philomory

Universal Conquest by Endurion 2011-01-08T00:11:00

Okay, first thing's first, this game brought back fond memories of Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control 2). I think once voting is done I'm gonna go revisit that game.

Spoilers ahead in the rest of the review.

Now, the first part of the game was quite fun. By that I mean, exploring and amassing credits to buy upgrades. It took quite a bit of time, but I was still enjoying myself by the time I finally saved up enough credits to get the final upgrade. "Now," I thought to myself, "Time to go find the aliens."

Problem was, there are just *way* too many green systems. I ended up clearing probably half of them before I finally got killed because I let my attention wane. I spent hours playing the game, which on the one hand says good things about the game, but, by the end, it felt more like a chore than entertainment.

I did find one world that persisted in being green despite not having any alien tech. A glance at the source made me suspect that that was where the alien base was supposed to be, but as far as I could tell the whole system was empty. I plucked every resource from every planet in that system, and found nothing. So it may have been a bug; maybe two systems were in the same spot, and I couldn't click the green one? Not sure. Another reason I suspect the aliens were supposed to be based there is that that region of space is the only one that seemed to have enemies in it.

Anyway, this has the beginnings of a great game, but for future LDs, maybe it'd be better if the game could be completed in less than an hour? Please? ;)

Anyway, all that said, I *did* like it. Just... throw the player a bone in terms of clues to the location of the base.

Unexpected Outcome by ippa 2011-01-06T01:49:00

A nice game; as noted by others, the music was very fitting. I have to admit, when I got to the end and found out the research results, I wasn't entirely sure what was so upsetting about them, but story works nonetheless.

Soundman Stepper by jonbro 2010-12-20T09:46:00

Couldn't play the OS X compiled copy since it's Intel only and I'm on a PPC Mac, so I thought, "no problem, there's a source link, I'll download the source and see if I can't get it to compile." Oddly, the source link appears to point to some other project entirely; no trace of your LD entry in it, at least that I could find. I'll check back later.

Soundman Stepper by jonbro 2010-12-26T07:10:00

Interesting use of audio, and yes, the third level was hard, partly because the sounds didn't really trigger exactly when you hit the button, and partly because I fail at music in general. Only complaint: when I'm judging games in the late evening, I *really* don't need a sudden foghorn sound to interrupt things :-p

:ORE: by moltanem2000 2010-12-28T08:03:00

I liked it, it's harder than it appears. If you extend this into a 'full' (i.e. polished) game, it needs adjustable difficulty, I think; or possibly just some check on the water. It'd be nice to be able to drain an area by flooding dumping it into the area below it; as it stands, you just end up with twice as much water.

Volatile by True Valhalla 2010-12-29T09:41:00

A very good entry; sadly, after a few minutes of gameplay the fps dropped below 10 and stayed there, regularly hitting 6 and occasionally 1. Too many pretty particle effects for this machine, I think ;). Nonetheless, I stuck it out long enough to defeat one of the three computer players; also, it made me happy to see that they also fought each other. Overall, a very nice entry.

Beacon by randomnine 2011-01-07T19:33:00

The story was really well executed, and it's fabulous to see someone make a game in C++, without basecode, that someone else would make (and feel good about) in a full engine like Game Maker.

Also, "Ha! ...eesh." Brilliant. And speaking of, the turret AI felt really really good. Tricking them was a lot of fun. And speaking of *that*, how many 48 hour games can you think of with an AI element capable of being tricked?

One very minor nitpick: if you get hit by a turret while text is rendering, you never get to see what the text would have said.

Lost by Gigacat 2011-01-08T00:25:00

I actually rather like this kind of gameplay, though yes, it could be longer. I had to mute my machine, the sound effects were painful.

Other than the sound, though, a good entry.

Maze of Towers by kurtwaldowski 2011-01-08T01:08:00

A fun retro platformer. I managed to get the first key before dying. With the right tweaks, this could be pretty awesome. Without them, it's kinda frustrating.

The 'K' thing nearly made me thing the game was totally broken, though.

plixel by asfdfdfd 2010-12-28T09:57:00

An interesting start, and it does get kinda difficult after a few levels. I like the effect of the light getting dimmer over time as your 'health' the best, I think.

The Jelly Caves by Darkhogg 2010-12-28T03:48:00

Wouldn't run :( Java starts to load, then nothing. Will hold off on rating until I try it on another computer.

The Jelly Caves by Darkhogg 2010-12-28T09:13:00

Tried it on another machine, and it's a pretty fun game! It gets pretty dang hard after the first floor, though. Perhaps don't introduce the blue jellies quite so quickly, and introduce the red jellies more gradually?

...You Are A Duck! by KoryWazHere 2010-12-29T09:49:00

No, *you're* a duck!

Cute, though it was laggy on my machine, which rapidly made the platforming elements impossible. Nonetheless, it was fun to roll around as a roller-skate duck in the easy areas.

Portrait Exploration by Manuel Magalhães 2010-12-26T07:44:00

Interesting use of the theme... would have fit LD16 (Exploration) better than this one, but then, the two themes are extremely similar anyway.

Glassbox by hcs 2010-12-26T08:59:00

Okay... I gather from other comments and from the screenshot that there are supposed to be images? For me the only things visible were the player and the coins, which makes an apparently already hard game very nearly impossible. Only absolute trial and error could even tell me where the floor was. Windows package version, by the way.

Arise by Jonneh 2010-12-28T09:20:00

Nice basis, but as others have noted it needs some additional elements to make it engaging. Also, I'm still not entirely sure why I won when I did.

Eureka! by spacsm 2010-12-26T08:49:00

OK, so the game isn't super-fun in and of itself, but I adore the choice of running around naked as Archimedes. Really funny and unique use of the theme.

Where can I go now? by Mirroar 2010-12-28T08:14:00

Man, I really want to play this, but I've tried it on two computers with different OSes and 4 different browsers between them, and in every case the result is the same: the game loads, but almost none of the resources do, so nearly every object is a white box, and the text is just white streaks (except, oddly, the letter M, which displays fine). Any suggestions?

10 Minute Galaxy by machinas 2010-12-28T03:43:00

Didn't work in Camino, worked in my copy of Safari, though not well; to be fair, my machine is fairly ancient. I'll hold off on rating until I can try again on another machine.

10 Minute Galaxy by machinas 2010-12-28T08:51:00

Ok, tried it on a different machine, and it's pretty fantastic. If you polish this the way you indicated you might in your blog posting, it'd be even more fantastic. As it is, once you get used to paying attention to your resources, it's pretty easy, but not in a bad way. Ianh's comparison to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is pretty apt.

Mini Ghost Hunter by 7Soul 2010-12-26T07:53:00

Seems like a very nice game, though from reading earlier comments you may have overcompensated when fixing the difficulty, as I can't kill more than a few enemies before dying. Really dig the graphics and audio, the music in particular reminds me of the old game boy Final Fantasy Legend series (which is a good thing).

Attack of the time travelling pygmy from outer paleolithic (aka Time Pygmy) by deepnight 2011-01-06T02:26:00

A very good entry, and funny too. Really nails the discovery theme, too. I managed a score of 268, with 26 of 30 discoveries. I suspect I am missing some involving the toilet, and possibly the rabbit, book, TV or computer.

In any case, all together a very good entry.

Cardboard adventure by bmfs 2011-01-07T18:31:00

Doesn't actually always work correctly even in Chrome, it seems to hang if you happen to be in the air from jumping as you approach the rabbit for the first time, or if you land your ship near the rabbit. Also, I had to play 4 times before the plunger even showed up (I wouldn't have even known about it but for reading the other reviews). Still, I do have to say that the art assets are nice.

Let's Science by Hazel 2010-12-26T08:35:00

This is, so far, one of my favorites; other than the fact that my scientists routinely (as in, several times a minute) got stuck behind the fridge or overlapping each other, there is little I can complain about in this game other than that there should be more of it. As noted by others, I especially adored the research assignments and scientist names.

StickMan's Discovery by DivideByZero 2010-12-26T07:20:00

Unable to play, possibly because (as suggested by Endurion) this computer doesn't have Visual Studio installed.

Here Be Monsters! by ethankennerly 2011-01-07T20:10:00

A good game. I hesitate to describe any game put together in 48 hours as 'too big', but if any one is, it's this one. I think you either need to make the map smaller, or perhaps preferably, the sight range larger. It was entertaining at first, but it felt like it was taking forever to explore the map and I didn't feel like I was accomplishing very much, which slightly detracted from the fun. Also, I might have found a bug (or maybe not): I know that when you die, your cargo is lost, but it appears that your un-turned-in map progress may also be lost... that is to say, it's still mapped out, but I didn't get credit for it in terms of percentage, so it may be impossible to reach 100% (I never got far enough to say for certain).

Those things aside, this is still a very good game and I think with a bit more polish it could be a lot of fun to play.

Fate of Mankind by LegacyCrono 2010-12-26T21:17:00

Very nice, I especially loved the beginning, where the discoveries came fairly rapid-fire. I found all the discoveries, but was still unable to reach certain secrets; particularly the one floating in the sky and the one guarded by 5 vertically oscillating blue squares. In any case, nice game all around. The ending, as mentioned by others, was ace. My favorite since Beacon.

The Final Discovery by Turc 2011-01-08T00:51:00

Yeah, the intro is pretty sweet. Made me laugh.

Space Pings! by idgar 2010-12-26T07:14:00

Sadly, unable to play. I can only judge windows entries from someone else's computer, which means no installing frameworks.

The Dreamer by johnfn 2010-12-20T10:37:00

Clever game. The controls could be a little finnicky at times, but that may be due to my machine's poor relationship with Flash than with the game itself. I liked the twist, it'd be neat to see it developed further.

Ghosts and Gemstones by _wdh 2011-01-07T18:53:00

Pretty difficult, but in a good way I think. Sadly, I didn't figure out what you're supposed to do to the boss until after he had killed me. In retrospect it was obvious, and I may try again and see if I can manage to beat him next time.

One frustrating bug, though: Sometimes your bullets will skip pixels, particularly sometimes pixels right next to you, and go eliminate pixels further on instead. This seems minor, but backing up and repositioning to get rid of a wall on the way to the stairs is an excellent way to be killed by a ghost :p.

1492Island by Valandre 2010-12-29T09:02:00

The basis for a fun game here, though some play balance issues plagued my attempts (or I'm doing something wrong). I routinely ended up with Skeletons in the middle of the island that neither the wizard nor the warrior could actually walk to; they'd drop dead on the way (presumably from exhaustion?) while the ranger, who could reach, always got clobbered. Since I couldn't kill the skeletons, I'd have to start over. If something could be done about issues like that, it'd be awesome.

Alchemy by panderia 2010-12-29T10:00:00

I like the concept behind the game, though it was probably too ambitious for the 48 hour time limit (I made the same mistake in my first Ludum Dare). I'd love to see the crafting system working, I'd say that'd make an interesting discovery game even without any combat features.

Disco Five by JohnColburn 2010-12-28T09:47:00

A quite fun game, though as you noted it needs some value tweaking; nonetheless, it kept me entertained for quite a while. Also, despite the roguelike interface, you managed to make it 'look nice', with excellent use of color and a good eye for UI; the dialog boxes and the 'treasure-detector' were very nice. With some tweaks. it would be even awesomer. My suggestion? Either allow upgrades (purchase larger fuel tanks and vision radius, etc, or allow the player to carry and deposit fuel stockpiles around the map for later use, or both.

Lost Discoveries by Tb0o 2011-01-08T00:45:00

A very ambitious game and, leaving aside the fact that it's incomplete, quite well done. The art style is very unique and interesting, and the sounds nicely atmospheric.

Only a few real complaints; one is that autosaving would be nice; two is that Pierre Curie is just as valid an answer to the final question as Marie was, but it's not counted as correct; three is that the presentation of text is awkward, in that it is sometimes hard to read on the background; and finally, the scene often fades in and out in the middle of conversation, which seems unnecessary.

But anyway, this gets very high marks. It is certainly the most innovative game I've judged so far, and spot on for the theme. Congratulations.

Clarity by Hooka 2010-12-26T08:02:00

*SPOILERS* As best I can tell, the minigames are based on optical illusions, and it doesn't matter what you do; none of lights are going out, it only looks that way; and despite appearances, the line is a solid color.

Which is cute, don't get me wrong, but since player input is almost entirely irrelevant, there's not much game here.

It's A Frickin' CAVE by Hempuli 2011-01-06T01:28:00

A cute little game, though the difficulty seems a bit off in the beginning; also, on first play it performs well (though it degrades a bit as you explore more), but it really takes a dive when I start a new game, I have to refresh the page each time I die to keep it playable. Of course, that's not really the game's fault, I have only 5+ year old computers to play it on.

Anyway, good game. I didn't really discover anything, but maybe I didn't get deep enough.

Grand Mystic Quest of Discovery by hulahulahest 2011-01-06T05:07:00

Very, very good. Not a lot else to say; just, very very good. Add some basic sound effects and chiptune music, and an ending, for a really polished feel, but even without those it was really engaging. Irritated my girlfriend since I wouldn't stop playing till I finished it. ;)

Ominous by gsw 2010-12-28T03:23:00

Interesting idea, reminds me a little of the carpentry game in puzzle pirates (which is a good thing, I like that game). Needs a little extra to make it feel like I'm discovering something, though.

Retirement of the Space Shuttle Discovery by Jonny D 2010-12-26T07:39:00

Not exactly 'fun', but certainly entertaining. Took me a while to get the hang of controls for precise movement.

Dinosaur Dance-Off by Draknek 2010-12-28T03:38:00

Made me smile.

Goofysaurus: http://www.draknek.org/dance/?dino=3vnl

Autoflotilla by Sparky 2010-12-29T08:30:00

I really digged the graphical style. Other than that, the very poor performance on my machine made it hard to get into the game, though I can see how it would probably be fun with a few more gameplay elements.

Corpse Runner by mklee 2010-12-28T08:30:00

Interesting idea, though perhaps it could have used a bit of extra spice to make it more engaging. Also, the exit is hard to find in part because it doesn't stand out very much; when I finally found it I realized I had walked within light-radius-range of it several times previously without recognizing it.

In any case, my strategy was just to pile up a ton of corpses right in the entryway, gave myself a good 250 seconds per trip :p

ChadyG's unnamed game for Ludum Dare 19 by ChadyG 2010-12-28T09:04:00

Actually, it did take me a while to discover how the gameplay and scoring worked. Oddly entertaining. I did like the audio quite a bit.

I have to ask, though... what *is* the story?

stars by superflat 2010-12-28T10:24:00

Gorgeous visuals and audio. Head and shoulders above the rest in those two categories. Just... no game. Even some fairly trivial platforming elements would have been nice; if you ever make a real game out of this, it'd be sweet.

Princess Mystery Dungeon by philomory 2011-05-02T16:41:00

Actually, a file was missing from the OS X packaged version. It should be playable all the way through the end of the game now, instead of crashing when you get to the boss!

Thanks for your comments!

Princess Mystery Dungeon by philomory 2011-05-04T03:57:00

Chingu is pure ruby and should be pretty easy to install by hand if you need to. If you have git, you can get it pretty easily from github, just make sure you use 0.8.1 rather than HEAD. (For that matter, even if you don't have git you can still download a tarball from github, https://github.com/ippa/chingu/archives/v0.8.1 for the correct version)

Princess Mystery Dungeon by philomory 2011-05-04T04:00:00

(I should note also that some of chingu's dependencies are not really necessary for my game; chingu includes functionality for online high scores and the like which I am not using. If you're the kind of person who would rather edit source files than install dependencies you don't actually need, have a blast ;) )

WHALE of a TALE by moltanem2000 2011-05-21T22:15:00

Very difficult for me to rate this game, so I only gave you a community score. The whole thing ran like molasses, no idea why; other game maker games have worked fine. Even dropping the guy on an island, it took a whole minute for him to land. :( Also, couldn't here any music, only a few sound effects that played before the graphical event that was supposed to trigger them.

Yhn by Jhelle 2011-05-02T23:33:00

Very cute game. Though the collision detection was a bit problematic, overall it was fun to play. Not *entirely* sure what was meant by "the hat protects you from spikes", since it didn't, but other than that, good job!

Eunaborb by krangGAMES 2011-05-02T23:08:00

A fun little game. Only complaint gameplay-wise is that it can be quite hard to actually click accurately on the little moving ball in order to start another move mid-roll. Allowing you to start the click-and-drag anywhere may have simplified things.

I'd be interested in seeing the additional levels you had planned.

Lady Save Yourself!!! by joekinley 2011-05-21T19:56:00

It's hard for me to judge the game in most of it's aspects; the graphics for me didn't look anything like the screenshot, and there were lots of clipping errors and such (possibly a PPC vs Intel mac issue?), also, everything moved very fast, and my character sometimes seemed to disappear from one place and appear at the destination. I'll try playing it again on another machine, but in the mean time what I *can* say is that I did like the music very much. Very atmospheric.

Furious Fighting Felines by ACodeGerm 2011-05-21T22:35:00

Neat to see a brawler, and I liked the audio quite a bit. Gameplay was rather stuttery for me, though.

Pathfinder by Jimjam 2011-05-02T23:20:00

Not a bad start, and an interesting idea. My main impression is just how slow the player moves, though. It'd be a lot more fun sped up.

The swatting mechanic is cute, though it took me a few tries to figure out what I was actually doing.

Who Goes There? by Orangy Tang 2011-05-03T00:38:00

Tried running on OS X (10.4.11), got this error:
[JavaAppLauncher Error] CallStaticVoidMethod() threw an exception
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
... etc. Not sure if it requires a newer version of Java or what.

SINGLEHANDEDLY by Elpizo 2011-05-02T23:48:00

This is a pretty sweet little game. The hidden lava pits, combined with the fact that you restart from the beginning when you die (and that lava kills you instantly) kept me from finishing it, though. I saw a load game feature, but no obvious save feature. Did I miss something?

Anyway, a fun game, I'll probably come back to it later.

Postman Chicky! by pythong 2011-05-21T22:42:00

I am among those who found it impossible to return to base after finishing the mailboxes in level one. The dog blocked the way, and wouldn't move out of the way (it seemed like he was stuck within a small area, because he wouldn't even chase me). Since there was a ceiling, I couldn't jump over the dog either. I restarted and tried again, same results.

ZombieRunner...Ware by TellusE 2011-05-21T22:31:00

The levels were kinda monotonously long. Also, the baby level was, as far as I could tell, impossible to fail, so it was kinda dull. On the other hand, bouncing around on the sheep was fun, and the music and sound effects were quite good. Text was fairly amusing.

Squishy's escape by Beanalby 2012-08-30T05:50:00

I was extremely happy to see the Daleks in there :-p

Other than that, fun, very short.

Super Devolution Man by bitlit 2012-08-29T07:50:00

Seems fairly fun, I got nearly to the end (or what I assume is the end), before the game crashed on me. I couldn't quite figure out the evolution aspect of it, though... did the ameboids evolve when two different colored ones came together or something like that?

The Wrong Kind of Evolution by Matt Hartley 2012-08-29T08:48:00

Seem fun but, as others have said, these kind of games need to allow you to aim independently from movement - either mouse plus WASD or WASD + arrows. As it stands it's kinda frustrating.

EvoWord by jovoc 2012-08-30T05:44:00

Pretty good! The bit where you have to chase down the letters is a *bit* tiresome, but overall it's a lot of fun. I especially think it would be cool for you to add more ways for the creature to vary with the words.

I should note that, on my machine, the tree view didn't actually work. It showed all the branches overlapping each other straight down the center. OS X 10.7

Evolvin Gen by Drabiter 2012-08-29T08:23:00

It was pretty funny, but I didn't actually figure out you were supposed to click the *words* in addition to the boxes until I came here and read other comments. After that the game worked rather better :-p

Monstris by jlnr 2015-09-06T21:06:00

Nice concept, Julian, and actually plays quite well (though it'd be nice if currently unplayable pieces were dimmed). Pity about missing the theme :-p

Terror Bird Feeding Frenzy by jwin 2015-09-05T00:53:00

I loved the visual design, it was really nice. Also, Terror Birds ++

(Idle?) Monster by KayZ 2015-09-06T08:11:00

Hilarious :-p

Obviously, not any more gameplay than the genre it's parodying, but, very funny. Played it all the way through.

Lil' Drake by bombjack 2015-09-06T20:58:00

This game is quite good. It really deserves to be fleshed out with more levels, and some audio.

Adventure's Of Lenky by Gas 2015-08-25T06:34:00

Is it actually possible to take out the blimp? I couldn't figure it out.

The Virus by okmmjyygv 2015-09-05T00:45:00

The music was good, but a little repetitive. The minigames were quite uneven in difficulty (and in length - the DNA one takes too long, and the avoid-purple-guy one doesn't take long enough). That said, it's pretty dang fun. Played all the way through.

Memory of Psychopath by Givit Game Studios 2015-08-25T06:16:00

The standout here is the excellent audio. It's a rare LD entry that has voice acting, that's for sure. I also really liked the background effect.

Unfortunately, the gameplay was somewhat marred by somewhat 'floaty' controls and really unforgiving collision detection on the spikes. Also, the fact that the audio restarts when you die is a big no-no in my opinion. At some parts of the last level, I would hear the same two seconds of audio ten, twenty times in a row.

That said, I did like it enough to stick through it. I can't emphasize enough how much I liked the audio in particular.

Forest monster! by hunttis 2015-08-25T17:06:00

Bonus points for making a game that I can play on my iPad. Very nice!

I May Have Misunderstood: RPG by wooltech 2015-09-06T21:28:00

Hilarious. In some ways, one of the best games I've played so far this LD. My favorite take on the theme, for sure.

The water ghost by scambier 2015-09-04T23:53:00

I liked the graphics, but I couldn't hear any audio at all.

Good Guys Always Win ! by ErelDev 2015-09-04T22:35:00

My favorite parts were the music, and the things you can throw were quite amusing.

Echidna by ironleonem 2015-09-04T23:31:00

I really like this. 100MB seems a bit big in terms of LD downloads, but I'm glad I played it regardless. Played through it twice, to see both endings.

Escape the Doom by m3games 2015-09-04T22:53:00

An excellent take on the theme. Not exactly a surprise per se (given that we all know what the theme is), but I liked it anyway. I especially like the good ending.

CubeMonster by Oran Bar 2015-09-04T22:43:00

The web link doesn't seem to work. I just get ads :(

Eye In The Sky by djfariel 2015-09-06T21:38:00

Pretty sweet! I especially liked the graphics and audio, but the gameplay was nice as well. Felt like maybe it could have used a few power-ups or some similar element, though.

Mike The Mediocre Meteor by peecestudios 2015-09-04T23:37:00

I'm not really sure how this is supposed work? The shield-weapon didn't seem to work for me, as far as I could tell.

Harvey, Dean, and Pete's Terrible Adventure by GenericTeamName 2015-09-04T23:12:00

Pretty fun! The controls were sometimes the *tiniest* bit frustrating, but overall it was very good.

Amnesia by colozz 2015-09-04T23:44:00

While the gameplay was rather rudimentary, the pixel art was quite good. Lots of room for growth, but hands down a better game than my own first LD entry, so keep up the good work.

Lure.Lair.Lunch by daveh 2015-09-06T21:41:00

OS X port hangs on launch. Running from the command line, I get:

Arcadia:MacOS adam$ ./lurelairlunch-ld33
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 356, in <module>
File "<string>", line 31, in __init__
File "/private/var/root/Dropbox/ld33/build/build_osx64/out00-PYZ.pyz/ConfigParser", line 330, in get
ConfigParser.NoSectionError: No section: 'menu'

Monster Doodle Battle! by superjai 2015-09-06T08:34:00

A lot of creativity went into this! Though, maybe my monster just sucked but I found myself getting absolutely creamed by the AI

Daylight Blobbery by Mark Smith 2015-09-06T07:35:00

Huh. I'm gonna go ahead and not rate this, treat it as 'couldn't play'. The web player behaved... very strangely.

Loading Complete by Nembo 2015-08-25T06:26:00

The text scrolling across the bottom of the screen was pretty entertaining, though sometimes I found it hard not to accidentally kill the hero before I finished reading it. I also kinda wish that at the end the hero *did* quit, and you got to go off with the girl :-p

D.A.Y.S. by mattthehoopy 2015-09-05T00:26:00

Interesting take on the theme, and implementing that many minigames in 48 hours can't have been easy (though, I the vodka and martini minigames seemed to be broken). Very good effort.

First Person Eater by Piotrek 2015-09-06T07:45:00

I found it kinda hard to see anything. Which, may have been intentional, but, anyway.

Emm... Boo! by Ulukai 2015-09-06T07:40:00

A good first attempt, but it'd be nice to see it taken further, probably via the addition of levels with increasing difficulty, and a minimum number of kids scared to pass the level. Just a thought.

PixelMonster by shawn42 2015-09-06T21:10:00

I like the concept quite a bit, though with only a few levels it's hard to say where it should go next. I could see your monster gaining different powers depending on what color he was, which could add a nice puzzle element to it.

Jeff's choice by nyxkn 2015-09-06T08:19:00

I really liked the environment art! I didn't hear any audio, though other commentators mentioned music.

The Cauldron of Humanity by Lashiz121 2015-09-05T00:30:00

Seems pretty good, but, as others have commented, it's quite difficult, and there's no indication of what any of the abilities do.

Escape The World by Ajayajayaj 2017-05-13T23:52:28Z

I like the general design of this, however I have a few suggestions:

* It might be more engaging if you were tasked with completing the level in a certain number of moves (not the minimum possible number of moves, that would probably be too difficult, but close to it). Or, you were ranked with a gold (minimum number of moves), silver (something close to minimal number of moves), bronze (completed it at all) Or, you got badges, 1 for completing the level, one for solving it quickly, one for solving it optimally. * If you do that, though (and maybe even if you don't), you'll want to introduce some easier levels to start off with.

Neither of these suggestions are strictly necessary; they would have increased _my_ enjoyment of the game, but I'm not sure they would actually make it a _better_ game in any broad sense. My specific problem was that in many levels, solving the level (in the sense of just clearing all the squares) was trivially easy, and could be accomplished more or less by just dicking around, but I often had the sense that I was missing some more elegant, clever, "correct" way to solve the level, and that the 'real' puzzle would have been finding _that_. Of course, in the later levels, actually clearing the cubes at all became a significant puzzle, but I still felt like I had probably missed the 'real' solution.

To a certain extent, you've already addressed this with the move counter and timer. My suggestion is basically, "emphasize that more", but if you have a different direction in mind (for example, if you prefer the at-your-own-pace, any-solution-that-works sort of puzzle game), then that's also cool.

Anyway, whichever way you choose to go with this, I'd love to see more levels.

My turn move count was 300-something? I don't remember exactly. Time take was 84 minutes, 'cause I went to go eat lunch in the middle :stuck_out_tongue:

Five Minute Fire Fight by Josh Riley 2017-05-13T04:51:45Z

I really like this! The aesthetic is great, the music is catchy, the gameplay is fun!

There's only one complaint I have, which is the speed with which the AI builds things. If you're winning, you never notice the problem, but in a tight game, or if you're losing, it's basically impossible to ever build anything, no matter how many resources you have. Even on with the Pace set to Slow and the AI set to easy, the _instant_ the AI demolishes your building, the build one of their own on top of it. The instant you demolish _their_ building, they build one in its place to replace it, as long as they have enough resources (this is why you won't notice the problem if your winning). I think the main thing is that ONE of the following needs to be true

* When a player's building is demolished, there's a one or two second grace period where the only player who can build something in it's place is them, OR * When a player's building is demolished, there's a one or two second penalty period where that player can't rebuild in that spot.

(These could be waved if the spot isn't contested, i.e. there's only one player with an adjacent building).

Right now, because the AI reacts to available build sites instantaneously, it's like the AI gets version 1 and the player gets version 2, and that's just not fair.

Other than that, I really like this!

You Dig-It by recursor 2017-05-11T17:12:45Z

This game is very fun! I do agree about the difficulty. I think one of two things would have reduced the frustration level Either:

1. Give HP or Lives 2. Make crabs stun you when hit, and kill you if hit again while stunned 3. Make crabs harmless for the first second or so after revealing them so if you reveal a crab it doesn't immediately kill you, OR 4. Allow swinging your pickaxe to temporarily stun crabs, and touching a stunned crab (by failing to jump over it, say) is harmless.

Any one of those would drop the frustration level (for me, at least) a great deal; if you did more than one, it might make the game a bit too easy, but that could be compensated for by adding additional challenges, or simply adding additional content to work towards.

Regardless, this is pulled off quite well for a compo entry, as @rplnt said it feels very complete. I know you had mechanics you wanted to include that you didn't get around to, but it doesn't show - with some compo games, you can 'see' the holes left by the missing mechanics, but that's not the case here. Good job!

Petty Puny Planet 38 by JorgeGameDev 2017-05-10T18:33:08Z

This is rad as hell. I played for way longer than I should have (given the goal of judging lots of other games), and managed to get, I believe, 9 of the 10 endings.

Overall, even though the flavor is very different, the game reminds me of Reigns (and also, appropriately, of another LD38 entry, [Puny World](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/puny-world) by @joe-cowman). I really hope you expand it in the future, I want to see more games like this out there.

Solitary Freedom by CMLSC 2017-05-03T09:05:52Z

I _really really really_ like the art style. A lot. Enough that I really wish the game window could be bigger so I could see it all better :stuck_out_tongue:

Here's my wishlist:

* Fullscreen-ability (any sort of zoom, really) * More levels * More forgiving timing on the spikes * A clearer indication that it's actually possible to pass through the spikes when they are in the down position. * I initially mistook the game for turn- and grid-based, and thought the spike animation was just a visual effect. I only discovered I could pass through them by accident.

My best time is 0:12.916

Addendum: I can confirm, it's a lot easier to tell what's going one when I use my OS's accessibility features to zoom my screen in on the game's window. And the graphics still look really nice :smile:

My Very Own World by Flipsy 2017-05-04T23:35:11Z

This is really cute, I especially liked the little people and their little dance. :smile:

Oddly, I had a hard time getting the game to run on my Mac. Something about the .app bundle is incorrect, it just won't run (even taking into account Gatekeeper). It seems to be something with the bundle itself, though, not the included binary files; usually when I have problems with a Jam game I run the binaries directly from the command line to see if I can get any error output, but this time when I ran it that way it just worked without problems. It's only trying to run the game the 'normal' way that doesn't work.

My Very Own World by Flipsy 2017-05-05T02:30:50Z

@flipsy I can now report more or less exactly what's going on, though how to fix it will depend on how you built the mac version of your app. Basically, MyVeryOwnWorld.app has an invalid signature. By default, OS X will not let you run an unsigned application, but you can tell it you trust it and then it will stop bugging you. An _incorrectly_ signed application, on the other hand, is verboten; the OS assumes the application has been tampered with and cannot be run. Frankly, I'm a little surprised it let me run the binary from the command line, bit it's possible the binary itself is unsigned, and only the app as a whole is signed, I'm not really a code signature expert.

If you built your app with code signing turned on, and then modified the resulting application file after the fact, don't do that, it's not allowed. If you're not modifying the app after it's built, see if you can find an option to turn off code signing, because whatever is signing this is doing it wrong.

To all appearances, though, it seems like you took an Adobe-distributed (signed) Flash Player.app, and injected your game's SWF into it somehow. Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely to work.

Anyway, if you tell me more about your build toolchain, I might be able to help more. Worst case, you could include a text file in the zip explaining how to run it (from Terminal, I mean), or make an Applescript that does so, something like that.

EDIT: This is a pretty hacky workaround, but I threw together an Applescript Application wrapper that just launches your own game in a way that works. If you have a way to build your app without the signature errors, I'd highly recommend going with that instead, but failing that this will probably work? I threw it up on Google Drive, check it out if you like: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-SN1W0AdRVLTVBNRWlQbHdWWmc

Earth Quest by Jiri_One 2017-05-15T16:50:40Z

This feels like a good start, though there's very little content as yet (of course, it can be hard to fit everything in during the compo). Other commenters have already explained the UI issues, and as @candlesan mentioned, the music loop is a bit short.

All that said, I like the look of this, and although too short a loop, the music is nice. Congratulations on completing in time for the compo, as well!

Blomst 🌻 by Ava Skoog 2017-05-14T00:38:48Z

This is really relaxing and atmospheric. I don't necessarily have a lot to add (though I suppose I can echo the interface concerns of @seconddimension), just really enjoyed it!

Wrong Delivery by g12345 2017-05-07T02:45:03Z

This is well done, and even without reading the description (which I didn't actually do until after I played), it _immediately_ put me in mind of Robot Wants Kitty. The controls are smooth and the map was (for the most part) well designed. It _really_ could have done with at least some basic sound effects, though, for player feedback. Hit/death animations would have also helped.

The two complaints I have in terms of the actual gameplay are: A) the enemies didn't really need to have multiple HP (especially the ceiling guys), it just makes them tedious to kill without making them difficult, and B) the room full of platforms on the way to the keycard is likewise more tedious than difficult. The rest of the map was enjoyable to play, but that room could have stood to have half as many enemies (or fewer).

One other thing, neither good nor bad, but: it's entirely possible (even easy) to get the package with only the double-jump, none of the subsequent powers are necessary (even though the dash is super fun):

package.png

Obelisk by Orcolom 2017-05-11T17:36:01Z

This is a really lovely game, and the puzzles are quite well designed! There are a few bugs I noticed, but nothing too terrible. My main complaints were:

* Occasionally activating the sensors (with Q/E) just stopped working, so it was impossible to rotate the connected platform. It's possible there was a mechanic behind this, but if so it wasn't explained. * Once, a bridge that as far as I could tell, was lined up perfectly, didn't descend. It's possible they weren't really lined up, but they sure looked like it. * I don't think being able to fall off the edges adds anything to game, it shouldn't be possible at all; if it's a bug that's hard to fix, make it so that if you fall off, you respawn on the platform you fell off of, rather than restarting the level. When this happened at the very end of a long level (combined with the previous item), that's where I ended up stopping playing.

Anyway, those three things aside I think you have something really awesome here. The aesthetic is great (reminds me of a more muted Monument Valley), the audio is nice and atmospheric, and the mechanics are interesting, and they're used to build well-designed puzzles. Very good job, I'd love to see more of this.

Cowmets by NickZangus 2017-04-27T17:35:48Z

I feel like I'm missing something. I lasso the cows, and then they fly around for a second, and then they go back to the cow-cloud. I tried dragging them back to the planet, but they don't seem to react to my movement, just fly around on their own a sec before returning to the cloud. Is there some control I'm missing?

Krilgor by Sheepolution 2017-05-19T22:25:30Z

This is really entertaining, and the mechanic is really unique and interesting. It's an excellent, very well constructed compo game, hard to find particular fault with. If I had to nitpick at all, I'd say the car was harder to use than necessary - that is, it took me several times dropping the car on the giant bug before I managed to do it at the correct angle, or whatever, and the game acknowledged it. But that's a minor point.

Loved the ending, as well, very funny.

More Room! by Skosnowich 2017-05-19T22:13:08Z

This is _very_ good, it's got a great difficulty curve, and the way the situation keeps escalating is really cool. A way to pause the game might be nice, but other than that, I've really got no complaints about the Jam version.

If you're looking to expand the game, one thing you might want to look at is introducing a few new elements over time, the way that @dgspitzer did with Song of Fungus (admittedly a puzzle game rather than a strategy game, but similar in some ways nonetheless). Basically, keep the players interest with some Differences in Kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlBR1z-ue-I

I don't think it would take a lot of new elements (indeed, too many new elements introduced might damage the game, or at least make it a different kind of game), but I think if you introduce a new twist when every once-in-a-while (no more than one per major scale shift, I suspect, and probably fewer), it'd help maintain interest and keep the strategizing fresh.

In any case, very good job, lots of fun to play, and pretty funny, too!

Transistor Soup by stuntddude 2017-05-20T05:05:31Z

This really, really awesome, however there's a few things I'm finding myself wanting very often (besides the "clear all button :stuck_out_tongue:)

* Horizontal bridges * A nicer way to do one-way wires than a pair of not gates * A nicer splitter than a triplet of not gates or a full adder with the same line feeding all three inputs * Some UI improvements, regarding drag-and-drop, placing and erasing lines, etc * In particular, it'd be real nice to be able to click a start point and an end point, and have the game draw a path from A to B, _placing bridges where necessary_.

Making suggestions for puzzle design is a bit trickier, but I think once you move beyond the really basic stuff, you need to start providing some constraints for the player; constraints will give the player an idea the general direction the answer is in without spelling it out for them. It might actually be good to have multiple difficulty tracks, which have the same puzzles to solve, but the easier modes impose constraints to keep you close to a sane solution. For instance, easy mode might tell you, "solve this with an XOR and an AND; intermediate mode might tell you, "Solve this with two gates", and expert mode would just tell you "Solve this".

Another way to create puzzles without requiring the player to re-invent things from a blank slate, would be to present broken circuits and have the player correct them. Though, that's a much bigger change to the gameplay than the other suggestions.

Anyway, all that said, this is a cool game.

Alysson by Jod 2017-05-04T21:17:34Z

Very nicely done. Packs some punch.

I could see where it was going very early on (end of chapter 2, beginning of chapter 3), and I wasn't wrong, but it went there with much more skill than I was expecting. I had what I _assume_ is the good ending, or at least, probably not the worst ending. As @remco said, could have used some audio, I think, but otherwise very good.

Anyway, kudos to you!

Protolife by icxon 2017-05-07T06:15:44Z

This is amazing, probably my favorite game of the combo, even though I find it somewhat difficult (this mitigated _somewhat_ by the glory of R-pentomino). I've not completed it yet, but I definitely plan to. If there was a mobile/tablet version of this, I'd probably never stop playing. Seriously.

I agree with @remco, additional types of proteins would be good. One that moved around during the infection phase, harvesting greens for you, but died if reds got to it, would be nice. One that automatically harvested adjacent greens would be nice an exploitable, actually :-p

Dean's World by Laguna 2017-05-20T00:20:32Z

This game looks and sounds nice, and the idea is solid, but there's some problems with the design, specifically as regards to crafting. Crafting recipes are basically impossible to discover on your own: even if you know that a pie is made from 4 berries, there are 126 different ways to arrange 4 items in a grid of 9 spaces; and that's if the four items are all the same, when there's four different items it's 3024 possible arrangements. How is the player supposed to discern which patterns make anything?

This can be fine, in a way, if the player is given room to explore and experiment, but because the fatigue, hunger and warmth timers continue to tick down while you're crafting, the player will likely die before they discover a single crafting recipe.

My recommendation would be to take one of two routes. Either: * *Horadric Cube Route* - Make positioning irrelevant, so that only quantity and item type matters; you already need to discover that 4 berries makes a pie, no need to exacerbate it by having it matter how you arrange the berries. * *MasterMind Route* - Have the game _inform_ you when you're partway to completing a recipe; the correct item in the correct spot should highlight in one color, while the correct item in the wrong spot highlights a different color (and an incorrect item doesn't highlight at all). Of course, unlike the game MasterMind, there's more than one possible recipe, so you'd need some way of deciding which one to display the highlighting for.

Either way, time should pause while at the crafting table

Beyond that, there's really nothing to complain about; as I said, the game looks and sounds nice, and the controls are mostly fine. But the crafting system is frustrating instead of engaging, because it doesn't reward experimentation.

Every World Has a Pizzeria by Lucas Trevisan 2017-05-17T23:08:33Z

This is pretty great from an aesthetic point of view, but I feel like it's a bit too hard. I'd suggest giving just a *little* bit more time than you are now for each delivery. Also, it's not super intuitive that you start the game without any pizzas (though I suppose it helps teach the player how to get more, right away). You might want to have some text say "Return to the pizzeria!" when you run out of pizzas, though.

Carefulzilla by glimaleite 2017-05-07T23:43:48Z

This is really fantastic. I could actually see this being expanded slightly, in-as-much as you could add different environments to stomp through and different monsters to save the cities from.

I like that there's an acknowledgement when you actually save everyone and cause no damage at all (not that I have accomplished this); is there a similar acknowledgement when you destroy every destructible thing? I tried, on one play through, and nothing in particular happened, but I may have simply missed something.

ATLANTIS by OccultOne 2017-05-11T05:21:16Z

This was amazingly well thought-out and put together; I'm definitely going to give the updated version a try, considering how good the jam version was.

There were some UI problems, but I feel like those have been adequately addressed by other commenters. My main problem was really just that it wasn't always clear ahead of time that there were problems impending. For example, when my Scout died for no readily apparent reason. I assume he drowned, but the tile he was in wasn't all the way sunk, and anyway the mage could stand on similar tiles just fine.

That said, this is just superb, big props for getting this made in just 72 hours!

Lottery: you judge them I judge you by doppelgunner 2017-05-10T07:14:36Z

This is an interesting idea. I do think the implementation is _slightly_ flawed, however, in that in a sense many of the choices you make don't matter; you're only allowed to leave one person alive, and everyone else gets killed; that being the case, it's not clear how much it matters what _order_ you kill them in.

I was playing the game fullscreen, so at the end I didn't even know I was being _shown_ a rating until I had already quit the game and returned the main menu.

All that being said, I still think this is a really cool premise for an entry. Well done!

King of the world by Linus 2017-05-04T05:58:49Z

The tutorial is very nicely constructed, it's unusual for a LD entry to have a tutorial that actually teaches you anything, so that was refreshing.

Personally, while I thought the timer worked _okay_, it meshed very poorly with the UI for counting units. That is, you have to mouse around and hover over things to figure out where you army is, which eats precious seconds off the timer. So, like @adhesion, I'd say you need to add a visual indicator of unit count, particularly in light of the timer.

Also like @adhesion, I found islands extremely problematic.

The reset-queue button didn't seem to work for me, as far as I could tell.

Other than those three issues, though, I thought the game was quite fun, and not something you usually see in a Jam (strategy games just don't show up that often here).

Planet Domination by Sir Magic 2017-05-12T20:16:42Z

This seems pretty neat, but I have to agree that it's hard to hold the planets in any meaningful way. With the current scoring system, it feels like only the last 30 seconds or so of gameplay matters; I'd suggest that instead of who has the most planets at the 2-minute mark, each team gets 1 point per planet they hold per second, and at the end of 2 minutes whoever had the most points wins; that way, it's more about who can hold the planets the longest, rather than who can snatch the planets right at the last second.

Some further comments: * The graphics are very nice! Simple, but effective. Audio isn't bad either. * There should not be the same number of teams as planets, makes it too easy to tie (with the current scoring system, anyway). * Player movement seems pretty slow. * Is it just me, or do the Blue and Green teams get multiple ships at once while the Red team gets only one? That seems a bit unfair. * I think a cool way to improve the gameplay loop here would be to have the planets actually in motion relative to the spawn points, maybe orbiting a star or something; if you're near enough to a planet, you automatically move with it, otherwise you retain your fixed frame of reference. No idea how feasible that is to implement, though. * It'd be neat to have different kind of ships to choose from, maybe one moves faster but has less shields, one fires missiles, I dunno. A lot of ways you could go with that if you decided to expand it post-Jam.

In any case, congratulations on finishing, hope to see you back in a future Jam!

ANTIVIRUS by KappaIX 2017-05-17T17:29:52Z

This is very well put together, and a lot of fun to play. I'm not sure I like the huge difficulty spike partway through the third section; I've no problem with difficult games, but prefer a smoother difficulty curve, whereas this went from "pretty easy" to "omg you're dead" in a blink. I think the solution there would be to add at least a *few* frames of invincibility when hit, so you can't be taken from full health to dead in a single go.

Other than that, this is very good! Kudos to you!

Pod2000 by nidup 2017-05-14T00:15:29Z

Maybe it was just me, but I experienced a bunch of technical issues with the game, in three different browsers. It looks really cool, though so far.

* In Chrome, it loaded, but there was a big white box covering about 40% of the canvas; it soon became apparent that it was the text entry area, but it's obviously not supposed to be a visible white box. * In Safari, it wouldn't start. Console complained that "const" declarations aren't allowed in strict mode. * In Firefox, the game actually loaded, and I was able to play. It was pretty cool, but I was only able to do the exploration portion of the game. When I tried to run `archive ls` or `inventory`, instead of listing all the things I had available, it would list one thing I had available (I think the most recent thing), repeatedly (as many times as there should have been things to list). So I couldn't tell what was in my inventory :(

I looked at other player's comments, and I seem to be the only person who's encountered these problems. Not sure what I've done wrong.

Miniscule Frenzy by Mieeh 2017-05-10T07:01:23Z

Very very nice; the Downwell aesthetic is pulled off really well here (possibly better than it actually is in Downwell :-p ). Enemy polarity is a mechanic I've seen before, but never in a platformer that I can recall. There's a lot of potential here for both action level design and puzzle level design (though action level design may benefit from some tweaks to make mid-air flipping more of a thing).

All in all, this is very cool. The difficulty curve works really well, for the most part; it felt challenging, but I was able to finish it. I will say I found level 12 to be much more challenging than any of the subsequent levels, though.

Starstruck Ducky by HuvaaKoodia 2017-05-03T06:04:11Z

I liked it quite a bit! Though, I think it could do with some additional levels, or a randomized duck layout, something to make it last longer than a few minutes.

Also, I agree with what everyone else says: the expressions on the duck are fantastic.

Planet CLTV-8 by graebor 2017-05-14T07:34:46Z

It's very pretty, and the core mechanic is pretty interesting. I think there's a lot of different ways you could build on this, if you were of a mind to.

U-Turn by benjamin 2017-05-17T18:36:44Z

This is amazingly good. On the first playthrough, I just thought it was "pretty good", but as soon as I got my first flag on my second play-through I knew I was in for a treat. Any game that uses procedural generation gets points in my book, but this game used it particularly well. Add to that the excellent pixel art, solid controls, and catchy music; this game is the full package.

I would love to see this expanded into a larger game in some manner. Maybe different environments, each with their own pool of effects to draw from, a la Spelunky?

Just, excellent, excellent job.

Daydreaming Island by camilo 2017-05-03T07:17:23Z

I'm not even going to comment on the the technical issues, because I know other commenters have already covered them in depth. That said, the graphics, writing and audio definitely combined to create a really interesting experience and atmosphere. You wrote in a response to @slimabob that you spent some time on stuff you didn't end up using, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about some of that stuff, as I definitely think it'd be worth expanding this into a longer experience (though, in a game like this, when it's longer, it can be hard to strike the right balance between puzzle-y bits and story/atmosphere, still worth trying though).

SUPER METROARIO by puppetmaster 2017-05-05T01:39:06Z

I played this game, for more than half an hour, and completed it. Pretty challenging, with a well-designed map (some of the stuff may have been hidden a bit _too_ well, but, I did find it, so, works for me).

My only complaint is to do with the controls/physics. Even switching back and forth between wasd and arrow keys (and eventually settling on both at once, wa_d for move and down arrow for duck), my hands hurt after playing this. Probably would have been a lot easier with a controller, but the weird jump physics didn't really help - none of the jumps were impossible (obviously), but some of them were more difficult than I would have liked.

That may sound like a lot of complaining, but I definitely still really like the game - almost certainly the LD38 entry I've stuck with for the longest amount of time.

OH, and before I forget: The music was really good, and the premise was really amusing. I love me some Metroidvania, so even with slightly weird controls, I definitely am a fan of this game.

The Flip Lands by SalamiChild 2017-05-10T07:36:31Z

I have to agree with @Jordgubben, the way this works is very well thought out; I could see this working very well with a bronze/silver/gold or 1/2/3-star system, where completing the level in few enough clicks is key to higher rankings, so you can always brute-force a level to get past it, but will have to really think about it if you want a good score.

The aesthetic was really nice, as well.

Vegicide by Reactor-Scram 2017-05-19T21:24:09Z

This was a pretty interesting game, and fun to play. I agree that the controls felt a bit weird (specifically the fact that you had to be careful about not letting go of the directional button before you let go of space/shift/whatever), but other than that, a nice job. Also interesting to see a WebGL game that's not a Unity export.

It'd be cool to see a version of thing with more levels, different attacks (or possibly different characters, each of whom has a unique attack), etc.

An Ant World by wolar 2017-05-03T08:19:56Z

This seems like a pretty cool entry, but I felt like I didn't have very much control over what my ants did. In particular, I had a hard time getting the sprays to work properly; sometimes the audio effect that accompanies the spraying would get stuck playing without any spray coming out. Not really sure what I was doing wrong.

Regarding @davidthelazar problem, modern Macs can no longer run PowerPC applications, that capability was removed in OS X 10.7, which came out in 2011. That said, you've clearly fixed the problem by now, since I was able to run it just fine (honestly, I didn't even know that Unity was still _capable_ of exporting PowerPC applications)

Fog and Glass by Alex bezuska 2017-05-14T00:45:31Z

It's an interesting entry, though I'm not sure I have a lot to say about it; certainly it looks very nice.

Actually, my one complaint: when the game loads up, there is no text at first; for me, it took almost 30 seconds for any text to appear. I was pressing right and left as the instructions said, trying to figure out if I was having any effect on the displayed graphics (it didn't seem like it). If that's intentional, I'd recommend against it. If it's not, and it's not just some weird issue with my browser (which it most certainly could be), then you might want to start with some sort of "loading" message; I almost quit before it even actually started. That said, it's entirely possible it's a problem on my end that no one else run into, in which case, please ignore the preceding paragraph.

Corgo-a-gogo by nickavv 2017-05-02T05:41:50Z

I found 6 Corgi's and 45 treats, no idea if there is more to find or not. The controls and physics are pretty iffy, but otherwise, a cute game. Congrats!

Icarus Isolation by King Kujito 2017-04-28T18:01:00Z

@xavier-indie-gamedev @king-kujito I also use a Mac, there's a much easier way to deal with Gatekeeper than turning it off entirely, just right-click (or control-click) on the app in question and select 'Open' from the context menu instead of double-clicking. You will be presented with a dialog box asking if you are sure you want to open the game. After you say yes, it will remember that app forever and you can open it as normal. This way, you don't have to turn off your security settings system wide just to play LD games.

@king-kujito As for the game itself, I have to agree that the controls are problematic, but I otherwise liked it. The ability to steer with the mouse would have been an amazing boon; partly because the mouse, as an analog input device, provides more precise control, but mostly because mouse-look has been a staple input method for 3D games for almost 20 years.

Puny World by Joe Cowman 2017-05-03T07:37:55Z

I love this, it reminds me very strongly of the game Reigns (which is a good thing, Reigns is absolutely fantastic). I'd love to see a version with more content, particularly in the form of more unrelated prayer-trees (as opposed to making the existing prayer trees longer and more complex). My new passtime is repeatedly destroying and resurrecting the world's birds.

(An _exceedingly_ minor niggle, but there are _way_ more than 300 million birds on Earth. Also, the comma placement is real weird on the score screen).

Planet Desumaton by SiegfriedCroes 2017-05-14T07:46:23Z

Wow, that was _tough_, took several tries. I did beat it, though. It looks really good, too. Some audio would have been really nice, but other than that, good job! I could see this being a cool game to play on a tablet, if it was built out some.

Throw by somethinboutgames 2017-05-03T16:38:47Z

Unfortunately, doesn't work for me on Mac. It runs, but I can't get past the title screen: M and E keys work to mute or exit, but clicking anywhere (such as on "start game") does nothing at all. :(

I'll try again later to see if I can figure it out.

EDIT: Nevermind, I feel dumb! FIgured it out.

OK, now that I've played it, I love this. A lot. I want more levels. And a better title screen, the current one is actually harder than level one, even after I got over my brain-fart about how to interact with it :-p

TerminAnt by davikin92 2017-05-19T21:03:45Z

I like this a lot, I wish there were more of it!

I usually don't like first person shooter games much, because I am very bad at them. This one, though, it more of a first-person platformer that happens to involve shooting (the same genre as Metroid Prime, basically). And I approve of that very much.

_As_ a first-person platformer, though, there is at least one are where it's a bit off - some of the platforms are very small, and it can be hard to aim your jumps properly given that you can't see your feet. So I'd definitely suggest polishing that aspect more if you continue with the game.

Other that that, though, it's hard to find a lot of flaws with this. I'd love to see more levels, with different powers and puzzle elements, etc.

Protoware Planet by josefalanga 2017-05-12T19:27:57Z

I'm not really good at FPS games, and don't play them often, so I found this pretty difficult (I didn't even clear the first wave of enemies). For me, it would have helped to have more prominent feedback that I was being hurt (I think some FPSes show an indicator to tell you what direction you're being attacked from? As I said, I don't play these often). That said, I imagine someone who actually plays this type of game regularly would not have the same problems.

On the parts I am equipped to judge properly, I think you did a pretty good job, especially for a compo entry! The art style is unusual but pulled off very well, and the music works well. I think some additional sound effects might have been called for, though; possibly one to tell your you're being hurt, or that there's an enemy right behind you, something like that.

Pineshore Planet by thomz12 2017-05-19T23:10:43Z

This is a cute game, small in scope but entertaining. I especially like the music and the visual aesthetic.

In fact, my main complaint is that it was harder to enjoy the visuals than I'd have liked, because the camera controls weren't very precise; it would have been _very_ nice to be able to rotate the camera in place, rather than trying to do a bunch of different lateral drags to force it to an appropriate angle (or just accepting that you can only see something's sideways paper-edge).

Other than that, though, no complaints! Kudos to you!

SUPER Space Barrel by aamatniekss 2017-05-09T18:56:35Z

This is quite fun, and you pulled off the art style _really_ well. I think as a Jam entry it holds up quite well as it is, but in an expanded version I think it might require lives or HP, because at the moment it gets very difficult _quite_ quickly. I'd love to see some alternate maps, though, maybe power ups, etc.

In any case, really well-constructed entry! Kudos.

Rockpolis: Town survival by Pete 2017-05-12T20:56:57Z

This was very nice, and I'm a huge fan of this sort of game.

Some suggestions: * Blue card purchase piles should not be re-dealt each round Instead, there should be three cards available for purchase; at the end of the turn, the leftmost card disappears, the other two cards slide left, and a new card appears in the rightmost spot. If you buy a card, any cards to the right of it slide left to fill in the space and a new card is dealt immediately. This adds some strategy to purchases. * A lot of the blue cards are, unfortunately, not very good. In particular, Bribe is very weak because it's only good if you happen to draw it on the same turn as you draw enough money to buy two things (or three) things. It should have some other effect; maybe purchase +2, health +2, or purchase + 2, attack +1, anything to ensure it won't be a dead weight most of the time. * These sorts of games _need_ to have mechanics that allow you to delete things from your deck. Novice players often look at them and thing, "Why would I _ever_ do that?", but experienced players know that those are the most powerful cards in the game. Actually, that could tie in nicely to bribe: destroy a card in your hand or discard pile to get +2 purchasing power. Thematically, you're using the destroyed card as a bribe; mechanically, destroying a card actually becomes the whole point of Bribe. Might have to bump the cost, in fact. * There should be a card that kills lots of enemies but can't hurt the boss. * It'd be cool if, as the game progressed (as the turn count got higher), things escalated for your city as well as the enemy; in other words, just like the opponent automatically starts sending more enemies per turn as the game draws on, it'd be cool if you got a +Action, +CardsDrawn or +Purchase bonus after a certain number of turns. Or maybe add a new card type (green?) that could show up occasionally in the blue card row, was really expensive, and gave permanent bonuses. In that case, maybe they're eventually destroyed by damage to the city and go to your discard pile (like Stations in Star Realms).

EDIT: Actually, Bribe doesn't even work, it made me draw 2 instead of buy 2, so it's not possible to buy more than one card a turn it seems, since bribe is the only card that would have done that.

littleBLASTplanet by gamepopper 2017-05-10T04:51:31Z

This is really cool, I like it a lot. I have to say, with the camera mode on follow the trajectory of your bullets while walking seemed to make _no_ sense, but once I switched the camera mode to stationary (which I understand is the default anyway), it was a lot easier to predict what was going on :-p

I feel like the only thing this game really needs is to make the progression through the level more obvious to the player; some combination of enemies getting tougher or more frequent towards the end of the level, a song that is the exact length of the level, something that makes it _feel_ like you're progressing. Obviously those are hard targets to hit in a game jam, especially when you're in the Compo, but for a post-jam expansion I'd try to increase that sense of progression within the level. Even a countdown timer would help (and not just a count-up timer).

For difficulty concerns, earlier levels could just be _shorter_, to combat the possibility of being bored early on.

For the curving bullets, I'd actually suggest having two guns would add some neat strategy to the game. One would act as the current gun acts, the other would be affected by gravity. You'd have both options available, but maybe there's a split second animation frame to switch weapons, or just the fire rate is for either weapon, combined, so you can't just spam them both simultaneously at all times. Something like that.

Little Remains by nilead 2017-05-16T04:48:02Z

This is probably the nicest looking game in the entire Jam, at least that I have encountered. However, the nice looks came at a price, it seems, because it can be hard to tell where it is possible to walk and where it is not. The changing camera angles on the same scene didn't really help, either.

Other than that, though, it's hard to find anything to complain about here. The story is good, the graphics are good, the music is good, the fetch quest is not too bad (which is praise, for a fetch quest :stuck_out_tongue:), it fits the theme well. Great job.

In a way, I'm glad you don't have to make the final choice, because I suspect what I view as the 'correct' answer would not be an option: take the Discarded with you in your ship! :wink:

A world too small and no jetpack by mikel 2017-05-05T00:43:29Z

The art is nice, particularly the 'splash' screens when you win or lose, which look very cute. The gameplay is pretty good, but I think the collision detection between the player and the enemies is pretty harsh at the moment, they are very hard to jump over successfully. My recommendations:

* Tweak the hit detection (and maybe enemy behavior) to make enemies a *lot* easier to avoid * Having done that, tweak the fuel drop algorithm to make it so you have to get past more enemies for each fuel; don't allow the first fuel to spawn with a bunch of enemies, or the last fuel to spawn in a big empty area.

If you do the first without the second, the game will be too easy, and if you do the second without the first, it'll be _way_ too hard, but I think if you did both, you could make this something really fun. You could expand it to include more planets, different enemy types, power ups, etc, if you wanted.

Also, it'd be cool to have some safe areas to stand, so you could catch your breath and admire the art. I found not even the capsule was completely safe.

Until Tomorrow by MSiddeek 2017-05-04T17:47:34Z

This is fantastic, especially the art style is amazing. I would have liked a few additional puzzles in the cave, but even still, extremely well done. @fanatrick is right, the bit with the old man on the Edge is pretty fantastic.

The audio was so quiet I didn't realize there _was_ any until I saw the sound icon on my Chrome tab halfway through. I had to turn the volume on my computer to maximum to really hear it.

Personally, I did _not_ notice any input lag like some others did. That said, something I'm experimenting with in my own game (post jam, not uploaded yet) is, if the player has input while animating from one state to the next, just skip to the end of the animation rather than queueing the input for later. That way, if the player really wants to, they can move as fast as they're pressing keys, but if they take things at a more 'normal' pace, they still animated smoothly between squares. If a lot of people complain about input lag for you, it's a method worth considering.

Anyway, that's a sidetrack; the main thing is, this game is super rad and I like it a lot.

GALAXEN by mrerdalural 2017-05-16T05:06:23Z

This is very nice! I think other people have already commented adequately on the way messages disappear (especially when two bodies are near each other). Other than that there's not really a lot to complain about.

I guess I can complain about this, if I have to about something: Quotes that have a hyphen in them, the stuff after the hyphen never shows. Presumably this is because you're splitting on the hyphen to hide the attribution, but it also affects "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine—it is stranger than we can imagine.", you just get "Not only it the universe stranger than we imagine".

Anyway, all in all, a neat experience!

Little Fortune Planet by Flaterectomy 2017-05-07T04:04:39Z

I couldn't get the volcano achievement, or the skull achievement. I'd assume the skull achievement comes from killing everyone, but not matter how quickly I do they just respawn immediately (EDIT: n/m, that wast the Cure for Death's fault).

Also, apologies to Troop, but, I could't understand a _word_ he was saying during the intro. Perhaps some subtitles?

EDIT: Whoops, after all that, nearly forgot to mention that I really liked this! It might need some tweaks, but this is really creative and cool.

Moon Dozer by sararyCow 2017-05-19T17:50:52Z

This is pretty neat, and very funny. Also while of course you didn't write or perform the music, I give you full imaginary points for your _choice_ of music, it fits _really_ well and enhances the mood a lot.

The one places where it falls a bit flat, unfortunately, is the gameplay itself. This idea has a ton of potential, but it'd be a lot more fun if you were rolling over cities , bouncing off mountains, and leaving a trail of destruction in your wake; as it is, you generally bounce off the first city you hit and roll to a stop almost immediately, even if launched with full power. I'd adjust the physics so that the moon doesn't actually collide with the cities at all, it just bowls through them with a slight loss of velocity (and maybe occasionally a small direction change). Mountains should act as they do now, but volcanoes should act like pinball bumpers, bouncing you away with more velocity than you came in with.

Also, I totally agree with @glitchy-pixel, if the game ended with the end of the music, that'd be pretty sweet. You could get a score based on how much you managed to destroy during the time limit.

All i all, though it has some flaws, I think this idea has legs; I'd love to see a more polished version in the future!

Small World Sim by pyokoanarogue 2017-05-04T23:20:43Z

This is very, very cool! My singular complaint is that the phrasing on the goals is hard to understand: drop _current_ funds below $20, or drop _funds per day_ bellow $20?

Other than that, I kept playing well past completing all the goal, and filled up the planet with (eventually) trees, houses, hospitals, and a single remaining factory. My population had semi-stabilized around 4600 (with a slow increase as the birth rate goes up automatically once a month). I could probably have gotten it to go higher, but I liked the layout I had and didn't want to demolish everything.

I could definitely see this being expanded into a more complex game. The main thing would be adding more goals, including goals with a "reach X by date Y" format. You might consider creating 'scenarios', like old Sim City games had, where you start with a certain amount of the map pre-filled in, and you have to complete a goal in X amount of time. It'd also be cool to add additional building types, possibly add some rules about what can go next to what, but I'm not sure I see that as completely essential.

Plutiny by peringo 2017-05-15T18:23:57Z

This was very good! I loved the art style and the music, and the gameplay was fun, too; I love me some upgrades. Story was funny.

My only real complaint is that the main waves of enemies are all, essentially, the same. Until you reach the boss, there's not a lot that differentiates each level from the previous. I'd aim to add new enemies, new patterns, some sort of Differences in Kind to punch up the gameplay a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlBR1z-ue-I

(Obviously, that can be real hard to do in a game jam context, but I hope you add some of that if you expand this post-jam; maybe you already did, I haven't checked out the post-jam version yet)

In any case, kudos to you!

House Escape by Piotrek 2017-05-07T05:46:03Z

This feels like a nice _start_ to a game, but it's very, very short, completable in less than a minute. Also, it seems a bit buggy, picking things up more than once, getting messages that don't make sense (there's something behind the TV, when you've already picked up the thing behind the TV, etc).

All that said, the game _looks_ really good; I like the art style quite a bit.

Glass Houses by diptoman 2017-05-07T05:34:01Z

This is a super great entry, the presentation is really tremendous. Although the current entry is pretty well self-contained, I actually feel like the style and setting would do well being expanded into a longer 'adventure' game - still without any text dialog. I feel like at the end, when the characters are presented with this whole new world they never knew, I want to explore it with them.

Although they're fairly different, this actually reminds me quite a bit of LOOM.

EDIT: To elaborate a little, I feel like an expanded version of this should maintain and expand on the gameplay of this version; not the walking-back-and-forth-a-lot part, mind, but the part at the end, the 'implicit' decision-making, where you choose between two paths by simple interaction, without necessarily realizing you're being presented with a choice.

Petit Adventure by Sun-Wukong 2017-05-08T16:55:40Z

This is amazing! It's a genre that you don't often see in an LD entry, but you really pulled it off. The visual style is _super_ cute.

I wonder if the people saying it's too hard, didn't find the Double Beam item. It's not exactly in an obvious location, and without it I'm not sure the game is completable. The early enemies need to be easier, or you need to start with more HP. Other than that, though, very nice.

I will say, in the MacOS version on Google Drive, the ending still doesn't work. Also, fighting the final boss, I still took damage on rounds I was not actually attacked, and still survived with negative hit points. I may try the itch.io download later to see if I can find the fixed version. But regardless, overall a great entry. One of the nicest looking I've seen yet.

Also, I know you sourced the audio from outside sources, so you don't get a rating on it, but I will say, you picked it well, it really adds to the atmosphere of the game.

MF100 - HACK THE JAM (old console emulator) by egordorichev 2017-05-04T07:50:42Z

On the Mac, the editor doesn't work right; as you move the cursor around the file, it inserts random invisible characters into the file at the cursor point (as well as moving the cursor). The result is that the file is no longer syntactically valid.

That said, this is very creative and weird. I really dig the aesthetic, even if I wasn't really able to use it.

The world is (a) flat by Jordgubben 2017-05-10T07:43:28Z

I think this is probably the most creative take on the theme I've seen so far, kudos for that! It's just unfortunate the game is so short, I'd have liked to see more.

One Push Man by harusame 2017-05-09T18:30:40Z

This game looks and sounds really nice, on par with Jam games rather than other Compo entries. Also, it's funny that the enemies can also grab the power-ups. That said, I feel like the game was a little bit unfair in terms of the difficulty ramp; maybe I'm just bad at the game (ok, I'm definitely bad at the game), but I felt like I was dying quickly enough enough that I didn't have a chance to get any better at it. I'd suggest starting off with some easier enemies who maybe are hard to push off, but don't push you back at all, so that you have a chance to get used to pushing enemies away; I found myself, often-as-not, just walking off the edge, following the enemy I had just pushed. Actually, maybe a little waving-arms "whoa" animation and a split-second delay to recover when you're going to walk directly off the edge (obviously not triggered if you get _pushed_ off the edge).

Other than that, this is pretty sweet!

Digital Backwater by Max Cahill 2017-04-25T05:49:27Z

Pretty neat! I like the idea of the persistent world.

Minos' Pond by Reflextions 2017-05-13T01:41:37Z

This is really cool, and I'd love to see this expanded. Unfortunately, I do have to agree with what @ryte2byte said about the UI; though of course it's understandable you can't polish everything in a JAM game, if you expand this further (and I hope you do), the UI needs some serious attention.

One other problem I had which prevented me from getting _super_ far is that I was able to build a Tree in front of my wood house. After that, whenever a wood Mino made a delivery, he'd get stuck and be unable to leave. Future Minos making deliveries wouldn't get stuck, they'd just drop stuff off without entering the door, but eventually the poor stuck Mino would die of hunger and thirst. Once that happened, there'd be room for another Mino to get stuck in the door and the cycle would repeat. They were dying like this as fast or faster than new ones showed up; by the time I stopped playing, I had 20-40 of all of the other Minos, but only 8 surviving wood Minos.

Anyway, those issues having been noted, I think this is fun concept, and I hope you make a post-jam version.

All The Way Down by luthwyhn 2017-05-20T05:12:56Z

It's a neat concept, I'd love to see where it would go if you expanded on it. Of course, as it stands it's incomplete and so not a lot happens, but that's life in game jams sometimes.

Also, I laughed at "You dead".

Planetary Defense by pixlark 2017-05-15T18:31:19Z

This is clever, but even with the ability to pick up the towers and move them, I feel like it's still too hard. As @terrabalt mentioned, a mini-map, radar, or some other indicator of where asteroids were approaching would have helped. I also feel like the controls could have been better - in fact, a single change would have made the game waaay friendlier: if you have an unplaced tower, and you right-click somewhere that there isn't a tower already, it should place a tower for you. Or, make left click place towers, right click remove them, and use A/D to rotate the planet.

Anyway, those complaints aside I really think this has a lot of promise! Kudos for finishing it under Compo constraints, as well!

Super Kaiju Dunk City by emarcotte 2017-05-04T05:38:00Z

This game was really, really unexpected, and I just have to say, the pixel art is _astonishingly_ good. Unfortunately, I'm pretty bad at Rhythm games (I'm _ok_ at CotND and garbage at everything else), so I had to be hyper-focused on the upcoming symbols while playing, with no change to really enjoy the art going by :stuck_out_tongue:.

While I beat level 1 on my first try, level 2 is already waaay to hard for me, and level 3 I fail within seconds. Ah, well.

Bantam! by dylanilvento 2017-05-19T17:39:17Z

The pixel art on display here is really nice, and I'm a huge sucker for "multi-modal" games, so I really like that part too. As others have stated, though, the controls for the combat sections just don't work well. Personally, I think it's very rarely a good idea to use a physics simulation for platforming controls, a platformer needs to give the player much more precise control over the movements of their character than a physics simulation typically allows. Obviously, of course, compromises have to be made during a game jam, especially in a Compo entry. But if you're planning to expand the game at all, I'd recommend rethinking how player movement is handled.

All that aside, I really did like this, and would love to see a more polished version! Maybe with longer, side-scrolling sections inside the castles, and things to shoot at in your ship? Or, at least, some obstacles in the overworld map that still allow you to explore, but make the obvious, easy path the one that leads to the easier levels first.

D4RK and the Small Worlds by abhimonk 2017-05-02T04:33:51Z

I have to agree with @AntaresValdemar, the difficulty is a bit too much, at least with a keyboard. Maybe with a controller it would have been better. I think I got killed by Saturn maybe... 20 times, before i gave up? My main problem there was the big bullets Saturn spawns, which (obviously) are the same color as Saturn (because the game is monochrome) and spawn in the same _place_ as Saturn, so you can't see them, and run into them when jumping to attack.

Also, there's no reason not restore health when passing a checkpoint (since you restore health when you die), but that's a minor complaint.

The music, was really really nice. SFX were pretty good too.

DELETED by Lupshenko 2017-05-04T18:46:36Z

You weren't kidding when you said the game would include weird things! It's a pity it's such a pain to get going, though. If nwjs weren't like 170MB, I'd suggest just bundling it with the game.

Super Collapse Guy by crazi456 2017-04-28T19:02:05Z

Very ambitious, and very well done. Mouse was a bit weird in WebGL, because it stops working if your mouse leaves the box, would have been nice to be able to go fullscreen. Other than that, extremely well done. The 3D/2D thing has been done before, but I don't think I've ever seen one with 360 degrees of freedom of rotation when switching back and forth.

Vertical look would have been nice, though necessarily your view would have to snap back to the horizontal plane when switching perspectives, or the whole thing would break.

King Of The Seals by MiggyG 2017-05-12T19:18:46Z

This is really good for a quick amusement, and very funny. I'm not really sure what you could to to expand it into more than two-minute experience, really, but for what it is, it's quite good!

Actually, no, I take that back. Semi-cooperative, semi-competitive, local multiplayer! That is, all players on the same team, trying to keep peasants off the island together, but each getting scored for their own 'kills'. If you can't work together as a team, you all lose, but you're still trying to beat your friends' scores. "This is a cooperative game, but I'm winning!" _That_ is what could take this beyond a two minute "Hah, that was silly" into something you'd play repeatedly.

Also at that point you could add different royal seals (King, Queen, Prince, Princess, Vizier, whatever) who had different abilities. I take it back, this could be awesome :stuck_out_tongue:

Although admittedly, adding all of that would be a ton of extra work.

You Are World. by amras0000 2017-05-15T18:56:51Z

This is a fantastic interpretation of the theme, and the music really adds to the mood. I like the core gameplay concept a lot, too. While it's appropriate that the game moves a little slower than average, if I had to level a complaint I'd say it's a bit _too_ slow; specifically, not the pace of improvement (which is fine), but the actual pace of your movement through space; it takes a long time to get anywhere. Also, I wish there was a button that caused the text to advance more quickly, because I was often sitting there waiting for it to fade so I could see the next message.

Those things aside, I _love_ this entry, especially as a compo entry. I'm not 100% sure (I've not been keeping careful track) but this is probably the highest rating I've given to a Compo entry this LD.

Also, the first volcano I picked up was named "Fires of Armok", love that reference.

All in all, great job!

LoneGalaxy by tehphen 2017-05-10T04:38:12Z

I am very bad at this game, even when playing against myself :-p

It's tough making a multiplayer game for Ludum Dare, because so many people do their judging solo. That said, it seems like a cool idea, one that starts difficult but that I can imagine getting good at.

Neon Genesis Pluto by Avocadosan 2017-05-19T19:11:24Z

WTF did I just play??? :stuck_out_tongue:

This is pretty fun, although it does get frustrating to start over from the beginning when you rescue an alien only to discover he was overlaid on top of an asteroid. Other than that, though, an amusing game, I liked it! The little Japanese quips were especially funny.

It _is_ a pity that collecting the AYY LMAOs didn't really seem to actually mean anything, though.

Flerth by parahunter 2017-05-08T16:33:14Z

This was really adorable! I love the art style, the audio worked well (I know you didn't make it, but you choose well, Kevin MacLeod is a great resource), and the core gameplay idea was well-executed. I'm not exactly sure how you could expand this mechanic into a larger game, but for what you've made, it's pretty great. My only real complaint is that the difficulty scales up pretty dramatically all at once.

RoboLand by slovakyan 2017-05-13T05:23:11Z

So I played the Jam and Post-Jam version, and I gotta say, in both versions, the background/water effect is _really_ cool, I like it a lot. Other than that, yeah, the post-jam version looks a lot nicer of course.

I look forward to seeing what other levels you can come up with, however, I have a suggestion: In my mind, the coolest thing about this kind of game is the way the player needs to figure things out in advance, before they start the robot moving. In the current game, you can keep changing arrows (and placing new ones) as long as you like. Now, for some of the puzzles, that's actually necessary with the current ruleset. Of course, if you throw out those options _entirely_ it basically becomes just a maze, which isn't quite right either. I wonder, though, if you could do something like one of the following:

* Restrict the number of moves the player is allowed to make after starting the robot, * Have a special kind of tile (built into the level, not placeable) that the robot stops on; only while standing on one of these tiles can you change the robot's instructions, then start them again. * Have tiles that you can place which, when the robot passes them, cause arrow tiles to rotate clockwise. That way, instead of the player clicking to rotate the tiles already in place, they have the robot do it.

I think the third one is my favorite option, but the first one would certainly be easier to implement.

Either way, I look forward to seeing more content from this! Kudos!

Atlas by CountTyranus 2017-05-08T18:55:26Z

The art style here is very good, although I think if the background had moved it would have given a much better feel for swimming through space (as opposed to sitting stationary in space). Also, yes, it felt a bit too hectic, with a bit too sparse a UI - some UI showing how many rockets you had left, how much damage the individual turrets had taken, etc, would have been good.

Also, your Mac download was a little messed up; there was a double-layer of .app wrapper (that is `Atlas_Mac.app/Atlas_Mac.app/Contents` instead of just `Atlas_Mac.app/Contents`, and the actual binary in the MacOS folder didn't have it's executable bit set when extracted from the RAR (this could have been an issue with the RAR extractor I used, admittedly). I was able to get the game to run without too much trouble regardless, since I'm used to this sort of thing (particularly for jam games), but other users may not have such an easy time.

All in all, this feels like a great start, I would definitely play more of this.

The Robot's Trial by citsua 2017-05-09T17:32:16Z

I like the art style (which, I normally don't like this sort of look, but in the case I did find it appealing, not sure I can put my finger on what's different). Other than that my biggest complaint is that the most interesting module, the magnet module, is really only used once; of course, in a LD context (particularly compo) there's not a lot of time for level design, so the limitation is understandable, it just would have been nice to see more of that one.

Other commenters have already mentioned the usability/UI issues. For reference, I can confirm that on MacOS it's a similar situation to Windows, the camera is if anything too sensitive. Anyway, other than that, I liked the entry!

rovR by morrilet 2017-05-07T05:17:57Z

This is a great idea, though like several prior commenters I found the space baby heads a bit frustrating, they just give you _so_ little room to maneuver that I also usually found it much easier to cheat and skip as many planets as possible.

That said, I really like the concept, and played all the way to the end! It's a fun experience, even if it was frustrating at times.

Dr. M Little's Planet Mass Overdrive by slimabob 2017-05-03T06:47:23Z

A fantastic entry! I had a lot of fun, and both endings were pretty sweet. Though, you should adjust it so that, if you choose to keep playing after the normal ending, it still lets you trigger the secret ending. Though, what happens now (you just push the Sun off the map) is pretty amusing too.

For my second play through, I decided to try to crash directly into the sun without having grown above size 5; for some reason, as soon as I touched the sun, my population stopped dying and I could do whatever I wanted without ever dipping below ~4 billion. Probably a bug, but I actually kind of like it if it' an easter egg.

Anyway all that aside, this feels like a Jam entry from a multi-person team, not a solo Compo entry. The fact that you got this made in 48 hours is super cool. I'll echo the requests from @camilo, I'd love to see additional levels for this.

EDIT: Actually I think what happened in my first play through was that I knocked some of the asteroids or moons on a trajectory out of bounds, so when I was done with the 'normal' path, collected everything left on the map and flew into the Sun, I still wasn't big enough. Might want to add a bounding box to keep things from flying off into space. Or not, maybe it's cool that that happens.

Super Smash Globes by 100th_Coin 2017-05-17T18:16:36Z

This was a pretty sweet puzzle game, though after you get the hang of it, the campaign is pretty easy. Survival has the potential to be much harder though; sometimes it is _very_ easy (maybe don't start adjacent to the enemy when the player makes the first move), but for non-trivial cases you have to think on your feet a lot more since you only get once chance and can't memorize the enemy's pattern.

Two touches I liked a lot were the character customization, and the fact that there was a 'map' so you knew how many levels there were left.

All in all, a very cool game. Good job, especially as a compo entry!

Wake Up ! by GoZz 2017-05-01T07:55:48Z

The visuals are very nice (reminds me of the game Spirits), and the audio is even better. The mechanical implementation (physics, controls, etc), obviously pretty rough. I really liked the ending!

Just as a tip, for games like this if you try to switch worlds while standing in what would be a wall in the target world, in my opinion it should just make a noise or display a visual effect, but not complete the switch. Getting stuck in a wall is no fun, even if you can switch right back.

Supernova by Veralos 2017-05-04T07:36:33Z

I have a total soft spot for games like this, exploration-platforming just scratches a bit of that Metroidvania itch, even if this game has none of the usual hallmarks of that genre. Certainly it would have been nice to have more variety (differences in kind), but in the short format I did complete it without it feeling repetitive.

I always love seeing people do procedural generation during Ludum Dare (even if I didn't do any myself time around).

Other than that, I can only echo what everyone else said about the aesthetics, the game looks and sounds very nice. Kudos to you.

Superbugs by Breadmower 2017-05-04T18:03:34Z

This works very well, I like it a lot. The mechanic is solid, though a lot of the puzzles are pretty easy.

I do disagree somewhat with @HuvaaKoodia, though; the last level is the only level where I found myself making mistakes and then having to correct them afterwards, so by that metric, it certain seems to qualify as 'harder'. While there are more constraints in the final level, which in principle directs you to the correct solution, the previous levels have so few constraints that almost anything you try will be a correct solution anyway.

Threading that needle, giving enough constraints that there is only one (or a few) correct solutions, but not so many constraints that said solution is obvious, may be difficult. But, if you can do it, you've got the makings of a really sweet puzzle game here.

Roguelike One by Chris Otey 2017-05-11T04:43:02Z

That was really enjoyable! I got to the very last level before I finally died; I was genuinely considering playing again immediately, but I need to judge other games too, so I'll be coming back after judging is complete to try again.

I do agree that the aiming is a bit of a problem, but not a huge one. I do wish there were more upgrades available that changed the way you fought (like the multi-shot one), though. In any case, while the aiming feel a bit awkward (especially since the _enemies_ can shoot in any direction), changing it would probably involve re-balancing a lot of the game.

My other two complaints are UI complaints: It's not really feasible to read the messages you get occasionally, because you're fighting while they're scrolling by. Maybe don't spawn any enemies until after the message has completed? Also, in the WebGL version (the only version I can play, since I'm on a Mac), pausing the game is pretty awkward: you have to hit escape to pause and unpause, but instead of doing what you wanted, it first kicks you out of full-screen. Then you press it again and it pauses. That means that if you want to pause, you can't safely get back into full screen until you beat the level.

Anyway, I hope you expand this further, I really like it!

Mind's Eye by Kosmo 2017-05-02T17:32:33Z

Excellent entry, though I'll agree somewhat with the other comments about the difficulty ramp. All told I got to level 12 in the end (didn't keep track of my other stats).

Unlike @drtizzle, the graphics weren't really my bag, but to each his own. My main suggestions if you plan to develop it farther are to improve the UI (make it more clear how health works, as I too initially though that a staticky screen was an unusable screen, and expected it to get un-staticky after a turn or too), add some power-ups for additional move options (temporarily turn light attack into a lunge that hits two in a row, temporarily make waiting defend, etc, and maybe a consumable board-clearing resource, like bombs in some shmups).

Mind's Eye by Kosmo 2017-05-03T09:23:42Z

@Kosmo I'm afraid those little lights may not have helped me, as for several rounds I just _assumed_ the screen was unusable and didn't even try to activate it, with even just one level of static. It was't until a few turns later when the screen was still staticky that I thought, "Hm, maybe I can still use that?"

In a sense it's my own fault for making unwarranted assumptions, but that's how it is with UI design. My suggestion is that if you press spacebar without at least visiting each panel, you get some sort of indication to go use it before ending the turn.

PixelWorld by Dom Harris 2017-05-04T16:42:35Z

I liked this quite a bit! I always love seeing procedural generation during Ludum Dare. The visuals were nice, though it might have been good to include a few more colorful things in the sea of black. The music was great, though it might have been good to include some more SFX. Basically on both counts I'd want the world just a bit more 'populated'. Overall, it was fun!

I did find the controls problematic - with they keyboard, I felt like i had a _very_ hard time controlling where I was going, in a way I don't usually feel with other 'twin stick' shooters (this didn't apply to shooting, only to movement). In particular, the way that momentum and gravity worked felt awkward. That said, I strongly suspect that it plays better with a controller, and as soon as I figure out where I put mine, I'll give that a go.

This World Of Mine by Wizcas 2017-04-28T18:38:55Z

This is really cute! Unfortunately, at least in the WebGL version, I had a really hard time getting the cat to hide in the hiding places, so I always got caught. I'll try the download version later.

This World Of Mine by Wizcas 2017-05-01T07:43:10Z

So, in the download version, I managed to glitch it out by 'roaring' while in a hideout (at least, I think that's what caused it), after which, a) I could no longer roar, and b) the human only ever rotated in place with a yellow light no matter what I did. He was always watching directly at me, but never did anything, so I could carry things right past him. I'll also echo what @jackyjjc said, it took me forever to realize you don't click the orange areas to hide.

Anyway, all that aside, it's pretty obvious this is a first-time entry, but at the same time, it's _waaaaay_ better than _my_ first entry, so, congratulations! You made something cute, and playable, and complete!

Arindama by Daniel Moreno 2017-05-14T01:37:02Z

This is really neat! I like it a lot, and finally, after 95-ish days, made the statue.

My only real complaint is, it's _reeaaaal_ easy to run out of grass, and there is _very_ little to do with leaves (and fruit, eventually). My final board had so many leaves and fruit, I had to rebuild the floor using leaves, and ended up dropping so many fruit off the edge they got stuck on the sky and built a stack on nothingness. Which was actually pretty cool, but probably wasn't intended.

Anyway, this is great! Kudos to you!

skyfruit.png

E.(a)T. by BrothersT 2017-05-04T21:30:28Z

This was cute, and fun! Also, I was too focused on the game to check for certain, but it seems like when you kick the pests 'into orbit', they really do just circle the planet a few times and then fall back to the surface, don't they? Clever, it really reinforces the "small world" feeling.

Main thing I would change is an audio notification when you're close to running out of food, and _possibly_ some sort of radar for enemies.

I also discovered, I really don't have what it takes to reach the high-score table on this one :-p

Sunken Mystery by Shubham Gupta 2017-05-18T17:37:21Z

This is pretty good entry, though it's in need of some polish. Specific thoughts:

* The music was very nice, but if you didn't create it yourself you should opt out of the music category for voting. * The controls/physics could use some tweaking. It's easy to get stuck on things. * There should probably be an oxygen count-down or bar telling you how long you have left before you lose * There should be pickups that restore some oxygen. * Running out of lives should not be a thing; starting over from level 1 is ok in games making use of procedurally-generated content, but otherwise, it doesn't add to the game in most cases.

In any case, kudos to you guys for this, good job!

LD38 - Big Dreams by Iron Leonem 2017-05-16T05:36:01Z

So, I never was able to get the browser version to load, using multiple browsers on different computers with different operating systems. Some of the linked resource files just give 403 errors. That said, the Download version worked fine.

I think the main problem, as you've already alluded to, is that the power-ups spawn _really_ infrequently. I never saw one until the second I was finally overwhelmed, when two appeared at once (one health, one a weapon change, I believe). Honestly the player should _start_ with a random power-up available, because they're a big part of what makes the game fun.

Other than that, though there's not a lot to complain about. The graphics are cute and the audio is fun. I guess overall the difficulty is too high, at least for me, but fixing the power-up problem would probably also fix that.

Destroy Blocks by D-Studios 2017-05-12T19:59:35Z

Unfortunately, as others have commented, the lag makes the game very difficult to play. The controls also seem a bit weird, mostly in that I occasionally sank into the floor. Despite all of that, it's a promising start, and I hope you come back for future LDs.

EDIT: Also, even though there were some problems with the playback, I like that you actually recorded real audio for the music. I've never done anything other than procedurally-generated music, so kudos to you for making it yourself.

World Keep-Away by dracominer 2017-05-18T18:48:51Z

The art style is really cute, and I love that you recorded real, actual music with a physical piano for this (even if it eventually gets repetitive; so does a _lot_ of LD game music, my own included). That said, there are some gameplay design issues here:

* It's not clear to the player what the goal is (the tutorial doesn't actually have a green 'goal' area, so even the player makes use of the tutorial, they still won't know what they're trying to do) * Even once you've beat one level and have seen a goal, it's really hard to know _where_ the goal is * I played for a fair while and _never_ figured out why I could sometimes jump really high, but most of the time couldn't. * The enemies are crazy unpredictable. * The turrets don't seem to help at all, as far as I can tell; they shoot the enemies, but that never seems to actually matter. * The health meter is actually not super obvious; Besides being somewhat hard to read, the fact that it's in the lower corner and has a decimal point made me assume for a long time that it was an FPS counter. Now, of course, in a sense that's my fault for making unwarranted assumptions, but that's how it is with UI design. * The levels are _reaaaaaally_ big! Really, really, really big! Too big! Like I suspect many others did, I ended up falling for long periods of time in level 3, assuming I was falling down a bottomless pit waiting for the game to realize so I could die and restart the level. But eventually, I hit some blocks. Later, I fell again, for at least 20 seconds, and then still hit more blocks. This happened often enough that eventually I was trained to just assume there would be more blocks. That was the point I was finally wrong, and died. Good level design generally means that the player can tell what's a hazard and what's not (in most cases, there are exceptions but I don't think this is one of them). * When I died, I was returned to the main menu, instead of starting the level over. With levels as long as this, actually, even starting the level over wouldn't be that great, you'd need a checkpoint system.

All that said, I do think this game has promise, and the premise is super cute. It's gonna take some time, though, if you want to polish it.

Missing Lands by potatolain 2017-05-19T20:47:18Z

This is _very_ cool, the idea of coding a game that would actually runs on a real NES is not something I can _imagine_ taking on under LD Compo time constraints. The actual game concept and design is quite fun, too! It'd be cool to see a slightly expanded version with more levels and possibly an additional verb for the player (not sure what it would be, just, some other interaction available to create additional depth).

Anyway, as I said, very, _very_ cool entry.

EDIT: Actually, regarding movement and collision detection, you may want to consider looking at the way The Legend of Zelda handles the issue, given their similarities. Troy Gilbert has a [great article](http://troygilbert.com/deconstructing-zelda/movement-mechanics/) on the subject that I referenced in a few previous LDs when I made my own zelda-ish games.

Bee World by InaBox 2017-05-20T05:17:18Z

It's a cute little game to pass a few minutes, but it does get dull after a while. It'd be nice if there were some way to regain health or attack enemies, though that'd have to be balanced with a more steeply ramping difficulty.

I'm bad at being a bee, though, I only got 300 points :-p

Rogue Basement by Steve Johnson 2017-05-01T07:24:50Z

Always nice to see a Roguelike. My favorite part by far is the music, which is really nice and atmospheric.

Flurpies by Gumboot 2017-04-28T18:17:38Z

This is pretty sweet! Although once I realized it was possible to leave the house, I didn't need to spend any time at all in the house; it was just, leave, get enough xp to evolve, return, evolve, leave, get enough xp to evolve, return, evolve, leave, get enough xp to evolve, return, win the game. If you still had reasons to return to the house, that'd be good.

No Minor Task: Party of a Lifetime by XAVIER_INDIE_GAMEDEV 2017-04-28T17:48:27Z

Pretty amusing, and I did beat it after 3 tries, but I have to agree with the other commenters (and the author) about the scale of the level and the difficulty. My second try, I managed to collect 200 classmates and then got caught trying to figure out where my house actually was. So that was irritating. But otherwise, yes, this was quite good.

Retro Rabbit by wtoa 2017-05-03T08:03:52Z

This is a very fun quick little arcade-y sort of game. I really liked the mechanical effects of the world getting smaller over time, it both makes the game easier (because it's easier to find and reach leaks) and harder (because the obstacles get more cramped). The carrot power up adding some nice touch of extra complexity, too. All in all, a good entry!

If I were going to expand it, I'd add probably add levels, and introduce new mechanics like enemies or new powerups on later levels (the levels mainly serve to give you a better option than 'start over from the beginning' when you die).

Mulletman and the Molemen by Stevemata 2017-04-26T06:13:03Z

I have to agree, VolemanFallToHisDeath.wav is... uh... special :-p

Other than that, it's fun, but very difficult. I almost feel like the game would be fine without even _having_ the Advancing Wall of Death, since keeping the Molemen out of pits is hard enough as it is.

kumo. by Turbo Hermit 2017-05-03T16:33:37Z

A nice, relaxing little simulation. I would have liked if the player had more "tools" at their disposal, perhaps being able to position the sun, rain, different kinds of plant food or soil, resulting in different kinds of plants growing. Also, a way to re-trigger the audio from existing flowers would be cool, so you'd get a little tune from your garden.

Sentai Survivor by Sir Daniev 2017-05-19T00:21:03Z

This is an entertaining concept, and even though the current implementation is somewhat limited, I feel like there's a lot of room to expand this and take it new places. Some suggestions:

* Some earlier commenters asked for a life bar, while others mentioned that you can only survive one hit; it's not actually clear to the player whether you have health that goes down every time you get hit, or if you just die immediately if you're hit *just* right, and are otherwise unharmed.. Whichever one is correct needs to be obvious. * The game's environment doesn't really change over time; something that might help maintain interest is if the rubble piled up rather than disappearing, and you had to keep climbing on top of it as more rubble fell. * If you plan to expand the game, you might consider having different stages, with the robot hero fighting various monsters in various weird locations, which the hapless player character is for some reason stuck in.

All that said, I liked the visuals, the audio, and the overall concept. Good job!

Super Small-io World! by micahcowan 2017-05-02T18:20:42Z

I liked it a lot, though I wasn't able to finish it after several attempts. I didn't find the wavy enemy problematic at all, it was the two enemies on the largest world that were the problem.

This game would be *substantially* improved, I feel, by the addition of levels with a ramping difficulty. Each level would still have the "get all the coins before they leap out of your pocket" mechanic, but the the level the game ended up with should be one of the later ones.

Bitverse by klekky 2017-05-19T22:56:59Z

It's kind of absurd how much content you were able to fit into this, given the constraints. Good job on that. It also looks and sounds pretty good. As you've noted, the controls probably need to be either rethought or better explained in-game (or both), but once you know how to play it controls smoothly enough.

There are a couple of bugs (or what I presume are bugs), I found a cool laser-looking gun on the second planet, but was unable to pick it up even after dropping my own gun. Also found a shotgun and was able to pick that up just fine.

I think if you get the crystal, but don't make it back to your ship afterwards, it shouldn't count :-p. But, I also think that any weapons you successfully bring back to your ship should be available as choices when starting a level, rather than forcing you to always go back to Vector.

The enemies on the third level are too deadly, I think, and take too many hits to kill. Re-doing that level over and over again wasn't so much fun.

All those things are polish issues, though; the core gameplay is fun, and the levels seem pretty well designed. Good job!

Dr. Zorongo by Zorongo 2017-05-15T17:42:45Z

An interesting game, but as previously noted, pretty buggy; there's not actually any reason to fight enemies, ever, as you can travel through closed toilets as easily as open ones.

It feels like, with enough polish and extra content, this could become like a sort of mini-Binding of Isaac. I hope you decide to polish it up a bit.

Little Sprout Garden by Valmay 2017-05-14T00:53:15Z

This is super cute, but, of course, doesn't really have anything to hold the player's attention for very long. I love the aesthetic, and would love to see it used as the launching point for some sort of village sim / strategy game.

Djinn Duel by Corco 2017-05-12T20:25:53Z

This is pretty interesting! There's actually a bit of strategy to it once you understand you can attack multiple tiles at once, but it is still ultimately mostly a guessing game. My recommendation would be to figure out a way to differentiate the tiles from one another, so that you can try to guess what your opponent might do based on which tiles they might find advantageous (or whether they're going to bluff you by going somewhere worthless to waste your turn).

Actually, another idea (possibly a better one) is to make movement also take energy the farther you go. That way there's an inherent strategy in deciding how far to move from your present location, and how much energy you think you're opponent is willing to spend on avoiding your attacks.

If you _really_ wanted to add a bunch of extra complexity (and I'm not 100% sure it's a good idea, but bear with me) you could even add a deck-of-cards mechanic, where different cards represent stronger attacks, or have limited ranges, etc. Or if not cards, just a set of abilities you choose at the beginning of the match without knowing what your opponent has chosen.

It Shakes the World Apart by lectvs 2017-05-14T07:18:14Z

This was very well done, I like it quite a bit. Obviously several people have commented on the slow movement, but other than that I really have no complaints.

<3 Angie.

Little bug by Altron 2017-05-12T21:18:51Z

This is actually quite good for a first time entry! The level design is not bad (although obviously more levels would be awesome), and the fact that you can't move and see at the same time adds a very tense atmosphere. I like that you can see the shadow of the enemies passing over your trail, to.

My main suggestion would be add some additional, fixed lights to the levels. Not very many, but a few. Just enough to tease the player, give them a chance to see an enemy as it moves past one of the built-in lights and wonder, "where is it heading next?". A clever player might pay attention to how long it takes the enemy to return to the light after leaving, giving the an idea of where it might be pathing. Then trick them, surprise, there's actually two enemies passing that light at different times! That sort of thing.

Other than that, my only complaints are some user-interface ones. As @Zelos points out, the instructional text at the beginning is hard to read. Also, the next level button when you win doesn't really fit with the rest of the look of the game.

Last day of the woods by Redblack Spade 2017-05-08T00:02:23Z

This is incredibly impressive for a 72 hour project with only one person. There's a _lot_ of mechanics and ideas in here, and, all of them are interesting.

That said, I do have a few problems with the implementation of those ideas, mostly in terms of controls. I was using the keyboard (can't find my gamepad, not sure it would have worked on the web version anyway), for what that's worth. There were a few times where there seemed to be significant input lag, or just dropped inputs. I also found myself using the red orbs when I didn't mean to a _ton_ of the time. In fact, often the hardest parts of using the red orbs was in getting to where you wanted to go without triggering them by accident during normal jumps. That being the case, I'd almost suggest trying something that's _usually_ a terrible idea, and have the second jump mapped to a different button than the first (maybe optionally?).

Anyway, all that said this is really cool, and I hope to come back (maybe on a Windows machine with a gamepad) and try it again.

Monolith by samlo 2017-05-10T05:15:40Z

This looks really neat, it's a type of retro aesthetic that doesn't get used very often and I dig it. That said, the game is way too hard for me. In particular, I have a very hard time telling when I'm in danger of being hit, I've not managed to get a score higher than 10.

Miniverse by sebasrez 2017-05-01T18:52:04Z

This is pretty sweet! Unfortunately, it does seem a little bit buggy (or at least has UI problems).

For example, the first time I played, when told to place my relics on the glowing squares, I placed them on the most visible squares, which were the Battle Grid. It took a few plays before I even _noticed_ the nearly-invisible squares to the left of the battle grid that are where you're actually supposed to place them. So first suggestion, it shouldn't be possible to place your relics anywhere other than in one of the three lane source squares, during battle, and those squares should be easier to see. The "This way to the other planets" arrows are also very hard to see, at least on the WebGL version.

Also, when I died because I was placing my relics on the battle grid instead of target squares, the tutorial guy I was fighting seemed to just vanish, but the game didn't end (though in retrospect I suspect he just moved off-screen and if I looked around I would have found him again).

After battle, you should automatically pick the relics you used back up, rather than picking them up manually.

The other thing is, once I got to the fourth guy, he told me he was turning four, because it was his birthday, and then he just stopped. He never opened the battle grid, though I had defeated the previous three guys.

Anyway, those points aside I really do like the look of this

FoodCo by Rucoon 2017-05-15T17:31:52Z

When I downloaded the mac version it also wouldn't launch, because the executable permission bit was not set on the contained binary. After setting it, the game ran, but I had other problems; specifically, right-click does nothing, so it's impossible to plant seeds. The only mechanic I could engage with was dropping rocks on things.

All that said, from the other comments it sounds like a pretty cool game. I hope you do a bugfix release in the future!

EDIT: Also, I really like the graphics!

Save the litle Planet! by igalencar 2017-05-13T04:32:23Z

This is really unusual. I'll start off with the obvious: The pixel art is really well done, and the music and sound effects are as well. The controls we a little iffy - as often as not, when I hit C, It'd just keep walking as normal rather than roll. I used it to move around the planets faster (as you do), but I never trusted it for combat.

The portal/jump spots themselves were cool, but rather frustrating; sometimes, I'd stand there and jump over and over again, and on the ten or twelfth try, I'd finally hit it just right and go. Other times, I would jump, start to flip, and then inexplicably flip back. Finally, sometimes I'd hit the portal, but miss a coin on the way, only to find out it wasn't actually possible to go through the portal the other direction, so I had to take a _long_ detour (with no map) to get back to where I was (and do it again, each time I failed to get that coin). None of these are huge problems, and that last one may even be intentional (though if so, I disagree it's a good idea).

Now, I'm going to level a criticism I don't think I've ever given to an LD entry before: This game... is simply... far, _far_ too long. I kept playing, thinking I was nearly at the end as I approached 50k points. Nope. I kept thinking, "Surely I'm nearly done, now. I'll give it a chance, I'd like to see the whole thing, see if there's an ending." When I finally stopped, I had more than one-hundred thousand points, and for all I know I'm still only halfway done (Of course, I could have counted planets, but I didn't realize when I started that it would be necessary). That far into the game, when you make a jump through a portal, discover that it has deposited you on one of the very first planets, turn around to go back the other way and discover you can't reach it, so you're going to have to find your way back the long way around? Let's just say it wasn't my favorite part of the game.

Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly approve of games with a lot of content, if you can pull them off. But unfortunately, there just wasn't enough going on to last as long as the game does. It needs to have different kinds of enemies, power-ups, sub-goals, it needs differences in kind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlBR1z-ue-I

Obviously in a game jam there's not always time to add all that. And that's ok! But if that's what happened, it might have been a good idea to reduce the number of planets once you realized you couldn't enough content to sustain an hour-plus-long experience.

Ok, so, now that I've got that off my chest, I do still want to reiterate: What you do have, though it has some problems, is a really good start. I would _love_ to see you build on this for a post-jam version. But unlike most post-jam games, I wouldn't focus at all on making the game bigger, just put more to do inside the game you already have.

EDIT: Also, what on earth did the Z key do? It seems to do _something_, makes an arrow appear on screen, but I couldn't figure out what it was for, didn't seem to point at anything specific).

Warpy's World by Nilanjan 2017-05-16T00:20:16Z

Wow, that was an interesting puzzle game! Like a weird variation on Braid, really. I like the aesthetic, as well, though for me the audio just came out as a sort of hissing sound. My main complaints would be:

* The basic concepts were not particularly well explained. I had to stumble around and die a lot before I figured out what you're supposed to do; specifcially, it's not at all clear when you first start the game that the world map wraps, or that you can sink blocks. Once I figured those things out, though, it was mostly smooth sailing. * The controls seem a little jumpy/jerky, like, you don't always seem to be moving exactly as you meant to. This could be fixed with just time and testing and iterating, I suspect. * There aren't enough levels, I want more :-p

Anyway, good job so far, and I hope you build on it further!

The Last Colony by hekst 2017-05-04T22:37:30Z

I _really_ like the concept here, but I do have to agree with the concerns other commenters expressed about the controls. Specifically, these are the three major problems I faced:

* The game was so fast paced enough that I didn't feel I had time to every look away from the 'action' to check the UI and get information about how I was doing. * As a consequence, it was not obvious when I had successfully docked, what the conditions were for docking, or even if the 'dock' keys did anything. When I did glance away from the action to look at the UI below, it didn't seem to tell me one way or the other. * It was very difficult to get the ships to glide in safely rather than slamming into the station at full speed (maybe intentional?)

All of those really come down to an issue of speed: in the micro, the actual gameplay moves to fast, and in the macro, the difficulty ramps up too quickly for the player to effectively learn (this second one is a pretty common problem for non-trivial Jam games, in my experience).

Anyway, all those things being said, I do see a lot of promise here, it seems like this could grow into something really cool!

Strangeness by philomory 2017-04-26T04:39:43Z

@xxdoombox Was the batch file called run.bat or Strangeness.bat? There's seems to be some AWS caching issue for bitbucket, I'm getting different versions even downloading it from two different computers in the same house.

In the meantime I've uploaded it with a new filename, which may work better.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-04-27T00:33:06Z

@amras0000 Thanks for your feedback! Enemies passing through boulders was a bug I was aware of but didn't have time to fix; Boulders going into walls was a bug I actually hadn't noticed until you pointed it out. Both should be fixed in an upcoming post-jam update version.

That enemies move one-at-a-time was originally intended, but I agree it was a bad decision; in the post-jam version, all enemies will move simultaneously.

I've had a few other people mention the issue with the bushes. For that one, I agree it's a problem. For the Jam, I should have just removed the bushes entirely since they don't affect any of the puzzles that made it into the jam version of the game. The idea was to give you tiles you can move through, but that enemies can't, and that you can't throw rocks through. Possibly in the post-jam version I'll come up with a replacement graphic that's more clear, or maybe I'll just remove them after all.

For what it's worth, putting a bush directly in your only path at the start of level 1 was specficially intended to teach the player that they could walk through them, but I guess it didn't work as well as I'd hoped :stuck_out_tongue:

Again, though, thanks for the feedback! I'm glad to hear the puzzles came off the way I had intended (not making you feel stupid, specifically, but that 'gotcha' feeling, which I thought would work well to make tiny puzzles still be interesting). I was worried they'd be too easy, or too hard, since this is really my first time doing puzzle design like this.

Oh also, regarding the sound effects, yes, they are too loud. A future update will add volume sliders, but in the mean time I should probably adjust them downwards.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-04-29T23:32:20Z

@jushiip: Thanks for the heads up, the issue with spaces has now been fixed in both the Jam and Post-Jam downloads (it's not an issue with the game's Ruby code, it's just a flaw in the Batch file)

The character is sad because there was supposed to be a (very limited) story of sorts as a framing device for the game, but I had to cut it, didn't have time. So instead we're just left with a sad main character. Long story short, though, he's sad because the world is disintegrating, he's surrounded by monsters, and he can't remember why. Wouldn't you be sad?

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-01T04:54:56Z

@joe-cowman, you can't get that key. You only need (and it is only possible to get) one of the three keys. The other two are traps.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-01T18:04:20Z

@xavier-indie-gamedev What version of MacOS are you running? The current build probably only works on 10.11.x and 10.12.x.

If you have a chance, could you try running the game from Terminal to see if you get any error output? To run the game from Terminal, open a new Terminal window and type `cd` and a space, then drag Strangeness.app onto the Terminal window. That should put the full path to the application in your Terminal window (e.g. `cd /Users/adam/Downloads/Strangeness.app`), so press enter. After that, type `Contents/MacOS/Strangeness` and press enter. The application should launch, and if there's any error output you should see it in the Terminal window when the application crashes.

I'll see about adding friendlier error logging to a future update of the Mac version.

**EDIT**: I think the problem may be that I didn't bundle SDL2.dylib with the game, so if you didn't have it installed yourself (or didn't have it installed in the same path I did), the game wouldn't be able to find it. If you have homebrew, you can try `brew install sdl2`, otherwise, I'll have an updated build posted shortly).

**EDIT2**: Updated build posted!

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-03T05:32:39Z

@stoogebag: I'm glad you liked it, I was quite pleased with your entry as well. In response to your specific points:

* This is definitely a problem, but it was the last level I designed during the Jam, and by the time I put the enemy in and realized the problem I had no time left to fix it. My plan is to just mirror-flip the level top-to-bottom so that the enemy faces south instead of north. Just haven't had time yet. * I'm working on this, but, every time I make a new puzzle I end up adding just a bit more tricks and red herrings, and then just a bit more, and before I know it I the puzzle isn't so straightforward anymore. I think once I get these "wouldn't it be cool if?" ideas out of my head and onto 'paper', I'll be able to sit down and design some 'normal' levels. * Originally, the controls _were_ WASD to move, and arrows to throw. When I was play-testing it, though, it felt all wrong, even though that's how I control The Binding of Isaac, which I have hundreds of hours in. So I changed it. Regardless, configurable controls are coming, including a choice between modifier-for-throw and separate-keys-for-throw. * I've already started, with a batch of four levels revolving around buttons that open and close barriers. Plenty of ideas for new enemies, too, including one that acts like the Pacer, but when hit with a rock turns 90 degrees instead of getting stunned. Unfortunately I'm quite busy with work, and do want to also participate in judging, so it's slow going so far.

If you _really_ want a preview, post-jam source link always points to the current Tip of my repository. So even though I haven't packaged up new builds with the new levels, you *can* find them. Probably easier to wait for me to post the next build, though :stuck_out_tongue:

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-03T18:56:42Z

@Linus Glad to hear you liked the game! If you found level 3 difficult, you're not alone, several people have complained about it. In the update I'm currently working on that adds new levels, most of the levels in the Jam version won't appear until later in the game, when you've had a chance to get used to the mechanics and tricks.

It wasn't clear from the instructions that the enemies can pass through boulders you push onto them because you're not supposed to be able to push boulders onto enemies in the first place. That's a bug, and It's fixed in the "Post-Jam Bugfix" version.

EDIT: I added a warning about this to the game description.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-04T05:01:16Z

@micahcowan Thanks for the heads up! I've uploaded a new build that has libyaml properly bundled with the application, so future users shouldn't need to go through the same process you did. But, I'm glad you got the game working, and glad you liked it!

For reference, the issue isn't about where in the app bundle you copied it; in order to address the issue, you need to use install_name_tool (bundled with the Xcode command line toolchain) to tell psych.bundle where to expect to find it. I had already gone through this process with libruby.dylib and libSDL2.dylib, but had forgotten about libyaml.dylib.

If this were a 'normal' compiled application the build toolchain would take care of this stuff, but making an app out of a non-compilable scripting language is a bit of an unusual case.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-04T20:55:08Z

@puppetmaster I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

@toonteamj Thank you for reminding me! I had planned to fix that in the post-jam version, but then never wrote it down and forgot to do so. That's now fixed in my work-in-progress version; now, if you walk into an enemy it kills you, just like if it walks into you. So now if you get trapped by an enemy you don't need to remember that R restarts the level, you can just touch the enemy to restart.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-10T17:03:17Z

@jupiter-hadley Thanks so much for including it! Sorry you weren't able to get the post-jam version to work, it's much easier. Even still, it was really cool to see you play my game!

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-13T00:35:07Z

@doppelgunner: Try the post-jam version; it's much better at ramping up from easier puzzles to harder ones, teaching you how to play. I'm still not 100% happy with it, still working on it, but it's already much better than the Jam version. What was level 3 in the Jam version is now level 11.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-13T05:07:46Z

@glitchy-pixel I'm glad you liked the game! In particular, I'm glad to get some feedback on the post-jam version, since I think it's a big improvement on the original. Also, in the "final" version I have taking vague shape in my head, the "repeating previous levels with a twist" thing is going to be something of a running theme. So I'm glad you approve.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-14T17:47:14Z

@zorg The jam and bug fix versions contains 5 levels, the post-jam update contains 17 at the moment.

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-19T04:56:44Z

@zorg I do have plans to expand it a lot. Porting it to mobile is going to be a lot more involved than just figuring out the controls, though, as the development toolchain I'm using doesn't really support it. I could port the game to Unity (which would probably be a good way to learn Unity), or I could roll up my sleeves and help @jlnr with [motion-gosu](https://github.com/gosu/motion-gosu), (which would be a great way to learn about complicated platform internals :stuck_out_tongue:).

Before I do either of those things I'll just be working on more levels and features for the current, plain-Ruby version. I've got a lot of plans, we'll see which of them pan out.

In any case, I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

Strangeness by philomory 2017-05-19T23:30:05Z

@spacesparkle I'm glad you liked the game, and it's nice to know my comments on your own game were useful!

For better or worse, those extra keys in level 2 _are_ the puzzle. In that level, there's only one door, and there are three keys; the puzzle is supposed to be figuring out which key it's actually possible to get, and then getting it. The other two keys are essentially traps. Whether that's a good design or not is a matter of opinion, but they _are_ a part of the intended design of the level.

That sort of puzzle design has gotten a mixed response; some players, like yourself, found it distracting; other players, like @micahcowan, found it appealing. The way I decided to handle the issue in my post-jam development is that I'm keeping that sort of misdirection as a part of the game, but only in the later levels, after the player has already mastered the basic mechanics. Hopefully that'll make for a more enjoyable experience.

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for playing!

Barbuglio by pataya 2017-05-17T23:00:11Z

This is pretty entertaining, though it feels like the balance is a little off. If you click on the wrong task, it takes you long enough to get back that you almost certainly miss the one you meant to click on; it'd be nice to have a way to cancel so you don't have to go all the way there and back, if you realize what you did in time.

My top score was 41717!

EDIT: Music, of course, was great! Also, one way you could expand the game would be to make the time demands a less intense, but eventually add additional demons you have to feed.

Asteroid Hopper by yyam 2017-05-16T05:27:36Z

The puzzle design here is very cool. My only complaint, and it's a pretty minor one, is that with all the clean pixel art, having anti-aliasing on the text made my eyes leak blood. Just a little bit.

I'm joking, of course (though if you can turn of the text anti-aliasing, please do!). Kudos on a well-constructed game!

Polyville by Daniel Conway 2017-05-12T19:50:01Z

First off, congratulations on your first entry; my own first entry was not nearly as nice. A few comments:

* I actually quite like the low-poly look of most things. You might want to change the main character, though; the player spends the whole game looking at the character's back, and yet almost every other model is more interesting to look at. * I understand very well how hard it is to get any audio into a compo entry, that said, this really could have used some sort of background audio. For future compos, I'd recommend finding some music-generating software and spending just a couple of minutes with it, so at least you have _something_ to put in. I've had some success with [Autotracker-BU](https://github.com/wibblymat/ld24/blob/master/autotracker.py), but other people seem to like [Wolfram Tones](http://tones.wolfram.com/) and [BeepBox](http://www.beepbox.co/) * For an ostensibly "small world", the map is actually pretty big! I'd suggest making the main character walk a little faster, or making the map a little smaller, so it doesn't take as long to get from place to place. Moving the Fog in closer would help reinforce the "trapped" atmosphere you've got going, too. * A minor point, but if you pick up an item before you get a quest, when you meet the person who gives you the quest you complete it without really finding out what it was you were doing. For example, I found the mushroom before I met the Wizard, so when I did meet him, he never got to give whatever his shpiel was about why he needed it. * At one point, my guy tripped on a rock (more or less) and tipped over. After that, it was not possible for me to turn upright anymore; the camera tilted too, and all of the controls were now relative to my horizontal position. I could scooch along the floor in the direction I was facing, but trying to turn left or right just pointed me at the sky or the dirt.

Anyway, all that aside, this is a promising start! In particular, it looks like you scoped pretty well, which is hard to do for your first compo; many first time entrants plan out something that's way too ambitious for 48 hours and end up with a game that doesn't even work (coughmecough). I hope to see you again in future jams!

Cartography by Zorg 2017-05-14T08:04:08Z

Congratulations on completing your first LD! It's amazing how much work it takes to build even a small game, isn't it?

I like the overall design, even if it did feel a bit empty. A small bit of additional environment to look at (grass and trees, cryptic drawings on the walls, etc) would have gone a long way, as would some audio, but obviously there's a limit to how much time you have in a Jam.

Hope to see you again next time around!

Small Planet by ZebraInFlames 2017-05-10T07:22:53Z

Wow, playing this is in a 1v1 fight gave me serious flashbacks to Star Control 2, one of the best games of all time (though admittedly, not specifically because of it's combat). It _is_ pretty difficult, though. I'd also suggest that, when you've died in a 2v2 or larger match, and are waiting for your team-mates to finish the match (or waiting to respawn), it'd be nice to be able to look around the map and see what's happening rather than having a fixed camera and hearing off-screen ships occasionally shoot each other.

Other than that, though, this was pretty fun. I think there's a lot of room to add cool additional mechanics, too.

Headspace by fueelin 2017-05-17T17:45:24Z

This is really interesting. I think it's a pity it's so short, because it doesn't really develop very much. From a gameplay perspective, the ants bit is the most engaging, but the earlier portion is much better in every other way that matters. In terms of establishing a mood, though, Headspace does a very good job, especially given Compo constraints. The music is very appropriate. Also, the aesthetic initially reminded me of the XKCD strips [Time](https://xkcd.com/1190/) and [Click and Drag](https://xkcd.com/1110/). Which is cool, even if it's not really _that_ similar (I think it's the trees).

Also, everything @takusan said. I try to find meaningful, helpful things to say about every entry, but, damn.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear you're planning on developing it further!

Marbleverse by Marc Grabow 2017-04-26T00:41:39Z

Very nice! I got a 296 on my second try, which was much better than my first try but no idea if it's "good" or not.

Arrows in Orbit by Stoemason 2017-05-04T21:42:08Z

Oh my god, this works really well, and if further developed it actually feels like there's room for a fair amount of strategic gameplay here. Being able to accidentally shoot yourself in the _back_ is an unusual experience, certainly. The controls seemed OK as is, but I imagine with a controller it'd be even smoother.

My main complaint would be that the arrows themselves can be kind hard to see, especially with the shadow effect. It'd be nice if they were a bit more visible, and also if the enemy arrows were visually distinct from the player's arrows. Actually, a nice touch would be a different sound effect playing when you shot yourself vs when an enemy shot you.

This is _very_ good for a first entry, honestly this is pretty good even for a veteran LDer (I remember my first entry, it was almost entirely unplayable). Good work, I hope you expand it. Some of the other commenters had some good suggestions on that front.

More than a Pixel by CAREFACE 2017-05-15T17:58:22Z

To start off, this feels like it has _nothing_ to do with the theme, but once you beat the first boss and see the transition between areas, it makes sense, and I actually really like it.

I'd love to see an expanded version!

Cubic Explorer by glitchy-pixel 2017-05-10T17:26:44Z

I'm a huge fan of (and sucker for) procedural generation (most of my LD entries have used it, even if this time didn't), but procedurally generating the gameplay (rather than just e.g. the map) is a really neat concept! Full marks on innovation, and I wish you luck on your Master's thesis.

Afterbirth by xxDOOMbox 2017-05-15T18:42:57Z

Nice and ridiculous use of the theme. The "Stop that baby!" voice is pretty great, too. I have to agree, though, this needs to be quite a bit longer; I'd suggest making the doctor take fewer hits to drop, but then having more enemies/obstacles as you escape through the hospital; as it is, there's not even any reason to jump, ever.

That said, yes, this is pretty cute and silly, and I like that. Music was good, too.

Gravity Trails by electr1ca 2017-05-07T03:21:26Z

This is very nice, although I feel like I failed more times getting from the 2nd-to-last checkpoint to the last one, than in the entire rest of the game. I really liked the Kirby-esque faces on some of the planets.

The whole thing was just, well put together and cute.

Quarky Space Explorer by Bamboy 2017-05-19T09:31:02Z

As previous commenters have mentioned, the controls/physics in the game make it quite difficult to play - you are constantly drifting when not pressing any buttons, and simply moving left and right (or stopping, once moving) can be a bit of a chore. It's a pity, because the game does have a fun atmosphere, some funny moments (the rabbit is called a goat, the cat is called a puppy, etc), and some really fantastic music.

I think the main thing to focus on would be improving the controls; if the controls worked smoothly, any other problems would be much easier to address.

Sentient Duality by CabbageCrow 2017-05-20T05:26:26Z

This is a really interesting mechanic, I think this deserves to be built upon. To do that, though, I think you'll need to add a lot more levels. Right now it could go in a lot of different directions:

* Make it arcade-y, with a time limit to complete the level and limited lives (pump in those quarters!) * Make it an endless-runner type game with a score attack and different modes * Make a level-based exploration/adventure game where you have to navigate levels, avoiding hazards and triggering sensors to open paths, etc, to reach the exit. * Make a couch multiplayer racing game, maybe!

Basically, you've got a really neat, flexible mechanic here, which could go any number of places. I'd be precious to see where you might take it.

If I had a complaint (besides the lack of audio), it's that when you reach the end it's not actually clear that you've reached the end. To all appearances the game may as well have soft-locked.

EDIT: Also, _really_ love the game's name. Very cool.

Glade in the Sky by AdroitConceptions 2017-05-07T03:09:02Z

Some checkpointing would have been nice, since it was pretty frustrating to start from scratch after making a single mistake. That said, the game isn't so long that it's a huge problem.

Oddly enough, I didn't even realize it was possible to jump until I was on the way to the final crystal and ended up stuck in a situation where without jump the game is not completable :stuck_out_tongue:

Was kind of fun to go back and try out the "cheats" other players mentioned above, though.

Classical Conditioning Cooperation - [CCC] by AwesomeAlliterationAlliance 2017-05-17T18:26:20Z

This is outstanding, especially the graphics. The controls could use a bit of polish, I think (specifically, It's a pain that you have to click on the mice with pixel-perfect accuracy; it should be enough to click the the tile the mouse is in). Also, explaining that you can pause (and still instruct mice while paused) _within_ the game would have been a good idea. But these are all minor complaints.

I agree with @richard-michael-smith; with enough polish, this could be a commercial game.

Song of Fungus by DGSpitzer 2017-05-09T18:17:56Z

This is a _very_ well-designed puzzle game, with a _lot_ more levels than I was expecting. It's a unique mechanic, and I really liked the variations you came up with and how they inter-related. I thought that the first Scarlet Mother was going to be the "boss", but no, it was just another awesome puzzle mechanic that you used to build several levels. I spent much more time on this than I "should" have (in terms of getting to the next game on my list), but it was time well-spent. I really hope to see more of this in the future.

If I had one complaint, though, I'd suggest some slight tweaks to the controls. I felt like my control over the camera was somewhat... slippery? Is the only word I can think of? Like the camera was sliding around more than I really wanted it to. It also would have been nice to be able to rotate and zoom the camera to see the scene from a different perspective.

Ark Initiative by Teslov 2017-05-11T04:55:34Z

I really like the presentation here, as others have said. It's unfortunate you weren't able to add more gameplay during the jam, but thats how game jams go sometimes. Also, animals are *really* expensive compared to the speed at which you gain currency. In the beginning it's very hard to get started, you need to work on the cost curve some, I think.

Speaking of curves, the one presentational thing I really missed was the ability to rotate the camera. I realize it doesn't matter much with the zoom options available, but it would have been nice none-the-less.

I also discovered an undocumented feature: if you use the arrow keys, for some reason you can make the food items run and jump around the map as if they were platformer characters. Which I can't imagine being useful, but it was pretty amusing anyway :-p

SurviBall by Raysangar 2017-05-05T00:29:22Z

This was really cute! I really, really like the look, and though it took me a few deaths to figure out the rules, I did eventually persevere: I like the ending, too.

One way to expand the game would be to make it a little less brutal in terms of resources, so that you can afford to spend turns non-optimally; and then add different weird little easter eggs wherever you currently get an error sound. Maybe a 'bonus' ending if you manage to survive and build the lighthouse after discovering all of the easter eggs.

Regardless, this is definitely one of the nicest-looking entries I've run into so far, and it was fun to play, too.

A Couple of Questions, Volume II: Small Business, Small World by stoogebag 2017-05-02T18:10:26Z

OMG, Luke's joke about spilling his drink. Out of the whole game, definitely my favorite joke. The voicing was also a treat, even if sometimes the voicing and the text didn't keep pace with each other properly.

Regarding the graphics, I've been scolded in the past for using public domain material like that in the Compo (fine in the Jam), so though I don't personally have a problem with it, I believe it's against the rules (or at least it _was_, back in LD17).

My only real complaints were A) the way you got kicked out of conversation and had to restart it after each time you asked about something from the notebook, B) the way you never could ask anyone about clues, only about other people, and C) the fact that sometimes there was no "goodby" option (in this case, the fastest way to end the conversation was to exploit A).

Other than that, though, great game. I played it all the way through.

A Couple of Questions, Volume II: Small Business, Small World by stoogebag 2017-05-03T07:56:25Z

@stoogebag Oh, it's definitely fine from a moral standpoint, these are definitely derivative works. It's just that, per the rules (as I understand them), derivative works are not allowed in the Compo, only the Jam. That said, it really doesn't bother me, I was just offering you a heads up since I was burned in the past. Honestly, though, it seems the rules on that may have been relaxed some since then. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Quantum Catburetor by jushiip 2017-04-27T17:43:17Z

This is pretty sweet, I like it a lot. My only suggestion might be to make it so that things you have seen persist a bit longer after moving out of your field of view, so you can swing back around and pick them up. Right now, I often find myself seeng a health pack or weapon upgrade appear and disappear at the edge of the world as I move by, before I can react to change direction and go grab it.

Virulence by Sputnik3D 2017-05-19T20:20:16Z

This is a very interesting idea, I'm a huge fan of games where you evolve a creature and then fight with it (like, E.V.O.-style, not Pokemon-style).

Unfortunately, the controls here are problematic. My little guy is just too hard to steer; also, there's no easy well to tell which side of your guy is "forward", which makes rotation+velocity controls extremely problematic. Even just adding some indicator to the white block to show which side was the front would have been a big help in that regard.

Other than that, I fee like in the build phase it would have been much cooler if you could choose what type of blocks you wanted, rather than just getting a uniform two of each; it would let the player experiment with different "builds", etc. I also think, rather than giving bonuses for having adjacent squares of the same color, there should be bonuses for building certain shapes (a simple one would be, a red, a green, and a blue, in a row, or, an L with a yellow on each side and a red in the middle). Some of these could be known to the player, and some of them could be surprises, but it would encourage experimentation more. Of course, it means you have to do shape recognition code, but for small shapes it's really not that hard (and you only need to run it when the shape changes, i.e. during build mode and when you lose a block to damage).

Anyway, all in all I can see this game going places, it's got a lot of potential! But please, work on those controls.

World Collector by TomBishopSPG 2017-05-16T04:28:34Z

I think it's an interesting and pretty unique set of mechanics. There are some problems with controls and difficulty, but it seems like you're already well aware of those. For me, I found it problematic that the action controls were mapped to traditionally directional buttons; I'd start off ok pressing left to shoot while moving left, but then when I wanted to shoot right I'd instinctively press right on the keyboard, which sends down your army instead.

All that said, I did did like the concept a lot and would love to see it polished more.

My Very Own World by SpaceSparkle 2017-05-19T20:07:33Z

This is very cool, it's not often you see a game of this sort in Ludum Dare, and I wholeheartedly approve. Unfortunately, games like this take a long time to play, so I wasn't able to finish, but I like the ideas behind it. The music was also very nice

My main complaints are the following:

* The UI isn't always very helpful. I'm not sure I can offer any concrete suggestions for improvement off the top of my head, but I'd definitely iterate on this some more if you wanted to expand the game further. In particular, it's not really clear what the strengths and weaknesses of each unit will be before you build one. * One thing to do would be to make it clearer how much damage your unit will take when making an attack; at the very least, make it clear to the player if they're making an attack that will get their unit killed. * The units aren't differentiated from each other enough. I feel the cavalry units should be able to move more than one square, rather than having a super-high attack power; instead the wizard should have higher attack power. Maybe not every unit should be able to build cities, maybe the shield guy should boost the defense of adjacent allies. * Consider having the "Settle" option count as a city move rather than a unit move, in terms of what you can do during a turn. I'm not saying it'd definitely be an improvement, but you might test it out to see how it plays.

The Puzzler by LittleDonutG 2017-05-04T18:55:25Z

I'm not really sure I understand how to play this. I was able to walk over and pick up the gun, and I can fire the gun, but nothing I shoot reacts in any way. Also, there's no way to open doors or pull the lever, that I could find. That said, even without being able to open doors, I was able to clip through some walls so I was able to explore anyway. It's an interesting space to explore, it's just a pity I couldn't figure out how the game works

Planet Rush: Save the Moiks! by FerNandXor 2017-05-19T22:44:40Z

This game is super cool, hard to believe it was made under Compo constraints. That said, there are still some aspects that could maybe use a little tweaking and polish. Mostly, just, game balance; figure out whether each item's cost is reasonable for the benefit you get from it, tweak spawn rates, movement speeds, etc. Maybe allow buildings to be hit multiple times before they are destroyed. Those sorts of tweaks are just about the only complaints I can level, here, the core mechanics are very cool.

Also, crystal shits. :thumbsup:

Blobbery by Odefus 2017-05-17T23:16:21Z

The aesthetics of this game are absolutely awesome, I love the look especially. The controls could use a little polish, but after you get used to it it's not too bad. Like @karln, I have mixed feelings about the size of the map; it's cool that there's a lot of content, but it's hard to know what to do or where to go. That's not a huge problem, as long as there's something to find in every direction, but as far as I can tell this game only had two pickups, so most directions seem like they'd be dead ends. I may be wrong, however, I didn't complete it yet.

Overall, this is a great start to a platformer, I'd love to see it polished up further!

Daily Routine: the smallest worlds are the ones we get stuck in by Samurai Spark 2017-04-28T18:30:40Z

This is really clever, and the twist is not that hard to find, the hard part is realizing there's a twist to find in the first place.

War of Quiz! by orquigames 2017-05-13T22:11:19Z

Q: How many arms/legs/limbs/tentacles does a squid have? A: Ten B: Zombie C: Call of Duty D: Venezuela

I like the concept here, but the answer pool for each question needs to be appropriate to that question. :stuck_out_tongue: The easiest way to do this is to just have a fixed set of four possible answers to each question. If you really want to draw them randomly from a shared pool, you're going to have to tag each answer with info like, "plural", "a number", "three nouns", "place", "person", "group of people", and then tag every question with a filter for what kinds of answers it's allowed to pull; that's a _lot_ more work.

Also, questions should be drawn randomly from the pool without replacement, so that the same question never shows up twice unless the entire question pool has been exhausted. Alternatively, a question that is answered incorrectly could be re-inserted into the pool; if it comes up again, the same four options should be available, and ones already chosen noted; or, when a question is answered incorrectly, the opponent could be given a chance to answer it, as some quiz shows do.

Den by La mecanique du plastique 2017-05-13T00:56:56Z

The visuals and, especially, the audio, are really brilliant here. Like many others, I got stuck at the second mining site, but hey, that just gave me more time to admire the running animation of the one guy running forever across the catwalk above me (he must be _really_ tired by now :wink:)

I don't know if you plan to expand this into something larger? I'm not sure how that would actually work, honestly. I could see some really neat environmental storytelling opportunities with the environments you'd have the player move through, but I'm not sure what gameplay mechanics you could add to keep the gameplay interesting for an extended length. It doesn't really feel right to have the giant monster solving puzzles, and fighting other giant monsters (or the puny humans) would sort of spoil the mood, it seems like. Still, if you did come up with something, I'd be first in line to try it out.

In any case, _as_ a Jam entry, it's really great, regardless.

WHAT A SMALL WORLD! by ilikescifi 2017-04-27T17:15:07Z

Cute! But, a bit short.

MiniPolis by korvyashka 2017-05-19T18:00:03Z

This is a really interesting concept, unfortunately it's way too hard!

I think one way to balance it would be to have cities that are attacked slow down their expansion before they start shrinking, rather than just cutting straight from expansion to rapid collapse; that way, if two cities were set to overlap each other at nearly exactly the same time, they would reach a natural equilibrium of neither being able to overwhelm the other because they're both being attacked. This would eventually get disrupted by the intrusion of some third city into the mix.

Another way you might tweak it is to leave the difficulty more-or-less as-is, but make levels; in each level. the cities would appear in a fixed pattern with fixed timings, and you have to keep them all alive for a particular amount of time. Then, once you accomplish that, on to the next level. It'd become a sort of puzzle game in that case.

Anyway, I also have to say, I really like the aesthetic! Good job!

Becky's very very Small and TOTALLY not mundane World by pmarincak 2017-05-14T07:28:23Z

The art style in this super good good, five stars on that front.

The gameplay, of course, is extremely limited, though I guess that's somewhat the point. Only other complaint was that eventually the music just... stopped. (WebGL, for reference).

ARR World by Simon Rahnasto 2017-05-19T18:58:07Z

This game is really something else, one of the most fun games I played all Jam, as well as having a very nice aesthetic and great music! The connection to the theme seems a little tenuous, but, ehh.

I also found @killerkun's exploit, but it's sort of tedious to make use of on a large scale so I didn't make _too_ much use of it :stuck_out_tongue:. Really handy if most of your guys have been killed and you just need a bit of money to recover, though.

I feel like this game is a really cool core for a larger experience; if this got expanded into one of those games where you sail around the world discovering new lands and sinking ships, maybe raiding harbors or whatever, I would play the shit out of that. Though, in making an expanded version you'd need to address the enemy spawning issue; it's fine for the Jam, but I think to sustain a larger experience you'd need to rebalance a lot of stuff, including the way enemy ships behave.

I do think it would have been good for there to be a reason to upgrade your scouts or captain beyond level one, though. In particular, I really would have liked the be able to upgrade the maneuverability of my ship; for scouts, I don't think it'd be a good idea to have more scouts mean more vision range (you'd be nearly obliged to always have as many scouts as was necessary to see the whole screen), but if the game was expanded to include non-combat, exploration elements I could definitely see scouts helping you discover interesting new lands or hidden treasures or whatever.

In any case, good job!

Not Enough Room by rubyleehs 2017-05-15T17:01:25Z

This is simple, and well executed, but I did feel like I wasn't in as close control of my square as I would have liked, with the controls a bit unresponsive. The design itself is really good, though, and I think with a bit of polish this would be a _lot_ of fun, like mini Meat Boy.

Destructo Island by morbidcamel101 2017-05-04T23:55:14Z

I'm very bad at FPS games and generally don't enjoy them that much, but this one was pretty fun! I'm very glad you decided to include different difficulty levels, for people like me. I got 10852 on Easy. That's probably not very good, but it's a big number so I'm gong to pretend I did well :wink:

One Giant Leap by AmnonLevi 2017-05-16T00:07:24Z

This is pretty difficult, also the controls are not _super_ intuitive; it took me a while to figure out that you only went left or right for as long as you held the button, for example.

That said, it's a cool idea, and the aesthetic is very funny.

Cubical by earthcollapse 2017-05-07T06:27:38Z

This is really nice looking, and fun to play around with. After I figured out what I was doing, it felt like the game would just go on forever, so it might be nice for there to be a score, or something, but otherwise, very nice!

The only complaint I really have is that it seems it should be sufficient to click on worms to get them to board (or even have them board automatically, if they'll all fit); drag-and-drop seems a bit unnecessary.

Lost in Translation by Sheepolution 2019-10-29T22:45:14Z

Hey, congrats on taking first place in three categories (including overall) and 2nd place in two more (including fun)! I gave the game a shot and it's a really cool idea! Franti!

Conjury: The Convocation the RPG by unpronounceable 2019-10-20T05:19:01Z

An interesting strategy game to be sure! I spent waaaay too long playing, tried playing strategically and was eventually able to win the Masters! The other commenters are probably right that it would have been better to dump all my stats into one strategy, but it was more satisfying going the balanced route :stuck_out_tongue:

ccg.png

That said, I'm _really_ confused by @geoff-nagy's comment - as far as I can tell this game has no audio, right?

Soundmarine by Dustyroom 2019-10-15T22:09:37Z

This was a tough one to rate; the visuals were fantastic, especially the way distant objects rendered outlines first and coloration only later was very cool. The audio, while simple, was also quite pleasing, and the way you built up the song over the course of play was kinda cool. That said, the actual gameplay was _very_ limited... it's not really "fun" in a traditional sense, though it's certainly still _enjoyable_.

In some ways, it reminds me of Gris, if Gris didn't have any puzzles, nor any player verbs other than walk left and walk right. It feels like it could be expanded into something really great (like Gris as it _actually_ is), but as it stands it's a bit lacking. Which, I mean, that's to be expected, considering the constraints of the Jam.

Chill Island by quadtree 2019-10-22T06:15:31Z

This is an interesting game, I feel like there's some cool stuff going on here! That said, some of it was a bit confusing. Principally, two things confused me:

1. What was the point of building anything? Was there in fact anything to build other than a wall? 2. Was it supposed to be possible to have more than one ember? If so, how were you supposed to collect them?

My experience was that I started the game and was already low on food; I found and ate some berries, lost some health but was no longe hungry, saw a few trees on fire, collected an ember and some wood, then the plane showed up. I ran back to the top of the mountain, built a wall, didn't see how that helped me, dropped all my sticks and pressed '3' over and over again until the sticks caught fire and I immediately won the game.

If I had any suggestions, it'd be to maybe slow things down just a tad. The plane arrived before I had even quite finished figuring out the controls, so I just ran to the top of the mountain and set a fire and then the game was over; it'd probably be better if the player had more time to explore before finishing.

All that said, this is still an impressive creation, particularly as a Compo game. I especially like the music. Well done!

World Collector by Joe Williamson 2019-10-09T00:23:31Z

This is such a cool idea! It looks great, it sounds fantastic, and it plays pretty well too. My only complaint would be, I'm _so_ used to jump being spacebar, I zoomed out when trying to jump like a dozen times. But it was still fantastic all around, I'd love to see this made into a larger game.

Singularity by dob 2019-10-21T18:10:11Z

This is a really clever little puzzle game! And, a lot of content, too!

The controls felt a little awkward at first, but, by the level 4 or 5 I got used to it. All in all quite enjoyable.

Unlock Everything by DDRKirbyISQ 2019-10-22T07:23:35Z

The "unlock basic elements of of a normal game" schtick has, of course, been done before, but regardless you've executed it beautifully. Even the least impressive elements of the game are "merely good", which is to say, nothing here is bad or even middling; some things, like the music, are actively excellent. Honestly, until I saw the credits I tacitly assumed it was a Jam entry from a team of at least three people with 72 hours of work - and had that been true, I'd _still_ have been impressed.

I'm sitting here listening to the music while I write this, which isn't something I've done with any other LD game, I don't think, not even the one other game I rated 5 stars on Audio. The gameplay is good, too :stuck_out_tongue:

If I had _one_ tiny complaint, it's that you missed a golden opportunity with the "you unlocked x" jokes. You pick up a key and it says, "You unlocked: The Key to the Gate!". And then when you actually go down and _open_ the gate it doesn't say anything at all, and you know in your heart really _should_ have said, "You've unlocked: the gate!" :broken_heart:

Ignis Universia: Eternal Sister Saga by arzi 2019-10-16T02:41:56Z

The actual combat mechanics were a little flat, but the game as a whole was a blast. Very funny, and of course the illustrations are fantastic. There's really very little to criticize here. I'd love to see a longer version (if not of this game specifically, at least, a VN/RPG with this game's tone and aesthetic).

Serene Sculpture by zirconcode 2019-10-28T17:53:40Z

Best score I could manage was zero, haha. Just couldn't close all the gaps in my lines before I ran out of chisels, which meant one click removed the entire stone. That said, others have obviously managed it quite well. so, kudos to them!

As for the game, it's an cool idea, though the implementation is a bit finicky for my tastes. The music was excellent, too. I could see a game with this core concept going places!

A Brand New World by RealityCheck 2019-10-19T07:36:36Z

This is a really cool game, although as mentioned by others (including yourself), the map is too big/there are too many cards. I found it really hard to keep anything forest-related alive, if it's intentional that Forests are hard to keep around, maybe associated creatures should be worth more points?

Screen Shot 2019-10-18 at 9.33.22 PM.png

In any case, nice game!

The Freelancer by TMAT Productions 2019-10-14T02:49:52Z

This is pretty fun, although, I am very bad at it, and never got passed the (first?) rocket guy (I only made it _to_ him once). I like the idea that you're just _throwing_ the bullets at the enemies. Also, "Eat... rockets? Sorry, it's been a rough day" made me laugh.

Neon Blood by Nek 2019-10-14T02:57:01Z

This was neat. I never really play FPS games so I don't know for sure if it's too hard or I'm just bad, but, sometimes I would think I was doing well and then suddenly I'd just be back at the title screen and not sure why (I had 100+ health moments before). I guess I died? Anyway, the aesthetic is cool and I like the idea the way the map reveal plays out.

Winter by fashionbatman 2019-10-26T21:06:25Z

This is an interesting take on the theme, and lovely to look at and listen to. The gameplay didn't really grab me, unfortunately.

Wandering Soul by negator2vc 2019-10-20T00:00:52Z

The aesthetics of this are really something else. The audio also contributed a lot to the atmosphere. Managing multi-modal gameplay in a jam timeframe is likewise impressive.

As others have pointed out, the combat is a bit lacking, not mechanically in-and-of-itself, but, it's kinda same-y. Some more abilities or enemy types, or even simply giving each area its own slight palette variation, might have improved things in that regard, though obviously there's a limit to what can be accomplished in the timeframe alloted.

Bob by Flaterectomy 2019-10-08T20:17:43Z

This was pretty sweet! I stopped after reaching 77150 points, on a Fabulous Colossal Raft ruled by the Queen. My only question is, do the 3 spooky masks or the Treasure Chest do anything?

raft.png

Healthy Competition by Elemental Zeal Game Studios 2019-10-20T02:41:52Z

This is fun, although, I couldn't tell if leveling up was making me stronger or not? Also, I agree with @guilb that in a game like this, you should attack in the direction of the mouse, not in the direction you're moving; _especially_ given that the mouse button is used to attack. Regardless, it's a good looking game with some nice variety.

Though, did you mean to say "Made for Ludum Dare 44"? Shouldn't that say "Ludum Dare 45"?

Pixel Cook by Huitre 2019-10-09T07:54:06Z

I'm not sure I "get it", but I had fun. I'm not sure I have the patience to grind out the sort of money some of those upgrades require, only getting $5-10 per item.

Edit: Oh, now I get it, I just launched the game from the Itch client, so I didn't see the hint sheets until after I had already played. I guess the more advanced crafting recipes sell for more money. I may have to try this again down the line.

Ashes to Ash by johnfn 2019-10-08T07:58:27Z

The game is pretty good, and I like the writing, but, the _music_ is _really_ nice. I was not expecting that.

Also I feel like I might have missed some secrets or something, I may come back to check it out again down the road.

Beet-hoven by jamioflan 2019-10-16T01:52:41Z

I like the audio cues and music notes, and it was fun to make weird pies. That said, is it just me or were both the fourth plot of land _and_ the beet completely unused? I couldn't find anyone who wanted a four-ingredient pie, nor anyone who wanted beet in their pie.

Nothing to Say by celia14 2019-10-19T19:39:40Z

This is really clever! I had fun with it! I was surprised that once you finally reach your goal, the game just keeps looping, though. Unless I _didn't_ actually reach the goal? Not sure what happened there.

Blackout by almost 2019-10-20T04:10:19Z

This was a really interesting game; I love that it was actually randomized so that on each play-through everything was different. I kept replaying until I got a play-through where _I_ was the killer, but I wasn't able to successfully bin the blame on one of the others :stuck_out_tongue:

In any case, really impressive work!

Liam Dehaudt's EPIC Life Simulator by pokenoufl 2019-10-08T18:47:54Z

Like all good idle games it manages to be both entertaining and incredibly tedious at the same time.

Nothing Box by guckstift 2019-10-16T03:17:14Z

This was really cool, I especially like how it starts you off exploring and (essentially) gathering information about the space you're in, and then caps it off at the end with a slight puzzle element.

If had one complaint, it'd be about some of the controls/UI: * To confirm an action (especially building a raft), you should have to push the _same_ direction twice in a row; right now, if you have water to both the north and the east, and you push up and then right, it immediately builds a raft to your right; it should instead switch to the flashing 'press again to confirm' state, to the right. * If you're standing on a raft you can't interact with anything. That felt a _little_ weird, but is probably fine. * It's super important to be able to distinguish the water from the other tiles easily, since it behaves so differently, but I wasn't able to _easily_ tell the difference until I had all the gems (maybe this depends on the order in which you collect them). Of course I could tell the difference if I stopped moving and looked closely, but it meant I had to be really on my toes about pressing the same direction twice if I didn't want to accidentally build a raft on a tile I didn't recognize as water quickly enough. * The UI sort of implied that the axe and pick could break, if that happens is it just game over? Or is repairing your tools what the two types of stone are used for? That's not really a complaint, I was just curious what happened.

Anyway, all that said this is overall a great game that I really liked.

The Greatest Game in the World by AhmenX 2019-10-28T17:44:28Z

This was amazing. The bits where you fix the game really made it, IMO (well that and the narration, of course). I honestly would have loved to have seen a few more of them (or just more joke 'fixes' you could make in the existing ones, like the camel). In any case the comparisons to The Stanley Parable made by other commenters are on point.

Kudos!

Survivor Slots by PeachTreeOath 2019-10-08T08:22:58Z

I love it, super clever and creative! Only complaint is, the end screen says to leave a comment with how many days it took, but that's after it's no longer possible to check how many days it took! I _believe_ it was 10, but I wasn't paying close attention.

In any case, I love this and would love to see some sort of expanded version.

Survivor Slots by PeachTreeOath 2019-10-08T08:41:37Z

@peachtreeoath As I said, it may not have been 10 days; that said, I know it was immediately after getting my fifth member, I started my final day with a spin that only required 6 adjustments to make the raft. Regardless, super cool!

Totally not Settlers by mr-tag 2019-10-08T08:34:32Z

This is _really_ elaborate. _Nice_ work! With a bit more polish it'd honestly feel like a commercial product. I'm going to have to come back to this one later for more.

Press Start For Nothing by evilobjective 2019-10-08T22:28:12Z

By the Queen's beard, that was... strange. What a strange game.

#000000 by kevinworkman 2019-10-17T03:13:33Z

timeline-small.png

This was a neat idea! I'm not sure it's an idea that can really be extended any farther, but for what it is, it's quite neat!

Full Moon by slimabob 2019-10-22T05:55:51Z

What... on... _Earth_... did I just play? :stuck_out_tongue:

On my first attempted playthrough, when the game attempted to swap out the winter terrain for the summer terrain, it failed to land me appropriately afterwards and I fell through the world. Which, I at first even considered might have been intention, but I decided that was unlikely and restarted.

+1 for the Yiddish, -0.5 for the geriatric butt.

Soulbound by ghost-in-the-toast 2019-10-14T04:33:42Z

This was really fun to play, I love the idea of a twin-stick shooter where your attacks come on a timer loop (UI is reminiscent of a rhythm game, though it isn't really one). The music was also great, although, I had a real hard time understanding what the narrator/voiceover was saying some of the time, subtitles would have helped immensely. Regardless, this is a great game.

Rescue Hamsters! by ryjcio 2019-10-26T21:39:37Z

This was a neat concept, although I'm too bad and could only beat the first level before my patience ran out. It felt a bit like Lemmings, only sort of backwards, which was neat.

A Merchant's Adventure by sharbelfs 2019-10-18T23:04:40Z

This was a lot of fun, and had some neat mechanics. I think it would benefit from the some means of recovery, such as trading trading two or three of the same resource card for a resource of your choice, maybe not exactly that, but something of that sort. Otherwise, really well done!

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-08T23:34:27Z

@tmat-productions @scott-steffes @jjoeyay @nachtwitch @death-is-cold Glad you liked the game!

@noshiz 16 is the final level so far, and, yes, I made it much harder than the previous levels.

@cincerteri @nek I'll try to reproduce the issue when I get a chance to test on a Win10 machine, see if I can figure out what's up. I'll let you know if I figure anything out.

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-14T00:45:59Z

@chaotikza Thanks for the full stack trace; I've still not been able to reproduce this, but, I've uploaded a new build that adds some additional debugging in case an error occurs during that function, do you'd be able to try the new build and let me see the output? I'd really appreciate it because I'd love to get it fixed if at all possible.

Thanks!

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-14T08:03:32Z

@wolfrug I think I can see the problem, thanks so much for that. I've uploaded a version that I believe should fix the issue. Please give it a go and let me know if the situation has improved!

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-14T17:10:14Z

@wolfrug Thanks so much for your assistance!

@cincerteri @nek @drjeebus @chaotikza The RangeError issue has been resolved, you should be able to play now.

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-15T21:35:48Z

@chaotikza Aha, that one I was able to reproduce myself, it was a dumb mistake; before I released the game I removed some media files from the media directory that didn't end up getting used in the gameplay, including a particular sound-effect that I never used... except, I never used it during gameplay, but it _was_ supposed to play in the menu when you tweak the sfx volume, so that you can hear how loud your chosen volume is. I deleted it, so the file failed to load, which means it crashed if you tried to adjust the sfx volume. That's not something I ever re-tested after the initial implementation, since I just play with the default settings most of the time. :face_palm:

In any case, I've uploaded a fixed build that allows changing the volume without crashing.

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-16T20:07:35Z

@antti-haavikko Thanks for playing, and for the detailed feedback! Some specific notes:

* ~~The Mac version works flawlessly on Macs running older version of macOS, which is what I have, but for some reason can only be run by directly starting the binary from the command line on newer Macs. I suspect there's something wrong with the other bundle contents like Info.plist, but I don't have access to an updated Mac at the moment so I haven't been able to figure out the details. I have a few ideas for workarounds if I can't figure it out, though~~ I believe I've figured out the Mac launch issue, see "Known Issues" above for details. * The 16th level is, indeed, way harder than all the previous levels. It's hard to judge difficulty without extensive play-testing; as you said, you found the prior 15 levels quite easy, but I know some other people had trouble with e.g. level 14, and to a lesser extent level 7. I wanted to make the last level one where I _knew_ it was _definitely_ quite difficult, so I could have something challenging at the end even for people who found the rest of the game pretty easy (like yourself). Obviously, it would have been even better if I had been able to create a smoother ramp-up, but I didn't have time to create any additional levels. It's certainly something I'll be focusing on if/when I resume work on the game; your point about harder levels requiring more than just following necessity after figuring out the first move, is particularly salient. * As for the level intro animation, that is actually one of the graphical elements I made myself; the tiles are CC-BY licensed, but the player avatar and its intro animation were done by me (as was the background). On the topic of having to watch it over and over again each time you restart, you actually don't have to! Because the game is strictly turn-based with no timing elements whatsoever, it's coded so that if you provide input while an animation such as the level intro or movement-slide is playing, it'll just jump to the end of the animation and process your input immediately - you can beat each level in as little as 1 frame per tlle, assuming you're able to press and release keys that quickly. I didn't explicitly document it because it's not really an important part of the gameplay, but it's there. * Yes, I absolutely needed more sound effects; but after spending 45 minutes trying to find a sound effect I liked from CC sources, and then another 45 minutes trying to make the level intro effect myself and ending up with something that was merely 'ok', I decided it wasn't something I was going to be able to achieve this time around within the timeframe of the jam.

In any case, glad you liked it, and thanks again for playing!

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-16T20:08:21Z

@bungalow @sillyman987 Thanks for playing!

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-21T08:20:21Z

@redz0ner @franciszek-pyrc @johnny-turbo @poweranze @realitycheck @sebastian-m @peachtreeoath @itsdanidre @aurel @jonno @chambre19 Thanks to all of you for your kind words! I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the game, these sorts of responses have made me eager to continue working on the game to make it even better.

@sharbelfs Thanks for playing! The terrain itself is just a aesthetic; I had some ideas for doing different things with different-looking terrain, but I ended up deciding against them.

@ryusui I'm glad you liked it! I have a few ideas for how I could implement a hint system, but it'll have to wait until all the judging is over and I have a chance to go back and add new levels and stuff, first.

@virimine You're right that balancing level difficulty is very difficult in these circumstances. I'm glad you liked the game! If there are ever plushies of the Maw of the Void, I'll let you know :stuck_out_tongue:

@rodrigo-robles Thanks for giving it a go! And yes, you can toggle full-screen mode from the Options menu, accessible from either the main menu or the pause screen.

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-16T22:35:07Z

This is a sweet little puzzle game; not too hard, not too easy, which, is a hard balance to pull off in this time frame. Graphics and especially music really added to the atmosphere.

The one thing that I found a little awkward (besides the handful of minor bugs noted by others) is the timing aspect of eating and jumping; because you don't switch colors immediately on pressing the button, there's an element of pressing the eat button, and then timing your jump so that you leave the ground before you switch but you switch mid-air before you land. An alternative implementation which had you change colors more-or-less immediately would instead have you timing when to eat instead of when to jump. I'm not sure the alternative is _better_, I'd have to play around with each and see how they felt (maybe you already did, for all I know). Anyway, that's my only "complaint".

One other thing that I guess could be slightly tweaked, would be to maybe give a visual indicator of which blocks have something to say before you reach them. That way the player doesn't have to go touch every block to check whether they have any dialog (since the dialog is pretty funny and worth seeing). But that's a pretty minor quibble too.

Escape from Nabazka by Tomcus 2019-10-20T02:19:06Z

Despite its shortcomings, this is actually _seriously_ impressive as a 48-hour project, especially a first attempt.

Some things that impressed me: * At least six different player abilities besides basic attack * At least three different types of enemy * At least two dungeon floors * Nothing was really broken or janky or buggy, that I noticed.

That may not _sound_ very impressive, but it's a lot better than I can claim for first entry into the compo (which was [really, really terrible](http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=1112)).

Of course, like everything, the game has its flaws: * The player moves reaaaaally sloooooooooooowly * There's nothing in the UI to indicate which spell you currently have selected * The music loop is kinda short, though this one isn't _too_ big of a problem.

Anyway, those things aside, this is really quite good. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next time!

The Only Way is Down by Roka Josh 2019-10-16T00:28:26Z

I played it, but I don't really feel competent to rate it because each time I played I died to like the second or third enemy I encountered, so I didn't really get to see any of the content. I'm not sure if there's something I don't understand about the gameplay, if I'm just bad, or if some sort of performance problem on my elderly Mac made it harder than it was intended to be (the controls felt kinda unresponsive, but I interpreted that as being due to the low gravity giving everything a floaty feel).

Regardless, it looks and sounds pretty nice, so I'm rating in those categories, but I don't really feel I have enough information to rate in any other category.

ModuMon - Barebones Edition by ArBe 2019-10-20T03:05:06Z

I haven't seen anyone else mention this, but for some reason when I try to move parts around or sell them, I have to click anywhere from 3-7 times to get the game to recognize I've done anything. I'm not sure what's up with that.

Otherwise, the game seems neat, but, there seems to be that there's no real defensive options; if you're close enough to hit the enemy, they're close enough to hit you, and as far as I can _tell_ none of the parts reduce the damage you take from being hit. You can it so you can deal more damage to the enemies, but no matter what you do you're still dying almost immediately if you do get hit :no_mouth: Maybe I'm just bad?

The Idea Explorer by Sebastian-M 2019-10-19T19:28:05Z

This is a really interesting game idea, and the shader work is real nice (even if the rest of the visuals are a bit bland). The music is good, too! All in all, it's good work; my only real complaint is that the player avatar moves too slowly, so if you fell, getting back to where you were was a real slog. But that could easily be tweaked.

Necrofenser Hero by Guilb 2019-10-21T23:14:26Z

This was pretty engaging! I think the instructions could have been a _little_ clearer (maybe just a prompt to the effect of, "guess I better go murder a chicken and raise it as unholy extension of my will"), but otherwise worked well. I do think some things could be improved upon, for example in terms of pace/time between waves (maybe slow down slightly), visual clarity (it _looks_ good, but it can be hard to tell what is going on), and meaningful player verbs (the 'control' action didn't seem very helpful, especially since it didn't work on the useful minions anyway).

But all in all it was still a well-realized and enjoyable game! Good job!

Bob the Brawler by itsdanidre 2019-10-20T05:32:10Z

An entertaining little brawler! Seemed well made, everything worked well, looked good. Building walls didn't seem to be too terribly useful, mind, but it was fun nonetheless. Maybe if you could build, like, turrets or traps or something? In any case, good job!

[N][O][T][H][I][N][G] by Johnny Turbo 2019-10-18T17:39:13Z

This was a really neat idea, with some interesting strategy. The only unfortunate part is, at least when I played, it seems to drag on once there's only two players left. Not sure if any tweak could be made to address that, or if a tweak is even necessary - it may be fine as it is. Regardless, really neat idea!

P L A G U E T I M E by bruins 2019-10-08T02:18:44Z

I played multiple times, one time scouring the entire island from one end to the other, and only ever found 4 copper/ore at most in a play through, so I couldn't craft the sword. Also, even though I had the resources, it wouldn't let me craft the bow or staff (perhaps because I hadn't crafted the sword? Not sure). It'd also be nice if you could tell how much health you have left.

All that aside, the stuff that did work was fun to play around with (I _did_ play multiple times, after all), and the aesthetic was fantastic as well. Good job!

Unraveling Nothing by Zachary Shah 2019-10-17T02:41:38Z

This was really neat, but at least for me (MacOS 10.13.2, Chrome), it didn't actually work. Q and E keys didn't do anything at all, and launching with the mouse didn't launch him in the direction of the mouse it just launched him up and to the right pretty much every time. Also, it shouldn't be possible to leave the tutorial without actually making use of the things it's trying to teach you, because as it stands you can finish the tutorial an still have no grasp of the controls.

The timer seems unnecessary as well.

I'd love to see a post-jam bugfix version of the game, though, it _seems_ like it'd be really cool, if it worked as intended.

Rock It Or Pocket by Ellis Spice 2019-10-08T00:50:13Z

Pretty sweet! I like how as you get more pockets, the game gets both easier (because it's easier to get a shot lined up for the ball you want to sink) but also harder (because you're more likely to accidentally sink the cue ball). I did feel like it could be a little awkward trying to control the power of the shot, but I got the hang of it eventually.

Wicked Wanderings by Trifectuh 2019-10-21T17:45:51Z

Ok, so the controls do need a bit of additional polish, but you've already said you've got plans to address that. More notably, the potions, and the ways you combine them, are pretty darn funny. I was able to discover all the recipes, and craft all the potions at least once; when I sold my ultimate creation (the first sale I'd made), the game _immediately_ ended, so, I assume that potion was worth 1000 or more. It'd be nice to be able to see how much something is worth before you sell it, if I had known the game was going to end as soon as I sold that potion, I would have played around a bit more before finishing it.

In any case, good work so far, and, looking forward to the updates!

Nothing but naked by LoneWolfDev 2019-10-17T02:58:59Z

A clever idea. The NPC sight cones felt like a bit of a lie; their shape implies that the NPCs can only see in a code in front of them, but since they instantly turn to face you if you walk behind them they effectively have 360 degree vision. Also, it feels like the NPCs who 'catch' you even when you're clothes should have some compensating flaw, like a longer detection period, or a shorter range of vision.

Deal with your Death by nikchernyakov 2019-10-20T03:34:13Z

This is really impressive work for a jam game. It looks pretty good, it sounds pretty good, and it's got a fair bit of content to it. Unfortunately, for me at least, it seemed too hard; I think maybe granting some more time before enemies start showing up would be nice.

How to Make a Sandwhich by Ziamor 2019-10-26T21:17:25Z

The visuals in this game are adorable, and the music is very nice, although it could have used a much longer loop, I think. Game worked just fine, although I was a bit disappointed that there was no acknowledgement of the sandwich at the end! In any case, good job!

Time Shelter by Max S. 2019-10-09T07:40:08Z

This was a neat little time travel game. Got to the end on my third pass.

Inspiration. by F1Krazy 2019-10-17T01:32:00Z

A nice looking game, for sure, and a nice twist on the theme. I ran into some different bugs than most people: * Trying to talk to the guy in the janitor place, with the bottle caps, locks up the game without displaying any text, until you press Z again; it's like you're talking to him but it doesn't show his text. * Once you get to the end screen, if you press Z before it's done fading in, it locks up completely; I was able to eventually get it to precede by hitting Z several more times, not exactly sure what was up with that. Other than that, it's a neat idea. good work!

Terra Nil - Reclaim the Wasteland by vfqd 2019-10-14T01:22:37Z

This was a great entry., although I'll echo the previous comments that mention rock-less small maps; in fact, after half-a-dozen tries I've never once seen a small board map that _did_ have any rocks, and of course without rock you can't even _start_ playing. But on a normal-sized map the gameplay is great.

ReWorld by Firesplash Entertainment 2019-10-17T04:11:30Z

This was a fun game, with cute art and some pretty good puzzles. My only real complaint is that the card art doesn't always clearly indicate what the card does (in particular, you can't push boxes until you've played the ... cloud card?), but you only need to play each card once to figure out what it does so it's not such a big deal.

Other than that, good job!

Broke af by coachsisyphus 2019-10-26T20:55:08Z

That was very strange! The music change at the end made me expect a very specific animated frog.

Actually pretty challenging, not _too_ tough, but still a decent challenge.

Scribble from Scratch by Tobias Maushammer 2019-10-19T23:46:24Z

This is a really nice looking game; the attention to detail in the effects is fantastic, all the way down to the ink in the pen. Unfortunately, it seemed like a _lot_ of the puzzles could be solved with a single catapult. Also, the reverse catapult seemed to be filled with glue, because when I tried to use it it launched me approximately zero inches.

Other than that though, this was a fun take on a clever idea!

Hoarder's Paradise by Scott Steffes 2019-10-08T22:18:36Z

Oh my. 446846. No idea if that's... good? It's pretty funny, though. You _very_ quickly have trouble reaching the bathroom with all the crap in the way.

HEARTSCAPE by ZakAmana 2019-10-16T02:05:24Z

This was a great idea and I'd love to see it expanded even further. I'm not too sure that it relates to the theme very much, but I don't really mind one way or the other. The mechanics are cool, the graphics, while simple, look nice, the sound track and sfx are great, all in all, really well done. I'm curious to see how you could expand this to make a more fully-fledged game, as it does feel like it starts to get pretty easy after a certain point. I look forward to seeing what you come up with (if you decided to expand it, of course).

The Game of Mao by Danny88881 2019-10-08T23:15:08Z

This is... really hard. Also the first time I loaded it I just had a black screen with music, but, I thought that was the game! I was pushing every button the keyboard, eventually I quit and reloaded and it loaded properly and I got to play :stuck_out_tongue:

My only other complaint is, at least in WebGL in chrome, once the Alternation rule in place, if you turn rapidly back and forth too quickly it seems to kill you, I'm _reasonably_ confident I pressed the keys in the correct order. It made midair turns extra hard in some spots.

Dr & Dr by Daniel Jenikovský 2019-10-26T21:42:13Z

@krisdev If this thing opens `shutdown.exe` then it's almost certainly intentional. and probably someone's idea of a joke. I'm tempted to run it through a Unity decompiler to see if I can figure out what exactly it's doing, but I'm on a mac at the moment and all the good Unity decompilers are Windows-only.

Shutdown.exe requires Administrator rights in Windows, I'm pretty sure, so if you run the game from an unprivileged account it wouldn't be able to shut off the machine (at least, not unless it's able to exploit some genuine vulnerability in Windows).

Slinger by Bungalow 2019-10-16T23:05:51Z

This was pretty sweet! The audio was subdued but nice, some of the graphics were good too, particularly the "thorns" effect and the trees (I know some people are bothered more by inconsistent quality than by blanket low quality, but I guess I'm not one of them). The level design was engaging, and the boss fight was likewise great.

If I had one complaint, it'd be about the sling controls. They worked, and I was able to complete the game, but they didn't really "feel" correct; in particular, while they always sent me in the direction the indicator showed, that often didn't feel like the direction they _should_ have been sending me. I think this may be because the reference point for the player's position used by the slings appears to be his head, but it feels more natural that it would be his body or feet. This was especially notable during this section: Slinger.png Here, I often felt like the sling didn't send me on the trajectory I expected, because it's opinion of my initial position was different from my own.

The other aspect of the sling that's slightly problematic is the window for activating it. Sometimes, particularly in the first section after you get the wall jump (which has very long jumps to make), you'll approach close enough to activate the sling, react by pressing the button, but by the time your button press is registered (most consisting of your own reaction time rather the actual input processing), you're out of range again. One option to _consider_ in cases like this is to have either a grace period or a grace zone; with a grace period, on leaving the sling's range you have a few frames where pressing the button still sets it off anyway; and a grace zone, if the sling doesn't activate until you're within (say) 30 pixels, it doesn't _deactivate_ once active until you're more than (say) 33 pixels away. This means the player still has to get to the sling, but as long as they're able to clip its active zone they still have a _chance_ of using it successfully.

Anyway, other than that, good job! The boss fight was especially well done, you don't see a lot of LD entries with both platforming and a real boss fight.

Beyond the Veil by Wolfrug 2019-10-07T22:08:31Z

Controls were pretty clunky and some proofreading was maybe in order, but I really dig the writing and the graphics were pretty sweet too. I also liked the way your choices changed your stats. All in all a nice job!

The items, that change everything by Dock Frankenstein 2019-10-18T17:26:54Z

An interesting little puzzle game, and fun to play. A bit easy. I liked that it's specifically clapping twice that turns the lights on and off :stuck_out_tongue:

Little Guardian by JUSTCAMH 2019-10-17T03:30:11Z

Screen Shot 2019-10-16 at 5.27.50 PM.png

Man, that was difficult. But fun! This was really well put together; I think this could probably be extended into a longer game, though some addition love might need to be given to the controls? Even as it is now it's great, though.

Chicken Nothing by sillyman987 2019-10-17T00:27:30Z

This is a good starting point; it needs some improvements but I think other commenters already covered them. In any case, nice entry, I hope to see you again in future jams!

The Adventures of Hugh Mahn Through Time by Ninnec 2019-10-20T03:45:27Z

This may be my favorite interpretation of the theme so far, I love the idea that "start with nothing" is your _goal state_. Unfortunately, I found the game pretty difficult to play, even on easy mode. I couldn't really tell if any of my shots were hitting the enemy, so I couldn't really tell whether, when I died, I had almost killed Arnold or had dealt him literally no damage at all.

Protoverse by Giome 2019-10-16T00:42:06Z

This was cool, and although it was undirected it was still entertaining to play with; I especially like the way you (more or less) simulated the look of a black hole consuming a star. Though, I do wish that part lasted longer, or that the field was bigger relative to the event horizon of the black hole; as it was, I was only able to get the black hole to eat one star before it was so large it took up the entire field and it was impossible to form new stars to feed to it. Given that a play session inevitably ends up in state where you can no longer meaningfully interact with the game, it'd be useful to have a reset button, rather, than being forced to quit and restart.

Protoverse by Giome 2019-10-16T20:17:03Z

@steing Hahaha, so I guess I didn't wait quite long enough; I probably stopped _seconds_ before the game reset itself :stuck_out_tongue: Ah, well, I guess I can retract my feedback about the restart button. I do still wish the black hole grew a bit more slowly so you could play around with it more, by getting to watch additional stars get consumed.

According to [an article I found](http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~ryden/ast162_6/notes25.html), a black hole with a mass 3 times that of our sun would only have a Schwarzschild radius of 9 km, and the radius scales linerarly with mass, so it after a star collapses there could still be plenty of room on the field for other stars. Of course, all of the other stars would eventually be gobbled up, but they'd orbit around for a while, still visible, before they were completely consumed to the point that you couldn't see them any longer.

Obviously, I don't expect you to have coded an accurate black hole simulation for a 72 hour game jam; I'm not even sure it would have made a better game if you had; I just wanted to share something I found out that seemed kinda interesting.

adventure again by gamefive 2019-10-17T03:06:36Z

It's not often you see a Ludum Dare game made with pencil-and-paper graphics! I like the style.

Ex Nihilo by Alexascher 2019-10-20T05:47:13Z

This is really neat, nice and relaxing. I figured out what _some_ of the stars did, but I don't think I solved the whole mystery (in particular I don't have a very clear idea what the red suns are for). In any case, everything I saw worked together well and it was just overall a nice experience. Thanks!

Edit: After playing some more, I wasn't even close to done! I'm still not.

I think it might be nice if the stars stuck around longer, so you have a chance to consider what you want to merge them with. As it stands, I feel like I need to plan everything out ahead of time if I want to manage the right combinations before some of the stars disappear.

No Food Nomads by ScalphaMission 2019-10-08T01:08:23Z

This is great! I love the mechanics and the way it's presented, and I like the surprising amount of strategy involved. The only thing that's not clear to me is, if you never die yourself, does it matter whether you bring enough food to feed your tribe?

In any case, super cool idea, it'd be neat to see it expanded upon.

Force of Nature by RedZ0ner 2019-10-17T01:09:33Z

This is an interesting idea; I was able to get all but two panels, and then I just got stomped; The humans just started turning things around, and I seemed to stop getting growth power, too; it went from a few points every second or so to 10-20 seconds just for 2 points of growth power, so I couldn't reliably build anything other than cross plants.

Some sort of plant that earned you additional growth power, either with a large initial investment, or with an accompanying penalty such as weakening the other plants in the same sector (or making humans faster, or whatever) would be helpful.

Edit: Also, I read on here about how spamming cross plants was an effective strategy, tried it, and was completely unable to proceed beyond the first tile; any cross plants I put down outsite the start tile were destroyed in far less time than it took me to drag-and-drop them. Really it seems like you need to establish a foothold with fortress trees and slowdowns before you have a chance of your cross plants suriving the way of 10 angry humans that immediately descend.

Also also, I sometimes found my tiles to be under attack even in blocks that had no humans left (and before the panic meter recached a point where the humans can migrate).

m_void1 by taffyko 2019-10-08T22:02:47Z

This is sweet! I hope you expand it, I'd love to see it taken a bit farther (especially the mind mechanic, which I feel could go a lot of interesting places). Good job!

Also, thank you for uploading a Mac version :stuck_out_tongue:

TidePool by Rebecca Harrison 2019-10-08T23:41:16Z

This is one of the nicest looking LD games I've seen. I found it _really_ hard to accomplish anything, but it was pretty entertaining just as sandbox to bounce around, anyway.

Blue Juice Dealer by Ryan Wine 2019-10-14T03:21:11Z

I played the original, WebGL build, and while I was able to craft a few potions I mostly just ran out of money over and over, as other people noted. Also, even when I gave the customer a potion, I often couldn't tell from their response whether they liked it or not. I'm gonna give the downloadable version a shot, too.

Awesome visuals and music, though.

LIME by CGIXE 2019-10-26T21:33:01Z

This was a _lot_ to get implemented in only 72 hours. Unfortunately, the resource densities seemed pretty off; by the time I had dug to the bottom of the map, grabbing every resource tile I could see, I had a _bunch_ of coal (which doesn't do anything), but only enough iron and golf for one bar of each. Obviously, I wasn't being perfectly thorough ( e.g. I didn't dig out all ~10,000 tiles in the map - assuming "size 100" means 100x100), but I would have expected to see to see a bit higher resource density.

Anyway, other than that quibble this is an impressive piece of work for a 72-hour project, to say nothing a first-time entry. Good job!

Medieval Mayhem by itsTripp 2019-10-14T03:29:50Z

It looked really nice, but was unplayable for me; the mouse look was at the same time both hyper-sensitive and also extremely laggy. Maybe my machine just isn't up to it, as few of the other commenters seem to have encountered that problem.

Tightrope Gauntlet by Jonno 2019-10-20T03:21:23Z

An interesting if minimal game. The controls aren't super obvious, although if I had paid more attention to the description maybe I would have figured that out faster :stuck_out_tongue:

I did encounter one bug, though: normally when I fall or get hit by an enemy the game tells me I died and offers to reset; but once I got the sword and then got hit by an enemy, I disappeared, but the game just froze, and never offereed to let me reset.

Spooky: The one who lost everything by Susumu Asaga 2019-10-22T06:34:24Z

This is a remarkably fully-featured game, marred only very slightly by somewhat finicky controls. When I got to the end I was hoping for more - I would absolute play an expanded, fleshed out version of this.

As for the difficulty, I feel like it was decent, though maybe a little uneven. An larger, expanded game would presumably need to feature a smoother difficulty curve, but for an LD entry this is about as good as you can get.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Monolith by Kalucifer 2019-10-09T00:12:10Z

On OS X, like @saltfactory-studio it hangs after you enter the third room. Looks nice, though.

Monolith by Kalucifer 2019-10-17T01:49:16Z

Ok, this is really clever, and I won't spoil it.

People who downloaded this trough the Itch app, you should make sure to run it directly by double-clicking on it in Explorer (or Finder), rather than launching it from the client, because if you launch it from the client, it'll _look_ like it works (e.g. the game loads and you can sort of play it) but it doesn't work the way it's _intended_ to work and you cannot actually finish the game.

Some notes for the developer on fixing the Itch client problems:

!>But I will say, at least on Mac (and quite possibly on Windows) this super cool clever thing this does _doesn't work_ when you run the game from the Itch client, because of [Itch sandboxing](https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html). The developer needs to set an [App Manifest](https://itch.io/docs/itch/integrating/manifest.html) and opt out of the sandbox with `sandbox = false` in order for the game to work properly when run from the Itch app. !> Also, just as a general note, it's really hard to pull something like this off smoothly; when you make your game crash intentionally as part of a secret puzzle, you need to make _really certain_ that it doesn't ever crash _unintentionally_, or the player is even more likely to assume the game is just buggy (something that is already a risk with just the intentional crash). Likewise, if you're going to have the game do unusual things a game wouldn't normally do, you have to make extra sure they work properly. Of course, that's hard to do given the constraints of a game jam.

Game Master by Rodrigo Robles 2019-10-20T03:12:27Z

This game is hard to rate, after all, if I don't have fun, is the game bad, or did I make a bad level? :stuck_out_tongue:

I'm kidding, of course. While the game mechanics once you enter the gameplay mode are incredibly minimal, the fact you implemented a level editor with all these different components, that actually _works_, is really impressive. Good job!

REWRITER by johjoh 2019-10-16T01:15:24Z

This has a lot of potential, and there are some really cool upgrades in here. I do think it could use some refinement, for example: * As @minibobbo noted, it can be difficult to accurately tell which tile the player is on, and you get punished pretty hard for making a mistake with that. Likewise for the enemies. So, either tying movement to the grid, or in some way highlighting the tiles that the player and enemies currently occupy, would be helpful (I know that technically the tile the player occupies _is_ differentiated, but the effect is so subtle that it's hard to parse during combat). * The enemies need more of a wind-up animation to their attacks; not for aesthetic purposes, but to give the player time to react to an incoming attack. Especially early in the game when you have only 1 range, there's a lot of tedious waiting for an enemy to attack so you can safely move in and counter attack (assuming you judged your relative grid positions correctly). It'd be nicer if you could (relatively) safely move in for an attack, and then dodge out of the way when you see an attack coming, rather than waiting until after they attack, slipping in for a quick hit and then fleeing and waiting for the next attack. Of course, they do already have _some_ wind-up; the windup they already have might be sufficient if it was more obvious what tile each of you were in, so you didn't have to spent reaction time working out whether or not you're co-linear with the enemy. * Range is _really_ important, especially early. Having an attack range bigger than your opponent makes the game easier in a way that not even damage up does; this is actually a nice change of pace from a lot of similar games where DPS is king, but it does get a little silly sometimes. Again, if the enemies telegraphed their attacks better it'd better balance the different options for attack * Of course as noted by others including yourself, some sound effects would be good.

I'd also like to give two notes of praise: * The specific way that attacking ties into movement (that is, player attacks destroy walls in addition to damaging foes, enemy attacks, create walls in addition to damaging the player) is neat, I don't think I've ever seen a mechanic like that before. * Even though the graphics aren't particularly detailed or complex, I really like the animation on the characters (particularly the player). His bounce is great.

Also some random notes that aren't really good or bad: In PowerTrip mode, a number of the powerups that appears in the chest are uniformly bad:

* Jittery: Halves damage for no benefit * Family Size: Halves movement speed for no benefit * Near-sighted: Reduces range to minimum for no benefit (basically a death sentence) * Shotgun: Quite good, though still theoretically a trade-off (downside matters less than in normal mode) * T-shirt: Uniformly good, just like it always is. * Heart Transplant: Absolutely fantastic, no downside, and much more relevant here than in normal mode.

I find the balance of these a bit weird in normal mode, though I'm not sure what you'd do about it.

Memories of Eleph by Leandroc 2019-10-17T04:28:27Z

The graphics and music combine to give the game a really nice atmosphere, and the sfx complement it nicely with their subdued, minor tone. The map design is also nice, but, some of the gameplay implementation doesn't feel very well thought: * The way the ghosts interact with the water is just unpleasant to play with, especially coupled with the way collision works for them. In a game that was otherwise easy I had to do that spit-water-at-ghosts screen more than a dozen times. * The timer just... isn't very fun. I know it's the only source of a fail state for the player, so I'm not sure removing it is the right option, but, maybe extending it? Or make it so running into an enemy doesn't take away any additional time beyond the time you already lose by having to redo the room? Some sort of tweak, anwyay.

Other than that I did really enjoy the game, good work!

Prison Escape by shaurya_juneja 2019-10-07T21:38:30Z

This didn't work for me, in Chrome on a Mac. I'll try again later on a Windows machine, see if that helps.

Prison Escape by shaurya_juneja 2019-10-16T02:53:09Z

This isn't bad at all, although of course it's a bit short (it was made in 48 hours, so no surprise there). Only a few complaints: * The 'jump' sound effect plays even when you're not jumping, e.g. if you walk off the edge of a platform. It should probably only play when you press spacebar and gain upward momentum. * Some of the terrain elements you need to navigate between are very close together (like the fire to your right and the platform above you in the lower right corner of level 1), so you need to navigate into a very precise position or you die. But, the controls are digital rather than analog (which is fine, in itself) and you move very quickly (which is also fine), so it becomes very hard to position yourself (which is less fine). I'd suggest that when the player starts moving from a stopped state, they have a brief period of acceleration before their reach their full movement speed, so you you make small adjustments in position by tapping rather than holding down the button.

Beyond that, good job on your first game!

Return to Civilization by Dave Anders 2019-10-08T23:54:59Z

The game looks and sounds nice, but it feels pretty hard to control. My first three attempts I kept stumbling into mushrooms I hadn't meant to eat, running out of sanity with near-full time and hunger bars. I did eventually find all three pieces though, and finished the game!

You may wan to fill out the "Ludum Dare Submission URL" field in Itch.io (below the tags section) so that people who find your game through Itch can find their way back here, by the way.