This Game Will Self Destruct in 10 Seconds by ChronusZ 2013-08-28T03:46:00
Nice dynamic shadows!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → wertle
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Lisa vs. the Tornado | jam | Mood | 4.63 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | That One Improv Game | compo | 3.64 | 3.28 | 3.85 | 3.78 | |||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Imperfection | jam | 44 | 4.00 | 3.71 | 4.03 | 4.00 | 4.08 | 4.22 | 3.72 | 3.63 | 37 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Sick Sick Solitaire | compo | 744 | 2.79 | 3.04 | 3.38 | 44 | ||||||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Lisa vs. the Tornado | jam | 96 | 3.83 | 3.20 | 3.85 | 3.62 | 3.26 | 3.79 | 2.71 | 4.63 | 30 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | One Does Not Simply Walk Into More Doors | jam | 128 | 3.74 | 3.81 | 3.44 | 4.13 | 3.74 | 3.93 | 3.75 | 3.69 | 73 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Afterlife Dance Party | jam | 80 | 3.76 | 3.97 | 3.64 | 4.03 | 3.71 | 3.91 | 4.23 | 3.73 | 71 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Rosa Neurosa | jam | 68 | 3.76 | 3.39 | 3.95 | 4.08 | 4.05 | 3.60 | 4.09 | 3.50 | 82 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | 10 Second Dragon Feeder | compo | 212 | 3.45 | 3.66 | 3.72 | 4.00 | 3.06 | 2.98 | 3.31 | 3.30 | 94 |
Nice dynamic shadows!
Nice mix of having actionable control while still doing a sort of "turn-based" style. Having a "miss" option when you hit something is pretty confusing, and it may help to throw in some extra feedback on the loot collection screen to help tell at a glance if something is better or worse under time pressure (colored text, arrows, etc). Love the music. Good job!
Nice work with the mood - the art was very consistent and helped convey a good atmosphere. One thing you might consider is having some feedback when you are getting dangerously close to the edge - the isometric perspective makes it hard to judge sometimes until it is too late. I did crash on the second "red" level, unfortunately :( Good work!
Clever use of progression, and picking up jewels is always gratifying. The momentum on the movement made it tricky to control, but not too bad. Good job!
Fun mechanic and nice integration of humor! There are a few little feedback things that would really help this shine - I sometimes had trouble determining what was going to give me shelter, maybe a ground shadow or some other visual indicator around the things that are safe would help call them out. It might also help to add more feedback for when you are in a "safe" state. I know you have the indicator up on the timer, but I'm usually very focused on the action on the screen, so something nearer to the character or an audio cue might help. I loved the music and the voiceovers, but if you keep working on this consider mixing the volume of the music down or the voices up - they kind of clashed with each other. Great job overall!
This was great, like a fast-form adventure game - all the nice puzzle and story elements without all the fuss. Good job.
This reminded me of the Kirby Samurai mini-game from Kirby Super Star. I love the dynamic that's created when playing with another person in the same space and the anxiety it creates (good anxiety, not bad anxiety!). Nice work :)
Super hard core theme interpretation. It was hard but I liked the art. It would probably help if the transitions between phases were sliiiightly longer to allow for mental shift between the modes. Good job.
I like this, it's kind of like vertical joust. Those jerk enemy balloons should be able to kill each other on accident. Fun mechanic. Good job!
I think the fact that it automatically goes to the next puzzle before you even place a piece makes it confusing to understand the mechanic. You need a little more time for the player to register that they have done the correct thing. I think the mechanic is interesting and has promise, it just needs a lot more feedback to help people learn the interface and know when they are doing something right/wrong. Good job.
I think the mechanic has a lot of potential, though it took me a few runs to figure out which clock I should be paying more attention to. Windows kept trying to thwart me by asking if I wanted to turn on sticky keys from all the shift-pressing, which would break the game when i went back to it. Curse you, windows!
Nice idea - I would have loved to regain time when going back into the bowl.
I love the idea of the near-death bonus - it puts a nice twist on a familiar mechanic.
An interesting experiment, I liked how the variation in seriousness in the question types caught me off guard.
The switching back and forth made for some good pacing. Nice hit reacts on the enemies, and I liked how you added in little touches like the tilt on the ship when accelerating/decelerating. Nice work :)
The fact that you made an online networked multiplayer game in a weekend is AMAZING. Also nice touch with controller support - it feels great with a gamepad. Well done!
I love how much personality you were able to give the probes with just sound and a simple "eye" animation. Nice ramping, too. Great work!
I like how the game started with a traditional basketball hoop setup that one would expect, then evolved into wackier and wackier arrangements. Very clean art, nice job!
The writing is hilarious! I love the interpretation of the theme as well.
Thanks for the comments all!
@andreyin - thanks for the tips, I definitely want to work more on this and wanted to figure out a good way to do rotation for touch interface. Will check out your .capx once I update Construct to the latest version ;)
I think it's a pretty interesting concept, though it could use some more helpful feedback on the interface - stuff to help call out which part you have on your car if it's in the list of available stuff, and maybe feedback to more easily compare if something is an upgrade, downgrade, or sidegrade. I also didn't realize I had to go back to the shop to actually install the parts first. Once I figured out what I was doing I thought the concept was pretty interesting, nice job!
RAINBOW!!!! Great visual feedback. The fans were delicious.
One thing you might consider is if you die by spike, hold the time bar in place - I had some trouble on occasion figuring out if I died from spikes or from the time running out since the bar disappears immediately. I think with some difficulty tuning this could be a super fun little game. Nice work!
Nice use of normals and dynamic lighting. The contextual narration text added a lot. Good job!
Was pretty fun once I figured out what to do. Maybe include some basic instructions to get people to that point faster. Good job!
Super cute art and a fun mechanic! One thing you may consider is having a little extra feedback for the states of the cannon (showing which ones can be clicked, when they are in the aim state, and which one the next bomb will go to, etc.) It may help make for a smoother experience. Good job overall!
Nice work. One thing that tripped me up was that I had a hard time spotting my character at first - maybe some bit of feedback to draw your eye to him as soon as the level loads (a bit of flashing, a different color) would help smooth that out.
Potential for an interesting interface here, though I must admit that I mostly flailed and hoped for the best :) One note, when I solved each one they went away so quickly that I didn't have time to register that I'd actually solved it - it took me awhile to figure out that's what was happening.
Apparently my capacity to retain tracks of rhythm information stops at 3, but I'm glad the drum sounds made it good for flailing frantically :) I had a little trouble with the color feedback for the lines, I couldn't tell if color or black meant "success" or "miss" Nice work overall!
Character design of the robots was quite nice. The music was good but some sound effects would really make this shine.
Great secondary animations on all the characters. This game was super tough. Good job!
Very cute and clean art. I liked that you attached a story element to some very simple games for context. Good job.
Loooove the sound effects! Tough but nicely done. Good job!
The two biggest things that would help would be some way of resetting the whole level (all ghosts back to start) and some kind of feedback about which ghost I was currently controlling (number labels, colors, somethin like that) Good job!
Nice implied humor without being over the top. Leave it up to the player's imagination!
As you already know, fixing the wall jumping so you don't have to move the direction of the wall will help tremendously. Also, the feedback for when you are in wall stick is a little bit subtle. Consider a minimum wall height requirement for wall stick so you don't accidentally launch yourself the opposite direction when jumping on a small platform. Overall, very nice work!
I think the mechanic has a lot of potential to be really fun. I didn't have another person to play with so I couldn't get the full experience. If you get polished reaction animations it could potentially be reeeally funny. Good job!
It was unclear to me what would cause a door to be created in spite of the text instructions. Some feedback about whether a placement was good or bad would be helpful, or perhaps some preview that would help me understand the rule about the doors. The concept is an interesting one, however. Good job!
I would have liked some way to reset with a clean slate once I figured out my current objective, otherwise it got sort of overwhelming with the clones when I was in the "figure out what to do next" phase and made it difficult to systematically experiment. But this is a good start, good job guys!
I think a timer for the waves would help - I forgot that they were 10 seconds + 10 second breaks so it felt like very strange pacing. Great art, though I couldn't figure out what the wall of popcorn was to represent, I thought perhaps ammo? Good start, hopefully you can finish it up!
I couldn't tell if I was doing something wrong or if I needed to be more precise with my movements/if there was something I was missing to succeed. A little more feedback about that would help out.
I like the mechanic idea a lot. Randomness as a mechanic is a tricky beast, it's funny and novel at first but if there is no way to get better or learn or improve skill-wise it can get a little tiresome. If there were a way to achieve mastery I think it would be more fun to play longer. Good job!
Simple but great atmosphere and nice use of lighting. Good job!
Nice use of the theme! One thing I found was that there was a disconnect between the mechanic of memorizing the path and the "physical" skill of controlling the ball. Because the ball controls were tricky to master, the memorization part became less and less significant over time as my failures were due to sliding off the edge and not picking the wrong path. If you could find a way to tie the mechanics together more strongly I think it would really make this shine. Nice work!
Great framing for a typing game!
I love the idea of the base mechanic and think it could be really fun with some iteration on the actual interaction. Like, I kept getting mixed up on if I was right clicking or left clicking, but if it were a drag interface I think it would feel more natural and more tactile and gratifying to move the troops around. Something to keep in mind if you decide to keep working on this. Nice work!
Very silly and a fun idea. If you keep working on this, consider adding a little more feedback - like differentiating a successful checkout from a botched one more clearly (for awhile I thought I was failing because I couldn't tell if the grunting sounds were good or bad)
Nice idea with the swapping of modes! Note that vertically oriented text is difficult to read, but even moreso under time pressure!
Seems like this has good potential to grow into something really interesting. It wasn't clear what I was supposed to be doing with the resources (if anything). There are a few feedback things that might help out - having the status of what's going on be more apparent would help, it took me a bit to notice it. Good work!
Nice use of some simple mechanics blended with humor
The audio feedback was very nice. Super clean art made it feel very polished. Nice simple memory game - good job!
Very clever mechanic!
Really fun core loop and once I figured out the knocking food with the bat that part was pretty fun. It took me several tries to figure it out, though. Even though there are text instructions, when under time pressure you forget everything x_x Good job!
Nice shooter mechanic, felt really smooth. Some layered feedback on when I was hit would help. Very silly theme interpretation, I like it!
Nice simple game, good use of unity. It was amazing how terrible I did once under time pressure x_x
Very clever approach, I liked it! I didn't get to unlock any of the "silly" stuff until the very last day so I wasn't sure if there was any logic to the progression and how things unlocked. A little UI wrangling could help convey that. Nice work!
Needing to drop the gun (or occasionally throw it) added a nice layer of depth to the whole thing. Well done!
Nice ambient sound, it would help if when I tried to interact with something that wasn't interactable if I got some feedback to let me know I was doing it wrong. Good job!
Simple but fun, really good job making a nice whole package and getting a bit of polish all around. The progression and skill upgrades made the ramping feel pretty good, and I'm sure it'll be great with some balancing and tuning. Good job!
I love the movement scheme and trying to pay attention to the enemy movement patterns, it lets me stop and think while the air loss maintains tension. Fantastic audio feedback!
This game is amazing! It is so cohesive on all fronts and has just the right amount of variety while still tying it together as a whole. I will say I was sad to be forced to the dark side and use a wrench when I wanted to win on my own merits, but such is life :) NICE WORK!!
Really well done! This flowed together perfectly with the pacing of both the game, and the music, and the humor with interstitials. It was clever on many fronts. Great work!
OMG those drawings, so good, so cute. Sound design is stellar and the animations were so very cute. Have I mentioned cute? Also cute. Nice work!
Fantastic mechanic! You have excellent pacing and level design skills. The level of challenge was just right and the level design often made me feel like a badass. Great work!
Excellent feedback on the weapons! Those mines made digging a cautious instead of mindless activity. My one critique would be the abrupt camera transitions when switching directions are a little jarring. Hilarious concept, well done!
The beat synching and sound effects on this are really great! I love the color shifting at checkpoint, too. Sometimes I struggled to map when I should ripple and when I should jump under pressure, maybe consider some extra feedback for which one you need to do (platform shapes or colors or something?) Otherwise it was fantastic!
Nice feedback on the melee. My mouse was super laggy so it made it hard for me to play but I'm gonna try it again on a good mouse :) It was challenging but I think in a good way. Good job!
This one was tough! I think because I don't have the intuition for how the pings were working so it took me awhile to grasp how I should be pinpointing this. Definitely made things feel pretty futile :)
I love the twists on this mechanic! Having different materials that adjust your speed is a great way to control the pacing and offer little "breathers" or moments of great stress. This also does a great job of ramping the difficulty so that things like self-crossing don't really show up until later. Well done!
It might be helpful to add a little more feedback on the beacons to convey what they are doing (do they have range, etc). Occasionally I thought I was out of range of the worm because I wasn't on his shadow, but he still chomped me. Nice job making it feel very desolate with the small characters on screen and big open space (sandstorms are a nice touch)
Fantastic atmosphere, I love the little touches like the sound design on the flowers and mushrooms.
I liked the core concept but I could never figure out how to craft anything :( It was interesting how the mechanics and spawning felt stressful but the music was very cheerful and low key, so I felt very relaxed.
Solid little platformer, the economy is a nice touch. If you were to keep iterating on this game, I would suggest adding some feedback for getting hit and time about to run out. Like sound or flashing or whatevs, just a little bit extra feedback would go a long way. Nice job!
Hard but fun, I kept wanting to keep trying. Spamming the button became quite painful pretty quickly, i kind of wanted to just be able to hold it down and dig (my tendons really wanted this to be the case). I love the dramatic dutch angle at the end when you die. Nice work!
Love the feedback. MOAR PLEASE. Thank you.
Thanks baykush! :D
I used my last 10 minutes of submission time to clarify the text box, hopefully it helps (it now also says "use complete sentences as though you are speaking to the patient," you'll have to force clear the cache to see the update)
Tobias - those are AMAZING XD
DrPrettyPatty - that was wonderful, hahaha!
Contemplative! I like where you're going with this, but it might be nice to tell people that it's impossible to have everything so they don't agonize for ages in depression about trying to figure it out. Such sad! Nice work!
I like the idea of the texture swapping for properties, it was pretty cool and I can see how you could develop that further beyond just heavy and light. I almost got to the end but at one point when I swapped a texture on a refrigerator it vanished on me, and then I lost an anvil by bouncing it up beyond reach, alas! There's some great feedback in this game (for example, coloring the wireframe the previous texture) but you can still clarify a few things, like make it a little easier to tell which texture I currently have selected. I want more textures like the tree that show the UV unwrapping in the icon :) Nice work!
Very strange, unusual experience :) I thought there were a lot of nice little touches, especially the mind trippy parts, like some kind of crazy unfinished anti swan chamber. 3 minutes is a hair cruel though. Nice work!
I like the idea of amorphously controlling a single squad of people, the trenches worked out well as a way of getting powerups just by wrangling your group.
In the Hall of the Mountain King makes all games better always. I had trouble at first because I thought you could only swap adjacent roots but once I figured that out I had a lot of fun! Seems like this would be great on a touch interface. Well done!
Nice solid shooter! I liked the graphics but they started to give me a headache after awhile. The music was great and fit with the aesthetic as a whole. Nice job!
Great sound design! It really added to the mood. The fog of war helped make simple exploration feel quite gratifying. Nice job.
I love this mechanic! It is so different and yet it is very simple to understand what's going on with your feedback. I also like how it inherently controls progression. It was very clever how everything in the world was a square except the enemy projectiles, nice job on that :) REally well done!
The delightful bouncing of the sheep made up for the fact that I drove him to his death repeatedly because of my inability to map up/down to isometric up/down. Very cute :)
I love this idea! Even though I feel terrible for consistently murdering entire populations of casual vacation-goers :( I found myself instinctively trying to use Maya controls to rotate the view. Maybe not great for the general populous, but it might be pretty awesome to have alt controls in there :) it was occasionally difficult to tell which weights were in the background and which were up front, maybe size or color feedback on that could help (like the ball in front is always the most lit or something). Excellent work!
Nice job, my one suggestion would be to really figure out how to push the contrast between interactables, things that need to be interacted with, and the decorative background. Right now things can get a little lost. I can definitely see how this will ramp up in difficulty with future iterations. Well done!
The automatic ramp-up actually felt pretty good, I think going in to a menu to upgrade things may have broken up the flow. Maybe time pressure would be nice. Good job :)
Well done! This is a great twist on mechanics that people are used to separately and they go together in a great way. My one piece of feedback would be that the chompy sound was so great that at first I thought my goal was to eat all the blocks :) Maybe just call out the exit a little bit tiny bit more. Good job!
Great interpretation of theme, and the concept is very nice if not a little rough in execution. The mood works with the weird aesthetic. I did run into a bug where I walked past a door off screen, then couldn't get my character back or do anything.
I can see where you guys are going with this and I think it has potential, just gotta work on that interaction being smooth and solid and not overly frustrating. It's a little difficult at the moment. But, i like the overall aesthetic and I thought it went together nicely with the music and what you were shooting for with the theme.
Creepy! And great story delivery. I must say my first instinct was to go right up to lantern wolf and see if I could talk to him. I thought he was going to tell me something interesting. Whoops!
This was super cute and cohesive design. The sound was great! I like how it's casual in the sense that the move counter counts up and you aren't trying to beat a limit unless you choose to. My one suggestion would be to celebrate the "win" of a level a bit longer (maybe a momentary pause while the wind chimes play - also old man dancing) but that is a minor bit. Nice work!
Pretty straightforward mechanic but I like how it forced you to plan ahead since you couldn't drill sideways. When I drilled a frog on accident, I felt like a terrible human being
This is a really fun concept! It was a little easy, most of the powers are currently a little OP. Would love to see a version of this game with more time to properly balance the difficulty, but a promising start.
This was really ambitious for a 48 hour project and you totally pulled it off! I would love to see a version where you have even more time to refine these themes because good job.
I had fun with this though at first the movement wasn't working for me so I had to refresh a few times. I love how you change over time as you evolve and the upgrades are pretty fun. I thought the sonar was a bit unusual because usually anything it could detect was already on screen anyway. Nice work, seems like this could definitely be expanded!
I can definitely see the seed of a really cool strategy puzzle game in here, I think your challenge is just going to be clearly teaching people the skills they need to play the puzzles. This is totally doable! Just break down each interaction and layer up until players have mastery of each step and then I think it'll be really great. There's an edge case where when you view straight on different layers of the same color blend together, not sure what to do for that case but it's not too common. Nice work, you should totally keep working on this!
Great coherent aesthetic! I had a little trouble with the dolphin and the projectiles being the same color, but I love how well the simple bubble effect worked.
Ah, the risk-reward of ray reproduction!
A couple things that might help polish this up: Some kind of feedback when you click on a block to indicate "you have selected this block the torch will go there next" so that it doesn't feel like a bug when I click and nothing immediately happens. You could also use this to indicate if there's a limit on how many blocks you could queue up. Not sure if it's intentional for the puzzle, but not being able to see through the flame to see what I'm melting can be tricky. Good job on your first Ludum Dare entry!
Nice solid little shooter, I liked how the lining thing mixed up my typical shooter strategy (which is normally shoot all things forever regardless of aim). My biggest piece of feedback to make this game better would be to pause a moment when you get hit by another fish before jumping straight to the You Lose screen, to allow my brain to catch up with what has happened. That will also help people to learn how much collision box they have to deal with so they can try and improve. Some extra feedback on the water going down would also help, it was pretty subtle and I was so focused on my fish that I didn't notice it. One easy way of calling this out might be a background pattern that's called out by the lowering of the water level. Nice work! Love the angry fishy faces!
The art is adorable, although this is a surprisingly challenging game with no way to avoid obstacles if you blow through your "meter" too fast. Way to stick with the joke all the way :)
Nice simple mechanic, albeit kind of gross :) I had trouble recognizing the yellow pickup as a "good" thing because it was kinda spiky like the bad things. but consuming flesh was gratifying.
I'm assuming I won when I got so big I filled up the whole screen :D I often accidentally moused off the unity window which caused woes.
Every time I left click the game freezes up on me :(
This game is so hard but it made me laugh so hard! Those birds! The delay between pressing space and doing the anti-bird flail was a little tough, it made it hard to react to the birds since they were so fast. I still laughed a lot though, I love that bunny. Good job on your first Ludum Dare :D
Great use of theme in the puzzle mechanics! I think the puzzles are very solid and the look is really cute. I think there are a few small things you can do to just tune up the overall flow and pacing of introduction. Here are some suggestions:
- When i was first introduced to the bubbles, it took me a moment to realize I could push them from any direction. I'd assumed they worked like the chests
- the buoy level was pretty tricky! That might be a good one to break down into 2: a very simple puzzle to introduce the concept, then go to the more advanced one (also, i only used one buoy in that puzzle, was the other one a red herring?)
- The level right after that one is great in how it is both simple but advanced, but since there was no buoy involved, it might make for better pacing to do it just before the buoy level instead of after, since it's good to do a couple buoys in a row
I didn't get to finish because I had a time constraint, but I want to come back and finish! Nice work!
Great mechanic! I managed to get all the way to the end, though it took me awhile to map my brain to my fingers properly :) Well done!
Complex math under time pressure isn't particularly fun. My strategy ended up being randomly connecting things and hoping the number would get to where I needed it. The idea is interesting but it just needs playtesting and iteration on explaining what exactly the player should be doing. Lots of playtesting with new players.
Great work! Since you asked for thorough feedback, here are a few things I think you could do to improve the game:
1. The hit reacts are great, but the death reaction looks very similar, so that when something dies I usually shoot it several more times until I realize it's dead. I'd recommend doing some manner of drastic, immediate feedback to say "this thing is dead don't waste bullets on it"
2. Placing turrets often got me killed! If you aren't going to have any breathers between waves that would be good for turret placing, consider auto-aiming the turrets so I can place them quickly, and not die in the process of trying to adjust them.
3. I didn't realize what the cell pickups were for a long time. I think the reason they didn't read as pickups is because there was so many things in the environment that were also glowing, so it didn't stand out.
Nice work!
Introspective and a little depressing -_- I'm going to go think about my life now.
Great atmosphere. The controls were disorienting and made me uneasy, which I suppose was the point :)
Very enjoyable and super cute game! Learning curve was a little high, but after a few mistakes it became clear what had to be done!
I like the different take on needing to move slowly and deliberately to keep the light up. The only problem there is that regaining progress after failure is pretty tough since you can't rush to catch up. Nice feel to this one.
OMG :O
A simple concept executed well, but a bit too highly tuned. The jumps got awfully difficult very quickly.
Even though the pacing was slow, I found the core loop very compelling and made it all the way to the end. Nice job!
This had really great pacing ramp-up. I loved how at the end everyone was frantically scurrying around. It felt great! Nice work :)
I like how the theme is integrated with the mechanic. Going under the water was a nice twist on a standard runner (although I usually just ended up getting myself killed when I went underwater, those fish are tricky!) The difficulty ramp-up is pretty intense, if you keep working on this, some intermediate difficulty levels would help with this. Nice work!
Nice work. I thought the camera felt a little low to the ground which made it tricky to navigate portions or the world with any sort of rise to them (like the spiral tree). It's interesting that you put the golem second when its combat mechanic seemed a bit more complex than the minotaur, but I liked the minotaur's attack. Something that could help would be some audio or visual feedback for getting hit, as it took me a long time to notice the hearts. My favorite thing was the bubble effect, it was stylized and felt kind of great.
I loved this game! The mechanic of carrying the portals around really added a fun, innovative twist to the puzzles that I hadn't really felt before. Even though there were a lot of mechanics going on, I felt like you ramped up the introduction of them well. My critiques are minor: Things happened SUPER FAST on my machine (is your game framerate independent?), it would be nice to have some beats or breathers at the transitions, like when you go through the portals, because I felt like I didn't have enough time to celebrate my brilliance at a successfully executed puzzle because it moved so fast that it was basically instantaneous. Another piece of feedback: while the art was well constructed and the music pleasant, if you continue to develop this I would encourage you to explore a more cohesive aesthetic that fits well with the gameplay. And I do hope you continue it because this game is awesome! SUPER NICE WORK!!!!!!!!!!
Oh! One other thing! Consider adding a grace period to your jumps - just enable jumping a few frames into the "in air" state so that it makes it easier to jump off a ledge without accidentally just falling. Minor nitpicky thing but it will help tons :)
The sound effects in this game are hilarious! I had trouble telling how the weapon switching was working, but overall it was just a fun romp with good feedback.
I think the concept behind this sort of strategy game has a lot of potential to explore lots of fun interesting interactions. Your biggest challenge seems like it will be UI presentation and how you dish out information since there is a LOT going on at once. If you continue to work on this, I'd recommend teaching things in isolation step by step so that by the time they reach a point where the game is now, the players have internalized all the cues for all the information and how it is meaningful. A lot of the UI issues came from not showing relationships between things in an easy way, like if I couldn't sell I didn't understand why, the jump to figure out it was because I didn't have any ships out was not clear. Also, I'm not sure the station justified having its own "mode," just because the information there was minimal and there was a lot of unused space. Just be careful that time spent at the station doesn't result in the player forgetting the overall course of the game that's going on back in the universe. Well done, I hope you continue to explore this idea!
Great work on creating a moody atmosphere with the art and the little polishy effects went a long way. I liked how this was sort of a an ambient exploratory game but still had moments that involved dexterity like evading the stabby things with a quick turn or dive. I don't know if it was a bug but the camera got really crazy in one of the later levels. Some nice ambient moody music and sound effects would take this a really long way if you intend to keep working on it. Good job!
Sorry to hear that you weren't able to finish in time for the jam. Dem life emergencies! I could sort of see where you guys were going with it, though, and I think the idea has potential. The part with being able to disconnect each side seems like you could do some fun puzzles there that you don't see in other games where you have two connected characters like this. One minor note, consider adding a grace period to your jump by enabling jumping a few frames into the fall state so it makes it nicer to jump off a ledge and not just fall. I will try and check out the post jam version if I have time. Nice job!
Super cute! The momentum of shifting between worlds reminded me a lot of Ibb and Obb. The way the music shifted between worlds reinforced your theme in a nice way. One minor thing: if you make the way you start your game the same as your in-games control, it can be a nice way to ease someone in (so like you had click to start but the controls are keyboard based. Maybe try space to start. The little animations on your character's jump and land and mid-air transitions gave him a lot of character - nice use of your polish time :) The spikes in happy world are a liiitle subtle and can be tricky to see sometimes.
Nice job, we gave lots of feedback in the stream which I will not repeat here because it's long but hopefully it was helpful :D
Super mind bendy! I thought the whole circular platforming vibe was really successful. I'd say the biggest thing you could do to make this better is figure out how to give appropriate feedback for when the gravity is going to switch up since it's hard to figure out without experimenting and it's not really sticky information (since experimenting often leads to death). Nice work!
Nice work on a networked game in such a short time, I can appreciate how insanely difficult that is! I like how the framework of the planets and needing to physically move around and explore adds a nice layer to a shared art gallery type thing. Nice work!
This is like some weird cross between Bounden and Antichamber and I love how weird it feels. The minimilist level was a bit much. Great simple aesthetic and fun exploratory puzzle. Well done!
I really liked how only being able to move with gravity shook things up. I played with only one ship per squad but I can imagine how chaotic it would get otherwise. I kind of wish this game wrapped around pacman style, but that's just sort of an intuition. One thing I think you could do to really help is give some manner of feedback about the range of the gravitational pull on the various space objects, as I often overshot because I thought I was gonna get sucked in when I actually didn't. Perhaps some manner of trajectory arrow?
Nice work! I liked how weighty this felt with just physically pushing things around and trying to overcome the angular momentum and such. I had one moment where a piece was spinning across the space and it looked like it was going to spin right into the last slot, but it just barely didn't make it. If you can detect cases like that, I'd cheat them in because it would have made me feel like a badass :D Nice polishy touches like the shooting stars in the starscape, etc.
I love the concept and wish I'd gotten to do more levels with the string lengthing/shortening. I got stuck on the level with the lava balls because the tuning on the jump and movement is such that it's very easy to overcorrect on the ground but undercorrect when in air, so those precision jumps are killer. Definitely something that can be tuned, though. I also had a little simulation sickness with the rotating of the camera, even though it was a neat visual effect. Nice work.
I love how you learn more about the character through the dialog choices, I just wish I could keep learning more. Some of the little sets of messages left me wanting more. It felt very sad and lonesome :( Good job!
We played this two-player with one person controlling each world and it worked out really well! I wish the starscape was more noticeable to help me feel like I was moving when I got away from the sun. The chain physics looked great, though the collision was a little hard to predict at the ends near the planet. Nice job!
Well done on creating a networked multiplayer game in 48 hours! I thought this was really a clever way to force people to co-operate and it was intuitive to figure out what the limits were pretty quickly. It gave me fond memories of crystal chronicles :)
Really nice work with the shifting mechanic! I think you had some pretty difficult spatial puzzles that might need a lot of extra feedback to convey the current game state. But I think there's a lot of fun puzzley stuff you can do with this. I loved the drawn style of the UI. Some audio work will really polish this right up! Nice job!
I think my two biggest pieces of feedback that would help make this better would be 1) don't let me go to a mission where I don't have enough dice to win. I kept doing that on accident because I wasn't clear on the UI for needed dice or whatever, and it's really frustrating. 2) In a lot of dice combat games like this (like Eldritch Horror, for example) you often get things that let you make meaningful trade-offs when you are in a situation where your roll is destined to fail, like rerolls or +1s or whatever. Something like that would really help alleviate the frustration when you lose on your second roll and still have to keep rolling. I didn't understand the value of ambushes, I was just frustrated that I lost an opportunity to find more dice. Similarly I valued finding dice over medkits, so a medkit ended up being disappointing as well. Overall I like the mechanic of rolling and choosing which dice of which pools to keep based on the probabilities, i thought that was a fun choice. I also thought that if I fought a dude it would make my counter go down, but apparently not! Nice work overall!
Be mindful of the colorblind, you already have patterns on the blocks so you could use that as an extra distinguishing factor. I think you could have done a better job of explaining the "weirdest thing" in your world. The thing with why the cat was dying was baffling and didn't really seem to fit the gameplay, so I think you could have spent more time on that. The art was lovely but the sound needed variety. I thought the base puzzle was interesting but the slowness of moving the blocks didn't really add to the experience, and often grew tedious. It just seemed like a bit of a mismatch in intent as to WHY the interaction was super slow. Nice work for the compo, though!
Nice work on this, I liked seeing the Ikaruga-style mechanics in a runner, which I don't believe I've seen before. If you continue this I would recommend a method of ensuring you don't get "impossible" spawns or long stretches of spawns where you don't have to interact (you can do this a couple ways, one way is pre-designing segments that work really well and just procedurally generating the segments, or you can figure out the minimum distance needed to swap and make sure things don't spawn under that distance). Since swapping is the only mechanic you could really play up the polish on those characters and have them animating super cute! Playtest with the colorblind :) Overall really nice work!
The audio was very slow and pensive and relaxing, but it didn't really fit well with the more intense, hectic platforming segment. I like how you did patterns on the different sides instead of just colors, that was a nice touch. It was a little on the painfully hard side, though. Nice work for the compo!
Super cute! I immediately experimented to see what the disguise did and lost it, which was kinda sucky since it's a long time before you get a second one. I wish the humans had some kind of tell for when they are about to turn, like maybe a pause or an animation, or a sound, or whatever, since the punishment for getting caught is so severe it might help encourage people to get at it if they feel more in control and more like getting caught was their own fault instead of just getting unlucky. Overall very cute, well done!
I love this concept! It made me think a bit of Continuity with the slider puzzle/platformer combo, but having them go in in two different games was quite nice. I love how there was also an element of making things happen in the world based on position of the sliders other than just the exits. I didn't get as much time with this as I'd have liked as I feel like there's a lot of things to discover that I didn't have time to delve into, so I'm planning on coming back to this and poking around with it more. Very nice work!
So I didn't get to explore this as in depth as probably was intended. I struggled with the movement being incredibly slow. Since this seems to be an exploration game, and the biggest obstacle between me and exploring is slow movement, it can feel pretty frustrating. Sometimes this can be addressed by making the act of moving feel really pleasant so I enjoy just floating around the universe. One suggestion would be to make the starscape move in parallax with me so that I can tell if I'm moving at all/making headway towards something. I tried to skip the dialog by hitting enter, but it seems to have broken something, and repeated dialog, so I just avoided attempting to skip in the future :) The music sets a distinct mood.
There was some great feedback here on the ship and the boost and such. I felt like I was in freakin Top Gun. However, I was never able to destroy a chain, there's a lack of feedback on hits so I never knew if I was actually damaging anything or not. Screenshake might be a fine method of hit feedback, but audio or vfx or any sort of cue would have helped. Good job!
I love the mechanic of needing to mind where you step in order to set yourself up for the escape. I think the level with symmetry on both sides is actually the best level to teach this, though I wish there was feedback on the thingies I landed on so I could remember which ones I had touched. Nice work on those animations! Note about jumping, it can be handy to allow a jump the first few frames into a an in-air state, to help situations where you're right on the edge of a platform and need to move-jump and fall off the edge when you intend to jump. Nice work! YAAAY!
I love the twist, it was hilarious! I like how the round planet made the world seem bigger than it was since you can't see over the horizon. The shooting mechanics could use some work, a reticle or something because I had no idea if I was hitting anything or not. Also a touch of feedback from getting shot. The animations were great, nice work!
Nice work! I think the biggest problem to overcome here is that the world shifting being on the same button as the shooting leads to lots of accidental world resetting when trying to switch buttons. There is a saying in UI: "don't put the ejector seat button next to the on switch." Since it is such a different mechanical function perhaps it could be mapped to its own different button? Also I wasn't sure if I could kill enemies even though they had hit feedback because they had such high health. Some indicator that I was making progress would help. I liked the overall way you married progression with needing to collect the hearts with eventually having enough health to fight the boss, and I loved how you got to fight the boss in the whole first world, although it was a little tedious because I could only take one shot at a time before having to turn around again. Overall really nice work!
Fantastic twist at the end to bring all things into context! The drift in the mechanics added just enough subtle complexity to really set this apart as a puzzle game. Definitely difficult but you clearly have addressed this already. Really wonderful job!
Interesting idea for a resource-based platformer (sort of). I got frustrated by a couple of things: accidentally clipping a ladder and having it consume one of mine was frustrating, although if you had an action to use a ladder it might get tedious to climb so I'm not sure if that's the best solution? Also the parts where you had to climb a ladder on the very edge got real tricky with the wrap-around, it seems like that happened mostly in the beginning. I loved the voice overs, well done!
Congrats on your first LD! I think there are a lot of little polishy things you could do to clean up this game but one thing I struggled with was knowing overall if I was doing well or doing poorly. Once I got a lot of speech balloons demanding stuff I couldn't figure out if it was because I was doing something wrong or if that's just the expected game state. Having the planets orbit might be a fun way of messing with people trying to keep track of which planets needed what. Nice job!
Congrats on your first LD! A couple of small things that could help polish this up: I'd recommend really pushing the color of the spikes to be completely different than the walls, I see you had them all share a thematic color, but it made the spikes difficult to parse and you really want those sticking out like a sore thumb so I understand they are hazards. The other thing you might want to play around with is the camera. I'd recommend trying a lead-cam instead of a follow-cam since you are often jumping into situations of danger so it's more helpful to see more of the screen in the direction you are traveling than the one you came from. Good job!
I'd recommend making the default binding for mode switching on a key that doesn't force you to lift your hand away from the arrows or space. Since this game is about speed and precision, I'd recommend ghosting the platforms for the other phase (similar to things like Guacamelee, Fly'n, Outland, etc). Without a ghost of the platforms the switching is more exploratory, which suits itself to a slower pace.
Really solid compo entry! I think you did a great job with the parallaxing of different game elements to create a sense of depth in the space. Most of my feedback would be about polishy things or extra feedback (like sound or different color flames on speed boost, ramp up in pacing, etc). Nice work!
I liked the drastic shifts in world and the supporting VO was pretty funny. When you make a first person game you have to be careful about making your collsion pill too big. What would make sense in third person instead in first person means you collide a lot when you feel like you shouldn't have touched anything, especially when you have stuff coming from behind or outside the periphery. Health models in games like this can help the player learn the bounds of their own collision versus one hit kill games in which it's much trickery. I thought the visuals were great at conveying the mode shift. Not personally a fan of poop jokes but that's just personal preference :)
I think my favorite part was when I got to be the dino pack and attack with everyone at once. It felt good to do. You have a couple of inconsistencies which were a little bit confusing, like how in evolution 2 I only had to touch the bits to get them, whereas other times I had to actively eat them. I got stuck on the pack phase because I eventually was unable to find another pack to fight. I might come back to this and try pressing forward as I believe there are many more phases. Good work!
I would say that if you're going to have a solution that requires you to move diagonally, you should make sure to teach it explicitly and then use it lots more after that (otherwise people will be looking for places to use the thing they just learned, like how we figured out how to get through walls :) ). I wasn't really sure what the red thingies (not the blocky red thingies but the portally red thingies) were and how they were different from the green thingies. I felt like the straightforward puzzles were good for teaching how the mechanics worked with the swapping, but after that there wasn't too much puzzliness since you mostly just walked forward and triggered things in order.
I loved this game! I'm normally not one to experiment with crafting to try and figure out combinations, but because it was so cute and fun to throw things into each other, I was much more willing to play around. I had trouble mapping which mouse button was which free hand, but I'm not sure a good solution to helping to convey that. I was a bit sad that after I made the final thing, I didn't get to throw my excess helpful things into the ocean. If i had more time, I'd go back and make a bunch of the helpful things and throw them in for other players. Well done!
Nice job on your first ever Ludum Dare! A few things that might help for future games - when you make anything with a top-down movement that has shooting, i'd recommend making the player shape something where it's easy to see what your facing is at a glance. It was a little tricky with the round blobby. I liked how giving that guy the sword came back around in a way I was not expecting later on. Hopefully this gives you a good basis for figuring out scope in future jams. Good job!
Those ships are so teeny tiny! I think one sort of polishy thing that would really help the pacing would be popup contextual menus instead of having to go back and forth to the side and the planets (the hotkeys helped a lot with this, though). Nice work!
I think this game could polish up really nicely and you should totally keep working on it. The mechanic is simple but got me thinking in a way that I was not used to with interpreting the arcs and paying attention to the overall rotation. Some sound and feedback could make this really great, and I think it would be well suited to different platforms (touch, etc). Nice job!
This is a wonderful approach to a slider puzzle, I love how it remains simple but incorporates a lot of complex things to consider for the player spacially (both in where the character can move and where the blocks need to move). My one suggestion would be an additional visual distinction between happy and sad positioned blocks, the face by itself makes it hard to read at-a-glance the entire board. Perhaps a saturation shift or something? Also the music stressed me out so i had to turn it off :O Great work!
Great work! This had some fantastic polish to it that really made it fun to play. The animations, effects, and sounds all worked really well together to convey all the important information. I would suggest that for the little wheel by the pulley, making it stand out as more of a UI piece than a background element would help, because I didn't notice it until you said something in the chat and it was really useful. Well done!
I think you have a really clever core mechanic going on here. A big challenge you have is in UI and how to convey all the information going on, I was confused at first that the colors of the planets were telling me what was needed/obtainable, etc. Also, more feedback for how much fuel you have would be helpful since it's really important. I'd say if you plan on continuing working on this, that pacing out all these different mechanics will be really important (for example, having fuel not be an issue on the first level and just teaching out to escape planet gravitational pull, then introduce resources, then introduce different color planets with different gravity, etc). If you spread all that stuff out a little at a time, it'll make learning all this extra information easier without putting a huge burden on UI.
I had a really great time with this puzzle game! Though it took me a bit to figure out what was going on, in spite of the title, but once I did I thought it was hilarious. The pushing mechanics made me think a tiny bit of Road Not Taken, which is a good thing :) More knowledge of what is happening early on would help a lot, like maybe an actual sneeze sound effect, or brushing sound effect when you have the brush out, etc. Super great job!
This is a pretty fun interpretation of a routing sort of game. It kind of made me think of Spacechem only with zeppelins and waffles :P It was super hard, though! I had trouble keeping track of what I had already routed (like if I already had something going from one place to the cities or not). My solution to all problems was just build more zeppelins, but apparently that's not so great seeing as my population declined x_x Nice work!
I really love all the different types of gameplay you were able to get out of this mechanic (puzzley stuff, twitchy platforming stuff, etc.). Super clever and there were lots of moments that made me feel really smart. Two nitpicky pieces of feedback: it'd be nice if the crates stood out more palette-wise from the rest of the environment. Also, the states of the bridge (on/off) were easy to see when the transition happened, but when I came upon one sometimes I didn't realize if it was on or off right away. Those are pretty minor, though. I had some trouble in the level where you had to run around and avoid the spikes while the camera went up, i kept dying but didn't think I was touching any spikes so was a little confused. Well done!
Nice job, I don't see too many puzzle games that do they lay-out-then-execute approach. I thought your ramp-up was nicely paced and I liked how every time you introduced a new element that it was set up so I could just run it immediately to see what that new thing did. If you want to polish it up further, aside from sound effects, something that might be nice would be some feedback for which tile I was mousing over before I placed something, just so I don't accidentally misclick. Also, individual undo or click-to-remove would be nice on levels with lots of placed elements. Nice job!
I really enjoyed this game - it was really frustrating, yet fun. I think you nailed the feeling of balancing on a unicycle (as someone who has never ridden a unicycle). I wish there was a litter more leniency on jumping near the edges of the platforms as I found myself falling off the platforms multiple times when I felt that the jump button just wasn't being registered. The graphics were very well done and the music was super thematic. The death sound was a little harsh, but other than that, nice job!
I think there are a couple of key things you can address if you decide to keep working on this game. Because I was so focused on paying attention to the ship(?), I didn't feel the impact of my killing the enemies because I couldn't see when it was happening and there was no feedback to tell me that I was actually killing dudes. You might want to try out how this feels if you can also destroy the projectiles, because that was the biggest source of noise that made it difficult to parse what was going on, though I'm not sure how much that would alter the gameplay. Otherwise, it was just really hard to distinguish the enemies because the projectiles visually dominated the screen, so maybe just work on making the enemies stand out and have more distinct feedback when destroyed (or mess with the size of projectiles vs enemies, etc). I didn't feel any value in rotating because I couldn't tell what it gained me, but I think i started to see the end effect that you were trying to go for. It might just be a matter of tuning rotation speed and projectile spawn speed. I did like the idea of losing sides as a way of representing health, but it was hard to see when that had happened. Might just be a feedback thing. Nice job.
Great job on the mood. The art all fit together beautifully, and I liked the way the poetry(?) was integrated. Overall, a nice little experience.
Nice feedback on the hammer swing with the animations, especially on the bat, it felt really good to smash them. Music was really nice. The floor dropping out mechanic feels like it could be explored more to get interesting strategies and whatnot. Good job!
This was super cute and a really nice environment to swim around in. I wish there was more of a visual indicator between the different stars as sometimes the frown was hard to tell apart from the smile. The magnifier glass was a really nice mechanic and added a bit of difficulty having to control that in addition to making sure your fish didn't run into any bad stars. Beautiful aesthetic. Nice job!
This game definitely got across the frustrating feeling of trying to operate both player's controls at once. It seemed like it should be simple, yet was surprisingly difficult to control both of the pong paddles. The sounds and graphics were simple, but added a lot to the old school vibe you had going for this game. I really enjoyed it. Nice job!
This game was super hard, but not in a way that I felt like I could improve myself skill-wise. It's more or less a memory game, like hyper-minimilist battletoads :P The difficulty came in learning what the next thing to happen was going to be, then dying, then remembering that step when you got to it again, versus something like super hexagon where the difficulty is more much reactive to the next thing coming. I thought the feedback for things blinking in was a little binary, and was confusing at times when something was in its "i'm going to kill you" state versus "i can pass through you." The sounds helped here a lot but there are probably some more things you can do with the visuals to emphasize this, since it's a pretty important piece of feedback in the game. Black bars on gray background are a little tricky to see. Otherwise, nice work for compo!
Really nice work conveying the different modes with art, sound, and different mechanics. I'd say that the puzzle was pretty large so it was hard for me to hold in my head things that might be relevant across all four modes, especially since there were many steps involved. At one point I pushed a block into a corner, unable to push it back out, and was uncertain if I had gotten myself stuck or not, since I didn't know if I needed that block for a puzzle in a different dimension. Nice work!
I like the concept a lot of what's going on with the mechanics and the indirect way you are dealing with the missiles vs just shooting them down. However, the camera made me extremely nauseated so I had to quit relatively early on x_x I'm not sure if there's anything to be done about this, like if it was a framerate issue, or the speed of rotation or what, but there you go. The art was super cute. Nice job!
This is wonderful. I really enjoyed that the game itself was still fun mechanically and didn't just rely on a throwaway joke. The Zelda tropes were really well done and I giggled the whole time. Super great work!
I caught all 9 fish. I enjoyed the retro graphics a lot and how there wasn't a lot of flashy things going on. I'm really impatient, but I appreciate how the game does have a relaxing feel to it.
This game cracked me up with it's weird theming and silly animations. It was really hard, though, that dog AI is OP! I found it really tricky to steer the aiming without just throwing the butter off screen. I think there are fun things to do with the whole hot potato multiplayer mechanic. Nice work!
I really liked the feel of the pathfinding-based timing to stay out of sight, I think it will work great with touch and it feels really different than most stealth games like this that I've played. Liked the transition between scenes, I think the art style is very cohesive. Wasn't sure how to rate on theme since there were multiple screens involved even though the gameplay sequences themselves took place on one screen, but whatevs, I think what you have works fien for the game. Nice work!
This game cracked me up! I had a lot of fun laughing at the silly poses, and trying to keep track of the answer options. Impossibly hard, yes! However, if you want to mess with this further, I think it could easily be ramped up. I wish the controls were just on the screen all the time, I think it's hard enough even knowing what you're doing that it wouldn't detract from difficulty or anything like that. Great job!
So at first we thought that the only way you could hurt one another was with the ground pound, which made it pretty interesting. I kind of wish that was the only way you could deal damage because it made it feel really different from other fighting games. We couldn't figure out the little candy cane thing, like what conditions made it happen. I think the biggest thing that could improve this game is making a faster loop. 100 health and 4 lives is reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally long, and took away the fun of the initial fast action. Something like just x hits to die might be more appropriate to the pace. Nice work tackling a multiplayer game for the jam, I know that can be tough. Good job.
I loved the secondary feedback on all the animations, it made it feel really good to move even if the controls were tricky to get a handle on. I think having either the song playing OR the character VO would have been fine, but having them both going at once was rough because they kept stomping one another and it just sounded noisy so I couldn't appreciate the humor as much. Took me awhile to realize that the double jump is more than just double :P Nice touch with the shedding of snowman parts to represent health. Good work for the compo!
I really enjoyed this game! The whole package is really cleanly put together and everything works great. My favorite thing is how the squares change to white when they are no longer a threat so you can distinguish them in your periphery. Great job on polishing up a simple idea and making it feel really nice. My score was 114.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get far enough to see what kind of interesting things you were going to do with the limited vision stuff. There's a lot of issues with feedback on understanding why I was dying. One thing that may have helped would be to hold on the game screen for a bit after I died so I could see what caused it, when it goes immediately to the game over screen I was just confused most of the time. The movement had a bit of a jitter that I think got me into trouble because I would collide with things while moving away from them. Permadeath isn't bad, but I think it needs a lot of supportive feedback to make it motivating to keep going instead of just frustrating (for example, getting back into the game as fast as possible can help with this). Nice work!
I really enjoyed this game once I got past the overwhelming initial info and figured out what I was doing. As mentioned on stream, indicators of planet status on the map would be super helpful for making the whole game flow better. It was really cool that you used data visualization stuff to make this game. The music seemed a little intense for the situation, it started stressing me out. Also, it wasn't clear that you could do cross-species trade to stabilize everyone and then cancel trade, but some kind of tutorial or way of slowly introducing mechanics might help solve that problem. Sometimes I couldn't cancel trade and couldn't figure out why. Nice work!
Really great job on theming everything to serve your narrative with all the text and warnings and stuff. It really took a simple concept and added that nice extra layer of polish to pull it all together into a solid experience. Also I killed everybody. Nice interpretation of the theme to one console interface, and nice visual touches to really sell that (like the skreen noise, etc). I found myself naturally trying to press the up arrow to repeat my last command, which might be a fun bit of super-polish if you consider it. Nice job!
Super cute animations, I wish the enemies had some kind of tell for shooting, or at least on the ones with fast projectiles. The special felt a little weak, I think because the enemies have such high health that even when I hit all enemies on the screen, it didn't feel like I did much. When I went to the middle after a floor dropped, my character seemed to have the same visual feedback as when I got hurt, so I couldn't tell if I was taking damage when I thought I was in the correct spot. The movement felt nice with the acceleration/deceleration on the character. One thing you could do to really crank things up a notch would be additional feedback on enemy hits to give me a better idea of how I was progressing in killing one of them. Nice job!
Nice work on this super-hard game. I like a lot of the little details you got in, such as the weightiness of the jump and the trails on the platforms making it easier to position yourself to fall on them. Sometimes I found myself walking through spikes without dying, so that was a little puzzling, but overall I thought the level design provided solid challenges. I liked the enemy that only moved when you did, it was a good example of getting a lot of mileage out of little time and mechanics. It was nice that there was no game over for how frustrating it was, it's a nice match-up. Really nice work for compo!
Super props for doing a networked game for compo. It was fun trying to get people in the stream to join, however, we had some problems where only one person could actually move (we did two on the phone, mine worked but the other did not). I liked that there was some vibration feedback when using the phone. There's a lot of bugs to work out but something like this would be really cool in an installation setting, where people could just wander up and play with their phones. Nice work!
I really liked the aesthetic of this game. There was a lot of nice little details in it. I was a little confused with how my sword works as sometimes it felt like I couldn't stab for what seemed like no reason.
I really liked this concept and enjoyed being able to scroll through the different years. I think if the scroll worked a bit faster or you could interrupt the scroll if you accidentally scrolled too far, that would feel much better. I wasn't super sure what was meant by the radio color indicator, though I'm pretty sure it meant the bottom bar. Some clearer feedback on that would be helpful. I'd love to experience this with some music if you had time to take it further later because I think it would add a lot to the overall experience. Great job!
I love the intro sequence and how you kept everything to one screen via the zooming, etc. I see what you mean about the soul mechanic, how right now there's nothing to keep you from just wandering around as a soul and getting all the eyes, I think if you figure out a way to make it necessary to take the risk of moving around in your body then you could do some interesting stuff with it. Also I accidentally shot a dude in the beginning and felt terrible about it :( Please mind our colorblind friends when you pick your feedback for which eyes have been activated already. Occasionally the background was really busy with the game objects, but you could address that in a number of ways, a little desaturation on the backgrounds might be the simplest way. Good job!
I love how all these different game elements came together to make a really convincing whole. My favorite was figuring out that the reason for telling people to be quiet was to be able to see their health bar, that made me smile. It was pretty tricky to pay attention to everything at once, but you had a lot of great feedback to let me know exactly what happened when I did something wrong. I had a little trouble keeping track of the overall meta progression because I was so focused on the short term goals. Nice job!
This was a super cool interpretation of the theme. Really innovative and cool. I had a really hard time figuring out how to play the game (for those reading through the comments trying to figure it out - you need to resize the window to touch the edges of the square), and even after figuring out how to play, I wasn't too sure what the ultimate objective was. Nice job!
I like the chaining idea and think it has a lot of potential. Not sure why you didn't just list the controls on the description, I almost gave up without getting to play since it wasn't obvious (for anyone else having trouble, controls are listed in the readme). I could never get past the scissor fish thing, I think permadeath is tough in this context because you don't get a lot of time to play and experiment with the next phase before dying. Some sound effects would really take this a long way. Nice work!
Very silly theming, I like the turtle cakes! I would say that the hyper sensitivity to the movement made it extremely difficult and I often accidentally ran into enemies. Part of this is because the attack direction was dependent on facing, so if I wanted to attack something coming up behind me, I would often turn and run into that enemy before I could set up to attack. Nice audio feedback on hittin stuff.
Nice twist! I had trouble figuring out how I was aiming my butt. The visuals are lovely and the music feels appropriate. (like a spider). Nice work!
Once I figured out what was going on with the light, I really enjoyed the tension it created trying to get to the next spot, but still having to be fearful of walking into a trap. I wish the light thing was a little more integrated mechanics-wise with what was going on in the rest of the game, but I definitely think it achieved that creepy-dangerous tomb feeling you were going for. Sometimes I would get a key and not realize it since it picks up on collision. it would be nice to show the key for a moment before it goes into your inventory if possible. Nice work!
The game crashes for me after I choose a quality setting :( There wasn't any useful info in the dump.
Nice game - well executed. I wish there was a bit more granularity to the angle of shooting as sometimes I couldn't actually shoot an enemy until they got closer. I didn't get too far into it, so I'm not sure if there are more enemies that do anything different, but it would be interesting to see what you could do playing around with the waves.
I had a really great time with this (and found Mr. Jenkins!). It gave me so many vibes from Dungeons of Daggorath so the nostaglia factor was strong. I'm normally not great at dungeon crawlers because I have a hard time mapping 3D to 2D in my mind, so I looooooved that there was a map. It made the whole thing more enjoyable. Also nice work on the attack feedback. I wish that potions were click-to-pick-up instead of mouseover so I could save some of them for later. Seeing the shield made me think there was going to be some kind of defense mechanism. Dunno if you had that planned but ran out of time, but might be nice to add in post jam. Great job!
Super cute! I thought it did a good job of conveying a very sad state in a subtle fashion through the gameplay. Once I figured out what was going on, and that I could never be with the aardvark, it made the whole thing really moody. It did take me a bit to understand what I was doing as the manatee. I liked how everything changed with the day/night cycle, it did great work to convey the mode shift (it would be cool if the sound also changed) Nice job!
This was a super ambitious compo game and I could see a lot of interesting things that you were attempting. I loved the art style and the overall dour feel that you were able to get across. In the end, there were some issues with redundancy but I like how you still got variety in re-used scenes with reconstructed sentences. I really wish there were subtitles for the narration. Nice work!
Nice work on a 3D jam game! I like how the humor had a sort of dark edge to it, but still kept an overall light and silly premise. The animations looked great but were quite slow on the actionable parts like the swinging, etc, that made it hard to predict. It was a little confusing that it was click-to-move, you may want to consider looking at various RTS games to see how they reinforce that style of movement with feedback. Also when you click too close to a dead body, you don't move at all, which can get confusing. Really nice job!
Nice work with this concept! It was fun and surprising to see how things would change up on me. I'm curious if there's more you can do with this mechanic other than always going left and right to just reveal the next section. There were some problematic issues with the jumping that made some of the platforming really difficult. The lack of in-air control and no grace period for in-air jumping (like if I was trying to jump off an edge while moving in a direction, a few frames of grace period when I go off the edge would help a lot) made some parts really frustrating. I like how you got a lot of moodiness by putting the character way deep relative to the camera. I thought I was able to wall jump automatically without direction, but when I got to the part where the red dot closed the walls this didn't happen. Maybe some kind of stickiness to the walls could help here? Nice job!
I really enjoyed this game. The lane switching felt super satisfying and the whole theme was just fun overall. The only issue I had was that it was confusing how the different lanes seem to be moving the obstacles at different speeds (or inconsistent speeds?), so it was hard to determine quick enough which lane to be in sometimes. I like the music as it fit the game really well. Nice job!
I had a really difficult time figuring out how the resource and space management system worked. It would probably be helpful to have some sort of tutorial segment where the concept of digging and releasing was introduced in a more gentle and clear manner.
Nice work finishing a 3D game for the comp, I thought this was a good way of getting it all on one screen by making it make sense with the theme of the world. I'm not sure if it was intended to be funny, but when I solved the issue of people being able to see me mess with the TV by covering the door with beds I unbolted from the wall it made me laugh out loud. Good job.
Pretty hard but I think the highest I got was like 47 or something? One thing that threw me off a bit was that the background was a grid and I was a square, so I kept using the background as reference for the razor locations, however the character is actually a bit larger than the grid squares, so I often collided on the edge when I was not expecting to. I liked the visuals on the razors for how they faded out after bouncing. Careful when using default text in html5 because it looks very different in style from the rest of your art. I know other people are saying they wish it was embedded but I don't like the embedded games on the entry page so I don't mind :) However, it would be nice to have it hosted someplace to avoid the browser issue. Nice job!
Loved the amount of character that went into the art, it was really nice. I thought you were trying to do some ambitious stuff with figuring out who to use to interrogate whom, and the revelation of different information over time, though some of it felt a little flat (maybe just time constraints to iterate on that style of interaction). There wasn't much build-up between figuring out what was going on and solving the case - when I won it was sort of a surprise. Also, even though everyone had a ton of character, I found myself spamming through the options to figure out the match because of the time pressure, instead of losing myself in the fantasy of the world. I'd say this idea is worth exploring further! Nice work.
I super liked this game. It's very polished and made me happy. The digging and luring mechanic was really inventive and fun. The biggest problems I had were
1)it was sometimes really hard to tell whether an enemy would fall into a hole or not (as the movement trajectory was a little hard to see).
2)having a cursor range for when the drill would work was confusing. It was difficult to understand when my cursor was out of range.
GREAT JOB!
Super props to making a networked multiplayer game in 48 hours! I got a bunch of people in my stream to play and it was, as promised, super chaotic, but fun! I like that you chose to put a lot into feedback (like the flying snowman parts) knowing that this would probably be impossible to balance, good use of time :) Nice work!
I like the concept of the joint progression meter a lot. The execution was a little rough but I think there are fun concepts worth exploring here. A minor note, it would be nice if you were using the controller if the other person could use the wasd controls instead of the cramped numpad controls. I appreciate that you didn't count self-deaths, as there were many. Many many. The feedback on the kick was my favorite, I think it was the most enjoyable to use because of the animations and nice impact sound. The sword attack was pretty hard to hit with, a wider hitbox might be worth trying so you get more actual combat instead of flailing and self-deaths. Nice work!
I love this idea and how the wrapping is so nicely integrated with how you lose lives. There's a lot of feedback issues with the platforming, but if you want to keep working on this, there's plenty of resources out there to help make that feel a lot better. The visual of the wrapping screen looked really cool. I think there are some fun design implications of this (like how on your second life you are suddenly going the opposite direction, etc). Nice job!
Volume was super loud but once I got it down I really liked the music. The art was nice but the biggest issue is that it was very hard to distinguish background elements from obstacles and collectibles. You can address this pretty easily, though, by maybe saturation control, etc. The background parallaxing felt great, I just kept getting confused thinking buildings were obstacles. One thing that threw me off was that I couldn't duck immediately after landing a jump since I technically hit the button while still in mid-air. Supporting this would go a long way to alleviating some frustration that I didn't feel was my fault. Also, you may want to consider some feedback on the duck to let people know that it is a timed thing as it took me a long time to figure that out. Nice work!
The steering in this game felt great! I loved how the subtle driving and impact sounds had something really funny about them that made this pretty delightful to play. I'm not sure how I lived in the end, because I was preeeetty on fire and the last car seemed to be mostly intact, but I still won in the end. Nice job covering all the bases in a 48 hour game (sound, music, "tutorial," feedback, etc). Really solid.
Nice job with a pretty interesting mechanic! At first it was pretty straightforward, but I like how you ramped up the ways you had to use the commands in the difficulty of the puzzles. I especially liked the little learning moment that taught me what the "record" command meant. It was much darker than I anticipated! One note and I talked about this on stream, but mind your grace period jumping to make it a little easier to jump off the edges of things. The visuals were great, i loved the rough edges around everything, they were slightly disconnected from the dark mood that ended up happening but maybe that's okay. I appreciate how you can approach solving puzzles in many different ways. Great work!
The visuals really set a nice mood for this, and I liked uncovering the weird details of this world by little indirect snippets of information revealed along the way. I was a little unclear on the association to the theme. Nice little vignette.
Super great work and hilarious drawings and voice acting! Even though I was terrible at the math, it was still fun to see what the results would be. My one piece of feedback is that when "OK" appeared I thought it was a prompt, so I was trying to hit enter or click on it and panicked a bit because I thought I was doing something wrong. Otherwise, I thought it was a clever interpretation of the theme and made me feel like I was terrible at math (but that's okay because I still learned an important life lesson). Well done!
I liked the color window feedback for when you got intelligence, though eventually I started suffering from a little simulation sickness when the camera started moving really fast. The movement felt a little inconsistent which jarred my eyes somewhat. Also, it wasn't clear to me if it would end eventually or if it was an infinite game - maybe some feedback if you are approaching an ending if there is one? Or making some progress through the level? Also, the mood of the game was very chill and pleasant, which felt kind of disconnected from the idea of surveillance drones, so I was expecting something dark but got surprised at the rather pleasant atmosphere! But perhaps this is its own commentary? :) Nice job!!
This is a wonderfully weird game and it totally works! There were some bumps figuring out how to get things going that I needed assistance from the author in, but once I figured out the things I could do and started getting involved in community debates, it was super fun! I'm really impressed that you were able to wrangle Google Spreadsheets into this system. I'd be curious to see some kind of end game, like if there's a time limit where you conclude the results of the our collective efforts, that might make things a little more tense with arguing over what plants to breed, etc. Overall, great job!
I like how you incorporated a tone matching game into the theme, it was a nice little story accompaniment. The tick to start the measure was helpful, but I wish there was also a visual cue in addition (something simple would work. Screen flash, perhaps?) mostly because it was sometimes easy to confuse the order of animations because I wasn't watching properly at the right time, especially if things were on opposite sides of the screen. I had a really hard time discerning the different pitches in the cows due to the very low sound. Dunno if this is my speakers or just an issue with my own hearing and difficulty detecting low frequency, but I unfortunately got stuck on the cow section x_x Nice work overall!
Had a 2 year old play this and she wanted to play again and again :) Super cute stuff, I saw this at the presentation on Sunday. I think the biggest thing that would take this a notch up would be some visual feedback for when you get hit. There's an audio cue but since you are moving around a lot and often it gets lost in the sound for firing, sometimes it's hard to notice when you get hit. This could be anything from an animation on the mouse to a splat effect from the food to even just flashing the mouse sprite, etc. Otherwise it was pretty clear the relationship between the food types and their trade offs. Super cute stuff, good job!
This cracked me up, though it was rather difficult! I loved the reaction faces he makes when you miss and hit your own glasses. I had a lot of difficulty in the practice section trying to nail the timing - one tiny bit of feedback that might help is some extra visual cue for when the "right" time to hit the note is (often done with pulses or flashes). Pretty minor, though. Super weird and great compo work!
I liked how you explored the relationship of what was happening in-game and the role the player had to take, that the player could will things just by saying them. It's something that we don't really disconnect from when we play games so it was an interesting touch. It was a little vague on connection to the theme. This is not to do with your game specifically, but a general Twine musing, I wish there were a way to see how many possible branches there were in a game, to see how much more there would be to explore. Nice work!
Nice proof of concept for a potentially interesting mechanic. You did great work giving character to the cubes with your animation feedback, tilting, and particle streams. I immediately understood that the badguy was bad and that I wanted to avoid his flashlight. There are a few things I think you can start to play with if you want to push this further. One, consider trying out a lead camera instead of centering it directly on the player - sometimes I felt a little cramped in the direction I was moving. There's a lot you can do with camera so I think it's worth experimenting. The teleport mechanic has potential but is really sensitive and a little unruly. If you haven't, I'd love to see how that works using a controller and analog stick, and if that precision makes moving around the teleport circle easier, that way you could really push things like needing to move your teleporter around corners and such. I hope you keep it up, nice work!
This was an amazing job for the scope that you did it in, you put a lot of effort into all the places that mattered most. I loooooved the little monster hands creeping onto screen to indicate range, and what you did with the music for the same. It was an elegant way of both creating mood but also giving the player important gameplay information at the same time. My only note would be that the effect when you successfully kill someone is a little unclear, and when it happened the first time I thought I had been killed. I think the fullscreen red flash makes me think "I have been injured" because it's as though something has happened to my own vision. The fact that the human whips around to see you at the last minute is really cool but also adds to this confusion (did they shoot me?). Perhaps a scream or finding another bit of feedback and saving the fullscreen red when YOU are shot. Not sure what that could be. That was really the only confusing point. Wonderful job with the mood and all the foley!
This was a wonderful little experience, i loooove the audio and I thought you did a great job of characterizing everyone through the dialog. I didn't want to eat the doctor, I liked him :( Perfectly consumable experience for the jam. The talking "sound" effect was hilarious, I wish there were more variation in them just because I liked hearing the sound and I wanted to hear more of it. The flailing animations were fantastic.
feldaar - It does not fit the monster theme at all, but not for lack of planning. I just wasn't able to finish the game because I grew ill midway through the weekend.
Draknet - those are definitely the top two pieces of feedback that I just didn't get to address. Mostly I want to make it so you can just drag the top card off the deck normally if you want. If I ever went back to it, those would be the two things I'd do first.
You folks did a really great job of implying a lot about the world with little "hint" details so I was constantly curious about what was going on. I like everything appears to be a normal world due to how you reference things casually (like "cleansing") that end up being rabbitholes to more complicated threads. The squiggly animations were great and added just enough extra visual interest to make this feel different than just a text adventure with images. I'm not normally one to try text adventures more than once to explore different options, but I did so with this game because I was very curious about the world and you didn't reveal it all at once so I had a reason to go searching. Good job!
I though there was a lot of cute wrapper to this game and I liked the cactus form, but it's difficult when you want someone to do something (i.e. eventually turn into cactus form) but you tell them in the game NOT to do that (don't kill innocents). Some people love to just thwart that for fun, but I'm the sort of person who would have really tried not to kill innocents, and only started shooting them because you told me "that's what the fun part is." If that's the fun part, maybe just make that the whole game or find a way to get there more quickly? I had some difficulty with the collision on the bullets which I mentioned in the chat. I think with game jams it's better to err on the side of generosity. I liked the art a lot, and the ambient Western-ness. In the shooty-shoot parts, I wish I had a way to back up while also facing forward (i believe you mentioned wanting to play with mouse targeting, that would have solved this, or perhaps some manner of strafe button). Nice work!
Excellent job on the little details in the animation. I love the wing flutter when you jump, and the feedback for chomping dudes. I had some trouble understanding how the bullets tracked me, sometimes I would charge ahead in a setup and not get hit, but if I tried the same strategy a second time I would get hit. Since this is a pretty hard game where you're solving room-by-room, I'd recommend making the restart time sliiiiiiiightly faster (the splatter feedback when you die is great, just a hair long. I want to get back in the action quickly when I die to try and learn how to overcome what killed me). I couldn't play as much as I wanted for the difficulty, but I think it's a solid entry. At some points I wish certain challenges were isolated (like the crouch jump part, I kept dying in the subsequent parts and felt like I had no way to practice or prepare and so kept having to do the crouch jump challenge over and over). Camera panning could be smoothed out, but that's polishy stuff. Well done!
I love the experimental approach to the concept. At first I was like "why are you all wiggly and unresponsive this feels not great" but then it immediately became clear once other ghosts showed up. It was a good way of disguising your player. I'm wondering if there is a way to get that feature while still making the controls feel responsive once you notice who you are playing, but it would probably be pretty challenging since they are conflicting goals. I think even a tiny bit of sound really would have kicked this up to the next level (possibly opening up some other opportunities to identify your player, identifying footsteps among lots of footsteps?). There were times when I got the candy and wasn't sure if I had correctly identified which ghost I was, but it may just be that the collision on the candy is kind of awkward when approached from the bottom, so it triggers sooner than I expect. Overall nice work trying something different!
I was frustrated that the actions I took were handled so well by the parents. I wanted them to be upset, but I got away scott free. I liked the fact that the choices were limited by your previous actions, so there was decision making to figure out how to get the most evil options to open up. Nice work!
I think there's a super interesting premise here and there's a lot you can do to push the promise of the setup (scaring people being a blue-collar working job for a monster) in the actual game itself. For example, I got confused about the coffee breaks and didn't understand why I was getting reset. If you made it super clear that that's what was happening, it could be pretty funny because union-mandated coffee break is actually disrupting your progress. I had a hard time telling if I actually scared someone. Sometimes they would scream, sometimes they wouldn't, I think if your game is all about scaring people awake then that's an area where you could afford to spend lots of feedback and polish - basically prioritize the core interactions of your game to make them feel really good. Even though there were objects in all the rooms, it felt kind of abstract and maze-like. Since part of the charm of the premise is the monster being in a real human world, it would be worth it to try and find a way to make the level feel like a real space. Is it a hotel? Is it a boarding house? What are the functions of the rooms? It doesn't have to be hyper realistic, but just a little bit of logic can help you dress them appropriately and make it feel like a more coherent space (would help with navigation too, because I could be like "I've been in the kitchen already" and so on). The game was quite long and I didn't get much further into Day 2 so I don't know if anything different happens in later days. The base idea has promise to be really charming, just find ways to push it in the rest of the game. Nice work!
I loved the sound effects on this, they were super juicy! I think there were a lot of little issues with feedback that could really push this game forward. It was unclear to me when I was taking damage, because I assumed the knights were just going for the treasure, i didn't register them as "attacking" me and only noticed I was low on health when the screen edge effects kicked in. A sound effect would have sufficed since figuring out a fancy animation on the knight would have been a lot of work. Though if you went the animation route, I'd recommend something really simple and obvious. I big ole sword swoop sprite perhaps, just something that makes the silhouette on the knight REALLY different so I catch it right away. I also wasn't clear exactly when I took damage, and wasn't sure how to attack them such that I wouldn't take any damage, since our ranges overlapped. I think you could have given a beat on the minotaur's death before going straight to the score screen to give me a chance to register what had just happened. Even if there was no animation, if everything on the screen just froze in place for a beat and maybe a sad sound effect, it would have given the same effect more or less. I felt sorry for this minotaur, his plight seemed hopeless. Nice job!
A lot of great stuff going on here! The animations on both the rat and the scientists were really well done to the point that I had an easy time buying in to the fantasy (I felt inclined to hide in nooks like a rat even though I wasn't actually sure if I could get caught). I loved how you made the most of very little, like how the scientists idle while at a counter made them look like they were working, but the same animation out in the open made it look like they were searching for me). I see that you couldn't get the sound implemented in time, but I love that the music changed with the different states, another great example of a small thing that had a large impact. In my stream chat, our resident edge detection expert (William Chyr) mentioned that it would be cool to explore varying the line thickness with depth (like if ratty's butt had thicker lines because it was closer to the camera, etc) could be something fun to play with. A few minor notes, you may want to look into some kind of grace period jumping when running and jumping off of ledges, I often tried to do running jumps but fell when I expected to jump. Just a few frames after falling off a ledge where jump can still be performed would work wonders (since this is a 3D game and you are often jumping forward, you can be a little more generous with this sort of grace period than a sidescroller because I often can't even tell when I'm exactly off the edge anyway). Great work on having a satisfying payoff with simple implementation. Excellent work!
Pretty fun and accurate pokemon parody. I like how the humans just straight up die, no candy-coating the hard facts here :) I thought you did a good job with the framing around alien abduction that was definitely making a comment and not a joke, which is what makes the best satire. There were a few little things that I think could clean up the experience, notably when you enter the cave you very easily walk back out because you're already pressing up. If you aren't going to have the exit mirror the entrance, it can address this problem if you have a no-input state when going into/coming out of doors, to give the player a beat to reorient and realize they're going to need to switch directions. That's a minor thing but stuff like that can help a lot! Nice work.
I really liked the visuals with the 2D lighting (is that a godot engine thing?) and the effect for hiding behind things read really well. There was some confusion over when I had actually succeeded, because the counter didn't go up and nothing happened visually other than you walking out the door, so I wasn't sure if I actually did what I was supposed to do or not. It wasn't entirely clear when I would get caught by the resident, like if I just had to be in the same room as him or if it was the boundaries of the light, etc. At first I was flustered that I couldn't tell if a bed was occupied, but then when I figured out that a big part of the game is luring people out of bed to even tell where they are, I thought it made a lot more sense. It was a little confusing that you were trying to wake them up to scare them, but waking them up in another way put you in danger, just kind of fuzzy narrative logic that took a bit for me to understand. Nice work!
Congrats on your first Ludum Dare game! This was a great entry and very silly. I loved the juxtaposition of the super metal music and the fact that I appeared very small on the screen, it felt super silly. There's a lot of little feedback things you can do to crank things up that I think wouldn't be too involved - since the game is all about crushing cars, that's a place where you could really push the feedback and make it feel REALLy satisfying to smoosh a car (mix up the sound really loud, do things like a fullscreen flash or a bit of screenshake, effects, go all out because this is what the game is about!). You may also want to look at some extra feedback when I am in the correct place for gas and repair, sound or state change when I am fueling up in addition to the meters themselves would help. I would even suggest experimenting with different zoom levels, i'd be curious to see how differently this places with a closer camera. Just something to think about. Overall, nice work!
Any game that has an achievement to destroy abstract art is the game for me!
The shuffle animation was so adorable that I couldn't stand it, and the main character looks like a delicious chicken mcnugget.
I think being more explicit about the controls would have been a good idea since it took us a while to figure out the ducking mechanic. Overall really short, but really fun to play. Great game!
Resident UI expert in my group when we streamed this really liked the spiral level select menu :) (Extra points for instant retry option). I really liked how you gave this game a lot of character and mood with the visuals, the little touches like the idle sucking in of particles and how the darkness expanded made it feel ominous. It made it feel like it had some story to it and not just a minigolf game. I wish there was feedback to tell me that I couldn't grab the character while it was still moving, some visual change on it or whatevs. I think the mood could have been pushed even further with some sound effects, especially in the spreading of the darkness. There was a lot of content for a jam game, so I appreciated you calling out which levels introduced new mechanics, it ramped up fairly nicely to the point where you started to have to make perfect shots. Nice work!
This was really funny, I loved the animations and the reaction of the alarm clock when the alarm goes off. The intro text faded too quickly for me to read, though! I like how you have a buffer of time before the skull starts moving to let people get their bearings, that feels pretty great. I mentioned this in the stream, but I think there are a couple of things you can do with the spacebar to make it feel more responsive - extra feedback on when you're supposed to press, but also maybe experiment with some grace period after the bar hits the target for registering a successful press. Right now it can feel like I should have gotten the target but I didn't because it was just on the edge of collision. Otherwise super cute and simple, great interpretation of the theme!
Alas, wouldn't run on Windows 8 (the executable ran and a command window opened but the program itself never ran)
I really enjoyed this because I'm terrible at management games so only having to make one decision at a time with no time pressure was great for me ;) I enjoyed the potential for silly options (like stuffing towels in a hull breach). The fun in this game came from seeing the results of attempting silly things, however i never shot people at the aliens or anything like that because I'm too much of a goody two shoes. I guess if you want using people up to be inevitable, you could extend it to use all resources but that might get too long so the joke doesn't hit. I still liked that you had lots of options, though, because it made me feel like I had the ability to experiment with stuff. Nice work!
Super cute concept, I think there is a seed here to try a lot of really interesting things. I love the flat-but-with-shadows art style. I'd be curious to see where you take the mechanic, seems like a lot you could do mainly with the question "why should I bother returning to the cave frequently?" If you continue work on this, I feel like that would be the best thing to start experimenting with next. The acceleration on the movement seemed to feel out of control pretty quickly, there's not really a consequence for this at the moment but could be another thing to play with (maybe if you bumped into a parent, game over, or something) basically a reason to want to walk instead of just run everywhere. Overall, fun concept, good job!
Really great work on putting a game together that feels coherent in the time allotment. The sound effects were especially punchy so it made flying across the room when shot out of the gun feel really impactful. There was something about the aesthetics that kept telling my brain I was viewing things from the side instead of overhead, possibly accentuating the corners of the "walls" would have helped? not sure what exactly was causing that for me. I managed to get stuck -_- but I would be curious for you to explore this mechanic to see what interesting unique possibilities it has (i'm guessing a lot of time-based interactions?) Good job!
Super great compo entry! I enjoyed figuring out how to use my shape abilities to platform in different ways. There were a few puzzles that ramped up pretty quickly, where I understood what I had to do but didn't have a safe place to practice the actual twitch skill of pulling it off (sometimes the arrow keys and wasd would conflate in my brain when trying to do a tricky move under time pressure). For example, the first room with moving lava, I understood that I needed to grow tall and then shrink the air, but couldn't practice this effectively. If you keep working on this, I'd suggest focusing on ways a person can train themselves before being stuck in a place where they cannot practice. I think you did a good job of getting a lot of mileage out of a short number of possible inputs, like it wasn't just about shape matching, I had to play around and see how the shifting affected my movement, which was great. Nice work!
Great work with all the things! You really put together a compelling and coherent game in the time limit - the aesthetics all work together really well (and the head crab is terrifying). It occasionally tripped me up when it said reload and I would instinctively shift, and the chicken and funny voice kind of stuck out in an otherwise moody aesthetic. I'd say next steps could be playing with push-back on the guns (which could help differentiate different guns), get a lil action goin on ;) Super great work!
Updated with additional instructions: Try and get all the pieces into their slots - use one hand to grab a piece and distract the board so you can sneak the other one in before the hole changes shape.
Hi Avon! The controls thing was tricky to solve - originally when the mouse movement was one-to-one, it was too precise and no challenge at all, thus pretty boring. I also tried double keyboard controls, which was extremely difficult. Ultimately I picked having the hand follow the mouse position instead of mapped to it because it was the best happy medium we could find in the time frame, though I could probably make it feel better by addressing its sluggish acceleration. Ultimately, I think the easiest way to play is with a game pad, so I may call that out in the description
I will give that a try! Though that might be enough of a feature change that I'm not sure if I'd be able to update the build. Does tuning controls count as a bug fix?
TheMeorch - it already supports gamepad in the exact way you describe :D
Brightstar - Love it! :D
Ooo, playing it as a 2-player thing is brilliant!
Super silly and Tang is very cute. I wanted more feedback when I had succeeded, sometimes I wasn't quite sure.
Super props for tackling online multiplayer game for a jam (and getting it working!). I enjoy games that are easy for people to join in, as you could do with the QR. I feel like there's some things here that would be interesting to explore further, but it was difficult to get a feel for what the gameplay would be like. I did like the dichotomy in having a host with a large view and the individual players only having small views so that the host could have some sort of communicative role (though that might be difficult with remote players who aren't in the same room). Otherwise it was tricky to understand what the arrows indicated, like if touching the generator again would switch to that specific direction, or if it was indicating that a second connection could be made. Probably just needed some UI clarity. Nice job tackling the online portion, that stuff is super hard. If you continue this, it might be easier to prototype the rest of the game just on one screen first to flesh out the context, because that the moment I can't get a feel for what it's going to be like. Nice work!
I really like the solution for signaling the next shape and how it allowed for the stacking effect for predicting of the upcoming shapes. I kind of wish it got to that point a little bit quicker because that was the most interesting part of the game. Maybe just making the first level slightly quicker or shorter to get into level 2? Or perhaps adjusting if they are restarting versus starting for the first time? Either way it's a minor thing. I would love to see if there was a way to do this on touch screen since it is such a simple game, maybe different shapes in different corners or something. There's potential here to explore for sure. Nice job!
Super cute, I love all the secondary motion on the character - very Bit Bit Blocks ;) My one suggestion would be a little faster movement in liquid and gas, I realize speed is an advantage for solid, but I had to start puzzle 2 over a few times, and it got tiresome waiting to get over to the part I kept messing up. Otherwise super cute aesthetic, nice work!
I really liked the moment I figured out that I had to "freeze" the shapes in the right ones to exit the room, it's a fun and simple premise. I would say I kept getting thrown off expecting to be able to shoot diagonally because I (and the enemies) could smoothly move on diagonals. I'd be curious if locking movement to the grid would clear up that confusion and still feel good to move around. Also, maybe bumping the projectile collision just a bit - I often felt I was lined up pretty well with an enemy but the projectile would zoom by. It felt really good when I got an enemy by my projectile bouncing off the wall, those were nice little moments. If you keep developing, that could be a fun advanced thing to play with down the line. At one point I was naked with a jester hat and I had no idea why. The lighting I think really made this stand out, especially with the effects on the projectile, etc. Nice work!
This is super great! The adding and splitting mechanics really made me have to puzzle in a different way than I was used to. Lots of nice little touches like the tiny feet, and it had a super sad feeling to it reinforced by the rain and the music and the fact that I had to leave parts of myself behind. I think this is definitely worth continuing to work on after the jam, there's lots to explore with this idea!
Great atmosphere here! I love how you played with the idea that people will play the game that's given to them because that is what they are "supposed" to do, I thought this was a good way of bringing that to light in a super creepy way. The overhead movement over detailed perspective shot of the rooms really conveyed the tone super well (and emphasized that it was not about "gameplay" or skill so much as a context for highlighting this theme). The interstitial text moments were really good, though sometimes the light treatment/humor felt a bit like a mismatch to the tone, but perhaps that was the intent? Really interesting experiment, great job!
Really nice work for your first Ludum Dare! The gameplay, visuals and sound all worked really well to support one another. Once I got the rhythm down for which buttons were mapped to which colors, I had an easy time going super fast, which made it really fun. I love the "tell" effect of the approaching wall, it was enough that I knew that I was close to danger but subtle enough that it wasn't noising up the screen. One thing you might try - there's a really cool light effect going on in the background hexes, it would be cool to see if you can get that color to match your current color, because it is something that is constantly present on the screen but not intrusive. If you intend to keep this a sort of "endless" game, I'd look into adding some sort of measurement of how far you've gotten so you have a sense of progress. Nice job!
Super nice job on the compo! I thought this was an interesting take on the shape matching "tunnel" games I've been seeing. I think if you want to keep working on this, you have a lot at your disposal to control pacing in a really nice way (for example, low impact segments being JUST about matching, medium being about matching and collecting, then hard being all three: matching, collecting and avoiding). Plus on top of that you can affect difficulty with how often you have to switch, etc. With all of those you can really make a specific pacing, which could be really nice. I had some difficulty understanding the boundaries of the shapes and when exactly I could shift without taking damage from the previous shape vs how soon I needed to shift to match the next one. I think there's a lot of different ways to address this visually. The black dots were a nice simple way to help convey depth, I think there's potentially lots of interesting visual stuff you can do to add to this. The health bar/distance were the only things that sort of stuck out from the rest of the visuals, I wonder if there would be another way of conveying health as part of the player? Might be worth exploring. minor note: let the player advance themselves out of the instructions ;) Good job on the compo!
This is a super lovely game, I really like the choice to go with the tangrams and preset shapes of them because it meant I got to look at a lot of really cool art! My biggest issue was that I was mapping rotation relative to the shape, so for example I kept trying to push right twice to make it pointing up, rather than selecting the correct orientation. This may just be a product of experience using the controller and expecting the analog stick to work in a relative way. It would be interesting to find a way to support both and detect which the player is trying to do, BUT that may cause complications since you have a leaderboard (if one method is inherently easier than the other) so maybe not. Or another thing you could do is isolate the two controls in the beginning, like start off with a single shape that you just have to choose orientation on so people can get used to that before adding both of them together, that might actually clear up a lot. There was a point where the music felt like it was syncing to the movement of the shape holes and it was REALLY COOL feeling. If you had a way of doing that on purpose it might get super interesting results. Nice work!
I like how this took a twist on a lot of the "rotate the shape to fit in the hole" games that have come out of this jam. It was almost like rotating the hole instead of the shape, and having to make a call on a shape that was too small yet to tell and rush to adjust as it got bigger was pretty interesting. It did take me a bit to realize that I was more cycling through shape options than actually rotating a single shape, but once I got that, I had an easier time making strategies to identify the correct shape (usually looking for one outstanding edge or feature and going based on that). I enjoyed how you used the art complexity to ramp up the difficulty, and it had a really consistent mood to it. If you wanted to do even more of a ramp-up, I'd suggest pacing earlier shapes to be easier to identify at a difference and move up towards the more subtle ones. I couldn't tell if this was already happening or if the shapes were just random. Also might nice to get a player input before starting right away ;) Nice work making an aesthetically coherent game!
Really nice attention to detail in this game! Design-wise, I really thought the bubble bounce-back move was super interesting with a lot of cool potential. Normally in puzzle platformers like this players expect an air dash, but this a really interesting twist on that ability that unlocked a bunch of fun little interaction possibilities (I do think it would be cool that if you popped your bubble it made the cooldown shorter). The lock/box taking up ability slots ended up building in really cool progression in every single puzzle that I haven't really seen in a game like this before. It had a really cool outcome. Also I loved all the little details in the animation and the fact that you could punch a dead dude. The sound effects were very precise and did a great job of communicating impact. Very nice job!
Great little game! I like how there was intentionality in little details that contributed to the difficulty, such as the fact that you got pushed backwards on firing and the fact that there is no way to rotate without leaving your square. It really upped the challenge and made me have to think about the movements I was making. It ramps up in difficulty SUPER FAST but that's fine for the game jam setting, however if you want to consider fleshing this out, I'd say you can do a lot of slow ramping up and teaching about the falling off of the web and such.
Excellent work! Every aspect of this game works really well with every other aspect. They all support one another for a very clean package. I really appreciate how every visual in the game serves a gameplay function but still also looks amazing, and the audio is top notch! I'd say this game is ripe for expanding! I appreciated that it was sort of a rhythm game but was more about trial and error and experimentation than twitch skill and response time. Nice work!
Super cute! I really like how well the simple graphics and minimalistic sound meshed really well together to make a nice cohesive aesthetic. Gameplay was pretty straightforward, but the themeing was a cute spin on it. Rockhopper penguin was immediately identifiable. I think if you do want to make this into a full game for mobile or whatever, consider ramping the difficulty and the introduction of shapes more slowly. Nice work!
Nice use of the pyramid as a natural interpretation of the theme! It was intuitive about why the space was running out. I appreciated the clear animated tell and pre-attack sound on the snakes. It was interesting how the last level ended up being the easiest to deal with the snake when I was expecting it to be the hardest. However I was playing on easy difficulty so maybe this was addressed in later difficulties. Randomizing the timing of when it jumped will do the trick to make it hella hard! Curious if the hieroglyphs actually say anything ;) Nice work
This game is great but it's really stressful! I like the inherent challenge of not being able to wander around and experiment because every single slight move has a consequence! Nice thematic representation of the mechanics, it made total sense why I was getting bigger and smaller without too much explanation needed. It was interesting how it wasn't enough to just know the path to solve a puzzle but that you had to be extremely precise with your movement in order to succeed even if you knew the right way. Nice work!