Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → TPunisher33
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Whip it up! | jam | 322 | 3.80 | 3.70 | 3.64 | 3.79 | 3.67 | 3.87 | 3.83 | 3.85 |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | Fairy Feeder | jam | 169 | 3.85 | 3.53 | 3.28 | 4.22 | 4.05 | 3.87 | 3.86 | 4.09 |
Flat-out, love this game and concept. Sound needs a bit of balancing as some of it can be grating and far louder than it should be, but the only thing stopping this from being knocked out of the park is the UX, building and repairing walls can be a chore and reorganizing defense positions when expanding is tedious and error-prone. You've done a fantastic job, definitely my favorite game in the jam thus-far.
@paulsams I think that's a valid point about the game and one that was discussed among the team during playtesting. I think the core balance to identify when picking between the two options presented is the balance between the efficiency of gameplay and the agency of the interaction. If there were no options as to how to place elements when purchasing there would definitely be a faster and potentially more accessible game-loop; however, at the opportunity cost of restricting the player's ability to feel agency (or the effect of adding their own touch) when placing elements. While I don't personally notice the disconnect and would have been fine with the purchase buttons functioning as you've described, other members of the team did prefer the ability to place things and went on to spearhead the placement restrictions for the food to add a perceived physical connection with the background art.
Upon reviewing the decision critically, I feel we made the right call. The overall structure of the game dedicates some 80% of the visual area to the terrarium and thus (in a static screen game like this) approximately 80% of the overall game-loop is dedicated to this 2D space. If we'd made buttons simply place things arbitrarily in the space, the total utility of the enormous commitment we made to that layout would decrease. In that scenario, the play space would lose more than a third of its total gameplay utility as it's now relegated only to dust gathering and warp dismissal instead of also being part of the means of placement. There's a lot of other smaller benefits we get by making the player manually place elements as well, but those are a longer discussion about timings and mouse motion that I'm honestly not qualified to deep-dive into, but I hope this has given you a sufficient answer :heart:
The monkeys are so cute and I love them. Definitely a fun game that takes a while to master, great work!
Cool concept, I'd love to see it fleshed out, maybe sync the nodes randomness so they always produce something that a little more on-key.
@plexsoup Sorry for the late response, I might have a bad ear for the pitch, some of it sounded off to me, but that might also be a limitation of the accuracy of the Godot pitch shifting engine (which I wouldn't rely on for a full release) and absolutely no fault of yours.
But actually what I was trying to suggest (poorly in hindsight) was that the nodes should communicate together so they are aware of the sounds each-other is making and produce less random and more "semi-random" sounds that follow standard chord progressions. Imagine if you placed two similar nodes near each other and instead of playing randomly selected pitches they selected pitches such that they from a chord together. Anyway, I don't want to derail any creative intentions you have, you've clearly got a great image for this game already in mind :heart:
Great art style! I felt like the controls were a little imprecise and I got stuck on corners pretty often, maybe making the tilemap for the wheat have beveled corners when there's no adjacent or diagonal tiles would alleviate that without much implementation work.
This is a very cute and relaxing game. I wish there were a few more mechanics to increase the difficulty or variety. I avoided the rocks in the dirt thinking they were obstacles for the longest time. Untitled.png
Very cute game! I like Twister for your keyboard.
"I'm 80 years old, I'm retired" - Why are all games just dreams that millennials can't achieve :sob:
In all seriousness this was an interesting game, not terribly difficult and I'm still not 100% sure I've got a good understanding of all the mechanics, but it was chill and fun! I think a little flavor text as the years go by or maybe a description of the year's events would go a long way.
Definitely a great game if a bit small. I wish there was an auto fire upgrade for the shotgun because my clicking finger hurts now. Also I recommend a visual effect on things when they're hit so it's easier to tell when you're doing damage.
The game has some gorgeous visual design and identity, excellent work! For me the biggest flaw is the power of the wind, sailing close hauled results in almost zero speed and the boat carries none of that speed when turning into the wind and attempting to tack. It's an interesting design decision I'm sure you had to make regarding the direct influence the player had on the boat and how "sailboat-ey" the boat felt to pilot and it's clear you leaned toward the former. As it is now, the boat feels more like driving a car than piloting a water craft, but that lessens the impact movement has on catching fish which is a part of the balancing act.
I'd love to play a more fluid version of the game though where the sailboat behaved more like a light water-craft and carried a lot of its momentum into turns so catching fish while on the move was more engaging. Still a great concept though!
@danmerey for something like this I would've avoided physics simulation as much as I could and built a model for basic boat motion (just a forward, turning, and wind force that you gather each frame) so it could be really fine-tuned without all the extra nonsense the full sim adds. Keep physics monitoring on so that on a physics overlap you can zero the model's motion against the overlap normal and reposition the boat back along the normal a bit to keep it from penetrating. Though it's been a few good years since I done a proper Unity release, I'm not sure how robust their physics API is anymore, but this is definitely doable in UE so probably totally doable in Unity.
I hope it's not weird to give systems implementation suggestions in these comments :sweat_smile: I can't imagine how busy you were doing this on your own.
@theothersamp I know quite a few people (myself included) who enjoy writing their own SDF implementations and collider code for each project. Unless I need it to work within the scope of something very small and be ultra light-weight like an implementation within UE Mass, I do my best to exert self-control and just let the physics system I'm already paying for pull its weight :smile:
Controls were quick and easy to use even on keyboard, audio was really great. I'd suggest offering a bit of coyote time on jumps as I often found myself dashing when I meant to jump in some of the platforming.
A neat and addicting concept, definitely a blast!
This was a blast to play but super unforgiving. I wish I had a bit more leeway to see what's above me as I was shooting most of the crows blind. Definitely loved playing as anime Rayman, 10/10 on that part.
Fascinating game, love the hand drawn aesthetic.
@vidim888 our linked team above is made up of 3 artists, 3 technical, and 1 facilitator. Everyone's always a bit of everything in a jam space, plus there are some people who dropped by to help or helped remotely who aren't in the linked team but are mentioned in the credits.
In the end most of the workload for this jam was spread out ad-hoc for each task, and all the artists were drawing completed recipes at some point and most everyone worked on the recipe spreadsheet as we figured things out at the get-go. Many on our team are professionals in the game-dev industry and are used to breaking out work on their own pretty efficiently. Though there was definitely a desire for more dedicated organizers with so many on the team :sweat_smile:
As always, thanks for the feedback :heart: We knew going into the initial ingredient spreadsheet the combinatorial explosion of our desired recipe space but felt confident in our ability to tackle it at the time. As with all jams, initial scoping is inaccurate and other elements like a score tracker and a fun recipient reaction vignette after delivery had to be scrapped as they provided nothing to the MVP.
But hey, any finished jam is a successful jam :wink:
An exceptionally well-put-together game. Music was well-suited to the graphical themes and the gameplay was engaging but never too difficult. Honestly great, I have no notes! Excellent work!
Definitely a cool take on constructing summoning circles!
A very clean experience, well done! The first section of the game was a bit of a hurdle since I didn't understand to read the book to get a spirit, then it was a bit tedious running back and forth to find the right lever, but all-in-all a good experience. Definitely felt like I wanted phantom 2 for the timed door in the middle but I made it past. Ran into a bug where both of the guards would catch me and I'd get sent back to jail again after a short delay while in the cell, but otherwise fairly bug-free!
The top-down combat was pretty fast paced and difficult, died the first time through but the game didn't fail me out so a small bug there. Otherwise it was a good submission!
As a friendly note: Since you used GANs and other NNs for a majority of the sound and visuals, you should exempt your submission from ratings in those categories.
Cute game, played through it quickly, no part of the game stops you from adding too many ingredients or multiples of the same ingredients which was confusing at first, thankfully you have a nice tutorial to help. Short and sweet.
A silly physics based platform puzzle game. The instructions and gameplay took a good bit to figure out but I managed to beat the game. Brave of you to use Unreal to make a game jam. After a decade working in the engine even I'm not that confident :sweat_smile: Great work!
Very cute game and a fun puzzler to boot, great work!
I have so many shoes, I can explore the whole boss arena! Still though, could not beat the boss, nothing I did seemed to make their health bar go down, otherwise a fun game, definitely a blast of combat and powerup gathering. Great work!
A nice and simple idea, very hard too. I had trouble leading the targets on the right with crystals without hitting myself.
There's definitely a lot of work to be done on this guy, hopefully you can get it fully functional before the submission deadline later today. Don't forget to remove the logs and screenshots under the saved directory from your exported game. Maybe remove that on-screen log dump too ;) Best of luck guys!
A fun little top-down romp. I didn't find myself using the sword much, but great job!
What a great lane battler! The art and sound worked together well and overall the experience is very clean, great job!