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Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-26T20:47:51Z

Great design, I like the concept of using coins as key conditions instead of how, in most games, you collect them just to get some score. To be honest, it took me probably 5 runs all around the map before I was able to find the fourth coin, and I was about to give up just moments before noticing the crouching area :) Bug reports:

* The aforementioned crouching area could get blocked by the pottery that's destroyed in front of the entrance, and the only solution is to restart the game. I consider this a severe issue. * There is no proper introduction of the controls, e.g. the E key to interact, and the About menu goes against a de-facto consensus, as there are usually just some credits under About. I would expect the keys to be mentioned in settings, as if to re-map them. * When closing the About menu, an accidental double-click causes the player to press the Exit button - that's some unfortunate button placement. I sure hope noone does that in the middle of the gameplay :) I guess that's why people usually do a double-check before quitting the game. * There should be a mouse sensitivity option in the game, as your constant is just too slow. It takes the camera the same time to rotate only 45 degrees as it takes my cursor to go from left to the right side of my screen. (This is a good choice for some pro-games within FPS games, but in a puzzle game it's just annoyingly too slow :) * By the way, I'm not too experienced in occulsion culling myself, but wouldn't that prevent the need to load the next part of the level? (The character sometimes does a glitchy jump after the load. It reminds me of the loading in Half-Life games :p)

I hope this'll help you in your post-LD endeavor, good luck! :)

Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-27T16:17:10Z

@linear Interesting, thanks for the information about technical details related to lighting, I haven't had enough experience with this yet, so I will have to learn more about the shadowmask etc., hopefully I'll be able to use these tricks to also optimize FPS in my lighting-based game :) By the way, wouldn't additive scene loading also solve this issue in a more straight-forward way? I was thinking that it may be easier to prevent the glitchy transition, and the scene loading could be also done asynchronously. Too bad there isn't any all-in-one solution provided by Unity, I feel like this is the kind of issue that everyone will face at some point and we should strive for a proper standardized approach :)

Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel 2019-10-27T19:49:19Z

@aurel I haven't previously finished the game, so I went back and I must say that it really takes a huge amount of time to realize that you can move those ramps - not just one, but both, and that there is a final solution to make the ball trigger all 3 switches. At first I was trying to catch the ball by pressing E, and later on I was looking for it on the ground :) Also the way the ball often fails to roll over the last ramp made me worry that I will have to use my body to redirect it :P By the way, just like some comments previously mentioned, playing with low brightness definitely makes player easily miss even some of more obvious parts of the level, including the ball itself.

Overall it's a nice exercise to look for solutions with minimal hints, but it honestly gets frustrating very quickly. On the upside, the atmosphere was so great that it felt authentic for the entire time, just like a player that would be left to second-guess himself if he were in a real temple. Most of us can only dream of making such an immersive level over the course of a few days without stealing tons of assets like free models and textures ;)

Still, I would expect a little bit more of complexity when it comes to the interaction with objects, and maybe some feedback in the form of a story progression, so that the player doesn't aimlessly wander to previous rooms where there is nothing to do, before I would consider this worthy of some official post-LD release :) Though when it comes to coins, I appreciate that the level can be completed even if some of them are missed, so that there is no need to strictly point the player to the missing ones (if a player won't notice them once, he will probably miss them again, e.g. if they are right above another platform that he had cleaned up). It is really challenging for a mind to properly memorize the entire level though, as one will get very easily lost if he doesn't hold everything in memory. The minimap would greatly reduce the difficulty, even though it would reduce the immersion a little bit :) What about making some simplified version of a map, so that the player has to understand the associations himself anyway?

I must strongly complain about the last door though. When I first played it (that's when I blocked myself in the crouching area), I saw the "33 door" in an unapproachable area, but when I played it later, I was no longer so focused on pushing all the random snake statues, so I completely ignored the one that you have to push down in order to unlock the door. What if the player pushes it to a wrong direction? I had to come here and read the comments in order to learn about it, as I remembered the "33 door", but had thought that it was simply somewhere else :) I would definitely never find it on my own.

Anyway, here is my score for the record :D It was fun after the worst part was behind me :P

monkey.png

Private Universe by Zathnic 2019-10-27T17:08:20Z

Cool gravity mechanics addition on top of a platformer. I got stuck though, when I collected a 3rd or 4th checkpoint that was on 4 white blocks. I kept jumping up and was constantly getting respawned, which I though was a bug, but then I realized I'm hitting dark blue blocks above me, which are under another 4 white blocks. After trying to jump for several minutes, I was not able to land on any other platform, however much I was trying... :)

Oh and I also finally managed to jump so far right, that I fell outside of the respawn blocks, so I got stuck even more :)

Kobold Simulator by someone 2019-10-26T21:42:29Z

Though there isn't very much to do in the game, you've made a great framework in which it'll be easy to fit more ideas later on. When it comes to the idea of making "yet another C++ engine" though, do you have some specific goal that you wish to accomplish more efficiently than the existing solutions? Or is it just a training exercise to learn the low level rendering details? Because if it's the first case, I'd much rather see it as an open-source project, or as a contribution to some existing one :)

Nothing by pantoufle 2019-10-27T09:12:07Z

Very fun concept, it reminds me of a great DOS game, from which I have wonderful memories, called The Incredible Machine. If I were you, I'd consider making a post-JAM effort to make something similar to that puzzle game :) But when it comes to the first impression, it was not very intuitive that I have to hold the mouse for such a long period (mostly because I accidentally had my wireless speaker turned off), and it felt like I have to actually do something, e.g. draw some pattern, yet the little sparks dissipate if I move the cursor too far, so I was unnecessarily worried ;) Also I remembered a recent show-off post from Reddit, and it felt like I caused the apple to be spawned because of a pattern I drew :) https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/dcc9hu/how_to_turn_a_pineapple_into_an_apple_pie/

An Egg From Nothing by ragtagradical 2019-10-22T15:44:36Z

I was also missing any objectives, and the instructions were too ambiguous - I didn't really understand which creatures were "harmful", what harm can they do, and what are the flowers :) But the rythm mechanics itself was great, it motivates player to time his "third beat" in a safe location before he gets enlightened by the pulse :) By the way, you should have selected the option that your download link supports HTML5.

Rescue Hamsters! by ryjcio 2019-10-27T10:05:50Z

I like the mechanics and this game definitely has a potential, but there are some UX issues, which I believe you should be able to fix post-Jam :) First, the ground selection in the top-right corner has mostly the same color as the background, so it's almost invisible on a first glance - I kept clicking on the screen and trying to use the hammer to build something. When it comes to the dynamics of the first levels, I have to assume that it's an intentional part of the difficulty that we have to immediately start to build unless we want the first hamster to die, then we have to quickly delete and re-spawn the ground around him (as there isn't enough resource to build the entire level) - and if the hamster dies, we have to quickly improvise and delete a part of our construction, so that we quickly build it around the spawn once again. Also the difficulty is implicitly increased by the need to be able to easily draw a straight line with mouse (which I'm not really complaining about, but it feels like some players may not enjoy). Also when the player moves the mouse too fast, sometimes an unexpected gap appears (but interestingly enough, sometimes the hamster walks over the gap). On top of that, when I was playing the second level, after I switched the Firefox tab for a moment and then went back, the respawn got stuck and the game did not restart even though all my hamsters died :)

Nevertheless, these issues are completely acceptable after 3 days of development, it's just something to think about in your future endeavors :)

Build Yourself by lilkrit 2019-10-27T11:12:24Z

Great result for a genre that was new to you, and I like the crafting concept :) I'm not experienced in Unreal, so I can't give you specific tips, but there is a huge number of issues that you can work on post-LD. I'll start with the fact that my first experience was that I pressed TAB multiple times, and I got stuck in a black screen with text, which couldn't be closed until I exit the game. Also the text scaling isn't very responsive, as the beginning and the ending of the full-screen tutorial text isn't visible on my 1280x1024 resolution. Now, when it comes to the gameplay, the car most certainly shouldn't act like it does on the edge of the platforms. The collider also isn't large enough, as a part of the car can enter the wall, and the car rotates around in a way that makes no sense physically... :) The doors flicker on top of them, which is definitely easy to notice and could be solved by making the object shorter by a few pixels. Also, it's not very enjoyable to get stuck under the bridge before exit, where the door is closed, should the player go a wrong way. By the way, there's also some invisible collider making the player stuck right where the shadow is below the platform at this place. Last but not least, the moving platforms are very easy to fail to step on, I believe everyone would appreciate if they stopped at least for half a second. By the way, it's interesting how this is the first game I played on LD that officially integrates and mentions the Win+G Game Bar on Windows :)

Build Yourself by lilkrit 2019-10-27T17:22:30Z

@lilkrit When it comes to the wheel rotation design, I think it would look very nice if you rotated the wheels of the car by 90 degrees. Even if you didn't properly animate it, at least it would explain the intention :) And when it comes to the TAB issue, here is a set of screenshots to help - when on the last screen, there is no response from any of the keys, including Esc: buildyourself.png

Bob the Brawler by itsdanidre 2019-10-25T07:52:38Z

Considering practically all comments are overwhelmingly positive, I feel like the only one here who didn't like the gameplay that much, so it's probably just a matter of personal taste :) The main thing I disliked was the need to spam mouse left-click, as it takes just too much effort, I'd much rather hold the left-click and have the character keep doing the punches. Maybe the double-click could be an attack that has some cooldown. Other than that, the gameplay felt too simple, as the only objective was putting walls in a pattern that helps you not to get overwhelmed from all directions. On a positive note, the game design is nice and kinda reminds me of Dyna Blaster :) I could imagine this game being great when you implement some additional features and challenging levels. Nevertheless, if I don't compare it against similar Unity games, it's still a great jam result considering you made it from scratch in JavaScript :)

Hubcap Pup by Terribly Awesome Games 2019-10-25T06:36:50Z

I agree with others that the aesthetic design is very neat. The story feels so sad that it almost hides the technical shortcomings :) On a serious note, the first issue I experienced was that many objects, including the cars, were positioned in such a way that it seemed they are a part of the background. Maybe you could have placed them closer to the camera - so that the dog tries to walk "as if through the center of them"? Other than that, I'm sure you are aware of the physics issues of jumping, and the worst part about it is probably the unnatural animation of jumping. But hey, it's a custom art and I know how much time it can take to fine-tune such a design :) As long as it's one of your first 2D side-view game, it's a great success and you have a great potential when you perfect this kind of graphical design!

Ludarium-45 by acronaut 2019-10-27T09:27:10Z

I don't really understand the objective in the game, as I was only able to collect the LD diskettes, yet the remaining time didn't change after pickup. I also have to criticize the lag on restart (some UI to mention that the level is loading would be nice), and thanks to the lack of mentioning controls, I almost didn't notice the Shift key :) But of course, from a graphical standpoint, the design is very unique and has a great combination of a minimalistic design with some neat animations and lighting effects. It surely leaves a larger lasting impression than many other average-looking games :)

Never Ending Entropy by CodeKoto 2019-10-29T15:34:59Z

Very cool design and story, too bad my GPU had an issue and the game has frozen, so I didn't have the opportunity to finish it (though my stability was almost gone, maybe I'd have to restart anyway), an auto-save would be nice :) At first it was very disorienting that there were only a few objects to interact with, but in spite of how much wandering it required, it grew into a game which is hard to believe that was only made in 3 days :) My major complaint is that the text appears too slowly, and that clicking completely skips it instead of first displaying the entire sentence. With text consisting of multiple messages it doesn't make much sense from a logical standpoint - if a player skips the first sentence in the middle, why even bother showing him the second sentence? He won't understand the context anymore. Also personally I hate it when games let players accidentally skip any part of the story - some games solve it by providing a history of last messages, e.g. look at GTA:VC, you get Briefing in the menu :) Also by the way, not everyone will understand the LMB/RMB instruction. If you make some post-LD effort, I'd make sure to remind players if they haven't used it :)

Never Ending Entropy by CodeKoto 2019-10-29T19:46:55Z

@anion-z Okay I gave it another try, but I lost too much stability by being careless when hurrying up, thus I lost after destroying the first HP bar of the boss... :) I'll try to finish it later, but it feels tedious to re-do the beginning :P You're right, the text is now faster. I wasn't on a low-end PC, just had some trobules with my driver and forgot about some background GPU eater :)

When it comes to LMB/RMB, I believe most people other than game developers/very experienced gamers aren't used to that acronym, and they are supposed to be your main consumers post-LD :) To be honest, first time I read RMB, I subconsciously felt like it wasn't important and it slipped my mind. And there was also too little emphasis on it, as it was just at the end of a relatively large block of text - which was also only displayed temporarily. Luckily, the second time I tried to click and found out that I can fight - though it wasn't like I really had to, as I was always faster than the enemies, and they kept getting locked out :) Though it took me a long time to realize that I gain the required complexity from the large enemies after I got told to get 1000, as after several minutes of playing I only managed to rise from 500 to 510.

Nevertheless, I think the text skipping issue is still relevant even though it's fast, even if only as a misclick prevention. Also I would vote for making the text appear from the left and not centered, as it's impossible to read it during the transition :) Plus a fun fact, I was afraid that the Superspeed buff is some enemy trigger, so I took my time cleaning up the room first :D

Race of time by Darkwing00Duck 2019-10-27T10:30:09Z

Just like the previous comments mentioned, the character controls are really clunky and the key latency is terrible, the car easily falls off the road, and the race itself is unfinished. Which is really sad, because the concept contains one of the best ideas when it comes to a race preparation. I would really like to see something similar in other casual racing games - maybe even as a split-screen game competition, where you have to steal the parts faster than your opponent :) I could imagine some interesting dynamics to arise in such a game. By the way, I see that you've really put some effort into making an interesting atmosphere, as you've used so many various objects, boxes, fences, "AI" logic with waypoints, minimap, interesting terrain... so it's far from a neglected game. I hope you won't give up on this... Time Lord game ;)

Inventory Loss by The-Vecter 2019-10-22T16:15:50Z

I finished the level with -1 items. The idea and the phrases in the inventory are funny (that is, if you have time to read them), but at times it feels like you were just too lazy to optimize the experience :) The tutorial omits how you have to use mouse + the text doesn't properly fit in square, there are huge issues with physics controller (some of which I understand can be are troublesome to fix, even Unity tutorials aren't honest with themselves as they use various hotfixes :P), and the game can't be Quit without ALT+F4 when you are fullscreen and not in the menu :) Also I don't see a reason not to publish the game also using WebGL. Nevertheless, good job with the first LD game, it will be easy to avoid these mistakes next time :)

Slinger by Bungalow 2019-10-22T10:57:12Z

Great jumping (slinging) mechanics, though the difficulty is really huge. It requires plenty of practice in order to train the reflexes, and I find the key bindings a bit hard to get used to - why not let us use the jump key in order to slinge? :) Also I agree with multiple points stated in comments above me. Good job nevertheless!

Slime Slayer by ZachZ 2019-10-27T18:09:49Z

Simple and straightforward implementation of the LD Theme, good job :) I didn't understand the beginning though, why did I have to click 10 times? :) But I liked the idea of an initial fall through all the platforms. One minor issue is that the player can walk on a round corner of a block, which I think doesn't feel natural. @anion-z Which reference was it, just the name of the game? :) Too bad I didn't find any Rimuru reference instead :P

Bruno's Mind Control Project by unplugred 2019-10-26T21:11:16Z

Truly enjoyable game, though it gets repetitive quickly, but it could be easy to add some post-LD features with various challenges for the replay value :) I could also imagine this to be a neat mini-game as a part of some larger game. I'm impressed with the very efficient graphical approach, and the ortographic zoom-out greatly improved the experience, though maybe the player actually has even too much freedom if he can switch between cameras all the time :) By the way, there are three issues I noticed: the difficulty switch isn't very "easy to grab", the flyers overlap each other on the ground, and the minimap camera doesn't show the entire screen, just the left part of it - I'm currently playing on an old 5:4 aspect ratio monitor, so that may be the cause :)

Dream Avatar by ynneblack 2019-10-27T20:27:16Z

Great idea, I believe that a kind of surreal lucid dream sim has an immense potential, and you should really consider to make some post-LD effort when you have more time to plan out some better stories. If you can come up with twists like these, sky is the limit :) To be honest, the riddle was too advanced for me and I wasn't able to notice how you subtly point towards the idea of "If I become a cat instead", nor did I connect the dots when it comes to copying the personal characteristics. Thus I hope that the next time you will make it a little bit more obvious, because nothing is worse than being stuck in the same dialogue, missing out on the clever story just because of some minor misunderstanding :) By the way, I believe that entering a lucid dream is the most efficient way to generate a great story full of novelty and authentic references. Our subconscious has a power beyond practically anyone's imagination, and it is supposed to be the our natural source of inspiration :) I hope you've had more luck than me though, once a person gets used to techniques like a dream log, they no longer function unless one keeps the spark of intention ablaze :)

Truth of Nothing by Ty Victorson 2019-10-27T18:34:00Z

Okay, I really didn't understand what message this game was trying to convey :D I have to complain that the beginning is really too slow, and I only managed to walk over the bridge on a third attempt after some frustration, and even then I didn't manage to jump, as it was very random, so I had to walk over the edge, and managed to do it without jumping :) Overall, the level design is okay and it could contain some interesting story, but I'm sorry that I failed to understand what the Truth was :)

Nothing is my car ! by T-Bo 2019-10-29T16:13:22Z

I see that you've made a really great job integrating feedback from comments. Thanks to that, I had practically no issues and managed to completely enjoy the game, thanks to the details like checklist, A/D, names of parts, restart... :) This is a perfect example of a simple clever design which a 3-day jam is supposed to manage!

I've managed to find three small issues though... As some people mentioned, there seem to be some performance issues. This also includes a horizontal screen tearing, as small black lines sometimes appear. Also I believe that your algorithm doesn't prevent spawning obstacles which cannot be avoided - but this RNG issue may well reasonably be a part of your design. Also I feel that it's anticlimatic how nothing happens when we assemble a full car - there is some post-LD potential to make it about something more than just chasing inifnite score :) By the way, I've really enjoyed the cow and waving from the tree on the respawn screen, that was a vital part of the experience worthy 5/5 :P

Little one by Asue 2019-10-22T15:17:16Z

A fine replica of the first Spore level, though it feels too easy as there isn't really any risk of losing, imo :) If you continued to work on this game, I would appreciate a greater diversity of skills, as there is really only "one" ability and the rest of the upgrades are simply variable changes. As a biggest criticism, I really missed some GUI to display the dash cooldown - it was always risky to try to dash into enemies, knowing it may be still charging :)

The Thrill of the Loan by TJMcDonald 2019-10-22T21:57:37Z

Great art and the choice of, let's say, minimalistic design of the mechanics. It really felt like playing some larger game with a complete story. I could imagine it to transition into a different game. By the way, I feel like you have wasted some potential when it comes to a first impression - both the starting screen, and the bank, are hard to really conceptually grasp at a first glance. At first I thought it's some kind of a spaceship game, as the borders were round and there were some "windows", and the character was so pink it felt like a different object :) And when the box goes on fire - you no longer see that it was a box. If you research how the human sight works, your brain doesn't really remember a previous object in this kind of transition, even though it may feel intuitive that we "notice" the difference. I'd propose some animation, like shaking the box / a match falling on it, in order to improve the context. The same with the bank - I believed that I'm in the left-top corner :)

EVOL by hiroboto 2019-10-26T21:29:26Z

Note that your zip of the game cannot be extracted using a built-in Win 10 zip support (Error 0x80004005: Unspecified error - starting with files like GFSDK_Aftermath_Lib.x64.dll), so make sure that 7zip isn't a requirement :)

Overall this game makes a great impression and I liked the choice of music (though doesn't that disqualify you from the Audio rating?), but I must say that the learning curve makes the jumping a little bit too difficult for my taste. Also, it's kind of shame to have to constantly listen just to the beginning of the song :) By the way, I was playing this on a 1280x1024 resolution and let's just say, your UI really isn't optimized for that :) (And as a full-screen game you also gotta add some Exit button.) Good luck with post-LD efforts!

EVOL by hiroboto 2019-10-27T16:54:30Z

@hiroboto Yes I was playing the latest version (I only found one link), so I was not complaining about the long restart (though it still takes some time), only about the jumping difficulty, no Exit button, and those resolution issues, e.g.: evol.png

Fall of RS-17 Icarus - an Akaban Tale by Kooshy 2019-10-22T10:12:41Z

Great atmosphere, but in my opinion it's just too unforgiving for players who get stuck - the semantics of our intentions could be explained using more hints. Some people may appreciate the difficulty though :) Also I'd add some crosshair change while the user aims at an interactable object, and I have to criticize the choice of a default text GUI of Unity - the font is too small and simple, plus the background also feels unfinished. I think it'd really improve immersion if you used some custom UI textures :) Plus I appreciate how you point cursor at the OK button by default, but it's still just annoying that we can't close it by clicking outside, or pressing Enter/Esc (or just WSAD). One last thing, the speed increase using SHIFT is really vital (and still doesn't feel fast enough) - what about making it a default speed as long as you don't implement any stamina mechanism? :)

Seedvilization by graslany 2019-10-29T15:03:39Z

Very interesting mechanics, though it takes some time of trial and error in order to fully understand how to control the growth, and which seeds can or cannot be moved. A little tutorial would greatly help new players :) I like the new surprise mechanics in later levels though.

Empty Stomach, Empty Toilet by Idontknow 2019-10-22T21:32:35Z

This MS Paint art is a real classic. So simple, yet this game managed to tell a story that mesmerized so many people :) By the way, I noticed your comment "Regarding setting the alpha on the whitespace", just download a free image editor IrfanView, open your MS Paint image, then just immediately save it (CTRL+S) as a .png and keep the transparency color checkbox. You will be asked to click on a color that becomes the background :)

Murder On Peacock Street by Seabird 2019-10-22T11:16:00Z

The intro is truly captivating, I like how you created the effect of driving in rain with 3D text, and then implicitly indicated stopping and getting out of the car without really having to animate it :) When it comes to first impressions in the game though, there are various important details you should fix. The controls are stated in a single line of "I - Inventory Esc - Skip Mouse -", which you should really separate with newlines or commas :) When opening the inventory, the text has very wrong aspect ratio and is of a low quality, you should tweak the UI canvas/text parameters in Unity. More importantly though, Esc is really a terrible choice to skip a dialogue, considering it closes the fullscreen mode :) And I believe the rest of the issues were addressed in previous comments. I believe you are allowed to integrate such minor bugs even before the LD Jam ends :) Your game has a huge potential if you solve the user experience issues, great job!

Soulful by aconfusedragon 2019-10-22T10:40:15Z

Nice graphics and audio that really support the immersion. When it comes to the tutorial, I like your implementation, but I must admit that I only properly understood the explanation of mechanics after I gave it a try having only skimmed over the tutorial. Maybe you could work on the first impression, so that your explanation of "good (pickup)" and "bad (avoid)", which you posted as a picture here on LD page, could be visualized during the tutorial itself. And one more thing, I think the pacing could be faster at the beginning - it takes maybe 7 seconds before a first item spawns, and then 10 seconds before any challenge starts. This may make sense for the first run (though it isn't remotely enough to get used to the movement borders and the relative acceleration compared to falling items), but it feels boring after every restart :) On the other hand, it nicely matches the moment music really starts. Thinking about the music, the rate of beats could actually even be used as a spawn timing instead of the random approach. But that's just my thought, maybe it's good enough as it is now :)

Keep Hope Alive by joe40001 2020-05-12T13:08:34Z

I'm not trying to take the issues like depression and anxiety lightly in any way, and I know it depends on many subjective factors, but still, I feel like you aren't giving them a representation they deserve, as this game makes the issue very binary, as if taking for a fact that people are victims of all of their circumstances, an that striving for a "success" and "opportunity" in life (whatever it may be) is the only feasible mindset there is. That's why I'd much rather see the game present, or at least hint upon some alternatives, so as to at least address the most stereotypical issues and self-destructive patterns that people repeat without a second thought, over and over, just because they've been programmed to do them by our society. Of course, anyone can get unlucky and fall to a rock bottom without having the energy to get up, but that doesn't automatically mean that most people aren't responsible for this happening to them. For example, the difference between a wasted life and a successful life may disappear the second one changes their semantics within their own belief system. However, there isn't any general solution that applies for everyone, so all we can do is to analyze the most obvious patterns, and to at least try to prevent those :) It's honestly scary how easily people can get stuck in a pattern just like this game visualizes, falling prey to entropy by chasing impossible expectations, deprecating their self-worth along the way :) Nevertheless, there are also actual physical issues of depression and anxiety, which aren't as simple as "being down" from having "wasted your life" (and if you apply a bit of critical thinking, you'll find out that the current medical system is flawed and broken, as they only research pills that cover the symptoms instead of healing a root of the issue, which can be even as simple as nutrition, including a belief that we need carbs to survive, which is further propagated by illogical expectations that people are capable of objectively researching conflicting nutritional studies). There are even some "substances" one can use to explore these unconscious states of mind, though they carry a risk of opening a mental wound you didn't know you had, and can also very well destroy your life if you underestimate them and then give up. I think this game is doing a disservice to such people by using these two conditions of depression and anxiety interchangeably, as if this was their real meaning, because there's a really huge lack of awareness in this regard within our society. On the other hand, the analogy of good times providing better opportunity of further good times, and vice versa, can often definitely feel just like you described it (and I believe our society should strive to explicitly address this, as it's insane how little can sometimes be enough to save a person's life, yet such people completely disappear from the frequency of successful people due to a default human nature) :) Either way, good job making a nice representation of how many people feel during their lives, I'm just suggesting for next time to also add a little bit of advice along the lines of "it's not that simple" ;)

Keep Hope Alive by joe40001 2020-05-12T22:05:48Z

@joe40001 Yeah, it's definitely a viable perspective that reframing itself can work as moving "up or to the right", it's just that the triggers may completely change their nature, e.g. one can go from looking for external success to looking for new values of internal success; or maybe to strive to detach from any such values at all. Still, looking at it as having a good summary of "3/4 of your life" may deceive you, because you may realize at any moment that what you've considered "good" is suddenly worthless, and so your summary flips from one minute to the other; and that means the opposite can be also true ;) Either way, it's our purpose to define our own purpose, so everyone has to decide for themselves; and our spiritual growth probably requires some suffering.

I don't want to hold a long discussion that's off-topic, but there's one thing I have to seriously disagree with: depression and anxiety most definitely can be chemical things (which I think can even cause each other.) That doesn't mean they have to be always "treated with chemicals", but it does mean that solving the underlying issue isn't always enough to flip the switch in your brain. Once your brain enters the circuit of anxiety, being unable to turn it off is quite a physical issue. Same is true for depression, as that neutral feeling of being capable of "waiting" through time can be also lost, and it's up to your brain to slowly decide that it accepts you as not being depressed. Basically, you can enter these states by a simple belief, but you may not find a path back. As a simple example, if you were threatened to do something dangerous, you wouldn't be able to stop your racing mind and you'd probably instantly develop insomnia along with physical anxiety symptoms and several health disorders, which would worsen every day; such results are documented. And literally, don't underestimate that if you start being worried about having to heal it, the worry itself can perpetuate it, making it impossible to solve. It's incomparable to just being anxious of future in general. Luckily, our brain usually always eventually returns back to the neutral feeling, but it can literally take months. (You can even find opposite examples, e.g. people who come to a realization that convinces them that they'll be better people from now on, yet very soon they fall back to their lazy routines. So maybe our brain is also just too lazy to stay depressed.) Some people aren't that lucky, and just like any other chronic illness, they will just decide to get on pills and cope with the side effects for the rest of their lives. It's interesting that the drugs from your doctor can even "cause" the paradoxical depression or anxiety, e.g. when you abruptly stop them, which is very dangerous; try to tell those people that it's not chemical ;) As I was saying, it's cruel that some people may develop these chronic issues even from simple things like bad nutrition, never realize it, have their lives destroyed for no good reason, and get on pills because they have no other choice anymore. This is one of the reasons why I believe that it's very dangerous to assume that your definition of depression or anxiety is the "real one". We literally have several issues named using the same label, most likely more than I know of, and people don't even realize it. Plus there are both substances, and also techniques like meditation, which are both very beneficial in some circumstances, yet if you mistake the meanings of those words, it can be life-threatening. Sorry for the long post, I hope some of it will be useful to anyone; I think we software developers are especially capable of using our research skills when it comes to our health, and we will be the ones to develop technologies to address these issues of "lack of information". My idea is simple: try to separate those definitions, that's all :)

Sim Cell by Archimagus 2020-05-11T15:32:31Z

Just as others have mentioned, I also wasn't capable of understanding the mechanics to be able to provide any relevant feedback, but considering how detailed it is, this has a huge potential of becoming an educational tool for people interested in biology if you focus your post-jam efforts this way. If you integrate the knowledge describing various other specific cells like bacteria, maybe it could help people visualize the consequences of some of their structural details, e.g. if the cells could also interact with specific environment. But ignoring the WebGL iframe issue, directing casual players to "Wikipedia: Actin-binding protein" seems like an overkill... :D Anyway, there was recently a huge project at legendsoflearning.com which financed various small Unity games by thousands € each, having them cover simple educational curricula, and this game seems to resemble some of their better quality stuff, all that's missing is a tutorial along with some quiz :)

Aviarium by AidanMarkham 2020-05-12T18:51:13Z

Excellent graphics with pretty good flying mechanics, though the ground rotation speed could be a bit faster, and considering there are so many trees, you could have made searching for the 7th stick a bit easier ;) Also the requirement of 5 crabs makes it feel too repetitive, 3 would seem like a better choice (as the comment above me mentioned, it would also make more sense :P)

The Angel Recording the Truth by Kevin Prehn 2020-05-12T11:13:53Z

On a negative note to give you some feedback, the UI is quite cumbersome to use, for example the OK button is too small and always moves its location, and even though I appreciate the Enter key being supported, having to click between predicates and to press a confirm button manually doesn't make for a good user experience. On top of that, the lack of looping of the background music is a bit annoying though, and it feels just a little bit too repetitive. But on a positive note, this is a great educational tool, which reminds me of a recent project legendsoflearning.com which funded similar games that follow certain educational curricula by paying few thousand dollars for each game, and this game would definitely meet their quality standard from what I've seen, so maybe you could find a way to make a post-jam effort in a similar way to improve our education :)

Tomb Flamer by AfroAnt 2020-05-12T12:13:34Z

Nice dungeon style game, though I felt like the map is larger than it had to be, luckily I soon found that the correct path towards the boss is just "straight up", but of course, I haven't figured out the mechanics to beat the boss myself, as it kept resetting back to the spawn whenever I went too far (even if that meant going to the tunnel behind him). I think it would be more satisfying if there were ways to re-fill the health other than going far away in the map to find new one-time consumables, which also prevents the user from using right-click to jump freely, as the comfort costs him life. Also, I found that some barrels could be opened by jumping over them, while others had to be jumped from the correct distance to land just over them. Good job nevertheless.

Friday at Barney's by AnaGF 2020-05-12T10:47:10Z

Nice non-traditional graphical style. Personally I dislike the inability to return and read old messages in games like this, along with the need to click at least twice for every message, though that's a standard nowadays. I'll point out one little bug: when you click on Phone in your inventory, the object behind it (door) also gets activated.

Surge by loginaut 2020-05-11T13:51:38Z

Nice visually good looking game, but your multiplayer instructions are very lacking, as you are letting users figure everything out by themselves. I'll assume that you intend this to be purely P2P without any server of your own, so users unable to forward port 7777 and share their IP with someone they already know have no way of experiencing the multiplayer. I didn't understand why the game starts after first pressing Play, yet when the match ends and I click Play again from the menu, suddenly I'm waiting. Running a second game instance didn't let me connect from the first one either no matter what I did, it only says "waiting to begin...", so the instructions could be more explicit even about how to join a local server.

You have chosen a very unusual aiming system, as most people are used to having crosshair stay at the middle of the camera :) When spectating after dying (at least it seems that's what happened, even though it doesn't say "life terminated" immediately), controllers seem to be stuck based on previous rotation, e.g. left/right is swapped, and it doesn't say when (if) will I re-spawn. One other issue is that the mouse gets stuck inside the window even in menu after the game ends. Mouse scroll is also too slow in-game. If you plan to continue developing this game post-jam, fixing these small issues will have a huge impact :) One small tip for your Git repository, try not to add the files listed inside before creating the .gitignore file, as you have plenty of temporary files inside /Library that can cause you conflicts on top of wasting space (Mirror even has one useless 30MB benchmark scene inside its Examples directory). We've also begun to learn Mirror as a part of our LD Jam 46 game, so feel free to check out our server-sided approach that doesn't rely on P2P if you're interested in some specifics :) There are currently plenty of non-intuitive issues regarding Mirror documentation, while some of them could could be addressed very easily if any experienced users contributed to improve it.

Pas by Lukuluk 2020-05-11T15:02:59Z

As a first impression I must say this effect is really cool, and it'd be definitely worth occasionally using even in other games. I also had a huge issue with <1 FPS, as I currently have monitor attached to iGPU instead of AMD, and the game refuses to utilize the external GPU this way; if you could optimize the performance to be at least 3 times faster, e.g. by reducing the number of dots for users that have low FPS, it'd at least become relatively playable. If you can parametrize it, the game could track FPS to update this dynamically as required. The motion blur also extremely hurts this, and I'd prefer the option to completely disable it in these low FPS scenarios, so the movement takes only 1 frame instead of several of them (and I think it hurts most games generally anyway). As a further feedback, there's a strange cursor when loading the game, and the music doesn't seem to be seamlessly looping. By the way, if you're using URP in Unity, try to disable post-processing in the camera object to make sure this wouldn't double the FPS, as URP has some very strange issues :)

Lively by CJGladback 2020-05-12T10:47:01Z

Too bad you didn't continue on this post-jam, or at least mention the individual features you've worked on, along with those that you originally intended to implement, but didn't have time to do so, as the description doesn't really make it clear to us :)

"IT" dies by PineappleGladiator 2020-05-11T15:17:43Z

Nice straight-forward mechanics once I got used to the meaning of those icons (take from a shelf, put into a cauldron) in spite of a very brief tutorial. I liked how detailed was the graphical design of all characters. The name uses capital "IT", which feels as if it meant I.T., so I'd probably name the game with "it" instead :) Also the game gets quite repetitive with the "tower defense" without any time counter, or any event to look forward to, so I'd advise you to improve this you continue the development post-jam, so that you won't lose players mid-game, thinking there's not much more to it :)

Keep your heart alive by Wizart 2020-05-12T13:21:33Z

A nice simple memorization game, I'd advise you to at least add a way to skip the memorization phase, and speed-up the random reordering once the player decides they are ready. You could also tidy up the text a little bit :)

Negative Zone by Phoenix Fireflower 2020-05-10T22:53:36Z

Great job with the aesthetics, your non-intrusive pleasantly paced tutorial messages together with self-evident goals should be definitely a part of most new games. Hopefully you're still improving the movement logic, because I was able to get stuck, having to jump to unstuck the character several times. I'd also suggest that when the user holds a jump key while falling down (as long as it's pressed the second time), the character should jump again as soon as it touches the ground. I also subjectively feel like the movement is a just too slow, so the game hasn't fulfilled its potential of being too comfortable, which is most visible when you accidentally make a mistake and have to re-do all of your actions, which isn't really satisfying, so you could try to lessen the impact of this if you plan to continue working on this game ;)

Grandma's Boi by CsOmega 2020-05-11T14:40:43Z

Nice low-poly graphics and music, along with the realistic idea of carrying a grandma. The interactive tutorial idea would be great, but the delay between switching text in the left-bottom corner seems too arbitrary, as one may not even notice that he missed a message. Also, during the tutorial my game turned into extremely low FPS, and it felt like I've just become slow due to exhaustion, but I couldn't fix it. Also, the way you have to attack by spamming mouse button wasn't too intuitive from the attack animation, is there even a reason why one can't simply hold the key considering the large attack cooldown? Other than that, if you work on the game post-jam, your main priorities should be the leg movement animation depending on a direction, better visual interaction between kids and the grandma once they all start stacking together, and the player clipping behind stairs, along with camera jumping when running towards the home, or when at max/min zoom level, plus considering that it's possible to zoom the camera in, you could use raycast to zoom in the camera temporarily once the player is behind a tree :) (Plus try to press Esc when on the Lose screen.) Also, I must say that the Normal mode pretty much feels like an infinite mode, so you could at least add a few additional short-term goals for the player to always strive towards :)

The Business by KovacsMarton 2020-05-12T11:40:48Z

Well, as a suggestion you should really fix that severe text contrast issue on the first screen asap, as we can barely read the instructions, this would be definitely within the acceptable limits of a fix made few hours or days after the jam; also it doesn't really explain that we should leave the first computer, and go buy a new one in the other room instead, plus the instructions of using "space key" should be really introduced on the second screen, so we don't forget it :) Also, it's not nice to force players to use ALT+F4, as we can't get back to the menu :P Otherwise it's a nice first attempt overall at a semi-idle game casual game, so if you add some interesting storyline (and work on the graphics), it could be easily turned into a nice mobile game :)

Carpe Diem by Jojo The Clown 2020-05-12T19:19:44Z

Well, the music is... interesting :P When it comes to plants seizing the day, I would most likely expect them to chase (or slide) towards the sun, but I wouldn't have thought of a decision to collect stopwatches to help me travel through time, I guess I still got plenty to learn from a Time Lord. You really should have added the basic game loop along with fixing the text font quality though, even if it were post-jam.

Don't Let It Die by dkviplounge 2020-05-12T10:50:40Z

Funny concept along with the voice-over, though the mechanics is sadly just as repetitive as the voice lines. If you plan to work on this post-jam, it'd be definitely worth it if you could add some variance to it using some state machine, so that "it" seems a bit more lively and moody based on some game events :) And yeah, I really dislike the forced motion blur without an option to disable it, which also makes it unplayable on low FPS.

Keep it up, Aline. by Aoni 2020-05-11T16:45:52Z

Nice story and game mechanics, and even though the process of loading doesn't seem to seamless, that's probably just a blender limitation. The goal of the game seems too vague though, as there are too many paths to take and not enough positive feedback for the player, so casual games probably wouldn't rate it high before some you make some post-jam improvements. The choice of having to hold an E key together with W and D wasn't too clever, as most cheap keyboards have a technical limitation that don't let you hold these keys together (rollover) - maybe you could make the E key a toggle :) And considering that nothing interesting seems to be happening most of the time, maybe you could at least add some funny dialogue between the characters while they're walking together. After all, even though it kind of makes sense to occasionally suddenly bite someone's neck and drink some blood, usually one would at least warn, or otherwise mentally prepare the other side every single time they should expect to feel the pain, even more so if they are carefully walking around traps, holding a heavy baggage on their shoulders ;)

Walter and Water by Daniel Ewusi-Essel 2020-05-12T13:14:27Z

Well, at least I had fun falling down off the platform several times; also, once the enemies stacked on top of my player and each other, they managed to shoot me towards the sky :D

Kill the Dead by Nerd Sanctuary 2020-05-12T14:26:17Z

Nice and stable top-down shooter, too bad there wasn't enough time to add more goals to make it feel less generic. I'd point out though that the health bar colors don't make too much sense (gaining green means losing health), and I'd also prefer to see some visual or sound feedback to warn me about the impending death from infection, because it's easy to forget about it due to the game's slow paced nature. Out of curiosity, considering that you seem to prefer Godot over Unity, which surely currently likes to keep many new features under development without stable alternatives, yet they also keep rapidly improving and are far from being an inferior choice for larger games; could you gives us some specifics of what you personally find more convincing about Godot in the long-term (except that they are completely free and maybe arguably simpler to use for some)?

The Cult of the Broken Clock by ectucker1 2020-10-06T21:21:13Z

An excellent aesthetic first impression with the clock hand making the game feel really natural. When it comes to game mechanics, firstly I'd expect that the timer is going to be somehow related to the game events (maybe like having quests to open a certain crate) or the clock itself, and secondly it could use some progress tracking to motivate player to do something specific, because right now they just strive to stay on the positive half of the clock for the sake of staying there (and never find a reason to go into the dark side unless overwhelmed by enemies). Good job and good luck with your further progress :)

Roller Riches by dxk2294 2020-10-09T09:08:48Z

Really great and properly designed incremental game, you should probably really try to go into a mobile game market with this idea :) The ending was a bit too anti-climatic, and there are some issues with WebGL version being too large to fit in one screen (without full-screen option), which even makes itch.io block the Research button, making it misclick-prone. Other than that not seeing the cost of building or the camera hint, the effects of the buildings (and their ordering interaction) feel maybe too ambiguous, but the game is fast paced enough so that one reaches the New Roller-Coaster Order soon enough :)

Beyond Death by Trypants 2020-10-09T08:33:47Z

Funny concept, one could make another video song of "Dumb Ways To Die" with the scenes from this game ;) But come on, is getting yourself impaled so that you can walk over your own corpse really the most efficient way to solve a puzzle? :) Btw. the intro was very well done, but I think there's an opportunity for more voice-overs during the gameplay if you plan to continue the development, for example after every death, when entering a new puzzle zone, or when idle for too long.

Stuck in an inner tube! by UkuleleFury 2020-10-09T08:20:04Z

Considering how fast one needs to react to jump after falling down before sliding away, my major feedback is that you could implement the jump key to register even while mid-air and activate instantly after touching the grind (as you probably intentionally chose not to enable auto-jump by holding the W key), so that players don't get frustrated when they feel that they've jumped at the correct time, yet they fell down and have to restart even (even if they still have some time while sliding, but don't neurotically spam the W key). Also sharing @jarvisp99's sentiment, this feels way too slippery ;)

Infinite Loop by bordonne 2020-10-06T20:17:59Z

Indeed a good example of what one stuck in a while loop would have to endure if they wanted to break out. However, I'll note that it's not very intuitive how one has to put all characters together, because C-family languages don't really care about spaces before symbols like ";", so I'd recommend either explicitly mentioning this, or just parsing the white-spaces out when checking for a solution :) If you were looking for further ideas, a perfect game update would be adding some compiler warnings, but it's true that your approach makes it feel more mysterious.

Loopedy Island by Douwe_Ravers 2020-10-06T20:51:33Z

Along with the feature of flying cars, I'd say that the car controls feel a little bit too unforgiving, making it a challenge to roam at a high speed without being constantly stuck in the walls. In any case, I wish you to find proper solutions for the Godot issues; btw. out of curiosity, was there a specific reason why did you go with Godot for example instead of Unity, and do you have any tips for others how to avoid the issues you've faced based on your experience? :)

Duck In A Loop by Matt Lewis 2020-10-06T20:31:41Z

As mentioned above, one often starts to unexpectedly fly, even though it should technically take 50-60 days for a duckling to learn to fly, and maybe even more for a rubber one. But with a game named as good as this, there's a lot of potential, so you should really keep up the good work and design some additional game loop mechanics to let players fully experience all of those duck skins :)

TowerStuck by Edeneden 2020-10-06T18:56:38Z

Thanks everyone for your feedback! We've updated the HTML5 version with some last minute improvements, addressing issues of @keithdae's wave 21 (sadly, this wasn't the loop where we intended for you to get stuck in), @trypants's sound settings, and @dyguests/@iron-leonem/@dxk2294/@ukulelefury/@quoclon's tower looping control issues, or the lack of hint about being able to press the enter key. Nevertheless, we hope you all had fun! :)

Easy Mode by BarelyEvenGames 2020-10-08T17:53:26Z

Also stuck in a ~~loop~~ wall :(

Peace Council by guoboism 2022-04-17T13:50:05Z

Great and pretty complex strategy game, though with success being more RNG than skill-based, just like real life. It was really fun. I managed to get the game to crash after a long session, but that may be just a WebGL-specific issue: `ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index` < https://pastebin.com/RLKzBPbR >

It seems the optimal strategy for a random game is to hurry up and destroy any adjacent cells as soon as possible, so that the countries can never wage war on each other. I wonder how they perform their global economical business and avoid starvation later on though :thinking:

As part of feedback, I'd really suggest to introduce any random end-game mechanic where we can spend large sums of money & influence, because right now there is a certain point (e.g. 200M+, 200+) beyond which these currencies have no use, and it is almost impossible to lose. And of course, it gets annoying when you have to read all the events after each turn, just to make sure you don't miss anything of importance, but I guess this would work as expected if you continued the development and many new events eventually got added, making it unreasonable for us to automate hiding "only some of them" :) Well, at least the "Locate" zoom-in could be replaced by a brief overview that doesn't do any zoom (which is especially annoying to constantly un-zoom when we use a touchpad).

A few more points: some cards are very non-intuitive, as players aren't certain if the effect is just temporary or permanent, maybe some symbol could be used to mark permanent effects. The "advisor vs. population" icons also look very similar, they could at least use a different color. (I also didn't see a number of remaining advisors for the current turn anywhere, this could be a resolution compatibility issue, here is a screenshot.) peace_header.png

\+ I'm quite curious about the difficulty of development of a card-based strategy with so many options, do you have any tips for other developers from implementation standpoint, at least when it comes to high-level design? :) Were there some kind of bugs you've underestimated, and was it straightforward to cover everything on UI? (I'm hoping today's Unity development is becoming more standardized in regards to following some patterns, rather than having the expectation of making basic structure of strategy games ad-hoc without proper planning, which was sadly my experience last time.) Last but not least: are you open-sourcing the project in a future? :)

Peace Council by guoboism 2022-04-18T17:50:26Z

@guoboism Thanks for your reaction, I'm wishing you luck in designing an interesting end-game mechanic and thriving in the fierce market competition between strategy games, so that you won't be attacked when vulnerable against games exceeding double your power ;)

Yeah it makes sense to keep the source closed if you have a vision like this, though just a side note to consider in a far future: I could still imagine maintaining some generic strategy framework as a separate open source project, while keeping only the game (with all the current assets and fine-tuned game logic) behind the closed doors. In a long term, once project's complexity grows, the benefits of being able to collaborate with other strategy developers and offload some work to voluntary maintainers may quickly outweigh the risks of concepts being stolen by parties who don't intend to add anything new anyway. Especially in an open ecosystem like Unity, integration of some mechanics between different types of games (or even inserting one game into another) can get interesting and complex very fast (e.g. you may introduce multiplayer yet still prefer to keep it easily extendable), and there has always been a lack of high quality libraries, especially on Asset Store (with their weird incentive structure of paywall and nonsense licensing that only benefits solo devs, which also harms their collaboration). Keeping any reusable common functionality fully open-source on GitHub and installing it via Unity Package Manager feels like a better option tbh :) But it's often a challenge to find even one library that fits your needs (and isn't neglected).

Regarding the implementation, you've mentioned some good examples: I'm sure some jam visitors would be interested in seeing the Excel data and some of its first iterations right in the project description, along with the process of how or why these choices were made. We all improvise when we have our creative moments, and yet when we're asked to replicate someone else's creative effort, we often can't decide for the life of us even on the starting point :sweat_smile: and what's worse, if something doesn't get standardized, it even gets easy to eventually forget our own solutions. The matter of OOP design patterns also gains on importance at some point, especially for a solo dev who doesn't receive any feedback on simplifying code architecture, often not even after project has been finished. Sustaining a simple yet robust economical model won't get easier later on either. There is also a difference between making Grid/Tiles from scratch vs. using Tilemap, and either you try a first thing that comes to mind, or you build up something that's more time-tested (at least you didn't need A* pathfinding yet :P). Last but not least, as you've noticed with the UI, making it responsive to support various resolutions is something Unity has always neglected helping us with (at least few years ago I've often spent majority of time just tweaking it and wishing to find some HUD library to make it more reasonable to finish a game prototype in 3 days without bugs). In any case, maybe I'm just reading into this too much; it's just that I feel like there is a lot of potential to build upon the concept you've just started, and I'm already worried about how it'll scale :) Have fun with your continued improvements!