Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → rjhelms
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Breakfast Time in Dream Land | compo | 267 | 3.50 | 3.62 | 3.10 | 3.50 | 3.47 | 3.50 | 3.67 | 3.42 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Junta! Police State 1981 | compo | 178 | 3.67 | 3.50 | 3.25 | 3.92 | 3.45 | 3.50 | 3.25 | 3.69 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Disco Lives | compo | 510 | 3.44 | 3.39 | 3.33 | 3.64 | 3.44 | 3.57 | 3.46 | 3.38 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | My Life is Not Currency | compo | 149 | 3.55 | 3.48 | 2.89 | 3.70 | 3.53 | 3.69 | 3.48 | 3.14 | ||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Zeus Needs Omelettes | compo | 65 | 3.82 | 3.76 | 3.37 | 3.87 | 3.60 | 3.80 | 3.89 | 3.71 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Disaster at Starbase 7 | compo | 300 | 3.46 | 3.51 | 3.31 | 3.85 | 3.42 | 3.66 | 2.78 | 3.66 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Punk at the Opera | compo | 64 | 3.92 | 4.07 | 3.03 | 3.65 | 3.57 | 3.81 | 3.66 | 3.76 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Bubble Boy | compo | 434 | 2.92 | 2.96 | 2.76 | 2.88 | 2.56 | 3.08 | 3.29 | 2.63 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Tenement Rush | compo | 140 | 3.64 | 3.28 | 3.72 | 4.48 | 3.15 | 3.54 | 3.64 | 2.96 | 56 | |
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Super Egyptian UFO Cat Pyramid Overlord 2000 BC | compo | |||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Robot Escape | jam | 249 | 3.57 | 3.48 | 3.09 | 3.35 | 3.07 | 3.56 | 2.64 | 3.53 | 85 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Xtreme Crop Duster Simulator '82 | compo | 96 | 3.83 | 3.88 | 3.49 | 4.01 | 4.07 | 3.71 | 3.15 | 3.52 | 100 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Red Threat | jam | 423 | 3.33 | 3.29 | 3.03 | 3.78 | 3.27 | 3.15 | 3.29 | 3.16 | 73 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Trench War | jam | 514 | 3.20 | 3.06 | 3.55 | 3.42 | 3.08 | 2.55 | 2.30 | 2.91 | 88 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Smugglers! | jam | 424 | 3.16 | 3.35 | 2.62 | 2.54 | 3.35 | 3.48 | 2.88 | 3.16 | 82 |
Great sound, love the graphic style.
Nice classic vertical scroller. My only real critique is that the boss fight could have used a bit more variety in the patterns - once I got down to dodging both of them, it was a little repetitive.
Very challenging and a lot of fun. Cool interpretation of the theme! I wish there was more!
The orbits make this a really cool and thematic twist on the air-traffic control idea.
Wow, this feels amazing! Very slick arcade style.
I agree with others that the connection to the theme is a little lose, but I've got no other criticisms - this is great!
Interesting take on the theme. Great visual and musical style.
It'd be a bit more accessible if you didn't start at the beginning each time you got destroyed.
Very nicely polished, and a really funny visual style. One of the best I've played so far!
I shouldn't figure out how to switch weapons with the keyboard, though. Maybe update the description with instructions about the key controls?
Mmm jumping puzzles.
I loved the graphical style of the worlds overlapping each other. Was cool to see what the next one would be like.
I agree with a few others that I'd have like the jumps to be a bit more floaty, and it would be cool to have a more dynamic game world to interact with - but "more" is the whole challenge with LD48, eh?
Intense!
There's a lot of potential here. One suggestion: make the controls work more like something like Asteroids, where it's relative to the direction the ship is facing. It was a little confusing to have W sometimes be forwards and sometimes be backwards, for example.
Cool interpretation of the theme, and the combination of minigames and a platformer worked really well.
In a few places it looked like I fell through the bottom of the level and expected to have to start it over, but instead I was able to jump out of the hole even though I couldn't see the character - a little confusing.
Very intriguing concept. I agree with others that one pixel per day isn't enough to really make this feel like a game, but as a way of experimenting with the theme and trying out Unity's network functionality it's great!
This would be great on a touch interface - trying to make the connections with a mouse was a little fiddly.
Awesomely unique interpretation of the theme, and a fun little game to boot.
933 spacebucks!
Fun game, but I don't miss working at a call center in real life. It'd be really cool to see this fleshed out more - dialogue trees instead of just a single queston/answer for each character, and audio to go along with the speech, would be great places to start.
Very nice change of pace from all the other entries I've seen so far. Not bad at all for 6 hours work, I'd love to see more!
Amazing tribute to the NES style! Graphics, music and difficulty were spot on.
Thanks Troy!
A minimap would have been a great idea - wish I had thought of it, but even if I had there probably wouldn't have been time.
Wow! Thanks so much everybody, I didn't expect this to be this well received - I've never done a game jam or even published a game before.
pinion & Talvara: yeah, I regret not explaining what the compass is for in the instructions. It seemed obvious to me at the time but I realize it's not - maybe putting an "N" at the top of it would also have helped.
Satyre and Talvara: that's what the LShift/Space is for - you'll never ditch them at your normal speed but you can boost to get out of there (though your cash ticks down faster.)
Love the visual style, but like others said the pacing on the whole is too slow.
Beautiful graphical style, and a nice interpretation of the theme. Would love to see more work on this!
Amazingly polished entry!
Fun little scroller, and a good challenge.
It wasn't obvious to me at first that I had a meter counting how much WiFi I had left, so the first time I died it was confusing - figured it out pretty fast after that, though.
Love the music and the aesthetic.
It wasn't obvious to me at first that the graphics in the top right were telling me what the left and right mouse buttons did, but I had a lot of fun once I got the hang of it - very challenging in a good way!
The scaling on the text in half-size mode is a little ugly, at least on my machine.
The 60 second countdown after leaving a ship is pretty unforgiving - I got lost on a planet a few times and died just trying to find my way back to the ship.
There's a lot of potential here, and this is a great start - would love to see what you can do with some more time on it!
I always wondered what it would be like to work a switchboard.
Nice touch on the appearance of the hanging gabled.
Cool concept and graphical style. Getting to the half-way point was an awesome revelation of how this fits the theme.
On my first attempt, there was a jump I just couldn't make - next try I didn't have that problem, and had a blast.
Very cool concept. Would love to see more of it!
Amazing! The graphics remind me of my days making "games" with the drawing functions in QBasic.
Very cool interpretation of the theme. I agree with others that the speeding up moving was a bit confusing - felt like there was a time limit when there wasn't one.
I really enjoyed this. There's been some good feedback about the UI so I won't reiterate that.
It wasn't clear what exactly made the "enemy" my opponent until I got to the Space age and saw that goal. I'm not sure how I'd change that to make it more apparent, but I'd have paid more attention to them earlier if I knew exactly what we were competing for.
I was a little skeptical at first - the stone age seemed to go a bit slowly. But as the production tree expanded, I had a lot of fun once I realized how much depth was there.
Great job for 48 hours - I'd love to see an expanded version of this.
A nice to see an economic sim here. I agree with others that there's some balance problems, but a good entry all the same.
I love this games like force you to take a ruthless role win, but then see consequences of what your doing.
Beautiful. I love the look and feel of it. Very, very difficult, at least for me.
Are all the planets named after beers? Awesome.
Good audio design, and fun idea. My only criticism is the controls while landing and taking off felt a little sluggish.
Good thought-provoking topical game. At first I thought "Where's the colour?", but then it dawned on me.
It was a little hard to figure out what was going on, other than just arresting everyone - but the incentives the points give you get the message across pretty well. Great job!
Loved the graphics. One of the best games to sneak snowmen in that I've played so far.
Could use some balance tweaks as it's really difficult - maybe have the snowmen come in waves of increasing difficulty to give the player some time to ramp up?
I think is the first LD game I've seen with an installer.
I love these kinds of games, but it wasn't obvious how you make money - seeing the screenshot that you had multiple painting machines in a line was the key to getting it sorted.
This could be a really excellent arcade-y factory sim with some different production lines and a bit more of a goal/challenge.
Great job! This is an awesome take on a puzzle game - I'm really impressed that you were able to do random level generation and still keep a reasonable difficulty progression.
Great polish on this one - and a good challenge, too!
Very creative twist on the theme! I had a lot of fun with this one.
Feels just like a classic arcade game. Great work!
Interesting idea, good graphics. Some of the modes were really, really hard - maybe doing it as a progression instead of randomly would be a bit better balanced.
The zombie names were great. This game has the right idea, but feels like a rush job - if you had taken the whole jam instead of just 9 hours I'm sure you'd have realized the potential a bit more.
Good controls, and good aesthetic style. Seems the comments are divided on whether this fits the theme - I think it's a great fit!
Remember laundry day? It's back, in game form!
I used to play a "racing" game that had a similar sort of style on the TRS-80. Cool to see something like that fit into this theme. Nice sprite work, too.
The graphics and sound were really elegant in their simplicity. Solid execution of a good, simple, fun concept.
This is really fun! Awesome job - not too often you see really well done multiplayer games in LD. I never did figure out what the points are, though.
Great graphics and sound - very unforgiving. Save points would be nice.
One bug I found: I could jump during the count down at the very start. A few times, that caused a game over right away as I fell through the floor somehow.
Always nice to see an economic sim in Ludum Dare.
I think there's some bugs with placement, a few times I was able to put things on tiles that weren't already empty.
Interesting idea! Some janky behaviours when I switched to a channel that had an obstacle on the tile I was standing on, but it didn't seem to affect my progress through the puzzle at all.
Nice interpretation of the theme, and a lot of potential for a bigger puzzle game if you wanted to keep going on it.
Was a little confusing at first, but once I got the hang of things I had some good fun.
The sound, art, and controls really capture the feel of an 8-bit arcade game.
Took a while to get the hang of it, but good fun once I did. Haven't tried the tilt controls, but got a score of 660 on keyboard.
Really innovative take on an infinite runner, and really challenging.
Adding some checkpoints to this would be good idea if you choose to keep working on this - at the very least, making it so you don't have to repeat the tutorial if you die after you've finished it.
Great entry!
Haha, awesome. This is pretty much exactly what the last day of the jam was like for me.
Oh man, this is unforgiving. I really like the idea, and the level looks great, but I'm just not good enough at platformers to really get anywhere.
Very cool control scheme! Took a while to get the hang of it, but it's good fun once I did.
Really innovative concept. Controls felt a bit sluggish at first, but make a lot of sense once I got the hang of them.
Thanks for playing, and for some great feedback, everybody.
To address some specific comments:
- Yeah, the music doesn't really fit in my opinion either. It was a rush job done right near the end of day 3, and putting together a synthesizer blues jam is something I can pretty much do in my sleep.
- The players have two metrics: health (red) and morale (green). Players lose morale by getting injured, but also by having bullets whiz over their head - when it hits zero, they drop what they're doing and flee to the bottom of the screen, where it slowly recovers.
- Winning and losing: I definitely didn't make this clear as I should have in the game. Units don't automatically "make it" once they're over the top; every 5 seconds, one of them can be killed in no-mans land. You've to to have 8 over the top alive at once to win - that's the "troops to victory" counter in the top right. You lose when you've got no one alive on the battlefield - so if everyone goes over, but never get that counter to 8, you'll lose.
- I agree lots of other things aren't really clear. The two things that are most missing to me is some sort of feedback about the state of jobs and buildings, and feedback about what happens when enemy fire hits a building. I had envisioned some more sprites to show those things, but didn't have time - then I was thinking about progress bars, but that felt like a really clunky solution. (And I also didn't have time.)
I definitely am considering picking this up again once I've had some time to recover!
Haha, awesome idea. Love it!
Nice subversive interpretation of the theme!
I love the idea here, but agree with some other folks: the game in the screen is a little lackluster - if it was tweaked to be a bit smoother and faster-paced, this would be the start of something excellent.
Very cool game! Agree with some others that the dragging felt a little off - I think the problem is that the sensitivity when moving the selected area without scrolling is way lower than the sensitivity of the scrolling.
Other than that, a great concept well executed! I feel like this could work really well, like a classic arcade game, with a gamepad: one stick to move the scanner and another to rotate/zoom.
Cool mechanic - Donkey Kong with physics!
With some balance tweaks and proper models this could be a really excellent platformer.
This would be really awesome as a mobile game!
Xbox controller support was a nice touch. It wasn't obvious to me that I had to go into options to enable it, but I found the game quite a bit easier to control with the gamepad instead of a keyboard.
Nice sound & graphical style!
Great graphics and sound, a simple solid concept well executed. Like others have said, this would be an awesome game for some local multipleyer.
Solid, simple mechanic and a good challenge. Great job!
Nice job working in the snowman theme.
Great evocation of the mood.
Now I know how AZERTY users feel with games that only have WASD. :p
Cool graphics, and nice twist on an old idea. I'd love to see a single-player mode on this.
Cool idea, but very short & straight-forward as is. I'd love to see the version with the full story!
Really cool concept. The field of view felt a touch too limited - even one tile further would have made things a lot less challenging.
The polish here is really excellent. Great controls, really well executed and charming style.
This is a Jelly Test - but I think there's a huge potential for this to be the basis for a much bigger Jelly Platformer.
Oh man, that's hard. Great interpretation of the theme!
Cute story, and a good take on theme.
Sorry to hear about the challenges you had. Not bad for a console game whipped up in one day.
Wow, amazing entry! Great story and a very engaging way of telling it.
Fun idea. I totally had a game like this for the TRS-80 a million years ago.
Really innovative use of the theme. Good puzzles!
Really well executed take on the theme & graphical style.
Not bad for four hours! This is the beginning of a solid arcade game - looking forward to what you can get done when you've got more time in LD32.
Outstanding entry! There's been a few games that play with the "one screen" theme like this, but this is probably the best executed of all the ones I've seen. Great graphics and sound, too!
Great game. Great interpretation of the theme, nice visual style, and just about the right puzzle difficulty.
I'd love to see more of this!
Cool idea. I don't think I've ever seen a government sim done as a Ludum Dare game before - good job!
I'm getting a 404 when I try to play the game - the source link seems to work, but not the Web link.
Simple and fun. Great job for a first game, keep it up!
Cool take on the theme. I also the same issue with being confused about the hang up & transfer - if people explained why they called back, rather than just picking up with the same dialog options for you, that'd go a long way to clarify it.
Really cool concept, well executed.
I had a crash trying to play a level after I had already beaten one - but they all works if I restarted the game.
Great graphical style, cool interpretation of the theme - good fun.
The first round was a little frustrating because the tiny playfield made getting a good shot on the enemies hard.
Cool take on an RTS made in 48 hours. Very challenging!
Cool story - I like the way that the different branches tie back to each other, it's a nice nod to players who want to see as much of the decision tree as they can.
Nice level design - could use a bit more polish with the controls, and some sound.
I'd suggest finding a place to to host this online so people can play it in browser without downloading, as just having it listed as "Source" makes it seem like more effort to get it running than it is. itch.io should be able to do that if you upload it as an "HTML" game.
Cool idea, lots of potential - keep working on it!
Nice graphical effects on the explosions.
Some suggestions: have zombies that move at different speeds, and a cap to how many bombs can be placed at a time. As it stands, if you just spam bombs right on the center you can go forever - though it's more fun to play it "fair."
Cool graphics. Love the GameBoy theme and the game-within-a-game idea. I'd love to see what you folks had in mind for the life sim elements.
Good feel to the sound and graphics. Simple, yet challenging & compelling gameplay - good job!
Ahh, this takes me back to waaay too many hours spent playing the first two Populous games. Awesome feel! Some of the controls are a little fiddly, but good fun overall.
I'd love to see a post-compo version of this - the ideas of a really good game are here, but it's not much of a challenge in the current unfinished state.
Hilarious. I'll have to remember to try the multiplayer on this - seems like it would be a blast.
"Game" doesn't feel like the right word for this. Very though-provoking and topical.
Haha, this is really delightful. Good fun simple gameplay with a really funny concept - loved the names!
Nice twist on the rhythm game genre.
Amazing interpretation of the theme, and a great twist on the ol' dungeon crawl genre.
More weapons and enemies and some time to polish this up could really round it out into something amazing.
Great controls, cool use of the theme, amazing graphics and sound - absolutely nailed that retro feel!
Very nice. This feels like the great basis for some interactive fiction.
Really funny idea. Good job - I like that you can do okay but just running, but to do really well you need to be a little tactical in when to fight and when to run.
Really like the idea for the theme, and the title screen is beautiful. Nice take on gameboy style graphics.
Two possible improvements I see are to make the movement a little snappier, and to check that fire doesn't spawn on the player - that got me a couple times.
Really cool concept - I love seeing strategy games in Ludum Dare, and the progressive mechanics introduced on each level were interesting.
It's really, really difficult, though - an easier rampup over the first few levels would help a lot, I think.
Great job. As one fan of authentic retro graphics to another, I really like the job you did with the authentic retro graphics.
Beautiful style, funny and interesting take on the theme. Only thing that would make it better would just be if there was more of it!
The graphics are amazing for a game about farting.
After scrambling like a madman to finish my entry, this put a huge smile on my face. Well done!
This is the best take on the theme I've seen so far. The idea of combining the elements is really well done and a lot of fun to play around with, graphics & audio style works really well too. Great job!
I love this! Great take on the theme, and a really good job gradually introducing the mechanics. Gets a bit frustrating at the end, as you say, but a rock-solid entry overall.
Like you said, short but well polished. It took me a little while to get the hang of but once I did it felt really good.
Definitely keep at this!
Nice job. It's pretty fun just screwing around with the physics in here, but the puzzles are pretty satisfying too. The minimalist sound & graphics work great.
This could definitely do well to be extended with more / more polished puzzles - it's a really solid idea for a game!
Great job, especially considering the setback you mentioned.
As you already said, this doesn't fit the theme, but it's a solid game. I really like the visual style, too. This could probably be quite easily extended into a pretty solid typing-tutor-style game.
Fits the theme really well. Funny idea, and charming programmer art. The Xbox controller support was a really nice touch.
I agree with other commenters that the difficulty spiked - I think it was 3 levels before the end?
Great work!
Nice entry. Not every day you see an "edutainment" title in Ludum Dare.
Movement stuttered a lot when my browser was maximized (Chrome 42 on Windows at 1680x1050) but went away when I made the window smaller.
This is hilarious! Great take on the theme. The Xbox controls felt great.
Really fun idea. Like others have said, with sounds and a bunch of different levels, this could be an amazing mobile game.
Really like the concept, and the pianos falling apart is hilarious.
Aiming them was a little tricky, but I guess that makes sense - pianos aren't known as precision weapons.
Really beautiful - the particle effects and menus were especially great.
There's some really fun gameplay here, but I'm not sure how well it fits the theme.
Reminds me a lot of Darius Twin on the SNES. Great stuff!
Really cool idea. I love the style and the look of the game world, and it's an unusual take on the theme which is great.
It did feel like I didn't have enough time to solve the puzzles - maybe a bit more of a tutorial showing what each of the sliders does would make the ramp-up to the main puzzles easier.
Really beautiful graphics and music.
I really like this entry, but I've never been great at 3D platformers so found this one to be really unforgiving. There's a ton of potential here - great job!
The music is great! Shame you weren't able to finish, but you're absolutely right - LD is all about pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and learning a lot in the process, so great work on that score.
Now excuse me, I gotta go get some Swedish Fish...
Really cool take on the theme. Controller support was a nice touch, too.
Thanks for playing and for the great feedback so far, everybody.
pvwradtke: thanks for letting me know about the bug with the Linux build. I have no idea what could cause that, but I do have access to an Ubuntu box so I'll take a look when I get a chance.
The size of this is impressive for a Ludum Dare game. Interesting concept, and the voice acting really helped with the immersion and to guide the story along.
The framerate was a little low on my PC, but not the the point of making it unplayable. I also would have liked to have seen a bit more of a tactical element to fighting the spheres, rather than just needing to fire a flare each time you see one.
Nice idea, and great take on the theme. I like the graphical style a lot, too.
The beat matching was really unforgiving, I thought. I got better at it as I played, but at first I could have sworn I was dead on but it was still registering as a missed beat.
Really good concept - I agree with a lot of the other feedback here.
One other suggestion would be to focus more on being either a platformer or a hacking sim - I like the combo, but it's tough to get both fully realized.
Really impressive how much there is here. I like that the different stories all approach the theme differently.
There's deeper tactics here than it seems at first glance, and I like the take on the theme.
Well that certainly was insane. Maybe the solutions to the puzzles were a bit toooo off the wall, but I can't fault you for creativity.
Snarky voiceovers were a nice touch.
Really fun take on the theme, and great graphical style.
I think the game would benefit a lot from a bit more depth: maybe weapon powerups, and enemies with some more behaviour (shooting back, moving up/down, etc.)
Great job!
Like others, I couldn't figure out if there was a way to get past the wolf.
Great graphical style, and a very compelling intro - you've got the start of something really good here.
Really cool music, and the gamepad controls were really smooth. Nice use of the theme, too.
Having a few sound effects (like one for each of the types of shot, one for hitting an enemy and another for an enemy hitting you) would have helped the immersion a lot, but a solid entry all the same.
Good fun to be had here. Didn't get a chance to play multiplayer, but kudos for supporting 4-player local play.
I love the sound and the graphics, and the take on the theme.
I really like the style of the graphics and sound. Stealth games aren't really my bag but I had fun with this one.
I love the music.
Not bad at all for your first game jam - can't go wrong with a compelling game mechanic that's well executed, and you've got that here for sure.
Nice idea. Good progression between the levels introducing a new concept on each one - it got pretty unforgiving by the end, but had a nice ramp-up to that point.
Really well polished. Nice take on the theme & a great visual style. I just wish there was more of it!
Great pixel art style, & cool take on the theme.
Really liked the monster names, and some of the stuff that popped up in the journal were great.
It's pretty funny seeing a progress quest style game as an LD entry, but like others have said, it would be nice to have some control over what was happening even if it was in a comically superficial way.
Good take on the theme, and funny execution. All the wacky things you could put in the cigarettes and their descriptions were a nice touch.
Great job for your first entry. I like how the two ends of the staff worked - a nice twist on mouse aiming.
I really like the idea here, and the sound and graphics are great - but it's just a bit too much to juggle at once, for me at least.
The biggest challenge for me is that the timing for the jumps is really unforgiving. If the jumps were a bit more "floaty" it would feel a lot easier.
All in all, great job. This is one of the more innovative games I've seen so far this LD.
Why would I want to prevent free pizzas from reaching me???
This could work really well as a rhythm game - kind already is one, it would just need to sync up with the music.
Having the music change on each level is a nice touch - the transition was a little awkward, maybe they should cross-fade?
Also doesn't want to run for me - loads a black screen, music starts, then CtD. A shame, because I really want to try this one.
Top notch entry - great take on the theme, awesome mood, and a reasonable challenge to boot. Great job!
I still only see a Mac OSX version - I'd love to try a Windows or Linux version of this.
Thanks for the Windows version! Nice visual style, great music, and a pretty nice feel to the controls.
Definitely keep at it, this is a great start for what looks like it could be a really good platformer.
Very refreshing change from the rest of the entries. I really like the direction you're taking the post-jam version, too.
For some reason (maybe RNGsus hates me?) on the first playthrough I didn't get any power-plants - worked fine on later attempts, though.
Really funny idea, and nice ramp up with more teachers on each level. I also love that you did this with your kids, that's an awesome way to spend a Ludum Dare weekend.
For whatever reason picking up food didn't work for me on the web version, but worked fine on the Windows build.
One of the most polished entries I've seen so far this LD. Great job all around!
Great sound and graphics. Really hilarious aesthetic - I like it.
The wide window resolution was an odd choice - it didn't play nice with my 1680x1050 monitor, but thankfully nothing needed for gameplay was cut off. Getting resolution-independence right can be a pain within the constraints of Ludum Dare, but it would go a long way to add some more polish to an already great entry.
Great job!
What is this I can't even. First kazoo I've heard in a Ludum Dare game, that's for sure.
Super funny, and I love the construction paper art. My only critique is that when I got big enough, the background scrolled really fast compared to everything else - got kinda disorienting.
Good fun. Controls work really well once you get used to them, and I especially love the way the sound builds up as things get crazy.
Most meta game of them all.
Another great entry from you folks - every Ludum Dare I look forward seeing to what you put together.
Probably the most interesting take on the theme I've seen so far - and the reference to the Westport Independent made me smile.
Wow, great entry! The progression of difficulty was really nice, up to the absolutely fiendish last level.
This plays like a demented version of Super Off Road - and that's a very good thing!
Really cool idea - love that you had your kids involved, too.
Definitely could use some better level balance, but there's a lot of good stuff in here.
This is really cool! A good challenge, but I had a lot of fun with it.
I agree with hyperscope that showing a countdown for timed abilities would be really helpful - especially on the last level, I found myself having to keep count in my head in order to manage the solution.
Good entry!
Really cool idea! It may be too ambitious for a Ludum Dare game - but I was able to get it working in Windows 8.1, and will keep tabs and give a proper rating as my playthough progresses.
Good puzzle game. Online high scores are a nice touch.
Good fun! Looks and sounds amazing, and the controls were just right to give a good challenge and keep things interesting without being frustrating.
This is a great complete package - sound and graphics would look right at home on a Super Nintendo. Good use of the theme, too.
Super interesting game. I love the progression of the mechanics as you go on - this would definitely be worth expanding on further!
Really nice idea.
The pod movement was a bit slow, and the lack of real pathing on them made things a bit frustrating.
I enjoyed this game a lot - if the movement & pacing were tightened up a bit, there's the makings of a really innovate RTS here.
Nice! Good twist on a classic.
Performance was a little choppy, even with the sound effects off, and the music was pretty loud compared to the rest of the sound - but good fun was had, overall.
Really cool concept. At times it was frustrating because I had no idea where to go, or saw a goal but had no way to achieve it... but I guess that's the whole point, eh?
Good stuff!
This is nice. Good aesthetic, nice music. Good job.
Really nice take on the themes! A good challenge, too.
This is really cool. Things got hairy once the birds started chasing me!
Really nice design around the sound and graphics.
There's not much too the gameplay, but it feels like the start of something like Painters Guild.
Lots of fun! Good job! I love seeing procedural generation employed well in LD entries.
The frame rate was pretty poor at times on my machine, but not so much as to be a problem - and certainly understandable considering this was put together in 48 hours.
This is a hilarious take on the theme. Nice variety of stations, too.
One thing I found a little frustrating was, as the number of stations operating got smaller, it was hard to find the optimal way to spend my time - either stay on one station and listen for the whole loop, hoping I find the offensive remark, or continuing to flip through them and risk missing it.
Really cool twist on a classic game. I thought I got it when I saw the number of points declined each time you hit the same object, but I didn't - until I did.
Woah. This game is super weird, but I love it - great stuff!
This game is punishingly hard! I think on the whole that fits its style very well, but some progression would be nice - perhaps have it start slowly, and make the whole game world accelerate with each point scored?
It's super addictive, though, and looks and sounds great. Good job!
Really fun idea. It was sweet to get a giant and crazy-looking ship.
Nice take on the theme, and good graphical style.
I got stuck at the level with the rotating platforms, though - unless I'm missing something about the solution, they rotated too fast to actually line anything up.
Love the premise. This is really challenging.
It'd be nice to have a counter of how far you've gone, so I could more easily compare runs and work towards getting as far as possible.
Lots of fun! Nice job.
I agree that a checkpoint system would be an improvement, like starting over at the same level when you died instead of from the start - especially for Ludum Dare, something like that can be good to help more people see the whole game.
Great music, great graphics, really nice level design. Very polished take on the endless runner genre.
Haha, we had somewhat similar aesthetic approaches, it seems.
I was really tempted to do something similar with a photograph of an old TV, but I don't have one quite old enough to pull it off.
I enjoyed this. Good job!
Just as a heads up, the .pdb files in Unity 5 builds aren't needed - I don't know why it puts them there, but you could shave some size off the download by removing them. (Not that it's terribly big to begin with.)
Well that certainly was insane.
That poor, poor clown. This is an awesome take on the theme, and good fun to boot.
It looks like there's a bug (at least in the Windows build) with restarting after game over - it didn't reset my score, and things seemed to freeze up after popping my first balloon on the second playthough. No biggie as quitting and relaunching is easy.
Nice idea - I think the execution could be made a bit friendlier.
A tutorial level would help a lot - where there was no winning or losing, but if you made a mistake it explained how your decision violated the checklist.
Nice balanced strategy game, with a good visual style. Sweet.
Good twist on a proven formula - the multiplayer is really cool.
I never would have thought to use both themes in this way, it's a nice take on it.I saw this game from your post-mortem, and my critique of this game would pretty much cover the points you've already raised.
Sounds like you learned a hell of a lot - great job getting something in for the compo on your first go-around. I had to do 3 jam entries before I figured out what I was doing well enough to get something done in 48 hours.
I always get a kick out of seeing business sims of various descriptions in Ludum Dare, as it's an underrepresented genre for sure.
Really good take on a great classic game style. The sound and graphics really reminded me of the style of DOS games in the 90s - lots of fun!
I ran into a couple of cases where things didn't seem to work right when the plant grew - for example, one time I got stuck in the bottom wall of the playfield, and couldn't move anymore. Couldn't make it happen consistently, though.
And a suggestion: you should make it clearer that the file for download is an installer - since I didn't know it was, it made me a bit nervous when it asked to make changes to my computer.
Nice level design - good execution with the gradual introduction of new goals and challenges.
The length felt about perfect for an LD game, too. Good job!
Super cool take on the theme.
Yikes, sorry folks! Have been trying to get Linux builds working and noticed the resolution issue, must have packaged it up wrong once I resolved that.
I'll get a fixed build up later tonight when I'm back at my PC.
Download should be fixed now - thanks for letting me know!
Serves me right for trying to upload a fixed build at 3:30 in the morning.
batmanasb, glad to hear it works well in WINE. While there's been no particular demand for a Linux build, I'm a big supporter of game devs releasing for Linux so figure I should do that myself.
Bad news is that the latest version of Unity seems to have some frustrating quirks with how builds work on Linux. The good news is, I think I've got them sorted out - should be a Linux build (as well as a Mac one) along very shortly.
Nice graphical style, and a good concept. I can see how this would be great for kids.
At first it bugged me a bit that there was a delay before the water stopped, but once I got the hang of it it made for a good challenge.
Nice take on the theme.
I can really relate to ending #6 - it's what this weekend was like for me, staring at a computer with a cat nearby.
Really unique and nice art style. I'd love to see more of this!
Really cool concept - I was skeptical of the controls at first but after a while they felt really good. I also liked how the checkpoint system worked.
Sound effects are a bit unbalanced in terms of volume, but good otherwise.
Nice job!
I always admire the ambition of people who make city builders for Ludum Dare - it's a huge project to try to pull off, especially for the compo.
There's a lot of fun to be had here, especially in the post-compo version, but the game needs a bit more work to reach its potential.
Nice one. This is up in the running for best polish & feel of the controls of anything I've played yet.
This game is beautiful - absolutely outstanding visual style. It's a good deal of fun, too. Great job!
Good fun. I agree with some of the other commenters that it's a bit frustrating that it's never possible to get all the garbage - no matter how well you play, you'll lose eventually.
But overall, great mechanics and good polish - good job!
Looks like for Processing, all you have to do is choose "Export Application" from the file menu to build a standalone executable version - that will probably be a lot easier for people to run.
Simple game, but I had some fun replaying it several times to see all the different outcomes.
I like the ancient mode - a nice touch.
I agree with others that this game's really difficult - a ramp-up in difficulty at the start would be a good improvement.
Good job for a first go with Unity. As others have said, it's missing some game mechanics to give it more of a goal or strategy than "rack up points", but the core gameplay is there for sure.
Solid take on the theme, and good addictive game play. Really hard, but that suits a game like this well.
Nice challenge! Took me a while to get familiar enough with the runes to recognize them, but good fun after that - great mood set by the sound and graphics.
Woah. Amazing take on the themes. A good challenge, and definitely near the top of the pile for mood. Great job!
Sound and visuals fit together great, too.
Great job. Love the look and sound of this.
Good fun. Controls feel like a good ol' classic arcade game.
Very nice and relaxing experience. Good stuff!
I love this idea! Felt a bit hard to control where I was cutting, but on the whole it's a really fun game with a charming style.
This is super challenging, but all in all a well put-together package. Good job!
Hilarious idea. Really nicely polished, too!
Song at the final boss was a bit loud, but otherwise, great job.
This is surprisingly difficult! Nice take on the theme - this ain't your average bridge builder.
This game's a a lot of fun, and looks and sounds great. Good straight-forward execution of the theme.
I agree with others that making the side-to-side movement a bit faster would be a good improvement on this. Controller support would be nice too, but that's just gravy. Either way, I had a lot of fun with this!
Really cool take on the theme. Great job!
Really nice aesthetics. A simple concept, well executed.
I can't get this to launch (on Windows). I get the following error:
boot.lua:364: No code to run
Your game might be packaged incorrectly
Make sure main.lua is at the top level of the zip
Nice job combining the two themes.
Really cool idea. I think this is worth pursuing further - it could be a really outstanding game if the controls and pacing were tightened up.
Lots of fun. I could see this working well as a mobile game, and it also wouldn't be out of place as a classic arcade game. Good stuff!
Glad to see a ☃ game.
Great entry! Nice take on the combination of themes.
The hard mode is something fierce.
Nice entry. Took a while to get the hang of dodging the bugs but good fun after that.
I really like the idea of using two buttons to press more buttons. This is for sure more fun than filling out real CAPTCHAs - it feels like I'm playing as a robot someone built in a hare-brained scheme to get around them.
Really fun idea! The mouse movement feels really good, and the AI was a decent challenge (when it wasn't stuck on walls.)
Sound would go a long way to making this feeling more complete.
Love the graphics and sound - very nice take on a two-button RPG.
Great entry. I really like the concept here and it's well executed. Good puzzle design.
I had a bit of jankiness with right-click detection, sometimes I had to press it a few times to switch modes. But nothing game-breaking.
Really good feel to this one, and an interesting visual style.
I can't even imagine making something that will run on real hardware in 48 hours - great job!
The fact that only one bullet could be on screen at once, combined with the fact that thrust and fire were on the same button, made this really challenging - at first it felt like I wasn't in control, but when it clicked I had some good fun.
Good fun - I love the visual style here.
I noticed the uploaded version is a development build - if you uncheck that when making it, it will remove the console that pops up when you lose - tho like others have said, it doesn't cause any problems.
I think this is the first proper roguelike I've seen in a Ludum Dare - nice.
Pretty simple idea, but it's very well executed here. I had a lot of fun with this.
Good take on the theme. Puzzle games of this ilk are always something I get a kick of seeing in Ludum Dare - it can be tough to balance them right, but when done well they really stand out.
Nice puzzler. Nothing to say that hasn't already been said in the comments, but yeah - you could do really well to keep working on this!
This is a highlight amongst the games I've played so far, for sure! Looks great, nice take on the theme, and a pretty good difficulty progression.
I was a little lost when I first got into the game, but after the first warp and enemy appeared it all made sense.
Interesting idea, but the shifting and collision detection seemed a bit glitchy which made the game harder than it needed to be. This could really shine with a bit more polish.
Nice platformer. The combo idea is really cool.
I found this game really difficult, personally, but I'm crap at retro platformers in general.
Not bad - the link to the theme is a bit tenuous, but all in all, pretty darn good for 8 hours!
I had to install OpenAL to get this to work - it might be helpful to either include the DLL in the zip, or mention it as a dependency in the game description.
Interesting idea, but it needs some polish to properly shine. I kept thinking I was getting the hang of it, but then I lost even though I still had squares left - what's the lose condition?
Nice! The procgen levels were really cool.
Movement was a bit glitchy at times, and it wasn't clear at first why I was dying in a few situations (falling for too long, and it seemed like the circle timed out...) so getting the hang of things was a bit frustrating - but I enjoyed myself a lot once I did.
Interesting idea, but it could use a bit more polish - in particular, a crosshair would be a huge help as others have said. I think moving speed vs. how long the kill zone lasts for could use some balancing as well.
Nice idea, really unforgiving though - I had some solid fun with this, but could never quite finish the whole course.
Some sound would really kick this up a notch, as would bringing up the non-boosted speed a bit - but the core of the game here is really solid.
The style of this is hilarious. After a while I felt that there wasn't really much to the gameplay, but all the different combinations of the powers kept me curious.
This is delightfully demented. Good stuff.
Nice take on the theme, and good visuals. As others have said, without a win or lose condition it's not quite a game, but what's here is really solid.
Good stuff - I had some good fun with this. It felt like at the end things were going a bit too fast, in that the challenge was just mashing buttons fast enough rather than recognizing the shapes, but I can't think of an easy way around that.
Either way, I had a lot of fun playing this!
Neat take on the theme. At times it felt like the main screen was a bit too far zoomed in, so the minimap was a nice touch.
Ordinarily I'd refrain from rating a game that I can't play, but this is seriously cool and impressive for something hacked together in a weekend. I love seeing when people take Ludum Dare in a totally unintended direction, so this put a huge smile on my face.
Pretty fun. I'd love to see some more of this.
(You should probably opt out of the "Audio" category, as I didn't hear anything when I was playing.)
Nice art, and a good take on the theme. Controller support is a good call with a game like this; the controls felt really good.
Just a heads up, you have "L" instead of "B" for the gamepad "switch to scissors" button in the description here - it's correct in-game, which is the important thing.
Nice one! This a fun take on the theme, and I like the visual style. Being able to pick up new things to shift into was a nice mechanic, though it could have been developed a bit more.
Having the option for mouse sensitivity was a nice touch. This is a really cool puzzle platformer, great job!
I think the visual style works well here - it's minimal, for sure, but engaging.
Marjie62: thanks so much!
testzero: I agree that controls are a weak spo here. I had better/configurable controls on my todo list, but, naw, didn't get there in time. I was torn about having the controls reoriented, but during dev I tried it both ways and this one felt better to me - though one thing I'm learning in from doing Ludum Dare is that what feels good to me is often confusing to other people!
This game is adorable, and has really compelling game play.
The difficulty ramp-up seems a little off - I think thing would be balanced a bit better if you started with more time, but got a little bit less for each box you completed. But we all know that getting the balance just right during Ludum Dare is a big challenge - all in all, great job!
Same issue as notime4games: "File has been removed due to inactivity."
Great concept. I had fun giving this a spin, but I think the balance is a bit off - for how subtle the tells are and the penalty for getting it wrong, it'd be nice to have a bit more time to just watch and learn.
Nice puzzle game. I like seeing LD games that are challenging for reasons other than janky controls. :p
Random puzzle generation is an awesome bit of polish for a compo entry.
Good fun! The visual style works really well, and the mechanics here are simple but solid.
This was really compelling once I got the hang of it. Nice idea.
This is really cool - great job creating a solid mood with so little. I like the angle you've taken with the theme here - it's subtle, but ends up pretty compelling.
It would be really cool to expand this, to have multiple endings and actually tie the hints into the game play more.
Interesting twist on a shoot-em up. At times it felt like the randomness made for an uneven difficulty progression, but I had some good fun with this.
I got the same issue as aidanmarkham - "restricted content" error from Dropbox.
All the detailed comments I could make have already been made, so I'll just say: great job!
Good take on the theme! It took me a few days to learn who's who, but that worked well as it added to the suspense.
I like the visual style a lot, too - maybe it could use a bit more polish in a few places, but it works well.
Really cool! Nice take on the theme - there's been a few games that I've played so far that take things in a similar direction, but this is one of the better executions of it I've seen.
The descriptions of some of the items made me laugh - a good unexpected source of humour for sure.
This is super slick. Great job! There's a ton of potential for a whole game in here.
Interesting idea! The pacing could be tightened up a bit, but all in all this was a pretty compelling little game.
Not bad for a first game! The controls felt a bit odd at first but totally work with the level design - kinda felt like skating across the levels once I got used to it.
Try as I might, I couldn't beat the last level - but I've never been great at platformers.
Great job! This is a really solid "mini" adventure game - good puzzle design, humour, sound and graphics.
My only criticism is that having to react quickly to the bullet at the end felt a bit "cheap" after getting used to being able to experiment at my own pace up until then.
Good fun. I was able to get to 140m, which I think is pretty decent if your best is 150.
Looks great! Nice simple but unique take on the theme. These sorts of games always run the risk that questions could be more open-ended, or players more creative, than you as the dev could imagine - that burned me a few times, but all in all it's well designed.
Nice polished package - the gameplay here is a little slight, but it all works really well, and the sound and graphics are great.
I got the game started, but I'm not sure how - it eventually moved beyond the title screen.
I feel like the game world is a bit too big for this sort of game - the premise is alright, but there's a lot of wandering around just trying to find something to interact with.
(Also: you don't need those .pdb files when you package up a Unity game - the download will be a bunch smaller without them.)
Nice concept. This could really shine with some polish to the graphics and difficulty.
The art style here is amazing, and the concept seems interesting - but, like you say, this isn't really finished. Keep at it, the idea's solid for sure.
Aww yiss, 112 points! I knew my touch-typing skills would come in handy one day. 10/10 would enslave humanity to serve reptile-kind again.
Best political simulator of 2016!
There's not much here, but I like the direction. Keep at it and I'm sure we'll see something bigger and better from you next time!
Solid take on the theme - there's a ton of potential here, but agree with some others that it could use some more polish to really shine. I couldn't get past the 3rd level, 'cause I kept getting stuck in the terrain when I changed forms.
I like the idea here, but as others have said, starting over from the beginning gets frustrating. A good practice for Ludum Dare is to be pretty forgiving with game overs, so that people are more likely to see the whole game - what I usually do is restart the current level rather than the whole game.
Great visual and audio design. You did a great job at setting the mood, though I didn't see a real connection to the theme.
The fact that I could shapeshift wasn't obvious to me at first - you should mention it in your instructions.
Really nice art style, and good hectic gameplay.
Nice visual style. I also found the wizard was pretty overpowered, but that was balanced somewhat by not being able to stay as him when things got hectic and I ran out of mana.
Also, just as a heads up - it's not a problem for the jam, but I'm not able to see your source code: Bitbucket gives me a "You do not have access to this repository" error when I follow the link and log in.
Not bad for a first crack at game development - keep at it!
This would be really nice with controller support - the movement actually already works with it using Unity's default getAxis or whatever, so it wouldn't be too hard to implement it the rest of the way.
It's a shame you didn't get as far as you had hoped, because what's here has a lot of promise. I like the visual style a lot.
Having the level advance when you're hit was a very good call for Ludum Dare, as it helps people see more of the game even if they're not any good at it.
Keep at this, for sure! (As an aside, there's no affect on other categories for opting out of audio or anything else. All it means is that when the final scores are presented, your game won't be ranked in those categories.)
Haha, good fun! This style of browser game takes me waaaaay back to a more innocent time on the Internet.
This is really slick - great job!
Great polish to this one. The delay in some of the keys taking effect was a bit frustrating at first, but once I got the hang of that, I found it brought some more depth to the gameplay.
Some of the puzzles were a little fiddly, but balance is a hard thing to get right under the time pressure of Ludum Dare - this is pretty good fun!
Man, this is incredibly polished!
If I had to criticize, I'd say that at times it felt that too much of my success (or lack of) was down to chance - that my highest scoring games were based around the random draws working out for me rather than my planning.
All the same, there's a good bit of depth here for an LD game - great job!
The visuals here are amazing, and a little sinister like El Cabaro says - I like them a lot.
The level design is punishing, though - I've never been great at platformers, and this one is just way too tough for me.
I only got one of the two endings, but... oh man. I did *not* expect that.
This was a ton of fun. It was a bit confusing at first, but once I figured out how to approach it systematically, it got pretty interesting.
Great aesthetic here. Gameplay is slight, for sure, but the whole package is super engaging - it's always great to see LD entries that stretch what we think of as a "game".
Some of the best visuals I've seen this Ludum Dare so far - pretty fun, to boot!
I had a lot of fun with this. The voice acting was pretty decent, and made for a nice take on the theme.
I had to give this a try after seeing some screenshots of it, and I'm glad I did. It was really interesting seeing different goombas and the ways that the planets turned out - just when I thought I had a handle on all the different ways they could vary, something entirely new showed up.
What you've put together is really impressive for 72 hours, but the scope is ambitious enough that it doesn't feel quite complete - for everything that's impressive about this, the gameplay gets a bit samey-samey after a few planets.
Still a better value than No Man's Sky, though. Great job!
This is really cool - like a solo board game. The random levels were wildly varying in difficulty, but that's to be expected - controlling for difficulty would be a huge thing to implement!
The pre-built level was just complex enough to give an introduction to the mechanics without being frustrating, but still take some thought to actually complete.
I feel like there's really solid potential for a two-player mode to this, but I'm not sure exactly how it would work.
Really cool idea for a simulation. It was fun to trounce the other tribes by microing my villagers.
Some sound would go a long way to making this feel more complete. The trade mechanic also felt a bit mysterious to me - I could tell that it was working, but didn't quite get a handle on how.
Good, simple fun! The ability to throw the spear around added a nice dimension to the game play, because you had to manage when you needed it vs when you could afford to throw it.
Uploading a version to fix that crash would be fine - you're allowed to fix things like that after the 48 hours, so long as it's not adding any game play etc. It's good to update your game description to say you'd done that, though.
A few other suggestions, specifically about packaging up your game:
1. You should give your game (the download/executable) a different name - something like "ludum dare" is fine when you're developing, but isn't so great a name for someone who's downloading it along side a lot of other LD entries.
2. I'd recommend against packaging up the game in an installer. I don't know about Gamemaker specifically, but there should be a way you can package it so it's just something you unzip and run - again, makes things a bit easier for people who are going to be running and playing a whole bunch of different games.
Well this takes me back - good fun. I'm impressed wit h the faithfulness of the Asteroids clone.
This is really charming. A little slight, maybe, but it definitely put a smile on my face. Cool idea to have the a story told through the different patients coming through.
It's also got me wondering if there'd be any fun in a game that took a more serious take on prehistoric medicine.
This is great. Nice take on the theme, and the visuals are simple but very effective.
Like others have said, I Found the controls a bit "floaty" - on the ground it felt fine, but jumping precisely was really hard - even on a gamepad, it felt like the sweet spot between falling short or overshooting was really narrow.
I think the strongest thing here is the level design: you did a great job adding complexity, and gradually introducing the gameplay mechanics one at a time. That's not an easy thing to do right in 48 hours, so kudos!
I like the idea here. I've spent a lot of my life at a command line and I'm still worried that something like this is going to happen to me.
I agree with some others that the game could use a bit more polish: tighten up the movement, tweak the level design, etc. But that's the hardest thing to get right during a game jam for sure.
Hope to see you in the next Ludum Dare!
Really groovy, man. The way that the levels shifted around made for a nice twist on classic platforming.
The controls feel really excellent, which is a great accomplishment for a platformer made in 48 hours. Also, like others have said, the music and graphics are spot-on.
Interesting idea. I agree with others that the pacing's off: especially at the start, smaller chunks before getting feedback would make the gameplay more compelling.
My final score - on easy - was 57/100. Especially got dinged on calligraphy, overall getting an 8 - well, I guess I'm no Sumerian calligrapher.
The mouse wheel gave me trouble trying to play the game embedded on the Ludum Dare website: no matter what I did, it scrolled the page as well as rotating the stylus. Worked fine when I followed the link, though. May be worthwhile disabling the embed if there's not an easy way around that.
Really excellent art and sound, like everyone is saying. The controls felt just right, as well.
I could see this being really excellent if it was an "endless runner" sort of game - rather than having an end, it just slowly accelerated and you were going for distance.
Also, love the title!
I'm always wowed by people who are able to make a game for actual retro hardware in 48 hours. This one's really well done, to boot, so great job.
I did find the combat a bit frustrating, like @xesenix. It would improve things a bit if tapping the d-pad turned you to face that direction before moving you - when I was next to a slime but not facing it, my instinct was to turn to hit it but that meant walking into it and taking damage.
It was fine when I got the hang of it, but frustrating at first.
The ending was hilarious, too - a great self-referential take on the theme.
This is really funny. I love how you've taken some of the quirks and oddities of old computer systems and exaggerated them. I don't remember having to operate a crank to load disks into a drive back in the day...
Well, this is gruesome. Amazing how much you're able to do with something so minimal.
Very interesting take on the theme.
The Windows version didn't want to work for me - just loaded to a white window - but the Web version is fine.
Great job! The puzzles were very well designed. The last one had me scratching my head for a while, but in a good way; I was really satisfied when I figured it out.
In a few places the collisions glitched out and one of the stones ended up in an odd place, but with some fiddling it was nothing I couldn't recover from.
The story was compelling and well told, too. If we were doing ratings this Ludum Dare, I'd definitely give you great marks for mood.
Thanks so much for the wonderful positive feedback folks!
@quentinus60: I agree that the spear dudes aren't balanced as well as they could be - during development they were too easy to avoid, so I buffed them but in retrospect I overdid it.
@manabreak: It makes me really happy to be recognized for the style of my games! It's as much a conceit towards doing art and sound quickly as anything else, but it does have a lot of charm, eh?
@PetterBergmar: yeah, after level 11 or so the balance is definitely skewed towards "impossible". I had some idea for more content in the late game but didn't get it implemented, so figured things should end before they got boring. Level 11 is really good, I think - that's about as far as I can get consistently.
@blinry: I agree about moving up and down. It wasn't part of my original design, and by the time I realized it should be in there I didn't have time to add it. :/
Well done! The art here is charming, and a good example of why I'm a big advocate of chunky pixel art for game jam entries.
Great job on putting together a decent puzzle game in 48 hours. It seems to be a really hard thing to get right, as so much of it hinges on really good level design - I've never been brave enough to try.
I got stuck in a few places - I could never quite wrap my head around exactly how to determine which car would be damaged by a given trap. Including the solutions was a nice touch, 'cause you definitely want people see as much of your game as possible.
Really solid entry, dude!
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHkKJfcBXcw
Haha, this is hilarious. Not a "game", per se, but very entertaining all the same.
I've always been a fan of watching genetic algorithms in action, and this is no exception. It does seem like the winning strategy is to smash the walls in such a way that the bits go flying across the people, taking them all out - that showed up in generation 2 or 3 in my game and by generation 12 was pretty much universal.
Good stuff!
I'm not entirely sure what I just played, but I think I loved it.
The actual game play was a bit frustrating in places, but I persevered because I got totally wrapped up in the story.
This is a great reflection on the collective insanity we all went through last weekend. Thanks for making it.
Good fun. I loved the chaos at the end too - it makes me happy to hear that it was serendipitous.
I guess my critique is that, after a certain point, it didn't feel like there was much of a challenge. It was fun to get more powerful, but it'd be nice if there was a ramp up to the difficulty as well - maybe the scarabs could move faster or more chaotically?
The idea of a block-breaking game with upgrades like this is really compelling - I agree with others that there's a lot of potential to expand this if you're so inclined!
Love the music! I like how this is different from a lot of the other games that take the retro-computing approach to the theme, by showing how things were often a pain in the butt back in the day rather than being a pure nostalgia trip.
Love the style here! The art, sound, music and characters are all really polished.
Flying the ship around was good fun too - took a while to get a hang of, but it felt pretty good when I did. Like a lot of unity games, it works with a controller too and just zooming around in the ship like that is good fun.
The actual gameplay itself is interesting, but gets a bit monotonous once you get the hang of it - I could see this get fleshed out by starting smaller, and bringing in more complications as time goes on.
Overall, good job!
Man, I haven't been on a sailboat in over 10 years, but this took me right back. You've managed to put together a really accurate simulation of how I remember it.
This is a really cohesive package - the sound and art are really polished, the game play feels great, and the difficulty progression is good.
Really cool take on the theme. I like how things progressed - when everything was in good shape, keeping it all under control seemed easy, and everything went sideways so slowly it kind of took me by surprise.
Really cool! I loved the puzzle design and the aesthetics - music and sound were great.
This would be so much fun to play more of.
Really polished! Great job.
I'm really impressed this is made with Twine! You did a great job pushing the limits of that platform.
I agree with much of @qzqxq's comments - it's really engaging at first, but once you're established and have everything up and running there's not really much that you have to do.
Some random events starting in year 4 or 5 - nothing punishing, but things that would require the player to re-prioritize a bit - would keep things more engaging for duration.
Great job, man! This is a really compelling puzzle game, with a hilarious premise and a great visual style.
Some music would make this really shine - but it's awesome all the same.
This is the best entry I've played for setting a mood - well done!
Very cool way of storytelling. The music fit the mood really well, too.
I'd love to see this idea taken further!
Great visual style, and a nice take on a classic puzzle. I wish I had a PS Move so I could see how that plays, I could see it working very well for this kind of game.
Very apropos to the Ludum Dare community!
Cool puzzle game! I could have played this for a lot longer - the length was good for an LD entry, but I was hooked and didn't want it to end.
The sound & graphics could have used a bit more polish, I think - they're fine, but I think a bit more time spent getting them better would have gone a long way.
There was some nice emergent complexity around how the roach turned on its own, the layout of the levels, and the instructions I gave it. Good fun!
Super interesting entry. It's a bit short, but that's understandable considering how much polish went into the graphical style and level design - I had a ton of fun trying to wrap my head around everything.
Really fun idea, but it gets bogged down with the physics a bit I think - for example, at one point I had a bed land right on top of a table, and it was impossible to sort out that I could see.
Also - for me, at least - once I was a piece of furniture, Q and E were move and A and D were rotate. That worked fine, but was confusing when I was expecting something different.
Nice stuff. At first I Thought there wasn't too much do this, but it gets surprisingly intense as the game goes on.
Being able to move further when next to eggs and enemies was a good design choice - it adds a decent amount of depth to the strategy which I didn't expect.
Good stuff!
Nice little party game! The visual style is great, and the sound effects are pretty funny and work well.
The controls feel a little bit unresponsive - I imagine that's deliberate to keep things challenging and unpredictable, but they could due to be tightened up somewhat.
Adding bots was a great idea - it's hard to find people to play multiplayer games with when I'm doing my LD rating, so having bots makes the game more accessible.
This was good for a laugh - great writing! You really used the limitations of the Pico-8 to great effect - the sound and graphics fit perfectly.
My biggest criticism is: more please!
Pretty cool, man. I find it really challenging - probably because I'm too much of an ass to make any friends, even in game.
I love the idea, and the style.
Just a Unity tip: in the Player settings, you can configure the supported aspect ratios - it looks like you designed this for 16:9, so restricting it to just that might avoid the issue of content getting cut off in some cases.
This is giving me flashbacks to working in a cube farm... I don't miss those days.
If you made the coworkers go on to infect eachother, this could be an epidemiology simulator. :)
@TerraCottaFrog - should be fixed now. I had the WebGL page set to "restricted" instead of "published" by accident.
This is good fun. You did a great job making a small space feel huge, which is great for this theme.
I feel like - as is often the case - a little bit more polish, especially around tuning the controls and polishing the sound a bit more, would have gone a long way. But what's here is a ton of fun, and an impressively well realized shooter for 48 hours.
Wow, amazing. You've got lots of great feedback so I won't repeat it.
I'm amazed at the amount of content you've got here - all scripted and voice acted, no less - in 72 hours.
Beautiful game, great job. I feel like it's a risky choice to go with a slower-paced game for Ludum Dare, but it's paid off well with this one.
Some of the navigation feels a bit clunky in places - I can't offer any constructive suggestions as that's something I struggle with as well.
Some music would have gone a ways to make this game even more immersive than it already is, but even without it there's a great amount of polish and completeness here for just two day's work. Well done.
Oh god, it's just like real life! I lost in the end because I got two managers who both just constantly pestered the guy working on the final task.
Some sound could really buff the humour here and make the downtime a bit more enjoyable, but it's a pretty solid humourous entry all the same.
Nice take on the theme, and I love the visual style here.
I think the gameplay would be a bit richer if there were more amenity types, but, well, that's Ludum Dare for ya. Great job!
I think I remember you talking about this idea on the IRC channel over the weekend. It's a great take on the theme!
The hit detection for the welding beam felt a little fiddly - I couldn't quite get a sense of what it took to destroy one of my ineffective competitors. Between that, and the fact that you move at the same speed as them (which is a nice design choice!) it was really challenging to get a hang of the combat mechanic.
The fog of war was a nice touch - a good bit of polish that deepens the gameplay in subtle ways.
Great job!
Great feel to this. A pretty classic idea, well executed.
The angled grid was a bit confusing at first, but I got used to it.
As others have said, being able to restart a level rather than the whole game would make things more enjoyable - especially for Ludum Dare, you want people to be able to see as much as your game as possible so it's worth it to be a bit more forgiving than you might be otherwise.
Good job!
Great stuff, dude. As a few others have mentioned, this is a style of game that's been around for ever, but you did a great job of it.
In particular, the difficulty progression seemed really well done.
It's true, I pretty much didn't leave the room during this Ludum Dare!
This is incredibly polished, and the soundtrack is amazing. Great job!
Love the art - great work for 48 hours!
Things are a bit jank, but that's unity physics for you. Making a pinball game in LD is very ambitious, and this is well done considering.
This is a two-player game, yeah? Sadly, I'm rating solo so I can't get the full experience here.
This is an interesting take on the theme, and the controls feel decent. I could see this getting really intense with two real competitive types going head-to-head.
I really like the premise and look of this, but sadly as of now there doesn't seem to be anyone else playing. I've made a note to come back to this tomorrow as I'd really like to give it a try!
As others have said, I admire the ambition of a multiplayer game for LD, but perhaps adding a single-player or offline mode would have been helpful.
Mmm, I always love well-executed puzzle games during Ludum Dare. There's a fine art to them that I don't have a knack for myself - you've done a great job here!
This is a very well put together "complete package" - compelling game play, a great aesthetic style to the sound and graphics, and a tutorial to boot.
One suggestion would be to go a bit deeper into the strategy in the tutorial - even after reading it, I felt a bit lost on my first playthrough. Even with the rules clearly explained, it took a few rounds for it to really click about how the game actually unfolded.
@cookie - fire should be left-control by default
I agree with @filogc - would love to see a walkthrough vid of this, as it looks really interesting but, as a VR-less pleb I can't try it out.
@neon Thanks for the walkthrough! Glad I came back to check it out. This looks pretty impressive for 48 hours! Lots of goofy things to try out, even the walkthrough did a good job of capturing the ennui of being alone in the middle of space.
Cooool. This has a decent amount more depth than I was expecting at first glance.
The different enemy AIs did a good job of keeping things interesting - however, in many cases, it seemed like keeping every area selected and focusing relentless attacks what the winning strategy against every one.
Graphics and audio are a nice package, too. I'm always impressed by decent strategy games during Ludum Dare, and this one did not disappoint. Great job!
I'll echo what others said, that the platforming was frustrating in places - between some fiddly jumps and tight platforms, it tried my patience a bit to fall down a long way and have to repeat things. A somewhat generous checkpoint system of some sort would have been helpful, just to reduce the situations where people will have to repeat a tough section multiple times.
Totally forgivable, though - designing levels and getting the balance right in 48 hours is tough!
The premise was really well executed, though, and the music set a great mood.
This has some really wonderful depth to it. A shame that you didn't quite reach the mark of having all the trappings of a "proper game", but the core mechanics are all very well done here.
Lots of RTS games that get made in Ludum Dare - this time around and in the past - have a lot of jankiness or balance problems, or are impossible to figure out. This one is really elegant; it's easy to wrap your head around, flows nicely, and it's apparent that there's actually some strategy to it rather than just "click randomly and pray".
You could do very well to keep working on this, if you were so inclined. Great stuff!
Nice visual style, and a fun take on the theme.
For people who don't know from circuit design, I can imagine this is pretty daunting - but it could make a solid game in the vein of Shenzhen I/O if it was fleshed out to have some tutorial levels and level introductions that give some guidance.
This is a phenomenal concept. The biggest thing that would make it more accessible would be a list of games, or even just one big one - it'd be great with a large number of players!
I agree with what others have said that a top-down view might be better. The FPS camera has its advantages, but was also a little disorienting - especially since looking around is "free."
This is pretty ambitious for the compo, I think. The premise is pretty sound, and I like how it fits the theme, but there's plenty of small frustrations that others have mentioned that keep me from really being able to get into this.
Very plainly influenced by SimTower and Project Highrise - but you admit to it, and there's far worse places to get your inspiration.
This felt like a pretty solid tech demo, rather than a game - all the core mechanics are there, but they didn't really go anywhere, if that makes sense. Getting the rent wrong didn't seem to have any consequences, there was nothing to unlock, etc... though isn't that how every LD game ends up?
I did appreciate that there was some good freedom in how to build your tower. More than SimTower gave, at least!
Holy moly, great job man! This is a great showing! Really polished for a compo entry. Controls feel great, the style is spot on, and I love the humour in the text throughout.
It gets really hectic once I reached "Regal" size - but that's perfect for the retro arcade here.
One of my favourites from this Ludum Dare, for sure!
Way back in the day, I was really into "artificial life" stuff - not quite games, per se, more like toys. Think SimEarth, but sometimes with much deeper simulations. Often you'd just sit back and watch, to watch an ecosystem form - or fail to form.
This captures a lot of what really got me intrigued in those days. It'd be nice to intervene in the simulation in more meaningful ways, but lots of things about this feel really good. A nice chance of pace from most of what I've seen this Ludum Dare.
I didn't hear any audio in this, tho, so can't rate you in that category. Should you have opted out of it?
A surprisingly deep turn based strategy game. I had a lot of fun with this!
It'd be nice if there was an explanation at the start of the game about what the different ants were good for - otherwise it takes a while to figure it out, which makes the early game feel a bit confusing.
Amazing. I've seen telnet games in Ludum Dare before, but this one really goes all out with it rather than just being a plain ol' text game. Well done!
Gameplay is a bit slight - it'd be nice to have an actual threat to the play from the baddies - but there's good humour here and it was fun playing through just to see all the content.
Like @endlessplumber, I also got stuck off on the side when I made it to "endless mode" - and oddly enough, it was also in dimension 4 (on my way back).
Great job!
Great job! I'm normally not a huge fan of tower defence games as I find they often don't have much depth, but the orbital mechanics element here make for a really fresh take on the game.
I don't have too much to offer as far as constructive feedback that isn't already covered by other comments. I think putting the boss in early was an excellent choice. We all know that getting balance right during Ludum Dare is pretty much impossible, so making sure that we all can see as much content as possible is a good call.
An interesting take on a tower defense game. I think you did well limiting the scope to something doable for Ludum Dare. Great job for just 7 hours!
That said, a bit more time and polish would do this game wonders. I like where the camera mechanic is going, but it's a little unreliable and doesn't quite reach its potential. Perhaps something like moving the camera with the keyboard, but having it bounded by the location of the castles, would work a bit better.
This is really fun, a good silly little sandbox. Everything fits together into a good package - the sound, visuals, the humour of the cards, and so on.
For whatever reason, in the downloadable version clicking on the cards didn't do anything - seems like others haven't had that issue so I'm not sure why that would be. (I'm running Win10 if it makes any difference.) Web version worked fine, though.
This is insane, and I love it. When I first saw the screenshot I thought "oh man, just a Scorched Earth clone?"
I was wrong with that gut reaction. So very, very wrong. This is a ton of fun. Probably the best LD game I've played this time around.
Good fun, but really hard like others have said. Ah well, balance is always the hardest part of Ludum Dare. Great job!
@madjackmcmad said most of it. There's a charm to the premise here that I really like. Keep making games, hope to see you next Ludum Dare!
I don't have much to say apart from echoing the other comments. I encourage you to keep at this one, if only to get a sense of how to polish things up, and I hope to see you in Ludum Dare 39!
The visual style got me interested right away - it all fits together really well. Music was nice, too, though it felt like some of the loops were a bit short.
The difficulty ramp-up felt really well done, at least for someone like me who's not great at platformers - just when I thought I was getting the hang of things, I got a shield upgrade and things got a bit more intense, but never punishingly so.
All in all, a great compo entry - good job!
Great job, man. Saw your progress on this on IRC over the weekend, but then somehow lost track of it once I got into ratings season. Managed to find it again this afternoon, and I'm glad I did - you did a great job getting the essence of a rogue-like distilled down to its very essence.
The graphics are amazing, and the core gameplay - running and shooting - felt really good.
The concept is really solid, but perhaps not explained very well to the player. I had to read the instructions a few times; at first it felt like they just didn't mean anything. Perhaps there is a way to streamline them for make them more "discoverable."
All in all, though, this is a phenomenal showing for a first Ludum Dare. There's a lot of potential here if you wanted to keep at it, and I'm sure you can come up with some great things in future.
Maybe not a "game", but a good diversion all the same. It was cool seeing everything come together at the end.
I can definitely see how this was good HTML5/JS practice!
The sound track and art style you've put together here are amazing, great job!
I agree with your assessment that this is pretty unfinished - the cutscenes lay out the framework of a really interesting game premise, but the game just isn't there. I hope you do keep plugging away at this, as you've started in an good direction.
This has a lot of charm, and is a really unique and interesting take on the the theme. Great job on those fronts - music is pretty decent, too.
To echo a lot of the other commenters, I think this could do well to be more "discoverable" - the interaction between different elements is interesting, but it's a slow burn and the game is pretty daunting at the start. Especially in a Ludum Dare game, it's really valuable to grab the player *right away* - the opening is great, but when I got into the game play I felt a bit lost.
There's some great ideas in here; with some polish and balancing they could really shine.
I like the idea of putting RPG mechanics in a game like this - it's an innovative take on the genre, and the balance was pretty good.
I assume you're using 3rd party sprites and sounds, since you've opted out of those categories - it'd be nice to see attribution for what you're using. (Mostly because I really like the sprites!)
This seems really interesting, but sorry to say I couldn't play it. Have nobody to give it a try with locally, and the internet matchmaking didn't find any results. For better or worse, this is often the challenge with multiplayer-only games - unless they're "massively" multiplayer (on a game jam scale, that is!) it's a challenge to get enough momentum to give people a good chance to play them.
It seems like some of the text in the menu is white-on-white, which made it hard to tell exactly what I was going on when I tried to create or join an internet game.
I was only able to try the survival mode - and I like it! There's a surprising amount of room to play around with different strategies, even if it seems very simple at first glance.
A bit more feedback about what's going on could help - for example, it wasn't apparent to me what the red outline was the combat range, at first, although it made perfect sense once I thought about it.
Very cool. I'm not familiar with the Last Question, but I have some Asimov anthologies around here so now you've got me curious.
Even though there's not much of a gameplay challenge here, the experience is really compelling. An intriguing way to tell a story, that's for sure. Well done.
Sorry to say that I'm getting the same crash as @EndlessPlumber. Windows 10 Home, Geforce 640.
Glad to see that you were able to get that crash fixed - it's working for me now!
There's not much to this game, but it's good for a few minutes of fun for sure. I just wonder what the government dude is doing, when he gets to work he brings the world closer to nuclear war, but if he doesn't make it the war just starts without him...
I like the visuals a lot - well done, and with a pretty unique style. Some more animations on the enemies would have been nice, but they work well as is.
One thing that would have been nice would be a "continue" option on game-over: rather than starting over, start back at the same level. Would make it easier for people to see more of the game!
I'll echo what a few others have said, that overall the game is a bit slow. Speeding *everything* up just a little bit would go a long way to tightening up the experience.
Overall, though, great job!
Hilariously jank in all the right ways. The different characters flopping around the elevator, the sexy narrator, all the jokes on the different floors... man oh man. Great work!
This is brutal. I love it, but I'm absolutely atrocious at it - perhaps it could more gradually ramp up the difficulty, but I'm also really bad at these sorts of games so maybe it's just me.
The concept is rock-solid, though. Great work for 12 hours.
The visual style is great here, and it's a lot of fun routing the train all over this little world.
The biggest thing that's missing here is the difficulty curve - once I got the hang of this, things just kind of equillibrated and there wasn't much more to the game apart from enjoying the mechanics. I'm not sure if it's as simple as ramping up the spawn rate, but that would do part of it.
Either way, this is a great concept well executed. Glad I checked it out!
Ooh, now this is a challenge - don't have the time to really puzzle through it all right now, but I'll definitely be coming back for more. Great work!
@justinsix Yeah, those instructions were written in a hurry (literally in the last 5 minutes of the compo) and aren't as clear or detailed as I had hoped. I'm going to put better ones up on here tomorrow, I think.
Thanks for checking it out!
@colin-doody - looks like Ctrl-W is close tab in Chrome, and it's catching that and closing the window when you're playing! Oops! That shouldn't happen if you use the arrow keys rather than WASD to move - but I think I'll upload a version with remapped controls so that doesn't happen.
Thanks for checking it out!
@deathray Thanks for the kind words. I agree with all of your ideas for where this could improve - "improve animations" was on the to-do list right until the end, in particular, but I obviously didn't quite make it there. :p
Whew, I leave Ludum Dare alone for a few days and come back to all sorts of amazing comments. Thank you very much for the kind and thoughtful feedback, y'all!
@phlip45 You're totally right that some flashing on hits & better feedback about the corruption disappearing would be better. For the charge up, it actually increases your maximum power rather than the current power - I thought about making the power bar grow but didn't implement it, but one way or another I agree it could be clearer.
@t8kk I think you're right. I intentionally wanted to keep the viewport a bit claustrophobic, but may have overdone it.
@amkingtrp Now that you mention it, I probably shouldn't have had the camera scroll at all - just jump entire screens at a time.
@hitchh1k3r That package looks amazingly useful - thank you! My goal here was to emulate the C64 graphical style, which had non-square pixels. That's also why the movement is faster L/R than U/D - the movement is the same speed in both axes in "pixel space", but looks different on screen.
Well that was fun! Really cool take on the theme, and a welcome change of pace from a lot of what we see in LD games. Well done!
I don't see an HTML5 version on the itch.io site - the Windows version worked fine, but maybe there's something that needs to be tweaked to make the web version appear?
This is a fun mechanic, but gets a bit fiddly. One thing that would help a lot would be if, after resetting, the thrusters didn't go back to their "home" position but instead stayed where they were - I found a number of times I'd say "oh, that just needs to go a bit to the right" or whatever, but finding that position was really difficult when I had to start from scratch - especially when there gets to be multiple items to move.
This is definitely the sort of game that I feel is really ambitious for Ludum Dare, especially for the compo. There's always a risk of either completely missing the ideal balance, or just not having enough content to really have a game - so having a compelling "hook" to the game is essential, and I think you've got that here.
Cool twist on the theme, and I really like the idea of tying in different gems in a match 3 game to stats like this. Too bad more of them aren't implemented, as there's a lot of potential here that doesn't quite get realized by having half of the gems not really do anything. Would love to see a post-jam version that had more of the mechanics fleshed out!
Great stuff! A focused idea, well executed - that's how you do Ludum Dare! The art style is really well executed, too.
Some more sound effects, and maybe a few more things to hold visual interest, would really make this game pop - but I had good fun with it as it is.
Glad to see Clippy finally getting some respect as the hero that he is!
I didn't really know what to expect going into this - it was a lot of fun! Unlocking the different powers, and then figuring out how they made it possible to progress, was very rewarding.
I love the concept and the aesthetics here, but found it a little hard to understand how all the mechanics fit together even with the explanation. Some more feedback inside the game, or a bit more of a ramp-up to introduce the mechanics, would probably go a long way to make it a bit clearer.
Well done! The balance to the puzzles is spot on for Ludum Dare - just the right difficulty curve to keep things moving, but still put up a decent challenge by the end of things.
Like others have said, the introduction of mechanics could have happened a bit quicker - maybe bring just the first level, then the radar, then the allocator?
I'm not sure about having the map be pitch black except for the player's spotlight - it set the mood, but having just a little bit of ambient light I think might have worked a bit better.
Using audio in this way is a really cool idea, and it worked really well.
I like the idea here, but it could use a more polish - sound, more graphical feedback, maybe some general balance tweaks. Really cool to see that there's multiplayer but (as is sadly often the case in Ludum Dare) I never got into a game - not sure if it wasn't working, or if there was no one online to match with.
Did you opt out of the wrong category by accident? I see the "audio" category but not "graphics", which seems backwards to me.
PS for folks having trouble with WASD controls, you can remap the controls in the launcher - it defaults to ZQSD, which is the WASD equivalent on AZERTY (ie, French) keyboards. When I think of it (which I didn't this LD, for my own part) I usually try to make my games support *both* keyboard layouts as that's usually pretty trivial to do.
A nice l'il puzzler. This has great potential for a mobile game!
I found wrapping my head around the controls a bit hard - not that they're complicated, but since the perspective was rotated it took a while to get the hang of.
I like how the mechanics were introduced, but felt that the difficulty curve didn't really ramp up beyond that. Something to keep in mind if you do keep working on this!
Good arcade-style fun! The two things that I feel are missing are music (but not having it is true to the Atari feel!) and a game over screen - being able to see your final score and a high score would really complete this package.
Cool take on the theme. I've got a soft spot for word games, and this didn't disappoint. You've got some great suggestions here in other comments, but all in all a really solid effort for 48 hours!
Took a while to get a hang of it, but that's good fun. Liek @atom0520 said, being able to skip the guide level would have been a nice touch.
It seemed like there was something finicky about dropping debris, but I couldn't quite figure out what - just that in some cases, they either wouldn't drop or wouldn't go where I expected them too.
This is really well polished for a compo game! The fact that all your dudes went to the same point, regardless of where the spawned, added a lot more complexity & interest than I was expecting in the first place.
A propos including paid (or otherwise non-freely-distributable) assets in your source, in the past I've just made a copy of the project with those items totally pulled out (ie the PlayMaker folders in your build) with a README explaining what's needed and where they need to go. It's probably small potatoes for Ludum Dare, but better safe than sorry.
This reminds me a lot of playing with my toy cars on that play mat with roads on it that everyone had. A lot of fun!
The controls were a bit mind-bending, but I get what you were going for - like a few others have said, the lack of reverse was what kept tripping me up.
Good work for your first game! You've been given a lot of good feedback already. One thing to add is that some animation would go a long way - mostly for the player, but also things like the plants swaying back and forth, or the weeds crumpling instead of just disappearing.
Keep at it, hope to see what you come up with in the next Ludum Dare!
Controls felt really good, which is hard to get right with a platformer in a game jam. I liked the story behind it and how it tied into the theme.
As others have said, there were a few unfair blind jumps, but other than that this could easily be fleshed out into a pretty fun casual platformer. Good stuff.
A timely environmental message - was kinda fun at first picking a random planet and saying "haha, you're a trash planet!" but then things got really interesting when it dawned on me there was no win condition - just a matter of managing things to hang on for as long as possible.
The UI was really nicely put together - it's simple enough, sure, but it felt really intuitive with is a great accomplishment.
Well done!
I agree with @pennycook, the thing that's really missing here is background music - otherwise, this is remarkably complete! The space ship theme works really well, and the controls work with it perfectly.
I'm sure I'm going to see at least a handful of battle royale games while rating LD42 games, and this sets the bar pretty high.
Not bad at all for your first go around! I feel like the controls are a bit "floaty" - a lot of the joy of a game like this comes from making the movement feel really good and snappy, though that's often a lot easier said than done. Just something to experiment with!
Damn son, this one really engaged me. Normally I don't have any talent or patience for platformers, but the pacing here was spot on to keep me going and the difficulty curve really rewarded that.
This is one of the standouts this Ludum Dare for me so far! I think the "mushy" controls work well enough here - makes the character feel a bit out of control, which is a good thing for a party game like this.
The AI is well-implemented enough, but I'm sure the real fun here is getting the mad-cap action of 4 players in a room together.
Well done!
That dude looks like someone out of an old Sierra adventure - I love it.
I wonder if there's a better balance about how many times you can get it wrong - ie you're on a timer, and it speeds up each time you miss, or something like that. Having to get it perfect did feel "too brutal" until I got the hang of it.
I dig a lot of the ideas that are at play here, but I'm terrible at platformers at the best of times and find this really difficult.
It took a while for it to click in my head about how this fit the theme. Kudos for choosing something that totally works but isn't obvious.
Alpha Complex is probably my favourite setting for anything ever, so seeing this game put a huge smile on my face.
The multiple endings was a nice touch - would have been nice to have "more" of an ending in each case, but pretty cool all the same.
The movement took a bit of getting used to - very old school, rather than WASD & mouselook like many games use now. Also felt a bit "floaty" Not a deal breaker by any means.
Thanks for the great feedback y'all!
@jay-elbourne Yeah, I agree that the jumping isn't perfect - getting jumping right in a platformer is haaaard, so I just fudged it.
@planschi Fair points. Having them congregate at the bottom was partly deliberate - there's a target number of eggs on the level, so you've gotta get down to the bottom to clear it out to get more to spawn on the higher platforms. Like jumping, difficulty balance is tough to get right!
@pyjamaboy Do you mean like when they die? That's a bug for sure - I think I see why it's happening. Good catch!
@bananabobbert Seems like a theme here that the jumping's not right. I'm happy with how the double jump worked out but agree it could be a bit nicer all around.
@kobrar Thanks - I agree the platforming could be a bit better, this was my first go at a platformer so it's all a bit new to me.
@gnarly-narwhal Huh, I coulda sworn the controller worked in the webgl build when I uploaded it the other day. I saw the same bug (WebGL only) in another game I was playing tonight - I wonder if a recent update somewhere broke something. What OS / browser are you using? I'll look into it, thanks for letting me know!
With respect to the double jump, I did want the timing to matter but I didn't get to tune it as well as I would have liked. That bug really does show how powerful doing it quickly is - way more than I intended!
@rsim The idea behind the coin timeout was to nerf the "just leave coins everywhere" strat, but maybe it could have been longer - even much longer. Thanks for the feedback!
Interesting story! The randomness element was a nice touch, as it made playing through multiple times to get both endings a bit more rewarding.
Cool puzzle game! Good job.
The premise of a trolley problem game put a huge smile on my face, and the visual style is on point here. The achievements were a great touch, too.
Not having any win or loss conditions kind of cramps the style of the game, though - at first, it's fun to try to avoid hitting anyone, then it's fun to try to hit everyone, but then it'd really help the game to have a goal to work towards or consequences to avoid.
Really difficult, but good fun!
Whew, this is challenging! I love the idea, but the randomness around the enemies and the fact that they're all single-hit-kill makes it feel really unforgiving - either a hit point or checkpoint system might be a good idea for a game like this.
Niiiiice. Had a few physics bugs as others have said, mostly on stairs, but this was a well-polish blast of fun. Great work!
I'm a sucker for games like this. Having character selection was a nice touch.
Was a little tricky to see how everything fit together. On my first playthrough I ended up had chores left, but it ran down faster than I could fill it up, taking my out on day 13. On my second, I ended up with "food", "chores", "play" and "shopping" left, and was able to keep all four in the green indefinitely. Ah well, taking time to get everything balanced during the compo is basically impossible, eh?
All in all I really liked this one!
This is really cool - as others have said, the difficulty curve isn't quite right, but that's perfectly normal for a Ludum Dare game. The idea here could totally be a fleshed out into a "full" game.
Cool take on the theme! I love the indirect control scheme, and the art is understated by effective.
I found things pretty unforgiving while I was getting the hang of things - having the earlier levels ease in a bit more would make the game more accessible I think.
Entirely too real! Hah! I guess it comes from a real place, eh?
The look and feel of this is amazing, and the take on the theme is clever. Success felt a bit random, though - it'd be nice if there was more of a link between your stats and the outcome of coding, or at least a more apparent one.
Similarly, having benefits and consequences for your decisions in the pop-up events would make things a bit richer - I know from my LD experience, sometimes I have to leave for something I might resent, but then when I come back to the game dev I'm recharged & reinspired. But sometimes... not.
Not sure if it's intentional, but after I died I kept all my abilities on the next run through - which actually kind of worked well as a checkpoint system, but it feels like it's probably a bug.
There's an impressive range of abilities here. Gameplay is pretty basic, but the fundamentals are good and it's a solid take on the genre.
Great stuff, @kobrar! The platforming took a bit to get used to (pretty good for Ludum Dare, tho) and it took a while to figure out the throwing mechanic, but I had a ton of fun once I got a handle on things.
The checkpoint system was a great call - make it possible to master the mechanics without getting frustrated by losing progress.
This is a really cool idea, and the pixel art is on point!
Did run into the attack state bug which kept me from being able to see everything that the game had to offer - will keep an eye on things and give this another try if you do get a chance to get a new build up.
Woah, this is cool! I've seen games like this that involve manipulating an in-game file system before, but never the real file system.
A few times it was pretty fiddly switching between windows with the right timing, but it was compelling enough to keep me going. Well done!
Great premise, the animations are great, and the sound design is on point - like others have said, the difficulty is a pretty harsh, especially at the start. Maybe a checkpoint system, where when you were caught you kept any animals you had brought back or sacrificed already, would make thing easier.
I also ran into a bug with my Xbox 360 controllers in the web version, where pressing a button was treated like repeated presses for as long as it was held down. The Win64 version doesn't have that problem, so maybe it's more a quirk of Unity's web builds or my browser than your game. (EDIT: I just learned my game is doing the same thing, as is my game from the last LD which certainly didn't back in August - I'm leaning towards "browser bug")
I had fun with this! Controls felt nice, and a well-realized visual style. Having the "try to beat 200" challenge right on screen is an amazing idea - gives the player a goal to keep 'em coming back!
On a few occasions the enemies got stuck on the side walls - I thought I was being clever by pushing them off that way rather than through the whole level, but they didn't fall all the way. I also felt like the reach of the attack was just a little short which made getting hit by spikes a bit unforgiving.
All in all though, this is a really slick & complete package.
This was fun - a nice take on the theme, and the controls felt really fun once I got the hang of them. Some sound and music would really bring it to the next level, but I get that it's really tough in 48 hours!
I have such a soft spot for city builders and related games, but there's so much to them that they're really tough to pull off in Ludum Dare.
Not too shabby for a first go around, hope to see you in the next Ludum Dare!
This would be a really fun party game! Sadly I didn't get a chance to try it out multiplayer.
It took me a while to get the hang of it - especially with the wrong directions for player 1 - but I had a lot of fun once I got the hang of it. "A simple concept well executed" is a great way to do Ludum Dare, so great job on that score.
The connection to the theme is a bit thin, but hey, that's a big part of Ludum Dare too.
Graphics are spartan, but work well. I came to really look forward to see what each piece of gossip was going to be.
Given the linear progression & how choices don't really affect the outcome, this is more "interactive visual morality tale" than "game" per se - but compelling all the same. Good stuff!
Great storytelling and art. I also got stuck at the same place as @virtual-turtle-studio and couldn't progress past there - would love to see more, so ping me if there's a new build!
Really cool idea, but needs to be more challenging to really be "a game" if you know what I mean - messing around with the Game of Life is fun, and this is an interesting context for it, but you can pretty much entirely ignore it and still beat all three levels without running out of resources.
Maybe that mostly has to do with the length of the game as it stands, as there's not enough time to really run down any of the meters!
I definitely get the Papers, Please vibe here. Nice.
This would be really cool with multiple endings - unless I missed something, I had to go with the "green text" one.
@c1fr1 Yeah, I agree - I generally try to err on the side of making my LD games a bit easy so that people will be more likely to play them all the way through, but I overshot it this time. You're totally right that the enemies who chase you aren't quite the threat they were intended to be.
@carlsonandpeeters & @dioinecail The screen transitions were an experiment that didn't quite work out. I've found that a lerped camera can be tough to tune just right, so was trying something different this time. Ah well!
Thanks for playing and for the great feedback so far!
Great job for a half day - this really took me back to the BBS days. If the screen was limited to drawing the screen at 2400bps...
@jimbly Haha, amazing! Now *that's* the BBS experience I remember.
Took two playthroughs to get a handle on who wanted what - and get comfortable absolutely zooming around the place - but there's good humour here that rewards taking the time to complete everything.
The art style is really charming and effective. Great job.
Lots of good feedback already, I don't have much to add. Some more pathfinding when moving the units so they avoid obstacles would add a lot of polish, but the core concept here is really solid.
@carbs gives great suggestions. The core mechanics here are solid, but not really obvious when you first start out.
Really cool! Took me one play through to figure out what the heck was going on but then I had a lot of fun. Got a high score of 623m which maybe is good?
The jump mechanic was really unique and contributes really well to the feel of this. It gets really tricky when standing on really small coins as it's tough to precisely line up a jump when small movements make such a big different.
I really like this. Great job!
As others have said, there's some bugs here but this is a remarkably fleshed out racing game for a weekend.
The lack of audio is a real shame, as some good racing sounds would really juice this up. It's also be nice to have some more info in the HUD - position, laps remaining, etc.
Took a while for it to click (hah) but it's a cute l'il bunny simulator.
Maybe there's just too much going on here? I appreciated that it took a bit of experimenting to figure out all of the relationships between the different actions & stats, but I wonder if it'd make for a more rewarding game if there were fewer things to do but each of them was harder to keep balanced.
This is really cool, and lots of good ideas here, but I (who was bad at Myst back in the day) find it really hard. I was able to figure out the lever puzzle, but the rest has me stumped. Or at least stumped within the time I have to devote to playing Ludum Dare games at the moment.
Tried out the post-compo version and sadly didn't get much farther.
Great take on theme, and good job getting this together in a compo weekend. If you do put a hint system (or put up a quick hint guide or similar) at any point I'd love to try it out.
Really cool idea, but (at least in the compo version) there's a few bugs that get in the way a bit too much - eventually my doctor decided he'd just wander off through a wall and his pathfinding never worked quite right after that.
Real ambitious concept, and I like the combination of childish & satirical humour in the concept & execution. I've made a note to come back and check out the post-compo version after the ratings are in!
Good fun, and a great take on the theme.
Some things were a little fiddly - ie, if a cat was too close to the opening to hell when I clicked it to see it's attributes, it'd accidentally get dropped in there whether I wanted it or not. But didn't take away from the fun! The different mini-games, and the fact that there was a chance to try each one more than once, worked really well. Good job!
I like how you interpreted the theme, makes for a nice twist on a classic Sokoban-type game. Let me wanting more, as I was thinking of more ways the level design could play off interactions between the different abilities.
That punch animation is a joy to behold.
Really fun, but really unforgiving in places - I agree with @odlog-oglog that a checkpoint system would be a nice addition.
I like the take on the theme and how it's implemented, and you managed to do a great job using Pico-8 to it's fullest to nail the retro aesthetic.
Great job setting a mood with this. As others have mentioned, the combat could stand to be be polished or juiced up a bit.
This looked and felt great! Difficulty was pretty good for an LD game. Balancing health and energy worked really well, and level design was good.
The biggest thing I can think of to improve this would be having a few more enemy types to deal with - I expected a bit more of a ramp-up as I unlocked each door.
I could not beat the unbeatable level - or rather, I didn't have the wherewithal to get to it just now. Cool to see that @ohfiddlediddle was able to beat it.
This is a really excellent game! The puzzles are well-designed, and there were enough mechanics to keep me engaged all the way through to the last level of hard-mode.
The biggest area to improve would be the art - but hey, there's a charm to the style you put together here and programmer art doesn't take anything away from a game like this. Great job!!!
Very impressive for 48 hours, especially not using an off-the-shelf 3D engine.
I feel like the asteroids being so small / so numerous makes the game seem overwhelming - perhaps it'd be easier if they were big, slow and few in number to start so it's easier to get a grasp of the core gameplay, then more, smaller ones could spawn to ramp up difficulty.
Seems like this game doesn't play nice with Chrome - there was no music and it ran much slower than when I tried in it Firefox (especially on the later levels).
Cool take on the theme, and a pretty unique outing for this Ludum Dare in general. I never knew there were so many currency symbols!
I think the later levels got a bit too tough, maybe - it was easier to find a few letters and guess the word based on the theme, than to actually find them all.
I had a lot of fun trying out the different weapons. As has already been mentioned the balance in the levels could be better, but the core gameplay is really solid.
Cool take on the theme. Maybe not "fun" like you'd expect a typical video game to be, but I enjoyed playing all the same.
I have the same problem as @bob174 - moving around was insanely fast. I couldn't get out of the first room with treasure, as because as soon as I touch a movement key I slam into the opposite wall.
I suspect you've got something in your physics/movement code that is framerate or CPU speed dependent that's causing this.
The game looks great, but I haven't been able to play far enough to rate it fairly!
Very cool idea, and great graphics.
The platforming was a bit too twitchy for me, which got frustrating: the age mechanic made missing jumps or putting cubes in the wrong position a bit too unforgiving. Not sure if that's a flaw with the game, or me just being terrible at platformers.
There was something weird about purchasing blocks on a second (or subsequent) playthrough - it doesn't seem to work quite right. Restarting the game fixed it.
Like @davidsheadgames says, I didn't like the default key mapping, so thanks for making it easy to rebind it!
All in all though, a lot of fun - a great twist on a classic!
Holy moly, this is amazing! The concept is simple enough, and I was maybe a little skeptical when I fired this game up, but the execution is absolutely phenomenal.
This one sucked me in for a long time as I had tons of fun exploring the map, committed to reaching the end. An absolute highlight of this Ludum Dare for sure!
Really cool! I enjoyed myself a lot.
One suggestion - at least for Ludum Dare, maybe not for game design in general - is to have a checkpoint system so at game over you can restart in the room you were already in. Makes it much easier for folks to see the entire game, while still giving you room to keep things challenging.
The feeling of being totally out of control once things get crazy fast totally works with your take on the theme. Very nice polish on the graphical experience, too. Good job.
Very cool, and interesting puzzles.
Some of the mechanics were a bit opaque - I don't feel like I completely got a handle on what everything in the puzzles did, and the use of some of the things to purchase wasn't clear. A bit more depth in the manual, or some tutorial levels, would have helped.
Awesome!!! My brain went a similar place with the interpretation of the theme - but I ended up with a very different game.
Having to keep an eye on both the rhythm and the flying bottles was a really cool challenge.
Thanks for playing, and all the awesome feedback everybody!
@devesh-sharma Humor is definitely a weird category in Ludum Dare. I do think there's a bit of humor in this one but agree that it's not the main focus!
@alekpinel Yeah, more music would be nice for sure. It's always ends up being a pretty last minute thing for me.
@goutye shhhh don't tell anyone, but the score system in this isn't really that well thought out. That's a pretty good one but I think you'll get around 30000 points just by finishing.
This is probably my favourite game so far this Ludum Dare. I'm amazed at the polish, and the number & quality of the levels.
Sometimes the time to complete each level felt a little short - not a big deal, but it was often quicker to just restart the whole level after a failed jump rather than keep trying from where I landed. Even just a tiny bit more time would feel a bit better in my opinion.
Amazing art style, and lots of fun things to play with. This is a pretty complete package, which is a great accomplishment for 72 hours.
Some more instructions would be helpful! It was hard to figure out what to do. The difficulty is also really intense when playing solo - multiplayer during LD is tricky in general as most people won't be able to try it out.
@mr-field The struggle is real when it comes to balance! It's so hard to have perspective when you've been playing your own game non-stop and know it inside and out.
As others have said, this is a really solid entry that is hampered by the difficulty. Either a checkpoint system, or just being able to survive more than one hit, would go a long way.
The art, sound, and overall mood are phenomenal!
Woah, great showing for your first 3D game. I've never been so brave in a Ludum Dare.
The controls feel just right, which makes the whole experience a joy. Well done!
I always love to see business sims in Ludum Dare. It's a tricky genre but I think you got it mostly right.
It was tough to keep things going - the rising labour costs mean that you have to keep expanding to stay afloat, but it can be hard to scrounge up the money to do that. I guess that's realism!
I'm pretty sure I had this job before. I had a lot of fun trying to find the endings. I got 3 - are there more?
Ending where I got fired was a bit confusing. I kept getting performance reviews that read like I was being fired, but could play another day.
The two game modes are a great choice - one of the big challenges with Ludum Dare is finding a good way for folks to see as much of your game as possible, and you accomplished that very well.
I really like the minimal aesthetic - sure, it's all default capsules, but the way they're positioned and bounce around, you know what they are!
This is a really cool twist on the rhythm game genre, and on the theme. In a few places the rhythm seemed a bit hard to follow. Maybe the timing was just a bit unforgiving? But I had a lot of fun with this either way.
Very cool take on the theme, as always. A bit mind-bending, as at first glance it feels like it should be Tetris but the actual game play is very different.
The speed ramp-up is maybe a bit too aggressive - getting to the frantic pace is good fun, but it felt like it happened before I could really get a handle on what I was supposed to do.
I enjoyed the level design. Like @whatnamegames says, the bloom was maybe a bit overdone - but it does fit the overall aesthetic. The frequent checkpoints were appreciated.
Some sound and music would have really pushed this to the next level - good job overall.
Great art and music. It took me a while to figure out that I could follow things from screen to screen, but it was fun to discover everything.
Great job setting the atmosphere here. Agree with others that the "normal" mode is maybe a bit too difficult - including an easy mode was a great decision!
I wasn't able to finish in my first playthrough as I kept getting disoriented, though I realized after I stopped that the house was a way better landmark than I had first though. I definitely want to come back and give this another go!
@radow Yeah, I totally get it. One thing I've learned from Ludum Dare is that, by the end of the jam, it's really hard to have perspective on difficulty - after all, you've been playing your own game non-stop for a few days and know it inside and out!
I feel this game on a deep, personal level. Music is great!
There could be more here, for sure, but the core concept here is good fun.
Great job for just 12 hours! As others have said, balance could do some work but that's a challenge for everyone in Ludum Dare.
I like the concept. This game would really benefit from some polish - @quinn-patrick has some great suggestions for simple things that are valuable to keep in mind.
The title of this game didn't disappoint! It was really fun to experiment with how the different things interacted with each other - after that, there wasn't much challenge, just a relaxing good time.
It wasn't clear to me how much it mattered where things were on screen, such as did the sun have the most effect when it was directly overhead, and did the rain have to fall on the tree directly?
I can definitely see how this would really excel with touch controls.
I love the aesthetics - the visuals and music go great together, and really draw you in to the game play.
Jiggling the balloon around is just plain fun - you really excelled at finding a solid core gameplay loop.
My only criticism is to echo what a few others have said - the hitboxes are maybe a bit big, and it's not always obvious what's background and what's actually harmful.
All in all, amazing job!
As others have said, I think this was maybe a bit too ambitious for a jam. The idea is solid, and all the mechanics are here, but the polish to bring it all together into a cohesive experience is missing.
I saw that this is your first go 'round at Ludum Dare - hope to see more from you in the future!
Wasn't clear to me at first that I had left and right click for land and water - but I eventually figured it out.
Lots of fun, and a funny take on the theme. Camera was a bit wonky in places, especially on the second level, but it wasn't unmanageable. (Playing with a gamepad, I kept trying to move the camera with the right stick, just by force of habit.)
Love this take on the theme. I always enjoy the chance to try out games that are a bit more laid back, too.
One thing: on the web build (on Chrome) scrolling to zoom in and scrolled out also scrolled the browser window. I find Chrome is often a pain with web games in ways like that! I switched to the Windows version and it worked great.
Really great graphical style - I love the 2d sprites in 3D space. But I couldn't figure out how I was actually supposed to play.
It took me a while to figure out all the things that were going on, but I was pleasantly surprised when I did. The balance between different mechanics - keeping the generators running, fixing the core, and blasting the aliens - made for more complex gameplay than I was expecting.
The health bar on the generator was a bit hard to see at first - maybe having it a bit farther away, or just more vibrant colors, would help.
All in all, great job!
This is one of my favourites so far this Ludum Dare! Simple to get started, but the strategy is quite a bit deeper than it seems at first.
I really liked only being able to delete 3x3 areas - the choice of what to delete hurt more than the gold cost, which made it something not to be done lightly.
At times, the famine and drought (especially the famine) seemed really punishing. Definitely took a few goes to realize the strategy isn't just "keep resources steady" but "be ready for a disaster."
Great job!!!
Graphics are good. I missed some sound, for sure - and, like in @testlab's screenshot, things were cutoff for me a bit.
Hope to you in the next Ludum Dare!
Phenomenal job for your first go! The graphical style goes together really well, and the core mechanics here are satisfying to play around with.
I hope to see more games from you!
PS re the problem you mentioned with the web build - taking some time to fix that and get a web build up is the sort of bug-fixing that's acceptable after a game jam, if you're so inclined. I find web builds NEVER work for me at the submission deadline, so mine usually follow sometime later. Which reminds me...
The downloadable version doesn't work - it's missing the data folder, which you need to package alongside the .exe for a Unity game! Web version worked just fine for me, though
I'm also getting major Vette vibes from this. The graphics, while minimal, work great.
I really like @brenno263's suggestion of making the fire die faster over time, as a way to ramp up the difficulty. The main gameplay loop here is pretty solid - but once you get the hang of it there's not much more.
This is ambitious for game jam! Well done getting this much accomplished.
Great music! As others have said, a bit more difficulty ramp-up would be helpful. Eventually I started getting tougher baddies, but it could have happened much easier.
Doesn't have too much to do with the theme - but impressive for a game jam all the same! Controls could be tightened up a bit, and it seemed like in a few places the enemies had trouble pathfinding, but great job all in all.
Great art. Not bad for a first crack at Unity!
To echo @gal-afik's feedback comment, tweaking the bounding boxes a bit would add quite a bit of polish. I feel like it should be more forgiving when you hit an enemy on the "back", in particular.
Oh, one other thing: for whatever reason, the direct link to the Web version didn't work for me. Just took me to a blank white page - going to the web version through the landing page worked fine though. Could be something on my end!
I love the graphics. "Aim" and "move" both being tied to the mouse is a really cool design - it's interested to discover the gameplay strategy that leads to.
Like @icegod says, the balance is a bit on the hard side, mostly because the fish don't heal very much. (In general, I find that when it comes to Ludum Dare, it's a lot safer to err on the side of being too easy.)
Great take on the theme, and impressive job having 4 different pieces of music in a compo entry!
Once things got going it seemed like there wasn't too much to do - just enjoy the tunes and chat with people. I guess that's like a real party.
As others have said, the character creation was a very nice touch.
Really cool idea, but I couldn't get the full experience playing it solo. I like the idea of only being able to shift certain rows from each side, as it means each player would have something to do.
Perhaps a "solo mode" where each row can be shifted from either side would be a cool option.
Man, this is cool! To an extent, it feels more like a tech demo than a game - but still one that is a ton of fun to mess around with.
I agree with others that some more instructions (even just on this page) would go along way. There's fun in figuring everything out, but a few hints never hurt anything.
Unfortunately I am getting the same "unspecified error" - I tried extracting in 7-zip instead and it finished with a bunch of errors, but the game doesn't run.
I wonder if the file just needs to be rezipped - I'll check back because I'm really looking forward to trying this!
I'm glad you got the upload fixed, and that I checked back to try this out. I really enjoyed it!
The artwork is really great. The main character is adorable and there's lots of nice little flourished in the animation I really appreciated.
My biggest critique is that the platforming didn't feel amazing - a bit to prone to bumping my head, if that makes sense. Getting platforming to good in a compo is really tough!
I really liked the different layers to how you interpreted the theme - and your own game title. All in all, a pretty solid entry.
This is great! The physics to this felt really good, and it was an interesting progression between the levels. It was fun having my attitude gog from "I must get it all perfect" to "meh, as long as it stacks!"
The controls are different from most Tetris clones I've played (usual Down or Space is drop, not Up) which took a bit of getting used to.
Great take on the theme!
Very cool! I enjoyed experimenting to see what the different color combinations do.
Audio would have really helped juicing this up - even if it was just a few beeps and boops - but a nice package even without that.
Would love to see this as a game - the graphics are great, and it's impressive that it's all voice acted! Too bad you didn't have the chance to get farther, as what's here has a ton of potential.
This is great! Nice variety of enemies, flying mechanics feel really good, nice music - just a really solid package on the whole.
I also had the issue where the game was too wide for my screen - my monitor is 1680px wide - but was able to get around it by just zooming out my browser window out one tick.
Really cool aesthetic and music. It'd be interesting to see how you could add more difficulty progression to this, but it's good fun as it is!
Cool take on the theme! I enjoyed the strategy involved in planning a path, mindful of where to drop new tiles.
I definitely feel your pain in getting things balanced - it's so hard to find the sweet spot in a weekend.
Compelling story! I love a well-done narrative game for Ludum Dare. Cool that you did it in Unity, too.
It was interesting how the questions developed from just reading comprehension to deeper knowledge.
I agree the pace of the UI sometimes felt a bit slow - but having it a bit laid back like that helps the mood quite a bit.
I had a kind of similar idea (based around the chaos theory stuff w/ bifurcation charts) when I was brainstorming - but you did this way better than I could have!
I wasn't able to solve all the puzzles but I had a ton of fun with this. The aesthetic is great, and it was a lot of fun experimenting w/ the different variables.
This was a lot of fun! The choice of items was pretty funny.
Really cool puzzle game!
It wasn't obvious to me that spacebar reset the level - I agree that a structured tutorial like @michelangelo suggested would go a long way to add some polish.
Lots of polish to this! Definitely has old school flash game vibes which I love.
It would be very nice to have a "ghost" or something of the last shot - I found in some cases getting things tweaked just right was really difficult as it was tough to repeat things consistently.
I also maybe ran into a bug when playing full screen - I couldn't drag my mouse cursor "out of bounds" so, for example, if the character was right at the bottom of the screen I couldn't give much power upwards - so in the end I just didn't play in full-screen mode.
All in all, great job - especially for your first go around at Ludum Dare!
Nice take on tower defense. I didn't realize until pretty late that I could upgrade buildings - but that didn't stop me from enjoying this.
Very cool! I agree with others - the ability to go a bit faster, and a better indication when a pig was getting eaten, would add some polish to this. But a really amazing entry as it is - great job!
This is awesome! I couldn't figure out the 2nd round - but like @tesseract says I think I'll come back to it when I've had some sleep 'cause I'm not at my best right now lol
Love the take on the theme a lot, and having things go wonky when the baby cried was a really nice touch. There's a lot of great ideas here, but I found it too hard to get very far!
Nice progression, great vibe from the graphics and music. really well done all in all!
Cool puzzle design. It would have been nice to have more puzzle types, to have less (or no) repetition.
Graphics were spartan, but worked. I liked the story & how it was revealed through dialogue.
Glad I had the chance to check this out!
Well, this took me way back! Great job capturing the flavour of the old text adventures, without some of the cruelty in the puzzle design. :p
I think you got the difficulty & complexity just about exactly right for an LD game. Well done.
This is really well done - lots of interlocking mechanics that mesh together really nicely, and drawing the power moves at random kept things interesting. I've always felt that doing a strategy game is playing Ludum Dare on hard mode, but you pulled it off pretty well.
I did have the slowdown issue as well, in Chrome. It seems like every LD there's some weird Chrome issue that crops up which is a shame.
This is really polished - great job. My only wish is that I could use an analog stick on controller instead of jus the D-pad, to have finer control - but perhaps that's part of the challenge!
This is adorable! It feels appropriate to be playing it on Easter, lol.
Some more sound effects would be nice, and it felt like sometimes the hitboxes to pick up rabbits were a bit small or not entirely where I expected them to be - but that didn't stop me from having fun.
This is really great! Nice take on the theme, and the progression of things getting more and more chaotic kept things interesting.
It'd be nice if there was a bit more "juice" to it - things like hitting and getting hit feeling like they had more impact. The mouse sensitivity was also a bit higher than I prefer, but I can't fault an LD game for that!
I really enjoyed this! The style of this is completely chaotic and I love it. Controls felt a little weird at first, but once I got the hang of them worked really well.
Nice low-poly aesthetic! It all comes together to a really nice package.
It was a bit frustrating to hit the iceberg with the back of the boat - the first time I played, I lost because I when I picked up a gear and moved too early.
This is exactly what happens in the real senate. I'm amazed at the realism!
I had the same issue where the post-it notes showed up in weird places, also on the WebGL build. Didn't stop me from playing but it make it difficult to know what I was choosing.
I would never have expected this combination to work, but it totally does. Really interesting take!
lolwut. I enjoyed it!
I struggled to get the hang of this, but it was fun to play with the different skills & powerups to see what worked.
I love when people take the Ludum Dare theme to explore games as a medium for storytelling. You did a great job with this - not what many people would expect a game to be, not "fun" (nor trying to be) but still a compelling & thoughtful experience on the perfect scale for a game jam. Well done!
Very cool! I saw your post about this during the compo weekend and made a note to come back and check this out, and I wasn't disappointed.
I struggled in places to wrap my head around the mechanics on the later levels, so felt like I was just playing by gut rather than strategically.
All in all, a really enjoyable and polished game. Thanks!
I really like the minimal art style!
This is really cool! I also found the doorways a bit "sticky" it certainly wasn't a deal-breaker.
This was a lot of fun!
I agree with some other commenters that the momentum felt a little weird - very slow to built from a dead stop, but then really hard to control once I got going. I appreciate the intention behind that but it didn't feel quite balanced.
All in all, a pretty fun & complete package.
(I did have an issue where the game crashed on launch, on Win 10 - but then the second time I tried it worked fine so not sure what that's about.)
Very impressive for a compo entry!
I also had trouble with resolution - my monitor is 16:10 and it was playable but the command prompt was hidden under the text. One option to make things resolution-independent is to have the game launch in windowed mode at a fixed resolution - 1280x720 is a pretty safe choice.
I really like the take on the theme, but - as has already been mentioned - there's maybe not quite enough here. This is a solid concept for a game and a good beginning, but I feel like even one more thing to do would go a long way. Perhaps something to regenerate radar or silos, get more spies, or something like that? It could be really compelling if it was enough to give you some breathing room to hang on a bit longer, and... dare I say it... delay the inevitable.
Really great music & visual style - definitely set the mood for this in wonderful ways. Great job for a few hours!
Nice take on the theme, but as others have said floaty controls make it hard to get far. Checkpoints are a really good thing to have, especially in a platformer, as it means that people can see more of the game.
I saw your comment that you only had 5 or 6 hours, and this was your first LD Jam - this is a great start and I'm looking forward to see what you can do with more time and experience!
Really nice puzzle design. Took me a while to figure out strategies for solving them, but once I did I was hooked.
I really like the art style and the music & sound effects done with your voice are charming.
I tried with a controller (an old Xbox 360 wired jobbie) but it didn't work that well - it seemed like it only recognized inputs when they were changing, not when they were held, if that makes sense. Didn't have that problem with keyboard.
@Serious07 @gamebuilder @Ripter Thank you kindly for playing, and for the kind words!
@jshaffer94247 Thanks! Overall I agree with you - a lot of the mechanics & items would do well to be explained somewhere. In the past I've been a big fan of introducing mechanics gradually and giving the player an opportunity to discover them, but this go-around it was enough of a scramble just to get this much in and playable in time!
Thanks @dnich013! I was definitely inspired by Streets of Rage with this one. Since the end of the compo, I've had some ideas about how I could have made the collisions work better, as I agree it's not quite right - but such is life during Ludum Dare!
The concept and illustrations are very charming, and who doesn't want to put King Lear in their place?
Like @jack-hipson says, playing rock-paper-scissors gets a bit tired after a while. I still kept going because I wanted to see all the stages of the tower, and what happened at the end, and I'm glad I did.
Took a while to get the hang of it, but I like it - there were a few turn-based racing games, but this is one of the more compelling ones.
Kudos for getting such an elegant 3D experience together in 3 days!
Just great. So much fun.
My experience with writing lyrics in "real life" is pretty much exactly as its depicted in the game. So much so that this could totally be reworked (or just used as) a tool for helping develop creativity.
This is like 3 genres! Well, if "Pacman" is a genre.
I understand the choice of one-button controls, but this might be more fun if you could move with the arrow keys - waiting around for the movement arrow made the pacing a bit tricky. Perhaps if missing the beat sent you in the wrong direction instead?
All in all, though, a really cool experience.
This is wonderful, very satisfying use of the theme with impressive level design and a great visual style.
I'm not one for precision platformers, but this game kept my attention for longer than many commercial titles of the genre. Well done.
I'd love to see controller support - this sort of game would be perfect on an old-school gamepad.
Amazing classic graphical style. Cool combination of themes, and the core mechanic is really compelling.
The "hard" level was a little overwhelming - it felt like there wasn't quite enough time to line everything up to make all the sweet combos. But I guess that's why it's hard mode!
I love this idea. It's got just enough complexity that it keeps me coming back for more. Great stuff.
I agree with @djfariel that it's a little tricky to tell what each tower is - once they're built it's pretty apparent, but the game gets hectic enough that it's a bit challenging to find the time to learn.
I will never not love a city builder. I really liked how this game had a few different phases, and elegantly guides the player through them.
On my first playthrough, when science went to far it killed all the men who weren't builders, so the population was stuck where it was. Not sure if that's a bug or a great example of emergent gameplay - I enjoyed myself either way. Well done.
This is the most unique take on the theme I've seen so far - well done!
Just a small niggle, the emails weren't consistent between "new turn" and "next turn" - which caused gmail, at least, to not thread them properly.
It'd be cool if this could be done entirely by email, ie your moves were done by replying to the email like 1991 intended.
Really clever idea. A lot of my thoughts are already captured by the other feedback - in short, this could really shine with a bit more polish. I really like the idea of going with an "original Super Mario Brothers" sort of movement scheme.
I did find a bug where a jump would end up with me half way in a platform, and that would move me a bit to the right. Once I realized that, I was able to push myself completely off the edge of the screen.
I wonder if a count down timer for the baddie appearing would be helpful. I definitely got a jolt from him popping up every time!
This gets really hard once it gets going fast! I enjoyed myself with this one, cool concept.
Fun little rhythm game. The racing element seems a little bolted-on, so to speak - does the choice of cars make a difference? It'd be nice to see that side of the interpretation developed a bit more.
It gets nice and hectic as things progress, which makes it really rewarding when I did get a good streak going.
This is really cool! I have a lot of nostalgia for the original SimCity and old-school text adventures so this is right up my alley.
It would be nice to be able to see a map of the city in game, but then again, keeping a map with pen & paper was a big part of the genre back in the day.
Well done!
I love it! Everything about this is, on its own, pretty simple, but it comes together as a great package - exactly what a good Ludum Dare game should be.
I played this one for a while and got pretty good at it, so I think I'm going to apply for some waiter jobs now.
Nice take on the theme. Like @notgreat said, I wonder if a combination of mouse/keyboard instead of just mouse would have made the controls a bit easier to grasp - I was just kind of stumbling along blindly for the first few levels, but I grokked it before it was too late.
@SuperTibbles that makes a lot of sense. I could see this turning into a *phenomenal* mobile game.
Great visual style. The choice of font really just pushes the whole thing over the edge - great attention to detail. I just wish there was more!
Did anyone else try shooting the hat off the cactus?
Interesting idea. It'd be cool to see how the FPS element could be developed a bit more, as I didn't see much point in moving around - standing still and focusing just on aiming with the mouse seemed the more effective strategy.
Yeah, what @vilcans said - silly idea and good execution. The physics of jumping off the staff lines are an awesome touch. Really great entry!
Really cool idea. The poison mechanic is cool, but slowly drove me mad - before it even registered that the letter was poison, I'd already be reading further ahead in the word so would miss it almost every time.
Slowing down helped me catch it, but that felt a bit weird in a typing game.
I'd love to see what you had in mind for the roguelike elements - but as you say, such is Jam.
This is pretty much how I feel playing minigolf.
Might be good to add some instructions - it wasn't clear exactly what I was trying to do until I watched the video, when a paragraph on the page would have explained it.
Good fun all the same!
Yup, a lot more depth here than I was expecting. I love that the theme carries through to the visuals - going all in with the setting like that really makes it come together.
I liked the approach of having a warp zone to choose levels. Not bad for coming from no Unity experience.
The controls felt a little loose to me; getting that right is a key part of a good platform experience. To an extent, that's a challenge with Unity in general: the physics engine is really solid, but it can take a lot of work to whip it into something that really feels good.
I'm really happy to see another game that used music genres of the interpretation of the theme!
Interesting idea, but I'm having a bit of trouble grasping the strategy. I was eventually able to beat it, but that was a much learning the pattern on each level rather than figuring out the general approach.
ie does 0 always involve just eating a point? Same with a column with a 9 in it - can anything go on top of that without losing a point?
It would be really cool if adjacent columns could combine to be used as multiple-digit numbers, and that would make the game play a lot deeper.
I like the idea here, and it's pretty well executed.
In general, I think things could be "tightened up" a bit - snappier controls, quicker progression, etc. A checkpoint system, so the player doesn't have to start all the way from the beginning again, would also be helpful for something like Ludum Dare - after all, you want people rating your game to see as much of it as possible.
All in all, a pretty good showing for your first Ludum Dare - hope to see you in the next one!
I really dig this idea. A bit frustrating at times when there wasn't any good vantage point to line up shots, but when everything clicked I had a lot of fun.
Looks and sounds great, but as you said in the description some of the core gameplay is missing. There's never enough time during Ludum Dare, so getting enough core gameplay in place to make you've got a fun experience is job 1, even if the player is just a rectangle and the doors are other-coloured rectangles.
Hope to see you in future LDs!
Always impressive to see networked multiplayer games in LD. This has a great classic arcade vibe to it, good fun. Sadly, I was only able to find one game when I went in to rate it so I didn't get a chance to really master the game. I'll definitely come back to this one in the near future to see if I can find some more people online.