Trouv

Shimash by thedashdude 2022-10-08T04:58:59Z

This was fun! My high score was 332.06:

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Here's my ranking of the 3 mini-games: 1. The missiles. The way this one scaled up felt great. Out of the three, this is the only one that gave me some "tetris effect". So satisfying. 2. The grid. This one was the most difficult for me for some reason. I'm not sure that I like how an attack will occasionally occur faster than the established rhythm. But other than that, no complaints, and I'm not even sure if that is a complaint. 3. The spinny bars. I liked that the bars weren't damaging on spawn. You also occasionally get some neo-dodge moments that felt great. However, even on the higher difficulties, this one just felt a bit slow. Maybe it was because the bars were so floaty? Perhaps they should've increased more in speed than in number? I'm not sure if that would work. Maybe they could've increased in size? It also just wasn't as polished as the other two visually or sound-wise.

I think if you choose to continue with this game, you should break the theme and experiment with making level changes more frequent as difficulty scales. I also wish the level transitions themselves got faster, even if their frequency didn't change.

Great job overall! This really feels like a complete package. Very well-scoped and polished.

Shimash by thedashdude 2022-10-09T22:07:23Z

@thedashdude Thanks for the write up, this is very interesting. I think you're right that the reason the spinning bars felt "slow" was because it always starts with 1 bar. You've probably already thought of this, but it makes me wonder what it would feel like if it sped up the spawn rate like it does now, but eventually it started spawning 2 at once, or even 3 at once in super end game.

Lights Out, Fright's Out! by TechnoNugget 2022-10-14T02:25:44Z

This was fun, and had some good puzzles. The last level especially got me thinking.

The darkness doesn't add too much to the game for me. For the most part, when the lights went out, I was able to just wait for the lights to come back on before continuing to play. I know that the button's color assignment didn't show unless it was dark, but you could easily figure this out by standing on them.

Clearly you have some good puzzle design skills. I wonder if it would be interesting if the puzzles leaned more into locking the ghosts away from you. That's how the top right ghost is in the last level before you press the blue button, so I think you wanted to play with this idea as well. If the ghosts had perfect pathing and more speed, the player would need to be careful to lock them away before it went dark, otherwise they would be guaranteed to get caught. Maybe instead of 10 seconds per light/dark round, you and the ghost would only have x number of moves per light/dark round respectively. I think emphasizing the ghost-manipulation in the puzzle design could give the dark more meaning, and could lead to some interesting challenges.

I also want to mention that this is one of the better looking games I've played so far in the jam. Very charming visuals. Good job overall!

Freight Frenzy by lbrande 2022-10-04T02:21:19Z

Absolutely fantastic. I played it for hours. My high score was 1595: freight-frenzy.png

I think the most stunning thing about the design of this game is the balance you chose. Placing 5 tetrominoes on 5x5 ships with 4 available to place at any time is perfect. The amount of time the ships spend at the harbor is perfect. I can tell you gave that some serious thought, given that you chose 0x10 seconds for each ship instead of just saying "a new one arrives every 10 seconds". So now, a new one arrives every 8 seconds, which makes things more frantic, but not too hard once you get the hang of it. A very clever way to bend the theme for the sake of gameplay.

The points system really incentivizes 5-tetrominoe ships. It's nice that the 4-tetrominoe ships give you points, but their true value is keeping the run alive so that you may eventually get another chance at a 5-tetrominoe ship. I can't stress how fun this balance is. I eventually got into a nice rhythm of going for 5 occasionally, and writing off subsequent ships as 4-tetrominoe ships to give myself a mental break. The fact that the 4-tetrominoe ships also varied in points gave the game just one extra layer of optimization that the player could think about.

But the truly inspired piece of the design is that there's 2 ships available instead of 1 or 3. It allows you to think ahead a nice amount, allows you to pick your moments where you're going for 5, it allows you to use one ship as a dumping ground for currently-useless pieces (but you still have to be careful!) It works so, so well. I loved that you could still place pieces on ships that were driving away, it added a nice element of nail-biting luck/skill.

The only complaint that I'll mention here is that the RNG was a bit brutal at times. Many ships were straight-up impossible to place 5 tetrominoes on due to their box rng. The tetrominoe rng was also brutal sometimes, but I think fixing the former would ease the latter enough to be acceptable. When spawning ships, logically place 5 pieces on them ahead of time and fill in the gaps with boxes, just so it's always possible. I don't even think you need to make it the 4/5 pieces that the player has on hand/upcoming; there's enough interoperability with tetrominoe shapes that the player could often make it work with what they have, plus not having a guarantee that they can make it work keeps some luck in the game, which is nice.

The balance really makes or breaks a game like this, and my god, did you make it. This was so much fun. Yell-at-my-screen fun. I give it 5 stars in "fun" and 5 stars in "theme". It'll definitely land among my favorites of the jam. Now, give it some sound/music, adjust the rng, give it a leaderboard, polish it up, and release it.

Freight Frenzy by lbrande 2022-10-05T01:45:59Z

New high score is 3020 :)

Freight Frenzy by lbrande 2022-10-09T01:18:27Z

Thanks for updating the ship generation. The new sound is a bit harsh, and I'm not sure that the panning is necessary.

Thanks to the new ship generation, I managed a new high score of 7655.

Tenfold Rim Mining by PurpledArtFrog 2022-10-09T01:15:34Z

I'm really impressed with the amount of features this has for a compo game.

My experience this, like many others, had two stages to it. The first was struggling to figure out what's going on, and the second was kind of doing nothing as my base had become perfect. I think the difficulty needs to scale up a little more quickly, or maybe higher than it is now. Really swarm the player with enemies by the end of it, vampire survivors style. Also, more tiers of upgrade would have kept me playing longer than I did. Maybe an ability to expand the frame of the base would be good too.

I think the asteroid count should increase drastically as well. I like having the asteroid cracker since it automates a very tedious task. Realizing that you should rush to make a +AI asteroid cracker, and then reaping the benefits, feels really good. But there's no reason to have two of them with the current game. You would need more upgrades, more enemies, and more asteroids to justify it.

Maybe the game does eventually scale up like that, but I didn't see it. Unfortunately, my keyboard doesn't have a numpad. It would have been nice to be able to speed up the game without having a numpad.

But, like I said, the feature count here is staggering for 48 hours. It feels like a pretty complete TD that just needs a bit more balancing. Great job.

Boss Swap by Wilko 2022-10-15T23:27:54Z

This was fun! Including the "ultrahard" difficulty was pretty bold. Forcing yourself to do a "perfect run" of something is a good way to tell whether or not it's totally fair and can be mastered. I think there were a couple issues keeping this from being the case.

One simple fix would be to make the player's hitbox WAY smaller. It's pretty common for bullet hell games to make the player's hitbox a single pixel, even.

A couple of minor issues with the bosses themselves. I didn't expect the stone head to be able to damage you while it was midair (it can) and lost a pretty good ultrahard run to this. Also, it would be nice if the drill boss telegraphed its attack a bit more, but that's a lot to ask for for a jam game.

But probably the biggest issue for me was that the controls felt a bit sluggish. It would have been nice if the dodge roll was a LOT faster. It's a massive commitment as it is now. Because it's so slow, it's pretty common to dodge into a projectile that wasn't even spawned in yet when you started the dodge. The guns felt a bit slow too. I wonder if the rifle would've felt better as like a machine gun, that still did less damage than a good shotgun shot, but required you to track a bit better and didn't feel slow.

Speaking of the shotgun, I think my favorite aspect of the game was how powerful it was. It's clear you were intending to reward players for staying close to the danger. High-risk, high-reward. Some of these other fixes would have made this more aggressive play-style so much fun.

Overall this is a very impressive boss rush for 72 hours, and a cool take on the theme. Good job!

Trainz by aligator 2022-10-10T00:14:35Z

This was tough, but fun. I managed to get 43 points. Full-screening the game helped on my 1080p monitor, it effectively zoomed out the game for me a little bit.

I think the game was a bit overwhelming. By the end of my runs, there were so many trains on screen at once. I think starting the game with just yellows and reds was a good idea, but going from just yellow and red to getting all 4 colors escalated too quickly. I think you could have spent a little less time on just yellow and red and spent a lot more time on the intermediate stages.

It gets a bit easier to manage once you realize that 4 of the intersections have an ideal setting and never need to change, so you only have to manage the other 6. Those 4 being the 2 in the top-right and the two on the far left. The top-right one leading to the red station can remain in the turn position forever, while the other 3 can remain straight forever. I think this is fine on its own, it rewards players for putting thought into the layout of the level.

As for the 6 you do manage, 4 of them are responsible for switching trains between the "upper track" and the "lower track", while the other 2 send the trains on the lower track to the red, blue, or yellow stations. This means that almost all trains want to be on the lower track. Oranges end up being so difficult to deal with because they're the only trains that want to be on the upper track. 3 out of the 6 intersections you have to manage are only ever changed to deal with orange trains.

The "upper track" and "lower track" could have a double meaning here since you can have lower track trains end up going on the upper track backwards, and visa versa. I say "could" because this is never necessary and would practically guarantee a collision. (Incidentally, the 4 unused intersections would be instrumental in turning trains around if it was ever necessary). You could make the argument that the red station requires going on the upper track backwards, but I think it's more accurate to categorize that stretch of track as a "bent" part of the lower track instead. After all, it's further to the right of the orange station, which is the only station on the "upper track". I think going backwards on some of these tracks would be an interesting gameplay element and would add a layer of complexity, but it's not explored in the current design.

So I'm a bit stuck between two opinions on the design. I want the game to be a bit less overwhelming, while simultaneously I want it to be more difficult by incorporating "going backwards" into the level design. If you choose to continue work on this game, I think you could manage both by balancing the trains a bit. Maybe the trains could be a bit less frequent (breaking the theme) while being a little bit faster, just so there's fewer trains on the screen at once. Maybe 1 train could appear every 10 seconds instead of 2. Maybe you could get rid of the blue station/trains, after all the blue trains' path seems a bit redundant to red/yellow already. Then, once the game has been toned down a bit, maybe you can incorporate "going backwards" more by putting the red station further to the left of the orange station. That way, going to the red station requires "going backwards" on the upper track. I'm not sure that it would work, but I think it could potentially make things a little more interesting.

This was a good game. I enjoyed playing it, thinking about it, and exploiting the quirks in the design. Good job!

Paper Prison by Fifut 2022-10-02T23:16:46Z

This was fun, and a bit nerve wracking. My high score was 3!

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Art style was great. I was pretty surprised by the nice smoothing in the main menu.

I think there was quite a bit of depth to the collider shape you chose for the player. It was cool how you could speed things up by squeezing through 2x1 holes if you turned to the side. You could also just barely squeeze through "diagonal" 1x1 holes, that technically had a clearance of sqrt(2) instead of 1.

I enjoyed being able to see the layout of the dirt maze before going down there, so that I could plan ahead. Trying to maximize speed here in general was really fun. However, I do wonder if it would be better with a specific design for the dirt maze, rather than it being randomly generated. I ended up hoping to get good maze rng when trying to get a high score. Even better would be to keep it randomly generated, but make the random generator a bit smarter, so that all results are roughly as difficult as each other and have roughly the same opportunity for clever optimizations. However, that level of procedural generation is a lot to ask for in 48 hours.

A couple notes about the mechanics. They worked fine for the most part, but the hit boxes for placing dirt felt huge. I often found myself trying to place dirt in a place that I thought was open, not being able to, and then panicking. I also think that the mouse aiming was a bit annoying. Mouse controls for aiming a top-down character have always been weird since you have to keep in mind the mouse's current position. Pulling down on the mouse doesn't always make the character look down, if the mouse is sufficiently high enough on the screen. The bigger problem for me though was clicking out of the window on accident. I think, given a little more time, dual-stick controls would be a great alternative here.

But yeah, overall I thought this was really good. I can see your passion here. Thanks for your hard work.

The Red Hoard by NoahShomette 2022-10-08T03:10:56Z

Quite difficult!

It seems like enemies were spawned directly around the player, so moving in one direction was the dominant strategy here. For example, if I ever chose to start going right after going down for a while, I would suddenly be bombarded by enemies. I think this is probably fine, in fact it ended up giving the power ups a bit of depth. To get the most out of the powerups, you need to stay in the same area for a few seconds, or go back into the direction you came from, for maximum enemy collision. However, both of these strategies will make the game significantly more difficult for a while, since you stopped going in one direction. There's a nice balance of risk and reward with the powerup strategies.

It was also satisfying to get the hang of the controls. It felt cool weaving through enemies, escaping near-impossible situations.

I wish there was some guarantee that a blue box would show up. Many of my runs ended through no fault of my own, I just happened to choose to go in a direction that didn't have a blue box for 10 seconds.

I also think the player may have just been a tad too fast. And I really do mean a "tad". I think the speed you chose is pretty close.

Other than that, I feel like it's missing something. Don't get me wrong, this is plenty impressive for 72 hours of work, but if you choose to expand on it in the future, I'm curious what direction you would go in. More enemy variety? Shooting? Predesigned enemy groups? More powerups? Perhaps another vector of complexity entirely, like upgrades + different upgrade paths. Sounds like you may have been going in that direction already since you mentioned vampire survivors on discord.

Good job, and thanks for repping bevy!

Happy Minesweeper by torte478 2022-10-09T16:40:25Z

@100th-coin I kind of disagree about generating the map after the first click. Actually, in the first and third levels, I think that is how it works. It seems like the first level is generated after the first click, and it's generated specifically so that you land on a mine on your first click. Then the 3rd level is generated after the first click, and it's generated specifically so you are surrounded by mines on your first click. The second level doesn't seem to be doing anything special with the generation though.

What I'm saying is I think it's specifically designed this way. The cruelty and unfairness is the point. "It felt like I was losing a life for no reason" is exactly what the designer intended. Even on level 2. After all, it seems they had the technology to generate the level after the first click (as they do in the first and third levels), but they chose to leave it this way.

Happy Minesweeper by torte478 2022-10-09T17:55:20Z

I usually have a distaste for serious subjects being used in jam games. I feel like, almost every time, the dev doesn't have enough time to handle the subject in a tasteful, appropriate way. This is one of the better ones I've played that fall into that category.

I think the reason this one works a little better for me is that it incorporates the gameplay into the anti-war theme really well. It's not just discussing the theme through dialogue, the game is built around it.

What impressed me most is that this had a few moments where the gameplay loop was altered for the sake of narrative. Like the first level having you always land on a mine initially, and then having the game go silent until you go to recruit soldiers. Or the third level being generated so the soldier be surrounded by mines, and being completely silent until they die. It takes a lot of extra work to break the core gameplay loop like this, and I think it works well.

Speaking of the last level, it seems to me that the conclusion being expressed here is something like "the problem with war is that you eventually run out of soldiers". Obviously we're supposed to sympathize with the soldiers as well, but ultimately if there were more people to draft, we would have been able to clear the final minefield.

The morality here feels a little lopsided to me. I think that the player is vilified somewhat by being the one to draft soldiers who will eventually be buried, but apart from that, the player's military is totally victimized here. Our soldiers are never depicted as killing enemies. Our intentions are only to clear minefields. It seems to me that the player's military must be weak, defending ourselves from some imperialist power. This is supported by the fact that our military is destroyed to the point that we literally run out of people to clear minefields with.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think the game was going a bit too easy on the player as an actor of war. Our military and our goals are just too sympathetic in the existing game. I think the idea of a soldier being surrounded by mines and just having to wait to be killed is clever and effective, but I think it serves the wrong conclusion as the final moment of the game. By solely treating friendly soldiers as the only victims of this war, the game becomes "anti-the-opposing-force-in-war" rather than "anti-war".

One more thing about the messaging. I think the final screen that says "stop war" with sad guitar playing was a little too much for my taste. Despite my over-analysis of the theme above, you have incorporated your theme into the gameplay really well. Because of this, you had the opportunity to let the gameplay speak for itself. I wish you had done that. As it is now, the "stop war" statement is the least effective expression of the theme in the entire game, and it's unfortunately the one that the game leaves us with.

About the gameplay itself. I wasn't sure how I felt about being shot at every 10 seconds at first, but now I think it's my favorite aspect of the gameplay. Ultimately, it made the game a lot more frantic and nerve wracking. It made me take care to think through as much of the minefield as I could while I had no soldiers on the battlefield. I think this is all cohesive with the anti-war theme, and emotionally effective. Great job here.

I will say that I wish the minefield didn't disappear while a soldier was moving. I think the goal here was to make it a little more cinematic? It was just kind of frustrating, as I wanted to make sure I spent my time wisely while a soldier was on the field.

I think this review may seem a bit harsh. That's not my intention. I really think this is an impressive compo game, and one of the best "serious" jam games I've played. The fact that I even have so much to say about it speaks to how effective it was. Great job overall.

Anti-Apophis Wristwatch by Trouv 2022-10-14T02:28:26Z

@technonugget yeah, time manipulation + physics was definitely the hardest part of making this. I spent a lot of time on my first day figuring out how that should work to make it not a buggy mess. I wanted to add some more complicated time-sensitive objects, like a box you could push around and make fall by pushing off edges, but I didn't have time.

DECAPHASE by Grif_in 2022-10-03T23:37:42Z

Game looks and sounds great. Managed to get to level 58 with this setup: decaphase.png

As you can tell, I favored the lasers. I think the tricky bit with designing this kind of game is balance and specialization. The lasers may have been a little OP. I also tried an all-turret run and an all-wave run, both of which had only a fraction of the success as this mostly-tower run. As for specialization, it'd be nice if certain towers had more of a rock-paper-scissors relationship with certain enemies (they might've had some already, I noticed that the turrets occasionally missed flying enemies, but it was hard to tell), and had different upgrade paths with different specializations, etc. But that's a lot to ask for in 72 hours.

I had a lot of questions about how the game worked that I think could have been communicated a little better. What path through the arena were the enemies going to take? Were the enemies getting stronger as the game progressed, or were there just more of them? Did tower upgrades apply to all existing towers, or just new ones? Like I mentioned earlier, did the towers have any specialization? I think some more help text, level displays above the enemies/towers, paths drawn in the arena, would've gone a long way here.

With all that said, I think the game's presentation was really great. The music was seriously impressive for 72 hours. The isometric view, 3d models, lighting, animations, and abilities were all beautiful. Even the GUI, while simple, was quite pretty. It was all very moody and cohesive. My absolute favorite part though was that the simulation kept running after game over, with enemies having different "wandering" behavior. I think a lesser game would've had the enemies continue to attack the already-dead base, or just have them do nothing after game over.

So yeah, great job on the presentation, and thanks for repping bevy in 3d!

Lights Out by jaykayey 2022-10-08T04:17:36Z

As everyone else has mentioned, this is very creepy. It's impressive how creeped out I was at times given how little time you had to make this.

I got to level 03 a few times but couldn't beat it. I'm curious how much more there is to it than that?

I kind of wished that the enemy wouldn't be able to kill you until after appearing from a distance (with the piano sound effect) for the first time. I think dying before you even see her kills the tension a bit, while also just not being very fair. As I got better at the game, this turned out to be most of my deaths.

I liked that the maze layout was the same every time, rather than it being randomized. It was difficult enough as it is to deal with the enemy's unpredictable position, the level itself being predictable helped.

Great mood, especially thanks to the music. I give it 5 stars in audio. Very impressive compo game.