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UKCoder

Games

YearLDThemeGameDivisionRankOvFuInThAuMoCo
201532An Unconventional WeaponWord Warriorscompo5833.142.863.053.143.142.7940

Performance over time

overall score (left axis) percentile (right axis)

Scatterplots

Fun vs Overall

Innovation vs Overall

Theme vs Overall

Audio vs Overall

Mood vs Overall

Comments by UKCoder

LD32 — An Unconventional Weapon

Granny Hates Cats by Newan 2015-04-20T19:43:00

Nice little game. I thought the presentation and feel to the game were very good.

+ points
the sprites have a lot of character for so few pixels
the sound effects and music were simple, but nice
the game felt fun
exploding the cats was amusing
the level of challenge was good, not too difficult, but not easy either (keeping in mind I was playing with a trackpad, not a mouse)

- points
didn't see enough instructions.
not sure why the cats all run to the middle, might have been better having them wander so you can't just sit still.
little point in moving the character, I found it easier to just sit just off centre freezing all the cats.
Felt like it could use a tiny bit more variety, a powerup or a boss cat or something.


Good job overall though :)

Eraser by celisoft 2015-04-20T22:14:00

Yeah, also found the animation to be a bit jerky and also the game time ran out before I'd properly figured out what to do.

Very interesting concept though. I think if you developed the game a little further it could turn into something very interesting.

Hive Mind by narve 2015-04-20T19:56:00

Very interesting game. I loved the concept and how it's balanced so that the further away the swarm moves, the less coherent it's movement becomes making it harder to damage enemies from a distance. Very clever.

Only thing I would have done different is perhaps an optional control scheme. Using 1/2/3 to activate the abilities felt a bit awkward, as I couldn't change what the swarm was doing quickly. Think it'd be nice to play with ASDW for movement and mouse for controlling the swarm, with left click to form a block, mouse movement always controlling the swarm and you could then even have right mouse button for another ability.

Word Warriors by UKCoder 2015-04-20T09:42:00

Thanks for the detailed feedback. Much appreciated. I'll take a look at the site :)

The character avatars are modified photos, hopefully just about qualifying as derivative work (though I admit, not very good). I had hoped to replace them before the compo ended, but as I didn't quite have enough time, I opted out of graphics judging.

The AI player is using a freely available set of dictionary files, which is why he sometimes chooses seemingly unfair words. I'll see if I can locate a better quality dictionary to replace it with at some point.

Also yes, the letters are entirely random. Didn't quite get time to implement a more intelligent scheme for letter choice.

Word Warriors by UKCoder 2015-04-20T20:54:00

Haha, that's brilliant. I did have it swear at me once too!

Agh, good spot on the typo!

Yeah, that's a slight bug I never quite got around to fixing when the AI player doesn't play a word. Relatively simple fix, but I was right down to the last minute working on it.

Also yes, the automatic word highlighting I guess is a bug in a sense. I was kind of aiming towards using that to increase difficulty, so you had to try alternatives if the auto find got the wrong one, as I actually found the game too easy most of the time (guess that happens when you play the game a lot as a developer!). Perhaps I'll implement tab to swap between possible chains. Or mouse, as you say!

Glad you guys have had fun with it :)

Word Warriors by UKCoder 2015-04-20T22:04:00

Yeah, the AI I implemented has difficulty finding 5 letter words or higher within the time limit, but was even more difficult if he consistently found 4 letter words. Need to fix that up for sure.

I may try and put in an alternate easier mode where you only search horizontally and vertically and save this mode for the hardcore. Or perhaps a mode with no turn time countdown.

Would love to do multiplayer with this at some point :)

Super Magiball Extreme Deluxe by jordyadan 2015-04-20T21:51:00

Really good game, if perhaps a little difficult. Think I agree that the damage is not quite high enough, would have been nice to start out mowing through enemies and have the later levels ramp up the difficulty.

Very fun mechanic though and great graphics/sound.

Demonic MeatBall by CafeAmbivalence 2015-04-20T21:12:00

Very interesting idea. The graphics are great. A little music would have been cool, but no biggy.

I did find that the character ran a bit too slowly, it was quite hard to manoeuvre into a position to make the meatball effective without getting chased down by the enemies.

A little bit of tweaking and this could be something special.

Indifference by Pibeex 2015-04-20T22:25:00

Not bad for something made in such a short timeframe.

I found the timing a little difficult to wrap my head around as there wasn't much room for error. I think maybe if you didn't project forwards quite as much when avoiding conflict, the balance would feel a little better.

Very clever idea though, wish I'd achieved that much in my first 3 hours of the contest, I didn't even have an idea at that point!