Greenfinger! by TomasPraestholm 2023-01-13T08:13:03Z
I'm so bad at this but damn do I love all of the vibes this has
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → SnekOfSpice
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Space, Yarr! | jam | 463 | 3.67 | 3.71 | 3.54 | 3.19 | 3.11 | 3.98 | 3.66 | 3.35 |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | Lavender Fields Forever | jam | 4 | 4.49 | 4.32 | 3.92 | 4.43 | 4.42 | 4.40 | 4.08 | 4.20 |
I'm so bad at this but damn do I love all of the vibes this has
This was honestly amazing. The voice acting was so fun and the physicality of all the game mechanics was really neat! The only minor thing I would've liked is some sort of tracker for when a recipe calls for duplicate ingredients, I spent a few seconds sometimes wondering why the order didn't go through when I just put down 1/4 seeds down.
But aside from that, this has an insane amount of polish for a 72 hour game jam game!
ayo I follow your work on bandcamp lmao, cool to see you're also doing gamedev!
So yea, the visuals were nice, but overall there's just a lot of nothing here. Which is fine, especially with the atmosphere of hitchhiking, but even just any sort of map or knowing where people need to go would be cool, because right now the game doesn't have any goals, and people can never arrive where they need to go
small interactables can go a long way to make boring stretches more engaging / give players something to fidget with, and some form of interaction with the passengers would be nice too. Just to understand anything about the world and/or them
also, the day/night transition was really sudden.
I wish there was an in-game tutorial to ease the player into the game loop, but outside of that, this felt really clean! It got so hectic at the end, but throughout the mechanics were really clean!
I do like the addition of 2-dimensional info with color/dot count for the different types of cargo, but with how uniform the squares were, it took me a few rounds to figure out that it was 1:1 correlated, and not that I had to watch out for matching color AND number. Less ambiguous alternatives might be letters for the colors (BRYG) or shapes? but that's a minor thing. Overall, this was really cool with a very minimalistic control scheme :3
On your jam page you say that gamepad is recommended, but just not supporting WASD seems very weird to me. But if you do gamepad support, especially in this game, I'd have loved for there to be stick sensitivity support too!
Outside of that tho, the game has lovely visuals and feels very juicy. Dashing into the circle to expand it should be explained somewhere but it's a really cool mechanic. Also, more interactivity with the game would have been nice, such as dashing into enemies to stun them or sth, otherwise the only consideration is "which of these options will wreck me the least"
but yea, this already feels well like a full game, not just gamejam output
The presentation of this was amazing! Lovely tunes, visuals, sprites, etc. it's quite stressful, especially when you need to get accustomed to the controls being relative to the car and not the world (which is just personal preference ofc), the pacing really is intense!
A cute idea that combines two well-established games together! It very much feels like a game jam game in terms of polish, as in, I think something like an input queue to quickly change directions would've greatly improved the game feel. Also, only 1 enemy type, and 2 upgrades made the game pretty uninteresting, since there is no addition of complexity over time.
Lastly, I had some off-sync timings with my missiles that felt just bad because 3 of them were all evenly spaced, and the 4th one was just in there with no regard to the timing of the others.
Overall tho, cool concept!
This was really sleek. I especially enjoyed the buttons, they felt so powerful in their slow movements. The puzzle mechanics felt clean and robust too!
the biggest missing feature for me was the lack of fast-forward. When I was iterating on a later part of a puzzle (especially in stages 4+), I often waited around for a good while until finally got to the part I was actually testing
Also, while visible, the angle and direction changing blocks could've been more visile in their direction. bigger, more glowing arrows, etc.
Overall tho, this was really nice!
I mean this is basically just a tower defense game. But it's a damn good one! I really enjoyed my time, and the voice acting and goofy names and character designs have so much charme. I do think the game could have been clearer about how the Gorblets pathing to different encampments affects their perfomance and stuff, and what the different items even do and their stats, etc. But overall, this was one of the few games this LD where I caught myself just losing track of time!
The IRL visuals were fucking amazing, the obviously fake whatsapp chat, the tram label just being replaced, the appearence of you, yea!
I only played solo, which probably took away some of the tension, and everything was super cryptic, but I still liked the vibes
I think I got one audio bug, where I had a looping scratching sfx after the first jumpscare that almost became a song with how fast it was, which destroyed any tension that might've existed, but I think this game works way better as a really amazing thing to look at and take in anyways
you mentioned that the sprites stop wobbling when an item has been put into the case, I didn't even register that. I think a double affirmation, such as an outline or change in saturation would've been good here, because a few times, I didn't pack what I thought was in there
The different sfx for different items (like the harp for the necklace) were lovely, and the sprite wobble and physicality were all just so fun. There isn't much of a goal sadly, so the score is kinda arbitrary, but it was fun to see what the game has in store just in terms of inventory!
The LD page version doesn't load sadly, but I played on itch.io! A mouse sensitivity setting would've been really handy, and overall some in-game explanation and navigation aid or anything would've been very nice. The atmosphere and lighting and art style were all lovely
Also it seemed like you can't swip upwards? but maybe I just couldn't figure it out. I also had a weird bug where I'd constantly rotate to the right unless I was interacting with something haha
but regardless, very nice vibes
Interesting little game! I found the end score calculation to be way too big in order of magnitude to care about it, like I'm not gonna do 4-digit multiplication to figure out what the optimal move would be. Maybe a preview of how a building would affect score would help here?
Also personally I'm really not a fan of the visual language. The visuals themselves were well-polished, but the implied narrative of huts being slums and suburban homes being a desirable step at all just did not feel right.
Anyways, the overall game mechanics were nice, and the explosive effects of multiplication were really satisfying!
This was phenomenal! The art style was cute, the gameplay really smart, the difficulty curve just right. Yea. Congrats to the team!!
online functionality in a gamejam game... absolutely wild
this was very funny and entertaining, I loved the voice acting and how silly and doodly everything was
the only thing I noticed was that the pen cut out fairly regularly when you move your mouse too quickly
A really cute game! There were a few minor issues like items not getting dropped when a day rolled over, so I sometimes still was grabbing stuff from the day before and immediately fed it when the new day started. Also, I the game never gave me any explicit overarching goal to tie the moment-to-moment gameplay together, which made it difficult to stay motivated. Overall tho, it's cute and the physics are fun!
The art style was lovely and I haven't played minigame collections like these in a long time, this was pretty unique among the games I've played so far!
THIS IS A FUCKING GAME JAM GAME??? HELLO??? THIS IS FUCKING MENTAL
I loved the story and artwork so much, this is so good what the hell
this is a solid game! its basic game loop is eerily close to Dome Keeper, especially with the stationary lighthouse turret and automated defense stuff. I liked the feeling of dual mining, and how the upgrade tree grew when I bought something, that both helped make the initial overview less intimidating, and made the progression and build direction (focusing on mining or combat for instance) feel more tangible in a UI sense.
I found the regrowing of resources was the most unintuitive part, especially since resources like rocks and minerals don't regrow irl, but I quickly got the hang of that
The destruction of tiles meant that resources actually became more scarce as the game went on, but the movement speed upgrades counteracted this, which made the resource gathering efficiency never rise or fall, which felt unengaging
but yea this was really good and fun!
this was so good!!
While you did clarify in another comment, enter is so atypical and out of the way of where your hands typically are, other input to advance text would've been nice. Also, idk what caused this but the game took 2 screenshots in the beginning? I'm guessing some UI element unintentionally grabbed focus or sth
Small input issues aside, this was phenomenal! The haikus were cute, the artwork was really effective and vibey, and overall it's just a cool cute game. I found the lantern fish to be a bit too difficult to make out at a glance, like their form takes up so much space I often just missed that I could squeeze into their mouth. but these are all minor nitpicks and I really enjoyed my time!
The link on the page here says "source code" where you have linked your itch.io page
Also sadly, the UI only seems to be in cyrillic, which I can't read, and overall it was very difficult to understand what I was even doing
Cool concept tho! A fairly serious take / topic for a game jam, I liked it-
the game deffo has a bold presence and personality! choosing to represent most stuff with emoji is an interesting choice. I think it sets it apart from many other games stylistically and also leans into the medium of 2023 web-based technology.
Big props to you for doing so much extra work such as a level guide, and I read it and here are my impressions: This game gives me big vibes of mid 2010s rage flash games. Why is level 1 an attention exercise? this game is not conductive to that kind of thinking at all. Which, maybe that was your intention, but this is pretty intense actually and I didn't know what to do because to me this was a real-time dungeon crawler lmao, I didn't even clock it as a puzzler.
Overall, very bold and intense game that doesn't actually communicate with the player much. But that non-communication is so in-your-face yet cryptic that it seems intentional
Very cute game; lovely sfx, music, bouncy animations, lots of items with unique art, etc.
From a game design perspective, this feels fairly unfocused however. The game provides a very short list of items to pack, but actually you don't have to pack anything. Which is fine btw, allowing the player to just do whatever is fun and meshes well with the freedom of creating your own travel case. But it creates this weird dynamic where you get all this space, but it's unclear what you should do with it. At least I just packed 3 items and went for it lmao
I thought the game loop would become more complex, and combining different items would then lead to having to fulfill more and more requirements over time (a bit like Password Game that made the rounds recently)
I could also deffo see this being even more chill and going the Unpacking route, I think the vibes would totally be there.
Lastly, you mentioned having to cut it already, but yea, any sort of info on what an item actually is would've been great, just because I spent like 3 minutes looking for makeup remover, just bc I'm used to mine looking blue lmfao
Overall tho, very cozy vibes!!
I loved this to bits. The art style was fantastic and controls felt good! The writing was super funny and characterful, and the absurd nature of everything like the god particle just hanging out was so cool.
I did get lost in space a few times just bc navigating can be quite difficult, and once I just forgot how to get motor oil bc I low-key forgot the Bernd existed. So a journal would have been very handy.
Overall tho, with a bit more polish, I'd totally play a full version of this!
What holds this game back the most is the lack of polish; animations, sfx, and vfx are all too non-existent to really be able to discern what's going on, especially to see what causes you to lose lives and where obelisks are. Additionally, the movement physics felt fairly basic and floaty, especially in regards to the horizontal movement feeling much weaker compared to the jump
btw, the web build only seems to work on the ldjam page in chrome, it loads infinitely on itch and on ldjam in firefox
I really liked the story!! also, the visuals were stunning, I really love your style.
On a more technical side, I'd look into random pitch variation for repeating sound effects, like the crow squaks, so they're less grating over time. Also, you mentioned that you used slashes"/" to replace commas"," because you're not very familiar with csv and file parsing, so definitely look into that. Also just because slashes can be used effectively in writing, and it's a shame to use them non-purposefully!
I loved this, the levels are so short that "just one more" is always jsutifiable after inevitable crashing into a wall. The visuals were simplistic yet clean, and were greatly condictive to the precise and focused game essence this offers.
The speedrunning was genuinely fun, and the controls were pretty unique! The only thing I would've liked is in-game explanations of the controls, which can also be used to build up player knowledge and game skill over the course of the play time. Like level 3 can be beat exclusively with strafing and would be great to have the player just be told "btw, these are the use cases of strafing", but that only works if the horizon doesn't already include them trying to beat a level with rotating and strafing beforehand bc you told them so on the jam page!
lovely game overall!!
what a cool concept! personally, I found the timing to be a bit tight towards the edges of screens and terrain, but it's such a well-polished take on platforming!! also the dialogue was really cute.