Antti Haavikko

Escape From The Bottle by Twaldigas 2017-05-17T15:59:45Z

Pretty neat little metroidvania. You mentioned something about sounds but I didn't hear anything (played the web version). The fullscreen on the web version was non-functional. Also, some of the texts that appeared on screen were weirdly stretched.

This Is Not Enough Planet! by madjackmcmad 2017-05-15T11:42:30Z

The OSX download link is still (or again) throwing 403.

This Is Not Enough Planet! by madjackmcmad 2017-05-15T13:42:39Z

Was very much worth the wait! At the least one of the best overall experiences of all the LD38 games I've played so far. Very nice polish, especially for a compo game.

Only very nitpicky stuff to critique about:

- Make it easier to differentiate between friendly and enemy bullets. Maybe decrease the contrast of friendly ones to make enemy ones stand out more or something like that. - A bit smaller player hitbox would make it "seem" more fair. Or maybe a bit of a invincibility grace period after getting hit. - Music would definitely smooth out the bit monotonous sound effects. But as a completely musically talentless solo dev, I'm on a same boat.

Quest Island by bentglasstube 2017-05-16T17:23:23Z

Dear diary. I'm writing this as I'm wandering around the fishing pole cave and can't find the way out. I wonder if I'll ever see the light of day again. I want to give up but I can't because this game reminds me of Zelda 2 and no matter how much people bash it, I still love it. See, even the main character looks kinda familiar...

bagu.gif

So, I made it out. Took a lot longer than I'd like to admit. Kinda dreading the idea of entering the cave next to that previous one. Someone give me breadcrumbs...

Okay, that was a lot easier. I kept a mental note of where the exit was at all times. This might be a fine point to break the 4th wall and discuss game mechanics. One in particular and that is allowing to skip/fastforward the speech texts. So many "you looked all arounds".

So some dude just thanked me for something and gave me a toch. Sweet, that would have been nice when I was stuck on that stupid dark cave. Anyways, was that the laundry dude? I don't think I found his loundry...

Another cave! Piece of cake with the torch. Seems to be empty though. Maybe I need to find something else first...

Strange feeling of deja vu. Another random person just thanked me for nothing and gave me a torch which I already had. Thanks for nothing, grey dude!

Seriously pink girl? You too...

---

So I'm officially giving up now. Dunno what grand adventures I missed. Loved and hated it at the same time. World could have been smaller since it was mostly empty anyway. Would have fit the theme better also...

Greyer by ccglp 2017-05-16T15:47:45Z

Very interesting ____!

After three tries, still couldn't get all the collectibles. Got 9 of them on the last try and saw the final one in the beginning but couldn't figure out how to reach it. Slow progress and constant message popups don't really encourage me to try a 4th time. Also, I'm not a huge fan of the super floaty jumping physics you had going on.

Other than that and despite the expectations of the game itself, very good job!

DUCKTRON by neontropics 2017-05-15T15:19:40Z

Funny stuff. From the description and screenshots, I was expecting different kind of hacking. Or maybe it still is. So meta.

Small delay on death would be nice to prevent skipping the end screen. Also would be cool to clear the starting area from other ducks. Quite ofter I would start a new game just to get whached on the face several times instantly before I could even move.

By the way, what was your own HS?

coollapse by nicruo 2017-05-16T16:24:03Z

Interesting mechanic which you could do a lot more with. I think the ball should be a bit smaller so drilling down one block wide holes would be not that pixel perfect. Something as simple as making the game endless and having the red blocks spawn randomly one at a time around the board might be pretty cool(lapse).

Loved the music!

FUEL by KCreanor 2017-05-18T07:34:09Z

Beat it with hard mode on (using touchpad instead of an actual mouse). Liked it. The controls were pretty much perfect.

The only thing I would change game design wise is the player hitbox (for collisions, obviously for pickups it's fine). I'm more into touhou style hitboxes where the colliding area is way smaller than the player sprite/model so it feels more fair. That way every single collision that happens seem more fair and surviving some super close call looking situations makes the player feel great.

All around solid entry. Good job!

B-M0X by sambrosia 2017-05-17T13:08:14Z

Super simple and short. Seemed like the best way to play was to click randomly until you find a "known" star then keep clicking randomly on the line until you found a match. Distances seemed to be pretty random and no help at all. Also the planet count can be false positive and I think I even once won with a candidate with 14 planets. Would need more depth for the triangulation system and a bit more stuff to do.

Loved the hand drawn graphics and the music fit the mood very well.

Titanomachy by savethejets1 2017-05-17T18:57:55Z

Just played against myself to see what the game is like. First time I got stuck. For some reason the active player could not play the last rock tile on their hand.

Screen Shot 2017-05-17 at 21.42.07.png

Restarted after that and didn't run to that issue again. Allowing the player to skip the intro would be nice.

The game looks and sounds very nice and polished. I'm super impressed on how much you got done on 48 hours. The only thing that kinda felt out of place was the solid slab of color under an unit after placed on the board.

Not sure how it would really play out in an actual duel. Seems like it would have quite a lot of strategy and depth involved. Is it supposed to be played so that both player know what their opponent has in their hand or no? If not, it would require some new state between player turns to work as a hotseat multiplayer.

The Shifting Catacombs of Mu'ralagh by Madgvox 2017-05-17T14:14:57Z

Loved the look and sound of it. Very nice indeed!

As others have pointed out, jumping could be better but wasn't really an issue with the current puzzles that required it. It was made harder by playing on higher resolution which resulted in everything being super tiny. Played a second time through with 800x600 fullscreen and it was a lot better.

So yeah. Beat it (twice) wanting more...

Super Smash Globes by 100th_Coin 2017-05-15T13:03:17Z

Played the OSX version and seemed to work ok. Ran into few issues but dunno if they're only present in the mac version. The most "breaking" bug was getting stuck at the end of completing the tutorial, nothing did anything and had to force quit and restart the app. All that sweet character customization lost :(

Another visual glitch that was kind of annoying was that every sprite seemed to have randomish depths. Like water of my planet would appear in front of enemy planet and ground didn't and so on.

Major props for adding character customization. I'm guessing you added it because you could then recycle the same character for player and enemies without getting repetitive.

Murder by TheGameGoyal 2017-05-17T12:44:49Z

Didn't first quite understand the whole looking down thing but tried again after reading the comments and it made a lor more sense. Cool mechanic poking fun at some stealth games like Hitman.

Visuals looked nice and sharp. Star HUD felt kinda out of place being the only non-pixelated piece of graphic on the screen.

The stabbing delay was awkward especially with the small hitbox. Cloudn't find any buttons for stab/look on the keyboard. Moving at least had alt keys but would have preferred to play with keyboard only since mouse was only used for the buttons.

Hops and Fever Dreams by Antti Haavikko 2017-04-28T06:00:28Z

Thanks for the feedback! I did notice at least one bugged cage that doesn't require a key myself but only after the time was up for submissions. And since it's not a game breaking bug, guess I can't fix it.

You almost made it to the end ;)

Hops and Fever Dreams by Antti Haavikko 2017-05-15T14:24:54Z

Couldn't agree more with you @neontropic on the music bit but I'm completely useless when it comes to music. I've been planning on trying to teach myself some kind of very basic grasp of doing music stuff but haven't gotten around to it yet. Would help a lot on jams.

The slow walk was kind of a design choice, encouraging jumping more which will then lead to accidental hilarious oribitings and flying to wrong planets. And I figured there weren't that big distances to traverse anyway.

Hops and Fever Dreams by Antti Haavikko 2017-05-16T18:10:30Z

@kepons wait WHAT!? Everyone else says it is too hard? And it's a bunny, I though the ears and the whole carrot thing would be a dead giveaway.

Hops and Fever Dreams by Antti Haavikko 2017-05-17T07:06:30Z

To everyone confused about jumping physics

It's quite simple really but just way too strict on timing right now. The bunny is a bit bouncy so when you jump right after hitting the ground, the bounce momentum increases your jump height. And vice versa, if you jump at the wrong time, you kill all the momentum and will do a small jump. **Just a classic story of me getting used to timing the jumps correctly myself so it ended up being way too hard for others.**

@occultone I tried fipping the controls when upside down but it didn't quite work. I know it feels weird but all the other options were worse. At least now you can hold down one direction and keep circling around the planet. And hey, if you tilt your head so that the bunny is upright, the controls always match the movement direction.

@brotherst glad to see someone notice the pooping feature! And to think that you also discovered a use for it, as some kind of poop propelling hovering machine. None of that was intentional at all. The pooping was added just for fun, had no idea it could actually be used for something. Probably could have spent that time on something more useful but hey, at least you liked it. And there is bound to be more juvenile people like us.

@nathan and @unclechris seen that bug happen few times post jam. I still have no idea what could be causing it. And the weird thing is that the bunny is colliding with something out there even when nothing is supposed to be there. Cause normally if you go 5 seconds without touching the ground, a message would appear showing that you can reset the level with R (added in case of launching oneself to orbit permanently).

It's super funny seeing that everyone has their own interpretation of the character expression (and even species). Exactly why I love going for the semi-abstract designs...

A small word but there can be only one (unfinished) by hellokill 2017-05-16T17:37:47Z

And still no download link :(

Lonely Rover by Skoggy 2017-05-15T15:46:00Z

Yay, a game I actually managed to finish! The ending reminded me of Tetris, needs more russian folk music though ;)

Almost didn't make it because of this stupid block decided to start bouncing around defying all laws of physics. Then finally I managed to grab it from the air and could then use it to get past the laser. lonely-rover-resized.gif

I think the screen shake was because your camera is too strictly following the rover which is shaking while driving around. A simple addition of damping the camera movement would get rid of the shakiness.

World Battles by Thinkofname 2017-05-15T14:10:14Z

Very nice! Simple visuals but they work. Bullets (both enemy and player) need to be bigger. A bit more details on the background would make it easier to notice the movements.

In my opinion, everything has too much health and the timer between waves is unnecessary.

Had to give up at this point:

Screen Shot 2017-05-15 at 17.01.24.png

The last enemy of a wave crashed into me and I couldn't move or damage it anymore. Well, I didn't have much room to plant any guns anyway especially since just having all the guns in one quadrant and keeping your enemies on that side seems to be the best strategy.

Aim for the Star by NightShadow0 2017-05-16T16:08:37Z

Golf with planets. Sure, why the heck not.

At first sight, I was expecting the other planets to have their own gravitational pulls and then was kind of disappointed when it didn't happen only to realize than the black holes did almost exactly that later on.

Nice amount of levels. Not too little and not so many either that it would get repetitive without the introduction of new mechanics. So much more you could do with it though.

Good game! Who would say no to a few rounds of mini-golf?

Aim for the Star by NightShadow0 2017-05-16T16:08:38Z

edit: Ugh, double post b/c slow server...

Vertical City by LiamLime 2017-05-15T10:36:34Z

Pretty solid stuff. Even though there is no goal or anything to really build towards. Very good sandbox foundation but the game part is kind of missing.

The visuals are quite nice and clean. The person sprite might need a bit more work ;) Adding parallax scrolling for the background city could be a nice touch.

Ran into few weird and random issues. At first I got stuck and couldn't build past the third floor but then at some point clicking there started registering again and managed to build more. And right now I can't build anything else besides homes. The buttons for other stuff aren't focusing, I think something invisible is on top of them preventing the click events. Might actually be the same issue that was blocking me from building the fourth floor first.

Ctrl + S the World! by Fury 2017-05-17T13:50:38Z

Why not allow other keys to be used instead of numpad? Plenty of unused keys left even on a numpadless keyboard.

It's a Small World by NedMakesGames 2017-05-15T12:37:11Z

Very cool. Really could have benefited from a full screen button, dunno why you decided to remove it from the web version. I'm on OSX so couldn't download and play full screen. The deadly pink asteroids and red hearts start looking quite similar when when the camera zooms out so far that they're only the size of a few pixels.

Nice and responsive controls. Didn't bother reading all the instructions so I missed majority of the different jump mechanics but those weren't really needed anyway. Pretty much the only one of the ones I missed at first I found useful was the quick landing one.

As some people have already mentioned, some kind of life system instead of instant failing would have been nice. Also some kind of multiplier system might be cool to entice more of the floor-is-lava-esque star jumping.

Bantam! by dylanilvento 2017-05-16T18:03:56Z

Would have loved to see more flying stuff. The ship looked sweet and it controlled beautifully. It just felt just right. Too bad it was pretty much just a level select.

And as other people have already mentioned, can't say the same about the platforming sections. After a bit I found myself just standing still and wailing on enemies but even that failed since dodging enemy bullets was sometimes near impossible with the controls and they had way too much health.

Rickshaw World by tobico 2017-05-17T13:22:37Z

Would have liked to have more contrast between passanger text and the ground. Compared to "driver" text, it was a lot harder to read. Also would have been nice to be able to control the camera. Could at least have fiddled with it and checked out some vistas while going for the next passanger.

A Giant's Tale by TheGamer1123211 2017-05-17T16:15:59Z

Can't interact on the left one but can on the right: giant.gif

Interesting idea. It was pretty hand-holdy straight up giving up all the solutions to the already easy puzzles. Would have wanted more and harder puzzles. Also would have been cool to be able to walk when all stretched out.

Simple platformer with color changing mechanic by kr1stoffer 2017-05-16T18:38:14Z

Very unique and awesome game mechanic. I don't think I've ever seen anything remotely similar to it. Also, possibly the best title of this whole LD.

The difficulty spiked up pretty hard on level 5. Could have eased it up a bit more gradually. And then there were the last two levels where like half of the level was just a red herring and not needed at all.

And at this point I went and played it again to recall what level number I'm supposed to talk about. Still cool the 2nd time through...

Very clever design on level 6 teaching about fall/jump without any messages or tutorial.

Seriously, can't praise this enough! Awesome idea. Just needs a bit of visual polish, audio and loads of levels and I'd see myself playing this for hours.

A Small Planet by rayriver 2017-05-15T16:19:49Z

Loved it! The coldness & "you can now enter cold" felt unnecessary and forced. It would work in a game with enemies or some kind of obstacles but not really when you only need to just walk in a direction for a minute or so.

But the rest was a truly enjoyable experience. Kinda was wishing for more involved and harder puzzles with the introduced mechanics but of course compo offers some design limitations. There is a lot more you could do with just the doors, switches and rocks. And you used the drill just as a glorified key. Could have included some puzzles designed around it like stair building à la Zelda 2.

But oh well, I guess the game is good when you finish it wanting more :)

Gravitational Gravityness by bgw 2017-05-17T14:21:30Z

Cool tech demo but you forgot to include a game with it. Could work as a Scorched Earth type game. All you need is piece of tape on screen for each player and some manual rules enforcement ;)

Mr-Vpn by tobia88 2017-04-27T11:43:37Z

Really cool concept!

Played the fixed osx version and got stuck at key breaker part. Just like @yami-no-tenshi-8, one window got stuck on to left corner and also blocked me from accessing the readme file again. Still managed to reach it with some stair building and got the key breaker "opened" but either can't figure out what to do next or ran into another bug.

And I'm pretty sure I already know what I need to do once I get access to that wall paper site @dunin mentioned.

Dwelling by aeveis 2017-05-17T18:32:32Z

The jam version of the game on itch.io straight up refused to load up for me and I tried Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Probably just my computer having issues with flash though. Got the post jam build working as a standalone swf.

Totally adorable graphics and rock solid audio as well. Controls felt perfect. PS4 controller on OSX had the same button mappings as you described for the 360 controller.

So all in all, nothing to bark at.

Space Caves by adamgryu 2017-05-17T13:41:31Z

Looked super awesome, especially the animations. Sounds effects fit the feel well too. Of course some music would have been nice. First tried with keyboard. Got frustrated after few deaths and plugged in a controller. The control was so much better after that.

Was the pit stop supposed to be a checkpoint or what? Did not seem to do anything for me.

Wabbits Great Escape by milano23 2017-05-16T17:48:18Z

Yup, no wabbit hole on level two made it impossible to pass. Dunno if it was intentional but every time I got a carrot, the fox circling it aggroed on me and then freezed in its tracks after few seconds. Grabbing carrots was also a bit wonky. Obviously, having more complex movement paths for the foxes and tweaking their sight cones would make it better.

Also would have liked it more if you could move by holding the button down instead of needing the spam click.

Escape to the Stars by justinooncx 2017-05-17T15:47:37Z

Very nice! Beautiful sprite work and sounds were sweet too. Gameplay was solid also, got me a few tries to get used to slow paced and patience requiring play style.

Made it to the second phase after several tries and wasn't really patient enough to try again after failing there. My biggest issue was the controls. Didn't quite work with a laptop with no actual mouse. Even having WASD as an alternative would help a lot being right handed and needing to play with touchpad. Switching the O and X button positions would have been better since you mainly just wanna dump your inventory to ship/npc to make some room and doing that now under constant pressure from enemies is hard enough. Maybe even pausing the action when chatting with npc or fiddling with the inventory considering all the inventory management that is needed.

Then the enemies. Slimes were no big deal. Dunno if the shrooms were on a timer or popped up randomly, either way could have used bit of a warning animation before popping up. Bots were a bit too tanky compared to other enemies. Every time had like only few of those items when others were already capped.

Will probably try again when on a computer with actual mouse and keyboard.

Spike Spire by Acuity 2017-05-15T12:05:36Z

Harsh difficulty straight from the get-go. Gave up after making it to the top of the level few times. Jumping also feels a bit floaty for the pixel perfect jumps you need to perform. Maybe having a smaller hitbox for player/spikes would make the horizontal positioning less punishing.

Separate jump button would have been nice and even restarting with any button after death. Also, having several different hand drawn frames of placeholder sprites for the "character" instead of one even semi finished sprite is kind of a weird choice.

Pretty cool music. I'm kind of jealous as a solo game dev with zero musical talent.

City Soundscapes by Firesplash Entertainment 2020-05-01T08:07:50Z

Well something at least should have been explained in the actual game. It was like a "watch these dudes fight, you can see their stats too" type of game. Sure, after a whole lot of experimentation and trying to click on everything I found some actual interactivity. Seems like the fountain healed the injured policemen. Fine. The dialog was confusing though and the icons in it made like no sense to me at least. Then I found out the sound things on the roofs they seemed to affect the people somehow but still was super confusing and unclear whether I was doing something wrong or what.

Might have tried and experimented some more but there was this very nasty bug in the macOS version at least where every single button had its hitbox misaligned from the graphic. Some were like 50% down and some were 50% up. Even something as simple as clicking ok on the fountain dialog was super annoying since I had to move my mouse cursor far enough down that the camera started moving. So pretty much every time I healed, I was looking at the southern sea afterwards.

The prices seemed to constantly be too much for the income to actually do anything. Sure it might be my own fault for not playing right. But on the other hand it's kinda your fault for not even giving a slightest shred of information to the player on what to do, how to do it or even what anything means. Of course everything is crystal clear to you guys since you made it but I'll bet no one else can really understand everything without quite frustrating trial and error.

The art was fine, even though I'm not a fan of this PS1 era 3D graphics style. The color palette was very muddy and dark, something lighter and more vibrant would have fit the cartoony style so much better. The fight sound effect got super annoying quick. Hearing a single damn audio clip stacked multiple times on multiple spots like 100% of the time you're playing is not great. It was ear grating, clicky and repetitive as hell. The only other sound effect that I think even was in the game, the police crying (or at least that is what I think it was) was ok though. Desperately would have needed more sound with some variation sprinkled in.

The UI was very confusing too. Even in the end I had like no clue what those different bars or their icons were supposed to represent. Even the health bars were not that informative because the people kept stacking on top of each other. Would have made more sense if the people would spread out some so like they would pick a random angle around their target to fight them from.

And what was that blue circle on the map even?

Anyways, good job! The game would need some polish and whole lot of player guidance (or even starting off simpler on a smaller scale and then expanding from there) but not a bad game by any means. :thumbsup:

Mumei by Abid 2020-04-21T13:25:45Z

So you forgot to put a wall here and that was the last straw for me. I already saw the whole map and I'm thinking the goal is to get all those hp upgrade thingies. Just can't be bothered anymore.

mumeinowall.png

Music was very nice. Sounds effects were not that amazing. Very boring and monotonous. Even the bfxr'y chippy bleeps and bloops can be made more varied and lively. And there were a bunch of things where the sound effect was missing completely. And the jump sound played on button press, not the actual jump.

Pixel art was crispy and nice and the animations were quite smooth too. The background had these weird flashing lines sometimes, I'm guessing that wasn't intentional.

So whats up with this? :thinking:

mumei.gif

I'm not the biggest fan of over hand holding but some direction of what to do would have been nice. And just wasting the players time is never fun. You did this on multiple occasions. Those breakable things, having even multiple layers of them and them taking a million hits to get destroyed. Not fun. And even requiring to keep mashing the shooting button instead of letting the player just hold it down. Another thing that isn't really fun is blind drops to either instant death or sometimes the actual way to proceed.

Speaking of controls, something weird happened on my first try. Nothing did anything. Well except for I noticed that mouse click shot too. Arrows did nothing and neither did z or space. Dunno if that is a godot thing or something weird you did.

Would have been fun if jumping on the soldiers would have killed them too. I mean, would have made sense too, a big mech standing on a dude wasn't. Also would have been nice to be able to kill the tanks (even though they didn't really pose a threat, just like pretty much everything in this game expect for instant death spikes). And giving feedback to user with sound and effects whether they're actually damaging something or not. Kinda like how you did with those dark boxes.

Anyways, good job! I seem to have really pretty much just pointed out "negative" things but it was fun game! :thumbsup:

Dr. Kronenberg by Ntimi 2020-05-01T13:39:42Z

Tried several times but I have no idea what I'm doing wrong (ior even what I'm doing at all). I'm stuck at around two minute mark (the timer seems to bug though and keep adding on your previous time on reset) and no matter what I try to do differently, game almost always just abruptly ends there with no indication on why. Surely this would need some kind of tutorial and easing up to the actual gameplay somehow.

The UI was the most confusing part. The meat dropping were kinda fine I guess but on the other had very unnecessary too. The whole game seems to be about transporting meat from a spot to another, surely there is no need to keep showing the spot where to pick it up and drop it constantly. The spots were way too pixel perfect too. The whole rooms could be it. I don't see why anyone would pick up some meat and just store it somewhere without putting it to another machine.

The machine bars could use some explanation too. Feeding them gave red but running out of green seemed to be bad. I mean, what the hell?

The controls weren't great. Especially so around the ladders. That pseudo jump launch on top of ladders was just stupid and very annoying. It just wasted time and happened like every time I climbed up. And the ladder hole was weirdly small. Having to stop on top of ladder and try to aim for the perfect spot to actually be allowed to go through was not fun at all.

At this point I went for a few more tries and it seems that the minions carrying stuff adds green and me carrying stuff adds red. Still no idea what to do with that though since I just suddenly lost with everything very nicely on the green.

Nope, can't figure it out, I'll give up...

Wow, just noticed, that's a huge team!

The pixel art looked nice. Especially liked the palette selection of the background. The rooms looked a bit messy though. I mean there was a lack of clarity on them. On their own while staring at them, they looked fine but somehow in the actual game they don't work that well. The background and the lack of contrast might play a key on it.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Medically Inaccurate by Emperor Eagle 2020-04-25T08:58:15Z

Pretty damn solid gameplay around a simple idea. Of course, as usual, some kind of multiplier system or something along those lines would make the scoring more interesting. Now it's very linear with the survival time so it's kinda like you're getting two same grades.

viruses.png

And that was played on hard mode (ie. laptop touchpad)...

Weren't a biggest fan of the controls. Somehow found it funny that your menu was "press space to continue" stuff while the game itself was mainly mouse controlled. It's very common to see people do it the other way around, needing mouse for menus while the game is only played with keyboard but I think this is the first time seeing it this way around. I think `Input.anyKeyDown` would be the way to go.

The movement felt too slippery. Just would need so minor tinkering around with the numbers. Moving is a simple thing to do but needs a lot of trial and error to get to feel right. I also quite often got stuck to walls and the heart, I think an easy way around this would be to drop down the friction on them and tweaking the collider shapes maybe.

I liked the multiple functionalities shooting had. Obviously you could kill stuff with it but also can use the recoil to move faster. And then you could even use it to move the health pickups. Which were kinda awkward though. Quite often they ended up being so damn far and then you even shoot them a bit further. So they end up in the corners. Making the shots affect them more and adding way more bounciness to them might fix the issue. They wouldn't just get stuck in the corners but would bounce and get closer to the middle perhaps.

The AI was very good at getting stuck on the walls. Would be pretty easy to fix. Raycast from them to target and if hitting a wall, just do something to fix it. For example get the closest point of the four "holes" between walls and move there before resuming their normal behaviour. It was also very easy to shoot them through the walls. Changing collision detection mode to contiuous from discrete would fix this. Or could check manually with raycasting too.

I liked the sound effects and visual effects that were there. Well, the sound effects could have packed a bit more punch though. Just would have liked to see and hear more. Like a spawning effect for the enemies. So much of the early game was just circling around the heart checking all the spawns. The enemies getting hit would have needed some feedback effect too. Or not needed really but would have made it way more satisfying to mow them down.

The overall visual style was ok but I really didn't like the color selection. The bright almost pure reds and blues just clash together and do not look harmonious at all. A better ligting job could have also improved the look immensly. Also took me ages to realize that those were actually enemy health bars. They really blended to the models. The color palette plays a huge role here as well. And the same was true for player/heart health bars too. They're something that should be like noticeable all the time without really looking at them and red on red just made them camoflage themselves very well. And the huge scale and double sided nature didn't make it very clear to get their value at a glance either.

Funnily the player model was graphically the weakest part of the game. Even the static heart had more character with its animation. So obviously it could use some more love. Also its movements were very jerky at times. Lerp and MoveTowards are your friends here to make stuff look smoother.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Medically Inaccurate by Emperor Eagle 2020-04-26T11:59:36Z

@emperor-eagle Using physics for the control is totally fine. Just need to tweak those numbers (the force amount, mass, max speed, drag, bounciness and friction) around to make it feel good.

Yeah AI doesn't need to be sophisticated or smart, fake it till you make it. Just like the "go to reset pos on stuck" method I described, simple and dumb but most likely would get the job done and still look organic enough. And a whole lot faster to implement than a full blown A*

Haha, not everyone has colorblindness to blame for their less than optimal color palette choices :smile:

Nuke-A-Tron 2000 by kale 2020-04-22T14:03:52Z

Fans of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, eh?

At least the HTML5 version was annoyingly glitchy. Got stuck on tutorial. Always showing the game over page on bottom. The actual play area only being a quarter of the screen. Everything being extremely tiny which made it needlessly hard to play. Had to stick my face to the monitor to read any of the texts and something like the line in that press the button when on green was almost invisible. I'm guessing pretty much all of these points came from the fact the the game didn't scale to different sizes properly.

The game looked quite nice, not counting the fact that everything was too small. There were some z fighting issues thoguh. Like the new minigame info bubble thing could be on top of the actual minigame. Sound effects were quite fine but the music got repetitive quick. And it even didn't loop properly.

The color selection game seemed to be completely bugged. The items on the last two rows weren't selectable. Well I guess the words do move out of there when clicking enough of the earlier words. Maybe because of the small size too, the blue was very hard to read on the dark background. Here I'm trying to click on blue but it's not registering. And it's not even showing the hover color.

noclick.gif

Stay in the circle game is way harder than the rest of the games. Well, again, at least when the circle in question is barely the size of the mouse cursor. I mean yeah, when the other games decided to play fair and just didn't lock you out of the game for some stupid reason.

Some things were not completely clickable. Noticeable example was the click button x times confirm button. Only the upper half of the button would register a click. Now that I think about it, this might even be the same issue as the color picking game one I explained earlier. Something is blocking the lower half of the screen.

bomb.png

This single picture pretty much explains everything I've been talking about. Also, where is the ball even?

Anyways, with bug fixes (mainly the scaling issues) and some minor balancing, this would have been a great game. Good job! :thumbsup:

Gregg by Walkalope 2020-04-22T18:29:44Z

Looks cool but also very busy looking. It's very hard to distinguish what is what. I also think the camera is bit too close so it leaves like no time to react to whats coming past screen boundaries. Or then you just need to inch forward very carefully and that just isn't really fun. The turrets seem to have god like reflexes so unless you outrange them or bounce kill them, you're pretty much dead on the spot. Quite often even the health bar doesn't matter with all that knockback and like no cooldown on their next shots.

Oh and if you're trying to play too careful, you're sol too because the plant life depletes so fast and the plant life pellets give so little. On the other hand, I think the was too many player life pickups since it was very rare to take any damage without dying anyway.

Ugh, can it really take that long to load? I'm guessing you're generating levels there but still can't possibly take that long. You can also at least shoot while it's "loading" so I'm quite suspicious about that. And if it's just a faux loading screen tho show the story, you should not force it on retries.

Didn't really feel like a jetpack. More like a double jump where the second jump propels you to the sky with the speed of light. Which made my first point about the god turrets even worse. Moving vertically with such insane speeds made it like a russian roulette when moving upwards. If there was a turret there, you'd probably die. And since screens have less height than width, you had even less time to react. A jetpack that would work like, well, like a jetpack would have been better. So after each jump you'd have specific amount of juice and holding jump would then add some upwards force and deplete the juice. With that you could make some more careful ascends and descends and might be more equipped to survive longer. Never found the portal but in the end I have this feeling that up is the way you're going too. That was the direction the level seemed to span the furthest and even changed visually the higher you climbed. And from the player perspective, it was the most dangerous direction to go.

Probably should have made the background color that is seen from the holes something else besides red. That way the red would be more easily and faster get tied to danger because of turrets and lava. The "level edge" dark blocks too blended way too well to the background walls. Made it hard to tell them apart.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Run A Morte by thecrancher 2020-04-24T15:49:04Z

Either I'm just dumb or there is a quite severe bug (in the mac version at least) where the toolbar isn't visible at all. Tried to click everywhere and press every button on the keyboard with no luck...

notools.png

DON`T DIE STAY ALIVE! by PenguinBob 2020-04-23T12:51:03Z

Yeah, this seems to be as high as I can manage.

penguin.png

Pretty cool! It was kinda unforgiving. The fact that there was no telegraph at all where the spears would be coming from made being on edge extremely dangerous. And if you're trying to just hang in the middle, the spears will pretty quickly drive you to the edges and your impending doom. Adding something like a brief danger icon on a spot just before the spear would appear there would help immensely.

I'd also like to see the tail end of the spears be less dangerous. Something like 10% of the tail of the spear could be non harming to make squeezing between spears more possible. And actually that could be taken even further and added to the tip too on a lesser scale. It would create more of these "close calls" (so actually instances where the player should have died but didn't) which are always fun and make the game seem more fair. Sure it would be very stack towards favouring the player but when you die and even have a slight inkling that you didn't hit the spike, it feels bad. A classic shmup mechanic which just makes the game feel better and less unfair.

Game development is full of these little tricks that stack the favour towards the player just to seem fair and to be more fun. Stuff like jump button buffering before actually hitting the ground from a previous jump or the so called "coyote air" which lets the player still jump for a tiny bit of time even after running off the ledge. That's what the player is trying to do, don't punish them for their silly slow human reflexes.

Restarting could be quicker. Sometimes the runs take just mere seconds, and it takes almost as long to restart and get the controls back to you.

Obviously there are stuff that could be improved. Sound effects for starters. It's a simple thing to add to make the actions seem more impactful. Then of course some special effects and (more) animations. You say there are cool animations but there were barely there and were very subtle. I'd like to see more. Maybe an idle animation for the penguin easily implemented with just by adding some squash and stretch. Fish too could be flopping around, just little position and rotation animations. The penguin could use some more black to be actually more easily distinguished as a penguin. Then the final visual thing I'd change is revising the color palette. I mean, so much brown.

Why submit to jam and not compo? Just for the extra day?

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

SMT V final Boss leak by sadsmile 2020-05-01T09:07:04Z

Cool idea and very neat execution! :ok_hand:

I really digged the visual style and with dynamic camera angles and so, very Personaish. Wasn't quite perfect though. Took me quite a while to understand which character was which. The color coding of them didn't really click to me for quite some while and at that point I had already learned their positions and order of actions. Could add the same colors to character "names" in the intro text too. And then obviously somehow indicate the active character on the sidebar thingy. Maybe something like a pointing arrow, other sections being more dimmed or pulsating the active section. And same goes for when selecting a target for your spell.

And speaking of spells, the would have needed some descriptions. No need to spoon feed everything but some hint on them would have been nice. Quite a few were obvious from the name but others could have used some info on. And having duplicates on the selection menu was quite pointless. The numbers and bars were confusing too. Still no idea what those different numbers meant. The bar seemed to be the health but why on earth did the tank have two bars?

The action effects seemed a bit lackluster. They also could get a nice dynamic camera angles on the target and a spicier effects. The tank ones were the best since he always targeted himself but that too could have been nicer with a change of camera angle after selection. This thing made the so called hero seem weak as hell since his swing just did this tiny effect and a weak little ding sound. That should have been the flashiest effect with the mightiest sound too. Also with some spicy screen shake to hammer in that he is doing some god damn damage! And the same goes for the baddie too. His actions had these almighty names but lacked the feedback to also make them feel powerful.

Arcanist and support seemed to have some problems that they slowly kept rising higher and higher every turn.

arcanist.png

And tank might be actually sinking too...

support2.png

I'm currently at 2000 damage done and it's getting quite repetitive. Might as well try a bit further. Even if there is an end it's a bit too far in my opinion. Or something different at least should happen to break up the repetitiveness. Maybe the boss could summon some minions! Sill have no idea what difference boost and manyfold have or even if either of them does anything really. Also not quite sure whether I should use strengthen on tank or hero. Well, I'm guessing that hero since with boost and strengthen he did 120 damage.

At least didn't notice any difference on the healing amount when boosting or manyfolding the support. That would have added a nice bit of versatility. The tank was also very boring, just taunting seemed like the best thing to do.

Ok, now at over 4k damage and nothing has changed at all. Expect arcanist and support soon escaping from the atmosphere and tank and hero being waist deep in the ground.

4040.png

And here is where I quit. Seeing your comment that there is no end and it seems like you can pretty much go on forever unless you're getting hella unlucky with god's wrath spam.

Anyways, very good job! :thumbsup:

SMT V final Boss leak by sadsmile 2020-05-01T18:00:00Z

Oh I see, makes sense. Yeah I think I only tried to use boost on healing song and if it's the same 20% as for hero attack, no wonder I didn't see any effect. If boost only adds 20% to any other spell power, it means arcanist is only doing a fifth of the stuff the others are. Weak! Healing song amount was so ridiculously low and hp bars so tiny that of course it's unnoticeable. Guess I didn't try manyfolding first aid at all. I think it's way too powerful then. Or rather other stuff like boost being comparatively weak (+20% vs +300% :wink:) and powerful stuff is always fun! With that you'd have no problem even outhealing the wrath of god spam.

Oh which reminds me about something I forgot to mention. The name "first aid" makes it seem like a weak ass move even though it was the more powerful heal really. Especially if you can manyfold it and make it the most OP spell in the game.

I had no issues with threat management even though I didn't even know the red number was representing that. Every time the baddie did his single target spell, it hit the tank. Maybe because I was constantly spamming taunt. I (kinda correctly) assumed that his second bar was additional health which filled with his other ability and didn't feel like I needed that ever since his hp pool was good enough for the support to, umm, support.

And yeah, balancing stuff is hard! Well not hard really but time consuming and needs lots of testing and tinkering. Time management is also very hard but of course gets easier with more experience. And that's exactly why game jams are so awesome. Even if one would completely fail at making a game, they'd still learn a lot.

Eradication by SpacialSeasoning 2020-04-29T17:19:25Z

Hmm, was about to give up and quit so many times but stuck with it till the end. Banging my head against the unfair and unforgiving wall until I made it through.

Made like no sense in the grand scheme of things. Seems like you just slapped on every mechanic you could think of there and like none of them had any practical use. The grapple hook had like no uses. Sure it could make you move faster trough those slowing tiles and what ever but then you stuck you to the wall for a split second which would pretty much always be punished. The crystal thing was very unnecessary too. I'm not even fully sure what it did. Was it like some kind of instant cover thing? And then the orb. Still like no idea what it did. If I had to guess I'd say it was like teleportation but in my case it was more like disorientation and certain doom.

The first kind of enemy was weirdly the deadliest one. So unfair. They shoot you from outside he screen obviously outranging you easily. Their shots are like lightning fast almost impossible to dodge except on the max range. And they did way too much damage too. Like the only way to kill them was to cheese them through the walls or corners. And you for sure had learn their position the hard way around. So unfair and punishing.

The same "lets just slap on everything there" mentality was in the graphics too. The art itself was fine but there was like no rhyme or reason for most of the things. Why only one arm? Why the (extremely pixelated) nudity? The whole flashlight thing felt like an addition just because you wanted to do dynamic shadow stuff. There were some red keys and health pickups (which could have easily been more plentiful) on red ground which made them very hard to notice. The red key could have replaced with some other color without affecting the game at all except making them more visible.

The dialog box "scrollbar" didn't indicate too well about there being more text. Gladly there was like a single row of pixels visible from the next row which hinted at it even though it looked more like a bug. Changing the box size or font size so that you see almost half of the partly visible line is like a cookie cutter UX trick to let users know about there being more. Of course a more visually informative scroll would do wonders too.

The damaging tiles added like nothing to the game. Well maybe just annoyance. Kinda same goes for the slippery and slowing down ones. Other than the ones that had an item in the middle could have just as easily been walls.

The respawn timer was pointless too. And you could even keep playing while your were dead. Wonder what would happen if you'd trigger a door or some other important bit while dead...

And kinda funnily as a contradiction, audio department was not packed with everything you could come up with. It was actually very sparse. A lot of the things were missing a sound effect completely. And of course the lack of music didn't really help here either but I can't really blame you too hard on that.

Anyways, I've listed quite a lot of flaws in the game but it wasn't bad by any means. It was an amazing amount of stuff you managed to do during the weekend but at the same time you spread it so thin that nothing really stood out as the main hook of the game. It would have been better to take one mechanic, hone it to perfection and build a game around that. Good job though! :thumbsup:

Keep "It" alive by LoicLeGrosFrere 2020-04-24T17:17:21Z

Umm, I don't really get it. Is it just supposed to be survive as long as you can?

Does it ramp up in the hiding spot range each feeding or were I just getting a godlike RNG? For like way past ten feedings, he was just always right next to my house, almost visible from the fridge. If it is indeed ramping up the range, it should do it a whole lot faster. And since the map was huge and I had ample time to explore, I kinda thought there was some other thing I was supposed to be doing. But sadly, nothing did anything. Couldn't even grab stuff from the other fridge.

The art was pretty nice. The scales were all over the place though. Most of the stuff was just too huge compared to the characters. Those picking up and feeding animation cutscenes got old fast! Would have been better as a not completely whole screen blocking cutout with a dialogue box or something so you could start moving already while checking it. Especially so since you already could move while it was on.

Weren't hugest fan of the controls. They felt a bit slidy. Wasn't the biggest of deals though since didn't really require any precision or anything like that.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Sitbot 5000 by James Beninger 2020-04-26T19:14:07Z

Pretty funny!

Instead of huge walls of text, I think it'd be better to feed that text like one paragraph at a time. Sure, it would be the same amount to read but in a less intimidating and not so inviting for a skip. Of course it would need to be changed not to be a letter but just the parents telling the "rules" instead.

The graphics were a bit messy and quite unclear on the hud bits. Went for a second playthrough and even then had to kinda focus on them to see what they're supposed to mean. Did not like the colour selection at all. It was very, umm, mspaint default colour swatch. The game also had some z fighting issues. At least the action bar thingy was constantly below some other sprites and so on. The house also felt very deserted, could have used some non-functional decorations. Like throw a carpet in there.

Then there was the balancing. The first level was fine I guess. I accidentally skipped the last paragraph of the letter so whole baby dying on the machine was confusing at first. And since the food hud was so unclear, I kept overfeeding the baby even though I noticed on the second run that the two bottles are more than enough. The hunger death could come a bit faster, compared to all other dangers, that one is way too generous.

The second level balancing was off too. It was way too easy and boring. You should have kept the feeding there too in my opinion instead of going backwards on difficulty. If you make the baby eat some shit, they slow down with no real downside. That's a good lesson for life. The third level was where the game actually started picking up the pace and got interesting. And of course this is where the game ended also...

Desperately would have needed more content. The third level was like the end of the tutorial introducing the mechanics. And once the player has grasped them, the game is already over. Such a wasted opportunity. Even with the current mechanics, you could design a plethora of different levels without still getting repetitive. And of course coming up with new dangers wouldn't be too hard either. Then what about multiple babies? That might be a good way to put your multitasking and prioritizing to the test.

So yeah, great idea with just enough depth while still remaining simple to grasp. The execution just needs some polish. Like spice up and clarify the sprite work. I'd completely replace the colour palette with something more harmonious and eye pleasing. That's about it, then just would need a buttload more content. Good job! :thumbsup:

Feed The Monster by Svalinn85 2020-04-24T15:22:26Z

Yay I made it. :tada:

alien.png

Pretty damn cool! The tutorial was quite fun way to do it even though I enjoy having it more interactive while playing much more. But that's a one way to make a wall of text less boring.

Would have been better if the timer ticked down to more tell about the actual objective. I almost quite after my first decent run of almost 2 minutes and 30 seconds. I guess I was like a second off since that seemed to be the magic mark though.

Cool to see that you added a fail state for pumping too hard too. Didn't encounter it but I'm guessing there is one for over feeding as well? :meat_on_bone:

Didn't quite like how the meats spawned in completely randomly. Would have made more sense if the hooks came off screen with one or without it. It was quite fun to try to find out an optimal place to throw the meats so they reach the alien with too much hassle. But since you need to pump some air constantly too, it didn't really matter much and you could just throw them on the obvious platform closest to the pump. These two things made like 90% of the whole playable area completely pointless.

Maybe if something spawned on random platforms which you had to retrieve too would force taking advantage of the whole level more. Wouldn't be too hard to come up with another bodily requirement for the alien dude.

I was positively surprised to notice that you can carry more than one meat at a time. Noticed it completely on accident when a meat spawn right on my trajectory. Knowing this made the game a whole lot easier since you were never in much of a rush to feed and could mainly focus on just gathering the meats and pumping. Then when the hunger was getting dangerously low, you could just chuck them all at once. Would have been cool to visually know how many meats I was carrying too. And Mashing ctrl too fast kept cancelling the already started throwing animation which wasn't fun.

Quite solid controls. I must say that ctrl+arrows is a bad combo for macs since it cycles between desktops. Well I knew about it and knew to be careful about pressing them together. Luckily didn't need to throw my meats on the run that much. Alternative keys would be cool, decent classics to compliment left control could be X or C, not Z so much because of AZERTY keyboards). And some weirdos do prefer playing with WASD even when there is no mouse functionality at all. I will never understand why but they do. I would have liked to see the menu keyboard controllable too. :thinking:

The sound scape could be enriched a bit too. Some sound effects were kinda missing. Grabbing meat, landing from a jump and maybe even a subtle footstep sound. Maybe the alien could make some adorable alien noises at random instead of only making the same eating sound. And other ambient stuff like that to make the game feel more alive.

Anyways, I think I've rambled enough. Good job! :thumbsup:

Flame Bearer by canti 2020-04-23T12:12:11Z

Very cool and fun game! Loved the art and especially the color palette. The level design was great with some nice hints and smooth learning curve. Dunno what the deal with the bats was near the end. Was there some kind of puzzle that I needed to trap them in the side rooms or what? Cause I did trap majority of them and the last one decided to head north and not come back so I followed him and never returned to the "puzzle" itself.

Obviously the lack of any audio was a letdown. The game already had a nice and relaxing (albeit, a bit ominous) and some ambient music and nice soundscape would have enhanced it even more. And seeing that it was a jam game and not compo, you could have even used some third party stuff. Of course you'd need to opt out of audio category (which you did anyway) but I'm like 100 percent sure that it would have increased your mood rating. Probably overall too.

Why did you submit to jam instead of compo? Just a time thing?

The end room was kinda neat. But its coolness was hindered a bit by the fact that first time I arrived there, I went too close to the south edge and was clipped to almost the beginning of the game. Quick run back to the end room and I managed to decipher the message and dumb me then decided to repeat the clipping process on the right edge of the screen. But the camera didn't follow there and the torch was lost forever.

My biggest annoyance was how the torch always dropped on screen transitions. Well I say always but there was this bug where it didn't and you didn't have to hold down the button to carry anymore. And it was actually better that way in my opinion.

Glad to hear that you are planning on taking this further. The base mechanic is simple yet flexible enough to build tons and tons of different neat puzzles around it. And the mechanic can be quite easily extended too so it doesn't get too boring. Something like different color flames or having multiple torches.

Awesome job! It was short and sweet and left me wanting for more... :thumbsup:

The Consequences of Gardening by JMad 2020-04-28T15:27:27Z

Nice! Quite ambitious project for a jam game. Congrats on mainly pulling it off...

The story was kinda cool but it really lacked depth. Obviously this is something well out of scope for a jam though. Like the whole hand thing was barely mentioned in the actual game. The lack of deeper introduction to the protagonist and his motivations made him very unlikeable made the whole story feel bland. After a bit, it was very predictable too. The idea was there but really would have required some meat around the bones. I would have also split the intro text to be fed one line at a time. Wells of text are never too fun.

I really liked the art. The only annoyance in that department really was the ugly yellow squares around the objects on highlight. If they had the same kind of shaped outline as the characters it would have been several times better. The UI should scale with the screen size too, it was borderline unplayable on full screen...

gertmenu.png

Well the font was kinda boring too...

The pick up menu also had this very annoying bug where if the item was still behind the take/inspect button, it would glitch out and just reopen the menu instead.

gertreopen.gif

And speaking of items, didn't like the fact that the items either were complete red herrings or just used themselves automatically. It removed that tiny bit on actual interactivity the game could have had. The puzzles weren't that complicated anyway that one wouldn't be able to solve them quite easily but would have made it feel more like a game. Of course this would introduce quite a huge task of more narration for trying to use different items on wrong spots but would have more organically given more places to add some more clever quips the game already had a few of.

There was this funny bug when you trigger something while an animation was still playing...

gertwalk.gif

The repeating conversations were a bad experience. Happened first with the girl and then because of that mashed through the repairman convo and didn't quite understand what made it change. I don't think I had any new items between those two tries either. Should have just added a simple bool flag to keep track if the conversation has already taken place and replace it with a shorter one on repetitions. And of course one that would smoothly transition to the branching plot when you have met the requirement. Also lacked some other permanence like the dude already being gone...

gertnodude.png

The sound work was great! Especially the music. The piece had these noises that I at least associated with Gert making noises while at first chilling at home so it was weird hearing those too everywhere else. Might have just been my brain doing connection where there shouldn't have been any.

Might be a good idea to proof read the whole script at least once before the end of a jam...

gertitalics.png

There also was this invisible butcher shop which I'm guessing was cut out of the game due to scoping issues.

gertbutcher.gif

All in all, good job! :thumbsup:

Sparks Of Light by Barwani 2020-04-22T14:42:39Z

Neat idea. But the actual mechanic might need some more work. It was a total gamble who wins a "battle". The fish could sometimes just easily shoot between your sparks and there was nothing you could really do about it. Also was quite frequent to soft lock you out when running out of recharge spots because of the forementioned crapshoot with the fishes.

I usually don't like to just tell that the mechanic isn't very fun and doesn't work without offering some solutions. I pretty much think that any mechanic can be made work with enough tweaks and fine tuning. But I'm kinda drawing blanks here. Well first of all, it needs to be slowed down a lot so you can actually try to time things correctly. I think just slowing down the spark rotation and enemy projectiles would do the trick here. Or are my old man reflexes just too slow for this kind of game? And yeah, as someone already has pointed out, enemy variation would be good too. But you can't really just do cookie cutter enemies (like the current fish kinda is) in a mechanic driven game, you need to design them around the mechanic to compliment it and pull forward fun/clever different uses for it.

The tutorial straight up lied few times...

"Use a spark and you lose it..." sparkslose.gif

"You must kill everything to go to next level..." sparks.gif

There was this minor visual glitch where the low health flashing didn't reset properly... sparks3.gif

But yeah, it was quite a fun little game. Of course as I already mentioned, the mechanic isn't really encaging and doesn't have enough depth in it but it did have the wings to carry through those few levels of content that the game currently had quite easily.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

The Adventures of Eggbert by BattleCat 2020-05-01T19:51:11Z

Press any key to return... except the one you used to come here! :smirk:

There is bit of a cheese. You can just chill here and let the score rack up while you're idling and already writing a comment feedback for the game. :sunglasses:

eggbertsafe.png

Oh, it seems like the eggs have death timer. Didn't even get to screenshot my score because of the "any key" but it was something a bit over 4k. Took quite a long time for the idling game over though so still very abusable.

Went for a "proper" run just about the same score there too. Should have just idlet after this point, it quickly went downhill from here...

eggbertscore.png

Best strategy seems to be to grab an egg and then just go chill on those safe platforms. Still very boring to just wait on a completely safe space for like forever until you can continue playing. Without changing the mechanics, it could detect when player has been still for like, umm lets say few seconds, it would hatch the egg right then and there and spawn next. There could even be a cute hatching animation that would start when idling for a bit. That would hint about the functionality without any additional tutorials or whatnot.

Nice sprite work! The fox sprite wasn't quite up there with rest of the sprites in my opinion. It looked comparatively flat and even the animation was stiffer than even the flowers that are just decorations.

This was bit cheap. The foxes could have had some sort of warning indicator on doors just before they were about to appear.

eggbertlame.png

The controls felt super good! Not something that can too often be said about jam games. It's surprisly hard thing to get right and too often neglected. The jump could have used a bit more horizontal movement for my liking but that's just nitpicking really. :ok_hand:

Also, you kinda stole the name from my Animal Crossing neighbor...

IMG_0326.JPG

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

The Adventures of Eggbert by BattleCat 2020-05-02T08:43:48Z

Oh right, they didn't have tails! That is probably one reason they looked a bit off to me too...

Blob by KevTukk 2020-04-24T17:44:35Z

First of all, I do not know if any of these are limitations PICO-8... :thinking:

blob.png

Not a biggest fan of the color palette. I quite sure you have at least somewhat of a free range of palettes on PICO-8. Otherwise it looks pretty ok but the red (especially with the light blue) really clashes. Other than the palette, I think the pixel art looked quite fine. The enemy blobs could have been more blob shaped and less perfect circles. The friendly one could have been more friendly too. Also maybe some animation would have made it stick out a bit from not just being a wall.

You had all four different sprites for moving different directions. But the idle pose always returned to downward facing one and same goes for attacking. Made it look a bit clunky and made aiming the attacks harder and disorientating. Would have liked for the attack area to be bigger.

There was no need to have own individual buttons for both feeding and attacking. They both could use the same one, you're not gonna attack your friend anyway. Or you could also just feed them by just walking towards them just like you do when picking up enemy remains.

The enemies knocking you around felt obnoxious. I guess in a way that's good sine it is supposed to be bad and just waste your time but I think it was a bit much. This of course too would have been better if the own attack area was bigger so it wouldn't need to be so pixel perfect.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup: Always fun to see PICO-8 games and what people manage to do with such limitations... :heart:

Eggs With Legs by Teto 2020-04-27T13:44:28Z

All these eggs are giving my Animal Crossing bunny day flashbacks! :rage::anger:

Awesome art but everything was so damn tiny! The biggest offender of course being the bullets. Seeing them was near impossible. Of course this got better on the later levels with better contrast but they just would need to be bigger. The text was also too tiny and didn't even fit the box.

The shop really suffered from the tinyness too. And not like there was any shortage of screen estate here...

eggshop.png

Could have used some descriptions for the items too.

The control scheme wasn't great for someone playing on a touchpad without actual buttons. It was physically impossible to shoot both weapons at the same time so I just had to work around with using one. And of course I bought a second one before realizing this and postponed by machine gun (overpowered goodness in comparison) purchase by a lot. There was like no reason to bind weapons to individual buttons. I mean, why would you only shoot one of them?

The enemies felt too bullet spongy and it was too easy to outrange them. And even before I started outranging them, I was just zigzagging back and forth while keeping the mouse button pressed. Not the most encaging combat really. The action even felt kinda slow. And those long egg gathering runs and laps back to shop made it even slower. There could be a fun functionality (just off combat maybe) to make these shopping trips more bearable. Or maybe the vendor could kinda follow you from a safe distance so that the shop would never be that far. The enemy hitbox also felt wonky. It seemed like I kinda had to hit them on the head part of the sprite. And same for sure didn't seem to apply to the player character. The bad accuracy didn't really help either, just made the pacing even slower.

Also would have been nice to reorganize the eqipped stuff on the mech egg. Guess the positions didn't really matter much though. The equip wheel thing could have described better too. Sure it's kinda obvious now after playing and of course has always been crystal clear to yourself but it was confusing at first. Also would have been cool if you didn't limit to just two weapons. I wanted weapons all around the mechgg! And for more strategy in equipping stuff you could do something like shields doing more when they're on front or getting a bonus for having same pieces right next to each other or something along those lines.

Soo, I'm not sure what was supposed to happen here...

allchicks.png

While first clearing the room, I was careful not to shoot the cages because it wasn't clear whether I was killing or freeing them. And after clearing the room I saw the message and started blasting them. But still nothing. And it was very tedious to mow them all down because even the cages had too much health. And the lingering hitbox on them was super annoying too.

end.png

So yeah, that was the end of my run. Pretty fun game, just would require some slight improvements. Good job! :thumbsup:

Core Transport by Clayton Does Things 2020-05-01T19:01:58Z

So this was my key to success on the first level...

rocket.png

Tried to repeat the same on the second level but the rocket did not propel this time. Dunno if it was some bug or what but the second level lagged like hell. Also all the available control spots were visible as seen on the pic.

The idea was fun and building stuff is always fun but the controls were awkward and complicated as hell. You did this on Unity so I'm guessing you know how to move, rotate and scale stuff there. It's the tried and true way, intuitive and been like that in like ever 3d modelling program since like forever. No need to try to re-invent the wheel, just try to do a similar system. Then you could just detect when pieces are close enough to each other and snap them together automatically.

Or since you had the first person controller there, might as well just let it pick up and carry stuff. Then detect collision with that piece and when it's touching something add option to glue it to what it's touching with a button. :tada: Ez pz!

And the play mode should still stay on the same "character" and should just have some other button to start the rocket. Would have made the two modes more consistent and improved the flow. Or maybe wouldn't even need to different modes if done like this.

But yeah, should have also added the info about the rocket to the actual game and all around improved the instructions.

PollUFO by OddSocks 2020-04-24T16:52:13Z

So damn, I had this whole thing pretty much written already and went for a quick more check to the game to verify something I wrote. Then forgot that I was in a browser game and force quit the whole browser losing everything I wrote. :disappointed:

Oh well, here we go again...

Very nice pixel art and funny sound effects! It was still way too silent overall, there just could have been more of the sounds. The cars could make some wroom wroom noises and maybe even some periodical honkings. And other stuff like that to more liven up the place. The missile sounds (especially when it missed) could have used a bit more oomph, felt kinda lackluster. The music got repetitive and kinda annoying pretty quick.

There was so much empty space. Probably would have been better to not cap the camera movement so high up so that there was more ground visible. Would be easier to make the ground look interesting than the sky. Currently like 95% of the screen estate was just that grayish blue sky. Of course adding more clouds would help too.

Managed to start at a bit of a disadvantage because you could already shoot while still on the how to play menu. And since it made a funny sound, guess who mashed the button on blank space a bit. And it seems like I have a miraculously amazing hit percentage on trees while firing blindly. So I was already pretty deep on the negatives when the game began. Even after that, I realized quite quickly that the stakes were like nonexistent. It was easy enough to just aim between the trees and wait for the cars to position themselves on my crosshairs. Even the tanks that seemed scary at first quite quickly lost their intimidation when their shots did nothing but push you back a bit.

The missile was too overpowered in my opinion and had like no downside to using it. Makes the normal laser almost pointless. Maybe it could have even longer cooldown to discourage the spam, bigger blast radius so it would be more dangerous to use around trees and even a slight homing on the closest target to differentiate it a bit from the normal shots.

You said it yourself oo, the game is kinda barebones. Even without adding any additional real content, spicing up the scoring system could make the game more interesting. Adding a multiplier is always a quick and easy way to make scoring systems deeper. You could add up a multiplier on each "kill" and then reset it back on tree hit, getting hit yourself or maybe even after a certain amount of time without a kill. And then the different polluters could have a varying base score amounts to add a bit of strategy in your target prioritizing.

And of course by adding more actual content would be sweet way to enliven the gameplay too. Additional "enemy" types such as already pointed out by other commenters would really make it better. Especially the helicopter since it would add more stuff to the sky and balance out some of the action off the ground. And speaking of ground, having it less flat would also help. Actual terrain shapes would make the aiming less linear and boring. And of course, some additional non-polluters too! Like maybe birds that you would need to dodge too.

Anyways, I don't remember if I had anything more on my previous writeup so I guess this'll have to do, good job! :thumbsup:

Social Distancing For LadyBugs by mehrdadsh 2020-04-26T15:01:10Z

ladybugs.png

Excellent idea! I actually did a flocking algorithm this LD too. Kinda funny how you show the rules after the first fail. That got a chuckle out of me (after I splatted the ladybugs instantly on start). Could get rid of the second dialog box though.

It was a bit unforgiving. One missed more by a slight margin and it was over. I'd decrease the swatter hitbox radius so like the flys radius on the edge of it wouldn't kill anything (especially the ladybugs). Just grazing a ladybug currently kills them and while technically fair, it doesn't seem that way really. Having close calls (where player should actually lose) makes a game more actiony.

Very nice audio work. I really like the fail song bit, really fits it and hammers in the whole "oh you dun goofed" vibe. The art was good but very very static. First of all, should flip the sprite x scale so that the bugs face their movement direction. Also a simple wing flapping animation would do wonders. I mean it's super easy, just make them consist of three sprites, the base and one for each wing. Then just slap in an animator there and rotate the wings around to points and voila, you got a less static bug.

It was very hard to distinguish other bigger bugs from ladybugs the further the game got. I was just kinda squinting my eyes and focusing on red. It probably is quite impossible for colorblind people.

Would have liked to see the same fancy font used for all texts. Although, it could be quite unreadable. It already was quite hard to make out what the red circle buttons on dialogs were saying. But kudos at least for not using default unity buttons, so often see people use those without even changing the color.

The scoring could be improved too. I think (it's very hard to dissect right now too) it is very linear now. Getting more score the more you squash with one hit would make sense. Like so that if you kill 10 bugs with a single hit, you'd get more points than killing 10 individually.

Bug limit seemed too high. Even while idling, it takes ages to fail because of that and more often than not you just end up splatting a ladybug way before that.

Congrats on the first game jam and easily clearing the bar by making a fully functioning game. Good job! :thumbsup:

Dog Signal - Ludum Dare 46 entry by vivek.sharma20 2020-04-24T14:35:26Z

Pretty net! Really liked the art style. The screen shake felt a bit too aggressive and short in my opinion. Bit lit less movement magnitude and a bit longer shake time would probably feel better. The sound effects that were there were good but would have needed more. Like the dog spawning and turning into a balloon could easily have some neat sounds too. Maybe moving your ship too.

Had some weird scaling issues when going full screen. The score indicator was weirdly positioned. The dogs didn't drift to the correct position before they started eating your bones either. Also, the background environment clipped too on left side at least.

The gameplay was super simple but quite solid in its simplicity. The movement didn't really serve much purpose. Felt like the best strategy was to just stay almost all the way down and time your shots correctly. It was almost a lost cause if you miss a shot. Well you can save one maybe two situations if you get lucky. The game does get repetitive very fast.

Since it's pretty much a single button game, you could have made that same button function as a start button on the menu view too. Would make it just smoother to play without need to swap from keyboard to mouse between tries.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Keep The Night Short by AlexandrosKap 2020-04-28T16:27:04Z

That was pretty fun! Well, kinda pointless too (literally even). Didn't understand what the goal was. Was it an endless runner? Or were I supposed have more of those entrances to next level and have some kind of real progression. I only saw those right at the start and never again. And I did play several times and the best run even took quite some while.

The controls were horrific. I guess they would work on mobile and that's what you were kinda going for but it was not great to play with a mouse (or touchpad even on my case). I constantly kept missing the buttons because I was mainly trying to focus on the actual action.

I was fun to figure out the different actions and how they should be used to get around different hazards. At first I was like wtf, no explanation at all? But quite quickly it clicked and everything mede sense. Even the icons that looked like weird hieroglyphics at first were actually well designed and perfect for their actions. Never really found out a use for the run though. Or a solution to those triple tribal guys. On my lenghtiest run they stopped spawning too so couldn't really experiment with them too much. The trees dropped fruit a bit too rarely, made it almost not worth it to interact with them since it also cost a hefty amount of, umm, potion bar? :thinking:

The 1-bit art was nice and all but damn it made it more difficult to read and react in time. Some colour would have really helped here but style over function I guess :sunglasses:. My only gripe with the art really was that the character having a solid colour background made it look awkward when it was in from of stuff. The music fit the game very well too. Sure, you didn't make it but it was a good fit. Some simple chippy sound effects would have been nice too. And they even would have helped with the detecting different stuff on that 1-bit style. I mean, two senses are better than just one.

So just now saw your mention about the game having an ending. Guess I have to dive back in. I don't give up that easily, I'm a stubborn old man! :bangbang:

Ok my guess that it has something to do with those triple guys didn't seem to be correct and just waiting them out was the right move. Back to the drawing board...

safe.png

Well that was actually quite disappointing. Was it just time or distance based? I must have been so damn close on my first lengthy run...

And my key to success (and around a bad control scheme) was to exploit the crap out of stop button. I basically hovered on it all the time and used it to buy me some extra time to react to those monsters and apples. The rest was just a walk in the park. Ignored the gamble trees (house always wins) completely and the ground fruit were more than enough to keep me alive. The game was just so much more boring to play this way.

So yeah, should probably have distance/time left ticking down shown on the screen to hint about the end. Then an actual difficulty curve, some sounds, use of physical buttons and some overall polish and you'd have an awesome little game in your hands.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Type it alive by Adry 2020-04-22T12:58:46Z

Reached round 10, guess I should be proud...

Would have been a lot more fun if it was real words that I was writing. It did seem to have these constant same strings so might have as well replaced them with some fun words or even sentences. Also was quite confusing when the letters disappeared and more appeared on the other side. Would have been better o see the whole string at once and maybe color the portion that is already written differently or something. Messed up quite a few times because of that.

Any particular reason you only had letters from the top two rows of a qwerty keyboard?

Also another thing that made it a bit awkward was he constant need to swap between arrow keys and writing mode. Could probably just remove the whole moving portion and detect the building I'm writing for from the prompt.

The different building types didn't seem to matter much. It seems to be quite balanced so that everything needs to be kept there to succeed. Also the space pressing requirement was completely pointless. You even stopped requiring it when upgrading, why the need on initial build?

Sound would have been a great addition. Having an audio feedback on misspells etc would have made it easier to notice. Of course that could have used better visual cue too, maybe something like blinking red.

Anyways, good job!

Keep our planet alive by Tengii 2020-04-22T13:28:31Z

First of all, not a great control scheme for playing on a touchpad. On mac at least where right click is just clicking on the touchpad with two fingers. Sure I'm stubbornly gimping myself but adding alternative control methods like doing the rotation with some two buttons would have only taken seconds. Of course it didn't really require that much dexterity and playing was still very much possible but could have been better too.

160.png

The visual style was neat, even though there wasn't that much of it. I would have wanted to se a bit more oomph on those asteroid explosions. Didn't feel satisfying enough for me.

The music was nice and relaxing. Made the game feel nicely moody. Sound effects (or singular sound effect to be more precise) was not that great. It was super clicky and just felt off putting. Being the only sound, it got super repetitive too.

I mean, if your game only has a single action and a single outcome for that action, you better make it feel nice and rewarding somehow.

Then the gameplay. It was way too slow. It was like, I don't even know, five minutes of mind numbing panning around and clicking on an asteroid every now and then (which could have all been a bit bigger too) and then pretty much suddenly out of nowhere getting out of hand. Felt like there was no middle ground, it was either borderline boredom or just too much (for touchpad at least). And the super slow start makes it very discouraging to try again. The game could actually start at around that "too much to handle" point and stretch it a bit wider. Of course this isn't that straight forward since not all players are the same.

But yeeeah, good job! :thumbsup:

Waifus please by colozz 2020-04-27T12:45:08Z

@juice-lizard Got it working on macOS with: ```sh java -XstartOnFirstThread -jar ld46.jar ```

There was no sound though. Dunno if the game even had any since you opted out from audio.

The idea fas very fun and could be expanded upon quite easily but you were leaning on Papers Please a "bit" too much. The same UI doesn't really work here. Papers Please stamping also had this rewarding tactileness with sweet animation, juicy sound and the oh so fun ability to freely stamp anywhere on the passport. You missed all these points.

Even though it seems to be a parody and not too serious, the game has some potential. First of all, would have been good to explain the rules in the game itself. And just like the source material, it should start simple and then get more complex each day. Like the first day could only be checking unit tests and merging to dev only. The second day then could be dev to master too and adding more difficulty by sprinkling in some typos like deb instead of dev or something like that that isn't so easily noticed on a glance. Then you could start actually showing the code of the PR itself and slowly start adding some checks for the player. Maybe something like checking that the code is commented, has semicolons on line ends, doesn't have too long lines etc. Something that was actually relevant but still something that could be done by a person who doesn't know or understand code at all.

Anyways, pretty much the only issue here was the the whole game visuals were taken from another game and they didn't quite work here. Even though the mechanics are similar, the same UI doesn't work in this context. Good job! :thumbsup:

Meteorite Pig by appix 2020-05-01T19:07:06Z

Itch link still broken. Did you forget to press publish on it? And I'm not on windows either...

SAVE THE DINOS! by marcusnystrand 2020-04-26T14:08:15Z

Brilliant idea to make the dinos breed! I've been toying around quite a lot with genetic algorithms over the years but still never used one in a game. Haven't come up with a clever game that could use one yet. Well sure, I'm guessing that the algorithm here is "fairly" simple (ie. just male or female randomly) but breeding nonetheless.

The pixel art was good, the dino really reminds me of the chrome "no internet" game dino but just more detailed and with colors. Really lion kingish color scheme, I dig it! The particle effects and sound were kinda bland though. It was nice that the asteroid click area was very generous. So many people do exact pixel perfect colliders and hit checks without understanding the fact that those make stuff seem unfair.

The bigger asteroids requiring multiple clicks was bit of a curveball. And because you didn't give any feedback about the clicks, it kinda felt like a bug. Maybe a better idea would be split the asteroid to two smaller ones on click and they could move diagonal. Another things that seem more like a bug instead of a feature was the trees blocking the asteroids. I think the trees should do some kind of a shake or something when they block an asteroid or something along those lines to make it more clear that it is a feature of the game.

The balancing between clicking asteroids and dinos seemed impossible. For my simple monkey brain at least it was just better to focus on either or. And at this point I of course remembered the space pause thing and went to try it out. Sadly it did not work at all on macOS Chrome at least. Ability to quickly pause and unpause with a press of a key would have most likely made it lot easier and more strategic to play. Albeit a lot less actiony. I'm playing on touchpad so especially would have helped here because quick and accurate movements aren't the best with it. The fullscreen was borked too. It kept the game size the same but just had it in a black void.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Keep it burning by Leon Oost 2020-04-23T13:32:01Z

Kinda cool but got very boring quick.

fire.png

Could have been more lenient on the pickup and fire feeding areas. Being so precise with it server like no purpose. And sometimes while there were multiple branches on the same spot, the dude picked up all of them yet I'm guessing it only counts for a single when you drop it to the fire. Could also add some collision detection so the player couldn't walk trough trees and nests.

Took me ages to understand what yelling actually did. I indeed kept yelling at the beavers and new that it had something to do with that but took until the latter half of my run to actually see a beaver with a branch for the first time and then it of course was obvious. And on total it happened to me only twice during the game. So the whole thing was pretty much pointless and was just like a very long despawn timer on the branches.

But fixing it would be quite easy too! First of all, I'd decrease the yelling cooldown. Since the range isn't clear, you shouldn't punish too hard for a missed yell. Also would decrease the beaver speed so that you could more easily catch up to them and yell when you see them with a branch. The beavers should only come out to go grab a branch. So you would know to follow them if they didn't have a branch. You could even telegraph a beaver emerging from a nest with an audio cue and if you'd like to be a pro about it (since it's not a very inclusive to only inform about something with only audio) add in a visual effect on the edge of the screen notifying about that too. Same audio/visual notification could be done about the branches "falling from trees" too. Of course these would make the game easier but it's easy enough to balance in other ways. Like that there would be more actual gameplay and less downtime just faffing around.

I kinda digged the art direction but it was quite inconsistent at places. The rain was kinda, umm, not great. The dude could have used an actual idle state too so he wouldn't be marching on place all the time. You actually animated the flame but then didn't use that same animation on the UI fire. Missed recycling opportunity! Wasn't quite clear to me if the fire "health" was indicated somehow. Sure it wouldn't really matter since you couldn't really affect it at all but would add a nice state of emergency and would notify about the nearing end so it wouldn't just end so abruptly.

The intro song wasn't that bad in my opinion, probably would have been better than the silence. All that silence made the few sounds effects that were there kinda gratihng and boring. Some variation on them would have been nice. You already recorded a shout, could have recorder a few more and always played a random one of those. Would have made it a lot better. And of course more sounds too, like subtle foot steps. Were there actually some ambient sounds like birds chirping or was I just imaging things? If there were, there should be more of them and if there wasn't, there should be!

I think thats about all I have to say about it. Good job! :thumbsup:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-20T15:08:11Z

@emmanuel-gaillot @loig Yeah it gets hard very quick. It is supposed to be short each run to encourage trying several times. You know, like in score based games such as pinballs, it's sometimes discouraging to try again after a long run.

@joshuarabbit Thanks for the kind words!

Thanks for playing and for leaving some feedback!

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-21T20:57:57Z

@ruoyu Oh I'm well aware of the compo rules, this isn't my first rodeo! I always work solo, even on jams where it isn't required. I have never actually jammed with a team. The camera movement and zooming was actually one of the last things I added because I didn't want it to feel that static. On hindsight, it was a dumb move to leave it to such a late point so I couldn't really test and tinker with it enough. Probably my biggest learning point from the weekend. Do not leave something that completely changes the feel of the game to such a late point.

@olafstromberg Yeah, I too noticed that sometimes the level generation just deals you a crap hand. Decided to sweep it under the rug though since the runs are so quick that one bad attempt shouldn't be such a big deal. Sometimes the levels can end up being even impossible because they get so narrow gaps which are then filled with rocks etc. And there is even this very rare terrain generation bug where it has some invisible walls in some corners. I guess something in my triangulation code is a bit off.

@gquibao Haha yeah, don't sweat it. I played it quite a lot this weekend. But actually, that isn't even near my hi score I got on the first day before I had implemented leaderboards. I think that was something around 3.5 mil and I even added an additional multiplier after that so it's fully feasible to get a score of around 10 mil. The key to scoring big is not letting your multiplier drop. It only drops when the monster eats a bird so doing well in the early game is a big factor in scoring. And the second monster does not spawn before 25 birds are eaten (if I remember the number correctly) so that early game before the second monster (and third if you can survive long enough) is a huge portion of the total score.

Thanks to everyone for playing and leaving feedback! :heart:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-22T16:41:31Z

@jajakeim Yeah it's just a HTTP request shot to my server. It has to be HTTPS though for to work with itch.io or you get mixed content errors.

@azo Exclamation marks! :smile:

@lazzydev72 Oh that's weird. I have not actually even tried the windows version but should be very similar on all standalone version and I did play quite a lot of mac version without encountering any crashes. Maybe I left some memory leak or something in the terrain generation just goes haywire. Good that at least the web version (which is the most important one for jam games really) is stable.

@simansimon Yeah, I'm not too happy about the camera really either. And you're not the only person irritated by it. I already mentioned earlier that it was actually one of the last things I added to the game. Dumb move to leave such an important bit to such a late point. Wanted it to be more lively and less static but would have needed more time to tweak its values and test more.

Thanks everyone for playing and leaving some quality feedback! :heartpulse:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-23T10:05:53Z

@gimblll Haha, pretty funny! Wish I could heart a comment more than once. Stupid bird should learn how to read. The film crew quite clearly warns about the villain on the teleprompter. Thanks for playing!

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-25T05:06:16Z

@jiri-hysek Yeah I really dig the flags on leaderboards too. It's a very minor addition but somehow it just attaches a ton of personality to each score. And it's a nice reminder about how global thing Ludum Dare really is...

leaderboards.png

@oldmanwinters Awesome that you mentioned the poop boost being able to be used offensively. I didn't want to spell it out in the "tutorial" and was starting to wonder if I actually should have since no one was saying anything about it. Using it offensively lots in he early game is actually playing a huge role in getting a big score.

Yeah the level generation does sometimes drop turds on you but I'd say the vast majority of the levels are just fine. I don't think I really got lucky with a level on that score of mine. I just played the game lots during the weekend and other people averaging out at around five tries per player. And it takes at least five tries to get accustomed to the mechanics really. The score increases exponentially too (in the best case when you don't let the multiplier drop) so the gap on the leaderboards really isn't that big. The top spot there is still ripe for getting. I'm quite positive I could at least double the score there pretty easily myself.

Thanks for playing! :two_hearts:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-26T11:46:34Z

@kuiefs @lapinchatware Sadly the original game doesn't exist anywhere anymore. This was the time before I even had internet. Learned to code from source codes I managed to get my hands on (and that were simple enough for a beginner to understand) and, drumroll, books! And a whole lot of trial and error of course. Actually might be a fun idea to do a more faithful recreation of it for some one hour jam or something...

Even though it wasn't really my intention, I kinda like the juxtaposition of warning about the enemy and them BOOM, everyone dies to it. It's just a few seconds in so probably not that big of an annoyance. Nope, not possible to destroy the blob. Not by traditional means at least. Maybe if you completely manage to break the physics of it though... :thinking:

@emperor-eagle Hmm, Emperor Eagle and his Seagull Squadron, that has a nice ring to it! :sunglasses: And that's a pretty respectable score. Even though it might seem like it's quite far from the bit over million score I left on the board, considering how the scoring works, it really isn't that far off. Thanks for the overly kind words!

And thanks to everyone for playing! :two_hearts:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-04-30T05:20:02Z

@local-minimum That's pretty weird, someone else mentioned the windows version doing the same but then they managed to play the web version without any issues. Was is always the same number or plays before the crash or was it a bit more random? And does it happen on when you click to start from the start menu?

@aurel300 Thanks a lot or the detailed feedback! Oh yes indeed, decided to keep the score very small this time so I could focus pretty hard on polish. There are even smaller details like the scenery faces (dunno why but I called them lurkers in code) actually do like a different emotes when they're hit by bird or poop. Something that will most likely go unnoticed in the heat of the action.

You got a very respectable score too! Finally my position on the leaderboards is starting to get threatened a bit. The British are invading the top five!

Yeah, the birds exploding sound is quite obnoxious. Or the sound itself (or sounds since it's few different clips layered on top of each other with individual pitch shifts) is fine in my opinion at least but it starts to be an issue when multiple birds die at the same time (ie. like always). The plentiful visual effects on these also seem to cause some lag for some people.

Totally would have made sense to add a quick restart button. I actually had that functionality there but it was also toggled to isEditor flag. Wonder why it didn't come to mind that might be a good addition since I kept using it constantly myself. I like always have these dev cheat keys on my games and I'm guessing other people have them too. Always a good idea to consider those from the critical perspective that are they fixing or improving some fundamental design flaw in the game. Like I've quite a few times had a speed up dev button which as a hindsight is a pretty big red flag...

The second monster spawns when it has killed a certain number of birds. It is still possible to play for quite some while even after that, at least until the point that you get a third one. Of course it indeed is much harder but there is an additional multiplier on the scoring of monster count squared (or was it cubed, can't quite remember). It probably could be even bigger though since your multiplier has reset at that point and it's nigh impossible to get it too high again. Would make the desperate struggle for those final pickups more worthwhile.

The monster dash thing ended up being a complete accident but I kinda liked it so I left it. It actually was supposed to be kind of a knockback. I'm adding the dying bird velocity vector to the monster applied forces. Obviously this also does sort of do a knockback when you're heading straight towards the monster but more often than not you are going the opposite direction.

I still feel like the camera movement is my biggest mishap this LD. Added it way too late to get to test and tinker with it enough. Well, jams are learning experiences and here is to hoping that I don't repeat the same mistake (too many times) again. It's something like a median of the positions of all birds and the pickup and at least the pickup position should be prioritized where a lot more.

No idea what causes the double bird and the birds appearing on random positions. Quite early on I had this suspicion that it was just the pickup spawning on a bird and immediately getting collected. I even added a fix for this but obviously it's not just that. And even if it was, the bird would spawn where the flock already is. And now that I think about it, might know the reason. Most likely it's multiple birds hitting the pickup on same frame. First handled hit spawns a bird and repositions the pickup. Second hit is then handled and bird is spawned in the just previously generated position and yet another position is found. Yeah, that must be it...

Thanks again for playing and leaving quality feedback! :two_hearts:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-05-02T04:32:02Z

Congrats @tacohej! :tada::military_medal: Finally someone dethroned me from the number one position.

The formula for the score per pellet is: **multiplier** x **live bird count** x **pellet number** x **monster count squared**

So the bird count is already a part of the score. This is why the early game matters so much and is the major bulk in scores. Also the exact reason why I added monster count to be a part of it too. Felt like anything past the first mistake didn't matter much. And it still doesn't matter enough for my liking, should have at leas cubed it instead of just squaring it. The end game indeed has those super tight squeezes between the blobs just barely surviving and those aren't rewarded like at all. Maybe I should have added kind of a grazing functionality à la Touhou series. Balancing stuff is hard! :confounded:

Yeah, kinda farming the mob speed is a good strategy. It has a huge amount of inertia not letting its velocity rise too high is a very good idea. It was thinking at some point adding a reset to multiplier when too much time passes between gathering pellets too but I guess I either forgot about it or decided that it's not needed.

Thanks for playing! :two_hearts:

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-05-02T08:49:15Z

@battlecat Oh you mean the tips as in the "tutorial" messages? They should be in front of everything else. And yeah, them being off screen was the camera issue. Pro tip, if you've been coding a static camera game for a weekend, it's not such a great idea in the final moments decide to adda some camera movement to make it seem more dynamic.

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-05-07T11:03:21Z

@angiemon Big thanks for the detailed feedback!

I indeed am "just" a programmer and I approach visual stuff mostly from code perspective too. I have worked as a web dev for over then years quite closely with graphic designers so I guess I've absorbed some eye for colors and basic compositions. :wink:

It actually is not possible to downgrade your score. Every time you submit a new row is added to the database and then the leaderboards just shows the best from those (with name and machine id combination) and ignores the rest. It just asks for a name each time for the case that multiple people would be playing on same computer. Unless you really somehow stumbled into some weird bug. I can check the database if you think something didn't go right...

Flock for Feast by Antti Haavikko 2020-05-12T20:11:02Z

@geckoo1337 Aww, sorry about the crashing! Was it the standalone version? I have a slight suspicion I might finally have a clue about the reason for this. I've now been developing my #7DRL game further and very similar thing happened there too. And there it was the case of Unity not including one shader in the compiled game. I have no clue why it doesn't crash straight when first trying to use the shader but kinda randomly after trying to use it loads of times. Thanks for playing tho... :two_hearts:

Station Keeping by invader 2020-04-29T16:18:33Z

It was so overly complicated to begin with. So many numbers and buzz words everywhere. The tutorial too did a pretty poor job at explaining stuff. It was just like do this and do this, not explaining anything really. Oh and it was so overly structured that one missed move (like not picking up what you were supposed to) completely hard locks you out of progressing...

stationkeepstucktutorialsmall.gif

There was just way too much crammed to the beginning. Could have started with a small ship with like only one locker of each type (if even that). Then introduce the mechanics way better and more thoroughly and let the player get used to them in a less complex environment. Then extend the tutorial some to have a portion of that freeform action too. And then finally after some good enough accomplishment, throw them to the actual game. Even after playing for quite some time, I'm still pretty clueless what the top row lockers and panels are all about. Or those blue screens, tutorial didn't even mention those.

I guess that fact that the trade ship takes ages to arrive makes sense in the actual game but on tutorial it was just irritating. Making the player just straight up wait is almost never fun. Made it even worse that due to all the bugs, I played the tutorial several times and also had to do the ship waiting way too many times. Sure, I could have skipped the tutorial but was still very unfamiliar about the mechanics and wanter a bit of a refresher.

The pixel art was pretty good. Having more distinction between the lockers would have been nice. Especially on the tutorial where you're pointing to some locker, first you have to read the text from bottom corder (ie. not a great placement for that either) and then scan the screen for the mildly blinking locker. Some way more easily visible flashing indicator on what locker you were supposed to go to and having the text appear close to that point would have made sense too. Just like when you have that "-1 fuel" text fly on the screen. It is very easily noticeable but funnily enough, serves like no purpose to player at all since it's a very non-critical information.

Cool to see a multiplier addition too. Well sure, you probably have all your player behaviour in that object and just throwing another one there and binding different keys isn't too hard. Really nicely done! But I just don't see it working for four people as of it's now. Even when playing alone you get these lull periods where you have like nothing to do. Can't even think what it would be like with four.

I wasn't a big fan of the inventory system. I don't really know why but I kept confusing which row is which for like the longest of times. Even though the way they were made perfect sense. Just having them look visually different might help alleviate this. Esc also didn't work on closing it like you said and I completely forgot about Q which did seem to work. Clicking on empty space was a nice addition but as a sole closing mechanic, it was clunky as hell.

Another thing I didn't enjoy very much was the controls. Well they were fine kinda and served their purpose really but didn't feel good. Especially the horizontal movement while floating or falling down got easily out of hand. Glad that there was like no precision required anywhere. I also think that the jetpack would have been better as a continuous lift instead of those bursts. Would give more control to player. For example they do like a slight bursting to slow down a descent.

Actually got stuck in a corner too...

stationkeepstuck.gif

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

HEART LORDS by Spooky 2020-04-21T12:55:23Z

Awesome style, really liked the visuals. Even the UI looked cool which isn't that common to see on jam games. Audio worked too.

Controls felt very clunky. Even more so because I played with a macbook touchpad so blocking was devilishly difficult. Well, even attacking and aiming but these were really my own faults more than the game's. The walking speed was waaaaay too slow and and I think you had this bug where the diagonal movement speed was faster. If you just plot down the input x and y to a vector, you end up like that. Pretty basic maths here, sqrt(1x1 + 1x1) is not 1. The enemies had too much health too. Those two things combined made the game feel very slow for a action packed game it could have been.

Also did not see any use for the double slash at all and it was weird that one slash couldn't hit multiple enemies. Well of course major part of this clunkiness came for the lack of real mouse, I do understand that, but in my opinion it would have worked better as a twin stick shooter anyway.

The dash was quite fun but the cooldown was so quick that it would have been pretty much the equal as having movement speed be faster. Just requiring less key presses for the same effect.

And lastly a very minor nitpick, it was quite hard to see/hear the difference between a hit and when it was blocked. Resulting in wasted time on a blocking enemy when could have been focusing elsewhere.

Anyways, very nice job! :thumbsup:

Tough without friends by miroreflect 2020-04-23T15:57:41Z

Quite nice idea but execution would need some major work. The mac version kinda worked, I think. Dunno if these issues are only present in it but there were no crashes etc. Btw, your Mac version download link icon is wrong (and you replaced the text too), that is the web version icon. Well, I do look for the mac/web version to see whether I can play so either works for me really.

Same kinda goes for art style. If looked interesting and nice but at the same time it wasn't very clear to look at. The style is neat but not very easy to distinguish what I'm looking at quickly. Especially when the movement speed was lightning fast.

First of all, every time the game came to start screen, the resolution changed to default and it popped out from fullscreen. Very annoying. And when I tried to actually check the options, the resolution couldn't be changed and there was no way to come back from it. Looking at your screenshots, that actually might have been a good size for the window. At least on those, everything looks a bit clearer. My options were either this original stamp sized window (which wasn't that bad except for the dude and the kill spots were not easily distinguished on the map) and full screen which then made the environment stuff bleed together.

The difficulty is way too hard. In the beginning at least. You could at least make the first attempts take a bit longer and then ramp up the speed once the player is accustomed to the mechanic.

The controls were clunky as hell. The actual movement was just fine but the map stuff was just ridiculous. The map should be its own button and toggled on and off with the same one. No need to have crap like restart and quit in the same view. For you should probably lock the player movement while on the map, it made it just disorientating. Or if you wanted to keep movement while on map, the floor selection should be a different key. But that way it would be easier to just play on the map screen all the time and 90% of the stuff you made would be wasted.

I did eventually beat it. That may have been partly due the fact that latter half of the whole run he went for the rope and I then intercepted his journey after which he always went for the balcony jump. Just going between those two things so it was easy as a breeze. Did kinda have to memorize the whole house layout first though. That would have come more organically if the start was slower (ramping up on speed) and the help arriving time was a bit further away. The button layout was also awkward for playing, WASD for the movement and swapping between esc and space for the "actions", not the most intuitive button configuration. Also had to keep a mental note all the time to not do anything else while looking at the map besides quick A/D when needing to change floors to not disorient myself.

saved.png

Actually went for an another run after that to verify something that I was writing at that time and beat it quite comfortably. Didn't even get that same rotating between just two spots this time and still had no issues. So there isn't really a difficulty issue here but the game starts and just goes from 0 to 100 immediately.

Was this on jam and not compo because of audio? Even though you opted out from the category, I'd still say it's a good idea to credit the author/source.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Tough without friends by miroreflect 2020-04-23T17:59:42Z

@miroreflect Yeah you're actually right about the icon. Maybe I'm just remembering wrong or it changed at some point but I somehow thought it should have been an apple.

Yes, tried esc and a/d on settings. And pretty much every single other key on the keyboard but nothing did anything.

**edit:** Oh one more thing. Arrow keys as alternative controls would have been nice too. I don't understand why people prefer WASD when there is no mouse controls at all. Aren't most people right handed? Why would you wanna play with your non-primary hand only.

Leif Kellenberger's Tazing Challenge by pudding 2020-04-21T12:28:17Z

So this is pretty much a win right?

taser.gif

Quite funny one. I'm guessing the whole Blades of Steel / Double Dribble speech was an intentional nod. Could have been even more bit crushed though. And even the cardiac arrest thing reminded me of Blades of Steel where the one actually losing the fight got kicked out of the game.

Then to the downsides. The gameplay was very limited because the camera was so zoomed in. Because of that, character switching was completely pointless because either you had to ball or had no clue what was going on. Even though the cardiac arrest thing was fun and all, it got old quite quick and waiting for that "cutscene" got less fun every time it happened again.

Controls were a bit clunky. Especially when trying to walk diagonally, it just didn't seem to co-operate at all. I still have no idea what the shoot power meter thing was. Didn't seem to do much. Aiming the taser was nigh impossible, luckily my team mates were as good using it as my opponents so I just had to focus on doing goals. And it wasn't even clear which was which goal. Had to let the opponent score first to see which way I should be scoring to.

The intro was quite confusing. It's 2015 (future) now and in three years so 2014 something something. I mean, WHAT? :thinking:

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Last Lantern by tacohej 2020-04-29T19:43:37Z

I'm sadly giving up on this. And not because the difficulty but game breaking bug that completely halts my progress at times.

noarrow.png

After bashing my head against the puzzles. At some point the arrows on the pushable boxes stop appearing and they can't be pushed anymore. And if one time wasn't bad enough. After a full hard restart and making a good amount of progress, it happened again!

noarrow2.png

Well, I kinda lied. Went for another try, couldn't help myself. Made it a little bit further this time before the arrow disappearing bug but not until the third checkpoint though. If such even exists.

And damn were you way too stingy with those checkpoints. They should be there almost like after every puzzle. Punishing players with making them repeat the same puzzles over and over again makes like zero sense. And due the fact that like half of the fails are because of clunky controls wonky enemy sightlines, it's even less fun.

Loved the art style. Simple yet refined, I think the only thing I'd change was the walk marker. Well maybe the blue of the pills didn't really fit the other look of the game. Just like the art, same goes for audio, superb stuff! Very nice and moody. And the camera movement was pretty damn nice too!

Fuck it, I can't resist myself. One more try...

Yeah, seems like a no go. This time I only got two deaths before it happened again. I'm on the room with the triple boxes if you know what I'm talking about. This just needs to be stupidly accurate. Of course if I could try it several times without playing the whole game up to that point, I might keep bashing my head against it but no.

There was this easy cheese for the room just before the second checkpoint. You could just ignore the second monster and let it catch you. You have enough time to activate the checkpoint anyway. Maybe you'd want to disable the checkpoint activation while being chased.

The block pushing mechanic felt rushed. No sound or animation and even the speed was weirdly faster than just walking normally. Every annoyance really came from these boxes. The monster detection around them was very finicky. And pushing the monster with the block (like in the horizontal corridor just prior to the room I got to) was awkward as hell. It quite often resulted in situations where you should be able to recover a slight detection for a small duration by pushing the monster with a box but they just do what ever the hell they please and just might slip through and see you. Or then might get randomly pushed to the exact spot you were supposed to go to.

Anyways, good job! Wish I could have played the whole thing... :thumbsup:

Last Lantern by tacohej 2020-05-01T18:17:13Z

Well, could have told me that I was a mere pixel away from the end... :sunglasses:

lastlantern.png

Still calling that last room kinda BS. Dunno if it was the correct solution to trap the first monster to a corner with the boxes so it couldn't follow you. Then use another box as a cover to get closer to the final pellet, and then just book it to it in a desperate suicide attempt.

Last Lantern by tacohej 2020-05-03T18:21:45Z

@rrrzzz If you're walking in the dark with a flashlight, someone can indeed see you from further away than the distance the flashlight is illuminating.

Phase Signal by goodwayman 2026-04-21T14:11:45Z

Dang, that was short. Felt like only a tutorial, could have easily taken these mechanics to a more mind bending puzzles.

Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 16.41.55.png

I accidentally played with my computer muted and thought there was no sound at all. After finishing I saw the mute button in game and realized my mistake. That was a good enough excuse to go for speedier runs and collecting all those shards.

Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 16.52.31.png

The look of the game was absolutely fabulous. Pleasant harmonious colors with a clean and cohesive art style. But of course that also comes with the downside of kinda awkward camera angle somewhat obstructing visibility and more importantly suffers from a horrendous control scheme. Could be just my personal problem but I've always been extremely confused about these isometric rotated views where you press down and don't know whether the object moves SW or SE. Of course with lengthier play time one could probably get more used to it. And one way to fix this could maybe be to rotate the view a bit more towards either side so it wouldn't be exactly 45 degree angle and one way would seem closer to orthogonal directions. And another way too would be to not lock the movement to diagonals only so the movement would still be perpendicular to camera.

Sounded great too! Nice and various sound effects on at least all the things that I've noticed and the ambient sound scape was awesome to fill up the void without the need for music. Nicely done.

As I mentioned, it was only kinda scratching the surface with these mechanics. It pretty much only introduced the mechanics and didn't ever build on any real puzzles around them. And even less so a combination of them. On my first go I kinda breezed through even not fully understanding all the mechanics. But even finding the shards afterwards posed no big issue. Except for that one shard that was surrounded by those red pressure plates and needed the green mode to gather. For some reason it took me way too long to realize that you can just swap manually to green in that level too. Maybe I only tried when I was standing on the plates and it was locking my manual change. Other than that the shards were a joke really, just tab through all the colors to find them. But a nice addition nonetheless as a means of offering a bit more replayability to otherwise short experience.

Anyways, that's all I've got. The game left me wanting for more, some devious more complex puzzles. Good job! 👍

Pulse Escape by SinusQuell 2026-04-20T17:26:31Z

Pretty nice! I've played enough Terraria to ace this! Didn't even have to build a bridge...

Screenshot 2026-04-20 at 19.59.08.png

There is a weird split on what you're supposed to do, kill it or run away. The score is based on the distance only. Yet killing it is the obvious choice. Easier and less boring too. But god damn it's annoying to have to keep mashing to shoot. The charge shot really didn't seem worth it either. And for just outrunning the wall, it seems like there is a limit how far you can actually do it since it speeds up probably to a point where you can't do anything to it anymore. I don't think this was all that far from it.

Screenshot 2026-04-20 at 20.03.39.png

It's a bit on the easy side in my opinion. The triple jump really made it trivial to keep navigating forward as long as you can still outrun the wall. The darkness wasn't really that challenging either, especially how much you were able to spam the light. And there didn't seem to be any downside to spamming it either. At least for shooting there was a bit of a recoil that made it tougher to move at the same time. The recoil by the way was a bit weird. If you were moving forward at full speed and shot backwards, it first kills your speed and then pushes you forward. Made it feel very awkward and unnatural to shoot while in motion. Other than that it controlled very well!

The wall had a gap on top which made me think maybe I could jump over it. Sadly didn't seem to be the case. The kill box on the bottom was also way too low and weird due to being invisible danger. With all those extra jumps you could easily still recover from that height back to the top.

The music was nice and fit the game mood pretty well. The sounds were a bit lacking. What was there wasn't bad by any means and they even didn't seem to get all that repetitive so kudos on that but there was so much actions that were still completely silent. Jumping and landing on a platforms (other than the first time) were completely silent for example. Shooting platforms or the wall should also make distinguished sounds to help realize whether you're landing your shots. Pretty much every action that happens in the game should have some sound tied to it. It really makes the game world feel more alive. The wall could maybe do some weird demonic gargling sounds too when you get too close to it to fill up the void with some more ambient stuff.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Snowstorm by mathemagics 2026-04-20T16:54:23Z

Is there anything to really find after the broken tower? I've tried several times, wandered to all possible directions really without a single blip on the radar. It's kinda disheartening to be there as just a guesswork with no clues at all. And even if there is anything for you to find.

Pretty nice pixel art though the animation was a bit stiff. But hey, at least there was some animations at least. And usually pixel art looks better if you keep the pixel size consistent between the sprites. Here at least the UI elements and the spiders had way bigger pixels than the rest of the art. The spiders, though looking good, had another classic "mistake" of rotated pixels which makes it look less cohesive. Weirdly enough, my favourite art piece here was the ground texture! A perfectly repeating yet doesn't look repetitive texture, not the easiest of things to do right. The snow effect was nice too. Painted a nice mood with the sound scape without being too busy looking or sight restricting.

The font too was a tad boring and stood out from the art style. There are a ton of free pixelated fonts out there which would mesh more nicely with the rest of the art here. I pretty much instantly have to change the font on every game I make the second I add some text to the game. 😅 It was the same with Unity default font and now with Godot too. But hey at least Godot doesn't have a default background color like that ugly Unity greyish blue. If you could be allergic to colors, that'd be mine. And all too often I see that still left in on jam games and causing me an aneurysm.

The gun eats a bit too much energy in my opinion. It's not really worth it shooting the spiders at all since you can quite easily outrun them instead and even if you occasionally get hit, you take less damage what you save up by not doing a couple of shots. The health meter seemed a bit pointless. It was just a less useful extension of the energy meter and I think the effort of adding that could have easily been spent elsewhere.

But yeah, that's all I've got. A bit more content and some reason to actually do combat with the spiders and it'd be great. Good job! 👍

Snowstorm by mathemagics 2026-04-20T17:35:53Z

Dang yeah, I heard the menacing sound and tried following that too but obviously to no luck. The last message was kinda pointing that there could be a chance of getting there. But alas, no. And I don't think pointing the fact out that there is no survival on the game over screen would be all that good of a choice either. It would kinda kill the immersion. I think the only way to solve it nicely would be to have something there to find. Could be even as simple as starting the beeping then fading to black and the game over or victory message. Wouldn't have been that much more additional work but would have tied that loose end. And don't feel bad about not having the time to finish it. It wasn't that unfinished really. There are always way less complete jam games out there and some people don't even manage to submit (even on jam schedule as opposed to compo).

Footsypool by Antti Haavikko 2026-04-21T18:13:04Z

@captaindreamcast Ye that's probably you, score seems to match. The flag is based on geolocation, no idea why it would show up that wrong for you. Never heard it being off from anyone else where I've used the same system. And I guess you changed your name after you had failed (ie. already submitted the game). If you play again though and submit any score again, it will still use your most current name for the older scores too.

edit: Took a peek at what's going on there in the backend and it shows locale blank for that score. And in that case I guess it used the first flag on the sprite sheet, ie. Andorra. Maybe the next time I use this system on a game, I'll add some "unknown flag" sprite for if the locale can't be resolved.

Highest in the world by CaptainDreamcast 2026-04-20T12:33:12Z

Funny stuff!

Screenshot 2026-04-20 at 15.10.59.png

Would have been nice to have the second half of the intro speeches written down too. Pretty much to just better keep track and know when to proceed really.

I really liked the art direction, especially in some pieces like the newspaper but it wasn't all that consistent. Too bad the story sequence pictures didn't get the same amount of polish. The actual in-game pixel art wasn't quite up to that bar either. The characters looked pretty nice (though I would have loved to see a bit more animation) but the environment looked a bit rushed and very repetitive.

Gameplay wise it was a bit clunky and stiff to control (variable jump height would have helped a ton). But nothing that bad since there wasn't that much pixel precision required anyway. Except that one mandatory between spike landing spot. That was a run killer when going for a speedy run. The ammo limitation felt unnecessary too. The knocked down enemies getting up and shooting so fast that you can't really react to it wasn't great. Would have been nice if there was some sort of warning and/or delay between them getting up and shooting.

By the way, you can die and win at the same time...

Screenshot 2026-04-20 at 15.09.08.png

Had to go for another faster run too since you're tracking time... 😎 It's pretty interesting mechanic where you have to risk vs reward on going higher or staying near the middle for safer and slower approach. But level design wise you usually had to still climb to the top anyway to reach the goal. And you could often max out the signal by just jumping in the middle.

Screenshot 2026-04-20 at 15.16.06.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

Celestial Bodies by rynti 2026-04-21T17:29:10Z

Pretty funny stuff! It was kinda weird that I had bought everything, put some dudes on the last planet too but the game just didn't trigger the end before I slapped some more dudes on the second to last planet too. Don't think there was any indication on what was missing.

Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 19.57.32.png

This made me think that the goal was to get three on every planet but I guess some of them required more... 🤔

Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 20.06.07.png

Looked pretty good. There is this classic "mistake" with pixel art where you scale the sprites and end up with different pixel sizes. Makes it look less cohesive as an art piece as a whole. The same goes for rotating the sprites but that isn't that easily solved though as it'll require a lot more than just keeping the sprites the correct ratio (ie. drawing them in the wanted size).

This color choice on the shop wasn't very great for readability.

Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 19.45.03.png

The audio side was good too. The music was nothing ground breaking but carried through the whole experience without getting annoying. The sound design was up there too, didn't notice any actions standing out by being soundless.

Then the actual gameplay. It was pretty nice. Kinda classic incremental game structure. But it was kinda on the easy side. You just launch and wait for a bit until you reach the next planet. Dodging was never a real issue. Once I missed the actual planet orbiting and then there was loads of things to dodge and losing the control made it kinda difficult. But no point doing it like that since you need to fill up all the planets anyway.

The shop didn't really count for that much either. If the amount of junk I faced on that one missed throw was normal, then maybe the less equipment upgrade will make it a lot easier but the rest felt kinda inconsequential. You can get pretty much all the "necessary" ones that the latter half of the game becomes just repetition and waiting game.

So out of interest I tried another run without buying any upgrades. Starting off, of course it's very easy still. Three launches on the first planet without even having to move. Three dudes to the second planet too, this time I had to actually touch the keyboard just a bit to reach it. Probably could still reach it completely idle too with just some luck and eating those two allowed hits. But then the third gets a bit trickier. Dodging isn't really the touch part but the loss of control is annoying. And having to wait the first braindead easy planets to reach that part to try again made me give up after a few tries. So seems like the less junk is easily the upgrade that makes the game super easy and the rest are pretty much just time saves.

Anyways, good job! Fun game and pretty well executed. With some tweaks to make the actual gameplay more interesting and the upgrade system more worth it, it'd be great! 👍

**edit:** Oh yeah one more thing I forgot to mention. Kudos on getting the colliders right! So often on jams people use the exact sprite shape for hitboxes which feels super unfair when you lose by just grazing another object and don't even really see it. Feels so much better to actually know for sure it was your fault when you get hit. And here it's very much the correct choice. Doesn't feel too lenient or strict, just right.

Destructive Interference by Rakthalekk 2026-04-22T17:28:11Z

Nice! Beat all the levels on all difficulties without too much difficulties after getting the hang of things.

I'm a big fan of rhythm games. Played a huge bunch of different ones after finding DDR in the switch of the millenia. I've kinda gone full circle with them and are mainly just playing ITGMania anymore. Felt kinda weird to have the lane picking and colors just being fixed to keys. I constantly had the check the key/color map while playing to make sure which was which while changing colors. Would probably be a lot easier on PS controller where the shapes seem to match. On xbox controller though, the colors are the same as the buttons but they do not match. Would probably make more sense to have the shapes map to PS controller shapes and the colors to xbox button colors to have more of a support for both.

Would probably need some sort of scoring to prevent cheesing and playing all too safe by taking the lanes one at a time. Another small annoyance I had was that there was quite a lot of just waiting all too often. Especially on the ends of songs where you had to just wait for some specific color note to appear. Probably the only use for the jump button though as the noise lanes left behind could sometimes not be dodged any other way like normally they like 100% can.

Screenshot 2026-04-22 at 19.50.11.png

Lovely art style. Though very bright and busy, it didn't feel too distracting. Sometimes the speech bubbles were covering the side lanes which was a bit annoying. And of course I would like to see more animations on the character portraits instead of just stiff single frames but of course jam schedules can be tough to squeeze such niceties in.

I would have really preferred for the songs to fully play instead of you "playing" the instruments. It makes it so much harder to get into the groove of the song you don't know, can't fully hear all the time and are constantly switching between different instruments.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Destructive Interference by Rakthalekk 2026-04-22T17:54:27Z

I meant that you could keep the button orders the same but just switch the colors of the icons to mach the xbox buttons so that triangle would be yellow, circle red, x green and square blue. So the button presses would be the same no matter which controller, shape would match ps and color xbox.

That way there wouldn't be a need to detect the controller at all. Though I'm sure there is a way to do it in Godot. I've only recently changed to Godot from Unity but at least there (and in raw JavaScript) you can get the name of the controller and detect it that way.

LightQuest by Tempii 2022-04-04T12:46:36Z

Did you forget to hit publish on your itch project? It's showing 404.

LightQuest by Tempii 2022-04-04T14:03:40Z

Finally managed to beat it! :tada:

Screenshot 2022-04-04 at 16.54.14.png

Yeah, the controls were not great. Probably better on pad though. Super hard to try to control the jumps/landings with that much acceleration.

Would desperately need a restart button. As failing some jumps will make you fail and just forces to wait until the time runs out before you can try again.

The first floating rocks time pickup was a bit hit or miss. Even a single failed try for it will end up spending more time than you get from it. Dunno if it's required though as I did grab it on my successful run and was quite close to running out of time in the end. Or maybe there are more hidden time pickups that I didn't find.

A better idea might have been to have those time pickups permanently disappear on collection and then increase the time you get at the start. Would have made collecting them in difficult spots be more of a thing you could do and end up feeling more rewarding.

The animations were very subtle. Could easily have gone bigger with em. And those story moments like finding the sword or hidden cave etc could have paused the timer (and lock movement maybe) to allow the player to actually read em without completely ruining the run.

But yeah, neat little game. Tough (due to controls) but quite fair and it was short too which allows for more difficulty in my opinion. Good job! :thumbsup:

Anonymous VS Death by lokt02 2022-04-04T14:40:18Z

Yeah the WebGL version worked just fine for me.

So umm, where to start even...

First I thought that the bomb double jumping wasn't intended mechanic as it made the stages pretty much trivial. But then I reached the final level (I think as I didn't manage to beat Skeletron) and seems like it was indeed intended as there was no other way up.

The controls didn't feel great. As a platformer it got stuck on edges and so on but it didn't matter as much as I was always just holding jump and flappy birding around dropping bombs on fools.

The zoom mechanic was completely pointless in my opinion. Well at least you could remember the zoom level the player had set so I wouldn't need to fully zoom out on the start of each level/run. But why would anyone ever be less than fully zoomed out? And same goes for the map, you could have the it remember the level the player was on. Those two annoyances were probably my biggest deterrents with repeatedly trying to beat ~~Skeletron~~ Death.

And the boss design next then! Broke some cardinal boss design rules here. The swings were completely untelegraphed ie. unavoidable and up to luck really. Didn't feel like there was any pattern and the boss might just randomly swipe you to death at any point where ever you were. Or maybe it's just my old man reflexes not being quite up the par for the task.

On your next project, familiarize yourself with Unity's canvas scaler component that is automatically added to each canvas. You can use it to make UI elements be proportionally sized so they won't be like 50% of the screen on non full screen mode as they are now.

Haha I completely feel you on that "waiting for Unity compiling etc" stuff. Feels like assembly reload has gotten awfully slow for any non nearly blank project since like few years ago.

Might wanna revise yourself with the compo rules at least on the using existing sounds/music part. Don't see any link for sources either unless they're included with the Windows executable.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Anonymous VS Death by lokt02 2022-04-04T15:38:18Z

Oh never mind about the compo rules bit as it seems to be a jam submission. Maybe I didn't have the compo only filter on as I though I did (as the jam is still in progress) or did you change it? :thinking:

Losing Your Sheet by rickylee 2022-04-04T13:35:01Z

Pretty neat!

Screenshot 2022-04-04 at 15.56.20.png

The instructions were confusing. I think they actually made the game harder. But I did kinda enjoy trying to figure it out, it's a big part of the fun as the main game loop here is quite repetitive and gets quite boring fast. Oh and the help texts getting masked by the clouds didn't help either.

Screenshot 2022-04-04 at 15.50.11.png

Looked quite good, pretty pleasing colors and so on. The pixel art looked nice but the pixel size was all over the place. Nice water physics too! But could have used more particles (to make it look nicer) and a more consistent pixelated style for those too for consistencies sake.

Aight, went for some more tries and I'm calling this good enough...

Screenshot 2022-04-04 at 16.27.42.png

Sadly the best strategy seems to be the most boring one. Just sit there doing nothing for a good 2 minutes. Ie. ~125 distance so good job @thoastbot for achieving on getting less than what you do by doing nothing. :wink: Then just clear the boat whacking the dude and repeat as long as is needed for the boat to be empty. Then just rinse and repeat until you get bored and fail on purpose.

It seems like the difficulty (dude splashing and boat splashing increase) ramps up fast around 120 to 130 but it doesn't get any more difficult after that.

The dude slapping was annoyingly finicky. Even a fraction of a second of him splashing will mean tenfold that time emptying the boat again. And I tried all the things from wildly waving the sail in the sweet spot to slowly and accurately trying to time a slap when he gets on but found no good rhyme or reason on how to do it with minimal (or no) splashes.

So yeah, that's about it. Good job! :thumbsup:

Knighthood by SMdG 2022-04-06T16:04:31Z

Almost :100:.

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 18.38.46.png

The look was ok but could use a whole lot more feedback. I have no idea if the enemies were damaging me or if it was just the time. And you already had red flash when the melee attack damaged the parasites, the laser could do the same so the player actually knows they're doing something. And if the enemies indeed were damaging the player, the same treatment should be done to that too.

The melee swing could also get some more visual swing arc representation. If you've ever played games like Strider or Hollow Knight, you'll know what I'm talking about. The range was very hard to figure out due to no visual feedback. The melee attack speed also felt annoyingly slow. That and the enemies were needlessly tanky.

Having two different attacks felt pointless. You really couldn't effectively use both and the laser did so little damage (also awkward to shoot, why not just require RMB?) that after some trying it out I ended up just going full on melee. The melee was also able to attack multiple enemies per swing as it hit everything around you it seems. The laser look didn't really fit with the look of everything else being pixel art either.

The pixel art was nice but the pixel size wasn't consistent and varied on pretty much every separate sprite. Keeping everything the same scale will make it look more cohesive and consistent. The texts in the intro were notoriously hard to read due to being so low resolution and still scaled that big. Good job on spacing the intro tutorials to different small sections though instead of just showing a huge wall of text. But having them shown in the middle of the game would really have been the way to go (as the action wasn't that hectic in the start anyway).

Having some marker show up where the parasites would spawn as a bit of a warning would have been nice. Now they can (and will) kinda surprise corner you.

The gameplay loop also a bit repetitive and the scoring is boring. It could be easily made more interesting with some other pickups besides just health and maybe some kind of multiplier system to beef up the score system giving it more depth and hence replayability.

The sound work was a bit meh. Very little different sound effects and no variety it them made them not great to listen to. And the mega short and simple music loop didn't really help here that much either. Adding even a random pitch shift to sounds would have done wonders adding variety to em.

Good job! :thumbsup:

Operation Slow & Steady by smubear 2022-04-08T08:25:52Z

Cool! It was very much on the easy side, especially being that short.

Screenshot 2022-04-08 at 10.51.04.png

I love the MSPaint aesthetic! But everything should have been the same style, now there was a mismatch of two different styles, the paint one and the more pixel arty style of the environments, boxes etc. The simple but very effective character animations too! Could spice them up a bit more by adding some squash and stretch.

The space key icon is flipped upside down by the way. Usually space is depicted as |______| instead. Took me surprisingly long to figure out what that picture meant... :sweat_smile:

Screenshot 2022-04-08 at 10.46.41.png

The ordering of the sprites seemed to be a bit all over the place. Snail walking behind doors etc. Didn't look quite right. Also the sliding doors looked a bit glitchy with the boxes on em. Ahh, that's probably cause the doors are actually straight up on/off and the opening and closing animations are just visual. Noticed this in that level where you drop the box on the button right next to the end door. If the door opening was the same as the animation, you could just open the door by standing on it and then quickly running through.

The controls were pretty damn good. Really a rarity in jam games so kudos on that! The jump felt good and weighty and even the wall jumps were smooth and nicely controllable. The only thing is that the falling speed should probably decrease while wall hugging.

It's always annoying when the game is completely playable with keyboard but you need to use mouse for menus and restart. Especially if the difficulty were to increase, this would become a huge annoyance on restarts.

You could skip a portion of (I think it was) level three by just ignoring the boxes and going up to the door with wall jumps instead.

The second to last level was a bit tedious with that much repetition. Biggest annoyance on it actually came from not seeing the snail off screen and then dropping on straight on it. So it would be nice to have some indicator on the edge of the screen pointing towards the snail if it wasn't visible. Other thing was the amount of buttons and getting confused on what triggers what. Easy solution here would be to have a visible cable connect between a button and whatever it controls. Both of these changes would keep the difficulty of the level exactly the same but just save some stupid mistakes and time waste.

So yeah, fun game. Not the most innovative one in the world and the theme connection was a bit of a shoehorn. In the end it did leave me wanting for more so I guess that's a good sign. Good job! :thumbsup:

Fountain of youth by greenphox 2022-04-06T18:30:28Z

Can't really say I loved it. Kinda soft lock the game. So many places you get stuck on and have no to proceed than just wait for death...

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 20.44.21.png

Making the player just flat out wait is never a good design choice.

On my first time I even got completely soft locked as I somehow lost the key I got from the left side and ended up with just two keys and an empty map. The whole using keys to get more keys stuff was super confusing too. Making the three keys you need to pass to the end of the game be something completely else would have been so much better.

After restarting completely it was a breeze though and two manned it. Would have even had enough time to do it with Robert but I don't think there is a way back up to get to the right side double keys after opening that door without respawning. Or is there?

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 21.08.16.png

It was really hard to look at. Not that the art work was bad but there wasn't enough contrast between the ground and the back wall. The character animation was a bit odd though. You just decided to do a mix between idle and walk and use the same for both? It also kinda looks like flossing. The paintings were awesome though, I think I recognised almost all of em.

The dungeon could also use more "landmarks" just like those paintings to help differentiate areas from others. Not everything looked very much the same and was super easy to get lost and because of that fall to the same soft lock traps again and again.

The walking speed was painfully slow even for the younger side of the character and obviously it got notoriously awful with elder folk as in addition even clearing single tile gaps became a pixel perfect jumps. And having long corridors with a dead end and a "prize" of a bit less time back than what you wasted exploring that nook doesn't feel very rewarding.

I guess you had some dedicated audio guy and the music pieces do sound nice. Not very fitting to the game overall theme and feel though. But where are all the sound effects? They add so much atmosphere and tactileness to games.

Anyways, it wasn't bad at all even if I'm just complaining about stuff. :sweat_smile: Just quite a few frustrating things that could have easily been avoided. Good job! :thumbsup:

Colorful Love by Mikomoares 2022-04-06T15:22:00Z

Finally managed to beat the last pesky level!

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 17.49.54.png

The last two levels were really annoying. If the second to last on you couldn't really see what was going on in the first jump and the drop down then seemed very up to luck how the smaller slime would like to bounce around uncontrollably.

But the last level was truly a challenge (to my patience too). The first jump started off tricky and I though it was BS up to luck as you sometimes just swing to the ceiling but learned to positioning the bigger one is the key to success here. The gap was needlessly tough though. Having that precise jump that you need to repeat over and over again with unwieldy controls isn't too fun.

But of course the main challenge was still ahead...

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 17.47.31.png

This thing was so damn annoying. For either of those two hearts, doing anything but the absolutely perfect movement meant instant death. First I tried doing it my stopping the blue one under the heart and then jumping with red one but obviously that meant death. And trying to stop that swinging was a nightmare. And that notoriously placed blue wall was such a dick move too. Then I tried going with speed and grabbing the left one first. Well of course the rope shortening will pull the blue slime straight to wall, what a surprise. But yeah, eventually did manage to pull it off.

The most disheartening part about these tries was the god damn delay between. Sure that transition looked cool but delay after death to transition, then the transition itself and as a cherry on top a (luckily skippaple but that was glitchy too) story moment every try. Those story things were a nice touch and a cool way to kinda tutorial the game but no need to show it every time (and even have a dedicated button for skipping it, could at least hide it when movement starts). In though games restarting needs to be QUICK! Well, this wasn't that tough really so it'd be forgivable without the forced speech bubbles but it has some potential to get much harder if more content is introduced. Obviously it would be easy to come up with more content as this was just scratching the surface even with just these mechanics.

I did like the look of it. The were few quite off-putting visual glitches that made it less appealing. There was some flashing black stuff periodically visible, I think it was the shadow going out of controls I think when the slimes aligned perfectly. Maybe due to dunno, a bit erroneous angle calculations or something. You know, sin and cos and stuff. :sweat_smile: Another small visual interference was that the rope didn't properly attach to the small slime all the time. Sometimes the gap was even the same size as the slime itself.

There were also two kinda different art styles fighting against each other here. The pixel style of the characters, torches and so on and the flat vectory style of the environment, lights etc. Probably sticking with just one style and making everything fit that would be better.

Oh and there was another visual glitchiness with the speech bubbles too. Sometimes when the text was wrapping to second line, the background color couldn't keep up and for a split second the text was overflowing the box and it looked ugly. But yeah, these few annoyances are of course just visual and super small but I do mention them because otherwise the game looked very sharp and nicely polished.

The controls were a bit janky. Could use the default 2d platformer treatment. Jump buffering (not that important in what was needed at its current state), coyote time (so letting player jump for a fraction of time even after running off the platform) and bigger gravity after peak of jump (to make it less floaty).

By the way, I've had a very similar idea for a game floating around in my head at times. Never got around to work on it and dunno if I ever will either. :shrug: But yeah, awesome game, good job! :thumbsup:

Loading... by pixel-fabian 2022-04-06T13:43:49Z

Neat! Of course it's not the most original concept in the world but with a nice art/story(ish) and plays pretty well.

A weird setup to require mouse input for menu (and restarting) while everything else is keyboard only.

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 16.41.10.png

At first I though that horizontal movement was absolutely pointless and you should be just fixed to right edge and always shoot that way. But yeah there are situations where you need to snake behind the gnome who is blocking your shots to a crate. The crates overwhelm you so fast that it really isn't needed cause your time is better spent on just focusing on unblocked crates.

It was somewhat annoying how after just a few seconds, there is too much stuff for you to really handle and it's just trying to mow as much as possible. Sure it fits the theme but doesn't make it feel any better really.

The biggest issue with this really to me seems to be the large height of the play area and the slow movement of the gnome. In the same time where you move from top to bottom, one newly spawned crate has already moved to the center point of the screen. Of course you do want the player to miss them too but might feel better if it wasn't that much that soon. The punishment for missing could be more and the amount missed less still resulting in the similar amount of play time. The box spawning could start with a smaller y difference from the middle and slowly increase as the game progresses.

The other gnomes were a nice design touch. They really nicely punish for mindlessly spamming your way through the game. And having them linger there for a bit even after getting shot so they soak up even more bullets if spammed was the cherry on top. Good choice!

It was quite hard for me to try to align myself properly for long shots. The screen being "backwards", the flat background and the long distance are surely the reasons for this. Did you toy around at all with an idea of a laser sight or something like that to alleviate the problem?

I guess there was some kind of bullet limit too. Sometimes shooting just made an annoying boop sound and no bullet came out. Any specific reason for this choice? It felt arbitrary and pointlessly punishing for having fun. This isn't NES and Mega Man where you can only have few sprites on the screen at once. I would also go as far as have the shoot button be able to be held down to shoot constantly. You already had a minor knockback on the player while shooting so that (and the civilian gnomes obviously too) would still make sometimes not shooting mandatory.

The sprite work did look nice but could still be improved. The thing that I'd change the most was the bullets. Could be bigger and brighter for more clear visibility/contrast. No need to try to mess with the classics, I think a decently sized white circle would be the best call here too.

A bit more oomph in the juice department wouldn't hurt either. Stuff like screen shake for explosions, muzzle flash and so on are super quick to add but make a huge difference on how the game feels. The sprites should also be ordered by their y position so that the stuff would appear to be in correct depths.

The music was ok and the sound effects weren't anything to write home about. Bfxr/sfxr bleeps and bloops work just fine (for me at least) but some variety would be needed. Most easily achieved by adding a bit of random pitch shifting when playing samples. And if you go a bit further and composite your effect from two different pitch shifted sound samples the received variety spikes up even more. The gnomes getting shot would have needed some sort of sound effect too in my opinion.

I also came up with my own genocide game mode...

Screenshot 2022-04-06 at 16.12.46.png

Dang, looks like the character limit on posts has been decreased. To be continued...

Loading... by pixel-fabian 2022-04-06T13:48:55Z

Lots of other stuff could of course be added too to make it more lasting and interesting. Spicing up the scoring with multipliers is always an easy choice on score based games. Could maybe go up for each destroyed box but reset on missed shot. That would really reward precision and punish recklessness.

Another easy(ish) way would be to add some collectible (temporary maybe to avoid power creep and balancing issues) powerups. Could be stuff like piercing shots, spread shot (maybe dangerous too :sunglasses:), explosive shots, faster fire rate and so on.

So yeah, I guess one max length post and a bit is enough rambling from me. Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-04T06:54:40Z

@plixel Umm, definitions not matching how? As it it's showing a word that wasn't found? Or the definition being nonsense? And was it in the English one (the sources are different for en/others)? In English version the definition will be randomly picked from all definitions so sometimes it will show more obscure definitions instead of the most common one (that you probably had in mind). It will also pick just one of the possible multiple word you match per placement and show that definition. And now that I think about it, there is a queue system for the speech bubble messages so the tutorial messages might be visible and hence postponing the definition showing up ie. making them be kinda off sync with the just placed letter which might be the cause of your confusion too.

And yeah, the dictionaries are far from perfect... 😅

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-04T15:11:56Z

@mook Haha nice! The random definition picks can indeed sometimes result in some surprising funnies.

@foxwater Hmm, might be the fact that the letter placing is locked when the scoring is still going on for the previous placement. So I think it was just you trying to play "too fast" for the game to keep up with. Gotta keep it linear so it won't mess up the multipliers and so on. Well at least it recovered and didn't cause any soft locks.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-04T18:35:41Z

@pinky-toast Did you use undo? You must place the undoed letter again before you can use others. The bunny mentions it too. Other than that the only thing that blocks letter placing is when it's still racking points for the previously placed letter and there *shouldn't* be a way to that to get stuck.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-04T18:46:05Z

@pinky-toast Yeah might have been a good idea to make it more clear. It's now on the right side of the hand with bit of a gap to other letters. And yeah, kinda the double edge of having the bunny blab so much about the word definitions and so on that the more "important" tutorial messages might be missed.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-04T19:09:51Z

@kemp Thanks! ❤️ Yeah I kinda have my own design philosophy that if something annoys me during dev/testing, it's bound to annoy others too and will do something about it. Couple of slips pretty early on ruining a big word and I knew undo had to be a thing. Same for the "show board button" when picking twists. Just few times of me wondering that what was to board state like anyway when comparing the twist choices was enough.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-04T19:39:13Z

@puree-adventure Yeah the non English word definitions are pulled from Wiktionary. The API result is full of formatting stuff and other unusable garbage (for this case) so trying to parse something relevant from it wasn't too easy. At its current state it seemed to work quite well on Finnish and I thought it would work similarly on other languages too. I know like three words of French so it was pretty much guess work and the case of *"yup that looks French and vaguely can poinpoint some similarish words there as the key word"*. But yeah, even if it is only relevant just every now and then, it's still a bonus in my books as it doesn't hinder the actual gameplay at all.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-05T03:34:21Z

@garazbolg2 This isn't by first my first word game and I think when I was making my second one (in English too), I had that *"that can't be a word, what does it mean"* moment too many times so I knew I had to introduce a word definition system. So yes, it being somewhat educational too is indeed intended.

Hard to say how much time goes to juice and polish but it is a major thing for me really. I usually juice stuff as I add them so there is no separate dev phase for it for me. As a reference, here is what the game looked like on Saturday evening after about 12 hours of dev time. The second day was mainly leaderboards, word definitions, audio stuff and overall polish.

https://youtu.be/UYw61u4WOmA

Undo is only meant for fixing slip ups really. It locks you to that letter because it has already drawn a new one and should not be used to peek at what's coming. Even though now you can somewhat cheese with it and check word validities.

Bunny has no name, just legs. Kinda funny how some people find it cute while others like @everythingisbacon and @jeremy-ryan think it's creepy. It ended up like that in a weird iterative process. I had no design in mind for it at the start, just added a body shape and added some legs to it. Picked the color palette of the whole game at that point, the yellow balanced the blue background nicely here. Then as I always do, I placed a blushing smiley face to it. Wanted to make it look more like an animal so I drew the snout shape and slapped it on. Looked too weird, added in whiskers and the beard tufts. Then it was time to add in the ears and for some reason went with the longer variety of ear locking it to the bunny genus.

@jeremy-ryan I do mention the software used in the description. It's GarageBand for music and Audacity for recordings. Been thinking of making the leap to Logic Pro though as the limitations of GarageBand are really starting to irk me. Also been thinking of purchasing a midi controller for like couple of years now but never got around to it.

Now I'm interested to know about that secret scoring strategy of yours. That seems like a lot of points compared to the next spot. Could you DM/email me or something?

Yeah pretty much hated the theme this time around. I don't do theme slaughter rounds or votings at all anymore cause they always end up disappointing as there is something better there than what ends up being chosen. So for this theme, there are two cookie cutter interpretations, the game mechanic one and the story one. As a game mechanic, it's pretty much what every arcade style game always does. I don't really do story games so that's not a good option either. But yeah, then there are the clever and innovative interpretations which I was drawing complete blanks for. And haven't played any game yet that does so either in a 5/5 way.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-05T07:38:21Z

Oh and @jeremy-ryan the letters picks are indeed kinda weighted. It actually picks a random word from the dictionary, shuffles the letters of it and every time a letter is requested, it gives one of those letters. And when the word runs out, it picks a new one etc. So the letters should kinda closely follow the natural distribution of letters in that language. Of course you can still end up using the "easy" letters too much and then the harder ones keep piling up. This happens to me quite a lot in Finnish that I run out of vowels as short ~4 words use too many of them compared to longer words.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-05T12:01:55Z

@jeremy-ryan Oh damn, that's gaming! 😎 Nothing super secret I didn't really know of. Never though about leaving the carefully planned big scorer words to the end though. Dunno if you considered checking for backwards words too as only getting the max number of words matters to raise the multiplier. Both of your example words have very limited words in that direction. Is trat/trats a word or is rat the only backwards one in both of them?

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-05T17:36:24Z

@arzi Can't really remember where I got em from. I've made several word games and been using the same dictionaries since the first one. They're all just plain text files with a list of words. The word definitions are then pulled from two different APIs, dictionaryapi.dev for the English one and Wiktionary for the rest.

Yeah and it's a lot easier in English in comparison to Finnish at least. I scored pretty much 5-10k on the Finnish one but even casually trying the English one I managed to pull off 30k. The English dictionary is more complete which helps and they have way more 3/4 letter words which is a major deal in building up the multiplier and scoring big.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-06T04:31:42Z

@bitdecay That's weird, someone commented on itch about the slowness too. On the downloaded version even. Was yours the browser one? What kind of specs do you have? It does run silky smooth on all my machines which all aren't the most performant ones. For example the browser version even has no hiccups running on iPad.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-08T17:31:19Z

@smubear Yeah the definitions are pulled from an API and I’m displaying a radom definition of all available so sometimes it ends up showing a very obscure word definition even if the same word would have some common ones.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-11T04:09:26Z

@eonarheim Oh it's definitely intentional and not a bug! It'd be boring to see the most common definition every time. Sure it now sometimes shows some super obscure ones too but also has a bigger chance of teaching something you didn't actually know which I consider a major bonus.

Claustrowordia by Antti Haavikko 2022-04-17T07:33:11Z

@strega Thanks! It’s compo btw so just me. 😎 Actually having language options is super simple, just swap the dictionary file. The word definitions were more work as they’re using two different APIs and parsing the wiktionary format was a nightmare. 😅 I’ve also done leaderboards so many times that it’s really a piece of cake for me. And I do have same already functional backend for them I use everywhere.

Cleric Wanted by Garazbolg2 2022-04-04T18:30:30Z

Close call but managed to pull it off (with the whole party alive too)!

Screenshot 2022-04-04 at 21.04.43.png

Can really relate to this as always a healer class player in MMOs. 😆

At first it seemed like it'd be mega grindy. But of course it wasn't as there wasn't really much more to do besides get more party members and repeat the same stuff until you beat it.

So my first party member pick was the tank. Tanks are the healers best friends, right? How could I have been that wrong, they're worthless! So I just stood there in the dungeon with him doing jack shit but hey, at least I was learning what the UI elements actually mean (needlessly confusing btw, more on that later) and how to do stuff.

So my next line of logic, tanks don't work so lets go full DPS and get a mage friend. And that was indeed the correct route. Few trip down the dungeon and I had cleaned the shop, now time to go for the clearing goal. I did try the tank again and gave the goon a chance too but they didn't really seem to be any better than going triple mage. Tank just stands there, sure soaking a lot of damage but so does an empty space. Goon was like a worse mage, dies just as easily but doesn't do that much damage.

So yeah, me and my 🧙‍♀️🧙‍♀️🧙‍♀️ friends managed to beat the dungeon by the skin of our teeth (or just two of them actually).

It did have some spark of interestingness kick in near the end when the rotation of your three spells actually mattered. Could be still made more intriguing though with more spells and more choices. Oh and that one (expensive) spell even being completely uncastable wasn't cool. 🤬

Kinda funny how it was the exact opposite on how healing works in FFXIV. There you mainly heal with your cheap spells and bigger ones are more like the panic one and comboing one. And here it was so that the biggest was the most hp per mana spent but due to long cd, you couldn't only rely on that. Neat! But yeah, it would really have needed some deeper mechanics like the tank actually holding aggro etc or maybe some actual control on the party members even to fully shine.

But it was very boring at start and when it started showing some signs of difficulty and actual needing to do something else besides masking a single button, it was over. So it really should ramp up more smoothly from mashing single button to complex rotations in the end (could be a bit more complex as it was now) more smoothly where the monotonous starting bit would be over sooner too.

So the UI was confusing and way too complex. Only the top bit with the actual characters was needed. The player/selected panels were just making it more confusing than it needed to be. Would have also helped if the enemy sprite on the first level was something completely different looking than the player or hires to more easily make it clear who is who and what is what when getting started.

But yeah, very fun game. Sadly it ended up being a lot more thin that at what it first seemed and left me wanting for more in the end (which is a good sign). Good job! :thumbsup:

Cleric Wanted by Garazbolg2 2022-04-04T18:32:33Z

@chriiis88 There is an actual end when you beat all 8 encounters. Join the dark side and get your own three mages! Tanks and goons are worthless... 😎

Cleric Wanted by Garazbolg2 2022-04-04T19:54:05Z

Yeah balancing is hard! The aggro thing is actually quite difficult for this kind of scenario as the other party members are not controlled (by anyone really). So they will either "play perfectly" (ie. tank will always have aggro etc, DPS will not over DPS to pull aggro etc) or they will be dumb and might as well be random. And in such perfect scenarios in these kind of party structure MMOs the healer only needs to focus on the tank occasionally topping others off from missed AoE damage etc. And of course other buffs too (which don't exist in this game, they could make it more interesting). You could for example actually show the intent of the enemies that they're casting X on Y and the player might then be able to react to it by using a single hit shielding spell on the paper thin mage to protect them from an incoming hit. And by mentioning paper thin mage, I think the classes would need to be defined further. Maybe if the tank did hold the aggro (at least the majority of it) but mages would do AoE damage but be fragile as hell. And so on.

Out of battery by Cam Cam 2017-07-31T16:22:51Z

Beat it!

oob.png

The jump on the far right was super annoying. Other than that it was just mapping the route and then execution. The controls were a bit floaty and too aggressive but nothing you couldn't get used to even with those few tricky jumps. I think at least one of those energy pellets was a straight up trap. You'd lose more energy going to get it than what you'd gain from it.

The checkpoint system was more annoying than useful. Well maybe a bit useful when falling into lava but not really when running out of juice. Cause you lose the same amount over the same distance. And adding a way to restart would be a nice addition also. I don't think anyone will beat it on their first go. They'll probably just end up in a loop where respawning on last checkpoint and failing again keep happening.

Anyways, good job!

BatteryMan by Rami 2017-08-03T14:06:45Z

Super awesome game! Sounds and graphics were spot on. Managed to finish it with a negative score and 16 deaths :)

Having controller support and even remappable controls is always a huge plus.

My biggest gripe would be how hard it was sometimes to get in line for a single tile gap drop / jump up because of the fast character movement. I can't even tell how many times I messed up by overshooting few times and then had to retreat back to a battery before trying again. Also the wall hugginess when dropping down one tile gaps was a bit too aggressive.

Dunno if you ever introduced the wall jumping mechanic. I think I read all the messages but didn't see anything about it and discovered it accidentally in the last "real" level. Dunno if you even need it, seems like you can almost always be carrying a box and do the jumps with it.

Level usage and box carrying could be different buttons. Messed up many times because of not realizing I was carrying a box when going for a level. Then I pick up the box and switch the level at the same time, panic and eventually run out of battery.

Good job! Hope to see something as awesome as this (or even better since you'll have more experience) from you on the next LD...

Into The Darkness by ProgrammingDimension 2017-07-31T16:43:55Z

**Solid stuff!**

"horror/not horror" :D

Made it to a bit over two minutes. I don't really feel like trying again though. Maybe there wasn't enough gameplay/strategy involved. It was pretty much just wandering aimlessly shining the flashlight all around and hoping to bump into a glimpse of red somewhere.

The visuals and sound design were nice. Clean and functional. **Good job!**

Battery Escape !!! by EggshellDog 2017-08-03T10:13:14Z

Fun game. I played the original compo version and it looks like you might have fixed some of these issues for the updated version already.

First thing, few minor annoyances / quality of life changes. Since it's designed as a mobilesque quick "play, upgrade and play again" type of game, the upgrade screen needs a straight up play again button instead of going through menu. Same for the cutscene. Maybe remember that it was skipped once and automatically skip it after that.

I have no idea why people are calling it too hard (and it looks like you delivered and made to post-compo version easier). I played the so called "hard" version and found it waaay too easy and I even ignored the dashing completely after my third try or so.

And why did I ignore the dashing then? In my opinion the dash direction should be flipped. Lets think you're trying to move towards NW. So obviously your mouse cursor is in the upper left quadrant of the screen. Then if you'd like to dash in that direction, you'd have to move the cursor all the way to the lower right quadrant before dashing. It was way too much work and took so long that it was safer and faster to just keep moving normally. Even in the only dangerous situation in the whole game, while being trapped in the bottom of the screen, the dash was useless. You can't put the cursor under the character when it is in the bottom of the screen so you can't aim the dash upwards at all.

So yeah, after I started ignoring the dashing completely, I got enough points to fully upgrade (the feature I didn't even use) on few tries. And on the last run I intentionally died, it felt like I could have gone on as long as I wanted. It needs some kind of gradual difficulty ramp up. And also needs some kind of scoring to know how far you've made it.

And speaking of going far, the further you play, the more and more the sound effects start getting distorted. I guess you're doing something wrong with the sounds here.

And by the way, I still have no idea what the icons on the right side of the screen were.

edit: After reading the description, I see that the icons were the progress meter. Tried again and it moves super slow. Maybe even the audio distortion thing was intentional and had something to do with the progress. Though it was a bug because it started sound more and more annoying.

Battery Escape !!! by EggshellDog 2017-08-03T10:37:16Z

Haha yeah, as I stated in the edit that you probably didn't see yet, I did the usual thing and only read the instruction after playing :D

Dunno how far I made it on my furthest try but I didn't really notice difficulty ramp up at all. And I must have played for at least 10 minutes just gently floating up (no real issues with the gravity) bumping on the yellow bolts.

And yes, I like to leave long and detailed feedback. Sometimes it might seem that I'm only criticizing the games but I think it is more valuable to know what could be improved. The jams are all about the learning experience after all (in my opinion at least).

Battery Escape !!! by EggshellDog 2017-08-03T11:34:24Z

You can try it yourself, if you just float up all the time there is slow progress on the meter. But yeah, I guess dashing up would make the progress faster. Makes sense.

Battery Escape !!! by EggshellDog 2017-08-03T13:27:44Z

Tried again playing properly this time. And sure, it's a lot harder and more fun like that. And I actually now learned how to use the dash properly too. Earlier I was thinking that the dash direction came from angle between character and release point and instead it is between where I start holding and release. Made it a lot easier to do some sweet dashings :D

Also figured out why I couldn't understand the progress meter at first, when going fullscreen (on the web version) the meter was outside the screen and only the icons for the difficulty checkpoints were visible.

Now I made it to the final stretch above the double bolt icon...

Battery Escape !!! by EggshellDog 2017-08-03T14:16:36Z

Nah, I'm on a macbook so it's 16:10. You shouldn't really rely on players having specific aspect ratio or resolution. You know you can position UI elements relatively regardless of user display? Like this: unityui.png

Artax by Flaterectomy 2017-08-06T19:21:42Z

Superb sprite work and flawless chiptunes (especially the hectic piece when first encountering the enemies)!

Sadly I fumbled a bit got myself stuck and had to start all over again since I can't die here and there is not respawn key (tried everything, found profiler and alternative interact button). artax-stuck.png

Platforming was spot on. I felt 100% in control of the character at all times. The controls had some issues though. First of all, would have preferred if I wasn't forced to only play with my non-dominant hand. So arrow keys as alternatives and also adding a separate jump button would be a major improvement. It was kinda weird that you couldn't call the bot mid-jump unless you were carrying something. Standing on top of the bot and calling him always made me glitch through him unless I kept jumping.

The level with the long way down and those goop pipes was annoyingly time consuming considering how easy it was to get killed near the end. The goop was pretty hard to see and it lingered on the ground too long. Some goes for the first level with enemies and the final level. They both had this needlessly long bot walking section. Dunno if I just suck but I died on those so many times that I probably spent majority of my play time on those three walking sections.

The final level started off pretty hard with the bot and all those enemies flying on your face so it was quite easy to miss a jump. But it got a lot easier after managed to get a bit more distance for the enemies. Actually had to wait around for the screen to catch up with me. Those platforms on the water could be made a bit more visible.

Was about to ask what this icon was (everything was so small on the web version since no full screen) but after zooming the image a bit, I guess it's a flower, it looked more like some weirdly colored turnip cutman in actual game size. Still dunno what it's supposed to mean though...

artax-icon.png

Awesome job overall!

And Here Again by PerduGames 2017-07-31T12:38:57Z

Gave it several tries and couldn't really figure out what I was really supposed to do. All the rooms I found were empty except for the one with the cigarette vendor. And I could not figure out what those cigs did either. Then I found a knife (maybe) from a manhole cover but that was pretty useless as well because it was easier to just avoid the yellow men.

Few nitpicks that kinda annoyed me were the clunky movement and sketchy AI. Just being in the sight lines of enemies kills me? Even through closed doors which was super cheap when they sometimes just camped my spawn room door. Also, the doors were too tight. I would increase their size a bit or decrease the player hitbox so it wouldn't be so pixel perfect to be able to go trough them.

And now I watched to video above and still can't quite understand the game. It looked like you were doing even worse than me playing it :D

All the nitpicky critiques aside, good job!

POW by ProdigalSon 2017-08-06T16:38:51Z

Cool puzzler. Had a nice amount of content without getting repetitive. It eased into new mechanics very nicely. The difficulty curve was pretty good, had few puzzles where I actually needed to stop and think for a while. The latter half was maybe too easy, just relying too much on time running out and bumping into dangerous things by accident.

The biggest issue for me was that I couldn't recall the gizmo when it was in the charging station. So many times, I left the gizmo there just to go charge and then had to backtrack to move it one space away before getting back to the actual puzzle and recalling there. Seemed like just a waste of time. I would have liked the carrying to be toggle based instead of the needing to hold the button. Could be just a minority opinion though, maybe having this as an option would be cool.

The graphics super nice and clean. Everything was easily recognizable after encountering them once. Music and sounds effects were perfect fit as well. The effects were very good at giving feedback when stuff was happening outside the screen.

The Power Factory by Swifttech 2017-07-31T13:10:01Z

I have no idea what I was really supposed to do or why things weren't working. Isn't power supposed to come from a generator instead of going to it? It really gave me no real indication why things blew up. It seemed pretty random and inevitable regardless of the configuration.

Clean look and it works well, thumbs up for that. The menus (start and killscreen) looked kinda out of place compared to the game itself. But hey, I don't thing there is a game dev out there who enjoys doing menus etc... ;)

Alienation by Robber 2017-08-02T17:08:15Z

We talked on your stream earlier, the web version indeed worked just fine. Few frame drops but I'm playing on a macbook anyway, not a "real" gaming computer.

Very nice and moody atmosphere, everything fit together pretty much perfectly (except for the UI, it looked kinda out of place). Especially loved the particle effects and the sweet sweet camera work you got going on. Would have liked some particles/sounds on hitting enemy to give feedback of a successful hit.

Speaking of enemies, they were a joke. The bats were so slow that they could be kited around for days and the spiders had so bad aim that they probably couldn't have hit me even if I was staying still. And the few times some enemy did manage to hit me, their damage was so low that there never was any urgency at all. And both the enemy types had too much health (probably the player too). Making them a bit harder (increasing speed, etc) and squishier would probably keep the difficulty the same (if you wanted to keep it on the easy side) but would make everything seem more impactful.

The aiming reticle was kinda hard to see. At some point the WebGL player glitched out and started showing my actual cursor, it made it a lot easier.

And finally, I don't even know for how many games I've left almost the same comment, spreading the gospel of your countrymen, the Vlambeer boys. Why have a shooting button at all if you never have to stop shooting? Maybe could be fixed by adding a reload mechanic or even following the theme and making shooting use energy which slowly replenishes so you'd need to conserve your shots a bit more.

THIRST by Togis 2017-08-06T17:28:17Z

Managed to almost get to lvl 3. Died to a crab who was camping on top of the exit without noticing how low my health was. Guess I should have explored more in search for potions. Difficulty was pretty harsh it being so heavily reliant on RNG. The dead end tiles could even be removed entirely or at least be made less frequent (or free to use).

Couldn't really figure out the scanner meter. Which way was supposed to be close and which far? One side had a flame (which I associated with hot/cold being close/far) and other had the word exit which also meant I would be close to it.

Also would have been nice to see numerical values of my health and water levels. Maybe even tooltips for what all the different items were. It was kinda annoying that I was sometimes forced to pick up a worse weapon because it was blocking the only way I could go.

Is this a bug? For some reason the L shaped tile didn't connect to the T shaped one on the right side of it. thirst2.png

The water/hp bars were misplaced on web version fullscreen for me. thirst1.png

The game could probably benefit from premade levels. Sure, you'd lose a lot of replay value that way but at least that way all the levels would be solvable. Or another way to make the progression feel more fair would be to make the levels start off way smaller. Something like 5x5 for the first etc, so you'd really have to goof things up to fail so early.

THIRST by Togis 2017-08-06T19:35:26Z

I'm on macOS Chrome, no zoom. And it happened only when fullscreen.

123.png

But I though that 2 was a T shape and should have connected to 1. Maybe I'm wrong and it only allowed me to put a tile there because of 3.

Supplice by Vegevan 2017-08-04T12:50:37Z

Gave up on the second level after not figuring out how to get to the end with one less bone used on the way. On the first level where you teach about the gargoyles, I went back to throw a bone to the earlier one and screen stopped scrolling after that for some reason, dunno what that was about.

Now after reading the comments I see that I could actually pick up the bones. I don't think I saw that mentioned in the dialog at all...

The throwing mechanic was kinda clunky. It took way too long to fill the bar while throwing and it was very inaccurate. You probably have puzzles further along where you need to arc the throw or somehow other control the throwing force but the whole force thing felt unnecessary and needlessly time-consuming during the first parts.

It would also be better if the dialog wouldn't require clicking on the next button instead of just clicking anywhere or pushing any key.

All in all, good job!

Cyberhell Cleaner by EricQuagmire 2017-08-05T11:45:10Z

It looked sweet. It was sometimes pretty hard to distinguish the enemies from the background. A lighter border on the sprites would obviously help here but dunno if that would mess up the art style you were going for too much. The UI didn't really fit in with the rest of the art design.

Arrow keys seemed to work as well as WASD but they played no animation while moving. Separate jump button (space) and manual reload button would have been nice.

Music was also awesome. Very dark, moody, action packed lo-wi piece which kept me on my toes. Felt like quite a lot of sounds effects were missing. Was the shooting sound actually the only one? Would have been easier to keep track of whats going on if the following actions had sounds: click on empty clip, reload, jump, getting hit, enemy deaths (so yeah, pretty much everything).

Not sure if I was actually using the shop between rounds. I clicked on the buy button on it and felt like I got energy. The button should give some audio/effect feedback if thats how it worked. And always kept losing one bullet due to the buy button disappearing and me shooting. What currency were you even using on the shop anyway? I think there were too few (ammo) pickups. Or at least until on like my 5th try, I noticed that there actually were different weapons you could use. And the ammo count on the UI did not update on pickup either (before you tried to shoot) which was confusing.

edit: Oh yeah, one more thing. Managed to glitch out of the map once on the bottom floor, left corner. Couldn't manage to get a screenshot in time because ran out of energy soon after.

The Final Boss: Running Out of Powers by n.feofentov 2017-08-06T16:53:40Z

Since this is Unity, any chance of you spitting out a macOS or WebGL build? As a sucker for shmups, I'd really like to try (ie. beat) this one ;)

The Final Boss: Running Out of Powers by n.feofentov 2017-08-06T19:26:00Z

Sure sure, I'm sure I can rate it fairly cause I've already seen it in action. I can probably figure out what it was like in the original version.

And you can just shout at me here since I'm tracking mentions on feedback friends anyway...

The Final Boss: Running Out of Powers by n.feofentov 2017-08-07T10:52:56Z

First of all, for anyone trying this on macOS and encountering the following...

finalboss.png

This fixes it:

`chmod 777 "The Final Boss 1.2.app/Contents/MacOS/The Final Boss 1.2"`

The Final Boss: Running Out of Powers by n.feofentov 2017-08-07T11:40:32Z

Cool!

Still needs major balancing. Some of the powers were too good to lose and some of them were pretty useless. Like if I ever lost dash/arc/burst before boss was on less than 50% it was a straight up restart. Might be a nice idea to add RMB as an alt for dashing.

There was a lack of feedback on some actions (like getting hit). And the lack on audio didn't help here at all. I would slow down the enemy bullets just a bit and add a white/lighter outline to them to make them easier to see. Especially the red ones were pretty notorious because of the lack of contrast. And did you really think having player dodge red bullets over red background would be a good idea?

I'd also decrease the player hitnbox size. Not quite sure how big it was because it was impossible to know when you got hit unless it was the killing blow. Could decrease it way down to be like a circle with a diameter of 25% of the sprite width. It'd seem more fair since player would not get hurt on close calls and you could even add more bullets then. More bullets on the screen is better, right? It was also pretty hard to weave in between bullets because of the fast speed/acceleration. This is why quite a lot of bullet hell shmups have a key which when held, slows the movement speed of the player allowing more precise movement.

Human Fueling by Mindoo 2017-08-02T07:42:39Z

Couldn't really play (by only having a windows version) it but few comments based on seeing it on ElysiaGriffin stream...

First of all, you need to prioritize your work better. The graphics look nice but thats about it. For example, the UI could need a lot of love. And as you mentioned on the stream, you weren't even able to test it enough to know if it is beatable. Maybe next time start the project on a smaller scale, using primitives and just try to make it work first.

And finally, a game design tip: If there is a button to do something, there should be a reason not to push it all the time. So you have a sprint button on your game but you need to be sprinting all the time (and event then can't beat it). There should be some reason not to sprint or just making it run automatically always.

Spacy adventure by egordorichev 2017-08-02T17:31:15Z

Very fun and addicting shump. Pretty much all the critiques that came in to mind crumbled away the longer I played. It seemed really hard at first, then I learned how to conserve energy and to wait for those powerups when too low. It was kinda hard to distinguish between powerups, bombs, enemy bullets and the background effects but got used to those as well the more I played.

Nice looking visuals, sweet music and sfx, nice action packed gameplay, what more can you really ask for in a shmup. Loved it!

Now I'm off to try few more times to see if there is something else interesting after the first boss and space invaders homage...

Forgetting Things by player2point0 2017-08-01T20:31:30Z

As others have pointed out, the visuals could need a bit of a touch. I mean, I have nothing against minimalist boxy styles like this but having some effects and so on would go a long way. Maybe even being very radical and consider changing the Unity default background color for the camera ;D

Had some great ideas. It felt pretty awkward that sometimes you could hug walls and jump up them and sometimes not. And yeah, the jumping felt pretty unconsistent as well. Maybe the walls you can/can't hug could be different colors to indicate that.

Same goes for the "character", it could have some visual indications of what it can or can't do (and some of those messages that pop up went away too fast imo). Right now on every level I had to do a check for jumping/double jumping etc but maybe that was your aim all along with this "losing powers" theme.

Good job!

While True Do by Phobos001 2017-08-05T15:33:34Z

Wow! Just wow! This was either way too deep for me to understand or the work of a complete madman. Either way, it was truly great. Your long experience on LD really shines through.

Awesome programmer art. Loved it. The texts on the end of phase one were too quick and hard to read but maybe it was your intention. The bar overfilling was a brilliant touch.

Just had to go for a second run. Was kinda disappointed that your actions really have no meaning. It seems to always go the same way no matter what you do.

Good job!

Batterime by Hadrien 2017-08-17T13:12:17Z

Good job! Really nice and simplistic art style. The style was super simple but spiced up by smart use of nice particles and image effects. I especially loved the floppy grabbing particle effect. Music and sounds fit the style pretty much perfectly. The menu didn't really fit the game aesthetically or functionally. Why require a mouse click on button when the whole actual game doesn't even use mouse at all.

batterime.png This part was pretty annoying. You needed to be very quick and precise right from the start to be able to catch the moving platform (without having to wait around for ages until it comes back). And the fact that the character starts in the air made me at least fail the timing of the jump there several times.

I think the fix for the previous issues would be to add a bit of a buffering for the jumpings. So if the player presses the jump button when not grounded, store it for something like 0.1 sec and if they land on that time window, do the jump immediately. Other than that, the controls were spot on.

~~By the way, after beating it and it returning to start menu, the button doesn't work anymore.~~ Guess I should read the descriptions of the games ;)

So just went back for another round to grab that screenshot and noticed that there is a running button. It was kinda useless or rather made not running useless. I think there should be some kind of downside to using it to encourage the player to not just keep holding it all the time. Maybe just having more levels with parts that would require more precise jumps/movements would fix it. And maybe even reverse the whole running function and make it default state with shift then making the character slower. That way it would go from 99% holding down a button and 1% not to 1% hold and 99% not.

Outside by Tamfoolery 2017-07-31T17:57:50Z

So, someone is a fan out Inside, eh?

outsideican.png

**I can! You don't know me, game!** But yeah, I don't think I was supposed to be able to make that jump...

Very cool game. Superb atmosphere, visuals and audio. I stumbled into a bug where the leftmost elevator switch didn't activate at all (after the first time and then failing). I had to restart the game for it to start working again.

Island trouble by PiotrJ 2017-07-31T20:45:34Z

Pretty cool little sim. And it said that I even won and unlocked all the things (even though it is still researching better panels). Okay, I think it now reached 40% efficient panels and stopped researching.

Not much to do in it really. Just plot down few buildings in the beginning and then just watch the numbers go up. Well I guess one could go the other way around, abuse coal mining which then would result in more greenhouse gasses and sea level rising? Some people just want to see the world burn...

Island trouble by PiotrJ 2017-07-31T21:06:28Z

@jbasinger The html5 version worked fine for me.

Torch Boy by FloBar 2017-07-31T20:52:01Z

Aww, this looks super sweet and I can't play it cause I'm on a mac :(

Torch Boy by FloBar 2017-08-02T11:04:47Z

Oh yes, finally got to play it after seeing this several times, loving the look of it and clicking on it being saddened by the windows only version. And the gameplay didn't disappoint at all!

I liked the difficulty, it was very short after all. And the biggest difficulty was the controls for me. I kept trying to hit space to jump and got shoot/charge buttons mixed quite a lot in the beginning. I think those two could actually be combined to be the same button. Charging when holding and shooting when tapping.

The sounds were nice but got kinda repetitive fast. If there was some sweet action packed chiptune music on the background, it would help to mask to monotonous sounds. And a trick I personally like to use is adding some random pitch shifts so the sound effects are a bit different each time they are played. Dunno if this is easily doable with the engine you used (GM?).

Very well done! Especially considering that it was your first jam.

edit: Holy crap, you have a ton of ratings already! I guess thats what you get for having an awesome looking cover image. And sure, I think I've seen your name on pretty much every games comment section as well, I bet it also helps ;)

edit two: One more thing. Up and down on the main menu both go down. Not really any issue but though I'd mention it.

Last Question by amras0000 2017-08-04T12:26:19Z

Some very neat ideas you got here. It was super confusing though. Even after reading the description here first (and forgetting most of it before being in the actual game). Took me ages to figure out how to actually get a drone and using the pretty much the only command I remembered, help. After that I pretty much just jumped around all over the place and rendered stuff because no other command seemed to do anything. Probably had something to do with the options I selected for my drone though. This game would REALLY need some guidance in the game itself instead of just giving a full essay in the description which will be soon mostly forgotten.

I would really liked if it was fully keyboard driven instead of requiring mouse clicks on buttons sometimes. Well I guess you could tab between the controls but it felt kinda awkward.

Proto472 by uzyfeo 2017-07-31T16:59:12Z

Cool game. Expecially liked the music(s). As a person with zero musical talent I'm always super impressed to see solo devs who manage to do quality music for their games on jams. And even doing multiple tracks... **hats off**

Do you lose if you run out of power or what was it for? I don't think I ever did, always just failed a jump. Speaking of jumps, it was kinda hard to determine the the distances. A circular dropshadow under the character (à la Mario 64) would probably have helped a bunch.

Also, always nice to see other game devs subscribe to the school of "hitbox smaller than actual character so it feels more fair and all the close calls don't result in failure"...

Don't be (the) patient by Sogomn 2017-07-31T15:56:26Z

Pretty cool! Works very well and is quite fun for some time. It does get pretty repetitive after several tries though. Difficulty ramps up pretty much and the timer isn't too forgiving. The difficulty is highly dependant on the RNG. Sometimes the sequence had a part that instantly spilled the beans on where to start looking and sometimes it felt like I couldn't even pinpoint the quadrant of the board where the correct answer was in allotted time. Is there always just one correct solution on the board or can there be more options?

My best score ended up being 8.

Very solid entry. Good job!

DRAIN by LERPish 2017-08-05T11:15:27Z

Liked the art style very much.

The combat felt a bit clumsy. It was missing quite a lot of audio/effect feedback on stuff like player getting hit, missing a swing etc. The combat was pretty much just backpedaling and trying to swing at enemies and hoping that they wouldn't hit you back. At least I couldn't come up with any better strategies. Did not find any use for the slow mechanic really. And I feel like there were quite a lot of invisible walls and/or small bumps on the ground which made me get stuck, and since there is no strafing and the turning is slow, I always ended up dead.

I had few instances where the player character animations glitched out and stopped showing the actual swing animation (only the trail effect).

The control(l)s were straight up lying. A/D and left/right did nothing. You turned with mouse and the keys should have been strafing anyway. Accidentally pressed C at some point which seemed to switch between camera modes but the other option was pretty much unusable. I also think that the camera should be raised a bit to let the player have a better view of whats in front of them.

Good job on your first LD! Hope to see more from you guys next time...

LD39:Running out of energy by johnnwfs 2017-08-04T13:12:50Z

Pretty nice!

rooehiscore.png

The success on this game is way too dependang on RNG placement of the energy bolts so that the scoring could be in any way considered skill based and competitive. The UFO has a huge advantage when you're going down and the player has the advantage when going up. Going left and right is just a guessing game since the UFO has zero second reaction time and the horizontal speeds of both are pretty much the same.

The scoring could be made more interesting by maybe adding some kind of multiplier system or sometimes spawning two energy pickups at the same time. The UFO running out of energy was kinda pointless since another one spawned in pretty much right after that. Maybe adding a bigger delay there could be an idea. Or maybe start spawning multiple of them the longer it goes. That way there would be an actual difficulty curve on the game and it'd be more interesting.

The sounds got monotonous pretty quickly. Too bad you didn't have time to do music, it always masks monotonous sounds quite well.

Did not have any control issues with the html5 version that others mentioned (osx/chrome).

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-07-31T14:03:07Z

@xavierseal To quote JW, one of my favourite game devs of all time, there is a difference between hard and short games :)

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-07-31T20:14:28Z

@gonutz Thanks for the kind words! There is no way out really but you were on the right track with the letter combination idea. It even looks/sounds different when you put a letter in the right spot. Maybe it was too cryptic and vague. Some people seem to figure it out pretty much instantly while others fail to grasp the idea and give up.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-07-31T21:12:20Z

@flobar :O

Well that's a surprise. So you didn't realise you could use other letters besides T?

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-01T13:24:09Z

@gamepopper Many thanks! Haha yeah, I was thinking about adding all the characters but just adding full english alphabet was enough work. And most of the letters are pretty useless even as they are now. There are just a handful of really useful letters that will get you through the game just fine by themselves.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-01T17:20:59Z

@brorawr Yeah I think it is pretty much inevitable nowadays that each idea has been already done to some extent already. I wouldn't be surprised it something similar has been already done but didn't really research it because wanted to keep my idea of it fresh and unbiased.

And yes, I am a really nice dude :)

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-01T20:35:21Z

@daniel Oh yes, it's so funny to see people start staring at their keyboards looking for the correctly shaped letter. Something so mundane and familiar to us as letters are, you don't usually think of them that way.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-01T22:45:22Z

@player2point0 It's not easily noticed if you play it well but the terminals have limited amounts of respawns. So pretty much the same as most of the games on this LD, a power/enegry that is running out. That's exactly why I wasn't really a big fan of this theme.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-02T13:16:52Z

@hitchh1k3r Thanks! The "story" was pretty much an afterthought. Had to come up with something for the description field ;)

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-02T19:20:22Z

@ganbaregameskyle Thanks. Although I'd like to call it a mechanic and not a gimmick :)

You died too many times. The terminals have limited number of respawns each. It displays the amount still left each time you die.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-03T09:32:56Z

@elliottd I intentionally did not include clearing of the letters because of the rooms where you need to get past the letters vertically/horizontally with correct shapes. And I wanted to keep their rules the same for each room. I did notice that the triple ball room gives you pretty much just a one good chance to do it but I kinda liked it that forces you to think differently on your second try. Almost like a hidden bonus puzzle. There are plenty of ways you can still do it even after failing the first time.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-03T12:56:35Z

@goldranger Thanks! I already explained the ideology of not allowing removing letters and the triple ball room on the post above yours. You're right on the collider bit, they wouldn't all need to be individual colliders. But this problem is present only on few places where there are bricks which aren't aligned properly.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-03T13:06:14Z

@goldranger Oh yeah, the final screen puzzle. I know it super vague and introduces a new puzzle style right out of nowhere but that is just my style. I don't like being too hand-holdy with tips in my games. I'm fully aware of it being a problem and rage-quit moment for some players but on the other hand, it gives a better feeling of accomplishment for the ones who manage to solve it on their own.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-05T10:04:32Z

@goldranger It's not really a secret room, it's in plain sight after all. Most people I've seen play it try to go for the room, fail and keep on moving forward forgetting that it was even there. Just wanted to create an illusion of the game not being so linear.

@peachtreeoath Thanks! This is exactly why I added in the letters crushing the player if it spawns on top of the character. I wanted to punish reckless brute forcing and make players think before the go. And as a happy side effect of that, I had to put in less death traps which then made it feel so that more of the deaths were players own fault.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-06T16:09:13Z

@togis Thanks again! Something pretty sad came into my mind right after your stream yesterday and just confirmed it from the video. You're so used to getting screwed by the default key bindings of games that you made the game harder for yourself by changing to less familiar keyboard layout. Not saying that I made the game with "alternative" key layouts in mind but just a happy accident that it would work with them.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-06T17:40:41Z

@togis Yeah but the sad bit is that you're so used to getting screwed that you change to QWERTY without even knowing if it's required.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-06T20:23:44Z

@goloso-games What did you try it with? I'm guessing it should work fine with azerty and dvorak as well. Should work as long as you can input the english alphabet so probably not with cyrillic ones etc...

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-07T10:44:58Z

@n-feofentov Yeah I noticed the issue of the first tutorial terminal being kinda confusing pretty fast after the compo. It's supposed to be the right arrow of the arrow keys but people seem to think it's an icon for a video or something. Probably would have been the best way to include all the arrow keys or at least both left and right arrows on the image.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-08T13:53:18Z

@prodigalson Could you explain in more details what really frustrated you? I'm guessing the part was the one after the initial T section? Was the issue not finding a correct shaped letter or not realizing that you can use other letters besides T at all? My intention was to have player kinda accidentally figuring out the whole mechanic of the game by having the same T letter not work there. If I'd go tweak things on the game now, I would make that letter area smaller so that other easier options (like L) would work there as well. And maybe even adding the correct letter to the terminal after a longish delay (like 30 seconds). At that point even the people who refused to try out things they weren't instructed to would probably get the idea.

Voodoo Lockdown by Antti Haavikko 2017-08-12T18:08:47Z

@fl Thanks for playing and your feedback! Yes, my take on the theme was pretty cop out and obscure, probably would have been a bit better idea to represent the lives as a battery icon instead of numbers.

I wasn't really going for replayability. It's kinda hard to do that with a puzzle game. And I know it's short(ish) but I think it hits the sweet spot for a LD game. I wanted that majority of people playing it to be able to finish it (or at least reach the final puzzle). I'm also already working on **a post compo version of it and it currently has around 5 to 10 times the amount of content** of the original.

You are also correct on there being too many lives (at least for most of the rooms). I think the only room where anyone has ran out of lives is the room before the final puzzle. I'm actually most likely going to remove the whole limited lives mechanic for the post compo version...

Totally agree on the music bit. That is why I'm recruiting someone else to compose it for the future version of the game :)

Puppies in Sea Trouble by anttiviljami 2017-07-31T13:51:20Z

Of course I had to try out the game of my namesake buddy :)

I felt like I got robbed of quite a few puppy lives. Sometimes they got to the island with their cutesy woof and the number didn't go up. Still felt the need to keep clicking away until someone else showed up to take my place. I also decided to add a new mechanic to make it more interesting and played it like a rhythm game.

The music was weirdly interesting. There was something it that instrument that was surprisingly compelling to me. The music could have looped better. Did you thing no one would play long enough to hear the whole song a couple of times? :D

The Lunar Invasion by MCjammydodger 2017-08-04T11:55:12Z

Something very weird happened to me on the first try. On the 3d part I was in the ceiling, everything was mirrored (except for the UI) both vertically and horizontally. Even the controls were flipped (S moved forwards and W backwards). Still managed to go to the 2d section which then was normal and everything was also normal on the tries after that. This happened in the WebGL version. Tried to refresh and try to reproduce the bug but no luck there.

I had to do a double check to see if I was playing the right game because it looked nothing like the screenshot at first :D

Other than that, I pretty much agree on the points everyone else already made, the mouse sensitivity etc...

OnFuelDrain() by reizoukin 2017-08-01T18:43:57Z

Already mentioned this on ZedKraze's stream but it's even more obvious after playing it myself, the bullets need to be visually bigger. You're not going for realistic visuals with this anyway, they could be almost half the size of the ships. You can check some awesome shmups like Ikaruga or the Touhou series for reference. Having a dot-like hitbox for them is cool but they were just way too hard to see. I think they were also a bit too fast compared to the player ship movement capabilities.

And speaking of moving capabilities, we also discussed the controls a bit. If feels awkward having all the controls clamped up to one hand when there is no need to use the other hand for mouse.

Really cool music. Overall, good job!

Swamped by Gumboot 2017-08-06T20:16:12Z

Very nice. Totally felt in love with the art. Would have loved to see it bigger with fullscreen option :)

Combat was pretty solid. It was pretty easy and everything just had too much health. And it also felt like all the enemies except for flies had too big hitbox.This was even more apparent when enemies were above/below you. You had to distance yourself just right not to get hit by them mid swing. Didn't find any good use for the gun and dashing at all. I only dashed when not in combat and traversing longer distances. Dashing also looked somewhat weird when doing it diagonally since you only had sprites for the four main directions. I think the gun and dash both consumed too much energy, the damage of the gun was low and it usually knocked the enemies back so that the next shot wouldn't even hit.

Final mild annoyance, I think the dialog window could be closed in the end of their speech instead of repeating the last line over and over. And then if you'd talk to them again they would start their speech from the beginning. The repeating of the final line broke the immersion and made it feel more gamey.

Super sweet entry, good job!

Assault//Battery by tuism 2017-07-31T12:50:43Z

~~Looks cool but there doesn't seem to be a download link on the itch.io page?~~ Seems to be fixed now.

It was even cooler than it looked! Too bad you didn't have time to add sound effects. They would have given the action even more oomph (not like it really needed it). One of my favourites to far.

Now I'm gonna go try few more times, almost broke 1k...

Assault//Battery by tuism 2017-07-31T14:50:10Z

Yay, success!

assaultbattery-1k.png

Shutdown by mahalis 2017-08-07T13:39:20Z

Wow, you got some serious use out of that "simple" shader. I really need to get into the world of writing shaders.

844.png

The game itself was cool. Pretty simple but cool. It could quite easily be beefed up by adding a more interesting scoring system (multipliers and such) and an actual difficulty curve. Right now it's pretty much just go until you get unlucky with the enemy spawns.

Some other stuff that could be added to make it more interesting:

- Sound effects - Pickups with temporary powerups (for example: speed boost, homing ability, spawn increase etc) - Enemy variety (not just visually) like having a boss type enemies which could have different numbers (based on the difficulty of the enemy) of random abilities. Their abilities could be something like a shield that protects them from one direction, requiring more than one hit etc - Some kind of character progression which would keep the players interested in trying again and again

Armless Kairo by thomas-olsson 2017-08-03T17:14:50Z

Awesome stuff! Super impressed on how much you managed to accomplish in a weekend. Everything was pretty much spot on: story, animations, overall gfx, sounds and music. The mood was fantastic, very darksoulsy which I love.

On my first run I fell into the pit from where the first double crossbow is. The wizard dude you meet later on was there but it was a dead end. Noticed the throwing mechanic there and tried the whole keyboard to look for any solutions without luck. I don't think you're supposed to be able to go there?

One minor annoyance was that you couldn't go back through doors to the previous area. I felt like I missed some stuff because I couldn't freely explore every nook and cranny.

Probably would have liked to play the original harder version, this felt kinda easy excluding the final boss. The boss could have telegraphed its moves just a tiny bit earlier (for my old man reflexes) but was still easily beatable.

Control mapping was a bit weird (for me). Not used to jumping with up arrow and space being pretty much anything else besides jumping. Nice that you added button prompts when you needed to use them for the first time. So many people seem to miss this important and quickly added feature and only list their controls on the description.

Hats On! by recursor 2017-12-04T20:51:14Z

I am the new **world champion**! :tophat:

Screen Shot 2017-12-04 at 22.40.04.png

Funny stuff! Neat idea and well executed. Is it just me or does the game behaviour get very weird after doing a 100 hat run and then immediately trying again. It seems like the hats do not behave the same as they did on the first run. It's probably because you spawn the hats on the top of the screen and since the camera is zoomed out, it spirals out of control. Like this:

Screen Shot 2017-12-04 at 22.48.14.png

Sofra by dietzribi 2017-12-04T15:56:08Z

So I accepted the challenge and did also beat it. On normal even. Quite an ending!

Sure, the difficulty was quite high. And for most part, because of the preciseness required to picking up and/or dropping the bunnies. That's pretty much the biggest issue in the game overall. Like when you have the babies split up and you rush to get the second batch (which you had to individually drop one by one, on different spots on the ground). When you try to pick them up, you had to be quite pixel perfect to be able to pick them up instead of unintentionally dropping all you had already gathered. Would maybe have been better if there was a dedicated pickup button which you could spam while running past them without fear of dropping the ones you're holding.

After learning the quirks of how to properly handle the babies and getting comfortable with the controls overall, it was pretty smooth. The difficulty was there but it wasn't really unfair or impossible.

Somehow I think this isn't how this part was supposed to be done: sofra.gif

The visuals were simply amazing! And the music fit there very well also. The overall mechanic was brilliant and worked very well. Good job!

Stuck in Parallel by Omiya Games 2017-12-09T13:08:03Z

The concept for super cool but execution was kinda shoddy. Wasn't a fan of the character slidiness at all. Also was kinda weird that after dropping a lantern, I had to first get away from it to be able to pick it up again. It also didn't help that the character was super easily getting stuck to the walls like this (so yeah, kinda well named game).

stuck.gif

It looked nice. Dunno if the hands and legs in the walking animation (also seen above) were supposed to give depth to the character but it made it just look like unintentional flickering to me.

Really enjoyed the puzzles and gameplay until the fourth level. This is where the bugs were everywhere and I just started to get pissed off and didn't want to bother fighting the bugs. Here are some fine examples...

**Lanterns moving on their own and getting you stuck** Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 14.37.29.png

**Visibility glitches** stuck-what.gif

**Suddenly just getting stuck somewhere where you're supposed to be able to walk.** stuck-stuck.gif

**Not able to move past the lowered yellow barrier just because I happened to touch the green lantern.** stuck-again.gif

Anyways, really good job! The game shows real promise...

**edit:** Yeah, one more thing. It's never a too good idea to do a mouse only menu when your game is keyboard only.

Stuck in Parallel by Omiya Games 2017-12-10T19:21:27Z

Yeah, the idea I was trying to solve it with was pretty much the other way around. Leaving the yellow one there at first and grabbing the green one (first at least) while kicking the yellow around as needed but as seen there, the yellow got glitched when I picked up the green.

Looks like the menus kinda work with keyboard too. It seems like you're using the Unity's event manager for that. At least on mac I had to first focus one of the menu items with mouse (by clicking on one of them and then releasing outside the button) to activate the keyboard controls.

Greedy Dungeon by daul 2017-12-08T14:16:31Z

Very nice!

PS4 controller worked perfectly. Did you use some plugin or something for the controller? Usually the button mappings are all over the place on different controllers with Unity's default Input Manager (or at least they were in the past). The control mechanic was spot on with controller, but as seen from the other comments, it seems to not be the case with the keyboard. The aiming took some time getting used to but it was really very accurate and intuitive after getting the hang of it.

Don't really know what the deal with the money was. Didn't notice any changes even though I always gathered all of em.

Dunno if it was only me but the glove felt worse than the starting sword. Didn't really find any use for the carry mechanic either (expect for the blocked chest obviously). And because of that, on my winning run (I think) I cleared the whole level before grabbing it. And then I didn't really get to use the big sword at all. Was that really the end. I did scour the whole level again and actually did find one more enemy but nothing else. And fighting with the big sword felt like more of the same. It seemed like the hitbox of the sword was still the same as that of the poke of the starting sword even though the animation promised a bigger hit area. Not quite sure of this though since I only got to fight one enemy with it but it did seem I was missing quite a few times even though the animation looked like a hit. So did I miss something or was that really the "end"? Kinda anticlimactic if it was...

The enemy AI could use a bit more love. They were super dumb and very easily exploitable. They were pretty much only dangerous if you tried to go for a swing while they were spawning in (learned that lesson quite quick) or if you somehow managed to get surrounded.

It was kinda easy to get stuck to the walls sometimes while walking next to them. Might be an issue with how the colliders are setup. Also there are some z-ordering issues but obviously these are very minor and don't affect the gameplay or even the look at all. greedydungeon.gif

Overall, awesome job! Enjoyed the game very much and in the end still felt like I'd want more content.

Greedy Dungeon by daul 2017-12-10T09:34:30Z

Another thing I forgot to mention, the health bar look doesn't fit the rest of the game at all. And it doesn't read very well because the lack of indication of what is full health. I'd also switch the health bar and coin count positions.

Spacelitch by Flaterectomy 2017-12-12T18:57:05Z

As everyone else in these comments have already been gushing about, the art and music are brilliant. Only minor thing was at least the starting track had a small awkward gap when it looped. Would have liked to play it full screen. That would have fixed some issues like bullets being very small and health bars being very unnoticeable (at least in the middle of the boss fight action).

Nice to see a shmup that haves a nicely sized hitbox. Never felt like I got any unfair hits in...

At first I obviously started playing this like any other shmup and though that god damn this game is hard. After few quite quick fails, I noticed that the best way to go is a pure pacifist run, only shooting those laser gate things. And playing like that, it actually became quite boring. I was a slow slug to see if the rng gods would allow me to get past those few hard bits in the end. To boss in fact was maybe even too easy. I would have gotten him on the first try but right in the end dodging its shots, I flied off screen (without knowing it was deadly) to my demise.

And that leads me conveniently to my next point, action feedback. For example, only flashing the player ship red when taking damage isn't enough. Especially so when it can be off screen while that is happening. So that would require sound feedback also in my opinion. Same goes for those message popups. They're so small that the first few times I didn't even notice them appearing (wasn't really looking at the bottom of the screen) and wondered why the screen froze for a good second or two. And as has already been pointed out several times, they got kinda annoying considering how many times (probably) one had to try again from the start.

I wasn't a huge fan of the constantly changing shooting pattern. It was quite annoying that you'd go so big portions of the game without shooting, and when you did have to shoot you had no idea of what your shooting pattern would be and shooting in a wrong position could completely ruin your run. The angle shots were there to just make the life of the player miserable and make them want to shoot even less. But you had to get them to get sweet sweet forward shooting fire rate up. And even if you tried to shoot stuff like in a "normal" shmup, the enemies got way too bullet spongy for your weak little pea shooter which you had for like 80% of the game.

Dunno if it was just my computer being weird but I had these weird frame drops every few minutes or so. Was especially annoying while fighting the boss.

Good job guys, very nice entry yet again!

Money Is Everything by Jani Nykanen 2017-12-04T20:09:11Z

First of all, probably spent more time trying to get it to compile on mac than I ended up playing it. Been too long since I did anything SDL related (probably like 15 years or so) but I was determined to play it. I was beckoned by the pretty pixel graphics and the fellow finn dev at the helm. And gotta show respect for the dying breed of C devs that are still out there. But SDL_image wasn't being a pal so in the end I booted up Windows. Look at what you made me do! :pensive:

So then I actually got to play it. Goes without saying that it looks absolutely fantastic. Red houses and all... isn't that like a golden rule of GeoGuessr that, if there are red houses, it's Finland. Could have used some sounds.

So I ended up actually following the games lead for quite a while and tried to get as many coins as I could. Not quite sure how many I got at best but it was enough for the game to become pretty much impossible. I was gonna complain about those jumpy plants as well, but they didn't really bother me on the no money run. But at first those were the bane of my existance. Until about 30 coins those were pretty much only thing that got me injured at all (well except for some less frequent cheap traps). They were a straight up gamble. There wasn't enough time to react to their jump height.

So while downloading all those frameworks and fiddling with the makefile, I had plenty of time to stare at your page description. A thing I don't even usually do (cause I'm a rebel :sunglasses:). You kinda gave away "the secret" there. I think what you had in game would have been enough. Sure, some people would have maybe missed it and will probably still do but it would have been more rewarding to find out myself.

Good job!

**edit:** Why on earth did you opt out on graphics category?

Money Is Everything by Jani Nykanen 2017-12-04T20:55:54Z

@jani-nykanen Nice! I gave you a rating there now as well.

The lost strawberry by egordorichev 2017-12-06T12:31:02Z

Very nice! Looks awesome, but as I've already told you, it is way too busy. It is pretty much unreadable. Every time I transitioned to a new level, I had to just stare it for a good while desperately trying to figure out where I am and what is going on (and usually even dying several times while doing so). I think introducing a fourth color for those flying particles and the decorative non-functional platforms would make it easier the read the levels.

So something like this (I bet everyone on their first go try to jump to that "platform" on the bottom right): strawberries.png

The controls were a bit too fast (for me at least). Especially so when dealing with the ropes or springs. Having a different button for the essence jumps was a weird choice and completely unnecessary. By the way, what are those non-keyboard controls you were showing? My PS4 controller at least did not do anything. Can't quite remember if I've previously even tried to use a controller on PICO-8 games (haven't even played one since last LD). Getting to play with controller would have probably fixed the quick controls issue for me, I'm a lot more comfortable playing platformers with one.

I really wasn't a big fan of those invisible blocks. At least those could have appeared a bit further away than only when you were already pretty much touching them.

All in all, good job! You managed to do a good chunk of content and the difficulty curve was pretty much perfect.

Dense Revolve by fiaKaiera 2017-12-04T16:32:26Z

Neat little game! Super short but hard to the boot. The difficulty was quite punishing, there wasn't much room for errors. I found the best strategy to be ignore 90% of the level, wall jump up from the middle area, quickly blitzkrieg down two mobs, reload and then desperately try to finish the rest with one clip.

I lost so many promising rounds due to my muscle memory saying that R is reload. Not really the game's fault, more mine. Finally managed to beat it when I concentrated real hard to keep my fingers on the X/C keys only and stopped doing so many quick restarts if something went wrong.

Simple but solid art style. Worked very well! Nice particle effects too. The sound effects got kinda annoying pretty fast. And there was so few of them that it made it even worse.

Actually, now as I was writing this I decided to take a look at the description which I pretty much just glanced over at the start. So at first I had no idea that it was the bullets that were slowing me down etc and you didn't start with a full clip. Tried again knowing that and it was a lot easier. Using pretty much the same strategy as earlier... I got up, shot down two enemies, went down to reload, shot away few rounds off the clip and tada, I was back at the starting maneuverability. The rest was easy pickings.

All in all, good job!

I'm tired of all your stuff by oliverlevay 2017-12-09T13:48:03Z

First of all, you've marked the linux and mac builds wrong... Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 15.14.55.png

So I forgot to input my name on the second launch :disappointed: Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 15.30.51.png

Quite a funny one. Since the main point was first trying to figure out what is worth the most, it would have been nice to see the amount somewhere when getting an object into trash instead of having to know how much I had before and doing subtraction. So in the simplest just showing another text box under the score that would say like "+25" for a while after scoring. Would have wanted to see more different stuff in the room (including a door).

Also had some weird control issues. Like it was never told that you could use space to skip the phone call in the beginning (now I noticed that you did tell about it in the description). Also the ending was weird requiring the player to esc and restart without any indication. Should have shown the retry/quit buttons there automatically. The look angle lock was quite strange choice as well. So for example when going for the shoes, you couldn't get too close to them or you couldn't look down enough to grab them.

I'm tired of all your stuff by oliverlevay 2017-12-09T15:13:42Z

Haha, it's cool, I could beat that 54 if I wanted to :sunglasses:

I don't think whipping out the realism card really works here for the look angle lock. Your arms are long enough to pick up stuff from like two meters away but suddenly the belly gets in the way if you get too close... :drooling_face:

Oh yeah, one more thing I forgot to mention on my first post. I don't think all the weights of the objects make sense. For example, I don't think the books should be lighter than the shoes. It was kinda weird that the shoes were pretty much the heaviest of all the objects.

America 2018 by Antti Tiihonen 2017-12-09T15:00:50Z

Nice! The art style was great and music fit the game very well. The tension was up 100% of the time when playing this. Would have liked to see (or hear, actually) the monsters make a bit more noise so they couldn't sneak up on you that well. I know they did make some noise but it was kinda drowning in the music and constant shooting. Those pentagram thingies looked kinda broken with all that disappearing but dunno, maybe that was the aesthetic you were going for. That particle effect on them was a cool addition. Made it easier to spot them from a distance while frantically running away from the monsters.

Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 16.44.34.png

I felt like the difficulty didn't ramp up properly. It was way too easy to dodge even a large pack of the monsters because you needed to be pretty much standing on the same pixel with them to get hurt. The constant health pickups (which I'm not even sure where they came from) also made it kinda easy and lessened the consequences of actually getting hit. They should get less frequent the further you get.

I also feel like the shooting should have some kind of downside to not allow the player to be shooting all the time. Sure, the shooting sound made it harder to hear the monsters but once you got far enough, couldn't really rely on the sounds anyway.

And as you yourself said, the AI is dumb and gets stuck easily. That would actually benefit the gameplay if they could unstuck themselves when gaining the line of sight to the player. Would get some cool jump scares when going around a corner and suddenly a monster that was stuck there just bounces on you.

Good job!

America 2018 by Antti Tiihonen 2017-12-09T18:54:50Z

@antti-tiihonen Oh yes, I have quite a similar ideology when it goes to jam games. Pretty much always leaving the projects as they were created during the jam and never returning to them. But it's good to know these things you could do differently anyway, you never know when you'll be in the same situation and maybe that time you know how to approach it better.

Anyways, good to see a fellow Antti here. I've done LD three times now and seen at least one every time. There's a lot of us... :dizzy_face:

The Exalted by Flubz 2017-12-04T19:29:30Z

Got me three tries but I beat it. On my first try I wasn't quite sure what to do and kept losing the core I didn't even know I was supposed to be shooting at. On the second try, I went a bit too ham because I didn't realize that those bullets were mine. So on the third try, I tried to maintain better accuracy (at first at least) and managed the powerups better (besides speed, that was trash) and it was a breeze.

The look was nice. Sound and music volume were very low. The music didn't really fit the mood of the game and got kinda jarring the longer I played... but who am I to complain about it really, I completely suck at music :sob:

Good job!

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-04T15:11:22Z

**Thank yous!** :hugging:

@tschery Yeah, it's completely random. So sometimes you can go for dozens of turns without getting anywhere and sometimes you have only winning cards in your starting hand. Sure, maybe having some kind of smart draw system would have been cool but those are hard to do and balance. :sweat_smile:

@wibblymat I know! Well it's not that hard really but takes a lot of time and memory. While developing I did find some patterns to look out for that result in success. The easiest being having a triple zero in any row or column.

@jani-nykanen Was it the first game you saw? Either way, high praise indeed, thanks!

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-05T06:36:21Z

@stevenjmiller Thanks! Why do you think there shouldn't be such cards? Because they don't do anything on addition/subtraction or because they are a too easy of a win with multiplication? :thinking:

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-05T07:40:50Z

@stevenjmiller Haha, I bet you'll be the only person to comment about them being too easy :dizzy_face:

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-05T20:13:44Z

@bluemirror Thanks for playing and the insightful feedback! You are quite correct on the gameplay. I did notice it myself that it's pretty much the same loop every single turn, look for the winning move and if it isn't there, just pick something and hope for the best. And now that I think about it, even adding a visible que of upcoming cards would let you plan ahead a bit more and it wouldn't be so much RNG based. But as you said, that might be a bit too much calculations for mere mortals. One other way to go around it could be removing the whole AI opponent completely and make it more like a puzzle with preset cards where you need to find the correct set operations that would net you the win.

I did toy around with the idea of adding a preview functionality but then didn't do it because I thought it would destroy the whole idea and you could easily just try all the options and see what sticks. So in the end I just decided to leave it as it is currently and focus more on the polish. Adding hats and stuff to desperately try to keep players interested.

@xarras Thanks! Not quite up there with the sudoku though. Could work if I went more in that puzzle direction as I explained in the first paragraph. But it was too big of a change to do in the mid point of the compo so I just decided to go with the route of polishing a turd. :wink:

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-05T20:50:26Z

@cruise-elroy Thanks! Yes the game has some flaws but if I can get people like you to refresh their knowledge of matrix maths or manage to introduce them to completely new people (while not being horribly bored), I feel like it does the job it is intended to.

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-06T12:43:43Z

@vottivott Wow thanks, so glad to hear someone liked the music! I'm a complete musical newbie. I've been a programmer for over 20 years so obviously that is my forté and doing art stuff is simple especially when working with a simple style such as this. But music creation on the other hand is something I have no grasp on and I've only dabbled on few times on jams only.

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-09T14:14:00Z

@cliff-lee-cl Thanks! Yeah, it's too hard and too easy at the same time. You can just throw in random cards and eventually win.

@arly Thanks! Yeah, seen/heard quite a few people do the same thing. It's kinda weird as soon how as I introduce matrices, people seem to forget how tic-tac-toe works or what your goal is (even though it's the first thing I tell them). Maybe matrix math is just too scary and people straight up forget everything they previously knew when introduced to matrices :flushed:. But yeah, of course stuff like that could quite easily be solved and made better but it's nearly impossible to get right in a weekend without any proper playtesting.

@gruhh Exactly what I was going for. Kinda. Making an serious educational game and trying to make it seem not so serious. I bet people will end up learning how matrix operations work (unless they knew it already) even if they don't really try to run all the calculations.

@ithildin You're right, at least starting with 2x2 matrix would have probably made it better. Maybe also adding in like matrix cards of 0-2 after the 0-1 ones etc before going for the full blown 0-9 ones.

Tic-Tac-Matrix by Antti Haavikko 2017-12-10T18:05:04Z

@oliverlevay Haha yeah, you're quite right about doing it completely randomly. Even the opponent does its picks randomly and only in the last level start running the calculation all the time. I was quite sure that people wouldn't be bothered to do the numbers for more than few times on multiplication so I didn't want to make it too punishing. Yup, the "tutorial" for multiplication could have been better. Couldn't fit the whole operation in one speech bubble area I had and didn't want to split it to too many either so it ended up probably being too non-informative for people completely new to matrix multiplication. Especially so since you couldn't go back to previous messages. Maybe adding a help button which would recap the previous taught operation again would have been nice.

Good to hear that you beat it. Even if it was by just throwing in random cards. I was very afraid of everyone getting put off by the complexity of the multiplication and would instantly rage quit. And I still think that the majority of players will do so and miss out on all those pretty hats...

Robin Loot by zanzavar 2017-12-06T11:36:21Z

First of all... *"Pencils & Brushes / Words & Numbers"*, thats cute!

The game was good. Looked and sounded sweet. A bit on the easy side. I think the hardest part for me was actually getting all the five pieces to line up properly to the ending door on the last level. The biggest factor to the easiness was the lack of time (or any other) pressure really. Nothing prevented you from leisurely hauling all the valuables to the door one by one and then leaving with all of em.

The sneaking/dog functionality could use some work. I found it quite unsatisfying that just releasing the sneak button near a dog without moving triggered them. It would have been nice if the dogs had like a warning when you were getting close to triggering them (like a subtle ear wiggle or something). Maybe also make them fall back sleep after some amount of time. And having a sweet failure state animation instead of just freeze frame and throwing on a message box would have been cool and would have made the failure less bitter.

This was bit of an annoying part because you couldn't see what was beneath. The camera could have panned down a bit (so like inverted amount of space on the top and bottom) when you were on the upper half of the play area. Screen Shot 2017-12-06 at 13.18.47.png

Funny thing that after playing and now only reading the description I see your comment about the shield. I was confused about what the last piece was on that level too. Could have added bit of a sparkle animations to all the valuables to make them more distinct. I think I also tried to grab the paintings of pretty much all the levels.

Overall, very good job guys!

I wonder if I had a younger sister by fangzhangmnm 2017-12-08T21:18:24Z

Couldn't really get into (or even quite understand) the story. Not saying it's bad or anything, not just my anime genre of choice. It was also too short to really get into the characters. Nice idea to mix story and gameplay like this but I think the actual pacing could do some work. I kept feeling like gameplay was constantly getting interrupted by the small story blurbs and vice versa. I think it would have been better if you hadn't completely blanked the screen and halted the gameplay for the dialog stuff, instead positioning the text on top of the play area and still allowing the player to move around. I think you actually did that on few "cutscenes" but in my opinion, everything should have been like that.

The gameplay itself as a bullet hell was pretty solid. All the moves were very avoidable by themselves. Except that one with umm, pidgeons? My brain just couldn't handle that one at all. Unlike what @fireslash said, I found Shana's swing attack well telegraphed. Sure I got hit by it few times at first but then learned the breathing animation stop and attack timing. My biggest gripe was the hitbox, I would have preferred the the full danmaku treatment with a way smaller one. It's hard enough to dodge stuff on traditional bullet hells where you can fly, whole another deal in a platformer. I think the fact that it was a platformer was holding the attack design back a bit. Pretty much like half of the attack patterns were just bullet moving on the ground towards you and you jump over them. Even this more traditional bullet hell pattern needed to be toned down to be pretty much that...

Screen Shot 2017-12-08 at 23.15.32.png

Goes without saying, the game looks awesome. Obviously could have used some sounds and music.

Good job!

Grammar Dystopia by Xarras 2017-12-05T12:32:35Z

I PODE IT!

Nice, very nice indeed. The look was amazing and the humour in the video clips was brilliant. The mix of video and hand drawn animations was lovely. Ended kinda early though, I was hoping it'll get even crazier with the rules.

Pretty much the only thing to complain about was that at first it wasn't clear that I was supposed to just go ahead and start typing. Maybe having a blinking cursor in the textbox would solve that. Also would have been nice to be able to edit the text I had already input. Like it was kinda annoying to have to type the whole sentence again just to change a starting syllable to correct one.

**Congratulationpen Ramsay, you have pode na gnizopa gapo.**

Skulls n' Ladders by arly 2017-12-07T18:58:20Z

Yay, did it! Screen Shot 2017-12-07 at 20.47.59.png

Played up until about half way until I noticed that you can throw the coins. Didn't really read the description that well so I missed that part and I tried to press it first so early that I didn't have any coins yet.

Felt like the noise level didn't really matter that much at all. You could always just always just inch your way forward one pixel at a time without making any noise no matter how many coins you had. And when I realized you can throw the coins and kill the skulls, it just got too easy. It was more fun trying to juke them before I knew I could throw the coins. It'd probably be more interesting if you couldn't kill the skulls, maybe just stun them for a short while instead. Or maybe not even that and you could only distract them with the sound the coins make. That would need quite a lot of redesign of the level though.

Trial of the Reaper by Cliff Lee CL 2017-12-08T11:51:59Z

First of all, the combination of arrows and ctrl is a no go on mac at least. They are used as OS hotkeys and will tab one out of the game when trying to use them.

The game was quite fun but I do agree with @wetdesertrock, it was way too easy. After my first messed up try (because of the hotkeys), I got S on every single run. And I'm quite sure I always had all the kills in the same combo. There was no need to pace my swings at all, the best strategy seemed to be just keep mashing the mouse button constantly.

The camera work was pretty damn good. Didn't quite fully grasp what was going on there but the swing/dash camera movement felt very nice. Adding some particle effects and screen shake would have made it even more satisfying. It was kinda hard to distinguish people who were still running around and the ones flying dead in the air.

Found it kinda funny that in your tools, you had two git clients and two charting tools :thinking:

Good job, very solid entry!

Ghosth - Annoying Ghosts by Crowno 2017-12-05T10:26:09Z

Very nice! It looked and sounded fantastic. The sprite work and animations were top notch. Would have wanted some more sound/animation feedback on ghost activation and stomp. I sometimes was left unsure about if I managed to activate a ghost or not and doing to ghost jumps didn't feel satisfying enough.

Stairs were annoying in so many ways. It was very easy to do a weird jump on those and accidentally lose a ghost making you do some boring backtracking. And speaking of backtracking, the following were two of my least favourite spots because of all that backtracking that was required after a failed attempt.

Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 11.37.19.png

This wasn't hard really but obviously I threw the ghost to the wrong direction at first and then had to go all the way back again to gather some ghosts. It even forced you to death respawn because there weren't any ghosts to try again with. And even after that, you need to do the same trek so many times, even after opening the door.

Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 11.48.35.png

The first hard part really. The pacing didn't work at all and the swinging ball hitboxes were really unfair. Couple that with the wonky stairs and the long way to get to try again, and it was getting annoying. The jump wasn't even that hard but you had to either guess right or die a couple of times to plot the correct course. This was the spot where I think I spent the majority of my play time. There is even that spike maze puzzle with very similar idea but even though the jumps are harder (and again some unfair spike hitboxes, these probably weren't bigger than the sprite itself but still felt unfair because you die in 100% of the so called "close calls") that works so much better because you can try again straight away.

Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 11.40.55.png

This spot was kinda hard to notice.

Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 11.56.15.png

Took me quite a while to actually figure out how these things worked. But I kinda liked that you weren't so hand-holdy all the time and let me figure it out by myself.

Only managed to "find" one of the secrets. I did see at least three but didn't really know I was supposed to be gunning for those (even though it was kinda obvious). Then the game *suddenly* ended and I couldn't go for em anymore. Is there something extra if you find all of them?

Ghosth - Annoying Ghosts by Crowno 2017-12-05T11:43:20Z

@oldpeculier Then explore left side first to find *them*.

Ghosth - Annoying Ghosts by Crowno 2017-12-05T12:51:50Z

Cool! Can't wait to try it again once you do an even better version. Maybe that is why I didn't get the secret cubes, to have more incentive to play again! :sunglasses:

SPLIT by steven-pinto 2017-12-08T15:47:42Z

Pretty cool!

Art style wasn't really consistent. Some objects had outlines, some didn't. Some objects objects were probably drawn too small and had to be scaled in the engine, resulting in their pixels being a lot bigger than some others. The font didn't really fit the rest of the style either. The sizes of some objects were also totally wrong. If I remember correctly, the bathroom for example didn't look too good...

The story was ok. Very predictable but the writing was decent. As you said yourself, the skip for the dialog would have been a must. They were always there for too long even for me as a non-native english speaker. And vice versa, there must be someone who doesn't read them fast enough and end up missing a part of it. So yeah, a manual dismiss would be the way to go. Or at least not locking the player to just stand still there while waiting for the message to disapper. And you already kinda had that same functionality with the diary and letter.

The pacing was also a bit off. It was kinda annoying that for example I couldn't pick up the shovel before I found the diary. Even though I had already been on the backyard where the character was wondering what he could dig it up with. I also think it would have been better if that up arrow wasn't there and you could actually examine everything (would require addition of more flavour text like the one in the moldy food). Would have made it a bit more like a game instead of just running on rails.

You kinda have to nail the gameplay mechanics on a story based game or the annoying parts will make you less focused/interested in the story...

I really liked the **moonwalk feature** ;) split.gif

Good job!

DIM by guoboism 2017-12-09T12:22:36Z

Pretty nice framework for a game you got there. Obviously it would need more interactive stuff like enemies (which it seems you've added post jam) and more variety overall. It got stale very fast, like right after a few levels. There was no progression or difficulty curve so pretty much after the first non-tutorial level, you've seen it all. I still went on for dozens of levels just to see if it is same stuff over and over again endlessly or if it will introduce something new. Sadly, it didn't. And it didn't even matter if I beat the level or died, it always just gave me the "next" level.

It looked quite nice. I really liked the 2D lighting you got going on there. The ending flash when you got too much energy was cool too. And speaking of energy, it was kinda annoying to gauge if you could still afford to grab a shiny without getting max or get hit by the spikes without getting to zero. Maybe adding subtle lines or some other markers to the bar to show the amount you'll get or lose would be nice. Also, in my opinion, the spikes should have been more punishing. You should stop the energy from decreasing when reaching the chest. Dunno really which one ended up happening, the real level finish or death, since they both were the same thing.

It was nice that I could run through one tile wide gaps but doing that should have been more consistent. And the behaviour in one tile high "corridors" didn't make sense either.

*Can run under one tile high gaps just fine.* Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 13.59.17.png

*Can't run under one tile high gaps with spikes above without getting hurt.* Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 14.00.44.png

Just like @sand-gardeners, I first though it was weird that I could shoot up but not down. It felt odd that pressing either down or up would always just aim up. Quite quickly I realized that shooting down would completely break the game though. Shooting up was never really needed either. I don't think I ever encountered a "puzzle" where it would have even helped. Same goes for the double jump, it was completely pointless. Also was kinda annoying that the jump sound played even though you had already used all your jumps.

The level generator was quite solid. Only few times it did lame stuff like spikes right under my spawn point. Quite often it did "puzzleless" levels when you didn't need to shoot or even jump once, just drop down a couple of times. Obviously now those levels were dumb but they would still work as a bit of a lull in the pacing if the gameplay had a bit more to it (like enemies etc).

And as a closing note, you really should try to keep some consistency in your version naming. This was just straight up confusing at first glance. The windows version named after the name, mac version after the platform. And only the 0.2 version marked with the platform checkbox. Also, not having space there makes it read *"dimo point one"* to me... Screen Shot 2017-12-09 at 14.19.24.png

Good job!

Lapped by somethinboutgames 2017-12-08T13:21:40Z

Screen Shot 2017-12-08 at 15.16.23.png

There are some fundamental issues with the game design. It required to to play like crap at first and slowly start getting better (which actually worked wonders on my first go, but obviously not after that). I didn't find this way to play really that fun. The other way to succeed would be the execute at 100% performance all the time. Obviously this isn't that fun either because the amount of laps needed and even a small hiccup would completely destroy your chances because your previous selves did not make any mistakes.

Do the ghost vehicles take damage when they crash? Is it possible for them to be destroyed? I saw them crash with each other quite a lot but never saw them getting destroyed. Or do they just get reset every lap so they never accumulate enough damage to get destroyed? If so, it would be fair to fill the player health also each lap (this would require lowering the max hp of course). And if they can't get destroyed, adding this could alleviate the issue of perfect play requirement at least a little bit.

So yeah, I kinda cheated on the above screenshot. If you go through the track backwards (and actually going through them clockwise seems more intuitive to me at least), the AI ghosts freak the f out and just chill in the start line or completely ignore the walls drive to the horizon. This is why racing games have checkpoints... :wink:

The look was simple but pretty nice. Wasn't a fan of the crash effect at all. It was distracting and didn't fit the look of the rest of the game really. Also wasn't a big fan of the "menu", I found it pretty clunky and unnecessary. One thing that could have been a nice addition is having a bit of a color variation on the ghosts depending on how old/good they are.

Good job!

**edit:** Yeah, one more thing! Maybe next time don't hard code the keys and use the Unity's (pretty decent) input manager ones instead. Using them, the players could actually change the keys in the startup config dialog, there would be alternative keys for people who prefer WASD and even most controllers would have worked right out of the box.

Lapped by somethinboutgames 2017-12-11T07:12:32Z

I'm on mac but I'm pretty sure it isn't a platform specific. It seems like it happens which ever way you go through the lap, if you go backwards (so pressing down instead up).

Flips! by Beavl_Games 2017-12-06T16:16:32Z

Took quite a long time but actually beat it: Screen Shot 2017-12-06 at 18.02.30.png

As you are probably planning to do with it, would work perfectly as a mobile game. The mechanic is cool and can get really challenging. The look is nice and clean, fits the genre very well.

But you did quite a poor job on introducing the mechanic. The so called introduction levels don't explain the mechanic too well and they pretty much automatically play themselves. And then suddenly you're in that "plan ahead" level and have no idea how the game works. Spent quite a long time there just clicking on stuff and trying to figure out what were the actual rules. The difficulty ramped up too fast in my opinion and it was all over the place.

Good job, a very promising game!

Card Cave Adventures by Swen 2018-04-23T12:32:24Z

I really enjoyed it until I got stuck. I think it might have happened because I dragged a card to the activation slot during the enemy phase. cca-stuck.png

This bit especially was very clever, teaching the player about the new tile without the need for any words. cca-nicetut.png

The gameplay was very slow. So much shuffling or just using dummy cards (like moving against the wall) not to waste needed attack cards over and over again while waiting for the right directions. Like the first few levels didn't require half of the cards at all and it of course just kept giving me those. My biggest issue with the game was card UI. You could have made the active cards are smaller and hand area bigger (so the cards in hand wouldn't overlap). The movement cards were still kinda hard to distinguish from each other because they all looked so similar. Maybe having an arrow instead of the running dude would help make them stand out with a quick glance. Also having the direction on top and stamina on bottom forces the player to pretty much read the whole card. The middle text bit was unnecessary since half of the time it was masked by another card.

Also wasn't a huge fan of cards always returning to the top of the stack instead of where they came from. It made it harder to keep track of what card is what (probably in part of because they all look alike). At first I thought it was a bug giving me free shuffles of just one card 😜 cca-reorder.gif

Another thing that kind bugged me was the constant need to move the cursor from left side to right side just to press the end button. Adding a hotkey for the button and maybe allowing just clicking on cards to send them back and forth between hand and play area would reduce the mileage of required cursor movement.

All in all, good job! I thoroughly enjoyed it as long as it lasted (but not enough to slog through the beginning levels again)...

Oh, one more thing... I tried to randomly mash buttons to see if I could get myself unstuck with no luck really but I discovered maybe some kind of debug key that still works (that being A). cca-moveleft.gif

Card Cave Adventures by Swen 2018-04-23T13:42:08Z

Heh, I usually add `Application.isEditor` to my debug button checks, it's way too easy to forget to take them off in the end.

Dungeonball by Gurbx 2018-04-25T10:19:19Z

I reached a black screen, is that the end?

It looked nice, kinda brought me back to my youth playing Marble Madness. One minor offputting thing was the ball not always masking properly when behind a wall. Some nice visual effects (could of used even more though, like for example a better indication when getting hurt). Sounds were quite nice also but got annoying/repetitive without background music and any variation.

The collision angles sometimes were off, but dunno, might have been intentional (especially when breaking stuff). I would have made the dragging start point way larger than it is now. The game shouldn't be about pixel perfectly being able to click on the center of the screen. The smallish window and it having no fullscreen option didn't help either. Is that really a thing in Godot, never seen a game with fullscreen made with it?

I would also decrease the size of the player hitbox. At least so for enemies/bullets, it just didn't feel fair. Grabbing the diamonds/keys would be fine as it is now, even though it is indeed quite generous.

Anyways, good job!

Dungeonball by Gurbx 2018-04-28T11:46:24Z

Oh, you're right, the default functionality of making window go fullscreen does work on mac too. My bad, never actually even considered trying it... ☺️

Just played it again and got the black screen again so it is indeed probably something mac related. Also, now that I played fullscreen, these small black lines appeared everywhere when the camera was moving and the walls had this nauseating effect of redrawing the jagged pixel edge over and over again making it look almost animated.

That Which Cannot Be Contained by HuvaaKoodia 2018-04-25T09:58:55Z

Quite a novel concept and execution was pretty damn solid as well. I think this was my best score... eyes.png

The difficulty is indeed there and it is way too heavily dependant on RNG. Sometimes it took ages for a purple/red to appear, so I had really no chance of survival for long because I got swarmed by the enemies. Dodging the bullets is easy enough, I think that is one portion that you pretty much nailed right. The bullets are slow enough and they're easily noticeable. The problem arises when the enemies eventually outnumber the destructive blocks, they start destroying them before you can match them, a downward spiral.

For a smoother experience you could replace the full RNG based spawning with something pattern based. So it could be for example: One enemy, 5 blocks (with at least one guaranteed match), another enemy, 4 blocks, enemy, 3 blocks, 2 enemies, 5 blocks... etc

It would result in a more fair and consistent experience on separate runs but still keeps it fresh enough because of some randomness like spawn positions and types.

The controls were pretty spot on. I personally would have preferred the keyboard controls directional keys to be flipped so I could move with arrows and aim with WASD (didn't even try controller because Unity and you mentioned Xbox controller, so PS controls are most likely borked as hell). And the whole control thing could have been made more approachable by just using a one set of directional keys for combined aiming/moving but obviously that would not allow some of the more advanced techniques which are there now. The block throwing was great, the rounding you used to find the proper row/column was perfect. Allowed quick and precise throws to be made without being pixel perfect.

I liked the visual style. The main protagonist and enemies had some nice charm to them. And as I already said, the bullets were big and visible which is super important in bullet hells (the player character hitbox size could be decreased though). The color palette was a bit too muddy for my taste.

All in all, good job!

Devil's Doll by metamorphling 2018-04-25T16:54:43Z

I wouldn't even call it hard, just ridiculous. Having those two pixel perfect jumps in the beginning was straight up mean. Clearing those even with normal platformer controls wouldn't be easy. Got few times to this part where you need to do said pixel perfect jump blind and that's where I'll call it quits. Maybe if there were some checkpoints... dd.png

Never realised how hard of a word 'jump' really was to type before.

Good job! The concept was neat even though the text adventure bit was only typing 'jump' over and over again with an occasional 'right' thrown in there, everything else was completely unnecessary at least on the parts I got to.

Empty Space by bentglasstube 2018-04-26T09:28:35Z

Neat game. I gave up at about ten minutes only having completed one row. I just wished there was a bit of progression, maybe starting with a smaller puzzle at first. The daunting 4x4 puzzle was a bit too much for me (and I even messed up starting it few times because numbers/letters and unnoticed zero). The shmup bit was easy (maybe even too easy, felt almost boring at times), I just struggled to remember what direction I was supposed to get and then actually getting it.

Some kind of icons instead of letters for the powerups would have made more sense. Now it took quite a long time to figure out what was what. And even after figuring them out, it was hard to distinguish them in the middle of the action. And the same goes for those bars, they made no sense to me but didn't matter anyway, powerups kept them filled pretty much all the time. The ammo amount thing when you ran out of your green shots was just straight up annoying. It did nothing but waste one's time. Didn't find much use for the boost either.

Good job!

Empty Space by bentglasstube 2018-05-03T04:42:30Z

I don't think the K powerup adds any difficulty really, it just adds a unnecessary time gating. And I do like leaving stuff open to the player to discover themselves but even after learning the letters, it was still hard to recall which letter was which in the heat of the moment. Maybe after a lot more play time they would become a second nature but currently the game doesn't really have the longevity for that.

I was under assumption that you couldn't use external audio/graphical assets (ie. break the rules of a category) even if you opted out of said category...

The Cavern of Bad Ideas by Jani Nykanen 2018-04-23T11:41:35Z

Looks dope as heck! Are you really gonna make me boot up windows again? 🤔

Tetrario by mipelius 2018-04-24T18:16:32Z

Pretty cool!

Started off very (maybe even too) easy but the last few levels actually had some difficulty in them. In part the difficulty was because of the clunky platforming controls. The jumping felt very inconsistent and costed me a bunch of restarts. The weird hitbox of the character and very quick acceleration made it sometimes very hard to precisely push the tetrominos.

Pushing mechanics had some weirdness in it too. Like how you couldn't normally push a block you were standing on but could do it while airborne.

tetrario2.gif

Some easy visual changes would be a huge help too. Like flashing the made row few times before they disappear to make it more clear to the player what is going on. And playing back that character crushing move of a block. Currently you just jump immediately from crush detection state to retry without the actual crushing happening and it just made it look unclear on what even happened.

tetrario.gif

My biggest tip for you is, alternative controls. I think only a (loud) minority of players prefer to just with up key instead of having a separate jump button. I also am in understanding that most people prefer WASD instead of arrow keys so might as well slap them in as alternatives. If I'm not mistaken, the only alt key you had was for restart... what's the idea behind that? 🤔

Anyways, good job!

Tetrario by mipelius 2018-04-25T07:52:11Z

Yeah I totally agree with the WASD thing, it feels so awkward to play with left hand only when right hand is doing sweet FA. But quite a lot of people do seem to prefer it and adding them is so damn quick that might as well do it.

Controls seem to a topic that is always there in comment section of platformers. For example, these are some actual comments I've gotten on one of my games... > "Let me use up to jump, as God intended." > "No WASD no play. No one uses arrow keys anymore."

Twin Stick Runner by utoxin 2018-04-27T17:24:39Z

Controls were all broken for me (PS4 controller). I could only move and use the shotgun with left trigger. And now I can't even go to the controls section of the game anymore. It's also kinda weird that you can open the pause menu when you're in the actual menu and they completely clip each other. Okay... restarted the game and now it seems to work.

The game was very easy, even when I couldn't use the normal gun at all. The floating blocks didn't really pose much of a threat. Does it get harder the further you go? It didn't really feel like it. I also found a method for probably infinite score. Just hold left from the beginning, the score will slowly go up and enemies will never spawn.

The shooting sound got very repetitive fast. And maybe there should be some kind of downside to shooting, otherwise it could be completely automatic. There is no point on forcing the player to hold the button down if it is 100% of the time. Well the shooting did stutter every now and then but I'm guessing that was something along the lines of having a max bullet amount and you weren't clearing them fast enough.

One thing to consider with these trail like particle systems is to change their spawning to be distance based instead of just constantly spewing up particles. So in the emission module, remove rate over time and add some rate over distance. That results in a nicer looking stream of particles and will not cause those clumps that appear there now when the ship slows down.

Anyways, good job!

Twin Stick Runner by utoxin 2018-04-29T12:03:49Z

@erkberg Sure they didn't make the assets really but excluding the particle effects (which I don't know if they are stock assets also), the said used assets are just cubes, rectangles and text anyways. So I think the graphics category still holds with overall composition, color selection etc...

Platjectile by APTriangle 2018-04-25T15:39:15Z

Neat idea of a game but sadly it was very short and super easy.

The platforming controls weren't that great. Jumping was very floaty and movements didn't feel like they had any weight. Probably the hardest part in the whole game was the knocking down the very first tower of the tutorial because of the lack of momentum. It was also super easy to get stuck like this. platjectile1.png

Seems like the collision detection had some issues with fast speeds. platjectile2.png

Good job! All that really was missing was more content, some tweaking of the controls and maybe addition of visual/audio feedback.

Street Chess by OddballDave 2018-04-27T10:39:51Z

Awesome idea, super sweet name and so on. Gotta love it!

There are just some balancing issues. Against AI at least (if kept at a level where it doesn't finish in a blink of an eye), it's just too easy to move one pawn out of the way and just go ham with the queen always winning with just three or four moves. And I'm not quite sure if there is a way to fix that either. Maybe if you'd restrict the movement of the same piece over and over again (but that'd kinda go against normal chess rules) so you couldn't move the same piece again before the opponent has done a move.

The story mode was great and the characters were nicely designed and super charming. Would have loved to see that style more incorporated to the actual game instead of just having a generic chess board setup. Like have the player/opponent character artworks on the sides along the lines of Super Puzzle Fighter or Tetris Attack.

Good job! Can't even imagine what kind of a huge tanglement of fingers it would be to play thing against a human on a touch device...

Match3 attack by Aterlamia 2018-04-23T11:28:35Z

Hmm, *"some textual errors"* indeed... it was kinda charming 😜

So on my first try, got stuck in the tutorial at this point. Attack button doesn't do anything: match3stuck.png

The I discovered a bit of a bug: match3bug.gif

And with the said bug, the game can't keep up and the noise it made almost deafened me: match3err.png

Turo by Krystof Klestil 2018-04-23T08:23:34Z

The macOS download link directory is empty...

Turo by Krystof Klestil 2018-04-23T09:19:58Z

By the way, you gotta use the name that is in the brackets to properly trigger the at mentions.

I guess the icon wasn't supposed to look like this... turo-icon.png

Seemed a bit on the easy side. Just two turrets right in the start were enough to handle everything except for the final wave. And even the final wave was no big deal with all the turrets I placed later on the track in the beginning before I put those two nukers in near the entrance.

turo.png

Completely missed the running bit of the game. Now looking at the screenshots, it looks like I was supposed to trigger it manually with the run button. So I just tried again and with those two magic turrets, I just stayed up and ran. Were there supposed to be obstacles to dodge or something and you didn't have time to add them or what? The camera movement on the running bit was quite nauseating.

Anyways, good job!

Meta Defense by ragnta 2018-04-23T11:02:02Z

I didn't do too hot since I got bored halfway through the wall of text that was the tutorial and just decided to start instead. So I completely missed the last part about making enemies happy and just tried to kill them all instead. Like you said, breaking the wall of text apart and sprinkling them to the first level to relevant places would be a much better solution. But hey, wall of text in the game itself is still better than only having it in the game description page 😉

I think these should have been in the correct order on which they represent: iconmismatch.png

Hive also had a weird issue where I think the play/earth tower were in wrong places: metahive.png

I think the map was too big which resulted in bunch of waiting in the beginning of a wave and a load of miss clicks when action got near the hive.

It really could have used to audio/animation feedback to make it more clear when a new label/speech bubble appeared somewhere. Not quite sure if having the building/status buttons on a panel on the right side was the best option either. Maybe a radial menu around the selected node (would lessen the unnecessary mouse movement between center of the screen and right edge) but that might just end up with even more clutter and miss clicks near the hive with the current zoom amount.

Good job!

Candy! by Ratstail91 2018-04-27T09:59:43Z

Nice mechanic, sweet tunes and crispy spritework!

First of all, the block pushing was horribly slow and you had to do it once because you only learned about color switching after that spot. The blocks and bombs were also very good at getting stuck on walls.

candy1.gif

The mechanic was interesting and could probably and you could do a lot more with it, you pretty much just scratched the surface here. Quite a few of the puzzles felt a bit samey and it pretty much ended right after I started getting used to the powers. The amount of tutorial was spot on. I like how you weren't too hand-holdy and just game the player the tools and left it for themselves to figure out how to use them properly in a safe and contained space where you'd have to figure them out to proceed.

The visuals had some weird glitches all the time. The grass flickered with some extra lines every now and then and the sprite depth orders were constantly messing up like this. candyzissues.png

There was also a weird inconsistency where if you stood too close, your flames didn't go past the bushes. And then right in the end there was a possibility to completely soft lock yourself out of the game. Too bad the weird wall clipping inconsistencies didn't affect the player and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't glitch out of there. I had to completely start from the scratch just to find out that it was the end.

candysoftlock.png

All in all, good job!

Litur Teningur by Vinterskog 2018-04-27T10:19:31Z

Very nice!

I had some difficulties judging depth and actual physical structures of block formations because the lack of shading. Everything was flat shaded so obviously everything just looked flat. Wasn't that huge of a hurdle though because there was no time pressure or any other real dangers not allowing you to inspect your surroundings very carefully.

Would have wanted a better way to change paint colors. For example, the scan tool could be made to double as an eyedropper tool so you could just pick up colors straight from the walls with RMB.

That's about all I've got to criticize about. Maybe adding some more structure like starting with a smaller world which you would beat with a certain score and could then proceed to a bigger one. But that might be taking it to a different more puzzle like direction than the one you intended.

Anyways, good job and welcome to the LD!

Brainiacs! by Dylan Rainwater 2018-04-23T08:52:00Z

braniacs.png

Pretty cool! I think this is the first time I've ever seen a Mac only game on LD... 🍎

I too got quite a lot of US-specific geography/politics questions which I obviously failed. But did manage to win quite easily because the enemy seemed to be missing (so kinda failing their questions) and the game was throwing me some real softballs like asking about the Doom release date and only having one answer option pre 2000.

The concept is really nice. Dunno if the combat has enough depth to it for it to more anything more than a trivia game. Right now it seemed pretty much like race to X points with the correct answers giving out random amounts of points. Didn't seem like the characters were very well balanced either.

My biggest criticism is about the question/answer box UI and the lack of feedback. The timer was too strict. Few times after reading the question, I noticed I had only few seconds left on the clock and didn't even get enough time to check all the options. I think you were also missing a message for when time ran out, it just showed my previous action again and went to enemy turn.

The appearing messages should scroll in one letter at a time like they do in pretty much every game ever made. That serves two purposes, it focuses the eye of the player to what changed right then and it also gives less of a wall of text right at the beginning. Over half of the screen was the visual combat scene but nothing meaningful was displayed there (except for hp amounts and current turn with the bouncing). Would have been quite simple to add some attack animations (just nudge them towards the enemy instead of just bouncing up and down) and hit/miss indicators (along with sound more effects).

With an addition of more in-depth combat system and hecka lot more questions, it would probably be super fun couch co-op game. Good Job!

Sneaky by The_Icy_One 2018-04-23T08:20:38Z

You listed macOS and HTML5 links but there only seems to be builds for Windows and Linux.

LeChaudron by Jajakeim 2018-04-28T10:12:26Z

Very solid entry! Obviously one key thing that was missing was audio but other than that, here are few things I think could improve it...

The gameplay could use some more structure. Like changing it to a level based system instead of just endless mode with score. The levels could be for example self contained sections where you'd have to do a certain recipe (so a sequence of ingredients) few times in a row without any wrong ones to pass. Maybe with an added time restriction to add more pressure and not just allow the player to wait for the perfect opportunities.

Or if you wouldn't want to take the level route, you could add in some scoring systems like getting a multiplier on the score the less time passed from the previous ingredient. Or maybe the ingredient gets individual multiplier based on if you've bounced it. And then you could add some kind of strike system to make it end at some point.

The art and especially animations were mostly great. The overly jagged look of the foods and information bubbles didn't match the quality of the chef and cauldron. They looked more like a result of a scaling algorithm than actual pixel art like the rest. And that default blue background of Unity is always a bit off putting to me. Some visual feedback would also help. Like maybe flashing or otherwise highlighting the wanted ingredient bubble for a few seconds when it is about to change. And then highlighting it even more when it changes to draw the players focus to it more.

Didn't find any reason to actually move the chef at all. You could just as easily stand in one spot and do everything from there. You could add some kind of system to force the player to actually move. Maybe the chef can't get hit by the ingredients so you'd have to dodge them or maybe there could be some extra ingredients on the ground that you'd have to deliver by foot. Lots of different options to make it actually useful, now it's just unnecessary functionality.

And one big thing that I already mentioned is audio. Even simple beeps and boops, generated with Bfxr or the like, add a lot more oomph to the actions. And a quick and dirty hack to make them less repetitive is to add a random amount of pitch variation on each play time. Of course music is another thing but it is harder and more time consuming (for me at least, I've only recently started familiarizing myself with making it).

But anyways, nice game and good job!

Frogs vs. Cats by cincodenada 2018-04-25T08:51:05Z

Cool idea but the execution needs some work.

First of all the usual suspect of controls. Sure, being a PICO-8 game, it was easy enough to guess the controls. But having three different jumps was just weird. And it took me quite a while to realize that I can jump through the platforms with the straight up vertical jump. frogscats.gif

It was really lacking on sound department. I think you only had two different sound effects, the jump and collision (which played way too much on stairs etc). They got annoying and repetitive very fast.

The text portion of the game wasn't flawless either. The text was way too fast (at least for me) and had some weird positioning/repeating glitches. frogstext1.png frogstext2.png

Then the items. It would have been nice if there was some visual indication of the chests, keys etc. Well, it kinda takes me back to early 90s point and click games where you sometimes had to methodically try to click on every pixel of the screen.

Anyways, good job!

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-23T11:37:07Z

Thanks everyone for the kind words! 🤗

@iluvatar I could quite easily do an Android build (since it is possible to side load apps without the need to add them to the store) but not quite sure if it's worth the install at its current state (only ten levels).

@ragnta Oh yes, sneaking a bit of education in games is always fun...

@krystof-klestil Good to know that the tutorial works! I tried to make it as minimal as possible to get the player going without getting too hand-holdy.

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-23T16:17:35Z

@swen Thanks! Yeah, the bug you've encountered is probably quite rare. It seems like you got the reset time exactly right so the block is on neither the hand or the tree and because of that it doesn't clear with the rest of them. And now that I think about it, same might probably happen if you pick up one block and reset while holding it, resulting in one extra block for the next try.

But yeah, seems like it's not hugely game breaking (can always back to start menu and load the level again to do a full refresh on the level) so as per the rules, I won't do anything about it.

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-24T08:18:24Z

@gonutz Yeah the link length is set when a block starts moving, not when it enters the play area. Probably would have been a lot better if it gave you time to fiddle with it until the very last step of the movements.

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-26T06:34:57Z

@atmospherium Yup, no one likes the slider bits, not even me. I should have cut the whole thing because it really didn't work that great, but it is so hard to do on jam games even if I only spent around an hour to make it. It's only three levels and they don't really add anything to the game (except for annoyance and frustration). That must be my biggest learning experience this LD. Thanks for playing and your feedback!

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-27T17:49:22Z

@cincodenada Wow, thanks a lot for the epic detailed comment!

The tutorial is the first level so it is supposed to start from that one after beating it. It doesn't really save the progress but it just keeps it in the memory as long as you keep the app open. So it is working as intended, even if the intended way might not be the smartest way. ☺️

That is exactly what I was going for with the slider mechanic, to break the pacing a bit and not let it get too monotonous. And I ended up not liking it that much so only made three levels with it, and didn't even add in any new levels after that at all. I intentionally kept the block amounts small in those level so reordering them again after a failure wouldn't be that big of a deal. And I did actually have kind of a prototype grid system to help with the block positions but hid it because obviously it didn't work at all with the changing link lengths.

Nicely done finding the alt ending. You're the first one to comment about it here so I'm guessing it's not that easy to find. Will probably cost me some points in the theme and humor categories but what fun would such secrets be if I'd have to spell them out.

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-28T10:26:58Z

@huminaboz Thanks! I do like the idea of adding some kind of planning tool. Could be something as basic as adding a pen tool that the player could use to freeformly scribble some plans and notes on top of the game area. I'm a big crossword puzzle guy so it'd be kinda equivalent of dimly writing down words to try them out. And hell, the draw mode could even be automatically on since there is no clicking or other interaction with the actual play area at all anyways.

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-29T08:18:06Z

@patrickgh3 Thanks! Yeah, I get it that it is frustrating when you fail because you were just off by one and have to completely start from scratch. But that was the intentional choice I made. The perfect execution required makes the victory that much sweeter (especially so if you've previously failed it in the said last move). If the player got the same set in the same order back after a failure, they could trial and error their way through the levels. I wanted the game to be about planning the perfect stack, not just randomly throwing stuff at it until it works.

Binary Blocks by Antti Haavikko 2018-04-29T09:48:08Z

@bauxite Why do you think it would be hard for non computer science students? The math is kindergarten level and the player doesn't need to know anything about the actual algorithm, recursion, or anything really. And for the randomizing part, I already explained my thought process for it in the comment above yours. Thanks for playing!

Big Business Clicker by alobker 2018-04-25T16:19:17Z

~~First of all, dunno if that is your site or not but forcing to HTTPS and not having a proper certificate is never too great.~~ Didn't read the description before playing/posting, as always... ☺️

Not quite sure what to say about the actual game either. It's pretty much exactly what's promised. One thing that was kinda awkward was playing the cards, maybe allowing drag and drop would make it feel better even though it's the same amount of work. Also you should bump the moving card z position to be on top, it looks weird when it moves beneath the static cards.

And I'm still not quite sure how the position of the cards really factors in to making money. It seems like maybe the top cards affect everything and the side ones only that row but why would these two situations result in the same income then... clicker1.png clicker2.png

I think the rate of new card spawning is way too low. The actual interesting bit of the game only starts when you have like more than five cards and actually have to do something to optimise your income (especially so when the more interesting cards start appearing, the ones with tradeoff etc, dunno if they're random though) and most people will likely give up before that happens. Thank god it actually runs even on inactive tab. 😜

Now I think I got how the cards work, the side ones aren't for the whole row, they're just for that specific slot. The clicky slot made it a bit more confusing. And now I also take that bit about trade off cards back, they're straight up trash.

It's strangely compelling, I can't get myself to close the tab...

Big Business Clicker by alobker 2018-04-25T19:21:30Z

So, will not take that long anymore to actually get to use the trash functionality... clickertrash.png

Big Business Clicker by alobker 2018-04-26T06:26:38Z

And this is where I'll call it quits and will finally close the tab... clicker-end.png

Btw, it would be better to see exact amount even later on instead of the rounded *x million per second*. Would make it easier to position the cards properly.

A New Kingdom by 2lol555 2018-08-13T15:20:35Z

@dylanbr Mac Chrome ran just fine for me.

Jumping felt quite inconsistent to me. Controlling the height of the jump was way too hard to be useful and even when trying to do full jumps, sometimes it did weird baby jumps and I felt to my doom. Also could use some classic safety net action of allowing the player to jump for few frames even after running off the edge of a platform. Also, same technique could be used for buffering the next jump while still midair to help when the player is hitting the jump key few frames too early. And now after writing the whole thing, re-checking what I wrote I went for another run to find out that you can actually hold down the jump button and it will jump as soon as the character hits the ground so you can scratch that whole mention about the jump buffering. But even so it sometimes did those weird baby jumps.

Arrow keys as alternatives would have been nice. I'm not left handed so just dedicating my main hand for just pressing jump button seems inefficient. It's a preference for sure but adding alt keys is fast as heck. Or better yet, stick to using Unity's own input system so even controllers would work with 0% additional effort.

It was quite damn hard. Dunno if there is more levels but it could have started off a bit easier to ease the player into the gameplay. 80% of the people saved (especially so if it was only just the first level) seems quite a lot to me. I completely forgot about the key to fall faster right after the intro (because it's so rarely seen mechanic) so that made it even harder but that's totally my own fault. :smile:

Anyways, good job!

A New Kingdom by 2lol555 2018-08-13T16:20:41Z

Oh it's an easy fix for the jumps then, just do `body.velocity = new Vector2(body.velocity.x, 0);` to reset the vertical speed before adding the force. And if you're using continuous forces instead of impulses, gotta remember to do them on `FixedUpdate` instead of `Update`.

The Flopp by Sanguis 2018-08-16T14:07:01Z

Pretty neat!

As seen on the @mza gif, double jumping was a bit off. You had to quickly do both the jumps to get the most air. I think it'd be better to reset the vertical velocity first and then add the second jump (to get rid of the potential downward velocity gimping up the second jump) so the optimal strategy would be the natural way of jumping again at the peak of the first jump. Gravity could overall be turn down just a notch to make the jumps more controllable. There was also sometimes this weird jittering when landing from a double jump.

flopp-doublejump.gif

I wasn't a huge fan of the blind drops of faith. Could pan the camera down while the character is crouching or something to alleviate that.

The aesthetic was cool. Rarely see this mspaint style look with nice animations. There was bit of a mismatch between the character art style and the environment but it still worked and actually made the character pop out nicely. The respawning animation got a bit annoying, it could have been faster (at least after the first one). Well at least the game wasn't super hard and long so it didn't get super annoying.

The new powerup text was way too small and quick to disappear. I quite often had to check the upper left controls for a clue on what I got. The text could have easily been big enough that the characters were the size of well, the player character. And speaking of powerups, I'm smelling a bit of running out of development time with that punching ability... :wink:

Anyways, good job!

Savle by DavidLibeau 2018-08-15T16:29:26Z

Very interesting and scary looking setup (with that danger extruding warning text) you got there! Very original idea indeed.

Could easily add more of these "puzzles" with some trickier requests but of course it would become quite huge. Well, adding some text based stuff or combinations of different file type requests would still work without getting too big. You could even do stuff like zips, even password protected ones and the password would be on another file somewhere etc. That one write protected file on the first customer folder was kind of a let down. I thought it was foreshadowing that the puzzles would get a lot trickier than they actually did. Loved the CupHead OST bit...

I was pleasantly surprised that it worked well with my slightly modified monokai based dark iTerm theme. So you get a 5/5 in the imaginary graphics category from me. savle.png

Managed to beat the 22 meg level with: `22 484 815 bytes (22,7 MB on disk) for 93 items`

It was also easily the hardest level. That or I don't really know what a sunset is :smile:

There also was one digit missing from the last level clue: ``` levelData4Size=145000 levelData4Sizeh="14M" ```

And now that I've looked at the code: - You really should variable those color changes. - One of us doesn't know what a sunset really is. - On level 4, you should probably also check for the non rush folder.

And yes, I did eye out the script after playing and it looks safe :wink:

Good job!

DON'T RUN OUT OF SPACE by Paden Shorey 2018-08-15T14:20:26Z

droos.png

Very interesting and cool art & sound design. They fit together well too. And controls were also super solid.

Some kind of "singing" sound appeared at some point and never stopped. Quickly after that the music also stopped and revealed annoying static drone sound. Here is a clip of that... https://youtu.be/Z_3MmWWjhg0

I would have liked to see some warning on the spots that the portals would appear at, they quite often appeared on top of me or right where I was going and ruined my combos. The portal spawning points could have used some "smartness" also instead of being pure random so they wouldn't spawn out of reach that often.

The slow start was also quite boring after I had gotten accustomed to how the game works. A tetris like "press down to speed up the block spawning rate" would have alleviated that and made the beginning part more bearable with continuous retries.

The exploding mechanic could have also used some work. There was no downside at all of using it and you got more blocks (ie. score) by using it. So you're just asking me to mash a button with my left pinky every second. So I think it could be fixed in at least two ways. The first one is by adding some kind of punishment of over using it like having it completely destroy the smallest blocks so you should be more careful on its usage. The second one is making it completely automatic so the character would explode once every second. Or at least let the player hold the button down but even even a button you need to hold down 100% of the time while playing is not great design.

Anyways, good job!

Space Out! by Wattumartti 2018-08-16T15:04:22Z

You can consider the Mac version tested.

Very nice and super polished entry! This was my best run... spaceout.png

The look was very clean and interesting, some planets had that kurzgesagt wibe. My biggest graphical issue was the text scaling with the zooming which made zooming out far enough almost completely useless. The text size could have been the same regardless of the zoom level. As everything else was done with mouse, I think the panning should have also been. Like for example if you click and drag on the empty space or when you do it anywhere with right mouse button. I know there was that RTS style edge of the screen panning but it was awkward to use back in Warcraft 2 days and is still.

One other super minor thing was that the line/ship only appeared after you had already dragged to the destination planet. I think it should have started as soon as the player starts dragging. The line could have also represented if the target planet was in range to get rid of the need to drop it there and use that awkward dialog. It already showed if I had enough space bux to build there but it didn't update when I kept the line dragged to a planet waiting for my bux to accumulate.

As I've already stated, the UI looked cool but there were some placement/UX issues. First of all, those popup dialogs with are you sure and not enough cash could be removed completely in my opinion or at least make them able to be accepted with keyboard shortcuts. The tech thing had a similar issue. The following workflow isn't the best of designs UX wise:

- Click on a planet around the center of the screen. - Move mouse all the way to the right to pick a thing. - Move mouse to center to agree to building. - Move mouse back to right for using said building. - Guess what, back to center to pick a shuttle or agree or whatever. - And if you want to cancel at any point, the back button is all the way on the bottom left corner of the screen, as far as it possible can be.

I think the better way would have been to not rob away the map control, just center on the planet and show the building options somewhere near it. And the cancel button could be if you just click anywhere else than the use/build. And yeah, those agreement popups were unnecessary here too and if not enough resources, it's enough to just show that information, not require the player to interact on it. It also would have been nice to be able to pan the map when selecting where to evacuate. It resulted on some almost unsolvable situations when I could pick from whatever happened to be visible.

The cash, population and planet icon tooltips were also quite weirdly placed but that wasn't a huge issue because I only had to check them once.

Anyways, very good job! A great game that with some UX improvements and balancing fixes could be awesome.

Asteroid by cheetah 2018-08-15T17:42:41Z

First of all before I even start playing the game, I'm not a native english speaker but I think the intro text had some issues: - `You have a few resource` => `You have few resources` - `But the land is literally falls down` => `But the land is literally falling down` - `Use alpha keys` => `Use number keys` Alpha keys are letters, numeric/number keys are exactly that, alphanumeric are both...

The FTL like events were cool but it would have been nice to be able to select the options also with mouse since the whole gameplay besides them is mouse based. Loads of typos in these too. And there should have been random possible outcomes and more of them overall. It was kinda boring to get same one four times in a row and you already knew the correct answer.

The font was also quite hard to read. The look was otherwise pretty clean. I'm not sure about the color choices though. Blue and green, specifically seemed very close to being pure colors which don't look that great at least in my opinion. A great tool for getting nice looking color combinations is https://coolors.co/app which I actually used myself this jam.

The gameplay is quite confusing and demanding at first. It throws a bit too much at the player right from the get go. And so much text everywhere. I think using icons for the resources etc would have made it less of a read fest and everything would have been faster to figure out with a quick glance.

See how much easier stuff like would be to make sense of in a quick look (obviously adding tooltips etc would be necessary too). And that "can be placed on" text was extra filler too that was already more clear from the color.

---

:walking: 5 :meat_on_bone: 65 :wind_blowing_face: 10 :gem: 50 :fuelpump: 20 :radioactive: 55

---

30 :gem: 10 :fuelpump: **Biodome** Produces :meat_on_bone: and :wind_blowing_face:

---

Also you should dim or somehow make sure it's easier to see that you can't afford a building, it was way unnecessarily tedious to looks at the prices from the wall of text and then check my resources from the other side of the screen. I'd also highlight the newest message on that log thing somehow when it appears for a while to make it easier to notice. Something like bold text, differently colored background and even a sound effect. There were also needlessly lot of entries on that log.

It was also quite annoying to have to click the building again if I wanted to build several of them in a row. And it was very easy to missclick while placing buildings. I wouldn't have made the building follow the cursor, just made the button for it seem activated (more so than that blue border) and focused the tile I'm going to build on with like a white outline or something.

And once gotten the hang of, it was way too easy. On my final (and successful) run, I had pretty much already beat it few days in and then just had to wait around for ages doing nothing (except for those infrequent prompts which I had abundance of resources for) for the inevitable victory. I actually tabbed out of the game and started writing this post while waiting. asteroid.png

And as expected... asteroidwon.png

Anyways, good job!

Asteroid by cheetah 2018-08-15T20:00:06Z

Haha yeah, I had some extra time to write for some reason... :wink:

That is exactly what I thought happened with the texts. Your english was great overall but there were those errors that seemed like typos or brain farts made in a rush. Maybe next time (if you do a text heavy game) write your texts a bit earlier and reserve some time to go through them later on with fresh eyes.

Yup, totally understand the time management issues. I'm sure you'll get better with that and other aspects as well with more experience. LD and other jams in general are mostly about the learning experience anyway.

Welcome to the LD community and see you on December!

I'm B'walkin' Here! by Ziamor 2018-08-19T19:01:51Z

Well that was a bit on the easy side... bwuk.png

The art was simply adorable and tune was bangin' but it could have used (even very simple) sound effects. The way you incorporated the timer to the actual game world was sweet. Always cool to see a hudless game with all the information needed still there. One thing that was missing though was the actual goal of the game. I only took a glimpse at the description and missed pretty much only saw the controls so obviously I failed at my first attempt (I thought the goal was to keep all the people from crossing the road). Maybe adding a simple arrow pointing to the right side of the screen on the first level would do the trick.

I think the hitboxes of everything were a bit high. For example, I should be able to move trough here already well before my head is lower than the post... bwuk.gif

And by the way, why isn't it failing in the above gif. Everyone had already gone past. Is it enough to just get over the street in time? That makes it even easier than I thought.

Anyways, good job!

A blob with a destination - LD42 by Dries Vuylsteke 2018-08-13T16:15:21Z

**Yay!** blobvictory.png

Pretty neat graphics. Especially the blob (although it sometimes looked weird with the missing outline) and lava. The music was okish too but it really could have used some sound effects. And obviously it looked kinda weird when the character "died" with gory blood splatter and still kept going for few seconds before it restarted the level. I mean, turn the character visibility off, stop its moving and do blood splatter. The level outskirts could have used some killboxes or something, I get triggered when I see that Unity default blue background... :smiley:

Had some nice mechanics to it. The neat directional jumps (which I would have preferred without the ability to actually move at all) from that one game that I can't recall the name of right now. The direction switching from VVVVVV. Rechargeable double jumps from Celeste. The phasing through the walls must have been used somewhere as well. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

But it was kinda too short and introduced those mechanics with such a machine gun pace that it didn't let the player get used to them. And those help messages were not great, turned them off right away after reaching a semi hard level. And by the way, you can que in jump during the help text (which I did several times trying to skip it with mouse). Showing it just once should be more than enough.

The execution could have used some polish, it was kinda riddled with bugs. There were invisible platforms and overall getting stuck on corners. blobinvisible.png

It was also quite easy to glitch through the ground without the powerup on that same level (9th I think). blobstuck.png

The overall level design was quite nice even though the difficulty spiked quite quick. It was nice that at least some levels had some freedom of choice and some tricky skips that could be performed. The levels weren't really ordered by difficulty in my opinion at least. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, an easier level after a tough one is a nice change of pace.

Wasn't a huge fan of the skill que system. For example that first double jump skill on the 11th level (the hardest one in my opinion) killed me so many times by blocking me out of phasing because I made it there without using the double jump just to get rewarded by getting my face melted off by the laser. Would it really have broken any levels that much if you were allowed to use the skills out of order?

Anyways, good job!

Closing Arena by Neu_Eric 2018-08-15T13:48:33Z

Can't play it because I'm not on windows so I won't be rating it but I can give you one nugget of feedback just based on the screenshot alone. The color selection is umm, quite aggressive. I can wholeheartedly recommend https://coolors.co/ for getting some eye pleasing color combinations.

Deep Down by Nyunesu 2018-08-14T16:00:48Z

deepdown.png

**Very cool!**

Cute pixel art with some nice animations and controls were super tight. I guess the music wasn't done by you guys or at least not during the jam but holy heck it was awesome, especially when the second level track kicked in...

Nice to see you covered all your bases with the control alternatives. Should pretty much be able to please everyone with WASD and arrow keys with separate jump button and also allowing you to jump with up.

Sound effects had some weird issues when they sometimes just didn't play at all. I think it was mostly the death sounds but caught few wall sticking sounds missing as well. The sound effects were the weakest side of the game overall. I think adding a bit of pitch variation each time a sound is played would be an easy fix for them getting too repetitive. Some sounds, again the death sound especially, could have used some more oomph.

The level design was well done and very intuitively taught all the necessary stuff without a word or even an icon. Everything went so smoothly like "oh that's a weird looking block, wonder what it does, lemme touch it, oh that, boom, understood". Only thing that really caught me off guard was the first spike, they could have looked more deadly.

The branching paths were quite unnecessary. You just made me play the whole game twice to experience everything. You could have just taken those bits, added a bit of extra and boom, a third level.

So yeah, my only complaint really is that there wasn't more of it. Good job!

Deep Down by Nyunesu 2018-08-14T16:33:04Z

@allan-kong I think the game was the one that was too short because it didn't let me hear to sweet sweet tunes long enough... :wink:

Exhaustion by Koala Squad 2018-08-16T16:54:30Z

Yay... exhaustion.png

Yeah, the tutorial wasn't great. I was confused on which character I was and as I had seen the top character on menu, that "map" screen etc, I thought I was the upper one. And obviously because of that, using the cards didn't feel very responsive. So yeah, I died and you straight up quit the game? At least having the tutorial text be able to be skipped would be nice.

Then I went in again and still bit confused about the gameplay, beat the game without even a near failure. It was way too easy and pretty much played itself. The only meaningful act of the player really was the card pick after a victory. And the status cards were the obvious choice because they were op as hell. The player cards always went before the the enemy, by having lots of clubs and those ice things, you were just unbeatable. The whole gameplay loop was just: draw a card, play it unless it's heal, repeat.

So the card draw should be automatic one per turn and maybe you could draw an additional one if you had nothing you wanted to play. Both duelists should play at the same time to tone down the status cards. And maybe add more interactivity between the cards like for example the shield would reflect status back to the one playing it and something more along those lines. Of course it would make it more complex but I think few battles in the player is ready for more complexity instead of same things with different names and bigger numbers.

You should take a page out MtG (aka the king of card games) book and make the actual effect of the card and flavor text look different. I wasn't invested in the lore enough to read the flavor text on the cards I didn't care about.

The map screen was a nice addition for a small change of pace between the battles. Sure there could be a little more to it like maybe sprinkle in some nuggets of story instead of having it in the cards. That would have been even better pacing by separating the lore and action. And maybe not have the character walk in air.

The whole card slots disappearing was a complete non-factor and seemed more like an afterthought to fulfil the theme.

Anyways, good job!

Exhaustion by Koala Squad 2018-08-16T17:54:25Z

No need to apologize at all! At least you had a tutorial and as you might know, it's not really all that common to see one in jam games. And just quitting the game as a artistic choice is fine of course but you gotta do it right. Forcing the player to sit through the unskippable tutorial isn't that.

Pamago by RoronoaCherry 2018-08-14T14:07:54Z

Normal was super easy, hard seemed too hard.

pamago.png

The differently colored first letters (as seen on the pic above) on menu items was kinda misleading. At least I thought it would be a keyboard shortcut, but nope.

Some kind of level progression would have been nice instead of just being one offs. Start off with easy ones and increase the difficulty a bit with each new level. Would have resulted in a more lengthy gameplay experience.

I've written this next "complaint" so many times that I probably should save it for later instead of just writing it again and again. Arrow keys as alternative would be nice (ie. use Unity's input manager instead of manually checking keys). Well they were for the second player but could as well use both when playing solo. I bet I'm not to only person to prefer not playing with just their non-dominant hand when no mouse usage is needed.

The depth calculations could use some more work. For example when the bird is carrying an object, use the same depth (the bird one) for them both instead of using their y coordinate. It also felt kinda weird that the overhead carried items dropped at that same position instead of dropping the item on the feet of the bird.

The character and its animation looked nice. I also liked the edge animation of the purple void quite a bit, I guess it was sprite animation? i'm guessing so because it looked a bit choppy and repeated quite fast. Could have done the same effect with particle effects for a smoother result.

Managed to get stuck once. Even esc didn't work at this point anymore... pamago-stuck.gif

Anyways, good job!

YTTRE by Drabbning 2018-08-14T14:46:40Z

This seems like a weird design choice to me. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise that it was already started and I had to just do some accelerating. yttre.png

Thanks for adding arrow keys as alternative even though you didn't mention them. I dislike playing with my non-dominant hand when my main one is doing sweet FA.

The black & white look was cool but I think it also was a bit of a downside. At least I was mainly staring at the arrows 100% of the time which made distinguishing those canisters from debris with my peripheral vision tricky. Having color here would have helped. And I still have no idea what those canisters even do...

I think it could have been more clear that there is an actual level progress instead of just saying "ok, can you do it faster now". Also something about the par times was a bit off. On the 21 second par I finished with I think 24 seconds and the countdown timer still had three seconds left and it did move me to the next level too. And right now I played some more and beat the 18 second par one in 18.45 seconds.

The ship tilting a bit was nice touch but I think the tilting speed was way too low. Especially so when changing direction suddenly, the ship would move to one direction and still be tilted towards the other. At least you should straighten the ship back to vertical when it isn't moving sideways at all.

The difficulty is way too reliant on RNG. I'm currently stuck at the 17 second level and I don't think I can beat it unless I get super lucky. I'm not doing much wrong but the RNG just isn't on my side. I think I made it to around 95% once...

Anyways, good job!

Hivemind by Antti Haavikko 2018-08-13T04:22:33Z

@valden Thanks for playing! I intentionally picked the comments from "controversial" so they would be trickier to guess. But yeah, the ones close to zero can sometimes indeed be very much a coin toss. As always, even after the first feedback I have an improvement idea: show the absolute value of karma and maybe the total sum of the number upvotes and downvotes. That would give the player some more information to base their guess on (and maybe even would make the skip streak skill more useful).

Hivemind by Antti Haavikko 2018-08-13T21:29:19Z

@chaitae @bovandenberg @andrew-friedman Thanks for playing and your feedback.

@dries-vuylsteke Yeah, porting it to mobile would be even more of an escapade of "running out of space" with the limited screen estate.

Hivemind by Antti Haavikko 2018-08-14T15:32:08Z

@rkuhl Obviously yeah, that can happen since there is no way to zoom the images. I've also encountered some gifs that don't play correctly and YouTube videos will probably not show up at all. But those are just one offs in a sea of endless posts so it shouldn't be that bad. Thanks for playing!

Hivemind by Antti Haavikko 2018-08-16T18:12:24Z

@koala-squad Hmm, that's weird. Can you drop any more information about the conflict? Was it some antivirus or firewall giving you sass? I promise it's not a virus, I don't even know if it is possible with Unity :smile:. I guess other Unity games work for you since your game was made with it too...

Hivemind by Antti Haavikko 2018-08-16T18:57:16Z

@frittatenbank Thanks! Yeah, I've noticed that it is most certainly more fun to play with at least one other person so you can discuss your reasonings and laugh at the funny posts together. So I do like the idea of taking it to a party game direction too. But on the flip side, instead of just browsing plain old boring Reddit or any other social feed while sitting on the bus or loo or something, might as well rack up some points on this, so mobile would be another option. Oh and the "flying helper thingy" speech isn't on a timer, it disappears when you click mouse or press any key.

@koala-squad Oh I see, that's an evil filter. But it's not quite true that nothing could be done about it. I at first thought I'd make the connection to Reddit from my own server so I could make a web build (would get rid of the CORS issue and default browser user agent). Then the game client would just communicate with my server. Obviously I didn't go that route because it would have been quite a lot of extra work for just the web build. But yeah, never say "there's nothing you can do" because there pretty much always is a solution in software development if you put enough hours behind it...

Dora De'athsplorer by Phantom Dinosaur 2018-08-14T15:04:48Z

dora.png

Nice music and super clean art, I liked it. That one single hoppy sound got kinda repetitive fast...

The falling platforms was quite pointless functionality overall. For first few seconds, it was a spamming check but it didn't matter at all since the beginning was so easy anyway and past that spamming wasn't punished at all. And them falling was also an annoyance if Dora just decides to do a U-turn and retrace their steps back to the falling ones.

It was also quite hard if not impossible to where the character is going to turn to. It having total freedom of movement while the visual presentation only shows four directions didn't make it any easier. And the difficulty overall was heavily reliant on RNG.

All in all, good job!

Sticks and Stones by harark 2018-08-16T17:44:37Z

Neat stuff!

Would have been more powerful if you didn't give the whole away with the warning and disguised it more as a game. So maybe stretch the beginning bit more, introduce the text elements as just UI elements that would maybe help to get to know the character a bit (which would also help the player care more about the coming story development) more and would lull the player into a false sense of security. That way the first red text wouldn't be as new and weird and obviously something bad.

The look was pretty great. Nice cute graphics with a quite dark story, I like the contrast. One thing I wasn't a huge fan was the first big text font. The later texts seemed to be a more pixelated font which suited the other graphics better. The music was sweet and the few sound effects were ok. I guess it could have used a bit more of them and maybe some ambience so it wouldn't be completely silent at points.

It would also be cool if the beginning and middle "stages" could be winnable. Obviously they should be hard to do so the main story would still be the main story. So something like you have to outlast the big text until it hits the wall and to do that you'd have to bob and weave between the letters (which I tried to do on my first run, but I guess the text hitbox is just a rectangle and there is pretty much just a time limit there too). And the middle stage could be pretty much the same as it is in the last one but with those things following you making it harder.

Anyways, good job! It's good to see someone try deliver a message in a jam game...

Party Person by DrDolan 2018-08-15T15:19:34Z

Hmm, it was actually X to get rid of someone, not C.

This ended up being my best run. partypersonhiscore.png

Very neat art style and the funny sound effects went well with it. I think you should have taken the mspaint aesthetic even further and drawn the rectangles and circles by free hand also. Dunno if it would have looked too messy but at least having some imperfection in them would be better in my opinion. Could have also added some variation to the legit guests to make the intruder harder to notice. And having more different kinds of intruders would make that even more interesting.

Because the guests didn't move at all, were very hard to push around and the get lost cards were so un-plentiful, it was inevitable to run to a impossible situation at some point of time based on pure luck. So it's pretty much RNG deciding how much points you will get regardless of how "well" you do. And to make it even worse, then you just stare at that impossible situation until the time runs out. partypersonthx.png

The dark rooms were quite annoying. Dropping the opacity down of that black darkness even a little bit would have made it more bearable. Also, the player character should be under that black veil too and the light switch arrow weren't moving like the rest of the task arrows.

And speaking of tasks, I think having them take time was bit of a waste of time. They were mandatory to progress anyway so it's not like it was a choice of I had time to do a specific task at some point or not. Or at least add progress bar or something so I wouldn't need to mash on the keys to know if I'm still doing a task, free to move or just stuck because of the guests.

*"Sure thing, I'll get rid of this intruder"*... The cat freaked out like they seem to do when you get rid of them but it didn't get rid of the intrusion task. It just kept running mainly somewhere off screen and periodically appeared on screen for a fracture of a second. partypersonintruder.png

Well never mind, after posting this and looking at the pic, I can see the other intruder quite clearly. :wink: Maybe it's because the robber doesn't have a unique sound so I didn't notice him with my peripheral vision as my main focus was still on the cat.

Anyways, good job!

Space Escape by FelipeDev 2018-08-19T18:46:52Z

*"Post your high score"*... yeah, mine was zero. spaceesc.png

I was a bit hard. And not hard in a way that would take some skill to execute (even though there was a bit of that too) but in a "bash your head against this until you've memorized the patterns" way. I dunno if adding visible tracks those death bringers travel would be too easy but at least it would with said memorization and would be easier to see where is safe and where isn't without so much trial and error. At least it would help with some places where a spike ball just suddenly runs at you with a speed our sound with no possible way to react to it.

The difficulty curve was also a bit all over the place. I think I struggled the most on level five (until I stopped being so damn stubborn and arrogant and decided to take it more slowly and methodically). Even some of the later levels could almost be completed blind by just running through few spike balls. Of course this affects the scoring in the end and was probably the reason I ended up with none. :wink:

The look was nice. The original Game Boy was my first ever own console so that aesthetic hold a fond place in my heart. Now I just gotta calibrate my screen to show everything a bit green and we're golden. The music was ok too but got kinda repetitive and monotone quick. Dunno, maybe adding drums to the tracks could help. And based on the music, I guess there was some kind of time limit per level also. I think it was level nine where I was finally almost at the door when the music changed, I got spooked by it (in my mind I thought some kind of bubble bobble like killer ghost would come after me) and ran straight to the only spike between me and the door.

And I'm still not quite sure what that number on the top right of the screen was. Is it the time limit?

Anyways, good job!

Space Escape by FelipeDev 2018-08-19T19:05:00Z

Hmm, the math doesn't quite add up... `133 * 10 != 330` and `330 * 10 != 300`

Space Escape by FelipeDev 2018-08-19T20:01:44Z

Haha, I see. So you didn't think anyone would die as much as me and @johnny-turbo :smile:

Crystalmancer by Crowno 2018-08-13T14:42:12Z

Finally, took me **ages**! crystalmancer_beat.png

Very nice art and tunes, as always. Controls were kinda clunky but they worked quite well with the slow and methodical gameplay anyway. At least after I got used to them. Would have preferred for the hammer to be its own key instead of needing to swap between the two weapons. It was slow enough to use already that it was punishment enough not to use it in middle of combat. The clear area of the hammer was also quit awful, it could have almost been doubled in size. And having to manually clear the room for path was just a waste of time and didn't feel too fun (would have been better with forementioned better hammer hit area). I think the crystal rod was also quite inconsistent. There should always be some crystals left behind when hitting enemy or jar for that sweet sweet multikill potential.

The enemy and their bullet hitboxes were too big. Quite often I got hit by something that I didn't think hit me and it felt very unfair. And speaking of unfair, I hate those flying ball enemies with a passion. I mean being invulnerable 90% of the time and still able to hurt the player and move faster than them was just bad. And when they weren't steamrolling over be hitting several times in a fracture of a second (invincibility frames please), they were being dicks floating around on the other side of the map wasting my time. The same somewhat applies to those spider enemies. I think they should have not been able to hurt the player mid jump.

The slight randomness on enemies did more harm than good in my opinion. It made me sometimes instantly take a bunch of damage right after they spawned. And some rooms were just huge death traps if approached from the wrong direction, like this one. crystalmancer_cheap.png

Good job, a very fun and frustrating game!

Crystalmancer by Crowno 2018-08-14T04:18:43Z

It's really sad to see people complaining not seeing the theme connection on this one. I mean, sure it was a clever take on it but it should be quite obvious how it relates to the theme after playing it for a while. Did they even give the game a fair go instead of just getting bodied in each three starting rooms and rage quitting after that.

Theme seems like a hard category to do well in. I don't think I've even tried any of the previous theme category winners so I don't know what their take was but I'd think going with the obvious take wouldn't score very highly. It's kinda like if the graphics category had a footnote of *"You have to vote 1 if you can't tell me what 11x12 is in under 3 seconds"*.

Chadwick Cave Chronicles by nerdyHerbivore 2018-08-19T19:12:04Z

I can't get past this screen. I've tried to press everything but nothing does anything. Tried the web version on Mac Chrome/Firefox. chadwickcavechronicles.png

Never mind, went full screen and the X become actually noticeable and was clickable. Quite a lot of the text on the book at map page was still missing though, I guess you only designed it on 16:9. Unity editor has that dropdown on the game window for changing aspect ratio on the fly for easy testing. I think at least 16:10 is quite a common one at least (and it was also your web version windowed aspect ratio).

The actual gameplay was maybe taking rail shooters a bit too far. There was pretty much nothing to do and almost impossible to fail. Took me quite a while to actually notice that the rocks even did damage on contact. And that if I'm correct at guessing that the first bar in the hud was health. Still have no idea what all the other bars were and and why I was even shooting at those purple plants/crystals. Dunno what was up with that spinny thing on the cave corners, it felt a bit silly and unnecessary.

I think you should show dimmer versions or just the outlines of stars here to better indicate what that one box is at all. It also seems to completely forget the previous level scores when you beat a new one. That or I just failed to get any stars on the first two while completely dominating the final one (even though I was messing around trying to hit rocks etc on it). searchcontinues.png

The music was nice but a bit too upbeat for the completely chill and non threatening gameplay. Maybe something slower and more atmospheric would have fit it better.

Polygon Bash by josehzz 2018-08-19T19:59:50Z

polybash.png

I think the whole shooting recoil movement made the whole gameplay kinda awkward. It made the boring *"stay next to a wall between spikes and shoot everything from there"* the best tactic. The only downside to that tactic was that sometimes when you died to a spike, after respawning you couldn't move at all without dying right there and then again. I think respawning at the center of the stage would make more sense.

One way to get rid of that boring tactic as being the best way to play would be to incorporate a multiplier that would go up every kill and would drop back to one if you touched a wall. Multiplier systems are always a nice and easy way to make scoring more interesting.

If I understood correctly, the music wasn't made for the game during the jam so this bit of the rules applies. I'll just leave the audio category unrated... > You’re free to use 3rd party Artwork/Music/Audio assets, or assets you previously created, but we ask that you OPT-OUT of the respected voting categories (Graphics, Audio).

The sound effects and visual effects were quite nice but could have used more of them. Enemy deaths especially would have felt more rewarding with that same pulse ring effect (maybe smaller though) and some nice booming explosion sound.

Anyways, good job!

The Gargoyle Landing by BoopsGames 2018-08-16T18:38:51Z

"Run stupid game", probably the easiest humor category points anyone could get.

Interesting idea combining twin stick shmup with a match three puzzle game. Took me ages to notice that it was indeed a match three game as well. And I think it was a bit too hard to align the blocks correctly because they were actually 2x3 blocks on a grid. Having them be 1x1 would be more manageable and enjoyable.

And when the arena starts to fill up, the AI just decides to screw the rules and walk through the blocks with their hilarious spinny animation (which seems like a programming bug that was too funny looking to fix). Well, the player character kinda cheats too by having a dagger that with a single swing can shoot a laser for the whole duration of the game and also gets points by shooting said laser at frozen enemies.

The enemy sprite looked awesome (block or not). The player character wasn't bad either but it had a completely different style.

Seems like there are two possible ways to play. Run around mainly killing stuff and dodging them and hope you get some matches or the methodical try to manually make matches while killing what you can. Whichever strategy I go with, I seem to end up with a very similar score in the end.

garg.png

Good job!

**edit:** Oh no, you've opted out of humor category. That start button and the enemy spin were easily enough to push you far beyond the majority.

Stjarna Höfuð by gamebuilder 2018-12-04T16:55:25Z

It was a bit weird. Even after reading that huge wall of text I was still a bit confused.

First of all, the audio was not great. There was a ton of crackling in it can that collection sound got old very fast. Adding some variation and getting rid of that crackling is the key here.

It was way too hard to get the game going. Had to try several times to actually reach a star before the mana ran out. And even after that, if the first start you went for wasn't purple, you were pretty much dead anyway. And the stars were so tiny in the beginning (and Alice's acceleration was so slow) that you pretty much had to take a stab in the dark and hope for the best. But once the momentum picked up it pretty much started playing itself becoming a DVD player screensaver and also impossible to lose anymore. Adding more control to the head and then adding some kind of fail state (maybe crashing into the moon when not big enough) would make it whole lotta better.

Anyways, good job!

Göldin by Paul_P1 2018-12-08T10:39:02Z

I got so close to actually getting to kill everyone. I did figure out that the same colored dudes would get mad if their brethren were killed. So I had to wipe them out one race at a time, kinda morbid btw. But the flashing and them grouping too much together got into way all the time. I always couldn't find one of the torch carrying ones or their letters in time. The letters were also kinda small and slanted to a weird angle so it was hard to clearly read them in time. I also tried the strategy of first positioning my fingers on top of the keys of the blue crew and then try to take them out in a quick swoop but somehow that method failed every single time as well as at least one dude miraculously always survived.

The look was nice and cohesive. Super simple design but it worked very well. The sound effects were a bit bland, for example could have used some more oomph on that explosion sound.

After I thought I was done with the game I came here to read the comments and saw you mention that you can actually finish without killing anyone so I had to go back to figure it out. Only to encounter this issue where the the camera was offset to either corner and I'd only see a portion of the screen. It was always this if not in fullscreen and 1/5 of the screen bottom right corner if in fullscreen so it became completely unplayable. Even refreshing the page didn't help here at all.

golin.png

And obviously while I was screenshotting and starting to write this I heard some new sounds from the game. Seems like the pacifist route was even easier that expected...

Anyways, good job!

Precedence by chauchau 2018-12-04T16:29:19Z

Neat! There wasn't a much of a game there but was interesting nonetheless. Would have been nice to have a bit clearer indication of when the world was going to end (which I think the shakyness was about). Went for a second run now and it was quite clear very near the end but it was way too late to react to it at all.

The whole take/leave selection felt meaningless since I always just took them. Could have been just automatic or presented a bit more lore about the people with more interesting choices. For example some people could be bad and backstab you or something. You know, something along the lines of FTL events. Do the people you rescue actually impact the ending at all? I tried to go for a run where I only rescued only blue people but the ending was the same I think. I do know leaving alone or just with few people do at least change one line in there.

Also would have been nice to have bit of a different look on the buildings I've already collected from, it was very easy to get confused about your surroundings because of the similar looking buildings.

Turning felt a bit sticky, hasty and nauseating and at least those hourglass shaped buildings were floating off the ground.

But anyways, cool game, good job!

Precedence by chauchau 2018-12-05T14:43:17Z

So I was along the right path on my deductions but the changes in the endings I saw at least were so minor that they were almost unnoticable.

JellyWay by auxC 2018-12-06T19:25:29Z

10.gif

So is there actually an 11th star? Played it through second time just to verify that I grabbed a star on each level. Did one level have two of them or what? A level select would be nice for star hunting reasons...

edit: Now right after writing this I immediately got it. Pretty clever, I'm dumb :blush:

Found a bit of a game breaking exploit quite early on:

jellycheat.gif

It would have pretty much trivialized all the puzzles so I decided to play the game without it. And leaps of faith are never fun especially so if there is a specific spot you need to land at not to die.

jellyleap.png

The leftmost guy on the last level was completely unnecessary, because first you could manage to jump and grab this dude:

jellygrab.gif

And then dunno if this was even how you were supposed to do the next bit:

jellyclimb.gif

And even with that skip the last level felt a bit too long and hard. Sure it was easy on my second time through but I think it was just too much too fast. It would indeed be fine if the game had more levels and a more linear difficulty progression.

The game looked and sounded sweet. I guess there was bit of a mismatch between the colorful characters and moody dark backgrounds but it still kinda worked. The laser cannons and the beams themselves looked quite out of place quality wise compared to the rest of the art. The same kinda goes for the spikes.

That's pretty much all the critique I can come up with. I would happily solve more puzzles of this, good job!

Amphora delivery by Tomáš Selmeci 2018-12-03T16:51:22Z

amphora.png

The art design was cool and so was the animation but the spit ball/splash and music felt very out of place.

The combat was very easy and repetitive as hell. I think I got hit just two times on the whole run, one of them because I tried to see if the shield would actually do something and the other because I pulled two goat deer thingies at once and got ganked. Didn't even use those vases at all because the combat didn't warrant for the use of limited supply (in fear of whats to come). I tried those throwing spears once but didn't feel like they speeded up the killing that much either. So over half of the functionalities of the character were completely pointless, including the jump.

Completely understandable that you got stuck implementing the different mechanics and didn't get to add different enemies etc. It's all about scoping your project correctly and prioritizing. Lessons learned, I guess.

Anyways, good job!

Super Space Meltdown by EatAtJoes 2018-12-05T15:23:54Z

ssm.png

And half of that time was spent on waiting for elevators. Yeah, they were way too slow. Just having to wait for things is never fun. Probably best way would be to make them go lot faster when the player isn't on and a bigger delay on each end. The elevators sometimes also straight up refused to take me with them so I had to keep walking on them to stay on the ride.

Losing those all those skills felt a bit much but I guess that was the point. Didn't even try the reverse one because that would have screwed with my brain too much. The air mobility one was the second one I sacrificed and it was just right at the end I realized what it actually did (the final bit where you had to go left). Not sure if you explained it in the help section but at least I forgot it if you did. Would have been better to squeeze the descriptions to the selection screen. The choices could have been made with keyboard also, not too intuitive to need to switch between mouse and keyboard for those choices only.

The vision sacrifice was a huge annoyance for a first time player. Had to make so many jumps of faith because of it. The only thing that didn't seem like much of a issue to lose was the floatiness one. It was the first to go and never missed it, I think it actually felt better without it.

Dunno why but I loved that landing pose. It had that mega man jumping like "YEEEAAH" attitude. It was hindered a bit by that weird jittering before actually hitting the ground and the slowdown while jumping forwards and trying to keep going but still cool. The music was cool also, obviously could have used some sound effects to go with it.

Anyways, good job and welcome to LD!

Cultist's Quest by James Dunlap 2018-12-08T22:30:58Z

So now I'm actually kinda pissed off. I spent a good hour and a half wandering around these desolate caverns just to suddenly die for some unknown reason. It was probably at least floor six or seven, the starting room had a rat and a goblin which I dispatched even though they took a surprisingly huge amount of hits to kill compared to anything else seen before. Oh the game actually seems to keep track of the action log from the previous run...

cq37.png

Well that's a lot of damage compared to all those single digit hits seen before. And I guess that goblin was one of those "hey I'm hiding under a door, so I guess lore wise I'm hitting you through a keyhole or something cause I give zero fucks" type of monsters.

So suck it Rodney, your amulet can rot in that cursed dungeon...

So I think you way over scoped your project and fell flat in your ambitiousness. You spread yourself so thin that you ended up with quite a lot of different functionalities (which still aren't enough for a classic roguelike) and none of them are very tight. Quite frankly, it ended up being quite boring. The floors were way way waaay too huge and empty. I mean I at least had nowhere near enough memory to remember even a 10th of these identical looking rooms and corridors. That's the beauty in classic roguelikes having the whole map visible at once, it's impossible to get lost. And even the bit more modern remakes of Nethack with graphics that can't fit the map to screen at once have a minimap. Did you even beat the game without using the zoomed out Unity editor as a makeshift map?

The rooms and corridors were unnecessarily big too. The rooms had no reason at all to be bigger than 5x5 and those 50+ tile corridors were a slog (with no repeat key functionality). Quite a few times ran into these "cool" minute long corridors that just ended up in a dead end which resulted in me trampling over half of my 10+ sacfifices because of the frequent visits there.

cqkey.png

This key/door system you had was quite dumb. The classic way of any key opening any locked door would have been way better. Sure, I forgot that there is a bash door key which made it 100 times worse but can you really blame be, you drop quite a big list of keys for a player who doesn't know anything about your game and expect them to remember everything (without any contextual information about the actual game). That's another beauty in classic roguelikes, even though they had tons of different keys and ascii graphics, only thing you really had to remember was the ? key. So I did try K after getting frustrated about the lock & key system but you had gone the complete other route of making it be bash and not kick and also binding the key to something unexpected. I wouldn't have remembered the sacrifice button either if I wouldn't tried to search at one of these...

cqsearch.png

What's the point of those? Didn't see much value in the whole sacrifice/spell thing either. The spell wasn't really that much more useful than melee because there was no way to figure out whether a monster is a real threat or not. And up to my cruel end, I didn't even know the monsters could pose a threat at all since everything I had met that far was just tickling me and I had health potions galore in my inventory.

Oh, it seems these comment posts actually have a character limit. To be continued in the post below... :sunglasses:

Cultist's Quest by James Dunlap 2018-12-08T22:31:09Z

The inventory system had its flaws too. First of all, what the deal with the horizontal scroll there? There wasn't even a need for a vertical one either. The inventory could only hold 10 items and you managed to fit five lines to that action log box that was like a quarter of the screen. At first the identify mechanic seemed completely pointless as well. I identified herb, bread and water and came up with herb, bread and water... what a surprise. Few floors later (and these and non door kicking floors so it was ages), I discovered my first spoiled food and thought that maybe identifying them is necessary indeed just to realize afterwards that even if you identify one as bad, you can't discard them and they will clutter up your inventory forever if you don't eat it anyway. Even the potions (except for the full heal one) I ignored completely after a while. Not sure if it was the case but I quite sure I quaffed same color potion twice in a row for inverse effects. So I deemed them more hassle for what their potential effects were worth.

The graphics were fine I guess even though I prefer my roguelikes ASCII. The music got repetitive quite fast.

Did you do the dungeon generation algorithm yourself from scratch? It seemed to take quite a long time to generate and you mentioned something about it requiring threading which resulted in no web version too. Shouldn't really be that demanding and for sure shouldn't require threads. There are also plenty of readily available made generators for dungeons just like these (and other kinds too) in various different languages (and even porting should still be faster than making one from scratch).

At least it sometimes presented me with a precious gift like this...

cqyay.png

Anyways, I'll end my #stillbitter ramblings here. Good job!

Cultist's Quest by James Dunlap 2018-12-13T05:17:59Z

I don't think you understood what I meant with repeat functionality. I meant NetHack like numpad 5 and then direction to go that way until something unexpected (encountering a monster, reaching the end of the corridor) happens.

Total Party Kill by adventureislands 2018-12-04T15:47:17Z

Superb! I just want more of it. Banging tunes (still listening to that sweet ending track as I'm writing this), sweet pixel art, what more could one want? Loved the ending too. The sound effects were the only thing that wasn't 100% awesome and you were a bit stingy with them. There was quite a lot of actions that had no sound at all which made them feel weird.

It this the actual intended solution? Seems kinda weird that the arrows behave differently on already dead comrades... tpk-huh.gif

And I know for sure this one isn't the intended way... tpk-fly.gif

Difficulty progression was a bit off and there were some levels next to each other that had the exact same solution. Even those samey levels would work if they didn't come right after the other. And the the difficulty curve doing a bit of a sine wave wasn't a huge issue either since it actually made the pacing feel nice since you didn't get stumped on every single level near the end. And the knights ability was completely pointless if you exclude the tutorial level. He was just there as a meat shield for the whole game afterwards. Well not really, he was kinda useful as a frustration vent when not figuring out the solution :wink:

Anyways, great job! Easily my favourite so far...

edit: Oh yeah, I actually worked on a game (that I never ended up finishing) with very similar idea couple of years ago but in it all the characters were the same and level varying amount of them had to reach the end.

Total Party Kill by adventureislands 2018-12-04T16:32:19Z

@ild-games-llc I did that level completely differently. Shot the knight guy to the right side wall with bow, then turned him to ice so he fell to the button.

GameJam Sacrifices by playball 2018-12-05T14:55:01Z

The link says PC, Mac and Linux but only the Windows version is there...

GameJam Sacrifices by playball 2018-12-05T16:19:15Z

Oh I see, there is a dropdown where you select the platform and you need to build to each separately.

Yahtzle! by 1257th or nothing 2018-12-07T18:41:56Z

Pretty damn cool! A whole lot better for sure than that normal boring stupid yahtzee.

yahtzle.png

At first I thought it was super hard and luck based but in the end I figured that the skills don't change sixes to ones so I was golden on my second try. I still taught it would be too RNG based on the start but I guess you can just bank some corn and make that six yourself if you keep missing it all the time like I did. I was also dumb enough on my first run to get too many yellow/brown dice so I couldn't even fit a red one in.

The look (even though the graphics were a bit blurry) and sound were good. Sure, it could have used some spiffy effects and animations. And of course it would have been nice to have all that how to play/win stuff in the actual game and probably not in a format of a huge wall of text. The problem with that is that even though I skimmed through the help, when I actually got to the game I still didn't know what to do because I had zero context about anything when reading the rules.

But my biggest issue with the game was the dice/button placement. I mean the player constantly has to constantly move the curosr between the left and right edges of the screen to perform anything. Especially so on a touchpad. I know it's kinda nitpicky and minor but adding hotkeys and/or reorganizing UI elements is also super easy.

Anyways, good job! Could quite easily add some more scenarios to lengthen and vary the gameplay a bit.

Ritual Slaughter by Steel_Dev 2018-12-07T20:21:13Z

Couldn't beat it in couple of tries and I don't think I wanna slog through that intro bit another time anymore. Sure the ritual bit was neat the first time and gave a nice anticipation of whats to come but it should 100% be skippable considering how difficult the actual fight is. It was kinda weird that you had to sacrifice 5 things right from the get go, like wasn't that over half of the available abilities. I mean, you can't sacrifice what you don't have. Quite a lot of people seem to have gone with the sacrifice and ability and that probably would have worked better here too.

Seems like the different abilities weren't balanced very well. Losing vision was a no brainer every time after I noticed that it just makes the screen a bit darker. And I didn't try the unnerfed melee but after sacrificing it became completely useless. So it seemed a lot smarter to just focus on the gun. Except it ran out of ammo and that reloading thing that has already been mentioned quite a few times. And I'm not even sure I managed to pick up any of those ammo drops. Were you supposed to pick them up by just walking over or did you need to hit E? I mean that's quite a lot for left hand only to constantly rotate around WASD to circle strafe around satan to dodge his fireballs and at the same time keep mashing R and E every second or so. I don't have enough fingers in one hand for that.

The art was pretty good even though it wasn't quite cohesive. There were some classic z-ordering issues with the sprites where stuff that was further back (i.e. more up) were on top of closer things. I'd also increase some of the UI elements some more. Like the mission info box and definitely make the red text in the middle more readable by adding a white outline or something to it. It was a bit hard to read and I'm not even red green color blind. The font selection didn't help with that either. I at least didn't hear any music at all even though there was a slider for it in the menu and the sound effects were also quite bland and repetitive.

Anyways, good job! I rarely complain about difficulty (being too high at least :sunglasses:), I'd happily bash my head against this mofo until conquered if it was a bit more accessible...

Crunch Clicker by Samuli 2018-12-03T15:39:28Z

crunch.png

Even though it seems like nothing really impacted the game progress at all, it would have been nice to even have an illusion of choice. The "event" dialog popped on top of the stat displays so I couldn't even see what I should decrease. And a bit more variety would have been nice, maybe even as radical as allowing a stat increase sometimes so you could even minmax your build a bit instead of just slowly draining all your stats to zero. The messages were all funny and all that but just "go down a level on stat" or "got a new keyboard" got old pretty fast and revealed the actuality of nothing mattering at all. But maybe that was the message you were trying to tell.

But yeah, good job and well done on achieving a zero crunch compo game. Can't quite say the same even though I slept the normal amounts and took plenty of breaks.

Sacrifice Carrier by M2tias 2018-12-03T15:20:22Z

Pretty neat! Crisp pixel art and nice tunes, as is quite often the case with PICO-8 titles.

It was a bit confusing at first because the sacrificing button did not seem to do anything and normal shots were indeed killing the enemies just fine. But it all made sense after first encountering one of the big enemy ships and failing horribly against them.

As you mentioned yourself, hitting the rocks was hard. And even with a fixed hitbox, it would be better if the little shots just didn't go through but instead stopped and maybe made some kind of immune indicating sound to more clearly point out that the power isn't enough. And against the little ships, it would be more satisfying if the fully charged shot wouldn't stop at the first ship and instead you could mow them all down with a single well placed shot.

But yeah, well done! All that is really missing is more content and an actual difficulty curve. After going for a second run after my first success, it was very very easy.

Tower of Sacrifice by notime4games 2018-12-07T19:21:32Z

Pretty cool! Even though it was probably way too easy. There was so much blood that you could easily even skip couple of levels. I didn't even get hit once. Those floating eye thingies got close few times, I think just giving them some more movement speed could do the trick. And obviously other enemies could be beefed up some more too. Even the intimidating looking sword guys with their cheaty non-telegraphed attacks and missing attack animation sprite were no match for my dodgy skills.

tos-broken-swordguy.gif

And this thing also looks like you just didn't stretch the black background to be big enough :smiley:

tos.png

Other than the difficulty, the overall gameplay was great. The controls felt good and responsive. The pixel art looked nice but could have used more variety. Same goes for the sound effects and the lack of music didn't help there much either. Could add in some more feedback when hitting the enemies like a flash them white or something along those lines.

The camera did have some issues like erratic and jittery movements mainly when jumping/falling. It probably was because it was so aggressively sticking to the player sprite. But yeah, 2D cameras (and don't even get me started on 3D ones) alone could eat a weekend from a developer and still be far from perfect.

Anyways, good job!

Tower of Sacrifice by notime4games 2018-12-08T06:21:10Z

@lucien-catonnet Haha, coyote time! Never heard that term before but immediately got what that means. I've kinda struggled when trying to explain it calling it something like a grace period when running off a platform or something like that but that is just perfect. Thanks for that! :smiley:

And yes, it pretty much always should be there on platformers. Sure this didn't require much precision platforming but it would have made a difference. There was few times when I failed the jumps when first going up those back and forth sections and was kinda missing such feature.

Maroon3d by juju 2018-12-05T16:41:47Z

It was confusing as hell. The "attack" seemed more like a glitch and enemies have so big hitboxes that they hit you when they're not even nowhere here. Especially when they're above/below you. The hitbox in an isometric style game should only pretty much cover the feet portion so the sprites can easily overlap vertically without collision. The cultists phasing through walls was just unfair and they quite often ambush you so fast that you have to learn the whole level by mistake first. And your own "attack" is horribly inaccurate.

The main character animations were cool. Some of that love could have been spread to other characters and the environment. Like the main character even had an idle animation yet the cultist had two frame walk cycle and the poor poor boys were just static cardboard cutouts. I liked the design of the cultist very much though.

But anyways, good job! With mainly that hitbox annoyance fixed and maybe some audio, I bet it would be a fun experience.

Sacrifice for the zone by theBOSS12 2018-12-03T16:09:05Z

I think I'll have to end up with this as my hi score: zone110.png

Very neat idea and also well executed. It looked good and sounded nice, pretty much only thing that irked me art wise was that explosion effect.

First thing I'd "improve" UI wise is the timer. Would be more logical to have it start from the max and count down to zero. And even better would be to change it to be percent instead of seconds. And I think it would look better if the said timer and other UI elements would be "painted on the ground" just like the zone text and ring so the balls would appear on top of them. Another thing would be to somehow indicate the explosion cooldown somewhere.

I liked the enemy variety even though there could be more and they weren't balanced quite perfectly. And of course there could be more different kinds. The green one felt a bit op. And speaking of that one, its functionality could have been indicated better. Maybe having it be be black (you know, bomb like) and have it blink red/yellow after the initial hit with a hissing sound would better indicate its behaviour. Or maybe have it grow spikes after the initial hit so it would look like a sea mine.

I don't think there is a score based game that wouldn't be made more interesting by adding a multiplier system. That way even a same length run could result on different scores based on the experience of the player. Something like bumping up the multiplier on each quick chain hit and resetting it on explosion or too big of a delay. Or something along those lines.

Powerups would be another thing to make the runs a bit more varied. Or even better. Make the enemies come in waves with shopping period in between them to allow purchasing of permanent upgrades of some sort. It would also help to pace the game a bit better instead of just being constant non-stop action.

But yeah, well done! Very simple, yet interesting and super fun game.

They are coming. by mosaic 2018-12-03T16:33:51Z

After my first horrible run, this was truly a surprise and it happened quick: coming.png

So yeah, it was super easy. I think I only killed like 5 zombies total on that run. Could be longer and have some kind of progressive difficulty curve. And maybe have a visible goal you're going for instead of just out of the blue claiming the player victor without them even doing anything really. And the balance wasn't quite right when on my first run I tried to kill them as much as I could only to find out that if there is any zombies in the bottom 10% section of the board, anything I'd send out will get immediately murdered.

Wasn't a huge fan of the background graphics. It made even the character sprites bleed into this muddy mess. Combat didn't feel too good either. I think adding a bit of knockback to sword swing would make it better. It'd at least make it feel less awkward. And the whole game was over so fast that I didn't even get to familiarize myself with those different stats bars on the bottom of the screen.

And a skip option for the intro would be very nice (after trying to go for a another try). I think it takes longer to watch through that than to actually beat the game :smiley:

Anyways, good job!

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-03T16:55:36Z

@slowpro Yeah, it was actually intended to be in the way. So you couldn't slow down too much.

@dusho I like to usually be not too hand-holdy and to leave the mechanics for the player to figure out themselves with only showing the required information.

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-03T17:23:37Z

@aplite Thanks! I tried to inform that (even with an animation) on the third level. Did you not see that at all?

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-03T19:27:42Z

@aplite Cool, nice to know that the difficulty progression is fine. I was a bit afraid that it would be too easy before I added the few later lavels. Did you make it all the way trough? Well, people usually complain my games being too hard so maybe my difficulty judgement skills aren’t quite up to bar.

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-07T05:22:17Z

@dietrich-epp Cool, thanks for making the video!

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-08T11:40:25Z

@mashas & @shiqichuan good job on making it all the way through! That last one is indeed quite tricky unless I'm not aware of a simpler solution. It was one of the last level additions I added. Actually drew that and one other level on paper while I was having dinner and after adding them to the game I realized that the solution I had planned didn't even work. But playing around in the level for some time, at least good five minutes, I found a working solution with the same set of demons so it was still all fine. And that's how it earned the last level spot.

@lucien-catonnet Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! I do get your point of disliking mixing puzzle and skill. I do like them both so obviously I enjoy the mix of them too. But everyone can't like the same things. And the required skill isn't really that high either, there is only a couple of places where real precision is required. But I do understand the frustration of knowing exactly what to do and not just being able to execute, been in the same boat so many times. There also shouldn't be any artificial delay added to the release. The spinning stops instantly on the same frame when the button is released.

Good find on those bugs! The pre-hold one I've even encountered myself post-jam and seen the music slowdown on some video. Happily though both of them have very low impact on the gameplay and immediately fix themselves right afterwards. But still noting them down if I decide to do some kind of enhanced version after the rating period is done.

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-08T13:11:23Z

@1257th-or-nothing Yeah, didn't implement progression saving this time since it seems like a huge rarity that people go back to a jam game. I think I've had it in all my previous LD games and the first time I drop it, someone notices the lack of it :smiley:

But yeah, will definitely add that if I decide to do a post-jam version... thanks for playing!

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-11T15:14:24Z

@glimaleite Many thanks! Yeah, I'm quite sure I will continue with the project. Just gotta make that holding down mechanic 100% clear and add a whole bunch of levels with some interesting and fitting additional mechanics like the moving blocks that @samh mentioned. Those were indeed on my mind even on the jam scope but quite quickly realized that it's not quite as simple as adding a moving object there. Gotta recalculate the arm positions if stuck to a moving one and check their collisions etc. So I decided to leave it out for now and just focus on the basics. But those would definitely will bring in some nice new level ideas.

@dk5000p I totally agree. I do regret not adding more of those "can you squeeze all these diaballs in this space" type of levels...

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-12T06:55:00Z

@secretpocketcat Thanks! Yeah, I think I know exactly the levels you mean and actually have already switched those. Haven't seen or heard anything about bug you've encountered before and can't really come up with a reason why such would happen. Did you notice that the diaballs only spawn after you bring you cursor to that rectangular area? Did you make sure the game canvas was actually focused after changing windows?

@mertios Yeah, I think it ended up being quite a lot harder than I expected. Actually, in the end of day one, when I probably had like half of the levels, I thought it would be too easy. The levels are indeed all in the same scene. All but the current one are disabled and when changing levels, I enable the next one and after the transition I set the previous back to disabled.

And I will never take it down even a notch with the particle effects! :sunglasses:

Diaball by Antti Haavikko 2018-12-15T08:32:57Z

@someoneman Thanks! What do you mean by lag? A slower computer and it can't handle all the effects? It should be pretty clear on how close you can get, the collider is the size of the head circle so not including the hair, beard and horns.

Ultimate Snackrifice by Dorkulon 2018-12-04T15:05:29Z

fridge.png

Very nice! Really brought me some nice memories of some weird suitcase packing game from the early 90s. One thing that game did better was that it presented the player with a predefined set of items that actually could all fit inside the suitcase. And it also had the additional complexity of allowing rotation of items. Can't really remember it that well but I'm pretty damn sure this one looked and sounded a whole lot better though. Super cute!

Wasn't a huge fan of these mobile restrictions. Could easily fit all three screens next to each other on desktop. There also was a usability mismatch with the screen transitions, you could just hover to change when dragging an item but had to click without one. Yeah, super minor but still annoying.

There is also a bit of a problem with the random nature of the game. It's very easy (borderline boring) until the very end and then it's all just up to the RNG. Like in the above screenshot, I went 100% fine until 2x2 space left and the game just decided to throw me a curveball in the form of never before seen wiener and other huge items that I possibly couldn't fit there. Those swap slots on the table/floor didn't really help much either since they couldn't even hold the problematic pieces. Until the very end you could easily just use the empty fridge space for the same functionality. And swapping would be better if the piece you're trying to put in the fridge only overlapped with one item, it would add the new item in and pull the existing item out.

Aanywas, awesome job!

Ludumiumings by smiley 2018-12-06T18:35:28Z

ludium.png

And even after that I'm still a bit confused about what was the actual intended way to play. What I really kept doing was sending as many fast peeps as I could before enemies started spawning. And afterwards just trying to send fast ones on the gaps of flies and when they eventually caught me, just click on them for a sec to let the flies pass.

Now with a better understanding I went for a second playtrough and came up with a better strategy and was a whole lot faster too. At least I think it was better since I got a better score...

ludrun2.png

In the start I just mashed medium dudes for the whole amount and pretty much used the same initial stopping method or in a bigger mess used fortify on one dude so the others could go in peace. I tried using destruct too but timing that was just too hard in my opinion. In the end it still feels like it was unnecessary to have three different classes of dudes. I think it was also unnecessary to disable the speed button if you hadn't already sent out all your guys. It made it just tedious if you didn't want to send all your guys at once.

The art was cool and so was the music. Was it the case that the miners weren't completely opaque? It looked a bit weird when they were walking close to each other on a vertical line. The color selection of the hp/ludumium bars and the name of the unit kinda clashed against the rest of the nice color palette and made them seem out of place.

Overall my biggest issue on the game was the wording of those different numbers. Dunno why and what would be the better way to inform about that but "safe in base", "left on field" and "to send" didn't quite click with me before pretty much the very end of the game. Maybe having the "safe in base"/"to send" next to the corresponding doors would make it clearer. The left on field one could easily be scrapped altogether, it just made things more confusing. Maybe my confusion about those number was because I thought they were mining the ludumium from the level instead of just transporting it.

These dudes can also shoot lasers from their crotches while walking...

ludblast.png

Anyways, good job!

Radioactive Worm Storm by MarkoPoloDev 2019-04-29T15:07:27Z

Oh cool, someone using SunVox! Music was nice and moody and the pixel art was cool and crispy. Loved the animations, especially the clouds and the lightning. Nice touch and they really brought the game alive.

So, nice to see a tutorial but I'm dumb and forgot the most important bit after reading the whole thing through and played without any memory about the scrolling mechanic. Needless to say that it was quite boring. Then I went for another round and tried to play properly (as far as I'm aware) but didn't really make it any further than on the first run. What is the intended strategy here? I tried to spread myself to both directions as far as possible to gain more energy but the long walk for the robots meant that the far towers kept getting bodied by maggots and then because of the wormholes they eventually boxed me in and ended me.

Well, went for a third (and fourth) try and made it through with the boring strategy of just using three lightning rods and waiting. Not very immersive gameplay...

rws.png

Anyways, good job!

Radioactive Worm Storm by MarkoPoloDev 2019-04-29T18:39:38Z

@argensis Yeah for sure it would have been better to sprinkle in those help messages in the middle of the game. Would have spared me one run of not remembering to scroll. The gameplay wasn't that hectic anyway that you'd easily have time to see some tutorialing while playing.

The Adventures of Bileous by LyghtningWither 2019-04-29T15:28:21Z

First of all, I have nothing bad to say about MsPaint graphics even though I personally enjoy hand drawn MsPain art more than the too symmetrical geometric shapes. But the color selection of just using bright pure colors hurts my eyes and soul. I'm no artist myself but I can wholeheartedly recommend using a tool like https://coolors.co/ to generate a palette of just a few colors that look nice together. I use it on almost every game jam!

Then to the gameplay. The enemy spawning was cheap and didn't give any warning resulting of many unavoidable damages taken. The AI was quite relentless if you happened to corner yourself but on the other hand it was dumb enough to be exploited by getting them stuck on the buildings.

The hitboxes were not very obvious and were too large. It would have made more sense if the character colliders was like this:

hitbox.png

...since it's kinda mimicking isometric view anyway. And the hitboxes for damaging the player should always be way way smaller than the sprite itself to make it seem not unfair.

Made it through on my second try! First time I would have probably made it too but I seemed to miss the weight item.

bileous.png

Didn't really see or understand the use for all the items either. Were they all even necessary?

Anyways, good job!

Grand Theft ATP by Erudis 2019-04-29T18:37:07Z

Nice idea, though it ended even before it really got going. Would have definitely needed more content. And half of the levels (if not all) were even setup so that it was impossible to fail.

atp.png

The visuals were clean and mouth sound effects are always cool in my books. The UI could use some love though, I'm not the biggest fan of solid white squares with black arial. You already had another font and a stylized play button in the intro screen, why not those in the game too instead :thinking:

One nice touch was the see through background on the help view (and even having in game help needs to be acknowledged in the jam scene) since it made it easy to see how the board was set up without the need to close the help view at all. Even though, I would have preferred for the descriptions to be in the game view itself as tooltips for the actual objects and buy buttons.

All in all, good job!

Grand Theft ATP by Erudis 2019-04-29T19:02:34Z

Good to hear! Generating a TMPro font takes like two seconds :wink: But yeah in all honestness I've even gone the route of using only images as text at some points because I had started with a font that was in a format not recognized by Unity (times before TMPro, I think it has a wider array of formats it supports).

Dr. Lud Umdare's Revenge by KunoNoOni 2019-05-03T14:11:27Z

Well that was super easy. I only managed to die because walking to those instant kill walls. The difficulty(ness) curve made the whole upgrade system completely pointless.

It sounded and looked ok but there were some minor issues... like the use of space here:

drludspace.png

Unity canvas has this option to scale with screen size, would have worked fine here.

unitycanvas.png

Also, sprinking in the controls on a wall of text isn't too fun. Should have had the lore text first and then the controls in a clear and separate section afterwards or something like that. And the whole epilepsy warning was kinda meh even though it maybe was needed because of this...

drludhuh.gif

And the gif doesn't even give full credit to all the blinking and flashing that happended there (each time I opened a door) because the low framerate. Also had some z-ordering issues. Usually it's best (in isometric-like games) to order sprite layers based on their y-axis coordinate.

drludordering.png

But yeah, it would have needed some length and difficulty to allow the upgrade system to actually kick in. Like first of all, make the enemies (if you can even call them that) move and be more threatening. Bullets would need more speed then though. The instant kill walls seemed unnecessary too and obviously a faster way to restart after death would be cool instead of needing to go through the whole menu.

Anyways, good job!

Sour Business! by GabrielH 2019-04-29T18:21:35Z

Funny stuff! No need to apologize about the audio, it fit the game perfectly and the graphics were adorable. And nice animations, good to see a fellow Anima2D user.

The controls were my biggest gripe. Or more like lack there of. The jump when running failed like 50% of the time and clearing even one fruit without running start was a bit too tricky. The balancing could have used some more work too, quite quickly the field was littered with non good fruit and no lemons anywhere. Also would have been to have some kind of end screen so I could know the score in the end.

I think my best score ended up being 10 bucks. Good job!

Lunch Lord by madjackmcmad 2019-05-04T17:45:53Z

After few tries, for some reason, I was determined to reach a high position on the leaderboards. And after maybe around two hours, I would be up there if the leaderboards were stable enough to work properly.

llhi.png

But they aren't and it's just stuck here...

llwaiting.png

Loads of small glitches and bugs that made the game less enjoyable as it could be. The biggest one was the weird teleportation behaviour of the enemies. Like they're still and when you get closer to them, they pretty much go super saiyan and sprint at breakneck speeds for a second or so. And the sheep do it too. Feels especially bad when you go close to a sheep that is with few enemies and then they're all like SYKE, sheep teleporting away from you and all the enemies ganking at your face instantly.

The bullets didn't despawn between the transition from town to cave. And because of that the following could happen were one is just insta killed on spawn because some bullets happened to be on that spot on town map.

lldead.png

The walls and collisions overall had some issues too. Sticking to walls and not being able to move next to them made them the deadliest enemy of all. It was also possible for enemies to spawn outside the playable area.

lloutside.png

Then there are the balancing issues. The stunlock was straight up ridiculous. Quite often getting hit just once spelled your doom because of it. The spatula hitbox was way too tiny in my opinion. Sure, it's supposed to be bad I guess but it's still the only even closely reliable weapon. Majority of the buyables were just too expensive (life-wise) and not that great. Their material costs really were a non-factor, you couldn't get life fast enough for them to become an issue really.

The blocks that spawned enemies were sometimes very unfair. They could spawn enemies all around you and you'd pretty much just be stuck between them gnawing at you from all angles. Especially the skeleton thingies were horrible at this since it was so hard to even spot them from all the bouncing bits.

It looked and sounded pretty slick. The only part that bugged me about it visuals wise was the weird and confusing was the wall "bottom" part that is probably supposed to be the actual wall, like isometric wise, but it also functioned on its own without the "top" bit. Looked weird. The UI was clean and functional if not that one leaderboard part of end where you couldn't select with mouse.

I smell some dev cheats on the screenshots you have up there. I hope you didn't only play the game like that during the development, it'd be an easy explanation to all these balancing issues.

Anyways, good job!

Escape from Hell by Becher 2019-04-30T16:15:20Z

Umm...

efh.png

So what did I miss, what was the whole point of that you die and go farm souls etc? The boss fight didn't get any easier and it wasn't really hard to begin with. Just tedious. Go forward, swipe (however many times you feel brave enough for) and walk back. Rinse and repeat for about ten straight minutes.

The outside scene looked gorgeous. Can't really say the same about the inside bit, it looked a bit rushed in comparison. The slime enemies also seemed very very buggy. They liked to completely disappear at times and sometimes just died on their own. That or the sword hitbox was extremely funky.

Controls didn't feel super great either. Sure, they did the job wouldn't really cut it if the game was more involved and the combat got even a bit harder. It should be more crispy and pixel perfect instead of floaty like this.

Anyways, good job! Even though short and very repetitive, it was an enjoyable ride!

Roboxery by cozmic 2019-05-01T16:54:17Z

Neat idea but just waiting around for a box to spawn is not fun. The smallest level was very easy, biggest hurdle was not getting bored while waiting for the spawns. But the other two gave me some problems...

In the second level I just couldn't get enough energy from selling the low value boxes and breaking them wasn't really an option either since it was too reliant on RNG. I dunno, the box values were barely enough to make some profit but didn't seem like enough to warrant a journey to the charging station. Seemed like it would have taken ages to fill the battery.

The biggest one I just couldn't even more the frames correctly to get a smooth path from spawn point to selling point and was constantly met up with the following bug(s) so I gave up. The box values also seemed as bad here as they were on the middle level.

roboxery-bug.gif

Also managed to break through the wall myself once and got stuck there which wasn't fun...

roboxery.png

Anyways, good job!

utsvulten by ditto 2019-05-04T12:33:40Z

Wow, what happened here, how did this blow up so much? Sure, it was awesome but the amount of ratings you've got is something I've never seen before... :thinking:

So yeah, I really don't have much to say about it other than that it was super cool. The only thing really I can critique about was the fact that the hand grabbing point wasn't at the cursor position. If the cursor wasn't visible, it wouldn't have mattered but now it made grabbing things just more confusing. Other than that, everything was top notch. Looked awesome and sounded superb.

Had to go for a second run to see if there was a different ending. By the way, there is at least one brain piece that isn't edible.

Anyways, awesome job! Sure, it wasn't much of a game but for what it was, it was perfect.

RoShamBo ++ by Von Vista 2019-04-29T14:34:04Z

There is no Mac client inside the zip (nor Linux for that matter). Unity doesn't automatically make all three platforms when you build, gotta target and build each separately...

builds.png

Lifeless -- A Little Depressing Game by tfdiaz 2019-04-29T18:55:40Z

Got this warning every time I ran it and it for some reason didn't work when I tried with terminal but ran just fine when I opened it from iTerm.

life.png

The whole giving and taking life thing wasn't very clear. I mean, if I was even doing it correctly (sure there was some color change I think) and what it did. I guess the bad red stuff was killing me and I could use the family members to get more life. But what is the point of taking their life, didn't seem to give any score or nothing.

And one time the game opened with no red words at all, thanks for the infinite score! What is the max int in Rust, you can set that as my hi-score :sunglasses:

lifenored.png

And yeah, gotta love to see some obscure engine choices in this se of Unity and Godot. Good job!

Victor Spumante And The Raindrops of Burgundy by gimblll 2019-04-30T15:55:58Z

Well that sure was, umm, something. I would have made more of an effort to hide the true nature of the game and keep a facade of being a clicker game for a bit longer (and better). You know, kinda like Frog Fractions where it goes for some while before completely going off the rails. Doing a game like this isn't probably a best idea in a jam, can't really focus that much on several different mini games and they end up just being boring and buggy speed bumps in progressing the story.

I dunno how seriously I should feedback in a game like this but making a joke game shouldn't really go ahead of user experience. You used a whole bunch of different fonts and pretty much all of them were terrible. Most didn't really read very well and pretty much only one that did, arial, is just plain looking in a game and boring.

But anyways, good job, you managed to do quite a lot!

Victor Spumante And The Raindrops of Burgundy by gimblll 2019-04-30T17:34:12Z

@gimblll Nah, don’t get me wrong, I really liked the humor in this. I just usually like to point out what could be improved (and even my opinion on how) since it’s more constructive.

Does Money Grow on Trees by Antti Haavikko 2019-04-29T13:15:04Z

@jiri-hysek Thanks! Of course there is a system in place for the plants and funny that you mention Game of Life since that is the exact ruleset that is in play here (unless I somehow managed to botch the simple "algorithm").

Does Money Grow on Trees by Antti Haavikko 2019-04-30T03:45:00Z

@mika-la-grand @kyavi The plants actually follow the rules of **Game of Life**. That moving thing when on computer isn't really a bug. I was aware of it but decided to only disable moving when the speech bubble had a selection in it. Lets just think that is computer has voice commands :wink: Thanks for playing!

Does Money Grow on Trees by Antti Haavikko 2019-04-30T17:18:21Z

@samuli Not RNG, Game of Life :smile:

Does Money Grow on Trees by Antti Haavikko 2019-05-01T17:05:16Z

@historymaker118 Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!

You can use fertilizer only on the 10x10 grid in about the middle of the screen but not on places that are grass already (since it converts blank ground to grass). The plants grow and die following the rules of **Game of Life**. As a hindsight, maybe I should have actually told about it somewhere and even have the rules there.

So the death mechanic goes like this. You pretty much have 4 health and lose one every time you plant. If you eat and sleep, your health is restored back to max. But if you've planted more than 4 times, it will not heal you and you die instead on that night.

Showdown Arena by aplite 2019-05-03T13:49:54Z

Made it to round eight until I ran out of ammo...

showdownarena.png

The robots posed no threat at all, the only way to lose is to run out of ammo. Even after always buying ammo with almost all the life I had, in the end it took me quite a while of idling next to two remaining robots for them to be able to kill me.

Running and "aiming" (which made instructions confusing since mouse was aim and right click was actually zoom) both seemed unnecessary. The running had no downside at all so might as well keep that button held 100% of the time and that is never great gameplay. At least it should have been toggleable. And zooming didn't seem to do anything either, I managed to hit them just as well without it. It also would have been nice to be able to skip the countdown to next wave if done looting and shopping.

Would have needed a lot more sound and visual feedback. I think you had only two sound effects, the robot ambient and the bullet hitting them. Different shot sounds for different guns for starters, that would have given them the needed personality. Also would have needed a better indication of bullets hitting the robots, it was sometimes unclear whether I hit them or not (because of this it's still unclear to me if I could shoot over the obstacles or not). Same goes for picking up health packs. Their hitbox was way too tiny so I quite often had to just dance around over one and stare at my health to know if I picked them up or not. Picking them up was especially unnecessarily hard when they landed on their side.

The look was ok even though it was very desolate. The gun icons were very uninformative, the only one that was clear was the SMG, I only recognized the others from the vending machine. I wasn't a fan at all of the font and it's color. White would have been less obtrusive with maybe changing to red when you want to indicate something like low life or out of ammo.

Anyways, good job! Pretty solid gameplay and I at least didn't encounter any horrible bugs. The biggest thing holding it back was the balancing.

Heartreasure by nettaigyo 2019-05-03T15:06:10Z

Geez, that was a tough one. The last one alone took me about 20 minutes to find and even the final 5 took me ages.

30.png

It was really getting frustrating to find the final few. Some of them were hidden devilishly well and others were extremely tiny. I regretted it so much that I didn't download the standalone version to be able to see it full screen. Would have been nice to have full screen button on the web version too.

Some kind of hint system would have been very welcome. Like a button that you could press every x minutes (to limit its overuse) that would tell how many hearts are on screen or something like that.

The art was adorable and full of charm. This sign was probably my favourite though, such nonsense...

sign.png

The piano puzzle was cool even though I sucked at it because I somehow remembered that C was the first line :thinking:. The other "main puzzles" were kinda bland. Would have been nice to get some audio/visual feedback when actually solving those puzzles. Same goes for all the hearts though, I think I got some by accident (ie. furiosly clicking everything randomly because I was getting mad). Some of them had those nice animations but other just vanished. Animations were a nice small boost of motivation to keep going so the fact that like 90% of them just disappeared wasn't too fun :cry:

Anyways, awesome job, really lovely little puzzler!

**edit:** Kinda funny and sad at the same time that majority of people talking about it being Mac only at the start, have a game themselves that is Windows only.

Haemogoblin by Dorkulon 2019-04-30T15:30:26Z

Very nice. Even though I pretty much hate tower defence genre. Lovely art and music and puns in game names are always good in my books. Only visual thing that stuck to me was the lack of shading on knights and gnome on the actual game scene. Made them pop out (and not in a good way) from everything else that was more detailed. Another thing that lack the polish that otherwise was there was the health bars.

hg.png

The balancing and overall progress flow were a bit off. The only way I was able to win was to just use 5 spiders on the first round and then completely drain the gnome. That with our savings from the first round are enough to bank a win. The traps were just too damn expensive to warrant their use. I see in the screenshot above that you had them as 60 at some point, seems more fair.

The lack of progress was also quite depressing. You lost all your buildings each round and the enemies didn't seen to get harder or increase in number the further it went at all. I was just pretty much stuck in a loop of all the blood I could make with traps was barely enough to make as much blood the next round.

The shopping cutscene looked nice but started to be a bit annoying after being in the fore mentioned loop for quite some while. Would be nice if it was skippable. The potion filling wrongfully played the sound on each click wether the previous one was done or not.

Anyways, good job!

Arcade Wars by Aurel300 2019-05-07T15:29:20Z

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here. The claw boss is just not taking any damage whatever I do. On my first run, the same thing happened but on the claw miniboss. You see it flashing white here but do damage is taken. Kinda infuriating really.

aw.gif

I love shmups so this is right up my alley. I like the touhou-like graze mechanic even though I wasn't quite sure in the heat of action whether it was like that or not but now reading the description I see that it was there. Couldn't really see it that well in the game itself since the hurt flashing was so quick and there were always non-bullet coins in the mix too. The bullet coins and just straight up pickup coins could have looked a bit more different even though it didn't really matter since you didn't gather either with your actual hitbox.

I think the theme here was kinda working against the fun aspect of the game. The fact that spending too much money thinking that you'd get enough back soon enough was a bummer after dying and realizing that the starting life is the same you had after your shopping spree. And the whole slot machine thing sure was on theme but wasn't that fun either. Made the whole fast bullets thing way less cool than I thought when buying it since it always just triggered on times when it did nothing but waste my ammo/life. And I'm not even 100% sure what else was there (I'm quite sure you could get more bombs and maybe lives too).

And my last nitpicks are the fact that you had to use the mouse between levels. It's kind of a golden rule that if your gameplay is keyboard only, your menus should work with it too. And same goes for mouse only games. Obviously it's the best way to include both always. And the last super minor nitpick is the somehow OCD-level annoyance of leaving the ship at the buy spot spot after being done shopping. FFS, you moved me there automatically, now move me back! :angry:

And that's about it, nothing bad I can say about the visuals and sounds. Both were great and made it a cohesive experience. Good job!

**Edit:** Oh yeah, one more thing. Another touhou staple that could work here is the variable movement speed. Unless you're familiar, there is a button that slows down the movement of the character for more precise dodging capabilities. The reverse would be needed here and it could even be combined with the shooting button, so moving faster when not shooting. It wasn't too fun noticing a huge pack of coins floating away and your puny movement speed was not enough to catch them.

I've Got A Second Chance At Life But Now I'm An Axolotl And In Massive Debt by remruts 2019-05-04T10:49:35Z

Yay, finally found it! Good thing you had the same username on here and itch.io

First of all, you should probably update the links here to include Mac/Linux to not deter us weirdos away with the Windows only looking game. And you can consider the mac version tested, worked just fine except for the fact that a slice was missing from the top and bottom. About as much to only see half of the bubble icons. Lovely install instructions for the Mac version too on the itch.io page. Well, it's the same as Windows, just unzip and open the app.

Looked great and the music was pretty good even though it didn't really fit. Definitely would have needed some sound effects. Other than the sound missing sound effects (and maybe a bit spicier particle effects), the "game feel" was juicy and on point with the screen shake and whatnot. One thing that I was kinda missing was an aiming reticule instead of just default mouse cursor. I at least seem to have this mouse cursor blindness that after launching a game and in the heat of action, I don't seem to see the default mouse cursor at all.

The lack of other enemy types you told about (and even the boss) really messed with the difficulty here. If you can even call it difficulty since it was unexistent. The zombies were super unthreatening and the levels didn't get any harder, it was just repeating the same level again and again but you only got stronger. At least you should have increased the zombie count each level even though it wouldn't have really mattered either since they die so fast and do literally nothing. And after remembering the right click to suck the hearts, you make so much bank so fast that you can afford all the upgrades in a heartbeat. Speaking of the upgrades, the attack up was the only useful one (well, the speed up was ok too). All the different bubble (btw, big and spread were mixed) types were straight up worse than the default one.

The walls were super glitchy. Well, not the walls but the player collider maybe. It was very easy to get stuck on walls, especially on corners. And shooting around corners quite often resulted in the bubbles just evaporating on the walls.

Dunno how much time you spent on the level generation script but I think the whole going the roguelike route kinda held the game back a bit in this scope. The terrain was also very open, wouldn't have felt really different if it was just a big open rectangle with the ladder in a random spot. Adding hand crafted levels would have probably been better here and the time saved from not tinkering with the generation could have been used to add the additional enemies and threats.

Anyways, great job!

Writers Block by Copper_Aardvark_Games 2019-10-07T16:32:03Z

That is just a Windows version inside the zip. There is another dropdown on Unity build window for the selected build platform too (even though the left menu says them all) and you need to build each one independantly.

unitybuilds.png

Writers Block by Copper_Aardvark_Games 2019-10-07T17:02:24Z

Still not quite right. The mac version is actually supposed to be .app, not a folder. Linux build, or lunux as you called it :ok_hand::laughing:, seems to be fine. After renaming the folder to .app, it started but then this happened.

writersblock.gif

Except on frame rate that the gif has no chance of replicating. And neither clicking or pressing A/Q does nothing.

Writers Block by Copper_Aardvark_Games 2019-10-07T20:09:14Z

No problem dude! Thanks for trying to applease us mac/linux weirdos anyway. :heart: I’ll try again when I’m back at the computer.

World Not Found by TheGamer1123211 2019-10-10T16:42:14Z

Well, I'm taking a bit of a break to come write this while I'm stuck with a completely fucked up font. It started up being quite simple but for some unknown reason it keeps getting changed and getting more and more screwed up. Now there are only like 5 different letters and some many duplicates of them that it is kinda impossible to decipher anything. I managed to make sense of the command list (except for their descriptions I guess?) but no clue what to use them on...

nicefont.png

And now that I came here and saw a glance of your screenshots (and obviously couldn't resist about looking at the non fucked up manual, it was all smooth sailing. Still have a feeling I did something wrong and was supposed to fix the alphabet somehow. But that hint message reset right back to "reboot world one" that I didn't quite know what to do. So I hacked my way with a completely broken alphabet. I also did the image puzzle before the reboot sequence.

worldvictory.png

There were some huge performance issues and I dunno why. At start it kinda ran fine except for a minor hiccup every five seconds or so but it got much worse the longer I played. Especially when the console was rendering text. That timer must leak or increase or something cause it kept getting slower and slower to render a single letter (or hieroglyph in my case at least). So near the end when I output the manual, it took way more than a minute to fully show up. And while it was doing so I tabbed out to start writing this and it even lagged my writing to Chrome. And I'm on mac btw.

Really liked it, was right up my alley. Well the font thing was annoying (and the text slowdown didn't help either) but that also wouldn't have been so bad if the alphabet stayed 1:1 and not 5 different letters are square. The rest of the game paled in comparison difficulty wise to that's why I think I did something completely wrong. The wire puzzle hint about shot circuiting wasn't really helpful but that puzzle was quite easily solvable by just fiddling around for a bit. Other than that, I found the "hints" way too hand holdy.

Anyways, good job, you've made an interesting a fun game! :tada:

Monks Can Into Space by skill347 2019-10-08T18:36:00Z

Pretty cool!

Ended up wanting more so I guess that's a good sign. Went for another try and managed to raise my score but still didn't quite figure out the flower watering mini game. All others were very clear and easily enough explained by a single image glance.

monks.png

Well I had to kinda squint my eyes to fully understand the explanation screens because of the crispy super blocky pixel graphics on a big screen. This game is one where having non fullscreen option would have really benefited the outcome. Both, making the graphics look better and also making the gameplay, well maybe not easier really, but more pleasant since the mouse cursor wouldn't need to travel such long distances (especially in the meditating mini game). It would kinda be like a user setting, which do you prefer, speed or precision? Maybe just my mouse work isn't what it used to be, I don't really play games on computer anymore.

Also could have extended the gameplay some more quite easily by repeating the mini game sequence with increasing difficulty until failure. Right now it seems that the perfect score would not be too hard to achieve.

Anyways, good job!

edit: Definitely agree with @pashashef, I lost my cursor several times as well...

Monks Can Into Space by skill347 2019-10-08T19:44:55Z

@skill347 I did play the mac version since I'm on a mac. Wouldn't really be an option if I was on PC now would it? :sweat_smile:

Fearless Islands by Mattias Cibien 2019-10-08T15:16:55Z

Met my doom on the hands of the treant. Luck just wasn't on my side, I kept missing and they just kept pummeling me with criticals.

The look was great. Especially the cards and UI components, the map view was a bit bland in comparison. The combat log messages not fitting the boxes was quite off-putting. And in my opinion, the messages scrolled the wrong way and could have been cleared each round to lessen the confusion about what happened and when. And they were too fast to follow anyway, I just watched the numbers on the cards. And I still have no clue what the right side number on the cards means. Or what is the difference between normal attack and magic attack.

Loads of typos that made the game more seem less professional and more confusing than it needed to be. For example, it should be "magic", "reduce x by y" and I still have no what the sandals even do. I'm guessing they give more evasion. And speaking of which, do the defence and evasion boosts stack à la Pokemon or are they completely useless and per round?

fearlessislands.png

The combat wasn't deep enough to be fun really. At least in the beginning (dunno how long the game is though). Might be that I just scratched the surface looking at the empty feats window but every new card was the same but (maybe) just a bit more powerful. The combat felt like rock paper scissors where rock beats everything but it doesn't work half of the time. And sometimes the rock of your opponent is just bigger than yours. And requiring two button clicks (and buttons that weren't even close to each other) wasn't necessary. Why would one need to change their mind after clicking a card once? Think if you're playing solitaire and after every move, a dialog appeared and made sure you intended to do the move.

Anyways, might seem like I'm only criticizing but that's not the case, you sure weren't lying about the pleasant graphics and the game in itself seemed quite bugless. It's just the actual combat gameplay mechanic that needs more depth and polish. Good job!

Fearless Islands by Mattias Cibien 2019-10-08T18:40:50Z

Oh I see, I didn't realize that all three cards change each round. That adds a bit of strategy but still very reliant on RNG since you can still miss or roll bad damage. And if you can fully evade, what's the point of defending then?

Hedgehog - Winter is Coming by FrederikH 2019-10-13T14:51:45Z

Pretty cool and clever idea. Took me until second level to actually understand what the hell was going on with the level "building". In the first one the platforms seemed to just appear where I clicked. :smile:

As the game had almost exact same jumping mechanic as the previous game I played, I can save my writing fingers and almost fully copy a paragraph from the feedback I wrote there. Jumping felt a bit weird. It was nice that you tried to implement a variable height jump but it didn’t quite work perfectly. It felt a bit too immediate, so to say, that he upwards motion stopped right when you release the jump button. And I’m not a big fan jumping mechanic that keeps jumping as long as you hold the jump button. Especially when trying to jump to a high platform, you needed to hold the button to reach the highest apex but then immediately jumped again from the corner of the platform you were trying to land to. Wasn't a huge issue here since there wasn't much precision required but felt a bit off anyway. The hang time felt too long also and was contrasted even more by the very quick downward acceleration (when releasing the button at the apex). I think those jumping numbers need to tweaking to get them just right.

The look was ok, of course it could have used some more flare. I know animations can be too daunting of a task for jam games but even adding something as simple as little bit of squish and stretch does wonders for making the sprite less static. So something like this, when the character has vertical velocity strech it a bit (something like X 0.9 and Y 1.1) and at the apex and landing squish (X 1.1 and Y 0.9). Here is an example from my own game. Even though it has full jumping animation, it didn't feel quite right before I added in the stretch and squish. And the wee bit of screen shake also adds to the feel of impact on the landing.

among-jump.gif

Obviously the game would need more audio work. Of course music can be hard if you're not musically talented (like me for example, but I try to do it anyway). But even something simple masks away the monotonousness of sound effects quite nicely. Even though you've opted out from audio category. It (and the lack of it) can still be a factor in mood at least. And you had way too little sounds effects too. Was it just the "eating" sound? Why no jump, land and most importantly, a victory fanfare! And I say eating in quotes because, umm, what were those yellow dots even? I've only actually seen a hedgehog twice in my 36 years of existence but I know for a fact that hedgehogs aren't that small compared to apples and their diet does not only consist of tiny yellow M&M’s. :thinking:

I had this weird feeling of familiarity with that font. Then I tabbed back to this site and noticed where I know it from. :smile: :thumbsup:

And then to my final and favourite part, the actual gameplay! My biggest issue was the need to keep jumping and flicking the level state forward and back to "preview" the next stage. Some kind of onion skin system where you would see like dimmer ghost versions of the next stage might work here. The display text for showing food count was completely unnecessary since it was a one screen game. Even the level stage might be better represented visually instead of text along the lines of:

0/5 :arrow_right: :black_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square: 1/5 :arrow_right: :white_large_square::black_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square::white_large_square:

And so on...

Anyways, good job! Wished there was more, it ended right when it started to get interesting. :tada:

ReWorld by Firesplash Entertainment 2019-10-14T16:11:28Z

I got the top time where it matters! That squeeze through the rainbow slimes was ridiculously tight.

reworld.png

First of all, the Mac version worked but needed some work. For anyone else who might try it, the following makes the app work and not throw a worthless information dialog of "can't open the app": ``` cd ReWorld.app/Contents/MacOS chmod +x Re-World ```

Neat idea but it was painfully slow to slog the cards back and forth. And quite weird idea to have a bunch of useless lore or quality of life cards (light, enemy showing, dragon, music) on a game with timed leaderboards.

Nice to see a tutorial but it was missing a bunch of stuff. Why not add the controls there too? And the biggest mishap, telling you need to play all cards on first part and then suddenly changing the rules in the second part to have a key (hidden) which you don't mention at all. Had to do the whole sequence several times before realizing that and the walking speed (and the amount of back and forth you had to do) made my brain rot trip by trip. I even tried to block the laser with the box but obviously that didn't work. You also tell that the box can't be pushed and don't introduce the strength card at all.

The (only) level with the second platter was also a bit tricky because the sudden introduction of it. As there hadn't been one before, I wasn't really ready and looking for it. It didn't really stand out that much either and looked like a wall or something to me. Maybe some embroidery on the lining or some shining animation or something would fix that.

Other than the app issue, the Mac version worked just fine. Didn't encounter any big bugs either. I think the only one was when you barely missed dropping a card to the plate, it was on the floor but if you tried to pick it up, the was instantly played and shrinked but still was on the floor. Happened to me several times but luckily it didn't really affect gameplay at all.

>Also if you encounter some in the linux or macos version, try the windows build.

This isn't really an option if you're not on a Windows machine...

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

No Allies by Ulascan 2019-10-07T16:25:24Z

Well, I can't really play it since it wasn't a HTML5 game after all. But now that you've baited me to look at the source, I have some questions! :blush:

1) Is that really all the code you had? Well at least a big bulk of it is in the scene files etc so I wouldn't really call those full sources. I always add the whole project folder (excluding builds, unity temp, lib and obj folders) so one could just pop it open and build it themselves.

2) Why on earth do those files not have an extension. They seem to be C# files though...

But good job on finishing your first game jam game (and compo too)! It's an accomplishment in itself that not everyone can say about themselves. Too bad about the over scoping but it often happens to first timers (and even to many nth timers :wink:). It's a thing that comes with time and experience. Gimme a ping if you actually do have an HMTL5 (or mac) build and I'll give it a go!

From Nothing by derpylz 2019-10-13T19:16:44Z

Well that was fun! Like the purest for of roguelikes, stripped down to its core. Learning by failing and failing a lot.

This ended up being my best run. I knew I had like 50/50 chance of meeting my fate on the jaws of that wolf. And yeah, that happened...

fromnothing.png

The wolves were something I didn't fully understand. I managed to figure out snakes pretty well and could quite consistently juke them out and the same method kinda worked for wolves too but like half of the time they still got me. Same kinda goes for the snakes too but they managed to bite me much less frequently.

And then there were those shops (or what even those dudes with signs were). It seems like the character was always carrying one item and couldn't get from the store if already carrying something. Didn't feel like I could actually pick from the two options either. I'm quite intrigued to know if those were even implemented or did I just completely miss something.

And now I wanna go for few more tries... :triumph:

So yeah, I did that but also went for a bit of a cheat: ``` var items = { stick: new Item('stick', 1, 1, ['fight']), paper: new Item('paper', 1, 1, ['hole']), stone: new Item('stone', 2, 1, ['fight', 'fight2']), coin: new Item('coin', 1, 1, []), flower: new Item('flower', 1, 1, ['girl']) } ```

Just a mere sight of this made it abundantly clear what to do. Seems like I was completely wrong about enemies. Guess I just pretty much always had one of the fighting items. But now I think the game glitched out on me. Next phase doesn't begin and the shopkeep oviously won't let me trade. Sigh, time for another reset (which would be a lovely addition in the actual game even though yeah, just refreshing the site works).

fromnothingflower.png

Btw, not a big fan of these unfair unwinnable situations where you just aren't given the necessary tools and the enemies just keep piling up. Also once met a level with three pits and I had only one means for getting paper on that level and I even carried paper from previous level too. And I was hoping that pit plus paper would be away to get rid of some enemies but alas, wasn't meant so.

fromnothingwat.png

And after all my troubles, I'm served a softball like this on I think level three. And I get to even choose from two mates :blush:

fromnothingsoftball.png

All you really had to do was to make the game 100% solvable just with pure stubborness and tiny twist of perception was to add a sound que and animation hinting on the stick and rock usage. Everything should click right after that, no need to get too hand holdy. Too bad I never managed to use paper on a pit before I spoilt it for myself. A big reason for that is probably because I didn't figure out it was trading, not choosing from two options.

And then for the extra obvious section of the feedback. The art was super cute and audio work was nice too. Nothing bad to say about those really. Except for the missing animation/sound on item usage I mentioned earlier. Of course there were some very minor issues like sprite z-ordering and some flickering but nothing too bad.

Anyways, awesome job! I loved it... :heart::thumbsup:

My Hope by fiwon123 2019-10-12T13:58:01Z

Pretty cool art style. Obviously the actual level graphics were quite bland (especially compared to the tutorial). But the character and monsters looked nice. So just some more level decorations and particle effects and it would look and feel top notch. Music was well done and very fitting. Somehow it managed to applease both sides of gameplay, combat and more lulling exploratory searching for more mobs to kill. Obviously it would have needed more sound effects and some variation in them as well.

And then to the controls. Jumping felt a bit weird. It was nice that you tried to implement a variable height jump but it didn't quite work perfectly. It felt a bit too immediate, so to say, that he upwards motion stopped right when you release the jump button. And I'm not a big fan jumping mechanic that keeps jumping as long as you hold the jump button. Especially when trying to jump to a high platform, you needed to hold the button to reach the highest apex but then immediately jumped again from the corner of the platform you were trying to land to. And speaking of jumping, this was a ridiculously hard jump to make...

myhope-hijump.png

Shooting had its issues too. It was kinda awkward that it didn't really aim where the mouse cursor was. Mouse just moved the crystal/light up and down and shooting was the vector between it and the character. It resulted in pretty much having to stare at the light when trying to shoot at mobs. The shooting range felt a bit short too. You had to get very close to your target and quite ofter that staffs just spawn enemies right at your location when you're trying to destroy them. Some kind of warning effect at a spot where mob is about to spawn would be nice. Well, the enemies were very unthreatening anyway. The only times I took damage were either when they spawned at me or when I had to do a blind drop and a mob was under me waiting.

The final level felt a bit maze-like and the searching for last staff aspect didn't feel very engaging either. If the levels were any bigger, it would definitely need some kind of arrow pointing to the remaining staff when there is only one left. Then the level could be bigger and more mazey. This red herring on the last level wasted so much of my time...

myhope-longjump.png

But finally I did manage to find the last one!

myhope-done.png

The upgrading mechanic felt kinda pointless. As I already mentioned, the life was no problem since the enemies didn't pose a threat at all. I poured all my points to damage and it didn't fell much stronger. Dunno about the attack speed then (if that's what it even was). Seems kinda counter productive in such a simple combat. Both just mean more damage. It would need stuff like crits to separate them more and even that would need lots of balancing.

Anyways, I think I've rambled enough. Congrats and good job! :thumbsup:

Drake Hits Rock Bottom by nervous-composers 2019-10-09T17:13:28Z

Well, I died on my first attempt right near the end because I tried to fight everything and you're a huge dick in your spike placement. There is no way to fight the enemies without taking damage. Can't do it from behind because the attack is so damn so they're already miles away then your swing finishes.

I mean what is this crap? Yet another unavoidable damage unless you know the level beforehand. drake.png

Obviously my second attempt was pretty smooth sailing because I knew to avoid fights. And I'm glad I stuck around for a second try because that ending was great. Easily my rating would have been worse if I didn't go for the second run. There was this weird delay before the final boss appeared though. I got to run back and forth the whole floor couple of times thinking I must have missed the "key". But then finally he decided to drag his butt to the face me and I instantly knew that would be my key to victory.

The overall platforming didn't feel very great either. Jumps felt very floaty and not being able to control the jump height coupled with spikes on the ceiling is basically the same thing as blind drops which you had plenty of too. But surprisingly I don't think any of those blind drops resulted in (at least harsh) punishment. Some platform colliders also didn't quite fit what they looked like they should and quite often some background elements looked more like platforms than the actual platforms. There also was this classing unity wall hugging thing. Unless it was intentional. And if it was intentional, you should probably indicate it in the sprite and still include some slipping. People aren't glue! And if you wanna not do that, the easiest way is to drop the player physics material friction to zero.

classicunity.gif

Btw, music didn't loop. Did you not think anyone would take that long to finish. Well, maybe I wouldn't have either if I didn't stop to take screenshots and record gifs. :wink:

Anyways, good job!

Aphantasia by kristinamay 2019-10-07T16:53:18Z

So, on the first level I tried to read and play at the same time... big mistake. That's why it looks like I missed the table and night is inside the house.

aphantasia.png

Very clever idea and nicely executed. Obviously more content in the form of more elaborate stories and bigger (or even any) variance in the objects that could be used. Btw, does it penalize you if you add in objects that aren't supposed to be there? So could you just do a big mess and still get it right? Well, not like the score really mattered anyway I think.

I had to try it out...

perfect.png

Perfect indeed!

Anyways, good job and big thanks for the mac version. :hearts::hearts: Been browsing games, rating and commenting for almost two hours now and this was just the second game I actually got to play...

Aphantasia by kristinamay 2019-10-07T17:07:15Z

I liked the fact that you kinda had to play it like a memory game. Listen to story first and then pick the objects. Having more/different options on each level (so you wouldn't exactly know what to look for in the story) and the stories being more twisty and complex would probably be fun. Kinda weird that the first level was the most complex one and the one where the person actually went back and corrected themselves.

...and to Nothingness Return by philomory 2019-10-16T15:35:16Z

Taking a bit of a break while I'm stuck on 16th level. Damn that was some steep difficulty ramp up. Can't seem to figure out how to eat the bottom right castle without making a dead end since I need to do last move on top left.

The mac version didn't start when trying to launch normally. No error message, no nothing. Gave it a go from the terminal and it actually started. So this is for fellow macists who might face the same issue: ``` cd And to Nothingness Return.app/Contents/MacOS ./And\ to\ Nothingness\ Return ```

The first 15 levels were maybe even too easy. Well of course it needs to start easy and introduce mechanics but it didn't really ramp up the difficulty at all before the 16th. It was always just figuring out the first move and everything after that just fell right into place. The mechanic was introduced perfectly, even showing the keys and all which is a rarity in jam games. And you had proper options too, nice!

The look is nice. Love the trippy level intro but it gets kinda old when you need to constantly keep restarting and watching it over and over again. The sprite work is crisp and clean, wished there was more animation though. The music was great. Definitely would have needed more sound effects. Some munchy and crunchy omnom sounds for eating the world and obviously a nice fanfare for finishing a level.

Okay, I'll go back to bashing my head against that 16th level again... :triumph:

ntnrclose.png

Slowly getting there, thank god for the undo mechanic cause I can't remember how I did the castle part. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omoNXtnVt1g

Psh, easy! :blush:

ntnrez.png

And I even did it again and was ready for a screenshot on the second time. And now I notice too that you didn't do the art or the music so I guess commenting about those is moot. But they fit together well anyway.

Anyways, dunno what else to say. Nice puzzler and brain melding last level. Good job! :thumbsup:

void window by dimesto52 2019-10-13T16:06:49Z

Neat idea but it was very confusing, seemed quite buggy and the writing umm, wasn't great. Well it was kinda cool that it had this weird broken kinda kinds book style of narrative but the hints were just almost Castlevania II level of cryptic. And the fact that you had to keep randomly clicking everywhere made it quite frequent that you just skip the next important bit of dialogue and need to start randomly clicking through the whole screen again. They should probably stay on screen or at least repeat after a delay of not making any progress. There was no need for the dialogue to be positioned on the corner either. Would have more sense to have them where well, where subtitles usually are, centered and near the bottom. Also might have been nice to differentiate who is speaking my changing the color of the text.

This was a big cause of confusion at the start.

cursor.png

Now I've started several times over and it's just more and more confusing the further I get. My first try I got to garden, then there was the leaves and something about dropping paint. Scoured the whole screen without finding it (didn't occur to me that if the character drops it, it would be like 10 meters in front of her). Went through the first door and when I came back, the leaves were gone so I though it bugged out and I was soft locked. So that was reset number one.

Second try I actually found the green paint, added the doors and went through one of em. Not quite sure what there even was because at this point I reset again as I started writing this feedback and wanted to try the leaves disappearing bug again. Surely enough, the leaves did disappear but the paint bucket was still there. Time to paint the flowers and add in the doors..

Went through a different door this time. I add in barbecue, the cook and even manage to find the red paint. Then the dude tells me something about painting the door. But none of the colors do anything on the door. And I can't find anything else either and can't go back through the door. Why are the doors context sensitive? Sometimes they work even without color and sometimes they don't. And now that the amount available colors increases, so does the amount of random clicking everywhere. Now I need to examine every pixel on the screen and try painting everything all the colors. And I can see this only getting more and more tedious. But now I think I'm stuck again. Can't find anything new to add, nothing accepts any of the colors I have and the door doesn't work. Here goes reset number... lost count. Hope I remember which door I picked the last time.

Well, now I see the messages warning about the doors that I need them to be right color to come back. Well that's a bit of a dick move unless the color I need is always in that room too. Looking at your screenshots, the barbecue room door seems to be red but when I got the red paint in that room, it still didn't let me paint the door red so dunno. Lemme try another door this time...

marie.png

Another quite paint in the butt room to get through. Not hints even given at all before I had already pretty much solved it. It also said there is a blue liquid in the bottles, yet I got purple paint. That looks like some kind of chemistry stuff, is this a reference to Marie Curie? Next room! Swimming pool room, easy, next! Girl and unicorn, can't find anything else and no hints, great. Not even stuck here, next! Okay, now to find some stars. Another huge pain in the butt room. Wanna play battleship with 4 times the size of normal grid? And btw, I only have three one cell size ships and I'm not gonna tell you if you hit right next to one. When I finally find the moon and all the stars, I get the paint and the yellow door doesn't even work. I'm ready to give up.

I really liked the idea but the execution would have required some major changes. The biggest issue was that the text change near cursor just wasn't enough to notice the interactive spots. Anyways, I'm getting near the character limit of posts, good job! :thumbsup:

When Nothing Came by velvetlobster 2019-10-16T17:42:33Z

Getting stuck right at the start. Nothing does anything except for right arrow which makes music pitch scale to zero and breaks the trees...

https://youtu.be/X-kqFvdE4Qs

Oh and first time I run the game, before refresh, the lower half of the screen is black too. If I refresh or change tabs, the blackness disappears. Mac Chrome if that helps...

**edit:** Tried Firefox, can see the flower idle/walking animation at least. Some progress...

**edit 2:** Oh, even the left arrow works here. It actually might be working... :triumph:

---

Ohh right! Thank god I got to play it, that was brilliant. I don't think I really got everything or even the most of it (the story that is) but the ending gave me shivers.

First I thought it would be some kind of Undertale homage. With the personified sunflower there and the cover pic room kinda looks similar to Toriel's living room and the Deltarune living room blended together.

The music was nice, really reminded me of Professor Layton (which is a super good thing). The art was pretty much perfect. Nice hand drawn feel with awesome simple animations like bringing in/out the stage pieces and the squiggliness of the texts. Really made the game feel alive and not be static.

Sure, it was kind of a non-game but it was interactive enough to keep me entertained at least. It's the small things that count. All the extra lore nuggets that you could find and the small interactivities that didn't even (to my knowledge) serve any purpose at all. It game the player (or me at least) something to do while, well, figuring out what to do. :blush: It was even fun to fiddle around arranging words and letters. At first I thought that might be some puzzle. And dunno, maybe it even was and I just couldn't figure it out. You did say there are loads of secrets there. My biggest goal was to get the car started, but alas, I couldn't manage to do it. If there is a way to do it, you get a big :thumbsup: from me.

The clickable words that the flower just repeated started of nice but got kinda repetitive and predictable. Could have given a bit more insight on those the further along it got or something. But then there was the dinner = :bird: thing that still haunts me.. :scream:

That's pretty much all I can say about it. There wasn't much gameplay elements, my usual main focus on critique, to feedback on. And what was there was working very much :ok_hand:

Awesome job! :heart::heart:

バクラウBloodless by Danilo Freire 2019-10-07T16:13:22Z

Start with nothing and end with nothing, with the exception of maybe some skill...

Very nice! Art was quite top notch and music fit very well. I really liked the difficulty (expect you could have hinted the read weapon thing in the game too). I already gave up once before noticing the text about it in the description. After that it was quite smooth sailing. Either the dash timing was a bit strict or the hitboxes were quite unfair, not sure which. Well at least the final boss swing hitbox was ridiculous. But he was the final boos so I'll let it pass. Just could have given him a bigger sword... :wink:

The enemies really liked to be passive and hang around off screen. Especially so on the second level where I spent most of my time not understanding the red weapon mechanic and not paying enough attention to the second swing of the enemy. The enemy passivity (them running away if you're too close and getting closer if you're too far), they just need to be baited too much and it felt a bit slow and tedious to play the waiting game with them. And the terrain hitboxes were kinda big and weird (at least too vertical) on some places at least.

The randomness of health drops made some runs way easier than others. Like on my second and final attempt at the boss, like every enemy before that (and those waves were super easy because the enemies get stuck in the terrain) dropped a heart so I could have even face tanked the boss. Nice touch btw that you refill the health between levels. Very minor details that could have easily been disregarded but not having the player be at an disadvantage after successful level clear is the way to go especially since there is no real punishment for dying. Of course it would be different if there was a maximum death count or something like a scoring system which punishes one for dying.

There were some very minor graphical glitches. Like at least once the between levels doors slid on top of each other so that the handles were on the screen edges instead of meeting in the middle. And quite ofter there were some z-ordering issues with the sprites, but that's not anything to bark at really.

Anyways, good job! Finished wanting more so that's a good sign I guess. But just making it longer wouldn't cut it, would need more enemy variance etc.

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-07T18:22:48Z

@christophebessette They aren’t reallly spread. It’s arrows or wasd with space for jump and z/j for eating.

@akusan For sure, should have made that first drop indicated somehow since dropping from any other position kills you. Truly noted, this is why games need non dev testers.

@grhyll It is always the color of the apple. Or at least it should be. And the topmost apple of the stack to be more exact. Unless there is some weird bug. And btw, it’s purple, not blue 😜

Thanks to everyone who has played and given feedback so far!

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-07T19:02:36Z

@grhyll Oh right yeah, that one. Yeah, that is basically blue though I’d call it cyan. It’s CMYK really... 😅

Must be a bug then. Or you’re doing something weird I didn’t consider at all.

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-10T13:36:11Z

@nervous-composers As it has already been stated, the first puzzle is too much. Somehow it didn't occur to me that the first "level" is almost all yellow and only has one spot where you need to drop through it and everywhere else kills you. This would be fixed by adding an arrow pointing down to the rightmost room on the level. Or to stick with the current scheme, add a block that tells/hints about it.

And speaking of blocks, those quips were pretty much just added as a way to show controls and introduce mechanics. I then just *had to* spread them all over the world because those (and apples) were added as the target for character to look at and them being too far made the pupils pop out from the eyes. :smile:

Yup, bugs are bound to happen in jam games. Glad that nothing majorly game breaking has surfaced yet at least. Even though random deaths sure can be annoying but hopefully those aren't that frequent. I guess the collider for checking block intersecting is bit too big or incorrectly positioned. And the mid animation apple picking is something I didn't take into account at all. I guess the apple is popped from the stack at the end of the animation even though it should be right at the start of it.

Big thanks for the feedback! :heart:

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-12T11:14:07Z

@tort60091 Thanks for the feedback! :heart: My whole idea behind the mechanic was to not be able to switch apple order so you couldn't just pick up apples all willy nilly and should do some scouting and plan ahead. Of course the mechanic could be extended upon, currently it pretty much runs its course and that is the reason why it's as short as it is. Well maybe few more puzzles could be squeezed in with the current mechanic if given enough thought. But I'm not entirely too happy about the puzzle design as they are currently, they were pretty much a rush job. Pretty much the whole level design was incorporated in the last third of the second day amongst several other fixes, tweaks and additions. I think I wasted too much time on the character and animations but at least I think they turned out pretty nice.

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-14T13:42:04Z

@frederikh Thanks for the feedback! I sure did put quite a lot of time to character and animations this time, maybe even too much time. Didn't really get to polish every other aspect as far as I would have wanted. The puzzles were kinda rushed and backgrounds, particle effects and other level decorations didn't quite get enough love. Well, at least there aren't any huge game breaking bugs.

I did try to zoom out enough that the puzzles could be scouted out without needing to do a trial run (with the exception of the last puzzle). The dropping puzzle (the one where you need to drop through a sequence of colors) zooms out enough to show all the blocks except for last two and the rightmost block on the platform where the apples are gives the color of the last one. So the whole sequence can be figured out without deaths. Same should be true for all earlier puzzles too, you just might need to do some scouting and not pick up all the apples as soon as you see them.

Among by Antti Haavikko 2019-10-16T13:36:38Z

@cdunham Thanks for the feedback! Yeah the apple mismatch bug is a bummer. I wonder why I didn't encounter it myself at all. Maybe I'm not impatient enough to try to eat them mid animation. :smile: And the death bug isn't great either but it kinda works in lore aspect, you wouldn't want to jump straight into the ceiling head first either, now would you. :wink: It was just a misplaced and/or incorrectly sized collider that caused this and I didn't run into it either during the weekend. It's a constant issue with (solo dev especially) game jam games that you yourself don't know how the players will play the game. Devs know the solutions and how to play so they are probably the only people playing their game "correctly".

Dr & Dr by Daniel Jenikovský 2019-10-09T15:53:43Z

What a brilliant start! Really caught me off guard. Is this really where it ends though? Nothing does anything and it's stuck here at 0.

drdr.png

Well at least it didn't crash my computer here like it seems to have done to some others.

Spare Change by Swordishmage 2019-10-10T18:22:22Z

Managed to beat it! And in some weird sadistic way in the end I also kinda started enjoying it...

rehab.png

There was quite a lot of wrong with it. Or at least things that could be majorly improved. Lets start with the biggest fun killer in the game, the boring and useless cooldowns. I mean, let the people play how they want without adding too many restrictions. The cooldown should be per bin basis and not global. So if someone wanted to triangle run their way between three bins all the way to rehab, why not allow that? Or if someone just likes sink too much into the protagonist and gamble all their earnings, why not? Now you're just limiting the playability options to just gathering trash bags and loose coins while every now and then rummaging through bins (begging took way too much time). The remainder texts about the cooldown were also super annoying. I mean the "I should wait a while before..." texts. Yeah I get it after the first one! It just added another dumb delay so you couldn't do those sweet search & beg in quick succession combo tactics.

Next next issue was the map itself. It was flat and boring and since everything looked the same, it was easy to get lost. The minimap was so zoomed in that its only functionality was spotting otherwise ridiculously hard to notice coins. The buildings weren't obvious enough to distinguish from each other at least before you learned what and where they were. The biggest offender being the rehab since it didn't even have a unique color. I mean, for example the restaurant could have had some golden arcs like some restaurant that shall remain nameless. Casino could have had a flashing neon sign. And dunno for the rehab, maybe like a hospital association would be enough and you could have a red cross on it. The dump was actually pretty ok but even that couldn't easily be spotted from far enough because of its height and color that kinda made it blend with tree trunks.

If there was some terrain shaping, it would be way more interesting to look at, navigate and even that would be places more recognizible because you wouldn't be only pinpointing yourself on those few mark buildings. Extra landmarks with no functionalities would do wonders too. Like some different looking buildings, big rocks, whatever really. And last easy fix to help with the navigation on not getting lost is to add a north marker to the minimap.

The controls could use some love too. The mouse somehow jittered weirdly. Dunno how to explain it really. And don't even get me started with the sprint mechanic. It was completely pointless and just there to make the player miserable. I mean, it was just "press and hold a button every now and then not to die of boredom" really. Each (held) button in a game should have some kind of draw back or flip side, or just made automatically be on 100% of the time. For example in a shooting button... it could have ammo management, knock back or slower movement while shooting. Otherwise it could just autofire all the time. Stamina management works in games with combat or where you need to run away from things but not really in a explorative walking/gathering game. Well at least you didn't put a green donut on the middle of the screen like BotW.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Pile of Corpses by TORT60091 2019-10-11T17:11:06Z

Pretty cool!

pileofcorpses.png

Clever idea, very original. Nice overall execution too. Didn't overstay its welcome either, the game ended just before the mechanic got boring. Of course it could be built upon to get more content. Some kind of shopping system and different enemies are the first thing that come to mind.

I have some minor gripes with the controls. The biggest issue was losing the cursor and clicking outside the screen. Should probably lock the cursor and use custom "virtual cursor" that could also be more visible too. Maybe drawing a line from gun barrel to cursor would help too. Well, a laser sight could be a viable purchase in the shop. :wink: Also machine guns so you wouldn't need to keep clicking. The grounded detection for jumping was very finnicky when on top of enemies. I had few times when I was standing on an enemy, went for a jump and just nothing happened and I fell to my doom. Also pressing down on a roof was a feature I wasn't ready for. I tried it in hopes of panning the camera down and of course again, I fell straight to en enemy.

And now that I'm on the topic of camera, it could use some love too. The follow target should probably be the cursor and not the character. Or to be more exact, the mid point between cursor and character clamped to some nice maximum value. It makes no sense that when I'm moving right and shooting left that the camera is panned 2/3 way to look to the movement direction and I can't really see what I'm shooting. Would really help with those clearing sections where you're on the roof and have no idea what is under you. Those situations felt quite awkward also because you can't shoot straight down.

The art was clean and nice. Could have used some more effects and variations though. Maybe some color/face variations on enemies. Definitely some particle effects like for jumping/landing (enemy too), bullet hit when not killing. And those same actions could use a sound effect too. The shooting sound wasn't bad. If I'm not fully mistaken, there even was some variation in it so it didn't get monotonous very fast. But it still kinda did because it pretty much was the only sound effect. I think the only other one was the killing sound but that was kinda bland and quiet in comparison that it didn't matter that much. It would have needed more oomp, that *"yess you just killed something"* badassery.

And next to nice and bassy sound effects, one easy way to add that oomp to actions is the pinnacle of game design, screen shake! Of course it's easy to go overboard with it and some people don't like it (or get nauseous) but god damn it makes games feel more dynamic and less boring. And I'm pretty damn sure you used Cinemachine and it's super easy to do with that. Well, not like making camera move randomly for a small amount of time is rocket science anyway.

Anyways, good job, really liked it! :thumbsup::sunglasses::thumbsup:

Blind by ukirain 2019-10-09T15:42:30Z

Yup, same issue as other have on mac:

blind.png

Kinda weird, never encountered this on a Unity game before.

Blind by ukirain 2019-10-09T15:55:23Z

Nope, not quite true. It's already +x chmod.png

Blind by ukirain 2019-10-09T16:02:52Z

That doesn't quite work because apps on mac are actually folders. But this does...

``` cd MacOS.app/Contents/MacOS chmod +x LudumDare45 ./LudumDare45 ```

Or, after that chmod the .app works too. So it indeed was the missing +x, just not in the correct "file".

Blind by ukirain 2019-10-09T16:38:43Z

After all this trying to get it working and seeing the pretty pictures, I can't help but feel a little bit disappointed. Wasn't bad at all, don't get me wrong but I was just hoping for more of a game really. It ended up being just a (very slightly) interactive story and story only games aren't really my cup of tea. And the whole story wasn't really my cup of tea either. Or it could have been but it was so short that I couldn't really get invested in the character or his motives at all so the ending didn't really mean anything to me.

The only kinda gamey bit, the bottle quest was also kinda ruined by some weirdness. When I clicked the computer, nothing happened at all. When I walked to right edge, he said something but half of the speech bubble was off screen so no clue what it did. And even when "handing the bottle over", it was still on the shelf. Maybe I should look way too deep into the story and think that Po didn't give that guy the bottle after all... :thinking:

atat.png

The "monster" speech sound really reminded me of Mettaton from Undertale and some other voice (maybe the bottle guy) sounded very similar to Papers Please speech. The art style I digged even though there was super little of it. What was it, like four screens and one character from two different angles. Oh yeah, the monster too and final image. Still not that much. I really like the palette of Po, really makes him pop from the background. Maybe even too much on the dim and monochrome screens (others than the light up store which composition wise looks :ok_hand:).

And by the looks of your screenshots, the russion version font looks like hundred times better and more fitting for the other game aesthetic. The english one (or at least the one on mac version) looks, well, not great and really sticks out and not in a good way. And there were some instances where the text didn't fit inside the speech bubble.

Anyways, good job!

Oh and by the way if you wanna make the mac instructions more readable, use triple backticks... triplebt.png

Spooky Japes by cdunham 2019-10-15T16:14:30Z

I would have wanted some more actual "gamey" elements. Right now it was just pretty much run around mashing click until you get x amount of money. No tactic, no skill, no nothing. Okay, lets spitball some mechanics that could make it more interesting...

- **Time limit:** Halloween night is over sooner or later and people go home. Would add an actual end and enable top scoring. People are only gonna play endless game once. But an end, fail state and a way to do better encourage repeated (and with that, prolonged) plays. - **Comboing:** The more people you scare at once, the more money you get. Should scale up exponentially so that scaring five people at once would be way way more than scaring five people individually. - **Voice meter:** You only have limited amount of scares. When you run out of voice, you can buy hot chocolate or something at your house to refill it. - **"Enemies":** The costumes that are scarier than yours could scare you and you'd lose money. Couldn't just be brain dead and zone out mashing click if not paying attention was punished.

Sprinting was pointless. There was no penalty for it, no need for it and it didn't really even increase speed that much. The run speed should have been the default movement speed. Right now you're only forcing people to hold down one button 100% of the time or wasting their time.

The look was fine. Nice amount of variety in the people, costumes and houses. Other than those, the environment looked quite bland. Concrete on concrete. Could be spiced up with some more environmental variety. Maybe some green patches, flowers and trees. Maybe some sandy smaller paths leading to houses or where ever. Some kind of water feature could work too.

The look was quite static though. Even adding a a wee bit of animation in the form of scaling makes it feel way more alive...

japes.gif

Some weird choppiness in the character movement. And the camera had a difficult time keeping up too. I can wholeheartedly recommend checking out Cinemachine. It's (free and official nowadays) super easy to setup and you can do stuff like variable damping based on dead zones and camera leading by the target movement direction.

Music was pretty nice. Fit the mood and theme of the game well. Definitely would have needed some sound effect though. Some screaming people and maybe some nonsensical jibber jabber kinda like Animal Crossing could work for the different sayings.

The hitboxes were off. If you're going for an isometric view, the hitbox should not be the size of the whole sprite and only should be the "base" of the object. It makes no real world sense that when approaching a house vertically, there is some kind of magical barrier gap of few meters before the walls. They should be something like this for a more natural feeling experience.

spookyjapeshitboxes.png

Anyways, good job!

Spooky Japes by cdunham 2019-10-16T13:27:53Z

@cdunham Yeah of course I get it that timing and scoping can be an issue in jam games. My suggestions were really if you decide to do a post jam version and of course for future projects too. You had quite a big team though, what was the team structure? Were you the only programmer? Did you run into any big hurdles (besides the AI which can of course be a big time sink) or why was even the core scaring mechanic of the game added in so late?

Collect Recyclables by possatti 2019-10-08T19:05:50Z

I used to think of myself as a THPS2 grind/manual master but I can barely manage to get to around $9 mark. :shrug:

There is some missed potential here. Since the tower never stays upright for even a split second, it really becomes a single button game. Well switching them at first is all fine and dandy to manage the speed but doing a lean switch when the tower is high enough (something like 8+) seems to be nigh impossible.

The super slow start really dicourages replayability. After a few tries, the slog to the interesting bits (8+) feels monotonous and like an eternity and then the actual action is over in seconds. I don't really have a solution to this problem though. Somehow would need to make beginning part more interesting and the actual interesting and exciting part more lengthy.

Never mind, I figured it out. And the answer is, HATS! You already earn money in the game so just keep total of the earnings and hats and other cool swag players can decorate their stick figure with. I bet that would encourage people to give few more tries. Would work on me at least. I'm a simple man, I see a cool hat, I gotta go for it. Problem solved! :point_right::sunglasses::point_right:

And yes, mspaint graphics are always :ok_hand: :two_hearts:

Good job!

Hiccup Time by Somogy 2020-10-11T11:20:26Z

Cool! Very interesting and quite unique mechanic and used nicely for few puzzle ideas. The mechanic would need some tweaking though. Currently it was quite often just annoying and hindering the traversal, slowing down the pace of the game by a lot. Maybe there could even be a "hold breath" functionality to pause the hiccup timer for some duration.

The ingredient display glitched out all over. Sometimes grabbing one ingredient made another disappear from the menu and so on. Made it really confusing to understand and made it seem like you lose the collected ingredients with some trigger i.e. death or time. The lack of real end made it even more confusing. Having some sort of an outro before looping back to start would have been nice. I had to play the game twice since I wasn't sure if I beat it or what on the first one. I never noticed I had gathered the chest items (lollipop and yellow potion) since they had disappeared from the UI before noticing them.

The intro pacing was a bit off too. It was quite fast and having the text and the action itself be that separated meant that it was hard to follow both. I pretty much completely missed the whole idea the first time I saw it and only started to realize what was going on after bumbling around getting confused about the teleporting for like a half a minute.

And the UI didn't quite look great because it didn't scale properly. It looks nice on your screenshots but it looked like this to me.

Screenshot 2020-10-11 at 13.47.14.png

Especially for the intro speech it was quite awkward. Having it in a speech bubble like that hiccup thing would have worked better in my opinion at least. Could even have gotten rid of the whole UI bar and have the icons just floating on top of the game view. Now it was just occupying quite a big portion of the screen real estate for pretty much no function at all. The timer there was completely pointless.

The hiccup timer bars were also quite confusing. Maybe just one pingponging bar would work better. :thinking: Like it would go from full to empty, then hiccup, slowly back to full, place the shadow and then just repeat like that.

I did not rate on graphics and audio as you requested but I can still comment about them. Looks like you didn't quite stick with the chosen tileset style. The bookshelf and book sprites (at least) didn't fit the look of everything else (no outline etc), were those straight from Minecraft? The hiccup bubble look weird with the half transparency. And the text on it wasn't centered vertically correctly. Were there like three different fonts? One on menu, second on timer/intro text area and last one on the hiccup bubble? And none of them really fit the tileset style either. Same goes for the hiccup bars, they had a different "pixel size" and the colors could have been picked from the tileset palette.

There was also some z-fighting issues. Quite often the order was correct (like with doors, bookshelves and those wall pillars) but some others (normal walls, weapon racks) always stayed behind the character. The blue particles were also always on top of everything so could be seen through closed doors and so on.

The music fit the game well and overall the sound effects were fine. Just the hiccupping effect got quite repetitive. Having few variations of it and playing them randomly would have been nice. Or just varying the pitch by a small percentage each time would also alleviate the repetitiveness.

Found a minor collision issue here.

hiccup-collision.gif

And corners had these weird rounded colliders too.

hiccup-corners.gif

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Loopfield by MikoziQ 2020-10-11T14:34:30Z

Aight, finally beat it! :sunglasses:

Screenshot 2020-10-11 at 17.05.04.png

The fastest asteroids and pickups were too much for my reflexes at least. I mean I were just on the edge of managing to block them but no way I got to actually decipher the color before that. I think it was quite a good move to not have the things spawn from top and bottom because then you'd have even less time to react. On the other hand it made half of the play time mind numbingly boring since you could just keep your cursor just above the ship and be completely safe from everything, only just keeping an eye out of pickups. Probably might have been better to just lock the aspect ratio to square and allow spawning on any edges. Obviously that would require either zooming back a bit or slowing down the projectiles.

The scoring is bit of a miss here. At its current state, it is quite pointless since it's almost like just a timer. And speaking of which, a timer to the rescue arrival would have been nice. And definitely could have made the difficulty ramp up towards the end to up the action just before the release. The scoring could be spiced up with a multiplier system. Could for example increase the multiplier on each destroyed asteroid and reset when getting hit. Maybe the timed reset of shield could reset the multiplier too so you'd want to manage your shield more manually. The come up with some scoring thing on powerup destroying too, kinda something like risk vs reward.

It was kinda weird how the powerups came closely togerher in groups of three. I mean it was kinda a good thing and kinda not. Grabbing a shield for example made it impossible for you to grab some health right afterwards and obviously wouldn't even need another shield. I do like the double edged sword thing you got going on in shield replenishing though. Kinda made you have to think and sometimes actually skip getting them when you had like 75% shield already in favour of maybe getting some health ones.

The look was pretty good! The color palette was mostly pleasant to look at (the asteroids felt a bit dirty looking compared to anything else). The destroying effects looked nice but would have just wanted to see a lot more. And they looked awkward when going fast speed and ending up inside (and under) the shield. Should have added the effect on the actual collision position instead of where the asteroid body would have ended up in. Giving the asteroids some size variation would be cool too and make it look less repetitive.

The shield filling visuals were kinda glitched too, it did like some weird 90 degree turn before actually going full. And I feel like the shield timer was completely pointless, the circle was already more than enough. The health bar could have also had either a frame/border or a background. Now it was quite hard to estimate how much health you actually had.

The sound effects weren't really anything to write home about. Kinda repetitive too because there was no variation. Especially with the lack of music. Why have the music play only on the menu scene? And the getting hit sound was very bland and seemed insignificant. Even though it should be the scariest thing in the game really! So the sound effect for it should pack a mean punch and be accompanied with some flashy visuals too.

Anyways, good job! And congrats on your first (and successful too) Ludum Dare entry! :thumbsup:

Time Crash by Gonzalol 2020-10-09T13:38:45Z

Pretty damn nice! I don't think I can beat this, my memory ability seems to not be too great :sweat:

Screenshot 2020-10-09 at 16.17.55.png

Very nice amount of polish here. And overall pleasant looking and cohesive visuals. Everything was nicely animated too. Music was very nice too, the clicking sound started to get a bit old and it was too loud in comparison.

The gameplay was rather simple but worked for what it is. The difficulty curve could have been quit a bit steeper in my opinion at least. Now it took quite some while to increase and it really makes it harder to go for another try after a failed attempt. A more quicker games would leave space for more motivation to try again.

Basic game loop starts getting quite repetitive too and the scoring is fairly uninteresting being so linear. Spicing he gameplay up with stuff like powerups could easily give the game more longevity. Could have stuff like "free pass, 50/50 stolen straight out of who wants to be a millionaire or more thinking time. Would be easy to come up with a bunch of them. And these could even be bought/earned between rounds to give like an overall progression thing.

The scoring could be quite easily improved with multiplier system where multiplier could be for example increased every time you pass a level without a single missed input. That would make the scoring more interesting, varied and skill based. Not just being based on a single thing (getting as far as possible) but two (getting as far as possible as cleanly as possible).

Anyways, awesome job! :thumbsup:

System Reboot by Toulou 2020-10-11T18:01:02Z

Aight, lets start with some spell check!

Screenshot 2020-10-11 at 20.10.22.png

**1st try** Completely missed the map prompt and ran up until got the wrench. Then I started wondering what the first item was and how to use it. First restart...

**2nd try** Oh yeah, now I can use the map. Cool! Run up to the wrench again and then completely forget that pressing space was a thing. Run around the first few rooms desperately trying to hit everything with the wrench. Then by some fluke hit space on the supercomputer and remember that oh yeah, space exists. Back to the switch and continue on. Oh cool, those enemy bots the intro warned me about. :scream: Psh, no problem at all, my wrench is op as heck hitting through walls/corners and so on. :wrench: Got to the room with black squiggly line walls and it was absolutely filled with bots. Met my end there, these bots are no joke when encountering them on closed spaces because you can't really control your swing direction that well.

**3rd try** Do a full loop. Heck, no punch card. Oh here again, lets investigate the map. Boss room and archive are the target. But can't access them.

**nth try** Just repeating the same stuff over and over again with no luck on finding the punch card or getting to either boss room or the archive. Getting really frustrated about the combat too. The room with the computers that can be turned off seem to hold some significance but no luck with it really. Some doors (I think mainly the starting room ones) were also acting weird, not always being open even though I think I was doing the same thing each time. And here is where I need to give up!

---

Really digged the visuals. Super simple yet charming. Color palette was pretty eye pleasing to look at. The sounds were also fine but just too few effects. And obviously the lack of music didn't really help in that department either. Sound is one thing that really could have sold the scariness of the enemy bots too. Also some visual feedback would have been needed to emphasise getting hit and hitting enemies. Something like color flashes, particle effects, screen shake and so on.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup: Too bad I didn't get to finish it... :cry:

Stuck in a Soup Loop by Doot 2020-10-12T20:16:54Z

Cool! Nice art style and catchy music. Loved the charming children book like art style. Of course it could have been brought more to life with even some subtle animations. Just some moving/scaling/rotating would been already a huge boost, no need to go for a full blown hand drawn animations.

Didn't really seem like it really mattered how well (or badly in my case) I did, the progress was the same.

Screenshot 2020-10-12 at 22.47.17.png

The tutorial was nice, clear and concise! It was straight to the point, with no need for huge walls of texts, telling exactly what is needed and when it is needed! Loved it! :heart: Game started off easy, maybe eve too easy. But then on the second and third days it really started picking up. And the last ones weren't really that much harder really, it was just way too many ingredients to throw in. The time just wasn't enough to manage to do but a few soups. And the recipes were not even really balanced. On same level there were 8 ingredient ones and 5 ingredient ones. Dunno if these were in random order though. Having them be fixed would obviously be better for balancing reasons but random would offer more replayability. Oh the choices!

Is it even possible to do the full ten soups on the last day in the lotted 40 seconds? I think they were mainly 8 ingredient ones, then the stir and serve. So ten steps per soup and ten soups meaning 0.4 second per step. Sounds like a tough one. :thinking:

All screens aren't 16:9 and the game didn't really support anything else.

Screenshot 2020-10-12 at 22.35.25.png

Made the results screen look even more awkward with the clipping text. Of course this wasn't so bad in this case and playing ended up being better in a smaller window anyway because the movement distances were shorter. :laughing:

Screenshot 2020-10-12 at 22.38.14.png

Could have introduced other elements to make the recipes harder rather than just making them longer. Sure, they needed to get a bit lengthier from the start but by the end it was just too much an repetitive. Something easy to add like changing the stirring direction or having to do the ingredients in some specific order would have really spiced it up. Then it could even go to the Papers Please route and add new stuff every new day to make it more complex. Something like maybe controlling the temperature of the soup or maybe showing the basic recipe but the customer would have an allergy to some ingredient. So broaden the complexity, not lengthen it.

Anyways, I think that's all I have to say about it. Well done, good game! :thumbsup:

Moby's Trip by blaster391 2020-10-07T19:53:46Z

Never a LD without a synthwave themed car game! :sweat_smile:

This was my first hurdle, didn't quite understand why it didn't let me write my name. Seems like I was trying to write it on the disabled button and the fancy looking label was the actual input box. Focus could have been on the field by default.

Screenshot 2020-10-07 at 21.57.57.png

Nice look and overall very consistent style. Same goes for music. Sound effects were a bit bland though. The camera movement was very wonky. Even quite nauseating on tighter corners and especially on the bumps. The bumps were so disorientating that I died like half of the time encountering them.

Wasn't a fan of the controls at all. I think they were too stuff, abrupt and had too much inertia for the precise movements needed.

The collision areas seemed too big too. In quite an unfair way really. You could even have already gone past something so that it wasn't even visible on the screen anymore and still collide with it. That in conjunction with the punishing gameplay of not allowing any mistakes made for a non risk taking (boring coward) strategy of just being safe and going as slow as possible seem like the best one. Really unfitting for the game in my opinion! Giving players some leeway and allowing them to recover from small mistakes would habe made it more fun. Something like maybe not make the player lose on first hit but start a timer of a minute and if they get hit during that another time, they'll lose. Currently it punishes way too hard for small mistakes that a partly even not their fault. Like the already mentioned bumps or the following configuration that was so damn deadly with the inaccurate controls...

:b::b::b::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle: :white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle: :white_circle::white_circle::red_car::blue_car::white_circle::white_circle: :white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::white_circle: :white_circle::white_circle::white_circle::b::b::b:

I tried to pay attention but at least I didn't notice any effect on the speed on scoring. Is that really the case? If it is, why so? It really doesn't make any sense. Why wouldn't the player go as slow as possible since it's a lot easier to dodge stuff that way? But it is also lot more boring. And completely defeats the purpose of having speed control at all if one is just straight up better in all ways (except for boredom factor). At least you added a downside to shooting (destroying the casette tapes, which I think did give some points). Quite often on jam games people just add a shooting or run button all willy nilly with no downside at all even though in those cases it could just have been automatic instead of having the player hold a button down 100% of the time.

Didn't quite figure out how you did the level randomization stuff. Obviously it was made from smaller sections or something like that. Some sections seemed to be hella rare though. Like once I saw this big bunch of several tapes in once. So RNG seems to play a big role on scoring too. Especially with those sections that require super precise movements to sneak past alive.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Frozen Potency by Eugenik 2020-10-11T13:44:13Z

The game was buggy as hell. Sure, some parts seemed even intentional but forcing a full app restart between rounds because the leaderboards gets stuck on the screen for example was not cool. And what even is the point of a leaderboard if everyone there is just "unknown".

Controls had some issues too. Like there was no downside at all for running so you never actually needed the walk. So you just forced your players to keep holding one button down 100% of the time. The picking up boxes was glitching too, quite often it just didn't register from some box positions and had to switch to another one. Binding grab and throw to different buttons was pointless. It was almost like a platformer which would change the jump button after each consecutive jump. And it was especially bad playing on a laptop touchpad where there is no physical right mouse button. Obviously that's my fault too for trying to play games without a proper mouse.

I think this is the best I can do without a mouse at least...

Screenshot 2020-10-11 at 16.27.21.png

Oh and Mac version indeed did require the following before the actual app wanted to start up: ```` chmod +x Frozen\ Potency\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/LD47 ```

The game looked good. The serious gritty graphics didn't quite fit the goofy theme of screen edge walking and silly physics though. And I guess they were just some already existing assets also. And the UI things looked quite sloppy with the default font and so on. The fog was a bit too strong, couldn't even see half of the enemies. The sounds were good too but got kinda out of hand when there was tons on enemies on the screen.

Getting around corners felt like a slog. It was quite often just a coin flip whether or not you're gonna make it or die trying. Didn't seem like there was that much strategy really. Just always keep the run button held and do small steps forward while grabbing the boxes and hurling them towards the enemy masses. The aiming was also hugely affected by RNG too since the boxes bounced around uncontrollably so it was completely up to luck whether the box knock out few guys or none at all.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Hyperloop hell by Aterlamia 2020-10-07T17:30:25Z

Well the Mac version worked just fine. The web version full screen didn't really work so had to go for the desktop version. Mac version at least was a debug build, should probably do a release one the next time. I don't really know Godot well enough (just done one jam game with it) to know what the difference is but it's easy enough to do so probably worth doing.

The pixel art overall looked nice but wasn't without issues. The biggest one I think was the lack of variety. Sure, reusing the same sprite work over and over again is fine, especially in a scene like train but adding even a little bit of variety would go a long way. There was some like the half closed windows but would have liked to see some more.

This one pole was also weird looking since it was positioned too high and you could see the character sprite from under it. The other copies of that same pole were pretty much fine.

Screenshot 2020-10-07 at 19.59.25.png

Then to the UI side of things. The font was super hard to read. The s letters were just confusing and looked more like g. And you didn't make it any easier with very poor color selection for those highlighted words. I had to literally squint and get closer to the screen to be able to read the blue one. And I don't even have any sort color blindness or any other sight imparity at all. The emphasis words were with different font too. Pretty much ticking all the boxes on what not to do here.

There was also this one point were you messed up the text coloring...

Screenshot 2020-10-07 at 19.54.26.png

The walking speed was too slow and I guess you noticed that yourself too because you added the speed walk key. But there is no point in having a functionality behind a key where the player would want to use it 100% of the time. There would need to be some sort of drawback or other reason on not using it for it to exist at all. Like the most common (cop-out) one being a stamina system which obviously wouldn't work here. Every action behind a button press needs to have a reason for player to use it and not use it too.

Then you also broke your own rule of making the text only proceed with x press on the lavatory hiding scene. The text scrolled past too fast, especially due to font and emphasis colors hindering the readed way too much. Too bad too since it seemed like you were actually dropping some major lore bits and jokes on that scene. The story was of course then reiterated to Diane on the phone right afterwards but the damage was already done at that point and it left a bad first impression.

The ending was super rushed. That very out of place single freeze frame sprite flip death animation, the abruptly ending story and the hastily mocked UI. The story was going at pretty decent pace up until that point but it was just then like "oh yeah, bad guys die and you win congrats"! And the end UI stuff was just like you just threw in some UI components to the screen last minute. Completely ditching the font used previously and even trying to align the stuff to look decent.

Screenshot 2020-10-07 at 20.00.17.png

Anyways, good job! Always cool to see people tackle more story based games on jams. :thumbsup:

Hyperloop hell by Aterlamia 2020-10-07T18:19:42Z

Oh damn, that sucks! Good on you for sticking with it though and not giving up due to the crash issue. :ok_hand:

Even if it was more like a cutscene, it still could have the break points for waiting the player to press the button to proceed. Timing texts is just impossible, it will be always too fast for some people and too slow for some. And not even taking into account other possible distractions that could totally make the player miss the whole thing.

Oh and just after posting that comment I saw the mentions about font change. Seems like the Mac version at least was still the original one and the new one looks much better and more readable. But yeah I guess you should keep the updated version separate (and well described on what was changed as it is now) as per the compo rules.

Oh yeah, one more thing I forgot to mention on my first comment was the bit over linearity. And I'm not saying that there should be like branching paths but it wasn't really designed for anything to be done umm, not exactly right. Like I wandered around aimlessly few times clicking x and so on and wrong old messages were appearing and getting stuck on screen etc. Maybe this was due to time issues as well. Oh at least it wasn't the RDR2 way along the lines of "you walked left when you needed to walk right, you died". :sweat_smile:

Godot seems to be good overall on doing the different platform builds. I don't think I've ever encountered a Godot made game where the Mac version had any issues. Oh and I used Godot on a jam once and I loooove how it had that one button hit to export all different builds... :heart:

Under The Moon by Albuquerque 2020-10-12T17:14:30Z

Pretty nice art! Very spelunkyish main character. :wink: And the other characters looked good too. Simple yet quite effective "walking animation". Could have done the similar treatment for idle and jumping too. Now jumping with the walk animation playing just looked goofy and the idle looked too static. The environment looked kinda bland to everything else in comparison. They could have used even just a little bit more details rather than just being solid color rectangles. The game had already a nice moody vibe which could have been improved even further by adding some sounds and a moody piece of music.

Managed to snag a win on my third try.

Screenshot 2020-10-12 at 19.51.57.png

Really find it weird choice and kinda annoying too that the game was pretty much just on a timer. You had to rush because being too slow meant the death. But then on the other hand, timed game events really lock you from progressing. Things like shop opening, sand falling (sure, you could glitch out the physics and do real high jumps to bypass this) and sacrifice starting. And my final run I was fast enough that I had to wait for store opening for at least a minute or so.

And if you're playing the way I think is intended, so just loop around the world and see events unfold, the timing of the end bits is way too strict. Even waiting for the baby to spawn at the altar and having a good guess on what to do with it, it still seemed like there wasn't too much time left.

I think a way better option would have been to trigger each event on a new loop instead of just timers. And maybe do something to kinda force the looping too like the initial key grab. Then you could also play a bit slower and enjoy the npc chats and so on. Rushing through didn't really fit the game theme wise.

Controls didn't feel great either. The jump was floaty and was quite easy to glitch the physics on the stairs. And the stairs were bad too. You pretty much had to either keep jumping (and eventually end up with those immersion breaking physics glitches) or to that sweet spot jump holding to levitate up the stairs which obviously also broke any final bits of immersion. I also think it was unnecessary to have running, without any downside it should be always on. And having talking and other interactions (carry/drop) on different keys felt pointless too. I personally am not one of these "up to jump" tribe people and would have loved to see a separate jump button. I always kept hitting space while going for jumps and then dropped what ever I was holding.

But yeeah, good job! :thumbsup: Nice art which could be taken to a whole new level with some further additional polish and a a solid gameplay loop which could also quite easily be perfected.

Time Saver by Daniikk1012 2020-10-09T14:17:01Z

Well the base mechanic of getting more time to your next try should have been introduced (or at least hinted on) better. Or not better, at all really. Had to go back to read the description on what the hell I was doing wrong. And I guess that was nothing, the game just needed a too big of a grind to get going over the first hump.

The look was pretty hit or miss. There was a clear mismatch of two different styles, pixel art for the characters and cleaner vector style for everything else. Of course such thing can work too but here it seemed like just like a bit too big of a leap to me.

The design of the main character was pretty cool. Nice touch that the available time was also represented in the tank or whatever that was supposed to be. The dashing frame could have gotten some more love, I think it was just one of the walking ones right now. Something like make him lean forwards a bit more and give the sword some movement too.

The enemy sprites paled in comparison, they looked quite messy. And especially their potion throws looked janky as hell. The eye enemies looked pretty. The enemies overall could have used some animation love too.

No idea what is going on this end scene though...

Screenshot 2020-10-09 at 16.52.16.png

The game controlled pretty nice. Especially late on the level when you start jump dashing and chain killing the eye enemies, it was quite fun. The second weapon felt completely unnecessary. Mainly because it was too awkward to use. Having the throwable bound to another button would have made more sense.

The goal of the game wasn't very clear either. Of course it wasn't too hard to guess but having one harder to kill enemy (I even though it was just decoration) at the start was just a dick move really. Having to do a complete new run because you didn't realize that was not too cool. Well, it was quite short anyway.

Screenshot 2020-10-09 at 16.50.38.png

The sound effects were not great! Only few sound effects with no variance started really getting old fast. Especially that long deafening screech siren on death/spawn really starts getting annoying. And there was a bunch of stuff that didn't have a sound effect at all, really made these action seem insignificant. More feedback overall would have been nice. Like some sort of flash or other type of hit registering effect would have helped in the case of the "immortal guy" in the beginning. Stuff like that overall (screen shake too) would really help sell the weight behind all actions.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Project R.O.O.M by Arad HamidSamiee 2020-10-12T17:24:04Z

The Mac version does not work. Kinda weird, I think it's first time ever seeing a Godot game which didn't. On the other hand, might also be a first time ever seeing an fps made with Godot too. :sweat_smile:

Screenshot 2020-10-12 at 20.16.56.png

Might have something to do with all those dots in the name. The pck file seems to exist under `Contents/Resources/Project R.O.O.M LD47 v0.4.pck` though... :thinking:

Too bad, managed to peak my interest with all the secrecy. :spy:

**edit:** Seems like my guess was correct. Got it working by renaming the following files to not have periods in the name.

proom.gif

Project R.O.O.M by Arad HamidSamiee 2020-10-12T18:05:40Z

Well, that was quite interesting. But I'm stumped now. After two and a half loops through the same questions, I'm giving up. Even your "spoiler section" doesn't really help. Or was there even a way to progress or just an endless loop (on questions and corridors)? That'd be kinda cop out. :sweat:

Thought I found some pattern on the question labels (sys, ph, q, e) corresponding with the answers but after like a ten or so correct ones it was foiled too. Was I just supposed to memorize every answer and get the right flawlessly? I definitely got some repeat questions I got the correct sound que for on the previous round but the questions did not start from the start though.

Kinda bold statement to say that **everything** was intentional. Was the points where if you walked up the ramp after a question too fast and didn't get a new question before stepping down first intentional? What about the horrible framerate (didn't seem that graphically demanding)?

Also found it quite awkward how the answer buttons and the podium were setup. And most of the possible actions were completely pointless (to my best knowledge at least). The game didn't even bother teaching about majority of them.

The question stuff was fun but too much repetition. Like the first time when seeing the shadow figure in the corner when prompted about someone else being there in the room was cool as hell but getting it repeated several times before even looping was just lame. It actually would have been spookier if it didn't happen after seeing it for the first time. Same goes for the non yes/no questions. First one was funny but the second was just more of the same.

Game had some nice small touches. Like the real time clock. Those always impress me for some weird reason. But I'm in the analog clock camp a bit more, those really impress the heck out of me. :sweat_smile: Even though I can't think of a single other game with an analog real time clock besides Inside right now... :thinking:

But yeah, good job! :thumbsup:

Beyond Death by Trypants 2020-10-11T17:01:59Z

Nice. Consistent good looking style and especially the animations were top notch! The UI could have used some of that same love. It looked rather bland and stock Unity and didn't even scale properly.

asd.png

The landscape changing the look the more you died was cool and on my first run I think I was on the last possible loop while getting through the door. The red water, blood on the altar and so on really sold the ominous feel of impending doom. Was quite confused about the lack of any ending and kinda missed the whole thing about 12 deaths my first time seeing the intro so actually played the game twice. The second run was obviously much smoother and squeezed through with what I think is minimum number of deaths possible (i.e. three). I even walked back from the final totem! :sunglasses:

The intro should be able to be skipped though...

The corpse usage as a helper for next round was cool. I was even admiring the previous corpse being there even before it really clicked to me that that it the main mechanic of the game and the way to solve the puzzles. But on the other hand even if it was cool and worked early on, later on in the stage it became just annoying really. It was just forced death and a time waste which is never fun. Thankfully you didn't do these too late in the stage really.

Might have actually made more sense to have the final idol also be on its own branch. Now it just kinda made the middle one almost pointless. And that would have made the trek to it shorter too so you could have used the death mechanic more.

But this was unacceptable! The dude falls down in the death animation and his hat falls off too...

Screenshot 2020-10-11 at 19.23.20.png

The block pushing was hella broken. Dumb me didn't realize that it was on a button which controlled the flame trap so I tried to push it to block the flame trap with. I managed to kinda do it but the block fell out of the world on top of the stairs. Should have introduced the flame trap in a more clear setting. Sure you had it once earlier before but it was too much covered by the wall and I only got to really see the button (which didn't even look deadly at all) and then the character just getting lit ablaze. And when encountering the pushable block (*time to crate* of around 3/4ths of the game :wink:) it kinda just looked like a pedestal for it. The pushing didn't always work, had to stop and try again several times often for it to move and getting it close to walls made it even more glitchy. Of course it wasn't even supposed to be pushed that much really so not a huge problem.

The game controlled fine but the locked isometric 45 degree view made it a bit awkward since you usually had to be holding down two keys. I guess it would work fine with an analog stick though. But allowing the player to rotate the camera would obviously be the best way to go. This would also fix those annoying places where a trap was hiding behind a wall up until you got too close to it to really react.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

A Certain Particle Chamber by Baturinsky 2020-10-08T18:59:28Z

Awesome stuff! This is where I will call it quits...

Screenshot 2020-10-08 at 21.36.21.png

At start it was very confusing, would have needed more linear and drip like introduction. I just threw too much (information) against the player right from the get go. At least you can really go at your own pace and there isn't any rush to learn stuff but I think might easily scare some people off before they really get to know what it is even about really. I was also dumb and confused left and right at the start and thought the level names were the hints on what to do. And even managed to beat like the first four ones like that before noticing the error of my ways... :sweat_smile:

It could also use some more gamification. It was a bit too much of a physics toy with some goals. Nothing wrong with it really though and at least I was very much enjoying my time with it. Really liked that the levels had a normal goal and then the gold one.

The difficulty was all over the place. Doesn't really matter that much because you can complete the levels in what ever order you wish. But some more linear curve would have made more sense and made for an easier introduction. The "hit beta" levels were obnoxiously hard! The beta particles just repelled the beams way too much. I wasted so much time trying to gold these, and these are probably the reason I gave up on trying to gold em all.

You see, stuff like this. The beta particle is shooting the beam pretty much straight backwards... :angry:

Screenshot 2020-10-08 at 21.57.02.png

Sometimes you set the bar kinda too high like this subpixel perfection requiring torture (even with just one moving piece, it was one of the "hardest").

Screenshot 2020-10-08 at 21.46.34.png

And sometimes on the other hand the the par was way too low (and yes, I am mixing limbo/golf analogies because I can't come up with anything else)... :sunglasses:

Screenshot 2020-10-08 at 21.44.27.png

The game really suffered from the lack of zoom functionality. Quite often even moving one piece a pixel made too huge of an impact.

Obviously the graphics weren't anything to write home about. The pure primary colors just do not look good together. The biggest offenders of course are pure red and blue which are very hard to read from a black background too. Made it really hard to locate which particle was which letter. Just applying some nice looking color palette here would do wonders with the game look.

Anyways, very good job! :thumbsup:

A Certain Particle Chamber by Baturinsky 2020-10-08T19:09:14Z

Oh and here are all my solutions too from where I called it quits! Of course few of them are already broken from the green solution trying (and failing) for the gold but generally they were kinda close to whatever they ended up as.

aspc-solutions.gif

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-05T06:31:21Z

@dinoraz Yeah I don't really like how glitchy it ended up still being. Especially the reverse/teleport skills. Other than those two skills, the glitchyness should be mainly just visual. Getting stuck on transitions (or more often just after death) was something I saw too but never got completely stuck on though. Usually this happens when frantically hitting keys right after death, more often than not in conjunction with the reverse skill. It should be technically impossible to spawn in a position where every direction would be fatal though.

I do get why you dislike the controls and think they feel off. But they are pretty much as I intended them to be. It's not really a real time game, you buffer in your next move(s) and they are executed on the next move step. And there are few features in place to make this feel better too like the pacmanish *"hit turn too early and we'll buffer it until you reach the junction"* and extra long move step delay when next colliding with a wall.

So dunno if fixing the transition death loop bug (hey at least it fits the theme! :wink:) would be considered totally game breaking and I'd be allowed to fix it. Well at least I'm going to fix it after the jam.

Thanks for giving it a go! :heart:

**edit**: Decided to do a post fix for the death loop hard lock. Or at least greatly decrease the chance of it... :thinking:

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-10T11:04:37Z

@thecreator Thanks! Dunno really about extending the game any further but I will for sure fix the current issues with the controls and stuff like that after the rating period is over. How and where exactly did you soft lock?

@samuli Thanks! Yeah, I don't really like how wonky the reverse mechanic ended up still being. The biggest issue with that is when you try to reverse right after grabbing food/powerup since the snake gets kinda confused about the recently added tail bit and quite often thinks it's colliding with it. The basic controls are pretty much how I wanted them to be. Isn't that how snake games usually work? Do you have any more detailed feedback on how it felt bad/wrong and suggestions on how it could be better? But yeah, I kinda over scoped this time it seems. Well I did manage to squeeze in everything I had planned but few things were left too rough around the edges for my liking. Mainly the reverse, wormhole (another skill later on which I guess you didn't get to see) and the powerup getting dialog pause/resume awkwardness. Will fix these after the rating period is done for sure.

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-10T11:19:05Z

@aterlamia Yeah I did have a feeling that the intro changing straight to gameplay would catch quite a few players off guard and get them instantly killed. But as you said, the deaths have like zero repercussions so I thought it wouldn't really matter and would serve more as a funnyish "oh shit I'm playing already" moment.

I think your respawning death issue was just input buffered from right before (or during) the death. I will most likely add bit of a delay between death and respawn and clear the input buffer on respawn to make these at least less likely.

Oh and I explained what I think is going on with reverse (at least) in the previous post to Samuli. This is another thing I will fix for sure post jam.

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback! :heart:

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-11T15:03:09Z

@joonamo Oh cool, didn't think anyone would actually beat it after noticing how easy it seems to be to completely break it with the reverse skill. I've actually already fixed that but gotta wait until the rating period is over until I can release it along with other misc fixes. What sort of setup do you have and was it the web version or standalone? I've made and played it with a not too new macbook and it has ran with this without any hiccups really even when I had some outrageous internal bugs during the development with way too many explosions going on at once. And at least it should recover from those frame drops once the blood starts despawning (10-30 seconds if I remember correctly). Thanks a lot for playing and sticking with it till the end despite all the horrible bugs! :heart:

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-11T15:10:11Z

And @joonamo and @oshawatt123 do you have any steps how you managed to end up in such a spot? Did it happen when respawning? That shouldn't even be a normal spawn spot, did it have something to do with reverse skill and maybe even changing rooms with it? It looks like it's either constantly reversing the direction or stuck in a teleport loop without actually teleporting anywhere. Any ideas on how I might be able to reproduce the issue would be greatly appreciated since I'm currently slowly working on fixing the issues with the game.

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-12T11:52:03Z

@thecreator Thanks for the clarification! :heart: It seems like it is most likely the same issue that I already have under wraps (I hope). And I was already aware of the wormhole helper picture not appearing again after dying. Planning on fixing that one post results too!

Snaketroidvania by Antti Haavikko 2020-10-26T05:43:29Z

@fabdynamic Thanks! :heart: Yeah I knew it works fine with mac, I too dev and test (also play other jam games) on one. That right click and open hassle has been a classic maneuver for all mac users for several years now so I'm guessing everyone already knows it. Yeah the reverse would have probably been better on its own key. Although, I do like the small amount of added complexity coming from the "calculation" you mentioned. Reversing might be a complicated procedure for a snake... :thinking:

iLoop - the 2D endless runner game of a robot stuck in a loop :) by melvinng 2020-10-07T16:45:48Z

Pretty cool! Obviously not a game with too much replay value and longevity due to the lack of difficulty curve and overall repetitiveness.

Screenshot 2020-10-07 at 19.07.11.png

So yeah, the difficulty curve was pretty much nonexistent. The enemy speed increased so damn slow and it even didn't matter really. The only points where you can take damage was either when completely misestimating the huge unfair enemy hitbox or when two of them came so close together that is was impossible to land between and do a new jump.

It was also quite unfun that the foods and enemies liked to sync up so that you couldn't get the foods. There was no point on going for a risky food grab (especially with the hard to read enemy hitboxes) because there was no way to recover from a mistake and zero consequence of not going for them unless completely safe. Some kind of mechanic for needing food would maybe enhance the game by giving the player some decisions to make. And the food placement could spice things up too by variating their distance from each other (now it seemed very close to fixed at least) and by having some of them be in air. And of course flying enemies would make it more varied too! Classic endless runner stuff.

Didn't the intro text say something about the robot growing? :thinking: Didn't happen to me at least. Oh now checking the screenshots on the description, it was just about the rank growing.

Every piece of art looked fine on their own. I especially loved the background(s). There was a big lack of consistency on them though. Every piece had their own color palettes and styles. Like they were done by different artists altogether. And now that I actually look at the rating category options, I'm guessing that you didn't do them and they actually were different artists.

Looks like the bot had other animations too besides the walk but you didn't use them for the jumping at all. That's actually something I just had to go back and check, I recalled seeing some kind of jump on the intro/stats screen. So yeah, no own animation for jump. Obviously not a too big of a deal since I barely even noticed it but on the other hand, a cool jump animation I would have definitely noticed. And it would have made the game "feel" better.

The parallax on the background felt a bit too strong (i.e. too slow background movement speed). Maybe it's just me but I quite often started admiring the pixel art there and when I snapped back to focusing on game it was very disorientating.

The sound effects seemed to be too late. You were already at like the peak of the jump when the sound effect happened. And the same goes for all other effects too. The sound effects weren't bad but some variety would have been nice. And overall they were kinda lackluster, would have wanted to hear more oomph on them to give the actions they were enforcing some more weight. And the same goes for visual effects too, some particle effects, screen shake and so on give the actions some nice and meaningful feedback.

Anyways, job well done and congrats on your first jam! :thumbsup:

Mr. Cheeks Sweet Dreams by MrTroy 2020-10-10T15:44:59Z

Piece of cake!

Screenshot 2020-10-10 at 18.13.43.png

The game looked good! Very clean and consistent throughout. The sound effects too had a lot of personality. The music was ok too but it got kinda repetitive fast because of the short loop with no variety. Of course the game was short enough for it not to get too annoying anyway. Would have wanted to see more visual effects there too to emphasise stuff like getting hit and so on. Like particle effects and screen shake are some quick and common ways to give some punchy feedback.

Looks like you didn't properly plan for any other aspect ratios.

Screenshot 2020-10-10 at 18.11.28.png

The actual mechanics were executed quite well but there was an issue with the main game loop in my opinion. The knockback from the block punches was just way too much. It took ages for the speed to start picking up downwards and to get to the same position where you hit the punch. And waiting is never fun!

The knockback was rarely useful for actually going back for something missed. Pretty impossible to plan for such moments without memorizing the map completely and organically those moments just did not really happen. It was mostly (for me at least) for slowing down the descent and blasting through the platforms. And for those purposes it was just annoyingly slow. This could be solved by cutting the punch knockback distance and time down by quite a lot. Or you could even do two different buttons for two different types of punches. One with knockback and one without it really. Of course the level design could be improved too to more facilitate the existance of these two different ones.

The max health seemed quite high and the heart pickups were so plentiful that there isn't any real danger of failing ever. Of course I'm very bad at making correct difficulty games too but this might have been just too easy. I could comfortably blast through hitting as much spikes as needed without any danger of running too low on health.

I missed the candy corn on my first loop but managed to snag it on the second one. What would happen if I missed it there too? Needing to do the whole empty loop just to try again? :scream:

How are you supposed to grab this gummy work in the correct way? I'm guessing not glitch through the green blocks with low speed like I did. The through glitching also looks super awkward because the sprites start z-fighting. Same happens when you go through the hearts.

Screenshot 2020-10-10 at 18.20.19.png

The spike hitboxes were too big. Like physically bigger than the sprite.

Screenshot 2020-10-10 at 18.09.35.png

And to feel fair, hitboxes would need to be at least a bit smaller than the actual sprite. So that close calls would favour the player and they wouldn't feel like they were hit unfairly. It's often hard to correctly estimate the hitboxes in the midst of action so it's safer to shrink them so when the player gets hit they know for sure it was due to their own fault.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Hamster Simulator by snowinn 2020-10-13T15:00:25Z

Haha, pretty funny stuff!

Kinda lacks the depth of clicker games (even though it really isn't even a one). There is a complete lack of any goal to aim for really. If you wanna go for a good single try, only get endurance. If you wanna go far in a long run, balance all the stats. Really basic and void of any strategy.

This was my first sprint.

Screenshot 2020-10-13 at 17.39.22.png

Obviously would need to also run in the background. A classic trope for idle/clicker games. Actually, weirdly enough it kinda does run even while on an inactive tab but the timing is way slower.

The upgrade menu should be open all the time so the whole UI would need some reordering. Currently the best way to play was to just keep it always open (cause you could still click the speed increase button) which then hid the main focus of the game, the hamster.

So I think it could have been made better by first of all just making it one shot so that you can't do another run (without restarting) if the endurance runs out. Then add way more stuff and attributes that can be bought (varying prices too)! At least a thing that would replenish the used endurance. Maybe something like upgrades to the wheel so it would accumulate "currency" faster. Maybe even bring hydration to the mix. The possibilities are endless!

The control setup also was super awkward too. Having just one key to do the speed increase while everything else was mouse controlled was not great. And made it even worse that the selected key resigned on the right side of the keyboard. Especially bad while playing on laptop.

The color selection could have been improved too. The hamster itself looked fine but the UI didn't really. Pure primary colors on the endurance bar (never a good look) and was that even the default Unity blue on the background? :nauseated_face: Your color selection on the itch page was more harmonious and thousand percent better looking even.

Anyway, good job! :thumbsup:

Hamster Simulator by snowinn 2020-10-14T19:45:15Z

@snowinn Yeah it seemed to run in the background, kinda. The time was just ticking much slower than if it was active. And I didn't mean shortcuts for the upgrades but just have the menu be "open" all the time and then the running key could be something more natural like space (or even any key).

End of my Rope by Maytch 2021-04-27T13:01:41Z

Cool! Pretty damn advanced for a jam game.

Somehow got myself clipped out of the play area on the room right after the second blue turret (I think). I shot the rope arrow to the ceiling and was trying to swing to the other side but then when I landed, the character just fell through the wall and into the void.

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 15.32.13.png

Almost gave up and restarted but luckily (playing on browser and full screen) I did try hitting the ESC key again after getting off full screen and gladly there was a restart level option there. I'm quite sure I tried hitting R which seemed to be the restart key on deaths.

The rope mechanic was wonky as hell but oh so fun. You could do completely bonkers stuff like just shoot and arrow straight into air and then proceed to jump climb that same rope for a good amount of height. And then there was stuff like balancing your rope around a platform so that there were same length of rope on both sides and you could weirdly enough reverse your climbing direction keys.

Showing the shotgun on the bar before the end was bit of a spoiler. And giving the shotgun (again) on the final room even if you don't go properly pick it up was a disappointment. Well maybe even bigger disappointment was that the game ended right when you got it. At least you should let the player go for a second round with the shotty. And maybe even just the shotty! You could get some mad propulsion hops with it... :thinking:

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 15.42.42.png

I for one wasn't a huge fan of the weird rumblings of the enemies. Somehow it didn't quite fit the otherwise look and feel of the game. Other than those it was taking itself quite seriously and that made the sounds seem out of place. Well of course there were the wonky physics too.

The movement speed of the character was too damn slow. This was super noticeable on the final boss which would have been a more fun fight if you could just fight it in a more agile and less turtly kitey way. Now it was just stay in his face shooting barely notched shots and kite away when needed. Boring!

Oh yeah, some UI scaling issues...

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 15.40.25.png

But yeah, thoroughly enjoyable ride. Good job! :thumbsup:

End of my Rope by Maytch 2021-05-01T18:46:25Z

@maytch Oh I was not aware that there was a run button too. That would have helped quite a lot I guess. Was that mentioned in the beginning?

But you only get the shotgun after the final boss. Or was there a way to get it earlier?

50 Step Treasure Hunt by Not_AS_Artistic 2021-04-28T16:18:51Z

Sooo, I'm drawing blanks on the rhyme thing. Even tried cheating but this doesn't make any sense...

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 19.00.51.png

And it really depends how well you need it to rhyme, there could be at least hundreds of different combination. And the fact that the first word isn't even a real one (to my knowledge at least). I don't know how it's supposed to be pronounced, like "chess" or "jesse". :thinking:

So my best guesses for the first word were "press" and "messy". :shrug:

Yeah someone obviously is a fan of Baba. :smile:

As already mentioned, the undo mechanic was quite broken and also quite unnecessary. I think having just a plain restart would have been better. I mean, it was only 50 steps anyway.

This was also already mentioned but it had some scaling issues. The step counter didn't seem to fit to the screen whether I was full screen or not. The sprites also were a bit blurry which is most likely caused by Unity's default bicubic scaling, changing that in the sprite import settings to point/none or whatever it was called would help. And I also think there are some pixel perfect settings on camera (I don't really do pixel art games so can't remember for sure).

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 18.48.27.png

The only route to the poet triangle wizard made me push this block to the diamond and that completely breaks everything. Kinda similar how you could mess with the undo to get the blocks stop working too or get yourself lodged inside them.

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 18.51.04.png

Anyways, good job on your first game jam game! :thumbsup: It's not perfect by any means but it's fully playable and doesn't have any completely game breaking bugs.

50 Step Treasure Hunt by Not_AS_Artistic 2021-04-28T17:33:47Z

Well yeah, of course the only path without the portals! Only could reach the dude with one move left like that and since he did nothing but tell some story I guessed that the portals would be the correct way forward.

Still drawing a blank. I did try the most literal version though, ie. the hint itself. :sweat_smile:

You Know The Drill by Maksime 2021-04-28T15:45:57Z

Cool!

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 17.59.46.png

Really liked the intro. Line by line fed story (especially when accompanied with some visuals) is always a superior to walls of text even though they make the player read just the same. Could have made the message box a tiny bit better still though. The color choices seemed like programmer choices (eww yucky pure red and green) in comparison to the artist made pleasant graphics. :sweat_smile: Also I would have opted for a line break before the gray help text here...

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 17.41.58.png

Also might be a good idea to scale the UI. Unless you're aware, there is a "canvas scaler" component by default attached to canvas element on Unity where you can toggle UI to scale with either screen height or width (or both). That way the UI will remain the same proportion instead of getting ridiculously small on bigger resolutions.

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 17.42.56.png

Another weird thing was the magenta NPC. Yet again a pure bright color! Why the hell was it purple. I mean it even had a unique idling animation yet to differentiate it from the player you just tinted it. Would have been better even if it looked identical to player in my opinion. Oh right, I checked the credits and looks like it was some ready made art kit.

The base game loop was fine and had the legs to carry my interest till the end even though it did get pretty repetitive fast. The upgrades were kinda boring and didn't feel like they impacted the game that much by offering player any choices. It could have just as easily been triple priced "level" upgrade. And I'm pretty sure your power and speed were flipped. My first purchases were energy and then speed but after then purchasing the power upgrade as my third one, I noticed a pretty significant speed boost.

Some more interesting upgrade additions could be a drill range extension or something that would make sideways digging less tedious. Having to dig two blocks to proceed made it not really worth it and it was best to just dig straight down and grab whatever was near enough.

Would have been better if the values of different ores were shown somewhere. Especially in the case of diamond/emerald since they both appeared at the same height and wanted to know which one I should prioritize. Kinda had to figure out the values based on mining speeds.

The prompt for each time you used the teleporter was pointless and annoying. Just a complete waste of time. Even if the player by some chance didn't want to do with there would be zero repercussions to just immediately teleport back.

Something weird going on in the corner here btw...

Apr-28-2021 18-35-32.gif

The teleporter "glass" isn't high enough. Also would have really preferred if the top portion didn't have collisions at all. It just made it annoying to get inside there at times. Especially with the bit too speedy controls. A lower acceleration for the movements would have really made it more pleasant.

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 18.38.15.png

Music was nice and the sounds that were there were ok too. But the missing effects for drilling at least (not sure if there were others missing too) made it less cohesive experience. Digging was the only thing that had a nice particle effect accompanied with some screen shake too so that being the only silent thing was weird.

Anyways, I think that's all I've got, good job! :thumbsup:

Craftmine by Cal 2021-04-29T14:59:08Z

Pretty fun!

Managed to play for a good chunk of time before (dunno if the game was the reason though) my whole computer froze and force restarted itself. Mac version by the way.

Welp, went for another try and this time it froze again after just a few minutes of play. It also took a weirdly long time to launch. Maybe like 5-10 seconds to actually see the pygame intro text and then at least the same for the game window to actually pop up.

Screenshot 2021-04-29 at 17.52.18.png

The upgrades didn't really feel like they offered anything else besides making farming a bit faster. The enemies posed no real danger even in the beginning. The combat looked very weird and felt kinda awkward since both the player and the enemies had a hidden range stat that was in no way visually represented.

The actual sprite work of the character and tiles looked pretty nice but the overall look was kinda hindered by those black "breaking" lines which just looked messy and too dominating being a higher pixel size. And the tiles not connecting properly didn't really help either. The animations also looked quite nice but there were some weird jumps and frame skips all over the place. On my second try I played more close attention to the color palette which after the first try I remembered being a bit too dark and dirty to my liking. But it was actually quite pleasant and all those dark lines were just muddying it down.

The special effect side was spicy. There was just about perfect amount of screen shake and the combined with the particle effects, they really brought some nice oomph to block breaking and combat.

The sound effects felt a bit jarring. I don't dare to go try a third time to investigate them closer but they left me with a feeling of pretty much every action making the same sound. Really would have needed some variation and of course even a simple background music hides the monotony of sounds pretty nicely. And the sound effect for walking at least just didn't work at all. If you do a walking sound at all, it needs to be very very subtle with some variation too since it's repeated so often.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup: Too bad I couldn't play more of it to see if there was some kind of end, or even anything different to what I already experienced.

The Rite of Shadows by Jaco van Hemert 2021-04-29T15:54:32Z

Nice take on the theme! Couldn't really get that into the story, I kinda felt it was spoon feeding too much too fast and getting in the way of the gameplay.

Wasn't the biggest of fans of the visuals. The colors were too muddy and murky for my liking. That help HUD was a bit too prominently placed. And everything really lacked on feedback. Enemies had to too big hitboxes which was most noticeable when slightly above them and the worse the bigger enemies were. The hitboxes could easily be shrinked down to cover like just a half of the actual sprite and it would then maybe start to feel fair. And on that same note, the sword hit hitbox could be increased and be moved with the player sprite. Just the same if a character in a run n' gun game could outrun the bullets.

The enemies were also all placed such that they got stuck on corners. And even if not that, those white barriers acted as a bit too much of a rubber band for em.

Screenshot 2021-04-29 at 18.14.51.png

And when the enemies hit you, the only feedback was that instant almost bug seeming huge knockback. At least when hitting enemies they had the red flash but it was very unclear if they were invulnerable during that or not. And the fact that your sword swings hurt you too made this missing piece of information even worse. I did try experimenting on the shooter boss on final fight with this and I'm thinking that they do not take damage when red. With that tactic of circling it when it did the multiple shots and going for a huge punish window afterwards would have actually been a good tactic but alas, it didn't work and fight was ground to a half cause you could only get two hits in per loop. Trying to hit it between the single shots was just too risky due to it somehow hitting you (even though visibly way too far) or you missing the swing because of its unpredictable quick movements.

The second level also revealed me the fact that the main mechanic doesn't really work at all. There was a pretty small window for error that you could do before your try was doomed. But of course the game didn't even note the fact that it would be impossible to beat the level even if you played the rest perfectly. I think on the final go when I actually beat the final boss(es), I only took like three hits the entire level and maybe did like few missed swings and was so close to dead that maybe just swinging the sword would have killed me.

The trance level mechanic was also quite pointless. Well useful for those slowdowns and dodging em. But if you just do more damage and take more damage, it seems like a stalemate. And it also draining the life constantly tipped it to the useless side. Or maybe I didn't understand it correctly and the damage boost you'd get would really outshine the bad sides.

The different level switching was interesting though, should have dug deeper on that one. But the sword swings draining life/energy was just not a good idea.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

The Bottom Dweller by alphapolygon 2021-04-28T17:30:02Z

Well of course I have to give the game of my namesake a try!

I guess this is good enough for me

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 20.01.16.png

So yeah, the visuals were really pixelated and because of that the achievement texts were an eye strain to even try to read. In the end these were the only ones I was missing, whatever they are...

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 20.26.09.png

A quite classic endless runner even. The achievements and the upgrades give it a nice amount of replay incentive but the small amount of different level sections makes the game get old kinda quick. Majority of the sections were pretty much trap setups for the early game and even after getting some upgrades, some other sections became traps. So pretty much the whole game progress is gated behind the double jump upgrade which can be unluckily missed for quite some time due to random choices and not affording it when it happens to appear. After getting the double jump, all the other upgrades felt meaningless.

And the double jump brings me to my biggest issue with the game. And that is actually probably the only reason one couldn't go on forever. That is the wonky (double) jump mechanic. It doesn't kill the existing momentum so it can be either a huge height boost if hitting the key twice quickly or just a slight speed decrease when falling from great heights. And this same behaviour also happens when just falling from a ledge without hitting jump. So if you hit the jump a fraction of a second too early before touching the ground, you will most likely just faceplant yourself towards some conveniently placed spikes.

The game would need some kind of actual difficulty curve. I think the classic and the easiest way would be to do a speed increase the further you got. And I guess it should also increase the reward the further you got.

And seems like it's already been mentioned but a classic jam game issue of too big hitboxes. Makes it super unfair and hard to estimate things.

The spikes also hurled the player in this uncontrollable and unpredictable arcs which really diminished the value of the armor upgrades. More often than not after the first hit it hurled me straight to another set of spikes. I mean, I got to this height by just ramming the spikes with no jumping at all.

Screenshot 2021-04-28 at 19.30.47.png

The visuals were pretty nice with a pleasant to look at color palette. Music was ok and got the job done but it was very quiet compared to that blaring coin sound which (being the almost only sound effect) got old fast! A slight variation for that sound would have been welcome addition. A random 10% pitch variation in either direction is my goto. And of course having more sound effects besides just the jump/hurt/coin and better volume balance would have made them feel less repetitive.

Another thing I really kinda was annoyed about was the double menu thing between tries. That was an unnecessary step and should have been merged to one only.

Nice rope physics by the way! :sweat_smile:

But yeah, good job! :thumbsup:

Geodiver 48 by exofrenon 2021-04-27T12:21:45Z

Cool! Kinda felt that it ended bit too early. Currently it was just scratching the surface and was pretty much just a tutorial. Wouldn't call it too easy though but that was mainly due to some unfortunate design choices. With just those few mechanics you could design a whole slew of interesting levels. The default movement felt very stiff but I guess that makes the dash be even more useful.

Two things really hindered my total enjoyment of the game. The bullshit hitboxes and the slogging slow intro between deaths. Hitboxes felt just unfair. Like it happened to me so many times that I sliced a vine or an enemy just fine and got their destroy animation and still crashed to em. I think the spikes were a bit too unforgiving too due to high speeds. And even the non spiked ceilings killing you was fiendish. On the last level I even tried mashing the swing button as fast as I could (and I'm an NES Track & Field master!) since it had to cooldown but still sometimes managed to die while also killing em. I guess it deters the users away from mashing and properly time their swings.

And yeah, the intro bit repetition thing was annoying. No need to repeat it every single time. Difficult games, or lets say games where you need to try again and again should restart very quickly. Could go even further and spawn right at the start and give the control to player while still displaying the tutorial message. Would get the best of both worlds, not making the player wait and still showing the repeated tutorial in case the player might have missed it.

Another thing I didn't quite like (and skipped before half point) was the wall of text intro. I'm not against having some story even in a simple game like this at all but it could be better than making the player read an essay before even starting the game. The first thing that comes to mind is just split the huge text to smaller bits and show them one by one. Maybe even accompanied by some visuals. Something along the lines of Ninja Gaiden or Undertale intros for example.

I liked the pixel art. Not too eye pleasing color palette in my opinion but still looked good. Sound were a bit bland. Bfxr bleeps and bloops are fine (I use em too) but they need some variations (I usually just go for ~10% random variation on pitch at run time) and everything needs the effects and not just some few actions. And of course some music would be a great addition in masking the repetitive sound effects.

Anyways, good job! Left me wanting more... :thumbsup:

The Deeper The Deadlier by EPU 2021-05-02T08:51:42Z

Well yes, the web version (at least) was indeed very buggy. I don't think they're any problems with the platform itself though.

Your UI was completely messed up. I think you might want to look into Unity's canvas scaler which is attached on canvas elements by default. It allows you to turn on UI scaling by screen width/height so everything will be the correct size no matter the screen size.

Got stuck on level four I think. The teleporter just didn't activate and let me go through. The same visually happened on the level before that at least but still teleported me.

Screenshot 2021-05-02 at 11.19.19.png

And at some point a piece of the background pillars that was previously not visible appeared. Maybe some z-ordering issues.

Screenshot 2021-05-02 at 11.19.35.png

The controls were kinda fine but the platforming was plagued by weird physics glitches. Getting stuck on ledges and walls was common. That gravity reversing field on the edges of the screen was very odd and confusing at the beginning. I think there were some other floaty gravity affecting placed as well which made contextualising the game whether it's platformer or top down not too clear at first.

Needing to pick up the gun was unnecessary in my opinion. Especially annoying on the second level where I managed to kick the gun off screen few times before actually successfully picking it up. At least not having to press a button to pick it up might have been better. Kinda weird that this least used key was the only thing explained in game.

The combat could have used more feedback. Shooting the enemies and getting hit just didn't feel like they had any impact. The damage caused by enemies also felt very inconsistent. Sometimes they killed you in mere fractions of a second while sometimes they felt like just tickling you. Maybe some invincibility frames would have offered a better more consistent experience.

Gave it a few more tries and now made it to the (final) boss. The boss seemed quite manageable at first before it did the swoop down and ram you manoeuvre. The biggest issue in that fight was getting stuck at the ledges. And holy hell was that boss way too tanky! The same over tankiness issue was actually there on the few levels before that fight too even with that op gun. All the gun effects looked cool by the way. I guess there might have been a better gun on the boss room floor besides the crappy starting pistol but you can't drop or pick up another once you have selected it. Then forcing the player to replay the whole thing again just to give it another go? No thanks!

But yeah, good job! :thumbsup:

The Deeper The Deadlier by EPU 2021-05-02T17:25:18Z

@fredripper2077 Yeah it was the web version (on Mac Chrome). I don't think any of the issues I encountered could have been just because of that. Well except for the broken double fullscreen button which I didn't even mention. :shrug:

The Deeper The Deadlier by EPU 2021-05-04T20:19:54Z

@fredripper2077 Cool cool! Can't play the Windows version since I'm on a Mac. The gun kicking wasn't really an issue after learning not to do it. I guess it didn't go outside the level but still outside of the view and since the sides had the gravity reverse thing it was kinda impossible to try to get it blindly. The green gun I think was visible on the boss room floor on web version too but of course I couldn't get it. Knowing about the drop mechanic would have helped immensely.

Welldiver by DevEmil 2021-04-27T14:08:12Z

Like it! On top of the leaderboard for now. Everyone else there was no challenge at all so I had to compete against the ghost score of 2000 and I lost to it too :cry:

The first 500 meters was an awful slog (at least after the first attempt). It was like impossible to fail before that and it was just mind numbingly boring. But after then even as early as ~750 meters you could fail just out of bubble starvation even without getting hit at all.

And that was the biggest problem of the game, too much reliant on RNG. The bubbles were necessary no matter how well you were dodging due to life and time being bound together. Quite often those bubbles were completely unreachable due to being inside enemy, being too far, being more than 50% off screen or just camped by a stompy or torpedo. And then just binding that time to be the score too made it linear and boring. Some more interesting scoring (multipliers and so on more skill based scores) would also have alleviated the boring early game.

The enemies were very nicely designed and telegraphed their moves pretty well. Was quite clear from the beginning already what everything did and how I had to dodge them. I still hated almost every single enemy so I guess they did their job well. Everything was easy enough to dodge in a vacuum but they they combine their attacks and so on it gets hectic.

The sound scape was great and the look was nice. Even the color palette was pleasant to look at. Dunno if changing it would make it look weird but it kinda annoyed me that all the mines were rotating on the same direction. And the torpedo "bullets" facing and firing backwards too was weird. Might be a nice addition of strategy on dodging em if they could only fire forwards.

Dunno what but there was something funky with the hitboxes. I did do some close call experimenting in the boring early games where there was nothing else to do and overall they seemed very fair. But then when the action was more hectic quite often I felt cases where I shouldn't have been hit but did anyway.

I would have liked for it to be a bit more zoomed out. Now it left very little time to react to things. And the progression direction being a shorter axis of the screen didn't help here either. Of course if it was more zoomed out, the difficulty would change drasticly.

Anyways, all in all good job guys! :thumbsup:

Welldiver by DevEmil 2021-04-27T14:11:36Z

Oh yeah one more thing. The own score not appearing on the leaderboards right then and there after a run (but only on the next run) was scary. Would also be a good idea to only show one score per player on there.

Sprookies by tanis 2021-05-02T08:14:13Z

Pretty neat idea even though not highly unique by any means. Mechanics wise there was already quite an interesting amount of stuff but the execution side would have needed some more polish. Everything was a bit rough around the edges.

Some of the biggest offenders were really just some slight design mishaps which could have been fixed in mere minutes. The wait amount on the start and end of the level was just bad. And the final straw was the full restart on deaths. I really don't want to keep playing the first two or three levels over and over again due to deaths and full game restarts due to clunky unresponsive controls and unfair hitboxes. Third level also had this blind drop straight to death star (if in a steep enough angle) which was umm, not fun. :anger:

This is where my progress was stumped every single time (if not earlier). Grabbing the baby before the death star just kills your momentum and then it's so damn difficult to jump over it.

Screenshot 2021-05-02 at 11.02.20.png

So yeah, the controls were stiff. I think the rotating worked fine while in the starting position but got jumpier and weirder the further you got. So I guess there was something wrong with your maths. Also how was that implemented, it didn't quite seem physically accurate. I guess you actually rotate the world? Probably would have been easier to just rotate the gravity. Quite often you could rotate the world up till the limit before the ball started rolling at all. Then there is also the slowness issue with the rotating mechanic. You couldn't really do anything even remotely reaction based since rotating from one side to another took ages. Maybe mouse controls where you would map the mouse x coordinate to the rotation might work.

Jumping was another issue with the controls. That jump charge just added unnecessary complexity and unprecision to jumping. I don't see the reason for such as there was cases ever where the player would want to do a small jump. The split mechanic could also have been bound to just one button which turned it on and off instead of needing two separate ones.

Pretty nice amount of visual fluff like the background particles and fish and the character facial animations. Would have rather you used that time to fix the gameplay though. The music and sounds were nice and funny too but also got a bit annoying the longer I played. The audio side painted this childish and lighthearted mood accompanied smily faces too but the color palette was then dark and muddy and didn't really fit too well. All those dark blues and grays. Something brighter and more colorful would have been a better match overall in my opinion.

Good job! :thumbsup:

Just Fishin' by Antti Haavikko 2021-04-28T06:06:07Z

@quetzakol Yes the puppy king method is indeed the intended way to play. I think this is the optimal route: - fish & sell - get rod & hook upgrades (also the discount one) - save for a dog - fish and the dog will keep emptying your bag - get a trap - get advanced traps & they will get your rod & hook upgrades ie. better fish - get more dogs & traps, your income explodes and you can buy everything :sweat_smile:

@devemil Well adding cosmetics is actually way faster route to flesh out the store contents than doing actual functional upgrades. Just drawing one sprite and slapping it on the character head takes no time at all. Or even faster to just change the color of the existing sprite.

Completely agree on the responsiviness things from the UI. It has been on my todo list since the end of day one of the jam but always had more important/interesting things to do. And actually still have but I will add this too for the possible post jam version for sure.

You might have to hands but everyone doesn't. There is a reason why "mouse only" is a category/tag and I've actually noticed quite a big portion of the incoming traffic on my games that have it come through it so I guess there is a demand for such. Also kinda ironic that you're suggesting this while your own game is kinda forcing players to play one handed too and with non dominant hand too (for the vast majority of people).

The traps only do not make fishing redundant before you get the advanced traps since fishing yields higher tier fish. Of course this isn't really explained in game though. But it does have same major balancing issues with the upgrades and their prices. Like the dogs are way too OP. The traps needing to clicks actually serves two purposes. It kinda hinders using them to still keep fishing more relevant. And it also offers a way to change the placement of em.

Yup I knew about the trap bug. Of course it was like the first thing that happened to me when I tried the game a bit on Monday. It's actually fixed already but not big enough of a bug to warrant a mid jam patch. I don't think @owca that is the same issue. If you buy multiple traps, you'll end up having just one of them in your hand but the rest are still in your inventory and can be equipped from there. Sure it's kinda clunky way and might need to improve it so that it automatically gets the next trap after placing the first one.

@exofrenon Haha yeah it's not my first rodeo! I actually did kinda over scope and didn't get to add in everything I wanted and more importantly couldn't do the amount of polish I would have wanted. Been attending few week long jams so that might be messing with my brain.

I don't think the theme take is that much of a stretch really. You keep going to "deeper" more valuable fish and also drilling deeper to the shop upgrades. I mean is your going deeper to a cave that much different?

Yeah the movement issue is something I plan on doing something to too. The key word in your phrasing is indeed the "almost". Computers don't lie, you weren't clicking on the same spot. If the distance between the fisher and clicked spot is greater than three units, it will move instead of casting. Lots of easy ways to fix this though and currently I'm thinking of alleviating it with different custom cursors.

Yes the game does have balancing issues but I'm never gonna balance my game(s) for the typical jam reviewer who barely turns the game on. Rating jam games based on that is a completely ass backwards way. You'd go with the completely opposite mindset on a AAA game review.

The different spots giving different fish was also something I thought of but couldn't squeeze in. That would have been accompanied with stuff like "fish of the day" that would be bought for double the price and so on. And of course adding like a range stat and better fish living more near the center of the lake on the deeper waters. But yeah, loads of ways to expand on this game that I had thought of but sadly the time just flew.

Thanks all for playing and leaving feedback! :heart:

Just Fishin' by Antti Haavikko 2021-04-28T07:46:31Z

@wolfrug Thanks! Yeah the end game is kinda just buying the expensive and completely useless crown from the shop. Of course it would have been possible to do some "end" here but I didn't want to stop further playing since it was actually quite fun to completely break the game with for example "world conquering bag size upgrades" as my work colleague discovered...

IMG_0049.JPG

I was kinda dumb and had 1.1^level for the bag size modifier which is just exponential growth instead of other spots where I had diminishing exponential curve like 0.9^level.

Just Fishin' by Antti Haavikko 2021-04-29T04:12:34Z

@seanarooni Haha, that's a lot! Only few more hundred million and it would have gone around to negatives :open_mouth:, I didn't really account for anyone going for that long. Cool to see that pretty much everyone who has posted a pic of their final setup are wearing the useless 10k crown. So I guess it is noticeable as the "end game" target.

Just Fishin' by Antti Haavikko 2021-04-29T18:12:22Z

@not-as-artistic The moving issue you were facing is most likely due to trying to click too far. The maximum range for fishing (distance between the character and the spot clicked) must be less than three Unity units (I think the character is around two units tall). If you're trying to click too far, the character will just move (as close to the position as possible). I guess this all just boils down to not explaining the range limitations at all. I'm currently thinking of maybe adding a different cursor for walking and fishing for the post jam version and I guess that would solve the issue.

Thanks for playing! :heart:

Just Fishin' by Antti Haavikko 2021-05-02T17:21:40Z

@tanis Yeah noticed that too, it's indeed the money addition UI element blocking the topmost button. Guess this managed to pass through my fingers because the button isn't blocked that much on a wider screen. Anyways, already have fixed that but thanks for pointing it out!

Town of Monsters by lesinvisible 2021-04-29T19:21:36Z

Well that was something quite different.

I survived until the final fight (at least I think it was that in the middle against the governor) but met my demise there because of what I'm guessing was just bad RNG.

I'm kinda 50/50 on the visuals here. I really liked the drawings but as the buttons there were just too small and messy. Sadly too the player portrait was probably the weakest piece of art of all in my opinion. The combat buttons really would have needed a tooltip or something. It was just a complete guessing game what everything was supposed to do. The combat really should have been explained somewhat. My best guess is that it was kinda like a rock paper scissors thing where you pick attack and defense separately. Probably a good idea would have been to remember the previous player choices and use them as default instead of resetting each time.

Went for two more tries but didn't even close to that. Met my end at second to last step on uneven pattern and then the last try I couldn't even beat the second opponent of loving brother. Maybe seeing both the combat messages at once might be good. So it wouldn't clear the player hit info when it was the opponents turn. That way you could digest both pieces of information in peace before choosing your next moves.

Would be nice if the conversation would actually reveal something (mainly the health since that seems to be the only thing that matters) about the enemies. Only on my third try I discovered the book but can't really get any reasonable information from that one either.

Went for yet another run and faced governor again. Managed to whittle his health to zero but he did the same to me. Which I think is weird that they still get to do their final blow after death. I guess I'm reaching the limit of my stubbornness. The next run I was on my second to last fight against a two healther and he just dodged everything every single time and proceeded to kill me. Thanks!

The musics were nice and using guitars for sound effects too was cool. But the sound effects did get very repetitive very fast. Also a very nice addition to have actual voice acting! Very much a rarity in jam games.

Okay, a one more final try! But this one will be the last try for sure. Brb...

Yeah, yet another double KO with the governor. GG.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:

Don't Melt by OwlyCode 2021-10-04T13:11:26Z

You did a pretty bad job at explaining the mechanics in game. Touching B/C locking you out of progressing without any real clue why was just awful. Couple of completely failed runs in I slowly started understanding what to actually do. But I still can't get past the point where you need to start powering the second turbine.

Ok, I lied. Went for some more tries and it seems like you need to lower the output of turbine A at that point. My bad for not paying close enough attention to the goal board. Now the biggest annoyance is waiting those 20 second maintain timers while nothing to do as everything is stable.

Other than the not helpful instructions and a very steep learning curve and difficulty, the game was very solid. It controls very nicely and everything works as it should. The jumping controls did have some floatiness and getting stuck on platforms but that wasn't an issue as the platforming really was just the means of transportation and not the key gameplay mechanic.

A small annoyance also was how you had to use mouse to start/restart while the game was only played with the keyboard. It was also possible to keep jumping near the wall (faulty ground detection) and eventually go out of the play area and completely soft lock.

Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 16.08.49.png

Oh and the warning lights remain there too long bringing a bit of a "boy who cried wolf" thing to the table. Might be intended too. 🤷‍♂️ And sometimes when warning light/sound starts and you're at the top platform, you can't even reach the valve fast enough to react.

Okay, one more final try...

Yeah no, got to the part where you start powering the final turbine but can't figure out how to not stall.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Don't Melt by OwlyCode 2021-10-04T19:32:00Z

Probably yeah and not understanding the given hinta and visible cues that were there were most likely my fault. At least the mechanics were learnable through bashing my head against it even without understanding the instructions. 😅

Rival Sniper by Hjalte 2021-10-04T15:55:35Z

Well that was maybe even a bit too easy. 🤷‍♂️

Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 18.23.48.png

Panicing people really liked pile up to a same spot and they can be killed with a single shot. This made the multiple target levels a cake walk unless the employee decided to pile up there too.

I never actually let anyone call the police. Seems like the timer for it is so damn long. And since there was no penalty for killing civilians, might as well blast everyone. Even in the last level, it was easy enough to first scroll to one side and then pan to other side killing all the targets (or just everyone but the employee).

The rival sniper didn't really pay any role on my two runs at all either. Wouldn't make much difference if it wasn't there at all. A weird detail to name the whole game about. The scare shots were also another mechanic that was introduced but wasn't really needed (or could even be used) at all.

The mega low rez style looked neat. The CRT effect looked kinda neat here too, just super surprising to me that someone would actually pay for such a simple shader. I just didn't like the color palette at all. And having two of the nearly same colors for majority of targets was kinda annoying to me. Well I guess it was the only source of real difficulty here.

The mid level conversation were pretty nice and the confirm shots were cool but the pacing on em didn't feel right. The text isn't very readable and the skip for the second message always came a bit too fast. I completely missed the whole existence of the rival sniper until the last level because of this.

The view scrolling was very glitchy. Pretty much every time when you changed direction, there was this annoying jitter towards the first direction before changing. And the scroll area not being clear was kinda annoying too as it made it harder to hit targets near the edge as the screen might start suddenly moving. Might have been better to just control it with keys (or better yet, both).

Anyways, good job! 👍

Rock'n'Rover by PizzArt64 2021-10-04T16:01:24Z

Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 19.01.15.png

Not sure but I'm quite sure it might be caused by the ' in the name. I tried fiddling around renaming stuff though (the app and the similarly named files contained in it) but no luck. I did try chmoding execute rights too which is usually the issue with peoples jam game mac builds.

Rock'n'Rover by PizzArt64 2021-10-04T16:36:01Z

Mac version still doesn't work but the HTML5 one does! 👍

Rock'n'Rover by PizzArt64 2021-10-04T17:12:42Z

Gave it three tries, made it to the final boss (I think?) on the final try but the RNG just keeps screwing with me. I mean think I missed like 10 misses in a row on that fight. And maybe I just don't see it but there doesn't seem to be any sort of real strategy for the fights.

I don't really get the idea behind it. Does the "defend" really defend of just give back energy?

Went for a few more tries right now and tried various tactics. And everything without any success of course.

So if you get attacked or heal, you lose "sustability" (which isn't how the word is spelled by the way). And defending halves the damage and gives you back some "sustability". So as far as I see, healing is pointless (you get full hp afterwards anyway) as you need to spend another turn gaining back used energy and most likely will end up losing more hp during the whole act. So basically just keep mashing attack is best tactic but since "sustability" isn't filled between fights, you gotta throw in defends every now and then, especially when the enemy is defending too to get the best out of your buck.

But that doesn't work really either because the RNGesus hates me it seems! :angry::anger:

The visuals and audio were rock solid. Nothing to complain really. Well, that was bit of an exaggeration as I didn't quite like the low "sustability" effect. Sure it was effective but something a bit more subtle would have been nice.

But yeah, that's about it. Solid stuff, good job! 👍

Rock'n'Rover by PizzArt64 2021-10-04T17:44:26Z

Haha yeah, might be. Dunno why I was reading it constanty as such. Especially when it was the theme. 😅

Why Can't I Hold All These Items? by glenugie 2021-10-05T16:25:33Z

Okay, I'm calling this an end now, it's getting very repetitive! 😅 How many inventory upgrades there are? Even for few rounds I was just doing it for the sake of doing it. Didn't need like half of the inventory space to complete the 5 mil contracts.

Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 19.03.36.png

Would have been cool to see more of the item interactions. Quite a lot of the existing ones were completely moot too like the explosives (would have to be dumb to trigger em) or the wrench as you wouldn't want to break anything anyway.

Some of the descriptions were also kinda misleading. The crystals did break even though you put only duct tape on top of it and the heavy alloy things didn't mention at all that they wouldn't break the same item. Kinda weird how the lighter one still breaks the heavier one though.

**Broken crystal with duct tape on top** Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 17.17.55.png

**Stacked weights** Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 17.49.13.png

You could also quite easily cheese the "after x steps do something", especially the artefacts by just keeping them in the boxes and picking up right before finishing. Not exactly sure but I think I also saw a timer reset when putting artefact back to box.

Early on this was a mega fast way of making bank...

Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 18.37.17.png

And speaking of shrooms, the definition of "adjacent squares" is quite loose here as they at least wrap around the level which caught me by surprise. And because of that took me quite a while to figure out how to properly contain them or let them grow to desired number instead of just treating them the same as artefacts.

The best tactic anyway seemed to be to just keep fishing for the best tier contracts you have and them not having ridiculous requirements like 6 artefacts.

Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 18.56.58.png

or

Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 18.51.46.png

But then it was very disheartening when you work hard for filling a good paying big contract and the map just doesn't spawn one of the items needed. Also very annoying when a lower tier contract (which is above the good one) you weren't paying attention to snipes some materials from a good one.

The timers were quite often on top of the tooltips.

Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 17.43.52.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

**edit:** Oh yeah one more important thing I forgot to write down. One major QOL improvement would be to hilite the contract lists with to reflect on what you had already gathered. Had to do so many careful double checks on these.

**edit two:** And another thing came to mind when I was going to the grocery store. Moving stuff on the inventory was kinda fiddly and clunky. The hit areas seemed a bit small so it was easy to missclick when not paying full attention. Definitely drag and drop moving would have felt nicer.

Topplecrown by caeonosphere 2021-10-07T18:42:32Z

Wow, really enjoyed this one!

topplwcrown.gif

Weren't the final two levels exactly the same on normal and hard? Well I did completely forget the solution of the pyramid when playing the other levels as hard and did have to figure it out again. Though I think I ended up in a completely different solution. But the final level was as easy as the first time as the AI really likes sacrificing its rooks.

Which brings me nicely to the rooks. I really would have preferred them to actually look like rooks. The king piece crow tips looked a bit sharp too. A slight rounding would have made it look more pleasant as in real world there are really no 100% sharp edges. Other than those minor details, the game looked and sounded very eye pleasing with the calm color palette and non intrusive soundscape. Very polished stuff, kudos! 👍

The bridge on normal had a completely pointless piece too as the piece downstairs could just use the steps to get where the other one was and one rook was more than enough to deliver a mate.

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 20.21.27.png

The hard version then game me some grief due to the block pushing puzzle. Was this actually the intended solution, I feel like I kinda lucked into it and that the proper one would have been to build a bridge pretty much like in the normal difficulty.

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 20.56.54.png

The AI was surprisingly good. Well I guess it's quite straight forward to do an AI when there is only two pieces really (tops, in the majority of levels). Of course they did always unga bunga their rooks in the final level. Even on the normal one sacced em both for nothing but then on hard one they stepped it up and also took down one of mine in their double sacrifice. But of course delivering a king & rook mate especially when there are some additional walls.

I constantly did go the same route on pyramid(s) and always was wondering why they didn't pull the trigger on my free hanging rook here.

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 21.04.49.png

So I move up and they never crush it... 🤔

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 21.04.58.png

I didn't quite like how the AI practically won stales. Of course it's the way it has to be as a draw in a game like this would be impossible but they did like throwing in perpetual checks quite often. :angry:

A quicker way to restart would have been nice too. Going back to menu, scrolling to find the level etc wasn't too fun. Even could go far as have an undo functionality since the AI always did the same moves as a response anyway. Also needing to pick your piece to move every single time was annoying. Especially on the single piece levels even though the multiple ones could have also remembered your previous moved piece.

Oh yeah and for compo using existing sounds is kinda a no go (especially as is, as a part of something bigger maybe a more gray area). And so pretty much is updating the game after the jam unless there are some huge game breaking bugs. Which I wouldn't consider these...

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 21.38.15.png

I do notice now that you mention it and the original version (windows only though I guess) can still be dug up but mainly linking to the updated version seems kinda iffy. 🤷‍♂️

Anyways, good job! 👍

Me And My Unicycle by Nikl 2021-10-06T13:50:27Z

It was pretty much a cake walk after getting the hang of it while practising around in the first level. I think I only failed total once on the levels past that.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 16.28.23.png

Didn't really click to me instantly that A/D and arrow keys were controlling different part. So for the few tries I did it completely by just using A/D which I usually don't even prefer unless you need to use mouse at the same time. Which you did here for the restarting, horrible design choice really! Yeah, so after trying out the arrow keys I was wondering why they seem to be mirrored controls. And at that point I then noticed that holding D/right both at the same time gives much more speed and balance. Then I payed another glance to the help message and understood what was going on.

Jumping controls were just not great. The jump height didn't feel consistent at all and the ground detection was very iffy too. So many tries I just failed due to a practically invisible small bounce which didn't allow me to jump or a baby jump which wasn't able to clear the gap. I think that was the source of my only death past first level. 🤔

There also might have been not proper reset for the player when restarting a level. I felt like there was some speed and or angular velocity inheritance going on? Cause sometimes right after start even without touching the controls, the dude started falling one way (and sometimes the other). 🤷‍♂️

Wasn't a biggest fan of the visuals. I have nothing against just grey stuff really but something here didn't look quite right. And the accented pure blue doesn't look like a great choice either. To my eye at least using pure bright colors brings to mind an amateurish mspaint look. Nothing wrong with that either if done as a stylistic choice though but I guess you weren't going for that.

There was also kind of a mismatch of different styles in the visuals. There were some hand drawn style elements and sharp very geometric shapes for pretty much the rest. I think it would have looked more uniform and cohesive if it was either or. And the background clouds didn't really fit either of these two styles.

The wobble of the wheel due to the rotation pivot not being in the visual center was very noticeable and off putting probably because majority of other stuff was static and geometric. If you had leaned completely on the hand drawn style, the wobble would have fit in nicely. So just draw all the shapes too by hand and maybe even draw everything couple of times and loop these as keyframes to appear as very "messy" hand drawn sketch.

But yeah, really kinda left me just wanting more content. I really enjoy tough physics games like these (ie. Trials, Getting Over It etc). Good job! 👍

NauSea by Notinatal 2021-10-06T16:41:30Z

So is it even possible to beat? After several tries and this was my best effort and at that point it pretty much dealt me an unwinnable situation.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 19.18.01.png

The barrel mission was utter garbage. The first time you encounter it, most likely the barrels will have rolled to some position where they can't even be recovered. So I guess that's where the annoyingly long just waiting time in the beginning comes to play. But still the fiddly physics and the unprecise movements could easily put you in a position where the barrels just block you from going to one side of the ship.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 19.10.42.png

So yeah, wasn't huge fan of the big amount of waiting that was needed. Just waiting in games is never fun. On my first run I had already gotten bored and locked myself to the mid left room with the table as there was no indications in forever.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 19.04.17.png

The usual game was divided into first minute or so just waiting (or fiddling around with the barrels unless they by some miracle want to co-operate). Then very casually running between tasks (and still having to wait between). Then at some point the speed just picks up to be too much and you're screwed.

The arrows were not too easily noticeable. Some movement could be added and they easily could have been bigger too. It was quite often very hard to evaluate at what point they were pointing towards. Mainly for the second/top floor left side spots.

Other than the barrel thing, the minigames were pretty fun and varied. They did get kinda repetitive as you learned the positions.

Went for another try and beat my previous best but still ended up in a situation that just couldn't be beat.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 19.34.14.png

I think it's just straight up too RNG based. And the events start becoming so quick and frequent that it's impossible to beat them.

Even the boxes on the bottom floor and lodge up the door and block your access to the leftmost spot. And the ladder becomes were quirky when the ship rotation becomes large.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 19.31.58.png

The controls overall were very loose and abrupt. Especially around the ladder. The character collider felt like it was some awkward shape which made pushing the objects unpredictable.

But yeah, it was good. With better pacing, cleaned up controls and a bit more variety, it'd be awesome. Good job! 👍

NauSea by Notinatal 2021-10-06T16:59:01Z

Oh and as it looks like I have accidentally hit the video recording shortcut while trying to take screenshots, here is a bonus video clip from my final run.

https://youtu.be/v-G-fAOEbe8

NauSea by Notinatal 2021-10-06T17:02:50Z

@notinatal Check that first non "win screen" screenshot I posted. There the middle barrel is too high to be gone over and all three are too heavy to be pushed. The barrels can also fly up to the left side of the table where I'd say they are impossible to be recovered.

NauSea by Notinatal 2021-10-07T04:11:19Z

It's still way too long of a wait time even for the first run. I had investigated the whole ship (not actually noticing the controls on the wall so by figuring out them by myself) and jumped to the sea as there was nothing else to do before getting any prompts. And indeed on my second run (as the diving wasn't the way to go) I locked myself to the room with the desk.

Oh and every two rounds played the Q/E buttons for restart and quit stop working and I had to hard reset the game.

TARANIS by Strange Nebula 2021-10-06T14:29:41Z

Finally! 😤

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 17.05.47.png

Soo, where to start. Let's pick the controls. They weren't great. Jumping was floaty, movement was slippery and the character got stuck on everything. The ground detection for jumps was also very fiddly. You pretty much had to be standing still a good length away from the edge to be able to jump properly. Trying to do a running jump? Forget about it, impossible! I'd rather have the C power be a toggle and not need hold it down.

The camera work wasn't perfect either. Loads of blind jumps and the camera moved too much vertically with jumps so it was needlessly hard to see where you'd be landing. When running the camera also lagged behind so you'd only be able to see 1/3 of the screen forward as it should do the exact opposite. I highly suggest Cinemachine which makes camera stuff a whole lot simpler to deal with (especially for non-programmers).

The forced waiting points were awful. Waiting is never really fun in a game. The horribly slow moving platforms (especially the one near the beginning that needed to move for ages and then suddenly change direction, mess your jump and make you wait for another cycle) and the "retry punishment gates" on the final section.

And speaking of the final section, that was pretty much breaking all these "rules". The first part was just fine actually. The second part however was kinda annoying as the camera moved too much up for you to see the platform underneath so you pretty much have to guess the landing. And then for jumping again you gotta remember to jump straight up first. And don't you dare hit near the corners when landing on a platform as you'll just get stuck there. And if by some luck you manage to wiggle your way up from such a position, the huge acceleration and sticky inertia will surely kick you off the other side.

The final jump on the final section was the worst. You have to just do it by faith and hope that the platform is moving the direction you think when you materialize them. And still the high speed they're moving is highly likely to mess up your jump. Well at least the music in the final bit slaps!

There were quite a few visual glitches which I don't think were part of the glitchy look. The character sometimes disappeared when moving left. The legs kept getting stuck on platform corners as the body kept moving.

And this looked annoyingly like something you should pick up.

Screenshot 2021-10-06 at 16.58.18.png

TARANIS by Strange Nebula 2021-10-06T16:45:21Z

Haha, I see, I see :smile:

But yeah, you definitely should be proud. Just completing a fully working game in a weekend isn't something everyone can say they've done. Sure it has some issues but 100% playable without any game breaking bugs and at least it was balanced enough that I didn't feel the urge to give up. 👌

Ines Table's Unstable Potion Factory by FuzzDistor 2021-10-07T14:55:47Z

Well, it would really need to get more difficult as it gets further, I had to manually stop trying to actually fail on my final run.

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 17.40.33.png

At first it was a really hard thing to grasp between the color of the label and the potion itself. But after few failed tries I really managed to hone in on the label.

The conveyor belt "fail point" also felt very arbitrary. Would have made much more sense to destroy the potions as they fall off unless grabbed in time. Now that I went back for a bit more clicking around, I noticed that the potions were spitting out numbers as a countdown for the destruction. Didn't really become apparent while first playing as I grabbed the potions as soon as they appeared and then for the remainder of the time they were outside of my peripheral as I was watching/pressing the color buttons and the potion was in hand. And then when I glimpsed on success I saw the numbers but always just though that they were the score.

The art style was adorable and the audio fit it well too. I just would have liked to see a bit more movement though. Just like the explosion and the aweet failure animation. Sadly when doing well the game was missing all those minor details and looked very static. And small things like increasing that "days without an accident" number would really have been a cherry on the top. There are also some quite funky looking glitches that can happen...

ines-v2.gif

Funnily enough, I've done a game with pretty much the exact same idea but completely different approach. https://anttihaavikko.itch.io/potions-frankly

Good job! 👍

W O B B L E by Gus Goucher 2021-10-09T14:14:57Z

Pretty damn cool! 😍

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 16.50.09.png

Simple yet nice aesthetic and the music slapped pretty hard. Everything read very well and was easy to get a grasp of the mechanics. Probably the longest credits sequence I've ever seen in a jam game. 😅

I think I ended up pretty much cheesing like the latter half of the game.

wobble-cheese.gif

Even in the final bit of the final level I think I literally found a way around all the designed obstacles.

wobble-end.gif

The controls department could have used some love. The character movements felt very abrupt and fixed jump was kinda iffy too. The block grabbing was quite finnicky. You never knew which way to boxes might want to rotate when you grabbed them and they surely would have needed some more mass. They also bounced and wobbled around like they were made out of polystyrene. Considering how many times you had to pile some boxes to make a tower, it was like the hardest thing in the game as the boxes behaved like they were in a 10 richter earthquake. And that whole grab auto releasing thing felt very awkward but I guess that was done to try to avoid the exact cheese I managed to abuse anyway.

The difficulty curve was nicely smooth and at no point it got too hard. For me at least. Could have easily done with a handful of even more difficult levels. But I do enjoy hard games and by looking at the other comments, I guess this could already be considered on the hard side of things.

As I said, the music was awesome. The sound effects not that much though. I think there was some mention about them being glitchy on Chrome and I did play on it. Some of them sounded a bit harsh. But definitely would have needed a bit more variety.

I found the lava wall completely pointless and just straight up annoying for first playthrough. Probably a completely separate timed mode or something like that would have worked better or you could just give them a grade based on speed. But killing player in a puzzle game because they can't do the solution fast enough doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Hiding the tutorial image about two same color box touching was pointless as you pretty much forced the player to see it happen first hand before showing the image itself.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Unscrambler by Antti Haavikko 2021-10-04T10:02:05Z

@jcmonkey Yes some of the words are crazy indeed. I have a ~2 megabyte word dictionary where I pick a word that can be spelled with the periodic table elements (starting with 5 letter ones and slowly getting longer each new level). Then from level 3 onwards it starts splitting (by their atomic number) to two different ones with basic math operations. For example Oxygen (atomic number 8) could become Carbon (6) and Helium (2) etc.

The solution doesn't necessarily need to be the same word the puzzle started with, any that is found in the dictionary will work.

Thanks for playing! ❤️

Unscrambler by Antti Haavikko 2021-10-05T05:12:56Z

@jeremy-ryan Dang, nicely done pretty much solving the game! 👍 It was actually quit long into the jam weekend when I discovered the multiply/divide trick with hydrogen to make em disappear. Was then quite aware that one could pretty much go on forever with that and tried thinking of ways to still make players lose lives somehow. But didn't come up with anything and though that at that point maybe they've just earned it. Math op, please nerf! 😎

@owlycode Yeah, a limited more down to earth dictionary set would indeed be good for the puzzle creation. Of course going through the list of hundreds of thousands of words is pretty much out of question though. And using a completely different simpler one could mean that some words might not be in the extended one. Well of course that could be sanitized/checked first just like I do to verify that the word is solvable with the elements.

Thanks a lot of playing and leaving detailed feedback! ❤️

Unscrambler by Antti Haavikko 2021-10-07T04:29:05Z

@samuli Yeah, totally! I kinda settled on the 10 hearts early on even before I had to math machine there and sadly didn't realize how infrequent the life loss will be with proper play. I did think about adding other sources of life loss later on than just technically "giving up" and submitting a shorter word. The top one being losing a life when the multiplier ticks down (every minute). I think it would have made it less possible to go on forever as one can now do quite easily with all the proper math tactics and patient word building.

@mathiouza Yeah, me too! 😅 That's kinda the reason I added the word definitions there. Yeah the sample words (from which the puzzle is built from too) can indeed be very complex as quite a few people have mentioned. The submitted answer doesn't need to match it though and as the math machine unlocks, you can blend the elements together in various ways and end up with dozens and dozens of possible "perfect solutions". You don't really need to know the elements to play as the display will tell you what the end result will be so you can just try them out. Of course it doesn't work for longer planning though. And it's secretly a bit of an educational game too! 😎

Unscrambler by Antti Haavikko 2021-10-09T19:00:33Z

@noethelazydev Yeah I was kinda drawing blanks for the theme so I went with unstable elements/chemistry route. Elements tend to be unstable and the whole elements changing to others was supposed to be that.

I did have the dictionary system ready as I’ve made other word games in the past. So I pretty much had it partially ready for checking if given string is a match or not.

Unscrambler by Antti Haavikko 2021-10-12T17:02:32Z

@willoxs Nah it's just a plain text file of words which I read into memory, a `Dictionary` to be technical as that is the most performant way to check if a word exists in it (in C#). The word definitions are then queried from an API so you can check that if you're interested.

The sources for that are here: https://github.com/anttihaavikko/unscrambler/blob/main/Assets/Scripts/WordDefiner.cs

Unscrambler by Antti Haavikko 2021-10-12T17:10:03Z

@willoxs Oh yeah of course, it's a requirement for compo entries.

Unstable Code by Souptik Datta 2021-10-04T16:32:41Z

First of all, had to do the classic manoeuvre to get it running on mac. But even after that OSX did some extra checks notifying that they're not sure that this isn't malicious software. First time I've ever seen that. Dunno if it's because you're deleting files. 🤔

Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 19.20.40.png

That wall of text and the speech were off sync. Made it kinda jarring to follow. Also had some weirdness when the line end was reached, it first scrolled a bit before breaking and after a 10 or so characters on the new line, the line height adjusted a bit.

Did manage to beat it pretty easily.

Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 19.19.17.png

That whole save corruption stuff etc was kinda cool but on the other hand quite pointless. It didn't really make the game any easier and the whole copying effort didn't really seem like it saved any time.

Always a good idea to add both WASD and arrow keys. And you managed to have a full screenful of text explaining the game and still not even tell the controls. Also, did not find any use for the jump. Even where it could have been used, it couldn't because the ground detection was so scuff that it didn't allow jumping too quickly after landing or near edges.

And don't really think it's a great idea to have the player object be a white glowing ball while the background also has a white glow in the middle where the player will spend majority of their time (making it pretty much invisible).

The fall damage seemed like a dick move in a game like this. And the lava on top seemed to rubber band a bit too much to my liking.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Waiter, please! by Yamzho 2021-10-07T17:09:22Z

Having to install java was bit of an annoyance. 😅

Loved the art style. Could have used some movement too and obviously some audio to back up the visuals. Controls wise I really would have preferred if it was drag and drop instead of click and then needing to click again. The drink images while grabbing them could have been a bit bigger too to ease returning them to the order sheet.

The idea was super neat and pretty well made. I really did not grasp how the strike system worked at all. I was always clicking on green and on later runs I managed to keep the balance well too so I always had that wide green area. But still the strikes just appeared for unknown reason. Really would have helped to see when you were getting the strikes to understand what I was doing wrong. This ended up being my best run.

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 19.51.57.png

Sometimes when going to deliver there were some strike symbols on top of the green lines. Was this me receiving strikes and if so, why? 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, always the game ending strike was gotten out of the blue while just loading/unloading the tray and while none of the order timers were getting depleted.

At first it was quite unclear that the things needed to be put back too after delivering. Doesn't really make much sense story wise either that you're coming back from delivering the drinks and you still have them on your tray for some reason. What do the customers never accept their drinks and you pour them back to bottles? 😆 Or was it the waiter walking to the table and then giving out the orders? If so, it doesn't make any sense that you can first load up everything, then walk to all the tables one by one and deliver them at once when there. Does this bar have only one table where all the customers are sitting at? 🤔

It was possible to dupe drinks if you grabbed one as an order was clearing above. Then the order where you had grabbed a drink from moves up and the already grabbed drink becomes grabbable again. So you end up with one extra one which you can't ever get rid of.

Making the balance stay at the center was actually very easy as it was completely grid based and even though I think there was some kind of weight system, they didn't differ that radically to matter much.

Anyway, good job! 👍

Durgon Outpost by Joseph Manley 2021-10-07T14:26:20Z

Well that was crazy short. Or was that really the end? That one dude kept saying to come back later but just waiting (ie. walking around) didn't work and neither did talking to everyone else and killing all the rats.

> I kind of cut content a bit there

That's one way to put it...

On my first run I did die to the last rat as I wasn't quite ready for how the combat worked. But before that I somehow managed to get misaligned from the grid. This remained until the end of the run, always being like third of a cell too much left.

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 17.04.34.png

Was it just decoration or why was the grid missing on two different rooms?

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 17.08.18.png

It was kinda annoying how you had to move towards the thing you were going to interact. There were no places where two different things would be next to you so you could as well check for all the directions for interactable cells.

The combat was also quite weird. At some point you just couldn't attack the NPC but neither did they. Until you move some (and they just keep following you). Then somehow the attacking gets unstuck again but obviously you will lose (against some NPCs at least) as they just have more HP than you and you're always just trading blows. 🤷‍♂️ And the HP didn't update correctly either until you move first.

durgon.gif

Anyways, good job! 👍 It's a really solid base for a game but obviously very much lacking on the content department at its current state.

Crumbling Mind by NoeTheLazyDev 2021-10-09T10:46:05Z

That Mac version doesn't seem to start up.

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 13.17.24.png

I did try the usual `chmod +x` trick too but not luck. After a bit of googling I found this one being a known issue with Godot exports (which this seems to be) which worked!

```sh sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/Crumbling\ Mind.app ```

But yeah, nice game! Really smooth and good looking animations. Didn't quite like the turning animation here. That works in some games but didn't really seem to fit here. The character really controlled very nicely too which isn't a common thing in jam platformers. The jump felt good and the acceleration/speed was on point.

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 13.30.49.png

It kinda lacked in the audio department. The music was awesome and did a really good job at painting the desired (I guess) mood but could really have used some sound effects as well.

The main depression/anxiety mechanic seemed like a pretty pointless thing. Depression was a sure run killer unless you were already close enough to a teddy bear or already exactly knew the route forward. And anxiety on the other hand did pretty much nothing to hinder the play at all, maybe even making it more enjoyable. And of course it looked cool! 😎 I'm a sucker for nice full screen shader effects and really enjoy doing em myself too. One thing I really loved about Godot was the ease of adding those compared to Unity which I usually work with.

Gameplay wise it was littered with blind jumps (even more so with depression) and choose a path spots which pretty much never are fun to a player. Some better camera work and having it be a bit more zoomed out would have helped here. For example the camera could have actually looked a bit forward instead of pretty much the opposite how it now behaved as it was dragging behind the character so only about a third of the screen estate was used for "valuable information". There already seemed to be some limitations on the camera y-axis movement which was nice but could have done some more as there wasn't that much verticality and it was ofter more needed to see what would be under you.

Anyways, that's about all the critique I can come up with. Good job! 👍

**edit:** Oh yeah forgot, there were some points where the ground detection wasn't working quite right and it allowed kinda double jumping.

crumbling-mind.gif

The Markus Polo Hostage Situation by Chris Hay 2021-10-09T11:26:54Z

Pretty neat!

So first off I was faced with this, a fraction of the input text was clipped off. Playing in not full screen almost fixed the issue making it still be readable though.

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 13.50.38.png

The game was way too linear for such a genre in my opinion. You couldn't really do anything that wasn't intended and even the correct solutions were completely spoon fed to you. Any of the choices you did prior to the last one didn't really matter either. They were just one extra sentence and loop back to the previous point. The only point really I think that didn't outright give you the answer just before you needed to type it was the searching the web. And even then you couldn't possibly know the answer the game was looking for and it then tells you the solution.

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 13.57.19.png

So yup, really didn't take any advantages from the text adventure genre and could have as easily been just multiple choice game. I guess all that time save coming from not having to implement the text interpret engine could have then gone to make the story branches a bit more interesting.

The story was actually pretty well done. I usually don't expect to see such even in story focused jam games (and usually don't either). But this was simple enough and told in a way to keep the interest up. Kudos! 👌

Well yeah, this is exactly what is was trying to do...

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 14.09.16.png

I don't think a "banker manager" is a thing. Was it just a hack to not confuse "call bank manager" and "call bank"? 😅

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 14.04.03.png

The music had this one point that really reminded of Gwyn fight track from Dark Souls. I was fully ready to meet a flame sword wielding old man and parry the crap out of him. 😎

I did all three endings but still think my first original one was "the best" one even though the game didn't feel that way about it...

Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 14.08.57.png

Anhyways, good job! 👍

Maudits Fantômes / Cursed Ghosts by Mossieur Patate 2022-10-04T17:07:38Z

I actually played the web version but after seeing the first comment, I had to try if it runs on mac. And yeah it does but does need execution rights first...

Screenshot 2022-10-04 at 19.50.03.png

I stopped playing at level 14. It really doesn't get any harder and gets quite repetitive fast. The huge wait times don't really help either. You always have enough lives to just do two at a time and that is very easy to do. Sometimes you can even push for three or four if lucky.

And the wait time gets even more annoying as you really can't practically do anything but wait until the last second where you make up your mind what to target as due the ghosts moving around. The theme take here kinda fights against the actual game design, it would play much better if there was no night phase really and it changed when you first pick something up.

Pretty much hated the control scheme how the vertical movements moved diagonally too. It really screwed with my head. The grid isn't really isometric looking enough for that to make sense.

The ghosts looked nice and dynamic enough with their quirky eye animations. I don't think this was the best possible way to display the lives though...

Screenshot 2022-10-04 at 20.06.08.png

Good job, neat take on a classic! 👍

Maudits Fantômes / Cursed Ghosts by Mossieur Patate 2022-10-06T07:06:19Z

Oh of course, I didn't try to be overly critical. I just give feedback that I'd find useful myself. So pretty much where to improve. Of course compliments are nice too but not that helpful really.

And yeah with proper visual representation the diagonal movement would have made more sense surely. Really just screwed with my brain at least to see a flat 2d grid where movement wasn't really as expected.

For the health UI the pellet is fine I think. Kinda looks like a coin though so having the mouth slit would help it come across even clearer. My problem with it really wasn't that but the number representation. Just having what is left would have been better. Ie. instead of 3/8, it would show 5. Or even better yet, just repeat the graphic 5 times so 😶😶😶😶😶.

DRILL BILL by Aurel300 2022-10-07T14:10:59Z

Nice! Claimed a high enough spot in both the leaderboards for now. 🎉 drillbill.png

At first I thought that it wouldn't really work as a score game but after few runs, it did trick my lizard brain to getting addicted on claiming a higher and higher spot on there. Still don't really fully understand how the scoring really works. The combo doesn't really seem to play a big role in how much you score but it might be speed instead. Dunno really. Well, don't die at least, that much I got.

The controls leave a bit more to be desired. The character just felt kinda stiff and too jerky on those platforming sections. Especially so if you had to shoot the at the same time like on the second to last level. Those two lava jumping levels were also quite big run killers for this exact reason. Very nice to see multiple different schemes supported though.

Loved all the little flourishes! Very nice attention to detail. Like the bounce of the clock and the fail crusher or something like animating the background based on player movement which made it feel a lot more interesting and dynamic. Even the score UI had a nice "glowing" animation which didn't go unnoticed. The pixel art was nice as well, weirdly the player character was the graphical element in the game given the least love. Even though all the other nice details were indeed nice, the player character should really be given at least the same treatment. That's where the player is mainly focusing anyway.

Very nice touch as well to represent the "current" color on the background pipes. Even though basically you really had to memorize the whole pattern before starting even.

The music was great and fitting, the sound effects served their purpose well enough too, didn't get repetitive or annoying at all even with how many times I did play it.

Other big run ender for me at least was the shooting "accuracy". It just didn't feel fair to pretty much see the sight connect when you're shooting just to realize that you're barely scraping the wall. Especially didn't feel great when you had to do those lava shots and only noticed way later on that you missed when you weren't even looking at it. Just kinda feels unfair. Even though it isn't really. 🤷‍♀️

Some of the levels were annoyingly tight and had practically no room for error. I'm mainly looking at you level 29. It also felt bad when time was up and you just froze in place waiting for the crusher. Having been able to still move and sometimes making it barely before the thing hit you would have felt amazing. Wouldn't have changed the gameplay or balancing at all, just how the player would feel near the end of the timer.

As it was a score based game where you need to replay loads, would have made sense to have a restart button. When fully score chasing and messing up even once, it meant a full restart. And it was super demoralizing when I restarted via full page refresh, started a new run and only after getting over half way done flawlessly to realize that I was on casual.

Good job! 👍

MinerLoop by PavelDlouhy 2022-10-04T16:22:54Z

Well that was probably the weirdest way to distribute a web game I've seen. 😅

Screenshot 2022-10-04 at 19.09.45.png

Very fun and original (probably been done but I've at least never seen it) idea to disallow loops. Makes it harder to do level design though. You even had a chance for a full on lock up...

Screenshot 2022-10-04 at 19.21.50.png

Pretty harmonious looking color choices! Except for the red kinda pops out too much. But it was indeed effective in its warning function. And what a banger of a music that was too!

Sad to see it be that short. Could have easily been couple of screens longer without anything additional without getting repetitive. It pretty much ended right after getting the hang of it.

I have a sneaky suspicion that this Minit-like "reset" every 10 seconds is going to be quite a common take on the theme this time around.

Good job! 👍

The Sandwicher by Antti Haavikko 2022-10-02T17:04:26Z

@eager Haha yeah, death is inevitable! 😅 But yup, you really gotta balance when to slow down for a heal and when to not. Every second you're not moving, the enemy wave timer keeps ticking making your future even more difficult.

The Sandwicher by Antti Haavikko 2022-10-04T04:43:22Z

@waffleworksgames Thanks! Yeah I have to agree that I did manage to get the feeling of carving through enemy masses to be quite satisfying. I did get to focus on that and overall polish quite a lot as the base premise of the game is quite simple. For the movement there is a slight constant force pushing you towards the closest enemy. That was initially meant to be one of the sign upgrades but after having it on since the beginning and then turning it off just didn't feel great, it made the launching feel boring in a stiff and static way.

The Sandwicher by Antti Haavikko 2022-10-04T18:24:39Z

@wrac4242 Yea it was a complete oversight on my part. I first realized that it might not be as obvious as I thought in my head when on monday I shared it to my coworkers and someone was immediately asking confused about it. Really thought it would be piece of cake to understand as it's just you do 1 damage to enemy and they do 1 back to you (except for the champion enemies later on that have the damage equal to the wave number). But of course it's not that easy to figure out as it's only displayed on your health bar and you're probably not focusing on that all that hard.

@madhumster You always are "homing" towards the closest enemy. The size doesn't matter.

@owca Nicely done! 🎉 Seems like you figured out the "proper way" to play if you managed to do that well on only few tries. 👍

The Sandwicher by Antti Haavikko 2022-10-05T05:16:08Z

@jeremy-ryan Nice! Your version of Breadalt makes me realize that I actually forgot to add cheese to those sandwiches. 🤨 What a sin. I knew there was something off on those bastards.

Yeah understandable that the homing isn't intuitive. Dunno if I just got too used to it as removing it (as I was going to make it an upgrade) made the game feel stiff and boring. And I kinda like it how it adds a bit of danger and a feel of randomness (even though it isn't random at all).

And actually the delayed healing was a bit of an accident at first. 😅 It was just that the whole landing animation was so long that you were able to cancel out of it and thus bypass the healing. Felt like a good fit so I tied it in to be a part of the main game loop.

The Sandwicher by Antti Haavikko 2022-10-07T23:01:13Z

@aurel300 Yeah my score it seems isn't even high, someone already achieved way over tenfold over that but just didn't manage to die anymore hence not be able to submit the score either. But I'd consider being on the front page already a good achievement. Mainly the scoring is just understanding the mechanics and focusing on the important signs (urden and azii really).

The movement works so that Breadalt is constantly pulled toward the closest enemy. I had that system running since the start pretty much and when I tried turning it off to make it a pickable upgrade, it just felt rigid and not too fun.

I mainly post the timelapses for my own enjoyment in the future but glad someone else gets something out of em too.

The Sandwicher by Antti Haavikko 2022-10-08T05:58:52Z

Hey you all mentioned not really figuring out how the movement and curving/homing towards closest enemy really worked. It's been mentioned enough that I guess it really is confusing. Do you think it would have been clearer and felt less arbitrary if that "force" to the closest enemy was also visually shown maybe as some kind of subtle line from the player character to the enemy triggering it?

@aurel300 @jeremy-ryan @madhumster @waffleworksgames

Gladiatorius by Juutis 2022-10-04T16:03:49Z

So is it endless? Tried few times and didn't really count how far I got but I think the enemy had around 10 hp where I failed on my better run.

I think you might have an issue with the canvas resizing as the button hitboxes get very much misplaced when going fullscreen.

There is sadly very little strategy for you to do. Enemy going always after you really just makes it a guessing game. Having the combatants take turns seeing who'd go first would be more interesting. And maybe even seeing each other's cards. I guess at that point it would need some actual AI work though, I think they were now only just throwing random cards. One way that might also be interesting was if both participants had the same cards. 🤔

Quite often when you managed to have them over extend with a big card you'd actually have some strategizing to do but sadly way too often you didn't have the appropriate cards to answer either. The very limited hand size also makes the ends of rounds quite a bore with both just skipping at least a turn or two. Not needing to fit the whole card before the end might make it better. Or the skip could pretty much be automatic too, at least if you had nothing you could play. I did skip my whole turn once which wasn't fun and there is only a very small chance of stumbling on a scenario where you could play a card but should just skip.

Nice to see some pretty elaborate 2d animations. Is it rigged and using IK or animating everything by hand? There is some annoying looking blurring going on on some piece rotations where the sprite is crisp for only fraction of the time. Didn't seem to happen (that much) on full screen but the misaligned hitboxes made it not play great like that.

I really played too slow to my liking. The cards moved mega slow and needing to wait for the slow and repetitive animations where nothing really happens (like mirror triple parries or defends) was a pain.

At first I kept confusing which action bar was for which person. Might have been a nice addition to mark them somehow. Wasn't huge fan of the color choices. Very umm, mspaintish to see pure bright colors. Well some of the card icons captured that same feel. 😅 So it was like three different art directions clashing with each other.

Screenshot 2022-10-04 at 18.54.43.png

The cards aren't balanced too well. Like for example the healing is absolutely worthless. Only for the player though as for enemy it's just annoying. Would have been nice to see more variation too but of course in its current state, having more would increase the guess work even more as now you would at least know about what the options were.

Good job! 👍 Really neat idea but kinda stumbles on lack of allowing for real strategy.

Gladiatorius by Juutis 2022-10-04T18:09:12Z

@juutis Oh yeah such timeline affecting cards would have been a nice addition. Would made it way more interesting and spicier.

I use Anima2D for skeletal rigs. It's discontinued and replaced with Unity's new 2d animation system but I still prefer it in many situations. I mostly use it just to build a skeleton and setup inverse kinematics for limbs so I can move the whole arm by just moving the tip etc. Then I just use those bones as wrapper objects for the sprites themselves. But if I need some actual sprite "bending" then I use the new Unity one.

Harvest Heist by 3ggplant 2023-01-10T14:35:04Z

Almost made it to a minute...

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 16.16.43.png

So it's very frustrating really. Dodging the shots is basically just up to luck and sometimes the watermelons just can't be found in time. Died several times without finding a single melon.

Kicking the scarecrows felt weirdly random too. Sometimes they just got their shot off without any warning so I guess the tactic is to only go for them right after they've shot. And you weirdly get stuck there for a while too which makes you vulnerable another scarecrow attacking you while doing so. But you lose too much time doing so as you pretty much constantly need to be on the prowl for the watermelons.

Seeing the shots is pretty difficult and I'm not even red/green colorblind. And the shots move so fast that it's really difficult to dodge them on reaction. Their hitboxes seem too big too and it makes very difficult to estimate how much you'll need to dodge. And the fact that they shoot even from off screen and sometimes in random directions doesn't really make it any fairer.

Also a quite weird design choice to have the player position etc not reset on retries. Sometimes you can just already have an arrow coming right at you when you start.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Some more tries later, needed to beat that minute marker at least...

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 16.34.37.png

Nimkip! by T C 2023-01-09T18:40:42Z

Neat idea but too bad the execution breaks in almost every way possible. I did manage to beat it though after soft locking myself few times first.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.20.31.png

The biggest issue really is that the nimkips don't really do what they're told. They have like 20% chance to actually do it and otherwise they just go there and do sweet FA.

nimkips.gif

Can't recall the non-workers either really as that will also recall the ones who are actually contributing too. Makes the whole gameplay loop absolutely tedious. And it's especially bad on combat cause no matter how many nimkips of what color ever you throw at an enemy, they might just glitch out and get killed and completely lock you from progressing. Finally I tried avoiding combat altogether and that seemed like the best strategy.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.18.29.png

Another pretty big issue was nimkips clipping outside the map and getting stuck in the void. And unless you figured out the completely unmentioned secret unit selection functionality, you couldn't even command your nimkips because the if the first acting one was stuck there.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.13.41.png

And that selection mechanic was also confusing when I first found it by accident. Obviously I tried to build one but hit the portrait instead and took me quite some time to find out why only reds were doing anything.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.11.11.png

The pixel art seemed pretty nice but it was mega blurry. And that green outline just looked weird. I think you did not set the sprite scaling mode to point. Doing that keeps the pixels from blurring out when upscaled. The animations also might have looked good from what I could see but everything kept blinking and flashing which kinda ruined it. And that grass texture was almost seizure inducing on non-fullscreen and moving. This UI color choice was absolutely horrible too, completely unreadable.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.00.57.png

The textbox text appearing animation looked weird as the words suddenly wrapped from line to line. I usually tackle this issue by making the full text actually always be there but the not appeared bit just being rendered transparent. There were also some z-ordering issues.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.07.06.png

And finally the controls. Well they did work but they didn't really feel great. The movement had this weird laggy inertia. Didn't really bother the gameplay that much though as no precision was really needed. The command and recall both did work but the recall size changing made it a bit inaccurate and prone to accidental recalls.

So yeah... as I told, the idea was pretty sweet but had some major issues in playability. Good job on finishing it though. 👍

Nimkip! by T C 2023-01-09T19:02:49Z

Yeah, seems so. At least on a quick try now they seem to be actually doing what they should. And there is sound too!

Nimkip! by T C 2023-01-12T07:28:49Z

@titos2k @crimoudin Worked on Mac Firefox at least just fine.

Carrots by maartene 2023-01-09T13:15:22Z

Pretty little stuff to do here. Sadly the carrots seem to cap at 100 no matter what so you can't even go for a bigger score. Took me quite a while to understand why it stopped gathering carrots at some point but after reaching the max few times I finally understood why that was.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 14.54.38.png

Now after writing this whole thing I went for few more rounds and it seems that the field even has more than 100. And if I just gather everything from there, the counter loops around back to 4. Doesn't really give much motivation to go for the treasure now does it? Even less so when the treasure is worth way less than what you'd be able to gather in carrots using the same time.

It sounded and looked pretty nice, though I guess everything was pre-made. The only thing that kinda stood out from the rest mega low poly style was the rabbit itself. And I think the shadows were a bit too dark which made it unnecessarily hard to sometimes figure out what was an object and what was just the shadow. The carrot picking sound was a bit tough on the ears.

The controls were a bit weird. The turning seemed kinda slow. Probably is nicer on a gamepad though. And only supporting WASD when the other hand isn't doing anything (except maybe space for jump) isn't a great choice. You should pretty much always add both WASD and arrows.

And btw, jumping wasn't even explained at all anywhere. In here either. And it was absolutely broken too :wink: And sadly the jump seems to get stuck where it really matters the most, near the treasure chest.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 14.48.55.png

The farmer AI, if you could call it that, was absolutely busted. His activation seems very arbitrary, sometimes aggroing you even if you have not stepped to the yard at all. And when he does aggro, it's crazy, shooting through walls and everything. Feels cheap.

Anyways, good job! 👍

abundance by Aurel300 2023-01-11T15:33:32Z

Cool!

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.02.02.png

But since obviously missing a log is a deal breaker so again we go...

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.08.50.png

Very solid work. Super stylized look and it works well. The swaying plants and lighting really brought the world alive. Some minor dithering issues here and there and some transparency glitches like this plant but nothing major and didn't really spoil the feel at all.

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.15.32.png

The controls were on point! Mega generous coyote air you got there, it never blocks you from jumping when just falling off. No wonder I didn't really mess up any jumps for that reason. Oh but overall I did mess quite a few jump. Can't blame the controls really, they were tight enough. But those death beams were brutal! I often took several hits when just getting hit once because of the knocks and then there were some instant death traps where you couldn't even get out anymore like this one where you just kept bouncing between the beams.

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 17.20.07.png

Well dying wasn't really a punishment but losing the logs and needing to backtrack again for those wasn't that much fun. And in my opinion the logs should disappear from the world just like the items do, as you can always just get back to them on your PDA. Do the kids nowadays even know what PDA is? On repeated runs closing it with P felt awkward. Could have been just like the final door at least that you could just git Z again to continue playing.

The 2.5D aspect really made my misjudge my jumps in places like these at first and I kept hitting my head. But then I got used to just staring at the "front bits" and judging my position from there. Which didn't really like to fit to my head as usually you'd think the character is in the middle of the z-axis.

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 16.53.32.png

Really would have needed some music or some ambience at least. That could have fit the mood too I guess. The sound effects already had some variation it them it seems, nice touch, often overlooked.

And finally a comic relief...

https://youtu.be/5KL7M6p41wA

Good job! 👍

abundance by Aurel300 2023-01-12T18:00:27Z

Haha, 1 frame of coyote air doesn't even count! Yeah the lack of it is often noticed when there is enough big jumps or precision needed. Even if the players don't really notice it, it makes it feel so much better. Well actually, if it's unnoticed completely and jumps being hard not complained about, then it has served it's purpose perfectly I guess.

Yeah shadow acne and some weird light/shadow bleeding where it really shouldn't (I guess). And some weird colored pixels on corners at least. But yeah, didn't make it look bad per se, could have been sold as an artistic choice too. 😜

abundance by Aurel300 2023-01-12T18:01:44Z

@jeremyfa At least on QWERTY mac they work just fine. You gotta be close to something to pick up for Z to work and gotta have the knife for C.

Hearty Harvest Tycoon by Ratheric 2023-01-09T17:47:16Z

Well, that's a Windows only build. Even if Unity says it's "Windows, Mac, Linux", you still need to pick (and separately build each) platform.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 19.45.29.png

Energy Harvest by SlantyOJ 2023-01-12T17:05:59Z

Neat idea. My first though was "cool, Marble Madness with two balls at the same time". Didn't do too hot on my first run...

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 18.45.41.png

The second one was better but need to do some math to get the time for it as your total time calculation doesn't reset on "play again" it seems. And not that I count it, I guess knowing the levels and how to reserve the energy didn't help at all.

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 18.49.21.png

The charging mechanic was quite un-fun. Forcing player to wait is never a good idea. Just doing a time penalty would have done the exact same thing without being annoying. And by using momentum and tapping you lose time that way too so I'm not sure if that's a really good idea either.

Felt like there wasn't enough force in the movement. Moving felt sluggish. Having more control over the movement would have definitely made it more fun. And the sluggishness and huge mass made the tactic of using one ball to bump the other pointless too. Just couldn't really do it. Pretty sad since it would have most likely introduced some interesting strategies.

Obviously needing the mouse to proceed between levels wasn't the best choice. Could have just made and keypress do the same thing and that way the player wouldn't need to move their hand to the mouse. A minor details but would have made playing (especially replaying) feel so much smoother.

The camera work wasn't great either. You basically had to know the levels already to actually be able to play well. The flat shading on the ground made it near impossible to see the height differences. The wobbling effect after charging was done was cool but looked awkward when moving.

Went for another run, at least this time I improved a bit.

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 18.57.24.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

Rough Harvest by Timur_Bahadir 2023-01-10T17:58:03Z

Pretty good. Very easy though. Played it through twice, the second time even without using any foods at all.

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 19.37.54.png

It get kinda out of had quick. I think the weed timers could have been a bit longer and have a more visible cues for when they became plantable and were about to grow weed. As the action was so constant that it really gave no room to familiarise oneself with the recipes and ingredients and so on.

The combat worked pretty well but felt too slow and not dangerous at all. Only the corn enemy seemed like it could actually pose even a minor threat. But as you were always in control of what was spawning, it wasn't a real issue either.

There was no downside at all to just constantly keeping both mouse buttons down and literally mashing space to move constantly as the normal walking speed was so horribly slow. You should pretty much always evaluate your player "actions" whether they could just be used all the time. That is why shooting usually has recoil, slower movement, reloads etc. Or even making them fully automatic could be another way to go. Now you only really had to stop for planting and cooking.

The visuals worked pretty well. Nice animations too. Would have wanted to see a bit more feedback on actions like hitting enemies and getting hit yourself. It just didn't feel like anything had much impact. And the screen shake was off by default for some reason, only noticed the existence of it on my second run. But it looked pretty weird. Not sure why but it felt sluggish somehow. Was it only camera rotation? I think it should be snappier and ideally accompanied with a gut punching sound effect to really drive the impact home.

But yeah, it was good. Of course it could have been better with a smoother progression and maybe having the foods permanently build up your stats instead of just being timed buffs. Good job though! 👍

**edit:** Oh and only now read the description. I played the web version and it worked just fine.

eHarr West err... by bloodycoin 2023-01-10T18:22:22Z

Umm, okay...

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.06.08.png

Had to play the post-jam version as that was the only mac version provided. Guess it doesn't really matter that much though. The game started with a completely black screen. I guess it's not supposed to do that? Then after clicking randomly I was greeted with this.

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.02.17.png

And after clicking some more, some UI elements appeared too.

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.02.21.png

But yeah, it was still very cryptic. I guess you could do some major low rez pixel art here.

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.02.47.png

So managed to actually start the game after all this major league artistry. The pixel art looked pretty nice. But I did not like the color choices on mainly the player character. I guess everything else looked just fine. The info texts were weirdly offset from the center too. Oh yeah now that I think about it the "inventory" was on the other side. 🤔

The character controls could have been snappier. I felt like the acceleration and slowing down was unnecessary. And probably should setup the colliders kinda like this so you could walk behind the objects and it would make more sense.

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 20.12.34.png

The main "point and click game loop" here was pretty simple. It felt unnecessary to be that tight in the order of things like having to do the watering can thing before you could even interact with the bucket. And none of the things really made any sense either. I guess the machines could have hinted a bit more on what they needed if interacting with them without the required thing. And of course getting rid of that rigid order and adding in more stuff to interact with (as maybe like red herrings) would have made it more interesting.

The ticking sound for the footsteps got irritating quite quick. Didn't really help that it along with the interaction beep were the only sounds in the game. Music definitely would have helped drown em out and some variety (and more sounds overall) would have really been the correct thing to do in my opinion.

Anyways, good job! 👍

eHarr West err... by bloodycoin 2023-01-11T13:03:19Z

Oh yeah the art thing makes sense. Totally missed the fact that my "artwork" was the final goal of the game. That's pretty cool and quite meta indeed. 👍 But I guess the screen being fully black first wasn't supposed to happen? And I think the UI and start could lean more towards helping understand what is going on there which would probably help players notice their art in the case too. Could even start the "actual game" then by zooming out from the case so that it's more focused. 🤷‍♀️

Hex-Yield by AndideBob 2023-01-10T15:25:22Z

Kinda fun to experiment around in. Of course I would have really liked there to be some actual goal and so on but guess this'll do too. I guess just discovering out new tiles could be a goal enough.

At least I "achieved" in unlocking the full progression...

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 17.08.14.png

Couldn't find all the different tiles though. But did find quite a lot. I'm missing 22, 24 and 26 only.

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 17.15.24.png

Can't really say that all those combinations really made that much sense. And it was so difficult to try to plan forward enough to make room for some specific combinations you wanted to try out. And the initial "watering phase" became such a bore after doing it over and over again.

It controlled quite smoothly and they were kinda intuitive. Hated the automatic camera movement when clicking on tiles though. And getting locked to some tile and needing to right click or hit the X to cancel felt pointless as just selecting some other tile could have done the same thing.

Visually it looked amazing. Loved the hand drawn art style and especially the bouncy animations. The sound scape was pretty perfect too and the music fit the mood and feel of the game great.

Oh yeah and the mac version needed this classic thing to actually run...

Screenshot 2023-01-10 at 17.24.03.png

Anyways, good job! Clearly one can see that you have a team where everyone knows their area well. 👍

Adelie - Water Under the Bridge by Meep 2023-01-19T13:32:00Z

Super fun idea and very well executed. Of course it would have benefited from some sweet tunes too but even without one, the sound effects remained pretty much non-irritating.

Screenshot 2023-01-19 at 15.11.46.png

Difficulty seems to stop ramping up around level 12 where the piranhas start to spawn. So after that it's all about luck just waiting until you run in to an un-winnable situation.

It was really clear what enemy was what and how they behaved after seeing them just once. Really good design on that department. Well maybe the tentacle thing was a bit confusing for the first few encounters as it seemed much scarier than it really was.

The early days started to feel like a slog after some repeated runs. There wasn't anything interesting happening and nothing you could do to improve your score as that was predetermined. But trying to breeze through that made me sloppy and prone to mistakes. A similar thing that happens often in roguelikes that you start trying to be fast to get to the interesting and new bits and start making stupid mistakes. But even in roguelikes (which are considered like the hardest genre ever) you aren't punished as hard as here. They always have some leeway for recovering but not here, just one stupid miss-step and you're done.

Like 75% of my runs ended before that day six marker where it actually starts to get interesting due to my dumb mistakes or enemy patterns that just can't be beaten. Usually that being two betas so near to each other in a "wrong" shape and you having no blocks to fall to. Well at least their AI wasn't perfect and you could sometimes juke them out even if they had you cornered.

The cutscenes get annoying. Even skipping them took forever. Any delays between tries (and levels) in a score chasing game like this start to really irritate fast.

And since you pretty much only die on your own stupidity or RNG being cheap, the end of the run never really feels good. At least it does have that "1 more" aspect but it would be boosted quite a lot if restarting and level transitions were quick and if there was something interesting in the early game too. At least like having the scoring be more skill based and not just "you get 80-120+ points randomly by level 10".

Good job! 👍 What is it that PICO-8 games pretty much always are far above other games in overall quality? 🤔

Adelie - Water Under the Bridge by Meep 2023-01-19T17:09:57Z

Oh right, makes sense. Did not know that PICO-8 has limited CPU too.

Crops Survivor by tanis 2023-01-09T15:54:48Z

Pretty cool! I've never actually played Vampire Survivors but even still it's not hard to figure out what game you're most inspired by here. 😅

Grabbed the first spot for now...

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 17.09.30.png

Actually went for another run and managed to improve it by a bit. Now I'm not even getting any powerups at all on level ups, even the crappy movement speed one is gone.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 17.57.11.png

And yes, I am saying that movement speed is an absolute waste of a skill here. The increase is minimal and you're already moving way faster than is needed. I think bumping it much would even hinder as it'll make gathering orbs harder.

Would have wanted to see a bit broader variety of powerups overall. Constantly getting served the same three with magnet capping out fast and speed being quite useless left me feeling like there wasn't much of a choice at all. Splitting the scythe one to be maybe separate damage/area would have been nice and pretty easy to come up with more different ones too. Like attack speed and healing would have fit in absolutely fine here.

So all in all, after the first few damage upgrades, more damage is pointless (just for the area). Movement speed caps at what, four stacks? Meaning 20% increase which wasn't even noticeable. And finally yeah the magnet did kinda work but I don't think it really was that much worth it to go for instead of damage and hit area.

So bigger pool of upgrades and serving three of them randomly might have been fun and obviously way more replayable. Allowing player to stack up the skills more would have been cool too. Of course it becomes harder to balance, especially for online leaderboards, but letting the player feel like they're getting (too) powerful is always a good idea. And all you need to really do to balance that is to ramp up the difficulty even harder at some point.

The early game of the (repeated) runs was often very boring. It picks up pace rather slow and feels grindy to get going. And as there is no healing, even small mistakes stack up. The enemy attack was hard to figure out. Was that on timer like the player one? Player character attack being timed felt weird at first too but I got used to it. It kinda served as a neat rhythm to the game.

Looks like we make quite a few same design decisions as game devs. The bouncy/scaling UI buttons, wobbling texts, the sliding panels on scene changes and even how your leaderboards/name input is setup are all very very similar on how I like to do things. Few things I'd focus more if I were you are color choices, fonts and overall player feedback. You know, like particles, flashing effects and screen shake on hits on so on.

The player character health bar was weirdly in front of the upgrade choice buttons...

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 17.15.13.png

Your audio work could have used some more love too. The music was kinda quiet and the sound effects were few and monotonous. Some variety to em would have been nice. And the swing sound started clipping like mad on the "end game" where you were killing dozens of enemies with a single swing.

Not a huge fan of the voxel art style either but that's just me and my taste. A better color palette would have helped here too. Now it looked too muddy and dark to me.

Oh yeah, almost forgot! You should usually add arrow keys too as alternative controls for WASD. And just requiring to use mouse for the upgrade picks while the whole game otherwise was just keys wasn't great either.

But yeah, good job! Fun game. 👍

Crops Survivor by tanis 2023-01-09T18:46:46Z

Haha, yeah guess that explains why there were that many same design choices 😆

Harv&West by Kebableykan 2023-01-09T14:38:17Z

So it's not a "web" build but just a Windows one.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-09T05:37:01Z

@coatline Thanks, big praises! I haven't really played that many typing games myself, I think Typing of the Dead might actually be the only one. 🤔

@kristinamay It doesn't really lock to a word you're typing. So you could technically even correctly fill some tiny word while writing some longer one.

typefarmer-double.gif

And there should be no distance limitation at all. My guess would be that you just saw the word wrong in those cases. There are a lot of weird words that by a glance look like common ones. 😅 Or another reason is similar to the what is shown in the above gif. If the word you're remembering and trying to type starts with the same letter(s) as the previously typed ended, then typing the first letter again will fail it.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-09T08:22:36Z

@elastiskalinjen Yeah I tried to make it not just about typing speed. Typing accurately is more important and there is also a distance multiplier which gives more score when you do those remembered off screen fills.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-09T19:00:29Z

@tanis Yeah that's how it's supposed to behave. So if you write CAR and also have RAM there somewhere, the R will be already marked. And if there is ARSE, you get two starting letters. It's intentional behaviour and the key to really making your multiplier go up.

I'm a non-native English speaker too and didn't face any major issues with those. Of course there are loads of uncommon and weird words in the dictionary and quite often at a quick glance you will mistake something for some other more common similar "looking" word.

Well it's not that "any" really. It also ignores mouse click and left/right and A/D 😅

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-10T05:20:42Z

@miloti It has a dictionary of words it picks from. Found that list somewhere few years back and been using the same one for all my word game needs.

https://github.com/anttihaavikko/typefarmer/blob/main/Assets/Misc/enwords.txt

@fancyreckless Haha yeah that's how the game also kinda happened. Started off with no great ideas on what to make so I started making a typing game. But when I made the camera follow the player and having the player be the origin of spawning new plants was when it clicked to me that this could be kinda fun and interesting. Then I piled on on that aspect and added the distance based score bonus etc.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-10T20:21:21Z

@juutis Thanks! And congrats on dethroning me from the number one spot. That took longer than I expected. I don't think I'm really any good at typing.

Yeah I actually kept failing on that same "trap" while I was playing it too. But stubbornly kept it like that thinking that it makes the scoring more interesting. Which I still think it does but hope it doesn't make it too bad in contrast.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-11T05:34:47Z

@jeremy-ryan Thanks! Yeah it was indeed a bit downscoped as I had less time to dedicate this weekend, maybe around 20 hours instead the usual 30ish. And I spent quite a lot of time in the beginning just thinking of ideas on what to do, the theme felt really to shoehorn into just farming or grim reaper.

Dang, just now I actually misspelled reaper and found out a way to combine both, Grim Rea**pear**. 😜🍐

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-11T12:40:20Z

@kepsert Haha, that is the power of online leaderboards! 😜 But looks like he also improved his score while you were at it.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-11T12:45:54Z

@kepsert It doesn't lock you to any word, it just fills every word that matches the letter you press (and resets everything that doesn't).

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-11T14:38:08Z

@bloodycoin Yeah guess that might have been a cool idea to zoom out a bit for more of a skill ceiling. And that is definitely the intended tactic. Not sure if it's the best though, at least with my typing skills it isn't enough to keep up with these players surpassing me on the leaderboards. 😅

And nicely kinda randomly found out that some weird words or spellings sooner or later come up and mess up your streak. That's the fun of having a huge dictionary with some weird monstrous words in there.

Thanks for the feedback! ❤️

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-12T14:51:15Z

@aurel300 Yeah so many people have mentioned that double letter punishment thing that it must be a "real" issue then. Of course I was hit by it too but stubbornly kept it like it was so actually discourage too much of an autopilot mode and needing to actually pay more attention.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-12T14:56:43Z

@aurel300 Oh and you always see the overgrowth plants. Plants only spawn around you and when there are 10+ unfilled on the field you lose. Of course if you're already running to another spot, you might just get a glimpse of a word just spawning in and have no real way to intentionally get back there.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-14T13:25:47Z

@kyrio Thanks for playing and the feedback! ❤️ The words "failing" does not really penalize you at all. Well I guess just the fail sound and shake might spook and confuse. The multiplier loss happens every time you hit a key, no matter if it's correct or not. So if you're writing a word and other keeps failing due to it, it doesn't really do anything. Yeah really thought that just showing the already written part with different color and animation would be enough to show how it works. And I didn't want to (over) explain the scoring mechanic etc as that isn't really needed to understand to play.

Typefarmer by Antti Haavikko 2023-01-24T05:38:53Z

@bradur Sure, feel free to grab it. Just by slap the component on TMP object and :tada: https://github.com/anttihaavikko/typefarmer/blob/main/Assets/AnttiStarterKit/Animations/WobblingText.cs

@ava-skoog Thanks for the feedback! ❤️ Yea I guess having some light vegetation and more irregularity on the ground coloring would help with the emptiness. The end and next word start matching was indeed intended as a scoring mechanic but it seems to trip people up quit a lot. Very surprised that no one has recognized those barks yet. 🤔 Maybe Tetris Attack wasn't such a big hit that people have those sound effects engraved to their brain like I do. And I guess it was a while ago too...

The Gold'n Apples by kikiriki367 2023-01-12T17:50:39Z

Pretty relaxing indeed. Barely made it after fumbling around at start and very very bad RNG.

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 19.34.27.png

And my final "great" build...

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 19.34.41.png

So the random deals were pretty brutal in the early game. You could even get so bad a luck that there is no way to pass the first island. And starting the whole thing again after a fail like that wasn't fun at all. Getting served a handful of only marketplaces at the start of an island was soul crushing.

The game should probably explain too that the apples and coin carry over so you shouldn't rush to the next island as soon as you can.

The visuals were pretty good. The white spot for the "picked up" building was a bit off putting and it was quite hard to remember where it was picked from when trying to return it. Could of really helped to have some sort of in place popup text/icon showing when you harvested apples or sold em for coin. Would have really made easing into the mechanic so much nicer.

Sometimes (or I think maybe even always) the hover effect didn't appear. Happened quite a few times at least on the one square off from left bottom corner on different islands too. And would have been cool to have the picked up building on the hover as kinda like a reminder preview of what you took. Messed up quite a few times because spent some time thinking and forgot what I had picked. And of course having undo functionality in a game like this would be a godsent.

The music was chill and fit the vibe of the game. Some sound effects would have been nice. They also would have helped giving feedback of gained apples or coin just like the visual effect I already mentioned.

Anyways, good job! 👍

The Gold'n Apples by kikiriki367 2023-01-13T07:16:36Z

Yeah the "bad hands" are no big deal really later on when you have probably some spare apples and more space to work with. But especially the first island(s) can get boned real hard by this. Having like a free refresh or always making sure that the starting hand has at least one hut would alleviate this.

Oh and of course not forcing a full restart would also fix the bad initial spawns as you could just quickly try again from the start of the island. Still wouldn't feel great by getting absolutely screwed by bad RNG.

Rot Waits for No One by giuti 2023-01-12T15:57:56Z

Cool!

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 17.40.23.png

It's quite discouraging on like season 8+ cause there is no way to serve even a majority of your clients. I'm pretty sure some of them even had so huge orders and little patience that they could barely even grown in that time. Let alone having to manage all the packing and few orders at the same time. Basically you could just serve one or maybe two of the clients and the rest will storm out. Didn't feel great.

I was doing quite good before the timers just became nigh impossible, the bar was even almost out of the frame already. Not a great use of space on this screen by the way.

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 17.32.05.png

It gets very repetitive after few seasons in because there is nothing new really. Just bigger orders and more ingredients which doesn't really make it any harder, just more annoying and time consuming. Sure it also got easier to do the orders wrong but having the box in correct spot helped and you only managed to serve two customers at a time anyway. Pretty much only sometimes forgot some slow growing ingredient from an order because I thought it was going to the later one.

Strong and cohesive visual art style, looked nice and the sound effects did their job well. Music got repetitive quick too being that short of a loop but not to the point of annoyance really. The orange sprite kinda popped out from the rest by being less detailed and sloppy looking. The customer patience meter was kinda confusing. Would have made a lot more sense (to me at least) to get rid of that arrow and just have the red fill up.

At first I didn't quite understand that the boxes needed to be closed. After messing about trying desperately to drag them, I found the button and clicked it on all of the boxes not really noting what was inside of em. Run ruined, it was time for a reset. The close button was also annoyingly small compared to everything else that had a a quite generous hitboxes and effect areas.

Other thing that felt tedious was watering the plants. The can being positioned so far and needing to drag for each plant separately was a bore. So much going back and forth there for no good reason. Didn't require any skill or precision, just a waste of time.

And these aren't seeds really. 😅 But of course it would maybe be confusing to have some other sprites for them (and more work to the artist on your team too).

Screenshot 2023-01-12 at 17.16.56.png

But yeah, that's it. Good job, very strong entry! 👍

Zarguuf's Big Berry Heist by bradur 2023-01-11T17:15:20Z

Dang, so short. I was just getting used to the control and it was already over. So time to bump up the difficulty and go for the SPEEEEEED...

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 19.03.26.png

I did a scouting mission too, guess I'm not supposed to be here?

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 18.48.54.png

And after going around the whole base, I found myself stuck on the other side. Walking the whole trip back didn't seem like a good idea.

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 18.50.28.png

After few glitchy teleports, I got myself out from there.

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 18.50.49.png

I think it was basically throwing too much stuff at you too fast. Didn't really get to properly use all the spells. I pretty much completely neglected the shield after the tutorial level since just dodging was more reliable to me. And the spells going off cooldown didn't have enough of an indication. Especially happened when I was pulling berries and the biggie on a crowded space. I so many times kept missing my pulls and also messing up whether I had the spell prepared or not. I think it could use leave the last used spell to be ready without the need to arm it again. Should make it smoother.

It looked and sounded good. The only thing that mainly irritated me was how the "cursor" kept jittering while moving. Also this teleport (at least) "bouncing off" looked a bit weird at times. And it hitting the walls was somewhat annoying when trying to quickly move and right before teleport something appeared slightly in the way. So it could be a bit more forgiving when going near corners.

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 19.05.59.png

Oh cool, found another shortcut to shave off few seconds...

Screenshot 2023-01-11 at 19.14.59.png

Good job! 👍

Zarguuf's Big Berry Heist by bradur 2023-01-11T18:12:31Z

Kinda annoying to have to replay the tutorial to try with different difficulties

https://youtu.be/y8T3gOofqfw

Zarguuf's Big Berry Heist by bradur 2023-01-13T14:14:40Z

So found a new skip to save yet another 10 seconds.

https://youtu.be/pRcxmYjIbb4

But since walls are no issue, why settle for going around the scenic route...

https://youtu.be/PaBpf-idZ3E

Zarguuf's Big Berry Heist by bradur 2023-01-13T14:21:09Z

And had to polish the rough edges to get the sub 40. Same tactic, no video this time.

Screenshot 2023-01-13 at 16.20.33.png

Storks Delivery Service by commanderstitch 2023-05-07T08:13:32Z

Like your logging 😅

``` we are ready to go to the title screen!! trying to create all the things! doing the level doing the Player x: 800y: 450 doing the Kittens Kittens added (at least one!) doing the evilDogs evilDogs added (at least one!) now everything is done ```

Always nice to see this mspaint aesthetic and and with a bunch of cooky animations and effects like here it really delivers. Some colors were quite rough to look at. Like the dirty puke green background on one of the level transitions.

Sadly it was very incomplete. I guess you had planned for more with all those actions that had no use at all in the game. Nothing besides move really did. Well the block did something at least and sprint also had it's use but neither was really needed. And having a sprint with no downside whatsoever isn't great. It needs maybe stamina system (which maybe you were planning too based on the bars above the character) or some downside to warrant a key press and not just be always on.

I'm pretty sure the kick also was absolutely pointless. And it was actually left click, not right. Was it supposed to be an attack against the dogs or to kick the kittens around to keep them safe?

Anyways, good job! 👍 Too bad this wasn't fleshed out more. With all the crazy stuff going on, it could have been amazing experience.

**edit:** Went for few more runs and I guess it was an attack after all. The hit box is just very strict and you risk more trying to do it than it's worth if you succeed. Once a dog spawned on me right at the start of a level making me fail instantly without any chance to do anything. And alternating between needing to press space and enter was annoying.

Void Scion by TechnoPorg 2023-05-07T07:31:48Z

Wow, big team. The game seems kinda incomplete. The world is very empty. I kept wandering around for ages and only managed to find I think three enemies and the boss. Which weirdly enough was the easiest of them all to defeat. 🤷‍♀️

Went for another run and found the start knight enemy, two shield ones, bow man and the cavalry. Then it seems to just be a whole lot of empty space to wander around in. That isn't even enough enemies to warrant an upgrade system. The enemies were also a complete joke difficulty wise. Your on attacks did more damage to your health than they did. Few of them also had completely unavoidable attacks so not a great design in that manner also.

The three different attacks weren't distinguished enough to have them all. Should have focused more on making one of them at least feel good and then maybe have other upgrades be for movement speed and health and so on. And of course would need a whole lot more enemies to make those upgrades matter too. My favourite from the attacks was the spear as it was the most polished one and had some interesting potential mechanic on the snake-like cursor following.

The character sprites looked pretty good. And the health bar especially was top notch. The tile set itself could have used some more love. They didn't really fit together and even in the only part that was tried to smooth out the "tiledness" on the road corners, it then was bleeding to the grass and looked even more awkward.

Having just few minor variations for each tile would go a long way to break up the repetitiveness and make it look more natural. And then of course have a more nice blends for going from tile to another which those road corners started to resemble already. And then of course just adding some decorative sprites of stones, tree stumps, flowers and so on every here and there would help tons to make it feel more alive.

It was also sometimes hard to distinguish mountains and the cobble road from each other when coming from a grass or dirt patch and only seeing one of them.

Screenshot 2023-05-07 at 9.53.41.png

Music was nice and chill, fit the vibe of just wandering around aimlessly perfectly. Even though it was a rather short and repetitive loop, it didn't get boring. It's still playing on the background for me while I'm writing this. The sound effects were good also. Having a small bit of variety in repeated ones like the walking one is so important (and often over looked). Kudos on that. 👌

Would have been nice to have some restart or any option really to get unstuck from the game over screen.

Went for another stroll through the game. Managed to kill the final boss with a single spear swipe by wiggling the mouse over him. And then the whole game crashed. 🤷‍♀️

And I also had some very weird frame rate stutters at random spots where nothing was even happening.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Void Scion by TechnoPorg 2023-05-08T06:16:57Z

Yes blending just like that. Anything to break it up looking that much tiled really.

So was it your first jam game? Of course better time management and understanding what you're capable of achieving in some specific duration comes with more experience.

Well yeah, maybe restart wasn't needed but getting hard locked in a game over screen wasn't great either. Could also let the player continue roaming around after that too. Of course at its current state, there wasn't anything really to do.

Continuing on a jam project is almost always a good idea. If nothing else you end up learning something more while doing so.

Contraband Crackdown by PurpledArtFrog 2023-05-01T09:49:22Z

Nice idea but it's so buggy that it's near unplayable. Did make it through it though...

Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 12.30.36.png

First of all, the web version at least has some major scaling issues. It doesn't really like to respond well to screen size and (maybe because of it) you get hard locked in the how to play or game over screen and have to do a full page refresh to continue. Not too fun. And zooming the page so that it the "supported" play size fits affects the positions somehow so that for example mouse clicks are misaligned a bit left and up.

Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 12.21.06.png

Really hard to stay informed on what is fully going on. The convicts sometimes teleported around and moved even while being knocked out. Didn't really figure out how the whole losing thing happened because sometimes they got away with contraband and nothing really seemed to happen. Played again and looked at the scoring thing more closely and I guess you just lost "points" when they escape. It is only detrimental in the beginning though and later on you really can't lose anymore as you get points so much faster than they possibly can take them away from you.

Best strategy (if you could even call it that) just seemed to be to just knock everyone out periodically and try to grab the loot. And knocking them out was a bit though to "aim" and the visual seemed a bit misleading.

Same as aiming your punches, grabbing stuff was weirdly intricate as well. Sometimes I could run circles on top of item and it just refused to get picked up. And items fading out by themselves didn't really help either. The pickup sound was quite often also missing which made it harder to understand whether you picked up an item or it disappeared or what happened.

Were the drones supposed to drop the items? It looked like that most of the time but sometimes they just appeared out of nowhere.

Oh and completely missed that there was supposedly a sprint on my first play. Even though, it didn't seem to work. Oh never mind, looks like there is an invisible cooldown on it. And having the music be muted by default was a weird choice. But even having it on didn't really help much with the irritatingly monotonous and repetitive sound effects. Some more variety would have been nice.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Contraband Crackdown by PurpledArtFrog 2023-05-01T13:41:25Z

Fair enough, I think it's a good idea to focus on a single aspect to hone. Mine this time was a new engine. The art itself looked pretty good in my opinion. And as you mentioned, polishing the effects and other feedback would really help sell it even better and of course make the game that much more enjoyable.

Contraband by Leo Barber Dev 2023-05-01T10:13:29Z

Success!

Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 13.03.58.png

Was very confused on the final level and had to restart completely to read the oh so slow messages (stopped reading them after to second one) thinking I missed some crucial information on maybe how to shoot or something.

The story messages could really be a bit speedier and could offer a scroll skip too (instead of completely skipping it) so you could read it on your own pace.

Guess I didn't miss anything and it was camera being absolutely dumb and not following me up before being way higher. And it also had some issues with following me back down in the end. And it was though to even figure out you could go up as previously your height was capped and this spot didn't appear any different. Just stumbled into it as there was no other ways around really.

The guardian hit box was very weird. Didn't seem to matter where the package was and all in all seemed quite arbitrary. Moving every direction besides up was annoyingly slow. I don't think allowing a bit more control would really hurt.

The sound scape was actually pretty nice. The ambience painted a nice mood without any need for special bells and whistles. The pixel art wasn't bad either was it looked a bit messy as the pixel size varied all over the place and not in a logical manner even (like the biggest pixels were in the background). Nice parallax though.

That's about it. Just would need some minor adjustments and obviously more content. Good job! 👍

Waggle Danger by Haustgeirr 2023-05-01T12:52:59Z

Very fun idea but it's mega annoying to play as the music just doesn't keep in sync at all. So basically missing the most important aspect of a rhythm game.

Really can't do any better as I keep dropping the combos left and right...

Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 15.36.17.png

I tried everything. Pausing to resync and full refresh starts too but to no avail, can't do more than a single full trip without it getting way off sync.

It looks nice. Very pleasing color palette and nice pixel art. Music and sounds work too but a more beat emphasising music could work better.

The scoring could be more interesting too. If it was in sync, it wouldn't be too hard to get the perfect 64*24 (at least that's how I figured it works).

Nothing much else to say here. I like the idea and the look/sound but the off syncing is really pissing in my cereal. But good job! 👍

Why Deliver Y ? by Aurel300 2023-05-04T14:48:34Z

Very cool! Got the "secret" ending on my first try.

Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.11.22.png

You get hard locked on that ending by the way. Had to refresh and try the normal one. Glad you had enough of a foresight to have a cheat for that (too).

Awesome way of telling a story really. Supported the gameplay very well so that even a slide puzzle hater such as I managed to breeze through it without any loathing. Also very glad that you didn't include any time/move limit so you can puzzle out those solutions in peace.

The lock picking mini game was my favourite part of the game really. Too bad it was very underused and that having no time pressure or anything really made it less of a hurdle. And now that I think about it, even the "enemy" detecting and moving mechanic was pretty much just scraping the surface. But obviously it was already pretty large scope for a jam and of course it's better the keep it tight feeling and have players wanting more than get repetitive. And the story could have easily handled few more levels of suspense to make the pacing better, now the end came kinda fast in my opinion.

The arrow keys didn't work on the level cleared menu. Of course not a major issue as I switched to WASD and mouse anyway after figuring out that the lock picking needs mouse anyway.

I think this might have been the only part where it happens but it wasn't great that you get ambushed from a blind angle because you had to flashlight on and have to replay the level to learn about it and keep your light off. Guess it hits two birds with one stone by teaching you about the restart too. 🤷‍♀️

Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 16.53.52.png

Then of course you go and punish that blind faith in turning off your flashlight at the start of each level like this... 😶

Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.39.08.png

Was it actually intentional that you could use the flashlight as a glorifier "skip turn" button? I felt like I cheesed at least one level with it.

It looked and sounded awesome! Nice pixel art and animation with just a few frames. Kudos. Perfect color choices too. 👍 Music fit the mood very well but having some jazzy drums (with brushes obviously) would have been sweet addition as a classic noir style detective trope. Did you do it yourself by the way? Didn't see any mention about it and I recall you having someone else usually tackle that part.

Didn't like the i in the font though. Of course it's just an opinion. Interesting choice though but it does make the text harder to read. There were some overlap too like this.

Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.44.33.png What's with the rank? It doesn't seem like rating on how well you did on the level and I at least couldn't find any difficulty selection or such.

Good job! 👍 Very full experience with practically no issues. Left me wanting more. Wanting more slide puzzles, guess I'm going crazy...

Bloodrush -DELUXE- by Max Amaden 2023-05-01T13:36:39Z

Pretty fun!

Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 16.27.15.png

Looks and sounds great, nicely polished! Even though the visuals themselves were rather simple, the effects and everything make it really pop. Some adrenaline pumping music would have been a nice addition too. And it would have helped with selling the slow-mo too. Now it was sometimes quite easy to get confused between the modes.

Also would be an amazing feature to see your run in real time afterwards... 🤔

The driving physics seemed a bit off. Or maybe not the actual driving but the collisions. They are just out of control. Looks like the car just randomizes it's rotation on collision. Really brings in these uncontrollable chain reactions where you just mash against walls and mail boxes.

I think it leans too much on the package/letter delivering and not that much on the actual fun part which is the driving. Especially not fun on those huge clusters of mailboxes like that one spot where it goes around the same are at least three times. 😤

The control scheme for throwing seems overly complicated and causes confusion on whether I'm normal or slow-mo and whether I'm charging a throw or not. That extra click to trigger the mode seems unnecessary. Throwing also has this weird inaccuracy that I think is caused by car spinning around. It's mega annoying as it just hinders your play without much you can do about it.

The levels feels kinda long and as I mentioned already, has too many delivery points. I think the game would have really benefited from having some shorter circuits even on that same city map. The current one is just too long and repetitive to really warrant trying to improve your time much.

Anyways, good job! Very outstanding quality for a compo game... 👍

Holy Ghost Kitchen! by xfinktion 2023-05-06T08:43:22Z

Pretty cool warioware'esque mini game madness!

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 10.58.22.png

The visuals are pretty rough. They serve their purpose but it's quite difficult to figure out what is what when seeing them for the first time. That hand maybe being the weirdest and most abstract thing of em all.

Mini games aren't really balanced. The chopping game is very difficult and with the fine chop it takes ages to complete compared to everything else. It is also annoyingly accurate.

It can somehow get stuck so that you can't pick any games anymore. The numbers do nothing and hitting space just nudges the background around.

Don't quite understand how the scoring and game over happens. Is this bar trying to indicate something?

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 11.01.47.png

Oh never mind. Now actually went for some more runs (full screen) and realized that your UI doesn't scale properly.

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 11.06.05.png

Managed to tie that 40 again and now I understand the scoring even less. I seem to get arbitrary number of points every mini game completed. Quite often even nothing at all for "perfect". Does it actually need to be perfectly completed to get any point. Now that I'm trying to pay attention, the chopping game never gives my points. It's pretty much impossible to get it perfect. Makes that game even less worth your time. The fine chop is easiest to time down but obviously it has the most chances of getting even single non perfect and wasting your time. The big chop is completely impossible to judge.

And I still don't quite understand the stir game circles either. Not quite sure if I need to do a rotation some specific way and end on the given direction or what. I do get perfects no matter what I do but rarely hear the ding for a score. So basically the only good scoring mini games are the time based pot one and the nacho one. Both quick and easy points.

But yeah, good job! 👍 Would be really fun to score chase if it was more balanced (with more interesting scoring) and had a bit more variety.

Holy Ghost Kitchen! by xfinktion 2023-05-10T05:04:02Z

Yeah having the recipes be shown somehow would really have helped. How do the recipes really work? Can multiple be active at once? Not quite sure if the design works that well since you need to fill recipes but only have random limited ingredients. So you have to sometimes waste time doing a minigame.

Holy Ghost Kitchen! by xfinktion 2023-05-11T06:37:21Z

Ohh I see. I guess it could work with some more clarity. Adding a shown "2 of 4" etc on the recipe selection boxes could help. That way the player would know which of the options is closest to scoring.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-01T10:24:54Z

@linus-lindberg That's weird. I'm on mac myself too and it does work just fine. I tried even downloading it now and using that which worked too. Are you on intel or apple chip mac? At first when exporting the final builds it kept crashing/freezing due to not being able to load the dictionary files (which I then figured out need to be included manually for the build). Don't think it's the same issue though (and obviously I fixed that too). Does the sign on main menu show an adjective other than "good" for you?

@tanis Yeah went with C# as I'm not a fan of python(ish) languages. Overall very positive about it how lightweight, stable and fast at compile times it is. As I mentioned, doing full screen shaders is miles ahead of doing the same in Unity. Some options on particles (trails, collisions etc) were what I was mostly missing from Unity. And obviously web export is a huge faux pas, not gonna be using Godot again before that is sorted out.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-01T10:34:58Z

@tanis Yeah didn't even think that it could be missing before the final few hours and doing the builds as it's been there on ver 3 for ages. Wouldn't have tested it yet had I known otherwise. Not sure how much "missed plays" you get by not having one but from my game analytics it looks like way over 90% of the plays are in web.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-01T10:38:10Z

@linus-lindberg Right so it doesn't have anything to do with the dictionary loading then if the word changes. I really have no idea why it crashes as the buttons (leaderboards and play) even do completely different things too. 🤔🤷‍♀️

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-02T03:40:08Z

@phoenix-fireflower Yeah I did find some mention about those but I can't even get that far. Screenshot 2023-05-02 at 6.37.51.png

Even though...

Screenshot 2023-05-02 at 6.38.39.png

I'm using the C# version and found someone mentioning about that not being in it yet.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-03T04:19:18Z

@100th-coin Yeah, should have added a pause menu with quick restart and at least audio adjustments. I did have that in mind at some point but think I forgot it. The cursor is intentionally hidden in the main scene where hand is used but it should be shown back in the customer picking scene. Wonder why it doesn't. Already seen few of these weird different ways of something working on different machines, a pretty big con in making the jump from Unity to Godot.

You're quite right on the letters ringing the bell completely domino effecting an ruining your score. But you could still try to salvage it, the extra rings will only make you lose the points for that level and could still progress to next level. But it is notoriously bad when a letter gets lodged to the right of the bell. And the fact that the held letter is released on ring doesn't help. Now that I think about it, I shouldn't have made it release when held letter was the one ringing the bell but just cancel the ring countdown immediately afterwards.

Thanks for the feedback and too bad the recording didn't work. ❤️

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-05T03:10:03Z

@yorsh What was unclear about the scoring? The "sandwichness" part I kept intentionally a bit elusive but everything else should be quite self-evident. Or at least I thought so...

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-05T12:54:54Z

@yorsh Oh right yeah, that makes sense. The only help messages that actually are there do mention "sandwich" and "ringing the bell" though. But you are indeed right and surely someone will not understand everything from the beginning just right and then proceed to not pay enough attention to figure it out from the score sheet either.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-06T14:00:51Z

@digitaldude555 Yeah I took the theme a bit differently and decided to approach it with as two separate words, **"deli"** and **"very"**.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-06T14:07:15Z

@benskca Dang, sorry about the crashes. No idea why it would behave like that (for you). These weirdnesses keep piling up which means I guess I need to stick with Unity at least for now. Crashing editor is still better than crashing final product... 🤔

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-08T05:48:54Z

@technoporg Well, I wrote that profile at least few years ago and I've been stubbornly trying to do music for my jam games (bound to be dozens) since. Of course I've improved there too but it's easily my weakest department in game making in my opinion at least. Didn't like the bell sound either but had to settle for something. Couldn't find a real bell or anything with a good tone to record with, it's just a metal bowl and a spoon.

The privacy concerns are understandable. But why rule out jam games in comparison to anything else? And it's not really saving/showing anything actually personal. Unless of course you write something personal there. Just a name you give yourself and a flag for the country. Hardly something to pinpoint an individual really. I think having online leaderboards gives a game so much more replay value as there is some real competition and incentive to do better. And having the flags there somehow helps too, adding some weird camaraderie and competitiveness. A feature which I've been constantly getting positive feedback (and queries on how it's done) on on every since I started adding them. And yes, the score submission is fire and forget, if it doesn't manage to save it, it just goes on with its life.

And yes, had to get creative with the theme. I think "delivery" is way too one dimensional of a theme. Probably one of the most boring jam themes I've ever seen. The only other interpretation besides the cookie cutter package/letter delivery is the giving birth one, which I've yet to seen anyone take it as.

I like the hand too. First it was just a floating hand, a big cursor really. Then I had a sudden idea of adding that IK arm there too and it immediately made it feel so much more dynamic and fun even though it has zero impact on the gameplay. Same as the background elements that react to physics too which most people probably don't even fully notice.

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-08T16:22:26Z

@kuggenhoffen Yeah I drew the letter colliders by hand on top of the letter sprites so it is very likely that both ends of "I" are a bit off and therefore can't really be balanced to sit straight.

The hand stopping at table level and cursor appearing was just to help press the continue button (and also the buttons on start menu). There isn't really any reason to try dragging letters there so I guess it's not a huge issue though. But I guess I should have just enabled that limiting on start menu and when the level is finished.

Super bummed about the crashes and I have no clue whatsoever what could be causing them. My best current guess is that there are some words in the dictionary that somehow cause the crash by maybe having some accented letters or something. I'm pretty sure I added out of bounds safeguards against such but no better guesses either. 🤷‍♀️

Guess you can't remember the words you picked before the crashes?

Very Good Deli by Antti Haavikko 2023-05-08T17:03:16Z

@kuggenhoffen Oh yes it definitely isn't! 😅 Cause you know, it's a dictionary and as such has (almost) all the words in the English language.

Elite Delivery. Pizza Dangerous by boddiul 2023-05-01T09:16:29Z

I think this is enough.

Screenshot 2023-05-01 at 12.03.51.png

Nice dual purpose design having to use your potential score to kill enemies. Too bad it doesn't really work that well as killing enemies is not a good strategy at all. Killing them gives no points or anything really and just deducts from your points. Much better to just keep them facing away from you and snipe deliver full pizzas.

pizzas2.gif

Skipping planets has no penalty at all either so you could pretty much go infinite if playing patiently and carefully. Skips should really penalize score/health somehow and having enemies spawn even if you didn't kill the previous one would deter away from the cheese pacifist strategy. Dunno if such would be feasible to implement with pico and such visuals.

Speaking of visuals, looked cool! Nice pseudo-3d on pico, I like it. Sounds left something to be desired though. I was just that same "pew pew pew" on repeat and pretty much nothing else. Got kinda irritating.

Was this end text dupe thing intended?

pizzas-end.gif

Anyways, good job! For some reason pico games more often than not deliver (pun intended). Just would need some balancing and slight gameplay loop fine tunes. 👍

Perceptive Perilous Package Piloting by kuggenhoffen 2023-05-03T15:21:48Z

The difficulty spikes from nothing to sky high in a split second.

Screenshot 2023-05-03 at 17.59.27.png

It kinda suffers from being too same each try to really warrant going for a better score. But on the other hand shuffles the words just enough that you can't really learn them and improve like that either. I think it would have been better to choose either or. Go with a full on random route or have everything be planned. Could have even done some thematical storytelling or at least have the other words besides "takeoff" fit in better if choosing the hand picked route.

Having to repeat the tutorial every try too isn't fun as it's just brain dead easy and always the exact same.

Having the game be split to levels doesn't really make sense here to me. It just adds unnecessary waiting time in the form of transitions, showing the score and even ramping up the difficulty back. Especially so when it's so insanely balanced that probably vast majority of players can't beat level three.

This slight size issue was very annoying to me. I'm blaming that missing 10 pixels for my poor performance! 😅

Screenshot 2023-05-03 at 17.48.09.png

There were some depth issues especially in the tutorial like this health bar and "dimmer bar" too covering the help texts. Also having transparent white on transparent so it multiplies for the arrow doesn't look good. Going full opaque would have been better here. And sometimes reading the red letters from purple background was tricky. Or just do the same as for the previous bubble and not have the arrow be angled.

By the way, I made something conceptually very similar on last Ludum Dare. 😜

typefarmer-cover.gif

But yeah, good job! 👍 Obviously would need some balancing and tweaks to help with replayability like a bigger dictionary.

The War is Over by M2tias 2023-05-04T15:27:42Z

As opposed to previous commenter, I didn't feel like the shooting sound packed enough of a punch really. It sounded lacklustre and felt like it too as your shots were just tickling those pesky bullet sponge robots to their deaths. Didn't help it either that you could always completely outrange them and make them absolutely trivial.

The mines did get me though so here is a post mortem moonwalk...

warmoonwalk.gif

At first I thought that they were too invisible but hey, that's exactly what they're supposed to be. The game was just so short that you didn't have enough time to start seeing them properly. Spelunky does this perfectly too. You start off triggering them all the time but learn to see them so clearly after enough runs.

Of course I made it to the end too.

Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.58.15.png

This bit was a bit tricky. As you need to notice that one dim square to get up there. The difference between those foreground and background elements could have been a bit more in my opinion. And now that I look at that picture I'm wondering how I managed to get up there without getting hurt as I didn't shoot the first mine before trying to hop up there... 🤔

Screenshot 2023-05-04 at 17.56.30.png

Of course the sprite tearing and cursor etc flickering wasn't great but wasn't that bad either really. The pixel art looked good and even though the pixel ratio kinda unnaturally grew bigger when going to the background layer, it was still consistent and worked.

Could have used with some more feedback. Like flashing and sound effects of enemies when getting hit and so on. Especially as they (well, the floating one really) were so tanky that you didn't even know if you were hurting them or not. Or even hitting them at all. And the "inaccuracy" or the shots wasn't often the player's fault either.

war-accuracy.gif

Shooting could have used like a bullet trace line. Other than just looking good, it also serves a purpose in helping you see if you hit the enemy or if the shot gets clipped by some corner. And it might look better to attach the muzzle flash to the gun so it moves with it. The smoke (if it's separate particles) would make more sense to still emit in world space though.

warmuzzle.gif

What a programmer way to call it "mouse button 0". 👌😂 Always a good idea to add a separate jump button (space) as an alternative to jumping with up. Also, of course double jump was necessary level layout wise but didn't really fit in thematically.

Good job! 👍

Here's ur Package by sansen 2023-05-06T13:32:34Z

Could be fun with some more polish. Mainly in the controls/playability department.

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 16.13.21.png

I feel like I cheesed like pretty much the whole game though. Mainly with this awkward wall cling which allowed you to climb pretty much anywhere and pretty much ignore all the need for different packages.

wall-hug.gif

Guess it was intentional but it felt weird. And the physics overall felt kinda glitchy all over the place. And placing the packages down seemed very accurate about the placement. I usually had to wiggle the mouse around the spot mashing the button to finally find a spot for em. Otherwise they just barely blinked green and then went back to red.

A bit too late to explain that you need to place a package by the house when the player has already just done it. Was really pondering before figuring out that why enter/return does nothing. Went back to see if I was supposed to bring a package there and then kinda accidentally placed one right by it and found out that's what is supposed to happen.

The pixel art looked good and actually pretty consistent considering that I guess you used some ready made assets and some were made by yourselves? The house looked weirdly blurry though and made it stand out from the rest.

Almost took your "deliver all" challenge but it got too tedious on the third level with the back and forth running. Also found out that it doesn't even accept the slime block.

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 16.22.22.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 16.24.05.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

Here's ur Package by sansen 2023-05-06T13:45:05Z

Oh yeah, this was a fun "skip"... and you can also see my package placing difficulties 😅

heres-ur-package-skip.gif

Duke Burger by x16 2023-05-06T06:45:09Z

Nice DOS days vibes! 👍

Started off very easy but the last level did give me some challenge. But not a good type of difficulty though. Blind jumps and trappy places where you throw your burger to the void etc. At least there was an endless supply of 2-ups.

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 9.04.38.png

Another big issue was the huge enemy hit boxes. They just weren't fair and impossible to estimate. And the getting hit feedback was so slight that quite often didn't even notice until later that you had taken damage. And on the other hand, the coin hit boxes were too small so especially on stairs you had to even go mega slow or do this awkward back and forth moving.

duke-coins.gif

The intro was weirdly paced. Some pointless scenes lingered on for way too long (like phone ringing or the "YES") but then the actual information slides whizz past so fast that I could barely decipher the part of the controls and guessed the rest.

The tunes were great! They had some awkward gaps while looping but that wasn't a big issue. That one piece was just straight up Prodigy right? All the musics and art too fit the "source material" perfectly.

It was quite cruel to have this tough jump and as a reward for getting up there just an endless pit of death. Having a piece of chicken there with an invisible wall would even have felt better.

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 8.57.54.png

The throwing arc felt weird. It was really tough to estimate it so that you'd actually hit enemies. And same for landing your burger safely. And it seems like sometimes the burger hurt the enemies but usually not. Maybe I was just doing something else like stomp them at the same time. Feature by the way that I didn't discover you could do until the very last level.

Other than the very abrupt flash on getting hit, it also could have used a bunch more feedback and sound effects on different things. I think sound effects were right now very much under utilised. Stuff like jumping and landing were all silent. Weirdly enough, throwing the burger and having that land did have a sound though. Even the player character walking could have some subtle sound.

Just falling of an edge didn't trigger the jumping state correctly so the wrong walk animation was playing instead of jumping/falling one.

duke-air-walk.gif

"Come get some..."

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 9.29.40.png

Good job! 👍

**edit:** Oh and one more thing. Not a big fan of whole rejump at landing if you are holding down the button. Especially awkward when high/long jumping up to another platform and hold it down to get the maximum height and distance. And then you're just immediately jumping again from the landing platform corner. Feels weird.

Postal Jump by digitaldude555 2023-05-06T12:55:20Z

Not fun getting stuck on walls all the time and having to fully restart the game to try again.

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.18.04.png

You had a R to restart but it only works when you've died. Pointless really. You should allow restarting at any time really and in the death case, any key really should do it or it could be completely automatic too. Having to keep a hand on keyboard just for retries (especially in a rapid fail game like this) on otherwise mouse based game just isn't great user experience. Of course it's an issue in the other direction too which is maybe even more common in jam games where the game itself is played with keyboard but the menus are mouse based.

The controls feel awkward. The double jump feels weird as the controls are different than the normal jump. The jumping angle doesn't look to be absolutely correct. The angle doesn't just seem quite right. And the spot where it starts drawing the launch line keeps starting at arbitrary positions too.

Here are just a few *fun* scenarios of being stuck in a wall...

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.20.05.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.18.04.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.33.44.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.24.42.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.30.09.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.41.45.png

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 15.53.02.png

And this is a first, you can even get stuck on the ground too...

postaljumpground.gif

The throw feel very limp. Of course it needs to be kinda nerfed to keep the main point on jumping. Just makes the whole throwing part almost unnecessary as you need to be almost touching the mailbox to deliver anyway. I think the route to true fun and distinguishing itself from Jump King would be to hone in more on the double jump and the throw as a pseudo third jump. Of course the level design would need to compensate for proper throw not being too good. I also would make the normal jump and double one be more consistent in controls. Double jump one could be the same sling shot manoeuvre and it could maybe slow down time while charging. And same for the throw too. Now it's awkward that the initial jump is a sling shot nudge (from behind the character), second jump is also from behind but a nudge and then the (limpy almost useless) throw itself is inverse so that you need to move the mouse to the other side of the character. These really should be unified.

Really irrirated to have to give up but really can't be bothered to keep replaying these same levels again and again only to be constantly getting stuck in random spots and having to do a hard reset.

Good job though. 👍

Postal Jump by digitaldude555 2023-05-06T13:44:27Z

Yeah, classic stuff on jam games. But jams are about learning and with enough repetition, you can even become better at testing your own games too.

Pixel Piles by Gabriel Chan 2023-10-03T18:46:55Z

Well, my goal was getting a single tetris and I finally did it after over an hour of trying.

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 21.28.01.png

Got very very close so many times but got screwed by misrotated held long piece or failing to drop it on the correct column (as it was so damn tight to do without falling to the pit).

Here is just a few of those barely missed attempts...

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 21.20.06.png

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 20.54.04.png

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 21.18.54.png

That has got to be one of the steepest learning curves on a game I've ever encountered. It's not just one level up from normal tetris as there are multiple new things you need to manage. And I'm even from an old-school tetris players where there was no hold. So even figuring out which of the two next pieces the held one was going to replace and how it was going to drop (as you couldn't move it anymore) was quite much.

The block rotating really was the trickiest bit in my opinion. It took just so much time to triple rotate a block. And quite often one of the sides was kinda blocked so you needed to rush to the other side and more often than not it wasn't enough time to rush there, do at worst case scenario three spins and then rush back to the correct spot.

I think allowing 4 height jumps would have alleviated quite a bit of frustrations that the game caused for me. Falling to a pit while trying to slot in a long piece for tetris or just slipping and falling there while trying to do spins just felt so damn bad. And on top of that, most single errors cause a huge chain reaction and are pretty much as good as a reset. One time I did manage to get off there with some janky jump right at the falling block on top of me but don't think there was an intended way. Even if it wasn't just a higher jump, there could perhaps be some trickier corner boost jump or something you could do so you just wouldn't be shit outta luck if slipped in.

And slipping is bound to happen. Those block corners were a bit too slippery to my liking. Having to do precise block at the same time didn't give you the luxury of keeping that close attention to the character either.

Not having access underneath slides and t-spins really hurts. Sometimes you can even get kinda screwed right at the start when you get two pieces with holes in the bottom row. As good as a restart again.

The game looked great. Cute looking character that kinda reminded me of slugcat. And that line break effect was spicy! 🌶️🔥🔥

Good job, very well made game! 👍 I hated playing it so much but that doesn't mean that it was bad at all. I guess gaming doesn't always have to be fun. 😅

Maybe I'm just bad at tetris...

**edit:** Oh yeah and the "next block" thing was just not right. You could already see that same block and were moving it so it should really have been the one after that.

FELL OUT by daveranan 2023-10-03T16:07:40Z

Pretty fun! Ended just about before it got annoyingly boring to run fetch quests between same few islands.

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 18.51.42.png

Obviously it looked awesome. Sounded pretty good too for what was there. Really would have needed more though. I think the only sound effects were the talking one and the stepping sounds. The speaking sounds were fun. Would have been nice to have different ones for different characters though. The boat at least would have needed a sound. And collecting coins too.

Telling that something is south-west when it's almost exactly west is a bit of a prank. Did manage to find everything without needing the map or anything though. It's just kinda tough to navigate when there is nothing to go by. Can see any landmarks in the sea and can't rotate the camera to see where you'd be going either. Allowing rotation would make exploration feel so much better. Same goes for in-land exploration too. The controls felt a bit janky and especially awkward when going to spaces like around the woods in lighthouse island. Every object had just way too big colliders which made walking around feel like guesswork and a chore.

The dialogue had it's great moments but mostly it was annoyingly filled with shallow "oh really" "yea really" and "no wai" "yea wai" isms. Just didn't flow quite right and had too many one liners back and forth between characters. And even when characters had more to say, it was needlessly cut to separate dialogue lines which made it seem even choppier. Of course it's a jam game so you don't have the luxury of iterating through the material too many times shining it to a sparkling gem but sometimes just less is more. There were also quite a lot of spelling mistakes.

Was the eastern island completely pointless by the way? 🤔

Good job! 👍

Too Maneon Loots by lastuck 2023-10-04T17:37:03Z

It's a bit much.

Screenshot 2023-10-04 at 20.11.59.png

There really isn't time to focus on any stats so can't really strategize that much. Just basically put on stuff that is the highest level. And constantly just trash everything else. Having all those different stats is more of a hinderence as you can't really focus on any of it.

I managed to bug it one run too. The dude just stopped moving and I managed to rack in quite a lot of kills without gaining any loot. Did lose though after all my gear got scrapped.

Screenshot 2023-10-04 at 20.16.40.png

The main issue really is how clunky it is to drag the stuff around. The info tooltip (which you never have time to read) covers way too much screen estate and clicking stuff on/off doesn't feel great, I think dragging would be more intuitive. The drop zones could be more forgiving too because ideally you're looking at other stuff while doing the busy work of trashing stuff for example. Felt especially awkward with the bigger items (chests) as it seemed to require more accuracy as the drop point was smaller percent of the item size.

The item tiles also weren't too different looking from empty space to my liking. Especially the not colored trash items like keys etc really blended in and it was hard to judge how much free space you had at times. Having a completely different background color for occupied spaces would have helped. It was also hard to notice when your gear broke especially if you were using white colored ones.

The look was great and nice music too. Too bad you can't really focus on the nice visuals at all because you're just micro managing your inventory 99% of the time.

The RNG factor seems really big here too. For at least the final tries I kept trying to do the same strategy that was working for me earlier the best and the results still varied a lot. Quite often I died out of the blue before the game starts giving you enough gear to warrant trashing even.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Nice Park! by Barbabulle 2023-10-03T14:58:49Z

Nice! Stopped going for accuracy and actually accidentally skipped few levels fumbling around in search if there was a restart button.

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 17.32.35.png

Spoilers, there was and looks like it even was told in game. Really would have wanted one but couldn't find it (or see the tip on my first go through). I'm pretty sure I tried hitting R for "retry" several different times, didn't occur to me that it was the neighbouring T for "try again".

Tried to go for another run aiming for 100% but got annoyed at first cars randomly sliding off the marker without anything touching them while parking other cars. It takes just way too long for the car inertia to die down and settle in place and it's not fun waiting extra 10 seconds per car to ensure they will not leave the spot before changing. And sometimes the judge is just being an asshole and not giving me 100% even though there wasn't a spec of green to be seen underneath.

But on the other hand, sometimes you can even see green and get a 100%... 🤷‍♀️

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 17.51.33.png

The further you got, the more like ass the cars started controlling. Especially the monster truck which felt like it was glued to the ground and sticked way too much to walls and those tiny dumb things that were borderline uncontrollable. Wasn't really fun, just frustrating.

And even the best behaving starter car as some control issues. It feels kinda inconsistent how throttling works. Sometimes it does way bigger movements with similar keypress and when backing even few extra pixels can waste a complete try, it doesn't feel great. Dunno how to explain it better, just feels weird. Are you applying forces in update without using delta by chance?

The pixel art looked great with nice little animations and effects! All those decorations and animals brought the game world alive and made it feel less boring and static. Sounds and music were great too, fit the feel of the game perfectly! The green spot marker looked very out of place with it being higher pixel density and way off palette compared to anything else. Oh and the monster truck tires are just objectively too light color! 😅 I didn't even register them as tires on first encounter and just thought they were some marks on the road.

Good job! 👍

Botpourri's Space Chase by Antti Haavikko 2023-10-03T06:47:11Z

@tanis @bumble Well I'm no expert (it seems) as my current visible record is 100kish and the current leader is a 33 mil. I did manage about 3-5 mil before adding leaderboards though. You can kinda see my strategy (and also my best scored run) on the gameplay video above. Basically the further from the start you go, the more points the enemies are. But of course more of them meaning more trouble too. There are also some major powerful (and expensive) abilities that only start appearing few screenfuls off the start. All the score gains are multiplied by your visible multiplier (duh 🙄) which increases up to x64 every kill and resets if you take damage. The score gains are also multiplied by your current free space so it might be worth not wasting everything you have if you don't really need it.

Botpourri's Space Chase by Antti Haavikko 2023-10-04T04:29:56Z

@chobochun Dang, too bad about the crash. Which version was it and how did it crash? How long was the run, wondering if there could be a memory leak. 🤔 Zooming out was definitely one powerup I had in mind early on but guess I forgot about it. Yeah new enemies would be a obvious addition. They already vary in stats (and size) a bit and I think to warrant a different look they would need some unique ability too.

@gastricsparrow Good to hear! The mechanics of course seem obvious to me as I came up with them. There is only a handful of them few are really needed to get going.

Botpourri's Space Chase by Antti Haavikko 2023-10-05T17:06:05Z

Oops. 😅 I’ve fallen to that same int score issue so many times yet always keep doing it thinking ”no one is gonna reach billions”. Nicely done though. And yeah, balancing is hard. Of course being overpowered is fun but not if it gets boring and loses all sense of difficulty. So the crash happened after dying? Might be due to that negative score. 🤷‍♀️

Botpourri's Space Chase by Antti Haavikko 2023-10-05T18:27:57Z

@juutis Yea yea, price is right rules. 😂 That heal should trigger only when entering a machine for a fisrt time. I recall testing it but of course I’m not 100% it does work.

Botpourri's Space Chase by Antti Haavikko 2023-10-06T05:15:59Z

Nicely done @juutis, I’d be surprised if someone snags that from you. 🎉

IMG_0194.jpeg

Realized that the multi actually doesn’t seem to cap to 64 like I intended. No wonder it can get out of hand. Not the only issue though… 😅

Botpourri's Space Chase by Antti Haavikko 2023-10-08T16:53:26Z

@simon-rahnasto You've basically summed up my whole design philosophy. I try to make mechanically so simple that they don't need much explanation yet deep enough that there is interesting stuff and strategies to discover. I'm also a big fan score games and juice. Juicing up the base game loop "mundane actions" like killing enemies so much that they're just satisfying to do by themselves adds so much.

Packed to the Gills by npckc 2023-10-03T17:01:02Z

Absolutely fantastic! I don't really have anything bad to say about it.

Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 19.49.52.png

Lovely art style with great looking cast of colorful characters and lovely sounds. Nice pacing and decent amount of replayability with all the different modes and fun poems in between. After playing quite a bit of different modes it does start getting a bit repetitive with so little variety in the different configurations but of course it's not even designed to keep people playing that long I guess.

That one car with a space that kinda looks like it'd be an upside down L but is too tall and needs to go straight was the biggest pain in my ass.

Why was Joel not there in the rush mode?

Going into real nit pick territory here as there isn't much at all to critique about. The scoring is kinda weird. You're scored based on trains caught and time taken but both are partly out of your hands as needing to wait doesn't give you a mark for catching a train (hence not 100 on my rush score) and time can be really hurt by getting hit by needing to wait those filled train cars too.

But yeah, awesome job! 👍 I want more... 🤩

Fire Festival by commanderstitch 2024-04-21T09:30:14Z

Hmm, can't get it to run (on mac)...

Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 12.29.35.png

and doing that...

Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 12.29.25.png

Fire Festival by commanderstitch 2024-04-22T06:27:25Z

The main selling point of Java is that it's supposed to be cross platform.

Summoner's Recipe Book by TiePie 2024-04-16T13:06:07Z

First of all, almost missed that the game was actually playable for me (mac user) as I'm not used to them being embed in the LD site itself. But glad I did notice and managed to play it. But this scroll issue thing really annoyed me. Enough that I had to go digging around in css with dev tools and fix it to see it all.

Screenshot 2024-04-16 at 15.17.25.png

Would this be considered beating it?

recipe-book-all.gif

It was pretty darn interesting to try find them all. Basically pretty much seeing the unknown recipes when getting a "hint" felt a bit cheap and cheaty. But without it was just too random and tedious. Maybe the hints should cost something and could then reveal the ingredients one by one to make it bit of a less "here is the answer". Or could give more general hints like how many ingredients, maybe the character pic as a hint to get ideas like "made of opals so it must be one of the ingredients needed" or even a more lore(ish) description of the creature in question to get more vague hints that way.

Like for the first half of my play through I was really confused on how to get materials because I thought you'd get them on creature sacrifice, not by just having them in your party. But then it clicked and the rest became a breeze.

One big quality of life thing (that would have made my resource generation issue easier too) would be to allow checking your party of creatures that which resources they generate. You only saw it once and then either had to remember them all.

Kinda funny that one of the hardest to get materials is the one you start with. And if you're an idiot like me and waste them all before understanding any of the mechanics really, you can get yourself in some big trouble later on.

Awesome art! And so much of it too for some cool creatures that you basically only see once for a split second and then never again. Music fit the mood well too.

Could have wrapped this thing in a mask component so that it doesn't overflow when scrolling.

recipe-book-no-mask.gif

Awesome job! 👍

That Time I Reincarnated Into /.../Trials By Summoning Demons With Unique Powers by Filip Vannfält 2024-04-23T12:23:17Z

The idea was great but would need quite a bit of iterations to make it fun to play too. Did make it to the end though after a couple of quite annoying soft locks and needs for complete page refresh.

Screenshot 2024-04-23 at 15.12.51.png

Well one of the locks was just hitting esc and leaving full screen but everything was so tiny without that it was near unplayable. The other time I got somehow stuck in a wall and the demon that carried me there couldn't move left to get me out.

Screenshot 2024-04-23 at 15.05.19.png

So the idea is great but executing the "plan" so to say just takes so much time and is fiddly as hell to swap between multiple demons and try to remember which does what. Doesn't really help that the only levels are basically the same thing with a very slight alteration. I think at least an easy way to help with demon power memorization would be to give them different color eyes maybe based on what ability they have the most of. And a way to unsummon them too would be nice (and obviously level restart as it's possible to mess up and lock yourself).

Nice pixel art and animations! The music and sounds fit the mood well too. All in all would be great fun if you somehow made the actual gameplay less tedious and obviously added a buttload of more brain melting content.

Good job! 👍

**edit:** Oh yeah and the controls could be streamlined quite a bit. Of course the game was short now but I kept constantly messing up with s/w/space. First of all, swapping off from a demon could automatically drop what they were holding to not get stuck on an immobile state then needing to rotate through everything again just to drop. Of course if you'd create puzzles with double carrying mechanics needed that would be another case. Both down and up could activate the summon area (and picks in the ring) to make it less fiddly. I would also swap the keys for grab and switch. I think it would also make a lot of sense if switching picked the demon closest to you first etc instead of using the summoning order.

Braid 3 by magicdweedoo 2024-04-20T08:12:25Z

Just perfect! ❤️

Screenshot 2024-04-20 at 10.58.52.png

I have actually not watched Prison Break so might have missed some nuances but I think I still got the gist of it.

Loved the music and sound effects but there were some crucial missing ones like for shooting. The music renditions were flawless with the off-tune pitch bends etc.

And of course the controls could be improved. Always a good idea to add separate jump button too (space) for people who do not prefer to jump with up. Platforming could be improved with more precise colliders and maybe even having jump buffering and coyote time. The game didn't really require too much precision on the jumping parts so not a big deal but still felt awkward sometimes. The cursor also kept disappearing on me which made aiming a bit difficult.

Accidentally found a bit of skip on the skateboarding section. You can actually drop down there early. Doesn't really save much time or make it easier by any stretch but still a functional skip. Well I guess it wouldn't be that fun to speedrun this game. 🤔

Awesome job! 👍

Breakout by tenshi42 2024-04-28T05:01:01Z

A bit glitchy. Keeps completely crashing on me after when I follow the bird to the elevator.

Screenshot 2024-04-28 at 7.36.01.png

The elevator doors open a bit funky too. Was this intended?

Screenshot 2024-04-28 at 7.35.19.png

I also glitched out of the whole world when I first went to the stairs. Had to fully hard boot the game.

Screenshot 2024-04-28 at 7.32.40.png

The movement is kinda clunky. I guess it might be kinda intentional as you seem to be in a wheelchair which I only noticed kinda late on my second run to the elevator to see if it will crash again and happened to look down by accident. I guess the bird did hint on it a bit. But gameplay wise it didn't feel great getting stuck on walls and getting through doorways was fiddly. And not being able to strafe to fix those times when you got completely blocked because walking with a too steep angle next to a wall and then had to awkwardly back up and rotate before proceeding.

The mouse leaving the screen was a bit annoying but at least you didn't need to click anywhere though so it didn't mess up completely. But in my opinion, E should be replaced by mouse click (at least as an alternative).

It ran kinda sluggishly. Of course I'm not running it in like the beefiest powerhouse in existence but didn't seem that detailed looking etc that it would cause any issues. Don't think it's just a rendering issue either. When I fell out I saw the outside section with loads of individual objects. Dunno if you have any scripts running on those at all times. A good and easy optimization trick for cases like this is to chop up your world to chunks (like could be each room), have them nested in empty gameobjects or something and then just turn them on/off as needed. That way the extra stuff don't keep running when the player isn't even anywhere near them.

Oh yeah, and needs that classic execute bit turned on to run on a mac...

Screenshot 2024-04-28 at 7.46.53.png

Yeah I can imagine git conflicts getting outrageous with those unity meta files. For code files it's always easy enough and solvable but who knows with those meta ones. I guess my hint for it is that you should commit small changes and often. As is kinda the usual guideline with git. That way you don't face as big of a risk for conflicts and even if you do, they're easier to solve.

Anyways, good job! 👍 Too bad I wasn't able to play it fully through...

Thalatta's Grand Heist by Silas Reinagel 2024-04-21T10:25:19Z

It's quite unfun to fail an exploration puzzle game based on time limit and be forced to fully start again. Did manage to beat it on a second try though.

The movement was annoyingly clunky. Getting stuck at walls and doorways was constant and the turning speed was slow so making adjustments to aim at the correct spot for a spell was very fiddly. Turning the blocks made the camera jitter annoyingly too.

Summoning with key combos felt kinda unnecessary. It works in Helldivers as it's more hectic and having to input the combos in the mids of action is a risk/reward and makes it feel even more hectic. But in this game there is no pressure (except that kinda dumb time limit) or any reason for the inputs to exist really so it just felt like an unnecessary step.

The 2D art looked nice but I have a sneaky suspicion that it was AI generated. If so, you probably should mention it somewhere? I think using AI generated content is a bit of a gray area on the rules. I remember seeing somewhere that it might be allowed now but you might need to opt-out if a category was mainly AI. Still very grey area though but I'd say it'd be at least worth mentioning if so.

The 3D was ok too but it wasn't very clear to look at and tell what was what. The doorways were hard to see. Different blocks like pressure plates and those time pickup plates (after having picked it up) were easy to confuse. Even the pushable blocks and some wall segments looked a bit too similar.

Having two locked doors (and the correct one even being less easily spottable) and then saying you need to summon three books by it was mean.

Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 12.58.15.png

The small delay between correct solution and doors activating didn't feel great. Especially earlier in the room where those pressure plates were hidden beneath the pushable blocks. Of course after getting to know the fact it became less of an issue.

The music was nice and overall the sound effects were quite good. The pickup sound to the time pellets was way too loud compared to everything else. And I think overall the volume level was rather low. The summon code key press sounds only happened when pressing with arrow keys and not when using WASD.

The stream ends quite often glitched out on me an looked like this...

Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 12.57.26.png

Anyways, good job! 👍 And wow what a big team...

**edit:** Just saw someone mention the fake treasure room and yeah, it was super mean. I guess I might have also beat it on my first if I didn't check it out and then proceed to desperately try to open a wrong door with the books. Having a time limit which results in a full game restart and actively tricking the players to wasting time is not a great choice.

Summoners Rift by Flatgub 2024-04-18T13:56:45Z

Pretty neat. Summoning assistant is too good, made winning feel cheap...

Screenshot 2024-04-18 at 16.28.31.png

The idea was quite cool. Though, it wasn't too easy to understand as the lengthy tutorial just didn't let you play at the same time. It basically just front loaded you with way too much information with zero context. Would have been nicer to ease more into it. Drip the information as you're playing when needed. And have some stuff be hidden from first few rounds like different card categories and so on not to confuse the player with too much too fast.

And having all those different card categories felt kinda pointless. Most of the cards I saw there were not really all useful. Basically the game is all about getting enough mana to cast a deity, nothing else really matters. So just get some cash inflow, all the possible mana source as bingo, you're done.

Even the deities in some of the categories were identical to others. Pretty sure they were just 30/20 and 50/15. There were some nice potential combos in the cards but they were a bit too reliant on luck and not really needed. Summons that don't give you mana or money seemed pretty much moot.

I liked to mspainty art style and drawings and the sounds effects were neat too. Obviously would have needed some funky tunes on the background too. I think there were few style offenders that looked "too sleek" and not hand painted enough compared to the rest, at least the candles come to mind. Obviously not a huge issue and not a big departure from the style of the rest but it still stood out as different.

Fun idea, I think it would just need more restrictions (like not allowing you to just pump all stats to max and grab all the good bits from different categories and having the deities be more so it wouldn't always be the same goal of 50 cash or 20 mana) to be great and make all the cards matter.

So from the top of my head the grim one for example could be that it requires you to pop ten creatures in a turn to get the cataclysm prevention.

But yeah, good job! 👍

Come By by the4thcircle 2024-04-17T16:54:54Z

Keeps crashing on me when I think dog is going too far or something.

Screenshot 2024-04-17 at 19.44.23.png

Kinda started to get a hang of controlling the dog but the last level is stupid annoying still and constant crashing doesn't help either. And for the earlier level(s), it's just easier to ignore to do completely.

The dog controls are a bit too much to handle. It was really confusing at first too, distinguishing the dog from the sheep wasn't easy. It was only after the tutorial was complete that I actually realized that one of them was a dog and that's the thing I was controlling with z/x. I think a simpler control scheme would have worked a bit better. Maybe something like z to toggle between alert/sneak and x+arrows to forward/back/circle left/circle right. I guess that'd be a lot easier to remember. And at least having the button legend be available on other levels too would have been nice.

And of course there is the thing about the amount of content. There is quite little and the difficulty spikes hard as it pretty much just throws everything at you at once. More gradual increase would have been approachable as it could introduce different mechanics one by one and let players learn them more easily.

And I loved that you end the level by patting the dog 💁‍♂️🐶

Good job! 👍 Shame about the crashing...

**edit:** Had to go back for a one more try. Beat it at least though let quite a lot of sheep get away...

Screenshot 2024-04-17 at 19.58.08.png

**edit 2:** Okay, a bit better now. 😅

Screenshot 2024-04-17 at 20.05.13.png

Ritual of the Meek by Antti Haavikko 2024-04-20T08:50:48Z

@flatgub Yeah, you might be right. At first I did have a freeform camera in mind but then for some reason pivoted for a room based one and sticked with that. Can't remember at all why I did that if there was some problem with the free one or what. I think I'll try to change the camera for the post-jam patch (fixing all the known bugs too) or at least try it out to see if it feels better. Thanks for playing and the feedback! ❤️

Ritual of the Meek by Antti Haavikko 2024-04-22T06:16:37Z

@jordan-neff Umm, something like "remember that thing you did a second ago, now do it again"?

Ritual of the Meek by Antti Haavikko 2024-04-25T11:34:09Z

@edj99 Oh cool, you beat it! 🎉 Didn't think anyone would pull it off as most people only spend mere minutes per game.

Ritual of the Meek by Antti Haavikko 2024-04-25T12:23:29Z

@edj99 Cool cool! How did you find the difficulty and pacing? Did you get stuck at all or find some portions hard in comparison to the rest? Like the invisible walls? One of them doesn't have a hint pic and one I think was missing from the dog bark list by accident. Or did you even notice that the dog "tells you" about those? What about the backtracking? I might have underestimated the need for it as obviously the players don't know the "optimal" way to play and most likely wander back and forth more than needed.

Ritual of the Meek by Antti Haavikko 2024-04-25T13:07:03Z

Yeah, the range for the dog (which can understandably be confused as a cat) might be a bit finicky too...

https://youtu.be/KFWy88gX3v8

And yeah, you can do some crazy probably game breaking stuff after getting the bag upgrade (and I'm absolutely fine with it).

Burger Ritual by meylish 2024-04-17T13:09:52Z

Tried it twice and keep getting a "bad ending"? Am I constantly getting screwed by the ingredients not correctly stacking to the burger or is there even a non fail ending?

Screenshot 2024-04-17 at 15.51.53.png

Well, third time the charm I guess. Was extra careful now with my ingredient draggings...

Screenshot 2024-04-17 at 16.09.10.png

The gameplay itself was kinda boring and clunky. As I already eluded above, the ingredients sometimes didn't stick to the burger itself when dragging them on place but just stayed there on the area beneath. Especially happened to me when the burger was getting tall enough and I instinctually dragged the ingredients near the top, not to the bottom where I think the hit area was no matter what.

Having to close the scroll each time was a bit annoying. Felt like an unnecessary extra step now that there was no time limit or anything. Would make a lot more sense if there was time constraint so that you would need to flex your memory or waste time toggling them on and off again. But right now it felt like and extra step. Just extra clicks that were already a bit too plentiful. But of course removing/automating those would make the game very thin.

Art looked great! Adding even a bit of movement would have really livened it up though. The sounds and music served their purpose, though nothing too amazing, it still felt really silent and monotonous.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Summoner Survivors by helluin 2024-04-16T12:12:56Z

Neat. But it really becomes rather boring and repetitive after a while. There is like no real challenge until at like I dunno maybe wave 20ish the boss appeared and whirlwinded right on top of me and I just couldn't move away from it. Felt really unfair and unfun to lose like that.

And it happened to me again. Now it didn't even spawn with that dash warning like but just immediately on top of me. Not sure which wave it was since the font is so hard to read.

I feel like own attack becomes completely useless after you get few summons and it just hinders you from that point on. And found no use at all for the unit moving functionality. It felt janky as hell and even when I tried to build me a protective layer of melee units, it wasn't any good either as they just broke the formation as soon as I needed to move even a tiny bit. Which obviously you need to do constantly to get money and dodge dynamites.

One more try and now I made it past 20 at least but then the frame rate just tanked to a slide show and it became basically unplayable.

Bit of a z-ordering issue with the trees...

Screenshot 2024-04-16 at 14.37.10.png

Is it just me or is the cheap yellow archer just the best option get get in mass? Maybe sprinkle in some blues if you're too wealthy to spend on yellows but the melee guys just didn't seem any good.

Anyways good job! 👍

Medieval Madness by Ganjalf 2024-04-20T08:47:25Z

Pretty fun idea but the execution would need some polishing in my opinion to make it fully shine. Doesn't look I can do any better than this...

Screenshot 2024-04-20 at 11.21.50.png

Like the UI is annoyingly misaligned in a sloppy way. Doesn't seem like it's doing that on purpose in a stylistic way since it doesn't really fit the art direction otherwise.

Like the title here...

Screenshot 2024-04-20 at 11.13.45.png

Or the buttons or restart scene...

Screenshot 2024-04-20 at 11.23.43.png

The intro was also front loading with too much information without zero context on the actual gameplay so it didn't really help that much. It kinda required reading it, not fully understanding anything, then playing once and finally going for another read to actually understand what it was saying. Would be better to sprinkle in the information where needed in the midst of the actual gameplay so the players have some context on what it's talking about and not just vomiting up paragraphs of text at once and hoping that they somehow remember it all perfectly.

And then the gameplay. As I said, the idea was cool, micro managing all the customers. The customer selection was annoyingly precise. It would feel much better if on any click you just find the closest thing (with maybe some max range) to the clicked position and activate that. That way you wouldn't need to be pixel perfect with your clicks and know the ambiguous hit areas of different things that didn't even always visually match the thing that it was representing.

I think it also would be better with a fixed camera showing all the play area at once. Now you really just had no idea if some other corner of the map had a bunch of customers about to get pissed off. Or at least it would be a good idea to indicate off screen spawns somehow maybe with an markers on the edge of the screen or by minimum with some directional sound effects. Sound effects would also help with the bit of a problem of not getting clear enough indication of customer mood changes.

The art looked nice but could have used more indications and effects of what was going on. Music fit the mood well too but the lack of sound effects was very loud.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Sophia's Spirit Journey by ryusui 2024-04-23T17:22:09Z

Managed to do it.

Screenshot 2024-04-23 at 19.57.10.png

All in all pretty good. The boss was a bit of a horrible experience with no sound cue for shots and them blending so well to the background and platforms. The platforming wasn't really precise enough of what it required, the blue platforms sometimes just letting you fall trough without any rhyme or reason and the brown platforms timer starting weirdly early if you go near them.

The final stretch before boss was kinda annoyingly long too with all the possible sources of chip damage there were. Not hard but just not very fun either to run repeatedly. Pretty much the same as the early phases of the boss after knowing what to do on them.

Other than that it was pretty well balanced. The checkpoints were plenty enough (maybe the beginning section could have used one too) and the dangers were never too much to handle but posed some threat at least.

First time I died after getting the first head I thought it glitched as my head was removed. Could have hinted somewhere (in the game) about the head switching at the point when you get your first one. I tried to do a full refresh at that point to start again but the continue screen with showing me 1/x heads gave me a clue and then I checked the description for anything I was missing. Obviously would have been nicer to have it on game.

The ice head was pretty useless. It served no purpose on the boss level with lava as you needed to switch off it to use the platforms and it required way too much dexterity to pull off with the clunky controls. And just staying on the platforms and hoping that the projectiles don't hit you was the way to go. The green one also was kinda moot and those moving platforms activating were just too damn slow. Waiting around doing nothing is never fun. On the boss it being slow served a purpose but normally it was just waiting for the sake of waiting. It, just like the blue one, served pretty much just as a passive effect. Which mechanically they could have easily been. And the shooty ones could also be just upgrades on top of each other which would have pretty much made the whole head switching unnecessary. And as it was only a hinderance really I don't think that might have been a bad idea. Of course it wouldn't have made sense thematically.

Noticed you made an updated version with sounds and music (and bug fixes) which is nice. Too bad you couldn't squeeze them to the original schedule. They were missed and surely would have added a lot. The art worked but I'm not entirely sold on the purple on the walls (and everywhere else even hiding boss projectiles as I mentioned). It was a bit too attention seekingly bright and could be toned down in brightness and saturation to make it more serve its purpose as a static scenery element.

But yeah, good job! 👍 Very "full" experience already for a jam game and I bet the...

Well, my curiosity got the better of me and took a peek on the updated version. Looks like it shares the same save file and indeed the changes make it so much better. Especially the sounds help a ton. Pulled it off on the first try without any problems and found the "secret ending" too. Very dark soulsy...

Screenshot 2024-04-23 at 20.20.11.png

Dance with the Sprites by Flewbimo 2024-10-11T16:09:54Z

So I'm assuming this is a win?!

Screenshot 2024-10-11 at 18.46.41.png

Might have been better to have something else on the "win" screen to tell it apart from losing. Not to even mention how unceremonious the actual win was.

Got there twice as the first time there I though I had gotten hit my those red sprites who were often really hard to distinguish from the friendly ones. Relying on color only on that isn't probably the best of choices. And the shape too was hard to figure out as they were just blobs. It was very tough to estimate how close you could let the enemies come. And even when releasing light and killing them, it was hard to make out when they were actually gone and it was safe to move past. At least once I was too impatient and they were still able to kill me even if they had started to die.

The web build ran just fine for me just on a MacBook so not the most powerhouse of devices out there. And I don't really see why it wouldn't perform, there wasn't really anything that should tank the frame rate unless the code is horribly unoptmimized (or even counter-optimized).

It was pretty fun to explore around the map but it was quite desolate and boring as the only threat there was really was confusing the red sprites with the collectible ones or outright missing them appearing from behind a wall or something. My first death came right out of the blue and still not sure even if there was an enemy even nearby.

The controls felt a bit abrupt and stiff for me. Some precise jumps (in the dark too) were unnecessarily hard to make as the character was so tiny accelerated so quick.

The boss was bit of a letdown after realizing that it's just a waiting game really. You literally can just rush there, stand absolutely still and mash E until you win. Didn't seem like whether you had even gathered any lights up to that point really mattered at all. And the boss was also in quite an obvious spot making over half of the map completely pointless. Like in my opinion that one floor above it would have been a much more clever spot to put it on as (at least for me) I completely missed knowing about it before I had already fallen below it.

Other than the similar and confusing enemy/collectible design, it looked good. The silhouette look is always nice to look at. The wasn't much audio at all but it did paint a nice and moody atmosphere. Some atmospheric music or ambient background noises to fill up the space would have been welcome though.

Anyways, good job! 👍

WE LOVE THE BOYS! by Brain Siege Gameworks 2024-10-09T17:45:06Z

Finally! The ending bit was so damn annoying with that one dude camping the light. Could of had checkpoints on those lights. Then you could have gone even more bonkers with the difficulty of course.

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 20.31.40.png

Really liked the art. Very reminiscing of flash times. The boys looked cute and derpy. The music was pretty cool too, though I think it likes to glitch out and stack and play multiple duplicates at times. Sound effects fit the mood of the game well too, just could of used a bit more of em in my opinion.

The idea of the game was fun too and quite unique. Could easily build more interesting mechanics on top of these ideas to stretch out and polish the game more.

Sadly though, the controls and the base gameplay were a bit lackluster. Aiming was borderline impossible with the boys bouncing all over the place. Hitboxes were inaccurate as hell, sometimes the criminals swung at me from like quarter of a screenful away. And sometimes they seemed to do absolutely nothing even if I was kinda close. The boys very often phased out of visible existence but still were there which made it very annoying.

The shield mechanic to bounce the boys was neat but would need some more work. There is no downside to having it on all the time so why if bind it to a button? It'd need some usage meter, "parryish" thing where it'd be more effective at the start of using it or something along those lines.

Also having to press "interact" on those tutorials was pointless. Could have just activated when stepping on them. Hiding rest of the tutorial messages behind the most obscure button of them all was weird choice. And no restart option at all was also not great. Having to refresh the page every fail to try again did not feel great.

Anyways, fun game, good job! 👍

Escape from the Eco-bottle by Stardust_Z 2024-10-08T13:42:06Z

Opening the embeded page itself, it seems to properly load: https://files.jam.host/embed/$396547/36301/index.html

But sadly hitting play there throws the following error (looks like a null ref error, should probably be there on editor too though it might not stop it working)...

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 16.39.36.png

Too bad, I was looking forward to playing, the art style looks sweet.

Also, are you using "invisible" buttons on top of an image? Guess they aren't quite invisible enough.

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 16.43.16.png

Escape from the Eco-bottle by Stardust_Z 2024-10-08T14:21:57Z

@stardust-z Can't, it's Windows only. And not sure if even that will work as it's Unity and just a single exe. I think Unity games come up with more than that. Has someone actually played the game?

Escape from the Eco-bottle by Stardust_Z 2024-10-09T04:56:21Z

First of all, congrats on your first jam game. It's released and playable, many people can't even say that. 🎉 And over scoping is super common, even for more experienced jammers. But scoping does get easier with repetition learning what you can accomplish in what time. Obviously you get better and faster at it too and learn from your mistakes. 😎

The art indeed was really nice. The character with the art style really reminded me of Alien Hominid. The animations were a bit too subtle and stiff in my opinion. Basing the intro animations on time no matter what the player was doing wasn't a great idea. The sounds were nice and music moody, it didn't loop too well though.

The background also had a looping seam...

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 7.12.19.png

Couldn't figure if it's possible to get past that wall jump section with the platform at the top. Even tried getting there few times as I kept missing a crystal.

The controls were a bit clunky. Jumps felt floaty and slow accelerating movement made it hard to make precise movements. Wall jumps didn't feel great due to this floatiness either and though the dash helped there a bit, it's cooldown was too long to use per jump. Not sure if it was intentional but you could still do your jump mid air if you fall off a platform without jumping. Kinda classic mistake.

The drop platforms were weird too. The initial one which had the help did exactly that (and didn't work with arrows btw) but the later ones just phase you through them automatically. Really surpised me and that's why I missed some crystal(s) on my first try.

Anyways, good job on your first (jam) game! 👍

Quackling Rescue by Laywelin 2024-10-11T17:11:11Z

Dang, so short. I was just getting started.

Screenshot 2024-10-11 at 19.55.05.png

Nice to see a game with controller support. Not a big issue as it was the first button anyone is going to realistically try but you didn't mention the quack button for pad. The quack cooldown was absolutely pointless. It served no purpose at all besides annoying the player by making them do some pointless waiting. All the distractions really too were just wasting time and not really acting as a real obstacle.

The art was super cute. Sadly the baby critters were so small though that you couldn't really appreciate the great artwork enough on the gameplay itself. Only saw them properly in the end really. The duck being a bit bigger worked much better in my opinion. But the hand drawn 3D-ish cutout look with some bouncy transform animations worked great. Annoyingly there was some sprite tearing/flickering.

The sound scape for rather simple but better than complete silence I guess. The volume level was very quiet too.

The gameplay itself would need something more. It was very much just a walking simulator with no real hurdles or challenges. The second level started showing some more interesting level design but there too only the sucker robot really did anything meaningful. And that too in the end (after giving a threatening look at the first glance) was just a distraction like everything else but it just moved.

Sure those water paths and spinning platforms gave some more interest to the levels but they served no purpose mechanics wise. Nothing would have changed if they weren't there. At first it seemed like they were introduced as a mechanic for upcoming puzzle but no, nothing. Having some light puzzles that reward you with then those babies instead of just randomly finding them would have improved the pacing a bit and obviously would have given the game some more, well, gaminess.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Quackling Rescue by Laywelin 2024-10-11T17:15:34Z

@kanity My guess would be that they're from a country that uses [AZERTY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY).

Quackling Rescue by Laywelin 2024-10-11T18:47:16Z

@laywelin Yeah of course there needs to be a bit of a cooldown on the quack so it can't be perma spammed. But right now for example if you estimate the range of it wrong, you just need to still there doing nothing for a bit before you can do it again. It literally does nothing. And that is kinda the whole design flaw with the whole distractions that they nothing but waste time. There is no skill factor at all in dodging them or anything. It just messes with the pacing and feel of exploring.

Of course all games don't have challenge the players in any way. Pretty often they just do and that is mainly why I play games. Of course there are more story based games too and games that don't really challenge but offer some meaningful player choices. But if you strip away all challenge, choices and story, what really is there left?

Shnorps: Invasion of Blorps by P3ngui 2024-10-08T13:35:15Z

I don't see any texts except for what I'm thinking is actually images.

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 16.29.15.png

or

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 16.29.25.png

And it's on M1 Mac btw, happening with Chrome and Firefox. I recall having a similar issues way back on iPhone/iPad builds (thought it was fixed at some point though) and managed to get around it by wrapping all the canvas elements in a single mask (so basically have a full size image as the root object of the canvas with a mask component & show graphic on it turned off). No idea why it works like that though...

Tiny Fate - Lost Ruins by sketchbookbug 2024-10-08T13:49:42Z

Geez, not lying about it being blurry. Fourth game in a row that is literally unplayable.

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 16.48.03.png

The game didn't even finish loading for me. Opened the embedded page in a new tab and then it managed to load. But alas, a bit too blurry to play.

TheCoon by XivArath 2024-10-08T13:27:37Z

Would be nice to put down the platform, in this case which is Windows only. The links section on the site actually has an option for this too.

And in case you thought that Unity "standalone universal" works straight out of the box for all listed platforms (which quite a few people seem to think), it doesn't and you still need to pick the target platform from this menu

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 16.25.26.png

Bugtallion by goodwincek 2024-10-08T14:20:54Z

Very fun! Didn't even check the help pics you had posted and only took a round or two to fully grasp the idea of it. Very intuitive!

Screenshot 2024-10-08 at 17.08.59.png

Pretty cool visuals. Nice mix of 2D and 3D though I don't really think the 3D gave anything to the game really besides funky dice. Really liked the pixel art of the characters.

The controls were a bit awkward. The constant extra unnecessary enter hit every turn to roll dice was kinda pointless. There also was a bit of a delay before it registered that enter press on the start of the turn which was kinda pointless. No need to repeat to player what to do at that point anymore when it's already dozens of rounds in. Mouse controls would have probably been the best option here in my opinion.

Allowing a single re-roll and maybe rolling both the dice at once (there were two anyway) would give a bit more chance for strategy. Could even let the player choose which to use for deploy and which for movement.

It was kinda easy as the opponent didn't seem too sharp. Even getting a single small fry next to the king was often worth several hit points as they didn't seem bothered by it at all and only randomly spawned something next to it for a kill. They always also spawned everything right next to their king even though doing it on the other side gives you much shorter path for attack. Easily beat it on my first try not knowing the mechanics or any thing at the start and I was even rolling like garbage all the time, mainly 1s and 2s.

If going for a single player experience, I'd do more of a build up with smaller boards and quicker rounds at start. That'd also ease the mechanics in quicker without that much of a commitment. Could then even play around with asymmetric board shapes and maybe having powerups or something on the board to spice it up even more and keep it from getting repetitive.

Anyways, good job! 👍🎉

Tiny Poopers and You by Chuckiee 2024-10-09T15:04:37Z

Daaamn, way too short. Just when I was getting the hang of it.

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 17.52.36.png

Of course, in it's current state it would start to get repetitive quite quick. The poopers could for example be a bit more aggressive so you couldn't so easily just go around and harvest. The options are endless of course time management and scoping is always an issue. At least you made something fully working and finished.

Of course there is the mini game of "kick the poop" 😅

Played through a second time too and I think it's the enemy pooping sound that is really grating sounding on the second level when they start stacking up. That and the sucking sound were a bit rough (especially with no variation). I'm pretty sure jsfxr can do a lot more pleasant sounding sounds too.

The hold RMB shoot acceleration felt a bit pointless as it started off so damn slow that you could achieve more by just mashing.

Really liked the pixel art. Going very low rez like this isn't as easy as one might think. Especially with nice animations. Just two frames of animation for both walk and idle but the bag bounce really sells it.

What a weird looking mouse, the cord usually goes to the other end... 😂

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 17.51.03.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

Tiny Game Hunting Holiday by Antti Haavikko 2024-10-08T04:13:47Z

@tanis Yeah I think giving up on a task would have been a good addition. With some time/money or some other penalty so it couldn't be abused. Getting a hard combination with only a single match and the country/city being not too familiar to you is indeed a tricky obstacle. The dude does tell in the beginning that both the letters just need to be somewhere in the country name. But I guess that is easy enough to miss as it can be just dismissed. Might have been a good idea to repeat the intro if noticing some struggling.

Tiny Game Hunting Holiday by Antti Haavikko 2024-10-09T04:59:07Z

@amarokczukay Sounds about right! 😜 You mean STI?

Tiny Game Hunting Holiday by Antti Haavikko 2024-10-09T10:13:27Z

@amarokczukay or yoda 😂

Tiny Game Hunting Holiday by Antti Haavikko 2024-10-09T17:16:41Z

@woona Well yeah, time is indeed the second end (not fail though) condition. And of course if you run out of money you're bound to run out of fuel too. Of course (real life) time would be another route that it could be taken but I don't really like that and kept it so that players can take their time thinking through (also cheating and looking at google maps or something :wink:) the options. And even if "cheating", it's still not brainless simple either so I'm pondering whether I should add an "easy mode" where the labels actually are visible.

But you are correct, fuel becomes a non-issue after you get the hang of the mechanics really and then you're just optimizing fuel/money usage for the allotted time. Of course there could be stuff like allowing buying an extension after the week is up if you have enough money or something. But I feel like extending it would be too much (at current state at least) as it already starts to get repetitive.

Tiny Game Hunting Holiday by Antti Haavikko 2024-10-22T16:40:12Z

@bradur So it does always detect the country you land in but will only inform you about what country it is if you're close to the capital. So for the country tasks, you can still accomplish them even if you don't see the country name pop up.

Love Dance by chispaLBC 2024-10-09T14:32:14Z

Dang, that was too short. I was just getting to the groove and it ended. There never even was a down for me (on the first run). Well at least you can play again and get different moves but would have wanted a bit more formal content and difficulty.

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 17.20.22.png

Back to menu button doesn't seem to work by the way.

Not much else to say. Nice art and color palette, cool chill music and fun "voice acting". Good job! 👍

Hallow Helpers by crow_seeds 2024-10-10T13:24:39Z

Nice! 🎉

Screenshot 2024-10-10 at 16.10.50.png

Very cool gameplay idea and a good amount of content. I just found the control scheme pretty horrible. Separate jump button would have done wonders as doing jumps while throwing down felt really awkward. And the physics overall felt a bit off. Like the character moved too fast and the object shapes didn't really function all that correctly.

But indeed very fun idea and even puzzle design. The different objects offered a really nice amount of freedom how to solve them on some levels at least. Like I'm pretty damn sure you're not supposed to be here yourself on this level but hey, if it works...

Screenshot 2024-10-10 at 16.04.41.png

And that first octopus level is probably designed to hop between two of them upwards and then toss a shroom but I did it with momentum building and hopping all the way to the candy with a single octopus.

The puzzles and different objects were pretty damn well designed. All their different functionalities became clear with just a little experimentation and it's nice that you didn't force spoon feed how to use them.

Very nice art style and sound design overall. Hell, there even was voice acting! The quips started getting quite repetitive though later on. Having a unique one for each level would have been cool. I just would have wanted a bit more movement and animations. The art was so good looking that it'd been nice to see it come more alive.

It was kinda weird that you really never had to actually throw the magnet at all and were better off just holding it on your hand and controlling it that way.

For the hand, seems like you didn't have too many ideas on how to use them as both levels (after the introduction) were basically the same idea. And those awkward physics were a bit annoying here on this level too trying to wrangle that mush to a hand and then that hand to another.

Screenshot 2024-10-10 at 16.08.00.png

The spike hitboxes also felt off. Like on that one of the early octopus (maybe second) levels where there was a spiked staircase and you could kill yourself on the spike without even leaving the bottom section. Would feel fairer to give some more leeway and shrink their hitboxes down some.

But yeah, that's about it. Good job, very fun (and complete) game! 👍

Rooted Deep by DzejPi 2025-04-10T17:49:22Z

Cool! Nice take on the cookie clicker formula.

The upgrades weren't really worth it as the final price was so low but it was so quickly achieved that I decided to buy them all anyways. And you only need a handful of plants to do so. Having more like 5-10 seemed like just waste as you couldn't harvest them fast enough. Usually you'd want your "win target" to be much higher and then have the upgrades be a gateway to making more easier like automation etc. I guess you know the formula...

The game looked and sounded great! Sweet cohesive art style and nice and moody sound scape, even without any music. Didn't even really miss any music, even though it obviously wouldn't have hurt either.

Controls were very good as well. There is a bit of an issue with the web version where if you're full screen and hit escape, the mouse lock is lost and you're stuck with not being able to look around fully. And I'm dumb enough to have done it twice and needed to do a full refresh to restart.

The whole swimming up and down was kinda pointless. Would have needed some reason to go up and down really. The obvious thing that comes to mind would be to have maybe the best selling plant have it's berries be high up so you couldn't reach them from the ground level. I also would have reused the same click behaviour for accessing the computer instead of adding a separate button for it.

Also having all those separate sell buttons and even the max buy buttons were very much pointless. I don't think there was any reason to ever not just sell all so one button would serve the same purpose. Unless of course you're going for the more manual labor aspect of clickers on it. Could of course be the product of planning more around it and having scrapped those out... 😉🤷‍♀️

Actually, now I read the full description and I guess there was some automation upgrades there indeed. But again, the target was so low that there was no need for it really.

Even if you over scoped a bit, you pulled it off nicely. Nothing really screams out unfinished. And of course learning is a big part of jamming experience.

And of course bonus points for using the correct "couldn't care less"! 😎

Good job! 👍

Rooted Deep by DzejPi 2025-04-11T04:14:14Z

Yeah, looks like the mouse indeed locks back if I press esc again and press continue from the menu there. Don't think it's something one would try without knowing though. I think you could even try locking it with every mouse click.

Ruby Hole by Aleksey4adoff 2025-04-07T14:13:28Z

Pretty fun! Fun carcassonne vibes. Took me three tries but managed to do it.

Screenshot 2025-04-07 at 17.02.00.png

The onboarding could be a bit smoother besides being a wall of text. I did succumb to it after my first horrible try but didn't even find that much good information there. Like it wasn't mentioned anywhere that you can actually rotate the tiles. Or that the mushroom farms give you more tiles to play with. Both of which are pretty essential to succeeding. Some small pop/pulse animation on the tile amount when completing a farm section would have been a nice touch to drive that point home.

Would make more sense to penalize skip somehow as you might just as well now skip all curves when you don't need to turn and also 99% of the empty tiles. Didn't really figure out what the small ruby tiles do. I'm guessing they give you more "score" but didn't figure out how to trigger them. Seemed very rare too and on my final and obviously longest run didn't even see any. Would probably make more sense to have like "a deck" of tiles so you wouldn't be bitten by possible bad luck. Also would help estimating/counting whether it's the time to close a mush farm to keep growing it for a few more tiles (seemed like the plus you gain is exponential).

Also two of my three runs started off giving me a mushroom block that was completely impossible to place at the start. The invisible biome change border also was kinda mean as it can easily mess up your mushroom farm.

But yeah, fun stuff. Good job! 👍

Home is where hell is by Anderson Job Loeffler 2025-04-07T16:40:27Z

Dang, that was short. At least that means there are no more "pick a pipe" or blind drops.

Awesome looking pixel art and lovely color palette. Solid platforming controls too (even though I'd usually want a separate jump button but I could use arrows and W as a pseudo jump). Couldn't even break out of the last wrong hole dead end by glitching/clipping to a wall no matter how I tried. 😅

Cool music too! Sound effects would have also been nice but I guess the biggest thing missing here was at least a bit more content.

Oh well, I guess game is a good one if it leaves you wanting some more content. Kinda funny that the preview gif on the page is like 50% of the whole game.

Good job! 👍

OnlyDown by nojoule 2025-04-08T13:21:39Z

Almost broke 1k, it starts becoming very laggy at that point. Might be something wrong how you're doing the drawing/updates for enemies.

Screenshot 2025-04-08 at 16.07.49.png

Well I did reach the "bottom" too I think...

Screenshot 2025-04-08 at 15.59.45.png

It's kinda lacking in the gameplay side. There doesn't seem to be that much difference on what you do strategy wise. The health regen system was also a bit confusing and controls had some minor issues like Moving diagonally stops jumping off ledges for some reason.

The art looks nice and cute with some pleasant color choices. There is some sprite tearing which is a common issue with tile maps. Should be a super easy fix just a single google search away. Can't remember it from the top of my head as I don't often work with tile maps. Audio would of course also been welcome addition but understandable that you couldn't add it due to other issues.

But hey, good job! 👍 Solid entry for a first time solo dev. It only gets easier and more fun from here! 😎 And remember that every time you face problems and solve them, you're more ready for them the next time...

DEPTHS - FLOOR 404 by ybzpp 2025-04-08T12:53:31Z

Cool! Can't figure out whether the choice in the end has any impact and what's up with the locked door. Couldn't seem to do anything differently on a second try and it's kinda too slow of an experience to keep doing repeatedly.

Had some major camera/mouse locking issues. The cursor kept sometimes escaping the lock and I ended up clicking outside the game and thereby halting it. And the look speed was horribly slow for my liking at least. Also felt like the controls for crouch, jump and sprint were kinda unnecessary. There was do downside to always sprinting, it was superior to slow walk in all ways, except for it kinda lessened the mood of the game. Crouch felt useless now too, especially so if you'd increase the interaction range by a tiny bit. Now it felt a bit too short.

The start is kinda awkward as the fuse is VERY hard to notice unless you know what you're looking for and dragging it didn't first come to mind. The game itself doesn't explain it so had to read the page for the instructions to proceed.

The elevator buttons not having any impact and the number going all bonkers was confusing at first, then cool but finally an annoying delay while trying to replay again.

But yeah, great moody atmosphere some great groundwork for an interesting puzzler experience. Good job! 👍

Binary Bomber by gsoutz 2025-04-09T16:57:10Z

Neat!

Screenshot 2025-04-09 at 19.42.10.png

Liked the style and the pixel art itself but it was almost nauseating to look at really. It was way too busy. So many bright colors made it hard to distinguish stuff. Especially in the last level. The background parallax was going the wrong (further things should move slower, not faster) way too which looked very trippy and confusing. The camera movement was also a bit awkward cause it let you go forward without being able to keep up which resulted in it only showing you like 20% of the space forward.

The enemies weren't really a threat as their shots just whizz by the player character. I guess unless you manage to jump to them. Even though I constantly kept messing up x/space keys (which would have made a lot more sense to me the other way around), they still didn't manage to hurt me.

Other than that, it controlled pretty well. The climb was a bit sticky and slow but it didn't matter that much really. The full square collider shape for the player sometimes caused weirdness as there is lot of empty space behind the sprite that still collides with the ground. Something a bit smaller usually works a lot better.

But the biggest issue really was the lack of on screen counter for the coins. It was very frustrating to wander all the way to the end to check whether there still might be some sneaky coin hiding in some corner.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Airman57 by Prvaak 2025-04-07T18:43:12Z

Took me few failures to get there but I did it in ~7 minutes on Airman 62.

Going fast seems just like a bad idea as you have really low amount of control of the pod. And going too slow gets kinda boring. And in the end bit where it gets kinda dense and hard, I just lucked out and found out you can pretty much go around everything and travel in the void. Made the ending a bit anticlimactic.

A bit more structure/content would have been nice. Like shorter mission but having multiple of em. Going a different direction too! Dunno why but that bottom right angle just seemed unintuitive to me. Also kinda annoying that you were mainly going down and have less visibility due to game being landscape.

So yeah, it controlled pretty well and flying around was quite nice. Except in the most dense bits getting bumped around from asteroid to asteroid because a small nick wasn't too fun. It feels to me like the bounce amount is a bit too much due to how little control you have to recover. Shorter missions and more variety/things to do would have made it stay its welcome better and not get that boring.

The music was nice, moody and a good fit (though I guess it wasn't made by you or for the jam). The acceleration sound effect sounded a bit harsh on startup. It was especially noticeable when trying to do small adjustments which was pretty much how I always played. A bit of a fade on it would probably have been better as it just was too harsh too fast from nothing.

Anyways, that's all I've got, good job! 👍

SATURATION by swooty 2025-04-09T17:29:03Z

Nice! Took me three tried to do it, every time reading a bit more of the description to get some kind of an idea what I was supposed to be doing and how to do so. Would have been nice to have some of that information in game. Only thing that was there was the very final button press needed to fix the leak at which point one has to assume you've already read all the other instructions.

The distance meter wasn't the most intuitive thing the guess what it was trying to say. Didn't help that I had no idea what I was looking for either. Obviously I thought more bar was better. Nope, obviously not! After trial and erroring with it in all the wrong ways, it was kinda easy in the end. How is the target spot generation? I think every time it was pretty much on the starting level for me so the whole up/down indication thing was kinda moot too.

The dual control system also felt awkward but I guess it makes sense as the sub needs to be slower in its movements and wouldn't really work with mouse controls that well. I guess you'd get used to it if the game was longer. But the controls both themselves were great. No issues there at all.

The game looked and sounded suberb! I have nothing bad to really say about it. Nice and moody. Very good UI work too with some nice color choices.

And of course, thanks for making a mac version too! It's sadly not too common, especially on compo side of things. Did have to do the usual chmod +x and right click to open shenanigans but the game worked flawlessly after that.

The game was easily good enough to stretch it on a little longer. The first fix is only like the tutorial and it was already over. Could have easily made it be like three fixes in a row with maybe the oxygen filled after each.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Dark Pit by Haokai XU 1999 2025-04-10T17:18:36Z

Softlock the game. I really like the idea of the mechanic but there is quite a lot of things that make it rather frustrating.

Screenshot 2025-04-10 at 19.45.54.png

There is so much waiting for a potential block to appear and when you try to make a leap for it it's almost always just noping out and refusing to jump because I guess the platform was a degree too steep or while midair a bunch of other unwanted platforms rain on me and trap me forcing a total game restart.

Screenshot 2025-04-10 at 19.57.03.png

I guess having the light cone be more the thing that affects blocks stopping and not just being close to you being enough would help with the traps at least a bit as you could kinda untangle yourself with it. But at least having a restart option other than hard quitting the game would be nice.

Also was very though to estimate whether the angle of a platform was enough to walk on or if it would consume the wall jump. I think like 99% of my deaths were not really my fault due to these. And I think having the wall jump be once per platform instead of once per jump would feel so much better.

It looked pretty nice. The soundscape was a bit barren. Some more sounds and overall more variety would have been a welcome addition. Of course music too.

So yeah, with few kinda minor changes/fixes it would be a very fun score chasing game. Main thing being make the ground detection more reliable for jumping and somehow stop the softlock traps of falling platforms.

Couldn't manage to get higher than this...

Screenshot 2025-04-10 at 20.02.01.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

SquidVenture by Goiaba Games 2025-04-09T18:09:08Z

Haha, knew after my first try that there was a "second ending" and had to go for another run. Actually maybe few because I got sucked into doing a bit of a speed run...

Screenshot 2025-04-09 at 20.54.37.png

Don't think that is even beatable without the skip I found (or any possible other ones). A full restart options would have been nice too for speed running purposes. Doing a full page reload was kinda awkward. Especially because (even on itch) it was sometimes not just straight up accepting focus in the game area itself so restarting was fiddly. I think it also ate the R key press event (even though it only worked on end I think) and thereby blocked ctrl+r refresh completely.

It controlled great. The pixel art was simple yet clean and good looking. Sounds overall worked brilliantly and the music fit the mood of the game.

Nice and generous to have checkpoints on all levels. Could have easily been longer with no real new mechanics without losing my interest. Having nice and fun movement and combat alone goes a long way.

One easy way to give it a bit more depth would be to have the shooting slow the player down a bit. Would make it so that you'd need to shoot a bit more carefully, especially if going for a speed run. I'm pretty much of the design school that if you have a function like shooting/running, there should be something in it that makes the player to do it 100% of the time. Ammo counts, stamina systems, recoil/knockback etc. Otherwise it might just as well be automatically doing it all the time.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Poor Julio... by Sayeg 2025-04-07T16:59:07Z

Pretty cool! Even managed to fail my first try because I was trying to time the presses. After that I just mashed space constantly which kinda lessened the stories a bit somehow. But still cool though.

The only thing that really annoyed me was how the text appearing kept jumping at the ends of the lines. I usually "fix" this by having all text actually be there but have the "invisible" part just be transparent. That way it's considered in text wrapping already and words don't jump from end of the line to the next one when they don't fit anymore.

Also same color text as the bar beneath is a pretty weird choice...

Anyways, good job! A "fun" experience... 👍

Drill-Off by Antti Haavikko 2025-04-08T12:30:16Z

@frib Yeah, most of the upgrades are just kinda bad and trappy. That's the biggest thing on my todo list for the post jam version, a complete overhaul of the perks so that there are some good, fun and interesting options. Now pretty much everything just ends up being bad except for few of them and the score increasing ones.

Fire & Ice by cicanci 2025-10-06T15:07:38Z

I don't really get it. I managed to get to 5 cards once but usually I can't get past the first two. The first ones seem to take 3 hits to kill but the ones after that seem to require more hits than you yourself hand handle. You could theoretically pre damage before some enemy before using a card to heal you but even killing an enemy without getting the card is way too tough. The slowly moving AI makes all the enemies clump up in a single cluster pretty soon making it impossible to target single enemies. And the lack of any indication of health left on self or enemies makes it even harder.

I keep going for more tries even while writing this but it seems weird. I just managed to kill one of the first two enemies without grabbing the card. Made two bumps on the third enemy, grabbed the card to fully heal and even by doing so I couldn't beat the third enemy. It just doesn't seem constant how much damage you do and how much damage the enemies do and how fast. Makes it rather frustrating to play.

There are also rare scenarios where an enemy bumps you and you go flying to the other direction losing all control for a bit.

The Gem Hoarder by SinusQuell 2025-10-06T15:28:12Z

Neat! Made it a week before losing. Seems like an exploit to let the player prepare between days. Kinda tedious to just stockpile huge amount of everything in preparation for the day and there at least should be some downside to doing so. The whole allowing preparation kinda messed up the whole point of the game for me really. 🤷‍♀️

The audio side was nice. Neat relaxing music fit the mood well. Some of the sounds got rather repetitive and harsh, some more variety would have helped. Visually it looked pretty good too. Sometimes (especially on the amulet), distinguishing between red and orange was a bit tough. And the whole game is probably a nightmare for any color blind or even red/green challenged players. 😱

Grabbing stuff seemed sometimes not to stick. I think you used the sprite shape for the detection but it felt a bit too strict and sometimes even a bit off. I'd even go as far as just grabbing the closest item next to the cursor when you click to be extra forgiving. I don't think the game should be about clicking accuracy but the franticly clicking around to try fill up the orders.

Now seeing the other comments, I'm on Mac Chrome too and it worked flawlessly!

Anyways, good job! 👍

The Gem Hoarder by SinusQuell 2025-10-06T16:20:17Z

I'm pretty sure you're allowed to do ports past the actual time period so adding standalone builds in addition of the web build might be a good idea if more people are facing that issue.

Tamago Bill by thegrottman 2025-10-09T16:29:36Z

Nice, super solid stuff! Nicely done for a second jam entry ever. I guess it's wasn't your first times completely making games looking at the end result.

Screenshot 2025-10-09 at 19.19.03.png

Really brings me back to my childhood too, basically any of those NES zapper games, especially that one western themed one which I can't remember the name of. Also thematically something like Sunset Riders. Dang that game was awesome (and a quarter eater).

There's a bit of a exploit/mistake that you can just wait around and shoot carefully only when you can be sure you can catch the egg too. There would probably need to be a penalty or lose condition for also letting too many bandits get away or just have a time limit.

The coin rate upgrade also reset after losing once and still didn't allow upgrading it again which meant that I couldn't really keep up with the increasing prices but didn't have a need for them anyway since it was that short. Also a bit annoying that your last shot doesn't allow you to get the egg meaning if you have the exact same number of shots left as you need eggs, you'll still lose even if you shoot everything perfectly from that point on.

But yeah, fun game. With a bit more shooting gameplay variety (and getting rid of the "exploit" and more (and more interesting) upgrades to spend your eggs on, this could easily be fun for way longer than the current length of it. Good job! 👍

**edit:** Oh yeah, forgot! Needs more sound effects for sure. Everything that was there was good and didn't get annoying or too repetitive but would need an egg catch sound for sure. You aren't (at least for me) constantly paying that much full attention to the basket but just seeing it in your peripheral so an sound for when the egg was actually caught and you'd be free to move to the next one would have made it so much better.

Word Collector by thesnide 2025-10-06T15:45:58Z

Nice! Stopped playing on level 50. It didn't seem to get any tougher and I just kept being around the same 140 seconds of time.

Screenshot 2025-10-06 at 18.39.20.png

Very solid stuff for only two hours! Funnily enough, I made a quite similar typing game few LDs back and it took me the whole weekend. 😅 Of course I did do graphics and audio on it too.

The biggest annoyance was doing a typo on a word that already went off screen and typing the next word without realizing and then needing to go back to fix the first word. Of course audio cues could help in this situation too.

But yeah, not much else to say. Seriously wonderful stuff for only two hours. Works flawlessly for what it is and obviously could be improved on if you had more time! Good job! 👍🎉

Benny's Quest by april21 2025-10-07T14:46:29Z

Nice! Was this all or is there still more hidden ones to find?

Screenshot 2025-10-07 at 17.34.05.png

It looks so much more player friendly on your screenshots, why is the released version this zoomed in? It makes it kinda tough to platform with all the blind jumps and the camera lacking behind too.

Screenshot 2025-10-07 at 17.35.05.png

Makes more sense to have a bit of a lookahead on 2d platformers cameras because you like 99% of the time want to see more on whats in front and not behind you. Also a nice feature to have is ability to pan camera up/down to help with those blind drops.

Liked the cute pixel art. It had so much charm and style even with very minimalistic art and simple animations. The style carries a ton of weight here. And the color palette was super pleasant to look at too.

Music was nice and chill. Helped keep me cool with all those rage inducing blind jumps and missed falls resulting in tons of repeat play. Sound effects were sooo barren. Only the flower collecting had a sound effect? Basically everything that happens should have a sound too. Jumping, landing, maybe even walking steps and the elevators could also produce a constant humm or something to help with those spots where you need to tell the player to wait a bit for one.

Oh yeah, speaking of the elevators, they were kinda annoyingly off sync all the time resulting just waiting around which is never really fun. One super nice thing could be to cheat with them so that they only activate once player is almost close enough to see them so that they'd pretty much automatically be there when needed.

Controls could really also use some "coyote time" ie. allowing to jump even a bit after running off an edge to help with those long jumps and slow reaction time. Another thing that'd make it feel nice to jump around is buffering a premature jump for a bit if tried to jump right before landing. These two are very common on platformers and when done right (of course too much is too much), they help it feel better and more fair even if you're stacking the cards in the favour of the player.

Anyways, that's all I've got. Good job! 👍

Benny's Quest by april21 2025-10-07T15:27:10Z

benny.png

Currency Collection Corvid by Elanor 2025-10-07T17:25:08Z

Love me some PICO games. Short and sweet! Not much to say, so I drew a picture instead...

Untitled_Artwork 9.png

Good job! 👍

Meta Jammer by pschichtel 2025-10-08T14:51:50Z

Damn, pretty cool! Sadly there really isn't anything to play here as it's basically just a different type of listing of the games.

Also crashed at some point and panning around stopped working due to it but could still click on the games that were visible.

Screenshot 2025-10-08 at 17.47.30.png

Meta Jammer by pschichtel 2025-10-09T14:52:11Z

@faithcaio Well yeah, but that "game" is already there without your game. 😅 I guess the awards are something extra.

Yeah it blocked panning completely, couldn't even move back to where I had come from.

Pelmeni's Magic Lab by rosday 2025-10-13T15:08:58Z

Nice! After a few tries, for some reason here, I managed to win...

Screenshot 2025-10-13 at 17.42.07.png

Something is a bit off here. I only had artificer and dining sets and placing the warlock dupe tile as green somehow allowed me to win. It's quite unclear what a set is...

It front loads waaaay too much information on the player at the beginning without knowing anything and even requires you to make a choice for your deck. That's just way too much and for several runs I pretty much just chose randomly at the start. Having like a random or "starter friendly" deck on your first run might be better. Like the influence here, Blue Prince, does it very slowly introducing more and more cards making you ease in to the complexity. Not just throwing everything at you at once. And here the interactions are actually even deeper than in BP.

I kinda played without using redraws at all. I pretty much just used when I was getting stuck otherwise which on hindsight wasn't that smart. I guess you could really plan out your deck and fish for some efficient building orders for an easy win but doubt anyone has that sort of deep knowledge of all the cards besides you as the dev.

Still quite not sure why sometimes I was discarding my hand and sometimes not. Don't think I placed any tiles that triggered such effect either. But quite a lot of time I couldn't be sure if I'd be able to play more than one card from my hand.

It's kinda weird and restricting that you can't place doorways towards the outer walls but can still point towards another tile without a door.

Would have been super nice to see the tile cost manipulations shown a bit. And even have the manipulated costs (the ones that come from other places than selected ranks) show up before picking the card up too. Also lasting effects like that one warlock card making the next 3 tiles free and being able to see how many freebies are still left.

Very nice pixel art with awesome color palette! The font wasn't the easiest of things ever to read but I guess that wasn't that much of an issue. And of course music and some sweet sound effects would have really made the experience much better.

And finally, I think that it would have played much nicer with mouse controls instead of keys.

Oh and I guess it wasn't the final thing. The game kinda breaks if you run out of tiles in your deck. Nothing major though as I guess the game is over there anyway and it doesn't like fully break and stop you from restarting. And why do I have 12 mana there? Can the crystal ritual thing put you above the max?

Screenshot 2025-10-13 at 18.05.45.png

Anyways, good job! 👍

Pelmeni's Magic Lab by rosday 2025-10-13T18:06:08Z

I wouldn't say it's too easy. The difficulty is pretty much on the sweet spot, not being too frustrating or instantly winning. Though instant wins can also happen even without any real knowledge by just randomly placing whatever you can. But something like a second level with a harder difficulty would be welcome still. And maybe with a level system such as this you could make even an easier level with predefined starter deck and way less options (and more tutorialing) to get players more accustomed to the game more smoothly.

One thing that could help understand the sets thing (especially with the variable set sizes) would be to show how many pieces of each set you have on those lighting up indicators too. The most confusing thing about sets to me was that dupe tiles didn't seem to really count at all and you needed to have all unique tiles of that color. And of course the dual color tiles make the sets more confusing to grasp at first. That's why I was so confused about my win too cause I thought I had more necro tiles to play for it but I guess the rest were warlock only.

The Collection of Me - 自我图鉴 by Amiuke 2025-10-15T16:17:51Z

Nice and moody!

Managed to snag two "real" endings and the mismatch one few times even though I thought all three items I had were colored.

Screenshot 2025-10-15 at 19.01.17.pngScreenshot 2025-10-15 at 19.04.12.png

I'm having a hard time picking up on the overarching story (if there is one) as a whole. The small snippets seem a bit too abstract to me and the gameplay isn't quite deep enough to carry that many playthroughs. It basically just becomes: pick and item and then try clicking every other item to see if they match. Only a few of the items seemed to have a distinct link that could reasonably be figured out by themselves but then others like cat and the tuna can didn't 🤷‍♀️

Nice art and the music was beautiful too and really painted a nice atmosphere. At least some of the images scale to fit the whole screen so they look kinda bad on any aspect ratio that isn't what you've intended. And the non fullscreen one doesn't show anything either as it's too big for the container and it shows scrollbars.

Went for a few more endings. Still as confused as ever though. I guess there isn't any deep thread between the micro stories.

Screenshot 2025-10-15 at 19.15.20.pngScreenshot 2025-10-15 at 19.16.17.png

And not a big deal at all but the trophy room doesn't work in English.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-06T17:38:37Z

@gwhyang Heh yeah, not my first rodeo! 😅 I actually kinda over scoped a bit and didn't get to do as much polishing (which is pretty much my favourite thing to do in game dev) as I usually try to do. My main target is to almost done state in the first day and then dedicate the second day pretty much fully to adding audio and polish. And that didn't really realize this time and a big chunk of the second day too was spent on just adding the required mechanics.

But hey, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do at least a bit of a post-jam version with all that "missing polish" and more content in a form of more variety in items, enemies and boss affixes at least, so your wish might come true... 😉

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-06T18:32:50Z

IMG_0286.png

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-09T04:52:32Z

@foursay Most of them mean the exact same thing as show next to them in english too. Some of them like heal and dodge aren’t quite literal but more flavour. Bone collecting is an old cantonese tradition so that’s why they’re there.

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-09T15:03:51Z

@wo-ri-gou-le Haha, thanks! I have indeed pretty much zero knowledge of Chinese language. Everything is pretty much lifted from Wikipedia, starting off from the article for "bone collecting" and branching off from there. A lot of them were like old traditions etc so I guess they might not make that much sense in modern Chinese. And for dodge, I couldn't find anything super appropriate and didn't want to retort to google translate so I pretty much took something. I think it indeed was something akin to "pay respects to the dead".

Hope it doesn't come off as "cultural appropriation" or being disrespectful in that "call of duty writing arabic in the wrong direction" way...

Oh and I have started to make and post-jam version of the game with more stuff so if you have any good recommendations for mythical/folklore creatures to add as enemies (jiangshi seemed like an obvious choice) or even weapons/items, they'd be more than welcome! 😊

jiangshi.gif toad.gif

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-10T04:03:55Z

@acartlidge Oh no it's no a cheese at all! It really doesn't matter whether you're in battle or not, rerolling still costs either a reroll or life. The current enemies don't actually do anything else besides be wall of hp you need to pass (until they have some special affixes too).

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-12T19:26:48Z

@ghettobastler Yup, for sure! The map is way too linear and can really stunlock you if you don't happen to get the required rolls. This is something I've already improved on the upcoming post-jam version with a more branching map ie. less chances of getting stuck at any point. And of course there are lots of other things there too.

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-21T11:36:29Z

@marudziik Yeah there is a bug on dice item ignoring the inventory size limit. I have fixed that already for the post-jam-version along with loads of other changes and content additions. Three more days to add even more stuff to it 😊, I'm going to patch/release it as soon as the rating period is over and the entries are "unlocked".

Bone Collector by Antti Haavikko 2025-10-25T04:35:11Z

@100th-coin Thanks a lot for the comprehensive feeback. And no, it's not coming off negative at all to me, this is exactly the kind of feedback I want (and pretty much give out to others too). ❤️

I just released the post-jam version I had been tinkering on for the past three weeks during the rating period. Lots of new content in the form of weapons, other items, enemies and bosses. And of course I did some balancing and tinkering to try to smoothen the gameplay and reduce the effect of complete randomness.

Probably not the easiest change to spot amongst the others but I did a quite major change on how the map is generated. It indeed now always has a fixed amount of shops and chests and also includes way more branching between them to allow for more player choices instead of getting locked to a single long path.

Of course the randomness is still there and I didn't want to "cheat the dice" to make them less punishing. Luck is still a big factor but it seems like you tasted the quite the extreme edges of that spectrum. Hopefully the new version plays a bit better in that sense with all the new tools to combat the randomness. At least there is more variety so even if you need to do repeated runs when your luck runs low, you'll still encounter new stuff.

Relic Hunter by ehtd 2025-10-08T15:58:58Z

Nice. Obviously it's short and there isn't that much to do but a solid start for a game where dig down for resources and come back up every now and then to deposit, refuel, maybe do upgrades or even some base building.

It was kinda weird and pointless that there were two different gauges that kinda conflicted with each other and served the same purpose. I mean fuel and cargo space. Never actually ran out of fuel but the cargo space kept doing the same thing that I couldn't drill anymore and had to return.

The music was banging but guess that was a ready made thing. But it's kinda confusing. The page you're linking to doesn't have that piece of music anywhere though. Is it just to link the artist? And it was from another Ludum Dare game? The sound effects were a bit harsh and would have needed more different sounds to be less barren and obviously a bit of variation in them.

Drilling those uranium bits and the relics could have used some feedback that it's doing something since they took longer than the normal ground. Not a big issue to not have them but would have made it clearer and maybe even more importantly, more satisfying to drill them. I'm a big proponent of making basic gameplay "goals" like gathering stuff and scoring look and feel so good and juicy so that they by themselves serve as an reward for doing it.

Anyways, good job! 👍

And I've been trying to do more drawing so I decided to draw the hunter (with quite a lot of creative liberties).

Untitled_Artwork 10.png

Circus Puppet Theater by Diralf 2025-10-15T16:39:46Z

Nice and easy!

Screenshot 2025-10-15 at 19.23.27.png

The gameplay was nice and intuitive enough to pick up and play (and complete) without reading any directions so kudos on that. The in game controls and the slight "sparkle" when you threw a thing to a spotlight (and dupes being rejected) were more than enough guidance to help me to victory.

Very cool art style and smooth animations too. A bit glitchy and confusing when "combat" is going on though. The different color clowns seemed a bit lazy. The kinda break and stand out the whole other art style as clear color tints on the main sprite. And even with just pure colors (which I usually loathe seeing unless in an art style fully leaning to mspaint look). Wouldn't have been such a huge job to color swap them on where ever you drew them, the end result would have been loads nicer! And of course some audio would have been a welcome addition.

The controls were pretty solid. The combat could kinda confusing when the clowns became unstunned and you couldn't quite tell which was an enemy and which was your "weapon". The friendly bullets looking the same as enemy bullets was also a bit of a annoyance. Nothing major of course as the game is so short and even the punishment of losing is so very minor.

The UI list of the things you had gathered seemed kinda unnecessary. And only now going back to play a second round I realized that the thing on the left hand corner was a full screen button. Even though that's the same symbol I always use for it too. 😅 I kept thinking first that it also was some sort of "inventory slot".

But yeah, that's all I've got. Good job! 👍