Raymoclaus

Socketbound by Wekaj 2017-08-01T08:19:10Z

The graphic theme is very nice and everything acted exactly as one would expect when you see what they look like which is the big plus here considering the small range of colour. Sound-wise it feels empty without even a simple backtrack and the little 8-bit sound effects don't serve much to create a mood. The way your character moves might make sense for the theme of the character but it hurts the flow of the game and the environments are designed in a way that almost expects you to have more fluid movement. I think with the way movement works it could have been nicer to go in a puzzle direction rather than a combat/survival direction.

Fluffy Racer by pfeyffer 2017-08-03T05:02:30Z

I have to echo the other comments, I had to have a try or two before I fully understood what I was doing but once I did I really enjoyed it overall. I had a strange bug where I was on 0 hp but then picked up some repair items and I was good, it might have had something to do with a shield item or maybe it was supposed to happen, who knows but I couldn't recreate it. This would make a nice tabletop game that's easy to make and build upon.

Wind-Up Knight by joemag 2017-08-01T07:53:02Z

Absolutely love those sound effects! It took me a while before I realised I could click on the wind ups multiple times rather than just once and wait til it runs out and up until that point it felt very limiting but then the experience felt a lot more fluid and enjoyable, making that more obvious could go a long way in making the beginning of the game feel more attractive to start with. My suggestions - if you choose to develop this idea - would be to have visual indicators for when a wind-up is 'almost' out of power, in its current state it is hard to keep track of all of them at once while also trying to platform and defeat enemies. Another suggestion is to have alternate controls for winding up like (1, 2, 3) for example which would make the game more accessible to laptop users if all they have is a trackpad. Overall though it was a lot of fun and it's a very inventive concept.

Lonely Robot by Feathergunner 2017-08-01T09:33:43Z

This is not bad in concept but there are quite a number of details that are holding this game back. It suffers a a lot from its UI design and how turns are made. A lot of your instructions tutorial can be summarised into something shorter. I think you could have foregone requiring the player to press a button to end their turn, clicking on a tile to move could have already counted as your turn. The lighting bar shows you how much energy you will use but not how much light it will give you which is probably more important. Giving the player a reminder to submit data when they're filling up could reduce that amount of information the player needs to keep track of. Having the data bar and the submit data box in two very different places on the screen is not very intuitive. Right-click/hold to move the camera around could be twice as fast, though that is a small nitpick. Hovering the mouse over different tiles while telling the player how much energy it will take to move to that tile will reduce the time it takes to make a turn because the player won't have to look at various parts of the screen for common information.

No Sorcerer's Sky by TheFlyingKeyboard 2017-08-03T04:01:03Z

This LOOKS really nice, but the extremely poor UI design is just too hard to ignore and kills what could have been one of the better game I'd seen so far. All those menus don't need to cover the whole screen, you lose a lot of information just by trying to play the game. Some HUD around the sides would have been nice, maybe clicking on a place should show its HUD elements on the screen and then be hidden when you click on a different building. One thing to note is that even though those menus cover the whole screen you can still click on the other places despite not seeing them. At the start, if there is going to be only one obtainable place (or only one that is viable to obtain), you might as well have it on by default so the player has some direction as to what to do first, especially when nothing is explained in the game.

Cute Chute by xel 2017-08-01T11:22:09Z

I was part of a team that made a game earlier this year and honestly I thought THAT was morbid because if you failed then dogs would drown. But then I find THIS and you are actively throwing cute things down a hole as the objective. Now I don't feel bad about making that game I made.

The humour here is top notch, the graphics are great, the gameplay is smooth and the sound effects are also nice and cute. Can't quite say the music fits the theme but other than that this has been a very unique and inspiring experience.

They come at night by bar0net 2017-08-01T10:26:00Z

Despite constantly running out of power I still found it quite easy considering all the mistakes it looks like I was making. It seemed like building a whole bunch of power sources was the best strategy because I was only being limited by how much power I could generate. It could do with some balancing but the concept is solid and I would like to see a cleaned-up version of this game.

I think it's a great that you have the box on the bottom for tool tips to help people understand your game a little better because one thing the game lacks is an explanation of how to play. However, that tool tip box only covers so much and some elements are not explained at all. For example, I had no idea what the "people" icon meant or what it was used for until enemies started getting through. Maybe exploring the idea of defending people and bringing that to light can be used to create a more emotional mood for the player. I think you could have a tool tip box appear near you cursor when you mouse over something instead of a fixed box, that way you keep relevant pieces of information close to each other on the UI.

On the game board itself, everything looks visually clean and clear. The sound effects are funny and I would definitely prefer to have them than without but at the rate and frequency they're playing I can see it getting quite annoying.

Pylon Defense by Doc ill 2017-08-01T08:52:52Z

I can definitely appreciate the humour in those Starcraft references. Everything here is very functional and supports the main mechanic of clicking to restore power so I would have to disagree with the criticism from others that generators shouldn't need to be clicked on, it would turn the game into a typical incremental game and you would lose what makes your game unique. However, I agree that as you get further in, it feels less and less rewarding to be recharging individual towers.

Given the limited space to place towers and the limitations of the towers themselves it's impossible to go any further than a certain point. As the difficulty of the waves gradually increase it gets to a point where even if you play perfectly you will still lose so I think being able to upgrade towers' damage/range/chargeAmount could extend that playtime for quite a bit longer. There is also a small gripe with the AI, I could be wrong but when 2 towers attack the same object it appears to do 1 damage in total so either adjust the AI to only have 1 attack an object at a time or make sure the damage stacks up properly.

Finally, something that's letting this down is the lack audio which can make the game feel a lot more satisfying and responsive to the player's actions. The Audio category has been left available to judge so for future reference keep in mind what categories you want to be judged on and opt out of categories that aren't present in your game.

TrappedWithAI9000 by werlar 2017-08-01T12:43:49Z

A fairly stock-standard 2D platforming shooter. The graphics are crude but at least they're clear and easy to understand for the most part. There isn't any music to generate or support a mood, the sound effects are so piercing and frequent that I could not keep listening to it. There is no humour in sight. For future reference, if you didn't focus or build in a category like humour and you don't want to be judged on it then you should opt out of those categories when submitting here.

The energy bar really just ends up being a timer renamed as energy which sort of governs all of your actions since it is actually a multitude of different concepts like health, ammo and the timer I've already mentioned. I would have kept these stats separate to make the game more about balancing various linked resources that compliment the genre. For example, weapons can expend energy and go on cooldown temporarily to replenish that energy, your movement can include a dash or a double jump which expends its own source of energy and standing still replenishes that. In short, lumping all of those things into one energy bar has really narrowed and limited the choices of the player.

Hungry Sky by edmond00 2017-08-03T06:57:52Z

I think the core gameplay has been really fleshed out which is great. I think the indicator for where the lightning strike should be much clearer but other than that, the only thing left to do is to incorporate this core gameplay into a larger scheme to keep players going for longer periods of time.

Battery Pack by shashwat 2017-08-03T03:39:13Z

I was only able to get up to level 7 so ignore some of these suggestions if they already exist beyond this point: - Having to start right back from level 1 after dying is not so fun because you then have to spend too much time doing something you've already done. Randomly fired bullets mitigate this a little bit because the challenge is slightly different but randomness itself tends to lessen the puzzle effect of a game because it makes it less solvable. I'm not saying that the player shouldn't lose any progress at all for failure, but reducing those consequences a little bit makes a game much more enjoyable for most. - Consumable charging stations didn't mean much when there isn't a need to back track. Maybe if you required the player to pick up a key before going to a portal you can have the player explore more of your puzzle and give consumable stations more meaning. - Blue bullets that freeze you have very little effect on how you solve each puzzle. Getting hit by one rarely requires you to change your course of action because it has no effect on your battery power. One suggestion might be to have bullets that push you back a little bit when hit. It's already been said but the bullets should be more noticeable and a little slower so the player has time to make decisions. - Alternate means of movement (doesn't necessarily have to be originating from the player's abilities, it could be environmental or enemy-driven effects like suggested earlier) can spice up your puzzles quite a bit.

Jumpy Robot by webzsta 2017-08-01T07:25:27Z

I was unable to pick up the batteries so I couldn't interact with generators either. Your double jump mechanic is a little unconventional in that double tapping it quickly gives a much higher jump than if you were to execute the second jump at the peak of the first jump. With that mechanic there are a few platforming sections you can skip by jumping right over. Being able to coordinate your landing on platforms is a little difficult given how close the camera is to your character. I would recommend zooming out a little and having what's called a "drop shadow" if you decide to improve this or work on anything similar.

Lost Cluster by Raymoclaus 2017-08-01T08:59:14Z

@MichaelTWG you're right, the huge space can feel a little daunting and the batteries are really far and few between. Something I was careful of was about how much information I was giving the player. If the player knew the location of all the batteries then they could essentially survive forever which I would see as a bad thing because a game needs exit points whether it is by winning/losing or some neutral event. I could have done something interesting though like point an arrow towards the battery that is the furthest away from your ship, it would give the player a direction if they're hopelessly lost but it would still be quite a task to survive on that information alone.

Lost Cluster by Raymoclaus 2017-08-01T09:05:35Z

@Pfeyffer I agree, when I started making the controls I was working under the thought that pressing up to go up would be intuitive. It wasn't until later when testing did I realise that what it should have been was to press up to go forward and use left/right to steer. With that I could have avoided the use of shift to reverse because the "down" button is free'd up to use for that movement. I definitely learned something while developing this game.

Lost Cluster by Raymoclaus 2017-08-06T05:09:33Z

@zchen I definitely like the radar idea. It would very much compliment the theme and mechanics without disrupting the mood. I was aware of the potential to get stuck which is why I had a way to move in reverse but it doesn't excuse the sub-optimal control scheme.

@cakemonitor I intentionally made sure there was at least one battery right in front of you as a neat way to teach the objective of the game in case someone didn't read the instructions. The rest are not meant to be easy to find. The intrinsic reward of the game (or at least the part I wanted players to focus on) is the desperate search rather than the actual collection of batteries. If all you want out of the game is collecting batteries then you're just performing a menial task and I can't see that being very enjoyable. Even if you go through an entire play-through without finding a single hidden battery then you still experienced that struggle which is what the game is at its core. It's just supposed to make you feel something other than an excitement-high, but also avoiding boredom.

Powersnek by Aarneus 2017-07-31T12:23:36Z

I think there could have been a little more content. I would have foregone the hexagonal movement and stuck with an easy-to-use square grid in favor of polishing and expanding the rest of the game because it doesn't largely support the main mechanic. That being said, it was an enjoyable puzzle to play in its own right.

Rising Dawn - First Blood: It's Brunchtime by AfroAnt 2019-05-02T02:57:42Z

- the shadows being models looked a bit funky because of the perspective. - I really enjoyed the audio of this game. I think it contributed well with the theme to create an appropriate mood. - I wasn't sure how to deal with groups of people that were spread out.

Flash Dash Dungeon by Raymoclaus 2019-05-02T04:23:35Z

Thanks for the feedback @danga @c0d3d @kyavi @azimuthgames @mharring @orangejuicepanda @silvervalegames @babyking @boxedmeatrevolution @killedbyapixel @nick-rafalski @fanmanpro @nandon @hpmnk.

I've updated the description addressing most of the recurring feedback. In the interest of fairness for the game jam, I will not be updating the game during the voting period unless there are major bugs that break the game.

For those of you that are looking for a more challenging and/or balanced way to play the game. Avoid using the grey crystal powerup in the shops that gives you extra current seconds. Not much time was given to balancing the game so this was an oversight.

Soul Tycoon by OrangeJuicePanda 2019-05-02T03:35:18Z

- It took me a couple of in-game days to work out exactly what I was supposed to do, first with building units and then collecting from them. Once I figured that out, I quickly got the ball rolling. - It didn't take long for me to become a little bored; I was playing for the sake of finishing rather than just having fun with it. Thanks for not having exponential wait-times like most typical tycoons/idle games tend to have. I was able to finish in 24 days. - The one thing that I enjoyed most was the humor. I can see you put more effort into that than most games do. - I think having a button to automatically collect from a region of units would have gone a long way in making the later stages of the game more managable.

Zoltanya, Outdated Robot Fortune Teller by AzimuthGames 2019-05-02T01:37:02Z

- This was definitely an innovative idea, at least setting/narrative-wise, not so much the gameplay. - The screen filter effects were making it hard to see icons above heads of NPCs and also the chart behind the main character. - It wasn't clear how I could get NPCs to play your arcade machine without hacking until you lose.

Ghostly Tricks by Nelson William 2019-05-03T02:34:01Z

This was pretty solid all around. It was polished and it had a good amount of content considering the type of content. I don't know if the timer was even necessary for the puzzles you had, but you could always utilise it in future additions.

Bloodlust by Danga 2019-05-02T00:13:32Z

Feedback on input felt great. I had a bug when tutorial prompt for Right Triger + Right stick appeared, I couldn't continue.

Let's make really bad life decisions... by FanManPro 2019-05-02T01:49:16Z

- controls were a bit funky, jumping didn't always work properly. Sometimes the jump was really small. The gameplay requires you to move in the air but that didnt' always work. - I got stuck in the ground once and had to restart. - I think the idea and gameplay was very innovative and fit the theme uniquely.

Mosquito Hunter by mharring 2019-05-02T02:30:16Z

- there was some weird graphical glitches in the background which I assume is a bug. - the grappling mechanic was a lot of fun to play around with. - the difficulty spiked very quickly because I didn't realise there was a double jump. - I think the controls could have benefitted from being able to use the mouse to shoot your tongue. I had lots of fun with this game.

Collecting Really Nice Cats! by cheesepencil 2019-05-06T03:28:30Z

Hi, cheese. You told me you couldn't run executable files, so I've added a web version of my game.

Demon Apprentice by c0d3d 2019-05-02T00:58:36Z

- I would have liked something to tell me when a wave4 was finished. Either a "Wave clear" message or an enemy counter - Sound effects were funny - The scythe was innovative, it took a couple of rounds to work it out.

bird food by kyavi 2019-05-02T01:07:53Z

I didn't like how the movement of the snake in a grid didn't quite line up with the environment. The environment felt it was placed on a grid with double the scale, but it made it harder to judge when I should change direction. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the puzzles with guillotine.

Shifty Maze by Raymoclaus 2020-05-04T04:44:59Z

@dg Glad you enjoyed it.

@cirno That's odd. I tested on chrome and it worked fine for me.

@sayumeki There is a low chance that the algorithm generates an unsolvable maze. You were just unlucky. There's also a low chance that it generates a straight path down the middle with no branches. I ran into both cases during testnig so I was aware of them, but there wasn't enough time or reasons to fix it. Thanks for playing :)