Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Sam Machell
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| π₯ | π₯ | 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Brownie Cove Cancelled | jam | Mood | 4.59 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | π₯ | Pompeii, Bubbleland | jam | 4.00 | 3.50 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 4.00 | 3.00 | 4.00 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | π₯ | Feast Work | jam | 704 | 3.43 | 2.77 | 3.67 | 3.70 | 3.27 | 4.06 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | π₯ | Memphis, Bubbleland | jam | 3.50 | 3.00 | 4.50 | 4.00 | 4.00 | 4.00 | 3.50 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | π₯ | Unpaid Serenade for Future Solution Group [2026 eCon Grief/Heartbreak Singalong] | jam | 63 | 4.23 | 3.48 | 4.02 | 3.38 | 4.51 | 4.19 | 3.56 | 4.56 |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | π₯ | Exhaustlands II | jam | |||||||||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | π₯ | Dark Kitchen | jam | 3.66 | 2.50 | 3.66 | 2.83 | 4.33 | 3.83 | 5.00 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | π₯ | Some Excavated Wounds | jam | 3.29 | 2.33 | 3.70 | 3.25 | 4.16 | 3.62 | 4.20 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | π₯ | Kitchen For One | jam | 838 | 3.14 | 2.52 | 4.20 | 2.27 | 4.00 | 3.87 | 2.60 | 3.87 |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | π₯ | Brownie Cove Cancelled | jam | 80 | 4.02 | 3.04 | 3.60 | 3.25 | 4.56 | 4.09 | 3.57 | 4.59 |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | π₯ | Exhaustlands | jam | 236 | 3.73 | 3.32 | 3.52 | 2.51 | 3.52 | 3.92 | 4.11 | |
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | π₯ | Definition of a Ghuest | jam | 262 | 3.77 | 2.98 | 3.68 | 4.00 | 3.67 | 2.63 | 4.50 | |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | π₯ | Between Stations | jam | 69 | 4.03 | 3.54 | 4.01 | 3.17 | 4.22 | 4.09 | 3.31 | 4.49 |
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | π₯ | The Cashbags Man | jam | 2.50 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 1.00 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 2.50 |
@tuism what do you mean by agency in this context?
@guoboism this is an interesting idea! Would definitely make the game more engaging mechanic wise. I wonder if it would change the feel though? Instead of feeling like you are tuning into different worlds and stories there might be more of a grandiose interconnected feel which is the opposite of what I was going for. Definitely a good thing to think about, thank you!
@shinyogre Thank you so much! That really really means a lot to me. Some aspects of it are somewhat autobiographical so I'm glad its managing to have an affect on people! :)
In regards to expanding on it, we think that we're done with this game specifically... but the world, themes, and style are going to be expanded upon in the game we're working on atm (plug lol) https://www.facebook.com/sandgardeners/
@jjjjason hey thanks man it was partly inspired by Alan Resnick's work, i think the extended videos he did for This House Has People In It are super interesting in terms of active/passive viewing and voyeurism. Other inspirations? Kentucky Route Zero is definitely the number one inspiration for me in games, like text-based narrative and choice. That shit is perfection. David Lynch's films are a constant inspiration. Lost in Translation as well in a weird way was an inspiration. Also for this project I looked a little at early video art and the way we interact with video art in galleries/at home. If that makes any sense? lol
@lestat there's no more content once you've exhausted the stations, apart from the static, can see why the writing at the end would confuse you im sorry about that
great game! really love the sense of time progressing, routine, learning the surroundings. i liked the snippets of dialogue from the character but often wished that they remained quiet as they spoilt some of the joy of discovery/puzzle solving. graphics are gorgeous and so is the sound, really helps to create a mood! beautiful stuff! the music is great. would have loved if there was maybe a couple more sound effects to just make it feel more punchy to play, but seriously cool stuff one of my favs so far
this is a great game! exactly the kind of work i like to make and like to see! i think it would work really well in an installation setup with multiple screens. really unique interpretation of the theme! nice one :)
to me this felt as though it would work better as a puzzle game, the way the poison spreads is a clever idea to make the player hurry to the next floor, but i think it would work better if it was specifically designed rather than random, as it feels unfair often. but as others have said the music helps create a great pace!
nice idea and felt really polished! i would like to see more dynamic events or unique things that could happen. or perhaps a day/night system like a game like paper's please?
i like the way you've done subtle world building, by making the like club on top and the little lights it really places the game in a world, which often games like this dont tend to do. i got upset when it insulted me though because i thought i was doing a good job :(
very funny idea, good stuff. the animations on the hair really stood out to me, feels almost like some kind of cosmic horror these monobrow hairs bursting through the groundskin like that i dunno lol
i really loved this game i think the idea is so great! I don't know if you know of Bennet Foddy's work (QWOP, Getting Over It), but he talks about utilising the computer keyboard by designing games specifically for it, rather than using the keyboard as a controller substitute, and this is a great example of that. really great stuff! beautiful hand drawn animations as well! big score from me :)
any chance for a mac or web build of this game? would love to play it!
@shinyogre thanks as always for your support and feedback. these things are definitely things we need to fix in the post jam version. it's so hard to think about gameplay after ignoring it for so long... needs balancing for sure. we are gonna add a proper map in.
@demn hey thanks so much! this is lovely feedback
our initial plan was to enter an endgame sequence after a certain amount of time where the world started shrinking, which would play into the theme. but yes you're right atm we are totally separate from the theme haha, just the way ideas develop sometimes. and yes! we will be adding a minimalistic map that will help show you the location of discovered named roads... hopefully still be mysterious enough to allow for discovery but also help people stop getting so lost. thanks for leaving such a detailed response <3
@foolmoron thanks very much for such kind words! and thanks for checking out Between Stations as well! very glad you liked! us TV addicts gotta stick together
i feel very stupid because i feel like i didnt really get it, i need to try again lol. but the art and concept are great i imagine seeing this as a mini game in a future animal crossing or something!
is there any way at all you can port this to mac? i really want to play it, looks amazing
i found it hard to tell exactly what was going to happen with each pill due to the colour coding that mostly worked? but sometimes not. the levels are really well designed and fun to solve! but i wish the snail thing could have moved slightly faster. good entry though in general! reminds me of the game Spewer somewhat... some similar ideas i think...
great game! reminds me of rhythm heaven a lot! (which is a good thing)
really nice game! love to see games like this made for the ludum! the art is beautiful and the puzzles are great, but i wonder if failure has to take you back to the previous level? i think being trapped on the same level when you fail feels more thematically in check and is not as punishing? but i dont know, obviously it's your game lol. great stuff tho i really like it, probably my fav so far!
sorry lol i also just wanna say i love when games tell stories through their mechanics and this game did that really well!
i actually found the silence, minimal graphics, and claustrophobic camera zoom to be quite effective at creating a mood! i liked how worried and still it felt - the calm before the storm. but i had no idea what i was doing and couldn't find the sword unfortunately
fun game! really frantic! beautiful music!
wow this looks great! please let me know if you put out a mac build i'd love to play :)
i really love typing games! good fun haha, i got 320. i reckon what would be cool is being able to build towers to help defend, and maybe theyd run out of ammo and youd type to refill them? just to help when it gets super hectic. good sounds tho made the typing feel really satisfying
hey really liked this game a lot! i thought the sound was especially great! really fun! dont have much else to say really O Y S T E R
Nice game! I really like the art style and the world that you've created! It's fun to play games where the goal is to some extent subjective - means there's lots of room for player expression!
is there any chance you could build this for mac? im desperate to play it!
I really enjoyed this! I love where games integrate meaning into the mechanics and you did that perfectly here. Nice way to turn the theme into something positive as well!
The simplicity of the controls works well! but the visuals are messy and make it hard to tell what's going on - not intuitive. I think a different font choice would have been better as this one was not very readable. I also found the audio (music in particular) really grating and far too repetitive. The balance of the gameplay itself seems pretty good to me tho! but i don't play this kind of thing tbh :)
The process of making the pots was fun but I found the paint specifically confusing. The lack of feedback made it hard to work out what I was doing wrong when it wasn't coming out well. Graphics are beautiful! Great job!
Definitely easy to control and makes fun. The noises got a bit grating and repetitive: very harsh. Nice tying together of concept and gameplay but I think you could've taken it further and pushed the idea into something fresh. Nice work!
This has been my fav game so far! It's all so polished and coherent and fun! 5 stars all round!
Really effective way of emotional storytelling! Limiting choices is one of my favourite tropes in terms of making a player feel constrained and it was done really well here :) sound was simple enough to be effective as well, and obvs the graphics are gorgeous! great work
This is really great I like it a lot! Very smart entry. I wonder if escape should even be an option, though? I kinda like the idea of an infinite loop you can't win. But really great entry! Best I've played I think.
Nicely done! I really like the music, it's catchy, but feels tonally dissonant with the rest of what you're going for. I think the recharge time on the attacks is pretty brutal, not super fun. But overall really well done!
Pretty fun game! The flying feels great. Took me a long while to work out what to do, but once I got it I was great haha.
This has been really nicely put together and the overall end product is really polished. I really love the music, although it definitely gets repetitive quickly. Overall nicely done, but perhaps the design could have been pushed further into a bit more of a unique area?
Nice and polished entry, I like it! It was quite difficult to work out how to get started, I felt really stupid. Also I kept clicking the down arrow button that swaps screen, like all the time lol
It's a shame both billionaires didn't die. Or at least have their wealth confiscated. The controls were pretty wild, I don't have an end or delete key on my laptop so my player 2 couldn't attack me as well - I'd consider changing them, or at least giving the player the option to. Nicely done overall though! And nice interpretation of the theme :v:
Really gorgeous game, had loads of fun!
Nice idea and I think the incorporation of the theme was nice, but the rest felt slightly janky. I hard a really hard time even killing one enemy! but good job !
The animation and controls were nice and smooth but the difficulty is a bit unnecessarily punishing imo. I don't understand why the elevator music? I was listening to this and it was helping with the atmosphere a bit more lol https://burial.bandcamp.com/album/subtemple . But overall nicely done! Feels like a pretty substantial game here given the time frame!
I wonder if Notre-dame would be the final boss? rich folks unable to resist the pull of tax-deductable nation treasures huh. Nice work! The game didn't develop enough quickly enough to keep me interested for long but it's well polished and I like the audio especially!
really nice experience! the lighting effects on the rain/fog are really great and the first time the firework went off i actually gasped out loud! beautiful!
i get that the experience is a meditative one, but it felt slightly too sluggish. not a pacing issue but a gamefeel one perhaps?
great audio also - nice stuff
@aeveis the references for the text are in the .txt file that came with the download ! (im pretty sure)
probably the most innovative game ive played all jam! the art style is very unique :D
nice idea for sure. im not sure the moving symbols really help the key mechanic of remembering and story telling though.. and im not sure how you could implement it but some kind of way of the story the player writes coming back would be good
@iluvatar coming soon
@aless thank you! so sorry it's taking us so long to get the builds up. we really knocked ourselves out this weekend and are still recovering lol! spending some time away from screens... you know how it is
Love how you've used the theme! Really great idea, and the visuals are lovely! The intro cutscene especially, but all of the sprites were charming and I enjoyed the colour scheme. The thing I found tricky was the platforming itself. I think about the most successful vertical platformers like Downwell or Spelunky, and how they're either zoomed out or have vertical aspect ratios so the player can plan their descent better!
Wonderful game! The audio is especially well done, and the clarity of the tables with the gramophones in the otherwise abstract place is very striking
Really beautiful animations! The graphics are great and there are some nice details! I wasn't very good at it... especially at the combat, which felt a little unfair. Once I'd decided I would be better not fighting I tried to avoid the enemies but sometimes couldn't jump over them. The autoscrolling works really well to keep the player constantly under pressure: always needing to move down but sometimes needing to wait in order to see what's coming. Very cool!
@magnie @pnkvrt thank you both for playing! Apologies for the visuals! Indeed we wanted them to be dizzying but perhaps we went too far :laughing:
@fadex thanks for playing! Your comment feels more like a movie than actual feedback tho...
Great game! Amazing mechanic and really smart puzzles!
Like the others - I like the idea behind the visuals, but found the enemies too fast and unfair. The only way I could succeed was by spamming shoot, which was pretty rough on my ears. I like neon shark's idea of larger enemies at the beginning.
I got 767! Very fun game! I really enjoyed the time pressure, it made me not overthink things and I ended up developing an instinctual understanding of where to go, which was very fun. The different powerups are also done super well!
Beautiful visuals and atmosphere! Lots of wonderful details in the way the story unfurls. I especially found the opening incredibly effective!
I really enjoyed this! The main mechanic of using the axe to grab walls is really great and engaging. It's cool to use it to wall jump, and to slide, and makes me think more about how often I take those mechanics for granted in other games. I think there's lots of room for experimentation with this! I found the combat a little frustrating and wonder if the game would've been stronger with more of a focus on the platforming? Maybe the caves would be even eerier without enemiesΒ±!
Really cool! When I got super deep, I accidentally let my energy run out, and when the light turned off it was very eerie. Cool stuff!
Looks really interesting! However, I can't seem to get the "Welcome click here to read more" button to move and can't read the text because of this! Is there anything I'm doing wrong?
Pretty fun! It would have felt a lot more fair if the framing was vertical - at the moment it feels a little luck based because I can't see what's ahead and plan my fall. But, because of this it did potentially do a good job of portraying the experience of being chained to an egg and falling down a pit, so...
This has been my favourite game I've played so far! Really fun. I love the graphics!
I really like the idea and the presentation, but pretty quickly I got in a situation where all my dwarves were stuck in one long narrow hole lol
I really enjoyed this a lot! The way the waters get darker and the need for droppable lights makes the process of going deeper feel really immersive. It's one of the nicest ways I've seen the theme used! I also really appreciate gameplay like taking pictures, that is peaceful and exploratory. I think the game could have benefitted a lot from audio feedback - when a picture has been taken successfully, or when you are low on oxygen, etc, just to make the flow feel more fair!
@ayxs we began the project in Godot but switched to Unity half way through. we want to move away from Unity soon but felt we'd be able to polish this turd a bit more on familiar turf
@lincolnsalles thank you kindly! And thank you for sharing the project. Self-promo isn't something we're very good at, so we appreciate when folks do it for us ;)
@decipator so full it hurts. limited space in my big Royal Belly! bohoho!! oh so full..... opted of Theme category... hungry hungry hungry hungry! jam good time to make new unsellable FOOD! FOOOOOD jaaaaam! Theme die out like the dodo (so tasty couldn't help myself! like the turkey leg! BOHOHOHO!)! cannot eat theme :((((
I like driving my trolley around, but I found it frustrating trying to locate where items are - there are too many shelves, and the numbers on the shelves are completely unhelpful to me. Maybe if on the list there were corresponding numbers it would be easier to find things
Fantastic! It feels really innovative to have such a sense of danger and immediacy in a puzzle game like this, the water moves so quick so you have to be very precise! My one critique would be the graphics and the level readability - making the door and the box the same shade makes my brain have to do a little bit extra work to parse what I need to achieve
This is really well done - there's attention to detail here that makes it stand out. I liked that I had to move around to confirm I understood the controls before it started, and there's a nice sense of increasing danger
lovely game! i really love the aesthetics and style and the interpretation of the theme is funny and original! really great job
looks absolutely beautiful and exactly like the kind of games i love to play and make and we need more of this in ludum dare! but im on mac and cant play it lol any chance youll be doing a mac build?
really fun idea! some of the art and sounds are beautiful and it feels great! clever way of thinking about the theme as well!
very tricky! lovely art style absolutely beautiful, felt really great and the audio was immersive! i like the idea of combining the two genres and i think theres a lot of potential in it. i especially like at the beginning the way the dialogue flowed and read (but that's just a weird small thing i like in games) good job!!!
nice game! i like the multitasking and the slow reveal of story elements... very interesting
hey id love to play this game i really love text adventures and those are the kind of games i make (and made for this jam) but am on mac. any chance of a web or mac build?
i wouldve liked to have been able to chat with the plants as i thought it was going to be a dating sim type experience, but a nice idea overall and the art is adorable!
i think the idea is really really great. i think theres a lot of potential in this idea of musical dialogue options. im thinking about the cardboard computer game Here and There Along the Echo for another nice phone line system. and also early Steve Reich pieces like Come Out that use the human voice in a musical way. or perhaps even thinking about theatre musicals. lots of territory for exploration that would be super interesting... hope some more comes out of this!
@zotapianola wow thank you so much! never felt so emotional reading feedback, it really means a lot. please feel free to check out our other games on our itch page! everything we make has the same kind of atmosphere and ideas, and we're working on a bigger project in the future that you may also be interested in. but seriously thank you!
lovely game! really nice to see some more experimental games that tackle topics like this! love the shifts in art style, really reflect the shifts in tone. nice work :)
any chance on a mac or web build? looks great id love to play
really fun game! nice interpretation of the them and felt pretty good to choose through the dialogues!
really fun idea! i like all the clues and everything. definitely can see this kind of concept included in a larger game, or perhaps more fleshed out i dont know. great work tho!
absolutely beautiful game!! realyl really lovely!
fun game! love the art and sounds its so cool to see pico 8 games entered! good job :)
beautiful idea and really well presented! very fun! gonna come back to this one definitely!
beautiful game! i love the flow of the conversation and the ongoing feeling of tension caused by trying to focus on the road. briliant stuff and lovely to see more text based games in the jam!!