Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Orionhart
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | đ„ | Card CafĂ© | unfinished | |||||||||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | đ„ | Short Fuse | jam | 887 | 3.20 | 2.74 | 2.90 | 3.24 | 3.88 | 3.36 | 2.85 | 2.96 |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | đ„ | [Don't] Prune the Money Tree | jam | 475 | 3.68 | 3.19 | 3.72 | 3.80 | 4.00 | 3.71 | 3.36 | 3.48 |
Loved the hand-drawn style. I wish there was more visual feedback when charging to show what direction the gust was going to go. I was a bit confused as to how it was calculated. And perhaps a sound effect! The music was very good and I love the simplicity of the game along with the addition of a leaderboard.
Loved it! Had a grand olde time. Good humor, great minimalist animations especially with the variety, and the music was kind of a bop. Wish there were some alternate fire methods for the fireball (hitting spacebar got hard when I wanted to spam it and focus on dodging) and I think the font didn't mesh well (and the timer was pretty small for how important it was). Was really impressed with the different boss logic you put together cohesively in the time given.
Overall, great job! Super impressed you did this solo.
Liked it a lot. A few things I would have wanted, like being able to see the day counter, or not having the taxation and money printers be linked to the equippables, but really cool take on it.
Absolutely loved it! Hilarious concept, well-executed on theme, and the atmosphere was quite something.
Really funny take on this! I actually kinda liked how the observations were sketched out poorly. It immersed me more in my role. I did want a little bit more detail to the bunker. Honestly, great humor, funny take on the theme, and a pretty simple and easy to understand game. Good job!
Pretty hilarious game. I might have gone with a different font, but I loved everything else! Made me chuckle.
It took me quite some time to figure out what was going on, and I had to restart a few times to read the dialogue which moved a bit too slow for my liking since hitting E would skip it instead of make it finish the type-writer effect first. The only major things I would change are that, and the fact that the visuals pause when talking to someone. The visual style was very cohesive, I think you fit the theme loosely but well, and you did a great job for being solo in the time allotted! Reminded me of stardew :)
The lack of sound feedback when casting orbs, activating pillars, etc. was a bit frustrating. I found myself confused if I was doing anything. I got stuck on a lot of level geometry, and felt like even if it was unnecessary there should have been a jump. Lastly, the text at the beginning scrolled very slowly and I accidentally disabled the text by clicking, so I was unsure what I was doing on my first go.
I was very impressed with the bad ending. I liked the djinn, and it was well done.
Overall, I was impressed with what you got done by yourself especially if you did the art and animations solo. I felt that there could have been more attention to a few details that would have made the game a lot more immersive with little overall needed additionally, but still! :)
Truthfully, I couldn't figure out how to move. The snowmen just stayed still and blew up. I will give a rating if I can figure it out. Love the n64 aesthetic though!
EDIT: I was using arrow keys. Turns out it was WASD and spacebar. Rated.
A bit laggy, and the web browser wouldn't capture my mouse, making it very hard to see what I was dodging. However, a good proof of concept (and thus a good jam entry) for a game of a similar style. I think the displacement of the cubes and having them stall in the air looks pretty cool!
Pretty good game overall. Well polished. I think the "inevitable" took a bit too long to get to, and after a while I just kept adding the same rooms and creatures. Also, I really needed some music and sound sliders. Really polished otherwise.
Kind of enjoyed this one. Not really sure exactly what I was doing, but I popped down some eggs, slashed some stuff, and made some cows! I was confused by the "distance" counter, which just seemed to be a timer, and the overall gist of it. I think you did a great job on the menus and UI!
I was excited by the art style when I saw it, and the amount of work you put in to communicating the information on the page. I think the game was held back by a lack of cohesive-ness in the systems and graphics, and the fact that you had to put all the information up on the page instead of making it accessible in the game. The main aspects of the core game loop were nice, but the systems that held them together frustrated me a bit. The lack of feedback and indicators while placing turrets, the font not fitting in with the rest of the graphics, and the core loop of having to gather materials manually just didn't excite me as much as I hoped it would. I am impressed with what you got done in the time allotted, though!
You got me with the fakeout "doomsday"! Definitely got a laugh out of me. The core game loop worked well, and I liked that you had a high scores list. The music was moody and fit the theme. I think the art and rendering seemed a bit squished with the aspect ratio, and the side-bars were a bit too big (I couldn't see people coming from the left and right) but overall a great jam submission!
I encountered quite a few bugs and glitches unfortunately, and I think you may have been better off sticking to one "area" than making three, but I liked the concept and the setpieces I did see were very pretty! Reminded me of Alt+F4.
Great adherence to the theme! The game definitely fit it. As for criticism, I found the dash not very useful, and while the slight delay before moving the boulder may have been a conscious decision, it made me confused as to whether or not I had to press or hold space to move it, so I ended up floundering for a few minutes before realizing how best to control it. Loved the overall atmosphere.
Pretty interesting experience! If it was a bit more polished, I could see you building it out into a full narrative. As it is, I felt you nailed the mood. Not sure how it fit the theme but well done.
Honestly this is an amazing entry! I barely have any feedback to give. Really smart take on this. I think perhaps the tileset needed a bit more work and the music didn't quite feel like it fit, but I really can't say enough good things about this.
Great jam submission! I love how fluid the deck and drawing cards mechanics were. Worked very well for such little time. I could have used more visual feedback (buttons, effects) to know when I needed to end my turn or had clicked a button. The music was a little simple as well, but overall, I enjoy the game.
Loved the mouth sounds and main character. My only real gripes were that the wall-jumping didn't feel very good, no sound or music in the final boss fight, and it was too short! Really liked the core concept overall and the spritework was fantastic.
Really impressed with the artwork, and how well the game ran. Definitely felt like I had a lack of options and feedback, and the UI was lacking (the top left was unclear as to what was being communicated). Je parle un peu de français, but seeing all the descriptions and jam pages in English and then trying to code-switch to French when the game started up made me lose track of some of the info.
Bon jeu, quand mĂȘme! J'ai crĂ©Ă© un jeu Ă propos d'un arbre aussi ;)
Good minimalist graphics style. Felt pretty good to play. Good choice of music and sound effects. I was initially slightly confused about what I was doing but figured it out pretty quick.
Unfortunately I wasn't a big fan of this one. I thought the environment art is awesome! Other than that, the music didn't fit, the enemies and character art felt inconsistent with the environment, and there wasn't a lot of 'feedback' from hitting enemies, getting hit, etc. I appreciate what you made, but felt you didn't put enough attention on the things that were needed for a clean player experience.
fun!
I couldn't get to the power-ups part, because most of the enemies clipped into platforms and I was unable to combat them, leading to my inevitable death. I wish it had a volume slider. Overall, good job on the art and platforming mechanics.
Really great entry! Haven't seen many typing games in a hot minute. The hitbox for the mice/grabbing items seemed a bit inconsistent. Really well thought out, with the music, the art, etc. Great job!
Honestly wild you got this done in 3 days. Thanks for reviewing my game-- I had to do you the same favor, and I'm glad I did!
So pumped! Made an actual game in such a short time that doesn't break (right away)! Even has high score and options saving.
I made a few attempts at a WebGL build but unfortunately, it was more complex than expected. Something with my code did not like WebGL. I can say, however, that the Windows and Mac builds work great.
Thank you so much for your ratings and comments so far! All criticism is valid. This game is its own kind of weird.
@Aspect-studio thanks for playing! I'll give this a go, and try to get a WebGL build working :)
The WebGL build attempts are ending up with some odd results... it runs okay, but the camera scaling is WAYYYY off. No clue how to fix. Google has yielded solutions that have not worked. Until further notice, please continue to play via Download as intended.
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@shadow64 your criticisms are all on the "money" ;) but yeah, we only had so much time, so I opted for a "complete" experience rather than a perfectly designed one. I often suffer from overscoping so I was excited to finish a game early and have time to polish it. Our game designer dropped to do other things after the first night so I was sort of coding and designing at the same time while tackling a lot of concepts I had only thought about. it was a ton of fun, but stretched my mind thin.
@fizzbark pruning a massive branch allows you to sell all the branches at the same trade rate (outlined in the top right corner) versus pruning in multiple batches which affects the trade rate multiple times.
@adam-probert thanks for that! my artists worked hard and I tried to implement their stuff as best I could!
@real-flamingicecubegames I'm having trouble beating 10 minutes as well! my buddy got 20 but I have no idea how o-o
@nardandas we took "Delay The Inevitable" in a cynical way, so that's totally a valid conclusion for you to come to x)
@icxon thanks for the playtest! we considered having green leaves in the form of dollar bills, but the tree generation proved more than enough for me to tackle as a solo coder, so I opted to just have the branches be worth cash. it also let us focus on the core mechanic more, though I agree with you (a money tree with actual money sounds amazing!)
@chaoscomposer truthfully, I thought it was interesting to have the shop and the monitor on different screens. since it doesn't pause, and I wanted to emphasize the "inevitability" of losing, I wanted to make it as punishing as possible to do anything but micro-manage the tree. perhapse that was naive from a game design perspective, since it ends up being frustrating as a player, but jams are a time to take risks-- it just doesn't always pay off haha.
glad you enjoyed it. I did end up having to come up with what the upgrades did pretty late on in development so they are relatively similar, but they're different enough (and we did some math) that deciding what to use is usually a "value over time" versus "smaller value up front" dilemma in a lot of cases. Like, the lvl 1 watering can is technically a heal of 25 HP over time, but the fertilizer is 20 hp up front for the same price. most of the upgrades are balanced with this sort of thing in mind. you end up having to choose based on how dire the situation is.
this is all to say that your criticism, as similar criticisms have been, is completely valid! thank you for the feedback.
Amazing job for your first jam game. Worked pretty well! Honestly, I feel like it could have been a bit more difficult/longer, but I know managing time and getting everything done early in jams is a difficult task. The main thing I would have wanted was more focus on the UX. An options menu, some way of lowering or muting the music.
I can't believe you made this. Thank you. It's not very fun but it's hilarious.
Unique take on the prompt! I like the idea of a business sim. Not too shabby. Impressive for a solo job.
I like the concept. Weirdly I think the odd aspect ratio helped it. Could have used some music, some more graphical variation, and dang those managers run fast. Also wasn't sure what was supposed to happen "every 10 seconds" because things seemed to happen much more quickly.
5 star entry. Really good. Bits of feedback- detect whether the player is using WASD or arrow keys, since I thought I had to move my hand to the arrow keys to play. Also, couldn't figure out the rule for when I jumped on my broom. Was it when I approached the edge, and if so, why did I hop off after a few seconds? Movement felt sluggish without it. The visuals were great, loved the atmospheric tree rustling and music and all. Good job!
I'll give my cons first because overall it was a great entry. I could have used a settings menu and a main menu, just to be able to adjust the audio levels. Maybe there was one, but ESC wasn't doing anything. I had gotten a different impression from the mouse and the map that made me think I was going to be using a trowel or something to plant things. The fact that the plants killed me and that I couldn't dig anything up surprised me!
Pluses are that once I realized what I was playing, it got more fun and interesting. I love roguelikes and getting choices between upgrades, and once I lowered the audio levels, the music and sound were great. Art was really well done as well.
I would love for the plants to have a positive as well as a negative, besides just giving you shards, to make me more incentivized to place them. I think post-jam, if you were to expand on this, moving away from the high-score aspect or finding some way to make players place plants in more interesting ways will be beneficial.
But who am I to talk! We didn't even get time to add the main menu we wanted or a solid tutorial. Jams are always a race against the clock. Thanks for your submission.
Great entry.
Great game! Really enjoyed it. I couldn't figure out how to beat level one but the atmosphere and theme of the whole thing kept me going for a bit. The audio and graphics in particular were superb.
Found a bit of difficulty learning the game, memorizing the potions, fulfilling request... but that's probably just me not being good at it. Overall I think this was a good entry. The 2D art against the 3D is usually a positive, but in the case, the shader on the models and the flat colors on the characters were a bit at odds. Some of the sound effects were a bit imbalanced (Hylee was a little loud compared to most of it), and sometimes my controls reversed, or I wasn't able to put ingredients into a pot, and I didn't really see any reason why that happened (I might have missed something). Still, you got a lot done in the time frame and as far as I can tell, it works well!
Really enjoyed it. Didn't realize for a while that the symbols at the top were supposed to be what you use for the free beats. Once I picked that up, it all made more sense.
Solid jam entry. The second snake themed game I've seen this jam! I appreciated the snakes popping in as eggs. Could have used some difficulty scaling and more variety in the tiles for the levels, but I had a good time playing a few waves.
Enjoyed it. I wish the star tiles still had numbers on them, so I knew if they were adjacent to a lock tile.
Fantastic job. Can't believe you did this so quickly! The only feedback I had was for the tutorial- I got so into swapping things, I didn't realize there was more to it! I spent a good few minutes just swapping wood purple and orange tiles that I didn't get to the combat for a while haha
@Jpiggs note taken! we were thinking that we would lower the explosion timer after the jam ratings are over, so the pace isn't impacted as much. but we should have adjusted values for sure. and yeah, bugs bugs! you try to squash em and more pop up last minute. we had a couple game breaking ones at the final hour so that was our rush.
@locemo for sure. there were some hiccoughs in the development process that lead to us not leaving enough time for playtesting or exports, and one of the things I've historically been poor at is building in a tutorial in time. definitely a good note. in addition to making the explosions stronger, we could have increased the radius to make it even more fast paced for the jam. the challenge was balancing it around the 10 second timer, and the fact that we had originally planned to make proc gen more robust (I have a page of notes in front of me on what we were planning on doing) but had some issues before even getting to that which prevented us from making more cohesive, navigable levels. for now, they're mostly just pretty labyrinths to showcase the mechanics!
@gangrue thank you! I didn't have time to offset the individual sound levels (left that to the sound designer) so I added a sound a music mixer in the settings menu. are you meaning the sound effects overall are too high volume, imbalanced between effects, or that the sounds themselves should be replaced?
@shiro-white for sure! we'll take a look at the project. thanks for checking out ours! Fuse hopes to see you in the future again as well (maybe with a full roguelike game design shell!)
Thanks all four of your for your feedback. We'll take it down and use it!
@parsonb absolutely. you can spot the unfinished indicator on the character's head! unfortunately, we forgot to finish implementing the fuse shortening and the fire getting larger before time was up. the only current indicator is the speed your character runs at. it speeds up closer to explosion time!
@thorpalsson thank you, and I agree. one of the downsides of the theme was that we realized 10 seconds feels a bit long.
@ryan-dotsikas thank you! there was actually a bug that was preventing the exit stairs from being generated that I only caught after I woke up post-submission! turns out coding 30 hours straight to the end of the jam leaves you prone to mistakes... and an 18 hour sleep. So it was a hot minute. There is now a post-submission bugfix patch a la the rules that only fixes the core issues.
@wilko there was a bug preventing the menu from working properly. I've pushed a fix to the webgl and download.
@lenan sorry about that. we wanted to get sounds in, but we didn't iterate on them very much! very valid criticism, and we'll change the sounds in the future. there are fps drops on webgl. we do intend to make a main menu post-jam, but for the jam submission it was unfortunately not implemented, and your criticism is 100% valid.
There is a known issue with browser memory and reloading scenes, causing the Restart button in the Game Over screen to not function correctly in browser. You will unfortunately need to reload the tab.
@paulsams thanks for your feedback. so I know, was it in the webgl version or the desktop version? the implementation of explosions we did was fast and loose, and works better on desktops. i agree also that arrows are generally unclear. we would love to do a shader that renders arrows behind objects when they're occluded, and also turn the block destruction into a shader (they're currently a sliced up cube object that gets replaced when the object is destroyed). there wasn't a lot of balancing done because of the scope of the project, so yeah- 100%, the implicit damage and constraint of the timer make the game pretty punishing.
This entry confused me. Pretty good, but I'm not sure how to feel.
Overall quality was good. The bounties made sense but I had a hard time memorizing them. The only thing that really confused me gameplay-wise was the Roll/Stay, since it told me I re-rolled a bounty (I think I forgot that the one in the bottom left wasn't the only bounty), and because I wasn't sure if I was choosing the dice to lock in, or to re-roll for a minute. Made sense after I tried it a couple times.
Thanks for including the help menu in game, by the way!
We are still upload the build within the upload period. Please be patient!
Yeah unfortunately some last minute fixes also broke some things. I'm working on making it usable. @okshirl each day, the game sends you to the shop so that is technically intended as far as the jam version goes. the bugs however were not intended- I am investigating (tomorrow after I sleep- did an all nighter for the last day of the jam).
I'm opting us out of the jam category and into unfinished until I fix the bugs.
@nadia-pixel @miller thanks for your feedback. I hope to come back with some updates that make the game make more sense and play smoother here soon!
The game definitely gives you a good sense of progress. Seeing those funny little guys moving faster to protect our precious Mr. President made me happy. And the end screen lessened the impact of me losing.