Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → PickyDogFish
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | π₯ | Taxcellent | jam | 209 | 3.75 | 3.52 | 3.90 | 4.33 | 4.31 | 2.86 | 3.81 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | π₯ | Riches From Below | jam | 61 | 4.13 | 3.91 | 3.67 | 3.77 | 4.53 | 3.75 | 3.77 | |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | π₯ | Waddle | jam | 95 | 4.09 | 3.88 | 3.93 | 3.96 | 4.42 | 3.78 | 4.21 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | π₯ | Realm of Elementals | jam | 930 | 3.25 | 3.10 | 2.92 | 4.12 | 3.90 | 3.22 | 2.68 | 3.27 |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | π₯ | Packed Ride | jam | 160 | 4.00 | 3.89 | 3.73 | 4.37 | 4.23 | 3.38 | 3.74 | 3.65 |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | π₯ | Rawnhill Post | jam | 404 | 3.73 | 3.47 | 3.25 | 4.42 | 4.10 | 2.44 | 3.27 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | π₯ | Solar Sentinel | jam | 319 | 3.60 | 3.39 | 3.15 | 3.56 | 4.58 | 2.52 | 3.14 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | π₯ | We Stole Aliens | jam | 908 | 3.18 | 2.82 | 2.92 | 3.40 | 3.57 | 3.04 | 3.33 | |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Tetformer | jam | 1433 | 2.84 | 2.92 | 3.84 | 3.23 | 2.00 | ||||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | π₯ | Sacrifice Ovcos | unfinished | |||||||||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | π₯ | Storming Sands | jam | 361 | 3.64 | 3.53 | 3.38 | 3.87 | 3.63 | 3.12 | 3.03 | |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | π₯ | Empowered State | jam | 881 | 3.10 | 2.98 | 2.83 | 2.81 | 3.15 | 2.19 | 2.93 |
The game looks really nice! But I lost pretty fast every time. Water just shoots up on top of the ship and its game over. Im not sure how to really avoid that from happening. Good job tho, nailed the theme!
A very simple game, but it actually looks very polished. Good job! One thing I noticed tho, you can kinda cheese the game by just balancing another object on the one you are holding with your mouse, and carry it high enough
Maybe i was missing something, but i fell through the half transparent blocks a couple times. I think they broke because of echolocation (neat mechanic), but they were still visible...
Also, i think it takes a bit too long to actually get into the game, i kinda got bored of plain platforming before it got to a bit harder levels.
Other than that, good job!
The game looks great, and its fun to play!
One of my favorites from the ones ive tried. simple mechanic, intuitive controls. Doesnt fit the theme perfectly, but good enough. Good job!
I kinda did the same thing in 2d for my game xD I like the idea, inspired by tricky towers. The blocks do feel a bit too bouncy tho. Good work!
I like the design, too bad you didn't make a couple more levels and actually force the player to use more than one duck. Good job!
I feel like i never really knew what the ants were doing. if i sent a worker will it pick up the food? Will it just go there? Sometimes they also seemed to go their own way. Not bad, but I feel like it could be a lot better with some tweaking.
@luka-roli that's a great idea! I wonder how no one on the team thought of that haha
This game is actually a lot of fun to play, and looks great as well.
As people already said, there are some collision problems and manual control over the camera would be nice. But good job getting the game done in time!
A simple and really fun game. The rules were easy to learn and the effects on cards added enough variety. As others already mentioned, it could be a bit clearer who placed the card. Maybe you could change the color of the gold corner of the opponents cards? And the explosion sound when plants grow is a bit out of place. But the game still felt pretty good all around and I enjoyed playing it a lot!
@surr-sloidah thanks for the feedback! We are aware that it lacks some depth and tower diversity. We first planned to add another type of power, wind, and make the two types of energy play together with weather. Sadly there was not enough time to add that, and neither was there enough time to properly balance everything. Maybe we will put some more work in after the jam, but given our track record don't get your hopes up haha.
@salmonmoose camera movement might be a good idea yeah, especially the collectors block quite a bit of vision. About connecting towers, i hoped i explained it well enough in the tutorial level, but i guess not.
@icxon thanks a lot for the feedback. Actually, atm all the levels are endless. There is a certain amount of preset waves, then trucks start randomly spawning. We will change that, or at least make it more clear in a small post-jam update along with some other small changes. Hopefully Godot will let us make another working build.
It might be because im tired and drank a beer or two, but the close game button being on every popup doesn't seem like the best idea. Good job tho!
As simple as it is, its a fun little game. Managed to push away 755 potatoes before I threw one at the lamp.
@twowolf I'm glad you enjoyed our game, and good job collecting all the golden stamps! As grizeldi said, we didn't make the music and SFX ourselves, that's why we opted out of that category. I found the music on pixabay, and I thought it fit with the game pretty well :)
As for the puzzle design, I had [GMTK's](https://www.youtube.com/@GMTK) recent series about making a puzzle game in the back of my mind when I was starting out.
I started out by listing all the different mechanics we thought we might put in the game. Then I made the introduction level to figure out how im going to be drawing out the levels in google sheets. I then proceeded to try designing a tutorial level for each of the mechanics, but later I decided to change the movement speeds so I scrapped all of them and started from scratch again haha. Introductory level, tutorial level and two additional (slightly harder) levels for each mechanic. For each one I had a bit of an idea of what I want the player to do or learn. First just how to move the car, what the goal is, expanding on that a bit with some harder levels, and then introducing a new mechanic in another easy level that makes use of it. Sometimes I wanted the player to do the wrong thing first, and then try again to find a better way to finish the level. I was trying to not overwhelm the player by introducing a lot of things at once, but I could still do a better job at explaining the basics. For example I didn't mention/make it obvious that vehicles can pass by each other, but can't stop on the same tile.
All in all I feel like the progression is okay, but a few harder levels are missing. It's too easy to collect the golden stamps, except for a couple levels. But we were running out of time, so we focused on other things. And I don't think I was mentally capable of designing more levels the last evening of the jam haha.
Did you maybe find that the levels progressed to slowly or were too easy? After designing them it was hard to tell what the difficulty really was :P
If you have any more specific questions I'll answer them when I find time.
Probably the most fun ld 53 game ill play. The mechanics are very simple, but allow you to build many thigns that control very differently.
This is more of an experience than a game, which isn't a bad thing. The jump mechanic does feel really bad for some reason, it was hard to do the parkour bits. Very interesting entry.
This is a really nice platformer. The movement feels nice, smooth and responsive. While in the "limited space" the acceleration was hard to control, but that's what made it fun and introduce a level of mastery once you got a feel for it. The game also looks really nice and cohesive, with some decent music as well (although a bit repetitive). As some people mentioned, a level when a player is forced to step onto a deactivated laser would be nice, but other than that, great level design!
Also here's the score from my playthrough: score.png
@stronf thanks for the feedback. We are aware that it could be more clear what seats are affected by which effect. We were thinking about adding some sort of particles or icons to show where it stinks or is noisy, but ultimately ran out of time. We're taking in the feedback and might make a small post-ld update with some quality of life changes ;)
Pretty challenging and fun game, but space to jump in a platformer is too much of a muscle memory for me :sweat_smile:
I somehow jumped out of level 9 once, and sometimes the character got a bit stuck on corners. Soon after i got too frustrated to continue haha.
First, good job on "finishing" a game. It's hard to scope things right at the start so that you can actually implement everything. This game could be way more fun if you added some more complexity, for example chaining like you mentioned. Some feedback: - as some people mentioned, sometimes you can't place down things that seem to fit, which makes it a bit annoying. - It gets repetitive fast. Adding some interaction between objects could improve that. - The scanning doesn't seem to really work (I'm guessing it's only supposed to scan objects while in the bright zone). Even if that worked, the fact that you stop scrolling once you scan an item and wait for the person to place it kinda defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it? - If the scanning is supposed to be the thing that sets the pace, then why is there also a timer? - What's the purpose of the different cameras? I guess so you could share what you made? If so, that's fine, but at the moment I don't see the point of having multiple camera angles. Maybe it would be better if you just rotated the camera around the room once you're done. - Explaining the story behind what you're doing in just a couple sentences can make player feel more motivated to play. I was confused, was I putting furniture in a van? Or in an apartment? Why are there different people on the level select screen? A single sentence could make players way less confused about what they are doing ;)
With all that out of the way, good job on your submission! Keep at it and see you at the next Ludum Dare!
This is a really basic maze game. Not a big fan. It does look decent, but I feel like it's mostly just because unreal looks pretty amazing out of the box.
Also, did you enable VR mode by accident? It started steamVR when I launched the game.
Still, good job on doing this solo, I find it really hard to motivate myself to do something on my own. Keep it up!
Shallow gameplay, but otherwise a really nice little game. Here's my highscore: CosmicCursorCapture.png
It's a smart idea to limit your scope, especially if its your first taking part in a jam. But where's the fun in that, you have to start by dreaming big so that those dreams can then crumble during the jam haha. Anyway, you made a really nice little game, and it feels quite polished for what it is. Great job :)
@gruzdid thank you for the comment! We didn't have enough time to polish the game and add any depth to the mechanics, but I'd love to hear what the game design problems are in your opinion.
This is a very nice idea with a pretty polished execution. It took me a couple waves to realize the second row of minions does not recharge on it's own, so maybe you could have mentioned that on the start screen. How many rounds did you make? Or are they generated into infinity? It feels decently balanced, maybe just a bit too easy. I got to round 15 before I got a bit bored, but i got a fair share of entertainment out of the game. Great job!
I really like the destructible terrain, it's really fun to play around for a while. The movement could feel better, it feels like there's no limit to the movement speed. I also think it would be cooler if the placed platforms would break into smaller pieces, possibly of the same size as the other terrain. All in all, seems like a great little experiment.
Interesting concept, I like the idea quite a bit. If you added some more depth to the summoning process it would be really cool, like sacrificing multiple animals at once for stronger summons, with different combinations resulting in different summons. And as someone mentioned, there is no punishment for pressing the wrong button, so you can just mash them all the time. Overall pretty good, especially for doing it solo!
Good job finishing a game! And sorry for not being as positive as the other comments. A couple things: the distance score isn't actually distance, is it? I got stuck on an edge for a bit and the distance kept going up, even though I wasn't moving forward at all. Is there a reason to not actually use the distance or am I missing something? Also, while the placement of different tiles in front of you is pretty cool, "selecting" where it will be placed is quite annoying. Again, good job for finishing a game. The best way to get better is to make things, so keep it up!
Great execution, the game feels nice to play, growing a colony is fun and exploration is fun because of the fog of war. It is however lacking content to have more depth, maybe enemies to fight or more interesting things to find. But a game jam is very limiting in terms of the amount you can make, so amazing job! Wish it didn't become laggy after you have a small army of skellies tho
Thank you all for all the kind words, and for the bug reports and improvement ideas! We've been writing down some things we could improve, and we might release a post-jam update on itch. @francoisvn making all camera movement on the mouse would definitely be better, so we might do that.
Some of the tutorial pop-ups would benefit a lot from being a short video instead of an image, as it's hard to properly explain the line splitting and merging with an image and a bit of text. That would probably help introduce the mechanic to new players.
@bstabuu We are aware of some bugs when multiple ducks in one line are giving orders, we just didn't have enough time to find and fix every bug - even though our programmer spent most of his time working on the duck movement :sweat_smile: Thanks for pointing it out though, we'll try to fix it in the post-jam update.
And the ability to pause would probably also be nice, so thanks for the idea :)
So if anyone really enjoys the game, maybe check the itch page in a few days, I'll try to design (at least) one more level as well ;)
I agree with the other commenters, it's a decent foundation, but lacks quite a bit of polish and more things to do. Good job though, pretty good base!
Nice vibe, but I honestly think the gameplay is just a worse minesweeper. the maps being split into different colors where you can only open tiles of that color just breaks the flow imo. The fun part of minesweeper is when you get a streak of easy tiles to open, and this just breaks that flow. The powerups are fun though, and good job on the voice acting, it adds a lot :)
@olenikimid thanks for the kind words.Thats a great idea for an upgrade, it would definitely be a nice addition, as it is pretty hard not to run over the divers.
And about adding visuals to the ship - we thought about it, negdo even made some 3d models, but there wasn't enough time to add it into the game.
Looks nice, and plays well - it feels pretty polished. For a typing game it's nice, but I'm not a big fan of typing games :sweat_smile:
The game really sets the mood. Alone in the depths, lost in the darkness. The upgrades are nice, for most of them you notice the difference it makes right away. some of them, like the movement upgrades werent really as noticable, but thats okay. I did get one shot by a jellyfish after picking up ~15 upgrades, not sure if thats intended. The getting lost part really sets the mood well, but in terms of gameplay, getting lost isnt really great. I had no idea where i am, where ive already been, which way to go to explore new areas. I think a decent way to solve that would be to allow the player to somehow leave a mark. Like leaving behind a very dim light, or just somehow marking things so you know youve already been there when you come back.
All in all, nice mood, decent gameplay, got lost in the darkness. Good job!
Honestly, i dont like how the game looks. but it was fun to play for a couple minutes. The jumping/landing is a bit buggy sometimes, you like stop just a bit above the platform, and then it takes the character a bit to actually land. And i feel like theres a bit of a fight between reaching the top and having a high score - the are kinda the opposite. Still, keep up the work!
@someone It's definitely the benefits of a (tried and tested) team.
Still, it's been a bit of a struggle fitting this amount of complexity into a game jam game, but mostly from a game design perspective. We tried to make the game short (only 12 turns) to allow people to play the whole thing for the jam rating, but that means that all the systems have to respond to players actions pretty fast. And with the region income, tax, basic upkeep, population and happiness stats being quite closely related to each other, it's a pain in the ass to balance. Also the map is randomly generated, which adds replayability, but also means that sometimes you get amazing income right off the bat, and sometimes it's pretty bad, making it harder to balance once again.
Maybe we bit off a bit more than we could chew, game design and UI/UX wise.
But honestly, it's been a lot of fun trying to balance the systems. I usually don't enjoy the number tweaking part all that much, but I didn't hate it this time. We already released a small rebalanced version (the one you probably played), and we might do one more.
And thanks for all the feedback guys! Much appreciated!
@aqtun We do have a bit of a problem with conveying all the information to the player. Making the numbers that fly up colored would be an easy way to improve things a little bit, but that would only go so far. I think some sort of an interactive tutorial would be needed to explain everything, as there is just too much going on.
I'd love to hear people's opinions about the UI. What are you checking after a turn? Are the graphs useful? When you click on a region, is the top table of information useful? Are the per tile type values helpful? Is there something else you'd like to see there?
In case anyone actually answers these questions, thank you in advance :)