Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → cassowary
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥉 | 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Squirrelativity | compo | Innovation | 4.52 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Suit Yourself | compo | 54 | 3.87 | 3.91 | 3.45 | 1.84 | 3.45 | 3.73 | 1.92 | 3.23 | |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | Stamp Collecting on Planet Q | compo | 7 | 4.30 | 4.23 | 4.38 | 3.96 | 4.31 | 4.06 | 3.77 | 4.13 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Continental Shelf | compo | 10 | 4.16 | 4.00 | 3.44 | 3.28 | 3.96 | 3.91 | 2.97 | 3.77 | |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Mini Beasts | compo | 17 | 4.21 | 4.19 | 3.78 | 4.04 | 4.05 | 4.20 | 2.96 | 4.12 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Stars Align | compo | 17 | 4.25 | 4.03 | 4.02 | 3.58 | 4.07 | 4.04 | 2.77 | 3.93 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Hazel & Hector | compo | 16 | 4.21 | 4.04 | 3.91 | 3.91 | 4.34 | 4.13 | 3.40 | 4.19 | |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | The Pigeon Post Principle | compo | 5 | 4.40 | 4.29 | 3.92 | 4.39 | 4.22 | 4.29 | 3.27 | 4.12 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Squirrelativity | compo | 7 | 4.31 | 4.17 | 4.52 | 4.02 | 4.04 | 3.91 | 3.27 | 4.05 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Renew my Subscription | compo | 10 | 4.21 | 4.08 | 4.41 | 4.38 | 4.14 | 3.96 | 3.41 | 3.75 | |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | The Great Flood | compo | 8 | 4.30 | 4.14 | 4.10 | 3.83 | 4.21 | 3.91 | 2.63 | 4.12 | |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Chthonic Brilliance | compo | 68 | 4.04 | 3.99 | 3.45 | 2.87 | 4.19 | 3.71 | 2.72 | 3.46 | |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Entanglement | compo | 34 | 4.00 | 3.87 | 4.01 | 3.51 | 3.03 | 3.04 | 2.37 | 3.11 | |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Petra | compo | 21 | 4.10 | 4.07 | 3.45 | 3.33 | 3.40 | 3.72 | 2.96 | 3.46 |
The running animation was really nice and smooth.
I found the platform near the bottom of level 2 kind of confusing, since it looked like I could jump up to it but it was _just_ out of reach.
I was impressed by the moving platforms! They seemed to work well.
I had a good time with this one. I also found left/right a little confusing because I think I wanted them to rotate the ball relative to the center, but they moved it relative to the edge of the circle instead, so it felt backwards.
Some background music would be nice, but I thought the sound effects perfectly complemented the graphic design.
The design felt really polished and nice. I liked the animations that added a little bounce to everything.
^ I agree - or having an option to change which way the isometric keys go. (I think EDGE has a setting like this.)
The colors and shading were nice.
A nice puzzle with a good difficulty curve. I particularly liked the puzzles where you had to put half the block on a 'double touch' tile. Makes you think!
This is a fun one! It's really easy to get into a groove. I could see this working well as a phone app too, with the one button controls.
It'd be cool to add background music that gradually speeds up as the game gets faster. :)
It's a good concept! I think it might be improved by having some sort of timer, so that the player doesn't have time to think about it. I found that it became a lot more difficult when I forced myself to just click without thinking, so building that into the game might create more of a challenge.
I like the artstyle! I found it really hard to prevent the trees from quickly spreading over the entire map. Maybe I should have planted more palm trees than I did...
It might be nice to allow left-click-and-drag to scroll the screen, or at least have some buttons to click to scroll the screen, so you don't have to move your hand from the mouse or spacebar to the arrow keys.
Also, for me, the cutting orders don't highlight for trees on the pink spaces. (I'm on linux though, so things might be weird here.)
I really like how each animal type has a unique sound effect when you pick them up!
I like it! It's a very unique design, and very well executed. I especially like how if you have multiple choices of the same letter, it selects them "in parallel." That is a nice little touch.
Oh man, it's like herding cats! The writing is great. :)
It's simple but fun! an interesting interpretation of the theme. I really like the animation of the guy walking up the stairs. :)
Glad people are enjoying the game!
@triplefox I'm not so much of an arranger/mixer-type person (more of an instrumentalist), so I appreciate this feedback. I'll try to work on my music mixing skills in future.
@elenesski Yeah, the initial idea spawned from the theme, but it kind of diverged somewhat from the initial conception. Some levels are closer to the initial idea, like 'Midas Touch' and 'Corners', where you're actually _running out of space_ to move the boxes around if you mess up. But some of the levels don't really suit the theme so well.
@historymaker118 That's no good! What OS/browser are you using? I can try to look into it.
edit: It seems to work for me on Firefox (61) on Windows 7. What version of firefox are you running? If you click out of the game and press F12 and select Console, is there an error message displayed?
I'd like to play this, but it seems like the Mac and Linux links also link to the Windows version? Is there something I'm missing?
Took me a little bit to get the hang of the controls (the meaning of the cursor changing shape had me confused), but once I'd figured it out, it was quite fun. There's a surprising amount going on in this game! It's a simple concept, but it works well, and the powerups add a little bit of extra depth to the mechanics.
I got to level 9 with 24370 points. I don't know if that's good or bad.
It's a fun concept, and the tension as stuff slowly disappears is nice. it does a good job of keeping you on the edge of your seat!
It might be cool if the tiles disappeared in a more predictable way (like having a higher chance to disappear near where a tile has already disappeared, or some such), because then you could strategize more in where you place things, rather than feeling like you're at the mercy of the random number generator.
The graphics were really good especially if it was your first time! I also really appreciated new game++, it was fun to beat the whole game super easily as a reward for making it through the first time!
Also, I can't say no to a game about cats. :cat:
I like this! The gameplay is fun and challenging (and very theme-appropriate!)
I like the graphical style as well. I don't know much about pico-8 but I really like the 3D effect on the title screen. :)
The movement speed is really slow, but I like the simple gameplay, and it's very on-theme. The graphics are cute!
I love this! There are so many elements working together and some of the puzzles are quite nice.
The audio and graphics are also fantastic!
^ it's not a platformer, though?
I liked the art. It gives me a very "TI-84 graphing calculator" vibe. (especially with that font!)
I liked the final boss, too, with the different phases.
The collision detection felt a bit wonky sometimes with the cannonballs - like their hitboxes were a bit too big. Also, sometimes it was hard to tell which way a cannon was facing, so it was surprising when they shot backwards through the wall.
Overall I liked it a lot!
The game froze on me while trying to pick up a coin while it was still in the air. :(
Fun concept, though! I like the sense of progression. I wish there was a bit more to do at the beginning, especially since you still have to pay attention to the progress bar so your crop doesn't die, haha. So you just have to sit there and wait for a while when you only have one field. But other than that, I think it's well done! And very theme-relevant. :)
Very cute! Some of the puzzles were quite tricky and I liked the premise. The "unlocking controls" idea feels like an obvious application of the theme, but only letting the robots have one at a time is a nice twist. I also appreciated the level-transition animation. :)
I liked this one! The graphical style was really nice, and I liked the progression of upgrades increasing your mobility. The battles were well-executed as well.
Some of the collision detection with the level definitely felt a little strange, and also it seemed like there wasn't a penalty for dying? Like, not that I wanted the game to be super punishing, but I thought it was a little strange that damage dealt to the boss before dying still counted, haha.
Overall, I really liked it! I wish there was more of it to play!
@inkyglow maybe this wasn't explained as well as it could have been, but for level 2, you can move one pawn but not the other if the path of one of them is blocked. So if you put the yellow pawn on the switch next to the pink block, and the blue pawn below it, and then press right, you'll win.
Very cool and relaxing! It was nice just to spend time walking around in the little world. I liked the different generated sounds as well.
My one issue with it is that I think it would be nice if the sounds had a bit more "volume" in space. When you walk past a sound that you're very close to, the fact that it's a point source (I think?) makes it suddenly jump to one ear and then back, since you're very slightly to the right of it, or something. It's a bit jarring. I also just think it would be fun to be able to stand in the middle of a sound and let it wash over you. :)
Overall, I really think this is a cool idea and very innovative. I really enjoyed it.
I'm in agreement with people that the hitboxes are a bit frustrating. It looks like you can go through certain spaces but it's actually impossible. A good trick is to make the hitboxes of things that hurt the player smaller than they actually appear. This makes the game feel more 'fair', even if it's really a cheat, haha.
this is super cool! I like your idea on how to incorporate the theme, and I really like how everything is constantly moving around, even in time with the music! It really helps contribute to the kind of "frantic" atmosphere. The online high scores are also a nice touch.
Hey, this is pretty cool! Reminds me of the kind of platformer with a creative twist mechanic from back in the Flash game days. :)
I also like the subtle theming, and the soundtrack. (Very Baroque!) And the menu screen is simple but I really appreciate the aesthetic of it!
Pretty cute! I like the art. It's a little basic at the moment, but I think a post-LD version with sound, more levels, a couple more mechanics, etc. would be really fun to play!
Wow, really tough! I was not able to beat it, but still enjoyed it. You made good use of the pico-8 graphical restrictions. And a good application of the theme! The controls feel really satisfying while maintaining a challenge. There is a blind jump into spikes after you jump over those first two snails, though.
The link doesn't seem to be working, it gives a 404 for me :(
Ok, I came back to this, and it's really sweet! It's an interesting take on the theme, and I like the "metaphorical" graphics. I also appreciate the simple sounds. And playing the game is almost like a therapeutic experience, haha.
...I guess I should call my friends. :)
I love the little cutscenes. And I feel like I learned something about moles...? The graphics are really cute too, and the backgrounds are pretty and feel stylistically cohesive.
Gameplay is pretty interesting as well, the limited pieces make it trickier than it seems at first glance!
Sometimes I wanted to remove a piece from the board and I couldn't figure out how to do that. I ended up just moving the pieces out of the way, but would have been nice to have the option to just remove stuff for organization purposes.
Wow, this is super cool. Love this kind of wolfenstein renderer, and it's quite impressive that you got it working on pico8!
Very fast, I had trouble with some of the initial enemies. Also at least for me, the cursor was kind of shaky which made it hard to feel like I was in control of the aiming.
I really like the graphics, sound effects, and other stuff -- the presentation is really nice, would love to see a version that's slightly easier for people like me with bad reflexes :sweat_smile:
Hey, this is pretty cool for 5 hours! I like what you did to make it harder as the game went on with more rocks showing up.
Agree with others that the drill makes it feel like you should be able to destroy rocks rather than them damaging you, haha. But I guess the idea is you're drilling through dirt and hitting rocks is bad because the drill can't handle them? In that case maybe it would be cool to show a little trail behind you so it looks like you're digging. :)
I like the little details in this. I really like the minimap! It's kind of fun navigating with it and getting excited when I see the thing I need. It's an interesting take on a maze game. And the controls feel pretty responsive -- I feel like in this kind of mouse control scheme it can get really tedious, but this game definitely avoids that!
I think I did run into the game breaking bug and wasn't able to return "Sight" to the host neuron, so I wasn't able to finish the game, but I still found it enjoyable and an interesting take on the theme!
@pirate-rob I was going to put in a level counter but I ran out of time :cry:
I also would have liked to have it save your progress, but ah well, that's the way of the game jam I suppose
@a0m1n3zone for the first box level, push the box off the top, then push it under the platform with the small gems - you can jump up through the bottom of the thin platforms. Then you can push the box back over to the right and use it to complete the level.
@n-c0de-r thanks! You should be able to reset the level by pressing R on your keyboard. I was planning on adding a move-by-move undo but didn't have enough time, haha.
Apologies in advance, the code is a huge mess. (and there are several bugs in the implementation which I "fixed" by designing the levels so they couldn't happen...) I hope reading it is still informative, though!
@slowfrog-again Haha, with more time there would have been ice blocks for sure -- I even had graphics for them! the alien was my initial attempt at the character pre-blob which somehow made it into the git repository. ;)
@blubberquark haha, it would, if it actually ran properly on phones. Definitely going to make it phone-accessible for the post-jam version, though. [edit: I have uploaded a very tiny bugfix change that should make it run a little better on phones. At least it's now playable, though only in portrait mode haha]
@pancelor I agree the movement is a bit slow; I've sped it up in the version I'm working on and now the jam version feels kind of unbearable lol
Hey this was pretty cool! I really liked the art style (especially in the story cutscene), and the collision detection on the "space junk" is actually really well done. I also like the dynamic rendering of the tether on the astronaut.
It would be cool to give the astronaut a few more sprites for thrusting, moving to the sides, facing the other way, etc. I think that would make controlling the character feel more dynamic!
I really like this little concept! It would be nice to have a bit more warning that the other imps are coming, or if you could shoot a bit faster -- I feel like having to see them and shoot them is a bit punishing especially if you miss. Some additional variety in enemies would also be cool to see (though of course it's hard in a jam timeframe ;D) Other than that I really liked it, I think the control scheme is interesting and I like the "multitasking" gameplay. And I really appreciate that you took time to add the "singing" option, I think it makes the game that much more charming.
This is super cute. I love the art style! The little animations on the items and the trails of dust when you land are some great attention to detail, and I like the style of the walls.
I love these kinds of exploratory fixed-screen platformers (idk if there's a term for them) and this is a great example!
Some of the collision detection feels a bit wonky, would be my only complaint, but it wasn't really much of an issue.
Really interesting I like the graphical style a lot and spraying the paint around is quite fun. Concurring with other commenters that it feels like you have to go really slowly and carefully -- I feel like it's easy to miss the spikes even when they're right next to you. Especially when you discover a new platform by painting its edge, and jump up onto it only to get killed by an invisible spike it's a bit disheartening, haha.
Overall cool stuff though, I really like the concept and I would love to see you expand further on it!
What a cute little game! I love games that work in musical elements into the interactivity. It would have been cool if the melodies of the solutions had a bit more 'musicality' to them. (Maybe keying the sharks to the pentatonic scale would help? :p)
I really liked the art -- the 1-bit graphical style was cool, the singing sharks were cute and I like the little bird character. I wish the game had a few more levels to really sink your teeth into the mechanics, but I know how hard that kind of thing can be in a game jam.
Minor, but I kind of wish there was a keyboard button to switch back and forth between play/edit, since when you need to change something in the level it feels kind of weird to grab the mouse to click the edit button while you're still in 'platforming' mode, if that makes sense.
Overall I think this is really creative, and if you continue development I think you could end up with something really interesting!
So, I really like the clean visual style, and the puzzles are well-made and tricky, with interesting interactions between the mechanics. The non-verbal explanation style and abstract 'find a path' gameplay really does remind me of The Witness.
I will say I don't ... really understand why there's a timer? It makes it hard to slow down and focus on making deductions. I think I would prefer this game a lot more if it didn't have time pressure and if you could undo your last move. It's frustrating especially on the bigger levels to make a mistake and need to restart the whole level. I didn't make it to the end, but I made it pretty close... except I don't really have a desire to replay through all the levels I already solved just to get back to where I was, you know? But, maybe that's just me.
That said, if you wanted to add some kind of 'zen mode' or something where you can solve all the puzzles at your own pace, I would love that! The puzzle system here is really really solid and you've got a really interesting set of mechanics going on.
Really fun little fluid dynamics game! I managed to beat it on normal. The difficulty feels well-tuned, you're constantly under pressure but you can deal with it with enough skill.
Seconding the person in the itch comments who compared it to the Dan-Ball Powder Game, haha.
I'm pretty bad at this, but I find it weirdly compelling. My main critiques are just that the graphics are a bit small (it's sometimes hard to see what's going on), and that the delivery mechanic is a bit unclear. I'm sure it would've been clearer had the game been finished though.
I like the music and the variety in enemy patterns. And the 'power pickup'(?) thing where you sort of vacuum them towards you is really satisfying.
"What do you run on, Rockette Morton?"
Uh, I also couldn't quite tell what was going on (I played it on my phone), but the art and polish is really nice! I scored 11, I think. I might come back and try and play it with a keyboard before I rate it, the mobile controls are a little difficult.
It's a very cute game and a nice take on the theme! It really does give a feeling of 'delaying the inevitable.' It was a little hard to select the weeds sometimes, which made it a bit hard to keep up. I think with more polish and some refinement of the controls this could turn into a really fun full game!
Nice little metroidvania! I think at one point I ran out of fireballs and couldn't progress, unless I missed something there. Also, it sometimes wasn't totally clear what object I needed to interact with and how to progress (took me a while to realize the little brazier thing could be set on fire.) I really like the graphics and the story! And the particle effects are really well-realized. Well done!
Wow, this is incredible! A great concept, executed near-flawlessly. Hard to believe this was made in 72 hours. The dialogue is really cute, the social interaction component is great, the drawing tools work well enough, and the 'two layers' thing is a really fun idea as well as serving as a form of quality control. I also just like the art style a lot. And the audio gives a nice relaxing feeling of being in an art gallery. The dynamic map layout is also cool with the ever-expanding gallery. My only critique is that there seems to be a tiny bit of camera drift that could be corrected, but other than that, wow this is really good.
@jordwest On the first level page it says you can press R to restart and Z to undo. You're not the first person to miss that though, so maybe I should have put it on the title screen or something. Whoops!
@f1krazy not just biblical! There's also the Epic of Gilgamesh, a couple Greek myths and some Indian/Korean/Irish stuff in there as well! ;)
Also, very happy everyone's enjoying the game! I'm working on an extension with a further 10 trickier puzzles ("Great Flood: The Lost Levels" :wink:) which I'll release separately when I'm done, since I wish I had had more time for level design during the jam.
@ronanrory thanks for playing! Yeah, that's a bug, I think I know what causes it. I'll publish a fix sometime soon, maybe post-jam since I also have a few graphical improvements and additional levels I'd like to add as well.
@andrewkennedy Thanks! I was proud of that one. I wanted to make sure each level focused on a unique application of the mechanics, even if not all of them ended up being that hard, haha.
Wow, placed 8th!! That's better than I was expecting!!
:(
The polish on things like the screen transitions, animations, sound effects, etc. is really nice. My main complaint would be that I wish you could reset the level without all the puzzle elements returning to their homes. Often I would have the solution but a grenade would be just slightly misplaced, or something, and I wanted to just nudge it over rather than having to re-place all the other elements as well. Overall, I liked it, it's very charming and silly, reminds me of old flash games in a way.
Well done! You've got a lot of mechanics and a surprising amount of depth here once you can figure it out. I, too, only managed to save two fellow humans. The pathfinding was cool but I also wished it could path around the little spikes/rocks. I also wish there was a way to view the whole map so I knew where the different bases were without having to slowly scroll over to them, but obviously that kind of thing might be difficult in a game jam with pico8! Overall it's really impressive considering the constraints!
I have to say, this went on significantly longer and with a higher production value than I initially expected. Very entertaining and didn't overstay its welcome. Also, you have a lovely voice.
Haha, this is cute. And relatable. I especially like the 'caffeine jitter' animation... that's how I feel when I drink coffee too.
Super cute! I love the art! And it's a fun simple concept that works great with the theme. I like how the different responses had different effects too, really made it feel like executing different moves in a fighting game (well, I assume... I don't play a lot of fighting games :wink:)
Very relatable. An excellent take on the theme. The dialogue in the story mode is very cute. I was surprised how much I was able to fit in there, I thought I wouldn't make it to day 7!
Cool take on the theme. Really interesting mechanical idea and exploration of the mechanic! I have to admit some of it was a little tricky to understand and I sometimes found the solution by accident just by going 'well, I haven't tried putting the block here yet', but it's a cool idea and you explored a lot of the possibility space of the mechanic, which is always cool to see. I also really liked the music and sound effects.
I really like the artstyle and the character designs. It's really visually distinctive. It's also fun, reminds me of home run contest too.
I wish there was a little title screen or something, when I press up/down/space not in fullscreen it makes the page scroll, and the countdown starts as soon as you run the game, so it's hard to enter fullscreen mode on the first go-round. I also wish it was a bit more clear when you are allowed to do the midair punches -- I ended up just mashing space, which seemed to sort of work, but I wasn't sure?
Overall, I like the game! I scored about 512 at my best. Not super impressive, but I'm still proud of it. :o
It's short, but it's a really fun idea. It's like a "meta-text adventure". Hard to believe it's based on Twine, that's pretty impressive.
Fun! It seemed like I was going to lose near the beginning, but once I made it past that, I ended up making it to like 3200 AD, and I could've kept going longer. It seems like my population leveled out at around 2500. I feel like the difficulty/frequency of events could have ramped up a bit more as the game went on to make extinction feel a bit more inevitable.
I like how you had to do different actions with the mouse to deal with the different natural disasters, and I liked the low-poly look! I also appreciated how the human structures became more advanced over time (though it was a bit funny to see things like nuclear power plants in the year 1650. :wink:)
Made it to wave 11 and scored 4380. I actually found this really really compelling but it's very hard, lol. The best tiny-brain strategy I eventually settled on was just to make one big loop through all the stations and block trains as they entered until I could let them in without causing a collision, and then I could let them out once they were empty. But obviously that isn't a perfect strategy either, lol.
Really like the graphics and music too -- the emotional support giraffes are hilarious and the music really captures a nice spacey vibe that contrasts with the hectic gameplay!
I might've also liked a preview of what trains were coming, but I get that that might conflict with what you were going for with the gameplay. Depends on what kind of vibe you're going for.
With more stuff happening it'd be cool! I like the zoomable camera. I think it should get harder a bit faster, if you're paying attention it's pretty easy for a long while just by positioning the employees properly and it gets a little monotonous.
I love non-standard versions of Snake, and this one is a clever one! There's a lot of different factors to balance out and think about when playing it, what with the fire and the bomb timer, etc. A few times I trapped a bomb in the corner with the fire which was a very interesting thing to have to deal with.
I found a minor bug: if you're moving, for example, to the right, it doesn't let you press left to turn around 180 degrees to hit your tail (which makes sense), but if you press two keys in quick succession (like, if you're moving right and press up then left very fast) you'll hit the part of your tail directly behind you instead of turning around as expected.
Overall, I really like this, the graphics are charming and the gameplay is engaging. Well done!
Wow, the art in this is really well done! I like how each level of dude has unique graphics, that's excellent attention to detail.
I like the auto-battle mechanic, but I wish there was more to do while waiting for the 10-second timer, since right now it feels a little dependent on the randomness of which card you get.
Would love to see a more complete version of this post-jam featuring music and gameplay tweaks, I think there's a lot of potential to this.
I hoped I could install this on my Fitbit, but I only have a versa 2 ;-;
Major major props for this though. It's very cool and I might check it out on the emulator in a bit!
I wish the map app could show where the different things are, or we could have an arrow pointing in the right direction, or something -- it's very hard to find all the different objects in the limited time available!
Other than that, it's a cute premise, and I like the art/music/sound. I think if you fleshed it out more it'd be a really compelling little game!
I really like the variety of character animations! Mechanically it's cool, it was an interesting take on wall-jumping that I'm not sure I've seen before. I liked the screen-shaking effects and whatnot to give the feeling of a collapsing facility, but I was a little unclear on what the 10-second timer was doing -- was the acid level raising every 10 seconds?
Overall, it was fun and I wish it was longer! I got 34 seconds. Also, 'Hazcat' is an A+ pun.
This is so cute and sweet. It's very relaxing and I love how the plant is dynamically rendered! And I love the screen transition as well.
Not all the games this jam worked well with the 10-second interval, but here it gives it a really nice calm contemplative vibe that I like a lot.
Also I like the cat on the done button :>
I played this on my phone for the real finger painting experience. It works really well! Super fun, I loved the variety of the drawings and the challenge in trying to recreate them. I also liked how it seemed to gradually increase in difficulty as it went on - right as I felt like I got what the game was about it hit me with the multicolored drawings which was very cool!
This is really good! Very original. I love the cute art, and it's relatable/funny to me as someone who works from home and has cat who walks all over the workspace and demands attention. I also like how using the different mouse buttons lets you nod and pet the cat at the same time. (it would be cool if you could type the status update and pet the cat at the same time too, for that real 'multitasking' feeling haha)
This is amazing, I had a blast with this one. I always love the LD entries that have a social/collaborative component to them. I actually thought "this reminds me of the painting game from last time," and apparently that was also done by you guys :p
I also love games that do something interesting with music, so this is excellent!! And I love that it has you collaborate with random other people. The melody input is kind of janky, but I think that's a good thing in a way -- it makes you not feel like you have to worry about getting it 100% right. The sort of 'half-baked-ness' of the songs you come up with is part of the charm, haha.
@lancival Huh, that's really strange. It looks correct on my end. What browser/OS/etc are you using?
Ahh, I've tried embedding it on ldjam.com and I'm able to reproduce the issue there. Please hold for technical difficulties... haha
@lancival Okay, I've uploaded a fixed version to itch which I believe should solve the issue. There was a bug with the code in charge of drawing the loading screen, weirdly enough. Let me know if it works for you now!
@paroxysmal yeah, I made that a restriction on purpose (I think it's explained somewhere in the following couple levels) because otherwise it became kind of easy to just 'cheese out' everything (e.g., move forward one space, flip time backwards and wait one tick, then flip time forwards again and repeat... you can move basically anywhere without advancing the clock.) So forbidding waiting on one-way streets means you have to move forward several steps at a time when you're on one.
@nicholas-maddalena for the in-game background music, the reversed audio is actually dynamic -- the background music plays backwards when time is reversed in the game. But yeah, I couldn't resist putting a little backwards section in the title screen music as well :>
@zwodahs There aren't any more mechanics introduced after level 6, I think -- after that it's just various puzzles with the stuff that was previously introduced. Thanks for playing! :)
@purpledartfrog that's no good! :( it works for me on all the google chromes I have access to -- if you press F12 and select 'console' at the top, is there an error message shown when you try to press a key to go to the next level?
oh good!! glad to hear it!
(if anyone else in the future faces a similar issue, do let me know if you see an error message in console so I can debug haha - it seems like a rare/inconsistent error but it'd be good to fix!)
@stingby12 hahah, that's awesome! glad you enjoyed the game!
@projectcolorball Hint for level 7 (in ROT13, translate using ROT13.com):
Jura lbh tb qbja gb gur raq gur svefg gvzr, vs lbh hfr nyy 10 frpbaqf, lbh'yy arire or noyr gb tb onpx orpnhfr ab znggre jung gvzr lbh ner ng, n gehpx jvyy nyjnlf or oybpxvat gur jnl. Fb jura lbh tb qbja, lbh arrq gb znxr fher gb yrnir bcra n gvzr jvaqbj qhevat juvpu lbh pna erghea onpx.
heyy 10th place!!
The graphics were very nice! Love the color palette. Aesthetically it really reminds me of the old Nitrome flash game 'final ninja', what with the turning invisible and the dodging shooty-guys/lasers/drones/cameras in a techno-world, haha.
I liked the dash mechanic a lot. There was also some clever level design with the stealth-disabling doors - I appreciated how sometimes you would go through the same area twice but be able to take a different route the second time. I wish you could use the stealth in chunks, rather than having to wait for it to recover even if you had some left over when you canceled it - it was a little annoying to have to stand around and wait for it to recover, and adding a 'conserving stealth energy' aspect might be a cool extra dimension of gameplay.
I was surprised how long the game was! And that there was voice acting! Overall a very impressive level of polish and sophistication for a 72-hour jam game.
It's a fun puzzle! I wish the snail moved a little faster, because sometimes executing on the solutions is a little tedious. I really appreciate that you gave the option to turn off the destroying tiles to purely focus on the puzzles, very nice.
I really like the idea here. With more polish this could make a really fun little game, and I agree it'd be really cool with overcooked-style local multiplayer. Agree with the people saying it would make more sense to have an 'over the shoulder' perspective - I got tripped up on the reversed order as well at first.
Honestly, the theme is a bit of a shame, because I think this is a game that might work better if things started moving faster and faster to create more of a challenge. But obviously you didn't really have a choice about the time interval :p
The graphics are very cute (I love how the character has a nose but no mouth) and I like the color mixing mechanic. Overall well done!
It is a pretty cool idea, and I like the parts where you have to switch back and forth between the two cubes multiple times. It's like a more constrained version of one of those 'time clone' games. The physics definitely have some issues though, I ran into an issue on the level 'preconditions' where I couldn't seem to jump if I was the bottom cube sometimes, even if the other cube was no longer on top of me. I've run into the same wall sticking issue when implementing a platformer with a physics engine, I know it can be a non-trivial problem to solve.
The 10 second loop makes this really hard, haha. My cows ended up escaping ;-;
It's very cute and a fun premise. I like the wide variety of actions you have to do and the different things to take care of. Very hectic!
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Pretty fun, I'm a big fan of word games. The interface is very visually clean-looking! It's so satisfying to manage to work in the J or other weird letter, and I appreciate that the game congratulates you for getting long(er) words. :slight_smile: I think it might be nice if it showed you how much extra time you got for each word -- I wasn't sure if longer words gave more time or if I should just be spamming as many words as i could, haha.
I feel like it would benefit from having only 3 elements, as it was sometimes difficult to work out what the current element was, remember what beat it, remember the control to switch, switch to that, and attack all in 10 seconds before it changes again. :sweat_smile:
I like the graphics though, very cute, and it's a nice use of the theme. Plus Connie is a good name for a bunny character :-)
This is awesome. What a fun and creative use of an AI. Good use of the theme as well -- drawing in 10 seconds is very hard and it's funny to see what the AI makes out of your scribblings.
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It's very nice, love the graphics and the time mechanic is well done.
The 'only having two clones' aspect is an interesting twist on the way this type of game works. That said, I wish that if you died it wouldn't record your clone, since it's very possible to die and lose your clone that was the result of several previous actions, and then you have to go through everything again, which is very tedious, and it happens often on some levels since they sometimes demand very precise synchronization with your ghost.
Other than that, though, this is a quite solid entry! Love the feeling of it and the level design is often quite clever with how it interacts with the ghost/character -- I like how it often takes more than two ghosts to make it through the level and you have to think about how not to block yourself off in the future when the ghost disappears.
It's an interesting kind of genre blend. I like the idea of building your way up by killing the enemies and having to manage your stack while also having to dodge enemy projectiles. And the art is very clean - love the color palette!
I wish it was a little easier to get the blocks to fall where you want, but maybe I'm just bad at the game lol ;-;
For a first jam game, the platforming physics are solid and the characters are cute! It reminds me of the old flash games which were inspired by lemmings, like 'onekey' and such.
I would have liked to see more use of the mechanic where they all jump at once. You started to get close to this on level 4, but for most of it it was pretty easy to just focus on one at a time, especially since there wasn't really a penalty for losing one (other than lost time). I'd love to see an expanded version of this with more focused level design, I think it has potential!
(also, maybe I missed it, but what does L.A.R.K. stand for?)
hahaha, I love this! the random upgrades were great especially when the cars start launching off each other and going every which way.
The graphics are pretty simple but work well. The color scheme is solid and I like the jiggly main character :>
It took me a second to figure out the controls, but once I did it worked well for me on the embedded version, fwiw.
I scored 53, which I think is pretty good?
I know the theme was 'every 10 seconds,' but I feel like it would work a bit better if the orders gradually came in faster (maybe your walk speed could speed up too to accommodate, or something.) As is it gets a little monotonous until you make a mistake and then you suddenly don't have enough time. Although, that does accurately capture how it feels to work in food service, so... :p
The graphics are very cute, and I like the different variety of things you have to make by combining various factors (cup size, milk in coffee, frosting, sprinkles, etc). The different images for orders did a good job conveying what needed to be done to construct each dish, although sometimes the different cup sizes were a little difficult to distinguish.
Overall good job! I like this game! It reminds me of a single-player version of Overcooked, with the different orders coming in at the top and the different steps you have to take to put them together.
Hey pretty cool! It's a very fun idea and the platforming physics are super solid! The spike hitbox felt a little big but overall it works pretty well. The low-friction dimension made it a little hard to progress though given the amount of precision needed for the platforming :sweat_smile: but other than that the difficulty felt well-balanced. Music was bit repetitive, but, you know, it's 48 hours, haha. Nice work!
I like this one! The cat is cute and the 'wall stick' maneuver feels satisfying to execute. Seconding that the controls feel very sensitive, especially in the air -- it's easy to mess things up by just nudging a box over a tiny bit or something without meaning to, especially if you just jumped off a wall or something. (Also this might just be me but the boss's hitbox in the last level felt a tad unfair :stuck_out_tongue:)
I like what you did with "every 10 seconds," you got a lot of mileage out of it, with the spikes that go on and off and the white blocks that disappear. I especially liked the 'puzzle' level where you had to let the box drop down onto the other box once the 10-second interval hit, that was cool.
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Pretty fun! The character is cute and I like the premise. The butterflies are a really fun idea for extra challenge, although some of them were just placed next to/on the way to the exit, haha. I also liked the dynamic lighting effect coming from the character!
I found the platforming a little finicky -- especially jumping off the diagonal platforms was often a hassle, and there were a few pixel-perfect jumps which were a bit annoying to execute.
Often, it felt like the enemies weren't very dangerous as obstacles -- in order to lose on hearts, you have to get hit 3 times within the span of 10 seconds, which didn't happen to me very often except with the enemy that follows you around (which then kind of felt impossible to dodge once it had hit you once.) Given that each level only lasts 10 seconds max and your hearts replenish at the end of each level, it might be worth considering making the character die in one hit and tweaking the enemy behaviors accordingly. Otherwise I often found myself simply not caring whether I got hit as long as I made it to the exit. (as you can see, I got a low time but a lot of hits :p)
The art and the engine seem solid to me and I like the speed aspect to the game. With some more polish, I think this project could become something really cool!
I'm really bad at this but it's a pretty interesting concept. I ended up trying to return back to the middle each time so it was a loop. The complete randomness of the enemy locations made it pretty difficult to come up with a long-term strategy though, oftentimes I just got killed when the next enemy spawned somewhere and I couldn't react in time, haha. But I really like the idea here, it's really kind of fascinating and fun to strategize around, I replayed it a bunch of times.
Whoa, this is super clever. I love how meta the mechanic is here and it went a lot deeper than I initially expected. Definitely seconding the opinion that I'd love to see this stuff expanded upon more in future. Also love the Stanley reference. The comic interface is a really nice metaphor for conveying the discrete slices of time. Well done, always love to see innovative puzzle games in LD!
Oh wow this is fantastic! Love the story / writing and the cute art. The characters are great. Really fantastic especially considering it was made in 72 hours. My only critique might be that it would be cool to have more of a rhythm aspect to the soul-harvesting part, since the rhythm game part of the game was kind of my favorite part. But overall wow this is really polished, well done!
Very impressive polish with music / graphics! Impressed this is a compo game! And the video tutorial is fun. My main nitpick is just that I wish there was a way to easily tell the amount of nutrient on a tile without hovering over it. With the water, the color of the tile does nicely for that, but it's less easy to tell if a tile is running low on nutrients. (unless I missed something?) 3 actions a day feels like usually enough to do everything you need to, so the game wasn't too difficult, but it was certainly a relaxing experience. Also, lovely music.
What, this is so creative! I love this! There was so much more depth to this than I expected going in. It's really cool how much you managed to accomplish in the end and I like that by the end you end up collecting every letter, very satisfying. The shears was a cool idea too, requiring some lateral thinking. Great work all around.
Graphics and audio are great! It was a little unclear when I was in danger of getting eaten by the cat, and I found the isometric controls to be a bit difficult (I keep expecting 'up' to be northwest, not sure why.) Love the concept here though and for a more limited-time compo project it's quite good!
the subtle sound design really adds beautifully to the atmosphere of this game
easy - 94% medium - 87% hard - 81% hell - 28% :sob:
Really cool. Well-scoped for a 48-hour jam, keeping it simple let you add a lot of cool polish/quality of life stuff! Love the minimap especially as well as the different difficulty levels. Controls feel appropriately snappy yet the right amount of awkward for this type of game :p
@torcado thank you!! to be honest, I kind of designed a lot of the puzzles by 'working backwards' from the solution, so I had a lot of trouble judging the difficulty of them haha. but very glad you enjoyed it!
@jimbly
Sprites: it is not procedural, but the leaves are separate sprites that get layered over the branch sprites in certain ways, so while each branch tile is a unique sprite animation, there's actually only 8 different leaf animations (four different directions for two tree types) that get combined in different ways for the corners/Y-pieces/etc, so it's not quite as crazy as it might seem. I did spend a lot of my time budget on drawing sprites though, lol.
ETA: oh yeah, the top tree sprites/leaves are also actually a flipped/reshaded version of the bottom tree sprites, so that saved some effort as well
Flowers: you're not imagining things, that's actually technically a bug in the game where branches that you draw and then undo will also produce flowers at the end, lol. Even though it's a bug, I might keep it because it's kind of cute that it makes a bigger reward for levels you struggled with, haha. (Though I might fix it after the rating period ends to prevent flowers from appearing on empty tiles...)
Drawing: you can't draw a new branch while a branch is growing out, but since the leaves are separate objects that are just cosmetic, you can draw new branches while the leaves are still appearing. If I make a post jam version, I'll probably fix it to let you draw new branches whenever you want.
hmm, fair point!
@aurel300 thank you! The ruleset is in fact original. If I make a post jam version I'll definitely try and include some more quality of life features like marking squares and such. I think that might also let me make more complex puzzles, which would be cool.
@loig Yeah, the text on level 3 was supposed to explain that, but I gather it didn't do a very good job because a lot of people were confused by this... whoops 😅
@papabirb Thanks! I think I've now fixed the Chrome bug -- if you have cookies disabled in your browser, it was failing when it tried to load the save file because Chrome blocks use of `localStorage` if you have cookies disabled. Now, it will work, though if you have cookies disabled the game won't save.
Also yeah, I didn't realize how hard level 5 was until it was too late lol. Will definitely have to reorder the levels in any kind of post jam version haha.
@meep I did design them by hand. Actually, I've since noticed a couple alternate solutions which I didn't catch when making the levels... whoops, haha
this is great! The hybrid puzzle mechanic idea is great, and the level of polish is crazy! The graphics and humorous terms for people are also very cute. I'm definitely going to need to replay this to get a better handle on the strategy. At first I didn't realize I could rotate pieces, but once I did it made a lot more sense, haha. To be honest, I mostly just found myself focusing on 3x3 areas rather than making lines, since they were a lot easier to fill up with the tetris pieces, but maybe part of my strategy should involve lines as well for combos, hmm... :thinking:
Very cute. The destructible physics on the castles is very fun. My inner Angry Birds teenager definitely wants to be able to defeat the enemies also by dropping things on their heads, though :D I like the freedom you have to kinda fly around and wreak destruction, so it'd be cool to see this idea expanded upon / given more time to develop. I think it's got potential to be quite cool.
It's a cool idea, but I wish the movement was faster and/or that I could change direction more easily. Often I'd kind of lock myself into a bad path and couldn't do anything to fix it. ;-; I think controlling the character with the arrow keys would've worked better.
But the idea of trying to create a sort of "firebreak" is very cool. I think with some more responsive gameplay this would actually make a quite interesting kind of frantic puzzle game. The level designs have some interesting explorations of the mechanics.
Also, you might consider having the level restart if you don't clear it, which would place more emphasis on trying to find a good solution, since as is the game just kind of moves forward no matter what you do.
This is a pretty cool little combo-based puzzle game! I scored 76. Might try again for a higher score :p I think the mechanics are pretty solid, so my main nitpicks are mostly interface-related -- in particular, it was very tempting to say "oh, I have two wheat, so I'll plant them both here" and click on two adjacent squares but actually it replaced the wheat I had selected with rice or something after the first click. I get why it does that, and I did figure it out eventually, but that did bite me a couple times at the beginning, lol.
Music could be a bit longer, but the sound effects were nice, and the separate sliders were very welcome there. Well done!
Cute! It really does feel like controlling an abstract art piece. I wish there was a bit more of a logic aspect to it, but this kind of relaxing experience is also cool! I actually didn't really have a problem with the floaty movement, I think it suited the vibe of the game.
This is very cute! It went on for longer and had more content than I expected! My cat perked up his ear when the computer said it didn't like cats, lol. Very impressive work!
Oh, and I scored 5 and also managed to get the good ending ;)
This is very cool! I like the art a lot (especially the flipper animation).
I think some of the mechanics could be explained better -- I didn't really realize picking up oysters slowed me down until it was too late (;-;) and I wasn't super clear on what the agility upgrade did. It also felt like collecting oysters often slowed me down an absurd amount, which would be an interesting tradeoff, but maybe it would be good to let the player jettison some oysters rather than just dying if you pick up too much :p
Overall though this is great. The graphics, audio, polish are great. I like the moody color palette and soundtrack. And I think the core loop is pretty fun and satisfying. Thanks!
Cool take on the theme. The graphics are really nice, and it's an interesting take on tower defense. Personally I wish the shooting was a little easier and that it was a little easier to collect the bits from the collectors, but overall this is a nice, well-polished experience. I especially like the ascending/descending notes when you collect/drop off the pieces!
This is great, I love the funky artstyle (reminds me of a warioware game a bit?) and the game idea is fun. And I love the polish with the sound design and music speed and stuff like the different death screens, it's great.
My minor critiques are that since the mosquito is controlled with the mouse I wish you could bite by clicking rather than pressing space as it's a bit awkward, and that the frogs are really hard to avoid, especially when you're moving slow, lol. Overall though it's fun and I like it! It's really tough, I got really close to 100% but I haven't been able to beat it ;-;
What a fun little game! I like all the little extra things you included like the different tilesets and different pieces of trash. It really gave it a lot of extra flair. The mechanics are also pretty cool and original, at first I wasn't sure where the challenge would come from with a platformer where you could jump as much as you wanted but it's an interesting twist. I just wish the game was longer and had a bit more of a substantial ending, but it's a game jam so it's forgivable, haha.
Quite a fun idea for the theme! I found the timing on the "triple action" moves pretty unforgiving compared to the single ones for some reason -- I could easily nail most of the level, but I couldn't figure out how to hit those ones consistently. Also the half-beat thing was strange because the character moving and the button presses are half a beat apart, so no matter which way I had it set it felt like something was happening on the offbeats. Maybe having the character move forward half the distance twice as often would make it feel a little better.
Nitpicks aside, the art is really cute, the gameplay works well, and I liked the flavor of the different elements and how they led to the different arrow presses. Well done!
Wow, this might be my favorite pico game I've ever seen. Impressive amount of stuff here for a compo game, too. Graphics and music are really charming and the dialogue is cute! Only critique is maybe that grabbing ladders in midair was a bit tricky, but overall this is a really really impressive entry, well done.
edit: also the music reminded me of the track "plant" from cave story specifically
Really clever take on the "programming game" genre. It's a fun idea as a way to teach people Javascript, I'd love to see this kind of thing expanded to teach more concepts!
Animations are great in this! I wish the dash was a little more useful. Overall it felt quite nicely balanced though, I liked how many different zombie types there were with different strengths and weaknesses!
Okay, very clever take on the theme, "comedic delivery" hadn't even occurred to me as a possible interpretation! This is great, I like the Animal Crossing vocal sounds. I do wish a little bit that you could press the button once for each _syllable_ rather than once for each _word_, to really capture the rhythm of speech, but overall this is quite clever, well done.
Yeah, I actually liked the slippery movement, but I agree the wand should be automatic, I think. It would also be cool to keep track of a high score (number of stars lit? distance traveled?) so people will want to replay to get a higher score. And so people can compare scores after they play :p
This is cool, reminds me of old flash games. I appreciated the Hitchhiker's Guide references and the unique gameplay mechanics! The magnet effect works especially well.
This is cute! I was a little skeptical of the puzzle potential of the mechanic at first, but the boost gave it some depth I didn't expect, which was cool. Level 9 was very tough indeed, haha, but the solution was clever.
I didn't realize there was more to it until I went fullscreen haha, it was only showing the corner of the screen originally on the web build. It's a cool idea though for sure.
I found it weirdly addictive in the same way it's easy to get sucked into Mini Metro and the like. I think the main thing it would benefit from is some kind of "lose" scenario, or if the point is to build a big automated factory-type thing, I think some more higher-level automations that you can unlock later would be cool (the arms are really fun but once you get all the arms there's not really anything more to do other than move the boxes around. I hope you do a post-jam version though, this is a solid base to build off of.
@jeremy-ryan That's so awesome, thank you so much!! :)
@jimbly Yes, the saxophone was recorded live! (The electric piano and drums are MIDI, obviously lol)
@jonathan-lorenz You actually can do both -- pressing a key will also continue after completing a level. I don't know why I wrote 'click,' honestly... not sure what I was thinking haha
I'm trying my best ._.; I've been so busy, I didn't intend to get this many hits on my game aaa
@jeremy-ryan Thank you! If only I hadn't made the music pause when playing the "level complete" jingle :laughing:
Honest feedback: I love the graphics, they remind me of old flash games and the color scheme is super appealing. Physics engine also works nicely and is fun to mess around with. Packing the packages in is super satisfying. I wish a little bit that the boxes would rotate with gravity if you picked them up by the corner, since rotating them is a little tricky. But overall this is a great entry, well done!!
This is fantastic! I was just about to say it reminded me of Hedgehog Launch as well. The music and sound design is top-notch. I do wish that there was some kind of "goal altitude" you could reach where you get to say "you won," but I get that it's a high-score thing, haha. I guess I'll settle for getting all the upgrades :p
This is very cool and lends itself to unique strategy. I also didn't realize at first that the packing order mattered for deliveries and then I was like "ohhh". The only issue I ran into was that it seemed like sometimes when driving, my position on the map didn't match up with where I actually was, which was a little confusing, but the important part of the map was just the relative layout of the houses anyway, so it wasn't too much of an issue. The audio is also relaxing and the color schemes for the houses are very nice. Overall this is a great submission, well done!
Graphics are very cute. I like the unique gameplay and the fact you're trying to manage your velocity to not smash the bottle if you run into something. The flick-screen camera is also an interesting touch, though it occasionally made it a bit difficult to foresee enemies' locations/patterns. Overall I enjoyed this one!
Very fun, reminds me a little bit of Overcooked. I really appreciated the detailed tutorial for picking up the mechanics! The frantic rush to complete the various tasks worked very well. Would be nice to give the game some audio to really enhance the frantic atmosphere of the gameplay. :)
Huh, this is really interesting. You don't see a lot of point-and-click games made for LD. I really was intrigued by the story enough to play through to the end, and I really liked the scribbly art style a lot, very unique. My only criticism is that it was a little bit "pixel-hunt-y" at times, I wish there was more of a cue for what to do after picking up the TIFY box, but other than that this was a super cool experience, thank you for making it!
Art is very cute! It is a good start for a game. I hope you will continue with this kind of thing in the future! :)
This was a cool idea! The aiming and continuous movement made for an interesting challenge. It didn't seem possible to aim at the houses on the end, and often there wasn't a matching pattern, but it's definitely unique in a cool way and I think there's potential here. (Also I've always got to support games with bird characters... :smile:)
Haha, I like the little touches like things in the background moving slightly when you touch them and the trail the egg leaves behind. The sound effects are also hilarious, and the level randomization is a cool idea. I do wish the timer was a little less tight since starting over from the beginning when you just get unlucky with the level is a little punishing, but overall this is quite good!
This is cool! I appreciated some of the subtle things like the fine control over jump height and the fact that the sides of the spikes didn't kill you. There were some collisions that felt a bit weird, and it seemed a bit strange that you could walk off the left side of the level (on level 3 I think this actually made me win, which was strange as well...) I also wish you could see the level numbers in the actual level as well. Other than those minor things though, this is a solid classic-type platformer. I always appreciate a good series of single-screen challenges. :)
This is very cute, I'd love to see more done with this mechanic. I wish you could control the character with the arrow keys as well -- doing everything left-handed felt kind of weird, and you could move with left/right but up/down didn't climb on ladders. Other than that, I think this is pretty cool! Level design was interesting and it was fun to try and line everything up perfectly on the last level (though the timing/collision felt a little tight when trying to re-grab the box, haha). Good job!
This is a cool idea, I like the puzzle aspect to it. Would love to see more levels making use of this mechanic in more complicated ways, I think it's got potential!
It's fun, the atmosphere of driving with the silly controls with the aggressive music and stuff works well. I was a little confused by the rating mechanic -- it seems like you start at 0 stars and gradually gain stars in the beginning, but then when you lose it's because your rating fell below a threshold? I feel like that could be made a little clearer. But overall I enjoyed it, the controls work well for this kind of game I think.
Wow, the presentation here is superb! The gameplay is interesting as well. I really appreciated the use of the block mechanic as well as the "enemies come back to life if you don't send them away" thing, it created a lot of interesting tension. My only nitpick would be that I wish the dash feature and the way the character's speed changed when attacking were slightly smoother, but that's a minor thing. The graphics and sound were great too, especially the sound effects. Well done!
This is really clever! The level design is cool and I love how many different ideas you were able to squeeze out of this concept. I definitely wasn't expecting the introduction of the outline-merging mechanic, which added a lot of welcome depth to the puzzles. And you've got a lot of levels! Well done!
I wish the wall-jump was a little more well-defined, and I encountered a bug in the second part of level 18 (moving the bottom 'dotted-box' by pushing the medium-sized block to the right should make the small block fall down on top of it, but instead the small block just disappears)
Overall, this is a really great entry, well done!
This is cute! I love this kind of pixel-3d style. The game feel with the sound effects and screen shake and stuff was also nice.
This is really cool! What a unique idea. I really liked "Theseus" especially. And the custom level idea is fantastic!
I got it on my first try! Pretty fun, interesting concept. I agree it might be more challenging with more strict Scrabble rules (e.g. no creating two-letter words that aren't real words by placing words next to each other).
It is a really cool idea! I wish there was a way to remove spells without using them. I ultimately lost because I had too many healing spells, but when I used them, they healed like 2 hearts but then I took 3 damage... lol. It's very creative though, I scored 8100 on my second try.
This is a really clever idea! I like how you could sometimes die and respawn to make sense of what different objects were, had almost a clever puzzle element. Sound and music are good and graphics are cute, I like the main character and robot designs.
Agree that restarting from the beginning after getting hit once felt a little brutal on some levels. This is a super minor nitpick, but I wish there had been a key to press to restart rather than having to click a button (you can press R to die, but you still have to click `try_again()` -- I would have liked to be able to press space or something.)
Overall I really liked it and I played through to the end. :)
Haha, this is a relatable game concept! It's a clever idea. Sometimes the collision is a bit wonky, running into stuff at an angle can cause your character + the camera to rotate in unintuitive ways and it can be hard to get out of the situation. The music is nice though and I like the silly artworks.
@amarokczukay Yes, the click and drag is a little awkward. I know exactly what the issue is but I didn't have time to fix it, lol. Basically, if you move your mouse so fast that it moves over two tiles at once while dragging, it won't count it properly. So, moving your mouse slightly slower while dragging should help.
@lcstark whoops! there are def a few minor bugs left in the game as well as some other things I'd like to tweak, I might make a quick post-jam-fix version
@jeremy-ryan I know what you mean -- I think adding another "standard" mechanic like sokoban boxes or one-way doors or breakable ground or something might help. As it is, it suffers a little bit due to the "if a character can get from point A to point B, they can always go back from point B to point A" effect, which is something I usually try to avoid in my puzzle rule sets. (both characters together don't have this issue, which is probably good enough for tiny short game, but I think if I expand it it'll need like 1-2 more mechanics.)
I love the art and sound design! I also like the gameplay concept of an idle game with a more 'spatial' component. Upgrading the 'money magnet' ability is very satisfying. I wish there were more things to upgrade to later in the game :)
Haha, this is clever! I like how many different function parameters you messed with. I thought the solution to Level 9 was quite clever. Music was also nice.
Very tough! I can't open the second door! I wish that you could trigger the buttons just by touching them rather than needing to press E as the collision is quite unforgiving.
This is cute and simple! You've got lots of nice little details and it's well designed and fun to play.
I think some sound effects and maybe a little visual effect (particle effect or something) when you pick up a coin/heart would go a long way to making it feel more polished!
Well done!
I like this! I also wish there was an undo button as some of these levels are very tricky! This kind of snakebird-like puzzle game is always very interesting. I really like the graphics!
This is great! I like how many mini-puzzles you were able to fit in. Definitely gives that old Flash game vibe.
Wow, this is really good! You've got a lot of clever level designs in here and I appreciated the humor in the addition of the chess pieces as well. Last couple levels took me a while to solve. I also liked the sound effect for completing a level. :)
Given that the plant placement order matters sometimes I agree that it might be nice to have a restart button, as there were a couple times I backed myself into a weird situation and had to drag all the plants off manually.
Overall I really like this one a lot, well done!
Makes me empathize with the tiny people inside the computer who do all the computations really fast... It's an interesting concept, I don't think I've seen something like this before. UI feels very smooth/clean, sounds/music are also very nice and chill. Well done!
Hey this is great! I really liked all the little animations for the game objects. I found the last level really challenging, really had to think and plan out my actions in advance.
Wow this is really good!! It's a clever take on the theme and the graphics are really cute. I like the music a lot as well.
The screen shake did feel like a bit much but I appreciate the option to turn it off.
Well done, this is a clever concept that works well with the theme and I was surprised how interesting/complex the levels got. The music reminds me of Nitrome a bit :)
In a couple places it felt like I should be able to rotate but couldn't, maybe that's just me though.
Well done, always love to see more well-designed LD puzzle games!
It's a cool idea and I did manage to win after a few tries! It took me a bit to understand how the numbers work and I'm still not totally sure how you're supposed to deduce whether a snow tile is about to collapse (in minesweeper, you can sort of logic it out based on your knowledge of where the mines are... here I'm not so sure.)
Graphics are very cute, and I really like the premise!
As mentioned before, controls are a little funky, I kept expecting to be able to hit space for jump, and shift + wasd + space + arrows is just a bit awkward. Level design is really tough but overall clever, and graphics are amazing! I'd love to see an expanded/polished version of this.
Really interesting concept and clever level design. I like the audio too. I wish there was either an undo button or that restarting was quicker as right now if you make one wrong move (easy to do when there's a turn limit!) you have to press R, wait for the animation to play, then use the mouse to click the button -- at least allowing a keyboard key to restart would really help a lot I think. Overall the design here is strong though!
This is amazing! I love the art so much! The gameplay is also a really clever idea, I like the creativity in how you assigned different shapes to the plants. I also didn't realize at first that you had to drag the juice to the slime, so that is my one complaint, but otherwise I like this a lot, well done.
Very clever little puzzle here! I love how the cats just poof out of existence after their job is done. You get a lot of depth out of the mechanic... the last level was super tricky, but I managed to solve it! I wish there had been some kind of victory screen at the end though for completing all the levels. :p
I like the sound effects a lot! The timing is pretty brutal, but I like that each run doesn't take too long. I wish it was a bit quicker to restart after dying, but otherwise this is quite a cute little idea.
This is fun, I enjoyed the Dwarf Fortress-style graphics and the look of the little characters and the animations for moving around. I also like the summoning/color-combination/potion-brewing mechanic.
I think it would've benefited from a tutorial or some kind of reference, even outside the game, because it was a little hard to tell what I was doing / what my goal was. (I did kind of work it out eventually...)
I got it to work on Windows 10 after installing the .NET 8! Pretty fun, clever idea. I like the matching on both color and shape. I wish it ramped up a bit quicker in the beginning, or maybe if there was a way to skip the tutorial that would be cool!
Fun idea! I wish there was an alternative to the scroll wheel to select different types of fish, as it was a little bit difficult sometimes to switch between them precisely while using a trackpad. But I really appreciated the humor of the chaotic physics puzzles. I especially liked the bouncing fish... very entertaining overall!
I played this yesterday (vs Jiri Hysek briefly :slight_smile:), it took me a while to be able to put together a team that beat the opponent but I eventually did it! Making a Twitch-plays LD submission is such a clever and unique idea. Graphics are really cute and I like the variation in the different unit types. The scope is a bit small due to jam-constraints, but an expanded version would be really cool to see.
This is so cute! I was surprised how many lines the dad had. The music and sound design was also great, especially the way that the sounds that the summoned objects make blended in with the background music was fantastic! I beat it in 34 minutes, but I took time at the end to play every single possible melody just to make sure I didn't miss anything...
If I had one critique, it was that it was sometimes disappointing to work up to play a really expensive note and only be rewarded with bees again. I know it's a jam game, so presumably the number of summonable things had to be limited, but that's something I think it might be worth expanding on in the future.
Thanks for making this, it's really nice!
I scored 1085, but I'm still a gladianoob... :p
Graphics are really sharp and I love the music (it reminds me a bit of Nitrome music, or maybe the Steven Universe instrumental soundtrack?) I like the variation in combat styles of the different gladiators. It's really cute and polished. I think my only nitpick is that I would've liked to feel like there was more 'escalation' going on over time -- I think the meter at the bottom got faster over time, but the penalty for running out on that didn't seem too harsh and it was pretty easy to just scribble something to satisfy it, so I think it might've been nice to have a different way of increasing the difficulty over time as well. Other than that though this is a really excellent entry, well done!
@amarokczukay Yeah, I had a bit of trouble striking a balance between letting the player turn without moving and not making it too laggy when you want to turn and walk in one direction... I'm not totally sure I nailed it in the end, lol. I'm glad you enjoyed the rest of the game!
(edit: I'll probably fix the control issue after the rating period is up -- it's really just a matter of adjusting a constant in the code which I think I accidentally set a bit too low.)
@ace17 hmm, you got this error while it's still loading? did you accidentally press R while loading the game? that seems to give me a similar error message (I guess I should block key inputs before the game is loaded, lol)
@jeremy-ryan thank you so much! it's so cute! :)
Wow, this is fantastic! I love what you were able to do with the Pico palette. I liked the level design and how it interacted with the different powers. The wind power was pretty fun to mess around with. I guess I wish there had been a little more of a story linking it all together, but overall this is a really solid entry, well done!
This is a cool take on the idle-game genre, I'm not sure I've seen one of these that works exactly like this before, so that's interesting! I think my main complaint would just be that I wish the game would not pause when clicking outside the window, so that I could have it open but be doing something else on screen while waiting for things to build up :p
I liked how active the player's role was in this, and how it was relatively quick to reach the end. It felt a bit like a puzzle rather than a thing you just have to wait for, especially with the low caps on resources. Aesthetics were nice -- I really like the art style and simple color palette, and the sound design was good. Overall, very well done!
What an interesting Snake variation. I really like the music/sound effects, and the graphics work well. Very impressive for only 8 hours! I think it might be improved by making the character speed up more with each additional bone, since it gets a bit monotonous with the slow pace. Good job!
Cute idea! I like that it's also playable on phones! I wish that it did a little bit more with your input rather than just scoring it, to add some more dynamic interactivity to it. I really liked when the birdsong diagrams just started going crazy, haha.
This is quite an interesting puzzlescript idea. Having all the mechanics be reversible and still managing to construct interesting puzzles out of them is a cool trick! I appreciated the variety in the three different mechanics and had fun discovering them, and then it was fun to figure out how the mechanics interacted with each other as well. And I'm not sure I've seen a puzzlescript game with procedural generation before, so that's cool.
Very cute! I think the ghost was a little bit aggressive considering how brutal touching it is, but after a while I did get the hang of the strategy and even completed the game perfectly after getting hit by the ghost (I got a bit lucky), so maybe it's actually fine on second thought. :p I would suggest freezing the ghost while the character is frozen after grabbing a part though, because I got got by it a couple times when I wasn't able to move, and that felt a bit unfair, lol.
Music is great and very spooky-halloweeny. I liked the art a lot, the character was especially cute. It was occasionally hard to tell what each monster part was supposed to represent, but I appreciated the color-coding and the fact there was only one of each as a way of resolving that.
The platforming physics worked well, I liked the 'slippiness' of the broom -- hitting X in midair when falling or jumping transitioned into flying very smoothly, which was fun. Well done!
Wow wow wow!! This is fantastic! Obviously the game wears the Dr. Seuss influence on its sleeve, but I believe I detected hints of 'hylics' and 'petscop' in here as well? The desolate atmosphere is really nicely conveyed by the music and sound design and I thought the difficulty of the different little puzzles was well-tuned to not be frustrating. I played through to the end, excellent work here. I think my favorites were Bigfoot and Evil. My only complaint is that the controls for items were a little bit wacky and that some of the collision detection was a bit strange, but I didn't run into anything super game-breaking.
This is cute! I agree with some of the critiques above, it might be nice to have an on-screen reminder of which cat was which and it might be nice to have some way that the game gets harder over time so that the player is eventually forced to lose -- as is, you can kind of just leave it on mini-cat running in the background and very slowly accrue points! Overall though this is very nice, the graphics are super cute, love the cat animations and the way the different cats work together mechanically is cool!
It took me a while to figure out exactly what the rules were -- some simpler tutorial puzzles to build up the mechanics might serve it well -- but there's some really clever puzzle design in here! A bit of a brain-melter to play early in the morning... I really love the graphics and backgrounds. The fact each level has stems leading to the particular arrangement of flowers on the field is a really nice subtle touch, and the 'pottery'-type tile graphics are a real treat. There were a couple moments in here where I thought 'surely this level has to be impossible,' but then I found the solution and got that 'ah, of course!' feeling which is a sign of a well-designed puzzle game I think.
Haha, I love this!! The randomly generated names and creature designs are really funny, and the sound effects are... life-changing, honestly. I wasn't sure what caused my guys to fall off the edge and get "killed by the void" though... I had four really good guys who beat the other team at like level 7 and then they all decided to fall off the edge at once :(
This is great! I love the summoning sound effect. Platforming was occasionally a tiny bit janky (and you could die by walking off the edge sometimes) but that's forgivable as it's a jam game. I really like the clever puzzle design here. I agree with the point made above that having a "next berg" indicator would be nice or something because sometimes it was a little hard to plan your next move when you weren't sure what size you were going to get next, and I got stuck a few times due to that. I really liked the graphics, it gave me flash game vibes a little bit. Overall this is really well done, props to you!
Cute idea! It's kind of like a memory game. I like how frantic it gets when the number of ingredients goes up. I wish there had been a little more with the physics of the bouncy squares -- at first I thought they all had to be in the glass when you hit spacebar, which might be a fun mechanic to mess around with.
Haha, it's a cute little idea. The main issue I ran into was with the camera movement -- the camera moving with the mouse also present and able to hit the edge of the screen was a little weird, and trying to click on stuff while the camera moves with the mouse was a little bit difficult... also sometimes the camera went upside-down ;._.
Would love to see this expanded into a more full-fledged game with some more interactivity!
This is so sweet! I love the soft art style and the cute characters. I think it was a little simple to just use all the items with all the situations to solve it, but I have to respect making an adventure game for Ludum Dare, that's really unique.
This is super cute! I played all the way to the end. There was more depth to this than I initially expected!
The controls were a little wonky -- arrow keys + mouse is kind of weird. I would've preferred WASD + space to jump. But it wasn't the end of the world.
I really appreciated the creativity in how you had to do a different thing to get each creature.
I think it would be cool to see an updated version with animations, sound effects, etc.
Hey, this is really unique and interesting. It took me a few tries to figure out how to actually succeed, but once you kinda get into a groove it's pretty fun. I like how the game progresses through different "stages" due to the way it works. I really appreciated the last upgrade, once you unlock that it's fun to just sit back and watch the fireworks! And once the particle effect really gets going it looks really cool.
Super super minor things: when you click on the upgrades to select them, it also triggers the sacred circle to start rearranging the guys as well, which probably it shouldn't. Also, the prayer particles show up on top of the percentage bar at the top, which makes it a bit hard to read sometimes.
Overall, great work! I don't know if I've ever seen a game quite like this before.
This is a cool take on a match 3! I like the "multiple layers" thing you've got going on and it's fun when you get a big combo. I also got pretty stuck at one point and was forced to lose -- might be cool to have a situation where it reshuffles the board if you run out of moves.
This is awesome! It's surprisingly hard to think of words that have double letters... I liked all the variety in different types of ants and the incremental powerups added a lot of replayability
I have to say I kind of expected the game to go on until I lost, in roguelike style, rather than proceeding for a certain number of rounds. But I guess I'm not sure what the lose condition could be, haha.
The way it included the words you typed at the end of each round into a letter was really cute and creative.
Well done!
The graphics are cool, it gives me a bit of Marble Blast Gold vibes. I think the physics could do with some tweaking -- the yellow rings don't really seem to give much of a boost, so once you lose your forward momentum it's basically impossible to recover, it seems like. (and also sometimes I didn't need the yellow rings?) I like the idea and the aesthetic though, I think with some recalibrated physics this could be really fun.
Hey wow, this is a cool idea! It's like a combination of a "serving orders in time" type of game (like Overcooked, etc) plus a matching game. The graphics are on point, there's lots of little subtle animations and stuff here which are great and add a lot of polish. I especially liked the cursor with eyes. :)
I will say it was a little frustrating sometimes when a bunny wanted something but I just didn't have enough to fill out a whole row. The only way to replace vegetables is to have another bunny eat them, so sometimes you end up just being at the mercy of hoping another bunny shows up that wants something you have, which can be frustrating since it's a little random. Maybe if you expand on this game, it would be cool to have other mechanics that could replace the vegetables in a different way as well?
Overall this is a great entry. I love that you included a bunch of different variants / difficulty settings. Thanks for making this!
@andrewkennedy that's what I get for leaving all the audio stuff until the last 2 hours :sweat_smile: glad you enjoyed though! I'll adjust the audio levels after the rating period ends. (I have a couple other tweaks I'd like to make to the music as well.)
@defrag For this game, most of the puzzles came from particular ideas I came up with for how certain pieces could interact in interesting ways. ("What if we make a frog and a spider have to switch places?") Then, I had to fill in the rest of the level around that idea in order to make sure that every blue and red spot could be flipped properly, which sometimes complicated the original solution or could act as a 'red herring'.
I have definitely constructed puzzles by working backwards from the solution in past games though. That's how I made most of the puzzles in my ludum dare 52 game, lol.
@sudocoffee I played the bari in high school too! Maybe for one of these jams I'll use *that* for the soundtrack... 🤔
@euler-moises did you mean to comment this on a different game? there's no modeling clay in this game 😅
@euler-moises haha, no problem, I figured something like that was what happened. Thank you for the kind words!
I actually also thought of the Hive similarity partway through the jam -- the earlier graphics looked a bit more like that game, too... I've never actually played Hive, but I used to work in a store that sold board games, and I always thought its aesthetic was very cool, so maybe there was a subconscious influence there, haha.
@jeremy-ryan thank you so much! I'm also getting my ratings in at the last minute lol ;._.
@papabirb the ladybugs are animated, but it's just a pretty basic 2-frame animation (and their legs don't actually move that much). The sound effects are definitely doing the heavy lifting there lol. Thanks for playing!
This one was awesome! It reminded me of the game "Minit" a bit. I did not expect that ending, very good.
Some of the timing on the later bugs was pretty tight, and sometimes it felt like it was more about getting lucky with where the bug showed up than it was about actively hitting the bug.
Audio was amazing. I really appreciated the attention to detail here with the different sounds, music, and stuff that was going on. The graphics were also good, and I appreciated all the different little scenes where the bugs were hiding, the little cutscenes, etc. Lovely work!
Music really reminds me of Crypt of the Necrodancer or something, very halloween vibes.
I like the premise of this game being like "number snake", but some of the collision detection felt a bit off to me and it seemed easy to accidentally lose all your lives very quickly. I definitely think the idea here has potential though, it's a really interesting concept.
I love the voice acting and intro cutscene so much, and there's a lot of little details you put in here that really add to the experience! Well done.
Wow, even with 3 people, how on earth did you do this in 3 days? Incredible work. I love the graphics and sound design so much, it's hard to even express it. The little 'meeping' creature sounds in the soundtrack are so good and the unique sound effects for each situation that pops up are excellent too.
I really like how you were able to communicate the premise of the game without using words. Gameplay reminds me a bit of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. Scope here is pretty perfectly bite-sized to stay interesting without overstaying its welcome and getting boring. Absolutely fantastic work, great job.
Wow, I absolutely love the art and graphics here -- super distinctive, detailed and interesting! I think the gameplay has potential too, but as is it's a little confusing and seems to lack win/lose conditions. I also found it a little difficult to remember which button did what. Overall I found this a really enjoyable aesthetic experience, I think with more polishing of the gameplay it could be really good! (Maybe you could have multiple levels with different layouts and stuff, too...)
This is really cool! I really like the graphics, they're very stylish. I especially like the player/enemy sprites and the upgrade sprites. The upgrade system and the variety of upgrades were also very cool, though I will say I did not expect the "speed" powerup to also permanently speed up the enemies, lol.
Minor nitpick: It's a little weird that when playing with keyboard, movement uses wasd + space, but the menu selections use arrow keys + space. It's a little non-obvious.
This is nicely done for compo scope. I think future opportunities for expansion are pretty clear -- more enemy types, different upgrades, maybe different types of pickups, etc. would be great ways to build on what you've got here.
Well this was an inexplicable experience! Incredible atmosphere and extremely silly graphics, I love the aesthetic of it.
I think it was a little hard to tell where stuff was coming from but also if I just kept jumping I was generally successful. I think adding some other things that can happen to you as you're running away that you have to avoid might make it a little bit more 'dynamic.'
This is cool! I love animal puzzles in custom js engines! :) I feel like I didn't quite always grasp how the 'happiness' mechanic worked, and I ended up solving a couple puzzles by trial-and-error, but I like the idea a lot. The capybara using its calming presence to fix things that would ordinarily invalidate the puzzle was a cool idea, for example. Also the art style is nice.
I'd love to see an expanded version of this with more puzzles to fill out the 'learning curve,' so to speak.
This is fantastic! I love the cool pseudo-3d graphics, the controls are fun, and I liked the different variety of bug types! They were too cute though, I felt bad running them over ;-; Also major props for including a full interactive tutorial as well in your compo game, wow!!
I'm glad to see you were able to put something together this time, despite the circumstances. This is a really creative entry, too, so I'm glad you submitted it! I liked the different powers that the guys have and the level design here made use of the different powers well to solve the puzzles. The graphics also make good use of the 1-bit style. Sending you best wishes and good vibes.
Very cute, I got to the end! I liked the visuals and lighting a lot. I think the controls were a little wonky and I knocked myself off the dark platform with the bug a couple of times. But I thought the pathfinding effect with the bugs was well-executed and the puzzles were neat!
Fun! I miss the days of silly flash games...
It's cool that you get a different picture for every possible combination of answers. I agree that names or descriptions for each creature would be a simple addition that would add a lot of 'replayability' to the game (to see all the descriptions).
I love the art and music! Super creative game mechanic idea, reminds me a bit of the old Nitrome game "Snot Put." I think the physics could do with some tuning, I found it really hard to throw with both the right angle and the right amount of power and it was a little too easy to let go of the creature by accident, which made it hard to hit enough seeds. But I love the amount of depth and polish on display here with the different varieties of creatures and the cutscenes, shop screen, etc. -- nicely done.
Well done! I love the simple graphics and the cute characters. I think I'd like to see more enemy / attack variety as it gets a little repetitive by the end, but for a jam game it's well-scoped and entertaining!
I don't know if I've ever felt such dread reading the instructions for a game before playing it...
You really nailed the aesthetic here. The audio is especially good, the sound effects feel really visceral and the sudden 'triumphant' music clashing with the normal ambient audio creates an excellent spooky effect. Graphics also make great use of only a few colors. I found some of the 'mystery-solving' aspects a little hard to understand, but I might just be bad at this kind of game. :sweat_smile:
Minor bug report: Often the game would freeze for me for a bit on Firefox if I did too much cutting, but it would recover after a bit.
I got Spidesense, but I forgot to take a screenshot! This is a cool game. You don't see a lot of this type of game in ludum dare, so I appreciate the rpgmaker-horror-type representation here. And it's cool that you put actual voiceover lines into the game. Thanks for making this!
Cute! We love to see a puzzle game. I think there's definitely potential to build more complex puzzles with these mechanics. Maybe consider some puzzles where there's multiple paths that the character could take, or multiple angles they could shoot the switch from, so that it's a little harder to see what the correct solution is. But you've got a nice range of mechanics here and it would definitely be cool to see an expanded take on this!
This is so cute! Absolutely love the graphics, especially the cats. The music is nice and I really liked the 'meow' sound effect when you get the candy.
I liked the aspect of playing as one character but controlling a bunch of other characters, though I found the controls a little wonky in the beginning. Eventually I got the hang of it, though. I do also wish it was a little easier to find the candies / see the danger zones -- I might have preferred if that mode was always turned on. I also found the map a little hard to visually interpret at times, it was kind of difficult to tell where I could go, maybe some bigger differences in color between walkable and not-walkable ground could help there.
Great work overall! I always have to support games with cats. :)
I like the "laying a trail" mechanic, and it's cool to watch the ants go, but I feel like I'm not sure what is going on beyond that. My ants keep dying for some reason and I'm not totally sure what the goal is, I guess...
OK this is awesome, congrats on completing your first Ludum Dare! There's a lot of potential here and this is a super creative idea. I actually didn't super mind the mouse controls, but I agree it was easy to forget which number corresponded to which guy and giving them numbers on their shirts would probably help.
The main issue I ran into was inconsistent collision detection on the springs (it seems like maybe if you hit a spring once it doesn't work until you get sufficiently far away from it again, or something like that.) I also ran into a couple other bugs -- a visual bug a couple times where the door would appear to be closed even though it was open and you could walk through it, and at some point I encountered a level where the door wouldn't seem to open even with all 3 guys on switches:
the.PNG
I definitely love this though, it's got a lot of personality and charm. I hope you'll keep participating in Ludum Dare in the future! It gets easier the more you do it. :)
I like the intro comic! The controls I also found a bit difficult. I think jumping when spacebar gets _released_ feels a little too weird, I might change the mechanics to allow holding space to jump higher or something instead.
I found it cute, and I really like the hand drawn text graphics vs the normal graphics. I found the controls / mechanics a bit mysterious (maybe I just don't have enough experience with roguelikes...) I enjoyed it though!
Nice! I beat it in 4:25.548 with 18 deaths. I think the torch mechanic clearing out the death areas was interesting.
Tthe graphics used very few colors in nice ways. I think you could have gone even further with this concept and, for example, made the torches the same color as the player and the platform as well.
There were a few really tight jumps late in some levels which felt a bit cruel, haha. But overall the platforming physics felt really nice and there was some clever level design especially in the last level. Nice job!
Amazing, incredible, a triumph. Graphics are incredibly cute, I love the variety and the scrolling backgrounds. Puzzles were well designed and fun to figure out. Thank you for making it! And it's really cool that you made the engine "from scratch"!
Really clever! I don't know if I've ever seen a mechanic like this before, but seconding the comment that it feels like a game that should already exist. The "rock-paper-scissors" mechanic creates some really interesting interactions. The music was pretty good but got a little repetitive. The graphics made great use of the four-color palette. Well done!
I really like how fast and responsive the controls feel, but it's really easy to just suddenly die with no warning due to moving very fast! Sliding around on the surface was a fun thing to discover. Graphics are super cute, I especially appreciated the little bubbles on the O2 bar. Well done!
Very interesting idea! Some of the jump physics felt a little weird, and the collision was strange in some places -- at one point I managed to walk offscreen and couldn't come back. I love the music and the unique graphical style! Well done.
Excellent! I was impressed by how much you were able to get out of this mechanic. The catryoshka dolls were a great touch and I liked some of the surprises in the last level. (Figuring out where to put the meeple was a big "aha" moment...) The variety of unique graphics you were able to put together was also really nice to see.
The semi-improvisational background music was a nice touch as well. :)
Very cute! I finished the game pretty quickly! I like the cute graphics and the constant moving was interesting, you had to be careful to get the timing right. At first, I thought the pufferfish was dangerous / spikes that we shouldn't touch, so I was a little confused, but I figured it out eventually. Overall, good job!
Cool! It's an interesting mechanic and the physics on the pieces are fun. Seconding comments saying it gets a little repetitive. Maybe it might be cooler to have the blocks that _don't_ cover the eyes remain on the board, since then it could get trickier to make the right shape. As it is right now, there's not a whole lot of advantage to using one shape over the other, since they all get removed when you cover all the eyes. I think there's definitely potential here though!
@jeremy-ryan Thanks for playing! You can actually beat the first level without moving the fish. It's just trickier, lol.
I actually did have a few other mechanics in mind as possible additions -- I thought it would be cool to have some "neutral" animals that blocked certain pathways but were restricted in how they could move (like, a crab that could only walk back and forth, or something.) But, alas, time constraints! Maybe I'll expand this later!
Nice! Graphics are cute and the little subtle animations and particle effects work great to create an "underwater" feeling. I think some of the collision was a little hard to understand or difficult to think about, but I like the "long-distance back and forth" mechanic a lot.
This is great! A nice twist on a point and click game. I appreciated the little extra touches and easter eggs you threw in. Also it's really cool that you made the whole thing only using your eyes! I'd love to see an expanded version of this with more missions and maybe an overarching story.
I like this! I wish the planets fit on the screen a little better to reduce scrolling, and it was a little slow-paced with only one freighter. Audio is great and very evocative of "the loneliness of deep space." The graphics make really great use of a limited color palette and I appreciate the attention to detail in terms of upgrades. Also the concept of decimal space weeks is funny to me.
Very cute! I appreciated the little musical reference cues especially. Though the single chord background music got a little monotonous in rooms that took a while. I was very charmed by the different references and impressed by the diversity of mechanics you were able to get in here! Very impressive for compo.
Whoa this is cool! Reminds me of a flash game, the animations are very smooth!
I think this would benefit from some checkpoints so you don't have to start over from the beginning when you die. The game would also benefit from some sound effects which would really tie everything together. Also I think the character could fall faster when _not_ using the umbrella. But those are mostly nitpicks, this is really well put together, thanks!
Fun basic idea! I didn't realize in the beginning I was supposed to collect the orange rocks, lol. Also I think it would be cool if it sped up over time. I think there's definitely room to expand on this!
Interesting! The simple graphics and gameplay and the background music reminded me of the kinds of flash games that I spent a lot of time playing as a kid. :)
I think the fact that hitting an obstacle both reduces your jump bar _and_ pushes you backwards makes it a little too punishing, since your jump bar is also what allows you to recover from being pushed backwards. It feels like it's a little easy to get trapped in an unwinnable situation. I wonder if just making the jump bar recover over time and only get used up when you actually jump, might make it feel a little more balanced. Or maybe I'm just bad at the game, who knows, lol.
Overall, I liked it and it's an interesting mechanical idea. Well done!
This is cute! It reminds me a little bit of Webfishing. The fishing minigame felt fun and well-balanced and I liked all the little details like the visitors on the aquarium screen. :)
It's so cute, I like it! I liked the ending especially. Graphics / animation are great and very well done. You get a lot of mileage out of just a few assets. I think some sound effects / music would really help complement the silly atmosphere. I think the controls kind of felt backwards to me? Maybe that's just me, but I feel like maybe left and right should have been swapped. But I got used to it pretty quickly. Overall, great job!
It feels like it's pretty much impossible to dodge certain combinations of obstacles... I like the graphics though!
I really like the control scheme and it's really fluid once you get into it! But, I can't beat this part: australia.PNG
Regardless, this is a really smooth and impressive entry. Thanks for making it.
As a fan of variant snake games, I really think this "roguelike snake" is a very cool idea! I like the little touches like the minimap. The way enemies split you and leave your previous tail behind is also a cool mechanic. I think the tile movement felt a little rough at times, I think if the snake and enemies moved smoothly between tiles (even if it was only 'cosmetic' and the movement was still tile-based underneath) that would go a long way towards improving the feel of the game. But overall this is quite nice and a great start for whatever you might want to add to it, you've got great potential here. I played the game several times to try to figure out better strategies, which seems like a sign that the game is good. :)
I got a lot of "checking / error" too. I'm using Firefox, for the record. But it's really cool to make a game like this that depends on other people's guesses. With more participants over time, it could evolve into something really interesting. My only gameplay nitpick is that I think it was a little bit easy to catch the vast majority of the words in phase 1. This means your available letters are basically just determined by what words the game happens to randomly throw at you, and you end up with so many letters that the "letter budget" doesn't really come into play very much. Not sure if you want to address it or not, but it's something I noticed. Overall, thanks for making this and well done!
Oh wow, this is really detailed and has a surprising amount going on for a compo game! I love the graphics as well. I really got sucked into it. The "progressive upgrade" mechanic is really fun and the crafting mechanic was really interesting and unique. I also wasn't totally sure what temperament did, but I see now that you have a tooltip for it and it wasn't necessary to complete the game. The concept of "upgrading and building up resources to collect higher-level gems" reminded me a bit of the board game "Splendor" (though of course the mechanics here are very different.) Oh, and the progressive sound effects are really neat. Well done!!
I really like the game-feel and the physics, it's very satisfying to FLING the fish out of the water and the mouse controls are super fun. I do wish there was a bit more going on rather than just getting lucky to get rarer fish as it got a bit repetitive after a while (maybe making catching the fish a little more difficult / involved somehow would be good). I'm also not sure that the low-resolution style with dynamic rotation always worked great, but the graphics themselves were very nice, especially the cute ghost and the various fish designs.
Interesting! It might have used some balancing to make some early-game upgrades that mixed up the gameplay a bit early on, as saving up for the $1000 upgrades could get a bit repetitive. Also it seemed a bit strange that I think I could double-jump from the beginning but the upgrade gave me a triple jump? Maybe I misunderstood something. I think it's a very cool concept though, it's like a combination of a sort of "progressive upgrade idle game" and a platformer where upgrades unlock new areas. Neat!
Huh, kind of cool! I wish it would generate a new level when I completed one. Graphics are cute. I hadn't heard of this Cellspace before (did you make it yourself?) but it kind of reminds me of Stagecast Creator a bit, which is neat. I do wish that the character moved a bit slower or that the controls were tweaked a bit (or that there was an undo), as I found myself occasionally moving two spaces instead of one.
I really like the graphics style, it looks simple but it's got a lot of attention to detail which makes it look quite nice. The extra touches like unlockable skins and stuff are also cool. I thought the controls felt occasionally a bit unresponsive which made it sometimes frustrating to intend to change direction quickly twice but instead crash into something. But, nice job! I was very impressed with the variety of different obstacles you managed to include.
Really cute!! Any game with squirrels and crows gets an A+ in my book. I really like the animation for filling up the magic symbol.
I like the graphics a lot, the individual sprites are very detailed and nice looking (especially the crow.) I think you might find it could pay off to focus on stylistic cohesion of graphics, like making sure everything has the same color scheme, style of outline, etc. which could really help tie the game together visually a bit more.
It's awesome that you recorded real-life objects outside for the sound effects. Recording random things to make sound effects is honestly one of my favorite parts of the Ludum Dare experience, lol.
Wow, cool one! I really like the chunky pixel look, and the gameplay is interesting. Some of these took me quite a while to solve! Sound design and stuff is also good. Even though it's a bit short, this is really impressively complete for being put together in such a short time.
I imagine this is what piloting an actual salvage spaceship would feel like... I really like the music and art, but I keep going offscreen and not being able to get back in time due to the floatiness of the controls.
This is super awesome, and I love the art/music especially. The attention to detail in the user interface with the tooltips and click and drag effects and stuff was also great. Seconding the feedback in the comments here that the text display felt a little slow and dragged the experience out. Overall wow this is quite good! Thank you for making it!
@gonutz after the first level, the instructions show up on screen if you wait a few seconds. It sounds like maybe I should have made the timeout period a little shorter, but ah well.
@fusionnist it's my favorite entry of mine in a while, too!
@wouter52 @alpacalypse re process: I feel like I have a few mechanical "themes" that I keep coming back to ("visit all these goal points in any order," "pull towards you vs push away from you," "two different characters/groups that are opposite relative to each other", "trace or extend along a path"). Also I tend to like wonky mouse controls and irregularly-shaped multi-tile objects. After a while, you get a sense for what mechanics are usually going to be able to create interesting puzzles.
A good sign that a set of mechanics can make interesting puzzles, in my opinion, is being able to build a "one-way door", where it's possible to move a character in one direction past an obstacle, but once they go past they can't come back.
In terms of level design, I usually find the most success by trying to think of one interesting interaction that you can do with the pieces (in this game, that would be something like, "what if we had to push a horizontal bar left and then right to get around an obstacle, using the same vertical bar both times?") and then trying to construct the rest of the level to force that idea to occur. I don't always succeed at forcing the idea to happen, and sometimes I end up permitting a lot of alternate solutions... but if a level is completable and the solution isn't obvious, then that's a good sign that even if there are alternate solutions they're probably also interesting.
Then I have to play through each level a lot, to try to judge difficulty and level order, and to make sure I'm not missing any simple ways to solve it. I don't always succeed at this either, which is why I often accidentally make the last level easier than the ones before, or put a really hard level too early, lol. Recently, I've realized that making a few "real" puzzles first, putting them at the end, and then trying to "fill in" the difficulty curve to teach different interactions in earlier levels, tends to create a better experience. I'm definitely still learning about how to do this better.
Wow, I ended up writing a lot. I hope this sort of answers your question, lol.
Is there a reason it requires Chrome to run in browser? I'm just curious.
I really really like all the different little art and animation effects here. Character is super cute. The procedurally generated rocks are mega-cool and it was really interesting to look for new ones. However, movement felt very slow, especially in the paw-grabbing segments, which could be a little frustrating. It's really cool though, I love that you included remappable controls as well! More games should come with a dedicated meow/woof button.
Cool idea! I really like the graphics and animations especially. The mechanical idea is very interesting and I like the idea of a tradeoff between health and carrying things, but in this case it seems there's not much of a benefit to carrying things, and indeed sometimes you _can't_ carry things past a certain point, which makes the mining feel a bit perfunctory. I think if there were some benefit to carrying a large amount of stuff, it would make the game feel a bit more tense or give more of a feeling of tradeoff.
This is really interesting! I wish movement was a bit quicker as it felt a bit tedious at times, but it was an interesting mechanic / puzzle for sure. I also wish maybe there was more of a monitor of which cards were left as it was sometimes a bit hard to strategize not knowing what was coming up. But I really like the idea, isometric games are really cool, and the graphics and sound effects are really pleasant and fitting.
It's simple, but it's such a cute idea! It really took me a second to figure out how to do it, but once I did I was able to use my ears to collect all the birds. Well done! The graphic style is very cute as well. I think my only critique is that the controls were a little weird -- following the birds with the mouse was sometimes a bit hard, and it was hard to remember which WASD corresponded to which notes. Overall, I had a great time with it! Thanks for making it.
Nice! I collected 145 cupcakes. I enjoyed it. Some nice creative level design here. I feel like the controls could have been tuned a little bit better -- it felt like the movement was a little fast and the friction was a bit too low, especially when the character was in the air it was a little hard to jump into things accurately. Aside from that, nice work! I especially appreciated that you included a few extra hidden secrets in the levels.
This is cool! I think the "half-tile" mechanics threw me for a loop originally, it might have been better to tutorialize that more / put in some easier levels to get used to it first. The 'combining together dung balls' mechanic is actually really interesting and adds a unique twist to Sokoban. It's surprising how much fertile ground there still is in Sokoban variants!! Also it's really cool that you did it for the gameboy! Also the graphics are cute! Well done overall :slight_smile:
Very cool idea! It was a little difficult to tell which things were obstacles, which were pickups, and which were background. Collision detection was also a little difficult, with some objects hitting you before the character overlaps with them, which made it hard to judge the right timing to avoid the obstacles. I like the graphics/music and the framing narrative, and it was cool that you added different areas to add variety, as well as pickups and stuff. There's a lot of good ideas here, keep it up and keep practicing your skills and you will become able to do great things!
This is very cute! Reminds me of old Box2d flash games. I do think there didn't seem to be a lot of strategy involved in moving around, I could basically consistently buy every upgrade just by standing in one place and the weather effects seemed kind of just random. Maybe if there was another mechanic relating to doing something with the weather dots already on the ground, that could help give more depth to the gameplay. The graphics are cute, I especially appreciated the little touches like the particles when the dots disappeared. Well done!
This is a really cool idea! I feel like it's a little difficult to make sure that your creatures are targeting the enemy leader, because you can't control where your minions or the enemies are. I liked the dynamic soundtrack and the cute art though!
Neat! I really like the art style a lot. (And I love crows.) I spotted a couple bugs in the game like guys on the right throwing rocks backwards... but for someone still learning game dev on a limited time frame it's quite impressive. Well done. :slight_smile:
Oh, I really like this a lot. I love the design of Bumk so much and the color scheme is extremely pleasing to the eye, which is great to see as it's surprisingly uncommon in jam games. The "physics engine" interactions cracked me up seeing it the first time. It's just a little calm thing, but it's great that you were able to scope small and focus on making the game the best it could be. :)
Really cute art/music, and interesting take on the theme! It really reminded me of something from the classic Flash era. I think my only critique would be that sometimes controls with the drone felt a little fiddly when trying to move it near the edge of the signal or trying to move the character along with it -- maybe it would've felt a little better if the drone couldn't move past the edge of the circle, and you had to turn off the signal to make it drop (and then you could just pull it along with you when moving, instead of having to move both the character and drone at the same time.) Overall though I had a good time with it, and I think the "nonlinear" structure that still had some progression to it was a cool idea! The "expanding" camera view over time helped reward backtracking to find things you couldn't see before, which I liked.
@kanity, do you mean that it won't let you drag across the boundary here, or that selecting this group won't clear it? These groups won't clear because the ends are two different colors, but if you can't drag from one to the other over the color boundary, that would be a bug that I haven't seen...
@kanity no problem, the rule is definitely a little confusing and I didn't have time to make a tutorial or anything, so it's understandable confusion lol