Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → the neon shark
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 💀 Soula Cola🥤 | jam | 346 | 3.78 | 3.64 | 3.46 | 3.62 | 3.94 | 3.67 | 3.57 | 3.60 | |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Mailville | jam | 118 | 4.10 | 4.33 | 3.74 | 4.51 | 4.15 | 3.91 | 3.94 | 3.98 | |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | One Fuse | compo | 436 | 3.22 | 2.60 | 4.10 | 3.66 | 3.45 | 3.50 | 2.95 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Unstable Einstein | compo | 234 | 3.54 | 3.65 | 3.41 | 3.21 | 3.23 | 3.23 | 3.00 | 3.26 | |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | SPERMA | compo | 195 | 3.76 | 3.86 | 3.87 | 4.12 | 3.30 | 3.20 | 4.08 | 3.50 |
A simple and effective game about digging. The creatures are quite strange but enjoyable! The level design seems good. I was hoping to have some animations since right now things feel a bit stiff. Adding a tracker for current depth and max depth would be a nice and easy touch.
Nice piece of work! The art style and fluidity overall feel great. One thing I didn't enjoy is that bullets would not kill an enemy that had just landed on my floor -- you have to wait a couple of frames before they can be hit. That behavior kept tripping me up :/ Otherwise amazing!
Simple and highly effective. The highly responsive nature of the game and the cute audio kept me going! Well done! I was hoping to encounter new types of challenges as I went deeper (maybe 280 wasn't deep enough to find new content).
The dancing in the helicopter was the absolute best part. I wanted to see more dancing or character postures of that caliber :)
The spacebar interactions were nice, but didn't need to last for so long -- 2 or 3 seconds is plenty. 15 seconds of spacebar mashing is not particularly fun.
Nice puzzle platforming game. Easy to understand and to play.
Clever little game and play on the theme.
Is there more to the game that I'm missing? I seem to be stuck in the first level. I reach the first doorway (using z/x to elevate the water first). When I reach the door, I'm instantly reset to the beginning. Very cool concept, but I want to play more of it than the first scene!
Would love to see some more juicy animations for hitting the enemy ships and blowing them up. Audio would be nice too :)
Also, a progress meter for the levels would be good since it's tough to tell "how much more I need to muscle through" to see the next interesting thing.
Stellar work! - Would've loooooved audio, but I understand the time constraints :( - Sometimes walking or shooting felt a bit clunky controls-wise. It seems like you have a rather long downtime for starting to shoot and starting to move after shooting. I suppose this is part of the game challenge and mechanics decisions, but I would've preferred a tighter response.
Excellent work dude! See it through and make an arcade game :D
The main menu could have been a bit clearer... but aside that, the game is simple and entertaining. The music is bordering on playful and obnoxious, but in an enjoyable way. The sound effects are excellent for the comedic style. When I reached level two and the music shifted... I was actually laughing aloud, well done!
I accidentally posted this review. Will come back shortly to review properly!
Perfect. Self-contained game with nice progression curve. Has a fun narrative to accompany it too! I was playing on track pad so I had a tough time playing it through. Giving key controls (like K/L) for rotating the sword would've gone a long way for me.
Stellar job!
Solid game! Made it down to 100 something depth before realizing I also had to come back up using the same path! Ooops.
Overall, I really enjoyed the simplicity of this puzzle game. - I wish I knew I had to path my way back up before playing downward for so long. - Could benefit from more types of rewards (higher value O2 or gems) the deeper you go.
Excellent work! The only complaint I have is that purchasing upgrades is very jarring. Every time I purchased something, items would shift in size and location. This made it hard to track what actually happened. Otherwise, AMAZING!
Nice game idea, thanks for checking out my version of... well... the same thing! Not sure I can give feedback without being biased by my own implementation :D The one definitely thing I'd recommend changing is the pacing of the game -- it overall feels a bit slow to progress. Great minds do think alike though <3
Once I understood what was going on (and reading the instructions), I grew to like it. I think that the UI and clarity of what's happening could be improved. For example, the buttons for swapping positions of characters aren't obviously buttons since they look baked in to the world. When the passives are engaged in a timely fashion, the player feels good. A nice extension of this would be to let players select their loadouts (changing abilities/passives).
Simple concept and overall good execution. I could see this being a very successful game with the appropriate polish applied. - Visuals definitely need improvement. (the combat animations especially). - The path planning needs to be reworked; sometimes the units get stuck behind walls. - Better clarity on what each tile will provide when you place it. - Means of spending the currency would be nice (unit perks, new tile types, bonus effects, trade tile). Very clever concept that I'd love to see built out!
I like this game and there's sooo much that I'd love to see added. I played for about 10 minutes before putting the game down. It reminds me a bit of a 2D top view version of Deep Rock Galactic. :D
Feedback on the basic: - The combat system and mining system are too similar and could probably be merged. Upgrading damage and mining rate separately is still a good ideas. - The enemies need health bars <3 - The animations for hitting enemies need to be juicy so they feel rewarding. - Walking around could feel a bit blocky... this game could really benefit from not binding the player and enemies to the grid system. - I felt like I had so much oil that it was not a challenge. The oil mechanic therefore became uninteresting since I totally forgot about it. I was picking up oil at random and didn't feel like I had to choose between oil and ore. - There didn't seem to be a good reason to travel far from the home base (e.g. no bigger rewards further away).
Feedback to go from good to GREAT: - Currently, the game doesn't present a goal for player excellence. My only option is to protect my mining rig, kill some bugs, and make sure I have a bit of ore to heal from time to time. The objective feels like a survival mission more than a quest for thriving. The player needs goals! The goal could be to discover cooler enemies, cooler loot, ancient relics, more powerful upgrades, etc. As it stands, the player's incentive to continue ends after 5 minutes since there is no goal to build to. - The upgrade screen is an absolute tease and there is SO much more you could add to it: Automated healing of the home base, Turrets to defend the home base, A minimap for when you get lost, cooling weapons, faster move speed, ability to end the mining mission early, teleport back to home base to defend or to leave.
Overall, a great concept and a strong first pass at execution!
Definitely is a bit hard right out the gate. Style is amazing, but gameplay needs some polish. - Early enemies come in super fast and are very small. Make them slower and bigger early in the game so players can ramp up in their skill. - I would've loved the ability to jump. I felt so.... static. - Upgrades please!
Great fun for a simple and pure concept! Some feelings I have - The hitbox for the top of the ship feels overly sensitive / unforgiving. - The base amount of fuel should be larger (change difficulty levels by granting more or less fuel maybe). - The death reset time should be about 0.5 seconds (instead of what feels like 2-3 seconds). I spent 25% of my gaming experience just waiting for the ship to reset and that's a huge turn-off for a game like this that rallies around rapid attempts.
That's all I've got. Congrats on this piece!
Outstanding execution! Only two points of feedback: - The death/end-of-run screen should be skippable or faster. - When reaching a new level, the dig button seems to be disabled for (roughly) a quarter second. This may have been by design, but without an animation of the bunny recovering, it feels like the game is not responsive for that moment.
Great great work!
This game knows what it wants to do and does it well. Some feedback: - The mechanic is so simple and so good. You nailed it! - The upgrade system is simple and well done. - Visuals + Controls + Audio are spot on. - When breaching the upgrade barriers, I sometimes felt like I had no means of preparing for what's ahead. A small safety/blanking region would be nice there to make me feel less cheated after the upgrades. - Had an ending that I was willing to play the game 4 times to reach (and clear progress indicator!). Good testament to the addictiveness! - I would've loved to see some more variety in terrain and enemy types, but I understand the scope is limited intentionally. - Sometimes the enemy placements felt unfair... so goes the world of randomized level generation though.
The intro art was quite nice. The concept of going deeper in to the underbed fears (or realities) of a child is a cool thought for sure. Some feedback: - The camera lags a bit far behind the player - The beasts don't follow the player aggressively enough! I feel like I have to keep teasing them. - The hit boxes for the walls are too big and it makes walking around corners feel tedious.
Graphically the game was ok, but the player interactions felt stiff and unrewarding :/ As @tombuston pointed out before, I felt like I was digging randomly so I couldn't be "better or worse" at the game... I could simply spend more time digging until some path was valid. Would love to see some sort of gold/gems that are collectible and a shop so I know I'm working towards something.
Played to completion! Short and sweet. Some thoughts: - The responsive controls were a treat. Beautiful work. - I would've loved if the horizontal motion was 30% faster (because I'm impatient and the up/down felt so good). - The camera when going upward felt slow and debilitating. Ascending would have to be done slowly to make sure you're not walking in to an enemy offscreen. - The sound of going up/down was so damn good, but part of me wished it was about 50 hz lower so it would actually be melodically tuned to the music. It sounds like a synth kickdrum and I was having a blast synchronizing it to the music. - The scraps have no impact on the game aside "completionism". I didn't feel really incentivized to approach them... - There should be a visual tell when an enemy is about to wake up from a stun. - Needed at least one or two more types of environmental challenges to spice up the experience.
Great work :D
Fun concept. Feeback: - The texturing was funky as the player mined deeper. Would be nice to maybe just use a simple block tileset instead. - When I dug a whole deeper in the water region, I couldn't jump back out :/ - Didn't know how to replenish oxygen without backtracking (air pockets somewhere maybe?)
This is an incredible piece of work. It is simple and compelling. It has a narrative that is nicely aligned with the mechanics. Huge bonus points for the emotion/facial expressions of the main character and associated text.
My only feedback is that sometimes I'd be so fixated on completing the challenge that I'd have to ignore the text to pass!
Very cool game! The concept is absolutely awesome and reminds me of a game that I played 3 or so years ago, PepperGrinder (https://igf.com/pepper-grinder). My only issue with this game is that I felt "out of control". If the intention of the game was to feel that way, then I'll reinterpret my experience. As it stand now though, I did not feel empowered to execute on my platforming vision -- rather, I was battling the controls and momentum system to make progress (even when moving slowly). Here are some of my thoughts on this: - The little fires are small and hard to spot (and black-n-white) that they felt like a cheap death. The mines were awesome and fair because they were clearly visible. - The idea of having no momentum change in air is cool and no-doubt part of the core game design. Even a super small left/right control response would make it feel better (to me). As I mentioned, the feeling of being "out of control" was slightly off-putting. - Going out the top of the ground in to the bottom of ground above you felt a bit awkward, but wasn't terrible. Automating that process would've been smoother. - Zooming the camera out a bit would've made path planning easier. Right now, the only way to "go fast and play smoothly" would be to memorize the route. My desire to find a platforming flow was inhibited by not seeing what was ahead; especially since I couldn't change my momentum after shooting out of the ground!
All that said, this is a strong piece of work. Congratulations on it!
Fun little piece - played it all the way through! Some notes: - I enjoyed the graphics style quite a lot! It was simple and pure. - The 2 or 3 sound snippets that existed in the game didn't complement the artwork in a constructive fashion. I think that something more springy for jumping and squishy for landing would've been nicer. - The jumping power felt inconsistent. I had a decent intuition for its behavior, but I had a tough time getting the jumps to be repeatable or predictable. Maybe the power meter could be more visible than the small particles under the player? - Sometimes the momentum wouldn't be reversed when hitting purple objects, but rather totally stopped. This felt like a bug, but may have been by design. - The green bouncy materials were the BEST!
Great work :)
Really enjoy this piece. The art and voice acting are exceptional! The one issue I had with the game is the sensation of consequences. I felt as though I had lots and lots of choices, but I wasn't sure what they were amounting to! I ultimately could just drag and drop random squares to my log and seemingly continue all the way to Eden. Having a more clear set of player milestones and challenges along the journey would help resolve this (assuming that's something you think the gameplay should have).
I was watching some of your streams as you made this, very very impressive work especially given the time constraints. Some notes from playing it: - The graphics are downright amazing. You sir are an excellent pixel artist. - Controls were definitely a rough point for my enjoyment. Hard to command granular orders. - Would highly benefit from visualization for your unit's action plans. - Camera panning felt awkward with mouse alone, keys were much better. Would've loved WASD controls. - Ability to dismiss notification overlays would be nice, they felt very "in my way. - I couldn't understand why some units could be recruited and some could not. - Holding space to move was nice, but the onset of the motion felt to slow (ease-in/ease-out felt wrong. A sharper attack that only has ease-out would feel better imo). - Having units show interactability on hover would be huge. - Seeing the remaining time before a unit can attack would be a nice-to-have. Overall, very well done given the constraints. I'd love to try the game out again when the playing experience feels more polished :)
Love it! Should definitely be made to a full game! Feedback: - The decision of "move or attack" feels great! Nice self-balancing there. - Performance in browser was mediocre... not the end of the world though! - Definitely fix the bug where you can no longer fire :( Happened to me a couple times. - The hook mechanic needs a bit more punch/juice/satisfaction. - The enemies could be more interesting (not always go directly towards player, charging attacks toward player that whoosh past, enemies that shoot bullets, etc.) - Node type that have different effects when reached (damage player, teleport, obstacles, kill all enemies, etc.) - More curated level design.
The art style and controls are great. Two things on my mind here:
(1) The enemies have a predictable pattern, but move so fast that it feels like "last moment" dodging isn't an option. That sort of snap judgement has the potential to make things more exciting imo (instead of just forecasting which side to hide in).
(2) For the duration of my playing, I didn't experience any moments where I needed to just hold down an arrow key for 2-3 seconds straight and make a sharp turn. I think that sort of variety in the pathing could prove exciting in addition to the routine small nudging.
The concept is interesting. I'd love to see this sort of psychedelic experience more polished though. The clunky platforming and stiff interactions detracted from what was otherwise an enticing and strange journey.
There should be a basic gold income that's comically slow. I feel like it's too easy to end up confused as to why you have no gold income :/
Nice work! Some feedback: - The beginning of the game felt slightly too slow. - Sometimes, the player would not jump when commanded :/ - You can jump once while in air, but the behavior just slows you down instead of performing a full jump as a player might expect. - It'd be nice to have a means of engaging with the enemies and not simply avoiding them indefinitely. - Upgrades would be a nice touch if you had a ideas where to put them.
This project is well made. The visuals, audio, and experience are cohesive and immersive. Some feedback: - This is closer to a visual novel than a game, there is no agency for the player and their actions. - The story-telling using images is a great choice, but also a risky one. Sometimes the narrative visuals felt too similar to the background or too static, so they were hard to identify as the focal point (especially with all the extra fog). - The pacing of this journey is too slow. There were a total of (I think) 5 narrative beats over the 3 minute experience. - When finally the prince was in combat, am I to assume he then died in combat because no frames followed? I feel like the story was missing something to make me feel for him. I was disconnected from the main character and had no emotional connection to his life events (being a kid and playing, then growing up and saying goodbye, then getting married, then having a kid and finding a map from a traveler, then going to war and dying). These are all just "things" that happened to this prince, but the player is left to use their imagination to craft a narrative of why they should care. - Finally, the end screen constellations were confusing. I clicked and dragged everything I could imagine, but the state of the game never changed so I assumed the experience was complete. What constellation was I looking for? What meaning should I be gleaning from this?
Overall, the mood of the piece was excellent, but the actual story and game mechanics fell flat. This concept is good, but requires some edits to properly polish the experience. I do highly recommend adding some player agency or intermediary user activity to retain engagement though.
This is fun, but it's very hard to intuit the shooting angle (would be nice to have an arc preview or shadows). Also, when the mouse leaves the game area, the ball automatically fires -- this makes it quite difficult to get the desired power on the edge of the screen.
I LOVE this concept. Spell casting is near and dear to my heart and I love the way it was presented here. There is much left to be desired from an animations and juicyness standpoint. That said, the bones of what you have here are awesome. Great work!
The impact of the shot overall felt great. (1) Would've liked to see some sort of bullet trail / visualization. (2) An ammo system and various weapons / firing rates could be an interesting addition.
The game felt sort of laggy and slow in the browser. I'm also not sure why the interaction was happening on a text messaging app which completely removed my immersion from the time period. The concept here is no doubt clever and humorous. For a game like this where the text is the focal point, it'd be nice to have that part actually polished. For me that means: - Choose the correct visual medium to convey the story (e.g. not a messenger app) - Allow skipping text or having it load faster. My experience was not enhanced by waiting.
Therapists write on notebooks for example. Here's the first thing I could come up with: - You have a notebook on the far right that you can (at any point) open and close to review previous questions asked and answers given. It will have finite info per page, and you'll need to flip through it page by page (instead of scrolling up and down). - When not viewing the notebook/log, the conversation should be more of a text box + face like a traditional RPG imo. You can see their expression and the accompanying text. Much like a real conversation, once the text has "passed" all you have to go on is your memory of reading it (or in this game, the notebook that automatically writes down notes).
The goal here is to feel like a psychotherapist and not like a BFF texting about WW1. Very interesting concept and overall good work with it!
I'm definitely liking the concept here! The gameloop prototype is excellent! Here's some thoughts I have for improvements: - Jumping needs a grace period when falling off an edge. Right now, the player fails to jump if you jump off the ledge a frame too late and that's frustrating (compare this jump tolerance to other game in the genre). - The concept of the combat is great, but the execution feels poor. I never felt in control of my character during combat. The best bet for making progress was simply to avoid enemies. - Speaking of enemies, the snake/worm that shoots stars is the bane of my existence. It fires on a seemingly regular cadence (but lacks a tell animation). If you're falling on one from above to try and kill it, it will simply shoot and kill you. The only means of approaching them is from the side, but even then you can be killed by their bullets... Either make their attacks more telegraphed and less frequent OR allow the spear to deflect their bullets. - I didn't play long enough to get to the point of having magic of any sort. The name implied "Spell"unker making me excited to get some fireballs and ice bolts etc. Don't make me wait for the fun, just give it to me! - The game's focus of collecting resources is neat, but let the player make some decisions with those resources. Let me choose fire ball/ice bolt/spear/whatever. Maybe you've implemented such a mechanic and I haven't gone far enough in yet. But the policy in games defaults to "get to the fun already"; magic is fun, snakes that kill shoot unblockable stars are less fun :p
Excited to see where you take this since it has a really solid start and big potential!
Simple and effective. Played it a couple of times. Took me a while to realize I was supposed to be touching the elevator and facing right to crank and descend. The gameplay gets a bit stale after a while, so giving a means to spice things up (with new enemies or upgrades) would be nice. I think the singing mechanic is charming and definitely something you could've used as part of the combat mechanics!
Simple and fun puzzle game.
Damn near perfect! Some points of feedback: - All the mechanics were fun and exciting to switch between rapidly. - The graphical style and audio were <3 <3 <3 - The character was a bit too slippery for my liking / ease of control. - My watergun requires too much times to cool the engine :/ - Refilling oil needs a more tactile response (the audio cue is too subtle). - I had no idea I could repair the crumbling walls until reading carefully in this page. Maybe a note on that in the homescreen would help. - The time to retry playing is too long! Let players replay immediately (1 second turnaround) instead of going through the homescreen again and waiting ~8 seconds each time. - Game difficulty goes all-in hard mode immediately (too quickly). - I had a hard time knowing the "health" of my drill. There were so many meters, audio, and visual cues that I had a hard time understanding what to even try fixing! I suppose the chaos is part of the fun... but my hope was that the chaos should be the player frantically making decisions instead of spending brain cycles on deciphering the many UI meters.
Great work by all you!!
A strange yet emotional journey. I enjoyed the game much more after reading all of your additional supporting text. Quite abstract, but also beautiful :)
Nicely done! I unfortunately missed the key moment of the game where I'm not supposed to keep falling in to the pit endlessly haha. The concept is pure and creative. The execution and story telling are solid. Some suggestions:
(1) I would've been more inclined to find the "catch" of this game / play it to completion if the walk speed were higher. I understand that the pacing of the game matters and there are limitations in development for a jam. However, the fact that I looked like I'm walking quickly, but actually am moving very very slowly was unusual (not sure if intentional for the mood). If you wanted the player to actually move than slowly, the animation should've resembled a walk instead of a run :)
(2) The twist of this game is clever! (although I didn't discover it on my own, I had to watch a playthrough). I would've loved if the game had 3 or 4 of these twists that the player could discover on their journey. Again, I understand there are time limits involved here...
Great job!
The interchangeable minigames are nice idea for mixing up the run each time. There's one minigame where you need to "press spacebar when the dot is in the middle". I spent multiple runs trying to just nail spacebar in the middle and failed everytime -- it seems like the only correct way to play that minigame is to spam spacebar :/
I played the game about 10 times, so it's definitely got some good appeal and addiction! Some feedback on what I felt: - I'd like more minigame versatility! - Obviously, new maps are fun too :) - There's one shortcut I saw toward the end, that was a nice touch. - The left/right/jump controls didn't feel particularly "tight". Everything was a bit floaty which made it hard for me to want to speed run more times. (Obviously we're in spacesuit so floaty is part of your mood, but it just felt awkward to walk or jump sometimes!) - Jumping and bumping your head on ledges is not fun. If you can remove the hitbox on ledges, that'd feel nicer.
Overall, great little proejct!
The concept here is excellent, but the execution is stopped me from giving it high marks. The joy of this game is that snappy sensation of "reaching" the target and then changing to use the other end of the rope -- that feeling is a good one. However, that fun is hindered a bit by some issues:
(1) It's not particularly pleasant to drag the mouse cursor to the absolute extremities of the screen to accomplish all basic motion. Make that sense of tension less demanding so the reward of contact can be given more frequently.
(2) The first level doesn't really guide you anywhere, it's just floating dots. The level design could use some love to make the player feel like they're on a journey with some clarity and that they're improving a particular skill on that journey.
(3) Use momentum instead of inhibiting it. When releasing the moving rope, it sort of grinds to a halt -- I'd love to see a throwing mechanic here that really doubles down on momentum instead of the rigid stopping behavior.
Overall, great bones here. Definitely consider making the addictive part easier to achieve (specifically, reaching the next node should be less annoying). I understand the point is to "reach", but having my mouse cursor exit the game area detracts from the fun.
Fun little open-ended puzzle game. I felt a bit frustrated with the feel of the grabbing mechanics, but I understand why you've set it up this way. Nice work.
Definitely getting some Disasterpiece/HLD vibes as @youthfulidealism has already called out. The graphics style and controls felt great. My criticisms are: - Entering the door after getting the key was oddly difficult. I tried smashing a bunch of buttons and at some point it let me in. I feel like that part should've been easier. - The level design wasn't always great at telegraphing where the player should try to progress. I'd find myself jumping to my death before realizing that I was going the wrong way.
Small comments aside, this is a stellar job!
A simple and mysterious descent to the depths. The beginning was slow, but it was a pleasure to encounter new obstacles and dangers as I progressed to the depths. I feel I got ripped off by a hitbox on my way back up and I wasn't excited enough to try again since the first 70% of the game moves so slowly. It's be nice if the early parts of the game gave the player more agency (as you have nicely setup deeper down with the hazards).
Really really nice work! - The concept is excellent and the graphics are spot on. - Maybe it's just the browser version of the game, but the controls felt a touch unresponsive / delayed. - The grapple mechanic should ALWAYS shoot out imo. When you aim in to the abyss or too far from a target, the player should see something happen instead of silently failing to fire the grapple. - The enemies were cleverly designed and well-animated. - The level design / guiding the player the right direction could be better. Consider "lighting" or a consistent design language for leading the player the correct way. - Climbing a vertical wall felt too difficult. Maybe I have the wrong technique for it though :) - The mouse cursor icon is hidden behind the grass sprites.
Nice work folks!
Who doesn't love a mining game?? Solid first steps here and good overall concept surrounding "Insanity in the caves". There are a few things I'd like to tightened up in the game loop: - There's nothing preventing the player from running past all ore and simply going deeper. There should be some requirements (a key, a price, something) to allow progress. - The mining itself felt ok, could benefit from some better hitboxes and user control fluidity. - Player upgrades is a big must-have for this sort of game. Faster motion, faster recovery from mining swings, mine ore in fewer swings. - I was unclear what my "end goal" was. Some sort of mining deposit cart and a counter of my current $ value would be nice as a reminder of how well I'm doing before the game end. - Add a sanity meter on screen and give the player a means to reduce their sanity by mining -> buying sanity potions -> repeat.
Funny concept -- was really hoping for some wise AI banter here... but I accept the "SO DEEP" thumbs up as well :)
I found it hard to get the ball rolling since in most circumstances the ball was on a totally flat surface. You could fix this by having more sloped regions in the levels to help player build moment. Also, some sort of "boost" on player command could help bootstrap motion.
The upgrade system concept is great! Well, at least what I could understand and imagine of it. The UI seemed generally broken in the Rune/Inventory manager. Would love it if it was more intuitive what was happening in there O_O
As for the rest: - I like the idea of collecting power ups by defeating foes - The controls were functional, but not fluid (good for a jam though!) - The player was very large and the camera wouldn't always show enough of the upcoming terrain to be useful. - The combat needs some spicing up. The only combat strategy right now seems to be: attack as fast as possible. Changing the enemy motion and attack patterns could make this more interesting.
It wasn't immediately obvious that you could eat fish that were the same size as you. Also, your move speed increases to a comical speed rather quickly in proportion to your fish scale.
I enjoyed the concept, but as it stands there is no opportunity for the player to grow as they experience this game. Your options are rather limited and there typically isn't enough heads up of upcoming obstacles to be particularly responsive.
Some considerations if you choose to extend this game: - Notify the player of upcoming fish sooner, or simply slow down the descending speed. - Give the player a means of healing if they earn it (go deep enough). - Give players some choices! If both left and right will cause the ship to get hurt, can you incentivize one path over the other in some other way? - Allow player to upgrade their running speed and/or the ship's move speed.
I felt a strong disconnect between pressing the buttons on the UI and seeing state change in the game. I know that you gave a tutorial about what the units are too, but having their names in the UI would go a long way since they look so similar. Cool concept and would like to see it with some more polish :)
I'm playing the game in Chrome. I can't do anything aside "GO" and "LEAVE". I tried just about every keyboard button and mouse click location. Am I missing something?
Could use some visual juice improvements, but overall very nice work. Also, those damn bullets seem to kill you rather abruptly and unfairly :/
Seems like I can't make it past the "pit". Anytime I reach a pit in the map, it simply resets me (and puts me at the top of the screen). I can't tell if I'm winning or losing when this happens.
Very fun concept. Some feedback:
(1) The inventory system is cool, but kinda slow... would be nice to either see it in the HUD or have the animation be faster.
(2) The enemy attack patterns aren't fun. I felt like I couldn't strategically dodge a few shots, then sneak up for an attack. The winning strategy was almost always to run for your life.
This game has some good bones. It feels like a hacker pokemon game or something. Some considerations: - The CRT screen effect was cool but too distorted for my taste / comfort - I felt that the combat was too slow sometimes (maybe a means to speed it up on demand / settings)
Very interesting and innovative concept!
There was lots of empty space between the obstacles. All of that extra downtime makes the player lose interest! I'd recommend removing the excess empty space (long runs of no obstacles) and introducing some new challenges.
Neat! One issue I had with the game is it feels "too zoomed in". You can't really get lots of context for the map, just what's immediately around you. The safest way to progress in the game seems to be to go very slowly to make sure you see all the terrain. I didn't get the sense that there was an alternative play style to "slow and safe". Since you can't SEE anything you pretty much have to move slowly or memorize the map...
(1) Would benefit from some nice animations instead of stiff motion between the three locations. (2) Sometimes the hitboxes feel unfair (like dying after definitely passing something already).
The hitbox for hitting/missing a target feels a bit off or unfair at times... The lack of obstacles on the playing arena makes the experience rather empty in my opinion. Walls, pits, enemies, traps, portals, springs, ice, sticky goop, lava, etc. are all good options to spice up the environment.
Another consideration that could elevate this game is a mechanic in which you mine a type of crystal to regain some time on your timer. This would then let players make interesting realtime decisions of "continue mining" vs. "refill on time".
Nice work making this little point-n-click mystery game.
Visual Feedback: - The text felt quite small during conversations. - It was hard to tell what was interactive (no UI cues on hover / highlights / etc.)
Narrative Feedback: - The personalities of the characters could be more over-the-top and exciting. - I had the option to go to the Pier, but I'm not sure why I would go there?! It would be better if the revealed evidence unlocked new travel locations (because then it makes sense to travel to them)
@luc-creationallabs thanks for checking the game out! didn't have much time for optimization and all the engine is pretty barebones/homebrew. The things that may be killing your machine is the 4k texture I use for the map and the 1k texture for collision lookups O_O Sorry it's not performant :(
@ariorick Thanks for the feedback -- I made the entire game in 400x400. If I was using a different engine (not just p5js dev env), I'd make something higher resolution. As for the sporadic behaviors, you're totally right! When pressing spacebar+the arrow keys at the same time, things seem to lose control a bit. You can avoid this by pressing spacebar separately than the arrows. Definitely something I need to polish up.
I really appreciate everyone's feedback! I'm glad so many of you have checked it out and had ideas to share!
@morphine <3 <3 <3
@a333 I didn't realize there was an expectation of making games on the easier side, sorry! This is my first jam entry and I was sort of optimizing for maximum play time without becoming obnoxious.
@backurio Thanks for the critique! I'm well aware the music is repetitive :( It's all I could pull off in a bind. The screen is fixed at 400x400 and in a proper build of this game i'd make it full screen and more optimized to enable that. Although not explained, the blue coins/protein are worth more the deeper you go, so it may be faster to have one long run opposed to 6 short ones. The spreading apart is definitely a bit too high early on, but I wanted to make sure players understood that they're expected to fail the first run :)
@nerzal and @luc-creationallabs I appreciate you folks trying out the game even though it wasn't performant enough for your machines. I'd appreciate knowing your computer specs (cpu and gpu) if you're willing to share!
@everyone Thank you ALL for stopped by. I'm so glad to see that you're having a blast with the game :) All of this hype is making me consider porting the game to Unity and optimizing it. This means I can provide: - Full screen mode - Runs smoothly on lighter hardware specs - and closer to 1000 max unit count (instead of 200)
Huge <3 again to everyone who has stopped by, smiled, and given reviews!
@axeltherabbit yes! The game uses procedural vageneration algorithms. Each round will have new challenges :)
Very true @scrawach. If you are reading this text, you have already beaten this game before.
Fun little narrative journey. The tone of the writing was enjoyable. The mechanics of options changing as you hover was an interesting addition to the narration style and player "choice".
I do love this style of pure puzzle-ish platformer. The graphics and audio were simple and clean. I have two mechanical points of feedback that I can give:
1. The inability to jump right as you leave a block's edge is incredibly frustrating. Most games provide a "coyote time" jump that grants another 100ms grace period for jumping. I found myself just unable to jump at times I expected to have control.
2. The distances for jumps sometimes felt annoying or unfair (mostly as a result of the first point). This would likely not need to be changes if (1) were addressed.
Overall, great piece of work! Thanks for making this.
I really like the idea here! A mix of tetris and a platformer. I feel like there's much left to explore too!
1. The player moves very slowly and that makes me sad when I'm trying to advance to the next segment. 2. Would be nice to know how many blocks remain (and what type) for the block-placement mechanic. 3. I generally felt like I'd "do it live" for the tetris block placement. I never felt particularly clever... I'm curious if the mechanics can be adjusted to let the player feel more creative during that phase.
The visual style was enjoyable. Mechanically, I found it a bit tough to connect with though. Some feelings:
Some easy changes: - The "START" button really doesn't need to be a button at all. Clicking anywhere should be sufficient. The mouse hovering the button doesn't imply it's a button so no reason to add confusion. I must have clicked it by accident the first time, because on my second run I had no clue how to start!
- The SCORE at the end of my game was always 0, even if it was incrementing during the game.
- After dying, I'd want the game to reset on button press / click instead of waiting 4 seconds. That 4 seconds is unplayable and unfun time! Give the player control :)
Some harder changes: - Running "backward" felt very difficult and heavy. Consider making that feel more natural. I don't enjoy the feeling of not being in control of the player character.
- The block placement mechanic did feel quite right. For it be useful as a platform, you'd pretty much have to click exactly on the player character which doesn't seem to be the fun part of the mechanic. I'd frequently wiff past the block even when it was positioned pretty well. Maybe a button to spawn the block underneath the player and stop momentum could solve that... it really depends what the goal of the block-building is.
- I wasn't able to successfully interact with the red block due to frustration of the above issues. If I could reset the game faster, I'd probably give it a few more goes.
The graphics and ambiance were really excellent. That said, the UI elements for the inventory felt very cheap in comparison to the rest of the game's appealing pixel art style. I enjoyed the early bits but lost interest once I wasn't sure how to continue (I made a protein shake, drank it, watched some TV, then wasn't sure how to leave my apartment!). Overall, great project for a short game jam. I wish I were more of a point-n-click enthusiast to give you a deeper critique :)
Fun little physics puzzler game. The first level was a bit confusing for me since I didn't understand I was supposed to drag the banana for a while (just assumed the monkey would grab when it could). After the first level, I was trained to dispose of boxes off screen. But on the second level, disposing of boxes was suddenly a condition for losing. While I enjoyed the added challenge of rebalancing displaced blocks, it was not taught well (although easy to learn). The graphics were excellent and the gameplay was smooth. Nice work on this!
I enjoyed the purity of the graphics and the calm music. As for the gameplay, it was a bit too linear for my taste. I didn't feel like I was exercising any creativity, mostly just obeying what the game was asking for. Some feedback on the mechanics:
- Add visual distinction between regular bridges and the world shifting lines. Right now, they always appear as the same UI element. While this doesn't matter given the game's linearity, it just felt inconsistent imo.
- The camera could sometimes move quite a bit when starting to draw. I found this sort of jarring. It wasn't too bad though as the game was always playable :)
The concept here is excellent and on-theme. The playability of the game was very rough for me personally (playing on a track pad though). The controls going in reverse and the screen shaking I could probably overcome with time, but the screen incessantly flashing white was very discomforting (understandable why you added it though). Fun little piece!
I do enjoy this sort of simulation. I feel like the user interface could be more polished for this experience since it is the bulk of the game's focus. The graph view was spot on, but the other panels were very large and sparse for the data they actually contained. Clever idea!
The game mechanic is conceptually sound. My brother exclaims "You have stolen the music of my people. 10/10. But also 0/10 because it's stolen." (Note this is a joke). The audio is annoying for the water droplets, but the music is so damn funny that I can't possibly be mad.
I liked the concept of this remote control for various switches. The gameplay could feel a bit tighter.
- I didn't understand that in the very first puzzle I had to "interact" with the disabled power source before my remote would start working. I was moment away from giving up before doing that by accident.
- The zappy channels were a bit unforgiving and unexpected. I would have my character die before any audio or visual cue occurred on the electricity rails.
- After dying a bit in to the game, my remote seemed to stop working. It was tough to tell if that was the case or if I was just pursuing the puzzle the wrong way.
Those issues aside, I think this concept has good potential! Nice work :)
The graphic style and story-telling here are no doubt excellent. I will say that sometimes the dialogue sequences felt a bit tooooo long for my taste. If I accidentally clicked the same item again, I'd have a long bit of dialogue to make it through again (smashing the LMB). Aside that, great work on this project.
A 2D parkour-light collect-a-thon. The directness of graphics and audio is great and definitely relays the message of the game. My primary criticism surrounds the wall-jump mechanic; I was never quite sure when I'd be allowed to jump. I generally tried to stick to walls and work my way up, but sometimes I feel like I was granted another wall jump without touching anything! Some thoughts:
1. Tighten up the wall jump mechanics to be more predictable. 2. Explain the difference between the blue and green terrain (if there is any) 3. Add some squash and stretch animations to the rectangular player to bring it more to life :)
Good job!
"Goonnn Giiiittt" -- Best audio ever. While I admired the responsiveness and the audio, I found it hard to be engaged with this one. I wasn't sure what made someone a better a worse player. Also, I sensed a lack of feedback on the UI for "how well am I doing?". Some small interface improvements (or upgrades) could go a long way with this.
Brilliantly simple. I liked the style and the controls (except right click on trackpad being not-so-fun). I didn't originally realize I was supposed to BUILD (until reviewing the instructions again). Nice work!
Straightforward interpretation of the theme. This concept should definitely be expanded to make the game more broadly exciting beyond a single see-saw. Also, it has been mentioned before, but you can "cheat" by simply spawning objects above the pivot and clicking rapidly. Some thoughts for improvements: 1. Limit the location where blocks can be added. 2. Fix the 1-frame glitch which shows new blocks in the wrong place (they spawn for one frame above the pivot no matter where I click) 3. Give the player a goal per "level". Something like "Balance 10 shapes for 5 seconds without the seesaw falling." 4. Add challenge by giving weirdly shaped balancing toys and weirdly shaped objects to drop on those balancing toys.
Interesting and creative! The concept here is quite fun and captures the theme's essence too. Your spectrum of upgrade/ability cards were super fun.
Here's some constructive feedback from my playthrough: 1. The game is very lonely with no audio. A simple addition of music and some sounds on purchasing would help build the mood significantly. 2. The number of meteors became overwhelming too quickly. I felt that by the time I had one meteor arriving, there were already 20 more on the way. Maybe this is survivable, but it looked absolutely daunting and made me feel like I wasn't even close to surviving. This steered me away from wanting to play again. 3. The card upgrade system is a really neat mechanic, but I always felt poor. Maybe I was just mismanaging my money, but I found myself often with only ONE choice which makes this less of a game. Having two free fallback options could help here. Imagine "Run a campaign" and "Taxes" were two cards that were always available. This could let the player choose between a fallback option to gain currency vs. purchasing one of the more engaging cards (like buying a missile defense tower). Player agency is critical in a game like this! So just make sure the player gets to make some decisions even if they're broke :)
I wasn't able to successfully join a lobby and play the game! I like the idea of this online multiplayer experience, but it wasn't working for me :/
Simple, cute, and fun! Great work on this. Losing is definitely inevitable in this game, so the theme is right on haha :)
The comms audio was great haha :)
The game vision here is great, but I want MORE. It's easy to get worn out of this gameloop within just a couple tries. Some suggestions:
1. Turning around should be faster. Searching for enemies requires searching the map a bit, but then when you inevitably swoosh past them, it can take a few seconds to turn around. While I understand this may have been the intentional design of the game, it felt more frustrating than fun.
2. The alien's projectiles need more contrast against the sky, they were very hard to see. Again this could be considered part of the game's intention, but it felt more accidental. Make them a sharp red color instead of a transparent green would help a lot.
3. Give the player something to work towards. I felt weak and lame. Killing the enemies didn't seem to give me any new abilities or points in any way. A basic weapon upgrade system (even if it was just default weapon + homing missiles as specials) would go a long way at adding strategy and replay value.
Thanks for sharing this project, it was fun!
NICE! Thanks for making those changes, the game plays much better!
Great vibe and visual style. Novel game mechanic and solid teaching moments. The main thing I didn't like was being unclear on how the fuse pushing works. Sometimes it worked as expected, but other times it wouldn't behave consistently (seemingly). This ultimately took away from me feeling like I was expressing my creativity while trying to solve the puzzle.
Excellent work! Melting is right on theme. The recipe for this game feels pretty traditional with the twist of it being timed. The humor is AMAZING. I love the little phrases from the Ice Cube character between checkpoints.
Some constructive points here would be: 1. The jumping power meter doesn't give me a great sense of power. Consider having the animation get longer instead of wider as you're charging up the jump. 2. Clipping an edge with your square face was very awkward since it killed all momentum instead of bouncing you backward. Without some more ricochet physics, you're forcing players to hop away from the wall instead of introducing a fun mechanic where you can bounce against them. 3. The first room was WAY TOO HARD. After I made it out of the first area, the rest seemed much easier haha. Don't scare new players away with an difficult first room (unless that's the game's style). Putting a couple more snow flakes in that first room would solve your problem without requiring a level redesign.
There is one obvious win in this game: It's funny. The instructions very casually explaining that the only thing to do is party while trying to survive jives well with the absurd visuals. While the graphics themselves are not amazing, the simple addition of everything pulsing to the beat brought this game up a couple of notches. It's definitely a bit irritating to look at on the player character, but the collectibles pulsing to the beat was definitely win.
My biggest criticism is that the physics for flying around feel reeeeeaaally rough. I felt it was too hard to make interesting maneuvers reliably. Another thing is that the instructions should mention that you need to return to home base to get additional time (obvious in retrospect, but not obvious first time I played).
Thanks for making this interesting piece.
Very meta! I love it.
Great idea, but I want MORE!
The appeal of this game loop is excellent. The mechanics generally play nicely together, but the experience doesn't scale well past the first minute.
1. Once you have a steady income stream, then money doesn't matter. I became cash immortal within 40 seconds of playing. To fix this, the cost of items should go up over time. 2. When a node is depleted of cash or firewall, something should happen. A red node made it to $0 then just starting counting in the negatives... This was unexpected and sort of demoralizing since it felt like the game was broken. 3. The text didn't render very well on my screen so it was hard to read. Not a dealbreaker though.
Thanks for sharing this.
Phenomenal idea and execution! Great way to take a typing game and give it some strategy and a fun story. I think my only criticism is making the problems that need addressing more "obvious". When water was filling up in my ship, I was like "oh no duh, gotta clear that out". But when I had some holes in my ship that were rather small, I just assumed I'd be fine? I wasn't fine haha. Essentially the only way to know that an order needed to be shouted was to start calling out someone's name and see if there were new options. Overall though, this is an excellent project.
Nice idea for a game here. I have some suggestions and some questions :) 1. The bucket's state should be 10x more obvious. It was hard to know if I had water or not or if I had splashed it on something successfully. The splash/usage of water has to have a juicy animation to convey that it has been spent (and where it was used). 2. Why do I need to pick up the bucket? Can't I just start by holding it? 3. Are the upper platforms relevant? I found myself running around only on the ground.
Great foundations here! Just needs a bit more polish to really hook me.
Game idea is awesome, but as mentioned above, the balance was off.
Some ideas for improvement: - When all my ships have escaped, take me to the Game Over screen with a report card. Currently, the game just keeps going and that's lame. - The different turrets should look different. I know this is a game jam and all, but at least make them different sizes and colors so I know what I've placed! Also, I had a hard time telling if they were doing more damage or not :/ - Building escape pods manually feels pointless right now, it should just be automated unless something changes in the game's design. Maybe they did cost something to build, but the currency system was so out-of-whack that I never felt poor. - Having an auxiliary competing objective would make this game much richer. Right now it's just "defend defend defend and crank out escape pods." But for the game experience to feel more rich, I need decision to make. The decision could be (e.g.) trying to move the main ship to mine new resources. This would force the player to think about their global turret layout and not just encircle one home base. It may also solve your infinite currency problem :)
Thanks for sharing this, it was quite fun!
Easy to understand and easy to play. Fun little game that is definitely on-point with the theme. The music selections and cut scenes were excellent -- A great addition to the experience!
Some potential adjustments: 1. Make it easier to understand where the staircases are. I found the transitions between the regions jarring / somewhat surprising even when I knew they were coming. 2. The hammer is a nice addition to the game, but I never encountered it :/ Would be nice to have that sort of upgrade be guaranteed at least once to expose the mechanic to players.
Great work!
The style is great, but I sure would love to see a more rich interplay of mechanics. 1. It'd be nice to see the number of rounds remaining without visiting the fire. 2. Narratively, if I can walk away from the fire for a long time, why do I need this fire at all? 3. The controls felt a bit tricky on a hex grid. I wouldn't mind this if the game mechanics benefited from the hex grid though. 4. The game needs to force me to make a decision. Exploring randomly isn't a decision, it's busy work and will always lose its spark after a short run. A mechanic that balances the number of items collected vs the player's move speed could solve this. 5. Upgrades never hurt :)
Fun and simple entry! I enjoy the fundamentals of the game loop here, but my blorb never got sick so I didn't get to experience it all. Although it stayed true to the Tamagotchi play style, I found it quite boring after a couple minutes. I suppose it's a rather "meta" experience though, since I inevitably left the game and my poor blorb will starve.
Nice project! Great card game implemented digitally. The game's concept is quite fun, but I'm held back by the nuances of the User Experience.
1. Sometimes clicking on cards would select then rapidly deselect. This made basic interactions annoying. 2. Having to click to view next card on the deck was agitating. It added no value to the gameplay and could be short-circuited digitally by showing the next card automatically, then clicking the stack you want to place it on. This takes 3 mouse clicks down to just one for the build phase. 3. The gameplay itself was fun, though some visual hints of what valid options remain may have been nice (nitpick). 4. Finally, the game over screen felt like it was trying to force the theme on me by saying "THAT WAS INEVITABLE." I had that feeling all on my own without needing the game to bash me over the head haha :)
Overall, nice work but please consider the user experience for games like this since they can make or break its addictive nature.
I had to click around a bit to get the game running, but once it did boot up it ran fine. I like the simplicity of the game loop and mechanics, but I had a hard time connecting with the physics/controls and the UI was rough.
For physics / controls, I found that everything felt too floaty, especially my player character. Walking and jumping around felt difficult to get good player placement. In a game that is heavily position-specific, the feeling of running and jumping around is the most important thing to make feel great.
The other issue I had was "knowing the health of things". I had died several times after blowing up the special boxes, but I wasn't sure why? It simply says "You died :(". This would be fine if I had a health bar that was ticking down or something, but I couldn't find such a thing :o:
Ironing out these two things would make a big difference. Nice work on this project!
I really enjoy this! I had to play about 10 times to get past the early game difficulty spike in to a stable loop. Once I got there, the game because too easy and the felt more like a traditional cookie clicker where I couldn't quite lose.
The good: Clever idea and well executed overall. Had me hooked trying to make it a bit further in the game's progression. The music was also a big win here :)
The bad: The game's balance felt off. This is the nature of game jams I suppose, but it hurt my enjoyment of the early game. Also, the default x1 speed was wayyyy too slow. I had to play at x5 to tolerate. The graphics also could've use some love, but I suppose they provide a sort of charm as-is haha.
Great work!
I've taken the game server down -- thanks for playing everyone! :)
This game was challenging to play by nature of how fast everything was moving and because the graphics were sort of harmful to the experience. One thing I really liked is that the player's shooting mechanic didn't originate from the player, but rather from a floating drone nearby -- cool!
Here's some suggestions on how to improve this game:
1. Remove all of the details from your graphics and make everything simple and solid colors. Make it easy to understand what the game elements are. The ground should be a simple single color. The background should be very muted colors (easy fix is to make it 30% opacity to get started). The regions where a player can fall to their death should be clearly visually marked.
2. The game should be a bit slower. It felt rapid and sporadic and hard to understand in its current form. Having everything be a bit small on the screen and slower would give some time and space for our human brains to understand what's going on (and then react and play the game in a controlled fashion).
3. Once those two playability improvements are addressed, the final step is to improve the user interface. The game seems to be designed for a 640x480 screen exclusively, so many of the UI elements on larger screens were visible "off screen". The game over menu was a dark red which made it hard to read, just make the text white instead.
Thanks for sharing your work with us all!
A classic style of top down shooter to fight for your survival. The controls feel good and the game runs smoothly. The audio for taking damage I found funny -- couldn't tell if the player was saying "oof" or "boom", but it was funny either way.
What can be done better though? 1. There are way too many medicine collectibles. I had to actively try to avoid the medicine collectibles to lose. By making them more scarce, you make the game more interesting by forcing the player to go get one. The medkits were abundant too, but at least they only healed a small amount. 2. Enemy deaths should have a fun animation, even if it's just particles. 3. More weapons PLEASE. This sort of game really thrives on having many gun types. I only saw two and I think that's a missed opportunity.
Nice work on this project.
I like the core mechanics here, but I had a hard time controlling the character in a fluid way. - The jump mechanic felt inconsistent or sometimes unresponsive. - The teleport mechanic was awesome and responsive, but I'd lose so much speed that it wasn't really worth it. - I'd sometimes experience my character slowing down to a halt and seemingly having no way to recover from that. - I wasn't sure what to do with bullet time :/
Overall, I like the foundations you have here, but there's some more tuning necessary to make this really shine.
Concept here is great! But gameplay user interaction felt a bit bumpy. The game loop and abilities were funny, I think you're on track to build something very cool here if you take the game further :) My biggest calms with this are that using the abilities didn't feel good or tangible. Reading about them was fun, but I found running toward the stars with almost no combat seemed to get the job done usually (at least early on).
An example of the awkward UX would be when I tried using the slip-n-slide ability. I pressed it and saw my selection area change, but then clicking in the new selection area didn't seem to do anything. I had a similar experience with a couple other abilities.
Aside the UX hiccups, I really like what you've made here. Thanks for sharing this.
Well made game! I like the concept and execution overall. My biggest criticism is around knowing which police force is currently selected. Once I had multiple police, I was getting hung up on how to quickly select and move them -- I had the idea, but not the right support from the UI to execute.
Some potential additions that would've improved my experience: 1. Make the currently-selected police unit highlighted. 2. Make selection hotkeys (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) for selecting the police troop instead of only click or drag. 3. Give some animations to juice things up. The "combat" of simply standing on top of each other was lackluster.
Overall, great work on this, I enjoyed it :)
This is an excellent short piece. The audio and narrative were perfect. The graphics worked in their own way and mechanics were tight enough to not be disruptive.
The biggest suggestion I have for improvement is to make the intro dialogue way way way shorter. Just have Dr. Carl give me a 2 second rundown that we're going to reset the day and let me experience the rest. I only got addicted to the game once I made it through my first loop, but I almost gave up going through my first loop since there was too much reading to get the experience started!
Overall GREAT stuff. Very eerie and well done :)
This game has great potential, you should pursue a full game for this.
What did I love? - This makes me think of the old classic game: Populous. Casting spells in a radius around your native tribe members is a great mechanic. - The spell casting mixing bowl was a nice touch to impact multiple tribesman at once. - The games theme and overall design were well made.
What would I like to see done differently? - I spent the first half of the game not casting any spells because there was no instructions on how to do it. I pressed all buttons until eventually SPACE BAR made the difference. You must tell players to press space bar either in the instruction or in the game itself in the center-bottom of the screen: "Your spell is ready to cast. Press [SPACE BAR] to use!" - When the spells are cast, the tribesman should do something visually interesting. Right now, it's hard to tell if I've made any difference after the spell has been cast. The player needs visual JUICE to keep them going. - Finally, I had some tribesman just popping in and out of existence and I found that confusing. I wasn't sure if they were dying or just glitching.
Overall, this is a really great game concept and I'd love to see it fleshed out to completion!
Straightforward gameplay. Overall the controls and feel of the game were good. What I was craving the most in this experience was: - More weapons - Limitations on those weapons (ammo for guns or integrity for other weapons like bats/knives) - Something to do with the collectible coins... At least a counter (unless I missed it) - Different enemy behaviors. They would always follow you, so staying stationary and spamming attack would be sufficient to killing hordes of enemies. Their dead bodies would drop health on top of you. So ultimately I could play the game and survive while standing still!
Nice work!
Never given straight 5's until I saw this. Elegant, clean, complete, and masterfully-crafted game. A small metroidvania dripping with style and personality. Amazing work!
There's something clever at the core here of collecting various inks needed "stay alive". From a game design perspective, the mechanics feel a bit flat. If you're going to give me 4 ink resources to track, I'd like them to be evolving at different rates / have impactful traits. Without variety in ink behavior, everything feels a bit monotonous. Good concept!
Nice and simple puzzler. I was hoping that the game mechanics or challenge would grow over time since there is a good scaffolding for a game here.
Straightforward and calm game. My favorite part was deciphering where ingredients would be based on the floor map labels. I think there's a fun opportunity here to shuffle up the labels to keep things interesting. For example, if all deliverables had 3+ tags, you could reshuffle where they live for each new delivery. It would make your mind need to do some more lateral thinking about different ways that "honey" could be found (e.g. insect section vs. sticky section vs. yellow section).
I wish I could make the text appear more quickly since it was generally preventing me from playing. I'd spend most of my time waiting for the text to appear, then play for 10 seconds, then wait again. With so many games out here to play, letting the player drive the cadence of the experience (especially in the genre game) is a good choice :D
Definitely hard to play on a trackpad haha. I think there's room for improvement on the UX front so I can get better feedback on how hard I'm throwing. Closest I got was ~70 units and wasn't sure what the reward would ultimately be so I had to give up :(
Very well implemented and content rich game. Stellar graphics and oozing with style!
Very well done! Simple and effective mechanics. Great graphics and mood. The combat is both straightforward and compelling. Minimap is clutch too. Great job!
Downright insane game. Excellent gameplay, smoothness, puzzling, innovation -- like WOW. Pretty much ready for Steam at $1.99 as-is.
"flap flap flap" sound effects were hilarious.
The game knows what it wants to be and does a damn good job at it. Well done! Sometimes the controls felt a bit unresponsive, but I could also just be bad :p
The puzzles were pretty tricky, but fun. The controls were a bit annoying when trying to choose between picking up beneath you vs next to you. My only real complaint is that some levels felt like they had two phases. The first part was easy and the second part was tricky, but every time I failed I'd have to redo both parts!
Nice and simple and plays well. After consuming the first three types of "enemies" there wasn't much else to do :/ Gimmi more!
Adam strikes again with another stunning piece. The graphics, narrative, and audio are out of this world for the duration of the jam (and also in general haha). Aside one bug I saw where I couldn't elect members for a mission, everything seemed pretty smooth. My one issue with the game is I wasn't building an intuition for the character traits and their ability to make a mission succeed. Instead, I would just shuffle things around until the "Outlook" meter said I had a good chance.
The controls felt pretty floaty (I know we're in space, but it felt really challenging to retain simple control). Also, I had no intuition for how the packages were being deployed -- sometimes they came out directly at the planet and other times they'd fly away from the planet somehow :o
I do like the core of what's here, and some polish on the experience + zooming out the camera a bit would go along way!
Good mood and interesting take on the theme: Delivering of a Soul. The gameplay itself seems secondary to the narrative of this piece, and I think that's the right choice for this genre. My only comment on the visuals here is that the lane hopping it too jarring -- would love that to be a smooth animation. Nice work.
I really want to play this game, but even with the tutorials I'm struggling to understand the nuances of what's going on :O I love the forward simulation aspect of this game though -- it seems very rich. The trains and detectives all bustling about when spamming "End Turn" was a joyous experience even though I had no idea what I was doing haha
A clever spin on a tetris-style game -- very fun! I like the variation in level designs, though I didn't play for too long since it's not really my genre. Thanks for sharing this though, it's quite innovative!
Funny and well-made experience! The cat shooting controls were nice, but I'd love to see some trails / vfx on the cat cannon. The sound effects are the pinnacle of human creation. I definitely have some opinions on some potential game design improvements though... The character's walking speed was so slow that moving around was "unfun" -- consider doubling it to see if things feel more lively. The ammo respawning was either too rare, or too hard to find (especially with the slow movement speed). Those matters aside, excellent project!
"Why does this game seem like it's intentionally making me fail and lose food? Am I just bad??" ** Ramp in road appears **
Really cute game. My biggest issue is the camera behaviors. I think that zooming out as a function of mouse position is very jarring. Also there seems to be some camera behavior where the camera jitters left/right very fast. Aside the camera, the game was quite fun! Well done.
Nice effects and simple gameplay. I wish I knew where all these goods were actually being delivered :p
Art.
Controls themselves felt pretty nice, but it was hard. So hard I couldn't make it out of the first area (not sure if it's a bug or if I'm bad). Trying to aim the potion was difficult and I felt like I could never jump high enough to continue on the journey. I like this idea of tossing the potion around -- it's a nice twist on the classic "Getting over it" style game.
Cute little game. I'm not sure if I found all three correct endings (1 delivery success, 2 "oh noes").
@acarc thanks for the kind words. I do a lot of my game brainstorming in Microsoft Paint, so I decided it'd be fun to emulate that visualization. A couple game jams ago I made a custom preprocessor + shader that takes 3D meshes and creates a scribbly MS paint effect. I've used that effect here :)
Nice submission! Love to see some variety here with a board game. The concise rules read well, and the player has lots of strategic choices to maximize their score. Would be fun to write an algorithm to play this :D
MY biggest ask is to make the mouse cursor more visible. On my display, the thin circle for the cursor was the hardest part to see and that made me focus on the wrong thing :O Also, would be nice if there were some time constraint to spice things up!
Super difficult to control especially since the boosters have very non-physical behavior. That said, I did successfully deliver two pizzas which is a damn miracle. It was like playing QWOP with a drone and it was HARD haha.
LOVE this concept. Space courier delivering between planets! I wish that the walking on the planets was a bit faster since that's not really what I'm excited to do in the game. If walking around the planets at large scale is relevant, I hadn't played long enough to experience that -- but it would be a great addition to have large explorable planets. Imagine traveling to the depths of one planet to collect a rare ore that should be delivered to a weird mole-person on a different planet. That sort of depth / world-building could be very very engaging :D
Reeeeealy good aesthetic. Oldschool Flash game vibes.
Final level is the best thing ever. Only feedback on game design here is I wish I could tell what the parry actually did O_O
The zoom feature wasn't working for me :( Very soothing and straightforward gameplay. I was struggling to figure out the "deliver" portion of this game. I just kept getting bigger and bigger!
"ahhhhhhhhhh" <- me with trackpad after realizing I'm doomed
Nice little puzzle game! Would definitely like the animations to run faster so I can spend more time playing than watching XD
Love the mood. Didn't love that I sometime sank my ship with no obstacles in sight :( The one change to audio I'd like to see is making the water more wave-like opposed to a waterfall.
This game definitely needs a coyote jump system. Much like @helekopeter I died many times due to unresponsive controls :(
Very impressive visual design!
Solid work. Aside the bug in the beginning where things don't spawn for a long time / way too much intro text, the game is nice. Mechanically, I really like what what you've done with the mail doubling as an objective and as health. Nice work!
Cute project. Deliver happiness!
The newest frogger: Ducker.
Direct take on the theme and overall well made. The controls were a bit rough since the boxes were the same mass as my ship (which made flying sort of hilarious).
Rich narrative and dialogue. Well made!
Simple and delightful. Love the music, mood, and synchronization (i swear it was synchronized to the music right? or is my mind playing tricks on me??)
incredible execution on all fronts. great work!
I LIKE IT! Love the spellcasting mechanic (and would love to know what you did for it if you don't mind sharing. I made a similar mechanic last year by training a small ML model :smile:).
I like the variety of units and the core concept. Some nice additions may be: 1. Reason to move -- as is, there doesn't seem to be an advantage to moving aside to entertain my left hand. Having projectiles to dodge or items for the player to collect could help with this. 2. Tradeoff on which unit to summon -- I pretty much always bring the biggest unit I can and the game just becomes "can you draw this shape well many times rapidly". Having a cooldown for spawning certain units OR an increasing cost for summoning the same thing consecutively could help.
Combining the ideas from 1 & 2, image the following as part of the core game loop: -> Summon critters by drawing shapes, each one with a unique cooldown. -> Move around the map collecting bonus cash for upgrades and cooldown crystals (e.g. -3 seconds from all summons). -> Be cautious where you position yourself since you can get attacked by enemies / may lose your base.
Ok, whew lots of feedback! Thanks for sharing your project, it's the start of something fantastic.
I LOVE that you rolled your own lightweight detector and backed it up with some graphs!!! So cool dude. Thanks for sharing the info on that. You should definitely read up on some ML options (if you're interested in this space of gesture recognition). The classic problem of character recognition is effectively the "Hello World" of machine learning these days.
LOVE this game. Excellent take on a crafting / underwater exploration game. Controls and mechanics are tight. The summoning portal feels like it could just be a "work bench for crafting" and the game would be identical. If there were maybe multiple portals or more opportunities to summon, that'd really lean you more in to the theme. That's my only critique though, I absolutely love what you've made here!
Nice job with this game! It was glitching out in the beginning and not shooting any of my bolts. To this moment I'm still not sure what the hammer icon does too lol. One things started working, I realized this game is partially a puzzle game and partially a skill-based aiming game -- super cool! I like the idea of the different abilities and customizing my spellcasts to kill all the enemies. I think this has the bones of something great. Thanks for sharing :)
5/5 on all categories. This game was so simply but perfectly executed. The cryptic diagrams for construction were a perfect balance of tricky to read, but also very clear. Genius. I want to summon 30 more burgers though!
This was soooo close to being incredible (just needed more time). The core gameplay felt too clunky to fall in love with. That said, the IDEA here is excellent. Cards for summoning, combining cards, upgrading my deck -- all awesome things!
Some feedback on ways to improve maybe: 1. Why would I ever hide my deck of cards? It was never blocking the view of the playable area. I ended up using this "mechanic" when the card selection got buggy lol. 2. When selecting a single card, the indication of selection was a slight elevation. That's too subtle! Just make it way brighter or outline it or something -- slap me in the face with an obvious selection. 3. If I'm about to summon a unit, I'd like an indicator on the terrain (e.g. summoning circle) or a change in the mouse cursor. It was simply difficult to identify if I was in a "summoning" state. 4. Some of the character animations seemed to be glitchy, but whatever I found that adorable. 5. I had no incentive to plan my card usage with either timing or placement. Some game design adjustments could be made that require the player to be in certain positions to use certain summon cards. Or maybe the player must run around collecting mana to cast cards (which all have some unique cost each).
All that said, I still really enjoyed the game. Hope you continue it!
Dripping with style and creativity. I was struggling with the aim mechanic and felt blessed anytime my bullets actually hit a target lol.
Lots of great stuff happening here. Wish there was sound, but otherwise so many things were very right. I was enjoying leveling up and could feel my character getting stronger. That said, I was lacking a bit of the key challenge of the game. I was sort of just spamming my summons as fast as possible and that was good enough to win every time. Giving me a reason to move around the map such as summoning cooldown refreshing or temporary powerups would make the player more engaged during the summoning downtime. Excellent work!
Really well made! The graphics were excellent and everything ran nice and smooth. I never felt particularly creative with my summoning though -- I was sort of just spamming the little guys and that seems to do great. Lots of potential here and I love it :)
Straightforward and fun + well made game! It felt a bit too easy? but maybe i didn't play long enough for it to get hard.
The quality and polish of this game is phenomenal! I was having a tough time feeling the "agency" of my actions since the summoning units / battle was in the top part of the screen and very unrelated to the rest of the gameplay. If there were a way to make the tension of the battle manifest on the game board you're playing, that'd really bring this game to the next level. Great work :)
Phenomenal polish. Game plays smoothly and is dripping with personality. Very well made. I'd appreciate an undo button or a faster reset cycle, but otherwise it's perfect!
First of all, congrats for pulling this cute little game together. The visuals are epic! The first time I played the game (without watching the playthough demo) I was only generating basic rats and didn't understand why -- I thought the game was bugged. Turns out I missing a mechanic about turning the sigils in the summoning circle that wasn't particularly visible. Even after knowing the mechanic, I found it a bit difficult to see the lines and predict if a gem would accomplish what I need.
Continuing on that thread, it was tricky to gain an intuition for why my rats were so weak (when I played the game wrong). When I pick up a gem labeled "+10 health", I think that just means I'm about to make a strong rat for free. To signal more clearly whats going on, maybe each gem has two indicators: one for unpowered and one for powered. If your gemstones is unpowered via a line tether, it will get a small (but clear) benefit such as +1 attack. If the same stone is powered/tethered, it will get +8 attack (also clarly indicated on the card). This also could help build a more versatile set of summoned creatures that don't always show up as "1 damage & 1 attack speed" by default :)
Here's some other random ideas: 1. Show a lineup of the next 3 enemy types and a timer of when they'll be arriving. 2. Your gemstones could have modifiers such as "armor piercing" or "flame" or "ice". These modifiers will change how effective your summoned creature is against an upcoming enemy. 3. Certain summoning circles should have good/bad modifiers (e.g. x2 or x0.5). This will make you decide carefully about how you will spend and position your gems. Do you want a creature with double health but low attack? or high attack but low health? 4. Force the player to use all the summoning circle slots. Don't let them horde their favorite gemstones for the perfect moment. 5. Unlock new gemstone types over time (deck-builder style).
Thanks for sharing your project. Excellent work.
Congrats on the game! I was having a hard time selecting the different abilities or aiming at units that were too close to my tower. Otherwise, worked like a charm -- fun little idea.
Nice game. Solid controls and fun puzzles :)
Fun simple graphics style. The game mechanics of an autobattler are definitely a bit foreign to me. I wasn't totally clear on how much I should be grinding on small contracts vs doing something intelligent/more skillful? The game definitely works and is enjoyable if you like this sort of game. How do I play it better or worse? :O
Nice concept! Has a Jump King vibe but is also incredibly difficult. I was struggling to clear the first gap that required the summon mechanic. Jump King works because it's so precise and predictable. The bird coming at me as a propellant never felt totally reliable and that made it tricky to control!
nice and simple game and well made. I felt that I could go quite far in the game by just clicking randomly and rapidly... I need some sort of incentive from the game that rewards me for playing strategically :)
Super neat idea you've got here! Instead of recruiting new characters like a conventional RPG or RTS, in this game you're swapping out your unit composition at game-time. Nice concept! I think that having the unit shapes be more obvious in how they function would be nice. For example, if your units were "Rock Paper Scissors" shapes, then it'd be obvious how to spec your units for battle. Right now, I can't quite discern when I should be a cube, or a sphere, or a donut :)