Birdbird's Life Balancing Agency by Togimaro 2021-10-05T19:14:11Z
Wow, so beautiful, polished and just all around a well crafted little game. Really loved the look and feel of the game, astonished that you managed to even include a tutorial!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → jnur
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Signalien | jam | 235 | 3.84 | 3.82 | 3.12 | 4.32 | 4.01 | 2.55 | 3.03 | 3.55 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Umbrage | jam | 264 | 3.75 | 3.81 | 3.27 | 3.58 | 3.85 | 2.64 | 3.21 | ||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Sheeplings | jam | 332 | 3.75 | 3.98 | 3.79 | 3.24 | 3.61 | 3.59 | 3.48 | ||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Pest Control | jam | 734 | 3.44 | 3.66 | 3.44 | 3.92 | 3.76 | 2.76 | 2.56 | 3.26 | |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | velho | jam | 983 | 3.34 | 3.36 | 2.94 | 3.61 | 3.28 | 2.45 | 2.38 | 3.02 |
Wow, so beautiful, polished and just all around a well crafted little game. Really loved the look and feel of the game, astonished that you managed to even include a tutorial!
Very fun! It took me a few tries to even get past the first windmill but after that it was even pretty intuitive and I got to the end with 24 passengers, barely missed the runway though.
I always love a good mix of 2d and 3d, the simple 2d characters in a bright and cheery low poly 3d world was really fun!
And the pacing of the game was great too, it was long enough to have some challenge and surprises, but not so long that it would've dragged on too long.
Just two very minor nitpicks: It would've been nice to only see the short intro on your first try, or making it skippable. And like some others here, the game crashed on completion, but no big deal.
Really fun little game! The idea of a mole-roguelike is brilliant. The graphics and sounds were also really charming.
The game looks really really nice and the comments make it sound worth checking out, but my Windows is sure it contains a virus :frowning: virus.png
@moandor Yeah, that's really unfortunate. Can't really help you more in debugging that, I just got that dialog and no additional info
The game looks and sounds wonderful! I have to agree with some of the previous commentors; some of the levels (Bridges, for example) require so much moving around that not being able to hold a key to move comes really tiring. The CRT screen effect fits the aesthetic super well, but it does interfere with the pushable blocks (I was also stuck in "Rooms" until checking the comments, didn't recognize the block due to the effect).
I would definitely play more of this if it had more levels and perhaps a not-so-steep learning curve! This would definitely also work really, really well as a mobile game. Bite sized chunks to play on the go, and simple controls with no need for precise inputs.
Pretty much the same feedback as other people here. Fun concept and the looks and sounds really fit the whole idea, but I found it impossible to play - movement was super slippery, aiming anything was hard and the time limits way too strict. If the controls were more polished and the time limit wasn't as harsh, I really do believe this could be a really fun little game, but as it is I couldn't really play it long enough to give it a proper chance. Completing menial and increasingly insane tasks around a Soviet nuclear plant (hell, even a basic American open plan office would work :sweat_smile:) could be a really fun little game!
Really fun and the sounds, graphics and gameplay fit really well together! I have to agree with the previous commenters, it's pretty hard to get a hang of doing all the jumps and wallruns and dives, I couldn't get past the third level :sweat_smile:
I have to join the choir and also compliment the visuals, I think they fit the gameplay really well. I liked the low brow sillyness with animals in weird places and sometimes almost surreal dialogue. Like some other commentors, I too had some trouble grasping the building mechanic, but once it clicked it was clear enough.
I also had to stop playing when I got stuck on a ladder when trying to get to the chicken in (or is it on?) the church, included a screenshot in case you're interested in trying to reproduce it: funstable.JPG
I loved the contrast between the low res pixel hands and blocky, barely textured environment. The player's grunts sounded a lot like the old Serious Sam games, almost to a confusing amount :smile:
Couldn't get past the second level, though. I'm not much of an FPS player so maybe it was just me having trouble comprehending my surroundings, but I kept ground pounding straight into the void when trying to jump and running all the way out of platforms when landing. I think adding some coyote time would've definitely helped me, as I was just pressing jump way too late when trying to jump from a platform while running.
Liked the mechanics and vibes of the game though, so definitely wished I was able to play it further :slight_smile:
Such a brilliant idea and great execution! So polished too with effects and the graphics, doesn't even feel like a jam game. I think someone already mentioned it, but not being able to "swipe" wherever in the right direction to move was the only gripe I had, and even that I quickly got used to. This could definitely even work as a mobile game, just slap in a challenge mode or something like that and it would be a nice little time waster on bus rides etc arps.JPG
I have to agree with pretty much everything said here! The graphics, effects and sounds fit so well together, everything felt polished in a weird, edgy way. The level from autofire onwards was a way too long stretch without checkpoints, walking all the way to where you died got somewhat tiring. Didn't get further than that though, once I got to the place where there's five-ish guys in a cluster, the game got super slow and laggy until it just stopped responding.
Overall a really, really nice game, definitely one of my favourites so far. Bonus points for **not** just rotating the character's arms' sprites when aiming, nothing looks uglier than rotated pixel graphics :wink: If you ever decide to expand on this and release a full game, I'm going to buy it without hesitation!
Oh and one tiny issue, the HUD was scrambled and unreadable on my screen. Thought that it was part of the unstable theme until I saw your screenshots, I'm guessing it's because of playing on a 4K resolution? gsm.png
Really beautiful! I think this could very well be built into a fun little shooter, the mechanic where both shooting and being hit "damages" you gives it a nice little twist. I have some suggestions in case you decide to keep working on this game and improving it: * Make movements faster. Slowly moving around a long level can get a bit tedious * I couldn't get past a section where there's a bunch of very high HP enemies shooting at you. You don't really have any way to dodge their bullets or defend yourself, and if you try to kill them you'll end up overheating and dying anyway. Maybe add more cover around levels, or make it possible to dodge bullets? * When I played the game (on itch.io, in Firefox on Windows (not full screen)), the aiming wasn't working correctly. The cannon shot consistently a bit off from the mouse position for some reason, I assume this is a bug?
Controlling the ship by enabling the thrusters is a really nice idea! I got to 630 points before trying to hit the thrusters with my mouse got too hard for me, maybe being able to toggle them with the keyboard or something like that would have helped
@fonkin Yep, Finnish! I was struggling to think of a name when I realized the game has some similarity to Noita and decided to follow the "Use your native language's word for the main character" -pattern of naming things.
And thanks for the critique on level design, the idea was that you know where the door is but you still need to explore the dungeon to kill the goblins before you can go through the door.
@grigri-games @neputevshina @marmeron @agent-peterson @malcolm Thanks! Having more varied sounds and spells was definitely something I wanted to do, but had to cut due to time running out. I think I actually built the actual level 4 hours before submission, and made & added the sounds two hours before submission :sweat_smile:
@joonamo Thanks! I think making a fun and balanced random arena or something like that for this would've been way harder than an MVP level design. I wish I had had more time to actually do a few levels with ramping difficulty, but no way I could've made that in time :smile:
@zapturk I knew about the wall clipping bug, didn't realize you can just go and walk to the exit when out of bounds :sweat_smile:
@tobold-h Thank you! I definitely did plan originally to have a few levels and maybe even a boss at the end, but obviously ran out of time
@eli-delventhal Yep, the HUD isn't intuitive at all - just shortly explaining it in the start screen would've been a good MVP solution for the jam.
@floxicek Thanks!
@nanobuilder Thanks a lot! Noita actually wasn't an inspiration from the beginning at all (at least consciously), I later realized the similarities and decided to honor them with the name. I've been thinking of ways to improve this or even make it into it's own complete game, and both making the next spell clearer somehow and some variation of that spellbook idea have been on my mind :slight_smile:
@elysiagriffin Thanks! It was fun watching you play it, and thanks for the good feedback on stream!
@figueroass27 Thank you! I did focus on the graphics & animation maybe even too much, so it's nice to hear that people liked them. The idea behind adding the teleport spell was that you can't just spam spells at goblins, as every once in a while you get something that breaks the pattern of just shooting offensive spells. The idea would've probably worked better if I had had time to add other non-offensive spells as well :thinking:
Great idea, and fun execution also! I like the setting of an unstable spaceship, and the atmosphere worked well. Kinda the same critiques as @stalemeat above, the graphics mismatched (the "resolutions" of different sprites mismatch, with some having really small pixels and some having huge, with the UI being really smooth and high res) and the controls were a bit confusing (I would suggest making the same key open doors, pick up and operate the yoke). Really fun and a great idea!
@quanperfect Entirely reasonable, I'm sure it's really difficult to find ready made sprites etc. that perfectly match each other!
Glad I got through without help, it was super enthralling! The visuals are *the* thing here, the rest just perfectly ties it up together. I'd buy an adventure game with these vibes, even if it was "just" clicking around (and sometimes using a tiny bit of brute force)
Just a heads up, the player is just a black screen for me (MacOS/Apple Silicon/Firefox, 4K screen). Errors from the console:
``` Error in Surface::configure: Validation Error
Caused by: `Surface` width and height must be within the maximum supported texture size. Requested was (15168, 8528), maximum extent is 8192. ```
and
``` event_loop/window_target.rs:665:26: already borrowed: BorrowMutError
```
Big props for using Bevy though :wink:
The humor and voice acting was perfectly silly and campy.
The visuals fit the point & click -like vibes very well.
The summoning minigame was perhaps the weakest point of the game, but even it was still fine. It felt a bit frustrating (even if it really wasn't that hard overall IMO). I think that was because it was hard to focus on the dots as they started to move towards the key icons, maybe? Like it was really hard to focus on so many things so far apart, compared to the traditional "Icons approach you on a straight line" mechanic from rhythm games.
Really liked it, overall superb!
Fun, feel like this could be a really good puzzle game idea even without the ice mechanics. The puzzle part suffers a bit from having to fight against the cultists sliding all over the place :sweat_smile:
Great idea, wonderful execution. Pretty mind boggling that you achieved this level of polish in a jam, the game feels complete, even if it's pretty quick to go through all the genres and try them out.
Fun premise, felt like it could be a really solid base for a more complex puzzle game. D&D was a great fit here, but could also have stuff like a corporate chapter where you juggle useless meetings etc.
The graphics really fit the vibe well, just like the music and overall ambiance. Short and sweet, and rather simple, but a great idea with great potential!
Sorta like a satanic Overcooked :smiling_imp: A great idea, well executed. And incredibly frustrating - in a good way - when you're trying to herd goats and chickens into the circle at the same time :smile:
Liked the overall vibe, I think the concept is solid. Could maybe a bit more interactive? Now it felt like just clicking on something and then waiting for the last second to click it again. Maybe if the devil management was a bit more involved or you had to deduce which devil would be good for the job, instead of just selecting based on the color?
Anyway, I think this is very solid for a weekend's work. It even looks and feels like a complete, polished game! And big props for disclosing the AI art use
@pringlae Now that you say that, yeah I'm pretty sure you're right - lots of text is probably not a great way to get many reviews for a jam game :sweat_smile:
Didn't have problems with the UI like some others here (MacOS, Firefox, 4K screen), but I wasn't able to complete a summoning (went to the "old" lady, selected ingredients, animations play out until one mushroom, bucket and carrot are placed. Then it's stuck and nothing happens, no matter what I do.
Really cute idea and graphics! The idea of hearing a villager's woes and then having to guess what they need is fun. I was confused when I suddenly wasn't able to pick up ingredients anymore, took me a while to realize that the inventory is capped to eight items(?). It was also sometimes hard to distinguish between items you can pick up other stuff in the game world. From what I was able to see on my testing, the humor worked and the vibes were great!
@kroltan Thanks for the feedback!
Totally agree with you, the end result ended up being pretty much a basic side scrolling shooter, you just get to decide where you shoot from basically. It's not super apparent, but the summons actually disappear after a while, both to make long range spamming less viable and to make it a bit harder to accidentally kill yourself with rats running around.
I did consider requiring line of sight, perhaps combined with a max distance, but decided against it. Exactly for the reason you mentioned, couldn't think of ways to efficiently and understandably communicate it to the player so I decided to leave it. My "vision" of a more complete version would definitely have that, as not having it would pre-empt a lot of threats and make cheesing encounters even easier. And there's some puzzle potential in limiting summons a tad.
@gamesplusjames @ziggy Thanks!
@quadape Oh right, the flying ones always need one hit and the horned enemies need two. Except in the boss fight, there they also need only one - I thought that the fight would be way too chaotic and hard if you had to hit them twice there as well. Felt really intuitive to me, didn't realize it might be confusing - but I guess that's just me being blind to my own ideas :sweat_smile: Thanks for the feedback!
Wooooow, so pretty. Not good at button mashing usually, but the juicy visuals kept me going
Fun and bold idea to do an Idle Clicker :smile: The graphics are fun, now I kinda want a proper demonic idle game
Like others here have said, the randomness makes building a bit frustrating. The UX of rotating the camera and spawning the blocks etc. feels nice and works well though!
Wonderful, great, awesome, cute. Suddenly noticed that I was playing it for the fifth time, trying to optimize those combos
Fun and pretty, theme match is quite a reach though :wink:
Don't have a Windows machine so I can't play it right now, but just wanted to pop in to say that the graphics looks really good and fun!
Really fun, it has some old school point & click charm with the dialog and light puzzles. And the graphics are super cute!
So cure! I'm still not quite sure what I was doing, kinda randomly hiring new bugs each day :sweat_smile: Speaking of bugs, the game crashed somewhere around day 8 randomly when fast forwarding. Didn't think to get more details on that, sorry!
Great fun, perfectly silly concept. Aiming with a mouse (admittedly, I was using a trackpad) was sometimes a bit clunky, but it didn't hurt that much
Simple and fun. Plays really well. The hand drawn graphics are super cute! There's some kind of an issue going on with the background color on my machine though (MacOS, Firefox), but it didn't hurt the fun too much Screenshot 2024-10-10 at 0.55.27.png
Fun! Got a bit hectic at times, but there's a surprising amount of depth out of such a simple mechanic
@mogmi Thanks! And thanks for reminding me about the screenshots, will add more later :)
@sp1d3rb0y Thanks, I was wondering if the effort put into those end screens was worth it :sweat_smile:
@detectivedirk Thanks! Yeah, I kinda thought that the chaos of the controls was almost more of a positive than a negative. Makes it feel like what I imagine actual herding must be like.
(PS. the "sheep stick to ceilings" ~~bug~~ feature was a last minute fix to the sheep clipping through ceilings - I'd rather have spider sheep running on ceilings than ghost sheep going through solid walls)
@vittima Thanks, it's my favorite too!
Haha, that was fun. My "Fresh off the jam" brains weren't able to go super far, but it was really entertaining and the hand drawn graphics were really charming
That was fun. The silly scribble graphics worked so well for this and it fit the theme very well. There was this "old school Flash game" like vibe, in a good way
Really charming graphics and sounds, with a bit more depth (like upgrade paths and stuff) I could see myself sinking some hours into this!
Fun! Took me a while to get a grasp of what all the buttons etc do, but pretty straightforward after you've clicked around for a bit
I was about to say "wow, this is a bit boring" after playing the couple first levels but then it suddenly got wild :smile: Very nice and surprising! I think I solved a few late game puzzles by just happening to mash space at just the right moments by luck, but the puzzles were really well designed!
Really fun and simple! My only annoyance was that sometimes the TVs were so distracting that trying to get the whole 13 duckling train going was really frustrating, but I guess that was kind of the point :sweat_smile:
Finished in 4:18, with 13 deaths. I think the controls were reasonably tight and the idea of having to activate the torches to clear hazards was smart. Some jumps felt unfairly tight, but they would've been perfectly fine if they just had a few more pixels of leeway.
Fun! Really great idea, I'm really impressed by the fact that you managed to implement it so well so fast. Pretty tough, but not too bad. By the way, it looked like the game may have just frozen at the end of the load (the web version), but it did eventually start up. So if anyone else is having the same issue, just stick it out - it's worth it
The vibes and weird vaporwave aesthetics were so fun, made the otherwise very dry concept of clicking on big words into a fun little game.
Also big props for being so dilligent in listing where you got the assets, and what you used to create the game. It's a shame that we can't rank the game's graphics
Liked it! I don't completely agree with some of the others that it could've been expanded on, I think game jam games excel exactly when they don't have too many mechanics. And I think this has a pretty good balance in that regard, the only thing missing IMHO is a difficulty curve
Joining the choir, the art is amazing. Especially the character design of the two enemies, that is not getting nearly enough praise here! As a game it's obviously pretty shallow, but as a small piece of narrative art it is spectacular. I liked all the different options on what to do, even though uncovering weak spots was clearly the only correct choice to make :wink:
Very impressive. Really liked the visuals obviously, but it's honestly mind boggling how y'all managed to get so much stuff and variety into the game in such a short time! The selection in weapons and the different and distinct enemies really make the game stand out from most game jam entries
Nice! I think you really struck a good balance between the amount of content and game polish. Didn't feel too hard to me, beat it on the first attempt (but lost on my second go, though). The boss's animations were really smooth! And it's always nice to see games made with smaller engines like Löve (and I'm saying this as a Unity user who cannot stand writing anything in Lua :smile:)
@magnesiumninja Thanks! Yeah, even I myself couldn't consistently get to the end every time :sweat_smile: The game is quite short, an efficient run through takes less than two minutes, so the one hit kills and some very slight randomization (the pieces of the singular level are shuffled on death) are there to give it a bit more meat on the bones
@dylan-shumway @greenradiation Thanks! I agree with both of you, plain jumping doesn't feel very good. It's pretty floaty and lacks some usual platformer features (like the "hold jump to jump higher" stuff and coyote time), making good jump physics that feel nice is pretty damn hard :sweat_smile:
@clymm Thanks! I have to admit that I spent way too much time on the animations, so nice to hear that you liked them
@wuppos Yeah I don’t think the jump feel is that big of an issue in the end - you shouldn’t be spending much time airborne without floating or diving anyway :wink:
I had much bigger plans for the randomness that I didn’t have time to really flesh out, but it turned out well anyway as it did indeed make the level much more pleasant to repeat and retry, even if it just ~6 short segments that are arranged in slightly different orders.
Thanks for the feedback! I’m afraid that I can’t really give in depth tips on making simple graphics look charming, I’ve always done them mostly on vibes. For this one, I made the animations with a stick figure first and then fleshed it out until it looked somewhat natural. And for the hover & dive animations I positioned the umbrella first for each frame, since that’s the important part of the motion. In general I just tried to use as few colors as possible and slap outlines on everything to make them stand out.
@margo @anderson-job-loeffler Thanks!
@toilari Yeah I agree that checkpoints would be pretty important if it was longer. As it is, checkpoints - and especially some kind of HP system - would've IMHO made the game way too trivial to beat, but it's a hard balance to strike. My past LD entries have been way too easy, so this time I prioritized challenge a bit more. Thanks for the feedback!
@mayrakissa Heh, seems like that's a divisive topic then :sweat_smile: I wanted to keep the players at least a bit on their toes when they retry the singular, short level, but I do get your point. I'd personally find retrying the exact same level again and again from the start to be more frustrating, but the best option would obviously be to either go all-in on the procedural generation or do traditional levels with checkpoints and stuff. Thanks for the review!
Fun! Took me a while to get the hang of it, with the upgrades and stuff. I kept wondering how I'm supposed to get deeper into the cave when I'm constantly running out of oxygen and dying :smile: But it was fun once I understood the potions and stuff. Dodging the enemy "bullets" was pretty hard when the laser effect is so big and in the front of everything, so you can't see them while shooting.
Just as a tip, since you said this was your first Ludum Dare - it's usually better to have fewer, more polished mechanics rather than many. It's tempting to add more stuff, but having a simple and really tight gameplay loop is much easier to do well in a weekend
Pretty hard to get started, I think I did two full attempts without thinking of a single good sentence :sweat_smile: Fun when I got a grasp of it. A really smart idea, with more varied words and sentences it could be a really fun word game! Right now it felt like there were too few good matches, and most were the same "did I" to "I did" swap. It works impressively nicely with the dragging and stuff, really polished!
Fun little defense game. Very pretty. If there's a strategy beyond "Spam as many of your most powerful unit as you can", I did not get it - But it's not a bad thing, deeper strategy elements would probably be pretty much impossible to do in a game jam :smile:
A fun way to make a small game out of the swinging mechanic. I agree with the others that the walking speed could be quite a bit faster. Another, maybe smaller thing, would be that the highlighting of the "targeted" hook could be more apparent - maybe some kind of targeting icon? As it is, I found it a bit hard sometimes to know when a hook is in range.
Great, fun, cute. Probably the first game I've played this jam where I can confidently give a "Humor" score at all :sweat_smile: I like that it's very focused on one mechanic and does it well. The only improvement I can think of is that it would've been great to have mouse controls for the aiming & jumping
I was getting really frustrated with the slow acceleration and light turning, until I got through the first level and saw that both can be upgraded :sweat_smile: Fun little game! I found trying to avoid the fish a tad too challening, with the water physics and all. Maybe being able to slow or scare them with the light would've been a nice way to combat that?
I really like the vibes and the idea. I couldn't get very far though, I ended up constantly running out of ammo and never being able to find where the shipwrecks were. With a bit more ammo and more indication of where to go, I think this would be a quite enjoyable little game. The atmosphere reminded me a bit of some kind of a retro version of Dregde
The idea is great and fits the theme really well. I have to admit, I kinda gave up once I realized that I'll never be able to backtrack to the starting shaft :sweat_smile: Other than the arrow you added to the post-jam build, I think there's a couple of ways to turn that annoyance into a fun little addition to the gameplay loop:
* Either make it so that the environment can be destroyed (which means that the player can dig their way back to the shaft) or * Make it so that the caverns will eventually cross back over to the center, where the drill will go through at some point
The game played well and was scoped perfectly in my opinion, that's my only complaint
Fun little game and the graphics are gorgeous. Took me a while to realize what path to take in order to get to the correct finish. The controls felt nice, the only real improvement I can think of is that it would've been nice to see further down, the camera's positioning made aiming needlessly hard.
I don't have a Windows PC and the WebGL build is apparently broken (?) so I can't play this, but just a tip if you want to receive reviews: Add some screenshots and stuff to the page here, people will be more likely to download it and give it a go
Fun little game. In my honest opinion, it could've been better if you focused more on the almost schmup-like dodging & collecting rather recognizing the fake fish's obscure movement patterns, but I think the fake fish idea was smart anyway. It's still surprisingly chill, in a good way of course!
Really pretty and a great idea. I really didn't get a hang of it though, the contrast between the background and the bullets is so low that I couldn't make them out and moving with a mouse is hard. Maybe I'll come back to it when my brains are not freshly fried out by the jam
Don't have access to a Windows PC right now, but just swinging by to say that the graphics remind me of those old free/shareware games in the best possible way!
The art style and simple sound effects remind me of old DOS games, in the best way. Immaculate vibes. Like the others said, some challenge would've been a great addition, but as it is it is still a great for a first jam entry!
I'm probably just not very good at the game, but being able to only shoot left and right made it way too difficult for me personally. Shooting in all four directions would probably make it too easy on the other hand, so maybe this is better and it's just a skill issue on my end. I liked the graphics and overall vibes of the game, it's simple enough to work really well as jam entry but also varied enough to keep you interested!
Surprisingly comfy, I was almost a bit scared at first but I found it really easy to pick up and get going. Feels like a really good foundation for a deeper/longer idle sort of game. Would maybe work nicely on a touch screen? Also, points for using Typescript for this, that must've been a really satisfying tech choice for this!
At first, I was confused about how exactly this fits the theme. Then I threw the first gym bro into the lunar orbit and it all clicked. Great idea, very solid execution! It could've even had more content and I would have kept on playing for quite some time
The vibes are just perfect. The music and graphics have this ephemeral feeling to them, and everything down to the color choices works so well together. Felt like an indie game from back when the indie boom was just starting.
Oh and the gameplay was also fun, and this was definitely one of the strongest lighthouse-themed submissions I've played. I'm just easily distracted by the aesthethics of it all :sweat_smile:
Took me five tries to avoid thermonuclear annihilation and achieve tepid peace. I'm not sure if I can ever go back to playing Civ without them adding in this hand shaking mechanic to them. Learning how to shake and read the other guy felt natural, I'm sure I would've achieved peace way sooner if I didn't try to play this with a trackpad and mouse acceleration turned on. The graphics and sounds felt like a perfect fit for the vibe.
Fun, cute graphics! I'm not sure if I missed something about the controls and wall jumping, but actually reaching the beacon at the end was really hard with how the wall jump is made to prevent just endless climbing. Other than that, the controls felt nice and the time limit was nicely balanced.
This could be a fun little edutainment sort of game. As it is, way too hard if you don't know semaphores already or don't pull up the meanings on another window. I believe having the alphabet visible while playing would not even make the game too easy, you'd still need to check them pretty fast and memorize the letters. Maybe there could then be a hard mode with the alphabet hidden? But it fits the theme well, the graphics are pretty and the music is fun and fitting.
That must be the biggest team I've ever seen in a jam :sweat_smile: I really liked the vibes! I'm personally not good at games where I need to juggle many things at once like this, so I honestly couldn't get past the second level, but that's purely a skill issue. The game has a ridiculous amount of polish when it comes to all the dialog and "voice acting". I hope this Nestori has his own ringed seal companion that's revealed at some point of the game :wink:
I have no sense of rhythm, so I wasn't able to get very far into the game. But I did play enough to know that it's great, the visuals and sounds were superb and the vibes overall fit together well. I wish I had the skill to complete the game, but I just stumble way too much when I have to do something strictly to a rhythm while actually thinking of what I'm doing :smile:
I'm not enough of a puzzle game fan to know if this is a novel mechanic, but it was really ingenious and easy to pick up! The simple cartoon graphics fit it really well. I had to give up at this level, I'm not good at this type of puzzles :sweat_smile: It would've actually been a nice addition if the game displayed the level number when you are playing, to make it easier to compare how far you got
Screenshot 2026-04-21 at 15.17.37.png
I'm probably just not an RTS person, or I did not understand something, but I really just kept getting nuked in under a minute :sweat_smile: But I can still tell that the idea is great, and twisting the usual RTS tropes like this is fun. And the visuals and overall vibes are great!
@pocketdog Thanks! It was a struggle to keep the car so simple, the urge to make it more detailed was strong. But having 16 separate sprites (one for each direction) was a pretty good deterrent there
@thomas-olsson Aww, that's so sweet, thanks! Nice to hear that all the time spent honing those animations paid off and brought joy to you
@rynti Thanks! I was worried that the concept would be tough to really onboard in such a short game, nice to hear that you found it easy to grasp. And yeah, I totally get what you mean with the annoying sounds. I didn't really pay sound effects that much attention until very late, so I basically had to decide between potentially annoying lofi and having no sound at all, so doing it like this felt like an easy choice. But I didn't have time to find a nice looping background music, or even a looping car engine sound, so now there's no background audio at all. Nice to hear that you liked it, even if the audio is a bit grating :wink:
@divarium @juanrod707 @viktor-kovachev Thanks!
@dywanix @raivk Yeah, creating satisfying and intuitive driving controls and physics is a pretty daunting task for a jam, especially top-down :sweat_smile: Even just deciding whether I want the camera to rotate with the car or not, and whether the controls steer the car left/right or you point to the direction you want to go. But as long as the player gets used to it, all is well in my books.
@snk Yeah balancing the bombs wasn't easy, it took even me myself quite a bit of practice until I could consistently beat the game on every try.
@soothsayer @dylan-shumway Thanks for the feedback! Yeah the sounds are clearly not conveying the vibe I though they would, that has been noted :smile:
@venomousmouse Thanks! Probably your browser acting weirdly, it would be a really weird bug to have. But nice that it sorted itself out like that!
@pipetto I totally get that! I personally don't like that sort of control scheme for a top-down game, but each to their own
@not-d00mka You don't have to rate the game on that category if you don't think there's enough to rate it on that, I think it's more valuable to keep all he applicable categories and only opt-out of ones where pre-made assets were used :wink: And yeah I agree that these tank controls are the best fit here, as I wanted to keep the camera oriented the same way as the map and not rotate either one of them, and having car controls based on cardinal directions would be really clumsy on a keyboard. Every opetion has its own benefits and drawbacks, and I do still think this was the best fit here. It's a matter opininion in the end, really.
Looks really charming and I want to try it, but there's this big black box blocking a part of the screen and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do :sweat_smile:
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@crygos Sorry, should have mentioned that straight away! MacOS, Firefox. But I tried again on Chrome, and that works fine! Really fun and inventive, and the vibes are perfect. I lack the rhythm and coordination to be good at it, but it is the comfiest rhythm game I remember ever playing.
Really fun idea! The goal could be described a bit better on the page here, took me quite a bit of time to realize that you are supposed to just guide the boats out of the screen - I was desperately trying to manouver them around the island at the bottom, not realizing that there's no need to do that
Looks really cool, the idea seems fun. I usually don't download any games and stick to playing HTML5 uploads, so I can't really rate this, but I'll still say that it is interesting and it's a shame the unicode characters broke. Makes the aliens a bit more immersive though, when you only see those blocks when they speak :smile: A pro tip, since this seems to be the first Ludum Dare for both of you - always try your build early on and make sure everything works and looks fine. Although I guess you'll probably remember that the next time
I definitely do not have fast enough reaction time to beat level 3 :sweat_smile: I loved the graphics, reminded me of old Flash games (in a good way!). Felt like something you may have found Newgrounds back in the day.
I think the description here is a bit too detailed, having so much information about the game hurts the charm a bit. Knowing how things work is nice to some extent, but here it takes away much of the surprise. It also feels a bit clinical, perhaps it was written or assisted by AI? But that obviously doesn't matter in terms of the game itself, it just spoils it a bit.
Oh and I'm convinced the text-to-speech sound of the "fork" spell was definitely not "fork" :smile:
It's cute! The graphics kinda remind me of old DOS games, like SkiFree. Took me a moment to grasp how to make the squirrels happy, I suggest you add a bit of a guide on your page here so players know what to do and the more impatient players don't just give up :)
Fun idea, nice execution, waaaaay too hard for me to actually progress :sweat_smile:
Fun idea with potential for some fun and inventive puzzle gameplay, but rather trivial as it is (I played until level 6). With more elements on the map, like buildings that either boost or harm signal, there would be material for a lot of different puzzles.
Fun. The graphics were really nice, they had a consistent style that fit the vibe of the game really well. My only complaints would be that the music was a bit grating to me (but I do get the vibe you were going for), and the enemy hitboxes could've been a bit bigger. Overall I like the idea and the execution though!
The game has a nice amount of polish where it matters the most, like shooting the zombies felt surprisingly satisfying with the screen shake etc. And the signal finding mechanic worked really well, having the scrambled text in there was a nice touch!
Fun idea. It would've benefited a lot from having sounds. Obviously voice acting is going to be out of scope for a jam, but being able to notice the car overheating from an audio cue as well as the eyes and text would've been great. Also, maybe a bit of a nitpick, having support for WASD & E in addition to arrows & enter would've been great, using arrows with you left hand and a mouse with your right hand is a bit awkward.