squimmy

Abstractio by loyance 2019-10-08T13:10:57Z

The visuals are clean and efficient.

The gameplay is interesting and strangely satisfying at first, but after a certain point, you eventually have to resort to trying every combination. This quickly becomes tedious and only grows worse as the number of possibilities expands.

I like the UI. It strikes a good balance between being intuitive while still forcing the player to experiment and work things out for themselves.

The audio is simple and utilitarian and suits the mood of the game well.

Ultimately, the game is well executed but the core idea behind it has inherent limitations.

Dispel The Nyxion by Alex Lutay 2019-10-07T13:58:40Z

Playing as a mysterious void of nothingness is a pretty cool idea for a game.

The system with the men building houses and everything is really neat, but your ability to interact with it is kind of limited. It feels like there's a lot of untapped untapped potential.

It's a little annoying that you can end up in a losing position long before you actually lose the game, and on your first playthrough it won't be obvious that you've basically already lost... Perhaps an alternate lose-condition (e.g. once they build 15 castles) would help with this?

Either way, the visuals are lovely. The camera shake when you destroy things is a nice touch, too :)

Bearly Alive by bjeaurn 2019-10-07T15:06:14Z

I like the effect of the changing seasons. It's such an efficient way of showing the passage of time.

Some parts were a little confusing, like the way you have to pick up dead animals before you can eat them, or that you have to stop moving to restore energy, but these issues only detracted from the game in the most trivial way.

This is such a sweet little story. For such a simple game, you really empathize with the little bear by the end of it.

NoGo45 by bcvery1 2019-10-11T12:32:39Z

Nice work. I like the sense of progression. The bug where you shoot yourself killed me a couple of times and it was frustrating to start over from the beginning, but aside from that, it was fun!

It's not really a bug, but it seems like you can bypass a lot of the challenge by collecting as many coins as you can before enabling enemies...

The only criticism I could offer would be that the monsters didn't stand out very much. It's not that they were hard to see, but they'd didn't draw your eye. Perhaps using lower-saturation colors for the terrain might have helped with this.

The music a nice, up-beat pace, the sound effects all made sense, and the combat was largely without fault and developed as the player makes progress.

A good game.

DAY/ONE by DrunkardWolf 2019-10-07T14:24:52Z

The low-poly assets and clean, high-contrast UI look great. There's some strong [Overland](https://overland-game.com/) vibes.

The interface is a bit lacking. It's not easy to tell what you can interact with or which character you have selected. Some simple highlighting of the active character, or more pronounced mouse-over effects for items/monsters would help a lot. The more interactive, the better!

Animations—even some very simple ones—would also help. It's not always clear what's happening when nothing is moving.

The music, however, is pretty good. It suits the atmosphere of the game really well, and the ambient background effects are a nice extra touch.

Hadron by N0ught234 2019-10-07T15:02:33Z

Maybe I'm missing something (or maybe I'm just bad at video games!) but I found it brutally difficult to mine anything, and even harder to fight the enemies...

The sound effects are very plain and simple, but they suit the feel of the game perfectly.

The UI's not particularly beautiful and the combat isn't much to speak of, but the game has an absolutely wondrous sense of scale. The plain black background really feels like the vast, empty expanse of space.

There's a sort of beautiful loneliness to it.

There was something here by Adrien Dittrick 2019-10-08T14:42:39Z

This is really cool.

I particularly like the way the scale, complexity and depth advances as the game progresses, not just in terms of gameplay, but the visuals and music, too.

It's impressive how almost every facet of the game works in harmony to support the story the game is trying to tell.

There's not much to criticize here. If I were to make one complaint, it's that it wasn't clear how anti-things and anti-converters worked. But this minor issue didn't really impact my ability to enjoy the game.

Great job.

Terra Nil - Reclaim the Wasteland by vfqd 2019-10-10T15:23:30Z

Truly fantastic game.

The basic gameplay mechanic is clever without being confusing. The way each structure interacts with the others is well explained and intuitive, and the tension created by conflicting requirements means you have to give proper thought to each placement.

The art is great. The use of strong key colors (brown, green and red) makes all the key gameplay elements stand out clearly (but you may want to seek feedback from red/green color-blind players on this). If I was going to be nit-picky, the water pump and calcinator could stand to be a little more distinct.

The audio work is very good too. The music suits the mood of the game perfectly, and the sound effects give strong feedback for all the actions you can take. The construction sounds have just the right level of punch and the little blips when collecting resources are subtle but satisfying.

The UI is very good too. The tooltips are a great way of conveying a lot of information without getting in the way. Even the font is a great fit. (Incidentally, is it a unity built-in font or your own work? I don't mean this in an accusatory way. I'm genuinely curious.) The only suggestion I can offer would be to make it slightly more obvious which structures do or do not require power — perhaps a lightning-bolt mark lightbulb or somesuch?

The level of polish is outstanding given the timeframe. If you're planning on continuing to work on this, there are a couple of tweaks I'd love to see, namely: More options for scrolling around the map, such as click-and-drag (presumably with the right mouse button) or using the WASD keys; and remembering difficulty and map size selections, rather than them resetting each time you choose "Play again".

I really only have one true criticism of this game and, to be fair, it's largely a matter of taste: The combination of "pixel" and hi-res art is rather jarring. Someone else mentioned the leaf icon, but the same applies to the little green orbs you collect, the power cables, and the UI overlay in general. Even the font, though really quite lovely, is particularly incongruous as the only obviously antialized element in the entire game. The little weeds and other decorations are also not aligned to the same pixels as the main game art. Most people probably won't consciously notice this, but it still subtly undermines the otherwise phenomenal artwork you've got.

That being said, this is a remarkably good game. I hope you continue working on it in future. I'll be keeping an eye on your itch.io page in the hopes of further updates after ludum dare 45 concludes.

Mission Start With Nothing by Benjamin123 2019-10-08T13:27:41Z

Inverted controls (with no way to change them!) is a bold choice. Unfortunately, it this case, I don't think it pays off.

Sound is such an integral element of so many stealth games that the total lack of audio in this one is a pity.

The general visual appearance of the game is good. The foggy environment lends credibility to the idea of such short-sighted guards ;)

The quality of models, lighting, and animation is in general rather high, given the time constraints you were under.

The objective wasn't clear to me so I was unable to finish the game.

Shape Void by Jummit 2019-10-07T12:48:24Z

I like the visuals. The glowing effect highlights the emptiness of the playing field.

It isn't clear how to play at first. There's not much to tell you what you'll be controlling or what you're aiming for, but the trial and error is part of the fun.

Emergency Procedures by enderr42 2019-10-08T15:26:27Z

This is a good effort for your first time, and you've got some interesting ideas at work, too.

I really like the way you've captured the physics of moving in zero-gravity. You're completely at the mercy of momentum until you reach a wall, so you have to plan your route carefully.

It seems like you already know this, but it's pretty clear there were some time-management problems.

You probably could have gotten away with putting much less effort into the art. There's a lot of fine detail in the visuals but I imagine most players will be focused on trying to win rather than appreciating the art.

Spending less time on the art doesn't just give you more time to spend on other things: it also forces you to be judicious about what elements need the most artistic detail. Making the most important parts of the level the most detailed helps draw the players attention to them, too.

The tension between trying to charge the battery and maintain shield and life-support power is an neat idea. With a little more polish and some sound to add to the atmosphere, you could have a pretty fun game on your hands.

But most of all, you made it, you finished it, and you put it out there for people to play, and that's what counts.

It may be your story by Keseril 2019-10-06T23:16:35Z

Nice job telling a story with minimal art assets.

The difficulty curve was great at the start, but it got slightly tedious later on — partly because you have to switch from the keyboard to the mouse to restart. Letting the player press a key to start again would have helped.

It also seems that some of the words stop moving (or don't start falling) if you're in the air. I assumed this was a bug, since at one point it seemed to make it impossible to progress, but it also added a little bit of extra strategy to some sections.

Great work on your first entry!

Mr.Grind by iozsaygi 2019-10-06T23:25:52Z

A neat take on the clicker genre.

The truck was an interesting way to add some breaks from the clicking and stop things from becoming flat and repetitive. It would have been nice if you could have done more with that idea.

It would have been cool if there were more different types of upgrades, or ones that start off locked and have to be unlocked somehow. As it stands, there's a nice progression but it feels a bit linear.

The music really helped build the kind of frantic mood that's perfect for an endless clicker game.

Great job.

Flourish by Corrade 2019-10-10T13:28:10Z

The artwork is beautiful and the aesthetic cohesion of the game is top-notch. The audio, visuals, and gameplay all work together very well.

I'm usually of the opinion that music plays a big role in building the mood and feeling of a game, but the ambient background noise you've added seems to do that job just fine.

It's particularly refreshing to see a nice, slow-paced game about creating life, and not another frantic action game based around destroying things.

Click-N-Move by TwinTurboDouche 2019-10-08T14:15:41Z

This is a nice idea for a game!

Unfortunately, it was a bit slow-paced to start with, so by the time I got my second weapon, it hadn't done a lot to capture my interest.

Obviously it's important to save the most powerful and exciting weapons for last (to give the player a sense of progression), but first impressions count. The crossbow is by far the least exciting and *least interactive* weapon. Having to use it for too long is going to put people off before they can see the rest of the game.

Having a weapons that are useful in different situations (rather than simply getting more powerful) would give more opportunity to think about what to use, instead of making old weapons obsolete as soon as new ones are unlocked.

Of the monsters I saw, all of them just moved directly at the me, so it wasn't difficult to hit them. It was simply a question of whether I could move faster than them or kill them before they reached me. It would have been great to see monsters that tried to dodge, or that hung back to build up numbers and attack en masse.

As for the visuals, you're certainly no Rembrandt, but the art's really not that bad. It definitely does its job. The iconography is simple but it's immediately clear what everything is. There's a clear visual progression to the weapons and the monsters look like monsters.

It might seem like I have a lot of complaints, but it's clear that the problems with the game are simply a result of the time constraints. The design and the core idea of the game is solid.

LEGION by crunchykingcobra 2019-10-07T13:07:31Z

Wow! This is really good.

The music, the graphics, and the gameplay are all fantastic and come together to make a great creepy atmosphere.

If I had to nitpick, an explanation of the score multiplier might have been nice, and the ending was a little anti-climactic. Anything other than an empty room would have been great, even just getting out of the facility to the outside world...

But these are both minor complaints. This game is really impressive.

My high score is 7400 points :)

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T10:34:30Z

@Kanonix Thanks! :)

I had some technical difficulties on the first day so I had to drastically reduce the scope of the game partway through development and it ended up a bit shorter than I would have liked.

I was worried the run animation was a little goofy, but people seemed to like it so maybe it was okay after all.

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T10:35:25Z

@HolyBlackCat Thank you!

Better a short, finished game than a longer one that never sees the light of day, I guess!

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T10:37:13Z

@blint6 Thanks!

Here's hoping next time will turn out better :)

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T10:43:38Z

@Jimbly Thank you!

I would have liked to make it a bit longer and add a bit more depth, but things just didn't go that way.

The music is a pretty short loop, so it's probably a good thing that the game ends before it starts to get annoying!

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T10:57:02Z

@Corrade Thanks for the feedback :)

I was worried "cairn" would be a bit too obscure of a word, but I didn't give myself enough space in the UI to make it a lot clearer.

As for the praying area, you're 100% correct. May my hubris stand as a warning to any others fool enough to dare implementing their own hitbox and hit-detection systems.

I like to think I could have solved these problems with more time, but at least they've been a valuable lesson for the next time I try this sort of thing!

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T11:14:33Z

@Griz Thanks for the warm welcome!

When I realized I wouldn't have time to implement the kind of scope I wanted, I had some trouble coming up with an ending for the game.

I'm just happy I was able to come up with a conclusive ending at all, though I realize not everyone will find it particularly satisfying!

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T11:21:15Z

@Hcursino Thanks!

I'm glad you were surprised and not just disappointed :)

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T11:28:41Z

@Yohsk13 Thanks for the feedback :)

In terms of time spent, I think the music turned out to be a good return on investment. It only took about 10 minutes to throw together but really helped establish the mood.

I'm happy to hear the game spoke to you in some way.

Hermitage by squimmy 2019-10-13T11:30:09Z

@ashashza Thanks for the feedback!

I like that stone circle. I'm amazed to see someone expressing creativity in such a short and simple game and truly thrilled that it was my game! :D

JO-KEN-DO! by Hcursino 2019-10-10T13:03:46Z

This game has the most content of the compo submissions I've played. The number of characters and amount of dialog is impressive given the time constraints.

This is an interesting game. I like the multiple overlapping rock-paper-scissors mechanics, but the current implementation of it is a combination of random guessing, trial-and-error, and rote memorization...

Other people have mentioned this, but the lack of sound effects or other UI feedback harms the gameplay experience. Combined with the time-limit, this makes the game rather confusing at first.

But the music is pretty good! It suits the pacing of the game particularly well.

More than anything, the size and scope of this game is really quite impressive.

Semantics by WashingMachinae 2019-10-07T12:41:28Z

I love it!

The sound and music work is fantastic and suits the surreal feeling of the experience perfectly.

Knight of Redemption by Yeomsley 2019-10-08T00:18:30Z

I like how you start off defenseless and having to avoid the monsters, but once you find the sword you get to go back and show them who's boss. In that way, it reminds me of the first Prince of Persia game.

There's clearly a lot of space for polish and improvements, but the core of this game is good. The controls are responsive, and the combat is simple but intuitive. Even the music gives a solid sense of urgency to the game and makes it feel fast-paced.

The real star is the level design. Exploring the dungeon is fun, and exiting from the cramped, twisting tunnels onto a wide green field gives a great sense of accomplishment, even if there's no flashing "YOU WIN!" text.

The Thing by Thiago Nascimento 2019-10-08T14:53:01Z

This game made me chuckle several times.

It's a very clever take on the theme with a good amount of polish to top it off.

BLOOP by danman9914 2020-10-06T01:45:53Z

The story is clever and well presented and the whole games has an outstanding degree of polish and flair. The art is fantastic and the sound all works brilliantly to build the mood. I particularly like the little audio cues for incoming attacks.

Great work.

Thunder Rally by smilewood 2020-10-06T02:04:33Z

This game is cute!

Maybe it could have done with more upgrade options or more interactivity, but it was fun nonetheless and the graphics and sound were extremely endearing.

Loop Invader by Ale 2020-10-11T04:03:16Z

This is a really intriguing idea and I think there's a lot of potential here.

Unfortunately, like other people have commented, I had a bit of trouble playing the game because it assumes an american (or at least western) keyboard layout. My parenthesis keys aren't on '9' and '0' so I kept accidentally inputting the wrong symbols... :sweat_smile:

The colour-coding of the blocks is clever, but `<2` and `>2` mean completely different things but are both highlighted in the same colour. On the other hand, I can't immediately think of a better way of colouring the blocks...

The gameplay is unique enough that it would really benefit from an interactive tutorial, or at least a bit of hand-holding in the first couple of levels. It would have also been nice to see more variety in the levels. Maybe some with pre-existing walls, or balls of varying sizes, that sort of thing. As it stands, the later levels are like the early levels, just with more balls; they don't expand upon the core idea any further.

Fortunately these are minor issues that don't interfere with enjoyment of the game, especially once you get the hang of the idea. I also quite like the music. It works well as soothing, "thinking" music.

Good job.

Fort Loop by deepnight 2020-10-07T03:04:57Z

The visuals are great and I quite liked the gameplay. The puzzles had a good difficulty curve and I particularly liked the way that enemies don't hurt you but they do slow you down, which is far more interesting, given the puzzle's core mechanic.

The short jump height and realistic movement didn't bother me, but I would have really appreciated some kind of clear feedback about when the loop is about to reset (maybe some sort of audio cue?). The torches were a good hint, but I found it difficult to tell the exact timing, which made the last couple of puzzles a little frustrating, since they weren't very forgiving on timing.

On the Phone (2020) by Linus Lindberg 2020-10-10T08:13:37Z

This hits uncomfortably close to home... :confused:

The Myth of Sisyphos by gilborn 2020-10-10T09:13:38Z

This is a great idea for a game based on the theme, but I think there needs to be more to make it clear to the player that they're making progress.

Looking at other comments here, there obviously is progression to the game, and even an ending, but sadly I gave up before seeing the end. Perhaps making the act of pushing the rock a little easier might help--I got stuck completely multiple times.

These minor gameplay complaints aside, the music, art and mood of the game were all great!

The Myth of Sisyphos by gilborn 2020-10-10T09:21:43Z

@gilborn Oh my goodness, I'm sorry! I mixed up two reviews. I'll edit my post with the correct review...

Hyperloop by R3L0ad1 2020-10-10T03:54:07Z

This game has an astonishing amount of flair and polish for a compo game. But that's not to say it's all style and no substance! The gameplay is solid and engaging and fits the theme well. I'm impressed.

Prison of the Dream Weaver by candlesan 2020-10-07T13:50:27Z

This is an interesting idea, but between the randomness of the cards and the slow movement making it hard to avoid enemy attacks, it felt like winning or losing was more a matter of luck than skill.

It's a pity there wasn't some way of better tying together the card minigame and the shooting gameplay. This game also exhibits my pet peeves: mixing pixel art (the player, monsters and environment) with high-res graphics (the player projectices). It undermines the cohesiveness of the game's aesthetic.

These petty complaints aside, you did a good job in not only implementing a complete game but, in some ways, implementing _two_ games!

Shlooper by Gurbx 2020-10-11T03:30:48Z

Everything in this game _feels_ really good. The sound effects and screenshake and particles were all really fantastic.

It might have been worth tweaking the difficulty in some way; especially since on your first playthrough you don't know exactly how long the game will be and don't know how much time you have per level. (For instance, the later levels take longer since there are more enemies to fight and dodge.)

The ending was also slightly unsatisfying, but I'm not sure what could have been done there that wouldn't have taken a lot of time.

Anyway, the gameplay more than makes up for these minor complaints. The controls feel responsive and everything has the right amount of "kick" to it. Good job.

P.S. The gun reminds me a lot of the pistol from Quake 2...

Recursion by DrunkardWolf 2020-10-05T10:06:55Z

This is great! The setting, the visual aesthetic and the audio all work together really well to build tension. The only criticism I can think of is that at some points the gameplay verges towards becoming boring, but I can't think of any way of addressing this that wouldn't undermine the whole point of the story the game tells.

a Damsel a Day by alec 2020-10-07T02:32:27Z

Nice! I particularly like the trees.

It seems like if you play long enough, you'll eventually reach a level that's impossible to beat, but I suppose that sort of thing is inevitable when you're placing things randomly, especially when doing things on such a tight timescale.

Aside from that, the design is tight, the music is catchy and the graphics are endearing. Great all around.

Portaloop by Allas 2020-10-09T14:16:39Z

This is a really neat idea for a game and ties in well to the theme.

You seem to already be aware of the sluggish controls, but aside from that, I think the challenge drops-off quite quickly when you get the hang of it, and either ramping-up the difficulty curve or giving the player an incentive to take risks (e.g. a bonus for trapping multiple enemies at once) might help keep the game entertaining for longer.

Daily Grind by spacemyname 2020-10-05T13:20:12Z

Neat!

There's not much to say about the core gameplay other than that it's simple and intuitive. You've done a good job, but I can think of a few minor things that could have made it a little more fun:

- Am I correct in understanding that there's no way to tell how much drink is left in the can? Everything else seems to have a number attached, so the drink seems a little out of place.

- Speaking of numbers, the "Multiplier" value isn't rounded before being displayed, so the trailing ".5" flickers while the value changes, which is a bit distracting.

- I feel like it might have been a bit more intuitive to have the game over happen when _all_ of the screens are occupied. "don't let them all fill up!" is easier to grok than "don't let 75% of them fill up!"

- The green effect over the left end of the thirst meter makes it hard to notice that your thirst meter is low, especially when you're focusing on the screens. It's not so much of a problem once you're used to the appearance, but it made the first playthrough a little bit confusing for me.

These are all quite minor complaints though. Congratulations on completing the game!

P.S. It seems that your thirst goes up just from clicking the mouse, regardless of whether any work is being done. Is this intentional, or just a bug?

Loop Back to the Future by Lex 2020-10-07T13:34:48Z

Scalextric simulator 2020! I love it. I really like the idea of using the DeLorean and charging the flux capacitor as a way to escape the loop (without having to do any other modelling or physics or anything :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:).

It's such a pity there was no music, it really feels like this would lend itself to being a rhythm game. But I can fully understand how much more effort it would be to not only compose music, but to then wrangle the whole game to always be in time with that music...

My only other complaint is the use of the default skybox. I think it would have looked a lot better with even a fairly low-effort skybox with maybe a treeline or something like that, instead of just a vast, empty horizon.

The Loop by Jin9310 2020-10-07T14:40:19Z

I really like it when the restriction of sticking closely to the theme results in a fresh and original gameplay mechanic that's also fun on its own merits. This game is a perfect example of that.

Other people have mentioned it, and I think it's purely a matter of taste, but being able to rapidly tap the 'r' key to stay in one place feels, to me, like it undermines the challenge of the game and the uniqueness of the control scheme. A short cooldown on switching directions or, better yet, a "stamina bar" would probably solve this, if you decide it needs addressing.

I also encountered the same collision bug mentioned by others, but I think that kind of thing is entirely forgivable, even expected, given the time constraints.

The Loop by Jin9310 2020-10-07T15:17:36Z

If I were to give one piece of honest criticism about the game, it would be this:

The pixel art you've used for the coins, hearts, and explosions is certainly very charming. But it clashes with the otherwise sleek, modern, and minimalistic style used for the rest of the game: the player orb thingy, the walls, the background, etc.

A more high-res, flat appearance for these hearts, coins and explosions would give the game a much more cohesive and striking look, I think.

GLITCH LOOP by ZakAmana 2020-10-10T04:24:07Z

There's huge number of various skills coming together to make this game really great. The music, art, animation, and puzzle design are all strong, and the high degree of polish really brings it all together with top-notch presentation.

When I finished the sixth level, I was fully expecting it would be the last level. I was amazed to see another five levels that expand upon and further develop the core gameplay mechanic!

I also think the timer that spins around the edge of the level is a stroke of genius. Without it, the gameplay would slowly devolve into frustrating trial-and-error as the complexity of the puzzles increases.

Very impressive for a compo game.

you are dead by noahw 2020-10-07T13:14:10Z

A brilliant, distinctive look, a quirky control-scheme, and fitting music to top it all off. Great job!

CREATION EXCAVATION by taffyko 2020-10-09T02:03:28Z

The visuals of this game are absolutely beautiful. The two-tone palette and unusual dither pattern give it a really distinctive look.

Unfortunately, I found the gameplay about as fun as the mspaint eraser tool. After the first couple of upgrades, I couldn't find any big hints about where to go next, and after a few minutes of wandering around, I gave up. I'm _not_ trying to say I think there's irredeemable flaws in the game's design--just that it's probably a game for people more patient than I.

If you think about it, ain't a sling a murder loop? by matthewrobo 2020-10-09T13:58:38Z

A unique idea, well-executed, with a great aesthetic.

The gameplay had a peggle-like addictive quality at first, but once I got the hang of it a lot of the challenge seemed to evaporate and the fun ebbed away quite quickly. Maybe some kind of scaling difficulty level (smaller enemies? faster enemies?) would not have gone amiss.

Featherfall by armytag 2020-10-08T01:33:05Z

The idea is clever and the level design works really well. The tree works really well as a hint that the world loops around.

The art style is cute, but an extra couple of sprites for a climbing animation might have been a good idea, if possible.

I agree with other people's comments that some music would help a lot. I think some gentle, laid-back, background music, would suit this game well, and that's the style that automatic music generators work best with, in my experience.

These minor issues aside, this was a really lovely game :smile:

Despair by enderr42 2020-10-10T04:44:07Z

This is a fascinating concept for a game.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time I didn't feel like I knew quite what I was doing. Perhaps tooltips, with more detailed information about the ships and what their different actions mean, would have helped. Also I would have liked some way to view a reminder of the different ship types. I forgot what they all were with seconds of closing the tutorial. :slight_frown:

The game was also a little slow to get started. It's important not to overwhelm the player with too much to do at the very start, but spending most of the time just waiting for your only ability to cooldown is not very fun either.

Nonetheless, this was fun. The different abilities to be unlocked were all interesting and I really liked the music, too. Good job.

Super Box Bot's Package Push by Honey Pony 2020-10-10T08:46:23Z

This is a very neat idea, but the difficulty curve seemed to be all over the place. I got stumped very early and almost lost interest, but I skipped that puzzle and found most of the later puzzles much easier. There wasn't much indication of which puzzles I'd finished nor whether I could do them out of order, so there was a good chance I could have given up completely after getting stuck and not seen most of the game.

Other than that, the game is interesting and well made. Good job!

Hulagain by squimmy 2020-10-06T02:24:59Z

@tolmera Thanks for your feedback! Making the hula hoop itself the main hint for the timing was a bit of an oversight on my part, especially when the hoop is only about 5x20 pixels in size. There's an audio cue when you get the timing right, but in retrospect that's mostly only useful once you've already worked it out. It's not so much help for new players trying to get their head around the hula hooping.

@luc-creationallabs Thanks! The game definitely has a couple of difficulty-related problems, particularly at the start. If I'd had more time, I probably would have spent it all on trying to make the hula hoop timing easier to understand...

Hulagain by squimmy 2020-10-07T11:32:51Z

@fryer Thanks for your feedback, and sorry about the sound volume :( The difficulty curve also definitely has problems. I had a very hard time trying to balance the hula hoop mechanic so that it wasn't so easy you could ignore it but also not so hard that it was frustrating. Unfortunately I think I fell a little to far on the "frustrating" side...

@blobo I'm glad you liked it! The sound, graphics and gameplay are all admittedly a bit mediocre, so it's nice to at least see the humour landing well!

Hulagain by squimmy 2020-10-08T12:29:12Z

@judgezedd @neowedge @zimny11 Thanks for your kind words! :smile:

@glaciereclipse You're quite right. Some parts of the game suffer from poor readability due to things not standing out from the background properly, and I suspect it's at least in part due to the palette I chose. And the hoop is _way_ too small for being the only thing in the game that can directly kill you. I also had a lot of trouble trying to find the right balance in the difficulty of spinning the hoop, and how much it factored into the gameplay. Building the levels, when I finished the first level, the hoop seemed to make things so difficult it was frustrating. I overcompensated by rendering the hoop almost meaningless in the the rest of the levels (they were largely linear and were short enough to rush through before the hoop hit the ground). If I'd had more time, I think I'd spend almost all of it trying to better communicate the hoop timing.

@gabriel-dias-oliveira-de-almeida Thanks! :grin:

@jin9310 Thank you! I hope it wasn't _too_ hard.

Hulagain by squimmy 2020-10-26T10:15:22Z

@honey-pony Thanks for the detailed critique! You're right about the difficulty. I spent quite a lot of time tweaking the timing and parameters trying to make the hula-hooping feel intuitive without it being too easy, and making it influence the platforming without getting in the way, but ultimately I had to move on to creating the rest of the game. I wasn't really satisfied with the balance I arrived at and opted instead to design the levels with this shortcoming in mind.

I also made a last-minute change of tweaking the timing of the hula-hooping and the tempo of the music to match each other. This makes the hula-hoop timing a little bit easier if you notice they match, but I didn't add anything to tell the player that moving in time to the music helps. Besides, the game was never intended as a traditional rhythm game so while they start out in sync, there's nothing to ensure they stay that way (I had problems making Bosca Ceoil output a track that looped properly, so when the music loops, it falls out of sync and is no longer in time with the hoop).

Anyway, I don't know if I'll ever revisit this game, but if I do I'll keep your comments under consideration.

ZBX 9800 by Jonathanfdr 2020-10-09T12:37:25Z

Very nice! A neat idea and very well executed, given the time constraints.

The idea of repeating instructions in a loop fits the theme very well, but in practice it seems like a lot of the puzzles could be completed without much looping.

I also agree with @ale's comments that a lot gameplay time gets spent on trial-and-error working out movement distances, and I second their suggestion of using _distance_ travelled as the value for the walk/run commands.

A couple of suggestions for if you ever revisit this game or make a sequel:

- Adding variables would have been a lot of extra work to code, but would have let you have some very interesting puzzles: zig-zags, spirals, etc.

- Keys you can collect that unlock doors or activate elevators would also have allowed much more complex and interesting puzzles and would probably not be that much more effort to add.

LoopHole by Polusi 2020-10-06T02:39:01Z

Good work. I think the simple art and minimalistic background music work well for this game.

If I were to offer a suggestion, it would be that it would have been nice to have had some kind of message appear upon reaching the bottom, to make it clear that it's the end of the game.

I feel like criticisms about the length of the game are misguided. It's much better to have a short, finished game than to plan a longer game but not finish it.

Tomb of the Mummy RL by Eldar 2020-10-08T12:37:54Z

How nice to see a classic roguelike!

The idea, the gameplay and the appearance were all solid, but the dialog boxes (introduction, help, etc) didn't match the ascii, monospaced style of the rest of game and broke the immersion slightly for me. It also would have been _much_ nicer if there'd been a way to immediately show the online leaderboards upon submitting my score. It might even have been enough to tempt me to try again for the #1 spot.

Obviously I realise implementing/fixing these things isn't feasible given the 48-hour time limit, but I hope this feedback is of use in future games (or if you ever revisit this one)!

Tomb of the Mummy RL by Eldar 2020-10-09T12:46:31Z

@eldar Taking a closer look, rather than guessing by gut-feeling, I think the main things that don't tie-in visually are the font in the dialog buttons ("Let's play!") which might be browser-defined and not configurable by you anyway, and the general layout of the dialog boxes (transparency, rounded corners, mouse-activated buttons).

I will freely admit that my hardline stance on visual consistency in roguelikes may be a minority standpoint borne of far too many hours spent playing games like angband and dcss in a terminal.

Tomb of the Mummy RL by Eldar 2020-10-14T01:42:43Z

@eldar Hard mode is interesting.

Gust of wind is still much weaker than exterminate, but there were a couple of times (mostly in the later levels where the tomb raiders do a lot of damage) that it was better to use gust of wind, just to be safe. It's more of an emergency escape button than something to use regularly, I suppose...

Either way, hard mode is a nice addition to the game!

Paper Planes by SamDemaine 2020-10-05T13:39:34Z

I love it!

The core gameplay concept is incredibly simple but it has surprising depth. The aesthetic also has a wonderful, elegant simplicity to it.

It seemed clear to me, but based on some of the other comments people are leaving, perhaps you could have done more to explain that the enemy planes all follow the same path the player takes. I suppose the intro clip just looks like the enemy is chasing the player, rather than retracing their steps. Maybe making the dotted trail longer would have helped?

Aside from time-consuming things like composing music, the only thing I can think of to improve the game would be to better hint to the player that the edges of the level loop around. If the intro animation was looped so that it showed the planes re-entering from the left as they exit from the right, that would have been perfect.

Paper Planes by SamDemaine 2020-10-06T12:01:54Z

@samdemaine It's really flattering to see my feedback implemented into the game so promptly! Since I'm already ~~nitpicking~~ backseat designing, have you considered making the arrow-key indicators at the bottom fade away after the first few seconds of gameplay? it might make things look even more clean and minimalistic.

black_box by Fraxle 2020-10-10T09:20:16Z

This is a neat and interesting idea, and generally well made, too!

In practice, it felt just a bit too repetitive for my taste, and it also felt unfair when the doors would lock just as you were approaching them, usually leading to an automatic loss if you had already had to travel most of the way across the ship…

That being said, the art style was cohesive, the game had good audio feedback and it was (in my experience) largely bug-free, which is an achievement in itself given the time constraints.

Well done.

Unchangeable by Engired 2020-10-05T11:08:10Z

It's hard to feel invested in the game when there's so little agency, especially when the protagonist seems to take actions that don't always make sense, and _especially_ when the ending is unfulfilling.

That being said, congratulations on completing the game!

Danger Beat by rhoff95 2020-10-07T13:08:18Z

This is a neat idea! I'm slightly surprised you took it in a bullet-hell direction. I was expecting a rhythm game of some sort. Either way, it works well.

The aesthetic style is nice, but the screen can get pretty cluttered at times. I suppose that's unavoidable in the bullet-hell genre; possibly it's the entire point!

The final loop by IndieQuest 2020-10-10T01:57:13Z

A fun, simple game.

I agree that being able to move the towers mid-battle makes things a bit easy. I think this could be solved by making the enemies move faster than the towers. this would mean you could fine-tune your placements after the battle started, but you wouldn't be able to chase-down enemies that got past.

I quite like the visual style and the subtle, tense music fits the game well.

This is a neat take on the tower-defence genre. If you decide to keep working on this after Ludum Ddare ends, with a few more types of towers and enemies and a little more polish, you'd have a solid coffee-break browser game on your hands.

FRUITFLY by frecklebars 2020-10-09T13:41:41Z

This is a cute game.

The visuals are nice and the writing is solid, but I think some people might find the ending unfulfilling rather than simply ambiguous. Another loop through the five days would have given you a lot of scope to flesh the story out and get the player invested in speculating about the meaning, but it would obviously have also been a lot more work.

In The Loop by Luc-creationallabs 2020-10-06T01:07:31Z

The idea behind this game is really well executed. The sound and visuals are clear and simple, the puzzles have variety and depth while never feeling contrived or over-complicated, and the difficulty is at just the right level where it's challenging, but not so hard it's frustrating. Well done.

Looper - The Last Mission by Coding4rtist 2020-10-09T14:41:58Z

_Very_ neat idea!

I found the game quite enjoyable, but the tiny, bouncing bullets made it hard to work out why I'd died the first few times. Obviously the game would be a bit boring if they didn't bounce, but if you plan on revising or revisiting this game, maybe experiment with making the bullets more visible.

The game is very fun, but not being sure why you died makes for a bad first impression and I'd hate for people to decide they don't like this game before realising how much fun it can be.

SORO BORO by nethead 2020-10-07T11:39:36Z

I really like the idea, but I'm sad to say that the combination of dying in one hit and miserly hitboxes on the enemies put me off enough that I didn't stick through to finish it.

Aside from that, the rest of the game was great. Good music, distinctive art, and all of it working together to build a compelling and cohesive style.

Collateral Damage by Michael Parrish 2020-10-07T14:24:55Z

This was a really neat idea for a game, but I think in practice it turns out to be "you take damage if you miss" and hence fits the theme mostly in aesthetic rather than in gameplay. Though the aesthetic fits the theme perfectly.

Being able to angle your shots away from the earth (maybe with shots falling into an unstable orbit and still eventually hitting the earth?) would have added a lot more depth to the game, but at the cost of the elegant simplicity that makes this game shine... (and a lot more effort to implement!)

Deeper than Beyond by Runuchok 2021-04-26T10:41:03Z

This is a cool game, but the first time I played it I found it a bit frustrating. The gyro minigame seems to be so time-consuming that you're better off just ignoring it and fixing two or three other things in the same amount of time. In fact, that's exactly what I did to beat this game -- completely ignored the gyro. The other minigames are mostly fine, but I think the battery and oscilloscope puzzles could benefit from some kind of hint, since they're both quite unforgiving. even just a gauge showing how close you are to to success would help a lot, I think.

The modelling work of the space craft interior is very good, but the grey textures were a bit boring. It would have been nice to see something to make it feel like a real space craft and not just a room full of minigames. Perhaps a metallic industrial look (with some yellow and black hazard stripes?) or maybe a sleek, white plastic look... But I'd consider it a low priority given the time constraints of the compo.

Sound effects would also have been a big benefit to a game like this. Alarms and klaxons would help alert the player when systems need fixing (especially if each system had its own unique warning sound) and sound effects like venting air or creaking metal would go a long way to building tension and atmosphere as the AGFC stability gets lower and lower. It seems like looking at the main screen is the only way to tell how close you are to losing, but when things got frantic, I didn't have the time for that, so when I lost it felt a bit abrupt.

Earigator by alec 2021-04-26T10:14:46Z

> WARNING: Do not insert swab into ear canal.

I'm always amazed by the quality some people achieve with pico-8! This is a tight and focused game with great visuals, catchy music and intuitive gameplay. My only complaint is that the intro feels a little bit wordy, especially compared to the concise and streamlined feel of the rest of the game.

Age of Dwarves by DangerBlack 2021-04-28T12:19:08Z

The music, art and overall gameplay is very impressive, but I think this kind of game needs a lot of quality-of-life UI features to make controlling more than half a dozen units bearable. That amount of UI polish probably isn't possible with the time available, so a better approach might have been to tweak things such that the player uses a smaller number of more powerful dwarves.

Viper Mission One by Majadroid 2021-04-26T09:44:59Z

I quite liked the presentation of this game in general and the sound effects in particular. It starts out quite fun -- the ship is responsive and the gun feels nice and powerful -- but unfortunately the game doesn't takes too long to add challenge and doesn't do much to add extra gameplay depth or complexity. Ideally there'd be an extra enemy type or something, but given the quality of the existing ship models, that might be asking too much given the time constraints. I also found it hard to judge the distance to the pickups, which in turn made it hard to line them up to collect them. adding some slight camera motion might have helped, allowing the player can use the parallax to better gauge distances.

Wormhole Adventurer by Lakea 2021-05-02T02:51:02Z

It seems like a few other people have mentioned the controls feeling a bit sluggish. That would be an ideal place to start if you were to continue working on this after Ludum Dare (an input-buffer would solve a lot of problems but probably not worth the time when you only have 48 hours). At first I thought the game was turn-based, until I realised I could mash the 'q' key to spam lasers!

Sound effects would have obviously helped, but as it stands, the silence suits the lonely and eerie setting of the game.

The other big problem is that it feels a bit empty. Obviously deep space is empty, but I think you still need something to keep it engaging and more than just navigating from one zone to the next.

I don't mean to be entirely critical. I'm a big fan of hex-grids (my game used one, too) and (if your dev process was anything like mine) I'm guessing you spent half the time implementing and debugging the hexagons and ran out of time to properly play-test the pacing of the game. Such is the nature of making something in such a short time...

I also like the graphics. The look and feel reminds me of similar games from the late nineties.

Elevator Ninja by Loig 2021-04-28T12:57:28Z

For such a simple concept, this game is quite fun to play. The cute art, funny sounds and responsive controls are a big help in that regard. I like the way the difficulty gradually scales up at just the right rate but, like a few other people have mentioned, I would have very much appreciated not having to replay the entire game every time I died at the very last set of spikes...

Also, the introduction seemed very slow paced, especially compared to the brisk feel of the rest of the game.

Hook, Line, Key by chiyeon 2021-04-26T09:38:46Z

Absolutely lovely. The visuals and audio come together wonderfully to create an amazing, relaxing atmosphere. If I was to make one suggestion, it would be to make the tutorial a bit more interactive. Letting me try out the controls as their explained would be easier and more intuitive than trying to remember it all at once and then only get to try it out once the tutorial has finished. I really love the music, by the way. And I liked that the main gameplay is done in near silence. It makes the whole experience more relaxing and makes reeling in the fish feel so much more tense thanks to the contrast.

Afraid to Turn by rhoff95 2021-04-26T09:54:37Z

Lovely pixel art! I quite like the parallax effect of the trees. The sound is also quite nice and really helps set the mood. The gameplay is a bit simple, but if anything this works in the game's favour. My only complaint is that I couldn't work out how to start the game at first, but that's mostly my fault for not reading the instructions...

Nostril Navigator by Xenon27 2021-04-26T09:43:55Z

Fun and simple, but I think it needs a score system of some kind. Unless I missed it, there's no way to tell how well you did, so it doesn't give much incentive to replay and try and beat your previous attempt. making the boogers worth points would be the obvious option, since they currently don't seem to do anything until you've already hit some hairs.

Nice Fall by Nice Gear Games 2021-04-28T10:09:02Z

This is good! The visuals and audio are simple and effective, and the gameplay is intuitive and engaging. The most impressive thing is the way so many little systems in the game work together to ensure the losing player doesn't get left behind. But it always feels natural and intuitive, and -- most importantly -- fair. It never feels like you got hit by a "blue shell", so to speak.

The only thing I think is missing is a sound effect for when you get stunned by the thorns. The first few times it happened to me, I didn't realise what had happened so I thought perhaps I had fallen too far or something... It didn't take long to work out what was happening, but compared to how obvious and intuitive the rest of the game felt, this moment of confusion stood out to me.

Todd the Caver by Sam Bigos 2021-04-26T09:47:24Z

I really enjoyed this game! The sound and visuals were simple but atmospheric, and the controls were challenging, but not frustrating. I ran into a bug a couple of times where gravity seemed to go sideways, but resetting to the last checkpoint fixed it, so it didn't have too much impact on my enjoyment.

Crypto-mine Disaster by Doc Kaos 2021-04-28T11:05:07Z

A fun and silly game with some interesting elements of emergent gameplay. I particularly liked the option of shoving doges onto the elevator to get more of them out in one trip.

There were a few little bugs I encountered (such as being able to throw dogs through walls, rendering the level unbeatable), but that's to be expected with only 48 hours to work with. The main complaint I have about this game is the user interface. switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse got tedious pretty quickly!

That being said, the art and music were both good, tying in in perfectly with the cute aesthetic and frantic pace of the game.

Lord Of The Flies by PixelPortalz 2021-04-26T09:39:53Z

Quirky and fun with nice funky music. I didn't understand how the eggs work at first, but the game is quick and intuitive so after a couple of tries I soon worked it out.

Pimble! by PirateHearts 2021-04-28T13:19:32Z

This is an interesting idea for a game. It's intuitive and familiar, but still feels fresh and original. The sound effects and visuals are good, and I particularly like the little details like particle effects and screen shake. The only thing that bothers me is that it's not clear how to avoid losing. It seems to be almost entirely luck-based, with the ability to keep playing based on how many extra pimbles you find...

Kill Yasuhiro by Spydercrawler 2021-04-28T10:49:43Z

A simple idea that's well executed, given the time constraints.

The time slowdown effect upon taking damage is a novel way of automatically scaling the difficulty as the player makes mistakes, but the way it's currently implemented makes the game feel a bit unresponsive, especially when you're near death.

The visuals are generally pretty good, but I think some sort of walk animation, or at least a footsteps sound effect, would have helped to make the character feel less like he was floating.

My main complaint with the game is the lack of a hitpoint bar for the boss, or at least some kind of feedback to make it clear that I'm making progress as I hit him. He has quite a lot of hitpoints and by the end I was starting to wonder if I was even hurting him.

One little detail I liked was the ability to strike arrows out of the air, but I was disappointed at not being able to do the same to bullets.

Swarm! by Ghost_Wave 2021-04-28T12:37:14Z

The graphics and music are good, and the basic gameplay idea is fun and unique, but unfortunately it got boring before too long. Other people have suggested adding more types of enemies, and I think that might have helped, but making the difficulty increase more quickly would probably be an easier way of keeping the game more engaging.

Hexworld by icxon 2021-10-06T12:16:22Z

The presentation was great. The music and art worked together to make for an amazing game-world.

Unfortunately, I didn't find the game-play itself very engaging. Perhaps there was depth to the combat that went completely over my head; if so, a little bit more in-game help might have made it easier to engage with.

Tama Town by MaggardJosh 2021-10-04T06:59:45Z

The idea is neat and the execution is quite good.

Unfortunately, after the first few levels, I found the game-play more frustrating than fun. I'm not certain why I found it frustrating but I suspect the rotating field of view makes it makes it feel like the ball moves in unpredictable ways because relative gravity is always shifting... I don't get motion sickness from playing games, but after this I have started to empathize with people who do!

The issues with the spinning camera aside, the music fits the feel of the game very well, the sound effects work well without being distracting, and the visuals are simple and easy to understand. Good job!

Tama Town by MaggardJosh 2021-10-04T07:17:17Z

The "rain" in background is a really good idea and would probably be enough in a slower-paced game, but I think it doesn't stand out enough when you're already concentrating on steering and trying to keep the ball under control. The earlier, simpler levels were definitely enjoyable!

Experiment #56 by ildfuglen 2021-10-04T13:46:29Z

Funny, cute and interesting.

It took me a little while to get my head around how the controls work, but once I did, they felt intuitive and responsive.

exclamation_mark by esenti 2021-10-04T09:34:59Z

I love this kind of elegant simplicity!

There are little things that could be done to improve it (for instance, it would be nice to control with the arrow keys rather than A and D), but if you start adding too many things, you quickly lose the simplicity that makes this interesting.

The Salatroitsk Incident by DrunkardWolf 2021-10-09T09:26:18Z

I enjoyed this!

The atmosphere was great and I loved both the sounds and visuals a lot. I think the lack of music really helped the maintain the feeling of tension in the game.

My main criticism is that a lot of the sound effects were a little bit too video-gamey for my taste. They broke my immersion somewhat and made the game not quite as spooky as it could have been. Instead of bleeps and jingles, I think the sound of clicking switches or rustling equipment would have worked better.

I didn't get lost while playing, but I can understand why some people complain that they did. The buildings and landmarks in the background were really good, so perhaps positioning something distinctive behind the car (like the Ferris-wheel) would make it easier to find the way back there?

Anyway, these are minor complaints. I think you did a really good job.

A puzzle with a cube and lazers by A.Bond 2021-10-04T13:01:24Z

Nice clean graphics (for me, at least) and simple, easy-to-understand animations (though I don't quite understand what's going on with the end-of-level animation)

The idea of the lights going out when you turn off the lasers is interesting, but in the levels I played, it ultimately turned out to be inconsequential.

That being said, I didn't finish all the levels due to, as barrier said, the controls feeling unresponsive. I think some sort of input buffer would go a long way to help in this regard.

StarBase Balance by dimesto52 2021-10-04T07:30:15Z

This is a fun idea.

I agree with zwodahs and cogcomp that some sort of explanation of how to control the rockets would have helped. Most people will work it out after a couple of failed attempts, but it's not a good first impression.

Related to what zwodahs said about leaving a single rocket alive, I'm not sure if it's a bug or just an oversight but it seems like a single rocket can maintain its altitude indefinitely, so the score becomes simply a matter of how long I leave the game running!

I also think it might have been a good idea to disable the scrolling the view when the cursor is over the control panel. It's a little bit distracting when everything moves around as you change the rocket power.

The music and art are nice, by the way. Simple and easy to understand. :thumbsup:

Gunstable Tanks by Gus the Shark 2021-10-05T03:37:44Z

Good game!

The graphics are clear and easy to understand and the controls are simple and responsive.

The dash mechanic is a neat way to make it possible to dodge enemy attacks without making the game feel too fast-paced, but when playing the game I mostly used it to dash towards the goal line as quickly as possible. I did have trouble activating the dash sometimes, but I suspect I just wasn't performing the input correctly.

The idea of the breaking gun is neat, but in practice it feels no different to an ammunition gauge with a special animation and model when you run out of ammo. I realize that being hit by enemies will also damage the gun, but since the player is generally trying to avoid being hit anyway, it ultimately felt like it didn't have much impact on how I played the game.

Applying the system to enemies as well as the player did sometimes encourage me to target enemies quickly before they use up their guns, but just as often it led to me ignoring an enemy, knowing that he would soon run out of ammo and become harmless.

One place the system did come into play nicely was with the boss, and how it followed the classic shmup boss trope of how you destroy all of its weapons. It was immediately clear how to approach the boss, even without prior knowledge of this kind of boss design.

A Long Way Home by Alexascher 2021-10-09T09:47:12Z

At first I found the game a little bit frustrating, but once I started to understand how the mechanics of the game worked, it only took me a couple more tries to beat the game. I'm not really a fan of long tutorials that spell everything out, but I suspect perhaps if the game was just a little more clear about how things worked, it might have saved me that initial frustration.

Aside from that, the game was lovely. The music was nice, the art was pretty, and everything came together in support of the style and mood of the game.

UnicycleBot by qazwsxedc121 2021-10-05T04:11:01Z

I like the idea and the little cycling animation is pretty cool. The parallax background also helps emphasize the sense of motion, too.

I think basing the score on distance traveled (with a bonus for coins collected) would have made the game a lot more fun. The level layout seems to be extremely random and, combined with the difficulty in controlling the character, it makes the scoring feel unfair and based more on what level gets generated than on how well you play. (for example, on time I was presented with a row of coins to collect, but on another attempt I there was nothing but ramps and spikes without a single coin in sight.)

Time Rift by Unrivaled Super Hottie 2021-10-10T05:35:39Z

This game was really visually striking! The lighting, geometry and effects all looked really interesting!

The design of the game was also interesting, but unfortunately I felt like each individual element of the game was working against all the other elements and it made a lot of things frustrating or counter-intuitive.

For example, the game starts off with a timer counting down and tells you you can sprint and vault, so everything lead me to expect a fast-paced _Mirror's Edge_-style experience! But the level design was cramped and enclosed and full of instant-kill traps that made it suicidal to charge ahead at full speed. And instead of respawning me close to where I died, ready to get back into the action, dying sent me back to the start of the game!

The time-traveling ability was very interesting, but felt a bit like an afterthought. There's no explanation for why you can control it (or, earlier, why you _can't_ control it) and there are only a couple of puzzles to be solved with it. I also think the time-travel system needed a bit more testing and debugging. Given the time constraints of the jam, something else would have had to have been sacrificed, but I found it buggy enough to detract from the experience.

All-in-all, there were some neat ideas presented with a lot of visual polish, but there wasn't much sense of cohesion to the game, as if it wasn't really sure about what it wanted to be.

A couple of examples of level-design that made me feel the game encouraged a cautious approach: - the spikes in the first spike-pit aren't visible until you're already in the pit, and even then only if you look down - although you can see the lasers before they kill you, there's no indication that they're an instant game over. (maybe they just activate something mechanism when they hit you!) In fact, since you don't have the time-jump ability yet, the time-jump-recharge bar looks just like an HP bar, so it seems reasonable to expect the lasers just knock off some HP.

Some bugs I encountered using the time-travel ability: - one time, the chromatic aberration and double-vision effect became more severe each time I used it, until it was almost impossible to see anything at all. - a couple of times, I ended up outside the level geometry with no way back in, and had to restart the game - If just go back out of the entrance to the spike room with the closing-in walls, you can still use the time-travel ability but the rooms are all blank and untextured

Domi-No-Mercy by squimmy 2021-10-06T13:32:32Z

Thank you so much everyone for such kind words and such great feedback!

This was my first attempt at making a game based on physics simulations, so a long list of planned features got slowly whittled away with every hour I spent fixing strange bugs and mis-configuration in the physics engine.

@appoxgames I didn't have the time to mention it anywhere in the game, but your units don't always shoot in exactly the direction you tell them to. they have a chance of shooting at a slightly different angle.

@hotaloca Volume control settings were the next thing I wanted to put in before I completely ran out of time... :sweat:

@draperdanman This was my first time using Krita for art (it's good!). I was mostly trying different brushes at random and some turned out better than others. As for sound, I got as far as digging out a bunch of board-game pieces and recording foley sounds for things colliding, but I didn't have time to put them into the game.

@fabernull I could have made the AI take its move immediately, but showing the thinking solved a couple of problems: it let me re-use some of the code for checking player movement, it gave the player time to see what was happening, and most important of all, it ended up looking pretty cool :grin:

@mordrick At first shooting was 100% accurate, but it was clear this gave the first player too much advantage. I originally planned to have an aesthetic based on old late 19th C. tabletop war-games (see the font and the Napoleonic-style cannon), but I didn't have the artistic skill to pull it off, so it just ended up as a very muddy color-scheme. I'm particularly concerned that the game might be almost unplayable for the color-blind. I originally used pixel-perfect textures for the text, but at low resolutions (particularly on web) it was completely illegible rather than just blurry. I later increased the web player resolution but never got around to re-importing the textures as pixel-perfect :sweat_smile:

@pdotjpg I did a terrible job of communicating how shooting works. It always fires with the same power and vertical angle, but horizontal angle is slightly randomized. Sadly there's nothing in the UI to indicate this :confused:

@pvp Thanks! Web audio seems to depend a lot on the browser. If I revisit this game after ratings and feedback are finished, I want to try and implement online multiplayer, but making the physics sync properly over an internet connection is a very daunting challenge.

@listonos for the AI, I did the simplest thing that could possibly work, so yeah, it's not great. Even still, I was paranoid it would turn out very buggy so it ended up being probably the most heavily-commented code I've ever written for a game-jam.

@maggardjosh better camera controls was another thing I wanted to add but just didn't have the time. Usually the simple rotation controls I added are enough, but there are definitely situations where you need to be able move the camera more freely.

@gdman yes, more units and more chain reactions would have been neat, but there were a couple of reasons I avoided that: The main reason was that I had no idea of the performance of the physics engine when compiled for HTML5, especially with large numbers of objects, so I kept numbers low to be safe. A lesser concern was that losing lots of units all at once to a chain reaction wouldn't be very fun... on the other hand, you're right: it _would_ be fun to knock over a whole army of enemies with one shot.

@gus-the-shark I would have loved to have added more kinds of units. Early on I had ideas for machine guns and grenades and all sorts of other things, but 48 hours turned out to be just not enough time to add much more than the bare minimum :slight_frown:

@peachtreeoath The main menu was a surprising amount of work: modelling the cannon, coding the dominoes to show different letters, and fiddling with the camera perspective so all the text was legible at once, despite being different distances from the camera. I'm glad that work paid off!

Among Monolyths by Dekajoo 2021-10-06T12:28:06Z

I very much enjoyed this game.

I can absolutely see how this game was inspired by The Witness, and in a good way: particularly how puzzles are presented to the player before they have information necessary to solve them, forcing them to go exploring to find easier puzzles to act as hints.

That sort of game design is definitely easier said than done, but you did it well.

Unstable Pinball by T C 2021-10-07T07:06:11Z

This is a very cool idea, and it's well-realized for something made on such a tight schedule. But unfortunately, I has quite a few problems playing the game :slight_frown:

I personally found the visuals to be a bit hard to read. Points of interest didn't really stand out, so it was hard to distinguish walls, ramps, and bumpers from the background art of the playfield. It also felt a bit flat. A bit of gloss on the ball, or some glow around the lights and targets would have helped in that regard, I think.

Also, This is probably the fault of the low-end laptop I played it on, but the ball fell through the flippers several times. I managed to make it to one of the later areas but got stuck when the ball ended up outside the play area: スクリーンショット 2021-10-07 16.02.50.png

But there's still clearly potential here and I particularly like how you managed to tie a pinball game in to the theme of the jam. Well done.

Tables & Tremors by SlimmerBurger 2021-10-06T12:22:24Z

Very fun!

The speed-running-style "best time" marker was enough to make me start a second play-through, but my second attempt stopped half-way through. The game was definitely fun enough to make me power through those last few tricky levels once, but they were hard enough to not make me want to bother beating them a second time.

Helico Pter by 3LSTMsInATrenchcoat 2021-10-05T02:47:43Z

I love this!

Very unforgiving but compelling enough that I played it all the way through. I suppose "Lunar Lander, but with more level design" is accurate, but it sells the game short, I think. The level design is fantastic and adds so much to the game.

The controls are responsive, the art work is lovely, and the sound works well. I'm not sure if it would work better with music, or if the silence helps keep the sense of tension you get when attempting a dangerous turn or a tricky landing.

The speed-tun timer is also a clever addition. I wasn't trying to speed-run the game, but I feel like it was still subtly goading me onward nonetheless.

Even the source code is very concise and easy to understand for something made under these time constraints. But do I feel compelled to point out that most nodes in Godot (everything under `Node2D`, at least) [already have a `show` method](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_canvasitem.html?highlight=show#class-canvasitem-method-show).

Unstababel by ubershmekel 2021-10-04T07:20:50Z

I like the sound effects. They really suit the simple, playful style of the game.

I don't know if my screen just isn't wide enough, but when I had bought all of the blocks, the building area became so crowded that I'd sometimes lose pieces off the side of the screen!

Whatever the case, I quite liked this game!

Harry by Owl_Skip 2021-10-04T09:01:53Z

Beautiful game. I like the writing and the presentation is fantastic. The visuals and music tie together really well to support the story.

I agree with retrisma and rjhelms, though, that the text displays a bit too slowly. It also would have been nice to have seen more interactivity somehow... but I imagine that would be a lot of work to implement for a story like this.

I wanted to take a look at the source code, but the linked github repository is empty! :anguished:

Harry by Owl_Skip 2021-10-04T09:24:51Z

@owl-skip Thanks! I was curious to see how the dialog text was stored and parsed.

@zarkonnen I had exactly the same thought recarding mmacevedo :grin:

Unshippable by MikoziQ 2021-10-05T12:45:07Z

I like the idea and the clean, simple graphics.

The game-play itself didn't quite "click" for me, and I think the main reason was that it felt more about trying to guess what the crane is over, rather than actually positioning the containers and balancing them on the boat. Your idea of a "highlight" option is a good one, but even just tweaking the lighting to be from directly above would let you use the crane's shadow to line things up.

I also had some trouble remembering how much the various containers weighed, which is a problem when the heaviest ones are ten times the weight of the lightest. Writing the weights on the containers themselves probably wouldn't suit the clean aesthetic of the game, but a hint or reminder somewhere in the UI would have helped.

There were also handful of bugs and stuff, but I'm guessing you're already aware of most of them and they're a result of the unforgiving time-frame for the compo.

Save the Reactor by Tvorojok 2021-10-09T08:25:30Z

I really like the art style. it suits the feel and mood of the game. The music was also quite good, but I feel like it drowned-out the sound effects a bit.

Fragile Payload by Connor Magson 2021-10-07T03:46:37Z

Congratulations on your first ever entry!

The art was neat. I liked the dithering in the background, and the subtle particle effects worked quite well.

Sadly, I didn't find the game itself fun. Maybe I just don't have the necessary patience, but I also feel like the game didn't give me the information I needed. The changing color of the orb helped a little bit, but I didn't have enough control over my speed, especially when on ramps, to make use of this information, especially when it's possible to go from fine to dead very quickly.

It was also very counter-intuitive that the solution to the large ramp with alternating hot/cold zones was to move _slowly_ through the fire. This would have also been easier to work out if the game gave more information about the relative temperatures of various things.

Nevertheless, I still think the idea has promise, and just adding something simple like a UI overlay showing a heat gauge (or better yet, something more subtle that tied into the game world... maybe a gauge around the orb that filled up?) might have been enough for me to really enjoy it.

I also feel like I should point out that the game is likely unplayable for people with certain kinds of color-blindness.

Still, this is a great effort considering the harsh time constraints of the compo.

Unstable Genius by Doc Kaos 2021-10-05T10:15:47Z

One of the best things about ludum dare is when you see games that are a little bit experimental or try something new and different. This isn't the first game to have live-action cut-scenes, or to be set within a fictional O.S., but together with the off-kilter sense of humor, it's enough to make it feel quirky and interesting.

The game is just the right size, too. it's large enough to be satisfying, but small enough that it never gets boring or has parts that were obviously unfinished. I say this mostly because I always find managing the scope to be difficult in the short time-frame of the compo.

If I had to find one thing to complain about, it would be that the music doesn't quite loop properly (at least on my computer), which I found surprisingly distracting.

Stable Inc. by CorbenG 2021-10-06T11:59:02Z

This was very engaging for a game about reading instructions and pressing buttons. The interactivity of the controls and the sounds and animations when using them was fun all on its own.

I'm not sure if the music added to the experience. I think just having silence, punctuated by the blare of the alarm and the click of the switches would have helped keep the sense of tension in the game.

Luckily there was a volume control option, and not only that, the settings menu used the same fun-to-use controls as the rest of the game. I quite liked that little detail.

A Hard Pill to Swallow by osh.studio 2021-10-07T03:03:00Z

Great work on your first ludum dare entry!

This was good, simple fun, but I do have a couple of small criticisms: - The enemies near the end (antibodies?) seemed to move very suddenly. When there was only one, I could follow their movement, but when there was more, their movement felt very abrupt and hard to predict. A simple wind-up animation just before they started moving might have helped. - The pill turning to a "dead" sprite as soon as I fired made me think I only got one shot per level! The was just me misunderstanding things, but a different sprite might have helped me avoid that misunderstanding.

Really, though, these are minor complaints. This was a fun game with just enough content to be engaging but not so long that it ever really got boring. Good job.

5 Minutes by o_sim 2021-10-04T13:15:19Z

I like these kind of "control panel" games!

Unfortunately, I couldn't work out how to survive for five minutes :(

One suggestion I have, if you revisit this game after the compo, or make a similar game in future, would be to add plenty of feedback when activating buttons and flipping switches. A satisfying "click" sound, a light turning on, a fan humming to life, these kind of things make even the process of interacting with the controls fun, and also make the game easier to understand. For instance, part-way through my first play-through of this game, I because confused as to which toggle switches were set to "on" and which were "off", since the two modes look so similar.

Unstable Piles by nulldreams 2021-10-06T12:35:33Z

This is a fun idea and the art and music are both very cute.

Unfortunately some of the game-play was a bit frustrating. The risk of bombs messing everything up made me just drop blocks away from my tower whenever there was a chance of a bomb, so they ended up being an annoyance rather than adding much to the depth of the game-play.

Also, it felt like the logic for calculating tower heights was a bit buggy.

Nonetheless, this is a very solid game for your first ever ludum dare entry. Good work.

Unstable Economy by DaylonWilkins 2021-10-04T07:47:36Z

This is an interesting simulation, but there's so much going on behind the scenes that it's a little bit intimidating.

I think this would be a lot more approachable if you had been able to add more UI conveniences. Trying to keep track of everyone's names and homes and where they work is a little bit overwhelming, especially when they also have so many gauges and statistics. For example, a warning when a gauge is getting too low would make it a lot easier to know when you're about to lose, or at least _why_ you lost.

Reducing the complexity, or at least adding more information about how all the different values influence the economy, could also help, too, I think.

I do like the visuals of the game. The simple shapes and colors work well for this kind of simulation-based game.

Insecurobot by Xinera 2021-10-04T13:40:34Z

This is a neat idea and there's plenty of polish (lighting effects, screen-shake, etc.) too.

I like the way you have to balance the benefits of keeping the temperature high against the risks of overheating.

A lot of these types of top-down arena shooters devolve into just running in circles around the enemies chasing you, but the falling obstacles and the risk/reward element of the temperature mechanic help keep it interesting.

It seems that if you keep moving, you can generally avoid taking damage, so once I'd gotten the hang of that, the game started to feel a bit too easy.

Shepherd's Island by blinry 2022-04-10T03:03:10Z

I really liked this game!

The core system was simple enough to quickly understand, but had enough depth that the puzzles were engaging.

The only thing that stands out to me that could have been done to improve this is some simple animations to make it feel a bit more dynamic and make it clearer what changed each turn. But I imagine it could be tricky to make it look good, given the way the water sometimes behaves.

Oops, I'm Sinking! by Criobite 2022-04-05T08:06:14Z

This is a neat idea and the visuals of the game are lovely, but there were a few little things about it that ended up not feeling very fun.

The core gameplay of baling water was pretty repetitive and the steering felt strange because it's always displayed at an angle, so it's hard to judge where the boat is heading.

That being said, I generally like how the game looks. The design of the boat is simple and functional, the water level is easy to understand, and the main character is distinctive and cute.

Shotgun King: the Final Checkmate by benjamin 2022-04-10T06:58:39Z

Very cool.

It took a few tries to get my head around how all the systems work but once I had it all worked out I found it very enjoyable.

Shoal by Kerdelos 2022-04-11T14:30:59Z

What a lovely game!

I really love the art, the music, and the general mood of it all.

The gameplay struck a fantastic balance between feeling relaxed and laid-back, while still having a sense of danger and tension.

My only complaint is that the stage felt a little repetitive after a while, but otherwise this was brilliant.

Apartheid by Jungle 2022-04-05T07:32:48Z

This is strikingly good artwork for such a tight schedule.

Unfortunately, when i played it, there was a blue rectangle over the dialog options so they were hard to click on and a few lines into the game the rectangle covered all the dialog options so I couldn't click on any at all and got stuck.

What I was able to play was interesting, but it would have been easier to read with a larger font size, and much less fiddly if I didn't have to click on a little `X` to progress the dialog.

The story was interesting enough that I read through the source code to see how it unfolds, but I would have loved to have been able to see it unfold together with the amazing artwork you put it with.

I don't know if you plan to fix the bug I encountered that stopped me from finishing the game, but I've included a screenshot of it. I was using Firefox on macOS High Sierra. スクリーンショット 2022-04-05 16.23.25.png

Flooded Caves by nusan 2022-04-10T08:18:54Z

This is very neat.

Making this work so smoothly on pico8 is clever enough, but also making it fun and gripping as a game is even more impressive.

The difficulty level seems very finely tuned. I played a couple of games on `Normal` and `Hard` before going on to `Very Hard` and was able to beat it first try, but only by the skin of my teeth, and with a couple of close calls.

This is the kind of game I can see myself coming back to from time to time, which is a level of quality that's hard to achieve in just 48 hours.

The Sea Won't Stop by m11 2022-04-05T03:52:38Z

Nice job! This game has a good sense of humour and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Snooze by LancesCaterpie 2022-04-10T12:18:55Z

Brilliant!

A fun idea and deeply relatable.

Don't Fall Asleep! by Number6406 2022-04-07T13:38:56Z

Godot 4!??!!! Cool! (And a little daring!)

This was really rather fun. I liked the various silly interactions with the items in the house, and the minigames were simple but diverse enough that they were never quite boring. The only thing that bothered me was that the fading-out effect when you get sleepy made it look like the room was filling with smoke!

Anyway, this was great, all around,

BLACK HOLE DEMISE by fraanns 2022-04-08T08:52:47Z

Neat idea. There's a lot of potential here for other things you could do with this mechanic.

There were a few things that seemed like design missteps to me: - requiring an input to activate checkpoints is a bit of a non-decision. There's no reason not to activate them so why not do it automatically? - the black hole eventually killing you didn't really have any impact on the gameplay. Death is easily recovered from and things you've moved don't get reset upon dying, so you can use the black hole freely and simply respawn if the bar fills up. - the flowers seemed a bit useless for the same reason: you can simply die and restart from the last checkpoint rather than bothering with the flowers.

It might have been nice to have seen the black hole system used in some more interesting ways, but the game is nice and concise as it stands.

Cheap Blue by trit_techne 2022-04-10T03:45:27Z

Nice!

The look of the ocean and the waves was really impressive.

When I first saw the buoys and coconuts, I thought they were pumpkins and cabbages and I was quite confused! :sweat_smile:

Sometimes the sail blocked the view of where I was going, which was a little bit annoying, but only a minor issue.

The sudden stop when I hit the invisible wall around the edge of the playing area felt a bit harsh. And also the transition to the ending screen was quite abrupt.

But otherwise this game was great. Good work.

Cheap Blue by trit_techne 2022-04-10T03:54:44Z

I also liked the music! And てるてる坊主船長 was rather cute too.

22h38 by Katutt 2022-04-10T09:26:17Z

This is a lovely game.

I liked the little details, like the way the shadows moved to show the passage of time, or how some things only happened at certain times of day. The visuals and music were also pretty good. I especially liked the aesthetics of how the world blows up, sending all the tiles of the world scattering.

The only real issue I have with the game is that it could do with some input buffering to make movement feel a little smoother. but otherwise this was a great entry.

The Lars Mission by Honest Dan 2022-04-10T13:26:27Z

Very polished visuals! The models, textures, UI, animation... it's all very good. The same goes for the sound effects and music, too.

The gameplay was also pretty good, but a little tricky to understand at first. I did mostly skim past the explanations, but only because they were hard to understand without context.

There are a couple of minor things I could complain about, like how it wasn't immediately evident how compiling the rocket code would work, or how maybe the water tank could have been more obviously a water tank, but these really are minor complaints.

I also ran into a bug, I think: on my first couple of attempts, the plants didn't seem to grow at all, despite me keeping them fully hydrated. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but on my third try they grew just fine and I think I did nothing different.

These kinds of bugs and issues are completely understandable. All in all this was a very impressive game.

Taoreta Mura by farzher 2022-04-07T10:51:19Z

pretty cool aesthetics. the game seemed to start running pretty slow after a while though.

Glub-Glubmarine by Frocto 2022-04-05T04:54:15Z

@graphite Thanks for the tip. We've updated the description to include a brief description of the controls along with a few of the bugs and problems we knew about but didn't have time to fix.

@alexio-games Oh no! :anguished: What browser/OS did it crash on?

Defendor by sapantaha 2022-04-08T09:15:56Z

I've become a little cynical about deck-builder games lately but this was surprisingly fun.

I did run into a couple of bugs but that's to be expected given the time constraints.

It also wasn't clearly explain up-front how drawing works, or when your discard pile gets shuffled into the draw pile, and I suspect most people coming to this from other games like Slay The Spire would have had the same initial confusion as me, but honestly I found the system you had to be new and interesting.

My only real complaint is that by the end of the game I physically couldn't play the cards quickly enough to defend against the ludicrous amounts of damage I was being dealt... Though I suppose that's in keeping with the "Delay the inevitable" theme.

Ludare OS by foxwater 2022-04-07T10:21:29Z

This was really neat! It took me a while to work out where I had to stand to activate the registers (maybe they could have been a little more high-contrast to stand out better?) but aside from that kind of trivial complaint, this is really quite an impressive game.

The Great Flood by cassowary 2022-04-11T14:33:10Z

This was very enjoyable.

The puzzle elements were clearly explained and used in interesting ways, and it was all presented with nice music and cute graphics.

Great work.

Deck And Decay by ThorPalsson 2022-04-07T13:13:21Z

Interesting idea with some nice visuals.

It wasn't really clear to me how the game benefited from having cards instead of just little people fighting or some other combat system. I also didn't really find much depth in the combat; it was simply a matter of always attacking with my most powerful character.

In the end I lost simply because there was no medicine and now way to get enough to continue, which made it feel like the actions I took didn't matter.

Decay Season by Morricore 2022-04-07T12:42:47Z

Interesting idea. I was a little disappointed that the game ends abruptly upon reaching Gecko.

Pyre by Foursay 2022-04-08T12:34:30Z

Solid presentation and polish. Reminded me of Limbo.

I don't know if it was a bug, but the ending just kind of stayed playing and didn't end. I had to use alt-F4 to exit.

Malarkey! by OddSocks 2022-04-10T04:09:28Z

Really great atmosphere.

I loved the use of environmental hints like power lines and pavement to guide the player towards points of interest.

Obviously the game has some little problems (the gameplay soon becomes rather repetitive, for example), but given the tight time-frame we're all working under, these issues are completely understandable.

Aster Defense by emrod 2022-04-10T07:08:39Z

The subtle background sounds really helped build a good sense of atmosphere for this game. Well done.

Harry the Haemophiliac Vampire by squimmy 2022-04-05T06:04:16Z

@lexian, @artilor901z, @crotonyl-alcohol, @jzucc12: Thanks. I'm glad you liked it.

@d00kl1, @jkyd, @charred-axolotl: You're absolutely 100% correct. I doodled the intro art while brainstorming ideas for the jam entry I was working on ([check it out if you like](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/glub-glubmarine)) and I liked the doodles enough to want to use them for something. So I threw together some really simple gameplay as fast as I possibly could. I wasn't sure if the watercolour style would be clear enough for gameplay, and I knew I wouldn't have time to redo it if it looked bad (too busy with the jam entry), so I used a less interesting style. In retrospect, I should have stuck with the watercolour style. The gameplay art isn't just uglier, it also makes the whole game feel less cohesive. But I'm glad you liked the intro art!

@spladug: Yes, the gameplay is very bare-bones. I would have loved to have added some simple AI for the humans: for instance, just making them run away if they see someone nearby get eaten. This might have let the player try all sorts of interesting strategies, like going for isolated people so there's nobody nearby to get panicked, or trying to manipulate the AI to herd people into one big group to eat them all at once... But I was extremely pressed for time so I had to be brutally strict with the scope of the game. :pensive:

Harry the Haemophiliac Vampire by squimmy 2022-04-21T16:00:36Z

Thanks everyone so much for your feedback!

@jk5000, @wongkongphooey, @jacinto-mba, @marvis: I'm really glad you liked it. That's great to hear.

@sunjet, @sokette, @binroot, @blockerz, @allax, @slecornu, @hmightypirate, @nyxkn, @dan-smith, @jul-li: Yes! the gameplay is pretty basic and bland. I chose a core gameplay loop I've made a few times before in various engines, simply because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't run into any unexpected, time-consuming problems. It still would have been nice if I'd been able to find the time to add some more variety to the gameplay. Maybe some bandages you can pick up to temporarily slow the bleeding, walls or other obstacles you need to navigate around, or even just some simple movement for the humans could have made things a lot more interesting. And yes, the gameplay is also sorely lacking in "juice": screen-shake or special effects, or even just sound effects or animations could have made the simple gameplay a lot more engaging...

@gamebuilder, @wouter52, @ratstail91: The music seems a little divisive! Music isn't really my strong suit, especially when it comes to making something longer than a few seconds, but I figured it was better to have something simple and repetitive than nothing at all. At least it can be muted!

@epeachyband, @clemall: I was unsure how to balance the difficulty, but in the end I opted to make it harder rather than easier. People who want to play as many entries as possible don't have more than a few minutes to spend on each game, so I'd rather those people get to see the "ending" than quit the game out of boredom. The spawning system for new humans also tends to spread them out more as you catch more of them, so the difficulty quickly increases as you play.

@m2tias, @oddsocks, @epeachyband, @clemall, @blockerz: The art-style, especially the intro, was a bit of an experiment. It seems like the intro was mostly pretty well-received so I think that makes it a successful experiment! Hopefully I can use what I learnt from this on later games, or maybe even revisit this game later on.

@skruffye This is exactly the kind of disaster his haemophilia medication is supposed to prevent!!!

Click to Continue by Daniel Foutz 2022-04-10T07:42:24Z

This reminds me of the kind of flash games that used to be popular but you never see them any more.

Wormy by PetTurtle 2022-04-05T03:50:06Z

Cool! Cute art and music and surprisingly addicting gameplay. Someone else mentioned the mines and food looking similar, and I agree. I suspect they might be almost indistinguishable to people with certain kinds of colour-blindness. The spikes were also a little tricky to see sometimes but maybe that's intentional...?

None of these minor issues were enough to detract from the fundamentally engaging gameplay.

Battery Low by Milestone Games 2022-04-08T14:07:11Z

I enjoyed this.

It was short and simple and it did everything it needed to effectively and efficiently.

Tax Mage by cagibi 2022-04-07T12:20:57Z

I quite enjoyed this!

using the same resource for both jumping and attacking seemed interesting at first, but it became a bit frustrating as the game went on. Possibly because, when shooting down at enemies from above, the projectile would often hit the corner of the ledge so I would need to jump and attack to hit them, but that means I have to wait for my mana to recharge!! :anguished:.

It was also super unfair that the bad guys can shoot through walls and I cant!!!

Still fun and enjoyable, though.

Volcano by ABRDs 2022-04-05T03:39:43Z

This is a cute, fun, buggy game and I love it.

The feeling of rolling everything into a ball and throwing it into the volcano is so much fun that I don't mind when things sometimes fall through the floor or catapult me into the air. I did experience one crash that locked the game up completely and forced me to restart it (the same "invalid conversion to integer" thing someone else mentioned), but otherwise this was great. The music and art and basic visual explanations of everything all work really well.

My only real complaint is that I wasn't able to throw myself into the volcano to keep it happy when I ran out of other things on the island.

1 Man 6 Bullets by Raphaeltan 2022-04-09T07:11:50Z

This was one of the highlights of Ludum Dare for me. fantastic work all round.

I'm curious to see where you go with a post-jam version, since the idea for the game seems so elegantly simple that adding too many extra bells and whistles could detract from the experience. But the jam version shows that you clearly know what you're doing, so I'm definitely looking forward to it!

Highrail to hell by BadPiggy 2022-04-10T09:00:33Z

The visuals were unique and interesting but I'm sad to say that I didn't find the gameplay interesting.

The first few levels were simple, which is understandable, but the timing on the "Break the exit door down" stage was very tight in a way that felt like a frustrating difficulty spike, rather than being tense or exciting. After finally beating that stage, the game ended almost immediately afterwards... :(

The combat itself was quite good, though. Enemy attacks were clearly communicated and there were just enough different abilities available that, for the most part, it didn't feel like I was just mashing the attack button to defeat them.

Immune System "Engineer" - Can you Delay the Inevitable Skin Breach? by Aarimous 2022-04-05T07:10:47Z

This is a neat game. I think a little more feedback could have made it a lot more engaging. For example a sound effect when linking two nodes even if it didn't fully satisfy the cell, or maybe a more striking change to the cells when they are satisfied. It would make it much easier to tell when something worked and make it easier to tell which cells will damage you when they reach the top.

But, this minor complaint aside, overall it's a really good game.

Malpractice by ikelucas 2022-04-08T14:24:02Z

This is rather zany!

The minigames were all quite well designed: not long enough that they become boring, but also all intuitive enough that it was clear what to do within the few seconds available.

Somnipathy by Cyzaine 2022-04-08T12:47:55Z

Very atmospheric game with solid visuals.

I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be doing, but I was scoring points so I must have been doing the right thing!

The Inevitable Sinking by Alpha Wolf Studios 2022-04-08T14:14:27Z

The gameplay was fairly routine, but it was was frantic and eclectic enough that it works.

Good job.

Halt the Annihilation by WillTurner 2022-04-08T11:17:46Z

It's not often you see such a fleshed-out tutorial for a game made on such a tight schedule!

The basic idea of the game confused me at first, but once I was able to win eventually.

The music was good too, but I found it a little bit too loud. I got similar comments for one of my games so I looked into some solutions and found [one that seems to work pretty well](https://godotengine.org/qa/24377/change-global-volume-in-3-0?show=24463#a24463). You can wire this up to a button or a simple `Input` listener and tweak all the game volume in one place!

Slip or Trip by erikengineengineer 2022-04-07T12:32:43Z

Very polished for just a few days work.

At one point it seems I died even when the arrow wasn't in the red zone. If this is a result of the difficulty scaling over time, perhaps it would be better if the effect was shown visually somehow? If it's just a bug, well, so be it, i guess.

Cold and Alone by David York 2022-04-08T12:24:08Z

This was good!

I think other people mentioned that there's not much to do after you've upgraded everything, and this is true. Obviously it works with the "Delaying the inevitable" theme, but it is disappointing because the rest of the game is quite engaging and it's a pity there's not more. But I suppose that's just how things are with tight deadlines like ludum dare.

Ceaseless Rain by CaptainCarrot 2022-04-06T12:44:10Z

I really liked this game. Everything about how it's designed is efficient and effective, and all the elements work well together, especially the way the style of art and music match the mood of the game.

Also, this is nothing to do with the quality of the game -- it looks great -- but I feel like I should point out that godot has a `BitmapFont` class, so you can create a font resource from an image and set that as the font for the engine's built-in UI system. What you have works fine, and coding it was probably quicker than learning the godot `BitmapFont` API, but it might save you some time in future!

Anyway, you did a great job with this game.

Escape The Pipes by Nathan Evans 2022-04-07T12:49:02Z

Brilliant work for your first jam!

ShortDay Survive by rayriver 2022-10-07T10:39:32Z

I ran into a funny bug where I got knocked out of the playing area. I was able to attack the enemies without them being able to fight back until eventually a monster found its way out of the playing area and instantly killed me :sweat_smile:

Breacher by tukisboolukis 2022-10-07T12:24:22Z

Other people have already commented on the hard-to-read visuals. Yes, bigger or slower-moving bullets would be easier to see, but also sound effects or visual effects when they are fired or when they hit you would also be a bit help. I also felt like some of the hitboxes were quite unforgiving, I was taking damage when it didn't really look to me like I was standing on acid.

Some music would have been really great to fill-in the dead time on your way to the computer after killing all the enemies. If you don't feel up to making any, I suggest wolfram tones (https://tones.wolfram.com/generate). it's not great, but it's better than nothing when you need to fill dead air.

The Curse of Tencond by Harry Alissavakis 2022-10-12T12:55:51Z

This was pretty good! Clever, imaginative, and very polished for a compo entry. The way the game unfolded was fun and silly without ever quite becoming annoying.

Renew my Subscription by cassowary 2022-10-11T13:27:25Z

What a delight! This was an absolute highlight of Ludum Dare for me.

On one hand, I'd love to see more of this, but on the other hand, it's so concise and fully-realised that I don't think there's anything you can add without diluting the experience.

Absolutely brilliant work.

Chaos Exam by Moekiru 2022-10-07T11:23:56Z

The difficulty seemed a bit all over the place, particularly with the computer science quest being the only one that required a minigame -- and a fairly strict one at that.

Otherwise, the game was fairly well put together. Good work.

Star Sweeper by Notan Lemon 2022-10-09T13:44:40Z

The visuals were clear and distinct and did their job very well, but I'm sad to say I bounced off the gameplay. I'm not a huge fan of trial-and-error to begin with, and the way the game encouraged me to play quickly, but then forced me to wait out the timer when I had locked-out all my options with padlock cards, meant it got tedious fast.

The general idea probably has promise though. It's just a matter of fine-tuning the level design and difficulty to focus more on the feel of frantic clicking and less on waiting out the clock when you have no moves left. Sadly, that kind of fine-tuning is difficult on such a tight deadline, and there's not really much you can do about that...

Dreamare by TureGrappa 2022-10-09T14:13:03Z

The objective of the game wasn't very clear, so it felt like I was just aimlessly wandering around, which wasn't great in terms of making me invested in the game, or giving me a sense of agency.

Also, like a lot of people have already mentioned, the room transitions were too jarring. I don't know if it was supposed to feel surreal and dreamlike, but exiting a room to the south only to enter the next room from the east felt more like a bug or an oversight.

Ťɦȩ Ɽḗḋ ꓤⴃὄⴅ by jaybaus 2022-10-11T13:36:41Z

This was a good idea and, on the whole, fairly well executed.

I feel like there was a bit of an over-reliance on keypads -- They look identical and it took me a couple of loops to realise there were multiple keypads. It also made the puzzles feel a bit samey. Perhaps adding full-text passwords or maybe a multi-dial combination lock would have helped (though that would obviously take time you probably didn't have).

That being said, there was a surprising amount of variety in way the various combinations were hidden. I ended up doing a lot of screen-shotting, though, and I think if the game had added something to make this less necessary (maybe a simple quest-log or even just more striking and memorable passwords) it would have felt much more complete.

Good work.

Grim Light by Forik 2022-10-07T11:07:16Z

This is visually quite impressive and the atmosphere was very well-crafted. I didn't find the gameplay very engaging, and the ending was a little bit disappointing, but the way the sound and visuals all came together at least kept me hooked long enough to see the ending.

Grim Light by Forik 2022-10-07T12:16:30Z

@forik Ah! Thank you, I see now. I didn't realise it was an evil witch. Maybe I should have worked it out from the evil witch laugh... :sweat_smile:

Katuns Fall by MaxBro 2022-10-09T14:07:15Z

There are a lot of rough edges (as is to be expected for a 72-hour game), but the game is not without potential. However, it seemed like I was able to build mines and lumber camps wherever I wanted and the monsters would mostly ignore them, so I had all the resources I wanted and didn't really find any challenge to the game before I got bored. You'd need to come up with a good solution to this for the game to really shine.

Bullet Hellth by Explosives101 2022-10-07T10:22:36Z

This was an interesting idea but it seemed like there were some bugs in the execution (particularly relating to pathfinding). It also seemed like enemies sometimes took as many as three shots to kill, but would only drop two shots worth of HP, which makes it seem a bit fatalistic and not as gripping as it could have been.

Dichotomy by StudioCherno 2022-10-07T09:56:20Z

The visuals and music were great, but I found the trial-and-error gameplay to be a bit too tedious for me to stick it out to the end. Some way to speed up the timer when I was finished entering my moves would have helped a lot, especially because the presentation and polish of the game were great.

There was also a bug(?) wherein if I entered my moves too quickly, the cube would attempt to move into a square before it had finished spawning, which would kill me. This certainly didn't help with the impression the game first gave me of being a little tedious.

Escape From Post-apocalypse by Gnum_ 2022-10-07T10:16:00Z

Other people have mentioned it, but the view pulls to the right constantly and I fell through the elevator at the end, so I don't know what was supposed to happen after that. Otherwise, the game seemed mostly complete; things did what they were supposed to, nothing crashed, and I was able to move around and complete the quests. Good work!

Pillagers Plague by bcollins0000 2022-10-09T14:20:55Z

This was a neat idea and I agree with other people's comments about how it solves a problem lots of tower defense games have where you're encouraged to place all your towers as far forward as possible.

That being said, I think a little more polish would have gone a long way to making the gameplay feel more engaging. The transition between levels was so abrupt it was almost confusing, and some sound effects or even just a little more visual effects would have made it much clearer when important things where happening, like enemies being killed or the castle taking damage.

Encoded War by KokkakNiphon 2022-10-09T13:57:52Z

I really like the idea and the way it's presented is great. Unfortunately I had trouble trying to work out how the game expected the timing of dots and dashes to work, and the ten second wait between receiving a message to be sent, and being able to send that message, was frustrating enough that I didn't have the patience to keep trying to work it out. An option to say "yeah, I know what to send, let me send it now" would have been sorely appreciated.

Swipe For Victory by FrostPower 2022-10-07T12:57:53Z

First-person platformers are very hard to make fun. not being able to see exactly where you'll land makes things frustrating to begin with, and without features to make it more forgiving (for example a double-jump), things only get more irritating.

Unfortunately in this game, the extremely slippery controls and a complete lack of convenience features (like jump-buffering) only make things worse.

I also don't understand what you were aiming for when designing levels and gauging difficulty. normally, difficulty is there to give the player a sense of achievement when overcoming a challenge. in this game, the levels simply felt unfair and when the player finally clears an obstacle, it feels more like luck than anything else; there's very little sense of achievement. What's more, in some cases the player gets launched so far that they have to wait for a long time before they die and can try again, which only compounds the frustration.

There's a noteworthy comment in this interview with Koji Igarashi (https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/a-i-bloodstained-i-q-a-with-koji-iga-igarashi), where he says that they ensured the bosses were fair by requiring the developers to defeat them without taking damage. I wonder how reliably you're able to beat your own game, @frostpower, without dying.

That being said, the game is complete and playable and from what I can tell is largely free of bugs. This kind of game is especially hard to make fun, so you were starting at a disadvantage, and you deserve recognition for what you were able to achieve in the short timeframe you had available.

Swipe For Victory by FrostPower 2022-10-09T13:29:49Z

Thanks for taking the feedback in the spirit it was intended. I've always found it hard to find honest feedback, and even when people tell me something I already know, I find it useful to compare what they focused on as problems as compared to what I thought were the major issues. Hopefully I've been able to be helpful in some way.

Run hunt repeat by Rafale25 2022-10-07T09:53:29Z

What a clever idea!

The presentation is a little spartan, but not enough to be off-putting. In fact, it works pretty well as a distinctive style for the game.

I particularly liked some of the emergent gameplay effects that occur, such as goading enemies to get close as possible to you so you can catch them easily when the timer flips. It makes for an interesting risk/reward system.

Fairy Feeder by recursiveanomaly 2023-01-14T11:00:54Z

This was pretty neat and I liked the little twist when you do the harvest. However, after the first harvest, the game didn't do anything to make me feel like it was building towards something (more progression, an ending, or anything else) so I didn't really feel compelled to keep playing after that. sorry! :sweat_smile:

Wurmi by joewan 2023-01-13T13:20:34Z

This was cute and fun. I think even some simple music would have done a lot to add to the mood of the game, and some simple animations would have made moving around the levels a lot more satisfying. But aside from these minor criticisms, I thought this was pretty good!

Furious Farm: Total Reap-Out by TRASEVOL_DOG 2023-01-17T12:55:47Z

This was really cool. One minor complaint is that while it make sense logically that the number of "contestants" gets whittled down each round, from a gameplay perspective it felt a little bit backwards: the game gets simpler and less hectic as it progresses, rather than developing into something more complex as you play...

Unseen Queen by cottontshirtz 2023-01-19T07:45:37Z

This is a pretty cool idea, and competently executed, too.

But, to be honest, I think the scale of the game exceeds the number of UI conveniences available: scrolling is a bit too slow for such a big map, animations are a bit too slow when you're trying to control so many units, that sort of thing...

But the game was still fun! Thanks for finishing it.

Crop Circle by Rulrite 2023-01-13T13:32:19Z

The gameplay felt a little bit frantic and random, but the visuals were engaging and the sound and music were both great so I still enjoyed it. You already seem to have a pretty good grasp of what went well and what needs work, but Aside from the points you've already outlined yourself, my main sticking point was that the combination of random factors and a very simple control system made it feel more luck than skill-based, so I didn't really feel compelled to keep trying to beat my best score. But, to be fair, this is mostly a knee-jerk impression, rather than a carefully-analysed conclusion.

Squirrelativity by cassowary 2023-01-17T12:44:11Z

This was really fun! Everything worked really well together—the gameplay, the sounds, the visuals—to make a lovely, relaxed experience.

Blood Harvest by Efilheim 2023-01-14T10:58:36Z

The visuals and audio were great and the idea was pretty neat too. Unfortunately, it seemed like most of the time, the easiest way to finish each level was to just run straight to the exit and ignore all the enemies. Perhaps if there had been a little more polish to make the combat feel really satisfying (maybe some stuff like screenshake or framestop?) then I might have wanted to engage more with it, but obviously it's hard to find the time for that when you only have a few days. Another idea might have been to add more shadow areas. A ticking clock does a lot to encourage people to rush through, so it might have helped to design levels so the player had more opportunities to wait for an opportune moment to strike, rather than just feeling like they may as well rush past, since the time spent waiting would cost more health than the enemy can deal as they dash past...

Soil and Toil by squimmy 2023-01-27T14:45:45Z

@diesdas, @paroxysmal, @dkdwrek, @dizzy, @adam-gould, @imyellowfish, @secrt101: Thanks very much for playing! I'm glad you liked it :)

@zbugba: Sorry! The game engine I used has pretty patchy HTML support right now. I'd like to be able to find the time release an improved version later and hopefully the engine will have better HTML support by then.

@likirus: Thank you. I'm glad you liked it. I used a default font and I think it's displayed at a lower point-size than it really supports, so it looks blurry when up-scaled. If I update the game, I'll probably replace the font with a more pixel-art-friendly one, which should help with that.

@tildecat: The music was pretty rushed, and I think it shows. But I'm glad you liked the game nonetheless!

@greenradiation, @tesseract, @sibi: Thanks for playing! Once you reach more than about 30 food, you have enough leeway to play optimally and things get much easier. I wanted to add some kind of complication that starts making things trickier as the game goes on, but I didn't have time...

@lizelive: The game has a problem with getting easier as it goes on, so you're right that an upgrade system is probably not a good idea, but I do want to add something that introduces more complexity as the game goes on.

@cassowary: Thanks very much for playing! To be honest, I'm not 100% happy with the UI, myself. I tried out a few different designs and eventually had to settle for the least bad one. The game invites you to try and plan ahead but the UI works against that, so I'll need to think about how I can improve the UI to make that work.

Click On Fish by Pomo 2023-01-13T13:44:35Z

This is a really clever idea and I like that there's online leaderboards. In general it just felt really polished and well-realised. But it was just too stressful for me to have more than a couple of attempts!

Farmula Grain Prix by Chase of Bass 2023-01-20T03:05:12Z

This is really fun! I was a bit confused the first few times I tried it but luckily I didn't bounce off it, because it's very enjoyable.

Wheat Master by nyxkn 2023-01-15T05:56:15Z

This is pretty neat! The graphics, sound and music are all great.

But, for some reason the gameplay didn't quite hook me, and after a few upgrades I just left it idling until I reached 1000 points to win. I think it might have been that all the subsequent upgrades are just slightly bigger/faster versions of the first rank in that upgrade — the fundamental gameplay is the same whether you have level-1 auto-harvest or level-3 auto-harvest.

I also found that the plant/harvest loop sort of collapses when you realise you can ignore the planting bit by just double-clicking whenever you harvest. I think this works to the game's detriment, and it might have been worth doing something to prevent it, like perhaps giving the harvest action a half-second animation that has to complete before new crops can be planted in the same place.

These complaints aside, the game was good. It felt polished and complete and was generally a nice, chill experience.

Wheat harvest paradox by KenForest 2023-01-13T12:40:36Z

The atmosphere of the game is great. At first I didn't quite understand what "time goes backwards" meant exactly but on the second day when I saw my harvester from the first day, it all made sense. It was a very striking visual that clearly and immediately explained what was going on.

The Feudal in the Rye by echerry 2023-01-17T14:13:58Z

This is good! There's a really solid gameplay loop here with great visuals to support it. Some things were a little unclear to me (what do fields actually do aside from get in the way of new buildings??) and there's plenty of scope to add UI polish, but otherwise it was a fun little experience.

Pointless Harvest by WouterK12 2023-01-13T13:01:26Z

The audio and visual effects when harvesting crops feel great, but for some reason the progression system didn't really hook me. Visually very impressive nonetheless.

King of Veggies by pinchazumos 2023-01-17T14:53:02Z

This is really good! There's not really much else to say about it... I suppose there's room for a little bit more polish, like maybe a bit more impact when placing a card or when harvesting, but honestly the core gameplay is so fundamentally neat and well-realised (and well-balanced for a jam game!) that it's very fun as it is.

The Harvester by flanne 2023-01-17T13:59:36Z

This is a neat idea for a game. Aside from some inconsistent behaviour (bugs?) around when enemy attacks are telegraphed, I think the main thing that bothered me was that hits didn't feel like they had much impact... maybe because there was no sound for an attack landing? (unless this is also a bug? I played on firefox, if that matters). Anyway, aside from that, this was a cool game!

Fleshy Friend by Fluri 2023-01-17T12:49:53Z

This is fun!? I'm not really sure I _get_ it, but it was an interesting experience.

BLOOD HARVEST by drowsy 2023-01-19T07:16:48Z

The audio and visual work was pretty great, but I found the gameplay a bit frustrating.

Is there some sort of audio cue for the braziers going out that I didn't notice? Because having to stop the other minigames to go and check on them really interrupts the flow of the gameplay. It also felt like sometimes both braziers must have gone out almost at the same time because I would sometimes lose only a few seconds after checking both of them.

It might have also been nice to have a bit more variety in the minigames...but honestly what you have here is already pretty good and the basic idea works well, I think.

Air Delivery by pianoman373 2023-05-03T13:44:17Z

This was cute and fun and polished. Very nice. The combination of the music and the floating island setting reminded me a lot of Cave Story.

Haitatsu Delivery Technologies by ghost-in-the-toast 2023-05-02T16:43:32Z

Cool graphics and catchy music, but the flying enemies were a bit annoying and I felt like the boss fight dragged on a little too long. It was neat to see a game with voice acting, though!

Neural Rot by Angela He 2023-05-02T15:54:11Z

This was pretty compelling, but it keeps crashing on me:

``` ERROR: Condition "slot >= slot_max" is true. Returning: nullptr at: get_instance (./core/object/object.h:972)```

It looks like [a bug in the engine](https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/master/core/object/object.h#L971) so it's not something you can be held responsible for.

I'll just rate based on what I was able to play (up to just a little bit after meeting the scientist).

eelBay by Peco 2023-05-04T07:56:42Z

This is clever and fun and I quite like it.

It is a bit frustrating in a timed game when you have to spend the first few seconds waiting for the first boat to arrive, but i suppose it gives you time to organise your starting eels if necessary.

I think you could also add some tension to the end of the round by adding a ticking clock or some other kind of warning that time is about to run out.

Otherwise, this is a pretty good game.

Special Delivery by Ismael Rodriguez 2023-05-02T16:16:09Z

This was very fun. I love the imaginative ways you used the limited control scheme. The art and music and everything was all great, too.

The Pigeon Post Principle by cassowary 2023-05-02T15:34:14Z

Nice work. Lovely music, cute art, and interesting puzzles. I think my favourite is #14.

Supply Heroes by SvenErik 2023-05-03T14:57:43Z

I love the idea, and the graphics and sound effects are great, too. unfortunately, the gameplay involved too much waiting to hold my short attention span :pensive:

Chain Mail by AdamCYounis 2023-05-02T17:19:17Z

The art and music are very impressive. Some parts of the interface were a little confusing, and it was a bit boring just clicking through the day when all your guys were out on missions, but otherwise this was a fun little game.

Pro Epistula Mori by squimmy 2023-05-03T12:58:03Z

@smoky01 such is the tragedy of war :(

@saviqq the font used in dialog and buttons is [m6x11](https://managore.itch.io/m6x11) by [Daniel Linssen](https://daniellinssen.games/)

@cinterre I was thinking of adding a message at the end of the game to tell you how many memorial plaques were sent to Mrs. Parts after the war, but that seemed a bit dark so I added the timer and made it show the time to complete instead.

@eharp, @calamador yes, I really should have added an exclusion zone around the delivery areas, not just because it can kill you unfairly, but also because the General and the Major are sensitive souls who shouldn't have to put up with breathing poison gas and being shot by artillery...

Rail Blazer by alanxoc3 2023-05-02T17:04:24Z

This was pretty neat. I particularly like the pixel art. However, after connecting the railway to all of the towns, collecting the $200 was a bit boring and felt like busywork. Victory is pretty much guaranteed at that point, so collecting the money seems a bit redundant.

30 Minutes Or Your Potion's Free by Rustywolf 2023-05-04T08:19:10Z

Pretty full-featured for a compo entry! There's lots of little ways you could have polished this up a bit, but what you've got here is already impressive for just 48 hours.

Deliver the baby! by Enad96 2023-05-03T14:28:21Z

This was fun. the controls felt a little wonky at times, but it's mostly fine. Very silly.

Paddy's Portage by Spacespytv 2023-05-03T15:28:27Z

This was cool. I feel like it struck a good balance between puzzle elements and timing/platforming challenge. My only minor complaint is that there were some places where the challenge felt "fake": mostly places where there were lasers but the player is almost guaranteed to already be carrying the box anyway. But this is a pretty minor complaint. The game was fun overall.

Unsafe Delivery Co. by MorePixels 2023-05-04T08:09:42Z

Not bad. It would have been cool to have seen some alternate routes to get to places. If there were quicker but more difficult ways to get to some places, it would have added an interesting risk/reward element to the game, I think.

Delivery Champ by Brandon Campbell 2023-05-03T13:24:07Z

this is very silly but quite fun. at a certain point, waiting for the baby crib to return becomes the limiting factor in how fast you can deliver the babies... LD53babies.png

The Bear of Bad News by Daniel Username 2023-05-02T17:44:03Z

This was fun! Two of the minigames looking very similar at first glance, which was a bit confusing when the time limits are so strict, but I was very impressed with both the art and the writing.

Machine Meltdown by Stefan Funke 2023-05-04T07:44:30Z

I think other people have already mentioned how the art is great and that it would be better if touching the robot didn't hurt you, or how there should be clearer telegraphing of incoming attacks. I'd also like to suggest that the player should become invincible for a fraction of a second after taking damage, otherwise the machine-gun attack can wipe out almost your entire HP bar if you're standing in the wrong place when it fires.

Otherwise though, I agree with the sentiments about the art, and also the animation. good job.

The Night Witches by Kultuk 2023-05-03T15:42:18Z

I really like the art style, and the idea is clever, too. Unfortunately, because the levels are so dynamic and there's no way to see how the enemies are going to move until everything starts moving, a lot of the gameplay felt a bit like simple trial and error... Still mostly pretty fun, though.

You Got Mail! by Kabura 2023-05-03T14:13:58Z

This is pretty neat. The idea is concise and the execution is pretty polished. The art and the music are both great and the one-button control system is a cool idea. My only complaint is that I keep accidentally starting a new game before I see what my score was because the same button to change directions also starts a new game immediately...

Bag Stranding by danmerey 2023-05-03T14:10:08Z

I love the walk animation.

Yuki's mystery by Sevla 2023-05-02T17:26:38Z

The gameplay felt a bit like trial and error. It wasn't clear at first how to navigate the house, or what rooms are where, so the gameplay mostly felt like a matter of just trying every room in order until the ending.

The music was atmospheric and matched the game well, though.

soul sender by aushijo 2023-05-03T14:19:50Z

The controls are tricky, but in a fun way, and the general idea of the game is also pretty clever. I laughed when the truck sprite went upside-down :grin:

Isles Express by Cinterre 2023-05-02T17:51:09Z

Fantastic work for your first game jam. You've done a great job keeping the scope of the game concise. I did find the difficulty very challenging, but I think I got the hang of it in the end.

Am I your "Type"? by pralista 2023-05-03T13:52:27Z

This is a nice, concise game that does what it does well. looks great and plays nicely. well done.

yAI presents Himari, the Beautiful Super Genius Artificial Intelligence by alaah 2026-04-24T02:26:43Z

Phenomenal stuff, and made all the more impressive by being pulled off in just 48 hours.

A Call to Arms by thomas-olsson 2026-04-24T09:09:43Z

Cute.

I particularly liked the music. It really helped give the game a pressing mood.

The Union by GeraldFIngBurke 2026-04-21T02:35:14Z

This looks very cool but there seems to be a lot of complexity inherent in the idea and all of it is front-loaded, so I was mostly just clicking around at random...

Patch Panel by Alex Davies 2026-04-21T02:27:11Z

This was really good. The skeuomorphic controls were really fun to mess around with and made everything easy to understand. Catching the wobbly wires was a little fiddly at times but, that being said, I think the game is much better off with that sort of visceral realism in the controls.

Effigy of the Sky Lords by Purrseus 2026-04-21T03:28:00Z

I thought this was fantastic.

Tight and controlled scope with plenty of polish; this was a neat little experience that didn't overstay its welcome.

R.P.S.G.F. by mr.kvinter 2026-04-21T05:00:53Z

It's kinda like bootleg Inscryption lol. The visuals and audio definitely work for what you're trying to do, but I do agree with what @TheSecondLeft said about the gameplay lacking depth.

Below the Light by Beebo Studios 2026-04-23T02:10:28Z

This was a pretty full-featured point-and-click adventure. Good work! I couldn't work out if I finished it or not --- I reached the underground room but didn't find anything in there except the note... If this is the ending, a little extra hint or even just a "congratulations" pop-up or something would have been nice.

If I were to offer one main suggesting, it would be to play test a little more. some of the puzzles felt very obtuse or unintuitive to me and some playtesting might have revealed that. However, the addition of a walkthrough was an effective (if somewhat dissatisfying) solution to this problem.

Suit Yourself by cassowary 2026-04-21T02:04:46Z

Great stuff. It took me a little while to realise that tiles didn't have to all be connected in a straight line, but once I worked that out it became a lot more fun.

RobotsXRescue by bigwhiteshogun 2026-04-22T05:51:23Z

This is very polished given the timeframe of the jam, and the level design and visuals make the whole thing pretty intuitive without needing much in the way of explanation.

I've not yet finished it (I'm still working through it) but my only real complaint would be the lack of an "undo" button. "Undo" is a huge help for these kind of puzzle games, to avoid having to redo the first half of a level to have another attempt at the second half.

Space Operator by MtWhateverest 2026-04-21T02:12:05Z

The explanation about how everything works felt a little lacking, and I think a bit more visual (and audio) feedback about what's going on would have been really helpful. Little ships zooming around on the map screen would have been pretty cool I think...

Signals and Points by squimmy 2026-04-22T11:58:08Z

@mostlikely I really wished I'd had the time to add a proper tutorial but I'd already blown past the deadline for the compo and was fixing bugs right up to the jam deadline. As for the depot, it's the large brown building in the north-west of the starting area. Using "Inspect" on it will let you buy trains there.

@mtwhateverest I'm glad to see someone finishing this. I was half worried it would be to slow and tedious to be fun......

@geraldfingburke Thanks for your kind words. I feel like there's a lot more work that could have been done in tutorialising the way everything works, and the economy could definitely be developed to be more complex and engaging. I'll give some serious thought to continuing work on this once voting is over.

@tweekus: Sure. Start by placing a rail directly alongside a station that makes a raw material (e.g. iron ore, at the iron mine station) and then continue that railway until it runs directly alongside a station that _consumes_ that same raw material (so, for iron ore, that would be the iron refinery station). Once you do this, send a train along the tracks and it will stop at the raw material station to collect the materials, then deliver them to the consuming station, at which point you will be awarded the appropriate resource.

TranscendAnts by JudJudson 2026-04-22T02:28:58Z

Pretty cool idea. I think a desktop build would have been a really good idea because the performance suffered a bit in the browser. I was still able to finish the game, but I think it would have been more fun if the framerate had been smoother.

Signal Singularities by DrSmey 2026-04-23T02:29:02Z

I really enjoyed this. I keep getting stuck and then leaving it for a while and coming back to try again. Is there a win-screen or does the complexity just keep ramping up indefinitely?

I also thought the polish was great. the effect when destroying a node is particularly fun.

Blip&Dig by ArtemGet 2026-04-23T06:22:42Z

Very cute. Pretty simple gameplay, but that sort of thing is fine for a 3-day game jam imo.

Dot Dash Mash by chybby 2026-04-21T03:36:54Z

This is really quite good!

I like the idea, and the execution is very polished too. Great work.

Warden of the Depths by Alex de la Cour 2026-04-23T11:00:48Z

the parry needs some sort of cooldown. mashing it trivialised combat.

Beyond The Ridge by evil23 2026-04-22T08:41:11Z

A first-person shooter lives and dies based on its gunplay and I'm sorry to say this one kind of dies. It was also not very performant on my (admittedly old) computer: the frame-rate was pretty patchy even with graphics set to "low".

Also the setting was confusing --- why would anyone start a village in a valley full of poison gas? Why does everyone shoot at you when you try to leave? Why aren't the people shooting at you worried about the gas? Maybe these questions are answered at the end of the game but sadly I didn't make it that far.

Cleared for Chaos by Reed Molbak 2026-04-22T06:40:58Z

This is great! The idea is engaging and simple and the execution leans into that simplicity. I can see myself coming back to play this again after I'm finished reviewing other games.

Beacon by MostLikely 2026-04-23T01:33:59Z

Pretty cool --- a neat way to combine military tactics with deck-building. It would have been neat to have had a little more visual feedback about which cards can't be used (e.g. because all the associated troops are dead), but that's more of a nice-to-have, and it's always hard to find time to add that sort of thing in just three days.

Mixed//Signals by MajoMirez 2026-04-21T02:39:04Z

cute little warioware-like

Invert! by Kaspjej 2026-04-21T03:21:15Z

This is an interesting game. I feel like it would have been a lot more engaging if I didn't need to press "Refresh" every time I changed something. It added *just enough* friction to everything that it tipped the balance from "fun" into "tedious"...

Do-roidhicky by Jacobloon 2026-04-22T06:15:38Z

This is a clever idea for a game. Unfortunately it froze for me and there were too many levels for me to bring myself to replay them all to see the ending.

Lasing & Aligns (Run in Browser) by ufen 2026-04-21T02:54:50Z

I thought the art style was interesting but I feel like I didn't really "get" the story. (probably more of a "me" problem to be honest)

Mating Call by Color and Form 2026-04-21T02:45:32Z

To be honest i found it a little confusing. A tutorial (or some other kind of in-game guidance) would probably have helped.

Reflectogram by Mikan 2026-04-24T05:58:04Z

This is a neat twist on the nonogram idea. I only got up to level 7 before giving up but i had fun nonetheless.

Through the Dark Forest by tweekus 2026-04-22T02:42:22Z

The art is pretty cute! I got both the good(?) and bad endings, but the good ending I got completely through luck --- I won before I even saw three bad signals.

SAVE OUR SOULS by steinhks 2026-04-23T06:48:25Z

Great interpretation of the theme. I agree with other people's comments about the speed being a little slow at times, but yeah, it's kind of inherent to the concept... Anyway, good work. This was enjoyable.

Inattentive cashier by YugiMuto 2026-04-21T03:08:26Z

it's a cute little game, but without something to change-up the gameplay a little each level, i didn't really feel compelled to finish all the levels...

Inattentive cashier by YugiMuto 2026-04-21T03:22:45Z

@YugiMuto Yeah, it reminded me a lot of old flash games -- in a good way.

Signal Cut by Liomio 2026-04-22T08:47:56Z

Not bad. I felt like the need to pick up the clippers was a little unnecessary, and the spark's movement along the wire wasn't very smooth at all, but otherwise it was a neat little game.

Tooth Fairy by FLemming1k 2026-04-24T01:42:32Z

This ended up much more interesting by the end than I expected. Nice work.

Treasures Below by HollowsEdge 2026-04-22T05:57:10Z

This is a great idea for the theme. It reminds me a lot of [LIDAR.EXE](https://kenforest.itch.io/lidar-exe) (which in turn was apparently based on [Scanner Sombre](https://store.steampowered.com/app/475190/Scanner_Sombre/). Truly there are no original ideas left)

I ended up playing on peaceful mode because after a few tries on normal i got tired of having to completely start over whenever the monster spotted me. Maybe adding some sort of limited defence against it, or even just a lives system, might have made the monster more fun to engage with.

Chromawalk by Zyertdox 2026-04-21T02:59:42Z

This is a fun and original puzzle game. I really enjoyed it, though some music would have been a great addition i think.

While You Were Here by jpat 2026-04-22T11:38:39Z

This was very clever. Maybe it could have done with a couple of extra puzzles, perhaps, but I think it's better for these kind of games to leave you wanting more rather than drag on and get boring.

i love you, too by tolviere 2026-04-21T05:12:31Z

It's quite impressive what you've done with such a simple concept. The gameplay and story tied together well and the scope of the game was tight and concise --- it's not a game that overstays its welcome.