Great music. Sets the mood nicely for some typing lol.

Very cool! I wish it wasn't quite so large, I couldn't see it all on my screen so I had to scroll back and forth, ha ha. But that's alright, what was there was solid. I ended up trying to type with only my left hand, and I never realized just how much I need both for typing normal words! :P Well done, congrats on finishing LD41!

It's relaxing and annoying at the same time. I like it

I guess it represents texting and driving? I don't really get it. I don't really see the "horror" part, using the "scary" font for some of the words didn't really do anything for me.

Standard brick-breaker gameplay. It's not bad. Having to juggle typing and brick breaker made it more interesting, but both sides were so easy that if the game didn't force me to stop I could go on till I got tired.

The typing portion had some issues. Sometimes words I didn't want to start get started. I think the last letter for the word I'm typing also counts as the first letter for a different word, which was confusing.

Sounds got really repetitive. Music was good and relaxing, but hearing the same "tink" sound every time the ball hit something got really tiring. Needs to be some variation.

This was very challenging, but I liked a lot, good mixing.

Really challenging and a little frantic, trying to jump between breakout and typing. I liked how the darker down started to creep in and I'd be interested in seeing where that would go if you'd kept going!

I was about to get the high score but the game stopped ! Maybe my multiplier was too high. Anyway this gameplay is a great idea, I think it can be a think with some little ajustment to make it gradually harder !

Really great use of the theme !

Really nice! Simple, yet quite challenging. The only bad thing would be that the white ball was a little hard to see on the bright background, and the font was a litte hard to read sometimes.

It was really weird how any letters typed would apply to all words (even if you're in the middle of typing something else) It'd constantly be throwing the "wrong letter" sound at me because I was typing the wrong word.

It was interesting how the whole thing was a metaphor for texting while driving, but I didn't like how it just kicked me out of the game to do that.

Omg, this game was so satisfying! The sound and music were very soothing. I felt like I was just casually playing one of my favorite games and I was so chilled out and relaxed. Then you could get more multipliers by typing words and having the ball just take out so many blocks, just made me so happy. Very well made 5/5!

Pretty good. Liked the combination. Nice idea. I didn't get to the point where I 'Can’t get rid of that gnawing feeling that something is wrong?' so maybe that should come faster

Great concept super tricky if your not the best typer though, must learn through city-blocks.Nice work

If you'd care to review mine here you go https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/spacescape

Neat concept! Plays well, great job!

very nice great concept!

@weekend-panda, Thanks for giving it a try despite the large resolution! I lowered it based off of your comment so I hope that solves the vision issues. Please have another try at it if you'd like.

@Zimmer, Haha that's kinda what we were aiming for, but hopefully it was more fun than annoying!

@KScorp, really appreciate your constructive criticism and will keep what you said in mind as I refine the project in the future!

@polegar, Ahh based off of your comment I'm assuming you "beat" the game by reaching the high score! I do agree it was a bit sudden but we wanted to sort of be more direct with what the message/analogy of the game.

@RilleP, Good point, we did notice that at the beginning and opted to add a small trail behind the ball, but I think we'll play around with more contrasting colors.

@notgreat, Yeah as mentioned earlier we wanted to be more direct with the messaging but we have plans on just adding an Endless mode with more traditional gameplay with more powerups and different blocks. But congrats on beating the game!

@EthanLittle909, Thanks for the kind words!

First thing I noticed was the screenshot and it looks like in the UI it says erase wife. I immediately thought that alone is perfect. This gets super tough very quickly. I would make the backdrop a little darker, or darken the ball. When I look away to type and look back it took a second or two to find the ball, often too late

simple but executed pretty well. kinda relaxing and stressful at the same time!

Music is relaxing, typing is stressful xD
I think that you had a problem with the collision with the player, seems like the ball collides inside the paddle and saves the day most of the times.

Nice message in the background, good entry! :)

Was quite chalanging but not hard enogugh. Liked that most of the words consists of letters on the left side of the keyboard wich made it a bit easier if you use the 10 finger system. Small improvment would be to highlight the "Space" a bit more. Its kinda hard if you have " US" left to see that you need a space.

An interesting combination of genres, but they felt kind of disconnected. Your theme was interesting, but I think it could come through a little bit stronger earlier on, maybe a more cohesive string of texts instead of single words? But overall really cool!

I fell tottaly in love with this game. The ball sometimes went through the paddle which made it difficult to bounce it back to top, but I have a lot of fun. Well done!

Simple graphic + simple idea = brilliant game :D

Fun little relaxing game! until you see a lot of words coming below and ball is about to land.

Simple but had a lot of fun with the mechanic :)

Oh no, multitasking :smile: ... haha. Great entry, even though I was terribad I enjoyed it a lot. Fits the theme like a glove!

great music and the mix of typing and block is nice, really enjoyed playing it!!!

nice game! i like the multitasking and the slow reveal of story elements... very interesting

The concept was nice but you would've made the typing more effective. Like destroying some bricks by typing etc. Overall it was a good game

Great concept! This is the game that let me more hooked up so far on LD41. Great work!

Very cool concept and quite a challenge too. I like how you had an excess amount of left hand only words ^_^ The audio was nice but the block breaking noise got a little old fast. I found myself dying after dying because I tried to type then instead of not die again. Great job!

Haha, definitely nailed the theme! It took me awhile to get the hang of watching the words and the ball at the same time, but once I got the hang of it I was able to keep things going for quite a while. Solid entry!

Interesting concept, I got so stressed typing and moving the platform at the same time but i also enjoyed it a lot i didn't get the part where you get a voicemail so if you coould explain it to me it wuld be awesome! Nice Job!

Interesting mix of genres—and totally doable with two persons at the keyboard. :smile:

Thank you for playing our game, too! :thumbsup:

I liked it a lot! The theme fits perfectly with a mix of 2 incompatible genres. It seems like it's a game to be enjoyed relaxed, but it's not. Good Job!

I really liked this game! But maybe that's because I'm a fan of both arkanoid and typing games :wink: I didn't exactly get what you had to do in the weird glitched phone screen where you get a voicemail though :sweat_smile:

I wish I was a better at typing so I could have advanced the story more. It was a lot of fun to try to multitask by typing and playing at the same time, but then you had to throw in a third task of trying to figure out the story at the same time.

I think I know what it was, but I wasn't anywhere near the high score so I don't know if there is an ending and if I was correct in my guess. I'll have to come back to it later...

This is a solid little game! Loved your attention to laying out and setting up the mechanics for the player. It was easy to pick up, with details like "type me", and the simple intuitive breakout style. I was able to jump right in, and the fast-paced easy-to-learn gameplay was very captivating.

I noticed during my second play-through that the words I was typing were kinda all strangely *negative*, and I began to worry about your writer 😱

I realize now that this game was intentionally in a horror style! The bland art and music direction really made it easy to think the scary words were an accident, which in turn made it more unsettling! I think its a really cool psychological-horror spin!

This game is solid.

Check out my play through of this awesome game, and make sure to hit that subscribe button to see more playthroughs of LD41 entries! : D
https://youtu.be/6jqqBWz4gzk

Very good go on the theme here. The ending caught me totally off-guard.

Found this game due to Indie Gaming's video, btw. So that's cool.

Cool game, but this can happen only to me :scream:  I finished it on my second playthrough :smile:

This was so fun and challenging. I almost finished, but i couldn't, really loved the idea ^^

Interesting gameplay. After some playing I got booted into the main menu, and I could only listen to voice mails and the text was constantly changing. Not sure if intended, but kinda strange :laughing: Nice music and sounds though! I also liked how the font suddenly started changing.

@Bauxite Very much intentional, you achieved the "win condition" aka the voicemail.

Very good entry! Love this combination since I love both genres and they combine incompatibly very compatibly?!? Music is great as well

Good job! Cool game!

I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.

I hope you continue with the project.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape

@Theras, Yeah we had some issues with balancing the amount of left-side and right-side words. From initial playtesting, it seemed a lot of people found it really difficult so removed a lot of the right-sided words.

@Autumnotopia, Agreed. At first we had whole phrases/sentences, but it was way too difficult given their length. We do plan in post-LD changes to generate parts of those phrases/sentences in order so that the player can read each word and hopefully notice that they're part of a whole phrase.

@simon-rahnasto, Thank you for taking the time to review it! Really enjoyed watching you play it on stream and hearing your feedback :)

@NorthernHawk, Sure would love to! So the game is an analogy for texting and driving. In hindsight, we should've made that a bit more clear maybe via additional audio and sprites related to cars. The voicemail is rewarded upon reaching the goal score, that's playable in an alternate main-menu screen and it alludes to the fate of the player.

@winniehell, I never thought about what if two players attempted this! Makes me wonder if we have some room to adapt some multiplayer mode down the line haha

@AlejandrodeCea, Congrats on "beating" the game! So the voicemail was suppose to be our reward to hopefully have the story come out to the surface. So our take on the theme was sorta an analogy for texting and driving. I hope that info makes the glitched screen scene make more sense now

@minibobbo, Ahh really appreciate your attempt and I hope you'd give it a try again very soon!

@elsiana-eaves, Haha your comment really made my day, really glad you noticed that! In some of our own playtests, we found that most didn't have the chance to notice the words due to the multitasking involved. In hindsight, I think that was an area we could have improved on. Some plans we have for our post-LD version will hopefully address that

@cristiano-m-garcia, Thank you for the kind words and definitely planning to continue. I really enjoyed your game also

Fun calming game. Mechaincs are well done and dont know how they can be better. If you polish th UI and make it a bit colorful, your probably looking at well-polished game. Awesome entry dude!

Wow! It was some hypnotic experience! Big change from the classic breakout, that can be quite stressful.
One of those games you could just open and play with no feeling of time. And the music complements the experience.

Nice job! :nerd:

This was great! I love breakout style games, so that part was already a win. The word-typing integration is a great feature - I want ALL THE BONUSES! but of course, if I try to get them, I set myself up to fail in the other part of the game. This mechanic works really well. The SFX and music are some of the best matched I have heard, across the titles I've played so far. Well done!

Lovely music. I would have hoped for slower ball movement. I'm not that good at playing :) Very well done entry.

I really liked it, it's quite a challenge to type and move at once!!!

I liked it, very challenging, great sound.

The theme/idea is great. Maybe the words could fall in front of the game area? Or would that be too confusing? Also took me a while to notice I can complete failed words :)

Here's my feedback:

**Positive:**

-- The concept is unique.

-- Its Fun

-- The intense feeling while playing

-- The Music fit game

**Negative:**

-- The collision of the ball with the player.

-- the mood outside the game didnt fit in the mood inside.

For Overall its a cool entry Good Job!!

Nice little game. A bit easy, i would say.
The "ERROR" screen reminded me of Pony Island :D

Nice music and atmosphere! It's a game I could play for a long time.

interesting concept! I don't think I've played a breakout game where the blocks were scrolling down from the top. The typing mechanics were a neat twist. All of the power ups from typing did make it a bit easy, but it was still fun! The ending was nicely done too.

Finally got the chance to rate your game. This is so coooool! What I liked about this game is that it is tough to play, yet very fun. :thumbsup: Great entry!

Finally got the chance to rate your game. This is so coooool! What I liked about this game is that it is tough to play, yet very fun. :thumbsup: Great entry!

@KScorp @OmnipotentIndie @Akand @Simon Rahnasto @NorthernHawk @minibobbo @Indie Gaming @ema1ih @Bauxite @jamfella @EkkoEkko @Poio @rplnt @theprint

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/city-blocks/post-mortem-city-blocks-ending-explained

Disclaimer 1: There is no real pattern who I just "@"'d - except I thought you might enjoy my "Ending Explained" blog.

Disclaimer 2: You guys are a great community and provided great feedback. Thank you all very much!

This was a lot of fun! The soft and relaxing music was a clever charade. I'm curious if you balanced your word list based on if words could be typed with one hand or not. Great work!

@Jedeen Yep, you hit the nail on the head. We balanced the list with what we called left-handed and right-handed words. We found that we got a good flow with left-handed words and limited the words using right-handed letters like l, m, p - some of the buff words still used these letters because we found bad typers get a balance: they may drop the ball but still get the buff but good players got a bit of a breather. We also wanted to tell a story so we still had to use some right-handed letters. I am really grateful you caught that and said something because the game's difficulty has been the subject of a long internal debate whenever we receive a comment saying the game is too difficult. Thank you for the comment.