THE DISCOVERY WAS SPIDERS by Six 2010-12-20T04:46:00
I would have loved to see this finished. Very interesting use of shadows. Creates a neat effect!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → FireSlash
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 👥 | 🥇 | 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Cyberframe EDEN | jam | Graphics | 4.88 |
| 👥 | 🥈 | 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | ZERMATT: ZERO | jam | Graphics | 4.74 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | 👥 | A Bulletmaster's Ritual | jam | 75 | 4.04 | 3.81 | 3.68 | 4.20 | 4.56 | 3.22 | 4.36 | |||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | 👥 | Carpathian Goodbye | jam | 491 | 3.48 | 3.25 | 3.14 | 4.01 | 3.86 | 2.64 | 3.71 | |||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Interstellar Cargo Maidens | jam | 135 | 4.01 | 3.60 | 3.45 | 4.42 | 3.32 | 4.18 | ||||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Cyberframe EDEN | jam | 5 | 4.52 | 4.33 | 4.05 | 3.89 | 4.88 | 4.47 | ||||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | Dressed Delivery | jam | 14 | 4.38 | 4.24 | 3.88 | 3.26 | 4.82 | 4.42 | 4.04 | 4.58 | ||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Assault on Hartblood Hotel | jam | 155 | 3.96 | 3.68 | 3.20 | 3.13 | 4.15 | 4.14 | 3.44 | 4.22 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | 👥 | Xermatt Redux | jam | 143 | 4.00 | 3.50 | 3.31 | 4.59 | 4.26 | 3.60 | 4.37 | |||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | 鬼心伝 - A Story of Heartful Oni | jam | 553 | 3.66 | 3.68 | 2.38 | 2.56 | 5.00 | 4.13 | 2.54 | 3.62 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | One Shot in the Dark, Now I'm Dead. | jam | 108 | 4.12 | 3.21 | 3.77 | 3.91 | 3.98 | 3.93 | 2.45 | 4.38 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Heaven Slash | jam | 235 | 3.95 | 3.56 | 3.06 | 2.70 | 4.33 | 4.16 | 3.93 | |||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Isochronism | jam | 289 | 3.93 | 3.69 | 3.05 | 3.50 | 4.42 | 3.98 | 3.50 | 4.33 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | ZERMATT: ZERO | jam | 59 | 4.13 | 3.62 | 3.48 | 3.35 | 4.74 | 4.27 | 3.04 | 4.48 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | Mobile Protection Unit HEADLESS | jam | 648 | 3.34 | 2.97 | 3.10 | 2.25 | 4.42 | 3.86 | ||||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | Silent Whisper | jam | 153 | 3.88 | 3.36 | 3.40 | 3.60 | 4.19 | 3.81 | 2.34 | 4.10 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Monster Girl Chaos: Hollow Apple | jam | 305 | 3.66 | 3.39 | 2.71 | 2.37 | 4.28 | 3.17 | 3.53 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | 👥 | Miss Paws and the Runic Maze | jam | 2.50 | 2.50 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 3.25 | 3.25 | 2.50 | ||||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Lovely Kana | jam | 104 | 3.95 | 3.59 | 3.40 | 3.51 | 4.67 | 4.14 | 3.98 | 4.19 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | STEEL GEAR CHAOS | jam | |||||||||||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Expando-ship | compo | 157 | 3.70 | 3.52 | 3.35 | 3.57 | 3.48 | 3.52 | 3.26 | 3.35 | 42 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Super Dash | compo | 80 | 3.84 | 3.88 | 3.48 | 2.96 | 3.25 | 3.17 | 2.11 | 2.82 | 42 | ||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Clarion Call | compo | 387 | 2.94 | 2.76 | 2.65 | 1.94 | 3.06 | 3.08 | 3.00 | 33 | |||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Cube World | jam | 44 | 3.59 | 3.56 | 3.09 | 3.13 | 3.66 | 3.45 | 2.48 | 2.86 | 57 | ||
| 2011 | 21 | Escape | End of file | compo | 34 | 3.71 | 3.88 | 3.06 | 3.65 | 3.24 | 3.75 | 2.75 | 3.70 | 8 | ||
| 2011 | 20 | It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This! | Void Runner | compo | 71 | 3.31 | 3.31 | 3.15 | 2.42 | 2.77 | 3.69 | 1.75 | 2.44 | 2 | ||
| 2010 | 19 | Discovery | Hat Quest | compo | 170 | 2.50 | 2.58 | 2.25 | 1.55 | 2.50 | 2.92 | 2.70 | 2.67 | 16 |
I would have loved to see this finished. Very interesting use of shadows. Creates a neat effect!
Gameplay is very simple, level steps are a bit too hard.
Great start, you should finish this one. Maybe push it into a Jam entry? :)
Wow this is really fun. Simple idea, awesome execution. <3
This game would be a lot more fun if: There were more levels, and it was actually challenging.
The problem at the moment being if you just wrench the ball at full speed, you can roll right over the breaky blocks with zero penalty. I didn't realize you were supposed to avoid them until I watched your gameplay video!
The level design quickly shifted from predictable to painfully annoying.
Cute little game. Had a lot of fun with it.
This is pretty fun, though it needs a bit more love to really throw it over the edge. For starters, the detection seems to fail if you do it "backwards" which should still be legal. The mouse detection is also very moody. Also the lack of menus, persistent scoring, and other common game elements make this somewhat lacking in polish. Still very fun.
Amusing little game. Don't see a way to restart after I die though. Looks a bit unfinished.
AI is a bit annoying. I got in a stalemate with one monster over 30 some turns before I gave up and just let him roam about. Maybe there's a way to kill monsters that I'm not aware of, but I couldn't take the mine because he kept hopping back and forth over it whenever I tried to click near. Then I let him hop somewhere else and he got to the castle. Also sometimes I noticed I could click multiple times before a monster's turn came about. Not sure if thats intentional or not.
Bugs aside, still pretty fun. Would be interesting to see the idea expanded a bit.
Ran into some amusing little bugs, including one where I spawned trapped in the upper right hand corner of the map. Bonus points for adding menus, high scores, etc.
Fun little game. Good execution, good concept, somewhat short on UI polish (menus etc) but the game and level design was very well done.
Very nice idea. Controls are a bit awkward and the transition between "worlds" is often annoying, finding myself bouncing back between them when I didn't want to. Cool idea and fun game though!
Interesting idea, but the execution is a bit dry. Gameplay get tedious fast. Liked the little story at the beginning, and the good screen transitions. Would have liked to see some menus, save/load, etc. Controls felt very awkward, and moving in small spaces was kind of buggy. Would like to see this expanded upon a bit :)
The difficulty was a teetering slope. If it was too easy, you could just stomp them as they came out and it was about as fun as watching paint dry. If you peek under options you can adjust the difficulty up or down to your liking, but I find a good game is one that you have to work on a bit to really master. This is why the end game scoring is there, with records, so you can watch your progress as a hat stomping machine.
As for the collisions, I suspect what you're seeing is that the collision boxes can be up to 8px behind the sprite due to a little mistake I made in the order of updating. If you generally bop them straight on the turret though, you'll be fine.
Also you CAN combo stomp, its just a bit tricky. You can't combo stomp the same tank, as it goes invulnerable for a second. You can however combo stomp a nearby tank if you keep moving from the first stomp. Also note the amount of bounce you get from stomping is directly related to the height you stomped from, so there's some strategy involved :)
Thanks for all the comments. I'll clean up the controls a bit after voting ends for anyone interested. The game speed IS a bit high, looking back, so I might take an SC approach to letting players adjust that as they see fit. I guess I was just working so fast the game speed felt normal to the pace I was working at. SuperCrateBox was part of the inspiration I used; a great game that I suggest anyone play, especially if you liked this. The font is an 8px pixel font, I had no trouble reading it on 1920x1200 but I didn't test the font loader in any other environments so maybe theres a bug somewhere.
Anonther FRB user! Hello there :)
This game really needs some better sound. The shadow effect is rather annoying in practice, and the graphics are meh. It has potential but without direction I find it hard to stay interested. Speeding up the movement might help.
Interesting little game, couldn't make it past the first level though. Not entirely sure whats going on either (what do the enemies even do?).
No instructions, tried a bunch of things, couldn't get anything to happen. Maybe it would help if you updated your entry with a key map or something? :)
Fun idea. Hero pathfinding is very bad though, they tend to just laze around unless you dig them out yourself, at which point you're likely to get hit from their attack spam.
Has a lot of potential... resetting back to the beginning when you hit a wall is pretty harsh though.
Well done. Somewhat awkward to play at first, interface is very cromagnon but given the time constraint it's hard to complain. Really enjoyed this :)
This is interesting... But what IS it. I thought it was the splash screen at first. Putting a 10 second timer on the exit is annoying. Lack of any instructions or description AT ALL make this somewhat difficult to make heads or tails of.
Very clever little game. Fun to explore and play. Useful feedback makes this quite nice.
Game looks great. Might be nice to have a 2x windowed mode.
I'm working on a silverlight port at the moment. There are some deployment snags, but I'll make a journal post when it's up. Until then if you're unable to run it, please just skip for now and hopefully it'll be up later :)
I had a bit too much fun with this...
Loved the style, the nice touches (text typing in), sound... heck, there's very little I didn't like.
Loved the graphics. AI was frustrating to deal with.
Cannot rate high enough.
Amazing atmosphere. Everything just clicks so well. Usually entries are have an obvious angle where the developer knew "I'm bad at <thing> so I'll skimp on that and compensate elsewhere". In your entry I don't see such weaknesses. Even the level design feels well thought out; with the timings all lining up nicely to avoid forcing the player to wait for a platform.
I'll be finishing this one later :)
I found this game most fun before I realized you could use the mouse as well. Once you start combining them it becomes mentally awkward and hard to work out obvious solutions. When you just use the keys there are simple patterns you can use to solve most situations.
So frustrating to control.. yet i can't stop.
Controls get annoying when trying to move at higher speeds. Also somewhat disorienting when going fast since the grid moves so far per step. Cute idea using ASCII.
Neat idea! A bit frustrating at times due to the controls being a bit touchy, but very fun.
Neat game. Love the graphics. I've not quite figured out the "trick" to not getting hit when attacking guards, but still fairly fun. Nice to see cooperative AI.
Fun little game. hard to really enjoy the dialogue with the slow auto-scroll though. I would have really liked clicking to advance the dialogue. Also a "smart" right mouse as seen in later adventure games would be nice as well (such as right clicking on the door defaults to "Use"
I realize now I didn't explain the energy mechanic. Your shields use energy to recharge, so that's what you're seeing. This creates a direct penalty to taking shield damage as it really messes with your ROF at lower reactor levels. Get it up to 4 or 5 and you can spam all day in armor.
Energy limit is a bit frustrating at times since you can't possibly know the level layout in advance or plan for it. Love the art style. isometric controls are a bit awkward at first.
Not a fan of the light mechanic. It seems a bit arbitrary and is frustrating at times. Still overall good game.
Amusing little game. Got old pretty fast though
I found it very hard to judge how many arrows I needed in advance to go down a hallway. Some kind of grid markings would have been nice.
Confusing at first. Found it quite addictive once I got going, though balance issues are somewhat evident. couldn't beat the second level.
Needs some balancing, but a very neat idea.
Love the graphics. "hide" seems a bit ambiguous at times, and the pickups aren't explained at all as far as I got. (What do I do with the cells/missiles?)
The controls weren't quite as tight as I would have liked for a platformer... my main grievance is that holding space continues to jump, which causes some frustrating circumstances when jumping between platforms.
Overall fun, would have liked to see a bit more variation in the kind of puzzles (More use of "push button, die, respawn" mechanic perhaps to encourage experimentation more?) but the level design was overall solid and entertaining. Ending was a bit anti-climactic though :P
Interesting concept. Somewhat confusing on exactly where you're trying to escape to, as it seems you can go anywhere. also hard to follow due to everything being very small, so I kept hitting stuff when I was trying to save time on arteries.
Interesting idea. I agree with the above comments on level progression.
I also found a strange quirk with your tile renderer. http://fireslash.net/~fireslash/images/ld21_reviews/ld21_joedev_net_1.png seems to happen randomly while running through the levels. Could be a floating point math issue?
I liked this a lot. Some of the enemies were a bit hard to deal with, but the concept was very fun and the health made it fairly forgiving, if not too much ("Oh I took too much damage early on maybe I should just kill myself"). Loved the menu style
Had a lot of fun with this. Collision was a bit frustrating at times due to the block size in relation to the character, but still played it to the end and enjoyed it.
Has potential, but hard to comment on it in its current state. I've love to see you keep working at this post jam :)
Painfully slow movement. 2d espionage sounds fun but at those speeds its just nerve wracking. Also would be nice to have an idea on the hearing range for guards.
Love the atmosphere. The traps were still dangerous after being sprung which was kind of weird and the levels were short.
Controls feel very strange and make little sense to me. I kept losing until I realized you had to jump to keep up with the scrolling rate of the game. I'm also unsure why you packaged two EXE files in your entry, they appear to be the same.
Really enjoyed this. Very fresh take on the puzzle platformer.
Game was a bit confusing at first, I thought it was bugged before I realized I had to move the blob.
Some of this appears to be brute force/random at times, but after I play for a bit I start noticing patterns. Its definitely a game you have to experiment around with to understand, but in a good way.
Cannot skip cutscenes... text is slow, cannot skip. Combat pong is an interesting idea but gets old very fast. Loved the tie in for the old LD theme.
Game crashes on load (both exes). I develop with .net4 and XNA4 so I'm sure it's not a lib issue.
You should re-upload this without the installer.
Collision detection was really dodgy. Also echoing previous comments on level generation. No difficulty curve, just beat a level and done.
I'd love to see this finished. Or at least maybe fixed for other browsers. (Terrain texture vanishes in chrome)
The above horizontal bug was very frustrating. Nice environments. Also kind of annoying that you have to jump so high for such a small obstacle, semi jumps would have been nice.
The red asteroids are difficult to spot at higher speeds, to the point of making the game frustrating. Hitting planets for speed was also fairly counter intuitive at first.
Love the style, but I agree the art is really small. Needs to be scaled 2x or more; as it stands I have no idea whats happening. It took me almost a full minute of flailing to figure out what to do on the first screen.
This calls for a post-compo version! :)
You don't need to package installers with XNA apps. I actually suggest you don't for LD, since it's a pain to have XNA games cluttering up your install list. I usually list the XNA and .NET4 installer links on my page for those who don't already have them.
Took me a while to figure it out. Interesting design. Controls could use some love as well, but I found it entertaining.
Post-compo time!
I loved the animations and the concept. I think you got a bit ambitious and the gameplay suffered as a result, but this is another fantastic case of a game that would be a fantastic candidate for some post-compo love.
Echoing the above difficulty concerns. Game feels very polished otherwise. If I was more patient and deliberative about puzzles I'd play this for hours.
The lightning is a nice touch
I laughed for a good minute when I heard the sfx. "Boing smash? thats a weird na-OHHHH."
My only complaint is that it's somewhat hard to tell exactly where the ball is going to hit.
also +cool points for the amiga ball.
Echoing the above: Awesome graphics, gameplay needs some work. This would be an awesome candidate for some post-compo love!
Words cannot express how much I love the styling of this game.
Tiny to the point of my eyes kind of hurt now.
Looks like I need to play AYIM.
Did you do anything specific that caused the crash? Can you reproduce it and send me the crash info? I did a playtest or 5 and was able to do the entire level run without incident, so I'm interested to know what went wrong. There are more than 5 levels and it shouldn't crash even after the last level.
I found the controls a bit frustrating. If you're holding right and want to nose down a bit, you get that, but when you release down he doesn't resume going right. The sword collision detection is also pretty vague. I found I can kill an enemy above and below me by slashing to the right, which makes little sense.
I spent more time playing this than I should have.
This seems to convey the opposite of the theme (Implying the world is a massive uncaring beast).
I suspect a bit of tweaking would do this game a lot of good. In future attempts i suggest you spend a bit more time play testing (It often helps to throw test builds out into the LD IRC channel for others to play around with and get feedback on)
Bonus points for itty bitty bears.
Am I the only one getting a weird flickering when running this? Makes it incredibly hard to play.
it's an interesting idea, but I found the constant growing a bit frustrating at times. Cleaning up the collision might solve this. In games like this it's usually best to undersize your collision rects and be a bit forgiving where possible. Obviously that can cause other problems with pushes and the like so sometimes it's good to have multiple collision shapes depending on what you're colliding against.
I've got a quick post on using Reach in XNA here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/19/xna-users-increase-compatibility-with-reach/
As others have mentioned, you should always build XNA games with the Reach profile where possible.
The pathing is infuriating and requires lots of micromanagement to keep them from just forming long lines or other bad constructs. However as someone who's implemented pathfinding before, I can forgive this on a 48 hour deadline. (Death to A*)
Nice to see an RTS in here! A highly under-loved genre in LD
This game gives me bad flashbacks from high school
Interesting little game. Wonderful visuals. Would love to see it finished.
Pages don't seem to vanish when you press the button. There's also probably a better way to indicate the pickup area than a red rectangle.
Keep working at it :)
Had a blast playing this. I was going to mention buggy collision until I noticed the planets themselves are moving too!
I noticed that if you take a hit on the side of a magma wall it does almost no damage, so you can clear a wave with a massive planet by just chipping away at a sheer magma wall the entire time.
Neat idea though! Would love to see it expanded upon. Maybe randomize missile launch points and intervals for more fun :)
Nice atmosphere. Controls got annoying when I found out I cant move diagonally.
Note; Chrome will whine about this file, comes back clean from VirusTotal.
Levels require forward thinking, some switches make the level unbeatable if you press them, which is kind of annoying but once you get into that mind set it's not that bad.
Didn't even notice the music at first, its really quiet!
Other than the wall jumping which hates me, the controls were really tight and the whole thing is really nice and polished. Graphics are ace, story is cute.
Neat sprites!
WHY AM I STILL PLAYING THIS OH GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME
Couldn't seem to figure it out. the guarding doesn't seem to work in reverse, I only take damage when I guard? pink heart dudes kept stealing my coins, and losing momentum at each wall was annoying.
I kind of just want to go into super fast crazy murder ball mode and not stop for anything.
I died and had to listen to the dialogue again, can't seem to skip it :C
Love this. The execution is wonderful and it's well polished as well.
Took a few suicides to realize I could control the flight (I skimmed the instructions, sorry D: )
Controls feel solid and it's very polished. Great work!
After a certain point you can win by just sitting in the middle and holding down space. The weapon spreads cover all but the outermost rows, and enemies never spawned in a way that didn't swing them into the line of fire long enough to let them die.
Controls are really wonky. You need to press a/d repeatedly to turn, or wait for key repeat to kick in.
Putting is also a bit awkward, the impulse force doesn't seem to snap to the ball in obvious ways so you sometimes get unpredictable results.
Love the art style.
It's very easy to dodge missiles, but I got frustrated and gave up trying to redirect them. Enemies don't seem to get any stronger if you don't kill them, nor do more spawn, so with no sense of urgency the winning move is to just run forever.
Great graphics, audio, etc.
Movement felt really floaty and wasn't enjoyable. You also had to be really close to the table but you'd also clip on it going down, which didn't really help the situation. There wasn't good visual feedback when you were clipping or weren't close enough to the counter.
Should be easy to polish up in a post-jam entry, and expand from here. Go for it!
Getting "Failed to initialized player 3d settings"
Graphics are very endearing, and the idea is good. However, I feel like the gameplay is severely hamstrung by the controls.
It took me a while just to realize I had to have the aiming open to teleport, and being forced to rely on the slow rotation speed makes gameplay slow and frustrating.
Mouse aiming would work well here, or as others have suggested, directional movement. An analog stick on a controller could also work.
There's something oddly satisfying about tearing office buildings out of the ground.
I'm not entirely sure what the power meter does, and there doesn't seem to be a clear goal or victory condition. But for something cobbled together in a day that's fairly easy to forgive.
You should consider making a non-compo finished version, even if it is late.
The art is simple but consistent and clean. The sfx are also fairly on spot, though the death animation doesn't seem to match the sfx there particularly well. Minor niggle though.
The largest issue I saw was the growing mechanic doesn't seem to really serve the player in any meaningful way. There was never really a reason NOT to grow, other than as a toggle to get through tight spaces. Without some kind of penalty or external need to optimize, it felt more like a gimmick than a gameplay mechanic.
As an example, it might have been interesting if the player could only get larger, never able to shrink. This would force the player to make decisions on when to grow, and to strategically map out the level to ensure the narrow routes are solved first.
The art is simple, but managed to provide a really great atmosphere.
It was certainly an interesting experience, though the flowers were a bit unclear (Was I even doing it right?). I guess I was since I cleared the game, though every time I felt a bit of apprehension when I pressed the bell, thinking I might have done it wrong.
On second thought that might have been the point. Either way, good job!
Impressed in the quantity of minigames. Not all of them play super well, but in a wario-ware style packaging it's fitting and enjoyable.
Also I lost to mr computer. Bad.
I will try harder next time.
I was wondering how long before I saw an endless runner! It's a great genre to play with for two button controls.
The implementation here is a bit shaky in places. Jumping doesn't feel particularly solid (which is important for a runner), and the obstacles aren't clear. I thought I was grabbing a powerup of some kind, but it killed me.
Music is really good.
It's rare to see a VN in LD.
Judging one is also a bit tough, as there's a lot of writing to do, and little time to do it.
The biggest things that stood out to me were the basics. The font was hard to read, the text appear would wrap mid-word (I'm guilty of this in my own game, so I can't reeeally dock you for this), and the moving text boxes are a bit tiresome when doing a lot of reading.
The writing also felt a bit stiff, but this isn't surprising given the amount of time that was available.
Overall very impressed with sheer content quantity and general quality of what was given. I would strongly encourage you to make a post-jam version of this and polish it up.
It's weird mixing mouse and keyboard controls in a platformer.
There's also an annoying physics behavior where if you try to jump while moving but are stuck on a ledge, you will only jump up, which; combined with a lack of ramps, makes it pretty annoying to move around.
It also seems like early enemies have way too much health.
Good audio, graphics set a nice mood as well.
Using mines to kill monsters that pace in one direction forces unnecessary waiting at times.
It would have also been nice if the spikes signaled their time to activation, as you again can only wait for them to pop to find out when they'll be up next.
Areas felt a bit unnecessarily large, but it fits with the mood of the game.
It's really hard to aim the fireballs. The charge time is quick and there's no visual or audio feedback to indicate how far you are into the charge cycle. I quickly reverted to just spamming the keys as it seemed to be the most effective solution.
Graphics are cute and well done!
Cute graphics, multiple game sections, humor, and good music to boot. A fine example of a well done Jam entry
If I had to complain, it's short without much replay value; but I enjoyed it none the less.
To echo others, the lack of any kind of feedback makes the mechanics largely unclear.
Even if you want to avoid animations, having something simple like a text log would at least explain the combat flow better. The only feedback you get right now is a few counters, which don't really tell you much about what's really going on.
A simple concept with a decent execution. It could have used more jazzing up and variety, and the difficulty curve is a bit slow, which quickly results in the player getting bored.
Music is good, sfx are fairly simple and limited.
This was more frustrating than fun. There isn't good mouse feedback, and I needed to read the description to understand why barriers couldn't be placed sometimes (Better feedback indicating it was intentionally failing would have helped, the score blink isn't too obvious)
The auto-scroll also made it sometimes difficult to click on tiles or place barriers near the beginning.
Overall interesting idea, but all I got out of it was a wrist cramp.
Thanks for playing!
Some last-minute gameplay elements were added that we didn't have time to add particularly good UI for. Make sure you read the "*how to play*" section above, as it explains them in lieu of a proper tutorial or UI indicator.
A Post-compo version will clean this up, once we finish tuning everything.
This was... strange.
The first "minigame" was confusing and I never quite figured it out, though I had better luck with the others.
Neat idea!
The punching physics were kind of weird, sometimes enemies got rocketed out, other times they just slide a bit.
Art and sound were good, though I would have liked to hear some SFX in there to make punching a bit more satisfying.
I also felt it was kind of annoying I couldn't punch up (to deal with the ones stuck against walls), and i would have liked to see the world tilt a bit based on which side the load was on (maybe it could fall over if there was too heavy a load on one side specifically?)
Cool little clicker/automation game! I love that building houses actually spawns units, vs the usual "Automagic numbers" approach clicker games usually go for.
It took me a while to figure out what to do though. A quick "How to play" or "controls" section in your description would be helpful!
Wonderful art and music! The pixels bleed character.
Gameplay wise I found it quickly becomes unfair (as in, reaching the limits of your move speed) which ruins it for me. Mouse input might have been more to my taste, but there are still some optimization strategies around re-centering. I would have liked to see something done with the "Money" you earn, as it seems to just be a fancy score indicator currently.
The first page explaining the controls was welcome, but it still wasn't particularly clear what was going on until I experimented a lot.
Like some others, I would have liked to see a bit less RNG involved. As it is, even the first planet with one cow is quite hard as you're basically relying on luck and a small set of tools to stack the odds a bit.
The "invulnerable cells" were a neat telegraphing idea. I found it pretty fun to eliminate clusters by monitoring the state of cells and exterminating them to the last cell, then moving on to the next section.
As djfariel mentioned, the powerups really don't make a lot of sense to me. I get the multishot; that's about it. The others have confusing telegraphs that you might want to reconsider.
Overall a fairly straightforward "twin stick" shooter, though I found it a bit frustrating when large new colonies spawned out of nowhere. I would have much preferred to have a level system, as it rewards the player better than just endless impossible to clear waves.
Woa! I was not expecting this when I first loaded the game.
I was a bit ham fisted with the controls at first; it wasn't super obvious what I needed to do. But once I got a feel for it I really enjoyed it! The music really helps build the mood, and the gravity mechanics are weirdly fun for such a simple idea.
I did find certain planets a bit tricky to escape; such as the grey metal one. The "double jump" mechanic wasn't super clear to me for a while, so it was a bit frustrating until I figured it out. You should telegraph this better so it's more clear to the player when they are executing one. It was also pretty tricky to land certain shots as a result; but it was challenging in a fun way.
Neat idea with turret placement. Initially I thought this was a tower defense game, so there was some confusion as to optimal placement, and why the just died the first round.
It wasn't immediately clear what the exits were. I also wasted time trying to use wasd. Whoops!
On the second level I somehow managed to fall through the bottom of the cage, thus ending my run.
Loved how planets had their own local gravity.
Things progress a bit slow, and I would have liked to see gravity exploited a bit more vs planet movement and rocket speed. Collisions also felt weird; I often got core hits when I didn't feel like I should have.
Super neat idea!
I would have liked to see more, but for a LD entry one can only ask for so much.
I felt a bit cheated when I got property damage because a car ran into my already-planted foot, but I'm actually not sure if I'm supposed to be aiming for a low or high score? I suppose it's up to the player.
There are lots of long, meandering dead ends. It's a bit frustrating from a player perspective, and typically something you'd solve during level design.
Jumping is very floaty, which leads to frustration when you miss a jump slightly and have to wait to fall before you can jump again. I suspect this was an intentional choice (low gravity) but when you have ambiguous levels like this, it can be frustrating unfortunately.
The ladder ability is a nice touch, but it should probably be given initially, or made much more obvious. I tried every possible route before finding it, which almost made me quit before digging deeper.
You might want to add some tile variations to your map. A common trick here to salt large maps like this is to just create a pool of "alternative" tiles and pepper them via RNG. Create some rare tiles too that stand out to give your level that extra bit of zest!
You also may wish to consider looking at angled tiles to spice up the level geometry a bit. Flat surfaces get boring quickly.
I got stuck after the second ladder powerup. I could get out of the pit, but couldn't figure out where to go.
Overall an interesting idea. I'd love to see more life added to the world, as it's a bit bland as others have stated. I think the mechanic itself has some potential if there's just more of a carrot to keep players hooked
Love the art on this!
The game is a bit frustrating though, as it often feels like the obstacles are simply impossible to avoid. This might just be my shmup senses being overly annoyed at the control limitations though.
Ye gods the aesthetic on this game is amazing.
I found the actual game to be fairly hard to get in to. I didn't really get anywhere, and found the tapes interface to be painful. Text scrolling is also annoyingly slow, and it felt punishing to go back and look at more info.
That said, the core idea is great. A few QOL tweaks and a bit more hand holding in the beginning could turn this into a really great game.
Oh man, we considered a card game for a while because, and I quote, "I've never seen someone do a card game in LD before".
Well, we didn't. But now I have!
My only complaint is that the intro is super long and unskippable (at least I didn't see a way to skip it).
Interesting approach to added complexity!
I do wish the weapon's visuals were improved more with each added mechanic; I do notice minor changes but they don't feel (visually or damage wise) like worthwile improvements given the added complexity. Half the fun of a design like this is making the player feel "overpowered", but the new mechanics mostly just felt like they were dragging me down.
Neat little concept.
The dialogue scrolls really slowly, and space skips it instead of revealing the whole line (per usual vn rules). This caused me to miss the controls out of habit.
The attack gas feels awkward to use since it comes from your rear and don't really go far, but it's an interesting forcing function for positioning. This is further helped by how tanking you are, a decision that felt wrong at first but I appreciated after playing a bit.
I found the difficulty curve a bit off putting, and closed it during the second level after several deaths.
Lovely pixel art with nice exaggerated animations.
Nice work!
There are a lot of things that weren't very well explained (such as why I have three classes, when they can all use any card seemingly). The negative cards also really didn't feel very punishing for the most part.
Combat felt really slow and wasn't very enjoyable.
The art was really well done! I love the style, and everything had a nice consistency to it! However, the sound really didn't seem to mesh well with it.
I think this could really be great with a bit of tweaking to the rules. Spend some time on a post-compo version with adjusted rules and see where it takes you. Make sure to get lots of outside playtesting feedback.
Ooh, this is up my alley.
I like that you took some inspiration from Undertale's bullet hell application. One thing to keep in mind is the fairness of each attack. Specifically, in Shana's case, it's impossible to avoid the attack until you get the timing down; this is something you should avoid. The attack should either be signaled in advance, or be slow enough to be avoidable given reasonable positioning.
For a good example of attack signaling, take a look at Iji; it even has a lot of similar attacks to the ones you use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67eLpLhxEPg
I also found the hitbox to be bit smaller than I expected. This is a common issue to contend with (hitbox size vs difficulty), which is why a lot of bullet hells use very small sprite/collision boxes by design.
Love the little flourish on the health bar.
The game seems to have ended for me when Sagiri spawned, she just sat there and followed me; no interactions seemed to advance the game.
After the first level I was expecting a simple difficulty ramp around the number of mines, but level 2 was a very pleasant surprise.
The graphics are nothing to write home about, the style has a nice consistency to it. My only real complaint is your font choice. It's a nice font for a title, but is fairly hard to read for longer strings.
I love the art style and sound/music choices.
This deserves a working post-compo version methinks!
Took me a few tries to understand the mechanics. You might consider a few "demonstration" levels to ease the player into the mechanics slower.
It's quite an interesting puzzle game. Since enemy movement isn't hinted in advance, it relies on you understanding their movements, which isn't great. Adding a "I'll move here" hint would be helpful.
Overall pretty fun. Some QOL stuff would make this really enjoyable!
The 3d assets are great! The 2d UI doesn't feel up to the same standard though. It might have been interesting to build the "happiness" bar as some kind of 3d asset instead. The text window also closed before I had a chance to read it most of the time, as I was busy being a good sushi boxer.
The "snapping" and mouse move was fairly intuitive for the most part, however one of the pieces of trash got "stuck" on my cursor and the game ended shortly after. I suspect part of this is due to using the web version, and the way mouse events work when the mouse cursor exits the window (In short: dang fangled internet machine!!!). Not sure there's a good fix for that honestly, beyond some code that tries to detect and handle missed mouse events. (Code that will inevitably be surrounded by comments containing expletives.)
Overall good work! The crates were a nice touch for something in a LD time scale.
"down to shoot" is a really strange control choice. Can't say I'm a fan, as it's just a bit awkward to do.
It seems the player can easily stick/get stuck to walls. This looks like a friction/force issue with your physics setup.
The basic idea is nice. I feel like I probably didn't give it a fair shake since I could only play in single player. It looks like it could be a lot of fun with friends!
It looks like the racket still applies an upward impulse even when you hit a ball from below.
This is probably a flash limitation, but I wish the mouse was captured. The racket going dead when the mouse exits the window is super frustrating.
A fellow Haxer!
It's not entirely clear what's going on at first, only after the enemy spawned did I realize what the little particles were doing. Enemies are also way too fast, often leading you to be stuck in an impossible situation. Collision was wonky; I was miles away from an enemy when the "game over" screen happened.
Interesting base concept, needs further development. Use playtesting feedback from LD to tune the idea, and give a post-compo version a whirl.
In Chrome, the play button doesn't appear to do anything. It doesn't even have a hover state like the exit button (which also does nothing).
I tried edge as well but it won't even load there.
edit: Got it to work after going fullscreen.
The turning mechanic feels really bad. Turning too early just stops the car, but turning too late kills you. In this state, I don't see any incentive to not just turn early and safely strafe through the corner. Since the turn kills the momentum, it lacks any of the enjoyment of a typical "drift" mechanic.
Performance was really bad in chrome. Not sure why, I've seen a few other unity games with this problem though, so I'm assuming the problem may be in chrome or unity, not your game specifically. A GTX 1070 + Threadripper 1950x should have no trouble with this.
Graphics had a nice consistency, this could be fun with some tweaked mechanics.
@shell-pirate Felina was only supposed to have an attack range of 1. I thought I changed it but seemingly never got around to actually editing/saving her config file. Her attack damage is also probably too high, but for LD I erred on being OP vs the game being too hard/frustrating for people unfamiliar with the genre.
If we do a post-compo version, a balance pass will be one of the first things I do.
Thanks for the feedback!
Critical bug: Double clicking the kittens picture does not open it.
Seriously though, fun little puzzle game. I agree with @star-sought in that the goal can sometimes be a bit vague (specifically on what to do with non-kittens related files), but otherwise it's a fun little challenge and give me a chuckle.
I can't decide if I hate or love the controls.
On one hand, they're weird and infuriating. On the other, the more i play it the better I get.
As others have stated, the music loop is a bit short and gets on your nerves after a while; but that's standard fare for compo.
The info dump of controls/rules at the beginning is a bit hard to mentally parse. I know it's LD and time is the enemy, but in the future consider teaching the player the rules as they play; so for example once they collect a few science, flash a little sign on the garage telling them to drop it off. The controls themselves were also all over the place from what one usually expects, so it just added to the list of things I had to read/remember before going in.
Does what it says on the tin I suppose.
When you're stuck and can't think of a good idea, try taking something simple and following the idea past it's logical conclusion. For example, instead of a fidget cube, why not use the same basic systems to build a space-based puzzle game where you needed to perform various combinations to clear blocks (perhaps something like yoshi's cookie mechanics), but instead of sliding rows you used sliders and toggle buttons?
Experimentation along those lines is what makes LD fun and interesting. Simply building a widget is a fine exercise, but not really the purpose of LD.
Despite this, I'll still applaud you for finishing a project inside the LD timescale. I hope you learn from this and come back for 43.
There's potential here, but the movement is frustrating and the mechanics are a bit confusing. I feel horribly inept at getting anything done unless I have the magnet powerup, and it's not clear if there's any penalty for dropping boxes in the wrong zone.
What's there seems to work well though. Boxes appear to combine into bigger boxes, gas mechanic works. It might be worth playing with the movement a bit. I'd also suggest adding some more feedback for when boxes are dropped off, since they just kinda vanish right now. Similarly, it took me a while to realize boxes combined since there wasn't any clear visual or audio feedback of this occurring.
I like the idea, but the execution seems to come down to luck more than anything. Asteroids move in often entirely impossible to predict ways, and shooting them usually just complicates matters. there's usually no path through the field from any position, meaning if your bomb/ghost aren't up there's no winning move.
It'd be interesting to try with fewer asteroids, but I imagine you've gone down this route already in your own experimentation.
The wall crushing mechanic is great, but I think I'd rather see it tied to time than health; as it just makes taking damage far more punishing.
Also noticed a bug where if you're using ghost, the bomb doesn't work. Probably just a collision parenting bug, should be easy to fix.
Asteroids interacting with each other is a neat feature, and might be more enjoyable with a less dense field. I'd also like to have seen a clamp to prevent them from going backwards; I had one shoot up at me from the back out of nowhere!
I get what you're going for here, but due to the board size, you end up spending most of the game just standing in one spot, then after a few minutes things move so fast you can get boxed in with no way to react.
It's a cool idea, but needs balance work for it to be fun.
The tetris-style line clear is a nice touch though.
As someone who's played a lot of tetris, it's hard for me to understand why I'd want the match 3 mechanic. It largely just messes with my stacking and creates more problems than it solves. Once I realized this, I began mostly worrying about accidentally creating a match 3, which seems like a bad mechanic.
Other than that, it's tetris. The basic boxes are all checked, and if nothing else I applaud you for trying something new and interesting in a space that you'd think would have been fully explored by now.
Play around with the mechanic a bit! I suspect if you make match3s more reliable and easy to obtain, they could be useful in solving some of the placement problems currently solved by intentionally bad stacks, or problems that require t-slide/etc.
Oh god it's loud. As a general piece of advice, always set SFX volume to 0.8 at the most, lower for sfxr/bfxr stuff. Headphone users will quietly thank you. Also beware of overlapping sounds, as that just makes them louder and angrier.
The controls are very weird. I probably would have gone for the "standard" wolf3d controls or mouselook if you want to be all fancy pants.
I think your FOV needs to be lower for a 3d billboard sprite game like this, the sprites feel like they're flying around when you turn.
Overall a pretty neat little project.
I found this one to be pretty tricky.
I think it would be valuable to add some kind of visual indicator to help newer players learn the timing and stay in the rhythm. Right now it seems to be just a case of knowing via trial and error, which can be a bit frustrating.
As a note to anyone else having this issue, right after spawning the screen glitches out for about a second and I die. This happens in chrome reliably. I switched to Firefox and the game plays as expected. Hopefully it's just my machine.
Ah, shmups. My wheelhouse. I love the art style you've gone for here. It's simple, but executed very consistently and thoughtfully. The sound effects fit well, and really the whole package just works. Enemy spawn patterns could be a bit smarter, but for the big chunky art style you've chosen, scripted bullets might be a bit over the top.
Nice work!
Oh wow a PICO8 game! I totally forgot this thing even existed!
I Love what you've done here. The art and graphics are cute and suit the game nicely, the gameplay itself is interesting, and I just can't bring myself to get mad at those cute little kitties when they block my path.
Pretty neat tower defense game!
It took me a while to figure out where the enemies were on the first wave; I think a lighter colour scheme would help in a lot of places. Space is dark! Make things bright!
The player's gun feels really anemic. I realize this is probably by design to encourage turret use, but perhaps it might be better to simply remove the gun all together, or replace it with something that is more for support (such as a weapon that slows enemies)
Agree with earlier comments on giving more info via the HUD. Health, upgrade amount, etc. Right now it seems I need to go up and inspect each turret to see it's upgrade amount. There might have been visual differences, but I didn't notice them during my playthrough.
Overall really fun! I see you're working on it post-compo, keep at it! I'd love to see where this ends up!
This is an ambitious kind of game to make during LD, especially for Compo. Don't feel too bad about slipping, it happens to us all.
Interface is missing some pretty big QOL features, like letting the user know when construction or research it done. Speaking of research, it seems Furryfication never completes, or it're repeatable. Not sure... That or I can't research and build at the same time?
The idea is great, and there's clearly some good stuff going on. I'd suggest taking a day or two off, and coming back over the weekend to give the UI a pass on a post-compo version. It's a fun little idea and I think it's worth bringing to fruition; especially when it's so close to being great.
It feels like the move/death/respawn loop is a bit too slow for a game that's based around heavy trial/error. I also find hearts as a damage boost mechanic to be a bit tricky, as it leaves a lot of ambiguity on how to approach the level. I found myself taking a lot of "leaps of faith" into spikes and not being sure if I made the right choice or not.
It was neat seeing experimentation down this route though, and it might be entirely solvable with level design and user messaging.
Took me several deaths to get my bearings. This is a bit unfortunate since the AI's patterns tend to lead them towards draws.
Once I figured it out I still was pretty bad, it would have been nice to have some kind of warmup or practice mode.
Worked fine for me.
This is a really neat idea. It has a nice gentle slope to let users figure everything out while it ramps up.
Art is nice and consistent, music is a bit simple but gets the job done.
It's an interesting take on the theme too, nice work!
Love the art style!
Mouselook sensitivity felt really high, though this can be hard to get right.
Does what it says on the tin. I'd say AI is probably going to be mandatory for most people though.
Smoother animation or tweens would go a long way toward improving the feel.
I kept getting these huge ~2sec stutters every time a tank spawns, which makes it really hard to play.
Threadripper 1950x / GTX 1070 / win10 / Chrome if it helps.
I got about 2 minutes in before dragging stopped working. It was fiddly before it worked, but after the bug hit items wouldn't move more than a few pixels from their spot in the inventory, meaning they'd always just drop back into place.
Not sure if it gets harder or not, the optimization strategy seems to be to just throw out big stuff and always grab the small items since they're more space efficient.
Couldn't figure out what to do either. Hopefully @bentekiller pops in and updates the description at some point!
Woa, this is not what I was expecting!
I have a strong beef with the controls. Maybe it's just muscle memory at this point, but I see a little cursor like that and I expect L/R rotate.
Once things get going, it's pretty confusing. Why do my projectiles keep blowing up, why does everything loop, etc. I love the idea, but it probably needs to be signaled better to the player.
Somehow despite that I still had a lot of fun. I'd highly encourage adding a bit more to the description to users don't need to spend as much time trying to figure out the game.
Interesting blend of mechanics.
The earlier comments largely nail my complaints with it; hard level structures combined with awkward movement flaws. I notice you can "stick" to platforms if you hold move while jumping.
The music pausing when you need to jump to the next platform is a nice touch. Feels like there might be something there, try cleaning it up a bit in post compo and seeing how it shakes out. I suspect with more carefully designed levels and more interesting hazards, you might have an interesting party game.
I know you wrote instructions on how to park the cars, but I somehow still managed to be confused and kept trying to press enter.
Car control is a bit awkward at times. Acceleration seemed really fast, and sometimes the car would "crash" even if it was going very slow and didn't hit anything obvious. (Probably clipping the edge of a collision box somewhere)
A lot of the quirks with clones are probably coming from using a physics engine. For a simple platformer, I think a quick AABB collision solver would actually work better than an out of box physics engine. It might be worth playing with now that LD is over; if nothing else than as an experiment and/or learning experience.
You might be able to quick fix the physics engine route too if you can add your own collision callback. Just track object to object collisions, and ignore all events between objects until they don't collide for a tick.
In any case, neat little game idea, and the glitches are pretty easy to avoid in normal play.
Love the idea!
My playthrough ended once i ran out of fuel, but from what I could play of it, I feel there's a pretty solid concept there. I highly encourage making a post-compo version now that things have cooled down. Play around with it a bit more, I think there's a lot of potential!
Controls were fine, but I found the collision to be the cause of most of my frustrations. The robot would snag just about every little box or corner, and turning doesn't have enough impulse to overcome it, which makes it infuriating to actually move around.
Grabbing the humans could also be a bit of a chore if they ran toward boxes.
Art and lighting are good, music loop is short but gets the job done.
I wish there was a way to end the level early, it seems like I had to wait for the last room to close despite it being empty.
Overall nice work for a compo entry!
Lovely art style!
I like the moving box mechanic as well. I got stuck at one point when a box I needed was off screen and I didn't realize I needed it.
I agree with others on the controls. It took me a life to realize it used sokoban rules, but otherwise it plays like I'd expect.
I realized after playing level 1 I should have started with T1 (T for tutorial! Doh!), so that may have saved me some grief.
Level advance would be nice, but compo deadlines can be unforgiving.
Love the little "shwoo" sound at the end.
Nice set of mechanics and variety! I felt the wave difficulty would probably have ramped a little faster, but that's shmups for you. One man's too hard is another's too easy.
Echoing the comments on the music, but otherwise everything else fits together quite nicely.
Overall had quite a bit of fun. Great work!
Would have liked to see the bullet travel to my mouse position, the current setup is a bit tricky to aim.
Also it seems like I take damage way too fast if I drive into something. Not sure if this is a bug, or if the iframes are too short/missing. The fast move speed exacerbates this a bit.
Nice feature set! Upgrades are a great touch, and keep the game moving.
Is seems being out of bounds only slows down the rate at which you "repeat" move, ie move when your key is down.
To this effect, you can win levels by just mashing 'd' fast enough.
Seems fairly straightforward. I would have liked to see some incentive to choose non-straight paths (such as powerups, time extensions, etc), but what you have seems to work as expected.
Could use some polish (music, sfx, juice) but I suspect you're aware. LD can be unforgiving in this regard.
Solid implementation from a mechanics standpoint.
The UI could use some polish, and I think it might be lacking in variety, but overall the idea is competent.
Some post-compo work would go a long way to fleshing the idea out. It's not a bad premise, but the lack of feedback, scoring, and a clear goal, makes it a bit ambiguous and generally not interesting.
Now that LD is over, play around a bit and see what comes of it.
I absolutely adore the art style! Echoing other comments on being hard to parse without reading the description, though I've been guilty of this in several of my entries as well.
Great work!
I was about to give you a low score on theme, and it dawned on me what you've done here. I let out an audible groan.
Mechanically the game seems sound. I do feel like level design is a bit hostile in places, but the game plays fast enough that a bit of experimentation was fine.
I think you're probably aware of the graphics and lack of polish, so I'll leave that feedback to your imagination. But I do think there's some interesting gameplay potential here. It's worth playing around with a post compo version if you get some time. I think it could be a lot of fun as a puzzle platformer.
@lossypi some actions let you reroll, others don't. It largely depends on how dire the situation is (ie, is it something where failure would prevent moving forward).
That said, I did play a bit fast and loose with some of the events.
The game used to play faster, but I slowed it down a lot for atmospheric reasons. I wanted to really dial home the feeling of despair and desolation. I may have overdone it....
Thanks for the feedback!
@sgergaud I'm not sure what you're talking about. Do you mean the first part where you can name your characters? Simply clicking "next" with no input provides default values. Though I suppose it's not super clear.
I'm not a fan of the controls here.
First, because they feel a bit floaty. Second, because after sacrificing a drone, your ship tends to fly off after the mouse cursor, leading to a quick demise.
Other than that though... a very competent shmup! You might try playing around with bullet engines like bulletml; they'll allow you to produce more interesting patterns without much work. Also consider difficulty options for shmups in the future; balancing these things for LD is near impossible.
Really though, the pacing was on point for LD, and it was fun enough to keep me engaged to the end. Nice work!
I agree with kambing on the traps being more frustrating than enjoyable.
I think it might be more interesting to have a trap budget, set them once, and let things roll (ie more of a setup puzzle than an active game). If you want to improve the current design, consider some kind of indicator on how long before the traps disappear, so the player knows when to replace them.
The saw traps seem overly powerful compared to others. There might have been a tradeoff, but it wasn't really clear.
The art is all wonderful, and the intro comic was a nice touch (even if the controls to advance through it were a bit weird)
In general I like what you've done here, and would love to see more work on this in a post-compo release!
Echoing other comments here: I love the visual style, the theme, and the choices. But the hitboxes and other bugs (I fell out of the world twice) make this game a bit hard to really enjoy.
Please do make a post-compo version of this!
This very much has an old school adventure game vibe to it, as rpgfaker mentioned.
Balance may need a bit of tweaking; but honestly getting it right in this kind of time frame would be more luck than anything.
Bit of a shame there's no audio, but overall I found it quite enjoyable. Good work!
Neat idea on using rescues as health!
I found the shooting felt a bit unresponsive at times. More pressing, if you're up against a building (ie one is directly above you), bullets don't fire at all. (They're likely colliding with the building itself and vanishing before even rendering).
Minor issue aside, the graphics are wonderful and the idea has solid execution. Well done!
Neat little game.
The enemies seemed mostly harmless though. They Even touching the edges of their cones mostly showed no reaction, and should they react, you can just walk away from them.
The layout itself ended up being more confusing than anything. It felt like work to traverse the area, where in stealth games you usually want it to be more tense and puzzle like.
That said, the atmosphere is good, and there's certainly plenty of map to traverse. The abilities make it much more enjoyable to zip through the map.
Overall quite good. Nice work!
I like the premise, but the time constraints don't feel very engaging.
I'm not sure how I'd design this game honestly. Perhaps a limited number of actions that can be performed over a set period, vs making the user wait to unlock content?
The UI could use some polish, but the goblin in the background is a nice touch.
Might be worth playing with the design a bit post-compo. There's a lot of good content here, it just needs to be presented in a different way.
The attack animation feels really awkward. A faster, single directional "slash" would probably provide more compelling feedback, as well as adding some kind of hit effect when you strike something.
It wasn't super clear at first that blood -> money. One I figured that out, I wasn't sure if monsters were respawning or I was just finding new ones. A lot of this could have been explained in the game (or at least the LD page) but it's pretty spartan right now unfortunately.
That all said, you've got a decent amount of content here for a 3 day siesta, I don't think it would take much tweaking to nudge this one over the line into something that's pretty fun to play. Consider noodling on a post-compo version when you get some time!
The inventory combination system really threw me for a loop a few times.
But wow, everything else here is solid. Good writing, standard point and click implementation, multiple endings. The works.
If I had to complain, the lack of a save feature makes some of the joke endings a bit rough. We all knew I was going to end the world with delicious candy...
Really though, amazing work!
Great job end to end on this! The art, music, and gameplay all work very well together, and produce a rather fun little stealth game.
If I had to nitpick, the intro/text sections are a bit slow; I'd like to see more text on the screen at once and a slightly more interesting text interaction, but what you have is a good compromise given your time budget. Something to look into for post compo I suppose! The skip button was welcome.
I don't have much else to add, but keep up the good work and strongly consider fleshing this into a larger experience.
Graphics have a nice consistency and mood.
The movement feels pretty wonky though. You can get "stuck" on walls, and it's sometimes hard to jump while heading up the side of the altar.
I'm also really good at catching fireballs with my face...
I had the same issue as great-bobleny, the mechanic around population seems really weird. If population started at 3 (one per resource farm) I probably wouldn't have had the issue, but I kept making corn and wood while waiting for a new person to pop up.
I would have liked some follow up text to go with the net change. It's not always clear *why* I'm gaining/losing something, and that bit of flavor text is important to providing context to the world I believe.
The gaining/losing hunger is a bit weird; it's not immediately clear if I want to gain hunger or lose it.
It also might be nice to get high level probabilities for some riskier outcomes. This does tip your hand a bit, but it lets players make smarter choices coming in blind, and allows you to tweak the odds without it seeming completely random to the player.
Those minor nitpicks aside, it's a solid implementation! I had fun playing and would love to see this expanded in a post-compo version.
This is a really neat idea!
Some minor nitpicks: - Levels don't seem to be timed for "zero cycle". (For example, the third level has the first platform too far away to make a jump even if you move at maximum speed) - The right click power tends to fade a bit slowly, which leads to some frustrating moments - The power circle obscures the other world, meaning moving platforms are extra evil. - It's important to remember platformers like this thrive on being tough but responsive and fair; such that the player always feels like it's their fault when they die. Right now I'm blaming the game a lot, which is not ideal.
That said, these are pretty minor annoyances, and easy to tweak. Overall I really love what you've done here!
Y'all got any more of them goblins to slay?
Only real complaint I have is that I died a lot for reasons that aren't really obvious to me. Maybe that's just the intent, but it felt bad when i just died without warning.
Then again, more dead goblins, so still a win?
I love how you've implemented the theme here. On the surface it looks like the standard implementation, but you've done it in a way that forces the player to make meaningful decisions.
Minor annoyance: I tabbed out for a second and a bat flew under the hero. When I tabbed back (having heard the damage sound) I saw nothing! ... the bat was rendering completely under my party, rendering him effectively invisible. That was a silly way to die :D
The forced time limit felt really bad, as it simply added pressure while I was trying to figure out the game.
I also found the system for assigning workers to be fairly counter-intuitive at first. This lead to a bit of a flummoxed first night.
Even after I figured it out, the system felt fairly rough to use. I suspect streamlining this process would improve the game feel quite a bit.
That aside, the idea's quite nice! Once I got the hang of things I found it to be a fairly enjoyable experience.
Oh man, I love the art for this. The audio also is a wonderful compliment to the style, and the atmosphere in general is on point as heck.
Gameplay wise, the piercing mechanic took a few shots to figure out, but it ended up being self-explanatory enough that I figured it out on my own.
However, it seems enemies can just spawn anywhere, and multiple times I had one spawn right in front of me, before I could even react to it. Random spawns aren't entirely evil, but giving the player a "safe zone" goes a long way in reducing frustration.
If you find that too easy, add a telegraph to where the enemies will spawn, giving players more time to react before the enemy appears and becomes dangerous.
I'd also consider adding a slow health regen, and simply preventing the player from attacking when it would be fatal. This gives players an "out" to having health lower than the sacrifice level, without just being doomed.
Overall great entry! I'd love to see a post-compo version!
Holy heck, this is great!
You pushed basically all of my buttons here. low poly scifi 3d graphics, space battles, power management, orbital combat AAAAAAAAA
I love this.
Please keep working on it.
I wish I could give you constructive feedback but nope. Just keep doing what you doing. But more.
More PICO-8 love!
Really neat take on the genre. I do find that needing to manually kill robots is rather tedious. I suspect this is a theme consideration, but it feels like itjust makes the game less fun.
It took me a while to fully understand how you gained the second resource. I guess that'll teach me for skipping the instructions.
Lovely mood in this, it's very retro in a good way. I would have liked some music, but that's about the extent of my complaints in the atmosphere department.
Nice work!
Nice and juicy interface! I see you speak tween.
Enjoyable little defense game with surprising depth.
if I had to complain (I do), your pixel sizes aren't consistent. That's a paddlin'.
Mechanically, I found more often than not enemies get stuck together, or the pig head gets stuck on enemies, or some combination of these. The pig head dying also seems to complicate things. In general, I suspect you're fighting the physics engine more than it's helping you.
For future games, you might look into using just a gravity constant with more traditional collision detection. I suspect it'll solve a lot of your problems here.
As for the gameplay, it's weirdly enjoyable to shoot pig heads at things.
Neat take on the puzzle platformer!
Controls were a bit floaty for my taste, but very servicable. It took some work to get the muscle memory down, but I'm honestly now sure how I'd do it any differently.
It wasn't immediately clear to me I didn't always need to kill *all* of the peasants.
The graphics were lovely! Felt like a more whimsical version of Binding of Isaac. It fit the theme quite well.
Overall nice entry. I look forward to seeing if you do anything with it post jam.
A surprisingly fun implementation of a text-only adventure.
Two bugs: 1) Sometimes the scroll behavior feels a bit weird. This is further complicated by choices occasionally being below the "fold". it might be nice to have a big angry flashy arrow of some kind to remind us that there's more to see. I find myself getting into a "groove" clicking options and not really paying a ton of attention to the scroll bar.
2) The game seems to have ended (or bugged out) at "You turn on the TV. It's showing some sort of Japanese cartoon." followed by the narrator quipping "Is now really the time?". I can't seem to progress from here, but it's not obviously a failure/game over state. After reading some other comments, I realized I had to scroll up and click a different option, which was not obvious.
Quite a bit of writing here for a Jam game, and I love seeing narrative works in LD. Great job!
The pacing was a bit off I think. Text boxes opened/closed way too slowly, and in general everything moved a lot slower than I'd expect for a shmup.
Interesting to remove the shooting half of the equation, but there weren't enough bullets/things to dodge to really offer up much of a threat, so it wasn't super engaging to me. That said, balancing shmups in LD is dang near impossible.
Overall interesting idea with solid execution, but could likely benefit from some minor tweaks to really make it shine.
Interesting design for a puzzle platformer!
Jumping and movement felt weird at times, especially around ledges. I suspect this is something weird in your collusion resolution, but it's not super critical since the game largely doesn't require precise movement.
Intro was a nice touch, but a "skip" might have been nice to have.
It feels a bit weird to fail by having too many followers (but not sacrificing them. I think I see why you did this, but maybe an alternative solution would be to have a "finish" or "exit" spot, and if you can make it there without accidentally sacrificing more than the required number, you can still progress. Level design could prevent this from ever occuring, but at least then it feels "fair", which I feel is an important aspect in a puzzle game.
A+ in the mood department. I'm loving what you've done here!
That said, the actual game part felt a bit unsatisfying. Throwing babies into the thing's mouth is tricky as there aren't any real aiming controls that I could see. They also tend to just sit in front of his jaws instead of going in, and when they pile up, the physics engine has a Physics Moment and just shoots babies off at a zillion miles an hour.
The ending also left me wanting.
This is one I'd love to see developed more post-compo. You've got a lot of really promising looking set pieces, but I think the idea needs to bake a bit longer.
Holy heck this game is hard!
I would have liked to see a bit more variety in the gameplay. Ultimately it seems every encounter boils down to kiting the slimes, which isn't super engaging.
Implementation seems solid; everything worked as expected. The powerups were a nice touch, but it felt like optimizing for speed/damage was the only right choice.
I'm not super happy with how the player moves, though I'm having trouble articulating how.
I would have loved to see this applied as more a puzzle platformer, but as it is there doesn't seem to be any real punishment for doing several overly excessive jumps. Also, A lot of places force you into extra jumps if you slightly miss, which doesn't feel good design-wise.
Also I'd suggest making the restart as fast as possible in platformers, else it can be frustrating as the player waits for the death and wipe animations to play.
Overall the mechanic is good, but I think it might be more interesting to apply it slightly differently. What I played was solid though. Good work!
@malarpuppet It's a bit tough to figure out as the longer form briefing didn't make it in. I put a shorter "what do I do" section in the game description which will hopefully help, but the intro dialog also explains it as well.
The only soft lock I'm aware of is if Carlos dies (The green mech) before a certain point. This is a gameover state but doesn't switch to the scene properly. If you got into one via some other path, please let me know! EDIT: Looks both mechs have states which can cause soft locks if you die. The second one is a bit more rare though.
I played a bit and honestly have no idea what I'm supposed to do. Are there instructions somewhere that I'm missing?
Lovely art style.
Found the actual gameplay to be a bit monotonous. I also felt like I should be able to get higher up in the level, but I couldn't jump very high and the little jump pad is in a bad spot.
Lack of iframes (or lack of clear communication about them) made some enemies feel cheesy.
In general I think the combat is pretty close to being fun, but needs tweaked a bit to really get me excited to play another round.
Echoing comments above, it was a bit tricky to figure out, but looked functionally complete. Some behaviors seemd buggy (like choosing professions) but it wasn't clear if this was because I wasn't allowed to, or the checkboxes just weren't working properly.
I see what you're trying to achieve, but it might be worth doing some bug fixing or simply adding detailed instructions for luddites like me.
Neat idea, but as others have said, the first life is always pretty confusing.
It's also not clear that there's any point in buying the weaker guns, or more than one gun, other than the challenge. Since ammo appears to be infinite, and tehre's no mechanic for gaining new lives, it's basically a one-time "which gun do I buy" decision. This makes it feel less interesting as a decision.
The camera is super nauseating. I'd probably anchor it to the player, or add a TON of lerp to make it less shakey.
Better unit AI and variety might spice things up a bit, but still pretty fun overall though.
I found the hit reg to be really finicky. This lead to a lot of cheap deaths and missed hits. Music is REALLY loud and pretty monotonous... I would have liked an option to turn it off (or at least lower it!).
Woa, this is fun!
Graphics are simple, but consistent, readable, and point. The weapon system does fit the theme, but the penalty felt too light.
I clipped through a ramp in the first laser room, which was amusing, but I was able to walk out and resume the game without losing progress, so it was ultimately not an issue.
Overall solid entry.
The controls in general felt super clunky, and ended up being a frustrating point of contention.
The comics were fun, and the mechanics seem to be sound. Just needs some work cleaning up the rough edges.
I love the style you've gone with here.
Overall pretty nice entry! The biggest complaint I have is that you can sort of get "stuck" on planets if you fall into them. Seems like this should either be a death state, or easier to break free of. Alternatively, you could add a "landed" state which allows the player to launch for a larger fuel cost that shoots them well past escape velocity.
Screenshake was super excessive to the point of being disorienting. I'd dial it back a few notches. Zombie spawn logic should also probably also do a quick check to ensure we don't spawn them on screen.
Overall I'm not sure I felt the purpose/value of the zombie waves. They felt very bolted-on. I suppose it's a forcing function for health/growing, but it doesn't really feel like part of the main loop.
"Oddly enjoyable" is the best way I can describe it. The art style is best described as "A tornado of assets", but somehow it ends up being charming through it all. The mechanics themselves were surprisingly deep once I got a feel for them, and the intro/tutorial explained everything in a clear/guided manner.
Great job!
The box move/jumping mechanic could have been clearer at the cliff. I normally don't mind puzzles like this, but with a time constraint it felt more like a bug than a challenge. I think I'd have to echo Brinkhousegames' comments on the box move speed; I might have expected them to be mechanically useful if they moved faster.
Otherwise played fine, with a good take on the theme.
Lovely style you've used here!
The basic seeker AI is a bit dumb, but in a charming way. Later enemies add a nice variety, and overall it all feels well executed. I would have loved a bit of audio, but recognize often doesn't allow for such things.
Overall great entry. If I had to complain, it takes a while before it's beneficial to pass down to your offspring, as limb collection is fairly slow (especially early game).
Took me a while to realize throw direction was based on where I clicked. The control scheme in general was a somewhat strange mix of keyboard and mouse... Something as simple as a mouse cursor may have improved clarity a bit.
The graphics and audio are incredibly charming!
Once the goblins kick into high gear, it feels fairly monotonous. The cannonball is probably trying to force some kind of strategy, but I found it mostly just cheap.
Overall fun little entry. Some mechanical tweaks around goblin spawns could really make this a fun little game!
@nonagram99 Whoops! One of the dialogue nodes on that tree wasn't connected. I've pushed a quick fix.
What an interesting take on sokoban.
I'll freely admit I'm terrible at this genre, but found it quite fun regardless. The undo button is VERY appreciated here.
Graphics are nice, and the overarching narrative plays well into developing the mood.
This was lovely!
I only wish there was more of it. I think it's pretty clear how this type of game can be expanded upon, it might be worth considering after the compo fatigue wears off.
Wow, there's a lot here for an LD entry!
Honestly I can't find much to really give feedback on beyond movement speed, which is slow for my taste but probably appropriate for the type of combat you're going for. I also would have liked the fireball to either spawn instantly, or at least spawn in the direction I clicked (It seems to follow my movement, so I can't "look away" during the cast period). Again, this might be an intentional and potentially correct choice for this game though.
The other piece of feedback would be to just get more playtesting data. Something I started doing in recent jams is to wrangle random friends to just play it at various states to get raw feedback on the mechanics and difficulty. It's been a positive force on our entries, and something that doesn't really burn much time.
Overall really solid entry; great work!
There are some neat pieces here. I hope you revisit this at some point, there's a lot of potential that just needs a little more time to bake.
I have the same UI issue as netmute; 4k monitor at 1.5x UI scaling. The character is also massive in relation to the tile sizes, this could probably be toned down a lot.
Graphics are nice and cohesive overall. The tile appear is a nice touch and serves as a fantastic "fog of war". I do wish there was a better way to visually determine which tiles were passable; often I'd get trapped without realizing it.
Gameplay wise it works as expected. I do wish there was a bit more variety in both events and mechanics, but this is already pushing the limits of what one can expect to reasonably polish in a Jam.
Overall solid entry. Nice work!
The lack of setup time and the large building grid made this more frustrating than anything for me. A better start/stop mechanic to give you setup time would be ideal (See: The Incredible Machine); or starting from a position where the hamsters don't instantly die (See: Lemmings).
The fisrt level was also brutally difficult. Typically you want to ease players in with a simple mechanics demo that's hard to mess up, so they can quickly learn the mechanics.
That said, the art is cute and the core mechanics all seem sound. These are minor gripes that can be easily sorted out in a post-jam version.
Interesting mix of mechanics.
I did find it annoying that the beat detection refuses to allow an early press though, so you're rewarded to being slightly behind the beat and being directly on it is risky.
The shooter part wasn't clear the first time, and I only noticed it was a thing on my second attempt. The failure screen also isn't super clear, though that might just be me missing the theme you were going for.
The laser turrets feel more like decorations than anything. As others have stated, ramming is orders of magnitude more useful and you just end up smashing into everything.
That said, it's quite fun despite that. However, it seems once you absorb a few ships you're effectively unstoppable, and the game grows tiring as you end up spending all your time hunting for things to absorb.
Super fun concept, absolutely worth fiddling around with post-compo.
While the controls were responsive, I found the collision to be rather frustrating.
For example, you cannot jump while falling, meaning if you miss the cliff edge you will simply plummet to your death. Similarly, the collision boxes between you and a thing you're jumping over often result in unexpected deaths.
Level design could also use some work; as others have pointed out there are a lot of unintentional shortcuts you can take due to the meandering path and reliance on platform/pit design.
Seems I can simply lose powerups if I fall in a bad spot while holding one. Respawning doesn't re-create them.
Now, that all said, all of these issues are easy to change/tweak. Nothing here is fundamentally broken and the core seems sound. You even have a few enemy and trap types, making the game surprisingly competent for what was likely a very rushed product given you binned your first few attempts.
Nice work!
Interesting set pieces here, such as the log falling and the webs, but without some kind of system to teach the player they end up requiring the "hints" section you added, which is unfortunate. The inventory screen was also fairly confusing.
Controls also don't feel super great; the double jump actually felt like a bug initially. Combined with slow movement speed, traversing the map doesn't feel great.
Ultimately this feels like an ambitious jam game that just didn't have enough time to bake. You've got a bunch of wonderful concepts that just need a bit more work to be fully realized, and this would be a prime candidate for something to spend a bit more time on now that LD is over.
Wonderful art direction here! The only oddity is that the horizontal pans in the intro end up looking a bit weird in some cases due to the lack of depth cues, while still having perspective. Adding some kind of shading effect can supply those cues (Something along the lines of cell shading could work) or possibly just tweaking the camera fov. That said, I don't know how many people even pick up on this, so it might be a non-issue.
Story wise the writing is solid. If I had to complain, as the player I don't have a good grasp on where things are going at first, and there aren't enough clues in the story to direct my choices in a meaningful way. Similarly, there doesn't appear to be any obvious cost to choosing poorly at first, so all of my first play-through decisions were made quite lightly. That said, I like the high level design, and if you're shooting for multiple attempts as the standard, this may actually be the correct choice (else players may fret over making poor choices and feel cheated when they run out of time)
Overall a really nice narrative game executed in a super creative way.
PICO-8 games are my jam
There seems to be a bug in which changing screens may clip you into a tree, at which point you're stuck. In retrospect I probably could have cut the tree down, but it was night so it didn't cross my mind.
There doesn't seem to be a ton of obvious value in building walls, perhaps they're more useful in later waves? For the most part it seems like they just waste resources.
General interactions felt fine, though the build cursor being so far from the character can be frustrating.
Overall great job! The art is lovely and the game is fun!
Woa this is great.
I did ultimately hit a bug, in which an arrow card was placed but didn't fire (It got stuck at the first animation frame, and no projectiles seemed to spawn; or perhaps they did spawn but simply didn't move?). There might be a reason for this mechanically but I couldn't figure out one. Luckily it didn't block the tile so I could just place a sword instead and still cleared it.
Graphics are simple yet lovely. Mechanics are solid, though it might be worth revisiting some of them (Baby hearts seem useless, for example) but there's so much to love here I'm mostly just excited to see where you go with it.
A fairly solid card game, but I feel the pacing really hurts it. Most turns are pretty straightforward, but card animations and effects are slow and I became impatient fairly quickly.
The level advancement also doesn't feel very rewarding; in games like these you really want to show off the things you gain each level (be it new cards in the deck, the "something" ability, etc).
lastly, the enemy having the same cards as yourself makes gameplay fairly direct. Compare with Slay the Spire, where unique decks force you to think specific ways about how you approach an enemy. In this game it's mostly just picking the optimal cards and hoping the AI does the wrong thing. A quick improvement might be to hide the opponent's cards. but giving them some unique abilities would spice it up a lot.
Overall a pretty solid job for a compo entry. Minor gameplay gripes aside, I didn't hit any bugs and everything seems to work as one would expect. Nice work!
I'm getting a 404 on both of your download links.
There's a big red "LIGHTING NEEDS REBUILT" warning in the corner.
Oh wow this is lovely.
The mood is absolutely fantastic, and the art and sound come together perfectly.
The platforming is tough but solid, though it seems to be more of a vehicle to convey the rest of the game.
There doesn't appear to be any hints toward what ingredients go together, and with limited funds experimentation is both expensive and risky.
I gave it three shots and crafted nothing of value. Perhaps a guide of some sort would help?
On my first attempted I picked muscle, walked up to the shopkeeper, and he sold me the stall for 0g. Then I won the game.
On a second playthrough I picked thief and stole some stuff first, but the shop was still 0g and the game instantly ends once you purchase it.
I suspect this isn't intentional, but I couldn't find any more specific instructions.
Story mode doesn't appear to go anywhere, just some dialogue based on who you pick and you win once you've spoken to everyone without any additional interaction.
In arcade mode the ship just instantly sinks. The screen before that has buttons you can click but they don't appear to do anything.
Pretty sure I'm missing something? It might be worth explaining the setup screen.
It took me a while to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do, but once that was sorted the puzzles were surprisingly deep. Graphics and sound are fairly cohesive, though I found the music loop a bit droning after a while.
Overall solid entry. Could use some better controls perhaps, but otherwise great!
There seem to be couple of conflicting mechanics here. On one hand, I need to reveal the platforms, but I appear to have a limited amount of reveal power. Since each level repeats, there's little incentive to be careful with this power since once I know where the platforms are, it's easy. It's a bit of a shame too since there's a pretty neat mechanic with the particles sliding off the platforms. I'm honestly not sure how to fix this off the top of my head, other than randomizing the platform positions.
The other oddity is that the reveal particles seem to kill me. This was surprising to me and I'm not sure what purpose it serves.
And lastly the platforming exercise seems to be mostly a formality once you've revealed the platforms.
Honestly you've got a couple really neat mechanics here but they're not being used well yet. I'd spend some time playing with it a bit more and I suspect you'll have a pretty unique game on your hands!
Art and music were lovely!
The combat felt lacking in depth and mechanically slow, but I didn't hit any unexpected bugs and was able to clear the game without incident.
Most of the commenters already mentioned the design and messaging issues, I'd just like to comment on a rather amusing bug I hit due to velocity not being reset when the player respawns. If you die going fast enough, you just keep falling through the world forever.
Overall a solid attempt for a first try!
After I sorted the controls for moving things around, I quickly realized I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.
As others have stated, better controls would help, but I quickly found myself bored even after I sorted the controls out. Building to the DNA strand didn't seem to reflect in any interesting changes, and it wasn't clear if I was actually doing the right things.
As high level direction, games like this can be incredibly fun tools that indirectly teach players about deep fields they don't know about, but it's a fairly tricky thing to pull off well. Zachtronics games are great examples here, with the game slowly ramping you up with simple concepts and strong player guidance. I realize this is an LD entry so such things are rather difficult to pull off in the time scale, but they're fairly important to making sure the game actually feels like a game.
I absolutely adore the art!
Gameplay wise, I think the platforming itself is mostly fine for this type of game; but the enemies ended up being a bit of a sticking point for me. The rabbits like to blend in with the background, and the pathing results in forcing the player to wait a lot. Typically this would be solved by giving the player an attack of some kind (see: sonic, mario).
The shop was a nice tough but I couldn't find any way to determine what items did without just using them.
Overall a pretty fun entry!
Oh no, these controls.
Honestly I was pretty turned off by them at first, but the game loop is tight enough that I kept trying new things, and eventually found a method that works for me. The high score is always a good way to help keep people engaged for more, a good evolution of this would be to go full "zachtronics" on it and track more stats (longest life, most kills per shots fired, etc)
The graphics are nice, and everything seems to be pretty coherent visually. Collisions feel super loose (AABBs maybe?), the usual lazy fix here is to just shrink the boxes by some percentage.
Overall a pretty solid entry.
The graphics are lovely!
The game itself though feels a bit too difficult. Making the roll a bit longer would go a long way toward making this more approachable. This is an easy trap to fall into during LD, getting friends to playtest at certain intervals is super helpful on that front. When in doubt, for LD make it too easy.
I gave it four shots and only made it to the sawblades once.
Solid little entry. The only bug I ran into was one of the "rooms" was inaccessible because it was blocked by another
Also found the distance from the entrance to be a bit long... ended up taking a bit of a joyride of faith. A little starfield would help the player be more confident flying out into space, as well as maybe some kind of connector deco meshes between the rooms.
Yeap, getting a 404 as well. Hopefully the author can fix it before rating ends.
The ability to control projectiles is a neat idea, but I found it almost always easier to just ignore that and line up a next shot instead.
Part of this is just the clunkyness of the controls; and part of it is more the natural limitations of my brain; I can't manage to chase the projectile while also avoiding hits.
Locking player movement for a time while hit seems like a rather punishing choice; it often just leads to the first person to take a hit being constantly bullied with projectiles they can't dodge while the other can easily skate around dodging until a projectile can be steered into them; which given control issues is a bit of a feat honestly.
Art and feel were both good.
In general I'd highly encourage an AI player for LD, even if it's dumb; most people likely don't have a friend to play with (especially right now).
the hard level seems to just error whether you win or lose.
In general, a pretty simple tower defense game. Would have loved to see more options. letting the player define their own path makes it fairly easy though.
I have no idea what "kills" eggs at this point honestly. I moved an egg from one spot to another, and moments later I lost the game, while staring at the unharmed egg. There seems to be a number of unexplained mechanics here; perhaps updating the description might help.
For the rest of it; movement felt solid for an FPS game, graphics were simple but reasonable; though the mixture of soft terrain and voxel structures is an interesting choice. Particles appeared to bleed through the world but this actually made it easier to find things; possibly a compromise for that reason but a map of some kind might have been preferable.
Overall a solid entry.
Also getting timeouts. Looks like it's dead again
Echoing others here; better UI would go a long way here; Zachtronics games are a good template.
You also probably need to train players on certain interactions like latches, this can be done in a few ways; for LD it's probably easiest to start levels requiring them with the critical concept pre-assembled to demonstrate how it works, then let them build the other. Then in later levels they can use past knowledge to work forward from there.
That said I love games like these, and despite the flaws found it a fun little entry.
Neat entry!
I wish the potions had a little explanation of some kind.
Platforming mechanics were a bit frustrating, and I wish the killbox was a bit closer so I didn't have to wait as long when I made a mistake.
Otherwise pretty fun!
I was just looking into the game of life earlier today; talk about coincidences!
Ultimately this is a really neat idea, but the gamification doesn't really feel good. I probably would have slowed things down a lot, maybe even made it turn based so the player has a lot more time to think and react to what's going on. This would also open up a lot more opportunities to give the player more control than the rather blunt tool interface currently given.
I know that isn't really in the spirit of Conway's original implementation though, so I suppose your goals here matter a lot.
Anyway, super neat entry!
Interesting idea. Took me a few tries, but once I got past the first manhole, I found it pretty easy.
Not sure what barking actually does.
It probably needs a few more mechanics to really get its groove, but this is certainly a solid foundation.
Cute little game.
The art is lovely and the audio backs it up nicely. Everything more or less worked as I expected, though it wasn't immediately obvious I had to move the camera myself. I would have liked to either see a wider camera angle such that this wasn't needed, or a self-moving camera mechanic of some kind.
Gameplay felt slow (as you seem to have already noticed) but ultimately the game loop is always going to be a bunch of waiting. I'm not sure how to solve this without drastic changes to your design.
Overall a fun little entry. Could use a bit more polish in some spots, such as the menus and transitions, but you appear to be on top of that as well.
As others have mentioned, this one's pretty hard to decipher. Most actions don't appear to have a logical outcome, and whatever variables are involved aren't clearly exposed to the player.
In games like this it's important to steer the player a bit; give them clear feedback on what is working and why. You typically want the player to feel smart for solving a puzzle, but not get frustrated in the process of finding that solution. It's a bit of a balancing act.
A functional map really helps here, nice work!
Enemies were a bit of a chore more than a challenge. their slow movement generally just makes them fodder, and constantly needing to sweep them while hunting for items became tedious.
mechanically everything worked as expected, though the victory screen could have used a bit more fanfare. Granted I'm guilty of this one too, 'tis the curse of the jam I suppose
Really well done for a compo entry honestly. I'd like to see more but this is a solid foundation
Getting some nice Downwell vibes from your art style here.
Overall this one gives me mixed feelings. I like the idea you've gone with, but I'm not sold on the execution; it's a neat concept but it doesn't go anywhere. In general the switching mechanic is rarely needed and when it is, it's just for nuisances like navigating around spikes.
Also as others have stated, the lack of checkpoints make playing this a bit of a chore.
Neat little entry though!
Lovely graphics!
Gameplay wise there's a lot going on here. Movement feels fairly forgiving but needing to bounce off enemies to hit the second level platforms is an interesting choice that I'm still conflicted on.
Once I realized the only real threat is the saucers, the game felt fairly easy and started to lose interest due to the lack of new mechanics.
Ignoring those little niggles though, the game itself is fun and well polished. The art is charming and overall it's a very impressive entry for a jam.
Love the aesthetics! It's a fun mix of tones that gives it a unique style.
Gameplay wise though it feels a bit simple. I love the concept, I just want more things to grapple to and maybe a bit of a slower speed so I can enjoy it more. but these might just be preference.
A simple idea with solid execution.
Collision on the rocks was a bit brutal (often you'd explode just by getting near them). The lack of audio and visual feedback on the car's speed and braking also introduced a lot of guesswork. I basically just kept failing until I got a mostly straight shot out of the level.
Overall neat idea, I would have liked to see some more variation in the effects though, perhaps buildings falling over and shattering, or tipping to the side to leave little gaps. Also hitting buildings at low speed probably shouldn't be a game over.
neat little entry though!
Echoing the control issues. Ultimately while the slippery feel is kind of annoying, the big issue for me is that movement continues after releasing the movement key. This removes almost all precision from the platforming.
Oh man, these controls. I get what you were trying to do, but various objects collide with the mouse vector unexpectedly, causing your character to veer off into strange locations.
I also found if I walked over something, I would end up pushing it through the floor.
Audio cues seem to play regardless of whether an action succeeds, so you're never quite sure if you did something or not.
The audio and graphics are nice and comfy. I think with some minor control tweaks and a tutorial, you'll have a fun little game
@no-grapes-games Yeah, this was a bit of a fear that cropped up at testing in the last 30min or so. However, I was pretty hesitant to up difficulty or make core changes with so little time left. My experiences with last minute "difficulty adjustments" have been... less than optimal.
In retrospect I probably needed a forcing function to get players to engage enemies; either making them block the player, or having them drop the keycards instead of being in the map already.
Thanks for the feedback!
Also since a few people have mentioned the input limitations (mouselook, strafe), that was an intentional choice for better or worse. We were actually going to make it even more convoluted (keyboard aim on top of keyboard movement) but in the end settled for this middle ground. Ultimately we wanted the game to play slowly and encourage a more methodical approach, but it didn't quite pan out that way in the end.
@johnsensei It was written in Haxe, using parts of the Heaps engine.
Amusingly perf was a big issue through a lot of the dev process, I spent a solid 6 hours getting the framerate above 60; but once I had a breakthrough I ended up breaking past 800fps with vsync off in native builds. Ultimately there's just not a lot of geometry or textures here, so once you get the draw call count down it's blazing fast.
The CDs were indeed the keys. The other items you saw were ammo boxes for the special weapons.
The weakpoint system color issue has been contentious and is a mix of oversight and not thinking through ikaruga's visual design. It came to light shortly after the jam was over, at which point it was too late to fix. I've tried to clarify the current system in the description but it's going to confuse people unfortunately.
Thanks for the feedback!
Really neat idea here.
As others have mentioned, it's really confusing as submitted. It might be worth doing a post-jam version with some easier tutorial levels that walk you through the early steps; the tutorial video is a nice stopgap that got me moving though.
I really hope you keep working on this. The ending was... missing something.
Overall this is a really solid entry. The graphics are charming, the audio is on point, and the game loop felt tight and fair while still providing a bit of a challenge. I usually try to provide constructive criticism when possible but honestly the only thing this entry needs is more time.
Great work!
The art's adorable.
Not being able to control the metamorphasis made the game a bit confusing, both in that I had no idea what was triggering the change, and because the level can be quickly solved with just the moth, making the early parts feel like a waste of time.
I think level design could solve this with some extra obstacles, like webs that the moth can't traverse but the worm can, or the middle stage can break, etc.
A lot of these issues are likely just symptoms of the team issues you ran into. Overall I can see what you were trying to accomplish here, and it's a neat idea with lots of potential; and what you have shows a lot of promise.
Nice job!
This is really fun!
The only complaint I have is that it plays pretty slowly. I think this is absolutely fine for LD, since it lets people get up to speed at a comfortable pace, but if you decide to flesh this out more, I'd look at ways to speed up the loop creation (Maybe letting you draw points with the mouse?)
Overall I really love this entry. The gameplay is brilliant and the puzzles have a comfy pace with new things being introduced every few levels and mechanics being tweaked and used in new ways. I really hope you keep working on this!
I had the same issue as nardandas. I tried a few strategies but I kept running out of time going for the second factory cluster.
What's there seems pretty solid, and I had fun optimizing my strategy around unit lifespan by repositioning factories, but it's just too tricky for me unfortunately.
Love the music!
The monster sprite is also cute, though it seems his collision doesn't match with his size well, and crushing cars is a bit fiddly.
I ended up soft locked when I finished a level with 1hp, not sure if I just "ran out" of levels, or if there's a legitimate bug there.
Fun little game though. If you want to expand upon this, it probably needs a bit more variety in things to attack and threats, but overall I had fun playing it.
Nice work!
Interesting idea. The controls felt... loose. That might be intentional, but it results in a somewhat spongey experience where I often felt the fault of a loss was the game itself rather than my inputs. Once I got the hang of the controls I started to make progress and had a much better time.
Surprisingly fun once you get into it. Implementation feels solid and I didn't hit any bugs.
Nice job!
Love the idea!
This reminds me of those old Lego Mindstorms sets with the brick programming language. I do with things were a bit more explicit though, the rocket launcher bot was mostly luck as you had no real control over the engagement beyond swapping the tiles.
That said, I think there were smart compromises made for LD in terms of scope and accessibility.
Overall great job!
Interesting ideas here. The difficulty curve was a bit rough but it's hard to get a really comfy ramp in a short jam like this.
good ideas for puzzle elements. Nice work!
Cute bunny slippers.
I would have liked to see a lot more brake force for something like a racing game, but tuning car physics can be a chore even without the presence of a time limit.
Took me a while to realize you could very the launch thrust by mouse distance.
Also the prediction arc seems to be somewhat unreliable, which made things a bit frustrating. However, the simple mechanics and chill vibes helped keep things comfy.
Overall a fun little gem.
I couldn't clear the second level, the box would either get stuck and cause me to not be able to move, or vanish if I tried to dash. I couldn't figure out how to drop it on the button either. Maybe update the instructions to be more clear how to use the boxes?
Also dashing is kind of weird, since there's no knockback you have to move away to dash again, and it takes multiple hits, so killing enemies feels really weird.
Neat ideas though. I think a bit more polish would go a long way here.
This completely broke my brain and I love it.
Such a simple change to a classic and you get this brain-melting masterpiece.
It could use some audio, and more levels, but you've clearly got something here and I'd love to see more work on it post-jam.
Simple but good.
In the stone level, the melee enemies had a bit too much HP I think, I found myself just running into them instead of trying to shoot them as it was faster.
The only real issue I had is that everything's super tiny, my old man eyes had trouble seeing things like the rocks. Pixel art games usually solve this by doubling the size of everything.
Nice work! I hope you'll be back for the next LD!
This was an interesting ride. I'm too dumb to memorize everything so I ended up snipping the notes so I could reference them while I played.
I also noticed it seems to break if you click too fast, or maybe just the hitreg is weird? Might also be a web build quirk.
Overall neat little concept. There's not a whole lot here to rate but the idea is solidly executed and I felt a tiny bit smarter for clearing it. Great job!
Fun idea.
I hit a bunch of weird movement cases though. Jumping against a wall would often cause you to "stick" against it, and I had trouble jumping off the moving platforms.
Also, starting back at the beginning every death was super punishing, and made it hard to want to keep trying.
Some lovely level design though, needing to loop back to get the star in the second level was a quick intro to how well this mechanic can be used.
All those glasses washed and no counter? How can I flaunt my expert washing skills?
A quick score at the credits would be fine. I agree cluttering up the main screen with a "score" would be net negative to the mood; though you could possibly express it as a dollar value and have Jill make some quip about how little you earn per glass.
The scrollbars in some of the clicker menus were a bit troublesome as they didn't respond to mousehweel, but that's really the worst thing I can say about this entry.
It's a solid click with some interesting mechanics. Art was nice and the music was relaxing.
Good work!
The little tooltips indicating what item is needed was super helpful! It makes it very clear to a player what's needed and how to progress, without dealing with the usual adventure game mix and mash tropes.
It did feel bad when I first noticed rooms shuffled, but I can see the design intent.
I agree with some others around the lack of feedback around party selection, I once tried skipping a party member and ended up facing an opponent with only 3 members (and died), so I assume the part is pre-selected and you just have to answer correctly. However, I lost at level 2 with a full party, so now I'm not sure.
Gripes aside, it's quite a lovely game. The graphics are simple yet charming, the writing is comfy and the mechanics are otherwise simple and straightforward. Depth is a bit questionable as presented, but I think this may be more down to scope and time limitations than design, as I saw some signs of progression in dialogue, just not consistently.
Nice job!
Echoing others in balance, I always feel super rushed and it takes multiple tries to get a working pattern down fast enough. Also it feels like the road placement code is constantly fighting me and I'm never sure why.
I like the idea, and it's satisfying when you get it to work, though a "fast forward" button might be useful for when you know the cars are stuck in a loop and you're just waiting for the timer to tick down.
You should be able to bundle python games (including pygame) into a binary with py2exe. Alternatively, you can just bundle the interp in with a download similar to how renpy does it.
That'll make a it a lot easier for people to play, as even if someone has python installed, it might be the wrong version or they might not have all your dependencies installed.
Looks like the aim reticule assumes the player is at the center, which produces some very counter-intuitive results. This is further complicated by it being a fixed distance from the player sprite, so it's very hard to mentally keep track of where you're aiming.
There are lots of good ideas here, I'd love to see a post jam version with some aiming tweaks.
I hit the same travel menu quirks others have mentioned, it was fairly confusing at first.
Other than that, neat little game. Clever character design. I with there were more interactions as Toulou stated, but the scope monster catches us all in the end. Food for a post-jam version I suppose.
Finally got it to work after several attempts. There are a bunch of UI cases that break in non-obvious ways, like the coolant not flowing if you turn it on before the generator is switched on. This lead me down a number of rabbit holes.
I like the idea, but it probably needs a bit more polish, and perhaps a quick paragraph or to describing the conditions and goals of the system.
As others have mentioned, the controls are a bit of a grab bag.
I would have liked to see the story told a bit more directly. Without reading the instructions outside the game it's very unclear what's going on, and as others have noted, there's no prompt to click on the notes and it's not clear which button interacts.
The art style is simple and clean, which is nice. The minigames feel a bit random though. I think you'd be fine without them.
Overall a neat idea, I'd love to see this fleshed out a bit more.
I'm not entirely clear on the victory conditions here. If I clear the level the ship zooms off but nothing happens, and additional lines don't appear to unlock.
The upgrade system is a nice tough, but speed upgrades are a double edged sword and should be treated with care.
Bullet patterns were fairly predictable and easy to dodge even without upgrades, but I'm a shmup player... so my experience here isn't really typical or representitive.
I love the idea and atmosphere. I hope you keep working on this!
Everything's *really* dark, which makes it hard to see what's going on.
The instructions in particular are black on black, so I had to rely on the ones on this page.
Overall seems to work as intended. I'd love to see more overarching goals though, and a stronger difficulty curve.
Simple but well executed.
I would have liked some kind of more clear health bar to know how many sheep before it's game over, the slanting mechanic is a cool concept but not really super visible. also sometimes you get cheap shotted coming out of the star straight into a sheep.
otherwise solid and fun!
Interesting fusion of the usual miner style and a builder/idle game.
For some reason I spent a lot of time trying to build with m1 instead of m2, and thought the game was broken. Might just be post-LD brain drain, but once I realized m2 places everything worked as expected.
The threat mechanic isn't super well explained, I sorta felt it out but it's not super clear to me why it goes down.
I would have liked to see the buildings expanded upon a bit more. For example, maybe making sugar more of a necessary resource, and buildings become more or less required to start scaling outward. In the current design I found by the time I built one of everything I just won.
Graphics are cute. Overall pretty neat!
grappling hooks are always fun, though I found it a bit trick to navigate the world with it. Seems the only way to ever go up was to fall through the portal and take damage.
The ammo clip being small forces you into a fairly specific playstyle, but the grappling hook makes it difficult to actually avoid combat with the crystal spawns.
Graphics and mood were solid, and the audio worked well.
Nice work!
Neat little sandbox.
Would be nice to have had some kind of goal, like maybe reaching enough escape velocity to delve deeper into the galaxy and reach other solar systems.
Neat idea.
The aim speeds being as slow as they were really forces you to plan ahead and generally just works really well. Graphics are simple but convey the point well.
upgrades were a nice touch. Everything felt solid and worked well.
Nice work!
Controls were a bit weird at first but otherwise worked as expected.
Upgrade system was a nice touch. Audio would have helped a lot with the mood, but the graphics were lovely.
Quite a lot to unpack here. I found a bunch of mechanics unexplained, and while I could figure some out, others ended up as showstoppers, like how to deal with enemies.
Super interesting idea though, and quite complex for a jam game. I'd strongly recommend writing a bit of a guide somewhere!
It wasn't clear to me where the pads even where. I thought they were the little buildings but nothing happened when I landed on one.
I was not expecting this.
For starters, the atmosphere was really spot on. The audio works well with the consistent visuals, and the cloud shader does a great job rounding things out.
Gameplay wise, at first I thought the play area was quite small, as I'd go north, hit an invisible wall, then go south, hit another one, etc. On my second run I chose to go left and then it made a lot more sense. Once that was sorted out... things actually worked really well. The AI is dumb as bricks but this actually works amazingly well, since resources are limited it creates a ton of tension dragging tens of ships behind you trying to eek out as much distance as you can without burning a decoy or losing your shields. I was subconsciously tensing up while playing; it really does nail the mood!
The ending felt a bit abrupt, but I'll give it a pass for the comfy CGs. I'd also like to see some tooltips over the ability icons, but now I'm just nitpicking.
Really fantastic work!
There's a lot of process here at the speed the game runs at. Part of me wants it to be more turn based, but that would take the difficulty out of it. Maybe just slowing it down would be fine. Or maybe making the difficulty curve a bit softer via a speed ramping mechanic, so people can feel it out and get used to it first.
Overall a pretty neat idea.
Quite the experience here.
Lovely mood, and a simple concept that weaves a story without words.
Well polished and rounded out with good audio and vfx.
Nicely done!
Lots of mechanics here, but the menus make things pretty rough.
The random delay on mining felt mostly just really confusing.
Not sure if you can just only craft one tool at a time, or if there's a bug with crafting multiple tools at once, but I crafted and axe and sword but only got the sword.
Overall seems like there's a lot of potential here, just needs some polish work.
Interesting idea to do storytelling through the inventory.
Bullet patterns were a bit of a mixed bag. The little guys were probably the worst since you had to actively bait them, where most of the other patterns could be dodged.
Last boss had some rough patterns. Hitbox was also ambiguous.
That said, the health bar solves basically all of these complaints, since taking a hit isn't lethal like most shmups. Though I found it a bit easy as a result. For the boss's last pattern I just face tanked all the shots since it was more efficient than trying to dodge.
Overall package seems solid. No major bugs, mostly just found myself wanting more enemies/levels/etc, which is always a good sign that you've got a solid idea.
Nice work!
+1 for not loading. Tried both chrome and FF, which both SHOULD support brotli compression, but it seems neither want to read the .br file.
Neat little game.
The insta-kill berries felt really bad; and generally just made me paranoid/hesitant to try new berry types as they appeared, or made me second guess whether one was lethal or not. I suppose that was probably the point, but it felt a bit too punishing.
Controls also slowly drove me nuts, they just weren't very intuitive to me for some reason.
Past that though, the game itself is pretty neat. A fascinating mixture of RTS and exploration that really works well.
Impressive scope for jam game!
The slow attack and floaty physics turned me off at first, but I sort of got used to it at some point and it stopped bothering me. For some reason I couldn't buy the attack range powerups, despite having more than enough gold.
Overall felt really strong, maybe that's intentional? Health was plentiful so I just charged at stuff and generally came out at or near full health.
end boss musta had a zillion HP for the number of times it took to bring him down. His blue laser attack never seemed to be targeting me.
Graphics are nice and consistent, and round things out nicely.
Nice work!
The lack of audio and visual cues for things like oxygen make it extremely confusing.
The graphics are nice but I'd like to see a bit more clarity in things like oxygen providers, I couldn't find any on my first dive but maybe I just confused them with sellable pickups?
Oxygen timer felt very short. The upgrade system seems cool but being limited to 3 runs removes the roguelike feeling from it.
This is... quite hard.
Maybe if it were a bit more forgiving it wouldn't be as frustrating? Perhaps lives, or a health bar. Might also be good to make the fireball launchers more visually obvious so you don't miss them, right now it's easy to get sniped.
It's not clear to me how to get to the room on the left... I always end up back outside of the cave.
uh3iHWI.png
Just checked, it's still a 404 unfortunately.
Does what it says on the tin.
in some sections, you can't see the next platform. These are "blind jumps" and generally not ideal, since there's no way for the player to predict what to do. In this case I think just zooming the camera out more would fix it.
Played through to the end, didn't encounter any game breaking bugs.
Simple little game. Seemed to mostly work as expected, though the section with the rocks on the slope almost got me stuck as they didn't want to slide at first.
got to the end without incident. Not sure what kills the little dude since I abused him pretty badly and he seemed just fine.
Pretty fun!
Cute take on the theme.
Mechanically it feels a bit too easy, but for LD it's usually best to err on that side.
No complaints at all really, game worked as expected, no issues cropped up, and I had a fun time assembling increasingly bizarre headlines.
Nice work!
Wasn't clear to me whether there's an actual win condition or nor given the number of enemies in the (last?) room.
View distance was really short and I usually walked into bears before I had a chance to shoot them.
Mechanics a bit unclear in a few spots but was able to feel them out on my second run.
Otherwise had a good time. Liked setting and mood, added a good bit of tension.
Feels like there's a lot of depth here that just hasn't surfaced itself well to me. Maybe I'm just missing it? Like a bunch of cards have effects but they don't ever seem relevant or useful toward the end-goal.
I suspect a lot of this is just a lack of vfx/treatment around them. A more obvious effect to show each card's effect when it plays would really highlight what they do; though even then I find myself strategizing mostly around card archetypes, not effects.
Played a bit, seems fun! Nice work!
Looks like the web build is broken. Tried in chrome and firefox, both give syntax errors trying to load the .br file. I've seen this before with itch+brotli compression, maybe try gzip on the web export?
Cute rabbit.
There were several places with blind jumps that lead to spike pits. This always feels kind of cheap... something to keep in mind when designing levels like these. I suppose the health bar and lives system compensates a bit, but in general it's best to avoid that since players usually feel cheated.
Hit a bug(?) at the first gate where all the mole things were dead (and none were showing on the hud) but the gate wouldn't open. Not sure if I'm just doing it wrong, or if there's some edge case.
Interesting concept.
Feels like to be successful you have to rely on momentum and floating a lot, which makes the game a fairly slow paced casual affair. This can be good, but the lack of audio makes it feel a bit tedious.
The mining mechanic wasn't clear at first, and I still sometimes find asteroids that just don't seem to be minable, and it's not clear why.
Controls were also a bit awkward.
Overall though, nice comfy little entry. Good work!
Neat idea!
I got to around depth 185 before it seemed I was moving faster than I could dig, I'm guessing 200 is around the theoretical max without getting lucky with bombs.
Could use a bit more variety, it might be neat to have powerups to deal with tricky rock formations, or other things to aim for instead of just optimizing for depth alone.
Simple concept with solid execution, and surprisingly fun.
I wish it was a bit more clear how far you could fall before death; felt like there was a mechanic there I just wasn't seeing.
I found it pretty fun trying to "chase" lightsticks down to get multiple uses out of each one.
the audio also did a great job setting the mood. Graphics were simple but effective.
Nice work!
Interesting narrative idea.
I think a bit more polish around the endings would help sell it a bit better, but you can't ask for too terribly much during LD. This would certainly be worth playing around with a bit more in a post LD version. I think there's a lot of potential here; it just needs a bit more time to bake.
Nice work!
I wish thing were a bit more deterministic. It felt like the chain reactions were a bit random. Maybe this is just me not fully understanding the mechanics, but especially on the third level, I'd find the reactions different each time I played.
The voice work was a lovely touch.
Nice work!
Solid entry.
I got stuck near the end(?) where you cross the red beam and your robot goes ballistic. Couldn't quite figure out how to get through that one.
Lack of a tutorial hurts here, but the failure cards are a functional post-failure tutorial.
The voices are a nice touch. Mechanics seem solid.
Nice work!
Absolutely fantastic art and style.
The spell building mechanic is really neat, but it's not clear how to be successful with it. I had trouble even building a spell since I kept hurting myself while moving runes around. A better preview system would have helped a lot here.
Player speed feels a bit slow, maybe it's just the walk animation being misleading though? Enemy pathfinding seems to get stuck a lot.
The environments look great and kept me wanting to dive more.
Overall really impressive output on this!
Cute little bugger.
Lots of varied mechanics here to keep things mixed up.
Nice work!
Nice polish!
Oh boy was this hard. I managed to make a couple potions before frustration got the better of me. The mechanics are super clear, I'm just not a patient person, and the pacing is clearly optimized for the slow, methodical types.
Graphics are lovely, and the music is simple yet catchy. I didn't encounter any obvious bugs.
Great job!
Super interesting idea.
Being given all four spells to start is a bit overwhelming. I like the variety but it might be better to ease players into it instead of just throwing them into the deep end right away.
Some crazy polish on this one!
Core game loop feels solid. The heat mechanic doesn't really feel like it adds much value to the gameplay though beyond being a nuisance. It might be interesting to flip it and have some way to use the instability of enemies as a way to clear otherwise impossible obstacles; maybe give the MC some kind of disruptor that resets their pathing?
Overall nice work!
Needing to move diagonally to go "straight" felt fairly awkward.
Mechanics appear to work as designed. More variety and polish in the gameplay sections would be nice, but it's already quite a feat to have gone this far.
Nice work!
Feels like this is missing some key components to really polish it off. Attack/defense mechanics also feel a bit arbitrary.
There's just enough meat to make it fun though, and that's what matters. I didn't initially notice the victory condition you mentioned on your page, so I was wondering why my full rack of MiGs weren't doing anything.
Neat little entry. It'd be interesting to see this fleshed out a bit more.
Nice work!
Felt like the sail and player movement should be separated; but I can see arguments to be made both ways.
As others have said, the sail mechanics are a bit foreign to people who've never sailed before. The explanations you gave are a good attempt but I think it'd be better to try and teach this in-game with some metrics and bars to help the player understand the relation between sail rotation and wind direction.
I absolutely love the concept here.
Boss design was a bit simplistic and easy to spam, but there was clear pattern progression. The rooftop segments were tricky but I felt like I was getting better each time.
The aesthetic you've got going here is fantastic as well.
Overall really nice work!
Neat idea!
I found the mixture of low lighting and the floor just vanishing without any real vfx to be extremely disorienting.
I made several attempts but never got past the first orb.
The tutorial also doesn't really explain the mechanic; it looks like it's trying to, but as a new player I just think it's teaching me to jump over pits, not teaching me to hop to reduce the lost blocks.
Love the concept though. Nice work!
Solid entry with some creative, mildly crazy, yet surprisingly fun mechanics.
Level design was solid and clearly tried to guide the player towards the solution where possible, with lots of resets.
Nice work!
Super neat idea.
I had some issues with visual occlusion when I had a lot of "S" pieces, but this could easily just be something you learn to manage as you play more.
Others have already covered most of the QoL stuff, but overall it's nicely done and plays as expected.
Nice work!
This is probably the nicest tutorial I've seen in an LD game! I wish it went a bit faster, but the interactivity made it super clear what was going on.
Gameplay wise, It felt like there wasn't much time to react to certain projectiles. The Sus blocks in particular had a tendency to spawn right next to a brick and there wasn't enough time for them to separate enough that I felt confident sniping it. Powerups felt solid, and the giant machine guns were a nice touch.
That said, the game itself felt like it dragged on. This is likely a pacing issue; the difficulty ramp probably just needs to be a bit faster for my tastes. These things are extremely hard to get right during compo, since it can only really be teased out with gameplay testing. Depending on your workflow, it could be good to set aside a few friends to test your game for feel and balance a few hours before the deadline so you can make any last minute tweaks; though I totally get why that might not always be possible.
Overall a super well done entry. Nice work!
Lovely take on an old classic.
The "lives" mechanic here is wonderful, and makes for some tense situations especially as things start to spiral out of control
The graphics and music were also lovely.
Nice work!
Super interesting design here.
The art is cute, and I love the little touches like the audio pitching down as things go south.
Nice work!
Nicely put together. Graphics and audio felt solid.
Core loop was hard to understand from the instructions but straightforward once I played around a bit.
Nice work!
Cute graphics!
The combat mechanics were an interesting take, it was a good mix of simple and challenging.
The falling paths were probably my biggest gripe. I took a wrong path on one of the levels, immediately realized my mistake, and really didn't have any way to "fix" it. Normally in puzzle games you get an "undo" or at least a reset option, but the blend of puzzle and rpg here produces some rough edges like this.
Didn't encounter any bugs on my playthroughs, and had fun.
Nice work!
The level design makes this one a bit tricky. Even the first room has you threading the needle with spikes as your punishment for failure; it's often better to give players a much more forgiving slope to teach them the mechanics, and save the spikes for later levels when they've had time to practice the mechanics more.
I had way more fun which this than I expected. The assets are pretty barebones, but they serve their purpose in communicating the basic game state.
The sheep directly north broke me though. Between the balls taking a while to move, and the sheep being a right bastard, I died every time I tried to bring it home.
Had a ton of fun trying though.
Pretty solid for a Jam game, lots of tiny mechanics here that probably weren't easy to get right in this timescale.
I got a good chunk in and had my base explode when placing a tower in a fairly innocent looking spot; some kind of bad physics reaction. I think maybe the placed building clipped with an existing one?
Second run went without a hitch.
Solid little narrative game.
Lack of audio makes it feel a bit barren in a weird kind of way, it's surprising how much audio feedback helps especially in narrative games like this.
Ow, my brain.
Level design felt pretty good, seems there was some effort in ensuring you could "one cycle" most obstacles. The left and right error after the jump pad felt a bit punishing since it moved so fast, but realistically the biggest enemy was decades of muscle memory.
Simple graphics but they felt well produced. I would have liked some backing audio, but otherwise it felt really solid.
nice work!
Interesting idea.
Feels like it needs another mechanic or two to really sell it though. Enemies don't seem to fall into pits which takes away a lot of the interesting mechanics around the movement. I also wish I could jump over small gaps.
Presentation is nice and seems to work as intended.
Player movement was really fast! The floatyness made it feel kind of hard to control.
I don't think the cloud moving mechanic was ever explained, I just had to kinda figure it out after flinging myself off the edge a few times.
There's a lot of nice graphics here, but some softer transitions would make things shine a bit better I think. Right now it can be a bit hard to realize what happened (such as when you die) due to how quickly it cuts to the next scene.
Moving stats are an interesting design idea. The upgrade time being tied to it felt a bit iffy since tracking both that and my ship was a bit overwhelming, but I imagine it comes with time.
Overall super neat idea, nice work!
Interesting idea for sure.
It took me a while to realize I could "drag" them to a position, maybe I just skimmed the controls too much.
At the end one of the dogs got wedged in the "angry" state but none of the tools fixed it. It seemed responsive though so I got the picture, might have just been a visual bug?
Fun little game with lots to explore.
Some of the indicators weren't super clear, like the table. It tells you only cake goes there, but only when you have an item. Before that it seems to do nothing; and it's the first indicator you interact with so it leads to some confusion. Probably my biggest gripe though is that dialogue hints don't pause the timer; feels like I'm being cheated of precious time.
I wish there was a scoring system as well. It'd be fun to try and optimize your score around anger/delay time/etc.
Overall great work!
Love the concept.
I wish there was a bit more intent to the level design, right now it feels like a lot of random and unrewarding jumping. Maybe if enemies were a bit more varied it could make it more interesting?
The game has a nice ambiance. Between the lighting effects and music, it really sells the concept.
Nice work!
Fun little concept.
As others have mentioned, adaptive soundtracks are always a wonderful touch.
I'm not super sure what a bunch of the in-world objects are. I worked out what the meters did, but some better explanations could be helpful.
The graphics are on point and everything felt cohesive. Nice work!
This certainly escalates quickly.
The rope physics are a bit frustrating, I suppose it matters where you grab the fuse but given the move speed of the character, I found I had a lot less agency than I'd hoped over things. Especially before the shredder pops up.
Overall lots of stuff to do and mechanics at play. Nice work!
Neat idea!
The physics are chaotic to a point of being frustrating, but the game is so lighthearted and quick to retry that you kinda just don't care and have fun with it anyway.
Audio cues and music add a nice atmosphere, and the little touches like the gentle sway of the waiter's arm and the cloth physics really help sell it.
Nice work!
Took a few tries to get the mechanics down.
I think I agree with some earlier comments on mechanical legibility.
The art style is absolutely amazing, and helped set the mood extremely well.
Nice work!
@badcop Thanks, I believe this is fixed now. There was a missing window resize callback, so the viewport didn't update properly in some situations.
@choo Look at our LD45 entry. We re-used the concept, but all of the code, assets, etc are new.
The description could maybe explain the mechanics a bit more. I was SUPER confused at first before I realized the "thought" on the left was the key to what clicking did at any given moment.
Mostly just echoing others here. The art is lovely and I vibe with the music, but the game is a bit opaque. Feels like it all moves a bit too fast and there's not quite enough guidance on how to keep our adorable little meat puppets alive.
Had fun trying though. Nice work!
Simple idea with solid execution.
The controls broke my brain at first, but I got used to them. Not super sure the explicit key is needed for picking up/dropping off bananas.
Had fun. Nice work!
I might just be extremely bad at fish flinging, but I could never quite get the fish to spin where I wanted.
Concept is cute. I'm not entirely sure what score is trying to accomplish though.
Had fun flopping about regardless.
Fish/10. Nice work!
Solid entry! There's a lot of subtle detail here that's easy to miss, and helps make the game feel more complete.
The start of the game felt vaugue at first but the effects guided me in the right direction well enough to get me through my first playthrough, even without an explicit tutorial.
I did find syringe placement to feel very hit or miss. I ended up just spam clicking it while moving my mouse until one "hit".
WebGL seems to be pretty hitchy at first, this is probably a unity thing with shader compilation or resource loading so I'm not sure how easy it is to fix.
Fun concept. Nice work!
This is really neat.
It took me a while to get the controls down, (and I'll echo other sentiments about indicators/UI), but overall it just worked.
Bot movement felt nice and juicy, cables even jiggle; really there's not a whole lot else to complain about.
Nice work!
A bit of a strange complaint perhaps, but I wish it was harder.
Seems like the difficulty ramp (if there is one?) is extremely outpaced by the effectiveness of your guns, which doesn't let me fully realize my urge to light up the sky with lasers and exploding asteroids.
Overall I really like this entry. It scratched my base building itch, and got me building a giant death ring of lasers and sensors.
Nice work!
Mood through the roof!
I frankly have no idea what I'm doing *but it scares me*.
I suspect being overly explicit with goals would ruin some of the mood, but you can usually give hints through storytelling. I did enjoy learning about my situation more, and the people I was stuck with; but it was less clear why the died; I wish sending others to those spots would give some exposition to their deaths.
Overall I really enjoyed it. Great work!
Agree on wanting the gauges to always be up. Seems hard to manage without them, but the UI is pretty obstrusive. It's also not super clear what's going on without them, so I didn't know what any of my actions were doing until I found that UI
Fun writing.
Always nice to see more narrative works in LD. I do think this might have been improved with some backing audio or art, but that can be hard when you're running solo.
Nice work!
escaped.PNG
Fun little puzzle game with some nice mechanics.
I seem to have escaped the world at the second "double doors" light puzzle though, by moving left after the door closed. Can't seem to get back in.
Same, website looks to be down. Let me know when it's fixed!
Simple mechanics and solid implementation.
A lovely throwback to old text adventure games.
Great work!
Interesting mechanics here. It ends up producing a pretty fast paced game that encourages lots of tight movements. Really fun!
Art was simple but cohesive, and the music/audio fits well.
Nice work!
I wish clicking on the balloons always gave them an upward impulse.
Other than that, not much to really complain about. Didn't hit any bugs, the art felt cohesive, and seems to do what it says on the tin.
Nice work!
Feels very portal-esque.
Mechanics are simple and worked as expected. the hit box shrinking with the vortex was a nice touch since it made me shift my strategy late game.
Nice work!
Nice touch with the ice cube acting as a "shield" for the fireballs.
I did find the collision to be extremely forgiving though. Running *into* a fireball was safe, but one falling *on* you was lethal.
Would be nice to see some kind of progress indicator, and there be a time threat of some sort. Right now there's nothing making me want to rush, so I never felt like I was really in harms way.
Nice work!
Neat idea.
Finding the various endings gives it good replay value, and the games are short enough to not feel tedious to reply.
Some of the attack patterns felt unavoidable, but the HP bar is thick enough for it to not really matter.
Graphics are solid and felt cohesive.
Always good to see more narrative works in LD. Nice work!
Love the concept. The dialogue is lovely and the voice acting is on point.
Around the ~5m mark the meter starts requiring constant clicking, which was the point I sort of stopped since it aggravates my wrist; but it looks like you can just hold the- uh- *divine rain* over a single house and basically never lose; so the the final boss more that than the fire itself.
Great work!
I love how you've packaged this with a simple narrative to sell the idea.
One thing I noticed is that the moving platforms affect player velocity in weird ways. This is pretty common when using physics engines; the physics tend to get in the way of the player's intent. It might be worth looking into more explicit movement systems for future games so you can get tighter movement.
Overall nice work!
I've never played wario ware, so this might be a problem inherited from that design; but the minigame readability is extremely low. In every case I failed before I understood how to succeed in the puzzle.
Good bits of polish in the graphics, the stage select was particularly nice. Audio was enjoyable too.
Nice work!
Neat concept.
The UI and stylization somewhat get in the way of the game in spots; like grabbing the wrong organ because they're too close to eachother in our fleshy meat sacks. I also found placement a bit annoying at times where I'd get it a bit too close to an edge and it'd snap back to the body. I would have rather it just snapped to the closest valid position instead.
Overall super cool take on the tower defense genre!
Graphics and audio are great! It builds a wonderful atmosphere.
Would have been great to have a bit more variation between rockets and bullets.
The only real complaint I have is just down to enemy AI and variation. There didn't seem to be any climbing difficulty so once you learned how to cheese the enemies you can pretty much go forever since ammo boxes refill your ammo.
Great work!
I found it a bit hard to follow the dialogue comfortably with the tiny little two line box. Often the speaker would switch between the two lines and break continuity in my brain between who was speaking.
Got stuck in the same spot as mopifish.
Otherwise always happy to see more narrative games in LD!
The effects on this game are frankly nuts. I don't know where you find the time.
I agree with the earlier comments around visibility and noise; at a certain point I simply don't have the mental capacity to be aware of everything on the screen, and certain cell types can snipe you from afar with their charges. A stronger tell might be useful here; I know you're limiting your palette but some kind of pink flash could do a lot to help direct the player's attention to oncoming threats; audio cues could help too.
Even then it might be worth reducing the number of enemies and focusing on giving them interesting behaviors vs going for quantity. At least early on anyway. perhaps the issue is more just about pacing.
Overall I really love this entry. It looks fantastic, has solid mechanics, and is weird in all the best ways. Fantastic work!
When I hit the checkpoint I got excited for more but that's basically the end.
I had a ton of fun! There were really only a few minor issues I had - Arrow key movement is off axis with the map, so it's tricky to stay on the speed pads. - Sometimes, pressing a switch makes something happen off screen so you have to spend a few turns hunting for the right place to go - I wish there was an instant reset button for when you know you've already messed up (the tighter timed sections)
The graphics are all super nice and coherent, the style is simple but works really well and feels good. Mechanically the game has a nice bit of progression; the speed upgrade in the end is tons of fun!
I'd love to see more if this if you ever make a longer version. Nice work!
This is a super neat idea.
Some of the effects were a bit tricky to use in a good way; needing to think about cast order and location made selection a lot more interesting. I missed a way to preview or understand cards before selecting them, but managed to make it work anyway. Boulder was a bit tricky though since I tried to use it after squirrel and it wouldn't hit; but I like that I had to reshuffle my combo to fit it in instead of just constantly adding stuff to the end.
Realizing this would be a nightmare to implement inside LD: it would have been nice to have a timeline I could scrub through to better understand where I need to tweak my setup; sometimes it wasn't clear if something hit or not in the chaos.
The art was comfy and the music was a bop. Everything worked as expected and cleared my house of ghosts.
Nice work!
I wish enemies were more of a threat beyond just existing; perhaps they could be the thing that lights the furnaces, instead of it happening randomly? Might give me a reason to prioritize them.
Once I hit level 2, I found enemies would spawn on top of me sometimes, which caused me to take an unavoidable hit.
Certain angles don't seem to line up with the mouse. I noticed the most when shooting the lower right end of the screen. Combined with the slow projectile speed, I'd often spend multiple seconds shooting the wrong spot before I got the feedback needed to correct.
Movement feels a bit floaty. Reducing the deceleration time would probably make the movement feel more responsive and snappier.
As others have mentioned, the gameplay in general feels a bit on the slower side. I think it'd be worth experimenting with faster kill times and more enemies.
That all said, I didn't hit any showstoppers and the game was easy to understand and fun.
Nice work!
Finally managed to clear it! I'm bad at these kinds of games.
There's a lot to do here; I appreciate the use of keyboard shortcuts for most of the actions. I was a bit confused at first on what was killing me; I wish the death screen pointed out your mistake. I lost several lives to not knowing how the o2 pump worked (and a few more after when I was only reading the LED instead of looking at the gauge). A lot of this probably just comes to being introduced to mechanics in a high stress environment.
A few more audio cues could be useful. The red screen flash on the space bar one was super helpful, but many others lacked any real big "Pay attention to me" states beyond just being red; the switch board got me a lot since I tended to not focus on it. Perhaps a pulsing or flashing state would help? there's already a lot of red on the screen so a LED turning red doesn't stand out much when you're in a panic. Honestly though these are all minor annoyances mostly coming back to my lack of skill in this class of game. Other than the O2 pump, everything else was easy to understand in the heat of things and worked as expected. The theme is well represented as well.
Music is comfy.
Nice work!
A simple concept with very solid execution.
Sometimes I found the asteroids would fall into the corners and not provide any cover, forcing a death. They probably need to be constrained more.
Had a lot of fun playing this! The mechanics are simple but come together in a very enjoyable way.
Nice work!
Ah, not-so-pleasant memories...
Neat little game! I found it quite difficult at first, but I realize much of it involved memorizing where the barcodes are and building that muscle memory. A softer ramp for newbies would perhaps be nice though.
Not sure if I'm supposed to need to zoom in to see the numbers of not; but they were quite legible in 4k without any additional work.
Movement jank aside, the beam mechanic was quite fun. You also did a nice job with the level design in communicating what areas were safe or not.
The ending puzzle felt a bit obtuse and took a while to figure out; I think a bit of additional communication here would have helped a lot; perhaps a special hit sound for the bulb that tells the player "bullets don't hurt this thing" while giving it a distinct behavior over walls and other unimportant objects. Similarly, I'd like to have seen a targeting laser for the ketchup gun since it's hard to know what's going on when it's off screen (and the position it landed after the second shot required me to do some tricky alignment).
Overall a solid attempt for your first platformer! You probably already learned this lesson; but physics engines shouldn't be used for player movement (Write a static or kinematic character controller and use the physics engine just for collision). It's a very common thing to get wrong especially in LD, so don't sweat it too much.
Nice work!
@peachtreeoath Thanks for the bug reports! I've done a quick sweep and cleaned these up. Let me know if you find any others.
@postfrog I know this isn't particularly helpful now that you're already done, but you can hold ctrl to skip dialogue. I guess I should put this stuff in the description somewhere...
@peachtreeoath you probably missed the open window in one of the bedrooms. It's mentioned in the dialogue but it's easy to miss. It's in one of the rooms that unlock with the first key
Love me some narrative games.
Same with the above, I'm not super sure if there are actually any bad choices? I just picked what felt right and never really got into any trouble. It would have been nice to see more consequences or have a better understanding of the impact of my choices.
The 10s pacing is very on-theme but feels like it just slows the game down; making me hesitant to play again to experiment more. If there was more data to consider or more choices to pick from, I might feel more time pressure.
Nice work!
Neat little design. Maybe it's been done before, but I've never seen a game remove targeting like this and let you optimize risky placements as damage opportunities like this before. It works really well!
The intro is polished to the point this could be in a retail game. Even the voice acting is good, with a nice post process. Well done.
No obvious bugs or missing features, and it's quite fun to play.
Well done!
Simple gameplay loop with a pretty nice difficulty curve.
My only major complaint is that the collision boxes seem a bit oversized; I occasionally take a hit I thought I dodged.
I didn't know I wanted to play as a bear riding a fish with a grappling hook.
But I'm glad I've now been enlightened to this extremely important thing I was missing in my life.
Frankly I had way too much fun with this. Some of the later sections are a bit tricky, but the cost to retry is *fairly* low so I kept coming back. I wish the initial setup was a bit more reliable (the move speed in water could be faster to make the initial launch easier?) but these are minor grievances to just smooth out my extremely bad gameplay skills.
I did wish the hook was a bit more forgiving; felt like if I didn't click close enough to a ledge it wouldn't fire? Not entirely sure, might just be a skill issue.
Graphics are lovely, audio was fun, and the mechanics are a bit tricky but addictive. I could bearly stop myself from playing it a second time after the first run. Fantastic work!
Anything with billboard sprites gets instant love from me.
As others have stated, the combat felt a bit iffy in spots. The main thing is I can't quite tell when the enemies actually attack me; so melee weapons are particularly challenging. A bit more communication here would go a long way towards improving combat feel I think.
Overall fun little entry, nice work!
Looks like the embed is broken, and the itch link also appears to be largely unplayable (seems to only show a small part of the screen?)
I have to agree with Shrill here.
There's a lot of charm and interesting dialogue, but the only seeming way to play is to just furiously click through it all, which further buries the lede since I can't figure out what I'm actually supposed to do. Even with the 1=10 debug setting, I can't sit back and enjoy the dialogue like I'd like unfortunately.
I also noticed some dialogues don't lead anywhere, like the "Pretend you have honey" option.
The art is charming and the music fits, the dialogue is fun too. This would be a prime candidate for a post LD version.
The polish is strong with this one.
This game is dark. Trying to build population felt fairly painful; part of me wishes the upgrade system helped more than it did but I ended up building tons of clone vats and consuming lots of biomass.
Lots of stuff going on mechanically and it all seems to work as expected. I appreciated the manual control sliders; they saved my run several times when I got overambitious with my buildout. Didn't quite make it out on my run but the lure of a clearly defined endgame will likely draw me back for more.
Graphics are great and have a nice consistency. The audio loop was comfy and didn't feel too repetitive.
Nice work!
Lovely graphics!
Got stuck sometimes if I teleported back on top of a sprite in that time period.
I wish I could choose when to switch between times; if I miss a beat I'm stuck for 20s waiting for it to shift.
Very cohesive design, and good use of palette shifting to indicate time period.
Nice work!
The graphics and mood on this are off the charts. I love what you've done here; a simple style that just *bleeds* aesthetic.
Movement wise, I found the character to be a bit fast and floaty; not entirely sure how to describe it but I often found myself wishing I had better control; especially in the end section. This could just be a skill issue, but it felt like the character had a bit too much momentum perhaps? I did feel like the fast movement helped with the urgency, which was good.
On Level design, I saw a lot of sections where I just BAAARELY couldn't make a jump unless I hopped up one tile higher before jumping. This was a bit annoying, but often forced me to move into the light; if that's the intention with these jumps then my annoyance is probably more on the movement not letting me execute the precise jumps I wanted to do there.
Ultimately this game is just lovely. The art, the music, and the feel are just spot on. It didn't have any of the common platformer jank like sticking to walls, and the controls felt like some care was spent trying to tune them even if they weren't my taste.
Nice work!
I never felt like I was getting good feedback to understand the rules. Using more explicit failure states would help direct the player towards their goal.
The art is really nice and cohesive. Started to make sense after I read the rules and experimented a bit.
Nice work!
Mechanically simple but solid.
I found it a bit easy, but shmups are one of those things that you basically can never balance for everyone because touhou exists as a benchmark many gamers aspire to reach.
I agree with comments about the audio being a bit repetitive. Using softer sounds here might have helped.
Nice work!
Cute and comfy little sheep game; love the art style! You had me at sheep girl.
Also got the black rectangle at the end.
The world is just big enough that it's easy to get disoriented. I wish it had a few more land markers or perhaps a minimap as a brute force solution. Something to help me know where I am in relation to the pen.
Nice work!
Super comfy little game with simple yet interesting mechanics.
The leaderboard at the end makes me think about ways to optimize more, but the game itself is very low stress, which I appreciate. Being able to rewire nodes and just have fun is certainly a compelling experience that scratches the right itch for me.
The graphics are simple but effective; a nice coherent look with all the right info baked in. Would have been nice to have some ambient music playing to help bring the shape "beeps" to life a bit more, but that's a tall order for a compo game for sure.
Fantastic job!
As others have said, a map would be nice, it's often a bit unclear how best to navigate obstacles. I also wish I could get new missions at destination stations, rather than flying home each time.
Overall it works great. Simple mechanics and solid implementation.
Nice work!
This came together really nice!
The graphics have a good balance of chunky and detail, the music loop fits well, and the fonts fit well.
The procedural (?) city generation sometimes produces dead ends that are hard to spot and kill your combo. Not sure if there's a way to spot these from farther away or not; maybe it's just operator error.
The dogs are kind of tricky, with limited turn and view radii I wasn't very good at dodging them. I wish I had more tools to interact with them. Maybe something like bones placed around the map I can pick up and throw to temporarily distract them? It could also give the player more things to do in the world.
Overall nice work!
Neat fusion of Dark Souls gameplay and classic dungeon crawlers.
AI seems to be a bit simplistic, I found I could just do 3 fast attacks then parry, and pretty reliably not take damage. Perhaps some kind of stun lock behavior? Not sure.
The hidden door in the first room was tricky; I almost gave up on finding the route. Couldn't find the relic in the forest, and getting to the end of the level without it is a bit of a downer. Maybe I missed something super obvious?
Overall plays quite nicely, feels tight and is fun. Didn't hit any obvious bugs or game breaking issues.
Nice work!
Wow this is really good!
The sprites are cute, the writing is fun, and the puzzles have a nice pace that makes me think a bit more each puzzle, so I'm not sent off a difficulty cliff or turned away by overly complex puzzles.
The only thing I missed was a reminder on which clients needed to be delivered to in order. That threw me for a loop in one of the puzzles.
Great work!
The lack of a checkpoint system makes this pretty brutal. I managed to clear it on the second try, but I was a bit frustrated to lose all my progress.
The art is simple and nicely coherent, but I wish the clouds were a bit easier to spot. Maybe being in 4k makes it harder? But a more clear effect would have been good.
Otherwise solid entry. Didn't hit any bugs, nice touches with the voice lines and audioscape.
Nice work!
Cute!
As others have mentioned, I do with the game played a bit faster. For a rail grinding game, I crave speed!
Good mix of rail designs, hazards, and interesting spaces. There was one section in level 2 or 3 where there's a semi-blind drop due to slow camera panning, but that's fairly forgivable since the cost of making mistakes is so low.
Loved the little narrative wrapping you gave it; nothing super intrusive, just a bit of narrative background for those who were interested.
Nice work!
At first I was pretty torn with the instructions being physics and not grid based. I think a lot of this comes down to there being a visually distinct grid, so it was surprising when the little guy flew off the grid as soon as I started turning.
That said, I ended up liking it quite a bit once I got my bearings.
I did notice a lot of obstacles can just be bowled through. I suspect that's why the TNT gets added later, but it would have been nice to have fixed barriers and more explicit training on being able to punch through boxes with enough speed.
Really nice work! The leaderboard is a nice touch.
Throwing packages never felt so good.
There's quite a lot of stuff here for a compo entry, nice work! I wish there were more packages to deliver in the vertical sections, but perhaps it's randomly generated and I just got (un)lucky?
Gameplay is simple but worked as expected. I got a pretty bad time because at first I thought "E for use" until I read the directions. Whoops!
Cute!
I think there's a bug with the intro CGs, they seem to scroll down but not fully off the screen, making it hard to see certain obstacles (such as the pits).
Also you should change your link to read web version instead of source code, it'll encourage more people to play.
Otherwise well executed and works great! I think I got to the end? Hard to be fully sure through the language barrier, but it felt like a good ending!
Nice work!
Lots of nice little bits of polish here. I absolutely adore the art!
As others have commented, I'd love to see more done with this. The core loop is fantastic, it just needs a bit more structure to really shine. This would be a fantastic candidate for some post-jam love when you're in the mood. Lots low hanging fruit to play with like structured levels, catmech upgrades, variants, more powerups, etc. Some roguelite mechanics could be fun too. Maybe ape some ideas from Vampire Survivors' progression system.
Nice work! I hope I get to see more some day :smiley_cat:
Neat ideas here, I wish there was more!
I found the controls a bit awkward; our little bee friend seems to keep moving for a bit after you let go of the key. This makes navigating the cloud pretty tricky; especially since it's instant death. I found I could just fly above it, but that felt like cheating.
There's clearly interesting stuff left to explore here even with the pieces you've already built, I hope you have some time to add more levels in a post-jam version later!
Wow, the polish here is really high. Loved the treatment you gave to the voices. The story is delivered in a simple yet effective way, and the gameplay, while not particularly deep, serves as a nice vehicle to deliver it with.
Nice work!
Super interesting mechanics!
As others have mentioned, the platforming here is pretty tricky, I didn't get very far.
Art is cute, concept is fun. Nice work!
I was not expecting this!
I play a decent amount of sudoku so my first instinct here was "wait this isn't solvable..." only to realize the gimmick.
It's a really neat fusion of mechanics. It rewards clever sudoku play and guess work while still being relatively accessible to people less familiar with the genre. Lots of easy knobs to turn for difficulty too.
The graphics are simple but cute and coherent, and the music layering is a nice touch. the fact that this is somehow a compo game is crazy.
Fantastic work, I hope to see more of this some day!
@devon-chan There should be a super simple one as far as just getting you geared up enough to continue. Maybe it bugged out? Do you not get the part install instructions or does the start button never show up?
Woa! I was not expecting something like this.
I love the mixture of scripting and AI, I kept second guessing myself as to whether this was AI or just a really clever text engine. It all felt very natural yet magical.
The art is lovely and the music does a good job fitting in with the mood and enhancing things without standing out too much.
hard to gauge difficulty given its construction, but I shoo'd away everyone pretty fast but the lifter. The only thing I really can say here is that I wish there was an incentive to interact with these characters more. When the winning move is to get away from them, you don't really ever get a chance to enjoy their personalities.
Overall this is a really heckin cool entry. Nice work!
Absolutely fantastic mood here!
I feel like the first clue probably needed a bit more direction to help set player expectations. I spent a lot of time randomly clicking on stuff before I realized what was going on; once you get the first clue the next steps become a lot more clear.
Unsure what the dialogue choices do (if anything?) but it was good for tone setting to help direct how the player should be feeling about their predicament.
Unsure on the ending, the scene and setting was good but it feels like some steps got skipped.
Overall great work! I always love seeing narrative works like this pop up in LD, and this one feels very well thought out in how the player interacts with the world.
(Double post, can't delete it seems, sorry!)
I wasn't expecting the depth of mechanics here when I opened this up. It's pretty neat!
Stick art is disarmingly cute. I also didn't notice you could talk to people, a quick tutorial would have been nice to just warm the player up to what's going on.
Overall pretty cool entry.
The art style is has some really cool vibes.
There's are some interesting pieces here that I imagine you had further plans for but just didn't make it time wise. It's a bit of a shame, but that's the nature of game jams.
Now that the jam is over, it might be worth just taking some time to casually poke it and see what you can come up with that moves the design forward. It's a good exercise for future jams, though I imagine you already learned a lot from this one.
In any event, I look forward to your future entries, I see a lot of promise here.
I think I got into a similar state as PoshDan, I saw some hints towards a story developing but it didn't seem to go anywhere, either I got into some kind of bug or vastly underestimated how many packages I needed to deliver to advance the story further.
I accidentally chose the wrong floor due to an input mistake and that really threw my package delivery situation for a loop; might be good to have some kind of safeguards there (perhaps adding a "go" button to confirm your choice which allows for a reset button as well)
I dig the atmosphere and theme. Absolutely feels like something sinister is lurking under the covers, I might give it another shot later to see if making a different choice there advanced things further.
Nice work!
Nice work on clearing the first hurdle! Be careful, it's a bit of an addiction...
Super simple concept with a cute wrapping. Plays like you'd expect, but the difficulty goes from 1 to 100 reeeal quick. I enjoy the frantic pace from a gameplay perspective, but it would have been nice to have some kind of even to trigger the sudden outburst of feline escapees.
Sound would have added a lot of juice here too, check out tools like bfxr if you need to make some simple stuff in a pinch; even blips and bloops can do a lot towards making players feel rewarded for their clicks.
Nice job!
Is it legal for a game to be this cute?
A simple idea taken to such a polished degree it feels like a retail game. The art is absolutely adorable, super coherent, and goes perfectly with the audio.
Gameplay is simple but has a logical progression, and keeps introducing new mechanics without overwhelming the player.
Great work!
echoing the controls being a bit strange at first, but once you get the hang of it it's pretty easy.
Cool application of the theme, and interesting concept. I liked seeing the blue guys closing up space, but it seems like that stops at a certain point. Maybe I just died too early, but it'd be interesting to see things continue to escalate a bit faster; as the pacing felt a bit slow.
Nice work!
I... Have no idea what I'm doing here. I met Vinny but didn't see any obvious clues for what to do after that, and I don't quite understand how the knobs work. The game is clearly giving me hints but I'm not quite picking up on what they mean. I found sgt salt by just trial and error; but then the instructions from there got me lost and I couldn't proceed further than that.
I love quirky games like this, and the concept is neat, but it feels like there's just too many dials with that take too line to tune to really feel comfortable just exploring, and if you mess up it's hard to recover without just resetting back to the crow.
The writing is lovely, every character feels unique and stands out.
Nice work!
Tons of assets here, and they all look quite nice and coherent.
The amount of options here for packing is nuts. A ton of work clearly went into making all of these options and features.
Music is simple and charming, didn't hit any obvious bugs, and absolutely packed some stuff I shouldn't have just to fill in those last few slots and fulfill my OCD.
You might want to have an off-site link though, seems like the LD embed player is cropping the edges of the screen a bit. Not enough to make it impossible to play, but it does make the edges feel cramped.
Overall Nice work!
Neat!
Took me a few turns to really get a feel for what I was supposed to do, but once I got it down it was quite an addictive little loop.
The stacking/unstacking part at the end feels a bit tedious after a bunch of rounds, not sure if there's a way to make it feel better. Maybe just making the stack area bigger so it's more forgiving with me slamming stuff in there? Or maybe being better about hiding the little struts under the buildings so it's more clear what the correct alignment is.
Also wish there was a health bar (If it's there I missed it?), as it seems damage doesn't heal up between rounds? I know I feel super tanky early on and eventually usually die to a light tap.
Really like this one, nice work!
This is a video game.
@t90 As you probably noticed, I do all my dev/testing in native and export to JS at the end. JS has a... lacking understanding of integers, and this kinda stuff happens.
I patched those under porting rules, let me know if you spot anything else doing a javascript. Thanks!
@mrmaico There's not great handling for when you go bankrupt, so that's basically the game over state.
You can't make trades that cost more than you current funds, so if you spend all your cash that's it! Make sure you leave some spare cash to make new trades before buying upgrades or items.
Wiggly!
Everything felt pretty solid here. Wall jumping is a bit iffy but I think this is user error rather than any kind of mechanical issue.
Jump lengths were tight in a few spots (The last one in Feel the Burn got me a few times...), I think a lot of it is just due to his very long hitbox, which is the nature of the butter here.
Game has some clear mechanical escalation and I good decision making on tutorialization and helping the player when they fail to solve the obvious puzzle you placed before them.
Nice work!
Got stuck after getting roll, not sure how to get the ball into the blue spot with the tools I have, but I'm probably missing something? Feels like interact should do something maybe but it doesn't. Not sure where else to go.
Movement is very fast but tight, so it felt fair. Atmosphere is great.
I was able to play in firefox, chrome gives the error others have reported.
Jumping is VERY slow and floaty, I think this is a FF bug maybe because sometimes it speeds up a lot, but it's hard to play with how long it takes to come down after jumping.
I tried flipping all the switchesd but wasn't getting enough feedback to figure out how to progress. Not sure why Ii'd want to switch critters when they seem to wander around on their own when I switch away.
I really like the idea, just needs some bug fixing and maybe a better tutorial for idiots like me.
In both firefox and chrome I get a black screen after the loading bar. Itch version works.
Some interesting ideas here, but movement felt a bit janky at times, and outcomes were unpredictable. Both the stacking behavior of the stool things and the riding behavior of the balloons felt a bit random and it often felt like I failed due to RNG rather than a mistake on my part. The player also sometimes gets free jumps off walls, this usually happens when using a physics body for the player instead of a kinematic controller.
That said, some neat ideas here. I quite like the spaces this game explores mechanically, and the level design does a good job of teaching new systems without overt tutorialization.
Graphics felt consistent and the music was nice.
Nice work!
Love the aesthetics!
Mechanically I think it maybe leans too hard on procedural generation for something that really wants to be hand crafted.
My first run I clicked the first area, made on choice (avoid foxes) then was presented with an option to settle. I took this and it's not really clear why I should take longer routes that drain more resources etc, but then the game just ends.
I can potentially get a higher score but there's not a lot motivating the player to go for those scores.
That said I do appreciate a good story telling engine, and I think this has a lot of potential with a few tweaks. I think pushing a bit more direction into the player's earlier experiences in the run can help produce more interesting stories, like having a minimum travel distance before settlement options turn up, and having more clear decision making/risk taking that leads towards settleable areas.
Nice work!
I think the instructions need a bit more clarification. "E" doesn't seem to do anything, and parry fills some kind of gauge but it's too inconsistent to figure out what it does. When I do parry the mobs fall to the ground sometimes, other times they just get stuck in place.
Neat! I love the clean yet clear art style, it came together really nice.
The tutorial went fine, but once the game started I lost keyboard control, so I played the run with just the mouse... which ended up being easier.
The monsters add a fun wrinkle to it and really bring the stress of it all together, but I feel like the controls and timings were a bit *too* forgiving. I realize that's a good default to err towards during a jam, but being left wanting for more is always a good sign.
I also wish levels were a bit more clearly defined, I don't know what the end goal was other than I got a score of 22. The tutorial had a nice clear end point, and felt kinda of lemmings-like. I sort of with the game had that kind of progression, but maybe that's a good direction for a post-LD version :)
Nice work!
Didn't launch on chrome, works on FF though some of the tutorial images were missing. I think I figured it out regardless.
Simple yet well executed idea.
Found the win mechanic to be a bit tricky, I had the most success just letting the light go out to lure them all in at once. I feel like there's probably more room for mechanical escalation, but the simplicity of the concept works well here too.
Nice work!
Love the subnautica vibes with this. Early game resource management is kind of annoying with the starter fish only giving 10 fuel, but by checkpoint 2 it's a lot easier, I think I probably just spent too much time up there trying to figure things out
Upgrades were cool, loved seeing the sub upgrade with each tier.
Light effect really helped sell the mood. I disliked how hard the ship was to control but it did add a lot of tension at the ending with how narrow that pipe was. I wonder if you could have achieved the same thing with more mass instead of less thrust.
Really cool entry, nice work!
There's a fun amount of chaos here, I see a lot of potential in the design.
As others notes, the performance tanks randomly, which is a bit weird, but could just be a quirk in the web export.
Graphics are very simple, to a point where they sometimes fail to communicate state well. I died on the third level and I'm not even sure how. I'm also not sure why I change color seemingly at random when the level changes.
Good job overall! Would be interesting to see a post-jam version of this concept.
The polish here is great. The graphics and feel of the game are fastastic.
Gameplay wise everything felt tight and had good risk/reward, but the random generation would often create situations that were unwinnable, so several retries often felt necessary. Since the levels re-generate every time you don't get to learn from your last run either, which is unfortunate.
This lead me towards a high risk strategy instead of encouraging smarter play, but I kind of wanted to be rewarded for playing smarter.
Overall nice work!
Having trouble with the web version, it only renders in a small sub-area of the window. In firefox, I can play but the cursor constantly drifts down making aiming impossible.
In chrome pressing space didn't work until I fiddled with window focus a bit, but it still only rendered to a small sub-section of the screen. probably an issue with display scaling.
Neat idea to play with! I wish there was an indicator to know how many apples were left. Felt like the DoF was working in reverse at first, as the apple came more into focus when I got super close, leading me to think I needed to get on the table for an even closer shot, as moving further away clearly made it blurrier until you hit the "zone".
Might have been fun to have some more camera settings to play with, or more movement mechanics to get the "perfect" shot, but still a cool implementation for the time given.
Nice work!
Cool concept.
Mechanically I found it a bit hard to figure out what was the right direction from the popups, and sometimes I'd end up clicking on a file trying to dismiss the popup, further exacerbating the situation.
When clicking on a wrong folder, you're told it's wrong but it still enters, so you always have to click back. The context switch, mixed with the popup and time pressure, sometimes causes me to forget which folder I even clicked on since the names repeat a lot. Would probably make more sense to not traverse here.
I wish I had more time to read the flavor text, but all I do is skim it for the filename and ignore the rest.
Might have been cool to have a more gentle guidance than the popup and time loss. For example, some kind of gauge or indicator that doesn't make it immediately obvious what the right/wrong choices are.
Simple but fun card game loop. The mechanics felt fun and I gave it a few tries, but never managed to succeed, probably just need to adjust my strategy more.
I didn't appreciate that the upgrade buffs were permanent at first, so that lead me to value those cards poorly on my first runs.
Super fun entry, nice work!
Interesting mechanics here. I really dig how you took a simple concept and just ran with it. I found it a BIT chaotic but it felt like I got a bit better every run, so there's clearly a skill component in there. There may need to be one more way to express skill or control over the thing, but I'm not quite sure what it would look like.
The music sets a nice mood and the graphics are all coherent.
Very cool entry, nice work!
It's not clear what's going when the workers dig, I wonder if Firefox is also bugged?
The dialogue weaves an interesting tale, and the concept is fun to play around with. I wish the strategy part was a big more fleshed out, as it seems like it doesn't really matter a ton where I mine, but the rest of it is really neat.
nice work!
@ditam The easiest way to side step these kinds of issues is to render to canvas; those APIs are very consistent between browsers; only issues I ever have are audio codecs (Looking at you apple).
Obviously too late to make the change for this jam, but might be something to learn for the next one. If you want something a bit more robust than just the stock API, I had a good experience with Pixi.js.
The aim direction being backwards felt weird, but I got over it. However, I found the game way too hard for me unfortunately, so I didn't get very far.
Controls feel consistent, which is important for this genre. Leaderboard is a nice touch. Good job!
Not much to say that hasn't already been said. The implementation is a bit awkward in spots but it's a fun idea that could really see a future if you develop it a bit more.
Not sure you even need an actual 3d world, even just color coded layers would probably be fine.
Cool entry, nice work!
As others have stated, I got strong motherlode vibes. The pacing feels a bit slow but that's hard to get right during the jam.
Would be nice to get more progressive upgrades that change the gameplay a bit more.
Overall solid entry, nice work!
The timer feels like an awkward addition as a default on feature. Unless I'm just not understanding something, it's more or less impossible to experience a lot of the content inside the time limit, I time out around when I see my first gem, nevermind going after it.
Feels like the game is stuck between two different designs.
I switched to sandbox mode and enjoyed the experience a lot more. Art is simple but consistent, the light mechanic is neat.
Nice work!
Simple visuals but surprisingly well designed gameplay. The number of variants and their evolving behaviors make for interesting combos, and the fast retry speed helps let the player quickly learn by trial and error instead of needing explicit tutorials.
Nice work!
I'm almost a bit disappointed this wasn't QWOP levels of frustrating to control.
Not entirely sure how to make the mosquito go away, moving a limb at it makes it go red but sometimes it'll just run away even if the limb speed seems slower.
Is there only one level?
Cool idea, nice work!
Despite multiple attempts I can't quite figure out how to succeed here. The feedback between success and error isn't super clear, and I'm not entirely sure what the correct methodology is for the QTEs.
I did find a few endings along the way, which is a cool feature, and the concept is interesting.
Nice work!
I feel like I don't have a ton of influence over the "ball" here beyond the launch trajectory, and even then it's not super clear how things will go past the first bounce. The small amount of influence I have seems fairly limited though it might just take more time to master.
The graphics are adorable, I love the style here.
There's a ton going on here, I don't fully comprehend all of it. One time while setting up the launch trajectory a bunch of orange cheese spawned on top of me for no obvious reason. It's super chaotic but in a hilariously fun kind of way. I'm not sure understanding the mechanics would change my playstyle at all, so it's probably fine to just lean into it.
Would have been cool to get some stuff like multiball (unless it's there and I never hit it?)
Cool entry, nice work!
When getting hit, you lose control of the character for a moment, but the enemy continues to chase. I found sometimes I'd get hit multiple times because of this.
Without a way to locate pickups, I found it hard to progress past a certain point, as it seems like pure luck as to whether you find any or not. Might have been cool to have some kind of radar or guidance system to help steer the player.
The mine explosion animation was super satisfying, I could almost always avoid them but I'd make a point of shooting them anyway.
Nice work!
Love the ambiance here. The bubbles and dark ambiance really fit here instead of a music track.
I found I stuck to walls somtimes, which was a bit annoying, but otherwise seems to work as expected.
Nice work!
Cool little puzzle game. Got stuck on the level in the second screenshot, but it's 2am so I no brain good.
The lift mechanic felt a bit kludgey at times as you had to sometimes move back a tile to push it in air, and it's never super clear when you need to do this outside of trial and error.
Each puzzle felt like an iteration on the last, and the introduction of new mechanics helps keep it fresh. nice work!
Really cool! Love the graphics, style, and mood.
Upgrades and general game feel are nice, but it's not clear if it's intentional that enemies can still attack while "dead" and being eaten.
The eating phase in general doesn't make a ton of sense mechanically, it would be cool if there was more of a reason to pick and choose which enemies to eat instead of just being obligated to eat all of them. There was still an interesting tradeoff on when to eat/where was it safe, but I found I could die of hunger while eating so it was hard tor really make good decisions there.
Really cool entry, nice work!
Very cool take on snake.
Feels like getting hit by enemies is basically fatal, as you can easily get "trapped" once you have a decent length as your tail goes through or blocks the door. Might be worth letting you either reclaim the tail, or having it go away.
Difficulty is high as others have mentioned, but the controls feel fairly tight and fair.
Nice work!
Fun little game with a addictive concept.
The upgrades are a bit RNG in some questionable ways at times, but roguelikes do be like that some times. I do with there was a bit more variety in the upgrades instead of damage scaling, and maybe some kind of signaling towards the next wave's strength, but these are mostly "Cool things you'd probably add anyway if you had more time" rather than game design issues.
Great work!
Interesting take on the theme.
Feels like there's a missing piece here to round out the gameplay, the first phase doesn't seem to really matter much beyond seeding letters. It goes so fast it could just as well be random and I don't think it would meaningfully change the second phase.
Maybe if there was more decision making involved it'd make the phase more impactful? Eg, if I had to choose between words instead of just collect all I can with no limits other than time.
Game worked fine, no bugs, and cool idea. Nice work!
This is an interesting design. Feels like ultimately you're just trying to buffer enough resources that the king can't make a dumb decision and kill you, though maybe the AI has some deeper logic I haven't found yet.
It'd be interesting to have some insight into the king's desires, or ways to predict what the king might want to a degree (eg, "the king wants something living" would narrow it to just humans/birds, so you would know flowers and coins are safe to be a bit greedy on until his mood changes). Not sure this would change my strategy much towards the later stages though since they scale with speed. Maybe instead scale by the amount of resources the king takes?
Either way, cool implementation. Nice work!
There's a good base here, but the slow pacing and difficulty ramping makes it a bit tiring after a while. I think you could probably double the speed of most stuff and get a more enjoyable pace.
The visuals are nice though, the music is good, and the minigames all function as one would expect without bugs.
Nice work!
Took a while to figure out the mechanics, but overall a pretty neat concept. The upgrade UI could use some work, and I couldn't figure out if there was a way to place more towers than the two at the start of the game, but the movement felt solid. The attack direction was a bit fiddly but it sort of felt like a skill after a while, and with tight controls it's less of an issue.
Nice work!
I love the robot animation!
Felt like the coffee cups and light bulbs were placed in ways that were difficult to avoid, It took me a while to find a good groove.
Controls feel mostly tight, though it would be good to have a bit more tolerance on hitbox edges, sometimes I think I'm going to clear and I don't. May just be a skill issue though.
Nice work!
Super interesting little game.
The mix of "work" and narrative is super interesting here.
Would have been nice to have a bit more mood setting (Maybe some text beeps, ambiance, etc) to make the world feel a bit more alive.
Cool entry, nice work!
@5h08 There is a branch for this sort of; if you beat up the locals too much with aggressive collectors, or go after more innocent groups, you build up hate, which has a separate ending.
The balance is a bit forgiving on this though.
Would have loved to see more, but enjoyed it for what it was. I wonder if Pond got shot down or not...
Yo this is fire.
It's clear you ran out of time on some stuff, but the depth here and polish for what you have is already pretty great. I really hope you keep working on this post jam, there's a lot to like.
I ended up dying and wasn't really sure how to gauge the threat level of a tile, maybe I missed a UI element for that?
Honestly feels like there's a lot of depth I'm not getting due to either lack of a tutorial or lack of interface elements.
Amazing work, I hope to see more!
This is REALLY good. I love all the choices you've made here on where to spend your time and what kind of experience to tell.
I was originally going to gripe about the lack of click to complete text, but you you use punctuation as an expression mechanic which lets you add a lot more emotion into your characters, and skipping that would dull the experience.
Others have noted a "skip" feature would be nice for second playthroughs.
Otherwise no notes. It's great. I love it. Awesome work!
Wow this is lovely! And in season now too.
Love the voice work, the evolving gameplay (Though the vertical crusher in the spine stage made me rage), and the overall look, feel, and mood.
Physics felt a bit wonky at times; felt like I'd gain or lose momentum when jumping sometimes, but I can't put my finger on it. I eventually got used to it.
Great work!
If there was a way to spend some fuel to "kick" the asteroid you're on to rotate faster, I think that'd add a lot more depth here. As it is, it feels a bit RNG; though maybe I've just yet to find the real strategy.
Love the look, feel, and sound of everything. Execution and polish are solid. nice work!
Game seems to end at the second level? Or it crashed. Not sure.
The camera movement is really hard on the eyes, but otherwise a pleasant experience. Managed to collect (all?) 20 coins for level 1 and 2 without taking damage.
Nice work!
Wow, the difficulty really ramps. My eyes hurt...
Cool idea for sure! I'd maybe reduce the search space a bit, at least for the earlier levels, since "spot the difference" over a large grid gets tiring fast, especially on high DPI with them being super tiny.
Fun idea though, with a nice simple but effective implementation. Nice work!
A surprising amount of depth here. Love the scaling/clicker mechanics, and it's a fresh take on the theme I've not seen yet.
Some of the text on the quest section gets cut off, but it doesn't hinder gameplay. Might be a display scaling thing? I'm on 1.5x display scale, some web apps don't like that.
Nice work!
I had to read the instructions to discover I could vacuum ghosts, I just avoided them initially and was collecting upgrades. I'm on firefox, maybe I'm missing a particle effect or something?
The Flashlight mechanic is cool, and it was nice seeing some variety in the enemy types.
Nice work!
There's a lot of interactivity here for a jam game!
I think the journal "broke" on my playthrough, the icon vanished so I couldn't find the three digit code.
Also sometimes it was hard to target a specific thing for inspection. But those are minor gripes.
Love the atmosphere, and weaves a nice yarn.
Well done!
Oh, this is cute.
...Oh.......
Oh no.....
Love the mix of horror and kids toys, however I couldn't figure out how to move the mage, so the runs never lasted very long. I eventually tried moving the blocks around to let him be punted around more but the game bugged out after that.
I'm using firefox if that helps. Tried arrow keys, wasd, and various mouse inputs; not sure if I'm dumb or there's a bug somewhere. (probably the former)
Cool little slice for a jam. I, like the other commentor, did not read the "Don't do this" section and did... many of them before noticing that section. :sweat_smile:
I didn't even know you could do web builds of rpgmaker games. Certainly has a lot of the standard assets/setup, but there's clearly a lot of work put in too.
It would be cool to see this expanded outside of the jam, expanding upon the idea a bit more and working out the bugs would really drive it home I think.
Nice work!
I had trouble with items not being aligned to the mouse cursor so I couldn't progress. Maybe a firefox+display scale thing? Not sure.
The movement feels really good!
Honestly there's a lot to like here. Game feel, art direction, etc. The main gripe I have is that the witch can very easily and quickly corner you and you have no recourse.
If you had some way of escaping or temporarily disabling her, it would go a long way here I think. Maybe if you could just go through the doors, that would provide a soft "reset" to get you away from her and try the approach again. It would also add some nice tension between deciding to go for the potion or scrambling towards a door.
There's also a long term design problem (eg, what to do after getting the potions) but I presume you had more plans here, but ran out of time.
Overall, really cool entry that just needs some more time to bake.
Love the visual style!
Not entirely sure what the strategy here is though. The cards can mostly be sussed out either by hovering over whether they can be used as attacks, and a bit of trial and error. Once that's done it seems like you just attack, heal, and sell until you win. But the AI also seems to be fairly accurate so sometimes I'd lose even with what I believe to be "correct" play.
I suspect I'm missing something? The rules imply there's some discovery involved so I maybe missed something.
Love the concept, nice work!
Woa! Really cool design here.
it might have been a bit cleaner to have more distinct bird phases (eg, 1,2,3 coins instead of the current cutoffs) but I get you probably wanted some wiggle room so the player could "lose" coins and not get soft locked.
I really dig the idea and played until the levels looped. Now that I'm commenting I realize there was more to do so I might go back and try to find more later, there are some really fun ideas here.
Great work!