Cute and fun!

Brilliant idea, and implemented really well! Really nice level design. I love this!

@rob6566 lol Rob I love your different player names! I need to add a replay function into the game :P

Thank you Ghost of Rob, the only player who I really vibed with.

Really interesting idea and I loved the aspect of picking a different part of the music for each player.

Gah, @zoranac @rob6566 and @randomhuman I accidentally opted out of all the categories, oops! (probably thanks to sleep deprivation) If you wouldn't mind updating your ratings to rate the other categories, that would be great! (And each category you rate bumps up your game too)

@jezzamon I though it was a bit weird that there were only three categories! I added my ratings for the rest now.

That was super fun! And such a clever idea, executed really well! Probably my favourite entry so far!

This is amazing, and really well done! Needs more people to see it! One of the few ideas that isn't just "take a regular game mechanic and pretend it's 'summoning' by adding poofs and pentagrams."

I did start getting a little stuck on the levels where I needed two helpers, since it seems easy to get two that don't work together. Could just search through them til you find two that work, but that's not so fun.

WOW! Really entertaining. Really funny. Perhaps a little frustrating - but it's all part of the fun! It can be maddening to see another player tap dancing on and off of a button and you're not sure if you're gonna have enough time to skip over the spikes or not. Shoutout to Thomas who was my ride or die for the first few levels

Amazing! A great idea, very well executed. How you managed to design the levels without already having access to a pool of players is beyond my comprehension. I'd love to see this idea explored further. Very well done!

@jezzamon Haha, Oops! I've Added my review for those other categories!

oh man what an awesome idea. i really love this kind of asynchronized multiplayer. this builds a really interesting sense of engagement with others, even when nobody is directly interacting. love this idea
really fun puzzles, and really nice music! great job as usual :)

This is fun, innovating, and… Tricky! What a neat idea to summon other players, I don't know how you ended with such thing but I'm impressed! However I gave up with the first two-ghost level, I tried many times but couldn't find any good bi-ghost choice which I can use wisely to end the level :sweat_smile:
Anyways, even giving that it was very fun to play, thank you for this experience I've never had before, well done!

but it's great...are you going to write a little about how you came up with this idea and how you made it happen? Frankly the best appropriation of the theme so far for me;

Damn I wanted to do something like this (tho my idea was less fun), but decided not too cause I don't know much about web, and I was scared it would take me way too much time to set up a server and whatever is needed. I'm curious what you used as a server?

Anyway, the game is very fun and matches the theme perfectly. It's a great idea, and you made it shine with the perfect levels for this. It's also the perfect length. Very well executed!

That was awesome!! So cleverly done! I think the community did not let you down with this one, as you need players to understand and somehow work together and being social and stuff. The graphics are top notch and the addition of a character selector is a welcome addition, especially for this multiplayer-like gameplay.

This is amazing! I would even assume this is input record created by you rather than random players, but those characters are behaving so reasonblely that I start to suspect if they ARE curious players like me, which is great in terms of what this game have brought me. I gotta say this is a smart way to utlize the theme as well, summonning other "players" is indeed fun here - nice job!

As always very interesting game!

Something quite odd happened to me though. The first time, I played on Firefox (in a private window, if that matters) and I ended up in a cursed world after the first level or so where there were no flags to reach. It was all very strange. You can see it in my playthrough below.

Then I rebooted it in Chrome and I got the real levels.

Unfortunately I forgot to hit record again as I got too busy trying to beat them.

It was fun, and frustrating, how summoned players often assumed (probably so did I) that they need not wait a bit and just rushed to the the button or what they assumed would be closed trap doors without giving me much time to react to what they were doing. So it often took two playthroughs at least.

There could be some quality of life improvements there. The game could restart the level with a slight delay when everyone is dead. And it would be nice if I could see who I summoned last attempt somehow so I don't have to memorize that person X dashes towards the button and Y goes for the traps.

The last couple of very intricate levels I got by very easily because I accidentally discovered a cheat. The buttons and spikes don't cover their entire tiles, so you can just walk along the edge without triggering anything. That should probably not be the case.

If someone what plays after me summons me on those levels they'll be quite perplexed at first as I just ignore what's in the way.

Very cool concept though. Well made.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ecKmBVZsnJ8

@local-minimum Guh, I thought I fixed that bug in previous LD games and set up things so I wouldn't run into it here! I save the levels as image files and read pixel values out of them when loading the level. Unfortunately Firefox applies gamma correction and such before I can read those values. It used to be a problem with pngs, so I switched to gif files. Now it does that for those too. I guess I'll have to figure out how to solve that.

Would love to make the quality of improvement tweaks you suggested! Actually there's a lot of that that I didn't get time to do.

And you're not the only person to discover sneaking between the buttons and the spikes. One fun thing about this is that I can watch replays of how people play the game and I laughed a lot when I saw someone do that :P But good job discovering it!

@foursay It's not faked, all the players are actual players who have played the game! I spent like 10 hours getting the whole server and database set up to save people's movements :sweat_smile:

In fact, if you reload the game, you'll see your player there too!

@yorsh For the web server I used Google Cloud's Cloud Functions (like AWS Lambda... I just tend to use Google's cloud infra). The code for that is in in the GitHub entry too: https://github.com/Jezzamonn/Echos-of-Players-Past/blob/main/cloudfunction/function.js

That's connecting to a SQL database also running in Google Cloud: https://github.com/Jezzamonn/Echos-of-Players-Past/blob/main/database/init.sql

Honestly it took so long getting those pieces set up together and configuring the permissions I'm not sure I would really recommend it haha. But now that I've done it once I might be able to do it again, much quicker for another Ludum Dare!

Awesome entry, definitly one of my favourites! Awesome job! Nice touch with the music assembly :)

I just wanted to say that this mechanics of summoning past players alone makes me want to give 6 stars out of 5 in Innovation :) Now, I know only the winning inputs are saved, but it still surprises me that I managed to finish that level full of buttons and spikes 😅. One small QoL thing I felt missing was a way to restart the level while keeping the same players I had chosen, but it's fine either way (I'm just being lazy, I can - and did - simply memorize their names)

OHH COME ONNNN THIS IS GENIUS!!!!! GHAGHGGH WHAT A GOOD ENTRY!!!!!!!

The graphics and music are so cute! The way each character represents one track of the full song is so creative! The puzzles are simple yet inventive! Getting to play around with other people's playthroughs adds a good amount of unintentional comedy as the characters unintentionally kill you a bunch of times until you find that perfect match lol! I can't begin to comprehend how you even managed to make this work. This is the best game I played so far based on sheer creativity!

I loved the personalisation and the puzzle aspect of trying to work with past players is an awesome twist! Really cool how you could summon players based on the audio and compose your own sound track! Really fun idea! Loved this one :D

WOW this rules I hate that I didn't see this before the rating period ended. Since the old site died I never really did LD again so it's been hard tracking down all the old accounts! THIS GAME RULES!!!! It's also hilarious and has tons of emergent challenges. LOVE IT