shru

Good Morning! It's Animal's Arena by shru 2016-04-20T14:03:00

I'm sorry to hear that you couldn't play my game due to your keyboard layout, but unfortunately the game framework I used does not make it especially easy to provide different keyboard bindings. [Or at least not effortless enough to make it something which would be a good option during a 72 hour contest.]

I think the best option for you or anyone else with a non standard keyboard layout is to temporarily switch it from inside your operating system. Sorry that I don't have a better answer.

Paisley Princess by 01010111 2017-05-02T04:50:38Z

Rad game, I love this. The gameplay, graphic aesthetic, and gameplay all worked marvelously together. I think you've really succeeding in distilling the essence of a genre into a minimalist package. The only flaw for me was that I found it a bit of a grind to gear up to the level 3 sword and shield, but once I got those completing the rest of the game was a blast!

-Cheer's, Simon

Snowed In by nuclearfriend 2017-05-02T04:05:35Z

You folks have made a really polished and high quality game. I thought that the writing was very funny and the voice acting was absolutely professional.

NekomimiAtsume by parkdraws 2017-05-02T04:12:56Z

Cute game! Or interactive artwork! Or whatever you would like to call it! I'd love to see this extended into something bigger! There is no "Cuteness" category for ratings, so I will substitute the "Innovation" category instead and give you 5 stars there.

Water Bear World by Aviland 2017-05-02T03:41:00Z

Nice game! I thought it was a great and original take on the theme and enjoyed the visuals and the atmosphere. I found the controls rather difficult (which from what I can tell is intentional to an extent), I think it might have been easier for me to internalize if left and right were to rotate, and up / down moved your forwards and backwards. (｀・ω・´)

Puchi Pooches by shru 2017-05-02T07:47:40Z

@fingamer, I'm aware of that bug where a bomb placed before death will explode after you respawn. It's fixed in a ~private~ build, but I didn't put it into the Ludum Dare release because deadlines etc.

Tiny Battle World by NickW 2017-05-02T04:26:38Z

Nice little game! It's a simple mechanic but I think there's a surprising degree of strategy to it, as you try to sneak off to the edge to get the boot without getting punted off yourself. It's very impressive to me that you chose to make a multiplayer game for Ludum Dare. Although, unfortunately I didn't get to play with more than one opponent at a time.

PEW PEW PRINCESS by Karai17 2017-08-06T03:05:51Z

Fun danmaku shooting game! I beat it on my second try! On my first try I blew through my shields while trying to discern the controls and then one of Blossom's attack patterns caught me off-guard.

I enjoyed the music a lot, but I generally agree with everyone else that sound would have enhanced it a lot. I think the character models were 3d, but it was a little hard to appreciate them based on how tiny they were rendered?

I have one gameplay critique: I found the movement speed too slow, please add Marisa to the game! It was fine for dodging fine projectiles, but it definitely felt sluggish when just trying to move across the screen. On my first attempt the first thing I did was mash shift to try to dash around the screen faster, but I quickly realized that you can only do that so much, oops!

Overall I had a lot of fun soaring through the sky in my Civilian T-pose as Erin! I'd love to see this extended into something longer! I'll shamelessly suggest that you check out my own LD39 game, you're not the only ones who made a bullet hell game in Love2d!

They are Watching you. by Maldo19 2017-08-13T04:49:04Z

Nice game! I had fun with this one and thought the movement mechanic was both fun and original. I also thought the visuals were attractive. I have a couple critiques though:

I think for this control method, fullscreen and locking the cursor to the window are both probably essential. You did include fullscreen, but I missed out on it on my first attempt because I skimmed past the key bindings and didn't realize it was so crucial. I want to say that you should have just have started the game in full screen because it's simply not playable without it, the player will click outside the window and focus something else by mistake, it's inevitable. Locking the cursor would have been an improvement too, because users like me who have multiple monitors will still have issues will still have issues defocusing the game if a secondary monitor is clicked. I'm not sure if Game Maker supports that though... hop to it, Mark Overmars!

My second comment is that I thought that the movement was too sensitive and was frustrating when trying to finely control your character. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that even the shortest click will send your character pretty much to terminal velocity in a given direction? I think it would have felt a lot better if there was more of an acceleration feeling to it. I also thought it was a little odd (although somewhat convenient at times) that your horizontal speed would quickly dampen if you weren't applying force, as if the air had some intense resistance.

I'd like to try a version of this game with tweaked controls, cheers!

Dream Disc by mindfungus 2017-08-05T02:38:33Z

Great game! The mechanic was simple but I thought was a lot of fun and good easy-to-learn difficult-to-master element to it. The physics felt good and whenever I missed a shot it always felt like it was my fault and not the games.

I thought the visuals were pleasant and were fitting for the game. The only issue I had with them is that it sometimes not clear which colour was the goal bumper, and which colour was the stopper bumper.

Running Out Of Tiles by BORB 2017-08-06T01:48:36Z

Cool concept, I found both of the endings! :)

Like others, I had issues with the controls. I was playing on gamepad and found it pretty awkward hold down B while using A to jump. I think there are a few options here, mapping B to a trigger instead would work quite well, I think.

The platforming feel could also be improved, I think making the jump floatier and giving the walk a weightier feel with a more gradual momentum would make it feel quite a bit better.

Anyways, it's a nice effort, I'd like to see this polished and extended with the mechanic used in some new ways.

p o w e r ARM by xand 2017-08-08T02:25:15Z

First of all, I was very impressed by how many features this game had for a compo entry. The music and sounds were very pleasant and unquestionably stand out amongst other Ludum Dare games I've played. The cartridge system was intriguing, but ultimately I didn't end up playing long enough to see the full extent of it's utilization -- more on that in a bit.

Some critiques:

Like basically everyone else said, the controls felt optimized for three hands, and my third was in the wash. I think space or left click to advance text would have made this a lot more enjoyable to play.

I died at the 4th enemy, the first one wearing the black shirt. I did notice that he was wearing different clothing from the first 3, but I was not expecting such a large spike in difficulty without warning and ultimately didn't bother to switch to a fresh battery charge. After losing here, I didn't really feel like spending another 3-4 minutes playing through the intro and getting to the same point again. I think you would have done well to better telegraph that the player should prepare for that fight, or prioritized a feature for the player to continue their game in some manner after dying.

Ministry of Synthesis by impbox 2017-08-06T01:27:21Z

Superb game! The mechanic is super unique and it left me feeling like I had learned something.

A lot of people have pointed out a lot of the critiques I had in mind, so I'll just mention a couple that I didn't spot while skimming through:

When working with some of the doors with higher frequency solutions, when I had a similar but different waveform it was often difficult to see how my own waveform differed. I think in these circumstances the low resolution worked against the gameplay. You might want to consider making the waveform window higher resolution than the platformer elements.

On one level I believe I came up with a solution which was identical to the expected waveform, but just out of phase. It's difficult to spot that your waveform has the incorrect phase until at the very end, since there's no real reference for where the wave sits on the timeline. You might want to consider allowing solutions regardless of phase, so long as the waveform is correct? (hopefully phase is the correct terminology here, I mean the offset of the waveform in time.)

Anyways, again, fantastic game! I really hope to see a spruced up post-jam version of this! I'll be recommending this to some non-gamedev friends because I thought it was so cool!

Cyborg Wizard Battle 2717 by SimonRhys 2017-08-13T04:28:57Z

I frankly didn't understand the game at all. I alloted my points, selected a character, then walked into the center. Once there I could continue to walk around and shoot, but nothing else seemed to happen.

燃える // burn by junkdeck 2017-08-06T03:34:39Z

Fun little game, I enjoyed this quite a lot. The controls were responsive and tight and shooting enemies felt good! The music had a nice perk to it and really enhanced the game for me. I loved how everything would slow down as your fuel became low, it was slight as hell, but also communicated the imminent need for fuel. Tight logo too, by the way!

A few critiques and suggestions:

I'm not a fan of screenshake being used so excessively in a game like this. I think it makes the game a lot more difficult to read when the action gets dicey. In my opinion gameplay should come before "juice".

Without seeing the code, I can't say for sure, but are the drops completely randomized? Generally I was finding that I had plenty of fuel and didn't need to worry about over-firing too much, but then occasionally I would find that I'd hit a dry spell where the game wasn't dropping anything for me. You might want to play around with a dynamic drop-rate where as your fuel gets lower, enemies have a higher chance of dropping it. (And, correspondingly, if you had high fuel, the game would not shower you in more fuel either)

I think a high score display would have improved the replayability a lot ー even if you just implemented it as a run-time variable that would be blown away after the game was closed. Without knowing whether I've bested my previous score, or came close, your game missed out on a "one more game" drive, I feel.

Again, very solid game. I'd love to give a tuned post-jam rendition of this another spin!

Battery Life by justinooncx 2017-08-31T23:26:34Z

How did nobody point out that the chara is Vivian James until now?

Hydrocrypt by shru 2017-08-06T03:41:34Z

@hndmrsh Thanks for the feedback! The playstyle I was trying to incentivize and encourage was one where you race through the dungeon as quickly as possible, probably collecting the treasures, but generally just trying to dodge bullets and kill enemies only when it's convenient as you're rushing through. It sounds like for the most part that's what people ended up doing, but I guess not everyone thought that this was the most fun way to play, even if it was optimal.

I like your idea of boss rooms requiring a key! If I make a post-jam version, I'll certainly add something along these lines.

Hydrocrypt by shru 2017-08-06T18:36:58Z

@bragou Thanks! The music and sounds were made by me, this video game was a one shru effort.

Hydrocrypt by shru 2017-08-15T04:25:44Z

@taras @klowner @sebastian-m I've fixed the crash you folks were seeing, along with the issue where the game appears in the corner of the screen. (These issues are both related, btw.) I really appreciate you guys taking the time to report it. I've uploaded a newer build to the itch.io page: https://shru.itch.io/hydrocrypt

@maldo19 Thanks for all of the feedback. I'm not 100% satisfied with the way all of the elements play into the darkness mechanic either. Just so you know though, the health upgrade works exactly as you described. If you pick it up with full HP, then your maximum HP will be increased by 1.

@sebastian-m It seems like rushing to the end of the floors is a common thing people felt compelled to do. Not showing the exit certainly would be one way to deal with that, although I think I'd need to polish the map first to make it more obvious where you've been.

@drachmor Thanks for the doting review, it means a lot to me! <3 The bosses definitely give you some time to maneuver between their waves of attack, bosses 1-5 I all can beat without taking any hits. I think with some more practice you should be able to move well enough to not get caught in a corner. :) (Boss 6 is total bullshit though, but that's what you get when your game just indefinitely scales for infinite levels... ^^;;)

Power Run by hovinarri 2017-08-13T04:54:18Z

hello hovinarri, did you make a game for ludum dare? i'd like to play it

Salvage! by frankiesmileshow 2017-08-13T05:07:41Z

Awesome game! I was really impressed by the level of polish and the amount of content here!

Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm still eagerly awaiting Barkley 2! Hope that project is going well.

Aesthetics Raider by undi 2017-08-12T05:33:49Z

i feel like i am the only person who can properly type ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ.

Harvest And Extract by Kthulhu1947 2017-08-06T02:41:54Z

Teleporting at the very bottom of my 1440p monitor was a big mistake! (the window size (possibly the world too?) seems to scale with your resolution?)

I hate to say it, but I think for me this game was lacking in some sort of element to make playing through it interesting. Running out of fuel never really seemed like a risk, so completing each map was just a matter of going through the motions of methodically exploring it without much strategy or necessity to particularly pay attention.

Judging from your list of "things I’d love to do", it seems like you've already thought of some ideas of how you could make it engaging. I think if some of those were implemented, then I would have found this game more enjoyable.

Dont Die, Greg by LJFMX 2017-08-12T02:35:38Z

Nice kitschy game, I thought it was funny, especially the voices!

BatteryMan by Rami 2017-08-05T01:32:13Z

Fun game!

I liked the battery mechanic best on the levels where you either had to race through a fairly obvious path, or on the later levels where you were generous with the green charging pads to give the player a chance to stop and think partially through. I thought it was iffier in the pure puzzle levels without "safezones", generally I found the effect it had on me is that was too pressured to really feel comfortable observing what the levers did and such. Maybe frantic puzzle solving was the sort of feeling you were going for, but I didn't find the time limit synergized well for my tastes during these levels.

I thought the controls could have been vastly improved with some quick tweaks. In particular I found it possible to finely adjust my position, it seems like even the finest tap of the arrow keys moves your character an entire block.

Nice game, and it's a great effort for your first LD. Hope to see what you make next jam!

The Light City of Karola by davidcollado 2017-08-13T04:24:07Z

Fun game, although it seems that it only lasted for 3 levels before abruptly closing on my machine, not 6 like it said on the itch.io page

Spacesquid Spaceship by Nezumi Games 2017-08-05T02:02:03Z

First of all, the spritework in this game was beautiful.

I had some issues understanding the mechanics of the game initially. In particular I don't think there's any part of the tutorial that explains that you need to charge the power core by clicking it, and that the guns can only be charged after the power core is at 100%. I think it would have made sense to explain both of these things before opening up access to the other rooms.

I found the minigame where you have to play with the control panel in order to bring your power back up was fun and tactile. The difficulty ramped up a little too quickly for my clicking-ability, 5 rooms up was my maximum. Perhaps it was semi-intentional for the aliens to become unmaintainable around that time, and the last stretch of the game is just supposed to be a mad dash to power the last few cores. I'm not sure.

I didn't realize until after playing that I could use the keyboard instead of my mouse to bring my power up. I think I would have enjoyed that more, less RSI that way. :) Perhaps that should have either been explained in the tutorial, or made apparent by the design of the control panel? (You could have labelled the buttons 1, 2, 3, the axis could have had WASD, etc.)

Nice game, clickers aren't usually my thing but I thought this one had enough going on to be enjoyable for me!

Stoneface by digaly 2017-08-12T02:42:57Z

Nice game, it genuinely made me jump a few times. I thought the graphics were well done, simple but polished and enough to totally immerse me.

I found that Stone Face mostly killed me when I had no way of really knowing that he was coming. I think it would have improved the game for me if you could hear his whine from further away.