't feel right.
Graphics were cute. Sound was minimal but cute. Overall, it's a good accomplishment for 48 hours and a good concept that, I think, deserves some further development time.
Clever use of the theme!
Visually it looks good. The audio and music is good too.
I found myself wishing I could fire cooler looking webs. Granted, I can stay in one place and design an awesome spider web but it won't do me any good since I have to go to the bugs.
I also didn't think birds felt particularly threatening.
Fun, clever, nice look and sound. Good game!
I enjoyed the game. The concept was simple and approachable and it was sufficiently challenging (and achievable) that it held my attention for good while.
I did get bitten by the spawn-in-the-corner bug a few times. I'm glad you gave me infinite tries so the bug wasn't that big of a deal. It was also frustrating to get stuck when I felt like I should be able to just slide by a block.
From a theme perspective: I felt like this game complied with the theme really only in its color-text. Otherwise, there really wasn't anything about it that was convincing me that this world was tiny.
All of that said, it's a fun game and something to be proud of! Thanks!
Yeah, you set an amazing mood in this game! The graphical style and the audio go together fantastically well. Very nice ambiance. A new gameplay concept (you ARE the slime mold... slime mold tower defense... tower climb on slime molds...) and you'll have something really noteworthy here.
This world is anything but tiny! Wow. Big map.
This is very nicely polished. You guys did a really good job making this a shiny product. Well done. That's no small feat.
The mechanic was unique and fresh but aged poorly. It needed to be spiced as the levels progressed. The difficulty ramp was good with the increasingly challenging patterns... but the interest ramp was flat since nothing about how I would accomplish the patterns changed.
So, what if some stars moved left and right or up and down. If I incorporate them into my drawing then I win once they achieve proper alignment. This forces me to think about more than just points as I draw.
What if I had the ability to create 1 star. Now I have to imagine the picture but with a missing point that I can insert myself. Potentially a big difficulty spike.
The music loop was too short--I think--at least, I was annoyed with the music within a few levels.
The graphical style and cohesion was fantastic. Your presentation on all levels was top notch. Well done.
Mac users: The windows version linked in the comments works great on Mac under Wine. This rating is based on using that.
Worked flawlessly! Loved the graphics and your polygon painting style. The explosion when I crashed my ship into an asteroid was simultaneously beautiful and maddening.
Good, responsive control and I enjoyed the arcade feel and being constrained to the XZ plane. Nice done.
I wished that impacts with my ship felt... chunkier... or something. It was hard to tell when I was hit and I was surprised to look up and wonder where all my health had gone. It'd be nice if my shots felt chunkier too.
Very nice work. Is Omicron your engine? I took a quick scan through the code and was impressed with the cleanliness.
This is good game design. The interplay between your mechanics shows it. You have a difficulty ramp (I'm growing slower and there are more beasts as I consume potatoes), a short term goal (lay an egg), and a longer term goal (live forever through my offspring?) And, via the death of the parent, you have something of a level progression since I get to be small and fast again in this more-hostile world.
Your outer loop (survive forever) could use some more interest sprinkled in as time goes on. For example, at each new generation or so, the squeeps evolve (and so do the beasts.) After I've laid my egg, there's no reason go continue with that generation since I can't lay another. You could let me lay more eggs to get a higher stat next generation or you could just force kill me after I've laid my egg. The "don't eat potatoes too fast" mechanic didn't really add any value or interest. I'd remove it.
Your graphics and sounds are appropriate and cohesive. Your controls feel good.
Good, simple, fun, solid entry. Well done.
Wow, great puzzle.
Incredibly frustrating to get started. I wouldn't have even considered pushing through if I hadn't seen the strong comments and your invitation to ask you questions in chat. Well done.
My biggest gripe is that it doesn't tell me how close I was to the time. The only feeling of progression I get is from watching my health but I don't want to do that because a number could appear at any moment.
A little polish would have gone a long way also. Just a bit of styling and better feedback. It's amazing how addictive simple concepts can be if they are communicated well.
Solid puzzle game with fun levels! I quite enjoyed my play of this. I stopped at level 14 because the challenge/satisfaction level wasn't ramping fast enough. I think a few more block types adding flavor to your 30 levels could have pulled me through. The yellow block certainly added value once it appeared.
Your progression (what I saw of it) was very good. You taught concepts and then explored them. I was never left thinking a level had a bug (because it ramped up the difficulty too quickly.)
Very solid entry.
Love the art style and some of the music. Gameplay ended up being a pixel hunt for me (probably because I was missing some critical piece of understanding of what my purpose was.)
This is nicely polished and well done. Silky smooth at full screen. It's cool to see people using browser tech at its best. Good job.
This is good. I'm shifting my perspective as I rate this game. With the hat I normally wear while rating games, I'd say something like "Appropriate art, nice music, but it was frustrating to go pixel hunting and there's no reason to play it again."
But, lets put on a different hat for this game. This game is an experience. It's a message. It is a point. Why should it have replayability? Once the point is made, its made. Why was I frustrated by hunting pixels? Because I hadn't seen the point yet. The game gave me time and let me find it on my own.
You folks have just made a game that excels at communication. That's important and rare. We/I tend to value games for more vague feelings of experience or excitement. Yours told me something worth hearing and was clear, concise, and well executed. Good job.
Quite amusing. First I won in 5 steps... and then I played and played trying to beat that stupid monster. You've manipulated my emotions!
Looks neat! Wish my platform (mac or linux) was supported!
I would have tried it if you had a mac or linux build.
Holy cow. This is like the essence of survival horror condensed into a one screen fragoff. I love it. A slightly better musical choice could make this insanely atmospheric and creepy.
This is a very good idea. I'm a fan.
Minimalist? Hm. Well, you really distilled this to its essence and got rid of the fluff. I'd say that's minimalist!
I loved this game. Seriously. Not just being nice.
The mood (as established by the 2 color graphics, simple shapes, pretty music, smooth motions, satisfying swishes and clicks) was superb. It makes this game shine. The puzzles were well designed and appropriately challenging. I've saved a bookmark so I can come back and go through all 20.
Very nicely done.
Cute. I was entertained. But, game locked up after the 3rd warning and I had to restart (and wait through the intro again.)
It felt good to smash through walls. Relieved some of the angst of getting clobbered by a speed block i never saw coming.
Good level. I kept playing. The voice in my head pulled me through because I wanted to know what would happen next. It gave a narrative to your game... made me form a relationship.
The gauntlet was maddening but you'd already established the quality of the game so I was willing to push through. That's rare for me (I really value my time) so you did something right.
Graphics were clean and appropriate to the theme. Music was appropriate as well.
Good work.
This is slick. The simple and beautiful layout and typography really make it. I enjoyed it.
Yeah! Nice work. Love the different challenges and the general feel of playfulness. You did good work.
Nice work. The feel of shooting and popping the enemies is great. Good kinaesthetics. The sound fits. The color transitions work well. The game has a really nice feel with player motion being the only exception. Movement feels sluggish (forces instead of impulses, perhaps?).
So, astroids + lunar lander actually works quite well and I enjoyed it. Controls felt good. The game was smooth and felt good to the touch. I think the balance would have been improved by adding a little bit of missile command (lose points when enemies hit the surface.)
Overall, Nice work. I found it to be well assembled, clever, and frustrating as heck. But, I blame it on my own lack of spatial memory and not the game.... way to point out my faults!
Graphically, nice. Sounds are appropriate. Good game play idea (even though I dislike it personally). An accomplishment. Well done.
Thanks for the mac fix!
Like the music and the colors. I want me one of those heat-seeking cannons!
Gameplay is simple. Well done for what it is. I find myself wishing for more emergent behavior. For example, what if there was a powerup that the center cannon rapid fire oneshot things. That'd be cool but I'd have to decide if I was willing to deal with the rain of shards. What if my scoop could grow? What if there were shards I didn't want to catch? What if I had to make sure my cannon was powered by some resource?
As it is, not much gameplay can emerge beyond what is explicit. That's fine but it's a limitation.
Good work.
I thought that this was a beautifully polished game and a clever use of the theme. I didn't catch the building bug though so the mechanic became tedious for me pretty quickly.
So... I thought that, being a shadow, I was supposed to provide my services to the things on the screen that were missing shadows (like the cat.) Then I encountered decisions where both objects had a shadow so I just picked the one that looked the friendliest. If both were missing a shadow, I chose the cat. Consistency must be worth something. Turns out that makes me 100% nice and nothing else.
Now that I know what's going on, this kind of reminds me of the conversation with the gypsy that you have at the beginning of most of the Ultima games. But, this is way more abstract. Should I give a shadow to a beer or a cat? Hm. I don't think either care much.
I think what we have here is a case of dissonance. The mechanic (moving a shadow) and the game itself (making a value judgement between two abstract concepts) are incongruous. They don't make sense together and, i think, that's why the game itself doesn't make sense in its current form.
That said: I thought the media elements and presentation (minus the dissonance) was well done. The graphics fit together well. The fades and menus and non-square shape of the window all gave it a sense of polish and thought. The shadow control felt sluggish (but that's not very important.)
I'm of the opinion that a game should create an experience or communicate a message. I think you were going for the latter and I think the message is the message that a mirror tells you. That's a profound and worthy goal and I don't think this hits it yet.
This was a really interesting and innovative idea. When I read the instructions my first thought was "this will never work"... but then it did. It was actually not that hard to move both characters at once. It was really hard to remember which character responded to which shift key because I was constantly flipping their order.
The enemies are really predictable and not very interesting. I actually think the game would be better if it were turn based instead of realtime.
Very clever idea. I may borrow mechanic at some point and try to flesh it out a bit.
Simple and humorous. I played it through and will play again. Nice touch with the high score list and the commentary as you play.
Nice work. The graphics were good. The sound effects were nice and the music was nice for a while (but its repetitiveness was ultimately the reason I stopped playing.)
Great concept. Very original and innovative. I constantly was making interesting tactical decisions to deal with either the eminent threat or try to position myself more generally for the typical threat. That's a pretty neat bit of thinking that emerged from such a simple mechanic.
Well done. Good use of the theme and nice polish.
Very terrain modified motion mechanic. It turns what doesn't look like a puzzle into something that feels fun, tricky, and kind of like a puzzle. You should build on this!
I laughed when I hit the red terrain. You taught me instantly how it worked by the way you designed that puzzle and my approach and you did it without frustrating me. Well done.
The music was good. The graphics need polish (I think a more careful color scheme and more consistent dimensioning of objects would do the trick.)
I'd love to see the interplay of terrains in this game. Also, would love to see objects that push but don't kill. Those could combine into some interesting scenarios. Objects that I can push that also interact with the terrain would be very interesting.
Well done. This is cool now and on its way to something quite cool.
Very complete entry. Love the touches like a tutorial and a level-select level. Very nicely executed. My obligatory complaint is that I feel like a teeny tiny pixel should be more floaty and less thunky. Like... the wind should blow me around. :)
This is a beautiful game... it's been said already by many reviewers but that is my strongest impression. The visual impact and curb appeal of this game is fantastic. Your use of the visual aspect of the theme is really top notch. The paint stroke edges and splotchy background really fit. You are a master of polish.
The level design made me laugh on several occasions. The colors totally fit together... in all, very pretty.
But, there wasn't much emergent fun to the gameplay (though, I definitely did go back and try to bash as much as I could... and ended up stranding myself. There's emergence through environment manipulation!) I think some additional elements from breakout and mario could have really enhanced the spice of the leve progression.
For example: A powerup that gives multiple balls (amplifying my destructive power but ultimately forcing me to choose which one to save.) Variation from the terrain would be interesting (super bouncy blocks... low bounce blocks...) There's really no difficulty progression in the game itself, though the meta-game (bashing blocks) provides no end of self imposed difficulty. It's a good game I think you've found a good place where you are and you may find that the additional weight of would direct in-game variety would ultimately distract from the meta-game.
Well done. I enjoyed this. Also, I greatly appreciate your support of the community. I almost certainly wouldn't be here if it wasn't for your encouragement. Rock on.
You made something indeed! Way to post it in spite of what you think of it.
You know what would totally rock? If you wrote up a killer postmortem for this and described what you think went really well and what didn't go well. What were you shooting to achieve and what prevented you from doing it? The exercise would help you do better next time and would help your peers as well.
A failure, properly responded to, is a fantastic opportunity. Go for it!
What a great idea to build puzzles on! And what expert puzzle design! I thought the tutorial puzzles were very well done and that the difficulty ramped appropriately. Nice work
I think mimicking the NES style was an appropriate interpretation of minimalist and you made a fantastic looking game!
There wasn't enough here to hold me past a few levels since I didn't see any new mechanics or twists developing but the polish here is very bright. You've done well.
Love it. Feels good to bash my spaceship into potatoes every now and then.
Controls feel good. Music is nice and appropriate. Good fun.
The controls were innovative but frustrating. All of my deaths were due to me not being able to efficiently communicate my intentions to the game not a lack of character ability or lack of cleverness. That's unfortunate.
Good theming and execution. Nice polish throughout. The signposts were a good way to teach the game concepts. This is well done.
A polished, complete entry, and an achievement. But, sadly, the controls ruin it for me (though, admirably, the controls support your theme well.)
You have a good mechanic here. I think you've demonstrated that it could be built into a fun game and you've got the raw material here to achieve that.
I loved the color mixing but I found the puzzles to be pretty obvious and uninteresting. I think it's the fault of the puzzle design, not the game mechanic. In this case, I found that there was a pretty obvious path through the maze and I just had to keep running and splashing through whatever I happened to encounter.... not a lot of thought required.
Reducing the number of wash stations would force me to plan my moves better. It would be fine if I got stuck as long as you gave me a way to reset. I saw some areas with so many colored exists that it looked like you were just trying to make it impossible to be stuck. That's kind of you... but not very mentally taxing on me.
As you flesh out this game, consider playing with patterns in additions to colors... maybe there are red and blue striped doors. Maybe the side of me that gets colored by the puddle depends on the direction I run into it. There are opportunities in your mechanic to gradually introduce a lot more variety in your levels.
Also, music and sound need attention. The music was dreary and there really wasn't sound. And, it took me a while to realize I had won the game. You could score me on time and display a win screen but I think it would be more interesting to score me on the number of times I washed off.
Hope this comment is helpful. You did well. I enjoyed your game. You're on the short list of games that I've beat for this compo.
This didn't work on mac. Here's the error message: http://pastebin.com/xmrEAfs1
I've seen this before. It's an incompatibility between an older version of lwjgl and Java 7 on mac. To fix it just drop in the latest lwjgl native library and you should be good to go.
Mono on my mac couldn't handle it but it may just be me. Has anyone else had luck with this on a mac?
This is the most fleshed out attempt on the one button flyer genere I've seen (is that a genre?) Good work.
But, as no fault of your execution, I think you've shown that there just isn't much gameplay to be found in the one button flyer. The enemies added tension but were also just frustrating because I had no real way to evade them... I could only soak up their damage. The turrets also added tension but they couldn't hit me anyway (and if they could then they would have been insane resource sponges.) The only resource I really have is the shield and even the most expert flying really has no effect on that resource's consumption (though expert flying does GET me more shield.)
The visuals are quite good. You really executed this well. I'm impressed. Take my comments as "you dug a fantastic mine... unfortunately there's no gold here."
Loved it and kept playing and playing. 15 is my best so far.
Lots of great little details in the minimalist graphics that make this work. And the cause-of-death adds a feeling of connection to my abstract character. Fantastic.
Love the concept but also found it frustrating... conflicted? I know.
When I teleported I couldn't tell if I had completed a level or lost somehow. The sense of progressing (or regression...i'm still not sure) wasn't there to pull me along and keep me playing.
The music that played in response to what I did was brilliant. I look forward to reading your postmortem.
You certainly made me laugh aloud with this one. Well done. Final boss was hard (I thought). This game reminded me of arguments as a kid. "Who would win if it was flipper vs batman?" Obviously, batman.
it was hard to see certain "controls" because of the lighting and i gave up before I discovered any sort of progress-toward-the-goal mechanic. Without having that mechanic, the game feels binary. Either you're perfect or your dead with no guidance towards how to be more perfect.
Excellent puzzle mechanic. Like, seriously, great. You needed to ease me into it a bit more gently because I almost wrote 'only your first level is beatable' but once I figured out that one block could go through at a time I understood. Very creative.
I think this would be fantastic without the 10 second timer or without the punishment of having to start over (pick one to remove).
Good graphics, appropriate audio, and good use of narrative to set the mood. I was in a rush to connect pipes to save my very life! Sadly, i lack the reflexes necessary to see much of your game. I can tell by the screenshots that I'm missing a lot and that makes me sad... I'm not quick enough with a mouse.
The window size ruins it, obviously. It's pretty hard to get over that flaw. But, good platformer controls (I think, anyway... assuming that pixel really was doing what I thought it was doing). Very very challenging. I didn't beat the level. I liked that the urgency of the music told you where the timer was. That was a good touch.
Great mood. I jumped or got chills at various appropriate times while playing the game. There were some technical/art issues (seams where your verts weren't welded properly) and the very low lighting was a mixed effect. I think you could have achieved an even scarier feel by letting me see more of the space but using the space itself to hide more (curtains, desks, spaces between walls that i see going through doors, etc). Somehow, the absoluteness of the darkness made me feel more safe. Aaaaand then a ghost got me.
I thought the audio was good and this game definitely made me chuckle.
Merciless is an appropriate name for this. The speed of mouselook was incredibly frustrating to me. I don't have a lot of the fine motor skill it takes to use a mouse effectively in situations like this so it was pretty hopeless from the start.
I did make it through about 6 levels. The moving platforms worked like magic (in a not entirely complementary way... i really have no idea how they worked... i just kinda got on them sometimes and not other times).
So, overall, an impressive technical achievement for the given time and truly a complete game (which is another huge achievement in itself), but for me, not much fun.
Your post on the main page made me realize that I didn't really communicate the things I did like about the game:
1. It is complete! That's no small feat as we all well know.
2. There is a since of progression and the level difficulty ramp is appropriate. I liked how you first taught me about switches and then hid the switch from me.
3. You didn't skip sound! Everyone ends up doing that, which is unfortunate because the sound input to our brains is really high bandwidth and a huge part of our overall experience with a thing.
4. You used a player skill mechanic. Meaning, I personally have to improve as a human (not as a virtual character) to progress through your game. That kind of mechanic really appeals to me if I have the base ability I need to get started.
5. You used the 10 second timer effectively. Even when I was frustrated (and eventually quit because I didn't feel like I was capable of controlling the player adequately) I felt like my goals were just a little bit out of my reach and that I could probably achieve them if I kept trying.
"Rimmer, you dolt!" Nice work and way to finish. I think your game design suffers from a similar problem to mine: lack of player agency. By that, I mean, it doesn't feel like there's much a player can do to influence the outcome of the game. I love games that, even if they kill me all the time, always leave me realizing how I could have escaped the situation. Your game kills me all the time and leaves me thinking "Friggin Rimmer."
Very entertaining. Like watching a great prank unfold. "Problem. Solved." Great humor, 5 stars on innovation and fun. I laughed and had fun.
You've seen graphics complaints a few times now, let me be more specific: I think the interface design concept is adequate (though the layout is a bit busy) but the pixelated low-color art juxtaposed with the perfect antialiased text feels bad.
A very strong entry. I agree that pacing is the weakness here but I suspect that it will be a matter of letting the player advance the action or detecting when the action should advance and not finding some magic length of time for the transmission. I do think that 10 seconds worth of commands is more than I would ever want to record so, if you do want to stick with theme later, I think I'd use the 10 seconds for "10 seconds of fuel" or "10 second delay between stick and robot (which I'm not required to wait through)".
The mechanic is fantastic. I actually haven't seen this one before. Very creative and enjoyable. It was fun to try to hone my predictive skills so that I could estimate what a quarter inch of burn on the timeline would translate to in motion.
Love it. Good example of an indirect control mechanic done very well.
Glad to see you're getting a lot of positive feedback. I personally found the controls to be so maddening I wasn't willing to continue past my first reset (at level 4). Neat idea and I'd say you executed it very well... I just get angry when there's that much indirection between me and what I'm trying to manipulate. I wouldn't do well in politics.
Very amusing stuff and good use of the theme! At first I thought I was taking a some kind of behavior test... like I was Pavlov's dog... then I read the instructions.
Wow. You've taken frustration, purified it, bottled it, and given it to me and told me to like it. And, strangely, I do! Is this stockholm syndrome?
So, i thought I had finally figured out how to ace the pit when i zoomed too far with the mousewheel and flipped the world! Yeah, that doesn't work... Couldn't read the sign that said how to change node types so I had to get creative.
One of my highest ratings so far. I love your core mechanic and the gameplay works out to be really fun. Great work!
I think the strengths of this entry are its graphics and its overall sense of mood. Incredible work! I do agree though that all of the assets on the screen should match each other in style and quality unless you're trying to create a visually jarring effect.
The narrative interstitials help to set the mood and give context to what you're doing -- and I think it's actually the particulars that context and how the gameplay interacts that is the games greatest weakness. See, I'm some uber-knight (who can't swing a sword worth beans because the sword always points at my mouse cursor instead of responding more directly to my mouse motions) who is slaughtering cute little creatures and saying "sorry". The ability you did give me to impact the world (through my sword) feels clunky (again, because of the way the mouse works) and isn't the impact I want to be making on the world. The way I would like to interact with the world (banding together the jellies and taking on that jerk liege of mine) isn't an option.
Very enjoyable. Played the game for a while and chatted with the author on IRC. Simple, fun, turns all the right audio/visual feedback nobs that arcade games use to make you feel happy. Well done.
i was amused by the chariots of fire humming. Does the jar ever open? I admit, I gave up.
Very entertaining and very impressive technical work in the time constraints! And, the assets and sound and feel is quite cohesive! Way to make the team thing happen so effectively.
I am the Ultimate Thief!
It's pretty impressive to see a stealth game that works in a compo like this. I enjoyed the experience. There were times that I wished that i could just outrun the guards but their amped up speed when I have the safe really helps to drive home that this is a stealth game.
5/5 overall. I think the graphics were perfectly adequate but were the weakest part of the game. It's strength was where it mattered: this was fun! Nice work.
And, thanks again for livestreaming my game. That was really enjoyable and informative to watch.
Way to not break your streak! Nice entry and clever idea. It didn't have much staying power with me but it was a few enjoyable moments. I'd say that's quite good for an LD entry and very good for an "over the atlantic" LD entry.
Someone should start an in-flight gamejam!
Quite ambitious! I was able to dodge my way through the first 25 levels (basically avoiding all items and enemies... "is that a spellbook? no, it's trying to kill me!"). Somewhere around 25 I suddenly got "Bad Ending". I'm guessing that someone I never saw just oneshotted me. Sad.
flipping nuts and totally great. I actually beat this game. Very creative and well executed. I loved the sense of progression with carl and the compass. The mood is very well done.
Wonderful! Love the intro "story" and the use of the theme as a mechanic. Very nicely done and enjoyable.
The game crashed on me when I took the north path at the first cross (after I had gone east and ran back screaming "oho noes!")
Wonderful! My favorite so far. Here's why:
* Music and graphics worked together to create a mood that I thought was perfect.
* Controls were quirky but fair and played perfectly with the mechanic of walls causing you damage.
* I was expecting to just smack my "other half" and be done with it but ended up needing to dance for a while. Made me chuckle.
Wish I could have played more creative / moody things from the same mind that brought me this first "level"
Technical quibble:
* Wish i could restart without refreshing
Yesssssss! Felt great to break out DOSBox. Wish I still had a proper old school box and CGA monitor around to experience the full glory. Wonderfully executed. Laughed at the end... I assume that was the end.... hm...
Music was wonderful (and contextual!)
Graphics were evocative and brought back great memories.
You took one of my favorite things about adventure games (time to think and consider my environment while relaxing) and totally through it out the window. The result? 5 stars for mood!
Lots of points for graphics and audio (though my heartbeat did sound like a geiger counter). The art was really pretty great and you did a good job of establishing the mood.
Not sure how this relates to the theme and I didn't think collecting goodies in the dark (or with finite timed light) ended up being much fun. There wasn't really a sense of progress.
Haha. Love the style and interaction. Very amusing.
982! That's good, right?
Fun game. My favorite of the mini games was the cats in the house. That's what I ultimately lost on. The animation there was part of the challenge whereas it was just polish on the other puzzles.
Loved the line-art style. The physics were great and it was fun to watch my truck fly around helplessly. In the end, I didn't feel like I really had much agency and I felt like the random number generator was really in control of the game. But, I still certainly had fun.
So frustrating! Very unclear interactions. Controls are unintuitive.
Huge points for graphics and sound (though your legal situation might be sticky).
Wow. Wow.... Wow. This is total brain dope. :) It's still running and I'm eagerly awaiting my opportunity to get a ... red blob thing so I can get $14 per arbitrary time unit.... I've been totally skinner boxed and my brain likes it.
Great music, sound, graphics. Disturbingly effective psychology... makes me feel rather like a primate.
I am now deeply ashamed to report that I have made it to humans!
Nice graphics. I'm guessing the intent is a bullet-hell evasion game? I wasn't very successful at it but hiding in the corner seemed to be an effective strategy.
If that's the intent then the game feels pretty unfair and hopeless unless there's some way to buff or protect my player other than dodging things that almost oneshot me and appear and shoot very quickly.
Very impressive work! The audio, graphics, writing, and mood were all superb. I died and died and died and laughed each time I found a new way to die. Frustration never felt so good.
Very emotionally effective setting/theming. Good use of the the theme word also. Music and graphics were wonderful. I felt genuinely sad when Zoe was killed. I'd stop and kneel and just wish she'd come back. Very emotive and well done.
I thought the level design (or perhaps generation) was pretty dull. It didn't really add or take away anything from the game so I'll call it more of a missed opportunity than a wart.
Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Art, animation, mechanics... really loved it.
I wouldn't have stood a chance without your walkthrough but it combined well with the on stage cues that other characters were giving me. I see how this could have stood alone.
At a more meta level: I really like this interaction concept. Really owns the idea that the player is playing the authors story in a way that most games try to hide.
Well executed. Played great. Loved the blood splat when some hapless diver was in the wrong place. The sound made me chuckle. Well done.
The way the screen blacks out as I'm running out of air was a great cue and added some nice tension to the game as well.
Serious and well executed. Lots of stars.
Definitely unique. The judges are amazing.
Insane, frustrating, darn nuts... and it kept me trying and trying and trying (and failing) because I wanted to know how I'd be insulted by the judges or the game next. Well done!
Appropriately dark. Well done.
The music was neat from a technical perspective but got irritating in time. My ear is always searching for a pattern so its absence is disturbing... though I guess that fits the theme of the game.
Had 4 bad endings and 1 extra bad ending. Guess I'm a scumbag!
Good graphics and clever idea for a game. I didn't feel like I could impact my situation enough to really enjoy the game. Perhaps the schmup idea of a super weapon could apply here to buy the player some time to get their bearings or get out of overwhelming situations.
This is very polished for an LD entry. Even a proper tutorial?! I'm very impressed.
I played the web version and couldn't figure out how to control my character. I tried arrows and WASD and mouse. Once I crashed into the wall the game stopped and I had to refresh to try something new. @netguy204 me and I'll come back and re-rank.
@thewustache This was fun! The weakest part of the game were random move heavy monsters because the goal of waiting for them to suicide wasn't very interesting. I'd advocate full determinism in a game like this. Remove M and J and add 'jump towards, jump away, move orthogonal to the player, mirror the player, opposite mirror the player. It would be cool to have buttons and cards that only monsters can use so that I can try to manipulate them further.
I'm impressed you got the camera/mouse controls working together as well as you did. They were awkward but intuitive enough that I could generally achieve my goal. When I lost it felt fair: Like i could have avoided it with more careful planning. It would be interesting to see some variation like wedge shaped gifts that need to stack a certain way to be stable or goals that you want to build a tower of gifts to reach.
This made me laugh at each of my stupid mistakes. Looking forward to trying with another player. When picking up a block it would be nice to have a visual indication of which block will be removed. I ripped the floor out from under my own feet quite a few times.
Beautiful animation! So nice, smooth, and well attached to the ground. Great game concept and execution. I encountered a few unwinnable environments. Very impressive accomplishment.
I was happy to fire up a gameboy emulator and try this out. Thanks for putting the time and heart into building for a retro system. This played well.
I had a lovely time murdering (or aiding in the reproduction of) tribbles. Nice pacing. Eventually the difficulty exceeded my dedication (level 7) but that's not your problem. Your level design taught me what I needed to know as I played. Good design.
Installed metamask in Chrome and getting an error in the console when I load your game: ``` Uncaught (in promise) Error: CryptoCult has not been deployed to detected network (network/artifact mismatch) ``` @netguy204 me and I'll come back if you fix it.
@dyn Lol. RTFM. I'm in.
Managed to get an exception in the smart contract. I picked the middle "pro crypto" option and manually set the gas price so my transaction would get through:
Screen Shot 2018-08-14 at 12.14.42 PM.png
I had more fun knowing that a LD entry was a smart contract than actually playing this game. If I could give you 10 stars for doing something just flat technically cool I would.
I liked the pencil art graphics. You stuck with that aesthetic in a way that made the whole game hang together nicely. The clickboxes were frustrating for me. I often didn't grab what I thought I was grabbing. Eventually bags stopped moving and I realized I could bag the off-screen bags by just tossing stuff to the right. Overall: neat concept, good graphical execution, physics need polish.
@darkguardsman oops, i managed to submit without the link. This has been fixed.
@katie-dover Awesome! That's exactly the sort of feeling I was shooting for. Great!
@bloc97 @roidz This could definitely use a tutorial or at least a little slideshow talking you through the interface and how the pieces interact. Thank you.
@matank Thank you for the feedback. I agree that the icons are hard to distinguish and not terribly memorable. Maybe something more abstract (circles, square, triangles) would make it easier to remember what sorts of stories you're hoping to publish.
@inworks Yes, quite lacking in sound effects and this is such a huge space for being clever! The post jam version will address this.
@tony-li Fantastic idea. Working on that now for the post jam version. Thank you!
@evan-charfauros I love this story. I'm glad the balance and mechanics of the game work well enough to have created this experience for you. One of my post-jam goals will be to tune the randomness and balance so that more people can have an experience like yours.
Thanks all for the comments!
Thanks @theslate !
@gamescalation :smirk:
Screen Shot 2018-08-15 at 7.37.12 AM.png
http://www.50ply.com/ld42/game.html
Could you post a walkthrough video or some more instructions? I've read the explanation and I'm still stumped. I'm placing things. I think I'm setting input/output but nothing changes to indicated that. Eventually happiness depletes and I run out of money. Has potential! @netguy204 me and I'll come back and take a second look.
I really like the concept here. I think I'm bouncing off the interface UX. My next iterations would be some quality of life things like highlighting the paths that are available between a building's supply and demand to help telegraph the goals to players. If carriages remembered a sequence of stops and could show me their path then I could make better decisions. I think these things make the game more interesting because they reveal enough that I can start to think about the implications of my choices. Right now I can't get past the first layer and the implications of my choices are surprising and hard to learn from.
Loved your choice of music. Once I understood my weapons I was pretty effective--circle strafing like a boss! I liked your use of the theme. Power ups would occasionally render behind the background (bug, I think). Overall: strong execution of a solid idea. You could grow this by changing up shape of the environment (shapes other than circles) or perhaps the feel of the environment (hole in the middle sucks you towards it). Nice work.
This is a very well designed puzzle with levels to show it off. It was the right length for the number of moves I had. If you choose to expand it I'd next introduce a change-up of some kind like a different kind of environment tile or something that manipulates the overall tile state. This is a good, complete, solid entry. Well done.
Graphics are cool. If there's an end I never found it. Good job building this. It's a bit of a lillypad hopper and I don't have any advice to move it meaningfully beyond where it is.
Cute! Visuals were nice. I lost my first round and won my second. I wish my win felt more like a victory and less inevitable (I only lost because I didn't understand the controls). I think making bubbles more sparse or smaller as you proceed could help ramp up the difficulty and make it feel more like winning was an accomplishment. Nice work!
Smoked me some grims! The lighting established a strong mood. I loved the character animation. I didn't enjoy running around and getting mauled by grims. If you do a post-jam version @netguy204 me and I'd love to check it out.
This is extremely ambitious for an LD! Mind blown when I dropped into that first person perspective.
That was cute and well executed. I like how you worked with the theme and how the challenge scaled. Well done.
Visuals are a consistent and high level of quality throughout the experience. Sound and visuals set a strong mood. Controls are responsive. Animation is fluid. You've pretty much nailed all your technicals. Well done. In the end I didn't enjoy doing the activity the game asked of me even though the experience was delivered in top notch packaging.
Dang... that was tough and I'm a good typist. Nice work! Visuals were nice. Appropriately challenging. I feel like I earned my score.
:boom: This thing oozes style! Beautifully done. Once I understood the goal I felt pretty awesome whipping around in my little scaling ship. I think something to change up the pacing from time to time would be nice--like, suddenly there's more drag or suddenly everything starts tending to the right. Something macro-environmental to help mark time and progress through the game.
I don't understand how this fits the theme but I don't care. This was obviously a work of love and should exist. I'm glad I got to experience it.
@laurim this is one of those works that just *should* exist and who cares on the theme. Well done. But, I agree: It does fit from that perspective.
Beautiful aesthetic. I really struggle with the last level. The pattern wasn't entirely consistent which ultimately made that level feel unfair. I eventually got lucky and made it through. Well done.
Clever use of the theme. Nice music. Clever shrinking world mechanic. I wished for 'tighter' controls so that I could feel more like "I'm an awesome spaceship" and less like "i'm dragging something around on a string." :video_game:
This was more fun than I would have expected from the elevator pitch. It had a meatboy feel to the difficulty: Brutal, memorization heavy, but fair and lets me try again to avoid my mistake the next time.
I did quite a bit of embarrassing laughing in public as I played this. Dropping those jerk minivans from a shrinking bridge was just too much to hold my stoicism. Excellent work. I'd love a light bit of physics so that I could clip the corner of a van and send it spiraling into others. :boom:
Beautiful art and composition. Great use of the theme.
Can you post some description of the controls? I clicked (right and left) the plots, the food, and the people and nothing discernible happened. @netguy204 me and I'll come back and rate.
I loved the colorful descriptions of each guest. Neat concept.
The elevator music made me smile. I understood the mechanics pretty quickly without explanation. I found the controls to be the most challenging aspect of the game which ultimately made the experience frustrating.
Wow, tough as nails but not unfair. When I lost (which I did constantly) I didn't feel like the game was cheating me--I felt like I hadn't mastered the skill. Ultimately I stopped early because I wasn't willing to master the skill but that's no negative on your game.
@htmichael Depends on your goal. I could also see doubling down on that difficulty and finding a way to make the small victories more sweet. Maybe shorten the levels and juice things up a bit. I think there's a definite place for tough-as-nails platformers.
THIS is interesting! I've never seen this set of mechanics (with any theme on top). Is it unique? I played against myself and ... well ... won, I guess. :smirk: It feels like there's enough of an interesting game here to grab a friend, sit down, and try to hone a set of strategies. That's the highest praise I can offer any LD game. Well done!
Hey BiG bro! I loved this! I think I made it to the end and became emperor (the game stopped... win? crash?) I loved how the story shot me forward through time. The music, setting, and writing as delightful at each stop. Great work.
In the end, skeletons were just a weird way to skin bullets. I wish you had played more with the idea of them being animate objects. For example, if they used pathfinding to attack the closest entity, including me, I could build a giant mob and kite them into baddies.
This was fantastic. I have an ongoing epic battle with my son, and much trash talk ensues. This is great fun. Thank you.
I spent some time confused with the info button depressed and thought the game was broken
@cogcomp thanks. I know the cause and will fix it post compo. Till then it's fun to exploit by packing L1 with treats by reseting to restock (you don't have to die to reset).
@ravernt you actually have to beat all the levels with your starting allotment of 10 treats. But you're my second tester to perceive that as a bug so it's probably bad design.
Thanks @argensis, I look forward to building levels that play with the mechanic(s) more.
@perfectsquare: Thank you. I liked that aesthetically but worried that it was confusing. It's nice to hear you read it that way.
@byazzle: I think the next obvious mechanic is repulsers like something startling that pushes the raccoon away. A stretch would be thinking about ways to put the attractors and repulsors into motion (slide a donut down the banisters or something)
@rakowu and @gabriel-bissonnette: thank you. I'm grateful you tried it!
Screenshot 2024-04-17 at 9.56.54 PM.png It did not go well... and I loved it. Clever use of the theme. The music was unwelcome by the 3rd wave.
That boss just gleefully whacking the button. I love it. It feels like a push-your-luck mechanic is waiting to be explored here. Like higher-scoring multiples every time you push the button.
Such a beautiful entry, but the gameplay lets it down (as far as I can tell.) My first run ended stuck in a well (with a lovely water splash effect), and my second run had me with no frog spawns left, and the frog I had spawned was irretrievable.
I couldn't pull off any of the slashed through summons on my trackpad. There are a LOT of mechanics going on here. Honestly a bit overwhelming.
I won and I flippin loved it. Initially, I didn't think it mechanically "worked," though with each win giving you more currency. But then I realized I could create a strategically advantageous line of slimes (tank in the front, archers in the back), and it clicked.
That was wild and fun. I loved how thematically appropriate it was for my followers to be dying en-masse as i navigated a narrow bridge.
I got smashed up bad by lightning head. Great game! I enjoyed combining my summons. I wish the game had telegraphed more how the skills / stats compose. I'm glad it showed me the combined result on hover but I feel I would have been more in control if I knew how to predict the impact of the combinations (like colors and shapes were important somehow).
Took a while to figure out but we got it. Great graphics for a compo entry. Clever use of the theme. Controls felt floaty. Combat with initiates felt indecisive.
LOVED IT. I read the captions aloud with my kids and we all laughed. I didn't realize that things were speeding up until they crushed me. I wish the scale up was somehow smoother which I think means starts sooner and progresses slower.
Got a score of 1051 and was proud of myself till I read the comments. Very fun game. Great polish.
i loved the motion in this game. that level of control is impressive for a compo entry. Things didn't feel totally tight.. i wished i could change direction faster. Great job!
Very solid survivor-like. The UI didn't sell me on how raising the stakes helped me so I didn't. If there was a very visible multiplier pressuring me to press my luck more it would help.