Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Poorwill
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Strange Platinum | compo | 728 | 3.02 | 2.94 | 3.47 | 3.39 | 2.91 | 2.22 | 2.63 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Sleeping Titanium | compo | 343 | 3.38 | 3.30 | 2.97 | 3.48 | 3.27 | 2.23 | 2.84 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Heavy Gold | compo | 332 | 3.39 | 3.41 | 3.00 | 3.60 | 3.42 | 3.19 | 2.50 | 2.89 |
A beautiful game. A little bit more sense and reason and it would be a major hook for me.
I reached a point where the workers kind of seemed to have broken down mentally and kept running around while I gave them actual tasks. Otherwise the game seems to have some pretty respectable AI.
Nice high risk high reward game mechanic.
Good sense of atmosphere and beautiful music. I was missing a sprint button but that might just be my chronic impatience.
It's pretty but the coins don't reset after starting a new game.
Nice responsive controls and fun gameplay.
Nice minimalistic artstyle. Everything manages to convey exactly what they are with very few pixels. The minimalistic AI also does it's job very well, the cats sometimes miss, the robins sometimes flutter around. It all creates some nice emergent gameplay.
It's really fun. I think you hit the theme very well and the curved road adds so much to the gameplay. Also the graphics is the best possible version of "programmer art" in my opinion. Good job!
Great game. Makes me wish for an actual release with slightly deeper gameplay, more idols, story etc.
Really a top notch entry.
Nicely polished - I feel that's one of the hardest thing to do in Ludum Dare. The intro is also nice, most games just throw you in willy-nilly.
I got a bug where I went to the dishwasher with dirty dishes and watched the previous ones get clean, I couldn't put the dirty ones in or take the clean ones out.
Solid idea though! If there were more minigames to juggle with, it could be a really awesome game.
Good effort! The disappearing tail of something going around the corner was well made. I feel the anxiety effect was too intense, putting you half-way through the floor and all - kind of broke immersion. Also asylums are a well worn out theme for horror games. There's a game jam dedicated to making horror games that aren't about mental health issues and the **asylum** (Asylum Jam).
The art of the terminals and the core idea are really nice. It already seems like a world you could kind of immerse yourself into. Although I felt the gameplay itself was a little too unresponsive and buggy still.
It does get slightly too hectic and intense with the visuals and it's hard to decipher what's what at times, but it's really a very beautiful and fun game.
I was disappointed that I couldn't hit some of the guys with the coffee, but all and all it was an enjoyable fun little experience.
Nice well polished and fun game. I really appreciate the deep message. In my opinion it's a stellar example of a good Ludum Dare compo entry.
It's great. Beautiful polish, nice graphics, very fun gameplay, good audio. It just ticks all the boxes.
What engine did you use to make it?
Nice use of theme.
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Nice progression on the difficulty and a well polished game!
Flying the ship is really fun and the models and the filter are pretty. The difficulty doesn't really go up that much though while playing, I wish there was something else that also "got worse" when you "had more".
I really like that you connected the different resources. I really hoped the skeletons would somehow attack the dogs though.
Nice spin on this type of game and cool aesthetics. I feel that it was maybe a little full on intense straight away though.
Good job, very well done. A truly wholesome experience.
Nice little game. The enemy difficulty growth curve might my a little too steep though. I think the tenth enemy already took **a lot** of arrows.
Nice idea (mine was really similar :D). I would really enjoy a .io version of this game as it already kind of feels like one.
At times I felt that the character was difficult to control. The attacking felt really good.
Well done on the simple control scheme. It makes just jumping in and playing very easy.
Nice gameplay. Feels almost like a logic puzzle game.
The slicing and dicing feels nice and the aesthetic + sound is pleasing. Although I feel that the enemies have way too much hitpoints.
Narratives conveyed with gameplay is one of my favorite things in games and I'm always so pleasantly surprised when it's done well. Visual choice with the background and simple neon colors is also bang on.
Thanks guys! All the feedback is really appreciated. The only person I really asked for feedback during development was myself and that's a sure road to oblivion!
@benhumphries yeah "You have perished" felt really powerful and appropriate for some reason :D. I also have a "You have triumphed" in there.
Nice visual direction and it basically felt like an actual part of a much much larger indie title. Good job!
Well done with the theme - the damaging ore is a good idea!
Bug report: Quit button didn't work and I think the ending credits music were playing along with the main music :D
Very nice! Usually I'd feel that it might have needed a timer but in this case I was glad there wasn't one, the throwing and drinking both feel good.
Yes! Gold is heavy! I felt that there was no need for me to hold any gold at all, so I avoided it and dropped it whenever I picked some up.
Otherwise a solid platformer with solid music and art.
The main mechanic, which is herding, feels nice. I was hoping that level 10 would be an impossibly large herd, but I appreciate your subtle and thought out difficulty curve.
This is a great game. Nice idea. Good execution. Lovely music.
This is a great game. Nice idea. Good execution. Lovely music.
This is a great game. Nice idea. Good execution. Lovely music
Beautiful music and art and lovely gameplay. I understand your decision to cut out the "the more you click, the worse it is" even though it was your only connection to the theme. I clicked around *a lot* and would probably not have finished if I were afraid to click that much.
You really hit the mark with the theme I feel. There's a nice emergent sense of dread that comes with the fact that you can't see much.
I love this. It hit the theme in a really unexpected and clever way (the more ideas you have, the worse it is) and the areas felt soothing and beautiful in a sad sort of way.
Didn't understand how to feed them D:
They were all so hungry D:
Didn't understand how to feed them D:
They were all so hungry D:
Nicely done with the concept and theme. I appreciate the tinge of creepiness that's out and about.
Nice sounding game! I named the guy Ä and got some funny glitchy results where they didn't know what to do next so they all just kept jamming.
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My game broke after the second choice because the buttons were still active even though they were invisible. So I could endlessly reduce wages and then raise wages to get unlimited money and happiness.
Otherwise it's a nice concept - resource management with happiness and money. It fits the theme nicely also.
A very nicely modeled room. I feel that it would have been more satisfying if the spiders would have died at the moment of newspaper impact and not at the moment of the click.
Attacking monsters and healing villagers both felt good. Visuals are also very nice. I like the idea of a resting point where you can see all your failures.
Nice idea. The doctor kept selling me pills and the boss didn't give me any money for doing a good job, so I ran out of money very quickly :D.
Cute main character. I would have appreciated some indicator while choosing the time as to what "more difficulty" meant.
Great game, water mom gave me the creeps. "Sorry caps" gave me the laughs. One of the more memorable entries in this LD.
A mildly surreal experience in a good way. Although I tried I just couldn't manage to be *nice*.
Really nice job on the camera and how it rolls around when reversing. I would have loved a slightly longer song loop though, it got really intense and slightly tiring too soon :D.
It's a decent tower defense game. I feel that the fact that tower placement wasn't grid based was also innovative, it did make placing towers in tighter places a tad bit finicky. Nice game overall. I appreciate the memes also.
Nicely aggravating. Colors fit well. Herding cats without roller skates is hard - now **this**
Slam dunk on the theme. The music accompanies everything well. The ground effect is very nice.
Amazing polish on it. The shooting feels nice, the heat map is a great idea, looks nice etc. Good job!
I liked the random nature of how the plants grew and the jumping itself felt nice.
I would have maybe preferred some other buttons than space and shift for those actions.
A very well polished game that hits the theme really well. Good job!
Shooting with several guys was very satisfying, but the movement got oddly sluggish and disoriented at one point. Was that intentional?
There's some balancing yet to be done with the enemies (or the sprint). While sprinting, you can actually avoid every enemy while collecting shrooms and since actually hitting enemies requires you to be dangerously close and almost certainly get hit - quickly running around and snatching the shrooms seemed to be the better option. I died by jumping in the water, thinking there were probably shrooms under water.
Hello! Congratulations on your first attempt. Some broadstroke feedback for the next project:
It will do a lot of good for a game if the art assets are of a similar resolution. Meaning if the pixels are the same size. The difference between the ship, platforms and meteoroids is slightly jarring.
Punishing difficulty in this genre is a good idea, but the player should feel like the mistakes are their own. Right now it feels like the ship flips to the side for random reasons. This essentially already makes you lose but then you have to helplessly flop over the side as well, to restart.
Visual indications are also important to relay important gameplay elements to the players. At first glance it looks very much like an asteroids game or a shoot em' up. So even though I know it's a platformer, I still feel like I should be able to fly. Also platforms that disappear, but can still be jumped on, are kind of confusing.
This might seem harsh, but I took the time because I see there has been effort put in the game and I hope you keep developing!
After typing that all out I realize this is an entry for an old LD :D oh well.
It's very fun. The inside/outside pipe jumping is nice also. No critics to give, just a good job experimenting with procedural generation.
This game has great tutorialization through gameplay. Every new level keeps expanding with various different rules of the world and it does so with no text at all. I'm very impressed.
I also started instantly spamming the attack in a corner. The slowdown kind of felt laggy at times as well. But there is something in the way the enemies attack and in the colors selection, that is very cool. The idea for the boss is neat as well.
Good idea, but the controls felt slightly unresponsive.
That being said, I think if I saw a game similar to Downwell that had this kind of level structure, I'd be well into it.
Amazing entry. Looks nice, sounds nice, gameplay loop is great. I think it's great that you decided to keep working on it. I guess currently the least impactful part of it is combat, which I'm sure you already have future plans for as well. Good luck!
Hello! I'm afraid the exploration feel of it didn't work for me since the character was just a little bit too slow when I had to backtrack. The flashlight eluded me as well, when I did several loops from different directions (I see from the map where I missed it). I also think that different sizes of pixels never look good in a game.
With all that harsh critique out of the way. I think that you have done a really good job completing a game in such a short amount of time. I think the idea of the game is great and I really want to see what you make next.
@gettingrekt Yeah the three end random end tiles is a little but much right from the start. Yeah sound would make it so much better! Poor time management forced me to cut it out completely.
@the-neon-shark Thank you for the feedback! Yeah in the end I realized as well that everything was so small and incomprehensible visually :D I used Unity pathfinding to save time and boy do those nav agents get confused at times.
@doommustard Yeah the card generation can be really unfair at times :D. That's a good catch with the next level button. I realized that it was exploitable, but not to that extent.
Thank you everyone for the great feedback and for giving me confidence to maybe make this into a full game in the future!
@dpmzi @matif100 @tatu-heinamaki Thank you for the great feedback! Honestly this makes Ludum Dare all the more worthwile participating in.
Lovely idea and very nice art. The aesthetics and the feel of it actually remind me of some good older era platformers.
Even though the effect of the opacity increasing and decreasing is cool, I feel like having the platformer translucent most of the time even kind of takes away from the overall look of things. I imagine maybe having a visible circle around the character that expands as you get sleepier and contracts the more awake you are would work interestingly as well. So the faster you go, the less you see the world around you.
Good job! Gameplay is interesting. It works well as a prototype, but you'd probably need to use some other logic for the movement of blocks, other than Unity physics. Currently it feels kind of loose as a result.
Other than that, good clear tutorial, nice visualization. The shift/ctrl + space combination kind of confuses the fingers, as space is usually the jump button :D
Well done on the post jam version as well!
I wanna be you when I grow up.
Lovely! Always keep working on your programming, art, sound. See what other games are doing that you like and try to dissect them. Why are they so great?
Whatever feeling you got that made you create the in world volume slider - trust it, cherish it, listen to it.
Very nice gameloop and a strong entry. I also already like how it looks (even though it was supposed to be temporary).
The concept reminded me of the beginning of "The Stars My Destination". Initially I didn't recognize the second level of 02 tanks from the rest of the rubble. They do have a white outline, but they are identical to the rest of the floating stuff otherwise.
Anyway. The graphics are very well drawn and the gameplay is very solid. Good job.
Good job! A very theme fitting entry. The hitboxes felt at time maybe too punishing, as it feels good to nearly miss something, but I felt like I got hit in all these situations. I also feel like maybe having slowing down also work with a slight cooldown would be an interesting mechanic as well.
Well it's an amazing effort. A very well built and polished game. The only things that I felt were missing, were some minor quality of life elements. For example a changing mouse cursor to note interactable items when hovering or make clicking on an object more satisfying; a double click to move faster; clicking to skip text roll.
That being said, these things are definitely not something that anyone could expect to be in a jam game and these kinds of game feel touches would blow the scope too big. So they are rather ideas for an actual future version that people would probably happily pay money for. Good job!
A very fun game! Good execution as well. Hitting the enemies from far away with the bow felt really cool, when enemy archers shot the books by accident was cool as well. The curse mechanic is also a clever way to increase the difficulty progressively.
Nice entry! During playing it I wished there were at least some oxygen pick ups in the sea. But I guess it would be real hassle to balance with the incremental system and the rest of the gameplay.
The gameplay loop and aesthetic have a lot of promise. I feel like maybe with a little bit of fine tuning (enemy placement, fighting, initially maybe a slower drill speed, a way to lob the fuel at a distance, minor tweaks and polish all around) people would happily be willing to pay for this game.
A very well polished concept. I also very much enjoy when pixel art pixels are mostly consistantly the same size.
I mostly agree with all the previous commentators: too much empty space, clunky combat etc. I do however think the single resource bar for attacks, sprint, health is an interesting idea. It would need a *lot* of balancing but it might work as an actual hook for your game.
Oh my what a nice idea and great excecution. Just a great all around entry.
One small thing I felt was that it was sometimes hard to determine the exact spot where you are supposed to be to drop them off.
Very nifty idea and good execution! Even though I believe that it's possible to make it to the 21th planet, by the 5th planet I felt kind of hopeless. I chose the most fuel rich planet and got a good fuel roll I think, but flying there took a huge chunk of said fuel away as well.
So even though I think I was doing everything correctly, I didn't *feel* like I was doing everything correctly, didn't get the dopamine hit I was expecting so to speak :D
The idea of seeing certain things to open a door is nice. Immediately turns the players attention towards exploration.
Got hopelessly stuck here though: Untitled.png
@al-is-kinda-cute Ooooh, the previous puzzle did teach this mechanic but I kind of fumbled through it without learning. I guess perhaps like a different color of ball would have made me more aware of an added puzzle mechanic. 🙆🏼♂️
This mechanic feels very fresh! Good job.
Hey! Well done on your first attempt. I don't know if this is intentional, but the music didn't loop for me. It was just silent at some point.
This is ingenious. Amazing execution.
It worked for me and I think it's a good minimalistic entry. I think it would be better to have numbers as the dialogue choice buttons instead of A, B and C. And it would be great if the button immediately then forwarded the dialogue, instead of having to press space as well.
You did get a good atmosphere going but I feel that the gameplay loop was a bit clunky. Moving forward while there is no monster chasing you and while you don't need to eat pills. The pills could maybe give like a satisfying amount of sanity back all at once, right now the slowly trickling sanity didn't feel as good gameplay wise.
A solid mechanics based game. New items kept changing the gameplay in a brisk and fun pace.
After a while though, the controls started to cramp up my left hand. This is a rather minor grievance though, because customizable keyboard bindings or gamepad support would completely remove this issue if you carry on developing this game.
I was able to melt down the first ice block and then for the life of me I couldn't figure out what to do next. Because I couldn't jump high enough to get on top of the block. That had me totally stumped.
The pictures look very cool though, and I'm sad that I couldn't reach any of it.
Nice! A really nice story effort for a jam.
Very fun. I had a serious lemon shortage right at the beginning but got through.
Well done! Not only did you combine two genres, you explored the fusion in depth!
Nice concept. I can really see a great game hatching in there.
Very fun and addictive. Nice polish on the game also.
It's lovely. I would love to see the farming simulator aspect actually fleshed out.
Nice fulfilling game. All aspects of it are well executed and well polished. Good job!
Thanks for the kind words!
@flameo326 yeah the initial upgrades have way too high prices, they don't come in nearly as quickly as they should.
Also nice intense QA action :D
A well executed mashup! Died unexpectedly during the second encounter. It was really fun nonetheless!
Nice concept. I felt that it might have been fun to manipulate the blocks some more. Maybe move them or lift them or something. It was pretty fun nonetheless!
If I'm rating this as a game, pacing in the beginning could be a little bit smoother. The initial experience is a little harsh.
If I'm rating this as an experience conveying depression, it's great. Really gets the feeling across.
Nice mash-up, audio and presentation. I wish my clicks would be just a little more responsive so I'd understand if I was moving the camera or spreading my roots :)
Excellent jam game and nice mashup. I would pay for a fully fleshed game like this.
Nice and simple. This is the best kind of jam game. Exploring a new interesting game mechanic with clear graphical representation.