Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → sakura_magika
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Happy Tree Harvest | jam | 225 | 3.76 | 3.48 | 3.98 | 4.58 | 3.36 | 3.61 | 3.25 | 3.86 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | The Itsy Bitsy Jumper | jam | 422 | 3.73 | 3.84 | 3.66 | 3.54 | 3.40 | 3.70 | 3.41 | 3.39 | ||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Plip-plop! Unstable Conditions of Care | jam | 771 | 3.50 | 3.65 | 3.76 | 3.77 | 3.15 | 3.53 | 3.75 | 3.47 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Thrice Upon A Time | jam | 825 | 3.57 | 3.21 | 3.26 | 3.58 | 3.73 | 3.61 | 3.08 | 3.60 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Plague Friend's Deathly Journey | jam | 711 | 3.57 | 3.40 | 3.59 | 3.97 | 3.50 | 3.70 | 3.58 |
sakura_magika leaves an average of 35.8 feedback comments each event.
i think the art was really cute! music had a good mix of cute and exciting.
very interesting hybrid gameplay of typing and click and drag. definitely got overwhelming over time, and i button mashed to no avail.
instead of gathering resources to build up time, i think it would have been cool if it built up the bomb meter, and when you filled it up you could clear screen, instead of right clicking to stun, which feels kind of arbitrary.
wow, you made touhou, nice! the controls felt too sensitive and jumpy for me. the "time halving" mechanic honestly felt unnecessary, like it didn't really add much or change how i played the game, i think a normal life system would have worked just fine.
some feedbacks: * i like the idea of slowly losing your vision, creates a good mood * please list the controls, i had to press a lot of random buttons to figure out attacking and movement * the movement dynamics could use some work, there's too much acceleration and deceleration, makes everything feel floaty and imprecise. * enemies walked inside/on top of me, and i move too slowly to get them out, so that was a really frustrating way to die. * could use some kind of visual / audio confirmation when i actually land a hit on the enemies
i really like the atmosphere you created here, with the music and shifting portrait visuals, and the loneliness of this old man in his office, i just wish the gameplay felt less random.
if you're going for true immersion into the role, then maybe the answers can be more obviously right or wrong, and more obviously connected to the narrative.
or you could make it less about reading into the individual caller's stories, and more "gamey", like have one or two key words in the text that are colored red/blue/yellow/green and it's more about matching the colors, with some kind of time limit.
i like how all the various parts come together! managing warmth, the fire, rocks, and gathering food feel varied.
i think the narrative was cool, but involved a few too many concepts, like druids and highborns and whatnot, my favorite parts were the grounded, more present aspects, but i appreciate the world building through narrative!
this was... a surreal experience, especially with the voice sound effects. you definitely captured a particular mood of a toilsome inane office job. i found myself feeling a lot of mental whiplash muxing "accept / reject" with "correct / incorrect".
thanks for making my day stranger!
combining arrow button dodging with mouse point and clicking, is an interesting idea, but it is pretty stressful to split attention and split control mechanics. innovative, but quite "fun".
good job with the art, theme, and metaphor with gameplay!
what a lovely and fascinating game! i love the art and character design. the rope / bag physics was so much fun. the movement dynamics felt good too.
got the climber achievement!
it's visually pretty interesting, gaining or losing points felt totally random to me. i could keep clicking on two squares, and sometimes i would lose points, other times i would gain points. at no point did i feel like i had control or understanding of the points. i understand the theory of the game, to gain points my moving pixels to the other side, but in practice, it just felt random.
an interesting experience, the practical sfx were a bit unsettling, yet a bit cute, and the background visuals were far too noisy, made it pretty tiring to look at.
i liked cycling the racers to give them breaks, i think more could be done with having three racers, to add some puzzle elements to the platforming.
the level design was interesting, i think the sloped surfaces were too ambiguous though, some of them looked pretty steep, but i could still slam my way up them, while others are too steep to climb. having a consistent visual language about what is and isn't climbable would make it more playable.
this is by far my favorite LD50 game. i think you took a very uninspiring theme and made something wonderful, playing as a dark souls boss! i love the visuals, character design, and game design. especially that the boss even has three phases! having the ranged attack become more powerful over time was such a cool touch.
i found the melee attack to be very unreliable, rarely actually making contact. it seemed to me like it never hit all the way to the ground. also, it was a bit unintuitive at first that i couldn't turn around without jumping or attacking. i guess it makes sense, because i might want to backup without turning my back on paige, but i found myself several times wishing i could turn around right away, and paige was going back and forth so it was hard to stay facing her. but, i suppose that's pretty common behavior / strategy for a dark souls boss, so i guess its quite fitting!
i made it to level 16. at that point, it seemed like there wasn't any more unique dialogue, so i just let paige kill me without doing anything. that was actually a pretty interesting experience. as i just sat there, so did paige, for like 30 seconds. then she attacked me a few times, and then just sat there again. in the end, it took her quite a while to defeat me, with a few pokes in between long periods of just standing there doing nothing. it was rather emotional experience, it felt like in the end, she didn't really want to kill me, and i didn't want to kill her. i don't know if this was intentional or not, but it was very moving.
i found that my best strategy was backing myself into the right hand wall and use ranged attacks. paige didn't seem to do very well with that, it seemed like she was pretty confused about where to find and attack me: Screen Shot 2022-04-20 at 11.42.39 AM.png
thank you so much for such a wonderful game!
this was really fun! like peaceful, wholesome version of badlands. i like the visuals and BGM, but the fisherman's voices were rather startling, a bit too dark and gruff for the rest of the atmosphere.
i'm really impressed with how all the level pieces come together, it feels very organic.
i think i hit the "boss fight" area you just mentioned, where the screen paused and there were several sharks, before it really sped up again. i think that's a cool mechanic to have, but it was really confusing to me when it happened. maybe having a countdown timer some sort of visual indicator that this area is special would help. also, the second level is crazy fast and difficult! i died so quickly, heheh. i think a slower curve up would be nice, it felt kind of jarring to the atmosphere of the game for it to suddenly become so much more difficult.
i had one run where i was absolutely showered with new schools of fish, and then the following run was extremely sparse, so i think a good refinement would be to control the randomness a bit.
also, i appreciate that sometimes there are bonus schools of fish in the outlet or sidepath streams, but i felt like, since most of them are just deadend deathtraps, it was never worth trying to go into one to get more fish.
this was really fun! i love the visuals and animation. in my first run i didn't even realize i could refill the balloons with apple gas and died quite quickly. in my second run i tried to run a bare minimum ship with just two apple peons, and made it like 4 minutes.
in my final run, i believe i beat the game. i rushed the propeller with 3 peons, 1 miner, and 2 iron miners. after getting the propeller, i got a gunman, and spent the extra iron and stone i was accumulating on castle upgrade, although i don't think that was necessary, as it felt sustainable even with just the three peons.
however, with the upgrades, i bought a couple more fighters, and filled the rest with peons, and at that point, i could sustain the balloons well over the drain rate. iron and stone continued to accumulate pointlessly.
i think using an exponential curve for the balloon drain rate would have added a sense of urgency, and inevitability, since it would eventually become impossible to keep up with. but it felt satisfying to know that i reached the point where i could keep my adorable little islanders alive forever.
cute graphics, i was surprised the first time a monster came out of the astroid. after that though, it felt a bit too easy and boring, there was only ever one astroid at a time, and it was not at all challenging to pick them off, then pick the bugs off. i think having the astroid spawn rate increase over time would have felt more engaging, then just flat-ending the game with the big astroid.
also, sometimes a glowing thing pops out of the astroids, but i couldn't interact with them. what are they for?
i like the colors and character design and the movement dynamics felt solid.
played through to the end, you definitely made an interesting piece.
feedback for gameplay: have some kind of feedback for the player when the game detects either a YES or NO gesture. not knowing if i correctly gave the input, combined with the already psycho nature of the dialogue, made me unsure whether it was actually getting my YES or NO response. like, i thought i gave the "right" answer, but the AI just got mad at my anyways, so i wasn't sure if that's just the narrative, or if i didn't input correctly.
feedback for narrative: the ending made the journey feel pointless, like, i might as well have just not done anything, the outcome would have been the same. maybe that's what you're going for to try to be on theme (and let me just say, the theme sucks, very uninspiring), but it's definitely a negative player experience for me, to essentially get a bad end even when making it all the way through by (presumably) answering correctly each time.
i made it! what a cheeky ending.
a very cute little game! i think a really fun change would be to make the poo meter slowly fill up over time, to give a sense of urgency, and force the player to solve each puzzle on a time limit! and it would feel more grounded given the premise of the game (i was actually surprised the meter didn't fill up on its own), to add an additional challenge!
i think the puzzle / level design was well done, it wasn't super intuitive at first that you could scooch through seats vertically but not horizontally, i just assumed they were also impassable objects, until i was forced to b the level design, so good job in teaching that mechanic through gameplay.
this is a most unique and fascinating entry! combining realtime movement with card playing / deck building is a really cool idea! i personally don't like using the mouse with the arrow keys at the same time for this game, i think having keyboard bindings for playing the cards would feel a lot better (kind of like using character abilities in action games), like maybe A/D to fall, and GHJKL for cards to keep it all on the home row.
i honestly think trying to align to the theme is really holding your game down. i think its a really bad theme, very uninspiring, encourages making bland unoriginal arcade games. i think the concept/system you came up with would be much more interesting for a platformer, or something with a bit more action.
the gameplay really didn't feel connected to the action taking place in the game. reminds me of the "learn to touch type" games i played in elementary school.
i strongly having some kind of feedback for pressing the buttons correctly and incorrectly, otherwise i have no idea if i'm doing well or not as i play.
i don't know if this is a good score or not, but here it is... Screen Shot 2022-04-11 at 6.15.41 PM.png
wow! this is seriously impressive, its so fun to watch the warriors go out and attack. i love the music and art!
well, that was surreal. i think i put on all of the clothes / interacted with the crab things, but it still gave me the "you're forgetting something" when i went outside. i was kinda expecting the character to be wearing the crab clothing and accessories.
it was pretty frustrating not being able to skip the crab starwars intro sequence, which i'm guessing was intentional, but still not a good experience, especially the second time. i ended up closing the tab after pressing many buttons.
thanks for making my day a little weirder!
i absolutely love this game, the visuals, music, and concept are just wonderful! how fun, to make my own Howl's Sailing Boat.
i had a lot of fun building a monstrosity of a boat, though it didn't do nearly as well as some of the others posted here!
absolutely excellent work!
Screen Shot 2022-04-11 at 3.41.46 PM.png Screen Shot 2022-04-11 at 3.41.57 PM.png
feels a lot like hades. i never really understood what fuel was supposed to do, does it just slowly drain as you play, and you need to pick up fuel and bring it to the generator?
very innovative idea for a really uninspiring theme!
does the way the player plays the game have any bearing on the MC patience, or is it just a straight time limit for your speech?
my run's favorite quote was: Screen Shot 2022-04-11 at 3.15.52 PM.png
this was a lot of fun, but i wasn't able to save the world after many tries : (
for being on theme, i guess it's impossible to save the earth, the games just keep on coming?
and while i get that forcing humans to play warriowares for no good reason is the point, i think the premise of "being ungrateful" and "horrible sins" feels like its trying too hard to come up with a reason. i think it would be more believable if the aliens were more upfront about it, like "hello lowly humans, we're bored so we're gonna force you to play these games or we'll destroy your planet."
wonderful job with the art, animation, and sound effects! i love the old school orchestral sci-fi feel! really impressive polish!
feedbacks: * intro text should be 2x as fast, or have a button to skip individual dialogues instead of the whole thing. * i was never able to pass the safe. it's clockwise, counterclockwise past and then to, then clockwise again right? i found it incredibly difficult to move to the right number (playing in a track pad). most frustrated by this one. * minesweeper - difficult to see where to click, and difficult over all! * difficulty scaling on the egg scramble is rough, after the first one, i had eggs already falling as soon as the game began, and spawning so far apart it feels impossible to catch them both.
it's a cute game, i wanted to take down the "big gunship" type enemies at first, but i found their health too high and their homing bombs too powerful, so i learned to just run away from them.
the world felt pretty sparse over all, and i felt like i needed to search for more enemies to kill. maybe that's what you're going for, with the idea of trying to survive, and not dry up, but i think it would be more fun to have more enemies.
i think the spikes ones were my favorite since they're not difficult to avoid the shots and give lots of points/health.
i saw a few power ups here and there, but i never felt like i needed them, or understood what they did. for this genre, i think that weapon modifications would be the most typical, or bombs (screen clear) or a shield.
as for innovation, this felt like a twin stick shooter (ala geometry wars) played mostly straight, with the addition of your constantly decreasing health. when i think about water drops trying to avoid evaporating, and fighting with other water drops, i would have expected some kind of mechanic with merging and growing, looking for smaller drops, avoiding ones bigger than you, and some kind of interaction with contact, instead of firing missiles. currently, it doesn't feel like a water droplet game, it feels like a geometry wars game with a water droplet skin.
good over all polish! i like the droplet font and colors, and subtle animation in the background.
i like the graphics and concept a lot!
i didn't survive that long relative to other players, but that's partially because i realized after a minute that i can mostly just stand still and hold down space, and my engagement dropped a lot.
for gameplay / fun factor, i feel like it only became interesting when the big boulders that split into smaller boulders started flying in. otherwise, i just kept my dinos bunched up to make a decently wide spread, and mostly stayed in one place holding down spacebar. so i was basically really bored for the first few minutes of play.
also, for holding down space bar, it felt like a chore, since there's basically no downside to not holding it down. if there were some kind of energy meter or a bigger cool down, it would provide more incentive to be strategic about it.
at once point i got a cute pink dino that fired laser beams. that was really nice and unexpected! but i think it happens to rarely, another big improvement would be a wider variety of dinos, and having different variations more frequently. but of course, only so much you can do in a game jam.
i agree, CTRL is a pretty unintuitive button to press for an action, i think E makes the most sense for WASD, or Shift for arrow controls.
but honestly, i think it's completely unnecessary for there to be any button press at all. i think it would play much more smoothly to automatically get the bananas. when i'm already concerned with keeping an eye on all the spotlights, i don't want to need to remember to press a button when i finally make it to the bananas.
it felt pretty challenging over all, especial for getting caught to be an instant loss. i think a QOL would be to have three chances, or maybe a timer like 2 seconds to get away if you're under the light.
i like the concept, but this game felt pretty punishing, when an organ is not doing well, ATP lowers, making it harder to heal the organ, a vicious cycle. maybe that's what you were going for, but ultimately it lead to rounds being over pretty quickly, and not much motivation to try again.
i think the visual style and mood are nice.
as for gameplay, a bit more feedback for performing actions would be good. even if its just a little sound, and maybe a visual pop (quick grow/shrink) animation on the relevant organ to make it feel like i'm really doing something when i heal / upgrade.
excellent work! i never expected to find myself so engaged by a cookie clicker game. i made it all the way through!
i won't spoil the ending for everyone else here, but i love the W. S. Maugham quote, really ties it all together. though, honestly, it was pretty disappointing to be hit with a solid color background and some text as the reward for finishing the game, after spending so much time looking at all of the pretty art and animation. i was expecting like a snapshot or something of the girl with her cat and her finished homework, or something to bring the visual story around to a conclusion.
i think you did well in tuning all the numbers. i felt like it was satisfying to figure out the "puzzle" of effective resource allocation.
It was really serene listening to the future funk and watching all the different animation iterations. i felt satisfied with fine tuning this "machine", figuring out where's best to spend resources. it also would have been nice to display the total number of loops it took to reach the end, if anything to compare against other players, or different runs, to see what strategy is more efficient.
i can't say it felt entirely on theme, i think i see what you're going for with the girl and the cat trying to prevent the milk from falling, but it definitely felt a lot more "LD46 - Stuck in a Loop" than delay the inevitable.
but still, it was really fun and cute! especially seeing the evolution of the various world objects through each world. meow!
@peachtreeoath oh my god, i played the Orisinal bunny cloud jumping game! i got those vibes from this too!! i remember letting that game run in the background as i worked in college just to listen to the music.
well, i did my best to place beavers to repair the damn and stem the water flooding, but i got a lot of game overs without really understanding what i did wrong or how i could have done better. is there something more to it than assigning beavers to the choke points?
i liked the attitude / humor in the dialogue. the graphics reminded me of the old "dwarfs" game.
it's an interesting game for sure, i really liked the gameplay mirroring the experience of life throwing all kinds of things at you, and you can try to go towards the good and avoid the bad, but eventually hit the bad.
i like the art and animation, so good job focusing on that. the sound effects were fittingly surreal.
(although i didn't understand why puzzle pieces were bad)
but as far as the game play, it felt much less like delay the inevitable, unless it's inevitably getting board by the game. i got to like 8000 and realized there was no difficulty curve, and no end condition other than deliberately going towards all the and things to kill yourself.
one way to fix it would be to make the base level decrease get exponentially faster, since no matter how many good things you try to go towards to prolong your life, death is inevitable for all of us. then it would feel like i'm actually playing against a challenge. i think it would metaphorically fit as well.
i like the HD 3D / pixel 2D blend of graphics. it seems like for a lot of the repairs, i needed to interact with the display board, instead of the actual machine next to it, which was pretty unintuitive to me.
also, it seemed like i just had to mash spacebar until it went up a decent amount, but when i was doing that for oxygen, it went up to like 30%, then just stopped, and eventually went back down even though i was pressing space bar. i was hearing the little "interaction blip" sound, so i'm not sure what was happening there.
i think more clear indication of where to interact, and the success of interacting would be good. the green light and soft "blip" sound are kind of underwhelming, since pressing interact is the core gameplay. and i think it would feel more interesting and realistic to interact with the machines, not the message boards.
and this is just a nitpick, but having the closed doors seemed like a rather arbitrary impedance to moving about.
i think you did an excellent job with the tutorial being delivered stage by stage, and the music set a great atmosphere, it all felt very immersive.
i didn't expect to die instantly when the blue meter ran out, the heart symbol made me think it would drain just one life point, so that was pretty brutal.
this is just a personal note, but i think "violence is the only answer" is pretty over done in games, and i was looking forward to more puzzles / dodging than just attacking enemies.
i appreciate the derpy visuals and sfx. more than once i really felt like i had shot on target, but still got game over.
i think having 3 lives or something would make it a bit more fun, game over right away feels kind of disruptive.
having the spikes block the air puffs created an interesting challenge. it definitely made the game more of a puzzle that requires lots of trial and error for how to time the puffs to get past the spikes, but the fact that you reset every time was pretty disheartening.
also, i don't see the point of having 3 lives if you reset either way.
it's an interesting concept, but i think that manually using the death bag isn't very fun or intuitive, you're basically incentivizing the player to find an item, put it in the bag, and wait until they die so they can start the run off with it. i think that some kind of automatic "carry items forward through death" would be better, like perhaps a random item you found gets carried to the next run, so your actions from the previous run still effect the next one, but you don't need to spend valuable time tooling around the menu, or give up a precious item that you found.
i like the neon glow visual style! decent over all twin stick shooter gameplay, the physics and movement felt pretty good, and it's fun to use strategies around hiding behind rocks from enemies.
the grab function didn't seem that useful to me, it seems to attract smaller pieces of debris, are you supposed to be able to launch them at enemy ships? or use them to block? with things as hectic as they are, i didn't feel like there was any space to figure out how to use grab.
I think you have a really cool idea here, of becoming more capable as you get older, but also nearing death as you get older, and needing to balance the two. some puzzles require an older form, or some are much easier with an older form, but there's a risk of being older. it adds an element of suspense to exploration.
I was able to explore pretty far in certain parts of the level by getting as far as I could, waiting to age up, then continuing, which was fun, but, in general I didn't feel rewarded for finally getting to the least accessible areas. there would just be like a couple fountains to age me back down, and I was like "well what was the point of waiting to age up to be able to get up here, if all I get is aging back down". I think at the very least a big treasure trove of diamonds would have been nice, but ideally some kind of unique item / encounter. of course, it's a game jam, so that might be asking for too much.
also, at the very far left, upper area, I found a fountain that I couldn't activate by touching it, and a door with a key behind it, but no way of getting around to the side with the key.
I think it was not very clear what the block colors meant. it seems like there are a variety of colors of normal blocks, with no difference between them, and then some other blocks that are damage / death blocks. it was confusing to have damage / death blocks in addition to the spikes and gears, especially because death blocks look so similar to normal blocks. I think it would be clearer what is damaging if you kept all blocks as "safe" and just used them for visual variety, and only had hazards be non-block shaped.
overall, it was a pretty surreal experience, especially with the music. why all the spikes and gears? what's up with the fountains? it made me feel like I (the jelly) am some kind of lab experiment, trapped, eternally trying to not die by staying young.
I looked up Magellan, he's a Portuguese-born navigator? Is he related to Ponce de León? he didn't seem to be mentioned in anything related to the Fountain of Youth.
overall, nice work, I think you're on to something good here, if you refine the level design more! and of course, there's the built-in jankiness of unity physics. slippery on floors, sticky on walls, the opposite of good.
I think you have some cool puzzle design, like needing to hop down to a previous level to get the key, then get back up before running out of breath.
I got stuck behind a wall of boxes several times, and I didn't figure out any way to get unstuck in that situation, which was pretty frustrating. I guess it's an unfortunate gotcha of any physics based game.
I think having some kind of way to recover from that is important for a game like this, maybe kicking or destroying the boxes? otherwise it seems too easy to accidentally / unexpectedly get into a game-over state, just because of the boxes, not the water, and have no choice but to wait until you drown.
having the game in an "always running" state was really confusing to me, i didn't understand why the controls didn't work and i phased through boulders, especially since, on my screen, the text on the bottom that says what the controls are is mostly cut off.
i think the hit boxes on the boulders are too big, i felt like i was constantly dying out of nowhere even though it looked like i had dodged, which was really frustrating.
since there are boulders that are low, i expected there to be some kind of way to jump over them, but it doesn't seem like there is. that could add some variety to the game play.
i also think some kind of score timer would be nice, to track current and high score, otherwise it feels pointless to keep trying.
congratulations on your first LD submission, hope this feedback is helpful!
your pixel art style reminds me of Curse of Monkey Island era computer games, when they were pixel-y, but really trying to look painterly, this lovely in-between time before games became HD, but after they left the confines of 8 bit.
it was a cute and mildly disturbing experience to be a sentient meatball being chased by the dog. i made it 45 seconds.
i'm guessing the doggy fun meter is intended to inevitably run out, no matter what? and if you slow down, it just drains it quicker? as i played, i found myself experimenting, trying to see if there was anything i could do to get the meter to go back up, and wondering if there was any benefit to going forward and backwards, instead of only forwards (especially since the controls menu states that going backwards is an option), but it seemed like the answer was no to both, you really only want to go forwards, and have the meter drain as slowly as possible.
this was a cool experience! very cool! i like the music and retro graphics and strange newspaper thing a lot. and the title! cool title for sure.
i made it to the forest, and then i was doing my best to follow the sound, there seemed to be a sound that got louder.
then very suddenly, i stepped behind a tree or something, and warped back to the beginning? does that mean i won? or i lost?
if i lost, then, well, so be it. i wish i knew if i made it to the end or not; it wasn't very clear. but then again, neither are dreams. this definitely felt like a dream. a liquid crystal dream.
i like the concept, did you ever consider switching between anxiety and depression as the game goes? it seems to lock you into one until you either check point or die, i think it would have felt more dynamic, or dare i say, unstable, to deal with constantly flowing through different mental states.
the background music was cool!
i tried several times to make a certain pretty difficult jump, but then i went pretty after the jump and unfortunately never ran into another teddy bear, then the screen blacked out from depression.
the depression mechanic was honestly a lot more anxiety inducing that anxiety itself (and honestly kinda frustrating) since it's essentially a death timer: if you don't make it to the next check point before the screen blacks out, it's all over.
maybe that's exactly what you were going for, but it doesn't feel very much like what depression feels like to me, and was just kinda frustrating to get lost and die to depression over and over.
i like the concept, and the snarkiness of the AI or whoever's talking to you, but more feedback, visual or audio, than just raw numbers would have been more engaging. there seem to be a lot of cool mechanics at play with balancing all the meters, but it's just not that fun when the result is just numbers.
i thought i was doing well, but screen suddenly faded to white then i died, and i have no idea why, it just instantly goes to rebooting screen, so i didn't get a chance to learn what i did wrong to do it better next time.
i really enjoyed this entry! it's hard to find dialogue this well written in a game jam, well done. especially the renaming bits, they were really entertaining, how frustrated Curie got haha!
also, i love how deep into music theory you went with this game! i can't say the mini games were particularly fun on their own, but it was really relaxing to hear the discordant tones resolve, and if they were too engage i'd miss the dialogue, so it made an overall very serene little journey.
i of course took the obvious route at the end, i was half-expecting the AI to sort of turn on me at the last minute, which... kinda happened?
i thought the floor crumbling right when you get to the cool thingy on the roof was a great moment!
i think the floors crumbling into physics-enabled rocks is the most unique thing about your game, would have liked to see more of that to make it stand out. make it feel more Unstable.
the jump was a bit finicky, doesn't always trigger when i'm up against the wall.
falling onto spikes was very annoying, can't jump out, but doesnt instant kill either, just need to walk back and forth until i die. please make it insta kill!
i'm not quite sure what the theme tie in is.
i like the pixely art i think the concept is cool, the idea that you need to drain your health to become small enough to fit through the crack, but then run to the end before you run out of health was a great moment in your game! the "ah-ha" was very satisfying.
i think the idea of silver and pink portions of the health bar, constantly draining, alternating, and changing you, is super awesome, but unfortunately i never figured out how to control it, so i got stuck at a level.
i think the "f to pause your health drain" felt kind of arbitrary, not sure how it fit in, didn't make sense in the gameplay narrative you crafted. like, as metaphors for life / relationships, what does it mean to pause? and from a pure gameplay perspective, yeah, just kinda arbitary. like "why do i have the ability to do this?"
anyways, cool entry over all! rainbow!!
it's always nice to listen to some tchaikovsky, and it really fit with what you're going for here!
at first it was really beautiful watching the orbs weave in and out, but unfortunately, i never got a sense for how my inputs were effecting the game; i never had a sense of control. eventually, my orbs just drifted apart, and i was sad.
is this just a simulation, or is there actually a goal, like, don't let them crash together, or don't let them drift apart?
i liked the graphics, reminded be of okami.
the gameplay would have been fun, except the camera instantly jumped upwards whenever i jumped, which was really jarring, made me dizzy, and made it really difficult to keep control.
i like how you tied the narrative to the gameplay! the writing was kinda meta, which was cool.
sorry you ran out of time, that's frustrating.
during the dialogue sequences, does it just auto advance? it seemed like sometimes pressing space worked and other times it didn't. i think it would be nice to press space to advance through the dialogue.
the intro cutscene was pretty funny, with the scream, and nonchalant switch flipping.
i liked how the game challenged me to plan and replan a good route to navigate the level that efficiently picked up the right tools and dealt with the challenges as they appeared.
however! not being able to jump off ledges was pretty frustrating. also not being able to switch a wrench for cup of water was frustrating, instead i had to walk over to the nearest disaster, waste it, then walk back to get the right tool.
one thing that confused me was the ship in the basement started freaking out, but nothing i could do interacted with it. i guessed this was just supposed to be a visual indicator of the ship's health, but visually it had the same treatment as the intractable elements. i went back to read the instructions, and realized i just needed to press space with no tools to fix it. i think making that clear in the game itself would have been nice.
i got close, but failed just one or two pixels away from a full charge.
i like the concept, but i found it pretty easy to get stuck, and also to glitch my way past a lot of the blocks in an unintended way. if i jumped at the blocks, i could stick to the edges and getup around them.
also, the platform colliders seem to be solid blocks, which made it impossible to back track because my head would bonk into them, which was pretty frustrating.
it seems like the blue plants are supposed to be exploding, so you launch yourself over the spike pits? i wasn't able to get it to work in the end, the physics was rather unpredictable.
it was pretty difficult to read the on-screen instructions, and while the readme was helpful, i don't like needing to read about how to play a game outside of the game itself.
also, it seems like using potions is disabled when in potion crafting mode, but the sound effects still played, which was confusing. the sound effects also seemed to play even if i didn't have enough potion to actually do a spray/lob, so that was confusing as well.
i think there needs to be a much more clear visual distinction between crafting mode and playing mode. personally, i'd bring up a menu screen for crafting that has instructions always visible in it.
i made it a meager 51 seconds. the core blew up but i have no idea why, i thought my pressure and temperature were in good zones, and none of the meteors hit.
i like the concept a lot (and my game is actually somewhat similar), especially balancing the controls/condition of the weapon with actually using the weapon, but i think the feedback needs to be more clear about what to do to stop the ship from melting down. like for example, some kind of visual hint for the control that you need to use to stabilize the ship for whatever meter is in a bad state.
i think the concept is cool, but i never figured out the underlying mechanic behind exploding. does it just happen at random intervals, or do i have any control over it? what governs how big the exploding radius is?
i found myself desperately hoping around to the turrets hoping to get an explosion, but none came.
then, on my very next playthrough, i rushed straight towards the first turret, got an explosion, and unexpectedly won right there! maybe because the win condition is "0 turrets), and the next turrent hadn't spawned in yet? it was amusing, but you probably want to fix that, by settings time limit, kill coung goal, or altering how the turrets spawn in.
i challenge anyone to beat my score of 5 second win!
hi hi!
how funny that we made nearly identical games! i loved ye oldey timey computer aesthetic, and the tangible integration of the menu items / controls into the visuals.
i liked that for the pasta, you had to open the lid to stir / add salt. creating dependence between the temperature and these two other parts meant that i had to more closely manage the temperature, so that i had a buffer space for when i needed salt/stirring. the first time, i lost because temperature went to low when i needed to open up to stir.
critiques of your implementation:
the most important thing i found missing from your game was audio feedback, and more strong visual feedback, for pressing the various buttons. i often couldn't tell if i was pressing the right button, or what was happening when i pressed any button. i think getting this right is critical, otherwise i can't build up an intuition for the controls; how what i'm doing is effecting the game.
i think the learning curve could use work too, you throw a bunch of rules for what button to press under what circumstance all at once at me, and it was pretty difficult to get going. i think going step by step to gain mastery would let you make the latter levels more difficult, because the player has already learned the basics.
possible bug: i beat the first two tasks, but the third task never unlocked.
wonderful job you two! this was an absolute charm to play, especially with a friend.
great job with the controller integration, made playing coop a lot of fun.
one feedback item is that i found it hard to reliably move the scratching post left and right using the tipping physics. sometimes i could get it tipping in the direction i wanted, then run that way, but others i couldnt.
i ended up resorting to repeatedly activating the "lifting" sequence, then trying to run to the left as it lifted, since it wasn't effected by physics during that state.
since moving left and right is crucial to the game, i think it would be nice to improve the ability to transport the post left and right reliably.
i like the minimalist visuals!
my high score was a meager 24.88.
i think the platforms were cool, but i didn't like the ropes very much. it took me a while to figure out i had to hold down space to stick to them, and even then, i didn't feel like i had any control. i died plenty of times when the rope didn't have enough momentum to swing me to the next platform. when this game is all about twitch reflexes, not having (or feeling like i had) control for random obstacles that come up, which cost me the run, was frustrating.
for this kind of game, i think an unstable environment is great, but not unstable player control.
or, maybe there's a secret to dealing with the ropes that i just didn't figure out?
minor UX note: it would have been really great to have the menu buttons controllable with arrows and space bar, or at least have a short cut to press space to retry on the score scene. i really wanted to have a seamless experience of trying runs over and over, but needing to switch to the mouse to click retry was annoying.
oh my god. i think this is the best game jam game i've ever played period. fantastic job across the board. i can't imagine a better take on the theme than this.
more than being enjoyable or fun, this game took me on a journey and changed the way i see the world. i think that's the most important thing art can do.
i think this game is excellent! reminds me of crypt of the necrodancer. i love the blend of rhythm game, tactics, and combat.
i made it to round 6. those walkers that explode everything around them are so tanky!
one feedback is it felt a bit confusing when everyone is two grid tiles tall, i felt like i should be able to shoot the enemies feet. maybe making them 1.5 tiles tall or so would help the visuals line up with the grid better.
this was a lot of fun! i love the win95 nostalgia, and the handdrawn/pixel look.
i'm not exactly sure how i got the big boobie win though. i debugged the fleas, then got stuck on loading forever, played some surf. tried to click back, of course can't go back in the trial version. restarted computer on a whim, and then it worked?! i mean, if that's what you're going for then great job, very true to life.
cute and fun, pup needs cake!
i made it as far as the big hole in the road, not sure how i'm supposed to get over it, i feel like i jumped as late and high as i possibly could!
for a level as long as you made, i think it should have check points, or be broken up into multiple levels. the gameplay wasn't engaging enough to motivate me to try again when i died half way through, because of how long it would take just to get back to the point again.
the "lives" mechanic was a bit unintuitive, because there are some things like hitting the barriers that would take away a life, but other things like the hole, or losing balance completely, that insta-killed, and it wasn't clear what would take life or kill me immediately.
i went through phases of thinking i understood the mechanics, realizing i didn't, thinking i did, and again, i didn't. got stuck at level three.
it wanted me to get 150 gold, but it would deplete my gold every time i made a new option, even if i didn't buy anything. was the intention that i had to make 150 gold in one option?
so, i got 150 gold on the next round, then was working on buying cards, but it blew up randomly! right before my fourth card! (probably there was some rule for why it blew up that i just forgot about). maybe from playing the same card too many times? got too frustrated at that point.
i think the concept is cool, but it felt like there were too many arbitrary rules / goals to keep track of.
great idea, but turning around instantly drops the egg out of the pan, no good! i'd rather have no ability to turn around it all, than for it to be an instant-lose button.
the walk animation is crazy unstable. the walking physics is also interesting, it seems to track some kind of momentum, which resulted in me getting stuck at the bottom of the ramps several times, which was frustrating, because i would have been able to catch my flying egg if i hadn't gotten stopped on the ramp.
there were a few times where the tiny gaps between the tiles became visible, resulting in glitchy (unstable?) looking visuals. maybe put a very slight overlap between tiles? (like, have the tile size slightly smaller than the sprite size)
i made it to the fire, but my egg fell into the fire, and i still lost :(
i liked all the egg related quotes, added to the charm of the game.
i like the spooky take on overcooked! the cute graphics were my favorite part, i like the hue rotation filter when the brew gets unstable.
i think combining various ingredients together in the ritual circles was a cool idea.
i think the three different ingredient prep stations didn't add a lot to the game, since they were all so close together, and had the exact same interaction, there was no motivation for actually learning which ingredient went with with prep station, and consequence for getting it wrong, since it would just make the "nope" sound, and move on to the next one, without losing much time. if you had spaced them out a bit more, it would have cost more time to get it wrong, which would have been more motivation to learn them. also, while some of them made sense, others didn't like grinding the feather looking thing, or boiling cobwebs. with no intuitive connection between them, that also made it seem more like a minor frustration than a fun mechanic.
for the opening cutscene, i would have appreciated a button that simply advanced the dialogue right way, instead of either skipping it entirely, or waiting the full duration of each dialogue sentence.
i also think that having some kind of progress meter would have been good. i felt totally blind as i played, not knowing what goal i was pursuing, or even if there was a goal, or if it would go on forever. that motivated me less to keep trying again, when i wasn't sure how much progress i had made in the previous run.
on the score screen, it said i had "00:01", and par was "05:00" or something. that didn't make any sense to me, i definitely played for more than one second. was 5 minutes supposed to be the duration of the game? or was there a certain number of recipes i had to successfully brew?
i got an error "mac build cannot be opened". running macOS Catalina.
this game was delightful! i'm in love with the cross of succulent photographs and 2D cartoon art. Mew Mew 2's character design is my favorite, but the caring relationship with Moomdud was really touching as well. i love the writing, humor, and funny names.
i took the drugs route. wahooooo! what at trip!
one possible bug is that in the drug sequence, i had a flashback about playing noseflute, but i didn't actually do that in my run (in fact, i ditched to do drugs, which was why i was tripping in the first place), so maybe it's a bug that i got that flashback?
anyways, thanks for such a fun experience!
i liked the visuals, but i found myself unable to play this very well. first i tried exploring to the right, and just found the end of the world, then died. then, i tried exploring to the left, looking for house #XYZ, but i walked so slowly, than i died before i could find it. i only managed to defuse one bomb in one house, the house right next to the starting point. and even when i tried to drop the bomb in the drop zone, the physics didn't behave the way i expected, and the bomb dropped behind me.
i would have been interested to explore more of the world that you built, but the slow movement speed and short timer to find bombs made it too difficult. also, as far as "fun-ness" goes, i don't think it's that fun looking for the right house, it feels really arbitrary to match the house to the number at the top of the screen. i think it would have been more engaging if the house actually had a visual indication that it got bombed.
i like this concept a lot! the graphics are very cute, and i like the idea of balancing attacking enemies against repairing the ship.
i think the game said i could press "Y" to repair the ship, but it didn't work for me. i'm not sure if it's actually supposed to work or not, but i really would have appreciated button-only controls, instead of having to use the mouse.
my main feedback is that it would be cool if repairing the ship was a bit more interesting than just spamming right click everywhere. like, maybe it consumes some kind of resource, or has a cool down, or something. i found myself completely giving up on the platforms above, and just walking back and forth trying to hammer as fast as possible, and occasionally slashing enemies.
overall, i think this is really well done though!
the art and animations are very cute! the farmers running at you are terrifying! i like your take on the theme :)
some feedbacks: i saw an upgrade for kicking farmers, but i never saw any instructions for what button to press to kick. i tried various ones and they didn't do anything.
the first few runs, i didn't notice that the dash had limited uses, i thought there was some kind of bug where i could only dash once.
i think the movement up and down the track felt a bit floaty.
nice job, especially for compo! I liked all the voice over, especially about the password. the game reminded me a bit of The Stanley Parable.
I know you were going for "UNSTABLE" but the camera shake was a bit extreme, I think. it adds to the personality of the game for sure, but a little less, or maybe a user setting to reduce it, would be appreciated.
I actually found the hacking a bit frustrating, because I think of WASD in terms of arrow directions, not the actual button letters, so I struggled to remember what finger mapped to what letter.
I think the graphics were pretty cool, did you do any modeling yourself?
I think I beat the game by getting to the escape pod, but I was a bit confused, because right before then, I found an empty fuse box that needed fuses to be repaired. I ended up accidentally escaping as I was trying to find the fuses. are there multiple endings or something?
i liked the visuals for the stars, they were nicely mesmerizing. i think making correcting the steering a bit more involved would have gone a long way to make the game more fun. i think it's nice that you made grace queer.
disturbingly fun! great puzzle design, the ending took me by surprise!
very well done! the graphics were so cute and creepy and polished! nice design on the first tutorial screen. i liked the variety of the levels, and monsters, and the monster count down was nice.
i really like the visuals, great job with pixel animation, and a "soul search self help" themed bullet hell is pretty funny and mood, but this was really hard, the slow movement speed was pretty frustrating, making it feel hard in a bad way, not a rewarding way. my experience with bullet hell is just undertale, so i'm not that experienced in the genre, but undertale felt hard in a good way, since i felt like i had more control
also, the shooting sound was pretty obnoxious,too screechy, i ended up just muting.
graphics and music were really cool, set a nice mood. i managed to get the ribs and something in the trash in my inventory, but couldn't progress from there after spending a while clicking around on everything. was not able to figure out how to us anything in my inventory.
one fairly simple thing to implement that would make the game feel a lot better to play is flipping the character on the X axis when i walk left. also, the collisions didn't make much sense to me, i felt often like i was getting stuck or unable to walk somewhere that seemed like i should be able to.
great job! i made it to the first level with the alternate floor plan. i liked the visuals and the "going down stairs" animation. the puzzle mechanic was fun to figure out.
one thing that really confused me was that i couldn't seem to do a "normal" vacuum even though i had 1 charge remaining. if one charge isn't enough to do the most basic technique, it just feels weird to me.
i think you could have taken the "eldritch hotel" theme a bit further, visually, the hotel, and the trash itself, seemed very normal.
overall, a very fun game!
the level design and flashlight holding made me feel pretty clausterphobic, so good job if you were going for that. i got turned around once, but eventually got to the acid lakes. i got across the first one and that felt rewarding, but i couldn't figure out a good way to jump from one pillar to the next, since they have sharp corners, i wasn't able to claw my way around to the other side of them. eventually, i think the acid glitched out and i just walked across.
got to the end, and i seem to have just fallen out of the level entirely, and watched it slowly shrink away into the infinite as i read your "you won message". it was kind of a good, but weird feeling.
i liked the music, but i don't think it fit well with the game. also i don't know what you're going for with the title. what lies?
great job, got to the end! wonderful job with the music, visuals, and animation! the story was cute, you even did animations, wow! i enjoyed the classic point and click gameplay, and it felt nice that the character would walk to where i clicked.
but the ending left me feeling a bit let down, like, to tell me "well it was all for nothing" after me putting all the effort into playing and finishing the game just didn't feel very rewarding.
i felt sad that i couldn't put the mask on, heheh.
some feedback for gameplay, it's not very clear when something has another interaction that you need to click for, vs if you'll just say the same thing again. i think some kind of indication, through dialogue or UI, that lets you know you should keep clicking would be good, especially because there's no way to skip dialogue, so having to sit through the same dialogue again as punishment for an exploratory click is pretty frustrating. on that note, a way to skip through dialogue would be good too.
overall, wonderful job!
great job on the visuals and atmosphere and sounds, but how to play was pretty confusing, and i ended up just killing myself when i thought i was killing cthulu. i clicked through the various options, but never felt like i got good feedback on what was effective until i saw the meter running low by alternating curse and insult. in the end, alternating those two was actually killing me rather than the boss.
i love the graphics and character design! i think the wall cling mechanic is cool, found myself wishing i could "double jump" with one on top of the other.
good job voice doing some voice acting! the power up system is well designed.
i got fairly far... i think... but honestly i have no way of knowing just how far close I got to the end of your game. i think some kind of feedback or indication system for progress would be good. or maybe i just missed it?
very cute! your animation and art is just incredible for a game jam! i love the slippery wibbly wobbly movement of the shrooms. The mechanic of eating your own kind to survive is grusome in a very fitting way.
I made it to level 84. Ended up getting trapped by the wormy-like blocks.
I think finding some kind of powerup to get that perhaps gives you superdigging for a limited time/number of strikes, so you can one hit any boulder, would be a good addition so the gameplay doesn't get as repetitive.
The controls were fairly tight, felt responsive and not floaty, though i think i hit a few edge cases in pressing various buttons at the same time that left my character unable to move until i released and pressed the buttons again.
Over all, very fun and well polished entry!
very well done! of all the games i've played so far, this one has the tightest and best feeling gameplay, i felt very in control, yet also very challenged, which is an awesome balance to hit. i liked the various enemies that were introduced as you went deeper, and how that made things more complicated and required some strategizing in addition to just dodging.
I like the mechanic of spamming the dig button to climb up walls, but it took me a while to get the hang of it. What was frustrating was getting stuck under a dirt tile that I was unable to dig through when trying to climb up.
Jumping felt a little floaty, could use a bit of tuning with the speed and acceleration curves, but at least all the controls felt very responsive.
Nice work for a compo! Overall you had graphics, sound, gameplay, and even a tiny idle animation. I think the feeling of anxiety of going under the water into the "caves" to get gems was well done.
the nested world / puzzles were really cool, reminded me of Gorogoa. i love how radically the art style changed between the different puzzles. sadly, i was only able to solve the gasoline fire blueprint puzzle. i couldn't get the dinosaur things to line up, though i got close, i tried so many combinations. i wasn't sure what to do with the mushrooms, and turning the dials didn't seem to do anything in the caves.
maybe some hints would be nice, i'd really like to explore more of this game!
you two did so well! i had the most fun playing the social dance game. i felt very connected with all the animal characters, and very distance and judged by all the humans.
the duckies were so much fun! really reminded me of sans from undertale. i found my self feeling very relieved to find them again after dealing with all the horror humans.
i also had a lot of fun just running around as a meowmie, the art and animation for mocha are great! the seashell sounds were beautiful too, i liked having the beach sequences break things up. it made me wonder which was the dream, and which was real life.
i agree with @rosypenguin , the level transitions could use some visual clues, i also ran into a lot of walls trying to find the next room.
i like the art and music, i think the gameplay concept is cool, but i ultimately found this game to be incredibly difficult. it took me a while to figure out that holding space went deeper (and deeper), and that i couldn't use the up/down arrows to control while i was burrowing, only left and right. the most frustrating parts were when it required you to dive, jump, then burrow again from the underside of a block (like up through the ceiling). the window that you have to release and press space again is so small, i think some way to make the controls feel more fluid work really help make this more fun to play.
the few times that i did actually pull off some back to back burrow/jumps felt really good. i especially appreciate the contrasted feeling of how slow and clumsy the zombie is just walking, but how fast, fluid, and powerful you are when burrowing. if the controls could be tuned somehow to make it easier to transition from one dive to the next, that would be great.
it's pretty cool, but i think the fishy hitboxes need a lot of work. i missed what felt like 80% of my shots, and I tried many different strategies, clicking right on them, clicking past them, leading their movement, and i could very clearly see the yellow line hit them or go through them, but it wouldn't eat them.
the slowing down time mechanic seems cool, but doesn't seem to have any cost or downside. why wouldn't i just hold the mouse down all the time?
i really liked the sound effect for successfully eating a fish.
i really liked this one, the animations of this adorable cat loving dwarf grandma are great. i liked the shrinking light mechanic, making it harder to find your way back up, meaning you have to manage both your time and your mining patterns to be able to get back in time.
i think the mechanics of capturing a cat could use work, i found that i could just spam J and K and instantly capture any cat. unless that was intentional. it didn't really detract from the fun, it was enjoyable enough to spam buttons and get as many cats as possible, but i felt like i wasn't playing the game as intended, since it had this "press the right button" instruction.
also, at some point i activated the "super granny lightining bolt" mode once, but i never figured out how it works, how to activate it, what's needed, etc. was that ever explained anywhere?
i love the concept and art, i think its very innovative and cute, but honestly, playing this game made my joy turn to pure frustration very quickly. couldn't get past the blue level.
i love the concept, but i think the guy abandoned me at some point after the "rock in the middle" room. i found my way to some water, but couldn't figure out how to go from there, and didn't get any more hints.
also, i wasn't sure if all the whispering was his voice, or like, scary demons around me. was i supposed to go towards or away from the whispers?
the visuals are pretty cute! i felt like there was too much delay between pressing X and the attacks actually beginning, and, though maybe this was intentional game design, i felt frustrated that i couldn't move while attacking. at the very least, i should start moving again after releasing the X button if i held the arrow key down, but it seems like i have to press the arrow key again after releasing X.
also, the elevator gave me a choice for whether to go down or not, and i'm not quite sure why. is it that you have the option to stay on the easier levels to grind more gold before going down to the harder levels?
I like the creepy graphics, especially this poor cute monster girl who has to go down stairs, and first person perspective of going down the stairs, but I felt like the battery drained really quickly, and the reloading time was too long.
Later on in the game, when lots and lots of things fly at you, it felt way to chaotic to try to manage shining the flashlight and charging the battery. It wasn't clear to me at first whether I have to hold the right click to charge, or just click it.
I think the concept is great, and the game had really cute graphics, animations, and music, but ultimately, I got too frustrated just trying to beat the first level. There are too many words that kill, some of them not expected, like "anxiety", and it became too much of a burden to memorize everything. I loved the funny effects like scream and cage, and cloning with "yourself", but it was actually really frustrating to hit "old", because it doesn't wear off, and just makes the whole rest of the level feel really annoyingly slow.
I think giving more visual clues, or some kind of way to mark hazards once you discover them, would make the game a lot more fun to play. I think having the random effects, and the key and the door hidden in text is awesome, but the amount of landmines strewn about just made me really afraid to walk on any text at all, and discouraged me from exploring. If that could be solved, I think this game would be great!
this game is really cool! i love the graphics, looks like you took photographs? and perhaps even stop motion animation? the flow of choosing words, and going back and forth between pages was interesting, sometimes it would go backwards and i didn't understand why.
also, often it seemed like there was a clear "right" answer for what to type, like, "this is the sun" or "this is the color purple", so i wasn't sure whether this game was trying to have me type a specific thing to play "correctly", or whether the intent was for me to just make up my own strange story.
I'm not sure if this was a bug or not, but I only visually saw the knife on the ground, I couldn't see everything else, I kept getting dialogue for like the journal, necklace, kitten, even the person who I killed for revenge. I just kept getting more dialogue as I walked forward.
I like the narrative based game, the text was a bit hard to read, but I get that it's going with the dark vibes. What made it more difficult though was how far away it was from me as the player, and the fact that I could just keep walking, and might not even notice the text. I think if this is a narrative based game, you should make the text more prominent, and not so easy to just ignore and keep walking, like maybe pause the game and have the player advance through the dialogue with button presses, and have the dialogue appear word by word or letter by letter to make it feel more engaging.
I really like this! I think the gameplay is very innovative, the hell theme and visuals are cute and fun, and the music was nice to! I was able to get a bonus, that felt really good. I think the mechanic of losing move options when you lose life works well as punishment.
Cute character, interesting mechanic of either jumping on or clearing the special circle blocks. I like the music too! I think the movement dynamics of the platforming could use some work, and I was a bit confused about the aspect ratio switch for the dialogue, is it supposed to be on a phone? Also, some visuals for the dialogue would have been good too.
i love this game!!! the pixel gameboy style and color palette are really pretty, theme tie in is perfect. i love how the battery meter depletes on the gameboy, and that's how you gameover / reset. the progression of difficulty and puzzles was really nice. music and SFX were perfectly suited to the game. amazing level of polish! well done well done.
wow you did a fantastic job with this! the time warp mechanic works very well, and makes for some really fun to solve puzzles! i love the graphics and sound too. the little colorful magical particles were really cute. the progression of the levels felt really good, just the right pacing of introducing new challenges. it was fun getting all the coins! i can easily see this becoming a fully fledged game, there's so much potential for more complex and difficult puzzles with this mechanic.
i'm completely blown away by the amount of polish here. the pixel animation, the sound effects, the pretty music, everything is so well polished. congratulations on such a great entry!
i absolutely love the pastel rainbow color palette and aesthetic of this game. the main character design is super cute. i think the gameplay is fun and ties into the theme well. the music was super cool too! the UI was gorgeously designed too, i love the disjointed feeling of the soft beautiful colors of the "panic meter", with the creepy face and what the meter represents.
two pieces of feedback are that i felt it was rather hard to aim correctly when shooting the bad spirits, especially with no aiming reticle, and the green sprites that give you arrows are spread too far and thin, making it too punishing when i miss. i would have enjoyed the game more if i felt more free and empowered as the player to run around saving the townsfolk by shooting the bad spirits, instead of spending most of the time running around trying to hunt down ammo and getting really stressed out whenever i miss a shot.
if you could refine the gameplay so i spent more time running around shooting the bad spirits and saving the townsfolk, which is fun and cool, making it easier to aim, and having to spend less time running around trying to hunt down the scarce ammo, which ended up feeling more frustrating and annoying, rather than a "healthy stress", i think it would really improve the game. perhaps there could be more green sprites, closer to where the action is, and they could respawn, and/or making them give you more arrows when you touch them.
overall, it was still a really fun and beautiful experience to play this game! incredibly well done in such a short time frame!
oh wow this game is sooooo good! i love the concept, theme tie in, and execution.
my main feedback is that the feeling of winning is kind of vague, and very short lived. the middle green bit lights up, which i think means i won, but it's still possible to get hit by a bullet and lose parts of the beat, which in a sense is losing. at that point, the screen is full of bullets, so i go back to a state of "not winning" very quickly, especially because i'm tempted to move the character into the green middle area, which didn't seem to do anything and just got me more surrounded by bullets. i was only able to enjoy the full music for a second, or less.
i think it would feel better to become invulnerable when you beat the game, either by getting the last record to add the last musical component, or perhaps, needing the player to make it to the green glowing center after getting the final record as a final challenge. i like the latter idea, because lighting up the center automatically makes me feel like i should go there anyways.
if you did something like that, then i could feel empowered as a player, and also just feel at ease and less stressed out, since i don't have to worry about getting hit, and i can enjoy both the sound of the full music and the pretty visuals of a screen full of bullets, and dance around in them without being punished for getting hit.
without any kind of winning state like this, and so easily getting hit after finishing the song and losing progress, it honestly felt pretty stressful and frustrating. it was hard for me to even take a screenshot.
if you keep working on the game, then more songs and maybe some powerups (shield, bomb) would be fun additions!
edit: also wanted to say that i think the automatic difficulty scaling of the game works really well, where you only go one step back whenever you get hit. however, it also creates an interesting insentive where at a certain it's actually easiest if you let yourself get hit all the way back to zero, then you can very quickly try to build the beat back up before the screen becomes totally full of bullets again.
apart from the stress and impermanence of winning, i think you did a wonderful job! i was able to beat it at 90 bpm.
edit: also beat 120 yay!
this game is awesome! I love the idea of one character being in a loop, and the other not, and using that to solve puzzles. The jump height difference between the two is another great layer of complexity.
the platforming (particularly jumping over tall fire) was a bit challenging/frustrating to me, and I really really didn't care the sound effects of jumping, for some reason they made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
Is there a way to restart/reset a level? I couldn't figure out any way to, which was also kind of frustrating.
Overall, great job, your idea was awesome and your execution was was solid, just some nitpicks / user friendly things.
i really like the concept, but i felt kind of frustrated/mislead after exhausting all possibilities, and realizing they all have the same ending. it seems like you really are stuck in a loop here, which i can appreciate taking the theme very literally, but ultimately didn't feel rewarding. as a player if i feel like i'm stuck in a loop, i have a desire to find out how to break out of the loop. since this game had no way to break out, it felt like every possible choice i could make was wrong, which left me feeling just sad.
i really like text based adventures, and branching narrative story, so i like the meta commentary that this game makes, just wish there was some kind of "good end".
i really like the pixel graphics and character design. i think the sounds created a good mood. i'm not sure why, but when i clicked to fire, it would only shoot like 5% of the time. i'm using a trackpad. at first i thought there was some sort of cooldown or ammo mechanic, but i watched the playthrough video, and that doesn't seem to be the case, so i'm not sure, maybe its a bug.
one feedback i have for story telling is that it felt kind of arbitrary that you just play through it twice, and that somehow stops the Count's time magic. i felt like there should have been something you do different the second time round, and i thought the clock in the front of the castle could have something to do with it, like maybe if you destroy the clock, then you're able to beat him once and for all, and his time magic fails.
i think the clock in the loading screen is my favorite part, its very beautifully painted, and i love the infinity symbol with the glow constantly moving through it.
i really liked this! the music and graphics fit perfectly together, and i loved the visual style. it felt very meditative and relaxing to play, even as it got harder. i wonder if there was any kind of ending, or way to break out, or if it just gets impossibly difficult...
i enjoyed this quite a bit, the pixel graphics and animation were charming, and the music fit really well too. i actually do social waltz in real life, so this was cool to find in the game jam. nice quote from futurama, perfect!
i got wrecked when the super fast arrows started flying at me (i think the third phase of the game). reminded me of those ridiculous DDR and taiko maps that have different speeds of arrows at the same time.
i love this game, probably the most well polish of all i've played so far. the art is so cute and well done, i love the ridiculous character designs. the art style reminds me of alien homonid era games. i'm curious about this cute blue haired girl in the background. the "park rules" were also a great touch.
the concept ties in perfectly to the theme. keeping your RPM up is a fun gameplay mechanic, the controls are simple but the play can be challenging. i really liked the different whistling sound effects when i mouse over a button.
i liked the background music, but honestly, sometimes one of the sound effects of hitting the critters sounded like a baby crying, which was really disturbing.
it took me a bit of playing to figure out that you automatically attack when you're close to enemies, and that attacking slows down your rpm. i could never figure out if there was any difference between the weapons, or what the point of getting weapons was. are they just visual, or do they actually behave different or deal different damage? i'm also not sure what the treats did. just give more points, or give back some "health" (or momentum)?
some obvious next steps to take would be different enemy behaviors and weapon behaviors, or maybe special moves (like a bomb to clear the screen), (unless you already had that, and i just didn't get far enough) or giving each of the dog characters a different signature move.
thanks for making such a cute and fun game!
love the graphics in this entry! reminds me of N64 games. the dialogue was cute too.
this was a fun little entry! i liked the dialogue and humor. it would be nice if it wasn't all left to chance, and you had some influence of picking where you go. the IT guy with the computer in the lazy river was hillarious.
one technical note, i have a high resolution monitor, and the game's display was tiny on my screen, and i couldn't resize it, so that was rather annoying. nice work over all tho!
fun little experience, i felt like the character movement and jumping was pretty slow and smudgy, but i ended up feeling hyped up and excited as the game got harder, and i got closer to being the last one left. i think with a it of tuning for the movement dynamics, and making the camera not go behind the level, this would be fun to play with friends!
well this was completely horrifying! i really like your art style and animation, the blend of pixel art and scribbly traditionally drawn pieces was awesome.
i liked the silent film dialogue style, but it felt a bit slow to me, pressing space to advance through quicker would have been nice.
i liked the gear puzzle, but i actually got stuck at the part where he goes to confront the landlord, where you press space and the hand slaps or something. i just couldn't figure out what to do there.
nice work over all!
this was a cute little experience, i liked the pixel art and chiptune. the granny humor was great! i really chuckled at the wall of grannies. i like the animation of the disappointed bear shaking their head too.
this was a delightful little experience. the humor was great, so many little touches everywhere, like the jokes on the white board. i love all the dialogue, especially the intern losing her... object. i got the receptionist ending, how delightfully gruesome!
i got the poor ending! i tried a few loops of doing a good job at work, but didn't end up reaching an ending with that one, not sure if i just needed to play more times, or if i wasn't heading towards an ending. maybe some kind of indicator of your progress towards and ending would help.
overall, i like the art style and music. cassettes are inherently stuck in a loop! perfect!
great work with this! i really appreciate the dual interface of being able to type in commands, in classic TBA style, or use the buttons, so you know what's available. i wasn't able to beat it, some type of hint system would have been nice, but i liked the writing and the monochrome art style. the music was nice too!
this is incredible for a game jam! nice job with the voice over. i liked the sound effects of taking pictures, and the background music.
this is really lovely! the 2d sketch -> 3d model style looks wonderful. the music fits well with the mood, and i like how its written, sometimes heartfelt and sometimes witty.
i want to especially, Especially, thank you for using gender neutral pronouns in the love letter from your first crush. it really means a lot to me, to feel included in this space you've created, and be able to really see myself in it.
this was a fun little game! i think the difficulty ramped up super hard in the final levels. it seemed like there's no room for error, and i have to play perfectly or i lose. one thing to improve would be to find a softer middleground for difficulty.
i think the art is cute. i was expecting there to be more loops, but i mostly just crashed a lot.
this is incredible for a game jam! i love how the music stays in sync between the seasons but different instruments come in to play the melody. the art was beautiful, i love the painterly look, and how it transitions from season to season. i really liked the rain in spring.
the mechanics are great, changing things in one season to move forward in the other. i think there's an inconsistency with the bear's position not updating in every season, but that's minor.
my main criticism is that it was really hard to jump on the bubbles, and climb on the vines / icicles. i ended up getting stuck at the first place where you need to jump on the bubbles. i couldn't figure out what to do after making the second apple drop. i watched a play through, it seems you need to backtrack several seasons, because the path is blocked off, to get back to winter, but that wasn't obvious to me, and i just couldn't get back up on the bubbles again a second time.
the creature at the end was very surprising! the clouds were beautiful too.
i think a bit more tuning with the movement, jumping, and climbing mechanics would have made this entry perfect!
i think it was less fun and more educational. at least it works! could be a good foundation to build on for more complexity.
I made it to the fire ball room but it was too hard, had to give up. would have liked to see the rest of the game.
This was delightful! I love the 3D graphics, the cute designs, little touches like how the menu is crafted, and the level reset animation. The puzzles had a great difficulty scale, I made it to level 9.
The way you incorporated this Jam's theme into your gameplay worked really well!
I think some simple background music, and sounds for hoping and completing the loop, would have gone a long way in making it feel immersive, but this is already incredible for a game jam!
i thought the slime graphics were cute. it has kind of a slow build up, but was more enjoyable with more enemies, however, it got really tiring to have to click for every single shot with so many enemies. some kind of character progression like getting a better weapon would have been good. some kind of way to break out of the loop and win would have motivated me to play more.
also, i think the environment visuals were good, but the level design itself was too big. there were some obstacles and stuff which was cool, but too much open space, so i felt kind of lost, or like, the obstacles didn't really matter because i could just hang out in open area.
Exploding packages is pretty fun and goofy, very relevant to modern life. I also got the big black box issue sticking around for screen transitions. I felt confused by why the packages are constantly sliding along the ground on some surfaces, there's no visual indication of what surfaces launch vs don't, so it all felt chaotic and random. I like that you had some audio effects, but I think adding an audio for the box hitting walls would have gone a long way to make it feel more immersive. Good for a gamejam over all.
This game is amazingly complex and sophisticated, bravo and well done!!!
I love the visuals, especially the sickly rainbow chronotoxin. Having the chronofluid to make objects "unstuck in time" to effect the next loop, and unlock things as you loop is awesome! (Also, is that a Slaughterhouse 5 reference?)
I think some visual feedback or indicator that you can pick up chronofluid with the mop would have been good, I didn't know what to do with it at first. All other objects interact just by pushing them or stepping on them, so the only way to know how to mop is by reading the directions which you should never count on players to do. If there had been some kind of visual feedback for the ability to mop up and put down the chronofluid, I think it would have been perfect!
Art was very well polished for a game jam, like the Ozzy reference. I think the gameplay is cool, and the phrases are funny.
I appreciate the gameplay as a metaphor for difficult conversations, but I also feel kind of lost or conflicted, because it seems like the only way to progress in the game is to say negative or aggressive things to damage your opponents. If it's a game about the experience of talking with people, I would have expected there to be some kind of positive way to make it through. Verbal violence doesn't seem much better than physical violence.
This was really fun, I love the visuals and gameplay, the sounds were a nice touch too. Fit the theme very well, and created a good atmosphere. It took me a while to figure out how to progress, collecting more and more blue energy before boosting. It presented some interesting choices, about whether I should go for the jump now, or risk trying to get more.
One critique is that I couldn't tell if there was any kind of end-goal, or if I'm just going to endlessly jump up.
i appreciate the celeste like gameplay, player movement and jumping was pretty hard to get used to, felt kind of sluggish somehow. having some way to eventually break out of the loop would have motivated me to play more. good job for a game jam!
i got as far as:
it was very pleasant, and very easy. i think there's a lot of potential with this theme and style, to add more complexity! for a game jam, i think this set out and achieved very reasonable goals.
I think this is a great entry. I think the movement mechanic is really creative, though it kinda felt I was like a a penguin waddling around from the top down. Some more audio feedback for when I move would have made it more immersive. I think all the level mechanics were fun and challenging. I appreciate the minimal art style.
I finished the game! I think the pumpkin was supposed to be a hint, pushing it would show you the direction you're supposed to go, but it seemed to allow me to push it the wrong way in at least some of the screens. I liked the pumpkin's expressions and dialogue, and the character and her animations were cute.
It was fairly frustrating to get reset without a firm understanding of how the pumpkin hint system worked. I understand that you're trying to make it a puzzle to figure out how to get out, but if the interaction of the hint doesn't give me a reliable answer, then I feel like I can't trust it, and am more inclined to just give up, rather than painstakingly exhaust all possibilities and memorize the solution.
Visuals are great, I like how the enemies are glitchy color. I really like how you can see the other sides of the loop as you pan around, all the environment visuals were very engaging.
I was confused by the presence of sidescroller style platforms, when I didn't have an actual character to run around, just moving the camera and pointing and clicking.
I also think some more visual feedback for successfully hitting an enemy would be good, I wasn't sure if my shots were connecting most of the time.
It also didn't feel very rewarding to just be stuck fighting until all the crystals died. A way to break out of the loop and win would have been nice.
Very well done! The dialogue was well written, the puzzles were fun to solve, and had a good difficulty and complexity curve. I think its awesome how the robots build the very tiles that you solve the puzzle with!
Artie's eyes changing color and shape was a great touch!
Excellent job!!! The visuals and sound were extremely good for a game jam. I like how the difficulty goes up with each loop, especially how the increased movement speed can be a blessing and a curse, making it harder to control the astronaut through obstacles, but easier to run past the stronger enemies. The core gameplay felt pretty solidly grounded in typical platformer form, but was executed very well, felt snappy and tight.
My favorite game so far! I love how you made the character stuck in a movement loop, instead of a time / gameplay loop. The simplicity of the one button gameplay really suited the visuals and sound. The gameplay was very fun and challenging. I really like how you incorporated more mechanics in the levels, like getting the stars to open the gates.
The challenge of minimizing your loop count also makes it a puzzle game, though I'm no where near good enough to optimize playthroughs of the levels hehe.
i think the mood was set up well by the visuals and soundtrack. moving the character felt good, but the combat felt imprecise, repetitive, and i didn't feel like i had good feedback for when i hit an enemy. i didn't really feel caught in a loop, as much as trudging through doom, with just more and more enemies.
some kind of gameplay progression would have been nice, like stronger attacks to deal with the increasing number of enemies.
i liked the visuals, felt kinda vaporwave, but when I played it, nothing ever happened, no viruses came, i couldn't use any attacks. moving and jumping with the character felt floaty and sluggish, and it was confusing that i could walk off the screen a bit. is the connection to the theme just that you are always at your computer?
LD52 — Harvest (36)
That Wasn't Wheat... by sammot 2023-01-16T04:16:45Z ♥ 1
pretty difficult! i like the limited visibility implementation with dithering, the pier art in general was well done, even with some shadow casting!
the color pallet makes it look really eerie, and it's especially unsettling with the amount of gore from hitting an animal.
i liked controlling the tractor EXCEPT for backing up! when i back up, it seems like the left/right arrows to become inverted, which doesn't really match how i'd expect a car to drive, so that took a bit of getting used to.
i thought i was driving carefully, but still hit rocks for the first three or so rounds. then, i finally made it through the time limit without exploding, but only had like half the quota :(
besides the frustrating difficulty (i probably just need to get good), i think i disliked the music the most. it really didn't feel like it fit at all. i think i was expecting something more atmospheric and creepy, given the visuals.
main lesson: don't harvest wheat at twilight!
Screen Shot 2023-01-15 at 8.10.23 PM.png
Hopping Harvester by ntb896 2023-01-16T04:02:36Z ♥ 2
this was actually one of the most fun entries i've played, in terms of pure gameplay feel & satisfaction. i spent my first few rounds thinking the walls and ceiling would kill me too, it became a lot easier once i realized i could bump along them and be fine.
for a while, i felt quite comfortable just getting the pearls that were far away from the obstacles, and letting the risky ones just go by. however, eventually i got cornered on the left edge of the screen, and when i finally got brave enough to try to get back over to the right where the pearls were, got hit by an obstacle right at the ceiling level :(
but yeah, the movement feels really tight, it's a simple arcade game with basically no glitches, great work!
the only thing i noticed was that the bgm dropped out for several minutes, then randomly came back. do you have a lot of silence at the end of your audio file?
final score: 37 Screen Shot 2023-01-15 at 7.59.20 PM.png
Elite Brain Harvester Zombie by Pulni 2023-01-16T03:36:21Z ♥ 1
played to level 10, seemed too easy to just kite around, auto attacking is convenient but to very engaging, i think it would have felt more rewarding if i had a few buttons to press for each attack.
good job for implementing the different attacks and upgrades, and of course the mouthed SFX
Screen Shot 2023-01-15 at 7.33.18 PM.png
LD52 Moonlight by Fis 2023-01-15T09:41:55Z ♥ 2
really cute character design! i like the cooldown based combat with two attacks, and how the attacks create light that reveals enemies. i think it would have been cool if the flowers made more light too.
if you continue working on the game, would you consider implementing a "twinstick" style keyboard only control scheme, where arrow buttons do attacks (8 directions), and maybe shift+arrow is ranged attack? just an idea; i'm not great at using the mouse for these kind of games heheh :(
Goblo The Harvester by Tricky_Fat_Cat 2023-01-15T09:30:33Z ♥ 4
wow, there is a /lot/ of content here, and it looks darn good too! great work making mario 64 with evil skellies and evil goblo all in just a jam!
i ran into a few input issues, like goblo not attacking when i click, or walking for a while after releasing the button (on the patched version).
other than that, my main frustration was not knowing how to kill the big skellies with shields for the longest time, until i accidentally discovered the ranged attack (nope, didnt read the tutorial). maybe this wasnt intentional, but i tried hitting them with many melee attacks and they just wouldn't die. a single ranged attacked did the job though. it felt kind of arbitrary that melee does nothing against them?
anyways, this was really cute and fun! made it near the top of world 2, found several purple stars, but then fell all the way down and got sad.
They Hide in the Fields by Hawkin 2023-01-15T08:58:37Z ♥ 3
it's always really cool to come across a spacial-audio driven entry, nice work! getting got by "them" is especially scary, good job capturing the fear factor in a jam game!
The Harvest by EpicGameFan 2023-01-15T08:56:22Z ♥ 2
wow, this was really cool! i find that a lot of adventure games, especially gamejam adventure games, suffer from either being inaccessibly convoluted, or not the most engaging, but this was quite a fun experience, the puzzles made sense for the most part, it was fun to explore and experiment. the art and music were quite polished too!
and then, the fact that this is to spec for an actual gameboy game (and that you have it running on gameboy hardware) for a gamejam is really super cool! great work!
i made it to a good end :) Screenshot 2023-01-15 005107.png
Hermesh by Kultuk 2023-01-15T08:34:03Z ♥ 3
tada! great success!
i came for the ducks.
Screenshot 2023-01-15 003235.png
Aggro-Culture by Ategon 2023-01-15T08:16:28Z ♥ 4
i think i agree with @fizzbark , this was fun to play but given that the wheat is a dud, and it's just about grinding those pachira coins and tomato turrets, i feel a bit lost playing. personally, i would have taken out the wheat and not shown the shop, if they dont actually work, and focused on making something fun with the mechanics you did complete. maybe do more with the map, since it seems like there is plantable and unplantable terrain.
i like the designs of the different bugs!
Harvest is coming by thomasward 2023-01-15T04:05:35Z ♥ 2
well, i went through an entire session without interacting with anything inside, and, to my great frustration, got a bad end, despite having done so well on the outdoor mini games.
then i read the comments, and there's all this talk of herb games and cooking games and the dog, and i realized i had missed basically more than half of the game.
i just didn't know there was anything to do inside! there wasn't a "todo list" that slide down like there was for the outside, and no visual indicator that something is interactive. just confusion that my son keeps getting worse and worse despite me chopping and fishing like a good daddo. it was quite frustrating!
it was definitely more satisfying to play through with doing the indoor tasks as well. i must say though, that fishing mini game needs to be "canned". it feels like it takes way too long, involves no skill, and i have no real influence on how it goes, just waiting for the line to bend.
i also agree with some other commenters that the grave hit box is too big.
other than that, i consistently got a really loud and harsh audio glitch around the beginning of the dialogue with the son, so i had to mute : (
i liked the record player, and petting the dog. it's the little things...
overall, it's a good little experience, but i'd really try and make sure interactive things are more clear, or maybe give stronger hints like the boy saying "i was cold last night, could you make a fire? i'm starving, and so is the dog, please feed me!"
Elonkorjuu - Live Harvest by Tutti Ankka 2023-01-15T03:39:41Z ♥ 2
this has gotta be one of the coolest looking LD submissions i've ever seen! i've never felt called to make 3D games, but seeing this game makes me feel like i could try it, designing with a sort of 3D world 2D asset hybrid.
i love both your visual style and level design sense, especially the use of dithering and color. gameplay is the perfect balance of simplicity and engaging.
the fact that you even support custom levels is just crazy for a jam!
main feedback would be that i don't think the BGM really fits the atmosphere, i would have gone with something more atmospheric, eerie, and moody, less rhythmic and up beat. but that's just a personal sensibility, the way it is now feels like it would be right at home in a 1980s arcade cabinet.
The Pets Over The Innsmouth by 21st Century 2023-01-15T03:31:07Z ♥ 2
oh my goodness, the art and animation are just incredible for a game jam! love the concept, but i wish the whole experience was a bit more accelerated in actual gameplay, like, everything just running at 2x or 3x speed, to really see the little ones run around, eat drink sleep and multiply, for a more satisfying harvest at the end!
Glean the Luminescent by jcg 2023-01-15T02:39:51Z ♥ 1
this was fun, i really like the visual of the light in the center growing in strength, and the shadow you cast from it. i wish that was integrated more into the gameplay, the idea of a central light and shadows surrounding it.
i also wish my character got more powered up the bigger the light got. maybe it did and i just didn't notice?
i found both the light points and the enemies really difficult to see on my screen, not sure if its a resolution thing, i have a HDPI display.
made it 5 cycles before becoming overwhelmed.
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Puppet show! by mitus 2023-01-14T21:01:47Z ♥ 1
so many surreal harvesting games this round! i found that i could just keep both torches running and clear away all the birds, looked so funny! good job with the puppetry visuals!
The Time Traveler's Garden by Drizzle Games 2023-01-14T20:42:22Z ♥ 6
well, this was absolutely fantastic! i love how the music shifts to the eerie, far away whistling. what a fun twist on overcooked for this theme! <3
i especially appreciate how the micro-narrative makes so much sense: of course if you could time travel, it makes sense to plant seeds, to to the future when they're ready, harvest them, then take them back in time to serve freshest ingredients to the customer. but, it all goes horrible wrong when the future is a nightmare of mutant plants!
i really really appreciate this kind of thoughtful design, where the mechanics and twist aren't arbitrary, and come together for a cohesive whole.
(i too found the enemies to be rather difficult, maybe having a block or dodge roll would help)
A Day in the Life of Death by DDRKirbyISQ 2023-01-14T20:38:36Z ♥ 1
this game was absolutely wonderful, the parents were my favorite, especially their theme song! i turned it up every time they came on. happy la la forever!
Herogatchi by WiredOverload 2023-01-14T20:34:57Z ♥ 3
cute idea, i liked playing as the archer hero. i actually never had a tamagotchi, so i felt a bit lost in that mode. i tried doing various things, but was never sure if it actually had an impact. found several glitches where the herogatchi screen got overlayed with multiple UI elements
Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 12.31.48 PM.png
i think its cool if you wanted to implement a faithful recreation of tamagotchi, but for me personally, i think making that part of the game simpler would have been better. i understand tamagotchi is a sort of long-form experience, so its hard to adapt to a 5 minute game jam experience, but maybe something more like Hades, heheh, where you spend a bit of time upgrading / reconfiguring, then going back out to the fight.
CharacteRiser by alexhonor 2023-01-14T20:23:34Z ♥ 4
A+ for innovation! i love seeing people make creative text based games, buying harvesting and selling the very letters you use for commands is such a wonderful idea, especially for the theme.
i think the delay for seeding is a bit too long tho, i want to play this game fast!
CrapCirclz by Francois Dervaux 2023-01-14T20:12:47Z ♥ 1
love the visuals and co-op design! i think its a shame that one player basically has to stop playing to get the top view, wish there could just be a button to toggle top view on/off so both players can make crap circles from that perspective!
Flavors of Victory by Kyrio 2023-01-14T20:06:06Z ♥ 4
excellent job! i think you've hit all the marks here. the visuals are especially delightful, gameplay is the perfect balance of simple to understand, but engaging.
i only wish your rock paper scissors charts could be integrated into the game itself somehow, even just a little hotkey to bring it up as an overlay for reference, but that's a minor nit.
also, maybe showing a bit of the math behind what determines the win or loss. for example, in the battle that got me, i really thought i hard crafted a proper recipe to beat the opponent, and i'm curious to know why they defeated me.
anyways, great work!
i got clobbered by this guy... Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 12.02.50 PM.png
Otter Seaweed Restaurant by StephanSchue 2023-01-14T19:08:57Z ♥ 1
wow, paper cutout graphics are great! did you physically create them or use texture maps?
A Necromancer's Guide To Happy Farming by TRUEchips 2023-01-14T19:06:54Z ♥ 0
this looks cute! is an HTML or mac version possible?
When The Wheat Grows by Better Half 2023-01-14T19:05:30Z ♥ 1
i'd really like to play this game, is it possible to build for HTML (or mac?)
Speedy Harvest by CG_Fred 2023-01-14T19:03:44Z ♥ 1
well, the multi-tractor-extravaganza was a very surprising and hilarious twist! i definitely chuckled. nice mouthed sound effects.
Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 11.02.21 AM.png
Fruit Market Express by benk 2023-01-14T18:55:35Z ♥ 1
this was actually quite fun! i have a knack for efficient packing, and it was cool to see it made into a game. i didn't realize at first, but you have to be sure your space is laid out correctly for both filling the bucket, and filling the selling bucket. i ran into what i thought was a bug in this state, but actually i needed to move things around to fit the second watermelon in: Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 10.48.57 AM.png
i did, however, find a bug, when i had a guy ready to sell, then i timed out, when i restarted he was still stuck there: Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 10.49.54 AM.png
anyways, after 3 attempts, my high score is $76 Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 10.52.19 AM.png
Pleasant Valley: New Beginnings by shaner421 2023-01-14T18:39:38Z ♥ 0
stardew valley + zombie plants! love the concept and the visuals, but i think combat is too hard and uninteresting, because (as far as I can tell), there's no block, so it's just a matter of kiting, and trying to get in for a hit, which gets old pretty fast, doesn't feel that satisfying. adding a block, or some other kind of evasion, would go a really long ways to making the combat feel more engaging and less frustrating!
Orchard Archer by icxon 2023-01-14T18:33:00Z ♥ 1
pretty fun, you hit a nice feel for the archery. i felt pretty frustrated by the purple killer apple, i shot it several times but it didn't seem to be killable.
Late Harvest by khaotom 2023-01-14T18:25:58Z ♥ 1
i harvested 10 flowers! very surreal, tapping movement is interesting, but got tiring after a while. good job for a few hours!
Samhain by daitli 2023-01-14T18:16:57Z ♥ 0
same issue as @leoatopos :( both firefox and chrome on mac
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Planet Harvest Unit by Harmofish 2023-01-14T01:46:10Z ♥ 1
it's cool that you made such a large and complex simulation for a game jam, but i felt pretty overwhelmed by the amount of information and all the various things to do in the UI
The Gold'n Apples by kikiriki367 2023-01-14T01:43:22Z ♥ 3
i gotta say, i skimmed through the tutorial, and when i played the first two times, got totally stuck because i thought the gold/apple gains were continuous, overtime and it was a turn based or real time simulation. i was pretty confused and frustrated when i didn't even have enough points to continue, but i decided to go back and reread. turns out it's a one-time gain based on the current world state! well, that cleared everything up. i'm sure there's some way to more clearly communicate that fact within the actual game play, but it's a game jam.
based on your high score table, i didn't do that great, but i didn't do that bad either. maybe i should have been optimizing for apples and focused less on getting gold in the final round.
chill hop bgm is an interesting choice, it's definitely nice to listen to, but feels pretty disjoint with both the pixel art style, the medieval setting, and the harvest theme. but it all more or less blended into a nice little experience :)
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Combine Carnage by MinThaMie 2023-01-12T03:13:00Z ♥ 1
what a funny game! the "hand made" SFX were entertaining. at first i thought part of the challenge was to stay on the path, but it seems like the car is locked in, which makes the game easier, but maybe less of an interesting challenge.
i think you need a stronger indication of the fact that there are multiple levels, and what level you are currently on. it just says "3, 2, 1" and "lap X/3", so i wasn't even sure i was progressing until i noticed the course was different. maybe say "Course X, Lap Y/3"
often, it seems like the wheat spawns with the sprite facing the wrong angle, when the car actually is right next to it (maybe you're spawning them facing the camera's current angle?) here are some examples, see how the sprite is just a pixely line? Screen Shot 2023-01-11 at 7.07.24 PM.png Screen Shot 2023-01-11 at 7.07.30 PM.png
i managed to get on the score board, though i don't think i did well. after a while i purposely hit a stump to see what would happen, since hitting the chickens was so funny. i was surprised that it straight-up ended my game. maybe be a little more clear that stumps are certain death? Screen Shot 2023-01-11 at 7.08.31 PM.png
nut another harvest story by WhaleJam 2023-01-12T03:01:30Z ♥ 2
wow, how cute! i like how you collect them all on the menu, and how they all bounce when you mouse them. i tried so hard to find the fifth nut, i think i explored every dialogue option and got two bad ends. i thought it might be a way to secretly cross the river... alas.
great work! i love the children storybook art style.
also dang, that raven! what a surprising attack!
Getting Apples In It by Sid Fish 2023-01-12T02:43:19Z ♥ 1
well, that was a surreal experience. the googly eyes on the drone and the auto generated voiceover narration made it feel like a dystopian parody.
i gotta say, maybe this was intentional, but the click and drag drone controls were amazingly frustrating. the lack of ability to rotate the drone except by landing it on a surface was especially frustrating. if you're trying to do some kind of commentary about "look how awful drones are" then good job!
i was gonna give all the levels an earnest go, but after a huge amount of effort to finally get an apple in the bucket in level 2, it literally just rolled out of the bucket (from within the bucket), and i gave up.
also, the windowed version was twice the size of my screen, and when i hit "maximize" to make it fit within the screen, some buttons were drawn outside the screen bounds. might wanna double check your UI layout setup!
overall, thanks for this surreal experience, i hope that we might not be replaced with drones quite yet.
Match-3: Crop Rotation by Ausstein 2023-01-12T02:35:19Z ♥ 1
when i read the description, i thought i understood how the game worked, but when i actually played it, i was really confused by the "rotation" interaction of mousing over various plants. from the description, it seemed like i would be able to choose how to rotate them by clicking left or right, but in practice, it seemed like they were rotating on their own, and the animation was rather jarring, when they animate into one orientation, then snap back, etc.
that all aside, i like the concept of trying to let the seeds mature and finding matches with the bigger plants.
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Harvest Battle Adventure by Falkreon 2023-01-12T02:28:32Z ♥ 1
i think its cool that you incorporated education about the poisonous plants into the game, and the low-res art reminded me of old computer games i've played.
on the web version (at least in Safari), i didn't get any sound.
a little more variation than just tapping would have been appreciated.
overall, i don't really vibe with killing plants (poisonous or otherwise) for no reason tho : (