Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Quillwerth
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Crank-Light | jam | 883 | 3.63 | 3.28 | 3.48 | 3.73 | 3.26 | 2.28 | 4.07 |
You've got the WarioWare feel here, and the game looks cohesive and is pleasant to play. The control explanations at the beginning are snazzy and well-presented. Definitely a great start! With the right improvements (a way to lose, more mini-games) this could be a great pass-the-control game for parties.
@damienp funny you should mention powering a light with a hand-crank... you should check my game out :wink:
I feel like I can't really approach this game, because I spend more time buying stuff to set up a run than I get actually playing the game. Additionally, the step of "place engine, give it gas, then kick it" is cute, but it was not at all intuitive.
Be careful not to waste your player's time or just dump them into a guessing game from the jump - unless that guessing game is the whole point, which I don't think is true for you here. I'd rather have a menu system that lets me click on supplies and then press "Go" to start than the "immersive" menu you've built here that takes longer to navigate through than I get with the actual gameplay.
This was interesting! I was a bit confused what "synchronized" meant, but I eventually figured that part out. You may want to spell out that you're talking about same pitch / volume combination for all of them. Nice idea and interested what else could be done with it.
Very well done. Reminds me a lot of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. This concept could make for a fun "maintenance loop" game.
The "feel" of this game is really nice. It's graphically cohesive and pleasant enough to look at that it could be a released title. The music is a nice tune, and I really liked the seamless change you got when you went to the outer reaches.
I ran into some unfortunate issues with the ice wrangling clogging up a 1 tile wide path, which was a fine challenge to deal with, but when you're down to the wire on water, the handling on those ice cubes becomes very important. If I'd lost because of that, I probably would have quit - feels unfair. Additionally, ice is generally useless unless you mess up like I did - I think making the stones not offer any regeneration would have been fine, and creates a need to bring back both the stones *and* ice in one go. I was also a bit bummed that, in a game with this level of visual polish, we only got a splash screen for winning. I get that time was limited, but I was very curious what the stones were going to do - awaken that snake beneath the tree, perhaps? Ah well, something for you to ponder for version 2.
I don't want to get too negative, though: this was a lovely game and you have a talent for creating atmosphere. Great work!
This is a nice twin-stick! There's not really any reason to move from the back of the screen, though, so it felt a bit like a side-scroller shmup with a bit more control. I liked the physics of the enemies, it's quite appropriate given how viruses move through the body - well, except for those purple ones, but I liked those for different reasons. Nice work!
I think only having a Linux release is really going to limit who can try out your game - Unfortunately, I'm in that camp of excluded folks. Any chance of a browser version?
This is a great idea, well executed, smart, and every design feature exists on multiple levels. Recontextualizing the controls as both a way to control the player *and* a physical asset to fight back bugs via mashing is brilliant. Please expand this!
I really liked the audio work here! Great voice acting for a game jam :grin:
Here's a speedrun, maybe WR?
walk-speedrun.gif
I like the nugget of this, but I'll echo the need for checkpoints. I quit after a few iterations because, despite wanting to play this all the way through, it's too slow to have to restart so many times.
Kinda slow, and I wish you'd put an arrow or something over the first spots to plant seeds. It wasn't clear to me what I could interact with, and I nearly put the game down at that point.
The art style here is lovely, and the song is nice - although 4 bars in a game this centered on waiting isn't quite enough. I get it though, the jam doesn't leave much time for composition.
I think you've got something fun here - a seed, if you will. I hope it grows into something bigger!
This feels like something you could really flesh out into a really fun game. You'll need more in the way of player agency in a version 1.0, because making a choice between "known thing" and "unknown thing" is not much of a decision - just a binary guess. But the mood and loop of the game is pretty fun - keep working on this!
I liked the idea of this a lot. The zigzag level was really hard to execute on, for whatever reason - and the game crashed on me twice here, I think you might have a bug around switching targets while a goblin you're possessing is dying. But this is a fun package, enjoyable to play and look at, and is a complete game. Very nice work - I think you have an action-puzzle you could really flesh out here.
I thought this was really cute, and *extremely* on-theme.
I'll echo the feedback that it's really hard, and sometimes it seems like the patterns aren't actually beatable (hah! get it?). The music really fits the gameplay, and when you nail a quick movement, it feels really good.
I have to wonder how much of the difficulty is due to how quickly you move when you click or release. Did you ever try a slower motion?
Is this a game? The amount of interaction was incredibly minimal. There's no "skill", no meaningful way to influence the ultimate outcome. It's a story, a poem, maybe a painting. Whatever it may be, the ending still managed to hit like a brick, even though I should have seen it coming. You created a world and situation that was engaging enough for me to get immersed in it, and never consider the inevitable conclusion that this story must hurtle towards. It genuinely hurt me.
Is this a game? I don't care. Bravo, and please grow this into whatever you think it should be. You have good instincts and vision - trust them.
I also tried to make games at your age, and I never got as far along as you did. Congrats!
Sound and scores would be great, as well as a reason to move the sword... rotating it in place is actually the optimal strategy right now, and it'd be good to get the movement controls in there.
Really nice job with spacing out the spiders - I never got a pattern that was unwinnable, and only lost because I made a mistake. That's not easy to figure out in a short time span, so nice work :smile:
@anrqangel Can you elaborate on the control issues? Curious how I can improve there.
@ladislavodstrcil I'm glad you liked the charging! Just came to me about an hour after announcement. And congrats on that final wave :ocean:
@bgamedev Thanks!
@landosystems Glad you liked the holster mechanic. I did play around with unholstering automatically on left-click and decided that it removed a lot of the tension from holstering. Thanks for reinforcing that it was a good choice.
@hiremedeveloper I'm so glad you got that feeling. That tension of needing to physically make it harder to defend yourself was the core I built the game around, and I'm happy it shone through for you :heartbeat: This is exceptionally kind feedback, thank you.
@anrqangel Fair point. I got player movement working very early and then never went back to play with it again - I got used to the 8-way movement but did also think about the scheme you suggest here (W moves to cursor, S moves away, A/D circle-strafe?) would be a good experiment at the very least. Thanks for clarifying!
@marcelo-zoletti I have no doubt there are bugs :wink: I sourced all sounds from Wikimedia Foundation, which was such an incredible resource here. Thanks for playing!
@vignesh-raj Thanks! I was concerned that the swing would be hard to understand, but I'm glad you liked it.
@codexus Did that management subtract from your enjoyment? It's intended to make you feel strained, but I'm curious if you had another take.
@marcusnystrand I like making spooky stuff. :ghost:
@black-flag Thank you, lighting was actually something I decided I wanted to play with before we even got the theme. Glad it helps!
@nicolasjl9 Thanks! The music is not mine, and I pulled it off Wikimedia Foundation with attributions on itch. That being said, I definitely spent a lot of time browsing Wikimedia looking for juuuuust the right sounds and made some edits both in-engine and using Audacity. As you might have guessed, I very purposefully built the finale to play off that soundtrack. Glad you liked the combination. The art is all mine and was done in Aseprite, which I think is a really great tool for this style of art.
@damienp Glad you enjoyed yourself. I would have felt bad plugging my game in your comments if you hadn't. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I put some time into making sure the difficulty was tough but fair... until the finale, I suppose.
@twobitadder Hey, thanks for checking this out! I'm glad the tooltips helped - I wasn't sure if they'd be visible enough. The arrows were crucial to making this work, as well - although I'm uncertain if I should have had them point directly and unerringly to your goals. A bit of uncertainty there might have been interesting.
As the developer, I should tell you that the secret to winning the finale consistently is to practice spawning the potions where you want them. This *is* a skill and not at all random chance! :wink:
@thibaud-ligneul That's a possible alternative, but I'd want to then toggle the player rotation off, or else they might look a bit silly when charging. Additionally, the physical feeling of removing your hand from your "weapon" (the mouse / the hatchet) was important to me. But point taken that the interface could still be developed. Thanks for playing!
@kuiefs Yeah, never really considered playing on a laptop. This is a fair consideration - I could have allowed for accessibility remappings even if I considered the "intended experience" to be using a real mouse with an easy right-click.
@euforia-games THANK YOU FOR PLAYING! :grin:
@laura-del-pino I also prefer an in-game tutorial - I envisioned a sunset section where you chop some wood with the hatchet and use the flashlight to find your way to the campfire. Time didn't permit it, unfortunately. I agree that the controls could use some tuning as well - and for your edification, I intentionally made the PC androgynous, so they're whatever gender you want. Glad you liked the sounds, I really feel like the game started to come together when I added them.
@karenin-dmitry No navigational help made the game an unfun slog - that's also why I tried to be forgiving with health drops, because I wanted folks to get to the end of the game within a few attempts. Making the enemies fair was important to me. I tuned their attack speed such that if you turn away from them and run, you can get out of bite range, leaving them frozen for a counter-attack. However, trying to walk backwards from them isn't fast enough most of the time, and you'll get munched.
That leads me to the holstering mechanic... I wanted you to feel vulnerable whenever you had to recharge the light, so having you put the hatchet away was an extremely direct way to communicate that. I like games that give a variety of player options in approach but that tense feeling is too important to me to compromise. I tried to keep it fair with the bark arrows, though - most of the time, you'll have enough warning to move your hand to the mouse, right click, hold left click, and face the wolf before it reaches you. Tense, but almost always winnable.
Thanks for your detailed feedback. Wish I could give more than one heart!
I'm honestly not sure what critique could be leveled at this game. Everything wrong with it is everything right with it. It's garbage, it knows it's garbage, it flourishes in trash and as trash. A gloriously hand-wrought shitpost that belongs in the Guggenheim. You, sir and/or madam, are an artist.
I laughed when the first door opened and there's *six more flowers.* Great writing!
Has some nice fundamentals but it feels off. Could benefit from some time workshopping the controls - the part right after super jump killed me several times in a row, and it didn't feel like I had done anything differently when I did get through it. The knockback from enemies was also a bit too high - I got bounced between 3 enemies and effectively died in one hit. Like I said, though, it's a good start!
I jumped into a teleporter and got sent to a dead-end room from which there was no escape. Was that the end of the game, or was I caught in a cunning ruse?
This is a good start, but I'll echo @drewg8 here and say: don't implement features until you absolutely need them. That will let you get more done, and what you get done will be sharper and more cohesive. Nice work on getting something out there, though! First step is the hardest :v: