Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → TeslaCoil
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Tow-Urr Defence | jam | 644 | 3.07 | 2.59 | 2.78 | 3.15 | 3.30 | 3.08 | 2.72 | 52 |
AWESOME game. I think it's my favourite of the ones I've reviewed so far. Turn this into a sort of adventure game, and you'll have something crazy good.
It was pretty easy, but that was undeniably a benefit. It gave the player time to experiment with the elements, think about what they were doing, and try out a bunch of different spells. If the game were too much harder, it would've been about finding "the best" spell and spamming it.
That said, I died at Wave 12, when every enemy spawned on top of me. :/
Good concept, frustrating game. As others have said, the character was painfully slow and dodging projectiles was annoying. No need to get into more detail on that.
One thing that really bugged me was the spike pits. I saw an enemy run into the spike pit and die. In most games, that would be a fantastic tutorial method that shows the player what happens without interrupting the flow of the game. But you describe how the game /switches conventions/, so that made me think the spikes would only hurt enemies and would give me some benefit, and hopped right in.
Part of the frustration was that I was playing as SPIKE NUT. At the very minimum, spikes shouldn't instantly kill Spike Nut. Maybe if they were fire pits or acid pits or something instead, I wouldn't have hopped in.
Eventually I got to the boss area(?), and couldn't beat it. Unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of challenge that made me want to try again. Maybe that's just me.
Awesome game! Upgrading the ship was so much fun. (This was my final result: http://i.imgur.com/REAQirG.png)
Otherwise, though, the gameplay felt a little lacking. The cities weren't really too difficult, and it was tedious to go all the way back across the map to upgrade and restore life.
Also, at times, it felt sort of arbitrary what parts I could place where. I think I mostly figured it out when I made my ultimate sad machine, but it was annoying at first.
Let's see, what else... the theme of using sadness as a weapon was definitely shown in the visuals, but it didn't really fit into the gameplay. The shooter could've been about anything, really.
I can nitpick some more, but at the end of the day, the ship-building was awesome. Good job.
Very fun game! I honestly did not expect it to control well, but it really did. The soccer ball went where I wanted to, but with enough of an arc that you had to think around it.
The baddies were annoying, once the birds and policemen started appearing. If you keep working on this, I DEMAND that you add a jump button. Just enough to get out of being cornered by a policeman when you don't have the soccer ball.
Also, being stunned while hit was really frustrating. The main difference between your game and others is that you can get hit when you're stunned! Mercy invincibility would've gone a long way in the anti-frustration factor.
Well... it was an interesting game. I didn't think you really used the theme of the jam, though. You didn't even seem to 'fight' the robot, so I don't consider the comb and shampoo weapons. Maybe I'm being picky.
The game felt incredibly easy. I think I got perfect on every level... until the arrows disappeared against the robot. Then I had no idea what to do, and it was basically trial and error. That's never fun. A better final boss, in my opinion, would have kept the arrows and been time-based. Maybe the robot was overheating or something and you could only touch it and its hair for a fraction of a second safely. Or maybe just have so many actions that it's hard to do all of them in the time you normally allow for a level.
Well, it missed the mark for me, but I have to admit, a hairstyling game that ends in cyberspace doing a robot's hair for the safety of the world is quite possibly the best concept anything has ever had.
Ooh, very cool concept. I have to admit, though, one thought going through my mind the whole time was "why did I need an account for this?". I wouldn't have minded if it made a little save file somewhere, or even didn't save my progress at all. Making an account for such a simple game just seemed kind of silly.
Another bit of confusion came from the enemies - I wasn't sure what I had to do to fight them. At first, I walked into them and the fight started. Then, that seemed to stop working. I refreshed the page, that solved it for a while, but then it stopped working again and the fights seemed to start way after I walked into the enemies.
Pretty cool game. The intro was fantastic, like people said. The controls were nice and responsive, and beating up the enemies was pretty satisfying. I'm not sure what the goal was, though. I got to a part with three coloured walls that I couldn't get through, and figured that was the end. Let me know if it wasn't. :P
Other critiques... I couldn't hear some of the vocals because the music was too loud. That's pretty minor. Also, the difficulty was weird. The enemies were almost silly in how easy they were to kill, but some of them reappeared instantly, and going back to the very beginning for one death makes it unrewarding to try to try anything new. I wanted to figure out if there was a way past the three coloured walls, but interacting with an enemy in any way besides instantly killing them would just send me back to the start.
Cool idea, but the execution felt a little wonky. Even when I was sure I didn't have a powerup, the effectiveness of my shots didn't seem to correspond to the colours. It seemed random. After a couple tries, I basically just messed with the scroll-wheel at random while firing as fast as possible at everything, and that seemed to work all right.
Interesting concept, and the graphics were pretty cute. One thing that bugged me, though, was how dangerous the black holes were. They kill you in one touch, but you have more than enough health to leisurely wade through enemies. It almost seemed like it was better to ignore the black holes and just dig through the level!
I agree with Tuism, on basically everything. But I'm also going to add a criticism on level design. The one represented by your second screenshot is incredibly frustrating. You start off basically half a player-length away from instant death. That made the long respawn time even longer since you had to wait for the one guy to turn around before attempting the level again.
I also found it very unclear what the rules were, so to speak. In that same level, I took control of the middle-right guy, dropped off the side and exploded. Do the humans take fall damage? It's possible the bottom guy shot me and I didn't realize it, but it really seemed like I died from impact with the ground. That's the kind of thing we need to know about. In another game, I'd just experiment, but the respawn time made experimentation frustrating. (It was similarly frustrating to learn that you died when the time limit on controlling a human expired...)
I liked the visuals, but I could not figure out the gameplay, even after your comments. When my flamingo's beak hit the opponent, it seemed random whether I would score, my opponent would score, or nothing would happen at all. I actually had my flamingo stuck inside the opponent without anything happening.
I thought I hadn't actually completed a match, but I tried playing a couple more times and realized that there just wasn't enough feedback when a match was over. The background stuff would have worked wonderfully to show important mechanics without distracting UI, but only in a game where the core elements are clearer. A nice flash or sound cue when I hit the opponent or the opponent hit me would've been great.
And then the physics were really wonky. The flamingo's heads would pop off, the opponent would get stuck behind the other cards, everything would go flying... the game really would have been a lot better without the spectators, in my opinion.
I felt this game was a little disappointing. I didn't find it particularly satisfying to attack enemies only to have them freeze in place or disappear at random. I would have thought with a sword, I'd be able to actually kill them. Especially since it seemed like the enemies still hurt you while they were frozen! The Goo Sword is a fantastic idea, and I'd like to see this sort of thing as a Zelda-esque adventure game where you harness the powers of goo to defeat evil. As a survival game, I just wasn't feeling it, sorry to say.
Fantastic game! Graphics and sound were great, theme was hilarious, all good. The boss was annoying, though. I spent the whole level on the right-hand edge, since it seemed to be safest. But then there was a huge wheel of jam in the middle of the screen, and the boss stayed in one place, so I couldn't hit him. Eventually I snuck into the circle, but when I died, I ended up back on the right edge and kept getting hit too fast to react.
So I guess I'd recommend some mercy invincibility, and maybe some more action on the boss? It didn't seem to do much, and I'd rather fight the boss directly than die to the same enemy spam that the whole level had.
Those are minor nitpicks, though. Great game.
Very cool game! There was an element of strategy to it that's not like most space-style shooters. The problem being, I don't think the best strategy is the one you wanted it to be. It looks like every enemy gives you the same amount of points. So all you have to do is shoot only the weakest enemies and dodge everything else. That's what I did on my second runthrough, spamming 10-shots at the boss whenever I could, and it wasn't too hard.
Great looking game! The clouds and cities were adorable, and I don't call cities adorable often. That said, I thought the game was really unforgiving. I found myself just wandering around waiting for good clouds because I /could not/ rain on cities without a wall of bad clouds getting in the way. It would be nice if the lakes restored your water supply on their own, just by hovering over them, instead of having to wait for the nice clouds.
Certainly true to the theme of the contest! Beating people to death with a belt and a bible is certainly unconventional. The graphics, though I normally don't like the indie pixel art style, were pretty nice. I have to admit, though, I found the game sort of dull. Blocking didn't seem to do much, so I just spammed attack and hoped for the best. I assume I wasn't blocking at the right time, but it was hard if not impossible to know when the right time was!
I liked the concept, but I found the game sort of frustrating. Pushing walls by running into them worked well, but sometimes I could move them by running parallel to the direction I wanted them to go and sometimes it didn't work too well. I wasn't sure if that was because of something I was doing or if it was a weird physics glitch, since frankly it didn't make a lot of sense for a snowball to 'pull' a wall. It's pretty unforgiving, too. I feel like a slower death rate, but a scoring system based on how much of your snowball survived, would really add to the game.
The game looked great. The art was good and the animations were solid, though a few of them kept going too long (and the jury stopped taking 'damage').
I just wish there was more to the gameplay. There was really no challenge. Pick one combo you like, spam it until you win. I think mine was Exhibit B. In fact, while writing this, I played again just by tapping Up and X as fast as I could, and won with a 600-hit combo.
A system that punished you for using the same combo twice in a row would be great. Or make the opponent an opposing prosecutor instead, who moved around, was harder to hit, and performed the same attacks you could do.
Cool game! The graphics and sound worked well to make a good spooky atmosphere. The 3D environment made the lighting look fantastic and gave it a great feel as you walked by objects. I just have two criticisms. The first is that, as other people mentioned, the WASD and mouse controls are really awkward. I constantly have to change keys to go in one direction just because I'm looking in different directions with the flashlight. Secondly, the game is really easy. I think the main reason is because the glowing ball can grab keys through walls - you should have to actually interact with the keys to collect them. Otherwise you don't even have to explore most of the spooky buildings!
I'm sorry, this was so dull. I get that it's an idle game, but that's no excuse to give the player NOTHING to do. Have you ever played Cookie Clicker? It's an idle game done right. You click a cookie to earn points and buy things that click the cookie for you or produce points by themselves. It's easy to get to a point where you can leave the game on overnight and end up with tons more points, but if you want something to do, you can still manage your little cookie empire.
Here, there's nothing. Give me SOME control over the game. Something to click to train my Animon, or the ability to change around my team, or - the big one - the ability to control the battles myself.
At the very least, add something nice to look at. Having pictures of the Animon would have let me get a little invested in the status of my team. Or some battle animation. Something besides text.
I'm also a little annoyed that it didn't fit the theme of the Jam, and how much of it was ripped straight out of Pokemon. Had you've made them, say, cutlery-mons or origami-mons, you would've actually had unconventional weapons. Battling monsters really isn't that unconventional.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
Basically, I started with Urr smashing bandits. That version of the game was winnable by JUST holding Space, so I looked for the apples as a sort of balancing mechanism. It looks like those may not have made it hard enough either.
As the game progresses, the good apples become rarer and the bad apples become more common. The idea was, at the very least, you'd have to release Space for a few seconds so you could click the few good apples in peace... but it caps at about 70% bad apples, so you still might not have to do that.
Waves were definitely something I should've done. That will be on the top of the list of things to do if I keep working on this later.
This was honestly one of my favourite games I've rated so far. The controls were good, the theme was well-represented, and it was pretty fun to get in a huge pile of shoes and go through them for the best stats.
Problems, though. One - the survival part was too easy. You could outrun all the zombies with even the basic shoes, so when I got two that had Speed 5, avoiding them was no contest at all. Two - the searching part was too tedious. I know that the zombie with my shoes glows, but I didn't know if the glow was too subtle and I walked past it or whether I just never encountered the thing. Eventually I got bored, wandered too far, and died. Also, on that note, the "You need to find your shoes!" text stayed on the screen for ages and kept blocking my view.
Amazing concept. Absolutely brilliant concept. It was just... really frustrating. If I'm walking around with a pipe, the direction I'm walking in doesn't affect how I hold the pipe. I can hold it any direction I want as I walk in any direction. I'd suggest if you take this further, add a 'flip orientation' button or some other control scheme to give the player direct control over the pipe, separate from their movement, so that they feel like dying is their own fault instead of the character deciding to hold the pipe the wrong way.
I thought the game was sort of "bad-difficult". The controls requiring two clicks per sock made it so that you only barely have enough time to hit one ghost, but then lots appear in different colours and there's not much you can do. It's frustrating because if the colours had've been bound to, say, number keys, it would have been fine. That's what I call bad difficulty; when it's the controls getting in the way more than anything else.
I'm sure with more time, you could have made a much better game. The concept is neat and there's some cool stuff going on, but it needed some more hours. :P
It was an interesting game. The graphics looked fantastic, and the concept was cool. But, like a few of the other commenters said, I found the game confusing. The plant trap was the only one I used effectively. The AI was also pretty weird. I think it was better that they wandered instead of all rushing towards the goal, but mine got stuck on walls quite often and only a few of them made any movement towards the exit at all. It was really easy to just stick plant traps in large clusters of guys and kill all of them.
Brilliant idea. The concept was absolutely brilliant. But I'm sorry, it was the most frustrating game ever. Turn-based battle games always have an element of strategy to them. After losing a battle, the player should think "oh, if only I'd done this instead of that, I would've won!". But in this game, there was too much randomness. The only really good move you have is to say "goodbye" or "bye" or something to that effect, but the result of that only move you have is too random to strategize around! Combine this with some parsing, like "get Cleverbot to say a sentence with a colour" or "get Cleverbot to say something mean", and you'd have a much fairer, and more exciting, game.