Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → piscythe
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Bunner Gunner | jam | 358 | 3.71 | 3.58 | 3.04 | 4.11 | 4.18 | 2.77 | 3.61 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Wrath of a Dying God | compo | 101 | 3.82 | 4.13 | 3.15 | 3.91 | 3.06 | 2.77 | ||||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Malleus Pistrium | jam | 1553 | 3.09 | 2.92 | 2.84 | 2.42 | 3.26 | 3.01 | 3.15 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | The Daytona 666 | jam | 1289 | 3.14 | 3.40 | 2.52 | 2.24 | 3.08 | 2.83 | 3.19 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Housing Crisis Island Wars | compo | 359 | 3.38 | 3.28 | 3.11 | 3.78 | 3.02 | 2.81 | ||||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Rocket Punch | compo | 426 | 3.26 | 3.32 | 3.10 | 3.56 | 2.84 | 3.19 | 2.73 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | L.A.V.A.L.A.M.P. vs Evil Magic Alien Robots | compo | 311 | 3.43 | 3.46 | 3.31 | 3.51 | 3.31 | 3.10 | 3.35 | |||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Last Sunset | compo | 208 | 3.52 | 3.68 | 2.88 | 3.12 | 3.08 | 3.40 | 3.58 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Edge of the Abyss | compo | 153 | 3.61 | 3.26 | 2.68 | 3.42 | 2.96 | 2.66 | 2.96 | |||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Duelist's Chamber | compo | 152 | 3.62 | 3.74 | 3.56 | 3.74 | 2.94 | 2.97 | 3.61 | 66 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Radivader | compo | 263 | 3.52 | 3.65 | 2.65 | 3.61 | 2.81 | 3.20 | 2.11 | 3.03 | 55 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Maze of Titans | compo | 1159 | 2.33 | 2.09 | 2.91 | 3.78 | 1.70 | 2.42 | 1.79 | 2.52 | 57 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Iter Bellum Deus | compo | 102 | 3.77 | 3.97 | 3.82 | 4.09 | 3.18 | 3.00 | 2.38 | 3.20 | 61 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | One vs. Legion | compo | 766 | 2.67 | 2.65 | 2.91 | 3.09 | 2.63 | 2.43 | 2.19 | 2.58 | 47 |
The aiming in this game is... difficult to get used to. It's also a bit too bright for the gameplay and concept - a bright look works for action-y zombie games, but not one that plays more like a horror game. Similarly, I'd like to see death animations and some kind of ambient sound - it doesn't have to be music, maybe just a low drone. There's potential for a good horror game in here if you expand it.
Failed to run on Windows 7 - game opens and immediately closes.
Minor complaints: you can walk out the bottom of the screen in some places, the 'losing half your screws on death' combined with the annoyance of returning to start makes upgrades difficult, and the drill fist is powerful to the point it seems like many levels were designed with it in mind.
The negative aside, I'm going to congratulate you on creating a wonderfully fun experience with only 72 hours to work with. The graphics are exquisite, the gameplay is fun, and there is a definite difficulty curve. While the music didn't stand out and it was a common interpretation of the theme, I am honored to give this game my first 5-star ratings of the event in Overall, Graphics, and Fun.
I click on the buttons and they do nothing. I'm using Windows 7/Firefox.
This game certainly requires quick thinking to set up routes before the blue enemies start moving.
My main problems here are the inconsistent jumping controls, which often don't seem to work, the visual aspect of having identical-looking terrain acting differently, and the blaster noise gets annoying. I do like the basic idea of a limited weapon that sometimes needs to be used and an unlimited weapon that is often impractical, but this needs work. I do feel kinda bad about being so critical of this game considering what went into it, though.
Unable to run:
Error: Failed to load mono
Unable to load mono library from "C:/Users/.../Desktop/Misc Games/Choices_win/Choices_win/Choices_Data/Mono/mono.dll" (error = 126).
Windows 7.
"Server not found, Firefox can't find the server at www.jeasonfire.tk."
Wait...are you sure you're not violating a copyright here?
Very fun, but it gets annoying having to start from the beginning every time I mess up.
Very well done and one of the best implementations of the theme I've seen. I can't get past the fourth level, however.
When I first saw this I misread it as "single jumps only," which isn't exactly innovative, but "one jump per level" lends itself to interesting gameplay and puzzles. There are some problems with wall collisions, though.
The fleeing villagers look a little like minor demons at first glance.
Augh. Throwing HappyBot over the pit is HARD.
I did a 40mb download for this. My one suggestion would be to compress your music - each track is over 10mb!
A wall bounce would also make longshots more productive. Right now it's hard to justify the risk.
Very interesting. Fun, and surprisingly hard to actually clear, even though 90% of the gameplay is just messing with the system. I also have to compliment the sense of humor - I lost it at "magic, suckers."
This is one of the more polished incarnations of this idea I've seen, but it doesn't look as if you had time to make puzzles that really took advantage of the mechanic. Last level I accidentally moved one of the blocks inside a box and thus couldn't solve it.
Suicided into a wall around 150 kills. Never saw anything as a threat. Liked the weapon setup.
I'm impressed you made this in 48 hours! I've seen a full game with a similar interaction between retro worlds, (Mega Mash by Nitrome,) but that game had very distinct borders between worlds. Here, the worlds rip and tear at eachother, creating a very neat effect and causing some tricky and interesting gameplay. Unfortunately, I did encounter a bug here, where I fell from Otter Mario's world into an Otter Zelda lake and got stuck, but most such cases result in player death. However, I had to use the level skip cheat to get past levels 3 through 6. This had nothing to do with Otter Zelda or Otter Space Thing, both of which had fine gameplay and tight controls. The problem was Otter Mario, who controls like an otter coated in lubricant, slipping and sliding around the stage, off platforms, and into instakill pits. This was the character I had to use for star sections, where I'd need to travel a certain distance before the star wore off. The sharply limited time I had for this meant that I had to hurry, and I'd either slip once and thus not have enough time, or slide into a pit and have to start the level over. While at least the game is forgiving enough to give more stars, I still found that the timing requirement was beyond my capabilities. Still, there were plenty of fun little polish elements, such as the coin meter changing form depending on the nature of the game it's in, but it needs some tuning.
I liked the annex/healing mechanics, but I had serious lag issues playing this and my computer isn't exactly bad.
Not shown: the vast majority of the human and monster populations that died long before finding their soulmates, at least if the difficulty of this game was any indication. The story and graphics were good, but it was disconcerting having to restart three times because I didn't do everything just right. I understand the desperation aspect, but I think the time limit was too strict.
Solid oldschool shooter you have here. (Says the guy who hasn't played any classic FPS.) Zombies took annoyingly long to kill with the stick and pistol, but that made getting the deathgun really satisfying. The graphics style worked really well and there was a definite sense of danger (especially considering how close I had to get to hit zombies with my stick.) I died twice to batswarm right before the end, and when I got an ending I had to alt+f4 exit. Still the best game I've played so far.
The seeming persistence of the stuff people do is a good solution to the problem of a limited audience. While I see the realism of the spaceship controls, the momentum made it difficult for me to perform "oh that looks cool I'm going to check that out" behavior, which is how I expected to interact with the world.
All the boxes stick to the bottom right corner. I tried both links and there wasn't a difference.
I love the audiovisual environment here, and I think this concept works much better as a turn-based game than in real time.
I saw this in the blog, but reached it through the rating system. The game did a very good job of creating a constant feeling of danger and I loved the dimension-warping mechanics, but things often felt random - I would get stuck with no time to find a way out.
I like the mechanics and concept here, but figuring out how to play was tricky even with instruction. It was annoying having to click the portal to switch between sending wimpies to be burned and sending grunts over to the fish world. There were sometimes collision bugs with enemy units flying straight past mine, but in the absence of such I found that if a single wimpy reaches your base, it can totally lock you down - even grunts don't seem able to stop it.
I think this might actually have worked better with chunkier pixel graphics - like a retro arcade. The soundscape and gameplay give this game a hectic arcade atmosphere, and I think that's its biggest strength.
Delightful. The graphics were good and the planet-hopping was really fun once I got the hang of it. The regular enemies were cool, though I found myself wishing I could just hold down the fire button. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to approach the bosses though - strafing didn't seem to be working all that well for me. I liked how the shooting/movement mechanics added chaos to navigation - you never know exactly where you'll end up when a fight is over. I'd love to see this expanded. I can just imagine trying to fend a swarm of space bats away from a planetoid or something.
I've tried this a bunch of times and never made it past 1 robot. I don't even feel as if I'm improving. I think either I'm missing something, I'm not good enough at time management, or this game is just too hard.
I liked the graphical style, and the gameplay had a good structure, but I found that survival often came down to a coin flip of whether the portal that opened was the one you were near. I also found myself wishing for a diagonal shot.
There's something innately satisfying about using a planet as a flail. I'm not sure how the scoring system is supposed to work because, due to the procedural generation, scores from different games aren't necessarily going to be comparable. The particle effects when you slam a huge planet into a sun are so cool though.
This game doesn't give you the tools to effectively avoid the enemies presented, and once the enemies were exhausted I didn't find the platforming enjoyable either. The music and sound were good, but hearing the same two voice clips over and over for no apparent reason got tiring.
The grid crafting is cool, though it could do with stacking and item movement/removal. The core top-down gameplay was fine for the most part, but the fight with the green enemy was rather confusing. Also, only mentioning the recipes in one dialogue each was not enough for me to memorize them - I'd recommend giving the player a reference sheet for recipes they've found. Still, not bad at all, and it has the potential for interesting expansion later if you can find ways to make it unique.
Overall this was good and engaging. As others have said, the lack of hand-holding and general forgiveness worked really well here. The boulder-throwing mechanics were interesting, but it was often hard to navigate the paths once I made them. Most of the puzzles were fun, but the final ascent up the tree was tedious because I kept having to go back down to fetch more boulders. I tried throwing them up into the branches to speed things up and that kinda helped, so props for letting that kind of thinking work. Maybe some kind of telekinetic boulder fetch would help there.
I liked most of the mechanics, but the jumping seemed inconsistent. Many unexpected deaths resulted from not being able to see what was on the other world and warping into spikes or a pit, and I found it was quite possible to materialize inside a platform. The level design and graphics were good, though, and the music was quite atmospheric.
That was the most intense pong I've ever played. When I first started, I had the brilliant idea to set the thing to hard. I lost 0-11, tried again and lost 1-11. Then I turned it down to normal and it seems I was just way the heck out of practice with pong because it took me 4 failed attempts before I won decisively. The second two game modes were fun, though I found the third game a bit easy compared to the previous two. Loved the music!
That was an interesting experience, once I got the hang of it. I liked the puzzle mechanics, and I don't think a lose state was necessary for this particular game, but I never really got a handle of the exact interaction between my actions and the game world. I noticed tiles getting dropped, and saw the tractors removing tiles, but I didn't understand how my animal nurturing translated into new green tiles. I did play it through to the end, and I was surprised at the tension near the end. "Will I get that last tile THIS time?" I liked the cyclic tension/relaxation dynamic.
I couldn't play because the game detected a controller when I don't even own one. I've messed with simulating controller input, so maybe it was residue from that.
It worked that time. The game was frustrating at times, but it was worth it because that was the most innovative idea and best use of the theme I've seen so far. The sounds complemented the experience well, and restart-at-will was a wise decision. I'd love to see this as a full game.
This game was difficult to get into at first, but it's very inventive.
This game accomplished exactly what it set out to do. I'm not experienced at all with NES-classic games, but this certainly communicated an atmosphere. While restarting at the beginning was a pain to some extent, it's worth it to persevere. I found that solving challenges and even just defeating enemies in efficient ways was very satisfying. The hole mechanics were mostly good, though they did flicker around a bit. (I glitched through the floor on two separate occasions.) An important part of the gameplay was memorizing meat locations, as well as memorizing both sides of an area so you'd know what to expect warping over. Otherwise, it was easy to dive across worlds into a swarm of ghosts - but that's 80s hard for you. My favorite part though was the end. Just as I was (for the second time) silently screaming "Where's the boss already?" it appeared. A really fun, cool, and satisfying boss fight is a rare thing to find in an LD game, but this one delivered. Thanks to that final battle, you've earned 5/5 Fun and Mood from me.
The minigames were mostly fun, and the slug race had me grinning. I won all four on the first go. My main complaint is that the competition didn't seem quite as grand as I'd expect from an interplanetary Olympics. More visual and audio presence from the crowd could have helped with that, but would have been difficult to do in the time allotted. Still, it was entertaining and visually appealing, so high marks in those categories.
Unable to run game: game window opens and then immediately closes. I'm on Windows 7 with Java build 1.7.0_67-b01.
Interesting idea. I liked the mechanic of trying to avoid collateral damage, though after what you said about civilians getting angry if you shot too many I was expecting more of a consequence than just losing the civilians (I tried just murdering all the survivors to see what happened.) The game is a nice challenge, and I won with only 1 survivor on my second attempt. Still, I felt really restrained by the lack of movement and options.
I was unable to play the windows download. It first told me that MSVCR110.dll was missing, and when I downloaded a copy and put it in the folder, it gave me an unable to start message (0x00000c7b.)
I thought the main mechanic was interesting, if a bit of a stretch with the theme (connect the worlds of the game and twitter or somesuch.) I wasn't able to test the implementation because I don't have a twitter. As for what mechanics I did see, it seemed solid until I realized I was in no actual danger. Enemies shooting at the player would fix that.
I like the idea, it would be interesting to see a post-compo version with a greatly expanded world, more workable controls, and perhaps some special box types with different effects.
The heavy movement restrictions made it difficult to move around and observe my effects on the environment. The abstract puzzles were an interesting concept, but were usually a variant of "mess with switches until something works." Still, I think this could have been a lot better with more freedom in motion and camera angle.
One of the best games I've played so far. I'm impressed by the sheer amount of content you were able to create within the time given. I count 9 weapons/tools (hammer, shovel, sword, machinegun, shotgun, ray gun, grenade launcher, medkit, map) plus the bike - and you gave me at least 8 distinct enemies to use them on. I liked the bike/foot dynamic - I often found myself switching modes of transportation depending on how I wanted to approach an enemy. Fighting the bandits without a gun, I got three of them bunched together and tried to stream their attacks on foot, but switched to bike charges when I realized that without the bike's speed I was going to get shot to pieces before I could get close enough. I often found myself worried about resources, with the often limited availability of health and ammo. I usually used melee for that reason - at least until I got the ray gun. I'd sometimes get lost in the wasteland, even without a bike once, but the clever limitations on world size meant I never got too far off the path. My main gameplay complaint was a lack of quest feedback. After I cleared out the bandits, the rogue's dialogue did not seem to change, and after I found the dead guy, I couldn't tell his friend what had happened. I also think I would have used a greater variety of weapons and tools if I'd been allowed to carry more. As it was, I found myself ferrying items around from location to location because I couldn't hang on to everything. Still a very enjoyable game, and one I'll remember.
This wasn't a bad idea, and I liked your use of multiple paths to open up options for scoring players. My score was 258, and I feel as if I could improve that with practice. Unfortunately, a lot of the skill was learning the jump controls, which I found to be rather unwieldy. While the graphics weren't exceptional, I enjoyed the audio environment presented.
The graphics and sound were good. Since the boss patterns were mostly streaming, I found myself in much more danger from the boss flailing around than anything else.
Being a stereotypical evil corporate overlord is apparently harder than I expected. I spent most of the game scrambling to stay alive as the people died and rebelled all around my company. The 1-action-per-turn limitation only made it harder to avert disaster, and I was itching for a way to deselect all commands. The take on corporate themes presented was quite refreshing, and I think that was this game's biggest strength.
Wouldn't a 5-dimensional square be a hypertesseract? (10 'sides' each side is a tesseract.) This was a simple, fun shooter. I didn't think that the harder difficulty was actually harder than normal because you got the 5-way shot right from the start, while in normal you had the single shot for the first half, making things harder.
Cool. I liked the audio environment and the concept, but the PC controls felt limited and the camera easily lost sight of the mosquito. It was quite fun chasing around screaming guys though.
There was an impressive quantity of content, which would have enamored me a lot more if I could use any of the items, heal myself in any fashion, or not find myself stuck with a "musket of rubber" with a melee-equivalent range (the cause of my first death.) It's a good start, and I'm currently downloading the post-jam to see something closer to what you wanted this to be.
I tried the post-compo and it's a huge improvement, but still a little rough. I had a lot of problems with the weapon switching with my scroll wheel, and found myself wishing for q/e weapon switching. I failed on floor 26 when I fell through a pit trap and landed inside a rock. Still, it actually has everything that the in-jam version was supposed to, and I commend your continued commitment to the game and strongly recommend that anyone rating this check out both versions.
Cool idea, but this really should have had an option for arrows/WASD. This is why games should really have an arrows option or customizable controls. (Says the guy who hasn't ever actually implemented the latter.) At least QWERTY users get a taste of what everyone else has to deal with.
Um. What. My first try, I hopped around a bit then got stuck on top of the screen. My second try, I hopped around, got a rocket launcher, then got stuck on top of the screen and could just rain rockets down on the hapless flowerpots. I'm not quite sure what to make of this so I just gave you 5/5 mood.
I like the idea behind this - basically a resource management puzzle. I don't like watching my beast try to chase down ducks that could dodge for far too long, and I simply could not figure out the second puzzle. I got my beast up as high as I could off ducks while keeping the gold for a goat, charged my stamina all the way up, and the beast still lost the fight. I really don't know what else to try.
I refused to give up, and checked the source to find out how the goats worked. It makes sense, but it's not immediately intuitive. Also, because of how the beast AI works, it's possible for it to be sitting at the wrong end of the field when the goat is summoned and drop below 110 stamina before the collision. It would have been nice to get some feedback on exactly how I failed the contract instead of just leaving it up to "you failed the contract." The game's still a good idea, and I'd like to see it expanded further.
Really cool! I like the idea and the implementation, though it leaves a lot to be explained. It was hard at first, but once I read your tips, I was able to survive the first wave, and it was easy after that - at least, until the game glitched out and hit me with an unstoppable waterfall of doom. The winning strategy is: immediately build a gold mine, farm, and iron mine in the first row and an army camp in the second row, then buy one gun. That should leave you with no iron. Put all civilian workers on food, then buy as many soldiers as possible and have them work gun/resource. With a little practice, I can get 3 soldiers on the gun before the enemy is halfway to the base. I noticed that it's possible to drag people off the field. Also, I didn't see the use of the birthing center, because you don't need civilians to make soldiers, soldiers are better, and once you have civvies you can't turn them into soldiers so you aren't getting the most out of your population cap, and the birthing center even costs extra to build. Still a cool game, even if in the end I'm still not really sure what Rl'yeh actually does.
Cool idea and really nice graphics. I found the attack system a bit disorienting - I wanted full projectiles and not the suddenly-appearing bombs.
Interesting. I liked the sounds, and it was fun once I figured out what I needed to be doing. I only ever figured out half the logic though, I never quite got a handle on how the clues related to the clicking order. Maybe it was the orbiting distance or the order left-to-right across the screen, but I couldn't say for certain. Also, I found the choice of graphics a bit odd. It's a cool concept though.
This is really good. It's interesting and has some cool depth to it - it took me two tries to figure out how to win. The different types of gauges threw me off a little, but at the same time I don't think it would have made more sense if you arranged it differently. Right now I think it's pretty intuitive e.g. you want more creativity and less stress. My strategy was: use absinthe to buff creativity, coffee to jog the productivity, socialize when the social needs bar was filled up, sleep enough every night to cap out stamina and get health up to 85-100%, and when all the gauges are looking good, just work. I almost never used nicotine or alcohol because I couldn't see much positive effect from them.
Cool. It's a fun concept, but finding enough 02 felt random. I got 1 block away on my first run and didn't even get close on the others. It's tricky splitting your attention between three hard-to-control dwarves. It's a really solid concept and execution, in any case.
This is pretty solid, especially for a first RTS. I liked the mechanics and the rain of exploding snowballs when an enemy dies. However, I eventually got bored, feeling constrained by the lack of options and not really getting the sense the the difficulty was increasing over time. Still, this is the best traditional RTS implementation I've seen in an LD compo entry.
I like the idea, and I see how this is supposed to work, but it just doesn't. I can make the spawning houses (using an interface that is the opposite of what the instructions say, with a hud that clashes with the playing field because it's sitting right in the middle of fullscreen mode, the only mode where right-clicks work), and I can make money, but it's pretty much luck-based. No matter what I tried, I could not make the explosions work. I'd like to see a post-compo update of this so people can see what you were really going for here.
Could not run. Received "invalid or corrupt jarfile" error. I'm running Windows 7 with Java 1.7_71
I really like the minimap idea, but I feel like something could be done to make it seem more like a minimap and less like just playing a regular game with a different aesthetic. I'm not sure what that would constitute, though. I really like the movement and flying mechanics.
Huh. I liked the style, and it was refreshing to play as the raiders instead of having them be cannon fodder villans. I had to zoom out to view to full interface. I quickly accumulated more money than I could really spend, and found myself wanting to be able to upgrade storage. It was cool hearing the sounds of battle.
Huh. This was an interesting game, and not too shabby a TBS implementation, but it could have used a bit more transparency. I often found that the move highlighting would highlight squares I could not actually move to. The armies start way too far apart - it was turn nine before any combat happened. At first, I thought the combat was going to be 1 snowman = 1 snowbot, but seeing the first two 'bots slaughter eight snowmen with no casualties ended that idea. Then I thought outnumbering was key, and that worked a bit better, but felt downright random. Sometimes three snowmen could easily dispatch a snowbot, other times the snowbot would totally cream all three of them, and on one heroic occasion a snowman managed to kill an undamaged snowbot in single combat. Seeing my numbers depleted, I rushed for the base, but the win condition couldn't trigger. Match ended with 3 robots alive (one completely walled off by corpses) and all snowmen dead.
I couldn't run the web version because my browser spat a bunch of java errors, so I had to download. The game had a fun premise, but the controls felt really slippery, the UI was understated, and there was very little feedback when I was hit. It's a good idea though, and I'd like to see it developed further.
Interesting idea and well-executed. It took me a while to realize the degree of precision needed. I didn't really see a reason to ever zoom in. The mouse controls were super twitchy.
This was really fun. The frozen ground seemed more intimidating than it really was, and I almost felt relieved seeing the big enemies because, even though their shots did way more damage, they were easier to dodge and didn't freeze ground. Enemy health bars would have been nice, as would knowing beforehand that the healing powerup was a full heal. Overall, one of the better entries I've seen.
This was really interesting. As far as LD strategy game implementations go, this was pretty solid, aside from, as others have mentioned, a lack of feedback about which player picked which cards. The random speed debuffs were really annoying - I found myself with two characters that could be anywhere they wanted and two that couldn't do anything because they were moving 1 space per turn. Still, it did a really good job of feeling like a zombie apocalypse, with the swarms growing overwhelming over time.
This was pretty solid from a graphical and dialogue standpoint. I liked the multiple pathways and diversity of character reactions. The 1/2 choices had me wishing for keyboard input and better buttons.
Nice, fun and inventive. It was way too easy too place blocks a few pixels off from the lasers and fail to block them.
This was fun and challenging once I got the hang of it. That took a long time, because I really found that my own expectations and muscle memory were working against me here - I kept expecting more traditional controls and either releasing a button I shouldn't have or pressing the opposite directional button to go from the side to the middle.
Excellent. Nice core mechanic, a good variety of challenges, and text that kept me wanting more. The challenge trying to stay within a square for 5 seconds with danmaku blocks was difficult, but the forgiving nature of the game made it workable. Good job!
This felt more like an exercise in button mashing than a shooter. The engine's solid, though.
I like the idea, and the graphics are well-done, but I found the gameplay to be a mixture of random and buggy to a point of nigh-unplayability. My troubles started with inaccurate help (my jump was up and not space as said in the description), then progressed to random objects falling on me and deaths on collision with objects that had already landed. The buzzing sounds when the fly jumps are amazing though.
Interesting and unique. The interface layout needs work. Eventually I found myself stranded with no more calls to make.
This was fast-paced and fun, with a decent graphical environment. I found the controls to be way too twitchy, making it really hard to hit individual targets. Maybe the game should start slower, too.
Excellent game! The graphics felt really smooth, the atmosphere was good, the controls were solid, the gameplay was interesting, and it all fit together into a nicely cohesive and challenging experience. It took me 3 tries to beat - one death from standing too close to spawn and another getting cornered during the final boss fight. The final boss seemed hard the first time but the second fight I just circled-strafed it to death.
Huh. Note that the "source" link is actually the windows version. I liked the idea, but the execution left something to be desired. I only found out about the shooting mechanic from reading the comments, and the walking controls feel sticky. Also, when you walk into a wall, your control direction is reversed - e.g, if you hold right and slam into the right wall, you will begin walking left. I'd recommend evaluating the way you handle player movement, because it looks to me like you're using speed variables where just incrementing the x and y values would be more appropriate. (Though I haven't seen the source and can't say for sure.)
This was interesting and inventive, if somewhat disorienting. The mechanics were fun once I figured out what was going on. I found the jump noise to be a bit too powerful compared to the rest of the audio, and it really felt as though I should have been able to switch walls by jumping. The cannons in the corners - right in the player's movement path - made me want to be able to jump over them and made me worry about them generating bullets inside me. I think those should have been embedded in the walls somehow. It's quite entertaining though.
(I played three rounds, scoring 7, 8, 8.)
Could not run (program ceases functioning immediately on startup). Using Win7 and OpenGL 4.0.0.
This game was really interesting, kind of disorienting, and a bit overwhelming. The reverse gravity took some getting used to, and the fast pace made it difficult to assess the situation and convert the blob of bright colors into something I could plan around. I really felt like the situation was too overwhelming to do much more than press buttons and hope something works. Still, it's a fun idea, well-executed, and the music is good. My score was 281271.
So I shot the monster and now it's bigger. And scarier. Why was that a good idea? Oh, right, fill it to bursting.
Very solidly done, with a good atmosphere and music. I liked progressing from barely remembering how to lead shots to running circles around enemies. The boss had cool music, but it could have done with a stronger attack pattern.
Wow. This game is visually pleasing, has an excellent soundscape, and provides a compelling experience with a rising difficulty curve. Though it might be billed as a bullet hell game, I found it to be more about resource management: dodging enough to stay alive while beating the enemy enrage timers. The weapons were good for this; each one was unique and required skill to use. I like how the collection mechanic and weapon E encouraged the player to risk closing with enemies. Unfortunately, the gameplay eventually started to become monotone, as the same enemy patterns repeated until I was ground into dust, while I was never quite clear on my hitbox. Also, the game crashed when I pressed a key after dying.
This is really nicely polished for a jam game. The sound and graphics are all cohesive and appealing, and the action has a real impact. It's inherently satisfying blowing through a crowd of enemies, but I found the combat mechanics unintuitive - I couldn't tell why sometimes I would rush in and get hit, while other times I could just mash through a huge mob. Also, the off-center text bugged me, though I give you credit for having the good sense to make the cinematic skippable. I expect that I'll come back and visit this one again sometime.
This game looks really cool, but the gameplay is sorely lacking at the moment. The slow lateral movement was tricky to get used to, and, combined with the tricky collision, made platforming never quite work the way I wanted it to. This was compounded by a platform spawning in Level 4 that I couldn't figure out how to get to. It might have been flat-out unreachable. I want this to be a cool action game, but right now it's something else entirely. It sounds like you know what this game should look like, though - I intend to come back and try the post-compo version.
For Team Evil!
...now where's my autoclicker?
Really, this would be improved if we could see some global statistics instead of just the battle-bar.
I think this one might've been a little ambitious - you have some really nice concepts implemented here, but the whole thing feels half-baked. I certainly didn't feel like a swarm with the sharp time limit and relatively slow teching, and was disappointed to find that the recommended map basically ignored the teching and instead just had the player run around killing stuff. The RTS implementation is a start, but I found myself wishing for pathfinding, tooltips, and attack-move. Not very many people get anywhere near this far into an RTS engine during LD, and there's a good reason for that. I certainly wouldn't advise you to abandon this, though - another 3-4 days and you can have something really cool.
@Your comment on my game.
Could one of you smack whoever decided that removing pathfinding would be an improvement? I don't like have to surgically extract my units from walls, especially with that timer ticking.
I really need to start maintaining a list of games I told people I'd come back for the post-compo versions of.
Rules of driving:
(1): It is not safe to drive on the road, please drive off to the side. Hitting trees does not matter, but cars will aggressively slam into you with no sense of self-preservation and then explode.
(2): Your truck has the turn radius of an aircraft carrier.
(3): Remember: truck cars are held together by elastic rope. Please plan accordingly, and hope you can extricate yourself from any trees or building edges you get caught on.
(4): No one likes green cars, especially people who drive them.
(5): Please be aware of the correct direction of travel and avoid all invisible walls.
I couldn't figure out how to get into the armoury. None of the commands listed in Help got me in (inspect armoury, inspect the armoury, go to armoury, go armoury.) "yell at armoury", "punch armoury," and "stab armoury" didn't work either, but I wasn't expecting those to. Also, Enter should enter commands. This looks like it should be interesting, but the command parser needs some work.
This game has a solid and cohesive graphical environment, an interesting story, and good audio. The only thing it's missing is gameplay. The two-button path choosing might have been better with more interesting choices than "find the key first or the locked door first." Really, there wasn't a point where I understood the impact my actions were going to have on the game. If I get hit by the fireball traps, what happens? Is there a strategy in combat, or do I just hit things until they die? What, if any, impact will my choices have? I'm glad there wasn't grinding, though. As a tech demo, it's excellent, but it needs something else to be a fun game.
Huh. Very interesting idea, but it could do with a bit more direction. It took me a while to figure out that nodes could make connections, longer to work out how to do upgrades, and evne then I had no idea how to be effective with the available tools.
This game made me think of impending doom more than growth. I really wanted the tree's health to be tied to its growth, but alas, I found myself desperately dashing around trying to prevent each and every blow. It was difficult balancing seed collection with keeping both sides of the tree within my weapon's video-game-flamethrower reach.
This is a really cool idea. I liked the tools available, and it was fun at the end scrambling to defend. The difficulty curve was off, though. The game started slow and stayed that way for a while, then quickly became extremely difficult. Also, the interface buttons need work - letting go of them outside of the playing field leaves them stuck there.
Score: Attempt 1 / 2270 Points
This looks really cool. There are a few big issues here, though. First, it could use a bit more instruction - no where in or out of game is it mentioned that you can increase Yellow income, and I never figured out how to use the geostation. Second, either I'm missing something, or units take forever to produce. I never actually managed to make a new unit. That was also because of 3), the game keeps crashing. It's really cool that you made a good-looking turn-based strategy game, but I can't get anywhere because of the crashes. I'd like to see a bugfixed post-compo version.
This looks pretty solid - you got the hectic retro feel down well. Deaths are sudden, making it a reflex challenge. I had to go fullscreen to use the RMB with the web player. Also, a warlock and a wizard are not quite the same thing, as D&D, WoW, and Harry Potter have taught us.
Wow! You really illustrated that even secret organizations have boring desk jobs! But seriously, the pace is slow and after a while of playing I felt like I'd gotten nowhere, with my organization's increased capabilities offered no tangible benefit. I think it also would have been more interesting with forced action instead of just passing until you see something good. The opening sequence was excellent, and I think an expanded version of this has potential.
I'm not sure what to make of this. The mechanics are inventive, but it took me a while to work out how to be effective. Momentum can easily turn against the player, and the player character seems to get in the way more than anything else. The fling really does need an attached power arrow. Also, the UI buttons are tiny. I liked the challenge scaling as the plant neared the top, but it was very easy to get knocked all the way back down to below the starting point.
This is such an amazing idea. I don't like button mashing, but this whole scenario just had me grinning. I made it to the final boss on turbo, but kept losing by half a meter's margin. The graphics and soundscape are so perfect though.
Gah! I feel like it's possible to master this with enough time, but the controls are not easy to learn.
The voice acting is amazing. Trying to figure out the platforming physics and wonky screen wrap, not so much. On the bright side, I laughed, especially at the ending.
This looks really cool, it's a shame I still haven't figured out how to not suck at it. Doulbe tap dodging is tricky, and I don't feel like I can afford to fight the controls when even the easy opponent telegraphs so little. The sounds are good, but the music does not make me think of a boxing match at all - it's too slow for that. The double punch is an awesome idea, but I don't think this was the right game for me to pick up this genre. Though I had fun playing it, I ultimately found myself jealous of Saitama.
This is a really cool idea, but I want more from it. The enemy hp not increasing while yours does results in a difficulty curve with a negative slope. The mechanics are fun, and it's satisfying to deliver a devastating combo while anticipating an blocking enemy attacks. I want to see more cards than just attack/resource, though, to push the action. Like a shield that blocks anything but can't attack, an attack that moves faster than usual. A two-player mode would be a welcome addition as well.
The music is cool, but I'd like to hear it past the first riff. It's usually a bad sign when a survival game tends to last less than ten seconds. The difficulty of shooting while moving combined with the multiple streams of splitting enemies that will each eventually overwhelm sustained peashooter fire makes it extremely difficult to survive. I'd suggest starting the spawn rate a couple orders of magnitude lower and gradually increasing it. Also, have shooting while moving that isn't broken.
Huh? This is a cool idea, but the graphics were completely messed up for me. The ogre would walk straight past things, then interact with empty air. When I said to ignore something, it the ogre would go back, then start walking in the other direction. The consequences of my actions weren't exactly clearly illustrated either - well, except for my death, which was exactly the outcome I expected from trying to Smash a dragon. It's a cool idea with nice atmosphere, and a fully developed version of this would be really cool, but as it is, it's not a cohesive experience.
Honestly, I think this one looked better on paper. It's a cool idea, and I think it has real potential, but I found it just became a grind after a while. I would enter a level, spend 30 seconds sniping turrets I couldn't see (not that fighting them up close is satisfying - it would be were it not for this game's unfortunate paucity of explosions), then spin in circles for a while trying to pin down planets with my mouse, then spend the money on more dakka. Seriously, the laser upgrade was the only one I found appealing. Drive-by terraforming means you never need to came about battery capacity, and I never felt a need to go faster. I think this would have been better with mechanics that forced you to deal with the planets and enemies at the same time instead of focusing on the enemies and then farming planets for a while.
I like this game idea, but I think it kinda got strangled by the 2-button theme. The actual gameplay was sound, if glitchy, but the interface left me with a headache. I can't think of a way to do it better with the limitations you had, but I found myself wishing for a mouse interface. I think this could have been helped with slower scrolling and more information density. The whole thing was exacerbated by the lag spikes I experienced, which worry me because the game doesn't have anything that could reasonably cause them. This could be a good game with a developed combat system, but as it was I found myself taking advantage of the bugs to speed my way to the finish.
Could not run (Error: Java Runtime Environment Not Found.) I have Win7 and Java 1.8.
On the upside, the graphics are nice. On the downside, I"m not sure my definition of "game" includes this. I'd suggest trying to add happiness meters for both animals and a variable ending depending on which one you favor.
With such a dynamic arena, I think a different means of navigation is called for - a rocket boost would fit the theme. Also, the jump noise is all kinds of annoying. Also, I got stuck on my first attempt at the tutorial. On the bright side, I like what you did with the planets, and the enemies are varied and interesting. There's potential here, but it needs a bit more polish.
Short and sweet. My only complaint about this game is that I wish there were more of it. Simple, easy-to-pick-up mechanics, appealing pixel art, and clever puzzles. My instinct to grab collectible things did not serve me well here. I could see a post-compo version of this becoming a successful web game.
Even though Hailstorm is the most OP thing, I'm glad I had it because that fire dungeon looked like a grindfest. Instead, I was able to one-shot everything except some of the slimes with a 0-cost all-targeting ability. So did the undead dungeon, but I just rushed through that and then one-shotted the final boss with Ardent Strike. At least I had to switch to Vengeful Blizzard / Unlimited Potions to quickly deal with the undead trash.
Also, your female character writing has some serious issues. I cringed every time the priestess said something, and the Yuki-Onna wasn't that much better.
Really sweet art, but the gameplay felt odd and incomplete. I don't understand why RMB is the attack button when LMB does nothing. The real problems was when I reached the boss, and we were evidently unable to damage each other. The boss music was cool at first, but then it faded away and I just found myself hammering away at a seemingly-invulnerable tree-bear with no health bar and easy-to-dodge attacks that didn't actually damage me.
Okay that was funny. The trial-and-error trying to guess what stats to use was fun. Telling us the consequences beforehand would just make the game even more random.
This game feels really nice. It has good music, a good range of available weapons, and a solid art style. However, the gameplay gets stagnant quickly. I made it to 120 kills without noticing an appreciable increase in difficulty. I like the idea with the different environments, but they really just felt like reskins of the same mechanics. I would like to see a version of this with a harder difficulty curve and more enemy variants. That said, this is certainly an impressive level of polish for LD.
This is a cool game and I like the upgrade system. The different build options are great for replay value. I keep dying from having Royal Blood enemies spawn on top of me though. Also, I ran into a crash bug while trying to spam Magus Fire. That said:
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!
I'll start by saying that I beat this, but you might not like how. I really like where you went with this. The tight audio and dodging are cool. The lag issue, however, is very not fixed. Also, the shooting mechanics seem strange and inconsistent, I think the boss should come down a bit more quickly after doing an air pattern, and this could really use an r to restart. I got up to 102 hits the normal way and probably would have won if I'd kept going, but then I found a trick. Apparently pressing down instantly reloads your weapon. Using this I can get 60+ hits before the end of the first phase. The game still isn't a cakewalk if you do this, but it certainly goes much more quickly. I managed to take down the boss in 1 minute exactly. This game may have its flaws, but you still convinced me to spend over an hour figuring out a way to win. Good job.
@onyon I've found that just mashing z gives me a rather sporadic shot pattern, but mashing z and down gives me a rapid-fire attack. My record without doing that was 42 hits before the first up, with 30ish being a more normal amount.
Embed link worked for me. Who needs BF1/CS:GO when you have meatballs! There should be a leaderboard, but aside from that it feels like you make exactly what you set out to make.
ZQSD? I'm lucky you also included arrow key controls. Nice and atmospheric. I like the choice of music and art style.
I like your use of dead body physics here.
The graphics here are easily my favorite thing about this game. It's really impressive that you were able to do those within the time available. I like the idea behind the mechanics, but I'm a bit less sold on the actual gameplay.
I found myself wishing for both feedback when attacks connect and the ability to shoot continuously by holding down the mouse instead of button mashing the whole time. The controls seem extra slippy for the female character, who I constantly found myself having to extract from corners.
Failed to run on Win7/64-bit. Error message: "this application requires a Java Runtime environment 1.8.0_74." Program then linked me to a Java installer which failed to install anything.
I really like how the graphics and sound make it feel like a combat-oriented game, contrasting with the pacifistic objective.
This is a cool idea with nice enemy design, but the difficulty doesn't really seem to escalate, so one can basically just play until they make a mistake.
I didn't even realize that there was more than one enemy on my first run through because I just accidentally murdered everything with the sliding syringes.
Oh my god this is amazing. The actual gameplay is fairly tricky because it's so easy for one thing to go wrong while you're busy fixing another, especially when the cannon and umbrella require such good timing. Still, the music is a perfect fit, the graphics are very well done, and this is easily the funniest thing I've seen this LD.
Personal Best: 16587 on attempt 2. Also, did someone on the dev team read Karl Capek's War With the Newts?
Very compelling. I cleared with 1/4 of a heart left, leaving me rather unprepared for the second loop. I underestimated Thorns.
I like the art style and music, but, as has been frequently-mentioned, the camera scrolling just doesn't work for the game type. I found myself unable to react to enemy ranged attacks because I was too close to the edge of the screen.
The golden ending challenge certainly isn't easy to get right. I'm glad you had the sense to add so many checkpoints.
That was interesting. I really like the damage/ammo mechanic. Aiming is awkward, and the soul enemies' projectiles are really hard to see against the background. Otherwise, the graphics and sound are solid. I made it to a level with both enemy types, and when I cleared that I got the game-over screen instead of moving on to the next level.
This worked fine on my Win7, so your revision seems to have worked.
I spent way too much time on the sliding puzzles.
I like the graphical style and the interpretation of the theme. Granted, I'd like to be able to move a bit more quickly, and maybe diagonally. Also, the gameplay seems pretty minimal.
Windows copy runs, but the only things that are clickable for me are the menu buttons.
Really sweet graphics and weapons. Homing rockets and laser seem like the endgame picks, but I'm personally fond of the shotgun. I was caught off guard by the bottomless pit areas, and the homing attacks seem a bit unreliable. Also, it's possible for dead enemies to drop money near the bounds of the map where the player can't get it. Good job with the lighting and weapon sounds.
First run: Wave 16.
I really like the idea here. Part team shooter, part physics puzzle.
The sound that things make when they get caught in the fire is obnoxious. On the bright side, it's impressive how much content you were able to make within the allotted time. However, you designed a leveling system that incentivizes players to focus on one weapon to the point of rendering the others ineffective. I just pumped points into my arrow skill and my power increase outpaced the difficulty curve by a noticeable margin. The graphical style is well-executed and the music sounds cool.
I had an absolute heck of a time trying to get the two windows / one computer thing working. I'm sure this would be a blast if I had a friend to run it with, but as it is I can't even get the two instances synchronized well enough to break out my amazing alt-tabbing skills.
@Catwheel I tried again and got it working fine. I'm in the US with a reasonably up-to-date computer.
Very atmospheric. Thematically, I like it. I had some issues with the text bubble though.
This game is really cool. I like the visual style and the music, and upgrades are always fun. I would appreciate having more time to think about upgrades, and the character gets caught on walls a bit. Combat started slow, but built up quickly with a variety of enemies. It took me a few tries to get the hang of it, but it wasn't too difficult once I figured out the right tactics. I loved the final boss. It was huge, flashy, and awesome.
Very solid work. Creative, challenging gameplay that keeps the player engaged by introducing new elements. The second-to-last level was very satisfying. It gets tiresome mashing my mouse so much though.
This was supposed to be about tentacle management, but I found that the easiest way to play was to use one tentacle to block the route to the 'princess' and then attack with impunity.
I don't buy your argument for why this fits the theme, but this game is cool enough that I'm willing to disregard that. It was challenging, but I was still able to make it through in one try. The kinetic and laser weapons are way too loud - I was relieved when I got the plasma gun and could finally hear the music. Also, there were areas where I had problems because it was too dark for me to see the enemies. I found the Corpse Soldier to be the hardest fight (though maybe single plasma wasn't the best weapon I could have brought.) The final boss went down relatively easily to the triple plasma. There's an impressive amount of content here.
You certainly got the apocalyptic mood down with this one. I'm not quite sure how the portal-closing is supposed to work, and the purify spell's long windup makes it difficult to use. I like the idea here, but I don't feel up to spending the hour or two it would take for me to figure out a winning path. Good job with the music.
Absolutely exemplary. Good music, solid art style and clean, satisfying gameplay. I love the variety of enemies and weapons. The menu navigation isn't quite what I'd like it to be, but the actual game has both polish and depth.
Highscore: 57 as of now, but I think I'll be coming back to this one.
This is a really creative and interesting idea, though in practice sorting through potential party members is a bit of a slog. The fight mechanics are a good fit for the game. I managed to beat Red Dragon, but lost to Splorb.
I was doing so well and then an enemy spawned on top of me.
Yes. This is exactly how I wanted to procrastinate on studying for finals. I kept getting stuck in the front row, so I think the teacher is on to me.
I really like the aesthetics here. An item pickup noise would work wonders.
"Normal science sees shadows on a cave wall. There's a better way, for a price." -Kaito Kusanagi
Nice work! Serious props for trying to make an RTS for LD. The pathfinding doesn't always work, and I really wish that I could produce units from any relay rather than just the last one I made, but this was still really fun. I liked the destructible map. The eventual red invasion was fun, and so was watching my guards flounder about in the back of my base while my workers bravely charged the enemy. I won my first game by noticing that there was a clear sight path between my hive and the enemy hive, allowing me to spawn a relay next to the hive and summon three guards inside the enemy base.
You had me sold with the sweet soundtrack. This game is fun, fast-paced, and dynamic. I got a lot more mileage out of my $500 bow than any of the expensive melee weapons. Having a final boss is always cool, but I think the one here should have at least tried to aim at the player. Still, good work!
You know what's awesome? Getting blown across the screen every time your platform decides to blink. I love the music and the attack animation is hilarious, but the physics in this are absolutely bizarre. You have earned your all-caps title.
Today I found out that roombas can flip couches. The AI is a challenging opponent, but I found that the controls were as well. A combination of slow turning and hyper acceleration has interesting consequences. On a brighter note, I really liked the game's use of music. It makes landing or taking a hit seem more significant.
Oh god why. The fish tank is filled with blood now. Blood and bones and the wails of the restless dead. You monster.
(Also the music is good.)
Short and sweet. I thought I was doing poorly, but then the AI made some bad decisions. Credit for doing voice acting during an LD.
I like the music and graphics, and the core gameplay is pretty solid. However, it does get a bit monotonous after a while. Maintaining the distance where you land hits and don't get hit is tricky. Also, it's annoying when purple orbs disappear during the overly-long day/night transition. My favorite thing about this game is the way you have to manage the crowd of enemies to keep the balance between not dying and not running out of cake.
I made Night 17 on attempt 1.
Really cool idea. Kind of tricky to get the positioning right on the traps. I'd appreciate some kind of warning when the traps are about to break.
What am I supposed to be doing? Why? How? I am absolutely mystified.
I like the minimalistic style, even more so since it reflects the game's philosophy. The mechanics seem simple at first, but engineering an ideal factory quickly becomes a puzzle. I do wish that the spaceport could sell more than one item type, though - it's a pain to toggle it back and forth when I'm making money from more than one thing. I'd suggest adding a recipe list to the description so players don't need to build one of everything to understand the economy. I ran the web build on Linux Mint/Firefox and had no performance issues, but I couldn't get the crafter to make satellites even though I was feeding it all the requisite parts.
The art style looks good, but I can't actually try the game because mouse input doesn't work on my Linux Mint. This is a known Unity bug. ~~If you make a web build I'd be happy to test that out.~~
Update: I tried the web build. Arena was empty when I showed up so I can't comment on that. During the platformer, I fell onto some spikes and didn't seem to take damage. Having an attack mapped to middle mouse was awkward. The attacks seemed to lack a feeling of weight and motion. I'd suggest having the player move forward as they attack instead of kinda floating back to their original position. It seemed odd to me that holding the jump button made you ignore the springs. Still, a multiplayer game is pretty ambitious for LD. I'd love to see a post-compo edition of this.
It is very lucky that Jones keeps an infinite supply of corks on his person, and equally unfortunate that he loses motor control at low depths. I died at 1:32 because I couldn't figure out how to QWOP a particular hole shut. I mostly like the graphical style, but the rotating fish bit seemed a little off to me. The menu is well done, and the atmosphere as the world begins to fill with water is excellent. The final moments of the game are beautifully panic-inducing.
@frodewin Try putting on a loop of the cultist voices from Dawn of War 1 while you play.
@kasarun Buildings in general are better for absorbing damage than units, and production buildings are better for that than towers and crystals. Units always aim for the nearest target.
@fiote I'm glad to see you made it to that bit. I also had a problem where it was possible for the player to reach a state (ex: mass lanterns + fill map with towers) where they could basically just go AFK. My solution was pretty heavy-handed, but it certainly ends games. The way I wrote the enemy spawns means that there's a double enrage at 30 minutes, but no one will ever see that.
@fiote My record is 18:25.
The spherical map adds a lot to what otherwise would be a pretty basic design. The levels I saw did a good job of emphasizing that. Having left-mouse only controls on an RTS felt awkward to me, but the voice-acted unit responses really made the control scheme more satisfying. However, it appears that the bug with units dying for no apparent reason is still active in the web build (I used LinuxMint/Firefox). This came to a head in Level 6, where I got stuck because all the units died before they could do anything. The day/night cycle was neat, but I had a hard time seeing what I was doing at night. The AI is well done considering the circumstances. Good work!
I also ran into the WebGL framerate bug. Something must have thrown off my aim, too, because where I should have been landing precision blow after precision blow with my mouse-aiming skills, I was getting only marginally better accuracy than if I were using a real gun. For clarity's sake, I am a horrible shot with pretty much any ranged weapon imaginable. When you said "suspiciously oversized objective," I was not expecting a monolithic pillar of doom sticking up from the sand like the last vestige of some forgotten kingdom, but there it was. Makes me wonder why the zombies were going for that instead of me.
I will give you credit for implementing the most realistic gun sounds I have ever heard in any video game.
Marvelous work here. I love how the environment turns what would otherwise have been a very simple game into a deep tactical and spatial challenge. The soundscape was well done and the visual environment did exactly what it needed to. The health pickups might have looked better if they stayed solid longer and then faded more quickly. Perhaps surprisingly, driving backwards led to a dramatic improvement in my scores. I found that being able to watch my enemies and return fire was more important than watching in front of me. Trying to navigate to the next health pickup without getting caught in a crossfire is a challenge. Highscore: 22.
It looks like you're onto something cool here. It was kinda fun building a bunch of houses are watching the slimes hop around, but after a couple minutes of house-building the game froze. The tooltips prevented me from feeling completely lost, but I still felt kinda lost. I'd suggest doing a post-compo version of this so we can see what it looks like with the intended features.
First run: apparently I turned the Earth into a hollowed-out sphere of boiling water full of exploding nukes, dolphins, and zombies. The three card hand seems a bit small for directing the world though - I tried for the volcano achievement but got locked into choosing between Biblical Flood and Hollow Earth, at which point I mispicked Biblical Flood because I thought Hollow Earth would also clear the lava core. Then I tried again and got stuck with two Biblical Floods. Fourth attempt I chained ballistic missiles and volcanoes together and turned half of the planet into lava craters. This still was not enough, so I just blew the whole thing up. That volcano achievement requires a **lot** of lava.
The game starts off on the right foot with an impressively-done intro cinematic. This is backed up by a solid soundscape and excellent animation work. The combat mechanics are simple, but there's an art to taking engagements correctly. That said, the player's attack animation is rigged so that when she finishes her combo, she instantly resets to her starting position a few steps backwards. I think it would be better to make it so that when she finishes her combo, she ends up standing at the point she stepped forward to - a few steps forward from her original position. Still, this is very well done.
This is pretty nice. It feels unfinished alright, but you were certainly on to something here. The character design is cool and I love how the projectile jitters up and down. It effectively conveys that I'm shooting some kind of chaotic sonic blast rather than a bullet. The enemies are hazardously fast - the boss pretty much comes out of nowhere and the bats can easily swoop in before you react. It took me two tries to beat the game thanks to such shenanigans. I like the soundtrack, simple as it is. I really found myself wishing for a health tracker. I ran the .swf provided using my Linux flash projector and everything seemed to work fine. Nice work!
This game is almost too tactically demanding. The player's slow turn radius and limited attack range make properly ambushing the score-critical flashing ducks an art. This is complicated by the huge herd of regular ducks, and it is very easy to get blindsided by a normal duck while approaching your target. I do worry that scores are influenced by the RNG component of where the flashing duck spawns. Music loop worked well and the graphics got the job done. I also had fine performance on the web build.
HS:1130.
I think the voxel art worked really well since this is a variant of a classic title. The bomb and spider mechanics were inventive, but they were also confusing for someone who didn't realize what was going on. The sounds were more or less exactly what they needed to be. I'm not sure what any of it had to do with a bad random number generator though. It's been a long time since I played the original, but the core mechanics from that are still solid. The difficulty curve seems well calibrated as well.
My score 28000/2nd attempt
@internetpaulicy
That is basically the opposite of how I do things. I usually panic and try to find a name after I've already made the game. Your way sounds better.
I like the open world exploration style and the assets were nice. On the downside, the controls on the whole felt sluggish. I had no problems with the strafing mechanic, it was the low speed of pretty much everything the character did that got to me. The "dead end" and graveyard were nice touches. I especially liked how you left a gravestone next to the graveyard key to hint to the player that the key went to the graveyard door.
It's very cool that you were able to build a strategy game like this. It's complex enough that it took me a moment to get a handle on things, and the early game was really fun as I scrambled to get production for each resource online before it ran out. However, after a while I started to feel like everything was stabilized and I wasn't really in much danger. The crises I was getting were like "people start going hungry because one food-maker apparently needs to be told to fix his own broken oven and the other one is asleep". Good work!
I really think the aliens are putting too much effort into this one. All they really needed to do was land some targets on the asteroid and watch Steve shoot himself trying to do target practice.
That said, I like how misfires can also work to the player's benefit, as stray bullets and come circling around and nail enemies. This is a very tight and challenging game. Whether I was trying not to kill myself, trying to chase down an alien before it blew the ground out from under my feet, or watching my ammo counter tick down I felt like I was fighting a desperate battle.
High Score: 20
[Edit: Why did my comment get posted twice?]
Excellent work! I love how the natural state cell ripples and deforms. This especially helps the visual contrast with the rigid cell. I was not expecting the nucleoli to switch states when I grabbed one, but it made sense once I saw it happen. I also liked seeing the text appear to warn me when I tried to do something in the wrong form. I didn't need them, but it means that I probably could have figured this one out even without the help screen. Unfortunately, it was over in only a few levels. This seems like something that's worth developing further.
Nice work! The pixel art style is very cohesive and I like how all items are usable as powerups. Combat feels a little slow with the long weapon recharge time. The robots in particular take an annoyingly long time to kill. Also, I found myself wishing that I had some warning for when the mushrooms were going to unburrow. There is a lot of strategy to dealing with the overlap of the different monster mechanics. Doing the quests was fun, but it was hard to click the quest and inventory buttons while I was constantly under attack by the monsters. All that said, this felt like complete experience and that itself is a good sign.
I completed the game in 837 seconds.
I really like the design of the combat system. Most of it was intuitive, and I quickly learned what the heavy/light attack dynamics were. I really like the enemy design with the "no light attack" symbol on the shirt. However, after playing for a while I felt that things got a bit monotonous. Eventually I just ended up sitting on one side of the arena, hitting whatever popped up on the one side of me, then unloading everything I had in the other direction. My interest was regained once I understood the damage mechanic - those blurred-out consoles are an excellent way of showing damage. I reached level 10 on my run.
Very interesting! I certainly needed to read the blog post to appreciate how detailed the mechanics are here. There's a lot to keep track of in this game, and the player is expected to have a long-term plan even as they frantically tap things. As I learned, knowing when to drop the big cooldown abilities can make the difference between victory and defeat. Nearly learned, that is. I got the boss to negative HP, but apparently my party getting wiped out registered first. Seems I broke my arm punching out the Eldritch Horror. Incidentally, I love the voiceovers - they really add a lot of flavor to the game. Overall, it was a memorably hectic experience.
I didn't find my tropical island vacation very relaxing. Something about the being so tight on time and resources. I did enjoy working out the correct course of action, and managed to escape on day 6 of my first attempt.
You absolutely nailed the mood with this one. The mood in question being panic. The music, mechanics, and not having any idea where Death is mean that running around blindly suddenly starts looking like a workable strategy.
My record: 1 minute 47 seconds.
I managed to reach the win state after a bit of practice. The enemies are certainly tricky, but they're manageable once you figure out how to deal with them. I was worried about the respawning coins, but they weren't really an issue for me. My gameplay issue was getting smashed between the rotating clouds on the big planet, often because my character didn't jump when I felt like it should have been able to. Props for the engine and the gravity mechanics. The music did its job well.
EDIT: Yeah, I kinda figured that it had something to do with the bouncing. Not that big of a deal once I got used to it.
I am a dude with a mustache and I approve of this game. Simple, intuitive, deep, and stylish.
I'll give you serious style points for the creepy words and I loved how the eyes on the eye tree followed me. However, I couldn't get mouse interaction on the Linux build to work with any consistency and couldn't open the journal at all. (I played on Linux Mint 18.1.) Mouse interaction worked properly on WINE, but I had even stranger issues there.
Edit: WebGL version works fine for me.
Interesting. I liked the depth and detail of the environment, and the monsters felt like a very legitimate threat. The controls seemed odd, and I think that having keys for rotation and acceleration rather than directions might have been a better fit. It took me a while to find Mjölnir and after that the voiceovers for "found Mjölnir" and "the gate is open" overlapped. That said, the voiceovers really helped set the stage. Just earlier today I was lamenting my lack of a smooth yet rugged narrating voice and here I find a prime example of what I was talking about.
The artwork here is excellently done, giving the game a very nice mood straight off the bat. I love the design work on the enemies, and the aiming and shooting mechanics feel excellent. Melee, however, is punishingly difficult, thanks to the long windup and the unclear hitbox on the player's attacks. The level-up system doesn't feel like a progression so much as a way of delaying the inevitable. Fortunately, reading @stevenjmiller's comment alerted me to the fact that the game also included a full boss fight. The boss was dynamic and challenging, and I felt accomplished having reached the win state.
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Interesting. I liked how everything came together, but it seems way too easy to draw an animal that gets its head obscured by a cloud. It's times like this that make me wish I owned a drawing tablet.
Great work! The mechanics are very innovative, presenting a challenge that isn't quite like anything I've seen before. The art style is cohesive and fitting, and the amount of content is impressive. That said, the way scoring is currently rigged makes adds an order of operations element that results in some strange situations. For example, at one point I had a mountain and a light bank next to eachother in darkness. If I approved the mountain first, I'd lose the delight from it because it was in darkness. If I approved the light bank first, I would take the -3 eyesore penalty. What I think should have happened is that when I combined the mountain and light bank, it would recalculate so that I got both the concealment effect and the delight from the mountain. I agree with @nilead that something like this could work really well on mobile.
I somehow made it through my entire first run having entirely missed the fact that clicking was what killed the sperm. The irony here is not lost on me. This is a fun, innovative, and satisfying game.
I played one game with each of the three decks, and won all of them. The mechanics are pretty basic, but they worked well enough. I never actually used the defend button. The keyboard controls took some getting used to - I think this would have worked better with mouse controls. I liked the discard and draw a hand mechanic. Most of my strategy was about trying to draw the 6-attack/defense cards and keeping my defense above the enemy's attack. The AI seems pretty weak, as it often does useless things like attacking when it can't do any damage or defending with 0 defense. I like the aesthetics of the game, too. Nice work!
I put so much effort into not missing the flowers and then [spoilers] happened. It was so tragic. This has to be an allegory for something.
That was interesting. The music is good and the graphics are clear. I don't understand why you made the horizontal dimension of the game so small. The only way I could figure out to get the item collected notification to go away was to go back to the main menu and then re-enter the game.
I like seeing a depiction of space combat where navigation is tricky and velocity management is crucial. The "defend Earth" objective limits the player's ability to explore, but the combat mechanics and variety of enemies give the game a lot of depth. The graphics are effective, and the soundscape fits well. The physics take some getting used to, but combat is very satisfying once you get a handle on what's going on. Ramming into my own missile, not so much. Good work!
Huh. I liked the level design, but ultimately I'm in the "couldn't understand the jump physics" camp. The art style is very nice. It's cohesive, distinctive, and cute. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the soundscape, which was cute for about five seconds and then became obnoxious. Also, the player's horizontal movement felt too slow, especially when a level asked me to walk all the way around one of the blocks. I like the environment variety and the carrot-eating animations. Nice work!
That was certainly interesting. The controls felt fine to me, but the player's starting bullet speed is way too low. I might have been better off making a "good side," but some part of me wanted to obsessively make sure my upgrades were symmetrical. The enemy behavior is just complex enough to make them interesting opponents, but it's super easy to get blindsided by one of the asteroids while trying to focus on the actual enemy. The upgrade system is well done. I like the way the wave/checkpoint system works, but I'm not sure how much I like having both checkpoint heals and regenerating health. It sounds redundant on paper, but in actual gameplay it seems to work fine. Good work!
Nice work! I like the weapon and power up selection. I felt like I should have been able to jump up through the moving platforms, but nope. Supply management was tricky because I didn't see a way to switch guns, each gun starts with a different amount of ammo, and ammo power ups give the same amount for every weapon. Also, I would have appreciated a couple seconds of warning before God Mode wore off. The difficulty seemed pretty manageable to me, but then the last two levels were cakewalks. I love the character designs, but now I kinda want to watch an action flick.
(Cleared in one attempt, 1 life remaining.)
That was certainly interesting. The flying controls really caught me off guard, but they were fun once I got used to them. The physics still felt pretty strange though. Despite the dialogue and well-defined quests, I didn't really feel like I was getting solid feedback for my actions. Still, you certainly did a good job of showing the player character's abilities and perspective. Nice work!
This was certainly something. I tried to play the game in Firefox, but for some reason the game would not respond to my spacebar so I couldn't actually move the charges. In Chrome I was able to play. I did find it a bit odd that even a pixel overlap between the charge and the conveyor can carry a charge away. Also, there were a few times where I somehow managed to drop a charge outside the screen and had to go fishing in the dark to get it back. The worst issue, however, was the sticky, stuttering, inexact controls. On the 12th level, I got completely stuck. I could move around in an inverted L shape, but I could not get out of that path to go deposit the charges. I will give you due credit for an interesting idea and functional procedural generation, but the implementation leaves something to be desired. Selection_019.png
Very nice work here! I like the amount of finesse that can be involved in rigging the drone chains combined. It's the sort of game that can be tricky to pick up at first, so making a tutorial stage was a very worthwhile investment of time. Though I often found myself coming up short on cash, I found it quite satisfying when I got the assembly line for a diamond ring together, let alone the masterpiece in level 2. It was very nice to be able to rewind time and sell things for full price so I could try out all sorts of different combinations. I did run into a number of situations where I had to combine resources that come in different quantities and ended up with resources wasted sitting around at the crafting station. Still, it's a mechanically interesting game with a lot of nice quality of life features.
I love the premise here. The gameplay is mostly solid as well, though the jumping felt kinda floaty and enemies sometimes fell from the sky and landed on me. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover the rocket launcher after several switches between the rifle and shotgun. The soundtrack and storyboards were cool, but I have some reservations about the art style. Destructible terrain is cool and many of the individual graphics looked good, but the game's art lacked a sense of cohesion. The 'boss' was cool, but gameplay-wise simply amounted to a swarm of normal enemies. I really liked the implementation of energy here - it both added time pressure and encouraged judicious use of specials without being stressful. The enemy variety, special attacks, and destructible terrain made for solid gameplay. Well done!
Huzzah! My cell of ~~terrorists~~ brave rebels has successfully overthrown the ~~government~~ evil overlords. The ~~7% of the population remaining~~ brave citizens who supported my cause will surely lead the city to ~~doom~~ a new golden age! Let us rejoice in this victory, which we achieved ~~on our second attempt because everyone died the first time~~ in a single glorious battle that was decided by ~~the random number generator~~ my cunning strategy! The three brutal overlords were eliminated ~~after dozens of failed assassinations~~ quickly and efficiently after we ascertained their weaknesses. Now, we can walk into a new golden age!
...
What's this I'm hearing about a movement forming to resist my rule? This cannot stand! I want them all executed immediately!
This was the most inventive game I've seen so far. The mechanics were a bit tricky to control at first, but once I got the hang of things it quickly turned into a fun game of measured speed and precision. The final boss proved himself to be a powerful opponent, and it was only on my third try that I managed to defeat him. Importantly, I can say in retrospect that I lost the first two times because of a strategic error - I was too worried about skulls and didn't put enough energy toward keeping him from winning by money. It's not too often one runs into an LD game with voice acting, as well. Good work!
I like some of the ideas here, but I found that this game grew dull quickly. I was expecting to need to be careful around enemies while lining up shots with a powerful plasma weapon, but I found the weapon to be a little underwhelming, while the fact that the enemies did so little damage meant I could simply walk or dash straight through them. My enemy was not the enemies themselves, but the ticking down of my power count. I won several levels by accidentally walking into an enemy. The difficulty curve is not nearly steep enough - I went through 20 levels and didn't really feel that it was getting more challenging. Also, I found that the mouse controls are bugged in the fullscreen web version. The art style is mostly good and I liked the intro.
This is a really interesting idea with quite a bit of depth. While the soundscape is nonexistent and the graphics serve as little more than a vehicle for expressing the mechanics, the mechanics themselves are very interesting. I like the decaying card mechanic, one of the better uses of the theme I've seen so far. Additionally, the burning and wall effects made me think a few moves ahead. I did find myself wishing for a 'pass turn' button, so I could maximize the effects of my huge blasty cards. Though I played without reading @boltkey's comment, I used the same strategy of holding on to a global 2 damage card for an emergency. This lead me to exactly the same result that @boltkey had, a turn 38 loss on my first try. Well done!
The whole time I kept thinking that the queen's horse is way bigger than the bats and should be able to just plow through them. It was certainly a fun game, and I liked the idea behind the shooting mechanics, though I agree with the other commentators that one-button shooting could have worked fine. Also, I frequently found myself wishing that I could shoot backwards. It wasn't always obvious that certain obstacles could be broken by arrows. The music is nice and fit thematically, but it was too relaxed to set the mood for a timed mission. I experienced no bugs (WebGL/Firefox). I did enjoy the use of 3d backgrounds.
Lasted 12 rounds on my first try. The game is interesting and aesthetically pleasing, and I really like the reverse skill tree idea. I wasn't exactly happy about having to sacrifice my skills, but I never really got the hang of the Ice Rune anyway and the icicle is tricky to aim. I think my favorite part about the player powers was how I could use the ice beam and glacier wall to push enemies around the battlefield. Being able to sculpt enemy formations like that effectively conveyed the idea that my character was a powerful wizard. Well done!
This is a pretty solid take on the theme. I like the sunglasses robot. The art style itself is a little lacking, but the audio is solid and the screenshake and knockback add very welcome juice to the game. Once I understood how the recharge mechanic worked, I found myself planning around it - for example, I would try to kill an enemy closer to the computer so I could make the trip with the battery shorter. It's a mechanic with a lot of potential. I got 51 kills / 173 time / 36 batteries on my second attempt. Well done!
For 11 hours of work, a short and sweet challenge platformer is pretty impressive. The game's cleanly constructed visuals allow a player to focus on its strong core mechanic. I'll admit that it took me embarassingly long to realize that the overload mechanic was based on the number of power rings collected and not a time limit. This was despite the deliberate visual cue of the rings turning the same color as the deathspikes. Though at first I felt that I was working with tight platformer controls, I did occasionally find myself slipping off platforms. The distance between checkpoints felt punishing, but to a reasonable degree. Well done!
Excellent work here. I got the 'universe dies of entropy' ending about 10 times, and honestly after the first few I was tempted to go rogue and try to wipe out humanity in a timeline. If you intended to make humanity come across as incessant, you certainly achieved that. After my winning run, I actually did try to wipe out humanity, but I couldn't figure out how. The 'defeat entropy' run is hard enough as it is. Though there are many paths through the research tree, it seems that most of them are dead ends. I tried reading the Asimov story for hints, and when that failed I looked at the source code. Except I somehow messed that up and ended up hitting the 'universe dies of entropy' ending one research away from victory twice in a row. I won't spoil the route for other people here, but I will note that there really isn't much room for error. Well done, and all hail Steve.
I like the idea here, but I found the gameplay to be simply bizarre. The graphical style is quite appealing, but the controls are an odd choice. Left/right to rotate and up to move forward feels sensible for vehicles, but I cannot say the same for a running human. Furthermore, the player's attacks have basically no weight or feedback behind them - I couldn't even tell if I was hitting my targets except when they went flying away. At least the wizard blast was considerably more satisfying to use. Some kind of health indicator for the enemies would have worked wonders here. There's a lot of good work here, but I don't think it quite came together.
That was really fun. The sword and rifle both felt like effective, meaningful tools, and the combination of the two was a good foundation for gameplay. You also nailed the feeling of escape - rushing through areas was almost always a better option than trying to stand and fight. The visual aesthetics are strong and cohesive, while the soundtrack gives the game an almost meditative edge. However, the sword did feel like it would benefit from being sped up somehow, and I occasionally found myself failing to take shots because the plasma bolt materialized inside a wall. The game provided a good variety of enemies and challenges. I especially liked how I could use the sword to deflect enemy shots. Strangely, the most awesome I felt during the game was one particular instance where I got hit while spinning around to shoot one of the fast enemies and took the killing shot in slow motion. Well done!
This game is certainly appealing. The sound effects are well done, the art style is cohesive, and overall it feels pretty good. Mechanically, I have some questions. I had problems with powerups spawning on the sides, out of my reach, and even more problems with how easy it is to boost right into enemies. Even when you're not boosting, it's hard to avoid slamming right into one of the formations of 3, though it feels pretty awesome to slip through such a formation. I made it to 223km from the finish on one run, and I suspect that had more to do with luck than skilled flying. The three power boosts were essential to stay in the game, as I would often crash with a boost bearing down on me. However, I felt that I should be able to boost closer to death than was actually the case. Regardless, I had quite a bit of fun playing this. Good work!
This game's strongest aspect is its graphical presentation. The excellent title screen is backed up by an appealing art style. I liked how, in contrast to most games with this control scheme, the focus was on collecting powerups rather than dodging obstacles. It was a fairly relaxing experience, except for the incessant buzzing noise that came from my plane's propeller. Not having the distance counter reset when the player runs out of fuel seems like an odd decision to me. I used the HTML5 version and didn't have any issues. Did I mention how much I like the title screen? Well done!
This is a heck of a balancing act you've got here. The graphics aren't exceptional, but they're enough to show the player what's going on. It took me unsettlingly long to realize that I wasn't at risk of running off, and even then my score wasn't nearly as impressive as what others have achieved. I did find the player's ability to stay on track left a little to be desired, especially when I had difficulty hitting the triggers that spawned more path. Still, it's a refreshing departure from the traditional endless runner formula. Well done!
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I like the aesthetics here - the excellent and fitting soundtrack, constantly rolling news ticker, and chattering Trump all add nice flavor to the game. However, I did have issues with tooltips not appearing a lot of the time, so I had to make some blind decisions. Perhaps as a result of this, I kinda stalled out at Anti-LGBT/Build a Wall tier. Also, I honestly don't see the connection to the theme. That said, this is a fairly covfefe
This one was short, but sweet. The mechanic behind it is both innovative and fun. It felt punishing at first, and I botched the first scenario several times getting the hang of it. However, once I understood what I was doing I was able to do the second two scenarios in a single attempt each. The gulliotine moves quickly enough to make the game feel hectic - a suitable way to provide challenge in a game that demands precision. Though the character models aren't much to speak of, the backdrops look cool and the music is excellent. Well done!
Not quite the direction I was expecting that story to go. I did like having decision points, though I wish there had been more long-term effects than "my face is green for the rest of the story." The soundtrack was fairly solid - especially the regal-sounding castle tune. The book puzzle took me a moment (I tried putting them in alphabetical order first) before the solution hit me, clear as day. I do think that the buttons would have benefited from a distinctive style. Still, I ultimately did find myself invested in the outcome of the story. Well done!
This game was fun. I wish it had lasted longer. I really liked the implementation of the power idea, and the visual indicator of it was very strong. My instincts told me that the dash mechanic was going to lead to a bunch of self-induced trainwrecks, but it turned out to be beautifully intuitive.
This kind of light based puzzle has a lot of potential. In this case, I found it to be a huge exercise in trial and error. As the player is given such a small amount of knowledge, the puzzle is reduced to a matter of trying paths until one works. To say that this game is pure trial and error is to do it a disservice, however. There is a comprehensible design language and the mechanics are designed to allow a player to come back from poor decisions. After a certain point, I began to get a feel for how to avoid paths to nowhere. The relaxing soundtrack went a long way toward preventing the experience from being frustrating.
This is sweet. It has a very solid art style, a good soundtrack, and solid core gameplay augmented with a good variety of powerups. While others have praised the responsiveness of the AI, I found its limit when the AI got blocked off from me with a wall and I tricked it into ringing itself out over half a dozen times, leading directly to my highscore of 17. Still, I think exploitability fits in with the theme of this game - there is a wallhack powerup, after all. Also, I may have ringed myself out twice before I figured out that the game had ringouts. Well done!
This was really interesting. I didn't comprehend it instantly, but I caught on quickly enough. There's certainly a balancing act to be struck with this one, trying to keep all the different stats in line while fending off enemies. Fortunately, since it's a turn based game the player has as much time to think as they need. I did, however, find it unclear when I was and wasn't allowed to attack. Sometimes I would walk right up to an opponent, but the attack command would never materialize. Maybe that's just what I get for using the WebGL version. Good work!
First run: Level 15/Turn 32
This game has a good atmosphere of tension. The music is creepy enough to be fitting and the effects used do a good job of inducing an escalating panic in the player. However, the gameplay itself feels basically luck-based. There is little obvious strategy besides 'cover as much ground as quickly as you can.' I don't know if this was an actual mechanic, but the last couple bars of power felt like they took much longer to tick down than the rest.
I scored 75, 65, 75 on my three attempts.
My word this is amazingly done. The art style is excellent and well-executed and the game's mechanics do a good job of backing it up. The controls and projectiles felt very solid and punchy (though my bot always would go kinda haywire during the victory screen.) I wish I had a friend around to play this with. As it was, I learned to exploit the AI's docility, and the last couple maps were complete stomps in my favor. My favorite map was the one with both power stations in the middle and the batteries in the corners. I like how it encouraged a different kind of interaction than the convention followed by the other four. All in all, I had a blast playing this. Well done!
That was certainly interesting. Even with the instructions painted on the screen, it took me a while to get a handle on exactly how to play the game. Tellingly, my score went up dramatically between my first and second attempts. I scored less than 10 on my first try, but made it to 40 on my second. There were a few rough edges, such as the vanishing batteries, and the jump pads take a bit of finesse to use well. I thought for sure that the system was based on not running completely out of power, but on my second run I died with only a single battery below yellow. The control scheme seemed a bit awkward to me. I think it would have made more sense to have w as jump and space for batteries. Still, it was hectic fun once I understood it.
That was pretty sweet. The art style was cogent and appealing, but the game's visuals are really sold by the zoom cam for attacks. It's quite satisfying choosing the right attack to blow through a horde of enemies. The leap attack's animation didn't seem quite as fitting as the others, though, and I did find it a little strange that enemies that already hit me wouldn't get creamed by my ulti. The sound effects are also well done, and the music is fitting for a dungeon crawl. Though I felt fairly stable for most of the game, I ended up squeaking across the finish line with less than 20 power remaining. Good work!
This is more of a tech demo than a game, but it's a heck of an impressive tech demo. That might be the most creative control scheme I've seen in an LD game, regardless of event. You may be interested to know that this didn't work in the first browser I tried (Firefox for Ubuntu) but did work in my other browser (Chrome).
I like this one. The core mechanic here is interesting and the puzzles are fun and engaging. I especially liked how I needed to position myself carefully to avoid gibbing myself with the lasers. I did, however, find myself wishing for the ability to turn in place instead of always facing the direction of movement. I didn't really feel like I was under pressure to not run out of power - perhaps a timer would have done that job. Also, the life counter/back to start on gameover thing seemed like a really odd choice for a puzzle game. I think the more conventional unlimited retries / r to restart setup would work better here. That said, the clean aesthetics and solid puzzle design make this a worthwhile experience. Well done!
Well done! You absolutely nailed the mood with this one, the mood in question being 'hectic Sisyphean labor.' The art style is appealing and cohesive and the maddeningly upbeat soundtrack nicely complements the gameplay. I found myself scrambling around, mistapping, and completely losing track of the notification log. I suspect that there's a high skill cap here. Notably, my score improved massively between my first and second attempts - from 9485 to 15245. It's an overwhelming game, but it's one I suspect I could become quite comfortable with if I played for long enough. I'm not a parent myself, but it seems to me that the commentary here is deeper than you advertise.
This is extremely impressive. Like others, I was reminded instantly of Touhou - the soundtrack isn't too far off and Lunatic difficulty is iconic. The game contains both a solidly constructed stage and a substantial pile of player powers. That said, I found it was easier mentally to just pick a power and roll with it instead of swapping them around. I did like how the system required more detailed resource management than I'd expect from a bullethell. The purple triangle based patterns did feel much easier than those around them, but I think the breather was nice to have. This game is certainly not without its flaws - it took me a little while to get the hang of hitting the right buttons and the player does not give strong enough feedback when hit. It took me a few tries to clear Normal, as expected. Going into Lunatic, I wasn't sure I was going to clear it at all. I was surprised, then, when I managed it in a single try. The responsiblity for that lies not with my dodging skills, but with Phantom Move, which I used to plow through everything. Excellent work!
I find this game to be a bit of an odd case. It has a very strong graphical presentation, fitting sound effects, and decent ideas behind its gameplay. Yet after a certain point, the underlying logic appears to break down. On each of my several runs, I would bash together an army and destroy a few villages. For that portion of the game, it felt like everything was working as intended, and it was fun. After that, the whole thing seemed to break down. Specifically, the game seems to start glitching out when I attack the large village on the bottom screen, below the first castle. The description warned me about not getting feedback when I lost fights. I was not prepared for when I stopped getting feedback for winning fights. For when I lost the ability to move my troops around. For when the troop counters at the bottom of the screen stopped matching up with the actual numbers of troops I could locate in the field. If this game appeared to be in full working order, I would consider it a flawed masterpiece, with its mysterious combat mechanics and questionable use of time pressure (I think @dob hit that particular nail on the head). As it was, I'm afraid that a game-breaking bug has prevented me from getting the full intended experience.
It's a shame I don't have an android phone and can't get the full experience. The opening splash screen is excellent, and the tune is certainly fitting. I'm convinced I've heard it somewhere before, but I can't think of where. Who knew that a mighty super robot could be laid low by outlet physics? Juggling the outlets was a unique challenge, and I often found myself neglecting charged meters as I fiddled with the things around. At times it felt that the pluts simply would not go in, and on a few occasions I had to jiggle the plugs that looked like they were in so they'd actually start charging. I'm just glad I didn't have to deal with five of the things. I did eventually hit the win screen, but it took me several attempts. Well done!
I like the clean, simple art style here, though I really found myself wishing for some kind of soundscape to go with it. My fighting style was to move cautiously into range and then cut my opponent before they had a chance to react. I felt a little bit of a rush going into each engagement, fearing that it might be my downfall, but the passivity of my opponents proved their undoing and I cleared the game in a single attempt. There's certainly potential in the combat system if you wish to develop it further. Good job!
That was certainly an experience. The game has a lot of mechanics and content, but I'm not convinced that it all comes together into a cohesive whole. The level of detail in the combat mechanics is undermined by the fact that most strategies lead to more or less the same outcome and the player's overall impact on the battle is offset by the player's army. I like the music, but it doesn't seem to fit the whole medieval fantasy aesthetic at all. It's also nice to see what appears to be the work of a fellow vector artist. I ran into a few different bugs, most notably one where I couldn't clear level 2 because even after I claimed all castles, there was an unallied, unattackable town. I did clear the other two, with a few deaths. Good work!
I've never seen a physics puzzler with quite this mechanic before. The presentation on this one is cute as well. However, after playing for a while, the game began lagging to the point of unplayability on my Win10. That's a shame, since it means I didn't actually get to play the post-compo levels at all. Good work!
So there I was, sitting down to play LD games instead of studying for my physics final. And look where I ended up. Watching crates fall into spike pits, getting crushed by non-moving boulders, and utterly failing to get a perfect record on every level. Also the name really confused me because I kept expecting to discover that some of the treasure chests just had goats in them. Yeah!
Well, I suppose that's one way to go down fighting. The core mechanic here is interesting and requires a good deal of awareness and coordination, though I didn't always quite understand what counted as a hit on an enemy or why the bacon would sometimes reach its "overcooked" state almost immediately after reaching its "cooked" state. The full voice acting certainly adds to the entertainment value. I won on my second attempt.
Can I revoke the driving licenses of everyone in this city? I know you put in light effects to get around this, but I was still annoyed that the doors kept getting blocked by cars and I couldn't tell which doors were open and augh! I failed once with one door left and at least twice with two doors left just because I could not remember which door I missed, let alone find it in the mess that the level became. On the bright side, this is some of the strongest 3d modeling and voice acting I've seen in LD. Good work!
This was nice and relaxing, especially after I realized that it wasn't possible for me to get big enough to eat the snakes. I was a little worried that the owl was somehow going to pop out of nowhere and mess me up, but that never really happened. The difficulty was too low for the core mechanic to come into effect, but I'll give you points for style.
I'm confused. I like the idea and the setup required, but I honestly don't understand what the lose condition is. I seem to be doing fine, and then suddenly I just...lose. My last run I had a bunch of farms, lots of water, lots of supply, no visible threats, and then the game over screen happened. I like the premise, but I'm not convinced the rules are explained well enough.
Interesting. I'm a bit too young to remember the golden days of text adventure, but I was certainly able to imagine what they were like from the level of immersion I got from something so simple. That is, as long as the parser decided to agree with me. While I'll admit that "flap arms" is not really a substitute for "jump", I found the fact that I couldn't substitute "rocket" for "missile" a bit more disconcerting. Thank goodness for hints. Nice job!
Legitimate boss fights in an LD? I don't care if you don't follow the theme if you have bosses. I found the graphics to be almost too abstract, but the music made the whole thing come across as almost mysterious. The platforming dynamics aren't quite as polished as I'd like, but I had fun fighting even against normal enemies. Oddly, I found the second boss easier than the first - the dodging and weaving that the first boss did was much more interesting than the simple routine of shoot and dodge I fell into with the second one. Good work!
Interesting. I like the basic idea here, but in practice the core mechanic seemed to manifest as "hit the weapon switch button until the annoying clicking noise stops." The enemies presented no credible threat whatsoever, but they did have a certain style to them. I enjoyed watching the way they moved, especially as they flailed about while collapsing when killed. The shades were a nice touch too. Good work!
I really like where this is going, but it feels incomplete as-is. The basket isn't that big of a deal, but the fast ricochet bullets came as a nasty surprise and I quickly ran out of health. Since that didn't mean anything, I happily pranced along listening to cute kitten noises until I had two kittens left to find. Then I walked into a room with three kittens in it. I don't think I was supposed to end up having to search for -1 remaining kittens. Still, I like what has been done here.
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Yep. That's 904,383,500 points. This was my second attempt. Eventually I walked off the world and the game told me I'd been caught by the cops. Anyway, this is pretty impressive for a first LD. Your pixel art style is promising and I laughed at some of the voiced dialogue. Gameplay-wise it seems to come down to just grabbing everything except black blobs, but I love the theory behind it. Good work!
@lautregars You could make a polished up version and release it as a post-compo edition.
This just might be the best version of the "self-inflicted bullet hell" concept I've played. From reading the comments, I can see that the powerup system allows for different playstyles. Mine was to grab health and damage pickups and trust my dodging skills to keep me ahead, allowing me to hammer down the core in my first attempt. It was hard for me to burst because of some control issues that were almost certainly WebGL's fault and not yours. The graphics are appealing, if simplistic. Unlike some other reviewers, I really enjoyed the soundtrack. Good work!
Nice work! Things did feel a little slow at first and I was a bit confused by the pickup key that only needed to be used once, but the pace of the game certainly accelerated as I ramped up my fish count. I got busted more than once because I overestimated my ability to grab those last couple fish. The soundtrack is very nice and fitting - I'm a little worried it's just going to be stuck in my head now. Also I loved how any of the random boxes and barrels in the scenery could potentially conceal an enemy cat. My highscore: 37124 points/ 40 fish / 4 bouillabaisses. Good work!
I was not expecting this but I'm glad I found it. The retro art, music, and sounds mesh together into a cohesive aesthetic and the gameplay was simple and intuitive enough that I was able to pick it up despite somehow failing to read the control explanation. Except I missed the shiny forehead, the knowledge of which was what allowed me to actually clear the game.
I don't know if it's my relative inexperience with 3d gaming acting on me, but I really had trouble getting the hang of the controls for this. Honestly I found myself wishing for a top-down perspective. Though the models look nice, I found that, like others have said, there wasn't all that much pulling me into the experience. With the lack of sound and "juice" I felt more like I was watching on a screen than involved in the action. The ideas here are excellent, but I just wasn't able to get engaged with this one. Still, good work!
Solid entry you have here. The graphical style is appealing and goes with the arcade music, and the gameplay is the kind of fast-paced frustrating test of skill that marks many good highscore-based games. It took me a few tries to figure out how not to get telefragged by the slimes that spawned in, and the fact that the player, but not bullets, can move through platforms on Nightmare led to some deaths. Walljumping and wallsliding are cool, but I wasn't always sure how my character was going to react when I was performing those actions. Weirdly, I didn't find my Hard performance to be better than my Nightmare performance. Good work!
That was certainly interesting. The music is excellent and the dungeon theme is very well established with the game's strong use of lighting. The combat, however, is not up to par. The lack of knockback or visual feedback when the player attacks and the lackluster animation make for rather unenticing action. In practice, I found the core gameplay to consist of dashing around avoiding fights and grabbing everything I could get my gauntleted hands on while trying to land difficult-to-time bomb hits. However, this was plenty of fun, especially with the ability to switch between two visually and practically distinct environments. My score: 5302g/2nd attempt.
While the number of frames of art created for this game is relatively low, the level of quality is indicative of an excellent craftsman. This crafsmanship is matched by the game's tight, skill-based mechanics. While merely having the player grow bigger with the amount of gold collected would be a fairly standard take on the theme, allowing the player to drop gold creates a mechanic that results in an engaging game of calculated risk. This effect is enhanced by the player's weapon. The boomerang axe is a satisfying tool in itself, and it is quite satisfying to catch an enemy on the rebound, but having it grow in size and power with the player's gold complicates the dynamic further and enhances the temptation. Also wow my evil twin is brutal. There are certainly elements here that feel missing or incomplete, such as the lack of feedback when the player dies, the relatively unpolished score and gold display, and the lack of a backdrop for the upper half of the screen. Despite these flaws, I found this game to be exceptional.
Really interesting, though I kinda botched it the first time. I like the rune magic system once I got the hang of it, but that was after I somehow managed to waste the only two yellow rune drops in the game and thus reach an unwinnable state. Made me wish that runes weren't expended when failing a spell. I liked how I needed to collect and expend green runes in order to get a red rune, so it struck me as odd that this pattern didn't really continue at all. The shield skill seems like more effort than it's worth when all that's really needed to fight yellow enemies is the triple shot. Still, the graphics and presentation are excellent and the music is suitably atmospheric. Well done!
Having to manage and throw around treasure adds an interesting new dimension to traditional platforming, especially once I got used to the physics of it. It does strike me as a bit odd that each level has a locked door, but you never actually use it - though I'm thankful for not having to cart all the treasure back through the entire previous level. During the first level I took the wrong approach, grabbing every chest I could find, but by the second level I had learned my lesson and mapped the place out before claiming anything. After that, all that stood between me and victory was an easy boss fight. I wish I had just been able to throw treasure at the bats, though I did figure out how to bridge spike pits with it. Good work!
Interesting. I liked the idea behind the game. That said, the controls are a bit fidgety - both player and enemy soldiers get caught on walls easily and the enemies are small enough that right-click targeting is tricky. I found myself wishing for auto-targeting of some sort. Also, I wish I'd been able to move the screen around my moving my mouse near the edge rather than just with the keyboard. I wasn't really fond of the sound effects. Still, the basic dynamic behind the game was engaging enough to keep me playing all the way through. I cleared all three levels with a total of 17 deaths. Good work!
Lovely projectile pattern you have here but there seems to be a minor ⑨ with it.
Interesting. I really liked the shuriken effect. The fact that the second level consisted of a room with a bunch of pretty stuff and nothing to do, not so much. Still, it was fun while it lasted. Good work!
A really fun take on inventory management. Fast-paced, challenging, and visually appealing. It took me a while to get the hang of it, and I died more than once against the final boss. As such, I felt rather accomplished at the end of the adventure even though the good ~~Baron~~ Sir Münchhausen obviously did most of the work. The music was nice and fitting, and I like the cutout art style. The randomness did get a little frustrating at times - such as when a slime shows up and the player has no daggers or blunt weapons, but the enemy and item variety adds substantial depth. Good job!
My favorite part about this game is the dynamism of the environment. The graphics are simplistic but expressive and the combat involves a lot of clicking, but the moving and spinning platforms are what adds the extra dimension that the game needs to be entertaining. Good work!
Really interesting idea. I really liked the cutscene art and the basic mechanic, but I got bored relatively quickly. The progression definitely felt slow at times, and once I got a good sense of what was and wasn't worthwhile rushing through the houses began to feel repetitive. The gameplay soundtrack was nice and mood-setting, but I was not especially thrilled with the shop music. Still, the sheer variety of items make for some interesting decision points. My performance: one loss on the road to max upgrades. Good work!
It was certainly interesting going through so many different environments and soundtracks. The combat was pretty basic, but the nature of this game made combat counterproductive anyway. Also, what the point of having a sprint key if there's no reason to not just hold it down constantly? While the ideas behind the theme implementation were interesting, the core mechanic seemed to be trial-and-error running around the map while trying to keep yourself from being cornered by a wall of mobs. I doubt I would have stayed engaged as long as I did without the story.
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I did manage to beat your highscore on hard, and I'm sure a more dedicated effort could blow that score out of the water. The player's range felt awkwardly short at first, but I got used to it eventually. Still, I found the shotgun awkward to use and quickly settled on the rifle as my weapon of choice. The core mechanic is excellent and the range of available upgrades allows for a lot of different strategies. The strength of this mechanic is enough to overpower the relatively unimpressive core gameplay. Bonus points for the graphics option and the quit button.
I like the idea behind this one. I'll admit that's partly because the same thing occurred to me during my brainstorm, but I ended up going with something else. It's nice being able to see how it works in practice. In this implementation, I didn't especially feel that it impacted the gameplay aside from how often I found myself decided to skip pickups. The controls didn't feel quite as good as I would have liked and I kept getting stuck on doors. The procedural generation for the dungeon was nice, but I felt that there were too many rooms with no enemies. Still, I was entertained during my run. Good work!
This game's strong art style belies its relatively weak fundamental gameplay. When you said "clicker game" you weren't kidding - the gameplay consists of incessant, nigh-mindless clicking. Perhaps with a soundscape and more juice this could have been satisfying, but as it was I found myself rather unengaged. I made it to the end, but didn't feel especially accomplished doing so. The damage markers are a nice touch though.
Interesting. I'll admit I wasn't terribly excited about a typing challenge, but the ever-increasing distortedness of the text I was trying to type kept it interesting and the over-loud audio at the end only enhanced the effect of escalating madness. And bloody old god names aren't exactly easy to type to begin with. It seemed that at times the strategy was to just pick a couple of gods and alternate between them - almost like some bizarre form of worship, I suppose. I went mad at exactly 69 points. Make of that what you will.
I really like the grainy art style and the classic cartoon backdrop. The core gameplay is very simplistic, but it fits the theme and does involve some optimization skill. The music works with the mood and pace of the game, but I'm less convinced that it fits the idea of high-speed racing. The background scrolling is nice, but I think there's more that could be done here to sell the idea of speed. Also, I think this game would benefit from having a countdown at the start rather than just throwing the player into the race. I lost a few seconds on my first attempt just trying to get my bearings. Nice work! Scores: Attempt 1: 120411. Attempt 2: 148617.
It's not that often I see a proper turn-based strategy in LD, so this was a treat. I liked the different characters. The rules for which actions could be performed after which other actions seemed a little arcane - why can I move->attack->divebomb but not divebomb->move->attack? Once I got the hang of each character's abilities, I was able to clear the game without losing a character. The combat does feel a little sluggish, and I found myself wishing for damage number popups. It doesn't seem like there's anything stopping Peregrine from being able to kite down melee enemies by attacking them normally and then using divebomb to get out of range. Felina didn't seem overpowered to me. She felt strong enough to reward the effort of moving her into position, and 16 damage isn't that much heavier than Fang (11) and Peregrine (7 + 5). It seemed intuitive to me that Fang's webs should have some kind of slow or disable effect instead of just clearing terrain blocks. I think she's the least powerful at the moment, so adding that would bring her up to par with the others. Good work!
It's not that often I see an LD puzzle game that really pushes what can be done with the puzzle mechanics and expects the player to think. I think players would have an easier time learning the mechanics with stronger visual indicators - for example, have the jelly somehow indicate how many turns it is away from expansion and have a visible countdown timer on the bombs. I stumbled my way to the end (8400 points / 3 gems), but that still meant missing half the content. Good work!
I saw the 'Nuclear Arms' and knew I had to see the latest entry in the series. I was disappointed, but only because it ended too quickly. The voice acted lines are excellent, with my personal favorite being the 'that's not loaded, right?' for the shotgun powerup. Gameplay-wise, the garbage mechanic works perfectly, resulting in an escalatingly claustrophobic playing field. I'm always pleased to see proper bosses in an LD game, and the ones here did not disappoint. Good work!
@ixchow There is at least one strategy that consistently beats this game, and it doesn't sound like you have it. Spamming power generators as much as possible is the early game strategy, but the idea is that sometimes it's better to focus on population capacity to buy yourself time. Thanks for your feedback!
@baronb That goes in the 'I didn't have time' bin. Thanks for your feedback!
@makbeard I had that idea too, but I only had time to make the one map. Thanks for your feedback!
@danny-sun Thank you!
@zicboy @balance686 I honestly wasn't expecting enthusiasm for a post-jam version, but just reading my own comments I can see a few things that could be added or improved. That would pull time away from another project, though...
Really cool idea with the inventory mechanic. This game messed with my intuition, as treasures that I would ordinarily be gladdened to see became both inventory and map clutter. The current implementation is minimalistic, but there's a lot of potential to be developed here. Also, the pixel art is on point. Good work!
Interesting idea. The arena falling apart seemed a bit inconsistent to me, and the combat didn't feel particularly intuitive - I wasn't sure what the strategy was, aside from 'spam click.' Also, I'd suggest supporting alternative control schemes, such as using w instead of space to jump and using the arrow keys. Good work!
Really interesting idea. It took me until halfway through the second level to realize that I was on Pac-Man controls - the control scheme didn't feel intuitive at all without that knowledge. Each level was its own puzzle with a different objective, but those objectives weren't always easy to discern. It took me many attempts to figure out that I was supposed to turn on the laser, then switch its direction near the UFO to shoot it down, especially as there was no clear visual indicator that this actually damaged the UFO. The final boss at least had the decency to have a healthbar. Also, I frequently died getting stuck on objects that I felt like I shouldn't have. I think a grid map might have improved the controls. Good work!
My 'organization' system was basically just a pile of cars. Is it any wonder I had so much trouble finding the right cars for the right people? I wasn't really sure what the loss condition actually was, though. Good work!
This was great. The mechanic of knocking defeated enemies into others made combat satisfying, the different enemy types were interesting, and the boss fight at the end was creative, challenging, and interesting. The sheer number of enemies cluttering the screen constituted an apt interpretation of the theme, and the game's strong soundtrack added to the appeal. It was hard to use the dash well with all the clutter. It took me several attempts to make it to the boss and several more to beat it, but the ending was well worth it. Excellent work!
Interesting and challenging. My first two attempts I lived for less than 3 seconds because the enemy shots caught me off guard. Maybe the enemy shot pattern should scale with time instead of being that fast from the beginning. It was fun trying to avoid the two complementary enemies once I got the hang of it. Good work!
Really cool idea. This feels more like a test of rapid situational analysis and mouse precision than a straight puzzle game. Good work!
Interesting idea. I could see something like this as a popular casual mobile game or a more in-depth puzzler depending on how you decided to expand the mechanics. I'm not sure if trying to powerlevel only a couple of spells was the best strategy, but those tier 2/3 spells certainly make a huge difference. I cleared the whole game and never quite understood the growth rules. Good work!
Really cool game! I kept trying to drag the pop-up windows to different parts of my screen, so your fake OS is reasonably convincing. Having the real system time in the bottom right is a nice touch. Learning the game takes a bit (my first attempt scored all of 20 points), but once I got the hang of things the gameplay and music came together for a really meditative experience. You've confirmed my suspicion that the difficulty wasn't scaling at all - once I got the hang of the mechanics and memorized the puzzles, I felt I could hold the line indefinitely, so I left after about 300 points. Good work!
Really cool idea, but the lack of polish cripples it. It took me until nearly the end of the first fight to realize that I had a character because I spawned offscreen, my dude didn't seem to do a particularly good job of facing the cursor, and I had no idea what was happening in fights due to a lack of healthbars. There's the core of a solid risk/reward game here, choosing between buying more income or more upgrades, but there isn't enough information provided to make good decisions. Also, upgrade prices seem to persist across resets, but the upgrades themselves do not. Also, I honestly don't see the theme connection. Good work!
Really interesting ideas here, especially the cars getting bigger with more guns. I could not find a middle ground between getting wrecked in one hit and sent back to start and effortlessly un-existing all of the enemies with the plasma gun. The upgrade system favors specializing in one weapon, but as a player trying out a jam entry I'd rather be incentivized to use all the weapons so I see everything the game has to offer. Having upgrades for things other than just weapons would be nice too. The music is good, but the gun noises can get grating, especially with speed-boosted minigun/laser. Good work!
I didn't find the difficulty curve to be that bad. I liked how you could use the sweep move as a second attack. Trying to strike a balance between sweeping and fighting was fun, and the game made me think a lot about kiting and positioning. My scores were 340 (first attempt) and 680 (second). Good work!
HTML5 version is super glitchy. This was a cool sandbox to mess around in - I can only imagine what kinds of puzzles you could make with these mechanics. Good work!
Really cool individuals pieces, but this game feels unpolished. The sprites are individually cool, but the lack of animation holds back the art style. The character powers don't feel intuitive or satisfying. The 1-width gaps are a pain to navigate the character through, and there isn't enough protection against enemies spawning on you and killing you before you can react. The music is, as others have said, excellent. Good work!
I picked this up and instantly understood why the post-jam version changed the control scheme. I really like the idea here, but I had so much trouble adapting that the room size never even became an issue - I would always die beforehand. The controls really forced me the think about every movement I made, and while this certainly made the game more interesting, I don't think it made it more fun. The health indicators made sense once I realized how they worked, but they'd be more intuitive if the bars shrank as well as changed color. Good work!
Really interesting. I seem to have had an easier time getting into the mindset that the gold is a hazard than most of the people here. The different enemy types really complemented each other. The boss was cool, but it really could have used a healthbar. Good work!
Really interesting balancing act happening here. It took many attempts and some knowledge about what sorts of animals to prioritize to succeed, and I lost a couple runs due to the few liars that slipped through. It did seem a little strange when I got the "turned too many animals away" ending after losing my last morality point to a liar - perhaps that should be its own ending condition. There is a little bit of luck-of-the-draw with the animal types - bees, for example, always seem to be amazing. Also is it really lying when a chicken or dodo claims to be a 'bird'? Good work!
Very engaging. Y'all did an excellent job of cultivating the feeling of intellectual panic that comes with having to solve a technical problem with the clock ticking down. I did find a way to shenanigans part of a puzzle piece onto the red part of the bar, which caused a fatal error when I hit validate. Later, I tried to deliberately fail all three puzzles to see the worst ending, but clicking validate on the third puzzle without even touching the pieces somehow counted as passing it. The art style is excellent, especially since the characters actually changed expressions. Good work!
Like others above, I was thrown off by the lack of an enter key. I also had a lot of trouble telling the as and os in the font apart. I'm really not sure how anyone is supposed to guess the partially-revealed passwords without knowing the dictionary that the game uses. I also feel as thought the difficulty could have ramped up more quickly. There's no reason to make the player do more than one of those $500 jobs, for example. I'm curious to see what this would look like with a stronger selection of minigames.
This is a really interesting twist on the classic notion of a "typing game". I kind of wish I knew where the end was or how close I was to it, though.
I was expecting this one to lean more toward "puzzle" and less toward "precision platformer". I wish it were more clearly telegraphed what switches did and which pressure plates require two crates. The soundscape is good and atmospheric - the loudness of the footsteps relative to everything else underscores how alone you are. It's a harsh game, where one mistake can lead to a reset. There were points where I felt as though *I* was stuck in a loop doing the same jumps over and over again. I did eventually make it to the end, but, as you seemingly intended, it didn't feel like a victory.
@robowarrior1982 @rschoellgen @jamison I've uploaded a new (-window) build of the game that should be properly windowed and resizable if necessary.
I really like how the chanting and music contribute to the dark atmosphere here. The mechanic is interesting, but felt unintuitive to me. The cultists are just so slow that when I thought I was giving them time to clear an obstacle, they'd be halfway through before it triggered again. It's probably sheer luck that I stumbled my way to the last fire with one cultist left. Good work!
I think you forgot to opt out of audio fyi. Cool idea for a precision clicking puzzle. Why did the green thing kill me? What was it?
As a fellow person dumb enough to make an rts for ldjam (3 of my past entries were), I salute you. However, it did feel really awkward that units remained in place relative to each other instead of converging on one point when I issued a move order. The minimap feels low-visibility to me. I'm very confused about what the number above the money count is supposed to be. As far as actual gameplay goes, I boomed up immediately, got rushed, and then crushed the attackers with overwhelming force and dropped the hammer. Textbook. It's only a prototype, so I'm curious to know where you plan to go from here.
This feels like one of those simple, challenging mobile games that people play for hours on end. The sound effects are quite good and I really appreciate the sense of impending doom as the bar ticks down and the tako gets angrier.
I want to like this game. I love the 2D animation, and I love boss-driven games, but I just don't get this one. It doesn't feel intuitive or fair. The movement and shooting feel more like a restraint than a challenge, and the lilypads just feel random. The fish's hitboxes aren't where I expect. Most of my deaths seemed to be because I get physics'd into the fish by a lilypad. I just kept finding myself in positions where I was unable to meaningfully react to the fish's attacks, and I'm not sure how to look at the game so as to avoid getting in trouble. Also, I can confirm that the windows build works fine on my Win10.
Untitled.png Wow this game was not kidding when the castle was covered in ? marks. It's absolutely incredible that you were able to make a 3D game look this good so quickly, and I had lots of fun up until I crossed the river. After I got to the castle, things kinda went downhill. The castle is more disorienting than threatening. After I killed the king, I lost my ability to interact with objects, but I succeeded in glitching through the door, running along the mountainside, and slipping through the hills past the doom knight area. I then jumped out of the world. I'm calling that a win. Ladders are kind of jank, I had a bunch of problems with invisible walls, open-looking doors I couldn't go through, beacons not being where I expected, and not being able to step up 20-centimeter steps. Despite these flaws, this is a spectacular entry. I thought it was really great when I got to the bridge and saw all of the corpses of people who tried to cross it. Avoiding the knights was fun, though I'll admit to being disappointed I couldn't clobber them with the water barrels. Relying on shortcuts instead of checkpoints makes the player feel as though they've earned their progress and strengthens the theme. The noise when a knight notices you is absolutely on point. Well done.
Combining an endless runner with a puzzle game is a really interesting idea. It was fun seeing how my choices on one run through the loop affected subsequent loops. However, the endless runner side of the game is punishing (as endless runners usually are), so I spent a lot of time retreading ground because an execution mistake or physics bug caused my death. I think it would be helpful if the jumps were shorter and fixed-height, and if they player could see more of the environment at once.
This is a really cool idea, but I had a much easier time just button mashing my way through than trying to play properly. There should be some kind of mechanic or redesign to make it so mashing doesn't turn you into an unstoppable flying death machine. The core mechanic seems like a really great foundation for a build-your-own-fighting-style sort of game.
It's impressive how much stuff you were able to model - and how well you captured the feeling of a hopeless maze. I found all three shapes and got a blue portal, but I just ended up at the beginning and didn't know what I was supposed to do from there.
This is a really sweet design. The enemy and weapon variety is great, and I love how all the different systems intersect. It's a whole new twist on the ammo system, forcing players to think about their ammo and controlling their fire in a completely different way. The result is a game that demands more precision and planning than a normal shooter, and therefore has a slower pace. Well done!
This was a really fun, trial-and-error take on crafting. The number of useless/debilitating potions I got from crafting felt really authentic to the experience of trying to cobble something together. For the same reason, I thought seeing a potion in action and trying to figure out what it did added to the experience. I wish I hadn't had to test by trial and error that inventory pauses the game - knowing that made it much easier to react to the ghoul when it appeared, as I could safely pause and chug a haste or freeze to fend it off. This may have been a quirk of my crafting style, but I was constantly flooded with Detect Undead when I really wanted Compass - I ended up trying to use the enemy-facing compass to navigate. Later in the game, inventory space became the biggest problem. I was forced to be really mindful of which ingredients to keep. I failed my first run, but on my second attempt I was able to assemble the banishment potion. I was worried it was going to be some kind of attack and I'd have craft a second one and Lure the ghoul in, but nope. Good work!
This game looks pretty nice and feels good, but I don't understand what exactly you intend to do with the mechanic. How can the shadows interact with the world? What kinds of puzzles would this allow for? I'm curious to know more about what the full product might look like.
It feels odd to me that attack is on mouse when the position of the mouse doesn't matter. Carving through the hordes of skeletons was fun, but I didn't feel very much agency in the outcome of those fights - it seemed like the best strategy was to just mash and rush them. The storm of projectiles, however, helped in that regard. I think the game would feel better if your normal attacks moved you forward. The moment when I first saw the dungeon just filled with purple skeletons was pretty good. I was a bit surprised when I cleared the game in one attempt - I was honestly expecting endless procedurally-generated levels, but nope. Good job, and may the git gods not curse you next time.
This is really inventive. My suggestion would be to present more information to the player in more ways. Like, there should be a way to highlight which suit is next so you don't have to reference the cycle chart and your current card. Also, I would love to know how the jokers calculate the probability of moving to any given space. I think UI improvements like this would make the game faster and more fun to play without taking away from the strategy involved. Good work!
I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't find the non-fat milk. No one labeled the syrup bottles so I guess this customer is getting some extra flavors. My cup is stuck. I can't move it so let's reset. Oh no I dumped my tip jar in the coffee there goes my hard-earned 19 cents. You know what? This guy is getting a cup of alcohol and gummy bears because I can't find the caramel. Who even cares? I'm going to stick an entire pumpkin in this cup just watch me.
5/5 mood.
I was really hoping someone would build a good game around the idea that "stuck in a loop" is something to be inflicted on an adversary rather than the player's state of being, and you have delivered. Horror and puzzles fit together naturally. I see that not everyone was able to figure out the basic mechanic, but I will say that the breakable rock mechanic is very intuitive once you get to it. The death animation and sound, if anything are a little *too* creepy - they certainly made me want to not die. For some reason I really felt that I could dodge the monster in a one-tile hallway, despite all evidence to the contrary - making the creature wider would clarify its hitbox. I'm glad I was able to play this with headphones. It was very satisfying hearing the monster dash through a portal and crash into rocks in the distance. Excellent work!
This turned out to be a "hold a button and run in circles" sort of game. I never felt as though I had any idea how much health I or the crystals had remaining. As noted above, it's confusing that you don't start with a weapon equipped. Having three guns was interesting, but, with the exception of the small enemies, it seemed to me that 2/3-shotting everything with the rocket was the way to go. I like the idea of locking the player into an irregular-shaped path, but it needs more mechanical support. Still, good work!
Finally a game for people who circle strafe. The strong enemy variety does include some types that punish or restrict circle-strafing, but I feel as though such an enemy should have turned up earlier to put pressure on the player from the beginning. Aside from that, this is a fun, straightforward game. Good work!
This game is great, but the gameplay feels like it sabotages itself. The actual combat is fun - killing enemies is very satisfying and it feels like I have to actually plan my approach for each enemy. The cleanup after combat is less fun. I appreciate the idea that you have to make sure the coast is clear before collecting currency, but I don't think the process needed to be two steps. I think siphoning up souls would feel much better if you didn't cripple your movement. Actually, I'd be much happier with the mechanic if I just had to push one button to pull in all of the souls on the screen. Also, the explosion upgrade feels really double-edged. Watching enemies go flying off the screen or into the water is fun until you realize you can't claim those souls. The 2D animation is absolutely on point. It feels really smooth and helps sell the visual gags.
Really cool idea, if kind of jank in execution. I spent a few minutes trying to cheese the final puzzle with dumb physics shenanigans before realizing that there was a perfectly rational, non execution-dependent solution. The audio cues for the interactive elements were well done, but I wish there were good visual cues as well, particularly telegraphing which switch does what. I felt pretty smart when I finished, so I'd say you did pretty well on the puzzle front.
I really don't know what the rhythm mechanic was supposed to be. My gun felt awkward and unpredictable and I have no idea how it was supposed to correlate with any kind of rhythm. The enemy encounters seemed really hard until I saw the persistent corpses and correctly inferred that the enemies don't loop - anything I kill before resetting stays dead. Since health isn't really a concern, that turns the game into a simple war of attrition, which, with the healing from the bottle, I was guaranteed to win. I was more concerned with aiming and my feeble attempts to not waste shots than avoiding the enemies. The non-linear treasure acquisition is a good structure, but I think it would have worked better with 4 gameplay treasures and then a last act or final boss for players to use all the different abilities. I did have fun playing this, though. Killing enemies felt good and I was really curious about what each treasure would be.
This rocks. It's satisfying in a very visceral way. A couple minutes in I stacked three cowboys on a stick of dynamite and thought *this is sweet*. Why can I jump? What does that buy me? Is a cowboy who works with pigs a pigboy? I've lost the plot but good job with your game.
I really like stuff where the player controls one person or a small group and there's a huge allied force. This one, however, feels pretty sluggish. It takes a long time for anything to happen, and most of the player's time is spent running back for supplies. For this idea to work, the player needs to be in a position to make strategic decisions about where to allocate their unit. Here, for all the player's autonomy in moving around the map, they're just another grunt. Assembling this many rts mechanics in 13 hours is very impressive though - I wonder what this could have been if you'd had the full 72. Good work!
I really like the core mechanic here. It's simple, but leads to interesting gameplay as you're forced to decide which areas of the screen to control. I surrendered half the screen, and then lost more and more space until I got boxed into a tiny column, scoring 178 on my second attempt. The bear's movement feels strangely slippery - probably in part because there's no walk animation. Good work!
I really like how the game builds tension with audio cues while providing safe havens. I really don't like how I can't see anything, especially when the thing I can't see is "the monster coming".
In the grass level, the smaller rocks didn't look like they ought to be path blockers (too small), and yet they were. Web fullscreen didn't work on my Firefox, so I ended up using 200% browser zoom instead. A lot of the enemies kinda felt the same. Aside from the fire enemies, they either run at you or stand and shoot single bullets. It would be more interesting to have enemies with noticeably different speeds and movement/projectile patterns. Having enemies flash and/or get knocked back when hit and explode on death would work wonders. Still, it's a working game with good music and a lot of decent-looking assets, so I'd say you did a good job.
This game looks really cool. I hated having to mash the fire button to get anything done, and I really felt as though I was fighting against the power bar instead of the monsters. I only saw the death/upgrades screen at all because I died on purpose. The power bar is an interesting idea, but I think as it is it's, in principle, really easy to end up in death spiral mode. Also, I tried wandering too far away from start and had all kinds of weird geometry glitches. Still, good work!
The battle mechanics felt kind of opaque to me. There was one battle where I was just mashing two of my mons into the last enemy, which had a sliver of health, but my team just kinda died and accomplished nothing. Having some kind of color-coded aura on the mons would be helpful. Also, I think slowing down the movement would give the player more time to react and plan the battle. I really wish the abilities were hotkeyed so I could use them without directing focus away from the battle. I really like where you're going with this - in fact, I've wanted to do something similar for a while, so I wish you the best of luck with the larger project.
I definitely don't feel like I every really got a good feel for how my attacks worked or why I should ever stop moving when all the enemies are shooting at where I was instead of where I was going. That said, this is one of the most visually stunning games I have ever seen in an LDJAM. Good job.
It's gorgeous, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I certainly wasn't able to collect a single fruit, and I have no idea how to get good enough to do so, or use the controls properly at all. There's a cool idea here though, and the water ripples are a nice touch.
This one was fun. I like the randomness because it forced me to learn the mechanics (particularly how to react to the oxygen crisis) instead of simply memorizing the correct route. It's cool how there's sort of a succession of pressing needs that you have to respond to while patching everything up. I like how the ending is "you escaped the loop" and then I click and the game drops me back in the loop.
The movement feels slippery, traveling through pipes is too slow, and I'm not really sure how to get back up from the sword area without dying. I appreciate how forgiving it is, though. The boss would have been easier to figure out if the projectiles changed color when hit.
I would prefer it if the best strategy for the final boss were to fight like a proper warrior instead of hiding behind a rock, but I guess Boris is a hunter. This is a very creative idea, and I'm glad I played it all the way through.
This game looks and feels really good. My one big complaint about it is that the room difficulty felt really uneven. The room with the pits and the ranged enemies was dramatically more difficult than any other room type offered, and getting it when the head was closing in, especially multiple times in a row, felt like a death sentence. All of the other rooms were much more straightforward. The boss at the end was fun, though it leaned a little too hard on adds. I really like the aesthetic decisions here. Good work!
This game doesn't really stick the player in a loop, but I had a lot of fun trying to line up the perfect shots. The sound effect when the ship is launched is excellent. The restart button made it tricky to remember where my last shot was, so I had to try to eyeball it based on where the stars were. There's a solid mix of precision and timing here. Good work!
Exactly as advertised. A simple, elegant twin-stick with good enemy variety and a high skill cap. Fairly basic in some respects, but what's there is fun and feels complete. Good work!
This is a really interesting idea. I think it would be really helpful to have some kind of indicator of where the orc is. It's hard to know how much time you need to spend running before you can safely start setting a trap. Having the orc be a huge unknown would be great for a horror game, but this one seems to be trying for an arcade-fantasy sort of feel. It would be good QoL to have the trap not completely reset if you leave, or allowed the player to move while setting. The orc's vertical hitbox is way too big. I found myself getting killed while the orc was offscreen because I put on too much vertical distance. The potions are absolutely opaque. Some effects are obvious (improved view), but there was one potion that made me transparent and I had no idea what it was for (the answer is in one of the screenshots above lol). Another one gave me flight and I died before I could work out the flight controls. Hexes, on the other hand, consistently made perfect sense. My first win took about 3 minutes, so I'm sorry to say I'm not in the running for the highscore. Good work!
I really wish I could hold down the mouse button to shoot instead of having to mash it.
For what it's worth, the whole "learning on each loop" part of the design worked for me. I really felt like I had to learn the mechanics to make it to the end. The false paths felt bad when I ran down them, but at least I learned to avoid them. Usually, flying around with wrench recoil is much easier than attempting to operate the normal movement controls, but sometimes staying on the ground or wallsliding can make an area easier and faster. It feels awkward to me to have ASD controls and then jump on spacebar when W isn't being used for anything. The idea of "realistic" movement in a platformer felt brain-bending. I'm so used to being able to change direction midair. Having a time limit on a game like this is kinda harsh, but it keeps things moving and creates great moments of panic.
This is a great puzzle game. It took me a while to fully understand the mechanics, but I don't think there's a better way to learn them than by using them. A lot of loops just involve moving to a location and then standing there/shooting a target, and I kinda wish there were a way to make that process less tedious. Still, this is an exemplary use of the theme to create a complete, innovative experience.
My bloodbath came to a rather abrupt end at 286,640 points, I'm sorry to say. I did one test run to learn the mechanics, bailed because I realized I mucked it up, and then came back and got that run. It seems like a strategy game, but I feel like the key to getting a really good score is sheer reflexes and apm. ...so exactly like an RTS. I applaud you for making a roller coaster game for people who kill people in roller coaster games.
You certainly made a challenge platformer all right. Pretty sure I died more to the blue turrets than the "smart" ones. That bit with the thwomp smashing the start is just plain rude, especially since the physics kinda break down and make it really painful to escape the death loop. This one is hard, but I did stumble across the finish line.
I found this to be ... extremely disorienting. My first few attempts I could barely parse what was going on, particularly because I thought all four directions were potential threats. Once I realized that I only needed to care about two directions, things got much easier, but I never really got a good sense of what was happening spatially and how I needed to move to avoid/contact the bars. On my good stretches, I think I understood what you were going for. When I was on a roll, the game felt really cool. Unfortunately, I never got to the point where I could make it through round 1 consistently, let alone round 2.
Absolutely sublime. The energy meter that slowly drains shaped my entire approach to the game, and I think that made it a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been.
I found 4/7 miners and then just had absolutely no idea where the rest of them were. Some kind of indicator would have been helpful. Lifting off the ground didn't feel good - I would have liked more acceleration or some kind of initial boost.
Interesting. It's really rng-heavy, but there's a skill to mitigating the risk. Definitely feels bad to just lose gear though. Combat feels smooth, but I'm not at all convinced that the heavy attack is worth it.
If you were aiming for horror than you missed. The bright music, non-threatening enemies, and unlimited ammo give it much more of an arcade feel. The only thing I worried about was getting blindsided by enemies, which happened 7 times. The threat level didn't really escalate, so I thought I was just going to die to attrition, but then the game just kind of decided that I had killed enough and handed me a victory screen. The graphics are solid and the gunfire effect, though minimal, felt good.
I like the interlocking balance of systems, but I really wish I had tighter control over what my miners actually do. Mine kept mining the wrong rocks or getting killed or wandering off in random directions because I couldn't micro them properly.
I really like the concept here, and the execution certainly sells the premise. However, I found it too annoying to be fun. In particular, I hate that bloody alarm clock. It feels awful to control. The game is certainly memorable and effective, but I'm going to let Chuck solve his own problems next time. My ranks were, in order, Bronze Bronze Silver Gold Gold Silver Silver, which I think reflects my acclimation process and then the difficulty curve kicking in.
I bounced on this one. I really like the idea and some of the mechanics, but I have two main issues with it. First: all the waiting time is completely unnecessary and just made me bored. Second, the game gave me absolutely no indication for what any of the numbers actually meant. With no knowledge of the combat mechanics, I had no idea how to optimize anything or judge risks. I was just flying blind and praying the dice fell in my favor. I could click buttons to make my numbers go up, but I had no indication of why any of them mattered. I'd at least like to have more detailed combat results than "your characters took x damage".
This is art.
I think having a normal camera here would have been better than making it an autoscroller. I'm rather fond of the spinny sharks though.
I'm happy to finally see something linux-native today. This was really fun and it was satisfying to see the meditating graphic pop up. Since you declined the music category, does that mean the music is from somewhere else? I was a little confused by the requirement of "use all 7s". It took me a couple minutes to realize that it meant that all 3 7s must be featured in my equation, not that I somehow had to make every number into a 7. There are certainly ways to run up the score, but it feels satisfying to notice that you're in a position to do so. But why do we want a high score in a game that's golf-themed? That's exactly the opposite of how golf works! My immersion!
None of the individual elements of this game particularly blew me away, but the variety of content offered balances the lack of polish on individual mechanics. I really appreciated the use of optional secret upgrades to encourage exploration. Shooting enemies normally did not feel worth it, but maybe that's just because I missed the shot upgrade. Having dash go toward mouse instead of in the current movement direction felt unituitive to me.
This was really cool. I love how it forces you to adopt an actual hunting technique instead of just blindly chasing things. After a large number of attempts, I did beat the boss. The trick is that it is hurt by jellyfish, but only while dashing and it doesn't stop the dash. So you have to use your boost to keep the jellyfish ball between you and the boss and make sure not to get hit when it rushes you. It's not really intuitive that jellyfish only damage the boss while dashing, which certainly increased the length of time it took me to figure all that out. Beating this one felt good.
I bounced pretty hard on this one. The inverted controls were in no way intuitive to me, and I ended up spending far more time watching the unskippable opening than playing the game. I think I'm just going to consider the secret ending my canon run.
I really like how limiting the player's movement changes the basic dynamic of Minesweeper. I played at late'o'clock my time, which probably influenced my decision to play this as a risk-management game instead of a logical deduction game. It feels like it could go on for a really long time if you stop to think everything through. Fortunately, unlike Minesweeper, there is room for error, so it's okay to take a few risks.
This game has hells of aesthetic, but I wish I could see what was below me.
I really liked the voice acting and sound design here. I got a bit frustrated with the gameplay, since I didn't always feel that I had time to react to the rock formations. I lost a bunch of runs to the second section, and then nailed the third on my first try. The ending is really well done.
Not gonna lie I cheated to get all of the upgrades. The teleport is absurdly expensive and without it the travel times are agonizing. This game really would have benefited from a faster and sharper upgrade progression. Everything you get should change the way you approach the game.
:bug: /5 would :bug: again.
The art is, as basically everyone else has noted, very good. I really like the spring jump - I never thought pressing down to jump would feel so natural. I'm less happy with the super-jump, which feels way too fast. There isn't very much to do, but mad points for aesthetic.
Man, anime characters make this look so much easier.
Really atmospheric. The tank controls are awful, though. I felt like I was fighting my control scheme more than I was fighting the enemies. I played about 8 times and didn't manage to bring down a single enemy. Also some doors seemed to open to blackness and if I went in I'd get softlocked. Dunno what was up with that.
Excellent use of lighting. I like how the bodies of my slain enemies just float in the water. The ending felt a bit sudden. I think The Sharks deserved more screen time.
You certainly nailed the feeling of being scared in a dark forest. I had a lot of fun trying to balance my fear level, forward progress, and not dying, and was able to clear in my first try with ~79% fear. Fighting fear really felt like a losing battle, which forced me to move forward.
Definitely a fan of the aesthetic here. Fighting on foot seems really hard, and it's easy to just get wrecked in space and not have a good ship to jump to. I wish there were some sense of progression, but otherwise the idea and execution are really cool.
I'm glad to see another inkscape artist. I don't think the levels needed to contain as much space as they did - I felt that I spent a lot of time waiting for my sub to transit from one place to another. In particular, returning from the cable to the start point seemed purposeless to me, since by that point I had already killed the enemies, so I was just killing time. Fighting when I can only shoot forward is awkward, but I think it's a reasonable way to reward people for using stealth or tactical retreat instead of taking fights. Health pickups were so generous that I never felt I was in danger, though. Good work!
It's a really cool idea, and the execution proves that even simple effects can make the dark creepy. However, the respawning trees meant that I didn't feel any threat except the possibility of running into mobs in the dark. After 5 minutes of managing my steadily-growing flame I called it and just walked into the forest. I like how the enemies can briefly survive in the light - as though to prove your lack of safety. Good work!
@frib @brandless good job! I knew we'd have some "winners" in here since I screwed up the endgame balance. Honestly if you make it to wave 50 that counts as a win but eventually you will always get bored and leave. Thus your defeat is InEvITabLE.
@theblitz I have never owned a Mac and have absolutely no idea if that build works.
Went to 630 on attempt 1. It was fun experimenting with towers, but it's definitely not obvious what does what and the answer is apparently "XW2 spam is blatantly superior to everything". This game sets a good arcadey tone, but the sheer number of sound effects later on causes the audio to become a distorted hellscape. That last wave - you were not messing around with the "inevitable" part. I think any improvements on that are most likely gonna be marginal but who knows? Maybe someone will hit 700. GG
sin.png
Actual footage of me trying to ascend to heaven. Yeah I got stuck like this and just had to wait for the darkness thing to tick down. After a few attempts I managed to set the bar at 78. It seems possible to go indefinitely so I expect to see that beaten several times over. This is super cool and I wonder if some bored person is gonna show up and set the bar at like 1000.
Really cool idea. I made it to 6 on attempt 1 and 10 on attempt 2 - given that the puzzles seem to be pcg with chains of prefab elements, I think having the game knowledge to quickly and efficiently solve every puzzle in the game is the key to doing really well here. The movement feel seems a little off to me. I'm a big far of the music design - in particular, the panic music as the game is about to end. Well done!
This is a super cool idea. I like the little grunts the dudes make when they die. It's not really obvious why enemies choose to attack beyond "they've been around for too long???", so deaths don't really feel fair. Furthermore, enemy placement RNG seems to be a significant factor in success. I won at 23 turns / 53 kills. Eventually. Good work!
Good fundamentals, but after playing for 4 minutes I concluded that the game was basically unlosable except by human error. The floaty jump is very generous, and there doesn't really seem to be a difficulty curve increase. I think this game would be greatly improved by some pressure to add a sense of urgency. I also think a sense of urgency would improve our response to global warming irl but that's not really something I expect to change in the world when someone makes a video game.
Imagine dying right near the end, tilting out, and then spending like 8 minutes trying to make it back there. Yup, it's that kind of game. I felt like it needed checkpoints until I realized how short it actually was. It's difficult to move with precision since the controls are so floaty, but once I nailed down how to airdash the correct direction it all came together. The dash effects feel pretty good. The timer is very loose, to say the least. I finished with more than 3:40 on the clock which is more than I started with.
It's a cool idea. It looks good. Controlling two characters feels surprisingly nice. But did I have fun doing it? No. Aiming boosters feels frustrating and my hand hurts from trying to button mash. I don't feel like I can effectively gauge how much time I have left because the asteroid is powered by Physics and idk why it happens to be more aggressive at some time than others. Still, good work!
This game took a few tries for me to acclimate to, but once I got into it the basic gameplay loop felt really good. With good upgrades, you can be basically stable, but there's still a sense of risk because of the possibility of player mistakes (getting hit) or rng screw (ice shards). The ice shard despawns are really unforgiving. Usually when I see a shard I can't even get to it before it despawns. Since the difficulty escalates as the planet gets hotter, missing shards due to rng can easily spiral into a loss. I'm glad I was able to pull together the win on this one though.
This game has incredible aesthetic. I wish there were more content so I could enjoy it for longer. I beat it in 1 attempt / 89 seconds. One observation I have is that I found myself looking at the minimap more than the main screen, and I feel like that distracted me from looking at the rest of the assets y'all made. The basic gameplay feels really good - I like how the vehicle controls. Good work!
ps i played in firefox
This is super cool, but I think my run bugged out. I was having to wait nearly a minute for each new adventurer to show up and that seems far too long.
Oh nice, a pico-8 game! I like the retro feel here. It really feels like you made exactly what you set out to create here. I got 95 on my first try, and walked away with a very clear sense that my failures were failures of my own skill. The mechanics may me simple, but I think there's a lot of execution depth here.
Not gonna lie I definitely saw "vomit pussy" on the list and had to find out what in god's name it was. And I think dealing with this one is beyond me. I can't even make it to the halfway point. I got all of the cats into the bathroom, but then I had to throw cats out of the way to get to the vomit. And then they all ran away and things got worse. It feels exactly like you're trapped in a box with a pile of filth-spewing animals. I'd rather not have to spam-click in games, but I suppose that's a matter of taste and design. Gonna have flashbacks to this if I ever contemplate becoming a Cat Lady. Good work!
Really fun and innovative concept! This really would have benefited from a more tutorial-like intro - the one that exists is very intimidating even though the solution is simple. There's little guidance as to where to go, either. It took me a long time to realize that I could go up to reveal more area. I eventually got the pink piece, but I failed what I'm pretty sure was the very last section and I don't feel like replaying the entire thing from the beginning just to get back there. Excellent work!
Unfortunately, the game bugged out in a bunch of different ways for me so I don't think I really got the intended experience. Repeating dialogue, customers stopping and never showing up, customers leaving before I could physically make a drink for them... Even before that, I really ended up feeling like I should just write a bot to play the game more efficiently than I could, and then I made my character into a bot that just delivers the same drink eternally. Still better than some irl jobs.
I can't believe it - so many karens in the store that reality itself started to lag. I suppose they're going to be speaking to reality's manager after this. Can I just take this nerf gun and shoot the ceo instead?
This is an interesting idea, but I don't feel like I understood the rules of it. Enemies would take damage or not take damage, they would do things or sit there doing nothing, and I never understood why. Couldn't make it past the third guy since I couldn't figure out how to deal damage to them consistently.
I read the guide before playing. It helped. A bit. I don't think the game gives me enough information/feedback to make effective decisions - it could at least tell me what my decisions even did. The atmosphere is great though.
This is a good foundation for an endless runner - I really got into the flow of things after spending many attempts nailing down the timings (you gotta drop the locker when you're on it so it doesn't hit *you*). Stacking backpacks on lockers is dirty. And then the dude just kind of caught up with me. I executed perfectly and then the principal decided to stop holding back and became sanic hedgedog. Inevitable indeed. Also, the music is very somber, which seems unfitting for the scenario. Something either frantic or comic would do a much better job of setting the mood. Setting this scenario at an art school got a smile out of me, though.
Got to 37 on attempt 2. I love it when I send gifts to kingdoms and they get mad at me. This is very fun - definitely some work to do on understanding the full consequences of everything that happens. I found myself snap-decapitating some poor bastard as my kingdom collapsed around me, so I think this design worked pretty well.
Very cool concept. I liked having to adapt my strategy on the fly as the game handed me different weapons. Cypon seemed insurmountable at first, but the power spike with the high-tier bullet upgrades is huge. The shield seemed like a burden at first, but being able to separate Cypon from the crowd proved very useful. Upgrading it seems pointless, though. Good work!
Very cool idea. I like picking augmentations and seeing the enemy cards stack. My main complaint is that the game feels unreadable. It's hard to tell what things do what or know what the enemies do. Things kind of blend together. I like how frantic it feels, though. There's a lot of pressure to get things done quickly. Good work!
This game looks really cool, though it takes a moment to orient oneself. There's a lot of content, excellent dialogue, and interesting mechanics. I do wish I spent less time fighting encounters of just The Same Zombie Forever, and my one death didn't feel fair - not much you can do when the game just decides to turn off your healer. That said, you definitely sold me on the antagonist enough that fighting her felt meaningful. Good job!
Whoa. I love the twist.
Okay that camera flip is just rude. This is a very cool idea for a game, but in practice it's very disorienting.
Took a bit to get the hang of, but very fun once I got rolling. Thankfully, the deeper tasks felt easier than the early ones - but maybe I just understood how to interact with the game at that point. Good job and glory to the blood gods.
I was not expecting the key to just be delivered directly to me
Really interesting and fun. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this. It's a game that expects both methodical planning and twitch reflexes, though fortunately it gives a lot of leeway. The sounds have understated weight to them and the graphics are clean, if minimalist. I found the mouse control a little sluggish, like my sensitivity was being held back. I liked how I was able to sort of 'conquer' areas of the map by dashing behind enemy lines leaving a wake of turrets. Good work!
@sirikan ...Apparently I just didn't upload the right thing 😳. The new link should work.
@sirikan @hare-software @lost-dutchman-software @incobalt Thanks for your feedback!
@goat-toaster-games The character concept is the entire reason I picked this over my other game ideas.
@tomdeal I really should have thought of that while I was hastily throwing together the title screen.
@fitz13 I'm not sure that changing the key will do it, but I agree that there's room for improvement with the punching. The funny thing about the theme is that I think this is also a better use of LD39's theme than my actual LD39 game.
@colin-misbach I also wish I'd been able to put in audio and more content, but time limits and life got in the way. Did you last long enough to see the red UFOs? It takes about 150 seconds before one shows up.
@slashee-the-cow Unless you're flirting with the edge of the screen too much, I'm as mystified as you.
@Deprecat is exactly on the mark here. The art style of this game is very strong, but the feedback given to the player isn't as strong as it could. The game feels more tense than satisfying, though the music is certainly an appropriate choice for a highschool dance. It's fun watching the big people freak out and chase you if you hit one of them - less so if you're trying to get away and there's just a wall of people. Good work!
I really like the idea here. The graphics are nice, the music sets the mood, and it looks cool when your whole line of guys crashes into the enemies. Personally engaging in combat didn't feel so good, though, as it was tricky to fight without getting hit and the lack of a health indicator made every fight feel like flirting with death. It would also be nice to have cost indicators for the player units instead of having to determine them empirically. Still, it's always fun to see strategy games in LD. Good work!
I always like to see people trying rts-type things in LD. I like the basic idea here and the stylized art. I agree with @G4MR about features to add, but am also compelled to point out that there should be stronger controls for your knights - at the very least I want to be able to select and move a group of knights instead of having to select and move each one individually. Good work!
That happened. Wasn't expecting that options button. The controls felt a little awkward, but there's some serious optimization work here for the interested. Good work!
An interesting idea supported by a strong art style and fitting music. It took me a few tries to figure out the jump timing - the vertical movement feels a little on the fast side. The crates felt much more significant than the other items because missing a field/cow/chicken only counts for rank, but a crate can force a reset. Once I had the timing, I managed a four star rating - with some practice I could probably get the 5. I liked the intro/outro text too. Good work!
This was fun and challenging. It took me embarrassingly long to realize that I could deal with the ball getting stuck by just sort of walking over and grabbing it. Because there is vertical movement in this game. Took me until the third level to notice. I like the clear definition of the different levels of charge and how they interact with the different enemy types. Predicting where the ball would end up was tricky, so I was thankful for the 'moving charge' upgrade. Good work!
I like where you're going with this. It's unfortunate that you didn't really have time to do anything with the CCG, so the result is more of a general space strategy game than a space strategy card game. The graphics are reasonably good for a jam game and I'm impressed by how well the jukedeck music fits. The cooldowns seem more restrictive than the fuel, meaning that the game is more about positioning ships and attacks than it is about deciding which cards to throw. Still, it was fun and I would be very interested in seeing a post-compo version.
I really like the idea here. The wounds that slow down the player's deck and limit their options do remind me of curse-heavy Dominion games, but the lose condition itself feels a bit too random. Fortunately for me, that randomness worked in my favor and I won two of the four fights because my opponent drew into three wounds first despite being behind on total wound count. I did often feel limited in options, especially when I drew into two wounds or a hand with no attack/move. Maybe a bigger hand size would help with that. The final black opponent seemed weaker than the others - it didn't seem to have as much of a cohesive strategy. Points for making a game that incorporates both card game mechanics and fighting game-style reads. Good work!
Nice work! I was initially skeptical about the top-down platforming, but it actually worked reasonably well after I got the hang of it. It took me more work to understand how the game communicated platform height - it took me something like half a dozen attempts to get through the penultimate level because I tried to make jumps that didn't work because the target platform was too high up. The boss fights were cool visually and aurally. I kept getting caught off guard by the speed of their attacks, but I dodged enough that I was able to dps them down before they killed me. Playing the 1.0 version I beat the crab boss in two attempts and the other two on my first try. The controls felt awkward in that I needed to keep track of WASD for rotating, arrows for strafing movement, and two other buttons for jumping and attacking. It would be simpler to have a single stafing button, rotation tied to shooting, or mouseaim with right click for jump. Boss health bars would also be nice. I love boss fights and therefore support the idea of a boss-focused post-jam version of this.
I like the juxtaposition between the romance story and all the heads on pikes. I succeeded in all three romances despite never actually figuring out the reaction indicators. The text speed is a bit on the slow side, and I was a little thrown off by the 'you're afraid/you're admirative' type choices where they described the player's reactions rather than statements. That got me in a little trouble with Agna when I thought I was calling her out and just ended up shaking in fear. The character portraits are sweet and the level of narrative content is exceptionally high for an LD game. Good work!
I appreciate the ambition here, but this could do with a bit more polish. Memorizing a long list of ingredients and then trying to figure out which things drop which things on tight time limit would be easier if it didn't take me a full minute to find any enemies at all, only to get swamped a minute later. It's hard to even check what enemies drop since the swarm of enemies demands a fighting retreat. The lack of feedback and knockback in combat make it feel dull. The charming character design and good concept speak in your favor, but the implementation is unfinished. Good work!
Cool idea, but I'm honestly a little confused. I never really understood why card interactions like 'the wrestlers crash directly into each other' would happen. Damage-dealing felt luck-based, especially with the aerial moves, and I never really understood the mechanics behind the submission holds. In my first run the second opponent took me down from nearly full health with a submission move. Though the gameplay felt opaque, the bells sounded good and the textual storytelling was on point. It woud've been cool to have narrative commentary along with move descriptions. Good work!
That was certainly interesting. I like the art style and character design, though I kinda wish there had been some animation of the fighting. For some reason, the music played through only my left headphone even though I could hear the sound effects through both. I think the high volume of defensive cards works against the gameplay - in one of my matches, I ended up with a hand containing four separate copies of the 'guard' card and as far as I can remember my opponent played Vengeful Lunge and nothing else. Draft or preconstructed decks would add more depth, but I think the game would also be improved by more complicated card effects that take the game away from the rock-paper-scissors that it currently is. Good work!
I think you're right on the money with your self-assessment - this game is unpolished, but feature-rich. I found myself scrambling to balance protecting the house with running around trying to grab items. Landing good shots with the bow was tricky, but rewarding when I got it right. I never understood the point of the fire arrows though. There are a lot of items and controls that get thrown at the player all at once where a more polished game would introduce them more gradually. I appreciate the amount of content you tried to cram in and would love to see a post-compo version.
After some experimentation, I have come to the conclusion that I am a terrible shot. This is a great idea, though - I laughed a little just reading the weapon descriptions. I wish I'd had a more involved course, though - pushing the ball along a featureless desert got a bit old. Also, it seems odd to me that the ball doesn't collide at all with rocks. I understand that otherwise it would get stuck, but it's a bit tricky trying to get the ball out from inside a rock. I am very thankful that you included the tab-to-locate-ball feature. Good work!
@Lost Dutchman Software I figured that was how the stage got picked but I rolled desert four times in a row and gave up on getting the grass.
@Lost Dutchman Software Got it on my 6th attempt.
Really interesting idea, but I just can't seem to get the hang of it. The punching controls feel fine, but the viewport feels too small to make good judgments amount where I'm going to land and it's alarmingly easy to end up going nowhere useful or get stuck on a platform. Several times I found myself stuck on top of a platform and none of my buttons, including middle mouse, would get me. I give you credit for creating reasonbly good visuals and audio, though. Good work!
5/5 would listen to screams again. It was really fun knocking the enemies around and trying to set up goal shots. However, it was frustrating when the ball would get stuck under an enemy since then I would just be waiting for death. If soccer were more like this I would watch more of it. Good work!
I'm forced to agree on that count. This game feels basically incomplete. I showed up and shot a bunch of fish, which earned me points, and when I went to the top of the screen with or without a fish I would get a fish info page and no way to go back into the game except through the main menu. I'm not really sure what the point was.
Nice. I like how the combat is tuned so that units can deal damage even when outnumbered. The death effects are well done, especially the visceral impact of the artillery barrage and the explosions on the ~~money pinatas~~ tanks. However, there was also a good deal of monotony in between tank encounters and waiting for the difficulty to ramp up. After a few early deaths trying to hold the furthest trench out, I stacked 40-50 men in the second trench and held up to wave 96. I might have been able to hold longer if I'd been smarter with artillery and ignored barbed wire. Good work!
I like the idea here, but this feels pretty bare-bones. The 'rts' mechanic is more of a route-selection than a true RTS, and I'm not seeing a connection between what happens on the map and in the gameplay. Forging that connection somehow would be the most important thing to add to this game, though making enemies that can realistically threaten a player who isn't out of ammo would be a close second. Still, good work!
Simple, but elegant. I'm going to have to dock you on theme on the grounds that I don't see any incompatibility between war and making money. I liked the arrow graphics, too. My first attempt was 277 s / 3781 units. Good work!
I'm surprised that people keep trying to use WASD controls for this when arrow keys work much better. The game is visually and conceptually cool, and throwing enemies at other enemies is fundamentally entertaining. However, I agree with @DeadPotato that combat doesn't feel quite as satisfying as it could. The weak x attack seems pointless, and it's not always clear why actions do or don't score points. The score indicator told me I had 100000+ points when I killed the boss, but the win screen said my score was 0. Also, the boss really could have used some kind of health indicator. All that said, I really like what you're doing here. Good work!
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I like the idea of bringing 3d invaders into a highscore arcade game, and the music and feel match up with that idea. However, I think I found a problem with the enemy design. I just parked myself in the bottom right corner and nothing could get past my sword. I played until I got the 5400 points screenshotted above, then suicided because I was bored and the difficulty wasn't going up. Things got a bit strange after a while - fairies would crash into each other on their own and score large domino chains and by the end I had three fairies that were just kind of flapping around in the foreground instead of descending on the stage. Regardless, good work!
Excellent use of the theme. I love this implementation of the beat'em-up X card game because it's not just a card game about fighting - it's a card game with a brutally fast arcade tempo. It's challenging to remember where the cards you need are and to drag and drop them quickly enough to beat the meter, making for a technically demanding game. This is exacerbated by the fact that sitting idle causes the player's hand to fill up with cards, making it even harder to find the one you actually want, let alone click and drag it out. The result is a very tangibly skill-based exercise. Tellingly, I visibly improved across my four or five attempts. At first I was only able to stand still firing wildly into the enemy lines, but on my winning run I deftly danced through enemy formations. Difficult as it is to control, you are very much on to something here. I'd like to see this as a post-compo or full release.
Really nice idea here. The character model is remarkably good given LD constraints and I always like to see inhuman-looking angel designs. Gameplay-wise, the platforming felt a bit awkward and punishing, exacerbated by the fact that Unreal Engine games never ever run well on my system. The hitboxes were a bit odd, too - I would often watch my sword pass right through an angel for no damage and then smack right into the thing. Still, I eventually got the hang of the mechanics and cleared the game on my second attempt. The slow choral music goes well with the slow, calculated pace of the gameplay. Good work!