Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → orangeoceans
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | Last Writes | jam | 65 | 4.12 | 3.58 | 4.32 | 4.63 | 4.20 | 4.05 | 4.19 | |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | 👥 | Crystal Tower Luxogenics | jam | 468 | 3.41 | 3.43 | 3.68 | 2.47 | 3.06 | 3.31 | 3.02 | |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Eat the Moon | jam | 427 | 3.65 | 3.52 | 3.27 | 4.27 | 3.22 | 3.50 | 3.40 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Pataspawn | compo | 3.42 | 3.50 | 4.07 | 4.35 | 3.78 | 3.64 | 3.25 | 3.58 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Infinite Square Well | jam | 345 | 3.80 | 3.23 | 4.53 | 3.66 | 3.93 | 3.96 | 3.65 | 4.20 |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | Cracken Cargo | jam | 99 | 4.13 | 3.83 | 4.07 | 4.40 | 4.50 | 4.43 | 4.13 | 4.10 |
All of the mechanics are really fun and layer well together! Also, I love the hatch animation. My only complaint is that the pressure/depth mechanic wasn't very clearly communicated, so the inventory shrinking was a little mysterious at first.
I like the spin on color matching puzzle games, and I like the idea of choosing to spend money on upgrades vs a new level. However, the camera and climbing are a little cumbersome and I found myself struggling against the physics by level 3.
There should definitely be more Wario Ware-likes! I liked that the in-game text were all missing spaces. It's a nice touch.
The way this game lets you brute force your way through puzzles without even knowing how you did it, then delivers epiphany after epiphany *retroactively*, is actually exhilarating. I cheered, more than once, in real life. It's the same feeling I get when an equation finally clicks, halfway through a homework set. It's like a movie full of foreshadowing that you only understand on rewatch. I've never really played anything like it.
I got stuck on level 25ish twice. While I agree that replaying a level would be a nice QoL fix, it's also pretty rewarding to go through the early levels again with full knowledge of how they work, so I don't mind that you made me trek all the way back!
I'm usually really bad at these puzzles, but I managed to beat all of the levels, so I think the difficulty curve was pretty well designed!
I think it's a really promising idea! I can imagine if you added an upgrade tree in a more fleshed out version, they could interact in some interesting ways.
The format reminds me of FMV games (without the video of course). Personally, as with FMV games it was a bit hard for me to sit through the monologues, so I found myself getting distracted, but I can see the format really appealing to someone else.
I appreciate that there were no right or wrong answers in the end, or if there were, this wasn't spelled out by the game. The open-endedness is very effective.
It's so fun and addicting and I am so bad. Couldn't get past tier 5 despite trying 5 or 6 times.
I think what's really difficult is that the tiers' crystal thresholds increase nonlinearly, but I could only increase my crystal output linearly. So while the tier 5 threshold was several times higher than the tier 4 threshold, I was setting up crystal production at the same or even slower rate as before -- existing lines of crystal pushers only ever got in the way of new ones. Even if I acted faster, the math would eventually catch up to me.
It's very possible that this is just a dandori issue on my part though! I'm curious if you were able to set up crystal pushers in a way that could scale up nonlinearly?
It's a fun game that brings back memories of playing flash cooking games on Kongregate. Also, I loooove that the main menu looks like a food menu. However:
[Where's the beef?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FZNYXKHwNw)
It does get a bit annoying when there's nothing I can do except wait for some beef that doesn't come.
Choosing upgrades by placing buildings is a really cool idea and I'd love to play a polished game based on that concept. I'm not convinced that the fire rate upgrades do anything here though.
Wow this is amazingly polished. I don't know what I'm doing but as long as the algae go pop I'm happy.
I thought this was pretty charming! The cauliflower and tomatoes were a bit hard to plan around since their shapes changed, especially after I have a few sprinklers up. At one point it became impossible to place the cauliflower I bought, but maybe that's just part of the risk in investment.
It's fun and adorable! I'm curious about what ideas you might have had that were left out, that might add some extra strategy. The upgrades system in particular seems like it has potential for a lot of depth and flavor.
It's a fun game :) I don't play a lot of bullet hells so I don't know if this is a typical mechanic, but I liked the tradeoff between firing speed/movement speed as you hold down Z.
Although, I was unclear about what the bubble size meant. Is it just a visual indicator of how long you've held down Z?
Accidentally made Todd Howard eat a planet :( Is that how we got Starfield?
This is kind of addicting
I think this combination of mechanics has potential but needs some tweaking. For instance, adding the ability to slam blocks down would be fun.
I like the polish and the voice sfx are pretty funny. Gameplay-wise, it seems a bit too easy to just build a flat surface leading to the goal?
@real-flamingicecubegames Oh that sounds cool, I'll give it another try then!
It's so tactile! Crushing blobs is just so satisfying. Almost meditative.
Whoa this is so cool, and so polished. I might actually play this with scrabble tiles IRL.
"The average person swallows 13 scrabble tiles a year"
This is true.
I was unsure about the scrubbing mechanic at first, but it turned out to be delightful. It reminds me of a WarioWare microgame.
I wish I could play the version with the screen constantly covered in trash! What were some of your more egregious ideas?
@chitoyuu niconico comments would be such a great addition. I can imagine a flood of them blocking the screen whenever you merge a big number, wasting your time limit.
Everything about this game is so stylish! I also love the reversal of the jumping mechanic after getting the spring. It's so hard though, I can't get past the first level up after getting the spring (with the big swirling wave). Is there a trick to it?
Oh haha maybe we made the forest too hard to find. I've added some of the harder to find coordinates to the post, in case anyone wants to just read the dialogue.
~~Oh no, it seems like the forest texture isn't actually loading properly on the web version. It seems to work fine on the PC version though.~~ The issue should be fixed!
@fireslash Thanks for playing anyway! Yeah, the next thing we would've added, if we had time, was a bookmark feature to let you save locations and more easily recover.
@chitoyuu Thank you! If you mean the Siren/Vinny quest and the Dogs quest, yes those are the only two we had time to implement.
@sylvic @croze Yeah, it was definitely a challenge to think of ways to make the space navigable.
The intent was to have a few lines that stretched out from each key location; you go from the crow to the city following one of the city's lines, then to Sgt. Salt on another of the city's lines. The same goes for the forest. I guess in the end we didn't communicate this very well; maybe we should've stated this directly?
I think if we were to develop this further, I'd like to incrementally add dials as the player finds new locations, rather than giving access to all of them at once.
Another consideration is that this game is pretty dependent on color perception. For instance where Sgt. Salt says to go to where the screen just starts to turn purple, some people have told me that what I see as purple, they see as blue. So the colors need to be adjusted to be more obvious, or color-based hints need to be thrown out altogether.
Thanks for the kind words and feedback everyone!
@lovewerk Those are all good suggestions. We'd thought about using some sort of shape/pattern for Sgt Salt's directions rather than just "purple" but I ended up wanting to use landmarks that were part of the static itself. I think if we flesh this out in the future, we'd use shapes/patterns for most directions except for things intended to be secrets. We'd also tweak the gradient so it would rely less on really subjective interpretations of what purple means.
I think it's possible you came across one of the "lines" that were diagonal? In that case, to focus it you'd have to move in two directions at once, whereas turning any single dial would make it fade. I can see how this can be very confusing since we didn't explain it, haha. Or maybe we just made it too stringent.
@bill-marcy Ooooh, good point about mixing up dials. That's the sort of QoL problem we wouldn't be able to spot on our own.
This is so cool!! I thought the mad libs were fun but I gasped when the battle began. I would definitely play a more fleshed out version of this, with increasingly absurd enemies and abilities.
I love to slide, and when I get the timing just right between slides, that's such a nice feeling. Also, the game over screens make each death delightful.
I've been looking for fun bureaucracy 'em ups since Papers Please! I think this has a lot of potential if expanded. My one criticism is that the window is a bit too small; I know lack of window space is kind of the point of the game but it's so small right now that it's a bit discouraging after level 1. (Maybe that's just a skill issue on my part)
@rob6566 Thanks! That HP thing is actually a bug, where enemies were doing way too much damage. It should be fixed now!
@josemwarrior Yeah that seems to be the consensus :( If I have some time this weekend I'll slow it down and add a drum beat. I guess rhythm games are hard to balance in 48 hours!
@fusionnist Wait that's incredible. The wall of enemies is definitely a bug I can't believe you managed to get so many of them!
@maissa @thefruckets @acerohode @kscerri Thanks for reporting the exterminator minigame bug. Unfortunately we can't reproduce it, as it seems to work fine on our end :( We've decided to disable the minigame for now in favor of just a flat -50% population penalty.
@martingonn Thanks! You can colonize other rooms by selecting the "Launch Expedition" option in the actions panel, then clicking on an uncolonized room. If "Launch Expedition" is grayed out, you need to unlock it via the "Infinity and Beyond" social advancement.
Extremely addicting. Am I just bad at the game or is attack almost always preferable to status effects?
I love puzzles where you have to figure out the rules, and I think your game pulled it off really well. I found it very satisfying when at the end of world 1 I finally figured out what it meant when stars turned green. It makes me wish the later mechanics continued to grow in mystery, if you develop this game further!
fusionnist, you always have the most polished entries. The gamefeel is super impressive for a game jam submission.
The weapons variation was fun, though I managed to beat the boss just by spamming everything I had. I wonder how players might be encouraged to use weapons more strategically?
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong? I've pushed a ball onto each of the four targets here, but nothing happened. Screenshot 2025-10-12 030747.png
Apologies, I forgot to set it public!
Thanks for the comments! Enemy HP scales exponentially whereas tower damage very much does not, so I'm curious which wave you all were able to make it to.
I'm curious what content you left out due to time constraints, as it seems entirely complete! In particular I thought that it was a good choice to end the game before actually coming out. It felt like anything else would've undermined the long buildup. There's a sense of liberation no matter what They might say in response.
me after my 9m tower collapses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJDNkVDGM_s
Interesting concept and great aesthetics! I think a fun way to build on the concept would be to vary the environments more, add some more enemy types, and add some other abilities for the player character, as combat felt kinda rote after a few rooms.
It would be nice if the door puzzle was related to time in some way; it's not obvious that it's relate to the hourglgass on the floor.
However this is a really cool proof of concept! I'd love to play a fully developed metroidvania/puzzle platformer with these mechanics.
The path is a neat little iteration on Unfair Flips. I'm excited to see this genre develop, like clicker games after Cookie Clicker.
Really really cool idea. I love how this plays with the usual Metroidvania mechanic of forcing you to unlock tools to explore new areas. Whereas it often feels frustrating to come across a gate that you know you can't enter until later, here it's possible to attempt to navigate before you unlock the color. Do you have any plans to make this into a full game? I can imagine tiles having properties beyond color, and different colors unlocking different combat/movement options.
I think I got softlocked? The last thing Himari said was something about chiptune.
I feel as if I've been spurned by a lover. 5/5
It's very visually striking, but that also make some parts of it hard to read. For instance, the jump recovery countdown wasn't really legible until I squinted at the boat. I'm also not sure which walls can be hidden behind, or what torches are meant to do. I wonder if there's a graphical glitch displaying shadows incorrectly?
I had to get my wife to hold me because it was too scary
I can already think of so many unique ways to use the mechanics you've developed here. In a fully developed version of this, I think it might be better to introduce players to challenges more gently, with a slower increase in difficulty. Everything before the part introducing the big red circle obstacles felt trivial (though interesting), and the red circles felt extremely difficult.
It might be possible, however, that I need to git gud
I love the dithered aesthetic and it was executed really well. I wish the clicker could've been more integrated with the rest of the gameplay. I had expected that increasing click power/autoclick would make time speed up even faster, or increase training rate, or something? But the simplicity is nice too
I might just be bad, but it feels like the SOS is too big relative to some of the wave features in the last level. I find myself getting it stuck in valleys even with the frequency at the lowest setting.
I'd be interested in seeing a gameplay video from someone better than me!
@ausstein Ohhhh I see now that I'm just bad at the game! I've been flatting out the curve after going downhill, expecting that if I then went back uphill I would lose the momentum I gained. But it seems like I actually should be increasing the amplitude again, to make a bigger jump?
5/5
I am not sure if the choices have much bearing on the outcome of the game (if it's ever possible to prevent Javert's suicide), and I appreciate the ambiguity. I was concerned that allowing too much flexibility would dilute the original work's themes, and I think you balanced it quite well. The Law, Class, Rank, etc options were great at portraying Javert's ambivalence. It didn't seem like I was piloting him, but only that I was exploring the various contradictory aspects of his psyche. I haven't played many visual novels, so I don't know if this is a new approach, but it's certainly effective.
If there were more minigames and affixes, I feel like I could play this for hours.
This is very cool. I had a similar idea at the start of the jam, but didn't pursue it due to the difficulty of implementing a communication system like this, so I'm really happy to see that someone managed to do it. Can I ask how the squid parses our input? Is there a list of combinations it's listening for specifically, or is there something more flexible going on? !> I managed to interpret all of the words in immersion mode, and fed it the fried egg, but I'm not sure what to do next. It seems like it's asking me if I am broken?
@paulsams I'll give it a try!
I'm impressed myself that I managed to figure out all of the words in immersion mode, but on the other hand story mode seems way too easy! I love it when puzzle games let the player figure things out on their own, and I think this is quite well executed, with just the right number of hints.
It's also rather brave to make a game like this for a game jam, where players have shorter attention spans and quit easily. While there's definitely room for polish, the ambition more than makes up for the flaws, so this is one of my favorite LD59 entries just for that reason.
I feel like the accuracy of both the player and enemies is too low to do much strategizing. All I can do is mash attack and hope for the best.
This feels like a promising proof of concept. If it was elaborated into a full game I would definitely play it!
Thanks for the feedback! We've added a walkthrough to the game description if you need it!
Thanks for the glowing reviews everyone :)
@drainkid It's a good point. Tuning the difficulty of the puzzles and the number of lives was a real challenge. Since so many of the puzzles can be brute forced, I decided that giving unlimited lives would blunt the pressure of solving the puzzles, and the impact of the game. In my own experience, I've found that I can appreciate a puzzle even when I have to use a walkthrough!
I wonder how we would balance this if we ever elaborated it into a longer game.
@zancked @thatfirey Thanks! FYI based on player feedback we've added some minor improvements to the cutscenes/story presentation that might make it clearer, though tbh the narrative is meant to be a bit vague.
@prunus-padis That's curious, if the [\`]/[~] cheat button doesn't work, are you on a non-English language keyboard maybe? Or maybe [\`] vs ['] is confusing? I'll add a different key.
The lives are meant to discourage brute forcing, yes, since all of the levels can be brute forced. When playtesting I found that without lives, players would simply stop paying attention and flail around until they got through the level.
We've talked a lot internally about if we should add checkpoints. I decided against it, for reasons relevant to the ending of the game (spoilers!). Once you know the solutions (or read the walkthrough), the game is actually quite short, so I felt that not including checkpoints was an ok tradeoff to keep the narrative cohesive.
I felt the cheat button was a reasonable compromise to players' naturally shorter attention spans during a game jam, as it's explicitly posed as a cheat and doesn't affect the game structure as such.
@prunus-padis I've added `.` as a cheat button. If you have a second, would you mind seeing if it works?
@tolviere It's a good point. When players get frustrated, they start to tune out, and they're less able to solve puzzles, especially ones like these that require some lateral thinking, so it's a vicious cycle. Personally, I feel like brute forcing causes players to tune out more than letting them give up with a cheat button. One is mind numbing, the other a deliberate decision. But your mileage may vary here.
I was terrible at solving video game puzzles as a child, to the extent that I played most of Zelda Wind Waker with a walkthrough by my side. Maybe my expectations are colored by this experience. Was my appreciation of the game worsened by how easily I gave up and cheated? I'm not sure. I think I enjoyed it just as much, but then again I had no counterfactual.
On a more meta level, I prefer a cheat button or a walkthrough for a short form game like this because it's explicitly portrayed as a cheat, i.e. almost extrinsic to the game experience, whereas the frustration is perhaps an intended, intrinsic part of the game. In other words, maybe it lets players bypass parts of the game they don't like, even though those parts have a reason to be in the game.
We do want to elaborate this game more, into a 2-ish hour experience maybe, which will require rethinking this approach. I don't think it would make sense to include a cheat button in a full Steam release!
Your randomization idea gave me an interesting idea. Maybe some of the more tutorial-like levels could be adjusted to not damage the player at all, allowing for experimentation or brute-forcing, but these are bookended by more challenging boss levels that test if the players truly understood the puzzles. Then we could randomize the tutorial-like levels to encourage even more experimentation if players fail at the boss levels.
@seong Oh I didn't realize this until you said it here but I do prefer austerity in player amenities. That's a very succinct way of putting it. I think it stems from the idea that games (and artworks in general) should abide by their own internal logic, rather than cater to the player. I'd much prefer that a game let you cheat than introduce too many quality of life features, which I feel inevitably warp the inherent structure of the game to fit extrinsic demands. But you and I disagree on the nature of an artwork's internality, if it exists at all.
@prunus-padis Glad to hear that it's working! And yeah it's ok it's not for everyone. Just wanted to make sure the game was functioning as intended haha
I actually loved having to glance around at their hands and frantically decipher them. It gave a real sense of urgency and chaos to the experience, and I think portrays the anxiety underlying the frivolous high society talk.
It's beautiful. In the past I've wondered how I should handle approaching a game jam with two divergent ideas, or at least divergent aesthetics. I'd tried to mash them together in one game, and while there is something to a collage of different styles, making two thematically related seems to allow each to stand on its own. It's inspiring and I might do something similar in the future.
I'm going to be a virtuoso at frog abuse
PS. I love your art style and design sensibility
There is a bug when I play this in Firefox, where the in-game cursor moves to the top of the screen uncontrollably. It works fine when I run it in Chrome!
It's unclear when the game has ended. I got to the jumpscare after the village, and replayed a bunch of times to try to avoid the jumpscare by closing the phone early, but it seemed like I couldn't do so. Is there any content after the jumpscare?
How is the public impact of a post determined? It seems that only picking the most "respectable" option is not a guarantee of success. Or is the idea that, despite your best efforts, you really have no control over the situation? That's pretty funny.
It would be fun to see people's reactions to your posts too.