#1 Dad by Timothy Y
I really like the concept behind the game. Technically I found it very interesting how you had a never ending world that kept looping around a 3D object, and symbolically I really liked how the actions performed in the game empowered it. The narrative is not relatable for me, probably not yet, but I do believe that it was very well executed. Gameplay wise there's not much to offer, but I don't believe that anything more was necessary for this game.
I liked it.
30第二エスケープ | 30 Second Escape by TheMiningBoyAlpha
I do not understand the goal of this game, I've seemingly walked everywhere where you can go, I also learned how to punch walls so I don't think I missed any spot. There wasn't any proper gameplay to be found, and the performance was terrible. I saw that this game crashed for Dan because the game tried to allocate more than a Gigabyte of RAM for the vertex buffers, a GIGABYTE of RAM! That's insane man! I also didn't enjoy the aesthetics that much, but you might have made it a a bit abstract on purpose to create a sense of style and I can respect that.
I can't say much more about this game, not without knowing the goal of it. I don't want to discourage you from doing 3D for your future projects, but I can see that you're not too familiar with it yet, and I believe that for small timeframes as with game jams you can better steer clear from 3D for now. Everyone needs to start somewhere, with some more effort you can get there!
Bouncer by Siolfor the Jackal
I find the gameplay idea quite interesting, tracking the attendees while also making sure that enough people are in the club, while balancing who comes in, poses a good challenge.
But I didn't get the hang of this game, it might just be me but I didn't find a tactic of keeping people inside the club. I tried to fill it up as quickly as possible with a balanced men/women ratio, I also kept track of that it didn't go beyond the capacity, but I still kept losing within the first minute.
I also believe that even if I got the hang of it, the lack of a sense of being rewarded throughout the playthrough does make the game tedious in the end. There's no real sense of what you're doing is the right thing and if you make it, it's over without giving off the feeling that you earned it.
I think this game has a good concept behind it, and with some tweaking it could be turned in a small, fun game.
Chemodynamics by Dickson Law
I find it very hard to believe that this game was created inside the time constrains of the jam, it all looks and feel so polished! The art of the game is really great, and the main menu functions very well too.
Personally I'm not a big fan of games where you have to cram in rules into your head, but I did give it a proper try for this game, and I must say, the challenges this game poses are very interesting and surprisingly fun to tackle. I do however feel like there's a lack of depth in the gameplay, even without all the rules imposed on the player. Gameplay is very much the same for the full playthrough, and most challenges you face are very similar to previous challenges. Because of this, I couldn't hold interest for too long with playing the game.
I've read through both the Readme and Afterword, and I feel like hints that shine at a great past with programming shines through the text. I quite enjoyed your style of writing, the same goes for the instructions of the game. It made me recall reading instructions for board games and game concepts of my father which always have a special place in my heart. This is not too relevant for the game, but I found it worth pointing out. I look forward to your potential future findings of GML 2020!
Citadel Stormer by Pixeltroid
I do not want to dislike this game, because I see that there's a lot of effort put into this entry, but this game was extremely frustrating to play.
Visually, the game looks great. Even with the limited colour palette, everything looked very clear and pretty. Shapes were simple and easily recognizeable. There's nothing wrong with the art, it's top notch.
The gameplay however is qutie lacking. Jumping didn't feel satisfying and was hard to pull off correctly, which made me fall more often than I should with zig-zags. There were sections were you had to go down but you couldn't see what was beneath you, and often there were insta-kill spikes at the bottom, so your blind jumps often resulted in deaths. Shooting was quite essential to progress at times, but when you die, ammo doesn't come back, while enemies do. So at times you were left with too little ammo to properly continue the game whithout a way to fill up your ammuntion.
Please don't take my frustrations personally, I do see that a lot of effort went into this game, especially with the art and the map design. But I couldn't really enjoy this game in its current state, but nothing that can't be fixed with some patches!
Crimson Raider by Lolslayer, Kazimir Mariusz
This is my own game, so take my review with a grain of salt, I will try to review it as objectively as possible, but because of the fact that I know the development cycle behind it and because of the personal attachment you have with your own projects I will probably be biase.
First of all, like many have noted, the presentation is quite great. The textures and sprites created by Kazimir look very nice and the lighting effects I've created are very pretty looking in my opinion. The systems behind the game are quite complex and I'm proud of what I accomplished in the small timeframe I had. Sadly, the gameplay was lacking. Not only was it short, it was a bit clunky and there wasn't much to spice things up. I forgot to store the direction the player swings at when initiating the attack, which means that if you swing multiple times after each other, if you don't move, all the attacks after the first one are reset to the starting direction, which is directly to the right of the player. Because of this to properly attack enemies you had to move a bit back after each swing so you could move towards the enemy again to properly aim, which was quite annoying. I hoped that making the movement camera-aligned would make it easier to pick up, but I agree that walking around ledges is a bit tricky at times because you have to press two buttons to walk along the grid.
The enemies were quite okay in my opinion, the one shooting projectiles was sadly not very effective often because it only shot at a very specific distance to the player, and the one that dashed at the player was a bit too hard to avoid, but I did enjoy the fact that you could block the attack of the dashing ghosts when slashing at the right time, and I find that hurting an enemy feels quite satisfying.
I would love to come back to this game at some point to build upon the systems that are found, but this entry in its current state is nothing more but a glorified tech demo, which I don't mind too much because I'm a programmer after all. ;P
Dicy Dungeon by The M
You know that a game is good when you keep coming back at it. Usually for these reviews I try to finish a game once, and then I write the review. For this one however I came back a few times simply for how much fun it was (sadly, some of my plahthroughs were cut short because of crashes). Even though the premise didn't sound that interesting at first when I read the Readme, there's a surprising amount of tactics found in this game, and all your decisions are based on risk/reward which makes it such a high-stakes game. The only flaw I found in the gameplay was that some enemies with a high armour value took way too long to take down.
The way the theme was incorporated into the gameplay wasn't very interesting, but it's an okay implementation and I won't judge the game for that.
Fort With Guns by MikeeyBikeey
I can see that this game was quite ambitious. The emphasis on the concept of playing around with different guns is tricky to pull off, and sadly that can be seen back into this entry. There are quite a few guns out there, but they don't feel very unique and I usually refer back to the shotgun machinegun which is quite fun to use.
Shooting was quite fun, but moving around felt a bit floaty and it wasn't always very easy to see when you were hit, which makes it feel undeserved when you get killed.
Art-wise it looks quite nice, and overall the systems feel quite solid, the gameplay was sadly just lacking but it was still fun to play through.
Garbage Heroes by GameDevDan
I liked this game quite a lot, even though the genres found in it don't really resonate with me. Overall I think that the gameplay works quite well, it always keeps you on your toes, it's quite tense, and also quite rewarding when pulled off well. I also like the fact that there's an option to make thinigs a bit easier with the second attack pattern when you find it too difficult to hit the mark perfectly for quite a lengthy sequence.
There are a few more things to like about this game, like how you used patterns in the enemies attacks to make it easier to recognize which buttons to press, or the fact that for every enemy the gameplay gets shaken up a little. The art is great too for a game jam game, and I enjoyed the fact that there was a simple story to justify the actions of the game. The music was on point too!
I liked this game, it was quite great overall.
Hatch Controller by NazGhuL
I doubt that it was fully legal to make this game, but I sure don't care.
I'm going to be honest, I really don't know how to play this game. I know how to close the hatch and when, but I have no clue how entering the code works. I'm willing to review this game agin if you PM me some instructions.
Art wise I did quite enjoy the game, and I found that the game had a good sense of humour as well. The voice of the droid was also a nice addition. The integration of the theme into gameplay was also quite well done in my opinion. Otherwise I (currently) have not much to add to this review.
EDIT: After being contacted by the creator, I understood the joke behind the game and that a lot was cut due to time constraints. I appreciate the joke, and it's fully understandable that you weren't able to finish it, it could happen to anybody, it happened to me as well this jam.
I'm Not Drunk by Pranjal, Shwet
I really enjoyed this game. It was frustrating, but in a good way. It didn't hold my interest for too long but I enjoyed my time playing this very much. I love how well the theme shaped the gameplay concept, the art looked great and the frantic music really helped to enhance the chaotic feeling this game had. Finally getting the charger in the phone felt really gratifying every time it happened, and missing the hole only made me more detirmened to keep trying. In the end however, the easest tactic I found was keep charging at the hole as often as possible,which made the gameplay a bit still, which was also why I didn't play this game for too long. But overall this is a really great entry for the game jam!
PS, there's a bug where if you re-play the game, the music doesn't play anymore, if you fix that I believe that this will be a very fun game to be released on its own without the context of the jam.
Just Another Night by Shadow_Lancer, Cowsox
There lies a good concept behind this game, quite great even. It even fits the theme very well. Gameplay itself is fun and intiutive, but there are sadly aspects that make the game frustrating to play.
For one, I never get passed the second night. At first this was because the story at the start of the second night only mentioned one piece of clothing to look after out for, but when opening the checklist there suddenly were three. This was rather confusing and I lost a few times because of that. But even after knowing this, I still couldn't get passed the second night. I'm not certain why, maybe it was a string of bad luck, or maybe I'm really that bad at playing this game? At least, the losses didn't feel deserved, and it was quite infuriating, which in the end let me to give up on this game after trying a at least 6 times.
The music and the art are quite good though. I also enjoyed the small detail of the music being dampened by the doors and sounding loud and clear every time you opened them.
master.hacker.pro by Reaktori, Riuku
This was a great entry! It was actually that fun that I finished all the levels, and man, this was very content packed for a game jam game. I really liked the art (especially the trail that moving objects left behind), and I found the puzzles quite imaginative too. The weakest aspect of the game was probably the combat, becuase the other gameplay elements catered to a different playstyle, and when both the puzzles and the combat started to clash it became a bit frustrating to mix two playstyles together, but it was still satisfying to beat the enemies every now and then, the sound effects probably helped a lot with that.
I also enjoyed the GMC references found in the game, and there were some good jokes too! This was a great game jam entry, it has everything I hope to see in a jam entry, and even a little more.
Mo's Fish Shack by Relic
This game was quite fun to play, it didn't really have a hook on me but it was fun to try out a few different tactics. Trying to go down as quickly as possible was surprisingly effective, but after some practice I had the best results when very carefully descending to find the most expensive fish, which was quite the challenge, and a fun one too. Sadly the novelty wore off quite quickly so I didn't play it for too long.
Art and presentation are quite well done. I'm mixed on the camera rubber banding when catching a fish though, for the fish that are close to the surface it feels quite satisfying, but with fish at the bottom of the screen the camera rubber banding is somewhat disoriantating. Overall quite a fun game, but I don't see myself coming back to it.
Ninja vs Demons by Toque
I finished this game in half a minute. Honestly, I couldn't figure out what the challenge of the game really was, the enemies didn't seem to hurt me and I couldn't figure out if you need to defend a certain point or anything in that regard. There really wasn't much to it. The animations were quite well done however and I do appreciate the effort of putting a story behind the game to justify the motivations of your character.
No Smash The Walls by IndianaBones
Even though the concept of the game isn't unique, it is a fun and relevant to the theme. Gameplay wise it's quite solid, the last-minute bombs are a nice idea, sadly I didn't get to use it properly because of that I try to gather as many as possible.
Visually it's quite simple, which isn't a problem at all for a game like this, but I do think that the gaps are too narrow visually to properly predict where you need to stand to enter them. I feel like many of the walls I hit were a result of mispredictions. This could be resolved by widening the gap a little, just not too much to make it look like you can fit in there multiple times.
I also really liked that as a reward for winning the game, you get an additional game to play. There was not too much to explore in that game but it was a fun little timewaster.
No Way Back by Gizmo199
I loved this game, I loved the art style, I loved the music, I loved the sounds effects (especially of the text being typed out), and I liked the gameplay quite a lot. There are quite a few possibilities created by the systems provided in the game for creating puzzles, and some of the ones found in this game are quite challenging and rewarding to solve. Sadly, some puzzles gave off the feeling that I didn't find the proper solution, but I still got through anyhow. Controlling two entities at once felt more like you are working against yourself instead of with yourself, which sadly makes the puzzles with the keys more frustrating than it should be. It's possible to get stuck and then you have to reset the whole game, which was slightly annoying, luckily it only happened once to me. I also feel like the game could've benefited from having the sliding work on a grid instead of being stopped by collisions, it would make the sliding feel more solid and grounded in my opinion, it now felt a bit sloppy not being aligned to the grid even though the sliding puzzles were grid-aligned.
Don't get me wrong though, I really enjoyed my ride with this game. It had a magical, dreamy feeling, which I often try to find in games that I haven't succeeded in doing so for a very long time, except for here, thank you for this experience, and I would love to listen to the soundtrack on repeat if you can send me the audio file.
Objective: Stealth by KPJ
While the concept is overall quite good, I didn't have the patience to finish this game. The fact that you have to repeat the same process over and over again when you were caught was extremely tiring, I truly believe that this game could make a good use of a checkpoint system. I also believe that the steps to succesfully get past the enemies need to be taken too carefully, you'll too easily be punished for small mistakes. Things weren't made too when many FOV's of guards overlapped, but I understand that not much can be done in the small timeframe of a game jam.
This doesn't mean that I didn't like the entry at all by the way, I quite liked the introduction cutscene, and how guards react when you throw the ball. Quickly jumping from the ceiling to the ground and back to sneak past the guards was also satisfying. This entry can be genuinely good, but it needs a few things tweaked in my opinion before it can really shine.
PINN by HayManMarc
This was quite a decent game, but it didn't hold my interest for too long. It was quite satisfying to see the ball bounce around, especially when it landed in the green zone. It was however quite cumbersome to move both sliders with the mouse and to juggle between them, at times I couldn't reach the ball with the second slider because I first had to grab it with the mouse, or because of the haste I threw the ball away. With a controller I'm certain you can make it possible to properly control both sliders with the joysticks.
I also felt that the end result of the ball was a bit too unpredictable. At times it felt like it should perfectly land in the green zone, and still it rolled out into one of the red zones, which was slightly frustrating and also probably the main reason why I quickly let go of playing this game.
Popcorn Spider by Nacky Slocker
There's not much to say about the game. Gameplay wise it doesn't really go anywhere and the novelty quickly wears off, but it had some sort of satisfaction to it quite alike to "Cookie clicker" like games
SINGLE POINT OF ENTRY.exe by David Pisano
This was a real surprise, the presentation of this game was amazing! I really liked how the text appeared on screen, how the screen was made to look old by using shaders, and the ASCII art used to portray different elements of the game. I really liked what sounds were used, and what jokes could be found. The fact that this game opened up Gmail actually scared me for one second (I sent the mail btw), and there were a ton of references I enjoyed (and probably still many that I overlooked).
The only thing that was a bit lacking was the integration of the theme into the gameplay, but with a game as great as this one I can easily forgive that!
Slimelvator by Michael McMullen
There honestly wasn't too much to it for this game. Gameplay wise it simply wasn't that. Finding keys on itself isn't that interesting and the combat is quite tedious, and it doesn't feel either. There was one exception though, and that was at the very end of the game. I loved plowing through masses of enemies, that honestly felt really great. And seeing the final boss shatter was also quite satisfying.
Art-wise it was overall quite serviceable, with a few elements standing out. I really liked how the heart icons in the UI warped around and I found it quite enjoyable how the player sprite wiggles around when walking. The bloom of the light sources in the hallways also was a nice addition.
Spielcomm by Bart
While the game was basically a walking simulator, it had some charm to it and I enjoyed my playthrough. I do have to say though, there was one word I never got to find, even though I did succeed in entering Spielcomm. I also enjoyed the fact that you put another game in there for when you finish this entry, but I honestly had no clue how to play it.
The Great Mech War of 2039 by Mercerenies
I loved playing this game, there was something addictive about throwing other robots out of the arena and upgrading your own robot. I'm baffled that you could get so many features in there, I found it already quite ambitious that you could modify your robot, but being able to upload your robot and compete against those of others? No, I would never expect anybody to be able to pull that off within the timeframe of a game jam. In my opinion, the only thing that the game misses is the ability to fight other players online in a multiplayer match, otherwise it's a perfect game!
I don't see how the theme plays into this game, but it doesn't matter too much, it was really fun to play this game!
PS I dare everyone who reads this review to fight my boy MR Chrome, I've high hopes for this guy!
PPS I unlocked all the mech parts
The Portal by Micah_DS
While there's a very interesting concept backing this game, I felt that the AI wasn't very much fun to play with. I finally gave up at the level "Keep your enemies close", I simply couldn't get the AI to do what I wanted them to do, and I simply couldn't properly figure out the logic about the AI's behaviour. I'm also afraid that the concept was quite limited in how many unique puzzles you can get ouf ot it, but I can be very much wrong there.
Graphically this game was quite well done, I also really liked the sound effects, and the music too. I read your Readme, but I don't think that you'll have to worry about the quality of the music, it was quite good!
Thirst of Freedom by Fried Llama Studio
I'm going to be honest here, I didn't play this for very long. I found it very confusing to figure out what to do and some gameplay features didn't even seem to be in there (or they were introduced much later on). It's clear that the game is unfinished, which is too bad, because all the building blocks for a good game were there, they just had to be pieced together. I see that you're an artist, and quite a proper one as well. But I feel like you need to team-up with someone else if you want to aim for quality of art you're aiming for in the span of a game jam. I would be very interested to see what comes out of that.
Tic-Tac-Toe by ParodyKnaveBob
There's not much to mention here, it's a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe. But it is nice to see that the simple game are still very much fun to play, and I enjoyed playing against the AI quite a lot. It was a bit too easy in my opinion but still relatively competent.
And don't worry Bob, it seems like you are still very capable of programming, I haven't looked at the source code but the game itself is very much functional.
Turret Trap by Curato
The concept behind this game is overall quite solid, and it fits the theme. The problem is that next to the core gameplay loop, there isn't anything added in to spice the game up. The gameplay was constantly the same, and there wasn't really any space for creating tactics to tackle the problem, the game mostly comes down to reaction speed which on its own isn't enough to compel.
Art and sound effects do their job, they don't bring not much tot the table but I appreciate the effort put in these fields. There's some good effort put in this game, but sadly I didn't really find it any fun to play, it wasn't frustrating either, but I don't have a reason to come back to it later.
Unnamed by MikeDark_x
This was a cute little entry. I really liked the game visually. Even with the extremely limited colour palette, the actions were very clear and different art asset all looked distinct. I particularly liked the animations of the final boss battle.
Gameplay wise it was sadly quite lacking. The controls feel nice, and I love how they were explained to the player, but there was simply a lack of variety found in the game. Only fighting a single enemy type, and never more than one at the same time, quickly became tedious, and the platforming wasn't interesting enough to compensate for these problems. The final boss battle, while visually great, was also not that interesting. The attack pattern was announced just too late to properly respond to them, and the pattern didn't change throughout the battle. Luckily, the battle didn't take too long to overstay its welcome.
But in the end I don't want you to take my criticism too harshly, this is a game jam after all and there's only so much you can do within the small timeframe you've received. The game was still quite robust and neatly tied together.
Wormhole by Alice
This was really intense. It frustrated me at times but the game always seemed to pull me back to be finished. But let's talk about gameplay.
Gameplay wise it's quite solid and good fun, but the game really could use a checkpoint system in my opinion. After a few playthroughs the first part becomes a piece of cake and it becomes a chore to finish that part every time to get to the part that's actually challenging. The different stages of the game also seemed disproportionally sorted in difficulty at times. I also don't see the point of the addition of a snake-like gameplay style, the mechanic wasn't used consistently which was confusing at start. With that I mean that even though the player hurts itself by moving into itself, projectiles don't hurt the player even though you would assume that at first (at least, I assumed that at first). The fact that you could hurt yourself also very rarely posed a problem, so often I forgot about that and I moved into my tail as a result, which was quite frustrating. I can see the problem though of the player being capable of making very small 360s when you remove the tail, so it's probably better to have a tail in there, but there might be a better solution for this problem. Overall though it was still very fun to play through.
Aesthetically the game looked really great. I loved how the backgrounds looked and its variety, I also liked how you announced an obstacle coming on screen before it actually hurt the player. One problem with the art however was that at times it was so chaotic that it became hard to follow the player, and was quite straining for my eyes. I also believe that this game needs a warning for epileptic people because I'm quite sure that a particular background at the end of the game would trigger them.
While the implementation of the theme wasn't particularly strong, there was a good joke behind it and I can appreciate that.
Overall a very solid game jam game, with some improvements I can see this become a small little fun game title.