minotalen

Aleph Qoph / Duat by ancient-pixel 2021-04-27T13:59:29Z

ooh wow so I walked for what felt like 20 minutes and am not sure at all whether the oasis is real (I believe it is). The graphics were very much my aesthetic, I just love meshes with gritty pixel art. Also it ran really smooth on my potato computer. The 'mutliplayer' gave me some Journey vibes, could imagine the tech in combination with some proximity-based conference tech (like Workadventure) to work for virtual meetups even.

None of my seeds sprouted, I guess I should have persevered and continued further. As much as I like the meditative aspect of that, I think for a jam game you should take into account the mind-space of the players which is 'I want to play and rate many games' and reduce the experience to be digestible in 10-15 minutes. You might be underestimating the (sadly short) attention span of the average player.

Anyway it's beautiful, even if I didn't get to see the flowers!

Aleph Qoph / Duat by ancient-pixel 2021-04-27T14:29:38Z

I feel like words could be 'synthesized' when mingling with other players perhaps, that might be cool!

Fetal Fury by Squidly 2021-04-28T03:03:08Z

Ha yeah have to agree, feeling strong newgrounds/isaac vibes from this one. The sound design is quite good and it's one of the few games where I feel like the category humor is actually applicable. One thing that didn't quite sit with me was that there is an incentive not to fight enemies. You could try starting with less time and giving a small time increment when you beat an enemy. Nonetheless it was some fun runs and the game feels quite polished, you can tell that some love went into making it feel good. I might have another go rn :)

Rooted by Webox 2021-04-28T18:45:14Z

Really sweet gfx! At first I thought 'oh how is this a puzzle' but the difficulty ramped up quickly enough. One thing I was missing a bit was an undo button. Impressive work for solo development though :)

Rooted by Webox 2021-04-28T22:52:44Z

@webox btw I found your game by trying to find other root games. Ours also has a root system, but they don't behave like yours do ;) Might steal the idea of having water veins, those are cool. Also you might want to check out the thinky-puzzle-games discord, they talk about puzzles 24/7 there!

Micronaut by healthire 2021-05-13T15:49:40Z

Cool stuff, strongly reminded me of Patrick's Parabox which I assume has been a strong influence. It would be nice if you had credited this creator inspiration, but maybe my assumtion is just wrong. Had a good time nonetheless!

Micronaut by healthire 2021-05-14T01:10:28Z

@healthire guess sometimes it happens that games are weirdly similar! Sorry for complaining then. I really like what you did with the game mechanic, the restriction of only being able to go deeper makes it suit the theme well.

Deep Roots by myrmyxo 2021-04-27T23:53:19Z

Heck yeah, that was a sweet puzzle mechanic. Was also quite fond of the pixel art! The menu font is a bit too wonky for my taste. In some levels I wished that I had undo, but that's daunting to implement, so I understand why you didn't :) Another small detail is that I skipped a level at some point and couldn't see which, because the level select doesn't show which level was solved. Still a really cool root game, if you like puzzle games you might enjoy joining the thinky-puzzle-discord, folks are talking about puzzles there like, all the time!

Ocelot Safari by pancelor 2021-04-27T13:12:31Z

Oh wow what cute pesky creatures! All my deaths were from locking myself in accidentally, and I deserved them all <3 'cutting corners' was a nice tool mechanic that I would like to see again in some other game!

Hello, user. by Totteri 2021-04-28T00:10:41Z

Hey, I just made it until the pong game. Have to say that the game ran really slow somehow, like the text scroll and everyt movement felt very sloggy. Don't think it was my PC. I think if you can, you should increase the tick speed by something drastic like 1.5x. Players during LD rating have a kind of short attention span I think ;) Will refrain from rating the game for now and give it another go if you upload a build with faster tick speed (afaik it's alright to make small adjustments).

Hello, user. by Totteri 2021-04-28T00:57:35Z

ha awesome I will play as soon as my windows is updated, so a few hours perhaps?

Spread Your Roots by Scott Cooper 2021-04-28T00:15:34Z

Hey uhm, something seems wrong with the viewport, you could try checking the 'enable fullscreen' option on itch or just running it directly in full screen! I'd really like to try it :3

Love Under the Robot Junkyard by frogmen 2021-04-27T14:02:25Z

Nice choice of colors, love the muted olive.

Brain Dive by ForestOfCode 2021-04-28T01:55:34Z

Hey uhm folks I found the game by googling "Brain Dive by EnderWarpify" ;D

Into the Abyss by oeschmid 2021-04-28T01:48:35Z

Hey, I did all the levels except for #6 which completely eludes me oO The mechanic itself was sweet, especially enjoyed minimalist levels like #9, where you just explore isolated quirks of the mechanics. In terms of level design, level 6 and 7 were a bit too claustrophobic in my opinion. It feels to me like you created a space that still has some nooks and crannies left to be explored, would love to play a post-jam version of this. Your graphics are cute (player char quite sus though) and you did well with the 5x5 limitation. One resource that personally helped me a lot with PS is the thinky-puzzle-games discord, they possess lots of 'unwritten knowledge' about the language and are generally quite helpful folks!

Thanks a bunch for the sweet comment you left under our game, it took 2 years and many projects for someone to finally call something I made art and I suppose the feels were worth it :')

Johnny Dreams Bad by JacobRutter 2021-05-03T17:09:03Z

Really sweet for a first jam, thanks for making it.

Blue Square and the Mystery Cave by asdehielo 2021-04-28T17:21:56Z

Hey, this was really sweet. I usually dislike blind jumps, but since the checkpoints are frequent it's not such a bother to fall straight into spikes. !> The dark stage at the end and the ending in general were really cool!

[HTML5] Bodenhorizont by minotalen 2021-04-27T02:54:23Z

to run the PuzzleScript source, you need to go to: https://dario-zubovic.github.io/PuzzleScript/editor.html

[HTML5] Bodenhorizont by minotalen 2021-04-27T14:41:05Z

@frogmen yeah the big flowers charge your cursor and allow you to place a crossing once. This helps reach places when out of options :)

@valden yeah making it in PS was a bit of a challenge, ended up disabling a helpful visual feedback animation in favor of game performance. I'm just a really big fan of portmanteaus, that's how frustraZen happened.

@rubentipparach there is a way to travel faster, but I don't want to spoil it here :P

[HTML5] Bodenhorizont by minotalen 2021-04-27T18:47:57Z

hehe @lone-wolf that might be a bit of a spoiler (: glad you had fun!

[HTML5] Bodenhorizont by minotalen 2021-04-28T18:52:06Z

@link270 yeah tbh I was not sure if this game would work well with streaming because usually jam games are designed to be digested/consumed in 5-15 minutes. This is amplified on-stream, when you suddently have a queue of devs waiting it can easily happen that a game that is not 'fast-food' falls through the cracks. It was really fun to see how you started fast, almost mashing keys and then slowed down, planning your steps more carefully. Nice also that you were kinda sharing knowledge between each other. I regret backseatgaming and explaining tricks, helped me figure out that discovering the how the root system functions may be an important part of the experience, but perhaps it was for the best since streaming a bunch of games reduces patience. Thanks again for playing, glad to know that the message gets through, even in a bit of a rush ;)

[HTML5] Bodenhorizont by minotalen 2021-04-28T23:20:12Z

@nusan thanks, accidentally skipping choices is a feedback I have gotten regularly. I will try to create a fix for it, but it's a bit tricky in PS :D But yeah, post-jam version should be up in a few days.

edit: took forever but it's done!

[HTML5] Bodenhorizont by minotalen 2021-05-12T00:26:04Z

Just realized I was so busy that I forgot to respond for a while, so here we go:

@bokonon glad poking at the system was fun for you, wish I could do the same. Maybe one day I'll lose my memory and get to 'explore' instead of 'exploit' my system haha.

@danframe aww yes that ledge was a bit too sadistic, it has been widened in the post-jam version. In general I have tried to make the game a bit more forgiving this time around.

@fis sorry that happened to you and thanks for reporting it, fix is coming up with the next build <3

@notan-lemon Thank you for playing, 'meditative' was certainly one of the goals :)

@jrevel thanks for the kind works. Maybe it is because I designed the system, but tbh a good portion of my runs now end with me having reached everything, so the 'lack of control' is partially also a 'lack of intimacy with the system'. I admit though that it is much tougher to understand the system when it is presented to you without explicit rules.

@wizard-sino getting a 'bad seed' at the start is certainly a flaw in the jam version. Sometimes I shout at the game: "Let me get there or else, I made you", but that also doesn't seem to help! I hope we have improved on the issue of bad starts in the post-jam version, the game will still sometimes hurt you in tragic ways though, sorry.