Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → U-Tsang Clan
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | 👥 | Leaky Blood | jam | 212 | 3.92 | 3.64 | 4.35 | 3.52 | 3.78 | 3.04 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Y-Sokombanator | jam | 341 | 3.87 | 3.68 | 4.39 | 4.43 | 3.31 | 3.54 | 1.66 | 3.36 |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Minno | jam | 226 | 3.80 | 3.76 | 4.24 | 3.53 | 3.26 | 3.17 | 3.21 |
Neat idea, but the result is pretty buggy, I guess that is to be expected from a game Jam game though :) First game I've seen that I feel actually fit the theme even if it was a little bit of a creative interpretation.
Pretty fun zach-like. I feel like the movement could be a good deal faster. I end up spending a lot of time just waiting for my code to execute.
Really liked it. One of the few games that actually fit the theme in a meaningful way and it is fun on top of that. My one suggestion would be a way of making it clear which buttons connect to which doors. Right now players have to do trial and error which is fine but I feel it would be nicer to just get down to business right out of the gate.
I feel like having exactly zero money shouldn't cause a game over if you still have goods left. The game says that you "attempted to buy more than you could afford", but I could afford it. Is this intentional?
The story felt more like a series of events than a real narrative. In my first couple play throughs I had thought I incurred the debts somehow and I was trying to figure out how. It took me a while to realize the character had the debts already when the game started. If you are continuing work on this I think it would be a nice idea to try and connect the events a little more.
Fun game! I'm immensely proud that I was able to get 112 with only sources and mirrors. Can anyone beat that? I believe the theoretic maximum for those is 120.
Edit: On stage 3 (sources, mirrors and amplifier) my record is 199.
Very fun game, I thought it was a thoughtful and unique mechanic. I would love to see more levels, particularly some harder ones.
There seems to be an issue where the life bar does not reset when you restart the game. I haven't been able to reach zero since it seems to increase at some points, so it might just be a visual thing.
I feel like this might be better if the levels were harder to figure out and the distance was easier to choose. By the time I made it to the 3rd level I was tired of the spinner selection. I knew what steps I needed to take, it just took forever to do them.
Occasionally my text input doesn't produce anything and clicking causes it to exit the dialog an apply an empty story to the current icon. Maybe it should not allow you to submit when the story is empty?
I think that there is a pretty compelling idea here but the execution leaves some want. I wasn't able to complete the game because after a minute or two it would completely lock me out jumping or moving. Plus on some play throughs I just started floating and was able to skip large parts of the game just by flying over them. Apart from the bugs, I also found that the input was a little over-sentitive and I had trouble telling exactly where my character was. I think that maybe the over-sensitive controls could be turned into a feature, making the red color useful for landing on a platform. Although maybe momentum could also serve this purpose without being quite as frustrating to the player. But there really needs to be some way to provide spatial awareness to the player. A shadow directly under the player could be one way, but some more landmarks to provide parallax would also help. I noticed that I had an easier time locating myself relative to my surroundings when the trees and bears started showing up. I get that the blank slate at the beginning is important to the theme and is a part of the game's narrative, it just makes it a little hard to have a sense of location. The last suggestion I have is some visual indication of what color is currently selected and a way to select colors and maybe color platforms with the keyboard.
I feel like this might come off as pretty critical, but I do like the game, especially for something made in 72 hrs, and I think with some improvements and some more time it can be a really solid game. I wouldn't have typed up this much if I thought the game was bad.
Does the difficulty increase over time? I didn't feel like it was getting harder. I did eventually loose after about 15 minutes or so. I feel like it needs to get a harder a little faster.
There are a couple of problems that I think are compounding with each other. And I think a few small tweaks could really make a difference. Here's my (I'm not an authority on the subject so take it as you will) list in no particular order
1. Put some time in between death and restart. A short respawn is good for perma-death games like this but the current one is *too* short. For one it is a little jarring but more importantly sometimes when I die I don't know how I died not really giving me an opportunity to improve and leaving me with the impression that the game is unfair. This compounds with:
2. Remove the leaps of faith. There are at least two instances in the game where you have to jump onto a platform you cannot see. The game does a decent enough job telling me that I have to jump I just don't know to where. It feels unfair when I die to these since I couldn't see what I was supposed to be doing. This is made worse by the quick restart time since I don't get to see where I was supposed to land or even what I hit, meaning I just keep making the same mistakes over and over. I think these would be best simply removed from the game, but fixing 1 or making failure non-lethal would help.
3. Jump on space down. Currently if the space bar is down while you are on a platform you will jump. This means that if you land while holding the space bar from the last jump you will jump again immediately. This causes a good deal of deaths especially because holding space seems to make my jumps larger. If you only triggered the jumps when the player presses the space while already on the ground, then I wouldn't be jumping accidentally. You might want to also make it so that space presses just before landing (a few milliseconds or so) trigger a jump upon landing to be a little more forgiving to players, but holding space while landing should probably not initiate a new jump.
4. Be a little more forgiving with platform edges. A good deal of platformers will actually let you jump a little bit after you leave the edge of a platform. This prevents the player from thinking that the game just ignored their jump if they were a tiny bit late. It should be short enough that most players don't even notice that it is the case, but long enough that the players almost never feel like they should have jumped but didn't. There were definitely a few times where I felt certain I had jumped while on the edge of the platform but I had really been too late. Giving this tiny bit of leeway makes the game feel fairer and helps the player feel they are in control.
Criticisms aside I think the idea of the game is really neat. I like the way that once I reach the end of the game the game completely changes, and now I have to avoid enemies and pickups. I couldn't beat the game (I managed to avoid killing enemies and all of the pickups but the first [I honestly don't know how to avoid it]), but I thought that twist where I had to rethink everything was pretty neat.
@kleinzach You did make it to the end! That last "level" is a bit of a place holder since we never got around to making a legitmate end. I agree that mouse support would be useful. It was on our list but for first time web devs it was a little out of reach for us within the time constraints. Thanks for the feedback!
@justcamh "would have been nice if that control was given in game": I'm wondering what you mean by this? I would be happy to make changes to the description if it would improve clarity for future users, I just don't know exactly what you are suggestion. Thanks for leaving a comment.
Maybe you might want to remove the HTML5 listing, it is not really usable and gives a false impression of the game overall. If I hadn't seen your comment I would have just thought the game was broken.
I made it past the start screen but I could not figure out how to satisfy the creatures. I think there could be a little bit more in the way of explanation.
Nice little game. The animations made it a little hard to be sure of where I actually was, so I had to slow myself down a bit to let the animations finish.
Nesting levels is a fun idea, and I like your take on it. I wish that the mechanics were explored a little more maybe with some tougher puzzles once the idea has been presented. But it's a jam game so that's probably to be expected.
I feel like I've seen this idea or something like it before, but it was very well executed regardless. The puzzle design was tight, and the number of puzzles was pretty impressive for a Jam game. I thought the boss fights could have been a little more puzzle-y, but maybe that's just because I sucked at them. :)
The presentation is really nice. It looks a lot more polished than a lot of games (mine included). Though I feel at some cost to the clarity of the actual mechanics. I didn't get what the sidebar with the points until my second play (I still don't get the one on the other side), and even then the mud and sand are pretty similar even with color queues so I kept getting mixed how many points they were worth. The sidebar looks nice, but it is a little hard to use. I also had trouble remembering all the combinations since even though most of them do nothing there are 56 different pairs that can be made. Despite how critical this might come across, it is a fun game and it looks nice. I liked it.
Fun game. I finished it in 3:16 after my first attempt failed. It would be nice to have one or two more maps, or even some procedural generation.
@zachary-barbanell Which levels in particular did you think were loud? I have my guesses, but I want to be sure.
Really excellent game! I just beat the normal mode and had so much fun figuring everything out. And looking at the challenge mode it seems like a fun twist. It did get a little bit tedious at times, which could be reduced by making the board smaller, but ultimately I think the board size was good for being able to figure out strategies and patterns.
I get `GLctx is undefined` when I try to start the game on OSX. Is there a fix for this? It worked for me on a Linux machine, so I played and rated it. Nice game otherwise. :)
I've notice that if you switch to another tab during the evade phase the mother stops moving but the clock keeps going. I accidentally ran up my score to several hours when I switched away to do something else.
Nice game, it was fun and looked nice. The difficulty curve is a little weird though. For me "hardcore" felt like a good difficulty where it's challenging but possible. "Easy" through "very hard" felt too easy like there was no risk and I was just waiting to get to the fun part, and "insane" felt too punishing, but I'm sure if I had some practice I would feel differently. I would have liked if some of the lower difficulties were combined, so you can get to the challenging bits easier, because they are fun when you do get there.
It was fun and looks great but the controlling was a little unpolished and there were some bugs that really interfered with the experience. It was very easy to soft lock yourself by placing two things too near to each other making both of them impossible to use? It still says press 'z' to use but it doesn't seem to do anything. You can also accidentally dismount off the ship into the void of space at which point you cannot get back onto the ship. I found the title screen though! Screenshot from 2022-04-05 12-35-58.png
@phoenixofforce Swords can be used to attack without expending them, mushrooms behave like blood except at the end of every level each mushroom tile increases by 1, so they heal slowly. You can see the descriptions for all the items on the help page.
@bloodbane Thanks for the feedback! Do you have an idea of what the unexplained cases are? There should only be two cases of defeat 1) You can't make any legal moves 2) You run out of vital items (red border). If there is some other case it's definitely a bug and I would love to know more.
@lootgrounds Interesting to hear about the gifts. It's not something we had considered, but your confusion makes sense the UI there could definitely be improved to make that clearer. I'm not aware of any blinking black rectangle. It could be a platform specific graphical issue (or maybe I'm missing something) if you could include a screenshot or perhaps what browser you are using I'd be happy to investigate and push a fixed build.
The game looks like just the kind of game I would be into, but I get an error during start up for both Firefox and Chromium: ``` Unable to parse Build/LD50.framework.js.br! This can happen if build compression was enabled but web server hosting the content was misconfigured to not serve the file with HTTP Response Header "Content-Encoding: br" present. Check browser Console and Devtools Network tab to debug. ``` If you fix this, you can ping me and I'd be happy to play + rate.
Very nice game. Nice little game where the controls are just the right amount of wonky. I don't know if this was your intention but the graphics reminds me of cats moving into the sunlight where it is warm.
It was kind of hard to figure out the controls at first, but once I got it I realized they were not very complicated. I played a couple of rounds and it never seemed like I was really in much danger of losing. Aside from the first game where I had no idea what was going on and everyone died, I always got everyone out with plenty of time to spare. A harder mode for once you've got the controls down would be great.
It's a really fun and unique idea. I wish a little less of the game was down to chance. It kind of sucks when none of your starting pieces can fit in the center, and you basically can't get more than a few days.
Fun game! The score and I think the health don't reset when you lose though so you have to restart the whole game which is a bit of a bummer.