Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → StanleyGray
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Unfinished Game (Keep the Ball Alive) | unfinished |
Smart, interesting, and unique game concept! Fun to play and well-polished, though I don't think there is a lot of replay value unless you lose. It seems pretty easy to win once you get the basic strategy down (won in 40 turns my first game despite playing mostly randomly at first). The "music" is pretty odd... it's definitely original.
Thanks for reporting your progress - it sounds like you learned a lot from it and that's always good. Nice job on the music and 3D models (no textures, but it worked). I think you achieved a certain "slightly unsettling but also optimistic" mood. The gameplay was basic, but still interesting to see what would happen. I never figured out how to interact with the tree, though (after completing two mini-puzzles near the start).
@Erkberg Ohh, I think I kept rotating the camera around the tree instead of waiting from a particular angle. The post-compo version sounds great!
Nice game. The combat is satisfying and I like the visual style, screen shake, direction indicators, etc. Good use of the theme, with both defense and feeding.
On the other hand, it was a bit too difficult for me. I had trouble killing all the enemies fast enough sometimes. I got the boss down to 10-20% multiple times, but never beat it. I'm curious to know if there is more after the boss, or does the game end? Also, after playing about 10 games or so in a row, my browser (Firefox) seemed to slow down to a crawl, which doesn't normally happen when playing HTML5 games, so there might be some issue there with memory not being freed up over time.
@rialgar Ah, thanks for looking into that! You shouldn't worry about the difficulty comment, especially taken alone. I know it's borderline impossible to balance a game perfectly. It could be the case that I'm just bad at this type of game and others will find it to be just right. Cheers!
Wow, fantastic game! Creative and well-polished. I love the character animation. Perfect controls/interface and sound. There was no music when I played it - should there have been? Also, the game locked up when I switched away for a minute to Discord and then returned (I'm using Win 10/Firefox). Not that it would affect my review, just thought you should know in case you develop the game further.
**Edit:** In the developer console, there was an error about music autoplay being disabled, so I enabled it for the site. However, it still doesn't play. I get the following warnings:
_Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name "autoplay"._
_Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name "midi"._
Nice game! Good graphics/environment and clever use of the theme. The game crashed the first time when I clicked "How To Play", but it worked fine after restarting it.
Cute game. The animation and sounds are pretty funny. It could use a power-up or two for variety. I ran into the "game not ending at 0 ducklings" bug you noted, and another: after the big gnome wave around 2 mins in, the gnomes only spawned one at a time (possibly because the gnome corpses from the wave never despawned).
Lots to like with this one: Great usage of particle effects. The ships/enemies and terrain both look quite good. Smooth controls and solid gameplay. Decent variety of enemies that behave pretty much as one would expect. Nice use of sounds and custom music.
My first run, I didn't quite kill the mini-boss, and he didn't kill me, but I died immediately after. I managed to take him out on my second run, but died again in pretty much the same place. :)
My only suggestions/criticisms: The level feels a bit hectic/cluttered, but I saw you have already addressed that in your comments. I concur with hyunkelw's comment about more distinct player vs. egg damage feedback. Finally, there's not a whole lot going on in the humor/mood departments (which is totally fine for this type of game, but I couldn't in good faith score you as high in those categories).
Pretty fun, unique game and a great take on the theme. The audio was quite good and I was surprised you opted out of that category.
I had the same issue as Ithildin where I had just burned the only stick when the mole explanation appeared, which felt kind of unfair. Running out of sticks was how I lost every time, unrelated to the typing sections (which were my favorite part).
Best graphics of any game I've played in the jam so far, and maybe the best music too.
Just to let you know, I found a bug: I entered the red zone by moving backwards but staying on rhythm. This made me go right through and I ended up behind it, so the game basically never ended until I quit. (It's probably the same issue that nimmems reported above.)
This is amazing. The core mechanic is very creative and contributes to the convincing mood and atmosphere. Great visuals and sound.
One side note, I'm not sure whether this was a "bad ending" or a bug, but after wandering the basement(s) for a while, I came to a dark room where I could no longer bark, and then when I entered the door in the back of that room, I seemed to fall down off the map into complete darkness...
Excellent entry. Good controls, puzzles/level design, difficulty, art, music, sound. I didn't see much use of the theme, though. (Just keeping your character alive is a bit of a cop-out because that is nearly every game ever.)
This was as far as I got... couldn't quite figure out how to reach the exit platform: not_quite.jpg
Phenomenal graphics, almost on the level of last decade's retail action RPGs (like Path of Exile). Nice music/sound and mood. Wasn't too fun to play though, because the combat is kind of clunky. But it's impressive what you were able to accomplish in only a few days.
While brainstorming for the theme, one of my first ideas was "Fish out of water" but I had no clue how to turn it into a game. Seems you figured it out! :) And I liked playing it! Funny game with great artistic design!
BTW, had one minor issue (Windows version) - the input sometimes didn't register if I clicked too fast.
The GameJolt download worked for me. I like that you tried out a lot of things: enemy AI, lighting, story, even a working minimap! However, as someone else noted, there were collision issues and I found myself getting stuck on things I couldn't see (I don't know if it was distant walls or enemies). Also, my HP/RP were dropping fast before I could really figure out what was going on. (I'm not sure what "RP" stood for?) Music would be a nice addition. It has potential if you worked on these areas. Nice attempt for your first game.
@TolMera Thanks for the feedback! That's nice of you to say. Though it's more likely that I will pursue some of the other ideas that came up while brainstorming which seemed more promising, but would take me more than 2-3 days to finish at my current skill level.
FWIW, to meet the minimum qualifications of a "game", it was supposed to count the number of consecutive hits until the ball lands (streak), keep track of your high score, and have a failure condition (limited number of balls), but I ran out of time/motivation. And the player sprites are just my placeholder squares that I took 10 seconds to scribble a face on. It actually pains me to look at it. :)
One of the most fun games I've played this LD. It's well-polished too. I noticed other people commenting that the gameplay is too simple, but keeping it simple is presumably how you were able to finish a full game with progression toward a long-term goal during the jam. I suppose I'd prefer slightly more differentiation from the obvious influences, but it didn't really detract from the fun.
Unlike the previous commenter, the "dialogue line 2" question was the only one that didn't make sense to me. Is it supposed to be a Python-like language where whitespace is significant?
Nice little game! Smooth controls and the art is well done. The neon sign as life counter is a clever touch. I also like your interpretation of the theme. The game is on the difficult side - that could be improved with increasing time rounds (such as 30->60->120->180). I only noticed one minor issue: clicking the "fullscreen" option on itch.io doesn't make it fullscreen (the game window stays the same size).
It's interesting for me to see what a 3D old-school dungeon crawl made in Godot can look like (I plan to study your source code). I definitely can tell a lot of work went into it. I like the virtual pet idea, and it's a nice way to add additional time pressure. Good game overall, and could be great with a bit more tweaking/polishing.
My suggestions for improvement: the enemies attack from slightly too far away and their death animation is too slow. I could pick up extra hearts that counted but weren't displayed. Floor 3 had no pet pickups that I could find, so I had to rush through, while Floor 4 had more than enough. Music would be a nice addition as well. You might want to export to HTML5 for non-Windows/Linux people (if you want more people to play).
This game has a great look! I loved the art and humor. The fire extinguisher was a cool effect. Though the gameplay is pretty confusing and limited. I think it would be better if Verne wasn't so eager to get himself into trouble... I wanted to look around at all the objects first, and maybe play with the cat or stuff like that.
I'm a sucker for card games, so had to try this. It has a nice pleasant/relaxed feel to play - almost Zen-like. The core idea and the card designs are well conceived/executed. My only gripe is similar to what others mentioned about the luck/difficulty (early game = hard, late game = easy), but that sort of thing is expected for a jam game. At a couple points it seemed like I lost a heart for no reason (maybe when my first sprinkler ran out of water?), but then it stopped happening, so maybe I was just missing something.
Cool! You knocked it out of the park with the mood, graphics, and theme. The storytelling/dialogue is pretty solid. I felt it was kind of lacking in the fun department, but makes up for it in the other areas.