Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Thingo Studios
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | JobSWitcH | jam | |||||||||||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | ZZXXX the Gremlin | jam | 677 | 3.15 | 2.78 | 3.30 | 3.36 | 3.30 | 3.32 | 3.17 | 3.14 | 47 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Disco Arachno | jam | 388 | 3.37 | 3.07 | 4.30 | 3.37 | 3.70 | 3.69 | 3.04 | 3.13 | 48 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Tsurara Donna | jam | 868 | 2.78 | 2.67 | 2.61 | 3.14 | 3.17 | 3.03 | 2.12 | 2.81 | 58 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Rare Earth | jam | 549 | 3.16 | 3.06 | 2.69 | 3.69 | 3.64 | 2.39 | 2.90 | 54 | ||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Boulevard of Broken Themes | jam | 294 | 3.35 | 3.57 | 3.60 | 3.57 | 2.34 | 2.57 | 3.91 | 2.86 | 57 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Dr. Pepsi Marriage Consultant | jam | 651 | 2.65 | 2.34 | 2.96 | 2.83 | 2.44 | 2.52 | 3.57 | 2.86 | 96 |
Hilarious. I sort of wish you didn't post any screenshots so the game's twists would have been more of a surprise.
Also, some visual indication that you're damaging the boss would be nice; I had no idea that the damage was supposed to be healed until I read the comments and wondered why it took ~40 hits to kill them.
HA. I wasn't quite sure why you could just eat up all the buzzsaws and never die, but then I got to the ending and I started laughing. Cute.
I loved this game. The only thing I'd like to say is that if you die after getting a key and don't save, you have to get the key again. This isn't immediately obvious; I would personally like it if you made it save when you hit a chest.
The gameplay is nothing revolutionary and it's a pretty surface-level interpretation of the theme. That being said, it more than makes up for it with its humor. Learning life lessons from a seagull with a self-help book and Art Garfunkel? Sure, why not!
I laughed the whole time. Really, REALLY funny game and I do not regret playing it in the slightest.
Got stuck on level 16 (where's the exit portal??), but I thoroughly enjoyed the game. A clever idea for a minimalistic platformer.
Ladies and gentlemen; the best game of LD29.
I wish I could give this game's soundtrack much, much higher than a five.
On the one hand, it is a pretty faithful reconstruction of Sortie en Mer done within 48 hours. On the other hand... if I want to play Sortie en Mer, I'll play Sortie en Mer, not a faithful reconstruction of Sortie en Mer done within 48 hours.
That being said, the music in this game is incredible. I just wish the game was less derivative.
Pretty cool dungeon crawler with tons of nudity. Not sure if Cowardice does anything, though.
It's not particularly difficult or original, but it's pretty funny and it has some cool music. I played for about half an hour when I should have been doing work, so you're definitely on par with Dice Wars here.
The two complaints I have with this game are 1) the "YOU DIED!" text never goes away, which gets pretty obnoxious pretty fast, and 2) it takes waaaaay too long to grind for the items. If you had the coins correspond to real world US currency (pennies/nickels/dimes/quarters/half-dollars/dollar coins) it would make the most sense, in my opinion.
Oh, and also-- Shoop da Whoop? 9001? It's not 2007 anymore, dude!
This game has the same problem a lot of horde games do; the enemies all eventually move towards the same spot and make it too easy for you to eat them all in one go.
I loved the graphics in this game. Personally I would have allowed for horizontal movement on your part, but it's still fun without it.
There is a very clever game in theory. In practice it's frustrating and poorly explained. The core concept of the game is solid (a game about politics where you have to create problems to distract the public), but it was poorly integrated with the gameplay and the scoring seemed haphazard. Kudos for the unconventional approach, though.
It seems like it could be a great Zelda-type game if there were actual enemies. GREAT vibe, though, with good graphics and beautiful music.
Also not sure how this fits the theme, but it's still cool.
Super polished and really fun, with some goofy enemy design to boot. The only frustrating part was getting those health blimps; I could never get one of them to crack.
The ending. Did you drown?? I'm kind of confused here.
But the graphics were gorgeous and the characters were pretty likable. I could beat the game at Level 4, so I'm assuming the dificulty curve is right.
The auto-scrolling is way too slow... it would be cool if it sped up as you got closer to the right of the screen, because I got sick of grazing a bat and moving two-three minutes backwards.
Cool music, though.
I'm not quite sure how just making contact with an alien wrecks my ship and makes me start over, but it's a pretty cool and atmospheric game.
It's Dig Dug, except not. It's still fun, if not very original.
It's not obvious that collision with ghosts kills you, because it looks like you have enough space to slide fast them.
The gameplay itself was minimal, but I found the game's core concept so adorable that I can forgive you for focusing on the hilarious voiceovers and drawings.
Clever reinterpretation of Snake. I didn't quite understand what was going on at first, but when I did I laughed. Great music too.
The core idea behind this game is solid. Definitely short, but still really fun. The only real complaint I have is that Clementine's scariness is definitely an informed attribute and I never felt that there was any reason for small children to fear her.
This game is GOOD, y'all. There are some flaws, though. Most obviously, the choice of weapon is a crapshoot; I put down chainsaw because I read the comments and heard screaming, but it was a knife.
The locations ribbon was a bit cramped, and you probably could have done something to make it more obvious they were five separate locations.
And there were some typos, too; most notably, if someone's seen two people, they will say "I have seen Casper, Sophie" rather than "I have seen Casper and Sophie."
But this was totally enjoyable and I loved the atmosphere.
I found it really fun to try to get the pink people to fall beneath the blocks and crush them. But actually playing the game as it was meant to be played was kind of frustrating. You probably could have made it more clear what you were supposed to be doing in-game, though. Color the arrows green and pink, respectively! Make the screen rumble when the screen is almost filled! As of right now it's really bland. But the core gameplay is simple and (hypothetically at least) fun!
When I was younger I downloaded this game called Maestro. It was this MMO designed by Mike Oldfield (you know, the Tubular Bells guy) where you walked around in this low-poly dream world and ambient music would play and I had no idea what was going on. It was great; strangely expansive, totally surreal, and weirdly fun despite the lack of real gameplay objectives.
This game reminds me of that, but really squicky. The gameplay itself was minimal, but it was sufficiently creepy. And it's original too-- how many games have you played about laparoscopic surgery? Not many. It's incredible.
I'm unable to open the .zip, and I can't view the contents either. Which is unfortunate because I actually REALLY WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME.
HILARIOUS if not particularly original. It's not obvious that you give birth when you go into a cave, but otherwise this game's pretty great.
The text in the book is a bit hard to read, but otherwise I found this game really enjoyable. You have to examine everyone while at the same time examining yourself, which is a pretty clever twist on this sort of mystery game. The constant feeling of dread is great too.
Nice ambience with an original control scheme.
The objects remain on screen even when you die; this looks sort of silly when you lose. Otherwise it's a pretty fun tower defense game.
Tangential relation to the theme, but I think the game itself was pretty fun.
Going off the screen renders the game in SEIZURE VISION. The game supposedly lasts for a week, but you're alive for eight days rather than seven. And you never dig a specific pattern in the sand.
???
I was really surprised by the game's ending. I thought the twist was that the PRINCESS was going to be doing the kidnapping, but instead it turned out that the princess was a total bitch. This is really deep stuff. It takes a lot of courage to make a game that tells the world, "Women are stupid and like going to the mall." It's a nuanced understanding of gender dynamics in the twenty-first century deserving of a brilliant art game like the one on display here. Bravo.
The game is pretty buggy. I went off-screen by accident and got stuck and couldn't move. Objective is clear enough, I guess.
The game is super polished, given that you made it in forty eight hours. That being said, the physics are really really wonky, and the platforming felt artificially difficult due to the weird lack of traction.
Sort of reminded me of Eversion, but stylized and much better than Eversion.
Well made; I didn't get the idea at first but when I understood how the beams worked it was a pretty fun game.
Pretty enjoyable. The hitboxes on the sharks felt a little wonky; if you grazed them and they turned and ate you I would like it more. Also, it's sort of weird that getting eaten and asphyxiating have the same death animation.
A cool idea with lots of ambience, but it was a bit too minimalistic for my taste.
Jumping was incredibly frustrating; if you hold space for any longer than the millisecond you need to jump it kills your horizontal movement. This is pretty much inexcusable in a platformer, especially a timed one.
Cool music though.
Very enjoyable, with a cool concept to boot. I didn't think it was anywhere near as hard as the comments are making it out to be, but it was still difficult. Fun, though, enough so that I wanted to play through to the end. ( http://imgur.com/H8rWcLy )
The background color shifting with your respective choice of humor was a really good integration of mechanics into gameplay, and the imagery was delightfully disgusting. The inexplicable rock music that started blaring whenever you unleashed the yellow bile made me laugh too.
I guess if I have a complaint it's that the more referential humor contrasts with the rest of the game. Haha, you find a pentagram because adventure game logic. Haha, it's a neckbeard who says "misandry" a couple times. They felt like cheap gags at the expense of the overall vibe of the game. Not problematic enough to be a serious detractor from (imo) the creepiest game of the jam.
Anyone considering giving this game a good rating in the graphics department should reconsider. The player character and enemy graphics are stolen from the game Super Crate Box. Compare/contrast the screenshot above with the one here: http://images.jayisgames.com/supercratebox_3.gif
I know you are pressed for time in the graphics department and that you're going to use placeholders. That's not an excuse for taking graphics from other games without credit.
I thought the score for this game was really good. The moon stage in particular made me think of Pink Floyd (which is not a comparison you make very often with freeware games made in forty-eight hours).
It's a really clever take on this sort of game, and I liked the little slug things. It wasn't all that fun, personally, but it was super funny. The little "doop dee doop" music that played during the story segments and the death animation made me laugh my ass off.
Everyone's said everything that can be said about this game, methinks. Gross and hilarious while never losing its heart.
Hands down the FUNNIEST entry, between the great dialogue and the brilliant music. I'd also like to commend you on the walking animation, which I found sort of impressive despite its simplicity.
Also, that title. Genius.
...huh???
Totally adorable, with some of the best music I've heard all jam. I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to just mash space but I did anyway and I had tons of fun with this one.
The guy sort of looks like the eleventh Doctor. Coincidence?
It's a very unique game, and I can't think of anything exactly like it. The closest comparison I can think of is Trauma Center, in particular, when you get out the ultrasound and look at your patient's leg and find five tumors that are all about to burst and you can't possibly treat them all. There's a great feeling of dread when you realize there's no possible way you can keep all these miners alive, and that some of them are just going to die.
Unfortunately, this is slightly negated by the fact that all the miners are adorably cartoony, even when dealing with Painful Hallucination and Extreme Loneliness.
It's still a really clever interpretation of the theme, both on and beneath the surface. You probably could have integrated the presentation better with the gameplay, though, which costs you a couple points in the rating.
Paul jumped very, very low; it was really difficult to make paths for him because of this. Still a clever application of the theme.
Unique interpretation of the theme. Sort of bizarre (to say the least)
This is the "12 Years a Slave" of video games.
God bless you.
Uploaded the wrong file by accident, embarrassingly enough. Fixed.
A good point, Chaoseed. I didn't realize you could edit the description fields. Fixed now.
That better?
This is really cute! I enjoyed it, especially the little cat with the hat in the shop.
When you lose, if you restart, you get stuck in the same place you died in. Which means that if you lose while on the top of the screen, the mouse will respawn at the top of the screen and likely lose again.
I got stuck in the walls a lot.
I think you have the funniest title though.
Really, REALLY buggy. Unplayably so, as I keep falling through the platforms and can't actually go through the level.
What little I heard of the music was good.
It's a clever idea, but I found it sort of difficult to run into pigs.
Sometimes the detection meter goes up arbitrarily. For example, the leftmost secret computer is hidden away in a little alcove where you should be out of sight, yet the officers are still able to detect if you're the only person working.
It's still a cool application of the theme.
Right now the game plays nice enough, but it doesn't have any real stakes to it. It's very easy to forget that you're being mauled by a shark when the only indicator of that is an easily overlooked HP: 4 at the top of the screen. Likewise with breath.
The easiest way to fix this would be to have there be some change in the player character image. If there was music you could probably make it speed up or something.
Great game, but shouldn't those books be soaked? I mean, how long have they been at the bottom of the sea? They should be waterlogged by this point!
I liked this game quite a bit: clever take on the theme (you're literally beneath the ocean surface, but you're also hiding your desire to eat sailors!) The only aspect that bothered me was how BORING the siren's voice was... I don't understand how a bat sound could make sailors love you! But it's gorgeously drawn and pretty funny too.
If you don't press keys IMMEDIATELY after starting the game, you can't escape the monster fast enough. Which is frustrating, given that you have to click to restart the game and thus couldn't move immediately after starting if you were playing one-handed (like yours truly). If you made it so you could navigate the game over menu with the arrow keys, that would eliminate the issue.
The audio is what pushes this game out of mediocre and into pretty good. Very relaxing.
Pressing R doesn't actually restart. But the soundtrack is great and the atmosphere is suitably dark.
Surprisingly fun, and with cool graphics too. Super good water effects!
Willy keeps moving even after you complete the level, which is actually pretty funny. I wasn't sure how ladders worked (is he supposed to always go left when he gets off?) but this game is still pretty solid.
The only problem I have is that there's no relation to the theme as far as I can tell.
The lack of actual goals hurts this game a little bit, but the sheer fun of the gameplay and the brilliant music bring this up.
Bubbles bounce off of bubbles with other stuff in them, but I think it would be more interesting if the bubbles bounced off of each other even when they're empty.
Fairly enjoyable, if a bit slow. None of my structures even remotely resembled trees, though.
Nice audio and interesting controls. The engine is solid!
This is really cool! Everyone's already mentioned the quality gameplay, but I just want to mention how good the title music is.
An interesting take on Super Hexagon. Sort of annoying in the same way Super Hexagon is with the pulsing, but it's a thematically sound game and I enjoyed it.
There is no way to "win" the game but I don't think that was the intention. Dialogue was less funny than the mechanized voice attempting to read it, including the punctuation marks and colons.
I found this one hilarious. The giant fish that fired out huge blasts of energy like a Megaman enemy made me laugh much, much harder than I should have. Good music. Very enjoyable game play, if not a bit repetitive.
I was all set to dismiss this game as meme-y garbage, but then I realized that it's actually really fun and well made. Controls are simple and fairly intuitive. I wish you could right click to shoot bubbles so that the entire game could be mouse controlled.
Also, I think it's possible for you to lose because the plane is out of air, even when all the passengers have been rescued. Not 100% sure though.
The core gameplay is interesting enough, but there's really no reason to pick number 1. You're preventing your opponent from scoring, but you're only scoring 1 point.
The game is pretty interesting. I thought this was going to be a Tower of Hanoi type game but it wasn't! It's cool.
I felt like there was less depth to the game than I thought there would be. Still enjoyable multiplayer.
The Puerto Ricans grumble, "fair fight!"
Really funny, with cute gameplay and good music. Like Ecco the Dolphin on steroids.
The pace feels way too slow. Part of the reason Flappy Bird is so popular is that the game doesn't have any filler; there's no delay between the pipes, so you die fast and can replay the game a lot more than you could otherwise. This game takes a while to get interesting, and when you die you have to wait another two minutes to get to the fun part!
Way too depressing to be fun. But the atmosphere was perfect.
I'm not sure if the word "fun" is really applicable here, but this game certainly made me laugh. You can keep playing after your rage peaks, though. Intentional?
If you miss one cube you lose, and it's a bit floaty. But th e idea is so cute and funny!!
A really clever idea, even though I died before the signal delay could kick in nine times out of ten. The music is definitely the highlight here.
Relentlessly happy. I wish there was an ADORABLE category here so I could give you a 5/5 in that.
You can fire through the platform up top, meaning you can safely snipe the enemies from above. I'm assuming you didn't want this to happen.
It's not the most polished game, but it's really charming. Gameplay isn't that original, but being the first platformer where Thatcher hires goblins to eat coal miners has to count for something. Thanks Maggie!
Interesting. On the one hand, it's a cool and unique take on a puzzle game; on the other hand it's really hard and nonintuitive.
I don't know if this really qualifies as a game, but it's SO DAMN COOL that I don't even care. This is the best interpretation of the theme I've seen, and I don't think I'll ever see anything as good as this in the theme department ever again. Amazing.
Unique art style married to interesting (if not very puzzly) game play. Definitely cool. My only gripe is it's not particularly on-theme, but that could be fixed easily enough. (Ethnic diversity between the people would make the theme more obvious, I think.)
Chrome seems to tag the second link as malicious and won't permit downloads.
It's a very, very cool idea, but it needs a really good server to work, that doesn't exist.
It's funny, and I like the depiction of hackers as cholesterol addled dorks with ugly fedoras. But I just didn't find it enjoyable as a game.
Well, the graphics and music are beautiful, but... is there gameplay here that I'm missing?
Never played anything quite like this before-- abstract but fun, with great music.
Into the woods, it's time to go, I hate to leave, I have to though...
Anyway-- very good atmosphere and good writing. Never sure how to rate text adventures, but this game's pretty darn good.
It's pretty nice! Two things that I think would make this game better:
1. Make the gaps show up with greater frequency when you have only two guys on screen.
2. Try to add scrolling in each world's background-- gives a greater sense of movement.
Otherwise, this was slick and fun! I enjoyed it.
That ending screen gave me a heart attack, oh my god.
REALLY HARD, even with the walkthrough. (And people thought my game was difficult? Pshaw.) But the humor makes it great rather than frustrating. I loved this game to pieces and I hope you win the funniest game award.
It was kind of interesting. I kind of wish you had put more effort into the game world, though: I can wander offscreen and through buildings, and there doesn't seem to be any integration between the (actually fascinating) story and the (nonexistent) gameplay.
A little too literal, perhaps? But still fun. I found the smaller planets felt too slippery, always trying to keep a distance from the rest of the planets-- I suspect this was intentional, to prevent camping in the corner?
Humorously literal take on the theme. As everyone's said, controls are weird. But the game itself is fun and original.
@arhpositive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrEN-YKLBM
@Victory Garden, carlsommer, anyone stuck on level 6
Okay, this definitely is me guessing people are going to immediately recognize a bit of popular culture they're not familiar with. The four strings in the background in Level 6 correspond to the four strings on a bass guitar. To beat the level, you have to play the bass line to the song "Under Pressure" by Queen & David Bowie. (Or the bass line to "Ice Ice Baby," if you're into that newfangled rap music.) Hit the third string six times, then hit the second string once.
@borgi, Boberro: You have to press escape twice to exit the game: once to get to the main menu, then once more to quit. To my knowledge there are two levels where this won't work (You Are Already Dead and Love) but they're easy enough that you can get to the next level and exit.
The purple kitty (I forgot her name) is SO ADORABLE. And you have to learn to walk!! AAAWWWWWWWWWW. I LOVE THIS GAME SO MUCH.
I didn't find it intuitive that I was supposed to go down, and I found the difficulty curve way too steep. Admittedly, using your thruster for light is a very cool idea.
Occasionally I would get tweets like "@JamieFoxx [LINK]" which were... not difficult. But this was surprisingly fun. Graphics could be less minimal, though: it looks like a very boring Jeopardy ripoff atm. I got up to 109 before I failed, which is apparently on the high end?
Very cool. I would make it clearer which levels you've unlocked on the main menu, as I couldn't tell initially that I only had level 1 unlocked.
For some reason, I got the impression that you can connect person A to person B, but not the other way around? I might be wrong here.
Graphics are nice, but a little generic. Would have been happier if there was more platforming involved.
There definitely was some effort put into this game, but it's much more frustrating than it should be. Part of this is that the level design (particularly in the blue levels) is a bit too reliant on leaps of faith. It's also fairly nonintuitive that contact with animals is fatal; jumping on a blue cockroach isn't usually lethal.
The music gets very frustrating fast because you only have a five second loop, not to mention it's not very well-made. Add this to the weird retro sound effects and the audio becomes very annoying very fast.
My favorite thing about this game is the backgrounds; it's cool that you can see the next stage in the background of the current one, and it's a nice touch that brings home that the worlds really are interconnected.
Platforms are weird. (The letters in the Vinny's sign...?) And the jump sound is irritating, especially in the levels where you have to jump a lot (the beginning of the Mario homage, for example.) But the humor is good.
Short, cute, fun. LOVED the weird little enemies.
The momentum on the boxes is incredibly frustrating, and you need some sort of way to reset the room.
Suitably mysterious, but I'm not sure how you could expand this into a fuller game. I guess you could have two different characters try to escape, creating different rooms with different puzzles but the same four objects. That's not a huge deal though. I approve.
A cute way to get around your nonexistent graphic skills, I guess. It's very, very funny. My only problem is that I wish there was an in-game way to understand what did what-- I thought Sword + Assassin would kill the Assassin, but it stole the sword and ran off...?
Interesting!! Definitely not an average interpretation of the theme.
I really, really did not enjoy this game. If you're going to make a game that requires precision platforming, you have to have sensible movement. This game's movement is completely baffling. There's friction, but only in midair...? It makes otherwise simple platforming sections much, much more frustrating than they have any right to be.
I do have to give you credit for composing so many tracks for this game, even if I didn't like it that much-- I know how hard it is to construct ten tracks in forty-eight hours.
Finally-- I'm amused because the protagonist looks like Andrew Hussie, and he appears to be connecting Illuminati pyramids.
http://i59.tinypic.com/2s6oq39.png
Um.......
Otherwise, it's an interesting concept. It's not intuitive when you're standing on top of a wall in a different color and you can't switch, and the battle system doesn't seem synced up with the rest of the game. (You're always red, even when the game is in green or blue mode.)
If you die and cancel rather than leaving a message, you don't respawn.
Otherwise, this is a super cool game with a great atmosphere. The game's concept is cool (even if Dark Souls did it first) and the traps are trappy.
The moment I saw your username I recognized you from COAL NOT DOLE and realized I had to play your game. I was not disappointed.
The parallax scrolling on the soil looks great, and the sound effects are hilarious. I love this game even better than your previous entries (which is saying something!)
Let's Play: Super Gravitron
I love this game-- it's a smart take on the theme. You should definitely port this to mobile.
Once I actually understood gameplay it was pretty adorable! The weak point here is the music, which is pretty amateurish. Graphics were cute, though.
I do like the Game and Watch display-- it's a cute way of doing the theme. I was a bit frustrated because there was no clear objective; I wasn't punished for missing shapes.
It took me a while to figure out the coin toss physics, but once I did I enjoyed it. Was the silver coin heavier than the gold one? I thought it was, but I might just suck at this.
This is much, much better than 2048. God bless you.
Enjoyable, but the weird physics that you've previously mentioned were very irritating. The fruit were cute but I wish they looked a little different in terms of shape-- have the lemons be oblong rather spherical, for instance. The music was fittingly bouncy.
The jump physics-- and I hesitate to call it that-- are very poor. Gravity does not work like that! In addition, the ammo limitations were far too low, and I frequently wasted time waiting for a crate to load. I also don't know if it's possible to get the crates in the corners.
That being said, the four-directional firing was very cool and I wish I saw more games that implemented that mechanic.
I enjoyed it, but I would inevitably get crushed under a bunch of rubble and be unable to move because of the four-foot walls of nukes around me. I also feel the boss might be too resilient. But I'm a sucker for Megaman style boss fights. (After all, my game is fourteen of them in a row, lol)
HOW MANY CHILDREN DOES THIS GUY HAVE??
Probably the best game I've played all jam, and not only because of nepotism. I found it pretty simple because I know my Boolean algebra, but it's still challenging. I wish there was more incentive to not just pick a random diagnosis and hope you had a 50/50 chance, though-- the game doesn't have much tension. Good music would probably help here (hint hint), although what audio you do have is appropriately Sim-ish and charming.
To confirm-- yes, the fourteen prototypes are fought in random order.
My email is thingo@plippi.com, if you ever want to talk to me about this.
My host's server seems to be down. I've posted a direct link on Box.net for the time being.
Makes me think of Flappy Bird in that it's very simple yet well-designed, and I could see a thousand variants on this game getting released on mobile. I like the sound effects, actually-- you slowly have to increase your speed, and the rhythm of the keypresses is fantastic.
Under the vigilant gaze of two festive harpies (elves? imps? harlots? the world may never know), the player partakes in rampant destruction of Christmas ornaments. This rampant demolition is hastened by an in-game timer which ticks down from four minutes and twenty seconds. (The subcultural reference present here is so obvious it's not worth mentioning, but it would explain many of the artistic choices present in this game.)
During my playthrough, I chose to paint the board a festive green. Compelled by the unswerving visage of the two-headed Christmas faeries, I completed my task in a mere two minutes. The two oracles then spoke in unison like the chorus in a Sophocles epic, echoing a moral sentiment that I will never forget:
...
"Don't be a grinch"
Upon seeing these words, I realized immediately the true meaning of Christmas-- love of our lord and savior, Jesus Hernandez Christ the Son of God aka Jehovah aka "G-d," who had saved me from my wasteful materialism in the pursuit of aesthetic unity, and I got down on my knees and wept for the innocence I had lost.
8/10
Fascinating in the same way watching someone else trip over a banana peel and die is fascinating. I did like the music.
This goes on much, much too long-- it's like playing Pong to 30, but the screen is three times larger and there are powerups that restart the level. I think that if I actively tried to lose this game, I would have to wait seven minutes; if you're actually trying to win this game it can take upwards of thirty minutes. I would rank this game much, much higher if you had three lives as opposed to the easily recoverable, very long lifebar you currently have.
The game's a little slow, and I found the water droplet hard to see. The phone should probably be horizontally aligned so you can get up closer to the screen.
The most polished game I've seen so far, with an amazing score and really nice graphics. I would love to see this fleshed out into a full game!!
Interesting gameplay, although the controls are a bit complicated. There's no reason not to mash the attack buttons as far as I can see.
I enjoyed it! I... still don't know what half the things were supposed to be, and most of them seemed pretty useless except as collectibles. What does green cone represent, for instance? It felt like boots got rarer as you went deeper into the maze, which made sense as a way to bring the game to a close.
I've figured this game out-- you are Daedalus and the red man is Icarus. Your son is able to "fly" (represented by the red man flapping his limbs like wings) because of your "hand"iwork (the cursor). But he refuses to come down, and he continues to rise in altitude (score). Ultimately, he goes too high, his wings fall off, and he plummets to his untimely demise (symbolized by the red man's death).
I think the turrets are a bit too efficient-- I set up two on the center platform at the very start of the game and didn't have to touch a single enemy afterwards.
Also, the protagonist looks like Dr. Phage from Awful Hospital and that terrifies me.
I'm not big on vaporwave stuff, so I rated this harsher than other people will. But I think this was a very clever way to get around the one screen rule.
I recently discovered that you can look up games by their creator's username; the moment I figured this out, I immediately searched for your game after fond memories of "Coal Not Dole."
I was not disappointed! The core concept is simple enough, but the real reason to play this name is to see one hundred awful/hilarious name puns in one minute. (Somewhere in heaven, Tom Magliozzi is laughing much too hard.) It's a really great central concept if you ever want to expand this into a full game, too-- there's a lot you could do with a game that takes place exclusively within the credits of a video game.
I didn't care for the gameplay-- I kept getting stuck in the walls, and the process by which you converted voters was a bit too abstract for my tastes. But there was a surprising amount of effort put into level design.
Explosive poops are pretty unconventional, I suppose.
I accidentally pressed 1 instead of 2 when they asked if you were on fire and my phone broke.
Still the best game I've played yet-- totally hilarious and frustrating in the best way possible.
This game is really similar to mine, actually, with the arcade feel and the ice weapon.
I definitely like the routine of firing the enemy into the portal, although I found pressing Z and X at the same time to be very frustrating, and I didn't like losing a life from running into enemies when I did the dash attack. I also feel like the first level is a lot harder than the ones that come after it.
But this is all little stuff-- this game is charming and polished, and totally worthy of love.
Fun! I rather liked the insults here, and the coach's reward for losing was cute. :-)
I designed a similar game for a jam about a year ago called "Genetic Bounce Moto." It was like this but a Metroidvania, and almost unplayably bad.
It's very chill, and I like the dangerous brightness of the lava. It's a good way to indicate "THIS IS HAZARDOUS" without anything flashy. My only problem is that the tutorial is a little weird. You learn how to go right, then how to jump, then how to go left? That seems wildly disjointed.
I loved this game so, so much. The steadily greyed out world is a wonderful reversal of that "ADD COLOR TO THE WORLD!!!" trope as well as a easy visual indication of how far you've progressed; the airship construction was super fun; all things considered, this was a wonderful game.
I thought I was the only arcade game about icicle murderers. :0(
Anyway, this game has an odd bug. When you hit an enemy while they're at the very edge of the screen, the wraparound doesn't quite work and they disappear forever without setting off death triggers, so the level never ends. Otherwise, the game is alright, though as Photon said, there's no reason not to kill your enemies via drowning.
The big problem with this game is that it goes on way too long. You can figure out the scoring system (Fannee Doolee, percentage of vowels, etc) after two or three rounds, so the next two thirds of the game are just hoping for good luck with the RNG.
Still, it's very funny and some of the words are just inherently humorous. And you get to see who would win in a fight between Aristotle and Hal 9000, which is always great.
I built a pufferfish with shark arms. IT WAS COOL.
So, you have a very cool idea here wrecked by generic fantasy flavor. If this game was concepted as, say, LD raters trying to snipe each others' games out of the running, that would be hilarious, and the mechanics would make instinctive sense. (If you give out too few stars, the mods will ban you from voting!) As it is, there's very little reason WHY you'd be rating bows and hammers.
Still, it's a cool take on the theme and I really would love to see this idea fleshed out somehow.
There's a lot to like about this game-- the score, the curved screen effect, the core concept and the kind of funny powerups (porn gives you sticky hands! hahaha)
But there are two problems with this game that really suck given the genre: your physics are kind of weird, and your level design is kind of bad. You have a lot of leaps of faith where you have to die a million times before you can progress because you have no idea where the platforms are.
Still, I'd like to see this turned into a full game.
Well, it's... it's pretty?
I have no idea what's going on. It takes two minutes to walk over to the part of the game that's actually interesting, and even then... your light goes crazy when you touch a black thing? Okay.
Alright, I suppose. I had a hard time telling the enemies apart from the junk I was supposed to pick up. Very cool music.
Adorable!! I felt warm and fuzzy inside. As someone who uses a hair dryer on a regular basis, I appreciated the concept. Control teaching was simple, too, which was very nice (I had to use a clunky instructions on title screen to get the controls across).
Though I wonder how your girlfriends manage to survive stuck in that ice like that?
The music in this game is really, really cool.
But even then, it does feel like you made a regular top down shooter and at the last second added the various birds to spice it up. Also, the chickens look like poop splatters.
I'm a sucker for really good rhythm games, and this game is pretty damn cool. My only beef the complete absence of stimulus-- there's no real indication whether you've hit the note, or even that not hitting the notes is a bad thing.
It's also not obvious what city represents what key; you can't color coordinate ala Guitar Hero and writing out the keypress would look tacky, so this is a hard problem. Maybe have each city have a little billboard with the corresponding key on it?
Also, I know everyone's going to say this, but awesome music here.
3867.
I kind of wish you had hilarious gore effects like Mortal Kombat or I Wanna Be The Guy-- as of now all it looks like is you knocking pills over.
I feel like a lot of the game wasn't immediately obvious; it's a bit hard to tell when you're in the teacher's line of sight, for instance. And as much as I love the Pachinko universe, I wish you could choose where to drop the boys so that it wasn't just "you have a 1/3rd chance of having to recapture them."
Still, it's super cute. No objections here.
"Okay, I'm pressing WASD, why doesn't the ball move?"
"Wait no, you're the little cube to the right."
"What? Okay, so let's move this thing onto the question mark. Do I press Q to question it or something?"
"No, you're supposed to ride the ball apparently."
"????? Okay so how do I do that?"
"The controls say to press X to apply force."
"Okay, let's try that."
"ERROR: STACK EXCEPTION"
"I think it's frozen now. Maybe this is part of the game?"
Hm. I like the core mechanic here-- very Kirbyish, but a bit more fun. Being able to aim upwards made the fight a bit too easy (and I was a little upset I couldn't make a diagonal).
Also, minor beef: how come you can't press space twice to just skip to the boss?
I'm not quite sure how I damage people in this game.
Now, typing out your sword seems like fun, but other than that this game seems rather lacking. A single player mode would have been nice. That being said-- really cute graphical style.
It's an experience! You seem to enjoy taking the piss out of yourselves, so the metaphysical dialogue is funny rather than irritatingly pretentious.
"Vaporwave"-flavored turds are still turds. Direct your energies towards creating actual games rather than cultivating your /mu/ cred.
Sorry, that was kind of blunt. Let me put it another way.
I played Chroma-2 last LD, and my distinct impression was "well, these guys have the artistic style down pat, but the gameplay is boring as hell. but they'll improve on the mechanics of their next LD entry!" As far as I can tell, these two games are practically identical.
You're really good musicians, and you're actually kind of funny. But if your audience is going to invest more than two minutes into a game that is passive-aggressively trying to give them a seizure, you need to polish the gameplay rather than the aesthetic.
Kind of frustrating-- this is why the planets in Galcon don't have their own alliance of "nah, man."
Very, very cool-- I appreciate the mock-Morricone.
My only wish was that it would be clearer when to fire; at the very least in the beginning of the game.
I mean, I didn't "enjoy" the game at all in the sense that I didn't have any idea what I was doing, but it was totally hilarious. The graphics rotating with you was pretty cool.
Sometimes, games with adult themes are surprisingly interesting. There was one such game during LD29: an adventure game about an aging porn star who relived his glory days and ultimately kidnapped a small child and brought her to Mexico. This game starts off with a massive penis on the title screen, and only gets worse from there.
I can only hope that the misogynistic "I'm gonna kill that whoring bitch" mentality that the protagonist here exudes does not represent Mister Varalta's real-life attitudes towards relationships.
PS: You know that dildos don't ejaculate, right?
PPS: You know there are ten-year-old girls participating in this jam, right?
For reference, going around and beating people up with a stolen dildo isn't necessarily awful.
It's the whole crux of this game being the player character's quest to murder his girlfriend that I find pretty much totally unsalvageable.
The gameplay itself was a little lacking-- I wish there was some way to heal yourself, or at the very least a checkpoint. It's cool how you psychoanalyze the Russian soldiers, though, and the dialogue is hilarious.
I like the bad puns-- Caracalbatross is my favorite.
Sort of wish you had more choice here, but it's a pretty nice mons parody.
I don't know if this really fits the theme, and the graphics were weird, and I spent half the game waiting for the next button to show up, and I accidentally unlocked a pong world when I answered "I am alone," and I had to click on every button twice.
And despite all this, HELP is probably one of the most weirdly immersive games I've played in the past year. The random popups of Descartes, the Blade Runner references, the MBTI charts... all go together to make a game that's surprisingly fun!
I got a 630.
The final stage was the highlight-- it felt like a very immature Super Hexagon. But seriously, Kim Kardashian farting? Are you like, five?
Enjoyable. I found that the monsters were often too distracted by my corpse to do anything.
Well, it's certainly funny! It's not immediately obvious that there's no win condition because of the room's shape; I wish the game made it more clear that this was an arcade game. Maybe a high score function would help? (Actually, I should add one in my game too, lol)
So, in conclusion, what it lacks in graphics or unique gameplay it makes up for with humor. A nice entry, as always. :0)
I really love this sort of "behind-the-scenes" game. Good work.
I did not expect that. World F-B is utterly horrifying in the best way possible.
The level counter going backwards is great too. Although I have to wonder, what is Luigi doing there?
It's a dress-up game, so I'm not sure I can judge this in the same way I could judge a platformer or a puzzle game or something like that. I mean, there's a huge range of outfits and accessories which let you dress up our monster friend in a million ways, which is the point, I think.
The twist at the end is interesting-- I sort of saw it coming after playing "One of Them," so it wasn't nearly as effective. But it's still a very cool reversal when taken in the context of the theme.
Cons: unless Dick Wolf was two game devs in a trench coat, I can't give you credit for any of the audio in this game. Which is a shame because it's very nice audio.
PROS: Everything else! The graphics are incredibly charming, the Ninji is cute, and the political humor isn't even remotely biting but it is funny. The ending is inane but in the best possible way.
This is a little annoying on a mouse, but the game is very cute. Not being able to gun down the bullets is a little frustrating.
I very much enjoyed this one.
Very enjoyable. I wish you could double tap to dash, but ground pounding is fun. Music is cool too.
I feel like you could have had some sort of sound cue that would tell you when the bar hit one side of the meter, so you could hear that and bike accordingly. The best strategy imo is to get a lot of speed at the start of the level and then get to the end. Surprisingly nice music!
CONS: The lack of variety in enemy types is a little frustrating.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY: The game could have taken place on a motorcycle and be named Young Motorcyclist's Maternity Masher Adventure, or, as you'd acronym it, YoMoMMA.
What a charming little game! Day six is so mean that it starts being frustrating before looping over to hilarious. Funny take on the theme, obviously; I'm surprised your game is the only one that comes up if you look up "monstering" !!!
The Ghost Trick parody that wasn't actually a Ghost Trick parody, but had a duck in it. Wehk wehk.
Cool, though in the canon games you can't catch a Pokemon once it's been reduced to 0 HP. I also wish leveling up would increase your base HP like canon games do. I like the game, though.
The obvious plus side here is the great audio-- suitably traumatic, and it's rare you find an LD with good voice acting.
The obvious negative here is that the game is stupid hard once the spikes come in-- I think you have Robert set to die on collision with the rectangle that contains the spike rather than the spike itself. The dream physics are interesting, and I liked how the spike room felt weightier than everything else, especially in tandem with the way you jump on them to "kill your parents." If you focused on syncing Robert's emotions with the physics this could be a very, very cool game.
HA!!! Giving this a five just for the music.
You should post the songs from this on a Soundcloud or something. They're really good, and if you intended for FOUR LEVELS you probably have unreleased stuff lying around that the world is dying to hear.
The twist isn't super surprising to be honest-- we've all played Shadow of the Colossus, yeah? I wish the bear made SOME attempt to dodge your shots if nothing else. But the gameplay mechanic was very enjoyable and the graphics and music are fantastic, so it's not like this is a bad game by any measure. In fact it's one of the best entries this LD I think.
I like the screams Mario makes when he dies
OH MY GOD!!! This is fantastic.
The boss fight is trivially easy-- I don't think I took a single hit. Turning into a demon was kind of underwhelming because the bar depleted too quickly. But the game is actually pretty funny, and the music is hilarious.
Like Papers, Please, but more soul crushing.
Is there any indication how far along you are on the drive? I couldn't find any, so the game felt kind of aimless.
It's a very interesting idea for a game especially given the theme-- who's the monster, the gym teacher or you? The graphics are very charming, as is the audio; it's very easy for a game drawn in crayon to look amateurish but this is deceptively cute looking.
It bothers me that both of the characters have the same dialogue-- it's hard to tell them apart beyond "the white guy" and "the one who looks like Geromy." Also not sure why the guy in shotgun vomiting would end the game. Still, very nice, even if the gameplay itself is minimal.
You should post controls for this game somewhere, because I have no idea how you eat people (which is presumably the point of the game, since I doubt you'd make a game about a shark that worked at a frozen yogurt store...)
It's basically one of those mean-spirited Windows parodies that everyone was making back in 2005, complete with an obnoxious Clippy stand-in. Clicking dialogue options is frustratingly hard because they'll move to the top of the screen before you can click them; there's no real incentive to gain or lose money; the satire of big gaming companies is kind of mediocre.
On the other hand, the graphics were pretty nice (I like the screen effect), and it's a fairly creative take on the theme.
Stellar audio. I was very confused once I brought the boss's health to zero-- but you're the monster, not the boss, so what you do is fittingly brutish. It's an interesting fusion of two of my favorite game genres, so I approve.
It's very, very odd to me that you'd be trying to get the cones. I spent two minutes trying to avoid the cones like in a demented driver's license exam before realizing my objective was to collect them all.
Still, not awful by any means. If I have a complaint it's that the car never changes no matter how many times you run into things; having it look visibly dented would be a much better HP meter than the vertical thing in the corner of the screen.
The distortion effect when you die is very cool-- I'm a sucker for glitch effects. Actually, the graphics here are all very very cool.
I had no idea that I could double jump for the first three minutes of play and did not understand that I was supposed to head right to fight mushroom monsters.
Color coding all the minigames was a cute idea given the minimalism of the graphics. There was a game with a similar concept a couple LDs ago except it was skinned as a four-pronged assault on humanity by a group of pigs, and it was funny! Which is the real appeal of WarioWare type games-- the humor.
Wonky hit detection on the sword (?), plus a very unfun control scheme. The Megaman model (one hand for movement, the other for jumping and shooting) works much better than whatever's going on here, and even mapping jump to W would work better.
Charming audio, though.
I think the inclusion of a solitaire mode of some sort would help greatly in terms of getting people to play it.
This is actually very funny, even if it's borderline impossible to get five players to sit down and play through it.
Has the peculiar problem that the first fifty seconds of the game are almost completely useless, since hitting 40 members from each team and hitting 4 members from each team don't impact the ending at all. If there was some alternate objective-- rocks you had to dodge or something-- for the first thirty seconds, you could have some reason to not just walk away from the keyboard for the first half of the game.
Ben Eath: the Surf Ace!
Okay, there was other stuff too.
It bothered me that every player had the same walking speed, so you could have a stalemate by walking in the same direction if you wanted. That's a minor complaint though. Very enjoyable!
This game really suffers from the two button controls-- you really want more motion than you have here. On the other hand, it's very funny, and I appreciated the random name generation. (I played football with Charles Bukowski! He's better at sports than he is at writing, unsurprisingly.)
@Linear: This game was made in Game Maker Studio on a PC running Windows 8. I'm not sure it's compatible with older systems. (Just six months ago I was running Windows XP, so I feel your pain!)
Not much of a game. It does have a clean interface, and the lack of an objective makes it pretty relaxing. Could definitely use audio or something.
Given that my game is also a C64 parody, I appreciated this. (I even already had the font downloaded! Ha!!) Very charming graphics. The music got irritating fast, though if it wasn't looping for ten minutes I'd love it.
Like everyone else, it seemed like there was literally no progress being made no matter what I did. The character design was charming and the UI was very nice, though.
What a cute little monster!
Problem, though-- you can do the prompts for each of the three options even when they're not selectable, so you can just spam Alt to get in free hits.
Still, so charming!
I feel like the snarky narrator was underused. The game did feel like it was trying to troll me with that final level.
But gameplay wise it was fun-- the final level hints towards something really fun, more of a puzzle game than a platformer. I liked it.
On the one hand, this is a perfect recreation of a Game and Watch, with charming graphics and an obvious ton of attention to detail.
On the other hand, it's not very fun. I also wish the buttons for the inputs were A and L so that you had to use two hands like you would on an actual console, even though that would be kind of annoying.
The "yum" noises were charming, as was the little glob. The actual game is no fun whatsoever, since it's a guessing game where you can't tell how big the blob is until it's too late.
I loved this much more than I thought I would. It's more like a collection of minigames than anything else, but I wouldn't have it any other way. The graphics are what make this game shine.
A very innovative game that has the minor problem of not feeling like a progression through time as it does through the game dev process. Having a platforming segment towards the middle struck me as weird since I don't associate the genre with Windows games. The lack of dialogue options was a little saddening. If you randomized them when you entered the room and only had one option you could have made interacting with the NPCs a little more fun.
I thought the graphics were a little odd-- you have these big pixelated rocks, but the rest of the graphics were at a regular size. The Wild West font just looks silly too.
Still, this is much more polished than a lot of first time entries. I hope to see more games by you in the future!
Not being able to see where the bullets are coming from is a questionable design decision. Was also confused about how to eat the soldiers.
Points for having a spider protagonist though!
Very reminiscent of "Tower of Greed" or any number of games with the bank-your-points-now-or-risk-it-and-get-more. Which is a good thing, since it's a sick concept for a game! The anglerfish was a very neat idea for an enemy, because not only is it easy to animate, it's also an untapped vein of horror.
A curious genre mashup. Well, not a mashup-- it's just very weird seeing this hyper-competitive style of game applied to growing flowers, a normally placid activity. (I'll avoid the obvious Undertale reference.)
Charming audio-- I never would have guessed it was computer generated had you not said so in the description.
I played a LOT of Jelly Battle back in the day and have been waiting for a functional clone of the game. I wish there was more of an indication where you could or couldn't jump, either by highlighting those squares or having a check next to your cursor when you're on an OK square.
You also don't spawn food often enough.