Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• "Serpent RL" says it all: it's a roguelike with a Snake twist, scoped down to a 7-day roguelike project. Completeness (2/5): Serpent RL is stable and runs well, but the feature set is minimal and there was not a lot of polish. If there were a few more game elements and the game would detect a losing circumstance and reset, it might be more representative of an average entry to the jam. Aesthetics (3/5): Simple ASCII graphics, colorized. There was no ambiguity to what was what, and the UI told me everything I needed to know. A solid base aesthetic. Fun (3/5): Serpent RL gave me just enough to think about that I did not lose my time. I enjoyed the difficulty of decision about whether or not to maneuver my snake down which passage, and how. The enemy AI, while rudimentary and probably random, nevertheless introduced sufficient challenge. (Were they even enemies if they were not deliberately trying to block you?) I did find myself wishing that they could be defeated in standard snake game fashion (by blocking them in) but you're stuck with them unless you spend a bomb on them. Innovation (3/5): Though the inclusion of Snake mechanics on top of a roguelike game is not particularly complicated, I will say that I have no recollection of playing a game that did that before (and I have played a lot). If I look at this from the perspective of being a roguelike, then sure, it was a neat twist on the usual mechanics. Scope (2/5): As the author said, they "kept it very simple." It could have been simpler, I appreciated that it had a proper procedural generation to the maps, the turn loop worked well, and the aesthetics were very functional. But games don't get much simpler than Snake. Roguelikeness (2/5): It's ASCII, grid-based, and the pickups and enemies were placed at random, but so also were the Snake games of yore. It's turn-based, and the maps are procedurally generated, so there are some resemblances to Rogue. However, if I'm going to be a stickler about it (and being a judge requires I do) then this is Snake, not Rogue.
• A game with a pretty solid core concept of snake + dungeon. It doesn't have a huge feature set and the aesthetics are not flashy, but it does execute on the core concept well. The rainbow snake was a very nice touch which did a lot to liven up the visual aspect. I did find that on later levels with multiple snakes, sometimes you'd get a room with long corridors that you could get into, but would be kind of difficult to get out of when enemys snake were prowling at the opposite exits. I suppose that's why you conserve bombs! When playing, it feels much more like a turn-based classic arcade-style game than a roguelike. If I had to describe it, it would be a combination of snake and pac-man, with a bomb mechanic to help you reset.
• I had fun with this title as a twist on the standard Snake game. I didn't find any bugs and the bombs meant I didn't worry too much about getting stuck, especially with the other snakes around. The graphic are simple and readable, with some color flair on the player. I would have liked to have seen some more innovation as the scope was quite restrained. In my opinion it just scrapes in as roguelike-like