Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → owl and jackalope
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Moo Problems 2021 | jam | 1178 | 3.51 | 3.65 | 3.61 | 3.55 | 3.71 | 3.42 | ||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Hazardous Cleanup | jam | 108 | 3.96 | 3.78 | 3.98 | 4.28 | 4.00 | 3.95 | 3.64 |
I found the world interesting, I was compelled to explore but ran into some performance problems in the web version. I like the idea of receiving powers as you sacrifice people as a way of progressing. I think if you had focused your ideas a little and made your world more dense you would have something really fun.
I liked the game. I see the sacrifice angle in that gathering up pills makes your more vulnerable to attacks. The enemies had a good health level so when you did run into conflict it felt nice. The controls tripped me up a little bit at first. I'm used to games like this using W to apply force to the ship in the direction it is facing. The fact that it was oriented to the screen made me do a double take. By far the biggest thing that you could do to improve this would be to add something to the background so that movement could more easily be conveyed. I had several pills, but I was moving so slowly that I wasn't even sure I was moving. Seriously though, this had me hooked even with how simple the premise is. Great work!
I was super into it. The game had a very eerie feel that you kept consistent in all of the rooms, and it paired masterfully with the music. The walking speed felt perfectly in pace with the long tones, but quickly became annoying. Honestly, I don't think I would have been so bothered with the walking speed if we didn't have to make the same trek at the beginning of each sin. The restarting to return to the confessional was a powerful visual, but maybe one you could have made without having to reset me back in the middle of the first massive room. Overall, great job definitely had me hooked.
Good game, I like the mechanic of giving a little up to improve other aspect of yourself. Plus, you had some pretty solid enemy designs. My two suggestions would be, that the sacrifices weren't obviously affecting game play. Health yeah, but damage reduction and some of the other stats were less obvious. The other suggestion would be to just increase the shooting speed and number of enemies. The speed between shots was a little long for me. If it was quicker with more guys to mow down the whole game would be more exciting. Overall, great entry. Had a lot of fun playing it.
I love the idea of a resource management style game where you delegate to your "tribe" of people. I think that it would have felt more connected to the UI selections if the game actually reflected the actions. Your people seemed to just walk around. It might have been nice to have a few standing guard, pulling food off of nearby bushes, sending a search party made a pack of them walk off screen, etc... Having some awareness of your surroundings would also help with decision making. Like knowing there are wolves nearby would make me cautious about sending people out, but I know that there are lots of berry bushes that don't stay alive long so I have to do the math to figure out if the sacrifice of people is worth it.
Really loved the way the game looked and the single screen style that you had for traversal. Felt very much like old school zelda in that regard, well done. The combat could have used a little diversity to make it a little more interesting towards the middle of the game. Overall well done!
Very pretty aesthetic. I was just explaining to someone that one of the nice things about having bad eyes is that lights at night are much prettier as massive distorted orbs. I didn't realize there was a term for it. Thank you teaching me something!
Awesome game! I really liked the idea. I loved the decision of keeping the cat 2D in a 3D world. It was very nice aesthetic. I loved starting the levels with my swarm of cats all performing actions in perfect sync. Polish up some of the tombstone spawning and the levels are already really good.
This is great! Love the sounds, the look, the gameplay. I really didn't want to stop playing. My only complaint is that your health is at the very top of the screen, but the game encourages you to keep your eye on the player. There were a few times that I not thinking I was out of blood shot off my last bit. Maybe having a visual queue on the player to indicate that I'm at least low so I can start playing more conservative or at least shoot a glance up to see what I am at. Overall great job! Great use of theme! You're awesome.
The responses were interesting and the music was really fun. The game had a very Better of Ted feel to it which was really cute. The only drawback was that the instructions at the beginning of the game were unclear and it was a little difficult to make out the notebook at first. Once I had it opened, I felt like I need to keep opening to remember what questions I could ask. Maybe leaving the dialog options available instead of typing would have been better. You could mix up the questions a little bit too so that you didn't always ask the golden three questions.
I love the chef's response. Made me giggle each time. The game looks good and the movement controls feel really nice. The game is a little challenging, the breeze that stops you dead is very frustrating. I was only a few steps away from the captain and ended up losing her and time because of it. Great concept and really meshes with the theme
Very nice little game! I love the slow-mo effect that takes over whenever you approach one of the buildings. Very nicely polished and well done. One improvement I might suggest is to make the whole group selectable rather than the individuals. Later on, when the game had gotten faster I found I had more difficulty selecting a robot to fling than I did actually aiming.
Really cool idea and executed well. Life simulations are always cool to watch, but are often difficult to follow and predict down the line (at least for me). It might be cool to shift focus to making the levels a little harder, but I get to restart on that level after quickly failing (like Super Meat Boy). I can get more familiar with the starting pattern, and can plan more accordingly for subsequent attempts. Overall great game! Keep it up!
@lucc and @cristiano-t thank you so much!
@trusty, I guess no sacrifices were made at all!
@doug-graham thanks for the criticism. I too struggled with the controls (and I played it a ton), if I were to do it again I may have chosen to go with using something like Q/E for switching instead so maybe it would feel like a different motion all together.
@fireslash thanks for the feedback, I didn't think about the not killing all them as being an issue. Thanks for bringing that up. If I do take this further I'll be sure to draw more attention to the actual goal being "disarming" all of the traps in the level.
This is a great concept. I really enjoyed playing your game. My only frustration was that the controls were a little twitchy so I found that I accidentally was moving myself off of the side. I don't know if you could have fixed that too much as long as I was using AD, but other than that the game is great!
Very fun! Character controls are very tight and the particle effects were very nice. The whole game felt very snappy. One downside, it wasn't always clear where the block had fallen from since they just move slowly down while the screen was shaking. Sometimes I would make a jump to a tile that was the one that was falling. Other than that great game!
The concept is great, counterintuitively the parts make the game so much more difficult. And its nice to know many bots failed where I might have succeeded.
One major change would be that once you escape, if you don't have all of the parts it just lets you go right back in rather than starting over.
A very simple little game. I enjoyed the ending with the smile on the main character's face. The music perfectly matched the tone and speed of the game. The first couple of puzzle's were pretty straight forward, but the wall and the tree were more difficult without having built on the idea of positioning the camera. Overall, I thought the game was enjoyably peaceful with an appropriate sense of dread. Great entry!
Art and audio are really great and go hand in hand. The game controls very well, very reminiscent of the old school games you were trying to emulate aesthetically. The raiders attacking and moments dealing with baddies made me think back to arcade classic shoot em ups. The single cow made it very difficult to play on my own, but I could see how through coop the game would have you split roles more often. I like the Oregon Trail style pit stops. Very polished game with a solid foundation that just needs a balance pass (and maybe just a tiny bit more instruction at the start). Great entry!
Truly innovative idea! The expanding zone adding additional spawn point while also opening you up to greater health gains was a tricky, but very interesting balancing act. Things quickly escalate and the chaos can be difficult to follow with the tiny viruses. It wasn't always easy to decide which cell was most useful in a given situation. Because of the aggressiveness of some viruses it felt like depending on spawn conditions a strategy that had previously been somewhat successful would do me in the next time. Played the post jam version as well, huge improvements with the mitosis meter that limits actions which gave more visibility into what each thing was doing (viruses and cells). Plus the updated balance made the game feel like it had and ebb and flow. Great job. I think I'd really enjoy playing this game if you wanted to expand it further.
Cute little fox drew me in. Really liked the quick levels that progressively got harder. Made me feel like I was really progressing through the game. Moving around was a little difficult especially whenever the stress of nighttime set in. I wanted to slam something in my inventory so I could get back, but ended up slightly overshooting and my foxy boy went hungry! Great game, really enjoyed it!
Hey this is a great game! The idea to have the power be your main form of interaction with the world whether it be shooting, powering things up, or just running faster was very well done. I loved that your health also tied into this. Taking damage didn't feel punitive like other games, but playing without care early on could put you into nasty positions down the line. The turrets didn't feel as helpful as they could have been. I was never relieved to power them up and dragging them around felt more cumbersome than it was worth and I often just charged them up and kited enemies near them so they would do my dirty work. Despite this most levels I was able to avoid fighting for the most part. I got into the habit of making sure that my charge was fully filled before going to the next area. There was one occasion where the door out was close enough that I just tanked shots because I knew I had enough energy. Not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely some risk vs reward going on. Overall, really fun entry. Thanks for making!
I really liked the idea. As someone that enjoys playing as a healer in most games this game really resonated with the method in which I like to play games. The controls were accessible after reading through the how to play. A little unclear if you didn't start down that path (like me, ha ha). Some easy things that would go a long way to improve this would be more feedback other than the bar going up whenever you did a heal and some display of how much each spell cost. You could kind of gauge it as you went on, but for hefty spells like the revive it was unclear that I needed all of my mana filled up in order to perform it. Overall good entry, I played your game for quite a bit.
This was really good! I loved the aesthetic reminded me of Don't Starve but if it took place in WW1 trenches. I really like the idea of finding or courting survivors to your camp in order to sacrifice them. The metal retrieval was a little difficult to understand at first, and putting my builders to work on a certain building was something I often forgot to do leaving them idle for a while. Overall, great idea, great visuals, and great execution!
This is really a novel idea and I had a lot of fun playing it. My only criticism was that it was difficult for me to realize whether my moss was ready to expand or not. I made game full screen and I was able to tell a little better, curse my terrible eyes!
As a fellow maker of a cow protection game, I really enjoyed this. The game played incredibly well and had a nice variety in the enemy designs that kept things interesting. Sound and art was great, really enjoyed the required wall bouncing that you needed to get around. Keep up the great work!
@wiredoverload thank you for the feedback! As others have said the difficulty curve was definitely too steep for the initial play through. I think adjusting the starting money to give you an early advantage as well as ticking the tool cost or bot spawn rate down (especially initial waves) would go a long way. Some more subtle things that I did that weren't messaged well were that higher platforms actually took less seeds to replenish than the lower platforms. Giving you incentive to use the vertical aspect of the level other than the natural protection from the cheap path finding that the bots use. And also that you can carry multiple items to throw into the truck so the best strategies for me often involved just letting my cheese/butter stack up to cash in all at once (maybe allowing tool switching in this case would have made that more apparent).
@erkberg totally agree! I didn't get really any time to balance and unfortunately that makes it pretty difficult. And yes, there is a point where the bots stop coming and you win the game. I've done it with three of my four cows, but I've also spent a lot of time playing it now! I'm making some adjustments for a post jam version that should hopefully make things easier. Thanks for playing!
Great game, great art, great music. Keep up the good work! Thought the audience as a health bar was a very clever concept that I didn't notice until I was near my last audience member. Great job!
Game has a really nice visual and audio feel! Took me a minute to get used to the jump mechanic, but ended up really liking it as I continued to play. Turrets were a little unforgiving especially if there were three or more around a corner. Overall, great entry.
Game is good! Really like the sound effects. They just fit the look so well. The game gave me a good laugh as I launched my little egg across the screen to allow it to bounce around the screen. I'll echo what others have said where the scaling of the jump felt a little off and it was something I couldn't get the hang of. Also I occasionally had start conditions where the next platform was directly above. For some one just getting the hang of things this was difficult for me to maneuver. The restart time was snappy and the simplicity game kept me playing. Great job!
Very interesting mechanic, the controls are a little touchy at first so it can be difficult to get the hang of the initial setup. Pulling down the intensity and adding a little more friction to the fish might help with that a little bit. Good entry, small and to the point. Could make a fun phone game where you to touch the top and bottom of the screen to change the platform. Good work!
Cute art style and fantastic sound effects. The game had an interesting idea. The first and second levels were very different than one another which was a little strange. I assumed that they levels would follow more of a steady evolution approach. Going from dropping the egg downward to dodging meteors felt like I was playing two different games with the same controls. I wish that I had the ability to push and pull the egg, especially on the second level. The push animations were so cute! Well done!
Really great game! Fun mechanic where you have throw out your spark. The jumping was a touch too extreme in some cases that made it difficult for you to move between platforms. Overall, I enjoyed the game and I thought the little narrations were a nice touch.
Love love love the art of the babies and the main monster mama. Level design was pretty nice. Echo what @annie-owl said about the look forward stuff. Fell into spikes accidentally a lot and accidentally threw my babies head on into a saw blade (or I think I did, baby was just gone when I got up there, ha ha) Platforming mechanics felt very polished, movement was precise and I felt like I was in control. Would have been nice to have more control of the jump height so that I could avoid bonking on the ceiling. Awesome game, fits the theme well, great job!
As a first game jam entry, there is a lot here. You have good bones for a game about managing your resources and puzzle solving your way to getting the flowers watered and taken care of. For the next jam or your next project, you should spend a little more time just developing out some levels and fun mechanics. The dialogue (and extra flair) is always fun to write down and think about, but its usually better to build a game around a mechanic than it is a story. That said, I thought the dialogue was very cute and gave me a chuckle while playing (Especially the over sensitive line). Keep up the good work. I think there is a lot of potential there.
I really like the play on hot potato. This game was really fun, I enjoyed playing through the levels. Dashing to save last minute potatoes felt very good. Keep up the good work!
Sh'bolga is great. Writing was entertaining and the platforming elements were great. Would love to see this turn into a longer game.