IVAN THE BILLIONAIRE by kiv 2019-05-21T18:53:29Z
It seems to be down again, alas. (Logs a "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket" error to the console.)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → ditam
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Radio Free Earth | jam | 223 | 3.85 | 3.60 | 3.64 | 4.22 | 3.33 | 2.95 | 4.08 | ||
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | The Legend of the Mondrokko | jam | 581 | 3.23 | 3.20 | 2.85 | 3.84 | 2.82 | 2.68 | 3.12 | ||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | The Dig | jam | 846 | 2.68 | 2.31 | 2.90 | 3.59 | 2.76 | 3.15 | 3.17 | ||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Succession | jam | 1032 | 2.76 | 2.17 | 2.80 | 3.25 | 2.64 | 3.58 | |||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | The Acolyte's Handbook | jam | 1067 | 3.05 | 2.67 | 3.30 | 4.29 | 3.28 | 2.43 | 3.67 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Space Cargo, Ltd. | jam | 624 | 3.51 | 3.31 | 3.36 | 3.81 | 3.31 | 1.71 | 3.73 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Stork Run | compo | 360 | 2.92 | 3.00 | 2.92 | 3.88 | 2.83 | 2.27 | 2.73 | 2.57 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | H. (A Harvest Puzzler) | jam | 610 | 3.18 | 2.77 | 3.65 | 3.79 | 2.97 | 2.12 | 3.31 | ||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | New Horizons | jam | 1003 | 3.06 | 3.00 | 3.60 | 3.93 | 2.81 | 2.69 | 3.20 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Beavers Inc. | jam | 317 | 3.82 | 3.66 | 3.92 | 3.88 | 3.82 | 3.50 | 3.39 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Pale Moon Shone | jam | 574 | 3.64 | 3.19 | 3.60 | 3.69 | 3.79 | 3.58 | 4.32 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Mineshaft | compo | 274 | 3.66 | 3.63 | 3.89 | 3.96 | 3.42 | 2.25 | 2.97 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | A Day in the Woods | jam | 288 | 3.90 | 3.38 | 3.93 | 4.14 | 3.02 | 4.21 | |||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | A Tree | jam | 2208 | 2.98 | 2.33 | 3.48 | 3.95 | 3.15 | 1.88 | 2.70 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Fruit Merchant | jam | 640 | 3.37 | 3.10 | 3.05 | 4.02 | 2.32 | 3.42 | |||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Scythemen | jam | 1145 | 2.38 | 2.04 | 2.25 | 2.90 | 1.95 | 2.61 |
It seems to be down again, alas. (Logs a "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket" error to the console.)
This is one of the best games I've played so far in this jam, it feels very complete and polished, congrats!
My only concern was that the elevators seemed to be a bit buggy, you can fall through them and the floor, forcing you to restart (seems to happen every time on the first level with elevators + buttons, if you push the life cube off the elevator), and sometimes they can not be triggered properly - for this, maybe the cleanest solution would be introducing a separate "interact" key, or making them automatic.
The Taxmen attack is hilarious. Please consider different controls for Player 2, the "End" key in particular is missing from some laptop keyboards, and it also moves the page around.
This is one of the most fun games of the jam I've tried so far, congrats! The collision mechanics are a bit buggy, but it can make for some fun daredevil moves of ships-jumping-over-islands, GTA(Grand Theft Armada?)-style.
Thanks for your comment MelanieE! I agree that the gameplay is lacking, alas. Originally I envisioned a more complex strategical game, but I only had time to implement the most fundamental gameplay mechanics. However, there's a chance I'll get around to those updates as well over the next couple of weeks, so maybe you'll want to revisit this page later, or keep an eye on the github repository. :)
@simon-rahnasto Thanks! It's great to see players liking the game enough to try for the best scores.
5 rounds is pretty much the best one can do in the current version of the game, 4 is theoretically possible, but you would need near-astronomical luck during the map generation to even have a shot at it.
Very solid. The length-based movement limitation for the snake is a great mechanic, intuitive and allows for constructing simple riddles, sequences that can only be done in a certain order, as shown by some of the levels. You should definitely consider adding more levels, I'm curious to see if any less trivial puzzles could be constructed for the mechanic.
Really nice and polished. Lovely quality of life touch with the trees turning translucent when passing behind them.
Many jam games (including mine) only have time to create the base mechanics and just enough content to showcase them, it's great that you guys could map out a large island, and even add an end boss different from the standard enemies. Congrats!
Cute little game, congrats. My chicken kept walking out of the map on the right, never to return, but that's probably not a bug, just life :(
Bug report: buying a coop does not actually reduce your money. Also, isn't there supposed to be a new coop appearing, like when buying a chicken?
The web version seems broken for me. (Chrome latest, Windows 10, 1280x720 resolution) The intro plays, the stars appear, and I can connect them, but nothing else happens - compared with your screenshot, the entire GUI panel on the right is missing.
Thanks @Ryano, works well now! Great atmosphere on this one.
@dafral Thanks! Actually, there are random events fluctuating the prices (every time you travel medium to long distances), but balancing the frequency of them is tricky -- too seldom and it's boring, too often and it makes it impossible to plan your purchases.
Originally I wanted the prices to be even more dynamic than this (based on supply and demand), but there were only so many hours :)
Thanks for the praise @jlindell! There is a minor hidden cost to travelling: fruits spoil, and expensive fruits typically spoil at higher rates. The map has 3 "zones", denoted by the appearance of towns, which determines the distance travelled. As such, for example, it's almost impossible to transport grapes from Edgemoor to Ostmont without the cargo spoiling.
Thanks @sillyman987, I'm glad to hear your love for it didn't change since yesterday :-p (Although I am a bit concerned by the shrinking number of !!!!s after it. Let's see how you feel a few days down the line!)
Congrats on your first jam game! I had no issues playing it in a browser, despite not having one of the listed resolutions. Fun theme.
This is actually a brilliant puzzler that I almost turned away from due to difficulties with the UI!
It took me long minutes to get used to the visuals, and comprehend what they represent. Until it clicked I felt like I'm playing a buggy game with weird collision detection bugs.
I think it comes down to a single issue: my brain kept trying to interpret the view as an isometric view of a 3D playing field, where the servers are cubes and the internet coverage is an area made up of cubes. Note how the servers have a lighter center, as if it was the illuminated closest corner of a 3D cube! (I'm sorry if you can't unsee this after my comment :D) In actuality, of course, the servers are just flat hexagons, and the internet coverage is just the colored convex hull of the gridpoints that have internet coverage.
I think it you reworked the UI to help the player realize this, this game would have a much better learning curve, and probably retention rate. Some obvious ideas are to make both the servers and the coverage area just colored dots on the grid points, rather than full hexagons. The very least, get rid of the centered gradient coloring of servers, and either use flat colors or a gradient starting from one edge.
Great concept though, and some very well put together levels, congrats!
Very cool game, and fancy graphics for the web platform too! I really wish you had time to polish the card moving, it is the main game mechanic, and there are a bunch of small annoying issues with it (as you mention, with dropping during a shift, but also in general about grabbing and selecting cards). Maybe this part of the interface should have been prioritized ahead of some graphical elements. Oh well, live and learn, you still published a very respectable and fully playable game, congrats!
A beautiful game, and I love the controls. Kudos to your UX person / whoever came up with this control scheme, some might have set up a system with separate keys to shield from wind, from rain, and to collect wood, and you managed to do all of it by just following the cursor. Very smooth!
You went with a modest scope, but polished the heck out of it, and the result is very smooth and respectable, congrats!
Sadly, I'm getting a "Your browser does not support any of the required graphics API for this content." error when trying to load the HTML5 version of this from Chrome latest. I've never had such issues with any Unity games hosted on itch.io before (but I'm not sure if this is using Unity).
Have you encountered this issue before? What are the supported browsers for the web version?
This is probably the most beautiful game I've seen for LD46, this bidirectional parallax is just sublime, congratulations!
It shows that as long as you have a strong theme, even the most simplistic game mechanics can turn into a good game with enough polish.
Damn, it alive yo! Hilarious opening, theme 5/5.
Cool concept. Not being familiar with the visual novel genre, I got confused a few times being stuck in "conversation contexts", where you can't interact with most of the screen, only with the two buttons in the top left corner. Having a clearer visual indicator that you're still in a conversation (either by fading or covering the background, or making the controls in the corner more prominent) would be a welcome improvement.
Very unique atmosphere, one of the most stylish games I've seen this jam, congrats! (Probably a bit far-fetched, but the bleak marine atmosphere with the mechanical whale reminded me of Sunless Sea)
The camera controls were a bit annoying, alas, zooming in and out seemed clunky, and you could still trigger the controls when zoomed out way too far to read or use them. Hard to say what's the best solution to that though.
Oh my, this game is a behemoth! There's a lot to learn and figure out, so I'll probably have to come back to it, but the concept is fascinating, good job guys!
An excellent game all around, congrats! Very funny, cute but very consistent art style, interesting mechanics, not too hard, and it's short enough to keep one's interest up. I enjoyed completing it - but I couldn't be bothered to improve my F grade in the end :)
You guys left the first comment on my game, so yours was the first game I saw this jam. Now, a few days later, after having looked at an other 30-40 games, I'd still say this one is probably the most beautiful, and it has the most memorable art style. Congratulations!
Really impressive game, congrats!
"Remember, civilians are not your friends but your source of energy" - maybe this would have fit LD #44 better, where the theme was "your life is currency" :)
A very nice game, congrats! The built-in tutorial is very smooth, and the game mechanics are easy to figure out.
It is odd that the nicely drawn start screen is only shown after you've lost your first try (this is the case in the HTML5 version anyway), I think it would improve the mood if the game started with it when first loaded, and maybe it would explain some of the context as well, currently it takes a short while to figure out what's happening.
Fun! The combination of the hitboxes and the push mechanic was a bit annoying, it is easy to "slip" to the other side of a fly or a snail, and when you instinctively try to correct the movement, you end up pushing them in the opposite direction.
A very relaxing and pretty puzzler, congrats! I think this is the type of game where keyboard controls would be a nice addition (and maybe it would have been even easier to implement than the drag-and-drop), with the numbers 1-3 selecting the block, and a cursor moved on the field by arrows. Just an idea to consider for a post-jam version :)
Thanks everyone for your comments.
@matt2728 I'm happy about that new perspective :) Thanks for the kind words.
@tomathor I agree with some of your complaints. On one hand, I intentionally wanted to keep some mechanics unclear initially, so that the player is forced to explore the options and read the descriptions. However, the lack of feedback for the general mechanics and game state is not really benefiting anyone, I'll try to improve that with one of my post-jam updates.
@lamasaurus Thanks for the feedback. Introducing systems gradually is an interesting idea, but it would be a large departure from the current setup, so you're unlikely to see it even in future updates :) Maybe for an other game though!
@sharbelfs Thank you! I'll try to come up with something for the carbohydrate "deadlock" you've experienced, but it might have to be a new game mechanic. Balancing the costs and hidden gameplay values in general is a huge task that I could have spent an extra 24 hours on easily.
@jangamesdev Actually, that game ending was only enabled by a batch of bugfixes I released an hour or so before your comment, so you were probably the first one to ever achieve it, congrats! :) If you want to avoid the humans, for now I suggest just skip buying any one of the trunk upgrades - they don't have an effect in the current game version, and those pesky humans will only bother you if you're fully upgraded.
@brachistosauro I definitely see where you're coming from. I was struggling a bit to come up with fun game mechanics, but I was committed to trying to stick to real world concepts inspired by actual tree biology, so I'm glad that you've learned something :)
@delunado As I explain one comment above, I intentionally tried keeping some mechanics vague, to force players to learn a bit about the basic workings of a tree. I hope it didn't make for too frustrating an experience. Thanks for playing!
@raphiell Thanks! Yeah, I agree that switching back to the branches when starting a new month is annoying. I originally added that because the branches were supposed to be the visual indicator of how the last month went (leaf health, weather etc), but I didn't have time for any of those things in the 72 hours. Maybe it will make more sense in on of the post-jam versions ;)
@shaolin-dave Well, what made you die? The death messages are trying to be helpful, ie. if you are turned out of the ground by winds, you probably didn't have strong enough (perennial) roots, and if you run out of water you just mismanaged your resources. I'm sure the game could use some balancing though, I hope it wasn't too frustrating!
As for the upgrades menu, note that there are different upgrades available for each section (this might be not obvious at a glance, as I'm keeping the popup open when switching views), so it sort of belongs to the current section. It could be a separate view somewhere, but then it would have needed to fit 3 times as much information.
@ulcius thanks! We are on the same page -- the original plans included visual feedback for all actions as well as the general health of the tree, but I had to cut corners heavily to make the deadline :) These are some of my top priority items though, however, for an eventual post-jam update, if I ever get around to it.
@toppervideogames Different tree species and environments are on the long-term roadmap, but there's many things to cover between now and then. Thanks for the detailed feedback! I know that anyone reaching the "humans" ending put an honest effort into playing the game, which I really appreciate.
@bmacintosh At points I felt like I'm wasting precious development time learning about tree biology, so it's very nice to see that aspect appreciated, thanks! Sadly, shedding leaves is currently not balanced well, but the core idea is that the more leaves you have, the more water you lose via evaporation, so in the winter months it's better to not keep them. However, with the current rates and costs, this is rarely the case.
@savvu Thank you! I tried explaining some concepts in the upgrade panels (in an earlier draft it was actually an "Info & Upgrades" panel), but I also intentionally tried forcing a trial-and-error method for learning the basic mechanics :)
Please do compile it for the web indeed, it would make it so much more easier to try your game :)
Thanks for including a Print and Play version, it's very refreshing to see such an unusual medium! (Plus I don't have Tabletop Simulator, so it allowed me to try this game.) The fully laid out modular tree looks great.
What piqued my interest initially was that my game (a Jam entry) also happens to be one where you're trying to keep a tree alive by managing some of its basic resources in different sections of the plant, but the similarities probably stop there :)
@fizzget thanks for the kind words! :) When I set out to make a game inspired by real tree biology, I knew I was going to have to sacrifice some gameplay "fun", so it is great to see that people can enjoy it nonetheless. I'm glad you were inspired to look up things, in fact, one low-priority item on my todo-list was adding wikipedia (or even scientific study) links to the relevant updates and mechanisms. Who knows, maybe I'll get around to it with one of my post-jam updates.
Cute game, grats on completing it! The idea of protecting the last plant on earth was also on my shortlist of game concepts, but I went with something different (but still plant-based) in the end - so in a way, it was good to see someone made it a reality!
Cool little game. The distance was picked well, it was long enough to not be trivial, but it was just short enough to motivate me to keep trying -- and make it eventually. Very happy I was rewarded with a separate victory screen too :) Congrats!
Cute game, especially liked the music.
I kept running into a bug where the dog bone kept "vibrating" on top of the screen until I pressed the "up" key to get it unstuck (maybe the "up" keypress state was somehow stuck after walking up to the dog bowl?).
I think it would be a great improvement if you could move diagonally.
This game is very hard, I was struggling to break a minute. As such, a quicker way to restart (where you could skip the menu and the intro) would be appreciated :)
Very nice atmosphere, good job!
Oh, the web version of your game seems to work perfectly! You should put a "HTML5 (web)" link to your description (with the same link), otherwise some might miss out on trying it!
@paologinefra To modify: in the bottom right corner of the game section (this page, just above the comments) there is a pencil icon. Click that to edit - you should get the same editor that you used to submit your game.
I never knew this, but I always wanted to possess a dead actor, make him deliver a dramatic speech about dying, and then leaving his lifeless body to collapse in the spotlight.
Shame it just ends, regardless of what you do.
4/5, would possess again.
Your itch.io link gives a 404.
Thanks @jamieok, I can confirm the itch.io link works now :)
Oh boy, that was a journey! It felt like I couldn't get any choice right on the first try, haha. Well done, a simple mechanic executed diligently, it's obvious you put quite some effort into the content, while many jam games are just tech demos with proof-of-concept gameplay.
Maybe it would be a bit meaner to the players, but I think the story/outcomes would have felt more natural if not every bad choice ended in a death immediately, but allowed you to explore some dead-ends.
Spoilers: if somebody just wants to read the story, I put the correct choices in a pastebin here: https://pastebin.com/SwSzPLgT
Thanks for including a web version! This is a very cute little concept. The icons for the programming slots were pretty intuitive, if the ball was more prominently displayed, and starting the round accepted any key instead of only space, this wouldn't even have needed a tutorial. Well done!
Also, I notice that you're still short on reviews - review others' games and leave feedback so that the website recommends your game to others! (See your Karma for Feedback given and Ratings given metrics.) There's still two days to go, good luck!
I wasn't sure what's going on at first, but then I came back to your description that cleared things up a bit, and it also made me appreciate the semi-abstract visual style. The game does a great job of conveying a mood and I can appreciate your personal connection and take on the theme. One of the more artful pieces this jam, congrats!
Oh no, I should have listened to Dr. Physicist! I couldn't beat the game, but I enjoyed going a few loops, even though I am still confused about what I was supposed to do, and how could I influence/avoid Mr Pumpkin. Still a very nice game with great atmosphere, and you also got ahead of my only complaint with "Looking around a bit with mouse is possible, but you’re not young anymore." :D Cool entry!
Well done, the batting mechanic is quite satisfying. It seems quite common to get the ball stuck in a perfectly vertical or horizontal bounce (stuck in a loop, heh), which is a bit annoying to deal with, but depending on your reflection logic, fixing this might be as simple as starting the levels with ever so slightly different angles, maybe avoiding integer fractions of pi radians.
Congrats, an outstanding entry! A really strong and unique concept, immaculate implementation, and a great atmosphere. I'm glad I could get some high votes in just as the rating period ends. Good luck with the ratings, I fully expect this game to end with very high scores across the board.
Hm, did anyone else have QWOP flashbacks while trying to accelerate?:) That aside, this is a very polished piece, congrats!
Very cool platform, it's always refreshing to see non-Unity HTML5 games (wink wink my game), and you guys took it to the next level by hosting it on your website, congrats! One of the more innovative games I've seen this jam, for sure.
A really well crafted game with a unique atmosphere. The memory fragments telling a story was very well executed, although I felt that you put a few too many twists and "powerful" components into the story, making it into a bit of a mess. Nonetheless, it managed to convey a lot with very simple tools.
I too had problems with the controls and hitboxes during the platforming sections, and walked and fell off the map a few times (I'm still not sure if the ending requires me to walk off the map on the first floor, but that's how I finished it), but I powered through because the game was otherwise worth it. Well done!
It gives me a "Your browser does not support WebGL" error, even though I'm using Chrome latest. (no errors shown in the console)
Ah, you guys definitely deserve more ratings. This is one of the most complete and fun entries I've played this jam, congrats!
The visuals are great, everything works smoothly, and the (spoiler) destruction is very satisfying. Lovely touch with the camera pan at the end!
Thanks for that walkthrough video, otherwise I never would have figured out what to do.
There's clearly a lot going on in this game, but they are quite hard to discover, alas. The player could use a bit more hand-holding (either some visual clues or text overlays - maybe showing the thoughts of the astronaut?), because the mechanics are so non-typical. But it looks like you were intentionally going for the challenging quest vibe, and I can respect that. With all that said, the game has a lot going for it, it has an intro, custom visual assets with a consistent look, sound effects, layered world simulation mechanics, and it does not seem to have any bugs. Congrats!
Lovely game! I was initially afraid of seeing all these programming themed games, but this one shows that the theme (even taken literally) does not have to be a gimmick, it can be the foundation for a solid puzzle-platformer, congrats!
And thanks for including a HTML5 badge in the cover image. It's a small touch, but I'm hunting for these games every jam, and the website does not help in finding them. (Also, it reminded me that I didn't properly set a cover image for my game, eh.)
Cool little game! The loop being a trip around the globe is an interesting take, but it is a bit hard to notice/realize if it wasn't for your description here.
Are you planning any post-jam updates? It feels like there's quite some depth to the mechanics, so I think it would be great to see this engine with some more UX polish.
re: "when everyone is dead there isn’t much left to do" -> gotta love these jam solutions :) But I think this one works rather naturally, just because your tribe is done, the globe will keep turning and your perishables will keep spoiling when noone is around. A fun loop-mechanic could be an other tribe moving into the abandoned camp site eventually if you don't quit the game :)
The controls are quite confusing, it took me ages to realize that clicking on the card's cost is the way to activate it. Your "How to Play" section should start with that, rather than what metaphor the game concept is based on, respectable as it might be :p I also ran into issues with seemingly random flipping, but I'm not sure if they were hitbox bugs or a game mechanic I didn't understand.
With that out of the way, you have a wonderful entry here, congrats! Some of the most polished and consistent visuals I've seen this event. It's really cool that you went for a serious theme with educational benefits, even if it might have cost your closeness to the theme. Plenty of content too (ie. cards, enemies, levels), some sounds could really round it all out. Well done to all of you!
Bravo! One of the best games this jam for sure. Fun and intuitive mechanics, polished and smooth-running, hilarious concept, great fun. Nuclear Throne vibes, anyone?
I'm proud to say that I managed to beat it on hard on the first try. hula-meme2.jpg
I have a couple of improvement suggestions: - do not require mouse clicks to start or dismiss messages, WASD/arrows could control the entire game - there should be more levels to hula power, it felt like there were only 2 states, powered and unpowered (is this actually correct, or does the hula deal different damage based on the speed?). Especially for the little summons that can be 1-shoted, it would be very satisfying if the hoop could slice through them without stopping at the highest power level.
This was one of the first games I played this jam, according to my comment above, almost 3 weeks ago. Now I have rated more than a 100 entries and I had to come back here to further bump some of your ratings, because this is one of the best games this jam, definitely in my top 3. Well done once again, and good luck with the rankings!
This is very intimidating at first, but kind of cool! I'm glad you went for complexity and content instead of UI polish, it's perfectly appropriate for a jam. Definitely one of the more unique entries this event.
Hah, what a description: "Not that anything would go wrong! All the crew are in cryosleep and the ship pretty much runs itself." Next sentence: "Use observe at the *last place that exploded*"... Then I start the game: "Ollie was killed last week"... I wasn't even surprised by the time I came across Kevin!
A really interesting and polished title, with detailed voice acting, and all in 48 hours? Well done! (And to think the first idea I scrapped from my 72h jam entry was voice acting for the narration...)
The UX could use some improvements, for example the card concept feels a bit forced - I think it would be more straightforward if the move/inspect/investigate options were just standard commands for any location, and you had a separate inventory to use items. But maybe you started out with a different idea in mind, and just didn't have time to pivot?
I beat the game, but I didn't manage to figure out what is the green-red bar on the right, and if it is important or not.
Also, it seemed like I had no use for the manual time reset option. Since the items stay with you after a reset, it would be a fun mechanic - for a post-jam version -, if you needed to get multiple copies of the same object, which you could only achieve by using the time reset before the ship explodes.
Anyway, just some food for thought, congrats on a very enjoyable entry!
Beautiful art. It would be really cool if you could break the cycle somehow - maybe by not killing? Could give some nice morals to the story. Fun game nonetheless, good job!
Very well done! Rather than an (obvious) feat of programming, this is an impressive feat of game design! I love the simple HTML approach, and the use of a regular card deck. You can really imagine playing this on a tabletop, and this mental connection makes any fancier graphics unnecessary, they feel like "real" cards as it is. The use of the theme feels a bit weak, but overall it's a very solid entry.
Truly inspiring in its simplicity, this is one of the most memorable games I've played this jam, congrats!
I've seen this theme with at least in 3 other entries now, but this is the most polished, bravo! A lot of very nice touches make this game better than the sum of its parts: the clear and polished UI, the great keyboard controls, the playback speed control, the little sound effects, the well thought out puzzle levels, all in all great fun.
I was hoping this would be a game playable from a browser when I saw the screenshots. Oh well. It was a bit funny that you decided to include the almost empty Game Over scene as one of the images :)
It is interesting to see multiple HR-themed games this jam, I guess that's a commentary on the corporate culture of our times, eh?
A cool entry. The visuals and the sounds are on point, both very polished, and it's amusing how you built a hacking theme around a simple platformer mechanic, good job! I hope you manage to get enough reviews - I see you have given plenty of ratings, but only gotten 8, so hopefully the website will be recommending your game a lot for these last 24 hours.
You have multiple promo posters for your game, how sick is that!
Bravo, one of my favourite games this jam! The graphics are rock solid, polished and beautiful, the concept is creative and adorable (I imagine it as a "haunted"/sentient house just wanting to be clean), the UI is clean and useful, and the puzzle levels are well thought out but not too complicated. Hats off!
Congrats, one of the funniest and most polished titles I've come across this jam! I played through it twice just to see all the messages. I wish it was a bit longer, or that the tasks were more difficult, to make the "stuck in a loop" aspect more obvious, but you can only do so much in 72 hours... and I'm glad that more effort went into the pacing and visual design of the director's commands, which really make the game. (On a sidenote, I think our entries have many similarities, with the player being cursed to follow the on-screen narration, but if this is a high-octane energy cocktail, mine is a mulled wine by a fireplace.)
Extra thanks for adding the WebGL build!
Lovely, a simple mechanic polished into a nice puzzler, well done, and thanks for including a WebGL build!
Something seems to be wildly off with the collision detection with past selves, but it only made the game easier, so I can't complain :) Would be great to have a larger collection of maps in a post-jam version, I'm curious how far you can push the boundaries of the concept.
Good job! A very unique mechanic that fits the theme well. The tutorial was a great touch, but it could have been extended a bit to teach more about boomerang behaviour, it would have helped with the level progression - sometimes I wasn't sure if the game is glitching or if I'm just not understanding movement rules.
Nicely polished game all in all.
Quite impressive and polished for 5 hours, congrats! Super satisfying cube popping sounds and visuals.
Congrats, this game has outstanding visuals, and there's a lot of content for a jam! Quite polished too. There was one annoying issue, that the up and down buttons were scrolling the whole page when it was not full screen. (Maybe it's a matter of a single `.preventDefault()` call somewhere?) But that didn't stop me from having fun and dying upwards of 5 times.
A very cool game! A lot of great UX touches, the minimap with the drop zones, the transparent circle when the car is behind buildings, the different driving speeds on different surfaces, the little beeps when backing up, the packages neatly following your car, great stuff. The controls are way too sensitive, which makes it a bit annoying to actually play, but it seems like a limitation of the 8(?)-directional movement. All in all, a very polished entry, congrats!
I immediately recognized the Kenney buildings asset pack you used, I used the same pack for my first-ever LD entry back for LD44. You guys have done the great pack more justice :)
Excellent! The narration is a good touch, otherwise I wouldn't have replayed the level a sufficient number of times ;)
Spoilers ahead: I was really enthusiastic when I broke the loop, I was a bit disappointed that it ended so quickly after, but I understand that in a jam setting that's all one has time for.
This game deserves more ratings - try to rate more games yourself, FYI, that will make it more likely that your game is recommended to others by the website!
A beautiful game, congrats! The WebGL build's performance was quite bad (I was getting what felt like 3-6 fps on Chrome with a HD4000 integrated graphics card), which also semi-broke the controls, but it was just playable enough to get a feel for the game. A simple yet powerful concept, even if it didn't feel that much connected to the theme.
How cool! Definitely one of the more innovative takes on the theme this event, congrats! I sadly didn't have a chance to try out the game in practice, but looking through the manual, it is clear that a lot of thought has went into it. Besides the unique format I really appreciate the finer touches such as the print setting instructions and the character class illustrations.
It does not seem to run for me :( I'm using Chrome latest, and I'm seeing multiple errors after load, here's the console panel: [https://pastebin.com/vTpN99Fw](https://pastebin.com/vTpN99Fw)
Congrats, a beautiful and smooth-running entry! Some of the best games this jam I've seen seemed to involve lassos, I guess that was the coolest take on the theme :) I had some glitches about window size at the start and when dying (all screen-wide effects were only applied to the top left corner of the screen), but I had a lot of fun, thank you!
Bravo, a very complete experience, even without that second ending! I spent way too much time in the "jumpy cube game" before I realized I can move the camera with the mouse, haha. I overloaded the engine in 12 loops, apparently -- it felt much more, but I spent most of the time in the minigame.
Very cool day-night cycle, a beautiful and fun game, congrats!
Probably one of my favourite game concepts this jam - a great balance between taking the theme literally and building a simple-yet-polished game around it with mechanics that don't feel arbitrary.
If only people were not so willing to abandon their luggage on the belt :D
Very well done! I really enjoyed the 3D loop, this type of counter-intuitive bending of space (a la Portal or The Stanley Parable) always makes for great immersion, and is a great highlight of computer games as an art medium.
I hope you guys collect the 20 ratings needed to get scored, because this is a very strong entry. (Note that you should rate other people's games -even more than you have, apparently- to get higher in the website's recommendations.)
Very cool! I almost wish the way out was a bit longer, it was quite satisfying to extend the path once you figured out what's going on. It reminds me of The Stanley Parable a bit, where entering the same room twice you might find different things. Every room looking identical here makes it fit the theme well, congrats!
@patrickjr's game was quite similar in theme, and my jam entry was also about exploring some woods. Go Team Forest!
Hahaha, this is so absurd, I love it! Besides the ridiculous and unique concept, it is also well polished, the looped and non-looped animal graphics are just perfect, and the shooting mechanic is very satisfying. Congrats!
*I await eagerly what the waiter brings to my table. It is something heavy: his pace is slow, and he's sweating. I wipe my mouse anxiously.*
***Spaghetti al Nero Di Seppie.*** *Damn. I've learned about this at the academy. I did the simulations. Never touched one with a real fork, but I'm ready. I can hear the chef shouting his wishes at me, but I don't listen.*
*I didn't eat since the morning. My watch tells me I need to get high 600s on the nutrition scale, so I decide to glitch my fork into constant spin mode. I do it instinctively, I don't even need to look at my fork, because I'm a pro, and I want to show the plate who's boss, so I stare down the white onion rings, my target.*
*As my fork grazes it, an onion ring flies off the plate, away from me. The spaghetti underneath starts to dance, and slides to the left. I was coming in too fast. But I've moved on before the ring hits the tablecloth. This is about to get messy, it is time for plan B...*
I guess what I'm trying to say is, this is one the greatest jam games I have ever played. Thank you.
Loving the hand-drawn parallax backgrounds, well done! If I could only wish for one UX improvement, I would like to be able to dismiss messages without the mouse, potentially with the same key I use for interactions. Would have shaved a few hours off my repeating days policing the town :)
Cool game! The door is an annoying red herring, I thought I had to figure out how to open it, but it looks like it's just an other moving item like anything else :) A unique concept that fits the theme well.
Congrats on finishing even though you didn't get close during the jam! With the obvious disclaimer you included, I think this is commendable - LD always encourages post-jam versions, which this basically is.
Was there a playable version (no matter how broken) when the jam finished? It would be cool if you could also share that, so that people can rate based on that - and it would be also interesting to see your progress. Don't worry about any low ratings, the game itself is your reward :)
Wow, what an insane amount of content for 3 days! Did you guys start from scratch? The connection to the theme is rather weak, but everything else is very impressive and playable. I was alone on the server, sadly.
I could never find a fireplace to make a campfire :( I did make a golden pickaxe though, but I was once again stuck trying to find the fancy crystal, so I just dropped off my axe at the statue and called it a day. I'll come back in US peak hours to see some other players.
Very impressive for a jam, lots of polish, and definitely Nuclear Throne vibes. Shame the theme connection was ditched entirely (?), otherwise this is one of the most complete entries I've seen this event.
Probably the first ever "action puzzler" I came across! I couldn't figure out if the red bars scattered around have any purpose, but otherwise I liked the graphics too, it definitely looks like a jam game :) Impressive amount of content with the multiple levels and game modes, well done!
Ah, cool to see a RenPy game! I always wondered how much it is suited for anything **but** a visual novel, and your battle mechanic is pushing that envelope a bit, so it's intriguing to see -- but admittedly, I have only played a handful of RenPy games, so maybe this is commonplace?
Anyway, this seems like a rather well polished entry, good job! I couldn't quite figure out how to win the battle, nor what spells like "Darkness" actually do, but I think this confusion can be in line with the ignorance of the character in the story.
Thank you @syudzius! I've just published an improved version, you might want to give it an other go, especially if you enjoyed the game in the previous state.
@pixelmoose-studio @cyberfrank @macmist Thank you, guys! I've spent an unjustifiable portion of my available time on those silly footprints, so it's heart-warming to see them appreciated :)
I can't take credit for the music, the three songs used (which I've edited down to fit the mood) are from three different artists on opengameart.org, you can find them in the repo under assets/attributions.txt.
@idan-rooze Thanks for the criticism and praise both! The loop mechanic being frustrating was one of my biggest worries. I tried making it more bearable by speeding it up (and dropping unnecessary steps) as the player experiences it multiple times, but there was a limit on how painless I could make it -- after all, you are stuck in a loop! :) But I definitely see where you're coming from, and if the game were any longer, I would have definitely considered some sort of checkpoint mechanic.
Once you know what to do, you can finish the entire game in less than 2 minutes, so I hope that people stick around until the end.
@skiwee and @vcasadei: The Stanley Parable and Bastion were probably my main inspirations for the narration, so it's great to see this noticed, and an honor to be even mentioned on the same page as those games, thanks!
Having voice narration was also my first idea, but I realized it's much more work, and I would have needed a complete storyboard in advance (to know what lines to record/get recorded), which were just not possible in this jam format. Now that I have the subtitles with the pen-on-paper scribbling sound effect, I think it would compete with any voice narration too much, if one were to be added on top of it.
@ianmust Thanks for sharing your experience, that's exactly how I hoped it would play out for some :) This game is a balancing act between not making the looping too frustrating, but also not making it too obvious to progress. I'm glad to be reading comments from both ends of this spectrum.
@azagaya I agree that some checkpoints would be a nice addition, and if the game were any longer, I would have seriously considered them. On one hand, the full reset fits the "stuck in a loop" theme best, but at a certain point, it just becomes too annoying.
@donamougou Thanks, placing the (spoilers ahead) tower was a big map design challenge, because I wanted to make the map big enough to be worth exploring, but I also wanted to make the tower a mandatory stop before you explore further east. That's why I've added the flags around the tower and the map transition/sroll mechanic, to make sure that everyone would see the tower before they are told to go there. I fear there might be some blind spots left, but hopefully not many had to loop again just because they couldn't find it.
Thanks for your positive comments as well @shubart @kira-yoshida @nickpofig!
Thank you for the praise @weine and @ar-borno!
@f1krazy: Thanks! The dialog skipping is a known bug/issue that I just didn't have time to solve. It happens when you complete an objective before its description is all typed up - then the game just moves on. I would probably need to implement some message queue, or be more aggressive in disabling the controls while a new task is being introduced. (A quick fix could be a message log where you could manually review past messages - but I think that would mess with the atmosphere.) Just the other day I came across @theaidency's great entry, and amusingly enough, he complained about facing the same issue. As he said: "For the best effect, play the game slowly, doing one thing at a time, waiting for each text box to end." :)
Thanks @greytyphoon! There are definitely a few glitches with triggers and message timings, I'll try to find time for a bugfix release around the weekend. (I very much appreciate the detailed report, I'll make sure to look into that particular case.) I'm glad you could still finish and enjoy the game!
Thank you too @sacredbacon!
Thanks @gurpegui, @mrstari and @wizard-sino!
@wizard-sino: Nothing else, really! You've beaten the game if you see that message, it's just that, you know, you're stuck in a loop :)
Thank you @vollfeiw and @linheha! Glad you enjoyed the mood and the mechanics.
@jam373 - thanks! As for the unfair restart - you can cross the bridge, but first you have to stay on it for a short while to take in the view, when the narration says so. Sadly there are some issues with the timing of the messages (mostly due to the fact that they appear with a slow typing effect), so sometimes you can fail tasks before you see them written. I'll try to improve the timing margins around this bridge task. I'm glad you found the general vibe to be one of wholesome adventuring, that was definitely the mood I was going for!
@egawag Thanks! Glad to hear the enjoyment outweighed the annoyance. Any particular area that felt fussy? I'm collecting feedback to adjust some zones and timings before the weekend.
@sli thanks for defending the mechanics :) If you've reached the chest there's nothing else to do, you've beaten the game, congrats!
@thecakeconsortium Thanks -- good to hear the green bar helped at least some, I was afraid it would be too subtle. As for the story being weird, only so much fit into the jam I'm afraid. I had more ambitious plans in the beginning, in particular, I wanted the green bar "choices" to be stackable, to allow more exploration and control, and create more choice-based events, but I realized that would be a huge undertaking in level design, so I settled for something much more linear. But now that the basic mechanisms are in place, and the reception seems positive, I might expand on the theme in a post-jam version, eventually.
@etrealjunior, @dadiaogames, @patrickjr Thank you!
Hello everyone! I've published a new version which addresses some minor bugs as well as some UX improvements that people have been pointing out here. (The original release is available [on GitHub as the 1.0 release/tag](https://github.com/ditam/loop-game/releases/tag/v1.0).) The waiting tasks, in particular, have become harder to fail, with a delay and more forgiving target zones, hopefully no more unfair restarts for anyone!
@jesus-gonzalez Thanks! I've just picked up Dear Esther in a bundle the other day, I'll make sure to try it out soon! As for the true ending, I can't tell you more. I'm afraid you're stuck in a loop ;) Maybe you'll learn more about the chest in a future jam, or an eventual post-jam version.
@nikos Thank you! In some of the early comments you can see some discussions about checkpoints, if the game were any longer, I would have added them. (Behind the scenes, the game is already split into chapters -- whenever the map expands--, but since chapters 2 & 3 have much fewer events that can cause a reset, I think it would have been an unnecessary amount of handholding to have checkpoints there. Plus, this way it fits the theme more :p)
@peterfonts Thank you! I'm honored to have the maker of Spaghetti Quest praise my game :) The movement speed adjustment is a nice idea, and I already have the architecture in place for it, so I might sneak it into one of the post-jam updates.
@smiley405 Thanks, it means a lot!
@davidemoriello Is it really though? I like to think of it as a story of adventuring and empowerment... (spoilers ahead) !>Our protagonist decides to break his daily routine to (re)discover the beauties of his forest, and there's even a literal treasure in the end :)
@davidemoriello Haha, glad you powered through :)
Very tough game, I gave up after connecting 3. It's also very confusing, I mistook the game logo for a tutorial on the opening page, so I was even more clueless once I started a new game :D (Or what is that 2D image of rings then if not a logo? It doesn't seem to have anything else to do with the rest of the game...)
It's interesting to see a game with such an abstract theme yet so detailed a backstory, but why not!
I think it would be a huge help if there were some counters for the ring speed, currently it is very hard to tell if left/right buttons are even doing anything, adding to the player's confusion.
So the controls and the difficulty curve could use some polishing, but it is a very unique entry with cool visuals that clearly had a lot of thought go into it, congrats!
A cool game concept that's currently a bit hobbled by bugs. I started with all skills unlocked, but kept receiving messages about unlocks. My ships also got stuck in the circle countdowns, as reported by others above. Sometimes I had multiple skills selected with a green border (I'm not sure if this is intentional to batch attacks), and I could not target any ships. I also had hitbox issues when it comes to closing dialogs and viewing descriptions - maybe stemming from the fact that the game was running in a resolution bigger than fullscreen?
I'll be watching this page during the rating period, to see if any updates come out.
This game made me nostalgic for some racing games of my childhood, off-roading to try to find the invisible checkpoints that made the game think I completed a lap. Except off-roading here means traveling with my boat under ground. And my boat is Tony Hawk.
The flat design of the spiraling tower is very cool. I love the simplicity of the gameplay, even if there's some complex battle mechanics in play. With some UX streamlining this can be a great fast paced minimalistic hack-and-slash, well done!
A beautiful game, congratulations! Feels like one of the most inspired and complete entries I've seen this event. The grayscale visuals really fit the theme. Looking forward to the post-jam version!
Albeit a bit more superficially, my game explores a similar topic, with a similar text-narration mechanic. I couldn't help but smile as I read your warning to "play the game slowly, doing one thing at a time, waiting for each text box to end", as I've struggled with the same technical issue :) So that already piqued my interest, but then I became intrigued upon seeing that atmospheric screenshot, and I'm very glad I didn't pass on trying this game.
Well done, one of the best puzzle games I've played this jam! A simple concept executed very well, with a lot of polish and great levels. Thanks for allowing jumping to any level, I still couldn't finish 3 of them, but I'm glad I could try them all.
This reminds me of many entries from an earlier jam, LD #44, where the theme was "Your life is currency". Nonetheless, it is a well polished and easy to play entry that also fits this theme, well done!
Beautiful art, and lots of very cool touches, congrats!
It would be a welcome improvement if you improved the hitboxes of the statues, sometimes I got stuck between them for a few seconds - unless that's part of the solution, I wouldn't know as I did not manage to beat it on time, I felt like I wasn't even close :)
Congrats, guys! This is a better game than what many adults have submitted :) I found the use of the loop theme to be a bit weak, I think the same idea could have been turned into a more enjoyable game mechanic - for starters, if you need to finish a level untouched, why not just reset immediately any time you take damage? Nonetheless, the game is quite polished and it has plenty of content for 2 days of work.
I hope we can see you again on future jams!
Very cute graphics, and lots of polish - and I've just noticed it's a Compo submission too, all the more impressive, congrats!
A very polished entry, congrats! The self-boosting mechanic is really cool. It would be a nice UX improvement (maybe as an easy difficulty level) if your "ghost" run was not reset by dying, only by explicitly using the magic hat. Regardless, I had a lot of fun, and didn't encounter any issues whatsoever, hat(s) off to you!
A very cute game, and impressive for the compo, congrats! I found the rabbit hole, but I was cursed to wake up by my tent again... am I really stuck in a loop, or is there a different way out?
Our games are name brothers, my entry is called A Day in the Woods :)
155s! Cute little game. A minimap would be a great addition, I felt a bit lost at times, especially when you reset without any object on screen, it is hard to tell that you've actually been reset.
I don't know if it was intentional, but the velocity persisting between resets gives way to some interesting speedrunning tactics where you can bypass large parts of the map - I ended up just flying over most obstacles.
It does not load for me :( The console displays the following messages, but no errors: build.loader.js:1 [UnityCache] indexedDB database could not be opened build.framework.js:2 IndexedDB is not available. Data will not persist in cache and PlayerPrefs will not be saved.
The build-up in difficulty/complexity along with the detailed (and consistently in-character!) messaging show that this has seen more polishing than what most jam games do, and it serves it well. Congrats!
It would be great if the tutorial waited for the user to follow the instructions, many times I thought I needed to do something, only to accidentally cycle through messages before having a chance to read them.
I love the simplicity of this, good job! Just when you thought @adorikill's Infinite Racer is minimalistic, here's an even purer essence of the same theme, very amusing to see. I feel like your collision mechanic "makes more sense" than the random fly-bys of that other game.
Oh boy, I've done so many donuts! Yet, unlike other commenters, I found the controls to be not too bad, you could do very satisfying turns once you got used to them - I never managed to go below 35s though. The simple fact that the lap time is recorded gave the game a lot of replayability, a good game design lesson I guess! An other very impressive compo submission, congrats!
The music is very nice, the character animation is very smooth, and the low-res pixel art is looking very stylish. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that the "Welcome to Hel" logo is missing an L not because of bad grammar or some hellish annoyance, but because it has fallen off and it's dangling by its corner, heh, a nice touch in an all around polished entry, well done!
A very ambitious undertaking for sure! Sadly I too got caught in various flying and clipping and sound-glitching bugs, but due to the abstract effects and theme I couldn't tell exactly when the glitching started and what was intended... which is actually kind of cool. Good luck, and looking forward to your future entries!
Cute little game, well done! The random name and profession generations were a nice touch, and really made an otherwise simple concept (ie. shooter with randomly generated levels) connect very well to the jam theme.
Neat little game, congrats on finishing it! Is there a way to beat the game or get out of the loop? I gave up after the 500 HP boss, where no more new battle elements seemed to have been introduced.
It wouldn't load for me in Chrome latest. The console logs a message and an error: `[UnityCache] indexedDB database could not be opened` `justanotherday:1 Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: screen.orientation.lock() is not available on this device.`
I'll spare you yet another comment about the control scheme :)
The art direction and music are very solid, but the connection to the theme feels a bit weak. Nonetheless, congrats on finishing the game on time - it seems to be the first jam entry for all of you guys, and for that, it is well done. Looking forward to your next entry!
Great art and music, but the programming deserves praise too, it works smoothly and without glitches. Congrats to the both of you on your first game!
+0.5 stars in multiple categories for having the eye-patch on only one eye.
Congrats on your first ever "game baby", it is a cute one! Bonus points for the hand-drawn art. I have also finished on ending 3/6.
I didn't realize RenPy can export to web, very cool!
Fun little game, good job! I managed to find George despite the plain "up there" description that sounds carelessly relative for a spaceship :p
Is the web version broken for anyone else? It loaded and displayed the opening scene with the two characters, and also played music, but I couldn't move - I see from the comments here that WASD were supposed to work, but I also tried every other key, to no avail... (In the console, there's only one error about constructing an Accelerometer, which should not be blocking.)
Congratulations, it must have been quite a challenge to make a 72 hour game with such a huge team. Can't have an argument with the Lead Dev about the holdup wit the Modeller if you're wearing all the hats ;)
A very pleasant puzzle game. In room 3 I spent minutes trying to find some spatial loop, or to pick up an earlier cube from afar through the resetting gates, !> only to find out that the second cube was just hidden in the corner, heh.
Don't be so negative, this is a very cool game concept, with quite some polish (except for the loss screen, eh). The visuals and the music are very neat too, kudos for making them from scratch! The tutorial was a welcome addition too, an all in all very enjoyable and interesting title, congrats and welcome to LD!
I also could not get the HTML5 version to load, sadly. I was really looking forward to sneaking in a last minute rating on this, because the screenshots look very impressive. Oh well, good luck with the ratings, and maybe look into the web version issues in a post-jam version.
You mention you're using Unity: any chance you could export a WebGL build?
Congratulations on your first game and welcome to LD!
It would be nice if the movement and falling speed were adjusted so that you have a chance to get everything right - as it is, after a certain point, the blocks fall so fast that you can't get them to the sides fast enough, even if you guess the right color before it appears.
The card game was a bit hard to understand, but once you figure out what's happening, it was quite playable. You could improve the UX a bit (including a visual tutorial) for a post-jam version, I think that would also make the connection to the theme more obvious.
Congrats on the double submission!
Hm, I'm doubting the lifelike claim in "Lifelike police & space platform simulation", but I've never been a police officer in space, so I'll give you the benefit of doubt.
Definitely the most enjoyable unfinished game I played this jam, congrats :) I also found myself doodling with the colored sheets while listening, but I didn't think to take a screenshot - I didn't realize there's an art gallery here in the comments, eh.
Great music choice, and a very polished game! I'm not a huge fan of jump scares, but I have to give it to you, it fit well here. Well done!
Ah, better luck for the next event, don't give up!
Wow, incredible amount of polish here, this rarely feels like a jam game at all. I agree with some comments above, multiplayer would indeed be awesome. Congrats!
Bravo, what a great puzzler! The connection to the theme is tenuous, but the level design is simply incredible, making the overall impression and the mood great. I spent almost an hour on this already, and I will be coming back for more.
As a sidenote, that pH repo looks intriguing, and it taught me about the `` collapsible section markup. Very cool!
Very cool! I can't get past the second line though, any pointers?
A very nice game! The 3D effects look great, and it runs very smoothly in the browser. I agree that the progression could be balanced a bit, to make it a bit less of a drag. That said, I was engaged enough that I kept looking for a treasure class beyond diamonds (it seems like there isn't one?), I went as deep as 2250 meters.
The fuel system seemed to be buggy in the beginning (it seemed to not deplete for long periods, then run out all of a sudden - and I seemed to be losing fuel inexplicably on the surface while selling cargo and reentering the shaft), but it was not an issue after the first tank upgrades.
I was happy to see that with the fully upgraded drill you could remove rock blocks, that would have been one of my improvement suggestions otherwise. To make an other suggestion, it would be great to selectively sell cargo - after a while, coal becomes very precious as a fuel source, and I did not want to sell it.
It was a bit annoying to find out in the end that you had music, but it was reserved for the post-victory celebration, after mining in silence for 20 minutes :D
What a great and consistent art direction, well done! The fabric/canvas texture is a great touch that makes everything look very crisp.
Bravo, I really loved the polish on this one! The game is well designed, both visually and conceptually, and the mechanics all work well. One of my favourite Pico8 games that I've seen yet - ever, not just this jam.
I'm surprised you didn't simply go for one endless level -- which would have fit the theme even more, but the way you made it, with the pearls at the end of each area made it feel more like a proper game.
Bravo, one of the best games I've seen this jam! The visuals are charming, high quality and consistent, and the photo mechanic works really well, especially with the unlockable resolution upgrades.
Sure, progression could use some balancing, as you mentioned above, but the overall impression is very nice. Expand the beastarium, make the rare species actually rare, add more (literal) depth, more upgrades, make a longer soundtrack, and I can absolutely see people paying money for a game like this, with the beautiful relaxing atmosphere it provides.
A very nice game that definitely deserves more ratings!
I had a hard time figuring out all of the mechanics, but it was definitely fun to watch my operation grow. I used the rally point command a lot, because microing all the miners seemed impossible, but I found that the behaviour seems quite random, the miners were converging very loosely on the rallied tiles. Is it because only 1 miner can work a tile, so they "claim" the tiles that are closest to the rally flag?
I also couldn't understand why my money keeps disappearing when I was not hiring or buying upgrades. Do the miners have periodical wages or something?
It would be great if the fastest time option was higher than 2x, as the game gets a bit slow once you're deep enough.
Overall a very polished entry with a lot of depth, well done.
Oh, and you might have settled on Minexile, but your URL saved the original title of Bob The Miners, which I prefer ;)
Ah, the control scheme is a bit tricky, and it took me a while to figure out that left/right orientations are absolute, and do not move with the character. This is a bit unintuitive when swinging on a rope, as to continue in the same direction, you have to switch from pressing left to pressing right when the rope angle crosses vertical...
That aside, the rope mechanic is quite enjoyable - it reminded me a bit of using the Ninja rope in Worms :)
I also struggled with figuring out beacon placement, but I think the core problem was that the black (passable) tiles look a bit too much like the background.
But once you figure out all these little details, this is actually a charming game with a very cool aesthetic and a unique mechanic. Well done!
Very cool game, it plays very smoothly, and the mechanics are intuitive enough. The water rising mechanic is very cool too, it would be awesome if the terrain was procedurally generated, but I know that's probably too much for a Jam - you spent your time in the right places, this is very polished!
I think the control scheme is needlessly complicated. Why not have a simple "interact" button, which can be used to plant, harvest, pick up or build? Usually at a single spot there's only one thing to do, so having to find the right button is a pointless hassle.
You should have opted in for the humour category, the premise, as well as the "oranges and gators" depiction of Florida life is hilarious.
Wow, there's a lot of stuff to build, and the automation works well! The combination of automation and resource chains with the end goal of launching a rocket ship feels a bit too much like Factorio, but the game is otherwise quite different, so it can stand on its own. It runs smoothly and I didn't encounter any obvious bugs. Well done!
The worker command editor could use some improvements, I couldn't figure out how to edit a program after adding a new command, which was quite annoying while getting the hang of things.
Visually I'd only change one thing, the design for the base rock resource is confusing, the red hue makes it look like it is in some error state, as if the game was saying "can't place item here". I would prefer if it just had the design of the "hardened rock" (magma+water), and the design of that was changed to something different.
I liked the non-literal take on the theme! The UX does drag it down a bit, but it's a neat game overall. The audio work is really nice, it adds a lot to the atmosphere.
The music is catchy off the bat, but the menu has a lot of glitches in the HTML5 version. First try I was unable to input a name, needed to refresh. Then the menu options took a couple seconds to register a click, by which time I have clicked again, moving me somewhere else. Then I had a sub-menu open on top of the main menu...
Anyway, once you start it, the game itself is fun and looks great. Well done!
A very interesting concept with clearly a lot of content. I liked the non-literal take on the theme too. Sadly the glitched out buttons kept me from exploring too much of it. Audio also didn't seem to work for me in the HTML5 build. (I can see in the dev console that the request for `main.mp3` returns a 500 error.)
Probably the first ever game I saw written in Prolog, so extra kudos for that!
What an absolutely wonderful game! One of my favourites this jam for sure. The pixel art is crisp, the atmosphere is strong and unique, and it plays very smoothly. Finally, it is balanced well enough that just as it starts to get boring, it ends!
Congratulations, and thanks for making this.
Ah, fun to see multiple takes on almost the same concept (I saw your comment on @fargred's similar game). Well done!
Is the background supposed to change colors and textures suddenly? With all the colorful fish, it made for a very trippy experience :)
A very digestible introduction to the normally dry and complicated marine-evolutionary concept of fishpoints!
(I got my jams mixed up, but it was still fun to come across this one.)
Fin! Bravo, an excellent concept. The colors and miniature map layouts make the mechanics clear very fast. I would love if it was a bit longer, but for a jam entry, and a proof-of-concept of the mechanic, it's great.
Oh, and it's written in Rust? Very cool!
What a beautiful game! (found it through your reddit post :)) Thanks for uploading the playthrough video, since I can't quite beat the game myself.
On a sidenote, your LDJAM history is inspiring me to give PyGame a chance one of these jams. Kudos!
Cool game! A bit buggy when it comes to interacting with objects (and the interaction GUI looked un-styled for me compared to your screenshots), but the concept is very cool, and the oxygen mechanic works very smoothly.
Kudos to the whole team, especially Miles!
The game does not seem to work properly for me :( Movement seems to work at a glance, I can even boost, but no matter if I rise or dive, I never encounter anything, there's no depth counter like on your screenshot, and the background color does not change (so I don't think I'm actually gaining depth).
The browser console has some logs that sound like errors, "ERROR: Shader", and various "shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)" messages. I'm playing on a Chrome browser with an Intel Iris® Xe GPU.
Cool game. No-nonsense, straight to the action! And very polished too, good graphics, proper sounds, great weapon feel (depth charges ftw), and it even has an end boss with multiple stages, bravo!
It would be great to see a post-jam version with a bit more variety to the enemies, and a steeper difficulty curve.
Well that was unexpected! Fun game with outstanding audio.
Is this... a metaphor for going on beach holidays with alcoholic uncles?
A beautiful game, well done!
Oh no, is Akbarat going to be okay? A very charming entry. You're pulling off the minimalistic style very well, the game has a very consistent and polished feel, and the whole story is very wholesome (well, except for maybe Akbarat's fate). A joy to play, well done!
Fun little game, I think with some funky synth soundtrack and some SFX it could be great mindless fun. The color channel shift effect around the edges, but not around the middle is a great touch.
Well done!
Very cool game, congrats! The mood is outstanding and the upgrade/progression system is nice. Are there any easter eggs to hunt for after you complete the mission? (I didn't make it back to the fisherman, so I wasn't sure if he'd say something...)
I also encountered the bug about floating into to sky on the right side of the screen, it does not seem to be tied to momentum, maybe it's just a hitbox issue?
A nicely polished game with very nice art! The path building mechanic is really cool. I wish it was a bit more obvious where the cave is collapsing, and how much time you have left, but you get a feel for it after a while.
Cute little game. Great job on balancing, you can tell that quite some effort went into making the progression smooth!
(I agree that having to press E is a pointless chore.)
Very difficult! I got to checkpoint 5 (the first one in the stony area), but it took me 104 deaths. Then I was introduced to the red blocks that actively try to kill me, and I was like "nope" :D
Still, a very fun game, and the main mechanic works really well, well done!
Cute game! The controls could use some improvements, it's very hard to move sideways, maybe you could move into the whole automatically when digging sideways? Plays pretty smoothly otherwise.
Very impressive for 12 hours and fiendishly difficult! I have no idea how to get to level 2 :)
A neat little game. I managed to beat it, even though I almost gave up on the LUL level, because the cubes were stuck in a compact shape and I couldn't make them into stairs - and that level has no way to kill the guy for a reset.
During my playthrough I didn't figure out what's the difference between white and regular blue tiles on the walls, as both seemed to be valid targets for the magnets. Maybe it's just a visual clue on how to beat the level?
Obviously a lot of effort went into the level design, and there's a decent number of them, so kudos for that!
Sadly there are a lot of minor bugs (or just unsmooth details) that hurt the enjoyability of the game. The movement is very glitchy, you slide around too much for any precision platforming, and you get stuck to vertical walls somewhat unpredictably. On one hand I wanted the levels to keep going (as each mostly just showcased a single obstacle type, and it would have been cool to have later levels combine them), on the other hand, anything more complicated would have been too frustrating to beat with the current control scheme.
Still, a commendably complete game (maybe bar the ending screen :-p) for a Compo submission, well done!
Wow, this game has an incredible amount of polish and content, I'll have to come back to it, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface (no pun intended). Absolutely gorgeous art. Bravo!
As for the tiniest feature request: could you do something about the behaviour of the ESC key? I'd love to play in full-screen mode, but whenever I pause with ESC, the browser exits full-screen mode. Any chance that a single `preventDefault()` could fix this?
A very frustrating game! I am a majestic whale and I shall not be pushed around by clownfish and penguins! I couldn't get deeper than 545m :(
Still had fun though.
Plays very smoothly, well done.
One thing I wanted to point out is that IRL antibiotics don't kill viruses, only bacteria. The rest of the game seemed scientifically accurate.
What's wrong with having 2 tunas? I'm curious about the lore :)
It's always very refreshing to see print & play games, and this one seems very neat! Great take on the theme too. Sadly it'll be a while before I can actually try out any 3-or-more player games, eh. (I have also made a card game for this jam, it's a 2 player mining game with an optional 1 vs computer mode. Only in the browser for now, but I'm tempted to turn it print & play post-jam - thanks to great examples like this.)
Plays very smoothly, well done! I got 4467 points, managed to do a couple rotations on the last layer.
The level transitions are lit. The level indicators on the left could also have some animation, otherwise it's easy to miss them disappearing.
The current build seems to be a bit buggy. First of all the instruction messages were partially off-screen, and then when I tried moving the archeologist, an alert (!) window popped up saying that an error occurred. I've dumped the browser console output into a pastebin here, in case it helps: https://pastebin.com/bAB0H8S1
It's a shame, because the design looks very intriguing! Due to the issues I ran into I couldn't figure out how it uses the theme, yet.
Seconding the Motherload vibes. I actually like that you can't move upwards, that makes sense.
Every minute or so I kept resetting to the surface. Is that a bug or some feature I didn't yet understand?
Thanks guys!
@samguy I'll definitely try working on it, I had to leave behind many items on my to-do list. I agree that the hand visibility needs work, I have multiple improvements in mind for this: - there should be an option to view any card in full, either by sliding them out when hovered, or (maybe on mobile) an optional 2-stage select-and-play workflow - cards of the same type should be stacked with a counter - there's only 7 different action cards in the game, so any hand should fit into 7 slots - probably the whole layout should be shifted up, since the current player's cards are always brought to the bottom anyway (when I first did the layout, I was planning to have the opponent play from the top).
Thanks @spydercrawler! Dominion is actually one of my favourite games, so I'm sure it influenced this - in fact, when I started out with my drafts I was planning to have a hand redraw mechanic too, which I ended up scraping partly because it was just too much like Dominion :) A flattering comparison, nonetheless!
As for the AI bugs, @spydercrawler & @wuppos, these issues are happening because there's no proper turn API for the AI to use, so instead it just simulates timeouts and clicks on the cards like the player would... as such, you can click into the AI turn, which causes all kinds of glitches! I'll see if I can add a simple bugfix for this, in the meantime, just think of it as a rouge AI that does not take kindly to interference.
Thank you for the comments.
Thanks guys!
@dhim and @xpycm thanks for the bug reports. I'll fix them before the weekend. The Sieve mechanic was added in a rush already into the submission hour, so I'm not entirely surprised it's broken. The AI I discussed above.
@boltkey I might just! I'll probably wait a bit to gather feedback for balancing issues (so not during the rating period), but I can absolutely see myself making a print & play version, in which case I'll be linking it in the description.
@phlip45 I'm not familiar with Thebes but I'll check it out! As for zooming in or viewing hand cards in full, there is no way to do that currently, but it's on my to-do list.
@dhim - I forgot to reply to your suggestion of having 3 decks. I think it's a fascinating idea, but it might change the concept of the game too much. Going to 3 decks from 1 is a bit of a jump, but maybe 2 decks could be introduced more seamlessly (and I'm just spitballing here) - maybe there could be a mechanic for splitting the shaft into two directions, where you move half of the uncovered deck into a separate pile? I'm afraid to break up the simplicity of the original idea, but maybe I'll explore this as an "expansion pack" eventually. Thanks for the suggestion and the detailed comment in general!
Thanks for the stream @togis! It was a special treat to see my game played in 2 player mode. You guys always had a nice word and constructive criticism for every game you played, which made for a very wholesome atmosphere.
As for the card zoom issue (flagged by @togis and @nsadie and maybe others too), I agree that this needs to be added, and it's probably the top item on my list, but as a new feature it'll have to wait for a post-jam version after the rating period. The thing is, I would not like to slow down the game by switching to a two-click workflow for playing cards, so it would need to be a togglable setting, or maybe I'll just add a magnifying glass / info button with which you can select any card to view in full, but otherwise not change the game flow (this would also be the easiest to implement, so I'm biased :-p).
Thanks @cdunham!
It's very possible you didn't get to see all cards during a game - the shop always has Pickaxe and TNT cards, but the bottom 2 slots are re-filled with a random card when one is bought. (I imagine in a physical version these would be fixed size decks reshuffled before every game).
As for buying any card at any time, you could just keep buying TNT until you've exploded the whole shaft deck, and end the game on round 1 :) Making TNT cost something also wouldn't quite work, because having a 0-cost TNT ensures that you never get stuck in the shaft, which allows for fully randomized shafts - even though in the jam version the shaft deck is always the same.
Thanks @udo! Balancing is of course very tricky, and probably impossible to do properly during a Compo. Something to keep in mind about wasting turns is that when the mineshaft is blocked, both players get "free turns" shopping, until one of them decides to bust open the shaft again. This adds a bit of extra game theory-based strategy to it, that I saw in action a few times when watching 2 humans play against each other.
In general, I was very aware of the opportunity cost of shopping (hence the 0-cost cards), but I am thinking of lowering the money costs of the special cards further, to encourage people to use those more. Thanks for your detailed feedback!
The animations are mostly CSS indeed, only laid out cards (the revealed shaft and the hands) are positioned from JS, but even that could probably be solved with a CSS flexbox or two.
Thanks for the detailed feedback @itsboats! During development 2 player mode was my main focus, and the AI opponent was just an afterthought of practicality, so that other jammers can actually play and rate the game properly. As such, there is no real "1 player mode", the AI is just a drop-in actor for Player 2 -- sadly this does not result in the best UX for solo mode.
I'm a bit wary of adding hover-only effects, because I want to support mobile and touch UIs properly too. What I like about those ideas in other comments of opening a full-size, zoomed view of the cards is that it does not need to interfere with the regular gameplay UX, it can just be a button used by people learning the game. After a couple of games, seeing only the card titles should be sufficient, there's only 7 different cards to learn after all.
What do you have in mind for Sabotage in a 3 or 4 player mode? Destroying 1 card of each opponent feels a bit unintuitive/unnatural (ie. how do you use 1 unit of TNT to destroy multiple items in different mining camps?), destroying 1 card for each TNT discarded might be too weak (with a bit of over-simplification, say you can spend 3 turns' worth of TNT to set back 3 opponents by 1 turn each, is that good enough?). But yeah, I can see the former working OK.
I do plan on creating a print-and-play version eventually. When I do, I'll add it to both here and to the hosted version of the game, should you want to bookmark either :)
This is one of the most beautiful games I've seen this jam, I love the minimalistic style. As @japes mentions, you can definitely feel Bad North, or more appropriately, Townscaper in this - but this is a compliment, of course :) Well done!
Fun game. During my 3rd or 4th try of The Cave I glitched through a wall, and I could continue flying inside the walls freely, handily beating everyone's records:
aero-glitch.jpg
Also, every time I beat a level all the buttons on the victory screen were broken and I had to reload the game :-//
Nonetheless, this plays very smoothly, and it has a lot of funny touches, well done!
I really like the concept of this no-gameplay exploration that tells a story. Very strong atmosphere, well done.
Holy Macaroni Penguins, what is this game!? There's an incredible amount of content here for a jam game, congratulations! You start out with a couple of tents, then half an hour later you're managing 100+ penguins and 13 different resources to build an ice-monument with robot penguins, crazy stuff...
I can't add much to what was already said above: QOL updates would be great, but ultimately I too just gave up at the monument after I couldn't make it complete a single percent, even though it was consuming resources... The game has turned into a bit too much of an idle/clicker game by that point, but the progression and awe I felt until that point was outstanding. Hats off!
Wow, amazing! Kudos for mentioning Scanner Sombre in the credits as inspiration, I've not heard of it before, so I was blown away. After some deliberation, appreciating your transparency in citing an inspiration I still went with a 5/5 innovation score on this :)
The ray casting mechanic is really cool and it works really well. I also loved that the caves were actually pitch dark, and not just sort-of dark, it made for a great atmosphere. I also couldn't figure out the monsters (so I just bunny hopped myself through those areas), but that just made them all the creepier. Well done!
A beautiful game. I also appreciated the easter egg hiding in the depths, however, !> knowing there's a submarine leaking oil in the middle of this reef
makes it hard to empathize with the final message that these waters are now clean :)
Very nice game, especially the graphics are great. I managed to get to 50+ ants and a 101 points overall.
I think there's some low-hanging fruit wrt improvements of the control scheme, it would be much better if the ant selection persisted after a command (especially if that command is just a move command), maybe overall it would be more intuitive if left clicking was just for selection and right clicking was for issuing a command?
Nicely done, very atmospheric. I only found one puzzle clue (I only saw here in the comments that there are supposed to be multiple), so I brute forced the rest of the puzzle too. Having the diamond rotate was a bit mean, as it looks the same in all orientations :p
I think my game might have glitched out at or right before the ending, !> I used the golden key to go into the room with tentacles, then into that tunnel with the trippy moving walls, but at the end of that the textures just disappeared, and I saw a mostly black screen with some red noise. Maybe some object was in the middle of the screen, rotating? It was hard to tell.
Is that the end, or did I miss something?
I also had an odd performance issue all the way until the elevator, movement was smooth, but looking around with the mouse was super laggy and choppy. Maybe it's something to do with all the objects in those scenes?
@caladrius I figured the lantern might have broken, so I kept pressing forward for a while, but nothing seemed to happen from that point on. I was using the WebGL build in Chrome latest.
I managed to escape :) Very cool entry! There's a lot of content for a jam, and it works well enough without a tutorial, I like that it does not tell you what to do. This made it hard to find the objectives sometimes, but was a huge bonus for the atmosphere. I too was reminded of some oldschool FPS titles like Half-Life.
Sadly the controls were a bit buggy. Around 50% of the time, I could not jump while running, which made the final platforming level very annoying.
I ran into a funny issue multiple times: I could not turn left :D At certain times my character was unable to look left - doing a full 360 to the right seemed to solve/reset the issue. (Zoolander, anyone?)
Cute little title, very polished, well done!
On one hand, I love the minimalistic control scheme where the mouse controls both the aim and the movement. And it certainly works well enough, and it's such a core mechanic that it's easy to accept. However, it is a bit annoying in practice, it is very hard to aim close to yourself, or aim "intuitively" without moving. Maybe I would have preferred to play with a more conventional arrows + mouse aim setup.
Cute game, really nice aesthetics. I also had issues with the tool order, many times after the pickaxe I got the lantern, but I thought it's an (annoying) game mechanic until I read the comments :D
I used the browser version in Chrome Version 90.0.4430.85 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Very cool, I love your use of the medium! Dynamically generated paragraphs, trembling text, a lot of cute touches. One of the more inventive titles I've met this jam.
If you plan on expanding or refining this later, I'd love to see the style of the reader choices stay more consistent. Choosing a stage of grief, like in the opening, is a very artistic storytelling device, while the very literal choices (talk to X, go to Y) of later are anything but. Also, having no choice but to click continue multiple times in a row also feels like pointless interactivity.
All that said, this is still great for a weekend's work, well done!
@craig-cordeiro Absolutely, finishing on time is a top priority for a jam, so I don't blame you at all for making these choices. And for the record, when I was talking about keeping the choices going, I didn't necessarily mean literally keeping the stages of grief choices for the whole story (though that would definitely be cool as well), rather just sticking to these "vague" options, which describe *how* or *with what mindset* does the character react, and not what they do exactly. I think that's a very powerful storytelling device.
It would be cool to see a post-jam version with more consistency in this regard.
Kudos.
Ah yiss, high-octane high-fiber poo-flinging action! Hilarious game, good job :D You guys are number 2! Shame on everyone who flushed their masks.
My personal best was 1320. Extra kudos for the networked hall of fame - I'm currently 9th!
Very nice game, the main mechanic works very smoothly, and there is sufficient depth (literally). At the end location my immediate thought was "oh no, I am stuck", but then I quickly realized that's where I belonged :) Very wholesome title, congrats!
A well balanced game (though I found the movement speed on land agonizingly slow) with a lot of content. Especially high marks in the graphics department, I, too, loved the minimalistic waves on top, as well as the transition to the underwater view. And the sea underneath feels alive, with a lot of polish on some of the enemies. Very well done!
What does PIBE stand for?
On my screen the food icons and values were misaligned by more than an entire row, which made it hard to read at a glance - and of course in a high-octane high-fiber game like this a glance is all I have!
Hilarious concept otherwise. I support the "block and sort" metagame.
Nerf cheese.
I too had difficulties figuring out what to do. Could you maybe rephrase the instructions to the game? What does it mean to "turn around"?
Oh hello there Mine Shaft, my entry is called Mineshaft :)
You have a very innovative game here, well done!
Congrats on your first game and welcome to LD!
It's a neat little game, the scope is modest, but it's well polished. The movement is smooth and the hitboxes seem to be fair as well. The slowdown mechanic ends up surprisingly useful too.
Some checkpoint system could be nice, I had some technical difficulties at 600 meters, but I wasn't looking forward to having to do the slower parts of the descent again...
I really enjoyed the little touch where you could blind yourself by flashing too close :) A very relaxing game, great atmosphere. Interestingly enough, this is the fourth game I've played where you have to take photos of the wildlife from a submarine, but it's still a very cool concept.
Wow, what a unique concept! I found the tutorial utterly confusing (there was only 1 value to "choose" from, so it wasn't clear what's happening), but the description and the actual first level made everything clear. Nevertheless, I still had no intuition for drawing the shapes, I just tried every combination of values :D
Well done!
Clicking seemed absolutely impossible, but funnily & luckily enough scrolling worked, so once I got my mouse out I managed to beat Level 1 in the HTML5 build. Well done!
A gorgeous game, well done! I think the story length is just right, if it was much longer the mechanics would get annoying. Excellent atmosphere.
Interesting design choice with the health counter. On one hand, you wouldn't want to punish a poor player who's been struggling to get the riddles right with having to restart, on the other hand, having something at stake nudges the player towards reading and thinking a bit rather than just brute-forcing the solutions.
A very inspiring entry all in all, thanks for making it!
On a minor sidenote, since there's a lot of clicking on text, adding `user-select: none;` to the CSS would be a nice improvement.
Some light Motherload vibes here, quite cool!
I wish the movement speed of the drill and the background was synchronized (some sort of inverse kinematics), the current result feels quite "floaty", it's hard to get a sense for getting deeper, because there's no steady reference points.
He has to cross platforms, but the game is not cross-platform :(
Hilarious, and a great take on the theme. The music track you composed is very cool too, a great example of how audio can boost the mood of a game immensely. (Makes me all the more disappointed that I'm yet to ever find the time to make the audio during a jam...) Kudos!
The link leads to a 404 error page for me.
Snaaaaaaaaake! Lovely art, and an original soundtrack to go with it? Hats off, a very stylish entry.
Very well done! The dash mechanic is a welcome twist on the genre, because it solves 2 problems of similar digging games at once: you can no longer just make a boring (no pun intended) infinite straight shaft to go deeper, and at the same time it also decreases "dead time" when you're trying to back out of already dug tunnels. Very elegant! The rest of the game is still a bit too familiar from all the other 2D mining entries (and Motherload variations of yore), but the overall feel is one of the nicest here.
Cool minimalist UI, and the drums are a great touch too, along with the music they make for a fun atmosphere.
Your link says HTML5 but it's a download link - could you please host the web version somewhere? (should be possible right there on itch.io)
A beautiful game. I also really liked the tiny descriptions (even though hovering moving objects was a bit inconvenient), they have a nice style with hints at a deeper and alive universe, great writing. Loved the thruster behavior too.
It took me the longest time to figure out how looting works - first I thought that the "blue zone" was the little blue box at the helm of the ship. Then I read @remco's comment which helped a bit, but it still felt like nothing is happening in the blue zone - it certainly didn't help that when I fullscreened the game, the inventory bar at the bottom disappeared :)
Nonetheless, this is a very polished title, that I would love to see expanded into a fuller game. Well done!
A very polished puzzler! I got stuck on level 20, but I might revisit this later just to finish. Graphics are very consistent, and the audio effects tie everything together nicely (- but as someone else mentioned, the grappling hook sound is a bit harsh/annoying). Well done!
Ha, I went back and beat level 20 and the whole game :) I think level 20 is much harder than 21-23. And the level 24 egg puzzle is brilliant! Great mechanic. Thanks for this wonderful puzzler!
I am loving the minimalism of this, bravo! Very inspiring.
Well done! I have no idea how to win (never got above 20%), but I had fun nonetheless. The 2D projection makes for a very clear UI for a 3D game.
What determines when a new type of piece is loaded into the crane? I wasn't sure if I was clicking something accidentally, or reaching some other achievement or time limit.
@eptwalabha A-ha, it was the scroll wheel then! (I was rotating the view with scrollwheel-clicks, and I must have kept scrolling here and there.) Thanks.
Thanks for the detailed instructions, without them I would have given up on this game, because there's so many mechanics that I would have never figured them out. Extra kudos for including a cheat code, the defrag puzzles were very quickly becoming annoying to redo. (This is probably the first jam game I see with cheats, funny how different it feels from calling them dev debug commands! ;))
An impressive amount of content, a well thought out concept, and very cool glitch art, bravo!
It's refreshing to see a 2-player game submitted, kudos! Hopefully you find your audience amongst all of us expecting to find single player games :)
The movement is very smooth, and the gameplay concept is neat. The art style is very consistent and polished too, you can tell that a lot of care went into this game.
I had a complaint here but I have to edit my comment - I thought the platforms collapsed randomly, but I realized that they collapse from idling on them! In this case, this is actually a great mechanic, and not unfair, as I previously stated :-p
I really like the minimalism of this, visually as well as control scheme and concept-wise. Well done! I managed 112 points at my best.
I think the sound effects could be a bit more mellow, to fit the peaceful martial art atmosphere a bit more, but I understand that you were going for a lo-fi 8-bit feel which the current effects might fit more.
Very nice game - I managed to beat it without ever figuring out what "searching for the nearest haunted house" does :) What is the right click for, for simply finding where the ghosts are? Or are the haunted houses where the rifts were?
QWOP meets Aperture Sciences! Despite the immediate callbacks to these, I found this entry quite innovative, but also very challenging :) Fun concept, and polished content, well done!
What a neat concept! It's always refreshing to see print-and-play games, never mind one that doesn't actually need any printing! Alas, I don't have enough dice at home to try this. Nonetheless, the dot counting mechanism is clever.
Have you thought of turning it into a 2(+) player game by taking turns over the same tower? With some restrictions on the ground level placement, you could end up with a more strategic alternative to Jenga.
A very polished experience, hats off! I'm only a few games in, but I suspect this will be one of the strongest entries I play this jam with the literal "balancing a stack of objects" take on the theme.
Beautiful neon aesthetic.
The first time I played, sounds weren't working for some reason - I only went back to check on them once I saw them complimented here in the comments. And going back I only found more polish :)
Welcome, everyone! With a day 0 patch I have unlocked a proper victory path (as well as fixed a botched commit that pushed my placeholder art during submission hour...), so my game is now properly playable and winnable.
I'm looking forward to your comments!
@thesedatedprince Thanks! I see where you're coming from, I was a bit worried that the "loop time" is a bit too long, and that might make finding the victory path annoying, but I'm really glad that the very first commenter managed to beat the game. I wouldn't add hints like that to the game itself, but I might add some spoiler tags to one of these comments.
@pennycook Thanks! I was focusing on creating a strong atmosphere this time around, and audio played a huge role in that, so it's great to see it appreciated. You can find the attributions for music as well as all the sound effects in the repo, [here](https://github.com/ditam/ld49/blob/master/assets/attributions.txt). As for the bottles, of course they are hard to hit when you've been drinking! Minor spoilers: !> Hitting the bottles is not the goal of the game ;)
@maxathon Of course, I kinda forgot, I'll add the key mappings in the next bugfix batch.
@mirianbr You're asking the right questions ;) Aiming is possible - whether you hear glass breaking should tell you if you were successful in it or not. But as for the main goal, !> it is not about shooting the bottles ;)
@destroyertech I'm glad you powered through. I agree that the continuity is not very obvious. There are some marginal clues, such as the aiming getting more (wait for it) unstable, but it might be hard to tell. I'll work on polishing this aspect if I ever make post-jam updates.
Thank you @devparty @dawcrash!
Thanks everyone! I've pushed a minor bugfix which should improve your experience with shooting, and slightly sped up the loop times based on your feedback.
Thanks for the praise @kamuniaft. The UX is not super clear there - you are meant to go back to the "same" dialog after the shooting scene, but you are not restarting or stuck, just entering the same room. If you hear a glass breaking, you hit the bottle - and one of the quotes is indeed reserved for this case. As for giving up: !> The goal of the game is not shooting well ;)
Thanks @eptwalabha ! It means a lot :)
Welcome back @pennycook ! Thanks for the detailed feedback, I'm definitely concerned about the feel of continuity (or the lack of it) after the shooting scene, if there's ever a post-jam version, this issue is on top of my list.
Thank you too @balduin. I also feel like there's a better ending (and path to it) somewhere within this concept and story, but that's all I could squeeze into this jam :)
Thanks @joror - check out the spoiler tags (black bars) I left in some of these comments.
Thanks @simex! This subversion of expectation was one of my main design goals during development, pretending to be a target shooting game initially. The repetition and the futility of the shooting scene was supposed to drive the player to explore the options at the bar. I don't like holding the players' hands too much, but it's a tricky thing to balance, it clearly seems like some people were turned away before finding their way to the ending. Thanks for sticking around! I'll try to polish this aspect if there's ever a post-jam version.
@chris-hay The speakers always have dedicated positions on the screen (top left for the bartender, top right for the "person at the door", bottom for Colton), plus there's also a touch of dedicated colour underneath the lines, but it might be too subtle to see. I'll try to think of a more rewarding ending screen. I'm glad you found the ending satisfying regardless, thanks for your praise!
Thank you too @rubixnoob13 and @kymakesgames!
Very well done, a simple concept executed with beautiful polish, I had a lot of fun completing it. The determinism of the cube is a great idea conceptually, and the puzzle levels have good progression (though for me the hardest one was the spiral one due to the many moves required), with some interesting mechanics.
I think if you added a couple more mechanics, and some sound effects, this could feel like a very complete puzzler, not just a jam entry. Some mechanics ideas off the top of my head: - tiles that permanently modify the cube (these could add a strategy element so you can craft ideal dice for timed runs) - tiles that temporarily reveal the transformation of "?" tiles (these could add a memorization aspect) - puzzles with 2 (or multiple) dice, where the same keys control both - step-based timers
But already as it is, this is one of my top picks this jam in multiple categories, bravo!
Very cool concept. I too would suggest separating the pick-up and shoot commands. It played quite smoothly otherwise.
Very cool. I was engaged enough that I went back to all (?) 3 endings. I liked the delicate balance between the "open world" of freely typed commands, and the narration guiding you through the linear story. Makes perfect sense for the jam format, impressive game design!
I too have made a multiple choice story game for this jam, but otherwise our entries are quite different :)
A surprisingly fun game! I'm not sure what does being a cat have to do with anything, or what were the objects attacking me, but I shot a bunch. Good shooting mechanics! My favourite part was waiting to get a quick reload, then moving in the air using the recoil mechanic.
Is there an endgame, or is it just about killing as many enemies as you can?
GTA London! (Gas... To Auto?) A button to reverse would have been much appreciated, had a lot of fun nonetheless.
Nice, I learned a lot about science. Digging the 8-bit style, good art direction, the music, the sound effects and the visuals fit very well!
Whoah dizzy! There's a lot going on in this game, and I still don't understand all the systems, but I had fun.
Very cool idea with the breathing mechanic. As other comments pointed out, if the stability level actually had an effect on the story (or does it?), and not just on the platforming, that would be golden.
The music didn't work for me for some reason, so the only sound effect was the breathing - which was sort of atmospheric, but it felt like something was missing.
I spent all that time trying to get a good score only for it to be mangled by an integer overflow! Fun title, and definitely outside the box. Well done!
On a technical note, the emscripteen banners on top were quite annoying, is there a way to remove them? (I had to manually inspect and edit the page in the dev console, otherwise I couldn't see the bottom of the screen) I don't think they are part of the planned experience, but with a game like this it's hard to tell :)
Very unique atmosphere on this one, one of pure chaos :) Very charming though!
Multiple times I had a kid disappear in the bottom corner of the room with no way to get them out... there should be either a way to move/rotate the screen there, or just adjust the room geometry so that that corner is not actually accessible to them.
Very fun idea though, it might be worth it to make a post-jam version with some UX patches, and it could be a nice standalone game.
Very cool concept! There should be a counter to see how many times you drowned, because after I realized how forgiving the respawn was, I wasn't even trying any other ways to get to my destination, just jump off my raft as many times as I needed to get where I wanted to go.
Very cool game, I had a lot of fun! The mechanics are very smooth, straightforward but polished.
I was wondering, is it possible to maneuver so as to "throw" a rocket from the truckbed so that it explodes without killing you? I never managed to pull it off, but that would allow some next level tactics.
@lucasglass That explains it, once I had a bomb on fire, I probably never went an other 7 seconds without exploding! (Club Full Throttle represent)
A very fun game, but the egg really needs to stay in the pan while turning... There were also a few other collider bugs, typically when walking uphill - the egg would break when the pan touched the ground tile. Maybe this is intentional, but it was very frustrating to deal with. I found the best strategy was just legging it, and just hoping to catch the flying egg at the end :D
Loved the attention to detail though, great quotes, crisp and crunchy eggshell sounds, and physics simulation on the broken egg all make for a very immersive experience. Well done!
Oh no, political conflicts! A very fun game with a very consistent visual style, well done! I've seen a surprising number of "a bunch of random minigames" entries this jam, but nonetheless, this one is great.
Very nice visual design work, this is one of the prettiest entries I've seen this jam, and the visual style for highlighting tasks and objectives is very clear and consistent, which makes the otherwise hectic gameplay fun. The sound effects are also on point, further increasing the atmosphere.
To boot, the WebGL build runs very smoothly, extra kudos for that.
Well done!
I disapprove of drunk driving, disgusting! Anyways, I made a game about drunk shooting.
That soundtrack is hot fire. Very cool style, and a lot of fun. A great advertisement for the Pico8-style, even if you didn't actually use that engine.
Curse you Heat Death! This is one of the most fun games I've played this jam, congrats! Did you guys compose the soundtrack too? Some of the songs were super familiar...
I found the radiation + armor combo a bit imba, but what can you do. Btw you seem to have some bugs wrt to full screen scaling, I only saw the timer and progress bar on the screenshots in the comments here. (By default I didn't see any of them, entering fullscreen I could see the bottom of the timer, but not enough to make out the values.)
What a beautiful game! A lot of polish for a jam game, well done. A small tutorial would be welcome, I wasn't sure what each of the options do.
It felt like sleeping takes effect over time, while every other action was immediate. Coupled with a timer, this made for the impression that you were wasting your energy by doing anything, and you were "better off" just waiting. But I guess this feeling fits the survival theme too, so oh well.
Really cute game. The visuals especially are very polished, I loved the level and character art and the attack animations. It feels like there's much more going on, but I'm not sure if I understood the multiplayer aspect - everyone playing your game creates a new cell, and you can follow the levels they entered? Are they different from levels you enter from your cell?
Nice polish on this one, very cool for a one-man project. Quite difficult too - but I guess that makes things inevitable. The mysterious rot feels like a bit of a reach for the theme, but why not!
This is one of my favourite entries this jam, congrats! The concept is wholesome and fits the theme perfectly. The dynamic music, the animation, the types of tasks all fit perfectly. The gameplay is a bit boring, but that's fair for a jam game, and all the polish makes up for it.
Bravo!
Very nicely polished entry, well done! It took a while for me to figure out what the first row is for (I just assumed you have to play cards there to activate them), but the instructions are clear enough once you actually read them :p The game works quite well, although it gets repetitive a bit too fast. It would be cool to have some card effects (either enemy or in hand) which move around cards already on the table.
Very nice graphics and control scheme.
Ah, there's much more here than meets the eye at first! Maybe you should include an intriguing screenshot in the description here - I for one missed the cover image used on the games list.
The biomes look great and blend nicely too. I agree with the other comments, there's a lot of nice touches to this one. I found the audio a bit hard to hear - maybe you could add a theme for the "empty" terrain, so that you can expect the musical changes, and adjust your sound levels (for a while I thought there are no sounds).
Add an in-game tutorial and some explicit goals (e.g. cover some percentage of the map, paint biomes accordingly to some colouring, or fight against some decay timer?), and you'll have yourself a very complete game. Very impressive for 72 hours!
Very cool. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the visuals greatly. The red fog and the fires frame everything very nicely.
I ran through some bullet packs a few times without picking them up, I'm not sure if it was a bug or just a very small hitbox that I missed. Nonetheless, very polished for a jam entry.
Fun concept. It probably took some precious ~~jam~~ compo time to get the aiming done with collision detection, but I think it would be actually more fun if you could launch yourself in any direction, just zapping from carrot to carrot.
I couldn't quite figure out what makes food split (oftentimes carrots far away from me would split, even without any acid explosions), maybe there's some indexing bug there?
Very memorable entry, good job!
A very cute little game, congrats! I couldn't figure out how to open or cross the gate, so every attempt I just waited for the invaders to blow it, which I think harmed my performance, heh.
Very interesting concept, but not having any motivation to move is a huge drawback to enjoyment. Still, this feels like a fun seed for a proper game - maybe you could have randomized challenges, where you're a different dish/pastry every level with a different temperature to aim for, and the flying mouths (mouths?) actually force you to fly around, splitting your attention, and giving more utility to the cool time travel mechanic. Very nice graphics and audio!
Very polished visuals, with a surprising difficulty curve! I couldn't make the last jump, and retrying is a bit painful -having to go through the entire level again-, so I decided to wake up at 8/9. Well done!
I love the crisp pixel art, and the general concept. The UI is clear and the tutorial is much appreciated. Gameplay was a bit repetitive ultimately, but nonetheless this is a very nice entry, congrats!
A very interesting mechanic! It felt a bit cheesy that you can make 0 / all cuts of cards, and combine the "all" parts to basically combine the full effect of any two cards. The audio and the graphics are nicely polished, with a bit of UI/UX work (or maybe an in-game tutorial) this can become an excellent game.
A wonderful amount of content with very polished art, well done! Feels a bit too much like Stardew Valley maybe?:)
I died a couple of times without understanding fully what's happening, and I'm sure I missed quite a bit of content still. I shall be back to explore this a bit more. Is there a way to pull up the control scheme after the splash screen? You could probably mention the controls in the description on this page.
Very cool game, I wish it had a proper ending - but then it wouldn't fit the theme I guess. I was so sure there would be an ending besides the carnage, that I kept trying for quite a while, but I couldn't find anything. (Besides the heavy FPS drops mentioned in the other comments, after a while I stopped getting any new gems, which might be a bug?)
I thought you would either have to kill all the skulls (they just seem to respawn anyway), or do something with the L-shaped tunnel to the west - I tried bombing it, shooting it with a crystal, axing it or lighting torches inside, nothing seemed to have any effect. That L shape was just a place to rest while the AI glitches out on the walls...
Otherwise this game had so much polish that I still think there's an easter egg or ending here that we're all missing :) Regardless, well done!
Is there any point to torches besides the aesthetic?
I actually loved this one. The gameplay is super simple, but it is presented very well - everything runs smoothly, the graphics are pretty, detailed and consistent, and the mini-games are clear, similar in style but different enough. Fun to play. Well done!
I think it could use some balancing, because many of the tasks never seemed to pick up enough speed to end the game as standalone tasks in the end. (I gave up on waiting for the pot to fill faster than I could drain it after about 9 minutes.)
Note that you should probably play and rate the games of others, that's how the website will recommend your game to others, and how you can end up with the necessary ~20 ratings.
This is a beautiful game, well done! One of my favourite takes on the theme, with a perfect length and frame for a jam game, a peaceful matter-of-fact passing of history.
I loved the way the analogy between the parts of an empire and the leaves of an autumn tree is driven home by all the event texts as well as the visuals. Very strong concept. I think the two most obvious improvement areas for a post-jam version would be adding some fitting background music, and improving the way the effects of a choice are applied to the map - currently it is very hard to see what exactly happened due to your choice, because it is immediate, and happens on the map while you're looking away from it (at the buttons).
I think adding a delay and an animation here could be really helpful in creating some immersion, giving the player a sense of control, as well as forcing them to notice and register the changes. Maybe some added narrative text could really drive home the point of what's happening due to the player's choice. (I was facing a somewhat similar problem in my submission, and I spent a considerable amount of time creating a delayed wave effect to update the map when the player clicks the End turn button.)
(Edit: I can see now that I'm not the first one to bring up this aspect, and you're already planning to address it. Excellent news!)
With these two improvements, I think this would be a rather complete game with a powerful and memorable theme. I hope to see a post-jam version!
I collected every sheep and toybox, but what next? The counter eventually in the bottom left went into negative, is that expected?
Even though I don't understand what's going on, the visuals are very polished and pleasing, and everything is running smoothly. And infinite "double" jump is always fun. Well done!
(duplicate)
(an other duplicate... how are y'all doin?)
Beautiful colour scheme and layers. It felt like a parallax effect while playing, but I guess it's just an illusion due to the different saturations. Everything runs and fits very smoothly, with a lot of nice touches, such as the different enemy AIs. A very polished entry, congrats!
Gotta love the little tippy tappy feet and the vibrant colors. Very stylish game! I agree with the other comments that the difficulty curve should ramp up a bit earlier. To boot, the music loop is also a touch too short. I was a bit bored after 3 minutes in, so I decided to [end it.](https://pbfcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PBF055-Dinosaur_Meteors.jpg)
Thanks @udo and @raxah - a tutorial of sorts (in the form of pop-up messages at the beginning of some levels) was on my roadmap, but I didn't get around to it before the submission deadline. I'll probably add something basic as a minimal post-jam update -- and also in the description box here on this page.
udo, the counter should appear on the beaver dam square indeed. Did you use the full-screen toggle by any chance when encountering this? I am aware of a placement bug related to that toggle, for which I'll have an other 0-day bugfix in soon.
Thank you too @arend-hintze !
Haha, much appreciated @hekateras! Pretty spot on, one important piece missing is that you can gain new workers if you place two beavers on the same tile. (But they will not do their job then!)
I have all these stupid things keeping me from updates, such as sleep and work. Bugfixes and tutorials will arrive in 6-8 hours.
I've added an in-game tutorial to explain the mechanics. Hopefully things are more straightforward now! I'll also add a few sentences to the description above.
Thanks @okamit! I'd love to make a post-jam version eventually, and I'm interested to hear suggestions for new mechanics (but I do have a few ideas already that I just didn't have time for during the jam).
@hekateras I included an update just for you, press R to get a new random level.
Thanks for the feedback!
@dining-philosopher Thanks! Yeah, I'm starting to think that "left to right" joke is more misleading than helpful. Rivers flow in every direction, wherever there's adjacent open tiles. (The only open tiles for now are grass and swamp - both have these green diagonals in the graphics.) The left-to-right thing only applies for the still water ponds that dams create, which is always one tile to their right... I'm not satisfied with this whole still water mechanic, I had much more plans for them in my initial drafts, but they turned into a bit of an (apparently confusing) gimmick by the end of the jam. Oh well! As for dams disappearing, the rules are rather simple there: dams start with 4 strength, and every turn they lose 1 strength for each adjacent water tile. This means that a new dam surrounded by water on all sides will not survive the turn, as the second level's opening and tutorial message tries to point out. A dam with strength 3 that has water on 2 sides will survive the turn with 1 strength left. The counter on the dam turning red is meant to indicate that the dam will not survive the turn, but this color is currently unreliable, there's some bug here that I will need to look into.
@sakura-magika there's only one way to lose a level: allowing water to flood into an objective tile (white circle thingie). The objective that was flooded is marked in red in this case, but this is not always visible due to the game over screen. As for choke points, those are the most critical of course, but on later levels you need to balance your resources and figure out where you can afford to let the water flow while you tend to other locations. It is possible to beat all standard levels! (The game offers infinite random sandbox levels after you complete the standard ones - not all of those are possible to win.) Thanks for your comment!
Thank you guys too @chingle @indigowolf and @jhax!
Thanks @automatonvx, the music should properly loop now.
@mwcz that's a nice compliment to get, thanks. I think even the jquery dependency could be easily dropped, I only used it to save a few minutes of development time during the jam, but nothing fancy. I think the word for this 'engineless' utopia you're envisioning is 'vanilla'. In my opinion it adds a lot to the charm of LD to do things from scratch, so most of my submissions are engine-less like this one.
I appreciate the feedback @yulotomorrow and @stefan-funke - tutorial messages can now be closed by clicking on them.
@dodormeur and @daniel-username thanks for the bug reports. I couldn't reproduce building outside the map yet, but I'll make sure to include a fix in the next round of updates.
@mantsje thanks! I haven't heard of Timberborn before, but it looks fun.
Thanks to everyone else as well for playing and leaving a comment @zack-hd @nate-bit-games @rustymonky @raphiell @skyeward @carla
Thanks @0x746564 - Indeed I didn't write the music, it is a version of this song from OpenGameArt: [A Journey Awaits by Pierre Bondoerffer (@pbondoer)](https://opengameart.org/content/a-journey-awaits) - I just heavily adjusted the pacing to fit the game's mood better. (There's an `attributions.txt` in the github repo mentioning the same.)
@acearcher Thanks - there sort of is an endless random mode, press R anytime to be dropped into a new random level :) I know it is annoying that after a random level you're dropped back to level 3 (or wherever you pressed R) - jam constraints, eh? I'll add a proper endless mode for the post-jam version.
Wow, what a polished entry. The bullet mechanic works perfectly, and ties in to the theme well. Excellent visuals and art direction, a very stylish game. Good job!
I couldn't get the controls to work... Nothing seemed to do anything. (I could skip the intro with the mouse, but that's all.)
I had the following errors logged to the console: ``` Godot Engine v3.4.4.stable.official.419e713a2 - https://godotengine.org index.js:9 [Deprecation] The ScriptProcessorNode is deprecated. Use AudioWorkletNode instead. (https://bit.ly/audio-worklet) create @ index.js:9 index.js:9 getGamepad will now require a Permission Policy. Please update your application accordingly. For more information see https://github.com/w3c/gamepad/pull/112 get_pads @ index.js:9 index.js:347 OpenGL ES 2.0 Renderer: WebKit WebGL index.js:347 OpenGL ES Batching: ON index.js:347 index.js:9 WebGL: INVALID_ENUM: bindTexture: invalid target _glBindTexture @ index.js:9 5WebGL: INVALID_ENUM: texParameter: invalid texture target ```
I was using Chrome on Windows. I'll give it an other go from an other machine soon.
Very nice puzzle mechanic, with a lot of nice audio and visual touches, even though I felt the constant movement a bit dizzying, which is not necessarily what you're looking for in a turn-based puzzler. It almost feels like it was written with an other theme in mind (control the environment? ;)), but it also ties in here fine. Very polished entry, congrats!
Larger maps could be a nice addition.
Oh no, the QWOP flashbacks are triggering my PTSD! Hilarous entry.
I have one important improvement request: please make the game restart on pressing space. For a game that you play with two hands on the keyboard, and have to restart every 5 seconds, it's annoying that you have to scramble for the mouse every time.
My best was 4.
Hm, lots of lightseconds here :) A very beautiful game! Everything was running very smoothly. I wasn't sure if there's a goal besides just delaying the inevitable approach of the black hole. Either way, good job!
Very nice concept, the standard deck of cards forces a simplicity of design that few jam games have. I would really like to see some improved UX for the building stage though, if all you can do is place the next card into the tableau, it should auto-reveal the next card, and a single click should place it into a stack. Having to do it in 3x52 clicks (reveal, select, place) is a bit annoying... as if the game was delaying the inevitable, heh :p
Hahaha, that's undoubtably the worst control scheme I've ever seen for a pong game. Flappy Pong. Delightfully frustrating, well done!
The screens says the paddles are Q and W, but actually they are Q and E :p
Pinball seems like the perfect analogy for this theme, well done!
How cheerful indeed! I really enjoyed the aesthetic here. I might be reaching for meaning here, but all the shadows and the inverted colour schemes (where the level is just negative space in front of a colourful background) tied in well with the idea that something bigger than us is going on, while the player is just a minor character in the background, fighting the inevitable. Well done!
Well, everyone knew making a game about removing banana peels from a poorly balanced cake while assassins are shooting at you was the obvious choice when the theme was announced, but you guys somehow pulled it off, and managed to make it feel fresh. Congrats.
\- ditam (cake salvation score 8)
No **HT**ML build for a game called Stuck in the **Hypertext**? A missed opportunity if I ever saw one! :)
Loved the style and the colour scheme on this one.
Absolutely gorgeous art style, and a lot of content to explore. It's impressive how "organic" the modular boat designs look, as if everything belonged in its place. Bravo!
Wow, hats off for this. 38 pages of PDF (that easily feel like 39 or 40!) of illustrated manual (did I say of yet?), made in 48 hours is crazy. I will not have a chance to play this during the rating period, but I still had fun browsing through the manuals. The DIKCS system looks solid, maybe not rock hard, but solid. I appreciated the casual vibes and zingers in the styles of great fantasy comical authors like Pratchett and Adams, and the swings from flow-of-consciousness remarks to dry RPG rule elaborations.
Also, you probably don't realize this, but your hand is in the way in the video from around 5:03. I'm not sure how long, because it made the video unwatchable for me, but I can confirm it was still there obstructing the view at 5:05. You might want to look into this.
\- Bob, head up to the 4th floor! \- Why, is something broken there boss? \- No, but by the time you get there, it will be!
A cute little entry. It features my pet peeve control scheme of "left click to select, left click again to issue command", but I still had fun with it.
> You’re not supposed to but it can get rather annoying having to wait 10 seconds even though the timing is kind of the main feature
Haha, this issue was one of my main fears while brainstorming for this jam (both for my own game, as well as all the entries I'll try), gotta love the gordian knot solution to it.
I did play before reading that though, so I was thoroughly confused. Fun entry though!
I've had it with these pesky cloning time vortices on this Monday-to-Friday plane! A very fun game, I almost wish it was more chaotic or challenging. I feel like I won before I fully understood what's happening.
I loved the low-res art with the dithered backgrounds, very stylish!
I played as Dab, he was fab. Does Fab dab? I'll have to try that the next time. Excellent game all around, I love the concept, and you turned it into a very polished entry. Plus there's a freaking theme song?!
Very cool game! I love procedurally generated titles. I was quite awful at it though, I didn't have the coordination to actually find the spikes with my flashlight. Had a lot of fun though!
Bonus points for the online leaderboard too!
Bravo! An incredible amount of polish and style for a jam game. This one just feels complete all around. One of the most impressive LD entries I've ever played.
Loved the cryptic atmosphere with the coded morsels of lore, and I thought you adapted the theme very tastefully, more as an inspiration than a hard rule.
Also, kudos for taking a hard stance on not doing a version without QR codes, I respect sticking to your artistic vision.
Beautiful art style, and a lot of polish. And indeed the tutorial was necessary, it still took me 3 minutes to figure out I can rotate the buildings with the scroll wheel.
I loved the atmosphere on this one, a very memorable entry.
Yes.
Beautiful! My favourite take on the theme so far. Having things disappear in 3 waves is a nice touch, it feels realistic, but it also makes things a bit more relaxed.
I think this could have been an even more minimalistic title as a single player zen experience, but the multiplayer is a very unique touch as well.
@der-finski First of all, huge kudos for caring enough that you played already when I've only had the github repo linked here. I did not have time to finish the storyline by the submission deadline, let alone to publish a live version anywhere.
Now I've gotten around to doing both - you can find links to both the original submission, as well as a day1 updated version, which includes the full storyline. Now you can actually complete the game :)
Thanks to all of you for the nice comments! This has been a rough jam for me, where I struggled with the theme a lot initially, and with the deadline later on :) As a result, I never felt very happy with this submission, because it is very far away from the wish-list of content and design that I set out to implement. It is great to see all of the comments focusing on the positives (in true LD fashion), and it might just give me the motivation to make a post-jam version that's closer to my original vision.
@pegasys, regarding the scanner killing you at the wrong time: the current implementation is a bit hacky (jam code!), where the scanner displayed on screen is entirely independent of the actual hit-scan logic, so there can be many reasons why the two would get out of sync. Sorry about any frustration it caused! I do plan on rewriting (and redrawing) the entire visual layer for a post-jam version; if I do get around to that, this will be surely fixed.
@savolae - I absolutely agree, I _really_ wanted to give the player a reason to have to change the speed in both directions, and not just always higher, but I couldn't come up with the proper in-universe reason for it! Plus all the other jam constraints, indeed. Maybe for a post-jam version!
Very interesting 3-axis movement controls together with the mouse free-look, but it doesn't take too long to get used to. Quite some fun once you get your first gun too! I couldn't figure out how to place blocks in build mode (was I lacking resources? Or pressing the wrong keys?), but I still had fun. Very clean visuals too, well done.
Hoping you get to 20 reviews!
Cool game about a bad trip. It felt like it could use some balancing to make it a bit more addictive, the monsters swarm you a bit too fast. The axe seems overpowered compared to the other weapons.
Very cool colour glitch effect.
When there were a lot of enemies on screen, it felt like the F presses were sometimes not registered, and you just had to mash the key until it ate a mushroom.
Wow, I'm only a couple ratings in, but I already know this is going to be one of my favourite entries this jam. I had a lot of fun, even though I only won 2/6 battles. (It seems like ties are sometimes a bit generous to one side, but maybe I just didn't understand the game well enough yet.) An all around great!
Very ambitious indeed, but quite cool! The board and the ruleset was very well laid out and visually clean, which is never easy. Print-and-play titles are always a breath of fresh air in LD, and this one feels quite polished, congrats! It would have been really cool to have an online playable digital prototype though...
I'm not a huge fan of any chutes and ladders mechanics ever, and I found the connection between the paths with their animal imagery and the abstract playing field a bit far-fetched, but I guess overall it still added to the atmosphere rather than take away from it.
All in all a memorable entry, well done!
A very cool entry, I'll probably go back right now to try to beat my high score of 70. (edits: 102. 130!) Simple but fun.
I'm happy I could give you your 20th review, you surely deserve to be rated!
A very cool game with lots of polish! I couldn't figure out what all the cards do (such as the brown ghost thingie), but mostly everything was quite intuitive on the first play already. Very consistent art style, and the gameplay seems quite balanced too, just hard enough that you can't win by clicking randomly, but simple enough to play without a tutorial.
I'm not sure why I had to drag the cards instead of just clicking on them, is there anywhere else to drag them but the CAT? Maybe I missed some mechanics entirely, heh, but I still managed to beat it on the first try. (Btw the Main Menu button on the victory screen does not seem to do anything.)
Runs and plays very smoothly! The jump mechanic took a while to get used to, seems like your vertical rise depends on how long you keep space pressed, which is a bit unusual and floaty, but why not! I couldn't beat the first level with the +5 second bonus potion.
Put me down for one more vote for arrow keys, please :)
Very cool, I got an even 300.
One annoying bug is that you can't seem to pick an upgrade while running, which becomes quite necessary later on. On the other hand, this really drills in the 10s cadence into the player.
Looks, plays and sounds great though, well done.
Absolutely beautiful entry! And it is engaging too, I got all 8 of them in.
When it ended, a black rectangle appeared in the middle of the screen, and just stayed there. I played the embedded version, and no errors were logged to the console (Sheep sounds intensify.), for what that's worth... I didn't run into any other issues though, runs and plays very smoothly.
I only wish that "urging" a sheep was a bit less aggressive. They are too peaceful and fluffy, it'd be more appropriate to be gentle with them.
Very nice entry, it has a lot of things going for it. First of all, the visuals are very pretty. A very cozy forest, and it is very satisfying to pull the berries off bushes. The system for introducing new spells works well too, though it does feel a bit rushed from the second spell on, giving you all the other spells over a couple bends along the path.
Is it possible to kill the goblins, or only to stun/delay them? 5 minutes in, I had just too many of them following me around, and I couldn't progress much further. It looked like you can damage them by pulling objects onto them (which btw I think would be super satisfying if it was one-shotting them), but the pull mechanic seemed a bit too finnicky for me to try it for too long. It seems like objects can only be pulled in 2 directions along a fixed axis - if this was upgraded to something as few as 4 or 6 directions, it could make it a lot more fun to play.
But all in all a very solid entry, it has plenty of content and it runs very smoothly, and the take on the theme feels fresh, it's not just an other plant-and-collect farmer sim. Well done!
Looks quite pretty and plays very smoothly, although it's a bit repetitive. Ran perfectly smooth in the web build too. Well done! The shadow was a nice touch to show the copter's projected position.
Very cool concept! I wish there was a visual indicator that a plant is a hybrid, it was hard to tell apart my regular boring potatoes from my superior corn-potatoes. The eating mechanic was also a bit confusing, because it seemed like you have to drop off items on your plate (without any visual indicator), and you only got their effects the next week? I'll have to pay more attention on my next attempt.
Regardless, I had fun!
Always a delight playing your games, Rongo! Congrats to the entire team.
Farming, especially in this jam, is always a bit tedious, but you've built a lovely atmosphere around it. An amazing amount of polish for 72 hours too, it feels very complete. I was happy to be reminded of Dome Romantik in some of the effects and animations, I think I could have recognized this team's handiwork even if it wasn't for the site notification about one of my followed users.
The image of the cute farming kitty blasting gnomes with a pistol at night is so viscerally hilarious that it carries the entire game on its back, to the top of the ratings, I'm sure.
I've been a fan and following your LD games ever since Fade, so I had very high expectations for this one, in fact I saved it for "dessert" until now. It did not disappoint! It's definitely in my top 3 from the ~50 games I got to try out.
Such a neatly polished game, looks great, and the atmosphere is excellent. I like that you decided to make it easy enough to make sure that players get to experience the mood and story instead. Feels like a smart call for the compo, and a good basis for developing the game later on. I hope you get around to making a post-jam version with maybe some extended mechanics and some puzzling challenges. Maybe the lore could be extended too?
!> For example, I think the goat could be adjusted to provide some basic mechanic, such as fertilizing tiles, to make it less "on the nose" that sacrificing it is what's needed to progress the story. It felt a bit inelegant that the game forces you to immediately sacrifice it once you get one in your hand.
I use python in my day job, and your games are an inspiration, definitely tempting me to give pygame a go one of these jams.
What can I do if someone asks for two colors? I only seem to be able to carry one at a time, and giving two to them separately doesn't seem to satisfy them. (First I thought it's a color mixing thing, but I'm not sure what to do about a purple+yellow request.)
The movement is a bit slippery, and the hitbox of the gate is annoying, but I really like the simplicity of the visuals.
Very cool game, but I found it a bit hard! Trees are missing their targets a lot, and you are almost guaranteed to be 50+% dead after a couple waves, and only then can you start to stabilize. Afterwards, on the other hand, I imagine the exponential growth of resources would become imba, so there should be some other mechanic to balance these two aspects out (helping in the beginning, hindering on later levels).
Very crisp and consistent art style, I liked the subtle burning of the city too. All in all a very fun and polished title, well done!
What a delight! Plays very smoothly, and the concept is very fresh too. Some audio could do it wonders, but it's still one of the most memorable and fun games I've played this jam, congrats!
I managed to do 100/97/84 percents on easy/normal/hard (ramming the fire before it spreads is imba), hell was a bit too stressful to finish for me.
An interesting concept. Is there a win condition? I was just harvesting flowers and minding my own business, and I had around 300 coins when the time ran out. Seems like the first plant is imba with its 5-ply cost multiplier, and just planting it in the top right moon kept me busy enough to not even worry about the other plants by the end of my first playthrough.
It would be very cool to see this extended with more mechanics, or a scoreboard of sorts.
Hahaha, that was quite the journey! I'm still not sure what the hell was going on. The intro starts with an idyllic village scene that's disrupted by a meteorite, and all of a sudden there's an angry banana-carrot-eggplant with guns! Okay, so you start the game, and you're driving a combine (what?), and angry watermelon-peas start suiciding on your harvester. I tried dropping them off at the depo, but I got stuck, which is when I discovered the EPIC "unstuck" somersault harvester piledriver move, which seemed to give me some points. But then I went back to the field and there were more peas, but I could no longer use the somersault without spilling the peas I collected, and dumping them all directly under myself allowed them to kill me instantly.
8/10, would play again.
Delightful! The deck building aspect is fun (I especially like the effect where the booster packs are mixed in), and the art style is super polished and charming. Plays very smoothly too, though I did run into some issues where I couldn't move some cards, seemingly without a reason.
Why are the cards hexagonal? :) It seemed like there were a couple of other art assets trying to work with the hexagonal aesthetic, but all in all they were more confusing than stylish. Nonetheless, this is a very fun entry, and one of the most beautiful ones I've seen so far!
Erm, excuse me? I was minding my own business, brewing tea for unappreciative customers, having a cozy life in a tea wagon when all of a sudden I died alone in the middle of the woods! That was an unexpected and abrupt twist, but until then I really enjoyed the atmosphere. I've never heard of ink, it seems like an interesting platform for these types of games.
I liked that the take on the theme was not super literal, just a recurring theme in the story. Well done!
Is this published? Your link shows a 404, and I also can't find anything by this name on your itch profile.
Oh wow, I gotta have to revisit this entry, so far I've only tried one of the ships, but it's fun to play! The space debris is very atmospheric, and so are the visual effects around the gravitational anomalies. (I could go without the strong CRT effect on the whole screen, but oh well.)
On one hand, it feels like having a more fragile ship would improve the "trying to navigate a dangerous space debris field" feeling, but on the other hand, the game might become a bit frustrating, it is already tricky enough to travel around with all this inertia and the one-directional thrusters.
The non-literal take on the theme is a breath of fresh air too.
One of the most polished entries I've encountered so far, congrats!
I really enjoyed the atmosphere on this one. The platforming felt a bit clunky, but I really liked the theme of bringing home monster seeds to your personal greenhouse lab, being impervious to death, as if you were some inter-dimensional Predator (from the movie). A simple concept with great polish that plays very smoothly.
Hello and welcome everyone! I'm very much looking forward to reading your comments. This is one of my more experimental entries, so I'm not sure what to expect.
This game is just called "**H.**", but I had to add a few more characters to the title for it to be accepted by the website.
Thanks everyone, I appreciate your feedback. It seems that the game is currently just too confusing to be enjoyable, heh.
First of all, I've now included the exact rules and mechanics in the description above. I'll see how can I add some minimal post-jam changes to the game itself to improve the experience.
Thanks @daitli, very fair criticism! I knew it's going to be a tall order to make it enjoyable without instructions, and it seems that I ended up on the wrong side of that fence. It's not just you haha. Exact instructions are now included on this page, fwiw.
@togo-sepultraut I really appreciate the detailed feedback and I agree with all of your points, really. I made some stylistic decisions at the expense of UX, but I'll see what can I improve here. I definitely want to extend the harvest stage to provide more explanatory feedback, I just couldn't get around to it during the jam. (I had a shoestring budget of time this time around, probably less than 10 net hours.)
@travh98 thanks for sharing your thought process, it's good insight! I've included exact rules above now - note that soil only needs to neighbour the water, and the water has to neighbor the plants, so soil can be further away overall.
Later today I'll take a look at those issues in Firefox and add a fix.
Thanks @fishy-f1shy for the ideas! I also considered only adding the mechanics level by level, but I really didn't want to change the rules inbetween levels, because I figured that would be confusing in a different way. However, you're right that pests are not necessary for the first level (soil is, however), I'll probably remove it from the palette there.
I'll look carefully if there are any bugs related to scoring, if you had 4 wheat tiles, and they were not eaten by pests, it should have been accepted for the first level.
Thank you too @jeankb, on second thought I think I really could just lay out the entire palette without sacrificing the general aesthetic, so I'll consider it. I'm less likely to add a reset button, since there is no penalty to painting over tiles, and the harvest resets the board anyway, but I'll give this some more thought.
@fishy-f1shy Oh my, there was a silly bug here indeed, any wheat or pests in the top left cell were not counted. (Just jam things!) This should be fixed now. Thanks a lot for the report! <3
I've fixed some issues for Firefox today, hopefully all major browsers are now supported.
Thanks @moosey, a comparison to The Witness is a huge compliment! I'm really glad that I managed to remind you of it. As I explain in an other comment above, I didn't really want to change the rules of the game in-between levels. (For example, if a rule of this world is that water leaks away without soil, why wouldn't it do that on the first level?) I don't remember if The Witness was adjusting the initial rules, or just extending them - the latter is probably just better game design.
As such, the only simplification I can currently think of is getting rid of the red tile for the first level, which is not necessary. I will continue considering this idea though, and I might add it in some form for a post-jam version.
Thank you too @secrt101, @coke, @adamwatters and @suchista! I see now how confusing it is to display the next color as opposed to the active one, and I'll probably end up changing it. I intentionally wanted to confuse the player here a bit, to create a sense of discovery and an a-ha moment... but it does seem to be the consensus that it's not a rewarding kind of confusion, so I'll probably do away with it.
Thanks @ravernt, @mistagiggles and @szieberth-adam!
Yeah, this is definitely not colorblind-friendly as it is. I can imagine a texture-based UI option (or a combination of textures and colors) for a post-jam version. In the meantime, I'll try to find a colorblind-friendlier palette that has something similar to these colors (to still keep the semantic connections between the tiles' function and color), and offer it as an alternative.
Thanks everyone! Following the suggestion that many of you have made, I've added a minor update that removes the red color from the first level's palette, to make things just a tad less confusing. This is the only simple change I could think of to make the progression a bit more gradual (see some of my comments above for my reasoning).
Thanks for the detailed feedback @lsy, I'm glad you enjoyed the puzzling aspect. The color "indicator" is meant to indicate the following color by design, I was intending this to be a sort of virtual palette or color picker that you can dip your brush into, so to say. But it's definitely source to a lot of confusion, heh.
I've also added an alternative color palette that might be more colorblind-friendly, you can toggle it in the bottom left corner. @szieberth-adam, would you mind trying it and letting me know if it's any improvement?
(I've picked a color palette that a [prominent colorblind researcher suggests](https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/) for scientific labeling, but I'm not sure how well it works here.)
Very interesting! It felt a bit like playing two different games. The bucket part was a bit underwhelming, and the 3d seemed wasted on it. The distribution view was beautifully done though, and it presented a very interesting breathing world with the water, air and food simulations. The timer for the distribution was an other interesting touch. A lot of thought-provoking ideas in this one all in all...
Maybe it could work as a bigger game if there were multiple minigames (such as the bucket part now), and there was a clearer visual separation between the main view (distribution), and all the other minigames. The current 3d transition doesn't really make sense.
Regardless, very nice for a compo entry!
I had a lot of issues with the web version, sadly. My cursor seemed to sometimes detach from my in-game pointer, which was very confusing, and I didn't seem to be able to complete a 360 degree turn, my rotation seemed to be locked in at something like a 120 degree arc? I'm not sure if these two issues were related. I also had a lot of glitchy audio and freezes, that got better over time, maybe that was related to some resources still loading.
Otherwise the game was fun, and the harvest-and-summon loop worked well enough. Very nice visuals too!
A gorgeous, unique art style, and it plays very smoothly too. One of my favourite takes on the theme this time around: a complex machine made for one purpose, to harvest. And you're not harvesting wheat or anything recognizable, just some abstract thingies, don't worry about, it's all for the mythical, capital-H Harvest.
Good call on moving to Extra to give the game the time it needed, because the result is a gem. Excellent game, well done!
Using the arm to move rocks was a bit annoying (and I regularly missed pests while operating it), but on second thought, even trying to vacuum up boulders fit this retro-futuristic aesthetic perfectly.
What a neat entry, the idea is very simple, but the amount of polish is impressive! Plays very well, with a nice difficulty curve too.
I ran into an annoying issue a few times where targets leave the screen without ever returning, sort of soft-locking you into losing. Something as simple as adding a button for a new contract could easily solve that, but I understand if the lore doesn't allow skipping :)
Online multiplayer jam entries are always very impressive. I had some (ok, a lot of) issues with lag, and controls being stuck, but I still had fun shooting at some carrots and broccolis.
Is there any sound? I see you didn't opt out of audio, but I couldn't hear anything.
Bravo, this game is a little gem! I really enjoyed playing it, and it's one of my favourites so far this event.
I think I fell into all the little traps and subversions you could hope for in a player. I went in blind. First apple harvest, I was thinking "this completion bar is very forgiving, they could have balanced it a bit tighter". Then at the wheat harvest, I was just glad that this is not just an apple harvesting game. During the first woodcutting scene, I remember thinking "heh, these sound effects make this feel pretty dramatic. As if I was the bad guy here!" I had around a 95% harvest rate across the board.
And then the "oh dear, what did I do?" moment at the end of year one. Chef's kiss. Then the realization that the progress bars just show what you need. The game was a bit repetitive, but at that point I just wanted to play it out. It took me 11 years to recover from the upcoming famine, down to 5 people at one time. I finished with 29 people and a pristine nature.
It's also really cool that you've included a link to a real-world effort about preservation. I always wanted to make one of my jam games more educational, tie it to some real-world phenomenon and include knowledge links and resources like that (there's plenty in my little notebooks of game concepts and ideas), but I'm yet to get around to it. My tree-based game for LD46, with some references to tree biology, was the closest I've gotten so far.
Seems like you're just about to hit 20 ratings, but you deserve more. I'm glad I could add one, thanks for the game!
I really liked the mix of 2d and 3d art (especially the pop-up effect of the cards - though I'm not a 100% sure if it is intentional, or just an amusing bug/artifact), and the "programmer art" is charming. A very impressive amount of content too for a jam game, a complex rule set, a tutorial, and split-screen multiplayer? Very cool.
Thanks for the heads-up about the issues of the embed, I was just about to mention them.
A very polished entry! I especially liked the subtle parallax effect, it worked really well together with the pixel art. A few events ago we had a "Deeper and Deeper" theme, where I feel like I've played 50 different games with this general premise, but I tried to not let that trauma influence my ratings here, heh. In fact, I think this was quite a nice take on the harvest theme.
Very cool! The mouse in the wheat field image is very strong, makes for a great atmosphere, and it's a refreshing non-literal take on the theme. I wish there was more running under the grains, and less following the clearing, but for a jam game, this is a great proof-of-concept that I can see working as a bigger game. And you still have a lot of content, with boss battles and all, very impressive.
I had a weird one-time issue on itch where I couldn't move on the first load, but then I played the embed without issues, and then itch worked fine too.
Very cozy and relaxing, well done! I probably spent the most time on this out of all the entries I've tried. My high score was only ~~118~~ 148, which feels low reading the other comments. I had fun nonetheless.
I too have made a minimalistic grid-based harvest puzzler that you might find a bit similar, but I went much more abstract.
Very educational, now I know what those data harvesters do with my phone. A cute little game, some audio could do it wonders. I really liked the background visuals, very polished and immersive.
(The embed does not seem to work btw.)
Well, this is both hilarious and sad. I tapped out in year 2!
What a gem this entry is! The puzzle mechanics work really well, the levels are nicely designed around introducing them, and the art is beautiful, consistent and polished.
I had some trouble with the level where you first get the projectile runes, downstairs you have to stop Ernest from hitting the tentacle on the right, then place a dash rune in front of the fire, and catch up with him to place the jump rune before he walks back into the fire. It seemed nigh impossible, given that you can't do a running jump while placing a rune, and he doesn't react to orders if he's walking the wrong way... I did manage in the end, but I felt that part could use a little balancing.
Anyway, I've grown quite fond of Ernest, the little rascal.
Very interesting line of sight mechanic. I wish there was a way to hold him in place while allowing yourself to move around and place runes, that might make it a bit more relaxed and fun. On the other hand, having to do things "together" just reinforced the tamer and pet working in tandem image.
I'm usually a bit hesitant to give high overall scores to entries that don't follow the theme, but this one deserves it across the board. Well done!
A nice little game, albeit a bit repetitive. I really liked the pixel art and the parallax effect, but it was quite disorienting that the ground moves at a different speed than the road that's on it! :) Very nice atmosphere though, would love to see some more mechanics to improve the replayability.
Gorgeous entry! The menu, tutorial and character selection screens were breath-taking, almost making the actual gameplay scene feel a bit tiny and crowded. I think zooming in a bit, and keeping a bit less empty space around the edges would have helped (played fullscreen in fullHD resolution, FWIW), it was a bit finicky this way. The slidy movement and the slightly unintuitive controls didn't help this aspect. Maybe this could all be a single button interface? Moving over something could pick up if there's empty inventory space, and a single interact button could plant / add applicable item / harvest as the current space allows.
But regardless, the atmosphere was top notch, very nice game overall.
I wish it had an AI opponent, but I know that's a tall order for a jam game.
A beautiful game. I didn't quite have the patience / finger strength to meet my weekly quotas, but I still had fun. Some audio would have been a nice touch, with how much polish the rest of the game has, I kept wondering if something's wrong that it's completely silent. (In fact, I still do.)
The tutorial/hint system works very well!
I too had trouble collecting more SSD after the first drop-off, even though the cargo counter did return to 0.
My my, it's raining handles and blades! It was however, not raining hilts so I couldn't fight at all on my first three attempts. And then I did craft a sword finally, but I wasn't sure how to use it. All in all, I found it a bit frustrating, but it has potential! Very nice character models, and the generated ground texture is charming too.
It seems like once you fall of the edges the game just seems to continue without any way to die or reset? I might have missed something.
So what do I do? I too, have flunked xenobiology.
I cut the patient open, and I kept poking the red thingies with the injection needle. It felt like the right thing to do! But it also felt like they wouldn't stop coming. Should I just tape them back up? I have tape.
Please respond quick, the patient is still here.
I really enjoyed the configure-ship-then-watch-simulation gameplay loop, it was a breath of fresh air. The visuals were intriguing, stylish but clean enough. For some reason, I was caught off guard by the simplicity of the gameplay after seeing the intricate visuals, but the mismatch only made this entry more memorable.
I'm not sure if I understand the update you added regarding income during waves - why would I earn money there? I mean, according to the in-game lore. It made perfect sense to me that money would be only paid out on delivery, not that I minded the extra income.
Looking forward to the post-jam version! I'd like to see an indicator for how far the next station is.
I can't believe that cargomantic vision is not yet an industry standard!
A neatly polished entry with an (initially) fun premise. The amount of packages was daunting, but I guess that's essential for the true delivery driver experience, huh? I gave up after 2 deliveries.
The web build ran OK on a potato btw, bonus points for that.
Wow! Who knew that one of the most innovative games I find this jam is going to be about storks! (_I'll allow myself the dig at the birds because I too have made a stork game :-p_)
I had a lot of fun with this. The UX is surprisingly good for a spreadsheet, and the puzzles were interesting enough for 5 levels. Well, I didn't much like the final level called Chaos (I found it too, well, chaotic), so I tapped out there off by 1 delivery total. I did manage to beat the developer's score on Wavy West Wind though, here's my solution:
!> A5 5, C9 3, E2 5, F9 4, J3 3, Score 120%
Ah, you actually have a web build, neat! I think you should edit your post to say this in this links section, because you might have people passing on your game seeing only "Windows" listed! (I'd just add the same link under a "HTML5" or "Web Build" label.)
This is a neat little game. Beautiful graphics and layout, so much so that the game loop felt a bit confusingly simply and static. I think some light animations, visual progress indicators and sound effects could do this game wonders!
I think I ran into a confusing bug a few times: new crew members didn't show up on the Delivery tab and I had to switch to an other tab and back to make them appear.
The concept is very nice otherwise, although the complexity is a bit intimidating at first. I think I didn't yet understand all the mechanics, but it's clear that a lot of thought went into the systems.
Actually, the WebGL build runs pretty alright on my integrated GPU! (Well, after the first 20 seconds or so.)
I really liked the minimalistic aesthetic of this one. It wasn't entirely clear to me which fish are enemies to be avoided, but that's fish life, eh?
A fun concept indeed, in a very nice package! The audio clues are really cool, but ultimately with them being less useful than the visual hints revealed in the bottom right (ie. you only hear "wrong pants", but the visuals tell you what pants to look for exactly), you eventually learn not to listen to them too much. I thought that was a missed opportunity, and it would have been also fun if you had to piece it together just based on the audio clues. (Maybe the visual indicator could be delayed to only reveal the correct color once you've ruled out all other options? Anyway.)
I liked the minimalistic yet polished graphics, and the web build ran very smoothly too. All in all a great submission.
Excuse me, are you telling me that in this post-apocalyptic wasteland where I live out of my battle car there is a canyon with a broken bridge over it that does **not** function as a jump ramp?! Literally unplayable.
Jokes aside, this is an incredibly polished jam entry, even for a 4-man team, bravo! Plays very smoothly, looks gorgeous, and it also fits the theme well. One of the top games this jam for sure.
Thanks guys! I've fixed some bugs and adjusted the pacing of the levels today, so you can get through the boring parts quicker.
Thanks a lot @zundou! I was also very happy with how the elevation shift animation turned out. Actually there's an entire second layer of clouds that's almost never visible due to a bug, but the other one works well enough on its own.
@kuggenhoffen thanks, it almost sounds like you had a hard time finding _something_ to complement, heh. But also, I can see how that's not an unfunny mental image. I do appreciate it either way!
@hatheus what babies? :-p
@jin9310 I've adjusted the speed increments a bit, they should be more noticeable now. The anti-air system might be a bit unintuitive - it rolls a random set of red "hit zones" around you, so you might not get hit at all - maybe that's why it looked broken. Originally I was planning to have this as a mechanic to add some strategic decision making (ie. whether to use evade or not), but in this jam version there's no point in not evading. Maybe in a post-jam version sometime!
Thanks @jose-bonilla! I appreciate the fair criticism, and I see where you're coming from, I definitely had a large backlog of polish and extra content that I didn't get around to until the deadline. At the end, my hubris got the best of me, I got my eyes too set on the compo this time. No regrets, but I think I'll be going back to the jam format next time around.
@daniboygg I absolutely agree that involving the mouse just for that one action is just bad UX, I'll be fixing it.
@sebastian-m I couldn't quite flesh out the lore here, but there's no babies involved, don't worry. In the end, there's only some breadcrumbs of information on the level ending screens, but my basic idea for the story was this: !> These storks are running some non-specific smuggling operation under the guise of delivering babies, hence the increasing resistance from the ground.
@arron-fowler Oh yeah, there's lots of juice missing. There's no new lives involved in this game though (see my spoiler tag above).
@chuckiee Yeah, it's a complete free-for-all with packages and houses, limiting that didn't even make it onto my to-do list during the compo, let alone near implementation. I tried adding difficulty in other aspects of the levels - but I see how a more fleshed out system for peaceful deliveries would also improve the transition experience later as the focus of the game shifts.
@jnaver thanks, I figured surviving the level is victory enough. I didn't have time for any grading system to begin with in the 48 hours, and at least this way every player is more likely to see the additional content on the later levels.
Thanks everyone for your feedback!
Thanks for the detailed feedback @honey-pony, I truly appreciate it. I'm glad that you liked it overall and kudos for hacking it! :) All my entries so far were pure vanilla JS, so the only barrier to modifying them is the messy jam code, heh. I'm glad you were interested enough to go through that trouble.
I don't disagree with your complaints, most of them are due to the compo time constraints. The anti-air seems confusing for many to begin with (there is a randomness element involved in whether it hits you or not), and I'm pretty sure there's some bug there related to its timeouts too - you are meant to have a few seconds to react.
Regarding the package spawn location, I intentionally moved it a bit higher as if the stork was dropping it from its beak, but iirc the actual hitbox calculation is via the actual player center. Since you're familiar with the internals already, you can flip the DEBUG global var to true for a little helping dot.
Ah, how do you do, fellow ~~kids~~ top-down stork game?
I really like your crisp and polished visuals, and the wind path mechanic is wonderfully quirky and unique! I wish you could interact with the clouds via them, that would just make sense! The gameplay descends into chaos quite soon, but I like how that contrasts the initial playful theme (I was very much going for the same subversion with my submission). A very cool entry overall.
A really neat concept, done with great polish! I found that typing out everything was a bit tedious, have you considered a version where the text scrolls by, and you only have to type key phrases? Maybe that could be a nice compromise between involvement and enjoyable gameplay.
During Ash's final letter, envelopes just flooded my screen - was that actually intended? If so, it was a very cool effect, but the way it was introduced (starting to overlap phoenix's last letter, mixing and covering envelopes) made me think it might have been a bug of sorts.
An other bug I ran into was that red letters kept showing up on words I was not yet typing - but reading the other comments here, I realize now that this is just due to allowing typing words out-of-order, which seems unnecessary. Either way, I still stuck around to read (well, write?) the whole story. A memorable entry, congrats!
Very nice entry! The use of the theme was very tasteful, just a background motive that sort-of explains the mechanics. And those mechanics were simple and fresh - made for a very relaxing puzzle.
The visuals were very pleasant too, clear yet pretty. The clouds slowing down massively on mouse hover (?) was a bit confusing (I thought it is some intentional bullet time effect to show them being collected, but it didn't consistently happen around my collectors), but it wasn't too distracting.
That's a rock solid entry! I loved the rolling movement effect, and it plays very smoothly. The underlying theme and ultimate objective of a hot-dog delivering itself is frankly hilarious (in fact, maybe I wouldn't spoil it already in the description, but give the player the gut-wrenching twist that _"I was the delivery all along!"_). Rocket Lion was a nice boss fight too. Well done!
I'm always on the lookout for physical LD games, so thanks for this! I liked the simplicity of the concept. I felt that the face-down version was a bit more fun to play, because it involved more guesswork and predicting your opponent, while face up there was too much calculation involved, that slowed the final rounds down immensely.
I think you're missing an alternative ending condition from the rules: since stack sizes are not limited, there might never be 13 houses established. In that case I figure play goes on as long as players have cards.
Bonus points for introducing me to Heckadeck.
A very polished entry all in all! I haven't seen many puzzle games this time around, and it was a welcome change of pace from all the time-pressured deliveries everywhere else.
I'd like to +1 the comments about the control scheme, but I had fun nonetheless!
"Very thematic.", heh. I'm always happy to see print-and-play submissions, they are a breath of fresh air. As you mention, the theme connection feels a bit thin, but otherwise it plays smoothly, and the rules are very neatly composed and laid out. Well done!
I found the version on itch quite buggy, alas (and the embed wouldn't even start). I couldn't drag most of the items on the conveyor belt, so it was hard to figure out what even is the objective. Confusingly, I could drag the packaging box - I guess that's meant to go to the delivery truck once assembled? I couldn't try, because I couldn't drag any jars.
The visuals were consistent and clean though, and the concept was fitting the theme, I would give this an other go if you made a post-jam version with some bugfixes and instructions.
I absolutely love the design of this, bravo! Super crisp and consistent, and it feels very polished. I managed to beat all the levels - more levels with a level selector would be very much welcome for a post-jam version.
I think I ran into a tiny bug on the last level (the one with the moons), where randomly in the middle of my umpteenth try I got a "delivery failed" message. I've never seen that screen until that point! :D Even though I did fail many levels - I just used R to reset, as the helpful on-screen prompt suggested.
Either way, a very charming game with an impressive amount of polish. One of my favourites this jam!
The QWOP of grappling hook-driven segmented truck games. Very cool and memorable. The soundtrack slaps!
I quite liked this one. Nothing like missing an enemy and chucking down the gem a long corridor, and having to run after it for ages... I felt this was a very tasteful take on the theme, not too on-the-nose, yet a rock solid connection that drives both the story and the main mechanic. Well done!
I never thought I'd say this, but nacho cheese is imba.
Hahaha, you have to hold the boot to run faster, brilliant! :D I had a lot of fun with this game, it might just be my favourite entry of this jam so far! Some of the mechanics were not too intuitive at first, I would have never figured out the chest upgrades without the instructions, but there were instructions, so hey.
Without upgrades, first I thought the attacks are a red herring, and you have to complete the objective ignoring the flowers. But in the end, it was much easier to just upgrade my bow quickly, and keep holding a boot whenever I can the rest of the time. (In fact, maybe the waves became too weak at that point, making the rest of the job not much of a challenge. Maybe this part could use some tweaking.)
Sadly a bug prevented me from seeing the victory screen: some monsters spawned in odd positions in the room, so they couldn't go down the tunnel, so the battle round never ended. But I did deliver the bomb, and it was still satisfying to do.
I really liked the visuals, the mechanics, as well as the dynamic music. The game feels like a very complete experience, well done!
Beautiful visuals, and the concept is fun! The door hitboxes seem to be super unforgiving though. I would have probably practiced a bit to get better, but annoyingly, I kept falling through the floor (entering an infinite fall)... sometimes immediately, sometimes a few houses down the road.
I really liked the mechanic of catching ledges with the box, it worked quite well! And you rarely see non-square or sphere shaped hitboxes in platformers, so kudos for that.
Otherwise the game was a bit too hard for me (I just can't get past the bouncy floor + red wall combo on level 1), but I still had a lot of fun!
An amazing level of polish, and impeccable style. I couldn't stop until I managed to beat all the levels. One of my favourites this jam, congrats!
One of my favourite entries this jam, bravo! Plays very smoothly, the mechanics are clear, intuitive and fun. I wish I could have built my island more! I'll check out the post-jam version soon - I hope it adds more levels and challenges.
I found the drag-and-drop mechanic with the cards a bit pointless and annoying (why not just click or say, right/dbl click to cast), but this is my only complaint.
A wonderful game all around. The super-minimal graphics are a reminder of how hard it is to create a well crafted puzzle game in a jam setting. I think you managed to walk a fine line here, creating levels where the words tell a story, yet the solutions are not entirely trivial. I particularly liked the simplicity and symbolism of the "deep breath" level, very tasteful. The dynamic music wasn't lost on me either.
All in all quite impressive - as usual -, for a compo submission, and support for custom levels is a cherry on top. I also enjoyed reading the comments here with the additional levels.
In the arc of your LD submissions, this one seems to circle back all the way to Fade, which was the entry that made me start following you. You're an inspiration, keep up the great work!
Flappy bat! A very cool mechanic, and I like the simple yet polished gameplay.
Very often (after restarting or when stopping in a nest) I triggered a bug where you could slide around the ceiling with the left/right keys without having to fly. It was a fun way to cheese some levels :-p
Bravo! A very simple concept executed brilliantly. A funny setting that fits the theme well, smooth gameplay and good puzzles.
I... did it. 14 minutes and 3 seconds, or so. I went through a lot of emotions in those 14 minutes, and I had a lot of time to think. I suffered, I was confused, I ... had... fun...? I was a worm, I was struggle manifest, I was QWOP without joints, yet I was only joints. I crawled, I flew, I went tail-first and head-down and back around, and all wiggly and squeezy. Then I crawled some more, and in the end, I flew.
An experience that will stay with me.
A unique, mind-twisting entry that does very well whatever it is it set out to do. Unlike any other, congrats.
Very nicely polished, I enjoyed it. (Shout-out to the polyomino game gang!)
If you added a Rotate button to the UI (or maybe rotating via double clicking), this would work perfectly well on mobile devices too! I also tried it on my phone, and that was the only issue stopping me.
Thanks everyone for the kind words and general feedback, each and every one of your comments is much appreciated!
Indeed there was a bug that allowed delivery requests to target the same planet they originate from, I've just pushed a fix for this.
Many of you complimented the music: the accolades belong to **yd** on opengameart.com, the opening track is ["Observing The Star" from here](https://opengameart.org/content/another-space-background-track). The second track is also by the same author, and the third one is by the user **Tozan** on the same site. There is an attributions file in the assets folder with links in the GitHub repo.
Thanks @floralvikings! A fullscreen toggle was planned, but it was very far from making the cut during submission hour, go figure. I went for a static fullHD (1920x1080) viewport in the end, and I actually can't reproduce your bug yet (heavy cargo ships display fine for me even in this bottom right corner), but I'll try to fix both of these issues in a post-jam version. The screenshot is much appreciated.
Thanks for the suggestions @peremily, @muri, @mncc8337, @magic-mike, @christian-zommerfelds, @destroyertech as well, in that post-jam update, I do plan on improving the cargo management, in particular: - it should be possible (and to boot, easy) to see the destinations of the current cargo - the current fullness of the ship should be visible while in transit between planets - it would be nice to be able to select existing cargo to see its details, and maybe even to jettison it :)
I'm not sure yet if these controls should go into the ship list bar on the top of the screen, or if they should be displayed next to the ship, but it's clear that they are needed.
I also plan to add some visual effect to identify and highlight which ship is currently selected.
Thanks @steffo, I think over the centuries the names of these Sicilian towns have gone through some minor changes ;)
Regarding cargo types, they currently do not have an effect. I had multiple ideas related to them (such as special placement rules, and some story elements), but they didn't fit into the jam timeline. For now, they are only there for immersion! And for filling the space in the UI for a nice balanced look. I mean immersion, yeah.
I am pretty confident I'll be creating a post-jam version that will utilize them though! Otherwise your idea to color code the destinations is quite elegant, and would have worked great for the scope as it is.
Limited space! Somehow I have the urge to give this very high scores in the theme category... Jokes aside, this is a very solid entry with a lot of content, and a very unique art style. Well done!
I'm not sure if this game is working as intended for me. I can click the next day button, or open the empty browser on the PC on the desk, but there's nothing happening. What are you supposed to do here?
Plays so smooooooooth! A bit hard to control once you get too much sideways momentum - as you warn in the description! -, but that just reminded me of real-life board sports. Very cool and fun to play, kudos! Loved the online leaderboard too.
Signed: Highscore #8.
Very cool concept, with charming graphics. I liked the mechanic that the voyage is just a textual report, it's a great shortcut for a jam game!
The pixel-hunting was a bit annoying sometimes, but what can you do if space is limited, eh?
What a scintillating color scheme! The whole map (a spaceship?) was beautiful, and its playful crispness fit the quirkiness of the concept. It's like playing Heat Signature on drugs.
I am a bit surprised that so many people reheat fish in their offices in the far future. That's a very bleak outlook for humanity. Great game though.
I did find the control scheme a bit annoying, frankly. Leftclick-and-drag to scroll and F to interact? Ouch. (Especially with how much scrolling you have to do on a map this size...) That's rather unconventional, and it took a lot of getting used to.
A very cute game! I couldn't hit the budgetary target - I think I just built too many spaceports, chasing that technology score. I had a lot of fun though, a simple yet polished entry, congrats!
(Something's definitely off with the line charts though, in my case the scale was too small, and my tech/attractiveness scores flew out on top way too soon.)
Oh, also, can we please talk about the uncle? Giving a nephew 250 bucks, expecting a 1500 (+500%) return in 50 days is very clearly criminal usury.
Haha, unexpected QWOP! It is very hard to step over that cat, I had to concede there. Very fun concept though!
If I can have one complaint: if the train takes a sharp right turn, things onboard should slide to the left, not the right, and vice versa :-p
This is super hard! Basically I don't seem to have enough space at the bottom of the screen to drag an arrow from, to make my box jump high enough. Once I got lucky with the spawn and got some spikes on the floor, but in cases where the guard moves side-to-side instead of up and down, this seems downright impossible.
It all looks very polished though, so it makes me think I might be missing something very obvious though, heh.
Ah yes, a classic tale of a medieval knight being shipwrecked in the middle of outer space. Fun concept!
I thought that on one hand the screen started to fade a bit too soon when you were running out of oxygen, on the other hand, I never made it back to the ship once it started fading on me, so it was probably fair, heh.
A very interesting entry. Modest in scope, yet ambitious in storytelling. I've only explored one ending, but I've been intrigued by the way you told the story.
Was there supposed to be any audio? I see you have the rating category, but I couldn't hear anything, and I'm afraid that might have detracted from the atmosphere :(
The embed displays this error: The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing: Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers) SharedArrayBuffer - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)
Any chance for a hosted HTML5 version somewhere?
Beautiful graphics and a story. Plays pretty smoothly too, though I did have some odd issues with rooms not being illuminated at first in the HTML version.
Fittingly for a ghost, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I found !> both sides of the old photograph, and the diaries/notes of the kids, even the stack of Edmund's paintings,
but what then?
For a minor improvement suggestion, I think movement should be blocked while you are interacting with something. A few times I wandered off in the background, and couldn't progress until I found my way back to interact again - which is tricky to do with the view blocked!
Hm, I also seem to have gotten stuck, but I got much further than the previous commenter. I could walk around and interact with object fine (even solved a very out-of-the-blue chess puzzle!), but once I get to the hallways with the doors, I seem to be stuck in a loop - either switching between the two hallways with the "9351" or the "427" doors, or just reappearing in the same one I was just in.
Something tells me that's a puzzle to figure out, but I couldn't get anywhere with it. I'll probably try this again a bit later. It's a very intriguing game!
The embedded version gives an error for me. Uh oh! - It says :) ("If you're seeing this error, it means I can't find your index.html file.")
Ah, this is a really cool game, but indeed it seems like -based on the comments on your itch page- that it was released months ago? I know the rules of the Jam are very flexible, but maybe not this much :)
0:43! Frankly, that's after a lot of restarts, I kept running into a bug (?) where the shape stopped responding to my clicks, seemed like it was stuck "glued" to the wall - a couple times it was nowhere to be seen, I probably clipped it outside of the play area somehow.
Nonetheless, a game that is captivating, and elegant in its simplicity. Well done!
Ta tuberatam nictum to you too, good sir. Very cool, simple and straightforward, but I enjoyed completing it. Graphics and audio are both very polished, great entry.
A jam game with online p2p? Wow.
I only tried the local multiplayer, but it works quite smoothly. The objective feels almost too simple, but I guess as long as it's just as simple for your opponent, it's fine :) Good call on making the playing field loop, this way a big punch doesn't lose you the game immediately, you just have to learn to "lean into it": instead of trying to get back, it seems like it's even faster to just keep going forward until you loop around, and you're back in the circle in the blink of an eye.
Fun!
This is really cool! Charging the ingredients partially to limit their power is a great twist on the summoning recipe genre, and I found it quite intuitive. It is very rewarding to see a fine-tuned spell "unfold". The cat theme is a bit surprising, but why not!
Well done!
Oooooh, Math in JavaScript: The Game? Looking forward to it!
Very cool atmosphere! I also had increasing amounts of lag in the web build as the number of blocks grew. I'm afraid I've softlocked myself by digging away the lowest of black blocks, but maybe I just need to look elsewhere.
I will be coming back to this one for sure.
Punching multiple enemies in one swoop is very satisfying! I found the levels a bit repetitive, but I still had fun.
I also noticed that when you walk downwards, your right hand is still on the right side of the screen, which is a bit confusing indeed.
I really enjoyed this one! Very simple concept with beautiful polish, bravo! It really needs a give up / reset button though, I kept having to reload the page, because I'm apparently bad at guessing words, but I wanted to keep playing.
It's great to see a more serious entry. I felt that the visuals and the music were sometimes quite in contrast with the serious or somber story (especially during the boss fight and the credits roll), but it was still impactful all in all.
I'm glad I went in blind, I feel that discovering what's going on made for a much better atmosphere than reading the synopsis on this page. Maybe you could put that under a spoiler tag?
Very unique and complete entry, bravo!
Hello and welcome everyone! I've made a rather simple game this time around, as I was very short on time due to other responsibilities. This was made in around 17 net hours, including a complete pivot in my scope around 6 hours in. (My original idea was that the spells would include gestures that you had to draw out freehand, but my mouse-drawing prototype was getting out of hand in complexity, while also not being particularly fun to use, so I decided to just cut my losses and switch to stationary candles.)
I'm looking forward to receiving your feedback, especially about the handbook as a game mechanic. I'm working on a larger game that features a similar manual that you have to repeatedly consult (or eventually learn by heart), so if anyone has any strong thoughts about the mechanic, do share, and don't pull your punches.
Share your final scores below!
In the upcoming couple of days I'll try to add a basic in-game tutorial, so you can just jump in without having to read this submission page.
Thanks everyone!
@cmakota mic capture with spoken words is an intriguing idea. Maybe with the right speech recognition library pulled in it could even fit into the Jam's confines. On the other hand, I can also see it ruining any serious atmosphere in exchange for some bonus points in innovation. But I'd love to try playing a game like that.
@valentinwb - you're absolutely right in that there's really no reason not to have both the book and the play area open at the same time. It was more of a game design decision to not do them side by side: I really wanted the action of consulting the handbook to be heavy and meaningful, both to build atmosphere, and to hopefully motivate players to learn some spells by heart. But as I mentioned in my top comment, I'm carefully reviewing the handbook mechanic itself, and what you're saying feels like a very reasonable request.
@kallico - Having "meaningful" runes or some sort of logic to the words was very much on my roadmap, but it was one of the first things to go when I faced time constraints. For example, I figured that changing single words could unlock more powerful versions of the same creature (reusing assets for these would have been a neat jam-friendly bonus). Most importantly, this would allow for a "discovery mode", where you can guess valid summon phrases that are not yet in the handbook - my first concept had a handbook with mystery pages that you had to unlock/fill. But the scope had to be cut heavily, so instead we ended up with these nonsensical but moderately funny one-liners :)
@klemen - Thanks! Re: seeing more, I always dream up post-jam versions of my submissions, to which I never get around... but never say never!
@lehmy thanks for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate it! Regarding the organization of the handbook, in this case I intentionally went for a "clunky" UX where you have to turn the pages one by one - I wanted to evoke the feeling of frantically rifling back and forth the pages of the book. Also, flipping through the pages being so time consuming was meant to be a motivation for players to memorize spells to gain a competitive edge - but I guess without a scoreboard, and given all the other shortcomings of the entry, few people attempted multiple rounds - you might have been the only one, heh.
So this was a balancing act between forcing the handbook to be in the focus, while not being so annoying to destroy gameplay. But for the general case (and the other title I'm working on) for this handbook mechanic, I'll definitely prioritize usability.
@thelastslowpoke and @batisdark - I think there's some bug involving shift and capital letters (I am processing keyboard events manually, which in hindsight was probably a bad idea, and I should just style and overlay some standard HTML inputs instead) - but actually you don't need to properly capitalize the spells at all :)
Thanks for submitting your scores @monica @ian-mcd @thelastslowpoke and @noobman64, I've added a leaderboard to the bottom of this submission page!
@thelastslowpoke I don't see why it wouldn't! (List updated.) This is _exactly_ the kind of viral traction we need! 5330 is very respectable btw, I'm not sure if I could do better myself!
A very nice game, but I was super confused by the UI in the beginning. I thought the cards in front were some sort of spells you can cast, while they are just an indicator for what spells you currently have active...
For anyone else struggling with the controls: the main control area is actually the row of spells on the right. The first click selects the spell, then a second click on the main play area selects the radius with which to deploy it. Once deployed, the spell will show up as a card in the middle - this area is mostly just an indicator of how much is left of the spell (color fades to gray when it's about to run out), but you can also right-click the cards to dismiss the spell and make room for a new one.
Ignoring the UX issues, the graphics are actually very nice and stylish. A straightforward idea with a lot of polish, well done!
I've been rather satisfied with Josh, but I can't beat the boss. He seems to dash through my army of Josh.
Josh.
I'm not sure I understood the tasks properly, I couldn't summon anything. Is the altar the pentagram on the ground? (It doesn't seem to do anything when I collect the clothes on it.) Or is it by the red demon guarded by the angels in the other room? In that case, 2 minutes is not enough for me to deliver three pieces there :)
Movement was a bit janky in the web build (being able to reduce the mouse sensitivity helped!), and the physics are a bit annoying and glitchy (you drop objects way too far, and they have a tendency to fall through the floor around the pentagram), really polished visuals though, well done!
Very polished and quite fun! I'd definitely come back to play more levels.
The villagers rebuilding certain structures while the city is under siege was a nice touch. The game was a bit too easy after the first barracks fell, but I still had fun watching the carnage.
Oh wow, this thing slaps. Very very stylish and polished, you can't help but laugh even though the subject matter is a bit disturbing.
I think a 1 player mode (a true Candy**man** vs Megacops mode, really) would work just as well.
Ah, this submission page being in English made me look for a language selector button for too long, but looking at the other comments, it seems like it's just not available in English. Shame, because it looks really polished at a glance!
Ah, this is quite hard! Distinguishing between yellow and orange is a bit tricky to begin with, but the main difficulty comes from the sheer amount of time you have to survive - there seem to be more bad signs than good, and the meteors get way too many and quick to dodge. I couldn't beat it :(
I dig the visual style though, very polished and consistent!
I had a lot of fun with this, but the web build kept freezing on me :( (The errors in the browser console -mostly complaining about memory limits and frame buffer sizes- were too numerous to copy and paste, but if you think that would help, I can give it an other go.)
Freezing issues aside, this is one of the more complete games I've played this jam! The little intro that tells a story, a variety of monsters with increasing rarity and difficulty, (I'm assuming) randomly generated dungeons, a lot of nice touches! The main mechanic of playing as a summon that has to gather resources for better summons is quite fresh too, and it makes for a great casual loop.
I think the most obvious avenues for improvement are: - better precision when shooting (currently there seem to be only a few angles you can shoot at, but there might be a difference in outcome based on your actual mouse position? It's rather confusing.) - better enemy AI (they clump and get stuck around corners too easily) - more sound effects (shooting / hitting, and maybe basic monster sounds would be doing a lot already)
Nonetheless, quite fun as it is, congrats!
Wow those policemen marching in through their emoji meat shields and one-shotting everything are scary! I got ~600. Simple and straightforward game, but I had fun!
Very enjoyable! Clicking to select only seems to work 1 out of 2-3 tries, which made it a bit confusing in the beginning, but once I figured out what's going on, it played very smoothly. The yin-yang leaf and bone resource system and the symmetrical armies they fuel works really well too.
Wow, talk about a picky audience. The DJ takes a short break to pet a dog, and the party dies? Sounds like it wasn't a great party to begin with.
Fun entry, very unique.
I really like the aesthetics and mood of this one. Very polished!
+1 vote for a restart level button :) Actually, speaking of buttons, the button to toggle the wizard list seems kind of pointless - I don't think you'd ever want it closed, and it's just an automatic first step every level to open it.
Beautiful art! I had a bit of trouble with getting around - movement was a bit slippery, and my own summons often blocked the way. (I think you should be able to just walk through your own summons.)
I had fun nonetheless, nice entry!
I had lots of fun, but rather soon I was one-shotting everything. Is it possible to win and reach some end screen? I figured maybe putting together a "complete" set could be an objective, but it seemed like an impossibly long time to wait for the opportunity, given the many options.
Well done!
I really liked the atmosphere of this one. It feels like every jam there's a few random entries that are "just" little circle simulations or auto-battlers, but this one actually fits the theme well, and the microscope / petri dish view is a very atmospheric setting. (Nice bloom effect too.)
I was a bit confused by the upgrade process at large. I get it that you only get to upgrade when your creatures lose, but what determines which updates are upgrade-able?
Ah, what a lovely little game! I have to say I was rather frustrated with the timer. This would be such a relaxing puzzler without it! The game is rather slow paced, and the maze is large, so losing 3-4+ minutes of progress deep into the maze is not a very fun experience. Nonetheless, the puzzles are very well designed (I especially like that backtracking is necessary), and the characters fit both the puzzle mechanics and the jam theme very well.
Congrats!
That's pretty cozy! Very nice visuals and sounds. I'm not sure what's the end goal if there's one, but I had a bit of fun just clicking around and watching life just happen. The credits sneaking in slowly was a nice touch - it fit the relaxed "sit back and watch" atmosphere.
BTW it looks like the descriptions for left clicks and right clicks here are swapped, aren't they? Whatever it was I dropped with the left click made the bacteria divide (seemingly regardless of the random type that was dropped - is there a difference?), and the other stuff seemed to have turned them into food.
Very smooth driving, albeit a bit hard to control. The fractal space is very interesting and makes for a cool atmosphere.
I think when you're backing up, left and right should be reversed so that your car behaves more like a real car. This was my only frustration with the controls.
A very unique mechanic, but it works very well, and the flock is surprisingly intuitive to control. Very cool entry!
BTW the jam version froze up my browser for around a full minute - it looked like it was waiting for some resources to load, but once it got started, it played smoothly. (Played it on Chrome latest with an Intel Iris XE integrated GPU)
My wife loved this one! :) We had quite some fun - it plays rather smoothly actually once you figure out what's going on. Rather unforgiving though - I never managed to save more than 4 friends. Man those slaughter scenes are brutal...
It does almost feel like as if it was made with some other theme in mind though :)
Very cool atmosphere. The pixel art looks great and ominous - but so much so that I was a bit let down by the eventual gameplay. That said, I still enjoyed clicking my way to the Dusty Nothing. But what you write about originally having a different scope in mind makes sense - so if that was the way to wrap it up for the jam, so be it!
I had multiple minor issues with the UI, such as: - the scrollbars in the Upgrades menu were moving all over the place when I tried to scroll. (As if there was an order to them, and scrolling to the end of one panel scrolled the next panel one instead?) - the button hitboxes/active areas are very small, and it is not obvious where the cursor is pointing - it was easy to accidentally start the next level, due to all the clicking, and the Engorge button appearing in the middle of the fight area
But these are all minor things, it played very smoothly otherwise! I have no idea how would one get enough "Essence" for some of the upgrades.
@imberny it is now! Thanks for your patience :)
@n00n-m00n if it starts over that probably means you didn't manage to cover the 50 percent it asks for. (Or there's a bug - it's not unheard of. If you want me to take a closer look, open the dev console, and send me the output in a pastebin pls.)
Note that the task only asks for the sunny areas, so you can ignore the the left ~quarter of the map.
We've just reached 20 ratings, thank you everyone!
@nrankin13, @fabula-rasa, and some others: I see where you're coming from - clearly there's not much gameplay here. This was something I decided to embrace early on in the jam, and instead I went for "vibes" and a bit of education (I've certainly spent way too much time during the 72h jam reading scientific papers and lectures about post-apocalypse scenarios and biological succession, heh). It's certainly a gamble, but I'm glad that the atmosphere resonates with some of you.
I even opted out of the "Humor" category altogether, but that was not an option for "Fun" - I'm sure we'll see rather low scores there.
The final score is indeed based on completion speed, and the coverage you achieved in the first minigame. I might include a breakdown of the scoring if I get around to adding more post-jam updates.
Any accolades for the music should go to Brandon Morris on OpenGameArt: https://opengameart.org/content/creepy-forest-f (I'm also mentioning him in the repo under attributions.)
This is a very cozy little strategy game, I had a lot of fun with it. Plays very well and looks great too.
I gave up on the level where you start off with 3 enemies and 4 more join in the second round. I think I needed to rethink my brute-force strategy. It would be nice if you could re-spec at the beginning of levels, or at least on the death/retry screens. Otherwise a level selection view would be cool, so that one could at least see their progress, or return to specific levels.
Wow, the hints and the strategy recommendations in the comments made me realize I didn't even scratch the surface of this game yet. [This is me reading them.](https://i.imgflip.com/96kiyn.jpg)
I'd love to see some screenshots (or playthrough videos) of how other people build their anthills, I couldn't get very far without drowning my ants :(
I kinda love the minimalistic UI in contrast with the complex systems, makes you think of Dwarf Fortress. It'd be cool if a post-jam update added a version with a less steep learning curve. Maybe the mechanics could be introduced one by one, or there could be levels with simple progressive goals like "generate 3 grub" or "make your workers survive the next rainfall". But I guess having the different difficulties and modes available is pretty good for a jam submission already!
A Line Rider-style 2d skateboarding game? Sign me up! The quicktime system was cool, but I wish there was more freedom in what tricks to do. Plays very smoothly though, and it's a very unique entry, well done!
I really loved the visuals and atmosphere of this one. Kudos for the phones-first aspect ratio too, it's a breath of fresh air amongst the submissions.
Hehe, these stupid fish never see that bait-swap coming!
I caught 65 out of 32 ;) Well done, such a complete entry - intro, menu, scoring system, physics sim, multiple levels, endless play mode as reward for completion, just great all around! I had a lot of fun with it.
My stupid standard issue goo gun attracted furniture more than goos, but what can you do.
Ouch, the semi-inverted flight controls were a mind-bender for sure! (up-down reversed but left-right maintained) Beautiful graphics though and a cute concept.
Wow, this is one of my favourite entries so far this jam. I've played for probably half an hour at least, I beat it on the 4th try.
Sure, it could have more levels, better end-game balance, but I think for a jam game it does everything great: plays super smoothly, has a story with a freaking intro sequence, cool art, custom music, and it even fits the theme well. Well done!
I especially liked the music on this one, it worked great with the rhythm of the levels and the sound effects. Great vibes!
The gameplay was a bit finnicky. Once things started moving, it was very hard to interact with the blocks or move them. And I agree with some comments here, the infinite creatures really lend themselves to cheesy "let's wait for them to fill up the space and it will work eventually" strategies :)
Can't you see I'm shaking this man down for his personal property?! Heh. Fun dialogs, and a cute game overall. Clearly a lot of work went into the systems, but I'm a bit confused about how much of it is "RPG maker MV game" stuff, and how much was made specifically for the jam. Either way, it plays smoothly, and it has quite some content, well done!
The inventory and party management systems felt a bit overwhelming, and I would have never tried the Esc key to begin with if it wasn't for the comments here. Some minimal in-game hints could go a long way with helping the player.
@gametrodon thanks for elaborating, I appreciate the transparency! And don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to imply that some systems coming with RPG maker is a bad thing. It's the end result that counts!
I think if you went with a single NPC, having a big party would have less weight. Maybe that's a "smarter" choice for a proper game, but I think for a jam game it's fine to intentionally have some UX friction to emphasize a strange aspect, such as the ever-growing party. Which I think in this case goes well with the mice / tiny creatures theme anyway. Kudos!
Nice one! Print-and-play entries are always a breath of fresh air. The core revealed-then-hidden hierarchy concept is interesting. I liked the explicit challenge / contesting mechanic - it gives some interesting room for bluffing.
I wish there were more ways to change the hierarchy, it would make it a bit more challenging to keep track of, and it would make cards like Peek more valuable. To add yet more of a challenge (at the cost of introducing some hidden variables), maybe some cards could even change the hierarchy without revealing the information to everyone.
One suggestion for the manual: having the hierarchy laid out as suggested, in a line between the players, can be rather confusing (as from one player's perspective it's ascending, from the other's it's descending), maybe laying them partially overlapping (ie. "stacked") is the simplest intuitive fix for this.
I also couldn't start the embedded version. The last few lines of the console logs say this: ``` [libil2cpp] ERROR: Could not open Il2CppData/Metadata/global-metadata.dat AntOfTheRoadWebVersion.framework.js.br:9 RuntimeInitializeOnLoadManagerInitializer: Failed reading 'RuntimeInitializeOnLoads.json' AntOfTheRoadWebVersion.framework.js.br:9 RuntimeInitializeOnLoadManagerInitializer: Failed reading 'ScriptingAssemblies.json' AntOfTheRoadWebVersion.framework.js.br:9 [Physics::Module] Initialized SinglethreadedJobDispatcher. AntOfTheRoadWebVersion.framework.js.br:9 No GlobalGameManagers file was found at , quitting player! AntOfTheRoadWebVersion.framework.js.br:9 Failed to initialize player ```
A very nice entry! Being stuck in a room while things are happening outside is a really nice storytelling device for a game with jam constraints.
First I thought the goal was getting out of the room, and I was a bit confused by the dialog on the stairs saying we should wait a bit, but I quickly figured out how to progress.
It can be very hard to bring humor into a serious story like this, but you still kind of managed it with the cake dialog options in the beginning. I almost wish that there was an entirely cake-based playthrough that allows you to skip the main storyline (a la Far Cry), but I guess that would be disrespectful to the serious theme.
So all in all a very complete entry, high scores across the board, well done!
Call me old fashioned but there's just something menacing about a school of fish breaking down your front door... Fun entry, plays smoothly too!
A beautiful game, and it's just a lot of fun to play, everything works very smoothly. Really liked the procedural maps (and names) too!
I wasn't sure if there's an end goal though - I stopped around level 5 with most of the upgrades bought.
Cute entry, and the gameplay is very smooth. I wasn't sure if the planet turning white after the crash is a visual effect (the planet exploding?) or just a bug with the textures :) Either way, the game looks great overall.
Hm, there seems to be a bug where you can't cast a line anymore after you buy the length upgrade? Either way, fun entry with a lot of promise. I think seeing the fish underwater makes for a very satisfying hunt and reel experience that most other fishing games don't have. I'd love to play a more complete post-jam version of this.
That's probably the prettiest Pico-8 game I've ever seen. Very cool! Just hard enough to be challenging but still fun. I love the added touch of the minimap, it's very helpful.
Oh I wanted this to keep going! On the other hand, hats off for picking a jam-appropriate scope, and polishing it. Very nice atmosphere. I hope you're expanding on this in a post-jam version!
He who smelt it...!
This is a neat little entry with a lot going for it, a nice crafting system, multiple scenes with randomly generated treasures - I think if you improved the movement inside the mines, and added an end goal to strive for, it would be rather enjoyable. As it is, as others have pointed out, trying to move and dig around is rather frustrating, I ended up just aiming for resources right below my feet, because climbing to a higher row or digging sideways was such a hassle.
The "send back resources" option didn't make much sense to me, why not just bring them along when going back to town?
A beautiful entry! Just as I was about to give up on it ever ending, the moon appeared out of nowhere! I finished it in 5:55 with all colors at 100% - but I'm not sure what actually triggered the ending. Is it something you have to find on the map? Or a certain number of tears you have to collect?
It could use some quick balancing: I got all 3 upgrades in the first ~20 seconds, then I spent 5 minutes just chasing tears. The sucking whirlwind is clearly overpowered, once you get that, there's not much point to using any other skill. Is the cooldown supposed to be just a couple of seconds? I think that could easily be increased 5 or 10-fold.
Yay, managed to beat this! Unexpectedly much fun. And that's despite the fact that the aiming seems to be all over the place - sometimes the ball goes off in wildly different directions than the swing direction arrow suggests - I guess because it also considers the distance of the player and the ball?
I had a very enjoyable moment, when I thought I was soft locked, the ball seemingly forever bouncing vertically on a jump pad, but I managed to bat it out of the air and continue the hole. I don't know if you set it up like that intentionally, but it's a testament to your "engine" regardless.
Oh, and I can imagine it's reassuring to know -since you put the dev effort into the animation- that yes, I did hit the tree on the first level :)
A very polished and atmospheric game. Very impressive for a 1-person compo entry, hats off! It feels a _bit too much_ like Dome Keeper / Dome Romantik which leaves a sour taste (but hey, that's what the Innovation score is for), but it's a great game nonetheless.
Short and fun! Great SFX curation, looks very polished, and I didn't come across any bugs either.
You might as well increase the mine damage, as it is, you really don't need to use torpedoes, you can just truck through everything - even on the last level you'll be left with 1 hp.
As others said, this looks like a good base for a more complex game.
Very cool Tron-like aesthetic. I don't know what I'm doing or why, but it was very easy to get started, and it's quite fun to play. The online leaderboards are always a nice touch. Very polished, bravo!
Very clever concept. I agree with some commenters that a mini-map could be very useful, but maybe that would make it lose its mind-bending charm.
I liked the clean visuals, and the overall polish.
A cute little title, looks great and plays very smoothly. (I did get the camera locking bug in the web build, but it seemed to go away after a couple of times - appreciated the heads-up.) I was conflicted about the number of resources: on one hand, I always find it annoying whenever a game world has exactly the amount of resources that are needed for my quest, it feels cheesy and immersion-breaking. On the other hand, somehow I also felt disappointed when I realized that I don't need to bother trying to get the crystals from the trickier locations, as there's plenty of low hanging fruit around :)
I think this is a good base for a larger game - a bit of story could really tie it together, something about how we crash landed, or what mystery the area holds. Maybe the giant staircase tower thingie could have something interesting at the top, rather than a single crystal.
This entry has a lot of nice things going for it. A neat blend (no pun intended) of cocktails to learn and to discover, custom art, and randomly generated tasks. It feels very polished overall, quite impressive! I especially liked Gargaro's character art, heh.
Looking forward to the recipe overview page in the post-jam version, if there's one in the works. I guess that feature would be needed to read about the recipes you've unlocked during the way?
A minor typo: the encyclopedia talks of Crystalline, but the ingredient is labelled Crystallite.
That was certainly interesting! A rather surreal experience. I can't help but shake the feeling that you started out with some weird movement or floating bug, and you decided to build a game around the effect :) But regardless, it kind of works! I really enjoyed swimming through the black boxes, and using momentum to make the awkward "leaps of faith" to the other blocks was kind of meditative. It's a shame it's rather short, I would have enjoyed seeing what kind of agility challenges you can come up with given the simple premise.
Was there supposed to be audio? I couldn't hear anything.
The title made me hope for some more story- or character-driven adventure, and I felt a bit let down by the lack of that, but I think it's a good starting point for building something more complex!
@lisek-gagatek @buckmeister There's only one thing to do: dig. Click a location to send a worker there (in the top left you can switch between 3 available workers to speed things up), which will reveal a small area of the layer below. Once enough of the current level has been digged up, a new level will start, and you can follow along the story.
I was planning a more involved gameplay loop, but, well, this is what fit into the jam. If I get around to a post-jam update, I'll certainly add an in-game tutorial.
@fireslash yeah, looks like it is also bugged in Firefox :( (At this point I have to ask myself, maybe my reference browser of Chrome on Windows is actually the bugged one? Heh.) I'm thinking I'll just rewrite all the layering visuals with a different method. I'll give it a go one of these evenings, see how much of a hassle it is...
@jordantanner Thanks! The dig results are indeed random. The only reward is the visual reveal - some parts of the dig site might be more interesting than others.
@tsaot There's a chance you also ran into the browser compatibility issue I'm facing. Looks like the visuals (revealing parts of the layer below) only work properly in Chrome on Windows for now.
@kristinamay Thanks to your comment, I've taken an other look at this bug, and discovered an easy fix - this is now applied to both the jam and post-jam versions, and **now it should work across all browsers and platforms!** (@alexis-brochec I'm afraid you might have run into a different non-visual bug, but maybe your case is improved now too.)
To everyone else, if you were frustrated or confused before due to not seeing any visual progress, maybe you want to give the fixed versions an other chance now. @lisek-gagatek @buckmeister @jordantanner @tsaot @quinn @fireslash @devilxrom @librory
Apologies for the confusion!
Thanks @sam-gorman, I think you're spot on regarding the gameplay. I see the problems myself, I just didn't find the time :) Good insight on the digging being the focus - I was intentionally going for this subversion where a cookie cutter management game is slowly taken over by the ominous story, but for that effect to work best, it does need a more fleshed out strategy part. I'd like to touch this up in the near future.
During these jams I regularly set my scopes too large, and over the last few jams I had a couple of games (LD 53-54) where I spent too much time on the game mechanics to have proper stories - this time I intentionally swapped my priorities.
I liked the vibes of this. No explanation, no intro, just a mysterious platform where you dive deep. What for? Not sure, but the beats are on - let's get blasting!
Nice one, I'm really digging the retro vibes of this. I do kind of wish the planets were circular though hehe. The tutorial didn't seem to help too much, but once you figure things out it plays very smoothly!
*Does one person have to name hundreds of towns a day? I wonder.*
On the meta-level, I really dig the concept of taking a simple accessory and mechanic (drawing cards from a standard deck in this case), and weaving an experience around it with the power of words and some illustrations. And boy, does this rulebook shine with polish! I did feel there was a bit of a mismatch between the art style of certain illustrations though. How much of the art was curated, and how much of it is original? You mention in the description that you had the chance to lean into graphics a lot more, but at the same time you've opted out of the graphics ratings, so I'm just curious.
I didn't find the time to actually play through this, but I read the rulebook with great interest. I was a bit confused by the stages of the throne: are you supposed to keep going back to chapters 3 and 4 until you've gathered enough money, or (if you failed the minimum requirement once) just keep doing dailies without the joker until you can go to chapter 6?
I liked how the mood turned darker as the game went on, fitting the theme both literally and figuratively. Also how the gameplay mechanics kept evolving as part of the story. A very unique entry, well done!
Those stupid ghosts were spawn-camping me. In ghost culture, this is considered a d**k move.
Very nice game with lots of polish. Extra points for the intro!
Just wonderful. I played the jam version, and it was already so polished! Absolutely loving the monochrome aesthetic and the silly concept. One of my favourites this jam, I had lots of fun with it.
+1 vote for fullscreen mode.
Finally! When the theme was announced, I was afraid we would be flooded with various deep dish pizza simulators with online social features. I am baffled that it took me trying and rating ~45 games before I finally came across this.
And the fact that you can add layers with different toppings and make the pizza truly great and truly deep, is, just, well - chef's kiss.
Please vote for my pizza.
cheers,
Chef Ditam
*(I drew my pizza expecting the play button to go forward rather than backwards...)*
Age of War! Very cool mechanic. Control was a bit clunky (probably a mix of the unintuitive cursor hitbox, the slow animations, and the large cell size for placing mushrooms), but it was an awe-inspiring sight to watch the mushroom towers battle it out. Probably noone should have a range larger than the viewport, it makes it hard to follow the action.
It's a nice interactive story. Standout writing and a very polished art style too. Well done!
The background soundtrack goes unreasonably hard sometimes :) But I guess that fits the absurdity of the real-life inspired story.
Oh, the ice (?) regrowing at the entrance while you're digging was a sneaky touch - I lost a couple of times because I was cutting it too close, and I didn't have time to dig myself back out. These little touches like that, the guitar option, or the colorful spaceship just chilling by the entrance give this game a very cool character, something that sets it aside from many of the other "dig for resources and bring them back to the surface before time runs out" games I've seen this jam. Well done!
(The sci-fi + steel guitar music combination reminded me of Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Firefly, there's something about the open frontiers of space and the wild west that just make this vibe work so well...)
Very atmospheric! The diver animation and the harpoon mechanic are both very nicely polished. I wished the enemies were less static - and then I got swordfished, serves me right...
The skippable tutorial is a great touch too.
I've found the Abyss! I wasn't sure if the game has an end, and I was just about to give up on it, as I've already mapped trenches of ~3000meters, but then I stumbled across the deepest one.
I was a bit confused in the beginning, maybe because the timers are so tiny, but it was smooth sailing (no pun intended) after a couple of minutes. I felt that the depth gradients were a bit too chaotic, and the colours of the waves a bit confusing (in most games you expect darker coloured waters to be deeper), but I still had quite some fun.
Great SFX - some chill music could go well with it. A very unique triangulation game, well done!
Baby you already said no to chocolate cake! I only asked again as a joke and now it's a yes?!
Very fun entry, I enjoyed falling through many levels. I like to imagine that the fish cake was a hilarious misunderstanding between the modeler and the game designer, hehe. Good job!
A clever puzzler, but I found it quite frustrating to play in practice. Maybe because I was playing the web build, but one out of every ~10 touches was only registered with a big enough delay to mess up the whole level - as the mechanic is very unforgiving. And then towards the edges of the blocks you bounce off at an angle - which frankly just seems unnecessary and mean... It took me 77 attempts to pass level 2 (tempted to make a joke about actual cardiac arrests here). The following 3-4 levels were considerably easier, but once I saw moving pieces, I just had to tap out. Nice option to have the autocomplete though, it allowed me to complete the story. The male voice actor knocked it out of the park with his performance.
Even if I didn't have too much _fun_, I have to respect the artistic vision here: the theme of heartbeats resonates throughout the game mechanic of precision timing, charging and bounces, echoed by the colours and the shapes of the levels themselves - clearly this is very well crafted, and one of the most complete entries I've encountered so far this jam. Bravo!
Lovely little game, Pico8 entries are always so magical. I enjoyed beating the (assuredly) evil anglerfish. (Although the victory message was utterly confusing, as it says "I'll" beat the boss, and that I should dive again - but I was happy to see other commenters seeing the same.) Unfortunately just ignoring most enemies and diving deep is a surprisingly effective tactic :)
I wish there was diagonal movement, but otherwise it plays super smoothly. The soundtrack is great too.
The lack of a retry button was irksome, because the good writing made me come back for more and more attempts. I _think_ I got what I could in the end (he did go off record about what he found), but I only got 45 story points for it, whatever that means. So who knows! (Maybe a complete victory would involve him going on record with the whole thing? Now that I've "groundhog dayed" the answer out of him, I'm less motivated to try for this ending.)
Either way, it was an enjoyable detective game of sorts. I kinda wish the answers to the basic (dead-end) questions changed based on the rest of the conversation - it seemed like there's really only 1 question that you can make progress with. On the other hand, this at least allowed me to dig deeper into that topic, and see where that takes me... Good literal and figurative take on the theme too, well done!
Cool, I always wanted to be an elevator! I enjoyed the quirky concept, though there's not much to do after a couple minutes. It's fun to imagine the confusion of the passengers. Neat visuals, and all in all a very complete game - modest in scope, but delivers on that scope with polish. Well done!
That is one funky walk! There wasn't much to do in this one, but I giggled at the walking animation for a bit. The intro images were really cool, quite atmospheric. I think this slideshow style works really well for jam games - cool that you found the time for artwork.
Wow this is quite hard to get started - timber and leaves seem rare enough to begin with, but I also need XP to craft? Those wild monkeys are no joke when all you have is rocks.
Hm, audio did not seem to work for me - did you mean to opt out of that category?
I had fun otherwise, I liked the 2.5D aesthetic. Fighting was a bit annoying because once the red thingies are touching you, it seems like your bullets pass through them.
That's a very intriguing screenshot under "something new" - are you working on post-jam updates?
Very nicely polished, excellent visuals and audio. I wish there was a bit more to do - I'd love to see a more challenging post-jam version with the same music and graphics. I feel like this could go in many directions from here: the music felt a bit darker and atmospheric, while the sound effects and game mechanics made it feel a bit more arcade-y. The monochrome aesthetic could certainly work for a more serious game, but the "frame" made everything look a bit retro and silly, as if you were not present in the scene, just looking at some retro handheld device...
I don't mean any of this as a critique - somehow this all works very well together as is!
A winner is me! >3
This is actually a lovely little game that is a bit hidden due to the "programmer art", heh. But I completed it, and had lots of fun with it. Great variety of fish, a reasonable upgrade system (wait there's a harpoon?) that you actually need to beat the game, and a proper ending, what else can you ask for?
Well done!
Such a cool entry! An impressive amount of content, and yet it ends when it's about to get most interesting. Great world-building.
I especially liked the sound effects synced to the text descriptions, it was a great tool for creating an immersive experience. Lots of great writing all around, and the clue and location system is really well set up. While it was a bit confusing, I didn't mind that many newly mentioned characters don't get added to the notebook - I guess it's a reasonable way of keeping the combination of clues and people manageable.
I think I ran into some glitches when trying to head into the mine - the mine map was first unresponsive, then it got stuck underneath the city map, and stayed there even when I started talking to the miners again - but eventually it came on top which allowed me to progress. I guess there must be some custom code handling navigation there, because it's sort of in the middle of a conversation - so you also have the "standard" option of finishing the convo (which seems to glitch out the map), or the custom action of navigating on this new map.
One of the most unexpectedly fun entries I've tried this jam. Well done!
The embedded version wouldn't start for me on Chrome, but as the comments suggested, it did work in Firefox.
I had quite some fun with it, but I wish there was something to do later on, or some goal to work towards - I've had a score of about 540k, at which point new towers were offered once every blue moon (I think my last two were around 300k and then 500k), and it didn't make sense to keep going. I wish there was some strategic depth to selecting updates, currently the most you can do is hope for a lucky spawn and herd the enemies to tower-dense areas, and just keep kiting / running in circles forever. With some more things to do, and an increasing difficulty level, this could become a very nice tower defense / zombie survivor hybrid.
I liked the way the theme was incorporated. Like some other commenters pointed out, it's kind of refreshing to see an idler game that's broken up into levels, that really helps with the monotony of the genre. So a cool idea!
Some basic sounds would do this a huge service, I kept thinking that something's broken on my end - because a game that looks this polished visually _has to_ have sounds! Heh.
Very cool entry! Fun to play, and it has great enemy variety, a consistent visual style, and a full upgrade system and a banger soundtrack to boot, very impressive for a jam game! The hunger timeout was a bit annoyingly fast, but I guess it was a good way to enforce/showcase the roguelike mechanics.
Oh, and I just can't not mention that the word is spelled "descend", it says "decent" a few too many times :-p
Oh man, collecting arrows while grappling is easier said than done! But it's a fun mechanic. I wish the grappling hook flew much much faster - it was tricky to aim because you have to consider the arrow's speed as well as the distance from the wall you're aiming it at. But it also made for a very memorable mechanic, well done!
Very cool idea! I was excited to find my own game on the board :) Great UI, the tiled game covers look very stylish, and the effect of new tiles being loaded is beautiful too. Kinda tricky to rate this one, but it's certainly one of the most innovative ideas and takes on the theme.
I sort of wish you took it one step further, and made it into more of a game with clearer objectives and somehow using the ratings or other metrics as resources - but that's certainly a tricky minefield to navigate, as you don't want any gamification to create an incentive for people not playing and rating games fairly and in earnest...
Okay, let's start with the elephant in the room: I was very excited to read the instructions mentioning that you can _punch_ in this game - too few violent entries this jam around. I was punching the air, metaphorically. But then you enter the game, with itchy fingers, eager to punch, so you press Space _to punch_... and your character **kicks**. It took me a while to get over this disappointment. (Until around the second punch, which is actually a punch.)
Jokes aside, this is a very impressive entry. Simple but nice dialog system, a working storyline, surprisingly nice NPC AI, and it has great performance too for a 3D entry that runs in a browser.
I could not click on the dialog options in fullscreen mode btw, but it worked fine in the original embed size.
Oh wow you indeed meant _whatever_! I had lots of fun with this one, but Filthy Feline proved too much for me. Very cute concept and great execution! I wish there was a way to jump ahead to the next battle, waiting around for up to a minute with 5 things in your cheeks is no fun - in jarring contrast to the rest of this great game.
@kyrio Ah, interesting. In that case, I think it must be due to those 2 hazelnuts you have by default: they are enough to defeat the Marten, so after that fight you're back in town with 5 items, and you have to wait the full minute. I'm not sure if I encountered this wait any other way.
I had lots of fun with this, the concept is fun, it plays very smoothly, and the soundtrack is a banger. I loved the background art too.
The compacting mechanic felt a bit pointless (no pun intended), but I guess what else could you do :)
Seems like you also lose some health if you fail to catch the falling garbage? Maybe compacting an almost full truck could be used to regain health - I think that could tie these mechanics nicely together, and would make a cozy infinite runner.
Oh, after a confused first impression I ended up liking this one a lot! Went for around 30 days, and collected 4.9k gold. It did get a bit tedious in the end. Based on your description, I'm guessing I was just stuck with a bad random seed of visitor pool that didn't line up with the requests I picked to fullfill. Either way, I had fun, and it's a very polished entry despite being practically text only. Well done!
One UI suggestion: the 'Requests' button really does not belong on the visitor's tab, it should be under our inventory. I think this made it a bit hard to figure out what's going on in the beginning.
Also, how to gain reknown? I thought eventually I would earn it by unlocking more difficult requests, but I never saw anything above Medium in the end.
I love how polished this is! A simple concept, but plenty of levels with a clear challenge to them. It was bending my mind a bit too much once even wheat came around, but I'll be revisiting this with a fresh head for sure. Well done!
Ah, such a nice puzzler! You can get into quite a flow after you figure out the rules. I gave up after a mis-click sent me back from level 11 (harsh, especially when you have infinite undo otherwise) - how many levels are there?
It's great to see a simple idea delivered with great polish, very nice entry!
I liked this one a lot. I was just about to buy the heavy hauler, when I ran into the same bug that others mention: just a black screen in space, eventually a white one instead. (No errors logged to the console either FWIW, only a warning about too many active WebGL contexts? A random guess, but maybe you're not cleaning up your webGL contexts when switching scenes, and eventually the "space" context is auto-cleaned up because it is the oldest one.)
I didn't feel much difference when switching between the laser Mk1 to Mk3, I think the game loop would be more satisfying if the upgrades had a more obvious effect. The laser targeting also felt a bit random, and it gave me the impression I didn't have much control over what asteroids are broken down - is it related to the size of the asteroid at all?
Shame about the game breaking bug, but nonetheless this is a very fun entry that could become a great one with some tweaking of gameplay params.
I wasn't sure how to progress after collecting all (?) 66 dollars. I felt like in true Katamari fashion I should pick up the table and the houses eventually, but it kept telling me I'm too small for the table... I guess I'm just not rich enough to earn my place at The Table :(
Hello and welcome everyone! Originally I set out to enter the compo, but my weekend didn't turn out as planned, so I am submitting this for the Jam. Nonetheless, except for the background music (courtesy of Cynicmusic on OpenGameArt), everything was made by me from scratch during these three days.
As usual, I have a long list of ideas and improvements I didn't get around to, and I'll try to add them in a post-jam version soon, but I'm still happy that I managed to submit something reasonably complete. I hope you enjoy playing!
Thanks for the kind words @myheadmess, @freeworld and @cgraen!
@martynas-dargis yeah, I probably wasted way too much time reinventing the wheel here (sprite animations, scrolling viewport, scene swapping etc), but going engine-less is just a lot of fun! I've made all but one of my LD entries from scratch like this.
@dhim thanks, that's a very thorough list of recommendations, I didn't know about topics and social previews on GitHub, I might just start using them!
@bobap I know _exactly_ what you mean by the transparency being off. I think it's somehow an artifact of the drawing method that I used - I'm using the `destination-out` composition mode of the HTML5 canvas. I had to move on and consider it good enough - just jam things _shrugs_...
Hey @ynnon, sorry the game has been giving you trouble. I'm not sure how to reproduce that bug you encountered yet, but I have some things to note: you don't need L to enter the forest, you need to interact with the road sign / the end of the road (with E). But this has a needlessly small hitbox, I'll improve this! But pressing L should work fine.
The merchant never intentionally scams you, but if you picked up any poison mushrooms, the whole batch needs to be thrown out - but the merchant will say so if this was the case. Any chance you ran into this? Of course, that wouldn't explain future trips yielding no result. I'll try to reproduce this!
It is possible to open the merchant dialog twice in quick succession which will hide the merchant's reaction to the goods - this is just a visual bug, but even then, you should get the fair price of your mushrooms, with the above caveat.
@ynnon re:the dialog not being closable: oops, that was one of the casualties of the submission rush, I simply didn't get around to adding a close button. But either way, the dialog is not blocking - you can walk to the exit as normal, despite it being open, or just press L. But thanks for the reminder, I'll put it high on the post-jam fix/improvement list.
Wait, that's it, two fish?! I really enjoyed the vibes though, first it felt really ominous with the music and the color scheme, then with the dialog and fishing it quickly turned quirky, and before I could figure which way it will continue it just... ended? Let me know if I'm missing something - I gave it a couple tries.
Guys, this is amazing, well done! One of the best jam games I've played in recent memory, not just this jam. Unfortunately I also couldn't beat it :( The controls and movement are a bit slippery sadly, which is especially frustrating during the boss fight...
But I really enjoyed the way there, the atmosphere is on point. I really liked the initial scanner-style visuals !> before picking up the vision unit, and then when the unit gets powered down during the boss fight it's so climactic. Chef's kiss.
Great visuals, good progression, responsive soundtrack, lots of amazing things going on for a jam game. Bravo!
Very cute! The card mechanic is very clear, and the levels are nicely designed around introducing the skills. I think the first 3 cards could just be auto-added to your active slots, and you wouldn't need to introduce the inventory until the 4th card - but I guess this way you give the player something to look forward to. Playe very smoothly too, well done.
I must admit, even though there's no W needed for the controls, I kept pressing it for jumps... which means I closed the browser tab multiple times while trying to dash with Ctrl haha.
This is one of the most complete games I've played this jam, congrats! (I've only played the web build, but looking at your changelog, this must have been pretty complete at the initial submission too.)
I did not manage to beat it yet, but I've given it 6-7 goes already, I've enjoyed it so much. The speed changer in the top right was very welcome, and I didn't notice any instability, having played mostly at 3x and 4x speeds.
I did notice some balancing issues: as it is, the game seems to be way too reliant on the unit count metric. If you get unlucky to get no houses in your draft, you will deal 0 damage. If you get lucky enough to get spikes, your opponent will deal 0. This makes houses and spikes way too imba. This is mitigated to some extent by the reroll option (which I've only noticed on my 2nd try), but still - any other items are almost always inferior to these two. Maybe this could be fixed by having some non-0 starting values, to decrease their relative effect? The way the money mechanic is incorporated is very interesting - a waste of space in battles, but necessary for long term survival. Great addition.
UX-wise, I think it was unnecessary to split rotation and flipping into different controls, almost the exact same effect could be achieved by just rotating - which could then be _either_ right clicking or scrolling. Selling decrees also seems needlessly complicated, which slows down the entire game: just have a "sell remaining decrees for 5/10/etc gold" option somewhere, so that you don't need to confirm your placement manually for every piece.
One more idea for improvement is to have an indicator of how much HP (maybe also decree count - but that might make it too easy) your next opponent will have, so you can start planning ahead whether it is worth selling your decrees.
All in all, excellent, kudos to the whole team. I think with some fine tuning of values (which surely needs plenty of playtesting), this could be released as a proper game. Visually it's already great, and the game loop is very satisfying.
Brilliant! I've only just started rating games, but I can already tell this is going to be one of my favourite games of the jam. You really managed to capture the vibes of building a ship out of scraps, and the clunky controls (intended or not) really drive home the feeling of rag-tag adventure. That feeling of reaching out mid-battle for a blown off attachment to re-attach it is just... on point, chef's kiss.
Wow, those dogs are ruthless! Very cute game, great take on the theme. (This is already the second raccoon game I encountered so far, but I expect a few more heh.)
Interesting take on the theme! I wasn't sure what to base my guesses on rather than blind chance, which made the gameplay loop not too rewarding... But either way, the art and writing are both great, very polished entry.
A minor complaint: the typing effect made me want to click to reveal the full message, but instead that skips to the next one.
So polished! Very cool vibes on this one. The hitbox for dashing felt a bit clunky - the visuals made me feel like a fiery effigy of duckly retribution, but whether I actually dealt damage felt a bit random. An interesting take on the theme too.
Hilarious concept, and very nice execution, bravo!
I couldn't collect the third folder, and having to restart there was a bit harsh heh. But very nice atmosphere, great visuals, and it's reassuring to see the no AI notice, well done!
Interesting puzzler! Nicely polished too. I beat it in 24 waves - probably the last 10 or so were fighting over the only couple spaces the opponent had, because I didn't realize I can clear tiles for a while :) It seems like the opponent never clears their tiles, which is a huge handicap.
Having the scoring units shape the battlefield for the future rounds is an interesting mechanic, but I wish there was a bit more strategy to this. Maybe there could be more bonuses depending on the formation? (e.g. synergies across multiple columns, special shapes with special effects, or some passive use for the 3rd row.)
Very cool vibes - the visuals and the movement feel are great! The core mechanic is easy to pick up on without any explanation, and it's very engaging - when the relays work, that is. I struggled a bit with relays often not connecting, and I couldn't figure out what causes this. It didn't _seem_ to be just based on distance or angles (sometimes the closest, and straight facing relays wouldn't connect), so I just considered it bugged, and unfortunately it was "bugging out" a lot.
Despite this, I had quite some fun. Having the "live" network of relays on free-moving asteroids was very satisfying, and a very nice take on the theme.
Very cool, impressive that the levels are randomly generated. I gave up on level 4, but I had fun, and I admire the concept. Even with the added description, I don't really get the point of the signal shape visualization, is that just an other timer? Or what makes the signal fuzzy? What should I do when it's becoming incoherent?
That's probably the most comprehensive and impressive tutorial I've ever seen for a jam game, hats off! A simple concept executed very well.
So cool! I really liked the straightforward concept and the smooth driving with the parabolic antenna swinging to left and right. Great vibes, fun to play, bravo!
A very interesting take on the theme! The signal being "devoured" is an interesting idea, but I guess in practice it's not that different from any other wall or obstacle... Like other commenters, I found it quite challenging to catch with my eyes and then remember where the traps were, but that's what made it fun! Well done.
I think some UI refresh/polish to match the ominous description could make for a very nice post-jam version which I'd gladly come back to.
A minor nitpick: in full-screen mode you can't see the timer and the signal meter.
"You chose the right door", heh. Unique entry that requires a lot of attention to complete. The undo option was much appreciated. I wish it was a bit longer, I feel like you set up some nice systems, but just as I was getting comfortable with them, it just ended. But I guess that's what jam games do! Some sound effects or some minimal illustrations could do it wonders.
Very nice! The movement is very satisfying, and the scrolling terrain looks very cool. I decided to try not building any defenses and just winging it, and well, it just worked - probably a bit too easily. Seems like the enemies should be assaulting the base a bit quicker, to urge the player to spend resources on defenses. Also, the base fire rate of the main drone/ship is just imba, no matter how many enemies I let accumulate by the gates, it only took a couple seconds to mow them down, so that I could return to collecting resources.
But overall, quite fun! I'd love to play a full game built on these foundations.
I think the biggest UI issue is the horizontal scrolling on the upgrade screen - I only noticed by accident (and well, looking for anything to do after building the tower) that there's anything after the first three options.
A beautiful and intriguing game. I actually found the parallax a bit confusing, the concept (and the minimap) suggested that we are in a watchtower looking around, but the parallax effect made me feel like I'm "orbiting" around a forest, because the back layers were barely moving. I'm not sure if you know what I mean :) Either way, I guess a bit of confusion fit the dreamy and mysterious aesthetic!
Very cool! I really like this minimal-yet-polished look, the no-fuss scope and the isometric playing field seemingly hovering in the air really fit the level-based puzzle concept. Clear and to the point!
I found it a bit tedious to scan and re-scan all the fields trying to compare them - I guess there's just a limited amount of fun to be had with this concept, heh. Maybe it would be more intuitive if the treasure distributions followed a more continuous gradient. For example, I often (frustratingly) missed isolated tiles of high-value gems, because I skipped over their cells, as there was not much indication of elevated levels in the general area.
Thanks @tenthousandfireants! It sounds like you might have played the game on a too small resolution screen maybe? That would interfere with scrolling the screen as well, leading to all kinds of a mess... For now the playing area is fixed at 1920 x 1080 (Full HD), I recommend to use the browser's zoom function (Ctrl +/-) to find a scale where everything fits. Edit: oh, and for the relay installs: if you heard the error sound, you probably didn't have enough credits for the installation? You need to pay separately for each new relay.
Thank you too @olegator0270 - I've added a few instructions on this submission page now, maybe that helps with the barebones UI.
@tenthousandfireants @khaotom @t-c thanks for the bug report - relay buying should be fixed now! I took a closer look and turned out it was attempting to re-add all previously installed relays, so it quickly burned through all your money. I might or might not have had too much money in dev mode to notice, no comment.
If you'd like, give it an other go now, it should be a less frustrating experience :)
Thanks @eric-nguyen - I was very happy to find these songs with Creative Commons licenses, they do a lot for the atmosphere. You can find them listed in the repo and in-game on the end credits scene.
Thanks for giving it an other go @t-c! I'll look into that % population bug, especially because it made you skip the final planet, !> which you actually can't bribe!
Changing the colour of bribed planets is something I simply forgot to do, I've just fixed it in the post-jam version (for now I've made their area markers green, maybe I could even remove them altogether to be less confusing, as bribes themselves don't provide signal coverage).
Thanks @ethernal-tech, glad you liked it! I agree that the UI is a bit sloppy currently. There are some minor UI sounds for successful/unsuccessful actions, but: - their levels are not set up properly, so they are hard to hear behind the music - the core issue is that the UI allows unsuccessful actions in the first place. Time is paused during the dialogs anyway (so it's not like you can wait to have enough money for the action), I need to simply display a "Not enough money" message instead of allowing pressing the button. I'll add this to the post-jam version soon! Beyond this, it's hard to visualize the action effects, but this should already get rid of a lot of confusion.
Thank you too @gurtek, extra kudos for playing through both versions - I'm really happy that you enjoyed the game enough to bother with that. Regarding your suggestions: - The fractional credits issue you need to bring up with SpaceGoogle AdSense ;) Jokes aside, I will push a small fix for this, I think it'll make for better UX (and the mechanic clearer to understand) if you always earn _something_ after listeners. - Highlighting the ship is a great idea, I'll try to add this too. - It was possible to win in the post-jam version, as evidenced by @xparker's comment below :) But I took a close look, and did find a relevant bug that made it much harder to win, because it broke !> multiple range upgrades, which is probably the easiest way to victory.
This is now also fixed in the post-jam version! (I just did a playthrough manually, I can confirm it's possible to win :))
@xparker thanks a lot! You managed to win despite some bugs increasing the difficulty, so congrats!
@lcstark, the ships are intentionally avoiding the last planet (otherwise their destinations are randomly selected), because I wanted to force players to use multiple mechanics to achieve the 100% coverage -- but yeah, this means that the discoverability of that planet is pretty bad. I guess I should have just put it in the middle of the map, heh. Some of the random dialogs you can encounter mention that they are not allowed on a certain planet, but that still doesn't really point the player anywhere. Oh well, it's good to hear that you stuck around to finish!
Thanks for the compliments @asieke @venomousmouse and @nordin!
Thanks @bentglasstube, I'm happy with the way the planetary patrols turned out (except for the fact that they don't have a custom image asset), especially after I tinkered with the ranges a bit in the post-jam version. Making them tease-able was one of my goals. Glad you enjoyed the game!
@murumart did you play the post-jam version? I had some bugs related to this in the original submission, but after the post-jam fixes you should only be able to buy multiple times at the 2 moons that also offer upgrades to your speed or your range.
Thank you too @alexandr-gerya!
Very nice, simple but polished. I went back multiple times, my best time was 25.8 seconds.
Oh boy I was very bad at this. But I found the concept very intriguing, and the gameplay very meditative. Appreciated the dynamic BPM option as well, the little results I had I achieved at half the suggested speed, but the vibes were maybe even nicer there.
A very unique entry, well done!
Ah, Advanced Interplanetary Signals Lost On Planets? I spent some time wondering the philosophical implications of the thought that from the perspective of a satellite trying to broadcast, planets are just junk in the way... Then I spent a longer amount of time not seeing the "back" button on the credits view (which I was tricked into clicking), as the credits rolled painfully slowly by.
Then I spent even more time sending rockets (I mean... signals?) around planets, which I was terrible at. Fun game though, with a clear and straightforward concept, well done!
Very cool! I wish it had a more gradual learning curve (in the beginning I really wished hitting the opponents once was enough, but with some of the initial commands you needed to hit them 3+ times), but once you get going the concept really shines! Great job with the cell-based drawing system, it's a great jam solution to the complex task of hand-drawing signals.
Such a cute concept! I wish luck had a smaller part in it - even from level 1 on, you can't get a perfect coverage of the playing field with your sticks, so you're often forced to guess around with a very limited number of shovels. I think this is rather frustrating, either there should be way more rods, or they should replenish when not finding anything, or you should have infinite shovels. (Maybe you could get a score based on how quick you found the nuts - that way luck would be still rewarded, but everyone would be allowed to progress.)
I ran into a bug on level 2 where I placed all my dowsing rods, then I used my (I think) last shovel to find the 1st nut, and then I was just stuck there, not being able to dig any more, nor failing or winning the level either.
Nonetheless, a great concept with beautiful graphics that plays very smoothly. Well done!
What a cute concept - I only glanced at the description before starting, so I was expecting a mostly regular narwhal to guide ships in a harbour, but then the beautiful cacophony of space-moths docking in space-cobwebs and space-sharks landing in gravitationally bound sideways pools started... fun game! Loved the creativity and the bold visuals.
I swear some of those asteroids were out to get me! I had lots of fun with this one, spent way more time than I thought I would after the first run. I really appreciated "luck" being upgradable :) The controls not rotating with the ship were a bit of a mind-bender, but still, a very polished, fun and all-around impressive entry. Well done!
I found this super hard, I felt like I didn't really get a grasp on how to properly lure and avoid monsters. I thought you can sneak around them by avoiding alerting them with the signals, but that didn't seem to work either.
The ping / echolocation mechanic is maybe not that unique in this jam, but the visual effect you have of the soundwave getting "painted" on the walls is truly unique, and it looks great - it really creates the effect that walls closer to you feel more solid and dense. Great sound design and atmosphere, well done!
I loved this one! Who knew that boats are one of the biggest killers of frogs? I liked how the different tracks lent themselves to different tactics, for example you can't effectively hit anyone with the train, but it's good for giving you some control over the incoming frogs. A brilliant spin on a classic, and it plays very smoothly!
I think I ran into a bug where I lost with still an open slot left, but nonetheless this was one of the most fun games I tried this jam, bravo!
Simple but with great polish! Although we've seen it in many games this jam, I think the general concept of having silent enemies that only get revealed on a scanner/ping/signal sweep is actually a great mechanic that builds tension in a very immersive way.
I managed 43 with a touchpad :)
After a short while shooting randomly in all directions becomes a rather effective tactic with all the enemies on screen. I wonder what would be a way to counteract this. Maybe you could penalize missed shots? Or have a "magazine" (or whatever the spaceship equivalent of it is), that only gets refilled on successful hits? Just some food for thought.
Oh no, I shot myself with an orbital beam :( But as a life-long supporter of friendly fire game mechanics, I can't be mad. Beautiful graphics, and straightforward concept, well done! I was not good enough to complete it (that hostile fauna is a menace), but I had fun.