Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → notgreat
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Feeding Words | compo | 726 | 3.22 | 3.00 | 3.27 | 2.72 | 2.35 | 1.90 | 2.14 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Space Shooter | compo | 461 | 2.80 | 2.54 | 2.95 | 3.37 | 2.80 | 2.02 | 2.32 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Bullets of Insight | compo | 198 | 3.61 | 3.90 | 4.30 | 4.26 | 2.71 | 3.02 | 1.77 | 2.90 |
Short, but effective. This has a level of polish rarely seen in 48-hour games.
I wasn't a fan of the control scheme- WAD+mouse works fine, but pressing J then requires either stretching the left hand really far or taking the right hand off the mouse.
You'd definitely need some more mechanics if you wanted to expand the game further, but I think this was just about the perfect length for what you have now.
Pretty fun, but it was annoying how making one super-squad was so overly powerful (if a bit slow). Having the Fog of War show revealed terrain would've made it much easier to know where I've been before, I got confused a couple times as to the overall structure of the map.
The healing wand weapon is kinda weird, it seems like the optimal way to use it is to pick it up, walk away for a few minutes, and the grab your old weapon and continue onward. This does not seem like a good idea, and it's made especially annoying by not having the health bars shown while healing. Does the healing affect other squads? I didn't actually test that.
I had a follower get stuck on a block sometimes and needed to loop back to get him to pathfind around it. One time I got a guy trapped inside some blocks (at the corner of 4 different blocks) but I'm not actually sure how he got there.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rules (they weren't clearly explained), but it seems to me like the best strategy by far is to just pump all your points into one category (bold/aggro for example) and just always pick that. I could definitely be misunderstanding how to effectively use observation effectively, but I really need clearer rules to know what to do.
Also, it doesn't really seem to fit the theme. You start with nothing but a bunch of points, sure, but those points let you build a reasonable deck at the very beginning so I don't think it works.
The MOV command runs way too slow, the turn SHL/SHR commands are nearly instantaneous (too fast)
The pusher cubes seem to visually glitch out for a frame at full extension.
Deleting all your code if you messed up is annoying, and overall more normal text editor would probably be a much better interface than a stack.
The complete lack of any control flow or interactable parts makes it so there isn't really much challenge to the actual gameplay part.
I like the basic idea, but I think you needed a lot more time to make it good.
An interesting idea, but I can't really classify it as a game... The blob also looked really weird when doing self-intersections sometimes. The background audio was affected by the speed of motion, which was a very nice touch but sometimes caused the background to sound really strange... like an audio track that was skipping or something. Not sure if intentional or not.
I pretty much won by accident. I figured out how to deposit crystal and built a 2nd auto miner, then just made a couple bots from a single factory. By the time I figured I should look at what's to the right, I had almost won.
The most challenging aspect was the odd momentum of your character.
This was a very ambitious project and has potential, but needs a lot more content and strategy to really be interesting. I did like the graphics though, great job on those.
I liked the idea, but I didn't find the actual gameplay fun. The biggest issue is (as others have mentioned) that player movement is not precise: when I let go of the button, I shouldn't continue moving for a half second and then suddenly stop.
The bullets pushing the player around was also really weird, as were the bullets being pushed around by your counter-bullets. Like you had a physics engine built in and wanted to use it for something for no real gameplay reason.
I really liked this one. It has some significant UI problems, the difficulty curve was really bad, and level 10 is impossible, but overall it was an incredibly solid entry. I loved the humor in it especially.
II liked the game overall, but I don't think shooting asteroids is the right concept for this idea. Properly clearing an area is best done by basically sitting still and continuously shooting everything around you. Making it so that you lose all your modules (except for 2) once they get hit makes it really hard to justify going anywhere with any sort of speed, especially with the weird controls (no turning friction especially)
When I picked up a 2nd booster modules, things started getting weird. I had accidentally picked it up on the reverse direction of my primary booster which meant I couldn't actually control the ship anymore. After I detached the 2nd booster, things started getting weird and it acted like it was still half-connected. After re-attaching it my ship started spiraling out of control and basically blew up (I then collided with some asteroids and got reset to the basic ship)
One of the better games I've played so far in the jam, even with the lack of audio. Excellent graphics style, though I wasn't a huge fan of the darkness effect in terms of game-readability even if it did look pretty neat.
However, I have to question how it fits the theme. There is an element of collecting upgrades and the gems, but I don't see that being aligned much to the theme.
"Return" should have a larger hit area. I apparently wasn't hitting the 3rd level's hitbox until I jumped. I also found the swinging to be weirdly slow, especially with how much hang time it gives if you do a swing while mid-jump.
Pressing "n" apparently goes to the next level and doing so in the end room crashes the game.
Reasonably fun, but most of the levels you just always have to start by disabling all (or most) of the zappers, and having a global lives system where you have to lose life to continue doesn't seem fun (and it seems like you agreed and gave way more lives than needed)
I don't get how it fits the theme though.
Interesting idea and fits the theme reasonably, but everything is too slow to be dangerous, and blocks are way too expensive for what they do (combat with the enemies directly on an open field is too easy). The player also moves too slow, as it gets quite tedious waiting sometimes.
I'd recommend making the enemies deal less damage but have a lot more of them spawn. Sometimes I'll go a whole in-game night without seeing a single enemy.
I also suggest including a little blurb at the shop about what the items do.
When I died the game froze and the enemy sound effect played on loop, that doesn't seem right.
I liked the idea a lot, but playing it just felt weird. The complete lack of any momentum in the character's movement and the very slow speed of your bullets likely contributed to this feeling, along with the player being quite large making dodging annoying (though not too hard since the bullets move slow enough)
Also, I couldn't figure out how to deal with the fast moving teal/blue guys who shoot out a shockwave. I can't get away from them fast enough and they damage me before I can kill them. Thus plus the seeming random spawning of enemies sometimes having them spawning right on top of me made me give up after a couple failures since I didn't see how I could improve on those aspects.
An interesting idea, but had major UI problems that became impossible to deal with on the first level where you need to swap the words. The text box covered the words that needed to be swapped and I couldn't click on them. See image below. You likely have a mix of resolution-specific and resolution-independent values that are becoming broken on my screen.
bug.png
It seems like the AI/reproduction is way more powerful than actually doing anything on your own. Despite that I was quite enjoying it until it crashed on me (after closing the upgrade menu). I was using the 1.01 version.
Decent, but I felt like the genre combination didn't actually add anything to the genre: I just had to remember to press the "Feed" button at a semi-regular rate, keeping the pet just above starvation level. It feels too much like a skeleton of a generic tower defense game rather than an actually fun game in and of itself. The tower defense genre thrives on its content which makes the lack of it a major problem in terms of entertainment (even if it's entirely understandable given the time constraints).
The art is well done. Not my personal style preference, but it does what it's trying to do well.
Great graphics reasonable audio, though I felt like the song didn't quite fit the feel of the gameplay. The story slides at the start were hilarious.
As for the gameplay, I found it to be good, but not amazing. I was quite annoyed when I found out that putting the robot on top of the laser doesn't actually stop the blast though. The non-grid movement of the world was quite annoying when paired with the explosive blocks, though I'm not sure why I found those significantly more annoying than the acid pits. The randomization seemed acceptable, good for adding replay value but very inconsistent in difficulty.
I enjoyed the game's puzzles. It was kinda funny how every cable+3 was a trap.
It's hard to say much about since the game itself is so simple. I feel like you needed to have a few more interacting mechanics if you wanted to make it longer, but the game was short enough that it didn't get too repetitive.
It took a minute for me to fully understand what everything did so more explanatory text in the tutorial would probably be appreciated, but it wasn't really a major issue. The simplistic graphics were clear and unambiguous, though obviously could've used quite a bit of fancying up.
I didn't really enjoy the gameplay. It was incredibly simplistic: choose the right power and click. There's no real decision making, and nor is it an engaging reflex challenge. The need to click a dozen or so times to destroy the flamethrower tanks was annoying, but without that the game would've been even easier and it was already pretty easy.
Perhaps the hotkeys were the issue? If I had to go back and forth with the menu it'd be annoying but there'd be at least some challenge. Maybe if the flamethrowers came from both sides and the planes came from all angles?
The art was certainly unique- I'm not sure if I'd call it good, but it was attention grabbing and it wasn't bad. The song fit well, but the lack of any sound effects was noticeable (though the sheer repetition of doing the same action so frequently is potentially worrying)
The game has major technical issues: left clicks often didn't register, and the game started lagging horribly if I tried to use the arrow keys to move the screen and once the main blob got large.
The gameplay of figuring out which towers needed to be on or off at any given time was reasonable, but the technical issues made it an exercise in frustration rather than the fun that I think the premise holds.
It doesn't really feel like the game hits the theme very well- you're building up the towns rather than trying to keep them alive.
715 my first try where I made smaller towns, 1051 my second try when I went with one giant wall (and then a smaller 2nd one with the extra walls from the first). I think that all landmarks should provide points every turn, with towns/towers just providing more. Not showing the whole map at once I think was a bad decision, particularly horizontally where there's a half-tile's worth of scrolling space.
Overall a fun game with some interesting decision making. Good job!
This is amazingly polished. The actual gameplay I found thoroughly mediocre (acceptable, but the whole element-combination thing felt like just a really awkward way of forcing me to memorize how to do which moves) but the graphics were amazing, the sound appropriately fitting if a bit repetitive and simplistic, and the fact that it included a complete story (if a simple one) is just amazing.
The windows loading cursor was weird, but not really a problem.
Unfortunately, the game seems to freeze within a minute of starting to play for me and I need to use Task Manager to close it. I tried 4 times and each time it froze at a different spot, but always very quickly. As such I have not rated it. Sorry!
I found this game simple but fun. I wish there was some other thing to do though, just moving the mouse around felt simplistic even though it's quite challenging to aim and block appropriately.
Having the difficulty spike right at the end of a long level is really annoying, since I have to fight through all of the relatively easy parts just to get one more chance at the hard part. Perhaps if each wave was its own individual level that'd feel more fair?
The UI in the center was for some reason placed behind the planet, making the wave progress bar less useful and the success screen almost completely unreadable.
@sinci1 That looks very different from what I was seeing. I tried it in both firefox and chrome, it happens on both.bug.png
I liked the idea, but the teleportation mechanic and inability to self-collide made the game feel really weird. The enemies spawning could've had a telegraph- I died a few times due to running near the wall when an enemy snake spawned in and colliding instantaneously.
@actyl @marcin-godzina The words become red as they're consumed which sort of acts as a timer but I agree that something clearer would've been better. If I had more time I definitely would've added an audio cue. Thanks for the feedback!
Oh, and Actyl: I don't know half the words I used, but highscore.png
And I'm sure it's possible to go far beyond that with the right power ups and a better eye for longer words. If you care, I used the word list at https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/blob/master/words_alpha.txt
@turkey The letters turn red as they're consumed but yeah, it should've been something more obvious.
@actyl Nice! You are now officially better than the developer! (for now...)
I just recently fixed a crash bug. It was happening when the tile randomization gets really unlucky (the exact maximum result causes it to try to access the 27th letter). If you redownload the executable, the crash should be fixed.
@testlab Oh, yeah, word games with time pressure are painful for nonnative speakers. I'm not sure I quite get what you mean about the difficulty progression though. The game does get continously harder as the letters get eaten faster and faster until eventually you're guaranteed to lose.
I felt like it needs more complexity. I got to wave 10 before quitting and never felt like I had any hint of a challenge. If I typo'd a word I'd maybe take a bit of damage but I could just spam heal and thus no consequences.
If the game added another couple meters like oxygen that drained at varying rates or maybe introduced resources like ammo and a RELOAD command that could get the panic rising which leads to more fun gameplay, but as it is I found it too easy.
Nice graphics and polish, reasonably good audio, and a very neat idea that perhaps needed more content to get interesting.
The game was interesting, but I didn't really find it fun. needing to repeat what I already knew worked to get to the part that I didn't know got annoying fast. My largest trouble was with the ladder- at first I didn't realize it could cross the river since I tried it while below the water, and after that I thought that I had to get on top of the pump to use it.
It fit the theme very well, but I just didn't find the game that interesting. Reasonably balanced, but not being able to just do a simple undo was incredibly annoying.
I also several times missed the end/death text since I was already using the arrow keys to make my next move when I realized I had actually died. Having a dedicated separate restart key (usable at any time) would probably be better.
I liked the game overall, but as others have mentioned it gets pretty repetitive and is a bit too easy overall, and once you get to 5/5 difficulty you keep growing in strength whereas the enemies stay the same. Overlapping the different enemy waves would be an easy way to continue power growth (eventually ending once there are more enemies than can killed or dodged).
I really liked the editor, though I'm pretty sure one of my body pieces disappeared when I placed it down. Not sure how that happened.
I liked this game quite a bit. At around 100 VP/day 60 though, the required amounts starting becoming impossibly high at an incredibly rapid rate: I'd need so many storage bins to get that high that it just wouldn't be practical. As soon as you fail one, the blight costs so much to prevent that either it spreads quick and you die, or you fail the missions and get blighted and have no money until you die. It's possible there's a mushroom strategy I missed (since that lets you get money by selling the mushrooms) but there doesn't seem to be the time/space necessary for that strategy to take off.
I didn't read the itch.io description, so I had no idea what the controls were for playing until I looked a second time. It'd be very useful to have those listed on the ldjam page as well (preferably they'd be in-game, but that can be harder)
As for the game itself: it seems like it has some interesting potential, but none of the puzzles ever really puzzled me. It was funny watching my soul fly away if I recalled it while falling, and I was really expecting that to be a major mechanic since it seemed to trigger the soul detectors as it flew by them.
The graphics are pretty good, though I'd suggest making sure that the background is clearly distinct from the foreground- there were some background purple tiles that looked like they might've been actual blocks.
Amazingly good atmosphere, but I found the controls to be very problematic. They felt laggy, and first-person platforming is always something inherently hard to get feeling right. The lack of any coyote time (or at least that's what it felt like) was particularly noticeable, particularly paired with the strong aerial mobility as that meant that the best way to jump from a small area was to do a vertical jump and then shift+forward after having left the ground which just felt incredibly awkward.
I found it kinda funny how only the arm+lantern cast a shadow and there was no person shadow, but that's not really a problem.
The cooldown indicator is horrible. Using the same indicator for casting time and ability cooldown would be acceptable, but the casting timer overrides the cooldown on a percentage basis rather than a raw time basis, leading to very misleading periods where I thought the ability was ready to use but it actually needed a few more seconds.
More than that, I'm not sure if this is a bug or what but the game seems impossible without the pause button. The cooldowns continue to tick down while the game is paused. You can't heal so it's not perfect, but it seems like that's the only way to output enough hp/sec to survive this. Using that felt like cheating, and without it I managed to consistently get to the E ability before dying. Also the explanations really need some words: it took me a while to figure out what the 3 ability did (heal over time on that character) and I'm still not sure what exactly the W and E do though I can guess based on context.
Overall though an interesting game concept that seems like it has some good potential, but needs some balancing and explanations to be actually fun for me.
I really liked this game. There's a few balance issues (draw-3s are ridiculously OP, Beam is by far the best weapon) but it was a fine blend of the two generes in a very interesting way.
The sound effects got a bit repetitive though.
I really enjoyed this game. The graphics were simple but effective. The sound effects got a bit monotonous/repetitive after a bit though. The early game was an interesting dodge-em-up with {T}s, then once I started getting more {C}s it became an idle game. Then once I got a {U} it was all over.
I would've liked to know what the {X} and {U} were going to do before I placed them, but all in all a very solid entry.
An interesting idea, but the lack of music in a rhythm game just doesn't work at all IMO.
The integration of the card game was interesting. It has potential, but there weren't enough of them to really make it interesting. Several of the cards were nearly useless, and it felt bad to get the same weak card 3 times in a row. That being said, i did find several of the cards to be fun, and the first time I got the laser was awesome.
Which brings me to my next point- it was far too easy. I got bored before taking a single point of damage. As long as I went for the cards which let me kill things better, I was able to keep the enemy count down enough that it was easy to dodge everything.
Also, the only difference between enemy types seems to be their hit points and the points you get for killing them. They even look identical! This made it feel like there wasn't any progression aside from the score going up.
It was really weird how any letters typed would apply to all words (even if you're in the middle of typing something else) It'd constantly be throwing the "wrong letter" sound at me because I was typing the wrong word.
It was interesting how the whole thing was a metaphor for texting while driving, but I didn't like how it just kicked me out of the game to do that.
This is a fine rhythm game, but I really don't get the combat part. I got that the health goes down when I miss/poor, is damage based on my combo or something? I don't really see how it combines the genres at all- this seems entirely a rhythm game.
Also, it was hard to keep the lane-finger mapping for some reason. Perhaps add a gap between the 2nd and 3rd lanes to simulate the keyboard separation?
Great graphics and style overall, but I didn't find the gameplay fun at all. It's basically a 5-item rock-paper-scissors, and that means that the "choose randomly" strategy is effectively unbeatable.
There's probably a bit more to the battle system that I'm missing, but I just didn't find it interesting to play.
This was interesting, but I don't think it worked very well. Once I figured out how to exploit the AI a little, there wasn't any part of the game that challenged me. While the time constraints were undoubtedly harsh, the lack of any complex build decisions from items/level ups/whatever meant that there wasn't anything that required me to think past the start (when I hadn't yet figured out the AI)
Amazing graphics/mood/audio coming together in an excellent horror package, but I just wasn't finding it fun to play. I'm not sure if I was missing something obvious, but the heavily restricted vision which added so much to the horror theme meant that if there was any puzzling I wasn't able to really notice it. I just went around hitting the pillars until the path seemed unlocked.
A very interesting game, and a very different take on the turn-based bullet hell than [my game](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bullets-of-insight).
The graphics and audio were simple but effective, and I very much enjoyed it.
Sometimes, when the screen got busy, it was hard to tell which squares were safe and which weren't. It would've been nice to highlight all of the square that the bullets were *going to be*. Also, making clicking both aiming and moving felt kinda bad, sometimes I was just a little off and moved when I meant to shoot (and the vice versa). Being able to make all clicks aim and using arrow keys/WASD for movement would've been nice.
In addition, starting from the beginning on death is very annoying.
It was an enjoyable game, but it wasn't very engaging. Once I got used to the controls (took a couple minutes) it was far too easy.
The graphics and audio were both solid, though I would've preferred a bit more differentiation between the plants ready to harvest and the stage before that.
Lowering the bomb spawn rate wouldn't make the game harder, just longer.
Enemy variety would probably be the way to go but yeah, time constraints are definitely a killer. One thing I noticed was that the game got easier as you killed more portals- having stronger/harder enemies start spawning then would probably help make the difficulty go up rather than down as the game goes on.
This was a pretty interesting game. However, 1) The whole game felt laggy. A combination of input delay and slow gravity meant that controlling the character wasn't problematic but never felt 'right' 2) The boss gave me no indication that I was dealing damage. I thought that I had to do something specific to get past some invulnerability, but no, I just had to keep shooting more. 3) After taking the upper route and completing one more level after that, I got stuck inside the walls. This ended my playthrough, as I couldn't figure out a way to force a restart (and then I fell off the edge and went past the bottom of the screen)
Very neat, but it also had a few things that were so annoying I eventually gave up:
1) Tight turns sometimes eat my inputs. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but when making two turns one after another sometimes the second turn's input doesn't seem to happen. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it's definitely annoying. It's likely I'm not inputting it quite correctly, but it's still extremely annoying, especially combined with 2) resetting to 0 hp on death. It'd be very nice to make it simply restart the room on death rather than resetting my hp to 0. It takes quite a while to build up to 20, and when I don't really know what everything does, experimentation and failure can be VERY expensive. 3) Lack of information. Tying in with the above, there's no text describing what various things do. It took me a while to figure out I was supposed to ram the diamond door once I picked up the diamond key thing (especially since it's placed at the back of the snake) and I still am not quite sure what all the different items do. Especially since getting the items takes quite a while, and you only can use it once.
This game has a lot of potential, but the small annoyances just added up too much.
An interesting idea, but the handling on the car is terrible, which made the game nearly unplayable to me. The weird turning acceleration meant I was constantly crashing into walls, and it seemed to me that the optimal strategy was thus to just camp out near the entrance, turning in circles and kill as many as possible as they spawned.
It was pretty fun but as others noted, the shooter part is woefully underdeveloped. Still, a solid rhythm game overall.
I did run into an issue where if I was slightly off on pressing on a repeated chain, the bar would take out 2 arrows at once, which obviously messes up my later presses. Also, the ending is kinda weird that your ship just shoots forever as pixellated color blobs rains down.
Unfortunately, I found the game interesting but rather unfun. The game was very slow paced, and being able to get the pieces stuck on corners just felt bad. While the grid-based nature is necessary in some ways, it also made it hard for me to intuitively grasp the way physics/indirect control worked. Having some way to show sub-grid positioning would be very useful.
The sound effects I found more annoying than helpful. I'm not sure why exactly, sorry.
The scoring system also seemed strange. While the basics were obvious, there were all sorts of strange edge cases that I didn't seem to pick up. I'm still not sure what exactly causing an orbit until the piece disappears is worth, though I did notice that sending a piece past the edge of the screen is -2.
An interesting idea, but the RTS part was.... strange? I'm not sure if it was broken or what, but the enemy never did anything, I could take over every planet with either my ship or by sending a ship unit. There was absolutely no challenge at all in that part.
The sound effects also sounded... human, I guess? Like a person was trying to make the sound effect rather than the sound itself being a thing.
Thanks for all the compliments!
@Potondo I probably should've included this somewhere, but you can press escape to return to the main menu at any time (or quit while on the menu)
And yeah, it's hard to do proper balance testing on this sort of timeframe, it's probably a bit too hard.
@HuvaaKoodia I did include a stage select option for exactly that reason. Was it not working for you?
Yeah, music was procedurally generated and then slightly tuned manually. I definitely focused mostly on the gameplay, and didn't get around to replacing my programmer art (48 hours really isn't much)
Thanks for the criticism.
I ran into a strange issue where enemy shots would collide with either my ship or my shots and then would stop moving, just staying on the screen. (When colliding with my shots, my shots would also stop moving)
Also, you definitely needed to have a sound effect when the ship gets hit. I sometimes lost lives without even noticing. This wasn't helped by the acceleration/deceleration of the ship making it feel hard to control.
It doesn't really "feel" like a card game. The SHMUP part is basically a normal SHMUP, whereas the card choices don't have a lot of the things people would usually associate with a card game.
That being said, it was pretty fun. Great artwork for a game jam!
Interesting, but I got bored far, far before it got challenging. Ramming my head into a wall to release a turret is a very... unusual method. I didn't like it.
Due to everything moving along the grid it felt bad. Having smooth motion would make it feel a lot better.
The first boss was definitely too hard, once I beat that one it wasn't that hard to beat the rest.
It was fun to play, great job. However, it didn't really 'feel' like a bullet hell. It felt like I was constantly circle-strafing and using cover, neither of which are really bullet-hell gameplay at all. An excellent platformer/boss rush though!
Very pretty graphics and good soundtrack. However, I had a lot of trouble actually playing due to it being hard to tell where everything was. Being able to rotate the camera or something would be nice, at the very least making it clearer where the ball is. Far too many times I fell off the edge due to miscounting how many steps I had taken/had left in the jump. it was also often difficult to figure out where the enemy bullets were going to go.
I also had some weird lag issues, but that's quite possibly just my machine.