Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → mahalis
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Lock | compo | 71 | 3.75 | 3.62 | 3.93 | 3.54 | 3.89 | 3.60 | 3.70 | |||
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | Lepidopterology Extreme | compo | 172 | 3.02 | 2.90 | 2.80 | 4.05 | 3.30 | 2.54 | 2.31 | 2.97 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Fit | compo | 159 | 3.61 | 3.44 | 3.16 | 3.44 | 4.41 | 3.37 | 3.45 | |||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Last Harvest | compo | 198 | 3.35 | 3.30 | 3.35 | 3.95 | 4.02 | 3.08 | 3.57 | |||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Inks | compo | 304 | 3.62 | 3.48 | 3.23 | 2.92 | 4.35 | 3.39 | 3.86 | |||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Around | compo | 292 | 3.46 | 3.22 | 3.22 | 4.00 | 3.82 | 2.90 | 3.00 | 2.90 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Age of Aquaria | compo | 254 | 3.72 | 3.62 | 3.56 | 3.85 | 4.33 | 2.87 | 3.24 | 3.53 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Skeleton Quest | compo | 117 | 3.70 | 3.64 | 3.61 | 3.93 | 3.66 | 3.80 | 3.70 | |||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Robin | compo | 3.28 | 3.14 | 2.91 | 3.21 | 3.85 | 2.58 | |||||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Superstar | compo | 312 | 3.25 | 3.13 | 3.56 | 3.72 | 4.17 | 2.83 | 2.96 | |||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Ping | compo | 148 | 3.72 | 3.42 | 3.02 | 3.50 | 4.05 | 3.31 | 3.55 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Typistry | compo | 374 | 3.33 | 3.23 | 3.53 | 3.93 | 3.60 | 2.62 | 2.85 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Duck Guardian | compo | 55 | 3.95 | 3.85 | 3.74 | 4.21 | 4.46 | 4.04 | 4.09 | 4.01 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Shutdown | compo | 108 | 3.73 | 3.20 | 3.13 | 3.75 | 4.12 | 3.26 | 3.52 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Surface Tension | compo | 233 | 3.40 | 3.09 | 3.50 | 3.63 | 4.31 | 2.36 | ||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Neko Katadzukeru | compo | 22 | 4.07 | 4.00 | 4.23 | 4.37 | 4.40 | 4.11 | 4.16 | 4.10 | 46 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Sprout | compo | 61 | 3.94 | 3.65 | 3.16 | 4.45 | 3.94 | 3.68 | 3.83 | 59 | ||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Tentacle Blockade | compo | 151 | 3.63 | 3.30 | 3.67 | 4.17 | 4.03 | 3.55 | 3.22 | 3.60 | 57 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Wanda | compo | 233 | 3.54 | 3.77 | 3.57 | 3.71 | 3.24 | 2.79 | 3.31 | 3.06 | 69 |
I can't walk at all - the only way I can move is by holding down a direction and Space, and even then the jumps only sometimes move me sideways. I got to the first "I", read the haiku, and eventually got over to the second "I", but hitting E there does nothing and it's not prompting me to do anything else. I'm pretty much stuck. :(
Chrome labels the download for this "malicious" and blocks it. Um?
Neat idea! I got stuck pretty early on (couldn't figure out what to do with the pink thing), but what I was able to get through was clever.
Fantastic. Great art and great writing - I really enjoyed the back-and-forth between the characters. Nice work!
It’s amazing how much fun this is for how simple it looks. Feels like a really good classic arcade game. The click-farther-away-to-go-faster mechanic is clever—adds a bit of depth to it. I agree with the other commenters: this would be fun on a touch screen. If you spent some more time on the graphics and sound this could do very well on the App Store :)
Love the music and the weapon progression, as well as the beaver's running animation. Bit repetitive after a while, but definitely fun.
Fun! I liked the blobby enemy designs - reminds me of some game I played way back in the mists of time. The demolition mechanic is pretty cool too.
Interesting idea, but as a couple of others have said, the randomized levels mean you only ever get one try at a given configuration. It'd be more fun if it kept the blocks you had in the layout you had them and let you rearrange them to try to get it right.
Neat! I like the art style and the particle effects. The movement feels like it could use some tuning, though - I had a really hard time not falling off things.
Amazing art and good music, but the gameplay is pretty rough. It's almost impossible to get out of the way of the red glowy things.
Fun! Tougher than it looks. Some of the sounds were better than others—the level start sound got on my nerves after a while and the “you won” sound is kind of harsh, but the “you failed” sound and the note progression as you build up a correct chain were much better. Nicely done.
This is fantastic and I will never be a doctor
Fantastic art. Loved the writing, especially "magic doesn't work on problems". Nicely done.
This was a a lot of fun and I really liked the art style (though the hamburgers were kind of incongruous). One thing I'd've liked to see would be more variety in the types of obstacles... maybe something you had to jump to avoid? Regardless, nice work!
Fantastic! Loved the idea from the get-go. Music and art are stellar. Movement’s a little fiddly, especially trying to get onto the narrow stairs. Very well done.
Pleasant. The movement feels a bit heavy, considering I'm just a light. I like the invisible things scattered around the scene. Might've been interesting for touching the orange light to make it shrink a little and then grow back over time - if you had to subsist off it without putting it out entirely there'd be a cool balancing act here.
Pretty solid! It would be interesting to be able to shift the ball across your “paddle” instead of having to try to ricochet it. Graphics could use some love, but they get the point across.
Looks really nice, but I'd've liked to see something in the gameplay that differed from regular pinball.
Those are really nice-looking spaceships. The movement controls are nifty too - kind of tricky, but novel for sure.
I... can't really tell what I'm supposed to do here. I got the fire? but can't seem to do anything with it.
Beautiful artwork, good sound, and a really clever interpretation of the theme. Well done!
Fun; could use some more complicated mechanics, though. It was pretty easy to get the red dots stuck on walls - some more randomness to their movement would help there.
The shape-matching thing is an interesting idea, but in practice the enemies move too fast to be able to chase them down before the next change. Not bad at all for a first game jam, though - keep it up!
Love the graphics—surprised you’re not asking to be judged on those, it’d be an immediate five-star. Gameplay is fun if a little slow. Good audio as well, very spacey.
Clever take on the theme. Really liked the glowy visuals. The edge-of-the-screen triggers felt a little too harsh, but not insurmountably so. Nice music too.
Phenomenally atmospheric—loved the art, especially the strange silhouettes. Couldn’t really tell when I was hitting anything, though, which made timing attacks pretty frustrating. Wish I had a Rift to try it out with, this seems like it’d be wonderfully creepy in VR.
Fantastic. Great interpretation of the theme, clever gameplay, nice art style as well. The difficulty could use some tuning—I think more of my brood died from being eaten by their milling siblings than by anything I could have done something about (hunger, bomb-people [who were a nice touch, by the way], etc.)—but overall this is a really, really well-done game.
Fun! Clever mechanic, nicely implemented. Difficulty seems a little off—I ended up losing a lot of health really quickly with no apparent means to defend myself—but the basic idea is very solid.
Great graphics, cute music and sounds… I found it kinda punishingly difficult, but playing it enough I could probably get the hang of it. Nice job!
Nice riff on the theme and I like the art style - reminds me of old point-and-click adventure games. Would be cool to see some more challenging levels where you have to use multiple different abilities. Really solid compo entry, though - good job!
This is really well done! The mechanic is simple but it works great, and there are a couple of really nice touches of visual polish like the airplane trails and squished-people effects. Lots of fun to mess around with, and room for strategy too. Great job!
Really cool idea! I couldn't come up with much, but I was impressed with what I saw in the gallery, even more so since those were user-created. It'd be interesting if there were a challenge mode where you had to figure out how to fill out a given silhouette.
Interesting start - the art is really impressive, and I like where the story (?) seemed to be going. Would definitely like to see more of this.
Fun idea, and I like the old-school art style, but it definitely needs some way to lose - I expected the concrete blocks to finish me off, but they just stopped me. As Chris says, it's a good start, just needs some more to the mechanics.
I like the art style and the premise, but the gameplay is kind of frustrating—I did find a gun part and thruster part, but once I got off the planet I couldn’t figure out what to do besides fly around. Solid start, though; I could see this being fun with some of the gameplay quirks ironed out.
Nice! Reminds me of the old Tycoon amusement-park-building games, with a little Nightmare Before Christmas thrown in. There seems to be a fine line between being not-"lame" and scaring my patrons to death, but with some tuning and maybe some more variety to the available scares, this could be a lot of fun.
Delightful. Reminds me of old-school third-person platformers. Great art style and music. Could use some more challenge—some kind of consequence if a scientist sees you out of your cage, maybe timed jumps (though I don’t know what those would be in a lab context)—but overall, excellent work.
Cute! I like the art style.
Cute! I'm not sure what the trick is to get them to not be scared of me (tried standing around and letting them come up to me, building a trail of berries back to the ship, etc.) but it was fun running around interacting with them anyway. And as everyone else has said, great sound effects. :)
Cute! Love the art style - as others have said, the objective was a little unclear, but it was fun to play with and the music gave it a nice upbeat sort of mood.
Thanks! I agree about the variety—had an idea for a special boat that would leave burning cargo behind to damage other boats, which could have been fun, but sadly I ran out of time. Your mention of the difficulty curve made me realize that it was actually inverted: the time between boats was getting longer instead of shorter. Math is hard, apparently :)
Clever and well-written. I deliberately fell off the platform partway through the training to see what would happen - was not disappointed. :)
Great entry! Impressive artwork and solid gameplay—I led the mob on a lengthy chase before getting stuck in some trees and dying. Intriguing end screens.
Cute art and the idea of only being able to grow in the light is kind of cool - I was confused for a while as to why I wasn't able to grow yet before realizing there was a threshold. I thought I heard a shift in the music right before I was successfully able to grow, which (if it was intentional) was a nice touch... might have just been my imagination, though. Still, not bad!
Nifty idea, and I really like the wall-revealing / monster-stuff-glowing visual effects, but there’s not much challenge to it—could really use a time-limit constraint or something.
Creepy! Really enjoyed the atmosphere and the subtly "off" things, like the number of people changing in the picture on the wall. Nice use of the simple art style too.
Pretty cool—procedural levels are tricky and yours work pretty well, though there were a couple of places I ran into doors that didn’t have a corresponding opening in the wall. Nice character art style, too.
Well done! Not at all what I was expecting. Really good art, especially for a compo entry.
This is great! Loved the writing. It seemed like some of the “you don’t have enough resources for X” screens also consumed a day, which didn’t seem right, but if I’d kept better track of which things needed what resource it wouldn’t have been an issue. Nice job!
Fun! I liked the mechanic—difficulty curve was a little punishing (I got to the "grow stronger" phase and then immediately died after jumping on someone) but it was fun. Nice job on the movement system and music too.
Cool! Impressive modeling and level design given the time constraint, and the main sneak-around-and-claw-people mechanic was a lot of fun. The post-processing effect was kind of odd, but it worked with the visual style. Nice job!
This is fantastic! Adorable graphics, great animation, cute music. Great work.
Oh, this is cool. Reminds me a bit of the way people could communicate in Journey, only more prison-y and pixel-ier. I'm glad I was at least able to take one of the guards down with me.
Nifty. Getting a working parkour movement system up and running in 48 hours is seriously impressive - I had some trouble getting used to the controls, but they worked pretty well when I was doing it right. One thing that might make it feel a bit better is some texture (or pattern, or whatever) - without any points of reference, it was a bit hard to gauge your actual movement when you were looking along or at a wall. Still, nice work!
Very cool. Love the sinuous patterns the tree makes. I couldn't quite get the hang of steering it, though - it felt like sometimes it would turn almost immediately and sometimes it would doggedly stay pointed in the same direction. Still, nice work!
Nice work - it does feel like a stripped-down version of a classic bullet hell. Figuring out the various movement patterns is satisfying, but the random-spew segments feel pretty unfair - I couldn't figure out what to do there to avoid knocking half a dozen dots back at the center. Still, good concept and well executed.
Peaceful. Lovely scenery - I particularly liked the subtle drifting particles overhead.
Clever - there's more to this than appears at first glance. It would be cool if the appearance of the land were more clearly linked to its quality / "green" level. Good music.
Interesting! I love the way your body is actually built out of the stuff you collect, and that disabling enemies involves shooting out their... well, important bits. The physics are kind of wonky, but it feels like there's a lot of potential here - I'd love to see this idea taken further.
Cute! I like the art style ("CAR", the spotted road, the stars when you manage a trick...) and the sound effects. Kinda tricky to get anywhere with only forward and right, but I guess that's part of the challenge. Nice.
Fun! Felt almost peaceful, despite the whole barreling-down-a-mountain thing. Nice art style, and good work on the terrain generation - the way bits of it visibly rose up in front of me gave it a cool, kind of dreamlike style. Well done.
Cool mechanic, and I like the backstory you provided (aww, Gary...); physics were a little wonky here and there, but the levels were fun to figure out. Nice work!
Wow - this is incredibly well-polished. Fun concept, simple-but-challenging gameplay, slick animation, great sound. Amazing work.
Cute! Love the art. Surprisingly challenging gameplay, too. I don't think I've ever more determinedly tried to outrun a seal. :)
Fun! Liked the graphics and the level design; would have loved to see more puzzles.
Superb art, and gameplay-wise it's an interesting take on the runner genre, but -man- is it hard. Trying to line myself up for the next chime is next to impossible. Made it to the third roof, but no further than that. I'd love to see a version of this with more standard controls - it's got a really charming look to it.
Cute - I like the art style and the rotating-the-world mechanic is nifty. Could use a little more complexity, but it's fun as-is.
Cool! Elegant, simple idea. The power-ups add a nice degree of variety, though I haven't made it far enough to use most of 'em... :)
Cute! Simple concept, but the controls make it interestingly challenging. Well done.
Fun! As a couple of others said, I really like the no-game-over restart mechanic. Cool art too; the animation of the flowers opening looks great.
Clever! I got stuck pretty early, I'm afraid, but I really like the way it uses the two-button controls to force you to plan your route carefully.
The sucker fish are a cool twist on the Flappy Bird formula - it kinda didn't feel like I had a way to avoid them between dodging columns, but I guess that was part of the challenge. Well done.
Cute art and the gameplay definitely has potential - the one thing that'd really help would be some more background content (clouds maybe?) so you could tell which way you're actually moving. Still, nice work; great first entry!
Fantastic! Love the concept and the execution. The elevator physics can be a bit wonky - it might be better for them to stop and reverse if they'd get stuck on a robot, rather than just letting it break through - but other than that this is outstanding. Looking forward to playing through more of it.
This is excellent. Great puzzle design, and while the graphics are simple they seem really polished as well. Nice work!
This is fun - some really good ideas in here. The controls were a bit tricky, but that added to the challenge. Nice artwork, especially the ship designs.
Cool! Took me a few tries to figure out a strategy, but it ended up being a lot of fun. Liked the CRT-y blur effect - livened up the graphics nicely.
This is great! It is a simple concept, but the execution is really good - the work you put into the transformation animations in particular really shows. Nice job!
Nifty! Haven't seen many mobile-web games in LDs past, and this one works well. Particularly liked the papercraft art style.
Wow, this is really cool. Super unusual mechanic, good puzzle design, great pixel art, and solid music as well - I can't think of the last puzzle-platformer I played that felt this meditative. Great job!
Interesting! Definitely fun to watch. Would have been cool to have the particles moving around more, maybe with some kind of flocking sim. Hope you keep working on it - this could turn into a really neat art piece.
This is bizarre and wonderful. Great art, fun mix of gameplay elements. "GREATNESS IS A DAILY CHOICE" made me crack up. Love it. Great job!
Benjamin, you might have a different LÖVE version—this was built with 0.9.2, and I think that API is different in either 0.8.x or 0.10.x.
Just updated it, and added instructions for Linux—should now work with 0.10.x as well. Thanks for spotting that!
Great job! Pretty simple concept but incredibly well-executed. Really enjoyed the music too.
This is cool! Really like the art style, and the sword gameplay's fun. I didn't end up using the shadow state much - felt a little hard to control - but even without that this was a fun challenge.
This is great! Love the graphics (especially the faces on the players) and the music. Simple mechanic, works really well. Nice job!
Nice! This is more challenging than it looks. The coloration thing SgtBursk mentioned was a good choice - it threw me off and made it much harder to get by on reflex. The particles were a nice touch too.
Cool! This is a lot of fun - simple concept but it gets challenging really quickly. Having different sound cues for the different alien ships was a nice touch. Good art as well. Great job.
This is really clever! I was kind of confused about the mechanics at first, but once I figured out what I was supposed to do the puzzles were a really fun challenge. Enjoyed the interstitial story bits, though a way to make the text appear faster would've been nice. Great art, too. Nice work!
Really cool concept, and nice graphics so far - looking forward to seeing it more fleshed out.
Nice job. Could maybe have used some more balance / tuning work - as Foxtacy said, the delay between shots was kind of long even in "power" mode - but the core idea is solid. Great graphics work; I liked the menu transition animation (the wedges-disappearing thing) and the shapeshifting effect as well.
This is really nicely put together. Love the art - the gameplay is a little repetitive, but it doesn't wear out its welcome. Great attention to detail too; I liked Charon and the other particles circling around Pluto.
Love the theme and the art style. More challenging than it looks. Nice work!
Fun! Nice job on the procedural level generation - works really well. The art's good, particularly the gun model, and I liked the transformation animations on the enemies. Well done.
Fun little simulation. I only managed to get to 56 - I think I didn't build up enough food storage before trying to increase my colony size. The music is really pleasant. Great work.
This is incredibly clever—I’m amazed it’s possible to make comprehensible visuals and reasonably-tonal sound out of the same stream of data. Great work.
This is superb. Great visual style, clever gameplay, and the (I'm guessing homemade?) llama noises are delightful.
Clever! I love the premise, and while the visuals are kinda minimalist (understandably), the base color scheme is really appealing. You got a lot done in eight hours; nice work!
This is fun! I had to spend a while playing it to figure out the rules, before eventually settling on trying to turn the whole world into volcanoes. The graphics are well done too - the rough texture on the tiles really enhances the look of it. Great work.
@cottontshirtz: It’s effectively 2D—all of the movement and whatnot is on an x/y plane that wraps around on both edges. The first day or so of work was getting the math needed to map between that space and Unreal’s 3D coordinate system, but once that was in place it was pretty straightforward. Planning to write up more details on that in a postmortem sometime soon.
Great art style - I'd love to see more games with this hand-drawn look. Clever writing, too. Could use a bit more depth to the puzzles - I was trying to figure out how to combine the bucket, water, and tape in the first section, before discovering I could just use the tape - but it was fun nonetheless. Nice work!
Nice! Short, but well produced; I'm impressed y'all were able to model / texture / animate all of this in 72 hours. Could have used a little more varied gameplay - another type of enemy or a different weapon (projectile, maybe?), but it was fun.
This is fantastic. I love the clumsy physics—being a giant city-destroying robot has never felt so whimsical. Great work!
This is really well done! I like the hand-drawn art style and the music is great. It's challenging, but in a good way - I died a lot and it was entirely my fault :) Great work.
As Simon mentioned, the robot design and the lighting effects are particularly well done. I appreciated being able to sort of home in on the targets by watching for hints of each bulb's color. It could use a little more challenge; the power drains really slowly and if you can avoid the mines (which is pretty easy since they're arranged in grids) then you're not at much risk of running out. Nice work!
This is really well done! The mechanics are excellent - challenging but not impossible, and very satisfying when you can line up a bunch of enemies for one dash (not to brag but I managed to get two birds and a spike-turtle thing in one shot just now). The parachuting-in thing is a clever way to give you a few seconds to get the lay of the land. Nice work!
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I agree it could use some more gameplay variety—I think I focused a bit too much on visual polish. Wasn’t sure whether to add sounds for jumping / eating things / etc., since I thought it might clash with the music, but that probably would have been a good idea too. Next time!
The art in this is amazing - I love the detail and the sort of gritty / smoky pixel animation. Good music / sound too. It's pretty difficult, but I started to get the hang of it after a while. Nice work!
This is astonishingly pretty - the visuals and music are lovely and give this a sort of dreamlike contemplative mood. The mechanic's novel and challenging too; it seems straightforward at first but it gets tough keeping track of where you've been and where you're trying to go. Amazing work.
This is bizarre and delightful. My life has been genuinely enriched by participating in your candy war.
This is cool! The aesthetic is really eye-catching—great retro feel. Nice use of physics when the train gets blown up. It’s a little light on depth (unless there’re more types of crate to pick up? I didn’t live long enough to find out), but it’s fun managing the turret power against the incoming enemies. Nice work!
Nice! The platforming's a little unforgiving at times, but it's fun, and the art and music are well done too. Congrats on the first entry - looking forward to seeing more!
This is superb, especially for a first entry. The environment tiles look really good, the exploration feels varied enough to be interesting, and the collect-stuff-and-build-a-power-network strategy aspect is solid and engaging. Enjoyed the music too. Great work!
This is great! I agree it could use some more difficulty - it's a bit too generous with health/power - but this could be really cool with the pressure turned up. The art's excellent, the sound effects are satisfying (I really like the bass in the weapon sound), and there's enough variety in the enemies to keep things lively. Nice job!
This is really well done! I had a similar idea, though I was thinking more in the direction of trying to abdicate. Tried a couple of different trajectories and got to the same ending—guess my choices were consistent, huh? :)
This is clever! Great start on the idea; I'd love to play more of it. The graphics were what caught my eye at first - they're really well done, you have a great eye for color. The music's really catchy too. Great work!
Beautiful and meditative. Love the art style—the silhouetting works really well with the patches of luminescence. Pleasant music too, really fits the mood. Great work!
This is superb. I had the same issue Ashment and Dob did (I tried both the even and not-even numbers), but even just up to that point it was really cool. Great concept and great execution—having all the menu and instructional text in-world was a really nice touch. Bravo.
Simple but fun - the music and sound effects are really well done. Clever writing, too - I grinned at the "let's wolf" / "how to wolf" buttons on the menu screen. Nice work.
Superb graphics work - I love the lighting effects and the colorful particles. Clever use of the level design to present instructions in-world too. It's pretty unforgiving - having to avoid touching *any* wall got a little frustrating - but I think if I'd stuck with it a while longer I would have gotten the hang of it. Nice job!
Stunningly pretty art - nice work!
This is really well done! I'm impressed with how elaborate the level design is, particularly for a compo game. The lasers are a little unforgiving since you can't see yourself, but they're a challenge I kept coming back to. Pleasant music composition as well. Nice work.
This is great! The idea is simple, but the art and music are really charming - they make it sort of a peaceful, contemplative experience (though I was pretty alarmed when the HUGE owl-thing first showed up). Nice job!
I'm really glad I stumbled across this - it's a ton of fun. Good puzzle design, great music and art. Nice work!
This is a ton of fun! It's a great new take on a classic - the strategy is really engaging. Excellent art and music too. I'd love to keep playing this - y'all should port it to mobile!
Nice! This is really compelling - there's a fun interplay between the different characters you have and where to best position them on the battlefield. It could do with being a little faster - I spent a lot of time just watching characters and enemies trading shots. I like the cartoony art style and the color scheme. Great entry overall.
This is superb! I love the character designs, the frame story's clever, and the controls work really well (I can imagine how much fiddling it took to get those right). Fantastic work.
Thanks so much for the feedback, everybody! I totally should have fixed the duck-katamari thing, but oh well :-)
This is clever! The puzzles get tricky fast - I got stuck in level 6. Cute art and pleasant music too. Nice work!
This is weird and really clever - I don't think I've ever seen a movement mechanic like this before. The vaporwave look is pretty great too. Excellent work!
I like this! The gameplay is pretty simple, but trying to direct snowballs either to the center or at the kids is an interesting challenge. Good artwork too - the snow falling in the background is a nice touch. Nice work.
This is outstanding. Gameplay's smooth and intense - it felt like a ballet when I was doing well, and then I got totally overwhelmed around phase 7 and it became more of a frantic jig. Great visual effects; the pulses of color around things helped a lot with keeping track of what was going on. Some music to go with the visuals would have been a nice improvement, but honestly it works in silence too. One of the best games I've seen in this jam so far - great work!
This is fun, and the art's really charming. It would've been nice to have some way to recover health, but it works well as-is. Great job!
Whoa, this is fantastic! I love the art style, the sounds and music, the novel and challenging gameplay... absolutely top-notch. Great job!
This is fun! Great music and art, and the gameplay’s challenging (albeit a little unfair for some start scenarios, as others have mentioned); it was really satisfying to finally turn the tables on the vampire hunters. Nice job!
This is intense - really clever take on the theme. The transitions are well done too. Nice job!
Gameplay’s simple but challenging, and the visual presentation is really nice. It’s clever that the changing bar height makes them harder to click on the longer you leave them. Nicely done!
Great entry! I love the music - it's the perfect soundtrack for joyous holiday thievery. I couldn't figure out how to get my suspicion level to go down other than just waiting, so it got a little repetitive after a while - do dancing / flipping actually do anything? If I were a security guard, I'd definitely be less concerned about someone stealing stuff if they were doing cool moves in the aisles.
This is fantastic. Incredibly well put together - good level design and superb music. Great job!
Wow, the art is outstanding - I love the look of your character and of the buildings in the background, they make me think of carved rocks covered in bioluminescent algae. The gameplay is a little flat as others mentioned - being able to move in two dimensions rather than one might help, or a way of eating people beyond just running over them. Overall, though, nice work!
This is great! Really unique art style, simple but challenging gameplay. Nice work.
This is a really clever mechanic! It seems easy at first, but as your blocks and the projectiles multiply you have to pay attention to a lot of trajectories. It'd be helpful to have a more obvious indication of which block you currently have selected - the highlight when you hit a number helps, but something persistent would be useful - and it would be cool if the projectile movement were more unpredictable (parabolic or something). Overall, great work!
Outstanding and hilarious; this put a silly grin on my face and made me urgently need to go snowboarding (though probably saving the liquor for afterwards). Loved the music, the way the controls get plausibly worse and worse as you get "drunker", and the ridiculous, glorious "WOO"s. Amazing job - probably the best game I've played from this jam so far.
This is cool! The grungy collage-y art style is unique, eye-catching, and fits the game really well. I liked the music change when I meth'd up, but I'm afraid I didn't get much farther than that - those syringe bullets are punishing. Great job overall though - I'd play a lot more of this if I weren't dying constantly :)
Wow, the art in this is really cool - the animated voxel style is nifty, and the color palette is neat too. Gameplay's decent, though it could use some tuning - it was clear from the beginning I had no chance of winning against the mob chasing me. Nice work!
This is fun! It's a lot tougher than it looks at first glance. I'm impressed you had time to make multiple music tracks - I like the fast one with the sort of arpeggiating bass line. Nice work.
I love the art in this - the bunnies are adorable and everything's really well drawn. I liked that they had individual names, too. It gets a little repetitive; it might be more fun if the bunnies moved around, or if there were more different things they wanted (beyond just carrots and medicine, though from what I understand about real-life bunnies that's basically their whole deal). Overall, nice work!
This is impressive - the gameplay's unusually elaborate considering the amount of work you clearly put into the graphics. The enemies are really well-differentiated; there's enough variety there to demand actual strategy when dealing with them. I spent a fair bit of time confused about what was going on and why my guns weren't firing, so it could probably use some clearer feedback... overall, though, this is an ambitious and well-executed idea. Nice job!
This is fun! As a few other folks have said, it's super challenging on a fast machine - that's not a bad thing though, just means you have to be a lot quicker. The background music's pleasant and the art is cute - great job.
Clever! The art is really nicely drawn - the 2.5D thing threw me for a loop at first, but I like it; feels like fighting with cardboard cutouts. The book of Cthulhu Knowledge made me grin. Nice work.
Superb artwork - it looks amazing. The movement does feel pretty rough, though - I only ever managed to get two of them on the first level and it was mostly because I got stuck whenever I tried to jump :(
Love the name - unfortunately I neither have controllers nor three other people to play LD games with me, so I can't tell how it plays. Great concept and fantastic art though - I'd love to try this if it had AI opponents to go up against.
This is really cool. Elegant mechanic and a nice minimal visual presentation. I did find the controls troublesome - getting stuck on things I was trying to jump into was particularly frustrating - but there's a really solid idea here and I'd love to play a version with some of the finickiness ironed out. Great job!
The art is really impressive and I like the idea, but I can't even get out of the first room - I see the sparkles on the thing on the floor, but nothing I do - hit E, click, hit other keys at random - makes anything happen. From the screenshots it looks like there's some really cool stuff to see, but I can't get to it. :( I've tried it on Safari on macOS, and Chrome and the EXE version on Windows... no luck at all.
This is a super innovative mechanic. Great artwork too. Even without reading your comments I was able to figure out how to play by trial and error. Nice job!
There’s some clever ideas in here - I was impressed with the variety of the curses I ended up with over time. Unfortunately I had the same issue LeReveur did, not being able to get onto the upper platform on the second level—I don’t know if I missed something or what, but if there’s some trick to getting a higher jump it’d be nice for it to be a bit more obvious.
Fun! Simple and elegant, and the music’s really catchy. Nice work.
Wow, this is superb! Totally unique gameplay and very well communicated - I knew exactly what I had to do after going through the tutorial, I just had very little chance of successfully doing it. Groovy music too. Fantastic work!
Weird and delightful. Love the concept and the art style; I wish I'd been able to figure out what the other people thought was going on, though I think I did persuade one that I liked wizards and was definitely not a spider.
This is really well done! Great use of the theme, and the gameplay's fun and challenging. Some sound would've been good, but I ran out of time for that on my own game so I totally understand that. :) Nice work!
Oof, I had to play this just for the title. Really impressed that you built this in assembly in a weekend; it feels super polished, though I'm not clear on what the wrenches were actually doing for me. Great work!
This is fun! The barrel-throwing is a little fiddly - a few times I threw it and it landed next to the shark so I had to wait for it to respawn. Seriously impressive for having been made in less than a day - nice work.
This is fantastic, but oof, that pun in the name... :) Seriously, great work - it's simple and fun and really well polished. Really liked the art - the engraving at the front of the board is a nice touch - and the animation / effects are solid as well.
Nice! The ship controls are pretty challenging, as others have said; it felt pretty hard to steer. The graphics are a nice twist on pixel art; the particle effect for the center portal thing looks particularly good (and I didn't think you could do that kind of spiraling with particles in LOVE - shows what I know). Really impressive for your first/second LD - I look forward to playing more of y'all's games!
This is really well polished, as Handle said; the incoming-enemy indicators are a nice touch (though they seem to not always appear?), as are the particle effects when you hit or destroy an enemy. We actually had very similar ideas - your enemy AI works a lot better than mine does, though. :) Great work!
This is great! Feels really polished—the boat is fun to steer around, and the visuals and sound have a really pleasant sort of Monument Valley vibe. It feels a little odd that you both get scored on the number of people you save and get an instant game-over if one of them drowns—I expected to get a not-perfect-score on the level rather than to be unable to finish it. Overall, though, nice work!
Huh, I like this idea - I'd really like to see what it would be like as a finished game. Love the art style; it makes me think of a hand-drawn version of Broken Age. I hope y'all make something for the next LD!
Hah, this is fun. I would not be a great judge in this world - my prison was half empty most of the time and I got down to 1 population on my last day. Still made it to day 30, though, so I'll take it. Nice art, too. Good work!
This is great! Fantastic art and writing, and the gameplay's tough enough to be a real challenge without being impossible. I agree more tutorializing would have helped, and the inventory menu felt a little fiddly, but I figured them out eventually and had a lot of fun. Excellent work.
This is fantastic! Love the look and feel of it, and the music adds a lot of intensity. It's super hard - I have no idea how you got up to 1500; by around 100 I was permanently low on energy. Still, great job!
This is fantastic! Really charming art style and music - I love the variety of houses. The gameplay's simple but fun - I started to try to strategize but the pace picked up too fast so I just ended up dashing between houses at random. Great work!
This is great! Fun story with well-realized characters. I liked how much your early choices popped up again throughout the story. Nice work.
Fantastic. Great idea, solid execution... it could do with being a little faster-paced, but it's still a romp. Good voice acting too - that was money well spent. :)
Wow, this is superb. Seems like a simple premise but it's really challenging - the sort of alternating figure-out-the-puzzle then execute-it-without-messing-up pattern is a lot of fun (though I'm not much good at it, haha). Great work!
Clever idea! Makes me think of the Magic School Bus. The flying felt fine to me, though it took me a few tries to realize I needed to find the... esophagus, I guess? at the beginning. It was a little hard to judge whether or not a given piece of food was going to hit me. Overall, nice work!
Wow, this is really good! The stealth-ish gameplay works well and it's really satisfying getting a town converted while one of the centurions is nearby, as is finally tearing their city down. I like the visual style and the animations a lot. If there's one improvement I'd make it's speeding everything up - I spent what felt like a long time waiting for my character to make their way across the map. Overall, though, great work!
This is well done - I haven't seen a platformer done on a spiral like this before. The obstacles are a little unforgiving; some more leeway with the jump (or maybe their collision?) might help that. Enjoyed the music - very thematically appropriate - though I appreciated having the option to mute it since it did get a little repetitive. Solid artwork, too, especially for a compo game. Nice job!
This is a terrifically well done and extremely stressful game. Great artwork and animation, and the mechanics are really elegant. Nice work.
Agreed, the art is fantastic - I'd love to see more in this style. Not a whole lot of gameplay to speak of, but it's a contemplative-feeling piece.
Thanks everyone! @sarwin, you don't use the cursor to grab - while you're holding down the grab button, any of your arms that touch something will grab onto it. @carlpilot, yeah, I'm afraid there are a couple of physics bugs - I never managed to track that one down :(
This is terrific. Great use of the theme, and the character animations are really well done; the lighting and music add a lot to the mood as well. Nice level design, too - it was a lot of fun trying to get the enemies to kill me in exactly the right spot. Well done!
Great writing and terrific pixel art, Jupiter especially. Nice work.
Wow, the visuals in this are terrific, particularly in the opening scene. The gameplay's well executed, and extremely polished for how little time this was made in. I never made it past the "still no checkpoint?" section, but I liked how it'd started subverting my expectations.
One suggestion, by the way, as someone who also makes Unreal games - it's a good idea to go to your project's plugin settings and disable the various VR plugins, so that people who have headsets connected don't have them automatically start up when your game starts. It doesn't break the game or anything to not disable them, but doing so can save your players some hassle.
Anyway - nice work!
This is well done! It took me a few tries to figure out what I was supposed to be doing (and the game says to use the O key, which didn't do anything for me - I eventually found that C worked), but once I did, this was a fun, challenging little game. Solid art and music as well. Nice work.
This is delightful. Great concept, great artwork, and the gameplay itself is fun too - all-in-all just a really well executed game. Nice work!
I like this! The shrinking "safe area" is a clever mechanic, and the renegerating maze is neat - I agree it would've been interesting to have the altar respawn elsewhere. Good sound effects and visuals; I particularly liked the particle effect when you sacrifice something. Nice work.
Ha! This is a great interpretation of the theme - I'm glad I'm not the only one who did a dismemberment game. The physics work well and the level design makes for some challenging puzzles. Great work!
Clever! Agreed about the walking speed, and one or two other kinds of sacrifice locations might be good to make the balancing act trickier, but I think the concept is solid. Nice work.
Congrats on finishing your first game! I like it—the demon art in particular is really well done.
This is so charming! The art, animation, sound, and music are all just really well done. I enjoyed the variety of mechanics for catching each type of prey - the mice in particular were a satisfying challenge. The last line of dialog made me grin. Great work.
Your Itch link is broken - I don't think anyone else has access to that page.
This is absolutely outstanding. It's morbid and adorable and gets extremely challenging; the art is great and the animations are terrifically well executed. This may end up being my favorite game from this LD. Fantastic job.
This is a really interestingly weird game - despite the simple visuals I found it viscerally unsettling. The music probably helped that, but I think a lot of it was the sort of dream logic of repeated resetting and having to retrace your steps to explore the place. Well done!
This is a solid little game - having to repeatedly click to shoot gets a little old, but the upgrade/downgrade mechanics are interesting. Some cool pixel art, especially in the final boss battle; I liked the variety of the projectiles it was throwing at me. Nice work.
It's a promising idea but in practice it's pretty frustrating - I think the main problem is that the enemy shots always hit, even if you move out of the way before they land. It would feel more fair if they were leading their shots rather than the shots magically landing on you whatever you do.
Oh this is clever; it's practically a typing tutor. Pretty unforgiving - I wish the jump were just a little bit higher - but I think with practice I could get the hang of it. The background visuals are cool. Nice work!
This is a sublimely weird game - the art style is really cool. Nice work.
I like the idea! Took me some time to figure it out - some instructions would be helpful - but once I did, I managed to get the fire out with about half of my city left. This could be a lot of fun with some more polish. Nice work.
Interesting take on the theme! Haven't gotten to play as a remora before. The mouse-shake thing feels like it could use some tuning; I had to shake it -really- fast to get an enemy off of me. The level design is really elaborate for a compo game. Nice work.
I like this! The art is really charming - it took me a while to figure out what one or two of the things were (I guess I don't know what garlic looks like), but the pixel art is really well rendered. Nice work.
The graphics and music are terrific - I love how fluid it feels even with the retro appearance. Well done!
@mykola It sounds like you thought through your gameplay a lot more thoroughly than I did :) I’m working on another update to the post-jam version that gives you coins when enemies die, and good suggestion on switching the order of enemy introduction around—the turrets are pretty challenging, especially since I didn’t end up adding the dodge ability I was planning for. Thanks for the detailed feedback!
Ha! I kind of stared at it for a while like "...am I done yet? Is there something I should do before I'm done?" which is a more existential question than I think I've had to answer playing an LD game before. Well done.
This is well done! Really polished for one of your first games. I agree with what @mmyarlathotep said - there's a couple of puzzles that you can kind of accidentally fail early on without realizing it. Overall, though, nice work!
Clever interpretation of the theme! I have to admit I didn't get very far, but I had the feeling if my brain worked better I would've really enjoyed it. I didn't quite get what was happening with the periodic "watch out for the time!" automatic reversals... it might have been easier to understand if you'd introduced the mechanic more gradually. Still, though, great work.
Wow, I absolutely love the artwork and music in this - the characters are all super lively and the sort of flame-y particles on the pickups look really cool. The orb mechanic is unique, and fun for a while - I started wishing I had a different kind of attack once I started getting really swarmed though. Overall, great work!
This is a bizarre masterpiece. Really impressed with how many different kinds of game you fit into this, and the writing was good throughout. Bravo.
This is such a clever idea! I love the hybrid interaction between the book and the world - makes me think of the Myst universe. The art's well done and there're some really clever puzzles. Fantastic work.
@candlesan Thanks! That happens when you dig up a bone that you already have. Loose bones will distract the dogs from you, and you can also pick them up if you end up losing one of that type of bone.
This is really pleasant! It's sort of meditative, and it feels well-balanced - my flowers did get taken out occasionally but the entropy things moved slowly and predictably enough that it didn't feel punishing. Nice work!
This is weird and charming. Really like the art, the explosions in particular. The gameplay tips made me grin. Nice work!
This is incredible. I love word games and this is a great one - beyond that, though, this is just an outrageously well-polished game. The visuals and animation are top-notch. the writing is clever and snappy, and the gameplay is superb. Y'all should seriously consider releasing this to a broader audience - I think it would do well. Outstanding work.
As everyone's been saying, the amount of polish for how little time you put into this is really incredible - the animation feels better than a lot of larger-scale games I've played. Nice work!
Congrats on your first compo entry! I like the pixel art; would love to see more in this style. I was a little confused by the controls since I couldn't tell your attack would face the direction of the mouse, but once I figured that out I got much better at it. Some more variety in the enemies would be interesting, and maybe some kind of ranged attack? Regardless, nice work.
This is good! I got pretty far—13 or 15 I think?—but I kinda got stuck after that. Kept looking for something around “field” or “crops”, but no luck. Still, it’s a well-executed concept, and the art’s better than you’re giving yourself credit for. :wink: Nice work.
This is extremely odd and I like it. Spent a while wrestling with the controls until I think I got the hang of it, but I had a really hard time in the second room - got the name plate thing to the edge of the table then couldn't for the life of me knock it off. Easily the most unique control scheme I've seen in an LD game. Nice work.
This is fantastic - I love the idea of having to actually play through a Groundhog's Day situation. I was all excited on my third or fourth attempt to have finally saved up enough for the fortune teller to cure me... and then he forgot I existed. Oops. Great work!
Clever! I made it to level 4 but had to give up at that point - the combination of the intermittent light and there being no safe place to stop after making it past one of the enemies was a bit too hard. Still, it's a great concept and well executed (and the ghost shadow is adorable). Nice work.
Wow, this is incredibly polished! The second level is pretty hard, especially at the outset - it'd be really helpful to have some kind of health pickup, I usually was under half health by the time I even got a weapon. I think the top-down view doesn't show off your art as well as it could - an angled perspective might have worked a bit better. Still, though, amazing work!
Pleasant! I really like the way the plants sort of draw themselves into existence. Nice work.
This is great! It looks simple but it's surprisingly challenging (or I'm real bad at timing things), and the sounds are hilarious - I almost burst out laughing when the sun came after me. The art style's well done too, reminds me of an early-00s Flash game. Nice work!
This is cool! I love the art - it's really vivid and comic-book-y. Nice work.
Neat concept! The movement controls were a little finicky - sometimes it's impossible to jump out of the water, which is kinda frustrating when one of the shark things is attacking you. Would be fun to have the different objects have some different characteristics for your ship. Nice work.
Wow, this is really ambitious for a weekend. Great art style, great colors. I liked being able to stick to the walls. For some reason the jump was really hard to use - half the time nothing happened, which made me die a lot. Overall, though, great work!
Cool! It's a simple idea but it works well. The music is really excellent - I can't believe it's possible to compose a whole piece like this in a weekend. Nice job.
This is great! It's straightforward and super compelling. I love how your body maintains the structure of everything you've absorbed, and how the skeletons stay inside you - it feels a lot better than just being a steadily growing ball. Made it all the way to "Impossible" before they finally broke me down. Great work.
As everyone else has been saying, the art is terrific - the watercolor style is really pleasant. Enjoyed the writing too, particularly some of the book titles. Nice work!
This is a really impressive compo entry! The art is great and the puzzles are deceptively challenging. The instant-fail can get a little frustrating, but I think I’d get the hang of it if I kept trying. Nice work.
This is really good! It's challenging and the steady addition of more elements makes you rethink what you were previously doing. I agree the homing projectiles are a little frustrating, but that makes it more satisfying when you figure out a way around them. Nice work!
This is fun! The visuals are well done and there's some surprisingly elaborate level design. The enemy homing missiles feel a bit too aggressive, though once you have your own it becomes a much fairer fight. Nice work.
This is so cool! It's almost meditative. Such a simple mechanic but it works really well. I do wish you could rotate faster - it feels like there's so little time between when you spot an incoming thing and when you need to catch it. Still, though, it's a really innovative and elegant concept. Great work.
Wow, for such an apparently straightforward concept it's -really- challenging. The minimalist aesthetic is really nice too. Well done!
This is super atmospheric—I think y’all nailed that. Love the palette and the painterly artwork. Took me a while to figure out what to do; some kind of feedback/hint that you’re supposed to hit Space on the obstacles might help. Overall, nice work!
This is cute! Lots of fun too. I was a little confused about the upgrade paths—I think I turned some of my turrets into cities (?) which then stopped shooting at anything. Some text instead of tiny icons would probably help. Still really enjoyed it though; great work!
Wow, this is fantastic! Tight, elegant gameplay and a unique, well-executed visual style. I love the volumetric-looking lighting and the paint-splatter-y particle effects. I appreciated how many checkpoints there were since I died to my own stupid mistakes a lot :) I did get lost occasionally—it could have used some indication of where the end of a level was—and the AI could probably use some better collision avoidance, as they spent a lot of time trying to get to me from the other side of walls. This is a compo game, though, and I’m well aware how much there is to do in those 48 hours. Absolutely outstanding work.
This is ambitious—I wasn’t able to get far in it, but as Kent said, there’s definitely the beginnings of a fun game here. The voxel art’s well done. Nice work.
This is brilliant. Unique interpretation of the theme, straightforward but tough gameplay, and the music / sound sets the atmosphere perfectly. Outstanding work.
Wow, this is so, so slick. I’m not much good at turn-based strategy games but the style and polish of this one really pulled me in. Clever writing too. Fantastic work.
I was excited to play this—I love word games—but yep, server times out for me too. Please comment if you end up getting it working again; seems like potentially a lot of fun.
This is brilliant. It’s challenging, engaging gameplay that also does a great job of getting its message across. Fantastic work.
This is cool! Really well-designed puzzles—the levels do a good job of introducing all the mechanics. Platforming can be a little finicky in places, but at least you can easily restart when you mess up. Nice job!
The difficulty does definitely ramp up super quickly. The art’s cute, and I’m always impressed to see projects made on these virtual consoles. Nice work!
Super ambitious idea—this is a great use of the VFX Graph tools. It was a little hard to figure out what the goal was; I fed a few light ball things to the tree, but I couldn’t really tell if that was doing anything. Lots of fun to just watch it all in motion, though; if there were a version that played itself I’d want to use it as a screensaver. Nice work!
The lighting makes this really atmospheric, even with the minimal art style. Having a little more information about how you’re doing—your health and the fox’s—might be helpful. Overall, though, nice work!
This is charming! Super fun idea, and I love the design / artwork—the details in the news chyron are a nice touch. I did have a trouble aiming when I was holding a building; a crosshair, or even better a visible preview of the trajectory, would have helped a lot. Still, though, great work!
I love the art style. Looks fantastic. The shooting gameplay works well; the AI’s not too smart, but it’s a good challenge once they start swarming you. The explosive-barrel ones are a fun addition. Great work!
This is adorable and surprisingly polished. It’s pretty frantic—a gradual ramp-up in the speed and number of cats would be nice—but that makes sense for an arcade game. Great work!
This is really charming. Clever interpretation of the theme. I like the animation style—it looks simple at first glance but there’s a lot of cool details in e.g. the way the nutcrackers land. Good music too, though for some reason it didn’t start until the first time I lost? Anyway: nice job!
I love the art in this! The platypus is absolutely adorable, and the level tiles are nicely done too. I’d like to have seen a little more novelty to the platforming, but it works well. Nice job!
Y’all, the graphics in this are absolutely outstanding—the pixel art is really well done on its own, but the post-processing and the visual effects take it to another level. Great work.
The art’s well done and it feels like there’s a good simulation in here, but I can’t figure out how to play it. I got my creatures to build homes (?) out of an egg carton, then make food storage and get some of the food on another shelf, but I couldn’t really tell what was going on or whether I was actually managing to keep any of them alive.
Delightful concept. I couldn’t be sure because I’m not any kind of physicist, but I got the impression the physics are pretty accurate? Minus the… soul… bit? I did hit some of the UI issues other folks brought up—the main one being the left edge of the screen being covered by part of the circle—but it didn’t make it unplayable or anything. Didn’t understand why I got pushed down at apparently random intervals, but I assume I missed something. Overall: nice work!
Ha, this is great! Short, sweet, and incredibly polished. The animated instruction text is a nice touch. I’d play many more levels of this.
I like this! The robot designs are cute. The “figure out what’s wrong with this and where I can get the parts from” concept is solid—I would definitely play an expanded version of it. Nice work.
Ha, this is great. Simple mechanics, but the art really elevates it. Proud to say I did indeed help my snail attain love.
Wow, this is super atmospheric. Great art, and the level design’s impressive as well—I couldn’t say exactly how, but I never got lost running around the forest. The creatures are a nice touch too. Oddly, the meter for my main fire went out close to the end of the game but it didn’t cause a game-over—maybe I misunderstood what the lose condition was? Regardless: nice work.
This is cool! Simple enough concept (at least as far as I got), but super well executed; the visuals work well and the music suits it perfectly. I’m not sure the timer mechanic really works, since you have to wait a while to see what your changes do, but maybe I’m just not good enough at it. :sweat_smile: Nice work.
Really well-executed concept and the visuals are solid too. It is, as everyone’s mentioned, quite hard—the best I’ve done is 440—but clearly with practice one could get way better at it. The proximity sound cues are a nice touch. Great work!
This is really delightful. Novel concept / mechanic that works well, and it’s super charmingly presented; the art and music are excellent too. Glad I got to meet a goat. Nice work!
I like this! Very chill and relaxing, with some nice visual flair. The eyes on the character are a clever touch—that small detail adds a lot. Interesting mechanic too; haven’t seen angular momentum used like this before. Great work.
Interesting concept! I like the visual style—the sort of tangly designs are really unusual. The gameplay feels a little unforgiving: there’s a point at which you can get to the bottom and keep jumping up and falling through the same blue energy thing, unable to progress any further. Some way to either save yourself or eventually fail would help. Overall, though, good work.
Wow, this is really clever! The name caught my eye and the gameplay lives up to it perfectly. It’s polished and elegant: simple concept, flawlessly executed. I’m not great at it—my high score’s only 560—but it makes me want to keep trying. Great work.
This is incredibly impressive—I can’t believe how much y’all built in a weekend. It was a little hard to tell what I was meant to do; I wandered around the second level a bunch, dodging guards (?) etc., but I didn’t find any keys or anything that would get me closer to the conference rooms. I think with some more patience I could probably have figured it out, though. Nice work!
This is really charming! Terrific pixel art, the music’s great, and the attack sound is delightful. As others have mentioned, the projectile room is a bit of a pain. I also found the fast-food boss disorienting in full screen—the screen shake is really aggressive. Overall, though, great work!
Wow, this is absolutely brilliant. I’m not much good at rhythm games so the level with the spikes is where I had to stop, but I *love* the concept and the execution. The art is really well done, the music’s superb, and the gameplay is just so, so elegant. Favorite game I’ve played in this LD so far. Terrific work.
Wow, this is brilliant! Really innovative gameplay and terrific puzzle design. Great visuals, and the music’s good too. I gave up on the level with the green/yellow/purple keys when I had all three and died to one of the zapper things; some kind of checkpoint system would make that less frustrating. Still, though, incredible work; this is one of the best platformers I’ve seen in LD.
This is charming—the art style and music make me think of really early CGI shorts. It was fun running around in front of people to try to get them into the frame of my camera.
This is really clever! I liked how quickly it broke down the expectation that you should do what the tutorial was telling you to do. I’m afraid I got stuck on level 9—thought it might be something to do with interacting with the timer in the corner (which otherwise didn’t seem to have a point?) but I couldn’t figure it out. It sounds like there was a lot more after that, though. Nice work!
My antivirus identified this as having "Trojan:Win32/Fuery.C!cl". Any idea why?
Cool premise! It’s fun once you get the hang of it. The portal mechanic was interesting, though the implementation seemed a little off—wherever I landed on one portal, I emerged at the left edge of the other, which made it hard to use it for platforming. Great music as others have said. Nice work.
This is utterly bizarre and I love it. Great work.
This is really impressive! For a game made in a weekend it’s really elaborate—in particular I’m amazed y’all implemented multiple minigames. Did find myself constantly getting lost; some variety in the environment would have helped a lot with that. I also wasn’t clear on how to solve some of the object-finding puzzles: in particular, the missing power module thing seemed to have a shelf right across from it with a bunch of things that looked like they’d fit, but as far as I could tell there was no way to pick any of those up. As others mentioned, the skybox outside the ship is incredibly pretty—it would have been great to have some more windows in the other rooms to see it through (might also have helped with the disorientation issue). Overall, nice work!
This is cool! Really original concept—a bit like classic programming games but more analog. It is pretty hard; I think one thing that would help with that a lot is being able to see the previous track you made when setting up a new one, so you could more easily see where to adjust your previous timing. The visuals are simple but well-polished, and the sounds are good too; this has a ton of potential. Nice work.
I like this! The music’s really pleasant and I really like the pixel art of the station. Quirky and imaginative writing. Nice work, and congrats on your first solo game.
This is really cool! Never seen a mechanic like this before and it was surprisingly challenging, especially having to keep separate mental counts of the number I killed vs. saw. Great visuals and music—you nailed the retro vaporwave vibe. Well done.
Clever use of the theme. The game concept itself is well established, but this is a good execution of it—the randomization is nice, as is the fact that you don’t have to click all the way through to a given target word if it’s linked to from the page you land on. Well done!
@impbox Thanks! That’s fair; I didn’t have an idea for a particularly innovative mechanic so I’m happy to just have executed reasonably well. The idea with the green / purple thing was as an indicator of what’s bigger or smaller than you; once you’re the biggest thing around, it’s all cleanup. Hard to read that with the indistinct shapes, though. Sorry to hear you had input trouble—when you haven’t moved the mouse recently it’s supposed to ignore mouse movements and let you use the keyboard/gamepad instead, but there must be some bug in what’s supposed to do that.
This is really impressive! Super elaborate for a compo game. It’s definitely got the Myst inscrutability. I figured out the button puzzle and found my way to the five switches, but I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to find information about which ones to pull. I’ve never been good at Myst, though, so… I guess you nailed it!
One of the silliest (and therefore best) takes on the theme I’ve seen yet. The multitasking is a lot of fun—you sort of have to let one side or the other become an unconscious process. It starts out maybe a little too easy, but it does ramp up eventually. I think this game gave me a real understanding for machine learning. Well done.
This is delightful! Super clever mechanic which I am… not at all good at. I got as far as the "A slow fall slips less" hint and got stuck there. Gorgeous illustrations—the palettes really pop—and cute sound too. Amazing work.
First time I’ve seen a bullet-hell game with accessibility settings, therefore the first bullet-hell game I’ve been able to play for any length of time without losing. :slight_smile: I’m a little unclear on what causes the game-over: a few times I’ve gotten to the end-game screen while I still had several lives left. Maybe a bug?
This is impressive! One of the more esoteric environments I’ve ever seen an LD game done in. Seems like it must have been a ton of work. I beat (?) the first level but couldn’t figure out how to progress to the next one—it was telling me to go right but no amount of messing with the movement keys got anything apparent to happen. Also, great title—I’ll admit the pun is what drew me in. :smile:
This is really impressive! The visual style is striking—I haven’t seen good cel-shading like this in a while—and I enjoyed unexpectedly getting fire hands. I fought a large ghost that I assumed I was only able to damage by getting underneath it; eventually I got a fade-to-black and the game exited, which… might have meant I won? Either way, I had fun. Music’s good—it’s pretty rare to see an LD game, let alone a compo one, that has different music for being in and out of combat. Well done.
This is really impressive! I did find the tilting really confusing—it made it surprisingly hard to steer. The atmosphere was good, and as others mentioned, the way the level’s laid out to encourage you to go deeper while putting a bunch of hazards in your way is good design. A little more feedback when a) you’re successfully drilling something (I seemed to miss a lot) and b) you’re close to a mine or being targeted by a missile would have been helpful, but… 48 hours is tight. Nice work!
This is weirdly meditative (the music really sets a vibe) and very frustrating at the same time. I appreciate that it doesn’t game-over you at any point, just moves you further upwards, but the fact that I moved way slower than half the enemies made it almost impossible to progress. With some difficulty adjustment I would have played this for quite a while. Nice work.
This is really tricky! I like it, but I’m not good at it. As @arya-s said, it’s impressive how much this one alteration changes the way you play it. Nice work.
First game I’ve given 5 stars for “mood” in quite a while—the Psychonauts-esque level design and random effects (“Hands?” being my favorite) really sell the feeling of it. I did find that I was missing some of the dialogue while trying to navigate the levels—@crazyrems’s suggestion is a good one. Overall: great work!
This is cute! On my best run I made it down to 46. I liked the randomness of the dark blue blocks; unexpectedly getting a cold one made for an interesting challenge. It might have been good to have some more structure to the areas that you couldn’t dig through (I assume I wasn’t supposed to dig the ! blocks? never actually tried it), but it works without that. Well done.
This is clever! Good use of the theme. Love the character design and the sparks coming off the elevator brakes. Some way to heal would have been nice, but maybe I just need to get good—I only made it down to 344. Nice work.
What I understand of the idea I like, but this could *really* have used some explanation of the mechanics, even on this page if not in the game itself. I couldn’t figure out what made a connection form between the plants—I got the y=x graph working once, but then I picked up one of the pots and couldn’t figure out how to get it connected again. What did I miss?
Wow, this is a really tightly designed game. Dead simple concept, super well executed. Could have used some more sound / music, but eh, it’s compo. The levels did a great job of introducing the mechanics of the different wall materials—I enjoyed the green section the most, it was fun finding a way to progress without manual jumps. Made it in 189. Great work.
As everyone said, the conversation audio is really good. I… have to admit I had no idea what was going on, or what the individual conversations were accomplishing other than occasionally opening a door or respawning me. I got to the point with two pairs of adjacent doors and got stuck—nothing I did seemed to cause anything to happen. I guess I was supposed to restart, but I’m not even sure what I did wrong to get into that state in the first place. Anyway—congrats on your first compo entry! It’s always intense but it can be a lot of fun.
@mathemagician Thanks for the explanation! That makes sense.
This is a lot of fun! I’m real bad at timing games, so I died a *lot* and eventually got stuck on the level where you start with two turrets directly to your left… but that’s just me being bad at timing. The music is really catchy and the sort of glowy effects really make the art pop. Great work.
This is super atmospheric! The lighting and the music, and the subtle drifting particles, all give it a real feeling of sinking into… well, an abyss. The gameplay confused me; on my second runthrough I don’t think an enemy ever got close enough to touch me but I died anyway. Did I miss something about… the number of crystals, or something?
Wow! The scope of this is wild for a game-jam game period, let alone a compo one. I had a pretty hard time navigating with the lighting, even in interaction mode, but I did manage to find and salvage a couple of items. Some kind of highlight to make interactive things stand out from non-interactive ones would have been nice, but… 48 hours :smile: Great work.
This is charming! First sound-based interpretation of the theme I’ve seen. The art and animations are terrific—I love the way the enemies fall apart and drop their skulls. It is, as a bunch of people have pointed out, quite hard—as soon as the green projectile ones showed up I was pretty much done for—but tuning difficulty for a jam game is always a challenge. Well done.
As others have said, I *love* the art style—the characters are weird and incredibly charming. I also had no idea what to do: I could never find anyone or anything to interact with that wasn’t an NPC with regular dialogue (all of which was well written, though) or a cop to fight. Some kind of… objective marker? or even a tutorial mission that held your hand a bit more would have helped. The premise is sound, though—with a little more time this could be a lot of fun!
This is absolutely terrific. Fun to play, catchy music, and the writing’s great—I got the silliest grin on my face at the "we will remember… FERDINAND…" line. I must have gotten lucky on my first run because I got something like $13K before hitting a bomb—the subsequent few were much briefer. If there’s one thing I’d like to see it’d be a way to jump; it was a little frustrating scanning something off to the side that was _just_ a little higher. But I guess only being able to go deeper fits the theme. Amazing work.
This is fun! I did not even come close to surviving on my first one—grabbed a couple of weights early and then I was falling too fast to do anything else—but I made it with 23 extra bones (?) on my second :smile: Great use of the theme, and the art’s good too!
This is really good! The gameplay is pretty simple but the level design is surprisingly elaborate—it feels like there’s a ton of stuff to find. I thought I knew all the types of fauna you had but right before I died to a giant fish I saw a jellyfish-thing get ready to attack me as well :smile: The art is charming; I’m impressed with the amount of detail you put into the animations. It would have been nice to have some way to recover health, and maybe more fuel tanks… but as-is it’s reasonably challenging and I did get noticeably better at it from one attempt to the next. Great work; congrats on your first successful LD!
Wow! This is really challenging and a lot of fun. I’m so used to navigating platformers without planning or thinking about it too much, so having to conserve jumps/dashes was hard. I made it farther than I expected, honestly—finally gave up on the level with five dashes in a row because I just couldn’t get the timing right. The visuals are beautiful and well-animated, and the sound effects are unique; I found I didn’t mind dying over and over again much because the start-of-level sound is just so satisfying. Great work!
This is cute! I really like the hand character, and the… chili peppers? I couldn’t figure out if there was a pattern to their movements but I got past them eventually. Nice work.
Unlike a bunch of the folks above, I was able to launch it without issue. Unfortunately it runs *way* too fast to play—within a fraction of a second after starting the game, my character gets swarmed with text and starts fading out. Is it… not limiting the frame rate, or something?
As others have said, the sounds are delightful—the dogs were my favorite. I do wish the difficulty ramped up a bit—by midnight or so I had the hang of things, and I kept going until 9:30 assuming the guy must eventually wake up… but no luck. The visuals are impressive for a compo entry, especially the amount of detail on the dog. Nice work!
What a unique concept! It’s definitely got a meditative vibe. The guitar music is pleasant; I think some fire crackling sounds would have been a great addition, but I have no idea how I’d record those sui generis for a compo game. I did find myself wrestling with the camera a lot—some more smoothing on it might have helped. It’s a lot of fun for such a straightforward idea, though—nice work!
Clever use of the theme! It’d be fun for the pages to be randomized somehow, but that seems like a much harder thing to implement. Nice work.
This is absolutely delightful. Love the music—especially the first track—and the weird physics on the cat are incredibly charming. I’m not much good at rhythm games, so I didn’t mind the imprecision. I agree about the confusing parallax though—in the hard mode it was tough to see where the quicker vs. slower note transitions were. Still, this is one of my favorite games I’ve played in this LD. Terrific work.
Really impressive! Unique take on the theme, and for the most part everything works well. I did wish I had some kind of aim-able weapon—it felt like the missiles weren’t doing enough even though I was spamming the fire button constantly. Made it up to level 3 twice and got knocked down again twice, at which point I gave up. The scale changes were neat—it felt like nothing much was changing for the first level or two, but by the time my impending mech was standing astride a planet I had a much clearer idea. Curious what the subsequent levels were—one planet per foot? A star? :smile: Great work.
Neat concept! It’s a little hard—the enemies have a ton of health whereas I seem to have almost none. The dual-wielding mechanic is fun. I think with some tuning this could be a really enjoyable mechanic. Well done.
I had to play this just for the elegance of the title, and because you’re one of the only other people I’ve seen do something 3D for the compo :slight_smile: It’s fun—I like the harvesting mechanic, though as a few other people mentioned it might have been helpful to have a way of knowing you’d successfully tagged something for harvesting. Nice work.
This is terrific! I had to play it just for the title portmanteau, but it’s way more engaging than I expected at a glance—the puzzles are really satisfying. I would spend a *lot* of time playing this if it were on my phone. Music’s really pleasant too: gives me a Stardew Valley vibe. Great work.
This is impressive! The visuals are terrific—the world looks very Borderlandsy and the illustrations for the organs and character are incredibly detailed. I found the gameplay a little frustrating since it was hard to tell what bits were just flavor text and what were meant to be clues… but maybe the answer is “everything is a clue” and I’m just bad at puzzles :slight_smile: Nice work.
Thanks @supremekurt! I’m glad you found it fun—I felt like I spent too much time on the graphics and not enough on gameplay depth, but it’s good to hear it was engaging anyway :slight_smile:
Hi @caranha! I’ve never made a Linux build before but I could give it a try if you’re willing to test that it works—if so, email me? This username at gmail.
@ScolonDev Sorry about that! I’ve updated the instructions above with a link to where to get that.
Short but fun. The animation livened it up a lot, both the trails on the note…star…things and the dancing flowers. It was cool seeing the flowers shift to having their petals drift away—I thought it might be doing a “change of seasons” kind of thing and was interested to see where that went, but then the song ended :grinning: Nice work.
This is so good! I can’t believe it’s a compo game—must have been an incredible amount of work. So many fun little details, like the screen tint when you [redacted] and the text on the signs at the festival, the way the corn sways as you walk through it… just terrific all round. Bravo.
Fun concept! The lag when moving makes that a little frustrating. It was a good challenge trying to dodge the scorpions. Gameplay-wise it might have been good to provide intermediate goals beyond the main one, as it didn’t feel like there was much reason to go one direction vs. another (except “away from the scorpions”, hah). With the lag fixed I would have played this for quite a while. Nice work.
This is clever! Simple mechanic but surprisingly challenging. Well done.
This is a very strange and charming game—I love the hand-drawn art and the overall concept. It is pretty hard and gets repetitive after a while—introducing some more mechanics over time might have helped—but it’s always hard tuning difficulty for compo games. Nice work!
This is charming! Great pixel art and I like the basic mechanic, though the balance seems off—I only ever saw one seed packet drop, so almost all of the time I was just shooting zucchini. I did love the game’s note about zucchini doing very little damage, though: that’s true! :laughing:
This is cool! The controls feel really good—that’s hard to polish in such a short time, so well done there. Music has a nice vibe to it. I thought the insta-kill borders were a little harsh vs. the rest of the things that can hurt you which you can recover from, but I guess it’s a reasonable design choice.
Oh wow, this is clever. I like how it sort of forces you to come up with an organizational scheme on the fly, just based on what you’ve seen so far—I ended up grouping things by hue, which seemed obvious, and eventually realized I needed to keep a couple of regions free for unboxing my boxes. Some sound effects and/or music could’ve added a lot to the engagement, but it’s compelling as-is. Nice work!
This is cool! It feels very tactile, like it could be a recreation of an actual game from the era. Wish I had a working gamepad to play it with—the discrete keyboard controls pushing things all the way to one end or the other made me feel like I was missing out on the intended experience. That’s kind of on me though: I can tell with analog controls there would be a lot of finesse to the gameplay. Well done!
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
@alexis8 and @ex3d0, you’re not the only ones who’ve told me the controls feel backwards… it’s kind of ambiguous whether you’re rotating it from the top or the bottom, or for that matter whether you’re rotating yourself or the entire tunnel. If I do a post-jam version, an option to invert the controls will definitely be in there.
@subsage / @jellycopter, I had plans for adding more gameplay wrinkles as it went on, like changing your available pins from a simple 1–2–3 to different sets with different-sized gaps in them… but there was no time, I barely managed to tune the gameplay as it was :sweat_smile: Again, hopefully in a post-jam version once I have the energy for that.
Ha, thanks @designernap! I’m definitely more of a graphics person than a sound one—the music got a few hours of work (mostly making synthetic instruments out of MetaSound’s generators and figuring out how to do a note sequence) and the sounds went in literally five minutes before the deadline. I’ll figure out a better process someday…
This is really clever! Original mechanic and really smoothly executed. I got stuck on the… second?… area—I saw the question block behind the tree but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Thought maybe moving my ribbon into its shadow and going 2D to grab it would do something, but it didn’t… or maybe I didn’t line it up right. Then I tried using the side stairs to get up to the ribbon on the right and managed to fall out of the world. Had a great time up to that point though—well done!
This is really clever! Great twist on the mechanic. I agree with @a327ex that making it more precise would help—I died a couple of times because I couldn’t tell whether I was far enough away from a wall. I appreciated that it allows you to stop moving and plan things out though. Nice work.
This looks like fun and I’d love to give it a try… but I’m reluctant to install Java. In the source code it looks like there might be a web version—are you considering putting that up?
This is hard! I don’t have the reflexes for it—on my best run so far I only made it past the first few obstacles. Seems like it would be a good challenge for someone better at platformers though. The art’s well done: the palette in particular is a good kind of unusual. Why am I green? Why is the kelp orange? I don’t know, but I like it.
This is terrific! Clever, original, well-executed mechanic—I love that the different words produce appropriate attack patterns for slash vs. jab vs. bisect etc. I couldn’t tell what the difference was between the enemies—was it their attack pattern? Point value? I agree with Jeremy’s point that the crosswording could have used a little more depth, but honestly: this is the compo, it’s super hard to get _anything_ good done in time, and you knocked it out of the park. Bravo.
Wow, I meant to get a bunch of games rated this morning and instead all I’ve done is play this. It’s so compelling! The mechanics work great and the faces are absolutely adorable. Terrific work.
This is adorable. The orcas-visiting-the-edges-of-the-ice mechanic is well done—it keeps you on your toes. I audibly gasped the first time one of the babies got eaten. Made it out with 12 of them; that should be enough to start a new colony somewhere safer, right? :sweat_smile: Great work!
This is seriously impressive! I love the visual style and the little details—Norton’s face and the animation while it’s parachuting are adorable. I made it to the boss fight but died pretty quickly; a checkpoint before that might have helped, though maybe I missed one along the way. It’s rare to see a compo game this elaborate and polished, though—amazing work.
This is terrific! Gets really enjoyably frantic after a while. I loved the cover illustration and the character animations. Don’t think I quite understood what the arrow mounds were for—I thought they might replenish the islands or something but I couldn’t tell what happened when I hit them. Regardless: had a great time. Nice work!
This is clever! I was really confused about the controls at first—the thing it shows the mouse cursor doing seems to be exactly the opposite of what you need to do to move (I would’ve expected to see it pulling **back** and releasing)—but once I got the hang of it it was a good challenge. The pipe system is a nice take on checkpointing. Well done.
The art is lovely! I found the gameplay pretty difficult—it was hard to know where I would go beyond the immediate trajectory since I wasn’t getting a feel for the planets’ gravity. Guess that’s part of the challenge though. Well done!
Loved the art and the sound effects—solid voice acting too. Didn’t quite get the wall down (the dancing bears got in the way—it happens) but I had a good time :slight_smile:
This is cool! Minimal and challenging—embarrassingly I have still yet to beat the Medium computer player. I’m impressed you got multiplayer working too; I’ve never attempted that for a compo game, I end up with enough things to debug just on **one** machine :sweat_smile:
Loved the writing—this is one of the only genuinely funny game-jam games I’ve ever played. I got stuck on the second-floor puzzle: I climbed up on the sculpture next to the key shelves in case there were more hidden ones lying down, and I tried the bells with and without counting the key and sword above them in the totals… no luck. I thought the game was telling me where I belonged among the social classes, but then I saw your hint in the comments here and was able to transcend my limitations and progress to the ending. Glad I did; it gave me much to think about.
This is fun! It’s pleasant and meditative… maybe a little slow? It didn’t feel like space was my main constraint—I had tons of room to build things out in. I appreciated the depth of the gameplay though, between the tile arrangement and the shade mechanic, and having my grandma show up occasionally added some character to what could otherwise have been a little too dry (ha) of an experience. Nice work.
This is clever! Good take on the theme, and the art does a good job of selling the setting (especially the hats on the enemies). By the time I got up to a height of 7 the AI had a hard time getting to me, so I racked up 50-odd kills… I guess I am the sheriff now?
The visuals are really cool! The controls are hard to get the hang of, and my first few games I was getting almost immediately knocked towards the hole and never escaping… a more gradual ramp-up of the asteroid density might have helped. It got fun once I got more of a feel for what I was doing though. Nice work.
Oh wow this is hard… I didn’t realize how much I rely on backspacing as I type :cry: Fun idea though—nice work!
The puzzle exploration is fun and I **love** the visual style—really striking and illustrative. The particle bits coming off the bottom of the platforms are a nice touch. Well done.
I’m impressed you used a jam as an opportunity to learn a new engine—that would stress me out! The mechanics are simple but novel: as someone else mentioned, it has WarioWare vibes, and that’s a good thing. Nice work!
This is fun! It’s pretty difficult, at least on my machine (might be a frame rate thing?)—my high score is only 11. Enjoyed it though. Well done.
This is fun! Some good variety among the levels. It’s interesting how as you get farther along in a level the mechanic shifts from a traditional racing game to more of a slow, cautious balancing act. Visuals are nice too—I’m always here for a TRON style (as you can see from my game this time around, ha). Well done.
This is weird! I like the mechanic a lot, but I got stuck pretty quickly (at Door)—wish I’d been able to find out what happened next, but everything I tried either took me back through the loop or gave me a "Hmm no..." message.
This is fun—straightforward mechanic but it’s nicely presented and the puzzles are well designed. The jumping-into-the-hole animation is a nice touch of whimsy.
This has a ton of character—the pixel art’s great and I enjoyed the intro voiceover. The first time I played it I got little minion-grade things to fight (and then died soon afterwards), but the second time I played after refreshing the page they didn’t show up. Some kind of bug?
This is interesting! It’s a cool mechanic but I had a hard time progressing—it was hard to tell where the object would end up when I threw it, and I kept getting stuck in situations where I could neither reach it nor get somewhere that I could retrieve it from. It seems like you’re meant to be able to pull the object around by walking into the edge of the field, but I couldn’t get that to work some of the time. Maybe a “pull” or “summon” system would help?
I’ll add my voice to the chorus of people telling you how great the art in this is. Super cool use of texture and striking color combinations. Gameplay-wise it seemed really thoroughly thought-out and I was interested to see where it went, but unfortunately I too got stuck at the first settlement with no apparent way to proceed. I did at least get to see one creature encounter along the way though.
This is cool! Easily the most atmospheric game I’ve played in this jam so far; the background music adds a lot to it. The mechanic is fun but feels a little too simple—maybe some action you could take other than moving would help?
The illustration is beautiful, the music’s pleasant, and I’m curious to see where the story goes… but it seems like whatever I do the fox never changes from feral / novice / wary and I get the squirrel ending (unless I mess up the earlier room conversation, in which case it’s gone earlier than that). I can’t tell whether I’m meant to consistently balance what I try to do or to stick to one path at a time. I guess it feels a little too easy to fail early on? Then again, if I **did** find a magic fox, I can’t imagine things would go a whole lot better… :sweat_smile:
Wow. The concept is simple but the execution is beautiful, meditative, and intense—it feels claustrophobic to have the darkness closing in but until the last moment you still have hope that a thing will appear and let you push it back for a little longer. Some sound and music would add to the experience but it’s incredibly atmospheric as it is, which I… never thought I would have reason to say about something this minimal. Outstanding work.
This is really ambitious for a solo game! It is also incredibly stressful to play. I agree that some more cues in the maze would have been interesting—I mostly got through on guesswork, which worked great for a few floors until I ended up at a **downward** stair. It sounds like for some people the rising water wasn’t that challenging, which suggests to me either that they’re way better at mazes or guessing than me (very possible) or that the water was rising some fixed amount per tick, without taking the delta-time into account. If the latter’s the case, it might be worth keeping an eye out for that in future, or people with high-refresh-rate screens will have a way harder time in your games :slight_smile: Anyway—nice work!
This is fantastic! The mechanic seems straightforward but there’s finesse to it, and it’s super well communicated—I appreciated the slow-motion-while-stretching to line things up. Love the art style and Drippy’s faces. Bravo.
This is challenging! I can’t say I love having to trial-and-error my way through the level due to not being able to see where the next platform is, but I get what y’all are going for. The art is great—it all reads really well and fits with the atmosphere. Nice work.
This is clever! I am not good at it. At least I can enjoy the cute blob art while repeatedly failing to beat an early level. Well done.
This is impressive but confusing—I had a hard time figuring out whether I could actually go through any given doorway. The board shifts are well communicated and I was able to outrun the mummy for a good while at least, though I also couldn’t figure out where I was meant to drop off my gems or what “encumbered”-ness did. As many others said, the visuals are terrific, and the music added some nice atmosphere too. Well done!
This is cool! The art’s beautiful—I love the illustrative style and the choice of palette—and the mechanic is more challenging than it appears at first glance. I couldn’t get past the second level, though: there’s a place near the top center where I kept dying even though it looked like I was still in a fully lit area. The movement direction changing with gravity flips also threw me off in places, though maybe that’s intentionally part of the challenge?
This is clever! It’s pretty hard—I can’t beat level 4 for the life of me, I’m too slow. Very original mechanic though, and the faces the circle makes add a lot of character to it. Nice work.
As others have said, the art’s great—I loved the little swimming animations everyone was doing. Music’s fun too. Nice work!
This is a lot of fun! I found the “gap” cells really confusing—it might have helped to explain what those meant up front—but once I understood that, I had a great time reorganizing things and made it to 47. I appreciated having a preview of the upcoming operations. Nice work!
This is great! Brilliant take on the theme—it’s an aggressively minimalist design and it works really well. It is a little hard to spot the dropped coins while also trying to pay attention to where / when the birds are going to attack, but maybe that’s intended as part of the challenge?
This is almost frighteningly ambitious for a jam game. Lovely artwork and great choice of sounds / music—even without much to do but walk around, I had a thoroughly relaxing time just walking around. Outstanding work.
I love the art! Sort of a graphic-novel style with some really nice little touches—I loved the glint on the screws as they came out. Kinda had a feeling where the story was going after the first box, but I enjoyed the payoff. I’ve never beaten one of these puzzle-box games and now I can say that I have!
Thanks for all the comments, everyone! Really appreciate y’all taking the time to play it.
@vidarn, it worked out pretty well but I wasn’t doing anything fancy asset-wise—the butterfly model is just a single unrigged mesh with a bunch of data packed into the channels of the vertex colors. If you’re curious and have a commercial version of Houdini, the .hiplc is in the source-code repository in the “assets” folder :slight_smile:
This is charming and hard! I only made it to wave 12—it got impossible to defend with my steadily shrinking hoard. I found myself wishing I had a better way to gather it back together, but I guess as a dragon I don’t have opposable thumbs. :sweat_smile: Nice work!
Condolences on having to start over—that’s rough! Your cats are adorable but I’ll admit I was aghast the first time I missed catching one :cry: Music was very charming. Hope things go more smoothly for your next game!
I’m a sucker for the neon aesthetic so I had to check this out. It’s fun and meditative—I like games that just give you something to engage with and experience, without pushing you towards a particular goal. Could have used some more variety in the environment: I enjoyed jumping the ramp things, but once I’d jumped a few it felt like I’d reached the end of the verbs I had available. Great music. Well done!
This is unbelievably good. Super novel and delightful mechanic, beyond-charming art (my skull’s wince as I kicked it was a nice touch), whimsical and engaging sound and music, clever puzzle design… just extraordinary. One of the most polished LD games I’ve ever seen. Bravo.
Fun and minimalist—I too hit the issue where the enemies could glitch through walls, but I was mostly able to keep away from them anyway. Loved the music. Nice work!
Simple but fun—the art is really charming, as is the magnet-ing animation and its corresponding sound effects. Well done!
This was interesting! Very polished and atmospheric. The inspection mechanics worked well once I figured out how to use them. Unfortunately I can’t read Russian so I didn’t have a way to learn anything about what was going on… but that’s my fault for never having learned Russian :sweat_smile:
This is terrifically impressive! Love the art and writing—I couldn’t believe how much flavor text (ha) you had in the Candypedia, and I enjoyed the names of my opponents and their bits of dialogue. Gameplay-wise, it felt smooth and polished but a little unbalanced (which is something I’ve always had trouble with in my games)—it might have felt like there were higher stakes if some of the NPCs had a way to take **my** candy rather than only the other way around. I did end up with an F because I bought a bunch of upgrades, but at least I had a cat photo to console myself with. Lovely work.
As yet another person with very bad short-term memory this was a bit of a nightmare :see_no_evil: Good mechanics though! I think with a smaller board I would have had an easier time keeping track of things and been able to engage with the upgrade path a bit more—it seems like there’s an interesting balance to strike between using the more numerous lower-level tiles to upgrade vs. using the already-upgraded higher-level tiles. Well done!
This is really well done! You did a great job of turning a couple of common mechanics into something unique—I can’t think of another game I’ve encountered that played like this. I liked the sort of pseudo-retro animations: the bits of meat turning at the same low frame rate but with different timings was a neat quirk. The F button mechanic was very helpful and I think more games should adopt it. Nice work!
Clever! Simple, but surprising fun. I couldn't figure out how to do anything at first - some feedback when trying to make an impossible move (or just instructions on how to play) would be helpful - but once I did, I liked it. Feels almost meditative. Nice work!
This is superb! Feels incredibly well-polished; there's nothing more or less in it than there needs to be. Catchy music, approachable but challenging gameplay, charming art style... great work.
This is clever! Tough genres to combine, but it works - this could be really interesting against a human player. Really solid artwork too; looks like you put a lot of time into it. Nice work!
This is brilliant and impossible - I threw 41 cards at the first hole and got maybe three of them anywhere near it. Great idea, impeccably executed, and exactly as difficult (and compelling) as it would be in real life. Fantastic work.
This is really well done and I am god-awful at it, but that's the case for real-world foosball as well so... points for accuracy, haha. Fun idea! Could stand to be sped up a little - I spent a lot of time watching the ball lazily make its way down the side of the field - but with some tuning this would be a great challenge.
This is delightful! The art is amazing - the main character's animation never gets old and I really dig the Far Side-esque petulant cow. I couldn't figure out how to get the delivery mechanic to work - I successfully sent the truck off once, then it came back and wouldn't take anything else I offered it - but the minigames were fun and well-executed. Great work.
This is fantastic! Love the concept and it's impeccably well executed. Great music too. Nice work!
This is really good! I didn't find it too difficult - got to maybe the fourth or fifth level without issue. I did a typing game too, and your word list seems a lot more interesting than mine; where'd you get it?
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I’m planning to add sound in one of the post-jam updates, and I might do another pass on the music too—it’s starting to grate on me :)
@mrspeaker, I’ll get a Mac build up ASAP—unfortunately UE4’s Mac performance is pretty rough so I may have to take an axe to the visuals.
This is so unsettling, in the best possible way - I feel as disoriented as I would be playing actual baseball, and nearly as uncomfortable as I'd be in actual Hell. Great sound effects and great concept - I made it to one base and then died, but who's counting? :)
This is great! Fun concept and fun to play. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the upbeat music with the desolate setting. Nice truck physics too - I don't think I've played anything that let me dodge and jump with a mail truck before. :)
This is clever! Nice genre-mashup, with a good frame story. The intro sequence goes on a little long, but it's fun once you get into it. I had a hard time judging timings; it might be helpful to have some indication of how fast your drone actually travels (even just a marker for "this distance = 1 second"). It's a good challenge though; nice work.
Wow, this is a challenge - my first half-dozen attempts ended in falling off the map while running away from something, and most of the rest getting mobbed by the little ground enemies. I could see having a lot of fun with it if I were better at it, though; the level design is really well done.
This is cute! Great pixel art. I like it much better than the original.
Okay, I'm a huge sucker for the TRON neon aesthetic so that's what first drew me in, but even aside from that this is a great game. Clever idea, challenging to play, and well polished. Nice work!
Holy crap, this is fantastic - easily the best game of this jam I've played so far. Great concept and very well executed. The zombie-shooting gets a little repetitive, but the cooking part keeps its charm - I really enjoyed the little rhythm mini-game. I hit a bug eventually where I couldn't drop any meat on the grill, which sadly put an end to my burger career, but everything up to that point was tremendous fun.
This is exquisite. For something so classically violent, it gets almost meditative after a while. The progression is well-designed - gets a little easy after a while with the right upgrades, but that's satisfying in itself. The graphics are great and the sound effects are satisfying; could use music, but it works without. One of the best games I've played from this jam. Fantastic job.
This is cool! A lot of songs seem to end up with really wide empty spaces or areas with no blue pick-up things, but for some of them it works well. I liked the brightly-colored minimalist vibe. Nice work.
Great aesthetic - clever way to make it visually interesting within the time constraint of the jam. Platforming's fun, though the controls are a little finicky - it would be nice to have more air control, I spent ages jumping from one side to another trying to get to one of the collectibles. Fantastic music. Nice work!
I love this! It starts out so whimsical and gets incredibly creepy as you go farther down - the sound definitely enhances that. The core movement mechanic works really well too. Great job!
Great idea! It's fun, though it gets repetitive after a while - as a few other folks mentioned, some kind of difficulty curve would be good. Fantastically catchy music. Nice work!
This is well done! It's a clever concept, and really well built for your first jam and in so short a time. It doesn't seem to get any harder over time - that'd be a good thing to add to it - but it's a solid foundation and fun as it is. Nice work!
Clever combination of ideas - the enemy attacks felt a little unbalanced, but it's still a fun challenge. Nice work.
This is excellent! Great combination of ideas, perfect execution. The pixel art's on-point, as are the music and the sound effects. This would do really well as a mobile game, if you feel like taking it that direction. Nice work!
Clever! I like this better than the RTSs I've played - it feels like it's more about planning your next move than constantly reacting to disasters. I couldn't get the research cards to play, for some reason - clicking one and clicking on the yellow clipboard just made a staticky noise and put the card back. Regardless, though, nicely done!
Absolutely fantastic visuals - I love the kind of Seuss-ian vibe of the trees, and the forest creatures are charmingly whimsical too (though that didn't stop them from getting stuck in my car's bumper). I didn't get much of an RPG feel from it - maybe they could have started bits of NPC dialog as you hit them? "Howdy, traveler, I -" "You must help us -" "I need -"...
Regardless, it's fun and the whole thing is really well polished; nice work!
This is cute! I love the art style. Not entirely sure I got what was going on - I grabbed an apple more or less by accident, then got in the way of another car until the meter on top of it filled. The idea seems like it has some fun potential. Nice job.
This is fun! Great combination of ideas, and I really dig the music and the pixel art. Nice work!
This is fantastic! It’s so tense. Love the sound effects (I’m always extolling the power of mouth-Foley) and the music, and the aesthetic is sharp—I think the combination of high resolution + high frame rate + bloom really elevates the simple graphics. The levels are challenging but don’t feel unfair (thank you for not including those). Terrific work.
This is impressive for a compo game! I agree it’s a bit hard to control, but difficulty tuning for something that you yourself have been playing all weekend is always tough—I’ve put up plenty of games that turned out to be unreasonably hard for anyone else to play :sweat_smile: Nice work.
This is beautiful! Really terrific art—I loved the little transitional poses that you catch a glimpse of when you successfully figure out how to progress. I still have it open on my other screen as I’m writing this and I’m enjoying the soundtrack; usually the music in a jam game is “there” at best, but you made something that’s pleasant to to listen to in its own right. Very well done.
I like the premise and the circuit mechanics, but I agree time pressure on a puzzle like this is pretty rough—I think it might have helped to have a first few levels with unlimited time so people can figure out how things work, **then** introduce the timer. Or maybe have the first few resets give you the same puzzle again so you can get the solution in place if you were close to getting it. Still, it’s a fun challenge once you get the idea down. Nice work.
@indigowolf I always end up doing a bunch of shader work to save myself from having to do UV mapping or animation :sweat_smile: A couple of the ones I’m using here depend on data baked into the mesh vertex colors and normals—for instance the artifact has the corner and “ring” areas marked in the red and green channels respectively, while the sort of ribbony mesh that bursts out of it when you solve one is a copy of the corner/ring geometry with “direction-to-move-while-bursting” baked into its normals. I’m planning to put up a development timelapse thing where you should be able to catch the Houdini graphs involved if you’re curious.
@steveofstevesgames That’s actually farther than I’ve ever gotten… once I verified that the mechanics worked I had to focus on getting the rest of it together. :slight_smile: Thanks for playing!
@wo-ri-gou-le Glad you liked it! Definitely does need more tutorialization—the progression stuff went in in the last ten minutes or so so it is super not tuned. I hope to add some better explanation in a post-jam version.
@goodwayman + @jpat Thanks! I’m amazed it works as well as it does on mobile, honestly. Didn’t have time to even add symbols to the buttons, but I hoped it would be clear enough just from poking at it.
@wo-ri-gou-le They’re generated at run time from a fixed random seed value—that was working for a while, the last-minute logic was just for the rate at which it adds layers of lenses. I was originally planning to have a couple of curated ones as a tutorial before it handed you off to the randomization… but plans and the compo are always a bit at odds :upside_down:
Thanks, all! Glad to hear it’s the right amount of challenging; it’s always hard to gauge difficulty when you’ve been playing the game yourself all weekend. I appreciate that y’all liked the graphics too—that’s always the most fun part to work on so I’m happy that the results are appealing.
This is hilarious! I love it, and I absolutely can’t argue with your reasoning re: compo vs. jam. Great drawings and impeccable sound effects. It seems I’m not ready to be a parent: I thought perhaps filling the crib with grapes would work but got a -42% comfort rating, which… fair :sweat_smile:
I like the premise of this a lot, and the presentation is good, but I really struggled to play it successfully—when I managed to complete a code it was usually almost by accident. I think making it a little slower would help, as would being able to see whether you’re actually lined up to catch something or not. Maybe the game could project incoming pieces to your hitbox and show you what the piece you’re currently lined up with will do to your assembled bits? There’s definitely something fun here, it might just need a more gradual learning curve.
This is clever! I found it really challenging with such a small board, but there’s probably some better strategy that I haven’t been able to find yet. Love the illustrations (the “engineer friends” are a great way to give that mechanic more character), and the animation’s very juicy as others have said—I liked the cartoony zoom lines when tossing things onto the board. Nice work.
This is interesting! I went through about a dozen levels and could sort of feel it starting to tickle my brain’s “develop an intuition for the structure of this puzzle” lobe. I was a little perplexed by the progression though—it would give me a series of interesting ones followed by a trivial “you have one beacon and the relays are connected in a straight line” one. Procedural generation could have used some more tuning, maybe. I agree that the sound design is very satisfying. Well done.
There’s a lot more depth to this than there appears at first glance; I was delighted when it introduced the “love yourself” mechanic because that adds so many possible wrinkles to the puzzles. The art’s minimalist but it works—I appreciated that you kind of elevated the pixel art with the fluid motion and drop shadows. Nice work.
This is great. Quite challenging in an old-school-platformer kind of way, but it didn’t feel unfair. Loved the writing—caught me off guard several times in a row—and the art is super charming as well. I think you’re fine theme-wise, I’ve played plenty of games that were way less “signal”-y. Nice work!
This is really cool! It does a great job of communicating the puzzle mechanics—it’s obvious what each piece does and how the timing works, so the challenge is just solving the actual problem rather than (as with many puzzle games) figuring out what’s even going on first. I think a lot of people would play a polished-up version of this. Great work.
This is so nicely done! Agreed that the wood-block art style is delightful, and the loop of managing the train signals is chill and meditative until it abruptly isn’t :sweat_smile: I found the economy a little punishing—it takes a long time to unlock the additional train which makes things more interesting, and having the trains collide knocks your balance down really quickly. Could use some adjustment there I think. Still, it’s a super charming and fun concept. Great work.
This is great! It’s a clever twist on the genre—reminds me a little of Grindstone, which I played a ridiculous amount of back in the day, and I could spend a ton of time with this as well. The art’s simple but polished and appealing, and the music does a nice job of setting the mood (and doesn’t feel repetitive, which is always the problem I have with making game music). Super impressive for 12 hours’ work. Well done!
This seems super promising! I got far enough to get more emails, at least, but past that I settled for reading your (fascinating) postmortem. Really liked the choice of depicting entropy with combustion—that seems like it would be really broadly useful, though of course nothing is perfectly unambiguous. Would love to play a more fleshed-out version of this. Well done.
This is terrifically well done, and **so** polished for a compo game! Adorable art and great music + sound effects (I’m always happy to see another “record mouth sounds and stuff-lying-around” person, it’s my favorite way to do sound effects). I also appreciate just from an urban-planning-philosophy stance that green means “walk” not “drive”. More communities should be designed like this one, crime chicks notwithstanding. Favorite game I’ve played in this LD so far, and there’s some stiff competition. Lovely work.
This is fantastic. Terrifically original and hilarious concept, absolutely on-theme, great choice of music… I do agree the controls seem backwards (in my head I’m signaling “cars go this direction” but the game takes it as “cars in this direction can go”), but even with that issue, I could play this for ages. Outstanding.
I had a hard time figuring this out—I got the first tower hooked up and replenished my relays, but after that I wandered around for a long time and never heard the tower noise again. I saw a few other destination boxes, but no towers to connect them to. Maybe I missed something? It definitely might have helped to make this easier to navigate, but I do like the premise and I’m always a fan of hand-drawn art. Well done.
This is clever! I like how the mechanics interact—the frequency-shifting thing makes you choose more carefully which cards to play. Well done.
I’m afraid I had to give up out of confusion too, but I do have to note that I like the sound effects themselves (even though I couldn’t figure out what to do with them) and the art—the opening cutscene with the UFO arrival was charming. Good job on that front.
This is interesting! I expected to run across a few “tune into the signal”-type games but the addition of the things-to-avoid on the screen was a good twist on it. It did get a little repetitive after a while and I kept hoping for an unexpected turn in the message… but I do think there’s something fun here, maybe as a mechanic in a larger game. Nice work.
This is really charming! Love the art style, and the music (even though I realize you didn’t make it) does an excellent job of setting the mood. The van’s fun to drive even though I’m constantly bumping into things. I agree with the others who’ve said that some more tutorialization would have helped—I’m still not sure I grasp all of the mechanics—but I have the same problem in basically all of my compo games so I can hardly fault you there :slight_smile: Nice work!
Wow this is hard! Even once I got used to the key mapping, it’s a lot to parse at once. It’s a fun challenge though. Feels like a retro game gadget from the 90s. Well done!