William Macfarlane

Uncanny Dodge by Dubgron 2017-12-06T17:05:46Z

I like the idea of clones as a way of having additional lives but making those extra lives a resource that you actively choose to spend in a mechanically relevant way. Fun!

Real Inc. by Atmög 2017-12-07T17:03:26Z

I don't know if it's just me, but I found the movement really difficult-feeling in a way that was more frustrating than fun. It made fighting/avoiding the pirates feel more like an interruption then an interesting challenge.

Anxiety by BBrown 2017-12-06T03:11:27Z

I really like the idea of using audio to communicate the mental state of the character. Audio is generally used to control mood, of course, and to create certain kinds of mental states in the player, but the explicit mapping of the player's mental state to the character's mental state, through the anxiety-level mechanic makes the audio feel like more than just a tool for setting mood but also a channel of information _about_ the character. I'm not sure I've seen anything quite like that before!

Deadly Diver by Ethan Kennerly 2017-12-07T14:30:25Z

I like it! Simple and effective! It seems like the game need to be played a bunch of times in a row for you to get an understanding of the system and the constraints, so an easy reset button would be really helpful just so you could play it a bunch of times to figure it out.

I really like menu/start screens that use the normal control mechanics, so I enjoyed that opening screen quite a bit!

Trapped by PoundTheGroundStudios 2017-12-05T21:58:52Z

It is extremely easy to die and every time I died I had to restart the program since the mouse-look seems to disable the mouse cursor and I couldn't readily figure out a way to press the start-button without the mouse. This made it almost impossible to play the game, unfortunately.

Starbage Man by BryceLTaylor 2017-12-06T03:21:27Z

Thanks for the great feedback, everyone! It's really cool to have so much to think with this soon after the jam. This was our first game jam and I'm finding the experience pretty amazing.

There are a lot of half-finished ideas in the game -- we couldn't decide whether to lock controls when the boss was talking to you or not because we wanted to add a bunch of random superfluous interruptions to get in the way of you doing your job but not quite stop you entirely. Perhaps a smaller boss animation with more of the screen visible so you could more reasonably _try_ to work but still have it in the way.

I think the skeleton of the "frantically running back and forth between controls to manage too many things" mini-game is there, but it's not actually tuned right for gameplay so it perhaps just feels kind of confusing and hard without quite feeling frantic and silly and fun. But I think there's a glimmer of a fun mechanic there that could be unearthed.

We wanted there to be too much garbage, too much to do, and too many interruptions from your boss, and I think we successfully got all 3 of the pieces working-enough to see the skeleton of relationships between those systems.

@micahtron -- I've never heard of Sclock Mercenary, but now I have something new to read. Thanks!

Don Quijote vs Pentapolin's flock by voxmures 2017-12-06T13:34:39Z

I like the theme and the presentation but found it hard to trial-and-error figure out what effects any of my actions had on the end results. It felt like there was an interesting system that I was just struggling to find.

Last Ticket by Luciax 2017-12-06T03:36:56Z

I like the way that the multiple different kinds of art-style in the platforming section interact with each-other. I particularly liked the enemy art design and found the timing of the oscillating purple floor things to be interestingly difficult to figure out.

The music was nicely atmospheric and fit the mood well but was a bit short and didn't loop extremely well, so it felt a bit jarring every time the track finished and restarted.

I really like "knowledge" as a thing that fits the theme, which I assume is what you were going for here.